Category Archives: Links

The modern art (and photography) problem

February 8, 2014 By in Essays, Links, photos Tags: , , , , , , 8 Comments

In “Modern art: I could have done that… so I did: After years of going to photography exhibitions and thinking he could do better, Julian Baggini gave it a go. But could he convince The Royal West of England Academy with his work?“, Baggini writes:

there are times when we come across something so simple, so unimpressive, and so devoid of technical merit that we just can’t help believing we could have done as well or better ourselves.

He’s right—except that this happens entirely too often and helps explain much of modern art’s bogosity. I’m not the only person to have noticed—in Glittering Images, Camille Paglia writes:

the big draws [for museums] remain Old Master or Impressionist painting, not contemporary art. No galvanizing new style has emerged since Pop Art, which killed the avant-garde by embracing commercial culture. Art makes news today only when a painting is stolen or auctioned at a record price.

She’s right too; many people have noticed this but few apparently have in the art world itself, which seems to have become more interested in marketing than making (a problem afflicting the humanities in academia too). But there are enough people invested in and profiting from propagating bogosity that they can remain indifferent to countervailing indifference.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAYears ago I was at the Seattle Art Museum and looking various pieces of modern supposed “art” that consisted mostly of a couple lines or splotches and what not, and they made me think: “there’s a hilarious novel in here about a director who surreptitiously hangs her own work—and no one notices.” Unfortunately, now I’ve realized that people have already done this, or things like it, in the real world—and no one cared. It’s barely possible to generate scandal in the art world anymore; conservatives have mostly learned about the Streisand effect and thus don’t react to the latest faux provocation. The artists themselves often lack both anything to say and any coherent way of saying it.

To the extent people respond to art, they respond to the art that people made when it took skill be an artist.

Photography has a somewhat similar problem, except that it’s been created by technology. Up until relatively recent it took a lot of time, money, and patience to become a reasonably skilled photographer. Now it doesn’t take nearly as much of any of those things: last year’s cameras and lenses still work incredibly well; improvements in autofocus, auto-exposure, and related technologies make photos look much better; and it’s possible to take, review, and edit hundreds or thousands of photos at a time, reducing the time necessary to go from “I took a picture” to expert.

The results are obvious for anyone who pays attention. Look through Flickr, or 500px, or any number of other sites and you’ll see thousands of brilliant, beautiful photos. I won’t say “anyone can do it,” but many people can. It’s also possible to take great photos by accident, with the machine doing almost all the work apart from the pointing and clicking. Adding a little bit of knowledge to the process is only likely to increase the keeper rate. Marketing seems to be one of the primary differentiators among professional photographers; tools like Lightroom expand the range of possibility for recovering from error.

One of the all-time top posts on Reddit’s photography section is “I am a professional photographer. I’d like to share some uncomfortable truths about photography,” where the author writes that “It’s more about equipment than we’d like to admit” and “Photography is easier than we’d like to admit.”

The profession is dying, for reasons not identical to painting but adjacent to it. In photography, we’re drowning in quality. In fine art, we’re drowning in bogosity, and few people appear to be interested in rescuing the victim.

What we signal when we speak: Verbal tee-ups, honesty, and tact

January 31, 2014 By in Culture, ideas, Links Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

In “Why Verbal Tee-Ups Like ‘To Be Honest’ Often Signal Insincerity: James W. Pennebaker, of the University of Texas, Austin, says these phrases are a form of dishonesty,” Elizabeth Bernstein ends with a quote: “You are more likely to seem like someone who is perfectly honest when you are no longer commenting on it.”

That’s probably true in some situations, but verbal tee-ups are (often) a decorous way of saying, “I’m going to say something you don’t want to hear” or “I’m potentially going to violate social convention by saying this.” They’re demonstrating social deftness by pre-empting feelings of the receiver saying or thinking, “This person is a jerk.”

In many cases qualifiers should be eliminated, but they exist for a reason and, as someone sometimes accused of being an asshole when I’m being honest (or trying to be), I’m aware of why verbal tee-ups are often deployed the way they’re deployed. Bernstein says, “for the listener, these phrases are confusing. They make it fairly impossible to understand, or even accurately hear, what the speaker is trying to say.” She’s right—the phrases are sometimes confusing. But sometimes they make it easier to hear what the speaker is saying. Bernstein does write:

Her advice is either to abort your speaking mission and think about whether what you wanted to say is something you should say, or to say what you want to say without using the phrase. “Eliminating it will automatically force you to find other more productive ways to be diplomatic,” Ms. Jovin says.

