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I hope you've never been to Ohio

Revisado: 12-16-18

The story is rather one-sided, but that's not that unusual given the time period, and the extant record (how many natives could write English in the 18th century?). But the thing that killed me is that the reader has literally no idea how to pronounce the names of locations in Ohio. Surely, he could have found this out before recording. I mean, he utterly botches even easy ones like Steubenville (the accent is not on "ben"), and he is utterly hopeless for Portage (a real English word, he pronounces like it's French); Scioto and Chillicothe are practically unrecognizable. If you are familiar with these names, it is maddening to hear them mispronounced over and over and over again, and it detracts from the narrative (such as it is).

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Mixed Bag

Revisado: 12-03-18

Penning a review of a book that posits the death of expertiseis surely bound to invite criticisms that I lack the appropriate expertise toeven contemplate such a thing. How dareI purport to know better than the author? I almost feel tempted to tout my own credentials to divert some of thosecriticisms, but that would take away from making an informed, reasonedcritique. I can only hope it will betaken in the spirit in which it was intended..

While I certainly feel some sympathy for the topic of thebook, the quality of the argument is a little uneven. The beginning of the book, in particular,comes across as a bit of a rant demanding respect for experts with some validexamples mixed in with examples that smack of demanding respect for rich,white, male privilege, and generational disdain. The irony is that the author isn't that mucholder than I am, and certainly doesn't remember the era he claims to want torecreate. The second half of the book ismore even, but really fails to provide any solutions to the identified problemother than to exhort the public to do better. The author can't really seem to decide whether he respects self-learningor not. At times he rails against thefake expertise of autodidacts, and at other times suggests that those of usoutside academia need to be more intellectually engaged. The confusion seems to be rooted in a similarconfusion to that surrounding the term meritocracy. A true meritocracy and a true autodidact aregood things, but many people who claim to be products of meritocracy, and thosewho claim to be self-taught, are neither meritorious nor possess genuinelearning. It's important to disentanglethe terms from the claims, but this is part of the larger problem identified bythe book..

Certainly, anti-intellectualism in America is real, and themodern lack of respect for experts--including knowledge and truthgenerally--are also real. A respect forauthority can go too far, as the author correctly identifies, but as a societythat depends on specialization as all modern societies do: a healthy respectfor those who have acquired knowledge and skills you do not have (if onlybecause there are not enough hours in the day to know everything) is necessaryfor society to function. However, theauthor does not fully escape arguments for his position that smack ofintellectual snobbery, even while acknowledging the expertise of theplumber. The Ivy League pedigree isshowing here. But instead of dwelling onthat, I want to address a couple of his more specific, and more problematicexamples, and where the author appears to stray into areas where he himselfappears to be uninformed..

One complaint typical of white men is about trigger warnings,and safe spaces, while ignoring the problems of casual racism and sexism. The author makes this same mistake twice inrapid succession and rails about the challenge to intellectual authority thisrepresents, and inability of young people to confront hard issues. He misses the point of his own examples. Trigger warnings are useful to help peoplesteel themselves mentally for a difficult conversation. They simply acknowledge that humans areemotional creatures, and if we have been through a difficult experience relatedto the topic under discussion, a warning gives us a moment to prepare ourselvesfor the inevitable flood of emotions. Warnings are about not being needlessly cruel,while still engaging with difficult topics. By preparing ourselves, we can remain calm and rational, rather thanbeing surprised by it and be more likely to get carried away by thoseemotions. Not having them would be adisservice to a rigorous and thoughtful discussion. This is entirely differentthan students becoming upset at racist Halloween costumes. The causal racism or sexism of ages pastsends a silent message that I, the wearer of this costume, don't respectyou. Frequently, such costumes alsoadvertise a lack of understanding of history (the very definition of beinguninformed). Asking for cultural andracial sensitivity outside the classroom is only teaching students about thepublic disregard for discrimination: it is not confronting difficultissues. Why should we want to preservebehavior in the public space where we communicate to our fellow citizens thatwe think everyone else is less of a human being if they are not a whiteman? Walking to class should not be anobject lesson in causal sexism or racism, and demanding a certain level ofhuman decency outside the classroom does not mean students are not prepared toconfront it on a rigorous intellectual level in the classroom. Moreover, asking the English department tobroaden their idea of ''great poet'' beyond European white men to those whomight also be great but who have been systematically excluded fromconsideration for centuries is not anti-intellectual, or even anti-expertise. Rather, it is demanding that the faculty dotheir jobs: apply that expertise to acknowledge the abilities of those who havepreviously been overlooked..

