Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Dak]

I'm often disappointed when philosophers do literary criticism. It's mostly unabashed exegesis with little to no consideration for contextual frameworks (critical ecologies, let's say).

EDIT: okay, all the stuff about undermining the critical procedure is overstated, I think; but I actually found the bit about AI intriguing.

I'm not following here. Suggesting that Bartleby is a blueprint for weaponizing AI doesn't mean he loses meaning in other contexts... Maybe I'm confused about your objection.

Suggesting Bartleby is a blueprint for weaponizing AI, particularly in terms of this mess about "affirming a negative" or whatever, I think is a rather hamfisted smashing of a square peg in a hexagonal hole, never mind the fact that Bartleby is a boorish, boring character. The incapacity of the employer is attributed to Bartleby's "weaponized semantics", which is ridiculous. The shortcomings of the employer are curious, but not complex. The employer/manager needs some assertiveness training or needs to be fired. If a sole proprietor, it seems unlikely he would have had success up to that point or wouldn't simply can the guy. Overall the story seems preposterous and unuseful even as a thought exercise, like some of the Case Examples which populate some of the less useful psych textbooks.

On a totally different note:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/26/call-for-adversarial-collaborations/

Adversarial collaboration on X topic to be submitted by approximately July 1st. Approximately 5k words. Potential $1,000 prize ($500 apiece). If that's something you'd be interested in attempting/would have the time for this summer and have an idea of a topic you think we could meet in the middle on let me know.

 

[Einherjar86]

Suggesting Bartleby is a blueprint for weaponizing AI, particularly in terms of this mess about "affirming a negative" or whatever, I think is a rather hamfisted smashing of a square peg in a hexagonal hole, never mind the fact that Bartleby is a boorish, boring character. The incapacity of the employer is attributed to Bartleby's "weaponized semantics", which is ridiculous. The shortcomings of the employer are curious, but not complex. The employer/manager needs some assertiveness training or needs to be fired. If a sole proprietor, it seems unlikely he would have had success up to that point or wouldn't simply can the guy. Overall the story seems preposterous and unuseful even as a thought exercise, like some of the Case Examples which populate some of the less useful psych textbooks.

I understand your objections, but the story isn't a thought experiment or a case study. It's an expression of incomprehensible absurdity (key word is expression).

I don't agree with Bakker that the story is a critique of criticism (my own words, probably not what Bakker would say), but this strikes me as one of your "I just don't like fiction" moments. The matter of the narrator's capability as a business-owner isn't really interesting, because the story doesn't aspire to plausibility. It's a ridiculous narrative, but that doesn't make it useless. Bakker has found it useful for talking about potential communicative difficulties in AI research, even programmed difficulties targeted at fostering confusion. That's a fascinating application, to my ears. It's almost certainly not what Melville had in mind, and most Melville scholars probably wouldn't buy it.

For me, Bartleby is a contextual enigma--someone whose behavior makes no sense within the parameters of his social environment. In this respect, he partakes of a literary tradition that includes Antigone, Joan of Arc (the literary, not historical, figure), and Robin Vote (from Nightwood). For me, this raises interesting questions about the representation/expression of gender ascription as well.

So a long response for a short answer: there's a lot to talk about in Bartleby beyond the believability of the scenario.

On a totally different note:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/26/call-for-adversarial-collaborations/

Adversarial collaboration on X topic to be submitted by approximately July 1st. Approximately 5k words. Potential $1,000 prize ($500 apiece). If that's something you'd be interested in attempting/would have the time for this summer and have an idea of a topic you think we could meet in the middle on let me know.

Oy. A cool opportunity, but I'm not sure. I hope to have a better sense of my summer schedule by the end of the next week.

Could the topic be whether "Bartleby" is an important story? (just kidding, I'd rather write about something else)

 

[Dak]

https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Flat-Re...+mind+is+flat+by+nick+chater/marginalrevol-20

Psychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental “surface” of conscious awareness lies a deep and complex set of inner beliefs, values, and desires that govern our thoughts, ideas, and actions, and that to know this depth is to know ourselves.

