Skating to where the puck will be... +Other ideas.

Referring to a strong neuroscientist someone says, "He is really good in that Wayne Gretzky way of skating to where the puck will be."

It seems that in Brecht's Mother Courage, she says something to the effect that you need courage when someone has failed to plan correctly.  So you need courageous soldiers when the generals screw up.

Jury-rigged and Jerry-built

Jury-rigged is a matter of an improvisation in repairing something. [comes from nautical use, jury-rigging a sail]

Jerry-built is shoddy workmanship.

What you can do in a classroom-- And why there's room for a person in the classrooms

I have been thinking about what made the difference in my higher education, college and graduate school.  What mattered was the interaction with my teachers, and watching them talk or lecture or comment. Actually, a good fraction of the time, nothing much mattered, but when it mattered it was that person thinking about a subject.

I studied physics and did my advanced work in elementary particle physics. My teachers were of varying degrees didactic, but what mattered was watching them think and work out problems and explain stuff. You could learn most of physics from textbooks and doing problems, but what you needed to learn was thinking like a physicist. Now the Feynman textbooks convey that rather well, but I know of no other such textbooks in physics, at any level, that really teach you this. So I was stuck with my teachers (about 7 or 8 had or eventually received Nobel Prizes in physics). Watching them think is what I learned: how to think like a physicist about the world. I imagine that watching videos or movies of those lectures might have done the work, but often it was a matter of the less polished, more impromptu moves that made the difference.

I also had a heavy dose of the great books, great thinkers, in both literature and social science and politics. Again, what I needed to master was how to read and think about the world of imagination and ideas, of culture and society. Actually, my teachers were not in general so good at teaching me this, and it is only in my later years, ten to thirty years post PhD that I began to learn to think in the ways humanities scholars do. As for the social sciences, those that emulate something like physics, I can see what they are doing. If there is something more subtle, say fieldwork in sociology, my humanities training was what was crucial. Trained as a physicist I was never much diverted by people pulling out equations or models--for I knew that what mattered was the basic ideas about such--and I discovered that many of my colleagues in the social sciences were so involved with the formalism that the ideas escaped their consideration.

In other words, what mattered to me was to learn to think. I imagine that if I studied a field where substantive detailed knowledge was crucial, I would not have been very adept, and perhaps those fields benefit from distance learning technologies and other didactic methods. But if you want to learn to think, you have to watch people do it, and model yourself after them. And it matters if you are in the room with them, engaged with them, and having a sense of what is at stake.

I do not do much didactic teaching. I don't know what to teach. Rather I teach people how to think about matters of public policy and city planning, about methodology and reliable knowledge, about critical analysis of scholarly work. I can write down some rules. But what matters, I believe, is watching me in action, and having me take on a student's work and try to make it better.  I will discuss reading and try to give people a sense of what matters in the text we are analyzing. I will take on questions and try to see how the question relates to what we are studying. I am a performer, an intellectual performer, and I live and die by my ability to think.

Technical Yiddish and Formal Mathematics: Bupkis and Unbelievable Chutzpah, Nonstandard Analysis

My colleague Ed Kleinbard of USC Gould School of Law, referred to the comparatively small amount of money you can raise in taxes from the ultra-rich as Bupkis ("This is what is known in public finance circles as bupkis.") that is, goat droppings, and the Yiddish term for nothing or something quite small.

In an earlier quote, he referred to some of Apple's tax strategy as Unbelievable Chutzpah (“There is a technical term economists like to use for behavior like this, Unbelievable Chutzpah.”), where by locating economic activity in low tax nations, taxes are reduced--actually a very large number of dollars being involved.

Such technical Yiddish has a theoretical structure in mathematics.There is in mathematics a whole theory of very small and very large quantities (as 1/small)--nonstandard analysis. It arose out of mathematical logic, set theory, and what is called model theory. Turns out to be very useful, for talking about infinitesimals, etc, when 4 x epsilon is still epsilon, and for many other mathematical notions.

I give up... You can't tell them if they don't want to hear.

Briefly: I will advise a colleague or a student about how to be more effective, with suitable disclaimers that I might well be wrong. They then defend themselves, in effect ignoring what I said about their behavior, justifying what they did without paying attention to matters of decorum or style. I have in the past tried to get back to them, to make them realize what I was trying to say.

I give up...

Potshots vs. Deep Questions

Often one goes to a seminar, and there is a continuing series of questions that are ok, but in fact are potshots at the speaker's work. What you want to do is to ask deep questions, questions that allow the speaker's work to be rescued from idiocy. But only some scholars are capable of rising to the occasion. If you are one of them, you want to avoid potshots. Another way of putting it is that a great scholar takes a dumb question asked by a student or colleague and converts it into an interesting and deep question and answer.

To a really talented scholar, I would say: You are too good to spend your time or effort shooting things down. You ought launch your own rockets. That is, when someone is giving an unsatisfactory talk, you want to ask a question that allows them to grow, and in effect that allows your deep intelligence to inform the conversation. I realize that what I am saying is not so sweet, but since I have respect for you, I will keep saying it. Of course, all of what I am saying could just be wrong, but at least I am putting myself on the line.

