Gregory House Is Not a Ph.D.

Vikash erred in using pictures of Hugh
Laurie to illustrate his post. Nobody
wants to see that.

Over at the Duck of Minerva, Vikash Yadav uses House, M.D. to highlight what he sees as the misdiagnoses of rational choice theory. Phil Arena, himself a formal theorist, rejoins that Dr. House is not his role model and presents a defense of what we might call "mere rationality" in the face of reductii ad absurdum like Vikash's.

As important as the topics raised in these posts are, they don't go far enough. Considering that one of the major points of Vikash's argument is about House's choice to be addicted, Phil, surprisingly, doesn't make the obvious point about Gary Becker's theory of rational addiction. Becker often gets slammed for this as being an example of rationalist thinking taken too far, but consider what happens when you decide to get drunk. Your actions are, essentially, logically similar to those of Becker's agent, with the caveat that in the morning (or, at least, by mid-afternoon) you will again be sober.

So alcohol is clearly a way by which agents choose to alter their own preference functions credibly and (in the moment) irreversibly. This is, it turns out, not so difficult to model mathematically. And I would argue that the discounting logic that goes into the question of Optimal Drunkenness (or Optimal Sponge) is something that actually cannot be expressed as well in words as in algebraic notation. (Indeed, words are always an inferior vector for expressing logical relationships if efficiency is our only criterion, and they are almost always strictly inferior in terms of their precision.)

But note that this is not an ontological or epistemological dispute. It is very precisely a methodological one, about the best ways for social scientists (and everyone else, really) to think about how to explore and to know the social universe. And here Phil's broader point stands. Even though one class of theorist managed to colonize formal logic first in the social science, there is no requirement that all theories expressed formally be of their ilk.

Definitions matter, so please provide them

Immerman, An Empire for Liberty (2010, Princeton UP):

Empire, as a noun, was value-free at the time the United States gained its independence. While its precise definition is elusive because of the problem of translation, it derived from the Latin imperium, which in English approximates the words rule and sovereignty. Hence its definition was functional or instrumental. Greeks used it to describe the relationship between the city-states that united to oppose the Persians (who also comprised an entity called an empire). But Athens exercised leadership over its fellow city-states; it did not really rule them.

I am not trying to be difficult here, but I find this paragraph difficult to follow in a way that I rarely find (empirical) political science hard to understand. Why are we talking about imperium to describe the Athenians' relationship with the Delian League, when there are perfectly good words like hegemony to do that work instead? In what way was Athenian "leadership" different from Persian "rule"?

And why does the "Augustan" invention of bureaucracy (which, to readers of S.E. Finer's History of Government from the Earliest Times or, I don't know, Weber, would come as a surprise) that Zimmerman attributes to Michael Doyle's work two sentences later represent a phase change in "empire"? (Does that mean that we should call the "Augustan Threshold" the "Qin Revolution"?)

Some of my friends often claim they find historians hard to read because so many concepts are rendered informally or, worse, idiographically. I used to disagree with them. But the more I encounter academic historians seeking to make grand theoretical (or grand-theoretical) claims, the more I sympathize with their complaints.

"That's important." versus "That's cool!"

The epitome of cool.

There's a fundamental distinction between social scientists who study something because it's important and social scientists who do research because it's cool.

Like all overgeneralizations, that's an overly broad statement, but I want to push it a little. Without confessing too much to the Internet, I have to say that sometimes I find work published in political science journals tedious, even when I think that the substance is important. Conversely, sometimes I find work done in economics to be flat-out awesome, even when I think the substance is meaningless.

The difference is visceral. My response to work in the former category might be to dutifully file the article away if it's relevant to a project I'm working on, and then remember to put "(Author 2011)" in my lit review section. My response to work in the latter category is to email it to my friends, usually with a subject line like "Awesome!!!" and then a message like "Sweet identification strategy!!!!!" (Cf. evidence on educational sorting from the market for movie star marriages.)

