He Who knows It All

I’m sitting in my apartment and I hear some very pleasant music my roommate has just turned on in the other room. “Hey, Robert, “ I ask loudly, “what is this piece?” He responds enthusiastically, “Oh, it’s Joni Mitchell… ‘Both Sides Now.’ It’s so great, isn’t it?” I haven’t heard the name. That means, if my laptop is close by, I’m checking Mitchell’s article on Wikipedia a few seconds later—just after Robert has spelled her name for me. It’s turned into some kind of a routine for me now, about literally anything new I hear or read about: I wikipedia it. I know it doesn’t sound as cool as, say, googling or IMing, and I suspect, due to its multitude of syllables and weird ending, it would never assume the position of a real verb in the Oxford English Dictionary. Yet I’d like to say I wikipedia things as I think this phenomenon, the action of looking up something on Wikipedia, is unique enough to claim its own word. Even if I’m alone in the usage of the bizarre verb, I don’t think I’m exceptional in my tendency to refer to Wikipedia all the time. We wikipedia virtually everything: names of people we want to know, random jargon we run into, and even technical terms related to our own fields of expertise. At least, that’s what most people are doing around me in an academic environment such as MIT.

This was one of the first things which brought Wikipedia to my attention more than two years ago. I realized I was referring to Wikipedia much more frequently than any other resource for looking up mathematical theorems or definitions in my coursework and research. Having access to all kinds of references, textbooks, journals, professors, and even super-smart friends, I was ultimately using something that was available to anybody with an internet connection anywhere in the world. Was Wikipedia making the fantasy of a universal and fair access to knowledge a reality? I was thrilled!

I get excited about things far too often to be able to go after all of them. Since my introduction to it, Wikipedia has been accepted in my category of exciting things to wait in the line, after many other such things, for my eventual attention and further investigation. I have learned that usually after this further-investigation stage, after more closely seeing things from both sides, usually my original excitement turns into a more cautious interest. In this case, however, the development of Wikipedia has been so fast, and its presence has become so visible in my everyday life, that the question of Wikipedia is no longer merely about a possibility for the realization of my dreams. When I’m reading a magazine, newspaper, webpage, and even a blog, I have a perception of my source, its credibility, biases, and position. What is my idea of Wikipedia, the resource I use for answering so many questions every day? How do I perceive its language, structure, and rules, knowing that they are gradually influencing the world around me, or, at least, what I learn about that world? Finally, I figured I couldn’t keep Wikipedia waiting any longer: I had to look into it.

Because it is available online for free, and having a rather simple interface, there is not much to doubt and argue about the open accessibility of Wikipedia. It is its openness on the other end of the stream of knowledge distribution, the creation of material, that usually makes people concerned. When I look at an article, according to the Wikipedian philosophy, I’m looking at an emergent phenomenon, not created according to any a priori plan, but rather created collaboratively by many individuals, the ones who cared enough about the subject to spend time and write, edit, visualize, or simply remove other people’s vandalism. Wikipedia boasts its openness to authorship, that in fact anyone can edit. It further emphasizes that the contributor is not required to be an expert in the topic, since the idea is to cover “existing human knowledge.” This radical position is in stark contrast to all I know of the conventional notion of an encyclopedia, or any trustworthy source of information for that matter. “It’s OK if you don’t learn everything,” they tried hard to teach us as kids, “just learn to ask any question of the right person.”

Interestingly, however, Wikipedia came out of Nupedia, an effort to add the open accessibility of a free online medium to the credibility of a peer-review, specialist-centered encyclopedia. Like many other internet-related booms, things have happened so fast that it sounds ridiculous to talk about a history of Wikipedia. Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales started Wikipedia in January of 2001, as a side project to Nupedia, inspired by the ease and simplicity of using wiki, software which allows collaborative writing and editing webpages. As we don’t hear about Nupedia these days, it’s not hard to infer that the incredibly fast growth of Wikipedia overshadowed the costly and slow progress of the main project to the extent that it was abandoned. Only seven years later, Wikipedia claims to be the most popular encyclopedia, if we really count it as one, including more than two million articles. I guess the story suggests that, whether we consider it as a cost or a benefit, the openness to contributions has been the main element in this success.

The first time I heard a serious criticism of Wikipedia was when, around a year ago, the history department of the Middlebury College famously banned citing Wikipedia in research papers. Neil Waters, professor of Japanese history, noticed that most students had a similarly wrong account of a certain event in their papers. It wasn’t hard for Waters to find the common source of the mistake: Wikipedia. How could one know who wrote the weird story appearing there? With the overwhelming popularity of Wikipedia among high school and college students, this uncertainty in trustworthiness is becoming more alarming to some people. The dispute between the crowd concerned with credibility and the passionate fans of Wikipedia has had other facets as well. Stephen Colbert, the famous comedian, has literally asked the people watching one of his shows to write random things in the Wikipedia article on elephants. He thinks that’s a good way to show why one can never trust an article on this webpage. Colbert is apparently not alone in his choice of methodology. A doubtful physicist friend of mine thought of an experiment to examine Wikipedia’s reliability. Having just attended a talk in which an MIT researcher announced the results of a new experiment confirming a basic model of theoretical physics, he edited a related Wikipedia article with an opposite claim, as if the results actually contradicted the model. He thought it would be interesting to learn how long it would take for that article to be corrected. His experiment didn’t turn out o have a perfect control of conditions as he shared the story with his friends who in turn informed other people in the lab where the research was conducted. Therefore, we can’t tell if the four day period he observed as a result was a signature of Wikipedia’s correction rate or that of information propagation in the physics department at MIT! Nevertheless, my lesson is that I can never be sure if what I read on Wikipedia is actually subject to such silly experimentation.