In general thinking about what you say, to the extent you can do so on the fly, is a good idea, but it’s also hard to do—which is probably why we get encouraged to do so so often. Qualifiers are a way of keeping your identity small while still speaking substantively. We could call the judicious use of verbal tee-ups “tact.”

Links: Goodbye theory, the artists’s lives, coffee, Dr. Strangelove, Divorce Corp., molly, and more

January 28, 2014 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* “David Winters on Elegy for Theory: Bye, Bye, Theory, Goodbye.” Except that undergrad and grad classes on theory are still mandatory in many places and much dubious “theory” still gets cited in conferences or by editors and peer reviewers. Actual death would be an improvement.

* Most writers of books don’t make enough money to live from their writing; notice this: “Together, what these patterns suggest is that few authors are getting rich off of their writing or even earning enough from their writing to quit their day jobs.”

* In keeping with the above: “Entrepreneurs of the spirit;” I’d add that the number of people who write a blog, continuously, for at least a couple years is very small.

* In keeping with a theme: Barry Eisler and Robert Gottlieb debate the future of publishing; in the short term I buy Gottlieb and in the long term I buy Eisler. The challenge is defining the terms.

* “Almost Everything in ‘Dr. Strangelove’ Was True,” which you should remember anytime you see someone working for any branch of government move their lips.

* Divorce Corp: A Movie Review, which is really a society review that should scare you.

* Why is coffee in France so bad?

* “‘I say, Charles, don’t you ever crave…’“, or, the 1200th anniversary of Charlemagne’s death.

* Politicians and cops are essentially indifferent to many people’s deaths, although the story is titled very differently; see also Daniel Okrent’s Last Call.

Looks matter and always will because they convey valuable information, and a note about the media

January 23, 2014 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In “The Revolution Will Not Be Screen-Printed on a Thong” Maureen O’Connor laments that people judge each other based on looks (“Why can’t we just not obsess about bodies?”), and then kind of answers her own question:

I ask that in earnest — it’s possible that we actually can’t stop, that this compulsive corporeal scrutiny is some sort of biological imperative, or species-wide neurosis left over from millennia of treating women as chattel.

We judge each based on looks because, as Geoffrey Miller describes in Spent and others have described elsewhere, looks convey a lot of useful information about age, fertility, and health. Beyond that, women are competitive with each other in this domain because they know (correctly) that men judge them based on looks (among other things).

In addition, as Tim Harford discusses in The Logic of Life, speed dating and other research shows that women reject about 90% of those in any given speed-dating event, and men reject about 80% of women. Both men and women usually report that they want similar things—men want youth and beauty; women want height and humor. But researchers devised clever experiments in which dating pools of either men or women have changed systematically—for example, by having entirely very tall men or very short men. Yet the rate at which men and women accept or decline dates remains the same.

That implies “compulsive corporeal scrutiny” is based partially on the knowledge that any particular person will be judged based on the other people around.

I don’t bring this up merely to correct a point in an article; it’s also to observe that a lot of the stuff one reads online is based on limited knowledge. As I get older I increasingly get the impression that a lot of journalists would be better served, at least intellectually speaking, to spend more time reading books and less time… doing other things?

One thing I like about journalists or journalist-blogger hybrids like Megan McArdle and Matt Yglesias is their wide, deep reading, and their willingness to connect wide, deep reading with the subjects they write about. One might disagree with them for ideological or other reasons, but they do at least know what they’re talking about and usually try to learn when they don’t. Too much of the media—whether in The Seattle Times or The Wall Street Journal or New York Magazine—is just making noise.*

Given the choice between most media and books, choose books. The challenge, of course, is finding them.

EDIT: Maybe Ezra Klein’s new mystery venture will solve some of the complaints above; he mentions “the deficiencies in how we present information” and promises “context.” I hope so, and certainly I’m not the first person to notice the many problems with the way much of the media works.

* Granted, I may be contributing to this in my own small way by contributing a link and possibly hits to a noise-making article that should be better than it is.

