The Social Construction of Insulting Gibberish
This is going to be a bit of a free-associative ramble, for which I will insincerely apologize in advance (after all, if I was really sorry about it, I just wouldn't post it in the first place...).
Wandering through the "blogosphere" the past few days, I've seen a lot of discussion of Randy Barnett's Glenn Reynolds impersonation, and his claim that "the Left really and truly lives in a socially constructed world." This disingenuous nonsense has been taken down in lots of places, most notably by Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber, who points out that Barnett's co-conspirator Eugene Volokh rightly takes offense at a similar line of argument from the Left. As Kieran puts it, writing to Volokh, "You should send Randy an email with a link to your blog or something -- he'd really benefit from reading it."
(To digress for a moment, The Volokh Conspiracy is one of those "blogosphere" phenomena (doo doo de-doo-doo), like Samizdata.net, that I Just Don't Get. Lots of people seem to think highly of it, but whenever I drop by, I'm underwhelmed. Now, granted, I don't read it regularly, so maybe I'm missing something, but the pieces I've seen linked approvingly by right-wingers generally leave me unimpressed, while the stuff I see linked by left-wingers, like Barnett's piece and Tyler Cowen's foolishness about do-not-call lists (again, nicely dismantled on Crooked Timber) strike me as the rankest idiocy.
(I realize that part of the attraction is that the actual Volokhs (Eugene, at least) are important and well-known in Real Life (TM). But even restricting things to Eugene's posts, I've never been blown away by what he writes. He always seems to engage in the same sort of "pick your desired conclusion, and then argue to get to it" reasoning that bugs me about much of political webloggery. Maybe people are just impressed that he writes like an actual law professor, which is relatively rare in blogdom...)
(And that snarky remark conjures unbidden the image of Glenn Reynolds filing court papers consisting entirely of snippets from various Posner and Scalia decisions, separated by single lines of "original" content, like "Indeed," or "Read the whole thing," with the occasional liberal jurist quoted, followed by a "Why do they hate America?" But we're getting way off track now...)
Anyway, my reaction to Barnett's "argument" resonated nicely with Ginger Stampley's post on ideology and character. Like Ginger, I've more or less stopped reading the bloggers who most annoy me, even though that risks some degree of ideological isolation. In the end, though, it's just not worth dealing with people of low character (a nice description Ginger quotes from Rafe Colburn)-- the question-begging, straw-man bashing, and McCarthyite smearing of political opponents on the sites in question irritate me well past useful levels. Barnett's post strikes me as another example of a person setting out to argue that his opponents are not only mistaken, but Bad People, and character doesn't get much lower than that.
Which is pretty much where things sat until this morning, when I read Jim Henley announcing a new blog and highlighting a post regarding A.S. Byatt's comments on Harry Potter. I've mentioned this before (and there's another Crooked Timber citation...), and you can find the whole Byatt article quoted here if you want to avoid the New York Times paywall.
Anyway, my reaction to Barnett is pretty much the standard complaint about Byatt. She's not just saying that the books aren't particularly good, the argument goes, she's claiming that the readers and fans of the books are Bad People. And thus, we hates her forever! Or something.
This came to mind because that wasn't how I read the Byatt article at all. I actually thought she made some good points regarding the books-- the Freud stuff was overdone, but she puts her finger on something that's bugged me about the books for a while, when she notes that "Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous." Now, granted, she goes on to follow that observation up with some tendentious remarks about cartoons and soap operas, but that struck me as just the sort of thing you need to do to "sex up" an essay to get it in the New York Times, and get people talking about it. I read it as more of an attempt to be "provocative" than an ad hominem attack on Harry Potter readers, and was mildly surprised to see the vehemence with which it was attacked.
I wrote the difference in reactions off as an inside/outside fandom thing. The strongest anti-Byatt responses I saw were via Kate's LiveJournal friends list, and those are mostly people who are part of Harry Potter fandom, while I'm, well, not. I read the books, and I enjoy them in a "I want to see what happens next" sense, but I just don't find them all that captivating. The world strikes me as relentlessly non-numinous (to cop Byatt's term), and has an ad hoc sort of feel that prevents me from getting too involved, while the characters fail to be all that memorable for me. (Which means, incidentally, that critiques of Byatt like the one at Polytropos, based on really liking the books, leave me unmoved.) Militant Potter fandom is another thing that I Just Don't Get.
