Review: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, by Richard Feynman

By Richard Feynman? Well, it's a series of presentations and interviews given by him, so the byline is mostly correct. Although it includes some of his famous technical predictions (on the future of computing and nanotechnology) and indictments (his report on the Challenger disaster), it's basically non-technical, filled up with anecdotes and the wider variety of his thoughts. It contains most of what I had actually read or heard of Feynman before I picked up some of his physics lectures the year before last. I saw the video following his report on the space shuttle in materials science class back when I was a freshman—the one where he dunks the o-ring into the ice water—and thought it was a bit of grandstanding actually. I was more impressed with the report statement this time around, which seems less out to impress and more to rather boldly condemn the deserving. I'd read the same snippet of Cargo Cult Science on the internet a half dozen times, which seems to get at something profound, and I remain ambivalent about the plenty of room on the bottom speech, as pull-quotes have appeared in front of approximately forty bazillion talks or review papers in the past 20 years. And, right, I am sure that Feynman diagrams got mentioned in passing somewhere near the end of physics III, where they wrapped up a survey of the stuff that was part of the field but you probably wouldn't need unless you chose to study it. And that's it. I was aware of who he was, knew something of his general contributions, and had heard of his mercurial approach to life. The influence on scientists and rationalists of my acquaintance has tended to sneak in here and there.

So let me tell you why I am disappointed. It just makes my own quasi-public bloviating seem so pointless. Maybe it should be validating, but the science philosophy you'll find here is of a tune with what I've been occasionally wailing about for more or less the entirety of time I've held this blog: accepting doubt as part of an honest worldview; evidence-based thinking; the dynamism between theory and measurement; approximations and representations pitted against objective reality; inquiry as a sort of moral imperative; informed wiseassery. What more does that leave me to comment about it? And I am forced to ask: how much debt does my own struggling worldview owe to this guy? Obviously I've read and interacted with many folks who were influenced by him. How corrupted am I by the company I've kept? Do we all think the same? What a depressing thought. (I don't actually think it's quite right: here's only one of many giants who asked the questions I, and you, happened to land in the middle of a public answering.)

Feynman's science philosophy was clearly important to him, but from these interviews, espousing it was more of a byproduct of his life than a motivation. (He always had quantum electrodynamics to fall back on, after all, not to mention rhythm.) He didn't read a lot of the stuff (and I still wonder how much it shows, really), dismissed what little he did read as an elaborate exercise in simplistic thinking, but for all that, he did do a lot of philosophizing. If this collection is representative of all his interviews, then it's a big part of what the public wanted to hear from him, and what we took away, and so he gets the role by default. It's a shame, almost, that he never really took it as far as he took his science, and while he was willing to march up and acknowledge the big moral questions of his career, I think he chose to leave some of the difficult ones hanging. Was he haunted by his role in the Manhattan project? He has a story about it that he liked to tell (he must have been asked about it a lot), and from it, I think the answer was yes. He tells us of the distinction between the thrill of the intellectual work, and of being a part of a community of exceptional and quirky scientists, and the late-dawning realization of the bomb's implications, which might be the end of all things. But acknowledgement is not judgment. Was there shame, regret, disillusionment? I can't really tell from the writing. In various of these interviews, Feynman would rather set judgment and decisions apart from the scientific process, and I think that's a fair peace, if it's a valid one. But if your research is driven with an intent to do massive harm, then should you do it? He doesn't seem to be the guy to indulge in very much self recrimination, and what the hell, he was really young at that time. By the time he challenged the NASA higher-ups later in life, his view of managerial competence had obviously dimmed. In the last segment of the book, he makes some similar observations on religion, noting, diplomatically, that its matters of spiritual fulfillment are, and should probably remain, unchallenged by science, but that faith exceeded its power of natural explanation some centuries ago. He avoids reaching a deeper conclusion about this, but maybe he's only offering a properly skeptical interpretation, and leaving the actual judgment to the audience. Maybe that's the best thing an honest thinker can do.

