Category: Academic

“Buyer’s market”

When did the values of the market become a substitute for ethical standards? I found myself wondering this in reading this article in Inside Higher Education about a young philosophy PhD who was offered a tenure-track job at Nazareth College in New York, replied with an enthusiastic email attempting to start a negotiation about starting salary, sabbatical, maternity leave, and limited teaching in her first year. Although she made clear that she didn’t expect all of her requests to be possible, the university responded with a brusque retraction of the job offer. Now, the misogyny of philosophy departments is by now well established, but this smackdown of a young colleague who has just been selected as the best available for a job in your department, merely for making some requests, seemed shocking to me. Not to the commenters on the IHE blog, though, who may be supposed to be mainly higher education professionals. Some sample comments:

She has too many requests and this is always a sign that a person is going to be a pain in the *&*%. Her requests on balance are not unreasonable but she is in no position to ask for all of this — it is a buyer’s market. … Lots of great people to choose from so why saddle yourself with someone who is challenged right off the bat.

several substantial requests, the sum of which went beyond the pale for hat-in-hand applicants.

You just spent a semester narrowing hundreds (or more) candidates and arguing for this ONE person… only to have them forward THAT? Not exactly who I want to spend the rest of my career with (not to mention that the person clearly felt they were ‘playing with house money’ and could afford to lose the job offer… someone who REALLY wants the job wouldn’t risk that message).

(To be fair, some comments are supportive of the candidate, and others take on other issues.) What fascinate me in these responses are these references to a “buyer’s market” to which the presumably arrogant candidate should have meekly submitted, with the clear presumption that the logic of the market is proper and just. If you are in a powerful position, where you can take advantage of those unfortunate enough to have qualifications that are in high supply and low demand, then of course you should, and no one could be surprised if you do. It’s an argument that is rarely applied to those who are robbed at knifepoint by those stronger or more ruthless than themselves, but it does show up in certain comments on rape and on international relations. It’s the belief that power creates its own justification.

I am frequently reminded of Nietzsche’s remarks on markets in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science):

Kaufen und verkaufen gilt jetzt als gemein, wie die Kunst des Lesens und Schreibens; Jeder ist jetzt darin eingeübt, selbst wenn er kein Handelsmann ist, und übt sich noch an jedem Tage in dieser Technik: ganz wie ehemals, im Zeitalter der wilderen Menschheit, Jedermann Jäger war und sich Tag für Tag in der Technik der Jagd übte.

Buying and selling are common skills nowadays, like the art of reading and writing: Everyone is accomplished in it, even if he’s not a businessman, and practices every day, just as in earlier times, in the days of primitive man, everyone was a hunter, and practiced that skill every day.

One last point: The largest number of commenters fault the young scholar for her “tone”. Everyone knows, apparently, that you don’t put this sort of thing so baldly in an email, for God’s sake! Obviously they had no choice but to rescind the offer when she attacked them with an EMAIL that clearly laid out what she would like. This is pretty hilarious, given how much philosophers pride themselves on their ruthlessly direct style of academic disputation, with some of them arguing that the would-be philosophers with excessive numbers of X chromosomes can’t hack it.

The meaning of inversion

Probably some clever semiotician has written about this, but the recent bizarre affair of La Quenelle got me to wondering: “When is an inversion not a significant inversion?” Or rather, when does a physical inversion not invert the signification?

The lewd gesture, invented by the French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala (described by The Independent as a “black French comedian”, for some reason)  is described by The Independent thus

An arm with an outstretched finger is pointed at the ground. The other arm is folded across the chest. The hand is placed on the first arm, showing how far up your enemy’s backside you wish to slide your “quenelle”. This hand is sometimes moved suggestively upwards.

