For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled

From The Rogers Commission Report into the Challenger Crash (June 1986) Appendix F - Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle, Richard Feynman.

Sometimes it takes a genius to make plain that which is commonly understood.

Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them. They must live in reality in comparing the costs and utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must be realistic in making contracts, in estimating costs, and the difficulty of the projects. Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

"But do I have a greater responsibility than that, as a minority?"

An interesting question, particularly when you pose two separate essays, Race and Writing by Justin C. Key and On the existence of fictional characters by D.G. Myers.

Here is Key's dilemma and question:

For example, I started a fantasy book with a society dominated by civilized werewolves and vampires. Here’s where I hit a cultural dilemma. As I was writing, my characters were naturally white, as that is the race that has dominated the genre I have read and seen on television (from Lord of the Rings to Goosebumps to Stephen King). Sometime into it, I realized that this was a little off: if I was truly ‘writing what I know’, wouldn’t all my characters be black since that’s what I’ve grown up around? Wouldn’t I incorporate all of the cultural nuances from the black community, much like Harry Potter taught us about current British culture? Shouldn’t I?

Maybe I should. But I didn’t want to, because I didn’t want that to define my book. I wanted it to be seen as a good story, and nothing else. Some of us may have ambitions of writing the next Great American Novel. But that means something different than the Great African American Novel or the Great Asian American Novel.

So, where does this lead me?

It seems to me that diversity is a good medium. Some of my characters will be white, some black, etc, etc. The only thing about that is, it’s not really much different than any other successful/popular white author. They virtually all include diversity at some point. The challenge for me is incorporating my minority perspective into my writing without isolating the general public (as that is my desired audience, NOT solely the black community). This could be done by having black main characters, but with a ‘supporting cast’ typical of what the average American is used to. Or having a strong minority character.

In the end, I just want to write good horror stories which scare the crap out of you, whether you’re white, black, or purple. But do I have a greater responsibility than that, as a minority? What are your thoughts?

Myers says (and this is in an independent blog post unrelated to Key's post)

But there is also a theoretical question, which is the more interesting. If a character in a novel is not described as being fat, is he fat nevertheless? Could he possibly be fat if the novel never says so? Obesity is treated as extraordinary, a distinguishing characteristic, but what if it is not? What if it is as unexceptional, as unworthy of comment, as teeth and nails? Obesity is extraordinary only from a specific point of view, and where it is “central,” then, the novelist is testifying to his ideology.

Which echoes an earlier observation made by Key.

One of my group-mates had a critique of the passage, stating that ‘…wasn’t something that helped the white residents sleep at night…’ was a strange thought, assuming the main character himself was white. I found that a little odd, as I didn’t really give any indication that the main character was white. Granted, I hadn’t given much indication that he was black, either (except, maybe, for the very passage you’ve just read). It reminded me that in America we tend to assume that characters are the standard white male or female unless stated otherwise. Even I, an African American, have this automatic view after growing up reading literature by white authors.

Myers' answer is

A female character in fiction has undergone an abortion if and only if the abortion is inscribed in the fiction. Perhaps the mere fact of reporting or describing an abortion makes it seem “central” to a critic for whom abortions should not be so; perhaps a prescriptive criticism will emerge that urges novelists to write about abortion (and also obesity, while they’re at it) more nonchalantly. They must write about it at all, though, to write about it with small concern; and the mere inclusion of it—the plain fact that the novelist decided to speak of it instead of remaining silent—will be significant. What is excluded from fiction signifies nothing, because it might as well not exist. Nothing outside the language of a novel is true about the men and women who are sentenced to live within it and nowhere else.

Advocates and ideologues everywhere want to read into a text all sorts of things that either explicitly were not in the mind of the author or for which there is no evidence of such intent on the part of the author. They do not want to take Sir Thomas More's counsel, "It will mean what the words say!" More than that, once they have read into a text what they want (or read out of it what they don't want), they then wish to hold the author accountable for their interpretation. A childish perspective but too prevalent.

