Spoilers

Wired points to a new study looking out how much people enjoy books when the ending twists are spoiled and when they're not spoiled and discovers that: "Spoilers Don’t Spoil Anything." Actually, that's not exactly what the study found. The study found that when comparing people's enjoyment of a story with or without a spoiler, on average, people tended to enjoy the spoiled stories more, in some cases significantly more. In a minority of cases, the subjects preferred the story unspoiled. In short, spoilers usually don't really spoil most types of stories, though they do spoil some.

To me this isn't really all that surprising, and I've discussed before the utility of "revealing surprises much earlier to create anticipation." The prototypical example is Romeo & Juliet, where the surprising twist ending is actually revealed in the Prologue. The anticipation of the tragic ending puts a pall over the whole play, giving it a certain ambiance, and as the tragic end approaches, the viewers begin feeling the sadness for the sad ending.

Nonetheless, there are times when a twist ending is best and a writer should try to withhold information. The question is when is a twist ending desirable and when not. Though I can't say I know the answer to this question, I have some thoughts.
1) It's probably worth it to hold out for a twist ending only if it's a really good twist, something really surprising. If the information isn't that earth-shattering, reveal it as soon as it's convenient.
2) If the audience can too easily guess the twist, it's not worth withholding.
3) A good twist should bring insight, not confusion. If things that didn't make sense, suddenly make sense after knowing the twist, then that's good. If things that previously made sense, suddenly don't make sense after knowing the twist, that's bad.

I'm sure there some other good rules of thumb, and there are exceptions to these rule. But they are a good starting point for thinking about when it's worth it to employ a twist ending. Though, most of the time it's probably best to reveal information when it's convenient throughout the course of the story.

Wired points to a new study looking out how much people enjoy books when the ending twists are spoiled and when they're not spoiled and discovers that: "Spoilers Don’t Spoil Anything." Actually, that's not exactly what the study found. The study found that when comparing people's enjoyment of a story with or without a spoiler, on average, people tended to enjoy the spoiled stories more, in some cases significantly more. In a minority of cases, the subjects preferred the story unspoiled. In short, spoilers usually don't really spoil most types of stories, though they do spoil some.

To me this isn't really all that surprising, and I've discussed before the utility of "revealing surprises much earlier to create anticipation." The prototypical example is Romeo & Juliet, where the surprising twist ending is actually revealed in the Prologue. The anticipation of the tragic ending puts a pall over the whole play, giving it a certain ambiance, and as the tragic end approaches, the viewers begin feeling the sadness for the sad ending.

Nonetheless, there are times when a twist ending is best and a writer should try to withhold information. The question is when is a twist ending desirable and when not. Though I can't say I know the answer to this question, I have some thoughts.
1) It's probably worth it to hold out for a twist ending only if it's a really good twist, something really surprising. If the information isn't that earth-shattering, reveal it as soon as it's convenient.
2) If the audience can too easily guess the twist, it's not worth withholding.
3) A good twist should bring insight, not confusion. If things that didn't make sense, suddenly make sense after knowing the twist, then that's good. If things that previously made sense, suddenly don't make sense after knowing the twist, that's bad.

I'm sure there some other good rules of thumb, and there are exceptions to these rule. But they are a good starting point for thinking about when it's worth it to employ a twist ending. Though, most of the time it's probably best to reveal information when it's convenient throughout the course of the story.

Spoilers

Inspiration vs Copyright Infringement

Michael Zhang asks the question "At What Point Does Inspiration Turn Into Copyright Infringement?" Namely, if an artist is inspired by another artist and uses similar elements or lifts pieces from another artists work, how similar do the works have to be for it to count as copyright infringement? For example, if you love the character of Jay Gatsby and wanted to create a character based on him, would it be copyright infringement if your character is a newly rich man in love with a woman from old money? what if he had fallen in love with her when he was just a poor soldier? what if he became rich working for the mob? what if his name is Jay? Where exactly do you draw the line?

The example that Zhang points to is not a good example. Janine Gordon is suing photographer Ryan McGinley claiming he stole photography ideas from her and that his works represent blatant copying, but the similarities between their photographs seem superficial.

Mike Masnick, I think rightly, points out, "Honestly, it's difficult for me to even say that McGinley's are 'inspired' by Gordon's, let alone copies."

José Freire, a gallery owner who's worked with McGinley responded in more detail, saying:

Among the artists named in reviews and essays about McGinley over the years one will find: Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Irving Penn, Man Ray, Alfred Steiglitz, Peter Hujar, Edward Weston, Catherine Opie, William Eggleston, Ansel Adams, and Dash Snow. Janine Gordon’s name has never once appeared as a comparison. These references, by numerous preeminent critics and curators, were not made to cast doubt on McGinley’s artistic process but rather to describe the status to which his work aspires.

...

Gordon’s claims for originality are extraordinary: she claims to have invented, among other things: visible grain and other errors in the image; the injection of the monochromatic into photography; the depiction of chaos; the use of smoke; the documentation of sub-cultures; and certain types of rudimentary composition (such as placing figures in the center of the page; or in a dynamic relationship to the edge of the image). She even appears to lay claim to “the kiss” as a “concept.”

...

[Gordon] states that there are 150 instances of “copyright violation”, however, these include numbers of images which are video stills taken by persons other than McGinley during extensive commercial shoots, pictures not even taken by McGinley, and images which resemble each other only if cropped; rotated; inverted, rendered in grayscale, or otherwise dramatically altered.

We are confident that Gordon’s case has absolutely no merit whatsoever and that her litigation will ultimately do more damage to herself than to McGinley.

That last point is important, not all the 150 examples of supposed infringement are actually photos taken by McGinley, including the fourth image embedded above, of the the three people laying on the bed. And, unsprurprisingly, Gordon has a history of such lawsuits.

Nonetheless, the question still stands. How different do two works of art, or even elements within a work of art, have to be, to be considered inspiration/homage/reference and how different to make it theft/infringement/derivative, even leaving the legal question aside.

The whole problem is exacerbated by the fact that there is no objective way of measuring difference or originality. People have very strong opinions about apparent rip-offs, but they're entirely subjective. It's not like the judge in this case can pull out some super secret originality yardstick from behind his bench and measure the respective differences and declare with certainty whether it is or is not above the statutory limit. The subjectiveness of such questions are fine for art history, since critics are free to squabble over such questions for generations on end. But it's a big problem for copyright law, since ultimately someone, whether it be judge or jury, is going to be put into the position of deciding the question, and their quite arbitrary and personal decision is going to be exalted to legal fact by the force of law.

Though I agree with Freire that the case is without merit, it's entirely possible that a sympathetic judge will rule against him. It might be fun to discuss and debate about such questions of originality, but it's deadly serious when potentially hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars ride on the answer.

Michael Zhang asks the question "At What Point Does Inspiration Turn Into Copyright Infringement?" Namely, if an artist is inspired by another artist and uses similar elements or lifts pieces from another artists work, how similar do the works have to be for it to count as copyright infringement? For example, if you love the character of Jay Gatsby and wanted to create a character based on him, would it be copyright infringement if your character is a newly rich man in love with a woman from old money? what if he had fallen in love with her when he was just a poor soldier? what if he became rich working for the mob? what if his name is Jay? Where exactly do you draw the line?

The example that Zhang points to is not a good example. Janine Gordon is suing photographer Ryan McGinley claiming he stole photography ideas from her and that his works represent blatant copying, but the similarities between their photographs seem superficial.

Mike Masnick, I think rightly, points out, "Honestly, it's difficult for me to even say that McGinley's are 'inspired' by Gordon's, let alone copies."

José Freire, a gallery owner who's worked with McGinley responded in more detail, saying:

Among the artists named in reviews and essays about McGinley over the years one will find: Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Irving Penn, Man Ray, Alfred Steiglitz, Peter Hujar, Edward Weston, Catherine Opie, William Eggleston, Ansel Adams, and Dash Snow. Janine Gordon’s name has never once appeared as a comparison. These references, by numerous preeminent critics and curators, were not made to cast doubt on McGinley’s artistic process but rather to describe the status to which his work aspires.

...

Gordon’s claims for originality are extraordinary: she claims to have invented, among other things: visible grain and other errors in the image; the injection of the monochromatic into photography; the depiction of chaos; the use of smoke; the documentation of sub-cultures; and certain types of rudimentary composition (such as placing figures in the center of the page; or in a dynamic relationship to the edge of the image). She even appears to lay claim to “the kiss” as a “concept.”

...

[Gordon] states that there are 150 instances of “copyright violation”, however, these include numbers of images which are video stills taken by persons other than McGinley during extensive commercial shoots, pictures not even taken by McGinley, and images which resemble each other only if cropped; rotated; inverted, rendered in grayscale, or otherwise dramatically altered.

We are confident that Gordon’s case has absolutely no merit whatsoever and that her litigation will ultimately do more damage to herself than to McGinley.

That last point is important, not all the 150 examples of supposed infringement are actually photos taken by McGinley, including the fourth image embedded above, of the the three people laying on the bed. And, unsprurprisingly, Gordon has a history of such lawsuits.

Nonetheless, the question still stands. How different do two works of art, or even elements within a work of art, have to be, to be considered inspiration/homage/reference and how different to make it theft/infringement/derivative, even leaving the legal question aside.

The whole problem is exacerbated by the fact that there is no objective way of measuring difference or originality. People have very strong opinions about apparent rip-offs, but they're entirely subjective. It's not like the judge in this case can pull out some super secret originality yardstick from behind his bench and measure the respective differences and declare with certainty whether it is or is not above the statutory limit. The subjectiveness of such questions are fine for art history, since critics are free to squabble over such questions for generations on end. But it's a big problem for copyright law, since ultimately someone, whether it be judge or jury, is going to be put into the position of deciding the question, and their quite arbitrary and personal decision is going to be exalted to legal fact by the force of law.

Though I agree with Freire that the case is without merit, it's entirely possible that a sympathetic judge will rule against him. It might be fun to discuss and debate about such questions of originality, but it's deadly serious when potentially hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars ride on the answer.

Inspiration vs Copyright Infringement

How to write a review

Robert Pinsky talks about what makes a good book review by looking at a famously malicious review John Keats' Endymion received when it was published in 1818. The review was written with gleeful acerbity by John Wilson Croker. The review fails, not just because it savages a true poetic masterpiece, but because it fails to do what a review is supposed to do. Pinsky explains that there are three things a review should include:

1. The review must tell what the book is about.
2. The review must tell what the book's author says about that thing the book is about.
3. The review must tell what the reviewer thinks about what the book's author says about that thing the book is about.