Anyway, the gesture has been described as anti-semitic, and the above-linked article describes how a footballer has been punished for performing the gesture on the field. How can a gesture be anti-semitic? one wonders. Is this like the joke about the woman who calls the police to complain about the man who whistles bawdy tunes when he walks past her house? Continue reading “The meaning of inversion”

The age of victimhood

I recently read Timothy Snyder’s book Bloodlands, a synoptic account of the Nazi and Soviet terror in Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Overall, the book disappointed me somewhat. I was expecting something more profoundly original than it actually was. Most of what he had to say would be familiar to anyone who has read the separate histories of the Nazi terror and the Soviet terror. Where comparisons were made, they ofter reminded me of the dadaist antijoke that exists in many forms — all of them fairly arbitrary — going something like “How is the Pope like an orange? Answer: They’re both round, except for the Pope.”

Again and again I felt like Snyder was trying to say, “Look at how similar the Stalinist and Hitler genocides were… They were both racially motivated, except for Stalin. They were both devoted to extracting economic value from the bodies of enemies of the state, except for Hitler.” And so on. At other points he seems committed to pointing out how completely different the two were… except that then he has to admit that they weren’t all that different, and in many respects you can’t even separate them in time and space, or in motivation, as they clearly learned from each other, and in some cases intentionally or unintentionally collaborated.

But one remark impressed me: He pointed out that both Stalin and Hitler obsessively portrayed themselves as victims of their victims. Claiming the mantle of victimhood has become so pervasive as a political strategy — both in domestic affairs within western democracies and in international relations — that it’s hard to remember that it was once considered disgraceful, the last refuge of the pusillanimous. At least, that’s my impression. It would be interesting to see an academic treatise on the history of the victimhood stance.

Hitler famously accused the Jews of dragging an unwilling Germany into war. Stalin accused the starving Ukrainians of anti-Soviet propaganda by blatantly starving. The Germans dressed up prisoners as Polish soldiers (and shot them) to show that the obvious German aggression was really a response to an attack. Of course, the need to play at “just war” has been with us since the advent of Christendom. It’s hard to imagine Alexander the Great caring much about showing that Thracian soldiers had crossed the border first and hurled the first spear. But it’s also hard to imagine Bismarck feeling the need to dress up corpses in French uniforms.

And it wasn’t just the great tyrants. One of the most chilling passages that Snyder quotes comes from a German officer writing to his wife about the difficulties he had slaughtering Jewish children, who “flew in great arcs, and we shot them to pieces in the air”. But then he thought of his own children, and that perversely steeled his nerves: “I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse.”

If there is any application of this principle to contemporary events in any lands that formerly rhymed with Calamine, I can’t imagine what it might be. I remember, when we were living in Canada, reading an article in the newspaper about a recommendation by a panel of Quebec historians that the teaching of Quebec history in schools should be rethought to be more positive, less emphasis on the quebecois as perennial losers. I thought that was a great move, and would bode well for Quebec and for Canada as a whole if it were adopted. In the long term. There’s power in being a victim, until there isn’t, until the moment when it suddenly tips over into being pathetic.

More Hockey Statisticks

I wrote last week about my surprising response to two books about the public conflicts over palaeoclimatology. Whereas I expected to find myself sympathising with the respected scientist Michael Mann, I found both authors equally repellant — both are smug and self-absorbed, both write crudely — and had most sympathy with Steven McIntyre, the former mining engineer who stars in Andrew Montford’s book. Fundamentally, I found that Mann’s own account made him seem like just the sort of arrogant senior scientist I have occasionally had to deal with as a statistician, one who is outraged that anyone outside his close circle would want to challenge his methodology.

A pair of long comments on the post underlined my impression of the cultish behaviour of people who have gotten enmeshed in the struggle over climate change, on both sides. The commenter writes:

I would suggest that McIntyre’s work went out of its way to try to cast doubt on Mann’s research, and in that process created as many errors of its own. Montford’s book takes that dubious effort and magnifies it for the purposes of attacking climate change science in general by vilifying a single piece of research by a single researcher.

I have to say, Montford’s effort has been highly effective. In one lecture I saw, given by Dr Richard Alley, he recounted being in Washington speaking to a science committee where one high level member stated, “Well, we know all this climate change stuff is based on a fraudulent Hockey Stick graph.”

