I’m sure there’s some good, scientific reason for this storage area at the Smithsonian:
(click for a bigger version on flickr)
(via Kottke), but there’s only one thing that comes to mind upon seeing it (tapers off around 3:20) …
What does Margaret Thatcher have to say about all of this?
The delivery is terrible, but the crowd seems to love it. I guess that’s politics for you.
So, not too long ago, I finally got around to reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (the guy who wrote The Tipping Point and Blink). I’ve read his other two books as well on the heavy recommendations of several people who insisted I would love them. Overall, I thought they were interesting, but there was something about them that I didn’t really like. Something about his writing style that annoyed me, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
In reading Outliers, by about 20 or 30 pages in, I found myself getting mad, which I’m pretty sure isn’t the intended effect, so I started noting some of the things that made me mad. I think most of it is around the fact that everyone seems to treat his books as scientific works of fact, and with the way he presents things it’s easy to get that impression. But, at the same time, it’s so, so, so wildly not scientific. Later in the book, I started writing down some of the things about him and his writing style (and to some degree the wide acceptance / praise of him) that sets me off. So, in no particular order or pretense of being scientific or anything other than one person’s rant, here’s a bunch of little pieces that in my mind add up to disliking Malcolm Gladwell.
- His language is extremely flowery, and tends to appeal strongly to the sense and to the emotions. It reads more like the script to an episode of 60 Minutes than science.
- He starts every argument with an isolated incident that is narrative, engaging, and make you sympathize with the character, and then generalizes wildly.
- The book isn’t really about outliers at all. In fact, it focuses more on large groups, patterns, and what shapes entirely average people. He just tends to use the extreme cases as his attempt for proof. It’s like a sociology text written in the language of a political campaign speech.
- The title could just as easily be (as it is his main argument) “Nurture’s important too”. The basic premise of the book is, when you get right down to it and strip away the flowery language, that the culture you’re raised in and how people treat you is as important in determining who you are, and therefore where you end up and what you end up doing, as are your genes or personal effort. In short, an entirely unoriginal argument that’s been going on for centuries in science. At the same time, he alternates wildly between tying personal effort / perseverance to genes (nature) and then portraying it as a cultural trait (nurture) to be absorbed (as in his scientific *gafaw* attempt at explaining why Asian kids are good at math – because their culture teaches them to have more effort and determination in problem solving).
- He doesn’t provide references, he just says “there was a study that proves this” and moves on. There is a short section in the back that references scientific papers (again, giving the appearance of being scientifically rigorous), but they – 1) are buried in the back, 2) don’t have any actual footnotes, to both discourage tying a specific piece of text to evidence so it could be supported / refuted 3) never gives more than a passing, dismissive reference to any studies or works that could counter his points. I think this – the lack of any sort of balance at all is what really sets me off.
- Because of all of the fawning adoration of him, I feel like I’ve read most of the book before I ever opened it. I had lots of moments of deja vu because it’s been quoted so heavily everywhere. Again, with everyone presenting it as fact and some sort of mild scientific break through.
- For each of his points, he claims basically all success in life can be attributed to one particular environmental factor. However, that factor varies from chapter to chapter. If we try to tie all of his “logic” together, we would find that the world should currently be ruled by Asian people from wealthy backgrounds who were born on January 1st, who lived near a computer lab growing up and have never interacted with Scottish people. Which is obviously totally supported by realit… oh wait, no, it’s not, at all.
- He loves juxtaposing things as desperate as possible to create an effect and impact in the reader’s mind, even if it’s at the cost of a logically coherent argument or understanding.
- He writes to be talked about, but not to say much.
- He uses a single quote, from a single individual, with no evidence that it speaks for a whole time (or even anything beyond just that individual’s opinion) to create broad, sweeping explanations of entire cultures.
- He places enough unrelated examples close enough together, and uses anecdotal evidence (at best) to tie them together, to make it seem as if he has created an encompassing theory of all existence, and also implies that he know how to fix it all, but never present his actual conclusion in a clear manner. This has two results, after someone reads it, they feel like they’ve learned something really important, but they can’t quite articulate it (because he doesn’t articulate it, and if they did so accurately, it wouldn’t seem so profound anymore), which leads them to 1) tell other people they should read it, because they can’t say exactly what it was about for sure, just that it was good, and 2) makes you think that if you had just a bit more time with him, he’d either put it all together for you, or at least give you all the other wonderful pieces that didn’t quite fit in the book, so you could finally figure it all out. In other words, he sets himself up for speaking engagements. Each individual example is also quotable / summarize-able enough that it both gives him something to talk about (rehash) on talk shows, and lends itself easily to being quoted elsewhere (again, felt like I read half of it before I opened the book), so it spreads. In short, he’s perfected using the points from his first book (The Tipping Point) to make himself hit a tipping point, even though he’s really just been an old set of hush puppies since then. The strange part is that, in a way, each of his books sets up every point needed to call him out, he spells out exactly what he’s doing, as he’s doing it, and no one calls him out for it.