It seems like a good way to do a review to me. I remember when I used to read Peter Travers' movie reviews in Rolling Stones, he once explained that the purpose of a movie review is to get people to the movies they're going to like. A review is not merely a platform for a reviewer's personal taste; a reviewer is not some sort of anointed cultural gatekeeper; a reviewer is just someone there to help potential customers.

Robert Pinsky talks about what makes a good book review by looking at a famously malicious review John Keats' Endymion received when it was published in 1818. The review was written with gleeful acerbity by John Wilson Croker. The review fails, not just because it savages a true poetic masterpiece, but because it fails to do what a review is supposed to do. Pinsky explains that there are three things a review should include:

1. The review must tell what the book is about.
2. The review must tell what the book's author says about that thing the book is about.
3. The review must tell what the reviewer thinks about what the book's author says about that thing the book is about.

It seems like a good way to do a review to me. I remember when I used to read Peter Travers' movie reviews in Rolling Stones, he once explained that the purpose of a movie review is to get people to the movies they're going to like. A review is not merely a platform for a reviewer's personal taste; a reviewer is not some sort of anointed cultural gatekeeper; a reviewer is just someone there to help potential customers.

How to write a review

How the internet affects our memory

New research shows that we tend to remember more poorly things that we think we can look up. As the New York Times describes it:

Dr. Sparrow and her collaborators, Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard and Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, staged four different memory experiments. In one, participants typed 40 bits of trivia — for example, “an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain” — into a computer. Half of the subjects believed the information would be saved in the computer; the other half believed the items they typed would be erased.

The subjects were significantly more likely to remember information if they thought they would not be able to find it later. “Participants did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read,” the authors write.

In other words, we don't put as much effort into remembering things we don't think we have to remember. Does it show that our memories are poorer because of the internet? No. In fact, nowadays we're barraged with so much more information and trivia than we were in the past that learning what is important to actually retain in your noggin and what you can just look up later if you ever need it is a really important skill. In fact, the researchers note that people tend to remember better how to find the info or where it is stored, rather than the info itself.

Ronald Bailey at Reason magazine makes the appropriate connection to Plato's Phaedrus (274e-275b), where Socrates had criticized writing's effect on memory saying:

this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

But Socrates has turned out to be wrong. Writing doesn't diminish our memory; it just changes the way we remember things. Just as writing was in Plato's day, the internet is sort of becoming a back up drive for our memory, a place to go to access stuff we don't have enough room for on our main drive. It supplements our memory. Wegner calls this type of thing "transactive memory," a place "where information is stored collectively outside the brain.

And there's nothing new here. We've always used other sources to supplement our memory, whether it's asking friends, looking it up in books or checking our notes. The difference is that now the internet is almost exclusively filling that role.

New research shows that we tend to remember more poorly things that we think we can look up. As the New York Times describes it:

Dr. Sparrow and her collaborators, Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard and Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, staged four different memory experiments. In one, participants typed 40 bits of trivia — for example, “an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain” — into a computer. Half of the subjects believed the information would be saved in the computer; the other half believed the items they typed would be erased.

The subjects were significantly more likely to remember information if they thought they would not be able to find it later. “Participants did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read,” the authors write.

In other words, we don't put as much effort into remembering things we don't think we have to remember. Does it show that our memories are poorer because of the internet? No. In fact, nowadays we're barraged with so much more information and trivia than we were in the past that learning what is important to actually retain in your noggin and what you can just look up later if you ever need it is a really important skill. In fact, the researchers note that people tend to remember better how to find the info or where it is stored, rather than the info itself.

Ronald Bailey at Reason magazine makes the appropriate connection to Plato's Phaedrus (274e-275b), where Socrates had criticized writing's effect on memory saying:

this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

But Socrates has turned out to be wrong. Writing doesn't diminish our memory; it just changes the way we remember things. Just as writing was in Plato's day, the internet is sort of becoming a back up drive for our memory, a place to go to access stuff we don't have enough room for on our main drive. It supplements our memory. Wegner calls this type of thing "transactive memory," a place "where information is stored collectively outside the brain.

And there's nothing new here. We've always used other sources to supplement our memory, whether it's asking friends, looking it up in books or checking our notes. The difference is that now the internet is almost exclusively filling that role.

How the internet affects our memory

Unrealistic fantasies

A while ago I posted about how romance novels seem to be for women what porn is for men. So, it's interesting to see, at around the same time, a study by some authors that claim that romance novels lead to sexual health problems and a rant by Naomi Wolf claiming that porn leads men to have mental health problems, such as porn addiction and a propensity for extreme sex.

Both of the articles present the veneer of science credibility, but neither appears to have much weight to them. Mind Hacks takes apart Wolf's argument pretty succinctly, showing how she misuses some fact and basically doesn't understand the neurochemistry she presents in the article. The article about romance novels, similarly, doesn't seem to present any evidence of its conclusion. The article basically looks at romance novels, sees their content and pretty much says, "if women take these stories as realistic expectation for what to expect from real-world romances, that'll lead to problems," which is tantamount to saying, "If young kids read Harry Potter and start to expect that they're going to very soon discover that they're wizards capable of magic, that'll lead to problems." Nowhere does the article actually prove that women pick up romance novels thinking they're going to be education and informative.

So, I guess, maybe, porn and romance novels aren't that bad after all. Oh well. I guess we can go back to letting people occasionally and temporarily escape into their unrealistic fantasies.

A while ago I posted about how romance novels seem to be for women what porn is for men. So, it's interesting to see, at around the same time, a study by some authors that claim that romance novels lead to sexual health problems and a rant by Naomi Wolf claiming that porn leads men to have mental health problems, such as porn addiction and a propensity for extreme sex.

Both of the articles present the veneer of science credibility, but neither appears to have much weight to them. Mind Hacks takes apart Wolf's argument pretty succinctly, showing how she misuses some fact and basically doesn't understand the neurochemistry she presents in the article. The article about romance novels, similarly, doesn't seem to present any evidence of its conclusion. The article basically looks at romance novels, sees their content and pretty much says, "if women take these stories as realistic expectation for what to expect from real-world romances, that'll lead to problems," which is tantamount to saying, "If young kids read Harry Potter and start to expect that they're going to very soon discover that they're wizards capable of magic, that'll lead to problems." Nowhere does the article actually prove that women pick up romance novels thinking they're going to be education and informative.

So, I guess, maybe, porn and romance novels aren't that bad after all. Oh well. I guess we can go back to letting people occasionally and temporarily escape into their unrealistic fantasies.

Unrealistic fantasies

Surprise vs Anticipation

One thing one must often think about in storytelling is when to reveal surprising revelations to the audience. Some people take the attitude of withholding the information usually for one of two reasons: either to create a big surprise at the end or to create a mystery that keeps the audience's attention. But there's also something to be said for revealing surprises much earlier to create anticipation. Allow me to explain.

Twist endings are unfortunately overused sometimes. A well done twist ending can really make a story: it's a good punctuation at the end that leaves you with a good impression when you put down a book or leave a movie theater. There are many things that can make a good twist, but I think the real test of whether a twist is good is if it significantly changes the experience of the story if you know the twist. For example, among films we can think of a number of celebrated twist endings (Psycho, The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, Les Diabolique, The Usual Suspects, La Jetee, and Twelve Monkeys) when we go back and watch these movies, we realize that it's a very different movie the second time. This is because the twist is really integral to the story. When you first see The Sixth Sense, you see the story of a psychologist trying to redeem himself in the midst of a failed marriage while trying to help a troubled child. The second time around, instead you see a deluded ghost bonding with a clearly reluctant kid while he watches his wife painfully mourn his passing. This is a good way to use a twist: a good twist should stretch back and change a whole story. If a twist seems tacked on, or dispensable or makes things more confusing, it's probably not a good idea.

Creating a mystery has a different use, to your reader or viewer interested in finding out the secret. This is standard practice in Mystery stories, but it is the stock and trade of many other stories, as well. Since we are innately curious creatures, we have a hard time leaving a mystery unsolved, making it difficulty to stop a movie or put down a book when there are still questions unanswered. Of course, it's important to make the mystery intriguing enough that we want to discover the truth. But the main thing to remember about mysteries is that it is important to make the revelation commensurate with expectation. In other words, if the audience is led to believe there's some big mystery, they shouldn't find out that's it's something small and mundane - it's a big disappointment. Thus, if you're going to build a mystery up, then you need to make it something big: either one big earth-shattering revelation or many smaller revelations that combine together into something complex and intricate.

But sometimes you want to avoid mystery and surprise and reveal information early to create anticipation. This usually works in the form of dramatic irony: the reader or viewer is told something that the character has yet to find out. It works well with particularly dramatic and emotionally charged revelations. We can think of the classic example of this, Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet was a popular story when Shakespeare decided to adapt it for the stage, so the ending was probably well known amongst his audience, but even if there were some that didn't known how it was going to end, he explained in the dialogue that is was going to have a tragic ending with the two lovers dying. The effect on the audience is to create expectation of the emotional event, giving the emotions more time to build up and rise, thus making our emotional reaction to the event stronger. Horror movies frequently do this with rising tension before a big scare. It's become even a cliche for horror movies to use the music to signal something ominous, to get the audience tense so that we'll jump all the more when something suddenly pops up on screen.

We can also illustrate this with another more recent example, which handles it particularly well: the pilot episode of Twin Peaks. In the first few minutes we're apprised of the fact that Laura Palmer is dead, and almost immediately the scene cuts to Laura's mother who's unaware of what has happened and is wondering where her daughter is. At this point, we can easily anticipate what's coming: the mother is going to find out her daughter is dead and is going to be very sad. A pall hangs over the scenes of the mother calling around asking people if they've seen her daughter and immediately makes her a sympathetic character. Because we know what's coming we can see the revelation quickly approaching, as the parents are about to learn the truth. Our sadness is given more time to grow and thus is felt much stronger.

All three of them have their place and fit well in certain places and in certain types of stories. The important point really is to not overuse any of them and to know when one or the other is important.

One thing one must often think about in storytelling is when to reveal surprising revelations to the audience. Some people take the attitude of withholding the information usually for one of two reasons: either to create a big surprise at the end or to create a mystery that keeps the audience's attention. But there's also something to be said for revealing surprises much earlier to create anticipation. Allow me to explain.

