Dan Luu on internet writing

Interesting post from Dan Luu about writing styles of internet gurus. I found his takes to be interesting: they overlap but are not identical to my attitudes on the topic: I think there’s a connection between the super-aggressive writing style, always getting in your face, telling you how everything you thought was true was wrong, and the style of “business books”—you know, the ones you see at airport bookstalls—that are supposed to grab you by the lapel and never let go. I’m not saying that Luu has a super-aggressive style; actually, I think he has a charming nerd style, very open and clearly delineating between the areas where he has expertise and the areas where he’s speculating. I have to admit I got a little creeped out somewhere in the middle of Luu’s article, where he starts talking about how to hold your hands when you’re shooting a gun. But, hey, he might be a vegetarian and creeped out by my incessant references to Jamaican beef patties, so fair is fair.

Does Ben Lerner play poker?

I’m guessing that the answer to the above question is No. OK, he’s probably played poker from time to time but he doesn’t think so much about it. I make this guess based on the complete absence of any poker references in Lerner’s three novels, as well as the lack of relevant hits when googling *”Ben Lerner” poker*.

In contrast, I think about poker a lot. It’s been several decades since I was in a regular Thursday night poker game, and, even then, none of us were serious about it. But poker isn’t just a game, or a business; it’s also a way of thinking, a perspective perhaps best captured in Mike Caro’s classic Book of Tells.

It goes like this. You have your cards and your plans, you’re looking at the other players, and they’re looking at you. You decide what you’re going to do, and you decide how to present yourself. If you have a pair of aces in the hole, you probable don’t want to present yourself that way! So you decide how you want other people to see you and then you method-act yourself into that role. Maybe you’ll present yourself as having a pair of nines: this would justify you reluctantly staying in the hand and motivate some sap with a pair of queens to try to take advantage of you. Or maybe there’s a jack on the board and you’ll present yourself as having a jack in the hole. In order to be convincing, you visualize the whole thing: Jack-nine, perhaps. Or you play the role of having nothing, you’re staying in just from hope or as a pure bluff. In which case you’ll try to act like someone with trash who’s pretending to have a high pair. This is all kind of ridiculous given that all the other players are trying to figure you out and they all think the same way, but it’s hard to avoid. After all, what’s the alternative? Act like you do have a pair of aces?

I thought of all this because Leaving the Atocha Station had many passages where the viewpoint character is presenting in that way. For example, from page 86:

I was surprised to find myself taking Teresa’s hand, although I did so with the faintest trace of irony, implied, at least potentially, in the childish way I slightly swung our arms; if the intimacy were unwelcome, she would dismiss it as frivolity. At the same time I was careful to communicate, mainly with my pace, that if I was acting unburdened and optimistic it was to cover the great sadness arising from the situation with my family. . . .

This is just so poker, the mix of strategy, inference, deception, and self-deception. “I was careful to communicate, mainly with my pace,” indeed! It’s about as plausible as thinking that I can present myself as holding a pair of nines.

The paradox, of course, is that Lerner in this passage, and in his novel more generally, is successfully conveying this character and his state of mind. But it’s a lot easier to do this in the privacy of your office, arranging and rearranging the sentences and paragraphs until it all works out, than to do it in a real-time social interaction. And Lerner happens to be really really good at writing; he’s the literary equivalent of a Vegas pro, not a weekly nickel-ante aficionado. Also, having read his three novels, I think it’s fair to say that there’s only one character he can really impersonate in this way. His other characters are convincing enough—in The Topeka School he successfully handles a few different voices—but he doesn’t really get inside them the way he does this “Adam” or “Ben” character.

That’s fine! One deep dive into a character is more than most writers can do. I enjoyed all three of Lerner’s novels. First I read 10:04, then The Topeka School, then Leaving the Atocha Station. They were kinda the same novel over and over again, but that’s ok too. Philip K. Dick wrote a zillion similar novels and they were all worth reading. Reading Scanner and then Valis and then Ubik is good: their similarities make us see through to more of the depth, as well as allowing us to appreciate all the little details that much more. To put it another way: writing three 200-books about different episodes in the life of the same character is no worse than writing a single 600-page tome.

Anyway, Atocha had three gimmicks that I enjoyed:

1. The character’s amusing behavior where he haplessly tries to convey a state of mind using ambiguous and uninterpretable actions (as in the above excerpt): that’s the poker thing.

2. Quiplike honest, for example from page 50:

“The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media,” I said, meaninglessly. . . .

“The proper names of leaders are distractions from concrete economic modes.” I was trying to sound deep, hoping concrete and mode were cognates. My limited stock of verbs encouraged general pronouncements.”

I love how the character can stand outside himself in this way. That “meaninglessly” is perfect.

3. Conveying the difficulty of communication in a foreign language, for example on page 14:

I wanted to know what she had been crying about and I managed to communicate that desire mainly by repeating the words for “fire” and “before.” She paused for a long moment and then began to speak; something about a home, but whether she meant a household or the literal structure, I couldn’t tell; I heard the names of streets and months; a list of things I thought were books or songs; hard times or hard weather, epoch, uncle, change, and analogy involving summer, something about buying and/or crashing a red car . . .

That “and/or” is perfectly, inappropriately precise.

And, ultimately, all languages are foreign languages, are they not? (I said, meaninglessly.)

Lerner’s other books don’t feature these particular tricks, but they have other fun bits. For example, from 10:04, page 182:

We arrived at the same time as the intern, who must not have known if he had the authority to invite us, and when we confronted each other in the gravel driveway, he smiled with embarrassment. Before he could try to account for himself, I hugged him as if he were an old friend I was thrilled to see after an interval of years—a kind of humor totally out of character for me—and everyone laughed and was at ease. How many out-of-character things did I need to do, I wondered, before the world rearranged itself around me?

“How many out-of-character things,” indeed. An excellent bit of metafiction.

Speaking of the Lernerverse: at the end of The Topeka School there is a page of Acknowledgments. This is the sort of thing that I’ll read when I really enjoyed a book; the cake is done and now I will eat all available crumbs. Anyway, one person Lerner thanks here “for encouragement and criticism” is Ed Skoog.

Ed Skoog! I remember that name. I look him up . . . he’s a poet, he’s from Topeka, Kansas, just like Ben Lerner! But that’s not where I remember the name. I remember the name Ed Skoog from seeing his name on Rhian Ellis and John Lennon’s blog, back in the day. Regular readers of our blog will remember Lennon from his New Sentences For The Testing Of Typewriters (“What joker put seven dog lice in my Iraqi fez box?”, “‘Yo, never mix Zoloft with Quik,’ gabs Doc Jasper,” etc.). Funny to see these connections, almost as if writers are real people, not just creators of artifacts. (Fyi, Lennon continues to write great stuff, even if he’s no longer on the literary fast-track; I guess this is related to the famous disappearance of the “mid-list” in the publishing business.)

Still wanting more, I googled Lerner’s book titles to see some reviews and also, I’m embarrassed to say, to learn more about his life. I didn’t learn whether he’s still in contact with “Cyrus,” “Isabel,” “Teresa,” or any of the other characters from Atocha (assuming they are “based” on “real people”), and to be honest I didn’t get much out of the reviews. I often enjoy reading reviews of books I’ve already read—indeed, I think book reviews are underrated (see here for the general point and here for an example)—but this time the reviews mostly just echoed my thoughts. That’s ok, it’s not the job of critics to cater to me.

One thing that did make me happy is that almost 100% of the reviews of Lerner’s books were enthusiastically positive. I’d kind of been afraid that there’d be some resentment of his success. Critics are a bunch of scorpions, right? No, I guess not: when they read a fun and thought-provoking book, they seem to like it. I found lots and lots of positive reviews of those three novels and nary a pan. All I could find that was even partly negative was one article that criticized Lerner and some other authors for being too sanctimoniously leftist, and another article that made fun of him for apparently not having a solid knowledge of German, thus leading Lerner to write an annoying introduction to a translated book by a German author. If those are the worst two things I can find about such a celebrated author, I’d have to say that the tall-poppy syndrome of book reviewing is less negative than I’d feared. No joke, I’m happy that the critics can focus on his work and not feel the need to pull him down. Maybe it will take a movie adaptation for the haters to really come out of the woodwork.

“Economic Fables” by Ariel Rubinstein

Contrarian (in a good way) economist Ariel Rubinstein pointed me to this book of his from 2012 that I really enjoyed.

It’s a bit related to three topics we’ve discussed in this space:

Parables vs. stories and more on stories in social science here

Why do we study social science?

Four projects in the intellectual history of quantitative social science.

An anti #slatepitch? “We Need to Admit Masking Kids at School Has Some Downsides”

tl;dr: It’s this weird kind of hot take where you say something completely obvious and act as if it’s objectionable to someone. Kinda like a hot take, but instead of going to the trouble of saying something actually counterintuitive, you say something innocuous, and the hot take is that “we” aren’t admitting it. Seems kinda odd to me, but maybe this is just the next generation of hot takes.

According to Slate, a pitch should “feel fresh or original . . . Slate is known for surprising, witty, persuasive arguments.

According to Wikipedia, “Slate has been known for publishing contrarian pieces arguing against commonly held views about a subject, giving rise to the #slatepitches Twitter hashtag in 2009.”

According to the Columbia Journalism Review (cited in that Wikipedia article), a Slate pitch is “an idea that sounds wrong or counterintuitive proposed as though it were the tightest logic ever.”

