Anyways, I really enjoyed this paper. It is very honest. I recommend getting a new checklist from an experience that allows you to connect and relate to people from different walks of life. I'll comment more later... I want to think about this some more.

-- JosephMacias - 11 Apr 2008

This paper is fascinating. But to the significant degree to which it refers to the recent senate election, it is monumentally self-serving. Andrew, it is not a matter of misunderstood genius to fail to win an election that you fail to take seriously. I cast six votes out of my allotted 15 in this election: one for each candidate who took it at least somewhat seriously. I am not the only one who disregarded candidates who did not articulate why they sought office. My votes included some incumbents, some non-incumbents (admittedly including myself), but not you, because your candidacy statement consisted almost entirely of one-liners. Funny, yes; enough to knock an incumbent out of office, never. It was not misunderstood genius that lost you the election, it was arrogance. The more I think about this essay, well-written as it may be, the more I am struck by your choice to list the phonetic pronunciation of your proper name on Lawnet as "your majesty."

-- RyanMcDevitt - 30 Mar 2008

Hi Ryan,
I respect the honesty of your comments. I only added your signature to the end. Last night, at about 7:50 Greenwich Mean Time, I woke up to loud voices in the hallway; had I known that you were commenting on my paper at that moment, I would have knocked on your door and asked to hear your opinions on my paper in person.

I'm glad you consider my paper "monumentally and pathetically self-serving." It means that I've finally generated both a "narrative" and a "thesis" -- a "personal essay" that's also an "essay." It means we can finally start asking the important questions that constitute revision: how can I IMPROVE the relationship between the "persona" and the "environment" that I chose for him.

Every anecdote in a personal essay ought to pursue a common thesis, i.e. ought to advocate a self-consistent and self-reinforcing character construct. So I'm disappointed with myself, to learn that I portrayed myself as "self-serving" only in those paragraphs that describe my response to the election results. The election is just one facet of people's perceptions of me; my classmates don't act in different "capacities" when they're voting for the student senate, commenting on the Wiki, or speaking to me (or not) in the hallway. So if I seem self-serving and arrogant in one paragraph, I ought to seem self-serving and arrogant throughout.

Now, I'm not sure whether you'd accept that characterization of me. First you said that what caused you (and by analogy, much of the class) to not vote for me, was specifically my flippant Candidate Statement; but in the very next sentence you said that the "arrogance" in that Statement validated my apparently "arrogant" behavior elsewhere -- e.g. how I listed the phonetic pronunciation of my name on Lawnet. (I guess some dialects or tongues would read "YOR MAA-je-stee" as "Your Majesty," though I've never heard anyone pronounce it that way.)

Whether or not you'd articulate it, you do seem to appreciate, that people judge and act as whole personas, not segmented functions. In this paper, for example, the same persona that "arrogantly" explained why I didn't win a senate seat, also explained how Eben's class is causing me to reconsider why I came to law school. My paper will be a success when my readers, faced by the contradiction between "arrogance" suggested by certain statements and lack of arrogance in others, choose the latter characterization as "true", and treat the former as "ironic."

I don't know how the mechanism works, but I feel that you should have sensed that I neither have, nor CLAIM, insight into what features of my persona influenced the election. I think you made a mistake -- I don't know why you took, out of context, my decision to portray myself with "certitude", with "pride in my genius," when there was an ESSENTIAL second step, "behaving socially." That word sets out technique I use in the rest of the paper, for explaining how Eben's class is affecting my path through law school: I use an empirical-sociological rather a subjective-psychological account. I think that I make it very clear, and I've always made it clear, in everything I write, that I don't give any credibility to "subjective" characterizations or evaluations of intentions. I think that's the bulwark that, in a contradiction, makes ironic any of my putative attempts to explicitly characterize my psychology, e.g. as arrogant.

The "empirical-sociological" language I speak contains no verb "decide" -- only "obey." That's why I did not try to translate the social experiment (as William James might call the election) into a hypothesis that we BOTH found meaningful. One who shares his hypothesis and method AFTER gathering the data, obliges us to accuse him of writing the method to fit the data to the hypothesis.

• where HYPOTHESIS means "My data will NOT say [ZERO], i.e. NOT say [NOT Q]
• METHOD means "I define ZERO as X, i.e. as [biased data from the following poll] ...;"
• [Q] is an interesting/meaningful statement) ...

Instead, we will say that I heard a command that I refused to obey, consisting in the following social fact: some of my classmates ask me to like myself less than I currently do." I can't obey that command -- but nor can I command THEM to like me more than THEY currently do. So I changed the subject, sort of: I kept talking about myself, but I analogized the (binary) critique of my Candidate Statement to this community's (nuanced) critique of *my previous Second Paper . By interpreting my previous Second Paper in light of those nuanced critiques (classmates commented on my previous drafts, I incorporated their reactions, their reactions were different, etc. ...), I was able to construct a persona that both I and my classmates could recognize.

