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Kim Pearson's comments on PHB have been scrubbed.
Really.
During "Free Speech Experiment" week.
Take a look at my OH KIM PEARSON NO post from a few days ago; follow the links.
Kim Pearson is the head of TransYouth Family Allies, a group dedicated to helping trans children. She's a good friend of Autumn Sandeen, to the point that when Kim first posted on the Blend, she accidentally used Autumn's account since Autumn never logged off of Kim's computer, the last time Autumn visited Kim in person.
I know this because it was on the discussion thread at PHB, related by Kim herself.
Now it's all mysteriously gone.
Holy fuck.
Pam Spaulding and Autumn Sandeen keep getting lower, and lower, and lower, and lower than I had ever thought possible.
It's pretty clear why: They are protecting Kim from criticism. And editing the public record in order to do so. And not telling anyone.
Meanwhile, I am the dishonest one, because I made a new account under my own name when I was unjustly banned for whistleblowing on Autumn's dishonesty. Pam refuses to deal with the fact that Autumn deliberately mislead PHB's readership in order to save her own skin and demonize me.
Damn.
Update: Here's the google cache, which I've also saved offline (in case it updates). Right now at least, you can clearly see Kim Pearson's comments, including her rather infamous declaration that there's something called "trans privilege."
Everyone who responded to Kim's absurdity also had their replies wiped too, of course.
Update 2: I saved a copy of the google cache, and posted it on my web site here.
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Warning: This is about Pam's House Blend.
According to multiple reports on Questioning Transphobia (in the comments of several posts), trans people on Pam's House Blend are being silently silenced.
No big dramatic "I'M BANNING U NOW" posts as Pam did for me, but quietly, surely, trans people who have been critical of Spaulding, Sandeen, or the cissexist chorus are finding themselves unable to post again the Blend, when they've had no problems before.
Naturally, Pam isn't responding to anyone about this; part of being In Charge means not being accountable to the lowly masses.
Pam will do anything to maintain cis privilege at PHB.
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Okay, nobody wants to talk about trans women, suicide, and the nonexistence of offline community? Fine, then let's talk about how "Sometime Around Midnight" by the Airborne Toxic Event is at least as pretentious, mopey, and awesome as the best one-hit-wonders' songs in the early eighties, even though the singer is somehow involved with McSweeney's, which leads to my new theory that
McSweeney's is the Duran Duran of the Oughties.
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http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1555 Last Thursday morning's little project was tracing the word linguablog ('blog about matters related to language and linguistics') and the related nouns linguablogger and linguablogging. As so often happens with such projects, it turned out to be fairly challenging and developed an offshoot, on innovative ling- vocabulary.
My earliest finds are from Enigmatic Mermaid's site (pombostrans.blogspot.com) in 2002, starting with
(4/7/02) Gregory Rabassa Gets a Beating and Other Tidbits from the NY Times. The New York Times is ripe with stories of interest for the readers of this linguablog. (link)
(and throughout that year, and thereafter, Linguabloggers is listed as a label on the site). Here are a few more cites from Enigmatic Mermaid:
(6/10/02) Les Coupes de Langue de la Grand Rousse. Cybercarnet d'une appassionata de la langue de Moliere. It's a linguablog. (link)
(6/15/02) Quasi-Linguablog. Pohadka is a linguablog of sorts, also covering Information Architecture, odds and ends. (link)
(6/23/02) ForeignWord Linguablogs. (link)
On to Language Hat the next year, early on in his blog:
(2/31/03) When I began, my readership could be counted on the fingers of both hands—and the fact that the second hand was needed was due entirely to Pat's and Merm's brilliant mutual-backscratching invention, Linguablogs. It rose steadily to an average of several dozen a day, then shot upward this month because of a combination of the excellent Pepys' Diary site, to which I quickly became addicted, and the Jan. 28 MSNBC recommendation ("One of the most exciting blogspotting finds I’ve made while judging Bloggies is the large and active community of linguabloggers…"). (link)
Hat used the vocabulary fairly often, as did other bloggers, for instance Melon Colonie in a posting about Language Log:
(11/9/03) AWE-INSPIRING LINGUABLOG (link)
As far as I can tell, the vocabulary doesn't appear on Language Log itself until 2005, when Mark Liberman produced an entertaining portmanteau:
(2/5/05) Having a couple of minutes to spare, I thought I'd check out the latest that the linguablogosphere has to offer, … (link)
A few days later, Mark quoted this from Language Hat:
(2/9/05) It's the "else" that baffles me, and I'd love to hear one of the Language Log mavens or other linguabloggers try to account for how it got there. (link)
There's plenty more after that, from Mark and other Language Loggers (in particular, Ben Zimmer).
