Schneier and Hawley

Directed from BoingBoing, I’ve been reading the installments of Bruce Schneier’s illuminating interview with TSA head Kip Hawley. I give Hawley some credit for agreeing to do the interview: not that many bureaucrats would agree to this kind of public discussion with a highly knowledgeable critic.

I’m unimpressed with Hawley’s answers to a lot of tough questions, though. Today’s installment is on the no-fly list, for example. Schneier (and many commenters at the site) zero in on one especially frustrating bit of evasion. Hawley concedes that there are names on the no-fly list that shouldn’t be there, and says TSA is trying hard to eliminate them. But, he says, the no-fly list also “works” and helps to prevent some people from flying. Hawley says that every week a small number of people show up at the airport and are not allowed to fly and that if we only knew who they were, we’d approve of the use of the list because these people must not be allowed to fly.

Schneier’s had a great response to this argument for a long time, and Hawley doesn’t recognize or respond to that critique. Hawley is not saying that the no-fly list is being used as a tool to identify and detailed suspected terrorists, leading to either their deportation or eventual conviction for crimes. What he’s claiming is that every week, a handful of people try to get on board a plane and are prevented from doing so because they are too dangerous to be allowed to fly under any circumstances. Dangerous how? Because they’ve got weapons or bombs on them right that second? Then find those weapons or explosives and convict them. If you know, really know, someone has a high probability of wanting to carry out a terrorist act on an airplane, it shouldn’t be too hard to find the evidence of preparations for that act when they show up at the airport. In what respect is someone “dangerous” to the safety of a flight if they’re not carrying anything that would allow them to attack that flight? Moreover, what does it mean that every single week there are a handful of people trying to board flights who are prevented from boarding (legitimately, according to Hawley) but who cannot be linked in any definitive material or direct fashion to terrorism and therefore convicted or detained? Seriously, what the hell is Hawley trying to say here? What is the use of that no-fly list? The use of taking off shoes? The use of making people carry fluids in little bags?

Like almost every practice he’s tried to defend so far in the interview, what it seems to me to boil down to is, “We’re trying to create enough of an impression that we’re doing something so that we can cover our asses when and if something actually does happen”. One commenter observed that some of what TSA does may also be about trying to create enough delays that a nervous would-be terrorist has more opportunities to display their nervousness to watchful experts, which strikes me as a plausible security practice and one that Hawley might have trouble bluntly admitting to. (E.g., we’re not doing all this stuff because it’s effective in and of itself, but because we’re trying to create a process that puts psychological pressure on passengers.)

I’m curious about whether Schneier will press Hawley on the actual conduct of TSA screeners towards the public. I’ve now encountered quite a few of them personally who are arbitrary or threatening towards most of the people passing through their supervision, and there’s a great many anecdotes out there of varying reliability about such behavior. That, too, strikes me as one of the purposes of the no-fly list and many other measures: to create a pervasive impression of authoritarian scrutiny. It’s the opposite of what an open society should be trying to accomplish with security measures. Hawley says there’s no danger of people being put on a no-fly list because they object to a TSA procedure while travelling or because of their political views–but without some sense that TSA procedures are subject to scrutiny by third parties who are not part of the security apparatus, there’s no reason to trust in his assurances.

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment

Institutional Cultures and External Missions

I’m generally not drawn to arguments about the discrepancy between a politician’s personal behavior and their public political positions, unless those political positions are already directed at personal or private behavior. If you’re a conservative politician who wants to legislate sexual morality and you make a public point of your own virtue, then you’re fair game if you’re caught with prostitutes. If you argue that individuals need to change their environmental practices and believe that government should compel them to change, then your own environmental practices are a legitimate issue. If a politician doesn’t have a history of advocacy about private sexual behavior, then I could care less what he or she does, and the same goes for most political positions. A policy position can be valid even if the individual arguing for it is a dodgy character in some fashion.

