Thursday, December 31, 2015
Saturday, December 26, 2015
Diversity
People don't realize this, but "diversity" was the catch-word involved in the abolishing of affirmative action. In the Bakke case from around '78, the SCOTUS ruled that you couldn't favor applicants by race, explicitly. However, you could construct a freshman class (or a 1st year med school class, since Bakke had applied to UCD Med school) and take into account all the different ways people are different from one another: what state they came from, whether they are rural or urban, whether they had special talents or characteristics, etc... This emphasis on diversity honored the notion of academic freedom: that the university might want to enhance the education of everyone by bringing different kind of people together.
I remember because I was a student at UCD at the time, and my father who taught there as well explained the case to me.
"Diversity" wasn't targeted at urm groups anymore (underrepresented minorities), but a university certainly could use it that way as well. Well, of course, universities began to use "diversity" only to mean urm groups. Because the problem was never to get enough White Idaho farmers or Jewish violinists to go to Harvard. Also, although international students automatically bring diversity (of culture, language, race, religion, and a whole host of other factors) somehow only domestic diversity counts.
(Logically, an all black school is not racially "diverse." By the same token, an individual cannot be diverse, only a population.)
So "diversity" is a blunt and inappropriate tool if what you are looking for is a racial mix reflective of US domestic populations. The reason is the tension between the original AA goal of compensating for past discrimination and the goal of diversity, which in actuality targets only two minority groups but sounds like it should strive for a much wider panoply of people. My department, for example, has faculty from Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Netherlands, Spain, Brazil, the US, etc... but yet we still aren't very diverse in terms of the representation of the under-represented US populations.
I remember because I was a student at UCD at the time, and my father who taught there as well explained the case to me.
"Diversity" wasn't targeted at urm groups anymore (underrepresented minorities), but a university certainly could use it that way as well. Well, of course, universities began to use "diversity" only to mean urm groups. Because the problem was never to get enough White Idaho farmers or Jewish violinists to go to Harvard. Also, although international students automatically bring diversity (of culture, language, race, religion, and a whole host of other factors) somehow only domestic diversity counts.
(Logically, an all black school is not racially "diverse." By the same token, an individual cannot be diverse, only a population.)
So "diversity" is a blunt and inappropriate tool if what you are looking for is a racial mix reflective of US domestic populations. The reason is the tension between the original AA goal of compensating for past discrimination and the goal of diversity, which in actuality targets only two minority groups but sounds like it should strive for a much wider panoply of people. My department, for example, has faculty from Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Netherlands, Spain, Brazil, the US, etc... but yet we still aren't very diverse in terms of the representation of the under-represented US populations.
The Two-Hour Work Session
Two hours seems about right. It is substantial enough to get a lot of work done, even with a few distractions. It's not so long that you need to get to make coffee or go to the bathroom. You have time to warm up and then cool down at the end, and switch focus a few times. If you don't get through the whole two hours, you're likely to have worked at least an hour fifteen.
String these together on successive days over a week or a month and and you will be unstoppable.
String these together on successive days over a week or a month and and you will be unstoppable.
The 5th Song
The 5th song is taking shape. It is is Bb and begins there in the tonic, with a sixth and ninth. It goes up to the subdominant Eb, then to the II chord Cmin7, with a flatted 5th and back to the tonic.
Then it goes to IV again, V7, then III (Dmin), a C#7, and a Cmaj7. I don't know if that is permissible, because I'm doing a II/V/I progression in another key. No matter, it sounds ok to me.
The next four measures will repeat the first four. Then the last four measure of the second A section will have to be slightly different, resolving on the tonic rather than on II.
It only took two days to learn to do chords in this key, so that's not so bad.
The melody so far goes like this: La, la, la, la, la // la la / la / la la. Well, I guess you have to be here to hear it. I always need chords first, then melody, then lyrics.
Lyrics seem infinitely perfectible to me, whereas the song (harmony / melody) just is what it. Perhaps that is a feature of my method.
The next step, logically, is to write down and record my songs. I've started to do both. But I think I need an album of 8 songs.
I am painfully aware of my limitations, yet my songs sound ok, even beautiful at times, to me. Toward the end of a part the other night I sat down and played one of them instrumentally and nobody complained.
I think, naturally, that I should set poems to music.
