Tag Archives: new york times

The Quantity Problem with Peer Review in the Sciences

Jack Hitt’s recent article in the New York Times touting the virtues of crowdsourcing peer review, of public comments on to-be-published or just-published scientific research, prompts me to offer a few thoughts on the problems in traditional peer review in a discipline—computer science—that I have had some exposure to in the past. In this post, I will concentrate on the forum for publication provided by academic meetings such as conferences or workshops.

First and foremost, far too much material is submitted for publication. There are thousands of  computer science conferences and workshops held annually. (This is not an exaggeration.) The reviewing for these events is carried out by the program committee, a loosely organized group of academics brought together to organize the event. Some members of the program committee constitute the original brains trust for the conference; yet others are invited to serve to increase the star rating of the conference—a conference’s quality is often gauged by the pedigree visible in the program committee—and to aid in the reviewing of conference submissions.

When submissions arrive, they are parceled out to the program committee for reviewing. In some cases, to ensure a more nuanced review, papers are assigned to more than one member of the committee; sometimes, however, a paper might receive only one review. This stage of the reviewing is often one-way-blind; the name of the author is known, but the referee remains anonymous to the author. In larger conferences, the reviewing is double-blind.

Academic schedules mean, inevitably, that the program committee member is over-committed: he has signed up for many academic events, and accepted as many invitations as he can, all in a rush to add lines to the CV, to increase his visibility in the community, to network. But now, conference submissions are in the Inbox, demanding careful, sincere, and honest review.

Unsurprisingly, the committee member is late with his reviews. The program committee chair sends out reminder emails; the harried committee member rushes off to review the paper,  gives it a perfunctory reading, and writes a brief summary and critique. This review is almost invariably a superficial assessment. Unsurprisingly a great deal of garbage gets past gatekeepers. Sometimes, the committee member with outsource or sub-contract the reviewing to a PhD student or a colleague.  PhD students can either very harsh or very mild reviewers; the former type bristles with aggression, eager to show off his newly acquired knowledge; the latter, diffidently taking his first steps into the professional academic world, hesitates to make critical judgments.

Sometimes a workshop or a conference will not receive enough submissions. Panic sets in among the program committee; the conference’s viability is threatened. Instructions go out to committee members: ‘Accept papers if they will spark discussion; accept them if they show some promise; accept them even if many call-for-papers guidelines are not met’. The conference is held; the less said about the quality of the papers presented, the better.

In computer science, publications in the proceedings of ‘premier’ conferences confer considerable prestige and are valuable additions to CVs; paper acceptances are a desired commodity. Interestingly enough, at the premier conferences, attendance lists are often made up of the usual suspects. This is partially ensured by the quality of the papers and also by the established authority of  the authors. Double-blind reviewing isn’t really ‘blind’; it is quite easy to determine the identity of authors by an inspection of the writing style, the  subject matter i.e., favorite hobby horses, sometimes even the formatting of mathematical symbols. (One research group always uses MS-Word to format their papers, as opposed to Latex; yet other uses idiosyncratic symbols for mathematical operators.) A not-so-confident reviewer, confronted with a paper written by an ‘authority’, holds fire. The paper makes it through. Yet another, knowing that this is written by an ‘authority’, lets it go through, because ‘it must be good’; others support ‘friendly’ research groups.

That last point brings us to the ‘paradigm problem.’  Fields of research often feature paradigms jostling for preeminence. Thus, reviewers are sometimes disinclined to favorably assess papers cast in the frameworks of competing paradigms but only too happy to enthusiastically accept those that show their own favored paradigm in a good light. Stories abound of academics who have experienced great difficulty in suggesting alternative frameworks to established paradigms that have cornered the market on conference committees and submissions.

Little can be done about the volume of research submitted for review. The modern academy has placed its members on the writing and publishing treadmill; like obedient children, confronted with the promotion and tenure process, academics comply.

But a great deal can be done about the reviewing process. More on that in a future post.

Note: This post is merely a cleaned up version of a post written on an older, now defunct blog (Decoding Liberation, named after the book.) I”m reposting it here because I wanted to reiterate my older worries, and to set up a preliminary to some soon-to-follow thoughts on crowd-sourcing peer review.

