Writing – Page 16 – a sibilant intake of breath

The danger of reading the news too often

I have been listening to an audiobook of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s: Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. It’s full of interesting concepts and engaging writing.

In one passage, Taleb describes the anxiety of the investor who feels the need to constantly check on how well an investment is doing. Has the value risen or fallen over the last month? Day? Minute? Second?

He describes a number of statistical and psychological features of such situations, but one seems possible to apply to estimating the ideal frequency of news-checking.

Taleb argues that with the investment, we generally see smaller jitters in value when we choose to look up the current value more often. Furthermore, and critically, we are likely to suffer more every time we see a drop in value than we are to celebrate when we see a gain — one of the ways in which people are demonstrably not ‘rational’ in the sense of valuing mathematically identical outcomes differently for emotional reasons.

Something similar may accompany the temptation to open a browser window to check Google News, open Twitter on your phone, glance at Facebook, or otherwise deliberately seek a new set of general updates about the broader state of the world. Given additional biases in the media, the odds are probably under 50% that any news story you have not seen before will be ‘positive’, at least for people who prefer a minimum amount of violence and suffering in the world. In particular, because violence is so emotionally salient to us, it tends to both dominate media coverage and draw the most attention when mixed in with other types of news stories.

If we feel the ‘losses’ in human welfare more acutely than the gains, checking for updates too frequently may lead us to develop and maintain an overly discouraged perspective on the world. This becomes even more likely when we take into account the seemingly irrational way in which our brains excessively prioritize what seems to be happening right now. Reading about the ongoing active shooter situation, with new updates coming in all the time, may be fundamentally more traumatizing than reading about the whole incident once it has been resolved (or at least moved to the next stage — the arrest, the trial, the post-massacre political analysis).

Perhaps it makes sense to intentionally curtail time spent following current news in favour (at least) of waiting for the summary (if any) in a weekly news magazine or, even better, working through the pages of a dusty book that has influenced the thinking of many people.

The history of the Arab Spring

The New York Times has published an exceptional long article by Scott Anderson about the history of the Middle East since 2003. It’s an ambitious text to have written, not a trivial task to read, and perhaps a suggestion that print journalism is enduring in its dedication to telling complicated stories, despite ongoing challenges to the business model and staffs of many of the most important print sources. It also includes some remarkable photography by Paolo Pellegrin.

A summary, early in the article, attributes special importance to the post-Ottoman settlement:

Yet one pattern does emerge, and it is striking. While most of the 22 nations that make up the Arab world have been buffeted to some degree by the Arab Spring, the six most profoundly affected — Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen — are all republics, rather than monarchies. And of these six, the three that have disintegrated so completely as to raise doubt that they will ever again exist as functioning states — Iraq, Syria and Libya — are all members of that small list of Arab countries created by Western imperial powers in the early 20th century. In each, little thought was given to national coherence, and even less to tribal or sectarian divisions. Certainly, these same internal divisions exist in many of the region’s other republics, as well as in its monarchies, but it would seem undeniable that those two factors operating in concert — the lack of an intrinsic sense of national identity joined to a form of government that supplanted the traditional organizing principle of society — left Iraq, Syria and Libya especially vulnerable when the storms of change descended.

This accords closely to Middle Eastern history as interpreted by many of the sources we read in my Oxford M.Phil. In particular, it reminds me of David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.

Step by step toward a proposal

My PhD committee members probably feel like I have fallen off the face of the Earth.

Seemingly decades ago, my hope was to have my thesis proposal submitted for approval by December 2015. Now, I am getting close to the point where I think the draft will be worth circulating to committee members and potential supervisors.

While there are literally hundreds of tasks which I have listed for myself in completing the proposal, including reading many books and articles, there are three that I think I should push through before sending a preliminary version to my committee members, if only to show them that I am alive and working. I need to incorporate ideas from a qualitative methods course I completed, specifically concerning ethical approval. Then, I need to incorporate two sets of comments from my friends Nathan and Nada.

