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Javier E

Michael Chwe, Author, Sees Jane Austen as Game Theorist - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • It’s not every day that someone stumbles upon a major new strategic thinker during family movie night. But that’s what happened to Michael Chwe, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, when he sat down with his children some eight years ago to watch “Clueless,” the 1995 romantic comedy based on Jane Austen’s “Emma.”
  • In 230 diagram-heavy pages, Mr. Chwe argues that Austen isn’t merely fodder for game-theoretical analysis, but an unacknowledged founder of the discipline itself: a kind of Empire-waisted version of the mathematician and cold war thinker John von Neumann, ruthlessly breaking down the stratagems of 18th-century social warfare.
  • Or, as Mr. Chwe puts it in the book, “Anyone interested in human behavior should read Austen because her research program has results.”
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  • Modern game theory is generally dated to 1944, with the publication of von Neumann’s “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,” which imagined human interactions as a series of moves and countermoves aimed at maximizing “payoff.” Since then the discipline has thrived, often dominating political science, economics and biology
  • But a century and a half earlier, Mr. Chwe argues, Austen was very deliberately trying to lay philosophical groundwork for a new theory of strategic action, sometimes charting territory that today’s theoreticians have themselves failed to reach.
  • First among her as yet unequaled concepts is “cluelessness
  • many situations, Mr. Chwe points out, involve parties with unequal levels of strategic thinking. Sometimes a party may simply lack ability. But sometimes a powerful party faced with a weaker one may not realize it even needs to think strategically.
  • Mr. Chwe, who identifies some 50 “strategic manipulations” in Austen
  • Game theory, he argues, isn’t just part of “hegemonic cold war discourse,” but what the political scientist James Scott called a subversive “weapon of the weak.”
  • Even some humanists who admire Mr. Chwe’s work suggest that when it comes to appreciating Austen, social scientists may be the clueless ones. Austen scholars “will not be surprised at all to see the depths of her grasp of strategic thinking and the way she anticipated a 20th-century field of inquiry,”
Javier E

Harold Bloom Is Dead. But His 'Rage for Reading' Is Undiminished. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • It’s a series of meditations on what Bloom believes to be the most important novels we have, and it takes for granted that its readers already know the books under consideration; in other words, that they have already absorbed “the canon,” and are eager to reconsider it later in their lives.
  • A not atypical, almost throwaway passage for you to test the waters on: “Tolstoy, as befits the writer since Shakespeare who most has the art of the actual, combines in his representational praxis the incompatible powers of Homer and the Yahwist.” This is not Bloom showing off; it’s the way Bloom thinks and proceeds.
  • Apart from his novelists, his frame of reference rests on Shakespeare above all others, Homer, Chaucer, Dante, Montaigne, Emerson, Dr. Johnson (the “shrewdest of all literary critics”), Blake, Wordsworth, Whitman (for him, the central American writer of the 19th century), Wallace Stevens, Freud
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  • Among the novelists, Cervantes, Tolstoy (supreme), Melville, Austen, Proust, Joyce.
  • He is inevitably at his strongest when dealing with those writers he cares most about. With Jane Austen, for one. And, above all, with Tolstoy:
  • As for Dickens, whose “David Copperfield” was a direct influence on Tolstoy, to Bloom his greatest achievement is “Bleak House”
  • He pairs it with Dickens’s final complete novel, “Our Mutual Friend,” a book I care for so extravagantly that I’ve read it three times
  • The two works in which Bloom is most fully invested are “Moby-Dick” (40 pages) and “Ulysses” (54)
  • He chooses to give room to not one but two of Le Guin’s novels, “The Left Hand of Darkness” and “The Dispossessed,”
Javier E

What Is College For? (Part 2) - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • How, exactly, does college prepare students for the workplace? For most jobs, it provides basic intellectual skills: the ability to understand relatively complex instructions, to write and speak clearly and cogently, to evaluate options critically. Beyond these intellectual skills, earning a college degree shows that you have the “moral qualities” needed for most jobs: you have (to put it a bit cynically), for a period of four years and with relatively little supervision, deferred to authority, met deadlines and carried out difficult tasks even when you found them pointless and boring.
  • This sort of intellectual and moral training, however, does not require studying with experts doing cutting-edge work on, say, Homeric poetry, elementary particle theory or the philosophy of Kant. It does not, that is, require the immersion in the world of intellectual culture that a college faculty is designed to provide. It is, rather, the sort of training that ought to result from good elementary and high school education.
  • students graduating from high school should, to cite one plausible model, be able to read with understanding classic literature (from, say, Austen and Browning to Whitman and Hemingway) and write well-organized and grammatically sound essays; they should know the basic outlines of American and European history, have a good beginner’s grasp of at least two natural sciences as well as pre-calculus mathematics, along with a grounding in a foreign language.
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  • Is it really possible to improve grade school and high school teaching to the level I’m suggesting? Yes, provided we employ the same sort of selection criteria for pre-college teachers as we do for other professionals such as doctors, lawyers and college professors. In contrast to other professions, teaching is not now the domain of the most successful students — quite the contrary. I’ve known many very bright students who had an initial interest in such teaching but soon realized that there is no comparison in terms of salary, prestige and working conditions.
  • Given this transformation in pre-college education, we could expect it to provide basic job-training for most students. At that point, we would still face a fundamental choice regarding higher education. We could see it as a highly restricted enterprise, educating only professionals who require advanced specialized skills. Correspondingly, only such professionals would have access to higher education as a locus of intellectual culture.
  • On the other hand, we could — as I would urge — see college as the entrée to intellectual culture for everyone who is capable of and interested in working at that level of intellectual engagement
  • Raising high school to the level I am proposing and opening college to everyone who will profit from it would be an expensive enterprise. We would need significant government support to ensure that all students receive an education commensurate with their abilities and aspirations, regardless of family resources. But the intellectual culture of our citizens should be a primary part of our national well-being, not just the predilection of an eccentric elite. As such, it should be among our highest priorities.
Javier E

