Author Archives: Jake Seliger

Links: Dating forums, bike lanes, Peter Thiel, Fuji X100T

September 13, 2014 By in Links Tags: , , , Leave a comment

* “Why Most PUA/Dating Forums Are Completely Fucking Worthless,” from a guy running a PUA/Dating Forum; most guys running PUA/Dating Forums appear to say this about other guys running PUA/Dating Forums, making the claim that others are completely fucking worthless a cliché of the genre.

* Counterintuitive: “Bike lanes have actually sped up car traffic in New York City.”

* “Is it okay to kill cyclists?” In the U.S., the answer is largely “yes.”

* “Elder Statesmen Declare a War on the ‘War on Drugs:’ What took them so long?” Excellent question.

* Steve Jobs Was a Low-Tech Parent.

Olympus 25mm 1.8-1022* Peter Thiel on the innovation environment; Zero to One comes out on Tuesday and you should read it.

* Peter Thiel Reddit AMA, and like the above it is consistently and exceptionally interesting.

* The Fuji X100T is an interesting looking camera that very annoyingly does not have a tilting rear LCD.

Life: Do it for the pleasure edition

September 11, 2014 By in Books, Life, Nonfiction Tags: , Leave a comment

“A man rarely succeeds at anything unless he has fun doing it.”

—Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, a book I’m shocked not to have read yet and that ought to be mandatory reading for academics, who are very bad at applying its lessons. Not everything in the book I buy but overall it is much more interesting than I expected and much better written. Note that this is the pre-1981 version, which means some references to gangsters and “popular” figures are dated, but as often happens with very old books it is revealing about its own time in ways not intended by its author.

I often see the point quoted above said regarding writing, coding, and any number of other activities. Yet I rarely see it said regarding, say, tax law, or accounting, or proctology, or garbage hauling.

Erving Goffman’s “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” for novelists

September 9, 2014 By in Books, Nonfiction Tags: , , Leave a comment

The Presentation for Self in Everyday Life endures because while it is nominally about sociology, its observations fit into other fields too: One could read it as a work of literary criticism but without literature, or a novelist’s handbook about how people behave around other people. It is filled interesting observations, like “not a few psychotherapists find employment in [. . .] making their living by telling individuals the facts of other people’s lives.” Or, colloquially, one reason people like fiction, memoirs, and blogs is to figure out how fucked up other people’s lives are. Few of us wish to advertise the fucked up parts of our lives and so in everyday experience those parts are hidden. I for one wish that I’d realized as much when I was younger.

Goffman gets the game theory aspect of punishing defectors from collective norms:

Similarly, a girl at a party who is flagrantly accessible may be shunned by the other girls who are present, but in certain matters she is part of their team and cannot fail to threaten the definition they are collectively maintaining that girls are difficult sexual prizes. Thus [. . .] teammates are often persons who agree informally to guide their efforts in a certain way as a means of self-protection and by doing so constitute an informal group.

Goffman selfThe sexual double standard is maintained more by women than by men, which Goffman got in 1959. He describes the way “teammates everywhere employ an informally and often unconsciously learned vocabulary of gestures and looks by which collusive staging cues can be conveyed.” Novelists should attend to that vocabulary and those clues when they discuss characters in specific worlds. One’s cultural world and coworkers color one’s viewpoint. A professional photographer cannot help but seeing the world partially through photography terms, and lawyers see cases waiting to happen everywhere. In the underworld this is most obvious, which is one reason why The Friends of Eddie Coyle works.

Goffman gets the way that people are groupish and feel conflicting loyalties towards their groups and towards outsiders who may be taken advantage of. In my own life, I feel more loyalty to readers than to the nonprofits and governments I write about in Grant Writing Confidential. The same is true of many bloggers in many fields who choose to pull back the curtain, so to speak; doctors and lawyers have scads of blogs devoted to that topic, as do hookers like Belle de Jour (whose Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl is good).

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is also a defense of privacy, and novels are generally experienced in private.

There are sections that are dated or dubious, as when Goffman writes that

we may have some sympathy for those who have but one fatal flaw and who attempt to conceal the fact that they are, for example, ex-convicts, deflowered, epileptic, or racially impure.

