"The Fool's Tale": Dramatis Personae

Today we take a short pause from our blogging to present the characters to an semi-autobiographical sequel to the Canterbury Tales, The Fool's Tale. Based on the people with whom I work, this will only be up for a short period before it's taken down.  

To be sure there's some exaggeration here and there -- some dramatic license is necessary, it's a story -- but I have no doubt all of the characters could easily identify themselves and everyone else.  The humor is in "you've got to know these people -- that's so true" type of nonsense, but since you'll never meet most of them, well, you'll just have to make do. Yet The Fool's Tale itself will never be written -- I have no plot -- and if it were written, then the story would need a self-reflective subtitle: How the Fool Lost His Job.

Our characters:

Some Questions for Libertarians

I know a lot of people, which means that, among the many I know, I know a fair number of self-described "libertarians."  These range from a friend of mine who happens to be an auto mechanic and who believes that libertarians have discovered a new form of economics and likes to say "Who is John Galt?" to a friend who is a former Libertarian gubernatorial candidate and notable lawyer and is on the inside of the movement.  I've often been puzzled by the discontinuities in libertarian beliefs -- for instance, I am puzzled by libertarians who rail against "the right to privacy" -- and I know I am not alone in this.  An article by R.J. Eskow published yesterday in Salon (which I saw via Pharyngula) puts it right up front: "11 Questions to See if Libertarians are Hypocrites."

The whole article is worth reading, as Eskow puts the questions into context. Here, though, are his questions:

1. Are unions, political parties, elections, and social movements like Occupy examples of “spontaneous order” [a term used by the Cato Institute to define libertarian thought] —and if not, why not?
2. Is a libertarian willing to admit that production is the result of many forces, each of which should be recognized and rewarded?
3. Is our libertarian willing to acknowledge that workers who bargain for their services, individually and collectively, are also employing market forces?
4. Is our libertarian willing to admit that a “free market” needs regulation?
5. Does our libertarian believe in democracy? If yes, explain what’s wrong with governments that regulate.
6. Does our libertarian use wealth that wouldn’t exist without government in order to preach against the role of government?
7. Does our libertarian reject any and all government protection for his intellectual property?
8. Does our libertarian recognize that democracy is a form of marketplace?
9. Does our libertarian recognize that large corporations are a threat to our freedoms?
10. Does he think that [Ayn] Rand was off the mark on this one, or does he agree that historical figures like King and Gandhi were “parasites”?
11. If you believe in the free market, why weren’t you willing to accept as final the judgment against libertarianism rendered decades ago in the free and unfettered marketplace of ideas?

I have to distance myself a bit from Eskow's questions (even in the context of the article in which they're propounded) as they make a few unfounded leaps and they're not that well phrased, complete, or ordered.  Still, they point up fundamental inconsistencies in libertarian dogmas.

And in so saying I have to point out that I am, as I supposed Eskow is, a strong believer in individual rights.¹ I seek a system which protects those rights and interests -- and provides the opportunity to exercise those rights and interests -- to the maximum extent for the maximum number of citizens. It's that last part that seems to me the too common rub with libertarians: they seem, too often, to seek to maximize rights for a few (usually themselves) to the detriment of everyone else. Yes, I think, democratic republican forms of government are the closest we've come so far to a regime of individual rights; and some government and some regulation, measured for it's reasonability, is necessary to protect our rights and interests.
____________________
¹ Here I have to make a controversial (if correct) comment: individual rights are not "natural rights." They are made by people. That is not a political or philosophical observation; it is a factual one. It is something we cannot change no matter how much we wish it to be different. One would have to be extremely ignorant of history to think that individual rights have existed for many centuries (let alone forever). One would have to be extremely ignorant of the world to think that individual rights exist everywhere. One would have to be extremely ignorant of culture to think that all cultures reflect or even understand western notions of individual rights. One would have to be extremely ignorant of the process of government and lawmaking to think that rights or laws magically exist. That individual rights are not "natural rights" does not mean that individual rights are unimportant; it means their explication and codification is critical.

