Annals of Awesome Insults

... The person who wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on the planet; also without doubt he is an idiot, an idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link.
-- Mark Twain, in a letter addressed to a salesman who sent him an ad for some bogus medicine [Source: Letters of Note]

The Seth Myth

Mihir Sharma is turning into a one-man demolition squad. First came his review of India Calling, and what do we have now? The Age of Seth, a most delicious tear-down of Suhel Seth's Get To The Top: The Ten Rules For Social Success.

If you have seen Seth on TV -- and he appears there far too often -- it is very easy to hate the man. Here's Girish Shahane's post that's largely about Seth, the TV commentator. A memorable line: "He makes points forcefully and articulately, but never with any hint of insight."

Quotes

"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides."
--John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

From Brad DeLong's post:

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Here's a juicy put-down, found in Paul Krugman's post:

"He’s a stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like."
--Ezra Klein (about someone called Dick Armey)

Awesome Comment of the Day

Olaf Storbeck blogged last weem about an upcoming conference to discuss "the merits and demerits of repeating oneslf." The immediate provocation for the meeting appears to be the outing of Bruno Frey as a serial self-plagiarizer.

Justus Haucap chimes in with an awesome comment:

Olaf, I heard there will be only one paper, but read and re-read numerous times.

Great Scientist

Sometime ago, a scientist -- let's call him Prof. X -- was chosen for the directorship of a premier institution. Since he was rather unknown at that time, this announcement generated quite a stir -- especially among those outside his field.

People were itching to know more about Prof. X, his scientific credentials, his claim to fame. They approached a colleague who works in the same field as Prof. X.

"What is Prof. X like?", they asked their colleague. "Tell us, is he a good scientist?"

"I don't know if he is a good scientist," said the colleague. After a short pause, he added, "But he's now a great scientist!"

Philosophy Quotes

Over at 3 Quarks Daily, Gerald Dworkin has put together a wonderful collection. Great fun!

Here's a geeky put-down:

He is a quantum philosopher. I can’t understand him and his position at the same time.
-- S, Morgenbesser

Here are a couple of other quotes:

Philosophy is the cure for which there is no adequate disease.
-- Jerry Fodor

Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
-- Mencken

Of low stakes and academic politics

In the bitter fight over "Oxford University's professorial seat in poetry", for which elections were held recently, do you want to know how low the stakes were? The Economist has the answer [via Aurelie Thiele]:

This year, out of more than 4,000 academic staff and 150,000 graduates, only 477 people bothered to vote.

Of vicious academic debates and low stakes ...

The interesting thing ... about this particular academic feud, however, is that for all its viciousness, the stakes really aren't low at all.

Commenting on an academic debate between Nassim Nicholas Taleb and economics Nobel winner Robert Merton, Felix Salmon sneaks in this gem, a wonderful variation on one of the best known academic quotes: "Academic politics is so bitter because the stakes are so low."

Philip Pullman on religion

Philip Pullman comments on the stupidity of those who clamor for banning books, films, and art -- "they never learn." Along the way, he has this to say about religion:

... [W]hen it comes to banning books, religion is the worst reason of the lot. Religion, uncontaminated by power, can be the source of a great deal of private solace, artistic inspiration, and moral wisdom. But when it gets its hands on the levers of political or social authority, it goes rotten very quickly indeed. The rank stench of oppression wafts from every authoritarian church, chapel, temple, mosque, or synagogue – from every place of worship where the priests have the power to meddle in the social and intellectual lives of their flocks, from every presidential palace or prime ministerial office where civil leaders have to pander to religious ones.

My basic objection to religion is not that it isn't true; I like plenty of things that aren't true. It's that religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

BTW, did you know that god actually prefers atheists?

Of spherical bastards and asymmetric assholes

Read Julianne Dalcanton's post for the details. I like this definition of spherical bastards:

... they [are] bastards any way you [look] at them.

Quote of the day

An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.
-- Nicholas Chamfort

I chanced upon this quote on my iGoogle start page.

Annals of put-downs ...

Our greatest novelist, alas.

Of Victor Hugo, by a contemporary critic.

This quote is taken from Neil Griffiths' take on what it takes to write a novel: "at some point it is necessary to believe you are the best writer in the world," in the words of Martin Amis.

My blog's 'film rating' shouldn't constrain me from posting this quote

Running simulations is very much like masturbation. Do it often enough, and it starts to feel better than the real thing.
-- Prof. George Rose (quoted here).

The link for the quote is from this post by Guru, who's too scared to post it in full because he wants to protect his blog's "G" rating.

For the record, my blog is also G-rated (at least as of now). But that shouldn't prevent me from my pursuing my passion for freaky quotes in which academics talk dirty or bad-mouth other academics and academic fields.

Traveller's Dilemma: Kaushik Basu responds to readers' questions

Remember Kaushik Basu's article on Traveller's Dilemma, and its implications about libertarian assumptions? [We looked at it here.] In a fairly detailed follow-up, Basu answers readers' questions. The criticisms and questions come from many angles, and you will have to read them yourself; I just want to highlight a juicy quote about economists:

As Fred Pryor noted with equally profound insight and cynicism, "An economist is someone who sees something working in practice, and asks whether it would work in theory."