Twist endings are unfortunately overused sometimes. A well done twist ending can really make a story: it's a good punctuation at the end that leaves you with a good impression when you put down a book or leave a movie theater. There are many things that can make a good twist, but I think the real test of whether a twist is good is if it significantly changes the experience of the story if you know the twist. For example, among films we can think of a number of celebrated twist endings (Psycho, The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, Les Diabolique, The Usual Suspects, La Jetee, and Twelve Monkeys) when we go back and watch these movies, we realize that it's a very different movie the second time. This is because the twist is really integral to the story. When you first see The Sixth Sense, you see the story of a psychologist trying to redeem himself in the midst of a failed marriage while trying to help a troubled child. The second time around, instead you see a deluded ghost bonding with a clearly reluctant kid while he watches his wife painfully mourn his passing. This is a good way to use a twist: a good twist should stretch back and change a whole story. If a twist seems tacked on, or dispensable or makes things more confusing, it's probably not a good idea.

Creating a mystery has a different use, to your reader or viewer interested in finding out the secret. This is standard practice in Mystery stories, but it is the stock and trade of many other stories, as well. Since we are innately curious creatures, we have a hard time leaving a mystery unsolved, making it difficulty to stop a movie or put down a book when there are still questions unanswered. Of course, it's important to make the mystery intriguing enough that we want to discover the truth. But the main thing to remember about mysteries is that it is important to make the revelation commensurate with expectation. In other words, if the audience is led to believe there's some big mystery, they shouldn't find out that's it's something small and mundane - it's a big disappointment. Thus, if you're going to build a mystery up, then you need to make it something big: either one big earth-shattering revelation or many smaller revelations that combine together into something complex and intricate.

But sometimes you want to avoid mystery and surprise and reveal information early to create anticipation. This usually works in the form of dramatic irony: the reader or viewer is told something that the character has yet to find out. It works well with particularly dramatic and emotionally charged revelations. We can think of the classic example of this, Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet was a popular story when Shakespeare decided to adapt it for the stage, so the ending was probably well known amongst his audience, but even if there were some that didn't known how it was going to end, he explained in the dialogue that is was going to have a tragic ending with the two lovers dying. The effect on the audience is to create expectation of the emotional event, giving the emotions more time to build up and rise, thus making our emotional reaction to the event stronger. Horror movies frequently do this with rising tension before a big scare. It's become even a cliche for horror movies to use the music to signal something ominous, to get the audience tense so that we'll jump all the more when something suddenly pops up on screen.

We can also illustrate this with another more recent example, which handles it particularly well: the pilot episode of Twin Peaks. In the first few minutes we're apprised of the fact that Laura Palmer is dead, and almost immediately the scene cuts to Laura's mother who's unaware of what has happened and is wondering where her daughter is. At this point, we can easily anticipate what's coming: the mother is going to find out her daughter is dead and is going to be very sad. A pall hangs over the scenes of the mother calling around asking people if they've seen her daughter and immediately makes her a sympathetic character. Because we know what's coming we can see the revelation quickly approaching, as the parents are about to learn the truth. Our sadness is given more time to grow and thus is felt much stronger.

All three of them have their place and fit well in certain places and in certain types of stories. The important point really is to not overuse any of them and to know when one or the other is important.

Surprise vs Anticipation

Constructing an Argument

Glenn Reynolds has a long post and a response from a teacher arguing that high school English should much be more focused on writing persuasive arguments. I can't say I disagree. I'm someone who loves literature and fiction and reads (and writes) a lot of it, but being able to present and defend a position is a much more valuable skill, and so long as we remember that a teacher can't teach everything and teaching priorities need to be made, then we should admit that writing argumentative essays should be a much higher priority. If there's one really important thing that a person can get out of philosophy, it's learning about the history of philosophical arguments for various ideas, more so than the ideas themselves.

Glenn Reynolds has a long post and a response from a teacher arguing that high school English should much be more focused on writing persuasive arguments. I can't say I disagree. I'm someone who loves literature and fiction and reads (and writes) a lot of it, but being able to present and defend a position is a much more valuable skill, and so long as we remember that a teacher can't teach everything and teaching priorities need to be made, then we should admit that writing argumentative essays should be a much higher priority. If there's one really important thing that a person can get out of philosophy, it's learning about the history of philosophical arguments for various ideas, more so than the ideas themselves.

Constructing an Argument

What can be taught

There are many that argue that in education we should be focusing more on creativity and independent thinking. The reasoning behind this is basically that these will always be valuable skills and focusing too much on facts and memorization is counter-productive since much of that knowledge may become quickly obsolete. The problem with this line of argument is that it's not entirely clear how or even whether these things can be taught.

The Guardian yesterday compiled a number of opinions from various writers who briefly weighed in on the question of whether creative writing can be taught. Their opinions range from "not really" to "somewhat." Unfortunately, they don't go into the question in too much depth and I think that more can be said.

There are a few things that should be noted. First, even if we don't know whether writing skill can be taught or not, we know it can be learned. No one is born a Shakespeare. Access to the childhood writings of great writers consistently shows that they wrote generally as poor as all children wrote. Somehow they learned a few things about writing along the way.

Second, the more knowledge you retain and the better you are able to use that knowledge, the more creative you'll be. Memory, particularly working memory, is a big component of overall intelligence. Many people like to make this diametrical division between rote memorization and creativity, but the reality is that the better a person's memory functions, generally the more creative they are. And the best way to improve memory is to memorize things. That doesn't mean that rote memorization is the best way to improve memory, just that memory skill is important. Also, the larger the storehouse of knowledge you can draw from, the more creative you'll be. That means that learning lots of facts can be very beneficial.

Third, a teacher can only be involved in a percentage of the learning of a student. There are only so many hours of teaching time, and these few hours are certainly only sufficient to impart limited knowledge. Students need to be learning on their own, especially if they ever want to attain something that requires a great many hours of skill, such as sophisticated and well-developed writing ability. K. Anders Ericsson famously estimated, based on considerable research, that it takes on average 10,000 hours or 10 years to master something (if not more, in highly competitive fields). That's a lot more hours than I, or any teacher, probably wants to spend teaching a student.

Fourth, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. In other words, you can't force a student to learn anything they don't want to learn. In fact, a student doesn't even need to stubbornly refuse to learn, just simply not paying attention or not studying is enough. In short, the student needs to be involved in the learning process. A good teacher can motivate students, but the student still needs to meet the teacher half way.

Fifth, writers are not entirely aware or able to explain what they know. There are many skills that we develop and master non-linguistically and non-consciously. For example, the ability to throw a football forty yards with pinpoint accuracy cannot be explained because it's a matter of training your muscles and your nervous system to be able to coordinate themselves in such a way that you can simply think, "Throw this ball to hit that target," and it will happen. Your muscles and nervous system are conditioned in such a way that you generally perform poorer if you think consciously too much about it; decisions need to be streamlined such that they can basically be made below the conscious level, quickly and without deliberation. The way you condition them is with practice, repetition and feedback, and a lot of it. A talented writer's sense about what is appropriate, what fits, what the best way to say such a thing, what should happen in a plot, what a character should do, and so on, is also frequently non-conscious; such decisions have been developed through the experience of lots of reading and writing. This means that writers need only be aware of what they are doing in a limited sense; as such they really only have a partial understanding of what they're doing right, not to mention that they might also fall into bad habits that they mistakenly think are favorable. Thus, their ability to pass on useful information will also be limited.

Sixth, being creative means doing thing differently. In other words, you can teach somehow how other people have done things, but being creative means doing things in a different may. By definition, if you teach someone something and they parrot it, they're not creative.

If we take these points in combination I think we can get a good idea of what it means to teach creative writing. Namely, that at best a teacher can facilitate the self-learning of a student. By definition you can't really teach creativity, but you can help students become more creative. And the best way to teach students would be to teach them more readily teachable knowledge like writing techniques, tropes, conventions and genres through giving examples and reading quality writing; as well as trying to motivate them to broaden their knowledge independently. In short, as to the question of whether creative writing can be taught, the answer is: "sort of, but not really."

There are many that argue that in education we should be focusing more on creativity and independent thinking. The reasoning behind this is basically that these will always be valuable skills and focusing too much on facts and memorization is counter-productive since much of that knowledge may become quickly obsolete. The problem with this line of argument is that it's not entirely clear how or even whether these things can be taught.

The Guardian yesterday compiled a number of opinions from various writers who briefly weighed in on the question of whether creative writing can be taught. Their opinions range from "not really" to "somewhat." Unfortunately, they don't go into the question in too much depth and I think that more can be said.

There are a few things that should be noted. First, even if we don't know whether writing skill can be taught or not, we know it can be learned. No one is born a Shakespeare. Access to the childhood writings of great writers consistently shows that they wrote generally as poor as all children wrote. Somehow they learned a few things about writing along the way.

Second, the more knowledge you retain and the better you are able to use that knowledge, the more creative you'll be. Memory, particularly working memory, is a big component of overall intelligence. Many people like to make this diametrical division between rote memorization and creativity, but the reality is that the better a person's memory functions, generally the more creative they are. And the best way to improve memory is to memorize things. That doesn't mean that rote memorization is the best way to improve memory, just that memory skill is important. Also, the larger the storehouse of knowledge you can draw from, the more creative you'll be. That means that learning lots of facts can be very beneficial.

Third, a teacher can only be involved in a percentage of the learning of a student. There are only so many hours of teaching time, and these few hours are certainly only sufficient to impart limited knowledge. Students need to be learning on their own, especially if they ever want to attain something that requires a great many hours of skill, such as sophisticated and well-developed writing ability. K. Anders Ericsson famously estimated, based on considerable research, that it takes on average 10,000 hours or 10 years to master something (if not more, in highly competitive fields). That's a lot more hours than I, or any teacher, probably wants to spend teaching a student.

Fourth, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. In other words, you can't force a student to learn anything they don't want to learn. In fact, a student doesn't even need to stubbornly refuse to learn, just simply not paying attention or not studying is enough. In short, the student needs to be involved in the learning process. A good teacher can motivate students, but the student still needs to meet the teacher half way.

Fifth, writers are not entirely aware or able to explain what they know. There are many skills that we develop and master non-linguistically and non-consciously. For example, the ability to throw a football forty yards with pinpoint accuracy cannot be explained because it's a matter of training your muscles and your nervous system to be able to coordinate themselves in such a way that you can simply think, "Throw this ball to hit that target," and it will happen. Your muscles and nervous system are conditioned in such a way that you generally perform poorer if you think consciously too much about it; decisions need to be streamlined such that they can basically be made below the conscious level, quickly and without deliberation. The way you condition them is with practice, repetition and feedback, and a lot of it. A talented writer's sense about what is appropriate, what fits, what the best way to say such a thing, what should happen in a plot, what a character should do, and so on, is also frequently non-conscious; such decisions have been developed through the experience of lots of reading and writing. This means that writers need only be aware of what they are doing in a limited sense; as such they really only have a partial understanding of what they're doing right, not to mention that they might also fall into bad habits that they mistakenly think are favorable. Thus, their ability to pass on useful information will also be limited.

