Quotulatiousness

August 4, 2022

“Klaus Schwab, it turns out, is Supervillain Thomas Friedman”

Filed under: Books, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray somehow manages to girds his loins to take on a task that most of us would run screaming from: actuall reading a book by Klaus Schwab:

Seeing roughly 4,000 references a day to Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, it occurred to me late last week that I’d never gone to the source — I’ve never read a book by Klaus Schwab. So I set out to read the one the Dutch parliamentarian asked his prime minister about, the one about the Great Reset, which Schwab co-wrote with Thierry Malleret. It’s a little like saying, “Man, you know, I’ve never gone swimming in the sewer,” and then pulling on your swimsuit.

So.

First, if you weigh about ten pounds, I can report that the book is the perfect size and shape for lounging.

This is the only value the book provides to the world, and I recommend the immediate deployment of all remaining copies to the one population that can actually use them. Personal to Klaus Schwab: Give the next book a scratchy cardboard cover. Just trust me on this.

As for the book’s relationship to humans: Klaus Schwab, it turns out, is Supervillain Thomas Friedman. Being shrewd, he notices things: Did you know that a lot more people are online now than twenty years ago? Did you know that many objects are now connected to the Internet, from “electric grids and water pumps, to kitchen ovens and agricultural irrigation systems”, and that objects didn’t used to be connected to the Internet? Did you realize that this shift is causing change? When we talk about the pace of change, reader, we are talking about a term called velocity, and a lot of change happening quickly has a high velocity.

If you’ve ever worked for a corporate middle manager who held meetings to encourage the team to think outside the box, you’ve already read Klaus Schwab. We get an endless stream of tautological management-speak, encouraging leaders to embrace transformation by adopting a transformational approach, leading to transformational action and transformational policy caused by a transformational something or other. Page 63: “Innovation in production, distribution, and business models can generate efficiency gains and new or better products that create higher value added, leading to new jobs and economic prosperity.” Innovation can create things that are new, he explained, showing why he’s one of our best-known and most powerful economic experts. A warning to the world: If Kamala Harris and Klaus Schwab ever end up alone in a room together for a sustained and direct conversation, the banality will attain critical mass, and we will all die in a world-consuming implosion.

And here’s the key to the man’s power and status: He sounds like them. He talks to the governing class in language they recognize, telling them the things they already think. He went to a place where people already were, and he told them he led them there.

July 10, 2022

QotD: The difference between courage and fearlessness

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Grrl power is based on wanting girls to be courageous. But the writers who do the scripts for grrl power movies seem to have have a fundamental misunderstanding of courage. Courage does not mean not being afraid of anything. I was watching the live-action reboot of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and I really got tired of the heroine, who kept saying “I’m not afraid” over and over, even in situations where she really ought to be afraid. That’s not courage, that’s foolhardiness. Like that stupid “fearless girl” sculpture they put in front of the charging bull on Wall Street. Within about 5 seconds, the girl is going to be dying from massive internal injuries caused by horns and hooves. No, courage means being able to put aside your fear so that you can do whatever duty is required of you. “Fearless girl” isn’t really doing anything, she’s just striking a pose. That doesn’t mean girls can’t be brave. They certainly can be. You know who I think is a good example of grrl power? Dorothy Gale. You know, the character played by Judy Garland in the classic Wizard of Oz film. I don’t know about the character in the book, but in the film version, Dorothy spent most of the journey through Oz scared to death. But do you know what? She slapped a dangerous lion in the snout. She threw water on a witch. And she called out a wizard with god-like powers for being a lying sh*tweasel. She was not any less afraid, but but she did what was needed to be done at the time she needed to act. That’s courage. That’s grrl power. And she didn’t just stand there striking a pose.

OregonMuse, “The Morning Rant”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2019-03-16.

July 7, 2022

Coping with the excesses of ideologists

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple considers how best to cope with fanatics bearing ideology and demanding your compliance and self-abasement:

Theodore Dalrymple on 24 September 2007.
Photo by jaapstronks at Flickr via Wikimedia Commons.

Ideologists are inherently totalitarian, especially when a still small voice tells them that their opinions are vulnerable to criticism. Shrillness then becomes the mental white noise with which they drown out their own doubts. They can’t allow any corner of the world to escape their attention. Uniformity will both demonstrate their correctness and, if it lasts long enough, make criticism unthinkable. Just as the white noise of shrillness once did, so will perpetual silence eventually allay their doubts.

Surrender is wrought by cowardice and, slightly less dishonorably, by boredom. What intelligent person wants to spend his life disputing evident absurdity? […]

There are one of two possible responses (other than outright opposition) to the Augean stable of ideological folly.