The Unsurprising Renaissance of Reading

Last week, Timothy Egan’s column in the New York Times noted an apparently surprising outcome of the presence of e-book readers and a ‘digital monolith’ like amazon.com, which should have resulted in the loss of the culture of reading, the loss of the culture of “ideas printed on dead trees’ to that of  ’the soulless digital monolith on Lake Union, with its 164 million customers.’

But,

[T]he apocalypse already came and went, and look who’s standing. One technology, the e-book, the biggest new invention in reading since Gutenberg cranked out a Bible with movable type, changed the world — most likely for better. We have more books, more readers, a bigger audience for words, on pixels or paper.

Of course, it might be that the publishing industry as we know it is doomed as is the beloved independent bookstore.  But are people reading more? The answer, it seems, is yes:

[T]he Association of American Publishers reported that overall revenues, and number of books sold in all formats, were up sizably in three years since 2008. Without e-books, the numbers would have been flat, or declined. One-fifth of all American adults reported reading an e-book in the past year….those digital consumers read far more books on average — about 24 a year — than the dead-tree consumers….e-book readers also buy lots of paper books…[they] “read more books in all formats”…By 2025, e-books will be 75 percent of total books sold.

But this ‘renaissance’ should not be surprising at all.

E-books represent a mode of distribution of the written word; they offer a mixed package of conveniences and entail the loss of many of the delightful physical affordances that printed books provide. As such they were never likely to appeal to all readers uniformly and thus unlikely to comprehensively destroy the culture of reading the printed-on-paper word. Readers read books on paper, via objects they can hold in their hand, for many more reasons than simply reading. Page-turning; marking in margins with a pencil (another physical affordance of another long-used artefact); these interactions have their own value and were never likely to be completely over-ridden by the e-book. They might lose their centrality for us as our material world changes and the nature of our embedding in it does. But it will take some doing. It will not be as facile a process as e-book-phobes might imagine.

And fears that e-books and their readers would destroy the culture of reading in general were even more overblown. Why anyone would imagine that reading would be displaced by a new mode of distribution that made it more convenient has always seemed mysterious to me. In a world bursting to the seams with information, with ever more knowledge to be disseminated, processed, and articulated (and I haven’t even touched on the expanding literary world yet!) why would reading ever lose its centrality?

Expressions of fears like those directed at e-books are not so much apprehensions of technology as much as they are expressions of distrust in humanity in general, in a lack of faith in its ability to absorb, and engage with, new modes of being in the world. For far too long, fearing that a particular relationship to the world might be mediated by a new mode of technology has been  considered a fashionable expression of one’s commitment to humanistic concerns; I think instead that it covers up an alarmingly fragile assessment of the resilience of human beings. This does not mean, of course, that concerns about the lockdown of e-books by pernicious technologies like DRM are unfounded; those continue to remain urgent. But those critiques, are, I think, independent of the worry that reading books on e-book readers will impact reading negatively.

Note: I still do not own an e-book reader, and do not anticipate buying one in the near future though my ever-growing archive of reading material in PDF format is making me consider doing so. I’m open to recommendations for the best reader for PDF files; please leave these in the comments section if possible.

The FBI, Elaborate Entrapment and Hannah Arendt on Secret Police

David Shipler writes in today’s New York Times about an interesting aspect of a series of ‘lethal terrorist plots’ that have been successfully interdicted by the nation’s law enforcement agencies:

[These] dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested

Shipler goes on to describe the elaborate entrapment methods followed by the FBI and its agents and asks:

This is legal, but is it legitimate? Without the F.B.I., would the culprits commit violence on their own? Is cultivating potential terrorists the best use of the manpower designed to find the real ones? Judging by their official answers, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department are sure of themselves — too sure, perhaps.

