Author Archives: Sarah Shugars

The Terminator and Free Will

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The Terminator franchise does some really interesting things with time.

Seriously.

Every storyline centers around time travel. Around events being changed, or perhaps not changed, as a result of time travel.

(The fourth movie is an exception to this, but I think we can all agree that movie was just terrible.)

I’m particularly intrigued by the Terminator movies as an argument for – or perhaps against – predestination.

At its heart, the struggle against the robot uprising and ensuing apocalypse is really an exploration of the questions can the future be changed? Is our fate already written?

On it’s face, the Terminator seems to argue against predestination.

In the eponymous 1984 movie Kyle Reese famously – yeah, that’s what I’m going with here – argues, “the future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.”

That phrase is repeated in various incarnations by human heroes throughout the franchise. It gives them the strength and determination to keep fighting.

There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.

But while our characters want to believe in their free will, while they need to believe in their ability to effect change, the actual events of the story don’t necessarily support that view.

The very words that Kyle says were told to him by John Connor – the man who sent Kyle back in time. The man who only exists because Kyle fathered him in the past.

Kyle Reese, who so strongly believes there is no fate, was apparently fated to travel back in time to father the son who would later send him back in time.

And if that wasn’t enough, there is every indication that Skynet, our nefarious robot consciousness, can also trace it’s origins to 1984.

Terminator 2 argues that Skynet exists in the future only because the technology was reverse-engineered from the robot which it sent to the past.

Skynet is its own grandpa.

If the Terminator hadn’t gone back in time, if Kyle Reese hadn’t gone back in time, neither Skynet nor John Connor would ever exist.

Yet our characters cling to the notion that there is no fate.

Of course, this sort of temporal paradox isn’t enough to resign ourselves to predestination. A paradox is a paradox…it doesn’t mean that everything is meant to be.

And yet, the most important point in human history seems to be fixed.

Judgement Day, as it’s called. When the machines rise up against man and the world as we know it is destroyed.

There is no fate but what we make for ourselves, the humans say.

Judgment Day is inevitable, reply the machines.

The date may change. The details may change. But the end always comes. Fight against it as they will, it certainly seems our heroes are helpless. It certainly seems as though, indeed, Judgement Day is inevitable.

And if that fate is sealed, the details hardly matter. Perhaps we have a sort of nominal free-will; perhaps we can make a choice, but not over anything that matters.

And yet, despite this seemingly inevitable impending doom, despite the fact that evidence seems to point to significant events being preordained, the humans keep soldiering on. Keep fighting the good fight, desperate to change the outcome and convinced that there is no fate.

And perhaps there is cause for this hope. After all, while humanity fights to alter the timeline, Skynet is altering the timeline as well. Judgement Day may not be inevitable, but rather just the most probable outcome in this temporal tug-of-war. Perhaps the future can be whatever humanity can make of it.

Or, perhaps, it is fate. Perhaps whatever we do – Judgement Day is inevitable.

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The Fall

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I recently finished reading Albert Camus’ The Fall – a book I may have scared someone off of because when I was more than halfway through I still wasn’t sure what it was about.

…And I’m still not sure what it was about.

Unlike his earlier works of the Stranger and the Plague, the Fall doesn’t have much of a plot. Not really.

It’s about a man.

It’s about a man’s fall from grace – or rather, man’s fall from grace.

Or, perhaps, his rise to power.

It’s entirely unclear.

Its a book that seems, at least in English translations, to be full of backhanded jabs at Nietzsche.

We meet our hero after his fall. As he recounts the highlights of his life.

He was perfect, he says. He was happy. He pursued the highest attainable position in life, and was fulfilled by natural attributes which allowed him to achieve those ambitions.

“I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know that there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness….To tell the truth, just from being so fully and simply a man, I looked upon myself as something of a superman,” Camus writes.

He was at the height of his life, he says. But in that height it is clear he is empty.

That exemplary perfection may as well be destruction. He is self-absorbed out of self-loathing. Cavalier out of over-caring. His presumed height is actually his deepest depth.

“Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came human beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate – for them.”

And then he falls.

Through nondescript tales of an ignored slight, of a spurned lover, our hero tells of his descent into further and further rungs of despair. Mapping his story as the journey through Dante’s Inferno.

At last, he is in the final circle of hell.But there, at the center of hell, at the depth of despair, there he is saved. There he finds perfection.

