Shortchanged?

According to a new study quoted in the NYT, "the average smartphone owner spends 667 minutes a month using apps. That is more time spent with apps than spent talking on a smartphone or using it to browse the Web." As it turns out, BlackBerry users launch much fewer apps than owners of iPhones and Android sets, mostly because they have access to a much smaller selection of those. Hm, those BlackBerry users are real suckers, missing out on the greatest revolution in the deployment of the "spotlight of attention" by countless users. They should really know better and buy immediately into the iWahatever dream masterminded by those great wizards at Apple.

Biggest Fish Face Little Risk of Being Caught

This is the title of a NYT article which seeks to explain why no CEO is likely to see jail time for his part (no need for gender-neutral language here) in creating the financial calamity of 2008. This is in marked contrast to the savings-and-loans fiasco of the 1980s. Following that series of unfortunate events, the federal government invested a lot of effort and money in prosecuting wrong-doers. As a result, over 1,000 felons were locked up. This time around, the federal government seems to have neither the resources nor the resolve to launch a similarly grand crusade. And financial operations have become so complicated that telling ingenuous creativity from fraud is all but impossible. Fraud is evident from top to bottom of the financial food chain – from CEOs withholding vital information from gullible investors, to mortgage brokers misleading clients about the terms of their loans and even encouraging them to lie on their applications. Still, the biggest fish have little to fear, and many have emerged from the debacle they engineered with increased net worth and unshaken self-confidence. What lessons should kids and all of us draw from this foreseeable failure to punish the criminal wrongdoings of those numerous vultures (who have not expressed the slightest regret or remorse)? I am not sure, but I guess conservative commentators will continue to blame the obvious erosion of the Protestant ethic on the usual suspects – an assortment of tenured and non-tenured liberal intellectuals, feminists, multiculturalists, gay rights activists, etc. This strikes me as a truly monumental failure to connect the dots by some otherwise intelligent, well-read, and generally nice people.

Planet of the nerds

A couple of years ago, the American Political Science Association launched a new journal, Perspectives on Politics. It was meant to provide an outlet - some grumpy skeptics would say a ghetto - for methodological transgressions and other hetherodox musings. Last year, it published an article by Laurence Mead called "Scholasticism in Political Science." It defined "scholasticism" as "a tendency for research to become overspecialized and ingrown" - in the pursuit of rigor and under pressure from the publish-or-perish dictum. Apparently, this trend has gathered pace in recent years, as political scientists have churned out countless articles with little real-world relevance. How does Mead know? He has done a rigorous study of little interest to anyone outside of APSA, and maybe even to the alleged scholastics. He has coded thousands of articles from APSA's flagship journal, and has found that most are very narrowly focused and are rarely cited. I have a somewhat different causal model explaining the outcomes Mead observes. The pressure to publish rigorous rigorous research surely exists, but over the years this has become the only kind of research most political scientists find meaningful and exciting. Over the decades, political science has gradually become populated by highly intelligent technicians who are engineers at heart. These are the kind of people who once kicked Nietzsche out of academia, invented the MAD doctrine, and gave the world freakonomics. Naturally, they regard more metaphorical analyses as so much gibberish. And weed out any job applicants suspected of producing those as thinly disguised impostors. Of course, they also rarely miss an opportunity to congratulate themselves on their progressive liberalism. Adam Curtis claims in the first episode of Pandora's Box that those were precisely the kind of people who ran the Soviet Gosplan. But he is only a director without an advanced degree in anything and has no scientific understanding of such complex issues. So what does he know?

P.S. A few years ago most of the students writing senior theses in Political Science at our department suddenly started to cobble together quantitative research designs. This happened without any faculty encouragement. Apparently, they independently reached the conclusion that only number crunching can provide some solid foundation for their young scholastic feet. There must be something in the Zeitgeist pushing young minds in this direction - apart from the schemings and mutual hyping of the geek mafia.

