Things learned recently (for lack of a better title...)

A month and a half since the last post. Mamma told me there'd be days like this: you won't update your blog, you'll forget about it, etc. Ah, if only I'd listened. Whatever. 'Tis evidence that I'm taking grad school seriously. Another way to put it is that it is sucking my life.

In these two months (August 24 - October 20) I've discovered the following about grad school and life in general:

• I love teaching. A lot. I look forward to classroom time when I'm on the other side of the desk much more than to anything else. My kids are intelligent and engaged, within the limits of their generation, of course (nonexistent general culture due to abysmal secondary schooling, irritatingly short attention span, some holier-than-thou attitude, etc). Despite the anti-intellectual world they live in, they seem to take entry-level philosophy decently seriously, and that pleases me. I'd like to believe it's because I'm just that good, but I know better. I'm sure it's because they genuinely like to think, as every healthy kid does, and it pains me that they have been (and will be) pressured not to from almost every side. But that's a lamentation for another time.

• I don't like my own research so much anymore. It may be for a variety of reasons. (1) I don't have much time for it, what with TAing and the inordinate amounts of assigned class reading, often in the order of 150+ pages a week. (2) My two research seminars, if engaging, aren't totally up my alley. "Religion in the Public Sphere" has has very high highs when secularism and establishment are discussed and very low lows when... well, anywhen else, even if I just love Simon May's South African accent. "On Darwin's Origin" is schizo: the large lectures are excruciatingly boring forays in the history of biology, which good ol' Dr. Zemke drilled into my brain four years ago, so... catching some zzzs. But the Friday graduate discussion sections are enthralling thanks to Dick Burian, who surely has to be the most knowledgeable living biped (look up R.M. Burian). So even though this stuff is awesome and is helping me a lot in building a solid background, I'd still like to focus my work elsewhere. See below.

• There's no such thing as "meanwhile." I'm supposed to carry out my own research at the same time as I take seminars, both for submitting it to conferences and journals and prospectively toward my thesis. But in practice, this is nearly impossible. This term I'm writing 3 term papers around 20 pages each (one on Lakatosian falsification in evolution, one on whether a secular state is implicitly a nonreligious establishment, and one gods only know what about)... and in the midst of that, plus teaching, I'm supposed to research epistemic circularity, which is what really turns me on? It's just not happening, at least not right now. They tell me that this is to be expected, though, and that to some extent it gets better. One hopes.

• I feel, to some degree, unfulfilled. This might really be mostly because I can't work on what I want, even though one seminar this coming Spring might give me the chance to. But maybe it's simpler than that, a normal and predictable side effect of having to get used to new living patterns. And who knows if this isn't a co-cause or an effect of my messed-up emotional life right now (see below). Once again, it might be too early. Probably, like many others, I've romanced grad school as a purely-intellectual liberation from the daily-grind uselessness of college... but of course the key word there is "romanced." Duh, Claudio.

• Never have a crush when you can't afford it. It's bad, bad, bad. But then again, what's new there. FML, and for once I mean it.

• VT's philosophy department is a rocking place to study. As per the Leiter report (www.philosophicalgourmet.com), we are among the top five programs in the U.S. offering terminal MA degrees in philosophy. I have no terms of comparison, but it feels that the reputation is well-earned, and I'm not talking about the big names we have here or attract each time we host a conference, though that counts too. My #1 reason is the superb quality of the faculty. I am holding a wary, but pleasant, double-mindedness in my relationships with them. On the one hand, I'm awestruck by the impressive amount of knowledge. Some are authorities in their fields; others are somewhat known and very serious scholars. Not one isn't a very respectable expert in something or other (which, given the positions they hold, is no less than I should expect). On the other hand, they feel less like oracles and more like peers. It helps that in our department faculty and grad students are on a first-name basis by default, but it goes deeper than mere lack of formality. Those with whom I've taken the time to converse have taken the time to talk TO me rather than AT me, and point me in useful directions for my research and my studies in general. Perhaps this department, at this time, is striking a desirable balance between quality of research and quality of teaching, which might reflect the equally good balance of very seasoned and very young professors--roughly, experience and enthusiasm.

