Category Archives: Links

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.

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.

Links: Sibling loss, free speech, self-publishing, transfer of learning, and more

August 24, 2012 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Quora answers: “What does it feel like to have your sibling die?” HT MR.

* The Case for the Private Sector in School Reform.

* Terrifying Teen Speech in the News Again: What kind of democracy teaches its young people they’ll be punished for talking out of turn?

* The Joys and Hazards of Self-Publishing on the Web. This basically describes where I’m going.

* From Tyler Cowen, a link to “Working 9 to 12: ‘How Much Is Enough?’ by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky:”

I well remember as recently as the 1980s how shabby England was, how terrible the plumbing, how shoddy the housing materials, how treacherously uneven the floors and sidewalks, how inadequate the heating and poor the food — and how tolerant the English were of discomfort. I recall breakfast at Hertford College, Oxford, in an imposing hall with a large broken window — apparently broken for some time — and the dons huddled sheeplike in overcoats; and in a freezing, squalid bar in the basement of the college a don in an overcoat expressing relief at being home after a year teaching in Virginia, which he had found terrifying because of America’s high crime rate, though he had not been touched by it. I remember being a guest of Brasenose College — Oxford’s wealthiest — and being envied because I had been invited to stay in the master’s guest quarters, only to find that stepping into the guest quarters was like stepping into a Surrealist painting, because the floor sloped in one direction and the two narrow beds in two other directions. I recall the English (now American) economist Ronald Coase telling me that until he visited the United States he did not know it was possible to be warm.

As I said in MR’s comments, to me, the situation may not have improved that much; as an undergrad I went from Clark University to the University of East Anglia for a semester and was shocked at the condition of the latter, and of England in general. Notice too this:

There is virtually no discussion of how people, their incomes halved, might be expected to employ the vastly greater leisure that the authors want them to have. Besides the sentence I quoted about the musician, sculptor, teacher and scientist — and the description is of their work, not of their leisure activities — there is a suggestion that a good leisure activity is letting one’s mind wander “freely and aimlessly,” and a list of three recreations — “playing football in the park, making and decorating one’s own furniture, strumming the guitar with friends” — offered to refute any contention that the authors’ conception of leisure is “narrowly highbrow.”

I like my work, most of the time, and would probably be bored being idle. We might be better off if we tried to do things we like, and, if we can’t, we should at least try to like the things that we do.

* “Low Transfer of Learning: The Glass Is Half Full,” which ends with this: “Instead of bemoaning American workers’ mediocre literacy and numeracy, we should be grateful that millions of Americans who learn little in school still manage to learn useful trades on the job. Seriously.”

The power of story: Jane Austen / William Deresiewicz edition

August 22, 2012 By in Links Tags: , , Leave a comment

“People’s stories are the most personal thing they have, and paying attention to those stories is just about the most important thing you can do for them.”

—William Deresiewicz, A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter

Links: Teen sex attitudes, writing lessons, sentence origins, math, cities, tea, languages, and more

August 15, 2012 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

* Parents Just Don’t Understand: A sociologist says American moms and dads are in denial about their kids’ sexual lives. See also: “ Sex? Not my kid! A new book explores parental delusions about their teens’ sexuality.” Notice this: “[S]exual threats are seen [by parents] as ever present — from someone else’s sex-crazed kid, someone else’s corruptive parental influence, someone else’s perversion. Rarely do parents attribute the risk to their own child’s sexual desire or agency. Surprise, surprise.”

* The Most Important Writing Lesson I Ever Learned; unfortunately, I think most academics either never learn or forget this:

When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, your mind becomes powerfully concentrated. You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer, must give him something worthy of his gift to you.

* Where do sentences come from?

* “[A]lgebra isn’t harder than other subjects, it’s more objective. Therefore, it tends to make educational fraud more visible. People rarely fail algebra and succeed in other subjects; they fail in all subjects and algebra is the only one where it can’t be ignored any longer.”

* How communities are banding together to create high-speed, affordable broadband access.