Reaching for the stars

Yesterday evening I felt really sick and miserable. As I was watching the heart-braking footage from Lybia, I accidentally flipped the channel to CNN. There, a puffed-up Barbie clone was hyperventilating over their latest "developing story": "Starry night in Hollywood." Can you imagine, someone's mother will tweet during the Oscars "ceremony"; and, for the first time ever, they will stream live footage from backstage celebrations over the internet! And all this is being revealed to us with only three days to go before the grand gala! I succumbed to all the excitement, ran to the bathroom, puked, and immediately felt better. Who says Hollywood and infotainment aren't healthy and wholesome?

Beauty will save the world

Over the last couple of years, Stanley Fish has published quite a few blop-ed pieces on the NYT web site offering a spirited defense of the humanities’ right to life. Facing severe pressures and sometimes even the ax from desperate academic managers, the humanities are now expected to prove their true value. At a time of austerity and diminishing expectations, why should research and teaching of sometimes arcane subjects be supported? Isn’t it an anachronistic luxury which should be sent the way of the three-piece suite and the feather hat? Fish recognizes that the public (and cost-cutting deciders) won’t buy the argument that studying Antigona or Chinese vases will boost the GDP or someone’s lifetime earning potential. Nor can such activities be credited with the dissemination of knowledge about the best artistic objects created by humanity or of paragons of moral excellence. As we have come to recognize, there is no uncontestable scale on which a Vermeer painting can be placed above Inuit embroidery or even a punk tattoo. And reading about the bravery of those hapless hoplites at the Thermopylae is unlikely in itself to inspire fearlessness among ROTC trainees. So, what justification does Fish offer instead? Pleasure, pure and simple. He says we should not expect the humanities to bring us or anyone else anything beyond aesthetic pleasure and appreciation. Sound great, and I would be the first to recognize the kick reading an uplifting story or a beautiful poem can give me. There is only one slight problem with this justification, and Fish knows it. Why should a country music lover be asked to subsidize the joy brought to some by atonal music or cubism? William Graham Sumner settled that one a long time ago – the “forgotten man” should be left alone and not asked to make even the smallest self-sacrifice; and the sum total of egotistical pursuits will create a better society. In the current Zeitgeist, Fish cannot possibly provide a plausible rebuttal. Instead, he says beleaguered academic aesthetes should employ a few Machiavellian tricks in the dog-eat-dog infighting university politics has become. And use their rhetorical skills to convince the top brass that they are the custodians of a sacred academic tradition dating back to the Renaissance. Yeah, right – this is surely going to fly. How about, then, a slightly different spin? Maybe keeping the humanities afloat could expose some students to works which sometimes inspire awe and admiration – an existential posture surpassing anyone’s instant needs and desires? An education empowering students to pursue such self-transcendence could perhaps be seen as a public good – as opposed to a private investment in the expectation of future individual rewards.

Under the iron boot of academic liberalism

At the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Jonathan Haidt asked his colleagues how many of them would describe themselves as other than liberal. Maybe 20-30 centrists or libertarians raised their hands, and three conservatives - out of around 1,000 present in the auditorium. To Haidt the result signaled the blatant discrimination practiced by the liberal majority toward any non-conformists. He apparently berated his arrogant colleagues for the hostile climate they had created for the few brave dissidents in their ranks, and warned them that their extremism would damage the public's faith in their scientific enterprise. As I read this I scratched my head. What's the big deal, really? Isn't it obvious that anyone who has an IQ above 115 and has read at least 20 non-fiction books from cover to cover cannot possibly be illiberal? Well, I do have two personal acquaintances who deviate from this rule - one in his 50s, the other in his mid-20s. But they must be the kind of rare exceptions which only serve to prove the rule. There cannot possibly be anyone else in the world who is quite like them.