I think the only answer to Key's question is that he has no obligation to any other party than his own conscience and muse. There is no right way to write, just as there is no gain-saying exactly what ought to be added or removed to make a passage attractive or effective. What is your story and to whom are you telling it? You as a writer: not you as someone else's placeholder for some arbitrary identity - sex, age, orientation, income, religion, class, nationality, race, education, marital status, etc. All of these are pertinent contextual elements, influencers of an individual author's development, but have nothing to do with what they actually choose to say or do.

Homophily (the study of the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others) is a recent field but extremely pertinent in network theory with enormous application (such as NSA surveillance). What is emerging is the commonsense perspective that we all define ourselves differently and the critical attributes of self-identification change over time. At twenty, perhaps my most conscious self-identification is that I am male, or am attending Princeton, or am passionate about archaeology. At forty, perhaps my most conscious self-identification might be that I am Christian or that I am a father, or am a partner at a law firm. I am both the same and different at every stage, much like a river.

If we are all just a churning portfolio of attributes which evolve over time, do we at any given point in time have a particular obligation to profile that attribute? I would say, in response to Key's question, no! No obligation to anyone else, we are answerable only to our own moral conscience regardless of the expectations of others. People always expect more of other people, and regrettably, they usually expect more than they themselves are willing to do.

In An Antique Land

Just finished In An Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh. Excellent. A delightful find. From his website's description.

"History in the guise of a traveller's tale," and the multi-generic book moves back and forth between Ghosh's experience living in small villages and towns in the Nile Delta and his reconstruction of a Jewish trader and his slave's lives in the eleventh century from documents from the Cairo Geniza. In the 1980s Amitav Ghosh moved into a converted chicken coop. It was on the roof of a house in Lataifa, a tiny village in Egypt. During the day he poured over medieval letters sent to India from Cairo by Arab merchants. In the evenings he shut out the bellowing of his fat landlord by turning up the volume of his transistor radio and wrote stories based on what he had seen in the village. The story of Khamees the Rat, the notorious impotent (already twice married); of Zaghloul the weaver determined to travel to India on a donkey; of one-eyed Mohammad, so obsessed with a girl that he spent nights kneeling outside her window to listen to the sound of her breathing; of Amm 'Taha, part-time witch, always ready to cast a spell for a little extra money; and, of course, the story of Amitav Ghosh himself, known in the village as the Indian doctor, the uncircumcised, cow-worshipping kaffir who would not convert to Islam. This book is the story of Amitav Ghosh's decade of intimacy with the village community. Mixing conversation and research, imagination and scholarship, it is also a charged, eccentric history of the special relationship between two countires, Egypt and India, through nearly ten centuries of parochialism and sympathy, bigotry and affection.

Pleasantly off-beat and eccentric, it will probably appeal most to those interested in History and in Travel but is cleverly written, weaving multiple stories together across time and place.

A passage capturing one of many points of incomprehension leading to insight.

I grew increasingly puzzled as I tried to deal with this barrage of inquiries, first, by the part the word 'still' played in their questions, and secondly by the masks of incredulity that seemed to fall on their faces as I affirmed, over and over again, that yes, in India too people used cattle-drawn ploughs and not tractors; water-wheels and not pumps; donkey-carts, not trucks; and yes, in India too there were many, many people who were very poor, indeed there were millions whose poverty they would scarcely have been able to imagine. But to my utter bewilderment, the more I insisted, the more sceptical they seemed to become, until at last I realized, with an overwhelming sense of shock, that the simple truth was that they did not believe what I was saying.

I later came to understand that their disbelief had little or nothing to do with what I had said; rather, they had constructed a certain ladder of 'Development' in their minds, and because all their images of material life were of those who stood in the rungs above, the circumstances of those below had become more or less unimaginable. I had an inkling then of the real and desperate seriousness of their engagement with modernism, because I realized that the fellaheen saw the material circumstances of their lives in exactly the same way that a university economist would: as a situation that was shamefully anachronistic, a warp upon time; I understood that their relationships with the objects of their everyday lives was never innocent of the knowledge that there were other places, other countries which do not have mud-walled houses and cattle-drawn ploughs, were insubstantial things, ghosts displaced in time, waiting to be exorcised and laid to rest. It was thus that I had my first suspicion of what it might mean to belong to an 'historical civilization', and it left me bewildered because, for my own part, it was precisely the absoluteness of time and the discreteness of epochs that I always had trouble in imagining.

