Working towards getting fired!

If I get laid off, which is highly likely, then from 2022, I will be able to test out what I had been yakking about forever in this blog: Why have we become so obsessed with work to the point of completely marginalizing everything else, especially if our work is non-essential?

Getting fired will be an unplanned way in which I will walk that talk!

When my daughter works, well, she is saving kids, some of whom are only a few months old.  A farmer in India feeds people.  Is my non-essential work important?  Will getting laid off mean that there will one less bullshit job that is being done?

Seven years ago, I blogged that people spend so much time at work, and then want to do fun stuff during their days off, that they even don't care to spend some hours with people that matter--friends and relations, especially parents.  Is working away that important?

Of course, because of the pandemic, many of us cannot visit with our people, within the country or far away.  Which is why I am gladder that I did visit with the parents or the daughter when I could.  Over the last 18 years, by my mental count, I have made 19 trips to India.  Two of those trips coincided with my sabbaticals; I spent three months there during each of those sabbaticals, instead of the usual three weeks.  I have no idea when the next trip might be, and who might or might not be around when I get there.  Or if there will be another trip at all.

In the age of the coronavirus, we live in a Zoom world, with screen time of all kinds with friends, family, students, whoever.  It is practically the world that E.M. Forster wrote about back in 1909.  The following lines that Forster wrote are all the more chilling:

The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind."

She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a visit.

A layoff would perhaps give me a lot more flexibility about visiting with the people who matter to me, without worrying about the constraints of the job.

More than anything else, what is the point of working when the busyness prevents people from even the barest minimum of simple pleasures?

In this essay, a recently laid off writer reflects on the busyness of work:

I was frustrated that I had tied so much of my self-worth to my job, especially when I could lose it at any moment. Why didn’t I have something else that gave me the same feelings of satisfaction and purpose? Why did work seem to be the centerpiece of my life, rather than just one other thing in it? Why did I have to work?

I am not the only one wrestling with these questions. Like me, many are reassessing a part of their lives they had once accepted uncritically. Those who were not essential workers realized their work was just that: nonessential. Others discovered that, at the very least, they didn’t have to put in 10-hour days to get their work done, or even to be considered “good” at their jobs. This wasn’t a matter of addressing burnout or general malaise: The pandemic had dramatically altered their very conception of work and made them question the notion that their lives should be built around it.

I hope that this lesson from the pandemic will be remembered even well after the virus is eliminated, or at least effectively contained.

The incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence

"I alone can fix it," he said.  And 63 million adults applauded and made him the leader.

He described himself as a "stable genius" and his supporters were thrilled with his reptilian cunning.

He is no physician, and yet he freely advises people, including experts, on what they should do.  During these COVID-19 times, he is practicing what he campaigned on--that he alone can fix it.

We have always known about confident idiots like him.  I blogged about the Dunning-Kruger effect more than 5 years ago--in November 2014.

[In] many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers—and we are all poor performers at some things—fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.
What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

"I alone can fix it."

Confident idiots spew bullshit all the time.

It is not an accident that I was drawn to Harry Franfurt's On Bullshit as soon as the tiny book was published.  Which is also why I loved Montaigne's Que sais-je?  Which is also why I developed a course that I offered only once, on intellectual humility.

A couple of years ago, I decided to offer a seminar on this subject.  I titled the course as "Intellectual boldness through intellectual humility."  In that, I essentially channeled my philosophy on education and life--to admit that I don't know.  The key, however, is to rise beyond that "I don't know."

But, 63 million loved the man who claimed to know it all!  And now we are all paying the price for his ignorance and incompetence.

Call out the bullshit. Tell the truth. Run!

Many, many moons ago, when I was a young graduate student, I went across town to listen to Pranab Bardhan, among others, at a symposium at UCLA.  A question Bardhan was asked was whether he would like to serve the Indian government in an official capacity.  This was back when India was beginning to think about liberalizing its economy.  Bardhan's reply resonated with me: he said that he could best contribute by being a constructive critic from the outside.

While life after graduation convinced me all the more that I am nowhere near Bardhan's smartness, I equally understood that constructive criticism is how I can best serve my fellow humans.

I was/am thankful get back to the academic world, which provides the best possible environment from which we can engage in constructive criticism.  After all, if we do not, and cannot, critique then what good are colleges for?

However, it seems like criticism is increasingly of the destructive and thoughtless kind.  On television, it is yelling matches devoid of reason and evidence.  Worse, it is all about bullshit now!  Of course, I am not the only one who has even created courses to address bullshit.

At the other end, it is nothing but standing ovations for any activity, all the way from kindergarten to graduate school.  Why this nauseating level of all enthusiasm and ovation all the time, and whatever happened to critics?  Not every work deserves that gold star, writes this professional critic:

The sad truth about the book world is that it doesn’t need more yes-saying novelists and certainly no more yes-saying critics. We are drowning in them. What we need more of, now that newspaper book sections are shrinking and vanishing like glaciers, are excellent and authoritative and punishing critics — perceptive enough to single out the voices that matter for legitimate praise, abusive enough to remind us that not everyone gets, or deserves, a gold star. 

What he writes about the book world is equally applicable to the world outside of publishing too.