Defending Wikipedia’s approach to the contributions, supporters usually refer to it as a manifestation of collective intelligence, a way to collaboratively present the state of shared knowledge. Pierre Lévy, scholar and philosopher, defines collective intelligence as “a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills.” The term has been used in a wide variety of contexts from biology and psychology, to sociology, political science, and economics, but Levy and I are both mainly interested in its applications in the realm of human-computer interactions. Arguably, the internet has been the closest we, as human beings, have ever got to what the expression ‘universally distributed’ describes. Besides, its contents are constantly changing and are clearly able to generate mobilization of skills. The problem, though, is that the internet is a real mess. If I want to learn, for instance, what people generally think about polygamy, the last thing I really want to do is to simply google the term. I will be drowned in a swarm of random web pages, more than 2,240,000 today. It’s hard to imagine this scattered, colorful crowd of webpages representing some intelligence regarding polygamy; it is just not coherent enough to be called so. Google’s effort to rank the web pages, or some webpages’ efforts to present brief introductions of certain topics, I argue, does not solve this problem simply because any web page only represents an individual view. So, having this universal accessibility, the internet as a whole still fails to be a representative collective intelligence. That’s exactly where Wikipedia comes in, usually showing up in Google’s search ranking as one of the first few options—which many people count the main reason for its popularity. Wikipedia provides a framework for collaborations among different ideas trying to present themselves on the internet. They get formed, structured, and made coherent.

Michael Gorman, former head of the American Library Association, has a different viewpoint. “Education is not a matter of popularity or of convenience… ,” he notes; “a professor who encourages the use of Wikipedia is the intellectual equivalent of a dietician who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs.” The question is whether we ever gain anything by valuing the intelligence of the masses, especially where the cost is neglecting the scholar’s knowledge. Isn’t this some kind of anti-elitism? At least Larry Stanger, one of the two original founders of Wikipedia, has now come to believe so. He has taken up a new middle-ground path, Citizendium, with more stress on expertise, professional editing, and author identifiability.

When I talked with Joshua Green, a researcher in media studies and the manager of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT, he emphasized that Wikipedia’s openness could answer all such questions. “What prevents the scholar from contributing to Wikipedia?” he asked fervently. He further posed an interesting question: “It is true that Wikipedia is destabilizing the expert paradigm. But is all this criticism not just an angry response from the ones who sit at the top of a system that legitimizes experts?” Green points to the dynamic nature of Wikipedia as a means to overcome all the mentioned deficiencies. Wikipedia has a self-correcting mechanism, where all the users can edit it whenever they encounter a mistake, and that, according to Josh’s passionately-held theory, captures the changing character of knowledge.

The conservative front has already countered Josh’s argument, it seems, by touching on the dynamic nature of Wikipedia with a more fundamental question: “The premise of Wikipedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection,” says Ted Pappas, the executive editor of Encyclopædia Britannica in an interview with the Guardian, “[but] that premise is completely unproven.” To me, this statement leaves the future to settle the debate.

Nevertheless, there are things proven already. There are millions of people using Wikipedia every day, including me, who find the contents reliable enough to continue doing so. Wikipedia’s zealous supporters go on working hard to ensure higher credibility while keeping its standards of openness. I know of a group of art historians who gather once in a while and spend an entire day editing and polishing Wikipedia articles in their field. And I have heard of Wikipedians who study certain topics in depth just to improve some substandard Wikipedia articles. Moreover, I was really impressed when I briefly went over Wikipedia’s policies and rules. Wikipedian philosophy has come up with its own terminology to describe the requirements and standards of articles. The focus of the system seems to be on the written rather than the writer. Notability, civility, recentism, neutrality, such terms have their own connotations for Wikipedians describing the quality of an article—you can wikipedia them if you’re curious as to what they actually mean! There are studies reporting rather contrary results about the exact contribution of the core group of around 77,000 dedicated Wikipedians. My general impression, however, is that they mainly edit and improve the quality of the material already written by thousands of other contributors. The community clearly demonstrates a strong will to achieve the same standards that the critics are seeking.

This communal driving engine behind Wikipedia is, in itself, another source of criticism for Wikipedia. Isn’t there an intrinsic bias integrated in the way articles are written by people interested in contributing? Wikipedia is claiming to embody the existing human knowledge, but many humans just don’t have time or motivation to represent themselves there. Some talk about a built-in liberal or libertarian bias in all Wikipedia articles due to the natural inclinations of most Wikipedians. Even if I don’t care about such subtle biases, I can’t pass by the news about how some corporations and governments are performing organized editions of the Wikipedia articles which correlate with their own interests. Is it that organized groups can outbalance the equilibrium in which consensus is assumed to be achieved?