Russian Landscape Artist Konstantin Kryzhitsky and Knowing the Artist

James Gurney, who writes the great art blog Gurney Journey, asks what a painting can tells us about an artist.  Speculating from the painting Peyzazh 1895 (below) by the Russian painter Konstantin Kryzhitsky,  of whom gurney was unaware (me to), Gurney asserts Kryzhitsky "had a deep soul, a love of mystery, melancholy, and music, and a keen sense of nature's moods that must have come from long walks through the countryside. This painting couldn't have been done by a flippant, urbane, or shallow person."

I'm not sure that so much about an artist can be gleaned from a single painting.  I certainly have my doubts that Kryzhitsky was not urbane.  Assuming the artist is not attempting to mislead about herself or himself -- and is, of course, not a forger or a machine -- still we may know very little of an artist from a work or series of works.  Of course, it depends on the work.  I could say very little about Ellsworth Kelly, for instance, just knowing some of his work.  As to Kryzhitsky, taking the assumption that he puts himself genuinely into his work, and looking at many of his landscapes, I see someone awed by nature both as to its beauty and scale, someone who wanted to show humankind as small in relation to that vastness, someone who had trained as an academic painter and had extraordinary technical skill, and someone who very sensitive and smart.

Peyzazh 1895 is, to my lights, a fantastic painting: from the illusion of smoke from the break in the trees, from the juxtaposition of built and natural world, to the question it raises of whether one is entering or leaving the estate, to the feeling of coldness and sense of place so real (but not slavishly realistic) that I can feel being there.  This last point flows readily across many of his works -- below the break a sample (and final comment):

From Wired: "As Math Grows More Complex, Will Computers Reign?"

From an interesting article in Wired from earlier this month:

Computers are now used extensively to discover new conjectures by finding patterns in data or equations, but they cannot conceptualize them within a larger theory, the way humans do. Computers also tend to bypass the theory-building process when proving theorems, said Constantin Teleman, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who does not use computers in his work. In his opinion, that’s the problem. “Pure mathematics is not just about knowing the answer; it’s about understanding,” Teleman said. “If all you have come up with is ‘the computer checked a million cases,’ then that’s a failure of understanding.”

Zeilberger disagrees. If humans can understand a proof, he says, it must be a trivial one. In the never-ending pursuit of mathematical progress, Zeilberger thinks humanity is losing its edge. Intuitive leaps and an ability to think abstractly gave us an early lead, he argues, but ultimately, the unswerving logic of 1′s and 0′s — guided by human programmers — will far outstrip our conceptual understanding, just as it did in chess. (Computers now consistently beat grandmasters.)

“Most of the things done by humans will be done easily by computers in 20 or 30 years,” Zeilberger said. “It’s already true in some parts of mathematics; a lot of papers published today done by humans are already obsolete and can be done using algorithms. Some of the problems we do today are completely uninteresting but are done because it’s something that humans can do.”

"Speak Memory" -- Oliver Sacks on the Validity and Shortcomings of Human Memory in The New York Review of Books

In 2001 Oliver Sacks, the great neurologist and author, published a book of memoirs named Uncle Tungston: Memoirs of a Chemical Boyhood. Shortly after its publication he learned from speaking with his brother Michael that he was not present one of the vivid incidents he "recalled" but that it came fro a letter another wrote. With that Sacks sends us on a short and fascinating odyssey on memories that are found from others, on “cryptomnesia.”

We are reminded (if you will) of the famous incident where Ronald Reagan described as historical fact a movie scene he remembered; George Harrison's likely unintentional copyright infringement in My Sweet Lord of Ronnie Mack's He's So Fine; Helen Keller's alleged (and plainly unintentional) plagiarism of a children's author when Keller was 11 (and Mark Twain's very kind letter to Keller about it, describing inadvertently plagiarizing Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.); of charges of plagiarism that were leveled against Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose memory was so prodigious he probably could not have helped but had cryptomnesia; and of Sack's being inadvertently plagiarized himself. Throughout there is a recurrent and compelling narrative that cryptomnesia is very common for all of us. This may present issues when we wonder what is real (it doesn't mean reality doesn't exist or that different memories are equally true, of course), and it presents fascinating questions as to how cryptomnesia occurs and how it can be measured. Sacks, in fact, while writing an article stronger on story than underlying science, cites to several writings worth further review.

