Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember: Bob Reich complains that when he was in the Clinton administration he never asked Alan Greenspan the questions and never got the answers he wanted to. Now when I was a not very senior Treasury Department official during the Clinton administration, I did get to ask Alan Greenspan the questions that Bob wanted to ask him. And I got answers. You see, every week a bunch of us senior Treasury Department staff would go over to the Federal Reserve for a lunch. (Food quality: 1 out of 10.) And, since about 1/3 of my job was fed watching and such, I went most of the time. And Greenspan was there, maybe 1/5 of the time, if I recall correctly. Sometimes he was quiet. Sometimes he was witty. And sometimes he let what little hair he had down, regarding himself as among, broadly, friends:
Re: land acknowledgements, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland reads an acknowledgement that the land we occupy is the ancestral land of Shasta, Takelma, and Latgawa peoples "who lived here since time immemorial", before every performance. It sinks in, gradually, that it's the least that can be done.
Re: Wired Article. It might almost be considered a modern prediction by Cassandra. American hegemony and techno-utopianism were all on the upswing at that point. The NASDAQ dot.com crash, 9/11, Bush recession, financial collapse, and the current problems of pandemics (and outbreaks - Ebola, MERS, SARS) and the now obvious climate crisis were all ahead of us. No one even wanted to think about any problems that might be ahead as anything more than easily coped with disruptions.
This reproduction of Alan Greenspan's thinking strikes me as more DeLong than Greenspan. However, it is both a fair and coherent reconstruction of the Greenspan era.
Perhaps... Certainly it is a **translation** of Greenspanese into DeLongese. And, as George Steiner wrote in his After Babel, all translations are gross distortions. But then, as he also says, all thinking is really translation...
"All thinking is really translation" is oddly put.
All communication, all expression of thought, is translation, but unless one thinks verbally (and I am not sure that is possible) this seems to be very much not the case with thinking. Algis Budrys made the point with respect to writing, in the essay "Clarifying Clarion."
Well, I think verbally—or at least I think I think verbally. George Steiner's After Babel <https://archive.org/details/afterbabel00geor> is, IMHO, a great book. Is there a link for the Budrys?
George Steiner (1975): After Babel: Aspects of Language & Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press) <https://archive.org/details/afterbabel00geor>: "Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1813…. Consider Elinor Dashwood's reflections when hearing news of Edward Ferrars's engagement….
>>The youthful infatuation of nineteen would naturally blind him to everything but her beauty and good nature; but the four succeeding years—years, which if rationally spent, give such improvement to the understanding, must have opened his eyes to her defects of education, while the same period of time, spent on her side in inferior society and more frivolous pursuits, had perhaps robbed her of that simplicity, which might once have given an interesting character to her beauty.
>>If in the supposition of his seeking to marry herself, his difficulties from his mother had seemed great, how much greater were they now likely to be, when the object of his engagement was undoubtedly inferior in connections, and probably inferior in fortune to herself. These difficulties, indeed, with an heart so alienated from Lucy, might not press very hard upon his patience; but melancholy was the state of the person, by whom the expectation of family opposition and unkindness, could be felt as relief!...
>At the surface, Jane Austen's prose is habitually unresistant to close reading; it has a lucid 'openness'. Are we not making difficulties for ourselves? I think not….
>The world of Sense and Sensibility and of Pride and Prejudice is an astute 'version of pastoral', a mid- and late eighteenth-century construct complicated, shifted slightly out of focus by a Regency point of view. No fictional landscape has ever been more strategic, more expressive, in a constant if undeclared mode, of a moral case. What is left out is, by that mere omission, acutely judged. From this derives the distinctive pressure on Jane Austen's language of the unspoken….
>The sentence structure in the second paragraph, on the other hand, attracts notice. There are two sentences, both unwieldy…. By contrast, the preceding paragraph… moves forward with a deliberately alternant, gliding cadence. The initial clause of paragraph two, 'If in the supposition of his seeking to marry herself” is awkward. The repetition of ‘herself' at the end of the sentence augments our impression of involution and discomfort. Both segments of the next sentence are ponderous and not immediately easy to construe….
>The purpose of this grammatical opaqueness is evident. These gouty sentences seek to contain, to ravel up a rawness and disorder of feeling which Elinor herself would find inadmissible. She is endeavouring to give reasoned form to her turbulent, startled response. At the same time, she is so plajnly involved in the situation that her pretence to considered, mundane judgement is transparent. The Augustan propriety of the passage, the profusion of abstract terms, the *Chinese box' effect of dependent and conditional phrases, make for subtle comedy. The novelist's stance towards this little flutter of bruised sentiments and vanities is unmistakably arch. In the following paragraph.. the hint of whimsy shades into gentle irony….