The show must go on

On BBC and Al Jazeera (which uses much British talent) the anchors and most of the reporters are stern, as if seeking to convey the dramatism and enormity of recent events in the Middle East. I guess this is the reason why the British empire was so short-lived - it didn't last in full swing even 100 years. Because it couldn't generate sufficient faith and good cheer. I guess the stiff upper lip did them in - the latest research shows that putting on the fakest of smiles makes you happy, regardless of any nuisances served up by any series of unfortunate events. Thankfully, CNN is a whole different story. Most of their personalities have been effortlessly cheerful. And they do inject some much needed fun into what would have been slightly depressing news coverage. Yuppies enjoying themselves off the Dubai coast in an upbeat ad, longer yachting reports, golf, and - of course - that other most exciting "developing story" - the upcoming wedding of William and Kate. I couldn't wait to hear who is in and who is out, a mere nine weeks before the momentous event! And the beaming "royal commentator" they had invited was just superb - so polished and knowledgeable, yet appropriately discrete. I hope the sun will never, ever set on the Time Warner empire.

Equal opportunity

The Notre Dame Magazine carries an article and inspiring photos of the university's new women's rugby team in action. Now, this is real empowerment. It finally offers female athletes an equal opportunity to suffer the debilitating concussions (and the many more visible injuries) commonly associated with college and men's football.

Who gets what, when, how

This is Laswell's famous definition of politics - the subtitle of his 1936 book which saught to explain what politics is all about. As Encyclopedia Britannica observes, it "later served as the standard lay definition of politics." I am watching the dramatic footage from the Middle East, and I am thinking: what an elegant definition; it captures with such razor-sharp precision the motivations of all those multitudes braving the hails of batons, tear gas canisters, and sometimes bullets. How could we ever begin to grasp what makes them tick without the scientific study of political attitudes and behavior? Last July Stephen Walt asked on the Foreign Policy web site if political science was drifting into irrelevance. Where did he get that, really?

We, Robots

This is the title of Jonah Lehrer’s review (in the NYT) of Sherry Turkle’s alarmist new book, Alone Together. In it, she describes the Internet “as a corporate trap, a ball and chain that keeps us tethered to the tiny screens of our cellphones, tapping out trite messages to stay in touch.” Lehrer thinks these worries are clearly overblown. In his view, the Internet is “just another tool, an accessory that allows us to do what we’ve always done: interact with one other. The form of these interactions is always changing. But the conversation remains.” So, the form of human “interactions” is changing, but its essence has remained the same. In her review of The Social Network (“Generation Why,” in the New York Review of Books), Zadie Smith reaches a very different conclusion. She says the movie “is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called ‘Mark Zuckerberg. It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore”; 500 million “members” who have adopted Zuckerberg’s definition of friendship as “the exchange of personal trivia.” Why has that happened? Nicholas Carr, who suspects that “Google is making us stupid,” offers the following hypothesis: “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.” What is “artificial” about this new kind of sentience Carr describes? Apparently, a degree of emotional numbing as those countless hours interacting with flickering screens rewire our (and our kids’) brains. But these concerns would also seem misplaced to anyone who has always “interacted” with the larger world and others in the manner Zuckerberg does.

10 Restaurants Worth a Plane Ride

This is a NYT article - and the restaurants profiled in it are not just in foreign countries; most are on other continents. The title says it all.

Science über alles

Jonathan Gottschall has argued that the only way to rescue literary criticism from marginalization and irrelevance is to put it on a solid scientific basis - which would involve the relentless application of statistics to all sorts of problems. The tag line for his article in the "Ideas" section of Boston Globe ("Measure for Measure") reads: "Literary criticism could be one of our best tools for understanding the human condition. But first, it needs a radical change: embracing science." Hm - what would be a simple hypothesis regarding the "human condition" which Gottschall could test using his favorite tools? How about: "God is dead"?

Towards the end of his essay Gottschall says: "The great wall dividing the two cultures of the sciences and humanities has no substance. We can walk right through it." Indeed - this is how things must look if you think all reality can be reduced to mechanical interactions, and equations reflecting those interactions. In "The Matrix," Cypher watches those greenish ones and zeros flowing down the computer screen and says that he can sees human beings behind them. With nerds, it's the other way around - they look at people, and all they can see is numbers.