But today I came across an article on Slate that was the opposite: It presented a completely unobjectionable idea but presented it as controversial. I’m not sure what to call this, maybe an #obvioustake?

The article was called, “We Need to Admit Masking Kids at School Has Some Downsides,” and already I was like, huh? Everybody knows that wearing a mask has downsides! After all, if you’re not in one of these settings:
1. Attending a costume ball,
2. Robbing a bank,
3. Working at a dusty job,
4. Concerned about transmitting infection,
5. Acting in a WW1 movie, or
6. Trick-or-treating,
then you won’t be wearing one! If there were no downsides, you’d see people wearing masks all the time, just for fun and fashion.

This made me wonder who was the audience for this article. Is there a “we” who won’t admit that asking kids at school has some downsides? That just seems weird.

The article continues in this vein, referring to “the question of whether there are downsides to masks.” This is so ridiculous! I guess the author of the article doesn’t wear glasses or she’d know that masks make your glasses fog up. Also, masks make it harder to breathe! After teaching a 90-minute class, I rush to go outside, rip off the mask, and take a deep drag of air. And I get to put my specs back on and I can see the world again. Pretty cool, huh?

That said, the Slate article, by economist Emily Oster, has some interesting parts, for example a discussion of “the observation that seeing the bottom half of the face is important for reading emotions, learning to speak, and learning to read.” I’ve done some research on that topic!

At the end, though, we get a return to the obvious: “The effects may be small, or mixed across kids, but in the absence of a disease risk, we would not have children mask at school or child care.” Halloween excepted, of course!

So this seems kinda like a Slate pitch turned inside out: a column full of unexceptional statements, but presented as if it’s controversial in some way (“We need to admit,” etc.).

Basbøll and I talked about how a good story is immutable and anomalous. “Anomalous” is the twist in the story. The above-discussed Slate article is reasonable—so much so that maybe it didn’t seem interesting enough until it was embedded in a familiar trope of controversy: bold truth-teller tells it like it is. You should be able to tell it like it is without being bold. Truth should be enough on its own without needing to be accompanied by controversy. Or, to put it another way, there’s enough real controversy in the world that there’s no reason to suppose it when it does not exist.

I guess this counts as an advance in journalism: a new way to appear to be counterintuitive. Instead of saying something ridiculous and working your butt off to defend it, you say something innocuous and just imply that you’re offering a hot take, thus moving the burden of explanation from you to those other people. A kind of journalistic jujitsu.

I like it! I mean, not really, I don’t actually like it. But I appreciate it in an intellectual sense.

Full disclosure: I sometimes write for Slate. I don’t think I ever mastered the #slatepitch, though.

P.S. The above story reminds of the classic, “Participants reported being hungrier when they walked into the café (mean = 7.38, SD = 2.20) than when they walked out [mean = 1.53, SD = 2.70, F(1, 75) = 107.68, P < 0.001]." But, to their credit, they didn't claim this was surprising.

Did Chinese laborers on the Yangtze pay someone to whip them? Why can’t political scientists and economists resist telling this evidence-free story? And why do they keep embellishing it?

Someone sends in a bizarre story shared by an anonymous blogger. It starts with a political scientist and economist named Michael Munger, who said in 2018:

There’s a famous example in China, where a group of coolies … have to pull a barge up the Yangtze River … There’s a trade-off … how do you make the 30 guys work hard? The insight of the team production problem is we need … division of labor. … If I’m pulling, I can’t spend my time watching you and you can’t spend your time watching me. We’ll create a new job, called the monitor. … We’ll give the monitor a whip. Now this looks like slavery. The great thing about this, and this is from an article by an economist named Steven NS Cheung. He found that this guy with a whip—and this is the most incredible thing Russ!—this guy with a whip was hired and paid by the coolies!

Wow—I’d never heard that story before! Paying to get whipped? Hard to believe, huh?

Where did the story come from? Here’s Cheung in 2018:

In 1970, Toronto’s John McManus was my guest in Seattle. I chatted to him about what happened when I was a refugee in wartime Guangxi. The journey from Liuzhou to Guiping was by river, and there were men on the banks whose job was to drag the boat with ropes. There was also an overseer armed with a whip. According to my mother, the whipper was hired to do just that by the boatmen!

My tale went the rounds, and it was seized by a number of neo-institutional economists. I tried to dissuade McManus, tell him not to publish his piece based on my Guangxi story, but he went ahead nonetheless. (See his “The Cost of Alternative Economic Organizations”, Canadian Journal of Economics1975). In 1976 Jensen and Meckling (1976) published a widely-cited paper in Journal of Financial Economics (“Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure”). As a result of all this, the Guangxi boatmen and their hired whippers gained posthumous fame. However, this could be a story invented by my mother – the smartest person I have ever known – to entertain a boy of seven!

The anonymous blogger quotes economist Ronald Coase in 2006 discussing the general problem of people taking a story and using it to illustrate some social science principle, without checking out the details of the story itself. Here’s Coase:

Facts are not like clay on a potter’s wheel, that can be molded to produce the desired result. They constitute the immutable material that we have to accept. …

What is it about the conduct of economics that led these able and honest economists to embrace error? …

it is the result of economics having become a theory-driven subject. …

If it is believed that their theory tells us how people would behave in different circumstances, it will appear unnecessary to many to make a detailed study of how they did in fact act. This leads to a very casual attitude toward checking the facts. If it is believed that certain contractual arrangements will lead to opportunistic behavior, it is not surprising that economists misinterpret the evidence and find what they expect to find.

The blogger continues:

Instead of taking the time to study and verify the facts, the economist prefers to seize upon any purported facts and shoehorn them to fit her preferred theories and worldviews. “Never let the facts get in the way of a sexy and publishable theory” could be the economist’s motto.

Of course, there exists the possibility that at some time in history, some workers some place did on at least one occasion hire a monitor to whip them. The problem is that we have zero evidence that this ever happened, other than a story a mother told to her seven-year-old son, who then repeats it decades later. A few decades further, the academic urban legend becomes an established fact that can be cited as evidence for one’s preferred theories and worldviews (and ignored otherwise). . . .

It is not OK—indeed it’s intellectually dishonest to cite a story as evidence when you know it might be false.

We need to call BS whenever we see it (and not just when the BS happens to challenge our preferred theories and worldviews).

And the BS is out there! The anonymous blogger writes:

With Clement and McCormick (1989), the story has become the “famous Chinese boatpullers fable”, where “the monitor uses his vision, intuition, and experience to determine shirking, counseling the loafers with his whip.”

Other writers that repeat the story include Ricketts (1990), Miller (1992), Watts (1992), Pejovich (1995), Donleavy (2005), Surdam (2010), and Munger (2019).

The bit about “counseling the loafers with his whip”—that’s really creepy! I guess this is supposed to be one of those “repugnant ideas” that some economists are so proud of, but to me this sort of edgelord remark seems like a symptom of moral rot. Ha ha those loafers are getting whipped, pretty funny, huh?

This reminds me of a story . . .

There was this business school professor, Karl Weick, who went around telling a story about soldiers in the snow in World War 1 . . . Weick lifted the story from a somewhat obscure poem . . . in retelling the story he altered it in a way that allowed him to make the points he wanted to make. I learned about this episode from Thomas Basbøll, and we later wrote two papers on the topic:

To throw away data: Plagiarism as a statistical crime

When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences

“Stories” vs. “parables”

In that second article, Basbøll and I distinguished between true stories, on one hand, and parables, on the other. We argued that one of the valuable things about an evidenced story is its immutability—the facts of the story are there, and our theories need to accommodate these facts. This is a key reason why stories are important: they constrain our models of the world; they falsify our simplistic ideas.

In contrast, a “parable” is flexible; it can be altered to serve the teller’s purpose. An evidenced story is a bit of truth, a rock upon which at theory can stumble. A parable is an illustration of a theory. Parables can be useful, as they can help us understand the implications of a theory.

In short: a story backed by evidence is an immutable fact that can be used to refute a theory. A parable is an illustration of a theory and does not bring additional information to the table. Stories and parables are both useful, but they’re different things. It is a mistake to present a parable as if it is an evidence-based story.

Not just economists

The anonymous blogger writes that this is “a common error made by economists” and refers to “We as economists and social scientists . . .”; also there’s the quote by Coase attributing it to “economics having become a theory-driven subject.” Fair enough: economists are out there with this story so they can get the criticism. But really I don’t think this has much to do with economics and economists; it’s more of a general problem of how we learn from stories.

As Basbøll writes, “It’s not just about trusting social scientists. Stories like this circulate in the executive suites of major banks and pharmaceutical companies, sometimes justifying very impactful decisions.” Just as the repugnant story of the whipped laborers has circulated among academic economists and political scientists, Weick’s distorted story of soldiers in the snow has been influential in management science.

How a story gets distorted in the retelling

I did some googling of *coolie yangtze whip* and found an article, “Self-Control at Work,” by Supreet Kaur, Michael Kremer, and Sendhil Mullainathan, published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2015:

. . . in a story by Steven Cheung (1983, 8): “On a boat trip up China’s Yangtze River in the 19th Century, a titled English woman complained to her host of the cruelty to the oarsmen. One burly coolie stood over the rowers with a whip, making sure there were no laggards. Her host explained that the boat was jointly owned by the oarsmen, and that they hired the man responsible for flogging.”

Interesting. Now it happened “in the 19th century.” Perhaps setting it so far in the past makes the story more plausible?