In this profoundly original book, behavioral scientist Nick Chater contends just the opposite: rather than being the plaything of unconscious currents, the brain generates behaviors in the moment based entirely on our past experiences. Engaging the reader with eye-opening experiments and visual examples, the author first demolishes our intuitive sense of how our mind works, then argues for a positive interpretation of the brain as a ceaseless and creative improviser.

 

[Dak]

http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/30/book-review-history-of-the-fabian-society/

I’m not sure whether Pease believed that a capitalist intellectual was a contradiction in terms, but he certainly didn’t expect to meet any or think they had anything interesting to say. Indeed, the one time he does bring up some people having arguments against socialism, they sound bizarre and totally unlike anything a modern person might possibly say:

When the Society was formed the Malthusian hypothesis held the field unchallenged and the stock argument against Socialism was that it would lead to universal misery by removing the beneficent checks on the growth of the population, imposed by starvation and disease upon the lowest stratum and society.

I don’t know if this was an echo chamber effect or if this was just how the late 19th century worked. I think the latter is at least possible. Remember, everyone (including the capitalists) expected communist countries to have stronger economies, even as late as the 1950s. The idea of coordination problems was almost unknown; the concept of prices as useful signals was still in its infancy. And the possibility that communism could lead to totalitarianism was almost inconceivable; for Pease these concepts are basically exact opposites, and it took Orwell to even jam the concept of “totalitarianism” in the public consciousness in a useful way. If you don’t have any of those concepts or ideas, how do you argue against socialism? I don’t know if anyone in Pease’s day had really solved that problem.
................
All of this came together into a feeling that socialism was so self-evident that arguing for capitalism was absurd. This led to a perspective where there was a battle between the right and rational way of organizing society (socialism) versus the entrenched forces who wanted to keep power but admitted they had no justification besides force and self-interest. Modern communism’s descent from its 19th century predecessors explains a lot about its mindset.

 

[Dak]

I'm linking this not as an attempt of generating an argument or whatever, but as sort of a post of sadness. I don't know how to generate a contact with Sowell, but I would love to shake this man's hand. But he's clearly on the downward slope of health, and there's no clear path of contact. He turns 88 next month, and any chance of shaking his hand and looking him in the eye decrease exponentially each year.

 

[Einherjar86]

His most recent book was published through Basic Books. You could try contacting the publisher. That’s how I got in touch with Sam Delany.

 

[Dak]

His most recent book was published through Basic Books. You could try contacting the publisher. That’s how I got in touch with Sam Delany.

Hmm. I went on their website and the Contact web form didn't really have a general question option. Basic Books apparently publishes for many public academics. I wonder if that makes a difference to transparency?

 

[Einherjar86]

Yeah, Hachette's contact portal is weirdly restrictive. You could send an email to Basic's general publicity email, although this is generally intended for the media (usually for reviews and promotional materials). You could explain your situation and say that you aren't sure what the appropriate method of contact is, and that they can redirect you if necessary. You'd think there would be an academic option; but even though Basic publishes a lot of academic writing, they're actually a popular press.

Something to keep in mind: Hachette is a major publishing group, so there are likely quite a few levels of access between you and Sowell. One difficulty is that editors and agents are usually quite protective of their authors, and contact requests probably have to be (or should) couched in some kind of professional context (e.g. interview, invitation to give a talk, etc.). As an academic, you have a bit of an advantage. Academics are trying to get in touch with each other all the time, so I can't imagine it would be unusual for them to receive a contact request from an academic regarding a particular author; but you may have to justify it as more than just wanting to open a line of communication.

You might consider making something publishable out of your contact. For example, you could pursue an interview request that you plan to publish in a psychology journal. This would probably begin by contacting some journals and finding one that approves the interview, and then the editorial staff at the journal would likely put you in touch with Sowell.

