Institution-Induced Stability

Simple majority rule is badly behaved. This is one of the earliest lessons learned by political scientists in the positive political theory tradition. Discovered and rediscovered by theorists over the centuries (including, famously, the Majorcan Franciscan monk Raymon Llull in the thirteenth century, the Marquis de Condorcet in the eighteenth, the Reverend Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) in the eighteenth, and Duncan Black in the twentieth), the method of majority rule cannot be counted on to produce a rational collective choice. In many circumstances (made precise in the technical literature), it is very likely (a claim also made precise) that whatever choice is produced will suffer the property of not being “best” in the preferences of all majorities: for any candidate alternative, there will always exist another alternative that some majority prefers to it. This chapter suggests that while a collection of preferences often cannot provide a collectively “best” choice, institutional arrangements, which restrict comparisons of alternatives, may allow majority rule to function more smoothly. That is, where equilibrium induced by preferences alone may fail to exist, institutional structure may induce stability.

Discrepancy to Variability

This chapter describes quantification during the late nineteenth century. Then, most ordinary people were gaining an overt awareness, and probability notions were seeping into everyday conversation and decision-making. However, new forms of abstract mathematics were being developed, albeit with some opposition from Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), who wanted to preserve traditionalist views of Euclidian geometry. The chapter introduces William Gossett, who worked in the laboratory of the Guinness brewery and developed “t-distribution,” which was published as “Student’s t-test.” It also describes his friendship with Sir Ronald Fisher, who developed many statistical hypothesis testing methods, published in The Design of Experiments, such as the ANOVA procedure, and the F ratio. Fisher also developed many research designs for hypothesis testing, both simple and complex, including the Latin squares design, as well as providing a classic description of inferential testing in the thought experiment called “the lady tasting tea.”

Brian Greene: The Speculative Sublime

Charles Dodgson warned a child correspondent of the dangers of living in the looking-glass world of mathematicians like himself, the high price of consistently believing “six impossible things before breakfast”: . . . Don’t be in such a hurry to believe next time—I’ll tell you why—If you set to work to believe everything you will tire out the muscles of the mind, and then you’ll be so weak you won’t be able to believe the simplest true things. Only last week a friend of mine set to work to believe Jack-the-giant-killer. He managed to do it, but he was so exhausted by it that when I told him it was raining (which was true) he couldn’t believe it, but rushed out into the street without his umbrella, the consequence of which was his hair got seriously damp, and one curl didn’t recover its right shape for nearly two days. . . . In all his books, Brian Greene is our tour guide on a journey into his particular looking-glass world—string theory, an exercise in the speculative sublime, a sublime only for aficionados, certainly not for you and me. Here is the abstract of an article cited a respectable 201 times: . . . We show that a string-inspired Planck scale modification of general relativity can have observable cosmological effects. Specifically, we present a complete analysis of the inflationary perturbation spectrum produced by a phenomenological Lagrangian that has a standard form on large scales but incorporates a string-inspired short distance cutoff, and find a deviation from the standard result. We use the de Sitter calculation as the basis of a qualitative analysis of other inflationary backgrounds, arguing that in these cases the cutoff could have a more pronounced effect, changing the shape of the spectrum. Moreover, the computational approach developed here can be used to provide unambiguous calculations of the perturbation spectrum in other heuristic models that modify trans-Planckian physics and thereby determine their impact on the inflationary perturbation spectrum. Finally, we argue that this model may provide an exception to constraints, recently proposed by Tanaka and Starobinsky, on the ability of Planck-scale physics to modify the cosmological spectrum. . . .

Hothouse Victorians: Art and Agency in Freshwater

The Victorian artistic community that grew up on the Isle of Wight around Tennyson and Julia Margaret Cameron has been reimagined in Virginia Woolf's play, Freshwater (1923, 1935), and more recently in Lynn Truss's novel, Tennyson's Gift (1996). Whereas Freshwater should be read as modernist or post- Victorian, Tennyson's Gift is neo-Victorian and postmodern in its form and attitude. Integral to both are the discontent of women and the disruption of gender norms. Therefore, this essay looks particularly at the question of female agency in a Victorian world envisioned in 1923-35 and one of 1996. In Freshwater, one sees a serious exploration of generational change and the desire for artistic freedom, especially through the character of Ellen Terry. Freshwater is a dress rehearsal for To the Lighthouse. Truss reimagines Freshwater by adding to Woolf's cast the unstable Charles Dodgson, whose Alice in Wonderland becomes the familiarizing scaffolding for readers in a Victorian world that seems as strange as Wonderland did to Alice. Here, female agency is elusive - too-knowing little girls hold sway and adult women use their power, rather pathetically, to win and hold the undeserving men they love.