Thursday, April 29, 2010

I wanna go fast!

Listening to criticism of the financial reform bill echoing on NPR, it sounds like some people are concerned that it will jeopardize our ability to recreate the financial explosion of the middle-aughts.

Isn't that the point?

Isn't the reason that 2005 was so good that it was based on a house of cards... in a wind tunnel?

The analogy at the tip of my tongue is: it sounds a little like baseball saying "we want to ban steroids, but only so long as it doesn't jeopardize our players' ability to hit 70 home runs a year." We need to be able to trust our financial sector. Trust has to be earned. That usually requires sacrifices of some kind or another.

all the cool kids are doing it

A few weeks ago, "This American Life" did another episode ("Inside Job") about the economic crisis. This one focused on a firm named "Magnetar" (after a breed of neutron star with obscenely strong magnetic fields; that is about the extent of their coolness; sort of; maybe; I'm having a hard time parsing this one). This firm made an obscene amount of money off of the crisis by (and this is the executive summary; you should really listen to the episode)

a) duping larger firms into investing in mortgage-backed securities. I say "duping" because these larger firms only invested in said securities because Magnetar volunteered to buy up their least stable part (in effect, agreeing to be the fall-guy for the investment). However, unlike the well-mannered fall-guys of mafia mythology, Magnetar was actually

b) betting heavily against those securities.

The idea was that, while Magnetar would certainly lose money on account of part (a) when the securities failed, that amount would pale in comparison to the amount of money they would make in part (b). One of the theses of the "This American Life" episode is that Magnetar started doing this right as the market was beginning to figure out that mortgage-backed securities were a bad idea (back in 2005). By volunteering to be everyone else's fall guy in part (a) Magnetar breathed life into a pretty bad idea and helped bring on 2008.

I am sad to say that none of this seems to me as clear-cut as it should.

Obviously, what Magnetar did was bad for a lot of people, but, at the same time, I can't shake the feeling that "they never promised anyone that they would look out for society as a whole; all they ever said was that they would make an obscene amount of money, and, as I said, they made good on that one."

Everyone keeps talking about "the demise of the American Dream," both in terms of health care and in terms of the economy and its possible solutions. Is it possible that this crisis is the American Dream: making aforementioned obscene amounts of money at the expense of quite literally everyone else in the country? I mean, as a nation, we're not really big on social responsibility. Our national identity seems pretty rooted in proving how much more awesome our nation is than everyone else's, not in anything we concretely do as a nation.

There's a stanza in the Springsteen song "A Long Walk Home"

"That flag flying over the courthouse // means certain things are set in stone // who we are, what we'll do // and what we won't."

I wonder if that isn't a little optimistic. Does our flag really stand for things we will do, or just things we won't? We won't abridge freedom of speech. That's great. We won't torture. That's obviously not true, but it's probably the point of the song. What will we do? We will send in the Marines to topple dictators (I'm not sure I believe that, either, but let's just take it as a given for the sake of argument). Okay, fine, we'll prove that our military is stronger than yours. Will we give cheap medical care to the least able among us? Who knows? Not without screaming about communism and fascism. Will we use our intellectual and industrial gifts to do something positive for the planet, or will we hide behind China and India's greenhouse gas emissions as if the words "per capita" don't actually mean anything? To whom are we actually responsible?

Obviously, I'm still coming down from having just read Ursula K. Leguin's "The Dispossessed." I don't understand why that book wasn't on my first year Core reading list and "the Communist Manifesto" was.

(This post is the bloviating offspring of what was going to be a comment on something Charles said on his blog)

(I'm tempted to edit this so the word "obscene" doesn't appear so often; I hate over-using words; it seems appropriate, though)

(It's also possible that the problem is in me. The first time I learned to play Hearts, I cheated. The rules didn't make sense to me. You were supposed to play in a way that was sub-optimal, but there was no external enforcement mechanism and no transparency by which other players could check that you weren't cheating. I think I was 23 at the time. I can't tell whether or not that supports my thesis.)

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

in case you were wondering

Today is the second day in two months I've heard air raid sirens in the city. It's only a drill, but still: air raid sirens. [Expletive].

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

"...if we assumed that these whales were ours to do with as we pleased..."

This post started out much angrier than (I hope) it ended. Story of my life...

The Radio Lab episode "Animal Minds" starts with a story about a whale tangled and drowning in the lines of about twenty crab traps and the bunch of humans with boats who, for no reason other than that they are awesome, worked to cut it free. They succeeded. Upon attaining freedom, the whale did not swim away. It hung around, gently nudging and staring at each of the divers in turn. Understandably, the divers took this behavior as whale for "thank you." From here, the episode turns to an animal psychologist who claims that it is "demeaning" to assign human emotions to other animals. Why, he asks, should we suppose that we live in a world in which every living being is somehow like us? Why shouldn't every species have its own way of relating (the implication being that maybe there is no whale "thank you")?

