Is This the Hardest Course in the Humanities? →

I should really stop shitting on Wait But Why because I have work to do, but one last thing.  In the mind-numbing 34,600-word post about Elon Musk’s “wizard hats,” there’s this brief remark:

Want to hear what a dog hears? That’s easy. The pitch range we can hear is limited by the dimensions of our cochlea – but pitches out of the ear’s range can be sent straight into our auditory nerve.

This would be really cool if it were possible, but is it?  The auditory nerve doesn’t carry raw acoustic vibrations, it carries the spike trains from hair cells in the cochlea, which respond to different pitches because the hairs vibrate at different fundamental frequencies.

There is some dispute (see the second half of this page) over how the pitch information is encoded.  From one perspective (”place theory”), the cochlear hairs do something like a Fourier transform, so that you can read off the Fourier component for 3000 Hz by examining the output from a set of cells with fundamental frequencies close to 3000 Hz.  But another perspective (“temporal theory”) notes that some cells actually fire at the same frequency as the same frequency as the pitches they respond to, and experiments show that firing rate itself does encode some pitch information.  But that only works (straightforwardly) for lower frequencies, because we can hear a whole range of frequencies that are higher than the fastest rate these neurons can fire.  (“Volley theory” provides a mechanism for getting around this, but that mechanism stops working between 1000 and 5000 Hz, and we can hear frequencies up to 20,000 Hz.)

So a sound that a dog could hear would (probably?) be “unspeakable” in the language of the auditory nerve: place coding doesn’t work because there are no places in the cochlea assigned to frequencies that high, and temporal coding just doesn’t work at high frequencies.

Besides, the “tonotopic” organization of the cochlea (different pitches represented in different places) is repeated throughout all levels of the auditory system.  In any given level of auditory processing, you can point to a particular place where each band of frequencies are processed.  There is no place carved out for the processing the dog frequencies.

This is a pretty bad mistake to make in an explainer which has a whole subsection about “How Hearing Works,” one that explicitly notes the tonotopic organization of the cochlea! 

The newspaper:

“Mélenchon, a far-left candidate,”

Wait But Why post “explaining” the same news story:

“Okay, so.  To understand this, we’re going to have to zoom way out first.

The first thing you need to know is that politics is kind of like a line.  We could call it the Politics Noodle.  People like to yell at each other because they’re standing on different parts of the noodle.

[6-panel cartoon of stick figures standing on a piece of spaghetti and exchanging quirky insults]

Weird, huh?

Now, imagine that Hillary Clinton wakes up one morning, and finds herself standing in her usual place on the Politics Noodle.

[cartoon of stick figure Hillary saying something Hillary-ish]

She looks to her left and sees Bernie Sanders,”

Incidentally (following up on this post), the style of The Devil’s Pleasure Palace is a thing to behold, and I recommend paging through it if you (general you) ever get a chance.  I find it unreadably annoying for more than brief stretches, but it’s not because the writing is bad in any of the usual ways; it’s clear that the author knows his way around the English language.

But rather than making any arguments, the author just strings together (1) standard right-wing talking points, (2) high-flown Genesis / Milton / Faust allegory, and (3) cultural references (both high and low) of dubious relevance – on and on in an interminable daisy chain.  The chapter breaks seem meaningless, since the chain just goes on, homogeneously, without anything like forward movement (progress? never!).  So, like, this is a typical passage:

The Left’s is not a classic Third World revenge, best expressed by Inigo Montoya in the Princess Bride: “You killed my father. Prepare to die.” Instead, it seeks a larger, dare one say, “comprehensive” target: a revenge on a society that remains distressingly what it is and that adamantly refuses to become what, by their lights, it should be. At root, their beef is not with Man but with God; even if they refuse to admit he exists, they still want to fight him anyway.

As refugees both luxuriating in and resenting their outsider status, the wise men of the Frankfurt School were infuriated by the non-state control of Hollywood and the national and local media they encountered in New York, New Jersey, and California. They scorned what they dubbed the “culture industry” and seethed with contemptuous rage against a land that cared very little for what they thought. Except of course for academia.