By now being “deflowered” is generally a positive, being epileptic is a medical condition, and racial purity is itself a bogus concept. Nonetheless the number of abstract lessons is large and Goffman’s observations are sharp. I haven’t exhausted the book based on a first reading. Much of human life is about politics. Human life will always have a strong political component because everyone learns from everyone else and there is no way to be as effective acting alone as one can act in groups.

Links: Myths, Mean Girls, identity, people lie about sex

September 8, 2014 By in Links Tags: , Leave a comment

* “5 Feminist Myths That Will Not Die.”

* “Notes on the Celebrity Data Theft,” from a technical and social hacking standpoint.

* “Ten Ways Colleges Work You Over,” and I wish I could get this in the hands of every high school student applying to competitive colleges.

* “An Analysis of Power And Social Dynamics In ‘Mean Girls;’” sounds stupid but isn’t.

* “Intellectual decay,” or, people in groups tend to identify based on opposition to the other group more than independent assessments of facts and situation.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA* An anecdote from Idiot Programmer on students, books, and cell phones.

* “Lies, damned lies and sex work statistics.”

* “Civil forfeiture: How prosecutors seize the assets of the innocent.” This is an evil practice, and I don’t use the term “evil” frequently.

* “Sometimes a Little Objectification Can Be a Good Thing,” which should be obvious to anyone attuned to desire and receptivity.

* “For Kayden Kross, the Family Business Happens to Be Porn” (SFW).

* “The Difference Between A Woman’s Behavior And Her Intent,” maybe, though I endorse the anti-conspiracy theory element. Think emergent behavior long before you spend a moment of thought on conscious conspiracy.

Why don’t more men go into teaching? Fear of The Accusation

September 8, 2014 By in Academia, sex, Teaching Tags: , , , , 8 Comments

In the NYT Motoko Rich asks “Why Don’t More Men Go Into Teaching?“, and he gives a variety of answers but not an important one: any male teacher is only one accusation away from having his entire career derailed and a potentially lengthy, onerous police investigation. I thought about going into teaching, but stories from existing male teachers were persuasively dissuading.

At the K-12 level, men have the (many) problems that all teachers face—obnoxious “do something” administrators, angry parents, medium- to low-status occupation, etc.—plus the need to teach defensively and to think about how any words or actions can be interpreted in the worst light possible. Being one-on-one with a student is dangerous. It’s often normal to touch someone for emphasis, or hug someone in a non-sexual manner, but that can’t happen. In short, many of the little things that are part of normal human interactions are forbidden or dangerous.

William Deresiewicz just published Excellent Sheep, a polemic about education and what students need; one excerpt, “Students crave emotional mentorship from their teachers that their parents can’t give them. There’s nothing wrong with that,” describes how students want and need mentorship: male teachers can’t really provide that at the K – 12 level any more, because the risk is too high. School policies and culture are ironically curtailing what is arguably the best part of education. It’s been said that guys in foxholes no longer fight for their country or their ideals, but for the guys next to them. I suspect that many students—and I’ve experienced this—don’t try to excel in a given class for the specific skills or the subject or the future job. They excel because they’re compelled to by the person in front of them. Yet that person can’t form a genuine connection without being able to spend at least some one-on-one time with some students. What’s left? Going through the motions.

The dangers are real and the cultural feelings are pervasive, though they rarely rise up to the level of official discourse. Still, check out the stories in “Teachers of reddit, have you ever had a student try to seduce you? What happened?” Or see the stories in numerous similar threads. They reveal a level of well-founded paranoia on the part of male teachers.

Teachers deal with hundreds of students every year. One grandstanding neurotic, to use Camille Paglia’s phrase, can create a huge amount of work and a level of gossip and innuendo that could take years to dissipate—if it ever does.* At worst, one grandstanding neurotic can cause job loss or imprisonment. Who wants that danger?

The paranoid attitude is also not limited to K – 12. When I was a first-year student at the University of Arizona, I was driving to L.A. to see my family for Thanksgiving and told some students, many of whom were from Southern California, that if they wanted a ride they could hitch one. That ride could be worth hundreds of dollars, relative to a flight. I also went to school three thousand miles from home, where I got a lot of help with matters like this—mostly from my cross country coach, but to a lesser extent from professors and others. I can appreciate what it’s like to show up somewhere and have no resources.

