Undeterred: A Critique of a Book About Life Without Free Will

Introduction

Is it responsible to review a book you haven’t even fully read? Well, here’s a thought experiment: suppose somebody came out with a new book about UFOs and in the introduction mentioned casually, “I never go UFO hunting without dropping acid first.” You’d have a pretty good justification to dismiss the book without even going out and buying it, right? Of course, bothering to review it would seem beside the point … but what if it were an “instant New York Times bestseller”? And what if you had reason to believe that thousands of otherwise appropriately skeptical people might somehow embrace the book? What if your family members decided that the denial of UFOs was a NASA conspiracy, and resolved to start dropping acid regularly? Wouldn’t you want to weigh in?

Something kind of like this happened a dozen years ago with Amy Chua’s irresponsible and stupid book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. I wrote a blog post criticizing her book without having read it—but I did read the excerpt of it in the New York Times which I felt was enough. If Chua’s own distillation has enough wrong with it to fundamentally undermine her argument, do we need to read the full book? (To make an analogy, if you’re at a restaurant and your appetizer has a cockroach in it, do you need to stay through the entrée and dessert to conclude the restaurant has a problem?) Bestselling books in this vein have a way of smearing their overall message across the zeitgeist, whether or not people engage with the source material. For example, my wife, who also didn’t read Chua’s book, was somewhat swept up in the chatter around it and started wondering aloud if we needed to start getting all tiger mother on our kids’ asses. At that point I felt the need to stand up and say something.

I’m feeling that again now about Robert Sapolsky’s new “instant bestseller,” Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. I read two profiles of Sapolsky, which struck a nerve, and then I waded through enough of his book to take its measure. The book is total drivel, and yet it’s clearly making a splash … almost as though people are taking Sapolsky seriously.

In this post, I will delve into my issues with the book: not just that it’s poorly written and reasoned, but why I disagree with its very ambition. This examination will involve a lot of logic (something Sapolsky occasionally dabbles in between bouts of self indulgent blathering). But first, just as a warm-up and for your amusement, I’ll start with an irresponsible ad hominem attack against him, since this blog prioritizes entertainment over utility.

Irresponsible ad hominem attack

Just look at that picture above, a drawing my daughter did of the photo accompanying the Sapolsky profile in the New York Times. Can’t you just imagine this guy cornering you at a cocktail party and holding forth? I wonder how that beard came to be. It could be he just has a weak chin, which would make his beard a better idea than his new book, but probably the superabundant facial hair is more about the intellectual air he hopes to achieve. I can picture him looking in the mirror thinking, “Would I look more like a guru if I had a big, fluffy grey beard? Or would I just look like Santa? How can I look more like Karl Marx?” Maybe that’s why he also has the really long hair. Now, let me be clear, I think long hair on a dude is totally fine, when he’s young. But an ageing adult needs to have a little decorum. I mean, he’s got fricking ringlets! Doe he use product in his hair? And check out the odd difference in coloration between his beard and his hair … makes me wonder if he actually dyes it. If so, how vain!

Also note his wise, world-weary expression … does he always look like that, or only when he’s posing for a photo that will appear in the New York Times? Of course, it could be the photographer saying, “Okay, that’s good, but could you try to look more contemplative, maybe a little world-weary? Could we get, you know, a little more guru going here?” In that case Sapolsky shouldn’t have gone along with it. He should have just smiled naturally, because he gets to be in the Times and that’s a pretty big deal. But of course he needs to present this persona, so he stares gloomily and intellectually off into the distance, little realizing that he does not, cannot convey an air of gravitas when he’s wearing plastic clogs. With white socks. Sure, I have flip-flops I wear around the house, but for the Times I would dress up a bit, show a little respect. Look, Sapolsky, you might hang around college kids but that doesn’t make you hip or cool. You’re trying to shape widespread public perception of deep philosophical matters … try to be a grown-up, would you please?

One more heads-up

Full disclosure: I hold free will to be a capacity people should cherish, and to deny or even doubt its existence is to threaten our ability to seize it. That is to say, anybody’s effort to discredit the existence of free will invokes my ire on principle. (As I describe here, I frequently bring unnecessary physical suffering upon myself simply to prove, to myself, that I have free will.) So to be perfectly candid, Sapolsky’s very intent (combined with his douche-y beard, vainglorious long hair, and Stanford pedigree) made we want to hate him right off. Nevertheless, as somebody truly interested in this topic (having read a number of books on existential philosophy), I was willing to read what Sapolsky has to say, even after reading the profile of him in the New York Times and a critique of his book in the New Yorker, both of which only deepened my sense that he’s a tool.

Alas, his book is really popular around here so I couldn’t get it from the library. (There are 35 holds ahead of me.) I don’t like to buy a book unless I’m pretty convinced it’ll be good. Sometimes all this takes is a paragraph ... if the opening to a book is good enough, I will take a gamble on that alone. If a book doesn’t start off great, but I still think it may have promise, I’ll read a few of the free sample pages Amazon serves up. In the case of Determined, Amazon was unusually generous, and for the first time ever I found myself longing for the end of the free pages. The excerpt of this poorly written, poorly reasoned tract just went on and on, until—32 excruciating pages in—Amazon finally cut me off. Now, based on the two profiles and the pages I’ve read, I’m prepared to say I’ve revised my initial opinion (that Sarposky is a tool) to more precisely and accurately state that I find him a self-indulgent, glib, preening old fool whose brazen dismissal of a vast body of thought going back hundreds of years is the height of arrogance. There’s no point trying to pretend this blog post is an exploration … it’s a take-down.