In most cases, entrapment defenses do not hold up in court because ‘the law requires that they show no predisposition to commit the crime, even when induced by government agents.’ The entrapment schemes followed by the FBI are distinctive because, before the 9/11 attacks, ‘it would be very unusual for the F.B.I. to present a crime opportunity that wasn’t in the scope of the activities that a person was already involved in’  and that is because ’There isn’t a business of terrorism in the United States’. So what the FBI has to do, apparently, is ‘find somebody who would jump at the opportunity if a real terrorist showed up in town.’ (Someone indulging in ‘Thought Crimes’ before those thoughts were directed toward action?)

The FBI’s entrapment includes not just providing material support but also at times, positive encouragement to those ‘terrorists’ that might be vacillating or reluctant. Read, for instance, the description of how James Cromitie, a defendant in the plot to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was led on and maneuvered, which concludes with:

It took 11 months of meandering discussion and a promise of $250,000 to lead him, with three co-conspirators he recruited, to plant fake bombs at two Riverdale synagogues.

This pattern of entrapment and its distinctive nature was noted by Judge Colleen McMahon, who, even as she rejected Cromitie’s entrapment defense and sentenced him to 25 years, noted:

Only the government could have made a ‘terrorist’ out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in its scope.

These activities of the FBI are not unknown, of course, they have been commented on before, most notably by Glenn Greenwald.

So it is worth wondering how many of these men would have remained at the level of grumbling malcontents unless they had been led on by their FBI handlers. Causal analysis and determination of intent in these cases seems especially murky and ambiguous, a little too indeterminate to warrant the crystal clear clarity of the sentence handed out.

In any case, as I read Shipler’s article I was reminded of a little passage in Hannah Arendt’s  On Revolution, which occurs in the chapter ‘The Revolutionary Tradition and its Lost Treasure’:

It certainly is not conspiracy that causes revolution, and secret societies – though they may succeed in committing a few spectacular crimes, usually with the help of the secret police (endnote 71) – are as a rule much too secret to be able to make their voices heard in public.

Endnote 71 notes:

The record of the secret police in fostering rather than preventing revolutionary activities is especially striking in France during the Second Empire and in Czarist Russia after 1880. It seems, for example, that there was not a single anti-government action under Louis Napoleon which had not been, inspired by the police; and the more important terroristic attacks in Russia prior to war and revolution seem all to have been police jobs.

Ann Patchett is Wrong About the Pulitzers

Ann Patchett has an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times, which waxes angsty over the failure of the Pulitzer committee to award a prize in fiction this year: This decision, besides affecting book sales, might lead readers to think there wasn’t any good fiction around. For as Patchett puts it, the Pulitzers are indispensable in drumming up the excitement that sends readers to bookstores, and play the same role in the literary world that the Oscars play in the world of cinema:

Unfortunately, the world of literature lacks the scandal, hype and pretty dresses that draw people to the Academy Awards, which, by the way, is not an institution devoted to choosing the best movie every year as much as it is an institution designed to get people excited about going to the movies. The Pulitzer Prize is our best chance as writers and readers and booksellers to celebrate fiction. This was the year we all lost.

So presumably, having failed to receive a directive from the Pulitzer prize committee on which books to purchase the next time they are at Barnes and Noble or browsing on Amazon, people will read less fiction. Oh, the horror!

I’m genuinely perplexed by this. I can understand Patchett’s angst from the perspective of authors. The Pulitzers do provide a massive marketing boost to a book, and bump up sales. And thus, one easily understands her angst from the bookseller’s perspective. But as a reader, pardon my French, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the Pulitzers. I read plenty of fiction, and I have not once, never, ever, ever, felt more excited or pumped up on reading about the Pulitzer award for fiction. (I watch a lot of movies too, and I remain resolutely unexcited by the announcement of the Oscars.)

I read fiction because, to quote Patchett, I realize that

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.

I started reading fiction as a child, and haven’t stopped yet; in my universe of reading  the Pulitzers exert no influence whatsoever. I’m not saying this as a snob; I imagine it is the same for many other readers. Patchett is genuinely confused: The Pulitzers don’t make people read more; rather they channel that reading into particular directions, towards particular locations of influence and connections in the world of writing and publishing (If you imagine the Pulitzers are free of lobbying influence, I have a bridge to sell you.) Readers read fiction for the reasons Patchett cites above; those reasons will not go away just because a Pulitzer was not awarded this year.