An arrogance too far

From The Dangers of Making Reading Spiritual by Noah Berlatsky.

Berlatsky is responding to an almost incomprehensibly mushy essay by Karen Swallow Prior in the Atlantic, where she argues, without evidence and without definitions, that:

It is "spiritual reading" -- not merely decoding -- that unleashes the power that good literature has to reach into our souls and, in so doing, draw and connect us to others. This is why the way we read can be even more important than what we read. In fact, reading good literature won't make a reader a better person any more than sitting in a church, synagogue or mosque will. But reading good books well just might.

[snip]

The power of "spiritual reading" is its ability to transcend the immediacy of the material, the moment, or even the moral choice at hand. This isn't the sort of phenomenon that lends itself to the quantifiable data Currie seeks, although Paul demonstrates is possible, to measure. Even so, such reading doesn't make us better so much as it makes us human.

Codswallop

I understand what Prior is getting at but this is gibberish. The problem is that people, including myself, who are convinced of the beneficial and potentially redeeming power of reading have no empirical ground on which to stand. There is a high correlation between enthusiastic reading and high IQ and good life outcomes but it is not clear whether there is simple correlation, covariance or causation. Prior's attempt to further narrow the parameters to just literary fiction reading is, in my mind, a rather embarrassing revelation to her actual argument which might be satirized as "I like reading literary fiction, I believe it makes me better, others ought to read literary fiction as well."

Without defining spiritual reading, without defining what it means to be human and how reading is relevant to being human, without linking empirically literary fiction reading to desirable life outcomes, without defining good literature, this is just a self-interested opinion masquerading as a serious argument.

Berlatsky's criticism of Prior's essay inflicts deep wounds on her argument without even being particularly comprehensive (there is much more to criticize than he tackles). His final paragraph gets at the meat of the issue.

You learn to be human and spiritual, not by reading, but by treating others as human—especially others who are not like you. Books can, perhaps, teach you about that. But to make books the measure of humanness is to restrict that measure to the brainy and the privileged. If books make us more human, then some of us are less human that others, which is the same as saying that all of us are less human.

There is in the book world, or at least in the public forums of the book world, an almost distasteful element of blindness to the intolerance, classism, and bigotry inherent in the position that you should read more and you should read better.

I advocate that people ought to read more solely on the grounds that I personally believe that it is beneficial and because I can see a correlation between enthusiastic readers and good outcomes (even if I cannot demonstrate that there is causation.) But that is as far as my argument can go - it is a faith-based matter. To hold the belief that you ought to be able to judge others on the basis of whether they read, and what they read, and how they read, is an arrogance too far.

I am sure that is not what Prior intends, but it is the logical inference of what she is arguing. So much for the tolerance and empathy that literary reading is supposed to cultivate. "Read the books I like, you Morlock."

Classics and Consequentiality

From Canon Fodder: Denouncing the Classics by Sam Sacks, a discussion about literary criticism and what constitutes a classic.

Eliot thought that a classic, in the strictest sense, was a work that apotheosized a great civilization at its zenith; so exacting (or, if you like, priggish) are his standards that literally the only writer to entirely fulfill them is Virgil. He thought Chaucer and Shakespeare were a little too rough around the edges, Goethe too provincial, Pope too mannered. Except for a passing mention of Henry James, he doesn’t even bother to mention the existence of American letters.

Sainte-Beuve is more flexible and encompassing, but he stipulates that a classic can only be truly distinguished by readers who have enjoyed a lifetime of learning and have staked out the leisure to devote themselves to their libraries. It exists as a concomitant to the salon and the ivory tower.

So if Eliot is imperialist and Sainte-Beuve is aristocratic, we need some idea of what makes a classic in a democracy. For that, we could do worse than to turn to Sainte-Beuve’s contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville, who has always seemed to have the new world’s number. In “Democracy in America,” de Tocqueville observed that Americans esteemed the arts and sciences more for their practical applications than for their abstract value—hence the popularity of newspapers, religious treatises, and self-help books. Reading itself was not done for the purposes of something as perversely theoretical as enlarging one’s soul; it needed to have some tangible function in the here and now: “Democratic nations may amuse themselves for a while with considering the productions of nature; but they are excited in reality only by a survey of themselves.”

