Category Archives: Culture

Amazon.com, Daniel Kahneman, and the future of publishing

February 16, 2012 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , Leave a comment

“Amazon Will Destroy You” says, among other things: “Amazon is going to destroy the Big 6, destroy bookstores, destroy 95% of all agents, destroy distributors (Ingram, Baker & Taylor), and revolutionize the publishing industry by becoming the dominant force. . . . Amazon INNOVATES. That’s the thing you whiners don’t understand.”

My own (very limited) adventures in publishing make me inclined to think this is basically correct; having now dealt a fair amount with agents, I’ve observed enough about their behavior to be suspicious: most appear to simply be judging submissions based on “gut instincts” of dubious predictive value. An increasing body of research shows how horseshit gut instincts are as a guide to most kinds of behavior, and how little we know about the decisions we make. You only have to read Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely to understand this. You can see the same principles in Moneyball, book or movie. Virtually every field that has pitted empirical data or tests against the beliefs of supposed “experts” has found that the data win. In the case of Amazon, the company is basically running a massive experiment by letting anyone who wants to publish, publish, and letting readers sort out who’s good.With the gates open, entrants are numerous—and more numerous than conventional publishers could ever hope to match.

Literary agents and publishers are now in the same position as baseball managers were in the pre-Moneyball era: completely missing the data revolution going on around them.

The gatekeepers are just wrong too much. You can tell as much from the innumerable stories about beloved, or at least popular, books that were rejected dozens or hundreds of times before finding a publisher. This isn’t the fault of agents or publishers directly: if I were an agent and saw the manuscripts for Harry Potter, Twilight, or The Da Vinci Code, I’d have rejected them—and I’d have been wrong, at least as measured by revenue. When publishers had a lock on distribution, however, they could afford to be wrong, because it was virtually impossible for writers to use alternate mechanisms to sell their books. A wrongly rejected book went in the drawer. A lucky break just happened to be a lucky break.

Increasingly, though, writers aren’t going to rely on gatekeepers. They’re going to let the market decide; publishers and agents will step in after a writer is popular. The problem is, once a writer is sufficiently successful via Internet metrics, I’m not sure that agents or publishers will be in much of a position to negotiate.

Amazon knows this. Its strategy is simple: let everyone in and let readers sort ’em out. This will shake out many of the false negatives given by agents and publishers. Conventional publishers, who pay for expensive Manhattan office space and distribution warehouses and paper, can’t afford to do this using traditional methods.

Agents and publishers probably know this, but they know it in the same way Blockbuster knew it had to compete with Netflix.

The world is moving away from mystical hand-waving and towards data / experimentation. Businesses on the wrong side of that divide are going to suffer.

EDIT: I’m reading Culture: Leading Scientists Explore Societies, Art, Power, and Technology and, weirdly, came across this contribution, by Cory Doctorow, which discusses a different context that applies to my analysis of the literary marketplace:

We’re bad futurists, we humans. We’re bad at predicting what will be important and useful tomorrow. We think the telephone will be best used to bring opera to America’s living rooms. We set out nobly to make TV into an educational medium. We create functional hypertext to facilitate the sharing of draft physics papers.

If you need to convince a gatekeeper that your contribution is worthy before you’re allowed to make it, you’d better hope the gatekeeper has superhuman prescience. (Gatekeepers don’t have superhuman prescience.) Historically, the best way to keep the important things rolling off the lines is to reduce the barriers to entry. Important things are a fraction of all things, and therefore, the more things you have, the more important things you’ll have.

The worst judges of tomorrow’s important things is today’s incumbents. If you’re about to creatively destroy some incumbent’s business-model, that incumbent will be able to tell you all kinds of reasons why you should cut it out. Travel agents had lots of soothing platitudes about why Expedia would never fly. Remember travel agents? Wonder how that worked out for them.

On what makes people happy, from Daniel Kahneman:

February 11, 2012 By in Culture, Life, Links Tags: , , , , , , 4 Comments

Our poor intuitions about the pursuit of happiness are a genuine paradox. Daniel Kahneman summarizes decades of happiness research this way: “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.”

(Emphasis in original.)

[. . .] it’s not just survey data that confirms the horror of rush hour. A few years ago, the Swiss economists Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer outlined a human bias they called “the commuting paradox.” They found that, when people are choosing where to live, they consistently underestimated the pain of a long commute. As a result, they mistakenly believed that the McMansion in the suburbs, with its extra bedroom and sprawling lawn, will make them happier, even though it might force them to drive an additional forty-five minutes to work. It turns out, though, that traffic is torture, and the big house isn’t worth it.

Both quotes come from “Does Money Make You Unhappy?” (hat tip Penelope Trunk). Strangely, Jonah Lehrer doesn’t mention Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, until the very end. Since reading Stumbling on Happiness, I’ve been pointing out these points from it to various people in various contexts:

  • making more than about $40,000 / year does little to improve happiness (this should probably be greater in, say, New York, but the main point about the diminishing returns of additional income for most people remains)
  • most people value friends, family, and social connections more than additional money above around $40K/year
  • your sex life probably matters more than your job, and many people mis-optimize in this area
  • making your work meaningful is important, although this means different things to different people

I consciously think about this book when making my own life choices, and this is also the kind of valuable insight that seemingly never gets taught in schools.

I have some theories about why so many people screw this up, but they aren’t well-developed enough to write about. Yet.

Hilarity Ensues — Tucker Max

February 9, 2012 By in Books, Culture, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 10 Comments

Laughter, the greatest testament some books can receive, can’t be directly quoted in a review. By the metric of “number of times I laughed out loud,” I gave many, many testaments to Hilarity Ensures.

