A Career Spent Learning How the Mind Emerges From the Brain - New York Times

A piece in the NYTimes on How the Mind Emerges From the Brain:
Dr. Gazzaniga was a founder of cognitive science, often focusing on people who had the link between the left and right hemispheres of their brain. In one case, each hemisphere received sensation from one eye:

"Dr. Gazzaniga and Dr. LeDoux showed P. S. a picture of a chicken claw in his right eye and a snow-covered house in the left eye. P. S. pointed to a chicken with his right hand and a snow shovel with his left.

'I'll never forget the day we got around to asking P. S., 'Why did you do that?' ' said Dr. Gazzaniga. 'He said, 'The chicken claw goes with the chicken.' That's all the left hemisphere saw. And then he looks at the shovel and said, 'The reason you need a shovel is to clean out the chicken shed.' '"

The big point to me is that the brain tries desperately, as here, to integrate input into a comprehensible picture/narrative. We make up stories or we ignore or omit data that's inconsistent, as here. You can see the phenomena in blogs, which are people telling themselves stories.

Doctors Do Know Things Patients Don't Know - New York Times

Dr. Kent Sepkowitz writes in the NY today about the pros and cons of having the course of treatment of an illness being directed by the doctor versus the patient, a patient who may have researched the illness on the Web. He says doctors don't want control for ego purposes.

"No, the difference between doctors and patients is that you are stuck playing on our home court. We know all the subtle bumps and slick spots, the places where things suddenly can ricochet out of control. With luck, we know when to pounce and when to shrug, when to grab the phone and start shouting and when to stall another week to see if things quiet down.

Managing an illness, in the best of circumstances, is an uncertain endeavor. Basically here's how it works: you inch along as if groping in blackest night for the light switch, trying first this, then that. Actual guideposts are rare. It can be most unsettling, especially if you haven't tried it before."

The bottom line is that things that look very simple from the outside turn out to be very complex and murky once you start in. Of course, that statement is true of any area of expertise; just ask a do-it-yourselfer who tries to do his own plumbing, etc. I generally give more trust and credence to experts than do the MSM, who almost always are looking in from the outside. But experts always have to remember both Lord Acton ("power corrupts") and the unequalled ability of people to fool themselves.

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Teacher of the Year and No Electricity

Last night Brian Lamb did an interesting interview with the Teacher of the Year, Jason Kamras of DC. See the transcript here. It touched on a number of questions, from Israel to idealism. Jason is a very good interviewee. Lamb has little tolerance for a long answer. Often he'll come in with a new question when the subject is just a few sentences into the answer. (Keeps the interview lively and interesting, but is frustrating when you really want to hear the whole thing.) Jason was one of the few I've seen who could smoothly answer the new question then switch back to the prior subject.

Jason has taught for 8 years, and spent his summers writing for grants, so he now has $50,000 of audio-video, computer, and other extras in his room But down the hall, in the same building:

"But back to your question. I have a colleague that does not have electricity in her classroom, and so she can't even use technology if she wanted to." (She has lights but no live electrical outlets.)

That's revealing, of a number of things. First, bureaucrats like Jason can be entrepreneurial. It's an unsolved mystery why Jason has power for his goodies and his colleague doesn't, but I've no doubt he would have scrounged a generator if he had had to. Second, most people see their job as doing their job. His colleague reasonably assumes she's not responsible for diagnosing problems in electrical circuits. Third, the school system is good enough to attract and keep a Jason and bad enough to tolerate the dead outlets. Fourth, I'd generalize and say that maintenance is almost always treated as something to be put off. That's true whether it's kids picking up their clothes, or Congress appropriating money for bureaucracies like the Park Service, IRS, or the military: money goes for new historical sites or new weapons but not for maintaining the old, collecting revenue or training and repairing weapons.

Another interesting item was touching on salaries. Jason started at $28,000. Lamb asked whether you could buy a home in DC on a teacher's salary and Kamras said it was getting difficult. Trying to find current DC salaries I stumbled on this piece. It seems to be very thoughtful, though I've not digested it. One figure I'd point out is that 1995-6, DC paid its teachers about 3 percent more than the average DC worker, which ranked 51st in the nation.

Hanson Mourns the Loss of History

Victor Davis Hanson mourns What happened to history? - The Washington Times: Commentary - May 07, 2005. He says Americans don't commemorate their great leaders and warriors of the past. Ralph Luker at Cliopatria is mildly critical of Hanson for not crediting Emerson for "the tyranny of the present", the phrase he uses to start the piece and notes a post by eb at No Great Matter showing that Hanson is repeating the past because he doesn't know the history of such charges.

While I agree with Luker and EB, I want to challenge this:

"To appreciate the value of history, we must also accept that human nature is constant and fixed across time and space. Our kindred forefathers in very dissimilar landscapes were nevertheless subject to the same emotions of fear, envy, honor and shame as our own.
In contrast, if one believes human nature is malleable -- or with requisite money and counseling can be 'improved' -- history becomes just an obsolete science. It would be no different from 18th-century biology before the microscope or early genetics without knowledge of DNA. Once man before our time appears alien, the story of his past has very little prognostic value. "

At best this is exaggeration to make his point (lefty thought devalues the worth of history). At worst it's nonsense. Whether we're talking about people in different cultures today, or people in our culture in the past, both similarities and differences matter. In my opinion, a responsible historian searches assiduously for both. And that should make for good history.

