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Now, onto some items of interest from around the interwebs.
Return to Middle Earth
I recently revisited J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I first read it in my early teens, some years before Peter Jackson’s film adaptation came out. As I age, I have greater appreciation for the craft and care of the work. And I see themes that were less apparent when I was younger.
If you consume books on audio, there’s two versions on Youtube I suggest. This one has voice acted dialogue and background music. Because of the latter, copyright strikes sometimes make the odd chapter disappear, so here’s a backup.
If you prefer a version with no frills, I like the voice and pace of this narrator’s reading.
Perhaps I’m not the only one revisiting the series. At Unfolding the World, J. Daniel Sawyer has a recent post complaining that the Jackson films completely bungle some major themes and characters. He thinks the problem begins from the opening narration, which switches Tolkien’s description of the race of men so that their defining characteristic is no longer their mortality, but their lust for power:
This change, coming in the first minute of the film, gives away the game. We are about to witness a Manichean morality play, where the Elves are pure, the Men are weak and grasping, and the Dark Lord is the apotheosis of Man’s most important feature: his desire for power.
I’m not nearly as harsh on the films as Sawyer — they’re entertaining in their own right and as good an adaptation as you’re likely to get. But one thing that struck me about going back to the books was how many characters come off worse in the films. Even when I was young, I thought the wise and noble Faramir was done dirty by the second movie. More recently I realized how much film Gimli had been downgraded from the eloquent, gracious, and chivalrous character of the book. And while book Pippin is light-hearted and impulsive, he’s also quick-witted and resourceful rather than a somewhat clueless crypto-stoner.
For the real nerds, Bret Devereaux has a lengthy analysis of the Battle of Helm’s Deep (or Battle of the Hornburg) in light of real military history and strategy. I particularly like Part VIII, on why evil wizard Saruman’s war strategy was utterly foolish. Sample:
If I keep coming back to the IJN in WWII, it is because Saruman’s mistakes remind me so much of faulty Japanese thinking in 1941 and 1942. They allowed an operational consideration (‘how best to engage the US Pacific fleet’) to dictate strategic considerations (‘if, when and how should war with the USA be commenced’), produced dangerously complex clockwork plans with extremely narrow and demanding timetables where the failure of any one part could lead to disaster and generally worked under the arrogant assumption of qualitative superiority, which in turn produced a blind inability to accurately gauge their opponent’s resolve and intentions.
Saruman’s foolishness is intentional on Tolkien’s part, as the character represents knowledge divorced from wisdom, as well as the dangers of pride, envy, and hate.
Which is a good transition to talking about academia.
Ivory Orthanc
One of my favorite sequences in Lord of the Rings (left out of the film) is when Saruman, cornered in his tower after losing a battle, attempts to sway our heroes with the power of his voice. Only his superhuman persuasion skills fail as he tries to sell competing narratives to multiple people at once. As good wizard Gandalf puts it: “He cannot be both tyrant and counsellor.... Yet he fell into the trap, and tried to deal with his victims piece-meal, while others listened."
According to economist Roland Fryer, that’s pretty much what happened to university administrators during the spate of anti-Israel protests on college campuses:
The key idea is that the protests present university administrations with a two-audience signaling quandary: Behaviors that appease students may anger alumni, and vice versa.
…If students decide “safety first” is the most important initiative on campus, administrators—even if they disagree—will adopt stances consistent with that and hope the alumni don’t revolt too much. If a few months later students set up encampments and chant anti-Israel slogans, then administrators will also adopt stances consistent with that and, again, hope the alumni don’t complain too much.
The congressional hearings revealed that this signaling strategy was at work. The three presidents would risk alienating students if they disavowed anti-Israel slogans and alumni if they endorsed them. So they offered lawyered-up equivocations that signaled confusion and weakness.
Pointer from Free Black Thought on X.
If Saruman squanders his knowledge through arrogance and envy, others do so through cowardice.