When C. P. Snow wrote "The Two Cultures," his analysis had a clear class angle. The literature/humanities circles he criticized for their lack of scientific understanding came mostly from Britain's top "public" (that is, private) boarding schools and old universities. Hence, they were very much part of the traditional elite. Most of the scientists, on the other hand, were of lower-middle or even working class origins and came mostly from the new polytechnics. Fast-forward half a century, and the picture is quite different - nerds have taken over most of the commanding heights in society and the economy. There are still a few minor bastions of metaphorical thinking (for example, some sectors of literary criticism and some other fuzzy areas), but their days seem numbered. I bet Gottschall could easily calculate their rate of attrition.

And the first will be last...

A NYT article says school districts in the US are scooping tens of thousands of iPads. They want to give those to to students, sometimes starting with kindergarten. What does this bold move demonstrate? Here is a suggestion: educators can now use only one last trick to attract and keep the attention of most students - put a screen under their nose. Poor communities which lack the resources to equip every child with a computer should in fact count this as a blessing. Unless the good Samaritans from One Laptop per Child Come Along. Judging from our daughter's experience, if Bulgarian education has one saving grace, it's the continuing reliance on hard copy and handwriting. There is research which suggests that printed matter evokes a stronger emotional reaction, and handwriting activates the brain in more beneficial way - as compared to reading from a screen and typing respectively. Oh, and some exciting statistics from the current issue of the Atlantic: the amount of time 15-to-19-year old in the US spent reading on a weekend day went down from 16 to 5 minutes in two years (between 2007 and 2009).

Outfoxed?

A couple of months ago, the writers behind the Simpsons tried a couple of digs at Fox News. During the opening credits of one episode, they inserted a Fox News helicopter adorned with the slogan: “Fox News: Not Racist, but No. 1 with Racists.” At the start of the next episode, the slogan was changed to “Unsuitable for Viewers under 75.” Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly fumed, and the Simpsons bunch – supported by their loyal liberal followers – probably felt a sense of warm gratification at their own boundless courage. But the Simpsons are in fact subsidizing Fox News, and Fox News anchors must be secretly grateful for such satirical pricks which can nicely illustrate the nihilistic hubris of the liberal media elite. As Marx would have put it, this is the objective truth about the relationship between the two Fox brands; and any other interpretation must be a form of false consciousness.

The truth about suicide bombers

This is the title of a recent article from the “Ideas” section of Boston Globe. It describes the work of Israeli and American researchers who have founds a simple explanation for the seemingly puzzling phenomenon: many suicide bombers are merely troubled individuals looking for an excuse to commit suicide (as an outright taking of one’s own life is forbidden by the Quran). This strikes me as a lame attempt by academics to explain away and discredit a detestable practice - one of the very few left in the age of cultural sensitivity and tolerance. But it may also reflect the genuine inability of most number-crunchers to fathom any search for self-transcendence, no matter how misguided it can be. This is a deficit which may also underlie recent attacks on religion by a dream team of beautiful minds (including Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, and the like).

Living on for the ages

This is the start of a newspaper article published back in November:

Messy Mya, burgeoning rapper and YouTube sensation, identified as 7th Ward murder victim

By Brendan McCarthy, The Times-Picayune

Moments after gunshots roared through the 7th Ward on Sunday night, a lone snapshot appeared on the Internet.

In it, a 22-year-old man is lying cheek to the ground, crimson pooling around his neck. His eyes are closed, his torso curled.

Chaos explodes around him, with the arms of others pressed to the back of his head. And someone is holding a cell phone just inches from his face.

This is how the world learned of Messy Mya's death.

The last will be first...

