Category: Culture

Jane Austen meets Bollywood by way of Tollywood

Jane Austen must be the most prolific dead screenwriter. She’s got to be the most widely adapted novelist, as hardly a year goes by without a new adaptation of her principal novels, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Mansfield Park. BBC seems to do the best all-around faithful-to-the-spirit productions, especially if you like Emma Thompson and Emma Woodhouse, but I like the Indian films.

Everybody’s heard of Bride and Prejudice, the adaptation by the director of Bend it Like Beckham starring Aishwarya Rai, one of the world’s great beauties. It’s a genuinely international production, filmed in Amritsar, London, and LA, and more approachable for the Western audience than genuine Bollywood fare on account of being in English and downplaying the singing and dancing. The whole young girl-looking-to-get-hitched thing is more relevant in modern India than it is in the West, but that never has seemed to be the main point of Austen. If you haven’t seen this movie, it’s worth a rental just to see Sayeed from Lost singing and dancing, and it’s good transition to real Bollywood**.

My favorite Austen so far is the Tamil* language (“Tollywood”) film Kandukondein, Kandukondein, loosely based on Sense and Sensibility. It features a young Aishwarya Rai (unfortunately dubbed, which is weird because she’s Kannadan or Telegudian), the great Mollywood star Mamooty, a Malayalee muslim hailing from Vaikom, and some other great studs and goddesses of Indian film. Tamil is close enough to Malayalam that most educated people (what, you didn’t study Malayalam, Hindi, and Sanskrit in college? Poor sap, I did) can understand a good part of the dialog, but there are helpful Inglish subtitles to fill in the gaps. The plot twists are completely implausible, the singing and dancing are outlandish, and the location shoots in Tamilian padi fields, a Scots castle, and at the Pyramids of Geza are over-the-top. Foreign locations aren’t green screen, they’re real, that’s the way they roll in India.

One of the great lines in cinema is uttered by the friend of a would-be director who’s lost his first job and fears he’s washed-up before he’s started: “Don’t worry, you can always do Malayalam or Telegu filems.” I’ll skip the Telegu for now, but I’m going to have to see some of that Mollywood action. The Bollywood stuff is a long way from Satyajit Ray’s Distant Thunder, but that spirit is supposed to be more or less alive in some of the Malu*** films, especially non-subtitled works with Mamooty such as Bhoothakkannadi. It takes a lot of nerve to make a film in a language spoken by fewer than 40 million people without subtitles.

*Note: Tamil, Telegu, Kannada, and Malayalam are South Indian languages, spoken more or less in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Kerala respectively. The South is the more traditional part of India. Bangalore is in Karnataka, and Madras is in Tamil Nadu.

**Bollywood = Bombay (now renamed “Mumbai”)
Mollywood = Kerala
Tollywood = Madras (now “Chennai”)

***Malu = Malayalam speaker (Keralite)

Fixing gay babies in the womb

Southern Baptist Seminary president Albert Mohler has accomplished a great feat of trolling on his blog, exploring the question of detecting and correcting homosexuality in pre-born fetuses:

Tyler Gray addresses these issues in the current issue of Radar magazine. In “Is Your Baby Gay?,” Gray sets out a fascinating scenario. A woman is told that her unborn baby boy is gay. This woman and her husband consider themselves to be liberal and tolerant of homosexuality. But this is not about homosexuality now; it is about their baby boy. The woman is then told that a hormone patch on her abdomen will “reverse the sexual orientation inscribed in his chromosomes.” The Sunday Times [London] predicts that such a patch should be available for use on humans within the decade. Will she use it?

This question stands at the intersection of so many competing interests. Feminists and political liberals have argued for decades now that a woman should have an unrestricted right to an abortion, for any cause or for no stated cause at all. How can they now complain if women decide to abort fetuses identified as homosexual? This question involves both abortion and gay rights — the perfect moral storm of our times.

Homosexual activists have claimed that sexual orientation cannot be changed. What if a hormone patch during pregnancy will do the job?

He’s got both gay activists and hardcore fundamentalists upset at him and sparked an article in the Associated Press.

Our hat’s off to the preacher.