Basic Books apparently publishes for many public academics. I wonder if that makes a difference to transparency?

How do you mean?

 

[Dak]

Yeah, Hachette's contact portal is weirdly restrictive. You could send an email to Basic's general publicity email, although this is generally intended for the media (usually for reviews and promotional materials). You could explain your situation and say that you aren't sure what the appropriate method of contact is, and that they can redirect you if necessary. You'd think there would be an academic option; but even though Basic publishes a lot of academic writing, they're actually a popular press.

Something to keep in mind: Hachette is a major publishing group, so there are likely quite a few levels of access between you and Sowell. One difficulty is that editors and agents are usually quite protective of their authors, and contact requests probably have to be (or should) couched in some kind of professional context (e.g. interview, invitation to give a talk, etc.). As an academic, you have a bit of an advantage. Academics are trying to get in touch with each other all the time, so I can't imagine it would be unusual for them to receive a contact request from an academic regarding a particular author; but you may have to justify it as more than just wanting to open a line of communication.

You might consider making something publishable out of your contact. For example, you could pursue an interview request that you plan to publish in a psychology journal. This would probably begin by contacting some journals and finding one that approves the interview, and then the editorial staff at the journal would likely put you in touch with Sowell.

Yeah I assume if I had a particularly academic reason for the contact that would smooth things. I could likely even contact the alumni department at either UChicago or Stanford for that purpose. However, I would certainly be doing something like that in a completely "free agent" sense if you will, and if it were still somewhat in relation to my area in psychology, the content would likely be against the grain of what my department would appreciate (eg disparities in health outcomes, etc.). I'm also not sure, in that sense, that I'd even be able to cover any new publishable (at least at the peer review level) ground either.

How do you mean?

Just basically what you said, the multiple levels of access thing.

 

[Dak]

https://subpixel.space/entries/after-authenticity/

For years my anxieties around work had centered on far-flung future goals—a sort of personal teleology about what I was supposed to achieve and the type of person I was supposed to become. It struck me then that there is a deep entitlement to the idea of an authentic self.

No wonder millennials, the Authentic Generation, all seem to think they can be the next Steve Jobs. If you believe in a “true self” that can be discovered or achieved you’re not a far cry from believing in destiny. Worse still, you could start extrapolating all sorts of conclusions from an imaginary “truth” at your “center.” It does not escape my attention that exactly this kind of assumption is at work whenever someone asserts absolute speech rights based purely on the combination of unique identities they can lay claim to. The more differentiated the self, the more defensible this demand tends to be. Identitarianism is mirrored in—would not be possible without—the widespread preoccupation with authentic selves. In the future we may be able to look back at toxic wantrepreneurship, white entitlement, and identity politics both “left” and ethnonationalist as being underwritten by the same philosophical blunder.

 

[Einherjar86]

https://subpixel.space/entries/after-authenticity/

I read the excerpt you quoted and a fair amount of the original piece, and I feel like I'm behind this nearly 100%. A lot of it is how I've felt about the notion of authenticity for years now. Authenticity isn't something that precedes our social and economic lives, it's a product of them--and a commodity. People want authenticity, in their food, their music, their art, blah blah blah. I object to it on multiple levels, including an aesthetic one.

My major point of disagreement is with the claim that it's primarily millennials who crave authenticity. I'm not saying they don't, but they don't crave it any more than gen-x'ers do. Generation X is particularly absorbed by the myth of an authentic America, the country, the homeland, conditioned by the imagery they were born into post-World War II and threatened by the countercultural movements of the '60s and '70s. To this day, the idea of an authentic America persists in slogans like "make American great again." Each generation has its myths of authenticity, so I don't agree that it's limited to millennials.