* Allen Wyler’s Dead Ringer unintentionally shows the importance of creative writing classes. The novel starts: “A dark, ill-formed premonition punched Lucas McRae in the guy so hard it stole his breath.” But premonitions don’t punch people in the gut—other people do. “A second later it vanished, leaving only a lingering vague sense of foreboding.” We don’t need “lingering” and “vague” one word will do, and the phrase itself is a cliche anyway. This is the sort of stuff college sophomores discuss in “Introduction to Writing the Novel.”

* Survival Lessons From an Ancient Failed City:

Today’s sprawling cities expanded in a period of mild weather too, with no anticipation that seas might rise or energy resources could be depleted. Angkor and modern cities resemble one another in that they were built to survive in only the most benign weather regimes. The roads, sewers and the like of the modern suburb are based on an assumption of mild weather and cheap energy. Recent events like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and subsequent Midwestern intense storms show how poorly modern infrastructure performs in extreme weather.

* Everyone loves smut, says Patty Marks of Ellora’s Cave, who turned kinky fiction into millions before E.L. James.

* How to start an online tea business. My best guess: don’t.

* Bryan Caplan: “To understand why Americans don’t learn foreign languages, simply reverse this reasoning. We don’t learn foreign languages because foreign languages rarely helps us get good jobs, meet interesting people, or enjoy culture.” I approve of learning foreign languages and admire people who do, but I doubt the typically American derives much benefit because the typical American has to travel too far to make use of the foreign language. For most people, learning programming languages is probably far more useful in terms of both job skills and “learning how to think.” This view is close to David Henderson’s point: “Thoughts on Second Language.” Here is a counterpoint. It is possible that foreign languages would be much more useful from a very young age, but then the same could be said of Python. It’s possible that I haven’t seen foreign language benefits in my life because I haven’t learned enough of a foreign language to receive real benefits.

* You’ll never be Chinese.

Links: The time for novels, technology in universities, programming and writing, academia, and more

July 29, 2012 By in Links Tags: , , , Leave a comment

* Zoe Williams: No time for novels – should we ditch fiction in times of crisis? When our daily news is apocalyptic, it’s irresponsible to read made-up stories. It’s time to start reading the serious stuff instead. Fortunately, people have been castigating fiction for as long as there has been fiction in any meaningful sense of the word.

* University of Virginia President Teresa “Sullivan has an ambitious plan to retool introductory courses as ‘hybrids,’ replacing much of the human labor with technology and freeing professors to focus on higher-level classes. Her initiative would go further than most elite universities have dared in replacing human instructors with software.” Having both listened to my students talk about what intro-level courses are like at the University of Arizona and having experienced the distinctly not useful aspects of many of the intro-level courses at Clark University, I can’t see a huge problem with trying these ideas: at the moment, such courses appear to largely be a way of collecting tuition, rather than imparting real knowledge. Many of my students say intro math and science courses at the U of A are so bad that the students prefer taking them at community colleges, if possible, and the intro humanities courses are often “taught” in lecture halls with hundreds or more than a thousand students nominally taking them at once.

(Hat tip Marginal Revolution.)

* “The Frisson of Friction: An undergraduate tries a challenging introductory programming course.” I find this especially poignant, given what I do: “Last I checked, there are just over 100 users of my [Chrome] extension. This is far fewer than the number of people using the most popular extension (AdBlock, with 1,626,216 users at that point), but also far more than the number of people who usually read my papers (my TF, 1).”

* Margaret Atwood answers questions on Reddit.

* On Leaving Academia. Notice too the discussion on Hacker News, including perverse publication incentives.

* Sexual harassment is not like employee theft. Notice this: “There’s a trade-off between preventing unwanted advances and preventing wanted advances – and there’s no reason to choose a corner solution. Treating harassment complaints as seriously as employee theft complaints is simply bad for business. You might make a few puritan workers happy, but what about everybody else?”