[Criticism] doesn’t mean delivering petty, ill-tempered Simon Cowell-like put-downs. It doesn’t necessarily mean heaping scorn. It means making fine distinctions. It means talking about ideas, aesthetics and morality as if these things matter (and they do). It’s at base an act of love. Our critical faculties are what make us human.

He puts it really, really, well: criticism comes out of a love for ideas and their beauty, whether that idea is scientific, musical, literary, or whatever.  It is precisely to develop an appreciation and understanding of these that we (supposedly) engage in higher education where we (supposedly) emphasize "critical thinking."

Of course, engaging in criticism might not win friends:

Until you work up the nerve to say what you think and stand behind it, young critics and fellow amiable tweeters, there’s always the advice the critic George Seldes gave in the title of his 1953 memoir: “Tell the Truth and Run.”

I suppose my problem is that I don't run even when it is clear that is what I am told to do!

I am here; deal with it :)

Truth filter

I checked the soles of the shoes.  Nothing.  All clean.

All because I thought I had stepped on dogshit!

That literal act of not paying attention to where I was going also serves as a metaphorical and philosophical reminder in life, as this following couplet from the old country advises:

दृष्टिपूतं न्यसेत्पादं पस्त्रपूतं जलं पिबेत् ।
सत्यपूतां वदेद्वाचं मनःपूतं समाचरेत् ॥

- मनुस्मृति

One must set foot only after seeing (cleared after an inspection by the eye).
One must drink water only after passing through a cloth.
One must utter words that pass through the truth filter.
One's actions must pass the conscience test.

- Manu Smriti

Truth filter.
Conscience test.

If only!

Perhaps humans have always behaved in ways such that truth was not a primary concern, and the conscience did not always dictate actions.  After all, if humans had behaved well, then why would they have even thought it was necessary to compose such verses, or draft the Ten Commandments, or ...

Oddly enough, all those structures that were packaged into religions did not make truthful and conscientious humans.  Through the centuries, we humans have been awfully untruthful without worrying about the conscience.  So atrocious is the human trait that we require one testifying under oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  Apparently we are well aware that we humans, including the believing kind, are capable of telling the truth, but only a partial truth while conveniently omitting certain parts of what would otherwise have been the whole truth!

The disregard for truth and the conscience manifests itself in daily life, in matters trivial and profound alike.

Maybe to be human means that we end up with dealing with instances like this dogshit in the current White House.

Truth filter.
Conscience test.

If only!

Truth is for losers?

Yet another post on "if only people would listen to me" edition! ;)

In many posts, I have complained that more and more people seem to be uninterested in the pursuit of truth.  Whether it is in a family context, or in a small college like mine, or national politics, it is only a few idiots like me who apparently believe in pursuing the truth.  A relentless pursuit of truth requires us to rid of our preconceived notions and to also question, say our favorite religious or political bottom-lines.

Consider for instance this post from less than a year ago, in which I worried about facts and truth.  I linked it to my graduate school days when I first came across "postmodernism."  I concluded that post with:

It is surreal that we now live a life where facts simply do not matter.  Academic post-modernists, who detest Trump and Putin, find that Trump and Putin are successfully practicing post-modernism where anything goes!

Or, how about this post from a month ago, in which I quoted from an essay:

Trump’s playbook should be familiar to any student of critical theory and philosophy. It often feels like Trump has stolen our ideas and weaponized them. For decades, critical social scientists and humanists have chipped away at the idea of truth. We’ve deconstructed facts, insisted that knowledge is situated and denied the existence of objectivity. The bedrock claim of critical philosophy, going back to Kant, is simple: We can never have certain knowledge about the world in its entirety. Claiming to know the truth is therefore a kind of assertion of power.

And today, I heard on NPR:

I think that several things have gone on in American society that have caused a kind of moral confusion. One of those things, I think, is that there's been a rather sustained assault on truth, kind of postmodernism. And that's a movement that really developed in the academy years ago, the notion that either objective truth doesn't exist or if it does, it's not something that we can ascertain. ...
I think what's happened is that that has now spread to the wider society and including political society. And I think when you lose that, you lose the ability to reason together. And that kind of thing is really problematic in a society. And we're seeing a kind of paranoia and conspiracy mongering in politics that is unusual and, I think, worrisome. And I think a lot of that comes back to this point about the idea that there just isn't a truth that we can agree on or accept.

Yep, as I titled that earlier post, if anything goes, then trump happens.

The question that the show's host asked is an awesome one:

 So are you asking lawmakers today to almost become political martyrs if they need to? They might go down in the next election, but at least they would be leading by example in trying to make the country less divided?

The guy--Peter Wehner of the Ethics and Public Policy Center--dodged that with a weak response.  But, that is the reality--pursuing the truth might lead to unpleasant outcomes for the pursuer--like how I could be without a job in a matter of four years from now.  But, the terror of losing my job does not deter me from seeking the truth.  I care not that I am an idiot for such an approach to life.

If anything goes ... trump comes in then

A few years ago, ok, decades ago, I was at a seminar talk that was highly critical of the empirical approach to understanding the human condition.  I sympathize a lot with that crowd, yes.  I detest, for instance, how the GDP has come to signify the be all and end all of everything that we are.  Why do I get unhappy with this elevation of the GDP to some near godly status?  For a number of reasons.  The easiest that I can point to even without explaining at length is how the GDP does not account for the destruction of the natural environment.

