What counts as interesting?

I was talking to a friend and they said they think the standardized test writing prompts tend to be interesting. I don't know how common that sentiment is. My guess is that for people with a background in philosophy or who tend to think things out, the topics are very bland and trite. (This will sound extremely condescending. It is, but I don't judge people's worth on intelligence.) For people who don't think very often or study English (or something like that), I can see why they are interesting.

Let me explain with a few examples I grabbed from the web:

"Do memories hinder or help people in their effort to learn from the past and succeed in the present?"

This is a scientific question. I don't think anyone has ever studied it so who the hell knows. Is it an important question? Not really--the question doesn't propose any programs for solving the problem if it exists. The key here, though, is that this isn't the kind of issue you can expect to make any progress on by writing down a bunch of "case studies" (e.g. anecdotes).

"Should schools help students understand moral choices and social issues?"

No one thinks schools shouldn't. Understanding moral/political issues are important and we do it in English and social science classes. The one thing that makes people feel uneasy is that schools can't avoid inculcating a certain moral perspective on issues. But teachers' views and peers' views are going to socialize students anyway, that is unavoidable. I think this one was settled a long time ago. The real question is to what extent should schools tell people what to think when discussing the issues. That is interesting but society has settled more or less on a consensus even there: schools should teach things nearly everyone believes, and if there is any controversy whatsoever, not discuss it. Maybe an interesting question that could come out of this is "What percentage of society has to disagree with a moral claim before it becomes unacceptable to teach it as accepted in schools?" (For example: what percentage of Americans have to find gay marriage acceptable for it to become acceptable to write about gay marriage in history books the same way we write about civil rights for blacks.)

"Do newspapers, magazines, television, radio, movies, the Internet, and other media determine what is important to most people?"

This is another scientific question. You can find out by running experiments to test to what extent changing the paper someone reads changes their priorities. I believe the answer is that, as anyone would expect, it changes their views a little bit. (There are two studies I can think of: one that studied the impact of Fox News on voting behavior and one that studied the impact of having a conservative or liberal paper deliver to the door.) The real question here is how much impact media has on values? That is going to be very hard to estimate and isn't even properly framed to start with. But whatever it is, writing some anecdotes about how watching CNN made you want to join the Peace Corp doesn't get us anywhere. But that's what the SAT wants . . . I think. (Comment: What do they mean by determine anyway? Do they mean if I ran a regression I'd get an R^2 of 1, as if nothing else beyond media socialized people's values. I'm just assuming they couldn't possibly mean that.)

GRE prompts can be even worse. My prompt was, in so many words, "can the ends justify the means?" That one was settled a long time ago. The answer is obvious.  Even more probing version of the question  are obvious (e.g. "when do the ends justify the means?" Answer: When the net outcome is better than the next best alternative.) I have a feeling that a lot of people in English departments never found out that that question was settled hundreds of years ago.

What does literature teach people?

I've probably written this introduction before, but it's necessary. When I read fiction and watch movies, I have fun. I love movies. But I rarely learn from watching films. I'd say that probably only 1 out of every 100 movies or books is really intellectually stimulating the way even bad non-fiction is.

A lot of people, however, claim that some movies (the kind that win Oscars?) are "smart." I've never understood what that means. The classic novels and plays we read in high school are also supposed to be "deep" or "smart" but I don't understand why. Let me respond to obvious counterpoints if that sounds incredibly ignorant.

First, I'm not stupid. I understand that Othello is about jealous and that Romeo and Juliet speaks to the fickle and passion nature of love. I know one of the lessons of Hamlet is that indecision can be a (tragic) flaw. But none of those ideas are new. Little kids know jealousy is bad. Teens usually feel love long before they read Shakespeare and anyone who ever spent time agonizing between chocolate and vanilla ice cream understands Hamlet. So when I say those plays aren't "smart" what I mean is that their themes are things everyone already knows--and if you already know it, you aren't learning it. (Movies have the same problem: Star Wars is about the problems of relying too much on technology; The Hurt Locker shows how war changes people; Inception shows us experience is more important than reality. I don't think any of that is ground-breaking. Also, the Neo-luddite pretensions of Star Wars are the worst thing about it.)

Now not all movies and books have trite themes. Some are kind of novel. Before I read Brave New World I'd never thought much about the relative value of truth and happiness. If you've never read "Politics and the English Language," then 1984's commentary on the government's use of language to control the populace is interesting. Avatar has the most innovative idea I've seen in a movie: the planet can think. It's trees are connected like neurons and collectively they constitute analogous to a brain. Far out. That said, I think all of these only count as borderline "smart" art. Brave New World is completely wrong: happiness is vastly more important than the truth. It's completely implausible that a government would ever try to control people through language the way it does in 1984, which is way over the top in general (and vastly inferior to Orwell's more measured essays for that reason). And of course the implication in Avatar is that we need to protect our planet--but our planet can't think, which Cameron might have been trying to imply.

So my question is this: Can anyone point out something novel they learned from fiction? What brilliant insights did I miss in Shakespeare? What did you learn from Moby Dick? To count it has to be something someone reasonably acquainted with philosophy isn't familiar with and has to be scientifically correct. (Ruminations on pseudo-psychology don't count.)

