-James Scott, Seeing Like A State

Two

Three

It isn’t one of the usual dangers he beats on – not sprawl, or oil, not your Chevy.

No, the latest JHK “harbinger of social dysfunction” is… tattoos.  I wish I were kidding you.  I wish he were kidding us, especially because I actually kind of like the guy – he appeals to my inner Jane Jacobs.  But after reading this:

The activity taking place here, however, is a symptom of the growing barbarism in American life. Tattooing has traditionally been a marginal activity among civilized people, the calling card of cannibals, sailors, and whores. The appropriate place for it is on the margins, in the back alleys, the skid rows. The mainstreaming of tattoos (on main street) is a harbinger of social dysfunction.

… it’s hard to take him quite as seriously, especially when you consider everybody everything else that was kept on the margins back then.

He is just joking, right?

See also: these people at IBM who have access to data that could spawn a million dissertations.

More on that HBS piece to follow, as comparing real networks to formal organizational structure makes me feel funny inside.

One of the advantages of being an electoral grunt is that I get to see the election as a whole, rather than just seeing a particular polling station.  I know what 1,000 AVC Advantages look like (ugly and stupid); the disturbing frequency with which their printers jam, turning your paper trail into a scorched black bar; and I know the names of countless precinct locations here.

Schools, libraries and mainstream churches form the vast majority of precincts here.  I cast my first vote at a state plant nursery, but that’s about the weirdest it’s gotten for me.  I’m curious: have you ever voted at a mosque?  An adult bookstore (hey, if you’re old enough to vote…)?  Let me know the strangest place you’ve done your duty.  I’ll work on finding out how precinct polling locations are chosen and update you.

Feynman’s main criticism here is that the social sciences don’t produce laws.  I think that is a very peculiar argument, because I don’t think that having a law in hand is the proof of science.  The pursuit of laws is certainly important, at least to a positivist like me, but God knows every social scientist in the world would love to discover some universal law for all societies.  We do, however, have some stuff that works pretty well within particular scopes.  Which makes Feynman’s argument sort of like saying that you can sprint all you want, but if don’t win a medal at the Olympics, you’re not actually running.

It’s also my belief that the social sciences are fundamentally a hell of a lot more difficult than the physical ones.  I’m not saying that that makes sociologists smarter than physicists – the opposite is probably true in general – but it does mean that we’ve got a much harder task.  We don’t get to smash people into their component parts in a lab environment, for one thing, and even if we could (and could get IRB approval), we probably wouldn’t get a $5 billion grant to do it.  Add in that social scientists actually have to abide by ethical codes, and well, it’s just not that simple.  It’s like meteorology – we’re studying a vast, complex system that is certainly governed by laws, but isn’t really comprehensible to humans through that particular lens.  Except if we want to fly a instrument-laden plane into our hurricanes, we have to get its permission first.

However, much like meteorologists, I think that the increasing power of computer simulations will pave the way for better prediction.  I just hope it comes in my lifetime, because I am rather Feynmanesque in my views of most of the methods we use.

See also Peter Klein and comment for a more thought-out reply.

• 1 missing detent
• 1 mismatched key
• 2 locks without keys
• 112 primary-related cards
• Several hundred pounds of paper
• 3 terrorists
• 1 ninja

Of course, most of my job consists of moving voting machines from one place to another, or humping the big ones to get them into just the right position (yes, humping).  I am getting a brutal crash course in the side of elections you don’t hear about in a political science program.  I like it… except that I leave home at 6am and don’t get home until 6 12 hours later.

It’s very strange to sitting at home while my academic colleagues are being bombarded.  Inundated.  Drowned.  It’s not that I don’t have work to do – I have a thesis to finish and a number of research projects to work on – it’s just that, without a job, without An Office, I am dangerously prone to idleness.  I’m exploring the feasibility of sneaking into local universities’ libraries to get some work done, because otherwise… well, the temptation of Mario Kart Wii (wahoo!) is grave indeed.

However, I should mention that I am employed again.  After two months of job searching, I feel like a citizen once more.  My job is only ever so slightly social-scientific; those jobs seem to be in scarce supply, or else I am so profoundly inept that I can’t grasp my own ineptitude.  I nearly got one – there is an agency here that does tobacco cessation (who comes up with these phrases?) research.  I had applied for a grunt work job – stuffing envelopes for surveys, data entry, etc. – but they were so impressed by my data managemenet experiences that they gave that job to someone else while promising me a position that would be mostly data management and survey analysis, but with the tantalizing hint of independent research.  That job, of course, never materialized.  Budgets, accountants, etc.