Links: Intellectual cowardice, fiction, child support threats, writing, oppression, and more!

January 20, 2014 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* “Our Intellectual Cowardice,” which the structure of academia makes rife. That being said, I also suspect that a lot of academics are silent regarding the weakness or silliness of other academics because none of their work matters: it’s already so widely ignored that another silly journal article is never going to have any impact anyway.

* Be wary of fMRI brain scan studies like this one, but it does at least get around the correlation-is-not-causation problem that plagues similar claims: “Study: Reading a Novel Changes Your Brain: College students experienced heightened connectivity in their left temporal cortexes after reading fiction.”

* Child support and the threat point.

* What is it like to operate on obese patients?

* “Writing to Win;” why do we obsess over the moment of a writer’s publication?

* Great news for pot smokers: drug cartels are building massive underground railroads into the U.S. to transport goods that Americans desperately want to buy.

* Are Bedrooms Superfluous? The next-generation Murphy bed.

* “How the Drug War Disappeared the Jury Trial,” which everyone needs to read and which should also scare everyone who does read it.

* “An MLA Story;” takeaway: Don’t go to grad school.

* “Why Does A Good Kettle Cost $90+?” Since I started drinking tea I have wondered about this and now have an answer. The Hacker News discussion is also good, except for the top comment.

* “The Humanities and Us: Don’t listen to today’s narcissistic academics—the West’s cultural inheritance is indispensable;” on some level you’ve read this before and as usual the writer goes too far in imagining a golden, magical past but nonetheless it is worth reading and complements “An MLA Story” and “Our Intellectual Cowardice.”

Grad students lack market power, and it shows: Or, the UC-Riverside non-scandal

January 11, 2014 By in Academia, ideas, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

A brief wave of academic outrage hit when UC-Rivderside’s English department sent job candidates an e-mail about MLA interviews five days before the conference. (MLA stands for “Modern Language Associate;” it’s big the soiree for English jobs). The outrage is somewhat justified because UC-R is in fact acting like a jerk. But many of the angry commentators are also missing something essential: from an employers perspective, a job search is often not about getting the absolute “best” or the most right person for the job. It’s about getting someone who meets or reasonably exceeds the qualifications. Search costs are real and high. Paul Graham wrote about these issues in “Two Kinds of Judgement” (The excerpt is long, but I can’t find a way to make it shorter while still retaining the point):

There are two different ways people judge you. Sometimes judging you correctly is the end goal. But there’s a second much more common type of judgement where it isn’t. We tend to regard all judgements of us as the first type. We’d probably be happier if we realized which are and which aren’t.

The first type of judgement, the type where judging you is the end goal, include court cases, grades in classes, and most competitions. Such judgements can of course be mistaken, but because the goal is to judge you correctly, there’s usually some kind of appeals process. If you feel you’ve been misjudged, you can protest that you’ve been treated unfairly.

Nearly all the judgements made on children are of this type, so we get into the habit early in life of thinking that all judgements are.

But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgements where judging you is only a means to something else. These include college admissions, hiring and investment decisions, and of course the judgements made in dating. This kind of judgement is not really about you.

Put yourself in the position of someone selecting players for a national team. Suppose for the sake of simplicity that this is a game with no positions, and that you have to select 20 players. There will be a few stars who clearly should make the team, and many players who clearly shouldn’t. The only place your judgement makes a difference is in the borderline cases. Suppose you screw up and underestimate the 20th best player, causing him not to make the team, and his place to be taken by the 21st best. You’ve still picked a good team. If the players have the usual distribution of ability, the 21st best player will be only slightly worse than the 20th best. Probably the difference between them will be less than the measurement error.

The 20th best player may feel he has been misjudged. But your goal here wasn’t to provide a service estimating people’s ability. It was to pick a team, and if the difference between the 20th and 21st best players is less than the measurement error, you’ve still done that optimally.

It’s a false analogy even to use the word unfair to describe this kind of misjudgement. It’s not aimed at producing a correct estimate of any given individual, but at selecting a reasonably optimal set.

One thing that leads us astray here is that the selector seems to be in a position of power. That makes him seem like a judge. If you regard someone judging you as a customer instead of a judge, the expectation of fairness goes away. The author of a good novel wouldn’t complain that readers were unfair for preferring a potboiler with a racy cover. Stupid, perhaps, but not unfair.

