Guess you can tell who is not a cultural anthropologist

From The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature by Timothy Ferris.

Speaking of the poor repute in which economics is held in some quarters.

Part of this is guilt by association. As a social science, economics tends to get lumped in with "soft" disciplines like cultural anthropology, much of which reads like fairy tales translated into Esperanto, and the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, who discovered nothing and cured nobody.

Data and story-telling

I believe all good communication about an issue is a mix of hard logic and data with illustrative anecdotes and stories.

The data provides a platform that separates reality from purely emotion driven interpretations and stories humanize the issue.

Dilbert has an alternative, more binary view.

I asked her for her phone number, she gave me an estimate

From The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature by Timothy Ferris.

For an allegedly dismal science, economics generates lots of jokes. Economists, it is said, are frequently wrong (they "forecast twelve of the past three recessions"), tend to be noncommittal ("If you laid all the world's economists end-to-end, they would not reach a conclusion") and like to hedge their bets ("I asked an economist for her phone number and she gave me an estimate"). Harry Truman wanted a one-armed economics advisor who wouldn't keep saying, "On the other hand." Ronald Reagan speculated that if economists had invented Trivial Pursuit, the game would have a hundred questions and three thousand answers. As early as 1855, Walter Bagehot of the Economist was claiming that "no real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist."

Changing expectations of age cohorts

Regarding An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P.D. James. The book was originally published in 1972, so written in the early 1970s. 45 years ago. The protagonist is a young woman, Cordelia Gray, only twenty-one years old.

That was a marginal sticking point for me early on. There was a good backstory that could, at a stretch explain it, but she seemed awfully well read and knowledgeable for a twenty-one year old, readily identifying second tier Italian Renaissance painters and recognizing stray poetical quotations, etc. But you never know with auto-didacts.

But as I read along, I began to wonder whether my minor discombobulation was less to do with the author unrealistically having a twenty-one year old taking over a failing one-person detective agency and making a go of it and more to do with a temporal dislocation on my part.

We are today, I think, very adjusted to the idea of late adulthood. Twenty-one year olds are routinely referred to as kids and it seems like adulthood has been pushed back into the late twenties or even the early thirties. We have dramatically shifted our adult age scales. Perhaps it is my contemporary perspective being imposed on the earlier reality that creates the tension.

A year or two ago I read Bob Greene's Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War. From the blurb:

When Bob Greene went home to central Ohio to be with his dying father, it set off a chain of events that led him to knowing his dad in a way he never had before--thanks to a quiet man who lived just a few miles away, a man who had changed the history of the world.

Greene's father--a soldier with an infantry division in World War II--often spoke of seeing the man around town. All but anonymous even in his own city, carefully maintaining his privacy, this man, Greene's father would point out to him, had "won the war." He was Paul Tibbets. At the age of twenty-nine, at the request of his country, Tibbets assembled a secret team of 1,800 American soldiers to carry out the single most violent act in the history of mankind. In 1945 Tibbets piloted a plane--which he called Enola Gay, after his mother--to the Japanese city of Hiroshima, where he dropped the atomic bomb.

On the morning after the last meal he ever ate with his father, Greene went to meet Tibbets. What developed was an unlikely friendship that allowed Greene to discover things about his father, and his father's generation of soldiers, that he never fully understood before.

DUTY is the story of three lives connected by history, proximity, and blood; indeed, it is many stories, intimate and achingly personal as well as deeply historic. In one soldier's memory of a mission that transformed the world--and in a son's last attempt to grasp his father's ingrained sense of honor and duty--lies a powerful tribute to the ordinary heroes of an extraordinary time in American life.

It's a wonderful book. In reading the book though, Tibbets' age startled me. Granted it was war years when many strange things happen, but still. From Wikipedia, Tibbetts was born in 1915:

In February 1942, he became the commanding officer of the 340th Bombardment Squadron of the 97th Bombardment Group, which was equipped with the Boeing B-17. In July 1942 the 97th became the first heavy bombardment group to be deployed as part of the Eighth Air Force, and Tibbets became deputy group commander. He flew the lead plane in the first American daylight heavy bomber mission against Occupied Europe on August 17, 1942, and the first American raid of more than 100 bombers in Europe on October 9, 1942. Tibbets was chosen to fly Major General Mark W. Clark and Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower to Gibraltar. After flying 43 combat missions, he became the assistant for bomber operations on the staff of the Twelfth Air Force.