Then it goes to IV again, V7, then III (Dmin), a C#7, and a Cmaj7. I don't know if that is permissible, because I'm doing a II/V/I progression in another key. No matter, it sounds ok to me.
The next four measures will repeat the first four. Then the last four measure of the second A section will have to be slightly different, resolving on the tonic rather than on II.
It only took two days to learn to do chords in this key, so that's not so bad.
The melody so far goes like this: La, la, la, la, la // la la / la / la la. Well, I guess you have to be here to hear it. I always need chords first, then melody, then lyrics.
Lyrics seem infinitely perfectible to me, whereas the song (harmony / melody) just is what it. Perhaps that is a feature of my method.
The next step, logically, is to write down and record my songs. I've started to do both. But I think I need an album of 8 songs.
I am painfully aware of my limitations, yet my songs sound ok, even beautiful at times, to me. Toward the end of a part the other night I sat down and played one of them instrumentally and nobody complained.
I think, naturally, that I should set poems to music.
Friday, December 25, 2015
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
The Fallacy Behind David and Goliath
1. We know the favorite wins more often than the underdog. Here, favorite is defined as the team more likely to win, in almost everyone's opinion. When the favorite wins, no explanation is needed, and the story behind their win is not interesting. There is no "story" there; no narrative impulse. There is not story in which the hare beats the tortoise, because, well, that is too obvious. A story must have some twist to it. The story of David and Goliath where Goliath wins is a story that doesn't get passed on in David's family. The reason David beats Goliath is that that is the raison d'être of the damned story. It's a story that exists for the sole reason of having David to do something improbably heroic.
2. So when the expected does not happen, then there must be some explanation, because the result is puzzling by its very nature. These explanations can be interesting (almost by definition), involving factors that people did not see ahead of time. But they usually have little predictive value. Why not? Well, because the underdog still loses more often than it doesn't, and the factors that can foul up predictions are unforeseeable by their very nature. A predictable upset is not an upset at all. If we factored in the factors that make certain underdogs win more often than not, then they would no longer be underdogs: those factors would just, from now on, be included in future predictions. Put another way, we can't use Gladwell's insights to win bets on football games. We can't say the underdog will always beat the point spread, or that favorite will always cover it. Of course, ex post facto reasoning is always wonderful. That's why, after the event, we can also give lists of reasons why things happened the way they did.
3. Since upsets are more interesting narratively, than expected results, and spectacular insights are even more interesting, they are more memorable. The explanations thus seem more significant. But really, they are not; unless they fall into some significant patterns, that can be made the basis of predictions. It is not particularly predictive to say: sometimes the underdog wins, because, say the chances of a 2% event occurring are still 2%, not zero. We don't remember the 98% of times when things happened like we thought they would.
[After reading some comments on Thomas's blog today I was thinking of Gladwell's book on this subject, in which he goes to great lengths to explain why things don't always occur the way we think they would.]
2. So when the expected does not happen, then there must be some explanation, because the result is puzzling by its very nature. These explanations can be interesting (almost by definition), involving factors that people did not see ahead of time. But they usually have little predictive value. Why not? Well, because the underdog still loses more often than it doesn't, and the factors that can foul up predictions are unforeseeable by their very nature. A predictable upset is not an upset at all. If we factored in the factors that make certain underdogs win more often than not, then they would no longer be underdogs: those factors would just, from now on, be included in future predictions. Put another way, we can't use Gladwell's insights to win bets on football games. We can't say the underdog will always beat the point spread, or that favorite will always cover it. Of course, ex post facto reasoning is always wonderful. That's why, after the event, we can also give lists of reasons why things happened the way they did.
3. Since upsets are more interesting narratively, than expected results, and spectacular insights are even more interesting, they are more memorable. The explanations thus seem more significant. But really, they are not; unless they fall into some significant patterns, that can be made the basis of predictions. It is not particularly predictive to say: sometimes the underdog wins, because, say the chances of a 2% event occurring are still 2%, not zero. We don't remember the 98% of times when things happened like we thought they would.
[After reading some comments on Thomas's blog today I was thinking of Gladwell's book on this subject, in which he goes to great lengths to explain why things don't always occur the way we think they would.]
Sunday, December 20, 2015
Ideology
Here's the problem. An ideology is like a filter to tell you what to think about a number of issues.