One final comment I'll make as it pertains to authenticity and art is that the traditions of naturalistic and realistic art--i.e. verisimilitude and accurate portrayals/depictions--are born from an authenticity hunger (even though they also challenge/critique this hunger). This is why I enjoy writers who experimentally challenge the notion of authenticity--Joyce, Pynchon, Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, etc... prose styles that don't conform to the boring rendering of reality in a way that enchants readers, that convinces us that "this is a skillfully staged representation of a plausible reality." Such appeals to readers' desires to be placated and swept away are what stock drugstore bookshelves and the bestseller lists, because most people don't want to feel challenged or inept when they read. They want the illusion of something unquestionably real. They want "authenticity." That there's skill involved here isn't in question; but it also takes skill to master such realistic/naturalistic techniques and then warp them into something challenging and defamiliarizing in a strikingly uncomfortable way--not merely something that is so meaninglessly alien that it forecloses any kind of reaction whatsoever.

This is why I enjoy fiction that threatens our comfort level when we read it, that deploys prose and grammar and punctuation in confusing and jarring ways, and that depicts scenarios and/or scenes that don't make sense on first reading. Fiction that skillfully reproduces reality isn't actually producing an accurate or authentic version of lived experience; it's catering to a middlebrow desire for the authentic that allows readers to escape the responsibility of truly understanding reality.

This isn't an original position when it comes to literature. Tom McCarthy has basically written the manifesto against superficial realist/naturalist/literalist art already:

We don't walk down the street saying to ourselves "As I walk down the street, comma, I contemplate the question of faith, or adultery, or x or y or z." A paradox emerges: that the twentieth-century avant-garde often paints a far more realistic picture of experience than nineteen-century realists ever did.

 

[Dak]

My major point of disagreement is with the claim that it's primarily millennials who crave authenticity. I'm not saying they don't, but they don't crave it any more than gen-x'ers do. Generation X is particularly absorbed by the myth of an authentic America, the country, the homeland, conditioned by the imagery they were born into post-World War II and threatened by the countercultural movements of the '60s and '70s. To this day, the idea of an authentic America persists in slogans like "make American great again." Each generation has its myths of authenticity, so I don't agree that it's limited to millennials.

I think I can agree with this; that the there's not an increase in interest in authenticity but instead a shifting focus of where authenticity is expected, or what the term refers to. I do think the millennial version of authenticity is particularly a form of conspicuous consumable consumption in comparison with those in that past (maybe as a result of increased ability to do so, or maybe in contrast the inability to either acquire larger durable signals or the inability to delay gratification/plan?).

One final comment I'll make as it pertains to authenticity and art is that the traditions of naturalistic and realistic art--i.e. verisimilitude and accurate portrayals/depictions--are born from an authenticity hunger (even though they also challenge/critique this hunger). This is why I enjoy writers who experimentally challenge the notion of authenticity--Joyce, Pynchon, Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, etc... prose styles that don't conform to the boring rendering of reality in a way that enchants readers, that convinces us that "this is a skillfully staged representation of a plausible reality." Such appeals to readers' desires to be placated and swept away are what stock drugstore bookshelves and the bestseller lists, because most people don't want to feel challenged or inept when they read. They want the illusion of something unquestionably real. They want "authenticity." That there's skill involved here isn't in question; but it also takes skill to master such realistic/naturalistic techniques and then warp them into something challenging and defamiliarizing in a strikingly uncomfortable way--not merely something that is so meaninglessly alien that it forecloses any kind of reaction whatsoever.

This is why I enjoy fiction that threatens our comfort level when we read it, that deploys prose and grammar and punctuation in confusing and jarring ways, and that depicts scenarios and/or scenes that don't make sense on first reading. Fiction that skillfully reproduces reality isn't actually producing an accurate or authentic version of lived experience; it's catering to a middlebrow desire for the authentic that allows readers to escape the responsibility of truly understanding reality.