Equally significant -- indeed, most significant from my perspective as a lawyer -- is how how unreliable witness memories are. We rely, by necessity it seems in many cases, on what people describe from the stand, and what they say is often very in accurate. Of course, sometimes witnesses lie straight-out (and are rarely prosecuted for this, by the way). But very often a witness convinces himself that an invented story is true. How can that happen? We suspect it is because they feel a need for some story; that the story they offer has some emotional purpose for them; or that perhaps it has been suggested. What we lack are realistic ways to examine their truthfulness. Short of that, witness testimony is accepted too readily, and it leads to real and substantial harm for many people.

I don't think we can abandon witness testimony. What we need are scientific, established criteria to measure its validity.

A User's Guide to Art Speak

Photo from Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

At The Guardian Andy Beckett discusses "art speak" -- something that's now been dubbed "International Art English" in a widely circulated article by an artist and an art critic. Mr. Beckett describes it:

If you've been to see contemporary art in the last three decades, you will probably be familiar with the feelings of bafflement, exhaustion or irritation that such gallery prose provokes. You may well have got used to ignoring it. As Polly Staple, art writer and director of the Chisenhale Gallery in London, puts it: "There are so many people who come to our shows who don't even look at the programme sheet. They don't want to look at any writing about art."

With its pompous paradoxes and its plagues of adverbs, its endless sentences and its strained rebellious poses, much of this promotional writing serves mainly, it seems, as ammunition for those who still insist contemporary art is a fraud. Surely no one sensible takes this jargon seriously?

David Levine and Alix Rule do. ...

      * * *
They christened it International Art English, or IAE, and concluded that its purest form was the gallery press release, which – in today's increasingly globalised, internet-widened art world – has a greater audience than ever. "We spent hours just printing them out and reading them to each other," says Levine. "We'd find some super-outrageous sentence and crack up about it. Then we'd try to understand the reality conveyed by that sentence."

"International Art English" is a great neologism. IAE is the patois of the ignorant attempting to describe the ineffable.

I am so happy with that last sentence, I should stop. But ...

The (New) Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project

The (New) Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project is "[a]n ongoing quest to track the Daily Mail's classification of inanimate objects into two types: those that cause cancer, and those that cure it. Inspired by and a direct continuation of the Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project ...." It is hilarious. This is a genius level idea.

While I'm on it, The New Yorker has a lengthy article on Dr. Mehmet Oz of The Dr. Oz Show. Oz is a highly qualified, highly successful cardio-thoracic surgeon who loves the limelight and has sort of promoted alternative therapies unsupported by evidence, as he acknowledges. "Sort of" because he seems to suggest they work, or might work, and does not seem to bothered by evidence to the contrary. He's being "open minded." His wife, Lisa, who is the daughter of a very prominent heart surgeon, is, in fact, a "Reiki master." That means she attempts to heal through a "spiritual practice" of laying on hands. It's not even ancient voodoo: it was invented by a Japanese Buddhist monk in the 1920's. (And I don't doubt that many people find it comforting, and that this can be therapeutic in itself -- but it's not treatment.)

Upcoming Posts at Galileo Feynman

When I began this blog I imagined a mix of posts on art and politics, music and culture, science and society interspersed with short essays on a variety of more philosophical subjects. I haven't had much chance to focus on the essay side -- which I'd normally post under the tag Blah blah blah, among others -- but I thought I'd mention what's in the hopper. It's all pretty nerdy, so abandon all hope if you're looking for something else. A lengthy list follows bellow the break.

Techniques of the Master Painter

Reference photo. All images from Gurney Journey, though
some originated in this article.

Blobby Photoshop "artist filter" adaptation

Master painting

James Gurney, author/artist behind the book series Dinotopia, who, among other things is an excellent plein air painter and very knowledgeable about technique, has a really interesting post about "image parsing" at his main blog, Gurney Journey. The thrust of the post is that:

Machines like Vangobot may develop the hand skills to manipulate the brushes and paints, but will they ever have artistic judgment? Is it possible for a computer to be programmed to see and interpret the world in the same way that an experienced painter does?