Patchett’s argument is an economic one; she should keep it that level, and not make the crucial mistake of imagining that somehow readers’ lives have been impoverished by the failure of the Pulitzer prize committee to award a prize. Patchett should feel free to speak as an industry spokesperson, for the machinery of publishers and authors. But she should leave readers out of it.

David Brooks on “Centralization”

On May 23-24, 1865, the victorious Union armies marched through Washington. The columns of troops stretched back 25 miles. They marched as a single mass, clad in blue, their bayonets pointing skyward.

Those lines, dear reader, are the openers of a David Brooks article about the “centralization” of power in Washington via the “Obama health care law” (whose official moniker is “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”). “Obama health care law,” then, in the next sentence or so, becomes just plain “Obamacare.” Another sentence or so later, as Brooks commences a four-step listing of how “Obamacare” has “centralized” Washington’s authority, we are told about how “Obamacare centralizes Medicare decisions — and the power of life and death — within an unelected Independent Payment Advisory Board.”

At this stage, I am eight paragraphs through this seventeen-paragraph missive, and thus far, I’ve been exposed to civil war imagery, Obamacare, and the “death panels” made famous by Sarah Palin.

As far as polemical or rhetorical accomplishment goes, I’d have to say that Brooks got off to a flying start by talking about “Union armies” in Washington, “clad in blue” ready to bayonet any surviving Confederate unfortunates scrounging about in the undergrowth. Civil War? Red versus Blue? Bring it on!

The militarized bluster of this beginning was maintained by his choice of “Obamacare” as a tag for the health care act, but he seemed to have lost some nerve when it came to the “death panels.” Rather than use that term Brooks merely sticks in a coy subclause “and the power of life and death” when talking about the “unelected Independent Advisory Board” that allegedly wields it.  This is someone who is dying to soar and swoop in his political engagements but finds himself unable to do so.

Later, Brooks continues his milquetoast rambling by committing to what he terms a “Hamiltonian” position: “centralize the goals, but decentralize the means people take to get there.” I honestly have no idea what it means to “centralize a goal” but I’ll assume in this context that it means deciding to do something, as a legislative authority, as a government,  for the nation and its peoples. Which, of course, means that just about any legislation signed to realize ends of national interest (i.e., without regard for a particular region, people or geographic interest) represent the “centralization of goals.”  This understanding of “centralization” certainly seems to take some of the possibly threatening totalitarian sheen off it.

Be that as it may, possibly more interesting is Brooks’ decentralized solution:

[G]overnment insists everybody has coverage but then encourages companies, families and Medicare beneficiaries to engage in a regulated process of discovery to find the best care at the lowest cost.

It isn’t clear, of course, how such “encouragement” would work, and it is entirely mysterious, at least at this level of description, how or why such a “regulated process of discovery” would be any more efficient, and conducive to the production of better outcomes than the “centralized” process that Brooks so abhors. And Brooks shouldn’t be happy about the “regulated” nature of the process either; that seems to smack of control and direction, frightening entities for our brave unstructured, decentralized, Hamiltonian warrior.

Susan Matt on Homesickness, the ‘New Globalist’, and Technology

Susan Matt suggests that homesickness still afflicts the ‘new globalists,’ the cosmopolitans who would live ‘abroad,’ whether permanently or temporarily, away from home (“The New Globalist is Homesick”, New York Times, March 21, 2012). And technology, precisely by bringing them back into closer contact with loved ones and old haunts, and assuaging loneliness and longing, might actually be making things worse; it might remind them ever more acutely of just what it is that they are missing. This ‘new’ homesickness  seems at odds with the foot-loose sensibility that is supposed to be the hallmark of the connected, wired, constantly traveling world. The homesickness which afflicted the immigrant in the past is ‘back,’ and it is ever more persistent.

I’m not sure that Matt’s statement below represents the discovery of a genuine novelty:

In nearly a decade’s research into the emotions and experiences of immigrants and migrants, I’ve discovered that many people who leave home in search of better prospects end up feeling displaced and depressed. Few speak openly of the substantial pain of leaving home.

