Via Tbogg, the great H. Allen Orr has a great article about Bobo’s latest book. Read the whole thing, but this is a good explanation of why I reach for my revolver whenever I hear a non-scientist say “nonlinear”:
Brooks claims repeatedly, for instance, that the unconscious—that most important part of the mind—corresponds to a murky domain of the unpredictable, the irregular, and the nonlinear. Indeed rationality, he announces, can’t acknowledge the importance of the unconscious because “once it dips its foot in that dark and bottomless current, all hope of regularity and predictability is gone.” But none of this follows. A process can be both perfectly unconscious and perfectly predictable. You are not conscious, for example, of how you use visual information from one eye to fill in for the blind spot from the other eye but I can confidently predict that you are doing so now.
Similarly, Brooks’s talk of nonlinearity is a red flag warning of scientific naiveté. “Nonlinear” has a precise mathematical meaning: the relation between two variables when plotted on a graph doesn’t look like a straight line. However, in Brooks’s hands, it means something that’s fuzzy or “cloudlike.” But there’s nothing fuzzy or cloudlike about, say, the change in the frequency of a gene under the action of natural selection; yet the relevant dynamics are nonlinear.
Update. A quote from the book that is highlighted in the article:
Later in their relationship, Rob and Julia would taste each other’s saliva and then collect genetic information.
Urza
Ok that quote in the update is either the ultimate in geekery for 2 scientists in love or totally mind blowing for how weird the writer is. I vote option 2 as the most likely.
Martin
I’ll have to share that line with my daughter. Dating is approaching and that should head it off another year.
Jennifer
I got nuthin’. Except, perhaps, a suggestion to revise your tag to: David Brooks, the reason Dickipedia was invented.
Hunter Gathers
What the hell, are Rob and Julia members of the Bene Gesserit or something? I’m half expecting Bobo to spout the virtues of the Golden Path.
Superking
F(x)=x^2. Non-linear yet predictable. Strange that.
moonbat
“Later in their relationship, Rob and Julia would taste each other’s saliva and then collect genetic information.”
Ewwww!
Cris (without an H)
Excellent post title. David Brooks’ writing makes me want to storm down a burning motel hallway, a shotgun in each hand, and blow somebody’s face off.
daveNYC
But would Julia taste Rob’s genetic information?
Yeah, I went there.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Superking: Yes, but you’re talking about higher math, really high math by Bobo’s standard. So high, in fact, that we shouldn’t waste his money teaching it in school.
Suffern ACE
What is foreplay anyway but a chance to take one last pass through the genetic data before taking the plunge?
Southern Beale
Gah. This post made my head hurt.
arguingwithsignposts
What, how can you forget this gem:
cleek
perhaps Brooks is using an approximation of the literary meaning of “nonlinear” (ex “nonlinear narrative”) – which basically means things aren’t presented in chronological order. the narrative jumps around in time, and often through multiple seemingly-unrelated plot lines, giving you bits and pieces of the story; and it’s up to you to put them all together.
TooManyJens
I feel like Bobo watched Farscape and then went horribly, horribly wrong.
Cris (without an H)
@arguingwithsignposts: Oh my, every excerpt in that LRB post is full of hot, sticky win.
eemom
shorter infinity articles analyzing, examining, critiquing, deconstructing, and refuting Bobo: how many ways can one say “buffoon”?
Svensker
@arguingwithsignposts:
Aaaaacccckkkkk. Some of the other quotes at your link are even worse.
Do all the tote baggers know he writes stuff like this?
MikeBoyScout
I think BoBo has confused non linear with non sequitur which is what BoBo’s verbal diarrhea is to political dialog.
Martin
@arguingwithsignposts:
See, who says that CS and JSF can’t be beneficial to the community here?
Suffern ACE
@arguingwithsignposts: Montaigne he is not.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Someone must suffer horribly for that quote.
jl
DougJ is not showing the pronounced humbility with is the hallmark of the best traditions of his country. Fie, fie, for shame, Begrimed Senescent DougJ.
Nest thing you know he will grumble when authorized authorities take away his retirement money.
The Republic of Stupidity
Why stop at saliva?
There must be other… ummm… precious bodily fluids… that Rob & Julia could swap, and thereby collect even more genetic information about each other…
futzinfarb
It is arguably criminal to title a post “I’ll show you the life of the mind” without a link to this
Quicksand
Somebody, please, hit me on the head with something so I can un-remember these quotes. Gah.