All these possible setbacks, according to Joshua Green, still don’t make Wikipedia any less appealing. He thinks that Wikipedia is an open system and as long as there is no restriction on who can write and edit it, all such flaws are essentially corrigible. “Why are they looking for such perfection on Wikipedia’s side?” Green asks. “Why should we believe something we read as an absolute fact in the first place?” This argument essentially leads to seeing Wikipedia not as an accountable resource for knowledge in the conventional sense of the word, but rather as a dynamic presentation of what is out there, usually on the internet, just as a starting point for more serious research. This view is how many Wikipedians, including Jimmy Wales, who has now taken the position of the Wikipedia spokesman, introduce the goal of the project. They try to argue that promoting a culture of correct research, the ability to examine any source of information, is more important than providing correct sources.

Kevin Driscoll, a graduate student of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, is a Wikipedian who agrees with this approach to the issue. I heard about his work on teaching students about Wikipedia in a documentary video where he was interviewed. Later, I found him through a mutual friend and he talked with me about his experience in that course. A couple of years ago when Driscoll was teaching Computer Science and Math to high school kids, there were a lot of discussions among the teachers in the school about the way students were using Wikipedia as a reference. He recalls that many of them were really concerned about the reliability of Wikipedia. Driscoll found his own way of dealing with the problem: he launched a project, collaborating with the history and English teachers, to have the students explore and learn about Wikipedia while writing their papers. The students were already familiar with the idea of Wikis as the school frequently used them for assignment submissions. During the course, students got to see how Wikipedia articles are written, edited, and even vandalized. They learned how to be critical of what they see on Wikipedia and use each article’s history and discussion pages to follow the dynamics of how the article has evolved. “Teenagers are more critical readers than what people give them credit for,” he confidently believes now. Based on his experience, providing students with all the background information about Wikipedia had a great impact on the way most of them used it.My personal experience is that high school kids are not the only ones who need to be taught about Wikipedia. I’m noticing that, as a graduate student, I do refer to Wikipedia for many questions I have. I even heard from a friend that she was using Wikipedia in parts of the introductory chapter of her PhD thesis. Sometimes I think that we are entering an era of intellectual laziness where, having been used to the comfort of the online search, we don’t often make any effort to go beyond the easy–to-consume, online resources. This is probably what causes so much concern for the librarian Gorman, who has witnessed the pre-internet era when research required physically going through many texts and digging the facts out of thousands of written pages. Is the quality of the research done using Wikipedia the same?

To me, there is yet a different aspect of Wikipedia that sounds more interesting than the accuracy or bias—which could be presumably discovered and corrected in Wikipedia’s open system of editing, as Josh points out. What Wikipedia is trying to achieve, along with the more general project of democratization of information, is a more pluralistic and dynamic process of knowledge production. At the end of the day, however, when I’m looking at an article on Wikipedia sometimes I feel embarrassed to remember how many other people, when faced with a question about the same subject, look at the very same presentation of the topic. I am consuming an intellectual product that does not in any way represent my intellectual choice, taste, and uniqueness; it is as common a source as could be! As Wikipedia consumers, even if we are more curious about the subject, we all go through the exact same links to the other relevant webpages. My concern here is not as much about credibility as it is about some kind of centralization. I think the main difference between a very prominent book about on a subject, that some would argue used to have a similar stance, and Wikipedia is exactly the latter’s ease of accessibility. An overwhelmingly large number of people look at Wikipedia, as the article would be available for us with only an extra click, whenever they are slightly intrigued by hearing or reading the term. We all share this source not because we believe in it but rather because it’s convenient for us. Ironically, how Wikipedia is achieving my fantasy of fair access to knowledge somehow causes me to pause in my excitement. When I checked the number of references made to the article on Barack Obama, US presidential candidate, during February, the distribution of hits had two huge peaks on the 12^th and 25^th, the days before the two big primary days. Not quite accidentally, many people got tempted to look up Obama’s article on those two specific days.

I agree, however, with Green’s point that it is not Wikipedia’s fault that many people refer to it. That sometimes, in our criticism, we are seeking some vague and often contradictory perfection. There is definitely a lot to appreciate about Wikipedia. Michael Gorman, our outspoken critic, puts the conclusion in this way: “Let me be clear, the Internet and the digital resources available to us are ineluctable forces that are shaping our lives, in many ways for the better. We cannot turn away from these forces, nor should we. But we must exercise judgment, use digital resources intelligently, and import into the digital world the values that have pervaded scholarship in Western societies for centuries.” Driscoll’s active way of promoting the standards of using online resources is clearly an important means in this exercise. All the debate about Wikipedia has brought us to contemplate both sides of the process and politics of knowledge production and the future of research methodology. Even if some prophetic statements predicting the failure of Wikipedia in less than four years come true, the debate will not end soon. Wikipedia has taught me, and all of us, to think in new ways about human knowledge, its production, and accessibility. It’s a new experience; new experiences are always welcome!

Obliteration

I just read Clinton's interview where she has threatened:

"In the next 10 years, during which they ['the Iranians'] might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them."

http://www.reuters.com/article/wtMostRead/idUSN2224332720080422

It's a really harsh statement but I understand what she is trying to do here. In the context of her presidential campaign, she wants to establish herself as tough and rigid in foreign policy distancing herself from Obama. This is another effort to show she is the one who will be there at that critical moment to "pick up the phone." Fine! She is also trying to send a serious message to the Iranian government that she wouldn't tolerate their ambitious plans. That also sounds like a reasonable stance for her. Moreover, she is talking about an absolutely unlikely scenario, where Iran not only has achieved nuclear power but has also chosen to be the second country, after US, ever to use it. In such a weird situation, things become complicated enough that you won't expect them to really go logically thereafter.