Most of today’s “vilenesses various” (in J.P. Donleavy’s phrase from The Unexpurgated Code) derive from this deep-seated resentment. P.J. O’Rourke’s famous characterization of the Left — “a philosophy of sniveling brats” — is spot-on. As Mephistopheles observes in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus: “Solamen miseris, socios habuisse doloris.” (“It is a comfort to the wretched to have companions in misery.”) For those of us who came of age during the tumultuous 1960s, who saw said sniveling brats trade in their knee pants for the tie-dyed jeans and ponchos of Woodstock, for those of us who never joined them in their posturing anarchy and supererogatory celebrations of self, the Left has been a continuing mystery, perhaps most especially in its remarkable success at making a parasitic living from a society its claims to despise. Like the bank robber Willie Sutton, modern leftists went where the money was: at Gramsci’s behest, into academia; prompted by Adorno’s ire, into the “culture industry”; and at Marx’s insistence, into the machinery of the state.

That’s most of page 186, near the start of Chapter 15, but those numbers are meaningless; pick any random page anywhere in the book and you’ll get something very similar.

We are in many ways neo-medieval. In our historical moment, visual icons have once again become the predominant means of relaying information. We too live in a present deeply referenced to the past (to 1977, say) and deeply apprehensive about an apocalyptic future. We too have spent much of our epoch recombining elements, placing the age-old icons in new, deracinated contexts. Sure, we have technology now, though postmodern culture has given us the benefits of the Enlightenment without its technical underpinnings. We illuminate things like Merlins, flipping light switches. It’s one big special effect. Once again, effortless will appears to rule. Magic seems to be everywhere.

i am sleep deprived and incapable of on-brand framing devices, but: i just wanted to inflict on you all this especially half-assed stab at connecting the present to the author’s personal era of interest

But if your skill always increases, even if just a little bit, then as long as you keep going, you will win. There are no dead-ends for monotonic functions, my friend.

This quote is such a perfectly empty use of mathematical terminology.  There’s even a link to the Wikipedia page on monotonic functions, just so you can bone up on the smart important concepts the authors knows – except the sentence sentence is literally just a restatement of the first using mathematical language.

In other news, computational complexity is no big deal, even log(x) is monotonic :P

(The quote is from this post by some LW guy claiming, with very little in the way of argument, that you can learn to read Latin using Anki without explicitly learning grammar, by drilling yourself on sentence / translation pairs.  Of all the languages to claim this about, Latin, really?  Good luck reading 60-word sentences with large gaps between nouns and the verbs/participles they agree with, dude)

(P. S. I got some welcome catharsis from a wonderfully snarky comment on the first installment, and only then noticed that it was by @slatestarscratchpad :) )

I find Leah Libresco’s conversion frustrating.  She always stresses that it was done for intellectual/philosophical/rational reasons and yet she has said very little about the vast amount of existing intellectual/philosophical/rational thought on the same issue.

Or rather, she talks about her sympathy with ideas (about ethics, say) that have been advanced by Catholics, but never gets around to the main issue, which many Catholic and non-Catholic intellectuals have written on: why believe in God, and why join the church?  It’s as if she thinks that the very idea that there are Catholic philosophers with appealing points is reason enough to swallow the whole pill – although few philosophers worthy of the name would endorse that rash, incurious leap! 

Incidentally, between Wilson and Dreher and various stuff on First Things etc., I’ve spent a fair amount of time idly looking in on various parts of the Christian intellectual blogosphere, and one really noticeable pattern is that all these people lean heavily on “naturalism cannot justify itself”-type arguments

It seems (to me, as an outsider who has done nothing like real research and would love to be corrected) like this is the main apologetic line that Christian intellectual world has converged on these days.  Science and reason are fine, but (the argument goes) if you’re just a creature built by mindless evolution, you have no reason to think your faculty of reason actually works, while grounding it in God is at least self-consistent, if not externally justifiable (“Q: Why can you reason? A: God.  Q: How do you know that?  A: God.”)