A couple of weeks ago, a lengthy NYT article drew attention to the pitfalls of “Growing up Digital, Wired for Distraction.” It chimed with concerns expressed in previous articles, as well as a Frontline documentary, Digital Nation, aired last February. Of course, technophiles will remain unconvinced; some will even continue to argue that “everything bad is good for you.” But I am now mulling a mischievous hypothesis: maybe some societies which find themselves on the losing side of the “digital divide” will be able to give a better neurological head start to their young.

Call to arms

For a couple of weeks now, the bestseller list in France has been topped by a 30-page pamphlet (Indignez-vous!) penned by Stéphane Hessel, a 93-year-old former resistance fighter. He appeals to readers to become outraged and express indignation at the state of modern society: the growing gap between the rich and poor under Sarkozy, France’s callous treatment of immigrants, the plight of the Palestinians, threats to France’s welfare system and the environment, etc. Essentially, Hessel calls on French society to reembrace the values of the resistance. How nice when someone who has lived a truly rich and meaningful life really cares to leave such a precious intellectual legacy behind. As another example, take Gordon Murray, the dying banker who recently published The Investment Answer, a pamphlet advising investors to relax and give up on efforts to beat the market. Or Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist who, after similarly being diagnosed with terminal cancer, gave several “last lectures” (available on YouTube) – advising anyone willing to listen how to achieve their childhood dreams, and how to manage their time more efficiently (by, for example, installing extra monitors on their PCs, avoiding long phone conversations, etc.).

The crisis of values

Here is how Paul Krugman renders the last 20 years of Irish history in the NYT ("Eating the Irish"):

"The Irish story began with a genuine economic miracle. But eventually this gave way to a speculative frenzy driven by runaway banks and real estate developers, all in a cozy relationship with leading politicians. The frenzy was financed with huge borrowing on the part of Irish banks, largely from banks in other European nations.

"Then the bubble burst, and those banks faced huge losses. You might have expected those who lent money to the banks to share in the losses. After all, they were consenting adults, and if they failed to understand the risks they were taking that was nobody’s fault but their own. But, no, the Irish government stepped in to guarantee the banks’ debt, turning private losses into public obligations.

"Before the bank bust, Ireland had little public debt. But with taxpayers suddenly on the hook for gigantic bank losses, even as revenues plunged, the nation’s creditworthiness was put in doubt. So Ireland tried to reassure the markets with a harsh program of spending cuts.

"Step back for a minute and think about that. These debts were incurred, not to pay for public programs, but by private wheeler-dealers seeking nothing but their own profit. Yet ordinary Irish citizens are now bearing the burden of those debts.

"Or to be more accurate, they’re bearing a burden much larger than the debt — because those spending cuts have caused a severe recession so that in addition to taking on the banks’ debts, the Irish are suffering from plunging incomes and high unemployment."

So, private investors and bankers pocketed huge profits while the markets was on a roll (or the bubble was being inflated); but the Irish government promptly nationalized their potential losses when the chips came down. One might wonder what this scheme would do to the sense of fairness and just returns of the Irish - and others who have seen socially destructive economic practices lavishly rewarded by "the market" and subsequent losses shifted onto the gullible public. But never mind - we all know that the crisis of values in modern societies comes from post-modernist nihilism and the indoctrination of the young by a motley gang of feminists, gay rights activists, and unshaven academics in tweed jackets. Why, oh, why is it so difficult even for highly cultured and talented people like Theodore Dalrymple and Kay Hymowitz to connect the dots?

