tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7903960439621673902024-03-13T12:54:23.027-04:00Unscientific ProgressBrian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.comBlogger29125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-61589112344381244062021-02-09T15:20:00.000-05:002021-02-09T15:20:06.665-05:00Hard Drive Recovery: A Practical Guide<p>I've been cleaning out ten years of accumulation from our home recently and my latest project has been to gather up all the computer, electronics, cables, and wires that no one is using anymore, figure out what we want to save, and how to properly dispose of the rest. I knew that there were two unused hard drives lying around our place, a failed drive I had replaced in an old computer I had not yet discarded, and one of unknown provenance that had innocently found its way to an inconspicuous place on a bookshelf.</p><p>A bit of research, probing distant memories of days past, and sharp questioning of my wife led to the conclusion that this wayward hard drive was from my wife's old Compaq computer that had long ago been discarded. Further sharp questioning of my wife led to her reaching into drawers and behind monitors and other pieces of electronic paraphernalia to produce no less than four (FOUR!) other hard drives, all of the "portable" USB type, and all not working for one reason or another. Being the kind soul that I am, I embarked on the journey of recovering all the memories (photos and movies of family and vacations lost, especially those of our daughter) that were locked in the magnetic orbital spheres of these five hard drives.</p><p>The very first problem I encountered was on that original Compaq hard drive. It had an IDE connection, whereas all the computers we own use SATA connectors and have no IDE ports. So my wife bought this <a href="https://www.unitek-products.com/products/usb-3-0-sata-to-ide-hdd-ssd-adapter">neat little adapter</a> that can convert all three major hard drive connectors, IDE, regular SATA (used in desktop hard drives) and micro SATA (used in laptop hard drives), into a USB connector. This proved really useful down the road, not just for this first drive. She also bought two new portable USB drives to store what I recovered.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcrVLXq8K7z24A8W_7z65YPWYPDAY_nSC_8wC2OfkqrDx8U6QtdxfwfgzIdIFqcWxAbtsclin_pjCwMoVEpF-Sg9UJuxOBlY3zJ43sf-KaRBaD2yoA3gnv78YRCvOXnjc0UOylTy1iYjU/s1000/Y-3324_03_Top_1800x1800.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcrVLXq8K7z24A8W_7z65YPWYPDAY_nSC_8wC2OfkqrDx8U6QtdxfwfgzIdIFqcWxAbtsclin_pjCwMoVEpF-Sg9UJuxOBlY3zJ43sf-KaRBaD2yoA3gnv78YRCvOXnjc0UOylTy1iYjU/s320/Y-3324_03_Top_1800x1800.jpg" /></a></div>The next thing I did was convert my old desktop that I no longer wanted but had not yet thrown away into a kind of data recovery hub. The main reason I did this was because a lot of the tasks I'm going to describe are resource-intensive and take a long time, especially over USB ports. I wanted to be able to continue using my own computer while I was doing this work. A side benefit was if any of my wife's old drives had failed due to a virus, it would be isolated on a computer I was going to discard as soon as I was done.<br /><p></p><p>With my old desktop set up and the adapter in hand, it was trivial to copy the contents of the Compaq hard drive (which was technically manufactured by Seagate) onto a new portable USB hard drive. My next task would be slightly more challenging.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDPxK6WLaPTtTcT-4ath-DTHo54dsOBY045tI50qwheOlFqAeJYDZ6OvLKDxVoecQQ-RC2juj3xHoMIHWAWb-kKJ8MEtY6xY7livxIvGxwyLXYDW9XqHuHKNKjMoNb-47exYt5OkyiTzY/s420/31iCicD8AJL._AC_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="256" data-original-width="420" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDPxK6WLaPTtTcT-4ath-DTHo54dsOBY045tI50qwheOlFqAeJYDZ6OvLKDxVoecQQ-RC2juj3xHoMIHWAWb-kKJ8MEtY6xY7livxIvGxwyLXYDW9XqHuHKNKjMoNb-47exYt5OkyiTzY/s320/31iCicD8AJL._AC_.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p>My wife had a huge, old USB <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Iomega-Desktop-External-Drive-34269/dp/B001768954">IOmega hard drive</a> that had stopped working. Preliminary testing confirmed that when the drive was plugged in, it did not even attempt to spin. (Hard drives need to spin to read/write data, and this can usually be detected by gently placing your hand on the drive, if it's accessible like an external hard drive. You should be able to feel a slight vibration when the drive is turned on, or hear a slight, or not so slight, hum or whir.) This was further complicated by the fact that Iomega <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LenovoEMC">had been bought</a> around the time the drive had been purchased, and the entire Iomega product line discontinued. There wasn't much support or documentation available. Fortunately, I did find information on opening the case and a suggestion that the problem was likely to be an adapter that wasn't particularly necessary.</p><p>This turned out to be laughably simple. I undid the screws on the back of the unit, and the hard drive just kind of fell out when I tipped the unit upright. Inside was a beautiful Seagate Barracuda 1 TB desktop hard drive. I pulled off the adapter that converted the micro SATA port into a USB port, plugged it into the adapter my wife had bought, and the drive worked perfectly. This was the nicest drive of the five my wife had, in good enough shape to keep and continue using. It's a shame it was fouled by a cheap adapter. My wife had a ton of data on this drive, so copying the files onto one of the new external drives took more than seven hours, but all in all, this was a fairly painless recovery.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGtf2ftLigcZCE1lrWJ2XMjgYdqOtL29K_ZzuhIfloIGDjsDAm3Ri0j4suqGq1Qbkkwr-BPnKgOCZiUoNy9UKTys9dPfuwlg6aHeHG7qRkoetPKgJtG_po_8Nclm_OSWg0ZYnjzrC6q7s/s477/41m5BD%252BXTUL._AC_SY450_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="384" data-original-width="477" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGtf2ftLigcZCE1lrWJ2XMjgYdqOtL29K_ZzuhIfloIGDjsDAm3Ri0j4suqGq1Qbkkwr-BPnKgOCZiUoNy9UKTys9dPfuwlg6aHeHG7qRkoetPKgJtG_po_8Nclm_OSWg0ZYnjzrC6q7s/s320/41m5BD%252BXTUL._AC_SY450_.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>The next drive was probably the most difficult. It was another Iomega drive, but more modern and much smaller (and a bit beat-up). Plugging it in, it spun up and the light went on, but it would not show up in file manager. Some online searching encouraged me to use <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/disk-management/overview-of-disk-management">window's disk management</a> to try to analyze the problem. There the drive showed up, but drive manager would not allow me to interact with it in any way. There were obvious things to try, like assigning it a letter, but all options were grayed out. Additional searching led me to turn to <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/diskpart" target="">dos's disk partition tool</a>. There, I could see the problem. The disk had a partition, but no volume. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKlgHkFDU2QkxNcqCgmDU9Ce-qu6MXQuWch26bI5Mg3X5sFM5KL82GerkCKYMner9Yc_8NWINyX81VcCBfQh4jt4JUrCJ2qgUJ1a_IiMYiDK-6ILgAPwb_GzfII3ENobsoFUkTOTRFyGc/s640/IMG_0272.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKlgHkFDU2QkxNcqCgmDU9Ce-qu6MXQuWch26bI5Mg3X5sFM5KL82GerkCKYMner9Yc_8NWINyX81VcCBfQh4jt4JUrCJ2qgUJ1a_IiMYiDK-6ILgAPwb_GzfII3ENobsoFUkTOTRFyGc/s320/IMG_0272.JPG" /></a></div><p>This was interesting information, but unfortunately not terribly useful. It seemed likely that had I wanted to use the disk, I could probably format it and create a new volume and partition. (I personally would recommend against trying to use a disk once it has failed in any way). But what I really wanted was to recover the data on the disk, and doing any of those things would jeopardize that data. In the unlikely case that this was another instance of a bad connector, I opened the box up, took out the hard drive inside, removed the adapter and plugged it in directly, but there was no change.</p><p>I cast about for a long time, frustrated that I could see the disk but just couldn't get to its contents. I felt pretty sure that there's a way to get data off a disk that has lost its volume, and that twenty years ago I could have found information on how to do that. But modern search engines seem to have lost the ability to find highly specialized hyper-technical web sites. I kept getting the same sites suggesting the same very common, but in this case utterly useless, suggestions (like format the hard drive). In the end, I downloaded the free version of the <a href="https://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/free-data-recovery-software.htm">EaseUS data recovery tool</a>. This tool also had trouble with the volume-less disk, but I hit the "Can't find location" link in the tool and it was able to see that the drive was there and do a general scan of the disk. I didn't want to pay for the tool yet, but I knew it could recover some information, so I moved on.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXEsSaDBUgqvQC-Uh8GtVY9o09e8GZumFikEYpCokXKVkpOh8rh3OJmTik72r_Ob-OGzcl6-1gPzlkVBVz5zBKLXsh00gdCrBucNuhM2XWFqQhO4hgX3N9UsvL0Ry5XNeW2z1YIJXGDIk/s640/22-100-026-01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXEsSaDBUgqvQC-Uh8GtVY9o09e8GZumFikEYpCokXKVkpOh8rh3OJmTik72r_Ob-OGzcl6-1gPzlkVBVz5zBKLXsh00gdCrBucNuhM2XWFqQhO4hgX3N9UsvL0Ry5XNeW2z1YIJXGDIk/s320/22-100-026-01.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p>The fourth disk was kind of the weirdest. It's an old SimpleTech external hard drive with a USB cable with two connectors on it. Plugging one connector in caused the disk to spin up and the lights to come on, but then the disk seemed to shut down. The internets suggested trying the USB plugs in a variety of ports. Fooling around in this manner, I was able to get the drive to spin up and stay spinning using the other connector. This drive was partitioned into three parts, but one of the partitions had been lost. I couldn't see it at first in disk manager, but it was there in disk partition, an extra 4GB of space on the disk that was not associated with a distinct partition.</p><p>So I copied the two working partitions onto the new external hard drive and went to work on the missing partition. Again, I was wary of fooling with the partition too much and losing the data, so I ended up using EaseUS on it. It turned out that the missing partition had most of the photos and documents and personalized files on it. So between the third and the fourth hard drives, my wife decided that she was willing to pay for one month of EaseUS. I ran a number of scans on the third disk and on this missing partition, recovered the data that I could onto the new external hard drive, and moved on.</p><p>The fifth and final drive was the least interesting. It would spin up for about ten seconds and then fall quiet. I opened the case, took out the disk, and connected it directly with the same results. Because it wasn't spinning, there was nothing to be seen in disk manager or disk partition. My wife said there wasn't much on this disk, I think it had failed so quickly she hadn't really used it much, so I gave up on it.</p><p>I hope this post has been instructful for those who have found it and has encouraged you that even though external hard disks may appear to have broken and failed, it is possible to recover data from them. There were definitely a bunch of good tools and tips and tricks we found in this journey that weren't necessarily immediately obvious or easy to find. One can only hope that google and the other search engines direct you here if any of this is useful to you, but I don't hold out high hopes.</p><p>In my next post I will talk about disposal of these hard drives.</p>Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-41570648327606726012020-09-21T19:14:00.006-04:002020-09-23T20:20:38.898-04:00Bingo<p>Overall, for this episode, I liked the plotline and the scenes around the Kettlemans, but I found the rest less compelling and in some places a little puzzling.</p><p>As was often the case with <i>Breaking Bad</i>, I really liked the opening shot of this episode. The implication as they scan down a list of pictures of Wanted Men and end on the real-life face of Jimmy was very interesting. The way they kept returning to shots with different speakers in the scene, mainly Jimmy, Mike, and/or Detective Sanders, but with the Wanted Men bulletin board framed behind them also seemed very apropos given the logical inferences from their conversation. In particular, I'm thinking about Detective Sanders suggesting that Fensky and Hoffman got what was coming and saying "The whole precinct was a sewer.", "Might be a good thing. New blood.", and "Some rocks you don't turn over." To my ears, that whole sequence was a sharp condemnation of both Sanders and Mike. If the precinct was a sewer, and new blood is needed to make things better, there's a sizable chunk of culpability that falls on them. Especially if their attitude is that when you see things going wrong, you don't look any closer. It seemed at once a nice little wrap of the previous episode and a sign of the difficulty of conforming to set episode lengths where Mike's story, which I thought was the best arc so far, awkwardly spilled over into both the preceding and succeeding episodes.</p><p>I found the scenes between Jimmy and Chuck, and in Jimmy's potential new office space with Kim a bit puzzling. The scene with Chuck didn't really seem to serve much purpose, it more felt like they didn't want to do an episode without nodding to Chuck's existence, but didn't have a real goal in mind either. I did really like the way Jimmy left Chuck a bunch of files knowing he'd go through them, the way you hope they will build on that in the future, but I was disappointed that they didn't come back and fulfill that promise in this episode. If that setup was their only real purpose, the scene seemed a bit thin. And I felt like Jimmy ought to know that Kim wouldn't accept his offer to go into business together, that the scene between them was a clumsy attempt to set up a later payoff. In general, I found the fact that we know so little about how Jimmy and Kim feel about each other, that they seem to be important to each other but don't ever have a conversation that moves past the superficial, that Jimmy seems to actually think Kim might join him, really problematic. I'll deal with this in more depth at the end, since the episode circles back to the office later.</p><p>I'd say the thing that most interested me about the Kettlemans, a thing I'm not sure I would have picked up on so quickly had I not been watching closely, is the dynamics of the relationship between Betsy and Craig Kettleman. I saw it first as they're holding hands talking to Kim, and Betsy pointedly releases Craig's hand as Kim delivers bad news, like if Craig is going to jail, Betsy wants nothing to do with him. I'm not sure if Craig is whipped or just meek, but you see it in the way Betsy frequently answers questions for him, interrupts to finish his sentences, leads him by the arm. I found it an interesting dynamic that she seems to care much more for her image and her family's financial fortune than she does for whether or not Craig goes to jail.</p><p>But inasmuch as I enjoyed observing the dynamics of the Kettlemans' relationship, I was frustrated watching Jimmy throughout the episode, not having access to his motivations. To start, I was mystified at why Jimmy didn't want to take the Kettlemans as clients, even before he spoke with Kim. There are implications he thinks they're too crazy to take on, that their goals/demands are unreasonable, that he knows they're Kim's clients and is suspicious of what's transpiring. But on the other hand, he was perfectly willing to take them on before, they can demand whatever they like but if they go to trial he'll be making a boatload of money that, protest as much as they like, they'll have no legitimate means to recoup, and he was actively trying to steal them from HHM before. I guess this is my way of saying not only did I want to know more about Jimmy's mental state through all this, information that could have come out in his conversations with Kim, but I found his actions implausible, as if the writers were steering him down a particular course because it suited their ends, because they wanted to get Mike involved and to get to the final confrontation between Jimmy and the Kettlemans.</p><p>I enjoyed the sequence with Mike at the Kettlemans. The whole watching Mike, thinking along with Jimmy, trying to figure out what's going on is something <i>Better Call Saul</i> does very well. I found it a little odd that money that had been lying around in a backpack in episode 3 is now stashed away in a hidden compartment inside a hidden compartment in a cabinet. But I thought the final confrontation between Jimmy and the Kelletmans was pitch-perfect, well-executed, and well thought-through. I liked the way Jimmy sees the exact dynamics he needs to exploit--the wife's sense of her own self-interest--and plays to that. I liked the way Betsy sprang up and ran for the money. I like the tension that runs through the scene were the consequences for both sides are really, really high and you're not quite sure where things will end up, but the logic and force behind Jimmy's lines, that "criminals have no recourse", and that he's "got nothing to lose" is compelling and impactful. I thought it was interesting how well this scheme of Jimmy's came off compared to the total or partial failure of pretty much all his other schemes so far, and it left me wondering whether the difference was Mike's involvement, Kim's involvement, or just dumb luck.</p><p>But as nicely as that scene is put together, there's one thing that bothered me really strongly. What is Saul's motivation? The episode ends with him taking his anger and his frustration out on his potential new office space. There's a sense that he's angry and disappointed because he's lost something, and the scene has some impact because it's clear that he has, but I can't tell you what he's lost. Is he angry because Kim won't be his partner? Because he lost out on the Kettlemans' case to help Kim? Because he secretly loves Kim and we just don't know it yet? Because he lost the money he had to return to the Kim's to set things right? Because he really wants to be a successful lawyer but he doesn't know how to make it happen? The most important question of the episode, why does he go to so much trouble, take such big risks, lose an opportunity to make so much money litigating the Kettleman's case, to help Kim stay at HHM is totally unanswered. As much as I liked the Kettleman arc in this episode, to end it by highlighting that there is this central, fundamental, really important thing that we don't know about Jimmy left a bitter taste in my mouth.