Beneath that laughter, though, there’s actually a surprisingly amount of commentary about how to live and think about your life interwoven among escapades with drunk girls, drunk guys, at least one drunk dog (that I counted), existential despair, sexual elation, three-ways, success at getting in his or her pants, despair at not getting in his or her pants, angry bouncers, angry parents, angry girls, and boats.

For an example of “how to live and think about your life,” consider this overly long quote about law school, which I include in part because I went to law school for a year, for the same crappy reasons and one different reason that every other bright but unfocused 22-year-old grad goes (the only thing I did right was quit):

Yes, Duke is a top ten law school, but the only thing difficult occurred well before I ever set foot on campus; getting admitted. Once I actually arrived on campus, I realized that not only was the hardest part done, but everything else was a complete joke. The emperor had no clothes.

Going to class is a complete waste of time. The professors don’t care about teaching; they either ramble endlessly about meaningless shit, or they spend the whole time telling you how important they are. The students are no better; the ones constantly raising their hands to talk (they’re called ‘gunners’) are all pompous suck-ups, and add nothing of value to the conversation. . . . I would say that probably 90% of what you go over in class has no bearing on either your life or your job as a lawyer. Think about that—most of what you learn in class has no application anywhere outside of law school.

Hypocrisy comes from the school itself: because “90% of what you go over in class has no bearing on either your life or your job,” classes don’t matter; school should be tightly coupled with outcomes related to your life or job. When school and outcomes aren’t tightly coupled, the school is exploiting you, and schools are particularly good at this because they’re dealing primarily with unformed humans who haven’t yet acquired the analytical skills to realize what’s happening to them. I’m not sure if Max is a reader of scholarly monographs, but if he is, First Thing We Do, Let’s Deregulate All the Lawyers would be a natural stocking stuffer. Law schools have positioned themselves as gatekeepers who extract resources from students in return for credentialing, rather than adding real value. If they did add sufficient value to convince the marketplace that lawyers with degrees are better than those without, they wouldn’t need legal means to restrict competition. Today, you can’t effectively read for the bar, take it, and become a lawyer on your own because other lawyers don’t want the competition and law schools want your money. You, like sheep, give it to them. So did I.

Max hates hypocrites: that’s the moral, if there is one, of much of his work, and especially of the Miss Vermont Story, concerning a bizarrely immature 23-year-old beauty pageant contestant who preaches abstinence and sobriety while practicing the exact opposite with Max. Out of a misguided sense of importance and vengeance, Katy Johnson / Miss Vermont’s mother orchestrates a dubious lawsuit whose only real outcome is a variation on the Streisand effect.

I identify with that story in particular, since I was a minor league hypocrite once:

This reminds me of the first weekend I smoked pot, in high school (it wasn’t great: I don’t much care for the feeling, although I understand that many others do). The next week, a friend said she was going to the elementary school a block from my house to talk about D.A.R.E., which is a dumb and ineffective program. She invited me to go with her. Most importantly, this got me out of a couple classes. I went, spouted platitudes, felt like the world’s most terrible hypocrite. When we left, I told my friend about my experience with pot. She said, “I got wasted this weekend.”

Hypocrisy ties more broadly into the girls who say one thing and do another. Though they’re mostly a source of bemusement in Hilarity Ensues, underneath the bemusement is a real critique: why lie, both to yourself and others, about what you really want? The question is mostly rhetorical, but there are answers, social conditioning being the most obvious. Max is aware of that conditioning:

The rules your parents teach you to live by are very different than the rules the world actually runs by. Most of the conventional wisdom is not only wrong, it’s a lie told to us by people who want to control us. It doesn’t help us, it helps them. Pretty much everything we’re told as children (and adults, really) by the established power structures in our lives are made-up fairytales used to reinforce that control. . . It makes sense if you think about it; the only way you can truly control people is to lie to them.

The “rules” are certainly different, although I’m not sure who the “us” and “them” are in the quoted paragraph. The lies we tell kids are real, and one reason for teenage alienation might be the slow, real discovery that much of what we’ve been told about decorum, success, and meaning are lies. Once implanted, those lies are hard to remove: “People will ignore a lot of reality in order to maintain their fantasies,” especially if those fantasies are comforting.

But Max is not advocating anarchy. He has a sense of anarchy’s consequences; in Mexico, “there is a flipside to no rules: The American safety net isn’t there to protect you from the consequences of your stupid decisions.” It’s an obvious point, yet I bet the million Max wannabes miss this insight, and miss the fact that pleasure has its pleasures and its price. In some ways Max is lucky: his own “stupid decisions” could’ve ended much worse. The “safety net” caught him. No cars hit him, he sustained no permanent physical injuries, and he didn’t encounter anyone murderously psychotic at a random bar. Lessons and memories remain, like those about how we absorb ideas when we grow up.

Lies are often propagated by parents because parents’ and kids’ interests diverge. The teenage girl having sex reaps the pleasure of the act, while her parents might end up paying much of the financial and emotional price of a pregnancy. So parents discourage sex, girls get mixed messages, most don’t have the intellectual capacity or inclination to sort truth from lie, and end up in the bizarrely bifurcated universe that provides fodder for jokes—in the United States, anyway, since “Canadians, especially French-Canadians, have a much healthier attitude towards sex than Americans,” an observation made in the context of a visit to a strip club in French-Canada.

The trick is discovering the lies. But even after discovery, most people appear to continue propagating them anyway, to their children, and want those lies propagated to their children. A surprisingly large number of potheads I knew in college became teachers, yet none to my knowledge would admit as much in a classroom. One friend teaches photography to high school students and, at the beginning of class, tells her students not to shoot nudes of people under 18, since that’s technically illegal, regardless of the central place of the nude in Western art. To her credit, she also adds this caveat: “And if you do anyway, don’t tell me.” It’s a subtle but effective dig at the powers-that-be.