Also the detail about the “titled English woman”—maybe that’s supposed to make us dislike her? Recall that in the original story she was not a titled English woman in the 19th century, she was a Chinese war refugee in the 20th century.

Changing her from a Chinese refugee to a “titled English woman” . . . that’s interesting, actually, as it fits with a common academic-social-scientist ploy to portray skeptics as out-of-touch elitists. You might naively think that laborers getting whipped is a bad thing, but that’s just you being a “titled English woman.” Let the experts explain to you how the real world works, you foolish bleeding heart liberal etc etc. The story would sound different if it were a Chinese refugee with her seven-year-old son.

In the earlier mistelling by McManus (1975), she was described as “an American lady”—I guess “a titled English woman” made a better story. Why not just go all the way and say it was Queen Victoria???

And one other thing . . . Cheung’s the original source, so how exactly did this “titled English women” enter the story in the first place?? Cheung (1983) is easily accessible online, and here’s what it says on page 8:

My own favorite example is riverboat pulling in China before the Communist regime, when a large group of workers marched along the shore towing a good-sized wooden boat. The unique interest of this example is that the collaborators actually agreed to the hiring of a monitor to whip them.

Hey—wait a minute! It seems that Kaur et al. just made up all those details—the Yangtze River, the 19th-century setting, the titled English woman, and of course the “burly” laborer—but then they put it all in quotes as if it had been written by Cheung (1983).

What the hell? This is really weird. Who would make up all these details, write them up, and then put the story in quotation marks like that?

From the first page of the Kaur et al. article: “We thank Lawrence Katz, David Laibson, John Matsusaka, Derek Neal, Ted O’Donoghue, three anonymous referees, and participants at numerous seminars for helpful comments.” Not one of them expressed suspicion about the “burly coolie” story.

And they draw from this story a suspiciously management-friendly bit of advice:

Discipline at the workplace—such as the coolie in Cheung’s story—may reflect demand for arrangements to help avoid the temptation to shirk.

I guess that’s the sort of attitude that will get you a faculty position in economics at some of American’s finest universities. After all, who among us has not hired someone to whip us “to help avoid the temptation to shirk”?

Here’s another, from an article by G. D. Donleavy:

Steven Cheung [23] relates that on the Yangtze River in China, there is a section of fast water over which boats are pulled upstream by a team of coolies prodded by an overseer using a whip. On one such passage an American lady, horrified at the sight of the overseer whipping the men as they strained at their harness, demanded that something be done about the brutality. She was informed by the captain that nothing could be done: ‘Those men own the right to draw boats over this stretch of water and they have hired the overseer and given him his duties.’

I looked up reference [23], and it’s not by Steven Cheung at all; it is an article by John McManus which contains all those fabricated details (the Yangtze, the “section of fast river,” the “coolies,” the “American lady,” and the mansplaining quote at the end).

And then there’s this book by David George Surdam, which tells the story as, “a Westerner was traveling by boat up the Yangtze River in China,” and continues, “The Westerner was horrified by this cruel treatment of the obviously overworked coolies. That is, horrified until it was pointed out . . .”

Ahhhh, those silly Western liberals who don’t understand the real world! Good thing we have economists around to explain reality.

And then there’s this “simpler version of Cheung’s account” told by Munger:

Imagine a group of workers pulling a barge upstream. There is a footpath beside the river, and the coolies struggle to pull the large, heavy cargo boat against the current. Walking alongside the coolies is the boss, a man with a whip. He looks at the calf muscles of the coolies, and if he sees them bunch up with strain, he does nothing. If he sees slack calf muscles, he whips the back of the offender.

“Slack calf muscles” . . . where did that come from??? I’d call this an elaboration, not a simplification! And Munger’s a political scientist—he has no excuse here. Political scientists are supposed to live in the world of reality.

Also, it’s kinda weird how every telling of this story (except for Cheung’s) uses the word “coolies.” Who talks that way? Are they just into being performatively “politically incorrect”? Something like, using some rude slang shows how fearless you are, so we should trust you even more??

“Yangtze” is the tell

Also, one funny detail. The anonymous blogger points out that the “Yangtze River” bit seems to be an embellishment adding in the retelling:

The route from Liuzhou to Guiping does not seem to be anywhere near the Yangtze River. And of course, the Yangtze River just so happens to be the one river someone non-Chinese will have heard of.

This reminds me of how the organizational theorist Karl Weick, when he retold the map-in-the-Alps story without attribution, described it as “an incident that happened during military maneuvers in Switzerland,” even though the original story said nothing about Switzerland and almost certainly would have occurred in a different part of the Alps. Weick, typical American that he was, read “Alps” and just assumed “Switzerland.”

As the anonymous blogger says, nobody seems to care about the details of these stories—but that doesn’t stop people from writing about them as if they’re true, and using them to support their views of the world. I don’t like it when Gladwell does it, and I don’t like it when political scientists and economists do it.

Connection to the Davies principle

Daniel Davies famously wrote, “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.”

I feel like there’s something similar going on here. Not lies, but some mixture of made-up stories and confused attribution, leading people to draw conclusions based on things that never happened.

Here’s my question: if you use a story to make a point (as Munger puts it, “That’s why I like the barge-hauling example so much”), and it turns out the story is made up—given how striking this laborers-hire-a-man-to-whip-them-story is, if it had ever been a real practice, I’d assume there’d be actual witness reports of it, not just someone remembering a story that his mother told him as a child—, then, does this cast doubt on the point you’re trying to make? Maybe it should!

“Discipline at the workplace may reflect demand for arrangements to help avoid the temptation to shirk.” Yeah, right. Funny—you never see the writers of these articles hiring “burly” guys to whip them. Why not, if it’s such a great idea??

Summary

Of all the parts of this story, what stuns me the most is the 2015 article by Kaur, Kremer, and Mullainathan, where they wrote:

The second view—that joint production necessitates the need for monitoring (Alchian and Demsetz 1972)—is summarized in a story by Steven Cheung (1983, 8): “On a boat trip up China’s Yangtze River in the 19th Century, a titled English woman complained to her host of the cruelty to the oarsmen. One burly coolie stood over the rowers with a whip, making sure there were no laggards. Her host explained that the boat was jointly owned by the oarsmen, and that they hired the man responsible for flogging.”

Looks like a direct quote, no? But go to Cheung (1983), and all you find is:

As examples of the gain from collaboration and the difficulty of delineating contributions, Alchian and Demsetz13 cite the examples of loading and of fishing. My own favorite example is riverboat pulling in China before the Communist regime, when a large group of workers marched along the shore towing a good-sized wooden boat. The unique interest of this example is that the collaborators actually agreed to the hiring of a monitor to whip them.

Kaur, Kremer, and Mullainathan made up all those details—and then they put it all in quotes! This is the opposite of plagiarism, I guess, to make up a story and then attribute it to a trusted source.

I ca see how you could get the details of a story garbled, or remember a story without recalling exactly where you heard it, or believe a tale without checking the evidence—but how exactly do you make up all these details and then put them in quotes, without checking the source? How does that happen?? I’m frankly baffled. I guess maybe the quotes were added by the copy editor? Still, the authors cited the exact page of Cheung (1983) where the story appeared, so you’d think they would’ve noticed that there was no Yangtze River, no 19th Century, no titled English woman, and no “burly coolie.”

And, hey, I just noticed one more thing! The story is that they were towing the boat, so there were no “oarsmen” either!

This has got to be the world record for the most extraordinary collection of errors that has ever been gathered in a single paragraph of an academic publication—with the possible exception of when Richard Tol dined alone.

Oh well, it’s just the Journal of Political Economy, nothing serious.

P.S. As noted above, it seemed strange to me that these academics kept using what seemed to be an old-fashioned and offensive term to refer to Chinese laborers. I found some definitions:

Britannica.com : “(from Hindi Kuli, an aboriginal tribal name, or from Tamil kuli, “wages”), in usually pejorative European usage, an unskilled labourer or porter usually in or from the Far East hired for low or subsistence wages.”

Dictionary.com: “noun Disparaging and Offensive.
an unskilled laborer, especially formerly in China and India.”

Merriam-Webster: “usually offensive
: an unskilled laborer or porter usually in or from the Far East hired for low or subsistence wages.”

Wikipedia: “a term for a low-wage labourer, typically of South Asian or East Asian descent. . . . The word has had a variety of other implications and is sometimes regarded as offensive or a pejorative, depending upon the historical and geographical context . . . The word originated in the 17th century Indian subcontinent and meant day labourer, but since the 20th century the word has been used in that region to refer to porters at railway stations. . . . now regarded as derogatory and/or a racial slur in the Americas (more so Caribbean), Oceania, and Africa / Southeast Asia – in reference to other people from Asia. . . . In modern Indian popular culture, coolies have often been portrayed as working-class heroes or anti-heroes. Indian films celebrating coolies include Deewaar (1975), Coolie (1983), Coolie No. 1 (1991), Coolie No. 1 (1995), and Coolie No. 1 (2020).”

So, yeah, I guess my instinct was in line with common usage, and it does seem obnoxious for those political scientists and economists to keep using the term. Not the biggest deal, but it seems related the larger problem that they’re just making stuff up about people they know nothing about, “slack calf muscles” and all that, and then bringing in the “titled English woman” as a foil. Using that rude and old-fashioned term for laborers is a kind of literary device that puts the story in the past, Gunga Din-style.