This isn't an original position when it comes to literature. Tom McCarthy has basically written the manifesto against superficial realist/naturalist/literalist art already:

Maybe you just prefer fiction that conforms to your conception of reality . I agree that most if not all fiction is simply escapism (like movies, TV shows, etc). I waffle a bit on the degree to which it is good or bad qua escapism. People who live on a constant diet of cheap fiction in particular are escaping from what? To where? For what purpose?

I see it as a form of rudderlessness. Maybe I'm biased, in that I felt somewhat rudderless during the time I was engaging in primarily escapist activities in my late teens. This interrsects with a longstanding criticism I've had of "the way things are", which this book review manages to lay out better than I could:

http://thefederalist.com/2018/05/14/west-isnt-committing-suicide-dying-natural-causes/

Goldberg is correct that we have lost our sense of gratitude, that we don’t really feel like things are as good as all that. But a large part of the reason is that the liberal order itself has robbed us of our ability to articulate what constitutes human happiness. We have freedom, we have immense wealth, but we have nothing to tell us what we should do with it, nothing to tell us what is good.
.............
[Young people] are in a condition like that of the first men in the state of nature—spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone. They can be anything they want to be, but they have no particular reason to want to be anything in particular............There is no necessity, no morality, no social pressure, no sacrifice to be made that militates going in or turning away from any of these directions, and there are desires pointing toward each, with mutually contradictory arguments to buttress them.
...........................
Plato’s description of young people in democracies. The youth lives “day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing, now practicing gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied with philosophy.”

Immense social wealth + a collapse of strong (religious & civic) norms. I can't say I know what the answer is, and I'm not sure there is an answer. But I don't think many are looking in the right place for it, if they are looking at all.

 

[Einherjar86]

Maybe you just prefer fiction that conforms to your conception of reality .

If that's true, then my conception is that reality is challenging, it's evasive, it isn't what you think it is... in other words, it takes work. I'm okay with that.

I see it as a form of rudderlessness. Maybe I'm biased, in that I felt somewhat rudderless during the time I was engaging in primarily escapist activities in my late teens.

The escapism I'm talking about is also deceptive in that it masquerades as "authentic" reality. The deception lies in persuading readers that what the text depicts is some accurate/plausible version of reality.

I also wouldn't say there's no place for escapism in literature and art (in which I'd include movies, television, comics, etc.); but I think that a lot of "middlebrow" (for lack of a better word) art achieves its commercial success by appealing to a desire for the authentic. People want to be reassured that their internal images of the world match up with how the world actually is.

 

[Dak]

I don't get to spend as much time reading/thinking about monetary/macro policy as I would like, but it's something that feels like, without some coursework, is dancing outside the limits of my ability to treat with it. My main interest really is in inflation/deflation, which is pretty much the center of macro policy - controlling inflation. Modern monetary policy has built in inflation - the money supply is intentionally grown. This almost always leads to some amount of inflation, but not always "problematic levels". I was ruminating on it yesterday and it seemed to me that a buffer against inflation with a growing money supply would be a growing population - demand keeping up with the supply. This has previously not really been an issue - but with multiple nations, and the global population projected to peak in the coming decades, we have a problem. Past and current spending globally has been kicked down to future generations with the expectation that there will always be more. But our best estimates now are that there won't be. So more money will have to be injected to cover the past debts, with lower levels of consumer demand to pick up the slack. And then I read this today:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/demography-predict-inflation.html

Demographic shifts, such as population ageing, have been suggested as possible explanations
for the past decade’s low inflation. We exploit cross-country variation in a long panel to identify age structure effects in inflation, controlling for standard monetary factors. A robust relationship emerges that accords with the lifecycle hypothesis. That is, inflationary pressure rises when the share of dependents increases and, conversely, subsides when the share of working age population increases. This relationship accounts for the bulk of trend inflation, for instance, about 7 percentage points of US disinflation since the 1980s. It predicts rising inflation over the coming decades.