Oreo Quotes of the Day

As part of an Oreo advertising campaign in China:

Others organized Oreo-themed basketball games to reinforce the idea of dunking cookies in milk.

Chinese people got hops.

Meanwhile in the United Kingdom:

Kraft [...] partnered with McDonald's to bring the Oreo McFlurry (already on sale in many countries) to a few McDonald's locations during its yearly Great Tastes of America promotions. 

Yup, traditional home cookin' like the Oreo.

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Philosophy Problem Sets?

I don't teach philosophy classes and I probably never will. But if I did I would make one big change: add problem sets.

The basic idea is that I'd lay out some arguments and ask student to reduce them to premises, or ask students, given some premises, to draw conclusions using the theories presented in class. Most of these would be trivial, but that's ok because most philosophy classes already require a trivial amount of philosophy and a non-trivial about of composition.

The rationale is that philosophy, like math or economics or computer science, could and should teach people problem-solving methods. If you have an ethical dilemma you can use the theory of utilitarianism, and your priors, to figure out the right thing to do. (Or you could use evidence rather than priors, but that takes you into the realm of science.) In some ways this paradigm only really applies to ethics, but I think problem sets could be developed for epistemology that would be esp. relevant for science majors.

Here are some examples:

1. Jeff Sachs says that donating $100 billion in aid to Africa is the right thing to do because it will lead to economic growth. Assume he's a utilitarian and diagram his argument:

Answer: Donating $100 billion to Africa will increase African incomes. Increasing African incomes raises utility. (Hard part: There is no better use of the $100 billion than donating to Africa.) Therefore, we should donate $100 billion to Africa.

2. (Mathematical problem) There is an island with 3 people. They agree to be utilitarians but can't agree on which utility function is better: U1 = x + y + z or U2 = xyz where x, y, and z are the individual utilities of the three people. Calculate the utility for each (x,y,z) below and discuss which system is more egalitarian. (Does either function help reconcile utilitarianism and Rawlsian conception of justice?)

Answer: U2 is more egalitarian. Graph them, it's interesting!

3. Prof. White decides to write a paper on the causes of war expounding democratic peace theory. He then makes a table of all the wars fought in the past 100 years and categorized them into wars between democracies and others. He says the data show (don't worry about how) democracies are less likely to fight wars. What is a major problem with his research plan?

Answer: He came to his conclusion before seeing the evidence. When he categorized the data he may have been tempted to categorize countries as "democracies" and "not" in such a way as to make his hypothesis hold.

4. Ann believes in virtue ethics. She wants to cultivate the virtue of charity. A local beggar asks for $5 to buy booze. A local businessman asks for $5 for research on a new vaccine. Who should Ann give the money to? Who would a utilitarian give the money to (assume the new vaccine will save many lives)? Does virtue ethics make any sense to any rational person? (Hint: The answer to the last question is no.)

Answer: Ann should give the money to the beggar, that is charity. Investing in a business is not charitable. A utilitarian would give the money to the businessman, who would use it to make products that satisfy needs (e.g. demand for health care) because it will make the world happier.

Offensive and Defensive Rebounds

Some statisticians treat offensive and defensive rebounds as equally valuable when evaluating NBA players. I don't see the logic. If I'm a player and I fail to get a defensive rebound, odds are (something like 70% chance) that someone else on my team will rebound the ball so the value of the rebound was 0.3 possessions. If I get an offensive rebound, then I created a possession that would have only been created about 30% of the time, so it's worth about 0.7 possessions. Theory says offensive rebounds are a lot more important. (One caveat: the kind of player who is available to get a lot of offensive rebounds may set few picks, create few of his own shots, and take few shots and thus draw fewer defenders. So offensive rebounds might be correlated with other bad, but unmeasurable attributes.)

Defense of the equivalence base it on regressions. The theory is, I guess, that the regressions are showing an implicit correlation between offensive rebounding and negative attributes (discussed above). Another theory, which is my guess (without looking closely at the data) is that defensive rebounds are overvalued because they are correlated with good defense (low opponent FG%), which is also unmeasured. If that is the case defensive rebounds are overvalued and that's why the equivalence shows up in the regressions.

One more time . . .

This is the best essay even written, hands down.

If you haven't read it five times, then you haven't read it enough.

Politics and the English Language by George Orwell

Read it once for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a week. Then read it again.

This is satire

While pensively pondering recent applications of the neo-constructivist gender studies literature to Title 9, it dawned on me that the racial dynamics theorized by Post-Colonial Oppression theory explain the popularity of American football in the United States.

In American football there is one position, the quarterback, that leads and others that follow. The quarterback is prescribed, by the traditional institutional framework of the game, to be white. The other (black) players are commanded by the white who barks orders in codes, reminiscent of the supposedly by-gone era of slavery. Is there any doubt that American football evolved as it did as a replacement for the latent desires of bigotted Southern rogues to oppress the "negro species?"

Note: Someone who read this pointed out that football was developed and became popular in the New England, not the South and that in the South blacks were not allowed to play football with whites until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and 70s. In other words, my theory doesn't make a lot of sense in light of the evidence. Fortunately, I'm an English professor so evidence is not in my lexicon.