Category Archives: Links

Where Good Ideas Come From – Steven Berlin Johnson's new book

September 25, 2010 By in ideas, Links, Tools Tags: , , , , 3 Comments

I already pre-ordered Steven Berlin Johnson’s new book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, but if I hadn’t, this video would have convinced me to:

Sounds like an excellent complement to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, since both are about structuring lives and minds are ideas and their implementation. This is an obvious topic of interest to novelists and academics, since both require a) lots of ideas and b) even more implementation of those ideas.

One thing I’ll be watching for closely in the book: around minute 3:30, the video says that the Internet isn’t going to make us more distracted in a bad way—it will make us more interconnected so that hunches and combine into ideas faster. That implies Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows is mostly wrong, which is an argument I’m skeptical about: I suspect that we need a combination of quiet, contemplative space of the sort the Internet is driving out along with the combination of ideas that originate from various sources. If one side becomes too lopsided, the creativity equation fails.

To be sure, it’s unwise to judge a book before reading it, and I want to see how the debate plays out.

Regular readers probably already know Johnson through my repeated references to his essay Tool for Thought, which is about Devonthink Pro and changed the way I work. I regularly tell my better students as well as friends to read this essay and use DTP in the way Johnson describes if they’re at all interested in ideas and writing.

September links: How to do literary criticism, yet another piece on changing literary standards, and ch-ch-changes with publishing and reading

September 7, 2010 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* The Literary Critic as Humanist: Frank Kermode, 1919-2010, exemplified an ideal that is dying.

* Essential reading: The New Social Novel.

* John Grisham: “Boxers, Briefs and Books,” which is about how hard and rewarding writing is, even when it doesn’t necessarily look it.

* Of Two Minds About Books, from the New York Times.

* The great book glut of 2010. This is a great time to be a reader, especially if you’re buying used from Abe Books, Amazon, or an equivalent, for reasons described here:

Lastly there are those riding the glut by listing 100s of thousands of cheap books and making money even on books listed at one penny (it’s the postage–they like light books). These are mainly ISBN ( I Sell By Numbers) sellers who catalogue with a barcode reader and buy books by the pallet at breathtakingly low prices. These are held in vast warehouses ( the ‘fulfillment’ sheds are near Luton.) A long way from the rambling old second hand bookshop.

* A brilliant idea for New Yorkers (and, hopefully, the rest of us): RentEnforcer. You say where you live, how much you pay, and your apartment size, then find out if what you’re paying is similar to or different from what others are paying.

* How Censoring Craigslist Helps Pimps, Child Traffickers and Other Abusive Scumbags.

* The Washington Post exploits “owning a substantial share of the public debate” by pushing its own financial interests. I hadn’t actually realized this is true.

* How did I end up living in a state as crazy as Arizona?

* This post on the changes in reading because of the physical experience that reading on a Kindle entails basically describes me.

* Don’t Quit!: “Very, very few novelists get to stay home writing all day.”

* There’s another of these posts about how the publishing industry is doomed or at least changing—but, this one, by Paul Carr, is not mindlessly “rah-rah ebooks.”

A quote from Seth Godin: “The timeframe for the launch of books has gone from silly to unrealistic. Today, even though all other media has accelerated rapidly, books still take a year or more [to be published].” But the amount of time from acceptance to bookstores isn’t really about the technology: it’s about marketing, finding space on bookstore shelves, etc.

At some point between now and 25 years from now I don’t doubt that publishers will have changed, perhaps to the point of redundancy. But this just isn’t happening that fast.

This one from the Carr: “And so yes, Seth, you’re right: you definitely should consider what the shelf-life of your idea is. And if you find it’s so short that it’ll be redundant in a few weeks, let alone a few months, then you shouldn’t – mustn’t – wait!” Yeah—and if your idea is so insubstantial that a few weeks might obviate its necessity or importance, perhaps that idea is so trivial as to be unimportant. That’s my basic problem with Twitter.

The article continues:

For all of the reasons above, there are really only two types of person for whom it makes a jot of sense to tear up their book deal and abandon the professionalism, billion-dollar print market, and immeasurable cachet of traditional publishing. The first is highly skilled self-promoter likes Godin who have successfully identified their entire (niche) audience and who know they will only ever sell a certain number of copies of their books to that same audience. […]

The second type of person is more tragic: authors who, for whatever reason, fear they’re about to be dumped by their publisher (or at best paid a tiny advance for their next book) and who want to save face by using innovation as an excuse.

And here’s both the problem and the solution at the moment, at least from the perspective of a novelist: “The catch-all argument is that, thanks to today’s technology, publishers are redundant: anyone can write, publish and market an ebook.” Anyone can write, publish, and market an ebook, but no one is doing any kind of quality control on those books. I’ve been sent a variety of self-published books, and one thing stands out: they were universally awful. Most of them weren’t even laid out well, visually. That’s why, as Carr points out, publishers aren’t going anywhere for the time being.