It might be that academics are now paying more attention to homesickness, but conversations about it and the infection of migrant enclaves, conversations and sensibilities with relentless nostalgia has been an enduring feature of migrants’ lives and it has remained impervious to the passage of time. This new homesickness is not new at all; it is just being paid attention to. Those living the lives of voluntary exile have always felt homesick, have never feared talking about it, and have always let it be writ large in their emotional and physical responses to their new worlds.

Consider for instance, that alcoholism is a common problem among international students in American universities; that expat cinema, for as long as can be remembered, has been concerned with the longing for a mythical, displaced land; consider how much the dilemma of the  torn, almost-schizophrenic, personality of the immigrant has been a feature of diasporic literatures. What are these if not manifestations of homesickness, permeating through the minds and bodies of immigrants?

It might be that the immigrant does not bring up homesickness in conversations with ‘locals,’ fearing these confessions might be viewed as evidence of dislike for his chosen home, a failure to assimilate properly, and reason to regard him as outsider in those conversational spaces. But elsewhere, in more welcoming climes, conversation all too easily returns to talk of home, of what remains behind, of the next trip, of the difficulties in reconciliation with two lands that leave them torn asunder psychically.

Matt is right to note that technology–whether it is because of the Skype call back home, the cable television channel in their own language or anything else like that–does not seem to help this homesickness. It cannot. It only serves to remind them that nothing can ever replace the felt sensation of place, the encounter with sounds, light, and smells, born of  the imprint of childhood experiences long-ago sensed and internalized, that  are a feature of physical contacts with ‘home,’ that tap into sensations long ago integrated into their minds and bodies. The phone call and the web cam will not tap into these; nothing quite replaces the walk out of the customs hall, past the immigration desk, out into the arrival hall, and the drive back ‘home’.

Video Game ‘Cloning’: What Is It Good For?

Cloning of video games is a Bad Thing. Or so sayeth Brian X. Chen and some video game developers (New York Times, March 12th, ” For Creators of Games, A Faint Line on Cloning”). Roughly, the thesis advanced is: ‘cloning’ can be destructive of developer motivation and the video game market, and thus seems to require legal intervention (by the application of patenting protections). I want to raise some questions that I hope will complicate the picture Chen provides us of innovation and its relationship to its legal regulation.

So,

In any commercialized art form, be it movies, literature or fashion, the creators often tread a fine line between inspiration and shameless copying. Some small video game makers say that line seems to have all but disappeared….“When another company takes inspiration from the game and they try to make a different game out of it, that’s when getting imitated turns into a compliment,” said Rami Ismail, a co-founder of Vlambeer. “Getting cloned is like getting punched in the face. It’s like a robbery.” Demoralized, Vlambeer stopped development of Ridiculous Fishing for several months. “It was kind of a motivation black hole,” said Jan Willem Nijman, another founder. “It almost destroyed Vlambeer.”

So, copying is ‘shameless’; the imitated seems to think it is both a ‘compliment’ and ‘like getting punched in the face’ and like ‘robbery;’ it can act as demotivator. Ismail’s statement starts by noting ‘inspiration’ and the creation of ‘different games’, which would seem to be a good thing (for game players at least). But something goes wrong: even though a new game has been created, it has employed ‘cloning’, the copying of  ”the soul of a game — its gameplay mechanics, design, characters and storyline — “. And this has demotivated the folks at Vlambeer.

This story raises questions well worth pursuing. What did Vlambeer do? Did it make another game? Did the presence of the new, ‘cloned’ game force them into other innovative avenues of development, rather than just working on a previously explored artistic niche? Did the cloning prevent Vlambeer from staying safely and staidly on the same beaten track? What brought Vlambeer back to working on games? What do they work on now and how? More generally, is it the case that those developers whose games have been ‘cloned’ start working on another game or do they exit the development market? Does cloning produce an arms race with games developers innovating furiously to maintain a cutting edge?