Now, there might well be occurrences in print before Enigmatic Mermaid in 2002, so I'm allowing comments. I welcome earlier sightings — but, please, these should be verifiable, not just recollections of what you said in the past.
On to the analysis of the word linguablog, which is clearly a combination of the elements lingua and blog, the second a word of ordinary English, the first not. The question is: what sort of a combination is it?
A clue to the answer comes from the wider world of naming blog types. One pattern that is always available in this world is the N + N compound: the second N is blog, the first N names the domain covered by the blog. Science blog is 'blog about science'; similarly, physics blog, chemistry blog, and many others. The pattern is productive; things like lexicostatistics blog and biochemistry blog are semantically transparent and unproblematic.
But ordinary people also like brevity, so as an alternative to astronomy blog, they're ready to jump to astroblog, with the first element shortened to astro, as in learnèd vocabulary like astrophysics and in more demotic student uses in "I'm majoring in astro" and "My astro professor is a bastard". (Such usages then leak out into other contexts — as with an astronomer friend of mine who's gone under the name Astroboy for some years, though he's no longer realistically describable as a boy.)
Sometimes there are clipped versions of the domain names already available: math for mathematics, giving mathblog. This particular clipping is available in a great many contexts ("Do the math!"), but other clippings are more restricted: chem for chemistry, for instance, which surfaces in student uses like "I'm majoring in chem" and "My chem professor is a bastard". Still, they are available for reference to blog domains: there are plenty of chemblogs (as well as chemistry blogs), plus statblogs (as well as statistics blogs). (There's more, of course; this is not an inventory of a universe, only a sampling of the phenomena in it.)
Meanwhile, a large number of academic-domain names are composites, with a learnèd base that's a bound element in Englsh (most commonly ending in a linking -o, derived from Ancient Greek — whether or not the base arises in Greek), plus a suffix (most commonly -logy): anthropology, geology, sociology (with the initial base from Latin), biology, etc.
The result is a "short form" astro, geo, socio, bio, usable not only in learnèd composites (like geophysics, sociolinguistics, and biochemistry) and collegiate clippings ("I'm a geo/socio/bio major"), but also in compound-like composites with blog: geoblog (both 'geology blog' and 'geography blog'), socioblog ('sociology blog'), bioblog ('biology blog'), and a ton of others. (The preferred pattern has alternating accent, so anthroblog 'anthropology blog', rather than anthropoblog.)
Slightly more complicated: -o short forms for fields whose names end in -ics: econoblog 'economics blog' (cf. econometrics), politicoblog 'politics blog' (cf. politico-economic policy). And then there's biblioblog 'biblical studies blog'.
Which brings us back to languages/linguistics. On the basis of what I've just said, you'd expect a blog on these subjects to be a linguoblog, but in fact there's a very small handful of hits for linguo-blog and linguo blog. And a very small number for linguiblog and its variants, plus some for lingblog and its variants. But there are hundreds of hits for linguablog and its variants; this is clearly the predominant usage, probably because the Latin noun lingua has a sense 'language'. (Perhaps it's also favored because it combines the lingu- of linguistics and the -ngua- of language.)
OED2 has an entry for linguo-, lingua- as combining forms of Latin lingua 'tongue', which notes that the correct combining form would be lingui-. All the cites involve reference to the anatomical organ rather than to language, but the dictionary also has entries for rare or obsolete items referring to language in some way, with various forms of the lingu- element:
in -a: linguacious 'talkative, loquacious', from 1651 on, but labeled "rare";
in -a: linguacity 'loquacity', cites from 1656 and 1721, labeled "obsolete";
in -i: linguipotence, a nonce word from Coleridge 1820, uncertainly glossed '?mastery of the tongue, or of languages';
in -o: linguosity 'talkativeness', one cite (1727), labeled "obsolete".
