The Affect Effect

I took four classes my first semester studying political science at SEU and earned A's in three of them. I was actually getting a small reputation as a wunderkind, the engineer who was doing unexpectedly well in political science. The fourth class was with Prof. Irving on rationality, and he requested that I go to his office to receive my grade. This was my first term paper, and I had written on Irving's extreme democracy book in which he argued that all important policy questions should be put to a vote. Based on my experience living in California, I didn't that would work because I felt like I was voting on important subjects about which I knew very little. But more importantly, it seemed to me that Irving's book was really about reformulating a workable socialism, which means that it is still subject to the Hayek's critique. Hayek argued that rationality, the brain's ability to process information, is inherently limited, which impacts the ability of socialist central committees to plan and run an economy. My paper argued similarly that there would be no way to convey enough information to voters in an extreme democracy to make informed decision.

On my way to Irving's office on that cold December day, I was hoping for an A but realized that probably wasn't going to happen. My gut told me the odds of my receiving an A were not good, but I'd been wrong before. Irving had been a little, reticent shall we say, but the collective noun for graduate student is an, "anxiety." I figured that even though I had disagreed with Irving, that's what people do, and he would be flattered that I had focused on his book. I settle into Irving's office, and he tells me he's giving me an F. The paper was so terrible that he checked my grades from my other classes to see what I had received. The fact that I had received 3 A's meant nothing to him. How could I write such a paper? What was I thinking? The paper was so awful in his opinion that I couldn't even rewrite it. However he was going to do me a favor by giving me an incomplete rather than the F I had earned. So total was his rejection that I tried to make some weak protests, but it was obvious they weren't going to help and could hurt. The only thing to do was leave.

On my way home, my brain felt like it was on fire. I tried to remain logical though, and there was no way to fight Irving's criticism directly. Instead I chose to focus on short-term goals, absorb the criticism, figure out what I did wrong, and then work to correct my error. I started by working through the logic of the paper, and I was pretty sure I was correct. In Irving's defense, I had studied engineering and computer science before studying political science, so while the mathematical and logical foundations of my argument were strong, I was weak on the literature. The paper was probably more than a little odd. Also this was also my first 20 page term paper. The analogy I had in mind at the time was a music student having become expert at piano and violin but who also wanted to study guitar. The first guitar lesson will probably be poor, but if you were good at piano and violin, then you'll probably be pretty good at guitar if you apply yourself, right?

Plus, the class had concentrated on rational choice theory, which didn't strike me as correct. It seemed to feature overly structured problems that lent themselves to closed-form, "correct" answers. There was a quality to the arguments that featured purportedly intelligent people making radical -- and by "radical," I mean large, significant, and fundamental -- changes to political-economic systems. This didn't seem supportable because the reason one undertakes changing political-economic systems is to improve them. But I had written over 10,000 lines of computer code for my master's thesis, and I treated this code base fundamentally differently than the political economy. When I changed that code, I had NO IDEA what would happen. That's not quite correct: I had a theory about what would happen, but I was often wrong. Consequently I only made a few changes to my code at a time and ensured I could back them out if necessary. Additionally I reasoned that my code, while complex, was far less complex than the political economy. Also, I new far more about my code, which I had created, than these people knew about the political economy. In fact, I knew more about that code base than anybody on the planet, so if I didn't know how changes would impact it, then how could these political scientists predict the consequences of a much, much more complex system? This seemed to me pretty reasonable logic that should be accepted at SEU.

I got my arguments all organized, made an appointment with Irving, and went to talk things over with him. I started by saying, "What I was trying to do with the paper was-"

Irving shouted me down, "Your paper meant nothing -- NOTHING!"

This outburst left quite an impression as I'm not used to being shouted down. And this was after I gave Irving a couple of weeks to calm down! It wasn't polite; it wasn't even professional. Being yelled at in such a manner is actually quite unusual in my academic experience. Our meeting went downhill from there, and I left Irving's office without a better understanding of my paper's shortcomings, which was the whole point of the meeting. However, Irving's reaction in a strange way made me feel better. Why was he so worked up? Why was he so angry and emotional? Why was he exhibiting so much affect? Why couldn't he even talk about my paper? His reaction started to feel to me more like an overreaction. But what did it mean? There had to be a reason behind his behavior, and perhaps the reason was there was more to the paper than he wanted to admit? There was no way to figure this out quickly as there was another semester's worth of classes coming up for which I needed to prepare. I was stuck with three A's and an F -- no wait -- make that an incomplete. There was also no way that I, as a first year graduate student, was going to win an argument with Irving, a tenured SEU professor who had a stellar academic pedigree with undergraduate and graduate degrees from schools every bit as prestigious as SEU. I put the matter away because I couldn't make progress on it in the short term. But an inkling of a question had been established that would not soon go away.