5.9.03

Field Camp

I'm heading out to the geography department Field Camp for the weekend. Blogging should resume Sunday night or Monday.
Stentor Danielson, 12:44,

Gender disparity in higher education

Kevin Drum's recent post on the gender gap in higher education -- more women than men are going to college, and women outperform men academically -- has spawned a long comments thread. The general consensus seems to be that there's a cultural (rather than structural or biological) factor at work here.

One popular explanation is that (to put it in crude terms) men are lazy, caring mostly about drinking and video games, whereas women are disciplined and studious. I don't have access to any actual data on whether this is true (I suspect the stereotype exaggerates the difference, but then the enrollment/achievement gap isn't such a yawning chasm either). But I'll grant for the sake of discussion that it's true.

People have generally been treating this as something obviously bad for men. The assumption is that academic success is a measure of how much a person benefitted from college. But there are other skills that one learns at college, skills that are better learned outside the classroom, often in the much-disparaged world of athletics -- interpersonal skills, teamwork, etc. These kind of skills can often be the most crucial in succeeding in the world outside of college. It's your ability to network, not your A in 19th Century French History, that gets you the job at Goldman-Sachs. Perhaps when men are "slacking off", they're building a different set of skills.

If I'm right, the importance of networking on finding jobs, getting promotions, etc. may be a case of structural sexism. Men certainly do better in the post-college world, and I'm skeptical of how much of that is due to simple outright discrimination. Employers look for employees in ways that make it easier for men to succeed, because the culture and structure of the business world have been created and maintained by people who work in a "male" way (whether they be actual males or not -- one bit of actual evidence I do have is that women and minorities who succeed in business and politics are generally those who think and act in a stereotypically white male way).

This idea that women are good at the official purpose of college, whereas men are good at the social purpose, is a sort of reversal of a stereotype. Men are often considered to be good at abstract formal reasoning, whereas women think relationally and socially. By this stereotype, men ought to be better at formal job-acquisition strategies like sending in resumes in response to official job postings, whereas women ought to be better at finding jobs through networking and connections. And maybe they are -- like I said, I have precious little actual data here.

On a slightly different topic, commenter Aurora offers this bit of pessimism:

Maybe -- shoot, I hope I'm wrong, but maybe -- the old egalitarian dream of man and woman standing shoulder-to-shoulder, eyeball-to-eyeball, sharing all the joys and sorrows of life equally, just can't work because men aren't willing to share prestige. As soon as women achieve a certain degree of success in some field or other, regardless of how male-dominated it used to be, the guys seem to just pick up all their marbles and go home -- even if it really fucks their own lives up in the process.

This assessment of the situation is probably true in the near term. It resembles a pessimistic take I had on gay marriage. But I would hope that, like Ampersand's friends who see marriage as devalued because of the exclusion of gays, men's attitudes toward doing "women's work" will change. I know that I, for one, would see a job as less attractive if there were an unjustified dominance of men in it (less so for an unjustified dominance of women, since then my presence would be helping to change things). Then again, maybe I just have a feminine attitude toward work and school -- after all, I spent much more time in college studying than I did drinking and playing video games, whatever some joker at the Maroon-News office thought.
Stentor Danielson, 12:04,

4.9.03

Yaccs update

My comments should hopefully be functional by Monday evening:

It looks like the old server is still failing intermittently. I can't debug the problem (since the server is located across the country), so the quickest solution is to ship a new server to the colocation facility. I'm going to build a server tomorrow and ship it on Friday. It should arrive Monday, September 8 around 6PM EST and should be online around 7PM. Again, I apologize for the downtime. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do to speed things up; the process of ordering and shipping a server takes time, and yesterday was the first day since the outage that any stores were open. The good news is that the new server is much better than the old one, so the site should be significantly faster/more responsive once it's running. Thanks for your patience and understanding. Hossein Sharifi (sharifi@cc.gatech.edu)

Stentor Danielson, 22:52,

Cartoon: "See No Quagmire ..."

My first cartoon of the year is online (no column from this week's issue). I'm going to try posting the cartoon itself here on the blog.



