Category Archives: academia

Today’s Academic Counterfactual Cultural Exploration (ACCE™)

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I had the plea­sure (and honor) of vis­it­ing Jason Moore’s lab at Dart­mouth ear­lier this week, and giv­ing a lit­tle sem­i­nar ver­sion of some­thing big I’ve been work­ing on for the last a few months. More about that project in a few days; the visit helped clar­ify a num­ber of open ques­tions and focus atten­tion where it was needed.

This was my first “real” visit to an aca­d­e­mic envi­ron­ment in a few years—the sort where I’m not just lurk­ing in the back­ground and hang­ing out with my tenure-​​track friends. Indeed, the last time I did some­thing like this I think it was my 2008 visit to Nic McPhee at the Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota at Mor­ris. Like Jason, Nic was also nice and help­ful, but UM Mor­ris a qual­i­ta­tively dif­fer­ent aca­d­e­mic cul­ture from that of the med­ical school at Dart­mouth. Both times I vis­ited mainly to observe the local work cul­tures, espe­cially look­ing at the col­lab­o­ra­tive net­work that con­nects stu­dents, fac­ulty and staff—within and between their respec­tive labs, depart­ments, dis­ci­plines and institutions.

I’ve been build­ing a cat­a­log of cul­tural and insti­tu­tional rou­tines and obsta­cles that side-track—and (often per­ma­nently) delay—potentially valu­able projects that could oth­er­wise be explored quickly. The same old ques­tion I always ask, more or less: What do you wish you had more resources to pursue?

Recently I’ve found a use­ful way to explore these rou­tines and obsta­cles is to dis­cuss lit­tle coun­ter­fac­tual sce­nar­ios and see what bub­bles to the sur­face. It can be an inter­est­ing way to sur­face trans­gres­sive behav­ior with­out actu­ally, you know, try­ing it out in real life.

Here’s a vari­ant that came to me as I stared out an air­plane win­dow recently:

Sup­pose a highly-​​respected but soon-​​to-​​retire researcher in Com­pu­ta­tional Phys­i­ol­ogy vis­its the salient depart­ment at Large Ivy Uni­ver­sity to give a sem­i­nar. As one comes to expect from a late-​​career lumi­nary, her talk tends a bit towards the philo­soph­i­cal, but it brings up a num­ber of inter­dis­ci­pli­nary ques­tions and uncon­ven­tional approaches to the con­struc­tion, use and study of Com­pu­ta­tional Phys­i­o­log­i­cal sys­tems. There’s a lot to think about, and a lot of mate­r­ial that most main­stream col­leagues just don’t run into very often.

After her sem­i­nar, she spends a day or two vis­it­ing her Host’s lab and a few of his col­le­gial LIU labs, chat­ting with staff, stu­dents, junior fac­ulty, and their var­i­ous Prin­ci­pal Inves­ti­ga­tors about their ongo­ing research and tech­nol­ogy, and com­par­ing notes on the inter­est­ing things that folks in other insti­tu­tions and dis­ci­plines have been doing.

As it devel­ops, she takes an inter­est in one of the ideas a grad­u­ate stu­dent brings up in pass­ing. The idea isn’t a part of the student’s the­sis research, nor is it even salient to the funded projects in any of the LIU Comp Phys labs. But it’s a good idea, and she decides it would be fas­ci­nat­ing to see how it would play out, and (even bet­ter) it’s a purely com­pu­ta­tional project that the vis­it­ing scholar real­izes could be done in a few weeks… by an agile team of soft­ware devel­op­ers. It wouldn’t need a grant or even a long plan­ning or pro­posal process to see what happens.

Nei­ther LIU nor the visitor’s home insti­tu­tion has any­thing like an “agile team of soft­ware devel­op­ers” as a component—hah! Not even a lit­tle bit. But in her increas­ing time spent “out in the world”, the vis­i­tor has actu­ally run into folks who have worked in those envi­ron­ments, and started to see the point of the var­i­ous “agile val­ues and practices”—at least as a kind of Utopian ideal.