>A thorough gloss… would engage… an awareness of the manifold ways in which Jane Austen enlists… Restoration comedy, and… post-Richardsonian sentimental fiction. The task is the more difficult…. What precise intonations, what 'stress marks' ought we to put on ‘good nature', on time 'rationally spent'? Nature, reason, and understanding are terms both of current speech and of the philosophic vocabulary…. ’Defects of education', 'inferior society', and ‘frivolous pursuits' pose traps of a different order. No modern equivalent is immediately available. The exact note of derogation depends on a specific scale of social and heuristic nuances. Only by steeping one-self in Miss Austen's novels can one gauge the extent of Lucy Steele’s imperfections. Used by a disappointed rival, moreover, these phrases may have an exaggerated, purely circumstantial edge….
>Dealing with the problem of necessary and sufficient context, with the amount of prior material required to understand a given message-unit, some linguists have put forward the term 'pre-information'. How much pre-information do we need to parse accurately the notions of simplicity and of interesting character, and to visualize their relationship to Lucy Steele's beauty? The classic cadence of the sentence, its somewhat strained mundanity, direct us towards the possibility of mild satire. Elinor's supposition is couched in the modish idiom of sentimental fiction and reflects the domestic formalities of moral discourse after Addison and Goldsmith…. At the same time, the aggrieved sharpness of Elinor's sentiments is unmistakable….
>How, next, are we to read ‘an interesting character to her beauty’?… Only by noting the stilted, eroded tenor of Elinor's parlance can we measure its cattiness, its betraying effort at self-control. But certain aspects of 'period flavour' (present, as well, in alienated and melancholy in paragraph two), and of the inferred body of idiomatic shorthand, remain elusive…
In the passage I have in mind he is talking about writing fiction but I recognize the same thing in a problem-solving context.
"Large parts of an idea – you can call it inspiration, or you can call it synthesis, but whatever you call it, it’s a terrific feeling when it hits squarely – are nonverbal. Even when you’re struck by an idea for a scene involving plenty of dialogue, you very rarely get specific words as distinguished from concepts. And narrative passages don’t usually come to you as descriptive essays, but as multimedia outbursts in which singing, shouting people propel themselves through a context of dramatic places for passionate reasons, and do it all at once. That’s not to say writers don’t get specific ideas for sharp-edged bundles of surgically precise words: for effective dialogue, or brilliant exposition. But that usually happens after you’ve started “working” on the idea – that is, translating it into English.
I don’t know the name of the language we translate from; I do know it’s been spoken, all over the world, from the beginning. But only inside individual heads; lacking telepathy, when we want to speak to others we have to communicate all those magically interleaved images through some sort of medium. Writers “write” – that is, those of us who become gripped by these unverbal fragilities in our heads must then code them down as letters in a straight line of words before anyone else can share their flowering.”
Re: land acknowledgements, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland reads an acknowledgement that the land we occupy is the ancestral land of Shasta, Takelma, and Latgawa peoples "who lived here since time immemorial", before every performance. It sinks in, gradually, that it's the least that can be done.
Re: Wired Article. It might almost be considered a modern prediction by Cassandra. American hegemony and techno-utopianism were all on the upswing at that point. The NASDAQ dot.com crash, 9/11, Bush recession, financial collapse, and the current problems of pandemics (and outbreaks - Ebola, MERS, SARS) and the now obvious climate crisis were all ahead of us. No one even wanted to think about any problems that might be ahead as anything more than easily coped with disruptions.
Even as late as 2003, Wired had a very upbeat article: The New Diamond Age, that riffed on Stephenson's utopian "The Diamond Age" (1995).
yes...
This reproduction of Alan Greenspan's thinking strikes me as more DeLong than Greenspan. However, it is both a fair and coherent reconstruction of the Greenspan era.
Perhaps... Certainly it is a **translation** of Greenspanese into DeLongese. And, as George Steiner wrote in his After Babel, all translations are gross distortions. But then, as he also says, all thinking is really translation...
Given Greenspan's sphinx-like character, your insights after likely the best we'll get.
Thanks... But, as I said, it is a distorting translation into my native idiolect...
"All thinking is really translation" is oddly put.
All communication, all expression of thought, is translation, but unless one thinks verbally (and I am not sure that is possible) this seems to be very much not the case with thinking. Algis Budrys made the point with respect to writing, in the essay "Clarifying Clarion."
Well, I think verbally—or at least I think I think verbally. George Steiner's After Babel <https://archive.org/details/afterbabel00geor> is, IMHO, a great book. Is there a link for the Budrys?
George Steiner (1975): After Babel: Aspects of Language & Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press) <https://archive.org/details/afterbabel00geor>: "Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility appeared in 1813…. Consider Elinor Dashwood's reflections when hearing news of Edward Ferrars's engagement….
>>The youthful infatuation of nineteen would naturally blind him to everything but her beauty and good nature; but the four succeeding years—years, which if rationally spent, give such improvement to the understanding, must have opened his eyes to her defects of education, while the same period of time, spent on her side in inferior society and more frivolous pursuits, had perhaps robbed her of that simplicity, which might once have given an interesting character to her beauty.
>>If in the supposition of his seeking to marry herself, his difficulties from his mother had seemed great, how much greater were they now likely to be, when the object of his engagement was undoubtedly inferior in connections, and probably inferior in fortune to herself. These difficulties, indeed, with an heart so alienated from Lucy, might not press very hard upon his patience; but melancholy was the state of the person, by whom the expectation of family opposition and unkindness, could be felt as relief!...