The usual contrarian ploy is to take some apparently horrible practice that normal people would disapprove of, and then demonstrate through logical reasoning that it is actually a good thing. In this case, though, these clever academics went to the trouble of making up what may well be a nonexistent practice, and continued by inventing a completely fictional character to personify society’s disapproval of this practice, as this provided a sharp contrast to their own hard-edged rationality.

Fake Data Pretend

I sit at my screen and wage war on my model
It seems like it’s all, it’s all for nothing
I know the barricades
And I know the mortar in the wall breaks
I recognize the weapons, I used them well.

This is my mistake
Let me make it good
I raised the model and I will be the one to knock it down.

I’ve a rich understanding of my finest defenses
I proclaim that claims are left unstated
I demand a rematch
I decree a stalemate
I divine my deeper motives
I recognize the diagnostics
I’ve practiced them well, I fitted them myself.

It’s amazing what devices you can sympathize (empathize)
This is my mistake
Let me make it good
I raised the model and I will be the one to knock it down.

Reach out for me and hold me tight
Hold that memory
Let my machine talk to me, let my machine talk to me.

This is my world and I am fake data pretend
This is my simulation
And this is my time
I have been given the freedom
To do as I see fit
It’s high time I’ve razed the models that I’ve constructed.

It’s amazing what devices you can sympathize (empathize)
This is my mistake
Let me make it good
I raised the model and I will be the one to knock it down.

You fill in the data
You fill in the theory
You fill in the transformation
I raised the model
And I’m the only one
I will be the one to knock it down.

Apologies to you know who. It’s amazing how few words needed to be changed.

Vaccines in the army

My dad told us a story about when he joined the army in 1942, everyone had to get a tetanus shot. They called it the Hook, and there was all this hype about. Before you’d get the shot, you’d hear the people who’d already got it warn you: “Watch the Hook!”

Hmmm, am I remembering this correctly? Let me do some googling . . . ok, here’s something:


I looked up the author of that book, Leo Bogart. He had a long career and at one point was president of the American Association of Public Opinion Research. He taught at Columbia! Amazing the things you can learn by googling.

Anyway, the Hook story came to mind after I came across this story about a TV personality who said that “The point of mandatory vaccination is to identify the sincere Christians in the ranks, the freethinkers, the men with high testosterone levels, and anyone else who does not love Joe Biden and make them leave immediately.”

Jeez . . . Needles are scary, huh?

In the immortal words of Queen Latifah: Everybody everybody look for the hook!

P.S. The juxtaposition of “Christians” and “freethinkers” in the above quote reminded me of this famous line from the 1930s:

What is still more important [than cultural homogeneity] is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.

So what is it—is it bad or good to be a “freethinker”? These fascist-sympathizing culture heroes should get their stories straight!

What is fame? The perspective from Niles, Michigan. Including an irrelevant anecdote about “the man who invented hedging”

Following up on our recent discussions of the different dimensions of fame (see here and here), I thought something could be gained by looking carefully at a narrowly defined subset.

Here’s Wikipedia’s list of notable people from Niles, Michigan. Wikipedia lists them in alphabetical order:

Joanna Beasley (born 1986), musician

Fred Bonine (1863–1941), held world’s record in the 100-meter dash from 1886 until 1921; became internationally known eye doctor who saw over one million patients at his office in Niles

Jake Cinninger (born 1975), musician, Umphrey’s McGee

Greydon Clark (born 1943), film director

John Francis Dodge (1864–1920), automobile industry pioneer

Horace Elgin Dodge (1868–1920), automobile industry pioneer

Edward L. Hamilton (1857–1923), U.S. Representative from 1897 until 1921. Served as chair of the United States House Committee on Territories from 1903 until 1911.

Thomas Fitzgerald (1796–1855), U.S. Senator and probate judge

Tommy James (born 1947), musician, Tommy James and the Shondells

Ring Lardner (1885–1933) Sr., satirist, short story writer and sports columnist

Lillian Luckey (1919–2021), All-American Girls Professional Baseball League player

Michael Mabry (born 1955), graphic designer and illustrator

Dave Schmidt (born 1957), Major League Baseball pitcher

Diane Seuss (born 1956), poet, finalist for Pulitzer Prize

Michael D. West, (born 1953) founder of Geron, now CEO of BioTime

Aaron Montgomery Ward (1844–1913), founder, Montgomery Ward

Some of these people are obscure, once-famous or, in some cases, never-famous. I could care less about the former chair of the United States House Committee on Territories. But a few of them stand out:

Fred Bonine: I’d never heard of the guy before this, but, hey! of all the people on this list, he seems the most impressive to me. Holding the world record for 35 years . . . how is that even possible? And then to see a million patients—that’s really something. If I had to pick one person to represent Niles, Michigan, it would be Fred Bonine.

I was curious about this world record so I noodled around on Wikipedia . . . “In 1886, Bonine set a world’s record with a time of 10.8 seconds in the 110-yard dash. The record stood for 35 years until it was broken in 1921 by Charley Paddock.” 10.8 seconds, that’s not bad! How were things going at the Olympics? In 1896, it seems that the winning time was 11.8 seconds, which seems kinda slow, actually. It didn’t go below 10.8 until 1912. But then we can list the 100 meters world record progression (which Wikipedia amusingly refers to as the “Men’s 100 metres world record progression”), which starts with a bunch of guys doing it in 10.8 at many different places, from 1891 through 1903, then it drops to 10.6 in 1906 and 10.5 in 1911. Bonine’s not listed at all, even though 110 yards is actually a slightly longer distance than 100 meters! Whassup with that! Maybe Bonine’s 10.8 was clocked by someone with an itchy stopwatch finger, I have no idea. I’m kinda thinking he didn’t really do it in 10.8 seconds, but who knows?

Anyway, to continue: the Dodge brothers probably have the most famous names in the list. I doubt many people really care now about their pioneering work in the auto industry, but oldsters still remember their names on millions of cars. When I was a kid we had a Dodge Dart. It was a piece of crap, typical American car always breaking down, and with a hinky three-on-the-tree gearshift.

Ring Lardner—yes, I knew he was from Niles; it was a line in “Here’s Ring Lardner’s Autobiography,” which I will copy here in its entirety, because, why not:

Hardly a man is now alive
Who cares that in March, 1885,
I was born in the city of Niles,
Michigan, which is 94 miles
From Chicago, a city in Illinois.
Sixteen years later, still only a boy,
I graduated from the Niles High School
With a general knowledge of rotation pool.
After my schooling, I thought it best
To give my soul and body a rest.
In 1905 this came to an end,
When I went to work on The Times in Souse Bend.
Thence to Chi, where I labored first
On the Inter-Ocean and then for Hearst,

Then for the Tribune and then to St. Lews,
Where I was editor of Sporting News.
And thence to Boston, where later a can
Was tied to me by the manager man.
1919 was the year
When, in Chicago, I finished my daily newspaper career.
In those 14 years—just a horse’s age—
My stuff was all on the sporting page.
In the last nine years (since it became illegal to drink),
I’ve been connected with The Bell Syndicate, Inc.,
I have four children as well as one Missus,
None of whom can write a poem as good as this is.

Ring Lardner’s one of the greatest writers who’s ever lived! In some sense. Let me say that Lardner’s on the efficient frontier of writers. There’s no better writer of sports fiction, but it’s not just that. Lardner is just special, in some way that’s hard to specify. But I’d trade 10 Damon Runyons for one Ring Lardner, and Damon Runyon is part of our national patrimony. It’s like . . . ummm, how’s this? Many years ago I recall reading an interview with Paul McCartney, and he said that some days he’d wake up and think, “I’m Paul McCartney,” and just reflect on how amazing that was. (McCartney wasn’t presenting this as an ego trip; it was more that he remains astounded by his persistent fame.) Anyway, that’s how I feel about Lardner. He’s Ring Lardner, and that will always be amazing. Ummmm, I better explain this to the non-Lardner-fans out there: the above poem is nothing so amazing. It’s more that, if you’ve read enough Lardner and you know his amazingness, you’ll enjoy the poem as it will remind you of many of his facets.

OK, to continue . . . I’d never heard of Lillian Luckey and I guess I’ll never think about her again, but she was “Listed at 5 ft 1 in (1.55 m), 126 lb (57 kg), she batted and threw right handed.” And she lived to the age of 102! She might be the person on the list who had the best stories.

I’d say Aaron Montgomery Ward was the most consequential person on the list. He practically invented the mail-order store, changing how Americans lived and shopped. He’s the only person on the list who seems to have had a unique historical niche.

And this reminds me of a story. When I was in college at MIT, it was possible to apply to summer jobs through the career center. One year I applied for a summer job at some actuarial firm. I didn’t really know what this was, but I knew they used probability and statistics, a subject that I enjoyed. In the interview, the guy was talking enthusiastically about his boss, a man who, according to my interviewer, “practically invented hedging.” The interviewer started telling me about some scheme his boss had come up with to avoid paying taxes. It sounded kinda creepy to me, but I don’t have a lot of principles, so it’s not like I stalked off in disgust. I just kept on with the interview, trying to sound enthusiastic. I didn’t get the summer job, which in retrospect is kinda funny: how many applicants did they have with perfect grades from MIT? But maybe he was able to detect my lack of interest, I dunno. I never really followed up to find out who the guy was who practically invented hedging.