Mind you, this idea isn’t any­thing com­mer­cial. But it’s a damned inter­est­ing project, and to be frank it would be a pity to see it delayed until the stu­dent grad­u­ates, and fin­ishes her post-doc(s), and gets done with tenure track, and so on and on.…

So the vis­i­tor chats online with a few peo­ple she knows, and they agree the project as sketched is a fea­si­ble way to spend about a month of work. Obvi­ously the stu­dent should have the lion’s share of aca­d­e­mic (and other!) credit if it goes for­ward. But the agile folks she chats with remind her that the point of the “one team” prac­tice is that the stu­dent prob­a­bly needs to be co-​​located with the team doing the work with her.

Alas, the stu­dent has a the­sis com­mit­tee meet­ing com­ing up shortly. She’s been asked by her com­mit­tee to work over the draft bib­li­og­ra­phy and bring it more in line with the stan­dards expected in the high-​​impact jour­nals in the field: get rid of those weird ref­er­ences from graph the­ory and ecol­ogy papers and add more from the mod­ern Comp Phys lit­er­a­ture, for example.

Noth­ing like this project has ever been in any of the Comp Phys jour­nals. It may not even catch on in the com­mu­nity, com­pared with the more obvi­ously recep­tive audi­ence over in Arti­fi­cial Men­ta­tion. But the AM folks have never even con­sid­ered Comp Phys as a domain where their stuff might be use­ful. It’s a blue-​​sky project, in that sense.

What has to hap­pen to get this work done? Does the stu­dent leave for a month? Does every­body wait until “it’s safe”? Does the student’s advi­sor col­lab­o­rate with the vis­i­tor on a grant, and use the funds to (even­tu­ally) fund an in-​​house (and almost cer­tainly inag­ile) devel­op­ment project that will take sev­eral years to do what might hap­pen in a month under other circumstances?

Who gets credit? The vis­i­tor wants the stu­dent to get essen­tially all of it. Does the student’s advi­sor get some? Under what circumstances?

Who gives per­mis­sion? Who needs to give per­mis­sion? The stu­dent should be work­ing on her the­sis. The advi­sor should be see­ing to his student’s pro­fes­sional track. And so on.

Who is a risk? What sort of risk?

Down is just the most common way out

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I recently spent a week in a tower look­ing down on Philadel­phia, rid­ing up and down to talks and bacon-​​filled break­fasts and warn­ing the other res­i­dents away from the fabled Ele­va­tor that Gets Stuck, divid­ing my day among the nine par­al­lel “tracks”—as if they were dis­con­nected and unre­lated in any way from one another—of a tech­ni­cal con­fer­ence in a field I “work in”.

I spent the week watch­ing peo­ple nego­ti­ate the var­i­ous fields they say they “work in”. Watched them talk­ing and argu­ing, enlight­en­ing and redefin­ing one another through their descrip­tions of their own work, their geog­ra­phy and fam­ily trees (the Ger­mans made a big show­ing; the Vir­gini­ans not so much), their social strata (stu­dents, post-​​docs, pro­fes­sors, cor­po­rates, and then the strange inex­plic­a­ble escapees like myself). Some of us acknowl­edged and hon­ored the 20th anniver­sary of the most influ­en­tial work in the sub­ject, John Koza’s Genetic Pro­gram­ming: On the Pro­gram­ming of Com­put­ers by Means of Nat­ural Selec­tion, and I watched as we lined our­selves up (this “field” we are) along the expected lines and ranks all over again.

I sat for an hour or so after the poster ses­sion until the her­nia pain I was hav­ing sub­sided, and a lit­tle crowd of enthu­si­as­tic Com­puter Sci­en­tists got caught in the eddy I made and sat down to chat about Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence and sci­ence fic­tion and what makes Genetic Pro­gram­ming the last best hope for the future of Strong AI, and so on. Now and then I’d open my mouth and say some­thing about how the notion of AI has become a frag­ile social shred of Cold War hubris, how even the idea of design­ing soft­ware is sub­ject to inter­pre­ta­tions these friends and col­leagues have never really under­stood, about the ways that sta­tis­ti­cians and soft­ware devel­op­ers and soci­ol­o­gists do their work with­out step­ping into these onto­log­i­cal traps… but those went over like a lead balloon.