</p>Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-37432049241089290052020-09-08T13:35:00.000-04:002020-09-08T13:35:19.147-04:00Better Call Saul: Five-O<p>I have to say, I really enjoyed this episode. I have a few quibbles, which I'll save to the end, but I thought it told a really compelling story that was interesting on many levels.</p><p>The episode starts with a string of really beautiful cinematography. Beautiful shots aren't really my thing, I can appreciate them when I see them, but I'm generally more interested in stories and themes. That said, if cinematography is your thing, this episode starts with beautiful shots following a train, some really well-chosen lighting and angles in a train station, a sequence of revealing shots of Mike's lumpy and aging body, and moves onto some more nice use of lighting and angles to show Stacey's backyard and Mike pushing his granddaughter Kaylee on a swing.</p><p>The episode then moves into promise-making mode. For those of you not familiar with the narrative concept of promise-making, it involves implicitly suggesting to the viewer that certain things are going to occur or be explained in the course of an episode. If a story fails to deliver on those promises, it generally leaves the viewer/reader feeling cheated. If the story makes big promises, as this one does, and delivers on most of them, the impact is heightened because the story's mastery of technique, of showing the viewer the inevitable, well-crafted chain of events that leads to the conclusion, earns, so to speak, the viewer's admiration and emotional or intellectual response.</p><p>The conversation between Mike and Stacey makes a lot of promises. The implicit accusations Stacey levels at Mike, and Mike's halting denial promise us that Mike does know what the phone conversation Matt had was about, he knows what Matt was involved with, he knows something about who killed Matt. The tension that builds between Stacey and Mike promises us some resolution, whether in this episode or another. Mike also makes an explicit promise, that he's better, solid, that he'll be around to help with Kaylee. This last one is definitely not resolved in this episode, and sets the stage for commitment to Stacey being a recurring theme in future episodes.</p><p>At this point, Jimmy makes a brief appearance that I think is really interesting for what it says about the narrative he's building for himself. First, I'm a big fan of the Matlock look. I liked the tribute, I liked the awkward way Jimmy wore it. Most of all, I liked the way it signaled that Jimmy has internalized the criticism that he's the type of lawyer criminals hire, but that he thinks he can solve it with superficial changes to his appearance. This interacts beautifully with the whole sequence where Jimmy verbally refuses Mike's request to spill coffee on the officer, but does it anyway and then asks Mike how he knew he'd be willing to spill the coffee. The answer, which Mike does not give, is that the Matlock guise is insufficient, that Mike too recognizes him as a criminals' lawyer, that the thirst for success, for approval, the need to please, marks him as such. Again, we come back to Dunning-Kruger, if Jimmy can't see these traits, doesn't really seem to be able to conceive of them, he won't be able to fix them.</p><p>The confrontation between Stacey and Mike furthers some of the central mysteries of the episode. Mike, very emotional, insists that his son wasn't dirty, and we're left wondering whether that's true or Mike, for some reason yet unknown, just really needs to believe that it's true. A further promise is made here, that is, that we will find out. Along with the suggestion in the police interview that Mike killed Hoffman and Fensky, these scenes in combination left me wondering why Mike doesn't want this mystery solved.</p><p>And this leads to the gut of the story, to a flashback sequence that starts with Mike popping open the door to a police car with a bit of string. I loved this scene. It gave you just enough information to be able to think ahead as the scene unravels, but not too much that you know everything. Then he walks over to two cops and tells them, "I know it was you." At this point I was thinking two things, first why not turn them in if he knows it was them, and second, what he is baiting them into. The rest I had all worked out as it unfurled, that he was playing at being drunk, that the gun they found on him was unloaded and he hoped they would try to kill him with his own weapon, that he probably had stashed a weapon of his own earlier in the sequence, but I thought it was all beautifully done. Nice tension, nice pacing, nice sense of letting the viewer think along with you but not being absolutely certain of what's coming up.</p><p>But given all that, I thought the most interesting part of this slice of the story was the contrast it sets up between Mike and Jimmy. Mike has thought ahead, at all times he's several steps ahead of Hoffman and Fensky, and his plan unravels exactly as he expected it to. He's the model of competence. Jimmy, on the other hand, has plans that are never thought out more than a step or two in advance, that always twist and bend in ways he's not prepared for and doesn't seem to have made even the slightest attempt to anticipate. He's sly and capable enough that we can't call him incompetent, but he is a purveyor of chaos.</p><p>The closing conversation between Mike and Stacey was my favorite part of the episode. We see Mike's despair. The hopelessness of asking cops to be straight when they're busting drug deals involving more cash than they make in a year, the corrupting necessity of going along to get along. We see the way our society is setup to fail. That alone is really interesting to me. Then layer on this complex narrative of Mike and Matt. Of the ultra-competent, street-smart, tough guy who's raised his son exactly the right way, upright and strong and tough and stubborn. And those traits, the very traits that reveal what a good father Mike was, what an outstanding person Matt was, are the traits that get him killed. I didn't find Mike sobbing over breaking his boy to be as compelling as some might. I thought that perfect tragic setup, Mike raising a boy who was doomed the moment he lovingly followed in his father's footsteps and joined the police, I thought that was where the true beauty and irony was in the story, and I thought the episode suffered a little for missing the emotional and intellectual power of that inevitability.</p><p>And for readers who are starting to get a sense of me, I'm sure it won't come as a surprise that as much as I found this conversation powerful, I had a lot of trouble with it. For one, I found the continual jumping around in time really disconcerting. When, exactly, is this conversation supposed to have taken place? And why does it need to come at the end? I think that's actually a big mistake. The conversation gives away no details of what happened between Mike, Hoffman, and Fensky. If we know how Mike feels about his son, about his time on the force earlier, it would have made the scene between the three that much more powerful, we would have known exactly what the stakes were for Mike, exactly why he was doing what he was doing, exactly how important it was to him. As it was, I will, with a slight twinge of embarrassment, admit, I didn't even realize that it was Hoffman and Fensky he met in the bar until later. I thought, if his son wasn't dirty, Hoffman and Fensky might not be dirty too, they might have all been killed the same way. And that Mike's beautifully conceived and executed plan might have been to avenge all three of them by killing two <b>other</b> dirty cops.</p><p>But this background story about Mike also reinforces this desire I've expressed before to see a different kind of narrative arc in the whole of <i>Better Call Saul </i>itself. Rather than a show that glorifies Mike's vigilante justice, his calm execution of vengeance, rather than a show that glorifies the chaos that Jimmy leaves in his wake, I'd like to see the show where Matt figures out how to stay alive. Where he's able to meld his strength of character with his father's street smarts, with Jimmy's legal expertise and showmanship, and somehow, someway, change the culture of Philadelphia. What does it take to clean up the Philadelphia PD, a change in culture, a change in politics? There's nothing difficult in writing a show about criminals, about the moral compromises they make to justify their actions, about the things they might wish they didn't have to do to stay alive. What would really take guts and imagination is to write a realistic show about strong and tough and cunning little guys who are able to wrest power away from those who have built the system that ensnares so many in choices that inevitably lead to corruption. Frankly, I don't have any conception of how they could possibly succeed, but I think the web of deceit among the upper echelons of politicians and police leadership would make the web of deceit among criminals look pale and paltry by comparison.</p><p>All this is even more important because of the narrative Mike has written for himself. He's a victim, a victim of a set of systems he was powerless to change because he never tried. Being a victim is convenient, it absolves Mike, it absolves us, of responsibility. But a funny thing happens when everyone's a victim, when people give up trying to band together to change the circumstances of their lives. Predictably, the next generation falls victim to the same problems.</p>Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-37086124355483663472020-08-24T13:35:00.000-04:002020-08-24T13:35:26.035-04:00Alpine Shepherd BoyOverall, I'd say I found this episode a bit dull. A lot of the stuff in the middle concerning Chuck held my interest, but while there was a certain humor in Jimmy visiting his kooky potential clients, I personally was more bored than I was amused. I'd say the same things for the ending scenes where he's visiting a senior home and we're following Mike as his story develops. There's a certain tension the show does very well at building, say, when we're following Mike around, or when Jimmy's talking to the guy who wants to create his own country, where you know something's going to happen and you're wondering not just what it will be, but how it will affect the character and what it will reveal about them. I definitely feel that tension, I appreciate the skill of their slow build, but I feel like the payoffs just aren't there, like the wait feels empty in retrospect. The scene where Jimmy's writing up a will for his client's dolls particularly felt slow to me and left me wondering why, if you have that time for such a slow build with such a low payoff, why can't you show a really deep, meaningful discussion between, for instance, Kim and Jimmy.<div><br /></div><div>One thing I did like is the opening series of shots. I thought the pan up from the lizard to the pan across the lush lawns to a slow focusing on Chuck's foil blanket showed both a really nice sense of what makes a shot visually appealing, beautiful if you will, and how to simultaneously set a scene. And I liked the moral quandary posed to Jimmy by Chuck's situation. Do you follow his wishes, enabling him to keep up the pretense of whatever it is that's going on with him, or do you go against his wishes and get him real help that might actually get to the bottom of what's going on? I really liked the way when Chuck first gets home, he seems almost unable to move, and then after the conversation in which Jimmy promises to play by Chuck's rules, Chuck almost jumps up to go make coffee.<div><br /></div><div>One thing that did bother me about Chuck's condition is the characters' willingness to buy into the science of it. Now, I understand it's a quack condition, that Chuck is going to be a terribly unreliable narrator when discussing it. In his own words, he calls it electromagnetic hypersensitivity and talks about it being a reaction to the electromagnetic fields that electronic devices produce. Being inside his house is supposed to help him. The problem is that wood, or even concrete, doesn't block electromagnetic fields. If the power lines outside his house are a problem, then being in a house won't solve it. If the electronic devices in his hospital room are a problem, then the electronic devices in the room next door should be a problem too. If the electromagnetic radiation from artificial lights is a problem, then sunlight contains the same frequencies of radiation, as does the light from a white gas lantern. And what about radio waves? Obviously, we all know, that those penetrate to the interior of houses.<div><br /></div><div>Now, of course, it's reasonable that Jimmy and Kim and Chuck don't know this off the top of their heads. But I'd expect at least one of them, or one of the psychologists Chuck purportedly saw, over the course of this multi-year episode, to have spent two minutes googling and come to Chuck to confront him with the dissonance of his condition. To me, something feels off in the way the science behind this condition is handled, and I expect better from a show with <i>Breaking Bad</i> in its DNA. If I were writing the episode, I would have tried to turn this to my advantage by reducing the length of the bits that I described above as slow and focusing on the hospital scene. Maybe Jimmy and Dr. Cruz team up to confront Chuck, who prides himself on his lucidity, on the science behind the condition. Maybe Jimmy sits down with Chuck and has a real heart-to-heart about whether or not he wants to continue this way. Maybe Kim and Jimmy have a more detailed conversation in which we actually find out what Jimmy sees as the pros and cons of each path rather than just getting an unexplained decision to take him home and then a reversal when Howard shows up that feels petty and thin. Maybe when Chuck jumps up to go make coffee, Jimmy confronts him and asks him if he actually really wants to get better, if the trips to psychologists didn't work out of stubborness. I think there are so many opportunities to explore really interesting issues about forced medical care, the failure of our medical system to deal with cases that have even a modicum of complexity, helping someone vs enabling them, the complex psychology of mental illnesses and normality, how you go about deciding what's best for someone. We get a tiny taste of this, but instead end up mostly with some cheap, cringe-worthy laughs about a sexually suggestive talking toilet.<div><br /></div><div>Really quick, I did find it interesting that this episode and the previous episode had themes that mirrored each other. The last was really about how everyone's a crook, from Jimmy, Marcon, and the bar patron they con, to the Kettlemans, to Nacho, to HHM, back to Jimmy himself with his publicity stunt. This one is about how everyone's a kook. From Jimmy's three crazy clients that open the episode, to his brother, to Jimmy himself. And I expect this to be one of the overall themes of the show, how human beings are such bizarre creatures. We believe weird things, we want certain things, but behave in ways that prevent us from getting them, we make up strange mental illnesses for reasons our conscious minds won't acknowledge, and so on.<div><br /></div><div>Which brings me to the pair of points I want to end on, both revolving around the narrative we see that Jimmy has built for himself, or maybe the course of his life that he cannot escape. After all, the early part of the episode shows us the results of his publicity stunt. A bunch of kooks for clients, none of whom suggests that he's going to break out of being the kind of lawyer that criminals hire. This reminds me of the posts I wrote a while ago on the Dunning-Kruger effect, that is, the cognitive bias that causes people who are bad at a task to overestimate their ability on it. This leads to, for instance, sizable majorities of Americans describing themselves as terrific drivers. Another way of framing Dunning-Kruger is to point out that if you can't see what you're doing wrong, you'll never be able to correct it. This is the way I want to frame it when looking at Jimmy. He can't see himself, his techniques, for what they are: stunts, schemes. It's a shame there's no mention of any law firm other than HHM because what Jimmy needs, to me, is to be part of a professional organization for a stretch of time, to learn from them and absorb the culture of professionalism and success. While I sympathize Jimmy's disdain for this kind of corporate law machine, and he might well refuse to sign up, it seems like it's on Chuck to guide him in that direction.<div><br /></div><div>The opinions of family members can play a large role in determining the narrative we build for ourselves. This condition Chuck's developed, the moral absolutism we see at the end when he essentially shames Jimmy for advertising, are naked attempts to control Jimmy. A large part of Jimmy's actions, his narrative, seem to be to escape from Chuck the moral scold. I'm not quite sure what to make of this yet, but I do think it's a shame we know so little of their relationship. Why is Jimmy so attached to Chuck, why does he look up to him so much as to say he's smater than himself? Why does Chuck care so much about Jimmy that he creates a psychological condition to try to control him? I expect we'll learn more about their relationship as the show continues, but I expect these questions will never be answered. Since they'd reveal so much about why Jimmy, and Chuck, end up on the path they're on, I think that's a real shame.