Robert Frost to BF Skinner, 1926

“All that makes a writer is the ability to write strongly and directly from some unaccountable and almost invincible personal prejudice like Stevensons in favor of all being happy as kings no matter if consumptive, or Hardy against God for the blunder of sex, or Sinclair Lewis’ against small American towns, or Shakespeare’s mixed, at once against and in favor of life itself. I take it that everybody has the prejudice and spends some time feeling for it to speak and write from. But most people end as they begin by acting out the prejudices of other people.”

I’m a Frost booster, but I don’t see the stance of being “at once against and in favor of life itself” as sufficiently focused to be called a “prejudice.”

 

 

 

Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday!

From a New York Times op-ed about the reading and writing curriculum, specifically the decreasing emphasis on prose fiction:

David Coleman, president of the College Board, who helped design and promote the Common Core, says English classes today focus too much on self-expression. “It is rare in a working environment,” he’s argued, “that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.’ ”

But isn’t it also rare to have to write a market analysis?

When we say, in brief, that someone “can write” I hope we are not saying they’re good at creating bureacratic documentation; I think we mean they can share information about a series of facts, events, or assertions concisely and clearly, while maintaining control over tone and diction so as to convey the right emotional relation to the material, and the right status relation with the recipient.

In other words, we are saying they can write e-mail that gets the job done and doesn’t waste time.

I see no reason reading novels wouldn’t teach you how to do this.

 

Writing seminar in mathematics

Tim Carmody, now a senior reporter at the Verge, taught a writing seminar at Penn called “Writing Seminar in Mathematics:  The Language of the Universe”:

For Galileo, the universe is written in the language of mathematics; for Descartes, the methods used in algebra and geometry teach us how to reason about anything, from philosophy to politics. Arguably, mathematics is fundamentally about writing–a set of rules that tell us what we are allowed to write and in what order. This seminar explores how mathematics’ emphasis on careful analysis, methodical argument, and logical proof can teach us to write in both scientific and nonscientific contexts. It will also examine the cultural and literary backgrounds of mathematical discoveries–the amazing, often funny stories behind the theorems scientists and engineers use every day. Our readings will come from philosophy and the history of science as well as Douglas Hofstadter’s wonderful book Gödel, Escher, Bach.

That sounds amazing!  I would love to teach a course like this, maybe someday as a FIG.  But probably not as a MOOC.  Perhaps an entirely new acronym is required.

Yes, scientists should write about science

A couple of people I know linked to this fierce blogpost by a philosopher of science claiming that science journalism is inherently corrupt:

Training scientists to be science communicators, as some insist we should do, merely makes them less active scientists, and they will remain unable to communicate science unless they, too, fall into the drama trap and modify attitudes. Facts are not dramatic. All the actual drama is in how people respond to facts, and that is no longer science, nor even science policy, but simple politics.

This has a number of implications. The most obvious is that we should not expect journalism nor popular publishing to do much to actually educate the lay public. The reason why textbooks and monographs are dry is that they do attempt to cover facts, and the different (actual) ideas and approaches, in order to initiate a critical analysis in the reader. You don’t do this with a breathless Dan Brown style of writing. So if we want a better informed populace, and it is vital that we have one, there is only one way to do it: teach the science to students in a non-partisan fashion, and stop making up drama, which is to say, conflict, where there is none. Evolution is not controversial in science, nor global warming, tobacco causing cancer, and the overuse of pesticides and fertilisers causing massive ecological damage. These are facts in any sense of the word, philosophical debates about factitude notwithstanding. All else is obfuscation for political drama.

Two responses:

• Facts are not dramatic;  but there is drama in the experience of passing from not knowing a fact to knowing it.  One great advantage that writers about math have over writers about the other sciences is that we can enact the mathematics — not an account of the mathematics, but the mathematics itself — right there on the page.  I have taught the proof of the infinitude of primes to undergraduates many times, and it is not dry — when you haven’t seen it before, it’s kind of mindblowing.  No Dan Brown hoo-hah required.
• Tobacco causing cancer is not controversial now, but it was certainly controversial within the memory of many people still now living.  The process by which we passed from “controversial” to “not controversial” is a scientific one (though of course a political one too.)  Talking about that process isn’t obfuscation — it’s a lesson in how we make new facts.

 

1000

This is the thousandth post.

I was going to use this space to give you some statistics, maybe make a Wordle, etc., but I couldn’t figure out how to get WordPress to give me the relevant statistics.

So let’s just say I’ve written a lot of stuff on this blog.  No way is the mean post less than 200 words long, so let’s say close to a thousand print pages.  And I’m really, really glad.  I know lots of people think the blog is dead and we’re all to fling aphorisms at each other on Twitter and Facebook instead.  I love aphorism-flinging, but, for me, blogging sits in a kind of perfect sweet spot; “published” enough that I feel someone’s out there reading, informal enough that I don’t mind making mistakes, short enough that I can bang out a post without compromising a workday, long enough that I can shape an argument that’s not just an aphorism.  Writing this blog, and reading other people’s blogs, has enriched my published writing and my mathematics too.  And I think in some small way it’s been useful to others — the blog has been cited at least 4 times on the arXiv!  That’s more than plenty of my papers.

