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The twitter updates will begin shortly, and can be followed at #armt.

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman returns several times to a formative experience he had in the Israeli army.  Assigned to a unit responsible for assigning fresh recruits to approriate units, he soon discovered that the interviews that he and his colleagues conducted with these recruits were, approximately, useless.  The interviews yielded secure impressions that over time turned out to be worthless for predicting the actual future fit and performance of recruits in their assigned units.  So Kahneman was charged with changing the system.  He retained the interviews, but developed an objective checklist of features and characteristics that were then processed through an algorithm.  The algorithm performed well in predicting future success, certainly far better than the subjective judgments reached in interviews.

Algorithms and their cousins, checklists, are hot now.  Through the work of Kahneman and others, we have come to increasingly recognize our own human limits.  We turn out to be predisposed, probably biologically, to overvalue our own, frequently biased, judgments.  In some cases, as in a critical surgery or on a crippled spaceship, literally life and death may hang on the balance of a human judgement.  Checklists increase the possibility for better judgement calls, and these are call we would all prefer to get right.

In my own professional world, we never make judgements of life and death.  We do, though, make judgements that have significant impacts on people’s lives, as well as on the climate of institutions and our own professional advancement.  We admit graduate students, hire faculty, and vote on their tenure and promotion.  They are not life and death decisions, but they are not unimportant either.

As I read Kahneman’s book, which deals explicitly with issues of hiring, I could not help but think of how we hire faculty.  I have taught at several institutions now in which I’ve participated in these decisions, and the process at each was similar.  We individually read the materials and recommendation letters and reach preliminary judgements about: fit; interest and viability of research; scholarly achievement (or potential for this); potential to contribute to our curriculum; and “collegiality.”  We then have a very unsystematic discussion of the candidates to arrive at a shortlist.  Candidates visit for a day or two, we chat with them and hear them speak, and then we have another unsystematic discussion that (usually) yields a decision.

Does this process work?  On the one hand, there are very few hires in which I have been involved that in retrospect I regret.  Yet on the other hand, the unsystematic way we make these decisions, and what comes across in the meetings as clear biases based on what Kahneman calls the “halo effect” (i.e., because we like somebody for one reason we assign them higher ratings in other areas), make me uneasy.  A spectacular lecture or charming interview might unduly help a weaker candidate, or vice-versa.  The question this raises is whether academic hiring, like the other kinds of hiring Kahneman discusses, would produce better decisions based on checklists and algorithms.

Kahneman discusses multiple cases in which algorithm-driven hiring was implemented, and each case met with fierce resistence on the part of those who have control over the hiring but better overall results.  Intuitively, I too cringe at the notion of hiring a colleague based on a checklist.  But I wonder if it would make me cringe more than the messy, often subjective, decision making process we already practice.  And I wonder, ultimately, about whether it would work out for the best, and how we might track and know that.

This rumination does in any case lead to (what is for me) an interesting consideration of the still-hypothetical checklist itself:  What would it look like, and what algorithm would process it?  I might pursue this more in another post, but in the meantime would be interested in hearing from others whether the entire idea of acacdemic hiring in this manner is crazy.

Ever wonder how many times the Babylonian Talmud cites the Bible? Me neither, until I compiled the data.

The answer is 13,219 times, give or take a little. For those who are interested, the Vilna edition of the Talmud has 5894 folio pages (information from Wikipedia, so beware!). That computes to about 2.25 citations per folio page.

I’m not sure what to do with this fact.  The verses are certainly not evenly distributed, but perhaps this gross number helps to reinforce the impression that the Talmud is not really about Scripture and its interpretation.  Stay tuned for other, more significant statistical facts about the Talmud’s use of Scripture.

For those who are curious, the Zip-code of Syracuse, NY is 13219

In the Babylonian Talmud, authority comes in variety of flavors.  Sometimes a tradition, heard from and cited in the name of a teacher, carries the day.  At other times, logic wins.  The behavior of a rabbi, the opinion of an expert, or the common practice of a community sometimes drive a discussion about law or ethics.  But the trump, as anyone who has spent any time with the Bavli knows, is the Bible, especially the Torah.  While it is certainly true that rabbis often turn and twist biblical verses as origami masters might, it is always better to have a verse on one’s side.

How, though, did the rabbis of late antiquity “know” the Bible?  Did they have the whole thing memorized?  Did they consult scrolls?  Did their versions look like ours?  Did they gravitate toward certain verses or sections, or steer clear of others?  If so, why?

For me, these questions arose quite incidentally about a year ago in the context of an informal Talmud reading group.  I figured that at least the empirical questions were easy to answer.  Somebody, somewhere, must have compiled a list of the biblical verses in the Talmud and counted them up in various ways.

If such a study exists, though, I still cannot locate it.  There are tools that indicate where in the Talmud a particular verse is discussed, but no charts, tables, and graphs that I could find helped very much when it came to quantifying the Talmud’s use of the Bible.  So as a side project I began to assemble the data.

This turned into a more involved undertaking than I anticipated, but it is very close to completion.  My crack research team – my son Dani Satlow and Elijah Petzold, a very talented Brown undergraduate – has now logged every biblical verse cited in the Bavli in a spreadsheet.  The method for doing this was not perfect: we went copied the indices of each of the tractates published in the Schottenstein edition of the Talmud.  We corrected obvious errors (mainly typos) as we went, but I suspect that the indices contain additional mistakes that are now incorporated into our spreadsheet (while undoubtedly introducing new ones of our own).  Nevertheless, given the mainly quantitative goals of the project and the large numbers present, these errors should not significantly distort the results.

My next step is to figure out good ways to use this data (which I will make freely accessible, probably by the end of the semester), and here I welcome your advice.  The three top questions on my list are:

• What is the most commonly cited verse in the Talmud?
• Are there verses, chapters, or books that the Talmud never cites?
• What is the density of biblical citations per tractate?

What would you like to know?

I generated the above image using Wordle, with random text from the beginning of the Talmud.  Wordle might itself be useful for research; perhaps a future post on that.

 

I have now added two new syllabi: “Faith and Violence“, a first-year seminar, and “The Talmud.”