Archimedes’ Hot Tub

A shout out to my friend and Nieman colleague Richard Lister, who was profiled in today’s Harvard Crimson.

I can’t believe it’s been nearly two weeks since Harvard icon Peter Gomes passed on. I enjoyed reading the obituaries of him. There was a kind of affection for him that I found unusual for stories about religious figures, particularly Christian ones. Perhaps that was because of Gomes’ confounding nature. Or that his lengthy service at Harvard never made him aloof from the small town of his youth.

Or perhaps it was just his iconoclastic preaching style

I only heard Gomes preach once, last fall at the generally terrific Morning prayer services at Appleton Chapel. I was, honestly, disappointed by his homily. He talked of the renovation of the chapel and how it brought in the light, with its metaphorical relationship to Christ. I mostly remember how he tottered across the floor from the main sanctuary to the pulpit in the chapel. I remember worrying that he wouldn’t make it. Just weeks later, he had his stroke. The loss was definitely mine.

i went yesterday to see a talk by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, two MIT economists considered stars in policy realm of global development. They were touting their forthcoming book, “Poor Economics” (Andrei Shleifer, who introduced their talk, cracked that the book was not about the state of the field).

The basic argument is that the poor are not creative people imprisoned by their lack of money, yearning to be set free to build good lives for themselves. No, the poor are like almost everyone else — they want nice things. For instance, Duflo and Banerjee found in their research that when people who make $1 a day increase their wages, they spend 1/3rd of that increase not on more food, but higher quality food. Nor does their research show that the poor are, as Banerjee put it, “capitalists without capital.” Only 15 percent of Mexico’s poor were entrepreneurs in 2002. By 2005, business failures meant only 6 percent of those poor were still operating, and only 1.8 percent had retained the same number of employees.

A survey showed that most poor people — 75 percent — want their sons to grow up to work for the government, either directly or as teachers. Another 18 percent hope their sons will get jobs at private firms. That leaves a tiny fraction who want to see their children become entrepreneurs. Banerjee says the reason is simple: it’s too hard to be an entrepreneur, and too risky. I feel that way sometimes, myself.

It looks like a promising book, and a fresh look at a crucial area of development economics. It’s due out in early May.

A lovely interview with Rebecca Skloot, Author of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”

As my Nieman year careens towards completion, one thought that sometimes makes me anxious is ‘now what?’

“Wait,” you might say, “aren’t you still a talented and successful freelance writer? Won’t you go back to that life?”

Oh, right. I’m an award winning journalist, even. To help me remember that, I won another: Outstanding Business and Technology Article from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. I won for a piece on Warner Music Group and its effort to forge a future in the digital world, Take Us to the River. It ran in Fast Company in July of last year and was the last feature I wrote before the Nieman year started.

Kudos also to my friends Barry Yeoman and Jonathan Green. Barry won the Arlene Eisenberg Award for Writing that Makes a Difference, for School of Hard Knocks, his piece on the malign nature of some for-profit colleges. Jon’s book Murder in the High Himalaya won for General Non-fiction.

(Reposted from November 2007.  I deleted this accidentally while purging spam posts).

I learned this morning that Peter Lipton has passed away.

He was one of the first speakers in Cambridge this summer at the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in Science and Religion. He gave a fun, provocative lecture on the philosophy of science. He had talked about the various models used to define science by philosophers of science like Carl Popper or Thomas Kuhn. He proposed that a way to manage conflict between science and religion is to take an immersion approach, borrowing in part from Kuhn and in part from a philosopher of science named Bas Van Fraassen.
Photo: www.Templeton-Cambridge.org

Peter was a fascinating lecturer, but also fascinating to we fellows for a different reason: he was both an atheist and a devout Jew, regularly attending temple. We had a terrific discussion with him about how he could separate his lack of belief in God yet still accept the idea of God in the scriptures (this is my shorthand and does not do justice to his position). But when one of the fellows asked him if he could accept the verses proscribing homosexuality, Lipton said adamantly he could not. So we challenged him further on this — how could he accept the idea of God while not believing in God, but make a different distinction around homosexuality?

I followed up with him on email. He sent me this:

Thanks for this excellent question, which is forcing me to think harder about my
position. There are several options here.

