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Dear Professor C., May I have a pony?
Mar. 31st, 2008 11:59 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 7. Slowly rising since this morning, supposed to continue rising overnight. Tomorrow should be the first significantly above-normal day of the spring--but no chance of hitting 20 at UW.
It's amazing how much snow is left in the ravine, given that the only snow left around the city is in the snowbanks. The ravine still has a blanket several inches thick. It's disturbingly grimy. So I wonder, is the difference in snow cover due to the ravine being a cold-air sink? (Seems somewhat likely, though the ravine's not very deep.) Is it due to the trees? (Probably not much if at all; they're pretty sparse.) Is it due to the ravine being a snow-trap? (Seems somewhat likely.) Is it due to the ravine being sheltered from street-salt? (Certainly has something to do with it.) Is it due to the lack of sun-catching pavement? (Definitely has something to do with it.) Is it due to the lack of heat sources under the ground? (Probably has something to do with it, although the subway runs under the ravine and there are bare spots in the snow where heat is vented--still, the subway tunnels are much colder than underground bits of buildings.)
Last week I went to a talk about liberal education and democracy. In the question period, someone said--with conviction--that she believes that the essay is a great exercise in democracy. You make your case, giving your reasons, and it's a model for how to settle disputes without resort to force. She compared it to the way courts of law operate. This is interesting to me because it's true and good in its own way, and it is completely at odds with my attitude toward philosophy, which I want to encourage my students to share. One of the ways that I try to encourage them to share it is by not having them write essays, and by trying to get them not to write what I do get them to write as if they were essays. That is, I want them to not adopt the pose that they have mastered what they are writing about and are in a position to pronounce a verdict on it; I want them not to engage in the standard essay-writerly bullshit which is all about being impressive and not about speaking truthfully. If you have a system of criminal law in which accuseds have the right to defend themselves, then the system has to be adversarial because you have to assume that the accused is motivated not to tell the truth but to be acquitted. To balance out the accused's interest in being acquitted, the prosecution must be motivated not to get at the truth but to get the accused convicted. The system rests on the assumption that the accused's seeking acquittal and the prosecution's seeking conviction will cancel each other out, and the truth will be left over. It's widely held in academia that the disinterested pursuit of truth is impossible. An adversarial system, seeking truth as a whole, seems like it might be a remedy for the inability of individuals to seek truth. But the adversarial legal system only works because there is a judge and/or jury, who are presumed to be disinterested pursuers of truth, to decide the question. This is not so in the academic case, and it's not so in the political case. This does not show that adversarial essay-writing is not a good exercise in democracy. It indicates why philosophy is at odds with both democracy and, alas, academia.
Today I went to a talk that was titled "A History of Liberty", but was actually a rehearsal of the cognitive-bias people-are-irrational-and-don't-understand-their-own-decision-making-processes social-psychology stuff that I mostly associate with Cass Sunstein (who, I have just learned from Uncle Wikipedia, is no longer with Martha Nussbaum but has since January been dating Samantha Power OMGWTFBBQ!), though there are better representatives--this guy today kept citing someone called Hite or Height. One of the things he talked about (which someone mentioned in a talk I went to in the fall--this sort of stuff is very popular) was a study that found that people will actually come to believe (and not just pretend they believe) obviously false things, such as that one line is longer than another (or something), if everyone else in their group professes belief in those false things. He also talked about The Milgram Experiment, which he prefaced by saying he was going to talk about the most famous psychology experiment ever, which prompted me to scratch my brain for a split second and then think "The Milgram Experiment?" just before he announced it was The Milgram Experiment. So, both of these things have to do with conformity and so forth. In the question period, someone said some stuff about how we university teachers need to design our courses to encourage dissent, and one bit of that stuff was that we should assign marks for class participation. Now, two things about that, the first of which is not all that important: if you reward dissent, how dissent-ful is it? (But then, the problem is to get people who are not dissenters by nature to dissent, so that objection may be altogether irrelevant.) Second, and more importantly: an implication of these conformity studies is that the more people talk to each other, the more they agree with each other. If I let my students sit in silence, they are free to sit there and disagree with me and think I'm an idiot. If I make them talk to me, they will most likely say things that represent them as being more in agreement with me (and more respectful of me) than they were before talking to me, and other studies in this neighbourhood show that saying something you don't believe moves you toward believing it.
Another of the things the speaker today was talking about was how giving people more choices can be paralyzing: extra choices can be noise in the decision-making process. Obviously, this is a well known phenomenon. But it--and his example of an academic at Yale getting offers from Princeton and Harvard and turning them both down because she couldn't decide between them, though she would've taken either one if it was the only one she got--got me thinking about my pet example of paralyzing choice: I was in a used bookstore which had just gotten a bunch of philosophy books in, any one of which I would've bought if the others weren't there, but since they were all there and I couldn't decide between them, I didn't buy any of them. It was depressing. But since his analysis of his examples agreed with my analysis of my example, I was prompted to disagree with my analysis of my example. (My friend DD, who likes this social-psych stuff a lot, told me once that there is one group of people who Studies Have Shown not to be affected by agreement biases, namely, philosophers. I don't recall whether he said that Studies Have Shown philosophers to have a perverse disagreement bias instead.) The extra choices weren't noise; they were informing me that I didn't really want any of the books any more than I wanted a whole bunch of other books, and so would probably be better off not buying any of them. This analysis is partially confirmed by the fact that most of the books I buy in used bookstores lie around mostly unread for years.