But, let's pause for a moment and ponder this statement. Ask ourselves what it means to "obliterate them". Who is "them"? She is talking about "the Iranians." She probably means the Iranian government, but you usually don't destroy a government. You only overthrow it, defeat it. It's the country that you obliterate. It's an entire nation that you destroy, just like Iraq. And, you destroy it while it actually hasn't even achieved the nuclear, or chemical, weapons that you're talking about.

It's interesting to hear this kind of rhetoric from the Democratic candidate running to replace a president who has actually implemented that threat to another nation. She is literally threatening "those people who run Iran" about how brutally she would demolish the people, the total country, everything. Like the threats kings would send to the enemies in the ancient times. Yah, history is cyclical, you've heard a lot.

I hope you understand I'm not only concerned about this matter because Iran is involved here. And I also hope you understand this is not about Clinton as one person, one candidate. This is just about how such a statement, in such a critical situation, counts as a sign of strength for a candidate rather than a huge gaffe, even in the eyes of the Democratic voters.

Yet, I'm really curious to know how her image of an obliterated country looks like.

How Can I Help You Today?

For a couple of months, I had to make sure that my cell phone’s amputated antenna stayed around its main body. If the antenna wasn’t there, it clearly meant that a replacement had to be carried out, something that I wanted to push back as much as I could. After a while, my friends began to complain about interrupts in our phone conversations and demanded a more active role on my side to fix the issue. Given that to fix, here in US, means to buy, and that only a couple of months were left to the end of my cell-phone contract, my stance was clear: I would just wait to get a free phone when signing a new contract. Even boycotts on my phone by close friends couldn’t perturb my resolution.

I had another good reason to put off doing new business with my cell-phone company: I really don’t have good experience of dealing with Verizon Wireless. Two years after I signed my contract, still I haven’t received my original deposit money back—I had just arrived in US with no credit history hence the need for the deposit. Well, it’s true that they actually sent me the money a year and half ago but, for some weird reason, I didn’t notice the mail containing the cheque until several months later when it was expired. There is always a solution for any mistake but that may involve things as complicated as calling Customer Service. I have made so many acquaintances among the company representatives over the last year or so: Linda, Maggie, Ray, Anne-Marie, just to name a few. They appear at the other end of the line, friendly and relaxed, after I have gone through a complex labyrinth of options, explained to me in full detail along with many other random points they would like me to know, and have found the option describing my case—which always happens to be that “other options” thing which comes at the end. The presence of a live human suddenly in this world of recorded voices brings a momentary comfort. It is, indeed, comforting despite the way they insist on telling me that they’re representing the most reliable network in US, in always the same tone and wording, even when I’m making my best effort to interrupt them, anxious I am to get to the main point. No matter what the details of my problems are, when I call Customer Service, there is always something unhappy for me to learn from the agents: certain stupid regulations I’ve been unaware of, or how my expectations from the company have been unreasonable and beyond what they could provide.

In the case of this deposit, however, there seems to be an unlucky chain of coincidences, presumably contrived by the aliens who are always after me, which somehow blocks the numerous requests my representative friends make in the system for re-mailing my cheque. Naturally, all my friend, Jason, can do for me at this point is to try putting a new request in the system. Every time I hear this, I fervently go on explaining in my broken English, which gets even worse in anger, how I have heard the exact same story from Jane last month, have gotten her name and contact information for the follow-up, and then nothing has happened. (Trust me; don’t waste your time by getting a representative’s contact information! I have never been able to talk with the same representative twice in my life despite having so many phone numbers.) Now, it’s Jason’s turn to calmly point me to the fact that he is a simple agent, the computer in front of him is all his space of authority, and since that’s all I can get on that line, it is in my interest to be cool with him. Basically, he is reminding me of my powerlessness. I know that argument very well. So I approve his wisdom, happily go ahead and write his name and phone number, get promised that he’s the one who will definitely and finally follow my case, thank him so much, and say goodbye knowing that I have made another friend that I won’t probably hear from again.

The complications in my relationship with the wireless company actually have a longer history. Two years ago, when I bought my phone, it seemed like pretty good equipment—that one was different from the one missing its antenna; I have lost and broken two others before getting this one. The cell phone came with a mega-pixel camera, picture messaging capability, Bluetooth file transfer, and even a toy music player. Well, it only took paying the extra money and getting this better-than-free phone to realize that the company had disabled all those features. You actually had to pay extra money to enable any of those. I sometimes imagine they have a huge, hidden R&D office fully devoted to engineering creative ways to charge their customers. When there is so much potential money out there in people’s credit cards, that should be an essential part of any service company, I’d guess.

With all that, finally, there came the time to renew my contract, when I could potentially revenge all my miseries by switching to another company. Surprisingly, it took me only to seriously consider the implications of such a switch to decide to actually stick to Verizon. I realized that signing these types of contracts is somewhat like marrying somebody in the Catholic Church. We make our minds up and do it once with somebody and then that’s it. There is so much to learn about a specific system and get used to, and there are so many things in life to worry about, that we usually choose to put up with whatever they do and then complain to the first three friends we see after any bad experience with them. Well, who is there to switch to, after all? Most likely, there would be even more to hate in another company.
So now I had to select a new phone, which came free with my renewal. Selections are not my favorite things in life. Selecting something is more associated to me with crossing out all those other things. That may be why I keep postponing any activity that involves making a selection as much as I can. There is an illusion that, for instance, if I’m to buy this cell phone, I potentially own all the cell phones out there until I go and deprive myself of all that by picking one. This illusion is certainly reinforced by online shopping where I can check out hundreds of options with a few clicks of a mouse.

