Category: Academy and Society Page 1 of 2

Not today, Yoda

On November 19, 2022

It’s really hard to address climate change because the bad effects take a generation to appear, but people value the here-and-now. I’m writing an essay about this for “Gardeners of the Galaxies“.

As much as I don’t like the idea of a discount rate when people are planning for the future, I’ve always had to admit that contradicting it makes matters worse. People who contradict it are the “longtermists” and “effective altruists” who somehow always turn out to be swindling people or smashing things without producing anything of value.

The language is full of exhortations about this, like “the beam in thine own eye” or “clean up your own backyard”. But I hope the editors appreciate my restraint in not citing Yoda:

All his life has he looked away to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph.

It amuses me that so many of the sites on line that offer quotations from Yoda also include his grunts. It reminds me of the Usenet FAQ that asserted when the Swedish Chef spoke, the words meant nothing. All the semantic content was in the “bork, bork, bork!” at the end.

Update

That feeling when you cite an article with a fairly harsh tone, and then two weeks later discover that the author was just getting started. Emile Torres, who wrote the article about longtermism, has two new articles out in the last couple of days. One in Salon, and another in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Environmentalism from Fiction

By Joe

On April 2, 2022

In Academy and Society, literature

The paper I didn’t present at TexMoot

The theme of this year’s TexMoot was “how fictional worlds teach us to care for this one”. For once, I was not the designated curmudgeon. That honor went to Joe Ricke, who started off the first talk by expressing uncertainty that the theme of the conference was something that even existed. He was referring to an immediate connection: that a reader would read a work of speculative fiction and come away with ideas about what to do the next day (month, year…) to save the planet. And he’s certainly right.

It’s always nice to hear about an intellectual error of which I’m not guilty. That’s not at all the way I interpreted the theme. A more likely effect that speculative fiction has on the reader is to get us used to thinking on a scale of parsecs of distance and centuries of time.

Such an attitude is in direct opposition to the demands of everyday economics. Most people are trying to make a living¹, which leads to a short-term focus. The value of gains and losses is time-dependent — money now is worth more than money some time in the future. If you don’t exploit all the things you have for profit right now, they’ll be taken over by someone who will. That impulse in the market economy caused most of the environmental destruction we’ve perpetrated in the modern era.

Speculative fiction can turn the reader’s relative valuation of possibilities away from the short-term, market-driven default. When we look at a tree, we’re not seeing just the fruit it produces, or its lumber value, but also Ents, and Yggdrasil, and all the other trees we know from literature. We see with different values. When I mentioned a half-baked version of this idea in class, Sørina expanded it with, “because we’re adding love to the calculation.” Which is an extraordinary thought. Apparently, among the powers of literature is to catalyze the reaction of love and mathematics.

As it turns out, the source of this idea is something I read long ago and forgot about. There’s a very similar thought from E.T. Jaynes, in his book ² that launched Bayesian statistics to its current prominence. Jaynes is talking about the concept from decision theory of the “loss function” — a way to quantify what we stand to gain or lose from each possible choice we can make.

Failure to judge one’s own loss function correctly is one of the major dangers that humans face. Having a little intelligence, one can invent myths out of his own imagination, and come to believe them. Worse, one person may persuade thousands of others to believe his private myths, as the sordid history of religious, political, and military disasters shows.

As the near-solecism “private myth” indicates, Jaynes is using the word to mean “falsehood”. Writing in the mid twentieth century, his thoughts were naturally going to be dominated by the negative implications of acting on fictional grounds, but “myth” has more meanings than that one. We now know that our standard way of thinking about nature is leading to disaster, so now myths can also be an opportunity to improve outcomes by changing our loss function. Expanding the elements of the computation to include all the lives involved, and the billions of years it took to bring them about, and the global (at least) results of our actions, are exactly the way speculative fiction has brought about its share of the change in attitudes to the environment that we’ve seen in the past 50 years.

Writers of both science fiction and fantasy know they’re doing this. Arthur C. Clarke said (several times), “If you take me too seriously, you’ll go broke. But if your children don’t take me seriously enough, they’ll go broke.”³ Those children are whom we call Generation X; the richest of us seem to have taken Clarke very seriously indeed.

Notes

A Dickieson Festpost

By Joe

On March 4, 2020

In Academy and Society, mythgard academy

Brenton Dickieson is celebrating his 1,000th post at A Pilgrim in Narnia, and everyone is invited! He’s been a positive influence on this little escapade into humanities scholarship since nearly the beginning. All the people who Know the Internet assure me that blogs are passé; nobody blogs any more. Fortunately for his 7,500 followers, Brent doesn’t read those people. Go on over and congratulate him. In honor of the occasion, an infinitesimal Festschrift about C.S. Lewis:

I’m just catching up on the Mythgard Academy class on Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis. I first read it when I was a teenager. Even though I didn’t have the concept of “imperialism” clear in my head, I could tell that Weston’s rant about human destiny was a withering indictment of the whole imperial project. But something I never noticed before is the initial description of Oyarsa. He’s not part of the planet. He’s actually out in heaven, but he rules Malacandra. We’re supposed to be thinking of planetary intelligences, of course, but that description also fits the civil-service functionary in London who administers a colony, or a bureaucrat in Washington DC who handles relations between an overseas military presence and the indigenes. Imperialism appears to be a tenacious concept — if we’re not careful, we’ll find ourselves with empires layered on top of empires, in a Great Chain of Politics.

