Category Archives: Links

Links: Theory of mind and the novel, libraries, Patagonia, books versus natural resources, bisexual women in narrative, Seattle, and more

March 28, 2012 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Theory of Mind and The Importance of the Novel.

* Privatized libraries are working surprisingly well so far.

* Patagonia makes gear for demanding climbers and itinerant surfers. How’d it catch on with the rest of us? Short answer: people like me. Longer answer: see article.

* “Dear Science Fiction Writers: Stop Being So Pessimistic!: Neal Stephenson created the Hieroglyph Project to convince sci-fi writers to stop worrying and learn to love the future.”

* Pass the Books. Hold the Oil.

* Why Bisexual Women are TV’s Hot New Thing. (Maybe.)

* Apparently, you can’t be really French and Jewish.

* The Secret to Seattle’s Booming Downtown. See also Edward Glaeser’s The Triumph of the City.

* Let’s hope the MPAA ratings board dies; sample: “[. . .] while the MPAA board pretends to be a source of neutral and non-ideological advice to parents, it all too often reveals itself to be a velvet-glove censorship agency, seemingly devoted to reactionary and defensive cultural standards.”

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and what we’re really arguing about

March 25, 2012 By in Culture, ideas, Links Tags: , , , , , 18 Comments

There’s a fascinating moment in The Righteous Mind where Jonathan Haidt makes a point similar to one I wrote about earlier:

If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.

Compare this to my December 2010 post “What people want and what they are: religious edition:”

. . . as Julian Sanchez puts it, “a lot of our current politics has less to do with actual policy disagreements than with resolving status anxieties.” I think his overall post is right, but I suspect that people pick their preferred policies (beyond patriotism, which is his example) to signal what they’re really like or want people to believe they’re really like.

Take my favorite example, gun control: the pro-gun types want other to think of them as capable, fierce, tough, and independent. And who isn’t in favor of those things? The anti-gun types want others to think of them as community-oriented, valuing health and welfare, and caring. And who isn’t in favor of those things?

You could extend this to other fields too (tax cuts, health care, whatever the issue du jour is), and they don’t always map to a neat left/right axis. Anyone can have an opinion that signals values on complex political topics in a way they can’t about, say, theoretical physics, mostly because complex political topics often don’t have correct answers. So they can be easily used to signal values that are often divorced from whatever real conditions on the ground look like. Almost no one uses their opinions on vector calculus to signify what they most believe.

Haidt doesn’t use the word “signal,” but his idea of using moral claims to “justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to” is pretty close. This also describes why, over the past ten years, I’ve become a person much less invested in political, moral, or (many kinds of) intellectual arguments: most of those arguments aren’t really about their content, but about something else, below the surface, that doesn’t always bob up to the surface. Here’s Paul Graham on that idea in “What You Can’t Say:”

Most struggles, whatever they’re really about, will be cast as struggles between competing ideas. The English Reformation was at bottom a struggle for wealth and power, but it ended up being cast as a struggle to preserve the souls of Englishmen from the corrupting influence of Rome. It’s easier to get people to fight for an idea. And whichever side wins, their ideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if God wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the victor.

Most people seem to equate “winning” an argument in a lawyerly fashion with being intellectually right. This might be why lawyers have some of the reputation they do: they get paid primarily to construct arguments that may be specious, but that have to be convincing.

I also like to think that realizing how moral arguments really work makes me a better teacher: rather than fighting with students who bring up moral arguments, I try to ask them where their arguments come from and how they come to believe what they believe. In other words, I try to work at a higher level of abstraction—which is what Haidt is doing in The Righteous Mind.

One other point about Haidt: if you’re frustrated by “how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you,” imagine how you must act to them.

March links: Dissertation changes, jazz, security theater, publishing, and the LSAT

March 20, 2012 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Dissing the Dissertation: MLA considers radical changes in the dissertation. This seems obvious, necessary, long overdue, and welcome.

