Monthly Archives: September 2012

To most people, reading and writing are boring and unimportant

September 15, 2012 By in Culture, ideas, Links Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

Robin Hanson says: “… folks, late in life, almost never write essays, or books, on ‘what I’ve learned about life.’ It would only take a few pages, and would seem to offer great value to others early in their lives. Why the silence?”

He offers various explanations, like “People don’t want to hear the truth, and they won’t find lies useful, so why bother,” “Young folks already think they know all the answers, so won’t listen,” and “Few care what people will think of them after they are dead.” But he also says, “None of these explanations seem especially satisfactory. What’s going on?” I offered my theory in the comments section but will elaborate on it here: Most people don’t give a shit about writing or ideas. You can observe this from their behavior. People do things that are important to them (like watching TV, making money, or having sex) and don’t do things that aren’t important to them.

Let’s change the question a little: Why doesn’t Robin build furniture, or write vital open-source software, or feed the hungry in his spare time? Those would seem to offer great value to others. Actually, he might do some of this stuff—Robin seems like the sort of fellow with a lot of unusual hobbies and habits—but even if he does some of that stuff, the question becomes why he does that and not some other valuable thing. Maybe he’s doing the value maximizing thing for him, in which case he enjoys it, in which case he keeps doing it. The question and answers become circular and tautological very quickly, but in this case I don’t think “circular” is “wrong.”

To return to the original question about “What I’ve learned about life,” I think that, for most people, writing life lessons, or whatever, would be completely unimportant. Plus, as a corollary to that, writing is really hard for most people. It’s really hard for me, and I do it every day! So we probably shouldn’t be surprised that most people don’t bother doing hard, meaningless things. Starting from scratch in any skill is a challenge. I’d like to learn how to sew, but I don’t even really know how to start (outside of a Google search), and I don’t really have time to begin learning a complex new skill until October 5. So although I’d like clothes that fit better, I don’t want them badly enough to really do something about it and build domain knowledge in that field.

So, given that most people find new skills hard to learn, and find writing unimportant and boring, the better question is: Why do people write, especially blogs? Robin is the outlier, not the hypothetical old person imparting life lessons. You could reduce this question to, “Why isn’t reading and writing important to most people,” and beyond the obvious answer—they can survive and reproduce without them—I don’t have much.

Gwern’s answer in Robin’s comments seems sound to me: “Differing incentives and realities. Old adults give advice to teens which basically assume they can act like old adults; they forget just how painful things like waiting were, and wish away even the most transparently biological realities like shifts in circadian rhythms.” I would add that teens also don’t think they’ll ever be old. They live in the present.

Thinking back over my own life, I’m struck by how few old people have had useful advice for me. For adolescents and young adults, sex is tremendously important, yet few old people give real advice about it, or gave real advice to me; many of them also don’t seem to understand what the modern dating environment is like. In addition, old people might be worried about coming across as lascivious or inappropriate, when they’re really just trying to impart knowledge—I know that I seldom tell my students, for example, what the dating world is actually like.

I’m also really interested in being a writer, and have been for a long time, but very few adults know anything about being a writer. Those who do often don’t know anything about the Internet, which is now inextricably linked with most writers’ writing lives. So the limited advice that old people can offer often doesn’t seem applicable to me.

Perhaps some old people sense this, and sense that many younger people won’t listen to them anyway.

Facebook and cellphones might be really bad for relationships

September 14, 2012 By in Culture, ideas, Tools Tags: , , , , , , , 12 Comments

There’s some possibly bogus research about “How your cell phone wrecks your relationships — even when you’re not using it.” I say “possibly bogus” because these kinds of social science studies are notoriously unreliable and unreproducible.* Nonetheless, this one reinforces some of my pre-existing biases and is congruent with things that I’ve observed in my own life and the lives of friends, so I’m going to not be too skeptical of its premises and will instead jump into uninformed speculation.

