Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Swan Song?

  Can a blog sing a swan song?  If so, this last posting of 2013 may be The Berkeley Write's.

  As I noted recently, I have been posting on this blog weekly for almost two years, managing in nearly 100 postings—I hope coherently—to string together close to 100,000 words in the process.  I suddenly feel that I have run out of two vital ingredients: interesting new ideas to write about and the ardor to keep up the pace.  Deeper down, I have an all-consuming fear of becoming more repetitive, more trivial and triter than I may already have been.  So, at least for the nonce, and maybe forever, I am taking down The Berkeley Write's masthead.

  If this really is The Berkeley Write's swan song, what could be more appropriate than to include in its lyrics a thank-you to all those readers who have praised its contents.  I would have stopped long ago had I not been so encouraged.

  I wish you Happy Holidays and a great 2014!

George Turin

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Will We Ever Learn?

  The scene: The wake of a major recession, caused by excesses by wealthy individuals and corporations.  The nation, particularly the middle class and small businesses, has been severely damaged.  The Democratic Party presses for reform and more regulation.  The Republican Party splits between its mainstream conservatives, who support the status quo, and a fringe group demanding a sweeping change in the party's direction.  The time: 2013, after the Great Recession of 2008? 

  Nope—I am writing about the turn of the 20th century, after the devastating Panic of 1893.  Ironically, the Republican Party's fringe were then left-wing progressives calling for legislation that would limit the power of the great trusts and monopolies, and provide more protection for unions and the average citizen.  (Remember: the Republican Party was at that time truly the party of Lincoln.)  Fortunately, the president was Theodore Roosevelt, one of the Republican fringe who—after being relegated to the powerless office of Vice President by the mainstream of the party—had succeeded to the presidency on the assassination of President McKinley.  By virtue of that accident of history, Roosevelt almost single-handedly launched the Progressive Era of the first two decades of the 20th century.

  That era is the subject of an excellent new book by Doris Kearns Goodwin: The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism.  As the title suggests, it is a twin biography of Roosevelt and Taft, the 26th and 27th presidents of the United States.  It also contains a series of mini-biographies of the so-called muckraking journalists, notably S. S. McClure, publisher of the influential McClure's magazine, and those who wrote lengthy exposés for it—among them Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffans and William Allen White.  It is a massive book (over 900 pages, about a third being copious end notes documenting its many quotations) but for all its length a very worthwhile read.

  I need not summarize Bully Pulpit here.  That has been done in a splendid review in the New York Times by Bill Keller, formerly executive editor of the paper.  Suffice it to say that the biographies of Roosevelt and Taft are fine pointillist paintings of the men, their families, their philosophies and their long-term interdependence—gripping even for those who have read about them previously.  The biographies of the muckrakers are much shorter, but explain how each became a stentorian voice for the people and against conglomerations of corporations and corrupt politicians.  The book illuminates how Roosevelt, Taft and the muckrakers interacted to change the course of the nation.

  Of course, Teddy Roosevelt dominates the book, as he did the era.  Scion of a rich and famous family, he was brash, hyperactive, and multi-talented: a prolific writer, a consummate politician, a warrior, a rancher and a big-game hunter.   He made his mark as a politician by being marvelously open to others' insights, especially the muckrakers' investigations of excesses in the country, always probing to get an understanding of the thinking of the masses.  Taft plays a secondary, supportive role—a counterbalance to Roosevelt's sometimes-immoderate forays.  They both used the Congress, the courts and executive power to break up trusts that had monopolized the oil, steel, railroad and financial industries through bribery, corruption and intimidation; and to empower the middle class and labor unions in their opposition to those trusts.

  Goodwin's book cannot help but focus one's attention on the repetitive folly of the business cycle, as new generations forget the lessons of the past.  We have had three such major cycles in the United States in the past 150 years, each starting with a period of increasing laissez faire that led to an extraordinary disparity of wealth, income and power between the moneyed classes and the rest of the population.  Major economic crises ensued, followed by periods of reform:
 
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the period of laissez faire was accompanied by the ascent of the robber barons in railroads, steel, oil, finance and other industries.  The Panic of 1893 called forth the reformers and regulation of the Progressive Era described above. 
Subsequent laissez faire excesses during the Roaring Twenties led to the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal then added massive new regulation to the economy, reining in the free-wheeling financial and industrial sectors and empowering unions.
In the 1970s and 1980s, laissez faire came back in favor, with many of the New Deal's regulations being reversed.  Subsequent excesses caused the Great Recession starting in 2008.  There is a still-ongoing period of regulatory reforms, against those who purblindly again want the market to "do its magic" unimpeded, and therefore are busy chipping away at those reforms.