- The subtle, detailed, well researched and cited argument that rationally addresses its critics is dead in our society.
- He bases his arguments on sweeping groups in ways that feed on (and feed into) stereotypes.
- He leaps up and down on scale – from an individual, one school, an isolated study, to a stereotype of a whole region based on one study, a whole culture / the whole world and all of human history – gives a grand sweeping feel, but gives basically no evidence.
- It’s emotional, you feel for the characters. Science doesn’t have characters. Even in psychology, you have patients, not protagonists.
- Not only does he only focus on environment as the sole predictor of success, he picks and chooses which parts of the environment to focus on. In his example of schools, he points out that at his personally relate-able, focused on, emotionally engaging school protagonist, everyone does orchestra, they have much much longer days, they have strict rules, but Gladwell only focuses on one thing as the solution- having 3 extra weeks of school in the summer. He argues that if we could just have kids go to school year round, it would fix everything, but ignored that maybe it’s not just the 3 extra weeks, maybe it’s the orchestra. What if every student had to take band? What if not sleeping enough is what’s actually helping them? He focuses on the environment for causes of things, but then ignores massive portions of the environment to further his specific argument.
- He puts up as an example of the way the world should be as including a 12 year old running on 6 hours of sleep each night, every night. Six hours.
- He seems to always propose a single right way to do things- train pilots this way and you’ll always be safe, raise children this was and they’ll be hockey stars.
- He continually argues that anyone who was given the correct opportunity succeeds – but he leaves out the many, many cases of people who may have been in the right situations, but still failed. He talks about one failure in the whole book.
- In particular, a certain paragraph on page 268 took me from mildly annoyed to “must rant to the internet about this”. Let me quote it here at length:
The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We looks at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today? To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determines success – the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history – with a society that provides opportunities for all. If Canada had a second hockey league for those children born in the last half of the year, it would today have twice as many adult hockey stars. Now multiply that sudden flowering of talent by every field and profession. The world could be so much richer than the world we have settled for.
Ah, the wonder! The soaring rhetoric! The potential of a brighter future for all!! This grand utopia if we would just listen to this one man’s wisdom!!! Oh wait. Fuck. It’s chock full of more examples of logical fallacies than than a textbook on Socrates. Let’s hit just a few of the high point of “are you fucking kidding me” in there. “Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968.” Really? That’s strange, because in your example of this earlier in the same fucking book, on page 51, you tell us that every single kid in Gates’ school had the ability to have the exact same access he had, and you refer on numerous occasions to “Gates and his friends” spending all this time on this very same computer. And you really think absolutely no other school in the world had a similar set up? Are you sure there weren’t actually a ton of them? Are you sure it’s not just that you haven’t heard of all the others, or even looked into it, because it might hurt your argument? Because they didn’t happen to produce an equally famous individual despite a similar environment? Or that someone who, oh say wasn’t even born until the next year could create software that’s currently run on multiples more computers than anything Gates ever touched? Or that with any research you would find that it never really was Gates’ technical ability that set him ahead but rather his business skills? My, all those MBA’s out there shall be great programmers one day. “If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?” One. Exactly fucking one. Microsoft is only a worthwhile example because it’s a huge monopoly. You know how many monopolies you can have in a particular market? Here’s a hint, it has to do with the prefix “mono”. Perhaps you meant “How many really successful companies could we have with huge market share?” Again, the same number. There’s only so much room in the market. Could they have been headed by other people? Probably. But that’s not going to make for a million more $260 Billion market cap companies. Aside from that a million kids spending all their time in a computer lab to produce a million Bill Gates would mean a million kids not out spending all their time in hockey leagues. Or playing guitar. Or student government. “If Canada had a second hockey league for those children born in the last half of the year, it would today have twice as many adult hockey stars.” No, it fucking wouldn’t. It would have exactly as many, they would just have birthdays bunched up in January and July instead of just January (that assuming we take Galdwell’s general argument here as being valid in the first place). Instead of screwing kids with November and December birthdays, we be screwing the ones with June and December birthdays, and spending twice as much on coaching and facilities for the opportunity. And hey, why not make 4 leagues?!! Then we could have 4 times as many adult hockey stars! Hey, why stop there? Let’s have twelve!! How about 365?!! Why not one for every hour of birth time? 8,760 hockey leagues and the world’s problems will be solved!!! But wait, 8,760 hockey leagues will only give us 8,584,800 NHL level players. With a mere 6,632,653 hockey leagues every person on the planet will be playing hockey at an NHL level. Cripples will be able to skate! The blind shall win shoot outs in overtime! Infants and the elderly alike will check one another into the boards!! All praise be to Malcolm Gladwell!!!