Shopping is a problem of joint cost minimization and gain maximization. What used to make the problem feasible and well-posed in the old times was its rather constrained search space. We had to go around the streets, look into as many shops as you could, and compare whatever we remembered of the products and their prices. There was always a clear end on the horizon: at the end of the first evening of shopping, or the second for the obsessive optimizer, you knew you had to settle on something. Online shopping, however, is a totally different story: there is no end to the number of times you can skip that other thing you are supposed to be doing at the moment, and do a little bit of browsing to compare a couple of products. There you go: the devil of surfing sucks you in right away and minutes turn into hours.

The few first times of looking for something online bring bewilderment, complete confusion, and feeling of being somehow lost in the variety presented to us. Then, little by little, after three or four times spending two or three hours of browsing stores, comparing products, and reading reviews, we kind of find ourself and are able to shrink the number of choices to a few. And then a more extensive research on the few options left begins, sifting through online product reviews. I don’t know who first thought of making these product reviews available online; they just make things more complicated. Now, we have not only all the mess of features described by the sellers, but also tons of web pages which reveal the dark side of things: the high capacity memory slot, the one which made us so inclined to get this one, actually doesn’t support standard cards, the battery in that other phone, the reasonably priced one, dies every half an hour, and that optimal phone, which seemed to be the best option, has a terrible voice quality. Any time we feel like we’re about to make up our mind about one, a review destroys our fantasy by forcing us to see the damn truth. Well, how many more hours of gazing to the monitor?

For more than a week, I was busy doing this research whenever I got a chance. It’s interesting how my idea of what I wanted to buy was transformed by looking at the products. Under the excessive influence of that gain maximization side, I started realizing how useful it could be to have this or that feature, that I actually needed this property in my cell phone, and I just had no idea before, that it totally made sense now to pay some more and get this only slightly more expensive cell phone and have this or that. Little by little, I came up with a rigid agenda for what exact specifications the cell phone had to have. Now I was finding all that variety not enough, any more, as I couldn’t find anything that matched what I was seeking. I had to relax some constraints to make a bigger search space, again. More time, of course, and more money.

Finally, the day I suddenly found myself having spent an hour doing this in the middle of my work in the lab, I figured I had to put an end to it. That cost me a couple more hours that morning but a choice was made, and an order was placed. I also bought a couple of other accessories to be done with the whole shopping thing. By this time, getting exposed to the wild world of features my cell phone could enjoy, the original idea of a free phone had turned into a smart phone worth a couple of hundred bucks. The good news was that I could now go back to normal life not worrying about buying a cell phone!
Not quite, it turned out. Not having heard back from the company, two days later, in the beginning of another morning of work, I had to call the Customer Service. This time, it was the turn for learning another rule: “Your phone comes with a data plan which you haven’t specified in your order,” my newest representative friend explained. The minimum was 25 dollars a month. Apparently, I have my own thresholds of how much I’d pay on things. “Can I just cancel the order?” I asked. I was back at the beginning again. Even worse, as I was frustrated, angry, and had bought the accessories on another online store already. Well, at least now I had a big constraint for the rest of my shopping adventure: buying a cell phone that matched a certain memory card! It was clear what the only option was: to really finish this story right there and right then. No need to mention how little real work I managed to do that morning.

When I pressed the final ‘Enter’ of my order, for a moment, I had the feeling of having accomplished something. The final phone I ordered was something I had checked out a million times before and, except that last day, always figured it couldn’t be my choice. Though that very same one, at the end, had turned out to be my choice, the only thing that mattered then was that my business with the cell-phone I was “done”. I said that to myself as if I had just put the last word of my thesis—isn’t that the ultimate achievement a graduate student may ever imagine? After a few minutes, though, there came a vacuum; I felt empty, as if I had actually just woken up having had a weird dream. It may have been, I guess, just because of looking at a monitor for so long. “How did I become so absorbed in this?” I asked myself. I usually philosophize about my own disturbing behavior to make myself feel better afterwards by giving an intellectual color to the whole experience: doing the disturbing thing and pretending to have learned something about myself! It was now the turn for spending the next hour, while having my lab’s free lunch, trying to sort things out about me and my cell-phone.

I wondered if I used to care so much about what I owned before. At home, in Iran, when I bought my first cell-phone, and there wasn’t any private wireless companies at that time, there were two ways to buy a phone: we could either register for the new lines to be installed in the next year, or buy a line from somebody else, which was of course much more expensive, around a thousand dollars then. Once we had the cell-phone, we paid our charges, per minute, monthly. No free cell-phone, no competition, no excitement of choosing our career, nothing. I had a very basic cell phone and never cared enough to look into having a fancier one. This wasn’t only about cell-phone; basically, I never got excited about owning something, it all seemed too dumb to me. That’s a way to see it as a byproduct of getting immersed in this different culture and economy, the one in which you’re either dealing with the aftermath of what you’ve just consumed, or planning for new consumption. Yet, there is another way of seeing the story: it may well be due to my new purchasing power, which I never enjoyed before as I didn’t get paid as an undergrad, which has exposed me to such lures of consumptions. This view goes beyond a local or cultural phenomenon, touching on an essential part of all of us: we opt for all these difficulties to enjoy the benefits of owning, or even being content with the mere feeling of owning.