(Note that I’m not being ageist here. I wrote “preening old fool” because it’s sad how foolish Sapolsky still is despite the many years he’s had available to him to have gained wisdom … years that he has apparently squandered.)

Thirty-two excruciating pages

Right off the bat, I have an issue with the title: Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. What’s with “a science”? Science isn’t supposed to be a realm where everybody gets to have his own version, his own private belief system. It’s about building consensus, and improving our understanding in this way. A scientist investigates, builds a hypothesis, proves it in the lab, and then other scientists attempt to recreate the experiment and either confirm or deny the findings. That’s why the normal phrase is “the science of,” not “a science of.” Contrast this to Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. “An inquiry” makes more sense: you would never have “the inquiry” since the number of inquiries into a realm as general and squishy as “values” is infinite. But science is supposed to be the leading edge of the best effort of scientists to build a common, tangible understanding of how the world works, based on experiments that produce data, which describe and predict behaviors and other demonstrable phenomena. The phrase “a science” suggests that Sapolsky doesn’t fully support the collaborative mission that science is supposed to have.

Rather than illustrating any specific line of scientific examination, Sapolsky seems to use his reputation and authority as a biologist and neuroscientist as a flag that he waves. His grand assertions really beg the question. For example: “Once you work with the notion that every aspect of behavior has deterministic, prior causes, you observe a behavior and can answer why it occurred: as just noted, because of the action of neurons in this or that part of your brain in the preceding second.” Here he includes a footnote directing the reader to an introduction to neuroscience that he includes as an appendix (which presumably we’ll ignore other than as a rubber stamp of his authority, or else it wouldn’t be an appendix) and to another book he wrote on neuroscience that he warns us is “agonizingly long.” It’s as though he’s saying, “Yeah, there’s all this science behind understanding behavior but it’s really complicated, so just take my word for it.”

But even beyond how complex this science might be, let’s back up a second: he’s asserting that we can explain any behavior in terms of deterministic, prior causes having to do with brain neurons in the preceding second. Seriously? We could actually catalog and describe all these neural events leading to the behavior? How could we possibly chase them all down? But it gets worse: he goes on to say that those neurons were activated in the minutes before the behavior, and that the behavior was also influenced by hormones from hours to days before that, and that the function of those neurons was influenced by experience and environment in the preceding months to years, and by the person’s development in the womb and what his or her pregnant mother was going through, and further by culture that has evolved over decades, even centuries. So really, there’s no way we’re actually “answering why the behavior occurred,” because who has data going back that far? It’s only a theoretical explanation.

In terms of tying a behavior to past events, neurological and circumstantial, I can suggest a simple scenario that defies the idea. Have you ever been on the fence about an action you had to take, and decided to flip a coin in order to decide? I think plenty of people do this, from time to time. Our willingness to base an action on the outcome of a flipped coin flies in the face of determinism. We have decided in advance to act based on the random outcome of this coin-flip, thus the behavior that follows this flip cannot be predetermined because until that coin is flipped, there is/are no predictive, deterministic preceding event(s). Since the result of the coin flip is random, one can’t go back and trace the resulting behavior to anything except the decision of the coin-flipper to base his or her next decision on heads vs. tails. How is that not freedom?

Sapolksy doesn’t seem to begin with data and use it to lead us towards a conclusion; rather, he starts with an attractive notion to get our buy-in, so that perhaps so we’ll go easy on him when he builds his case. At the end of his first chapter he asks us to imagine a college graduation ceremony with all the happy students and their proud families milling about, and then draws our attention to a (hypothetical) garbage collector in the back. He asks us to consider the background of this garbage collector compared to that of the graduates. He declares, “Trade every factor over which they had no control, and you will switch who would be in the graduation robe and who would be hauling garbage cans. This is what I mean by determinism.”

What a smarmy, smurfy load of shit. Yeah, being born to college graduates in a wholesome community surely helps a person’s educational prospects, but it doesn’t determine how far they get. It just changes the odds a bit. Both my parents went to Berkeley; my dad earned a Ph.D.; one of my brothers—though lucky enough to grow up in one of the best school districts in the nation—dropped out of high school. Meanwhile, the rapper Lil Wayne (as he describes in this interview) was raised in a school district so dangerous that his mom, upon seeing him packing a gun in his backpack before heading to class, implored him to drop out, which he then did. And yet, Lil Wayne (despite the distraction of a platinum-selling music career) earned his GED and later enrolled at the University of Houston. So there are two counterexamples, right off the top of my head. Sapolsky’s little anecdote doesn’t effectively convey the gist of determinism. It’s sentimental, simplistic, and twee.

This backwards-looking attempt at establishing causality breaks down so easily upon close inspection. How is it not free will that my brother Geoff moved to the Netherlands? Is it fair to say that, having been born to the parents that he was, with the genes that he had, developing as a fetus in the natal environment that he did, growing up in the community that he did, and attending the college that he did, there was no other possible outcome than relocating to Europe? What about his identical twin brother, who—despite having the same parents, the same genes, the same fetal environment, the same community, the same friends, and the same (initial) college—stayed on this continent? Shouldn’t these two have been deterministically pushed into the same inevitable decision about where to put down roots?

