Friday, October 23, 2015

Today in deliberate misreadings: Politics And The English Language

 George "The Animal Steele" Orwell

Everyone knows George Orwell wrote a great essay on political language. Hipsters (edit: I don't mean to attack this person specifically. The was inspired by someone I know personally) know that the essay is bunk, claiming stupidly that we should all write beige, colorless prose and always avoid the passive voice. The fact that I called them hipsters tells you where I stand. Yes, it is strange that Orwell should make us want to write as dully as ... The King James Bible. Gosh, it's almost like such a reading doesn't make sense when you think of it like that. Well, that's because it doesn't! One would think that linguists would understand the idea of qualifying phrases! Imagine if I wrote such trash about fluid mechanics:

 I've always been fascinated by vortex dynamics

"How stupid is Helmholtz's essay on vortex dynamics? If he were right, wingtip vorticies couldn't end in a fluid, so they'd have to extend all the way back to where the plane started at the beginning of time. That's ridiculous. I can't imagine the damage done to fluid mechanics by this illogical essay."

All I have to do is ignore that Helmholtz ever said "velocity potential" and I make him sound ridiculous. Yes, it's easy to sound smart when you cut out half the sentence ("Never use the passive ..." rather than "Never use the passive where you can use the active."). Plus, it lets you get out of having to use real data! Since you've created a totally artificial theory that nobody ever proposed, nobody will call you on it if you reject it badly after all. Heck, why not go further? Let's claim Maxwell never discovered Maxwell's correction to Ampere's Law, just by leaving out those parts of his books! It's fun!

In ur noospapers, writin' ur propaganda

Okay, now they've got me doing it. These kinds of arguments are well documented in Schopenhauer, and it is more fun to attack hipsters and George Orwell than it is to sit around in your underwear. I should have a sense of humor about things. If you do something as simple as read the essay, you'll notice that Orwell's praise is always toward the visual and metaphorical and away from the beige and standard. Orwell didn't say "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms." but rather "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.". Read those two sentences and tell me there's no difference. Or how about this dull, image-less prose taken from something Orwell himself thinks is worth publishing:

"When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases ... one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them."

What's that from? Oh right, that's from the very essay you just read! Orwell is throughout the entire essay calling for more colorful, more illustrated, more metaphorical/simile-heavy prose. He uses images constantly throughout the essay, and indeed throughout his writing. I wouldn't go as far as to say Orwell was a frustrated artist, writing because he couldn't draw political cartoons. That's G.K. Chesterton you're thinking of. But Orwell always had his eye fixed on creating an image in the reader's mind.

I didn't say anything about Orwell's deeper concern that avoiding metaphor and imagery allows one to deflect from what one is really writing about. I don't know that if Laski had to write about the Soviet in the way Orwell said that it would force Laski to think about what the Soviet was really doing and he would find it in himself to criticize them before Czechoslovakia. I'd guess that Orwell has a point but the psychological issue needs to be studied empirically. Do such studies exist?

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Sunday, October 4, 2015

If I Have Mine and You Have Yours, Do We Have Ours?

Let's play pretend. Let's say you're an earnest young music producer and you're going to make a star out of an earnest young talent. She's really good, Joni Mitchell or Kate Bush level. How do you capture her genius? Do you hire strings, really go balls out? Or is it more beautiful to capture her pure and unrestrained? Well, here's one piece of advice:



That's not helpful is it? Alright, well, here's what we think mathematically. This is a problem of "Multi-Objective Programming".


Single objective programming, or simple optimization, is pretty simple to understand (though in practice it can become quite difficult). You want to do ... something and you want to do your best. You wanna make the most money, or move the most people, or be the purest, or rock the hardest, or be the funniest, etc., etc. It was recognized by Newton that for smooth payoff functions, finding maximums and minimums was equivalent to finding the roots of derivatives (he wouldn't have phrased it like this). So all you have to do is have a root-finding technique, and there are very efficient ways of doing that. It's simple enough that reducing a design decision to an optimization problem is equivalent to solving it. I've actually done some work in this area, engineering stuff by optimization techniques.

Multi-Objective Programming is more complex. It's satire rather than just comedy - now you want to be as funny as possible and reach as many people as possible. Occasionally you're going to run into some trade-offs. How long are you willing to stray from the message for a laugh? How many laughs are you willing to sacrifice to get to the point? There's no longer any notion of a simple best, there's real trade-offs. How can we solve such a problem?