Sixth, being creative means doing thing differently. In other words, you can teach somehow how other people have done things, but being creative means doing things in a different may. By definition, if you teach someone something and they parrot it, they're not creative.

If we take these points in combination I think we can get a good idea of what it means to teach creative writing. Namely, that at best a teacher can facilitate the self-learning of a student. By definition you can't really teach creativity, but you can help students become more creative. And the best way to teach students would be to teach them more readily teachable knowledge like writing techniques, tropes, conventions and genres through giving examples and reading quality writing; as well as trying to motivate them to broaden their knowledge independently. In short, as to the question of whether creative writing can be taught, the answer is: "sort of, but not really."

What can be taught

Romance novels & Porn

I had a girlfriend once who told me that women enjoy porn just as much as men; it's just that the female version of porn is the romance novel. I've never found reason to doubt her on that. Men are more aroused by visual imagery whereas women are aroused by, not so much story, as by character. Research by Ogi Ogas & Sai Gaddam confirms this intuition. They looked at web searches and web content and found consistently that women prefer stories with men who have sexy or romantically desirable character traits. They give an evolutionary psychology interpretation of the difference, saying that women, throughout the long history of our evolution, have had to be more careful about finding a man that will stick around the raise the children. So, if you want to write a story appealing to women, make your characters more like that romantic, emotionally-available, trustworthy, devoted, ambitious and successful (and on and on) type that women love.

If male-oriented porn and romance novels are correlative, it gives new meaning to the old 19th paranoia about the immoral influence of novels upon women.

I had a girlfriend once who told me that women enjoy porn just as much as men; it's just that the female version of porn is the romance novel. I've never found reason to doubt her on that. Men are more aroused by visual imagery whereas women are aroused by, not so much story, as by character. Research by Ogi Ogas & Sai Gaddam confirms this intuition. They looked at web searches and web content and found consistently that women prefer stories with men who have sexy or romantically desirable character traits. They give an evolutionary psychology interpretation of the difference, saying that women, throughout the long history of our evolution, have had to be more careful about finding a man that will stick around the raise the children. So, if you want to write a story appealing to women, make your characters more like that romantic, emotionally-available, trustworthy, devoted, ambitious and successful (and on and on) type that women love.

If male-oriented porn and romance novels are correlative, it gives new meaning to the old 19th paranoia about the immoral influence of novels upon women.

Romance novels & Porn

Emotions and Expression of Emotions

There's believed to be a close link between emotions and expressions of emotions. I remember first reading about this idea in Paul Ekman's book Emotion's Revealed. Ekman, early in his research career had gone through a long process of documenting every facial expression the facial muscles are capable of making, by contracting individually and in every conceivable combination all the facial muscles of the face. The purpose was to make sure they had a complete and accurate list of all meaningful facial expressions. Most facial expressions that you can make are just silly, weird expressions that mean nothing. The few that are actually meaningful are only a small subset, like expressions of sadness, joy, anger and so on. What Ekman discovered in this process is that whenever he made the proper expression of an emotion it would lead to the feeling of that emotion. For example, the expression of sadness involves contracting a muscle in the center of the forehead called the pyramidal muscle (it's called that because it causes a furrowed pattern on the brow in the shape of an inverted triangle). When you contract the pyramidal muscle, you can feel a sort of a tinge of sadness inside, like some sad event is tugging your heart. And similarly when you make a genuine smile, sometimes called a Duchenne Smile, which involves both raising the edge of your lips as well as contracting the orbicularis oculi muscles at the edge of your eyes to form the crow's feet wrinkles (I think Ekman said that smile also involves contracting the muscle between your eyebrows at the top of your nose), it makes you feel good.

New research has confirmed that there is a close correlation between emotions and expressions of emotions. One avenue of research is noting that people whose forehead is numbed by Botox lose the ability to empathize with others. The idea is that the Botox deadens your ability to express emotions because so many of the muscles critical to expressing emotions can't be moved. You can't contract your pyramidal muscle, or your orbicularis oculi muscles, and thus your ability to feel sadness and happiness is dampened. By dampening your ability to feel these emotions, your ability to empathize is also dampened. Perhaps, it's because part of our empathy process involves unconsciously mirroring other people's facial expressions so that we feel along with them.

It makes we wonder how this all fits in with theories of emotion. For example, according to various two-factor theories of emotion, such as Schachter-Singer, emotions are caused by different state of arousal combined with interpretation of that arousal. For example, if you're aroused, your heart beating fast, you might just as easily interpret it as fear or lust. If expression of emotions play a part, this could help flesh out the interpretation part of the two-factor theory.

There's believed to be a close link between emotions and expressions of emotions. I remember first reading about this idea in Paul Ekman's book Emotion's Revealed. Ekman, early in his research career had gone through a long process of documenting every facial expression the facial muscles are capable of making, by contracting individually and in every conceivable combination all the facial muscles of the face. The purpose was to make sure they had a complete and accurate list of all meaningful facial expressions. Most facial expressions that you can make are just silly, weird expressions that mean nothing. The few that are actually meaningful are only a small subset, like expressions of sadness, joy, anger and so on. What Ekman discovered in this process is that whenever he made the proper expression of an emotion it would lead to the feeling of that emotion. For example, the expression of sadness involves contracting a muscle in the center of the forehead called the pyramidal muscle (it's called that because it causes a furrowed pattern on the brow in the shape of an inverted triangle). When you contract the pyramidal muscle, you can feel a sort of a tinge of sadness inside, like some sad event is tugging your heart. And similarly when you make a genuine smile, sometimes called a Duchenne Smile, which involves both raising the edge of your lips as well as contracting the orbicularis oculi muscles at the edge of your eyes to form the crow's feet wrinkles (I think Ekman said that smile also involves contracting the muscle between your eyebrows at the top of your nose), it makes you feel good.

New research has confirmed that there is a close correlation between emotions and expressions of emotions. One avenue of research is noting that people whose forehead is numbed by Botox lose the ability to empathize with others. The idea is that the Botox deadens your ability to express emotions because so many of the muscles critical to expressing emotions can't be moved. You can't contract your pyramidal muscle, or your orbicularis oculi muscles, and thus your ability to feel sadness and happiness is dampened. By dampening your ability to feel these emotions, your ability to empathize is also dampened. Perhaps, it's because part of our empathy process involves unconsciously mirroring other people's facial expressions so that we feel along with them.

It makes we wonder how this all fits in with theories of emotion. For example, according to various two-factor theories of emotion, such as Schachter-Singer, emotions are caused by different state of arousal combined with interpretation of that arousal. For example, if you're aroused, your heart beating fast, you might just as easily interpret it as fear or lust. If expression of emotions play a part, this could help flesh out the interpretation part of the two-factor theory.

Emotions and Expression of Emotions

Birthers and belief

With the release of President Obama's long form birth certificate today you'd think this would be the end of the so called birther movement. Sadly, this may not be the case. I'm going to make a prediction and say that, though this movement will become further marginalized, I don't think it'll disappear. The reason I think this is not because there is anything like significant evidence that Obama was born outside the US, but because of the nature of human belief. I think this can be illustrated two ways.

We might first illustrate this with a story. In fact, we'll illustrate it with two stories. First, we have the case of Shabbethai Zebi (aka Sabbatai Zevi), a 17th century Jew living in the Levant under Ottoman rule who became convinced that he was the messiah. He was apparently a charismatic figure, who gained quite a following, on the conviction that he was the long-awaited messiah who was going to lead the Jews to independence and victory over their current ruler, the Ottoman empire, under Sultan Mehmet IV. He was a powerful figure in the Jewish community, garnered a huge following, and ultimately went to Istanbul convinced that, perhaps through some miracle, he would replace the sultan as leader of the Ottomans and would wear the sultans crown on his head. It didn't work out that way, and he was quickly imprisoned. He made a good enough impression on the Ottoman leadership that they permitted him to join the court, if he converted to Islam. And that's what he did. He converted to Islam. Understandably, this was devastating to the great movement that followed him, since it profoundly disconfirmed everything they'd been led to believe, but it didn't entirely kill it. Those who weren't disenchanted by his conversion started the Sabbatean movement, which is still alive today in Turkey. The movement is characterized by Jews who openly practice Muslim ways, but secretly subscribe to Jewish beliefs and await the return Shabbethai as a messiah.

Another similar case is the Paul is Dead conspiracy theory. This one began in 1969 as just a rumor in the US that Paul McCartney of the Beatles was dead. The rumor quickly gained speed, spreading across college campuses and into mainstream news. It was able to build up so much momentum because at the time Paul McCartney was out of touch; he was way out in his Scottish retreat with his wife, trying to deliberately cut himself off from the world for a little while to get a break. The rumor became popular because the Beatles had apparently hidden all types of clues in their songs and album art. For example, people claimed that the shrubbery on the cover of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band is a grave, that the cover of Abbey Road is a funeral procession with Paul as the deceased, or that the "Number 9" voice on "Revolution 9" played backwards sounded like "Turn me on dead man." The shear number of ostensible clues that have been found is astounding, mind-blowing, and you could see and hear them all for yourself if you owned the albums. The whole rumor was quickly killed within a couple weeks when a reporter from Life tracked down Paul at his Scottish retreat and got some pictures and an interview. Most people were reassured and chuckled to themselves at how such a rumor got so out of control. But not everyone was convinced, and there are people to this day who believe that Paul died and was replaced by a lookalike.

What are we to make of these stories? We can also think of it in terms of W. V. O. Quine's concept of the web of belief. The idea is that we have many beliefs which are interconnected and which confirm one another. When new evidence is presented which perhaps shakes up or disconfirms these beliefs, we have to adjust these beliefs to accommodate it. Usually, we adjust the beliefs that are at the edge of our web of belief, the one's that are the least foundational. At the center are the beliefs that are pretty much unchanging and are the foundation for all other beliefs. Quine identified things like logic and beliefs about experience (for example, that sensory experience is largely accurate) and perhaps basic tenets about science as most foundational. But then again these foundation beliefs could vary from person to person. For some people a core belief might be a belief in God or a belief in the superiority of scientific method. These beliefs are the things that most identify us, so we are going to always try to change our other beliefs to preserve these central beliefs, no matter what the new evidence is. This core of our web of belief could be any ideology, say Marxism or Catholicism or Keynesianism or Platonism or whatever. And in fact, it could be some sort more marginal ideology like being a Holocaust denier, or a Moon Landing Denier, or a believer in Shape-shifting Lizard Aliens, or a birther. If you look hard enough and are creative enough, you can find evidence for anything and figure out ways to deny any contrary evidence. If it's important enough to you to preserve those beliefs, you can find a way.