But let’s assume that a person’s behavior could be tied to a pattern of neuron activity and historical factors. How would the scientist determine, much less prove, causality that is so airtight as to deny the possibility of free will? The perfect test would be if the scientist could then use his understanding of the precise mechanism of that behavior to make predictions about future behaviors as well. If we’re confident we understand exactly why that man pulled that trigger, shouldn’t we know his next move?

The last time I checked, biologists haven’t proven to be great prognosticators of human behavior. (Business people have done okay here, in terms of understanding basic principles such as are used in advertising, but they don’t pretend to be scientists.) Doesn’t it seem like Sapolsky is overestimating what science can do for his thesis? To put it another way, if Sapolsky really thinks there is a solid scientific basis to his refutation of free will, why shouldn’t his scientific findings be subject to peer review instead of just published to a lay audience as a general interest book?

Actually, from what I can tell, Sapolsky didn’t even do much of his own research for this book; it’s more of a survey of the existing stuff. Well … some of it. Which brings us to an overarching failure of logic in Sapolsky’s approach. He declares in his first chapter that to accomplish his goal of convincing the reader there is no free will, he’ll “look at the way smart, nuanced thinkers argue for free will, from the perspectives of philosophy, legal thought, psychology, and neuroscience. I’ll be trying to present their views to the best of my ability, and to then explain why I think they are all mistaken.” Um ... what? He’s going to discredit everyone who disagrees with him? Sure, his book is 528 pages long, but how is he going to evaluate even a moderately representative sample of the existing literature across these four gigantic fields? To be more honest he’d have to write, “I’m going to look at the way a VANISHINGLY SMALL PROPORTION of smart, nuanced (BUT NOT TOO SMART OR NUANCED SINCE I’VE CHOSEN TO INCLUDE ONLY THE ONES I THINK ARE WRONG) thinkers to explain why I think THIS TINY SAMPLING of them are all mistaken.” His approach only makes sense if he could refute all the great thinkers who’ve studied this question, which is of course impossible: it’s like proving a negative.

So, he digs himself in pretty deep with his stated intention to base his argument on a glancing review of these four realms while pretending that’s sufficient. Then, although he acknowledges that individual scientific studies can’t disprove free will, he goes on to say, “But—and this is the incredibly important point—put all the scientific results together, from all the relevant scientific disciplines, and there’s no room for free will” (italics his). Is he really purporting to have done this? He sure hasn’t presented the findings of such a comprehensive effort, which is no surprise because it would be simply impossible. ALL? ALL SCIENTIFIC RESULTS? There’s no way. Again, what he’s really asserting is more hypothetical; it’s like he’s saying, “I’ll bet if you looked at all the scientific results you’d find they’d collectively deny free will. In fact I’m sure of it. Just take my word for it.”

If it seems like I’m accusing Sapolsky of essentially cherry-picking his evidence: yes, I am. Consider that, as he willingly admits (in both profiles I’ve read of him), he has denied the existence of free will since he was thirteen years old: that is, since before he was educated and before his brain had even fully formed. So although he’s using biology and neurology to bolster his decades-old belief, he’s not doing so in the responsible manner of a scientist exploring the matter—he began his research with his mind already made up. It looks to me like a classic example of confirmation bias.

After his first chapter, which defines a lot of terms and explains his approach, Sapolsky’s book gets increasingly boring and pointless. He starts his second chapter with an exposition of one of the methodological approaches scientists have taken, through various studies, to evaluate the existence of free will. After a brief outline of this approach, Sapolsky concludes, “I think that at the end of the day, these studies are irrelevant.” Why, then, does he spend the next ten pages (well, at least ten—at this point the Amazon sample mercifully ran out) describing one such study in excruciating detail? How does simply knocking down other people’s work support his own improbable conclusion? (It’s like two economists discrediting a typewriter keyboard layout by basing their findings on a single previous study conducted about it, as I describe here.) I’m aghast at what passes for scholarship, and that this book is popular. Perhaps it’s just like the Tiger Mother book … it’ll be something to talk about at cocktail parties for a while because it’s timely, and then it will sink out of sight forever.

Beyond his poor execution

As described above, one of Sapolsky’s stated goals is “to convince you that there is no free will.” His second stated goal is “to take seriously all the implications of there being no free will.” With this second goal he seems to focus on whether or not we can hold people morally responsible for their behavior in the absence of free will. He says free-will skeptics (like himself) are “less punitive and more forgiving.” This seems to be at the heart of why, and perhaps how, he was able to publish this book: he’s positioning himself and his mission as a way to be a kinder and more liberal person, and as readers we can (choose to!) join him. Don’t hate the guy who broke into your car, he implies, because it wasn’t really him, he didn’t mean to do it, it was just the desperate position society put him in. So we’re sort of coaxed (or bullied) into accepting Sapolsky’s position so we don’t come off like the heartless old-school moralists who would throw a homeless man in prison for stealing loaf of bread.