It must have been a big score to interview Feynman about religion. But for a few vestigial cultural trappings, I don't get Feynman as any kind of deist, but in ways he thinks like one, really one of these wonder-in-the-miracle-of-god's-creation types. He is infectious when he's talking about the surprising elegance of the universe, and the surprisingly deep logical reach of mathematics, and the underappreciated poetry of these things. He talks about his early mentors, especially his father, who taught him to approach an understanding of the world with appreciation, playfulness and creativity. And speaking of cargo cults, you could do all the things his dad did with little Richard, and you still wouldn't get a Feynman--any more than freezing over your yard and strapping the skates onto Junior gets you a little Gretzky--there was no doubt some outstanding nature that came together with the outstanding nurture. You could see where it grew from: here's the rare scientist who you'd imagine could get himself to devalue his own beliefs or theories with pure objectivity, given the proper evidence, possibly because he was humble enough, or had a knack to see things clearly from several different approaches, or because it was easy and exciting for him to reformulate his understanding of things.

I've mentioned that I picked this to read paired against that David Foster Wallace romp, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which looks at childhood and other power structures with every intention of holding the reader down, and biting him back, a wit which was the definition of mordant. Since both were broken up into shorts, I basically shuffled them together, like an angel/devil sort of thing on each shoulder. One guy felt paralyzed by doubt, the other energized by it. Feynman's wit was more the force of inspiration, clear thinking, and optimism in new discoveries, which he retained even after catching a glimpse of how people and nature really work.

Review: Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, by Richard P. Feynman

I have, over the years, spent a lot of time on the internet, and the sort of argument styles you find online have started to grate after awhile. Not to say it's surprising, you'll meet ten people a day whose self estimation exceeds their capability, but the digital fields have propagated a certain strain, the self-styled Vulcans or the Slans finally given their opportunity to shine in a purely intellectual medium, and okay, a few of them do shine, even in political arenas, but I'm increasingly convinced that quality thinking is a rare flower even among the Comic Book Guy set, that intelligence and a penchant for declarative sentences may not be sufficient to overcome the various self-deceptions, inappropriate generalizations, faulty logic, bad weighting of counterargument, inability to distinguish hindsight from foresight, and all the rest of the bestiary of cognitive curlicues that obstruct most minds from grasping the nature of things in a broad but generally accurate and consistent sense.* Now and then, a great or even exceptional thinker will emerge, and rarer still will that thinker be able to communicate with accuracy, humor, and humility. Feynman was a gem.

Of course, one of the side effects of reading Feynman is that once that high of uncut understanding wears off, your own brain feels a little muddier afterwards. I think that the audience that evolved to love this guy is primarily composed of scientists looking for deeper meaning into what they already know. (I suppose I could put myself into this group, although without doubt, relativity isn't something I already know in a meaningful way.) These lectures were great at communicating insight, but they're actually lean on facts. I not at all certain that I'd have wanted to learn freshman physics from this guy. I wouldn't have been left with the tools to do the problem sets.

What I didn't realize when I picked this up, is that they're six connected pieces. The progression here, examining the laws of physics through geometrical transformations, holds together cleverly and proceeds naturally to relativity. I further appreciated the discussion of the contemporary setting of Einstein's theories, what he was specifically trying to address with them, and that the Lorentz transformations (which in special relativity, Einstein explained the validity of) had already been thrown out there as fudge factors to explain the discrepancies between predictions of Maxwell's equations (where it falls out as a constant in the simplest EM wave equation) and what's expected by conventional expectations of relative motion, as well as the confusing experiments that were going on when the great man was busy theorizing. The context makes relativity seem a lot less weird, frankly.

I recall reading that one of Einstein's proudest achievments was his index notation for vectors. Basically, he simplified the math symbols so that you don't have to write big brackets, or unit vectors, or summations. It's pretty intuitive and handy, occasionally adopted formally by fluid mechanics nerds (which Einstein dabbled in), and frequently informally by any hack engineer who's tried his** hand at primitive excuses for number crunching. If you ask a mechanics guy and a computer guy, both inclined to use index notation, what's the meaning of a "vector," you'll probably get two different answers, and thinking this way, I'd have rather seen Feynman move down from the general, in which a vector is a column of numbers of arbitrary length, which is merely limited to three when it needs to describe Euclidian space, or, presumably, four when describing Minkowski space. (How dare he present this subject forty years ago!) It's not immediately clear that the innovation couldn't have been constrained to new algebraic operations specified to describe relativistic effects in 4-D space, rather than specifying a new sort of space in which the fourth dimension has separate properties. I will say that the geometrical analyses that Feynman described struck me as very clever. ("Clever." I mean it's Einstein here--this is like a mosquito calling a jetliner sort of large.) I suppose I'd have to do problem sets to get the real scoop on it all (and I've no interest in that).