I do, however, recall what it's like to be part of a fan community and see it attacked from outside. And I remember being grievously offended by "attacks" that were, in retrospect, fairly mild, and generally well-founded. So I can understand how people who hold the books dear might take the Byatt article much more personally than I do, and react accordingly.
Which got me to wondering whether my reaction to the Barnett piece might not be similar. After all, my impression was mostly due to the snippets posted at various liberal weblogs, and the discussion therein. Maybe I'm just a part of "liberal fandom," as it were, and took his piece too personally as a result.
So I went back and re-read it, keeping the fandom problem in mind.
Nope. It's still one of the most idiotic and insulting things I've read since... Well, in quite some time. What's more, his follow-up piece, billed by some as a partial retraction of the original, is equally stupid.
But then, I would think that, wouldn't I?
Posted at 11:23 AM | link | follow-ups | [ hide comments ]
To cite an example: That George Bush is president is undeniable. That he is president because the Supreme Court settled is also undeniable. That Barnett places emphasis on the former and folks on the left place emphasis on the latter is merely a matter of perspective.
"Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family."
Today I'm boggled less by any possible attack on the characters of readers, [than] the sense that Byatt read a completely different book than I did.
is basically to say "It's a difference in emphasis."
The long-term plot involves a threat to the entire world, but the immediate plots all involve fairly narrow threats to Harry himself, and his friends and family. Indeed, it's the narrowness of the threats that makes the plot of the fifth book possible-- because nobody other than Harry and his immediate circle has been directly threatened, the daftly-named folks at the Ministry of Magic can continue to believe that there's no larger threat, thus setting the whole annoying thing in motion.
You can argue that the same is true of most of the classic children's fantasies-- most of Susan Cooper's books, for example, involve immediate threats to only a select few people, and the overall war with the Dark doesn't go global until the final volume-- but I think it's reasonable to say that the real dangers in the books so far have only affected Harry and those close to him.
Chad Orzel, 07.25.2003, 12:55 pm [link]
(Hogwarts Houses, "Mudbloods", goblins, house-elves . . . the long-term plot is shaping up to be tolerance and cooperation v. enslavement and genocide.)
But she had to go and mess it up with all that crap about TV (and with the bizarre praise for the equally mediocre Susan Cooper), so fooey on Byatt.
Mike Kozlowski, 07.25.2003, 2:00 pm [link]
Heh.
The *series* runs off the rails at the end by extrapolating the concept of Plot Tokens to its logical and completely arbitrary end.
I always want to yell at it, "Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!"
Cooper isn't mediocre, just wildly uneven.
One question about Byatt/Rowling: do you think that Byatt is asserting that good fantasy should have an air of the numinous, and Rowling hasn't tried to provide that, and therefore is bad? Or is she saying that Rowling has _tried_ to provide an air of the numinous and has simply failed miserably?
Mark, 07.25.2003, 2:32 pm [link]
However, one weird thing is that I wouldn't call Pratchett--whom both Byatt and I admire greatly--a writer of numinous fantasy, either. So it's not clear if the numinousness is what's required, or if it's just enough to be working in imaginary-world fantasy.
Either way, Rowling hasn't really tried for it.
(I think numinous is orthogonal to "good", but relevant to "taste".)
I think it was Neil Gaiman who said that the secret to literature is that there's room for a thing to mean more than it literally means. In the Potterverse, there's no such room: Everything is what it is, flat and obvious.
Pratchett, Tolkien, and Lewis can tell us things about people and the world; Rowling can tell us only about Harry Potter.
Mike Kozlowski, 07.25.2003, 3:10 pm [link]
The former. At least that's how I would read it, and that's part of what strikes me as being wrong with the books.
Someday I'll bore all my readers to tears by writing a lengthy essay on what I think magic in fantasy novels ought to be like (the exact list of characteristics is somewhat fluid), but two of the central elements would be: 1) Magic isn't science, and shouldn't behave like technology, and 2) Magic should have a cost. Rowling, to my mind, fails on both counts, and that failure is what keeps the world from being "numinous."
The numinousity (numinousness? numinitude?) of Pratchett, on the other hand, is an interesting question. For one thing, it sort of depends on which Pratchett you're talking about-- The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantasic are more slapstick than anything else, and bear little resemblence to, say, Lords and Ladies. His best work, though, has a certain... moral weight, maybe? I wouldn't call it "numninous" (but then, it's not a word I use much), but there's a solidity to his best stuff that I don't find in the Potter books.
