34 posts
A blog about community, complexity, and making good choices. Essays and quotes on judgment, uncertainty, governance, play, and power — originally published at out-of-many.com (2017–2020).
This twitter thread is a great example of "minding the gap", that is: doing the necessary improvisational work to complete a task that has only been partially, abstractly specified. I recently learned another term for this: bricolage.
Via Martha Nussbaum’s Poetic Justice, an excerpt from Woodson v. North Carolina (1976):
This TED talk by Shonda Rhimes underscores the importance of play:
One prominent idea of rights, common in the US political and legal tradition, understands rights to be barriers against interfering state action: if the state just keeps its hands off, rights are taken to have been secured. The Capabilities Approach, by contrast, insists that all entitlements involve an affirmative task for government: it must actively support people’s capabilities, not just fail to set up obstacles. In the absence of action, rights are mere words on paper. Vasanti was not beaten by the government of Gujarat; she was beaten by her husband. But a government that does not make and then actively enforce laws against domestic violence, or give women the education and skills they need to get a living wage if they leave an abusive marriage, is accountable for the indignity such a woman endures. Fundamental rights are only words unless and until they are made real by government action. The very idea of “negative liberty”, often heard in this connection, is an incoherent idea: all liberties are positive, meaning liberties to do or to be something; and all require the inhibition of interference by others.”
Imagine a child playing in a sandbox, dreaming up elaborate stories about the castles they’ve built with their sandbox toys. Now, imagine a group of eighteen adults, two teams of office co-workers, throwing around a baseball according to very precise rules. Those adults are playing too.
With the exception of rare contrivances like king’s missives and broadcast television, we learn most of what we learn and meet most of the people we meet through networking. This has always been true, but it’s clearer than ever with social media. To be honest I rather like it. When a friend I trust or a writer I admire shares a link I tend to follow along enthusiastically.
I posted a few months ago about negative capability – that is, the ability to tolerate uncertainty, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Coined by the Romantic poet Keats, the term is easily associated with art but applies in all disciplines and all areas of life. Uncertainty pervades everything. So it behooves us to come to terms with it.
This link goes to a fascinating little explainer by Popehat on Twitter. Excerpted here and lightly edited for readability:
Last week I was on a panel about ‘Democracy and the Digital Commons’ at Suffolk University. At the start of the panel, each of us gave a 5-10 minute talk to help frame the discussion. While there’s no transcript of the panel itself, here are my notes for the intro. (Quick context: each of us tied our talk to the Boston Marathon bombing and in particular Reddit’s response to it.)
Back in high school and college, I had friends who offered to do tarot readings for me. I always turned them down. “What a dumb idea,” I’d think. “How could a deck of cards predict your future!”
We often talk about giving people the benefit of the doubt, but seldom talk about its opposite, to the point that no agreed upon phrase for it exists. The best I could come up with is the “burden of doubt”, which largely applies to courtroom settings. Even with the help of judicial documents, the phrase is not very popular.
This old tweet has recently been making the rounds and sparked up some discussion among my Facebook friends:
There is a lot to be said about what happened to Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka yesterday, but this tweet by Jennifer Richeson captures the analysis of the incident that’s most relevant to this blog:
I recently read David Ciepley’s “Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation”. I recommend reading it yourself, but here’s my best attempt to summarize it in my own words.
Last week I went to a rally to protest a series of raids by ICE in my city. The rally turned into an unplanned march through the streets, and I had to make two quick decisions: first, whether to join the march, and second, whether to remain in the street when the police started to give warnings.
Principles are really important, and by and large you should try hard to stick to them. I have tremendous respect for those who have died or gone to jail for their principles.
It is in the very nature of a question like “What do I owe my parents?” that there is not and can never be a final, numerically answer. It is a question that we re-visit and re-negotiate every minute we are with them; obligation and love form an endless Möbius strip, through which our complex interdependence on each other makes the idea of paying off that debt – and of thereby severing the relationship – a sort of bitter joke. Precisely because it is a non-monetary “debt,” its function is to be an unpayable and unbreakable bond, one whose dividends never end and one that could and will never default.