First, I could follow your advice and accept but not believe the proscription on
homosexuality. This would capture my view that I work with the entire text, and that
I am helped in my ethical deliberation by struggling with that text, even in cases
where I end up not believing some of its moral content. The downside of this option,
from my point of view is that it takes the notion of acceptance pretty far from van
Fraassen’s use in his constructive empiricism, since for me ‘accept’ would now seem
to mean something like ‘engage with’. For van Fraassen, ‘accept’ has a more positive
meaning, something like ‘believe to have true empirical consequences’ or ‘use for the
purpose of making predictions’.

On balance the first option may still be my best bet. But I think I have another
option too. For although I did not mention this yesterday, full acceptance is only
the limiting case. Thus van Fraassen would not say that we should even accept all of
all of our theories, since in many (all?) cases we know that the theory is not even
entirely empirically adequate. So we may decide only to accept part of the theory.
Thus we have three levels: the stuff we believe, the stuff we accept without
believing, and the stuff we do not even accept. So I think I could take the view
that the proscription on homosexuality is something I do not even accept. (I can
still of course give it a literal interpretation, even though I wholly reject it.)
The downside of this option is that it might lead to a loss in the coherence of my
religious practice, a coherence that the notion of acceptance was designed in part to
preserve.

There is also a third, dynamic option, combining the first two. What I have in mind
here is that one might start with accross-the-board acceptance as a kind of default,
so one begins by accepting the whole text, but then with study and thought one works
out not only which parts of what one accepts one should also believe, but also which
parts one should not on reflection continue to accept.

A paper he was working on at the time that captures his thinking on the subject, “Science and Religion, The Immersion Solution,” Peter Lipton , will soon be published.

He and I also exchanged a brief note on Harry Emerson Fosdick’s 1929 sermon, Shall the Fundamentalists Win?. Peter said the sermon was quite apropos for the ideas in his paper.

The Cambridge obituary on Peter Lipton.

It was a treat to engage with him. May his model resonate.

I’m not much for celebrity, but I do like hearing about ordinary impostors. When the story broke about “Clark Rockefeller,” the German peasant who insinuated himself into the upper echelons of society wherever he went, I could not get enough (except for maybe this satiating piece in Vanity Fair, The Man in the Rockefeller Suit). Around the same time the New Yorker published a piece on a French man who impersonated missing children, some real, some not. I had to read every word.
I suppose I’m drawn to these macabre stories because such stories aren’t supposed to happen in our post-wired world. We’re not supposed to be able to game the system for years on end, as both those men did. What drives a person to create such an elaborate guise, of all the ones that might be adopted?Perhaps it’s also interesting to wonder about identity — who are we, really? What can we trust about ourselves and those around us? Impostors seem to play, and prey, on our ideas of how people behave in community.

Lately, I followed the saga of Harvard’s fake student Adam Wheeler, caught when he brazenly applied for a Rhodes Scholarship. He was recently ordered to pay back $45,000.  I wonder if he’d be a good enough novelist or writer of screen thrillers to pay it back in spades, maybe set up the Adam Wheeler Scholar Fund, for a student who got closest to faking his or her way into Harvard each year.
Perhaps these ordinary impostors, these modern-day Bill Starbucks (from Richard Nash’s “The Rainmaker”),will disappear, overwhelmed by the spread of sensor technology and newfangled data mining techniques . My bet is cloaking technology will continue to let people slip through the cracks, no matter how good software gets at tracking us. Impostors are social hackers, and they’ll probably always stay one step ahead.

The Business School at Harvard goes a week longer than the college, so I just finished the last session of my last class, Entrepreneurship and Global Capitalism. I’m sad about that – I have come to really love this course and how it engages us and forces us to wrestle with the difficulties of everyday business decision-making. At the business school, the professor uses Socratic method to navigate the students in a public discussion, hearkening back to Plato and his dialogues. Our professor, Geoff Jones, was a worthy successor to Plato. Without seeming to do more than touch the rudder now and again, he took us towards his goal, to understand that history matters and that history is complex, its lessons not clearcut. I think we got that.

The world is globalizing again, though it is not yet as global as it was in the 19^th century, and today’s globalization bears far different effects. In the 1800s, entrepreneurs from the West made almost all the rules, not governments and certainly not the locals being co-opted into the world economy. That’s no longer the case.  We’ve seen that globalization can fall apart, that the world has more friction, and that government matters a lot more to the way businesses form and function than it once did.  We’ve also seen that great entrepreneurs often build companies that succeed financially but destroy or degrade the society they operate in. The company and entrepreneur often move on, but the system is affected. Capitalists say nothing to Hitler and capitalism carries a stain, making Communism more attractive, especially to countries already feeling exploited by their encounter with capitalists. Capitalists use slave or bonded labor and overthrow governments for acting in the best interests of their citizens, and capitalism becomes viewed as exploitative and evil system to an entire continent.