The trouble is, such sentimental appeals cannot and should not stand in place of actual intellectual rigor. The New Yorker writer Nikhil Krishnan, in his review of Determined, questions Sapolsky’s assertion that free-will skeptics are less punitive and more forgiving:

But he can’t really have meant that... If free-will skepticism means never having to say you’re sorry, then it also means never being forgiven. Forgiveness is, as much as vengeance, a concept that can be applied only from within the first-person point of view. Sapolsky’s ethic of forgiveness demands that we retain something of our old-fashioned belief in holding one another responsible.

Ah, but I’m delving again into the failure of Sapolsky’s argument (because it’s just so easy!) when I’ve been trying to get into something else: the ramifications of accepting his ideas and putting them into practice.

My biggest issue with Sapolsky’s book is that if we truly embrace his goals of 1) agreeing there is no free will, and 2) living according to this belief, we are denying the possibility of making better choices. And yet isn’t making better choices the noble purpose of some of our most important human behaviors? Think of education, counseling, coaching, even self-reflection. If our every move has already been decided, what’s the point in trying to be better, by trying to choose better?

If we want to advance the argument that humans are slaves to our brain chemistry, it seems like nicotine addiction would be the ideal poster child. This NIH report, describing how nicotine activates reward centers, and how it rewires the brain of the addict, should be right up any neuroscientist’s alley:

Nicotine causes the release of dopamine in the mesolimbic area, the corpus striatum, and the frontal cortex. Of particular importance are the dopaminergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area of the midbrain, and the release of dopamine in the shell of the nucleus accumbens, as this pathway appears to be critical in drug-induced reward… Likewise, nicotine withdrawal is associated with significant increases in intracranial self-stimulation reward threshold, consistent with deficient dopamine release and reduced reward. The decrease in brain reward function experienced during nicotine withdrawal is an essential component of nicotine addiction and a key barrier to abstinence.

The nicotine addict, then, would seem to be a classic case of somebody with no free will. As the same NIH report states, “Approximately 80% of smokers who attempt to quit on their own relapse within the first month of abstinence, and only approximately 3% remain abstinent at six months.” And yet, my brother—who had smoked for over forty years—decided exactly a year ago that he had to quit, and he did. For this to happen, he had to believe that he could … that he could fly in the face of statistics and his own fraught history with tobacco. But in Sapolsky’s view, my brother doesn’t get any credit for his resolve and tenacity—that is, for deciding enough was enough. Are we to believe Sapolsky that for my brother to quit smoking was predetermined somehow, just like taking up the nasty habit in the first place (even though he had the same parents I did, and grew up in the same health-crazed community)? So my brother’s behavior was all preordained, from the forty-year chemical addiction to the bold refusal to put up with even one more day of it? Seriously?

What if Sapolsky’s book had come out a year ago and my brother read it, decided he had no free will, decided to be more compassionate with himself because it wasn’t his fault he was a smoker, that he had no say in the matter, and that his lungs were already doomed based on neurons, environment, and history? Would he have taken that huge step of deciding (or, fine, pretending to decide) to quit?

Sapolsky seems to be trying to couch his worldview in being fairer: in not holding criminals responsible for their crime, and in not praising this or that lucky guy for his achievement. But we don’t need to deny the existence of free will to be more fair. We can acknowledge that a person choosing between hunger and theft was dealt, by society and history, a worse hand than the guy choosing between a savings account and a mutual fund. The world isn’t fair … we get it. But why not focus more on what all of us humans can choose (or seem to choose) to do, like taking better care of our bodies, our minds, our families? Why not behave as though we can improve, even if—worst case and unbeknownst to us—our free will is just a placebo? I mean, who cares … besides the preening, self-aggrandizing academic who needs to publish?

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From the Archives - Journal for my Younger Daughter

Introduction

Around the time Lindsay, my second daughter, was born, I started keeping a journal about her life. (I did the same for her older sister, and you can see an excerpt here.) My journal project was inspired by those baby books where you put in footprints, birth size and weight, developmental milestones, etc. Those baby books are typically surpassed only by exercise bikes and crock pots in unfulfilled good intentions. Usually the first couple of pages are diligently filled out, and then the new parents get overwhelmed and the rest of the book is blank. 

I endeavored to do better. The result? A mammoth 400-page document, spanning my daughter’s entire life thus far, which I presented to her when dropping her off at college. Here’s an excerpt, emphasizing episodes I think are funny (but which shouldn’t embarrass my kid, who after all has suffered enough, what with me as her dad).

A note on the text: it’s written in the second person (i.e., “you”) because the journal’s real audience is my daughter. You albertnet readers just get a taste.

(Art in this post is by Lindsay’s Grandma Coral, except one picture by Lindsay.)

September 15, 2004 (age almost-1)

I’d forgotten how messy it is when a baby tries to feed herself. You’ll sit at the high chair happily for twenty minutes or more, grabbing everything on your tray, shoving much of it in your mouth, spitting much of this back out, and dropping a lot. Watermelon is a favorite, as are Cheerios (or “ring shaped oat cereal,” as the parenting books call them), refried beans (cold), little blocks of cheese, pieces of bread, cut-up fruit . . . just about everything except baby food, which you never really took a shine to. I’ll be all stoked at how much you ate, until clean-up time when I discover what looks like at least 90% of it on the floor, in your chair, and in the pouch of your bib (when we manage to get the bib on you, which is seldom). When you’re done you scream and cry throughout the clean-up, just like your sister used to do. Then you want to be held, which is a problem because I don’t want to have to change my outfit in addition to yours.

