Thursday, December 23, 2004 ::: YGLESIAS VOTING METHODS
Matthew Yglesias has some cute ideas about how to run the primary election, but it seems to me that the last thing you want to do for the any election in this country is to drive down voter turnout. Any system that requires either multiple voting dates, or unreliability on when the vote will happen or when in the process the vote will happen will keep people away from the polls. His athletic-tournament style systems are fairly similar, however, to some established alternative voting methodologies.
explains the options very nicely. And actually, the Democratic primary would be a good place to try out Condorcet voting since (1) it could be imposed by fiat rather than needing to be endorsed by an ignorant electorate, and (2) our chief problem in the primaries is that we're always conflicted over whether to go for a centrist for strategic reasons or a leftist because he's really the guy we'd like to see. Condorcet is designed to pick somebody everybody can live with.
All that said, I can see one important possible objection to Condorcet, and that is that you always end up with the Vanilla candidate. Sometimes the world needs a radical. I don't have the answer to that problem.
Sunday, November 28, 2004 :::
NAXOS COMMISSIONS PETER MAXWELL DAVIES
This is pretty cool news. Naxos has commissioned Sir Peter Maxwell Davies to write string quartets:
"Last week Naxos of America released the CD of the first 2 of Sir Peter's 10 projected "Naxos Quartets." Four more CDs are to follow at regular intervals. It's a huge commitment for the Maggini Quartet, a British-based, British-specializing ensemble that's faced with the task of learning the new works and presenting them in annual concerts at Wigmore Hall in London. (Nos. 4 and 5 had their premiere in October.)
"What's really remarkable, however, is the involvement of a record company in commissioning new music. The conventional wisdom at most major labels is that it's hard enough to sell new music. Going out and helping it come into being is virtually unprecedented."
In addition to the coolness of a record company commissioning new music, this brings up a couple of additional subjects:
First, distribution costs are falling faster than ever. It used to be a major expense just to do the duplication of commercial releases, and now a CD costs a dollar or two per unit to manufacture. The Naxos business model allows them to spend the monies freed up in those savings on making the CDs cheap, and they use other strategies for keeping costs down as well -- ugly cover art, usually a public-domain image slapped into their standard generic format, means no artist fees or art royalties; skilled but non-famous ensembles who they can hire on the cheap; and probably other less obvious techniques. The result is generally a solid recording with decent engineering (production costs for recording are plummetting, too, of course) which they can sell cheap all over the place. Why spend $20 on brand-name artists and pretty cover art when you can spend $7 or $10 apiece on Naxos and get two CDs for the same price? The result of the lowered bar to producing CDs, however, is a glutted market. If I somehow managed to land a record deal, with Naxos or Sony Classical, or Nonesuch, or anybody else, in order for my record to make any money they would have to promote it like crazy. Davies is getting a lot of free publicity because what Naxos is doing is new and the Naxos PR department can get results, but when (if) the Naxos model becomes standard the New York Times won't run articles any more, and will probably ignore their press releases. That's not to say that their model will fail -- on the contrary, if they do it right it might work nicely, but they won't be able to take risks on new artists any more than any other classical label can. Remember that CRI folded a couple years ago, and they were one of the most important New Music Labels out there. So how do you get in on the Naxos action if you aren't already famous? You don't. I'm not complaing, mind you, just stating the facts. The good news, though, is that there are now venues through with the unknown composer can get his or her music heard. I have some pieces up at music.download.com, and while I don't get many hits I can direct interested people to it, and the occasional web-surfer can stumble across it. I got fan mail from Eastern Europe the other day.
The point is, distibution has become a PR problem rather than a manufacturing problem. It used to be that getting a recording made at all was the PR problem, but the lowered bar has moved the point at which the PR is required. I don't have any solutions at the moment, but it's interesting.
The second interesting issue is the possibility of outsourcing recordings. Hollywood has been outsourcing film-scoring for a decade or more since eastern european orchestras are far cheaper to hire than Hollywood orchestras, and about as good. What Naxos is doing on a large scale today might soon be duplicated by individuals. Suppose I've just written a string quartet, and I can't find an american group to perform it. I hire four guys in the Czech Republic or in India to record it. I haven't run the numbers (I'm not even sure where to FIND the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if the whole project could be paid for overseas for the cost of hiring somebody to record the ensemble in the US. I end up with a solid recording of real instruments to which I own all the rights -- I can publish my CD, I can send the recording around to American quartets to try to drum up some performances, I can use it to apply for grad-schools, I can send it to my mom.