Nonetheless, I told some other grad students that I’d told students they could get a ride to California, and the other grad students were shocked. That’s so dangerous! Are you crazy? What if something…happens? Would you give a ride to a woman? That’s super risky, dude. Can’t believe you did it.

It was as if I’d jumped into an enemy pillbox during war and somehow lived to see the sunset. They’d internalized the defensive mindset (and a mindset that portrayed a lot of latent sexism for a supposedly feminist group). Their reaction helps explain why so much teaching is so poor. And I was dealing with legal adults, most of whom lived autonomously! Nonetheless, the other grad students were expressing a real fear—a variant of the fear  male K – 12 teachers live with, which is legitimate and governs their behavior. And it dissuades men from teaching.

Why put up with the usual problems teachers face if a teacher can’t even do the job really well? Answer: Don’t.

* Paglia writes that she favors campus efforts to deal with genuine sexual harassment and rape, but that “I was concerned about the possibility of false charges by grandstanding neurotics, with whom I’d had quite enough contact at Bennington. Every sexual harassment code should incorporate stiff penalties for false accusation, presently rarely mentioned.” In 2014, stiff penalties for false accusations are still never mentioned.

Why I don’t donate to Clark University, and thoughts on the future of college

September 2, 2014 By in Academia, Teaching Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

I went to Clark University, and a couple weeks ago I talked to someone from their “development” department (read: they ask alumni for money) about what I’d been up to, what I thought about Clark, and then, finally, in the “Will-she-sleep-with-me” moment, whether I’d give more than $10 a year. I won’t. Even if I magically made Zuckerbergian billions, I wouldn’t give much more because while Clark is a good school, it isn’t in a position to solve the most pressing problem(s) in higher education: cost and access. Clark can be a wonderful and amazing experience for individual students but it will never be widely accessible due to cost and its model is not replicable for the same reason; the major problems in education are cost and access, which I’ll return to below.

Right now I give a little cash because of bogus rankings like those by U.S. News and World Report; here’s a good piece by Malcolm Gladwell on their bogosity. Nonetheless, despite them being bogus, people love rankings—even very bad rankings. When I was in high school, someone—the villain U.S. News again, maybe—ranked high schools simply by the number of students divided by the number of AP tests (or vice-versa). My high school came out well in that regard and parents and administrators and even the students themselves (to some extent) ran around saying “Oh wow we go to one of the best high schools in America!!” Which was bullshit to anyone who stopped to think for 30 seconds, but the meme propagated anyway and the number of people infected with the counter-meme (“Most school rankings are bullshit”) was and is much smaller than the number with the first meme.*

Maybe nothing short of a cultural change in views on college can alleviate the obsession-with-ranking problem. Some of that cultural change may be in the air: here’s one of the articles about Google’s decreased emphasis on college degrees. Maybe more firms will move in this direction. Certainly I would be more interested in assessing someone’s blog, books, or other material in hiring them than their degree. I’ve met a lot of PhDs who are morons. That is not to deny the value of education—it is easier and more pleasant for most people to learn in the context of someone who can select material, judge material, and accelerate learning. But too few teachers seem able or willing to do that. Alternate signals may emerge.

To look at one alternative to the present education system consider Western Governors University. This is one article on WGU, though there are many others. As I mentioned in the first paragraph, the major problems in contemporary higher ed emerge from rising costs, Baumol’s Cost Disease, weird cross subsidies, and related factors. Tyler Cowen’s book The Great Stagnation is good on these subjects. I obviously like and generally support Clark but I don’t think the school is the answer to the biggest problems in higher ed today. There may not be one single answer. We may be seeing the researcher-teacher hybrid model splitting back into their constituent pats as well, since, as has long been observed, someone very good at one may not be good at the other.

The “teacher” point is important too, because teaching well is expensive and difficult. It’s not clear to me that the current structure of higher education is sustainable regarding teaching. Here is one well-written and half-right, half-wrong piece about how “Teaching Is Not a Business.” In some sense everything is a business whether we want it to be or not.

Saying that teaching is not a business is another way of saying, “We can pour an infinite amount of money into this endeavor without asking what we’re getting it.” There is a magic to teaching and I’m susceptible to that feeling, but teaching is also a system and set of institutions and many other things as well. Not surprisingly most members of the guild want to retain the mystique and a lot of outsiders appalled at rising costs want to de-mystify and improve. The overall trajectory of the last two or three hundred years makes me think the latter are eventually going to win, even if the definition of winning changes and the win takes decades to play out.