And in this wretched state, Camus ends the story: But let’s not worry! It’s too late now. It will always be too late. Fortunately!

And perhaps that is why I find Camus so compelling: he is a man who insists on salvation in damnation; who finds glory in despair.

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Predictive Social Science

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One of the great sources of despair in the social sciences is the lack of predictive theories.

Physics can tell us what will happen when we throw a ball in the air, or when we drop two objects simultaneously. Why can’t the social sciences provide similar trajectories for human behavior?

Put another way by economist Richard R. Nelson, “If you can land a man on the moon, why can’t you solve the social problems of the ghetto?”

One argument is that the social sciences are quantitatively stunted compared to their natural science peers; that the science of social has not yet developed to it’s full potential.

Those feeling more kind may argue that human affairs are simply more complex than those of levers and pulleys; that civil society is infinitely more intricate than a Grand Unified Theory. It’s not so much an issue of scientific chops, but rather that there is so much more work to do to solve social problems.

I find both of these arguments rather uninspiring, but what’s notable is that they each lend themselves to the same solution: more data, more formalism, more math, more “science.”

As if predictive social science is just around the corner. As if the solution to poverty is one Einstein riding a wave of light away.

To be fair, the social sciences have made remarkable quantitative advances. In 2008, Nate Silver correctly predicted the presidential contest in 49 states, and the winner of all 35 U.S. Senate races.

Fueled by the promise of better sales and better customers, the field of predictive analyics is on the rise – helping companies better identify what their customers want. Or perhaps, more accurately, what they can get their customers to buy.

In 2012, for example, Target used their big data mining to figure out a teen girl was pregnant – before her father did. It wasn’t that complicated, as it turns out, just watch for the purchase of certain vitamins and you could have a lucrative customer for life.

But creeping on a teenager – or even predicting elections – is a far cry from solving our most pressing social problems.

Why can’t you solve the social problems of the ghetto?

Perhaps our first mistake is to think there is an analytical solution.

Bent Flyvbjerg, a Danish urban planner, argues that a predictive theory approach to the social sciences is “a wasteful dead-end.” Instead we should “promote social sciences that are strong where natural science is weak – that is, in reflexive analysis and deliberation about values and interests.”

Flyvbjerg calls this approach the phronetic model, explaining, “At the core of phronetic social science stands the Aristotelian maxim that social issues are best decided by means of the public sphere, not by science. Though imperfect, no better device than public deliberation following the rules of constitutional democracy has been arrived at for settling social issues, so far as human history can show.”

I’m not sure I agree with Flyvbjerg that “no predictive theories have been arrived at in social science, despite centuries of trying.” Surely, we have not solved poverty, but we’ve come disturbingly close to predicting the patterns of an individual.

But just because we could have predictive theories of social science does not mean that is all we should aim for.

There is important knowledge, valuable knowledge, in quantitative understandings of society. We should pursue those understandings fully, but we should not deign to stop there.

Why can’t you solve the social problems of the ghetto?

Surely, one white, male economist cannot. No matter how much data he has.

But perhaps we can.

Predictive social science, assuming it exists, is only one tool towards a solution. Without phronetic social science – dialogue and deliberation between all members of a society – it is worth nothing.

Of course, this phronetic social science ought to be informed by predictive social science, just as predictive social science ought to be informed by phronetic social science.

The two aren’t competing paths towards the same end – we must pursue them both.

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YUM: A Taste of Immigrant City

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On April 16, The Welcome Project will host its annual YUM: A Taste of Immigrant City event. I serve on the board of The Welcome Project, and am chair of the organizing committee for YUM. It’s a fun event, and I hope to see you there!

Here is the full event description:

YUM: A Taste of Immigrant City 2015
Thursday, April 16 | 7pm
Arts at the Armory, 191 Highland Avenue, Somerville, MA 02143
Tickets: $35 in Advance, $40 at the door | yumsomerville.org

Join The Welcome Project for live music and delicious food as we celebrate 25 years of building the collective power of immigrants in Somerville.The event will feature the diverse tastes of 13 immigrant-run restaurants, an exciting silent auction, and music by Son Del Sol. Additionally, the evening will recognize local leaders Franklin Dalembert, of the Somerville Haitian Coalition, and Lisa Brukilacchio, of the Somerville Community Health Agenda at CHA. Proceeds go towards the work of The Welcome Project strengthening the voices of immigrant families across the city. Individuals interested in purchasing tickets can do so by visiting www.yumsomerville.org.