Bravo to Naxos, congratulations to Sir Peter, and watch out world, things are getting interesting.
Matt Yglesias brings up a topic of interest to me by way of a Katie Roiphe article: how should naming and name-changing conventions work in marriage.
He makes the interesting suggestion that we should exert social pressure through shame on people to keep their own names, which is a bit too authoritarian for my taste, but which heads in the right direction. There are several options, and it's important to note that my position is that we should pick one option as the default, but allow specific couples to do whatever they want. The problem is how to change the default without the use of shaming. Here are the options:
1. Women change their names. (this is, of course, the current default)
2. Men change their names. (nice idea in the short term, but eventually ends up just as problematic as option 1.)
3. Hyphenation. (works for one generation, but then gets too complicated to be a practical default algorithm in subsequent generations. It's still an option for specific couples, but I don't think it makes sense as the default system.)
4. The couple chooses whichever name they think is the coolest and the appropriate member of the couple changes his or her name. (feasible, but too difficult to arrive at from our current position since the baggage of past sexist practice would impinge too much on the ability to make the aesthetic choice. I fear that most women would change their names and claim it was for aesthetic reasons when really it was as a result of the sexist status quo.)
5. Each member of the couple keeps his or her own name. I think this is the best choice, but we still have the problem of what to do with the names of potential children. Options:
a. The kids get the father's name. (less bad, but still problematic in the same ways as the current default.)
b. The kids get the mother's name. (less bad, but still problematic in the same way as option 2 above.)
c. The kids get hyphenation. (Parents get to keep their names, but the children are still saddled with the same complications as in option 3 above, not the least of which is the problem of equitably hyphenating two hyphenated names while still resulting in a two-name hyphenated result.)
d. Boys get their father's name, Girls get their mother's name. (Best option yet, but still problematic. You have multiple kids with different names but the same parents. In the case of more children of one sex than of the other the left-out parent might feel cheated by the system. It also reinforces the importance of sex in naming conventions, which is part of what we're trying to abolish -- here it's the whole "separate but equal" thing.)
5e. Parents keep their names. When they have children they choose whichever last name they think is the coolest, or which ever last name carries the cultural heritage that is most likely to need preservation in the face of the dominant culture. For example if Smith and Peterson marry, their children are probably the Petersons. If Peterson and Wong marry (in America), their children are probably the Wongs. It's not a perfect system, since one parent is the only member of the family with a different name, but the couple make the decision as a partnership. It's also much better than option 4 above because the parents retain their names. And it's not complicated -- anybody can figure it out and understand it, and it maximize the occurrence of aesthetically pleasing names in the population. This is my preferred option, and I intend when I marry and have children to follow it if my future wife is amenable. I wouldn't wish my last name on anybody, but I'd like to keep it for myself.
So how do we effect the change of the default while respecting the rights of individuals to use whatever system they prefer? Of this I am not sure. The problem is similar, though, to the problem of fixing the stay-at-home mom issue. Ideally all kids should have a stay at home parent for the first few years of life, but it's unfair to have the default position that Mom is the one who stays at home. The research indicates that in terms of the healthy development of the kids stay-at-home moms and stay-at-home dads are equally effective, so somehow we need to arrive at a culture where there are no societal assumptions about whose job it is. The resultant society would have a 50/50 distribution of the stay-at-home responsibility, with every couple making the choice based on what works best for them. One of the strategies of getting there is to shame women who stay at home and praise men who stay home, but that requires shaming couples who are doing the best thing for their situation -- and about half of all couples fall into this category.
I don't have the answer, but we need to figure it out, and soon.
Tuesday, March 16, 2004 :::
IMPROVISATION AND TIME
Much as I admire Frederic Rzewski, I have to disagree with his opinion on the difference between Composition and Improvisation as reported by Kyle Gann:
"When I was young, I believed in the statement that 'Improvisation is composition in real time.' But as I've gotten older, I've come to realize that improvisation and composition are not only different mental processes, but even opposed to each other. In composing, you've got to remember every detail you write in the piece. But improvisation is just the opposite: you have to constantly forget what you've just done so you're free to do something else."
