Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

A colleague of mine noted that he was so impressed to learn that the Presidents, Chancellors, and Deans of certain prestigious research institutions actually teach classes and do publishable research, and he lamented that ours don’t.  While I have little use for people who have not seen the inside of a classroom or lab in a long time, let’s unpack this a bit.

First, notice that my colleague knew this.  If you were to point to some random Deputy Associate Vice Chancellor for Blah Blah Blah, does that person teach?  I dunno.  I’ve never heard of him.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  But I know that the Chancellor of the place where I went to grad school still teaches a class in 2 of the 3 quarters.  I know this because he’s a public face who gives speeches and makes sure to mention this.  But what about his Deputy Vice Chancellor for Blah Blah?  Does she teach?  What, youve never heard of her?  Exactly.  Neither have I.  The relevant question is not whether the public face does things to “stay connected” and mentions it in every speech.  The relevant question is, when you get a bunch of the key decision-makers into a room, how many of the rest of them do it?

Second, the people who TA for these people don’t just run a weekly discussion and grade exams.  They often have to pinch-hit on the lecturing.  There’s teaching and then there’s teaching.  Related to that, in grad school I knew somebody whose research advisor was Vice Chancellor for something or other.  He saw her once a year.  The rest of the time he dealt with a Staff Scientist who ran the lab, got paid from the grant, and probably wrote the grant.  There’s running a research lab and then there’s running a research lab.

The counter-example is Energy Secretary Steve Chu, who has published at least 2 papers in Nature since becoming Energy Secretary.  First, there will always be outliers.  More importantly, how many top-level Energy Department Administrators can our readers name?  (Physicists are not eligible to answer this question.)  OK, how many other top-level Energy Department Administrators can you name?  Note that the one you can name is the most visible guy, he was selected by a politician, and he was selected in part for his scientific fame.  So, a visible guy is selected by a person who cares about image, and he does visible things on top of his administrative job.  Yeah.  This isn’t disproving my point.

The disconnect between those who do and those who manage is probably not quite as big in academia as it is in most sectors.  Some of those Deputy Associate Vice Blah Blah Blahs really do teach half-time, and some of them do return to full-time teaching after an admin stint.  But plenty of them are indeed disconnected.  Most importantly, you cannot judge the situation by looking at what the most public face does.  Bill Frist still did a few heart surgeries a week while in the Senate.  Should we conclude that the Senate Health and Human Services Committee members will personally handle your billing paperwork when you get sick under Obamacare?  I mean, W. cleared brush.  Should I conclude that his aides personally helped with trail maintenance in the National Parks?

By Thoreau

By various accounts, the number of people who had access to the latest Wikileaks documents was in the 6 to 7 digit range.  Now, I am aware that these people had all undergone background investigations.  However, I invite you to consider the sorts of people who get security clearances:

*Torturers

*Spokesmen who lie to the public 5 times daily.

*Officials who, as official or unofficial policy, sell weapons to the shadiest regimes on earth.

*Contractors who, for public policy or for profit, sell weapons to the shadiest regimes on earth with or without permission.

*Scientists who build WMD’s.

*Military personnel who are willing to launch nuclear missiles if given confirmed orders.

*Mercenaries who will procure child prostitutes for corrupt cops.

Now, I realize that many of these people only do these things because they consider it a regrettable but necessary duty.  I’m sure that some of them do these awful things for what they believe to be the best of reasons.  (Which is an indictment of the human capacity for rationalization if ever there was one.)  But all of them?  Really?  You don’t think that there are some sociopaths in that crew?  Consider also that drug dealers routinely buy off people in the security apparatus.

It therefore follows that, in all likelihood, Ames, Hanson, and the other double agents of infamy are merely the ones who got caught (probably because they provided so much info, instead of bits and pieces), and in all likelihood foreign intelligence services have no problem getting their hands on allegedly “secret” information.  If so, then when a document is stamped “TOP SECRET” the only people who WON’T see it are the voters and taxpayers of the United States (minus the million or so voters and taxpayers who have “security” clearances.)

