Adventures in false modesty
I think that there comes a time in a man's life, somewhere between the John Bates Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize, perhaps upon the beginning of one's New York Times column, perhaps on one's first million-dollar professorship, after which it is no longer seemly to pretend to be surprised that one is considered by others to be influential.
Well, you can acknowledge that you have some influence and still be surprised to learn that you were highly influential in a particular case. Maybe it didn't seem that way at the time.
ReplyDeleteAnd surely false modesty is way better than the well-established Nobel laureate/columnist tendency to go around insisting that you are massively influential and everything you say on any topic should be respected by everyone?
Hear, hear!
ReplyDeleteI, for one, am entirely free of false modesty.
And krugman is comparing himself to Tom Friedman, who (unlike Krugman) is a real pundit.
ReplyDeleteMe too, as what I heard of.
ReplyDeleteWithout commenting on the main point, I should say that my one abiding memory of the trip was the magnificent disorder of P.K.'s office - piles of books and papers everywhere. I'm no slouch meself when it comes to messiness, but I wasn't in the same league. Even my mate Rich Yeselson, whose desk area was once genuinely condemned by OSHA as a fire hazard, wouldn't measure up. I've had an informal theory for a while that messiness is positively correlated with creativity (all the unexpected connections that are made when the one pile of books collapses on top of the other) - if it bears out at all, I'm surprised that it's only the one Nobel that the man has.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, this is one of those rare occasions when d-squared comes off not as a bracing truthteller or a voice for common sense, but rather as someone who doesn't have a clue how human beings actually work.
ReplyDeleteNeither being accomplished, nor being praised for one's accomplishments, liberates anyone from the nagging sense that there's something crazy about being massively praised. If d2 doesn't get this, he's a bigger nerd than any of the nitwits he's so admirably skewered in the years I've been reading him.
And by the way, "unseemly" my ass. "Unseemly" means "I have a twisted emotional relationship to this celebrity, made up of expectations I invented, and therefore they ought to behave as I need them to." This is the realm of fan fiction, and I don't mean that in a nice way.
I think Patrick might have been trying to call me a wanker there, but I think half way through he fell in love with his own prose style and forgot to drop the word in.
ReplyDeleteHe went with "nerd". Squeamish, we Americans are.
ReplyDeleteIn related news, I just took a look at "Making Light" for the first time in three years and yes, it is still a really terrible blog.
ReplyDeleteI do mean that in a nice way, in so far as it is possible to say "your blog is really boring" in a nice way.
I'm going to stay on the sidelines for the impending scuffle, but I do suspect that being at Princeton, with its fairly large accumulation of geniuses and gongs -- without the ego massage of an All Souls' high table -- is conducive to a certain amount of humility.
ReplyDelete(I remember a talk in London by Freeman Dyson, describing the atmosphere at the IAS during the 1950s with von Neumann, Gödel and Einstein all down the corridor, and the way in which that was perceived as alternately normal and unworldly.)
with von Neumann, Gödel and Einstein all down the corridor
ReplyDeleteit is really, really noteable, though, that the Princeton IAS has distinguished itself for years by the striking absence of any new or worthwhile discoveries produced by the assembled brains, all of whom did their career-defining work somewhere else. It is sort of the Newcastle United of research institutes - a place for faded stars with career-ending injuries to gracefully live out the twilight of their career on lots of money.
This week on his NYT blog, Errol Morris describes his time as a grad student there; Thomas Kuhn threw an ashtray at him.
ReplyDeleteRe the IAS, most people there are only there for a year or two, on fellowships - there's quite a small permanent faculty these days.
ReplyDeleteThough your criticism has been made by others: "When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.
"Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!"
-- Richard Feynman
Arguably, the act of throwing an ashtray at Thomas Kuhn's head could be considered an important contribution to philosophy of science.
ReplyDeleteFinding it hard to agree with D2's comments about the IAS, though I guess it depends on how you interpret "new", "worthwhile", and "career-defining" (the three overlap, but I'd argue against them being the same). Some *pretty good* people to be found in the list http://www.math.ias.edu/people/members (though as ajay says, many are on temporary visiting positions)
ReplyDelete