Category: ESSAYS

Like rants, only more “scholarly-sounding”.

 

The Gift of Failure

(At a riverside cabin 11 miles south of Black Mountain, NC – 11 June 2015:)

Today I drove over to Asheville School, where I first arrived fifty-six years ago, almost to the day, and from which I departed several months later, never (I thought) to return. I’m glad I went back today, because it illuminated a turning point in my life that I had never fully understood before.

That summer long ago I had just completed eighth grade at a public Junior High in Winter Park, Florida. My family had a traditional respect for quality education and it was evident that I was ill-prepared for same, so they sent me off to Asheville to be brought up to speed in summer school. I have no knowledge of the considerations that contributed to that choice; I only know that I was a redneck kid with no interest in having my mind expanded. I spent the summer avoiding work, building model airplanes surreptitiously in my dorm room and complaining about the lousy fishing in the lake down the hill. I couldn’t wait to get back to the bass of Florida, and I soon got my wish.

When my uncle came to retrieve me at the end of the term, he was informed that I was not welcome back. In short, I flunked out. This was a little embarrassing, I recall, and even moreso when I reflexively called my uncle “Sir” thanks to a month or two of conditioning.

When I got home to Winter Haven, Florida I was duly enrolled in Denison Junior High, where I spent two weeks discovering the consequences of my impulsive choice. My home room teacher enforced discipline like a prison warden; my classmates were exactly what I had been at the beginning of the summer. It was Kafka’s hell.

I begged my mother to give me a second chance. Miraculously, I got one from Harry D. Hoey, then Headmaster of Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where my mother was working on her Masters degree at the Art Academy. This time I cooperated, and learning took hold.

I graduated from Cranbrook in 1963, from Trinity College (in Hartford, CT) in 1967 and then from the University of California at Berkeley with a Ph.D. in Physics in 1972; thence to an academic career at the University of British Columbia. A lot has happened. I’ve had a great life with many successes and few failures since that critical one at Asheville School. But the long story of my life is not really relevant to the point I’d like to make here:

Turning points don’t come easily, especially to willful adolescents. Sometimes the most generous gift you can give a child is to let them know in no uncertain terms that they have failed – failed to live up to your well-advertised standards, failed to live up to their own potential. “Cultivating self-esteem” has its place, but today it has become an obsession that does harm to those whose self-esteem comes only from others’ praise.

Love is meaningless if it has to be deserved; respect is meaningless if it doesn’t.

Nonmaleficence Conundrum

If you watch television, you can’t avoid hearing about how this pill or or that salve will miraculously cure your headache or skin rash or allergy, as long as you don’t mind a small risk of coughing up your lungs while convulsing and popping blood vessels in your brain. The warnings required by law in drug advertising are so dire that people make jokes about them, because taking them seriously would foster the worst kind of paranoia. (Somehow beer ads are exempt from such encyclopedic caveats; although alcohol is certainly a dangerous drug, it’s one we’re used to — and we still remember what happened when we tried to prohibit its use.)

Now I read about a study (see Wells & Kaptchuk) that shows how these warnings trigger a nocebo effect (see the eponymous Rant on this site): patients who are warned about possible side effects in the name of informed consent are significantly more likely to experience said side effects than those left blissfully ignorant.

It follows as night the day that all those warnings on TV about possible serious side effects are actually causing more such effects in the millions of viewers being warned. The legally mandated caveats are actually killing people! Surely the deep pockets of the pharmas are funding massive legal action to strike down these laws; if not, the first lawyer to think of it is going to make a lot of money.

Is there no way to retain the requirement for full disclosure without making more people sick? Sure there is: just provide all the information. Tell us how likely each of the side effects is; that information must exist, or it would be hard to justify requiring the warnings. The only problems are (a) viewers would have to acquire the wit to distinguish between a little and a lot (see my Rant on “Quantitacy” here) and (b) the ads would be several minutes long, unless the announcer learns to talk even faster!

Poor Cuba!

Today the USA announced that it would drop its ban on travel to Cuba and relax the trade restrictions that have prevented Cubans from exchanging good cigars for electronics and cars from the USA for the past half century.  I fear this will serve to drain Cuba’s remaining resources into the capitalist reservoir in short order.  Why?  Simple statistical economics (Stat Ec for short):

To the extent that all wealth is shared equally in an ideal socialist economy, there is only one possible distribution of wealth, and so the economic entropy of such a system (i.e. the logarithm of the number of possible random redistributions) is zero.  More importantly, the entropy is unchanged when more wealth is added.  Cuba may not be an ideal socialist economy, but it’s a lot closer than the USA, where every conceivable redistribution of wealth is a priori equally likely, giving an enormous economic entropy and a very large entropy increase with every injection of new wealth.  The USA is certainly not an ideal capitalist economy, but the deviation from randomness only occurs at the high end of the personal wealth spectrum: the wealth of the infamous 1% is far higher than predicted by a simple Boltzmann distribution (exponential decay of probability with increasing wealth), but for everyone else we might as well be utterly indiscriminating in all our financial transactions.  Look it up!