Another error the author makes is to suggest that becausenon-Ivy League schools aren't sufficiently ''competitive,'' that are producingan inadequate education, because, he says, students don't graduate at the same rate as schools with more privilegedstudents. He completely disregards thefact that many Ivy League students are there either on scholarship, or aresupported by sufficiently wealthy and privileged families that they can affordto just take classes; so, of course, they may be not only of above-averageintelligence, but also can dedicate their time to study and to take advantageof opportunities their less-privileged peers cannot, like unpaid internships orresearch opportunities afforded by wealthier schools. Students at commuter universities andcommunity colleges do sometimes have some of the issues addressed by theauthor, but the students are usually also older, many have families and thusmore responsibilities, or are from less privileged families who cannot givetheir kids a free-ride to college, and so must work to help supportthemselves. Paying for college is notonly expensive, but eats up the time needed to study, and makes it impossibleaccept all the opportunities that might be available that would eat up evenmore time. It also means that studentsmay not be able to afford to take as many classes at once, and so yes, it maytake longer. Personal emergencies suchas illness or job loss may disrupt the ability to take courses for extendedperiods of time. But these same schoolscan represent opportunity that would not be available for highly talentedstudents who did not have the grades or the focus at an early age, or theprivilege of going to a high-quality private school, that would guaranteeadmission to the Ivy League, even assuming they could afford it. While certainly higher education, and publiceducation is experiencing problems, those problems are more closely related tothe dearth of funding and the pressures from the administration than it is thefault of the students. And do I getasked (as a college-level math instructor) to give A's away to students thatdon't deserve it? Sure, I do. Is it annoying and even a little insulting?Sure, it is. But, supposing that thisrepresents the majority of students is simply not statistically accurate..

The most disappointing aspect of the book, though, is thelack of realistic solutions. Yes, it'simportant to recognize that there are problems in education in America,cultural problems, and problems of accepting fact and correction. Without giving some thought to serioussolutions to the problems identified (real or imagined), this is why the bookcan read so much like a glorified rant. The public doesn't understand statistics to critique scientific orpseudo-scientific claims found online. Advocating for greater information literacy would help. Reimagining public libraries to takeadvantage of the information curating expertise of librarians would behelpful. The author's only suggestion isfor the public to ''do better,'' or defer to the knowledge of experts harder,without really making any practical way to make that a reality. In the end, it makes the book more of adisappointment than anything else.

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What the h*** are “Texians”???

Revisado: 12-01-18

While the material is fine as a short intro to the Mexican-American War, listening to the audio where the narrator keeps referring to “Texians” is a lot like sitting in a room with a small cloud of hungry mosquitos that gets more and more annoying as time goes on.

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The story state-by-state

Revisado: 04-06-13

What did you love best about Ratification?

The role of early conventions on the outcome of later conventions isn't often emphasized in most history classes. In a way, very little has changed in politics.

Any additional comments?

Each state has it's own chapter in the order the state conventions met to ratify so that the impact of one ratification convention on the next one is clear. It's also really apparent how close-run a thing ratification was, contrary to what is sometimes the modern opinion that this was a done-deal from the beginning. What I think I found most interesting were the arguments made about protecting liberty. The debate during this period often claimed that it would be the states that would protect citizens from violations of liberty by the national government. Today, it seems more like this is reversed, that it's the federal government protecting the citizens from violations of liberty by the states.

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Jan 1775 - Dec 1776

Revisado: 04-06-13

Would you try another book from David McCullough and/or David McCullough?

yes

Any additional comments?