Your job, given your reasonable request for theory and mechanism, is to present your observations in terms of a theory rather than a series of scattershot observations. You might have said, "I just want to be sure we understand that your work tells us nothing much about the motivations or scheming of these actors. In fact I can imagine a whole variety of innocent explanations for your observations. Here are some...  " I realize this is hard to do, but you don't want to be  too smart by-a-half. For the ability to discern such innocent explanations is nice, but that gets you nowhere unless you also start thinking about how you would go about checking them out. That is why I mentioned fieldwork as well as statistical studies.  The reason I am so sharp here is that you are more than too smart by-a-half, you are really smart and deep.  You don't want to diminish your power by being that half.

What makes Chicago/Moscow style objections in a seminar is that the objections are never cheap. They reveal the depth of the questioner. You have all that depth.

Now of course, I understand that you could be frustrated by a talk that does not do what you think it should, and that may have driven you off course. What I usually do is about 15 minutes in try to ask a question to find out what is going on. That question almost always puts me at risk, since I am making a positive claim: "Is what you are doing X, Y, and Z?"  Potshots are a waste of your depth.

When a Project Fizzles

Right now I am thinking about my next project. I wrote an outline for a presumed book, and in the last day or so I expanded it in an essay of about 2500 words. As I was writing, the book seemed rather more pedestrian than I had imagined, the ideas seemed rather more obvious. Of course, the book would have had detailed examples and cases. But for the moment, these 2500 words do not look so promising. I have said what I wanted to say, and perhaps no more should be said.

I won't know until a few days from now when I reread what I have written, fix it up a bit, and share with a few people who are more expert in the field than I am.

If it fizzles, I will be grateful that I have discovered this well before I have put in much more time and effort. Of course, one is disappointed, but at least the air is cleared.

We'll see.

Academic Shenanigans

Some years ago, I was at a major institution, and a graduate student told me about shenanigans in the research of someone in her lab. I never got the details, but there was some sort of scientific misconduct. And it was not clear what she could do, since she was a vulnerable graduate student. Some very distinguished scientists were involved, although the misconducting person was a postdoc in the lab. Eventually, some years later, a distinguished historian wrote a book about the events. Something fishy was going on. There was not only smoke, but also fire.

At the same time, I was told by a junior faculty member that the head of her research center wanted to divert research funds from her research grant to pay for administrative expenses (normally covered by indirects). The expenses were real, but were not built into the research grant. The head of the lab was very distinguished, but also had a national reputation for not being so kosher.  Nothing could be done, except to deny the head of the research center their request. The junior faculty member knew then and there they would have to leave. [In some fields, the head of a lab puts their names on all the papers, assumes that grants received by more juniors are in effect their own, etc.] So she went out and found another position at a good institutios, and then followed my usual counsel. Living well is the best revenge. Everyone knew that the head of the lab was disreputable, but the head was sufficiently powerful to get away with it until he had to leave one institution for another that was more willing to tolerate his shenanigans. The junior faculty member thrived at the new institutions, has a strong national reputation, and has been able to avoid being tarred by the head's nonsense.


In each case, you find that the institution will protect its most senior people if they are valuable and their misconduct is not too egregious. Junior people are best off getting out of the way, moving on, and realizing that chairs, deans, and provosts are less concerned with fairness than with maintaining their assets, however problematic they are.

Arrogance has no limits, so a distinguished senior faculty member or a dean, may well hire someone who would otherwise seem less than qualified. Perhaps a family friend, a lover, a payoff for other favors. Deans and chairs are quite willing to allow such anti-ringers to cause all sorts of trouble, make hell for colleagues, since they are insulated. There's nothing much to do, but stay away and the anti-ringer will self-destruct.

I use the word shenanigans rather than ethical lapses or corruption or illegality because these violations are about power and arrogance. Even if they were Ok by the rules, they would be awful.

Somebody Up There Likes Me

Rocky Graziano wrote a book "Somebody Up There Likes Me."

For about five years I served on a university committee. I did my work, and in fact I did much more than the normal amount of work, since I was asked to do so. I learned a lot, and it was interesting. It took up time, but this was my relaxation time from writing books, so it was a plus.

Recently at a dinner for 300, I found myself at my host's table. A few minutes into the dinner, my host leans forward and says to the people around the table, "I want to tell you about Martin. His work for my committee provided me with the guidance I valued most, since it was always in terms of making the institution stronger."  She went on a bit longer. I was surprised and also gratified. I had done my committee work since it was needed and it was interesting. I did not expect to be rewarded, rather this is what it means to be a professor. The glow is still there. (Manifestly this was a setup by the host--otherwise I would not be at her table, sitting just opposite her.)

"I'm staying out of it."

One of my colleagues, finding herself on a committee headed in a disastrous direction, tells me, "I'm staying out of it. Keeping my head down." She tells me that she only gets involved when the issues directly concern her and her projects, and for which there will be consequences.

I tend to put my head up, and I get shot regularly.