Swirling and poising idly in golden light.

The Buzzards
by Martin Armstrong

When evening came and the warm glow grew deeper
And every tree that bordered the green meadows
And in the yellow cornfields every reaper
And every corn-shock stood above their shadows
Flung eastward from their feet in longer measure,
Serenely far there swam in the sunny height
A buzzard and his mate who took their pleasure
Swirling and poising idly in golden light.
On great pied motionless moth-wings borne along,
So effortless and so strong,
Cutting each other’s paths, together they glided,
Then wheeled asunder till they soared divided
Two valleys’ width (as though it were delight
To part like this, being sure they could unite
So swiftly in their empty, free dominion),
Curved headlong downward, towered up the sunny steep,
Then, with a sudden lift of the one great pinion,
Swung proudly to a curve and from its height
Took half a mile of sunlight in one long sweep.

And we, so small on the swift immense hillside,
Stood tranced, until our souls arose uplifted
On those far-sweeping, wide,
Strong curves of flight,–swayed up and hugely drifted,
Were washed, made strong and beautiful in the tide
Of sun-bathed air. But far beneath, beholden
Through shining deeps of air, the fields were golden
And rosy burned the heather where cornfields ended.

And still those buzzards wheeled, while light withdrew
Out of the vales and to surging slopes ascended,
Till the loftiest-flaming summit died to blue.

Stop moping and do something!

I empathize with their goal but they are on evidentiarily weak ground. None-the-less, I enjoyed this passage from The Dehumanities by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro.

A good sign something has gone astray is that a work is reduced to a simple message. Only mediocre literature can be read that way. Otherwise, why not just memorize messages: love your neighbor (A Tale of Two Cities). Help the unfortunate (Les Misérables). Child abuse is wrong (Jane Eyre and David Copperfield). Do not kill old ladies, even really mean ones (Crime and Punishment). First impressions can be misleading (Pride and Prejudice). Don’t give in to jealousy (Othello). Obsessions can be dangerous (Moby Dick). Stop moping and do something! (Hamlet). There’s no fool like an old fool (King Lear).

Inherently individual

Its a long way from fish to men but I suspect that the same would be true for man if ethics did not prevent the same experiment on humans. From Behavioural individuality in clonal fish arises despite near-identical rearing conditions by David Bierbach, Kate L. Laskowski & Max Wolf.

Behavioural individuality is thought to be caused by differences in genes and/or environmental conditions. Therefore, if these sources of variation are removed, individuals are predicted to develop similar phenotypes lacking repeatable individual variation. Moreover, even among genetically identical individuals, direct social interactions are predicted to be a powerful factor shaping the development of individuality. We use tightly controlled ontogenetic experiments with clonal fish, the Amazon molly (Poecilia formosa), to test whether near-identical rearing conditions and lack of social contact dampen individuality. In sharp contrast to our predictions, we find that (i) substantial individual variation in behaviour emerges among genetically identical individuals isolated directly after birth into highly standardized environments and (ii) increasing levels of social experience during ontogeny do not affect levels of individual behavioural variation. In contrast to the current research paradigm, which focuses on genes and/or environmental drivers, our findings suggest that individuality might be an inevitable and potentially unpredictable outcome of development.

Humans are a product of a complex, dynamic, multi-causal, chaotic system. Controlling for environment and controlling for genes is insufficient to produce identical outcomes. People will be differentiated individuals. The system is too complex for it to be otherwise.

It would be better if the privilege were limited to me alone

From What Is Man? and Other Essays by Mark Twain. From the last chapter, Is Shakespeare Dead? He is treating man's disputatious nature and tendency towards fanciful claims.

Scattered here and there through the stacks of unpublished manuscript which constitute this formidable Autobiography and Diary of mine, certain chapters will in some distant future be found which deal with “Claimants”—claimants historically notorious: Satan, Claimant; the Golden Calf, Claimant; the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, Claimant; Louis XVII., Claimant; William Shakespeare, Claimant; Arthur Orton, Claimant; Mary Baker G. Eddy, Claimant—and the rest of them. Eminent Claimants, successful Claimants, defeated Claimants, royal Claimants, pleb Claimants, showy Claimants, shabby Claimants, revered Claimants, despised Claimants, twinkle star-like here and there and yonder through the mists of history and legend and tradition—and, oh, all the darling tribe are clothed in mystery and romance, and we read about them with deep interest and discuss them with loving sympathy or with rancorous resentment, according to which side we hitch ourselves to. It has always been so with the human race. There was never a Claimant that couldn’t get a hearing, nor one that couldn’t accumulate a rapturous following, no matter how flimsy and apparently unauthentic his claim might be.