The Post had a very good article on an Afghanistan village that stoned a young woman who committed adultery. Her father aided the execution, then expressed his sadness as he remembered her personality. I can understand the adultery and understand the sadness. It takes a hell of an effort to understand the emotions that may have accompanied the father's assent to the execution. But the article gave me enough on which to try.

On Mothers Day: For Tom DeLay and His Mother

I was thinking about politicians and baking bread.

Then I saw today's piece in the Times on DeLay's Empire of Favors which says DeLay is more than the caricature. For one thing, he's kind:

"The reason, it seems, is that over the years, brick by brick, Mr. DeLay has built a wall of political support. His small acts of kindness have become lore. Pizza during late night votes. Travel arrangements for low-level lawmakers. Birthday wishes, get-well cards, condolences for House members in emotional need.

On a larger scale, friends - and enemies - describe him as a favor-trader extraordinaire, piling up a mountain of goodwill."

The Washington Post did a magazine article on him a year or two ago. His father was an alcoholic and DeLay is now estranged from his mother. That offers an entrance to his psyche. In my experience, children of alcoholics are often very eager to please the people they meet (think Clinton, Reagan, my wife). Hence the kindnesses. Both the Post piece and the new Times article remind us of the dangers of stereotyping those we oppose, even though it's so much fun and emotionally satisfying. The fact that DeLay and his mother are estranged is sad, particularly on Mothers Day.

Why are politicians like bread? Well, when you make bread you knead it and work it and generally punch the hell out of it, just like the public does to politicians. Bread doesn't have any shape of its own, when rising it often goes all over the place, good bread requires a very small amount of yeast and lots of dough, its changes of shape and composition result from hot air, alcohol and gas, when baked some breads have body and substance and many are vapid, and brown breads are often more interesting than whites.

Agriculture and the Reds, Nathaniel Weyl

The New York Times obit on Nathaniel Weyl touches on the close connection between farm programs and communism and lawyers:

"Mr. Weyl (pronounced 'while') had been active in leftist student groups while he was an undergraduate at Columbia College. He left academic life for Washington in 1933 and joined the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, where he was recruited into a communist cell that, he would later testify, included Hiss."

The "communists" were in the Office of the General Counsel, and basically were purged in 1935 in a controversy over the treatment of sharecroppers in the South. AAA was a magnet for young talent, along with Hiss both JK Galbraith and Adlai Stevenson worked there. It may have been similar to the Peace Corps under JFK. For the communists and other leftists the job meant a chance to make a difference, to satisfy one's moralistic idealism by working on behalf of the poor and powerless. I suspect they also had a romantic view of agriculture, shared by such current writers from different perspectives as Wendell Berry and Victor Davis Hanson.

As it's Mother's Day, it's appropriate to be sentimental. The obit boils Weyl's life down to early communism, spying, and then testifying against Hiss. But a recent article in the American Historical Review pointed out the contribution that the old left made to the cause of civil rights and feminism in the 30's and 40's. It seems that some charges of the segregationist leaders in the 1950's about leftist influence on civil rights had more validity than I wanted to admit. Yes, it's a fault of the young to want their causes to be pure and true; it's wisdom in the old to realize the best of men have mixed motives and even the worst may achieve some good.

Know Your Beef

As agricultural prices continue to decline, more and more people are seeking custom niches. Now the entire state of South Dakota is backing their certified beef, as described in this WPost article:

"Enlisting its police and administrative authority, the state guarantees consumers who buy South Dakota Certified Beef that they will be partaking of a computer-tracked cow that was born, fed and butchered inside state borders, using exacting standards of nutrition, with a humane upbringing and walled off from all possible contact with mad cow disease.

After a consumer takes home the beef, he or she can use the Internet to find a photograph of the South Dakota family ranch where it came from. And if a rancher or a butcher cheats in caring for cows under the new rules, the state is ready and willing to charge him with a felony and send him to prison for two years."

The idea may sound good, but there's some problems with it.

• First, as described here, USDA is implementing a national animal ID system. So anyone, state, or individual, could piggyback on the system to offer similar guarantees with little or no added investment.
• Second, while I've invested in Whole Foods because I think organic-style marketing is only going to grow, I'm not sure how much of a premium South Dakota could command. (What they really need, about a year or so from now, is a really major mad cow problem.)
• Third, the logical extrapolation is using the Internet to see, not the ranch, but the actual steer being raised. But that may be more reality than city types really want to deal with. (Michael Pollan had an article in the NYTimes magazine a couple years ago where he bought a calf and had it raised, so he could write about the process. My memory is he wasn't happy about eating it.)
  