This is related to the observation that the Cambodians knew that Cambodia was being bombed, even if the American people didn’t.  Ditto for the people of Yemen, Pakistan, and Syria.

By Thoreau

My wife and I were talking about animals last night, and why it is that humans (whose newborn offspring are noisy and mostly hairless) are so enchanted by puppies and kittens (whose newborn offspring are hairy and usually not as noisy).   We also talked about how dogs often look as though they are exhibiting the human trait of smiling.  I observed that humans and dogs have been evolving together for tens of thousands of years, and while humans have obviously influenced dog evolution, I wonder if they have influenced our evolution.  Maybe we are genetically wired to find puppies cute because they grow up to help us do evolutionarily-important things like hunt and herd and play fetch.

The idea of recent human evolution being influenced by other species isn’t as crazy as it sounds.  I’ve read (can’t find the article now) that human genes related to immunity have actually undergone quite a bit of evolution and selection over the past few thousand years in response to bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms.  If nothing else, I think it’s obvious that cats have spent millenia selectively breeding humans to get us to build a communication network for distribution of kitten pictures.

By Thoreau

No Serious Adult will be upset over this.  The real crime, obviously, is that we found out.

Meanwhile, Assange has started writing for the Onion.

UPDATE:  I’m confident that Interpol will launch an immediate investigation of these alleged sex crimes, and waste no time in issuing warrants for the individuals involved.

By Thoreau

Often in a scientific article some of the most important info is in a separate “supplemental info” section that is posted online, separate from the regular article.  When I download a paper, I generally download the regular article and the supporting info, then combine the .pdf’s.  It would be nice if journals offered bundled files with both already put together.  And, in journals that have articles that explain the research articles to a non-specialist, it would be even better if you could download a single package of summary, research article, and supporting info.

By Thoreau

Julian Assange has taken control of our airwaves.

By Thoreau

Like I said, I actually have some sympathy for diplomats who want to keep communications private.  I have also said that a lot of what we learned from Wikileaks isn’t necessarily new.  So, I am open to arguments that Assange and his organization are acting recklessly.  I won’t say “irresponsibly” because the people at Wikileaks have not signed agreements to protect government secrets, and many of them aren’t even US citizens.  So they have no responsibility to the US government.  Also, while there is an argument to be made that Wikileaks is acting recklessly, there is also an argument for that much of what they do is necessary, important, and beneficial.

With all of that out of the way, the US government is bound and determined to respond to Wikileaks in a manner that is disproportionate to any amount of recklessness that might be attributed to Wikileaks.  Threatening Amazon for hosting him?  Denial of service attacks?  (No, I don’t know for certain that those are by the US gov’t, but I’d be willing to make a wager.)  Talk of invoking the espionage act for what is essentially a form of investigative journalism?

Even more bizarre, the US government is now threatening to not give security clearances to people who have looked at Wikileaks documents, and Ivy League schools are warning their students about this.  Now, I have no great sympathy for Ivy Leaguers who are worried about blowing their chances of working at the CIA.  However, it is the height of stupidity to think that they can have a future workforce of foreign policy geeks who refrain from Googling the biggest foreign policy story in a while, and reading the juicy finding.  Or, even worse, maybe they’re exactly right, and they will in fact have exactly the workforce they seek.  Which would explain a lot.

One might say any number of things about Assange’s character as an individual (and, for all I know, those things might even be true), or give any number of reasons why Wikileaks is acting recklessly (and those critiques might even be valid).  All of those things are irrelevant.  The allegedly liberal government of an purported democratic republic has a duty to behave in a liberal manner.  We allegedly expect the authorities to behave better than whatever punk they might be going after.

So, perhaps the easiest and least surprising but nonetheless most revealing aspect of this episode is the government’s response to it.

By Thoreau

Whether you think Julian Assange is a hero for transparency or a reckless anti-American terrorist, did we actually learn anything from his releases?  I mean, didn’t we already know that northern Mexico is a complete disaster, that Russia is run by organized crime, that the Arab regimes all freaking hate Iran, that many Saudis support Al Qaeda, that it’s hard to get Pakistani cooperation on just about anything, that flying killer robots roam the skies of Yemen, and that Berlusconi is not to be trusted on just about anything?

