Monthly Archives: December 2012

The followup to Lawrence Mitchell’s specious law school editorial

December 5, 2012 By in Academia, Teaching Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A friend observed that more than a few people savaged the editorial I discussed in “The specious reasoning in Lawrence M. Mitchell’s ‘Law School Is Worth the Money.'” The savaging doesn’t surprise me. Sometimes there are two sides to a story, but sometimes the evidence in favor of one side or interpretation is so strong that only a fool would disbelieve it.

If you know anything at all about law schools and the structure of law schools, it’s impossible not to see Mitchell’s piece as self-serving and disingenuous at best, and cruelly mendacious at worst. The kindest thing to be said is that Mitchell might simply be experiencing the intellectual blindness all of us suffer from occasionally. Chuck Klosterman, however, is the subject of this piece and defends law school out of ignorance. I don’t mean that as a synonym for stupid, as so many people do: I mean it in the dictionary sense, “lack of knowledge or information.” That shows in his response. Sometimes outsiders can make valuable observations that insiders miss. Sometimes they’re merely ignorant about an issue or field. He’s the latter.

The Mystal piece gets this right:

Heck, when I decided to go to law school, I kind of thought that I was signing up to go to “College II: This Time It Counts.” But that kind of casual connection misses a great big point: law school is a professional school. People go there to become professionals.

This attitude is really common among the 22 – 24-year-old set. It describes a part of my attitude at that age. Unfortunately, it’s also a tremendous mistake because of the money involved. Law schools have clearly evolved into institutions that work to extract as much money as possible from their nominal students. And the feds are enabling them to do so. There are differences between the federal student loan guarantees and what the big banks did in the leadup to the housing crisis, but the similarities are profound. I think the reckoning will play out differently, but it will play out.

I should clarify that I’m not arguing law school is bad for everyone, all the time. It isn’t. If you have the kind of personality that thrives in big-firm cultures, if you get into one of the top three law schools, if you have the self-certainty and tenacity necessary to be a top lawyer, fighting with other top lawyers: law school might be for you. But that’s maybe ten to twenty percent of the current law school population. The rest are being had, and are eventually going to tire of being had by law schools and their own bad judgment.

Anytime someone describes sexual behavior as “dumb,” ask: Dumb in what timeframe?

December 4, 2012 By in ideas, Links, sex Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

In writing about the David Petraeus non-scandal, Adam Gopnik says, correctly, that “Benghazi is a tragedy in search of a scandal; the Petraeus affair is a scandal in search of a tragedy,” and, perhaps less correctly, this:

The point of lust, not to put too fine a point on it, is that it lures us to do dumb stuff, and the fact that the dumb stuff gets done is continuing proof of its power. As Roth’s Alexander Portnoy tells us, “Ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd”—a Yiddish saying that means, more or less, that when desire comes in the door judgment jumps out the window and cracks its skull on the pavement.

But whether lust “lures us to do dumb stuff” depends on timeframe we’re looking at: if we do “dumb stuff” that results in our genes still existing, say, 200 years from now, then what’s dumb in the context of the next month may be “smart” from the context of a couple centuries from now. We’re evolutionarily primed to propagate our genes—that’s Richard Dawkins’ point in The Selfish Gene.

We also have to ask what happens in the very short term: presumably, in the minutes to hours that Petraeus and Broadwell were doing it (or anyone is “doing it”), they were making a very smart decision for themselves over those few minutes. One might be able to look at the quality of their decision making in terms of Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd’s The Time Paradox, and as being very good for the immediate present when they were doing it, not very good in the months or years after the scandal comes to light, and, depending on conception, very good over the very long term.

Don’t read this post and the books linked, then go out and cheat on your significant other only to say that your selfish genes and hedonistic time perspective “made” you do it. But do think about the intellectual context in which Portnoy’s claim exists, and how desire can function in the very long and short run.