human error

“There have been many errors in the world which, it would seem, not even a child would make now. What crooked, blind, narrow, impassable, far-straying paths mankind has chosen, striving to attain eternal truth, while a whole straight road lay open before it.”*

Chichikov, the main character in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, travels widely across the Russian countryside trying to purchase dead peasants from noblemen. Not literally, though – he’s not digging up corpses and carrying them across Russia with him in tightly sealed bags. No, he’s just taking advantage of a peculiarity of early nineteenth-century tsarist Russia. Specifically, the census counts how many serfs are owned by any given particular noblemen; once the peasants die for any reason, they are still counted by the state as being alive, which matters significantly for the owner, who must continue to pay taxes on their behalf until the next census counts them as dead. Chichikov’s goal is to travel across Russia purchasing ownership of these dead but legally living “souls.” If you want to know why, read the book.

For a while, he is well-loved by everyone he encounters, and only attempts to strike deals with a select few, lying to everyone else and saying he has purchased living peasants. A master of manipulation, he fluidly tweaks and transforms his personality to match the situation and the person at-hand, making himself perfectly “agreeable” in every way. When someone is vain, he flatters him, praises him, tells him what a fine estate the person runs. When someone has superstitions regarding life after death, he plays into these convictions, cleverly using them against her. Stupidly, almost everyone he encounters falls for it for a long time – thinking with certainty that Chichikov is one of the finest men they have ever met.

The whole time you read it, you find yourself laughing at how easily many of these people are deceived by Chichikov’s tactics. He runs into resistance now and then, but even if a character manages to defy the deception, you can be certain that the successful figure is nevertheless crazy or unthinking in some other respect (one of the characters who resists Chichikov’s flattery is a pathological gambler, who tries to use his dead souls as a part of a bet with Chichikov, only to cheat at checkers against the traveler in doing so, thereafter attempting to murder him, surrounding Chichikov with his serfs and chanting threats).

In any case, our hero eventually manages to cause quite an uproar. It gets out that he has been buying dead souls from noblemen in the countryside, and no can comprehend why he would be doing so (he had told everyone in the town that he had bought living peasants for “resettlement”). The irony here is that, even once an entire town sees through Chichikov’s trickery, they draw the most absurd conclusions regarding what he is actually up to. A slew of outlandish rumors spread throughout the gentry, including the notion that everything is part of a grand plot to kidnap the governor’s daughter, and another belief that he is an important man from the state sent to, as Gogol would say, do “God knows what.”

To resolve the dispute, a large group of aristocratic men decide to gather together to establish once and for all just who this Chichikov is – what type of person he is, what his history is and why exactly he has come to their own.

And now we come to one of the most memorable experiences of reading this novel.

“The Tail of Captain Kopeikin.”

For almost six full pages, the postmaster tells the story of a man called, surprise, Captain Kopeikin – a soldier who lost an arm and had a leg blown off in war, and spent several months petitioning the tsar for what we could call veteran’s benefits, eventually wandering the countryside once rejected and joining a band of highwaymen. “[Chichikov], dear gentleman, is none other than Captain Kopeikin!”

Gogol writes six pages of this extremely detailed story of a man who has no leg and no arm and is proposed by one of our inane Russian aristocrats to be our hero, Chichikov.

“ ‘Only forgive me, Ivan Andreevish,’ the police chief said suddenly, interrupting him, ‘you yourself said that Captain Kopeikin was missing an arm and a leg, while Chichikov…’ ”

Embarassed, the postmaster struggles to come up with an excuse. Maybe Chichikov has a fake arm or a fake leg – I mean, after all, there have been many technological advances in this direction, haven’t there? But no, it’s just obvious nonsense – although it takes everyone else six pages to realize this, it is, in the end, just not acceptable.

It is after just a few more equally careless lapses in judgment that the quote with which I began this entry shows up (they spend several pages questioning the gambler mentioned above, who they know to be insane and a habitual liar, and who claims to have gone to school with Chichikov). It actually starts to seem just plain unrealistic, simply because the mistakes made by the characters only become increasingly unthinkable.

“And in the world of mankind there are many whole centuries which, it would seem, should be crossed out and abolished as unnecessary. There have been many errors in the world which, it would seem, not even a child would make now. What crooked, blind, narrow, impassable, far-straying paths mankind has chosen, striving to attain eternal truth, while a whole straight road lay open before it.”

Sarcastically shocked, he laments that government officials “should scare themselves so; to create such nonsense, to stray so far from the truth, when even a child could see what the matter was!”

But after getting a good laugh out of his reader, the author ceases criticizing his characters and humanity in general and turns towards reminding his audience that they, too, are human. That I, you, and we are no better than the child-like, perpetually blind, nonsensical aristocrats in Dead Souls. And that while you are so conceitedly laughing at them, someone else will be looking down and laughing at you.

“Man is generous with the word ‘fool,’ and is ready to serve it up to his neighbor twenty times a day…It is easy for the reader to judge, looking down from his comfortable corner at the top, from which the whole horizon opens out, upon all that is going on below, where man can only see the nearest object….The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendents will also laugh afterwards.”

*Gogol, Nikolai, Dead Souls, New York, NY: Vintage Classics, 1997.

read the directions, please

My methodology professor was kind enough to schedule our midterm today, the day after Spring Break. This gave me the chance to spend the last few days reviewing the “definitions” and “significance” of about eight pages worth of terms while freshening up on some of the statistical methods from my last course on research design. So I got to work on Friday – I went through all of my notes from the semester in the Rochester Library for a few hours, moving a large table towards the wall so I could be near an outlet. On Saturday, I continued to spend time I could’ve spent relaxing reviewing even more information, before running into a parked car later that day in my driveway.