Scholarship is hard

By Joe

On October 1, 2019

In Academy and Society, Digital Humanities

The next thing I was going to do, after I finished the alliterative-verse detection program, was to apply it to another work that obviously wasn’t trying to remind the reader of Old English. So — who’s the least-old-english writer I can think of.

The one who came first to mind was James Joyce. He’s writing about the same time as Tolkien, and his affection for myth is just as strong (though directed differently). Best of all, he’s in the public domain, so I can get high-quality plain-text versions of his works from Project Gutenberg. Ulysses might be a perfect comparison.

So I downloaded it and fed it into the maw of the machine. It’s 265,000 words, compared to The Lord of the Rings at 470,000, so it should be manageable, right? Right? Wrong. LotR had just under 2,000 words I needed to encode by hand. Ulysses has almost 10,000. I’ve loved LotR for almost half a century, and I can recite lots of it from memory, so that was a manageable task. It still took me almost a month, though. For Ulysses, I have no such affection. No way am I going to devote a third of a year to converting it to machine pronunciation.

Second option: I asked Sørina whom she could recommend for comparison. (She’s working on her Ph.D. so she knows everything.) She suggested foreign novels in translation. There’s an idea — African literature! African writers have a completely different sense of rhythm and sound than the Norsemen do. And in many countries, they write in English. They’ll be perfect.

Well. If there’s a public-domain novel written by an African, I can’t find it. Nothing before 1930 even seems to exist on line. There are quite a few 20C novels, but they’re all still under copyright. Everything before then has been consigned to the dustiest shelves of university libraries. Bloody colonialists. By what seemed like a fortuitous coincidence, Wendy Belcher fired off a Twitter thread about African literature just as I was giving up. She’s writing an anthology that will give me all kinds of examples. “Will.” Someday, alas. Right now, the chapters I need are just headings with blank spaces underneath.

If anyone has any other ideas, I’d be happy to hear them.

I still have the knack

By Joe

On September 22, 2019

In Academy and Society

To date, my proudest scholarly achievement has been killing off an entire sub-field of nuclear physics. But I’m not done yet! Within six months of learning to speak Old English, I’ve somehow caused the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists to collapse.
”Allegations of white supremacy are tearing apart a prestigious medieval studies group” in the Washington Post.

Snottor

By Joe

On April 1, 2019

In Academy and Society, mythgard academy

Now that I’ve read “The Wanderer”, I’ve learned the Anglo-Saxon word “snottor”. That got me thinking. I realized there’s a confluence of events in the world that need to be dealt with.

Signum U is about to get the authority to grant degrees. Master of Arts is the current thinking, which shows a lack of ambition.
More than a few Signum students already have master’s degrees and even doctorates. Why take a course for credit, if it gives you a distinction you’ve already got?
The title “doctor”, alas, carries a lot of social rank with it. This being the USA, for-profit STEM education has sprung up to meet the market. Trade schools around the country are cranking out doctorates in the servile arts that require relatively little effort. So there are lots of “doctors” out there. It’s not very distinctive any more.

We’re going to need a new academic title to differentiate real scholars from people who got their boss to pay their tuition to get an extra degree so they look more impressive on a contract proposal. It seems wrong to have a Latin-named degree at Signum, anyway.

I hereby propose the creation of a new academic degree of “Snottor” for continuing students who already have a Ph.D. in another field. It ranks higher than “Doctor”, so all the world may know our magnificent erudition. Let’s just see some unscrupulous college try to sell Snottorates for massaging the amour-propre of middle management!

And “diploma” should be replaced with “twifeald”.

What’s an “Old Book”?

By Joe

On December 19, 2018

In Academy and Society

Brenton Dickieson has a discussion going at A Pilgrim in Narnia about C.S. Lewis’s opinion that reading old books is good for you. I have always agreed with that, despite the fact that it sometimes makes me talk funny. That statement immediately raises the question, “how old does he mean”? Brent takes the minimum of the set {ages of books mentioned by CSL in that piece}, and gets 50 years. Surprisingly young, for a medievalist. I would have expected 10 times that.

The Tempest, 1921 edition — The oldest book in easy reach, from my grandmother’s grade school

Obviously (I say, as is customary when I’m about to prove myself wrong), the definition of “old” is determined by the discipline within which one is working. The humanities change slowly, so a “research methods” class in a state-of-the-art university might have us reading St. Augustine, and people still care what Sir Philip Sidney had to say.

The sciences change faster: in 1989 I got some sidelong looks for citing a paper from 1962 [1]. Engineering changes faster still: I am now so old that I’ve written things that are indistinguishable from old books. At the extreme, computer software changes like quicksilver. One of my co-workers retired last week and left his books behind. His books unquestionably contained archaic thinking, despite the fact that some of them were published this year. Glibly phrased, by the time a book about software can get to your shelf, it’s obsolete.

There’s always an exception that proves me wrong, though. My Relativity professor was the extraordinary E. A. Desloge. One day in lecture, he mentioned that St. Augustine had actually asked the right question to have discovered the Theory of Relativity. Augustine asked, “Is time the same for everyone, or does each person have their own?” I believe Prof. Desloge was paraphrasing Confessions XI. Alas for the history of science, Augustine believed there was a Preferred Observer and he built his entire cosmology around Him. But as far as we’re concerned here, this is a definite case of a modern physicist reading a very old book.

[1] Skyrme, T. . (1962). “A unified field theory of mesons and baryons”. Nuclear Physics 31: 556–569. Bibcode:1962NucPh..31..556S. doi:10.1016/0029-5582(62)90775-7.

Tom Shippey – The Hero and the Zeitgeist

By Joe

On June 30, 2018

In Academy and Society, scholarship

Heroic Fantasy, as a genre, has never been more popular. By absolute numbers this is unquestionable. I suspect that even as a fraction of the total audience of readers and viewers, it is true as well. Tom Shippey gave a plenary address at Mythmoot V to tell us what that might signify. (And let us pause for a moment to marvel at the fact that Prof. Shippey, whose adversarial relationship with computer technology is famous, skyped from England into a conference in Virginia which was streamed via Twitch in the cloud and watched as far away as Japan. Kudos to Ed Powell, Ringmaster!)

So: Is heroic fantasy the spirit of our age? Because Prof. Shippey knew to whom he was talking, he started with Tolkien. In The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien doesn’t use “hero” without some kind of modifier. There’s only one sincere use. In The Silmarillion, he doesn’t use the word at all.

Here’s what the ~~Encyclopedia Galactica~~ Oxford English Dictionary has to say about heroes. The various definitions align with Northrop Frye’s literary modes, once Prof. Shippey adds a line referring to current popular usage. The examples are mine.

Mode	Earliest Use	Meaning	Example
Myth	1387	demigod	Hercules
Romance	1586	warrior hero	Horatius
High Mimesis	1661	great soul	Nelson Mandela
Low Mimesis	1697	the chief male personage in a story	Candide
Irony	current	any military veteran	Norman Schwarzkopf

If we accept the historical Western idea that military glory is greater than any other, this is a clear downward trajectory. “Hero” has had its meaning lowered as the idea becomes more widespread. Of course, the true historical progression might be a circle, as pushing through irony puts you back at the top. (cf James Joyce’s Ulysses) LotR has each kind of hero, and it’s an entertaining way to pass a long drive, thinking of which ones are which.

Why has heroic fantasy become the spirit of the age? Prof. Shippey has been around long enough that he’s personally experienced another descending scale:

Leadership
Management
Administration

So where once we had leaders out front, we now have administrators who are invisible. As the old man who taught me how to be a system engineer loved to say, “You lead people. You manage resources. You administer punishment.” (Come to think of it, he was born not far from Prof. Shippey, a decade earlier.)

Heroic fantasy is not an escapist genre any more. It’s a response to the things we are losing. We’re pushing back up the Frye scale because we miss leadership.

Best line of the talk: “Tyrion Lannister is someone you can look up to.”

Worst scholarly reference of the talk: Hietikko, H. Power, Leadership, Doom, and Hope. “Management by Sauron”. Because it’s in Finnish so nobody had read it.

Question period:

Q: is the dwindling of the Elves like the dwindling of heroes? A: An intriguing idea, but no. (JH: That sounds like a story idea.)

Q: haven’t people always thought the past was more heroic? A: If we could call back a viking hero from the past, and ask him to do what the Atlantic convoys did in WW2, he’d say hell, no. The ancient models were more personal. We have different requirements for heroism these days. Ancient heroes wouldn’t fare any better today than ours would fare in a fight with battle-axes.

BTW: the cartoon of a hero on a downward trajectory is by Ian Ransley.

A Durham Proverb for Engineers

By Joe

On May 13, 2018

In Academy and Society

Tom Shippey’s lecture #8 of the Signum U class “Philology through Tolkien” is about Anglo-Saxon wisdom poetry. I found the claim particularly interesting that it is difficult to understand some of their maxims, which is interesting because people don’t agree on which ones are the hard ones. Here’s an example from the Durham Proverbs: “The fuller the cup, the fairer you must bear it.” Prof. Shippey threw the question to the class – what does that mean? He says his best guess was that it meant, “Don’t complain about the job, just get on with it.”