These are qualities of the "eye" or "mind" or even the "soul" more than the "hand." Blog reader M.P. invoked a quote from nineteenth century drawing instructor James Duffield Harding who characterized the great artist as having an instinct for "selection, arrangement, sentiment, and beauty" rather than just replicating reality.

      * * *
Note the difference in this master painter's interpretation. The details in the faces are accurately drawn, but rougher brushes are used for the foliage. The drapery is painted efficiently with big slashing strokes. The sky is painted loosely with spots of light. The sidewalk tiles are in perspective, but they're just suggested with thin dashing strokes. The colors are warmed up and intensified.

For a computer to do this, it would have to understand what it was looking at, and have an instinct to do all these subjective interpretations. It would need to be able to handle a lot of brushes in a variety of ways depending on what forms it was painting.

He's toying with us.

Negative Absolute Temperatures (!)

A "negative absolute temperature" is a temperature below 0° Kelvin. Zero degrees Kelvin is known as "absolute zero" for a reason. We have laws, people.

Well, anyway, now some highfalutin German physicists have gone and published a paper titled Negative Absolute Temperature for Motional Degrees of Freedom reporting that they have "created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time," according to Nature.

Schneider and his colleagues reached such sub-absolute-zero temperatures with an ultracold quantum gas made up of potassium atoms. Using lasers and magnetic fields, they kept the individual atoms in a lattice arrangement. At positive temperatures, the atoms repel, making the configuration stable. The team then quickly adjusted the magnetic fields, causing the atoms to attract rather than repel each other. “This suddenly shifts the atoms from their most stable, lowest-energy state to the highest possible energy state, before they can react,” says Schneider.

Well, I never.

What's next? Travel back in time?

I did use to have a math teacher who moved so slowly that I theorized that any substantial increase in slowness would require time to become negative. Yet, if one views temperature as the extent of vibration of a particle, then "negative absolute temperature" could be viewed as reversing time ... yes? Well, let's think that through ...

I have to admit I am a skeptic about the time thing, but then there is this thing with flipable interactions in Feynman diagrams where time is supposedly reversed -- supposedly for antimatter, though Richard Feynman, with his mentor at Princeton, John Wheeler, thought of that as one way of approaching quantum dynamics.

The Great Swindle: A Provocative Essay on "Fake Ideas" and "Fake Emotions"

Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons, one of the artists Scruton believes
engages in fake art. 

Roger Scruton, writing at Aeon Magazine, has a lengthy essay on the prevalence, in his view, on how "fake ideas" and "fake emotions" have "elbowed out truth and beauty" in modern societies. It's an old argument, though he expresses it well, if provocatively:

... There are fake beliefs, fake opinions, fake kinds of expertise. There is also fake emotion, which comes about when people debase the forms and the language in which true feeling can take root, so that they are no longer fully aware of the difference between the true and the false. ...

... To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included. ... The fake really is shocked when he is exposed, since he had created around himself a community of trust, of which he himself was a member. ...

        ***
The most important way of clearing intellectual space for fake scholarship and culture is to marginalise the concept of truth. ...

Scruton makes several errors. For one -- and most importantly -- he conflates truth and beauty. They fundamentally differ. "Truth" can be spoken of in at least a quasi-objective way since there is a measure for truth: the world we inhabit. "Beauty" is always a matter of debate, and people can quite justifiably bring different measures to the conversation.

From The New York Times: "As Companies Seek Tax Deals, Governments Pay High Price"

The 48 companies that have received at least $100 million, per the NYT,
General Motors received at least $1.77 billion in state/local incentives

In The New York Times today (Sunday -- saw it on line early) a superlative article reviews the extraordinary amounts that state and local governments give to huge corporations in the attempt to lure or keep them in the locale and create jobs and business:

A Times investigation has examined and tallied thousands of local incentives granted nationwide and has found that states, counties and cities are giving up more than $80 billion each year to companies. The beneficiaries come from virtually every corner of the corporate world, encompassing oil and coal conglomerates, technology and entertainment companies, banks and big-box retail chains.