Spreading money

Viacom sues Google over YouTube for a cool billion bucks and Jeff Jarvis is predictably upset:

I’ve been reading Viacom’s boneheaded $1 billion complaint against YouTube. Viacom complains about YouTube but, in truth, they’re complaining about their own viewers. They whine about theft but, in fact, they’re whining about recommendation, about their audience finding them more audience. Viacom is trying, singlehandedly, to turn the TV industry into the music industry. They are trying to spread stupid.

Let me suggest another point of view. I believe Viacom is upset over the fact that the TV programming they produce has been appropriated by another company for the purpose of substituting the other company’s ads for Viacom’s. Viacom depends on ad sales to cover the costs of production and delivery of their programming, and when their shows end up on YouTube, Google makes all the money for the ads they sell alongside Viacom’s programming. Presumably, if Google were willing to equitably share their ad revenues with Viacom this case would never have done to court.

So who’s entitled to this ad revenue, Google or Viacom? And who’s “spreading stupid” here?

Enlightenment fundamentalist

The latest criticism of Ayaan Hirsi Ali is that she’s an “enlightenment fundamentalist:”

Having in her youth been tempted by Islamist fundamentalism, under the influence of an inspiring schoolteacher, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is now a brave, outspoken, slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist. In a pattern familiar to historians of political intellectuals, she has gone from one extreme to the other, with an emotional energy perfectly summed up by Shakespeare: “As the heresies that men do leave/are hated most of those they did deceive.” This is precisely why she is a heroine to many secular European intellectuals, who are themselves Enlightenment fundamentalists. They believe that not just Islam but all religion is insulting to the intelligence and crippling to the human spirit. Most of them believe that a Europe based entirely on secular humanism would be a better Europe. Maybe they are right. (Some of my best friends are Enlightenment fundamentalists.) Maybe they are wrong. But let’s not pretend this is anything other than a frontal challenge to Islam. In his crazed diatribe, Mohammed Bouyeri was not altogether mistaken to identify as his generic European enemy the “unbelieving fundamentalist.”

Christopher Hitchens disputes this charge:

In her book, Ayaan Hirsi Ali says the following: “I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and forced marriage for the world of reason and sexual emancipation. After making this voyage I know that one of these two worlds is simply better than the other. Not for its gaudy gadgetry, but for its fundamental values.” This is a fairly representative quotation. She has her criticisms of the West, but she prefers it to a society where women are subordinate, censorship is pervasive, and violence is officially preached against unbelievers. As an African victim of, and escapee from, this system, she feels she has acquired the right to say so. What is “fundamentalist” about that?

I would embrace the “enlightenment fundamentalist” label. There’s no shame in being a fanatic for tolerance, secular democracy, science, and reason, and these are the fundamental values of Western civilization. Or were, once upon a time.

BONUS FEATURE: For no extra charge, see today’s Opinion Journal on Ms. Ali:

This worldview has led certain critics to dismiss Ms. Hirsi Ali as a secular extremist. “I have my ideas and my views,” she says, “and I want to argue them. It is our obligation to look at things critically.” As to the charges that she is an “Enlightenment fundamentalist,” she points out, rightly, that people who live in democratic societies are not supposed to settle their disagreements by killing one another.

Amen.

Read me first

Writing in The Guardian, the esteemed technologist Seth Finkelstein offers a clear and concise picture of Wikipedia’s delusional alternate reality:

One of Wikipedia’s major public relations successes has been in misdirecting observers into a narrative of technological miracles, diverting attention from analysing its old-fashioned cult appeal. While I don’t mean to imply that everyone involved in Wikipedia is wrapped up in delusion, that process is a key factor. A charismatic leader, who peddles a type of spiritual transcendence through selfless service to an ideal, finding a cadre of acolytes willing to devote their lives (without payment) to the organisation’s projects – that’s a story worth telling. But not abetting.

This is particularly interesting to me at the moment, because one of the faithful is trying to get me banned from editing the Wikipedia article on Net Neutrality, simply to silence a point of view.

Wikipedia is the place to go when reality doesn’t live up to your expectations. Wiki-reality is so much better than real reality that once you go there, you’ll never come back. Kudos to Seth, information entropy’s biggest enemy.

