Accidental Blogger

I frequently exchange e-mail messages with my co-bloggers. While most of them remain private conversations, occasionally the content of the exchange is so funny or informative or both that I request the author to publish it as a blog post or a comment.

A few days ago, I sent co-blogger Dean C. Rowan who is a librarian, this link to a piece by Bill Maher about a drug testing program in Levy County, Florida aimed at library volunteers. In his usual irreverent way, Maher lampoons the program for its absurd and misplaced zeal. In the process he also says some inaccurate things about librarians and library volunteers.  The funniest line in Maher’s commentary about librarians and drug abuse may have been the following:

"The last time a librarian did something really stupid and reckless on drugs was when Laura married George."

Dean agrees with Maher about the drug testing fiasco but he took exception to some of Maher’s stereotypical observations about librarians. He also had a problem with the Royal Institute of London’s vote on the "best science book" ever written, on which I wrote a recent post — he explains why. In the process, Dean, who is a music afficionado, also touches upon patterns and random events in our daily life (specificlly the frequency with which tunes show up on an iPod shuffle) and how we sometimes tend to confuse the two.  On the whole, a very enjoyable rant.  So I decided to post it here (with Dean’s permission of course) rather than let it languish in my email folder.

With uncanny symmetry, the three separate topics that are discussed involve the names Levy, Levi and Levy respectively. Now, Dean would ask, is that a pattern or a random trio?

"Much of the stuff of this message was drafted in response to your post about science books–see below.  This Maher bit is remarkable.  I mean, it’s hard to believe–but then again, maybe it isn’t–that these buffoons in Levy County actually enacted such a law.  On the other hand, also unsurprisingly, Maher perpetuates the stereotypes.  Granted, these particular volunteers were mostly senior citizens.  (Then again, my wife was 22 when she first volunteered at the library where we met.)  But the bit about Aunt Iris misshelving Readers Digest and showing the homeless how to use microfiche readers unintentionally trivializes the enormous contributions of volunteers.  Of course, Maher is making fun of Levy County for not showing due respect to its volunteers, but he does so at the volunteers’ expense.  In other words, as usual, I’m of two minds about  this.

I often wonder if one of the reasons libraries and librarians are, relatively speaking, devalued, is that there is so little risk of serious physical or financial damage, and therefore no reason to secure especially valuable people to conduct their affairs.  But then lawyers and doctors deliberately use damaging means to achieve their purportedly laudable goals.  If those professions exercised half the empathy routinely  exercised by librarians, we might have much less invasive legal and medical professions…but they’d also be less lucrative.  (But see how even my own musings are stereotypical?  The empathy of librarians…it’s a gendered profession, as they say.)

Your post on science books–really, *popular* science books–has me spinning out of orbit on science and art again.  Although I’ve always wanted to read Levi, and your mini-review certainly urges me to read Periodic Table, I am stunned that it and many of the other titles have ended up on a nominally scientific book list.  It seems misleading to characterize a book "about" science, as you put it, as a "science book," just as it would be to hold that, say, Bleak House is a "law book."  Why does the Royal Institution and its eminent membership stand for this? Well, it appears that an important mission of the RI is popularization of science.  So be it.  I just wish the press releases had been a bit more forthcoming about the extent of the bibliography encompassed by the contest.  I was flabbergasted, for one thing, that I was familiar with almost all of the titles or authors included, a phenomenon I would not expect with a list of "real" science books, even the best of them.

Just now, however, I’ve been reminded about a journalist’s recent account of his experience with his iPod, on which the purportedly random shuffle feature seemed to favor certain artists over others.  See this: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/netmusic/story/0,,1889487,00.html. (The author, Steve Levy–sorta like the County in Florida and the author of The Periodic Table!–is being interviewed on WFMU as I type.)  My response to the article is a combination of amusement and jadedness.  (One response, "So what?," also happens to be the Miles Davis tune the interviewer is now playing under his remarks.)  I’m tickled to learn that the iPod–which for so-called audiophile music lovers like myself is a sure sign of audio apocalypse–exhibits eerie behavior that stumps even folks who ought to and do know better.

But I’m also unimpressed to a large degree, and Levy’s article provides some of the reasons.  For one, he mentions the remarkable phenomenon that the likelihood of at least one pair of people in a room of only forty people sharing a birthday is near certainty.  He could have mentioned, too, the way we tend to see an automobile of the same make/model/year/color/etc. as one recently purchased by a friend or family member.  In other words, the iPod is entirely irrelevant to this ancient and familiar phenomenon of randomness, yet it somehow serves to embody a  false sense of cutting-edge scientific and technological possibility, achieved only now that we can cram a bunch of songs onto a microchip or two.

There’s another related aspect of the article that fuels my ennui, the fast and loose psychologizing by an expert.  One paragraph quotes a mathematician of some repute, John Allen Paolos:

"We often interpret and impose patterns on events that are random," he says. "Especially with something like songs. Songs evoke emotion, and some stick in our minds more than others."

To which Levy responds, "In other words, we think the shuffle is flawed, but the problem is actually in our heads."

First, Paolos’ remark is unclear:  We often interpret…events that are random?  We often interpret…patterns on events…?  He has a hard time deciding what’s involved in interpretation.  But he and Levy have no problem noting our imposition of patterns and treating it as somehow problematic, as if there are free-floating patterns out there on which we have imposed nothing, which we needn’t interpret to recognize.  Science, I should think, is precisely about explicitly delimiting the paramaters according to which we choose to impose patterns.

Second, Paulos’ remark suggests that in fact Steely Dan wasn’t played more frequently than Levy would have expected.  Instead, he attributes the observation to Levy’s emotional engagement with SD’s tunes.  But emotion in this case is irrelevant:  Levy monitiored what he dubs LTBSD, albeit perhaps not perfectly accurately, and he wrote the article to describe how we routinely impute motivation to random behavior.  And then Levy cedes Paulos’ point!  This is absurd and, to me, a clear case of scientific-like "reasoning" utterly missing the point.  The fact that we perceive significance in randomness is not a flaw or problem related to cognitive dysfunction or emotional distortion.

The problem with Paolos and Levy’s conversation has to do with a confusion between the two examples of random phenomena I mentioned earlier: birthdays and new cars.  The former is a case of real probability manifesting a real "pattern," one which we have a hard time accepting, even when (or especially when) it is demonstrated to us.  Hang around crowds of forty or so people, ask their birthdays, discover the astonishing frequency of pairs of shared birthdays…and still you sense that something has been rigged.  You can’t believe the pattern has randomly occurred.  Alternatively, your friend buys a red Mini Cooper with a moonroof…and all of a sudden everybody has one, or so you observe. This is pretty obviously a case of emotions directing your perceptions. You focus on the object that has suddently acquired some personal significance.  In this case, you see patterns where others would not.

Paolos treats the iPod phenomenon like the Mini Cooper scenario:  There aren’t really more red Minis than before your friend bought the car.  You just see it that way.  But the iPod phenomenon is actually like the birthday scenario.  We ought to expect clusters–seemingly non-random behavior–in random series.  We’re not imposing anything on the result–more Steely Dan, more frequently–much less letting our emotions get the best of us, when we notice what is the case.

So there you have it, a venting.  I tried to think of my favorite science book, but I kept coming up with statistics sorts of things that I can’t honestly say I read in full.  John Tukey’s Exploratory Data Analysis is one extremely esoteric example.  Then there are Edward Tufte’s gorgeous books about "envisioning information" and so forth.  I can’t really pin one down.  But I’ll have to read some Levi."