In one of the lectures, Feynman had a great bit about using measurement as a tool for explaining the universe, and took an entertaining poke at fly-by know-it-alls who'd pretend it's intuitive (he's favoring empiricism over pure rationalism I guess, but he didn't frame it that way). That discussion of how the geometry of space time could be deduced from within the system was the most animated, and, I think the most successful application of his grand insight, and it occurs to me I've seen a dozen explanations along the same lines (usually with graphics of marbles making dimples in a computer-generated 2-D grid) that, unlike Feynman's analogies, were not terribly intelligible at all. I've caught the bug's-eye thing before too and the jumpy speaking style too (I don't usually "hear" when I read, but I could feel Feynman speaking in this one), and it occured to me that many of my professors were among the generation of (inevitably lesser) Feynman copycats.


* Alternate theory: I'm projecting.
** For a possible theory about my use of gendered pronouns, see note 1.

Review: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, by David Foster Wallace

In 1985, Richard Feynman presented a suite of ideas to a Japanese audience about the future of computing, the text of which was included in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, the second half of this paired review, coming to a blog near you, um, real soon now. Feynman, of course, was a remarkably clear thinker, and is remembered for being rather accurate in his predictions about these things (or at least enough prognostication hit the mark that lectures could be plucked 15 years later to support a reputation of prescience). He talked about miniaturization, which was obviously an early trend (and a safe prediction in '85!), and parallel computing is also something we adopted before so very long, although more interested scientists than me can tell me how closely and how well he called that one. One of the ideas he threw around that was new to me were about using (more) reversible processes for low-energy computing. Imagine the inside of your computer shredded down to the very cells: at the component level, the basic functions of almost all the devices--transistors and diodes--are to control the flow and direction of an electrical current, open and shutting like little informational ratchets. When they are powered, they're meant to be irreversible. As you wire these up together into little logic structures and present inputs, as shown in the NAND gate from his lecture (could have been any of them: NAND returns 0 if both inputs are 1, and returns 1 otherwise), it presents a new output and then neglects what brought it there. If the output were allowed to roll back through the gate, then it would become meaningless--you have to run each device at energies many orders of magnitude higher than thermal diffusion, so that the gate does not do that. You have to supply enough power to make sure your computation rolls down to the very end.

If, on the other hand, your output function preserves information which produced the decision, then, said Feynman, rolling back over the little hills wouldn't be a big deal. So shown here is his picture of a reversible NAND logic gate. Letting the system diffuse backwards is no longer so disconcerting, it can slosh back and forth at the local scale, so long as there is a net energy gradient pushing the whole thing forward. It may well end up being slower than CMOS, but it'll use far less energy.

[And let's do have fun thinking about that a sec. Imagining a characteristic clock cycle or distance between gates, could computation still occur very well as we encroached on that spatial or temporal period? Couldn't we have a low-activation energy irreversible computer? Presumably that would run along a cascade of chemical reactions—would that DNA computer I talked about a few years ago qualify? Would you bother to make a reversible logic gate out of transistors, or would you find some other element?]

I suppose that's the way that statistical (thermodynamic) processes tend to work in nature, cumulatively, but since we're talking computers, doesn't that seem like how we think too? I mean that as a personal observation and not a scientific statement, that is, I don't know if amounts to a servicable model of neural behavior, but as far as the way thoughts roll along in my tiny brain, the surging forward and racing back like waves, caught in loops as they chase their imaginary tails, maybe making some forward progress but only with effort and a great deal of redundance, making conclusions but only after gently wearing in the path and trucking the assumptions along, then it seems to be right on. I'm happy that it does go forward, at least sometimes, and maybe it's as useful a scale of intelligence as we'll get. I can almost hear the engine roaring along for some people while the clutch fails to engage, and it may be Feynman's genius that he was better able than most people to keep it clicking forward (and was fearless enough to let the path take him where it led).