Most of the angry applicants for the UC-R job appear to have been in school for too long and not to realize that each employers’s goal isn’t to judge them perfectly. It’s to get someone who is reasonably okay and then get on with their lives. It’s also almost impossible to tell based on interviews and recommendations alone whether someone is a good for for a job; usually it takes months of working together to realize whether someone is actually good. In academia, I’m not sure one professor ever really knows if another is any good, since they don’t tend to take each other’s classes.

UC-R appears to think that it can get someone reasonable even though it’s doing something mean. They’re probably right.

English PhDs feel the heat because they lack market power. Many posted jobs get dozens or even more than a hundred very good-seeming candidates, almost any one of whom would be fine. They’d show up to department meetings, teach competently, publish in peer-reviewed journals. At that point, departments can pretty much post the candidates’s photos on a dartboard and pick the one who their darts hit.

A lot of grad students (and professors) also appear to have or want to have the same relationship with universities that children have to parents. But the universities aren’t there with their best interests in mind; the universities are doing their own thing. Realizing this is quite painful and probably helps to explain the anguish being expressed on blogs and Twitter. To the extent those blog posts and Tweets discourage others from starting or continuing grad school, they’re doing something useful (I myself have contributed to the genre).

In normal employment situations, employers who behave like jerks get punished because people won’t work for them. UC-R is unlikely to have that problem. They could probably restrict their entire search to Southern California and still easily have 10 or more very good candidates. Given that, UC-R isn’t even behaving in a way that is “stupid,” to use Graham’s word.

The curious thing is that so many people want to stay in academia despite the way it treats them. Megan McArdle wrote about the obvious solution: “Can’t Get Tenure? Then Get a Real Job.”

Links: The long-distance reader, Flowers in the Attic, goodbye camera, get a real job, and more

January 8, 2014 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

* The loneliness of the long-distance reader.

* “Goodbye, Cameras;” in the last two or three years I’ve become more interested in photography.

* “The Flowers in the Attic generation grows up;” after reading innumerable pieces like this one I read the novel a couple years ago and found it boring, perhaps because I’m not a teenage girl?

* “Most likely you go your way and I’ll go mine.”

* “Can’t get tenure? Then get a real job.” I’m following this advice.

* “Don Jon” [the movie] Is A Blue Pill Disaster.

* Tyler Cowen on Megan McArdle’s The Upside of Down,” a book I was ready to dismiss as a writer (who I generally like) recounting the usual papers, but Cowen says “It is extremely well written, engages the reader, is based upon entirely fresh anecdotes and research results, and makes an important point.”

* D. G. Myers: Academe quits me.

* I was prepared to hate “Written Off: Jennifer Weiner’s quest for literary respect” and yet admire the even tone and frequent humor. I’ve often read descriptions of Weiner’s books, considered them, then gone on to something else.

Links: Modern sex dynamics, making American literature, journalism, morality, ideology, and more

January 4, 2014 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* The Making of American Literature: The correspondence of editor, critic, and Lost Generation chronicler Malcolm Cowley. I’m not sure that I’ve even heard of Cowley before this article.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA* The Tragedy of Common-Sense Morality: Evolution didn’t equip us for modern judgments. Or, for that matter, many diffuse, modern threats. The book concerns Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, which is very good—just not quite as good as Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. Both answer a lot of fundamental questions about morality, group thinking, and ideology.

* “Does journalism have a future?” When I graduated from high school, I guessed not and have lived my life accordingly. I’m glad I made the choices I did in this regard. Instead of making the mistake of trying to be a journalist, I’ve made different mistakes.

* Camille Paglia on Rob Ford, Rihanna and rape culture. Paglia is giving many interviews lately though not because she has another book out. She’s also in the WSJ on the end “suicide of a civilization.” Though I would ask: Suicide, or evolution?

* People are moving to Florida because it’s cheap.

* We Pretend to Teach, They Pretend to Learn: At colleges today, all parties are strongly incentivized to maintain low standards. Having been on both ends of the college teaching / learning experience, I’ve rarely read a truer article. I’m just not convinced that today is much different than 50 years ago, except for having much higher financial stakes on both sides of the table.

