Hermenautic Circle blog

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” You’ve all heard that. It’s A.N. Whitehead. At some point I read something which suggested that the thought continues: ‘because he had the foresight to write out all the heresies in advance.’ Or words to that effect. I thought that was rather witty. Now I bother to look at the original source, Whitehead’s Process and Reality (Amazon has an edition you can search inside.) And apparently the witty, heretical sting in the tail isn’t there. Curious. Does anyone know what’s going on? I’d sort of like to go one quoting the thing. I’ve done so informally on a few occasions. I didn’t think of it. Did someone else famous say it?

I have also discovered that if you Google Whitehead you get sponsored ads that promise: “No More Whiteheads! Whitehead Removal for under $25 Satisfaction Guaranteed.” Ha! You could never do that to Plato.

1. No matter what happens in the present or the future, I will not remove a name or a reference from any past blog post. If there are significant changes to past content, I will be forthright about why the content has been adjusted or removed and offer a public explanation.

2. Even when I have mixed or negative feelings towards a blogger, if I have found a link from that blogger’s site, I will properly credit them.

3. Critical comments that take to task the posts here are welcome. But if you regularly troll on these pages and wish to pollute meaningful discourse, you will be banned from commenting. I remain as benevolent a dictator as I can. A number of people who have been particularly hostile have still been permitted to comment and have not been banned. Since 2004, I have banned only four people from commenting and viewing this site. These have been truly extraordinary cases. People who visit this site around fifteen times a day and get off on leaving bile (so the logs say). I have banned these people more out of concern for their emotional health than for any particular thing they have to say about me. (I also reserve the right to close a thread, if I feel that it has gone on far enough.)

4. I will not disemvowel any comments. These are the actions of a moderator too terrified to think outside her hermetic bubble. Commenters have been especially helpful in pointing out corrections, changing my mind, and otherwise helping me to articulate better. Even when I violently disagree with a comment, I generally try to find something within it. Therefore, it behooves me to respect their right to express themselves within the parameters of this statement.

5. If I have reported a factual error, please email me and I will correct it. If you wish to change my mind by informing me of certain facts, I remain open to your thoughts. I have been known to update specific posts here when such information has been presented to me.

6. I will not publicly post your private email. I respect your right to privacy. I believe that, as a blogger, there must be a private conduit as well as a public conduit.

7. If I am interviewing you, and you tell me something that is “off the record,” as far as I’m concerned, it’s off the record. (This policy, incidentally, has resulted in a number of great stories delivered to my ears. Too bad that I can’t tell you about them.)

8. If you wish to discuss something with me or clear up something on the phone, I will do this. This has happened a few times and I have listened to the party relay his side of the story.

9. These rules are open to amendment. And if I decide to amend these rules, I will certainly do so. But if I violate any of these rules, you have every right to tear me a new asshole. Particularly if I’m silent for days about it.

steev-o has added a photo to the pool:

3.5" x 2.5" Monkshtah Artist Trading Card based on one of seventy imaginary "monkshtahs" (name derived from how a child might pronounce the word monster) I sketched in a Moleskine notebook , 6/29/2008, black Pigma Micron pen, Koi watercolors and rubber stamp lettering on thick watercolor paper

The following is a non-technical summary of Brad DeLong’s May 2008 paper Capital and Its Complements.

Adam Smith explained that in all countries with “security of property and tolerable administration of justice” citizens would spend all their money (capital), either on consumption or investment, causing the country’s economy to grow. After some contention, later economic studies tended to bare this out: a shortage of capital wasn’t always the bottleneck, but when it was, removing it could lead to extraordinarily rapid growth.

The problem for poor countries is that, because of high mortality rates (which require more children to have some survive) and low educational levels (which mean those children can find productive employment quickly), they have high population growth and thus low capital-to-labor ratios. Worse, trade allows you to spend your money buying manufactured goods from overseas, for which you have only your very cheap labor to provide in return. The result is that it requires an enormous amount of domestic investment to improve capital-to-labor ratios.

And so rich country economists made “the neoliberal bet” on behalf of poor countries: they hoped that loosening restrictions on international capital flows would send capital rushing in to poor countries and build their economies, the same way that Great Britain’s massive investment in a young United States (in 1913 Britain’s foreign assets equaled 60% of its domestic capital stock) built up that country.