Testing the Zeitgeist

Writing for the “Language Log,” Mark Liberman deconstructs the recent NYT article on the potential perils of “Growing up Digital.” He apparently wants to send out a general warning against the recent explosion of alarmist pop neuroscience since his post is titled “Your Brain on …?” Liberman thinks one of the main studies quoted in the NYT piece has methodological flaws, therefore the article provides no sound proof regarding the effects of video games and thrilling video material on kids’ brains. He warns against alarmist stories with “a high ratio of stereotype and anecdote to fact,” as opposed to “serious large-scale studies of causes and effects.” Each impressionistic account should be seen for what it truly is – just another case of “ritual inter-generational hand-wringing.” Like, you know, Socrates’s worries about the negative effects of writing, concerns about the printing press, or the telephone (Liberman quotes a NYT article from 1924 describing the telephone as that “most persistent and … most penetrating” aspect of “the jagged city and its machines,” which “go by fits, forever speeding and slackening and speeding again, so that there is no certainty”; with the benefit of hindsight, we can now see how totally, utterly baseless all such alarmist premonitions have been). The comments below Lieberman’s post mostly support his blasé attitude. True, one reader (a self-described scientist who knows all too well “that anecdotal evidence doesn't mean squat in science”) does sound some concern. In his view, sometimes a phenomenon may become so “prevalent that you don't need science to tell you of its existence, instead perhaps only of its severity, and even then, sometimes it takes a while for scientists to come up with a good way to empirically quantify these things.” This might just be the case now, of we take his own observations seriously: “I'm young, and I have experienced for myself how constant exposure to the internet and games have severely harmed my own ability to concentrate and focus on tasks for long periods at a time (meaning, any longer than half an hour). But moreover, all my friends are having the same problem.” Another reader, though, immediately counters these worries. Citing his own superhuman powers of concentration at age 58, after decades of gaming, he concludes: “Your anecdotal narrative is no more proof of anything than mine.” A more sympathetic young reader admits: “I … use the internet many hours most days, and have serious trouble with concentration, procrastination, discipline at work, and so on, and yes, many of my friends have similar problems.” But does he see any causal link here? Not necessarily. In his universe, “without a control group of friends who don’t use the internet so much, I don’t see how we can fairly put the blame on it!” I have the following hypothesis regarding the total reliance of such superintelligent researchers (most are male, thus the ubiquitous “he” above; but women are not immune to the syndrome) on clear-cut experimental proof and their intense scorn for “anecdotal narratives” (why would some call it “evidence,” really?). If the left hemisphere of your brain is overdeveloped (a requirement for – and partly the effect of – a successful scientific career these days), it will inhibit the more inchoate impulses generated by the right hemisphere. As a result, you will tend to focus on observable causal relationships among isolated “variables”; and you won’t be able to step back and sense some overall patterns. Liberman and his fellow-travelers will, of course, dismiss such a glib explanation as a groundless overgeneralization by someone who should have never been granted a Ph.D. in a social discipline. They will continue to study language, of all things, applying the one and only scientific method that can produce true knowledge; and to throw out the CVs of job applicants who show the slightest diversion from the scientific canon. More ominously, others will continue to apply the same mindset and methodology to the study of society, politics, the economy – and even the human psyche. And their predictions will never be proven wrong, no matter how severe the next crisis they miss may turn out to be. As Iain McGilchrist notes in “The Master and His Emissary,” one of the benefits of having a hypertrophied left hemisphere is immunity from self-doubt.

Don’t daydream – ever!

A recent study has concluded that a “wandering mind may lead to unhappiness.” That is, if your mind strays too often from the task you need to perform, you are likelier to experience some depressive thoughts and feelings. Staying focused on that task, on the other hand, would make you happier. As we all know, it can even give you that elusive high referred to as “flow.” Since moments of mind-wandering tended to precede spurts of moodiness, the researchers concluded that the former were causing the latter, not the other way around. My money, though, would be on a different explanation. Could this be another spurious correlation, both variables being determined by a third, less obvious one? Maybe more impulsive (or compulsive) people would be more likely to succumb to uncontrollable ruminations. This, of course, is a classic recipe for depression. But the weaker self-control which produces impulsiveness is generally associated with negative emotionality (except for cases of hypomania, when individuals experience a chronic, invigorating high). So, people with robust self-control (those who would always wait for the second marshmallow) have no reason to fear they might experience a temporary mood disorder if they spend a bit longer ironing or self-grooming (the kind of tasks which seem to predispose us most to mind-wandering). Cutting down on such chores, though, might make everyone happier. I hope some clever research theme will think up a series of ingenious experiments to test this hypothesis.

