et cetera

WHEN BOTH ARE STRANGERS

Let us say the young Lakes from Chicago are about to move to Strangetown, where John Lake will manage the new branch office his firm has just opened. Business is the usual reason for moving to a new community. John will, of course, meet a few people through business. If the town is small and characteristically friendly, Mary will probably get to know her neighbours quickly. The Lakes will become members of the church and, by participating in a variety of church and community activities, gradually enlarge their acquaintance.

Emily Post, Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage, Funk and Wagnalls, New York, 10th Edition, 1960, p. 272.

As is common knowledge among those who have both ears and a brain, WFMU is the greatest station in the history of radio. While the sound quality over the internet is of course far better than over the radiowaves, it brought me untold joy when I arrived in New York to be able to sit a little radio on the refrigerator and listen while cooking, or washing dishes. I have a few favourite presenters, and they are: Bethany, Dave (who incidentally did the designs for the wonderful Autonomedia, a publisher I still love even though they regularly screwed up my orders, sending me either the wrong thing or nothing at all, followed up with stony silence in the face of my complaints), and Bryce. Now, about a month ago I heard an absolutely amazing broadcast from Bryce, and have been meaning to post it here ever since. Without further ado, here it is.

On a tour through Iowa farming communities, Rudolph W. Giuliani endured the test of making small talk.

From the Times news feed for Adam Nagourney, “Iowans Check for Dirt Under Giuliani’s Nails“, New York Times, 20 August 2007.

I am aware this will have little interest for most readers, but it looks like JSTOR is finally going to be enabling DOI for journals that wish to have their content identifiable in this way. This is very good news. JSTOR is easily the best online database for academic journals. It is beautifully designed, has all of the top journals, and is constantly being updated with new features that are both useful and well integrated with their service. It is a model of how to handle online content. Except, that is—until now—for the way the content could be identified and shared. Formerly JSTOR had their own URI scheme, and it was ugly. Very ugly. For example, suppose I wanted to send you to Eli Hirsch’s paper “Rules for a Good Language” from the Journal of Philosophy (1988). Formerly I would have had to provide you with this extremely ugly URI:

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X%28198812%2985
%3A12%3C694%3ARFAGL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N

I had to manually split that over two lines, it is so unwieldy. And not only is this ugly, but it is proprietary. With the introduction of DOI however I can now provide you with this elegant URI:

http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2026729

This has the advantages of economy and conformance to an open standard. It achieves the first by not trying to encode content information into the URI, as in the JSTOR scheme. It achieves the second simply by being registered through the DOI service. This means that if the Journal of Philosophy wanted to switch from JSTOR to another provider, it could update the DOI information so that the Hirsch link would pass you through to the new provider. It is clearly in the interests of all journals to adopt this scheme to enable a degree of independence from their online providers, and I assume it will only be a matter of time before all JSTOR journals provide DOI for their articles. (Perhaps this is the reason I stumbled across this news by accident rather than seeing it on the JSTOR announcement list). For now this is so new that, unusually enough, you can only see the DOI information for articles when you link to them from outside a zone where you are authorised to access them—if I look at the Hirsch article from my university network I do not see the DOI information, while if I look at it from this café I can.

Next, we can hope that The Journal of Philosophy will enable DOI for the articles it has online on its own website.

Félix Fénéon spent part of the year 1906 writing unsigned news briefs for the French newspaper Le Matin. More than a thousand of these have now been translated and published by The New York Review of Books Classics as Novels in Three Lines. A selection–

Some drinkers in Houilles were passing around a pistol they thought was unloaded. Lagrange pulled the trigger. He did not get up.

Seamstress Adolphine Julien, 35, threw acid in the face of her runaway lover, Barthuel, a student. Two passersby were splashed.

Four times in one week farm servant Marie Choland set her employer’s farm on fire. Now she can burn down Montluçon prison.

On the bowling lawn a stroke leveled M. André, 75, of Levallois. While his ball was still rolling he was no more.

With a cheese knife, Coste, from the suburbs of Marseilles, killed his sister who, also a grocer, was his competition.

Swimming teacher Renard, whose pupils porpoised in the Marne at Charenton, got into the water himself; he drowned.