Towards the end of the essay, he foreshadows the postmodern critical theorists and their obsession with political correctness, triggering, etc. Also, some of the key elements in The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.

He opens mockingly of the type of moral certitude which is still in circulation today.

One of the most trying defects which I find in these—these—what shall I call them? for I will not apply injurious epithets to them, the way they do to us, such violations of courtesy being repugnant to my nature and my dignity. The farthest I can go in that direction is to call them by names of limited reverence—names merely descriptive, never unkind, never offensive, never tainted by harsh feeling. If THEY would do like this, they would feel better in their hearts. Very well, then—to proceed. One of the most trying defects which I find in these Stratfordolaters, these Shakesperiods, these thugs, these bangalores, these troglodytes, these herumfrodites, these blatherskites, these buccaneers, these bandoleers, is their spirit of irreverence. It is detectable in every utterance of theirs when they are talking about us. I am thankful that in me there is nothing of that spirit. When a thing is sacred to me it is impossible for me to be irreverent toward it. I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except towards the things which were sacred to other people. Am I in the right? I think so.

The hallmark of the postmodernist critical theorist is their desire to keep carving out special victim groups and then, in an authoritarian fashion, try and police what can and cannot be said. Twain presages this inclination as well.

Now then, what aggravates me is that these troglodytes and muscovites and bandoleers and buccaneers are ALSO trying to crowd in and share the benefit of the law, and compel everybody to revere their Shakespeare and hold him sacred. We can’t have that: there’s enough of us already. If you go on widening and spreading and inflating the privilege, it will presently come to be conceded that each man’s sacred things are the ONLY ones, and the rest of the human race will have to be humbly reverent toward them or suffer for it. That can surely happen, and when it happens, the word Irreverence will be regarded as the most meaningless, and foolish, and self-conceited, and insolent, and impudent, and dictatorial word in the language. And people will say, “Whose business is it what gods I worship and what things hold sacred? Who has the right to dictate to my conscience, and where did he get that right?”

We cannot afford to let that calamity come upon us. We must save the word from this destruction. There is but one way to do it, and that is to stop the spread of the privilege and strictly confine it to its present limits—that is, to all the Christian sects, to all the Hindu sects, and me. We do not need any more, the stock is watered enough, just as it is.

It would be better if the privilege were limited to me alone. I think so because I am the only sect that knows how to employ it gently, kindly, charitably, dispassionately. The other sects lack the quality of self-restraint.

Resembles ocean into tempest wrought, To waft a feather, or to drown a fly.

Night Thoughts
by Edward Young (1742)

Night Thoughts is a compilation of poems where each poem represents a different night. The poem provided below takes place on the first night. The reader is able to delve into Young’s mind while he searches for meaning in the philosophy of life. The melancholic tone of his work makes it more relatable while at the same time arouses the imagination of the reader.
This is the bud of being, the dim dawn,
The twilight of our day, the vestibule;
Life’s theatre as yet is shut, and death,
Strong death, alone can heave the massy bar,
This gross impediment of clay remove,
And make us embryos of existence free.
From real life, but little more remote
Is he, not yet a candidate for light,
The future embryo, slumbering in his sire.
Embryos we must be, till we burst the shell,
Yon ambient azure shell, and spring to life,
The life of gods, O transport! and of man.
Yet man, fool man! here buries all his thoughts;
Inters celestial hopes without one sigh.
Prisoner of earth, and pent beneath the moon,
Here pinions all his wishes; wing’d by heaven
To fly at infinite; and reach it there,
Where seraphs gather immortality,
On life’s fair tree, fast by the throne of God.
What golden joys ambrosial clustering glow
In His full beam, and ripen for the just,
Where momentary ages are no more!
Where time, and pain, and chance, and death, expire!
And is it in the flight of threescore years
To push eternity from human thought,
And smother souls immortal in the dust?
A soul immortal, spending all her fires,
Wasting her strength in strenuous idleness
Thrown into tumult, raptured, or alarm’d,
At aught this scene can threaten or indulge,
Resembles ocean into tempest wrought,
To waft a feather, or to drown a fly.
Where falls this censure? It o’erwhelms myself;
How was my heart encrusted by the world!
O how self-fetter’d was my grovelling soul!
How, like a worm, was I wrapt round and round
In silken thought, which reptile fancy spun,
Till darken’d reason lay quite clouded o’er
With soft conceit of endless comfort here,
Nor yet put forth her wings to reach the skies!