</div></div></div></div></div></div>Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-40198182638944703752020-08-18T10:16:00.003-04:002020-08-18T10:18:09.364-04:00HeroI found this episode much more compelling than the last for two reasons. First, the arc of the show was very well put together and very satisfying in the end. I thought the sequence of the guy falling off the billboard was fantastically conceived. There's a nice setup with Jimmy and the cameraman bickering over the shot. Then, when the man falls, there was a span of time where, flashing back to Jimmy bargaining for the lives of his skateboarder accomplices, I was thinking how, whatever his flaws, Jimmy's instincts so often lead him in the right direction. Then, as he's mumbling to himself not to look down as he climbs, it occurred to me that this was likely a scam of some sort, a publicity stunt. I did have some quibbling problems with the scene, however. Jimmy presumably hauls up the man using one arm while dangling sixty-five feet up. I noticed when I was watching, and it's really conspicuous on rewatching, that the safety rope holding the man up is being reeled in during the course of the shot. There is never any slack in the line. Honestly hauling the worker up would require planting both feet and pulling with both hands, which might not give you dramatic, tight camera shots, but has just as much room for tension and danger. Also, early shots of Jimmy extending his hand show a significantly bigger gap between the two men than later shots. All this is obviously done to build doubt, tension, and suspense, but I'm not a big fan. <i>Better Call Saul</i> is certainly not the only show to engage in these moving-the-goalposts-closer techniques, but I think they're sloppy and insulting to the viewer.<div><br /></div><div>The other reason I found this episode compelling is because of some early head nods to issues I've mentioned in earlier reviews, that is, issues around the narrative Jimmy has built for himself in his head. In back-to-back scenes, Mrs. Ketterman tells Jimmy "You're the kind of lawyer guilty people have." and Jimmy says to Mike "You assume that criminals are gonna be smarter than they are." The first is great because I think it's a pretty spot-on assessment of the way Jimmy comes across, and because of Jimmy's obvious surprise and his unusual difficulty in coming up with a response. It's clear he doesn't see himself that way, and I immediately began to wonder if he was going to have the self-control and the self-awareness to attempt to change. The question is almost immediately answered in this episode. Yes, he is going to <b>try</b> to change. Trying to copy the HHM brand and the publicity stunt both seem like attempts to appear more upscale lawyer and less ambulance-chaser. But no, he is going to fail, he is who he is, and the character flaws and general approach to doing things that Mrs. Ketterman sees will continue to emerge. This is shown most convincingly in the way he still goes after HHM, the way a kind of cheap, immediate vengeance still dominates his mind when what he really needs is the wisdom to exact his revenge by becoming successful and pursuing a life well lived.<div><br /></div><div>I really appreciated the second line because, though Jimmy wasn't aware of it when he said it, it was obviously also directed at himself. And this feeds back into Jimmy's whole inability to see himself for what he is, an ability necessary for true change and for building the kind of successful, stable life that Jimmy wants for himself but which we know, from where he ends up, that he will fail to achieve. I don't know how much more development we'll get of this idea that Jimmy can't see himself clearly, but I'm personally kind of fascinated by it. If you've read a good bit of my writing, I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn that I'm super self-aware, self-aware to a fault, to a point of dwelling too much on things I've done wrong and on my shortcomings. So it's always fascinating to me to see someone who is also obviously intelligent like Jimmy, but very much lacking in self-awareness. Also, and I doubt we'll ever get much of this, but it makes me even more interested to learn how Jimmy sees himself, to get a sense of how much he might know or not know that his schemes and his loquaciousness are going to perpetually cause him trouble. To know how well he handles, for instance, uncertainty, how well he anticipates and prepares himself for the range of outcomes his actions might produce.<div><br /></div><div>The other big scene I wanted to devote some time to is the conversation between Kim and Jimmy in the nail salon. I personally found this scene frustrating. I didn't get Jimmy's angle, why he was making things personal. With the money he's come into, he has a chance to kind of start over, to start a new career unharried by an immediate need for money, to build his own distinct brand. It was interesting to me that he told Kim that she could work anywhere, but that he can't see himself clearly enough to know the same is true of him, to see that this is his opportunity. I wasn't happy that he avoids Kim's question about why he's pursuing a path of vengeance and trying to provoke HHM, and that she doesn't press him on it. And this entire conversation was, to me, emblematic of the problems with television. If this was real life, if Kim truly cares about Jimmy, this conversation would have been hours, it could have been a real opportunity for both of them actually to try to persuade the other to pursue a different course, to learn about each other and themselves. But because this is television, you have to distill that whole soul-searching conversation into three minutes, and there's no opportunity for Kim to hold Jimmy to the fire, to pin him down and get him to think about, to tell her why he's pursuing this path.<div><br /></div><div>Now, I'm sufficiently self-aware to know that these are my preferences, that I'm describing the kind of show I want to watch, that I would want to write, the kind of conversation I would try to have if I were either of their friends. I know that the world is wide enough that there are people for whom the conversation I'm suggesting they might have would be totally vain and frustrating, and that Kim might know that and just avoid the difficulty and the pain. I get that, I get that anytime I criticize the show there will be people out there who love the very things I dislike. I hope that anyone who's reading this, even if they disagree with a good portion of the things I say, is getting something out of this, another perspective, a new angle on things they might not have picked up on, a deeper dive into issues they wouldn't think about if they just consumed the show and forget about it.<div><br /></div><div>I'll end with a couple miscellaneous comments. I found it both shocking and refreshing that the Kettlemens are so unapologetic about the money they've stolen. I think as far as a show like <i>Better Call Saul</i> has a message, it's this, that people are selfish jerks who will do anything to gratify their most pressing impulses and have little compunction at having done so. I think there's a certain truth to that, that a large part of society operates that way, but I've rarely experienced it. My work atmospheres have generally been populated by competent, mostly self-controlled people who are able to work as a team towards some large goal. Well, at least until upper management pops their heads in. I didn't have a problem with Jimmy accepting their bribe, but I'm also aware, as I write this, that the show once again used this trick of setting up a character (here Jimmy) as sympathetic by contrasting them with someone less sympathetic. Finally, I don't get Jimmy's relationship with Chuck. Based on what we've seen, if someone treated me as Chuck treats Jimmy, given what Jimmy is doing for him, I would not want to subject myself to the hassle. I imagine at some point we'll get some insight into Jimmy's inner view of the relationship, I gather he's looking for approval, trying to get respect and an I-told-you-so by showing he can be the responsible one.Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-64060230075010002072020-08-10T13:23:00.001-04:002020-08-10T13:23:30.926-04:00Better Call Saul: NachoI have to say, this episode didn't work for me, and I have to wonder if I would have reacted the same way to it were I not committing myself to watching it closely, with a fresh mind and a notepad, ready to write up my thoughts afterward.<div><br /></div><div>I'd describe the show's arc as Jimmy does some questionable things, ends up in trouble, through a combination of coincidence, wits, desperation, and determination, solves a mystery, proves the cops wrong, potentially saves his own skin, and blows open the case against the Kettlemans. And I think that arc, especially with the nice tidy ending, could be really satisfying to a casual viewer. But as someone watching the show critically, it fell flat for me. My wife and I, having watched all the original and Next Generation <i>Strek Trek</i> episodes together, are now watching <i>Star Trek: Enterprise</i>. The writing's always been a little uneven, but we're now in the third season, and the writing is noticeably worse. By about five minutes into literally every episode in the third season, we've rolled our eyes at each other multiple times while questioning aloud why the characters are doing particular things that don't make sense and obviously are going to cause them problems. A show requires a sort of benefit of the doubt, a suspension of disbelief, in order to work, and this episode lost mine.<div><br /></div><div>Now, don't get me wrong, <i>Better Call Saul</i> is absolutely much better written than "Enterprise". I do like the complexity and the kind of real-world grit of characters like Jimmy and Mike. I like how the show prods you to think along with the characters, trying to answer questions like what is Jimmy doing, how is he going to get out of this, should he tell Kim everything he knows about Nacho, where did the Kettlemans really go? But there are too many odd decisions or coincidences in this show, and by the end I was no longer willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.<div><br /></div><div>To start, I didn't understand what Jimmy was doing in calling Kim and the Kettlemans, whether he was trying to warn them or play them and why he thought, if he was trying to warn them, things would not backfire. Then there were the multiple phone messages he left for Nacho which, while I understand he was nervous and hunting for a way out, just seemed to me over-the-top asking for trouble. There's the whole interaction with Mike, which has never made any sense to me. Why is he always short on stickers, hasn't he learned yet, why not just pay the extra money, why make a big fuss that will obviously make things worse, why, in this episode, does he have pocket change to make who-knows-how-many pay phone calls, but doesn't have enough cash to pay nine dollars in parking fees? I understand Jimmy's impulsiveness, his impatience, his desperation in this particular episode, I understand there's a certain humor at work here, but it's always struck me as a bit contrived. Still, I consider all this relatively minor. When Jimmy makes the desperate and/or foolish decision to look for the Kettlemans himself by walking randomly, with no tracking skills, for what, given the progression of lighting from later afternoon to evening, must be hours, and manages to find them, that's when the show really lost me. Things didn't get any better when the Kettlemans just happen to leave the backpack with all the cash near the door to their tent, and it's the bag Jimmy just happens to grab and start pulling on.<div><br /></div><div>Another reason I found this episode frustrating is that I want access to at least some of Jimmy's internal monologue, the narrative he's building for himself. The show goes to great lengths, especially when he's calling to warn the Kettlemans, to show his indecision, to show how hard he's wrestling with himself over the course of action he's taking. But we have no idea why he's wrestling with himself, what his concerns are we don't even, even during the calls to Kim and to the Kettlemans, we don't even really know what he's trying to accomplish. I personally thought he was still trying to play them somehow. I understand the show is trying to build suspense, to arouse in the viewer a desire to see how things turn out and what's really going on, and I'm sure that works for a lot of people. But when a show withholds important information that a character obviously has access to, I recognize that as an artifice employed by the writers, and it frustrates me, it shows the seems in the presentation. I personally would find the show more meaningful, more engaging, more revelatory of Jimmy's character, if we found out what he was thinking, which demons he was wrestling with, how much doubt he harbored over the wisdom of his path, what he thought his chances of success were, what his ultimate plan is, or if he even has one.<div><br /></div><div>I think the show itself senses this deficiency. When he hangs up from talking to Kim, he mumbles "I'm no hero." At the time, I took it as additional evidence that he was trying to play them somehow, but in hindsight I think it's intended to show his regret from trying to scam Mrs. Kettleman/Tucos' grandmother. Either way, that utterance indicates to me that the writers realized that Jimmy had to make some kind of comment on his internal mental state, that they couldn't just leave everything to showing us his actions. His regret needed to be vocalized. I just don't think they went far enough. There's so much meat in this part of the story that's left on the bone, so much opportunity to complicate Jimmy's narrative and his character that's wasted.<div><br /></div><div>The last thing I want to comment on is the opening scene between younger Chuck and younger Jimmy. I certainly thought it was cool to see the younger Jimmy, but again, that scene didn't work well for me because so little information was conveyed. We already knew Jimmy had a troubled past, and that's all we really learn. I also found it really confusing when Jimmy appeared sincerely (to my eyes) to want to turn over a new leaf, and it just made Chuck mad at him. This was another case where if we had more markers of internal mental state, both from Jimmy and from Chuck, it would give us a lot more insight into their characters, make the scene easier to understand, enrich some of the later interactions, and help us understand why Jimmy in the present seems in such danger of falling off the narrow path, especially with his family offering so little support.</div>Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-568456515269171742020-07-27T20:46:00.002-04:002020-07-27T20:46:27.954-04:00Better Call Saul: MijoI liked this episode less than the first, but it was still very well done.<br />
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There was, however, one exchange that really stood out for me, and I want to talk about that first. It starts the moment that Jimmy, after securing his freedom from Tuco, turns to negotiate for the freedom of his accomplices. That turning, in and of itself, is a nice moment, a nice revealing of Jimmy's character, but the dialogue between them, the back-and-forth as they were negotiating, struck me as brilliant in terms of the values that were discussed. For reasons related to my writing (and <i>Candidate Spectrum</i>), I've been thinking about civilization a lot recently. Conflicting values had already been set up when Tuco mentioned he wanted respect, and Nacho pointed out that Jimmy had been respecting him and shouldn't die. In their negotiation, a flood of additional values emerge: a desire for justice for a wrong done, Jimmy's use of the boys' mother in making appeals for mercy and for pity, the concept of proportionality in law.<br />
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On a first pass, the tension between these values is interesting because of how they play out in the context of the scene. The punishment that they ultimately agree to has a certain logic to it, a certain fitting irony, you can almost feel it coming from the very start of the negotiation. But in many ways, it's completely illogical. There's no proportionality in it, no justice, it includes a tremendous amount of physical pain, loss of livelihood, medical expenses, that is in no way reflective of the crime that Jimmy and his accomplices intended to commit, not to mention the one they actually committed. But something that isn't supposed to be a part of a judicial proceeding, the balance of power, the leverage, lies so much on Tuco's side, that the negotiated outcome is so much better than them dying, and Jimmy has no choice but to accept.<br />
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And this kind of leads me to the first thing that bothers me about the episode, the glorification of violence. Sure, as their legs are broken, we can watch Jimmy's expression, we can imagine the range of emotions he's feeling as he saves their lives at the cost of their snapping legs. But the joy Tuco takes in breaking the boys' legs ought to be an ugly thing to witness, instead of having a sense of justice about it. In my eyes, the cinematography, just how well the scene is shot, the angle of Tuco jumping down, the sounds, the screams, it all glorifies his actions. And the viewer is already primed to associate with Tuco. We've seen these boys be utter morons in trying to hard-sell their injuries miles away from where they purportedly occurred, in their almost ludicrously ugly behavior, in trying to intimidate a little old lady, and calling her a biznatch. We don't see their mother, if they have one, their suffering, whatever might have driven them to these crimes of idiocy, but we do see Tuco's grandmother, her distress, his deep commitment to her. These all contribute to the framing of Tuco as the sympathetic character, to the framing of this scene as a just result. And maybe it's all necessary, maybe the scene doesn't work any other way, but it bothers me that in order for us as a society to be entertained, we have to be so glib with violence, we have to be led into sympathizing with criminals in this manner.<br />
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And I want to stay with these themes of justice, of getting what you deserve, of proportionality, because I think they indicate what else this show could be other than a celebration of Jimmy's slide into criminality. We know who Jimmy becomes, we know where this series is going, but I feel like there's a better show, a more interesting, uplifting, revelatory show lurking in the premise. Jimmy's obviously talented. This negotiation with Tuco, the montage of court scenes later, proves that. We're also shown, somewhat selectively, that he has both a troubled past and a desire to put that past behind him. I anticipate we're going to witness a lot more of Jimmy's backstory, and I expect it to be dark. But there's a parallel between the story of the skateboarders and Jimmy's story.<br />
