Marbury

on getting people wrong

Apologies for this blog's moment of inertia; a phrase that well describes my own week. While I rub my eyes and work out what's worth writing about, please accept this offering: a wonderful passage from Philip Roth's American Pastoral that pretty much tells you all you need to know about what psychologists call "theory of mind" and much else besides:

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the "brain" of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of "other people," which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that--well, lucky you.

the last thirty days of 2010

The president just signed the Don't Ask Don't Tell Repeal bill into law, meaning that gays can now openly serve in the US military.

The New Start arms control treaty is - somewhat unexpectedly - very much on course for ratification.

With these bills passed, this Congress will have been the most productive in terms of legislation of any since the 1960s.

In the wake of the tax deal, Obama's ratings with liberals have dipped a little (though you'd have to bet on them returning) while his support amongst liberal or moderate Republicans has increased.

For Obama, the last thirty days of this year have been by far the best.

assange, those charges, and our hypocrisy

I must confess I haven't followed the Assange trial very closely at all, but I've been struck by how much those who support the activities of Wikileaks have been keen to see him get off the charges of rape.

As far as we know, the charges are real. The case may not have been pursued with as much vigour by the Swedish authorities had it not been for Assange's notoriety. But we should assume that the people making the charges believe they were violated. Yet we have people on the left, who normally argue that charges of rape should be taken more seriously than they often are, blithely dismissing the whole case.

The two issues - whether Wikileaks is a noble enterprise, and whether Assange should be prosecuted for rape - are distinct. It's perfectly possible to believe that both are true or both are false. But everyone is lining up behind these questions as if they were a pair: either Wikileaks is noble and Assange should walk free of the rape charges, or Wikileaks is evil and Assange is a disgusting rapist. So there seems to be a lot of dishonesty, or at least self-deception, in people's attitudes to this story.

Anyway, here's someone making similar points with a lot more force and a lot more swearing.

mistakes were made

Lord (John) Hutton

There's a very good book by the social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson called Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me). It explores the reasons behind the tremendous difficulty people have in accepting responsibility for their own screw-ups. It came to mind when I read this story: Sir Bill Jeffrey, the man who was until recently the most senior civil servant in the Ministry of Defence has been given a rap over the knuckles by MPs, essentially for not telling his boss, John Hutton, that he was making a huge cock-up by ordering an unaffordable and useless aircraft carrier:

The Public Accounts Committee takes the highly unusual step of criticising him by name for failing to request a “letter of instruction” from his minister before signing the “unaffordable” aircraft carrier contract. They conclude he did not “discharge his responsibility” as accounting officer. In plain language, it means he failed in his duty to protect value for money.

These “letters of instruction” are the nuclear option in the Whitehall mandarins’ armoury, to be deployed when ministers are pressing for a decision that would waste money or carried big financial risks. It is the point when the mandarin says: ‘Minister, if you want to press ahead against the advice of the department, you’ll have to put that in writing’.

As the FT explains, the aircraft carrier decision was actually the perfect example of when this nuclear option should be used. But it does seem somehow unfair that the civil servant who gets the blame while the man who actually took the decision gets away with no censure. Perhaps Hutton will apologise? Hmm. Here's what he told The TImes (£) this week:

“Mistakes were made. But we’ve got a very good and capable industry and we shouldn’t do anything that compromises the ability of the defence industry to compete effectively in supplying the equipment our troops need."

dead rabbit isles

This is the work of an artist called Fernando Vincent, who makes art out of maps ("artography" if you prefer). Check out more of his work here.

sign language

Anyone watching Bill Clinton speak will be struck by the expressive way he moves those enormous hands. In fact, his hands may not be merely emphasising his words, but helping him form his thoughts.

One of the most fascinating areas of psychology at the moment is the study of "embodied cognition": the way that our mental concepts of the world are shaped by our bodies and what we do with them. Here's Andy Clark, a philosopher at Edinburgh University:

Most of us gesture (some of us more wildly than others) when we talk. For many years, it was assumed that this bodily action served at best some expressive purpose, perhaps one of emphasis or illustration. Psychologists and linguists...have lately questioned this assumption, suspecting that the bodily motions may themselves be playing some kind of active role in our thought process. In experiments where the active use of gesture is inhibited, subjects show decreased performance on various kinds of mental tasks. Now whatever is going on in these cases, the brain is obviously deeply implicated! No one thinks that the physical handwavings are all by themselves the repositories of thoughts or reasoning. But it may be that they are contributing to the thinking and reasoning, perhaps by lessening or otherwise altering the tasks that the brain must perform, and thus helping us to move our own thinking along. It is noteworthy, for example, that the use of spontaneous gesture increases when we are actively thinking a problem through, rather than simply rehearsing a known solution.

