Good afternoon.
I sent you
my wishes for the season. That's what
now passes as a Christmas/holiday card from me.
A linguist friend of mine wrote
back to me after my little report on funny words. "There is one more possible explanation
for words being funny: their similarity to words in other languages - which
may, of course, be because those words are related to one or more of the
factors that make words funny within a language. There is a linguistic
technical term for this phenomenon: 'pernicious homophony.'"
He provided examples from
Swedish. "When we boys encountered
the German word for cousin, which is 'vetter,' we found that word incredibly
funny. Why? Because it sounded like the plural of 'vagina'
in our dialect. Which, of course,
confirms that funniness may be related to sex.
Another example is the Swedish word 'fack,' one of whose meanings is
something like 'trade,' for example in the name of the prominent art and design
school in Stockholm, named 'Konstfack,' School of 'Art Trade.' The funniness is, I am sure, obvious to you. I have encountered Americans who have found a
particular Swedish road sign very amusing, not to say hilarious: 'Full fart,' [which means] 'full speed'!"
Finally, "you cannot even say
farewell in English to a Swede without running the risk of 'pernicious
homophony'! 'Good' is, of course, 'god'
in Swedish - no problem there. But 'bye'
in 'good bye' may pose a problem. I have
heard little Swedish children laugh uproariously when hearing somebody say 'good
bye.' Why? Because in Swedish a word pronounced the same
way as 'bye' in English means 'poop.' So, Gary: 'Good poop' to you!"
This was one of those moments,
reading an email, when I really did LOL.
* * *
Only someone miraculously innocent
of history could believe that competition among ideas will result in the
triumph of truth.
— John Gray
I have long
wondered about the validity of the concept of "the marketplace of ideas"
and the proposition that the truth will out, given enough free speech. I worry that Gray may be correct (although he
*is* sort of a "nattering nabob of negativism" among philosophers
about liberal society). The First Amendment
is grounded in the belief about the marketplace of ideas. Although the concept is rooted in earlier
writings,
[t]he first reference to the "free
trade in ideas" within "the competition of the market" appears
in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s dissent in Abrams v. United States. The
phrase "marketplace of ideas" first appears in a concurring opinion
by Justice William O. Douglas in the Supreme Court decision United States v. Rumely in 1953: "Like the publishers of newspapers,
magazines, or books, this publisher bids for the minds of men in the market
place of ideas."
It's a
claim, not a law of nature or society. I've
not seen any data to support it (or refute it).
I'm not sure how one would gather the data or even what the data would
be. But if Gray is correct, and the
principle is wrong, then what? The alternatives
sound even worse, such as state control of speech (e.g., 1984, Nazi Germany).
What prompts
the concern, of course, is the vast amount of disinformation (that is, outright
lies and other factually incorrect statements) that is spread on social and
other media in the 21st century.
If the falsehoods and misdirection triumph, in the sense that they guide
elections and public policy and government action, then we are all in for a
rough ride into the future. It doesn't
help that the current occupant of the White House is chief spreader of manure.
* * *
A marvelous
occasional publication from Drexel University, The Smart Set, recently carried an article titled "Reviving
the Dinner Party." It was written
by a young woman, a self-described Millennial, who told of her path to hosting
dinner parties. Such events were not
part of her family life while growing up; her parents never had them. (And, she added, they also didn't have many
close friends. What a surprise.) Living in apartments with roommates during
college and immediately thereafter didn't provide a venue for anything like a "dinner
party." Sure, they'd get together
for pizza or spaghetti and play video games or watch a sporting event, and more
often it would be "meeting at the gym, carpooling, or joining a club, all
of which I've done in pursuit of deepening friendships." Or dining out or meeting at the local coffee
shop.
But when she
was a guest at others' homes,
I enjoyed the feeling that dinner
at other people's houses gave me; every person . . . who has allowed me to
visit their home and dine with them has made me feel so connected and supported
as they let me in. It was a fundamentally different and positive feeling from
meeting at a corporate or public space. . . .
So I wanted to host dinner parties partly to respond to the good
feelings I received when other people hosted me in their homes.