I'm certain that Rzewski is a much, much better improviser than I am, but the claim that in improv you have to "constantly forget what you've just done" seems wrong to me. If anything you have to remember better because if you don't maintain some sort of consistency the entire performance will be incoherent. We hear large scale organization when we listen to through-composed music, and thus we expect to hear related types of organization in improvised music. When composing you have the luxury of forgetting what you've already done because you can always go back and check, and you can always re-arrange things chronologically to achieve the desired effect. If you want your improvisation to be effective, though, you have to be smart enough to make the organization work in real-time.
Happy Birthday to the composer whose name most closely resembles a court case:
Max V. Matthews!
Those who have not studied electroacoustic music may still be familar with his work, since he did the arrangement of "Bicycle Built for Two" featured in 2001 A Space Oddesy.
Atrios says ". . .I bet will be down to 50,000 troops max by August, no matter what is happening there. Of course, by September we may be in Syria, but..."
I'm not prepared to make predictions one way or the other, but it seems to me that radical force reduction in Iraq and an invasion of Syria come from two separate ideological agendas, so we're unlikely to see both. Force reduction would be a product of the Election2000 Bush's anti-nationbuilding, isolationist ideology, whereas invasion and occupation of Syria is part of the PNAC Pax Americana agenda, which explicitly requires maintaining an occupation of Iraq for the sake of force projection. It's not clear to me which ideology Bush is attached to at the moment, but I doubt he'll mix and match.
I generally really like Matt Yglesias, but I disagree with his conclusion that
this Ted Rall column is a joke.
Rall has aparently said a number of inflamatory things in the past, and perhaps this column will upset people as well, but it strikes me as a very reasoned attempt to answer some of the basic questions of the day: "Why do they hate us?" and "Why haven't we been greeted as liberators?" I don't read it as an endorsement of terrorism at all, or a poorly executed joke, but rather an attempt to explain the position of the other side -- I found the explaination both convincing and enlightening, even if I think the hypothetical Iraqi writer has the wrong attitude. If we're going to do the right thing, no matter what you think the right thing IS, we need to accurately understand what we're up against.
That said, I agree that the format of the column undermines the cause -- by giving the impression that he might agree with the hypothetical Iraqi he makes himself, and by stupid-but-typical-conservative-extension, others on his side, look like terrorist supporters. A safer, and likely more successful approach would have been to say explicity "Many people on all sides of the debate don't seem to understand why we're getting so much resistance in Iraq after having liberated them from a tyrant. It will help us in clarifying our goals and strategies if we understand the Iraqi perspective, so here's what I think it is."
Thursday, November 06, 2003 ::: THREE TALES AND PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
As a work of art, Steve Reich's new video opera in collaboration with Beryl Korot is a work of genius. I've been listening to it just about every day for about a month and it's really magnificent. Anybody who likes his work should order it NOW -- the CD/DVD set is about $15 at most stores. BUT, as much as I love it as art, I have some serious philosophical issues with Act III.
For those unfamiliar with the work and with the style and technique, "Three Tales" is what Reich and Korot have called a "video opera." It's performed by instrumentalists and singers, and has a lot of historical footage and sound recordings, and recordings of interviews that Reich and Korot did on the subjects of the opera. "Three Tales" is about technology in the 20th century -- Act I is about the Hindenburg disaster, Act II is about the nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll, and Act II is ostensibly about Dolly the cloned sheep, but actually covers not just cloning but also artificial intelligence, robotics, and philosophy of mind. The problem with Act III is that it has several chunks of interview footage of really smart people saying things that don't make sense, or are downright offensive.
My first problem is that Reich and Korot very obviously set out to make Richard Dawkins into a villain. Yes, the philosophy he offers is very physicalist and even anti-spiritualist, but it's what he believes, and I doubt he's really a bad guy. He comes across as very sincere, and like he put a lot of work into preparing for their interview of him, and were I him I would be very hurt at receiving the treatment they give him in the piece. That said, even though they try to make him the villain, he's my favorite interview subject by far. He says a lot of really cool stuff, my favorite of which is:
"Once upon a time there was carbon based life, and it gave over to silicon based life. I don't view the prospect, with equanimity. Maybe I'm just sentimental."
Unfortunately, many of the other statements by other interview subjects simply don't hold up under scrutiny, and I think that what's going on is that these people arexcellentet scientists but poor philosophers. I make no claim of having a great philosophical background myself, but if I can explain why they are wrong then they really need to go back and rework their theories.