Over at the wonderful Anthropology In Practice blog, we learn that gesturing and language production seem to be intertwined in our brains and in our evolution:

Gestures are an integral part of language. Arbib, Liebal, and Pika (2008) believe that gestures, via pantomime and protosigns, may have played a large role in the emergence of vocalization (protospeech) leading to the development of protolanguage. Their hypothesis is based on the structure of the brain, specifically a mirroring of structures in the brain: near Broca's area, a region of the brain said to be involved in language production, is a region "activated for both grasping and observation of grasping". The proximity of a grasping region to a language region is intriguing.

Read on.

michael jackson comes out in support of assange

(h/t Boing Boing)

cutting the pay of public sector execs may improve their quality

Local councils are being forced to cut back on everything including and especially on the salaries of their senior executives. You might think this means hiring less qualified or less competent people to fill those roles. But a new study from Bournemouth University Business School suggests that it may lead to the opposite result: higher-performing executives.

Psychologists talk about two different types of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic motivation is reliant on external rewards, most importantly financial, but also status, perks, and so on. Intrinsic motivation what keeps people going even when these rewards are low or non-existent: it's the sheer satisfaction and enjoyment of doing a job well. Most people are motivated by factors on both side of the equation but the balance varies from job to job and person to person.

Public sector organisations ought to be looking for people who have very high levels of intrinsic motivation - who see their job as a calling, more than a means of making money. There is evidence to suggest, however, that by offering big salaries they are less likely to attract such people:

Using British longitudinal data, we find that individuals are attracted to the public sector by the intrinsic rather than the extrinsic rewards that the sector offers. We also find evidence supporting the intrinsic motivation crowding out hypothesis, in that, higher extrinsic rewards reduce the propensity of intrinsically motivated individuals to accept public sector employment. 

Oddly, the researchers only found this effect in higher education and the NHS. I haven't bought access to the whole paper so I can't tell you why that might be. But this report might offer a scrap of comfort to local councillors who are trying to attract quality people with very little in the pot from which to pay them.

is it ok to give up on a book without finishing it?

In my view the answer to this perennial question is a resounding Yes. The reason is simple: there are too many books worth reading, and too little life, to waste time on a book that isn't satisfying.

I'm glad to say this view now has the imprimatur of the Paris Review:

There’s nothing wrong with not finishing a book. Samuel Johnson, surely one of the great readers of all time, claimed to feel guilty because he almost never read a book to the end—but still, he didn’t. Finish them, I mean. Why should you read a book just because it’s there, or (worse) because you read it yesterday? Completism is the bugbear of actual reading. There are books even by some of my favorite authors that I have never looked at and never plan to... I say, enjoy your promiscuity and keep reading new things.

Agreed!

Now, rather tediously, I must qualify this opinion. Of course, it's good to persevere with a book beyond the first moments of boredom or distraction. Some books take time to tune or sink into; some have longeurs but are on the whole well worth a dose of drudgery.

There comes a point, however, in a book as in a relationship, where you just know this isn't going to work out. That is surely the time to say, it's not you, it's me (or vice versa). Actually that raises an interesting question in itself: I can divide the books on which I've given up into those where it was the author's fault and those where it was my fault. For my inability to read Crime and Punishment, for instance, I blame myself, not Dosty.

As more and more books are purchased and consumed digitally, the ratio of books bought to books read is probably going to change. On the whole I see the digital age as being good for book sales, because the purchasing mechanism will be so effortless. Like the article you've just read? Just one click at the bottom of it and the author's new book is on your iPad. Once it's on your iPad, or Kindle or whatever, you'll read the first few thousand words, get distracted by another book, or a game, or the infinite diversions of the web, and neglect to return to it. So the net result is likely to be more books bought, fewer books read.

did obama just win reelection?

The more you look at it, the better that deal gets for the president. The strength of the economy in the next two years is by far the biggest determinant of his reelection chances, and he's just persuaded the Republicans to give the economy a massive boost. He has - at the cost of accepting a temporary extension of tax cuts for the rich - been able to support the unemployed and the middle class. He's also - as Andrew Sullivan points out - landed the GOP with a potential civil war.

Charles Krauthammer, perhaps the premier conservative columnist and a rabid partisan, has written a brilliant column in which he argues forcefully that neither the Republicans or the Democrats have quite realised what a coup the president just pulled off:

Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 — and House Democrats don’t have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years — which just happen to be the two years of the run-up to the next presidential election. This is a defeat?... Obama is no fool. While getting Republicans to boost his own reelection chances, he gets them to make a mockery of their newfound, second-chance, post-Bush, tea-party, this-time-we’re-serious persona of debt-averse fiscal responsibility.