This is another reason I have no expectation of a true retirement, at least based on past financial retirement models. I might pull a military pension, but is it going to be indexed to inflation in the future? Unlikely.

 

[Dak]

Two separate concerning issues that we've touched on some. Not that I think anything is going to slow this train, but I'm beginning to see the window opening for "Victorian" services

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/software-eating-world-tesla-edition.html

Last week Consumer Reports refused to recommend Tesla’s Model 3 because it discovered lengthy braking distances. This week Consumer Reports changed their review to recommend after Tesla improved braking distance by nearly 20 feet with an over the air software update!

A few concerns:
1. If braking distance can be changed via an OTA update, what else can be changed, and how long before the process is easily hackable?
2. Was the braking distance left artificially long so that Tesla could play this media game? Was anyone going to be put at risk?
3. As other commenters mentioned, how does this affect differing conditions.
4. As someone who used to like playing rdriving/racing games, I know I was a much better driver when driving the same balanced stat car across many types of challenges because I had learned exactly how it would handle, as opposed to trying to match certain types of cars to different tracks or challenges. From this perspective, having a car with the potential of top-down pushed changes to handling does not sound appealing.

Now the more "meta" concern:

The larger economic issue is that every durable good is becoming a service. When you buy a car, a refrigerator, a house you will be buying a stream of future services, updates, corrections, improvements. That is going to change the industrial organization of firms and potentially increase monopoly power for two reasons. First, reputation will increase in importance as consumers will want to buy from firms they perceive as being well-backed and long-lasting and second durable goods will be rented more than bought which makes it easier for durable goods producers not to compete with themselves thus solving Coase’s durable good monopoly problem.

Adobe is an excellent/widely known example on the software side of this process. You do not buy Adobe now, you rent it. This is obviously better for the company, and the constant updating and cloud services are sold as an also-benefit to the consumer, but I don't "buy" it. Microsoft Office is going to the same route. When goods become services, it's economic death by a thousand cuts. Of course, this is software, and there are work arounds/competing free services. When looking at durable goods, I think we are starting to see the crack appear on the margin for quality, non-connected goods.

 

[Dak]

https://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1003276176045961216

Interesting bit on Chinese transnationals.

 

[Einherjar86]

Kinda behind on a lot of these posts. The info looks interesting but I've been a bit absorbed in current projects and haven't had the time to devote to reading the links. Hopefully I'll have a chance in the next couple weeks.

 

[Dak]

https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/deliver...6126100114074064019125107005113092066&EXT=pdf

Psychopathy by State:

1. D.C.
2. Connecticut
3. California
4. New Jersey
5. New York/Wyoming
7. Maine
8. Wisconsin
9. Nevada
10. Illinois

Looking at the next 5-10 almost all more NE states + Florida. I'm guessing their model loaded Neuroticism more heavily on the Psychopathy construct.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Seems pretty useless until that Hyatt et al comes out and shows how they define psychopathy.

 

[Dak]

Seems pretty useless until that Hyatt et al comes out and shows how they define psychopathy.

The paper uses this state-level data on personality in conjunction with Hyatt et al. (Forthcoming), who translate the Big Five personality traits into psychopathy. These latter authors argue counter to Patrick et al. (2009), who previously described psychopathy as a constellation of disinhibition, boldness, and meanness. Hyatt et al. demonstrate that these traits are superfluous, as they are already nested within 3 the Big Five personality traits. Boldness corresponds to low neuroticism and high extraversion, meanness corresponds to low agreeableness, and disinhibition corresponds to low conscientiousness. The findings of Rentfrow et al (2013) and Hyatt et al. (Forthcoming) can thereby be combined into a method of estimating the level of psychopathy for each U.S. state.

Edit: Just went digging for that. Off the cuff I had assumed high neuroticism due to the state rankings, but this also makes sense - and since psychopaths are a smaller portion of the population, it doesn't go against the aggregate findings of high neuroticism in the NE.