So I'm pretty firmly in the awesome camp.

This research design is going
to be legend ... wait for it ...
ary.

Ideally, that means my projects would combine novel, exacting theory with testable implications that involved clear identification strategies and unique datasets or cases. And sometimes that happens! The converse is that in the worst-case scenario I could distracted by the awesome nature of a dataset and a case and try to back out a theory to justify spending time on it.

Fortunately, that really hasn't happened much since first year.

But it means that I really can't wake up in the morning determined to study something because it's important. It's the diamonds-water paradox of social science. Freakonomics (at least the early, peer-reviewed Levitt stuff) was awesome and often theoretically relevant; the reaction from the policymaking public (and often the disciplinary public too) was often "Who cares?" By contrast, another grinding, dull paper based on a novel dataset establishing some "important" and "worthy" fact is easier to justify to non-academics but leaves everyone except for your subfield stablemates bored to tears. (See all area studies journals, especially those below the first rank.)

I wish I were a guy motivated by importance. It seems like it would be more rewarding to talk about (say) nuclear nonproliferation if you thought your work could avert the deaths of millions. By contrast, I can't be the only guy (please say I'm not the only guy) to think that an accidental use of a WMD could be a really awesome treatment, since it would be at least as-if random. (I'm joking, mostly. But we all know that papers like Acemoglu and Robinson have used treatments that were fairly horrific to place in pretty good journals.)

So maybe it's a phase. But even if I grow out of it, I'm not sure that the discipline will.

Google is incredibly smart

Well, there's no way that this Google search should have worked, but it did, and now I'm super-amazed at Google.

I think by now we've all experienced the "Google glitch," which is when you assume that Google knows exactly what you're talking about even though there's no way it should. For instance, the other day, I was looking at china patterns, and so I simply googled "china." There were a lot of results I honestly didn't expect, because I somehow thought that Google would know I wanted to learn more about saucers and serving dishes. After all, it was sitting right there during the entire conversation!

But this is something else. This is Google understanding that "ajps" is "American Journal of Political Science." And that is amazing.

Also, a sure sign that Google + Siri + UAVs = Skynet.

Nights in White Satin

The Cambridge Nights Web site is a great idea, but I can't help but notice: Only white(ish) men have ideas? Anyway, I prefer Blam Nights.

"All our language has been taxed by war"

The news comes that Boeing will shut down its defense plant in Wichita, Kansas.

Allen Ginsberg would be ecstatic.

I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas
          but not afraid
                    to speak my lonesomeness in a car,
                    because not only my lonesomeness
                                it's Ours, all over America,
                                                     O tender fellows--
                                & spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy
                                in the moon 100 years ago or in 

                                          the middle of Kansas now..

Scholars shouldn't host their professional Web sites on institutional servers

This cover suggests two things:
(1) Why do we think that the death of print media
will lead to dumber media coverage of anything?
(2) Yes, I'm insinuating that this is how
 I think most scholars still see the Internet.
And its battles. On the frontiers. Of cyberspace.

Tomorrow, I'll continue my tour of methodology by giving quantoids the same respectful treatment I gave to quallys on Friday. But in the meantime, I want to raise an issue suitable for a federal holiday:

Why do scholars host their professional Web sites on institutional servers?

To be fair, I can understand why this is the default position for most scholars. First, unless you're a rare scholar--one of the top five in your field, the kind of scholar who has a better name brand than the institution at which you're located--then having myuniversity.edu/myname is more immediately attractive than having myname.com.

Second, as my fictitious Jewish grandfather might say, hosting your own site (even on someone else's server) means you're dealing with the FTPs and the logons and the HTML--who can understand it?

Third, academics are weird about self-promotion. Even though they live in a world entirely determined by reputation (think about it: we have anonymous peer review but we make sure that our names are on our articles and books!), they think that there's something unseemly about trying to ... advertise the work that they've dedicated their lives to. Much better, of course, to hope that someone takes the time to read their work in the Journal of Tiresome Drivel (newly included in SSCI), their monograph with North Kentucky Press, and their, um, anonymous blog.