Read the whole thing.

just like old times

A significant and somewhat charming postscript to last week's tax deal: a joint Obama-Clinton press conference. The two presidents had just met for an hour to talk about the economy, before Obama wheeled out his predecessor to help sell the deal to the press, and ultimately to Democrats who have their doubts about it.

Clinton looks tired and sounds a little weak of voice (he'd just come off an overnight flight), but is as compelling and cogent as ever. Obama, who watches with the look of a proud nephew, seems to have finally come round to the idea that Clinton can be a valuable adviser and political ally (it was a tough sell, but Bill always finds a way to seduce his targets). After about ten minutes he leaves Clinton to get on with it. Then it's just like old times: Clinton as confident behind the presidential podium as ever, taking questions on a range of issues and calling out the reporters by name.

london's burning

This is from a stunning series of photographs of yesterday's riots, over at the Boston Globe.

I have a lot of respect for the police for managing to contain wild, thuggish and irresponsible protesters with a minimum of injuries (you can count on one hand the number of cities in the world in which a mass protest would have got out of hand like this without at least someone getting killed).

Those elements aside, do the students and those who march with them have a point? Only somewhat. As you can see if you read this summary of the issues (from an anti-fees newspaper) the arguments are very finely balanced. On the whole, this is a redistributive measure that will see poor students better off. But you wouldn't know that from the blind fury of the protesters.

What is true is that the fee ceiling has been set high, and the cutting of the higher education budget is severe and quite possibly damaging. The government has been determined to maintain or even increase spending on schools, and given the state of the nation's finances, something else had to give.

Of course, if it were cutting the NHS budget too, the cuts everywhere else would have been considerably alleviated (the NHS accounts for 25% of departmental spend). But the Tories believed that to win the election, they had to promise to leave that sacred cow alone.

Fraser Nelson makes an excellent point: Nick Clegg's biggest mistake may not have been The Pledge (though obviously that was a whopper) but not forcing the Tories off the hook upon which they had impaled themselves with regard to health spending. If the Lib Dems (and the Tory leadership) had been thinking just a little more imaginatively, they could have used the Coalition as an excuse to throw out or at least dilute that other pledge too. Having said that, a lot of these decisions were made in the 48 hours or so of the post-election negotiations.

One more point: this was a failure of political communication. As with Obama and healthcare, the Coalition had a very good case, but seemed incapable of explaining it in simple, compelling terms. As a result they got shouted down.

dept. of literary insults

Truman Capote on William Faulkner:

“He was a great friend of mine. Well, as much as you could be a friend of his, unless you were a fourteen-year-old nymphet.”

More here.

obama's latest compromise

Andy Borowitz (kind of a one-man Onion) captures how a certain portion of the Democratic Party feel this week, in a rather good joke:

In Latest Compromise With GOP, Obama Agrees He Is A Muslim

WASHINGTON – In his latest effort to find common ground with Republicans in Congress, President Barack Obama said today that he was willing to agree that he is a Muslim.

Differences over his religious orientation have been a sore point between the President and his Republican foes for the past two years, but in agreeing that he is a Muslim Mr. Obama is sending a clear signal that he is trying to find consensus.

no more mr nice guy

Earlier this week the White House struck a deal with newly empowered congressional Republicans on tax. It involved allowing the Bush tax cuts on rich people to continue and cutting the estate tax (the Democrat 'gives') whilst extending unemployment insurance and cutting payroll taxes for those lower down the income scale (the Republican gives). Ezra Klein has a comprehensive explanation of the agreement here. It sounds like a proper deal, with both sides having plenty to be annoyed about - although the left is far more upset than the right, and is loudly accusing the president of selling out, a charge they're now firmly in the habit of making.

During his press conference on the deal Obama took time out to lay into the left of his party (see below). He raked up the public option debate on healthcare, sure to rile the liberal base. He accused them of wanting only symbolic victories rather than real change.

Some have seen this as the first hint of a new triangulation strategy, in which the president positions himself as between and above the warring factions of left and right. It sounded like something more authentic to me; genuine annoyance at elements in his own party for carping about every compromise. Whatever it was, this seems like a significant moment for his presidency:

Klein and Clive Crook thought the president came across as needlessly defensive and insecure. Perhaps, but compared to his "wet blanket" impression in the post-midterms presser, this was better, wasn't it? At least he is showing signs of life. He seemed in danger of becoming Calvin Coolidge.