The notion of a "solution" to a problem with multiple objectives dates back to Hume, but has its first clear enunciation in the work of economist Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto was a very interesting person. He was at first a dedicated Free Market Liberal type and dedicated much of this part of his life to simplifying and extending the economic equilibrium theories of Leon Walras. He later decided that economic theories from Hume to himself left out the "irrational" aspects of human behavior. He believed that human nature was fundamentally non-logical, that political power was found in the vicious struggle of elites and that empirical study of sociology is what is best in life. By the end of his life, he was calling for releasing the hounds on anyone to the left of Mussolini - of whom he was very, very big fan. Hey, I said he was smart, not wise.

Well, Pareto's other beliefs aside, his proposal for the solution of multi-objective problems was very important innovation. A solution is called "Pareto" if improving in one aspect must mean detracting another. For the Joni Mitchell example, it would mean going beyond tasteful, jazzy backing to syrupy Mantovani backing (I don't hate Mantovani, just note that he'd be wrong for Mitchell). This isn't an optimum in the original sense -it can't be an optimum in the original sense. There's no longer a clear notion of best. It's a notion of stability of decisions. Imagine that Joni Mitchell had two producers, one who wanted bigness and the other honesty. Of course, much of what she does can please both producers - write a beautiful melody with lots of hooks and nice lyrics. But at some point, adding/subtracting some more strings will please one and not the other. Pareto's idea is not perfect. For instance, if Joni decides to completely listen to one producer and not the other, that idea is perfectly Pareto - even if it is wrong. To put it another way, let's say Mom bakes us a pie. If I take the whole pie, you can't get any without taking some from me. The distribution is Pareto - but not good.

The most important application of this idea, and Pareto's original application, was to the distribution of goods in a static economy. In this post, I discussed about how a highly unequal distribution of goods could develop from trade economy. Notice that at a Pareto stable point, trade effectively stops - Chamberlin stays the richest person. Nobody can make themselves better off without hurting someone (not necessarily Wilt, mind you). This has powerful implications. In fact, an economist named Francis Edgeworth developed a highly innovative iterative argument where trade people negotiate and renegotiate their contracts. Since only the set of Pareto equilbria are stable (this is a mathematical sticking point), they must land on one. This was, arguably, the first argument that an invisible hand could actually achieve a stable distribution, rather than the Walras/Pareto demonstration that one exists. Of course, this argument is also present in a purely verbal form in Hume. I've written about this before.

Well, I'm having trouble with my laptop battery, so we'll have to get into Pareto and dynamic economies some other time. See you then!

Uninteresting Note: I originally wanted to name this post "Economies Wobble But Do They Fall Down?" but that's about the stability of equilibria and not what an equilibrium is.

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Solo Duke



Well, I wanted to write a wise post on some classic results about on (Pareto) stability of a growing economy (in short, cain't be done, son), but I couldn't think of anything to say that would be interesting. But then I saw this and of course anything I'd say would pale in comparison. I love that Duke starts with Fluerette Africain, a number he wrote (for Charles Mingus - Duke's best work was always specific) relatively recently to this recording. It shows Duke's influence from Monk, an influence that Duke thanked Monk for at every opportunity! (of course, Monk was deeply influenced by Duke as well - and first)

Coleman Hawkins & Duke Ellington

Well, I guess I should give my opinions on the essential Duke... nothing like judging great artists and great men. Well, I bend strongly toward the weird. Money Jungle - played by the trio of Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Max Roach - is definitely on the list. Music should have big personality, that was Duke's philosophy. Ellington At Newport is a better portrait of his general sound. Of course, one of his very best albums is his tribute to his long time music director and close friend Billy Strayhorn ... And His Mother Called Him Bill. But, of course, this doesn't feature Ellington's compositions. Billy Strayhorn's style is instantly distinguishable from Duke's, I don't consider myself a connoisseur and I've never once confused them in my life. Billy was better educated than Duke, and Strayhorn's style was ... educated, urbane melancholy. Ellington tended to break rules more innocently and with more dramatic effect. Of course, & John Coltrane and Meets Coleman Hawkins are great for post-bop enthusiasts like myself. Some might argue that Coleman Hawkins and pre-bop rather than post-bop. The use of "rather than" rather than "as well as" is their only mistake.

 I think this is the right orchestra...

 Once more modern albums have got you used to the Ellington genius, try The Blanton-Webster Band, which captures his 40's sound. People not used to 40's sound should not jump into the old material with both feet. Good recording technology is a blessing. Well, that's my attempt to give my favorite albums. Of course, there's collections galore, but I can't sort through all those.



I also wouldn't try to introduce someone to 40's music through Ellington - it was too innovative. It's a double whammy of intricate compositions and old fashioned sound. I'd try the great Louis Jordan, though it might trick people into thinking music in the 40's was any good. Good place to start, other than the earlier links, is his classic story of getting beat up and arrested at a raucous party.