Inventiveness with the element ling- (in the sense 'language') continues. I spent some time last Thursday with friends, imagining possible ling- innovations; almost all of our candidates turned out to be attested. Here's a small sampling of what I found. Some of them are, like linguablog, compound-like; others look like portmanteaus; still others look like playful word formation, with recently minted suffixes like -tastic and -icious; a number are hard to categorize. (Some are spelled as two separate words, some as hyphenated, some as solid; I'm giving only one version here.)
linguabot / linguobot, LinguBot (automated question answering service), linguacide / linguicide 'language death' (whether by intentional annihilation or not), Lingua Mania (screensaver cum language instruction), Linguanaut (language instruction), linguaphile / linguiphile / linguophile, linguaphobe / linguiphobe / linguophobe, linguaphone (a musical instrument), LinguaScope (language teaching), Linguasphere Observatory (language research netwood)
Lingualicious (blog on learning and teaching foreign languages), linguilicious (adjective of praise, with reference to writing), linguatastic / linguitastic (ditto), Lingtastic (translation service)
among the suggested new names for JapanesePod101.com: Lingfinity, LingoLizard, Lingovation
The 'language' element appears as ling-, lingu-, lingua-, lingui-, and linguo-, but lingua- seems to be the most frequent variant.
In Ling World, invention abounds.
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http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1560 Somehow a discussion of language universals ends up with fart noises:
(Hat tip to Bruce Webster.)
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I'm gonna do other stuff instead of thinking about Pam's House Blend today. Yay! :)
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BE LOTS MORE RESPECTFUL TO PAM SPAULDING OKAY AND MAYBE SHE WON'T OUT YOU
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You know, I think that some "bans" are justifiably ignored.
This one, here's what happened:
- Autumn Sandeen, one of Pam Spaulding's site admins, publicly smeared me by posting a false and fraudulent account of what happened, so she could blame me for something she messed up a day before I ever posted.
- I called Autumn on it, and she refused to cop to her mistakes, instead digging in and refusing to address the deception.
- I asked Pam to respond to the lies Autumn had told, and the obvious scapegoating that a simple explanation of the public record would reveal, and Pam did not do so.
- Finally, after much cajoling, Autumn sort-of responded, by sending me private email about her public offense and my public call for accountability, and then unilaterally ordered me to not reveal it anywhere.
- I, of course, posted this in public rather than abide by Autumn's bizarre demand. I posted this on my livejournal.
- I dropped a link to it on Pam's House Blend, but I certainly did not post the actual content there.
- Pam -- who now says that if it's on the internet, it's fair game -- blasted my honesty and banned me from PHB for violating their terms of service...by posting "personal information." Which, as everyone really knows, means stuff like "here's this trans person's name" and "here's the abortion doctor's home address" not "here's the letter from an admin who refuses to account publicly for her public smear against you" or even a link to the same."
- Then I made an account under my alternate name.
Quite frankly, it would have been wrong for me to not ignore such a ban. The fact that Pam continues to say that I deserve any punishment she metes out and that I deserve to have my reputation smeared for "sockpuppetry" (note: if I'd truly desired to do so, I am more than clever enough to come up with something that's not, like, you know, my own name) speaks a lot about how important it is to her that we talk about anything other than the way her site treats trans people -- and the way Pam handles obvious deception and abuse of power by her unpaid "staff." She talks a lot about "disrespect," but it's always just about respecting her, and it's about blaming me and my friends/readers for the problems that she and Autumn caused. Respect goes both ways. By the time we hit that last bullet point above, both Autumn and Pam had shown more than enough disrespect to me and other trans people to "justify" such a minor crime as evading her bullshit ban. PS: As I noted before, I am fortunate that my circumstances are such that her revenge-"outing" and subsequent refusal to remove the detailed information will probably not cause me any hardship. However, Pam did not know this at the time she posted, and her actions could have proven disastrous if committed against another trans person. Not in the "ZOMG u disrespected my blog by ignoring my poor implemented ban!" but as in real consequences, from destruction of relationship and family life to loss of employment, and at worst, this kind of shit can get trans people beaten, raped, or killed. Pam doesn't care, though. Because those "sockpuppets"? They deserve whatever they get, and Pam will make sure to give it to them.