When was the last time you heard a lawmaker say, “You know, I was always for the war on terror, but then I saw a 19 year old in a grateful dead t-shirt and a fuck you hat light a dumpster on fire, and I said to myself, you know, maybe I’ve been wrong about foreign policy, maybe I’ve been wrong about a lot of things.”
A bit of a creepy, sort of tongue in cheek, sort of not tongue in cheek, thought provoking video about how to start a mind control cult (feel free to substitute in any of a host of other words there) :
Via Ovablastic
The video is here. Yes, it’s long, and old, but it’s good to reflect now and then on just how terrible Bush really was. Really gets rolling at about 4 minutes in and 13:20 is my favorite. After about 16:30 it gets sort of lame.
So I’ve been batting this one around in my head for a while, and then I read this article (very, very hyperbolic and one sided, but still fairly informative none the less), which set me off a bit to finally write this up. The idea (really sort of 2 ideas together) still definitely has issues, but it’s at least something to think about. This one’s admittedly equal parts idea and rant, and parts are half joking, though also half not.
Now, in an ideal world, politicians would actually care about representing the views of the people who they are supposed to represent. No US Senator from Minnesota would vote for a bill unless he thought that the people of Minnesota would support it. No Minnesota State Congressman would vote for a piece of legislation unless he thought that the people in his specific district would support it. They would do frequent opinion polls among the people they represent (not national polls) on relevant issues.
However, I think we all know that not how things work. If a drug company promises some money to a campaign in exchange for slightly stricter intellectual property laws, it will probably go through. If the head of the TSA has a side business that has clients that sell body scanners, we’re told we need body scanners in every airport to stay safe. If the steel industry wants higher tariffs to make higher profits to have more money to donate to politicians, the circle of political life goes on.
While there are many, many groups I can give money to as an individual in order to try to elect a given politician, there’s not much I can do to influence him/her after the election until they start making campaign promises the next time around. In short, while companies and interest groups can influence politicians while in office, the average citizen only really comes into discussion around election time.
So, here’s my idea – political bounties (for clarity, so I don’t have the FBI knocking at my door, I’m referring to bounties on laws getting passed/repealed, not on politicians’ heads). Now you may be saying, wait, you want to just buy laws? Well, yes. It basically works that way now for companies, I just want to be more blunt about the government representing the money rather than representing the people. Aside from that, as it stands, companies don’t just have the same rights as individuals, they have more rights. While an actual person can only donate up to a specific amount of money, corporations basically can spend whatever they want. I’m just proposing equal rights here. However, the real key to this idea is that the bounties are only awarded to a politician (or more specifically their reelection fund) AFTER they accomplish what the bounty is for, and that they will be for very, very specific changes.
For instance, I think it’s stupid that I can’t buy beer on Sunday in Minnesota, and I’d like to see that changed. I don’t care which politician introduces the legislation, or what party they’re from. I just want to be able to go grab a bottle of wine for diner on Sunday. So, if this were all set up, I would start a political bounty for legalizing the sale of alcohol on Sunday in Minnesota, and I would contribute a few dollars. And anyone else who thought it was a good idea could also contribute a few bucks. The key here is that the bounty continues to sit and grow until someone introduces a piece of legislation that passes to change the law. No one gets the money until the law is changed. Basically, we shift the focus for individual campaign contributions from campaign promises to realized results. This would also work for non-incumbents, they could take out loans to campaign on, and pay them back when they got some results and got bounties (or not get elected and go bankrupt I suppose).
Another sort of complimentary idea for this would be that we shut down all direct campaign contributions. Instead, each citizen is allocated $100 (arbitrary number, adjust as you see fit). The $100 comes from tax money, so actually the rich are contributing way more, and the poor way less, but they all get equal say, thus leveling the field some across economic groups that way. Also, I say allocated rather than given because you don’t actually get this money, this money is held by the government and you instruct them (probably via a form on some website) on which campaign to contribute it to and how. This could have a short list of options, such as making the contribution conditional on specific campaign promise being fulfilled. For instance, $50 to Person X unconditionally, and $50 split equally among all politicians who vote to repeal the Patriot Act, if the repeal succeeds. You could also contribute it an interest group, who could then use it to advertise about a specific issue rather than for a specific politician. The key here is that this would be the only money they would be allowed to use. This would help to make it so the government represent (or at least plays to) the people instead of corporations, and it would give all citizen equal say in their government (or again, equal influence over the election). Politicians would be strictly banned from using any other funds in their campaigns.