Tommy James: You may not recall this name, but . . . he wrote the song Crimson and Clover. You’ve heard that! As a matter of fact, that’s what motivated this post: I heard Crimson and Clover on the radio, looked it up on wikipedia to find its story, then clicked on the name of the songwriter. His page said he was from Niles, Michigan, which rang a bell—the Lardner poem!—so I looked up that city to see who else was from there. And here we are.

So what has this little study taught us about fame? Not so much, I guess: we already knew that fame is multidimensional: there are different ways of being famous. Montgomery Ward is a mostly forgotten name, but in some sort of integral of fame over time, he might be the winner here. Dodge is even more famous, but I’d say it’s thought of more as a company than a personal name. Ward is that way too, but Dodge even more so, as Ward has some personal reputation as a pioneer in business. Tommy James was personally famous only for a short time, but his song has been well known for many decades now. Ring Lardner was a famous journalist back in the 1920s and is now an obscure historical figure, but I’d guess that people will still be reading some of his stories, long after Ward etc. are just historical figures. And Lillian Luckey and Fred Bonine illustrate how you can be locally famous. I think some of this discussion is improved by its narrow focus. Going down the ladder of fame like this gives us some clarity that is lost when comparing biggies such as Norman Lear, Henry Kissinger, and Queen Elizabeth.

P.S. More here.

“Freedom is not user friendly”

That’s something that Charles Margossian said in a work meeting today, referring to the idea that if a certain software feature (embedded Laplace in Stan) were made more flexible, that would complicate the API.

That was a good point, and I like the pithy phrase. It belongs in some compendium of quotations, right next to “Freedom is seldom found / by beating someone to the ground.” For now I’ll put it in the lexicon.

I guess this is related to the well-known tension between freedom and security in politics, or the tension between freedom and regularization in statistical inference. As is always the case, much depends on how you define freedom. For example, in the 8 schools, if you estimate each school separately (the no-pooling model), you’ll overfit and get bad estimates. But if you embed it into a hierarchical model (either explicitly in a Bayesian setting or implicitly by considering the complete-pooling and no-pooling models as two alternatives), then you get more reasonable estimates of the effect in each school. In some sense, the no-pooling model has the most “freedom” and the least constraint of all these options. In another sense, the hierarchical model gives you more freedom because it regularizes away the worst excesses of the fit. By analogy, a trapeze artist working with a net or safety cord has more freedom than if she is fully untethered, as the security gives her the freedom to do maneuvers more smoothly.

Ultimately, for statistical software the most user friendly thing is for it to enable users to do useful analyses. So, in that sense, embedded Laplace will make Stan more user friendly by allowing users to fit bigger and more realistic models. But there’s a price to pay in the meantime.

A Cure for Gravity

I just finished reading the above-titled Joe Jackson autobiography from 1999. I was charmed right away on page 12 with this passage:

The first of our three 45-minute sets is uneventful, but this is normal. People are still trickling in. Most of them seem to be middle-aged bruisers with long sideburns who won’t leave until they’ve had at least eight pints. Their pudding-fed wives are dressed, if not to kill, then at least to inflict grievous bodily harm . . .

I love that! Partly because you can see the work he put into writing it. I’m not saying it’s great literature, or even good literature, but it has character.

The book itself was readable and interesting. It reminded me a lot, both in style and content, of Quentin Crisp.

Was that on purpose, Jackson picking up Crisp’s style to tell a similar story of growing up and finding oneself in a world of characters?

I googled *”joe jackson” “quentin crisp”* and came across this interview from 2002 where Jackson says:

And if we’re talking about stereotypes, then I guess what I’m saying in the song is that I almost prefer the older stereotype—this sort of Oscar Wilde/Quentin Crisp gay stereotype, I almost prefer that to the more-straight-than-straight stereotype.

So, yeah, Jackson was aware of Crisp, and maybe that was an influence on his writing style.

That same Google search also turned up this bit from Crisp:

Playing Shakespeare is really tiring. You never get to sit down, unless you’re the king.

Dude had some great lines.

Whitehead, no Russell. Chicken, no chaser.

From an article about Colson Whitehead:

Whitehead stopped at the corner of Morningside Avenue, the location of Carney’s shop in the novel. (“This used to be a fried chicken joint,” he said, pointing out the M&G Diner sign still hanging above what is now a men’s clothing boutique.)

I went to that chicken place once! It was horrible. The suspicions began while we were waiting for the food. A delivery guy came in with a bag of takeout Chinese from some other place. That’s not a good sign, when the people who work in a restaurant order out for their dinner. And, indeed, the chicken was no good. I don’t remember the details (soggy? greasy? tasteless?), but, whatever it was, we never wanted to go back. And I like fried chicken. Who doesn’t, really? My go-to place now is the Korean fried chicken place on 106 St.—we refer to it as KFC. When I lived in California, there was an actual KFC two blocks from my house, and I went there once. No lie, I couldn’t keep that drumstick down. It was like eating a stick of butter. So gross. Popeye’s it wasn’t. I guess that quality varies across KFC franchises but I’m not planning to ever gonna test that hypothesis.

P.S. I read that Whitehead story in the newspaper the other day. Searching for it online (googling *Colson Whitehead fried chicken*) yielded this amusing speech. It turns out that Whitehead is really into fried chicken. And if you read the above quote carefully, you see that he never said that the chicken at M&G was any good. Actually I’m guessing it used to be good but that it went under a change of management or chef at some point between its glory days and when I tried it out, which was a few years before it shut down. What really bums me out is that the Korea Mill (not the same as the above-mentioned Korean chicken place) closed. I don’t know the full story; I’m hoping the owners just chose to retire.

P.P.S. I was happy to learn that Whitehead, like me, is a fan of The Sportswriter, even though he is not impressed by everything written by the author of that novel.

Why do we prefer familiarity in music and surprise in stories?

This came up in two books I read recently: “Elements of Surprise,” by Vera Tobin (who has a Ph.D. in English and teaches cognitive science) and “How Music Works” by David Byrne (Psycho Killer, etc.). Tobin’s book is about plot and suspense in stories—she talks mostly about books and movies. Byrne’s book is about music, live and recorded.

Here’s Byrne, describing one of his stage shows which he derived in part from Kabuki and other traditional modes of Asian theater:

There is another way in which pop-music shows resemble both Western and Eastern classical theater: the audience knows the story already. In classical theater, the director’s interpretation holds a mirror up to the oft-told tale in a way that allows us to see it in a new light. Well, same with pop concerts. The audience loves to hear songs they’ve heard before, and though they are most familiar with the recorded versions, they appreciate hearing what they already know in a new context. . . .

As a performing artist, this can be frustrating. We don’t want to be stuck playing our hits forever, but playing only new, unfamiliar stuff can alienate a crowd—I know, I’ve done it. This situation seems unfair. You would never go to a movie longing to spend half the evening watching familiar scenes featuring the actors replayed, with only a few new ones interspersed. And you’d grow tired of a visual artist or a writer who merely replicated work they’ve done before with little variation. . . .

So here’s the puzzle:

With stories we value suspense and surprise. Lots of interesting stuff on this topic from Tobin. Even for books and movies that are not “thrillers,” we appreciate a bit of uncertainty and surprise, both in the overall plot and in the details of what people are going to say and what comes next. But in music we value familiarity. A song or piece of music typically sounds better if we’ve heard it before—even many times before. The familiarity is part of what makes it satisfying.

In that way, music is like food. There’s nothing like “comfort food.” And, yes, we like to explore new tastes, but then if you find something new that you like, you’ll want to eat it again in future meals (at least until you get sick of it).

Yes, literature has its “comfort food” as well. When I first read George Orwell, many years ago, I liked it, and I read lots of other things by him. I like Meg Wolitzer’s books so I keep reading them. They’re all kinda similar but I like them all. OK, I have no interest in reading her “young adult”-style books, but that fits the story too, of wanting to stick with the familiar. And, of course, when it comes to movies and TV, people love sequels.

But there’s a difference. When I read one more book by Meg Wolitzer or Ross Macdonald or whoever, yes, it’s comfort food, yes, it’s similar to what came before, but there’s plot and suspense and a new story with each book. I’m not rereading or rewatching the same story, in the same way that I’m rehearing the same song (and, yes, it makes me happy when I hear a familiar REM song pop up on the radio). And, yes, we will reread books and rewatch movies, but that’s just an occasional thing, not the norm (setting aside the experience of small children who want to hear the same story over and over), in the way that listening to a familiar album is the norm in music listening, or in the way that when we go to a concert, we like to hear some of the hits we’ve heard so many times before.

So. With stories we like suspense, with music and food we like familiarity. Why is that? Can someone please explain?

One explanation I came up with is that when we listen to music, we’re usually doing other things, like jogging or biking or driving or working or just living our life, but when we read, our attention is fully on the book—indeed, it’s hard to imagine how to read without giving it your full attention. But that can’t be the full story: as Byrne points out, we also want familiarity when seeing a live concert, and when attending a concert we give it as much attention as we would give a movie, for example.