Chad Orzel, 07.25.2003, 5:30 pm [link]
By deciding his important facts are "the facts" and other people's important facts are "lies", [Barnett's] just as guilty as anybody, and sadly incapable of realizing it.
That's certainly one way of looking at it, demonstrated nicely by one of his "liberal 'truths':
The Supreme Court "decided the election" (rather than reversed a rogue Southern state Supreme Court and restore the rulings of local, mainly democratic, election officials).
The parenthetical bit, which he proposes as the "fact" to counter the liberal version, is every bit as ludicrously prejudicial a description of events as anything he takes issue with from the Left.
What makes me break to the "low character" side, rather than just shrugging it off as a cae study in the perils of little knowledge, is his follow-up, where he writes:
Second, a few deny the charge by denying the examples I provided -- claiming either that the false "facts" I mention are really true, or they are not truly "facts." Some of these objections, especially the latter, are well-taken. But I believe even better examples could have been found, and being a blog I had only so much time to invest.
That just screams "low character." He admits that the "evidence" he provided wasn't actually very good, but rather than back down he invokes evidence which might conceivably exist somewhere else. Some lurkers are bound to email it to him any day now, so we should just concede that he's right.
That's low character in action. It's also pretty much the Bush administration position on Iraqi WMD, but that's a rant of a different color...
Chad Orzel, 07.25.2003, 5:43 pm [link]
I agree with everything you said, but my theory is that people on the left want to demonstrate their even-handedness and therefore need a right-wing blog to describe as credible, and the Volokh is at least clearly written and occasionally criticizes other right-wingers rather than just closing ranks.
On another note, thanks for the pentaquark post, I read it with interest.
drapetomaniac, 07.27.2003, 12:42 am [link]
Mark, 07.27.2003, 10:24 am [link]
1. On Byatt's insulting of adult Harry Potter readers, you write: I read it as more of an attempt to be "provocative" than an ad hominem attack on Harry Potter readers, and was mildly surprised to see the vehemence with which it was attacked. So, your take is that she's trolling? That may be the case, but it doesn't really cast her in a better light.
2. Some of what Byatt writes is spot-on, as far as it goes. HP is a part of the "substitue/made family" genre. The books are decidedly lacking in numinositude. Her error, IMAO, comes in declaring that these are necessarily bad things (or at best, childish things, unsuitable for adults).
The idea that the voluntary bonds of friendship can be as strong, or stronger than, the socially and biologically-imposed bonds of blood is a pretty common theme, especially in current popular culture. Consider how, over the last decade or so, sitcoms have shifted from nuclear-family-centric fare (Family Ties, The Cosby Show, Growing Pains) to groups of friends, or "constructed families" (Friends, Seinfeld, Will and Grace). I suppose Ms. Byatt might cite that as yet another example of how modern society is filled with "childish adults," but that really falls under judging a change in culture from the viewpoint of the old culture. (The fact that her criticism is based on Freudian concepts is telling.) That in itself is not entirely invalid, but it is not unimpeachably correct, either. (Which brings us right back to socially-constructed reality!)
Now, as for the charges of non-numisosity, that is, again, an objectively correct assessment of the Harry Potter universe. But so what? I think that a fair assessment would acknowledge that Mileage May Vary. One of the reasons I like the Potter books is the quotidian nature of magic and wizardry. Ms. Byatt writes: Much of the real evil in the later books is caused by newspaper gossip columnists who make Harry into a dubious celebrity, which is the modern word for the chosen hero. Most of the rest of the evil (apart from Voldemort) is caused by bureaucratic interference in educational affairs. as if that's a bad thing.
Maybe it's just that I've spent too much of my life reading about heroic youths striving to save the world from the Big Bad Soul-Destroying Supernatural Evil Dude Under the Mountain(TM). It makes me appreciate a battle against Bad Bureaucracy and Unenlightened Self-Interest as a novelty. But I acknowledge that this is a matter of personal taste.
3. Volokh Conspiracy: I think part of the appeal is that they're quite low on the anti-liberal invective that you get on so many other conservative-leaning blogs. While one may disagree with them, and while one may find their arguments nonconvincing, they usually, y'know, make arguments, rather than accusing their ideological opposites of being "objectively pro-Saddam" or other such tripe. (Also, there's a noticeable variation in quality among the various Conspirators, so what I'm saying may not apply universally. I haven't been reading it as much since Jacob Levy's been away.)