I am more bothered, however, by civic and political organizations that don’t practice what they preach. I just encountered another example of this pattern recently–a group that promotes a laid-back, open and unconventional sensibility in their public mission but who are deeply hierarchical, snobbish, and arrogant in their internal institutional culture. I’ve seen it before: a lot of non-profits and community groups, for example, argue strongly for values and virtues in public life that they themselves don’t practice. That’s often not a case of trying and failing, either, but of total bloody-minded refusal to even recognize or discuss the discrepancy. One vivid example I remember one person I know encountering was a group whose leader was strongly feminist and pro-labor in the way she interpreted the group’s mission but who pressured people working for the organization to do unpaid work and give up various entitlements. I don’t think this is just a pattern in liberal or left-wing groups, either. There have been more than a few public revelations about organizations of religious conservatives whose institutional culture is miles away from the virtues they advocate publically, for example.

Occasionally this cuts in the opposite direction, too. I can think of a few organizations that appear to defend some form of hierarchy and elitism in their public mission that are collegial, inclusive and unpretentious in their internal operations.

Part of the problem is that there’s no way to really know about this kind of thing unless you interact with a particular group in great detail or you know and trust someone who has worked with that group. But when I think about transparency with regard to civic organizations and non-profit groups, this kind of information is really what I want to know most about. It’s nice to know how a group spends its money, but I’d like to know more, “does this group try to apply its own political or social advocacy to itself”? Do they talk internally about how to align their institutional culture with their mission?

Posted in Miscellany, Politics | 4 Comments

It’s Not the Size, It’s What You Do With It

Endowments, that is.

Large endowments for universities and colleges are not in and of themselves a problem or an embarassment, nor should institutions with large endowments hesitate to try and increase the size of their endowment still further both through investments and donations.

The real issue is one that Margaret Soltan eventually focused on in her critique of Harvard’s endowment management. A large endowment is like an IRA for an immortal. We spend down our IRAs eventually after we retire because we’re going to die and because as a society we’ve decided to limit the capacity of kin groups to accumulate wealth from generation to generation. However, income from interest is a big part of what makes retirement savings work. Institutions don’t spend down their endowments because they’re not going to die (usually).

The bigger an endowment, the more it contributes to the annual operating budget of an institution (educational or otherwise). The pointed questions we need to be asking then concern what is done with those increased resources.

Broadly speaking, you could do a number of things with large and ever-growing endowment income in an institution of higher education.

1) You could lower the cost of attending the institution. At some proportionate scale of endowment size, you could plausibly make the institution free for anyone admitted. At present, what most selective private institutions do, in effect, is charge a very high fee for relatively wealthy customers and a discounted fee relative to wealth for any customers below a set cutoff, all the way down to no fee.

It sounds very appealing in some respects to make attending completely free, but two things to consider. First, what’s the argument for making it free to wealthy families? That doesn’t serve a social justice objective. Even in a very well-endowed institution, there is a sizeable per-student cost. If it isn’t defrayed by tuition, it’s paid from endowment income, and that payment deprives the institution of other opportunities to use those funds elsewhere.

Second, there’s a lot of evidence out there that lowering the sticker price of selective higher education has a perverse impact on the quality of applicants, e.g., that parents are using high prices as an informational signal of quality. I understand this thinking better when I think about my own behavior in a high-end grocery store. I’m a foodie, but sometimes I’m buying an ingredient or product for a recipe where I don’t have personal experience with the quality difference between three products on the shelf. Yet I know one thing: I want the best product. I also don’t care too much about the price difference between a $5.00 product and a $9.00 product if what I’m trying to do is cook an elegant meal for guests. If the product is one that I think is going to make a significant difference in the end result, I may take the $9.00 price tag as an informational signal of quality and buy that. However, when I’m dealing with food where I have personal experience of the product, I often know that the most expensive product is not the best (or even more commonly, I may know that the three products are identical except for their pricing). As a professor, I know that the actual quality of the education you get at Harvard is probably less than what you get at many similar institutions, but it’s very hard for outsiders to fully grasp that, as it depends on information that can’t be easily accessed from the outside. Plus, of course, Harvard’s prestige as an institution translates into economic and social advantages for its students which may make it worth buying a Harvard education even if its day-to-day quality isn’t equal to some other institutions.

