Intellectual

An essay by Tyler Cowen (probably best known for his blog, Marginal Revolution), titled Autism as Academic Paradigm, has been getting a lot of notice because in it Cowen posits that in “American college or university, autism is often a competitive advantage rather than a problem to be solved.”
His point, though, is that autistics often have exceptionally good characteristics as well as negative ones, but our society’s view of autism as a disorder tends only to focus much more on the negative characteristics, especially the ones that make it difficult for autistics to get along in general society.
I’m in agreement with Cowen. I look at it this way: there are a variety of measures of cognitive and social abilities; as a society, we draw (fairly arbitrary) lines on these measures and state that anyone who is over the line for a particular measure suffers from a disorder, even if the individual operates within accepted norms for many other measures, or even exceptionally well in some.

The Null Device recently linked to a story about a professor who got a nonsensical, computer-generated article accepted for publication in a supposedly peer-reviewed, producer-pays-to-publish academic journal. It’s an interesting story, but what caught my eye was the professor’s carefully considered conclusions based on his experience:

From this one case, we cannot conclude that Bentham Science journals practice no peer review, only that it is inconsistently applied. . . While one should be careful not to generalize these results to other Open Access journals using similar business models, it does raise the question of whether, at least in some cases, the producer-pays-to-publish model may unduly influence editorial decision-making.

This type of thinking makes me miss the academic world; I think this is also a good example of the type of careful academic nuance that all too often gets lost when academic topics are presented to a wider audience.

This list of mostly anonymous quotes from college admissions officers is pretty depressing. For instance:

“All in all, we’re less selective than some of the elite schools or the Ivy League. But there are still some factors out of an applicant’s hands. One night, I got food poisoning at a restaurant in Buffalo. The next day, I rejected all the Buffalo applications. I couldn’t stomach reading them.”

(via Rafe Colburn)

A talk about obsession (and long Q&A with the audience) by Mythbuster Adam Savage at The last Hope hacker convention in July, 2008. It’s an hour long, but if you like Mythbusters, it’s well worth watching.

In an article in today’s New York Times Magazine, Eric Klinenberg ponders why people don’t prepare themselves better for possible disasters. He comes up with two possible explanations that resonated with me:

One major concern I heard was that there are simply too many things to worry about. Participants complained about having to prepare for too many specific disaster possibilities and in turn feeling overwhelmed, if not helpless.
…
[M]any people simply don’t want to live in a culture of preparedness. The notion is off-putting, and downright scary for some, because it seems to place fear and defensiveness at the center of our public and private lives. Careful planning means dwelling on the uncomfortable topics of our own mortality, the vulnerability of our loved ones and the fragility of our planet, and there’s a psychological price to be paid for that.

I live in an area where serious natural disasters are unlikely (or unlikely to be serious), so the only real concerns I have are man-made disasters.
My thinking regarding disasters is as follows: I’m not too worried any disaster that leads to a temporary (let’s say three days or shorter) breakdown of social infrastructure (electricity, municipal water, shipping of goods to stores, etc.). We can probably manage one way or another without any particular preparedness. And if there’s a disaster that leads to a prolonged breakdown of social infrastructure, then we’re all screwed, and no amount of preparedness short of stocking an entire room with food, water, guns and ammo, gasoline, etc., will help us through it.
I’m not saying that I am not preparing for a serious disaster because I don’t think it’ll happen. On the contrary, I think our social infrastructure is extremely fragile and the likelihood of such a breakdown of society is easier to cause than most people want to believe. It’s just that I’m not willing to put the time, effort and money into preparing for it. I just assume that I, along with many people, probably would not survive such a disaster, and given the cost/benefit analysis, I’m okay with that.

This AP article is a mess. In particular, check out this sentence:

Fournier appeared disappointed as left [sic] the capsule and walked to the hanger [sic]. He was hugged by members of his entourage.

Oh, there’s also this:

Fournier, 64, had planned to make the attempt Monday, but had to postpone his plans because of weather conditions.

And in case you missed it the first time, later in the article:

Spokeswoman Francine Lecompte-Gittens said Monday’s postponement was due to unfavorable weather.

The big story in the blog world today is about a Yale art student whose senior thesis involves repeatedly artificially inseminating herself and then aborting. The student’s stated goal is to “inspire some sort of discourse.”
What I find interesting, though, is that even at ultra-left MetaFilter, almost all of the commenters find this project distasteful, with frequent statements such as this one: “I’m pretty darn ‘liberal’ when it comes to abortion and all that, but this rubs me the wrong way, though I’m not entirely sure of the reason why.”
The discussion went on for a good 80 comments before someone posted something similar to what I’ve been thinking, which provide a reason for the commenter quoted above:

This art is shocking and provocative but that is not to diminish it. It is not an empty shock to me. It is filled with real and legitimate questions on how abortion and pregnancy works in our society. The way I see it is it is sort of a completly unspoken truce where most Americans don’t really like abortion but they get that women generally don’t take the decision lightly, they wouldn’t get an abortion unless they thought it was really important.
Now in this case a women is getting pregnant and ending the pregnancy for its own sake. The abortion is the point rather than a means to an end (which is vaguely agreed to be having a child later when you can take better care of it) She is asserting and questioning her own right to do this. She is pointing out that this right which is nearly absolute is in a way contingent on the reason behind it. At the same time though, where is the harm? The fetuses were not developed, the body sometimes rejects a fetus. This is a part of life. And what about her feelings, pregnancy is supposed to have a deep bond between the mother and child what is necessary for this to occur? Is this absolute? Is there something wrong when that isn’t there? What does she feel about these children, is she a monster for not thinking what we expect?
We have taken a biological reality and built this mythology around it and it might be that the mythology is an important and necessary part of what it is to be human or it might not be, and this art, I think, actually helps us answer this question.

There’s your hoped-for discourse right there.
UPDATE: Yale now says that this project never happened; it was a ‘creative fiction.’ If so, the artist still achieved her stated goal.

Over at Slacktivist, Fred Clark delivered a rant today about the sad state of journalism. As usual, it’s a thought-provoking piece. However, what makes the post even better is one of the comments, which begins:

Wow. You have basically described my job.
I’m online editor at a smallish newspaper in the Midwest. Once a week, I am given a page to fill dedicated to exactly this sort of swill. And I am given a couple hours to come up with the copy and photos to fill that page. I literally am required to skim through the press releases, submitted poems, online comments sections, e-mailed photos and family-written profiles to come up with enough to fill that gaping hole in the paper. I consider it a good week when I can find something that is at least written in the first person. It is a relentless schedule. Every Thursday, I wade into the cesspool looking for shiny things, while a relentless clock ticks away in the background.
And that is really the rub. I don’t have more time, nor would my bosses allocate more time, for me to factcheck every one of these pieces. Or any of these pieces, for that matter. And since I have that blank page staring back at me, I am genuinely relieved to be able to insert that terrible poem. Or that diary about your backpacking trip to Nepal. And if you send a photo? Ohmigod, you are my most favorite person in the world. Because that big, white page must be filled. And if you don’t send your crap in, what in the world will I fill it with?

The rest of the comment is just as depressingly insightful.