Other questions suggest themselves. Did consumers get more games out of this episode of cloning? Were the ‘cloned’ versions of the game better in any regard? Even if the “gameplay mechanics, characters and storyline” are ‘cloned’ what does it mean to say the ‘design’ was cloned? Was the interface of the cloned version identical, or did the interface work ‘better’ in some interesting dimension? For instance, are any of the ‘cloned’ games faster? Do they load quicker? Do game players indicate their preferences for these new games in any way?

After not raising these questions, Chen turns to possible legal protections and regimes:

One reason that cloning is so frequent in the game industry is that there is no easy way to protect a game. A piece of published writing or a photograph can be copyrighted, but not the mechanics of a game. Small game makers could seek patents protecting software design, but they generally shy away from this because acquiring a patent can be both time-consuming and relatively expensive, said Ellisen Shelton Turner, an intellectual property lawyer at Irell & Manella in Los Angeles.

In addition, because games so often draw inspirations from previous works, many game creators believe that patent protections could stifle creativity in future games, Mr. Turner said. “A lot of them are anti-patents,” he said. “And only in hindsight do they think patents are the proper thing to do when someone has stolen their idea.”

But what are the ‘mechanics’ of a game and why are they kinds of things that could be be copyrighted? Turner claims that developers shy away from acquiring patents because of the difficulties of the process but then in the next sentence puts it down to their acknowledgment of the creativity-stifling potential of patent protection. Those same developers might know that their development has drawn freely on the creative output of other developers and that seeking patent protections might be damaging to the ecology of the game development world; developers might be more cognizant of this ecology and its particular constraints, than say, corporate ‘intellectual property’ lawyers.  The belated self-knowledge that Turner ascribes to game developers might rather be their acknowledgment of the particular contours of their development community: that their decision to not seek patents  comes with a price attached while contributing to very particular freedoms enjoyed by game developers.

Finally, the central claim, that cloning results in bad outcomes:

The founders of Vlambeer, the maker of Radical Fishing, said they disagreed that cloning was good for consumers. They said cloning would make it more difficult for small companies to take risks on new ideas, but easy for big companies to succeed by rehashing old ideas. As a result, all new games could look extremely alike and unoriginal.

“If we go into that sort of spiral we’ll end up in a place where there’s only cloners, and there’s a limited amount of creativity happening,” Mr. Ismail said. “That’s the biggest horror scenario.”

This ‘horror scenario’ seems overstated. First, in light of the questions raised above. Second, because, peculiarly, in the scenario envisaged, game players appear to have no agency, no discrimination. They do not grant any game-maker first-mover advantage, they seem not to select between games, they mindlessly take on clones just because they are similar to extant games.

‘Cloning’ suggests the creation of identical copies; but the situation at hand deals with new games that incorporate central features of the older game. This fact, and the nature of the game development process, which draws on a ‘commons’ of code, algorithmic techniques, and a grab-bag of tricks and solutions to game development problems, considerably complicates the picture of the game development world and its possible legal regulation that emerges from Chen’s article.

Allison Arieff on Architecture and Jargon, and Why Ethical Theory Should Listen

Allison Arieff’s article, “Why Don’t We Read About Architecture” (New York Times, March 2nd, 2012), concludes, roughly, that the use of jargon in descriptions of architecture interferes with our appreciation of, and engagement with, the sciences and arts of the ‘built environment’. Arieff’s complaint is a familiar one in bemoaning jargon in fields of writing that have acquired an academic dimension; you would have to be particularly perverse to want to read some of the ‘prose’ that is all too frequently brought to bear on descriptions of building, urban spaces, architectural choices and the like. Buildings are where we eat, sleep, make love, bring up children, fight, resolve familial crises, develop relationships; they are where set up home. But writing about them is shrouded in impenetrable, jaw-breaking, ennui-introducing language; it repels rather than invites participation in thinking more about where we live, and how.