The people who follow the straight path are often cursed by getting what they think they want, like law school and becoming a lawyer. Many who win such dubious victories come to rue them, like Max’s friend Hate, who “kept doing the ‘right’ thing, checking off all the boxes. . . and he kept getting fucked. All the while, the guy doing the wrong thing (me, for example) kept getting what he wanted. Sisyphus led a less futile existence than Hate: at least Sisyphus got in a workout” (notice, too, here the characteristic and characteristically hilarious allusion, recast into the modern language of the gym). Here, “right” and “wrong” are inverted: the real world is big and confusing, and one needs a strong bullshit to detector to make sense of it. If you don’t pay attention, these moments will slip by, like some of Max’s jokes: in one story, a groups of girls came over, and “one of them told me that she was afraid to try anal sex because of my first book. I told her I didn’t give a shit about her problems” (emphasis added).

Other moments involve the perfect allusion, as when a dominatrix plies her trade on Max at a party: “She was beating me with the type of anger usually reserved for people who owe money to Tony Soprano.” Or the apt analogy: “Whatever, we’re both naked and horny, and I’ve fucked way worse. No turning back now. When you try to jump a lake of fire you don’t take your foot off the gas once you’ve hit the ramp.” When you’re having sex with someone you compare to a lake of fire, you may want to reconsider your partner or quarry: but that’s also the sober, distant, far from the act person talking, not the person in the moment (the writer says, thinking back to his own dubious moments). Consider this, of Max’s friend Jerry: “He was not fucking her; he was jackhammering her so hard and fast, he was moving like one of those things that mixes paint at Home Depot.” I haven’t read so many creative sexual descriptions outside of Nicholson Baker. Or inside of Nicholson Baker, as the case may be. These metaphors create their own worlds, in James Wood’s sense in “The All and the If: God and Metaphor in Melville.”

The reaction to Max fascinates almost as much as Max’s writing itself: critics call his writing odious and worse (an example, from Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic: “He published his exploits in an unbelievably nasty little book called I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. . . .” As someone who’s dated around enough to find the occasional nutcase, I find many of his stories too believable). Yet those critics don’t often go beyond name-calling and into close reading, and calling someone’s work “unbelievably nasty” makes it more intriguing, not less, especially because Literary history serves up innumerable examples of writers who thumb the day’s decorum and later come to be revered; obvious examples include Dreiser, for Sister Carrie, which now reads so tepidly and tediously that it’s tough to get through, or D.H. Lawrence for Lady Chatterley’s Lover, given its references to anal and class miscegenation, or James Joyce’s voyeurism and masturbation.

Now, just because past writers have defied conventional norms and later received literary recognition for that doesn’t mean the two have a causal relationship, or that anyone who defies norms will thereby gain later literary recognition. But I think the quality of Max’s writing sets him apart from other people writing about sex adventures online or off, and that’s what draws me. The style affects the content, and it’s that style that makes him broadly popular, and very much unlike his literary predecessors.

But Max doesn’t wrap himself in high-brow literary paraphernalia or pretensions. He does the opposite, and that’s what I think his critics hate, along with his honesty. Drape yourself in highbrow literary accouterments and you can write what you want; do the opposite and take tepid critical punishment, which is no doubt salved by fan adoration (given a choice between groupies and a sedate, smug, and positive New Yorker Review of Books essay, which would you choose? Me too).

I think aspect of critics’ dislike of Max’s honesty comes from a particular source: there’s still a large contingent of people who want to view women as non-carnal and basically preyed on and manipulated by men (see one example, which I wrote about, in “The Weekly Standard on the New-Old Dating Game, Hooking Up, Daughter-Guarding, and much, much more“). This kind of makes sense if you’re a parent trying to lie to yourself or protect your daughter or son—or at least make them compliant. Or religious and trying to do much the same, but it doesn’t make much sense if you’ve dated a fair number of women, or are female and honest, or pay more attention to behavior than to words.

The distaste for Max’s sexual politics is hard to square with Max’s legion of willing groupies, or even with his descriptions of his pre-fame hookups: it takes two or more people for sex, and the women say yes, even if many of them choose to douse themselves in alcohol first. The refutation of the belief that women are non-carnal victims is in the behavior of the women Max describes, not Max himself. Being angry at Max is shooting the messenger: if hot women regularly put out for gallant, polite men, I think his bad boy personality would morph quickly. Women’s revealed preferences, as shown by their love of Max (or your local bad boy), might be what bothers his critics.

If women themselves were collectively more honest, they’d simply say they go out and get hammered so they can hook up with guys. Instead, they often lie to themselves and others and say they’re just going out to “have a good time” or “hang out with their friends,” or any number of other rationalizations. That word, “honest,” appears with surprising frequency, especially as it relates to gender: In Mexico, “Girls wanted to fuck, and here, as opposed to America, they were honest about it.” Why aren’t girls honest in the first place? Because their parents don’t want them to be.

There are also moments where Max wonders: “I never understand why women think drama and bullshit are attractive to guys. They’re not. I’m going to be real clear about this, ladies, so pay attention: Prince Charming doesn’t come to rescue cunty lunatics.” Here’s my guess: women don’t consciously think “drama and bullshit are attractive to guys,” but they like the attention drama and bullshit generate, especially among guys too committed, weak, or stupid to avoid or ignore it. Women engaged in vapid drama might say they want “Prince Charming” but be willing to compromise through the ministrations of whoever responds to their keening. Granted, lacking self-awareness is also a human trait more than a female one: on the side of straight men, I think about all the so-called “nice guys” who are “nice” not because they’re genuinely caring but because they think they can’t get laid acting otherwise anyway. Women often crave attention: look at the ones who go to bars to stroke desire and then ignore the desire they’ve stroked. I can’t remember where I read it, but someone said that men go to bars to get laid, while women go to get attention and maybe get laid. That fits the behavioral patterns I’ve seen.