I'm kind of ambivalent about the art quality here -- Iraq turned out very well, and I like the experimentation with the frames of the panels, but Bush barely looks like Bush. I think I've drawn him so many times (plus so many other guys wearing a suit and tie) that I think I'm just getting lazy. Concept-wise, I like that I worked duct tape into a cartoon, but in retrospect there's kind of a metaphor shift between the panels -- from using the tape to hold Iraq together, to using it to cover his eyes.
Stentor Danielson, 22:48,

Scarcity: can't live with it, can't live without it

Henry Farrell posts about science fiction writers' attempts to grapple with economics in a future where there is no scarcity.

This came home to me at Torcon, where a well-attended and intelligent panel discussed the economics of abundance - if future scientific progress allows us to produce [and, presumably, distribute] material goods effectively for free (as some sf writers postulate), then what happens to society? Iain Banks’ ‘Culture’ series is perhaps the best known sf take on this question; Banks sneakily describes a Communist utopia in terms which might well mislead the uninitiated into thinking that he’s a gung-ho libertarian. And Banks got frequent and deserved namechecks at the panel. Charlie Stross gave the standard take that economics is the science of choice under scarcity, and then launched into a discussion of what economics might have to say under conditions where scarcity didn’t apply (answer: not much). The panel, after some meanderings, more or less agreed that material abundance would lead people to displace their energies to achieving social status through positional goods and the like.

This is in a sense a follow-up to his earlier post about transhumanism. Both deal with the problem of how the human mind (economists are, presumably, human -- though the question of how ordinary people will experience a world without scarcity is even more interesting, from my point of view), a tool adapted to decision-making under constraints, deals with unconstrained scenarios. We don't have the same squicky reaction to a lack of economic scarcity as we do to transhumanism, perhaps because economic scarcity is less personal and more routinely frustrating. Indeed, there's a strong tradition on the left of celebrating the coming scarcity-free future. Or rather, there are two such traditions -- the Marxist, which says that industrial capitalism will end scarcity by producing so much so cheaply (a view shared by plenty on the right as well); and what I would call the eco-Daoist, which calls for a cultural change so that we are satisfied with what we have, thus experiencing abundance in a world that has reduced the actual availability of goods in order to live within its ecological means.

It's interesting how many readers -- including myself -- immediately denied Henry's premise, asserting different ways in which scarcity would persist even in the presence of unlimited free material goods. One of the big factors is that, beyond bare subsistence needs, abundance is always defined relationally. A recent study (I can't find the link to it anymore) found that being rich doesn't make you happy, but being richer (than your neighbors, or than you were in the past) can. Everyone thinks that if they just had a little more -- twice their current income, according to the study -- they would beat scarcity, and have functional abundance. We create scarcity even where it doesn't have to exist. Thus it seems that only functionally infinite availability would count as total abundance. In that case, I wonder if the abundant goods wouldn't lose meaning. They would no longer be experienced as abundant or scarce, but as pointless, just as, say, people who live in a non-polluted area don't see air as any kind of issue at all.
Stentor Danielson, 14:39,

3.9.03

More Bush psychology: ideology versus red tape

EPA Lifts Ban On Selling PCB Sites The Bush administration has ended a 25-year-old ban on the sale of land polluted with PCBs. The ban was intended to prevent hundreds of polluted sites from being redeveloped in ways that spread the toxin or raise public health risks. The Environmental Protection Agency decided the ban was "an unnecessary barrier to redevelopment (and) may actually delay the clean-up of contaminated properties," according to an internal memo issued last month to advise agency staff of the change. ... The decision, already in effect, has not been made public. It is being treated as a "new interpretation" of existing law, according to the memo, which was obtained by USA TODAY. As such, no public comment was required. ... The policy shift does not affect cleanup standards and liability rules for PCB sites. The memo says the change is needed to resolve cases in which buyers want to clean up PCB-fouled sites that are owned by people who lack the money or ability to do it. ... But the EPA already allowed its regional offices to waive the ban on selling PCB-contaminated land when a buyer is willing to clean it up. Regional officials say that process slowed the transfer of a few properties but generally worked.