The obvious problem with this part, is that you basically have to limit free speech in order to keep companies and rich people from buying their own advertising. And it sort of presupposes that elections are decided by how much advertising you can do, rather than what people actually think, which gets a bit to the heart of the issue that most people know almost nothing about politics, but are still responsible for choosing politicians. In order to make it manageable, you would also have to limit the list of conditions that you could apply to your contribution. Maybe you could make it so the $100 can be payed out at your will throughout the elected politician’s term?
There’s also the elephant in the room that any change like this would have to be put in place by, you guessed it, politician. And we’ve already covered where they currently get incentives from.
Ugh. Politics makes my head hurt, and make me nauseous. This is why I haven’t had much on here about it for a while, and will probably continue that way for a while.
I’ve been collecting links for this one for a while, though admittedly I still haven’t really come up with any particularly cohesive argument about it, more just presenting it as something to think about. The idea/argument/trend/anti-trend is what’s referred to as Free Range Kids. Basically it’s the counter to the current trend towards “in the world we live in, you just can’t be too careful, especially when it comes to kids”. Free Range Kids would tend to say that it’s probably okay if you let your kids go outside and play without an adult hovering over them or gps enabled tracking bracelets strapped around their ankles. As many others have said it better, here’s a few links:
The comment sections (where applicable) tend to be interesting for the mix of adults fondly remembering wandering and exploring as a kid, and cynics assuring anyone that doesn’t hover over their child that the child will end up dead or a heroin addict. They tend to get pretty fierce, even by internet standards. A few more articles for the sake of the comment sections here, here, and here.
Discussions of free range kids tends to draw to the surface quite a few pretty hot button issues/debates, such as:
There also seems to be some parallels in here for that other major freedom vs safety debate of our times – terrorism. How much should we modify our lives and how many freedoms should we give up to try to foil the terrorists / pedophiles? How does the media affect our perceptions of these threats? How much should the parents / government always be the ones to make decisions for what’s best and safest? How much does one lead into the other, with the government replacing parents as an authority figure that can tell us what’s safe?
They wore wigs. They wore tights. They wore ruffles. That’s right ladies and gentlemen, our country was founded by drag queens. Fancy drag queens.
I got a flyer in the mail today about the upcoming Minneapolis elections. Apparently, we’ll be using ranked choice voting:
I know people tend to have pretty strong feelings one way or the other about ranked choice voting, though I have to admit I’m not really well informed enough on the issue and how it affects things to really have a strong opinion. However, in reading over the flyer, I did find the candidates and their party affiliations interesting, let’s zoom in on that a bit:
I like it. Though a little odd that a couple of the parties fielded multiple candidates for the same race. Someone dropped the ball on strategy there, or there’s some rebels in the party.
On a vaguely related note, does anyone remember the Giant Sloth Party (named for the full sized (huge) giant sloth in the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History) that used to run for positions in the University of Iowa student government? Are they still around?
You know, they could have just gone to work for the Empire and then formed a union too. That totally would have stuck it to them.
Man, I need to get out of Minnesota.
Via Boing Boing
As a side note, just because I like this particular video, I’m not really trying to promote the guy who made it or his view of how to fix things. He’s absolutely crazy. Like his whole own brand of crazy so far beyond bat-shit crazy it needs its own new term. This guy is llama vomit crazy with tinge of gopher bile psycho.
What do you call 533 idiots in one building?
Congress.
(Yes, I know, there’s 535 people in Congress, but I like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich.)
Remember when Chrysler / Jeep / Dodge did their “Let’s Refuel America” guarantee of $2.99 gas for 3 years for anyone buying one of their new vehicles, in order to offset their cars being gas guzzlers? Given that gas has been cheaper than $2.99 since October of last year (so they haven’t had to pay a dime to this program since then) how are they not swimming in cash? How terrible of financial shape would they have been in if gas prices had actually kept going up? How much more of your tax money would they be holding on to for you then? Remind me again why we have any faith at all in them to not blow through every dime we give them?
Why we don’t let them fail, and let other car manufacturers buy up their facilities and equipment at bankruptcy sale prices and actually build decent cars with it that will sell under a realistic business model? Honda and Toyota already have plants in the US. Yes, that Japanese Honda Accord is made in Ohio, and that Japanese Toyota Tundra is made in Texas, in fact, most of their line up is built here.
Or, break Chrysler up under anti-trust laws into the three brands they’ve already made themselves, so parts of them can fail without taking out a huge sector of the economy. (Same for GM. Ford I’ll be gentle on for the moment since they actually show signs of being in tune with the market, have a reasonably sized line up, and didn’t take government funds.) Anti-trust laws exist so the words “too big to fail” should never be uttered. Too bad the government hasn’t really enforced them since the early to mid ’90′s.
I’m not going to even try to talk about the government’s involvement in the health care system here (at least for now), but it really made me laugh when I heard Wisconsin’s government sponsored health care program is called BadgerCare.
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