I thought entrepreneurs were important when I started this class, but largely abstracted from society. I now see that entrepreneurs are amazingly creative forces for society, artists of a sort, who motivate themselves and others to build something that has tangible effects on their community and greater society, much as an artist marshals colors and materials into something grander than its mere components. But entrepreneurs are not separate from society and cannot myopically focus on their business. At the start of the course, I was constantly frustrated by a subset of my classmates who refused to look beyond the balance sheet, who denied entrepreneurs having a role beyond their business operations, beyond profits. That changed during the course – even the most die-hard of these students became more nuanced in their arguments (I like to think I did, too). I found myself sometimes wondering what specific students thought about an issue that would come up in class, but they hadn’t addressed. More importantly, I also found myself thinking that I should go talk with someone I usually disagree with, to get their perspective and better understand it.

Geoff put up three quotes at the start of today’s class:

• What’s past is prologue (Shakespeare, The Tempest)
• We should always be aware that what now lies in the past once lay in the future (F.W. Maitland)
• History never repeats itself but it rhymes, Mark Twayne (Geoff’s misspelling, which may be deliberate. The quote is attributed to Twain, but appears to in fact come from a poem by John Robert Colombo, who wrote “History never repeats itself, but it rhymes, said Mark Twain”)

I’m with Shakespeare – I think the past influences and affects the present.  I don’t think it repeats itself exactly but we see where it might go by what has gone before.

Today’s class debated whether the world was flat or spiky.  Of course, it’s both. It’s flat in many ways, thanks to technology both digital and mechanical. But it isn’t flat everywhere, even where there’s Internet access and widespread mobile phone use. Oddly, as we learned in the course, the more digital (flatter) we get, the more we see business cluster into specific geographic areas (spikier). During the debate, I made notes to myself about how even within societies there are spikes and flats. I mapped out a version of his course in novels I’ve read. His first module, the first Global Economy, was Dickens (”Hard Times,” “Great Expectations”) and Sinclair (”The Jungle”). The Second module, the collapse of the world economy, was Dos Passos (”U.S.A.”) and Lewis (”Babbitt”). The Third module, the rebuilding of the global economy, was Pynchon (”Gravity’s Rainbow”) and Marques (”Love in the Time of Cholera”), Puig (”Kiss of the Spider Woman”) and McInerney (”Bright Lights, Big City”). The fourth, the second Global Economy, seemed to map well with my friend Joel Deane’s bitter novel of the Australian service economy “Another,” and with Franzen’s “The Corrections.” All of them show people within a society, some within the circles of money and power, others not, and how whimsical, thoughtless, bad and greedy decisions especially those of the powerful, play out. We saw this in our case studies, also, most markedly in places like Argentina, Chile, Prussia, Japan, and Guatemala.

Throughout, Geoff referred to a slide with photographs of a number of the entrepreneurs we studied. At the end, he told the class to think forward to 2040, and to imagine their own pictures up there. “What will people say about you and your life?” he asked us. He hoped that this would make the class think differently about difficult and complex decisions they’ll be making. It was a great charge, and I’m excited to see where my classmates go.

I don’t know if all HBS classes end with a standing ovation for the professor, but this one did. I wish he was teaching  next term.

Catching up on some overdue posts… I interviewed Fred Brooks, a pioneering software thinker (and doer), for Computerworld.

Brooks may be old school, but his new book, The Design of Design, offers well-polished, concise essays that even the most egregious multitasker will be able to follow. We talked about some of his ideas in the Q&A, but there’s almost always good stuff that doesn’t make it. The last thing to go in this one were his comments about the state of writing amongst American-born graduate students in computer science:

We still get graduate students who have difficulty writing plain English paragraphs. I get some students with English as a second language who write better than some of my American students.

Writing something other than code still matters for programmers.

The Nieman class of 2011 (sans one, who was navigating treacherous visa waters).

We are a diverse group geographically, of course, and also professionally. Newspapers employ 15 of us, television five of us, radio one, two of us work in multiple media, one of us mostly writes books, and one of us is a photojournalist. Eight of us are freelance or independent.