This is a fair point, much fairer than I thought when I first wrote those words. Not all animals are humans (though all humans are animals, a point which the Radio Lab hosts accentuate returning from the break before their last segment). Anthropomorphizing non-humans glosses over the reasons that this is true and prevents everyone involved from learning something from encounters with other species. There, I said it. What I take issue with is the way the point is raised. Instead of starting from the assumption that non-human animals are unlike us and trying to find the ways that we are similar, why can't we start from the assumption that they are like us (or, even better, that we are like them) and try to find the ways that we/they are different. To turn the psychologist's words petulantly around: "why shouldn't we suppose that we live in a world in which we are somehow like every living being?"

Case in point: The first piece of evidence the psychologist raises is a study done by another psychologist on dogs. The second psychologist (whose name stuck out for being a woman named Alexander Horowitz; she works at Barnard College) gathered a group of dog owners. Somehow, she contrived to have time alone with the dogs, after which she told every owner that their dog had misbehaved. This was only true in half of the cases. The owners (all of them) scolded the dogs. The dogs (even the dogs who had done nothing wrong) assumed the "guilty dog" posture (ears and head down; tail between legs). "Aha!" said the psychologist, "that posture does not denote guilt; it denotes submission. The dogs are just acknowledging our authority." Can we really separate this notion from guilt? Sure, there is a feeling I associate with the knowledge that I have done something wrong, but after 29 years of living in a society composed of religious, academic, and political authorities, I associate the same feeling with the knowledge that I have done something that an authority figure tells me is wrong.

I've always found the natural/artificial distinction some what troublesome. New York City is artificial. A beaver dam or an anthill is not. If this is really True, then there should probably be a word for "built by a beaver" or "built by ants" the way that artificial means "built by humans." "Artificial ingredients" also bother me. Unless they're holding out on us (or themselves; seriously, guys, there's a Nobel Prize -- or five -- in this), food scientists aren't in the business of producing particles from the aether, so everything must come from the Earth at some level. I know this is a lot of semantics and glosses over some very important distinctions about how margarine will probably kill you faster than butter, but there are consequences to how we draw those distinctions. After 2,000 years living from the assumption that we are different and therefore removed from all of the creatures around us, we have wiped out the Dodo, worse-than-decimated (which means to kill a "measly" 10%) several species of whale (and tigers, and gorillas, and...) and made an industry of felling the trees and polluting the oceans that regulate the composition of the air we breathe. We assumed the answer ("we are wholly different from all other animals") and the entire planet paid the price. Maybe we ought to consider assuming a different answer. The impact of assuming we are like other animals and being wrong is a world with fewer cheeseburgers, SUVs, and multi-national corporations. The impact of assuming we are not like other animals and being wrong is a world with less arable land.

People who think I'm being sentimental should read this. The elephants, it seems, are tired of putting up with our crap. If you'd rather not be depressed, you could also listen to this episode of Speaking of Faith.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

and while you're at it, eat your broccoli

I adopted a new podcast this week: Radio Lab. This American Life keeps joining forces with them, so I figured, why not?

This week's episode was about testing the limits of the human body/brain/species. Yup, you read that last one right. The final ten minutes of the show was devoted to a group of roboticists at Cornell who have designed a giant computer to answer open-ended questions. What do I mean by that? They built a double-pendulum, put it under a video camera, hooked that camera up to their giant computer and asked "what's going on here?" After about a day (with no background knowledge, just the video footage), the computer came up with the following answer:

Force equals mass times acceleration.

Yes, after one day watching one (admittedly chaotic) pendulum, this computer figured out the fundamental law of modern science that humanity (acting through Aristotle, Sir Isaac Newton, and everyone in between) took about 20,000 years to discover (depending on where you reckon the start of humanity).

Let's just take a moment to appreciate the beauty of that.

Let's take another moment to freak out about the fact that we are teaching robots to do science on their own. Crap.

Let's move on. At the end of the segment, some biologists feed the computer years of data about the behavior of single-celled organisms and ask the same question. The computer ponies up, delivering relatively simple equations that not only explain the data but predict future data. Unfortunately, the biologists (or really any human, actually) have no idea what the equations mean or why they work (foolish mortals!). To quote the radio program "they have the answers, but not the insight." Anyone who's ever taken a physics class knows where I'm going with this. 400 years after the birth of modern science, researchers are looking at the back of the book.

Any text book that is actually useful will include the answers to every other problem in an appendix. Most professors assign at least some of these problems as homework. The thinking is that once you do the problem, you can peak at the answer and, if the book disagrees with you, you can go back over your work, figure out where you went wrong, and hopefully learn something about either your intuition or your ability to do arithmetic. It goes without saying that merely handing in the answers without showing your work (usually not included in the back of the book) will net you precisely zero points.

It is oft lamented that what we do as students in classrooms (listen to lectures, sit exams, do homework problems about spherical cows in frictionless vacuums) has very little to do with actually being a scientist. Apparently, that is no longer true.