And this may well be one of the pleasures of fiction too, to extract the linear trends out of the highly recursive subjective experiences. I think it's good writing to engage a deeper understanding of what cognition and communication really feels like in the extreme close-up, but on the other hand, there's a reason we've been lying to ourselves about it for 6000+ years. We humans seem to find this intellectual muddling forward to be just a touch unpleasant and like to make our stories about sequences and decisions. And then let's throw into that bubbling stew some other human frailties--depression, negative comparisons, failed standards—and a deep awareness of the process can start to be a real bitch. Self-loathing can achieve a very special circularity among smart people, where it leads to an analysis of your own character, which leads an understanding of why you're miserable and how you've failed to change it, which is loathsome. It may be astute, but how much of this does anyone really want to read?

This is the spirit that suffuses almost everything in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. (There are many such brief interviews, and the whole book includes those among a long series of other vignettes and shorts.) The title of the book is the punchline: the many depressed or disturbed characters are exposed by the text as, in fact, horrible people, despite their lies and notwithstanding their occasional awareness. I hate that I got sick of them halfway through, and after a while I stopped distinguishing them so well, particularly in the "hideous men" sections, where everyone shared the same mannerisms (unpunctuated quote unquote speech qualifiers and so forth) and a universally easy intellectual access to the world of the therapist's couch, whatever the actual varied settings of the interview. Too much self-help styled recrimination hanging under a very affected textual experiment. Eventually it all started to sound in my mind like the relentless thumps and scratches of David Foster Wallace flogging himself.

I don't think it had to connect in such a leaden fashion with me. There are points of this book that are funny, which would have worked even better if he had made his jokes and kept things short. I wish there were more of them. I remarked to Schmutzie that some of the sections could read a little like a comedy routine, and a feeling of external context would have done wonders for that, but I didn't often have enough in the text itself to spot Wallace's humor cues (and it wasn't quite satisfying enough to run the experiment assuming it's humor). Some of the situations are sufficiently absurd (there's an episode of intimidation by literal dick-waving) that they're worth a bemused chuckle, and some of the characters attain a self-negating Humbertish pomposity that is entertainment gold (god help me, I thought the episode where the old man elaborates on his deathbed his resentment of his offspring—babies are such users—was hilarious). But that's not an author comparison I'd have preferred to make, because while I can accept the discomforting marriage of felicity and nastiness, it's got to balance, and Nabokov comes off as a far better writer in the matchup, while Wallace leaves me heavy on the hideousness. Likewise, the contrast of their stated equanimity to everything else they reveal in their interviews was well-positioned and entertaining when it was covered the first dozen times, but eventually the mode got too well-used. I do wonder how those parts would have grabbed me as a teenager, when I was more willing to entertain that "what women want" could be compartmentalized from their existence as human beings.

Wallace tried to break the short story form often and consciously in this book. Breaking the fourth wall and addressing the reader worked much less well than taking apart the language and monkeying with it. There is a story—told disjointed, tinted, and almost poetic—that elevates a personal tragedy into something almost beautiful and dreamlike. I also enjoyed the freewheeling retelling of a California drama in the style of some futuristic mythic versificator. The skills are there, and more playfulness and less hideousness would have gone a long way toward my enjoyment. I don't want the self-loathing spiral to seem even more shallow and yet inescapable.

On the Use and Abuse of History

Even scientists making "scientific" observations know that what they see will be affected by their position.

It's a minor excerpt from Howard Zinn's book Declarations of Independence that I am currently reading (extending the political theme--sorry), which questions the content and purpose of American ideology. Now, this is an opinion I support in principle, but since he's an influential academic, and treading this close to my own thoughts, I'm going to hold his words to a higher standard than, say, rock lyrics. I've been getting stuck on the details of his argument a lot. The reading of Heisenberg wasn't relevant to very much, but it's symptomatic of Zinn's early discussion--something is askew with the presentation of how ideology works.