Buildings are, of course, used to make political and aesthetic statements, and they are not only used as dwelling spaces. They are also sites of work and storehouses of art, for instance. So some invocation of theoretical language, pitched in several registers, in unpacking an architect’s vision is almost inevitable. But still; the average article on architecture is almost unreadable (and it doesn’t have to be so, given that theory can be written clearly). This lack of readability prohibits a broader ‘engagement’ with the the issues that architecture raises, and perhaps even permits the ghastly buildings that are now ever increasingly a feature of our urban landscapes. It is almost as if the sheer intractability of the linguistic apparatus used to grapple with building spaces has permitted the hijacking of that activity by uninspired economic and artistic decisions.

The closest analogy to this state of affairs is, I think, the state of writing in ethical and moral theory. I am not going to suggest, for a second, that that venue is where anyone even considers looking for guidance in making ethical and moral decisions; for that it seems we have made the decision to turn to literature, the movies, and the plentiful, daily, vivid examples of our friends, lovers, family and co-workers. But that reluctance to turn to the products of professional philosophy should be curiosity-invoking: Does that branch of theorizing–given its subject-matter–have to be so remote from our lived experiences? (I have to admit, there is something richly comic in the idea that someone caught in the horns of an ethical dilemma would run to the local library and start a systematic search through The Philosopher’s Index; and I find this possibility comic even while knowing that that is not what journal articles are meant for.)

The analytically-oriented philosopher is particularly guilty of the sin of inquiry framed in sterile, specialized language, of course, but it doesn’t seem to me that things are any better in any other orientation. It is almost as if the professionalization of ethical and moral inquiry–via its placement in university departments associated with ‘disciplines’–brought with it a linguistic package that demanded a conformity so stifling that its end result has been a rather comprehensive obscuring of its original aim: providing orientation toward the good life.

Bill Keller Needs to Drop the Snark and Do Serious Journalism

Over at the New York Times, Bill Keller, who has been doing his best to make sure it will be hard to take him for a serious  journalist, writes a piece–bursting to the seams with snark–on Wikileaks. Keller thinks he is providing a serious evaluation of the fallout of Wikileaks (most particularly, its leaking of a gigantic corpus of military and diplomatic secrets last year). But Keller–whose trafficking in superficiality has been embarassingly on display for all too long on the NYT’s Op-Ed’s pages–simply cannot be bothered with seriously engaging with the issues that Wikileaks raised. Like: the need for transparency for those in power (as opposed to the privacy rights of individuals); the relationship of journalists with politicians; and most importantly, the all-too-evident eagerness of modern journalists to roll over and play faithful stenographer or megaphone for Wall Street, Capitol Hill and the Pentagon.

Instead, all Keller can do, in a pathetic display of lame attempts at sophomoric snark, is dish out one jibe after the other at Julian Assange. (His evident dislike for Assange tells me that Assange really hit home.) There are, count-em, sixteen paragraphs in Keller’s peice. It’s not till we get to the seventh or eighth paragraph that Keller stops being juvenile and starts to say something substantive.

And it’s not much. Roughly: Wikileaks exposed too much. In response, the always-secretive have become more secretive. And now life is harder for all us Serious Journalists[tm]. So let me get this straight:  in response to exposure,  those ensconced in power have dug their heels in, become more opaque, stepped up their chilling attacks on journalists and potential whistle-blowers, and this is Wikileaks fault? Could Keller be more offensive, more of a fawning lapdog of the powerful and the opaque, if he tried? I don’t think so.

Keller also forgets, in his Why-Did-This-Nonconformist-Crash-This-Comfortable-Politician-And-Media-Garden-Party litany, the role that the rest of his supine media crew played in ensuring that Wikileaks’ impact was minimized. Who took up cudgels on Wikileaks behalf? Did the media give ample column inches and airtime to the case for Wikileaks? Were the corporate-government smear jobs on Wikileaks adequately highlighted? Has the media establishment stepped back from its passionate embrace of those in power and looked a little more closely, a little more aggressively, at their pronouncements? They are the ones in power, remember?

If the secretive and powerful have become more secretive in response to exposure, the response of a serious journalist should be to make sure the secrecy is investigated even more closely.  It most emphatically should not be to shower scorn and ridicule on those who took risks in trying to expose the powerful. The idiotic quoting of the off-base SNL skit, which confuses the privacy of private citizens with the opacity of governmental entities, is perhaps the best indication that Keller has lost the plot. But far more offensive is the simpleminded acceptance of the government’s position: if you dare expose us, we’ll become even more secretive.

