An Unenviable Situation

Sunday, March 17, 2024

from 1996

Saturday, March 16, 2024

This was the most astonishing thing about teaching freshmen at Cornell this fall: students who had never read anything longer than a reading comprehension excerpt for the SAT.

For all the flaws of the balanced literacy method, it was presumably implemented by people who thought it would help. It is hard to see a similar motivation in the growing trend toward assigning students only the kind of short passages that can be included in a standardized test. Due in part to changes driven by the infamous Common Core standards, teachers now have to fight to assign their students longer readings, much less entire books, because those activities won’t feed directly into students getting higher test scores, which leads to schools getting more funding. The emphasis on standardized tests was always a distraction at best, but we have reached the point where it is actively cannibalizing students’ educational experience—an outcome no one intended or planned, and for which there is no possible justification.

A Stanford professor and editor of N+1, linking idiot Adam Kotsko. 
And this, at CT. 

My blogging is about two things: (1) the radical changes wrought by modern communication technology; and (2) the inability of the epistemic technologies of the written word to understand point (1).

I find this dialectical tension to be generative, but I can see how readers looking for answers might find it unsatisfying.

A recent paper in Nature, titled “Online images amplify gender bias,” makes the point in a more familiar format. Consider the first full clause of the first sentence of the abstract:

“Each year, people spend less time reading and more time viewing images”

BOOM. Footnoted: “Time spent reading. American Academy of the Arts and Sciences https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/public-life/time-spent-reading (2019).”

I’ve frequently claimed that the age of reading and writing are over,...

Maybe Kevin Munger should stop writing. 

The technocrats who rule our world are not going to start communicating only in memes. But the fact of fading literacy is only the problem now of how the class of designers and managers communicate with the managed. The era of "citizenship" is over.

And Farrell is as sleazy as ever
So Noah Smith has a quite negative review of Acemoglu and Johnson’s recent book, Power and Progress, a book that I myself liked very much. Before letting rip, Noah says nice things about Acemoglu and Johnson, and I’ll do the same here for him. There are a lot of people on the left who detest Noah, but I know him to be a genuinely decent person. What he says of Acemoglu and Johnson is what I’ll say about him – his heart is in the right place. Sometimes … he does not go out of his way to make himself lovable to lefties, but as someone who has been known to get involved in stupid and tendentious spats on the Internet myself, I’m in no position to heave rocks at glasshouses.

And Gaza, on actual politics (class and foreign relations, social in every sense), as always, useless: passive, hand wringing, willed ignorance and worse. Anglo-American  left liberals are unreadable. I don't even pay attention anymore. I'm not going to waste my time with CT. If you're not following opinion outside the bubble, including the bubble of the western left, and the west itself, there's not much to say. I try. I follow what I can.

Again, the importance of Palestinian political scientists and Arab academics (writing in english) is that they exist. It's got nothing to do with any inherent value in academia.

Sometimes, in his lofty condescension, a film-maker seeks to bring enlightenment to the great unwashed and force feed this or that trendy political pap to an audience which has not had the opportunity, or perhaps even the wish, to participate in either the experience or the mind of the film-maker. This, which might be called the ‘Carlos’ fantasy, suggests to the filmmaker that he is important to the world. Documentaries like plays, novels, poems – are fictional in form and have no measurable social utility.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Awakening from his dogmatic slumber. 20 years ago he would have called that unoriginal observation anti-Semitic. And it would have referred to him. He's outgrown some of the pathology. 20 years from now he'll feel some secret regret.
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OK
The second one reminded me of something from the past 

Thursday, March 07, 2024

Coetzee likes to trespass on his own fictional territory. In Elizabeth Costello (2003) he was quickly on the scene to pause the action and deliver a little lesson in the nature of fictiveness: ‘The presentation scene itself we skip. It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, superseded by the time and space of the fiction.’ And so on.

The origin of all this "meta-fictional" crap isn't fiction—Shakespeare is "meta-fiction" by default. 

"The line is the thought. This is the point of iambic pentameter."

And then

The 'seriousness' of realist art is based on the absence of any reminder of the fact that it is really is a question of art. 
Tristram Shandy as literature in the Age of Reason.

Various ways to repeat myself. I wish more people got the joke

Friday, February 23, 2024

repeats, and new, with Farrell and Shalizi  All of them, so stupid. Keller's tweet is the definition of fascism. And no one gets the joke. I should write more but I'm not sure I'm in the mood.
Cosma and I wrote the article to push back against one version of the common claim that we can blame everything that is wrong and toxic with social media (and by extension, American democracy – this is a U.S. centric piece) on engagement maximizing algorithms and their cousins. Specifically, we don’t think that we can fully blame these algorithms for the kinds of belief polarization that we see online: people’s willingness, for example, to concoct elaborate justifications for their belief that Trump Really Won in 2020. 