Heading into her late 20s and
living in a smaller Midwest city, she was having difficult developing new
friendships of the kind that she'd known in college and a little later. "I could see that I wasn't getting very
far, emotionally, just sitting next to people in restaurants or joining them at
yoga class. Everyone was very pleasant, but something about hosting people in
my home felt more like friendship to me, no matter how stressed out it made me
feel."
One of the
hurdles she had to get past was the stereotyped view of a "dinner party." That is, "a single host or hostess
preparing a planned dinner, where enough people would come together to fill a
table and would eat together" and converse before, during, and after the
meal. She relates that a writer for the New York Times declared that such events
are disappearing; he "sees stylized civility and elegance as fading, as
more and more diverse groups of people no longer hold the same rigorous social
mores that characterize a certain form of dinner party nostalgia. (Think:
champagne glasses and a ton of forks to choose from)." She reports that various media observers have
written eulogies for the dinner party as traditionally envisioned, hosted by
the socially and financially elite.
Unlike a family potluck, where
rules might be family specific, there were very specific forms of decorum that
separated regular folks from the truly refined. In a modern era where
millionaires and billionaires are born or made every day into a wide variety of
cultural contexts, it's hard to expect that everyone attended some form of 'finishing
school' to get them up to speed on these rules.
[For example, that scaramouche in the White House.]
She worries about several matters
in contemplating a dinner party.
As a greater percentage of people
from middle and low income backgrounds go to college and join a diverse set of
college graduates, the dinner party I could throw is becoming populated with
many more diverse voices and experiences than before. I want to invite a wide
variety of people to a party, but what if they clash on conversational topics?
. . . Do I dress up for my guests? Do I have food waiting when everyone arrives
and let them serve their plates, or do I get everyone to sit down and bring the
food out?
She concludes that while there's no Amy Vanderbilt or Emily
Post to tell her how to have a dinner party, it's also true that "no one
really should be able to tell me how to have dinner with my friends, but it
does leave a nascent hostess constantly wondering about a potential misstep."
So she
resolved to have several dinner parties in the following year.
I was realizing that friendship, so
direct in kindergarten and so prolific in college, was hard to come by in my
young professional life. It was quite easy to meet people, and quite easy to
then recognize people again at a later date, but things tended to stall around
there. I wanted some kind of shortcut to intimacy, something that would show
others that I was serious about becoming friends even when I was still figuring
out if that was true. I had figured out that social media wasn't cutting it,
and just "friending" someone wasn't drawing anyone new into my
circle. The dinner party became my means.
My parents' social pattern was
almost the opposite of hers. All the
time I was growing up they were either hosting a dinner gathering or guests at
someone else's dinner party many times during the year. There is a chicken-and-egg question here, but
my parents also had reams of good friends; did they have friends (at least in
part) because of dinner parties, or did they have dinner parties because they
had a lot of friends? I guess liking to
host and attend dinner parties is genetic, because rough calculation suggests
to me that we've hosted well over 300 dinner parties in the house I've lived in
for nearly 30 years (including summer events on the deck, which count as a "dinner
party" in my sense of the term).
[The crack about genetics is a joke—but if genetics play a role in what
one might call "sociability"—a broader personality trait—then it's
not entirely without substance. Read on
for more on this topic.] And, of course,
both Kathy and I have been to countless dinner parties, some more casual than
others, but dinner parties nonetheless. We
enjoy them all (well, almost all).
In contrast, in conversations with
a couple of friends in the last year or so, I was surprised at statements
made. "Oh, we never entertain"
and "I think we had one party in our house once" (in a house they've
lived in for decades). I don't criticize
others for not hosting, but it's sure not our style. I can't imagine not entertaining friends from
time to time. The young Smart Set writer is also correct, in my
experience, that a dinner party is one way to both build and cement friendships. (Dinner parties are not the *only* way to do
so, but they're one obvious and comparatively easy way to do so.) They are also a way to determine that an
acquaintanceship should (or should not) progress to a friendship.