Even though my experience didn’t result in any answers to my deep philosophical inquiries, at least there are two things I know now: first, I’m not a good shopper from the cost minimization point of view. Second, next time I call Verizon’s Customer Service to follow up on my deposit, I will demand talking to a manager. No contact information accepted this time!

I Love Bach!

This is Bach's Violin Partita No. 3 in E major, Part I: Preludio. Not that I know what all that exactly means! It's played by Nathan Milstein whom again I don't know but whose performance of this piece I liked!

I was actually introduced into this piece by an instrumental interpretation of Vanessa Mae:

Bhutto: Fall of Another Hope

Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. I really don't know why this sounded so shocking to me. In fact, news like this should have been quite ordinary to expect by now. Yet, it was shocking to me in the same way that the assassination of Mohammad Baqir Hakim was so terrifying more than four years ago. The main difference is that the former didn't seem as inevitable as the latter, or rather, could have been avoided in a way that the other one could not. Of course, I am talking about the political motivation and will behind the assassination plot and not the failure of security measures or things of that kind.

Musharraf government declared Al-Qaeda responsible for the assassination. As the camouflaged, mysterious sinister behind almost all the evil in the world today, pointing to this name as the answer naturally ends any further investigation in this case. Done by Al-Qaeda or anybody else, Bhutto's death leaves Musharraf with no competent political figure in the upcoming elections and the foreseeable future. We all know that Bhutto couldn't be a true savior for the turmoiled Pakistan of today especially with her dark resume of corruptions in previous P.P.P. governments. Nevertheless, she was still deemed as a sign of hope for a more democratic Pakistan in a country where military power had failed to maintain any satisfactory standard of stability or security. This hope is now gone. In the same way that the loss of Hakim eliminated the possibility of a more moderate Shiite side in the Iraqi conflicts.

Musharraf has ruled over Pakistan for more than eight years now enjoying the support of US as a prospective candidate for bringing stability to the region which is the main front in the war against Islamic extremists. Coming from army and taking his power through a coup against the civilian government of Sharif, he proved to be a good friend of a US government who has shown a solid faith in militaristic methods. Considering Musharraf's resume in his rather long reign, however, I see this unalterable friendship as another failure of US foreign policy in the last few years. Pakistan front is so critical in the ongoing confrontations with Islamic extremism that US, under no condition, can go with the possibility of exchanging an undemocratic, allied government with an even more unstable Pakistan. Having put all its trust in Musharraf throughout the recent years, there is not much about which US could blame or pressure him: whether declaring a state of emergency right before the elections, or the assassination of his main political rival, Musharraf's explanation about things should be accepted no matter how ridiculous it looks! Musharraf is definitely confident of his stance with respect to US in Pakistani politics. That seems to be enough for one to maintain the power at the moment.

At the end of the day, I believe the really sad side of the story is not the role of US government in Pakistani politics. Nor it is the power of Islamic extremists. Not even the army. I find the real tragedy in the fact that this liberal, educated woman didn't leave behind a good memory of her time in power. Yes the real tragedy is that the corrupted intellectuals usually complete the two other corners of the triangle of power in Muslim countries: the fanatics and the army. I would mourn on the chances Bhutto had missed more than her own loss.

What Can a Mighty Heart Do?

It is 12:30 AM and I am just back from watching the movie A Mighty Heart. And it has not been the kind of experience that I can postpone writing about it until tomorrow. This movie is based on a memoir by Mariane Pearl, under the same title, which tells the story of her journalist husband, Daniel, who was kidnapped and killed by terrorists in Pakistan in early 2002.

A mighty heart is narrating a very subtle story and I was curious to see how it is related by a movie that is supposed to be mainstream and commercial, starring somebody like Angelina Jolie. I think the movie was successful in giving a realistic account of such an extreme human experience in a way that was convincing and, also, touching. And, I stress on its being convincing which I believe is the most difficult part of this task: to have it as simple and clean as one can accept its reality without sensing the weight of the usual redundancies. Of course, I do not mean that there was no dramatization in the movie or the realism prevailed on its entirety. It was just that the story was not sensationalized to the degree that keeps it from being believable. I specially liked the depiction of the void and boredom in the moments, the very same moments so intense to Mariane and the people around her, which existed in the lives of beings not involved in the incident.

However, in the worlds in which we are living today, Mariane’s story was not, and could not have been, only the story of a woman losing her beloved husband. In a world so traumatized by terrorism, and in particular its fundamentalist Islamic version, narrating such a story will inevitably convey specific messages to the audience. The simplest such a message to send is the hatred: our instinctive reaction to other’s atrocious behavior. It is enough to barely confront you with the intensity of some brutality to make you disgusted with that other from whose side the wrongdoing is coming. With hatred, comes the need for vengeance, the need to destroy the ones who committed the transgression to you and to your beloved. Wasn’t it that the popularity of the Afghanistan’s war, from which Pearl was reporting at the time, can be completely understood in terms of this need for immediate retaliation? And, later on, also the Iraq’s war…? Ironically, hatred acts exactly like a source of positive feedback for more transgression. The process of violent retaliation, say in the form of war, always involves transgression to some innocent others creating a subsequent hatred and need of retaliation for them. Radicalism bears more radicalism in return and the violent use of power turns into the only valid language of communication between human beings: how else can you explain the mentality of the people who insist so firmly on avoiding any sort of negotiation with certain supposed enemies?