A look through the Classics section of bookstores—in America or any of the Western democracies—bears out de Tocqueville’s instincts. The offerings are wide-ranging, tilting toward diversity and inclusion. But, more to the point, artistic brilliance is no longer the most important determining factor. What makes a classic today is cultural significance. Authors are anointed not because they are great (although many of them are) but because they are important.

Given that there is no objective criteria for aesthetic evaluation, I have tended towards thinking of books in terms of their consequentiality. How many people has it affected over how many years and how deeply. This, I think, picks up two different attributes - is the subject worth talking about and how well is it being discussed? In this reading, books can drift in and out of the canon, but usually like the roach motel ad, they "check in, but they don't check out!" The mere act of becoming a part of the canon makes you mostly a permanent member. People might not any longer read you all that much but you are of permanent interest. Who, any longer, reads all of Aristotle's Ethics. Perhaps most philosophy majors but not many beyond that I would suspect. But virtually every member of the clerisy will have passing familiarity with the key concepts and likely will have read at least some Ethics.

Then there are the near misses; Lady Chatterley's Lover perhaps, possibly Goodbye to All That! Influential in their time and of both literary and historical interest but not quite there. You also have the bestsellers. Fifty Shades of Grey is quite the global phenomenon in terms of millions of copies sold from such obscurity in so short a time but never destined for the canon.

The measure I have been playing with in trying to put a metric on a book is Consequentiality as measured by annual sales (where available), length of time in print, frequency of citation by other authors, number of foreign editions, and number of foreign language translations. This information is challenging to collect but most of it, other than annual sales is usually available. With the measures you get Popularity (annual sales), Durability (length of time in print), Relevance (citations), and Universality (number of foreign editions and number of languages). Any book that scores in the top quartile on at least three of these measures, ought, I suspect, to be considered a near classic or classic.

With the few hundred I have collected data on, it is both affirming and revealing. Virtually all of the canon excel on three of the four measures, sometimes on all four. But you find a lot of sleepers out there, titles with measures that are near canon in the metrics but never there.

Influences on tie formation

From Beyond and Below Racial Homophily: ERG Models of a Friendship Network Documented on Facebook by Andreas Wimmer

A notable feature of U.S. social networks is their high degree of racial homogeneity, which is often attributed to racial homophily—the preference for associating with individuals of the same racial background. The authors unpack racial homogeneity using a theoretical framework that distinguishes between various tie formation mechanisms and their effects on the racial composition of networks, exponential random graph modeling that can disentangle these mechanisms empirically, and a rich new data set based on the Facebook pages of a cohort of college students. They first show that racial homogeneity results not only from racial homophily proper but also from homophily among coethnics of the same racial background and from balancing mechanisms such as the tendency to reciprocate friendships or to befriend the friends of friends, which both amplify the homogeneity effects of homophily. Then, they put the importance of racial homophily further into perspective by comparing its effects to those of other mechanisms of tie formation. Balancing, propinquity based on coresidence, and homophily regarding nonracial categories (e.g., students from “elite” backgrounds or those from particular states) all influence the tie formation process more than does racial homophily.

Emphasis added.

Media Malfeascance

I know I had a rant some time ago regarding the apparently deliberate misrepresentation of results from studies as reported in major newspapers. Here is another example from the New York Times, Discrimination in Housing Against Nonwhites Persists Quietly, U.S. Study Finds by Shaila Dewan.

Stipulated that discrimination is bad and should be discouraged. This is about the reporting and not the importance of the subject. The money paragraph.

“Although we’ve come a long way from the days of blatant, in-your-face housing injustice, discrimination still persists,” Shaun Donovan, the department’s secretary, said in a telephone conference on Tuesday unveiling the findings. “And just because it has taken on a hidden form doesn’t make it any less harmful.”

In each of the study’s 8,000 tests, one white and one minority tester of the same gender and age, posing as equally well-qualified renters or buyers, visited the same housing provider or agent. In more than half the test cases, both testers were shown the same number of apartments or homes. But in cases where one tester was shown more homes or apartments, the white tester was usually favored, leading to a higher number of units shown to whites overall.