The cost of the awards is certainly far higher. A full accounting, The Times discovered, is not possible because the incentives are granted by thousands of government agencies and officials, and many do not know the value of all their awards. Nor do they know if the money was worth it because they rarely track how many jobs are created. Even where officials do track incentives, they acknowledge that it is impossible to know whether the jobs would have been created without the aid.

“How can you even talk about rationalizing what you’re doing when you don’t even know what you’re doing?” said Timothy J. Bartik, a senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, Mich.

The article is supported by excellent interactive graphics of the data (a hallmark of the NYT),which can be found here.

The False Positive Paradox

I've posted before about my affection for Randall Monroe's webcomic xkcd and his related work, humor, and insight, and tonight (via Neatorama) I learned that it's been two years since his fiance was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer.  She's beating it so far.  He's noted the stats, and had a webcomic on this, but it also reminded me of something separate: the false positive paradox. (Well, that sounds like a downer, but it's not.)

The false positive paradox arises when a fairly reliable test yields fewer correct positive results than incorrect positive because the incidence of whatever is being tested is so low in the population. For example, imagine 1% of a population has a disease and a test for the disease is 95% accurate. That means if one gets a positive result there is, in fact, only about a 16% chance that one actually has the disease (specifically, the chance of a correct positive result is 1% x 95% = .95%; the chance for a false positive result is 99% x 5% = 4.95%; the chance of having the condition with a positive result is then .95 / (.95 + 4.95) ≈ 16%).

A Few Words on Lincoln, Federalism, and Cynicism

Later today except for some overseas ballots, the popular voting will be completed for President of the United States and federal congressional elections (some state races will go to run offs). We'll likely know then or tomorrow morning who will be the President and what political party(s) will control the House and Senate.

The Republicans, alas, are not the party they were long ago. They like to call themselves the party of Lincoln, but their values are contrary to what he and the early Republicans stood for. The Republican Party was formed in the 1850's expressly to oppose the notion of "popular sovereignty," a catch phrase used in the  1840's and 1850's to mean local jurisdiction to extend slavery despite federal agreements and laws that would limit it. Many seem to have forgotten -- if they ever knew -- that Lincoln's Republicans wanted a strong federal government and opposed the notion that slavery should be accepted through local fiat and contrary to federal policy. Indeed, a war was fought over the issue, and we, as a nation, won.

A Few Words on Valuing Education, Intellectual Attainment, and Science, and the Role of Religion

In the United States education is primarily provided by state and local governments rather than the federal government. Indeed, for many U.S. states, education is the largest budget item. Nonetheless, federal contributions still are very large -- about 10.8% of the overall funding for primary and secondary education. At both the state and federal level ideological issues have intruded into the attempt to teach facts.

A Few Words on Global Warming, the Environment, and Governmental Regulation

Via Wikipedia

By now, few sane people could doubt that global warming is real. Debate, if any, might still be had, no matter how quibbling, over the causes -- is it primarily natural or man-made (frankly I don't doubt that there is a significant man-made component, but whatever)? -- and the long term consequences -- how big a problem is this (but almost all assessments, it's a huge problem)? Yet, regardless of debates of the causes or ignorance of all consequences, the reality of global warming results in some consequences that must be addressed. Regardless of debates, there are reasonable things we can do to reduce the problem.  The point, again, being that regardless of the extent of human cause, the problem must be addressed, regardless of knowing the full extent of the problem, some things still can be done.

Nonetheless, extremist Republican viewpoints and rhetoric are still preventing exercising any meaningfully solutions. Such a course, in my view, is irresponsible. Let us suppose that there is a basis to doubt the full extent of the problem or full human cause. Given the magnitude of the danger, the prudent thing to do is to act. This is not a speculative danger; this is one scientists overwhelmingly agree upon.

A Few Words on Gun Control and the Culture of Fear

The US has more guns per person than any other country in the world. It also has a relatively high homicide rate. (As I've previously discussed, the U.S. also has highest rate of incarceration of any nation on Earth with the most people in prison anywhere -- it also has by far the highest military budget on Earth.)

