We recently stumbled upon this short post by Maria Popova (“How to criticize with kindness”) explaining philosopher Daniel Dennett’s “four rules” of fair-minded, scholarly criticism. In brief, before you begin to refute or criticize someone else’s ideas, you should do three things first:
Attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”
List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
Mention anything you have learned from your target.
[Criticize all you want now.]
In the alternative, here is a much more crisp and concise “Twitter-style” version of these same rules, courtesy of “agmaster” via reddit:
Or, to be more precise, how couples who publish their wedding announcements in the New York Times meet. Data scientist Todd W. Schneider built a special-purpose website called Wedding Crunchers that analyzes wedding announcements published in the Sunday Times. His data set now includes more than 63,000 wedding announcements dating back to 1981. Here, however, via Vox, is a smaller breakdown based on the most recent 702 wedding announcements published in the N.Y. Times (since August 23, 2015):
“Napster was the ultimate geek banner, a battle that had been fought by hackers on the biggest stage of all. Ultimately, the hackers had lost, but … it was still the biggest hack in history.”–Ben Mezrich, Accidental Billionaires (Ch. 18)
We are going to focus on Napster in our next class, and we are going to re-enact a preliminary injunction hearing in the case of Metallica v. Napster. In that case, the rock band Metallica sued Napster for copyright infringement, in essence, accusing Napster of allowing its users to steal Metallica’s music. Accordingly, we are going to need four student-volunteers for this activity:
(1) Two students will represent the plaintiff, the rock band Metallica, and so your side will argue why Napster’s file-sharing system is illegal (copyright infringement) and why your client is entitled to an injunction.
(2) The other two students will represent the defendant, the peer-to-peer file-sharing website Napster. Your side will argue why Napster’s file-sharing system constitutes “fair use” under federal copyright law.
Here is some background: Before Sean Parker discovered Facebook, he co-founded a company called Napster, a peer-to-peer file-sharing website that allowed users to share MP3 music files with each other (see image below, courtesy of the website “How Stuff Works”). At the time (1999-2001), Napster was huge. According to Wikipedia, for example, “verified Napster use peaked with 26.4 million users worldwide in February 2001.” By the way, Metallica wasn’t the only plaintiff who sued Napster. The powerful Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) also brought a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against Napster in December 1999, and the RIAA eventually persuaded a court to issue an injunction shutting down the website … But did the court make the correct decision?
Critical thinking question: How is a website like YouTube any different than the old Napster?
“This wasn’t right, damn it. This wasn’t fair.” –Quote attributed to one of the Winklevoss twins in Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires.
In our next lecture, we are going to re-enact another pivotal scene from the film “The Social Network” (see the YouTube clip posted below), a scene based on chapter 16 of the bestseller The Accidental Billionaires. (Cf. the fascinating prologue in Aaron Greenspan’s book Authoritas (ThinkPress, 2008), a memoir of his years at Harvard.) This scene takes place in the spring of 2004 in the office of Larry Summers, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary and distinguished economist who was the president of Harvard University at the time. In summary, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss arrange a meeting with the president of Harvard (in real life, they waited in line like everyone else to meet Dr Summers during his monthly office hours), and they are going to accuse a fellow student (sophomore Mark Zuckerberg) of violating Harvard’s Honor Code, which reads as follows:
Members of the Harvard College community commit themselves to producing academic work of integrity – that is, work that adheres to the scholarly and intellectual standards of accurate attribution of sources, appropriate collection and use of data, and transparent acknowledgement of the contribution of others to their ideas, discoveries, interpretations, and conclusions. Cheating on exams or problem sets, plagiarizing or misrepresenting the ideas or language of someone else as one’s own, falsifying data, or any other instance of academic dishonesty violates the standards of our community, as well as the standards of the wider world of learning and affairs.
We will thus need three students to re-enact this pivotal scene: one to play the role of President Summers and two to play the roles of Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. In the meantime, please think about the following three questions:
1. In your opinion, are the twins right? Did Zuckerberg violate the Honor Code?
2. Does Harvard have “jurisdiction” (i.e. legal authority) to investigate this alleged breach of the university’s honor code?