Here is part of the Richard Feynman passage I mentioned before, concerning measurement and cheap philosophy. (It's long, even chopped up):

So the fact that "things depend upon your frame of reference" is supposed to have had a profound effect on modern thought. One might well wonder why, because, after all, that certainly cannot have been necessary to go to all the trouble of the physical relativity theory in order to discover it…. [C]ertainly there must be deeper things in the theory of relativity that just this simple remark that "A person looks different from the front than from the back." Of course relativity is deeper than this, because we can make definite predictions with it. It certainly would be rather remarkable if we could predict the behavior of nature from such a simple observation alone.

There is another school of philosophers who feel very uncomfortable about the theory of relativity, which asserts that we cannot determine our absolute velocity without looking at something outside, and who would say, "It is obvious that one cannot measure his velocity without looking outside. It is self-evident that it is meaningless to talk about the velocity of a thing without looking outside; the physicists are rather stupid for having thought otherwise, but it has just dawned on them that this is the case. If only we philosophers had realized what the problems were that the physicists had, we could have decided immediately by brainwork that it is impossible to to tell how fast one is moving without looking outside, and we could have made an enormous contribution to physics." These philosophers are always with us, struggling in the periphery to try to tell us something, but they never really understand the subtleties and depths of the problem.

Our inability to detect absolute motion is a result of experiment and not a result of plain thought….Now is it absolutely, definitely, philosophically necessary that one should not be able to tell how fast he is moving without looking outside? One of the consequences of the relativity was the development of a philosophy which said, "You can only define what you can measure! Since it is self-evident that one cannot measure a velocity without seeing what he is measuring it relative to, therefore it is clear that there is no meaning to absolute velocity. The physicists should have realized that they can talk only about what they can measure." But that is the whole problem: whether or not one can define absolute velocity is the same as the problem of whether or not one can detect in an experiment, without looking outside, whether he is moving. In other words, whether or not a thing is measurable is not something to be decided a priori by thought alone, but something that can be decided only by experiment….

[I]f we have a set of "strange ideas," such as that time goes slower when one moves, and so forth, whether we like them or do not like them is an irrelevant question. The only relevant question is whether the ideas are consistent with what is found experimentally.

This, incidentally, is exactly the point where what seemed a fine idea for a post just wanders off somewhere, digressing itself down the precipitous road of closely-related philosophical terminology. Modern versions of empiricism or realism did struggle to work Einstein in there, but the summary that "of course you can only define what you can measure" is certainly older than that. (It's hard for me to believe that, whatever interesting reducionist attempts were made in the field over the years, that any practical person thought that rationalism or empiricism had to be an either/or proposition.) I'll echo Feynman's view that measurement is really the trump card in all this (even if we can reason beyond measurement and observe things we haven't yet deduced) and that at some level, it's synonymous with composing a question. Certainly without measurements and their consequences no one would have ever got to relativity. I'd love to believe, like Feynman, that the underlying philosophy isn't especially relevant, except here I am, treading ignorantly up against it once more. If it comes down to admitting stuff, I accept a physical reality that is independent from our mind and only somewhat like our perceptions (even though mind circumscribes our understanding of reality), and I believe that mathematics (and scientific theory) is merely descriptive, that it exists only in a medium, and is not otherwise a reality itself, even though the deductive power is amazingly rich, and speculation on where they diverge can be interesting as hell. Is there a school of philosophy that fits that in? Is it worth it to find out the history of my viewpoint? I am not sure what debt Feynman's essential modern "scientific realism" owed to the shoulders of earlier philosophers either.

I do like mashing up unrelated disciplines to see how the analogies hold--I'd better, given what I'm doing here--but like I said, the quick aside into physics didn't strengthen Howard Zinn's point very much here, and it constitutes the kind of thinking that could get the physicist into the posthumous whirligig dealie.

Everything humans undertake can be described as having a basis in some underlying idea, even when we don't care to spend a lot of time acknowledging them. (Even the notion that we don't behave as if governed by philosophical constructs is a philosophical construct, if you know what I mean.) Zinn clearly intends "ideology" as an external set of ideas, some governing set of philosophical principle that pushes society along (and I agree that the ideas can be sicker than they first look). The vernacular usually sets the ideologue in the realm of pure and simplified thought, well apart from the realist (and Zinn follows this too, a bit haphazardly), with the difference that, while realism is technically an ideology, it requires evidence to validate itself. Declarations of Independence is observational, but it calls for a new prescription, a new ideology.