Amir Khalid
@arguingwithsignposts:
I could toil for a hundred years, and never come up with sentences of such inspired weirdness.
beltane
And ye shall know your conservatives by the wretched sex scenes they write.
aimai
I’m on a brain science kick right now, reading my way through a number of recent books from “The Brain that Changes Itself” to “Sleights of Mind: The Neuroscience of Magic” and I can confidently assert, qua amateur, that the notion of a massive, unpredictable, mysterious, shadowy, unconcscious has never been less reflective of the latest research. So even in his pose of interlocutor–as nothing more than some kind of mindless trolly running between the latest academic pop science and the slavering hordes of NYT readers Brooks fails.
aimai
AWL
Bobo’s a virgin, isn’t he?
Wag
You say non-linear,
I say non-sequester
Let’s call the whole thing off
Tonal Crow
As if we didn’t already have ample evidence that Bobo worships Ayn Rand.
beltane
@AWL: I should hope so, because the thought of him exchanging genetic information with anyone poses a real threat to the institution of marriage.
futzinfarb
@Wag:
…
I say non-sequitur
…
?
Duty calls.
Tonal Crow
@AWL:
I’m not so sure about that. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you.
Roger Moore
@The Republic of Stupidity:
I think those precious bodily fluids are what he’s talking about with the collecting genetic information. Of course what he actually means is “transferring” genetic information, not “collecting”, which is part of what makes it so awful. This reminds me of the old thing about the difference between the right word and the almost right one is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
gelfling545
@AWL: I was just thinking that, if this is an example of the conservative mind-set, they will obviously have few opportunities to reproduce. I find this comforting.
Wag
@futzinfarb:
Ok, you can go to bed now.
:)
jl
Thomas Nagel’s review in the weirdest quotes link is funny, and dripping with Alien strength acid
March 11, 2011
David Brooks’s Theory of Human Nature
By THOMAS NAGEL
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/books/review/book-review-the-social-animal-by-david-brooks.html
This device is supposed to relieve the tedium of what would otherwise be like skimming through 10 years’ worth of the Tuesday Science Times
Brooks seems willing to take seriously any claim by a cognitive scientist, however idiotic: for example, that since people need only 4,000 words for 98 percent of conversations, the reason they have vocabularies of 60,000 words is to impress and sort out potential mates.
Brooks is out to expose the superficiality of an overly rational view of human nature, but there is more than one kind of superficiality.
freelancer
@arguingwithsignposts:
(As Eddie Izzard) “Uhm…Quoi?”
/Izzard
Weirdest thing I’ve ever read.
WereBear
@arguingwithsignposts: Gah. That’s in the book? I don’t even what to know what its in aid of.
Bago
As an engineer actually building the friggin cloud, can I ask Brooks to take a 2×4 to the head? Being a 1:2 ratio with a linear projection, even bobo should understand it. It’s when you go from Bo to bobo.
ciaran
oh sweet jebus, that link to the london review of books is actually terrifying. wtf is wrong with that man?
Bago
@futzinfarb: As a licensed homophonic, it is my duty to reference that doody.
RSA
Julia: I found these swabs and vials in your jacket pocket yesterday.
Rob: Honey, I can explain…
Julia: You’re having an affair!
jl
Nagel makes some interesting points, which now that I prepare to summarize them, makes me wonder whether Nagal’s ability to think clearly was wasted reviewing such a silly book
One is that Brooks conceptualizes these supposedly and mysterious unknowable subconscious mostly in terms of (edit: traditionally trite and familiar) conscious concepts, which leads to hopeless confusion in how Brooks’ interprets the science.
Another is that Brooks devotes most of the book to how understanding the subconscious in order to control others (or society in general), but almost nothing on how this knowledge is used by people to understand and control themselves, which Nagle thinks is a more interesting problem, and one that needs to be solved first.
And third, Brooks’ analysis of how we should consciously control ourselves, in view of our new knowledge of the role of subconscious mind) is to rely on conventional morality and religion. Which Nagels thinks will only work for ‘easy cases’.
[in my view, the third issue is related to the first, Brooks’ conceptualization of the subconscious almost entirely of pre existing concepts we have in our conscious minds. Which I guess means Brooks uses science to justify a kind of old school version of self discipline, with the subconscious mind being a wild ass Dr. Jeckel (edit, or Mr. Hyde? I keep mixing them up, anyway, I mean the bad man) , which we will consciously control through disciplined conscious application of convention and bromides]
MikeBoyScout
I wonder, does BoBo know that Freud was an atheist and that Jung wrote about God’s evil face?
