rationality

There's an article in the Aug. 23 New Yorker by Joshua Rothman about rationality. My reaction to it feels offbeat but not irrational.

I'm certainly capable of reacting emotionally, mostly in spontaneous situations, but I think I run my life decisions, on a scale running from "plan my next vacation" on up, on a fairly rational basis as average people go. I modify my practice over time as I learn more about what works and what does not. That's about becoming more knowledgeable, not more rational.

Yet I have no desire to join a rationality movement as described in this article. It does not seem to me a rational thing to do. I read Scott Alexander, who's a figure in that movement, but I read him because he's entertaining and often informative, and unlike some of his fellows he does not hold up rationality as a goal in itself.

What I find missing from comparisons of rational and supposedly irrational behavior is a lack of consideration of the difference between people's individual goals and personalities.

Rothman describes his college friend Greg, a conscious rationalist, as particularly interested in making rational study of monetary investments. Such an interest is sort of a default example of rationality in action, and for someone like Greg, who became a hedge fund manager, focusing on it makes sense.

But I would say, "I'm not particularly interested in studying investments. That's not what I want to spend my free time and my intellectual energy on; there are other things I prefer to do. Consequently, even if I did work at this, I'd probably not be particularly good at it.* So since there are people who make their living advising other people at investments, I can have them put me in mutual funds. Then there will be two levels of expertise watching over my money. They could make mistakes, to be sure, but then so could I if I were doing this. And I think I can avoid the small risk of con men by not using people offering implausibly high returns out of black boxes." That strikes me as a rational reaction from someone with those priorities.

Rothman defines Charlotte Lucas as rational when she accepts Mr. Collins' offer of marriage, implying that Lizzie was irrational to refuse it. But they're different people with different needs and expectations. Charlotte says she's not romantic. She is only concerned with financial security, and as a married woman demonstrates her priorities, eking out a life as detached from her irritating husband as possible.

That's fine for her, but Lizzie wants partnership and a meeting of minds out of marriage, and it would have been irrational for her to make the decision which was rational for Charlotte. Lizzie's only mistake here was to be surprised and not realize how different Charlotte is from herself. That's a lack of knowledge, not of rationality.

*This isn't always the case. I spent my school years perplexed at the fact that I was both very good at math, and found it exceedingly boring.

Michael Morgan

Oh now, this is sad. Michael Morgan, music director of the Oakland Symphony for over thirty years now, died yesterday. It was the result of a post-operation infection that had already led Morgan to cancel some concerts. With Michael Tilson Thomas, emeritus of the San Francisco Symphony, also out post-operationally right now, one has cause to fret.

And Morgan, who was 63, was just beginning to come into his own on a larger stage. Ignored across the Bay for decades, he had just recently made his San Francisco Symphony conducting debut. Among the pieces in his concert was Louise Farrenc's Third Symphony (1847).

That sort of unusual programming was typical Morgan. Getting to Oakland from here for an evening out is a nuisance, but I usually ventured up for a Morgan concert about once a year, because I just couldn't resist his programming. The last one I attended had music by five Black composers, going all the way back to the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and including Florence Price's Third Symphony (1940).

There were lots of others, including an evening with American Indian concert music. A rare violin concerto by John Adams. And Morgan was a good conductor as well as an imaginative programmer: of the four times I've heard Bernstein's Mass live, his rendition was musically the best. And he put a blistering defense of the work's value in the program notes: "The work is constantly underestimated by those who are still distracted by its liberal politics and liberal use of popular music idioms. But those of us who have studied it find that the more one studies it, the greater and greater it seems: both as a well-integrated piece of music and as a political/philosophical/spiritual statement."

So Morgan took his music seriously, but he had an informality of manner unlike anything I've seen in other major conductors. Before performing another of his obscure finds, Stenhammar's Second Symphony, he told the audience that he'd first found it in a record bin. Well, so did I; but that's not the sort of source a conductor normally admits to.

He held a poll of listeners for favorite piece, and promised to perform it. Dvorak's Symphony from the New World won, and he paired it with Bruckner's Te Deum, which made another combination I couldn't miss.

Morgan also pleased me by playing a lot of Shostakovich. In February 2017 (note the date), he led Shostakovich's Ninth. He explained that this short, light, cheerful and cheeky work defied Stalin's expectations for a huge, pompous peroration to celebrate victory in WW2, the more so as it was a Ninth, with all the epic burden that number has carried in symphonies since Beethoven. "Sometimes," Morgan said, "when you have a strongman leader, who thinks he can tell everyone what to do, artists have to punch back." And when the audience erupted into huge applause at this, he said with a grin, "I don't know what you people think I'm referring to." And he concluded, "Think of the Shostakovich Ninth as a work of resistance ... our own little poke in the eye to strongman dictators."

Some years ago, I was sitting in the audience at the San Francisco Conservatory waiting for a panel discussion to start, when a guy in jeans and a polo shirt set down a backpack and slipped into the seat next to it, a few rows in front of me. Then I recognized him: it was Michael Morgan. Again with the informality: how many other major conductors would you expect to see just casually in an audience like that?

I really cherished this man and his work, and I'll miss them both.