Thankfully though, A Mighty Heart does not take that simple road. Mariane Pearl, the real person I saw on a Charlie Rose show, is one of those endearing human beings who have gone beyond their mere instincts and respond to such horrible aggressions with remarkable endurance and serenity. The way I can understand it, Mariane’s message, besides being a sincere account of a severe suffering, is a call for understanding and tolerance. Having lost her husband along their common efforts to reflect a more accurate image of this other people for her own people, how can she be a proponent of a blind hatred towards them? And being as much aware of the realities of that other world as she is, Mariane Pearl knows that fighting terrorism with guns is not the right way to get rid of that. In a memorable scene of the movie, the interviewer, frustrated in his efforts to have her express some disgust towards where she has faced that horrifying experience, asks if she had seen the brutality of the video depicting the beheading of her husband. Her response is so deep and remarkable:

Do you have any decency? How could you ask me such a question? ...

Just at that moment, all of us notice the absurdity of the question and suddenly ask ourselves what the real intention in asking such a question could be. May be, she is reminding us the fact that a mere description of such brutalities can be employed to promote certain political agenda with no sincere intentions for the actual victims. This is what has now come to be known as the Politics of Fear.

The brief image of the Pakistani side is also rather realistic: a mixture of the fundamentalists, filled with a similar blind hatred which is, in return, originated from their perceived transgressions of the West, the people simply exploited by the radical groups, and the understanding ones who, embarrassed by the incident, are trying not to let the gap between the two sides become deeper by their own people's crazy actions. Believing in such a complicated image, one will have a hard time agreeing that an abrupt military attack could solve the challenge of Islamic radicalism. This is a deep, complicated problem whose long-term solution, in my mind, lies more truly in the economic and intellectual dimensions of the society itself. If the solver is not patient and nobody can stop him, which seems to have been the case at least so far, he will not do anything but activating that positive feedback mechanism. Proof? Just compare the news of today and six years ago…

Finally, I have two more unfortunate comments. First, in the entire theatre, in downtown Boston, there were hardly more than twenty people. The movie was just premiered on July 22! Second, please check out the criticism of the movie in wikipedia, the part about the race of Angelina Jolie and her not being as black as Mariane is. This is the second time I am hearing this argument about somebody being not black enough for something, the first time being about Obama. Could somebody please explain for me how this seems relevant in the context of a movie such as this?!

What is Fun? ...

Well, I think Dima is absolutely right in that I haven't been clear about my understanding of the word fun. The way I see it, it is a completely subjective notion, something that is defined only with respect to the one who is talking about it. When people use it, no further explanation and justification is given or could be asked for: when some thing is descirbed to be fun, one seldom asks why, or how, or... It is fun since I feel it is... And I also have the impression that it is often consciously used to distinguish the corresponding statement from something that has more depth and justification in it.

From Paris Hilton to Middle East

I’m sitting in front of TV: CNN, Larry King Live which is on the story of the recently murdered pregnant woman and Paris Hilton’s freedom from jail. Anybody who has even sketchily checked out the news headlines recently, definitely knows about these stories, and probably some other similar ones. And it is so interesting for me to see things like this as the number one news headlines of CNN.

A few days ago, I was discussing the role of media in American society with one of my friends who was complaining about the narrow spectrum of the news covered by the media here. I was arguing that this is just a natural consequence of the supply and demand rules in the realm of news business. This is what people want to hear and watch, and the media brings more of that for them. Although it seems far from the ideals of media feeling responsible for improving public awareness, this is what I expected of the media in such a highly business-oriented culture.

Since then, I have been paying more attention to the headlines. And I should say, now, I am really surprised about, first, how drastically different the American notion of news is from mine, and second, why I never noticed this major difference earlier! Clearly, my comparison is most accurate with respect to what I have observed in my home country, Iran, but I think I can even generalize it, to some extent, to many other places in the world as far as I have seen. The point is very simple: if you watch CNN (the cable channel that we receive here at MIT,) you barely hear the names of more than three or four other countries in a day: one is of course Iraq nowadays: some recent counts of casualties, another is usually UK: often news about the royal family, such as the princes’ dating news, and some random news form here and there once in a while. Most of the news is apparently dedicated to US internal news. But this is still not the whole story: the internal headlines news is overwhelmingly filled with news about celebrities, random, funny and entertaining stories and so on. And this is so different from the idea of news at least the way we perceive it in Iran. We all know that there is always huge pressure on the independent media in Iran and censor is strictly practiced. Nevertheless, we still have a notion, and also ideal, of news that we want to find on our media as far as the existing amount of freedom allows.

My idea of news media was that there are two sorts of news media: the serious and the light ones. In our serious news media, most of the major headline news is political, social or economical. Sports and other types of news, including for instance horrible murders, always have their own place, which is not as visible, unless for some specific reason they become important enough to appear among the top news. Of course, we also have unserious media which only cover amusing news for people specifically excited about sports, celebrity, or murder news!