With the release of President Obama's long form birth certificate today you'd think this would be the end of the so called birther movement. Sadly, this may not be the case. I'm going to make a prediction and say that, though this movement will become further marginalized, I don't think it'll disappear. The reason I think this is not because there is anything like significant evidence that Obama was born outside the US, but because of the nature of human belief. I think this can be illustrated two ways.

We might first illustrate this with a story. In fact, we'll illustrate it with two stories. First, we have the case of Shabbethai Zebi (aka Sabbatai Zevi), a 17th century Jew living in the Levant under Ottoman rule who became convinced that he was the messiah. He was apparently a charismatic figure, who gained quite a following, on the conviction that he was the long-awaited messiah who was going to lead the Jews to independence and victory over their current ruler, the Ottoman empire, under Sultan Mehmet IV. He was a powerful figure in the Jewish community, garnered a huge following, and ultimately went to Istanbul convinced that, perhaps through some miracle, he would replace the sultan as leader of the Ottomans and would wear the sultans crown on his head. It didn't work out that way, and he was quickly imprisoned. He made a good enough impression on the Ottoman leadership that they permitted him to join the court, if he converted to Islam. And that's what he did. He converted to Islam. Understandably, this was devastating to the great movement that followed him, since it profoundly disconfirmed everything they'd been led to believe, but it didn't entirely kill it. Those who weren't disenchanted by his conversion started the Sabbatean movement, which is still alive today in Turkey. The movement is characterized by Jews who openly practice Muslim ways, but secretly subscribe to Jewish beliefs and await the return Shabbethai as a messiah.

Another similar case is the Paul is Dead conspiracy theory. This one began in 1969 as just a rumor in the US that Paul McCartney of the Beatles was dead. The rumor quickly gained speed, spreading across college campuses and into mainstream news. It was able to build up so much momentum because at the time Paul McCartney was out of touch; he was way out in his Scottish retreat with his wife, trying to deliberately cut himself off from the world for a little while to get a break. The rumor became popular because the Beatles had apparently hidden all types of clues in their songs and album art. For example, people claimed that the shrubbery on the cover of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band is a grave, that the cover of Abbey Road is a funeral procession with Paul as the deceased, or that the "Number 9" voice on "Revolution 9" played backwards sounded like "Turn me on dead man." The shear number of ostensible clues that have been found is astounding, mind-blowing, and you could see and hear them all for yourself if you owned the albums. The whole rumor was quickly killed within a couple weeks when a reporter from Life tracked down Paul at his Scottish retreat and got some pictures and an interview. Most people were reassured and chuckled to themselves at how such a rumor got so out of control. But not everyone was convinced, and there are people to this day who believe that Paul died and was replaced by a lookalike.

What are we to make of these stories? We can also think of it in terms of W. V. O. Quine's concept of the web of belief. The idea is that we have many beliefs which are interconnected and which confirm one another. When new evidence is presented which perhaps shakes up or disconfirms these beliefs, we have to adjust these beliefs to accommodate it. Usually, we adjust the beliefs that are at the edge of our web of belief, the one's that are the least foundational. At the center are the beliefs that are pretty much unchanging and are the foundation for all other beliefs. Quine identified things like logic and beliefs about experience (for example, that sensory experience is largely accurate) and perhaps basic tenets about science as most foundational. But then again these foundation beliefs could vary from person to person. For some people a core belief might be a belief in God or a belief in the superiority of scientific method. These beliefs are the things that most identify us, so we are going to always try to change our other beliefs to preserve these central beliefs, no matter what the new evidence is. This core of our web of belief could be any ideology, say Marxism or Catholicism or Keynesianism or Platonism or whatever. And in fact, it could be some sort more marginal ideology like being a Holocaust denier, or a Moon Landing Denier, or a believer in Shape-shifting Lizard Aliens, or a birther. If you look hard enough and are creative enough, you can find evidence for anything and figure out ways to deny any contrary evidence. If it's important enough to you to preserve those beliefs, you can find a way.

Birthers and belief

Repugnance and Rationalization

Matt Zwolinski at Bleeding Heart Libertarians has a nice piece on the place of repugnance in many of our moral calculations. The basic idea is that when we try to defend certain positions with rational arguments, the arguments themselves end up being post hoc window dressing to rationalize basic assumptions or moral feelings. He gives the example of immigration. For example, it's argued that we don't want open immigration because immigrants will use up social services. But this doesn't make sense. First of all it's dubious empirically. But even if it's true, we could just allow immigrants to enter the country and opt out of expensive social services like health & education. And it proves too much, since it could be used to justify preventing poor people from having babies or preventing immigration across state borders. This isn't the only rationality one could use to prove that immigration is undesirable, but any justification one could propose falls into the same trap of not taking into account different ways immigration could be managed and justifying things not meant to be justified.

But the reason that people think that immigration is a bad idea is not because they've been convinced by rational arguments. It's just a feeling, that we try to dress up afterwards with some sort of rationality. People dislike immigrants due to racism or nationalism (they sully the purity of one's homeland) or simply a fear that they constitute some sort of vague threat (such as stealing jobs or promoting terrorism), and then they conclude that therefore immigration is bad. In other words they're against immigration due to some sort of feeling of repugnance, not any rational argument.

Admittedly, one is never going to be able to completely reduce any sort of moral preference or value decision down pure logic. At the base there has to be sort of judgment that just can't be justified. I think that open immigration is good because it brings greater freedom and opportunity to improve the immigrants wealth and well-being and I think it in no way undermines and perhaps even improves wealth in the country receiving the immigrants. Part of this argument is empirically testable (does open immigration make countries poorer or wealthier?), but part of this is an unjustifiable assumption: people deserve more freedom and opportunity to improve their conditions no matter where they're from; being born in one place shouldn't confer any exclusive privilege.

I think that people who argue against should be forthright in their basic assumptions. If they think immigration should be restricted because foreigners are repugnant, let them be open about it because then people can judge that basic assumption for what it is. If they think immigrants take our jobs, they need to admit that they're assuming that such jobs belong to those who, by pure luck, where born in the country where the jobs are, and they need to admit that they're argument is open to empirical refutation. Of course, they're not going to do that because it severely weakens their argument and exposes judgments that most people have a much harder time agreeing with.

Much of philosophy as well as political discourse is involved in this process of dressing up unquestioned assumptions in sophisticated rationalizations. Smart people are very good at it. But if we want to get at the arguments, we need to get down to these basic assumptions and judge them on their merits.

Matt Zwolinski at Bleeding Heart Libertarians has a nice piece on the place of repugnance in many of our moral calculations. The basic idea is that when we try to defend certain positions with rational arguments, the arguments themselves end up being post hoc window dressing to rationalize basic assumptions or moral feelings. He gives the example of immigration. For example, it's argued that we don't want open immigration because immigrants will use up social services. But this doesn't make sense. First of all it's dubious empirically. But even if it's true, we could just allow immigrants to enter the country and opt out of expensive social services like health & education. And it proves too much, since it could be used to justify preventing poor people from having babies or preventing immigration across state borders. This isn't the only rationality one could use to prove that immigration is undesirable, but any justification one could propose falls into the same trap of not taking into account different ways immigration could be managed and justifying things not meant to be justified.

But the reason that people think that immigration is a bad idea is not because they've been convinced by rational arguments. It's just a feeling, that we try to dress up afterwards with some sort of rationality. People dislike immigrants due to racism or nationalism (they sully the purity of one's homeland) or simply a fear that they constitute some sort of vague threat (such as stealing jobs or promoting terrorism), and then they conclude that therefore immigration is bad. In other words they're against immigration due to some sort of feeling of repugnance, not any rational argument.

Admittedly, one is never going to be able to completely reduce any sort of moral preference or value decision down pure logic. At the base there has to be sort of judgment that just can't be justified. I think that open immigration is good because it brings greater freedom and opportunity to improve the immigrants wealth and well-being and I think it in no way undermines and perhaps even improves wealth in the country receiving the immigrants. Part of this argument is empirically testable (does open immigration make countries poorer or wealthier?), but part of this is an unjustifiable assumption: people deserve more freedom and opportunity to improve their conditions no matter where they're from; being born in one place shouldn't confer any exclusive privilege.

I think that people who argue against should be forthright in their basic assumptions. If they think immigration should be restricted because foreigners are repugnant, let them be open about it because then people can judge that basic assumption for what it is. If they think immigrants take our jobs, they need to admit that they're assuming that such jobs belong to those who, by pure luck, where born in the country where the jobs are, and they need to admit that they're argument is open to empirical refutation. Of course, they're not going to do that because it severely weakens their argument and exposes judgments that most people have a much harder time agreeing with.

Much of philosophy as well as political discourse is involved in this process of dressing up unquestioned assumptions in sophisticated rationalizations. Smart people are very good at it. But if we want to get at the arguments, we need to get down to these basic assumptions and judge them on their merits.

Repugnance and Rationalization

Vengeful God

In the book of Numbers there's a story about the rebellion of Korah, which particularly shows the vengeful side of God. It begins when Korah and a number of his followers question the authority of Moses, asking why it is that he gets to be raised up above all the people. Now Moses says it's because he speaks directly with God, and to prove that he really speaks on behalf of God, Moses asks Korah and 250 of his followers to take censers filled with incense and stand with them in front of the tabernacle. Then God sent down fire and engulfed in flames all those 250 followers of Korah. For the rest of Korah's followers and all those associated with him, the earth opened up and swallowed them whole and they directly descended into Sheol, the land of the dead. The lesson: if you disobey God, He'll take vengeance, and it won't be nice.

This may not be your view of God. You might think of God as forgiving. Dawkins even says that this type of frightening portrait of divine vengeance is a form of emotional abuse foisted on children. On the other hand, at least according to some preliminary research, it might make you more honest. At least that's what psychologist Azim F. Shariff says, according to one study he's conducted. He says that if you believe in a vengeful God instead of a forgiving God, it will make you less likely to cheat. That doesn't mean that believing in a forgiving God (or no God at all) makes you prone to unrestrained turpitude and immorality, but it might make you a bit more moral in cases of minor moral temptation.