So, yes, I have lots of problems with this stupid empirical approach that simultaneously takes a condescending view towards the gazillion things that have not been quantified nor can they be really quantified.  However, I have always had problems with intellectuals equating this empiricism mania with the scientific method itself.  The scientific method that is driven by logic and evidence.

Thus, I worried about the postmodernism that I was learning about in graduate school.  It challenged the very notion of "truth" and it easily slid into a common denominator of anything goes.  Challenging authority is one thing, which I always support.  But, to question the legitimacy of the truth that was being pursued?  If anything goes, then where is truth and where is the untruth?

Which brings us to trump:

Trump’s playbook should be familiar to any student of critical theory and philosophy. It often feels like Trump has stolen our ideas and weaponized them.
For decades, critical social scientists and humanists have chipped away at the idea of truth. We’ve deconstructed facts, insisted that knowledge is situated and denied the existence of objectivity. The bedrock claim of critical philosophy, going back to Kant, is simple: We can never have certain knowledge about the world in its entirety. Claiming to know the truth is therefore a kind of assertion of power.

I know, I know ... every post somehow seems to be about trump.  Of course, that is what happens when the authoritarian looms large.  Which is why scientists and poets alike in the old Soviet Union were haunted by the oppressors in everything they did every day.  It sucks being in such a system!

Anyway, back to trump and postmodernism:

Call it what you want: relativism, constructivism, deconstruction, postmodernism, critique. The idea is the same: Truth is not found, but made, and making truth means exercising power.
The reductive version is simpler and easier to abuse: Fact is fiction, and anything goes. It’s this version of critical social theory that the populist right has seized on and that Trump has made into a powerful weapon.

For people like me, who never got along with the postmodernist crowd nor with the fucking trump mob, we are now caught between the devil and the deep blue sea!

If you think that by now the critical theorists and their students have learnt a bitter lesson of reality, hmmm, think again.  A coalition of students at Pomona College (an expensive liberal arts college in Southern California) signed off on a statement against bringing ultra-conservative and right-leaning libertarian speakers to campus.  And they note in their statement:

Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity, and wielded a dichotomy of 'subjectivity vs. objectivity' as a means of silencing oppressed peoples. The idea that there is a single truth--'the Truth'--is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples.

The pursuit of truth of an attempt to silence oppressed peoples?  No wonder trump wins with his "plain speaking" that has absolutely no relation to truth!

Today's moronic idea ... is tomorrow's death!

When the demagogue and his minions love a Kennedy, then certainly those strange bedfellows can lead us only in one direction: Insanity!

It is more than insanity.  It is deadly.  Literally.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the demagogue are simpaticos when it comes to vaccine and autism.

vaccine denialism became a central issue in American public health as a result of his study. And Kennedy, along with the actress Jenny McCarthy, became one of the cause’s most famous supporters. ... Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that Kennedy told reporters yesterday that Donald Trump—who has, over the years, issued a stream of inaccurate and conspiratorial tweets on the subject of vaccines and autism—has asked him to “chair a commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity.’’

Welcome to the United States of Bullshit; it is most fitting that the demagogue will now become the Bullshitter-in-Chief!

[The] Trump vaccine commission is not simply a bad idea—it is a deadly one. Asking Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to chair a commission on scientific integrity is like asking Ted Kaczynski to run the United States Postal Service.

I love that line about Kaczynski ;)

But, smile and laugh we cannot.

A conspiracy theory such as the one about the autism vaccine is like an untreated wound. It has festered for years, and yesterday Trump and Kennedy guaranteed that it can only deepen—causing tremendous destruction and needless pain.

Thanks, you atrocious Republican voters who elected the demagogue!

Get ready ... for a lot of bullshit!

Ah, yes, after this topic, which is about the certainty that we all face, perhaps bullshit is one of my favorite topics.  After all, it takes a bullshitter to love bullshit ;)

People talk about the past golden age, like the golden age of cinema, or the golden age of cricket (no, not the bugs!).  We now live in a golden age, and of an interesting kind:

We are currently in a golden age of bullshit. The internet is awash with unchecked claims.

Well, I read that on the internet.  So, is that bullshit or the truth?  Isn't everything in the internet true anyway ;)

So, of course, curious people want to know who are the people who are most likely to believe the bullshit.  What is an individual’s propensity to believe in bullshit?  Develop "a Bullshit Receptivity scale (BSR)" then.  What does the research show?

Summarizing the results, Pennycook, et al., write that “[people] more receptive to bullshit are less reflective, lower in cognitive ability (i.e., verbal and fluid intelligence, numeracy), are more prone to … conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.”

If you believed that, you probably rank way high in the scale ;)

Seriously, that makes sense, right?  So, what can be done to make sure people will be lower in the SBR scale?

Basically, the goal here should be to get people to slow down and more carefully examine the information being presented to them. To scan it, in other words, for bullshit.

To be engaged and to examine the information is nothing but the rational, critical approach that science employs.  The scientific method.  

if you love science, you had better question it, and question it well, so it can live up to its potential.

The unfortunate aspect is that the very scientific method of questioning anything leads the people with high BSR to believe that scientific research is all bogus.  Science, on the other hand, sniffs out bullshit.  But, sometimes the scientific method cannot be enough to tackle bullshit.  Why?