Thus, I stand before you blog to you as a Voting Machine Technician.  Somewhere in Colorado, there is a warehouse with 1,100 voting machines in it.  Voting machines that must be tested before the election.  And I – I shall test them.  Fear not, citizens!  I shall defend your democratic rights and electoral integrity!

If CNN reports 100,000,000.333 votes for “Anarchy!  Muahahaha!” emerging from Colorado… well, you know who to blame.

1.  Protests like this one seem to be largely political-identity masturbation.  Strikes and boycotts work because they have economic impacts; protest marches work when they scare people (I have a pet theory that militants during the Civil Rights era had a lot to do with the success of the pacifist branch of things, but it’s not something I’ve really studied).  This protest achieved nothing except letting the people involved think that they were making a difference, when in actuality they all probably set their causes back a bit (see points 2 and 3).  Lots of young people looking cool in their riot bandanas, etc.  But I’m sure they all felt like they had done their duty – after all, as one march leader chanted, “This is what democracy looks like.”  That’s exactly what democracy looks like, if you’re a 17th-century aristocrat: the wailing of thousands of voices, achieving nothing.

2.  In order to make a big scene, you have to align yourself with so many other political groups that you threaten a lot of your credibility.  I mean, how can you have hippies, Communists, anarchists and Black Panthers at the same rally?  Each associating with the others just makes them all look radical, naive, and stupid to the people that are most likely to be sympathetic to each.  The World Trade Organization protesters have the same problem – you’ve got union workers advocating protectionism to help domestic labor mixing with fair-traders who see trade as a way to reduce poverty in developing countries.

It’s the same problem with political parties themselves – hell, it’s the basic problem of human association: balancing the strength of numbers with the dilution of individual goals.  In order to have an impact, groups have to align; but by aligning, they lose control over the type of impact they make.

3.  People are FUCKING STUPID (imagine I said that in the voice of Yahtzee Crenshaw).  I have never heard so much naive bullshit in my life, and I very nearly transformed into a 60-year-old white Texan oilman just so I could feel vindicated by how FUCKING STUPID THESE DERN LIBERALS ARE.  Block after block of slogans: “Fight the power! “Revolution!” “Rise up!”  as if slogans actually DO something, or as though they even know what the word “revolution” means.  They take credit for whatever progress the US has made while denying any responsibility for anything bad that’s happened.  Because, you know, their marches made the minimum wage increase happen!  And their choice not to vote – or to vote for Ralph Nader (or somebody else with an equally good chance of winning the election, like Eugene Debs) – CERTAINLY didn’t have anything to do with the ascent of the Bush administration.  By about halfway through the march – after one group of people laid down on the ground and then stood up triumphantly to chants of “Rise up!  Rise up!”, as if anyone other than themselves was moved by that piece of theater – I was really hoping that someone would give the police an excuse to gas the whole lot of them, just for their smugness.

4.  There is tremendous irony in a rally that advocates free speech while creating a hostile environment for dissent.  Example: at one point during the rally, a speaker was slandering the police, and then told the crowd, “If you disagree, speak up!”  I seriously considered raising my hand – I know and like a number of cops, and my stint as a teaching assistant for a police and society class has given me a degree of insight into the problems inherent in forcing a small percentage of the population to have to deal with all of society’s worst shit – but (ahem) I was there on sociological business.  But I wonder how many people in that crowd would actually agree to a wholesale, indiscriminate “fuck you” to all police everywhere – and how many would admit it in private.

I do like the crowd’s message in this one, though, right around 2:30.  That’s a message we can ALL get behind.

I used to understand why people don’t just move to improve their economic situation.  It’s hard to find jobs outside of your area, you’re leaving behind your social network and all the support it entails, it costs a lot more to move than most people think.  But now that I am unemployed and moving… now I understand.

Social network, developed over 20 years?  Still there, but digitized.

Intimate knowledge of good places to look for jobs, good restaurants, street names?  Gone.  I don’t even know where to take my recycling.  Colorado doesn’t even have bottle-deposit recycling.  Barbarians.

Savings from two years of living frugally on a teaching assistant’s salary?  Replaced with growing credit card debt.

I am the highly-educated, privileged white male, and moving is still a big pain in the ass.  I wouldn’t recommend it.