But what ended up happening was exactly the opposite. Yes, NAFTA led US companies to invest the $20 to $30 billion a year on manufacturing in Mexico that its boosters predicted, but that investment was more than outweighed by the $30 to $40 billion a year fleeing the country from Mexico’s wealthy wanting to invest it in the United States. Why? In part because the US was more politically stable, and thus a safer investment climate. And in part because the US treats its own workers so poorly — with productivity rising 35% since 2000 while real wages remain flat — it provides an excellent investment opportunity.

But meanwhile, all this investment in the US was dwarfed by the Chinese acquisition of our debt (and thus the political risk it represents). China needed to do this, since US purchase of their exports is the only thing funding the manufacturing-led industrialization of a massive portion of their economy; there would be massive dislocation if that funding dried up.

“Recognition of these facts came slowly.” First, Larry Summers said it was our unsustainable current account deficit. (That was the 1990s; today that deficit is four times as large.) Later, economists thought it must have been our large budget deficits. Then they began thinking it was the run-up in housing prices. But that, it is now clear to most economists, was the result of a bubble. And yet the flow of capital to the US continues. But, perhaps even more frighteningly, it could stop at any moment.

The following is a non-technical summary of Brad DeLong’s May 2008 paper Capital and Its Complements.

Adam Smith explained that in all countries with “security of property and tolerable administration of justice” citizens would spend all their money (capital), either on consumption or investment, causing the country’s economy to grow. After some contention, later economic studies tended to bare this out: a shortage of capital wasn’t always the bottleneck, but when it was, removing it could lead to extraordinarily rapid growth.

The problem for poor countries is that, because of high mortality rates (which require more children to have some survive) and low educational levels (which mean those children can find productive employment quickly), they have high population growth and thus low capital-to-labor ratios. Worse, trade allows you to spend your money buying manufactured goods from overseas, for which you have only your very cheap labor to provide in return. The result is that it requires an enormous amount of domestic investment to improve capital-to-labor ratios.

And so rich country economists made “the neoliberal bet” on behalf of poor countries: they hoped that loosening restrictions on international capital flows would send capital rushing in to poor countries and build their economies, the same way that Great Britain’s massive investment in a young United States (in 1913 Britain’s foreign assets equaled 60% of its domestic capital stock) built up that country.

But what ended up happening was exactly the opposite. Yes, NAFTA led US companies to invest the $20 to $30 billion a year on manufacturing in Mexico that its boosters predicted, but that investment was more than outweighed by the $30 to $40 billion a year fleeing the country from Mexico’s wealthy wanting to invest it in the United States. Why? In part because the US was more politically stable, and thus a safer investment climate. And in part because the US treats its own workers so poorly — with productivity rising 35% since 2000 while real wages remain flat — it provides an excellent investment opportunity.

But meanwhile, all this investment in the US was dwarfed by the Chinese acquisition of our debt (and thus the political risk it represents). China needed to do this, since US purchase of their exports is the only thing funding the manufacturing-led industrialization of a massive portion of their economy; there would be massive dislocation if that funding dried up.

“Recognition of these facts came slowly.” First, Larry Summers said it was our unsustainable current account deficit. (That was the 1990s; today that deficit is four times as large.) Later, economists thought it must have been our large budget deficits. Then they began thinking it was the run-up in housing prices. But that, it is now clear to most economists, was the result of a bubble. And yet the flow of capital to the US continues. But, perhaps even more frighteningly, it could stop at any moment.

As a transatlantic transplant myself, writing on the 20th anniversary of my departure from the country of my birth, Ireland, I've occasion to note the weird disjunctures that territory-by-territory licensing of intellectual property engenders in the world of book publishing. That is, the little bits of fucked-up-ness that happen when books are published in the US and UK (and Canada and Australia, sometimes) months and years apart.

Our translation of Dorothea Dieckmann's Guantanamo was just published in the UK, and got this marvelous review last week in The Guardian—Michel Faber on Dorothea Dieckmann's delicate dissection of the horrors of Camp X-Ray—although we'd published it in September of 2007.

There's a lovely piece on vinyl fetishism in yesterday's [London] Times that mentions Travis Elborough's The Long Player Goodbye: How Vinyl Changed the World, which we shall publish in April or May of 2009, while Jessa Crispin loved Kevin Myer's "beautiful, brutal," memoir of covering the Troubles in Northern Ireland Watching the Door so much, she couldn't help but immediately review it in her column in the US-based The Smart Set, even though we're not publishing til April of 2009 also...

In fact, I suspect that facility with which news of good work now travels across licensing territories is becoming such that we publishers are  under increasing pressure to develop more reader-friendly approaches to how we handle the timing of publication...

