Some Public Anecdotes about Some Public Persons

Herbert Simon apparently mistook my brother for me when Michael was on his Carnegie Fellowship. Usually it's the other way around ("Your ties are just like your brother's" or "You are balding exactly like your brother." -- these are actual quotations). If I could choose just one person to know me by reputation over Michael, it would be my #1 academic hero, Herb Simon!
I was allowed to sit in, when Francis Crick visited Jerry Feldman and his protege. Crick was insistent on pacing the presentation quickly, cueing the student to move on, like he was fast forwarding through powerpoint slides, saying "next" and "ok" before each sentence was half formulated. In retrospect, this student had no business going online with someone like Crick. I had met asses with genius before, but this was the first genius I saw who had every right to be an ass.
Searle was surprised when I introduced him as the philosopher who had advanced artificial intelligence through his work on speech acts and practical reasoning; he had spent so much time trying to be the enemy, he had not realized that he had actually become a co-conspirator.
I introduced Lotfi Zadeh as a national treasure, and I stand by that description. He used to carry around a camera to photograph his colleagues. For all we knew, he just tossed all those conference group pics. But what a clever way to make people feel special.
I seem to recall Dan Dennett cleaning up on my billiards table after briefly feigning incompetence. Just a warning for anyone he plans to hustle in the future.
Shoham signed for my paycheck and Israel gave me an office, Suppes mentored me, and Ginsberg/Lifschitz entertained, but it was really Amos Tversky who was responsible for inviting me out to Stanford for a year. I only cornered him in his office once during that time, but it was an eventful conversation. He was a gentleman who did not dismiss my radical-translation-based interpretationism out of hand. But he did lean on his stack of papers as if there were a button under there to call for security if things got out of hand! That conversation led directly to the J. Phil. article on how a formal theory could be normative. I think it's outrageous that Daniel Kahneman could be given a Nobel without his ever-present co-author, Tversky. (And by the way, let's not forget Ward Edwards' original contribution to this area.) I see that Kahneman protested, but the prize committee has its rules. So much less for the reputation of the prize. It's like the von Neumann-Morgenstern division. I told my students on an airplane that if a Nobel were ever offered, they'd do better to turn it down. People overhearing us must have thought I was just blowing smoke, but I still think you don't want to share a prize-for-area from a committee-playing-safe that has a record of giving-to-canonizer (usually not the originator). Better to have a MacArthur Genius Award. Tversky's reputation will only grow in time from the omission. I'd suggest a posthumous MacArthur for Tversky ..., except that I see they had the foresight to give him one when he was alive.
We all thought that IQ-proponent Richard Herrnstein was the dullest intellect we had as a professor when we were Harvard freshmen. The beauty of this observation, of course, is that anyone who wants to defend Herrnstein's brilliance has to admit that there must be different ways that one can manifest one's intelligence; hence, there must be a variety of IQ measures.
The California press questioned Ron Unz's claim of a 214 IQ when he was running in the Republican primary against Pete Wilson. The joke, which Ron Unz knows as well as any of us, is that those tests are not tuned to measure the high range with any useful precision. It's actually humor like this that led us to believe in Physics 55 that Ron Unz was a lot smarter than the rest of us.
Scalia and I had the following curious exchange... here. I would actually prefer a judicious judge, a person of good judgement, to a brilliant legal scholar. My error. The irony is that I deliberately shortened "testimonial" to "testament" when speaking to him through a car window so he could get out of the conversation and get to his plane two syllables sooner.
The Danny Pearl I met was an intern for a Boston newspaper when I was a summer intern at DEC. Someone at DEC knew him and he dropped by for lunch. I seem to recall there was a scheme a few years later whereby I would have a chance to meet his kid sister at Stanford by delivering a package to her dorm. I chickened out and left the parcel with the RA's. But I've never met a man of whom it was so easy to imagine that he was family, and who so quickly made you feel like the two of you were on the same side.
Some people want to take shots at Barack Obama for the accuracy of the dialogue in his Dreams memoir. Well, I finally sat down to read it this Christmas, and he remembered things a lot better than I did. I had been telling people I first met him in eighth grade, but he remembered a "slender Chinese boy with dental headgear" in Miss Hefty's fifth grade class. Hey, I was in Miss Hefty's fifth grade class! And I was the only slender Chinese boy with, rather unfortunately, dental headgear back then. Sure enough, when I checked, he'd even signed my yearbook, "To the nicest skinnybones, ... Barry Obama". Apparently he has always had a sensitivity to weight. Alas, over the intervening years, he is now the skinny one and I am the chub. I can vaguely recall talking to an old white guy before school started, presumably his grandfather, and this guy may well have misunderstood my "Castle Hall Middle School is new for us" as "I am new to Punahou." So much for people who think Obama's memory needs sharpening.