April 7, 2005 (age 1-½)

When I say, “Where’s your nose?” you grin, grab my finger, and touch your nose with it. Then you touch my nose with it. Then you start moving my hand around to different parts of my head: “That’s my ear,” I’ll say, “and that’s my mouth … that’s my cheek.” It’s not entirely clear how much you’re directing the hand and how much I am; it’s like a Ouija board.

You love throwing things away. Every time I empty the trash I have to watch out. The cat’s dish gets thrown out a lot. You’re just like your mother.

April 3, 2006 (age 2-½)

[Our cat] Misha kept getting on the table during dinner. I admonished her, “Get out of here Misha! Go catch some bugs!” (My point was that she’s supposed to be a hunter, not a scavenger, and yet I wouldn’t encourage her to catch birds.) Well, you and Alexa really liked this utterance. I’m not sure whether you grasped the point or not; you may just have seen it as a stock put-down or something. Anyway, the other day we were getting in the car and you and Alexa had some dispute, perhaps over who got what car seat. With a somewhat self-satisfied air (I think you’d prevailed in the dispute), you said, “Go away, Alexa! Go catch some bugs!” Man, she was pissed ... especially, I think, because your mom and I were laughing at what you said. I think this was your first joke ever, or at least your first joke that actually made somebody laugh out loud. I know plenty of adults who haven’t yet achieved that milestone.

April 11, 2006 (age 2-½)

I was reading No No, Jo to you. It’s about a kitten who’s always making messes by trying to help, and each page ends, “But does Sam [or whoever] thank that kitten? Sam says...” Then you open out a flap that shows the kid reacting to Jo’s mess, saying, “No no, Jo!” The idea is that the child to whom you’re reading the book can provide the chorus, or punch line, for each page. But you weren’t doing it. You’d done it before, but this time you were in a needy, weepy way because you’d just awoken from your nap to find the babysitter was here. You like the sitter okay, but of course you recognized that her presence meant your mom would be leaving. (I would be leaving too, but that’s no big deal for you.) It was tough even getting you to let me read to you to cheer you up. I thought you might be coaxed into helping me say the “No no, Jo!” part, so I prompted you. “What does Sam say?” I asked. “Please?” you whimpered.

April 18, 2006 (age 2-½)

We had Easter at your Grandma Judy’s house up in Oregon. After the egg hunt we had breakfast and then a walk. Your mom was enjoying the walking so much that she asked me to administer the chocolate bunnies to you and Alexa while she and my mom walked some more. This seemed like a fine work detail at first, until I saw the size of the rabbits. They were huge! Probably four inches tall, and solid chocolate. Of course you and your sister were thrilled and started gnawing on them right away. Soon you had chocolate all over your mouth and hands. As your mom was leaving she’d said, “Dana, it’s up to you to keep them from making a mess!” I gave you and Alexa each a paper napkin. I policed the devouring of the chocolate for a long while, maybe fifteen minutes, but man, what a tedious job. At several points I thought of taking the chocolate away because it was just too much, but of course that would be like taking candy from a baby. A lot like that in fact. So I tried to encourage you to save some for later. I gave you each a bag to put your bunny in. You dutifully wrapped the bunny in the napkin and put it in the bag, and then, once the delight of this operation wore off, you took it back out and started gnawing again. Finally I couldn’t bear the tedium, not to mention the ghastliness of it all, any longer and started to pack for our trip home. Your mom returned to discover that you (and/or Alexa) had smeared melted chocolate all over the cream-colored upholstery of one of Grandma Judy’s dining room chairs. Your mom snapped at me, I snapped back at her, my mom was hurt because she’d actually bought the bunnies and they’d cost a lot, and at last we fully appreciated the glory of Christ’s resurrection and the thrilling mystery of the rabbit that lays eggs.

June 7, 2006 (age 2-¾)

You were going to tag along with your mom to your sister’s ballet class, but I got home from work right before they left. Your mom saw an opportunity and changed her plan, leaving you home with me (vs. chasing you around the community center for 45 minutes). Oh, man, you were not happy about this—in fact, you had a complete meltdown. I was so exhausted from work, I went straight to my last-resort solution to the crisis: I put in a video for you, which is a rare treat. Then I put a beer in the freezer (we didn’t have any cold) and set a timer to remind me it was in there, lest it get forgotten and burst. When that timer went off, some 10-15 minutes into your video, you thought I’d set it for you, to limit your video time (a standard practice, but one which frankly hadn’t occurred to me in this instance). To my pleasant surprise, you ejected the tape and brought it to me, without any fuss. After that we seemed to be reconciled. It just goes to show, beer is probably the solution to most parenting difficulties.

September 26, 2006 (age almost-3)

You often use the word “instead” when you’re not actually comparing two options. “I want milk instead,” you’ll say, apropos of nothing. I guess it makes sense, because whenever you propose the having of something you’re also implicitly rejecting the not-having of that thing; i.e., “I want milk instead of no milk,” or “I want milk instead of nothing.” Very philosophical of you.

January 23, 2007 (age 3)

Your mom used code words the other night so you wouldn’t understand an idea she proposed to me. She referred to me as “the paternal guardian” or some such thing. “Call him ‘Daddy,’” you told her. Ah, the power of context (though in this case, for her to refer to me in the third person, when talking to me, should have helped throw you off the scent).