Complaints about nonexistent red tape seem to be a popular tactic in the Bush administration -- they also feature prominently in the rationale for the Healthy Forests Initiative. It's a tricky strategy, and nearly fooled me here -- until I got toward the end of the article and saw that the red tape wasn't a real problem, I was willing to give this policy change the benefit of the doubt.

I was still suspicious, though, because of the secrecy involved in this change. Ordinarily it would suggest that the administration has something it wants to hide, and expected a public comment period and publicity for the proposal would not bring accolades. On the other hand, this administration seems to have a genetic demand for secrecy, so it could perhaps be due as much to habit as to a rational calculation of the consequences in this particular case.

I think there's something of a connection between the two elements of secrecy and aversion to red tape. In Max Weber's terminology of bureaucratic versus charismatic governance, Bush comes down squarely on the side of charisma. It was apparent in the 2000 campaign, when his supporters favorably contrasted his "character" to Al Gore's obsession with policy detail. It paid off handsomely when, after September 11, he was able to connect with Americans as a strong but comforting father figure rather than winning them over with a rational and effective plan for combatting terrorism (though many would argue that he did subsequently come up with that, too). He was famously able to judge Vladimir Putin's soul by a fact-to-face meeting with the Russian president, rather than an analysis of his acts in office.

Beyond his personal charisma, Bush has a personality-based, rather than institutionalized, method of getting things done. It's well known that one of the things he prizes above all else in advisors is their personal loyalty. He wants to work through connections, not formal procedures. This is (at least part of) why he has such aversion to red tape, of which public disclosure/freedom of information requirements are a subset. "Red tape" is a pejorative (sometimes accurately so) term for institutional constraints on the actions of the powerful. Such restraints exist because the personal integrity of our leadership can't always be trusted -- at the most basic level, this is the "liberal" in "liberal democracy". Bush is frustrated by these formalities. He would restrain the abuses of the powerful not by explicit procedures but by a shared implicit morality. It's the obvious rawness of the formal standards, their existence as external constraints rather than internal motivations, that is the problem.

This, I think, is the center of the difference between the small-government tendencies of social conservatism and of libertarianism. Various social theorists, notably Louis Althusser and Anthony Giddens (who nevertheless disagreed about much else), tended to divide social forces into three camps -- politics, economics, and ideology. Politics are those forces that revolve around physical coercion, or the threat thereof. Economics are those forces that arise out of incentives arising from access to resources. Ideology (intended here in a non-pejorative sense) is those forces that are rooted in people's beliefs. As a quick example, if you want to keep me off of your property, a political solution might be to hire a guard, an economic solution might be to pay me to keep out, and an ideological solution might be to convince me that God doesn't want me to tresspass.

Both libertarians and conservatives have a distrust of the domestic use of political forces (since even the most seemingly benign regulations are backed by the threat of a court imposing a coercive punishment). But without political force, what keeps society in line? Libertarians place great confidence in economic forces -- that social order will arise spontaneously out of people's pursuit of scarce resources, so long as political force on the part of citizens or the government is kept at a minimum. There's a quasi-Darwinian logic in that anyone who strays too far will fail, like an out-competed company, and thus we're in a sense coerced by the threat of poverty into playing by the rules (a consequentialist system, as opposed to the short-term moralizing inherent in political justice). For this reason, libertarians are able to be "civil libertarians" -- that is, to grant broad freedom in matters of ideology such as freedom of speech or religion. Conservatives, on the other hand, place more confidence in ideology. Ideology acts as a sort of internalized coercion that keeps people wanting to be on the straight and narrow. When ideology is supreme, politics becomes unneccessary -- and thus conservatives are happy with rolling back those political regulations that they feel are superseded by people's ideological trustworthiness (as, for example, the trustworthiness of ordinary people to take care of their environments). In the short term, however, they often depend on an application of politics -- such as state-sponsored religion and moralizing legislation -- to cultivate the necessary ideology.
Stentor Danielson, 11:53,

2.9.03

Screw you, environmentalists

Paul Bunyan Or Big Timber All too often in the media we see loggers and environmentalists at odds with one another. Where the environmentalists see the machinations of Big Timber, they lash out at the loggers, and thereby catch their blue-collar counterparts in a complex quandary - like my father, perhaps they don't support clear cutting and realize that, without working more towards sustainability, this will lead to the ultimate destruction of their own livelihoods. But all too often the immediate needs outweighs concerns for the future - they need work and Big Timber provides their jobs. Perhaps both environmentalists and loggers should meet halfway, like my father and I did, and promote sustainable logging, jobs for loggers, and a more responsible timber industry that works for people and not solely for profit.