* “More ominous than a strike,” a post responding to Dr. Helen’s Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matters. The book is okay but is more a collection of blog post blockquotes than a real book. Nonetheless it’s somewhat useful for people who just started thinking about modern gender dynamics but haven’t done much reading on the subject.

Links: Cars and cities, antibiotics and sex, mattresses, universities, writing advice and more

December 21, 2013 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

* Cars Kill Cities.

* How to design happier cities.

* Computer science professor leaves, explains the problems with his institution, and doesn’t include the standard false-guilt genuflection. Or, as he puts it, he’s “going feral.”

* How Tuft & Needle is disrupting the wildly corrupt mattress industry; I’d buy from them next time I need a mattress.

* The media doesn’t talk about suicide and statistics about suicide with guns are nonexistent or bad.

* “No Antibiotics, No Sexual Revolution,” or, “how the legal system is holding back medical innovation.” See also Alex Tabarrok’s wonderful and short book Launching the Innovation Renaissance.

* “Are Graduate Students At Private Schools ‘Employees’?” Given the amount and kind of work they do, it’s hard to answer “no.” At the University of Arizona, English grad students taught two classes per semester, for pay—the same amount of teaching professors did.

* “Solving the Shortage in Primary Care Doctors;” see also my essay “Why you should become a nurse or physicians assistant instead of a doctor: the underrated perils of medical school.”

* Yet another reason why public schools are as fucked up as they are: Student Gets Suspended, Loses Scholarship After Hugging a Teacher.

* The politics of science fiction.

* “Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots.”

* “How to Write: A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini, and More: Highlights from 12 months of interviews with writers about their craft and the authors they love.” Perhaps the most notable part is the number of people who give opposing or at least semi-contradictory advice. From that we might infer a meta rule: what works for other people won’t necessarily work for you (or me), and there isn’t necessarily a perfectly “right” way to do it.

Links: Artists, sex, utility, antibiotics, books, hypocrisy, and more!

December 10, 2013 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* From Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen, and thus perhaps more cerebral and less salacious than might be otherwise expected: “Why don’t people have more sex?”

* A lesson we have to learn, over and over again: “Not everyone is going to like the thing you made, and that’s okay:”

Consider this, about having perspective on criticism: If you enjoyed making a thing, and you’re proud of the thing you made, that’s enough. Not everyone is going to like it, and that’s okay. And sometimes, a person who likes your work and a person who don’t will show up within milliseconds of each other to let you know how they feel. One does not need to cancel out the other, positively or negatively; if you’re proud of the work, and you enjoyed the work, that is what’s important.Don’t let the fear of not pleasing someone stop you from being creative.

(The main situation in which it’s not okay is when a person acts as a gatekeeper or has the ability to block forward progress if they don’t like your work; this is a major and under-discussed problem in academia.)

* Why don’t French books sell abroad?

* “When We Lose Antibiotics, Here’s Everything Else We’ll Lose Too.” We’re losing antibiotics.

* Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) of Tennessee’s preschool program show that preschool doesn’t appear to improve the later school performance of those enrolled, or much of anything else.

* On the good news front: “Fed up with slow and pricey Internet, cities start demanding gigabit fiber.”

* “Overall, we Americans have a stronger attachment to U.S. dominance than to fair play or anyone’s rights.”

* An interview with the author, essayist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn; this is especially useful:

I think undergraduates should be kept away from Theory at all costs. I don’t think people should be allowed to even hear the word “theory” until they’re doing graduate work—for the very good reason that it’s impossible to theorise about texts before one has deep familiarity with them (not that that stopped anyone in the 1980s when I was in grad school). Undergraduates should be taught to have a clean appreciation of what texts say and how they say them, and learn how to write intelligently and clearly about that. If undergraduates had to have a model of criticism it ought to be popular criticism rather than traditional academic criticism.

* “The Stem and the Flower,” or, the distressing politicization of everyday life.

* This quote does not come from the sort of source you would expect it to come from: “When the history of how the United States became a dystopian, surveillance state is written no one will be able to say that we were not warned.”

* “The Other Side of the Story: When I was fourteen, I had a relationship with my eighth grade history teacher. People called me a victim. They called him a villain. But it’s more complicated than that.” This may tie into the first link in this list.