Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 229

Merry, Merry Christmas

Once, years ago, I was driving around somewhere in Chicagoland and (as was my wont) listening to WXRT, the best radio station in America, when they played a Koko Taylor song. Afterwards, the DJ — I think it was Lin Brehmer — remembered that when Stevie Ray Vaughan died in 1990 he was tasked with getting some reflections on the great bluesman from other musicians. He had a list of names and numbers, and at the top of the list was Keith Richards — or rather, Keith Richards’s assistant. So he called the number and was told that Mr. Richards’s assistant wasn’t available and was unlikely to become available. Brehmer couldn’t get past the assistant to the assistant.

So he sighed and called the next number on the list: Koko Taylor. Phone rings; a man’s voice, maybe a young man, answers: “Hello.”

“Um … I’m hoping to speak to Koko Taylor.”

“Hang on a second … MOM!!”

advice for Der Spiegel

In Der Spiegel’s report on how their star reporter Claas Relotius got away with fabricating stories for years, Ullrich Fichtner writes, “Already, every text printed in DER SPIEGEL goes through a thorough fact-checking and vetting process to review the accuracy of every fact stated in an article.” But immediately after making this claim he demonstrates that is is not true (Where are the fact-checkers??) and indeed could not be true. After mentioning a few small facts that could be and were checked, he continues,

But the problems with Relotius’ articles relate not to details like that, but to his on-the-ground reporting. That work is based on the fundamental trust the editorial staff bestows on all journalists under their oversight. The fact-checking and research department at DER SPIEGEL is the journalist’s natural enemy — and that’s just how DER SPIEGEL founder Rudolf Augstein wanted it. But the department also assists with reporting, providing information and details while also seeking to prevent mistakes. Ultimately, the department is also working to put out the same product. The idea that a colleague would deliberately cheat is not part of everyday considerations in journalism. The honest effort to seek truth and veracity is the rule. Cheating is the exception.

There is simply no way to find out whether Relotius was telling the truth when he describes the music he heard playing in an abortion clinic in Mississippi. Could you, if you were a Der Spiegel fact-checker, even know whether he visited the abortion clinic at all? Perhaps you could, by demanding in advance that he photograph every place he visited when researching his story. But that’s quite a demand, and Fichtner is right to suggest that it would be hard, and probably counter-productive, to sustain such an adversarial relationship between reporters and fact-checkers. And it would be too expensive, as well as kinda creepy, to send fact-checkers along with reporters on their travels.

So Fichtner is right to say that when editors send reporters out they basically have to trust them to tell the truth. The need for trust cannot be eliminated from the equation. The problem posed by Relotius’s fabrications is basically insoluble.

But I do have a suggestion for Der Spiegel, and it’s based on this evisceration of Relotius’s story about Fergus Falls, Minnesota. The first thing to note is that Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn point to a great many factual errors in Relotius’s piece about their town that could have and should have been caught by fact-checkers. The second thing to note is that several of the claims he made in his story — for instance, that there was a sign at the town limits reading “Mexicans Keep Out” — are prima facie highly implausible and deserved some serious looking into.

But the third and most important thing to note is that none of the ridiculous things Relotius says about the residents of Fergus Falls would be implausible to an educated German — and here we get close to the heart of the matter, at least for me. Reading Fichtner’s postmortem I couldn’t help noticing that most of the Relotius stories that are almost wholly fictional concern the United States, and it seems highly likely that Relotius knew exactly what kinds of stories about this country would lull the fact-checkers to sleep: stories that confirmed all of their prejudices about the culturally limited, fearful, Bible-thumping yahoos who elected Trump and support capital punishment and oppose abortion. If he had written stories that challenged any of those stereotypes, no doubt the fact-checkers would immediately have roused themselves from their slumbers. But Relotius knew better than to do that: he spoon-fed them their own bigotries, and they slipped back into their snoozing. And so he was able to spend years just making up a bunch of crap and winning awards for doing it.