One of my students mentioned Tucker Max in the context of literary valuation in class a couple days ago, and he seemed to want to know if Max “counted” as a good writer, or something like that (students are weirdly attuned to perceived authority: many have wanted to know about Paul Graham’s background, for example, which is the kind of thing that interests me not at all—I only want to evaluate people based solely on their writing, not about aspects of their life tangential to their writing or the accuracy of their arguments).

It seems like students themselves are wary, at least in official discourse, of trying to decide for themselves who’s a “good” writer and who isn’t. They associate “goodness” with “approved” behavior. They probably have some sense of the critical edifice above them, canonizing some writers and ignoring others. I wish I could convince them to develop their own ideas of what counts, and how it does. That’s part of stepping out of the artificial school fishbowl and into the greater literary world, where the people who win big are the ones who reconceptualize what’s possible. Max did: he mentions the thousands of rejections he got from literary agents, publishers, magazines, and others when he started out. But he also had the good fortune to see his style evolve with the Internet.

The occasional dark threads appear too, as with mentions of depression, or a moment on a boat off the Alaskan coast:

At 7pm, the dark, empty deck of a crab boat is a strange place. It’s pitch black and there’s no land, no life, nothing whatsoever. It’s complete, barren, unforgiving void. It’s just plain disturbing. The water frothing beneath the sides of the boat is literally black. Dying that way—by falling in and freezing—must be horrific.

You can understand Moby-Dick by looking at the sea; Max is encountering an existential void. If he didn’t appear to be enjoying himself so much and if I were a dumber kind of critic, I’d say something about this standing for the heart of his soul.

This is the part where a lot of reviews and essays say something bad. I don’t have much. There are occasional oddities in language: “Yes, Duke is a top ten law school, but the only thing difficult occurred well before I ever set foot on campus; getting admitted.” Why “thing difficult” instead of “difficult thing?” Usually the adjective goes before the noun. I can’t think of any stylistic or content reason for the word order reversal, or why he used a semi-colon instead of a colon. I should probably also say something about how he interacts with women, but why bother? A friend’s Dad gave her this advice when she was 12 and periodically thereafter: men will treat you as badly as you let them. And is it “bad” to give someone what they want (again: think of revealed preferences)? In America, the answer tends towards “no.” Max gives readers what they want—humor, respite, philosophy—and, whatever his critics may protest, many women what they want. Everyone is happy, save those who don’t want to confront the reality on the ground of life.

Shaping Things and Bruce Sterling’s technoculture

January 31, 2012 By in Books, Culture, Nonfiction, SF/Fantasy Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Design is hard to do. Design is not art. But design has some of the requirements of art. The achievement of greatness in art or design requires passionate virtuosity. VIRTUOSITY means thorough mastery of craft. PASSION is required to focus human effort to a level that transcends the norm. Some guitarists have passion, especially young ones. Some have virtuosity, especially old ones. Some few have both at once, and during some mortal window of superb achievement, they are great guitarists.

That’s from Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things, and I admire the distinction between design and art, which overlap to some extent but not totally; his point about “passionate virtuosity” is one I’ve seen elsewhere but is worth repeating, because it seems like so many seemingly different fields require the same thing. Certainly writing does, and one sees too many people with the passion or the virtuosity but not both.

Another sample:

I do write a great deal about technology. That became my theme as an artist. The human reaction to technological change—nothing interests me more. I want and need to know all about it. I want to plumb its every aspect. I even want to find new words for aspects of it that haven’t as yet been described.

I would guess artists, especially of narrative arts, are going to have to pay steadily more attention to technology: it informs too many lives too much to ignore, and people have as many disparate response “to technological change” as they do to love.

The book itself—Shaping Things—is interesting without being captivating. It needs more examples and case studies, and fewer grand pronouncements; it resembles a lot of literary theory in this way. If you get a physical copy, you’ll also find terrible design, with all kinds of doodads, weird fonts, random backgrounds, and so forth, all of which distract from readability in the name of being weird (those capitalizations in the blockquote above are in the text). It’s a kind of anti-Apple product.

The book’s design is distinctive, but distinctive is automatically good, and as a mechanism for transferring ideas via text Shaping Things isn’t optimal because of those distractions. Nonetheless, the idea density is high, and I’m going to keep my copy, at least for the time being. Like Sterling, I’ve become steadily more interested in design and what design says about people and culture. I’m not sure how that’ll work into my fiction, but long-simmering ideas and interests tend to emerge in unpredictable ways. For example: I’ve thought about a novel in which a camera shows an emotionally stunted photographer—along the Conrad and Houllebecq lines—who thinks in the language of photography itself what the photographer takes to be the future. Or is it? Photographers have a rich array of metaphors to draw on, and they have to be attuned to light, shapes, and the interplay of things and colors. Cameras themselves are technologies, and in the last 15 years they’ve become computers, with rapid advancements from year to year and all of the technolust that implies.

I don’t know where this idea might go, or if it will go at all, but I’ve been mulling it for a long time. A character like the one or ones I’m imagine would be reacting to technological change. I won’t say “nothing interests me more,” as Sterling does, but human reaction to technology is certainly up there, as I increasingly think it has to be, for people in virtually any field, if one wants any real shot at understanding what’s going on.

Shaping Things and Bruce Sterling's technoculture

January 31, 2012 By in Books, Culture, Nonfiction, SF/Fantasy Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Design is hard to do. Design is not art. But design has some of the requirements of art. The achievement of greatness in art or design requires passionate virtuosity. VIRTUOSITY means thorough mastery of craft. PASSION is required to focus human effort to a level that transcends the norm. Some guitarists have passion, especially young ones. Some have virtuosity, especially old ones. Some few have both at once, and during some mortal window of superb achievement, they are great guitarists.