I was watch­ing a “field” folded up into itself, address­ing itself. A closed field. And that’s OK. Fields are ubiq­ui­tous and ephemeral. They’re what we make of them, and the use we derive from being able to tell sim­pler sto­ries is more than enough to com­pen­sate for the obsta­cles they can occa­sion­ally create.

It was thrilling to watch my conference’s “field” being born, twenty years back. There is no less thrill in see­ing the lit­tle cracks and folds, the seams split­ting and the periph­ery falling away, as it falls apart.

Soon all sorts of raw mate­ri­als will be exposed and made avail­able again. All sorts of pos­si­bil­i­ties are stored already there in Res Poten­tia (as an old friend would say)—in the echoes of what was said along the way but ignored and for­got­ten in the rush for­ward, and the glimpses folks have had (but kept to them­selves) of other fields’ sto­ry­lines. Com­po­nents, parts and pas­sages, the stuff nobody has ever done a close read­ing of, the unrecorded his­to­ries and the things nobody even both­ers to say “I thought of that first!” about.

Turnover. Progress. A net­work unstitched and rewritten.

Some­thing like fif­teen years before the tower con­fer­ence, I’d been asked to leave my posi­tion as a grad­u­ate can­di­date in Biol­ogy at the Uni­ver­sity down the road from where I was now loom­ing. I went to the con­fer­ence think­ing I might find time to be melan­choly or bit­ter with that shadow down ’tother end of Wal­nut Street, like the other sur­vivors of Grad School Culls I’ve met. Grad­u­ate School and the aca­d­e­mic life are so important-​​feeling when you’re that age.

But there were no pangs or twinges. Grad­u­ate School—and the Acad­emy more broadly—are no less sto­ries than my “field” is a story. We use them as excuses for the embar­rass­ing mad thoughts and triv­ial affec­ta­tions we enter­tain while we fill our days with life. More broadly, they’re mem­o­ries of the Cold War and its resource lim­i­ta­tions, and lit­tle mir­rors of the states in which we house them: impe­r­ial, famil­ial, col­le­gial, or ruth­less. We speak of them as though they’re tools, and in a sense they are. But their util­ity comes not from what they do directly, but the boost they give the scan­sion of our lives after the fact.

It all reads bet­ter when you’ve done what’s expected, don’t you think? Con­tra com­mon usage, you don’t do Grad­u­ate School. It’s a thing that explains what you’ve been doing, why you look that way or act that way, why your enthu­si­asms and naiveté are so refresh­ing or enrag­ing. Grad­u­ate School is itself a “field”.

I real­ize I never did tell any­body at the con­fer­ence what it is I really do. What my “field” “really” is.

They tend to just assume, when you’re at a tech­ni­cal con­fer­ence. A few old friends and col­leagues know a bit bet­ter, but they still can’t quite con­nect the dots. Beyond some jokes about me being a spy of some sort because I was so cagey about my plans and scope and affil­i­a­tions, I don’t think many folk really noticed. We talked about the things I’ve done of course, but that’s how this sort of thing works, and it’s the com­mon ground for any conversation.

I con­fess that I look for­ward to the day we all meet at some other future con­fer­ence and com­pare notes, and end up frown­ing and smil­ing about the dif­fer­ent sto­ries we’ve told about the same stuff. I’ll be there, smil­ing and frown­ing and shrug­ging right along with them. Pick a plane or a cave wall to project the shadow of the Real World onto, and tell a story about the out­lines it makes. The trick is to shrug and smile and pick another plane and do it all again to get a com­pletely dif­fer­ent shadow, until you find the one most use­ful for the day. It’s a magic trick for most folks. Now and then I try to share the secrets, but when I start to explain the habits and prac­tices and assump­tions that make this stuff fea­si­ble and inter­est­ing… those go over like a lead balloon.

That story—itself about stories—isn’t sim­ple yet.

At the Wal­nut Street Uni­ver­sity fif­teen years ago, I was asked to quit mak­ing a scene by beg­ging my the­sis com­mit­tee to treat my com­pu­ta­tional whatever-​​it-​​was (“research”?) as Biol­ogy proper. The story I can tell now is that I was freed to do the work in the proper “field”, the one that brought me back to this con­fer­ence in the tower fif­teen years later. But in the con­text of the day it was a blow. Look at the young enthu­si­asts in schools around the world, learn­ing and eager and lis­ten­ing to the sto­ries we build tow­ers out of. Ivory tow­ers, con­fer­ence towers—all kinds.