So my suggestion for the editors and fact-checkers of Der Spiegel is this: In the future, when one of your reporters starts smoothly murmuring in your ear precisely what you want to hear, immediately strive to awaken your comatose suspicions. You’ll need them.

the Book of Job

from Old Stile Press

a letter from David Jones

Arthurian Legend

David Jones’s chart of sources for Arthurian Legend, from the Tate.
Click image for a larger version.

knowwedge is what bwings us togeddah today

I’ve explained before why I believe generational thinking to be more harmful than helpful. But people who are addicted to generational thinking have a disproportionate share in our political discourse. They might think that older heads are wiser heads, or they might think that we need an infusion of youthful energy, but they agree that you can tell a lot about a politician by noting his or her age. I don’t believe it. Being young  doesn’t make you a hobbit, nor being old a wizard. (Anyway, that’s just Peter Jackson sucking up to a demographic whose money he craves.) Others say that what matters is race, or class, or sex, or sexual orientation, and while those markers may be more meaningful than age, none of them is especially important either.

You know what matters? Knowwedge Knowledge. If you’re running for office, I couldn’t care less how old you are — unless you’re over 80, in which case actuarial issues kick in. What I care about is this: What do you know? Can you summon to mind the general outlines of the Constitution of the United States? Are you aware of any distinctive, or especially controversial, laws of the state you live in? If you were to be elected to office, can you make a reasonable guess at the legal and political issues that are likely to confront you, and how they are affected by existing laws? Do you understand that there’s no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment? Do you understand how Facebook makes money? Do you grasp why a rogue employee can’t tinker with Google’s algorithms to punish conservatives? Have you seen, and do you comprehend, the evidence for anthropogenic climate change? What do you know? 

People sometimes refer to the Trump administration as an idiocracy: rule by the idiotic. I  don’t think that’s quite right, first because Trump has a certain serpentine cunning, but also because the idiot, etymologically, is the private person, the person in his own world. Idiots don’t run for office, neither do they vote.

Others call the current regime a kakistocracy: rule by the worst. It’s a reasonable designation. The more I have thought about it the more convinced I have become that Americans elected as their President the single most comprehensively disqualified public figure for the job: a man disqualified by temperament, by character, by inexperience, by vulnerability to blackmail — and by sheer ignorance.

And it’s that last point that makes me want to call the current regime by a different name: it is, I think, an agnoiocracy — rule by the ignorant. Rule by know-nothings. Most of the people who voted for Trump are not as crassly venal as he is, but they tend to be equally ignorant. It was their ignorance (or denial — it amounts to the same thing) of the facts of our political order that made them think that Trump could be a successful president, and their ignorance of Trump’s non-televised history that made them think that he could be trusted to keep any promise that is not in his direct interest to keep.

When children are small they make messes, and they do so because they’re ignorant. It’s not their fault: they haven’t been around very long, they don’t have a lot of experience with cause and effect. So they pour orange juice on the carpet, and take Sharpies to the walls — leaving messes for their parents and other guardians to clean up.

Our infantile agnoiocracy — and I include in it the legislative as well as the executive branch, and Democrats as well as Republicans — is making enormous messes that later on we’ll all have to clean up, if we can. And that’s why, from now on, when I’m looking at people running for office, the chief question I’ll be asking will not involve their positions on issues. I’ll ask: What do you know? Have you sufficiently remedied your natural ignorance that you are unlikely to make messes as big as the ones we’re now faced with?

But watching all the flailing and floundering and whining and fit-pitching of our political elite has had another effect on me: it has made me increasingly sympathetic to arguments, like Jason Brennan’s, for the replacement of democracy by some kind of epistocracy. The only thing holding me back: the people responsible for creating the epistocracy are the members of our current agnoiocracy. I envision a Central Committee of this nation’s intellectual elite featuring Jared and Ivanka Kushner, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Laura Ingraham.

knowledge is what bwings us togeddah today

I’ve explained before why I believe generational thinking to be more harmful than helpful. But people who are addicted to generational thinking have a disproportionate share in our political discourse. They might think that older heads are wiser heads, or they might think that we need an infusion of youthful energy, but they agree that you can tell a lot about a politician by noting his or her age. I don’t believe it. Being young  doesn’t make you a hobbit, nor being old a wizard. (Anyway, that’s just Peter Jackson sucking up to a demographic whose money he craves.) Others say that what matters is race, or class, or sex, or sexual orientation, and while those markers may be more meaningful than age, none of them is especially important either. 