That’s from Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things, and I admire the distinction between design and art, which overlap to some extent but not totally; his point about “passionate virtuosity” is one I’ve seen elsewhere but is worth repeating, because it seems like so many seemingly different fields require the same thing. Certainly writing does, and one sees too many people with the passion or the virtuosity but not both.

Another sample:

I do write a great deal about technology. That became my theme as an artist. The human reaction to technological change—nothing interests me more. I want and need to know all about it. I want to plumb its every aspect. I even want to find new words for aspects of it that haven’t as yet been described.

I would guess artists, especially of narrative arts, are going to have to pay steadily more attention to technology: it informs too many lives too much to ignore, and people have as many disparate response “to technological change” as they do to love.

The book itself—Shaping Things—is interesting without being captivating. It needs more examples and case studies, and fewer grand pronouncements; it resembles a lot of literary theory in this way. If you get a physical copy, you’ll also find terrible design, with all kinds of doodads, weird fonts, random backgrounds, and so forth, all of which distract from readability in the name of being weird (those capitalizations in the blockquote above are in the text). It’s a kind of anti-Apple product.

The book’s design is distinctive, but distinctive is automatically good, and as a mechanism for transferring ideas via text Shaping Things isn’t optimal because of those distractions. Nonetheless, the idea density is high, and I’m going to keep my copy, at least for the time being. Like Sterling, I’ve become steadily more interested in design and what design says about people and culture. I’m not sure how that’ll work into my fiction, but long-simmering ideas and interests tend to emerge in unpredictable ways. For example: I’ve thought about a novel in which a camera shows an emotionally stunted photographer—along the Conrad and Houllebecq lines—who thinks in the language of photography itself what the photographer takes to be the future. Or is it? Photographers have a rich array of metaphors to draw on, and they have to be attuned to light, shapes, and the interplay of things and colors. Cameras themselves are technologies, and in the last 15 years they’ve become computers, with rapid advancements from year to year and all of the technolust that implies.

I don’t know where this idea might go, or if it will go at all, but I’ve been mulling it for a long time. A character like the one or ones I’m imagine would be reacting to technological change. I won’t say “nothing interests me more,” as Sterling does, but human reaction to technology is certainly up there, as I increasingly think it has to be, for people in virtually any field, if one wants any real shot at understanding what’s going on.

Commenting, community deterioration, and Hacker News

January 15, 2012 By in Culture Tags: , , , , , , , 21 Comments

The people who most need to read and understand this post are the ones least likely to. Nonetheless, I’m going to post because the topic is important yet neglected topic restraint when speaking and writing. In real life, the problem isn’t nearly as acute as it is on the Internet: few people will ignore social cues that say, “You’re being a jerk,” but on the Internet there are few or no social cues, especially in the comments sections of websites. I try to comment when I have useful, unique, original, or non-standard things to say. That isn’t so often, but it’s often enough that I leave a reasonably large number of comments; some of them are the first drafts of blog posts (and some of those blog posts may eventually find their way into books, a topic that I’ve been thinking about more and more lately).

And when I don’t have something useful, unique, original, or non-standard to say (or ask), I just shut up. But Internet comments tend to degrade as a website grows; it attracts more people who just comment, often in ways that aren’t negative enough to silence through moderation but still annoying enough to lower the quality of the conversation. This, it seems to me, is a problem separate from trolls: the commenters who are leaving thoughtless comments aren’t necessarily doing so for attention, and they may not realize what they’re doing. And we can’t just state it in the negative: don’t don’t this. We should state it in the positive: do add substance. Hacker News tries to solve this problem with its Guidelines and through culture, but the site has been growing faster, it seems, than its culture.

There may not be anything that can be done about this problem; it appears to take a certain and unusual mind to appreciate long-form discussion, be courteous, not feed or respond to trolls, and contribute only things of substance. The early (or earlier) readers of Hacker News, and other big news sites, appear to have understood this. The more recent readers don’t, or a critical mass of people is developing who don’t work to contribute substantive material. I hadn’t really thought about the issue until about a month ago, in this comment thread, where I pointed out that single-function devices can still have utility. A poster named Dextorious replied: “Yeah. So on top of owning an iPhone, you are also a hipster with a (trendy but useless, considering the iPhone also tells the time) watch and a notebook (it’s even a Moleskine). Way to prove the parent poster’s point.”

Argh. I replied:

1) I don’t know what you mean by a “hipster,” or what a “hipster” is, other than that you’re using the term as a slur: http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html . I also don’t know what “hipster culture” means or is.

2) The original poster who I’m responding to said, “the days of the wristwatch and one-function cell-phone are gone [. . .],” so I’m not sure how one can be simultaneously “trendy” and part of a declining trend (that is, watch-wearing).

3) If you’d read the link, you’d know that I don’t use Moleskine notebooks any more because their quality variability appears to have increased over time.

But I bet my reply took way longer than Dextorious’s comment, and by the time I was done replying I felt like I’d wasted my time. I wanted to add another part:

4) I worry that this level of stupidity, and repeated stupidity, is becoming more normal; it’s very hard to wade through that stupidity as an individual. Dextorious has a lot of problems with reason; he tends to post things like “Thanks for the “democratic” downvoting.”

I looked through his comment history; there are many one-line, two-sentence comments like this one, which led to a pointless flame war. He calls Facebook “hyper-valued web crap,” but not in the context of providing real insight. Likewise, consider this comment. Others tell him that he’s not being very nice, as in a comment where Dinkumthinkum says, “You’re missing the point.” But how do you tell someone who chronically misses the point that they’re missing the point? In another thread, talmand says, “Wow, overreact much?” Yes, he does; but you can’t tell from looking a single comment what dextorious is doing, and most people aren’t going to look for a pattern of useless behavior in a poster’s comment history. I only did to make a point.