April 4, 2007 (age 3-½)

You call butter “toast,” as in, “I want more toast for my bread.” You call your lacy shawl “my marriage.” You call guinea pigs “bunny pigs.”

April 7, 2008 (age 4-½)

Last night at dinner, you had a bite of your mom’s dinner roll. “I don’t like this,” you said. “It tastes like Play-Doh.” I asked you how you knew what Play-Doh tasted like. You said, quite reasonably and matter-of-factly, “Because of this [roll].” This is a nice example of the logical fallacy of “Petitio Principii,” and you delivered it expertly, even convincingly.

July 16, 2008 (age 4-¾)

I sent in proofs-of-purchase from a cereal box and ordered you and Alexa these “Mommy and me” matching wristwatches (big and small). To my surprise, both you and Alexa wanted the black Hot Wheels watches instead of the pink Barbie ones. They arrived yesterday. They feel like they’re made of rubber. They’re black, with a tire tread texture. I asked if you liked them (and may have asked how you would rate them vs. the Barbie version, I can’t recall). You said, “These are cool. Cool is better than beautiful, because beautiful is just paint.”

August 25, 2008 (age almost-5)

You and Alexa were awake, first thing in the morning, and stayed in your beds, talking. I sneaked the door open, and silently peered in. Alexa asked you, “Lindsay, who’s your favorite person in the whole world?” You replied, “That Otto kid at Dandelion [preschool].” Alexa didn’t like this answer at all; as became evident, she wanted you to say that she was your favorite. She told you you’d hurt her feelings, and lectured you on how family is supposed to be more important than mere friends, but you wouldn’t back down. This discussion repeated itself a week or two later, and this time, though he was still your favorite, you couldn’t even remember Otto’s name. (I reminded you, but you seemed unsure that you’d had this right to begin with.)

December 18, 2008 (age 5)

We bought a new[er] car. I had cautioned you and Alexa to behave during our visit to the dealer, and you and Alexa really did. I had also said, almost as an aside, that it would be better if you didn’t appear too excited about the car, since it wouldn’t help our negotiating leverage for the dealer to know we were in love with it. I was a bit concerned about how excited you and Alexa would be about the built-in booster seats (which really are cool). Not surprisingly, that was the first thing the dealer brought to your and Alexa’s attention. I’m sure he recognized that if he could get you girls jazzed on that feature, we’d have a hard time walking away if he didn’t meet our price—sort of the “threat of tantrum” technique that grocery stores use, stocking every aisle with crappy toys and hoping parents will just bite the bullet and buy them, to lubricate the grocery shopping process.

Well, we all piled in for a test drive, and within minutes you said loudly, “I don’t like this booster!” I asked why not. You replied, again loudly, “It doesn’t have any armrests!” This was going well. The dealer’s implicit “You wouldn’t deprive these delightful children of their beloved built-in boosters, would you?” was being answered with an implicit, “Try me. Your boosters are overrated.” I decided to take a gamble and pretend to try to resolve your misgivings, figuring that you’ve never yet accepted a token bone thrown your way: “But Lindsay, if I weren’t sitting in the middle seat, we could fold down the middle armrest and you’d have that!” You replied, with an irritated don’t-you-patronize-me tone, “I want two armrests! I have two arms, so I want two armrests! I don’t want this booster!” So the booster seats were effectively neutralized as a bargaining tool. Yesssss!

July 22, 2010 (age 6-¾)

Alexa finished a meal recently and instead of taking her plate to the counter, she took it into the dining room. “Alexa, I know you’re licking your plate. Stop that and bring it in here,” I told her. She commented that if nobody sees her, it shouldn’t matter. “God can see you,” I said, just to see what my daughters’ reactions would be. You replied, “Does he care?” This was a departure: at other times, you’d referred to God as a she. I asked, “So God is a he, huh?” You replied, “Yes, God is a he and Goddess is a she.” I asked you who is in charge. You paused for a moment, reflecting, and then said, “They fight a lot.”

June 6, 2011 (age 7-½)

You read more and more picture books by yourself, but with chapter books you still prefer being read to. Right now I’m reading aloud Clarice Bean, Don’t Look Now. Every so often I pause and ask you questions to see if you’re catching all the details and subtexts. Yesterday I asked, “Do you think Clarice should have told Betty that she had tickets to the ‘Ruby Redfort’ movie premier, to cheer her up?” You replied, “No, that would make it worse because Betty wouldn’t be able to go—her family is moving away, but she hasn’t told Clarice that yet.” I said, “That’s right, we know something that Clarice doesn’t. And what is that an example of?” Without missing a beat, you replied, “Dramatic irony.” That’s my girl!

July 31, 2011 (age 7-¾)

You and Alexa were complaining about not having enough little Lego dudes to play with. Your mom suggested you make your own little Lego guys out of Lego bricks. Alexa complained, “That’ll never work!” Your mom replied, “Then the Lego set has failed the whole family and we’ll never buy them again.” This infuriated Alexa, who cried, “That’s not funny in the least! We don’t have the right kind of bricks for that!” Always acting in solidarity with your sister, you wailed, in an equally affronted tone, “It’s like trying to do a math problem but you don’t even have a brain!”

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From the Archives - Drama in Philosophy Class!