This baffling academic farrago

One of the frustrations of reading literary fiction is that book reviews are little more than insipid wafting of sensibilities and tired cliches.

This sort of review also occurs in nonfiction reviewing as well, though perhaps somewhat less often. Nonfiction has some structural and evidentiary bases which can be disputed and interpreted in a fashion not possible in fiction.

Arthur Waldron has delivered just such a robust, trenchant criticism in his There is no Thucydides Trap: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap. The target of his slicing and dicing is Destined for War by Graham Allison.

Allison posits that China's rise makes it probable that there will be conflict between the US and China, the Thucydides Trap. Waldron is impatient with such trite reasoning.

Let us start by observing that perhaps the two greatest classicists of the last century, Professor Donald Kagan of Yale and the late Professor Ernst Badian of Harvard, long ago proved that no such thing exists as the “Thucydides Trap,” certainly not in the actual Greek text of the great History of the Peloponnesian War, perhaps the greatest single work of history ever.

Astonishingly, even the names of these two towering academic giants are absent from the index of this baffling academic farrago. It was penned by Graham Allison, a Harvard professor — associated with the Kennedy School of Government — to whom questions along the lines of “How did you write about The Iliad without mentioning Homer?” should be addressed.

Allison’s argument draws on one sentence of Thucydides’s text: “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian Power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” This lapidary summing up of an entire argument is justly celebrated. It introduced to historiography the idea that wars may have “deep causes,” that resident powers are tragically fated to attack rising powers. It is brilliant and important, no question, but is it correct?

Clearly not for the Peloponnesian War. Generations of scholars have chewed over Thucydides’s text. Every battlefield has been measured. The quantity of academic literature on the topic is overwhelming, dating as far back as 1629 when Thomas Hobbes produced the first English translation.

In the present day, Kagan wrote four volumes in which he modestly but decisively overturned the idea of the Thucydides Trap. Badian did the same.

[snip]

Ignoring all this, Allison takes Thucydides literally: Wars (sometimes) begin when rising powers like Athens threaten established powers like Sparta. But do they really? The case is difficult to make. Japan was the rising power in 1904 while Russia was long established. Did Russia therefore seek to preempt Japan? No. The Japanese launched a surprise attack on Russia, scuttling the Czar’s fleet. In 1941, the Japanese were again the rising power. Did ever-vigilant America strike out to eliminate the Japanese threat? Wrong. Roosevelt considered it “infamy” when Japan surprised him by attacking Pearl Harbor at a time when the world was already in flames. Switch to Europe — in the 1930s, Germany was obviously the rising, menacing power. Did France, Russia, England, and the other threatened powers move against it? They could not even form an alliance, so the USSR eventually joined Hitler rather than fight him. Exceptions there are, and Allison makes a half-baked effort to find them, but these are not the mainstream. Is this some kind of immense academic lapse?

No. What has really happened is that Allison has caught China fever, not hard around Harvard, although knowing no Chinese language and little Chinese history.

As a result, Allison seems to have been impressed above all by Chinese numbers: population, army size, growth rate, steel production, etc. So if that sentence from Thucydides is correct, then China is clearly a rising power that will want her “place in the sun” — which will lead ineluctably to a collision between rising China (Athens) instigated by the presumably setting U.S. (Sparta), which will see military preemption as the only recourse to avert a loss of power and a Chinese-dominated world. To escape this trap, Allison demands that we must find a way to give China what she wants and forget the lessons of so many previous wars. Many of Allison’s colleagues at Harvard also believe this to be true.

The reality, however, is that Allison’s recipe is actually a recipe for war. Appeasement of aggressors is far more dangerous than measured confrontation. Did China become more aggressive in the South China Sea in the 2000s because the Obama administration got tougher or because it went AWOL on the issue? I’d say the latter is more likely. When it comes to China, we might want to be more mindful of the “Chamberlain Trap” after the peace-loving prime minister of England, one of the authors of the disastrous 1938 Munich agreement that sought to avoid war by concessions, which in fact taught Hitler that the British were easily fooled. That is the trap we are in urgent need of avoiding.