Pam, 07.27.2003, 2:42 pm [link]
One of the interpretive issues that I see with respect to Barnett's comment is that some of us expect guys like Barnett to go into an argument with fairness in mind. Whether it's because we're squishy liberals or spent too long on USENET, we forget sometimes that while fairness may be an occasional pose of political hacks, it's not their natural state. Barnett is in this to win points for his way of thinking, not to engage the enemy (hint: Chad, that's us).
I think this also explains the Volokhs and the bitter reaction of many on the left to Glenn Reynolds. Volokh appears to have a lawyer's commitment to argumentative fairness. People thought Reynolds had it, and he proved to be a partisan hack. (Let's not talk about Samizdata.) If Volokh ever starts producing seriously partisan commentary, he'll stop being a readable righty too.
Randy Barnett, when he's talking about originalism, can be brilliant; and I'm glad that he wrote his "different world" article, because I think it did highlight just how vast the extremes of political thought are. I think that members of the extreme right are living in a different world, myself. It was illuminating to see an encompassing worldview so utterly different from my own. As in all things, I think that reality lies somewhere in the middle.
I particularly enjoyed the points raised here about emphasis of facts and how they can distort. I've been trying to think of a way to articulate this, and that's as good as any.
As to Susan Cooper: I'm afraid I'm biased on this, but as a kid, this was an eye-opener of a series to me, showing me what fantasy can do. While others argue that she resolved things in too pat of a fashion, I personally feel the series was left horribly incomplete. I'd love to see an "adult" rework of the entire series. It will remain to me one of my favorite series ever.
Kenneth G. Cavness, 07.28.2003, 11:45 am [link]
I'm disappointed to learn that the numen is not the unit of measure of numinosity, incidentally.
I think that, when you're talking about what Harry Potter's missing, it's not so much numinousness that we're looking at as depth, in general.
I think it was Neil Gaiman who said that the secret to literature is that there's room for a thing to mean more than it literally means. In the Potterverse, there's no such room: Everything is what it is, flat and obvious.
Pratchett, Tolkien, and Lewis can tell us things about people and the world; Rowling can tell us only about Harry Potter.
[/quote]
But then I doubt that you will find someone who reads Harry Potter to learn about humanity. It is not so much Literature but rather literature.
Something to put your thought to rest after a day of learning and working, it is not something to get your thinking going ( which does happen to me if I read, let`s say, "Small gods" or "The Stars, My destination" )
Suenert, 07.30.2003, 1:53 am [link]
Re: Potter/ Byatt, Pam writes:
Now, as for the charges of non-numisosity, that is, again, an objectively correct assessment of the Harry Potter universe. But so what? I think that a fair assessment would acknowledge that Mileage May Vary.
I realized fairly recently, in connection with a similar debate elsewhere, that I've changed my mind regarding the need for explicitly stating that statements made in a review are statements of opinion. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that I've sworn off Usenet, and spend most of my frivolous net time reading weblogs instead.
The nature of the book-review beast is such that any comments made are inescapably matters of opinion. Throwing in frequent statements to that effect only serves to break up the flow of the text (and take up space, which is probably an issue when writing for the New York Times, which doesn't provide unlimited space for ranting). And, really would tacking the phrase "That's just my opinion, I could be wrong" really make "The book stinks worse than a three-meter pile of rancid dingo droppings" a less insulting review?
Whether they're cast that way or not, reviews are inevitably statements of opinion, and should be read with "YMMV" implied throughout. Especially when you disagree with the reviewer's opinion.
As for the "trolling" question, I don't think that's how I'd describe it. "Trolling," to me, denotes staking out an extreme position that you don't actually believe, just for the sake of suckering other people into a pointless argument.
What Byatt is doing, I think, is stating her honest opinion of the books, but wording it strongly, in order to make it more interesting reading, and potentially sparking some discussion. Which has worked, obviously...
As for "numinous," kodi writes:
I don't suppose it matters, since I haven't read the books, but coming from that perspective it seems odd to see someone claiming that they are not "SUPERNATURAL, MYSTERIOUS." I guess it's believable that they are not "filled with a sense of the presence of divinity : HOLY," but that doesn't seem to be what she's getting at.