I’m sure [Andrew] Montford appreciates your piece here perpetuating that position.

I don’t know exactly what Montford’s “effort” is. Certainly, in his book he has little to say about the rest of climate science, but what he does have to say can hardly give any impression other than that the “hockey stick” is a small part of palaeoclimatology, and that palaeoclimatology is a small part of climate research. He never accuses Mann or anyone else of fraud in his book, although he is unyielding and close to hysterical in imputing incompetence to Mann and some of his closest collaborators.

As for McIntyre’s work going “out of its way to try to cast doubt”, this hardly seems different to me than the usual way scientists are motivated. It’s no different than the comments about “getting rid of the Mediaeval Warm Period”, that Montford is obsessed with, as evidence of scientific corruption. I was never bothered by that comment, or any of the comments that came out of the disgraceful email hack of the Climatic Research Unit, because I understand that scientists rarely launch an investigation without any preconceptions. It’s perfectly plausible — even likely — that climate researchers would have had a strong gut feeling that this warm period was much less substantial than it had seemed, but were casting about for a way to prove the point. The trick here is to have a rigorous methodology that won’t bend to your preconceptions. The same way, McIntyre had a gut feeling that the climate was much more variable in the past than the mainstream researchers wanted to believe, and he set about proving his point by trying to find the flaws in their methodology.

The fact that later studies ended up confirming the broad outlines of Mann’s picture, and disproving McIntyre’s intuition does not make his critique any the less serious or important. And it doesn’t make Mann’s efforts to portray all of his opponents as villains any less unsavoury. And his efforts to present scientific defensiveness as high principle do a disservice to science in general, and to climate science more specifically.

The commenter describes Mann’s self-righteous refusal to provide essential materials for McIntyre’s attempts to re-evaluate his work as a natural response to ” the levels to which “skeptics” are willing to go. It may seem absurd, but I think that is only because the levels they go to are so outrageous.” Except that it looks to me as though Mann’s stonewalling came first. Maybe that’s wrong, but again, if so, he doesn’t seem to think anyone has a right to expect evidence of the fact.

Mann comes across in his own book as a manipulator who would like to tar all of his opponents with the outrageous actions that some have committed. He accuses McIntyre of “intimidation” without considering it necessary to provide any shred of evidence. The portion of their correspondence quoted by Montford obviously doesn’t show anything beyond occasional exasperation at Mann’s stonewalling. Obviously there could be more to it, but Mann seems so persuaded of his own saintliness that his bare assertion of his own pure motives — and of the correctness of his methodology — ought to persuade every reader. And so convinced of the objectivity of his friends and colleagues that merely quoting their statements in his defence should suffice.

Science is science, but many climate scientists have (quite rightly) decided that the implications of what they have learned demand political action. They can’t then express horror when others blend their scientific inquiry with a political agenda.

Of hockey sticks and statistics

[Updated at bottom] I recently read two books on climate science — or rather, two books on the controversies around climate science. One book was Michael Mann’s book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars; the other The Hockey Stick Illusion by Andrew Montford.

Now, I am, by inclination and tribal allegiance, of the party of Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading climate scientists. He and his colleagues have been subject to beastly treatment by political opponents, some of which is detailed in his book. And I only picked up the Montford book out of a sense of obligation to see what the opposing side was saying. And yet…

Montford’s book makes a pretty persuasive case. Not that climate science is bunk, or a conspiracy, or that anthropogenic global warming is a fiction — there is far too much converging evidence from different fields to plausibly make that claim (and indeed, Montford never makes such a claim) — but that a combination of egotism and back-scratching has seriously slowed down the process of evaluation and correction of sometimes sloppy statistical procedures, and tarnished the reputation of the scientific community generally.