Another twist is that surprise is said to be essential to much of music. There’s the cliche that each measure should be a surprise when it comes but it should seem just right in retrospect. There are some sorts of songs where the interest comes entirely from the words, and the music is just there to set the mood—consider, for example, old-time ballads, story songs such as Alice’s Restaurant, or Gilbert and Sullivan—the music is super-important in these cases, and without the music the song would just fall apart, but there’s no need for surprise in the music itself. The music of Sullivan is a perfect example, because without Gilbert’s words, it sounds too symmetric and boring. For most songs and other pieces of music, we want some twists, and indeed this seems very similar to the role of plot and surprise in storytelling. I wrote about this before: “Much of storytelling involves expectations and surprise: building suspense, defusing non-suspense, and so on. Recall that saying that the best music is both expected and surprising in every measure. So, if you’re writing a novel and you introduce a character who seems like a bad person, you have to be aware that your reader is trying to figure it out: is this truly a bad person who just reveals badness right away, is this a good person who is misunderstood, will there be character development, etc.”

But this just brings us back to our puzzle. Surprise is important for much of the musical experience. But when we listen to music, unlike when we read or listen to or watch stories, we prefer familiarity, even great familiarity. You might say that this is because only with deep familiarity can we really appreciate the subtleties of the music, but (a) we often prefer familiarity for very simple music too, and (b) that same argument would apply to stories, but, again, when we receive stories we usually prefer surprise.

So the puzzle still remains for me. I guess that something has been written (or sung?) about this, so maybe youall can help me out.

Zoom colloquium’s song

To the tune of Simon and Garfunkel’s Kathy’s Song. Inspired by Andrew’s talk advice from earlier and my comment that it’s especially hard to give virtual talks when you feel like you are between topics or methods or otherwise transitioning what kind of work you do but aren’t sure yet what’s next.

I hear the questions afterward
They miss the point of what I said
Like the last QA continuing
Threatening to delay my next meeting

And from the shelter of my mind
Through the window of my eyes
I gaze beyond the zoom fullscreen
To email, where my next link lies

My mind’s distracted and diffused
My thoughts are many miles away
They lie in talks I’ve yet to write
And give when you’re expecting slides

And the bullet I was writing is left undone
I don’t know why that slide’s still there
A deck I made yet can’t complete
With fonts that mix showing I don’t care

And so you see I have come to doubt
All that I just presented as true
I’ll end it there without a summary
The only point I have is too new

And as I watch my deck go by
Each animation’s weary path to die
I know that I am like that slide
There but for what I can’t express go I

My problems with Superior

This post is by Lizzie.

I was once in a faculty meeting where a colleague attempted to explain that people are complicated. They are rarely simply good or bad. The same person can be intellectually brilliant in some regards and a revolting racist at the same time (Jim Watson was the subject in this case). I am not sure she made a dent in the perceptions of everyone who needed perhaps more than a dent in their perceptions, but it was a an excellent try.

This sort of complexity is sometimes a major pain. It means there are no easy answers where it would be really handy if we had them. And then we could organize things as simply good or bad, right or wrong. Such as research in human genetics, with its revolting and recurring history of eugenics, alongside its power to help us better diagnose and and potentially develop gene therapy treatments for a suite of diseases (such as Cystic Fibrosis).

And this sort of complexity is a major part of what was missing for me from the book Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini (reviewed by Andrew here).

I have a couple disclaimers about my feelings towards this book.

  • I read this book many months ago (in the spring of 2021 I believe) and am only now, at the end of the year, getting around to writing this up. So my memory is not as fresh as I would like. Part of the delay was feeling busy at work and part was not wanting to be negative about a book that in many ways takes on a hard subject and makes a compelling case, sharing information we should all know along the way.
  • I am a biologist. I am a community ecologist, so fairly removed from the genetics realm, but I find genetics work fascinating and my partner works in ecophylogenetics, so I am not as far removed as some. This makes me biased, as the book takes aim at biologists, but it also means I understand the science behind some of the claims.

I recommend Superior. It’s well-written and easy to read. It’s a super quick read of a topic we all should think and talk more about: race science, and how science can slip into supporting racism, nationalism and a suite of other evils that society cannot seem to rid itself of. It also captures a good dose of the sadder side of the process of science, including how the power of publication pushes people to over-reach and over-state.

I also disliked Superior for a few key reasons:

1. It seems to skip over all the really difficult questions in the topic of how we do science on human genetics, with no attempt to acknowledge that they are difficult questions or provide any answers. I spent a good half the book waiting for this to crop up. But it never did. My best guess is that Saini thinks we should simply stop doing 90% of the research we’re doing in human genetics.

There’s a related illogical mix of how the science is presented. She explains that the greatest human genetic diversity is found in Africa (which I presume all biologists know and I hope most people learn this early in school nowadays), then explains human migration patterns and that they show how often different populations of people in human history have interwoven. This is cool science! And stuff we learned through studying human genetics of different groups of people in different places. But then she condemns recent studies using similar methods, without fully defining the problem that made the old studies useful and the new studies evil. She seems to decry studies of ethnic groups without ever mentioning the utility of say, studies of the Ashkenazi Jews, which helped biologists find the genes linked to Cystic Fibrosis, Tay-Sachs and many other diseases. Science does good and bad. That’s the messy, tricky problem that I thought this book seemed to mostly ignore.

There’s actually an interesting issue here to me in the evolution of genetic/genomic science. From sometime in the 80s through sometime in the 2000’s genetics was really focused on finding single genes that did important things: caused Huntington’s disease for example, or changing the hair color of certain rodent groups. But at some point we ran out of finding those and I would say we didn’t find all that many. Most phenotypic traits might be more like height — which genetically is controlled by at least 50 genes, probably many more, in complicated ways that interact with the environment you’re raised in. And it takes a lot of data to find this all out. So finding out the genetic component of most traits is going to require a lot of data (and better methods) and wading far deeper into this tricky subject of how to do it ethically. But polygenic inheritance doesn’t appear much in the book and it’s not in the index.

Back to good and bad, scientists seem to be mainly good or bad also in this book. They are either out telling the world we’re all one people, or slipping rapidly and ignorantly into race science. The ones who find human history is a complicated story of migration and intermixing are never those charging for publications or doing anything scientifically questionable. David Reich “surprises [the author] with his gentleness. … He is unfailing polite, pausing only to message his wife.” He is never a researcher running a powerhouse lab potentially in part by colluding with other well-funded labs to outcompete the labs that won’t collaborate with him (as detailed here). I think he’s likely both, but scientists don’t seem to be so complicated as that in the book.

There’s no blurry line the author ever leads the readers to look at and wonder what to do about.

2. I thought statistics were not consistently reported. They were explained in depth when they supported the author’s argument and glossed over otherwise. For example, the author (who is British-Indian) writes “as much as 95% of [human genetic] variation is within population groups. Statistically this means that while I look nothing like the white British woman who lives next door to me in my apartment building, it’s perfectly possible for me to have more in common with her than with my Indian-born neighbor who lives downstairs.” Sure, it’s perfectly possible (for many reasons, given how little info we’re given here), but statistically it’s more likely that Saini will have more in common genetically with her Indian-born neighbor because of that other 5% which is never discussed. She introduces uncertainty intervals only for a recent study painfully trying to link a gene variant, which appeared to sweep through some European, North African, Middle-Eastern and Asian groups at a mean date of 5800 years ago, to the brain, but we never discuss the uncertainty for past human migration that mixed populations. I get that she’s making an argument, but I wanted it more carefully made. Complaining that scientists warp statistics for their own agenda is less convincing when an author does the same.

3. I am biased as a biologist myself, but I felt like the author had a holier than thou tone, looking down on us racist little biologists who could not understand the complexity of the social construct of race. I sort of liked this for my own personal benefit: it struck home for me the idea of why we need to all acknowledge our privilege and bias. I was annoyed with the author for not making it clear to me that she knew she was as much part of the problem, and that we’re all in it together.

At the end of the book she writes of biologists who use racial categories in their research: “They should at least know what race is” (author’s emphasis). This comes just after she writes about a:

…fairly young, diverse, international team, not all stuffy or old fashioned. And [the anthropologist studying them] noticed that all the scientists were routinely using racial categories not only to select their subjects but also to confidently pick out statistical differences between these racial groups.

So as [the anthropologist] observed them, she asked each scientist she interviewed one simple question `How would you define race?’

Not one of them could answer her question confidently or clearly.

I bet a bunch of them bombed answering this in a way that I’d be horrified by, but I didn’t trust the author at this point to think much more than that this is a damn hard question that would require a long answer about the social science of it, with a dash of biology (including the current inadequacy of both genetic data and statistics), and the mess of check-boxes on forms.

It’s a question that I wish Saini had given me a straight answer to in the book, and I don’t feel she did.

One answer is that race is a social construct and cannot be defined genetically. Saini seems to suggest the ills of racism spring from this attempt. But the ills of racism to me do not come from whether we define race socially or genetically, but in the idea that there could ever be a hierarchy of races. If we could define races well genetically, I doubt we rid ourselves of this inane idea.

Superior seems to want to take down the basic ideas of racism by showing that we are all one people, that we are highly intermixed and genetically similar. We are! But we are also genetically diverse. And, like we value cultural diversity, we should also value — not try to obscure — that diversity. In my work and the work of many researchers, genetic diversity is often what saves us; it’s the monocultures that fail us. I think Superior fails by not acknowledging how fantastic genetic diversity is, how much it has given us (and will in the future), and instead offers the false promise that if we all recognized race isn’t genetic then we wouldn’t be racist anymore.