* Should you self-publish? See above. Short answer: only if you already have an obvious readership.

August 2010 Links: Bookshelves, query letters, and more

August 23, 2010 By in Links 4 Comments

* Good advice from Jaron Lanier: how to be on the Internet.

* Exactly the sort of thing that appeals to me: bookshelf porn (note: this link is entirely safe for work, unless you have an office that bans employees from looking at books).

* I want to read this book too, based solely on the query letter.

* The Golden State’s War on Itself: How politicians turned the California Dream into a nightmare.

* Awesome: In German Suburb, Life Goes On Without Cars.

* The inevitable envy among writers.

* Salinger’s toilet up for auction — seriously?. Note that the appendage “seriously?” is from Carolyn Kellogg, although she expresses my sentiments as well.

* I love Slate’s “Bogus Trend Stories of the Week” feature, in which they discuss stories based on questionable or phony numbers, anecdote, moral panic, hysteria, fear mongering, and the like. The best part: cited numbers or statistics often contradict the overall thrust of the stories themselves. Sex often plays a role, as it does in this week’s topic: Child pornography, sextortion, and Chinese hymenoplasties. Samples:

Presented with convincing data, I’m prepared to believe that child porn is growing. But if a Department of Justice report states that the number of offenders is unknown and the quantity of images and videos of child pornography being traded is also unknown, how can anybody say that the distribution of child porn is on the rise?

* Measuring colleges for what they do instead of who they enroll: finally.

* The bizarre place that is Russia:

For the disastrous Russian heat wave has exposed a key failing of Russian society: The flow of information has stopped. There is not a single newspaper that even strives to be national in its coverage. The television is not only controlled by the Kremlin; it is made by the Kremlin for the Kremlin, and it is entirely unsuited to gathering or conveying actual information. Even the Russian blogosphere is bizarrely fragmented: Researchers who “mapped” it discovered that, unlike any other blogosphere in the world, it consists of many non-overlapping circles. People in different walks of life, different professions, and different parts of the country simply do not talk to one another. The same is true of political institutions: Since the Russian government effectively abolished representative democracy, canceling direct elections, there is no reason—and no real mechanism—for Moscow politicians to know what is going on in the vast country. Nor do governors need concern themselves with the lives and the disasters in their regions—they, too, are no longer elected but are appointed by the Kremlin.

Some Americans suffer from information overload; Russians suffer from the opposite.

Institutional hypocrisy enabled by wealth, part 2, gambling edition

July 28, 2010 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

My comment from July 18 regarding Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition:

[…] hypocrisy regarding victimless crimes is a luxury good. It can be indulged when a society has sufficient wealth that it can afford to be hypocritical, signaling that its members want to be perceived as virtuous even when many of them as individuals would prefer to indulge in alcohol, other drugs, or sex-for-money.

Today’s New York Times:

With pressure mounting on the federal government to find new revenues, Congress is considering legalizing, and taxing, an activity it banned just four years ago: Internet gambling.

Lesson: moralizing is a vice enabled by excess wealth. Now that our societal wealth is not quite so vast, maybe we’ll consider lowering the prison population; as the Economist wrote, America locks up too many people, some for acts that should not even be criminal.

Releasing some of them would be morally justified, as the Economist makes clear, and probably economically rational. This assumes such people are not Zero marginal product workers, as Tyler Cowen discusses at the link. Such an assumption might be too large to be sustained; I can’t evaluate the arguments about zero marginal product workers very well.

The dangers of over-reliance on evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, courtesy of Ernest Gellner and Henry Farrell

July 28, 2010 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Primitive man has lived twice: once in and for himself, and the second time for us, in our reconstruction. Inconclusive evidence may oblige him to live such a double life forever. Ever since the principles of our own social order have become a matter of sustained debate, there has been a persistent tendency to invoke the First Man to settle our disputes for us. His vote in the next general election is eagerly solicited. It is not entirely clear why Early Man should possess such authority over our choices.

That’s from Henry Gellner’s Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History. Today, we wouldn’t call the primitive man the primitive man because “primitive” it prejudicial and “people” usually used instead of “man” because it explicitly includes all humans. We would instead call “primitive man” the “pre-agrarian world” or “evolutionary times” and then continue from there. But the point Gellner is making about our habitual “reconstruction” of what that looked like, in large part for the prejudices of the present, is well-taken and worth remembering in the light of books like Sex at Dawn, The Mating Mind, or the entire oeuvre of evolutionary biology and psychology, which have undergone tremendous revision over the past three decades and will no doubt continue to undergo tremendous revision under the next three and beyond.

