Reunion summary, part II

Months of persistent nagging, often several times a day, was insufficient this time. Most of the class defaulted and failed to submit any self-summary for our next reunion (and accompanying book). This forced the alumni office to give us an extension and step up the guilt-tripping to previously-unexplored reaches of extremity.

Lo! and behold: it worked. Well, a bit. I'll admit that I didn't put as much pizzazz and creative obfuscation into this one as the last one. (In my defense, I now have a job which offers me a lot less free time for creative writing projects on the side.)

My quest for evil mastermindhood continues apace. I have maximally levelled up on the education ladder, and collected one degree of each type (arts, science, philosophy); I now demand to be addressed by my full title ("Professor Doctor Master..."), which is becoming an onerous time-delay during dramatic entries.

Since last we met, I moved to Canada, and then, when that proved insufficiently French, I moved to Paris itself. O! that epitome of French stereotypes: the glorious boulevards, the wine/bread/cheese, the magnificently sneery accents. Many truly marvelous adventures were had, which this margin is too narrow to contain. After nearly a decade abroad, I reluctantly returned to domestic shores in pursuit of that most elusive of quest objectives: tenure.

I return to the US a well-travelled, multilingual, and even-more-highly educated person, all things which serve me well for making small talk and getting pigeonholed. As a professor of computer science, I know a lot about both pigeons and holes. Ask me sometime.

I promise to give you homework. (Due date: the next reunion.)

If unnamed editors change anything, that'll pretty much determine my non-participation in future editions. (Last time they threatened that editors might take action, but the final version was what I had submitted, ridiculosity unchanged.)

These periodic check-ins seem decreasingly relevant in the networked social media sphere in which I dwell: everyone I want to hear about, I already do hear about; we are already in touch. And everyone else? Reading about them in the paper-printed book (!) will be useful, but mostly for tracking how many future CEOs and congresspeople I knew in their early 20s.


This post's theme word is aesculapian, "relating to medicine," or "a doctor." I usually introduce myself as "a doctor, but not the type that helps people", but I am considering condensing this to "a non-aesculapian doctor", to alienate all but the most erudite.

How should groups make decisions?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question. Today's lecture was on Arrow's Impossibility Theorem so I quite reasonably asked:

How should groups make decisions?

I framed the question as a group deciding where to go for dinner, given the individual ranked preferences of each person over all the dinner options. So one student, confronted with impossibility, wrote, "just starve, we're going to die anyways. ^_^". Another summarized national exhaustion with "I don't like decisions" and yet another echoed the first with "why bother, we will all die anyways".

Others took a more whimsical approach:

• anarchy
• define a "mom"  friend, listen to them
• attendance sheet surveys
• attendance sheet popular vote
• separation of power
• choose 50 US residents at random (with replacement), repeat sample 100,000 times, choose most popular winner
• a long and indecisive debate
• only consult those with the loudest voices
• not first past the post
• dictatorship
• elect a dictator
• math
• select the most privileged person, ask them
• compromise
• hand raising
• someone should make an impassioned speech
• oracles
• trial by combat
• long discussions
• flip n coins
• throw questions into the void and wait
• Quaker Process (Organized Consensus)
• no groups; return to hunter gatherer society
• debate
• pick the best one
• rolling dice
• compromise
• capitalism!!
• by assuming I'm always right
• alphabetically

A subset of students were excited by the idea of a dictatorship, but wanted to further specify which dictator in particular:

• politburo with Josif as head
• establish [student in class] as dictator
• Option 1: oligarchy consisting of Ina Garten, Alex Guarnaschelli, and Amanda Freitag
  Option 2: The Purge

In the margins of the attendance sheet, students sketched political signs and placards and then later students annotated them (by adjusting the name) or voted (by writing "+1" nearby).

I don't know what a "complementary probabilistic majority" is, but it sounds neat. Gold star for piquing professorial curiosity.

By popular vote, "compromise" was the only method which received more than one vote. But several other votes were similar (the above, two voting to "die anyways", and several picking debate/discussion).


This post's theme word is consonance (n), "agreement or accord" or "a combination of sounds pleasing to the ear" or "the repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the ends of words, such as st in the phrase first and last." Consonance and assonance together underlie many tongue-twisters.