Technical Work

The ex ante-ex post distinction and scenarios

I have been reading Lawrence Solum's Legal Theory Blog on some problems of intellectual property with great profit. Solum is engaged in a discussion with Eugene Volokh [1,2] on certain problems in economic analysis of intellectual property rights. My concern here is with two methodological problems. The first problem comes from the ex ante/ex post distinction, the second from the use of hypothetical cases.

Comparative analysis of sea lion skulls

I was visiting the California Academy of Sciences with friends yesterday, and I took them to see the Skulls exhibit. The core of the exhibit is a collection of sea lion skulls (about 900 in all) that occupies an entire wall of the exhibit hall. As you walk up to the wall, you see an enormous matrix of very similar forms, all displayed the same way. The labels on the exhibit tell you that there are seven skulls in the collection which are not sea lions, and this sets an obvious puzzle: find the ringers. You're helped, if you want it, by the labels on the rail in front of the wall, which unobtrusively flag the outlier skulls.

Looking for the outliers leads you to start looking more closely at the individual skulls in the exhibit. Differences are readily apparent: some are larger than others; many have a pronounced crest on top, while others don't; some have larger fangs than others; one (E33) seems to be wider than it is long, while most of them are longer than wide (Aha!); and so on. The longer you look, the more differences appear, the more subtle they become, the more minor variations in proportion seem to stand out, the more strongly a few skulls seem to look, well, peculiar.

You can't help speculating: the smaller ones must be juveniles. The crests seem to be associated with overall size, but many of the bigger skulls seem to be heavier as well, with larger fangs; are those the males? The large one with the rounded skull, no crest, and a short muzzle doesn't seem to fit into that sequence-- sure enough it's a bear, not a sea lion. But the bear looks a lot more like a sea lion than the sheep does.

In short, the Academy has developed a wonderful machine for teaching comparative analysis in an extraordinarily effective way, leading people to discover and sort out the important similarities and differences for themselves. The important lesson of course, is not sea lions, but discovering and sorting out similarities and differences. It's a lovely example of the highest-quality kind of education in comparative analysis, one which is rarely found in laboratories.

If you're in the Bay Area, the exhibit will be open every day until December 31, when the Academy will be closed for reconstruction. The Academy (but not the skulls exhibit) will re-open in downtown San Francisco next year, and the rebuilt Academy is scheduled to re-open in 2008.

Graff on college teaching

I've been enjoying Gerald Graff's Clueless in Academe. The core of his argument is that colleges are doing a poor job of teaching, for at least two reasons. First, they fail to explain the culture of scholarship to students, thus leaving the students unsure of what and how to learn. Second, Graff feels that academia does a poor job of reaching out to the bigger world, of transmitting its most important lessons, which are about the value of argument-- i.e.,

…summarizing the claims of others, sticking with a summary to unpack its key implications and premises, weighing evidence, spotting and identifying contradictions and non sequiturs, telling stories and devising examples that exemplify one's point, generalizing one's conclusions, and many other practices that come into play in every field. (p. 22)