And I’m not doing this to pick on Dextorious; he’s one guy, but he’s symptomatic of similar threads I’ve seen. The latest happened today, in which jacquesm said:

The thread because this is one of the most hateful and ugly threads I’ve ever seen on HN. A thread like this would be literally unthinkable a year or more ago, and now I’m not even surprised it is here.

I’m not surprised either, and I’m not sure what to do with it in the face of cultural change. I’m not sure there’s a good algorithmic way of dealing with weak comments; one might have a Dunning-Kruger effect at work: the people who are least likely to provide valuable and non-jerky comments are also least likely to realize they’re not doing it. Most of the time, when you’re thinking about writing a comment, you should stop and ask: Is this important? Is it important enough to give it its own post? Is it cruel? Most people don’t do this. I suppose Hacker News could solve this problem by appointing super users or something like that, but such a solution doesn’t scale and has the problem of borderline-useful comments, like many of Dextorious’s. And sometimes it is genuinely hard to separate people telling difficult truths and people being jerks. Self-policing works much better but is imperfect, and its imperfection grows faster than the number of users.

This post is an effort towards cultural change, not only on Hacker News but elsewhere on the Internet. I’ve discussed the problem before and doubt it’s going to go away. I’m still going to try to help people write better comments and think better, but I worry that it’s a losing battle in most circumstances.

The 99% are watching four to five hours of TV a day, and other tales from the present

January 12, 2012 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , 10 Comments

I’m reading “Streaming Dreams: YouTube turns pro” and noticed this:

But there is one category in which YouTube has made little progress. The average ’Tuber spends only fifteen minutes a day on the site—a paltry showing when compared with the four or five hours the average American spends in front of the TV each day.

Emphasis added; the quote is from The New Yorker; Nielsen, who does the most TV tracking, agrees with the four hours number. In all of the contemporary reports and newspaper accounts and blog posts about income equality, I’ve never seen TV consumption mentioned. To me TV consumption is astonishing and might also be linked to Americans’ larger economic problems—I can’t imagine that most successful, people who earn a lot of money watch anything like four hours of TV a day, because where would they get the time? I also doubt TV probably isn’t imparting the skills and knowledge that future high earners need to be high earners. It could be that I’m succumbing to the availability bias and assuming that the high earners I know are representative, but the fact itself still amazes.

This also reminded me of Bryan Caplan’s post “Kahneman, Greed and Success,” in which Caplan says: “Kahneman highlights an important, neglected reason why some people are rich and others are poor: some people care about money more than the rest of us. People who want to be rich make the choices and sacrifices conducive to that end – and on average they succeed.” The key words there are “on average,” but that’s probably true of most things people want: the ones who really strive to achieve something are on average more likely to get it, though no one foresees the future and even those who strive to do everything right may still fail. Those of us who spend four hours a day watching TV, however, are probably not trying—which means it shouldn’t surprise us when we fail to earn as much as we otherwise could. And, to me, skipping TV doesn’t even look like much of a “sacrifice,” because so much of it is boring.

I’m reminded too of friends and acquaintances who mention their artistic aspirations in writing, movies, or music. When they say they want to make movies, write, or record music, I ask to read, see, or hear their work. Very few of them have any to show, or blogs, YouTube shorts, or albums online, and when I express surprise, they seem disconnected from the art they claim they want to make. Which makes me think their ambitions aren’t real ambitions: they’re conversational pieces, or status poses. Or the holders of false artistic ambitions are stuck in antiquity, waiting for someone to give them permission or degrees or deadlines. Whatever the case, I’ve learned to be very skeptical of the people who claim they want to be artists but aren’t actively being artists. Given the proliferation and low cost of the tools necessary to make art, the only thing standing between people and being artists is themselves.

Income doesn’t work quite that way, but the people who really want to make money are taking proactive steps to make money. The people who say they want to earn more but instead watch four or five hours of TV a day are posing, or complaining without taking action, like my would-be artist friends and acquaintances. The obsessives are the ones who succeed as artists. They also appear to be the ones who succeed as startup founders. It looks increasingly like the complaints about income inequality are really based on resentment—not just of those with wealth, but resentment of the complainer’s earlier consumption and time choices, and it comes from people who haven’t chosen professions based on income—like journalism, teaching, or professing. It comes from people who made trade-offs away from earning more and toward consuming more (like TV), but who eventually find that they don’t like the trade-offs they made.

Some might also not realize they’re making choices; I’m reminded of John Scalzi in “Being Poor,” where he says “Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old.” But that probably applies to a minority of people, not a majority, and it would be stupid and misleading to compare the median to the genuinely poor.*

A lot of us probably aren’t, as Caplan points out, “racing for the same finish line: material success” (and, as we’ve been exhorted numerous times, maybe we shouldn’t be). If you race for that materialistic or monetary line and not some other, it’s hard to imagine “normal” behavior more detrimental to getting there than watching four hours of TV a day. The people who are making the money are the ones building YouTube, not watching YouTube and TV. I suppose four hours of TV is an improvement on, say, four hours staring at a wall. But very few people are really building what economists call “human capital” when they watch TV. They’re instead regressing to the mean, in income and in so many other fields.

Read too Scalzi’s later essay, “Why Not Feeling Rich is Not Being Poor, and Other Things Financial,” where he cautions people again the mistake of using “Being Poor” as a stick to beat the wealthy—even those wealthy whose comparison groups make them think they’re not wealthy. One thing that might make us all feel wealthier is simple: not comparing ourselves to our wealthiest neighbors or the people on TV, especially since the extravagance depicted on many TV shows is so astonishing compared to what normal people have. Such a principle doesn’t apply solely to wealth, either: subconsciously assuming that the people you date or marry should be as hot and witty as TV stars is as unwise as using such people for financial comparisons.

EDIT: William Gibson in Distrust That Particular Flavor: “I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.”

