Nosimpler

Who really matters in our democracy — the general public, or wealthy elites? That's the topic of a new study by political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern. The study's been getting lots of attention, because the authors conclude, basically, that the US is a corrupt oligarchy where ordinary voters barely matter...

The Vox link discusses these conclusions in some detail.  This graph shows the probability of a policy being adopted by the U.S. vs the percentage of the general population that agrees with the policy:

And this one shows the approval probability vs the preferences of the economic elite and special interest groups:

The study is here.  This from their Abstract:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

From the collections of the Musée "Bible et Terre Sainte" -

This stone mask from the pre-ceramic neolithic period dates to 7000 BCE and is probably the oldest mask in the world.

Happy Halloween to all.

Via Unexplained Spoopies.

Today I want to tell you guys about core-econ.org, a free (although you do have to register) textbook my buddy Suresh Naidu is using this semester to teach out of and is also contributing to, along with a bunch of other economists.

It’s super cool, and I wish a class like that had been available when I was an undergrad. In fact I took an economics course at UC Berkeley and it was a bad experience – I couldn’t figure out why anyone would think that people behaved according to arbitrary mathematical rules. There was no discussion of whether the assumptions were valid, no data to back it up. I decided that anybody who kept going had to be either religious or willing to say anything for money.

Not much has changed, and that means that Econ 101 is a terrible gateway for the subject, letting in people who are mostly kind of weird. This is a shame because, later on in graduate level economics, there really is no reason to use toy models of society without argument and without data; the sky’s the limit when you get through the bullshit at the beginning. The goal of the Core Econ project is to give students a taste for the good stuff early; the subtitle on the webpage is teaching economics as if the last three decades happened.

What does that mean? Let’s take a look at the first few chapters of the curriculum (the full list is here):

1. The capitalist revolution
2. Innovation and the transition from stagnation to rapid growth
3. Scarcity, work and progress
4. Strategy, altruism and cooperation
5. Property, contract and power
6. The firm and its employees
7. The firm and its customers

Once you register, you can download a given chapter in pdf form. So I did that for Chapter 6, The firm and its employees, and here’s a screenshot of the first page:

The chapter immediately dives into a discussion of Apple and Foxconn. Interesting! Topical! Like, it might actually help you understand the newspaper!! Can you imagine that?

The project is still in beta version, so give it some time to smooth out the rough edges, but I’m pretty excited about it already. It has super high production values and will squarely compete with the standard textbooks and curriculums, which is a good thing, both because it’s good stuff and because it’s free.

(Reuters) - The U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday voted overwhelmingly for the 23rd time to condemn the decades-long U.S. economic embargo against Cuba, with many nations praising the island state for its response in fighting the deadly Ebola virus that is ravaging West Africa. 

In the 193-nation assembly, 188 countries voted for the nonbinding resolution, titled "Necessity of Ending the Economic, Commercial and Financial Embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba."

As in previous years, the only countries that voted against the declaration were the United States and an ally, Israel...

While the General Assembly's vote is nonbinding and symbolic, it serves to highlight U.S. isolation regarding Havana. It is one of very few issues where all of Washington's Western allies part ways with the United States...

Washington broke diplomatic ties and imposed a comprehensive trade embargo on the Communist-run Caribbean island more than half a century ago during the Cold War. Its policy today appears to be influenced by domestic politics in Florida, where Cuban exiles have opposed any conciliation with former President Fidel Castro or current President Raul Castro, who took over for his brother in 2008. 

This ludicrous policy has been maintained now for about 50 years.  Presumably by now the Kennedy family has smoked all of the 1,200 Cuban cigars JFK imported right before he imposed the ban on commerce.

The energy lost by electrons passing through a material can reveal the symmetry of individual molecules inside the sample.

Published Wed Oct 29, 2014

Nature Neuroscience 17, 1500 (2014). doi:10.1038/nn.3776

Authors: John P Cunningham & Byron M Yu

Author(s): Bastiaan Florijn, Corentin Coulais, and Martin van Hecke

Squeezing a holey rubber slab changes its stiffness over a wide range in the direction perpendicular to the squeeze.

[Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 175503] Published Fri Oct 24, 2014

Neuroscience: How curiosity enhances learning

Nature 514, 7521 (2014). doi:10.1038/514143b

Curiosity boosts people's ability to learn and retain new information, thanks to key reward and memory centres in the brain.Matthias Gruber and his colleagues at the University of California, Davis asked volunteers to rate their level of curiosity for a series of trivia questions,

A new microscope allows three-dimensional imaging of living systems at very high resolution in real time. Authors: Bi-Chang Chen, Wesley R. Legant, Kai Wang, Lin Shao, Daniel E. Milkie, Michael W. Davidson, Chris Janetopoulos, Xufeng S. Wu, John A. Hammer, Zhe Liu, Brian P. English, Yuko Mimori-Kiyosue, Daniel P. Romero, Alex T. Ritter, Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, Lillian Fritz-Laylin, R. Dyche Mullins, Diana M. Mitchell, Joshua N. Bembenek, Anne-Cecile Reymann, Ralph Böhme, Stephan W. Grill, Jennifer T. Wang, Geraldine Seydoux, U. Serdar Tulu, Daniel P. Kiehart, Eric Betzig

(updated below – Update II)

TORONTO – In Quebec on Monday, two Canadian soldiers were hit by a car driven by Martin Couture-Rouleau, a 25-year-old Canadian who, as The Globe and Mail reported, “converted to Islam recently and called himself Ahmad Rouleau.” One of the soldiers died, as did Couture-Rouleau when he was shot by police upon apprehension after allegedly brandishing a large knife. Police speculated that the incident was deliberate, alleging the driver waited for two hours before hitting the soldiers, one of whom was wearing a uniform. The incident took place in the parking lot of a shopping mall 30 miles southeast of Montreal, “a few kilometres from the Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean, the military academy operated by the Department of National Defence.”

The right-wing Canadian government wasted no time in seizing on the incident to promote its fear-mongering agenda over terrorism, which includes pending legislation to vest its intelligence agency, CSIS, with more spying and secrecy powers in the name of fighting ISIS. A government spokesperson asserted “clear indications” that the driver “had become radicalized.”

In a “clearly prearranged exchange,” a conservative MP, during parliamentary question time, asked Prime Minister Stephen Harper (pictured above) whether this was considered a “terrorist attack”; in reply, the prime minister gravely opined that the incident was “obviously extremely troubling.” Canada’s Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney pronounced the incident “clearly linked to terrorist ideology,” while newspapers predictably followed suit, calling it a “suspected terrorist attack” and “homegrown terrorism.” CSIS spokesperson Tahera Mufti said “the event was the violent expression of an extremist ideology promoted by terrorist groups with global followings” and added: “That something like this would happen in a peaceable Canadian community like Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu shows the long reach of these ideologies.”

In sum, the national mood and discourse in Canada is virtually identical to what prevails in every Western country whenever an incident like this happens: shock and bewilderment that someone would want to bring violence to such a good and innocent country (“a peaceable Canadian community like Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu”), followed by claims that the incident shows how primitive and savage is the “terrorist ideology” of extremist Muslims, followed by rage and demand for still more actions of militarism and freedom-deprivation. There are two points worth making about this:

First, Canada has spent the last 13 years proclaiming itself a nation at war. It actively participated in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and was an enthusiastic partner in some of the most extremist War on Terror abuses perpetrated by the U.S. Earlier this month, the Prime Minister revealed, with the support of a large majority of Canadians, that “Canada is poised to go to war in Iraq, as [he] announced plans in Parliament [] to send CF-18 fighter jets for up to six months to battle Islamic extremists.” Just yesterday, Canadian Defence Minister Rob Nicholson flamboyantly appeared at the airfield in Alberta from which the fighter jets left for Iraq and stood tall as he issued the standard Churchillian war rhetoric about the noble fight against evil.

It is always stunning when a country that has brought violence and military force to numerous countries acts shocked and bewildered when someone brings a tiny fraction of that violence back to that country. Regardless of one’s views on the justifiability of Canada’s lengthy military actions, it’s not the slightest bit surprising or difficult to understand why people who identify with those on the other end of Canadian bombs and bullets would decide to attack the military responsible for that violence.

That’s the nature of war. A country doesn’t get to run around for years wallowing in war glory, invading, rendering and bombing others, without the risk of having violence brought back to it. Rather than being baffling or shocking, that reaction is completely natural and predictable. The only surprising thing about any of it is that it doesn’t happen more often.