Cory Clark, Matias Fjeldmark, and Phillip Tetlock recently published an article “Taboos and Self-Censorship Among U.S. Psychology Professors.” Their method:
In summer 2021, we collected the top 100 universities and the top 100 psychology graduate programs in the United States according to U.S. News & World Report rankings…. We collected email addresses from faculty webpages for each university. In late 2021, we invited 4,603 psychology faculty to participate, of whom 470 provided responses on at least some questions.
Respondents were given a list of statements about controversial topics. They were then asked to agree or disagree with the statement itself, to rate how reluctant they would be to share their views on that topic, and to what degree they thought other scholars should be discouraged from studying those topics.
Clark and colleagues found sex differences in taboo beliefs:
…men believed more strongly in the truth of every single taboo conclusion relative to women, with two exceptions…. For example, female psychologists (on average) were quite confident that academia discriminates against Black people, but male psychologists (on average) were on the fence; male psychologists (on average) were quite confident that men and women evolved different psychological characteristics, but female psychologists (on average) were on the fence.
There were corresponding differences in reported self-censorship and belief that research on those questions should be discouraged:
With at least small effects, in almost every case, males self-censored more than females (p < .005 for four conclusions), and females wanted to discourage research more than males (p < .005 for seven conclusions….)
….When gender, ideology, and age were simultaneously regressed on research discouragement, with at least small effects, female gender predicted more discouragement for seven conclusions (p < .005 for four).
I saw several on X respond to that finding with the quotation from George Orwell’s 1984:
It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.
Another finding was that many professors worried about getting fired over their beliefs:
…. only 40.4% had no concern about getting fired—and recall that this concern is about whether they would get fired if they shared their own empirical beliefs openly, not a concern about sharing some hypothetical and extreme belief. Thus, the majority of professors hold empirical beliefs that they perceive to be sufficiently socially unwelcome that it would increase risk of termination if others were to discover those beliefs.
And whether or not the professor had tenure didn’t seem to matter:
There were no differences between the tenured and the untenured on fear of any consequences. We also computed a self-censorship index across all taboo conclusions, ∝ = .92, and found that tenured (M = 40.01, SD = 26.30) and untenured professors (M = 40.55, SD = 25.56) self-censor to virtually identical degrees, t(410) = 0.16, p = .869, possibly because tenure provides no protection against the consequences scholars fear most—ostracism, social-media attacks, and stigmatization.
The pursuit of knowledge is also threatened by dishonesty and avarice. The Wall Street Journal reports that academic publisher Wiley is shuttering 19 of its journals, partly in response to the rapid proliferation of fraudulent papers:
“The sources of the fake science are ‘paper mills’ — businesses or individuals that, for a price, will list a scientist as an author of a wholly or partially fabricated paper.”
…. “Problematic papers typically appear in batches of up to hundreds or even thousands within a publisher or journal. A signature move is to submit the same paper to multiple journals at once to maximize the chance of getting in…. Publishers say some fraudsters have even posed as academics to secure spots as guest editors for special issues and organizers of conferences, and then control the papers that are published there.”
After Wiley paid $300 million to acquire an Egyptian publisher and its 250 journals, it noticed a lot of the papers in those journals had random irrelevant citations and what appeared to be AI-generated gobbledygook. Thousands of papers are suspect.
A computer scientist who created a screener for detecting phony papers notes one humorous symptom:
“Cabanac and his colleagues realized that researchers who wanted to avoid plagiarism detectors had swapped out key scientific terms for synonyms from automatic text generators, leading to comically misfit phrases. “Breast cancer” became “bosom peril”; “fluid dynamics” became “goey stream,” “artificial intelligence” became “counterfeit consciousness.”
The state of academia might drive one to despair.
Denethor’s Bane
But one of those Tolkien themes that stands out more to me these days is the folly of despair. Tolkien’s baddies repeatedly try to stymie their enemies by making them believe their situation hopeless and themselves powerless. To swallow the Enemy’s blackpills is to fall into decrepitude or madness.
