Seth’s blog

I had lunch with Lisa Goldberg, an adjunct professor in the Statistics Department at Berkeley. Her application area is finance. She said that people in finance have at least as much contempt for academics as academics do for people in finance. Thorstein Veblen, of course, wrote about the latter — people looking down on useful work — but not the former. Perhaps his views were skewed by being an academic himself. I blogged earlier about how students in each major at a San Francisco art school look down on the students in some other major.

Lisa also said she sleeps well. I was surprised — hardly anyone says that. It turns out she exercises heavily. She swims or runs seven days a week and when she swims, she swims 2000 meters. As a former swimmer, I know that’s a lot. When I exercised, there was no clear effect on my sleep, apart from falling asleep faster. I still woke up too early in the morning. Maybe I wasn’t exercising enough. Anyway, it’s one little data point supporting my conclusions from standing on one leg.

[Rosie Shuster] did have one quality she could privately lord over her classmates: her father was a comedian. . . A life in comedy meant that Frank Shuster nodded, rather than laughed, at jokes that worked.

From American Nerd: The Story of My People by Benjamin Nugent, pp. 62-3. When I was in college I came up with a theory: Laughter is caused by sudden pleasure. Obviously we enjoy jokes, and jokes have punchlines. People laugh in lots of situations not involving humor and as far as I can tell they always involve sudden pleasure — unexpectedly seeing an old friend, for example.

Which is only to say, as this passage implies, there should be a limited number of joke categories and they should be far from mysterious. I once wrote a bunch of jokes from the TV show Cheers on cards and sorted them into categories. Later I classified six months of New Yorker cartoons and Spy accepted it. It was my first submission and I was thrilled.

More. Mike Kenny put it better than me. That I was able to get my research published in a magazine I adored was “a fusing of the intellectual with the practical.” I was going to say it was a practical application of pure research.

The Harvard Society of Fellows, I learned from this great post by Steve Levitt, drink expensive wine — like $60/bottle. Steve, who was a Fellow for 3 years, did a simple experiment that showed the other members couldn’t tell expensive wine from cheap wine. Although the other members had liked the idea of doing the experiment, they didn’t like the results:

There was a lot of anger when I revealed the results, especially the fact that I had included the same wine twice. One eminent scholar stormed out of the room stating that he had a cold — otherwise he would have detected my sleight of hand with certainty.

Stormed out of the room! Why were they so angry? I think they were embarrassed. And not just that. Steve doesn’t say it, but I think there had been lots of dinner table conversation about how great the wine was. Now all that conversation was revealed to be delusional. Noting the greatness of the wine was — to be crude about it — a way of noting the greatness of those assembled at the table. “We appreciate the finer things in life,” they were saying. “We deserve to be here.” Snobbery is reassuring. In a tiny voice, the results said, yes, you are here, congratulations, but the reason you are here is more complicated than “you deserved it”.

Sure, we can learn about human nature by looking at art. I’ve done that. What’s less obvious, at least to me, is how much  can be learned about human nature by observing art students. I got a glimpse of this from talking to a student at California College of the Arts. Three things I learned:

1. Every department looks down on every other department. Or, at least, there is a vast amount of “looking down on”. One example is that students in the illustration department look down on students in the fashion department. This is puzzling because the two subjects are unrelated (unlike, say, graphic design and illustration, which are closely related). Why does it happen? My informant thought it was because so many people looked down on illustrators that they were desperate to find a group they themselves could look down on; they chose fashion even though it made no sense.

2. Students in each major have distinct personalities. Photography majors tend to be self-centered and outspoken. In class, they talk more than they need to. Illustration majors are relatively childlike; they are wacky and playful and fun and less serious. In the illustration department, unlike other departments, critiques are always sugar-coated: “This is great, what a nice job you did, you might think about …” Graphic design majors are “urban” — more sophisticated, more interested in being cutting edge, more concerned about the job market. Fashion majors tend to be flighty.

3. Almost all students at CCA enter with their major already decided. They are intensely focused on their subject — think about it all the time. They have little interest in what can be learned from other disciplines. Somehow focus seems to get in the way of curiosity. You might think that art is about being creative and creativity is helped by curiosity. Somehow this doesn’t occur to them and isn’t taught.

Shown the above, my informant, wanting to give a more complete picture, added:

I also think that a lot of those students who help to create these perceptions are probably also the ones that feel the need to be labeled. The photography students who create the image of self-assuredness, the ones who talk about themselves and their work all the time, probably feel they need to do it because it’s the image of themselves and of photographers that they need to create. Same goes for fashion and illustration and all others. There are probably other students who feel the way that I do and just choose not to get into it and would rather leave those “personas” for someone else to convey.

I think it’s specific to art students, and [part of a] desire to be seen as artistic, since most artists i know outside of school don’t seem to perpetuate this. i don’t want to make it seem as if art students are superficial and uninspired. i’ve met my share of really great people.

More. Russ Roberts, interviewing Diane Coyle: “The culture among the graduate students [in economics at the University of Chicago in the late 1970s], and probably among the faculty, was to really look down on the other social sciences and to see them as a total waste of time.”