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I wrote:
Subject: No, seriously, Pam, it's not so cool.
I'd appreciate if you could take down the front-page announcement and links where you're outing me by associating my birth name and my (future) female name.
Ban me if you like; that's always been your call. I'm not contesting that. But identifying my female name as a "sockpuppet" and encouraging your thousands of readers to mistrust a trans woman because she's got two names is more than a little over the top.
Yeah, I know, you're going to say that finding something on a publicly accessible site is fair game. But it's NOT, Pam, no more than if someone located your home address via the web and posted it prominently on a high traffic right-wing site. What you're doing is more than a little bit disrespectful, and could potentially be harmful to me.
--Kynn
Pam replied:
Kynn,
1) I will not remove proof that you engaged in sockpuppetry to continue fomenting vitriol on the Internet, one of the most serious Net offenses one can commit. Its impact goes beyond your actions on this one blog; it will taint your reputation elsewhere online - and you did it to yourself.
2) There is a major difference between locating someone's home address on the internet if the person has never put the information out there to begin with. I've never done so, so if it's out there, it would have been done so without my permission by a third party or business. It's nowhere on my personal web page or the Blend. YOU are the one who CHOSE to put your information out onto the internet YOURSELF on your own page in the first place; and the information is still up there on your page. No one forced you to do it. Given how seriously you now suddenly take its public availability as a harm, it begs the question why you put it up there of your own volition to begin with. BTW, the fact that you put your information up and it's been crawled means it's in Google in perpetuity, so you should have thought of that when you created your profile page on your site. If this is truly a serious issue about privacy, feel free to get back to me when you've done something about your own page's disclosures.
You can't out someone who's already outed themselves on their own page. The only thing I've outed about you is the fact that you sockpuppeted.
3) You've earned the mistrust by engaging in the sockpuppetry -- again, you CHOSE to do that, in your blind rage to continue crapping on the Blend in public. Misjudgments and bad decisions have consequences, as you and your friends have let Autumn, me, and all the Blend readers know over and over for the last several days, ad nauseum. What makes you think that you are entitled to a different standard of personal responsibility for your comments and sockpuppeting behaviors online? Sockpuppetry has nothing to do with sexual orientation or gender identity, and you know that; there's no trans victimization going on.
4) You've shown disrespect towards me, as the site owner, by refusing to abide by a ban by re-registering to not only continue to spew the bile, but to defend your prior identity on the Blend in the public comments with the sockpuppetry and encouraged your own readers and friends to continue the havoc. Why should I believe you haven't or won't register again to continue the vitriol? You have zero credibility now; saying "Ban me if you like" is rendered meaningless. Again, that is a result of your own actions.
Sorry to say, but you've placed yourself in this position, Kynn. You can obviously edit your own page to remove the data you newly consider private. I don't have any text-based information disclosing what is in that image file to begin with on the blog. The only association is through the link to your own page. The fact is that you sockpuppeted and I have the full proof of it -- that portion will remain intact, even if I choose to redact any of the image's data at some point in the future.
Consider being more respectful (and tell your friends/readers the same while you're at it) and you'll receive it in return.
--Pam
Okay then.
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http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1559 The ordinary-language meaning of technical terms often wanders far from home, following paths of connotative association and denotative opportunity. We've followed the semantic travels of "passive voice" through meanings like "vague about agency", "stylistically listless", and "failure to take sides". I recently read that writers should "Use an active voice (putting things in present/future) instead of a passive voice (putting things in the past)".
The terminology of the "autism spectrum" seems to have started a similar journey through successive steps of family resemblance.