  Will we ever learn?  I doubt it, for such madcap cycles have been occurring with regularity since at least the Dutch tulip mania of the early 17th century.  In this opinion, I am in the good company of John Kenneth Galbraith who in his little gem of a book, A Short History of Financial Euphoria, concludes that "there is probably not a great deal that can be done.  Regulation outlawing financial incredulity or mass euphoria is not a practical possibility." 

  When will the next disaster hit?  No one can tell, not even Nobel Prize-winning economists, for all their expertise.  As Galbraith once famously said, "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

A Career in Uniform

  After writing about my maiden ocean voyage to Europe [1], I got an email from my cousin G [2], "swapping stories" by describing his own first trans-Atlantic trip.  It was courtesy of the U. S. Army on his way to a tour of duty in Germany: nine days in 1953 as an inductee, bunked in a "stateroom" with fifty others on cots stacked three high.  My own year-earlier trip now seems quite effete, but the comparison reminds me how lucky I was never to have been drafted.  In a strange way, as it turned out, the country was even luckier.

  I did have a career in uniform of a sort, which by default ended in my making my particular contribution to the nation's military.  That career started modestly when I was just 12.  I had joined the Boy Scouts immediately after America was drawn into World War II by the attack on Pearl Harbor, doing so because most of my friends did.  I was also attracted by the idea of wearing a uniform in those military-dominated times—although that brought an uneasy reminder to my mother of another uniform I would have to don if the war lasted long enough.  (It didn't.)

  There was also the excitement of automatically becoming a member of the Civil Defense Corps, a group being trained to respond to an enemy air raid.  When the sirens sounded, I was not to shelter in the central hallway of my apartment with my family, but to put on my uniform with a special lightning-bolt armband signifying that I was a messenger, and report to my assigned command post in New York City's streets.  Despite my mother's immediate anxiety about that role, the likelihood of an air raid was near zero, since it could only be done from Germany's sole aircraft carrier, which would have been detected long before getting within range of our shores.  Enemy U-boats were of course always present offshore, but they were more concerned with sinking ships than lobbing a few shells at cities.  Each "air raid" was only a test of the system;

  What could be more thrilling to a 12-year-old boy than being outside in pitch-black streets, delivering messages from one command post to another, notifying wardens of violations of the blackout, learning to distinguish between incendiary and other types of bombs and what to do about each, and generally participating in a war "game"?  

  Some five years later, the war over, my love affair with uniforms had vanished.  By then, I was in the Reserve Officers Training Corps in college, compulsory for two years, and had to wear a uniform on the three days a week when drills were held.  I could not have been a worse student in ROTC, getting in it the only C grades of my college career.  Faultlessly participating in lockstep drills on the parade ground was beyond me;  indeed, with my mind on physics or chemistry, I twice to my embarrassment dropped my rifle during a review of the regiment held in the armory for a visiting general from Washington.  (Do you have any idea how a dropped rifle echoes in an armory?  I can still hear the reverberations.)  Once, when disassembling a sidearm—supposedly I was to be able to do it with my eyes closed—I let go of some doohickey I shouldn't have, releasing a spring that, shooting across the room, almost permanently closed my sergeant's eye.  My marksmanship with a rifle was so poor that my allotment of bullets was sequestered for use by the rifle team.  And I cannot imagine how I did it, but I even failed an open-book exam on strategy and tactics! 

  So it was very fortunate for the security of the nation that I was able to opt out of ROTC at the end of two years, ending my career in uniform.  If I had been forced to stay in for four years, I would have graduated from college with a second-lieutenant's commission in the Army reserve.  My God!—who knows what military disasters might have been precipitated if I had been placed in the front lines in that capacity?  The country was much more secure for having had me in a support role in defense industries, as described in [3] and [4].

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

The Internet Revisited

  This year I have been curiously mute about the impact on our lives of the Internet and information technology more generally.  Last year, on the other hand, I was obsessed with the subject, publishing no fewer than seven postings about it.  I tended to be mostly negative, despite all the undisputed benefits the web places at our fingertips. 