This article gives a nice synopsis of the way Bush's Healthy Forests Initiative serves the needs of the logging industry under the guise of serving the needs of the environment and communities vulnerable to fire. It closes with the nice paragraph above reminding us that often (though not always) the people directly engaged with the environment understand how to care for it, even if they can't do the right thing because of larger political and economic structures.

The article also raises the point that current logging practices are not sustainable. This is bad not just for the environment and the loggers, but by extension the logging companies as well -- which raises the question of why they would push for something that enables them to ruin themselves. One possibility is simple shortsightedness. I don't think that's the whole story, since the loggers at least seem to see the long term, so you'd think it would have occurred to the higher-ups as well (one of the advantages of old-fashioned vertical promotion, instead of the increasingly popular horizontal movement between similar jobs at different companies, is that management would always have the experience and perspective of one of the grunts). And it would be in the company's best interest to take such a perspective -- if company A carefully husbands its resources, it can blow companies B and C out of the water once they waste all their resources on unsustainable practices.

The counter to that is that perhaps companies B and C would run company A out of business through their unsustainable practices, so that it wouldn't last long enough to reap the rewards of its stewardship. This is a sort of "ruthless cutthroat logic of capitalism" argument. I'm not so sure that this is the whole story either. It seems that in this case it would be in any company's interest to have environmental standards in place across the board that would restrain both themselves, and their competitors, from being unsustainably ruthless. This kind of thing seems quite possible in the US (though not in some other country where you'd always have to worry about your competitor getting a special deal from their cronies in the government), especially if the timber companies have some sort of industry council that they can work collectively through.

I think an element in the question is the nature of the timber company versus environmentalists debate. Just as environmentalists get tricked into seeing loggers as the enemy even when they're not, timber companies and those who try to support them can get tricked into being more anti-environmentalist than pro-logging. They start to assume that whatever the environmentalists want must be bad for logging. This kind of thinking works fine in most political issues, when the two sides want directly opposing things (e.g. no access to abortions versus lots of access to abortions). Environmentalists* oppose not logging (or any other industry environmentalists oppose) per se, but a side effect of logging. But so long as the two sides are seen as head-to-head, neither is able to see the insights the other has to offer about pursuing their goals together. Moreover, they begin to do things more to strike a blow at the enemy than to advance their real interests. I think the ethos of "those environmentalists can't tell us where we can and can't log/drill/mine" is sometimes as important in shaping environmentally destructive practice, particularly legislatively, as is rational economic calculation. Sustainable forestry comes off as capituation to environmentalism rather than a practice that's good for both the timber industry and the environment.

*An important thing to note about the environmentalists in my post and the original article is that they're of the pragmatic anthropocentric-conservationist bent, which makes up the bulk of environmentalists. Hardcore biocentrists and ecocentrists would be less able to make the kinds of reconciliation at issue here.
Stentor Danielson, 21:43,

Better news from Central Asia

Uzbek workers have gone on strike, demanding the crazy socialist policy of actually paying people their wages. The authorities squashed it, but the fact that the strike even happens suggests that Uzbeks are fed up with what has been essentially thirteen more years of Soviet-style rule. I suppose it's too much to hope that the US puts some pressure on Islam Karimov to pay attention to the message from his people.
Stentor Danielson, 18:01,

Salvaging the Aral

Kazaks To Dam Shrinking Aral In the last 50 years the Aral [Sea] has dried up to a fraction of its original size. It has divided into two parts, the northern one inside Kazakstan and the bigger southern section largely in Uzbekistan. Soviet irrigation projects which drew off much of the water from the Aral's principal sources, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, are largely to blame for the crisis. ... Since January, engineers have been working on a dyke which they hope will contain the northern section, located in Kazakstan. Together with technology to regulate the flow of the Syr Darya, which runs through Kazak territory into the northern Aral, scientists think water levels could even begin rising, allowing the fishing industry to revive. ... Local people are all too familiar with the winds which carry poisonous dust from the dead seabed over hundreds of kilometres, creating a salty white mist. Kazak scientists say constant exposure to the salts and pollutants in the air and soil reduces people's immunity and leads to widespread disease. Respiratory illnesses among children are increasing fast. The poverty caused by the economic consequences of the disappearing Aral makes people even more prone to sickness.