This project will involve a lot of challenges. Two that loom over me are getting it through ethical approval, given the way the communities opposing these pipelines are often vulnerable and specifically targeted by state security services, and actually finding people who were involved in fighting these pipelines who are willing to be interviewed.

One step at a time, I suppose.

Let down by Gibson’s The Peripheral

The main storytelling device in William Gibson’s novel The Peripheral is after-the-fact exposition (ATFE), which gives it the feeling of a mystery more than conventional science fiction. Rather than tell you in advance how a world or a technology works, Gibson shows you the results without context and provides the explanation later. This does well for avoiding the tedium which is sometimes mocked in speculative fiction, where books or chapters open with the author describing the parameters of the fiction with a boring lack of tension or mystery. For me, at least, it falls down in the case of this book when the central mysteries are never resolved. In increasing order of importance:

Why is Lower Manhattan underwater due to climate change in the far future (p. 435), but London is apparently untroubled?
What was the point of the “party time” test of character (p. 382)? The woman tested never seems to face an important moral choice later.
Is Aelita actually murdered? If so, why? What do the antagonists who are revealed at the end have to gain from it?
What’s the story with the Chinese server that connects the mid-future with the far-future (p. 189)? What did the people who built it use it for?
What’s the metaphysics of this book? It says that the middle-future in communication with the far-future (p. 185-6) has its timeline changed as a consequence (p. 422). Is this a case of infinitely branching universes where communication pathways can be established between any two? Every time someone far the far-future communicates with the past, do they create a new future timeline starting from there?
Why do people in the far future care what happens in this particular mid-future? A major plot point is one character from the far-future trying to avoid a catastrophe in the mid-future (p. 320-1), but what’s the point if (from the far-future perspective) this is just one branch in a vast number of pasts? Why care so much about this one?
Why is having people from the mid-future drive robots in the far-future useful? They never do anything that remote operators in the far-future couldn’t do without all this time travel communication.

I was also frustrated by how a large part of the book is devoted to people training to pilot these future robots (as well as acquiring specialized weapons), which only end up getting used in a rather disappointing way. In particular, a supposedly evil red cube from a custom universe focused on weapon development never ends up doing anything interesting.

Sometimes the ATFE approach is quite frustrating: especially the habit of opening chapters using only pronouns to describe the person involved, pointlessly leaving the reader unclear about what is being described. When people are murdered, the motive and immediate consequences are often unclear.

My shot

It’s strange that a stage show running in one city is affecting the whole continent, but New York isn’t a normal place and Lin-Manuel Miranda clearly isn’t a normal man.

The killing in Orlando originally prompted my personal doctrine in response to political violence: refuse to be terrorized. One or a few people armed and keen to kill do not affect my thinking about politics.

I cried quite unexpectedly when I saw Miranda’s sonnet.

Reading more about the musical, and revelling in my BitTorrent audio, I am increasingly impressed by the virtuoso genius of the thing. Violence has sometimes been a decisive factor historically, but there is scope to hope that ideas and arguments can be our battleground as humanity learns to live all together on this small planet.

John Green on his often-banned book

I have written before about banned books.

In this video, a contemporary author discusses the experience of having his novel banned for containing apparently mature content:

His closer — about deferring to librarians to make such judgments – differs from the more common narrative that rejects such curation entirely.

Free speech at universities

The Economist recently printed an article about free speech on university campuses in the U.S..

In particular, they contrast thedemands.org which they say “lists speech-curbing demands from students at 72 institutions” and the Chicago Statement which argues that “[c]oncerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable”.

Generally speaking, I am extremely skeptical about curbs on the freedom of speech, even when they have plausible justifications. People don’t have a right not to be offended, and universities must provoke thinking in order to serve their purpose.