The upshot is that using endowment income to lower (or eliminate) the cost of attending a college or university across the board as opposed to the sliding-scale discounting that’s now the common practice might not be the best use of endowment income, and it might perversely damage the institution doing it.

2) You could use endowment income to increase the quality of the institution itself. Soltan focuses on this point, and properly so. What are most colleges and universities with large endowments doing with their incomes? I think the average or typical answer is, “Much much more of what they already do”. In other words, the expansion of capacity and capability has flowed amorphously out of the existing structure of most institutions. More research, more faculty positions, more administrative capacities, better facilities, upgraded infrastructures. An institute here, a center there. Super Size Me. Eggs in many baskets.

The counter to this strategy would be to argue that expanded incomes from endowments should be largely directed at some singular, specific creative goal, that the institution should resist pressure to increase its administrative capabilities, keep its faculty size largely static, maintain its facilities but not expand them, and do something spectacular and particular.

My question would be, what? Surely the goal of doing a singular spectacular thing with that income is not in and of itself self-evidently better than amorphously improving most of your capabilities in most of what you do. One of Soltan’s suggestions for Harvard has been to look at the example of Florida Southern College, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I guess the suggestion here is to build architectural or artistic marvels for the pleasure of future generations, to make something of lasting beauty. That’s appealing in a way, but it also has a bit of pharonic vanity about it. It doesn’t seem to me to self-evidently outweigh doing more research, hiring more faculty, beefing up administrative capacity, improving most facilities, investing in better infrastructure.

I can think of some ideas that are spectacular which appeal to me personally, including scribbling over the entire structure of the average liberal arts and professional curricula to try something completely new. But that would be extremely risky, the kind of risk that trustees charged with due diligence are asked not to take (to the point of being liable if they do.) But this is the kind of argument that anyone who complains about the size of university endowments is really obligated to take on board, because size really isn’t the question. If you’re not happy with endowments, what you’re really complaining about is the uses to which they are put. So, then: which uses make you unhappy, and why? What should be done instead (at the cost of no longer doing something which is presently being done)?

Posted in Academia | 18 Comments

Let’s Not Mince Words

The US Senate is being “tough” on Gonzalez, but it comes down to this: either Gonzalez or Comey is lying. They need to ask him straight up: are you calling Comey a liar? No more of this postmodern “you have to see it in context” shit. Either the Attorney General of the United States of America is going to say, “The other guy is a liar” or not. If not, that’ll make it clear that we have a President who thinks it’s a jolly good idea to have the top law enforcement officer of the country be a liar. If he says Comey is a liar, then stack the public records of the two men up against each other. Hint: Gonzalez doesn’t look real good. Especially given that this is an Administration that has been more than willing to take a dump on any man or woman of honor who had the guts to break with them in public and criticize them. The supreme political principle in this time? Loyalty to the President. Not loyalty to your responsibilities, your office, your society.

Posted in Politics | 5 Comments

Harry Potter as Complex Event

I’m editing a long section of my manuscript that argues for seeing European colonialism in Africa, and specifically indirect rule, as an emergent, complex-system kind of institution. There are some really overt explanatory and causal arguments that come with this shift: a system that some argue was designed from above with specific instrumental intent becomes instead the accidental consequence of many smaller historical movements and developments. In other ways, it’s not necessarily that different a perspective. Power doesn’t disappear from the scene, imperialism doesn’t become benevolent, and the kinds of mutualism or negotiation between Africans and Europeans within indirect rule practices that have received more attention in the historiography in recent years just take on a slightly different structural character.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to rewrite many similar kinds of events using the vocabulary of complex-systems theory. Such a shift isn’t necessarily radically unlike anything we know, but it does strike at the heart of one kind of common explanatory framework that many of us turn to when we’re trying to explain why a social or cultural event has occurred. I’ll call this “popular social science”, a kind of generalized, public-sphere version of the disciplinary practices of economics and political science. It’s regression analysis without the math. People try to explain an event by identifying its causes or inputs and then proceed to identify the single most important independent variable through common sense or observed assertions about the effect size of that variable. So we end up with stories like, “It was going after the squeegee men that reduced crime in New York”, “The reason that 9/11 happened is US training and arming of jihadis in Afghanistan during Soviet occupation”, or “Pirates of the Caribbean 2 sold as well as it did because of Johnny Depp’s performance in the first film, not because the audience liked the second film better than the first.” These are popular arguments about causation, echoed by a variety of scholarly arguments.

