Adversarial Collaboration

David Shariatmadari's profile of Prof. Daniel Kahneman has lots of fascinating details, including some about his childhood years in Nazi-occupied France. In the section on Kahneman's intellectual contributions, we find this episode which I think is fantastic:

... Then there is the concept of adversarial collaboration, an attempt to do away with pointless academic feuding. Though he doesn’t like to think in terms of leaving a legacy, it’s one thing he says he hopes to be remembered for. In the early 2000s Kahneman sought out a leading opponent of his view that so-called expert judgments were frequently flawed. Gary Klein’s research focused on the ability of professionals such as firefighters to make intuitive but highly skilled judgments in difficult circumstances. “We spent five or six years trying to figure out the boundary, where he’s right, where I am right. And that was a very satisfying experience. We wrote a paper entitled ‘A Failure to Disagree’”.

Fortunately, that paper is available online.

What Indian Mathematicians Knew in Calculus

Biman Nath, a professor of astrophysics at Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru, has a great article in Frontline about the development of proto-calculus ideas by ancient Indian mathematicians -- specifically, Aryabhatta, Brahmagupta, Bhaskara II (all in Sanskrit over 1000 years ago), and Madhava (in Malaalam, some 600 years ago).

Along the way, he makes a good point about the state of the 'debate' in the public sphere on history of Indian scientific ideas:

... [M]ost of us are not historians, and such discussions become pointless after a while. One has come across the names Aryabhata or Varahamihira in school textbooks, but one would be hard pressed to name any specific achievement of these ancient Indian scientists. School students are taught about the discovery of the zero but they never learn what it means to have “discovered” it.

How does one suddenly invoke a number and bring it down to the realm of reality? We teach our children that our ancestors must have had a remarkable knowledge of metallurgy and give the example of the iron pillar in Delhi, but we never spell out what exactly they knew.

This superficiality in our collective knowledge often leads to meaningless, rhetorical debates on the achievements of ancient Indian scientists. [...]

Nath peppers his article with snippets that give us a richer picture of how these mathematicians presented their results. For example, here's Aryabhatta:

... Aryabhata’s sine table was considered the most accurate ... He had tabulated the sines of 24 angles, equally spaced between zero and 90 degrees (with a difference of 3.75° between them). The table was in the form of a verse, and he had come up with an ingenious way of coding the table in the words of the poem. The introduction to his book Aryabhatia explained the code. [...]

And, Brahmagupta and Madhava:

It is not clear how Brahmagupta derived the formula—he never explained it anywhere—but historians think he used geometry.

[...]

Like his predecessor Brahmagupta, Madhava never explained how he came up with the formula. Historians of mathematics again suspect that he obtained it through geometrical methods.

Finally, all this leads to question of what happened after Madhava's work, and why it did not blossom into calculus as we know it today? I look forward to a follow-up article by Nath.

E.O. Wilson: "Great Scientist ≠ Good at Math"

In his WSJ opinion piece, Wilson gives a blunt answer by way of a "professional secret": "Many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semiliterate." He does make the rather unexceptionable point that "if your level of mathematical competence is low, plan to raise it," but also adds that "you can do outstanding scientific work with what you have." Of course, if your level of math is not all that high, he also suggests you avoid "most of physics and chemistry, as well as a few specialties in molecular biology."

His article has led to tons of responses: Paul Krugman agrees, but with a caveat: "at least in the areas I work in, you do need some mathematical intuition, even if you don’t necessarily need to know a lot of formal theorems."

A couple of other responses. In Science's Cult of Calculation, Jag Bhalla talks about the rivalry in science between "math-monks" vs. "pluralist reasoners". Terry McGlynn places Wilson's piece within the context of Tribalism in the sciences: empiricists vs. theoreticians.

The tribe of theoretical ecologists appears to have got very upset with Wilson's piece for reasons that lie within the internal politics of that field -- this post explains some of it, and has tons of links.

Michael Lewis on the Fourth Cookie

This is the best commencement speech of 2012.

Links

1. Charles Simic in NYRB: Why I Still Write Poetry. Simic had me hooked right in the first paragraph:

   When my mother was very old and in a nursing home, she surprised me one day toward the end of her life by asking me if I still wrote poetry. When I blurted out that I still do, she stared at me with incomprehension. I had to repeat what I said, till she sighed and shook her head, probably thinking to herself this son of mine has always been a little nuts. Now that I’m in my seventies, I’m asked that question now and then by people who don’t know me well. Many of them, I suspect, hope to hear me say that I’ve come my senses and given up that foolish passion of my youth and are visibly surprised to hear me confess that I haven’t yet. They seem to think there is something downright unwholesome and even shocking about it, as if I were dating a high school girl, at my age, and going with her roller-skating that night.

