Monday, March 20, 2006

Serge Lang vs. Bob Somerby in a BLOWOUT!

I knew Serge Lang as the man who would walk into my math classes and start asking us questions, often to the professor's dismay. (Sometimes he asked the professor questions too: "Are you using my textbook? Why not?")

Besides math, Serge Lang is famous for two things: claiming that the link between HIV and AIDS has not been established, and keeping Samuel Huntington out of the National Academy of the Sciences. Lang gave me a few hundred pages of documents about the conflict, as he did with anyone who was willing to listen to him. He claimed that Huntington's papers were "utter nonsense." His biggest objection was to a paper Huntington wrote that purported to demonstrate the link between a society's frustration and instability. One of his indices classed South Africa as a "satisfied society." Lang thought (rightly) that Huntington's effort to quantify oppression and instability didn't correspond to reality. Huntington's defenders typically turned this into a straw-man argument. They said that Serge Lang objected to any attempt to turn things like frustration and instability into numbers, and that the argument was caused by a mathematician's resentment of the "soft" sciences. (See Jared Diamond's Soft sciences are often harder than hard sciences in Discovery.) Lang didn't actually have any problem with using numbers to measure satisfaction; his objection was that Huntington's index in fact measured nothing. Lang particularly hated Fareed Zakaria, now the editor of Newsweek, who wrote a letter saying that it was "a fact" that in the sixties, there were no "major riots, strikes, or disturbances" in South Africa. Lang had a file of New York Times articles on South Africa, all contradicting Zakaria.

Serge Lang's way of talking to students about this was to invite them to his office to take his test, which would determine whether they could tell "a fact from a hole in the ground." After explaining Huntington's paper and showing you Zakaria's letter, he asked two questions: 1) Did Fareed Zakaria use the word "fact" in his letter? 2) Comment on Fareed Zakaria's letter. The correct answer to the first question was yes; the correct answer to the second was either, "It is untrue that there were no major strikes, disturbances, or riots in South Africa in the sixties," or "I am not familiar enough with the history of South Africa to judge whether Fareed Zakaria is correct or not." After you answered, Lang had you sign and date your paper, which he would store somewhere secure. (I failed, like everyone else.)

At this point, Lang would explain the problem with academia: nobody bothered to find out whether claims were true. Instead, people just did "theoretical bullshit."

Bob Somerby has a political blog that predates the word blog. He makes the same argument as Lang, but directed towards the media, saying that they ignore facts because they find it hard to figure out what's true and what's not. Some representative articles:

6 comments:

Seth said...

Like the Pavement reference (which I think about 6 people in the world would catch). Do you remember who the original BLOWOUT contestants were? I think I do and will post my answer in 24 hours.

Toby said...

I was planning to end the post with, "If you got the Pavement reference in the title of this post, you're probably my brother."

Seth said...

Great minds think alike.

Seth said...

Jon Spencer and Neil Hagerty.

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