A number of studies by Harvard scientists have correlated the higher rates of gun ownership with higher incidents of homicide both in the United States and the world.  New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Hawaii, for example, are the three U.S. states with the lowest gun ownership, and are also the three lowest in deaths caused by guns. The highest rate of gun ownership are in Wyoming and Montana, and they are number 2 and 4 in the rate of death by guns. Aljazeera, of all places, has an excellent -- and reliable, based on my check of the stats -- interactive graphic of the United States and gun ownership coupled with homicide rates.

The U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment does not prohibit reasonable restrictions on gun ownership. It does not prevent requiring trigger locks, background checks, limitations on transfer, taxation, storage requirements, display requirements, limitations on number, ammunition limitations, or prohibition of things other than personal arms. It doesn't give a right to sell, just to "bear," arms. The appropriate question is why, given that there is a general right to own guns are so many opposed to laws assuring the right is exercised in a safe manner?

A Few Words on Health Care Reform in the U.S.

Chart from here.

The United States spends far more on health care and has worse health outcomes than most other westernized nations. These are facts: (a) the U.S. spends more; (b) people in the U.S. get worse results overall. Something is wrong.

There are a number of areas that need attention. For example, in the $3.8 trillion 2013 U.S. budget (which, for the federal fiscal year, began in October 2012) 21% of the total -- $811 billion -- is slated to go just for Medicaid, Medicare, and children's health insurance. The Obama administration passed a comprehensive plan to address health care which the Republicans have aggressively opposed. Numerous independent organizations have looked at this and estimated that costs ultimately go down (one purpose, after all, is to bring health spending under control) while health services improve.

The Obama plan is only a first step. It will not bring costs down sufficiently, and it does not address all of the problems. Some of these seem obvious: there is a missing mechanism for competition in the provision of critical health care services. One goes to the doctor or the hospital in the U.S. and pays what one is told, less insurance. There's no negotiating on cost or shopping around. Nor is there a check on what doctors and hospitals want to charge except insurance (which they can often exceed). There is, generally, no incentive to limit services, to avoid unnecessary services, or to provide less expensive alternatives.

It's no wonder there's lots of opposition; one need only follow the money. Which brings us back, with no need for comment, to the Republican opposition to reform.

A Few Words on Abortion and Keeping Government Out of a Woman's Business

Roughly 50 years ago a Planned Parenthood director and an affiliated doctor were arrested for distributing contraceptives and providing advice on how to use them (their clinic, actually, was opened exactly 51 years ago to the day of this post). The constitutionality of the law eventually made its way to the United States Supreme Court, where, in Griswold v. Connecticut, 281 U.S. 479 (1965), it was struck down.

In its ruling the Court enunciated for the first time the "right to privacy" -- a right also called the "right to be let alone." The right to be let alone is the right to be let alone from government interference, to maintain one's own counsel, body, and activities -- sphere inviolate from the government -- a sphere of privacy. (N.B., while one dissent in Griswold accuses the courtof inventing the right of "privacy" based on "natural law" as "privacy" is not a word used in the Constitution. The Court, though, does not claim it is "natural law" but premises its view but on a "penumbra" of privacy the protections for individuals provided in the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 14th amendments.)

Eight years later in Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), the the United States Supreme Court relied on Griswold's "right to privacy" to hold that women have a right to abortion before their fetus is viable. Roe does not hold that there is a universal right to abortion or abortion at any time. It relies on Griswold to hold there is a sphere where citizens should be free from governmental interference and balances this freedom against a right to life it looks to when a fetus may be viable. 

Roe's rationale should be trumpeted by the "tea party" and libertarian types in the U.S. since being free  from government interference is their mantra. They're not keen on it. I'm left questioning the sincerity of their views.

A Few Words on Incarceration Rates in the U.S. and the "War on Drugs"

Chart from Wikipedia article on incarceration in U.S.

An issue that has been "under the radar" during the 2012 Presidential campaigns of both parties -- and ignored for all practical purposes in congressional races around the United States -- is the efficacy of the "War on Drugs" and the much broader problem in the United States of putting so much of our population in prison.

The United States not only has the most number of people in prison in the world, but it has the highest incarceration rate among its population in the world.  More people per capita go to prison in the U.S. than anywhere else. Evidently, people who live in the U.S. are the biggest bunch of criminals anywhere. Either that or the U.S. criminal justice system is broken.