“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”

You want a real example?  Think about anything that Donald Trump says at any of his rallies.  They are all bullshit.  Now, think about all the work that has to go into refuting the errors.  A huge magnitude of energy will be needed to refute his bullshit.  You will be barely into the process when a new day dawns and Trump would have generated more bullshit.

If it is the golden age of bullshit, then Trump is certainly the man of the hour.

The world is reborn in humble facts

A few weeks ago, in an email exchange on science and the Upanishads--yes, this blogger will gladly dish out opinions, upon request, on all things considered!--I added the following editorial comment:

BTW, the article mentions Deepak Chopra ... I am one of those who make fun of Chopra because he is yet another in a long line of people who have sold mumbo-jumbo to gullible Westerners and made a whole lot of money. 

The likes of Chopra prove over and over again PT Barnum's old line that there's a sucker born every minute!

Chopra is fun to beat up on because he is seemingly everywhere--on television, in print, and even on Twitter.   His outpouring of wisdom has made it easy for websites to automatically generate Chopraisms; the title of this post was generated by this site, where you, too, can have hours of fun.

Oddly enough, in this more literate world, people seem to be as gullible as ever before.  It is almost as if literacy and education has got nothing to do with thinking.  But then, on many matters people prefer Chopraisms and more because they seem comforting and reassuring.  Like how perhaps alcohol and drugs could make it seem like the problems go away.

We are forever ready to accept as truth if we want to believe in it.  A few days ago, a "cousin-in-law" had posted on Facebook something about Donald Trump, just because the content put Trump in such a bad light.  It was yet another case of if something is too good to be true, well, maybe it ain't true after all.  Despite my intense hatred for the fascist Trump, I commented that it was all an urban legend and referred him to a site that had the facts on that.

People believe in bullshit all the time, it seems.  The same people who are quick to point out the bullshit in another's belief willingly submit to bullshit that is consistent with their preferred view of the world.

So, how might you – the reader – vaccinate yourself against it?

You better figure out how to vaccinate yourself against bullshit because it seems like bullshit has been increasing at exponential rates and the growth rate does not appear to be slowing down anytime soon.  Because:

We live in the age of information, which means that we also live in the age of misinformation.

So, what can you do?  Be on the alert, all the time.

Bullshit is much harder to detect when we want to agree with it.

Or, at least make sure you read this blog every single day--after all, it is a bullshit-free paradise ;)

Ackamarackus! It is time we talked bullshit

As much as I love the political theatre for the entertainment it provides, there is a reason why I prefer to view that as entertainment: if I am not able to laugh at the idiots who want to govern my life, then I will be left with intense pain and emotions.  I way prefer to be at ease than to be walking around stressed.  It is no different from how I am work, too, with my esteemed colleagues ;)

In the process of laughing at the idiots, I came across the word of the day: Ackamarackus.  I had no idea such a word existed. When I read that, I was initially convinced that the writer had made up the word, like how my old neighbor had created that wonderful word, exhaustipated.  However, it turns out that ackamarackus is for real; who knew!

The writer notes in the context of Marco Rubio's bullshit that it was not BS but ackamarackus:

Ackamarackus is a type of BS that’s big and showy and distracting: it’s a five-star circus of bamboozlement.

The Wiki dictionary notes about ackamarackus:

activity engaged in just for show; deceptive nonsense

Which means, hmmm, Donald Trump in his entirety is ackamarackus.  The guy is a deceptive and distracting nonsense, indeed.  But, it is shocking how he and other nonsensical sideshows are considered eligible enough to become the next commander-in-chief!

Four years ago, back in November 2011, Dan Drezner had this to say about the GOP presidential candidates then:

Americans have elected foreign policy neophytes in the past. Some have worked out quite well in advancing US interests (Harry S. Truman) while others have not (George W. Bush). What these presidents had in common, however, was a genuine belief that foreign affairs were intrinsically important. Truman read widely on international affairs, and Bush convened a team of seasoned foreign policy advisers to tutor him on the issues two years before taking office. They understood that decisions to spend money or send troops overseas would determine how they were remembered, and affect the national security of the United States. More recent presidents have grasped the concept that economic trouble in Europe means trouble for the United States as well. Compared with past commanders-in-chief, the motto of the current Republican candidates is simple: don’t know, don’t care.  

Looks like he doesn't have to edit a single word there and can run with the same commentary yet again, right?

I brought that to Drezner's attention, via a tweet.  It didn't take him long to respond:

Hmm... this might merit a follow-up essay. https://t.co/Lb8TMJKGFS

— Daniel Drezner (@dandrezner) September 25, 2015

This time around, the GOP's leading candidates as of now are all neophytes, running on the "logic" that their absolute lack of knowledge and experience is their greatest asset, which makes Sarah Palin seem like a theoretical physicist par excellence!

You see why enjoying this as farcical theatre is the best option; "all that’s missing is a tiger (or elephant?) jumping through a flaming hoop."  Ackamarackus! ;)

Assholes Bullshit

Biologically speaking, those two go together, right?  

But, that is not what this post is about.

Years ago, I came across a write-up about a book that was coming out and I didn't need anything more than that write-up to order myself a copy.  One reading and I knew I had to use that as a required text for an Honors course.  That book?  On Bullshit.  