It's depressing that it's come to this, and I'm suspicious of turning to yet more massive engineering projects to fix a problem that was caused by massive engineering projects (Soviet irrigation schemes) and allowed to continue by the hope of yet more massive engineering projects (the SibAral Canal, that would have diverted part of the Ob river into Central Asia and thus supposedly fix everything). But perhaps a smaller, more manageable project like saving the northern half of the sea (i.e., the stuff that happens after the dam is done) will help lay the groundwork for reviving the whole thing. The consequences of the pollution and salt on the dry bed of the sea suggest that the only real long-term solution is to restore the entire sea to near-pre-Soviet levels.
Stentor Danielson, 17:54,

Blackouts, terrorism, and wildfires

One of the elements that made the Northeast blackout a few weeks back so catastrophic was the widespread interconnection of modern life. A transmission problem in Cleveland brought down not just that city's power, but power across the region. And without power, other services -- transportation, water, food provision, etc. -- broke down as well. Thus one of the suggestions proposed later was a greater decentralization of the power supply. This same interconnection is at the heart of many fears about terrorism. While the blackout was, of course, not due to terrorism, it's far from inconceivable that a terrorist could execute a similar attack on some element of the nation's (or world's) infrastructure, sending problems cascading through the system with just a small disruption. This interconnection thus is part of the increasing power that even an individual may be able to wield. Whereas a hunter-gatherer of a few thousand years ago would have been hard-pressed to kill even a handful of people, and could do little lasting damage to social systems, a modern-day terrorist could change the fate of the world. Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's awful novel Vril: The Power Of The Coming Race predicted that, when everyone had infinite power, a truce of peace would result. Instead, today we fear being held hostage by a few extremists with great power.

Ecological dangers usually seem to work quite differently. No single person can trigger, for example, global warming -- it can only happen by the accumulated emissions of billions of people over decades. It's similar with overfishing, or soil erosion. But a dynamic closer to that of the blackout seems to be operating in the case of catastrophic wildfires (or possibly certain types of GM catastrophe that resemble the release of an alien organism, a sort of biotech cane toad scenario). While all of nature is interconnected, in a healthy state it is characterized by certain negative feedbacks that contain changes. But an unhealthy ecosystem, such as a forest with a buildup of fuel, creates the possibility of wide-reaching cascading change. One careless campfire could light a whole state on fire. This means that every individual is suddenly crucial. We can't ignore outliers, considering them to be extremists made impotent by their lack of numbers. The case of wildfire is potentially more catastrophic because the system that the fire cascades through is not a human one. In the case of the blackout, many areas were saved from losing power because there was intimate human involvement in the system, allowing the cascade to be cut off. Certainly the fire-susceptibility of the ecosystem is shaped by humans. But humans are not an integral part of it, able to dynamically alter it as changes occur in order to quarrantine hazards. At best we can set up a self-quarrantining system, in which, for example, a patchwork of previously de-fueled areas keep any one spark from spreading very far, reducing the destructive power of the few careless individuals.
Stentor Danielson, 17:35,

Yard sale someday

With Fox News' lawsuit against Al Franken dead, the "fair and balanced" frenzy has died down. Meanwhile, I'm becoming annoyed by the presence of signs for yard sales that are taped to poles around Worcester. They all say "yard sale today," yet they've been there for upwards of a week. So either some people are having a very long yard sale, or they couldn't be bothered to either a) write an actual date on their sign, or b) take their sign down once the sale was over. So, it's off to the kiosk for people who don't take their yard sale signs down.
Stentor Danielson, 17:08,

1.9.03

Yaccs is broken

Hopefully my comments will be back soon.
Stentor Danielson, 12:30,

Bush the pragmatist?