[snip]

China’s tremendous economic vulnerabilities have no mention in Allison’s book. But they are critical to any reading of China’s future. China imports a huge amount of its energy and is madly planning a vast expansion in nuclear power, including dozens of reactors at sea. She has water endowments similar to Sudan, which means nowhere near enough. The capital intensity of production is very high: In China, one standard energy unit used fully produces 33 cents of product. In India, the figure is 77 cents. Gradually climb and you get to $3 in Europe and then — in Japan — $5.55. China is poor not only because she wastes energy but water, too, while destroying her ecology in a way perhaps lacking any precedent. Figures such as these are very difficult to find: Mine come from researchers in the energy sector. Solving all of this, while making the skies blue, is a task of both extraordinary technical complexity and expense that will put China’s competing special interests at one another’s throats. Not solving, however, will doom China’s future. Allison may know this on some level, but you have to spend a lot of time in China and talk to a lot of specialists (often in Chinese) before the enormity becomes crushingly real.

What’s more, Chinese are leaving China in unprecedented numbers. The late Richard Solomon, who worked on U.S.-China relations for decades, remarked to me a few weeks before his death that “one day last year all the Chinese who could decided to move away.” Why? The pollution might kill your infants; the hospitals are terrible, the food is adulterated, the system corrupt and unpredictable. Here in the Philadelphia suburbs and elsewhere, thousands of Chinese buyers are flocking to buy homes in cash. Even Xi Jinping sent his daughter to Harvard. Does that imply a high-profile political career for her in China? Probably not. It rather implies a quiet retirement with Xi’s grandchildren over here. Our American private secondary schools are inundated by Chinese applicants. For the first time this year, my Chinese graduate students are marrying one another and buying houses here. This is a leading indicator. If it could be done, the coming tsunami would bring 10 million highly qualified Chinese families to the U.S. in 10 years — along with fleeing crooks, spies, and other flotsam and jetsam. Even Xi’s first wife fled China; she lives in England.

Allison, however, misses this; “immigration” is not in his index. Instead, he speculates about war, based on some superficial reading and sampling of the literature, coming to the question “What does Xi want?” — which I take as meaning that he thinks Xi’s opinion matters — which makes nonsense of the vast determining waves of economic development, not to mention his glance at Thucydides — with the opinion following that somehow we should try to find out what that is and cut a deal. This is geopolitics from a Harvard professor? This is the great wave of history?

How to conclude a look at so ill conceived and sloppily executed a book? Do not blame Allison. The problem is the pervasive lack of knowledge of China — a country which is, after all, run by the Communist Party, the police, and the army, and thus difficult to get to know. This black hole of information has perversely created an overabundance of fantasies, some very pessimistic, some as absurdly bright as a foreigner on the payroll can make them.

Poor Allison.

I am more of a mind with Waldron. I see five prevailing challenges for China in the future, none of which individually are simple and all of which are pressing.

The most obvious is the demographic challenge. Observers have long been asking whether China would get rich before it got old. The former one-child policy, combined with rapid urbanization and with rapid increase in consumerism have kept China's total fertility rate (1.56) way below replacement for more than a generation now. Sociologically and economically such rapid falls in TFR put stress on a nation. Who will man the army, the manufacturing plants, the farms, etc. Who will pay for the elderly? These are not insurmountable problems but China's economic rise is recent and its national consensus fragile. There is little margin for additional stresses.

Unmet expectations is a second challenge. For nearly forty years, China managed to pull off a blinding 10% growth a year as it transitioned to a market economy. In recent years, that pace has slowed to a still stellar 5%. But at 10% growth, you are doubling every 7 years and at 5% every fourteen years. If a third of your population has known nothing but becoming twice as rich every seven years, then five percent growth can seem disappointingly pedestrian.

The third challenge is loss of low hanging fruit. Committing to a relatively free market economy was philosophically difficult and hugely consequential in its implementation, but in the scheme of things, that was probably the easiest fruit for the picking. Your biggest lifts in income generation, health and education come at the bottom of the s-curve: getting everyone to full literacy and numeracy, building highways and sewer systems, basic infrastructure including hospitals, etc. But once you have done that, the rest of the fruit is higher, more out of reach. Returns on effort are lower. You have to work harder to get less. It happens with every economy. The low hanging fruit has all been picked in China.