The issue here is not justification (very few people would view attacks on soldiers in a shopping mall parking lot to be justified). The issue is causation. Every time one of these attacks occurs — from 9/11 on down — Western governments pretend that it was just some sort of unprovoked, utterly “senseless” act of violence caused by primitive, irrational, savage religious extremism inexplicably aimed at a country innocently minding its own business. They even invent fairy tales to feed to the population to explain why it happens: they hate us for our freedoms.

Those fairy tales are pure deceit. Except in the rarest of cases, the violence has clearly identifiable and easy-to-understand causes: namely, anger over the violence that the country’s government has spent years directing at others. The statements of those accused by the west of terrorism, and even the Pentagon’s own commissioned research, have made conclusively clear what motivates these acts: namely, anger over the violence, abuse and interference by Western countries in that part of the world, with the world’s Muslims overwhelmingly the targets and victims. The very policies of militarism and civil liberties erosions justified in the name of stopping terrorism are actually what fuels terrorism and ensures its endless continuation.

If you want to be a country that spends more than a decade proclaiming itself at war and bringing violence to others, then one should expect that violence will sometimes be directed at you as well. Far from being the by-product of primitive and inscrutable religions, that behavior is the natural reaction of human beings targeted with violence. Anyone who doubts that should review the 13-year orgy of violence the U.S. has unleashed on the world since the 9/11 attack, as well as the decades of violence and interference from the U.S. in that region prior to that.

Second, in what conceivable sense can this incident be called a “terrorist” attack? As I have written many times over the last several years, and as some of the best scholarship proves, “terrorism” is a word utterly devoid of objective or consistent meaning. It is little more than a totally malleable, propagandistic fear-mongering term used by Western governments (and non-Western ones) to justify whatever actions they undertake. As Professor Tomis Kapitan wrote in a brilliant essay in The New York Times on Monday: “Part of the success of this rhetoric traces to the fact that there is no consensus about the meaning of ‘terrorism.’”

But to the extent the term has any common understanding, it includes the deliberate (or wholly reckless) targeting of civilians with violence for political ends. But in this case in Canada, it wasn’t civilians who were targeted. If one believes the government’s accounts of the incident, the driver waited two hours until he saw a soldier in uniform. In other words, he seems to have deliberately avoided attacking civilians, and targeted a soldier instead – a member of a military that is currently fighting a war.

Again, the point isn’t justifiability. There is a compelling argument to make that undeployed soldiers engaged in normal civilian activities at home are not valid targets under the laws of war (although the U.S. and its closest allies use extremely broad and permissive standards for what constitutes legitimate military targets when it comes to their own violence). The point is that targeting soldiers who are part of a military fighting an active war is completely inconsistent with the common usage of the word “terrorism,” and yet it is reflexively applied by government officials and media outlets to this incident in Canada (and others like it in the UK and the US).

That’s because the most common functional definition of “terrorism” in Western discourse is quite clear. At this point, it means little more than: “violence directed at Westerners by Muslims” (when not used to mean “violence by Muslims,” it usually just means: violence the state dislikes). The term “terrorism” has become nothing more than a rhetorical weapon for legitimizing all violence by Western countries, and delegitimizing all violence against them, even when the violence called “terrorism” is clearly intended as retaliation for Western violence.

This is about far more than semantics. It is central to how the west propagandizes its citizenries; the manipulative use of the “terrorism” term lies at heart of that. As Professor Kapitan wrote yesterday in The New York Times:

Even when a definition is agreed upon, the rhetoric of “terror” is applied both selectively and inconsistently. In the mainstream American media, the “terrorist” label is usually reserved for those opposed to the policies of the U.S. and its allies. By contrast, some acts of violence that constitute terrorism under most definitions are not identified as such — for instance, the massacre of over 2000 Palestinian civilians in the Beirut refugee camps in 1982 or the killings of more than 3000 civilians in Nicaragua by “contra” rebels during the 1980s, or the genocide that took the lives of at least a half million Rwandans in 1994. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some actions that do not qualify as terrorism are labeled as such — that would include attacks by Hamas, Hezbollah or ISIS, for instance, against uniformed soldiers on duty.