If you have been paying attention, then you would have come across a number of posts where I refer to the book and its author, Harry Frankfurt, who is an Ivy League philosopher.  (Like in this set of posts.)  One student withdrew from Honors because of that book as a requirement, and most students enjoyed it--especially the video interview with Frankfurt.

Who wouldn't love it!  Even the few sentences that Frankfurt writes to begin the essay will make you want to read more:

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis. 

DrB, who is one of the closest colleagues at work, was so fascinated by my constant talking about Bullshit that she invited me to talk with her class.  A music class!  I did.  Students loved it.  Since then, I have also been re-invited, more than a couple of times.  Was it last term, or the one before, that I talked to DrB's students, after which one of them came to my office to borrow my copy of Bullshit; he said he would return it.  Maybe he loves Bullshit way too much! ;)

A few months ago, DrB told me that she had picked up a book for her travels and that as a Bullshit fan I would love this book also.  The book?  Yes, you guessed it by now what the first half of the title of this post is.  

I told her it was an old book.  Turns out that she was not referring to The No Asshole Rule, which was a few years old, but to a different one: Assholes.  

Earlier today, she emailed me: "I will bring you Assholes, A Theory by Dr. Aaron James, PhD in Philosophy from Harvard..."

Isn't it wonderful to have a colleague who thinks only about me when she thinks about Bullshit and Assholes? ;)

What is James's book about?

What does it mean for someone to be an asshole? The answer is not obvious, despite the fact that we are often personally stuck dealing with people for whom there is no better name. Try as we might to avoid them, assholes are found everywhere—at work, at home, on the road, and in the public sphere. Encountering one causes great difficulty and personal strain, especially because we often cannot understand why exactly someone should be acting like that.
Asshole management begins with asshole understanding. Much as Machiavelli illuminated political strategy for princes, this book finally gives us the concepts to think or say why assholes disturb us so, and explains why such people seem part of the human social condition, especially in an age of raging narcissism and unbridled capitalism. These concepts are also practically useful, as understanding the asshole we are stuck with helps us think constructively about how to handle problems he (and they are mostly all men) presents. We get a better sense of when the asshole is best resisted, and when he is best ignored—a better sense of what is, and what is not, worth fighting for.

I am now thinking this: wouldn't it be interesting--I mean, interesting--to have the authors of Bullshit  and Assholes in the same room for a philosophy parlor?  Imagine a drinking game in that setting: a shot every single time the word "bullshit" or the word "asshole" is uttered. 

Ah, such is my life of Bullshit and Assholes. In more ways than one, of course! ;)

Source

Thank God I don’t have to deal with any yak or bullshit

"I'm so glad the end of the term is near.  I feel drained" said the colleague.

I smiled.  And hoped that I would not be asked how I felt.  But, it was hope against hope.

"How about you?"

There.

I couldn't bullshit a response.  Of course, that is also how I end up with very few colleagues who want to chat with me.  Life is not at all about direct and open conversations.  It is mostly about bullshit.  And bullshit I detest.

I wouldn't want to bullshit in this context anyway.  I love what I do.  Engaging with students is what I want to do.  To bug them with questions. To make them think. Why would I feel drained?

"I actually get depressed sometimes in the summer.  I miss the interactions with students."  Yep, that's what I replied.

Later, after returning to my office, I continued with the grading.  Evidence was in plenty that students are thinking.  And even questioning their own views of the world.

One student had written, "It makes me view both sides of an argument, which is something not a lot of classes offer."  Why would I feel drained?  In fact, I am energized with such feedback!

From another student: "This course is also really helping me think critically about the world and about anything I do."  Or, how about this one: "The way the class is taught is different than any other class I have attended because the homework makes me think deeper ..."

What if you are a student and you find out that most faculty simply cannot wait for the term to end?  That you are draining them of their energy?  You see why Mark Edmundson wrote:

The students and the professors have made a deal: Neither of them has to throw himself heart and soul into what happens in the classroom.

Of course, some exclaim those kinds of inanities because, well, academics simply do not know how to say hello and how to engage in a social conversation:

We do, however, feel that it’s necessary to yak about bullshit in academe. The uncomfortable academic -- always hyperbolic in his/her semesterlong anxiety of teaching -- does not know what to say when passing a colleague on campus or chatting in a book exhibit at a conference or spending a minute in the elevator as it proceeds to one’s floor. There’s an uncomfortable silence. What to do? Express something phatic. “How’s your semester going?” “Busy, busy, busy!”

It is a highly narcissistic profession; it's all about the faculty.  Oh well, yet another day in the loony bin! ;)

Phatic addresses are comforting. They allow us to pass over that awkward silence that arises among academics who spend their days with so much to discuss (their own work, classroom lectures, theory, administrative issues, politics, race, gender), but when confronted with the casual moment know only the at-hand phatic comment. “Glad the semester is almost over” comforts both sides of the conversation. Thank God I don’t have to actually inquire into your life; thank God I don’t have to respond. Thank God I don’t have to know what really caused certain things to occur in a certain city in America. Thank God I don’t have to deal with any yak or bullshit.

"Thank God I don’t have to deal with any yak or bullshit" from faculty colleagues is the only comforting thought about the term coming to an end.  But, I know I won't be able to wait to meet with students.  Because it is phenomenally energizing to read something like:

This course has opened my eyes for a lot of reasons.