For example, Jason Calacanis ("We Live in Public (and the end of empathy)", 1/28/2009), used the term "Internet Asperger's Syndrome" to describe the reaction to a late-90s "art project" in which his friend Josh Harris "put a couple dozen cameras all over his loft and recorded the inevitable breakdown of his life with the love of his life", and set up internet chat rooms for public discussion of the results.
The commenters in the chat rooms were so "vicious", according to Calacanis, that "it took Josh five years to recover": something about the experiment "robbed the subjects — and their audience — of every last ounce of empathy". This leads Calacanis to propose what he calls "Harris' Law":
At some point, all humanity in an online community is lost, and the goal becomes to inflict as much psychological suffering as possible on another person.
And he says that he's come to "recognize a new disorder, the underlying cause of Harris' Law", Internet Asperger's Syndrome, which "affects people when their communication moves to digital", causing them to "[stop] seeing the humanity in other people", and to behave in other ways that (in his view) parallel the symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome.
The term Internet Asperger's Syndrome was recently picked up by Jonathan Kimak in a humorous piece for Cracked ("6 New Personality Disorders Caused by the Internet", 6/30/2009). Kimak writes (inaccurately) that Asperger's Syndrome is a
… rarely diagnosed but often claimed disorder is a mild form of Autism that comes with what seems to be a biological inability to show empathy for other human beings, as well as (and maybe stemming from) an inability to recognize nonverbal cues. They continually do weird, upsetting things because they don't know it's upsetting you. That part of their brain is broken.
People cringe when they hear this term because they know that a large number of the teenagers claiming Asperger's are, in fact, merely dicks.
He agrees with Calacanis's diagnosis:
Calacanis figured out that people who do all of their communicating online wind up mimicking Asperger's behaviors because they are imposing the same disadvantages on themselves. In both cases, when the ability to see nonverbal responses and facial expressions goes away, so does empathy. Soon the thing you're communicating with isn't a person, they're just a bunch of words on a screen. A bunch of words that the little bastard didn't even bother to spellcheck.
Thus Kimak ends up connecting Asperger's Syndrome with various forms of internet-mediated mob cruelty — his characteristic examples are things like "A kid commits suicide on webcam while the trolls cheer him on … Normal kids, … but get them in a chat room and suddenly it reads like the transcript to a Charles Manson parole hearing"
Ironically, it takes a certain lack of empathy to see Charles Manson's sociopathic crimes as having any similarity at all with the social awkwardness and focused, "systematizing" interests of Asperger's people. And spontaneous adolescent mob cruelty, internet-mediated or not, strikes me as having little to do with either one.
In this case, Calacanis and Kimak make the the connection between chat-room meanness and Asperger's because of the idea that the lack of non-verbal cues leads to the depersonalization of victims. But the kind of mobbing gossip that they describe — as familiar from school cafeterias as from web forums — is way outside the spectrum of Asperger's behaviors, from everything I've seen and read. And charismatic sociopaths like Manson are unusually skilled in exactly the sorts of communicative manipulation that Aspies have problems with.
The current DSM-IV-TR description of Asperger's Disorder (299.80) is:
Qualitative impairment in social interaction, as manifested by at least two of the following:
- marked impairment in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body postures, and gestures to regulate social interaction
- failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level
- a lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people (e.g., by a lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest to other people)
- lack of social or emotional reciprocity
Restricted repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests, and activities, as manifested by at least one of the following:
- encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus
- apparently inflexible adherence to specific, nonfunctional routines or rituals
- stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms (e.g., hand or finger flapping or twisting, or complex whole-body movements)
- persistent preoccupation with parts of objects
The disturbance causes clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
Apparently, Calacanis and Kimak have taken two points of association — the lack of non-verbal cues characteristic of text-mediated interactions, and the "lack of social or emotional reciprocity" that is a possible diagnostic indicator for Asperger's Syndrome — and made a terminological jump to a completely different sort of phenomenon, namely socially-reinforced mob cruelty in chat rooms and similar web forums. (With a nod to yet another phenomenon, namely Charles-Manson-like sociopathic charisma.) This is quite like the chain of associations at work in various folk interpretations of "passive voice".