Historically, the rhetoric of terror has been used by those in power not only to sway public opinion, but to direct attention away from their own acts of terror.

At this point, “terrorism” is the term that means nothing, but justifies everything. It is long past time that media outlets begin skeptically questioning its usage by political officials rather than mindlessly parroting it.

Photo: AP/The Canadian Press, Adrian Wyld

UPDATE: Multiple conservative commentators have claimed that this article and my subsequent discussion of it are about this morning’s shooting of a solider in Ottawa. Aside from the fact that what I wrote is expressly about a completely different incident – one that took place in Quebec on Monday – this article and my comments were published before this morning’s shooting spree was reported. So unless someone believes I possess powers of clairvoyance, the claim that I was commenting on the Ottawa shooting – about which virtually nothing is known, including the identity and motive of the shooter(s) – is obviously false.

Then there’s also the extremely predictable accusation that I was justifying the attack on the soldiers. I know from prior experience in discussing these questions that no matter how clear you make it that you are writing about causation and not justification, many will still distort what you write to claim you’ve justified the attack. That’s true even if one makes as clear as the English language permits that you’re not writing about justification: “The issue here is not justification (very few people would view attacks on soldiers in a shopping mall parking lot to be justified). The issue is causation.” If there’s a way to make that any clearer, please let me know.

One more time: the difference between “causation” and “justification” is so obvious that it should require no explanation. If one observes that someone who smokes four packs of cigarettes a day can expect to develop emphysema, that’s an observation about causation, not a celebration of the person’s illness. Only a willful desire to distort, or some deep confusion, can account for a failure to process this most basic point.

UPDATE II: In that brilliant essay I referenced above, published just three days ago in The New York Times, Professor Tomis Kapitan made this point:

Obviously, to point out the causes and objectives of particular terrorist actions is to imply nothing about their legitimacy — that is an independent matter….

That point is so simple and, as he said, “obvious” that I have a hard time understanding what could account for some commentators conflating the two other than a willful desire to mislead.

The post Canada, At War For 13 Years, Shocked That ‘A Terrorist’ Attacked Its Soldiers appeared first on The Intercept.

Networks often represent systems that do not have a long history of studies in traditional fields of physics, albeit there are some notable exceptions such as energy landscapes and quantum gravity. Here we consider networks that naturally arise in cosmology. Nodes in these networks are stationary observers uniformly distributed in an expanding open FLRW universe with any scale factor, and two observers are connected if one can causally influence the other. We show that these networks are growing Lorentz-invariant graphs with power-law distributions of node degrees. These networks encode maximum information about the observable universe available to a given observer.

Take a look at this paper by Solon Barocas and Andrew D. Selbst entitled Big Data’s Disparate Impact.

It deals with the question of whether current anti-discrimination law is equipped to handle the kind of unintentional discrimination and digital redlining we see emerging in some “big data” models (and that we suspect are hidden in a bunch more). See for example this post for more on this concept.

The short answer is no, our laws are not equipped.

Here’s the abstract:

This article addresses the potential for disparate impact in the data mining processes that are taking over modern-day business. Scholars and policymakers had, until recently, focused almost exclusively on data mining’s capacity to hide intentional discrimination, hoping to convince regulators to develop the tools to unmask such discrimination. Recently there has been a noted shift in the policy discussions, where some have begun to recognize that unintentional discrimination is a hidden danger that might be even more worrisome. So far, the recognition of the possibility of unintentional discrimination lacks technical and theoretical foundation, making policy recommendations difficult, where they are not simply misdirected. This article provides the necessary foundation about how data mining can give rise to discrimination and how data mining interacts with anti-discrimination law.

The article carefully steps through the technical process of data mining and points to different places within the process where a disproportionately adverse impact on protected classes may result from innocent choices on the part of the data miner. From there, the article analyzes these disproportionate impacts under Title VII. The Article concludes both that Title VII is largely ill equipped to address the discrimination that results from data mining. Worse, due to problems in the internal logic of data mining as well as political and constitutional constraints, there appears to be no easy way to reform Title VII to fix these inadequacies. The article focuses on Title VII because it is the most well developed anti-discrimination doctrine, but the conclusions apply more broadly because they are based on the general approach to anti-discrimination within American law.