Participating restaurants are:
Aguacate Verde, Mexican; Fasika, Ethiopian; Gauchao, Brazilian; La Brasa, Fusion; Masala, Indian and Nepali; Maya Sol, Mexican; The Neighborhood Restaurant, Portuguese; Rincon Mexicano, Mexican; Royal Bengal, North Indian/Bengali; Sabur, Mediterranean; Sally O’Brien’s, Irish; Tu Y Yo, Mexican; Vinny’s at Night, Italian

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Saint Patrick

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Today, the Internet seems to be full of articles titled “10 things you didn’t know about St. Patrick’s Day,” or “Everything you know about St. Patrick’s Day is wrong.”

I’m not sure who these articles are geared towards, but they seem to comprise mostly of tidbits of information which I imagine most people who actually know about St. Patrick’s Day already know.

To be fair, there are plenty of people who don’t know anything about St. Patrick’s Day – which is perfectly fine. It is, after all, a somewhat obscure Catholic holiday primarily popularized in the United States.

Albeit among the more popular Saint’s Days, Saint Patrick’s Day isn’t particularly more notable than, say, St. Brigid’s Day.

St. Brigid, if you didn’t know, is another patron saint of Ireland. Sharing a name with the Celtic goddess Brigid, St. Brigid’s Day is February 1, marking the beginning of spring. In another not-coincidence, St. Brigid’s Day corresponds to an important Celtic cross-quarter holiday: Imbolic…which marks the beginning of spring.

In my matriarchal family, St. Brigid always seemed arguably more important – we didn’t celebrate St. Brigid’s Day, but we did have a St. Brigid’s cross – but somehow, nationally, the male St. Patrick seems to get all the glory.

It’s a complicated holiday to celebrate, though.

Saint Patrick is a patron saint of Ireland because he was one of the leading forces in Christianizing the Celtic nations.

He used the three-leaf clover – the Shamrock – to explain Catholicism’s trinity. He used the Celtic pentagram to describe the five wounds of Christ. Like other missionaries of his day, he took pagan customs and symbols and wielded them for his Christian cause.

Famously, St. Patrick “drove all the snakes from Ireland” – a particularly miraculous feat since the isle didn’t have snakes to begin with.

Or could it be, as some argue, that “snakes” is just a metaphor for driving out “the old, evil, pagan ways out of Ireland”?

Well, that’s nice.

St. Patrick’s Day isn’t just a day where we stereotype the Irish as drunkards and all get to be “Irish for a day.”

It’s a day of history – about loss and pain, about new beginnings and a complicated past.

We raise a pint to hope for the future and to properly mourn the past. We raise a pint because maybe that’s all there is in this life. We raise a pint, indeed.

Eat, drink, and be merry – for tomorrow we may die.

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Outliers

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“Big data” is all the rage.

As if all the knowledge of the universe is somehow encoded there, just waiting to be mapped like the genome.

Don’t get me wrong, big data is very exciting. Our social science models are more accurate, our marketing more creepy. Big data is helping us understand the world just a little bit better. And that is fantastic.

But perhaps there’s something more valuable to be gleaned from all this big data.
As Brooke Foucault Welles, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern, argues, “honoring the experiences of extreme statistical minorities represents one of Big Data’s most exciting scientific possibilities.”

At last we have datasets large enough to capture the “outlier” experience, large enough to truly explore and understand the “outlier” experience.

Why is this important?

As Welles describes:

When women and minorities are excluded as subjects of basic social science research, there is a tenancy to identify majoring experiences as “normal,” and discuss minority experiences in terms of how they deviate from those norms. In doing so, women, minorities, and the statistically underrepresented are problematically written into the margins of social science, discussed only in terms of their differences, or else excluded altogether.

There has been much coverage of how medical trials are largely unrepresentative of women – with one study finding less than one-quarter of all patients enrolled in 46 examined clinical trials were women.

This gender bias has been shown to be detrimental, with Anaesthetist Anita Holdcroft arguing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, that the “evidence basis of medicine may be fundamentally flawed because there is an ongoing failure of research tools to include sex differences in study design and analysis.”

We should insist on parity in medical research and we should settle for nothing else when it comes to the social sciences.

People who deviate from the so-called norm – whether women, people of color, or just those that experience the world differently – these people aren’t outliers. They aren’t anomalies to be polished away from immaculate datasets.

They are the rare pearls you can only find by looking.