That's it. No, I'm sure there's more... but that's it for now. Each of the points made above needs elaboration, but that'll have to be some other time. Bed beckons. Ah, yes, THAT is an important point...

• If you don't get all the sleep that you need, you're DEAD!

Choosing Darwin, or, grad school has begun!

Who would've thought that with the start of school I'd've blogged less!... okay, everybody. It's a good sign. Means school is keeping me busy. But is it the "this is awesome-but damn is it challenging-but who cares it's awesome" kind of busy or the "this sucks-I hate it-FML-arrgghhh" kind of busy? Definitely the former.

The biggest problem to face was the choice of seminars. There are simply too many on offer here at VT that are amazingly interesting, which probably says something about the breadth of my philosophical interests and the lack of in-depth preference at this point (except perhaps a slight bias toward epistemology and history/philosophy of science, but those are very broad strokes themselves). So, with the DGS's consent, I signed up for four seminars, while the typical course load is three. I then had two weeks to decide which ones to keep and which one to drop. It was a difficult choice.

The original four seminars were about: (1) religion in the public sphere, focusing mostly on arguments for and against religious tolerance, from Locke to Rawls; (2) the epistemology and metaphysics of Locke and Berkeley, and of the pre-Humean modern period in general; (3) the life and work of Charles Darwin, in occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of the Species; (4) and symbolic logic.

Of these, the logic course had to stay, since it's mandatory for all new philosophy MAs. In retrospect, I should have tried to test out of it, since it covers 90% of the material I also studied as an undergraduate... but oh well: this will be a less stressful, more diluted refresher. Also the religion course wasn't in discussion, since it's a one-of-a-kind class with extremely interesting readings and a well-prepared professor (Simon May) that may not come up again while I'm at VT. So it was down to Darwin vs. Locke/Berkeley.

After two weeks of attendance, I've decided to drop Locke/Berkeley. I must confess it was intriguing, and the first week's writing assignment has been a lot of fun. Never before had it taken me ten hours to write a two-page paper, but it was the most original and better-reasoned paper I've written all year, barring my undergrad thesis, of course. As it turned out, Dr. Ott thought it was "very well done!", so chances are I would have done reasonably well in the course. That and the fact that it's the most strongly epistemological of all my choices made me reluctant to let it go. Dr. Ott is fun and a freakin' genius, class discussion was exciting... so nothing really tipped the scale against it.

But something tipped the scale in favor of Darwin. Three nights ago, I lay in bed reading myself to sleep with some of Darwin's field notes from the voyage of the Beagle, a class reading. I fell in love all over again. Some of my fondest memories of college date back to my freshman year, when the glorious Warren Zemke made us read Gould, Mayr, Shermer, Sagan, and of course Darwin himself for a course on history of science and scientific methodology. Those memories came back like a flood, reminding me of why I loved Darwin's lucid thinking, his poetic and yet strikingly accurate observations on geology and zoology, and the beauty of the story of the discovery of natural selection. To have re-read Peter Bowler's Evolution: The History of an Idea in the first week of class surely helped, too, as that had been among my favorite texts last year for a paper on the same topic.

In short, I chose with my heart and not with my brain. Sure, I can rationalize my choice all I want. I can say that the history of science will still be useful to me as a philosophy grad student, or that the course's instructor Dick Burian is both an awesome guy and a great philosopher (I remember him being cited as an authority on adaptationism in my textbooks, for chrissake), or that I will be able to focus not so much on the history of science and instead write a phil.bio term paper if I want to, or that the course will still count toward the philosophy degree as an elective. These are all good reasons, but they didn't tip the scale. The pleasure of reading about natural history did.

Whether that was a poor choice, time will tell. But for now I am confident it was the correct one, partly because there were no wrong choices, not really: when you work and study next door to such excellent philosophers and talented fellow grad students, you're doing the right thing by definition. So yeah, I might as well be wearing the infamous "I'm really excited to be here!" t-shirt. Phail much? Hmm. We'll see.

Reflections on TA-ing and other stuff coming soon... soon-ish... well, eventually!