PhD proposal progress

I have come across a lot of exciting material for my PhD project in the last few weeks. Documents like the papal encyclical Laudato Si raise interesting questions about the connections between the faith community’s involvement in the effort against climate change, anti-capitalism, and the moral contemplation of the environment. For instance, there are interesting parallels between this theological interpretation of biodiversity loss and ‘deep’ ecology in which nature is considered valuable for its own sake and not only for human purposes.

Another encouraging development is the universal enthusiasm for the project. I have discussed it with experts in faith and aboriginal communities, people at Massey College, committee members and potential supervisors, people at parties, environmentalists, journalists, and civil servants. People are sometimes skeptical about whether it will prove logistically feasible to talk to so many people and follow the routes of two phantom pipelines, but nobody has argued that the project is not worth trying.

Once the Community Response to the ad hoc committee on divestment’s report has been assembled, my top priority will be the creation of a major new version of my proposal for circulation to committee members and potential supervisors.

Gaddis on the Cold War

The pope had been an actor before he became a priest, and his triumphant return to Poland in 1979 revealed that he had lost none of his theatrical skills. Few leaders of his era could match him in his ability to use words, gestures, exhortations, rebukes — even jokes — to move the hearts and minds of the millions who saw and heard him. All at once a single individual, through a series of dramatic performances, was changing the course of history. That was in a way appropriate, because the Cold War itself was a kind of theatre in which distinctions between illusions and reality were not always obvious. It presented great opportunities for great actors to play great roles.

These opportunities did not become fully apparent, however, until the early 1980s, for it was only then that the material forms of power upon which the United States, the Soviet Union, and their allies had lavished so much attention for so long — the nuclear weapons and missiles, the conventional military forces, the intelligence establishments, the military-industrial complexes, the propaganda machines — began to lose their potency. Real power rested, during the final decade of the Cold War, with leaders like John Paul II, whose mastery of intangibles — of such qualities as courage, eloquence, imagination, determination, and faith — allowed them to expose disparities between what people believed and the systems under which the Cold War had obliged them to live. The gaps were most glaring in the Marxist-Leninist world: so much so that when fully revealed there was no way to close them other than to dismantle communism itself, and thereby end the Cold War.

Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. p. 195-6

This book covered familiar ground, since I have been taking courses on the Cold War since at least high school. Still, it has a concise and interesting argument. It was interesting to read about the Soviet placement of missiles in Cuba being primarily motivated by a desire to spread communism in Latin America by protecting the ‘spontaneous’ Marxist takeover of Cuba. The book may be overly kind to Nixon and Reagan, with both depicted as accomplished grand strategists. The book is probably appropriately harsh on Mao: estimating deaths from his Great Leap Forward at 30 million and highlighting the strangeness of him still being revered in China while few feel similarly about Stalin.

Pre-research preparations

I had my first meeting with U of T’s research ethics people, regarding my proposed PhD project.

One thing they drew my attention to is some of the policy language in the Tri-Council Policy Statement on Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans, which is like the north star for research ethics in Canada.

One policy directive (6.11) explains:

Researchers shall submit their research proposals, including proposals for pilot studies, for REB [Research Ethics Board] review and approval of its ethical acceptability prior to the start of recruitment of participants, access to data, or collection of human biological materials. REB review is not required for the initial exploratory phase, which may involve contact with individuals or communities intended to establish research partnerships or to inform the design of a research proposal.

Similarly, another directive (10.1) says:

Researchers shall submit their research approvals, including proposals for pilot studies, for REB review and approval of its ethical acceptability prior to the start of recruitment of participants, or access to data. Subject to the exceptions in Article 10.5, REB review is not requires for the initial exploratory phase (often involving contact with individuals or communities) intended to discuss the feasibility of the research, establish research partnerships, or the design of a research proposal.

This is quite important, in part because chapter 9 (“Research involving the First Nations, Inuit, and Metis Peoples of Canada”) calls for a “collaborative relationship between researchers and communities”.

During the next couple of months I need to put a lot of effort into situating this project within relevant literatures, as well as developing a convincing and ethically appropriate methodology for effectively evaluating my research questions.