I really appreciate this paper, because it’s an area I know almost nothing about: discrimination law and what are the standards for evidence of discrimination.

Sadly, what this paper explains to me is how very far we are away from anything resembling what we need to actually address the problems. For example, even in this paper, where the writers are well aware that training on historical data can unintentionally codify discriminatory treatment, they still seem to assume that the people who build and deploy models will “notice” this treatment. From my experience working in advertising, that’s not actually what happens. We don’t measure the effects of our models on our users. We only see whether we have gained an edge in terms of profit, which is very different.

Essentially, as modelers, we don’t humanize the people on the other side of the transaction, which prevents us from worrying about discrimination or even being aware of it as an issue. It’s so far from “intentional” that it’s almost a ridiculous accusation to make. Even so, it may well be a real problem and I don’t know how we as a society can deal with it unless we update our laws.

Author(s): G. Vittorini, D. Hucul, I. V. Inlek, C. Crocker, and C. Monroe

Time-resolved photon detection can be used to generate entanglement between distinguishable photons. This technique can be extended to entangle quantum memories that emit photons with different frequencies and identical temporal profiles without the loss of entanglement rate or fidelity. We experime...

[Phys. Rev. A 90, 040302(R)] Published Fri Oct 10, 2014

Author(s): Olaf Stenull and T. C. Lubensky

The elastic and vibrational properties of randomized Penrose tilings - lattices exhibiting 5-fold symmetry - are shown to be similar to those of jammed sphere systems.

[Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 158301] Published Mon Oct 06, 2014

I am somewhat surprised to hear myself say this, but this month’s Notices of the AMS is killing it. Generally speaking I think of it as rather narrowly focused but things seem to be expanding and picking up. Scanning the list of editors, they do seem to have quite a few people that want to address wider public issues that touch and are touched by mathematicians.

First, there’s an article about how the h-rank of an author is basically just the square root of the number of citations for that author. It’s called Critique of Hirsch’s Citation Index: A Combinatorial Fermi Problem and it’s written by Alexander Yong. Doesn’t surprised me too much, but there you go, people often fall in love with new fancy metrics that turn out to be simple transformations of old discarded metrics.

Second, and even more interesting to me, there’s an article that explains the mathematical vapidness of a widely cited social science paper. It’s called Does Diversity Trump Ability? An Example of the Misuse of Mathematics in the Social Sciences and it’s written by Abby Thompson. My favorite part of paper:

 

Oh, and here’s another excellent take-down of a part of that paper:

 

Let me just take this moment to say, right on, Notices of the AMS! And of course, right on Alexander Yong and Abby Thompson!

Excerpts from an Associated Press article published in the somewhat-agriculture-oriented StarTribune:

A weed strong enough to stop combines and resist many herbicides has been confirmed in South Dakota for the first time, raising concerns it could spread and cut deeply into crop production in the Upper Midwest — one of the few areas it hadn't yet invaded.

The threat from palmer amaranth is so great that officials in North Dakota have named it the weed of the year, even though it has yet to be found in the state.

"If you think you find plants — kill it!" North Dakota State University Extension Weed Specialist Rich Zollinger said. "Don't even think. Just kill it."..

The weed some officials refer to as "Satan" has moved into the Midwest from cotton country, and was discovered in western Iowa soybean fields last year. It's native to desert regions of the southwest U.S. and northern Mexico... The plants can grow as tall as 7 feet, each one producing as much as a million seeds. Its stems can grow as thick as baseball bats...

"The big concern is, in Southern states, it has developed — quickly — resistance to a considerable amount of herbicides," Johnson said.

And a more measured viewpoint from the Wikipedia entry:

Amaranthus palmeri is a species of edible flowering plant in the amaranth genus. It has several common names, including Palmer's amaranth, Palmer amaranth, Palmer's pigweed, and carelessweed. It is native to most of the southern half of North America...

The leaves, stems and seeds of Palmer amaranth, like those of other amaranths, are edible and highly nutritious. Palmer amaranth was once widely cultivated and eaten by Native Americans across North America, both for its abundant seeds and as a cooked or dried green vegetable. Other related Amaranthus species have been grown as crops for their greens and seeds for thousands of years in Mexico, South America, the Caribbean, Africa, India, and China. The plant can be toxic to livestock animals...