(If you look at the lower left corner in the class picture that the NY Times printed, that's me, barefoot in white pants. Someone was passing a love note, I guess to the girl sitting behind me, and the camera caught me with it. Meanwhile, if Susan in the purple muumuu in the center ever reads this, I'm so sorry you left Punahou because we all had crushes on you.)
I remember when I first heard that Barry Obama was joining the basketball team in ninth grade. We all played a lot of hoops back then. (I was a shot blocker whenever two mostly Japanese upper-middle-class children-of-dentists BMW-driving gangs would meet on the asphalt courts in mid-afternoon sun. When I got to college and found that my barely-5'9" shot blocking skills were no longer relevant, I was so bummed.) Even though this school went to great lengths to supply its varsity teams with talent, it had not yet been able to get the black guy to do the black guy thing. I remember being somewhat disappointed to hear that he had acquiesced, that he would willingly fall into the racial stereotype. The school was pretty good at making kids feel free to pursue their individual talents, so I'm sure there was a struggle for his soul. It turns out that he really was talented at basketball, and it's a bit embarrassing that his classmates didn't pay much attention to the basketball team -- I didn't know it was a winning team until I read it in recent articles unearthing Obama's past. I wonder how he chose to wear 23, years before Michael Jordan would make that number famous. As for any claims that race might have figured in his limited playing time, I have watched upper middle class white guys playing ahead of a token black player at elite private schools all my life. That's just the way it has been in rich-kid American high schools and universities, and anyone who disputes the fact is welcome to study video of the past two decades where I have been. I remember having a student who was the token black bench player, who never dunked during warm-ups. I once begged him to help us put down some uppity med students one night at the med school gym and was surprised by how "black" he could play ball. Who knew JC could play so well above the rim? Putting two and two together, I realized that the school's coaches were not letting him "ghetto up" their league. Times may have changed a bit in the past couple of years, but that's the way it was even in the mid nineties. Dan Hale suggests that there was the only white guy on Obama's team (Hale, Orme, and Bendix?). The coach, Chris McLachlin, is a legend in the advancement of women's sports, hardly the kind of guy who would tow an institution's racial line. But I don't see anything wrong with the Dreams recollection of how it was.
It's true that Hawaii is a fantastic melting pot and people have all sorts of issues with race besides the black-white thing. But I remember clearly in seventh grade when a teacher suggested that a dark-skinned student was "black". She went ballistic. She protested that she was half-Hawaiian, and that she should not be mistaken for having any other ancestry. I thought that the teacher was going to get fired for such a grave mistake. Fortunately, there are two sides to that error. Half-Hawaiian occupies the highest rung in the racial ladder of the islands. To be mistaken as anything other than half-Hawaiian, when you are in fact so mixed, is a bit like being an unrecognized blue-blooded royal. So the whole event could be swept under the "Oh I didn't realize you were Hawaiian!" rug. Still, the dirty secret is that there really was a "Don't call me black!" racial undertone. It's a lot more complicated than that, since all of our heroes in Hawaii in the seventies were black people. We were listening to disco music and watching the UH basketball Fantastic Five do their thing all the time without realizing they were black people. I had to look up the Fantastic Five after reading Obama's book -- sure enough they were black guys. Who knew? Tavares and Stylistics? Black. And not Yvonne Elliman, but yes, Pattie Brooks. Really? (Wasn't Earth, Wind, and Fire everyone's first live concert?) It's one of the charming things about Hawaii that the Asian-non-Asian line is the main racial divide, and only the military seemed to be Black-White conscious back then. Was Obama an outcast because of his race? There seemed to be one Jew, one Indian, one Celt, one Hollander, one descendant of original Hawaiian missionaries. Was it a big deal to be an isolated black? As a nerd who was painfully aware of who got dates and who didn't, I can attest that few of the girls would have dated a black guy back then. It was probably worse being black than being a nerd. In 1979, it had been a long time since To Sir, with Love, and there would be time still before Revenge of the Nerds II.
First thing I remember Barry Obama asking me was "Are you Chinese?" followed by "Are you communist?" I had to run home and ask my mom what a communist was, and I got schooled in how my family helped the KMT oppose the Maoist revolution, whatever that meant. Still, it's amazing how advanced Barry was in his cultural awareness at such a young age.