1776 covered just the period of the Revolution from late 1775 to the end of 1776 around the time of the Battle of Trenton. It's primarily a book about Washington and his struggles as a commander learning to fight the British during what turned out to be a very bad year for him militarily, and suppressing dissent from the ranks of his own commanders vying for his job. While the Declaration of Independence is mentioned, it's a relatively far off political move that has little impact on the conduction of the war, except to increase the pressure not to screw it up. The slow pace of information exchange is interesting from a modern perspective because generals in the field are often making decisions contrary to the king's because it takes three months for messages to cross the Atlantic.

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Rather strange definition of "elite"

Revisado: 04-06-13

If you could sum up Twilight of the Elites in three words, what would they be?

good; limited scope.

Any additional comments?

I rather think he missed the mark wildly in a few places.

I think he managed to lay out quite a few of the problems in our current brand of "meritocracy" for instance, but attacking meritocracy in all its forms doesn't seem to be the answer. For after all, why shouldn't we want merit to have some influence on who is involved in government? It hardly seems like randomly choosing citizens to fill roles they aren't interested in or trained for, as the Greeks did, is more effective or less prone to corruption. Perhaps what we need to reconsider, though, is how we define merit. Being rich would seem to be a poor standard of merit, and yet the reason it's possible to conflate meritocracy and plutocracy as he does is precisely because that is how capitalists are expected to judge merit. Perhaps we would do just as well to maintain what he admits is a widespread belief in meritocracy, but work to change our perception of what makes someone meritorious.

I also found it interesting that one of the major "elite" groups that he ignored almost entirely was academia. Oh, he mentioned them in so far as he name-dropped Noam Chomsky, and in passing, the Penn State sexual abuse scandal, but otherwise, he had nothing especially positive or negative to say about it. Indeed, even the graduates of elite universities he mentioned only those that ended up on Wall Street, and not those who eschewed money in favor of less destructive pursuits like teaching (which are also considerably less well-paying). Academia would have been an interesting example in his litany of elites. While it certainly hasn't been entirely immune from scandal (look at all the papers that have been retracted from journals recently), academics have been attacked as elites, but as an institution have generally weathered the criticism far better than other types of elites in fact, if not in public opinion on the right. And the decentralized nature of science compares relatively favorably with the decentralized movements of both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street which he sought to highlight. (Though whether the Tea Party is as decentralized as it claims to be should probably have gotten more attention.) And the value of getting more academics like Elizabeth Warren involved in politics was also completely overlooked: the very types of people who had presciently warned about the immanent collapse of the market before it happened.

I also took strong exception to his attacks on intelligence. It's certainly true that we tend to see intelligence in the way he described financial elites, as an ever escalating hierarchy that has no upper limit. The analogy fails, however, on a couple of regards. For one thing, it's a ladder that is almost impossible to climb. One might improve one's performance on an exam from not quite making it to making it past some threshold, but one is not ever going to magically climb from an IQ of 100 to an IQ of 160 not matter how much studying you do. Financially, that kind of movement is possible,even if unlikely (and rather less likely than most people seem to think). So striving to climb that hierarchy is futile to a certain extent. And intellect is hardly the same as achievement. One can use or not use native intellect, work hard or not, but not really ever become a genius if you weren't born one. Nor does this particularly matter how one measures IQ or which kind of intelligence one measures. His analogy with height also falls short. Height is a useful comparison with intelligence in that it falls along a bell curve (again, however one measures it), and that it is determined both with some genetic components, and some environmental components, but no one disputes the existence of beauty just because it can't be measured precisely, or because more than one factor goes into calculating it (symmetry, general health, etc.) Beauty is real, and so is intelligence. But just as being beautiful doesn't make us more competent or a better human being (even though our brains sometimes act like it does), neither does intelligence necessarily. Intelligence coupled with a Randian worldview is certainly destructive, but then, Isaac Newton and Thomas Jefferson aren't famous for being of average intellect. Do people do anything to deserve high intelligence? No, of course not, but then neither did LeBron James do anything to deserve being born with preternatural sports abilities either. Somehow we manage not to begrudge him encouragement and support, but we do the intellectually gifted? The gifted are a double-edged sword of course. In the wrong hands they can do a great amount of damage, but applied to science and technology, they can also take us to the Moon. Intelligence and fostering it is not the problem, at least in principle. Furthermore, smarter doesn't necessarily mean better even in intellectual pursuits. It has been noted by researchers looking at affirmative action on college admissions and graduation rates, that as long as students meet some minimum threshold of intellect, outcomes do not necessarily improve with better test scores and similar things can be said of a number of fields that have rather high thresholds for intelligence, even physics and math. Do you think someone with an IQ of 170 will necessarily do better than someone with an IQ of 160? If you do, you'd be wrong. Because above the minimum threshold, other factors become paramount. So the attacks on Sotomayor's intelligence were probably misguided at best, but also probably rooted in other factors which he noticeably doesn't mention.