Introduction

When I was a student at UC Santa Barbara, choosing classes was never easy. The most important requirement of a class was that it fit into my cycling schedule. A two-hour span between classes, followed by a one-hour class, was either a total waste of riding opportunity, or truancy waiting to happen. Beyond this, I tended to go with classes that looked interesting, or—better yet—easy. So when I came upon Philosophy 3 – Critical Thinking, a class essentially about logic, I was really intrigued.

Right off the bat, I wondered if you can actually teach somebody how to think logically. I suspected that you couldn’t—that this was a kind of talent. I also felt like I kind of had this talent, since I was pretty good at math and at writing persuasive papers. Moreover, a childhood nickname my brothers gave me was “Logic Lad.” Believe me, my brothers were not given to ever saying anything nice to me, so this nickname must have been a grudging capitulation around an undeniable trait.

This confidence was tempered by (or perhaps a delusion brought about by) an insecurity, which was that I only thought I was a rational, logical person. To have such swagger and be woefully ignorant of my own inability to think critically was a frightening proposition. So, as a hedge against being an unknowing intellectual poser, I thought I better take this class in order to validate, or possibly bring about, my (supposed) capability to think critically.

Little did I realize, when signing up, how much drama this course would occasion. Read on for the torrid tale of our first midterm exam and its aftermath.

Drama in Philosophy Class – February 8, 1989

I had high hopes right from the beginning about Philosophy 3 – Critical Thinking. The textbook is really cool. Verbal arguments are encoded with all these cool symbols, bridging the gap I always felt there must be between math and clearly written arguments. But I was kind of disappointed, right off, by the professor. She just didn’t strike me as the total braniac that I hoped she (and all my professors) would be.

How could I assess this so quickly, and who am I to declare such a thing? Well, it’s mainly due to her imprecise, unstructured delivery. She loves to ramble worthlessly during lecture, repeating herself continually in a monotonous, tiresome tone. Also, her grammar is pretty bad for a UC professor: “Does anyone else need a syllabi?” or “Another criteria we look at is…” or “While the price of gold really might have fell…”

I know grammar knowledge isn’t the same thing as intelligence, but still … I don’t think an Oxford professor would ever slip up like that. But beyond all this, my main problem with this professor is that her lectures dang near put me to sleep every time. (I know, I know … this could be me. I’ve slept through all kinds of classes, even ones I know would be interesting if I were only awake to hear them.)

But you know, the professor isn’t that bad, actually … she does impart some useful lessons. But the Teaching Assistant (T.A.) for the class bugs the hell out of me. He seems to have recently moved here from some Eastern Bloc country, which wouldn’t be a problem except that his poor grasp of English hinders his ability to clearly teach this subject, given the importance of clarity when dealing with tricky argument forms. For example, when teaching a syllogism, it’s really important not to say “In case he” instead of “In the case that he.” Consider this sentence: “In the case that he does not bring an umbrella, he will get wet.” No problem there, right? But if your T.A. says, “In case he brings an umbrella, he will get wet.” This has an entirely different meaning and makes our protagonist seem pretty deranged, wouldn’t you say? I tried to explain the difference but this T.A. absolutely could not follow me. His English skills were not up to the job. Usually after he talks for a while, everybody ends up shrugging at the futility of it all, and loses interest.

As with most T.A. discussion sections, much of the period is devoted to the Question & Answer session. There are two possible scenarios for how this goes. If the entire class is unprepared or asleep (or both), nobody will ask any questions and the T.A. will wait patiently for about ten minutes before becoming irritated. Then he quizzes the class, perhaps to try to snap us into attention. He doesn’t get any satisfactory answers, either because the students are actually clueless, or they’re toying with him (I can’t figure out which). After five or six students give unsatisfactory answers, I’ll try to end the stalemate with the correct answer. For example, if the question is, “What is a sound argument?” I will say, “It’s a valid argument that has true premises.” Then T.A. will shake his head and field five more wrong answers, growing increasingly frustrated. Finally he will announce the correct answer: “It’s an argument which has true premises and is valid.” How does he not recognize my answer as correct? Perhaps it’s his poor grasp of English … maybe he has memorized the correct answer by rote and thus requires the wording to be identical. Critical thinking indeed!

The other question and answer scenario is somewhat less common. Here, a student actually comes to class having read the material and attempted the homework, but is completely lost. Well, the T.A.’s job is to eliminate confusion, so the student has come to the right place. Or so he thinks! Invariably, the student gets nowhere. He will ask something like, “What is the difference between cogent and sound arguments?” and the T.A. will throw the question out to the class: “Anyone? Anyone?” After waiting for about five minutes for a response from another student, the T.A. will say, “Hasn’t anybody done the reading?” After another awkward pause, he lets the question die, hoping the student has given up hope. If the student repeats the question, the T.A. says, “Well, it’s in your textbook.” If the student still persists, then the T.A. says, “You’ll have to come to my office hours.” This last resort is brutally effective, as no student in the history of higher education has ever gone to a T.A.’s office hours.

But you know, the T.A. isn’t actually my main gripe with the class. After all, being surrounded by other students could lead to a stimulating discussion anyway, right? That’s the whole point of the small discussion sections. But I have yet to hear a single intelligent utterance from any of my classmates. Mostly I just hear a lot of whining. And after the midterm exam, they turned their bitching up to 11. In fact, our discussion section was so heated, it was almost like a student revolt.