3. If this dispute is not a matter under Harvard’s jurisdiction, then what court would have jurisdiction to hear the Winklevoss’s allegations, a State court of general jurisdiction or an Article III federal tribunal?
In addition to the technical legal issue of “subject-matter jurisdiction” (i.e. the legal authority of a court to hear a case), we will also discuss the fundamental issue of personal ethics. Simply put, how do you decide between right and wrong?
As our friends and fellow “forty-something” bloggers at Cheap Talk like to point out, prisoner dilemmas are everywhere. Suppose you are a junior manager at a large Fortune 500 corporation or a junior attorney/accountant at a firm. Your boss sends you an email on a Saturday. Monday is a national holiday. Do you respond immediately, or do you wait until Tuesday morning to reply? We suspect that the answer to this question depends on whether you think your boss has also sent emails out to any of your peers. If you wait until Tuesday to reply to your boss’s email, while your peers respond immediately to theirs, you look bad to your boss. If, however, your peers decide to wait until Tuesday to reply, then you should reply right away to your boss, since you will now look good. In other words, in the parlance of game theory, you should “defect” and respond immediately to emails from your boss in either case, regardless what your peers do.
Two of our favorite public intellectuals on the Internet (is that an oxymoron?) are Nate Silver (fivethirtyeight) and Tyler Cowen (marginalrevolution). We admire Professor Cowen because he is one of the few economists interested in human nature and culture. He teaches a course in “Law & Literature” and is a voracious reader of Latin American literature. (We studied Latin lit in college, and our academic field is law.) We admire Nate Silver because he has almost single-handedly dismantled the pernicious media monopoly of partisan political commentators or “pundits” in traditional print and TV media. We now admire Silver for his intellectual honesty. Recently, he wrote up a mea culpa titled “How I acted like a pundit and screwed up on Donald Trump“; here is an excerpt (emphasis added; footnote omitted):
Without having a model, I found, I was subject to a lot of the same biases as the pundits I usually criticize. In particular, I got anchored on my initial forecast and was slow to update my priors in the face of new data. And I found myself selectively interpreting the evidence and engaging in some lazy reasoning. Another way to put it is that a model gives you discipline, and discipline is a valuable resource when everyone is losing their mind in the midst of a campaign.
Then there is Tyler Cowen’s highly speculative, over-generalized, and (frankly) insulting cultural explanation of the rise of Trump titled “What the hell is going on?“; here is an excerpt (emphasis and ellipsis in the original):
The contemporary world is not very well built for a large chunk of males. The nature of current service jobs, coddled class time and homework-intensive schooling, a feminized culture allergic to most forms of violence, post-feminist gender relations, and egalitarian semi-cosmopolitanism just don’t sit well with many…what shall I call them? Brutes? Quite simply, there are many people who don’t like it when the world becomes nicer. They do less well with nice. And they respond by in turn behaving less nicely, if only in their voting behavior and perhaps their internet harassment as well.
Nice try, Tyler … After all, we understand academics are supposed to speculate about the nature of the world, but one’s speculations should at the very least be insightful and internally consistent. The problem with Professor Cowen’s “brutes” argument is that it is neither. If the world really is such a “nicer” place (how do we measure “niceness,” by the way?), why are so many car bombs going off in the Middle East and commercial planes getting blown up?
Vanessa Friedman has written a fascinating short essay titled “The End of the Office Dress Code.” In addition to her insightful interview of Susan Scafidi, a law professor at Fordham University and director of the Fashion Law Institute, Ms Friedman raises many interesting questions about the legality of dress codes at work. She also raises deeper questions about the meaning of such vague terms as “professional” or “business casual,” like this one:
One person’s “appropriate” can easily be another’s “disgraceful,” and words like “professional,” when used to describe dress requirements, can seem so vague as to be almost meaningless. Kanye West wearing ripped jeans and a jeweled Balmain jacket at the Met Gala: cool or rude? Julia Roberts at the premiere of “Money Monster” at Cannes this year in bare feet: red carpet pioneer or a step too far?