You explained the outcome of the election, the "experiment," in terms of the reasons YOU didn't vote for me -- some phenotype of me that you regard as both "monumentally and pathetically self-serving", and "arrogant." (How altruistic of you to remove "pathetically" from "self-serving", in a later revision.) But I don't see what makes you, or me, or any one person, competent to explain why I was the one candidate out of sixteen not to win.

• It's natural for us all to assume that there existed a social concept of me pre-existing the election;
• the hazard is for persons to conceive of the election as MEASURING, inter alia, that social fact.
  • However, it actually CREATED some new social fact, i.e. those persons' willingness to analogize its "data" to past phenomena.
    • But WHICH past phenomena?? The election never claimed to measure my social identity; and yet that's exactly the social fact that gets created in its aftermath
    • i.e.: the answer held by the public as to "How well we think the experiment measuring Andrew's social traits (e.g. his "arrogance," etc) was controlled" becomes a function of "What values certain advocates want the public to validate, and how badly they want the public to validate it."

In other words, you're competent to comment on why you didn't vote for me. That's fine, I'm humble enough to hear it. Instead, you made a serious misstep, by likening my "arrogance" to a "monumentally and pathetically self-serving" portion of my paper. I regard that as an ad hominem. In an earlier draft of this response, I tried to turn the tables on you. It would have been more mature of me to simply assert that in the context of my own paper, where the power relationship is asymmetric, (search for "In the context of my own paper") I have a special immunity against public, personal attacks. Instead, I'll paraphrase my previous comeback as an empirical-sociological claim: attempts to use the Wiki for psychoanalysis at 7:50 Greenwich Mean Time are poorly calculated to be credible.

-- AndrewGradman - 30 Mar 2008

While I have no idea what you're referring to about loud voices in the night, since I was home alone last night and reading your paper because I couldn't sleep, I do agree that 3:30 am after the Dean's Cup is not the ideal time to offer comments. It is exactly because I, and I assume others, don't know you that well that it matters what your candidate statement says. I don't have an opinion on your "public persona," and you are certainly among the majority in approaching the election facetiously. I only wanted to point out that it's most likely that and that alone which cost you. I find this paper very interesting and exceptionally well written otherwise; I wanted to comment only with regard to the one aspect on which I have commented. It looks like you're moving toward asking for more specific comments; I will be happy to offer them. (EDIT) Now that I've seen your completed response, I'll finish my thoughts. I like the way you've framed your use of the election in your paper in your comment above; perhaps I did have it out of context. I have not claimed to be competent to explain the outcome of the election; I have explained my thoughts on it and speculated as to others'. I'm perfectly aware that I could be wrong, which is why I was at least somewhat careful to qualify my speculation as such. More to the point, my response to the election part of the paper as "self-serving" is with regard to its revisionism. You denigrate as a "popularity contest" an election, which you would have us believe you took part in seriously, now that you've lost it, without taking any responsibility for, or even acknowledging, the fact that your public platform was quite literally a joke. As a factual matter, by the way, you're actually not the only listed candidate who was not elected--a write-in candidate was elected, so it ended up being 15 of 17. Finally, with regard to your effort to undercut my comments by implying I made them while drunk or some such, there is an adage that comes to mind: "when you don't have the law on your side, use the facts. When you don't have either the law or the facts on your side, pound the podium. And when that doesn't work, use personal attacks." I do some of my best thinking at night and it does not do your point any justice to make unwarranted implications about me instead of actually confronting my comments. If you'd rather not consider them, fine, disregard them. You're an excellent writer, and, as I said, this is a fascinating essay; the use of the senate thing reads as revisionist or intellectually dishonest and undermines the strong remainder the paper.

-- RyanMcDevitt - 11 Apr 2008

I rarely understand what you write, Andrew, probably because I am not 'listening' at the same frequency as you are speaking or because I am just watching when you do speak. That being said, when you write as lucidly as the prose of this essay, you really demonstrate your ability to be good. And instructive. I do not mean this to be an arrogant or condescending comment, if it comes out so. Indeed, that is precisely the opposite effect that I intend it. From the above, you have a good mind, and I wish I could 'read' it more often, in every sense of that verb.

-- JesseCreed - 11 Apr 2008

Jesse
Thank you for being willing to admit when you do not understand what I write: that's my fault, and hearing you say it is the best form of constructive criticism. It's the writer's sin to not make himself understood (William James and Teiresias again).

I guess this is the lesson I learned:

• One must in some way already be relevant to his readers (e.g. shared election / public "father surgeon" story) before his writing can portray him in a way that they consider relevant ...
• ...just as you need some data (from an election or a poll), before you can craft a message to your voters.
  • --> thus the "Senate Election" was a POLL, urging me to change the message in my Second Paper.

-- AndrewGradman - 11 Apr 2008