Why I write fewer book reviews

January 11, 2012 By in Books, Critics, Culture Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments

When I started writing this blog I mainly wrote book reviews. Now, as a couple readers have pointed out, I don’t write nearly as many. Why?

1) I know a lot more now than I did then and have lived, read, and synthesized enough that I can combine lots of distinct things into unique stories that share non-obvious thins about the world. When I started, I couldn’t do that. Now my skills have broadened substantially, and, as a result, I write on different topics.

2) For many writers, reviewing books for a couple years is extremely useful because it introduces a wide array of narratives, styles, and so forth, forcing you to develop, express, and justify your opinions if you’re going to write anything worthwhile. Few other environments force you to do this; in academia, the books you’re assigned are already supposed to be “great,” so you’re not asked to say if they’re crap—even though many of the assigned books in school are crap, you’re not supposed to say so. After going through dozens or hundreds of books and explaining why you think they’re good and bad and in between, you should end up developing at least a moderately coherent philosophy of what you like, why you like it, and, ideally, how you should implement it. You shouldn’t let that philosophy become a set of blinders, but it does help to think systematically about tastes and preferences and so forth.

You might not be saying much about the books you’re reviewing, but you are saying a lot about what you’ve come to think about books.

3) No one cares about book reviews. If people in the aggregate did care about book reviews, virtually every newspaper in the country wouldn’t have shuttered what book review section it once had. What a limited number of people do want to know is what books they should read and, to a lesser extent, why. Having established, I’d like to imagine, some level of credibility by going through 2), above, I think I’m better able to do this now than I was when I started, and without necessarily dissecting every aspect of every book.

It’s also very hard and time consuming to write a great review, at least for me.

Lev Grossman also points out a supply / demand issue in an interview:

There was a time not long ago when opinions about books were a scarce commodity. Now we have an extreme surplus of opinions about books, and it’s very easy to obtain them. So if you’re in the business of supplying opinions about books, you need to get into a slightly different business. Being a critic becomes much more about supplying context for books, talking about new ways of reading, sharing ways in which it can be a rich experience.

He’s right, and his economic perspective is useful: when something is plentiful, easy to produce, and thus cheap, we should do something else. And I’m doing more of the “something else,” using as my model writers like Derek Sivers and Paul Graham.

To return to Grossman’s point, we might also treat what we’re doing differently. Clay Shirky says in Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

Scarcity is easier to deal with than abundance, because when something becomes scarce, we simply think it more valuable than it was before, a conceptually easy change. Abundance is different: its advent means we can start treating previously valuable things as if they were cheap enough to waste, which is to say cheap enough to experiment with. Because abundance can remove the trade-offs we’re used to, it can be disorienting to people who’ve grown up with scarcity. When a resource is scarce, the people who manage it often regard it as valuable in itself, without stopping to consider how much of the value is tied to its scarcity.

Lots of people are writing lots of reviews, some of them good (I like to think some of mine are good) but most not. Most are just impressionistic or empty or garbage. By now, opinions are plentiful, which means we should probably shift towards greater understanding and knowledge production instead of raw opinion. That’s what I’m doing in point 1). I’m no longer convinced that book reviews are automatically to be regarded “as valuable in [themselves],” as they might’ve been when it was quite hard to get ahold of books and opinions about those books. Today, for any given book, you can type its name into Google and find dozens or hundreds of reviews. This might make pointing out lesser known but good books useful—which I did with Never the Face: A Story of Desire—and the New York Review of Books is doing on a mass scale with its publishing imprint. Granted, I’ve found few books in that series I’ve really liked aside from The Dud Avocado, but I pay attention to the books published by it.

4) It’s useful to keep When To Ignore Criticism (and How to Get People to Take Your Critique Seriously) by John Scalzi in mind; he says critics tend to have four major functions: consumer reporting, exegesis, instruction, and polemic (details at his site). The first is useful but easily found across the web, and it’s also of less and less use to me because deciding what’s “worth it” is so personal, like style. My tastes these days are much more refined and specific than they were, say, 10 years ago (and I suspect they’ll be more refined still in 10 years). The second is basically what academic articles do, and I’d rather do that for money, however indirectly. The third is still of interest to me, and I do it sometimes, especially with bad reviews. The fourth is a toss-up.

When I started, I mostly wanted to do one and two. Now I’m not that convinced they’re important. In addition, books that I really love and really think are worth reading don’t come along all that frequently; maybe I should make a list of them at the top. Every week, there’s an issue of the New York Times Book Review with a book on the cover, but that doesn’t mean every week brings a fabulous book very much much worth reading by a large number of people. Having been fooled by cover stories a couple of times (Angelology being the most salient example), I’m much warier of them now.

Unfortunately, academic writing is also usually less fun, less intelligent, more windy, and duller than writing on the Internet. Anything is accomplishes rhetorically or intellectually is usually done through a film of muck thrown on by the culture of academic publishing, peer reviewers, and journal editors. There’s a very good reason no one outside of academia reads academic literary criticism, although I hadn’t appreciated why until I began to read it.

5) Professionalization. To spend the time and energy writing the great review for this blog, I necessarily have to give up time that I would otherwise spend writing stuff for grad school. There could conceivably be tangible financial rewards from publishing literary criticism, however abstruse or little read. There are not such rewards in blogging, at least given academia’s current structural equilibrium.

(If you’re going to argue that this equilibrium is bad and the game is dumb, that’s a fine thing to do, but it’s also the subject for another day.)

6) People, including me, care more about books than book reviews. I’m better off spending more time writing fiction and less time writing about fiction. So I do that, even if the labors are not yet evident. A book might, conceivably, be important and read for a long period of time. Book reviews, on the other hand, seldom are. So I want to work toward the more important activity; instead of telling you what I think is good, I’d rather just do it.