This might lend at least some credence to that whole Ring of Gyges story from Plato's Republic (Book II, sections 359a-360d). The story goes that Gyges found a ring, that when he turned it, made him completely invisible. He used this power to then seduce the queen and murder the king. Glaucon used the story, for one, to argue that people are moral because they fear the reproof of others. H. G. Wells picked up this story and turned it into his Invisible Man. Wells concluded the same thing that Glaucon did, that a person unrestrained by the gaze of others would degenerate into a corrupt person without any moral mooring. But, if a person believes that they are always under the gaze of a god, and particularly a god that seriously disapproves and might not forgive a moral misdeed, then it might keep one more in line.

The parallel is inexact, since the Ring of Gyges and The Invisible Man are also about the corrupting influence of the power conferred by invisibility. And I don't think most of us are even tempted to commit majorly horrible things like murder, rape or major theft, even if we could guarantee no one would know about it because we don't want to hurt others. In the end, being a good person is about developing good habits, but it can be the case that the fear of the reproof of others, perhaps even divine vengeance, can help us along, especially with relatively minor moral lapses like lying or cheating that we might be prone to sometimes let slip.

In the book of Numbers there's a story about the rebellion of Korah, which particularly shows the vengeful side of God. It begins when Korah and a number of his followers question the authority of Moses, asking why it is that he gets to be raised up above all the people. Now Moses says it's because he speaks directly with God, and to prove that he really speaks on behalf of God, Moses asks Korah and 250 of his followers to take censers filled with incense and stand with them in front of the tabernacle. Then God sent down fire and engulfed in flames all those 250 followers of Korah. For the rest of Korah's followers and all those associated with him, the earth opened up and swallowed them whole and they directly descended into Sheol, the land of the dead. The lesson: if you disobey God, He'll take vengeance, and it won't be nice.

This may not be your view of God. You might think of God as forgiving. Dawkins even says that this type of frightening portrait of divine vengeance is a form of emotional abuse foisted on children. On the other hand, at least according to some preliminary research, it might make you more honest. At least that's what psychologist Azim F. Shariff says, according to one study he's conducted. He says that if you believe in a vengeful God instead of a forgiving God, it will make you less likely to cheat. That doesn't mean that believing in a forgiving God (or no God at all) makes you prone to unrestrained turpitude and immorality, but it might make you a bit more moral in cases of minor moral temptation.

This might lend at least some credence to that whole Ring of Gyges story from Plato's Republic (Book II, sections 359a-360d). The story goes that Gyges found a ring, that when he turned it, made him completely invisible. He used this power to then seduce the queen and murder the king. Glaucon used the story, for one, to argue that people are moral because they fear the reproof of others. H. G. Wells picked up this story and turned it into his Invisible Man. Wells concluded the same thing that Glaucon did, that a person unrestrained by the gaze of others would degenerate into a corrupt person without any moral mooring. But, if a person believes that they are always under the gaze of a god, and particularly a god that seriously disapproves and might not forgive a moral misdeed, then it might keep one more in line.

The parallel is inexact, since the Ring of Gyges and The Invisible Man are also about the corrupting influence of the power conferred by invisibility. And I don't think most of us are even tempted to commit majorly horrible things like murder, rape or major theft, even if we could guarantee no one would know about it because we don't want to hurt others. In the end, being a good person is about developing good habits, but it can be the case that the fear of the reproof of others, perhaps even divine vengeance, can help us along, especially with relatively minor moral lapses like lying or cheating that we might be prone to sometimes let slip.

Vengeful God

Metaphorical Thinking

Julia Galef has a nice post on the perils of metaphorical thinking. This is something that's been a big issue in philosophy at least as far back as Nietzsche who wrote "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense" that language is pure metaphor, in which he said "What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms . . . truths are illusion of which we have forgotten they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour." And later, in the Genealogy of Morality he mentioned the "seduction of language"(I:13) as a threat even in the sciences.

But even this idea predates Nietzsche, since, for example we hear Hegel many times complaining of the dangers of "picture thinking," in his Phenomenology of Spirit, by which he means thinking in terms of imagery and not in terms of ideas. And there are probably earlier examples, which simply don't come to mind at the moment.

New research has confirmed the suspicions of these earlier philosophers. We don't just use the word "cold" impassively to describe someone who is emotionally cold, we in fact think of it in terms of its primary meaning, as a colder temperature. For example, in the study Galef mentioned said people having warmer emotions towards people when they were holding something warm, or another said people perceived the temperature as colder when someone was being cold to them.

This can sometimes have major implications, such as the disgust factors with things that we metaphorically perceive as impure. Galef only mentions the perceptions of conservative religious beliefs, but it also affects environmentalism and preference for organic foods and bottled water.

Research like this may even only scratch the surface. We like to think we might be able to avoid it, but if Nietzsche is right about the pervasiveness of metaphor in our language and language is the primary way we think, then it might be inevitable, at least for all thinking in terms of language (such arguments don't apply to math).

Julia Galef has a nice post on the perils of metaphorical thinking. This is something that's been a big issue in philosophy at least as far back as Nietzsche who wrote "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense" that language is pure metaphor, in which he said "What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms . . . truths are illusion of which we have forgotten they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour." And later, in the Genealogy of Morality he mentioned the "seduction of language"(I:13) as a threat even in the sciences.

But even this idea predates Nietzsche, since, for example we hear Hegel many times complaining of the dangers of "picture thinking," in his Phenomenology of Spirit, by which he means thinking in terms of imagery and not in terms of ideas. And there are probably earlier examples, which simply don't come to mind at the moment.

New research has confirmed the suspicions of these earlier philosophers. We don't just use the word "cold" impassively to describe someone who is emotionally cold, we in fact think of it in terms of its primary meaning, as a colder temperature. For example, in the study Galef mentioned said people having warmer emotions towards people when they were holding something warm, or another said people perceived the temperature as colder when someone was being cold to them.

This can sometimes have major implications, such as the disgust factors with things that we metaphorically perceive as impure. Galef only mentions the perceptions of conservative religious beliefs, but it also affects environmentalism and preference for organic foods and bottled water.

Research like this may even only scratch the surface. We like to think we might be able to avoid it, but if Nietzsche is right about the pervasiveness of metaphor in our language and language is the primary way we think, then it might be inevitable, at least for all thinking in terms of language (such arguments don't apply to math).

Metaphorical Thinking

What is zero to the zeroth power

Another post on numbers for today. I was reading a post on the question of what 0⁰ is. If you remember your math you'll know that any number a raised to the zeroth power power is 1, namely A⁰=1. There are a couple ways of explaining the logic of this.

One is to say that Aⁿ = 1 x A x A x A ... A_n. In other words, if you want to find the exponent of 25ⁿ then you take 1 and multiply it times 25, n times. So, if n is 0, then it's just 1 by itself, so 25⁰=1.

A second way to look at it, since A^-n = 1 / Aⁿ, that would mean A⁰ equals A^n-n, which is another way of saying Aⁿ / Aⁿ. Since a number divided by itself is always 1, then this would equal 1.

Another way is to think of it like a limit using fractions of exponents. A^1/2 is another way of saying the square root of A, and A^1/3 the cube root and A^1/4 the fourth root. Now as you take bigger and bigger roots of a number, the value gets smaller and smaller. But the value doesn't approach zero, it approaches one. For example, you'll notice if you calculate, say 5^{1/100,000,000} you'll get a number very close to 1 (my calculator gave 1.0000000160943792), and it only gets closer as you increase the value. This makes sense, since the root is just an exponent in reverse, and if you think of multiplying any number times itself that's less than 1, it'll just get smaller and smaller, approaching 0. So, the root of any number greater than 1 will always have to be greater than one, so that when it multiplies by itself it gets bigger. So, the n root of a number greater than 1, as n gets bigger and bigger will get closer to 1. Meanwhile that value of 1 / 100,000,000 is only getting closer to 0. In other words, if you have a formula Aⁿ = x, as n gets smaller and smaller (approaches 0), the value approaches of x approaches 1.

All of this makes perfect sense, until you ask what happens when A = 0, then it all just breaks down. If we think of it the first way, then we'd say that 0ⁿ = 1 x 0 x 0 x 0 ... 0_n; thus 0⁰ = 1. If we look at it the second way, we'd say that 0^n-n = 0ⁿ / 0ⁿ; but that would mean we'd be dividing by 0, which is undefined. For example, since, 0^2-2 would equal 0² / 0², this would equal 0 / 0, which doesn't mean anything. Thus, by the second way, 0⁰ is undefined. But then if we look at it the third way, then we would say, since 0^1/2 = 0 and 0^1/3 = 0 and 0^1/4 = 0, and so on, then it would seem 0⁰ = 0.

Wikipedia has an extensive entry on this question. It's a debated question, apparently with three different positions: either it must equal 1, it is undefined, or it varies based on the circumstance. One fellow named Benson, who falls into the third camp, says, "The choice whether to define 0^0 is based on convenience, not on correctness."

Over at the Measure of Doubt blog, Julia Galef, took this idea and concluded that math is something that is invented for the purpose of being useful. This doesn't mean it's untrue, it might just mean that math is more like a language or a pattern of relations. Any particularly mathematical theorem is true because it's just describing relations between various mathematical elements. But a mathematic formula that describes a phenomenon out in the world would be different; it would be a description, using mathematical symbols instead of words, and would be true to the degree to which it is an accurate description. To me, the idea that a mathematical definition would vary based on convenience seems wrong, since the virtue of math is its precision and internal consistency, and it also seems like the decision to make 0^0 equal 1 is also based on arguments from convenience. So, I'd have to go with the undefined camp.

Another post on numbers for today. I was reading a post on the question of what 0⁰ is. If you remember your math you'll know that any number a raised to the zeroth power power is 1, namely A⁰=1. There are a couple ways of explaining the logic of this.

One is to say that Aⁿ = 1 x A x A x A ... A_n. In other words, if you want to find the exponent of 25ⁿ then you take 1 and multiply it times 25, n times. So, if n is 0, then it's just 1 by itself, so 25⁰=1.

A second way to look at it, since A^-n = 1 / Aⁿ, that would mean A⁰ equals A^n-n, which is another way of saying Aⁿ / Aⁿ. Since a number divided by itself is always 1, then this would equal 1.