Among those Americans who care enough about politics to have registered themselves with The Democratic Party and intend to vote in the upcoming Democratic primary elections, 7 percent think that Barack Obama is a Muslim (CBS Poll). I find it very difficult to interpret this sort of information. In particular, I am curious how stable this judgement is among the 7 percent. Suppose each person who responded that Obama was Muslim was asked a further question concerning why the media has not paid as much attention to Obama’s religion as to his race, and then given the chance to revise their answer to the initial question. Of course in order for this not to be a clue that they had answered incorrectly, each question in the poll would have to be followed with a similar question about the presuppositions or entailments of the response provided. In this way the poll would become deeper, in the sense that it would elicit people to provide opinions they had been forced to integrate in some albeit minor way with other beliefs they possess. Would the percentage differ at all from 7 percent? We might be optimistic that it would drop substantially or pessimistic that it would drop not at all. I initially started writing this with the optimistic view in mind—surely, I thought, these 7 percent have provided a snap response, perhaps fooled by the existence of the question in the poll into assigning a higher probability to the chance of Obama being Muslim than they would otherwise (here it is important whether the question was a request to identify Obama’s religion or a request to answer yes or no to whether Obama is a Muslim, but the CBS report does not provide this information). Moreover, I optimistically thought, a little prompting for some inference to the best explanation ought to help them out here—the best explanation for the media not covering Obama’s religion in any significant way would certainly be that he is not Muslim. But then I remembered recently reading a very interesting paper by Tom Kelly called “Disagreement, Dogmatism, and Belief Polarization”, forthcoming in The Journal of Philosophy [PDF], which has the following abstract:

Suppose that you and I disagree about some non-straightforward matter of fact (say, about whether capital punishment tends to have a deterrent effect on crime). Psychologists have demonstrated the following striking phenomenon: if you and I are subsequently exposed to a mixed body of evidence that bears on the question, doing so tends to increase the extent of our initial disagreement. That is, in response to exactly the same evidence, each of us grows increasingly confident of his or her original view; we thus become increasingly polarized as our common evidence increases. I consider several alternative models of how people reason about newly-acquired evidence which seems to disconfirm their prior beliefs. I then explore the normative implications of these models for the phenomenon in question.

The particular psychological evidence to which Kelly refers does not immediately bear on the question I am considering here, but it is clear that the evidence suggests a quite broad pessimism about our capabilities as epistemic agents. After all, this evidence shows that prior belief can swamp the proper assessment of new evidence, while in the case I have suggested I was initially optimistic that people would revise their beliefs simply by further reflection, with any new evidence restricted entirely to the presuppositions of the secondary questions (for example, that the media has not paid as much attention to Obama’s religion as to his race). So perhaps we should be pessimistic, not merely that the number would stay at 7 percent, but that the auxiliary questions would entrench the confidence of the 7 percent in their false beliefs.

Now I am no epistemologist or cognitive scientist, but I have a theory about what explains these phenomena, and it is that as humans we are too quick to invoke potential explanations and too slow to evaluate all of our evidence in the way suggested by standard theories of confirmation. Or to put it using a different metaphor, we weigh potential explanations too heavily and the evidence itself too lightly. Or again, we prefer to have all our phenomena explained by a weakly supported theory than to have most of our phenomena explained by a well supported theory. Think here of our penchant for conspiracy theories [PDF]. It strikes me that I could quickly think of a host of potential evolutionary explanations for this, but then I would have exhibited the feature of human psychology I have purported to describe to an exorbitantly ironic degree, rather than the merely blandly ironic degree at which I currently stand. (Note that this would have the benefit of giving an evolutionary explanation for why people want to give evolutionary explanations for everything under the sun. I leave it as an exercise whether this circle would be virtuous or vicious). So instead I offer a nice example of the way we proliferate explanations endlessly: Why do reporters use the code “- 30 -” to sign off their articles? (See Mark Eli Kalderon’s posts on the topic here, here, and here).

Of course this is all beside the point. Election ballots do not come with prompts to revise your beliefs in optimal ways, they simply come with names and checkboxes. Obama? Sounds dangerously like Osama, I’m not going to vote for him, now let me see, John McCain, now there’s a good American name, he invented the Big Mac didn’t he? Tick.

I was recently lucky to see (with Huw and Mike) the exhibition Modernism: Designing a New World 1914—1939 at the Corcoran in Washington DC. One part of the exhibition that I particularly enjoyed was the graphic design of the Russian modernists, and in particular the work of El Lissitzky, who I knew from his many designs for the books of Vladimir Mayakovsky. So I was very happy to find, via Three Percent, that the New York Public Library has a wonderful collection of 656 Russian book jackets from the period 1917-1942 available online. The following are some of my favourites, though they are uniformly interesting (click covers for details).
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