>At the surface, Jane Austen's prose is habitually unresistant to close reading; it has a lucid 'openness'. Are we not making difficulties for ourselves? I think not….
>The world of Sense and Sensibility and of Pride and Prejudice is an astute 'version of pastoral', a mid- and late eighteenth-century construct complicated, shifted slightly out of focus by a Regency point of view. No fictional landscape has ever been more strategic, more expressive, in a constant if undeclared mode, of a moral case. What is left out is, by that mere omission, acutely judged. From this derives the distinctive pressure on Jane Austen's language of the unspoken….
>The sentence structure in the second paragraph, on the other hand, attracts notice. There are two sentences, both unwieldy…. By contrast, the preceding paragraph… moves forward with a deliberately alternant, gliding cadence. The initial clause of paragraph two, 'If in the supposition of his seeking to marry herself” is awkward. The repetition of ‘herself' at the end of the sentence augments our impression of involution and discomfort. Both segments of the next sentence are ponderous and not immediately easy to construe….
>The purpose of this grammatical opaqueness is evident. These gouty sentences seek to contain, to ravel up a rawness and disorder of feeling which Elinor herself would find inadmissible. She is endeavouring to give reasoned form to her turbulent, startled response. At the same time, she is so plajnly involved in the situation that her pretence to considered, mundane judgement is transparent. The Augustan propriety of the passage, the profusion of abstract terms, the *Chinese box' effect of dependent and conditional phrases, make for subtle comedy. The novelist's stance towards this little flutter of bruised sentiments and vanities is unmistakably arch. In the following paragraph.. the hint of whimsy shades into gentle irony….
>A thorough gloss… would engage… an awareness of the manifold ways in which Jane Austen enlists… Restoration comedy, and… post-Richardsonian sentimental fiction. The task is the more difficult…. What precise intonations, what 'stress marks' ought we to put on ‘good nature', on time 'rationally spent'? Nature, reason, and understanding are terms both of current speech and of the philosophic vocabulary…. ’Defects of education', 'inferior society', and ‘frivolous pursuits' pose traps of a different order. No modern equivalent is immediately available. The exact note of derogation depends on a specific scale of social and heuristic nuances. Only by steeping one-self in Miss Austen's novels can one gauge the extent of Lucy Steele’s imperfections. Used by a disappointed rival, moreover, these phrases may have an exaggerated, purely circumstantial edge….
>Dealing with the problem of necessary and sufficient context, with the amount of prior material required to understand a given message-unit, some linguists have put forward the term 'pre-information'. How much pre-information do we need to parse accurately the notions of simplicity and of interesting character, and to visualize their relationship to Lucy Steele's beauty? The classic cadence of the sentence, its somewhat strained mundanity, direct us towards the possibility of mild satire. Elinor's supposition is couched in the modish idiom of sentimental fiction and reflects the domestic formalities of moral discourse after Addison and Goldsmith…. At the same time, the aggrieved sharpness of Elinor's sentiments is unmistakable….
>How, next, are we to read ‘an interesting character to her beauty’?… Only by noting the stilted, eroded tenor of Elinor's parlance can we measure its cattiness, its betraying effort at self-control. But certain aspects of 'period flavour' (present, as well, in alienated and melancholy in paragraph two), and of the inferred body of idiomatic shorthand, remain elusive…
It's interesting to hear, and hard for me to imagine. Something for DeHaene to investigate with PET scans I suppose.
Budrys has a collection "Beyond the Outposts" discussed at https://locusmag.com/2020/05/paul-di-filippo-reviews-beyond-the-outposts-essays-on-sf-and-fantasy-1955-1996-by-algis-budrys/
In the passage I have in mind he is talking about writing fiction but I recognize the same thing in a problem-solving context.
"Large parts of an idea – you can call it inspiration, or you can call it synthesis, but whatever you call it, it’s a terrific feeling when it hits squarely – are nonverbal. Even when you’re struck by an idea for a scene involving plenty of dialogue, you very rarely get specific words as distinguished from concepts. And narrative passages don’t usually come to you as descriptive essays, but as multimedia outbursts in which singing, shouting people propel themselves through a context of dramatic places for passionate reasons, and do it all at once. That’s not to say writers don’t get specific ideas for sharp-edged bundles of surgically precise words: for effective dialogue, or brilliant exposition. But that usually happens after you’ve started “working” on the idea – that is, translating it into English.
I don’t know the name of the language we translate from; I do know it’s been spoken, all over the world, from the beginning. But only inside individual heads; lacking telepathy, when we want to speak to others we have to communicate all those magically interleaved images through some sort of medium. Writers “write” – that is, those of us who become gripped by these unverbal fragilities in our heads must then code them down as letters in a straight line of words before anyone else can share their flowering.”
Thx....
Also this for example: https://cbmm.mit.edu/video/language-brain
but it will take some considerable time for the threads to join up, presumably ...
Thx again...