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Jimmy's been wronged. He has the talent to be a big-time lawyer, but he hasn't gotten the opportunity. Is it the fault of HHM and other big law firms, the failing of all the people who ought to have taught him, including Chuck, to be an effective mentor, the system, his family, his own faults combined with not having been given a second chance? In so many ways it doesn't matter. The systems that govern our lives know so little about justice, proportionality, respect, mercy, about who's deserving of what. The show I want to see doesn't glorify criminals and violence and trace the floundering moral path that leads a man to a degenerate life as the lawyer of said criminals. The show I want to see depicts the same man, depicts Jimmy as we see him in this episode, on a long struggle to fight back against and illuminate the flaws in the system that has put him where he is. It reveals the ways that the balance of power and the leverage in our actual court system favors the rich, the privileged, the HHM's of the world and their clients. It paints a path, at least for one man, out of the morass and towards justice. As crisp and compelling as a show like <i>Better Call Saul</i> is, I believe the show I'm proposing could be just as compelling, just as entertaining, but with a message that points us toward the light instead of toward the darkness.<br />
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There's one other thing that really struck me in this episode that's very subtle but I want to bring to everyone's attention. That is, the role of confirmation bias. The first time it comes up is very obvious. Tuco believes Jimmy is with law enforcement, and tortures him until Jimmy affirms his belief. Then he walks away, satisfied that he's correct, that the narrative he's building for his life has been validated. The second time it comes up is more subtle. When Chuck first finds Jimmy on his couch, there seems to be a twinge in his arm. The twinge leads him to look for a cause, and he finds and discards Jimmy's cellphone. Both characters' false worldviews are validated. They see what they want to see, both in a way that prevents them from engaging with reality as it truly exists.<br />
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I think this is something almost everyone does. We have a story of our lives, a narrative we build for ourselves, we trap ourselves in. Tuco and Chuck aren't the only ones to succumb to this tendency in the show, Jimmy is very obviously struggling with the narrative both he and others have constructed for him, you can almost see him slowly being reeled back in. I'll be very interested to see if this theme was accidental in this episode, or if it gets picked back up again. As an artist, the idea that certain kinds of shows and books and stories are entertaining and engaging, and others are too dry or philosophical, is very relevant to me. I think we, as a society, have also built a narrative for ourselves, a narrative the people who decide which shows get made, which books get published, all too often reinforce. But I want to encourage everyone, myself included, to understand that it is possible to break the narratives that ensnare us. It is possible to become something that even we ourselves might not believe we can be.Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-73571053860421346472020-07-19T22:09:00.000-04:002020-07-27T20:39:44.989-04:00Better Call Saul: UnoOverall, I liked this episode a good bit. The opening sequence showing an older Jimmy hiding and then reliving the glory days gets you into the dreariness of his later existence, the sense of dread of what might happen, the nostalgia for better days. The pull-away in the scene when he's kicking a trash can after leaving HHM to show the woman smoking outside is a beautiful piece of cinematography. The build-up and tension before the skateboarders take a hit for Jimmy is very well done. And the twist of it being a different person driving, going to a place where unexpected things are going to happen is a nice way to illustrate how maybe Jimmy isn't quite as bright as he thinks he is and whatever his intentions, things aren't going to work out as he wants.<br />
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The first episode showcases a lot of the things I liked about <i>Breaking Bad</i>. The writing, the cinematography, the acting, everything is top-notch. The tension, sense of mystery, and story-telling are as good as it gets on television. I love the Saul character himself, his irreverence, his energy, the head-ticks and hand motions and subtle mouth movements that really fit the character and are consistent scene-to-scene, episode-to-episode.<br />
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Having cataloged the good, I want to talk a bit about the things that I found troublesome. The <i>Better Call Saul</i>-style of show does a magnificent job of immersing you in a character's world visually, of conveying possible mental states through images, but it almost universally ignores those mental states. I think that's a shame. For instance, as the older Jimmy is watching his old commercials, what is he really thinking? The viewer can impute thoughts to Jimmy, but I firmly believe that asking us viewers to do that misses a huge opportunity. His feelings must be very complicated, much more complicated than we could imagine. Does he miss those days because he thought he was serving justice, because they were exciting, because he was full of optimism and hope for the future? What regrets does he have, does he realize how corny he sounds, how shady, what does he think he might have done to avoid ending up a Cinnabon peon of unknown address?<br />
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These moments, for me, continually come up throughout the episode. When he's kicking the garbage can, we can certainly feel his frustration, his rage, but we know so little about why he's angry. Does he suspect he's being played, that HHM might well have spoken with Chuck, does he really think that he might accomplish whatever it is he's up to? Speaking of which, why exactly does he not cash the twenty-six thousand? There's no evidence that doing so would end the payments, in fact, he's expressly told more would be forthcoming.<br />
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I understand the sense of mystery that the show is trying to build, I'm conscious of the way my mind is being engaged and challenged to fill in details, and I admit to taking a certain pleasure in that process. But ultimately, I find that process a bit empty. I believe that in avoiding filling in the complications, subtleties, and nuances that access to an interior monologue might provide, the writers miss an opportunity to say something truly interesting about the character of Jimmy, the details of his life, the state of our world. I think in aiming for the low-hanging fruit of pulling us into Jimmy's world, making us feel as if we inhabit it with Jimmy, they rob us of the chance to really get to know Jimmy as a person in all his complexity, his moral nuances, the strength of his emotion, whatever doubt and conflict he must feel. In my opinion, this is the essence of why books always end up being better than movies, because you have more access to a character's mental states, and that's where the really interesting work gets done. I think it's a shame that a show as well-done as <i>Better Call Saul</i> settles into familiar cinematic story-telling techniques rather than really innovating.<br />
<br />
There are a number of other more nit-picky holes that bothered me on watching this episode. To start, why did he not plead his initial case in the morgue out? He clearly had no chance to win, and going to trial was far more time-intensive. I'm also not thrilled with the level of coincidence involved in the twist that ends the show, that is, a different person driving a car almost indistinguishable from the target car with the same start to the license plate at the same time and on the same road, making the same turn, as the target. And while the idiocy involved is amusing, I'm also think it's a little sloppy that the twist relies on the boys being so stupid as to jump up after getting the supposed injury on tape and follow the car to try to complete their scam when they've got a lawyer on their side.<br />
<br />
Finally, there are two big, important questions that go unaddressed because we're not given any access to any character's internal state. The first revolves around Chuck. Why is he having such trouble facing the end? Why is he in so deep with conspiracy theories? Can he not see how much grief he's causing Jimmy? Why does Jimmy, even granting that he wants to indulge a dying brother, not try harder to have an honest discussion about both where Chuck and Jimmy are headed? Naturally, I don't know where the show will take this relationship, but there are so many potentially interesting paths to pursue here about end-of-life care, about narratives we build for ourselves to avoid unpleasantness that end up trapping us, about motivations to avoid the truth, about the nature of friendship. I'm sad that all these fascinating avenues will get sacrificed to tell a purportedly more compelling story.<br />
<br />
And those questions also tie into Jimmy. I'm sure, more than the questions around Chuck, the show will develop some of these themes. Even so, in the first episode I'd like to know more about whether or not Jimmy views himself as a good guy or a bad guy, as an opportunist, a hack, an incompetent, a smooth operator? I find his motivations baffling. His actions, like being reluctant to take money from Chuck, and his seemingly sincere attempts to do well for his morgue clients, are portrayed in a positive light, but his interactions with HHM and his attempts to ensnare the Kettlemans seem more like a huckster trying to make a quick buck. While I understand that a character pursuing a more staid career would have much less entertainment value, it's a big hole in the character to not understand why Jimmy isn't using the resources that Chuck might provide along with his own hustle and intelligence to establish a more legitimate and respectable career.Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-51098666863683235642020-07-19T22:03:00.002-04:002020-07-19T22:03:26.762-04:00Better Call Saul KickoffThis is the grand launch of the review section of my website. The general idea is to <b>regularly</b> post content on something that I think my visitors might be interested in, and might want to read my thoughts on. I intend to post new content before 9am eastern every Monday.<br />
<br />
I'm going to start by watching The AMC show "Better Call Saul", nominated in 2017 and 2019 for the Outstanding Drama Series Emmy, and posting my thoughts. I'm picking "Better Call Saul" both because it's received a good amount of critical acclaim, and because, while I expect to enjoy it, I anticipate my views will deviate from the consensus in illuminating ways.<br />
<br />
I will be cross-posting all reviews to my blog in case people want a more traditional, subscription-based site. Part of the idea of doing reviews is that I could never quite get a regular schedule of posts going for my blog. In large part, that was because whenever I started to write something, it was often related to things I wanted to write fiction about, and it interfered with my fiction writing. With these reviews, I hope to generate content where I can express my views and aesthetics without interfering with my fiction productivity.Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-10852235668844381262013-10-17T20:04:00.002-04:002013-10-17T20:05:11.548-04:00The Power of the Gatekeepers<p>I'm going to be writing a series of posts that are loosely connected to show, I hope, the subtle ways in which seemingly unrelated events and trends in our society combine in destructive ways. I believe that to truly move forward as a society, we need thinkers, citizens, and leaders who can see this interconnectedness. Any of these posts will be accessible from the following table:</p>
<h4>Table of Contents</h4>
<ol>
<li><a href="http://unsciencepr.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-smallness-of-our-extremism.html">The Smallness of our Extremism</a></li>
<li>The Power of the Gatekeepers</li>
<li>Blockbusters and Gatekeepers</li>
<li>On the Importance of Literature and the Humanities</li>
<li>Back to Dunning-Kruger</li>
</ol>
<h4>The Power of the Gatekeepers</h4>
<p>The media, or more properly, the companies that own the media, function as Gatekeepers in our society. In many ways, they decide the issues that are presented to us, discussed, bandied about. It's a complicated relationship, as there are ways in which the media is simply chasing market share, and that if people are tired, say, of hearing about Ross Perot, Ross Perot will fade from our national dialogue. But while we as information-consumers also exercise significant responsibility, the Gatekeepers of our major media outlets have far more influence in what facts are presented to us, who gets coverage, how long any particular issue stays in the limelight, and the overall tone of coverage.<p>
<p>The power of Gatekeepers is illustrated in <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/142109/">this Chronicle article</a>:
<blockquote>Even when not wielding his blue pencil, Stalin's editorial zeal was all-consuming. He excised people—indeed whole peoples—out of the manuscript of worldly existence, had them vanished from photographs and lexicons, changed their words and the meanings of their words, edited conversations as they happened, backing his interlocutors into more desirable (to him) formulations. "The Poles have been visiting here," he told the former Comintern chief Georgi Dimitrov in 1948. "I ask them: What do you think of Dimitrov's statement? They say: A good thing. And I tell them that it isn't a good thing. Then they reply that they, too, think it isn't a good thing."<br><br>
All editors, wrote the cultural historian Jacques Barzun, "show a common bias: ... what the editor would prefer is preferable." Being an author is well and good, and Stalin wrote several books—the word "author" does after all share a root with the word "authority"—but he knew that editing was a higher power. Naimark argues that editing is as much a part of Stalinist ideology as anything he said or wrote. This insight warrants amplification. Under Stalinism, anyone could speak or write, but since Stalin was the supreme gatekeeper of the censorship hierarchy and the gulag system, the power to edit was power itself.</blockquote></p>
<p>I want to offer a couple of illustrations of how the tone our Gatekeepers set can warp issues that are in the national spotlight. Probably the easiest to digest, since I mentioned it in my <a href="http://unsciencepr.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-smallness-of-our-extremism.html">last post</a>, is how the media covers taxation. Imagine how public perception and discourse would change if every time an article or broadcast mentioned the dispute over, say, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, it also mentioned that the top personal tax rate in the 1950's was 91%, and that many corporations pay a corporate tax rate of 0% due to loopholes and company-specific exemptions. How many people have ever heard a media outlet point out that, in addition to being unpatriotic, large companies that pay very low corporate tax rates make it harder for small businesses, who pay rates 20-30% higher, to survive and prosper?</p>
<p>Another issue that the media slants with the tone of it's coverage is illegal immigration. I don't want to get into whether or not they should be granted amnesty for breaking our immigration laws, but I do want to affirm that I think breaking the law is a serious matter that requires some sort of punishment. But there are segments of our society that castigate immigrants as the root of many evils, and the media does more to encourage this perception than to correct it. In my experience, illegal immigrants are hard workers who often willing to do jobs that Americans won't, <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57579225/">like picking strawberries as described in this CBS report</a>. They often put up with conditions <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/publications/injustice-on-our-plates/section-two-workplace-exploitation-immigrant-women">which would outrage American workers</a>. And many times companies specifically seek them out, <a href="http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2008/10/08/239299/more-than-300-arrested-in-sc-raid.html#.UmBww1PBzoU">hire them illegally, and treat them poorly to keep costs down</a>. I know in many communities in the wider New York City metro area there are street corners where immigrants gather where you can go, point to a couple young men, and have them climb in your truck and do whatever work you have for them for a day's (cash) pay. Imagine how perceptions might change if every time immigrants are portrayed as leeches on our social safety net who steal jobs from American workers, it is also mentioned that many of the jobs they take are jobs no Americans are willing to do, or jobs in which American bosses are specifically exploiting them to keep the prices the rest of us pay down.</p>
<p>To me the most powerful way Gatekeepers manipulate our society has to do with third-part politicians. I'd say the typical attitude I encounter when I discuss politicians with people I know is that they're all crooks, and we ought to throw the lot of them out. Yet these same people are always dismayed at the concept of actually voting for a third-party candidate, you know, of actually throwing them all out. The media absolutely encourages this view that voting for a third-party candidate is throwing your vote away. In truth, if every person who didn't vote, voted for a third party candidate, that candidate would win. In a landslide. As an example, in 2012, roughly 66 million people voted for President Obama and roughly 61 million people voted for Mitt Romney. The leading third party got over 1 million votes. Meanwhile, 93 million eligible citizens did not cast ballots.</p>
<p>The power to throw the bums out is in our hands, but due to a large degree to the way we've been trained to think by the Gatekeepers, we just never use it. That is the power of the Gatekeepers. Media companies that donate millions and millions of dollars to the two major political parties lead us to think that we have to vote for one of those two parties. I wonder why.</p>Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-21153959416694946682013-10-14T19:54:00.002-04:002013-10-14T20:02:18.353-04:00The Smallness of our Extremism<p>I'm going to be writing a series of posts that are loosely connected to show, I hope, the subtle ways in which seemingly unrelated events and trends in our society combine in destructive ways. I believe that to truly move forward as a society, we need thinkers, citizens, and leaders who can see this interconnectedness. Any of these posts will be accessible from the following table:</p>