Here’s T.C. Boyle o:

What I’d like to see more of are the sort of wide-ranging and penetrating overviews of a given writer’s work by writers and thinkers who are the equals of those they presume to analyze. This happens rarely. Why? Well, what’s in it for the critic? Is he/she going to be paid? By whom? Harper’s runs in-depth book essays, as does the New York Review of Books and other outlets. Fine and dandy. There would be more if there were more of an audience. But there isn’t.

For a long time, I did it free, though perhaps not at the level Boyle would desire; now I don’t, per the professionalization issue.

7) A great deal of art and art criticism does, in the end, reduce to taste, and the opinions and analyses of critics are basically votes that, over time, accumulate and lift some few works out of history’s ocean. But I’m not sure that book reviews are the optimal means of performing that work: better to do it by alluding to older work in newer work, or integrating ideas into more considered essays, or otherwise use artistic work in some larger synthesis.

8) In Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Norrell is having a debate with two toadies and says, “I really have no desire to write reviews of other people’s books. Modern publications upon magic are the most pernicious things in the world, full of misinformation and wrong opinions.” Lascelles, who has become a kind of self-appointed, high-status servant, says:

[I]t is precisely by passing judgements upon other people’s work and pointing out their errors that readers can be made to understand your opinions better. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn a review to one’s own ends. One only need mention the book once or twice and for the rest of the article one may develop one’s theme just as one chuses. It is, I assure you, what every body else does.

And because everybody else does it, we should do it too. Modern publications about literature probably feel the same as Norrell’s view of 1807 publications of magic, because it’s hard to tell what constitutes true information and right opinions in literature—making it seem that everyone else’s writing is “full of misinformation and wrong opinions.” (Norrell, of course, things he can right this, and in the context of the novel he may be right.) Besides, even if we are confronted by facts we don’t agree with, we tend to ignore them:

Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite.

Opinions are probably much the same, which explains how we get to where we are. Opinions about books even more so, which is how Lev Grossman came to say what he said above.

Anyway, Norrell realizes that book reviewing is often a waste of time, and Lascelles likes book reviewing not because of its intrinsic merit but because he thinks of it as high status (which it might’ve been in 1807). In 2011 or 2012, reviewing books might still be a waste of time and is a much lower status activity, so that even the Lascelles of the world–who I’ve met—are unlikely to be drawn to it.

As I said above, the best review of a book isn’t a review of it, but another book that speaks back to it, or incorporates its ideas, or disagrees with it, or uses it as a starting point. Which isn’t a book review at all, of course: It’s something more special, and more rare. So I’m more interested now in doing that kind of review, like Norrell is interested in doing magic instead of writing about other people’s opinions of doing magic, rather than writing about whether a book is worth reading or not. I’ll still do that to some extent, but I’ve been drifting away for some time and am likely to do so further. If Lev Grossman is remembered beyond his lifetime, I doubt it will be for his criticism, however worthy it might be: he’ll be remembered for The Magicians and his other literary work. I’d like to follow his example.

EDIT: Here’s Henry Bech in The Complete Henry Bech:

That a negative review might be a fallible verdict, delivered in haste, against a deadline, for a few dollars, by a writer with problems and limitations of his own was a reasonable and weaseling supposition he could no longer, in the dignity of his years, entertain.

Yet this is the supposition artists need to entertain; critics’ opinions are as cacophonous and random as a jungle, and listening to them is hard, and, the writers who react most vituperatively to critics are probably doing so because they fear the critic or critics might be right.

Updike is also writing close to home here: the better known the writer, the more critics he’s naturally going to attract. So the volume of critical attacks might also be linked to success.

DSLRs, smartphones, and point-n-shoots

January 4, 2012 By in Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Pictures taken with smartphone cameras almost outnumber standalone digital cameras. A couple thoughts:

1) More people probably have phones with them than regular digital cameras, so the “photographer base” is probably much larger. For more statistical anomalies, see C|Net’s take. Moral: it’s easy to lie / mislead with statistics!

2) People who have standalone digital cameras, especially dSLRs, probably take more pictures than people without; so I would guess a larger number of pictures are taken by a smaller number of people in that case. I would tend to guess they also take better pictures: not because of some magical quality dSLRs possess, but because people who know a lot about photography are more likely to buy better cameras.

3) Separate from the article, I have never seen a greater number of dSLRs than I did in NYC. Tourists, I guess? I never conspicuously hauled mine around. I wonder which city would qualify as “most photographed in the world;” perhaps Flickr or Facebook’s data hordes could answer. I would guess Tokyo or London.

4) Smartphones are clearly reaching (and, in some cases, have already reached) the “good enough” stage that so much consumer technology eventually does. I wouldn’t trade a Canon s100 or t2i for a phone camera, but in decent lighting the iPhone 4 and 4s do produce nice results. Note that interchangeable lens camera sales are up, probably because the Internet makes pictures more valuable for amateurs because of the possibility of sharing and perceived status gain.

5) The photographer still makes the camera more than vice-versa.

6) For any kind of composed shooting, a tripod will do more than anything except decent lighting, whether natural or studio.

7) Life is uncomposed, and capturing life might demand the same.

8) What am I missing?

Humor as an antidote to frustration, from Christopher Hitchens

December 20, 2011 By in Culture, Nonfiction Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I think of Christopher Hitchens more along the lines of Katha Pollitt, who “want[s] to complicate the picture even at the risk of seeming churlish.” And she does. Still, Hitchens was sometimes spectacularly right, as in this introduction to Arguably: Essays:

The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity. Since an essential element in the American idea is its variety, I have tried to celebrate things that are amusing for their own sake, or ridiculous but revealing, or simply of intrinsic interest. All of the above might apply to the subject of my little essay on the art and science of the blowjob, for example [….]

Be almost as wary of the humorless as you are of the people who pride themselves on humor.