2. Yoni Appelbaum in The Atlantic: How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit. Worth reading to get some insights into the online culture at two sites that depend totally on contributions from their users.

3. The Oatmeal (comics): Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived. Warning: Don't click if you are a fan of Edison. [Update: This post attempts a fact-check (Via this comment; thanks, Anirban!) Update 2: A rebuttal from The Oatmeal (thanks, Priyank!)]

Kenyon College Commencement Speech by David Foster Wallace (2005)

If you feel like listening to the speech, here are the YouTube links (there's no video, though): Part 1, Part 2. Here's the transcript.

An excerpt:

... This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted: You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

Freeman Dyson: "The 'Dramatic Picture' of Richard Feynman"

Dyson reviews a couple of recent books on Richard Feynman -- a scientific biography by Lawrence Krauss and a comic-book biography by Jim Ottaviani, with art by Leland Myrick. Both get a very good rating from Dyson. Here's an excerpt on the essence -- 'the central theme' -- of Feynman's scientific work:

The central theme of Feynman’s work as a scientist was to explore a new way of thinking and working with quantum mechanics. The book succeeds in explaining without any mathematical jargon how Feynman thought and worked. This is possible because Feynman visualized the world with pictures rather than with equations. Other physicists in the past and present describe the laws of nature with equations and then solve the equations to find out what happens. Feynman skipped the equations and wrote down the solutions directly, using his pictures as a guide. Skipping the equations was his greatest contribution to science. By skipping the equations, he created the language that a majority of modern physicists speak. Incidentally, he created a language that ordinary people without mathematical training can understand. To use the language to do quantitative calculations requires training, but untrained people can use it to describe qualitatively how nature behaves.

Along the way, we learn the difference between the comic-book literary forms manga and gekiga:

... The genre of serious comic-book literature was highly developed in Japan long before it appeared in the West. The Ottaviani-Myrick book is the best example of this genre that I have yet seen with text in English. Some Western readers commonly use the Japanese word manga to mean serious comic-book literature. According to one of my Japanese friends, this usage is wrong. The word manga means “idle picture” and is used in Japan to describe collections of trivial comic-book stories. The correct word for serious comic-book literature is gekiga, meaning “dramatic picture.” The Feynman picture-book is a fine example of gekiga for Western readers.

Hans Rosling on Washing Machines

Nine minutes of magic.

Links ...

1. Over at Babbage, the S&T blog at The Economist: Physics Anniversaries: How Professor Maxwell Changed the World:

   [Maxwell] showed that nature ought not to be taken at face value, and that she can be cajoled into revealing her hidden charms so long as the entreaties are whispered in mathematical verse.

2. Jennifer Rohn in Nature: Give Post-Docs a Career, Not Empty Promises [via e-mail from Pradeepkumar.]

   The scientific enterprise is run on what economists call the 'tournament' model, with practitioners pitted against one another in bitter pursuit of a very rare prize. Given that cheap and disposable trainees — PhD students and postdocs — fuel the entire scientific research enterprise, it is not surprising that few inside the system seem interested in change. A system complicit in this sort of exploitation is at best indifferent and at worst cruel. I have no doubt that most lab heads want the best for their many apprentices, but at the system level, the practice continues.

3. Jef Akst in The Scientist: I Hate Your Paper -- "Many say the peer review system is broken. Here’s how some journals are trying to fix it." [Via e-mail from Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam.]

   Problem #1
   Reviewers are biased by personal motives

   Solution: Eliminate anonymous peer review ( Biology Direct, BMJ, BMC); run open peer review alongside traditional review (Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics); judge a paper based only on scientific soundness, not impact or scope (PLoS ONE).

New York Magazine Profiles Krugman

Awesome profile by Benjamin Wallace-Wells: What's Left of the Left: Paul Krugman’s lonely crusade. Here's an excerpt:

Paul Krugman is a lonely man. That he is comfortable in his solitude, that he emphasizes its virtues, that his intelligence gives it a poetic gloss, none of this diminishes the poignancy of his isolation. Krugman grew up an only child and is deeply self-conscious. He will list his shortcomings as though he’d been preparing for the chance: “Loner. Ordinarily shy. Shy with individuals.” He is married but has no children nor—rare for a Nobelist—many protégés. When I asked him if there were any friends of his I could talk to in order to understand him better, he hesitated, then said, “That’s going to be hard.” One colleague at Princeton, where Krugman has taught since 2000, says the economist will avert his eyes when circumstance places the two of them alone in an elevator, his nose stuck in the corner, so as to avoid conversation. Krugman’s wife, Robin Wells, an academic economist herself, was recently reading the Ian McEwan novel Solar, whose protagonist is a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who has been married five times, and she found the scenario implausible. “You could never win the Nobel Prize with that kind of personal life,” she says. “It’s too distracting.”