* The Social Conservative Subterranean Fantasy World Is Exposed, and It’s Frightening; notice this: “Comedians may, in fact, be even bigger beneficiaries than Democratic politicians who are watching a stampede of women voters into their welcoming “we don’t hate you because you’re sexually active” arms.”

* On Jazz; “Listening to Jazz is like simultaneously hearing all the footsteps on the sidewalk of a city. . .”

* The real reason health insurers won’t cover people with pre-existing conditions.

* The Unwelcome Mat, on security Theater and how the U.S.’s idiotic stance border is hurting itself.

* With This Machine, You Can Print Your Own Books at the Local Bookstore; translation: self-publishing is going to grow as this kind of machine spreads.

* Who cares if book publishers are colluding with Apple to raise e-book prices?; as Matt says elsewhere, “the publishing industry is facing intense competition and disruptive change no matter what these guys do, and the DOJ may as well leave them alone.”

* A comment from my friend, “Laila:” “It seems somehow appropriate that your follower was a prostitute.” Oh?

* Fewer people are taking the LSAT—and, if they’re smart, fewer will go to law school.

Links: Freshman composition, MPAA idiocy, peer-review problems in medicine, photography and / in love, The Rent is Too Damn High (the book)

February 29, 2012 By in Links Tags: , , , , , 5 Comments

Q Tonic Water* Anna sent this to me and suggested that I could use it; I replied that I “Definitely [could]. It’s startlingly, amazingly accurate, as if one had painted targets on deer, making them easier to hunt, commando style, with a compound bow and a rag tied around one’s head.”

* Further MPAA idiocy: “Teenagers will be barred from watching a documentary about what teenagers actually say and do to one another.”

* Israel nixes solar energy for Palestinians.

* Megan McArdle notes that A lot of residents make up peer-reviewed research papers. She says, “The higher the stakes, the greater the incentives to cheat. Still, these sorts of errors are many multiples of the percentage I would have expected, even with the most generous interpretation of how the mistakes were made.”

I would actually draw a different conclusion: random, bureaucratically-imposed hoops on professions lead to the fulfillment of those hoops via any means necessary. A lot of residencies want or require their residents to have a “research project” because having residents do “research projects” looks good for the residency. A lot of residents are sick of school, tired all the time, and just want to go out and get a real job. The need for a random community doc to have done a “research project” in grad school is, at best, unclear.

If you impose hoops that are very different than the market tests you face post-hoop, don’t be surprised if people try to circumvent the hoop.

* Photography: All My Exes Live in Print (SFW), about Mark Helfrich’s book Naked Pictures of My Ex-Girlfriends.

* What an awesome office! Uncomfortable chairs, though.

* Good legal news: Fifth Amendment Right Against Self Incrimination Protects Against Being Forced to Decrypt Hard Drive Contents.

* “Shame Is Not the Solution” for improving teachers. On the other hand, I suspect some of the districts who want to make teaching evaluations and test scores public are doing so out of desperation, or because they can’t build the kind of sophisticated evaluation systems Gates mentions. (For another discussion of this issue, see LA Times Ranks Teachers from Marginal Revolution.)

* Interested in style? See Chic Little Devil.

* Twilight of the Lecture: The trend toward “active learning” may overthrow the style of teaching that has ruled universities for 600 years. I’ve independently realized some, though not all, of these ideas.

* Apple didn’t revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did.

* The Rent Is Too Damn High Now Available for Preorder.

* One of my students mentioned “Santorum” (link slightly NSFW; no pictures, fortunately, and see also here) in office hours, causing me to laugh uncontrollably until he mentioned that he meant the politician, not the substance; in the context, it was ambiguous.

Links: The death of safe sex?, hypocrites in many forms, law school, Nikon, birth rates and female conscientiousness, liberal arts, and more

February 21, 2012 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

* “The Death of Safe Sex“? (The question mark is mine).

* Law schools increasingly look like scams; see here for more.

* The Cowboy and the Welfare State, concerning “an area of Minnesota where people inveigh against the welfare state, despite being inextricably tied to it.” Filed under: hypocrisy.