(end of post)

TA training vs. SI training

I'm undergoing GTA (graduate teaching assistant) training at Virginia Tech, and after the first two days--4 sessions out of 6--my opinion is mixed. The presentations and workshops are well-delivered, entertaining, etc. Top-notch stuff. But they're sorely lacking in two important aspects.

One, presentations are mostly frontal-delivery, one-(wo)man shows with little interaction and no hands-on learning... which is pretty bad, since they're supposed to be shaping teachers. Two, the content of this TA workshop is aimed at people who have never been on the deep end of the classroom before. The first issue is endemic to academia and I won't discuss it. The latter is more of interest to me.

For the last two years of college at Wartburg I've served as a Supplemental Instructor for introductory courses in philosophy. The duties of a SI are quite similar to a TA's, minus the grading (though some SIs do that too). SIs lead discussion, help out students with difficult concepts and putting the material in perspective, assist the professor with scheduling and class communication, and re-lecture as needed. Heck, I've even taught two plenary sessions when the professor was sick. In general, SIs use their hybrid more-than-student, less-than-faculty post to serve as a bridge between faculty and students. The duties and image of TAs are much closer to the faculty side than to the student side, but from a practical standpoint their tasks are nearly identical to SIs. As a result, 95% of the material discussed in these GTA workshops was simply old stuff for me, with the few local differences peculiar to VT accounting for the rest.

I'm a (wannabe-) philosopher, so I name things and affix blame. For one, I blame Virginia Tech for not differentiating between those students with previous SI experience. SI is a national program and more than a few fellow GTAs I've met these days have been SI leaders. They, too, were more or less peeved, depending on the level of SI training they had received at their undergraduate insititution. There should have been some sort of pre-screening based on previous SI-ship experience or advanced sessions for former SIs--or even involvement of former SIs in training non-SI new TAs, just like SI peer mentors carried out a significant portion of SI training at Wartburg. You get my drift. There were countless options, but I feel that the human resources weren't properly utilized. Pity.

More importantly, I praise Wartburg for preparing me so well. The training I've received from (among others) my SI supervisors Jeff Beck and Michael Gleason and my SI peer mentor Lia Kampman was amazingly attuned with VT's declared expectations for their TAs, at least based on these workshops. Now perhaps in a couple months I'll find out I'm an awful TA, and if so I can blame both Wartburg and VT for all-around insufficient preparation--and/or myself, of course, for being a poor learner and not having done more.

Regardless, my point is that I'm very glad that the knowledge and experience I've accumulated in the last two years as a SI, easily the most rewarding part of my college life, is turning out to have been sound, poignant, and resting on solid pedagogical foundations. Whether or not I'm massively deluded, I'll find out. But for now it feels good.

(end of post)

(OT) Airport meanderings

I love airports. I love the smells, the sounds, and most of all the people. Sure, I'm still basically a kid at heart, and what kid doesn't love those giant dick-shaped flying machines--but there's so much more than that. Nothing smells like an airport. It's a mixture of old plastic, new rubber, and human skin. Seriously. When the day is done and you smell your travel clothes, they smell like airport. Unmistakable. And as I said, the people! In no other place than a major international airport do you see such a potpourri of nations, colors, habits, and tongues... and I'm not even very much the multicultural kind: my Wartburg friends know I've never even attended an I-club meeting, party, or whatever! Haha. But today in Rome, as I was waiting to board, I saw a family of Hasidic Jews holding Torahs, waiting in line for the bathroom, next to three Roman teens video-texting someone and talking football in delightfully untranslatable terms. Nearby, the American fat lady tried to placate a crying toddler whom I hoped wouldn't be on MY flight (he was), all the while the Swedish 10-something brother and sister play-wrestled each other on the floor (as only Scandinavian kids can do) as their parents half-laughed and half-scolded. It was one of those epiphanies: we're all basically alike, we're all awesome and we all suck pretty much the same.