We do this by engaging in a kind of thought experiment. Would we see similar polarization of beliefs if we lived in a world where Facebook, Twitter et al. hadn’t started using these algorithms after 2012 or so? Our rough answer is that plausibly, yes: we would see lots of polarization.
We do this by engaging in a kind of thought experiment. Would we see similar polarization of beliefs if we lived in a world where Facebook, Twitter et al. hadn’t started using these algorithms after 2012 or so? Our rough answer is that plausibly, yes: we would see lots of polarization. Following Mercier and Sperber, we assume that people are motivated reasoners – they more often look for evidence to support what they want to believe than to challenge their assumptions. And all they need to do this is a combination of simple search (Google like it used to be) and social media 2.0.

Toxicity, and hygiene, the language of liberal fascism. [more comedy]

If Farrell were a method actor, he might ask "What's my motivation?", but being one of the "big children in university chairs", he imagines his own disinterest. Weber was honest and gave the answer: the preservation of the academy.

Cultural consensus in the field of education can be justified basically only on the condition of severe self-restraint in the observance of the canons of science and scholarship. If one desires this consensus, one must put aside the idea of any sort of instruction in ultimate values and beliefs; similarly the university teacher, especially in the confidentiality of his lecture hall—nowadays of such solicitude—is under the sternest obligation to avoid proposing his own position in the struggle of ideals. He must make his chair into a forum where the understanding of ultimate standpoints—alien to and divergent from his own—is fostered, rather than into an arena where he propagates his own ideals 
Technocratic neoliberalism: Farrell, and Wendy Brown
and then...
"We imagine that platforms can bring the whole sprawling chaos of human behavior into compliance with the law. Make our lives policeable, and policed, to a degree no govt in history could have imagined."

Yet Eichmann's case is different from that of the ordinary criminal, who can shield himself effectively against the reality of a non-criminal world only within the narrow limits of his gang. Eichmann needed only to recall the past in order to feel assured that he was not lying and that he was not deceiving himself, for he and the world he lived in had once been in perfect harmony. And that German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann's mentality. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreoever, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character. During the war, the lie most effective with the whole of the German people was the slogan of "the battle of destiny for the German people" [der Schicksalskampf des deutschen Volkes], coined either by Hitler or by Goebbels, which made self-deception easier on three counts: it suggested, first, that the war was no war; second, that it was started by destiny and not by Germany; and, third, that it was a matter of life and death for the Germans, who must annihilate their enemies or be annihilated. 

Saturday, February 10, 2024

general

Democratic candidates 2024, with the backup singers. The GOP is done. Coming to terms with genocide will be take decades.

The last is a repeat
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Nimrod Novik
@NimrodNovik
Special Ambassador (ret ).
Past Senior Adviser to PM Peres (RIP).
Fellow, Israel Policy Forum.
BOD, Commanders for Israel's Security (CIS). 
Senior Fellow, ECF

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus. It means just what it says. 

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Sunday, January 21, 2024

keeping this one as a record.

Friday, January 19, 2024

repeat March 24, 2022, because I hear the DSA are in trouble.

Sunday, January 14, 2024

It may not be done, but I think I am.
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I keep forgetting that site is a pain in the ass if you're not registered. The text is also here, or use the link on the right side of this page.

Sunday, December 31, 2023

I'd forgotten to do this. [see Jan.]

Mirowski, "The Evolution of Platform Science"
Draft 2.0, April 2023

There is a massive literature explaining how large language models comprised of neural networks actually function; but most of the crucial points can be made without venturing into theweeds of computer science. These chatbots are based on large scale statistical exercises, trained upon truly massive datasets. They are language models because they extract and report specific words (sentences, paragraphs, etc.) that would most likely follow on from the inputs supplied by the interlocutor. In the first instance, there is nothing at all present that could be graced with the term ‘intelligence’; rather, it is an overgrown word autocompletion algorithm, not so very different from one that you might find on your phone or word processor. But that is only in the first instance; chatbots are not entirely automated in their so-called ‘deep learning’ process, but are also subject to the intervention of actual human beings at various junctures in their training regimens. This is revealed in Figure I, taken directly from the website of Open AI

image source:https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt 

Far from ‘improving’ the chatbot outputs, what these interventions do is feed further noise and indeterminacy to the system. These workers (not just ‘labelers’, pace the Figure) take the statistical results and censor or skew them according to principles which are nowhere present in the software or the underlying data sets. For instance, what the low-paid censor considers lifelikeor transgressionary may vary widely according to local standards and different objectives than any straightforward criteria of ‘intelligence’. In other words, neither the language model  protocols nor the guidelines imposed by the human censors are structured to achieve any  particular epistemic ends or values; and indeed, the criteria of the humans dragooned into the  process may diverge in profound ways from those built into the statistical algorithms. Further, if any output is deemed embarrassing or problematic for any of a smorgasbord of random external reasons dictated by the executive suites, then the censors are mobilized once again to prevent the algorithms from delivering those results. At least of this writing in April 2023, the output is a hodgepodge.