A different chain of autism-associations emerges in Gary Stix, "The Science of Economic Bubbles and Busts", Scientific American, 6/22/2009.
But before getting to the autism part, let me take advantage of the digression-tolerant blog format to point out a lovely example of Explanatory Neurophilia from the same article:
Behavioral economists have identified a number of biases, some with direct relevance to bubble economics. . In confirmation bias, people overweight information that confirms their viewpoint. Witness the massive run-up in housing prices as people assumed that rising home prices would be a sure bet. The herding behavior that resulted caused massive numbers of people to share this belief. Availability bias, which can prompt decisions based on the most recent information, is one reason that some newspaper editors shunned using the word “crash” in the fall of 2008 in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid a flat panic. Hindsight bias, the feeling that something was known all along, can be witnessed postcrash: investors, homeowners and economists acknowledged that the signs of a bubble were obvious, despite having actively contributed to the rise in home prices.
Neuroeconomics, a close relation of behavioral economics, trains a functional magnetic resonance imaging device or another form of brain imaging on the question of whether these idiosyncratic biases are figments of an academician’s imagination or actually operate in the human mind.
Think about that for a minute. Decades of careful experimentation have demonstrated the existence of these biases, and explored their nature in elaborate quantitative detail, resulting in thousands of publications and a Nobel Prize. But all this might just be a figment of some academician's imagination — until we see the fMRI pictures to be found in Bernd Weber et al., "The medial prefrontal cortex exhibits money illusion", PNAS 106(13): 5025-5028, 2009, which show that
… areas of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which have been previously associated with the processing of anticipatory and experienced rewards, and the valuation of goods, exhibited money illusion. We also found that the amount of money illusion exhibited by the vmPFC was correlated with the amount of money illusion exhibited in the evaluation of economic transactions.
(The "money illusion" is the tendency of people to evaluate sums of money in terms of their nominal or face value instead of in terms of their purchasing power.)
I could digress further, to explain why the fMRI evidence is actually weaker, so far, than the evidence from experiments using behavioral dependent variables other than blood oxygenation level in various brain regions — and likely to remain that way for some time — but that's a topic for another post.
For now, on to what Mr. Stix has to say about the relationship of autism to financial bubbles:
One group that does not value perceived losses differently than gains are individuals with autism, a disorder characterized by problems with social interaction. When tested, autistics often demonstrate strict logic when balancing gains and losses, but this seeming rationality may itself denote abnormal behavior. “Adhering to logical, rational principles of ideal economic choice may be biologically unnatural,” says Colin F. Camerer, a professor of behavioral economics at Caltech.
The suggestion here is that the rational-choice dynamics of neo-classical economics is somehow "autistic".
This idea may be connected to the rebellion in 2000 of a group of French economics students, who wrote an open letter to their professors and administrators to complain about the domination of the neoclassical model in their curriculum, explaining that "Nous ne voulons plus faire semblant d’étudier cette science autiste qu’on essaie de nous imposer" ("We no longer want to pretend to study this autistic science that is being forced on us").
They named their website autisme-economie.org, and a page on their website explains their choice of terminology as follows:
Nous avons utilisé ce terme d’ « autisme » parce qu’il nous semblait bien résumer ce que nous ressentions, notamment la fermeture totale de la discipline au monde extérieur. Or cette fermeture à l’extérieur est communément associée à l’autisme, même si, comme beaucoup d’autres personnes, nous connaissons très mal cette maladie. Selon le Petit Robert, l’autisme désigne une « attitude de détachement de la réalité extérieure accompagnée d’une vie intérieure intense ». Pour le Larousse, c’est une « perturbation affective caractérisée par un repliement du sujet sur lui-même avec perte plus ou moins importante des contacts avec le monde extérieur ». Ce seul mot parvient donc, selon nous, à caractériser le comportement du courant dominant (académiquement) en économie. Celui-ci se caractérise en effet par sa coupure au monde extérieur, d’ailleurs couplée à une « vie intérieure intense », c’est-à-dire la production à jets continus de petits modèles tous plus débiles les uns que les autres.