...

So anyone who registers myname.com is obviously a self-promoter of the worst kind. Probably votes Republican, too.

But anyone who has bothered to set up a Web site on a university server has already probably overcome objection #2. (If you attend my institution, Prestig* U., you've proven yourself extremely fluent with Web technology ca. 1996 if you've managed to set up your Web site on our server.) And objection #3 is, ahem, pretty transparently dumb, too, since you're thinking about setting up a Web site on the Internet.

So Objection #1 is pretty much the biggest problem. But that's wrong. In fact, having an institutionally-affiliated Web site is probably a bigger problem in the long run. Why? Because your affiliation might change. And if it does, then you probably won't set up your Web site at your new institution as nicely as it had been at your old job. Think of it: after moving cross-country, with all that entails, are you really going to want to spend another evening recoding HTML or even sitting down with iWeb to cleanse all mentions of Former University from your site?

What that implies, in turn, is that you will put up a temporary site with some of the things that used to be on your Web site, with every intention of making it better in "the future," a mysterious time when you have the leisure to take care of such things, or, even worse, that you'll just let your Former University Web site keep going until some tight-fisted administrator kills your site and you have to scramble to upload everything to a hastily-written site on a new server. In either case, you won't get anything like the beneift you imagined when you first decided to host your working papers and (pirated) published articles. This applies most strongly to graduate students, of course, whose institutional affiliations are guaranteed to change and who have the most to gain from as their reputation grows.

*"Prestig" is not a good thing. Prestige is to "prestig" as the Nobel Prize in Physics is to the Bank of Sweden Memorial Prize in Economics.

1940s Americans Are Anti-American

Propaganda poster from World War II.

Photograph from Abu Ghraib.

What do quallys know, anyway?

Don't worry, Robert Caro,
I'm still pre-ordering your
books in hardcover.

Well, let's write a post guaranteed to alienate some friends and granting agencies! You should know upfront that I'm partly venting here and partly trying to work through some ideas about what "qualitative," "quantitative," and "multi-method" research are.

 I'm reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, which brought to mind some latent fears about qualitative methods. In particular,

1. What do narrative historians know, anyway?
2. How are they sure of what they know?
3. If narrative evidence conflicts with statistical evidence, how do we adjudicate between these accounts?

These ideas were prompted by a gushing piece about Apple's archives at Stanford University. There's lots of happy stories about how "researchers" will be able to learn more about Apple's history, and the history of Silicon Valley, by delving into these records.

And I'm sure they will! Really! But how much more will they learn from this sort of thing than they would from:

1. The (fairly extensive) existing secondary record, including newspaper and magazine articles
2. The (fairly extensive) existing primary record (see e.g. and e.g. #2)
3. Something that I've never actually seen an academic or popular historian do: taking apart quarterly and annual reports and investigating them in the same way a forensic accountant would.
4. Something that I'm really sure I've never seen an academic or popular historian do: learn how to program or read circuit diagrams in order to understand exactly what it was that, say, Woz was doing when he designed the Apple ][ that made it so efficient, or how innovative the Macintosh's handling of certain features (like rendering the mouse arrow using software instead of hardware) were.

I bring these points up, and particularly the last two, because the more country studies and biographies I read the more I'm torn between the fact that narrative historians clearly know a heck of a lot of facts and Sartori's dictum that "that he who knows only one country knows none."

Yes, I'm using this not to illustrate the depths of human
suffering but the challenges of methodology. 30 Rock
was right: Grad students are the worst people.