Palmer amaranth is considered a threat most specifically to the production of genetically modified cotton and soybean crops in the southern United States because in many places, the plant has developed resistance to glyphosate.

Photo by FireFlyForest, via Eat The Weeds.

Bruges is trying something different:

The Belgian city of Bruges has approved plans to build a pipeline which will funnel beer underneath its famous cobbled streets.

Locals and politicians were fed up with huge lorries clattering through the cobbled streets and tiny canal paths of the picturesque city and decided to connect the De Halve Maan brewery to a bottling factory 3.2km (two miles) away.

It is estimated that some 500 trucks currently motor through Bruges each year on their way to the brewery, which is a famous tourist attraction.

Now they will be kept out of the city limits, as the pipe pumps 1,500 gallons of beer per hour. Construction is set to begin next year.

“The beer will take 10 to 15 minutes to reach the bottling plant,” said brewery CEO Xavier Vanneste. “By using the pipeline we will keep hundreds of lorries out of the city centre. This is unique in the brewing industry with exception of one German brewery that has installed a similar system.”

There is more here, and for the pointer I thank Samir Varma.

The front cover shows Dutch Boy, carrying his paint bucket, being greeted by a toy lead soldier, a shoe, a plate and a light bulb. The back cover features a hand that has made a broad brush stroke with the admonition "'Save the surface and you save all'; Paint & Varnish"... The first page shows the Dutch Boy talking to the lead soldier; it is followed by 14 images--7 in color and 7 in outline--of items that use lead. Items include a light bulb (lead glass), shoes and baseballs (lead in the rubber), and a bullet (entirely made of lead). Each outlined image was to be filled in using the complementary color image at its side as a guide.

Text via The Ethical Adman, where there is additional information; image via Sweet Dreams.

Not even sure what to say about this.

Obama administration officials repeatedly threatened the family of murdered journalist James Foley that they might face criminal charges for supporting terrorism if they paid ransom to the ISIS killers who ultimately beheaded their son, his mother and brother said this week.

Neocortical population activity varies between deactivated and activated states marked by the presence and absence of slow oscillations, respectively. Neocortex activation occurs during waking and vigilance and is readily induced in anesthetized animals by stimulating the brainstem reticular formation, basal forebrain, or thalamus. Neuromodulators are thought to be responsible for these changes in cortical activity, but their selective cortical effects (i.e., without actions in other brain areas) on neocortical population activity in vivo are not well defined. We found that selective cholinergic and noradrenergic stimulation of the barrel cortex produces well differentiated activated states in rats. Cholinergic cortical stimulation activates the cortex by abolishing synchronous slow oscillations and shifting firing to a tonic mode, which increases in rate at high doses. This shift causes the sensory thalamus itself to become activated. In contrast, noradrenergic cortical stimulation activates the cortex by abolishing synchronous slow oscillations but suppresses overall cortical firing rate, which deactivates the thalamus. Cortical activation produced by either of these neuromodulators leads to suppressed sensory responses and more focused receptive fields. High-frequency sensory stimuli are best relayed to barrel cortex during cortical cholinergic activation because this also activates the thalamus. Cortical neuromodulation sets different cortical and thalamic states that may serve to control sensory information processing according to behavioral contingencies.

OK, let’s take a break from blogging about economics. OK, I haven’t actually been blogging so much about econ lately, but it just happens that I’m writing this on 19 July, a day after poking a stick into the hornet’s nest by posting “Differences between econometrics and statistics: From varying treatment effects to utilities, economists seem to like models that are fixed in stone, while statisticians tend to be more comfortable with variation” (which in turn was on auto-post as I’d written it a couple months earlier).

As is often the case, I’m on the blog to procrastinate: in this case, my colleagues and I are preparing a new course and there’s tons of important work to be done. I’m getting tired of reading comments on economics and empiricism and so I scooted over to Basbøll’s blog and kicked off a brief comment thread about the academic entertainer Slavoj Zizek. At first I was going to post and continue that discussion here, but I don’t give too poops about Slavoj Zizek, so I followed Basbøll’s blogroll link to “Stupid Motivational Tricks” and right away found something interesting.

