drwex | Batting .500 is good, right?

Last night taura_g accompanied me on a little in-town adventure to hear a pair of talks.

First up, George Lakoff talking about "The Brain's Politics: How Campaigns Are Framed and Why".

In fact, the talk ended up being a lot of background and less about the advertised political stuff. It was an OK talk for that. I've been a fan of Lakoff earliest work on metaphors, which I think was completely revolutionary, and less so of his later political stuff. So his review of the ideas behind metaphor theory and cognition was OK, but not new to me. He did tell the origin story - how did he first come to do this work - which I had not heard before and enjoyed.

My problem with the current work is that I don't think it's well grounded. He makes assumptions that, post hoc, seem OK but that I don't think are necessarily entailed by the theory. For example, he has lately amended his theory to assert that the preservation of conservatism is a necessary part of the paternal-father model that he says governs conservative thinking. Well, this is a very useful tool for explaining away the fact that conservatives will jettison their own ideas once the other side adopts them, but I don't think his theory necessarily entails it. It feels like something odd just bolted on to explain away an inconvenient set of facts.

Then again, I felt the same way when he started in on the "don't talk about an elephant" ideas, and the last few years' of research in mirror neurons and the like have certainly proven that to be correct. So maybe I'm just being too skeptical. Certainly he has revolutionized the field once, no matter what we think of his current stuff.

So overall an engaging and thought-provoking talk. We left during the Q&A in order to go to the second event...

Boston Camera Club Talk: Processing the Digital Image

Err, yeah. I won't bore you with the details, but this was definitely a "can I have that hour of my life back please?" event. The speaker was awful - he spent about 40 minutes rambling and discoursing on trivia and banalities completely unrelated to the nominal topic. It's possible that he does know something about digital image processing and Adobe Lightroom, but you couldn't prove it by listening to him.

We bailed at the supposed stop time of 8:30, though it was clear he was going to ramble on for a good deal longer. On the ride home I was grasping for the right word to describe the room full of people there and the best I could come up with was "wankers" (in the actual British meaning of 'egotistical' and 'self-indulgent' with overtones of 'people who think they know something but in fact are clueless').

It's partly my own fault - had I bothered to check out the speaker's Web site beforehand I might have had a clue. And really a couple of hours isn't a big loss. But I doubt I'll be going to any future Boston Camera Club anything.