Here in Chicago was no difference. See, I cancelled my flight to Roanoke at the last minute and am staying overnight to catch the first flight out at 7am. So since I'm at the Hilton, which is on airport grounds and within walking distance of most terminals, tonight I just toured the airport. Yep. Seriously, how many times do you get to do that? In an airport, you're either running because the flight's on time and you aren't, or you're waiting because the flight's late or the personnel is incompetent. Neither is the good state of mind to consider your surroundings. Despite my love for airports, I admit I haven't really ever gotten to enjoy them, because all the time spent there is time spent worrying, running, or generally being very focused on what needs doing. (For a foreign national in a country with severe repercussions for the smallest mistake in your immigration papers, concentration is a must). Plus, airports are really supposed to be functional, not pretty.

AND YET! Chicago O'Hare is a beauty. I've toured all four terminals in a little over an hour of walking, of course limiting myself to the areas before security. The structure is huge, extremely complex and yet impressively simply laid out and easy to follow. There's a dozen ways to get to the same place and it's nearly impossible to get lost. Everything looks like it can be fully operational at 3am as at peak hours with a million people swarming around. Speaking of people... A mother realized her flight left at 7:45 instead of 8:45, swore loudly in Spanish while her two tween daughters laughed, and then explained to them in broken English that they'd have to run if they wanted to make the flight; they spoke perfect English. A businessman insulted his girlfriend (or whatever) on the phone, totally making a fool of himself. A guy had a prosthetic arm with a hook; a frickin' HOOK! A Hispanic TSA guard went out of his way to help a heavily veiled Iranian (I guess) woman who got confused on which gate to go.

I'm not sure why, but I love all this. Airports are among the most amazing places you'll ever see, both architecturally and from a human(e) standpoint. They're hubs of multiculturalism and varied humanity, and you can't consider yourself a serious people-watcher if you don't go to your local airport every once in a while and just look around. Okay, lately I've been at Fiumicino, Heathrow, Detroit Metro, and O'Hare, which are all very large and very busy...... but you get my drift. :)

Frustration much?

How frustrating it is that all I have to read here at home that's even slightly philosophically oriented (and which I haven't read) is Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief. I'm not really sure why I bought it in the first place, years ago. I usually appreciate what AP has to say about warrant and epistemic circularity, but I'm not too interested in philosophy of religion anymore, so... ah well. I guess it's back to printing articles from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. And yes, I'm whining. As much as I LOVE being with my parents right now, I'm stuck here for another week and I just can't wait to go back and start classes and shit.

(ignore the stuff below: this IS the full post...)

Asimov's "Foundation" book review

Just got done reading the first book (1951) of Asimov's Foundation saga, made of seven novels and dozens of short stories. I'd only heard the highest praise about it. It won the Hugo award for best sci-fi literary series of all time and it's often flaunted as the genre's highest achievement. My father especially loves it and has read the series many times over.

I really enjoyed the first book. It's intelligent, unpredictable, original, and direct: it tells the bare facts, most of the action happens in dialogues, and there's almost no character development--all stuff that usually spells "bad lit," but which is exactly what I like, as I said last week. I have some reservations, of course, but overall my opinion is positive.

Plot recap. In a very far future, four quadrillion humans populate the Milky Way, united under the huge Galactic Empire. A dying psychologist, Hari Seldon, develops the science of psychohistory, which allows mathematical prediction of the behavior of very large populations. Seldon predicts the Empire will fall within a few generations, and 30,000 years of barbarism will follow before a second Empire will rise and re-unite the galaxy. The fall is by now inevitable, but Seldon develops a Plan to preserve human knowledge afterwards, an intellectual ark to shorten the upcoming middle ages to a mere 1,000 years.

He creates two Foundations of a few thousand settlers at opposite ends of the galaxy. The first Foundation is on Terminus, a small and barren planet in the extreme periphery of the Empire. In the coming decades, Terminus endures a series of "Seldon crises," crucial moments when the Foundation must ensure history follows the Seldon Plan. The first few Seldon crises concern the Four Kingdoms, powerful warmongering planets that threaten to invade Terminus. The Foundation keeps them at bay first with atomic power and then with free trade. Since knowledge of atomic power is already lost in the outer systems, the Foundation introduces its atom-based technology as a religion: its agents pose as "high priests" who are the sole keepers of atomic power plants. Terminus traders, then, establish a clever symbiotic relationship with the Kingdoms, making them purchase household atomic gadgets with food and raw materials. At the end of the book, though, characters realize that rules are changing fast. Korell, a planet closer to the center of the galaxy than the Kingdoms, has retained some knowledge of atomic power and even has some old Imperial starships and weapons. The Foundation's religion is thus ineffectual, and Korell can only be controlled by pure trade devoid of mysticism. Here Asimov suggests that the Foundation will need to keep reinventing its policies as it expands closer to the galaxy's center, where the Empire is still alive and well... for now anyway.