<h4>Table of Contents</h4>
<ol>
<li>The Smallness of our Extremism</li>
<li>The Power of the Gatekeepers</li>
<li>Blockbusters and Gatekeepers</li>
<li>On the Importance of Literature and the Humanities</li>
<li>Back to Dunning-Kruger</li>
</ol>
<h4>The Smallness of our Extremism</h4>
<p>At the time of this post, the US government is shut down and negotiations are underway to reopen it. Currently, it seems that for shutting down the government and threatening the credit-worthiness of US debts, the Republicans will get a temporary waiver of a tax on medical devices. That's right, millions of lives were disrupted and a great deal of uncertainty was generated in the business world all so that a few companies could get a (temporary) special tax break that essentially amounts to pork spending.</p>
<p>But this is just a single example of how the ridiculously tiny differences between our two political parties are getting blown entirely out of proportion. As many know, the shutdown began in the first place because Republicans want to force the Democrats to not implement a health care plan that is essentially identical to the one their last Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, implemented in Massachusetts when he was governor there. Another example involves tax rates. The top tax bracket on personal income for the entirety of the 1950's was 91%. But now the two parties, Republicans in particular, are acting like it's the end of the free world because the top federal rate is 39.6% instead of 35%. Yes, there's talk of revolution over a less than five percent different in the top income bracket.</p>
<p>It will become apparent if you read this blog, that I don't fit easily within either political party. I generally find them both to be wrong about things more often than they are right, and, up until a few years ago, I found the wrongness fairly evenly divided between them. The range of political policies they represent is ridiculously narrow. Could you imagine someone advocating a 90% tax rate today? Could you imagine someone advocating a 23% tax rate on the top income bracket? By the way, that is the actual average paid by the top 0.1% of earners in 2010 as reported in the ultra-liberal magazine <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/janetnovack/2013/03/06/as-stock-market-recovered-rich-took-bigger-share-of-nations-income-and-paid-lower-tax-rate/">Forbes</a> (/sarcasm). How about we have a national corporate tax level of 0% since, as <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-20129155/study-many-fortune-500-cos-paid-$0-taxes/">CBS reports</a>, many Fortune 500 companies already pay 0%?</p>
<p>These would be policies worth fighting over. Not worth shutting down a government and threatening a world economic crisis for, but definitely worth getting mad about. But given the smallness of the differences between the positions of the two current parties, the extremism currently on display is unwarranted, childish, and embarrassing.</p>Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-50811776502520118742012-05-08T20:33:00.001-04:002012-05-08T20:40:52.252-04:00How Will Robots Treat Us?I've been thinking a lot about robot intelligence lately, and a quote from Pete Mandik brought something to the forefront of my mind and crystallized my thoughts for me. You can read the full interview <a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/brain-hammer/">here</a> but the part I'm interested in is this:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I think our best guide to what we should think about any future beings
that surpass us is to think about our current attitudes to beings that
already surpass us. On the individual level, I’m not bothered, that is, I
don’t feel the value sucked out of my life, by the knowledge that there
are lots of individuals that are smarter than me. On the species level,
I don’t feel that humans are devalued by the knowledge that other
species are faster runners, better swimmers, etc. I think, then, by
analogy, we should try to take similar attitudes to any post-humans
(mechanical or biological) that outperform us. We should continue to
value our own lives on our own terms. And also, you know, root for them,
since they’ll be our children.</blockquote>
I think his suggestion, that in considering superior beings potential relationships with us we should think about our relationships with the beings already around us, is great. But Pete seems a bit too eager to meet those superior beings for my tastes. I'd like to turn his suggestion in a different direction. Let's think about how those superior beings might treat us, their inferiors, based on examining how we treat the inferior species we're surrounded with. Yeah, you can see where this is going real fast, right? We squish many types of bugs without a second thought. We subject cows, pigs, and chickens to conditions tantamount to torture in preparation to eat them. Our closest and most respected relatives, the apes, we send to space and subject to various medical procedures we wouldn't dream of performing on other humans. Perhaps the best we could hope for, I think, is that whatever superior beings we encounter treat us like we treat cats and dogs, as curiosities to be domesticated and pampered.<br />
<br />
I don't think the possibilities are all bad, however. It's possible, especially if our superiors are robots we've programmed, that they actually won't be able to do anything other than what we ask them to do. They also might recognize our strong points and wish to cooperate with us. But I don't like the odds. And I think anyone who longs to hurry along the creation of robots that rival or exceed our abilities is a fool who we ought to try with all our power to stop. Unfortunately, I have to agree with Pete when he suggests that it's going to be very, very hard for us as a society to muster the collective wisdom to slow down the research that is leading in this direction. Especially when that research is backed by a lot of people (and corporations, or are they people too?) with very deep pockets.Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-69275460613113665392011-10-28T09:11:00.003-04:002011-10-28T09:14:52.588-04:00Occupy Wall Street and CapitalismOne of the reasons I've let this blog fall silent is that I feel I ought to explain my political beliefs before I comment on certain topics so people know where I stand, and to lay out a case for my impartiality and objectivity. But there is so much ignorant analysis of the Occupy Wall Street protests, I feel compelled to comment on them. Let me simply state that I consider myself Progressive. That is, I believe that there is always a way to make our country work better. Often that involves a stronger government, but just as often it involves trimming government, weakening the government, or exploring alternatives when the government isn't doing things efficiently. Perhaps my political position can be summed up concisely by stating that I think Obama is the best president we've had since Bush 41.<br />
<br />
The biggest criticism I've heard of Occupy Wall Street is that many of the protestors are politically ignorant, naive, or incoherent. That anyone would make this criticism shows just how confused we've become about how a democracy works. They're protestors, not academics or politicians or bureaucrats or *gulp* members of the media. Their job isn't to come up with policies to cure our country's ills or even to necessarily be able to coherently define those ills. Their job is to protest and draw attention to a topic.<br />
<br />
What has made me sad is how badly and uniformly pundits and purported journalists have failed to do their job and have made the Occupy Wall Street protests necessary. The problems our country is facing is economics 101, stuff I studied in high school, and I've yet to see these so-called experts, including many people with doctoral degrees in economics, even get close to the underlying problem in their analysis.<br />
<br />
First, a little background. Free markets are good. We like free markets because they encourage competition. We like competition because it provides us with cheaper goods, it forces companies to innovate, and it generally makes our society more productive. There's a huge problem with free markets, though, one recognized by the father of capitalism himself, Adam Smith: Monoplies.<br />
<br />
The logical end point of all free markets is a monopoly, a situation in which one company controls all of a certain product. That is the goal of every company, to either buy all of its competition or to drive them out of the market. Famous monopolies or near-monopolies include Standard Oil Trust, AT&T and Microsoft. Monopolies are very, very bad. When they exist, there is no competition in a given market any more. There is no incentive for a monopolistic company to price it's goods fairly or to innovate. It is almost impossible for a monopoly to fail or go out of business. The government is empowered to break-up monopolies because they can be so toxic to the well-being of our economy.<br />
<br />
Related to the monopoly is the oligopoly, a situation in which a small number of businesses dominate a market. I'd give an example, but almost every commodity market in modern-day America is an oligopoly. From soft drinks to energy to car manufacturers to airlines to banks to cell phone carriers to software companies, our modern economic landscape is dominated by either oligopolies or monopolies. Oligopolies aren't necessarily bad, but they often lead to the same problems as monopolies. Those problems are poor price competition, failure to innovate, and companies becoming so entrenched they can't do anything dumb enough to fail. Beginning to sound familiar, right?<br />
<br />
Thus the first half of our economic troubles can be summed up by two words: Monopoly and Oligopoly. How often have you heard those on the news lately? Pundits aren't entirely wrong when they talk about companies that are too big to fail being a problem. But that's really only identifying a single symptom of a deeper disease, and their mis-diagnosis explains why they uniformly have almost nothing productive to say about what might be done to fix the problem. Oligopolies and monopolies aren't only problems because the government sometimes has to bail them out, they're problems because they stifle innovation, overprice goods, and inhibit creative destruction (among other things). The later problems are far more dangerous than the first, especially if the government is able to negotiate favorable bailout terms in which most of the bailout funds are re-cupped (which is what happened in 2008).<br />
<br />
More analysis to follow.Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-75899250382251972022011-06-08T14:12:00.001-04:002011-06-08T14:26:30.783-04:00Inevitable ExpensesOver at the New York Times, <a href="http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/health-care-costs-and-the-tax-burden/">Bruce Bartlett</a> has a column on tax burdens across developed countries. His chart shows rather clearly that the US has pretty much the lowest tax burden in the developed world (depending on whether you consider Turkey, Chile and Mexico, the only nations with lower burdens, part of the developed world or not).<br />
<br />
He goes on to talk about how, while we all know that death and taxes are inescapable, paying for our health care is also inescapable. In Europe, of course, taxes pay for the lion's share of the health care, while here that is only true for the poor and elderly. The rest of us pay personally, whether directly or in the form of lower salaries. If you combine both of these inescapable costs, our tax+health care burden in United States rises to very near the average for the countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (O.E.C.D.).<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju6AbQRd_kW3_P_PdmqIymcwT_Uala4he3siY6uTIeZmquBHGezQpgiePN801LShRh9jdtfYrBgVrntMQXzdQwZFL-P3g2fZiT0youCcuhniin2Dmk51AkOGLf8Mo7jeLATtBcNGSaioo/s1600/TaxHealthCare.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEju6AbQRd_kW3_P_PdmqIymcwT_Uala4he3siY6uTIeZmquBHGezQpgiePN801LShRh9jdtfYrBgVrntMQXzdQwZFL-P3g2fZiT0youCcuhniin2Dmk51AkOGLf8Mo7jeLATtBcNGSaioo/s320/TaxHealthCare.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<br />
But why stop there? There is one other major service that many European countries provide that we normally pay for here in the United States: education. Those that attend college in the United States pay a steep price that can run into six figures for a degree, while in Denmark, for instance, not only is post-secondary education free, but many students also receive a stipend to help with living expenses. And while a whole society benefits if higher education is more readily available, not only because the better educated generally earn more money and pay more taxes, I think that in many European countries the less educated also directly benefit.<br />
<br />
After all, our education system consistently ranks as one of the worst in the developed world. It's no secret that while our university system is outstanding, our public K-12 system is in such a shambles that in many areas of the country almost everyone who can afford it sends their children to private schools. And in our current economic downturn, school budgets and teachers' jobs are being cut at unprecedented rates in many states. I know that part of the failure on this level is simply inefficient spending, especially on pensions and on tenured ineffective teachers, but a lot also has to do with the fact that we're not willing to pay for our best and brightest to become teachers, as they do in countries with the best K-12 systems like Singapore and Finland.<br />
<br />
I don't think anyone can calculate the combined out-of-pocket expenses and lost opportunity cost our educational system engenders. But I'm absolutely certain that if we could somehow calculate and tabulate it as we have for health care costs, we would find that the education+health care+taxes trio of inevitable expenses born by our citizenry is comparatively much higher than in the chart above.<br />
<br />
And if you don't think education is an inevitable expense, try thinking about what would happen if we stopped investing in it altogether.<br />
<br />
The point is, whatever some people would have you believe, the overall tax burden is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is how efficiently a country divides its resources. Certain things the government does better, and certain things private enterprise does better.Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-10045180400641011372011-05-09T14:03:00.000-04:002011-05-09T14:03:20.056-04:00Torture is Wrong (It's Effectiveness is Irrelevant)Torture has been a hot topic lately. But a disturbingly large portion of the dialogue has been about whether or not it works, whether or not using torture is in the best interests of our country. <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-07/does-torture-work-how-illegal-interrogations-hurt-the-us/">This article</a> in the Atlantic is a great example of this trend.<br />
<br />
Arguments about utility are dangerous things though. Torture is wrong. Full stop. It has no place in a civilized society. Full stop. End of discussion, or at least so it should be.<br />
<br />
Otherwise, if we're really going to consider the utility of immoral acts, we can't stop at torture. What about murder? Sure, killing people is wrong, but what if it's useful? It's hard to doubt that America would be a more efficient place if, instead of paying to imprison inmates, we just executed the lot. Maybe we should put together commissions, as well, to determine if it might not be more efficient to round up all those people living on the public dole and see if, at the very least, we couldn't send them to an island somewhere to fend for themselves. I hear Australia is nice this time of year.<br />
<br />
Torture is morally wrong. Anyone who employs it is a reprehensible, disgusting war criminal no better than Saddam Hussein. That a sizable portion of the country thinks that the possibility of torturing people should be a topic of debate shows how close we are to undoing the bonds of civilization that hold us together. There are few greater ironies in the world than that torture's supporters in this country are often the same who profess to be concerned about America's moral degredation.Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-24428345374293764582011-04-20T14:19:00.000-04:002011-04-20T14:19:43.395-04:00Scott Adams and the Education Complexity ShiftScott Adams, the comic strip writer behind Dilbert, recently had an editorial in the WSJ and a follow-up blog post about something he calls the Education Complexity Shift. You can read the blog post <a href="http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_education_complexity_shift/">here.</a><br />
<br />
Now, I think he's wrong on several counts, but the most important is crystallized by this sentence:<br />
<blockquote> But if you compare teaching history with, for example, teaching a kid how to compare complicated financial alternatives, I'd always choose the skill that has the most practical value. </blockquote>Education has become increasingly concerned with things of "practical value". Where to find meaning in life, how to lead a rich and full life, and the difference between right and wrong will never have this so-called practical value. But from what I've seen, our world doesn't suffer from too few people trying to compare complicated financial alternatives (thank you Lehman Brothers, AIG, and most recently the people in the GE tax division) but from too few people trying to do what is best for their country and for their fellow citizens. That is what happens when you let science and progress define the terms of the debate on the merits of a liberal arts education. (And yes, the name of this blog is no mistake.) Specifically, I'm thinking of the way that modern-day Republicans are more intent on making Democrats look bad than on helping our economy grow again, but I also think there's a sense of entitlement in this country that is very disturbing, perhaps best characterized by this <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/04/stories-we-live-by-inhofe-v-halaby/237443/">example.</a><br />