I found this, from Tim Parks’s “Does Money Make Us Write Better?“, interesting:

When they are starting out writers rarely make anything at all for what they do. I wrote seven novels over a period of six years before one was accepted for publication. Rejected by some twenty publishers that seventh eventually earned me an advance of £1,000 for world rights. Evidently, I wasn’t working for money. What then? Pleasure? I don’t think so; I remember I was on the point of giving up when that book was accepted. I’d had enough. However much I enjoyed trying to get the world into words, the rejections were disheartening; and the writing habit was keeping me from a “proper” career elsewhere.

John Barth and William Goldman almost quit too. How many others have? I don’t want to be one of them. And I bet I can make more than £1,000, though I don’t know how long ago Parks began writing: adjusted for inflation, £1,000 might be a lot of money.

* Charter schools raise educational standards for vulnerable children.

Links: Publishing and publishers, bondage and love, the Sony RX100, the University of Washington, and more

July 13, 2012 By in Links Leave a comment

* Penelope Trunk: How I got a big advance from a big publisher and self-published anyway, which complements Philip Greenspun’s The book behind the book behind the book…. Notice this, from Greenspun: “Meanwhile, back on Earth: Dead trees publishers (1) don’t surf the Internet, (2) don’t read books, (3) don’t understand the value of a high Internet profile.” Of those, I think number three is less true, but while publishers understand this, they haven’t realized that writers are probably going to get most of the value from high Internet profiles. Notice what Trunk says: “So I sold my book to a mainstream publisher and they sucked. I am going to go into extreme detail about how much they sucked, so I’m not going to tell you the name of the publisher because I got a lot of money from them.”

* I know which one I’d choose, from today’s edition of highly improbable studies: “Facebook Sharing Comparable To Enjoyment From Sex, Food.”

* How Bondage Solves the Problem of Modern Love, on 50 Shades of Grey.

* A Tiny Camera to Rival the Pros: The Sony RX100.

* Class, not race, really divides America today—a point I’ve been making for a while.

* The camera you have with you; notice this:

Almost nothing I’ve shot since 2010 is usable.

The Rebel photos look decent. The 5D Mark II photos look great. But photos from the iPhone 4, and even from the 4S, don’t hold up. They look fine on a 3.5-inch screen, but they look terrible on my big desktop monitor and abysmal on the Retina MacBook Pro.

* United States: The Inevitable Empire. I would add a question mark to the end.

* Why do condos even exist? An important question I’d never considered as such.

* A Northwest Pipeline to Silicon Valley: The role of the University of Washington in Seattle tech.

Literature and its language:

June 26, 2012 By in Links, Writing Leave a comment

“It has always seemed to me that literature is, in one way or another in different cases, anomalous or strange in its use of language. This is a distinguishing feature of literature: the weird way in which language is used in it.”

—J. Hillis Miler, from The J. Hillis Miller Reader.

I wonder if I’m using language strangely enough in my own work, and what I’m doing to make literature separate from criticism (or criticism into literature, which also, to my mind, requires the use of language as more than mere description in the same way that humans are more than just collections of cells).

Links: Funny words, climate change, things the U.S. does right, writers, self-publishing, Seattle’s Escala condo building as the site of depravity, and ovulation’s effect on mate choice

May 18, 2012 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* I got into an argument with a friend about whether “mollusk” is an inherently funny word. I argued yes. Discuss.

* Game over for the climate, which is one of those important articles you won’t read.

* “As an outsider I hear plenty of what America does wrong, I want to hear what they do right.”

* I need this.

* “The Writer in the Family:” “So there I stood at the front of my granddaughter Jessica’s fourth-grade classroom, still as a glazed dog, while Jessie introduced me to her classmates, to whom I was about to speak. ‘This is my grandfather, Boppo,’ she said, invoking my grandpaternal nickname. ‘He lives in the basement and does nothing.'”

* Why Are Teen Moms Poor? Surprising new research shows it’s not because they have babies. They have babies because they’re poor.

* Why self publishing, even if its title is “I May Be Mad I May Be Blind;” see also this post. Both are from literary agent Betsy Lerner.

* ‘Game Of Thrones’ Running Out Of Unkempt Old Men To Cast.