The easiest thing to do in both cases is to give in to the monomaniacs; but the first response is to go into what Germans in the time of Hitler called “inner emigration”, that is to say, to try to find a niche in which to get on with one’s life undisturbed by the surrounding idiocy and viciousness, for example by laying low and taking up an interest that flies below the ideological radar.

This method can’t be a hundred percent successful, because the ideological monomaniacs demand not merely the absence of dissent from their ideology, but also some proof of positive adherence to it: for example, by signing up to policies on equality, inclusion, and diversity.

By signing up to such self-contradictory nonsense, of course, the person who seeks inner emigration feels soiled; he has undermined his own probity. But at least, or so he hopes, he will then be free of interference. This hope is usually dashed because, to quote another poem:

    … that is called paying the Dane-geld;
    But we’ve proved it again and again,
    That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
    You never get rid of the Dane.

In other words, the ideologist always comes back for more self-abasement: Today it’s transgenderism, tomorrow it will be — what? The glories of incest, the social necessity and benefit of infanticide? It doesn’t matter: The aim is not improvement, it’s the exertion of power, for one of the cultural or psychological characteristics of the age, at least among the educated, is the belief that, in human relations, everything is a matter of power and therefore that only power counts or is to be trusted.

Another way of dealing with the ideologists is to obey the old slogan that if you can’t beat them, join them. People therefore join up to what is, in effect, a new secular religion, and since most people who do so are not out-and-out villains or opportunists, they have to persuade themselves that they actually do believe the tenets of the new religion; and, as is often the way with converts, they become fanatics, not merely to persuade themselves, but to expunge their wicked past in which they were not believers and were quite possibly mockers.

July 2, 2022

QotD: How To Read Lacan

Filed under: Books, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Why did I read How To Read Lacan by Slavoj Zizek?

I could answer this question on many levels. For example, the theological level: maybe I committed some sin in a past life. Maybe I was predestined to unhappiness. Maybe, having given me free will, God is no longer able to save me from my own bad choices.

On a more practical level: I’m trying to learn more about leftism, I’m trying to learn more about continental philosophy, and I’m trying to learn more about psychoanalysis. I figured I might as well get it all out of the way at once.

I was expecting this to be incomprehensible, but I was pleasantly surprised how good a writer Zizek was. He explains everything clearly, in down-to-earth prose interspersed with mildly funny Slovenian jokes that illustrate his points.

(Lacan himself is completely incomprehensible, to the point where he might as well be speaking Martian, but this book wisely avoided quoting Lacan except where absolutely necessary).

Despite being very readable, this book never really came together. Each chapter consisted of a Lacan quote, followed by Zizek’s interpretations and thoughts. The thoughts were always things like “Sometimes the act of communication itself can communicate something” or “We are never truly engaged with another person, even during sex”. These are always kind of reasonable, Zizek always does a good job proving them and relating them to mildly funny Slovenian jokes, and I came away agreeing with all of them. But I don’t feel like I understand how any of them cohere together into an object called “Lacanianism”, and none of them really seemed like a very surprising revelation, which is one reason this doesn’t get a full book review.

Scott Alexander, “Short Book Reviews April 2019”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-04-09.

June 25, 2022

The Public Choice Model in … grand strategy?

Filed under: Books, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy by Richard Hanania. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:

[In Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy], Richard Hanania details how a public choice model (imported from public choice theory in economics) can explain the United States’ incoherent foreign policy much better than the unitary actor model (imported from rational choice theory in economics) that underlies the illusion of American grand strategy in international relations (IR), in particular the dominant school of realism. As the subtitle “How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy” suggests, American foreign policy is driven by special interest groups, which results in millions of deaths for no good reason.

In the unitary actor model, the primary unit of analysis of inter-state relations is the state as a monolithic agent capable of making rational decisions (forming coherent, long-term “grand strategy”) from cost-benefit analysis based on preference ranking and expected “national interest” maximisation.

In the public choice model, small special-interest groups that reap a large proportion of the benefits from a policy (concentrated interests) are much more incentivised to lobby for a policy than the general public who pay for a negligible portion of the cost of the policy (diffused interests) are incentivised to lobby against. The former can coordinate much easier than the latter that has to overcome rational ignorance (the cost of educating oneself about foreign policy outweighs any benefit an one can expect to gain as individual citizens cannot affect foreign policy) and the society-wide collective action problem (irrational for every citizen to cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma especially if individual gain is negligible) resulting in inefficient (not-public-good-maximising) policymaking i.e. government failure.

