Knowing Carbonara

Like many people who only write on their blog every few years, I probably spend too much time consuming more modern forms of online content.  

Despite the algorithmic focus of today's internet, YouTube in particular occasionally suggests stuff to me that satisfies a "need" I didn't know I had. In this case, it's been suggesting various "science" YouTubers to me, and I found myself enjoying this video in particular about physics crackpots:

 

 

The gist of the video is that physicists get a lot of e-mails from people who've claimed to have "solved" some problem in physics, or that physics as it's currently understood is wrong.  She mentions that a lot of these cranks are retired engineers, and having written correspondence for senior public officials over the years, I can attest to the fact that engineers have a strange propensity for attempting to "solve" some problem in a way they'd build a bridge, but without say, knowing anything about bridge building.  It's funny because it's true!

What does this have to do with spaghetti carbonara? Well, about halfway into the video, the host uses an analogy about crackpots where she compares receiving these e-mails to someone coming into a professional kitchen and telling the chef that they're doing food incorrectly, and the crank proceeds to shows them their own correctly prepared meal, which is in fact made of play dough.  

It's a great analogy and she does a better job of explaining it than I do here, but it reminded me of an incident where I did something crank-like at a restaurant that complicates the narrative a bit.

I should note that I completely agree with everything she says, and that this isn't meant to be a refutation of her video, more of a deeply weird story that's stuck with me for a long time that's both connected to her analogy and also the epistemological concerns her video raises.

So, the story - I was in Calgary visiting my family a few years after having moved to Toronto, circa 2000, and we went out to dinner to a local Italian restaurant.  This restaurant was a small and highly popular local chain, and was known for authentic and affordable Italian food (This detail is important!).

At the time I was really into spaghetti carbonara.  I would make it at home, and I would order it regularly whenever I was at an Italian restaurant.  I'd even had it in Italy, and uh, Austria, so I feel confident in saying that I was pretty well-versed in the preparation and eating of spaghetti carbonara.

All this is to say that I ordered it at this well-known local restaurant. And when the dish came out, it wasn't spaghetti carbonara.  It was scrambled eggs with bacon on pasta.  

Now, to my many Italian-food-making readers, if you've made carbonara, you'll know exactly what's happened.  Part of making carbonara is that you use an egg at the end to make a creamy sauce.  Jamie Oliver demonstrates this here:

If you watch the video, he goes to some lengths to show that you can't put the egg in while the pasta and bacon are still too hot, because you'll wind up with scrambled eggs, which is what I got.

This is clearly what had happened, and in my naivete, I figured that they'd known this and just sent it out anyway.  Because this is Canada.   In the same way a bartender will pour a pint of beer that's mostly foam and serve it, daring you to send it back, I assumed they thought they could simply give it to me, and I'd eat it, because people do this all the time.  

Unfortunately, I was at the height of my pretentious gourmand phase, where I had aspirations of becoming a food critic, and so I sent it back and asked them to make it correctly.  As a Canadian, I was nice about it, and not the least bit passive aggressive.

So the waitress went back to the kitchen, and a few minutes later, the manager of the restaurant came to me to ask me what the problem was.  I was a bit surprised, but explained to him that what I was given wasn't carbonara - I mean, it was the same ingredients but it had been prepared incorrectly.

He had no idea what I meant.  So I explained to him what I thought had happened, and he nodded and looked at me appreciatively in the way that service sector people do when you're doing something as condescending as explaining to the manager of an Italian restaurant how to make a very popular and not at all obscure pasta dish. And he apologized for the mistake, but then he suggested that I order something else.

That's when it dawned on me - no one had ever pointed out to the restaurant that this isn't what spaghetti carbonara was supposed to look like. This was a busy and popular Italian restaurant, and they'd been making carbonara for years like this, and no one had ever said anything.

Why else would he tell me to order something else?  If this were a one off, they'd just make it correctly, but they couldn't because no one knew what I was talking about.  

I don't mean this as a dig to the cooks either - like most chains, these were probably not trained chefs but people hired to work cheaply in a busy kitchen, and who were following recipes. From their perspective, I was probably some Toronto snob who was telling them what to do - I wasn't even Italian!  How would I know?  

From their perspective, I was the crackpot!

But I did know, and in this day and age, one would probably just whip out their phone and show the manager 25 videos on YouTube demonstrating exactly how their kitchen was doing this incorrectly. But at the time, all I had was my word.