To which Basu responds:

Pryor is right about economists but wrong in suggesting that that is the defining characteristic of an economist. All science works that way. The fact that apples fall downwards was the end of the matter for the lay person but a puzzle to scientists because it did not fit their theoretical presumptions. If I may add an adage to Pryor's: A scientist is someone with the capacity to ask questions which seem obvious to others.

Why do universities have so much learning?

The freshmen bring a little in and the seniors take none out, so [learning] accumulates through the years.
-- A. Lawrence Lowell

From this article by Fred R. Shapiro, author of The Yale Book of Quotations. In the article, he goes into the history behind this and a few other quotes (such as 'Publish or perish', and "Academic politics is so bitter because the stakes are so low").

Annals of academic putdowns: The 'feigned praise' edition

In physics recommendation land, there is no more damning praise than saying someone is a “hard worker”.
-- Julianne Dalcanton at Cosmic Variance

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To call a young colleague's work "rather ... journalistic" is to signal a negative vote on tenure.
-- David Damrosch in The Chronicle

Jerks in seminars

Incoherent ponderer ponders about the jerks -- he says, " it is ALWAYS a guy by the way" -- who ask arrogant (and sometimes, stupid) questions in an authoritative tone during seminars. I'm sure you have seen some of them; I certainly have, and I cringe everytime I think about any of them. The rest of their personality doesn't matter; it's just this one ugly facet that stays with me, and reminds me not to have anything at all to do with them. Oh, of course, the jerks I have seen in action are also guys. Always.

From the many interesting anecdotes in 'Ponderer's post, let me just quote one for the interesting way in which a jerk was put in his place by the speaker:

I know another annoying "jerk" person - this time within our own department. Last year a speaker showed a movie shot in real time of some cool process, and he raised his hand to say: "this cannot be! It should be 1,000 times slower". When the speaker conceded at first "maybe you are right", he answered "take it for granted, I am always right". Everyone laughed assuming it was a joke, except I was watching his face when he said it and it clearly wasn't a joke - he was dead serious. To my delight the speaker then responded: "You know, now that I think about it, you may be wrong after all. Let's watch the movie again". After the movie was over, and the "jerk" guy tried to make some other randomly jerky point, the speaker [interrupted] him with "let's watch the movie again". And after a third review was over, he says "You know, let's watch it just one more time". Followed by "Any more questions?" I was [applauding] very loudly and was nearly jumping up and down in triumph. For that moment I wanted to be that presenter guy.

Blog-writing and writing for publication

Let's look at the evidence, all of which came to my notice last week.

Evidence 1

Let's hear David Warsh (author of the widely acclaimed Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery), who quotes John Updike:

I’ve been discovering how fundamentally antithetical is the world of the blog to the ethos of writing for publication. This disjunction was described supremely well by the novelist John Updike in a little essay that appeared yesterday in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, adapted from an earlier speech to booksellers.

The electronic marvels that abound around us serve, surprisingly, to inflame what is most informally and noncritically human about us — our computer screens stare back at us with a kind of giant, instant “Aw, shucks,” disarming in its modesty, disquieting in its diffidence.

The printed, bound and paid-for book was — still is, for the moment — more exacting, more demanding, of its producer and consumer both. It is the site of an encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the other’s steps but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of personal encounter, with all its merely social conventions, its merciful padding of blather and mutual forgiveness.

Evidence 2

Let's give the mike now to Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on happiness :

... I made a commitment to myself when I started this blog that I wouldn’t insult its readers by yapping about nothing just so that I can say I made an appearance. Every one of my blog entries reprints an essay that I spent a great deal of time writing and that I hope is worth your time to read. So for those of you who want to hear me babble about my every third thought, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to get me drunk first. For those of you who don’t want to read a blog that has no real meat on the bone, I’m your man.

Evidence 3

This one is about the blogospheric misrepresentation of what Tim Berners-Lee said at a recent press meet (To be fair, bloggers were not alone; almost all MSM outlets lustily participated in this crime). Here's Becky Hogge on this 'incident':

Let's take a break for comic interlude.

A search on Google News several days after the event reveals tremors still reverberating from as far as Spain, India and Taiwan. "World Wide Web developer concerned Internet could be misused" and "World Wide Web creator warns of cheats and liars" scream the headlines; my favourite being from Mac Daily: "World Wide Web creator (and Apple Mac user) Berners-Lee fears for Web's future."

It was the story the traditional press had been waiting for. Misinformation will take over the web, warns internet inventor; "undemocratic things" will start happening. Quick, big media, save us! And then, just as surely, the backlash: "Hands off the Web, Sir Tim," demanded Sarah Dempster in the Times on 6 November, presumably so that her paper's proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, can continue to get his hands on it.

One lonely blog post tells the real story. What had been an attempt to explain how reputation works in the blogosphere had apparently been misinterpreted, and Berners-Lee's words had been "turned upside down into a 'blogging is one of the biggest perils' message," as the Guardian reported on 3 November. The author of said lonely post was one Tim Berners-Lee.

Berners-Lee's "lonely post" is here.

Is it possible -- is it just possible -- that a huge number of bloggers are into blogging in a way that was so nicely articulated by Joel Achenbach?

QOTD

Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions.
-- Evan Esar

The purpose of studying economics

The purpose of studying economics is to learn how to avoid being deceived by other economists.
-- Joan Robinson

I found this gem in this essay, written by an admirably moderate economist. The whole essay is devoted to a strong argument against "economic fundamentalism".