I would never have thought of that. I always look at the explicit denotation of a phrase first, because I’m better at that than finding connotations and implications. (For the record, Idiosophers have official permission to stick our noses into Anglo-Saxon proverbs.) And this proverb, taken almost literally, is relevant right now. In a modern system-management context, it means that optimized systems are brittle; they aren’t robust.

People who lead interesting lives won’t have heard about this, but the endless quest of managers to squeeze every drop of efficiency out of their systems changed a lot in the last 20 years. Now that they’ve started doing serious data collection and analysis on their operations, they have found opportunities to make even old legacy companies fabulously profitable. (Hey, kids! Did you know the middle seats on an airliner used to be empty most of the time?) But everything comes with a cost. The problem with these optimized systems, these cups full to the brim, is that even a tiny disruption can bring the whole operation crashing to a halt. (Airlines used to re-book passengers from cancelled flights into those middle seats within a few hours. Now it can take days.) The mead spills all over the floor.

So, recently, system engineers started getting requests from managers to increase the “robustness” of their systems. And the answer usually comes back, “That’s easy – build some extra capacity.” Which means giving back half the benefit of the optimization and undoing half of the doing-more-with-less innovations they got awards for. The managers were not happy. If those managers had just paid more attention to their Anglo-Saxon forebears, we could have saved everybody a bunch of soul-crushing PowerPoint presentations.

Now managers ask for “resilience” instead. We’ll see if that turns out any better.

Skin Color in Roman Britain

By Joe

On August 12, 2017

In Academy and Society, ardagraphy

There has been quite a stink over the past few weeks about what color skin the Romans in Britain had. The BBC put a dark-skinned Roman official in a children’s cartoon history program, and the denizens of social media were off to the races. [1] Mary Beard and Neville Morley picked up the standard for the classicists. Among the alt-right antagonists was the pop market-analyst N.N. Taleb, who got famous for coining the term “Black Swan”, but seems not to have the chops to back up his reputation. The noise from the racists got so loud that the Faculty of Classics at Cambridge felt obliged to weigh in. This is kind of amazing to me. I was sure everyone knew that the Roman Empire stretched well into Africa and Asia. They even had an emperor called “Philip the Arab“, for crying out loud! When the Roman generals chose troops to occupy a far-flung province, prudence dictated that their preferred troops not have any language in common with the subject population except Latin. So claiming that the Romans in Britain were all light-skinned seems unsupportable.

But let’s see what they’re saying. As nearly as the the alt-right are willing to be understood, they’re basing their objections on a map of genetic markers in the current British population. A 2015 study of the fine-scale genetic structure of the UK doesn’t show much sign of African genes. They think this “hard science” is much more important evidence than squishy, historically-based evidence, even when the historians have eyewitness accounts. The Guardian article I linked at the top lists some good reasons why genetic surveys might not be the best evidence for claims about ethnicity 2,000 years ago.

I’d like to add another reason: There resemblance between the genetic survey’s clusters and the patterns of family names in the UK is not strong. Leslie et al. tracked autosomal DNA, not mitochondrial, so there should be strong parallels. Surnames and genes are inherited from the same ancestors, after all. A map from the Nature article looks like this:

Clusters of genetic similarity.

In the course of tracking down hobbits, I found the work of James Cheshire and his collaborators, which shows a strong relationship between clusters of family names in the UK and the cultural/administrative regions of the country. Here’s a map published by Cheshire, Longley, and Singleton in 2010.

Clusters of family names

There are some general resemblances. The big homogeneous blob in the East and South East is there, though family names don’t let it extend all the way to Northumberland. I can see hints in the light-blue smear in the North West and the purple smear in the southern West Midlands. Below the coarsest level, though, the two distributions do not resemble each other very well. In particular, the genetics suggests that the people of Pembrokeshire (the southern peninsula of Wales) are affiliated with the Scotch-Irish borderlanders. Family names suggest they’re more like the West Midlanders. And if there’s a family resemblance between Yorkshiremen and Cornishmen, it doesn’t show up in their names.

The conclusion I draw from this is that the genetics is pointing us in a common direction with external markers of family ties. There really is something there, and a salute to the geneticists who have managed to tease it out. However, the signals are accompanied by a lot of noise. We can’t yet use genetic evidence with any precision. When we have a person standing next to an Ethiopian legionary on Hadrian’s Wall and writing about it, it would be foolish to try to contradict him with our rudimentary genetic surveys.

Post-scriptum: I really enjoyed the line, “History is written by the winners; genetics is written by the masses.”

[1] Sorry.