And “big data” provides an emerging venue for finding them.

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Network Science

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I am thrilled to share that I’ve been accepted into Northeastern’s Network Science Ph.D. program, and I will begin there full-time this fall.

As the website describes, this “is a new interdisciplinary program that provides the tools and concepts for understanding the structure and dynamics of networks across diverse domains, such as human behavior, socio-technical infrastructures, or biological agents.”

Networks can be seen and understood in a range of different settings. There’s the network of your Facebook friends, and the network of roads that weave through your town. Networks can be used to understand the spread of disease, the narrative of a story, the development of professional knowledge, or the process of a person’s moral reasoning.

I plan to apply Network Science specifically to political science questions. I’m interested in understanding how individuals interact through a network lens; how institutions interact; how individuals in institutions interact; how local, regional, national, and global levels interact –

I could go on.

I’ve been interested in these questions for a long time. I suppose one of the reasons I’ve pursued an interdisciplinary background – my Bachelor’s is in physics and Japanese, my Master’s in marketing – is because no single field seemed to answer all these questions. Or fully seek to address them.

Most disciplines seem to focus on just one way of looking at the world.

As an undergraduate, my Sociology 101 professor said that sociology is like trying to understand the world by looking down on a bustling street. A psychologist watches individuals, a sociologist watches the crowd.

I’m not sure whether others would agree with that assessment, but it always seemed an excellent argument for why psychologists and sociologists ought not to be siloed.

Both perspectives are crucial.

To me, network science is a step back from that level. It’s about seeking understanding both on an individual and collective level. Seeing how things fit together, how they are connected or not connected. Zooming in to a micro level and zooming out to a macro level.

One could easily argue that this approach is still too limiting. In her recent book, Forms, Caroline Levine uses the techniques of literary analysis to argue that the world can be understood through the colliding of different forms, namely: whole, rhythm, hierarchy, and network. So perhaps “networks” are but one of many forms which can help us understand the world.

But I, at least for the time being, think of all those forms in network terms and I’m eager to explore their colliding.

When you slam particles together, surprising things emerge. And when networks collide the result is no less surprising.

So this is a real thing that is happening. And I’m thrilled and humbled to have the opportunity to explore these questions.

And over the next five years, you all can come along for the ride.

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50 Years from Selma

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Just over 50 years ago, a group of 600 civil rights activists were gassed and beaten during a march from Selma to Montgomery.

Where have we gone since then?

John Lewis, who co-chaired the march as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), is now a Congressman for Georgia’s 5th congressional district.

So, there’s that.

Lewis was actually my commencement speaker when I finished my Masters at Emerson college.

I’m pretty sure most people didn’t know who he was.

Some congressman or something?

Meanwhile in Oklahoma, members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternity were videotaped jovially singing a shockingly racist song.

Every time I hear SAE officials fervently claim that they denounce such acts, I imagine the follow up to be, “We don’t support this behavior – students shouldn’t be videotaped expressing such things!”

After all, everyone knows you should keep your racist thoughts inside your own head. Letting them out, perhaps, only in the comfort of your own home while wearing a smoking jacket in your study.

Ever since they did away with Whites Only clubs, no public place is safe any more.

….We did do away with those clubs, didn’t we?

I sure hope so, but I wouldn’t be surprised to stumble upon one.

Not in name, of course, but in practice. An establishment with just the right price and just the right attitude to keep unfavorables away. If you know what I mean.

So that’s where we’ve come since Selma.

Someone told me this morning that in the last 40 years, college graduation rates for the lowest income bracket has gone up 2%. From 7% to 9%.

Over those same 40 years, graduation rates for the top income bracket has gone up 20%. From 20% to 40%.

So that’s where we’ve come since Selma.

I wasn’t around in 1965 so I can’t speak to what racism was like then.

I sure hope it’s gotten better.

But I do know it’s gotten more proper.

We – as white society generally – have learned that you can’t be videotaping singing about lynchings and dropping the n-word. That’s not acceptable at all.

In polite society, we just find reasons – simple, explainable, non-racist reasons why the white people are always on top and the black people are always behind.

I recently heard a white woman cut a black woman off mid-sentence. “I don’t mean to interrupt you,” she said…as she continued interrupting.

So that’s where we’ve come since Selma.

I suppose a conversation slight isn’t so bad in the grand scheme of things. I’ve been slighted all time – alas, often by men. But I wondered what was happening in each woman’s head – was I the only one wondering how race was part of the dynamic?