This is related to the fourth challenge, Hayek's knowledge problem, especially true of such a large (population and geography) country as China. While China relaxed its market regulations, it has kept its political centralization. In the first flush of growth, you can generally afford some level of capital misallocation (ghost cities). But as your market matures, its continued growth depends to an increasing extent on the free flow of information. The free flow of information can be challenging to a highly centralized and authoritarian political system. The desire for economic growth requires more knowledge transparency than is easily accommodated.

The final challenge is very similar: Complexity requires freedom. Continued economic growth requires more information that is precise, accurate and timely. But as the economy continues to grow, it becomes more complex. That complexity is thwarted by knowledge obfuscation and by control. Complexity requires freedom. That increasing complexity is challenging even for countries with long and strong traditions of freedom. For a country where that tradition is not strong, the burden is even greater.

These five challenges are not insurmountable but they belie the easy expectations conjured by forty years of magical growth. They require a sophisticated touch, group cohesion, and a big dollop of luck.

Forecasting guidelines

Clearing out some old files, I came across this list. No identifying author, heading, url; just a sheet of printed paper. It is a quick reference list of statistics and forecasting. Rather than simply throw it out, here are the guidelines:

Comparison classes should inform your probability estimates

Hunt for the right information

Adjust and update your forecasts when appropriate

Mathematical and statistical models can help

Post-mortem analyses help you improve

Select the right questions to answer

Know the power players

Norms and protocols of domestic and international institutions matter

Other perspectives aside from power politics can also inform your forecasts

Wildcards, accidents and black swans can catch you off-guard if you don't consider the risk of irreducible uncertainty

Lunch or evidence

From the New Yorker, July 29, 2013.

Grudging consent

From Grudging Consent by Charles Tilly. A lengthy meditation on the State and the Citizen. Thoughtful, not strident. Here is one passage:

All systems of rule, whether democratic or undemocratic, survive by finding stable supplies of the basic resources it takes to run a government: means of coercion, administration and patronage. Of course, the mix of crucial resources changes over time. For millennia, kingdoms and empires sustained themselves mainly with soldiers, weapons, food, animals, labor power and strategic information. These days, powerful states necessarily add to that array a much richer supply of information, scientific-technical knowledge and communications media. But the principle remains the same: Effective rule depends on the continuous production of crucial resources. If the resources dry up, rulers lose the means of enforcing whatever decisions they make and state capacity collapses. This has happened often in history, as an anthropologist studying Central America or the Near East could readily show us.

The main difference between non- or predemocratic regimes and democratic ones is that the former tend to commandeer resources under threat of coercion, whereas democratic ones draw essential resources mainly from subject populations that have substantial power to accept or reject their demands — populations with what we call “voice.” This is grudging consent at work.

I think the prerequisites for grudging consent are transparency, clarity, accountability, and reliability. If you are missing one or more of these attributes, then the capacity of citizens to extend grudging consent is sharply limited. The weaker the consent, the more precarious the state system becomes.

44% quotation error rate in scientific studies

Fascinating. From Bad Footnotes Can Be Deadly by Daniel Engber. Engber is using the opioid crisis (59,000 deaths from overdoses in the past year) as the context for a discussion of what I have referred to as cognitive pollution - things believed to be true which are not.

The New York Times reported last week that 59,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2016, in the latest sign that America’s prescription painkiller epidemic is only getting worse. Yet the more shocking news about the scourge of opioids came a few days earlier, in a note published in the New England Journal of Medicine by a team of researchers in Canada. That note shows how a tiny blurb that first appeared in the journal’s January 1980 issue helped reshape—and distort—conventional wisdom on pain management, tilting doctors in favor of giving out addictive drugs.

Back in 1979, Boston University Medical Center researchers Jane Porter and Hershel Jick found that just a handful of the patients who’d been treated with narcotics at a set of six hospitals went on to develop drug dependencies. Their single-paragraph summary of this result would be published as a letter to the editor in the NEJM under the heading, “Addiction Rare in Patients Treated With Narcotics.”