Tibbets returned to the United States in February 1943 to help with the development of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. In September 1944, he was appointed the commander of the 509th Composite Group, which would conduct the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A Colonel by twenty-nine, leader of the first heavy bomber strikes (early in the war when casualties were the highest), then the first 100-bomber strike. He was essentially a test pilot for the mold-breaking B-29 but which also was plagued with multiple failures and crashes throughout its development. Then commander of the 509th for its special mission. All by twenty-nine. They grew up young in those days.

In the end, I think twenty-one year old Cordelia Gray is not so much an author pulling a character out of the nursery. Cordelia Gray is a reminder of how long we now keep our kids in the nursery.

Doryphore

Good to know. I had a different term for it, less sophisticated Greek and more earthy Anglo-Saxon.

A ‘doryphore’ is a person who draws attention to the minor errors made by others, especially in a pestering fashion.

— Literary Interest (@InterestingLit) September 24, 2015

But only one of them knew this

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P.D. James. I enjoy her artful descriptions, particularly of architecture and art as well as of Christian churches and liturgies. She brings a grace to murder mysteries that is pleasantly unexpected. She not infrequently slips in telling observations that cause you to set the book aside for a moment to digest the import of what she is saying.

Towards the end of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman there is such a turn.

Half a hour later Dalgliesh was seated opposite the Assistant Commissioner in the latter's office. The two men disliked each other but only one of them knew this and he was the one to whom it didn't matter.

It's one of those wordings that initially seems awkward, forcing you to stop and disentangle it. Knowing Dalgliesh's character (wise and moral), he is the one to whom it doesn't matter. With that knowledge and having straightened it out, what seemed like awkward phrasing suddenly becomes a deft and minimalist rendering of an entire scene and relationship. You realize she is saying so much more than the few words yield directly. That is wonderful.

By the way, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman is a very enjoyable read. I made the mistake of bringing it along on a business trip and stayed up too late before an early morning meeting in order to finish it.

A common commitment to enlarging the circle of scientific knowledge

For probably three years now I have been periodically lugging around Tim Ferris's The Science of Liberty. Why? It's just that good. One of those books where nearly every page has some new information, some new perspective on something familiar, some attractive turn-of-phrase, some new idea completely unexpected. I love those sorts of books and don't want them to end. Counterproductively, I end up carrying them around, parcelling out a page here, a couple of paragraphs there. On the one hand, it makes it last longer. On the other, it does a disservice to the author who has an argument to make, an argument that can get dissipated when dosed out in teaspoon servings.

I now am about 60% through and all sorts of items from the fascinatingly trivial to the inspiringly significant. The argument is coming together and I now do really need to read it in continuous sittings no matter how little I want it to end. The first of many excerpts and quotations. Page 187.

In a deeper sense all economics is liberal anyway, inasmuch as economics is a science. Economists are liberal, notwithstanding their political differences, to the extent that their work promotes fact-finding over ideology. An image that comes to mind is that of Hayek and Keynes during World War II. The two disagreed with and distrusted each other - Hayek was an aristocratic Viennese war veteran, Keynes a Bloomsbury bisexual - but when Hayek fled London during the Blitz, Keynes put him up in his rooms at Cambridge and the two stood rooftop air-raid watches together, scanning the night skies for German warplanes while debating the relative merits of government intervention versus unfettered free markets. What makes such scientific collegiality possible is not just a shared interest in a particular discipline but a common commitment to enlarging the circle of scientific knowledge.

I like both the image of the two cerebral antagonists watching for bombers and I especially like that useful definition of a liberal as someone with a "common commitment to enlarging the circle of scientific knowledge." People bedaub themselves with all sorts of terms to mark themselves as part of one tribe or another despite the fact that the terms have come unmoored from the original meanings and no longer bear any resemblance. As an example, I would take it as axiomatic that anyone seeking to suppress freedom of speech under whatever auspices, but especially when seeking to avoid hurt feelings, has no basis for calling themselves liberal, and yet that seems to be a common habit today.

Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future . . .

I recently finished a murder mystery, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P.D. James. It was written in the early 1970s and one of the characters seemed unusually young for the role the author assigned her, but as I noted in a post yesterday, that feeling was more a reflection on the changed social circumstances of today than on the author's judgment. We are no longer so accustomed to young people carving out adult lives at what now seem such tender ages.