The something interesting that I found was a post by Jonathan Mayhew about someone who’s the poet laureate of North Carolina. I had no idea that an individual state would have a poet laureate but it seems like a good idea, a quite reasonable nearly cost-free thing to do, indeed it would be cool to have all sorts of official state art. In reading the post I was mildly irritated by Mayhew’s use of “NC” as a generic replacement for “North Carolina.” The abbreviation is fine in some contexts but I founn it a bit jarring to read, “The literary community of NC . . .” On the other hand, it’s just a goddam blog so I don’t know what I’m supposed to be expecting.

But I’m getting completely off the point here. What happened is that Mayhew quoted a couple of mediocre passages from poems by two of North Carolina’s poet laureates (apparently they just had a changing of the guard).

Mayhew’s reactions gave me some thoughts of my own regarding the purpose of poetry. I’ll first copy what he wrote and then give my reflections.

Mayhew quotes from the previous laureate:

“Joan and I were in Raleigh together
for the first time to take the tour
for new vista volunteers
at North Carolina’s Central Prison…”

and then shares his reaction:

Ouch. It’s fine to use seemingly plain language, etc… but no rhythm, nothing going on in the language. This kind of writing just causes physical pain to me.

Then he quotes from the recent laureate:

“I’m grateful for my car, he says,
voice raspy with hard living.
Tossed on the seat, a briefcase
covered with union stickers,
stuffed with unemployment forms,
want ads, old utility bills,
birth certificate, school application
papers for the skinny ten-year-old
sitting beside him who loves baseball…”

This he characterizes as worse than the first poem (“not much worse,” though), but I don’t quite understand where this ranking is coming from, given that he follows up with, “More is going on in her language, actually. It’s not exactly good, but it’s salvageable, with some concreteness there at least.”

I assume that we can all agree, though, that it’s hard to judge either poem, or either poet, by these short excerpts. Both excerpts radiate mediocrity but of course a bit of mediocrity can do the job in the context of a larger message. I’m pretty sure that, for almost any major poet, you could without much difficulty find passages that, if shown to me in isolation, would not sparkle and could indeed look a bit like hackwork. I mean, sure, “voice raspy with hard living” sounds cliched, but who among us does not grab a cliche from time to time. For all we know from this excerpt, the use of the cliche is part of the point in establishing the narrator’s voice.

OK, let me be clear here. I’m not trying to get all contrarian on you and praise these two poets. I have no problem giving Mayhew the benefit of the doubt, I’ll assume he read a bit by each of them and with these excerpts is giving something of a true sense of these poems’ style and content. So I will accept (until convinced otherwise) that these poets are indeed mediocre.

What is the purpose of a poem?

And this brings us to today’s topic. The thing that bothers me about Mayhew’s post (even though I have a feeling I’d agree with him 100% about the strengths and weaknesses of these poems, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we share many tastes about and attitudes toward literature) is the implicit attitude that I see there, which I feel I’ve seen in other discussions of poetry, which is that the purpose of a poem is to be wonderful.

Huh? “The purpose of a poem is to be wonderful.” That seems like a reasonable statement, no? Who could disagree with that?

To see my problem with this statement (which, to be fair, Mayhew never said, but which I see as implicit in his post), consider the related question, “What is the purpose of a novel?” Or, for that matter, what is the purpose of a research article? Or what is the purpose of a song?

My point is that I think it’s a bad attitude to think that the purpose of a poem is to be wonderful. It’s insulting to poetry to give it such a narrow range. A poem is a sort of song without music and, as such can have many different purposes.

OK, procrastination successful. An hour spent, now time for bed.

The post What is the purpose of a poem? appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

We study the dynamics of a single diffusing particle (a "man") with diffusivity $D_M$ that is attacked by another diffusing particle (a "mosquito") with fixed diffusivity $D_m$. Each time the mosquito meets and bites the man, the diffusivity of the man is reduced by a fixed amount, while the diffusivity of the mosquito is unchanged. The mosquito is also displaced by a small distance $\pm a$ with respect to the man after each encounter. The man is defined as dead when $D_M$ reaches zero. At the moment when the man dies, his probability distribution of displacements $x$ is given by a Cauchy form, which asymptotically decays as $x^{-2}$, while the distribution of times $t$ when the man dies asymptotically decays as $t^{-3/2}$, which has the same form as the one-dimensional first-passage probability.