This mindset was what made me so surprised with CNN which is covering, to such detailed degree, the celebrity news. I thought CNN might assume some kind of dignity that does not allow it to spend so much time discussing how actor X insulted his daughter on the phone, or actore Y was arrested while drunk driving … Let me actually describe a few things from what I just saw on the Larry King Live, the same show that some times even has the former presidents on: obsessive descriptions of the confrontation of the mom’s victim, face to face, with the indicted man, expressions of hatred and disgust from the victim’s family, obviously under such an unbearable pressure of the situation, toward again the indicted. Reporters saying:

-“Did he make eye contact?”
-“Yes, according to the family. And it was emptiness that the mom saw in his eyes…” [or something very close to this.]

I remember one of the first things that seemed so different to me when I had just arrived in US was how the media does not avoid revealing the identities of people only indicted, and not convicted, of a crime. It is just a side note that in Iran it is generally believed that until somebody is convicted, the media should not release the name or picture of the accused.

In order to be more concrete, here I bring the top of the first pages of CNN and BBC news, the way they look right now. You can find news about other parts of the world in BBC while, looking at CNN’s top page, it is as if the world is just a peaceful village where nothing worthwhile is happening. And this is still CNN… I refuse to comment about things such as FOX News… It is interesting, though, that CNN international that I had seen outside US looked completely different to me!

Now, isn't it sad that this is all what people get to learn about even when they switch the channels from all the kinds of shows, that we know what they are about, to CNN?

To have fun, or not to have...

I want to have fun… I am looking for fun… I am doing this for the fun of it… I am really intrigued by the usage of the magic word fun in the American English. Coming from a culture where things are all supposed to be complex and multi-layer, I was really surprised to notice how the fun is employed to justify intentions, goals, and even lives! There is of course a very simple and widespread way to turn this surprise into a cliché: American pop culture recognizes superficial concepts and encourages shallowness; therefore, it is corrupted! Some actually put it in the other way hence, a chicken and egg problem. I know many people who believe in this statement and imagine there are some who get outraged about it. Nevertheless, I prefer to develop my own complex story around this surprise instead of judging the quality of a culture. No matter how over-idealized it might look, for me, different cultures are reflections of common human experience under different social, political, and geographical conditions.

In most parts of the world, humans have been always struggling for their elementary needs through famine, disease, poverty, prejudice, cruelty, brutality, war, and so on. Such a struggle has an inherent depth in it: what is more fundamental than the everlasting live/death conflict: to be or not to be? Life justifies itself; efforts for survival are glorious and profound by nature. More interesting than the original struggle is the consequent challenges it generates in the minds of the close observers. The extreme intellectual and emotional experiences one gains in such situations remind him of the mysteries he ought to solve about himself. Unfortunately, his resulting depth is not always pleasant: determined about his own solution to the great mystery, he often ends up generating new troubles for the lives of others and so the cycle persists…

Years ago, I found myself faced with the following dilemma: say, we could get rid of all the evil we know such that human beings become freed from all severe agonies they have ever suffered. Then, where would the inspiration for the rest of history come from? Here, let us not be concerned with why such a dull question seemed challenging to me. Instead, I want to connect this imaginary picture with a caricature of American experience: a country which has spent the tormenting twentieth century in rather security and stability. OK, I know about the great depression, Vietnam War, civil rights movement and all such things… But they are just not comparable to their counterparts in any other country: while even the most powerful European nations have been at least once demolished during the world wars, Americans may find the Perl Harbor attack outrageous. To this, add the vastness of the country which brings distance between the people and the outside unsafe world. Isn’t it interesting, then, to observe how life becomes a relaxed experience that should be only enjoyed? Isn’t it just a little model of what all the deep philosophers all around the world have been always trying to realize for their people? In other words, isn’t it the result a structure that the efforts of a group of deep American intellectuals started some 300 years ago? I insist that I acknowledge all the complexities and troubles of the American society, the issues with the minorities, and so on. My argument is only meaningful relative to the corresponding experience of the middle class in almost all the other countries in the world.

Another interesting point is that, in fact, fun is an American euphemism for the deeper notion of happiness! If our dear philosophers are faced with the above question, many, including the old Aristotle, bring up happiness as that ultimate thing to be sought in such a flourishing society. The only difference is that Aristotle may try to again define happiness in terms of some other profound thing, like Telos or such. Instead, some may take happiness as a subjective principle and build their whole structure on that, hence, agreeing with the original supposedly depthless idea of fun. It seems that we are back again to a chicken and egg problem.

This is just the beginning of the story… There is so much one can say about this problem… I like to finish with another caricature that I always have in mind from two years ago when I watched two documentaries about lives of Einstein and Feynman in the same day. The divergence between the two giants’ approaches was amazing: Einstein, intensely worried about the metaphysical aspects and consequences of his physics, versus Feynman, proud that he was doing his physics just for the fun of it… !

A Daniel come to judgment! yea, a Daniel!

Amidst of such overwhelming days when the things are not going the way they should, I am taking a few minutes off the work to give myself a late birthday gift. At the end of the twenty forth spring, I'd like to quote this line from The Merchant of Venice that I saw years ago and loved so much:

A second Daniel, a Daniel, ...
A Daniel, still say I, a second Daniel! ...

I liked it just for the passion of the actor in that play when he was reciting these lines and, of course, for the nice reflection of my name in it! It was actually being performed in Persian and now that I've checked the original text, I found quite a few anti-semitic-looking lines right around these words. But, after all, I'm quoting this here completely independent of its original context in the very special meaning that it has for me. In fact, it's more correct for me to replace second with another ... Who can tell how many Danials I've been?!