Apologies have become feel-good gestures that play to the banal sentimentality of mass audiences that otherwise show little consideration to others in their rush through life. The idea, and virtue, of apologising is being leached of significance and meaning.
If apologies still have any value it is that they can focus attention on those who never say that they are sorry. The Chinese do not apologise for their brutality in Tibet; the Russians do not apologise for the war in Chechnia
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Tags: morality
Simon Caterson in Saturday’s Age has discovered to his evident surprise that the Booker Prize judges tend to come from England. Worse still, they have “a background that more often than not includes the prestigious British universities and are typically senior prominent academics, reviewers, editors or authors.”
But - and you can hear him trying to unsmack his gob – “there is a tendency for the prize not to go to to people like them.”
Lie down in a darkened room, Simon, and lay off the Foucault. That stuff rots the brain.
Tags: literature
On ABC TV news tonight the man who ran down people with a bulldozer was described as having ‘commandeered’ the vehicle. Well, it’s not lexically wrong: Shorter Oxford gives as sense 2. ‘take arbitrary possession of’. But the far stronger and more common usage is that in which officialdom – the army, the police, an emergency crew- commandeer a vehicle; when the need, that is, for urgent action in the public interest temporarily overrides legal possession. Thus the ABC’s way of putting it leaves a faint impression that the man had formal authority.
Does this tiny point matter? Yes, if you care in general about precision. But much more because such things quickly invade usage. You will have often seen and heard that some poor sod was ‘executed’ or killed ‘execution-style’. Again, plain villainy is unduly dignified. The man in Israel stole the bulldozer, then used it to kill people.
Tags: language change
The excellent (and mindbogglingly productive) Megan McArdle has a piece in The Atlantic Online about bad numbers which set me thinking again about the role of blogging. OK, all by herself Megan McArdle is a cogent argument for blogging. But what she says implies a place for anyone at all on the Web who is interested in putting out reliable and trustworthy information.
Her thesis about numbers is that they stick in the mind and distort our judgment even when we know better, even when they’re wrong or irrelevant. Despite what ought to be disabling criticisms of its methodology, the first widely-publicised estimate of the number of civilian casualties caused by the Iraq War remains influential. Why? It was first in the field and came with the imprimatur of The Lancet. So the World Health Organisation’s much lower estimate – one quarter of the number – trails in the shadows.
Ideology figures here: the anti-war Left loved the Lancet figure, and no-one committed to an all-embracing ideology ever has much regard for plain old empirical truth. But McArdle cites work in cognitive psychology that shows that we’re all prone to this error. It’s a form of the well-known and well-attested primary availability error: the first thing we see of a particular kind colours our view of that kind. I like to illustrate that one by reminding people how kids cathect proper names – ‘Ooooh yuk, Derek.’
The Web is full of junk so it’s very tempting for reflective people to dismiss it as a venue for discussion. What the phenomenon of bad numbers indicates, however, is the need for good ones.
Does the same thing apply to arguments themselves? To opinions? Anecdotes-with-tendency? I hope so. What makes me almost sure is the work on attitude formation. This shows that they are rarely formed by one event. (We do get over the fact that Derek stole our peanut butter sandwich in grade two.) Attitudes take shape gradually, solidifying out of a cloud of particles of information, events and experiences small and dramatic.
So even the tiniest blog can add a stone to the pile. Well, a pebble anyway.
Pupils are being rewarded for writing obscenities in their GCSE English examinations even when it has nothing to do with the question.
One pupil who wrote f*** was given marks for accurate spelling and conveying a meaning successfully.
His paper was marked by Peter Buckroyd, a chief examiner who has instructed fellow examiners to mark in the same way. He told trainee examiners recently to adhere strictly to the mark scheme, to the extent that pupils who wrote only expletives on their papers should be awarded points.
Hat tip to Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science.
Swift would have enjoyed Buckroyd.
Tags: educational gripes