  For example, I joined MIT professor Sherry Turkle in being disturbed by the "alone together" syndrome, epitomized by groups of people staring at their smartphones and tablets rather than engaging face to face with each other—a modern preference to communicate by texting or tweeting rather than by physical presence [1].  With writer Nicholas Carr, I wondered what the Internet is doing to the wiring of our brains—whether our constant multitasking is making it harder for us to think linearly, as we do when we concentrate on reading a book [2].   With New York Times columnist David Brooks, I worried that online learning will diminish the passionate, interactive experience that education should be [3].  And with Columbia professor Tim Wu, I tried to parse the Internet forces that could constrain rather than hugely multiply the availability of information [4].
  Now comes a book that is almost unequivocally positive: Clive Thompson's Smarter than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better.  His motif is stated plainly at the outset: "If this book accentuates the positive, that's in part because we've been so flooded with apocalyptic warnings of late."  Indeed, the very apocalypses of others are boons to him.  Thompson has morphed the original Apocalypse's nefarious four horsemen into three very unapocalyptic Internet virtues: 
Memory Augmentation: We supplement our brain's memory using personal electronic devices and the Internet's huge data banks, thus freeing us from the chore of memorization so we can do more "human" things: intuit, invent, conduct relationships. 
Focusing our thoughts:  We all are now writing far more than most of our forebears by incessantly blogging (mea culpa!), emailing, texting, IM'ing, tweeting, etc.  In thus writing down our ideas, we feel forced to hone them more precisely than we would if merely thinking or mouthing them. 
Networking:  Through our constant online interaction, particularly in social networking, we have developed an "ESP-like 'ambient awareness' … of what others are doing and thinking," which expands our ability to understand people we care about and to dispel "pluralistic ignorance" of people at a distance from us.  Networking also makes us more collaborative.
  Thompson's initial chapter, "The Rise of the Centaurs," illustrates the first of these virtues—memory augmentation—by using the example of chess.  Technology makes it possible for the best computers to beat the best chess masters, because computers can quickly explore every possible chain of moves seven or more deep in the light of a huge memorized archive of classical strategies, and choose the best next move, which can beat a mere human's intuitive understanding of the state of play.  But Thompson points out that even moderately good chess players augmented by modest computers can beat either the best chess master or the most powerful computer playing alone.  That is, a "centaur" combining the human brain with a computer's memory and speed trumps all. 
  That's the main theme of the book: humans will progress by delegating functions like memory and calculation to machines, while reserving human, un-machinelike capabilities to themselves—a complementary hybrid of organic and silicon chemistry.  My son likes to think of this in sci-fi terms: as a stage of evolution of Homo sapiens.  Many foresee the next step as direct electrical connections between the brain and the machine.  Rudimentary links of this type have already been fashioned to control artificial limbs—cyborgs rather than centaurs, so to speak—but so far not to memory augmentation.
  I myself can attest to the second virtue—focusing our thoughts.  In the past twenty months I have written almost 100,000 words on this blog, a rate of composition that astonishes even a retired academic like me.  The process has forced me to turn inchoate thoughts on a large variety of subjects into what I hope are well-structured arguments and sentiments worthy of being read.  Every paragraph—indeed, every word—I write is examined and re-examined until it expresses the meaning and nuance I intend.  Thompson claims that, despite the Internet Age's sometimes regrettable outpouring of badly composed screeds, my experience is the more common; people in general are taking added care in polishing their writings to a fine sheen.  Further, he contends that increased literacy with the written word has led to adroitness in other media when words alone won't do, e.g., video commentaries on such sites as YouTube.  Activity like this by ordinary people, when broadcasted, has broken the stranglehold the powerful have traditionally had on public speech.
  The impact of the third virtue—networking—is even more dramatic, says Thompson.  First, people are constantly electronically telling each other of their doings, however trivial (to the point where I wonder how they have any time for other daily pursuits). Thompson asserts that this activity serves to create an invaluable "ambient awareness" that binds society together and replaces the less spontaneous and less efficient water-cooler and coffee-klatsch chit-chat of yesteryear.  Second, on-line collaboration in projects such as Wikipedia has shown that placing our knowledge on the web has a more personal quality than just storing cold facts.  The so-called wisdom of crowds comes into play, in which many small, independent and interactive contributions to a project can lead to faster and more accurate solutions of problems.
  A brave new world in the offing?  We'll see.  Even Thompson worries that outsourcing memory to machines might impair the Eureka! moments that arise unbidden from the brain's obsessive and subconscious searching for relationships among the myriad items stored in its own memory (see [5]).  He is concerned about the falling away of privacy as people sometimes rashly share thoughts that then permanently become embedded in the web's memory.  He notes too that a collaborative network structured by sharing many people's ideas can fall prey to a dominating personality who can transform the group into lemmings—independent brainwork by each of its many members is essential.  On the other hand, Thompson is less worried about the disruption multitasking imposes on our ability to concentrate for long periods on a single task, feeling that each of us will somehow figure out how to suppress multitask interruptions when we need to, while taking advantage of their value at other times.
  The pell-mell advance of the Information Age is of course unstoppable.  None of us can predict where it will lead in ten years, much less a century, no more than anyone in the early 19th century could have predicted the impact of industrialization one hundred years later.  Will Homo sapiens evolve by the 22nd century into a new cyborg/centaur species—call it Homo sapiens artificialis—with implanted electronics fully integrated into it?   Will it be a self-perpetuating species of the wealthier among us who can afford the implantations for themselves and their offspring?  Will Homo sapiens itself become a subordinated species? 
  Maybe we are headed for an apocalypse after all.