Matthew Yglesias makes a more philosophical version of the "my opponents live in a fantasy world that reinforces their own preconceptions" argument:

My own take is that Bushian metaphysics have more in common with the naive pragmatism of William James' "Will to Believe" than with anything more properly postmodern. The idea is not that truth is indeterminate, or infinitely flexible, but rather that it's determined by an overall assessment of the belief's utility to the believer.

Though I haven't read "Will To Believe" (though I've read about it, and read other pragmatist literature including James' Pragmatism and Varieties of Religious Experience), I think the idea of Bushian* conceptions of Iraq illustrate the failures of vulgar pragmatism as compared to full-fledged pragmatism.

Vulgar pragmatism concerns the psychological utility of a belief -- a belief is justified if you want to believe it, or if it makes you happy to believe it. Full-fledged pragmatism, on the other hand, concerns the practical utility of a belief -- a belief is justified if it enables you to successfully interact with the world around you. There is a psychological element to full-fledged pragmatism, of course -- a belief isn't very useful if it's too complicated to understand, for example. But psychology is not the only element, whereas it is in vulgar pragmatism.

By the prevailing liberal take on the situation in Iraq (I'm hedging because I'm still not up to speed on the situation after my summer quasi-hiatus, so I'm relying on the judgement of bloggers I trust), the Bush administration has been engaging in some vulgar pragmatism. They want to believe that Saddam was a grave threat to the world, that Iraqis want to be liberated by American soldiers, that the reconstruction of Iraq is proceeding successfully, and so forth. So they selectively use information, trust exiles who tell them what they want to hear, ignore or hand-wave setbacks, and so forth. They alter their assessment of reality to the one most congenial to their (short-term) psychological satisfaction.

However, one of the key points made by full-fledged pragmatists is that if your beliefs get too far out of whack, reality will bite you in the rear (a sort of optimistically Darwinian idea of truth, in which holders of erroneous beliefs are weeded out by their failure to act successfully within the world). And that seems to be happening in Iraq -- the problems of the Bushian belief have led the administration to fail to accomplish its stated goals in Iraq. For example, the belief that Iraqis would welcome America with open arms led them to neglect planning for the postwar phase, and to alienate allies who could provide much-needed resources for the reconstruction. Soldiers in Iraq with Bushian views must be finding it harder and harder to maintain them as those views prove themselves not to be conducive to successful action within the Iraqi environment.

But the original pragmatists underestimated the human capacity for convincing oneself that one hasn't been bitten by reality. This is especially true for the administration's leaders, who are sheltered from reality's bite by their distance from the battlefield. (This point was essentially the point of my undergrad senior thesis on the failure of Soviet agriculture. In hindsight, my thesis was basically an attempt to create pragmatism and structuration theory from scratch, since I hadn't yet encountered John Dewey or Anthony Giddens.) What's more likely to bite Bush is the domestic political failure of his beliefs. He can fool himself about how well his views have allowed him to rebuild Iraq, but it's much harder to pretend that they enabled him to win reelection if the failure of his Iraq policy turns voters against him.

*Or would it more properly be "Bushist"? This is like the "Marxist" vs. "Marxian" distinction that I've never been able to make head or tails of -- at best it seems some of Marx's followers prefer "-ian" because "-ist" suggests a quasi-religious rigid ideology.
Stentor Danielson, 12:24,

31.8.03

Those crazy Finns

Man Of Principle Will Not Touch Euro Notes Or Coins [74-year-old Helge] Kaalikoski has not laid one finger on a euro note or coin during the twenty months that the common European currency has been legal tender in Finland. Kaalikoski spends his days in retirement along the shores of Lake Päijänne in Asikkala. He needs to leave the peace and quiet of his rocky cape every now and then to attend to some business in the nearest city, Lahti. Once he gets there, he must park his red Lada somewhere. But as Kaalikoski cannot handle euros, he puts no money in the parking meters. In the windscreen of the Lada, Kaalikoski leaves a notice for parking inspectors, listing the facts: the legal tender in Finland is the markka. There is no law on the euro, and Kaalikoski is a law-abiding citizen who does not use this currency. In the event that he receives a parking ticket, he will not pay it. The notice is politely signed below.

Stentor Danielson, 16:50,