David Isenberg, who should be basking in the afterglow of his successful Freedom to Connect conference, is very upset with The Guardian for publishing Seth’s opinion. The poor dude should join the debate rather than try to silence other points of view. Oops.

UPDATE: The ultimate Wikipedia bogey-man is Daniel Brandt.

UPDATE: See The Register for a cute satire If Surgery Was Like Wikipedia.

Trivia at risk?

A new development in the Wikipedia fake credentials scandal:

After pressure over the weekend from Wikipedia’s Il Duce Jimmy Wales, the encyclopedia’s most illustrious fake professor Ryan Jordan has resigned his post at Wikia Inc.

Wikipedia depends on the kindness of strangers, and if their support stops, it will have to shut down. And then where would we find the life stories of the participants in American Idol season 2? Oh, the humanity.

The Wikipedia Scandal Continues

Nick Carr reports on the latest twist in the Wikipedia phony credentials scandal:

Head Wikipedian Jimmy Wales, having previously defended the Wikipedian administrator Ryan Jordan, who faked an elaborate online identity – “Essjay” – as a distinguished religion scholar, has this morning asked his beleaguered colleague to resign, saying that his “past support of EssJay in this matter was fully based on a lack of knowledge about what has been going on.”

Seth Finkelstein highlights the core of Jimbo’s belated reaction:

It doesn’t matter that Essjay lied to the New Yorker reporter about his credentials, making Wikipedia look good to the media – a matter Wales has known about for weeks. No mention of the dishonesty of using degree falsification to endorse Wikipedia in a letter to a professor. That’s lying to those outside The Family.

But he used his false credentials in content disputes. That’s serious! It’s an IN-WORLD offense! It’s inside The Family.

It all started with a Wikipedia official lying to the New Yorker:

Essjay was recommended to Ms. Schiff as a source by a member of Wikipedia’s management team because of his respected position within the Wikipedia community. He was willing to describe his work as a Wikipedia administrator but would not identify himself other than by confirming the biographical details that appeared on his user page. At the time of publication, neither we nor Wikipedia knew Essjay’s real name. Essjay’s entire Wikipedia life was conducted with only a user name; anonymity is common for Wikipedia admin-istrators and contributors, and he says that he feared personal retribution from those he had ruled against online. Essjay now says that his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and that he has never taught. He was recently hired by Wikia—a for-profit company affiliated with Wikipedia—as a “community manager”; he continues to hold his Wikipedia positions. He did not answer a message we sent to him; Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay’s invented persona, “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.”

Wikipedia fans claim Ryan Jordan is an exception and most of the paid staff and volunteer editors are honest. My experience in Wikipedia editing, including the inevitable content disputes, administrative blocks, and arbitration requests leads me to believe that Ryan Jordans are more the rule than the exception in Wikipedia land. It’s a project that’s built on unpaid, anonymous labor, and the only thing they can possibly be getting out of it is emotional payback (read: a fantasy life.)

Jordan, like countless other Wikipedians, created a persona for himself that represented what he wished himself to be, and he stomped through Wikipedia pretending it was real for so long he became deluded enough to believe it.

Someday I’ll write about what goes on behind the scenes at Wikipedia, and it won’t be pretty.

Teaching the hive mind to discriminate

Writing on his blog, Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein invokes the name of the sainted Hayek to endorse the decentralized nature of Wikipedia and other peer-production exercises:

Developing one of the most important ideas of the 20th century, Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek attacked socialist planning on the grounds that no planner could possibly obtain the “dispersed bits” of information held by individual members of society. Hayek insisted that the knowledge of individuals, taken as a whole, is far greater than that of any commission or board, however diligent and expert. The magic of the system of prices and of economic markets is that they incorporate a great deal of diffuse knowledge.

Sunstein fails to appreciate that markets are a special case in group dynamics, where knowledge is maximally distributed. So I pointed that out to him:

Wikipedia is all about process, and because its process is so different from Britannica’s, it’s not really accurate to describe it as an “encyclopedia”. Wikipedia is actually the world’s largest collection of trivia, gossip, received wisdom, rumor, and innuendo. It’s valuable because any large collection of information is valuable, but not in the same way that the verified, expert summaries in an encyclopedia are valuable.