A causal narrative that follows a complex-systems logic is different. Rather than trying to subtract away all competing explanations to identify a single key variable, a complex-system story would want to keep piling it on, because the whole point is that an important discrete event of some kind happens because of the accidental or unplanned convergence of many smaller changes and ongoing developments. For a story-teller, though, this poses a problem. How to convey complexity in simple terms?

Let’s take the example of the Harry Potter phenomenon. A lot of the writing I’ve seen in the press about this ever since the first book took off into the sales stratosphere wants to settle on a single overriding explanation. It’s the general quality of the books! It’s cunning marketing! It’s Rowling’s particular flavor of fantasy and school-days pastiche! It’s the triumph of geekery in mass culture! It’s a new generation of shared parent-child culture!

It seems silly to want to settle on any of those as a single or overriding explanation. A complex-systems story isn’t just “it’s all of those and more”, though. That would leave a complex-system story as, “Nothing is explainable, because all events are irreducibly complex and all explanations equal”. In public life, that would leave us with little more to say about any event besides “que sera, sera”.

A good complex-system story, it seems to me, is always a history. It’s a story about how many tributaries flow into a river. Once you’re at the river and you’re looking back at the terrain, then of course it seems inevitable that they would flow as they did. But if you start at the point when one glacier started to melt as it grinded its way back up a mountain valley, trickling this way and that, the precise placement and flow of the river isn’t at all inevitable, and very small shifts in how that river evolved over long periods of time is what makes for its unique character, what makes for an Angel Falls or a Grand Canyon.

So take Harry Potter again. Here’s the story I think you could tell.

The first tributary: over the course of the past century, “children’s literature” grew both in the range of stories it contained and in the amount of books. This growth was fed by the democratization of education, the spread and valorization of literacy, the idea that childhood was a special time of life needing special forms of appropriate entertainment and leisure, by the growth of consumerism after 1945, and by the huge demographic bulge known as the “Baby Boom”.

The second tributary: a common narrative structure and set of tropes within children’s literature based around schooling and coming of age, an early representative of which was Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

The third tributary: JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings popularized the genre of fantasy in the 1970s and contributed a key conceptual vocabulary that then mutated and took on new forms in other books and in other genres of popular culture.

The fourth tributary: a specific set of children’s books published between 1975 and 1996 whose protagonists and themes helped make the Harry Potter books seem familiar in both theme and tone (Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, Lloyd Alexander’s Taran series, Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Margaret Storey’s The Dragon’s Sister and Timothy Travels, lots more)

The fifth tributary: a convergence of adult and children’s entertainment produced in part by films like Disney’s A Little Mermaid but also by the coming of age of a generation of parents who continued to preferentially consume cultural works resembling some of their favorite works from childhood, who were for various reasons less concerned with emphasizing their adulthood through rejecting childhood leisure habits.

The sixth tributary: JK Rowling’s extremely appealing mixture of established themes, character types and narrative structures. (E.g., the Harry Potter books aren’t just a random pastiche, but instead a markedly skilled and creative combination of familiar elements, forming an original whole.)

The seventh tributary: the initial slow popularization of the series among children and fantasy-reading adults, giving the first book an air of authenticity, combined with new communicative networks (e.g., the Internet) that allowed people making such cultural discoveries to exchange their discoveries more rapidly through networks of similarly minded consumers.

The eight tributary: smart marketing of the series once its popularity began to take off.