And more specifically on the use of Public Choice Theory:

Public choice theory was developed to understand domestic politics, but Hanania argues that public choice is actually even more useful in understanding foreign policy.

First, national defence is “the quintessential public good” in that the taxpayers who pay for “national security” compose a diffuse interest group, while those who profit from it form concentrated interests. This calls into question the assumption that American national security is directly proportional to its military spending (America spends more on defence than most of the rest of the world combined).

Second, the public is ignorant of foreign affairs, so those who control the flow of information have excess influence. Even politicians and bureaucrats are ignorant, for example most(!) counterterrorism officials — the chief of the FBI’s national security branch and a seven-term congressman then serving as the vice chairman of a House intelligence subcommittee, did not know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. The same favoured interests exert influence at all levels of society, including at the top, for example intelligence agencies are discounted if they contradict what leaders think they know through personal contacts and publicly available material, as was the case in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Third, unlike policy areas like education, it is legitimate for governments to declare certain foreign affairs information to be classified i.e. the public has no right to know. Top officials leaking classified information to the press is normal practice, so they can be extremely selective in manipulating public knowledge.

Fourth, it’s difficult to know who possesses genuine expertise, so foreign policy discourse is prone to capture by special interests. History runs only once — the cause and effect in foreign policy are hard to generalise into measurable forecasts; as demonstrated by Tetlock’s superforecasters, geopolitical experts are worse than informed laymen at predicting world events. Unlike those who have fought the tobacco companies that denied the harms of smoking, or oil companies that denied global warming, the opponents of interventionists may never be able to muster evidence clear enough to win against those in power with special interests backing.

Hanania’s special interest groups are the usual suspects: government contractors (weapons manufacturers [1]), the national security establishment (the Pentagon [2]), and foreign governments [3] (not limited to electoral intervention).

What doesn’t have comparable influence is business interests as argued by IR theorists. Unlike weapons manufacturers, other business interests have to overcome the collective action problem, especially when some businesses benefit from protectionism. By interfering in a foreign state, the US may build a stable capitalist system propitious for multinationals, but can conversely cause a greater degree of instability and make it impossible to do business there; when business interests are unsure what the impact of a foreign policy will be for their bottom line, they should be more likely to focus their lobbying efforts elsewhere.

June 24, 2022

QotD: “[Woodrow] Wilson was a human pile of flaming trash”

Filed under: Government, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I come now not to explain Wilson, but to hate him. A national consensus on hating Wilson is long overdue. It is the patriotic duty of every decent American. While conservatives have particular reasons to detest Wilson, and all his works, and all his empty promises, there is more than enough in his record for moderates, liberals, progressives, libertarians, and socialists to join us in this great and unifying cause.

The roll call of the worst presidents in American history includes some consensus top choices. James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce both contributed mightily to the nation’s slide into the Civil War, and Andrew Johnson did enduring harm to Reconstruction in the war’s aftermath. But all three of those men were repudiated by the end of their single term in office. They left no heirs who would acknowledge their influence, no fleet of academic hagiographers who could see themselves reflected in those presidencies.

Wilson, by contrast, served two full and consequential terms. He was the only Democrat re-elected to the job during the century between 1832 and 1936. He was lionized by liberals and progressives in academia and the media for most of the century after he left office in 1921. In my youth, and perhaps yours, Wilson was presented in history books as a tragic hero whom the unthinking American people didn’t deserve. He was often placed highly on academics’ rankings of the presidents. Princeton University named its school of international relations for him. Even in rescinding that honor in June 2020, the university’s press release declared: “Though scholars disagree about how to assess Wilson’s tenure as president of the United States, many rank him among the nation’s greatest leaders and credit him with visionary ideas that shaped the world for the better.”

Nah. Wilson was a human pile of flaming trash. He was a bad man who made the country and the world worse. His name should be an obscenity, his image an effigy. Hating him is a wholesome obligation of citizenship.

Dan McLaughlin, “The Hater’s Guide to Woodrow Wilson”, National Review, 2022-03-16.

June 23, 2022

The government believes that anyone opposed to Bill C-11 is “spreading misinformation”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Happily for the Canadian government (if not for Canadian internet users), if Bill C-11 gets passed, they can sic the CRTC on those critics … isn’t that convenient?

Last week, shortly after midnight in Ottawa, the House of Commons Heritage Committee concluded its deliberations on the Online Streaming Act, which will grant a federal regulator authority over the global Internet.

You may think putting the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and its nine government-appointed commissioners in charge of the entire online world is a good thing. Or you may think it’s a bad thing. But I’m guessing we can all agree that Bill C-11, the world’s most extensive internet regulation legislation so far, is a Thing.