It seems like cell phones and Facebook cordon a large part of your life from your significant other (assuming you have one or aspire to have one) and encourage benign-seeming secrecy in that other part of your life. In the “old days,” developing friendships or quasi-friendships with new people required face-to-face time, or talking on the phone (which, at home, was easily enough overheard) or writing letters (which are slow, a lot of people aren’t very good at it or don’t like to write letters). Now, you can be developing new relationships with other people while your significant other is in the same room, and the significant other won’t know about the relationship happening via text message. You can also solicit instant attention, especially by posting provocative pictures or insinuating song lyrics, while simultaneously lying to yourself about what you’re doing in a way that would be much harder without Facebook and cell phones.

Those new relationships start out innocently, only to evolve, out of sight, into something more. Another dubious study made the rounds of the Internet a couple months ago, claiming that Facebook was mentioned in a third of British divorce petitions. Now, it’s hard to distinguish correlation from causation here—people with bad relationships might be more attached to their phones and Facebook profiles—but it does seem like Facebook and cellphones enable behavior that would have been much more difficult before they became ubiquitous.

I don’t wish to pine for a mythical golden age, which never existed anyway. But it is striking, how many of my friends’ and peers’ relationships seem to founder on the shoals of technology. Technology seems to be enabling a bunch of behaviors that undermine real relationships, and, if so, then some forms of technology might be pushing us towards shorter, faster relationships; it might also be encouraging us to simply hop into the next boat if we’re having trouble, rather than trying to right the boat we’re already in. Facebook also seems to encourage a “perpetual past,” by letting people from the past instantly and quietly “re-connect.” Sometimes this is good. Sometimes less so. How many married people want their husband or wife chatting again with a high school first love? With a summer college flame? With a co-worker discussing intimate details of her own failing relationship?

Perhaps relationship norms will evolve to discourage the use of online media (“Are we serious enough to de-active each other’s Facebook accounts?” If the answer is “no,” then we’re not serious and, if I’m looking for something serious, I should move on). Incidentally, I don’t think blogs have the same kind of effect; this blog, for instance, is reasonably popular by the standards of occasional bloggers, and has generated a non-zero number of groupies, but the overall anonymity of readers (and the kind of content I tend to post) in relation to me probably put a damper on the kinds of relationship problems that may plague Facebook and cell phones.

EDIT: See also “I’m cheating on you right now: An admiring like on your Facebook page. A flirty late-night text. All while my partner’s right there next to me” mentions, unsurprisingly:

A study in 2013 at the University of Missouri surveyed 205 Facebook users aged 18–82 and found that “a high level of Facebook usage is associated with negative relationship outcomes” such as “breakup/divorce, emotional cheating, and physical cheating.”

Again, I want to maintain some skepticism and am curious about studies that don’t find a difference and thus aren’t published. But some research does match my own anecdotal impressions.

* If you’d like to read more, “Scientific Utopia: II – Restructuring Incentives and Practices to Promote Truth Over Publishability” is a good place to start, though it will strike horror in the epistemologist in you. Or, alternately, as Clay Shirky points out in “The Cognitive Surplus, “[…] our behavior contributes to an environment that encourages some opportunities and hinders others.” In the case of cell phones and Facebook, I think the kinds of behaviors encouraged are pretty obvious.

John Updike writes about the Game in 1965

September 5, 2012 By in Links, sex Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

“The puzzling quality—a basic indifference?—that makes a few men inexhaustibly seductive is a gift as arbitrary in its bestowal as an artistic talent. And, as with a possessed artist, Don Juan is as much to be pitied as envied.”

—John Updike, Assorted Prose, in an essay on Dennis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World.

This is also The Game, circa 1965. How might the world have been different if Updike decided that the “quality” “that makes a few men inexhaustibly seductive” is not “a gift” but is a skill, a set of habits and behaviors, that can be learned like any other—like becoming an “artist?”

To extend the metaphor, virtually any artist can improve at his craft, but only a very few seem to become what people later term geniuses. Yet the level of improvement available to someone who wants it is vast, which is easy enough to see by, say, looking at a writer’s juvenilia in comparison to his mature work. Updike wants to see “a possessed artist,” with “possessed” connoting some demonic power that comes from outside; I want to see the artist as driven from within, and able to improve his skill to the extent he wants to. The same is true of seduction.