Cricket and the Fight Against Imperialism

Orlando Patterson and Jason Kaufman write in the The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Bowling for Democracy (from a forthcoming piece in The American Sociological Review on the puzzle of why cricket is a big sport in Britain and some parts of the former British Empire, but not in either Canada or the U.S. "The puzzle only deepens when one considers that cricket was once popular in both Canada and the United States. It rivaled baseball for most of the 19th century, with as many stories in the sports pages of The New York Times until 1880. Indeed, the world's first international test match was played between Canada and the United States in 1844. So the puzzle is not so much why it was never adopted in North America, but why in the early 20th century it was subsequently rejected."

They discuss factors like climate, playing space and duration of games but focus on cricket's role in affirming a native elite as opposed to egalitarian games like baseball. They also mention the role of nationalism--the former colony defeating the mother country.

Sport is an interesting subject. As a "meme", it's clear and identifiable. Does it spread more through grassroots activity, or from the top down? Is the spread a matter of evolution in the biological sense or competition in the economic? What about the linkage between sport and religion?

The big three U.S. sports seem to have spread at the grassroots, though basketball and college football had strong connections with the Protestant elite (basketball was born in a YMCA). Perhaps because sport and entertainment are meritocratic endeavors, meaning money rules, both have been routes for mobility. Boxing was big for a long time (anyone remember the Friday night fights on TV), often as a route for upward mobility by various minorities. If boxing were still big, we'd be seeing more Hispanic-American boxers than we do. Similarly track and field have lost mind share. Now corporations want to promote sports, exploiting Tiger Woods and Mia Hamm, pumping the Triple Crown races, and sponsoring every square inch of NASCAR races.

U.S. sport seems less nationalistic than (say) soccer, although the Olympics succeed in rousing our interest. Losing the basketball gold medal the first time hurt, but it wasn't that big a deal the last time. Still, I think the post-war Olympics were more nationalistic than recent events, perhaps because it was viewed as a proxy for war. Doing well at the Olympics meant demonstrating the superiority of one's social system; that was the myth that all, from Hitler to the East Germans to Soviets to Chinese bought into and we weren't far behind. It touches on the area that William James called the "moral equivalent of war". Try reading his piece. It seems to me like another time, at least if I forget the few months after 9-11.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell and Lesbians

Eugene Volokh at Volokh Conspiracy starts off: "I'm puzzled about how the military's 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy -- or for that matter, any exclusion policy -- can be justified as to lesbians." He goes on to show why a rule that might make some sense applied to male homosexuals makes no sense if the same reasoning is applied to lesbians.

But his puzzlement is surely rhetorical, if effective. "Don't ask, don't tell" is just one instance of a general rule of human thinking: "if it doesn't fit, you must omit" (apologies to Johnnie Cochran). For example, most generalizations about Americans implicitly omit some groups (the group might be women, children, Southerners, Hispanics, Mormons, Amish, atheists, native Americans, etc.) Once you get into an argument, often neither you nor your opponent has anything to gain by expanding your thinking. In "don't ask, don't tell" gay activists wanted acceptance, the military wanted status quo, and neither were served by a more nuanced argument.

Real Men Don't Google

A report dealing with the Department of Justice Inspector General's report on intelligence analysts in the FBI in today's Washington Post Federal Diary: FBI Analyst Jobs Remain Vacant:

"The report also documented numerous instances in which analysts were made to perform work that one called 'demeaning.' One veteran intelligence analyst who went to the bureau from another agency spent a week watching workers do a repair job, while another analyst at a small field office was required to work nights and weekends operating the telephone switchboard.

Some analysts appear to be viewed as assistants to regular FBI agents, who ask them to perform Internet searches and other basic research, the audit found. 'A lot of my job doesn't require a college education,' one analyst told investigators."

I blogged on related subjects in connection with the 9/11 commission report and the FBI's failed attempt to automate their activities. I've skimmed part of the IG report, which seems to say:

• FBI has hired new analysts in the last 5 years, including people with foreign language, military intelligence and similar backgrounds.
• But it's having problems keeping the new hires, because the training isn't good and the FBI doesn't really know how to handle them. The impression I get is that the hires see themselves as members of a profession, while the special agents who dominate the agency see them as "support".
  
• By contrast, the older analysts, those who converted over from secretarial/support specialties are less discontented and more comfortable. They have learned over time that the agents are top dog in the agency and are reconciled to that fact.
  
• The training for analysts lumps new and old analysts together, but importantly does not include special agents. Also, the analysts can't train on a computer facility that would permit sharing data with other agencies, a true indicator of how [un]important DOJ thinks data sharing is.
  

So the FBI culture of macho get-your-man continues. And its disdain for those like Robert Hansen who understand computers but isn't a "real" special agent like J. Edgar and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. continues. Assuming no more 9-11's, it's likely the culture will continue, unless an analyst captures bin Laden. Organizations are like bodies; their immune systems reject things identified as "alien". My position is supported by this from the Post piece:

"Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit said he believed that crime fighting, rather than intelligence work, "will always be dominant" in the bureau.

Although law enforcement is "easily graded and important for careers," Posner said, intelligence work is more difficult to measure. He also said the decentralized nature of the FBI does not lend itself well to battling global terrorist networks.

As a result, Posner said, there is "really a deep dog and cat incompatibility between criminal and intelligence activities."