A college without free speech is nothing but a kindergarten

A few years ago, before the faculty colleagues' behavior made me quit my position as director of the university's Honors Program, I required students to read Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit.  Not only did I love it (as I continue to do so even now) quite a few students loved it as well.  Some even wrote to me about it; like this email that I dug up from my archives:

I have learned far more than I ever wished to about bullshit from your philosophic analysis, "On Bullshit". I feel like there is so much more to bullshit than I ever realized. No wonder you enjoy it so fully.

The world is full of bullshit and bullshitters, and I am one with close to zero tolerance for bullshit and bullshitters.  Which is all the more why when Vox offered a link to write up bogus job descriptions, I crafted this bogus description for myself:

Sriram is a curator who uses straight-up bullshit to create enlightenment of learning in the fecund Willamette Valley http://t.co/e0DHvHrbUk
— sriram khe (@congoboy) March 21, 2015

But then there was one student who wrote to me that his background and values did not permit him to use the word "bullshit" and that, therefore, he would not be ok with reading On Bullshit.  I explained to him that this was a serious book, authored by an Ivy League philosopher.  The student wanted an exemption and some other book in place.  I didn't budge.  The student then wrote in an email to me:

 after careful prayer and consideration, I have decided to withdraw from the Honors program

That was ten years ago.  Thinking back about it, it seems like over the decade higher education has become increasingly worried about making sure that students do not feel offended by the discourse.  Ideas cannot be challenged, can't even be presented, because those ideas might upset students.  It is all about triggers in the syllabus and safe spaces anymore:

Once you designate some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe. It follows that they should be made safer.

You see what a dangerous path higher education is on to now?

I’m old enough to remember a time when college students objected to providing a platform to certain speakers because they were deemed politically unacceptable. Now students worry whether acts of speech or pieces of writing may put them in emotional peril.

Whatever happened to colleges and free speech?

It shows that while keeping college-level discussions “safe” may feel good to the hypersensitive, it’s bad for them and for everyone else. People ought to go to college to sharpen their wits and broaden their field of vision. Shield them from unfamiliar ideas, and they’ll never learn the discipline of seeing the world as other people see it. They’ll be unprepared for the social and intellectual headwinds that will hit them as soon as they step off the campuses whose climates they have so carefully controlled. What will they do when they hear opinions they’ve learned to shrink from? If they want to change the world, how will they learn to persuade people to join them?

I, too, would prefer a world filled with compassion and empathy, and with no place for hate and cruelty.  But, working towards such an ideal is different from understanding the harsh reality of the world as it is.

But, colleges have only amplified their "student life bureaucracy," as I refer to them, which is what the op-ed author explains as:

Only a few of the students want stronger anti-hate-speech codes. Mostly they ask for things like mandatory training sessions and stricter enforcement of existing rules. Still, it’s disconcerting to see students clamor for a kind of intrusive supervision that would have outraged students a few generations ago. But those were hardier souls. Now students’ needs are anticipated by a small army of service professionals — mental health counselors, student-life deans and the like. This new bureaucracy may be exacerbating students’ “self-infantilization,” as Judith Shapiro, the former president of Barnard College, suggested in an essay for Inside Higher Ed.

Shapiro calls it "self-infantilization" and I use a simpler word: bullshit!

While the following might be an extreme and isolated example, the underlying issues have become all too prevalent:

A few weeks ago, Zineb El Rhazoui, a journalist at Charlie Hebdo, spoke at the University of Chicago, protected by the security guards she has traveled with since supporters of the Islamic State issued death threats against her. During the question-and-answer period, a Muslim student stood up to object to the newspaper’s apparent disrespect for Muslims and to express her dislike of the phrase “I am Charlie.”
Ms. El Rhazoui replied, somewhat irritably, “Being Charlie Hebdo means to die because of a drawing,” and not everyone has the guts to do that (although she didn’t use the word guts). She lives under constant threat, Ms. El Rhazoui said. The student answered that she felt threatened, too.

Re-read that.  A journalist whose life is under threat and, therefore, is protected by security guards even when on a college campus, versus a student feeling "threatened" because of the "I am Charlie" statement.  Who is really under threat and who really needs that safe space, you think?

Such is the state of higher education today!  Bullshit it is :(

I wonder what my favorite public intellectual would say about all these.  Wait, she already did! ;)

The older I get, the more I hate college football

In the market economy, we certainly know how to put a price on anything and everything, irrespective of how much we value that item or the work that a person does.

Take for instance the snow that has been piling up in Boston.  Imagine if the workers whose job it is to clear the roads and streets did not show up for work. Or threatened to go on a strike.  We immediately see the value of the work they do, right?  These are real services they provide, without which quite of bit of life in Boston will come to a standstill.  One would think that they will be highly paid.

source

Or, take elementary school teachers as an example.  We trust them with what pretty much every parent would consider to be the most precious in life--their children.  Teachers who have immense opportunities to shape or ruin their children's futures.   One would think that they will be highly paid.

Instead, you and I and the other billions of humans collectively prefer to pay people for services that we could easily do without.

Take, for instance, the latest news about a college football coach. At the university in the town where I live.

The University of Oregon will pay at least $17.5 million to keep winning football coach Mark Helfrich on his home turf for another five years.