Another way is to think of it like a limit using fractions of exponents. A^1/2 is another way of saying the square root of A, and A^1/3 the cube root and A^1/4 the fourth root. Now as you take bigger and bigger roots of a number, the value gets smaller and smaller. But the value doesn't approach zero, it approaches one. For example, you'll notice if you calculate, say 5^{1/100,000,000} you'll get a number very close to 1 (my calculator gave 1.0000000160943792), and it only gets closer as you increase the value. This makes sense, since the root is just an exponent in reverse, and if you think of multiplying any number times itself that's less than 1, it'll just get smaller and smaller, approaching 0. So, the root of any number greater than 1 will always have to be greater than one, so that when it multiplies by itself it gets bigger. So, the n root of a number greater than 1, as n gets bigger and bigger will get closer to 1. Meanwhile that value of 1 / 100,000,000 is only getting closer to 0. In other words, if you have a formula Aⁿ = x, as n gets smaller and smaller (approaches 0), the value approaches of x approaches 1.

All of this makes perfect sense, until you ask what happens when A = 0, then it all just breaks down. If we think of it the first way, then we'd say that 0ⁿ = 1 x 0 x 0 x 0 ... 0_n; thus 0⁰ = 1. If we look at it the second way, we'd say that 0^n-n = 0ⁿ / 0ⁿ; but that would mean we'd be dividing by 0, which is undefined. For example, since, 0^2-2 would equal 0² / 0², this would equal 0 / 0, which doesn't mean anything. Thus, by the second way, 0⁰ is undefined. But then if we look at it the third way, then we would say, since 0^1/2 = 0 and 0^1/3 = 0 and 0^1/4 = 0, and so on, then it would seem 0⁰ = 0.

Wikipedia has an extensive entry on this question. It's a debated question, apparently with three different positions: either it must equal 1, it is undefined, or it varies based on the circumstance. One fellow named Benson, who falls into the third camp, says, "The choice whether to define 0^0 is based on convenience, not on correctness."

Over at the Measure of Doubt blog, Julia Galef, took this idea and concluded that math is something that is invented for the purpose of being useful. This doesn't mean it's untrue, it might just mean that math is more like a language or a pattern of relations. Any particularly mathematical theorem is true because it's just describing relations between various mathematical elements. But a mathematic formula that describes a phenomenon out in the world would be different; it would be a description, using mathematical symbols instead of words, and would be true to the degree to which it is an accurate description. To me, the idea that a mathematical definition would vary based on convenience seems wrong, since the virtue of math is its precision and internal consistency, and it also seems like the decision to make 0^0 equal 1 is also based on arguments from convenience. So, I'd have to go with the undefined camp.

What is zero to the zeroth power

Teaching great books to kids

Interesting commentary at The Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the value of teaching sophisticated great books to young kids "How to Teach Books to Kids." The basic idea is that when you read great books at too young of an age, they don't really stick and you don't understand them. In other words, it might not be a good idea to try and force youngsters to read these books.

I can't say I disagree. Though I'd love it if more people were familiar with the great books and think great books educations are great, it's an education that simply isn't appropriate for most people, and very few young kids are ready for it. I am presuming that people do mostly forget about the great books they read when young, which I can't say for certain is the case, but it seems likely. As a person involved in teaching Philosophy, I can say I've many times talked to people who, when I mention that I'm getting my PhD in philosophy, mention that they'd studied some philosophy in undergrad or high school. But they invariably can remember almost nothing of what they'd studied. It's not because they have poor memory, it's just because the things they learned weren't too useful to them and it's been too long. Education has costs. It takes time and it takes money. So, if you learn about something and pretty much entirely forget it within a few years, it seems like you've wasted that time and money. It's primary value is that you can honestly say, "Oh yeah, I read that. It's really good."

I think it's more realistic to expect kids to read books at their age level. Don't try to foist books that don't really grab them (they'll remember books that engross them much better than those that don't) and make them and make them think that reading is boring. Just get them to read and write at their own level. I think because there're are a lot of smart people that are really intrigued by great books, that they expect everyone else will be equally as fascinated, but it's simply not true. More freedom in what students get to read. Let them discover the important stuff on their own.

Interesting commentary at The Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the value of teaching sophisticated great books to young kids "How to Teach Books to Kids." The basic idea is that when you read great books at too young of an age, they don't really stick and you don't understand them. In other words, it might not be a good idea to try and force youngsters to read these books.

I can't say I disagree. Though I'd love it if more people were familiar with the great books and think great books educations are great, it's an education that simply isn't appropriate for most people, and very few young kids are ready for it. I am presuming that people do mostly forget about the great books they read when young, which I can't say for certain is the case, but it seems likely. As a person involved in teaching Philosophy, I can say I've many times talked to people who, when I mention that I'm getting my PhD in philosophy, mention that they'd studied some philosophy in undergrad or high school. But they invariably can remember almost nothing of what they'd studied. It's not because they have poor memory, it's just because the things they learned weren't too useful to them and it's been too long. Education has costs. It takes time and it takes money. So, if you learn about something and pretty much entirely forget it within a few years, it seems like you've wasted that time and money. It's primary value is that you can honestly say, "Oh yeah, I read that. It's really good."

I think it's more realistic to expect kids to read books at their age level. Don't try to foist books that don't really grab them (they'll remember books that engross them much better than those that don't) and make them and make them think that reading is boring. Just get them to read and write at their own level. I think because there're are a lot of smart people that are really intrigued by great books, that they expect everyone else will be equally as fascinated, but it's simply not true. More freedom in what students get to read. Let them discover the important stuff on their own.

Teaching great books to kids

Wine Tasting Contest

A recent study has shown that people can't really tell the difference between good wine and cheap wine. This shouldn't come as particularly shocking. There has been correlative research that has shown that people's expectation can really influence their perception. For example, if you give someone a cheap wine and tell them it's expensive they'll enjoy it more, and vice versa if you give them expensive wine in cheap bottles. Penn & Teller had an amusing example of this in their TV show Bullshit, where they took two gourmands and presented them with some cheaply made food craftily dressed up. The food was served at a fine restaurant, included elegant presentation and was prefaced with a sumptuous description by the waiter. The effect was that this cheap food tasted amazing. We, as humans, are hugely influenced by expectation.

This experiment, though, wasn't testing expectation, but just simply whether people like expensive or cheap wine better. They were just doing completely blind taste tests. People weren't told which wines were cheap or expensive. They were just tasting wines and evaluating them. It turns out there isn't really a significant difference between people's preference of one over the other. On average, cheap wines taste as good as expensive wines. In short, the appeal of expensive wines, at least for most people, really is entirely in expectation.

I can relate a personal experience of wine-tasting, which perhaps illustrates this point. When my parents were living in Houston, my mother was working for a small oil company. One of the holidays when I visited, my parents brought me along to a company party. The party included a wine-tasting contest. The contest comprised drinking six wines and ranking them. The closer your ranking came to the rankings given by Wine Spectator, the higher your score. The person who ranked the closest to Wine Spectator would win $100 dollars, for which reason I decided to give it a try. At the time I was 22 years old and hadn't been drinking for very long. I'd be lying if I said I didn't drink until I was 21, but I definitely was not a heavy drinker, and had rather limited experience. I certainly had limited experience with wine.

In the end, I won. I couldn't help feeling a vindication of my superior palette, thinking that, despite my relative inexperience, I'd bested these more experienced adults, despite their year of experience. But the more probable reason is that it was just pure luck. There's no doubt that the wines tasted differently and some slightly better, but there was an undoubted level of just random guessing in my ranking.

My experience perhaps raises the possibility of another avenue of study. Instead of comparing expensive wines to cheap wines, compare highly ranked wines to lower ranked wines. I'm sure you could find a number of different rankings for a selection of, say, 30 or so wines, and aggregate those rankings and then compare them to the blind rankings of average drinkers. Do average drinkers agree with the wine experts? How much do wine experts agree? Are the wine experts influenced by price in their rankings? If you tell people that a wine is ranked highly by wine experts, do they tend to enjoy it more? Maybe I can write a grant and get some money to do an experiment looking at some of these questions.

A recent study has shown that people can't really tell the difference between good wine and cheap wine. This shouldn't come as particularly shocking. There has been correlative research that has shown that people's expectation can really influence their perception. For example, if you give someone a cheap wine and tell them it's expensive they'll enjoy it more, and vice versa if you give them expensive wine in cheap bottles. Penn & Teller had an amusing example of this in their TV show Bullshit, where they took two gourmands and presented them with some cheaply made food craftily dressed up. The food was served at a fine restaurant, included elegant presentation and was prefaced with a sumptuous description by the waiter. The effect was that this cheap food tasted amazing. We, as humans, are hugely influenced by expectation.

This experiment, though, wasn't testing expectation, but just simply whether people like expensive or cheap wine better. They were just doing completely blind taste tests. People weren't told which wines were cheap or expensive. They were just tasting wines and evaluating them. It turns out there isn't really a significant difference between people's preference of one over the other. On average, cheap wines taste as good as expensive wines. In short, the appeal of expensive wines, at least for most people, really is entirely in expectation.

I can relate a personal experience of wine-tasting, which perhaps illustrates this point. When my parents were living in Houston, my mother was working for a small oil company. One of the holidays when I visited, my parents brought me along to a company party. The party included a wine-tasting contest. The contest comprised drinking six wines and ranking them. The closer your ranking came to the rankings given by Wine Spectator, the higher your score. The person who ranked the closest to Wine Spectator would win $100 dollars, for which reason I decided to give it a try. At the time I was 22 years old and hadn't been drinking for very long. I'd be lying if I said I didn't drink until I was 21, but I definitely was not a heavy drinker, and had rather limited experience. I certainly had limited experience with wine.

In the end, I won. I couldn't help feeling a vindication of my superior palette, thinking that, despite my relative inexperience, I'd bested these more experienced adults, despite their year of experience. But the more probable reason is that it was just pure luck. There's no doubt that the wines tasted differently and some slightly better, but there was an undoubted level of just random guessing in my ranking.

My experience perhaps raises the possibility of another avenue of study. Instead of comparing expensive wines to cheap wines, compare highly ranked wines to lower ranked wines. I'm sure you could find a number of different rankings for a selection of, say, 30 or so wines, and aggregate those rankings and then compare them to the blind rankings of average drinkers. Do average drinkers agree with the wine experts? How much do wine experts agree? Are the wine experts influenced by price in their rankings? If you tell people that a wine is ranked highly by wine experts, do they tend to enjoy it more? Maybe I can write a grant and get some money to do an experiment looking at some of these questions.

Wine Tasting Contest

The Unexamined Veil of Tenure

That's the title of an article at The Chronicle of Higher Education. The author, Steve Conhen, argues that tenure is a harmful institution and needs to seriously reformed. His argument is that tenure protects bad teachers and that attempts to address this problem, through post-tenure evaluation are completely ineffective.