We have used the term "autism" because it seem to us to summarize what we were objecting to, namely the complete closure of the discipline to the outside world. Now, this closure to the outside is commonly associated with autism, although we, like many others, know very little about this illness. According to the Petit Robert dictionary, autism refers to an "attitude of detachment from exterior reality accompanied by an intense inner life". For the Larousse, it's a "affective disorder characterized by withdrawal of the subject into himself, along with a significant loss of contact with the outside world". This single word then, we feel, manages to describe the behavior of the dominant (academic) trend in economics. This is characterized in fact by its cutting of connections to the outside world, at the same time coupled with an "intense inner life", that is, the production of a continuous stream of little models, each more retarded than the last.
An American relative of this movement is called "Post-Autistic Economics", with a website and a journal called the "real world economics review (Formerly the post-autistics economics review)". (See Edward Fullbrook "The Post-Autistic Economics Movement: A Brief History".) In the French rebellion and its American echo, the idea seems to be that neoclassical economics is "autistic" because it is isolated from society and "[preoccupied] with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus". This is arguably insulting both to neoclassical economics and to autism, but it's plausible as a metaphorical application of the DSM-IV type of definition.
Colin Camerer's ideas about the relations between autism and rational-choice theory, in contrast, seem to include the idea that they both apply logic inappropriately in attempting to predict human behavior. (For a hilarious account of game theory mis-applied to normal human interactions — without any mention of the autism spectrum — see Dan Zettwoch's Deadlock.) This perspective is expressed at somewhat greater length in "Neuroeconomics: How Neuroscience Can Inform Economics", Journal of Economic Literature XLII: 9-64, 2005. Here's he's discusses irrationality in the Ultimatum Game:
When players do follow the dictates of game theory, the result can be a low payoff and confusion. Consider this quote from an upset subject, an Israeli college student, whose low offer in a $10.00 ultimatum game was rejected (from Shmuel Zamir 2000):
I did not earn any money because all the other players are stupid! How can you reject a positive amount of money and prefer to get zero? They just did not understand the game! You should have stopped the experiment and explained it to them . . .
Ironically, while the subject’s reasoning matches exactly how conventional game theory approaches the game, it also sounds autistic, because this subject is surprised and perplexed by how normal people behave.
Camerer et al. discuss "Elizabeth Hill and David Sally’s (2003) extensive comparison of normal and autistic children and adults playing ultimatum games". But the Hill and Sally experiments don't support a view that the "rationality" of conventional game theory is "autistic", either in the Ultimatum Game or elsewhere.
The citation by Camerer et al. is to a 2003 UCL working paper, Elisabeth Hill and David Sally, "Dilemmas and bargains: Autism, theory-of-mind, cooperation and fairness". The research was continued, and the final published version was David Sally and Elisabeth Hill, "The development of interpersonal strategy: Autism, theory-of-mind, cooperation and fairness", Journal of Economic Psychology, 27(1) 73-97, 2006):
Mentalising is assumed to be involved in decision-making that is necessary to social interaction. We investigated the relationship between mentalising and three types of strategic games – Prisoners’ Dilemma, Dictator and Ultimatum – in children with and without autistic spectrum disorders. Overall, the results revealed less dramatic differences than expected among the normally developing age groups and the children with autism, suggesting that in these laboratory tasks, mentalising skills are not always necessary. There were, nonetheless, some important findings. Young children were more cautious about initiating cooperation than their older peers and, in bargaining situations, they were less generous in their opening unilateral grants and over-solicitous of an empowered receiver. Participants with autism did have a harder time shifting strategy between versions of the Prisoners’ Dilemma, and they were much more likely to accept low initial offers in the Ultimatum game and to refuse fair proposals. In addition, participants’ measured mentalising abilities explain intentional and strategic behaviour within the prisoners’ dilemma and the avoidance of unsuccessful ultimatum proposals.