Fiona Maazel appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #212. Maazel is the author of Last, Last Chance.

[LISTENING NOTE! Please note that this show contains numerous grinding noises. We have endeavored to remove as many of these as possible, and reduce the noise where possible. Alas, SOME aural residue remains.]

Condition of the Show: Considering the niceties of superplagues.

Author: Fiona Maazel

Subjects Discussed: Being under observation, the relationship between kosher chickens and superplagues, rich WASPy girls, individual vs. societal ironies, keeping the protagonist’s name somewhat secret, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, on not reading Camus for protective purposes, Panic in the Streets, the anxiety of influence, opting for a more realistic plague narrative, using humor to cantilever a dark narrative, devising multiple historical voices, pawing around in the dark, reincarnations, Groundhog Day as the essence of reincarnation, thongs and corporeal elliptical themes, the dangers of reading too fast, perceived titular homages to Nabokov, reviewers who are “certain” about books, auctorial intentions, moving around and setting a portion of the book in Texas, wanting to be T.S. Eliot, pursuing the grit, the pervasiveness of television, revolting against cultural media, Nordic tales, developing a conscious understanding of a deity, Stanley as a barometer, and agitprop.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: If one looks at more lower brow choices, like Stephen King’s The Stand or The Andromeda Strain, or any number of superplague television series, like The Survivors and things like that, one tends to find a narrative that begins with the decimation of humanity. Yours is not that particular book. Again, going back to this question of inversions, I’m wondering if you made a particular choice. You had to have known about The Stand.

Maazel: Sure, it’s true. But I didn’t think it was an inversion. I thought it was credible actually. I did a lot of research about plague and also about the CDC and bioterrorism. And just how unlikely the scenario I proposed is. It’s extraordinarily likely. This isn’t an alternate reality kind of novel. It didn’t seem likely that someone would unleash a plague and actually wipe out all of humanity. That’s just not credible. I wanted to come up with a credible scenario. So I guess from the perspective of someone writing fiction or reading fiction, one might expect something like a terrific slate wiper to come along, as we’ve seen in so many of these movies and books. But I actually wanted something that seemed really realistic. That only 3,000 people would die and the fact that they put a stop to it. For instance, when we had this little anthrax outbreak or even bird flu, people are dying, but they’re still containing it. I was more interested in the anxiety, the terror, the foreboding of what could happen. Might this thing wipe out a hundred million Americans or a hundred million people? That was more interesting to me than watching this disease tramp across the country and actually kill off half the United States.

I’ve written before about the dangers of transparency and medical technology, at least when it comes to diagnosing back pain. Simply put, doctors tend to assume that any imaging technology with better resolution will lead to better diagnoses. But that’s often not the case:

A large study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) randomly assigned 380 patients with back pain to undergo two different types of diagnostic analysis. One group received X-rays. The other group got diagnosed using MRI’s, which give the doctor a much more detailed picture of the underlying anatomy.

Which group fared better? Did better pictures lead to better treatments? There was no difference in patient outcome: the vast majority of people in both groups got better. More information didn’t lead to less pain. But stark differences emerged when the study looked at how the different groups were treated. Nearly 50 percent of MRI patients were diagnosed with some sort of disc abnormality, and this diagnosis led to intensive medical interventions. The MRI group had more doctor visits, more injections, more physical therapy and were more than twice as likely to undergo surgery. Although these additional treatments were very expensive, they had no measurable benefit.

Yesterday, the Times had a fascinating story on heart CT-scans which, like MRI, allow doctors to see all sorts of new stuff. They can detect the buildup of plaque in arteries and locate abnormalities in heart muscle. Unfortunately, the medical benefits of CT-scans have yet to be proven (arterial plaque, like spinal disc abnormalities, can also be a normal consequence of the aging process), the technology is extremely expensive and each scan subjects patients to large doses of radiation, or the equivalent of several hundred x-rays. Nevertheless, the CT-scans continue to increase in popularity:

Increasing use of the scans, formally known as CT angiograms, is part of a much larger trend in American medicine. A faith in innovation, often driven by financial incentives, encourages American doctors and hospitals to adopt new technologies even without proof that they work better than older techniques. Patient advocacy groups and some doctors are clamoring for such evidence. But the story of the CT angiogram is a sobering reminder of the forces that overwhelm such efforts, making it very difficult to rein in a new technology long enough to determine whether its benefits are worth its costs.