"Supernatural, Mysterious" is probably closer to the sense she means in the review, and that's roughly what I mean when I say I agree with her. Yes, the books contain magic, but it's startlingly mundane. And, as someone over at Crooked Timber noted, part of the progress of the plot is a steady process of de-mystifying the magic world.
The idea of a secret world of real-life wizards and witches is an idea with the potential to be "numinous," but finding out that magic consists of swishing your wand in exactly the right way while saying a few faux-Latin words sort of robs it of any deep mystical quality it might've had.
In my opinion, of course.
Chad Orzel, 07.30.2003, 10:59 am [link]
Well, yes. But. (There's always a "but.") There's a difference in opining that a book (or movie, or music album, or whatever) is objectively bad and simply acknowledging that it is simply not to one's taste. In the first case, I expect to see justification for such an opinion, like too many plot-holes, or bad characterization, or what-have-you. You know, things which are commonly accepted as signs of bad writing. We can still disagree about whether the work in question actually has those flaws, but at least we agree on the criteria by which it is being judged.
Now, some of Byatt's criticisms fall into this category. However, I don't think that the "numinosity" issue does. Is "Children's fantasy should be numinous" equivalent to "plots should be self-consistent"? I've done some book-reviewing in my time, and I'd never make a claim like that.
It's like saying that The Big Sleep is a terrible book because it's a detective story, and one doesn't like detective stories. Is it really a surprise that people find her pretentious and snooty when she makes a claim like that?
(One might argue that "pretentious and snooty" is a prerequisite for doing literary criticism in the NYT, I guess, but I don't see how that would make it better.)
And, on the "trolling" issue, I was being half-facetious. Nevertheless, if Byatt is not trolling (by your definition), then her nasty criticisms of adult Potter fans must be taken at face value. I just don't see any way her comment about soap operas and celebrity gossip can be put in a good light.
Pam, 07.30.2003, 9:14 pm [link]
On the subject of criticism and opinion, my point is that a criticism of the first type ("This book has plot holes I could fly the Death Star through") can (and should be) taken much more seriously than a criticism of the personal-taste variety ("This books sucks because I hate detective stories"). By conflating the second type with the first, Byatt ruins her credibility with readers who don't share her tastes in numinositude. It's the same as when people claim that all SF is inherently bad.
Pam, 07.30.2003, 9:30 pm [link]
I read Byatt's comments as essentially criticising Rowling for a lack of ambition. The books fail, for her, because they don't even attempt to achieve the qualities that, for her, define good fantasy novels (specifically, "numinousitude," whatever that means in detail). She's not saying she dislikes fantasy (a good thing, as she's written some), just that she doesn't like this kind of fantasy.
To go back to the mystery example, I wouldn't say it's like writing off the whole genre, but more like an Agatha Christie fan complaining that The Big Sleep is a bad mystery novel because there's no way the reader can figure out the solution from the clues given (and forget about trying to figure out who killed the chauffeur...). Which is true, as far as it goes-- by that standard, it's not a very good mystery novel.
But we may be down to splitting hairs, at this point.
Chad Orzel, 07.31.2003, 8:31 am [link]
COMMENTS ARE CLOSED.
Please visit Uncertain Principles' new location at ScienceBlogs to comment.
Obligatory Cheap College Joke II
Via Ted Barlow, who's back to blogging (for the moment), a probably-inevitable development in the story of Amherst student and etiquette maven Paul Kelly Tripplehorn Jr.: his own fan page.
Of course, this just goes to show you that there is nothing so utterly trivial and ephemeral that someone won't put a page up on the Web about it... If only Andy Warhol had known-- fame is fleeting, but the Google cache is forever.
Posted at 9:00 AM | link | follow-ups | no comments
If You Think That's Bad, You Should Hear the Simple Explanation...
In the comments following my intro to particle physics, Matt Reece notes that "things are simultaneously more complicated and more clean than [I] suggest," pointing out that I omitted the fact that most particles can decay in several different ways. He goes on to note, though, that:
I know you were simplifying things for the general reader, but I think the really amazing thing I would want to get across to non- physicists about the Standard Model is its essential simplicity. Simpler than that table, in a lot of ways. Essentially, all the rules for what interacts with what come from gauge theory - the symmetries specify the interactions - except the things that come from the breaking of electroweak symmetry through the Higgs mechanism, which, while ugly, is still fairly simple.