The idiocy of right-wing ideology is like a scape-goat. Since the right is idiotic, it must mean that we, the non-right, have the answers: just the opposite of what they think. Very easy.
But most things you might want to know don't break down that easily. So the ideological response to the right is likely to be wrong, not because the right is right, but because the answer to the right is reactive. It is reactionary.
The absence of conservatives in certain fields of academia is not bad because the conservative ideas are so great and we should listen to them. It is bad because ideas themselves should not be so easily categorized. Even about political issues. If no conservative people are part of the conversation at all, then a complacency sets in. They are idiots, horrible people.
...
Someone on a Facebook group, "teaching with a sociological lens," posted a New York Times article about why there should be more conservatives in academia. Of course, everyone in the group piled on, with the usual canards: reality has a liberal bias, etc... and with some caricatures of conservative thought as racist and simplistic. Very unhelpful and very simplistic itself. It was as though the stupidity of conservatism had made the group more stupid as well.
...
An example might be watered-down po-mo in composition studies. The idea behind it is a good one: authority and hierarchy are bad; epistemology is uncertain. But the result is that the real virtues of poststructuralist thought, any rigor it might have, devolves into base caricature, as Thomas Basbøll has shown. Another example: skepticism toward American foreign policy might make people more sympathetic to Putin or regimes in Venezuela or Cuba.
...
Conservatism becomes the scapegoat, a garbage pail where we throw all the idea we don't like. Misogyny, racism, free-market capitalism, gun violence. Everything in the pail smells equally bad, because all that garbage is in there. But the mechanism ends up protecting liberal thought from its own idiocies, weaker in the end, less nuanced.
...
A social psychologist named Jonathan Haidt, who is a brother of a former colleague of mine from when I taught at Ohio State, has developed some interesting ideas about this in his recent work. Since I am not right-wing, I recognize this scapegoating in myself. It makes life easier in some sense, but in my own work I have to figure things out myself rather than thinking that a left-right dichotomy resolves relevant issues.
My own idea is that reality has a reality bias. In other words, things are not that simple, and adherence to the idea that you just have to look at the conservative view and think the opposite is intellectually lazy.
The idiocy of right-wing ideology is like a scape-goat. Since the right is idiotic, it must mean that we, the non-right, have the answers: just the opposite of what they think. Very easy.
But most things you might want to know don't break down that easily. So the ideological response to the right is likely to be wrong, not because the right is right, but because the answer to the right is reactive. It is reactionary.
The absence of conservatives in certain fields of academia is not bad because the conservative ideas are so great and we should listen to them. It is bad because ideas themselves should not be so easily categorized. Even about political issues. If no conservative people are part of the conversation at all, then a complacency sets in. They are idiots, horrible people.
...
Someone on a Facebook group, "teaching with a sociological lens," posted a New York Times article about why there should be more conservatives in academia. Of course, everyone in the group piled on, with the usual canards: reality has a liberal bias, etc... and with some caricatures of conservative thought as racist and simplistic. Very unhelpful and very simplistic itself. It was as though the stupidity of conservatism had made the group more stupid as well.
...
An example might be watered-down po-mo in composition studies. The idea behind it is a good one: authority and hierarchy are bad; epistemology is uncertain. But the result is that the real virtues of poststructuralist thought, any rigor it might have, devolves into base caricature, as Thomas Basbøll has shown. Another example: skepticism toward American foreign policy might make people more sympathetic to Putin or regimes in Venezuela or Cuba.
...
Conservatism becomes the scapegoat, a garbage pail where we throw all the idea we don't like. Misogyny, racism, free-market capitalism, gun violence. Everything in the pail smells equally bad, because all that garbage is in there. But the mechanism ends up protecting liberal thought from its own idiocies, weaker in the end, less nuanced.
...
A social psychologist named Jonathan Haidt, who is a brother of a former colleague of mine from when I taught at Ohio State, has developed some interesting ideas about this in his recent work. Since I am not right-wing, I recognize this scapegoating in myself. It makes life easier in some sense, but in my own work I have to figure things out myself rather than thinking that a left-right dichotomy resolves relevant issues.
My own idea is that reality has a reality bias. In other words, things are not that simple, and adherence to the idea that you just have to look at the conservative view and think the opposite is intellectually lazy.
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