It’s good to fit. To have a sim­ple story every­body knows, and use our sto­ries of sim­i­lar work and sim­i­lar life to shore up the walls of the place we all work together. Our “field”, our “Uni­ver­sity”, our “discipline”.

The story I tried to tell when I was in Grad­u­ate School down ’tother end of Wal­nut Street, before I knew how to do this sort of thing, was about Bio­log­i­cal Engi­neer­ing, and Maker Cul­ture, and explain­ing things by chang­ing the world. It was all the start of some­thing hap­pen­ing in some other tower, I real­ize. The story I end up telling now is how doing that same work has nearly bro­ken my old friend and advi­sor (or at least made him sound like a crack­pot to our peers), how the world has caught up and it pleases me to see peo­ple in places besides the other end of Wal­nut Street doing the very work we wanted, and how much plea­sure I take in know­ing peo­ple who knit DNA and cre­ate jel­ly­fish from rat cells and threaten to cure not dis­ease but a worldview.

Dif­fer­ent plane and a dif­fer­ent pro­jec­tion of the same real stuff. The world doesn’t give a damn what we say about it, so we’re free to make new sto­ries on demand. There are always new tow­ers being built, and raw mate­ri­als get­ting freed up as older ones are disassembled.

I wave down Wal­nut Street, and never really think about it again except with a smile. I won­der where those peo­ple live now, and what it’s like in the world for them. Is it the same? Is it trans­formed yet?

Always be will­ing to wait for one of the Ele­va­tors that Doesn’t Get Stuck.

What I do is edit. I’m an Edi­tor. It will be a lit­tle while before folks real­ize what that means, is all. And I’ll be shrug­ging right there along­side them as we find the words to use when we explain it, and tell that story more use­fully, more sim­ply. And maybe a cure will start to come along with these new sto­ries, as more peo­ple real­ize they have trou­ble telling unfaceted tales, lin­ear tales, sta­ble tales of one thing lead­ing to another.

Being an Edi­tor has a lot to do with sal­vage, with sur­fac­ing and sug­gest­ing uses for the raw mate­ri­als freed up when our sto­ries change them­selves. You site your­self at the edges of sev­eral shad­ows, and you squint up at the sun to see what’s really up there, and over time you learn to make some shad­ows of your own. Every story changes itself in the telling. That’s not merely our work as Edi­tors, but our lives.

Nobody would believe me if I came right out and said that I cre­ate the field to suit the work I want to do. On the fly; not from whole cloth, but from the chunks of other fields as needed. Nor will they believe you, when you are cured of your pro­fes­sion and start to merely do what’s called for to make your­self useful.

At least that’s the story I tell myself. It does the job.

Later: Lau­rent Bossavit has reminded me of Venkatash Rao’s sim­i­lar essay from a few months back, far less ellip­ti­cal than mine. Go and enjoy. It’s good to fit. :)

Against Originality

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Surely I can’t be the first per­son to say it: Our culture’s demand that every great mind be orig­i­nal has become a sti­fling horror.

First, because the sup­posed traits of “orig­i­nal­ity” are a sham, except among the insane. You’re rid­ing the yel­low line next to “schiz­o­phrenic” if you’ve writ­ten an unin­tel­li­gi­ble con­text­less ram­ble in a pri­vate lan­guage. You may already be a sociopath if you con­sis­tently dis­avow the con­ver­sa­tions and train­ing and cul­tural embed­ded­ness of your work’s greater con­text. You’re prob­a­bly delusional—even though we’re all out to under­mine you—if you keep ignor­ing the fre­quent simul­ta­ne­ous appear­ance of sim­i­lar works in diverse set­tings around the world.

And as any decent crazy per­son should, you will get upset when you see “your” idea pop­ping up all over the world as if other peo­ple had stolen it.