The differences between ASD children and neurotypical controls were significant, but not explainable in terms of a difference in rationality (nor do Hill and Sally attempt any such explanation). For example, the distribution of offers in the Ultimatum Game looked like this:
The ASD kids were more likely to offer 0, 6, and 7 units than their non-ASD peers — but none of those choices are dictated by rational-choice game theory. And similarly for the acceptances:
In both cases, the explanation that Hill and Sally offers is not that the ASD children were more rational than the others, but rather than they were less likely to be able to model the mental state of others. The main evidence is the distribution of Ultimatum Game behaviors as a function not of ASD diagnosis, but of score on a test of "mentalising" ability:
In this case, the conclusions of game-theoretic "rationality" do overlap in part with the results of failure to model the likely reactions of others — but this is not because the poor mentalizers are more rational. In some respects, the poor mentalizers were even further from the "rational" standard than the good mentalizers were. I'd be willing to bet, in fact, that low scores on the "second-order false belief test" would usually correlate, especially developmentally, with low scores on test of abstract logical reasoning.
So along with the extended or figurative use of Asperger's Syndrome to mean something like "rude and cruel", we seem to be seeing an extended sense of autistic to mean "excessively rational". This is all part of the normal — and irrational — process of semantic drift. Unfortunately, like the similar drift in meaning of spastic, it's rude and cruel to the individuals in the set originally referenced.
[Some earlier Language Log posts on ASD and its intersection with popular culture: here, here, here, here.]
[It's also worth noting that the word autism as a technical term has also undergone a century of semantic drift, and that the current phrase "autism spectrum" itself may refer to a collection of things that will turn out to have nothing more in common than a slightly more systematic application, by psychologists and psychiatrists, of a somewhat better-informed family-resemblance process… ]
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Is Federer the best? The record book says so. Fifteen majors- one more than Pete Sampras. He wasn't at his most inspired yesterday- and he was facing an opponent who was playing out of his skin- but he still won. He makes victory look not easy exactly, but fated.
It was, as one of the papers said, an "ugly" win. There wasn't much artistry about it. Muhammed Ali, the prettiest fighter of them all, also won ugly towards the end of his career. Great champions are like that. When beauty deserts them they keep going on whatever's left in the locker- craft, character, will-power. There's something awesome, almost supernatural about the way a champion past his prime keeps on racking up the victories.
But Rafa wasn't there. Rafa was someplace else. Maybe on his fishing boat, puposefully not thinking about what might have been. And if Rafa had been there....?
You can only be the best on the day- against the opposition that presents itself. Federer was the best yesterday- on a lot of yesterdays- but there are lots of opponents he'll never meet. He will never meet Laver in his prime or Borg in his prime or any of those other great champions of the past- and we can only theorize about the outcome of such impossible encounters. We shouldn't let his greatness overshadow theirs. They too were the best on the day. The best on many days.
We like to make lists, grading things in order of merit. We find it comforting . We crave certainties. It's almost a religious thing.
But the certainties wobble when you look at them closely. Federer's pre-eminence is all about counting beans, about the number of days on which he turned up and was the best. He gets a prize for consistency. That's something, but does it add up to absolute greatness? The questions pile in. What if Laver hadn't lost 5 prime years to the the amateur-pro controversy? What if Rafa had been at Wimbledon this year? Thank goodness they do; otherwise we'd have nothing to talk about.
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( intense. )
I figured out how to play the keyboard cat song on the guitar! Here is a tab:
e----------------------------------------------
b----------------------------------------------
g----------------------------------------------
d--2-5-2--2-5-2-----2-------2------------------
a-3------3------0-3---3-0-3---3----------------
e-------------------------------3-3-3-3-3-3----
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The World March will begin in New Zealand on October 2, 2009, the anniversary of Gandhi’s birth, declared the "International Day of Nonviolence" by the United Nations. It will conclude in the Andes Mountains (Punta de Vacas, Aconcagua, Argentina) on January 2, 2010. The March will last 90 days, three long months of travel. It will pass through all climates and seasons, from the hot summer of the tropics and the deserts, to the winter of Siberia. A permanent base of a hundred people of different nationalities will complete the journey. The March will arrive in Australia (Sydney) on October the 3rd, stay one full day on the 4th and leave on the 5th towards Manila, The Philippines.
More at: http://www.peacebound.com/
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