<br />
But I think Adams is also wrong on a wider level, and it's obvious when he tries to talk about why education used to be important two hundred years ago:<br />
<blockquote>you needed to make school artificially complicated to stretch a student's mind. Once a student's mind was expanded, stressed, stretched and challenged, it became a powerful tool when released back into the relatively simple "real world."</blockquote>Even back then, the world was by no means simple. Morality and spirituality (and even politics) are the most complicated subjects known to man, and nothing about that has changed in the last two hundred years. That is why a solid education was and remains irreplaceable. But it has also been my experience that the real world is what is simple and it is school that is complex. In the jobs I've had, true, I have had to use many complex software and hardware packages that the schools I attended never had the money to purchase or train me on. But once I learned them, usually in about six months, I was done. I had mastered the job. Like planning the most efficient trip by plane, there was little about those packages that a child couldn't learn. In school, on the other hand, every six months I was freshly presented with a new set of four or five potentially very different classes which were attempts to study different aspects of reality in all its gory detail, dealing with situations both practical and impractical, but absolutely covering a much wider and more complex array of phenomenon than I would ever encounter in my jobs.<br />
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Now, I would agree that often in a modern university teachers are more interested in doing research than in teaching and often students don't take advantage of the opportunities for self-improvement presented to them. But these flaws are only going to get worse if people focus only on practical benefits.Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-13890274455562606612010-08-24T11:37:00.000-04:002010-08-24T11:37:52.095-04:00Limits of Human KnowledgeWhile it stands on its own, this discussion is a continuation of <a href="http://unsciencepr.blogspot.com/2010/07/difficulty-of-self-assesing-competency.html">this post</a> on an essay by Errol Morris.<br />
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At the end of his essay Morris contemplates whether or not there is a limit to human knowledge. He basically frames it as considering whether or not we will ever be able to understand the structure of the universe. His own opinion seems to be that we will not, but his only justification is that he would be disappointed in the architect of creation if creatures as simple as we were able to understand it all.<br />
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I think he gets the answer right, but his rational is frankly juvenile. By way of giving a better rational, I've long been fascinated by a very simple question. Is it possible to create a mind, an organism, that can understand itself? To focus on a concrete example, let's look at man. Neglecting temporarily our ability to make sense of the universe, will we ever be able to fully understand how our own minds work? To me, the answer is clearly that we will not, at least not without genetic manipulation which renders us a new species entirely, unrecognizable as homo sapien. Hopefully I at least began to spell out why in <a href="http://unsciencepr.blogspot.com/2010/08/knowing-and-not-knowing.html">this post.</a><br />
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In essence, I think that no single person will ever be able to simultaneously understand all the biochemical interactions in our brain, the way all the different centers of the brain are specialized and interact with each other, and how the physical features and processes of the brain give rise to consciousness, to the fact that there is a way that our experiences feel that seems irreducible to materialistic terms. I think it's quite possible that at some point it may be possible to assemble a thousand biochemists who between therm understand the biochemical pathways of the mind, and similarly for its physiological structure and its philosophic ramifications, but I do not believe that any single individual will ever understand the whole.<br />
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But this leads to several other layers to the question. Can mankind as a whole understand how a human's brain works? If we take those three thousand specialists, might their collective knowledge give us an understanding of how the brain works? I think the answer there again is no. If those three thousand specialists got together to try to design a genetic manipulation or a drug to affect the brain in a certain way, my experience in the pharmaceutical industry tells me that to a large degree they would still be shooting in the dark at a series of moving targets, though perhaps in a room in which they had a flashlight or two. Human beings just don't interface as smoothly as collectives like ants or bees, and of course ant collectives aren't nearly sophisticated enough to understand the human brain, or their own collective lives.<br />
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But of course, there is another avenue of thought to pursue. These specialists could catalog their knowledge on a computer. If it were a sentient computer, it may even be capable of understanding the whole of the human brain. Of course, to go back to the original question, if we were to build such a sentient computer, this wouldn't mean it understood its own mind, simply our minds. Still, would such a sentient computer be able to understand its own mind? Unfortunately, this is a question that I can't even begin to answer. I'm inclined to think it more likely simply because computer CPU's can be understood by people, whereas brains cannot be understood. But no one yet knows what a sentient computer would require, whether or not its circuits would be of a type we could even build, or perhaps might require a team of thousands each working on a small part of the whole that only they understand. Perhaps the circuits required for true learning or creativity would grow more difficult to comprehend exponentially, so that every improvement that might lead to an understanding the previous iteration couldn't understand itself.<br />
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Either way, I think it would be an incredibly bad idea to build such a computer. It could only take two views of its human creators. It could think us irrelevant, or it could think us a waste of energy and space. Best case scenario, it tolerates our existence, worst case it tries to extinguish it. No upside. At all.<br />
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So, to go back to Morris's question, while I think a single homo sapien will never understand everything in the universe, I do think we have a chance to understand the general structure of existence. Looking at something like the periodic table, for instance, there is a stunningly beautiful simplicity to its arrangement. The consequences of its structure, most relevant to us in that a molecule like water is so abundant, stable, and conducive to life, are sublime and quickly give rise to a complexity and subtlety that likewise is stunning in both its beauty and rationality. My own opinion is that current efforts in subatomic particles and quantum mechanics have gone off the track somehow. I think that whatever force created the universe created a system, like the periodic table, that is stunningly simply fundamentally, but which quickly gives rise to complexities and consequences (like evolution, consciousness, and creativity) which blossom explosively.Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-46104909688210889862010-08-11T14:53:00.004-04:002010-08-11T14:54:48.018-04:00Knowing and Not KnowingI want to spend some time taking about the concept of anosognosia--not knowing something you should know--developed most fully in <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/the-anosognosics-dilemma-somethings-wrong-but-youll-never-know-what-it-is-part-4/">part 4 of Morris's essay</a>. I think this is the first place that Morris really falls down and fails to give us any kind of answer to the question of how anosognosia works in what I'd guess is an effort to make his topic seem more interesting. But I think as you actually approach an answer, the topic only gets more interesting.<br />
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To start, if we're going to talk about not knowing something we should know, we need first to think about what it means to know something. The average person knows at a minimum tens of thousands of things. Most illustrative, to me, is proper names, perhaps because I am so bad with them. Names of friends, names of relatives, names of actors, names of movies, names of books. In my experience, not infrequently in the course of conversations people want to refer to someone or something but can't remember what that thing is called. Surely this, too, is a case of anosognosia. All the more because often the name that we are searching for comes to us at some later indeterminate time, when we have no use for the name at all.<br />
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This raises the question, how do we know things at all? What is going on with these simple memory omissions? Is our brain like a computer, with each fact stored in a discrete location? If so, then when we fail to remember something, have we either forgotten where to find that location or has that location been corrupted? Both of these errors, after all, happen in computers. But neither of those seems an adequate explanation. If the location of the fact is corrupted, then how could we remember that fact later? If we've simply forgotten where that information is stored, then how do we find that location later? The latest research suggests that memories are connections between neurons and that the connections grow stronger with repetition. But to me that doesn't really address the issue. First, it is obvious. Our brain is nothing more than a bunch of connections of neurons, so of course memories have to be connections too. But further, how does the fact that a memory is a connection of neurons really explain how we know facts? What kind of connections of neurons are necessary to remember the name of my Aunt Bea? What kinds are necessary for me to remember that I like the actress Renee Zellweger and the fact that along with remembering her name a mental image of her face comes to mind. And don't even get me started on what connections are necessary to remember how to spell her name. For me, who can't spell, the answer is no connections would ever be sufficient. For me, this is the first interesting aspect of anosognosia: for all our science, picturing how memory works is still a very hazy endeavor.<br />
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So anosognosia, actually, is nothing special at all. Almost every fact in our brain is dormant for the majority of our waking moments. And it quickly gets more complicated when you start to add in all the psychological biases we display. We tend not to remember things which we don't want to remember. As much as I might rack my brain to give you some personal examples, I'm a bit too busy not remembering them now. I will assure you, though, that there are many things I've done which I'd rather not remember doing, and there are many things I'm not good at that I've long forgotten the myriad cues and signals that might indicate to me, if I chose to pay attention to them in the first place, that I wasn't good at those tasks. There are positive aspects of people I hate which I will never recall. And there's absolutely no way you could prove whether or not I know these things. In many cases if I've done a good job at repressing a memory so that there are neural connections for that memory but the memory could never ever get into my consciousness, we would really need to define a bit more clearly what we mean by "know".<br />
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But where it again starts to get really interesting is when you start to look into areas where the beliefs one holds are complicated. I believe I am a trifle on the lazy side (just a trifle), yet I've always gotten good reviews at every job I've ever worked. Somehow I have to reconcile those two contrary pieces of information. I believe that people ought to earn the lifestyle they want to lead, but I believe that we ought to make some basic provisions for those people who are not equipped by either genetics or society to earn their way, and I'm also aware that many people who do have money have done very little to earn it whether because they obtained the money illicitly, inherited it, or, perhaps, won the lottery. These competing ideas and hundreds if not thousands more are all in my head, in essence vying for dominance. <br />
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Is it really any surprise, given all this, that there are people who display varying levels of awareness, indifference, and denial regarding the fact that they've lost the use of their left arm? I don't think so, and I think in trying to persuade us that this is where the big mystery is, Morris does us a disservice.<br />
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To me, the big mystery is tied up in these complex net of beliefs. And reading, conversation and writing really bring out how tenuous our knowledge and beliefs are, really illustrate their fluidity. In the course of verbal debates, in the course of trying to present my thoughts in writing, I've often discovered that I don't believe the things I thought I believed. Sometimes I find that I don't believe something which I was going to write a passionate essay in support of, sometimes I find in writing that two ideas I thought were compatible are not, sometimes I find that I actually end up disproving the thesis of my paper. Sometimes in a debate I say something and realize how silly it sounds. Sometimes I read something that just completely and irrefutably contradicts something I had believed.<br />
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It's hard for me to describe, especially to someone who might not have occasion to write or debate a lot. Writing and debating have always seemed to me like trials. You have an idea, you need to play with it some, give it a spin, explore it. You believe an author of a book was trying to say one thing, but on talking to others who read the book, on looking more closely at the text, you see you were entirely wrong. There seems something permanently makeshift about my ideas, my beliefs, my mind. And I think that is the way it has to be. We are creatures of the moment. Our mental capacities are extremely limited. We can really only hold one thing in our mind at any time to look at it and think about it. If this is the kind of creature we are and the limitations our mind works under, then how could our beliefs and our knowledge behave any differently?Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-68202074685506390342010-08-05T16:13:00.007-04:002010-08-24T10:31:32.525-04:00Dunning-Kruger: Teachers of Pre-Med StudentsContinuation of <a href="http://unsciencepr.blogspot.com/2010/07/dunning-krugar-pre-med-students.html">this discussion</a> on teaching pre-med students.<br />
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So I find myself in something of a conundrum. I recognize the reasons that my students are unable to obtain the scores they want on the MCAT. Broadly, they either have poor study skills or they have poor problem solving skills. But I'm left banging my head against the Dunning-Kruger effect:<br />
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<blockquote>"When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it."</blockquote><br />
Basically, in this situation what it means is that those students who are capable of realizing they are doing things poorly and improving have already realized their flaws and tried to fix them. That is the difference between the 30-to-36 student and the 24-to-28 student.<br />
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As I've come to understand these things, I've come to understand that I too am flawed. I stand at the front of the classroom and lecture on things (the facts of chemistry and biology important to know for the MCAT) that ultimately don't address the fundamental needs of these students. While it might be flattering to think that because I understand what the true needs of my students are, I'm better than the other teachers, despite my understanding I'm not really sure how to help them. I, too, am a victim of Dunning-Kruger. As a teacher, I have an obligation to help these students learn, but I am unable to figure out what to do. There are teaching techniques, ways of reaching and influencing students that I should know but which I don't know.<br />
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So I come back to these different types of questions Morris proposes in his article on anosognosia. I've asked a question that I don't know how to answer, a question I believe no one actually knows how to answer: How do you help students become better test-takers? Take problem solving skills as an example, I've done some research on the issue. It turns out that problems are solved in two steps. Before a test, one must internalize the steps necessary to solve a large number of types of problems. Then, when taking a test, one must properly categorize each particular problem as one of those types and then execute the steps we carry in our minds. But knowing that this is how we solve problems only raises other issues. Without accounting for time constraints and class sizes, how does one teach an abstract skill such as categorizing a problem as one of the hundreds of types a student ought to know, and then successfully following through on each of the steps? How, for that matter, do I teach students whose problem might be poor reading comprehension how to read better?<br />