Abner Mikva says Barack Obama is the smartest guy he's ever met. Well, as Punahou's math team captain for two years, where the lowest scoring kid got three MIT degrees, including his PhD in a nuclear engineering, where Obama never showed his face, I can say we have to look carefully at Mikva's statement. First of all, something happened to Obama when he hit LA, and he carried that burgeoning intellect into NYC. Somewhere along the way, he discovered his voice and his scholarship, and in that same time, a talent for productive politics and insightful legal thinking became more important to a career than trigonometry. I'll trade a math team high score trophy for that "old man with dignity" poem that Barry published in the literary magazine. Second, would you really want that nuclear engineer dabbling in politics? The closer we look at Mikva's statement, the more illuminating it becomes. There is a reason why the Rhodes scholars are supposed to have Bill Bradley-like sports credentials. Leadership is about being smart enough to know how to deal with all kinds of people. Social intelligence is the highest form of intelligence. Obama might or might not have made my math team, but if he is going to lead my nation, then I am much happier he spent his time on the school newspaper and literary magazine, and yes, even on the basketball court and in the Waikiki apartment of a disaffected political poet. Larry Lessig blogged that he was the first to see Obama as a presidential winner. Not true, I think. I recall dinner with the Chicago Law Review students where I was stuck between a junior Republican and a young Democrat. The only thing they could agree on that night was that Obama was a future national winner. That dinner was supposed to include Cass Sunstein, who didn't make it. I see Sunstein has very nice things to say about his Chicago Law colleague, too. How smart is Obama? To me, the answer is this: U. Chicago probably has a smarter bunch of people than Harvard (yes, I said it), and the best of the best are probably at the law school. To see Chicago Law Professors falling over themselves to endorse Obama is a better recommendation of this man's Presidential intellect than anything I can imagine.
For the people who think Barack Obama's new house is too nice for a junior senator with a book deal, who don't believe he could be as down-to-earth as his supporters imagine, I have to help paint the picture. For the record, the Illinois Legislator was going to drive himself to our conference banquet and speak for the paltry sum of $300 in Spring of 2001. I was of course appalled by the low ball offer. The event's treasurer had in mind that it would be $500 or $600 after adding an honorarium, but Obama didn't know that. And the dinner was worth maybe $60. This is basically what we pay professors from Urbana when they decide to visit St. Louis. People like Scalia get $10,000 - $20,000 to speak and an entourage. Fortunately, we had to cancel on each other -- his work took him late into the night and our attendance was going to be poor. Anyone who looks at the man and thinks he has had it too good has got to ask himself, twelve years after being a top student at Harvard Law School, would you be willing to drive six hours and sit for four hours with people who are never going to be remember your name, for a $300 fee?
I realized earlier this year that "Barack" is probably the same name as "Baruch", and I discovered that my old pal Brad DeLong had even blogged about it a week before my epiphany. I guess Obama chooses "Barack" for a variety of reasons: to honor his father, to recognize his ascent from high school hoops to Harvard Law School leader, to permit him a pen name or persona when he aspires to be poetic and visionary. I like DeLong's observation that most of the "Barry's" you meet are in Schul. But I was thinking who were the prominent "Barry's" of the seventies and eighties. You have Barry White, Barry Gibb, and Barry Manilow. Obama would have known Barry Goldwater, too. No wonder he chooses Barack. (Nothing wrong with Barry Sanders, by the way.) As for the middle name, "Hussein," I remember giving a student, "Hassan," grief for years, claiming it was a derivation of the same name. He said his name was German, and after he made a couple dozen million dollars at Google (no kidding -- try http://backrub.tjtech.org/1997/index.htm) he actually gave cash presents to all his old friends except me, even though I had recruited him and paid for his summers. Be careful whose name you make fun of. Meanwhile, I keep laughing at names like Paula Abdul and Ralph Nader, Paul Anka and John Sununu, because people don't seem to recognize their Arabic roots. Let's put it this way. No one had a problem going to chapel at Punahou school and singing songs from the Christian bible. No one ever pulled out a prayer rug and pointed it to Mecca, or quoted the Koran. And in senior year, they gave us a really narrow minded new Chaplain from the deep South, and we tried our best to like her. We really did. Punahou was a plenty Christian school. My father was best described as an almost-forgot-I'm-a-Buddhist, and all I remember from that was lighting incense at a really well-decorated cemetary, which is what I now do in my own garden when I run out of mosquito repellent and Missi has been to the Indian store. People in Hawaii in the seventies were more worried about their tanning and their discoing than their salvation. When I'm in that polling booth and I see my old classmate's name, will I pause before punching? Maybe. I'll pause to think about how we're the same age, and maybe I'll think about whether the nation can follow a black man in 2008, whether it can accept its own gift of historic renewal. Will I pause because I think he might have been programmed by an elementary school in Indonesia to be excessively or unduly nice to Islamic extremists? No.