How we reconstruct that time and “invoke the First Man” should be remembered as a reconstruction and not as the last word; he shouldn’t necessarily “possess such authority over our choices” today, because what was good for people living before agriculture or before the Industrial Revolution may not be good for us now.

It helps to understand the kinds of things that influence us, but we need to be wary of cherry picking evidence to support whatever kinds of social views we already hold.

I’m reading Gellner thanks to Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber.

In Praise of William Deresiewicz

June 30, 2010 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , 4 Comments

I’ve read three long, fascinating essays by English professor William Deresiewicz over the last two days: Solitude and Leadership:If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts; Love on Campus: Why we should understand, and even encourage, a certain sort of erotic intensity between student and professor (and he’s not talking about the bed-shaking kind, unless one’s partner is in paper form); and The Disadvantages of an Elite Education: Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers.

I don’t agree with everything he’s written in those pieces, but their scope and unexpectedness is refreshing: in all three cases, he takes potentially tired themes (people are distracted a lot today; a great deal of film and fiction depicts randy professors sleeping with students; and elite colleges are training too many hoop jumpers instead of thinkers) and goes with them to unexpected places: how Heart of Darkness depicts bureaucracy and finding yourself; the erotic intensity of ideas and how they can be mingled with erotic intensity of the more conventional variety; and the entitlement complex that paradoxically can scare people into hewing to the narrow path. Even my summaries of a small portion of where he goes in each essay is hopelessly inadequate, which is part of what makes those essays so good.

The three are not all that separate: they all deal with conformity, individuality, college life, and the place of the university in society. Read together, they have more cohesiveness than many entire books. Most importantly, however, they go places I haven’t even thought about going, which is their most useful and unusual feature of all.

Jeff Sypeck pointed me to one and Robert Nagle to another; I only know both through e-mail, which is a very small but real demonstration of the Internet’s true power to make connections. All three essays might play into my eventual dissertation; at the very least, they’ve changed the way I think about many of the issues discussed, which to me is more valuable still.

Progress, extra time, efficiency, and consumer goods

June 26, 2010 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Robin Hanson, typically insightful:

The most recent survey by the Consumer Reports National Research Center found that five-year-old vehicles had about one-third fewer problems than the five-year-old vehicles we studied in April 2005. In fact, owners of about two-thirds of those vehicles reported no problems. And serious repairs, such as engine or transmission replacement, were quite rare. (p.15, June ‘10, Consumer Reports)

Car problem rates falling 1/3 in five years is change you might not notice, but if you think about it, its a pretty big deal. Most people are surprised to hear that the world economy doubles roughly every fifteen years; when they think back fifteen years, the world doesn’t seem that different. Besides a few big changes, most things seem not pretty similar. But this is illusory – most change happens behind the scenes.

We don’t notice the (relatively) small, cumulative changes that add up to major improvements in life unless we’re paying attention to them, which Hanson is drawing attention to here. If we don’t have our cars repaired as often, we have more time to think about and do other things. This means we have more time to think about art, technology, life, and so forth, although most of that surplus is probably used watching TV, searching for pornography, and so on.

But computers have improved too, just like cars: around 2002 or 2003, a typical computer became more than fast enough for most typical activities aside from high-end gaming and video editing; by now, the developed world is awash in computers that are “good enough.” Some relatively small percentage of us will use those computers to help us think, help us make things, and help others learn.

Of course, most people spend that extra time watching TV; according to the Los Angeles Times:

“The Nielsen Co.’s ‘Three Screen Report — referring to televisions, computers and cellphones — for the fourth quarter said the average American now watches more than 151 hours of TV a month. That’s about five hours a day and an all-time high, up 3.6% from the 145 or so hours Americans reportedly watched in the same period last year.”

But fewer are doing so now than once did, which is a large part of Clay Shirky’s point in Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, a book worth checking out from the library but probably not worth buying. He says:

Today people have new freedom to act in concert and in public. In terms of personal satisfaction, this good is fairly uncomplicated—even the banal uses of our creative capacity (posting YouTube videos of kittens on treadmills or writing bloviating blog posts) are still more creative and generous than watching TV. We don’t really care how individuals create and share; it’s enough that they exercise this kind of freedom.

The “freedom to act in concert” is significant because the costs of doing so are low. Still, we don’t just have more time because the cost of doing things other than watching TV have fallen, although that’s important, as Shirky discusses elsewhere in his book—we have more time because things like cars, as Hanson points out, don’t demand as much time as they did. And that change is fairly recent; as John Scalzi wrote a few months ago:

You have to get to about 1997 before there’s a car I would willingly get into these days. As opposed to today, when even the cheap boxy cars meant for first-time buyers have decent mileage, will protect you if you’re hit by a semi, and have more gizmos and better living conditions than my first couple of apartments.