* The War on Cameras, which actually concerns whether police are accountable to the public or to no one, a la The Wire.

* My Last Day: Le Bernardin’s Pastry Chef Reflects on 8 Long Years.

* How Nikon is killing camera repair.

* For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage. This quote from the article: “Ms. Strader said her boyfriend was so dependent that she had to buy his cigarettes. Marrying him never entered her mind” reminds me of Bryan Caplan’s post “Poverty, Conscientiousness, and Broken Families,” where he says, “even when [the authors] are talking about men, low female conscientiousness is implicit. After all, conscientious women wouldn’t associate with habitually unemployed men in the first place – not to mention alcoholics, addicts, or criminals.”

* When to be meek.

* Skills and the liberal arts.

* The Real Defense Budget.

* James Fallows on tricks of the interview trade. I want to find an excerpt but the piece has too many to choose one.

* Mag Lights are still made in the USA.

* “A school suspended a teacher for using the racial epithet in an educational context. Now he’s suing his district. Why is this considered hate speech?” The school’s reaction here is inane; you can’t teach books like Huck Finn without using the word “nigger” (for that matter, it would be hard to discuss, say, the lyrics of Jay-Z—or community cohesion and The Wire—without using it). Racially derogatory terms can’t be magically excised from the language, and to pretend they don’t exist is to ignore a vital avenue of discussion.

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.

Links: Adultery, the age of nonfiction, education, Charles Murray, A Wrinkle in Time, Chipolte, and more

February 13, 2012 By in Links Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

* “46 Women Who Were Not My Wife: A true story of adultery, with more honest lessons you can learn than from the Tiger Woods ‘infidelity’ statement.”

* The Emerging Wisdom Revolution

* Bizarre search query of the week: “dick tattoo down your leg”. Another weird one: “lingwe vidio porno yourn sex”. Does “lingwe” here refer to the only Lingwë I know?

* The Digital Back Catalogue, which I have noticed but never quite articulated in this fashion: “Each day—each hour, even—all previous “newsy” items become obsolete and the demand for new newsy items is robust. But the existing stock of well-hewn blocks of substantial prose is already very large and it no longer depreciates the way it did in print.” Sites like Give Me Something to Read, Longform.org, and even The Atlantic exploit the tendency for substantial nonfiction to endure beyond the 24-hour news cycle.

* Envisioning a Post-Campus America; having now seen the underside (or overside?) of Campus America, the upsides of such a move appear to outweigh the downsides. One possibility: campus will remain thanks to mating sorting. Maybe, but I think there are cheaper ways to accomplish the same thing, like living in cool cities or neighborhoods. Capitol Hill in Seattle, for instance.

* Whence comes this sudden wave of economic determinism? Tyler Cowen on the new response to Charles Murray’s book The State of White America, including this: “I’m struck by how many people are offering negative comment on the new Murray book who have not read it, or who do not appear to have read it.”

* ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ Turns 50: Meg Murry Made Katniss Everdeen Possible. The difference: Madeline L’Engle was a good writer, and Suzanne Collins isn’t. Among people who’ve expressed admiration for The Hunger Games, I’ve always offered this: send me a couple of sentences in the novel that you really admire. So far none have.

* Chipotle Is Apple: The burrito chain is revolutionizing food: Why doesn’t it get more respect? Good question: I actually eat at Chipotle somewhat regularly, and its food is pretty tasty and reasonably good for you, at least by the standards of fast food, especially if you get a “bowl” instead of a “burrito.”

* Car Dealers Wince at a Site to End Sales Haggling; translation: use Truecar.com next time you want to buy a car. Every lawsuit and investigation instigated by carmakers against the upstart gives the upstart legitimacy in the eyes of the market.

* Unsurprising hypocrisy: “Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It.” As a kid, I saw a Mad Magazine cartoon depicting a guy decrying government and its incompetence in one panel, with the second one showing his unhappiness at his social security check being late.