And you’d think a thing that big would be deserving of respectful, honest debate and thoughtful review. If there’s something in the legislation that is bad in a way that isn’t intended, you’d want it caught and fixed, right? We are, after all, about to grant authority over 21st-century communications to people in charge of something called The Broadcasting Act. An act that was passed in 1993 to make sure nothing terrible — like people preferring NFL over CFL football or the Oscars over the Genies — results from watching too much American TV. Given that thousands of successful Canadian free enterprise Tik-Tokers and YouTubers fear new rules will disadvantage them in favour of the CRTC’s certified cultural broccoli, you’d think that’d be worth a think.

But you’d be wrong.

[…]

But then Liberal MP Tim Louis of Kitchener took this government’s truth-torquing communications strategy to a breathtaking level of self-righteous fantasy — one that dripped with contempt for all but he and his clan.

He calmly rose in the House of Commons and quietly accused C-11’s critics of deliberately spreading “misinformation” — a chilling threat given the government’s plans to deal with he same in “Online Harms” legislation later this year.

Louis did not even try to say, as did Mendicino’s deputy minister, that there was a misunderstanding of some kind. He did not attempt to make it clear that there are people who — as reasonable people often will — disagree. He did not dismiss the bill’s critics as being overwrought, incorrect and yet honourable. He stood up in the House of Commons and, barefaced, declared that views, lived experiences and legal analyses — including the testimony of CRTC Chair Ian Scott — are “simply untrue”. In other words, it’s all #fakenews.

And we are all liars.

June 20, 2022

The blight of the 21st century – the dictatorship of the experts

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Oliver Traldi considers the role of experts in the modern world:

Click to see full-size image at The New Yorker.

A few weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration as President, the New Yorker published a cartoon depicting a mustached, mostly bald man, hand raised high, mouth open in a sort of improbable rhombus, tongue flapping wildly within, saying: “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?” The tableau surely elicited many a self-satisfied chuckle from readers disgusted by the populist energy and establishment distrust that they perceived in Trump’s supporters.

But what exactly is the joke here? Citizens in a democracy are not akin to airline passengers, buckled quietly into their seats and powerless to affect change, their destinations and very lives placed in the hands of professionals guarded by a reinforced door up front. Even brief reflection reveals the cartoonist’s analogy to be comparing like to unlike.

That none of us thinks we know better than a plane’s captain, yet we often think we know better than experts in matters of politics, suggests differences between those domains. And it highlights a vexing problem for modern political discourse and deliberation: We need and value expertise, yet we have no foolproof means for qualifying it. To the contrary, our public square tends to amplify precisely those least worthy of our trust. How should we decide who counts an expert, what topics their expertise properly addresses, and which claims deserve deference?

* * *

We all rely upon experts. When something hurts, we consult a doctor, unless it’s a toothache, in which case we go to a dentist. We trust plumbers, electricians, and roofers to build and repair our homes, and we prefer that our lawyers and accountants be properly accredited. Some people attain expertise through training, others through experience or talent. I defer to someone who’s lived in a city to tell me what to do when I visit, and to a colleague who’s studied a particular topic at length even though we have the same mastery of our field overall. A friend with good fashion sense is an invaluable aid in times of sartorial crisis.

In all these cases, our reliance on expertise means suspending our own judgment and placing our trust in another — that is, giving deference. But we defer in different ways and for different reasons. The pilot we choose not to vote out of the cockpit has skill, what philosophers sometimes call “knowledge how”. We need the pilot to do something for us, but if all goes well we need not alter our own beliefs or behaviors on his say so. At the other extreme, a history teacher might do nothing but express claims, the philosopher’s “knowledge that”, which students are meant to adopt as their own beliefs. Within the medical profession, performing surgery is knowledge-how while diagnosing a headache and recommending two aspirin as the treatment is closer to knowledge-that.

But how are those without expertise to determine who has it? Generally, we leave that determination to each individual. A free society and the free market allow for widely differing judgments about who to trust about what, with credentialing mechanisms in place to facilitate signaling and legal consequences for outright fraud. Speculative bubbles notwithstanding, the market also helps to aggregate countless individual judgments in ways that yield socially valuable outcomes. Two New York City diners may have signs promising the “World’s Best Cup of Coffee”, but the one that actually has good coffee is more likely to be bustling on any given day and to thrive in the long run.

H/T to Ed West’s weekly round-up post for the link.