This is getting far afield from the point about donating to Clark, but the biggest issue is that I don’t see how most of the current version of higher ed is rewarding teaching adequately. Some like “The Minerva Project” may be the answer. It and Western Governors University are both very consciously doing a lot of things very differently than the standard college model, which Clark follows in important ways. Clark has a high cost structure and can’t avoid that. As I said above it is a good school. If I had a kid and could afford to send them I would.

But how much does Clark cost?

Somewhere within Clark, someone has the minimum number of dollars per student the school must take in in order to stay afloat. If I had to guess, I’d guess that number is between $25,000 and $30,000, and Clark must hit it whether Joe pays $15,000 and Jane pays $40,000 or vice-versa. Every college has this number somewhere. For a few schools it’s probably zero, counting endowments. Until we get more clarity about that number, however, it’s hard to get a meaningful value for it.

This began life as an e-mail to the Clark development person. Most of the answers she gets are probably more emotional than my somewhat cerebral / systems-based thinking, but part of my dissertation is about academia and I’ve now worked in, around, and for a lot of colleges, as a student, instructor, and consultant. The inside of the sausage factory is not a pretty place and the romantic notions I may have once had regarding the college experience are now dashed. I still retain hope and even optimism—I would be teaching as an adjunct this semester if I didn’t—but the ugly reality is that relatively few existing institutions have the structure or infrastructure, literally or intellectually or politically, necessary to make real changes. Whatever spare cash I might have one day—ha!—is unlikely to go to existing providers. It’ll go to whoever is trying to augment or replace them. Right now I don’t know who that is.

It’s not you, Clark. It’s it.**

* These sorts of idiocies persist. When I was in grad school, some girl in the University of Arizona’s Rhet Comp (or “Rhetoric and Composition”) program claimed that they were “number two in the country.” Being the obnoxious person I am I asked, “As ranked by who?” She didn’t know. “As measured how?” She didn’t know and didn’t like me. To be fair I thought she was dumb and didn’t see her manifesting evidence to the contrary while I was around.

** See also “Ten Ways Colleges Work You Over;” I doubt any individuals at Clark approve of the competitive college race, but they are also relatively powerless to stop it.

Links: Entitlement, Ferguson, blogs, reading, war

September 1, 2014 By in Links Tags: , , , 2 Comments

* “The Problem of Entitlement: A Question of Respect,” especially worth reading for teachers and students, though it is excellent throughout. This especially resonates:

The world of grad students two decades later is a lot different. Nearly all the students have smartphones, which they bring to class. Nearly all of them spend more time staring at screens than at books.

And the students I encounter seem to value reading less and less. I remember one especially galling workshop that I taught a few years ago, in which I asked the participants to read a single story, “Guests of the Nation” by Frank O’Connor. Hardly any of them bothered. They didn’t seem to understand—they were too entitled to understand—that the production of great literature requires a deep engagement with great literature. In fact, they were more likely to talk about a movie or TV show, or what they just posted on Facebook, than the last great book they read.

When I go into coffeeshops computers and phones outnumber books at least 10:1. That is worth contemplating for anyone who writes or aspires to write books. In many ways writing is more important than ever—in an email yesterday I said that books may be the (financial) wagging the cultural dog—but people are arguably getting paid either less or differently for it.

women with cell phone in coffee shop-1829* “How we’d cover Ferguson if it happened in another country.”

* Blogs will outlast the various “Social Media” companies.

* Housing policy is the biggest thing “blue states” are screwing up.

* “The Great Unread: Why do some classics continue to fascinate while others gather dust?” What is the role of the reader, and how will a given society evolve? To most 19th C writers, coming secularization probably wasn’t totally obvious. What are 21st Century writers underestimating?

The other reality of reading is that an infinite number of books can be read at a given moment. Even dedicated readers rarely read more than 100 books a year.

* Fundamentalists are not traditionalists.

* We cannot really understand the horror of the Eastern front in World War II.