If it’s true that the “knowledge of individuals, taken as a whole, is far greater than that of any commission or board,” it’s also true that the sum of their prejudice, mistaken beliefs, wishful thinking, and conformance to tradition is greater.

All of this is to say that group endeavors like Wikipedia produce breadth but not depth. For some endeavors depth is important, but for all others it’s fine to consult the rabble.

Marketing, for example, can gain much by mining the dark corners of Wikipedia; engineering and medicine, not so much, as knowledge is not dispersed at the depths as it is at the surface.

Which brings us back to Hayek. Markets do a great job of bringing information about the wishes of buyers to bear on the consciousness of sellers. Everybody who participates in a market is an expert on the subject of his own wishes or his own product. But when you leave the realm of buying and selling, expertise is not as widely dispersed as participation, and then the decentralized model falls down.

And then we’ve got a little back-and-forth with Tim Wu on Tech Lib, where Wu says:

So its obviously true that decentralized and centralized systems are better for different things, as RB points.

One thing I think is interesting, and don’t quite understand, is how often, however, humans tend to underestimate the potential of decentralized solutions

That’s what Hayek was getting at in his paper — there’s no question that if you put a perfect, planned economy next to an unplanned economy, the planned economy will win. Hands down.

But we aren’t good at knowing when information problems will cripple what would have been the better system.

So maybe we’re overcompensating, as RB suggests, in the direction of decentralized systems, but I happen to think we have to fight a perfectionist instinct that drives us too over-centralization

Just ask Napoleon III

Here’s the essential issue, as I see it: It’s undeniably true that information exists nearly everywhere, hence the potential information present in a large group is greater than that in a small group, and that’s why markets allocate resources better than committees. But it’s also true that misinformation exists nearly everywhere, so there’s also a huge potential for large groups to be misguided.

So the real question about information and group scaling is this: are there procedures for separating good information from false information (“discrimination”) that are effective enough to allow groups to be scaled indefinitely without a loss of information quality? It’s an article of faith in the Wikipedia “community” that such procedures exist, and that they’re essentially self-operative. That’s the mythos of “emergence”, that systems, including human systems, automatically self-organize in such a way as to reward good behavior and information and purge bad information. This seems to be based on the underlying assumption that people being basically good, the good will always prevail in any group.

I see no reason to believe that groups have this property, even if one accepts as given the fundamental goodness of the individual. And even if some groups have this property, does it follow that self-selecting groups do? Polling, for example, seems to pretty accurate when it’s done by random sample. But self-selected polling is notoriously inaccurate. If a web site puts up a presidential preference poll and supporters of one candidate or another urge each other to vote, the results are skewed.

This is what happens in Wikipedia and many open source projects: participation is limited to people with an interest in a particular outcome, and they distort the process to get the desired result. Participation is not automatically tailored to align with expertise, as it is in markets.

The methods we have for separating fact from fiction, such as the expert opinion, scientific method and random polling, don’t scale to arbitrarily large groups.

Hence the work of large groups is suspect.

Banning Wikipedia

The dubious nature of Wikipedia information has come to the attention of the authorities:

When half a dozen students in Neil Waters’s Japanese history class at Middlebury College asserted on exams that the Jesuits supported the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th-century Japan, he knew something was wrong. The Jesuits were in “no position to aid a revolution,” he said; the few of them in Japan were in hiding.

He figured out the problem soon enough. The obscure, though incorrect, information was from Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia, and the students had picked it up cramming for his exam.

Dr. Waters and other professors in the history department had begun noticing about a year ago that students were citing Wikipedia as a source in their papers. When confronted, many would say that their high school teachers had allowed the practice.

But the errors on the Japanese history test last semester were the last straw. At Dr. Waters’s urging, the Middlebury history department notified its students this month that Wikipedia could not be cited in papers or exams, and that students could not “point to Wikipedia or any similar source that may appear in the future to escape the consequences of errors.”

Kudos to Middlebury College.