* A Western Diet High in Sugars and Fat Could Contribute to ADHD.

* Building taller should be much, much easier.

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.

Mid-February Links: Twitter, parking, protest and intellectualism, A Wrinkle in Time

February 5, 2012 By in Links Tags: , , , Leave a comment

* I started a Twitter account that basically doubles as an RSS feed. So if you prefer to be updated about new posts via Twitter, you’ve now got an easy way to do it.

* A Jew in the Northwest: Exile, ethnicity, and the search for the perfect futon. I’m from Seattle, and my experience doesn’t match Deresiewicz’s. Malamud’s A New Life seemed like ancient history to me. I wonder if I have less focus on ethnicity than seemingly every other writer in the universe.

* “How to Fight The Man:”

For generations people have been told: Think for yourself; come up with your own independent worldview. Unless your name is Nietzsche, that’s probably a bad idea. Very few people have the genius or time to come up with a comprehensive and rigorous worldview.

If you go out there armed only with your own observations and sentiments, you will surely find yourself on very weak ground. You’ll lack the arguments, convictions and the coherent view of reality that you’ll need when challenged by a self-confident opposition. This is more or less what happened to Jefferson Bethke. [. . .]

Most professors would like their students to be more rebellious and argumentative. But rebellion without a rigorous alternative vision is just a feeble spasm.

The flipside of the “Concentrate on the moment. Feel, don’t think. Trust your instincts” temperament is a lack of knowledge that leads to ineffectiveness. Balancing rigor and independence is tough.

* The French parenting style; one lesson might be to worry way less, since you can’t control your child’s outcome to nearly the extent you want to imagine you can. See further Bryan Caplan, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.

* ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ and Its Sci-Fi Heroine.

* This is a sign of progress, even if it isn’t pitched as such.

Links: William Gibson, publishing (self and legacy), teaching, boring playgrounds

February 2, 2012 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* William Gibson eloquently describes why I write a blog, from Distrust That Particular Flavor:

In writing speeches, curiously, one sometimes finds out what one thinks, at that moment, about something. The world at large, say. Or futurity. Or the impossibility of absolutely grasping either. Generally they make me even more uncomfortable to write than articles, but later, back in the place of writing fiction, I often discover that I have been trying to tell myself something.

In writing almost anything, “one sometimes finds out what one thinks,” especially if the readers of that writing pose interesting, informed questions. Which I often think about, even when I don’t respond directly. Note that I often respond directly, too.

* Speaking of blogs, I updated the “About” page of this one, for the first time in years.

* How Thor Power Hammered Publishing, which I didn’t know. Incidentally, this may also explain some of the shift towards ebooks, since publishers don’t like paper inventory.

* “My US Border Nightmare;” would you want to return to a country after this?

* Scholars Seek Better Ways to Track Impact Online.

* Self-Publishing Your Own Book is the New Business Card.

* Barnes & Noble and the Collapse of the Publishing Ecosystem; I am not convinced:

Macmillan CEO John Sargent tries to persuade Bosman that the chain goes all the way to the writers. “Anybody who is an author, a publisher, or makes their living from distributing intellectual property in book form is badly hurt,” he said, “if Barnes & Noble does not prosper.”

What about all those writers who aren’t involved in legacy publishing and can’t get their books in stores? Besides, I don’t think readers care about who “makes their living from distributing intellectual property;” they care about whether a book is any good.

* Con’d: Will Amazon Kill Publishing? And, if so, will anyone not being employed by a publisher mourn?

* Con’d, part 3: “Writers are essential. Readers are essential. Publishers are not.”

* The Great Divorce, on Charles C. Mann’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, which sounds like a book better read about than read. See also Tyler Cowen’s take.

* Teaching with authenticity and authority, which I try to do.

* Great idea: “Legislation in Florida would allow parents to vote to restructure a public school into a private or charter model.”

* Make playgrounds safe but boring and kids won’t use them. When I was a kid, I loved dodgeball, which is apparently also out of style.