Life: The meaning of life edition

August 29, 2014 By in Life Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

“Their protest often reduces salvation to the idle contemplation of one’s own inner void; to them, even the merest search for a remedy is a form of complicity with the alienating situation. On the contrary, the only possible salvation demands an active and practical involvement with the situation. Man works, produces a world of objects, and inevitably alienates himself to them. But then he rids himself of his alienation by accepting those objects, by committing himself to them, and, instead of annihilating them, by negating them in the name of transformation, aware that at every transformation he will again find himself confronting the same dialectic situation. . .

If he chooses instead to withdraw into himself and to cultivate his own purity and spiritual independence, he will find not salvation but annihilation. He cannot transcend alienation by refusing to compromise himself in the objective situation that emerges out of his work.”

—Umberto Eco, The Open Work

Guest Post: I Was Customer Number One for Uber Fresh Yesterday!

August 27, 2014 By in business Tags: , , , 2 Comments

This post is by my Dad, Isaac Seliger.

It’s hard to be first at anything in America, but yesterday I was the very first Uber Fresh lunch delivery customer. Uber, which is of course taking on the taxi cartels with reasonable success, is trying to become something like a local Amazon–delivering restaurant meals, late-night rolling papers and condoms, for example, or taking the dog to the groomer, and so on. Since no one—including Uber or Amazon—actually knows how to do this, Uber chose this week to test the lunch delivery market in my neighborhood, Downtown Santa Monica.

Downtown SaMo,* as we locals call it, is Santa Monica’s version of the East Village, where Jake lives now, Capitol Hill in Seattle, where he once lived. Which is to say, the area is composed of lots of apartment buildings occupied either by young hipsters like Jake or geezers like me, but few people in between, since the in-betweeners are in prime family time. In Santa Monica, lots of earnest bars selling hand-crafted $12 cocktails ($15 in the East civet pixVillage), $20 small plates of roasted beets and kale, and $5 cups of pour-over coffee. The tragically hip Funnel Mill coffee shop two blocks from me actually sells $90/cup Kopi Luwak Civet Shit coffee, which Jake and I did not try when he last visited.

In short Downtown SaMo is perfect to test Uber Fresh. This week Uber is testing is a single lunch selection from a local restaurant each day, starting yesterday, which is delivered for $12—including the Uber driver’s cut. At 11:30 AM I placed my order using the Uber app and, as promised, the Uber guy showed up within ten minutes. That’s a big improvement on most delivery, which can take anywhere from ten minutes to an hour to never.

Unlike ordering from Eat24 or GrubHub, however, the Uber driver won’t come upstairs, so I met him at the curb. To me this is a big negative: by the time I overcome inertia sufficiently to get myself together to go downstairs, I might as well continue out the door to the dozens of takeout places within a few blocks of me. Death to inconvenience! That could be the rallying cry of a lot of modern consumer-facing startups. It’s not a bad tagline for my own company, Seliger + Associates.

Anyway, the driver turned out to be the typical Uber driver with an an odd, vaguely Eastern European name and accent, accompanied by an Uberette in her late 20s. She popped out of car with a big smile and a free cookie and declared I was the very first Uber Fresh delivery! It helps that the Uber Development Office is nearby.

But how was the food? The lunch was from Tender Greens, an LA-based salad bar chain, which is okay but not exciting. This described lunch, which consisted of a cup of tepid chicken soup, an ordinary Caesar Salad, and, in my case, a very tasty cookie. The best part the container: a nifty black Uber bag. Sort of a party favor or “party favorite,” as Jake’s younger sister used to call them when she was about four.

uber_bag-1148Although being Customer Numero Uno was interesting, I wouldn’t rush to order Uber Fresh again anytime soon. The food was kind of meh, fairly expensive at $12 and, since I had to go downstairs anyway, I could have walked to about 20 lunch places in ten minutes. As a business, the single-meal option is interesting but also problematic given the target demographic, since just about every resident of SaMo (or the East Village or Capitol Hill), except me, has some kind of food concern/issue, and most will want a vegan/gluten free/non-GMO or something alternative. Jake doesn’t like simple carbs, for example. But, as Joe Bob Briggs likes to say, you might want to check it out.

* [Jake’s note: They do?]

Echopraxia, the new Peter Watts novel, is here

August 26, 2014 By in Books, Fiction Tags: , 2 Comments

Echopraxia - Peter Watts

I’ll be offline, in many senses of the word, until it’s done. Here are posts mentioning his novel Blindsight, and here are posts mentioning him.