I don’t care if the blog is dead — if you’re on the fence about starting one, I say you should do it.

A few notes:

• My most popular post, by a mile, was my post alerting the community to Mochizuki’s claimed proof of ABC, which was linked to by several big sites like Hacker News.  It’s been viewed over 50,000 times.  The next most popular was a post about a hiring controversy in math that I won’t link to because the matter is long settled to everyone’s satisfaction.   Next was a post sharing an anonymous account of treatment at a halfway house which is believed to be by David Foster Wallace.  In fact, of the 10 most popular posts, 7 are about math, 2 are about David Foster Wallace, and the remaining one is Is There Life After Potty Power? which, based on my search logs and the comments, gets a lot of views from people who, after hundreds of viewings, have developed a romantic attachment to the star of a toilet-training video.  
• From this you should get the basic idea — people like the math posts a lot and the literature posts a fair amount.  And nobody cares about the Orioles at all.
• When I was considering starting this blog, I asked David Carlton, who’s been doing it much longer, what the secret was to keeping up a blog and not letting it die out.  ”Low standards,” he told me.  What he meant:  to blog you have to be willing to to write things that are inarticulate, or not fully-thought-through, or which still have pieces missing; otherwise blog entries (like some math papers!) end up languishing, invisible and unfinished, forever.  I think it would be better for math if those messy and partial ideas were more public than they are, and I think one way for this to happen is for more mathematicians to blog.  And to have low standards.

Gromov: why we don’t explain things

This common and unfortunate fact of the lack of adequate presentation of basic ideas and motivations of almost any mathematical theory is probably due to the binary nature of mathematical perception.

Either you have no inkling of an idea, or, once you have understood it, the very idea appears so embarrassingly obvious that you feel reluctant to say it aloud…

(Gromov, “Stability and Pinching”)

Althouse on Gatsby

I don’t always see eye-to-eye with my law school colleague and UW superblogger Ann Althouse (and her comments section is a wretched hive of scum and villainy) but I was pleased to see that she’s doing a series of close readings of sentences from The Great Gatsby.  The world needs more close reading.  Today’s entry:

Gatsby’s notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities on his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news.

My own favorite sentence in Gatsby is a simple one.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

Is anybody still editing the New York Times?

From the John Jeremiah Sullivan piece on massage in the NYTimes magazine:

When you feel like that, you don’t leap to be naked in rooms with an assortment of strangers while they rub their hands all over your bare flesh — there’s probably a fetish group for becoming as physically disgusting as you can and then procuring massages, but that’s not my damage. Also, there’s something about massage in general that makes me more, not less, relaxed.

He means “less, not more.”  If you click through you’ll see it’s been corrected in the online version.  So someone noticed it at some point.  But someone should have noticed it before the piece was posted and printed!

See also my complaint about Justin Cronin’s The Passage, which besides being carelessly edited — when you vomit because a vampire bit you, you are retching, not wretching, dammit! — failed to live up to the promise of its very good first 300 pages.  Executive summary:  it starts out as The Stand and ends up as The Dark Tower, and if you think that is not a downgrade then we shall fight.

Back to Sullivan:

But that’s true for so many of us — we fall into our lines of work like coins dropping into slots, bouncing down off various failures and false-starts.

has a nice cadence but does not actually describe a thing that is like the way a coin drops into a slot.  Before the coin goes in the slot, it doesn’t bounce off anything, and after it’s in the slot, it may bounce down off things inside the mechanism (is that what he meant?) but it does so while travelling down a well-defined rigid channel, exactly the opposite of what Sullivan is going for.

Finally:

The yellowish gray-green circles under my eyes had a micropebbled texture, and my skin gave off a sebaceousy sheen of coffee-packet coffee.

Most of this is great, especially “micropebbled,” but “sebaceousy” isn’t right — I’m not sure the “add -y to informalize a word,” move, a lexical way to indicate “kind of” or “sort of,” applies to any adjective, and if it does apply to some, I’m sure it doesn’t apply to “sebaceous.”

 

 

Triple negative

J Cronin’s The Passage is surprisingly interesting and I hope to blog about it at greater length some other time.  (Short version:  it is the only thing I’ve ever read that imitates Stephen King and gets right what works about Stephen King, and this is sort of a great achievement.)  Still, though, there’s this:

It wasn’t that he didn’t like her, nor that she had failed to make her interest less than plain.

It took me about thirty seconds to figure out what this actually said, and once I figured it out, I was pretty sure it didn’t say what Cronin wanted it to say.  But how could any editor read this sentence and not flag it?

Nate Silver is the Kurt Cobain of statistics

Or so I argue in today’s Boston Globe, where I review Silver’s excellent new book.  I considered trying to wedge a “The Signal and The Noise” / “The Colour and the Shape” joke in there too, but it was too labored.

Concluding graf:

Prediction is a fundamentally human activity. Just as a novel is no less an expression of human feeling for being composed on a laptop, the forecasts Silver studies — at least the good ones — are expressions of human thought and belief, no matter how many theorems and algorithms forecasters bring to their aid. The math serves as a check on our human biases, and our insight serves as a check on the computer’s bugs and blind spots. In Silver’s world, math can’t replace or supersede us. Quite the contrary: It is math that allows us to become our wiser selves.