Just focus!

A couple of weeks ago it was revealed that typesetters had accidentally opened the wrong file for the British edition of John Franzen’s thick new novel, “Freedom.” As a result, 80,000 copies of the wrong draft were printed, and needed to be pulped. These may seem unrelated, but a recent study of data compiled in Oklahoma has revealed that surgical errors may be on the increase, despite detailed protocols aimed at avoiding them (and related malpractice lawsuits). In recent years, these have included things like operating on the wrong patient, organ, side of the brain, etc. – sometimes with lethal consequences. And the BBC web site still has a “Skillwise Factsheet” posted providing instructions on how to construct a good paragraph – and it contains the following gem: “What does the topic sentence do? It introduces the main idea of the sentence.” It has been maybe two years since I first saw it, and it is still there, unchanged. I would be curious to what extent this apparent difficulty to stay focused and pay attention to detail might make engineering errors (and even friendly fire accidents ) more common than they would normally be. But there must be a away to dispel the mental fog induced by an increasingly complex, fast-paced and technologically saturated social environment – yes, you guessed it, by applying even more innovative and immersive technologies.

Don't cut off your ear!

Jonah Lehrer describes in his blog (“Feeling Sad Makes Us More Creative?”) a recent study which seems to confirm “that people who are a little bit miserable” (like Van Gogh) are more creative (or innovative). He concludes that “the cliché might be true after all. Angst has creative perks.” I recall some time ago Lehrer already wrote about the upside of depression, but his focus is narrower now. When a researcher induced sad feelings and thoughts in experimental subjects, they produced collages which were judged a (statistically significant) tad more creative as compared to controls. Sadness also seemed to make subjects more attentive and detail-oriented, and to generally sharpen their “information processing strategies.” Apparently, such focus and diligence are quite helpful in performing various tasks – “writing a poem or solving a hard technical problem.” As further proof, Lehrer points to a survey which found that 80 per cent of writers who participated in one workshop “met the formal diagnostic criteria for some form of depression.” In my naïveté, I have always thought artistic creativity is a bit different from the sparks of innovation that have given us the atomic bomb and Facebook. While the latter could easily come to people who meet the diagnostic criteria for some part of the autistic spectrum, the former would seem to hinge on intense emotional attunement and expression. In that case, heightened sensitivity could produce both depressive slumps (or even madness) and creative surges. So having raw nerves would make it likelier that you 1) cut off your ear, and 2) achieve artistic recognition, and maybe even greatness. It seems like a classic case where one independent variable (emotional sensitivity/intensity) determines two dependent variables (depressive moods and creativity); therefore the correlation between those does not signify causation. On the basis of this theory, I do have the hunch that sacrificing any body part is highly unlikely to unleash the creative potential pent up in your skull. And this would apply to geeks, too – so maybe Lehrer is right and there is no meaningful difference between the two areas of creativity or innovation.

Facebook will save the world

I knew Facebook had already done a lot to upgrade the lives of millions, but apparently its most important contribution to humanity still lies ahead ("The Age of Possibility"). In the NYT, Roger Cohen describes a momentous global transformation which will shift the center of economic and political gravity in the world from the West to the rest. He is well aware that similar transitions in the past have involved enormous bloodshed and suffering. yet, he is "not too worried." What gives him confidence that this time things will be different? The first item on his list is "the web of social networks that now span the globe." The one example Cohen gives on this account reads: "Half a billion Facebook users constitute some sort of insurance against disaggregation." In his view, "being in touch in ways that dissolve national borders makes it more difficult to be in large-scale violent conflict across fault lines." I am thinking - who else wasn't "too worrried" and thought that this time things would be different? Oh, yes - the dotcom crowd 10 years ago, and the bankers (plus the millions of small "investors" in "home equity" who took their bait). But let's stay away from such far-fetched analogies. We all know that one day things will be really, truly different. If we could only believe strongly enough.