The amazing thing about Obama is that he doesn't say anything terribly different from what I am thinking, and maybe nothing much different from what you are thinking. For a while everyone assumed it was a Hawaii thing for him to be even handed while strongly liberal, to be inclusive but keep high standards, to be reasonable while asking for progress, and to be a patriot while questioning Washington. Ater all, we are the state that has no majority race, where fresh immigrants are often hard to distinguish from their assimilated third generation in-laws, where there is a military base respected at every turn, but people don't want to see their loved ones deployed capriciously, and where interaction with others, even the Mormons on the North Shore, is well practiced. I once wrote to our graduating seniors that they had an obligation to train to be future leaders on a national stage, because ours was a way out of traditional racial and political conflict and acerbity. Especially with the rise of economic Asia, I wrote, their potential was greater than just being occupants of fair islands. So there is an Obama Phenomenon now, where every well-educated articulate Punahou graduate who once flirted with politics is climbing into a local race, to see how far the island way of thinking and relaxed private school training will carry. But it's not just an island-heterogeneity-and-tolerance thing or a Punahou-teaches-virtue-and-decency thing. It's an American thing. It's a democracy thing. It's what people all over the country want to hear their leaders saying, except that they want them to really mean it when they say it. Ed Case might eventually unseat Dan Inouye, and I expect he'll be saying the same kinds of things Barack is saying, and meaning them, and dare I say as much as I admire Inouye, it'll be better to have some youth in Hawaii's Senate seats. If Ed doesn't do it, there is another like mind in waiting. Can't find someone in the class of '72? How about '75? But not every one of these guys did the groundwork that Barack did. You had to be willing to work in the inner city with the people. You had to be willing to go back to that work even after law school provided a ticket to a big money firm. You had to be willing to walk in the shoes of a black man and love your white Midwestern family completely. You had to spend a dozen years helping to run a state. It doesn't hurt, either, that he has this good voice and poetic soul, and a lectureship in Constitutional Law.
There should be a rule that if you are a runner-up in the Miss USA pageant and a 28-year old actress, a main character on a show with the word "Beautiful" in the title, you should not be allowed to show your face at your tenth reunion. Teri Ann Linn did that, and it still seems rather unfair.
I sent a cassette tape of favorite 70's soul and 60's jazz cuts to Candy Dulfer after I met her in a Dutch dance club in the early nineties. She'd just done her cover of Pick up the Pieces, so I stuck a twenty-five minute version of Pieces on side A that I'd captured from the radio on reel-to-reel tape back in high school. I still can't figure out who did that long, live version, with at least half a dozen brass solos. But now when I listen to her band do its riffs on the Montreux dvd's, I can hear some very cool familiar phrases. Seems Candy never quotes from that tape, but maybe she passed it along to her backups.
I waited in line for an hour to get Hillary Clinton's (assistant-)signed book at Library Limited, and even though I was an active participant in her "Village", I just stood there, looked her in the eyes, and shook her hand without a word. She's a smart person: she knew exactly what I was thinking. I've been waiting ten years to vote for that woman, and I may even get the chance soon. Or maybe an even better choice.
Yo Yo Ma was the Leverett House music tutor and all the co-ed music students understandably wanted to do duets with him. That's part of his legend and lore: the Chinese guy who plays the cello like a Latin lover. But what no one knows is that plenty of the college boys thought his wife, the German tutor, was pretty hot, too. It seems Yo Yo Ma did quite a lot to improve the social plight of the Chinese-American male.
For about twelve months, the Cy Young award winner Chris Carpenter lived a few houses down from us. We didn't see much of him: just a new Porsche turbo with darkened windows going by, when he wasn't driving his family's Land Rover or his oversized red truck. (I hate to say it, but if he hadn't packed up his house a few months ago, he might be pitching this season instead of having elbow surgery.) One day we decided to have a friendly neighborhood garage sale and I hung my Bob Gibson 45 jersey right in the center of the yard. Mid-morning, the charcoal gray Porsche goes by, slowing as it passes, mesmerized by the Hall of Fame icon dancing in the sunlight. And that evening, despite having had a couple of bad recent starts, Carp tossed a complete game shutout.
Harry Lewis might not remember, but I was ranting about excessive drinking among Harvard undergrads one Spring at a Harvard Club of St. Louis dinner (at Harry's, on Market St., get it?). I said that now the class was more than half women, and the Asian quota was up from about 3% when I was there to something like 20% -- and these were precisely the groups that didn't appreciate drunk spoiled East Coast boys barfing all over the dorms on weekends. He seemed to think it wasn't much of a problem. But he returned that Fall, took up the cause, and wrote in his Excellence without a Soul that it was one of the most important things that needed to be done during his tenure as Dean. I suppose the general counsel's office might have provoked his change of mind, but I'd like to think it was dinner at Harry's.
I don't know which was worse -- approaching Stephen Gould with nothing for him to sign but a napkin, or meeting Howard Nemerov at a party and being so inarticulate, he had to get up and walk away. But I don't regret being placed on Roger Penrose's schedule and telling him I wasn't going to discuss his computability-and-the-universe ideas. Sometimes you have to help people discover the limits of their popularity. If it was any consolation, I noted, I attended his physics lecture and was blown away by the equations.