* The Writer in the Family: “If the sad truth be known, writers, being the misfits we are, probably ought not to belong to families in the first place. We simply are too self-interested, though we may excuse the flaw by calling it “focused.” As artists, writers hardly are alone in this failing.” The problem, however, is that families provide a lot of material, and to not have at least one is to deny one’s self a rich vein of material, and possibly several rich veins, which could be turned into a novel, or perhaps several novels, and a poem.

* A lot of what’s wrong with public schools can be surmised from “How did this parent end up in jail? Kelley Williams-Bolar just wanted her kids to go to a safer school — then her story took an unexpected turn.”

* Seattle is famous (?): Seattle’s Escala Condo Building Set Steamy Scenes for “Fifty Shades of Grey”

* Perception of American Women As Masculine Is Going Mainstream.

* “Ovulation Leads Women to Perceive Sexy Cads as Good Dads:”

Why do some women pursue relationships with men who are attractive, dominant, and charming but who do not want to be in relationships—the prototypical sexy cad? Previous research shows that women have an increased desire for such men when they are ovulating, but it is unclear why ovulating women would think it is wise to pursue men who may be unfaithful and could desert them. Using both college-age and community-based samples, in 3 studies we show that ovulating women perceive charismatic and physically attractive men, but not reliable and nice men, as more committed partners and more devoted future fathers. Ovulating women perceive that sexy cads would be good fathers to their own children but not to the children of other women.

* Good news: The End of Soda?

Links: Funny words, climate change, things the U.S. does right, writers, self-publishing, Seattle's Escala condo building as the site of depravity, and ovulation's effect on mate choice

May 18, 2012 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* I got into an argument with a friend about whether “mollusk” is an inherently funny word. I argued yes. Discuss.

* Game over for the climate, which is one of those important articles you won’t read.

* “As an outsider I hear plenty of what America does wrong, I want to hear what they do right.”

* I need this.

* “The Writer in the Family:” “So there I stood at the front of my granddaughter Jessica’s fourth-grade classroom, still as a glazed dog, while Jessie introduced me to her classmates, to whom I was about to speak. ‘This is my grandfather, Boppo,’ she said, invoking my grandpaternal nickname. ‘He lives in the basement and does nothing.'”

* Why Are Teen Moms Poor? Surprising new research shows it’s not because they have babies. They have babies because they’re poor.

* Why self publishing, even if its title is “I May Be Mad I May Be Blind;” see also this post. Both are from literary agent Betsy Lerner.

* ‘Game Of Thrones’ Running Out Of Unkempt Old Men To Cast.

* The Writer in the Family: “If the sad truth be known, writers, being the misfits we are, probably ought not to belong to families in the first place. We simply are too self-interested, though we may excuse the flaw by calling it “focused.” As artists, writers hardly are alone in this failing.” The problem, however, is that families provide a lot of material, and to not have at least one is to deny one’s self a rich vein of material, and possibly several rich veins, which could be turned into a novel, or perhaps several novels, and a poem.

* A lot of what’s wrong with public schools can be surmised from “How did this parent end up in jail? Kelley Williams-Bolar just wanted her kids to go to a safer school — then her story took an unexpected turn.”

* Seattle is famous (?): Seattle’s Escala Condo Building Set Steamy Scenes for “Fifty Shades of Grey”

* Perception of American Women As Masculine Is Going Mainstream.

* “Ovulation Leads Women to Perceive Sexy Cads as Good Dads:”

Why do some women pursue relationships with men who are attractive, dominant, and charming but who do not want to be in relationships—the prototypical sexy cad? Previous research shows that women have an increased desire for such men when they are ovulating, but it is unclear why ovulating women would think it is wise to pursue men who may be unfaithful and could desert them. Using both college-age and community-based samples, in 3 studies we show that ovulating women perceive charismatic and physically attractive men, but not reliable and nice men, as more committed partners and more devoted future fathers. Ovulating women perceive that sexy cads would be good fathers to their own children but not to the children of other women.

* Good news: The End of Soda?