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[found via a post to PEN-L by Jim Devine]

The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer–

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Also available for download.

[found via a post to PEN-L by Jim Devine]

Also available for download.

In a predictably excellent essay reviewing The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould (Ed: Steve Rose) and Punctuated Equilibrium by Gould, Lewontin offers two valuable reminders. One is the essential and important difference between a “public intellectual” like Gould who works to disseminate knowledge of his field to the general public and someone like Dawkins who (my words) is after slick overarching ideas that can be turned into bestsellers or service personal aggrandisement. The second, perhaps more important (and quoted below) is a reminder of the nature of scientific activity:

[ Link ]

FWIW, from BBC:

More:

I am a member of a few "left" mailing lists, which are typically dominated by Western Orthodox Leftists (typically Marxists) and even tentative mention of open source, by me (an admitted amateur in left theory), is dismissed as irrelevant to left goals, actions, etc. I never quite understood why not. Open source development seems to provide an interesting and successful example of communal effort and production, underpinned by certain ideals (from each according to his abilities and to each according to his need! ;-)) that should warm the heart of leftists.

Not all of the free software / open source movement's principles and functioning is leftist of course. There is a strong libertarian streak running through open source development and certain larger issues (participation within a capitalist system) are poorly addressed. These differences are known within the community, however, and are the subject of ongoing debate. Richard Stallman, the father of what we call today Open Source, goes to great length to stress the political considerations of his movement, and defends his precepts successfully against the newer school (Cathedral/Bazaar types). It seemed strange to me, therefore, that all of this would be so easily dismissed by the entrenched left.

Today, I came across a couple of texts that do seem to take open source a bit more seriously.

One of them is Yochai Benkler's (Yale Law School) book The Wealth of Networks (PDF), the Introduction of which I quote from below:

I haven't read the entire book yet, but it promises to be an interesting read. Another book in a similar vein (which Benkler refers to also) is Steven Weber's The Success of Open Source which funnily enough begins:

Clearly, Weber can speak more intelligently of the matter than I can ;-). In the Preface, he goes on to say:

Now, why couldn't I have put it that way, when arguing for the importance of examining open source! Below is a bit more from the Introduction, followed by a link:

There is an excerpt in PDF from the book available for download from Harvard University Press.

[A question to English usage types: is "Apropos of" or "Apropos to" the right usage in this title? My initial urge was "of" but on further thought I felt "to" is more apropos!]

I have already posted on the Kaavya Viswanathan affair (plagiarization by the young Indian-American author), though I did not quite articulate what it is that bothered me about her. Below is an article from the Guardian that describes the difficulty that minorities have in getting published. A comment towards the qend of the quoted text describes my uneasiness: that minority writers are further disadvantaged by those (otherwise privileged) who play upon their minority status to open doors.

From Schopenhauer (serious) to the Beatles (trivial), the West has demonstrated a fitful fascination for things Indian. The latest (not counting the return of Yoga) has been Indian English literature — by which I mean not the modestly illuminating works of someone like R.K. Narayan, bot more the cutesy stuff such as the exotic prose of Arundhati Roy. Much was made of the Indian-American Kaavya Viswanathan's precocious work of fiction in the past year. Things have taken a turn for the worse and the below news item might signal the beginning of the end of this fad.

Some interesting links:

I was re-reading Philip Kitcher’s comprehensive critique of SocioBiology over the weekend. Titled "Vaulting Ambition" its a serious and detailed work that works through the arguments and the models. The book has the convincing mathematics inside; I will stop at posting the more simple and emotional appeal in the introduction:

There is a certain vulnerability, of over-reaching, in acts of triumphalism that robs the agent of his well-deserved preening (we saw some of that in the fall of Bush (at least in popularity) in short order after proclamations of a ‘mandate’). There was a time when Selfish Gene theorists and other reductionists were somewhat of establishment outsiders and also not favourable with the public. EP and Sociobiology proponents fought hard to reach their current Amazon.com sales rank (Edward Wilson had to endure water being poured on him by indignant students, for instance), and with

But as the Eastwood character said in ‘Unforgiven’, it does seem to be not about deserving, at least over at the NYT Book Review, where old Dennett, all around AI and Neo-Darwinism groupie, gets a spanking in a review of his own take on Religion (following Edward Wilson’s attempt at it a few years ago). Read on (and click through) for an entertaining review that almost redeems TNR.

But before I let you proceed to the review, i have to say that I am quite tickled by the reviewer’s identification of scientism and materialism as the force behind some of these lines of thought. I am tickled because I have sitting in the drafts (for this blog) a festering rant about the American Left that ties into some of this stuff. It is particularly funny, to me, that Wieseltier (the reviewer) says:

Funny because I was thinking of some parts of the left and their own omniscient white man with a long beard… ;-). But that is another blog post…

What’s up with the dudes with big white beards, anyway?