Being Alive

We saw Company on Broadway last weekend. It was the day that Sondheim passed away, so it was very sad. The show itself was directed in a broad, over-the-top sort of way. Later we found a version on youtube and listened to that. I prefer that traditional take, which was bittersweet with comic elements rather than being comic with bittersweet elements. When we saw the show on Broadway, from the reaction of the crowd to each line it seemed that everyone but us in the audience had seen the show many times before. Every line was getting a zillion laffs. I can see that if you’re already familiar with the show, you might enjoy an offbeat version; to me, though, the crowd reactions and the show’s pacing detracted from the larger themes and the music as well.

I guess this is a general issue in any performance: do you aim for the aficionados or the noobs? When you’re doing greatest hits, do you riff or do you play it straight? And how does this work in the context of Broadway performers doing 8 shows a week? Instructors sometimes teach multiple sections of the same course, but even then they get to move on to new material as the semester goes on.

Spufford: “Semi-bamboozled” and cookery vs. science (special Thanksgiving post)

As a fan of Francis Spufford’s novel Golden Hill, I was thrilled to see it featured in BBC’s Book Club podcast. I enjoyed the episode, and now I want to reread the book, or maybe read Spufford’s new novel.

But what I want to talk about here is one particular thing Spufford said on that show in regard to a plot point that he revealed slowly throughout the book. A caller said that she gradually had a sense of what was going on, but it didn’t happen all at once, and Spufford said he was glad, that his goal had been for the readers to be “semi-bamboozled” so that they feel some unease at first but are willing to just keep reading to find out what’s going on.

I really liked this idea of semi-bamboozlement, and it relates to something we’ve talked about before (see also here). Ultimately, no fictional world can be completely coherent. The real world is overdetermined, and if you look at it too carefully the seams will be apparent. So semi-bamboozlement is kind of the default state when reading fiction. Beyond that are the usual challenges of maintaining that balance between expectation and surprise that has been much discussed by theorists of fiction and drama.

P.S. Elsewhere on the show, Spufford said, “Writing is a bit more like cookery and a bit less like science,” when talking about the way in which revision involves putting things in and taking them out and moving them around until all the flavors are balanced. I guess I should say “flavours.” I don’t remember the exact quote, and unfortunately the podcast seems to have no transcript. Anyway, I had two reactions to this remark from Spufford about writing and cookery:

1. I agree. Writing really is like that! It’s kind of like solving a puzzle or drawing a picture, where you add something in one place and that upsets the balance and then something else needs to be changed, and then something else, and so on.

2. I’d also say that science itself is “a bit more like cookery and a bit less like science” according to Spufford’s definition. Or, I should say, the way scientists do science is more similar to what non-scientists think cookery is like and quite a bit different from what non-scientists think science is like.

I wonder if the way writers do writing is more similar to what non-writers think cookery is like and quite a bit different from what non-writers think writing is like.

And that makes me wonder if the way cooks do cookery is more similar to what non-cooks think science is like and quite a bit different from what non-cooks think cookery is like.

Maybe the difference is that just about everybody does a bit of writing (texting is writing too!), and many people do some cookery, but only a small percentage of people do science. I think that serious writing and serious cookery aren’t so different from casual writing and casual cookery—but I also suspect that casual writers and cooks don’t always have such a clear sense of their processes in doing these activities.

Kelloggs in the house!

We got twin Kelloggs for you today.

First is Greg, who came up on the blog the other day. Greg’s a biologist, and he posted a video debunking some bogus covid science claims that are floating around on the internet. Actually, Greg has a whole Youtube channel with bioinformatics explainers. So that’s cool. Dude can sing too.

And this got me wondering what David’s been up to. A quick google turned up this article with Cary Moskovitz, “Inquiry-Based Writing in the Laboratory Course.” Hey! I don’t teach laboratory courses, exactly, but I think statistical methods is close enough. Moskovitz and Kellogg share some insights:

The inadequacies of the traditional lab, in which students go through the motions of laboratory work in a series of “cookbook” activities, have been widely recognized. . . . However, educational reform has yet to overcome the inertia of the traditional school “lab report.” Even in inquiry-based settings, such lab reports remain largely inauthentic and make-work affairs, involving little actual communication beyond the implicit argu- ment for a good grade. Real scientific writing, on the other hand, involves a variety of rhetorical functions including persuading skeptical audiences, constructing interpretive frameworks, refuting the work of others, and so forth.

To that list, I’d add “refuting one’s own work” and “exploring the conditions for one’s work to be refuted,” but I agree the general point.

They also emphasize the importance of defining the audience for a writing task. I agree with that too.

From the other direction we can consider the mess that is scientific writing in the real world. I think Moskovitz and Kellogg are talking about undergraduate students, but things are just as bad, although in different ways, among Ph.D. students and postdoctoral trainees, where there can be huge pressure to publish in so-called top journals, a pressure that can overwhelm all other goals of communication and learning. We need to work on this at all levels, from the empty “five-paragraph essay” on King Lear in high school to empty journal articles produced by working academics, and everything in between.

So thanks, Kelloggs, for giving us lots to think about today. And happy Thanksgiving!

Some unexpected insights from Dan Ariely’s Wall Street Journal’s advice column!

Back in the 1930s, it was Miss Lonelyhearts. In the 1970s, Dear Ann and Dear Abby ruled the roost. The 80s had Miss Manners. In the 90s, we turned to Dan Savage for his weekly wisdom. And nowadays advice columns are popping up all over the internet, from Dear Prudence to Ask Alma.

Gur Huberman recently alerted me to a new entry in the advice sweepstakes, this time with a business focus, appearing in the Wall Street Journal. The advice in the column related to some recent blog discussion so I thought I’d share it here for you!

A Ted-talking behavioral economist answers questions about accepting lavish hospitality and work emails received at odd hours

Dear Ted,

A collaborator of mine who has a much higher h-index than mine has invited me to coauthor at his summer house in North Carolina this spring. I would love to get a PNAS paper on my C.V., but I don’t want him to think that our collaboration is contingent on this coauthorship or to feel trapped with me as his workl companion. Plus, I’m not sure how I could express my gratitude, since any data I could afford would pale in comparison with the data that he appears to be able to get for free from insurance companies. Also, I’m not much of a college basketball fan—I prefer the NBA—and I’ve also heard that it can get pretty hot and humid in the south, even in the spring. What should I do? —Liz

Let me get you to think about the first part of your question in three ways.

First, put yourself in your friend’s shoes and ask yourself how you would feel. I suspect that you would not have invited someone as your coauthor if you felt trapped by them. This isn’t an easy exercise, but I find that it is useful in thinking about our approach to relationships and favors. Perhaps you could show up to your friend’s house with a special dataset–something he was never involved in collecting, so he can publish results from it and have plausible deniability if anything goes wrong!

Second, we experience coauthorship in relative, not absolute, terms. So a collaboration that seems expensive to you might not seem expensive to your friend. Again, think about the vacation from his point of view. Perhaps he already has 57,000 citations, so one more paper is no big deal to him. No way he’d risk his career by publishing a paper with fraudulent data!

Finally, collaborations are complex, and people bring lots of things to a collaboration, including kindness, support, a sense of humor, love, curiosity, and the willingness to promote work based on questionable data. Citations are only one of those many things. What do you bring to your collaboration? Citations might not matter much to your friend—but he might really envy your ability to launder fraudulent data, for example, or value your advice in complex ethical matters.

As for gratitude, saying thanks has a magical effect on the giver, so don’t sweat the method too much—just say it a few times: at least once while you are collaboration, and at least once a few weeks after you are back and when Retraction Watch comes calling and asking where your data came from.

Finally, you should rethink your negative attitude toward college basketball. Did you know that some of the greatest stars in the NBA played college basketball in the state of North Carolina? I’m thinking of Michael Jordan, Steph Curry, and our beloved Dream Team hero Christian Laettner. So my advice is turn up the A/C and enjoy March Madness. Psychological research shows that when beliefs we value are threatened, we try to find ways to defend such beliefs and keep the belief alive.

Dear Ted,

My boss is a night owl, and I often wake up to a barrage of emails. But I don’t like starting off my day feeling like I’m behind and having the urge to fabricate data before I even get out of bed. How can people working at different hours respect each other’s time? — Yohann

When we receive an email on the subject of data falsification, we tend to assume that the content is top of the sender’s mind and requires an urgent response. This assumption is often misguided. The emailer might well work with fabricated data all the time, in which case this email is no big deal, no more important than 57,000 other things on the sender’s mind.

I tested this bias on myself by asking people who emailed me data to destroy all records of where the data came from. I gave them a pull down menu with options that ranged from “drop everything and destroy the raw data now” to “by the end of the day” to “by the end of the week,” to “by the end of the month,” and I also added an option I was most curious about, which was “deny that the data ever existed.” It was surprising to me how many emails were in the “deny that the data ever existed” category (about 20%) and more surprising how few emails were in the “drop everything and destroy the data now” category (about 2%).

With this in mind, maybe ask everyone in your company to add something to urgent emails (say, !!!) and to ones where no response is necessary (maybe ***). This way the senders can mitigate confusion by being explicit about their expectations regarding fabricated data, which should make the urgency bias go away. Such tricks aren’t going to save us from the next big Ponzi scheme or doping athlete or thieving politician. But they could rein in the vast majority of people who cheat “just by a little.”

P.S. I know there will never be another Veronica Geng, but it was her mood that I was aiming for here.

Don’t Call Me Shirley, Mr. Feynman!