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I'm not going to pretend I have the answers to these questions. This is kind of where I am right now, trying to figure out if anyone else has the answers or if there even are answers. I'm trying a few techniques out to see how they work. For a while I have been telling students that when they get a problem wrong, they need to understand why they got it wrong. That, in other words, practice without improvement is useless, that it doesn't matter how many questions you do if you don't learn to do any of them better. But as Dunning has suggested, I'm always frightened to find out, in one-on-one discussions, that students haven't listened to my advice and continue to plow through practice problems unreflectively, valuing quantity over quality. Of the students who do listen, many don't really understand the advice. They look for the reason they got the problem wrong, but they don't actually try to go through the right method to solve the problem step by step to get that routine in their mind. It's a subtle, but extremely important difference, knowing what you did wrong versus knowing how to do it right the next time.<br />
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I've also taken to more explicitly telling students the steps I'm taking as I solve a problem. For all MCAT questions the first step is determining if the answer was in the test passage, if it draws on things the student is expected to know, or if it is a fusion of the two. But there are more steps past that. What concept is being tested? What are the relevant equations, facts and rationalizations surrounding that concept? This technique has helped a little in that while most often a student who can't get started just can't figure out what the question is asking (a reading comprehension issue), a significant portion of the time I'll uncover that the student simply doesn't know something he ought to know. But this leads back to another thing I've had difficulty understanding. If I tell students that they ought to memorize things, why do they not memorize them? When I took a science test, I always made a list of things I ought to know (and memorized them) and things I ought to understand (and made sure I could explain them). Many students seem to lack this skill. More, as Dunning-Kruger teaches, they seem to be unaware that they ought to know this skill. Basically, every time I find a trick that seems to help, I'm brought back to the fact that these students need to learn to help themselves, my ability to help them is limited.<br />
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This need to learn to help themselves, and the centrality of reading comprehension issues in the difficulties these students face, brings me to the <a href="http://unsciencepr.blogspot.com/2010/07/value-of-good-teacher.html">post I made</a> a few days ago. Good teachers, especially early in education, are immeasurably important. While I would love to be able to address these issues, I simply can't given the format of my interaction with these students and the amount of time we have together. Typically I have students either in a one-on-one setting for eight hours or in groups of ten for twenty hours. In that time, I have to teach them material which it takes college professors 45 hours to cover, while also doing a fair number of sample problems together, discussing time management and other test strategies, and covering other logistical issues of the class and of the MCAT. Given these restrictions, how much can I really expect to do in terms of re-teaching these students how to approach a test? More broadly, if we have no restrictions, how do we teach young students or re-teach older students how to solve problems and how to read effectively?<br />
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I think the answer is we simply don't know. Good elementary school teachers and good parents teach these things, but we don't know how they do it. More, I've over-generalized in my description of students. I've seen students who come in with an initial 24 and leave scoring in the mid 30's by, among other things, re-teaching themselves how to pay more attention to the wording of questions and re-teaching themselves using the problem-solving techniques I preach that don't reach the other students. I've seen students who come in scoring a 24 and don't improve through the length of the course. I refuse to believe that the 24-to-28 students, who are literally as close as they can be to going to a quality medical school, are beyond hope. If we want to do something that will improve our society more than any scientific advance in the history of the world, all we have to do is answer one simple question: How do we raise children, how do we re-teach older students, so that they are not subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect?Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-54780803140866257882010-07-28T14:42:00.002-04:002010-08-11T14:55:42.951-04:00The Value of a Good TeacherIn the middle of this discussion on how to really help MCAT students, the New York Times drops <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/business/economy/28leonhardt.html?src=me&ref=homepage">this article</a> on how much a good kindergarten teacher is actually worth.<br />
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This is too rich a topic to interrupt the discussion, so I'll keep my comments brief and let my readers do the unpacking. First, does anyone really think that standardized test scores are a good way to measure student progress? If the folks in the Obama administration are really interested in improving public education, start by coming up with a better metric. I'd suggest <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html">testing for creativity</a>, but I think the irony of the suggestion might be lost on those who insist on sticking by standardized tests.<br />
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Which leads me to the second and last thing I want to say. Nothing is more important to our country's future than the quality of our children's education. Of all the things academics are trying to do, how about some of them follow this study's lead and really try to probe the value of good teachers at all levels, the value of various class sizes, of having computer training for elementary school students (I'm guessing negative value) and so on? Then, and I know it is a lot to ask, perhaps we could have an informed discourse on the proper spending levels for public schools.Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-17224856297656240762010-07-26T13:21:00.008-04:002010-08-24T10:32:09.787-04:00Dunning-Kruger: Pre Med StudentsThis is a continuation of <a href="http://unsciencepr.blogspot.com/2010/07/difficulty-of-self-assesing-competency.html">the post here</a> on the Dunning-Kruger effect, which can be summarized as follows:<br />
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<blockquote>"When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it."</blockquote><br />
In order to ground our discussion of the Dunning-Kruger effect and show its practical side, it is time to make the effect personal. One of the many things I do to earn money is teach MCAT, the standardized test all medical school students take, a sort of SAT for the pre-med. The MCAT is broken into three parts, a verbal part, a physical sciences part which tests the students' knowledge of two semesters of college chemistry and two of physics, and a biological sciences part which tests the easier parts of about seven semesters of college organic chemistry and a variety of biology disciplines. Each section is scored from 1-15 for a possible total of 45 points. Generally 10's on each section, a 30, is required to get into a decent school. A score lower than a thirty or a poor split (i.e. 11/11/8) often relegates a student to a lesser school, some of which only grant a DO degree (Doctor of Osteopathy) instead of an MD. (You'd be surprised how many general practitioners, the doctor you're most likely to see first in the course of an illness, do not have an MD.)<br />
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I get a wide swath of students. The best come in scoring about a 30, while the worst come in scoring about a 15. The majority sit right around 24. This most common type of student would probably score about a 27 if she studied on her own outside of a formal review course. She's right on the cusp. She knows she isn't the smartest student, she knows she needs help and that's usually why she's signed up for the course I teach.<br />
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In my years teaching MCAT, I've observed a strange phenomenon. My students work very hard, they are very motivated. They really want to become doctors, to the point that they're willing to devote eight hours a day for a whole summer and $2000 or more to getting into medical school. But the most common outcome for this student who comes in scoring a 24, and who could score a 27 studying on her own, is that she scores a 28. The smallest of improvements. Watching this story play out course after course has led me to wonder what's going wrong, why is the course not helping a student who is so motivated to succeed?<br />
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Before I answer that, let me discuss the students who come in scoring a 30 or a 15. The typical student who comes in scoring a 30 is a good student who really doesn't need my class to get into medical school, but who prefers the structure of a class to studying on her own. She asks few questions during lectures, nods her head often, is less stressed then everyone else, and typically scores about a 36 on the real MCAT, an impressive 6 point improvement, all the more impressive because she has less to learn. In other words, the student who goes from a 24 to a 28 does so by improving on medium difficulty questions whereas the one who goes from 30 to 36 learns to answer the difficult questions right. <br />
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On the other side of the equation is the student who comes in scoring a 15. This student usually doesn't end up taking the MCAT. He will end the course still scoring about a 15, realize that it isn't good enough, and decide to save the $200 test fee. The typical 15-scorer always comes to any extra help sessions I give and sometimes even takes the course again. From what I can gather, motivation is not the issue for this student.<br />
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Thinking about the best and the worst students in my class has led me to realize is that most students who come in scoring a 24 think that they are not getting the score they want either because they need more practice or because they don't know the material well enough. Depending on their perception, they will either spend countless doing practice exams and practice questions or spend countless hours studying. They are partially right, and that is why they improve from a 24 to a 28. But they are mostly wrong. What they miss is that there is some deficiency either in the way they take a test or the way they study. It is not a matter of practice, but a matter of approach. Almost all of them are poor problem solvers. Some calculate carelessly. Others read the questions too fast and answer a different question than the one they are asked. Others lack confidence, or have jumpy minds, and are always second-guessing the answer they get. Many have poor reading comprehension, they study the textbooks but the information doesn't get into their head. Or they don't understand that reading and memorization are different tasks and mistakenly assume that if they read everything, of course they must know it.<br />
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Thus, the problems these students face are entirely results of a sophisticated form of the Dunning-Kruger effect. They <i>know</i>, as they should, that their scores are lacking. But they assume the flaw is that they are not working <i>hard</i> enough. This assessment leads them in a circle. When their score doesn't improve, they simply put their head down and decide they must work harder still. However, what they need is to change the way they work, to lift their head up and learn to work <i>smarter</i> instead of harder. This is what they should know, but don't.<br />
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Hopefully that is where I come in, but it is not easy to get them to make the next step. These students have been at the back of the pre-med pack for three or four years of college. They know there are students who are more advanced than they are but often they've chalked it up to simply not being as smart as those other students. They need to have it rammed into their heads that those other kids aren't any smarter, intrinsically, they just know how to learn. They need to be reached by someone, hopefully me, who can teach them the best methods to solve problems, how to read and retain information better, exactly which pieces of information must be memorized. They need, in other words, to re-evalute their self-image and to re-learn how to learn. It is not easy, it is not the work for a single course. Still, if they succeed, they will be better for the rest of their lives. Med school will be easier for them, they will become better doctors, hopefully they will even become better citizens.<br />
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That is my analysis of my students. In a reassuring yet forceful manner, I try to convey my observations to them, to point out to them that the reason they continue to perform poorly despite hard work is a flaw in they way they evaluate themselves. My results are, to say the least, mixed. Next time, I'll explain how, despite understanding what is going on, as a teacher I too am caught up in the Dunning-Kruger effect and its consequences.Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-59834039287683663282010-07-21T11:24:00.004-04:002010-08-24T10:30:44.512-04:00The Difficulty of Self-Assesing CompetencyThere was a thought-provoking but poorly organized essay by Errol Morris over at the New York Times a few weeks ago. There's so much in it and so much that comes out of thinking about it that I'm having difficulty coordinating everything I want to say about it. This first post on it is going to be a little dry, so bear with me. The resulting discussions and insight will be worth the initial dryness.<br />
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<div></div>The essay itself is broken into five parts. I found it worthwhile to read the <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1/">first</a>, <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/the-anosognosics-dilemma-somethings-wrong-but-youll-never-know-what-it-is-part-4/">fourth</a> and <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/the-anosognosics-dilemma-somethings-wrong-but-youll-never-know-what-it-is-part-5/">fifth</a> parts as well as the first four paragraphs of the <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/the-anosognosics-dilemma-somethings-wrong-but-youll-never-know-what-it-is-part-2/">second</a>. I strongly encourage you to read those portions, but I will do my best to summarize the relevant parts as we go.<br />
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<div></div>Before I begin the summary and clarification, I want to offer a brief criticism of the article for those who do read it. Many people will probably find the second and <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/the-anosognosics-dilemma-somethings-wrong-but-youll-never-know-what-it-is-part-3/">third</a> sections of the essay interesting as well but I found that the majority of the second portion was a somewhat obscure history lesson that confused rather than illuminated what Morris was driving at. Along the same lines, I found that while part 3 was a very vivid and historically important example of anosognosia, it also didn't illuminate Morris's points in any significant way and was more of a sidetrack. The presence of these sections forced Morris to, somewhat awkwardly, resummarize the beginning of the essay again in parts 4 and 5. And the digression away from the core of the problem of anosognosia leads me to my second criticism of the essay. Until the epilogue, Morris doesn't answer any of the questions he so provocatively raises. In fact, by the time we get to the epilogue, Morris is answering different questions from those he had been asking throughout the course of the essay and, to my mind, giving very unsatisfactory answers to those questions he does directly address. <br />
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<div></div>Connected to this, the most interesting parts of the essay by far are the responses he elicits from the people he interviews. While they sometimes answer the questions he raises, their answers are at best incomplete. I know some people like the journalist to stay out of things and just report (whatever they think that means in an essay piece) but I think when you're writing an essay on philosophy, psychology and neuroscience like this, you need to give an opinion. The majority of the time you will know the subject far better than your reader and by not telling him what you learned and where you stand, you are robbing him of your expertise. Most people will just let an article like this pass in and out of their head and you cheat them of the biggest insights when you deny them the answers to the questions you raise, even if your answers are poor and incomplete. The advanced reader will still be able to see past your conclusions and come to his own. <br />
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I have other, more quibbling, problems with the essay which I'll get to as they come up. <br />
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To briefly summarize the article, Morris is chiefly interested in what's called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is summarized as follows:<br />
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<div></div><blockquote>"When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it." <sup>1</sup></blockquote><br />
<div></div>To illustrate this phenomenon, Morris offers the case of a bank robber who was told that if he rubbed lemon juice on his face, the cameras in the banks wouldn't be able to record his face. Not quite believing this, he rubbed lemon juice on his face, took a picture, and found that his face was not in the picture. Turns out that, with lemon juice in his eye, he mis-aimed the camera and snapped a photo of some part of the room where he wasn't. Regardless, now a convert to the powers of lemon juice, he proceeded to rob two banks squinting all the while and looking squarely in the cameras. He was caught rather quickly. This is certainly not the only case you'll run into in your life of people being almost unbelievably stupid, but it does raise some pressing questions.<br />