Perhaps the worst thing that can be said about WikiLeaks AND the State Department is that they both treated these things like shocking revelations while anybody who read decent newspapers prior to the leaks already knew all of this.  (The same critique also applies to many members of the general public.)

Meanwhile, Doctor Science at Obsidian Wings observes that sometimes even very nasty conspiracies are quite open. As he she says, the Project for a New American Century was hardly a secret.  They were quite open about their goals from the start.  And while many (though hardly all) people “on the inside” believed in the argument for the Iraq War, plenty of people “on the outside” smelled BS in the WMD claims, and knew that it would be a mess on the basis of Iraq’s sectarian divisions and the general messiness of the Middle East.  Often the truth is open and the secrets are lies.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had in 2002 with somebody whose husband was a recently-hired engineer at a defense contractor.  I was arguing against the WMD case, and she said “Well, my husband has a security clearance, and he can’t tell me much of what they tell him at work, but he’s really worried.”  Now, I admittedly don’t know the details of what he did.  But I am a bit doubtful that a recent graduate doing engineering work had a Need to Know on all of the intelligence concerning possible (at the time, and since disproved) WMDs.  More likely, he was told “We need a device to counter the effects of such-and-such” or “When we go into a weapons depot, we need a machine that can detect trace concentrations of such-and-such so we have advance warning of leaking canisters.”  Or something like that.  So he assumes that if they’re building devices to detect or counter whatever weapon then they must know that Iraq has such weapons.  They’re putting their money where their mouth is, paying him to build an instrument, so they must be confident, yes?  Of course, those of us without clearances read newspapers, and while we didn’t know exactly what his project was, we knew that they thought there were WMD, and we know that they were spending money on war preparations.  So even without clearances, we knew that money was being put where mouths were.  We also suspected, on the basis of other publicly-available info, that they were wrong, and we didn’t get to be awed by documents stamped “TOP SECRET”.  The lack of access to “the good stuff” probably made some of us more objective, not less objective, because “the good stuff” can dazzle you with lies just as easily as it can enlighten you.  Also, having access to mouth-aligned money might make you a bit more credulous sometimes, yes?

UPDATE:  Another  thought on secret info vs. public info.  If you have a clearance, somebody above you can say “You have a Need To Know this info, but you don’t Need To Know that info.”  They can decide what documents you Need To Know, and hence shape what you see.  With public info, nobody can stop you from reading any newspaper or whatever that you want to read.  So, a whole bunch of defense contractor employees, people who don’t Need To Know about the reliability of sources and methods, but only Need To Know that those in charge want a sarin gas detector (or whatever) are left to infer that the people at the top know about a sarin gas threat.  They have no information on whether this fear is well-founded.

By Thoreau

This article on US-Israeli relations presents a fascinating and detailed analysis.

By Thoreau

I think everybody needs to keep the following in mind:

1)  Just because a diplomat or an analyst writes that something appears to be true, that doesn’t mean it is true.  The writer could be mistaken, or acting on bad info, or outright lying.

2)  Just because somebody says something to a diplomat behind closed doors, that does not mean that the source was honest.  Even if the source was being sincere, the source might be mistaken.

3)  Even if everything that the source is saying behind closed doors is quite sincere, that doesn’t mean the source is telling you everything.  The guy who says “Yeah, you and this other country should totally fight each other!” might actually want to see that happen.  That doesn’t mean he is telling you this because he cares about you.

4)  I’ve seen this point made elsewhere, but I can’t find the link:  If a trouble-maker wanted to drum up a case for war on false pretenses (obviously a hypothetical, such a thing would never happen in real life) why not have some intelligence agents make documents on real letterhead (or whatever formatting marks give an air of authenticity) and then have some guy meet with Assange in a dark alley (or the internet equivalent thereof) and pass them on while looking nervously over his shoulder?  It would look like a leaker from the inside just trying to make information free to the world.  But it would get out, and pretty soon the narrative in the press would be “Hey, why haven’t we gone to war yet?  Why is the leadership being so wussy?  Let’s throw them in that briar patch!”