Category Archives: Personal

Blog Revival?

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I’m about to bike over to a screening of Food, Inc. on campus, but I’m feeling bad for having neglected my blog for this long.

I was actually in part inspired to rekindle my efforts here by Davit Lat (of Above the Law) and his interview at The Blackbook Legal Blog.  I was keeping myself away for a combination of personal reasons and the consensus at school (alluded to in the Blackbook link) that keeping a blog can only hurt one’s jobs prospects.  I think this is only true if one says idiotic things or posts ridiculous pictures of oneself, neither of which I’m really at risk of doing.  Plus honestly, if I can’t write about my interests in my spare time, I’m not convinced that the work that blogging forces me to forgo will be felt as much of a loss anyway.

On a completely unrelated note, I recently had an article run in the Harvard Law Record.  After spending a few post-college years regretting never publishing in the Michigan Daily, I can finally take comfort in the fact that I’ve published in a student paper.  The article even got a kind mention over at The Situationist.

Parade of Horribles

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I read Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony when I first worked in New York a few years ago.  The story is one I’d heard as a Catholic schoolboy:  A monk named Anthony goes to the desert to escape earthly distractions.  God tempts him with every from of hedonism and sends demons to torment him and disrupt his prayers.  Anthony performs a superhuman triumph of the will and refuses to yield to any of the temptations.  God rewards his piety by letting him hold the infant Christ-child, the only time Christ returned to the earth since the Ascension.

I always found this probably the strangest story in the whole Catholic mythology of saints.  As a kid this kind of stuff terrified me about God and now makes me concerned about the psychological harm religions (esp. Catholicism) inflicts on the minds of children.

St. Anthony of Padua is my namesake, but my interest here also has something to do with a mistaken narcissistic impulse to view everything in life as a temptation away from some higher purpose, which is probably why Flaubert identified with the story as well.

temptation of saint anthony central panel by H. Bosch

Back when I read the Temptations, I looked up every artists’ depiction I could find online from the middle ages to today.  The temptations were an absolute blank canvas for artists to throw as many lascivious, nightmarish, ridiculous images as they could into a single painting.  I think Flaubert saw it this way as well.  People who’ve researched this much better than myself have pointed out how much these St. Anthony paintings set the table for the surrealists (Hieronymus Bosch and Dali have two of the more memorable paintings of the Temptation).

temptation of st. anthony by S. Dali

The difference between decision-making and talking about making decisions

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I’ve lately been reconsidering whether it makes sense to pursue a PhD on top of the JD I’m paying for.  It would be in either psychology or neuroscience, but I’m having trouble weighing the pros and cons of the additional degree.  Counterintuitively, I’m pretty certain that the PhD would end up limiting the career choices I have available without creating many new ones.  This might actually be a good thing, nudging me toward academia.  But it’s pretty well documented that people have a bias toward keeping as many doors open as possible, sometimes even when it’s more advantageous to specialize (did Barry Schwartz write about that?).  And then there is the time commitment.

The law school does have a Project on Law and Mind Sciences.  Jon Hanson, who heads that program and maintains the always interesting Situationist blog, does work I really strongly admire.  I’ve already taken a seminar with him that’s only reinforced my desire to pursue some psychological strands in the law.  Briefly, he’s arguing that people’s choices are constrained by the situations and circumstances around them, and that we’re mistaken in focusing on personality or the idea of individuals as consistent moral actors.  It’s a position I agree with but that doesn’t really suggest very practical, realizable policies (or maybe that’s just a statement on how deeply ingrained the fundamental attribution error is in our society).

I am writing all this in part because I couldn’t sleep tonight.  I just finished watching this video of Cass Sunstein describing his most recent book, Nudge, which suggests ways that some basic psychological insights can improve policy effectiveness:
http://forum.wgbh.org/lecture/improving-decisions-about-health-wealth-and-happiness

Sunstein was at HLS for about a semester before being appointed head of OIRA when Obama took office this last winter.  I recall one of my professors calling it the most powerful position in government you’ve never heard of.  OIRA makes cost-benefit determinations (alongside the OMB), coordinates agencies, and oversees wide-ranging government policies.  And under Sunstein’s direction, it will presumably also be now taking actual human behavior into account in implementing policy.  It’s unfortunate I won’t get to take a class with him, but it is reassuring to know that the current administration has people whose skepticism toward the rational actor model predated the economic crisis.

Anyway, the point is, there are ways here to be exploring this area, and there are people around doing interesting work.  Whether I apply for an additional degree or not, I’m determined to publish something before I graduate, and I plan to use this space to start hashing through some ideas.