He also seems to rather circle around this notion of equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome. Part of the issue here is what is considered opportunity and what is considered outcome. The right would have you believe that as long as they put no legal barriers in the way, all the rest is outcome, and here I certainly disagree. Getting into a good school would certainly seem to me to be part of the opportunity, not the outcome, so applying egalitarian principles at this level seems reasonable to me. The grades one gets once admitted would seem to be more the outcome here. Similarly for hiring practices would be opportunity, while job performance would be outcome. Opportunity doesn't merely stop at the court room door or the voting booth. The author's attacks on intelligence are sometimes rooted in his egalitarian principles, but how does it help us as a society to squander such intellectual assets by insisting our gifted kids should only get the same education as our most average ones? Having lived through that experience myself, the six years I thought about killing myself directly related to the boredom I experienced in school served no greater purpose than to waste my ability and damage my mental health. We should be helping every person reach their maximum potential in whatever they are good at. The author's experience of going to an elite school, indeed, puts him in a position to suffer a bit from some of his own criticisms of the financial elite in this regard: he simply doesn't understand what the alternative he's proposing really means. And what's worse, it seems to me that the radical egalitarianism he advocates is at its core anti-intellectual, and doesn't really address the specific problems that need to be addressed.

This is, of course, the flip-side to democracy. The part of democracy that our elite founders so worried about. That's why we aren't a pure democracy. There are lessons to be learned here, but radical and pure ideologies are too simplistic to work in the real world. Mixed strategies are more complicated, but as our founders realized in the mixed strategy they employed for our government, they are far more durable, flexible and stable than unmixed ones. If money is the problem (and I certain agree that it is both politically and in the financial markets), then address that problem directly. If the incentive structure is screwed up (as the emphasis on publishing created the retraction scandal in the sciences), then correct that. But casting the net so wide that it takes out good institutions along with the bad will ultimately do more harm than good.

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Bias much?

Revisado: 12-15-10

When I began listening to this audiobook, I found it compelling and interesting. The people that Johnson discusses are brilliant and flawed, and the movers and shakers of the 19th and 20th centuries, spanning all walks of life and spheres of influence. But after a while, I began to notice the drumbeat Johnson's real message. These intellectuals are not to be trusted; they are predominantly atheists; they are liars and dysfunctional with their families; they are promiscuous and the source of their own miseries. Moreover, once Marx was introduced, almost every single one of them was painted as a Communist Party lackey. The message was clear, and made explicit eventually: public intellectuals should keep their opinions to themselves; they are compulsive liars, even to themselves, poor thinkers, and never, ever to be believed. Once I finished, I looked up the author, and discovered his political leanings really ARE as obvious as you might think: conservative, religious and anti-science. While it was interesting to see what someone from the far right thinks of these giants of their day, I certainly must take everything he says with a large grain of salt. It is a shame really. He made a few good points, but these points are lost in a sea of prejudice. He doesn't even condemn the activities of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee from the 50s. If a reader wishes to make moral judgments of any of the intellectuals here portrayed, their Wikipedia articles do them better justice, and with less obvious preconceptions.

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