This isn't an uncommon occurrence when attempting to explain things in physics. Ideas that sound horrifically complicated and arbitrary when explained to one audience frequently turn out to be remarkably simple and elegant when expressed at a slightly higher level of mathematics. There's another example lurking in the body of that original post-- the Modern Physics textbooks I have start off by discussing the whole weird zoo of subatomic particles, and the weird rules governing their decays, which sound horribly complicated. As I said in that post, though, the whole thing makes much more sense when you start looking at particles in terms of the quarks that make them up.
My favorite example of this, though, starts at the most basic level of physics, with kinematics and Newtonian mechanics. Like pretty much every department in the country, we teach two different versions of intro mechanics: A calculus-based course for science and engineering majors, and an algebra-based (non-calculus) course for "Life Sciences" (read: "pre-meds who need it to pass the MCAT"). The remarkable thing is that, in many ways, it's actually harder to deal with the non-calculus version.
Algebra-based physics is basically what most people have in high school, and generally revolves around the memorization of various equations and rules for applying them. Kinematics (the mathematical description of motion) is reduced to a set of equations that students just have to memorize:
vf = vi + a t
xf = xi + vi t + (1/2) a t2
vf2 = vi2 + 2 a (xf - xi)
(Apologies if this causes any bad flashbacks...) These let you describe the final position and velocity of an object in terms of its initial position and velocity, provided it's subject to a constant acceleration the whole time. If you want to describe acceleration that changes in time, you need to memorize a different set of equations, describing things in terms of the accelerating acceleration. This method doesn't generalize very well to problems beyond the scope of those few equations, and it doesn't leave students with that clear a picture of how things work.
If you know a bit of calculus, on the other hand, this stuff all makes a little more sense. In the calculus version, all you really need to know is a couple of definitions-- velocity is the derivative of position, acceleration the derivative of velocity-- and you can construct whatever else you need. The first two equations above follow directly from those definitions, and the condition that acceleration is constant, and they take about two minutes to generate. What's more, once you have the calculus-based definition, you can generalize this process to any random problem you want to deal with. Non-constant acceleration is no problem.
Now, in practice, most of the students in the calculus-based intro classes just memorize the same set of equations as the students in the non-calculus version, and plug ahead blindly without any deep understanding of how things fit together. But for some students, the calculus version ties everything together in a very satisfying way. The first time I saw that explanation laid out, I thought it was the coolest thing ever-- all the silly rules suddenly made sense. (This is probably a good litmus test for identifying future physics majors...)
Similar things happen as you move to more complex areas in mechanics-- problems that are viciously intractable using basic calculus and Newton's Laws are solved simply and elegantly with calculus of variations-- and also in other subjects. The Uncertainty Principle, written out over in the left-hand column, pops in out of nowhere when you first encounter it, while later classes show that it arises quite naturally from the conjugate relationship between position and momentum. This even occurs between fields-- a colleague here says he went to college planning to be a chemistry major, but switched to physics after seeing where the Schroedinger Equation comes from (his chem classes used it, but never explained it).
It's one of the weird ironies of science that the simple explanation of things is often more complicated and less comprehensible than the more advanced explanation. This probably underlies a lot of the problems we have attracting students into the sciences, and explaining science to the public, but I'm not sure what, if anything, can really be done about it.
Posted at 1:04 PM | link | follow-ups | 7 comments
Women Are From Mars, Men Like Pushing Buttons
During the summers here, there's a weekly seminar series in which students who are on campus doing research give fifteen-minute talks about what they're working on. This is sometimes irritating-- the talks are scheduled opposite my lunchtime basketball, and missing out on hoops irks me-- and sometimes interesting.
Yesterday's seminar proved to be one of the interesting ones. A student in the Psychology department talked about a study they're doing regarding gender bias in the treatment of pain. (A very readable abstract describing the study is available on-line.) It seems there are a number of studies out there showing that women (and minorities, but the talk yesterday focused on gender) receive lower levels of treatment for pain than men do. There are all kinds of arguments about what causes this-- some references and discussion can be found in this site aimed at doctors-- most of them having to do with the direct doctor-patient interaction.