Some medical experts say the American devotion to the newest, most expensive technology is an important reason that the United States spends much more on health care than other industrialized nations — more than $2.2 trillion in 2007, an estimated $7,500 a person, about twice the average in other countries — without providing better care.

Read the comments on this post…

This coming Thursday night, July 3, is the opening of (extra-special adviser to Murketing) Ellen Susan’s Soldier Portraits show, at the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland. Plus: Lecture Saturday July 5. Time and location details below.

More about the project at American Photo’s State of the Art blog; in the June 2008 issue of Photo District News; and in the June/July 2008 issue of The South. And of course at SoldierPortraits.com. Here’s a brief extract from the latter:

The project consists of portrait photographs of soldiers of the United States Army, primarily of the 3rd Infantry Division. The goal of the project is to look at a person in military uniform and to see that person as a unique individual. Until now, the focus has been on the 3rd Infantry Division for its particularly active role in present day military events.

The photographs are made using the 150 year old collodion wet plate process — the same process that was used to document much of the period (and many of the soldiers) of the Civil War.

SOLDIER PORTRAITS
July 3 - August 2, 2008
Blue Sky Gallery
122 NW 8th Avenue
Portland, Oregon
Open Tuesday through Sunday, 12 - 5 pm

Opening Reception July 3, 6pm

Lecture July 5, 3pm

(Also showing: Some guy named Rauschenberg. From Texas, I think.)

–> More Soldier Portraits images are also included in group shows at Rayko Photo Center, San Francisco
July 18 - August 24 and at The Photographic Resource Center, Boston, through July 2, 2008, as well as at the Jepson Center for the Arts at the Telfair Musuem, Savannah, GA, through July 8, 2008.

ShareThis

Thanks to Henry for the invitation to guest-post. I’m a long-time reader and admirer of CT, and my goal this week is to ask a couple of questions that I don’t think have obvious answers, but which I think are quite important to the development of a networked society, and about which CT readers may have a lot to say.

The first question is pedagogical: it’s obvious, both from observing my own students and from paying attention to social media, that the work students have always done in groups is now migrating online. What, if anything, should the academy do to adapt?

The poster child for this change, of course, is Chris Avenir, who was the admin for a large Facebook group discussing chemistry homework from Ryerson University. Avenir was threatened with expulsion (though he was not expelled), and was given a 0 out of 10 for the homework being discussed on the site.

While the decision over his expulsion was still pending, Avenir said “But if this kind of help is cheating, then so is tutoring and all the mentoring programs the university runs and the discussions we do in tutorials.”

After deciding not to expel Avenir, Technology Dean James Norrie said “Are we Luddites here at Ryerson? No, but our academic misconduct code says if work is to be done individually and students collaborate, that’s cheating, whether it’s by Facebook, fax or mimeograph.”

Now, my natural inclination is to think Avenir is right and Norrie is wrong—that learning is a basically social activity, and that the model that treats the effort as an exercise in quality control of individual minds is not merely silly but hypocritical—as Avenir notes, discussion, both formal and informal, is a large part of the pedagogical landscape.

And yet I also know that there are fields where problems are complex but answers are simple—there are an infinite number of mathematical formulae for which 42 is the answer, but your possession of that number only operates as proof that you understand a particular formula if I also trust that you weren’t just handed the answer.

So, to adopt The Economist’s old motto of “Simplify, then exaggerate”, here’s a false dichotomy: does the growth of networked support for student-to-student study mark the appearance of the previously invisible but critical engine of learning, or will its normalization set up a harmful social gradient, where nerd kids give likeable kids the right answers with no work?

And should the response on the part of the academy be a) “We should support this important change”, b) “We have never really cared what students do outside class, and this is no different”, or c) “Deep socialization of study is a core threat to academic integrity, so this must be stopped”?

Sometimes we could entice Bohr to come with us to see a Western or a gangster film we had selected. His comments were always remarkable because he used to introduce some of his ideas on observations and measurements into his criticism. Once, after a thoroughly stupid Tom Mix film, his verdict went about as follows: "I did not like that picture, it was too improbable. That the scoundrel runs off with the beautiful girl is logical, it always happens. That the bridge collapses under their carriage is unlikely but I am willing to accept it. That the heroine remains suspended in mid-air over a precipice is even more unlikely , but again I accept it, I am even willing to accept that at that very moment Tom Mix is coming by on his horse. But that at that very moment there should be a fellow with a motion picture camera to film the whole business that is more than I am willing to believe."