Socrates, however, who is commonly said to have believed in the teachability of virtue, seems indeed to have held that talking and thinking about piety, justice, courage, and the rest were liable to make men more pious, more just, more courageous, even though they were not given either definitions or “values” to direct further conduct. What Socrates actually believed in in such matters can best be illustrated by the similes he applied to himself. He called himself a gadfly and a midwife, and, according to Plato, was called by somebody else an “electric ray”, a fish that paralyzes and numbs by contact, a likeness whose appropriateness he recognized under the condition that it be understood that “the electric ray paralyzes others only through being paralyzed itself. It isn’t that, knowing the answers myself I perplex other people. The truth is rather that I infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself.”
This originated as a post to a mailing list on the subject of blockchains and how they might help the cause of open science. The quote below is the claim I was directly responding to.
The point is partly an intergenerational one. Recall from the previous chapter the idea that inequalities of outcomes in one generation becomes inequalities of opportunity in the next and its analog: free associations in one generation become inherited ways of life in the next. This is a necessary truth; children are born into particular times and places and social worlds that have been shaped by the choices their parents have made. This does not simply mean that the parents were free and the children were not; it was also true of the parents that they were born into particular times and places and social worlds. If the parents had some freedom to reshape their worlds in partially original ways, to join or form groups into which they were not born, then the children also have some such freedom. But there could be a narrowing over time; parents can join groups or adopt ways of life that leave their children with fewer choices than they themselves had.
I detest and fear dogma. I know that all revolutions must have ideologies to spur them on. That in the heat of conflict these ideologies tend to be smelted into rigid dogmas claiming exclusive possession of the truth, and the keys to paradise, is tragic. Dogma is the enemy of human freedom. Dogma must be watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary movement. The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice. Those who enshrine the poor of Have-Nots are as guilty as other dogmatists and just as dangerous. To diminish the danger that ideology will deteriorate into dogma, and to protect the free, open, questing, and creative mind of man, as well as to allow for change, no ideology should be more specific than that of America’s founding fathers: ‘For the general welfare’. (p. 4)
In an article about Milton Friedman in the Pacific Standard, Rick Paulas quotes from an article of Friedman’s published in 1970:
Warning: Black Panther spoilers.
Bureaucracy is stupid, David Graeber writes in The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. As the premise for a book, it’s more fertile than it sounds.
In an essay at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova sketches out a conception of identity as a collection of fragments which is, paradoxically, being repressed and sanded down by identity politics:
Back in college, I based my Division III (senior thesis) research on a set of empathy studies by Nancy Eisenberg. Eisenberg’s line of research hinges on a distinction between two different kinds of empathy: empathic concern, the ability to recognize and care about the hurt others feel, and personal distress, the experiencing of the other person’s hurt yourself. Counterintuitively, personal distress is not positively associated with helping behavior. In fact, it may even decrease the likelihood of helping, if there’s an easy escape route away from the empathy-provoking situation.
In a previous post, I wrote that asking questions is harder than answering them, although I qualified that in a big way with “answering [questions] involves going back over and over again and updating our hypotheses, which makes answering questions feel hard”. I want to revisit this claim.
Back when I was a research scientist, I straddled the boundary between “hard” and “soft” sciences. I did social psychology, which is a pretty soft science as sciences go, but I paired it with biology and physiology in general and endocrinology in particular, which meant getting a taste for some of the harder stuff.
What shade of gray would you say this is?
This is a short and subtle piece by Diana Senechal about sexual harassment claims and our response to them. I by and large agree with it, but I like it mostly for the poem (or, well, stanza of a poem) it introduced me to, Robert Frost's The Wood Pile:
It's easy to complain about "purity politics". It's easy to complain about "neoliberals" and "sellouts". But we live in hard times, and the easy route's not going to get us anywhere.
Chalk Corridor by fdecomite 6/25/2013 CC BY 2.0
Mike Montiero recently posted an essay to Medium "One person’s history of Twitter, from beginning to end". It's a good piece, but what really struck me was this referenced Tweet from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone:
Andrew Gelman has a brief post up on his blog comparing the way bug reports in open source software are received to the way many researchers respond to criticisms of their work. The comments there are good, and cover my first reaction, which was, "Developers respond well to bug reports?" But that's a bit tongue in cheek. I do think that, overall, developers are a bit more responsive to bug reports than scientists are to published criticisms of their work. Here are my theories as to why that is: