Alligators in the Sewer (and other Folk Tales)

Thomas J. Craughwell. Alligators in the Sewer (1999) Folk tales, or real stories that happened to a friend of a friend, or FOAF. The compiler serves up relevant research into older versions of the tales. The plot generally remains the same, only details of technology and lifestyle change with the times. A first class potato-chip book, which I will dip into repeatedly as time and occasion offer. 

Recommended, if you can find a copy.

BTW, there are no alligators in the sewers of New York or any other city.

****

We All Live In A Bubble (The Reality Bubble, Tong, 2019)

 Ziya Tong. The Reality Bubble (2019) We all live in a bubble created by our brains. The bubble includes the simulation of physical reality and the social and psychological realities we’ve learned to think of as just the way things are. But these realities have blind spots. Tong begins with the visual blind spot and spends a good deal of time describing what we can’t or don’t see because of our limited sensory and cognitive equipment. Science provides methods for filling in the blind spots, but it’s limited by the social and conceptual environment of its time, and its results are always tentative and incomplete. But it’s the best tool we have.
     Tong builds on this insight to describe the blind spots that make the bubbles dangerously comfortable places to live. The most serious blind spots are in our images of our relation to the non-human world. We see ourselves as different and separate from our environment. But that environment is our life support system. Misconceiving that fact will destroy human life as we know it. It’s already destroyed huge swaths of non-human life: in the last century, about 90% of wildlife has disappeared, partly because we’ve hunted it, but mostly because we’ve converted their habitats into agricultural land.
      Tong’s facts and insights range from exhilarating to depressing. Her final explicit message is that we must see what the blind spots hide from us, else we will continue to make suicidal choices. I don’t see good odds of that change happening. Policy makers are abysmally ignorant of the most basic science, and the rest of us are not much better. Economics is fatally flawed. The Friedmanites believe that efficiency means converting as many costs as possible into externalities, which don’t show up in profit-and-loss statements. So-called capitalism assumes that profit is the sole purpose of business. Very few economists show any kind of awareness of science and technology other than as a means of increasing profits. The natural world is perceived as a bundle of resources to be converted into cash as efficiently as possible. Not doing so is considered wasteful.
     In general, people believe that a rising GDP and increased productivity are signs of economic health. GDP merely tracks the money, not what it buys. Increasing productivity requires increasing consumption, not to mention that much of what’s produced satisfies mere whim. We believe that having more stuff means a better standard of living. Etc. And ever and again we are told that we must balance economic values against environmental costs, as if the economy were independent of the environment. That particular delusion amounts to insanity.
    Buy or borrow the book and read it. ****

Death (Lapham's Quarterly 06-4, 2013)

  Lapham’s Quarterly 06-4: Death (2013) The many ways people have died and been done to death, musings about death, religious warnings and promises about life after death, the decay of the body and the waning of memories, the consolations and pain of grief.... Death is a large subject.
     Much of what we do is an attempt to either thwart death or to ignore it. A few minutes ago, I read an article reporting that cancer deaths in Canada are down overall while some cancers are increasing. More screening is one reason. The tone of the report suggests that somehow the defeat of cancer will prevent death. But of course it won’t. The odds of dying from cancer are about 1 in 7 or 14%, but the odds of dying from any one of the myriad causes are 1 in 1, or 100%.
     Meanwhile, we plan our lives as if they will continue at least until the next scheduled event. Life must go on.
     An excellent collection, as usual. ***

Work: Love it or hate it, you need it. (Lapham's Quarterly 04-2, Spring 2011)

 LQ 04-2: Lines of Work. (2011) “Work fascinates me. I could watch it for hours.” That’s one of the quotes scattered through this collection. It expresses one end of the range of attitudes to work, adumbrated in the curse laid on Adam after the Fall: In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread. At the other end we find St Benedict’s Ora et Labora, “Work and pray”, often rendered as Laborare est orare, “To work is to pray.”
     We humans need purpose and structure in our lives, and work provides that. The lucky ones have work that satisfies. Most have work that earns enough to survive, while providing much of the social life without which we cannot thrive. The unlucky ones toil at soul-crushing labour, which as often as not is neither valued nor rewarded as the necessary effort that enables our survival and keeps the rest of us in relative comfort.
     William Morris (not included, an instructive omission, I think) was one of many starry-eyed reformers who recognised the inhumane aspects of industrialised work, and wanted a return to what he believed was the golden age of craft. He thought of craft as work that not only earned a living but engaged the worker’s skill and imagination. Morris failed to see that even craft relies on the toil of labourers that relieves the crafter of the necessity of spending time in the work that sustains their life.
     There are many descriptions of actual work in this collection, most by people who found a way out of the labour that they describe. One is by Orwell. His account of how the workers at the grand hotels of Paris discharged their duties would have convinced me never to stay at anything above a one or two star establishment. Maybe things have changed since the 1930s. I would have included an excerpt from Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
     The other pieces describe or discuss the context of work, or of the relations that working with others makes possible. Work makes up the single largest part of our lives. Irksome or satisfying, necessary or optional, we can’t escape it. It’s the necessity that irks. When we choose how to occupy ourselves, that freedom erases the negatives.
     Most of my jobs have been more or less interesting, at least until I mastered the requisite skills. But usually, my co-workers were more important than the work. I worked most of my life as a teacher, work that was sometimes frustrating enough that I wondered whether I could continue. I did, and now I miss the classroom and the staff room.
     As always, recommended. ****

Celebrities: A culural constant (LQ 04-1)

LQ 04-1: Celebrity (2011) There are times when our worship of celebrities seems like a

peculiarly 21st century aberration. This collection may cause a revision of that opinion, and perhaps a more sanguine attitude. It had that effect on me, and prompted a number of reflections. Herewith a small sampling.
     True, there are now probably more people famous for being famous than ever before, but such people have always existed, and humans have always paid them more attention than they merited. True, much celebrity is founded on genuine achievement, but even more genuine achievement has gone uncelebrated. Our century may be unusual only in the intensity of celebrity worship. But every historical era is an outlier in some aspect of human possibility; that’s how and why we mark them. Cultural expression varies over time and place, but the range of cultural options is remarkably small. One of them is celebrity, labelled fame in earlier times.
     The desire for fame was often considered a virtuous ambition, especially by the Greeks and Romans, for it prompted striving for excellence. The desire for notoriety has been seen as the corresponding vice. While the great religions have praised the one and condemned the other, they have also expressed some ambivalence. For glorying in fame, even that earned by virtue or excellence, is too close to pride, especially its pathetic variant, vanity.
     Celebrity belongs to the suite of social dimensions labelled “reputation.” Our public persona is our reputation. We know ourselves in the tension and contrast between that public persona and our self-perception. That makes reputation important: We want outer and inner self to be as closely aligned as possible. It may be that our focus on celebrity is in part an attempt to learn how to create a reputation that meets our expectations or fantasies about ourselves.
     There’s a lot to chew on in this collection. One is P T Barnum’s discussion of how to make celebrity pay: Manufacture it. Reading his comments, one sees that marketing is the commodification of celebrity, which in turn explains phenomena such as the Kardashians. That’s progress of a sort, perhaps.
    Recommended. ****

The City (Lapham's Quarterly 03-1, 2011)

 LQ 03-4: The City (2010) The city is, I think, one of humankind’s great inventions. Through

most of our existence on Earth, there were no towns and cities. They became possible when agriculture improved enough to support a fairly large proportion of non-agricultural workers. Nowadays, in technologically advanced countries, about 5% of the population works directly in agriculture. It’s likely that building towns began when agriculture enabled supporting about 5% of the population as non-agricultural workers. But even so, pretty well every household raised all or most of their food well into the 18th or 19th century. Cities in the modern sense required not only more efficient agriculture but more efficient and cheaper transport. This may be why the first large cities were all on navigable rivers and/or next to good harbours.
     But from the beginning, towns and cities were disliked. Most of the excerpts in this collection attack the moral laxity and material excess of cities. The tension between the city and the country has varied, but it’s always existed. Cities have been targets of robbery, a.k.a. wars of conquest. They concentrate cultural and intellectual resources. That in turn fosters innovation, which raises suspicion and worse in the surrounding rural communities. In the relation between city and hinterland, exploitation and mutual dependence are often hard to distinguish, another reason for rural suspicion of the city. The first states, hierarchically organised societies with large power and economic differences, were cities. Larger States resulted from wars between cities.
     I like cities. I also like the small town in which I live. I doubt I would like it so much if I couldn’t get most of the advantages of city life as easily as I do. Communications technology provides more choice than we can manage; we’ve learned to limit our sources to make choice easier. Materially, pretty well everything I would want from the city is available by mail or special order when not available locally. Still, cities are increasing in size and number. Almost half of humankind now lives in cities. It’s will be more than half within a decade.
     Many comments in this collection indicate express praise not for human cities, but for the City of God. That golden city is not only the expected destination of the faithful, it is a counter example to the human cities that failed to live up to the expectations of their detractors.
     Recommended. ****

Social Media and Social Disruption

     The media are still obsessing about the effects of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, and his rebranding it as X. It seems to me that Twitter was always more important for the media than the rest of us. If the media hadn't reported on the latest Twitter kerfuffle, I wouldn't have had a clue. Without the media, Twitter would have had no presence in my life. That's still so.

     From where I sit, "social platforms" differ from previous media in one crucial respect: the audience controls the content. Newspapers, radio, TV all had a passive audience. You bought the paper, switched on the radio/TV, and got the news the purveyors thought was fit to tell. Despite different political/etc viewpoints, those media created a mass audience with a common culture. Cable began the shift to audience control. The internet has made it the default. We now have a fractured culture, with no common narratives, and hence no widely held understanding of how the world works. Worse, we have an increasing number of people who believe that they and those who agree with them know the truth. Too many people no longer understand that all insights about the world are provisional. At best, they are merely good enough approximations to the truth. At worst, they're delusional.

     In many ways, this fracturing repeats the fracturing of the common religious culture when print made books cheap, and so fostered reading. The almost immediate effect was individual interpretations of the sacred texts, which led to disagreements about creeds, which triggered wars. It took two centuries before something resembling a consensus about the social role of religion emerged in Europe.

     Every time a disruptive communication medium appears, there is cultural reconfiguration. People "do their own research". The effect is profound disagreement and mutual distrust. It is always painful, and often bloody. We're living through such a reconfiguration. It's more complicated, difficult and dangerous than previous ones because we're also living through a major environmental change. It's going to be a very rough ride.

Edited and extended version of a comment posted in the New York Times 2023-10-19

 

Travelling (Lapham's 02-3, 2009)

 Lapham’s Quarterly 02-3: Travel. (Summer 2009) Migration is forced, travel is chosen. We

succeed at both because humans have survived by keeping on the move, whether within a territory suitable for hunting and gathering, or by removal into a new territory. We share wanderlust with other animals, which suggest that it’s a condition of species survival.
     This collection tells us what we already know: Travel confirms our conviction that there’s no place like home, and prompts wonder and even delight at the variety of human ways of living and making a living. Which effect predominates depends on the traveller. The evidence shows that the self-centred make poor travellers.
     Tourism is the invention of the leisure class, of people who did not depend on trading profit to finance the journey. But apart from that, there’s little difference between tourism trading, and exploration. Travel reveals as much about ourselves as about the places and people we meet. The modern variety of tourism developed from the Grand Tour, paid for by parents anxious that their offspring would acquire experience useful for a successful career in the higher branches of capitalism and government. The educational component still predominates: the tourist industry offers education as the reason and excuse for spending time being carried across water and land while being cosseted by “the staff”.
     Many of the pieces here are firsthand accounts, which satisfy the reader’s wanderlust without requiring the tiresome nuisances of actual travel. The fictions use the differences between the traveller and the strange lands as opportunities for allegory and satire, or demonstrations that growing up entails self-discovery. Hence the many plots strung out along the roads taken, or not taken, by the hero and their companions.
     I enjoyed the collection as much for its reminders of my own travels as for the experiences of the narrators. ****

Freedom: We don't agree (Lapham's Quarterly 25 01)

Lapham’s Quarterly 25-01 Freedom (Spring 2023). This collection shows that there has beenprecious little consensus on what  freedom means. Most of the pieces assume a political context. Some discuss the moral meanings, usually in contrast to licence. There’s a good deal of story-telling about the effects of oppression, of the struggles for political freedoms. There’s some discussion of self control versus external control. But most of the pieces explicitly or implicitly assume that freedom means the ability to do what one wants to do, with as few constraints, limits, or consequences as possible. Some think that freedom means no consequences whatsoever. But most writers recognise that, since we live with other people, our freedoms and theirs may conflict. Freedom has limits.

    None of the writers refer to the engineer’s concept, which (briefly) refers to how much the design parameters may vary. In practice, it means that the fixing of some variable limits the range and even the availability of some other variable(s) in the design problem. Decide X’s value, and Y’s value is limited, or fixed. Or Y may be impossible to include.  That’s an operational definition, one that I see applicable to politics, social relations, career decisions, and so on. For example, if you decide that a free market means minimal regulation by the government, then only customer demands or preferences will influence such things as a business’s labour or waste disposal practices, etc. In short, you can’t have it all. Exercising your freedom to choose X limits or prevents your freedom to choose Y.

     Many people believe that unpleasant consequences of some choice are limits on their freedom. That belief animated the protests to the covid-19 pandemic measures imposed by governments and businesses. Taken to its logical conclusion, that belief implies that the criminal is an oppressed victim of unjust law, a conclusion that the protesters would not, I think, accept. Thus, reasoning about freedom becomes a nice example of why reason isn’t always reasonable. That also explains why people have disagreed about the concept. Every definition of freedom implies unreasonable conclusions.

     A good collection, as always. ***

Lynn Truss on courtesy in speech and writing.

 

Lynn Truss Talk to the Hand (2005) Truss is seriously annoyed by rudeness. Not the rudeness of ignoring merely fashionable etiquette, but the rudeness of ignoring other people’s rights, especially the right to be treated with respect. Her reaction is to stay inside and bolt the door. Maybe escaping rudeness can make for a more peaceful life, but it will be lonely one.
Truss’s six reasons for staying inside are:
* Was That So Hard To Say? (about Please and Thank you)
* Why Am I The One Doing This? (about downloading customer service onto the customer, etc)
* My Bubble, My Rules (about being a good guest, among other things)
* The Universal Eff-Off Reflex
* Booing The Judges (about fake egalitarianism)
* Someone Else Will Clean It Up
Of course her remarks go beyond my simplistic summary phrases. She’s well worth reading, more than once, which I intend to do. ****

Lynn Truss. Eats, Shoots and Leaves (2003) Truss’s first book. Her defence of good punctuation has, I hope, done some good. But she doesn’t go far enough: Punctuation is the (inevitably inadequate) method for signalling syntactic structure. The title demonstrates this admirably. But Truss doesn’t follow through. She discusses the conventions very well, and provides wonderful examples of what happens when writers ignore them. But her explanations of the rationales are too often misleading. For example, her differentiation between ; : . These marks correspond to the subtle signals in speech that there’s more to come, with some hint as to how it’s related to what’s just been said. The apostrophe is not a punctuation mark, but a spelling mark, as are the diacritic and the hyphen.

      I guess I want more conceptual rigour. But that’s nit-picking. Truss has done us all a service, and she’s done it with grace, humour, and nuanced awareness of how we differ in our pointing preferences. Buy this book, follow its advice, and read it at least once a year. ****

Unintended consequences: Noninterference (Harry Turtledove)

 

Harry Turtledove. Noninterference (19881). The Federation Survey Service is surveying Bilbeis IV. The local ruler, a woman of remarkable character, is dying of cancer. The Terrans decide to give her “immune system amplifiers”. The Bilbeis biology is close enough to human for the drug to work, but different enough to have unforeseen consequences. Those consequences and their effects provide the bones of the plot. Turtledove adds convincing characters and sociological insights to make a well-constructed entertainment that also asks serious questions about governance, polity, bureaucracy, historical hinge points, and of course the effects of individual quirks on other people’s plans.
     Turtledove is also known for alternate histories and historical fiction. His Wiki bibliography lists an enormous number of books. This one I  rate well above average for the genre: ***

Mathematics and the News

 

 

John Allen Paulos. A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995) I bought this book because I’d read Paulos’s Innumeracy, a seminal book that I think every teacher should read. This book extends one of his themes, that the media are a prime source of innumeracy, and so tend to distort and misinform. Each section corresponds to a section of the paper, News, Sports, the Arts, etc. The misuse or misreporting of statistics features in all sections, but the unwarranted surprise at coincidences, and confidence in economic and sports forecasts, together come a close second.
     Once again, Paulos muses on the vagaries of voting. Every voting system ever attempted has produced results that annoy a large section, sometimes even the majority, of voters. If he were to write today, he would note the vacuousness of political polling, which always produces more or less misleading results.
     But mathematics is about patterns and processes, so even the society section, with its reports about charity balls, the doings of famous people, etc, gives opportunity for mathematical musing about relationship networks, and the interconnectedness of our social circles, which Facebook et al have made more obvious than ever in the 25 years since Paulos wrote the book.
     This was a re-read, I enjoyed the book, but not as much as Innumeracy. ***

     Update 2020 08 13: Percentages are real problem.
     One of the most common errors is to report a percentage change without reporting the base rate. For example, "XYZ increases the cancer of some obscure organ  by 150%". True, it increases the rate from 1 per 100,000 per year to 3 per 100,000 per year.
     Another egregious error is to confuse percentage points with percentages. Thus, "Unemployment rate increases 2 %". Yup, it rose  from 5% to 7%, which is an increase of 2/5, or 40%.

   Update 2020 12 22: Raw numbers vs Rates: How to misreport covid-19

     Every day now we hear the number of new cases and deaths from covid-19. Almost never the rates. For example, Ontario reported some 2100 new cases the other day, while Alberta reported about 1800. But Ontario has roughly three times the population of Alberta, so the rate in Alberta is about three times higher.

     The mistake is to treat every jurisdiction equally, which hardly ever makes sense. The same error shows up when reporting miscellaneous numbers about cities and towns. Such as crime rates. Small towns naturally have fewer crimes, but related to population, the crime rates are usually higher than in the large cities.

     Related to time, the rates are of course lower. Hence the pained astonishment when a neighbour murders his family. This suggests that we pay more attention to events along our individual time-lines, and less to events within the communtiy at large. Our preception biases mislead us.

     Rule of thumb: Do The Arithmetic! Always calculate the rates.

     

Nostalgia and history: Cartoons by Lancaster

Osbert Lancaster. The Penguin Osbert Lancaster. (1964) Lancaster was for many years an editorial cartoonist for the Daily Express. He had other sources of income, too. His charmingly accurate stereotypes of the upper middle and upper classes shows that he belonged to that social stratum.
     The cartoons are of course dated in their references to then current political and social issues, but his commentary is not. Rather more damage is done by foolishness, incompetence, and an uninformed desire to do good than by active malice. Thus, in a 1949 cartoon, one newspaper reader to another, “I may be underestimating slightly, but by my reckoning this makes the seventeenth ‘most important mission in history’ since 1945.”
     There’s also a section on the development of interior decorating, acutely observed. All in all, a nicely done dose of nostalgia and history. ****

"20th century functional" architecture, as seen by Lancaster. He was an expert historian of architectural fashion.

 

The Fascination of Everyday Things: Margert Visser's The Way We Are

     Margaret Visser. The Way We Are (1994). A wonderful potato chip book, but more nourishing. Margaret Visser wrote a column for Saturday Night, Canada’s defunct general interest and arts magazine. Her editor, John Fraser, persuaded her to collect them into a book. Here it is, and if you can find a copy, buy or borrow it. You won’t be disappointed.
     Visser has a knack for giving you both the essence of some topic and some off-the-wall riff on it. These essays often prompt further reflection. My favourite: she ends In Flagrante Delicto (an essay about blushing) thus:
     We blush above all when we think that other people think that we are different from what we want them to think we are.
     Which reminds me of my tentative definition of “honour” as our mutual acceptance of the public images we’ve created of ourselves as being better than we know ourselves to be. “Dishonour” is the revelation that we are not what we pretend to be. Hence the widespread misconception that some bad behaviour reveals “what a person really is”. What a person really is all the behaviours they are capable of. Most of us never discover all that we are capable of, but few, I think, understand how lucky they are. ****

Guide to gentlemanliness

     Douglas Sutherland. The English Gentleman (1978) An anatomy of the English gentleman, written with a mildly Wodehousian wit, and generally agreeing with Edmund Burke’s “A King may make a nobleman, but he cannot make a gentleman.” Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk, Bart, supplies a foreword, which suggests a serious purpose beneath the mild mockery.
     Sutherland’s stereotypical English gentleman is a version of Chaucer’s very parfitt gentil knight, warts, prejudices, and all. Briefly, he minds his own business and expects you to mind yours. He strives for courtesy, decency, and kindness, as he understands these virtues; and avoids petty strife, again as he understands it. He has a strong sense of duty, is not given to self-reflection, or any reflection for that matter, and detests change for change’s sake. He spends as little as possible, but can be generous. He sees himself as upholding standards, though he may have  a vague idea that these standards may be mere shibboleths. He’s not a snob, though his shyness may give the opposite impression.
     The last chapter provides some advice on how to be a gentleman. But if you’ve understood Sutherland’s discussion up that point, you’ll realise that no gentleman strives to be one. ***

A subway by any other name....

Here's one of the stories about Elon Musk's proposal for underground roads for autonomous electric vehicles: Musk's Hole. Looks an awful lot like a subway to me.

This whole autonomous car thing is an attempt to combine the indvidual convenience of the car with the safety of rail. From a rail passenger's point of view, a subway car is an autonomous vehicle. "Leave the driving to us", Greyhound used to say. Well, when you ride in a train, someone or something else is driving. Properly controlled and isolated from cross traffic, a railroad is a horizontal elevator (as George Kneiling said many decades ago). The first elevators were controlled by human operators. Now they are automated. There's no reason not to automate passenger rail, except our weird notion that we should all be able to come and go as we please, and damn the expense.

A History of Leisure

     Witold Rybczynski. Waiting for the Weekend. (1991) Where and when did the weekend habit originate? Answering this question takes Rybczynski into the history of our calendars, religious customs, and the effects of industrialisation, which severed work from leisure in a way that no other techno-cultural innovation did. That leads to the puzzle of what we mean by leisure. Chesterton famously said that leisure was the opportunity to do nothing. Nothing except sit or stroll and experience the present senses, or think about them. But idleness has always been frowned upon by the serious people who want us all to be good. So leisure has become suspect unless it’s used for serious pursuits, or for the serious pursuit of frivolities.
     As always, Rybczynski writes with grace, wears his learning lightly, and triggers both clarification of old insights and recognition of new ones. Best of all, he connects the dots. The result is another nice web of ideas and fact.
     He also encourages thought about what think we already know. One thing we know is that work is good, and idleness is bad. That making stuff is good, and using it up is bad. Both of these ideas helped create our economy of abundance and waste. Both of them will have to be abandoned if we want to survive climate change and maintain a comfortable life. We make too much, and what we can’t use up, we throw away.
     Read the book. ****