This first quote is interspliced with Dawkins explaining that the brain is like a computer.
Rodney Brooks: "We've always thought of our brains in terms of our latest technology. So at one point our brains were steam engines. When I was a kid, they were telephone switching networks. Then they became digital computers. Then, massively parallel digital computers. Probably, out there now, there are kid's books which say that our brain is the world wide web. We probably haven't got it right yet."
I don't dispute his history, although I question his interpretation of it, and I think his final remark is a red herring. A Steam engine is not a bad analogy for the brain if it's the best you've got -- it's a machine with a whole bunch of component parts that all work together as a unit. A telephone switching network is a better analogy -- one of the major issues the brain has to deal with is information transmission and distribution. The telephone-switching-network analogy is an improvement on the earlier analogy. The digital computer analogy is even better, although it retains the best parts of the earlier analogies -- the digital computer is a complete unit composed of many sub-parts, and lots of switching-network-like data management and routing hardware and software, but in addition to the distribution of data, it processes data -- it "thinks." Massively parallel digital computers is a better analogy still, because it takes a bunch of self contained devices and has them work together as a unit. Consider Wernike's Area and Brocha's Area -- two areas of the brain used in speech function, and imagine each of the as a computer with the two networked together as part of the "speech" subnetwork. In short, the historical examples he gives are not fad notions later proved wrong, but the best analogy available at the time, and which would later be improved upon. The "World Wide Web" analogy sounds silly, and it is. The historical progression has been toward more and more ability to process data, but the WWW doesn't process data -- it stores it. (The web might be a great analogy for memory, since it stores data, and related data are linked together. The more links to a particular page could be seen as an increase in what psychologists call "boundary strength." But that's now what he claims the authors of kids books are saying.) There's probably a better analogy to be had, but I will be shocked if it's a total departure from the "massively parallel digital computers" analogy rather than an improvement upon it.
Brooks then makes a flawed critique of the Turing Test. (I'm not claiming that the Turing Test is valid or not, just that his criticism is invalid.):
"Alan Turing came up with this idea: if you talked to a computer over instant messaging, and you couldn't tell the difference between whether it was a computer answering you or a person answering you. Then the computer must be intelligent. That leaves out a whole lot of stuff that we do with one another. We look each other in the eye, we smile, we nod at each other."
Steven Hawking has been paralyzed over his entire body with the exception of his eyes and a hand that he can clench and unclench. He can't smile. He can't nod. He can look you in the eye, but that's about it. Would Hawking fail the Turing Test? I doubt it. Have we stopped thinking of him as intelligent just because he can't use body language? When you talk to your old high-school friends over instant messaging do you begin to doubt their intelligence? Body language is nice, but it's not a requirement of intelligence.
The next problem comes when Joshua Getzler and Jaron Lanier start talking about evolution and religion. I'll address them together since they are making similar points.
Lanier: Its a terrible mistake, to think of the spiritual impulse, as arising from cognitive weakness.
Getzler: The 20th century, where religious thinking was abandoned for secular and Darwinian ideology. . . The 20th century was the worst graveyard in human history...and that should give us pause. . .
I object to Lanier's quote because he makes a statement of opinion as i it were fact when the science would ether support the alternate viewpoint or nothing. It's offensive to say that the spiriimpulsempuse comes from cognitive weakness -- which is why I would never say it -- but it's a matter of opinion.
Getzler's claim is far worse. Secularism didn't cause the mass deaths of the 20th century -- we've just become more efficient killers as a result of improved technology, and to claim that secularism is responsible is tantamount to claiming that the non-religious are morally infirm. If Pope Urban had had access to nuclear weapons he would have turned the Middle East into a parking lot during the crusades. Somehow I doubt that the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is the result of all of too much secularism in the region. And I doubt that Northern Ireland would be any less of a mess if people just believed a little more fervently that god is on their side. Religions cause wars. Secularism has probably caused conflict too. The body count isdependentndant on either of those, but rather on other issues of sociology and the strength of the available firepower. My favorite relevant quote on the subject is from William Carlos Williams, ironicallyicaly, is used by Reich himself in "The Desert Music."
"Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant
To know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize
Them, he must either change them or perish"
Anyway, even though some of the interview material doesn't make sense, it's still a great piece.