Interestingly enough, we hadn’t even gotten our tests back, so the class wasn’t responding to poor grades, not exactly. But I think they highly suspected they’d augered in, based on two things: one, almost nobody finished the test (or even came close), and two, the professor had announced at the post-exam lecture that almost everybody crashed and burned. The median score was a 56%. So my classmates came to class armed with numerous reasons why the test was like, totally unfair. The T.A., arrogant  as ever, took a big risk at the beginning of the period by venturing that the students, not the test, were at fault. Instantly the jackleg spokesman for the students fired off a rebuttal: “Isn’t your argument fallacious?” Well, at least the guy had picked up a bit of the lingo.

The T.A. responded: “At my Thursday review section, before the exam, I asked how many people thought the class was easy. Almost everybody raised his hand. Then I asked how many people had done the review problems. Out of 48 students, four raised their hands. Out of that four, only one had gone to the Reserve Book Room to check his answers. If this is indicative of the whole class, we can conclude that the students did not study hard enough.”

 I have to admit, this makes some sense. But, this being a class on logic, he probably should have trod more carefully. For one thing, it’s not necessarily a given that his Thursday section was intellectually similar to ours. They might have all chosen that section (day and time) based on their athletic or party schedules, for all we know. Second, it’s possible that after his first boring question, a lot of the students lost interest and couldn’t be bothered to keep raising their hands.

Our class demanded a “recount.” I found this absurd. The T.A. hadn’t asked our section these questions, so he had counted nothing … how could he now “recount”? And if he asked our class the same questions now, what were we going to say? That we had also neglected to do the review problems? Yeah, right. Amazingly, the T.A. indulged this “recount,” and guess what? It turns out everybody in the class had done all the review problems and had gone to the Reserve Book Room to check our answers! Obviously the test was a gross miscarriage of justice! Of course all this was immaterial. It’s not the T.A.’s job to write the test, so if the test is unfair, that’s not his problem. Nor could he do anything about it.

This pointless debate went on and on, the class growing increasingly impassioned and the T.A. becoming increasingly flustered. I had no interest in the proceedings because, notwithstanding the median score, I felt pretty confident that, unless I was the most self-deluded person on the planet, I’d done fine. The test had seemed easy to me, almost eerily so, and I had finished early. I couldn’t get too worried about my grade because, if I had done poorly, the low grade would be the least of my worries. Being the most self-deluded person on the planet would be a deep, deep hole that I’d probably spend the rest of my life trying to climb out of.

Feeling a strange combination of boredom and discomfort, I began doodling. Unfortunately I am a very poor doodler. I find my doodles tiresome and annoying and end up scribbling them out. So I got sick of that and picked up a flyer advertising a Spring Break trip to Mexico. Then I read a flyer about how I, too, could earn extra income at home doing telecommunications. Before long, I decided that the discussion had to be more interesting than the flyers. Tuning back in, I realized that there was actually an educational opportunity available to me here: I could listen for, and document, the all the logical fallacies committed by the students—proof of their unpreparedness, as these same fallacies were the very subject of the exam! So here they are, taken directly from my notes:

“We did fine on the homework. But when you put a gun to a guy’s head and tell him to recite the Constitution, he won’t be able to do it. Likewise, with our time restrictions, we couldn’t perform well on the test.” WEAK ANALOGY

“We couldn’t be expected to study that long. We got so many tests right now we just don’t got time for everything. If we spent all our time studying for this class, we’d, like, fail all our others! Besides, think of the stress we’re going through!” APPEAL TO PITY

“Exams are always too long. Like this History test I had we had basically fifty minutes to write three essays. And one of them was on material we hadn’t even covered! Soooo lame!” RED HERRING

“Look: 300 students did poorly. Four T.A.’s and one professor blame us for it. Obviously, you guys must be wrong.” ACCIDENT (general rule applied incorrectly to a specific case)

“Two of my friends didn’t even finish the test and neither did I. So don’t eee-ven try to tell me you gave us enough time!” HASTY GENERALIZATION

“I saw this one dude walking up to turn in the test, and he was just filling in random dots like crazy.” RED HERRING

Some of the arguments I wrote down, while not committing specific fallacies, seemed illogical anyway. See if you can pinpoint the weaknesses in the following arguments:

“In the categorical syllogism problems, the examples were too hard. I mean, what if we don’t know the difference between reptiles and mammals?”

“When you said ‘open book,’ you set a trap for us to fall into. That’s not fair!”

“We only had a minute for each [multiple choice] problem. Maybe we’re just not fast enough readers!”

“When you have that many problems in front of you, they just all start to melt together.”

“What if the ten percent of the class that did well were just a product of chance?”

“I got ahold of last year’s midterm and it was a lot shorter. How do you explain that?”

“I tried to calculate how much time we had for each problem, but it was hard because each section had its own numbering. By the time I figured it all out, I only had half an hour left and I didn’t finish!”

“It was totally bogus. I mean, they were all the kind where you have to, like, stop and think!”

“All the examples seemed like they were from poems.”

This last statement caused me to almost burst out laughing. That would have been unwise indeed … the whole class could have turned on me! From this point forward I was focused purely on not smirking or snorting … not only would I look like a dick, but I would actually be one. For once in my college career, I wished I couldn’t stay awake.

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