For another profile (equally awesome) with a different emphasis, try this one at the New Yorker from a year ago.

The Guardian profiles A.C. Grayling

The awesome profile, by Decca Aitkenhead, follows the publication of The Good Book: A Secular Bible which, according to Grayling, is "ambitious and hubristic – a distillation of the best that has been thought and said by people who've really experienced life, and thought about it". Halfway through the profile, Grayling gets a chance to respond to the charge that "the atheist movement has been ... by adopting a tone so militant as to alienate potential supporters, and fortify the religious lobby.":

"Well, firstly, I think the charges of militancy and fundamentalism of course come from our opponents, the theists. My rejoinder is to say when the boot was on their foot they burned us at the stake. All we're doing is speaking very frankly and bluntly and they don't like it," he laughs. "So we speak frankly and bluntly, and the respect agenda is now gone, they can no longer float behind the diaphanous veil – 'Ooh, I have faith so you mustn't offend me'. So they don't like the blunt talking. But we're not burning them at the stake. They've got to remember that when it was the other way around it was a much more serious matter.

"And besides, really," he adds with a withering little laugh, "how can you be a militant atheist? How can you be militant non-stamp collector? This is really what it comes down to. You just don't collect stamps. So how can you be a fundamentalist non-stamp collector? It's like sleeping furiously. It's just wrong."

Evgeny Morozov on "What Technolgoy Wants" by Kevin Kelly

A scathing review that'll make you go, "Ouch!"

Kelly’s project, by contrast, seeks to deepen the moral void -— and to establish its normative character by claiming that it is propelled by the same forces as evolution. But can evolution really explain the plight of child laborers mining for cobalt—a key ingredient in batteries for mobile phones—in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Zambia? (According to a 2007 study by SwedWatch, a Swedish watchdog, there were some fifty thousand workers under the age of eighteen involved in this practice.) Is exploiting minors for cobalt mining something that technology wants, or is it something that certain businesses, here disguised under the innocent label of the “technium,” require? To claim that such processes follow the normal direction of evolution is to let the mining corporations off the hook far too easily.

Krugman Links

1. The Joy of Research:

   A bit of personal meta here: I realized a few hours ago that I was actually having a good weekend, and that made me step back and think about what I actually enjoy in my current role as public intellectual.

   It’s not the hemidemisemicelebrity; I’m actually a bit uneasy about being recognized. It’s not mainly the ability to get my voice heard, either. [...]

2. Models, Plain and Fancy:

   Karl Smith argues that informal economic arguments — models in the sense of thought experiments, not necessarily backed by equations and/or data-crunching — deserve more respect from the profession. I agree ...

   And there's More on Simple Models

3. Bonus Link: Sexual Identity in Florida.

Louis Menand: Why the women’s movement needed “The Feminine Mystique.”

The persistent characterization of “The Feminine Mystique” as some kind of bolt from the blue is part of a big historical mystery. Why did a women’s movement take so long to develop in the United States after 1945? “Our society is a veritable crazy quilt of contradictory practices and beliefs,” Komarovsky wrote, about gender roles, in 1953, and, as the revisionists have demonstrated, if you pick out the right data you can identify trends in the direction of gender equality in the nineteen-fifties. The number of women enrolled in college nearly doubled in that decade, for example, and the employment rate for women rose four times as fast as it did for men. At some point, presumably, the increasing numbers of women in the educational and vocational pipelines would have produced pressure to get rid of gender discrimination. Coontz concludes that a women’s movement “would have happened with or without Betty Friedan.”

That may be so, but it’s a counterfactual assertion. ...

From his review of Stephanie Coontz's A Strange Stirring: ‘The Feminine Mystique’ and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.

Just when this blog was about to go all highbrow ...

... with a link to this Woody Allen interview, the guy has to tell me highbrow is not how he runs:

Q. I half-expected to see you at that 12-hour performance of Dostoyevsky’s “Demons” that Lincoln Center Festival produced over the summer.

A. No, no, I’m a lowbrow. I read that material, more out of obligation than enjoyment. For enjoyment, for me, it’s a beer and the football game.

That apart, the interview has some very good sections. Here's Allen on aging:

Q. How do you feel about the aging process?

A. Well, I’m against it. [laughs] I think it has nothing to recommend it. You don’t gain any wisdom as the years go by. You fall apart, is what happens. People try and put a nice varnish on it, and say, well, you mellow. You come to understand life and accept things. But you’d trade all of that for being 35 again. I’ve experienced that thing where you wake up in the middle of the night and you start to think about your own mortality and envision it, and it gives you a little shiver. That’s what happens to Anthony Hopkins at the beginning of the movie, and from then on in, he did not want to hear from his more realistic wife, “Oh, you can’t keep doing that — you’re not young anymore.” Yes, she’s right, but nobody wants to hear that.