Those last two sentences caught my eye. That's an awfully stilted way of putting it. What are they hiding? Why the awkward wording? Well, as it turns out, there's a reason. When we think of discrimination occurring, we want a very simple morality tale that's quite clear, but its not quite that, should I say it?, black and white.

Turns out that there is a lot of noise in the system. Real estate agents show different viewers more options sometimes to whites, sometimes to blacks and sometimes to Hispanics. And by big numbers. Let's walk through it. With my skepticism aroused, I went back to the original report, Housing Discrimination Against Racial and Ethnic Minorities 2012. The critical information is forty pages in, Exhibit IV-1: Summary Measures of Discrimination Against Minority Renters.

When the HUD field testers (of each racial group) met with real estate rental agents, what do you think happened? From the news article you would expect that "But in cases where one tester was shown more homes or apartments, the white tester was usually favored, leading to a higher number of units shown to whites overall." Sounds like a lot right? But what does it really mean? We can figure it out from the table.

To me, there are two quite critical pieces of information buried in those sentences that should receive a lot more attention than they do.

In the first case, it is apparently common in these tests for there to be random variation in the number of units shown. Comparing how Blacks and Whites are treated (as paired comparisons), in 54% of the cases, they were both told about additional units (i.e were treated identically). In 28% of the cases Whites were told about extra units but blacks were not, and in 19% of the cases Blacks were told about extra units and Whites were not. So, of a hundred times visited, in only a net of 9% of the cases were Whites treated better than Blacks. I would put this as Agents treated applicants equally (within random variation) 91% of the time. Wow! That's pretty good. Can always do better, but that is still pretty good. And 19% & 28% tells me there is a lot of random variation in the system. So the big improvement for all renters is not in reducing the 9% structural discrimination by agents but in reducing the 19-28% random variation.

Doesn't that picture sound a lot better than "the white tester was usually favored, leading to a higher number of units shown to whites overall" which sounds far more pervasive?

Run your eye down the numbers in the table. There's only a couple of other instances where the discrimination is as high as 9%. What is striking to me is how close the numbers all are. When meeting with agents, Whites are shown only 3% more units than Blacks (given the random variation). Again - Wow! There's less than 1% variation in rents quoted across all the ethnic groups.

Now there is still discrimination to be squeezed out of the system, and the remaining amounts will be harder given the random variation and most of the cheap and easy remedial actions having already been taken, but let's talk about the situation as it is rather than paint false pictures.

It's a scandal that there is any discrimination but there's an even bigger scandal when the degree of discrimination is misrepresented. Since it has to do with numbers and statistics this is probably simply a matter of journalistic ignorance and laziness. A harsh judgment supported by the fact that much of the news article is simply a parroting of the report's executive summary. And it is no surprise that an agency would exaggerate the circumstances - their funding depends on there being a continuing crisis for them to solve. But we should expect more from our news media than this.

College Major and IQ

From the people at Bachelor of Education, an interesting rendition of IQ and College Major.


Source: What Does Your College Major Say About Your IQ?

Click to enlarge and see entire graphic.

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

From Ursula K. Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness p. 29, Chap. 3

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

We see what we want to see

From Homophily and Contagion Are Generically Confounded in Observational Social Network Studies by Cosma Rohilla Shalizi and Andrew C. Thomas. The abstract.

We consider processes on social networks that can potentially involve three factors: homophily, or the formation of social ties due to matching individual traits; social contagion, also known as social influence; and the causal effect of an individual's covariates on their behavior or other measurable responses. We show that, generically, all of these are confounded with each other. Distinguishing them from one another requires strong assumptions on the parametrization of the social process or on the adequacy of the covariates used (or both). In particular we demonstrate, with simple examples, that asymmetries in regression coe fficients cannot identify causal effects, and that very simple models of imitation (a form of social contagion) can produce substantial correlations between an individual's enduring traits and their choices, even when there is no intrinsic affi nity between them. We also suggest some possible constructive responses to these results.

I think what this is saying is that the effect of homophily, social influence, and personal choices are hard to isolate from one another in causal terms and that it is too easy to impose an assumed causal relationship when one does not actually exist. And in fact, the act of imposing such a relationship is really just a function of one's preexisting assumptions.