June 5, 2022

QotD: The Matrix

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The notion that reality is an illusion is a bit of a cliché, of course, but there are plenty of French philosophers willing to give it a bit of intellectual heft. The line in the screenplay about “the desert of the real” came from the eminent “Theorist” Jean Baudrillard, a great proponent of the notion that reality is simulation and the author of, among other books, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Instead, it was created and waged only on computer screens. “Since this war was won in advance,” wrote Baudrillard, “we will never know what it would have been like had it existed.” Did the Wachowskis seek permission to use the central thesis of his career? He could probably have sued for plagiarism — although, in turn, the film’s producers could argue that his theory that reality is a simulation is itself a simulation and that their alleged film did not take place.

The point is Andy and Larry Wachowski figured they’d hit on the perfect wrinkle for a classic postmodern nerd franchise — the Star Wars of our generation. And if you say, “Hang on, old boy, surely Star Wars is the Star Wars of our generation?”, I’d say, nah, it’s too 1930s radio serial, and its grandiosity is plonkingly earnest and squaresville instead of as coolly meta as Keanu Reeves’ too-bored-to-act acting style. The Matrix was quickly followed by The Matrix Revisited, The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Recycled, and Neo got paleo pretty quick. None of the sequels could quite match the initial red-pilling of surface reality, and so they simply dug the rabbit hole deeper. Zion is the last outpost of humanity — but maybe it’s merely a Matrix-within-the-Matrix? Ever consider that, huh? And what if Neo himself is a Matrix-within-the-Matrix-within-the-Matrix? He was supposed to be “The One” — but maybe one of the others is The One. Maybe The One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.

By the sequel, the Wachowskis’ “innovative visual style” (a Cecil B De Mille-scale computer game peopled by sullen pouters) was looking a lot less innovative: they did all the same things they did in the first film all over again, just more expensively and even more arbitrarily — the scene in which Keanu/Neo is fighting a hundred guys in black and doesn’t win, doesn’t lose, but just finds himself fighting vainly the old ennui and so buggers off after 15 minutes pretty much sums it up. By the second movie, Keanu had perfected his morose blank look, and fine actors like Laurence Fishburne were turning in performances so clunkily solemn you’d think they were auditioning for George Lucas. As usual, the subterranean city of Zion proved to be just another generic dystopian underground parking garage; and the orgiastic dance party looked like a weekend rave in Huddersfield.

Mark Steyn, “The Matrix”, Steyn Online, 2019-04-06.

May 31, 2022

A new history of the evil empire. No, not that one. Not that one either. The other evil empire!

Filed under: Africa, Asia, Books, Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Barnaby Crowcroft reviews Caroline Elkins’ new history of the British empire, Legacy of Violence:

Elkins is correct that British decolonisation after the end of the war — if not “white-washed” — has got off lightly among historians, often via a contrast with the dreadful behaviour of the French. We remain far too influenced by the impression that Britain willingly and amicably handed over power (as Harold Macmillan put it) to Asian and African representatives of “agreeable, educated, Liberal, North Oxford society”.

There is a single map in this book which should definitively dispose of such ideas, showing all the colonial conflicts and states of emergency Britain was engaged in around the world after 1945. There are the well-known counterinsurgencies in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Aden. Alongside other, less well-known ones, however — British Guiana, Malaysia, Belize, Oman and the New Hebrides — bring us pretty much into the 1980s without a single year of global colonial peace.

In Kenya and Malaya, the British carried out massive coercive interventions in the 1950s, including the forcible resettlement of over a million people into closely monitored “new villages”, which, if they cannot be likened to concentration camps, certainly resemble the kinds of things the French were doing in Algeria. Difficult though it is to believe today, until very recently the British were a “warlike” and patriotic people, and their agents could be ruthless in the pursuit of imperial interest overseas.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to take seriously the more grandiose claims of Legacy of Violence, including Elkins’ presumption to have uncovered the Key to All Mythologies of British imperial wickedness in the form of Liberalism and Racism. The prose is part of the problem. Her introductory statement of the book’s bombastic aims reads more like something written by a professional satirist, than a professional historian.

“To study the British empire,” she writes, “is to unlock memory’s gate using the key of historical enquiry. But once inside, history’s fortress is bewildering … Unlike mythical fire-breathing monsters, however, the creatures inhabiting the annals of Britain’s imperial past are not illusions [but] monstrosities [which] inflicted untold suffering …”

Much of the book is given over to a plodding chronicle of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British history, in which events are construed — and often misconstrued — to give the meanest possible interpretation. British “arch-imperialists” resemble cartoon villains, who wear “Hitleresque moustaches” and “racist coattails” and are awarded MBEs and OBEs according to how much harm they inflict upon colonial subjects. There is even an imaginative reconstruction of British pilots all but laughing as they machine-gun “defenceless women and children”; readers are invited to listen to their “screams of pain”.