You know what matters? Knowledge. If you’re running for office, I couldn’t care less how old you are — unless you’re over 80, in which case actuarial issues kick in. What I care about is this: What do you know? Can you summon to mind the general outlines of the Constitution of the United States? Are you aware of any distinctive, or especially controversial, laws of the state you live in? If you were to be elected to office, can you make a reasonable guess at the legal and political issues that are likely to confront you, and how they are affected by existing laws? Do you understand that there’s no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment? Do you understand how Facebook makes money? Do you grasp why a rogue employee can’t tinker with Google’s algorithms to punish conservatives? Have you seen, and do you comprehend, the evidence for anthropogenic climate change? What do you know? 

People sometimes refer to the Trump administration as an idiocracy: rule by the idiotic. I  don’t think that’s quite right, first because Trump has a certain serpentine cunning, but also because the idiot, etymologically, is the private person, the person in his own world. Idiots don’t run for office, neither do they vote. 

Others call the current regime a kakistocracy: rule by the worst. It’s a reasonable designation. The more I have thought about it the more convinced I have become that Americans elected as their President the single most comprehensively disqualified public figure for the job: a man disqualified by temperament, by character, by inexperience, by vulnerability to blackmail — and by sheer ignorance. 

And it’s that last point that makes me want to call the current regime by a different name: it is, I think, an agnoiocracy — rule by the ignorant. Rule by know-nothings. Most of the people who voted for Trump are not as crassly venal as he is, but they tend to be equally ignorant. It was their ignorance (or denial — it amounts to the same thing) of the facts of our political order that made them think that Trump could be a successful president, and their ignorance of Trump’s non-televised history that made them think that he could be trusted to keep any promise that is not in his direct interest to keep. 

When children are small they make messes, and they do so because they’re ignorant. It’s not their fault: they haven’t been around very long, they don’t have a lot of experience with cause and effect. So they pour orange juice on the carpet, and take Sharpies to the walls — leaving messes for their parents and other guardians to clean up. 

Our infantile agnoiocracy — and I include in it the legislative as well as the executive branch, and Democrats as well as Republicans — is making enormous messes that later on we’ll all have to clean up, if we can. And that’s why, from now on, when I’m looking at people running for office, the chief question I’ll be asking will not involve their positions on issues. I’ll ask: What do you know? Have you sufficiently remedied your natural ignorance that you are unlikely to make messes as big as the ones we’re now faced with? 

But watching all the flailing and floundering and whining and fit-pitching of our political elite has had another effect on me: it has made me increasingly sympathetic to arguments, like Jason Brennan’s, for the replacement of democracy by some kind of epistocracy. The only thing holding me back: the people responsible for creating the epistocracy are the members of our current agnoiocracy. I envision a Central Committee of this nation’s intellectual elite featuring Jared and Ivanka Kushner, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Laura Ingraham. 

it’s all very simple

First, insist in a very loud voice that you are a vigorous supporter of religious freedom. 

Second, add the following: “But of course I’m no supporter of bigotry.” 

Third, describe every religious opinion you don’t share as bigotry. 

newsletter news

A note for those of you who don’t look at my micro.blog: I have deleted my TinyLetter account and moved my newsletter to buttondown.email. If you have already subscribed through TinyLetter, you should also be subscribed to the new one. If you have not subscribed, you may do so here. 

Knuth, Lutheran

This is a nice — not a great, but a nice — profile of one of my heroes, Donald Knuth, but it does have an odd little moment: 

Dr. Knuth lives in Stanford, and allowed for a Sunday visitor. That he spared an entire day was exceptional — usually his availability is “modulo nap time,” a sacred daily ritual from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. He started early, at Palo Alto’s First Lutheran Church, where he delivered a Sunday school lesson to a standing-room-only crowd. Driving home, he got philosophical about mathematics. 

Hmmm, isn’t that interesting? Knuth is the deepest and most wide-ranging of computer scientists; plus, “many consider Dr. Knuth’s work on the TeX computer typesetting system to be the greatest contribution to typography since Gutenberg”; and he’s a Sunday-school teacher? Might it not be worth our time to explore that a little bit? Apparently not. 

But if you, unlike the NYT, wanted to explore these matters, then you might take a look at the book of calligraphy and commentary that Knuth put together called 3:16: Bible Texts Illuminated; or, if you’re really interested, listen to or read his lectures on religion and computer science, Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About.