According to the recent correspondence in NEJM, this single paragraph was cited hundreds of times in the 1990s and 2000s to support the claim that prescription painkillers weren’t that addictive. It was during this period that doctors started treating pain much more aggressively than they had before and handing out potent drugs with little circumspection. (For a good history of the changing use of painkillers, see this piece in Vox.)

The original paragraph from Porter and Jick, just 101 words in all, read as follows:

Recently, we examined our current files to determine the incidence of narcotic addiction in 39,946 hospitalized medical patients who were monitored consecutively. Although there were 11,882 patients who received at least one narcotic preparation, there were only four cases of reasonably well documented addiction in patients who had no history of addiction. The addiction was considered major in only one instance. The drugs implicated were meperidine in two patients, Percodan in one, and hydromorphone in one. We conclude that despite widespread use of narcotic drugs in hospitals, the development of addiction is rare in medical patients with no history of addiction.

Most citations of this note seemed to overlook its narrow scope. The blurb gives a rate of drug addiction for patients with restricted access to the drugs in question and no stated definition of what it means to be “addicted.” Thirty-seven years ago, when Porter and Jick’s letter first appeared, opioids were carefully controlled; the patients they described may have taken painkillers while they were at the hospital, but they weren’t going home with them. That meant the addiction rate they found (four in 11,882) had little bearing on the more important question—now sadly resolved—of whether it’s safe to prescribe opioids to patients outside the hospital setting. Despite these limitations, the stature of this tiny research project seemed to only grow as time went on, like a scholarly fish tale. In 1990, Scientific American described Porter and Jick’s paragraph as a “an extensive study.” By 2001, Time had promoted it to the status of “a landmark study.”

I was in college around this time and recall how compelling this evidence seemed to be. "Did you see that recent study . . . "

Engber goes on to discuss many other instances where researchers start with only a partial understanding of the circumstances of a study, its provenance or its quality, assume into place the level of quality they would wish that the study had and then use it to buttress whatever point they are trying to make.

In academic publishing, references are meant to buttress arguments, establish facts, and dole out credit where it’s due. In practice, they often do the opposite, hiding more than they show. In a disturbing and delightful series of papers on this topic, Norwegian social anthropologist Ole Bjorn Rekdal has shown how easily and often citations are abused. When you try to trace the provenance of any given, referenced fact—on addiction rates, for example—you may well find yourself tangled in a nest of secondary sources, with each paper claiming to have pulled the fact from another. These daisy-chained citations make it very hard—and at times impossible—to locate original source material. They also lead to a game of research telephone, in which the context of a fact gets stripped away, and its meaning morphed as it gets transmitted from one citation to the next.

It is the same with quotations. Try finding an actual source for many quotations and verify that the person actually said that - it is astonishing how happily people share so many unsourced and inaccurate quotes.

“Most scientists probably have some awareness [of] quotation error and citation copying in the scientific literature,” Wetterer wrote, “but I believe few have much appreciation for how common or important these problems may be.” He goes on to summarize some broader surveys of the problem: One study compared more than 1,000 direct quotes in scholarly papers with their original sources and found that 44 percent contained at least one mistake; another looked at how mistakes like typos propagate through bibliographies and concluded that at least 70 percent of all scientific citations are copied from the bibliographies of other secondary sources.

Other researchers have found error rates as high as 67 percent in the journals of specific fields. Rekdal notes that entire books are routinely cited as the source for specific facts, without the help of page numbers. “At times, I get the feeling that references have been placed in quantities and with a degree of precision reminiscent of last minute oregano flakes being sprinkled over a pizza on the way to the oven,” he writes.

And technology, which should be a solution, is, so far, merely an amplifier of cognitive pollutuon.

Meanwhile, the same digital tools that might be used to clean up the literature also make it easier to rank scholars according to their “bibliometrics”—i.e., the number of times their papers have been cited in the literature. This, in turns incentivizes researchers to use (and abuse) their bibliographies as a way of advancing their careers. I mean, why not stuff your paper full of vacuous pointers to your own work or that of your colleagues?

The stuffing of journals with trash citations has clogged a vital channel of scientific communication, by overwhelming useful references with those that are trivial, inaccurate, or plagiarized. The recent flap over Porter and Jick’s paragraph from 1980 shows how this knowledge jamming can even, in some cases, be a matter of life or death.

Transparency, consequences and a market-place of ideas. It sounds so easy but we are a long ways from the ideal.