Sec­ond, because orig­i­nal­ity is an arti­fi­cial lim­i­ta­tion on a con­tex­tual but intrin­si­cally unlim­ited resource. Cre­ative problem-​​solving. Could you build me a house for this land­scape unlike other people’s? Could you make me think about the mono­lithic raw fact of the world, at least one facet which con­cerns me today, in a way nobody else ever has? Could you design me a drug for my dis­ease, or a valve for my plumb­ing, or a rocket for my war, or a chair which inspires my aes­thete crowd in a way oth­ers in my salient cul­tural net­work will not have expe­ri­enced? Could you please write a book for me, refer­ring to the touch­stones of my cul­tural iden­tity, but which at the same time takes an eye-​​opening new stance?

But don’t use any weird mate­ri­als or tech­niques or too much other funny stuff, of course. Make it just dif­fer­ent enough.

Third, because the illu­sion that con­tin­gent cre­ativ­ity is lim­ited fos­ters rent-​​seeking behav­ior where no rea­son­able claim exists. Of course I will cite you when I explain to my stu­dents about your evoca­tive imagery of rain­drops on cer­tain vari­eties of flower petals, and also your view on the whiskers on kit­tens. I agree to pay that license fee when­ever I drink from a cup with the open­ing cun­ningly placed at the top, rather than the bot­tom. I will hap­pily relin­quish this thing my peo­ple have known since before the mis­sion­ar­ies came, hav­ing heard of your recent patent of the active com­pounds therein. All I have are these cites, whuffie, money, jail time and pub­lic apolo­gies: please take whichever you feel best ame­lio­rates my mis­take.

Not because yours is sub­stan­tially bet­ter than this other one, but because it has been duly recorded in the Big Book of One Law that you used up the entire fuck­ing idea when you staked your claim.

Fourth, because the rent-​​seeking infra­struc­ture sup­ports leeches. Not much more to say on this, right? We will pur­sue your claim. We will root out the inter­lop­ers. We will cre­ate and main­tain a cen­tral cat­a­log that includes your work. We will mon­i­tor the medium itself so that your priv­i­lege is not under­mined. We will strive cease­lessly to extend your priv­i­lege, indeed until well after you are dead.

For a nom­i­nal frac­tion of the fees you are owed.

These can­not be new sto­ries. And I can’t be both­ered to look up who’s been writ­ing about them.

Except every­body since for­ever.

I’m not rant­ing because I’m tired of the easily-​​ridiculed but oner­ous legal restric­tions, the grow­ing tis­sue of lies cen­tered around “cre­ativ­ity” and “exclu­siv­ity” in our legal frame­work, or any of that old crap. Those are easy. Every­body is mad about them.

Hell, we were mad about all that crap before the rest of you started jump­ing on the band­wagon.

No, I’m upset because I got mad the other day when an ass­hole Ger­man engi­neer I know from a con­fer­ence pub­lished a preprint where he posed an “orig­i­nal” the­ory essen­tially iden­ti­cal to stuff we talked about years ago—and he didn’t cite any­body I think he should have, imply­ing that he is map­ping out some New Fron­tier of Thought.

And because Stephen Wol­fram, the man per­son­ally, pisses me off—because his doorstop rel­e­gates the life’s work of smart peo­ple I know to occa­sional men­tions in the tiny appen­dix, imply­ing to most peo­ple that he invented Sci­ence Itself.

I’m upset because when I look at some­thing in some ran­dom book or web­site, or hear some­thing, or some­body men­tions it to me, and it’s a thing I once felt pride in doing or even know­ing, but now every­body does or knows it —I am dri­ven to feel that they’re doing it wrong.

I know because it was some­thing I invested actual think­ing time in back when. And here it is now, much later, being pop­u­lar­ized! And if you look, none of the “orig­i­nal” cre­ative peo­ple who made it a thing to me are men­tioned. It’s all these new main­stream immigrants.

What right have they to it, with­out giv­ing credit where it’s due? Worse, what right have they to use our words to mis­lead their naive fol­low­ers now?