Thus, while the music isn’t my cup of tea, I appreciate the message of this new single “Whitepilled” by the band Backwordz.
Other counsels of hope:
At Art of Manliness Podcast Brett McCay and John Tyson talk about “The Shadows in Men’s Hearts and How to Fight Them.” The discussion includes despair.
Cate Hall at Useful Fictions discusses “How to be More Agentic.” Examples include “increase your surface area for luck,” “assume everything is learnable,” and “learn to love the moat of low status.”
(I know a few people these days looking to transition out of academia, so that last one hits close to home.)
Also on theme of taking agency, Joshua Lelon posts this flow-chart on X:
I think they all sound better if you imagine them in the style of Gandalf. “Do you despair, Theoden king? What if victory were not impossible? What is the most trifling thing you could do to move even one step closer to it?” So says Gandalf the White-Pilled.
Slinker and Stinker
In Lord of the Rings, King Theoden is brought to despair by the poisoned words of his treacherous counselor Grima Wormtongue. But most of us are quite capable of screwing ourselves up without outside assistance.
According to Scott Alexander, that’s a core idea of a hot new therapeutic technique called Internal Family Systems. Therapists seek to find their patient’s inner Wormtongue:
What I gather from the manuals: IFS is about working with “parts”. You treat your mind as containing a Self - a sort of perfect angelic intellect without any flaws or mental illnesses - and various Parts - little sub-minds with their own agendas who can sometimes occlude or overwhelm the Self. During therapy, you talk to the Parts, learn their motives, and bargain with them.
This passage reminded me of sociologist James Tucker’s article “New Age Religion and the Cult of the Self”:
“New Age religion has a general philosophy, a theology if you will, that also reflects a psychiatric model. Most notably, the self is considered to be divine but incomplete and in need of help.”
If New Age represents psychiatry spreading into religion, then Internal Family Systems might involve religion spreading back into psychiatry. For Alexander reviews a book by a prominent IFS practitioner that posits that these harmful internal voices are not actually part of the self at all, but literal demons.
At least this is what I take from The Others Within Us, by Robert Falconer, a veteran IFS therapist.
But it’s not just Falconer saying this. The book has a foreword by Richard Schwartz, the inventor of IFS, where he basically endorses it. It has cover blurbs from some high-ranking IFS trainers. My impression is that everyone high up in IFS believed something like this - some as metaphor, other as literal reality.
…. The IFS community was a bunch of normal, respectable therapists, trying to practice normal therapy. But every so often, one of their patients’ Parts would admit, unprompted, to being a demon.
….. With enough questioning, the entities will reveal more information. Some of them are the spirits of the unquiet dead…. Others have always been demons, as long as they remember.
…. The demons often enter the victim during moments of unbearable trauma…. Mostly these are the situations you’d expect - child abuse and rape - but a surprising number of them say they got in during a childhood surgery.
…. Once inside, the demons “feed on energy”, usually in the form of negative emotions. They “farm” the energy by causing extra negative emotion, either by directly engaging in negative self-talk with the victim, or by tricking them into making bad decisions.
Falconer argues that many other practitioners have encountered demons, including one who converted to belief in a literal Devil and began adding exorcism to his practice.
And so on and so forth. To hear Falconer tell it, one of psychotherapy’s big crises is that veteran therapists and psychiatrists keep noticing the demons, keep talking about it in their isolated silos, but nobody’s ever blown the lid off the whole thing and made it public.
After watching secular wokes reinvent original sin and psychologists reinvent Evil Eye and Bay Area rationalists reinvent eschatology, I’m not surprised that highly educated therapists are reinventing exorcism.
Whether or not you believe in the reality of demons, or the claim that these particular patients have them, you might decide “well, if it makes them better, it’s an effective therapy.”