To determine whether Britain’s empire was uniquely violent invites the question: compared to what? Niall Ferguson earned opprobrium for suggesting in 2003 that alongside the rival empires which arose to challenge it in the middle of the twentieth century, Britain’s looked pretty attractive.

To her credit, Elkins does not disagree with this. Her treatment of Malaya’s communist insurgency suggests that she is not particularly exercised by violence when it is committed by ideological confrères. The only thing we get in the way of any broader comparison, however, is the notably wishy-washy one implied between the “East and the West”, which she describes as the contrast between “humanity and inhumanity”.

May 26, 2022

The hierarchy of scientific journals

Filed under: Books, Media, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of Melinda Baldwin’s Making Nature: The History of a Scientific Journal. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:

The world of scientific publishing is organized as a hierarchy of status, much like the hierarchy of angels in the Abrahamic religions. At the bottom are the non-peer-reviewed blog posts and Twitter threads. Slightly above are the preprint servers like arXiv, and then big peer-reviewed journals like PLOS One. Above those are all the field-specific journals, some with higher reputation than others. And at the top, near the divine presence, are the CNS journals: Cell, Nature, and Science.

Full title: The Assumption of the Virgin..Artist: Francesco Botticini..Date made: probably about 1475-6..

For an actual hierarchy of journals based on citation data, see this paper, which puts Nature and Science at the top. Might be worth mentioning that it comes from a journal in the Nature Publishing Group family.

Leaving aside Cell, a more specialized biology journal that seems to have gotten into the CNS acronym the same way Netflix got into the FAANG acronym, Nature and Science are very similar. They both publish articles in all scientific fields. They both date from the 19th century. They’re published weekly. They jointly won a fancy prize for services to humanity in 2007. And having your paper in either is one of the best things that can happen to a scientist’s career, thanks to their immense prestige.

But how, exactly, did Nature and Science become so prestigious? This is the question I hoped Making Nature: The History of a Scientific Journal, a 2015 book by historian of science Melinda Baldwin, might answer. It focuses on Nature, but much of its lessons can likely be extrapolated to Science considering their similarity.

I grew curious about this when I realized that most researchers treat journal prestige as a given. Everyone knows that Nature and Science matter enormously, yet few would be able to say why exactly. But this is important! Prestigious institutions, from universities to media companies to major sports competitions, have a huge impact on the world. It’s useful to understand how they came to be, beyond “being famous for being famous”.

One reason this is more difficult than it sounds is that we often settle for superficial answers. Selectivity, for instance, is a common explanation: prestige simply comes from obtaining what is hard to obtain, such as a Harvard degree, an Olympic medal or a Nobel Prize. Nature is indeed highly selective, accepting less than 10% of submitted articles (and the vast majority of papers are not even deemed worthy of a submission to Nature by their authors). Yet harsh selectivity alone cannot explain prestige, or it would be trivial to launch a prestigious journal or university just by setting an artificially low acceptance rate.

Another facile explanation is longevity. It’s true that prestigious institutions are often old, and indeed Nature has been around for more than 150 years since its birth in 1869. Science is only slightly younger, having been founded in 1880. But there are many older scientific journals: the oldest one, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, was created two hundred years before Nature, in 1665. Then there are more recent publications that are prestigious: Cell, for instance, was founded in 1974. The correlation between prestige and longevity is real, but imperfect. It also says nothing of causation: does longevity cause prestige, or does prestige cause longevity?

What matters is not the span of time per se, but the specific events that happened — in other words, the history. Making Nature, while not specifically about prestige, gives us exactly that.

May 5, 2022

Paul Wells reviews Davos Man by Peter S. Goodman

Filed under: Books, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Paul Wells — now on Substack — considers an unusual-from-a-Canadian-perspective critical book on the World Economic Forum and the people who attend their exclusive shindigs in Davos, Switzerland:

I’ve been reading Peter S. Goodman’s Davos Man, a tough, angry — not entirely persuasive — critique of the sort of people who get top-level access to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Because Goodman’s vantage point is left-by-centre-left, his book provides fascinating counterpoint to a polemic about the WEF that is, in Canada, the almost exclusive preserve of the right.

[…]

Politicians who make a show of having a problem with Davos should explain what the problem is; why they didn’t raise their concerns when cabinet colleagues were lining up to go; and what solutions, if any, they propose. Otherwise they might seem to be faking their indignation to lure a few votes.