(The “not externally justifiable” part is actively accepted by the “presuppositional apologetics” school of thought which Wilson subscribes to – there, “you can’t provide reasons that would convince an atheist” is if anything a feature rather than a bug, because if you hypothetically reject Christianity then reason vanishes along with it)

Of course I don’t buy this argument, but it also just seems like an obviously bad one?  The naturalist story about the origin reason is just “being able to form correct beliefs helps organisms do stuff, so it was adaptive and natural selection encouraged it.”  Of course it didn’t do that perfectly, and if there was a conflict between adaptiveness and reason, selection would (by definition) choose the former every time.  But this is equally true of more mundane faculties like, say, vision.  Do these people think that I can’t trust my eyes without God?  (Maybe they do.  Descartes did, I think – see the “No Atheistic Knowledge Thesis” here – but it would be nice if the modern writers were clear on this point, which they generally aren’t.)

The other one that comes up a lot is “naturalism can’t justify ethics,” which is harder to refute, but mostly (I think) bc justifying ethics is inherently a tough one and the religious justifications are just as questionable.  There are of course a whole bunch of standard back-and-forth arguments about this and I suspect you will be glad that I don’t intend to talk about it any further in this post.

One thing that seems noteworthy about these arguments is that they are all about philosophical self-consistency, and usually don’t go so far as to say that atheists are actually always irrational or evil, just that if they aren’t, they “don’t know why” they aren’t.  It all feels very much like an intellectual “gotcha” without much moral or emotional force.  The documentary where Wilson debates Hitchens is fun, because they’re both fun characters, but it eventually gets very tedious bc Wilson just keeps using the “you can’t justify yourself” argument, over and over, and it eventually (IIRC) seems like he thinks Hitchens is a great guy who just has the odd flaw that he is unaware of what caused him to be a great guy.  Which just doesn’t seem like a very big deal to me, in the end.

I checked in with Noted Terrible Man Doug Wilson after several months spent hatereading at other pastures (or sometimes, blessedly, not hatereading at all).  And the first nontrivial blog post I find (i.e. the first one that isn’t just him quoting one of his own books, or the like) is about some sort of spiraling internet argument over the Trinity that is really amusingly reminiscent of the sorts of argumentative kerfuffles I see all the time on tumblr (“necrobestialitygate,” etc.)

As many of you know, a controversy with two layers erupted within the last month, having to do with Trinitarian theology and complementarianism. I have provided some links to all this at the bottom of the post here. Theologians like Wayne Grudem have taught that within the Godhead there is an eternal functional subordination, which provides a model for a complementarian approach to marriage. Critics like Mark Jones have maintained that this necessitates three wills within the Godhead and that the orthodox position has always maintained that there is only a single divine will, and that to say anything otherwise is to mess with the divine simplicity. A third set of critics like Tim and David Bayly agree with Grudem as far as it goes, but emphasize that the complementarian world needs to be a lot more robust in its opposition to egalitarianism.

It’s fun to see what these sorts of events look like from the outside.  In particular, it ties into something I was thinking about the other day about tumblr arguments – specifically that they’re often about “important things,” things that in principle have to do with how I conduct my IRL life, yet at the same time the marginal choice to “continue discoursing” as opposed to “stepping away from the keyboard” tends to have negligible effect on my everyday life.  My views might get pushed here or pulled there by internet arguments, a little bit, but ultimately there’s just so much else that determines them – everything I know that doesn’t come from internet interlocutors, everything I’ve internalized from the moment-to-moment texture of experience – that the effect of the arguments barely registers.  Like, there are a lot of arguments in my tumblr sphere about how to relate to other people who are different from you, or about “practical epistemology” (where do you get your information, what kinds of beliefs should you form from it), and this stuff is actually important, but my IRL decisions just follow their own path regardless, mostly.

In this case, the issues (as far as I can make out) is “actually important,” in that its about fundamental issues in these people’s faiths (which are very important to them), and have to do with complementarianism, which is something with direct IRL implications.  Yet I don’t imagine that anyone’s religious or marital practice will shift more than negligibly as a result of this argument.

It’s easy to get sucked into internet arguments by saying to yourself “it’s not like I can just ignore these issues, they really matter for my life, I need to figure them out,” conveniently forgetting that you also have to establish a link between “having the internet argument” and “figuring them out,” when there may well be no such link