So when I sat down this morning at about 10:20 to take on this test, I was more than prepared. The only thing I felt concerned about was time – it looked long and detailed and was certain to involve a lot of analytical writing and interpretations of tables, studies and models. My strategic priority here was to simply make sure I did not get bogged down in an earlier, simpler section, and then get fucked later on in the test by something more complicated.

Glancing through the few pages before I began, I saw that there were two different studies we had to interpret – after defining and explaining the significance of about ten different terms. One study was just a paragraph describing what a researcher had done; the second study was presented simply as a regression table.

Thinking I had a lot on my plate, I immediately set to work, writing down definitions as fast as I could, my sloppy handwriting smothering the page like a mud slide, my hand getting a bit stiff and needing some shaking about half way through. When I finally finished explaining the terms, I had 40 minutes left – half of the class period, right on schedule, hypothetically at least.

But I was still nervous. I had to read a few paragraphs describing some study about the variables which determine a country’s currency value, and below that were about 8 different short answer questions. I read quickly, scribbling some notes in the margin as I proceeded, trying to anticipate some of the questions. Once I felt I understood what I had read, I got started with my answers.

Question 1 seemed easy enough, but I was confused a bit by its wording. Question 2 was equally straight forward. And then it all went downhill.

Questions started asking me which variables were statistically significant. They asked me to name the control variables used in the study. They asked me to list threats to internal and external validity. Now, don’t get me wrong – having studied all weekend, I understood perfectly what these questions were asking me to do. But my answers still somehow seemed utterly wrong and confused – I found myself writing down things like “We don’t know whether the variable is statistically significant, because she gives us no information to assess this.”

“Why the fuck would he be asking these questions,” I thought, “when there is no table to get the numbers or control variables from?” I must have been doing something wrong, I thought. That, or he was trying to trick us – asking us for control variables when no control variables existed.

Yes! That must be it! When he asks, “List the control variables,” we are supposed to say, “There are no control variables – hence the whole study is garbage.” So that’s what I wrote – or something like it. What else could I do? There was no way to answer these questions – there was no information pertaining to control variables, no information pertaining to statistical significance, no information pertaining to external validity, sample size, coefficients or standard errors. Nothing. The whole study was flawed!

“He’s trying to trick us!”

But I was not comfortable. I didn’t have much time left. I felt I had done something wrong. I was not convinced that I had actually beat him at his own sneaky little game of trying to deceive us. And let’s not forget – I still had a second study to analyze on the next page, this one presented as a table of various variables and their corresponding coefficients, standard errors, t-scores, the works.

I flipped the page.

“Fifteen minutes you guys!” shouted my professor, updating the countdown on the board.

I looked at the table and the questions below it. They seemed vaguely related to the study I had just read a few paragraphs about. Even the author of the table was identical to the author of the study I had just analyzed, the study I had just so ruthlessly condemned as flawed. I stared at it for a moment, trying to push a terrible thought out of my mind. But no amount of logic could defeat the inevitable conclusion.

The table contained all the information I needed to answer the eight questions that I had already answered with entire paragraphs on the previous page. There was only one study, not two."Use the regression table on the next page to answer the questions below," the directions which I had not read had tried to tell me.

All of my answers were wrong.

I may have nearly hyperventilated. My heart instantly filled with a sense of my doom. I was in disbelief. I must have just stared at the table without comprehending anything it said for a solid two minutes. I tried to figure out what to do – should I go tell him about my mistake? Maybe he’d give me more time.

Then I remembered an earlier exchange. “What if we don’t finish?” a girl had asked. “Then you don’t finish,” my professor said, laughing.

“Remember to answer every question!” I suddenly heard him boisterously declare, “Just get something down – it will hurt you if you don’t!”

“But you only have ten minutes,” he quickly continued, once again replacing the number on the board. “So keep at it.”

“Jesus Christ,” I thought.

I scratched out questions four through eight on the previous pages of my blue book. I started scrambling to come up with replacement answers on the next couple pages. But my mind wouldn’t work like it usually does – I felt frozen, unable to function, incapable of complex thought. I could almost hear the clock ticking – I could feel my grave opening up below my seat to swallow me whole. I was fucked. There was nothing I could do.

I kept scribbling answers down. Then I kept realizing that I had misunderstood something in the question I had just re-answered. I had to answer it again. Then I perceived that, since I hadn’t seen this table, my whole understanding of the study had been completely skewed. Then I re-answered again.

The result was a mess of a couple pages in my blue book, with scribbles everywhere, dreadful handwriting overflowing across the neat straight lines beneath, random arrows pointing in different directions, and not a complete sentence to be found anywhere. On top of this, I still had 3 other questions, completely new ones which I hadn’t even read, that needed to be answered.

I answered them with a hurricane of jibberish.

I was defeated.

“Jeez, Andrew, hurry up,” I suddenly heard a friend of mine say. The time allotted for test-taking had so quickly come to an end – time itself seemed to have sped up so drastically in those last fifteen minutes.

I coughed up one more incomprehensible fragment.

“I didn’t see the regression table until near the end,” I said to my professor as I handed my test to him.

His eyes widened and his mouth dropped.

“What happened, man?” he asked, looking sympathetic, glancing down into my jungle of a blue book.

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”