Simon Singh's documentary on Andrew Wiles

This 45-minute documentary on Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is surprisingly powerful and emotional. Give it until 1:45 or so and you'll want to watch the whole thing. [...]

That comment is from Jason Kottke and he's absolutely right. If the embedded video doesn't work, watch it at Google Videos.

Effects of a Liberal Arts Education on Managers

Via a great catch by Chris Blattman, here's an awesome experiment initiated by Bell System (AT&T's ancestor) in the 1950s. Responding to the perception that its managers should know not only "how to answer questions," but also "what questions are worth asking," the company,

[together with the University of Pennsylvania], ... set up a program called the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives. More than simply training its young executives to do a particular job, the institute would give them, in a 10-month immersion program on the Penn campus, what amounted to a complete liberal arts education.

The results were pretty, ... um ..., revealing!

At the end of the 10-month course, an anonymous questionnaire was circulated among the Bell students; their answers revealed that they were reading more widely than they had before — if they had read at all — and they were more curious about the world around them. At a time when the country was divided by McCarthyism, they tended to see more than one side to any given argument.

What’s more, the graduates were no longer content to let the machinery of business determine the course of their lives. One man told Baltzell that before the program he had been “like a straw floating with the current down the stream” and added: “The stream was the Bell Telephone Company. I don’t think I will ever be that straw again.”

The institute was judged a success by Morris S. Viteles, one of the pioneers of industrial psychology, who evaluated its graduates. But Bell gradually withdrew its support after yet another positive assessment found that while executives came out of the program more confident and more intellectually engaged, they were also less interested in putting the company’s bottom line ahead of their commitments to their families and communities. By 1960, the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives was finished.

Word of the day: Sprezzatura

At The School of Life, Nick Southgate explains this lovely concept:

... In 1528 Italian noble Baldassare Castiglione wrote a small manual of advice about desirable conduct in the Renaissance court, an arena every bit as conscious of success as any in the modern day. The Book of The Courtier urges the importance of the value of what Castiglione calls sprezzatura. His advice is “to practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.”

However, we shouldn’t just note that Castiglione’s sprezzatura is about the importance of being effortless, but that it emphasises appearing to be effortless, and concealing the effort that goes into what we do. For how ever beguiling the spell of sprezzatura it has a paradox at its heart – it’s a lot of hard work. [Bold emphasis added]

Sundeep Dougal has a useful FAQ on M.F. Husain

Over at the Outlook blog. This particular question gets to the crux of the looniness of the anti-Husain campaign:

But aren't these paintings insulting and obscene and liable to hurt the sentiments of Hindus?

Well, ask any art-critic and historian and they would be able to place it in perspective. Delhi High Court in May 2008 clearly stated the obvious: "A painter has his own perspective of looking at things and it cannot be the basis of initiating criminal proceedings against him...In India, new puritanism is being carried out in the name of cultural purity and a host of ignorant people are vandalizing art and pushing us towards a pre-renaissance era".

The Chief Justice of India K.G.Balakrishan had the best response to the question when, while upholding the Delhi HC decision, he said: “There are so many such subjects, photographs and publications. Will you file cases against all of them? It (Husain’s work) is art. If you don’t want to see it, then don’t see it. There are so many such art forms in the (Hindu) temple structures.”

The main point to note also is that these paintings were not in public places and were in private collections, rarely exhibited and that too in rarefied exhibitions attended by people who by no stretch of imagination would have been offended by them, at exclusive galleries. All of them were done many, many years back. Those who claimed to be hurt by these paintings were the ones who went about putting these paintings in public domain. [Bold emphasis added]

Fail: Why Do Some Book "Reviews" Collapse and Self-Destruct?

It's pretty amazing that Nature editors screwed up in offering to Jared Diamond the job of reviewing Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire, a collection of academic essays that question -- actually, attempt to demolish, going by these commentaries -- the thesis of his own book Collapse.

If you didn't know anything about Collapse, you would need eagle's eyes while reading Diamond's piece to see the conflict between him and the book he's 'reviewing'. This situation has 'unfair' written all over it!

What could have mitigated it is a clear and explicit acknowledgment (preferably right at the beginning) of the fact that Diamond is writing about a book of critiques of his own work. And this, Diamond does not do and, strangely, Nature's editors do not seem to think is necessary.

* * *

Molika Ashford of StinkyJournalism.Org is on the case. In a follow-up, she offers a brief overview of 'reviewing ethics' practiced by other journals, including Science.

Hat tip to Janet Stemwedel, who has a fun poll that asks you to vote on the kinds of expectations you have when you read a book review in "large circulation science periodicals."