Things got stranger - for the rest of the evening, whenever a waiter or waitress would walk by, they would apologize to me for the mix-up.  There was this whole production that was clearly rehearsed to make me feel better, but I would have felt better knowing that they were going to  make the dish correctly - I even offered to show them!  And again, I understand that this would have made me look like an arrogant jerk, but I certainly would have felt better.

But then one wonders - let's say that the manager goes home, wondering if what I was saying was true, and goes to an Italian cookbook and discovers that I was telling the truth.  What then?  Maybe it was a popular item, and people might complain that it was different when they started preparing it correctly!  Or maybe they'd rechristen it as their "house-style" carbonara, made just the way Nonna used to make at home!

But it raises an important question: what happens when the places that sell themselves as authentic and as experts, reveal themselves to be nothing of the sort?

I left the restaurant with a sinking feeling, a kind of amused horror, and it's a feeling that I've been getting again recently, when I think about the rise of AI.  

So much of what I've seen of ChatGPT in its deployment so far reminds me of that (now-gone) local authentic Italian restaurant chain, and how so many Calgarians thought it was great and authentic, all while being served scrambled egg pasta.  I see all these people on YouTube talking about using ChatGPT to teach them stuff, but it's pretty clear that ChatGPT is not always reliable.

How we think of knowledge is shifting and how we deal with that shift is going to have some very serious implications, not just for AI replaceable people like me, but for questions of knowledge and what constitutes knowledge as opposed to belief.

Next up - where I complain about something I saw online! 

Ian Hacking (1937-2023)

I found out yesterday that the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking has passed away.  The University of Toronto philosophy department has a notice here, and Brian Leiter's philosophy blog has some great reminiscences here.  What follows are my own reflections on his passing.

 It is difficult for me to overstate how important Ian Hacking was to me as a thinker.  

Throughout my life, I have had a tendency to form what we now commonly refer to as "parasocial relationships". I'd find someone to admire and I'd read everything about them and then eventually I'd move on.  

So it was in the early 2000s that I embarked on a (in hindsight ill-conceived) plan to get an MA in philosophy from the University of Toronto.  The reason for this was pretty straightforward - at the time I was being passed over for jobs in the Ontario Government (where I worked) for people who had MAs in...just about anything.  It was that simple!  

At that point getting a graduate degree in music was out of the question (Why? Good question!) but in any case, like most clever young men, I thought I would really like to pursue a philosophy degree.  

However, there was a catch - as someone with a music degree, I needed at least 10 half courses in philosophy to apply for the the MA program.  I should add, and this will be important for later, U of T had very restricted enrollment for the MA due to the fact that the department, like most departments, saw its graduate program as a training program, and no one gets a job with an MA in philosophy - no one, except I hoped, for myself!

Anyway, I started accumulating credits, and at some point (the specific moment is lost to time) I found out about Ian Hacking.  It might have been at a philosophy social, where I met him and had a nice brief conversation with him about his Wittgenstein course (which I couldn't take due to a scheduling conflict - I was taking these courses while holding down a full time job). 

At some point, I started reading his work and was blown away by it. Although the analytic/continental philosophy wars seem to have died off, at the time (2002-2006?) they were very much alive.  Ian Hacking somehow managed to straddle this distinction - he had come out of the analytical side, discovered Foucault, and then did philosophical genealogies à la Foucault, but which were in fact, much better than anything Foucault had produced.  

Beyond this, he was perhaps the clearest philosophical writer I had ever read - he could take virtually any concept, from either side of the-then philosophical divide, and make it easy to understand for those of us who perhaps didn't have the time to invest in just reading the texts.

I read everything he wrote - books, papers, essays, even his reviews in the NY Review of Books.  I wasn't ever able to take a course with him, again mostly due to scheduling conflicts, but so much of my philosophical underpinnings come from that reading - far more than any of the coursework I did.

In fact, calling my relationship to him "parasocial" doesn't really do justice to his influence on my thinking - it's more akin to ancient understanding of philosophical schools (Pierre Hadot's What is Ancient Philosophy? is a great introduction to this topic), where the practice of reading and discussing a philosopher's work  transforms one's own perceptions of the world.  

That's the kind of effect he had on me.  I never got into the MA program (and wound up doing something very different indeed!) but I regularly think about Ian Hacking, his sense of wonder, and how he did philosophy, and it makes me want to look at the world anew after so many years of closing myself off to it.  

I wish there were more people out there like him, and even if he never founded a philosophical school on the Athenian model, I'd like to think that his legacy might prod some of us (me, just me), to, in a clumsy paraphrase of one of his books,  try to do a little less representing, and a little more intervening.