Second, it’s easy to see why Davos catastrophism has taken root in some corners of the electorate. We are coming off a COVID pandemic, after all. Very early, only weeks into this historic disaster, the WEF was quick to start discussing visions of a green egalitarian future with prominent roles for green progressive governments and Davos regulars. This was the “Great Reset”, which I discussed here in a magazine. Soon Trudeau was on video calls saying, “This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to reimagine economic systems.” Which was jarring. Still is. Soon people were digging up old video of Klaus Schwab, the WEF founder, bragging about “penetrating the cabinets” of Western countries with “Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum”.

People who didn’t like everything that’s happened since — vaccines, lockdowns, restrictions — started reading great significance into all kinds of perceived Davos connections. Often Trudeau has seemed eager to help. Replacing his finance minister with the only member of his cabinet who sits on the WEF Board of Trustees, while yet again blathering on about how “we can choose to embrace bold new solutions to the challenges we face and refuse to be held back by old ways of thinking” was … loopy, sure, but it probably only accidentally resembled the second act of a Bond movie.

Bringing an element of novelty to all this is Peter S. Goodman, the Global Economics Correspondent of the New York Times. Even if he were Canadian, nobody should expect Goodman to support Poilievre for Conservative leader. Davos Man is a furious diatribe, not against the WEF as an institution but against many of Davos’s richest regulars — and it’s written from a consistently social-democratic perspective.

From its subtitle, “How the Billionaires Devoured the World”, Davos Man relentlessly skewers some of the most glamorous Davos habitués — Amazon gillionaire Jeff Bezos, Blackstone founder Stephen Schwarzman, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, banker Jamie Dimon, Salesforce guy Marc Benioff. And their, you know, ilk.

“Over recent decades, the billionaire class has ransacked governments by shirking taxes, leaving societies deprived of the resources needed to combat trouble,” Goodman writes. Davos Man — Goodman has borrowed the term from Samuel Huntington — “is a rare and remarkable creature, a predator who attacks without restraint … expanding his territory and seizing the nourishment of others.” Goodman’s language is consistently violent. The billionaires “eviscerate financial regulations”, “defenestrated antitrust authorities”, “squashed the power of labor movements”.

April 26, 2022

A new guide to classical architecture

Filed under: Architecture, Books — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Ptolemy Dean reviews The Layman’s Guide to Classical Architecture by Quinlan Terry:

Trained in the bleakly grey era of the late 1950’s, the classical architect Quinlan Terry has achieved a remarkable legacy. At the time he embarked on his architectural career, the profession was locked firmly in the postwar austerity of flat-roofed perfunctory modernism, with planar walls of exposed aggregate concrete or unadorned “stretcher bond” brickwork.

This was the “machine age” of mass production of buildings, and it is sometimes hard to remember how restrictive this period must once have been, as so much has happened since. To the more hard-line practitioners of those times, any suggestion of creating buildings with ornament was considered at best eccentric but more often offensive and worthy of censure.

This beautifully produced red-cloth-covered hardback book is therefore a fitting record of a lifetime’s work of studying, drawing and creating new classical buildings. Such buildings are generally defined by the application of the five classical orders of columns handed down to us by the ancient Greeks and Romans. They are beautifully illustrated and explained in this book. There have been centuries of creative re-use of these Classical orders. Italian Renaissance, Palladians, Georgians, Victorians and Edwardians across the world have all offered ever inventive, fresh, new and distinctive reinterpretations of the Classical architectural language.

But, with the arrival of the International Modern Movement, the literal application of classical architecture was dramatically reduced and it was no longer taught in mainstream schools of architecture. For almost a century, Classicism has been seen as largely irrelevant in new building design. This book sets out to explain, in layman’s terms, what each part of the classical assembly is called and how the components can be developed and composed into a harmonious building.

Quinlan Terry’s classical buildings, which are illustrated in elegantly drawn elevations and crisp black and white photographs, illustrate that the selection and interpretation of the language of classicism is a highly personalised choice. Quinlan’s first employer, from 1962, had been Raymond Erith, to whom this book is dedicated. Erith was a gentle practitioner based in rural Essex who weathered the worst of the postwar austerity until his death in 1973.

After that time, and in part due to Erith and Terry’s joint achievement, the climate for making traditionalist buildings steadily improved, and the occasional country house commissions multiplied and expanded into full scale classical country houses on a substantial scale both here and in the United States.