The ninth tributary: the intensifying feedback loop of the media attention to the series popularity, bringing in new readers and making the phenomenon structurally permanent. (This commonly happens to other cultural “series” of various kinds, and the quality of subsequent installments has to be truly dreadful in order to dampen the feedback effects.)

—-

I don’t know how to tell that story in as compact a fashion as “It’s because Scholastic advertised the series heavily” or “It’s because Rowling is derivative, kids have lousy taste and our mass culture sucks” (the Harold Bloom approach). But I think you can organize this kind of story so that it’s not just a random list of contributing causes, either. I’ve tried to go chronologically (oldest cause first, most recent effect last) and from levels of structural depth to levels of contingent immediacy. (e.g., “children’s literature” is a really complex phenomenon in its own right, structurally embedded in its own complex history; “smart marketing” is a very episodic, fast-moving response to a situation where arguably “dumb marketing” could have affected this history in an opposite way).

The important thing is not to get gulled into giving one of these mini-stories the prize of being the key or singular event. Instead, this is like a simultaneous version of “for want of a nail”: all these stories have to flow into the river for the river to flow its spectacular and specific course, to make its waterfalls and canyons and change everything downstream. There’s a place for some determinism in this story: by 1997, children’s literature was an established cultural system, fantasy was an important part of it, adult-children crossover was well-established in the marketplace. There would have been books and films produced by the confluence of those things. There’s a place for some contingency in this story: Rowling’s creative abilities, the marketing by Scholastic, the identification by “early adopters” of the book’s appeal.

I also think you can tell a complex-systems story where the effects of the event can be described without having to rehearse the causes endlessly. In fact, that’s the other place where the complex-systems story differs from the single-variable crowd. The single-variable crowd are often going to assume the continued determinative importance of that variable. E.g., if they argue that Harry Potter took off because it was marketed aggressively, they’re going to assume that aggressive marketing can sell most cultural products. The complex-system storyteller can say instead, “It almost doesn’t matter why Harry Potter became an event if what you want to know is, ‘What will its consequences be’? The event is not the sum of its causes, its causes cannot be disaggregated from it: it is now a phenomenon in its own right that will cause future events as a singular force”.

So you go into the children’s section of the bookstore and you see a great many books that I think would not have existed but for Harry Potter, or which are being marketed and written differently than they would have been. You see Hollywood making films that I think no producer would have thought to greenlight in 1996, let alone throw huge sums of money at. (The Golden Compass, for example.) But because the Harry Potter phenomenon wasn’t driven centrally or in a single-cause way by an attraction to literacy, it also isn’t going to have the spillover effects on literacy as a general phenomenon that some commenters keep expecting it to have.

Posted in Academia, Books, Popular Culture | 23 Comments

The Trouble With Harry

Harry Reid will really lose any semblance of enthusiastic support from me if he can’t muster the good sense to get out of the RIAA’s pocket.

The Democrats have got to get clear on this point in general. You can’t go up against the Administration’s undermining of civil liberties while also letting RIAA lobbyists insert whatever appalling legal ideas they’ve come up with this week into legislation.

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy, Politics | 1 Comment

Look With Care at the Shape of the Square

I’m reading David Christian’s Maps of Time, which I’ll probably comment on more extensively here soon.

One small point that caught my attention while reading, however. Christian claims at one point, without a specific attributed sourcing, that sedentary and early agricultural villages everywhere can be identified in part by the fact that the houses they build are square.

I’m just wondering what the evidence is for this claim. I can think of a lot of societies engaged in agriculture that have built round houses. The square house seems to me to be much more ideologically specific wherever I’ve run into it.

This sort of claim is a good example of why I’m a little leery of archaeological work that tries to simplify potentially cultural, intellectual or political issues into materialist claims, or that tries to universalize from a data set that is heavily skewed towards China, the Middle East and Western Europe.

Even as a materialist argument, I’m wondering what evidence there is that square houses last better or are otherwise preferable for permanent settlements.