$17.5 million!  Other than this guy who is now spending some of his fortunes on a road trip, I doubt whether any reader of this blog really knows what $17.5 million mean.  I have no freaking clue how to understand that kind of a money.

$17.5 million for coaching a football team.

The market, my friend, knows how to put a price but has no fucking understanding of value!  This is the system that we are stuck with.  Especially when the people can't get enough entertainment in their lives.  To heck with the children in the second grade, but goddammit we shall have entertainment 24x7!

You want more references to understand the distorted and screwed up emphasis on entertainment?

Helfrich’s annual salary is now about six times the UO president’s compensation.

Let me recap.
The coach is for a football team, whose existence is made possible by the university whom the players represent.
Without the university, there will not be students.
Without students, no football team.
The university is there to educate students.
One would think that, therefore, the educator-in-chief, the university president, would be the highest paid officer, right?
But, the coach earns six times what the president is paid!

According to the USA Today coaches salaries database, Helfrich — whose previous annual salary of $2 million ranked 52nd nationally and 10th in the Pac-12 — is now fourth among his Pac-12 counterparts and tied for 22nd nationally with an immediate base-pay raise to $3.15 million.

That, my friend, is how "the market" works!  But, we are stuck with it because the great alternative was infinitely worse.

Keep this in mind the next time you try to convince me, or somebody else, or even yourself, on the glories of the market!

BTW, because a $17.5 million can barely cover the caviar bill:

Some of the fringe benefits in Helfrich’s contract include:
Two courtesy cars.
Membership to the Eugene Country Club and the Downtown Athletic Club.
Use of a skybox suite and 12 tickets to home football games; four tickets to home games of Oregon’s other varsity sports.
Travel for his spouse to regular-season road games and for his spouse and children to postseason games.

Meanwhile, the road cleaning crew in Boston gets ready for another dump on Thursday.  The elementary school teachers spend their own money for supplies.  We pay bullshit jobs quite a bit, and make sure we would attack the real value adders if they asked for an Oliver Twist-more!

in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.  Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.

We are fucked up!

ps: I am sure there will be some who will claim that these are not representative of a free market.  But, hey, that claim is no different from die hard Marxists' claim that the USSR was not practicing true Communism.  So, no point talking about some Utopian version of anything that does not exist on this planet.

When ignorance feels like expertise. The confident idiots we are.

Yes, that is the story of me as a faculty in the classroom.

Come to think of it, that is the story of my life.

I suppose if I were to ever write an autobiography (as if I have not shared enough of my life in this blog!) the title of that book will be "A Confident Idiot."  Hey, what are you sniggering at?

Perhaps you are chuckling at how freely I admit to my idiocy.  That, dear reader, is one of the greatest benefits of aging, unlike the pretensions that I had to stage-manage when I was younger.

Turns out that whether we are young or old, we are all confident idiots, writes a Cornell University professor:

For more than 20 years, I have researched people’s understanding of their own expertise—formally known as the study of metacognition, the processes by which human beings evaluate and regulate their knowledge, reasoning, and learning—and the results have been consistently sobering, occasionally comical, and never dull.
The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” As it turns out, this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve. Although what we know is often perceptible to us, even the broad outlines of what we don’t know are all too often completely invisible. To a great degree, we fail to recognize the frequency and scope of our ignorance.

Recall that profound adage about wisdom: not knowing that we don't know is not the mark of a wise one.  To understand deep down that we know very little and that we know that we don't know is one heck of a strong position.  Well, unless you want to be a politician!

Of course, we will assume that the Cornell professor, David Dunning, knows what he is writing about ;)

[In] many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers—and we are all poor performers at some things—fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.
What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

That's right--the ones who are incompetent are blessed with inappropriate confidence.  Go figure!  No wonder then that politicians are damn confident people ;)

But, hold your laughter:

Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you. But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all.

Recall that profound adage about why people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones?  You and I are in our own little glass houses, too!

To quite an extent, it is all because that is how we are wired; the brain is awesome, but that brain is also why we become confident idiots:

An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate by-product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate. But our genius for creative storytelling, combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can sometimes lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunate, or downright dangerous—especially in a technologically advanced, complex democratic society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with immense destructive power (See: crisis, financial; war, Iraq). As the humorist Josh Billings once put it, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” (Ironically, one thing many people “know” about this quote is that it was first uttered by Mark Twain or Will Rogers—which just ain’t so.)

Thus,

people rely on the cognitive clutter in their minds—whether it’s an ideological reflex, a misapplied theory, or a cradle-born intuition—to answer technical, political, and social questions they have little or no direct expertise in.

Harry Frankfurt had a much simpler way to describe all this: we bullshit!  Frankfurt noted that the ability to bullshit, and the inclination to do so, does not decrease with education but actually increases with it--because of all the new skills we picked up to articulate ideas about which we don't know a damn thing.  While Frankfurt reached that via philosophy, the Cornell professor approaches it via psychology.

So, any suggestions?

For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil’s advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect. It helps to try practicing what the psychologist Charles Lord calls “considering the opposite.” To do this, I often imagine myself in a future in which I have turned out to be wrong in a decision, and then consider what the likeliest path was that led to my failure. And lastly: Seek advice. Other people may have their own misbeliefs, but a discussion can often be sufficient to rid a serious person of his or her most egregious misconceptions.