Keller is pushing back at the wrong forces in this debate. In doing that, he is merely the latest depressing example of the incestuous embrace of the political and media establishments in this nation.

Cary Sherman is Upset SOPA and PIPA Were Not Enacted

I am thankful to the RIAA‘s Cary Sherman for having provided a wonderful sample of writing, which may profitably be used by those teaching classes on rhetoric and critical thinking. I’m referring to Sherman’s screed in today’s New York Times, which alternates between self-pity and bluster in complaining about the failure of the passage of SOPA and PIPA, and which concludes with the line “We need reason, not rhetoric, in discussing how to achieve a ['safe and legal Internet'].” Do as I say, not as I do.

(Pardon me for merely taking potshots at Mr. Sherman below; on matters like these, I tend to write with a red cloud misting my eyes, and can barely type coherent sentences; pardon me too, for not addressing every single ‘point’ that Mr. Sherman attempts to make.)

We begin then, with:

The digital tsunami that swept over the Capitol last month, forcing Congress to set aside legislation to combat the online piracy of American music, movies, books and other creative works, raised questions about how the democratic process functions in the digital age.

“Tsunami”: Remember those aqueous beasts that killed hundreds of thousands and caused billions of dollars in damage? That’s what a concerted, organized political action against the RIAA’s attempt to clamp down on the ‘Net was like. It certainly raised questions for me about “how the democratic process functions in the digital age.” For instance, why doesn’t it happen more often in this nation? Note: I said “clamp down.” I am playing along.

Then,

Policy makers had recognized a constitutional (and economic) imperative to protect American property from theft…They knew that music sales in the United States are less than half of what they were in 1999, when the file-sharing site Napster emerged, and that direct employment in the industry had fallen by more than half since then, to less than 10,000.

“Constitutional” – the use of this term is an old-fashioned, well-worn American tactic to induce feelings of betrayal in a good citizen (ideally, one that hasn’t read the Constitution). I assume Mr. Sherman is equally concerned about another “constitutional imperative,” that of limited terms for copyright protection.

“Theft” – followed by two claims whose causes have yet to be traced to online music sharing. Note: I used “sharing.” I brought my bat and ball too.

At the 11th hour, a flood of e-mails and phone calls to Congress stopped the legislation in its tracks. Was this the result of democracy, or demagoguery?

“Demagoguery” – unfortunately, the line between this terrible thing and “democracy” is a hard one to draw and historically, has been so. Certainly, from the ramparts of the castle, the approaching “tsunami” of pitchforks may look like it was cobbled together by demagogues.

Misinformation may be a dirty trick, but it works. Consider, for example, the claim that SOPA and PIPA were “censorship,” a loaded and inflammatory term

“Loaded and inflammatory,” like “piracy,” “tsunami,” “theft,” and “misinformation” (which conjures up images of a Ministry of Information dishing out newspeak). The use of the latter terms is permitted only when the RIAAA and its minions are obeying “constitutional,” “economic,” and perhaps even moral imperatives. To resist them is “demagoguery.”

I might be mistaken in presenting Sherman’s Op-Ed as a piece of political rhetoric; its agonizingly self-pitying tone suggests a deeper, psychologically rooted dysfunction. I know pop-psychologizing is poor form, but really, what can you do with lines like the following?

The hyperbolic mistruths, presented on the home pages of some of the world’s most popular Web sites, amounted to an abuse of trust and a misuse of power….[These sites]  are duping their users into accepting as truth what are merely self-serving political declarations.

So let me wrap up this shooting-fish-in-a-barrel episode and get back to work: Sherman’s “hyperbolic mistruth,” presented on the editorial page of one of the world’s most moneyed media outlets is a “self-serving political declaration.” Read it, ‘clip it’, keep it aside. You’ll see in in textbooks soon, mark my words.

And go read the Wikipedia articles linked to above.