That set of reflections led me down another path of memories. It is an instance of a thing that seemed prevalent and common then but which seems to have vanished into the cultural ether, leaving no trace. I would ascribe it to just particular local circumstances except that I encountered it in three different countries over the space of half a dozen years, roughly the mid-1970s to the very early 1980s at the latest. But since then, I don't think I have heard anyone mention it. Ever. It seems odd.

What I am referencing is the secret art of gay signalling. It was an article of faith among my age cohort, or at least I encountered it in similarly aged people in three different countries, that gays, or more broadly LGBT as we would put it today, could identify one another in social situations. I have only the very vaguest of recollections as to what those signals were. Something about how they shook hands or which ear had the ear ring. Something along those lines. I think there might have even been some lore to the effect that one signal meant go on a date and another meant having a hook-up.

This information was shared sotto voce among young adolescent males as a right of passage almost, informing you of how to not accidentally communicate something you didn't intend.

It all seems absurdly ridiculous now. But so do so many things in life. Was this truly a common thing, or just a fluke of the different places I landed as I moved between countries. If it was common, why has it disappeared from view? Or has it? I have grown accustomed to recognizing few contemporary celebrities, all of whom can be named by my children. Perhaps kids are still passing on the lore of LGBT signalling and I don't know it.

My guess is that it was purely a transient phenomenon of the time. The formerly hidden and/or reviled were making their first declarative entrance into the broader culture. The unknown, and therefore not understood and therefore perhaps feared in a way, were out there and making their presence known. Watch Out! Be Careful! If they do this, it means that. . .

We have come such a long way but it is still most curious that there should be no memory of it (that I am aware of).

Communication inflation

Hard to dispute.

Most books should just have been mag articles, most articles should be blog posts, most blog posts should be tweets & most tweets never sent

— Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) September 26, 2015

Fun to treat it glibly but there is a quite interesting issue embedded in here regarding both the inflation of information/opinion generation and the erosion or collapse of effective filters.

How do we take advantage of the new availability of information while screening out distractions and cognitive pollution. We are, collectively, still working towards that solution.

Measured data and the importance of context in interpretation

An excellent example of the importance of maintaining perspective.

I am a keen advocate of using empirical data to inform important decisions. Among the challenges is to keep some sort of context to the data that is being examined. It isn't always saying what you first might think it is saying.

From Googling for God by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.

Google searches for trends is an interesting resource but it has to be matched to alternative sources of trend data to determine that it is representative.

It has been a bad decade for God, at least so far. Despite the rising popularity of Pope Francis, who was elected in 2013, Google searches for churches are 15 percent lower in the first half of this decade than they were during the last half of the previous one. Searches questioning God’s existence are up. Many behaviors that he supposedly abhors have skyrocketed. Porn searches are up 83 percent. For heroin, it’s 32 percent.

How are the Ten Commandments doing? Not well. “Love thy neighbor” is the most common search with the word “neighbor” in it, but right behind at No. 2 is “neighbor porn.” The top Google search including the word “God” is “God of War,” a video game, with more than 700,000 searches per year. The No. 1 search that includes “how to” and “Walmart” is “how to steal from Walmart,” beating all questions related to coupons, price-matching or applying for a job.

The example that Stephens-Davidowitz uses which I find a sharp prompt towards context is:

In the era before digital data, there were debates about the relative popularity of celebrities and deities, most famously when John Lennon claimed that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Lennon didn’t live long enough to compare Google search counts. Today, it is pretty clear that Jesus does not get the most attention, at least online. There are 4.7 million searches every year for Jesus Christ. The pope gets 2.95 million. There are 49 million for Kim Kardashian.

People are searching ten-times as often for Kim Kardashian as for Jesus Christ. But what does that really mean? Is Kim Kardashian really ten times more important than Jesus Christ? I think the answer can be a reasonably certain, No! but how then to understand the data?

What about ten years ago and ten years from now. Sic transit gloria mundi. Jesus Christ has been around 2,000 years and is imbued and embedded in a our culture and our way of thinking about the world in ways that are simply foundational. From that perspective, Jesus Christ will always take second place to flash-in-pan celebrities and issues.

Related to that, one might postulate that people simply have less reason to google Jesus Christ. Any bookstore or library have footages of biblical related resources far exceeding the handful of Kardashian tomes they might have. What about the fact that there is a church every block or every few blocks in any American city? Isn't that evidence of a presence in daily life quite different, more substantial, and of greater duration than the bad-behaving celebrity of the moment?

No answers, as I say, I think the article is a good reminder of the importance of context and that the easy interpretation of data is not necessarily either the most useful or the most accurate.