Human behavior is different than physics, in that what they believe can influence the outcome, or, at least, that's the hypothesis. It's also different in that models of human behavior--even the phenomenological ones--are only accurate in the broad-brush and general-trends sense, as any of the generations of economists can tell you. History, by definition, is the data, even if we tend to be selective in what pieces of it we choose to measure. (The difference between the overview and the lives people must live is important, but it has a lot to do with why tend to ignore the little guy in historical contexts. Zinn's genius is to measure history based on the lives that more people have experienced.) On skimming the historical evidence, I'd say that actual human behavior suggests that the effects of ideology are actually fairly limited, and people tend to revert to some level of short-range decency among those with whom we identify, and a threshold for opportunism that drops as we migrate from the inner circle. I lean to a more anthropological explanation of human behavior, I guess.

Zinn spends more than a chapter complaining about Niccolò Machiavelli's ideology, and his take is infuriating. Mac didn't say that "the ends justifies the means," he said that leaders are only judged by the ends, which is important if you're trying to dissect his philosophy. Zinn could have emphasized that he thought Machiavelli was wrong, or that his advice was amoral, or that he was a woeful product of his times, or that his advice was so obviously self-serving. (I'd add that it may well have been a little subversive too.) There's a world of difference between following his advice (there, the discussion is good), and following his practice. Machiavelli may or may not have been a monster, but he was a scientist, not an ideologue. He was basing his views on measurement.

Take it away, Dr. F.:

What, then, are the philosophic influence of the theory of relativity? If we limit ourselves to influences in the sense of what kind of new ideas and suggestions are made to the physicist by the principle of relativity, we could describe some of them as follows. The first discovery is, essentially, that even those ideas which have been held for a very long time and which have been very accurately verified might be wrong. It was a shocking discover, of course, that Newton's laws are wrong, after all the years in which they seemed to be accurate. Of course it is clear, not that the experiments were wrong, but that they were done over only a limited range of velocities, so small that the relativistic effects would not have been evident. But nevertheless, we now have a much more humble point of view of our physical laws--everything can be wrong.

And here's the thing. History has shown a large diversity of human behavior, including drastic changes in how we behave, sometimes, amazingly, within a just a couple generations (agriculture, travel, communication). The aggregate behavior seems to be a response to environment, of which the pervading ideas and knowledge--not sure if we call that ideology--are only only a part. (I mean, I may seem like a reasonable guy, but you should see me when I run out of beer.) While history might exhibit observable large-scale patterns, and while our nature can't be too distinct from what it was 30000 years ago, we've messed with the environment significantly. Some of the effects of this we can predict (and it ain't looking too rosy), but as we move at new velocities, let's keep measuring.

Pretty Soon You're Talking Real Money, Part II

In The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Richard Feynman was asked his opinion on whether another Michael Faraday could emerge in today's (some today twenty-odd years ago, that is) scientific milieu. Faraday was a rare and spectacular sort of genius, one of the fathers of electromagnetic theory. He never had formal training, reportedly found the mathematical basis of the early theorists incomprehensible, and yet he managed to piece together the basic relationship of electricity and magnetism, figured out some of the subtle business of electrical polarizaiton of materials, describing qualitatively (as I write in my occasional proposal) physics that it would take another sixty or seventy years to report the mathematics for. He did this on a combination of pure intuition, language, and a facility for cobbling together chewing gum and baling wire experiments. That he managed this before the invention of duct tape is no doubt equally remarkably to experimental physicists. As for me, my admiration for Faraday is only enhanced by the fact he looked like some plausible combination of a sideshow barker and garage-tinkering lunatic, but then nearly everyone in the early 19th century looked like that.

Anyway, Feynman replied that a late twentieth-century Faraday was unlikely. Physics had evolved, he thought, to the point where it was necessary to understand the current mathematics to really make a new innovation in the field. Naturally, he held out that it wasn't impossible, but he didn't currently see enough new area where even the basics needed to be worked out. He believed that the questions that were being asked in the 1980s were on the forward edge of theory, or outside of the easily measurable.