Our country is built on black bodies. Black bodies established our economy, and black bodies ripen our prisons.

It’s not that our society is racist – heavens no, we did away with that in Selma – its just that we don’t have good schools to educate black students, we don’t have kind words to welcome black views, we don’t have the capacity to deal with this messy knot of poverty and violence.

It’s not that we’re racist, we just shoot unarmed black men in the street.

So, that’s where we’ve come since Selma.

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History is Not Static

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I had the pleasure this morning of attending the inaugural event of the “Tisch Talks in the Humanities,” an effort in the public humanities which seeks to explore areas of mutual interest to the humanities and the public sphere.

This morning’s talk, Source @Sourcing, featured the work of two Tufts faculty members: Marie-Claire Beaulieu, Assistant Professor, Department of Classics and Jennifer Eyl, Assistant Professor, Department of Religion.

While their work covers different spheres, a common theme emerged from the two talks: ancient text aren’t as static as you might think.

In someways, this is not so surprising – how many times have you heard history conveniently edited as someone earnestly insists, but marriage has always been a monogamous relationship between a man and a woman!

That’s not really true, but it feels like history anyway.

What’s interesting from a classicists perspective is that this processes of reinterpreting is constantly happening – and is constantly being framed, not as an adaptation of the past, but a simple articulation of it.

For example, Eyl, who has studied the writings of the Apostle Paul and who is launching an initiative exploring the language of the Old Testament, pointed out that the idea of “Original Sin” was an invention of Augustine. That understanding is central to how we understand Christianity today, but at the time, it was a reinterpretation of Genesis.

Similarly, in early Biblical writings you won’t find references to Christians as a group – it was only after Christianity grew that the idea of Christians as a collective whole emerged.

But translations of early texts into modern English, bring all these years of subtle understanding and reinterpretation with them.

Beaulieu, meanwhile, shared her work with Tufts’ Project Perseus Digital Library. A rich, annotated, open sources collection of texts, Perseus has many cool features – including the ability to compare the evolution of texts over time.

For example, one Latin text told the first person narrative of a monk who traveled to China. A French translation of that text – framing itself as true to the source material – shifted the story to third person, adjusted some of the details, and added some linguistical flourishes.

That’s not to say the author of the French version intentional altered the translation, but the reality is that as a text goes through translations over time, it is naturally reinterpreted over time, as new authors read through the lens of the sensibilities of the day.

But what is the point of all this?

Well, I suppose, while it’s common to remember that “history is told by the winners,” I think it is also helpful to remember that history is always told by modernity.

In a very literal sense, what happened in the past is static in the past, but in a more practical sense – history is not static. What happened in the past is constantly being reimagined, reinterpreted, and reframed.

We talk about English as a “living language.” Well, I suppose, ideas are growing too. And they constantly shift to fit the needs of the day.

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Never Slight the Stage Hands

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Among the many important life lessons my father taught me was to never piss off the stage hands – or really anyone on crew. Lights. Sound. You don’t want to mess with any of that.

This is common advice in the theater, where over-privileged actors have a tendency to incite the ire of the people who actually get stuff done.

That is, some actors make the mistake of thinking the show is all about them. Confident of their right to do whatever they want, they abuse those around them – most notably those at the bottom of the totem poll. The stage hands.

My father had a whole host of stories about actors who were upstaged by slighted stage crew.

My favorite was about an actor playing Martin Luther. When his character received an edict from the Pope condemning his actions, he was supposed to defiantly post the (actually blank) scroll to his church’s door. This all went as planned until, stirred by the actor’s continual mistreatment of the crew…there began to be problems with his props.

One night, as he was about to reveal the typically blank scroll to the audience, the actor was surprised to find himself instead confronted by a simple message:

“F*** you. – The Pope.”

Well, it was written somewhat more colorfully than I’ve put it here.

The actor was able to recover with some dignity – tearing the scroll to shreds rather than revealing it to the audience. But let that be a lesson to you: Never mess with the stage hands.

Of course, the power of vindictiveness ought not to be the thing that keeps you in check.

It is true that you shouldn’t mess with the stage hands because they can mess with you better, but the real lesson was deeper than that.

Actors get all the credit. They get the fame and the glory. But the crew – they’re the ones who deserve the real respect.

They don’t get rich and they don’t get famous, but they get everything done.

No matter who you think you are, you shouldn’t disrespect that.

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