The student speaking yesterday talked about two different studies trying to get around issues of interpersonal interaction in this area. One looked at self-medication of post-surgical patients (people recovering from surgery were given an apparatus that allowed them to push a button to dispense more analgesic; the study kept track of how often they pushed the button, and what the results were), while the other was a vignette study, asking doctors to prescribe medication based on a written description of a patient (the descriptions were identical except for the name, and the study looked at the dose prescribed under various circumstances). Three significant results jumped out at me from the talk.
The first notable result was that women were more likely to experience bad side effects in the self-medication study. This is basically a manifestation of the fact that gender affects everything, including the experience and treatment of pain. A few minutes' Goggling shows that this is a thorny problem, and the subject of much debate and experimentation.
The second result is more a matter for stand-up comedy. It was found that men in the self-medication study were much more likely to push the button for more painkillers, by something like a factor of two. According to the faculty member heading the project, they pushed the button even when the device was in the lock-out period, and wouldn't dispense more drugs. "Apparently," she commented, "men just enjoy pushing buttons." The extension of this study to TV remotes is left as an exercise for the reader.
The third one was the really striking finding, though. In the vignette study, they found no significant difference in how drugs were prescribed, unless they took the gender of the physician into account, and there, the difference wasn't what you would expect. They presented results in terms of the average prescribed dose, and male doctors prescribed about the same dose for both male and female patients (something like 33 and 31 mg, respectively-- not a significant difference). Female doctors, on the other hand, prescribed about the same amount of analgesic for female patients, but about 2/3 as much for male patients. In other words, contrary to the studies mentioned above, they found that female doctors were under-prescribing for their male patients.
There's a bunch of interesting stuff here, most notably the fact that the vignettes differed only in the gender of the name attached to the description. Probably the most surprising thing from my perspective, though, is the fact that two different studies of the same issue give results which are diametrically opposed-- or, rather, the fact that neither of them is obviously wrong.
That doesn't happen a whole lot in physics. You sometimes see two different experiments which produce different results, but generally, that can be traced back to a glaring error in one or the other. If nothing else, a third experiment will usually pin down the real result.
This sort of thing is distressingly common in medicine, though. Or at least, it seems to be, based on my glancing encounters with medical research via the mass media. You seem to get an awful lot of contradictory results, and dramatically contradictory ones, at that.
Some of this may be attributable to the medical profession's dodgy use of statistics (in particular, I'm not sure I have any real confidence in the self-medication study, which involved 200-odd patients recovering from all different kinds of surgery), but it's not that hard to believe that subconscious factors involved in interacting with real people could completely change the results. (It would be interesting to see a similar study using video vignettes, with actors reading scripts...) This is an inevitable result of involving actual human beings in the process, with all the complicated biochemistry and muddled psychology that entails.
Anyway, the moral of the whole thing seems to be that men shouldn't go to female doctors looking for drugs. At least, until the next study comes along...
Also, buttons are cool.
Posted at 12:11 PM | link | follow-ups | 4 comments
"Too Much Free Time" Doesn't Begin to Describe It
Lacking a "Particles" section, I have nowhere else to put this: The ASCII-Art Matrix.
(Warning: this is a 4-5 MB file, and will take forever to download on a dial-up connection. It has to be seen to be believed, though. Via a mailing list I'm on.)
Posted at 1:45 PM | link | follow-ups | no comments
Arrrrrrgh!!!!!!
So, I have two students who've been working for me so far this summer, with a third arriving today, to take over for one of the first two. She's spent the last five weeks working on a computer data acquisition program, and the plan was for her to get the new guy up to speed on that, so he can use it to implement a feedback loop for the laser locking scheme that we're planning to use. Things have been going well so far.
This morning, the new guy showed up, and we went down to the lab to get him set up, only to find a chilling message on the computer: "No operating system found." In happier times, I might ask how this is really distinct from successfully starting Windows, but in happier times, I would be able to access my data.
I hate Mondays. And computers. And especially computers on Mondays.
Posted at 10:27 AM | link | follow-ups | 3 comments
Oh damn--can't resist--just one Byatt quote (putting numinous-ness aside, which, okay, that's a YMMV and a known point of difference in our tastes)--
"Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family."
Today I'm boggled less by any possible attack on the characters of readers, and the sense that Byatt read a completely different book than I did.
(Well, but the
"It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip."
*still* pisses me off. And in my viewpoint, people who are insulting to be "provocative" are still, you know, _insulting_.
I'm done now, honest. Really!
*slinks away* )
Kate, 07.25.2003, 11:58 am [link]