It's amazing how much snow is left in the ravine, given that the only snow left around the city is in the snowbanks. The ravine still has a blanket several inches thick. It's disturbingly grimy. So I wonder, is the difference in snow cover due to the ravine being a cold-air sink? (Seems somewhat likely, though the ravine's not very deep.) Is it due to the trees? (Probably not much if at all; they're pretty sparse.) Is it due to the ravine being a snow-trap? (Seems somewhat likely.) Is it due to the ravine being sheltered from street-salt? (Certainly has something to do with it.) Is it due to the lack of sun-catching pavement? (Definitely has something to do with it.) Is it due to the lack of heat sources under the ground? (Probably has something to do with it, although the subway runs under the ravine and there are bare spots in the snow where heat is vented--still, the subway tunnels are much colder than underground bits of buildings.)
Last week I went to a talk about liberal education and democracy. In the question period, someone said--with conviction--that she believes that the essay is a great exercise in democracy. You make your case, giving your reasons, and it's a model for how to settle disputes without resort to force. She compared it to the way courts of law operate. This is interesting to me because it's true and good in its own way, and it is completely at odds with my attitude toward philosophy, which I want to encourage my students to share. One of the ways that I try to encourage them to share it is by not having them write essays, and by trying to get them not to write what I do get them to write as if they were essays. That is, I want them to not adopt the pose that they have mastered what they are writing about and are in a position to pronounce a verdict on it; I want them not to engage in the standard essay-writerly bullshit which is all about being impressive and not about speaking truthfully. If you have a system of criminal law in which accuseds have the right to defend themselves, then the system has to be adversarial because you have to assume that the accused is motivated not to tell the truth but to be acquitted. To balance out the accused's interest in being acquitted, the prosecution must be motivated not to get at the truth but to get the accused convicted. The system rests on the assumption that the accused's seeking acquittal and the prosecution's seeking conviction will cancel each other out, and the truth will be left over. It's widely held in academia that the disinterested pursuit of truth is impossible. An adversarial system, seeking truth as a whole, seems like it might be a remedy for the inability of individuals to seek truth. But the adversarial legal system only works because there is a judge and/or jury, who are presumed to be disinterested pursuers of truth, to decide the question. This is not so in the academic case, and it's not so in the political case. This does not show that adversarial essay-writing is not a good exercise in democracy. It indicates why philosophy is at odds with both democracy and, alas, academia.
Today I went to a talk that was titled "A History of Liberty", but was actually a rehearsal of the cognitive-bias people-are-irrational-and-don't-understand-their-own-decision-making-processes social-psychology stuff that I mostly associate with Cass Sunstein (who, I have just learned from Uncle Wikipedia, is no longer with Martha Nussbaum but has since January been dating Samantha Power OMGWTFBBQ!), though there are better representatives--this guy today kept citing someone called Hite or Height. One of the things he talked about (which someone mentioned in a talk I went to in the fall--this sort of stuff is very popular) was a study that found that people will actually come to believe (and not just pretend they believe) obviously false things, such as that one line is longer than another (or something), if everyone else in their group professes belief in those false things. He also talked about The Milgram Experiment, which he prefaced by saying he was going to talk about the most famous psychology experiment ever, which prompted me to scratch my brain for a split second and then think "The Milgram Experiment?" just before he announced it was The Milgram Experiment. So, both of these things have to do with conformity and so forth. In the question period, someone said some stuff about how we university teachers need to design our courses to encourage dissent, and one bit of that stuff was that we should assign marks for class participation. Now, two things about that, the first of which is not all that important: if you reward dissent, how dissent-ful is it? (But then, the problem is to get people who are not dissenters by nature to dissent, so that objection may be altogether irrelevant.) Second, and more importantly: an implication of these conformity studies is that the more people talk to each other, the more they agree with each other. If I let my students sit in silence, they are free to sit there and disagree with me and think I'm an idiot. If I make them talk to me, they will most likely say things that represent them as being more in agreement with me (and more respectful of me) than they were before talking to me, and other studies in this neighbourhood show that saying something you don't believe moves you toward believing it.
Another of the things the speaker today was talking about was how giving people more choices can be paralyzing: extra choices can be noise in the decision-making process. Obviously, this is a well known phenomenon. But it--and his example of an academic at Yale getting offers from Princeton and Harvard and turning them both down because she couldn't decide between them, though she would've taken either one if it was the only one she got--got me thinking about my pet example of paralyzing choice: I was in a used bookstore which had just gotten a bunch of philosophy books in, any one of which I would've bought if the others weren't there, but since they were all there and I couldn't decide between them, I didn't buy any of them. It was depressing. But since his analysis of his examples agreed with my analysis of my example, I was prompted to disagree with my analysis of my example. (My friend DD, who likes this social-psych stuff a lot, told me once that there is one group of people who Studies Have Shown not to be affected by agreement biases, namely, philosophers. I don't recall whether he said that Studies Have Shown philosophers to have a perverse disagreement bias instead.) The extra choices weren't noise; they were informing me that I didn't really want any of the books any more than I wanted a whole bunch of other books, and so would probably be better off not buying any of them. This analysis is partially confirmed by the fact that most of the books I buy in used bookstores lie around mostly unread for years.