It gets worse

Friday, December 29, 2023

Here again the convergences in the translations are striking. But the minor variants talk to us too. Proust’s narrator speaks of ‘l’idée que je me suis faite du sadisme’. Nelson’s phrase ‘my conception of sadism’ is close to Scott Moncrieff and Carter’s ‘my idea of sadism’, while the original Scott Moncrieff version expands the phrase into a sort of commentary: ‘my idea of that cruel side of human passion called “sadism”’. Kilmartin and Davis respond more openly to the mention of the idea’s making – ‘the notion I was to form’ (Kilmartin), ‘the idea which I formed’ (Davis) – and Grieve does so at greater length: ‘a certain notion of the meaning of sadism was to form ... in my mind.’ The little train of words Proust’s narrator offers to describe Mlle Vinteuil’s ‘air’ as she closes the shutters (‘las, gauche, affairé, honnête et triste’) creates a quietly interesting puzzle. All the translators but one start with ‘weary, awkward’ (Kilmartin goes for ‘languid, awkward’) and they all end with ‘sad’. ‘Affairé’ and ‘honnête’ turn out to be more elusive or questionable. The suggestions here are ‘fussy, prim’ (Nelson), ‘fussy, honest’ (Davis), ‘busy, trustworthy’ (Grieve), ‘bustling, sincere’ (Kilmartin and Carter), ‘preoccupied, sincere’ (Scott Moncrieff). Small differences, but our view of the narrator’s view of Mlle Vinteuil shifts quite a bit as it moves among them. And in this context, the choice between staying with Proust’s grammar and speeding it up is intriguing. Four translations out of six convert Proust’s ‘might perhaps still not have lost faith’ (‘n’eût peut-être pas encore perdu sa foi’) into ‘might still have continued to believe’; Grieve elaborates a little: ‘preserved some scrap of faith’. We are looking perhaps at the difference between relaying meaning and tracking movements of thought.
An hour or two drifting from Levinas on the Talmud, to the Talmud, and then to someone's memories of Quine. It still amazes me how many people search for the meaning in the world itself, as if meanings were subatomic particles. It's the definition of theology, and that's one thing I have no interest in at all.

I've said it all before. My writing's changed. I don't try as hard.
And drifting again, I end back here.

If you're going to spend your life studying Proust or Michelangelo, in the end you're using them to study yourself: your own perceptions of things. It's better to admit you're using them as material. The scholarship of false humility is creepy: the creepiness of biography, and journalism.
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Philosophers vs historians again, on Arendt.
Geuss vs Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment

In terms borrowed from or suggested by the language of Hannah Arendt, this book has told part of the story of the revival in the early modern West of the ancient ideal of homo politicus (the zoon politikon of Aristotle), who affirms his being and his virtue by the medium of political action, whose closest kinsman is homo rhetor and whose antithesis is the homo credens of Christian faith. Following this debate into the beginnings of modern historicist sociology, we have been led to study the complex eighteenth-century controversy between homo politicus and homo mercator, whom we saw to be an offshoot and not a progenitor—at least as regards the history of social perception—of homo creditor. The latter figure was defined and to a large degree discredited by his failure to meet the standards set by homo politicus, and eighteenth-century attempts to construct a bourgeois ideology contended none too successfully with the primacy already enjoyed by a civic ideology; even in America a liberal work ethic has historically suffered from the guilt imposed on it by its inability to define for itself a virtue that saves it from corruption; the descent from Daniel Boone to Willy Loman is seen as steady and uninterrupted. But one figure from the Arendtian gallery is missing, curiously enough, from the history even of the American work ethic: the homo faber of the European idealist and socialist traditions, who served to bridge the gap between the myths of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It is not yet as clear as it might be how the emergence of this figure is related to the European debate between virtue and commerce; but because industrial labor in America conquered a wilderness rather than transforming an ancient agrarian landscape, homo faber in this continent is seen as conquering space rather than transforming history, and the American work force has been even less willing than the European to see itself as a true proletariat. The ethos of historicist socialism has consequently been an importation of transplanted intellectuals (even the martyr Joe Hill left word that he "had lived as an artist and would die as an artist"), and has remained in many ways subject to the messianic populisms of the westward movement.

Fun and frustration, mostly frustration. 

In America there are comparatively few who are rich enough to live without profession. Every profession requires an apprenticeship, which limits the time of instruction to the early years of life. At fifteen they enter upon their calling, and thus their education ends at the age when ours begins. 

Davidson is also known for rejection of the idea of a conceptual scheme, thought of as something peculiar to one language or one way of looking at the world, arguing that where the possibility of translation stops so does the coherence of the idea that there is something to translate. 