Posted in Academia, Africa | 7 Comments

Go Ahead and Talk

Further discussion of Harry Potter in the comments. Don’t read if you want to avoid spoilers. Good reading about the book at Russell Arben Fox’s blog and Unfogged.

Any mysteries, oddities, etc. you want cleared up? Let’s work on that, too.

Update: you know what surprises me? That more people aren’t making more out of Harry’s intensely strong resemblance to a certain other messianic figure in this book. More in comments.

Posted in Books, Popular Culture | 40 Comments

Most Annoying?

Well, Swarthmore’s in the running for Gawker’s most annoying liberal arts college. I agree with one commenter, though. How the HELL did Dartmouth not get on this list? Outrageous. Also, in the interest of political balance, St. John’s should totally be on the list. Middlebury, Kenyon and Carleton I think too. Very not fair. And what the hell is Goddard doing on the list when these other worthy luminaries of annoyance did not qualify?

Posted in Academia | 12 Comments

Liveblogging Harry Potter (No Major or Direct Spoilers)

Creepy. Plus: he’s bad!

Please, Rowling, you aren’t going to do something that cliched are you? The eye had better not be what I think it is.

Hey, he’s kind of nice for once. Sort of sweet.

Wow, big action scene. Exciting. NO! Geezus, didn’t see that coming.

Nail-biting. Is everyone ok? Ouch! No body found on that guy, I invoke superhero rules.

Wow. Her?

What are those things for, I wonder. “I open at the close”. Hrm.

Here comes the bride!

Could Rita Skeeter have a point?

JESUS CHRIST!

Good thinking, Hermione. Hey, how’d those guys do that?

Ah, now I see why Kreacher had to be in the story.

Wow, it’s like an episode of Mission: Impossible. Exciting stuff!

Now what? Oh, they’re all thinking the same thing.

It’s like the One Ring, only with 75% less calories. But where’s Mount Doom?

Interesting conversation. Kind of convenient that those guys are just hanging out here fishing or whatever.

YOU BASTARD! COME BACK HERE! Shit.

Don’t trust her. SNAKE! AGH! One hundred thousand nine-year olds just got nightmares.

Yeah, whose patronus is that, anyway? One more bad sign that Rowling’s pulling the cliche. Oo, Harry joins the Polar Bear Club. And he’s back! Thank god. Cool, One Ring down without any fingers lost.

Oh fuck. Now what!! How are they gonna get out of this one? Looks bad. Wait, he’s back? I was wondering when he’d show up to save the day. Good timing. Excellent save! OH NO! [sniffles]

Ok, Harry’s done with his Hamlet phase, getting decisive now. Good job. More Mission Impossible stuff, or is this To Catch a Thief? How are they going to fit all these action bits into the film when they make it? Yow! Ouch! Go go go go go!

[checks book] How is she going to wrap this all up? Getting close to the end. Ah, of COURSE one of those thingies is there. I knew it. (So did Harry.) Oh NO Voldemort is on to them. The Amazing Race commences.

Hey! I forgot all about that guy after reading the Skeeter thing. Nice gun-on-mantelpiece, Rowling. And you really weren’t doing the cliche thing at all! Mad props to you. Ah, so THAT’s the real story about Dumbledore. Wow, totally makes sense.

BIG FUCKING CLIMAX. FUCK YEAH. EVERYTHING. BOOM! WOW! Oh no! GO PROFESSOR MCGONNEGAL. AGGGGH! OUCH! OOOO!

Here it comes! He’s gonna get his. Wow, that was kind of an anti-climax. I want to know all the secrets.

Oh, here come the secrets via ghostly wizard-vision flashback. Ok, kind of what a lot of people said. Yes, it was love.

OH DAMN! EVERYONE WAS RIGHT! [tearing up] Just what a lot of people said. But it’s a bit early, looking at the pages that are left.

Hey. Oh, interesting. Oh, is that it? Ok. Interesting.

Now for the real finale.

Awwwwww. Awwwwwwwwwww. AWWWWWWW. Sniffle.

Posted in Books, Popular Culture | 24 Comments