So what happens when a “hot” wealth reservoir (one with almost no increase of entropy per unit added wealth) is put in economic contact with a “cold” one (with a large increase of entropy for every addition of wealth)?  Wealth flows spontaneously from Cuba to the USA through the agency of completely random exchanges.  Again, look it up!  Any textbook on Statistical Mechanics will give you the details; or you can read mine: http://jick.net/~jess/hr/skept/Therm/

Which brings me to another observation that will surely be misunderstood by most readers: there will always be more people with low wealth than with high wealth, and this fact has nothing to do with anyone’s intentions.  It is an unavoidable consequence of completely random transactions involving exchanges of wealth.  Yes, like you, I believe my transactions are far from random; but then where does that Boltzmann distribution come from?  We try to bias our transactions in our favour, but we fail.  Randomness cannot be defeated.

Therefore if we could tomorrow gather up all the wealth in the world and distribute it evenly among all people (the limiting case of our desire to “flatten the distribution”), within several years the distribution would be back to the Boltzmann form — probably with even more “excess” wealth at the top end, because we would probably have relaxed many of the safeguards we have now, in the mistaken belief that uniform wealth would ensure fair trade.

The best we can hope for is to ensure equality of opportunity.  Equality of success is impossible, and not even desirable!  In our recent quest for the latter, we have compromised our traditional commitment to the former.  While “liberals” pursue the fantasy of a flat distribution of wealth, “conservatives” have been inventing ways to cheat in the game of wealth accumulation.  Crooks don’t want equality of opportunity; they want to have all the opportunity, and they want you to have none.

I am not a liberal.  I am not a conservative.  No, I do not have to choose a side.  Don’t be a fool.

Science

Last night I went to a Green College/STS meeting in which four young academics described what they thought Science was or wasn’t.  The first was an Historian bent on insulting all who thought of themselves as Scientists; the second was another, more conciliatory Historian trying to educate Scientists as to what they actually do; the third was an STSer trying to explain what STS is or isn’t; and the last was a Mathematical Physicist who seemed completely unaware of his context or what the discussion was supposed to be about.  I stuck up my hand, of course, but was never called on.  So I came home and stewed overnight, and now I think I’m ready to express my thoughts.

To make bold statements, or even to think critically, about any subject requires a certain arrogance: you must believe that not only is it possible to understand the subject, it is possible for you to understand the subject.  To be correct in this assumption, however, requires a certain humility: you must acknowledge that other people may have thought about the subject too, and that their thoughts are worth listening to and absorbing before you shoot your mouth off.  I have too little of the latter to become a great thinker.  Dang.

I think it is necessary to stipulate that Science is both “what Scientists do” and “what Scientists are trying to do”.  These are clearly not the same thing.  Moreover, they both beg the question of, “Who is a Scientist?”  Lots of kooks go around calling themselves Scientists, and while some of them turn out eventually to be correct, this transition almost always depends upon their acceptance by other Scientists.  So Science really is a “club” of sorts.  We are stuck with some sort of Constructivist sociological model; but not necessarily the Strong Program, which states confidently that facts are determined only by politics.

Coming back to the (I think critical) question of “what are Scientists trying to do,” the obvious answer is, “All sorts of different, and frequently incompatible, things.”  But is there anything sufficiently universal to use as a sort of RFID for Scientists?  I think so.  It is that guardedly arrogant notion that every phenomenon has an explanation and is ultimately understandable — perhaps not by me, but definitely by a sufficiently intelligent entity.  Sociologists and STSers usually conflate this immediately with Realism, but that’s just their usual silliness; the Understandability Principle would apply equally well to a purely Solipsist universe where all phenomena were only in your head (whatever that is).  It would be a lot harder to understand such phenomena, since that gets into the realm of Psychology, but the same aesthetic would still apply.  It is, after all, an aesthetic commitment more than a rational belief, since it is patently unprovable and unrefutable.

There is more than a tautological truth to the statement, “Science is what Scientists do.”  It implies that, by definition, if you are not a Scientist you don’t know what you are talking about when you try to describe Science.  Of course, unless I can campaign successfully to persuade the Scientific Community to accept my definition of the common aesthetic commitment of all Scientists as the best way to determine who gets membership in the club, I got no clout.  Oh well, I can still use it to annoy STSers back.

A room full of STSers quoting from Bruno Latour about Science is like a bunch of couch potatoes quoting from Don Cherry about hockey during the Superbowl halftime show.  No, actually, it’s like a panel of TV sportscasters delving into their statistics to reach consensus that the only way Usain Bolt could run that fast is if he’s on steroids.  They have never run 100m or 200m at any speed; they have no personal experience of what they are talking about; and they really don’t have a right to their opinions, but of course they will have them anyway, and try to shove them down the sprinters’ throats.