This has hap­pened through the years with “Chaos the­ory”, “com­plex­ity” research, “bio­com­put­ing” research, “agile” soft­ware devel­op­ment and man­age­ment, “cowork­ing”, the “social Web”, “social net­works”, “Prag­ma­tism”… that’s just a quick off-​​the-​​cuff list for me. I did early work with a thing, and nobody much cared, and then much later some­body else did slightly over­lap­ping work, and now it’s all the fuck­ing rage.

And I think Dammit, in my day we were try­ing to save the world, not just sell wid­gets like this ass­hole. Why are they all lis­ten­ing to him? Doesn’t any­body ever read what we said back then when this was really new?

Your mileage may vary, but I will make you eat your hat if you haven’t expe­ri­enced this same emo­tion when faced with inter­lop­ers and other late­com­ers announc­ing their dis­cov­ery of cer­tain styles and gen­res of “sci­ence fic­tion”, “paint­ing”, “pho­tog­ra­phy”, “local food”, “book arts”, “user expe­ri­ence”, “func­tional pro­gram­ming”, “punk”, “con­ser­vatism”, “pro­gres­sivism”, “min­i­mal­ism”, “sus­tain­abil­ity”, “blog­ging”, “anar­chism”, “free verse”, “that crap they call ‘role­play­ing’ these days”, “that crap they call ‘news’ and ‘jour­nal­ism’ these days”, “eco­nomic devel­op­ment”, “genet­ics”, “peren­nial gar­den­ing”, “aero­nau­tics”, “com­pas­sion”, “Chris­t­ian faith”, “Bud­dhism” and so on.

Some folks might think I’m describ­ing envy; that one has a sense of vio­la­tion because these new­fan­gled pop­u­lar­iz­ers are get­ting all the rents one feels are owed to the “real” inven­tors. But it’s not.

I admit it might be a bit like pride. But a strange sort of pride, where you didn’t real­ize you had any until a plug was pulled and it all drained out.

No. I think not.

I think it’s a lot more like the feel­ing you get—as my wife Bar­bara pointed out a cou­ple of days back (see what I did there?)—when you first real­ize your child is her own per­son, and that she’s made her own deci­sion, and that despite all your early work to bring her up right, she’s going to hare off in her own direction.

Because you know what’s over in that direc­tion. You know the has­sle and dan­ger, the illu­sions and pain, the inef­fi­cien­cies and unsat­is­fy­ing expe­ri­ences she’s head­ing for, because you expe­ri­enced them all years ago. You tried to keep her from doing that stu­pid stuff, and tried to get her to see the cool stuff, the life-​​saving and sim­ple stuff, the right stuff, but she’s thought­lessly skep­ti­cal about any­thing she actu­ally heard. And worse, some­day she will come back and announce as “new” some­thing you knew all along.

I think I’m upset because “orig­i­nal­ity cul­ture” makes me feel that all the time now. Not con­tent to be a mere hip­ster claim­ing to have prior knowl­edge of every cul­tural and intel­lec­tual phe­nom­e­non, I am reduced to some hor­rific recur­sive hip­ster, who feels that sad­ness when­ever I am shown some­body is explor­ing a known thing with their own per­spec­tive.

Because of course it’s “orig­i­nal­ity cul­ture” that makes me imag­ine that my expe­ri­ence of that thing, long ago, which I failed to com­mu­ni­cate to these new­com­ers, is in any way salient to what they have going on in their lives. When I did it, it was new, and we expended valu­able resources and took per­sonal risks to do all that, and coined all these new terms to describe the amaz­ingly insight­ful stuff nobody had ever talked about before.

I like to call this the Tozier Effect.

Of course the ass­hole Ger­man can talk about stuff we both have done, for the same rea­son I can: it’s cool and it will help the world to know more about it. And because I am also an ass­hole Ger­man to somebody.

Of course Wol­fram can be the Edi­son of the Sym­bolic World, for the same rea­son Edi­son could: it’s cool and it will help the world to know more about it. And because I have also played Edi­son in my time.

And the nou­veau “agilists” and “com­plex­ol­o­gists” and “Web 3.0 gurus” and the lat­est Busi­ness Rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies and TED-​​talking Inspi­ra­tional Crowd are wel­come to carry on.

There’s enough rea­son for me to ques­tion the very notion of orig­i­nal­ity just in the fact that we so rarely ques­tion the vocab­u­lary we use to dis­cuss it.

