The Daily Office:
Monday, 28 June 2010
Matins
¶ As proponents of the idea that “building to last” is nowhere near as desirable as “building to upgrade,” we’re piqued by Robin Sloan’s Snarkmarket entry, “Only Crash.” What begins as a sort of hygeinic principle for writing code swells out into this:
What else could we apply crash-only thinkÂing to? ImagÂine a crash-only govÂernÂment, where the tranÂsiÂtion between adminÂisÂtraÂtions is always a small revÂoÂluÂtion. In a sysÂtem like that, you’d optiÂmize for revolution—build buffers around it—and as a result, when a “real†revÂoÂluÂtion finally came, it’d be no big deal.
To this tempting pipe dream, Robin’s colleague Tim Carmody administers a well-chilled (if largely implicit) reminder (see the Comments) that most politicans are in it for the long haul, outcomes be damned.
SpeakÂing of polÂiÂtics, this reminds me of someÂthing Ezra Klein said back durÂing HCR debate, although I can’t find the link. PolitÂiÂcal parÂties like to try to engiÂneer “perÂmaÂnent majoriÂties.†And all the strucÂtural incenÂtives, from politiÂcians to staffers to lobÂbyÂists and fundraisÂers, push you in that direcÂtion. But if you look at hisÂtory, every party that has a majorÂity loses it, and loses it pretty quickly. The idea he pushed is that majoriÂties aren’t to be kept, but to be gained, used in the serÂvice of long-term goals of your party, and then lost. You lose seats, maybe you even lose power for a while, but you get health-care reform.
Lauds
¶ All we can think of is the Emperor’s New Clothes: Terry Teachout, having gotten his hands on a 1988 study entitled “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems,” began thinking that Modernism’s more complicated masterpieces might “never find an audience” because they take too long to apprehend. (About Last Night)
It immediately occurred to me when I read his paper that the same inborn limitations on intelligibility might apply to practitioners of other art forms–and no sooner did I come to that conclusion than I felt the first stirrings of a “Sightings” column for The Wall Street Journal.
Do click through to the WSJ piece. You wouldn’t want to miss the zinger at the end, James Joyce’s astonishing demand. We can remember when such imperatives were intimidating. Now, like those “new clothes,” they only seem grandiose.
Prime
¶ A Federal Reserve economist, Kartik Athreye, has brought down the wrath of the Blosophere upon himself by suggesting that “economics is hard” — and therefore not to be trusted to hoi polloi without advanced degrees. From the ensuing kerfuffle, Tyler Cowen sounds a truly grown-up note.
My view is a little different than Brad’s. I would say that economics is really, really, really, really, really, really, really hard. And that’s leaving out a few of the “reallys.”
It’s so hard that experts don’t always do it well. The experts are constantly prone to correction by non-experts, by practitioners, by people who are self-educated economic experts but not professional economists, and by people who know some economics and a lot about some other field(s). It is very often that we — at least some of us — are wrong and at least some of those other people are right. Furthermore those other people are often more meta-rational than a lot of professional economists.
That’s why, Mr Cowen concludes, he be lost without the real-world input of amateurs.
Tierce
¶ A word about “blind taste tests.” (You Are Not So Smart)
At first, the researchers thought they should put some sort of label on the glasses. So, they went with M and Q.
People said they liked Pepsi, labeled M, better than Coke, labeled Q.
Irritated by this, Coca-Cola did their own study and put Coke in both glasses. Again, M won the contest.
It turns out, it wasn’t the soda; people just liked the letter M better than the letter Q.
Sext
¶ Gen McChrystal seeks the Directorship of the Institute of Dead and Dying Languages. (Emdashes)
A little about my background: in 1972, I founded and led the Dampal, Adynyamathanha, and Matagalpa Platoon, or DAMP, at West Point. We celebrated our appreciation of these dying languages by kidnapping pledges in the dead of night, throwing them in the back of a ice truck, and handcuffing them to an oil rig in their underwear.
They had to find their way back by following instructions written in Dampal, Adynyamathanha, and Matagalpa. The guys who made it back became full members of DAMP. That’s the kind of idea and initiative your Institute needs.
I also actively use Pig Latin, which not too many young people know these days, which qualifies it as an endangered language.
Nones
¶ Now that there is talk of a pipeline running from Iran to Pakistan, it’s really time for the United States to develop a policy that comprehensively ecompasses Afghanistan and the western Muslim rump of India. And to begin, we might listen to Pakistanis themselves. Cyril Almeida, writing at Dawn, does not seem to be sure of very much, but perhaps that’s the point. (via RealClearWorld)
The other example of strategic confusion is how the dots may be connected in GHQ over the McChrystal firing. A common fear among long-time observers of security policy here has been that the army has still not ‘got it’, that it still has not understood the nature of the beast that is militancy, that it still has not understood the potential for Afghanistan to destabilise Pakistan, the notion of ‘reverse strategic depth’.
True, the generals are aware of the dangers, but they seem too quick to discount them and focus too much on the ‘opportunity’ side of the threat coin. And few in GHQ would ever admit to confusion, least of all of the strategic kind. They believe they know what they’re doing, as surely as they have over the last 62 years.
But that, as the rest of us know, doesn’t mean there isn’t confusion. Already there was talk that there was something in Afghanistan before the Americans arrived and there could be that same something, with necessary adjustments, after the Americans leave. If you were a Pakistani general and that’s what you believed, then how could you connect the dots after the McChrystal debacle? Surely catching a glimpse of the disarray would reinforce your beliefs.
Vespers
¶ One paragraph of Richard Eskow’s “appropriating” review of David Schields’s Reality Hunger stands out, not because it’s the funniest, but because it handily dispatches the entire book-review problem. We refer to the paragraph numbered 18. (3 Quarks Daily)
At the end I sorta liked the guy. He sounds like a lot of my friends, some of whom can be irritating sometimes too. So I either need to give this book a better review or find new friends. I was entertained by the book, for sure. It helped me survive a cross-country flight, even if it had fewer insights per mile than I expected. Still, it was awfully hard to see past the over-reaching and excesses. It almost seemed as if someone decided it would be a good idea to write a provocative book about our appropriating mashup culture, wrote a successful proposal, then retrofitted the whole book to the marketing proposal-ish concept.
Compline
¶ Dick Cavett remembers Arthur Godfrey. We remember Arthur Godfrey, although we’re not sure why. We’d forgotten, though, how sharp he was. His faintly sidelong manner is hard to describe, but easy to see in the video that accompanies Mr Cavett’s reminiscence. (Which — and why is this still disappointing — turns out to be mostly about Mr Cavett’s relationship with the Nixon White House.) (NYT)
He was a colossus of the entertainment world to a degree that may never be equaled; if only for the fact that he had — count ‘em — three network shows at the same time on CBS: a simulcast talk show in the morning, and not one but two (live) prime-time shows every week, consistently in the top ten.
Arthur Godfrey was not just an entertainer. If the phrase ever applied to a human being, he was an industry.
That must be it. There was a time when Arthur Godfrey was more inescapable than McDonald’s, Julia Roberts, and Apple all rolled into one.
Have a Look
¶ Catalog Living: why bother with Sims or Second Life, when you can spend well-appointed hours with Gary and Elaine? Who knows what tragedies — not to mention inconveniences — lurk in their airbrushed interiors? (via MetaFilter)