Alexander is a bit more wary, noting that psychiatrists have a way of calling up the syndromes they treat, as people with disordered minds understand and express their own distress in culturally patterned ways:
In the “multiple personalities panic” of the 1980s, some psychologists started thinking multiple personality disorder was a big thing and suggesting to all their traumatized borderline female patients that they might have it. Sure enough, lots of these people developed multiple personalities. This didn’t seem fake, just weird. Eventually the American Psychiatric Association sent out a statement saying “STOP DOING THIS”, therapists stopped talking about multiple personalities with their traumatized borderline female patients, and these people mostly stopped getting multiple personality disorder (although the occasional new case crops up here and there)
Thus, as professional belief in demons increases, we may well see a sharp rise in people with symptoms of demonic possession. Alexander even links to the case of a contemporary Bay Area therapeutic cult that “collapsed in a severe and avoidable iatrogenic possession epidemic.”
Great Follies and Slender Hopes
Michael Shermer of Skeptic interviews Bradley Campbell on his new book, How To Think Better About Social Justice: Why Good Sociology Matters.
Though the term social justice might be poisoned for many by its association with neoMarxian activism, Campbell argues that most of us would admit to some moral concern with how society is organized.
The hope is that by learning more about how the social world works we can better learn our options for improving it and the trade-offs involved. But the neoMarxian critical theories that influence much activism might be the single worst paradigm in sociology for achieving this. Thus the folly of most contemporary social justice activism is that activists have a poor idea of how the social world actually works and tend to reject the notion that they should even learn about it before launching their crusade.
In their discussion, Shermer alludes to such seemingly counterproductive activist tactics as blocking traffic or defacing famous art. I see environmental activists doing such things and I doubt they know much about either the natural environment or the social one. But while much contemporary environmentalism is mired in folly, perhaps there is hope in more practical actions like Dutch inventor Boylan Slat’s Ocean Cleanup projects.
On the value of good sociology, consider this article in Science: “Induction of social contagion for diverse outcomes in structured experiments in isolated villages.” Authors Eduardo Airoldi and Nicholas Christakis try to harness the effect of social contagion — the transfer of behaviors and ideas through social networks — for good ends. They demonstrate how understanding social network structure helps with this:
In a large randomized controlled trial involving 24,702 people in 176 villages in the isolated western highlands of Honduras, we tested an algorithm known as friendship-nomination targeting.
This method means that instead of talking to your initial random sample, you ask each person in the sample to name a friend — and then talk to that person. This method allows one to locate people who were more central in the social network.
After sampling people in this way, the authors then provided them with an educational intervention meant to improve maternal and child health. Thanks to social contagion effects, just providing this to the centrally networked individuals produced outcomes for the whole community:
Social interventions often seek to target all members of a relevant population, such as a village, school, or firm. However, face-to-face counseling for information provision or behavior change takes time and resources. Yet, social network–targeting methodologies could mean that intervening in smaller fractions of the population could have the same effect as targeting 100% of the population.
Sociology is full of folly, but there’s hope that good work is still done here and there.
And on a final note: At The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia provides “Stupidity: A Reading List” because “you get smarter by studying foolishness.” It seems a good list. I suppose the hope is that we learn from the folly.
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Substacks cited above:
(Scott Alexander); (The Honest Broker), (Useful Fictions), (Unfolding the World)
“More recently I realized how much film Gimli had been downgraded from the eloquent, gracious, and chivalrous character of the book.”
Spot on. I feel like a lot of the Fellowship members in the movie had characterization of stock fantasy characters. Like, Gimli is the party’s dwarf so he acts like a stereotypical fantasy dwarf: gregarious, has fun interactions with other characters, eager to fight, etc. And it is funny because Lord of the Rings is kind of an ur-text of the fantasy genre but at the same time it is its own thing and does not necessarily follow many of the tropes that came later but are associated with Tolkien’s trilogy by default.