The depth of knowledge that Adam Tooze or Richard Evans brings to their discussion about Nazi Germany, for instance, is pretty much matchless. But neither Evans nor Tooze could invest the same amount of effort into knowing, say, Imperial Japan or Fascist Italy; both of them would do the same thing I would do, namely buying some books by Herbert Bix or R.J.B. Bosworth, mine their bibliographies, and spend six months reading through them. Add the UK, France, or God help them the USSR and they're 2.5 years away from feeling comfortable about beginning primary source research.

And, inter alia, they'll have to learn Russian, Japanese, and Frankish, which may take some time.

And what happens after this investment of time? Once they've done this, they're still apt to be subject to both the availability heuristic, based on the ideas they've been exposed to during their research, and the narrative fallacy, because they're in the business of crafting narratives. That presupposes that there is a narrative to be found, that the narrative is meaningful, and that the narrative is not simply the product of randomness.

More to the point, as I alluded earlier, historians do not have a specialized functional area of expertise aside from research methodology. Now, that's a lot! But it's not a field that seems to have vastly become more sophisticated over the past century compared to, say, economics, sociology, political science, or psychology.

I'm not insisting that historians would be better
off if they read this, just rudely insinuating it.

Some may object that I am now conflating sophistication with quantification. And to a large degree I am. Why? Because of work like this study of Nazi voting patterns by Gary King. In reading this article, I learned more about the bases of support for the Nazis than I have in several years of avocational reading about the NSDAP. Then there's work like this Larry Bartels article on the irrationality of retrospective voting, which makes a point that I will go so far as to say that qualitative researchers in any field would be unable to prove: that voters are subject to myopic retrospective voting. And even if you think that the Bartels article, the Achen and Bartels working papers, or the Healy et al classic on football games and incumbent vote share don't prove it, you can return to the classic "shark attack" paper on the Wilson 1916 election. Yes, qualitative researchers might be able to suggest that, as they have since approximately Plato's time, but they are simply incapable of making the argument as persuasively or as conclusively as quantitative researchers.

This is not an argument about whether it is "harder" or "easier" to do qual or quant work. The bad news for quallys is that it is frequently easier for quantitative researchers to write papers, certainly once they've invested in learning methodology, writing code, and putting together a dataset. The worse news for quallys is that quantitative workers benefit from every advance in computer power vastly more than they do; consider recent advances in computer-assisted textual analysis, which is beginning to encroach directly on what historians' core competency used to be: analyzing giant corpuses of text.

Next week: What do quantoids know, anyway? The same half-baked level of rambling "analysis" deployed against number-crunchers who think that knowing how to program R code is a substitute for knowing what Watergate was.

Why do people use giant puppets in street protests?

His fur isn't the only thing that's red.

So, what's up with the puppets? When Occupiers do their thing, even in Lincoln, Neb., they always make sure to bring their puppets. They don't emerge spontaneously: the puppeteers and the costumes are coordinated in advance, at least to the same degree that a potluck is coordinated. Puppets aren't free, so somebody's funding them; at least one puppeteer draws money from a Kickstarter project. (The puppeteer in question is the notorious guy who wanted to get an MFA in puppetry and blamed the economy for his inability to get a job.)

Not being in the target audience for protesters or puppetry (except) (also except), it's unsurprising that the point is lost on me. But unlike other things that I don't get--Sex and the City, Miller Lite, Seventh-Day Adventism--I can't even see the appeal. Putting the puppets together is hard work, I'll grant; this video certainly suggests that there's planning that goes into each puppet.

But what is it supposed to mean? Why did this become the signature form of leftist protests? Even when Tea Partiers hoist their quasi-literate signs, I at least know immediately what they're for (white people) and against (non-white people). With the puppets, though, I'm not sure what the semiotics are. (Is the Statue of Liberty sincere or ironic?)

The best guess I can hazard is that the puppets are a manifestation of the self-reinforcing insularity of the protests. (This interview with a leading street protest puppeteer certainly suggests that the artists are severely out of touch with the apparent targets of their agit-prop.) Puppeteers communicate only with each other; the spectacle they produce is not the puppets, but the incomprehension of the audience.