I admit to a certain bias here: The attacks on Mann’s work that Montford describes are statistical in nature, and Mann’s response reminds me of the tone that is all too common when statisticians raise questions about published scientific work. Montford has a remarkable amount of technical detail — so much that I found myself wondering who his intended audience is — and the critiques he describes (mainly due to the Canadian mining engineer Steve McIntyre) seem eminently sensible. In the end, I don’t think they panned out, put they were genuine shortcomings in the early work, and McIntyre seems to have done the right things in demonstrating the failure of a statistical method, at least in principle, and to have earned for his trouble only incomprehension and abuse from Mann and his colleagues.

Continue reading “Of hockey sticks and statistics”

“Institutions of Higher Perspiration”

“They don’t want to turn the universities into sweatshops. They’ll be institutions of higher perspiration.”

That was my conclusion about the trajectory to which our managerial overlords aspire, as I was trying to convince a colleague that he should support the UCU, the British academics union, and its escalating strike action. I walked the picket lines for the first time on Thursday, during our two-hour strike. There were about 20 of us there, and only a few were senior academics, which is somewhat disheartening. There were almost as many reporters as strikers, so I got to talk to    all of them. Their questions were interesting:

  1. Why do you think you deserve more pay, in this time of wage restraint? Other workers aren’t getting raises. I think they should join unions and demand higher wages too. It’s not a law of nature that we have “wage restraint” for everyone but the CEOs and fat-cat bankers. It’s a reflection of political decisions and power imbalance, and the effect of words like “time of wage restraint”. Continue reading ““Institutions of Higher Perspiration””

Demographic fallacies and classical music

I was just reading an article in Slate with the title “Classical Music in America is Dead”. The argument boils down to two points:

  1. Classical music listeners are a small portion of the population.
  2. Relatively few young people in the audience.

With regard to (1), I thought it interesting that he writes

Just 2.8 percent of albums sold in 2013 were categorized as classical. By comparison, rock took 35 percent; R&B 18 percent; soundtracks 4 percent. Only jazz, at 2.3 percent, is more incidental to the business of American music.

What’s interesting is that, while jazz is certainly a minority taste, and its trajectory in American culture has closely paralleled that of classical music in the 20th century, I don’t think anyone would claim that jazz is dead.

He quotes the critic Richard Sandow, who makes a demographic argument that

And the aging audience is also a shrinking one. The NEA, ever since 1982, has reported a smaller and smaller percentage of American adults going to classical music performances. And, as time goes on, those who do go are increasingly concentrated in the older age groups (so that by now, the only group going as often as it did in the past are those over 65).

Which means that the audience is most definitely shrinking. Younger people aren’t coming into it. In the 1980s, the NEA reported, the percentage of people under 30 in the classical music audience fell in half. And older people also aren’t coming into the classical audience. If they were, we’d see a steady percentage of people in their 40s and 50s going to classical events, but we don’t. That percentage is falling.

Of course, this is vastly overstated. “Younger people” are “coming into it”… in smaller numbers than before. It’s an absurd fallacy (not uncommon, and addressed first (to my knowledge) in theoretical ageing research by Yashin et al. in the 1980s) that you can determine the longitudinal dynamics for individuals by looking at the cross-sectional age distribution.

Consider a model where individuals are recruited into classical music at a constant rate over their lifetimes, ending with 10% of the 80-year-olds. (We’ll leave the older population out of it.) Then about 11% of the adult audience would be under 30. Suppose there were now a change, just so that children under 15 were no longer being recruited into classical music, but after that age they continued to be enter at the same rate as before. Then the fraction of the adult audience under 30 would be halved, to about 5.5%. The number of people in their 40s and 50s going to concerts would decline by about 15%.

I’m not arguing that this is what is going on. A lot of the story is probably the general splintering of the music audience, and the fact that people increasingly prefer to stay home for their entertainment. (This is one reason why I have argued that the classical music establishment’s reliance on enormously expensive orchestras and opera companies is a mistake.) Just that you can’t make inferences about individual trajectories over time without data about individual trajectories.