I don’t care if you keep using those terms and notions… mostly. Why should I waste time striv­ing to under­mine your claims about how “orig­i­nal­ity” works? Espe­cially by fram­ing my argu­ments in that same ques­tion­able lan­guage of uni­ver­sal­ity, exclu­siv­ity and rights? That’s a sucker’s bet.

I have evi­dence that I’m going to turn out being right when I stop think­ing and talk­ing about “orig­i­nal­ity” in your terms. But I also have evi­dence that you do real good by using those terms. And I have evi­dence that we’re both wrong and should use some other words and ideas instead.

’Tis but the nature of the world.

That said, I’m just decid­ing to stop using those words, even around you. Even when you talk about “your” “cul­ture” “need­ing” to “pro­mote” “inno­va­tion”, even when you talk about “eco­nomic” “growth” and your cul­tural “oblig­a­tion” to be “cited”, or how “artists” will “starve” with­out your “support”.

We’re not going to have those con­ver­sa­tions with those ideas any more, you and me, is all I’m saying.

And I will be a bit hap­pier, and you will be sad and confused.

And that’s an improve­ment, in my book.

Well, OK. Except for one thing.

When it becomes clear that your vocab­u­lary about own­er­ship and rights and pri­or­ity and value is clearly hurt­ing peo­ple? That’s when we will inter­vene. Your wounded ego, your claims that imag­i­na­tion is a zero-​​sum game, your rent-​​seeking, your leech squad—they will become our tar­gets when you cross that line.

Not you. We’re not going to tar­get you. But when you sharpen your final vocab­u­lary into a harm­ful tool, or a cage, or a wall—that’s when we are sup­posed to come along with the breaker bars.

It’s OK. There are other ideas and words in the world. There are always other ones. And you’d be sur­prised how help­ful and good it can be, some­times, to just start with a new batch.

Well, not new as such. You know what I mean.

Can one visualize cosmopolitanism of college students?

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I’m reminded of a GIS visu­al­iza­tion I wanted to see when we were trav­el­ing through lit­tle col­lege towns in Ohio and Indi­ana and Ken­tucky the other day.

We all know col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties draw stu­dents from all over. But some surely tend to draw from a more local pop­u­la­tion, and oth­ers from a more global population.

Ignore for a moment the grad­u­ate and post­doc and young fac­ulty pop­u­la­tions, which are what you might call “seller’s mar­kets” for the time being. For a given insti­tu­tion of higher learn­ing, sup­pose we draw a lin­ear con­nec­tion (on a map) to the home of each stu­dent. Sup­pose we aggre­gate these a bit, per­haps by hier­ar­chi­cal clus­ter­ing; a big bunch of stu­dents at Miami Uni­ver­sity prob­a­bly come from the Cincin­nati area, a bunch from cen­tral Ohio, a smaller but sig­nif­i­cant bunch from the Cleve­land and Toledo areas, a pile from Indi­anapo­lis or whatever.

And here’s where I can’t get past “spaghetti tum­ble” mode. How can one visu­al­ize these flows, with­out dis­card­ing the long tail of unusual cases? I know about the Forbes migra­tion visu­al­iza­tion, but that has a one-​​county-​​at-​​a-​​time thing going on; what could one do with cun­ningly col­ored and/​or shaped poly­gons or something?

What I’m won­der­ing, I sup­pose, is some­thing about the char­ac­ter of col­lege towns. You can see some­thing very close to my sus­pi­cions in the Forbes map: click two adja­cent coun­ties, say Pre­ble County Ohio (rural) and But­ler County Ohio (rural with col­lege town). Notice the difference?

How might one show that sort of thing all at once, and not on a county-​​by-​​county level but on a town-​​by-​​town scale, and not on the basis of pop­u­la­tion migra­tion but on student’s homes?

Because the peo­ple we’re making—the adults we’re making—in these col­lege towns are very, very dif­fer­ent from one another, in my expe­ri­ence. I won­der if self-​​assortment, diver­sity of expe­ri­ence and mutual expo­sure, and echo cham­bers have some­thing impor­tant to say about it.