Comments on: That Was the Month That Was

By: Doug

Doug — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 21:11:49 +0000

I think that Bruce Sterling and the Viridian Greens got name-checked pretty early in Stross’ comment thread. If not, they certainly should have been, and if you’re interested in climate and environmental commentary that’s ahead of the curve and orthogonal to tired debates,

A brief excerpt from one of the early Viridian manifestoes:

” The Viridian Grandfather Principle

“When a particular course of green action is suggested, ask yourself if it might not be done better by someone who is dead. For instance, conserving water. Is your deceased grandfather better at conserving water than you are? He is, isn’t he? He’s even better at boycotting ExxonMobil. These may be worthy efforts, but they are not Viridian. Viridians prefer to carry out green activities that living people can do well.”

Another Viridian precept is not to fight consumer impulses because they are going to win anyway. Make green choices the most desirable things around and let people’s naturally un-altruistic tendencies work for you. (See also, I suppose, United States Constitution.)

Anyway, if the Stross discussion interested you, Sterling will too. Plus he’s also got a blog.

By: jim

jim — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 01:07:46 +0000

There’s actually a connection between your (1) and (2). John Holbo’s talk for the blogging panel (a pdf of his draft is linked from Scott’s piece) referred to the report on tenure and promotion (Michael Berube, also on the panel, had been part of the task force: academic incest again). John made an a priori argument that tenure rates ought to remain constant, that a department that too frequently denies tenure thereby incurs avoidable costs: every time you deny tenure you subject yourself to a new search process. To my mind, this nicely resolved the problem with the task force’s report. There are three statements in the report: (1) the publication requirements for tenure in the humanities is increasing, (2) the opportunities for publication in the humanities are decreasing, (3) tenure rates remain constant. The only way all three of these can be true simultaneously is for there to be a disjunction between what departments say are their requirements for tenure and what departments actually do when confronted with a tenure candidate. John’s argument can probably be pushed into a game-theoretic argument that there’s an optimal rate of tenure denial, which sufficiently creates the impression (not least to one’s junior faculty) of dedication to research, while incurring least recruiting costs.

By: withywindle

withywindle — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 22:36:30 +0000

You are admirably consistent–this is, of course, the same philosophical outlook you bring to bear on American military intervention abroad. Kudos.

Just to toss something out there: we do actually now have some data on the effects of past environmental programs over the last century, so it is possible to argue (if hardly with total predictive accuracy) from experience. So 1) this argument predicated on experience is open to environmentalists; and 2) done rightly, it should have some purchase with you.

********************************************

You must have written some hundreds of thousands of words on the blog by now. I can’t imagine that you haven’t revealed very substantial amounts of your character by now. I am not sure that the narrative of your daily life would tell us more. (And, I confess, I rather like the idea of some scraps of privacy remaining in the world. Do remain a bulwark against the TMI-ing of the world.)