Hippie science

There are two books I’ve read sort of recently, From Counterculture to Cyberculture by Fred Turner and How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser, that supplement each other as a picture of how antimaterialistic culture of the SF Bay area in the late 1960s through mid-1970s produced a lot of nonsense, but also hugely important new impulses in hard technical fields. Silicon Valley grew out of an ethos of DIY back-to-the-earth-ism (hence the “Homebrew Computer Club”), while the Fundamental Fysiks Group at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, took the energy of enthusiasm for parapsychology and mysticism, and channeled it into revival of an inquisitive style of physics that rediscovered entanglement and Bell’s Theorem, and laid the groundwork for quantum cryptography and quantum information science.

Math and taxes

Oxford University has a new mathematics building. It’s very nice, looks like it would be a good place to work. But I found it fascinating to learn that the building is split in half, one part for teaching, one for research, with undergraduates basically forbidden to enter the research part. It’s a bit of a nuisance for the faculty, who need to give tutorials, and would sometimes find it convenient to do it in their Maths Institute office rather than in their college. Why is it? The story — I can’t vouch for its truth, but I’ve heard this from several people — is that it is for tax reasons. Apparently, research is considered a charitable activity, while teaching is… I don’t know, commercial activity? By splitting the building this way, they were spared paying VAT (close to 20%) on the construction.

This suggests an updated version of an old Jewish joke:

(Student tries to enter the research side of the Maths Institute Building.)

Receptionist: Where do you think you’re going? You’re not allowed in there.

Student: I’m looking for my brother. He’s a graduate student here.

Receptionist: Why don’t you ring him?

Student: He’s probably in one of the interaction zones, which have been designed to facilitate informal discussion outside the framework of traditional office spaces.

Receptionist: You could ring his mobile.

Student: As you are probably aware, the lovely metal cladding on the interior walls has exactly the right dimensions to block all mobile telephone and computer wireless radio signals. (True, apparently.) Please, I just need to go in for two minutes.

Receptionist: Well, okay. But don’t let me catch you learning in there!

Einstein and the Quantum

I just saw an ad (in Blackwell’s Books) for a book titled Einstein and the Quantum, with a text that began

Einstein himself famously rejected quantum mechanics with his God does not play dice theory…

Putting aside the fact that “God does not play dice with the universe” is a quip, not a theory, I’m fascinated by this extreme statement of a calumny on Einstein that I knew as standard when I first learned about quantum mechanics from popular science in the 1970s, that the old man, despite his revolutionary past (and he was only in his late 40s) simply lacked the intellectual flexibility to keep up, rejected the new science, and was proved wrong by the march of progress.

In fact, that famous remark (from a 1926 letter to Max Born) acknowledged up front that the emerging probabilistic view of quantum mechanics was proving very useful. He simply rejected the willingness to deny a micro-level interpretation. (And the so-called Copenhagen “Interpretation” of quantum mechanics is really an anti-interpretation, a programmatic refusal to interpret. For more comments on the pedagogical function, see here.) The fact that this approach went from strength to strength as a calculating tool does not mean that its interpretive framework, the one that said that probabilities are the fundamental objects and there is no use going deeper, has been proved, any more than the success of Maxwell’s equations proved the existence of molecular vortices in the luminiferous aether. In particular, proponents of the Copenhagen Interpretation have tended to ignore the fact that they are helping themselves to a supposedly primitive concept, probability, that is actually complex, strange, and sorely in need of physical foundations.

Certainly one powerful strain of modern work on the foundations of physics — in particular, the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics (cf. David Wallace’s The Emergent Multiverse) also rejects the notion that there is some randomness at the core of quantum mechanics, and takes as a point of departure the entanglement theory first proposed in the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment.

* Einstein wrote, “Die Theorie liefert viel, aber dem Geheimnis des Alten bringt sie uns kaum näher. Jedenfalls bin ich überzeugt, daß der nicht würfelt.“ Literally: “The theory gives us much, but it hardly brings us nearer to the Ancient One’s secret. In any case, I am convinced that he does not throw dice.”