The question still is: what are we going to do with all that spare time, spare computing power, and spare mental capacity? The answers (so far) look positive, but I don’t have the foresight (and neither does Shirky—he points out that we have it, but can’t really say what will happen) to predict specific changes rather than the scale of those changes. In a very small way, I’m part of the answer, since I wouldn’t have been able to do what I’m doing right now 20 years ago. About 10 years ago, it would’ve been much harder because blogging software hadn’t matured. Now it’s incredibly easy. That’s progress, even if most blog posts don’t look much like progress because they concern cats, celebrity scans, and so on.

Something’s wrong, but you don’t know what: the stupid person’s paradox and the Dunning-Kruger Effect

June 20, 2010 By in Links, Teaching Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

“Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is:” What happens when you’re too incompetent to judge that you’re incompetent? One of my friends teaches the LSAT (Law School Admission Test) and calls this the stupid person’s paradox—you’re too stupid to realize that you’re stupid. He often found evidence of the stupid person’s paradox in students with high GPAs in very easy majors who then wondered why they were terrible at the test and/or couldn’t read effectively.

I like that name better than the “the Dunning-Kruger Effect,” which finds that “our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.” I wonder if understanding the effect makes us less likely to susceptible to it, or merely makes us implicitly smug that we’re smart enough to understand it and “they” aren’t, but in actuality we suffer just as much.

I find this bit of the article especially interesting:

DAVID DUNNING: People will often make the case, “We can’t be that stupid, or we would have been evolutionarily wiped out as a species a long time ago.” I don’t agree. I find myself saying, “Well, no. Gee, all you need to do is be far enough along to be able to get three square meals or to solve the calorie problem long enough so that you can reproduce. And then, that’s it. You don’t need a lot of smarts. You don’t have to do tensor calculus. You don’t have to do quantum physics to be able to survive to the point where you can reproduce.” One could argue that evolution suggests we’re not idiots, but I would say, “Well, no. Evolution just makes sure we’re not blithering idiots. But, we could be idiots in a lot of different ways and still make it through the day.”

Steve Jobs’ prescient comment

May 29, 2010 By in Computers/Apple, Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

“The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it’s going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.”

(Emphasis added.)

—That’s from a 1996 interview with Jobs, and he was completely right: little of interest happened to the desktop interface virtually everyone uses until around 2003 or 2004, when OS X 10.3 was released. The first major useful change in desktops that I recall during the period was Spotlight in OS X 10.4, which was, not coincidentally, around the time I got a PowerBook.

May 2010 links: soap operas, Kindles, systems and stories, and more

May 8, 2010 By in Academia, Books, Links Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

* People’s lives are more like soap operas that most of us realize.

* I admire Jeffrey Lewis’ website.

* Peak everything? Not really.

* Academia isn’t broken. We are.

* The most popular passages highlighted in Kindle books. This is a fascinating yet creepy reminder of how much Amazon knows about you.

It also demonstrates the lousy taste most people have in books, with Dan Brown and someone named William P. Young at the top of the list. Young’s book, The Shack, is described as “a one of a kind invitation to journey to the very heart of God.” I’ll pass, thanks. The first book I see on the list that isn’t shlocky is Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture, which you can (and should) also watch on YouTube.

* Comcast awarded the “Golden Poo” award as the worst company in America. This is doubly funny to me because my internet access comes through Comcast (because I have no other effective choice thanks to Qwest in Tucson offering anemic DSL speeds). A few weeks ago, a market research firm conducting a survey for Comcast called to ask what I thought of the company on a scale of 1 (worst) to 10 (best), and I kept saying “1… 1… 1…” over and over again. But I’m stuck with Comcast and its high prices because they have no real competitors.

* United States sovereign debt is the number one thing to fear right now. But almost no politicians are dealing with it in any way, let alone a realistic way.

* Systems and stories.

* Why don’t men read books? Or, as an alternate question, “It’s worth asking, then, why there are so few men in publishing. Could it be the low pay, low status and ridiculous hours?” (This is all in response to Jason Pinter’s essay).

* The Second Pass’s review of Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow. I’m probably going to pass—”Even in his best fiction—Money, London Fields—he has relied on narrative gimmicks and trickery to support creaky storylines, and The Pregnant Widow is no exception”—perhaps in favor of rereading Money.

Davidson also says that “Amis is famously fond of playful character names (which can be a weakness), and this novel is full of them: Pansy, Probert, Amen, Dilshak.” This probably isn’t a major problem for me, as I just finished Henry James’ The Golden Bowl for a grad seminar, and in that novel a character is named “Fanny Assingham,” with many plays on what said name could mean.