Aha, that is no different from what I tell students all the time.  Phew, good to know that I have not been a confident idiot in advocating that method! ;)

The built-in features of our brains, and the life experiences we accumulate, do in fact fill our heads with immense knowledge; what they do not confer is insight into the dimensions of our ignorance. As such, wisdom may not involve facts and formulas so much as the ability to recognize when a limit has been reached. Stumbling through all our cognitive clutter just to recognize a true “I don’t know” may not constitute failure as much as it does an enviable success, a crucial signpost that shows us we are traveling in the right direction toward the truth.

Exactly.  If you don't know, be confident and bold when you say "I don't know."  But then try to know as well.

Source: The New Yorker, of course!

Mr. Burns Endorses Romney, and Students rally that election is bullshit!

From America's Finest News Source:

Don't forget to keep an eye on the news tickers at the bottom of the screen--they are atrociously hilarious :)

No, that rally was not to protest the following Romney endorsement!

Forget the debate hype. It's Obama's to lose, not Romney's to win

Slick sales people do what they have to do in order to win over a potential customer.  The slickest of them all, like Mitt Romney or Karl Rove, do it really well through Bullshit.

It is "Bullshit" and not "bullshit" because I am referring to Professor Frankfurt's charming little book, where he makes a wonderful point that the truth is not of concern to the bullshitter.  The bullshitter simply says whatever will work for the moment, and cares not where the truth is.  A liar, as Frankfurt noted, has respect for the truth and knows what the truth is, and fights to make sure that the truth shall not be revealed.  Frankfurt observed that in the age of marketing--products or candidates, it doesn't matter--we bullshit when we want to market it.  Full disclosure is not what we engage in when we want to market anything.

I doubt that Romney's and the GOP's bullshit alone can win over the few voters who are not already firmly in the blue or red corners.  And given that the presidential election is decided not by popular vote alone, but by winning a majority of electoral votes, well, we need to keep track of the probable electoral vote distribution between these two candidates.

The Economist (yes, that damned Socialist newspaper from Europe!) projects 285 to 253 in favor of Obama:

Over at the New Yorker, John Cassidy gives Obama an even larger margin (assuming a split in the tossups):

Cassidy notes:

Everything now depends on whether Romney can sustain his momentum. In 2004, John Kerry got a similar bounce—about four or five points in the national polls—after a strong performance in the first debate, but his surge didn’t last very long. It is possible that Romney’s bounce will meet the same fate. Indeed, there is some preliminary evidence to suggest that this is already happening.

I disagree with Cassidy: it does not depend on whether Romney can sustain the momentum, but whether Obama will keeping throwing it away.  

If you are so inclined, watch the debates and enjoy the theatrics there.  I have better things to do--like grading assignments, going for walks, cooking, laundry ... in other words, my life!

BTW, it doesn't mean that Obama doesn't Bullshit.  All politicians all do. And they are all honourable men, indeed!

Marketing graduate school

As if I needed additional materials as evidence of how we aggressively market graduate education, despite the whole thing being a "graduate scheme," well, here is an example--excerpted from a campus email:

Graduate School Week is returning this October! It is a great opportunity to help introduce students to graduate school information. ...

Class Presentations: An opportunity for faculty to bring a grad school presentation right into your courses! We will work with you to set up a class presentation for your classes. This presentation can be very flexible - ... The idea is to help integrate this information into a class period where students can get the most essential parts of graduate school information for their needs, and for you to be able to help get this information to them by inviting us into the classroom....

WOU Graduate Programs Fair: ...booths from all of WOU's graduate programs will be set up with representatives on hand to give out information, answer questions, and help orient students to the types of graduate programs WOU offers. A great way for undergraduates to learn more about degrees right here at WOU. (And a wonderful way for students to get extra credit for attending!)

BTW, did you catch that "extra credit" deal for attending the fair? :(

Harry Frankfurt noted that marketing, by its very nature, requires a whole lot of bullshitting!

Debt Ceiling: Money talks and bullshit walks!

Forget the pundits and politicians--the best analysis is in the videos here :)

The Daily Show - Armadebtdon 2011 - Republicans Think Obama Is Obsessed
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Senior Economic Analyst explains the importance of this: we will soon hit the bullshit ceiling!

The Daily Show - Armadebtdon 2011 - National Bulls**t Ceiling
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Well, here is the walking bullshit meter, Professor Harry Frankfurt, who postulated that bullshit will only keep increasing :(

Writing, in 800 words or less

Paul Krugman writes:

If I had my way, we’d require students to write 800-word essays, just for writing and reasoning practice.

I have been doing this for years now.  It forces students to develop well-focused arguments.  There is also one other huge benefit: it minimizes the possibility of Bullshit.  (Come to think of it, we need to impose such word restrictions whenever faculty speak or write anywhere, anytime!  editor: does that include you? Awshutup!)

Anyway, back to Krugman:

It’s really, really hard to say something meaningful in a limited space. And yet, that constraint has its virtues: it forces you to be concise, to figure out what you really need to say and skip the rest, to find turns of phrase that are shorter and usually plainer. And my experience is that the process of doing all that almost always makes the thing read better.

Yep.  While my columns do not have the importance or reach that Krugman's have, I am always aiming for a length of between 675 and 725 words.  Unless the newspaper restricts me to 500 words or less.