The collective unconsciousness mind of the teahad would non like Bobo cozying up to such surreal thinkers.
ruemara
Is he trying to stop people from mating? Because that line has certainly halted my pheromone production.
futzinfarb
As an incensed homophobic it is clearly not your doody.
futzinfarb
@Bago:
An incensed homophobic would clearly have no duty to the doody.
scav
We’ve got a contender! The late Auberon Waugh (son of HeEvelyn) and The Lierary Review have a Bad Sex in Fiction Award. 2010 here
Evil Parallel Universe
Late to the party as usual, but I just finished reading “How the Hippies Saved Physics.” Basically, the book is about how physics emphasized applied applications rather than a “foundational” or philosophical understanding/study of quantum mechanics after WW II and during the cold war.
Bobo really comes off as one of the marginal physicists (or non-physicists) trying to relate quantum mechanics and quantum processes to consciousness, parapsychology, etc., while diving into bed pretty much with the human potential movement on the West Coast at the time. And it turns out, like Bobo, even the those of the hippies who were real physicists seem to get a lot of the science wrong, let alone the non-scientists.
So, I think this proves Bobo is a hippy.
(The book actually tries to make the case that these physicists on the fringe of polite scientific society, being supported by wealthy patrons like Werner Erhard or foundations like Esalen, were actually important to moving physics education and practice back to more foundational, less practical, areas of endeavor. And he makes his point in ways, though he overstates it by more than a wee bit IMO).
taylormattd
Doug, I hate you forever for that last blockquote.
futzinfarb
@eemom:
Kind of like that challenge in Steve Martin’s Cyrano vehicle, Roxanne:
Useful buffoon
Useless buffoon
Corrupt buffoon
Ignorant buffoon
Asinine buffoon
Supercilious buffoon
Incompetent buffoon
Undeservedly-wealthy buffoon
Worthless-sack-of-shit buffoon
Undeserving buffoon
Poseur buffoon
Pseudo-intellectual buffoon
Inarticulate buffoon
Pompous buffoon
Inappropriate-use-of-hydrocarbon-polymers buffoon
STFU buffoon
NYT buffoon
Buffoon’s buffoon
Why-oh-why-is-this-the-schmuck-who-doesn’t-outlive-his-fifteen-minutes buffoon
Dick buffoon
harlana
@arguingwithsignposts: Oh, that link was cruel! I have a migraine now.
SensesFail
@Evil Parallel Universe:
It’s like the kind of pseudo-scientific b.s. that you hear from Deepak Chopra and Robert Lanza over at the Huffington Post, where they both try to use quantum theory to support speculation concerning the existence of a soul or life after death.
Here’s a paragraph from a piece by Robert Lanza at the Huffington post entitled “What Is It Like After You Die”:
Delia
Yes, the LRB link is frightening. I’ll never be able to think about Bobo again without gagging.
But I will give you a good working definition of nonlinear. Nonlinear is when I break my yardstick and use the two halves to drum nonlinearly on Bobo’s shiny head in a vain attempt to pound some sense in.
futzinfarb
@SensesFail:
Damn – this explains a great deal! The second law of thermodynamics tells us that energy is constantly being transformed into more and more useless forms. Bobo’s mind is useless energy that cannot be destroyed!
The Other Chuck
The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest really ought to take submissions from third parties, because I can’t be the first to want to submit Bobo’s writings to them…
Crusty Dem
I left a long, neuroscience-based joke up at Tbogg’s, but felt the need to state that:
is scientifically absurd. There’s no way we can “collect genetic information” from tasting saliva, unless somebody published something on the adenine->umami linkage that I somehow missed.
Shorter Bobo should read: “Science, bitches! Look at the shit I just made up!”
Jinxtigr
@Martin: It’s called FURRY and boy, does it work XD
Matt
No wonder conservatives like Brooks are so worried about other people’s sex lives – their own are clearly so bizarre that projecting them onto others has GOT to make them worried… ;)
DougW
@cleek: A classic version of this is a book by Uwe Johnson called Speculations about Jacob (originally Mutmassungen Uber Jacob). The reader has to put all the pieces together, though he/she usually don’t know Who is speaking, or When their dialogue occurs in time. Outstanding!
Josie
Honestly, DougJ, I would be perfectly content if you never quoted from or blogged about Bobo again. I don’t think enough people read him to make a difference, and, if they like his writing, they aren’t worth trying to reach.
Delia
@futzinfarb:
So as more and more energy is transformed into its useless state, it becomes Bobo’s Mind. Which means at the Heat Death of the Universe everything that exists is Bobo’s Mind, and is therefore completely useless.
wmd
pernicious bullshit. that’s all there is to say.
Luthe
I personally love the Amazon tags.
Librarian
Bobo writes these books because he wants to be known as a public intellectual, but he is a rank amateur who is totally in over his head when dealing with such esoteric fields in which he has no professional training like sociology and psychology. He makes it even worse when, instead of writing a straight nonfiction work, he has to make it a novel, which he and his publisher believe will sell more books, but which makes him look even more ridiculous.