This plot just begs reading. No sci-fi before or since has tackled human history on such a large scale. The only way to make this gargantuan storyarc readable is to focus on facts and single episodes, so the book does read like a summary, and that too abridged... but once again that's fine by me. A negative side effect is that characters are limited to stock American white males. They all speak and act like post-WWII, pre-Cold War era stereotypes: scorfnul, sexist, and a bit racist. It's a shame that a novel with this scope should be written at a time of relative intellectual hegemony, between two major revolutions. Asimov does eschew self-righteous patriotism, though. The Foundation is not Captain America but rather a stalwart of universal (progressive) principles of science and knowledge. If anything, the novel could have been seen as somewhat anti-American upon release: the Foundation prevails thanks to a careful handling of free trade and State-supported religion, two mainstays of the U.S. after WWII. By portraying free trade and religion as little more than organized manipulations of the masses, Asimov is obviously trading jabs at capitalism. It must help that he's a Soviet-turned-American!

A little less forgivable is that he completely ignores the role of women and children, a grave miss in a sociological tale. You write a novel about the preservation of all human knowledge in a time of barbarism and you "forget" to discuss things like procreation, education policies, civil rights, or anything other than the (puerile) cabinet politics of rich white men? Even just in the 1970s he would have been crucified for this. Along the same lines, the novel forgoes any talk of genetic engineering and bioethics, preferring instead the typical, morbid post-WWII infatuation with all things atomic. Asimov can't be fully blamed for all this, though. The genetic turn, for example, was unforeseeable even for an erudite futurist like him at a time when DNA hadn't even been identified; and times probably just weren't mature enough for more social-oriented considerations. Also, perhaps some of these issues are addressed in future Foundation books, which he kept writing well into the 1980s. We'll see.

When all's said and done, the book's main asset remains that it embodies what science-fiction should always be about: a projection of a possible, future state of affairs based on historical, sociological, psychological, and philosophical hypotheses. Science fiction is unwritten history, and the masters of the genre interpret it this way, surely influenced by the "Three Greats": Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke, and Robert Heinlein, to whom I might add Philip Dick (not to mention other major authors like Ursula LeGuin and Kurt Vonnegut, who have ventured into sci-fi but not often enough to be properly called "sci-fi authors"). In Foundation, the genius idea of psychohistory follows these canons. It lends a side to philosophical considerations about free will and predestination which Asimov acknowledges even in this first novel. The idea is fascinating that psychohistory can predict the future of the masses with great precision but is completely unable to make predictions about any one individual. As the Master Trader Hober Mallow explains halfway through the novel, given a large enough population some individual is likely to come along whose characteristics are necessary and sufficient to fulfill the task at hand and keep the Seldon Plan on track... and that's a fantastic metaphor for the workings of actual, past history.

As my father wryly reminds me, in the second novel a new menace comes from "the Mule," a humanoid mutant with extrasensory, psychic abilities that Seldon could not predict and who thus seriously endangers the Plan. I look forward to that! For now I just wish, perhaps childishly, that this kind of novel had been written later in the 20th century, when a wider variety of issues could be tackled and factored in the Seldon Plan. But ah well. :-)

End of July

Reflections on Asimov's Foundation coming up. The FINA World Championships are keeping me way too busy for proper philosophizing (a welcome break), and now that Michael Phelps is finally defeated, things are going to get interesting in the 100m and the freestyle relays!

Meanwhile, check out Sam Harris's op-ed on Obama's choice of a scientific advisor. I have a long-standing love/hate relationship with Mr. H so I'll soon comment on this too.