Shoot the Piano Player

[Nick Thompson]

David,

This is a tremendous fable you tell:  I reproduce it below:  :

A sociologist completed a $500,000 statistical study in order to find a
brothel in his city. He rushed to that establishment only to find the
anthropologist in the lounge playing the piano.

The story wonderfully displays the ambiguity of both anthropology and FBI informanthood.  Think how different the story would have been if the anthrpologist had been the madam.  How about a short story in which the piano player is an anthropologist, the madam is an fbi informant,  the book keeper is a sociologist, and all the working girls and boys turn out to be city vice cops.  Let the story unfold when the city in which this is all true hosts a sociological convention on Vice in America and all the sociologists end up at the whore house.  At Clark, in our working group, I kept pressing the question of why we would not accept [such] a work of fiction as a PhD dissertation.  Let the climactic scene in the story be the one in which the I of the story, a science reporter from the New Yorker sent to cover the Convention,   sits the whole "staff" of the bawdy house down to explain the situation to them.  The ending should be done as a rip on one of those sherlock home endings, where each player's role is revealed to the gasps of the others.  

Did you know that Audubon, whose portfolio of drawings, Birds of America is breathtakingly accurate, also wrote a text called ornithological biographies.  While it had considerable scientific notareity in its time, particularly in England, it was patently confabulated.  Audubon, who NEVER painted a bird except at life size, simply didnt have the same standards for verbal representation as he did for visual representation.  So, you cannot trust it!  Because every tenth sentence contains a whopper, all the other sentences are worthless.  

I find that truth matters to me, even though I am not sure what it is.  I would read Ornithological Biographies if I thought the author was tryng to be true, but would find it boring if I thought the author was trying to tell me a good tale.  Is telling the truth like keeping the rhyme scheme in a poem;  free form is too easy?  

Mike Agar and I try to discuss this from time to  time but we always end up hurling plates and  cups at each other from opposite sides of the room.  Where does the truth come from and how do we recognize it when we see it?  Two simple questions.  Why cant  we just answer them?   I like to think that it comes from the dialectic between everything and everything else: truth as emergent.  UGH!  When we all teach our PhD program together,  we are going to have to come up with something better than that!  In our future Phd program, these issues will be settled.  Perhaps some day Stu will deliver  the answers  on a tablet from Old Baldy.

Nick

> [Original Message]
> From: Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
> To: <PPARYSKI at aol.com>; <nickthompson at earthlink.net>; The Friday MorningApplied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
> Date: 8/7/2007 9:29:02 AM
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Rationalilzations or Causes?
>
>
>
> Prof. Thompson is correct and I replied such, but think it went only to
> him not the list.  Anyway, that is why anthropologists insist on
> participant observation and rely a lot more on "natural" communication,
> stories, conversations, etc. than on formal interviews, quantitative
> data, and so called "qualitative" data collection used by sociologists.
>
> A sociologist completed a $500,000 statistical study in order to find a
> brothel in his city.  He rushed to that establishment only to find the
> anthropologist in the lounge playing the piano.
>
> davew
>
> On Tue, 7 Aug 2007 11:19:39 EDT, PPARYSKI at aol.com said:
> > Fellow cohorts,
> >  
> > I certainly agree with Herr Prof. Thompson.  In my experience in
> > developing
> > (?) third and fourth world countries, people interviewed generally  told
> > the
> > interviewer what they thought the interviewer would like to hear.   This
> > was
> > particularly true for the poor who hoped to gain something from the
> > process.
> > Observation of what people actually do can be a more powerful tool at
> > times.
> > Ort simply letting people tell their story as was done in the remarkable
> > book
> > Aikenfield.
> >  
> > Perhaps all GIS systems should include anecdotal information?
> >  
> > Paul Paryski
> >
> >
> >
> > ************************************** Get a sneak peek of the all-new
> > AOL at
> > http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour

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