* * *
Darn it, I
read a quotation attributed to John Kenneth Galbraith and later I couldn't find
it. If I remember it correctly,
Galbraith was asked if he thought in words or pictures. He replied, "I think in thoughts." Without doing any reading in neuroscience or
philosophy, and relying solely on my own reflections, my experience is the same
as Galbraith's. I don't think in words
or pictures, either. I don't know what I
think in, except that whatever it is, it gets translated from brain through the
fingers or the mouth into words, which is how I—or anyone—turns whatever is in
their brain into something for others to behold. Surely the thoughts precede the printed or
spoken word. Don't they? Apart from the instance when we speak without
thinking, which often turns out badly—but even then, presumably there had to be
some microsecond of thought before the words were uttered.
* * *
A
neurogeneticist at Trinity College Dublin, and author of Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are (2018), recently
wrote an article that supported two opinions I've long held. Given that some of this is contested
territory, my reaction may be a case of confirmation bias, but the puissant
logic of his position seems to me difficult to get around.
Many of our psychological traits
are innate in origin. There is overwhelming evidence from twin, family and
general population studies that all manner of personality traits, as well as
things such as intelligence, sexuality and risk of psychiatric disorders, are
highly heritable. [So the difference among people on such things as] IQ scores
or personality measures is [partly, but significantly] attributable to genetic
differences between people. The story of our lives most definitively does not
start with a blank page.
What he
goes on to clarify, however, is that there are few "direct links from
molecules to minds" and that the "commonly used 'gene for X'
construction is unfortunate in suggesting that such genes have a dedicated
function: that it is their purpose to cause X. This is not the case at all." The term "gene" has two different
meanings, which causes confusion. In
biology, it's "a stretch of DNA that codes for a specific protein. So
there is a gene for the protein haemoglobin, which carries oxygen around in the
blood, and a gene for insulin, which regulates our blood sugar, and genes for
metabolic enzymes and neurotransmitter receptors and antibodies, and so on." In the study of the heritability of traits or
characteristics, a gene is something that can be passed between generations
that is related directly to a trait or condition (such as sickle-cell anemia or
blue eyes). What links the two is "variation:
the 'gene' for sickle-cell anaemia is really just a mutation or change in
sequence in the stretch of DNA that codes for haemoglobin."
Genetic
variants are what cause differences among people on traits and conditions. But, he cautions, they "might be having
their effects in highly indirect ways."
Human brains vary widely "in the size of various parts of the
brain," characteristics that are heritable to some extent, but "the
relationship between these kinds of neural properties and psychological traits
is far from simple." The search for
a link between various brain structures and behaviors, sometimes identified, "have
not held up to further scrutiny."
The reason, he says, is "that the brain is simply not so modular"
and functions are spread all over the place as well as reliant on the
interconnections. "There is no one
bit of the brain that you do your thinking with."
So there's no gene for intelligence. Not even just a few genes for intelligence,
probably. There are variants that "have
now been associated with intelligence" but each one is very small in its
effect. Interestingly, they seem to be involved
with brain development—so intelligence may (at least in part) be a reflection "much
more generally how well the brain is put together." Similarly with other traits; these genes "are
multitaskers: they are involved in diverse cellular processes in many different
brain regions." Moreover, because
all these systems are linked together, variants in one part affect others. So don't go looking for genetic conditions
that control or affect traits.
The relationship between our
genotypes and our psychological traits, while substantial, is highly indirect
and emergent. It involves the interplay of the effects of thousands of genetic
variants, realised through the complex processes of development, ultimately
giving rise to variation in many parameters of brain structure and function,
which, collectively, impinge on the high-level cognitive and behavioural
functions that underpin individual differences in our psychology.
And that's just the way things are.
Nature is under no obligation to make things simple for us. When we open the
lid of the black box, we should not expect to see lots of neatly separated
smaller black boxes inside – it's a mess in there.
Mess though
it surely is, it appears to be a mess because we can't figure it out, at least
not now. But that doesn't mean it doesn't
work. I see too many instances of kids
with traits that reflect the parents—and upbringing isn't a satisfactory answer
because it often seems too simplistic.
He puts
paid, once again, the notion that ailments and traits are linked to specific
genes, thus endorsing the proposition that you should be *very* skeptical any
time you read or hear a news piece reporting a link between a gene and
something or another.
* * *
"Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do
best."