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How can people be so stupid? And, by extension, are even the most successful of us doing really stupid things and simply not realizing it? Or, perhaps more directly, what really stupid things are even the most successful of us doing and how do we find out?<br />
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The need to explain the Dunning-Kruger effect brings Morris to the concept of anosognosia. There are many definitions he uses throughout the article, but I'm going to go with this one:<br />
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<div></div><blockquote>"The state of not knowing something you should know."</blockquote><br />
<div></div>To illustrate anosognosia he cites an example of a woman paralyzed on her left side who is not aware that she is paralyzed. He asks her to touch his nose with her right hand, which she does. Then he asks her to touch his nose with her left hand. Though she claims that she is raising her left hand towards his nose, it actually remains lying in her lap. She really <i>has</i> to know at this point that her arm isn't moving, but she's in a state of anosognosia. He leaves her for a time and then returns, again asking her to touch his nose with her left hand. This time, she uses her right hand to pick her left arm up so that her left hand touches his nose. You can see the confusion in her mind. Some parts of her clearly know what is going on, and some parts clearly don't.<br />
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In the fifth part of the essay, Morris quotes Dunning tying anosognosia and the Dunning-Kruger<br />
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<blockquote>The road to self-insight really runs through other people. So it really depends on what sort of feedback you are getting. Is the world telling you good things? Is the world rewarding you in a way that you would expect a competent person to be rewarded? If you watch other people, you often find there are different ways to do things; there are better ways to do things. I’m not as good as I thought I was, but I have something to work on. Now, the sad part about that is — there’s been a replication of this with medical students — people at the bottom, if you show them what other people do, they don’t get it. They don’t realize that what those other people are doing is superior to what they’re doing. And that’s the troubling thing. So for people at the bottom, that social comparison information is a wonderful piece of information, but they may not be in a position to take advantage of it like other people."</blockquote><br />
I think this is one of those areas Morris screws up in not refining Dunning's answer. Dunning basically says that incompetent people don't realize the difference between a good way to do something and a bad way. But I don't think that is quite right. I think first that the incompetent have trouble figuring out whether or not they are being rewarded as a competent person ought to be rewarded. They <i>ought</i> to know, for instance, that they are poor or are getting bad grades. But they don't want to admit it, they're convinced that the problem is not them but the world's perception of them.<br />
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That's one way to see it. Another way is that competent people realize when the screw things up, and do things so as not to repeat the same mistake in the future. I don't think competent people need outside confirmation to know when they've done things poorly or well. On the other hand, incompetent people don't realize when they screw things up. Perhaps another way of putting it, the incompetent don't see the difference between the better way to do things and the way they are doing things. And if you don't see the difference, of course you can't realize one way is better than another. But that is only part of the answer. I think some part of them <i>does</i> know the difference, but for a variety of reasons, they don't want to acknowledge the difference.<br />
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In failing to make this explicit, in leaving Dunning's incomplete answer as the last word, Morris does his essay and his topic a major disservice.<br />
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<div></div>Before I move on to what all of this has led me to think about, I want to make explicit some things Morris confuses a bit. First, there are three relevant types of knowledge which Morris doesn't break out but which he probably ought to have:<br />
<ol><li>Factual knowledge</li>
<li>Knowing how to do something</li>
<li>Knowing about oneself, having an accurate self-representation</li>
</ol>These three types have a good bit of overlap, but they also have particular differences. I'm not going to go into even more dry detail about why I've separated these types of knowledge as I have, hopefully I'm competent enough that my meaning is clear. <br />
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<div></div>Second, Morris specifically breaks potential questions into different types. Expanding on his essay a little we have:<br />
<ol><li>Answered questions: questions whose answer we either have memorized or know where to find</li>
<li>Unanswered questions: questions we have thought to ask but don't yet know how to answer</li>
<li>Unasked questions: questions we haven't yet thought to ask</li>
<li>Unanswerable questions: questions that we will never be able to answer</li>
</ol>There are of course, several permutations of these (for example, are there unaskable questions?, partially unanswered questions?) but the above is sufficient for our purposes.<br />
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<div></div>1. Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999, vol. 77, no. 6, pp. 1121-1134.Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-80440240759060858572010-07-16T11:23:00.003-04:002010-08-11T14:56:04.233-04:00Philosophy for Daily LifeI mentioned in my last post that I'm an equal-opportunity critic. It's now philosophy's turn to play the whipping boy, though with the tremendous admiration science garners in our society, this is a bit like asymmetric warfare.<br />
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The New York Times recently asked two philosophers to defend philosophy from the criticism that philosophers are too far removed from the daily lives of most people. Both answered with lengthy essays. The first ended up being a discussion of the proper level of abstraction and complexity in philosophy. The second could be summarized as a short biography of Plutarch that attempts to argue that philosophy should be fun and should be practiced at dinner parties. If you feel like wasting your time, you can read the essays at a post titled (apparently without conscious irony) <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/lost-in-the-clouds/?scp=3&sq=philosophy&st=Search">Lost in the Clouds</a>.<br />
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Now, both essays did say some thing that were true, but neither actually addressed the criticism which they were supposed to address. I think this is, to a large degree, what is wrong with Philosophy. That is, if you ask a philosopher a question, he may say a lot of things, some portion of which may end up being either true or interesting, but he's unlikely to actually answer your question. This by no means is a problem confined to these essays. My personal experience having essentially double majored in Philosophy is that American Philosophy departments are full of people who like to argue about things, who are impressed by the cleverness of the mental loops they can execute, but who can't actually answer any questions or address any problems. In particular I've seen a disturbing tendency to argue about what a specific word means when it's obvious to everyone that words have multiple meanings. As a specific example, I took a class where we spent a whole semester reading philosophers who were trying to give a single, unifying definition to the word good such that it would have the same meaning when you said "good dog", "he does good", "he is a good friend", or "this food tastes good". The professor was so lost in the trees, he couldn't see that these philosophers he so admired were making a mistake a fifth grader would catch.<br />
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Now, I'm not one of those who feels he can criticize without offering an alternative. While the real answer is far beyond the scope of a blog post (I have a finished 7000 word essay on the purpose of the humanities which I may extend into a book someday), I can offer some pointers here as to the right direction. To that end, there are a number of great moral questions in our society that are becoming more pressing but which continue to go unaddressed. What is the best way to use money, when do you have too much, and what should you do with the extra? Given the other needs in our society, how much is it worth to add one year to the end of our lives and who should make the decision about when to pay and when to stop paying for treatments? If philosophers began to address these and many other practical, thorny, and important questions, they would gain more respect in society. In addition, our society dreadfully needs to be educated on how to spot arguments with logical fallacies and arguments made in bad faith, areas that philosophers are uniquely qualified to address, and not coincidentally, areas I'll touch on a good bit on this blog.Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-52626884133978197122010-07-14T14:41:00.003-04:002010-08-05T16:18:32.698-04:00The Purported Science of Wisdom<a href="http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article06171002.aspx"></a><br />
One of the common themes that is going to keep coming up on this blog is how there are specific areas that science just doesn't belong. This is not to say, however, that we should ignore the conclusions of science or that the humanities and religious thought aren't also susceptible to overreach, but those are topics for another day. An example of scientific overreach is highlighted in this review of the book <a href="http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article06171002.aspx">Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience</a>.<br />
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<blockquote>There are, according to Hall and the researchers he meets, eight attributes of wisdom: Emotional Regulation, Knowing What's Important, Moral Reasoning, Compassion, Humility, Altruism, Patience, and Dealing with Uncertainty.</blockquote><br />
The huge flaw in breaking out wisdom in this way is that the eight attributes really all boil down to one: Understanding What's Important (Knowing is such a science word), especially because displaying any of the other traits in excess is downright unwise. For example, Humility is understanding that the things we don't know are often more important than the things we do know. But the truly wise will recognize that humility in the face of foolishness is overrated. Likewise, Patience is understanding that waiting is often more important than not waiting. Compassion is understanding that it is important to acknowledge the suffering of others and commiserate with them. Still, wisdom sometimes dictates knowing when people need to be told to just suck it up and keep on trucking. Emotional Regulation is understanding it is important to control your emotions or, sometimes, to let them out. I'll leave it to you to construct the rest, but it really seems that in naming Knowing What's Important as a single component of wisdom, scientists really just end up demonstrating that they don't know what's important.<br />
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If all you're left with, then, is that wisdom is understanding what's important, well, you haven't really defined anything, you've just restated the problem.<br />
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That said, I think the most disturbing oversight in this attempt to break wisdom into its constituent pieces is the failure to examine where wisdom comes from and why it's important. I mean, watching "wisdom" flash through an fMRI is great and all, but it's really just a parlor trick unless you can actually show us how to get more of it. To that end, I think a large unmentioned aspect of wisdom is understanding that sometimes suffering enriches our experience of life. I can tell you from personal experience that living for a year in China, going through break-ups, and studying difficult texts were not the most pleasant experiences in my life. But they were the experiences that shaped me the most, and had the most to do with teaching me what is valuable and how I could become a better person. I would not give them up for anything. But I think society as a whole would be very reluctant to embrace this aspect of wisdom, and if science is going to do the humanist any favors, it could attempt to understand why.Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-790396043962167390.post-1843382716482621622010-07-12T15:25:00.000-04:002010-07-12T15:25:24.893-04:00Did LeBron James Wimp Out?There's a lot of talk in the media that LeBron James made a mistake by going to the Miami Heat, that he took the easy way out and that if he wins a title it will be perceived as tainted. Let me be clear, from a publicity standpoint, I think he handled this terribly. From a personal standpoint, I would have liked to see him as a Net or a Knick But anyone who says that going to the Heat is a mistake or a cop-out is just dead wrong.<br />
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We don't quite know yet how good LeBron the basketball player is. The average model says that he's been worth approximately 25-30 wins for Cleveland in the regular season. Consensus also seems to be that no matter how many wins he gets in the regular season, without supporting players as good as those that Kobe has in Los Angeles, it will be very difficult for him to win an NBA title. The truth is, we will never know what the future would have held for him had he decided to play for the Cavaliers, the Knicks or the Bulls. But that doesn't mean that we can't draw certain conclusions about his various potential futures.<br />
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For the purposes of this thought exercise, I believe that however good LeBron is, it doesn't matter where he plays. LeBron's skills are set. Maybe he's worth twenty regular season wins, maybe forty. Maybe he can lead mediocre teams to a title, maybe he requires another All Star playing alongside him to get a title, maybe he requires another Hall of Famer alongside him. Whatever his value, if we don't know it now it is not because his talents are going to change, but because we don't have yet have enough information to accurately assess them.<br />
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The point is, I believe there is a high estimate scenario for LeBron and a low estimate scenario and that we actually know what they are. We're going to think about the Cavaliers, the Knicks, and the Heat assuming that the Cavaliers represent a scenario where he'd probably rarely have another All-Star alongside him, the Knicks a scenario in which he would have had at least one and possibly two All-Stars on his team, and the Heat a situation in which he plays each year with a future top-notch Hall of Famer and another All-Star. If LeBron is as talented as billed, the high estimate scenario, I believe he would win two titles with Cleveland. He'd be billed a national hero by the Midwest press, but when you compare his legacy to Kobe and Jordan he'd fall short. Two titles simply don't compare with six, no matter how much work those two required. If he played with the Knicks in this high-talent scenario, I believe he'd win three to five titles depending on who he was surrounded with. Again, four titles would put him in the conversation about who the greatest post-1990 player was, but probably not at the top. Playing with the Heat, assuming no injuries to Bosh or Wade, I think LeBron will win seven or eight titles. If those three players are as good as we think they are, they simply shouldn't lose as long as they keep playing together. In this scenario, LeBron is squarely in the conversation with Kobe and Jordan. He'll have more titles, but with a better supporting cast. It will be almost impossible not to consider all three as equals with the best being a matter of opinion.<br />
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Then there is the low-talent scenario. Here, it turns out that LeBron isn't nearly as good as we think, perhaps he shows a habit of poor play in the playoffs, perhaps his hunger fades after a few years. If he stayed with Cleveland and this were his true talent level, he would never win a title. He'd be written off as a tremendous disappointment, a player who fell short of expectations in a way no one ever has before. In New York I think he'd win a title or two, making him a very good player, a hero to Knicks fans, but someone clearly not in the realm of the greats and perhaps no more highly regarded than a player like Stoudemire or Ewing. In Miami, alongside Wade who's already won on his own, I find it hard to believe that this diminished LeBron wouldn't still win at least three or four titles. Again, he'd be perceived as something less than what he could have been, but it's tough to argue with that many titles, even with so much help. He wouldn't be in the conversation with Jordan and Kobe, but he'd be in the next tier of greats.<br />
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Looking at these alternatives, I think it is clear that for the high and low talent cases I've outlined as well as for the in-betweens, LeBron's legacy is best served by playing in Miami, with the Knicks a close second. However talented he turns out to be, he'll win the most titles there, and I think history will remember that Jordan had Pippin and an excellent supporting cast while Kobe had Shaq/Gasol and a similarly talented team. That LeBron choose his cast himself rather than waiting, like Ewing, for it to materialize around him only shows his understanding of the way basketball greatness is evaluated. Those who decry his move to Miami by saying that if he wins there his title will be tainted will do well to remember that the number of titles he wins depends more on who he plays with than on his own talent and that he's more interested in how the last title he wins will look than the first.Brian Catohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15704903543541795412noreply@blogger.com0