We Are Just Not Digging The Whole Anymore : NPR - 1 views

  • We just don't do whole things anymore. We don't read complete books — just excerpts. We don't listen to whole CDs — just samplings. We don't sit through whole baseball games — just a few innings. Don't even write whole sentences. Or read whole stories like this one. Long-form reading, listening and viewing habits are giving way to browse-and-choose consumption. With the increase in the number of media options — or distractions, depending on how you look at them — something has to give, and that something is our attention span. - Adam Thierer, senior research fellow at George Mason University We care more about the parts and less about the entire. We are into snippets and smidgens and clips and tweets. We are not only a fragmented society, but a fragment society.
  • One Duke University student was famously quoted in a 2006 Time magazine essay telling his history professor, "We don't read whole books anymore."
  • Now there are lots of websites that present whole books and concepts in nano form
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  • nearly half of all adults — 47 percent — get some of their local news and information on mobile computing devices. We are receiving our news in kibbles and bits, sacrificing context and quality for quickness and quantity.
  • Here is the ultra-condensation of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: Mr. Darcy: Nothing is good enough for me. Ms. Elizabeth Bennet: I could never marry that proud man. (They change their minds.) THE END
  • Fewer and fewer gamers are following gaming storylines all the way to completion, according to a recent blog post on the IGN Entertainment video game website.
  • "With the increase in the number of media options — or distractions, depending on how you look at them — something has to give, and that something is our attention span." He ticks off a long list of bandied-about terms. Here's a shortened version: cognitive overload; information paralysis; techno stress; and data asphyxiation.
  • Rockmore believes that the way many people learn — or try to learn — these days is via this transporter technique. "The truth is," he says, "that modern pedagogy probably needs to address this in the sense that there is so much information out there, for free, so that obtaining it — even in bits and pieces — is not the challenge, rather integrating it into a coherent whole is. That's a new paradigm."
Javier E

A Commencement Address Too Honest to Deliver in Person - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Use this hiatus to do something you would never have done if this emergency hadn’t hit. When the lockdown lifts, move to another state or country. Take some job that never would have made sense if you were worrying about building a career—bartender, handyman, AmeriCorps volunteer.
  • If you use the next two years as a random hiatus, you may not wind up richer, but you’ll wind up more interesting.
  • The biggest way most colleges fail is this: They don’t plant the intellectual and moral seeds students are going to need later, when they get hit by the vicissitudes of life.
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  • If you didn’t study Jane Austen while you were here, you probably lack the capacity to think clearly about making a marriage decision. If you didn’t read George Eliot, then you missed a master class on how to judge people’s character. If you didn’t read Nietzsche, you are probably unprepared to handle the complexities of atheism—and if you didn’t read Augustine and Kierkegaard, you’re probably unprepared to handle the complexities of faith.
  • The list goes on. If you didn’t read de Tocqueville, you probably don’t understand your own country. If you didn’t study Gibbon, you probably lack the vocabulary to describe the rise and fall of cultures and nations.
  • The wisdom of the ages is your inheritance; it can make your life easier. These resources often fail to get shared because universities are too careerist, or because faculty members are more interested in their academic specialties or politics than in teaching undergraduates, or because of a host of other reasons
  • What are you putting into your mind? Our culture spends a lot less time worrying about this, and when it does, it goes about it all wrong.
  • my worry is that, especially now that you’re out of college, you won’t put enough really excellent stuff into your brain.
  • I worry that it’s possible to grow up now not even aware that those upper registers of human feeling and thought exist.
  • The theory of maximum taste says that each person’s mind is defined by its upper limit—the best that it habitually consumes and is capable of consuming.
  • After college, most of us resolve to keep doing this kind of thing, but we’re busy and our brains are tired at the end of the day. Months and years go by. We get caught up in stuff, settle for consuming Twitter and, frankly, journalism. Our maximum taste shrinks.
  • I’m worried about the future of your maximum taste. People in my and earlier generations, at least those lucky enough to get a college education, got some exposure to the classics, which lit a fire that gets rekindled every time we sit down to read something really excellent.
  • the “theory of maximum taste.” This theory is based on the idea that exposure to genius has the power to expand your consciousness. If you spend a lot of time with genius, your mind will end up bigger and broader than if you spend your time only with run-of-the-mill stuff.
  • the whole culture is eroding the skill the UCLA scholar Maryanne Wolf calls “deep literacy,” the ability to deeply engage in a dialectical way with a text or piece of philosophy, literature, or art.
  • “To the extent that you cannot perceive the world in its fullness, to the same extent you will fall back into mindless, repetitive, self-reinforcing behavior, unable to escape.”
  • I can’t say that to you, because it sounds fussy and elitist and OK Boomer. And if you were in front of me, you’d roll your eyes.
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    Or as the neurologist Richard Cytowic put it to Adam Garfinkle, "To the extent that you cannot perceive the world in its fullness, to the same extent you will fall back into mindless, repetitive, self-reinforcing behavior, unable to escape."*
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