April 13, 2022

A new look at the Commonwealth and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Miranda Malins reviews a new history of the period between the execution of Charles I and the Stuart restoration of Charles II, The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown by Anna Keay:

This evasion is not for the historian Anna Keay. Faced with these collective shortcomings (“This book was born of ignorance,” she explains in opening), she explores this most dynamic of decades, looking it squarely in the face. With her, we roam around the period, the broad chronological narrative softened through a selection of nine interwoven biographies ranging from the irrepressible newspaperman Marchamont Nedham, to the indomitable royalist Countess of Derby, from the brilliant scientist William Petty to the dreaming Digger Gerrard Winstanley.

This structure achieves a broad perspective and rare realism, giving the reader the sense of dipping and diving through the restless waves of the republic and taking them to all corners of the new Britain forged in the fire of three Civil Wars. As expected, we travel from the trial and execution of Charles I to the Restoration of his son, but Keay’s achievement is to make the shape-shifting years of the kingless Commonwealth and Protectorate that lie between more thrilling than either royal bookend, demonstrating how far from inevitable the return of the Stuarts was. There is no “high road to Restoration” here, but rather a snaking maze of paths striking off in new directions and looping back: an uncharted landscape for Keay’s characters to navigate where every choice counted.

The result is a panoramic and pulsating drama every bit as restless as the republic it captures so well. Indeed the “Restless” adjective of the title perfectly conjures the progressive spirit of Britain without a crown: unstable and dangerous, yes, but as a result, experimental and unafraid. As Keay puts it: “The 1650s was a time of extraordinarily ambitious political, social, economic and intellectual innovation, and it was not a foregone conclusion that the British republic would fail.”

This portrait will be, for many, a revelation. Far from the dour, militaristic regimes of popular imagination, life under the Commonwealth and Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate emerges as innovative and exciting: the effect of the hitherto unimaginable act of abolishing the monarchy and House of Lords after years of transformative conflict being to unleash an energetic spirit of ambitious experimentation and industry.

We feel this bold energy in the meetings of the Oxford Experimental Philosophy Club (which would become the Royal Society in 1660) and its young member William Petty managing to survey the whole of Ireland in record time despite having no cartographical experience; in failed cloth trader Gerrard Winstanley’s determination to dig the new Jerusalem that had come to him on an autumn ramble; in Marchamont Nedham escaping Newgate prison and picking his way through several dangerous changes of side, pen in hand, always managing to land cat-like on his feet through sheer commercial nous and audacity.

QotD: Architectural arrogance

Filed under: Architecture, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

While most of the architectural establishment has responded to the op-ed with noticeable silence, Mark Lamster, architecture critic for the Dallas Morning News, did bravely publish a post on Facebook in which he began by quoting the opinion piece: “We’ve taught generations of architects to speak out as artists, but we haven’t taught them how to listen.” Lamster then commented, “super-smart nyt op-ed from Martin Pedersen and steven bingler [sic].”

What is most telling, however, is the vitriolic response the op-ed triggered in Aaron Betsky. Called “one of the 21st century’s architectural power brokers,” Betsky is the former head of the Cincinnati Art Museum, and was director of the 2008 Venice International Architecture Biennale, the most important architecture show in the world. An architectural priest and patrician, he is to the profession what The New York Times is to the chattering classes: a voice of the high-status quo. Indeed, he writes for Architect, the official magazine of the AIA.

Betsky rained down on Bingler and Pedersen with ridicule and scorn: Their piece was “so pointless and riddled with clichés as to beggar comprehension.” He summarized their position: “we have three of the standard criticisms of buildings designed by architects: first, they are ugly according to what the piece’s authors perceive as some sort of widely-held community standard (or at least according to some 88-year old ladies); second, they are built without consultation; third they don’t work.”

Yet Betsky then admitted, “All those critiques might be true.” They are irrelevant, he claims, since architecture must be about experimentation and the shock of the new. (Why this should be the case he does not say.) And sometimes designers must stretch technology to the breaking (or leaking) point: “The fact that buildings look strange to some people, and that roofs sometimes leak, is part and parcel of the research and development aspect of the design discipline.” Ever brave, he is willing to let others suffer for his art.

At no point did Betsky consider the actual human beings, the unwilling guinea pigs who live in the houses. He implicitly says of the poor residents: Do their roofs leak? Let them buy buckets. And as for sickness-inducing mold, there’s Obamacare for that. Betsky also does not consider what a leaky roof means to people whose prior homes were destroyed by water. The architects, having completed their noble experiments, effectively say like the arrogant King Louis XV of France: “Après moi, le deluge” [After me, the flood]. No wonder architects have an image problem.

Justin Shubow, “Architecture Continues To Implode: More Insiders Admit The Profession Is Failing”, Forbes, 2015-01-06.

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