— Wallace Stegner
Great
students don't need passion for schooling, or so recent (and I think pretty
solid) research says. I'm trying to
figure out if I or any of my friends were passionate about school. I think I probably wasn't. In junior high school, obviously not, given
my grades. But not in high school,
either, I think, even though I performed well.
(The research is on 15-year-olds, so the "school" is
secondary, not college or university.)
Most of us
would think passion a critical part of success in most endeavors. You have to passionate about the violin to
put in the thousands of hours of practice to play at the top tier. You have to be passionate about gardening to
grow beautiful flowers and tasty vegetables.
You have to be passionate about farming to voluntarily adopt it as a
life pursuit. And so on. Stegner's hypothesis is supported by data. My long-time faculty friend Jo-Ida Hansen,
who for many years ran the Center for Interest Measurement Research at the
University of Minnesota, once commented to me that the research is clear: People do well at things in which they are
interested and, conversely, they are not likely to do well at things that do
not interest them. One can debate
whether "interest" = "passion," but they're clearly
related.
Professor Jihyun Lee at the
University of New South Wales (Australia) does interesting work. Trained at Columbia and Harvard, she worked
for the Educational Testing Service before going to Australia. She focuses in part on making psychometric
tests more accurate and usable in educational settings, a worthwhile goal. In the course of her work, she looked at
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results, an international
survey of students conducted every three years; the 2015 results included
students in 72 countries. In addition to
tests in reading, math, and science, it also asks students about their
attitudes toward school.
What Professor Lee found is that
there is nearly zero correlation between attitude to school and academic
performance, and her findings from the 2015 PISA results parallel those in the
earlier PISA surveys. She analyzed the
data by country (developing or developed), gender, and socio-economic
status. None of those variables
matters. (Statistical analysis led her
to conclude that about 2% of the variation in academic performance depends on
passion, so it's essentially irrelevant.)
"This means that in most countries, academically able students do
not hold their schooling in high regard.
Similarly, academically less able students do not necessarily have low
opinions about their schooling. There's
simply no connection."
So, she asks, what motivates
students to do well in school? Drawing
on other research based on PISA results, she concludes that the drive "comes
from within. . . . What sets
academically able and less able students apart is self-belief about their own
strengths and weaknesses. Individual
psychological variables such as self-efficacy, anxiety and enjoyment of
learning in itself explain between 15 per cent and 25 per cent of the variation
in students' academic achievement."
What accounts for the other 75% of
the variation? One guesses it's raw
ability, socio-economic status (apart from passion), attendance, parental
education, and a multitude of other factors.
School quality surely matters.
The debate about what factors weigh more heavily, and can be manipulated
to the advantage of students, has been going on in the field of educational
research for decades.
This was one of those articles
where the reader comments were largely on point and thoughtful. One weakness that several commentators noted
was that 15-year-olds around the world are being asked to respond to these four
questions in the PISA survey:
(a) school has done little to prepare me for adult life when
I leave school
(b) school has been a waste of time
(c) school helped give me confidence to make decisions
(d) school has taught me things that could be useful in a
job
At 15 years old, how would they know? *Maybe* they could legitimately answer (c),
but they certainly can't assess accurately (a), (b), and (d). As one reader wrote, he teaches 15-year-olds
and loves them—but they're knuckleheads.
A variety of other commenters, however, thought Professor Lee made a
valid and useful point. I think the
critics have the better argument.
The comment
about knuckleheads parallels my skepticism about relying too heavily on student
evaluations of teaching. There are
plenty of examples of the "hardest" teacher being the one whose
students take away the most from a class—something they realize decades later. Even college students can be knuckleheads.
The more I
thought about this, the more I realized I was *not* passionate about
school. In fact, I often allowed myself
to be distracted from studying. I very
much wanted to *learn* the subject matter (some in high school, more in college,
and especially in graduate school), but *studying* is hard work and, for me,
not something I looked forward to. Sitting
down with book or journal article, highlighter in hand, was something I had to
force myself to do. I knew I had to do
it, and I always did, and on occasion *did* enjoy the actual work of learning,
but for the most part not. (I should add
that this description is not accurate when one is doing one's own research; in
that case, the reading and studying the work that's been done is fun.)
I'm done studying
for this message, so I'm sending it.
-- Gary