In the spirit of Second Chance U and The New Dirty Dozen, here’s another movie idea for you:

It’s the year 2075. Environmental devastation is wrecking the earth. New York and Miami are underwater. California has no water and we’re burning the candle at both ends by running nuclear plants 24/7 to power desalinization. Riots on the streets, drone fights in the air, etc. Confederate-flag-waving terrorists disrupt every election. John Yoo’s been uploaded to the internet and is on the Supreme Court for eternity. Music services are subscription only: if you play a Beatles record on your home stereo, the Disney copyright police will track down the signal, break down your door, and take your records. On-air radio and TV is coded and you have to pay for the decoder; otherwise all you’ll get is Nickelback records (yes, they’re still releasing new albums every year), Friends reboots, and WNBA highlight reels. Practical nuclear fusion power remains 25 years in the future, just has it has been for the past century.

In this dystopian nightmare, a group of renegade scientists in Los Angeles, near the site of the former Caltech (which was shut down during the Critical Race Theory riots of the mid 2020s), come up with an audacious plan. Through state-of-the-art genetic engineering and artificial intelligence technologies pirated from AppleGoogleBook, they construct replicas of three geniuses of the previous century: Richard Feynman and two others. I’m not sure who the other two should be: to go with the physics genius thing, we might pick Stephen Hawking and Stephen Wolfram; if we want to go gonzo we could pick, umm, I dunno, Robin Williams and Bill Cosby. Either way, we have some entertaining sidekicks who can provide commentary and yucks as needed.

Anyway, the idea is that Feynman comes back to life and is amusingly irascible about “political correctness” and all the silliness of modern culture, also he considers the politicians of both parties to be annoying time wasters. Team Save-The-World wants Feynman to design a scalable fusion power generator, but all Feynman wants to do is play the bongos. As one of the fathers of quantum computing [I saw him give a talk on the topic at Bell Labs back in the 80s!], he’s fascinated by quantum AI and wants to build a program to design creative new Brazilian beats. At some point in an amusing scene he escapes his handlers and hops on a RTD bus (yes, they still have those) with destination label Beach. Fun scenes ensue with the crazies on the bus, then 3 hours later there he is. His handlers are scared, they get on the phone with the FBI where they have to reveal their plan . . . eventually the irreverent physicist is found sitting with his friends and some Brazilian dudes on the beach, happily playing music. But this new beat gets him thinking: the music is accelerating around the players, each time modifying itself . . . hmmm, this makes him think of a new tokamak design . . . aha!

At this point, things move fast, and the drama is if they can build these new plants fast enough to forestall world doom! Feynman becomes a hero, but then he starts behaving like . . . Feynman. He patronizes everyone, he tries to pick up anything in a skirt (amusing scenes ensue with some dude in a skirt), and then comes the Serious Part of the drama. This man could save the world, but at what cost? How to balance mid-twentieth-century-style sexism with the possibility of saving the world? Someone fires up a Ruth Bader Ginsburg emulator to get the retro-feminist take.

How does it all end? To go pro- or anti-Feynman would be kind of a cheat. I think the way to go would be to have the resurrected Feynman die in some poetic-justice way, for example he’s tinkering with the latest reactor design and the reactor gets out of control, a nearby woman technician politely tugs on his sleeve: “Excuse me, Dr. Feynman–” He’s torn between annoyance at being distracted and interest in the prospect of another conquest: “Look, I’m working . . . oh, hellooo young lady . . .” The technician then says, more urgently: “We have to go. Now!” Feynman chuckles: “Oh, sure, we can go soon enough, just let me finish this calculation . . .” The machine starts to blow, the technician jumps aside, grabs Feynman, and pulls him to safety. But he still doesn’t catch what’s going on so he says in his charming Brooklyn accent, “Hey, tiger, just wait a minute,” and he goes back to grab his papers, only too late noticing the flood of plasma heading right at him . . .

Then a coda: 10 years later, the world has been saved. But was it all worth it? Who can say??

OK, there goes a half hour of my life that I’ll never see again!

P.S. I realize much of this was ripped off from the SF classic, Houston, Houston, Do You Read? But it’s ok for a movie to copy from a book, no?

“The Truants,” by William Barrett

I’ve been curious about this book ever since I read a review back when it came out in 1982, but I never happened to come across it, so the other day I checked it out of the library and read it.

William Barrett was born in 1913, and The Truants is his memoir of his time working at Partisan Review, the famous magazine of the so-called New York Intellectuals of the 1930s-50s. The thing that interests me about the Partisan Review crowd in particular is that so much has been written about them, but it’s hard to figure out exactly why. They weren’t particularly talented writers—for that, you’d go for Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson, who were part of that general social circle but not core Partisan Review writers—or, further afield, there’s A. J. Liebling, Saul Bellow, etc., all of whom found larger audiences. Alfred Kazin and Daniel Bell had more to say, but they weren’t really Partisan Review writers either. Then there was the political line of the magazine—liberal and anticommunist. Barrett makes a big deal about this, but in the 1930s and 40s, liberal and anticommunist was about as mainstream as you could get in the U.S. Liberals were winning elections (with a brief exception in 1946), and communism was never popular in this country. So, sure, give them credit for not falling for Stalinism, but that can’t be enough, right?

The editors of Partisan Review were Philip Rahv and William Phillips, and I think it’s fair to say that neither of them is remembered for anything but being an editor. It seems that Partisan Review published lots of good essays and stories on a very low budget, so this would their distinguishing characteristics: not their personalities, not their politics, but their skills as editors. To use a sports analogy (which I guess these guys never did), I don’t know how much of that was recruiting and how much was coaching, but in any case they must have been doing something right. Unfortunately, Barrett talks all about their personalities and their politics, and nothing about their editorial skills, so overall his book was a disappointment to me—it was as if Moneyball had been written without ever talking about baseball strategy—even thought it was well written and he had some interesting things to say.

What really fascinated me about the book, though, was its self-defeating nature. About half the book is gossip and half is politics. (OK, I guess it’s more like 30% gossip and 70% politics, but gossip is more fun than politics so I remember it as 50/50.) Anyway, the gossip part is roughly 50% gossip and 50% of Barrett criticizing other people for gossiping, and the politics part is roughly 50% criticizing other people for being dogmatic about politics and 50% Barrett being dogmatic itself.

Also, it’s so retro! He starts out on page 1 describing a Jewish guy as “dark and faintly menacing . . . The gaze is heavy-lidded, exotic; he might be a diamond merchant in Antwerp or a mysterious agent on the old Orient Express.” A diamond merchant in Antwerp, huh? And then later on, after describing a visiting E. M. Forster as “an elderly queen camping all over the place,” Barrett writes, “Once, a few years back, when homosexuals in demonstration marched up Fifth Avenue, I expressed distaste to a friend and was rebuked for being intolerant; I replied that it was not a question of tolerance but that I would feel the same distaste if a crowd of heterosexuals were to march up Fifth Avenue with their flies open. . . . What was so bad about the closet anyway? It was warm and cozy here.” The amusing thing to me about this passage is not how dated it is, or its illogic (I doubt the gay people were marching in Fifth Avenue with their flies open), but that Barrett tells this story of “the spectacle of the aging queen” but then blames it on Philip Rahv, who apparently was the one who told it to Barrett “with great glee, fairly dripping with Schadenfreude.”

This is pretty much the pattern with all the stories. Juicy gossip attached to a moralistic anti-gossip stance. On page 24, Barrett writes, “In this memoir, I must warn the reader, I am not a walker in the city seeking narcissistically to capture myself.” OK, I get it, he doesn’t like Alfred Kazin, the literary critic most famous for his memoir, “A Walker in the City.” Now I’m curious what Barrett has to say directly about Kazin, so I go to the index, which leads me to pages 46-47, where there are 6 paragraphs of funny anecdotes recounting putdowns that Rahv, Phillips, and others did on Kazin behind Kazin’s back, followed by a paragraph discussing how maybe all this gossip was a bad thing: “remarks made in the family did not always remain there but had a way of getting noised abroad and passing into circles where their effect would be malicious and damaging. The question was whether Rahv ever observed this distinction—whether he would not deliver his personal observations wherever he pleased. . . . Rahv stood so much at the center of the circle, he embodied it so much in his single person, that his own negative attitude could hardly keep from spreading to the whole.” Indeed. And this happens over and over in the book: Barrett tells a story that makes Edmund Wilson, or Hannah Arendt, or some other literary figure look bad, and then, in a more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone, blames it on Rahv. It’s enough to make me feel some sympathy for the old diamond merchant.

And then there’s the politics. Perhaps 1982 was the high-water mark of the neoconservative movement, and I can hardly fault Barrett for his anticommunism or his annoyance to his Partisan Review colleagues who condemned Stalin but still couldn’t let go of Marxism. The funny thing here is that Barrett slams those liberal Marxists for being dogmatic and overlooking the failures of socialism, but then he’s so dogmatic in the other direction. Economic freedom is great, but is freedom what the U.S. was dishing out in Guatemala, Iran, Vietnam, etc.? The odd thing about Barrett’s take on politics is that he was operating in a social milieu in which Marxism was the norm, but in the U.S. as a whole Marxism was a fringe ideology. Back in the 1930s-50s, a large part of America was still racially segregated! I guess this is an example of what they say about people swinging from one political extreme to the other.

Anyway, my point here is not that Barrett had some blinkered ideological takes on politics—lots of people have that, and you can still deliver insight from a one-sided position. I just thought it was interesting that, with the politics as with the gossip, Barrett was criticizing his friends for doing exactly what he was doing himself. It’s the whole unreliable-narrator thing, and it can make fascinating reading.