The Scientist and the Poet

Asking for a scritch under the neck, my cat jumped into my lap. He wiggled to get in tight with his left side hard against me. He looked up, showing his neck. A light scratch and his right paw began flexing, the nails almost clear, curved like scimitars, came out between the toes and retreated. Research on the Jacobson gland led me to the flehman response. Yes, I had seen that but this was different.

The scientist: why the flexing? Science being the discipline of knowing the question to ask — a little like a lawyer, never ask the witness the question you don’t know the answer to.

The poet: what does it mean? And if to answer I anthropomorphize or imagine being a cat or worse, the imply cognition of the cat it will be the answer to all the questions.

The Experimentalist and the Economist

If I understand correctly, Paul Krugman likes to say the economic answer is not the moral answer. Does that give the discipline more heft as a science? Lay scientists too often argue that morality plays no role in pure science — it is only the messy intrusion of application that creates moral uncertainty. Econometrics took the high road, far from the economists with their policy prescription. They searched for the natural experiment where outcomes could test the models.

Facebook, now used regularly by one-sixth the world’s population, created their “Trust Engineers”. This group with its access to a huge cross-cultural, diverse economic, varied age pool could run true experiments with sample sized only hinted at in experimental design.

Stunned by the backlash when reporters uncovered experiments without consent

Boston Book Festival 200 Words

We are all refugees now, in this pandemic. We have travelled to a land we might have heard about but never expected to visit. The practice and habits of this culture are strange, but we must adapt if we are to survive. How long has it been since we have seen a smile? How long has it been since we have had a conversation that is neither muffled by a mask nor shouted across an open space? What has happened to secrets? Are lovers left with only looks?

We are all immigrants now. We connect and reconnect with family mediated by technology. It is better than the delays of mail for the generation that fought the war, or the crackling, hollow echo of a bad phone connection for the generation before computers. We can now at least see each other when we meet in cyberspace, which, for some, is more frequently than we met before. We used to save our time, stories, haircuts, or new relationships for a reveal at annual family gatherings. Now we are all immigrants, seeing each other fleetingly, comparing our respective worlds with curiosity as we puzzle at different social practices merely a state border away.