This morning on NPR, as part of a series this week that is evidently sponsored by the damn Chamber of Commerce, I learned that Peter Thiel, the co-founder (wait, which half did he found?) of PayPal is offering students $100,000 to drop a couple years of college and become entrepreneurs. Now, on one hand, I get it. With some colleges topping $50k per year these days, it's a hell of an investment, and if you're nineteen and can get into the grind without first sinking that cost, then you're ahead of the game. I'd tell you college is a pure scam if I didn't personally value it so much, and if my engineer's training (mostly trained judgment, but no doubt some people are born with that) wasn't so helpful. But if you're the kind of kid that can create high tech with twist ties and duct tape, then those two extra years of theory are probably not going to make the difference in your career. For the right kind of kid, thihs is a good deal: high-risk, sure, and it's not competitive remuneration with a full-time employment with benefits and existing capital equipment, but you 'll be ahead of your peers looking for that deal in two years when your venture fails. But is it a good way to be looking at engineering in society?

I mean, fucking PayPal, anyway. There was a short window where the acceptance of the internet, as a new medium, supported innovation that could get by on concepts (that is, without fucking doing or making anything), an arena freshly enough sodden where any goddamn thing had a chance of taking root. You idea men flourished precisely because you were in a unique moment when there were no established competitors, or because your particular branding took a little better than C2it or CertaPay or whatthefuckever unremembered version of pets.com failed to find utility, and if I remember 1999 at all, about 99.4% of those conceptual masterpieces still managed to blow other people's fortunes, thanks to about as much actual technical or business savvy as your typical 1830s peddlar of miracle tonic. But yeah Pete, your confirmation bias tells you you're a genius. Let's ask for your next business opinion.

As a professional bullshitter in the field of applied research, I have a good idea how far the lower five figures are going to get you. A hundred grand is exactly the business I'm in. To identify a problem, to propose a solution, and work it out is hard enough. Often you find it's for marginal improvement (or marginal loss) that requires a detailed cost analysis, and that's on the off-chance it works at all. There's a question of how far you can get in your garage, a question of far can you get without infrastructure. To do technical research you need to measure things. You need a laboratory, tools, at a minimum, materials to build things out of, and while there is room for innovation in the area, even the basic areas, it's not so virgin a field as it once was. As I started to write this up, CNN was broadcasting an excited news piece on the latest X Prize, which rewards complicated high-tech ventures after they demonstrate success. How much do you think you have to invest for a 10% chance to win a $1.4 million for a mechanical oil separator? We need 'em so badly (and we do), then why are we doing it on people's own thin dimes? Fucking cheapskates.

Now, we're not quite in the place with engineering as we are with fundamental physics: there's room for tinkerers, and the entrepreneurial model isn't completely broken. I don't intend to discourage the effort by any means, and I think that finding these people and supporting them is wise. But spotting a hundred grand to spark a high-risk research program is chump change, and doing it for the equivalent expected value is even worse. Baiting kids with dreams of Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Wozniak to fabricate shit in their dorm rooms and garages is probably not the best alternative to more comprehensive funding research the sciences, and it's not as if you can count on the paradigm shifting every generation, especially when you leave it to revolutionize itself, while fluffing the egos and fortunes of the people who recognize talent instead of apply it. Democraticization of innovation seems to correlate with the speed of its progress (rich patrons and then universities was better for progress than keeping it in the monastaries, letting women into the academy was a plus, that sort of thing), although it's hard to generalize across the slow sweep of history. Twenty Under Twenty and the X-Prizes are not bad ideas, and it's great to have something like that in the suite of science investment. But relying on them over straight-up funding seems like a giant step backward.

Sympathy for the Devil You (Pretend to) Know and He is Us

I felt like writing a "perspective" post, one of those things where I get all uncomfortable with certain self-truths (about me, and about us, you buncha complicit fat-cats you), and I figured I'd take the double-edged sword to David Brooks, who pretty well deserves a twice-weekly evisceration (I originally had a whole over-complicated metaphor as my opening graph, by the way, which I've scrapped, only regretting that now I'll have to shelve the phrase "pissant Promethei" for some other time), and for whom I developed a small fascination with his particular form of contemptibility back when I was reading him a lot back in the firewall days (thanks, daveto). Instead of digging around for the best example of his form, I figured I'd just wait for his next column.