The article makes good points but I think what the article sort of misses is that this really is a question of trade offs. Tenure is valuable because it improves academic freedom, but it is harmful because decreases the chances that bad professors will be fired. The fact that there were only 10 tenured professors let go in two years out of 600,000 (that would be 1 for every 120,000) shows that tenured professors are let go at a much, much lower rate than other comparable professionals. Compare that to doctors, who lost their medical license at a rate closer to 1 in 500 (and that's not even looking at the number that simply lost their jobs without losing their license). Such a low rate of termination suggests relatively high numbers of bad professors on the roles (even if we're talking, say, less than 5%, that's still really high).

The question is whether these roles of bad teachers are somehow worth it for all the academic freedom that professors get. So, how does tenure contribute to academic freedom? There are some things to consider. First, academic freedom is going to be limited by other factors, such as the need to publish in journals that may not appreciate radical theses, the desire to avoid alienating students or colleagues or create controversy. Simply put, humans are social creatures, and few of us are really brave enough to stand far outside the norm. Second, most professors only get tenure after they've passed their most intellectually agile (mid 20s) and radical part of their life. By the time professors get tenure, their ideas are mostly settled, and since there is no protection for academic freedom before tenure, it's much less likely that radical ideas are going to start springing up afterwards. In fact, it's more likely that professors who express radical ideas (at a time when they are more likely to harbor such ideas) will not get tenure, since other professors may deny them tenure for ideological reasons. Third, even in the absence of tenure, most colleges would be reluctant to remove any established professors for ideological reasons, for fear of marring their reputation. In fact, before the institution of tenure, it was quite rare to dismiss professors for ideological reasons. Fourth, long term contracts would still serve the cause of academic freedom (though not quite nearly as well) as lifetime tenure. A professor with a ten year contract has little fear of being fired for ideological reasons, but still the incentive to continue to be productive, so that the contract might be renewed.

I wish there was a more systematic way to compare academic freedom with tenure vs no tenure, but in the absence of such evidence it seems that tenure only modestly improves academic freedom, and that the problem of bad professors is more significant. Thus, presuming I am right, tenure might be better replaced by a system of long-term contracts. Of course, I'm open to dissent.

That's the title of an article at The Chronicle of Higher Education. The author, Steve Conhen, argues that tenure is a harmful institution and needs to seriously reformed. His argument is that tenure protects bad teachers and that attempts to address this problem, through post-tenure evaluation are completely ineffective.

The article makes good points but I think what the article sort of misses is that this really is a question of trade offs. Tenure is valuable because it improves academic freedom, but it is harmful because decreases the chances that bad professors will be fired. The fact that there were only 10 tenured professors let go in two years out of 600,000 (that would be 1 for every 120,000) shows that tenured professors are let go at a much, much lower rate than other comparable professionals. Compare that to doctors, who lost their medical license at a rate closer to 1 in 500 (and that's not even looking at the number that simply lost their jobs without losing their license). Such a low rate of termination suggests relatively high numbers of bad professors on the roles (even if we're talking, say, less than 5%, that's still really high).

The question is whether these roles of bad teachers are somehow worth it for all the academic freedom that professors get. So, how does tenure contribute to academic freedom? There are some things to consider. First, academic freedom is going to be limited by other factors, such as the need to publish in journals that may not appreciate radical theses, the desire to avoid alienating students or colleagues or create controversy. Simply put, humans are social creatures, and few of us are really brave enough to stand far outside the norm. Second, most professors only get tenure after they've passed their most intellectually agile (mid 20s) and radical part of their life. By the time professors get tenure, their ideas are mostly settled, and since there is no protection for academic freedom before tenure, it's much less likely that radical ideas are going to start springing up afterwards. In fact, it's more likely that professors who express radical ideas (at a time when they are more likely to harbor such ideas) will not get tenure, since other professors may deny them tenure for ideological reasons. Third, even in the absence of tenure, most colleges would be reluctant to remove any established professors for ideological reasons, for fear of marring their reputation. In fact, before the institution of tenure, it was quite rare to dismiss professors for ideological reasons. Fourth, long term contracts would still serve the cause of academic freedom (though not quite nearly as well) as lifetime tenure. A professor with a ten year contract has little fear of being fired for ideological reasons, but still the incentive to continue to be productive, so that the contract might be renewed.

I wish there was a more systematic way to compare academic freedom with tenure vs no tenure, but in the absence of such evidence it seems that tenure only modestly improves academic freedom, and that the problem of bad professors is more significant. Thus, presuming I am right, tenure might be better replaced by a system of long-term contracts. Of course, I'm open to dissent.

The Unexamined Veil of Tenure

Ideas are cheap

At Techdirt Mike Masniak makes a point he's made many times that Ideas without Execution are nothing. His critique concerns intellectual property, and basically it is that our system of patents and copyrights makes the ideas that are patented and copyrighted seam much more valuable than they are. But, in reality, without taking that idea and making it into something that's really valuable, it's nothing.

As someone who writes lots of stories, I can certainly sympathize with what he's saying. Ideas are not nothing, but they're certainly cheap. I've got way more ideas than I need. Just with the ideas I have for future writing projects outlined now (in greater or lesser detail), I could probably keep myself busy writing for about the next 10 years, and, of course, in those 10 years, I'd probably come up with other ideas, and so on, ad infinitum. In short, I'll always have way more ideas than time to develop them.

That doesn't mean those ideas aren't worth anything. If fact they're very valuable, relatively speaking. When we talk about an idea, say, for a novel, what we mean, basically is just a general outline. For example, if I had an idea for writing a story about the life of Moses, based on Freud's Theory that he was follower of Akhenaten, that idea is a start. But the execution requires many other smaller ideas - details as small as a choice of particular word, or as major as how to develop Moses' character or what main conflicts to include. And all these ideas need development, from simple things like playing around with the wording of a sentence to doing extensive research to try and make the setting of Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt historically accurate. And this time is very valuable.

The outline is sort of like a tent-pole idea which supports all these ideas, but one can easily take a good tent-pole idea and make a bad story, because all these other smaller ideas add up. People have this mistaken notion that it's just a matter of luck, and if they'd got this great idea first, they'd be successful; for example, if they wrote Hamlet before Shakespeare, they'd be long remembered as a literary genius. But, of course, many scholars think that someone did write Hamlet before Shakespeare, namely Thomas Kyd. This play was lost because no one bothered to copy it or preserve it, presumably because it just wasn't all that good of a play. In fact, this is a perennial problem of adaptations: good books have been frequently translated into bad films. It's because, though they have some good ideas, lifted from the original material, they don't add any new good ideas that work well in the new medium - namely, they muck up the execution. The initial idea is an important step on the way to a finished product, but it's only one of many steps, and those other steps, are in the aggregate, much more valuable.

At Techdirt Mike Masniak makes a point he's made many times that Ideas without Execution are nothing. His critique concerns intellectual property, and basically it is that our system of patents and copyrights makes the ideas that are patented and copyrighted seam much more valuable than they are. But, in reality, without taking that idea and making it into something that's really valuable, it's nothing.

As someone who writes lots of stories, I can certainly sympathize with what he's saying. Ideas are not nothing, but they're certainly cheap. I've got way more ideas than I need. Just with the ideas I have for future writing projects outlined now (in greater or lesser detail), I could probably keep myself busy writing for about the next 10 years, and, of course, in those 10 years, I'd probably come up with other ideas, and so on, ad infinitum. In short, I'll always have way more ideas than time to develop them.

That doesn't mean those ideas aren't worth anything. If fact they're very valuable, relatively speaking. When we talk about an idea, say, for a novel, what we mean, basically is just a general outline. For example, if I had an idea for writing a story about the life of Moses, based on Freud's Theory that he was follower of Akhenaten, that idea is a start. But the execution requires many other smaller ideas - details as small as a choice of particular word, or as major as how to develop Moses' character or what main conflicts to include. And all these ideas need development, from simple things like playing around with the wording of a sentence to doing extensive research to try and make the setting of Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt historically accurate. And this time is very valuable.

The outline is sort of like a tent-pole idea which supports all these ideas, but one can easily take a good tent-pole idea and make a bad story, because all these other smaller ideas add up. People have this mistaken notion that it's just a matter of luck, and if they'd got this great idea first, they'd be successful; for example, if they wrote Hamlet before Shakespeare, they'd be long remembered as a literary genius. But, of course, many scholars think that someone did write Hamlet before Shakespeare, namely Thomas Kyd. This play was lost because no one bothered to copy it or preserve it, presumably because it just wasn't all that good of a play. In fact, this is a perennial problem of adaptations: good books have been frequently translated into bad films. It's because, though they have some good ideas, lifted from the original material, they don't add any new good ideas that work well in the new medium - namely, they muck up the execution. The initial idea is an important step on the way to a finished product, but it's only one of many steps, and those other steps, are in the aggregate, much more valuable.

Ideas are cheap

Teaching English

When I was in my early 20s living in Helsinki trying to make a living teaching English as a second language, I had a British friend named Tom. He had been working in Amsterdam and was considerably more successful than me as a language teacher. He came to visit me in Helsinki for a few weeks while he was considering relocating there. One day he told me a story about a mishap in class. He'd been teaching some beginner students some very rudimentary English. One day he asked them, "What did you do this morning?" One of the students, a woman, raised her hand and answered, "This morning I had breast-fuck." He was, undoubtedly, shocked and blurted out, "What do you mean?!" And she said, "Breast-fuck. You know: toast, cereal, juice." And then he said, relieved, "Oh, you mean breakfast. That's something very different. Try not to confuse those words" Tom would later admit to me that this story hadn't actually happened to him, but actually happened to a friend of his who was teaching English in Japan. But Tom explained, "If you tell anyone that story, you have to pretend like it happened to you. It's makes a much better story if you pretend like it was you."

When I was in my early 20s living in Helsinki trying to make a living teaching English as a second language, I had a British friend named Tom. He had been working in Amsterdam and was considerably more successful than me as a language teacher. He came to visit me in Helsinki for a few weeks while he was considering relocating there. One day he told me a story about a mishap in class. He'd been teaching some beginner students some very rudimentary English. One day he asked them, "What did you do this morning?" One of the students, a woman, raised her hand and answered, "This morning I had breast-fuck." He was, undoubtedly, shocked and blurted out, "What do you mean?!" And she said, "Breast-fuck. You know: toast, cereal, juice." And then he said, relieved, "Oh, you mean breakfast. That's something very different. Try not to confuse those words" Tom would later admit to me that this story hadn't actually happened to him, but actually happened to a friend of his who was teaching English in Japan. But Tom explained, "If you tell anyone that story, you have to pretend like it happened to you. It's makes a much better story if you pretend like it was you."

Teaching English