Canadian and US political attitudes

     Fire and Ice (2003) Michael Adams, founder of Environics, summarises the results of three Canadian and American surveys, which suggest that Canadian and American values are diverging. At the time (and still to some extent today), it was taken for granted that Canadians were becoming more American. This book makes a persuasive case for the contrary. In particular it shows that, measured with American scales of values, Canadians are more post-modern, more liberal, more community minded, more inner-directed, etc, than Americans. In general, Canadians lie outside the range of American attitudes and values, and are off some scales entirely.
     Two things struck me about Adams’s results:
     a) The drift into what we now call Trumpism was already well-established by the early 1990s. The main difference between then and now is that the disaffected Americans who occupy the “Exclusion and Intensity” quadrant of Adams’s “maps” have begun to vote. They’ve also, I think, become more numerous and more intense.
     b) The divisiveness that has characterised America from about Ronald Reagan onwards has become more prevalent in Canada.
     Fifteen years is a long time in cultural change these days. The Millennials, who tend towards liberal values in Canada and to libertarian values in the USA, will I think become more politically active and influential. Check the Environics website for updates in Adams’s project to track cultural change. ***

The Tipping Point (Gladwell 2002)

     Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point (2002) Gladwell developed the book from an article in The New Yorker, and it shows. While the whole text is interesting, longeurs do threaten to set in before the halfway mark. Extending the text to book length required adding examples, which means repetitions. I read the first four chapters over a couple of days, then took almost three weeks to finish the book.
     Gladwell examines the tipping point in a social context, and identifies the factors that trigger a “social epidemic.” His bibliography suggests that he didn’t look at chaos theory, else he would have realised that he was discussing a classic chaotic system: a network of feedback loops that can change size and state very rapidly when one or more variables reach some threshold.
     It’s a tricky business identifying those variables and thresholds. Gladwell is most interesting (to me, anyway) when he discusses how experience established some of them. For example, Hutterites have found that when a colony reaches 150, it must fission. They’ve made it a rule. Just why group size has a negative effect on how well the group fulfills its goals when it passes 150 is “not well understood”. A priori, there is no reason to suppose that communication should become compromised at this size, but that’s what happens. The group size effect is important for management theory and practice: Gladwell has a case study that examines how one company rigorously enforces the group size rule when organising projects and expanding capacity.
     Gladwell is most interested in how insights into several factors can be be used to control and to trigger social epidemics. Marketers love the book for this reason, as the pre-title blurbs make only too clear. Group size, message “stickiness”, and the behaviours of key figures he labels connectors, mavens, and salesmen are key factors. He wrote the book before the rise of Facebook and other social platforms, which have magnified and accelerated social epidemics. For this reason alone, the book is worth reading. It certainly clarified my thinking about why and how Facebook has exacerbated tribal divisions.
     Despite its age, the book is not outdated. Recommended. ***½

Lapham's Quarterly V1, #1: States of War

     Lewis Lapham, ed. Lapham’s Quarterly: Vol. 1, #1: States of War (2008) Lewis Lapham, erstwhile editor of Harper’s, has been collecting snippets from here and there for years. Starting in 2008, he has issued themed collections of them, the first one about War, because that was the time of the 2nd Gulf War, perpetrated by G W Bush Jr. It’s a fascinating, depressing read.
     War is as old as civilisation. The anthropological consensus is that war and agriculture were invented at the same time, because agriculture created the surplus wealth that made cities possible. But the new technology entailed a new polity, that of the centralised state, which the had to defend itself against other centralised states. Hence war, which required ever larger zones of influence, and so led to empire. Barbarians outside the empire of course coveted its riches, which meant more war. Ecological catastrophes (droughts, multi-year crop failures, plagues) disrupted the more or less stable empires, which meant more war. The leftover pieces of the empires reassembled themselves into new empires. New ecological catastrophes began the cycle all over again.
     And so it went and goes. We now have weapons that will cause the same kind of disruptions that ecological disasters cause, so it’s toss-up which will get us first.
     As I said, it’s a depressing read but worth it. The selections range from more or less scholarly disquisitions through advice on the art of war, to chronicles, reportage and personal witness. You can buy past issues from Lapham’s Quarterly, or you may find a current issue at a better bookstore. ****