Here's today's. I regret for the purposes of this post that it's a little more coherent than usual--normally Dave likes to offer non-sequitur sorts of theses, conclusions that pretend to resolve to Republican wisdom as derived from the bigger ideas or the (better) counterarguments that precede the message, ideas which clearly grab his interest, but which he doesn't labor to understand (Last week's piece on the Enlightenment is a good example of this. Did you know that the whole intellectual movement hinged on arguments over "go fast," which is where deductive reasoning gets you, and which perfectly describes populists and Democrats today, versus "take it slow," because Edmund Burke? I'm no philosopher either, but that seems to, uh, elide some important thinking of the time.)--and that I disagree with him just a skosh less then usual this time around (He may be right, sort of, about complexity, or at least it's an idea that many people accept. But in the case of BP and minerals management in this country, not to mention his other examples, he kind of elides the long-standing and fundamental problems of resource extraction vis a vis the environment, of public vs. industrial interests, about which people have not quite been silent but they have certainly been marginalized by serious chin-strokers such as himself, and here he pops up like Wormtongue again, flattering the industry, telling the world on its behalf that it was inevitable anyway, and was in no way related to cost-cutting or insufficient attention to the dangers of drilling that have been known since 1853. Complex systems may or may not be extra sensitive to external shocks, but you know what Dave? Fuck you.), but it's not a bad example of the traits I most feel like picking on.

Bobo is forever about that critical elision. What gets me is that I can't tell if he's lazy or lying, if he's failing to apply the reason he celebrates because he's dumb, or because he purposely ignores it. I tend to think it's the latter, and my running images of him include a contented lickspittle in the service of power or a knowledgeable, self-selected operative (like that guy Syme in 1984, who understood what was going on with the Eurasian political philosophy, and bought in anyway; in the novel, they eventually disappeared him, as I recall), but there's really no evidence of inner intellectual turmoil in his writing or speaking gigs. Even if he's in the habit of skimming science and philosophy articles for smart-sounding quotes, his conclusions never stray from conservative cant, no matter how irrelevantly he introduces them or how soothingly he enunciates. There's never any work to show. Maybe I get this impression that he's too smart to believe this shit because Brooks is an okay writer, a guy who can master the tone of his arguments, clearly, and is capable of delivering the intellectual patina that thoughtful conservatives crave. Maybe he's just phoning in the columns that he knows will keep him in print, burnt out eons ago from actually believing (or disbelieving) in anything, regardless of however he claims to have seen the half-light of boring faux-moderation. (I was going with "low-rent Lucifers" in the first draft too. Just sayin'.)

And that brings me to my last mental image of the guy, the one where I project heavily. Two columns and a half-dozen television and radio appearances a week have got to shake the believerism out of all but the most clear-headed or righteous, and never mind that sincerity isn't really a job requirement anyway in his line of work. The David Brooks of my sometimes imagination has defended against this by not treating the subject seriously, and softens the usual bullshit with a dollop of the important stuff he imagines he's interested in. Here's the author authoring away on auto-pilot, and in his fantasies he's dreaming of a job where he could wear a white coat and and carry a lab notebook, hammering out the problems of cognition, philosophy, or whatever it that he imagines Richard Feynman did, never mind that he doesn't really have the analytical skills to really understand the subjects or the motivation to keep up the technical effort for very long.

And you know, here I am, a mediocre scientist in an unglamorous discipline, gliding along with what skills are easier for me, fucking around on my blog in my free time and wondering if I could have been a writer instead. There are natural and brilliant scientists out there (and far better opinion writers, Bobo), and I am not one, but I am even less well-suited to the job of my fantasy, as should be obvious. Even if Brooks is fatigued down to his soul, it doesn't excuse the stuff he writes, and in his public life, he's a terrible human being. But I look at what I'm supposed to be doing for a living, and even though I have a lot of good rationalizations, I'm in many ways feeding the same beast, with about as much passion. I'm struggling to discern a difference.

[Added: There are far better opinion writers out there.]