Beginning in the 1950s and blossoming since 1961, a major scholarly controversy has sucked The Federalist into its gravitational field: What was its role in the great shift from republicanism to liberalism in American political thought? These complex bodies of ideas and practices have almost no direct links to today’s Republican party or modern American liberalism; moreover, these terms have become so vague that many historians have abandoned both words as useless.

Wednesday, December 20, 2023

Mishra, "Memory Failure", in the LRB.

In March​ 1960, Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of West Germany, met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York. Eight years earlier, Germany had agreed to pay millions of marks in reparations to Israel, but the two countries had yet to establish diplomatic relations. Adenauer’s language at their meeting was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a ‘fortress of the West’ and ‘I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone.’ Six decades on, Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel put it in 2008. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked, with more vehemence than clarity, by German leaders in the weeks since 7 October. Solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the foundation of its collective identity. But in 1960, when Adenauer met Ben-Gurion, he was presiding over a systematic reversal of the de-Nazification process decreed by the country’s Western occupiers in 1945, and aiding the suppression of the unprecedented horror of the Judaeocide. The German people, according to Adenauer, were also victims of Hitler. What’s more, he went on, most Germans under Nazi rule had ‘joyfully helped fellow Jewish citizens whenever they could’.

...Such was the ‘unprincipled political gamesmanship’, as Primo Levi called it, that expedited the rehabilitation of Germany only a few years after the full extent of its genocidal antisemitism became known. A strategic philosemitism, parasitic on old antisemitic stereotypes but now combined with sentimental images of Jews, flourished in postwar Germany. The novelist Manès Sperber was one of those repulsed by it. ‘Your philosemitism depresses me,’ he wrote to a colleague, ‘degrades me like a compliment that is based on an absurd misunderstanding ... You overestimate us Jews in a dangerous fashion and insist on loving our entire people. I don’t request this, I do not wish for us – or any other people – to be loved in this way.’ In Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding (2020), Daniel Marwecki describes the way that visions of Israel as a new embodiment of Jewish power awakened dormant German fantasies. A report by the West German delegation to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 marvelled at ‘the novel and very advantageous type of the Israeli youth’, who are ‘of great height, often blond and blue-eyed, free and self-determined in their movements with well-defined faces’ and exhibit ‘almost none of the features which one was used to view as Jewish’. Commenting on Israel’s successes in the 1967 war, Die Welt regretted German ‘infamies’ about the Jewish people: the belief that they were ‘without national sentiment; never ready for battle, but always keen to profit from somebody else’s war effort’. The Jews were in fact a ‘small, brave, heroic, genius people’. Axel Springer, which published Die Welt, was among the major postwar employers of superannuated Nazis. 

There's a lot more. This is small but it made me laugh. 

...What then of Germany’s much lauded culture of historical memory? Susan Neiman, who wrote admiringly of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Learning from the Germans (2020), now says she has changed her mind. ‘German historical reckoning has gone haywire,’ she wrote in October. ‘This philosemitic fury ... has been used to attack Jews in Germany.’ 

Nirit Sommerfeld was threatened with arrest in 2019. 

I had an email exchange with Neiman after she published her piece on Jacob Taubes . 
"In 1945 Hannah Arendt wrote that “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.” She was wrong. Apart from a handful of German philosophers—all Jewish except Brentano—philosophy ignored the questions the twentieth century had raised again."

She was right. It's the subtext of everything in post-war Europe. Philosophers are pedants and pedantry is garbage. The history of pedantry, like the history of anything else, is scholarship. 
Post-war Germany was a culture of autism and denial. Nostalgia for the present.

de Man, Robbe-Grillet, Billiards at Half-Past NineOn the Natural History of Destruction, The Tin Drum, Crabwalk, Deutschland im Herbst. everything, every fucking thing.

I won't post her response, but it wasn't enough. 

Longing for reconciliation indeed. The Taubes piece—a perverse discussion of a perverse man— previously here
And Leiter is a fan. I wonder what he thinks now.

Remember Jason Stanley who also never got the point. And does he now?

It's been fun watching left intellectual Germanophiles try and fail to come to terms with this crap. 

Neiman's new piece is here. I haven't read it yet.
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I'd forgotten Deborah Feldman.

Friday, December 15, 2023

Drift, the bourgeoisie, materialism, the press, etc. Change is slow, but when it becomes clear it's kind of electric. 

Prior to the recent attack by Hamas, six in 10 (57%) said the United States should be ready to meet with leaders of Hamas, including half of Republicans (51%), and majorities of Democrats (61%) and Independents (59%).

On most other questions there are great partisan differences. While most Americans preferred the United States take neither side in the conflict (64%), Republicans were equally likely to say they should take Israel’s side (49%) as no side (48%).

The attack pushed Israel over an edge, or what's become an edge.