How much criticism amounts to taste? Jonathan Haidt and The Happiness Hypothesis

March 15, 2013 By in Books 2 Comments

In Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis he writes:

Consider the following story:

Julie and Mark are sister and brother. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least, it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie is already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom, too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other.

Do you think it is acceptable for two consenting adults, who happen to be siblings, to make love? If you are like most people in my studies, you immediately answered no. But how would you justify that judgment? People often reach first for the argument that incestuous sex leads to offspring that suffer genetic abnormalities. When I point out that the siblings used two forms of birth control, however, no one says, “Oh, well, in that case it’s okay.” Instead, people begin searching for other arguments, for example, “It’s going to harm their relationship.” When I respond that in this case the sex has made the relationship stronger, people just scratch their heads, frown, and say, “I know it’s wrong, I’m just having a hard time explaining why.”

The point of these studies is that moral judgment is like aesthetic judgment. When you see a painting, you usually know instantly and automatically whether you like it. If someone asks you to explain your judgment, you confabulate. You don’t really know why you think something is beautiful, but your interpreter module (the rider) is skilled at making up reasons [. . . .] You search for a plausible reason for liking the painting, and you latch on to the first reason that makes sense (maybe something vague about color or light, or the reflection of the painter in the clown’s nose). Moral arguments are much the same: Two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other. When you refute a persons’s argument, does she generally change her mind and agree with you? Of course not, because the argument you defeated was not the cause of her position; it was made up after the judgment was made.

Max Planck famously said that science advances one funeral at a time, and the same is of art.

Haidt’s description shows why political, religious, and even economic arguments are often so unsatisfying: regardless of what ideas or evidence one person cites, the other person isn’t really going to care (and you’re probably the other person, too). The other person is looking for ways to justify their thinking, like you are, and feelings can’t really be argued with—not by most people, most of the time.

Plus—and Haidt doesn’t discuss this, but it’s hard to miss if you’re paying attention to everyday life—most people have only a superficial understanding of the opinions they hold. This is especially obvious to any expert discussing matters with a non-expert. In many fields, even experts discussing matters with other experts may just have more sophisticated versions of their initial opinions and impressions; that’s certainly how I often feel when I read papers in English lit, or talk to some English professors. That discipline certainly seems to proceed funeral by funeral.

Still, I wonder if Haidt has run studies in which he has explicitly primed participants for critical thinking and reasoning, then asked similar sets of questions. One of the rare ways that people might open up and think is to avoid the direct discussion—”Is gun safety good or bad?”—and move to a meta discussion—”most people are too closed to new information to have political discussions”—prior to the “real” discussion about gun safety, or whatever the political or social issue du jour happens to be.

In light of these ideas, it might be best not to argue directly: when abortion comes up, don’t talk about the issue directly. Talk about what happens to the people in the moment: what pressures is the woman having the abortion feelings? What does the protester feel? Why? The same is true of art: what’s a great sentence in that novel? Where does the plot turn suddenly? What is greatness in general?

These are the same methods good teachers use: they don’t directly fight with their students, because the fight is unfair and, more importantly, it’s unproductive. I tend to ask questions that students find oblique, and now, after reading Haidt, I know why.

I also know why I give some of the answers I do when I’ve been asked to read friends’ or students’ stories, novels, and other writing. Sometimes they asked if I think the work is good. I never answer directly, because the more useful answer isn’t mine—it’s the writer’s answer, five years from when they’re asking. If the writer spends five years working on their craft and thinking about their problem space, they’ll have a very different perspective, and they’ll be able to judge for themselves. At a high enough level, taste rules, but getting to that high level is a steep climb.

Opinions also shift in the individual over time: many novels I liked in middle and high school I would now find unbearable boring, clichéd, and stupid, while my middle-school self would find many of the books I like now incomprehensible or pointless.

Links: Publishing, BDSM (these two are not related, surprisingly), Chekhov the player, Lasch, parking, L.A., the ten-year hoodie, and more

March 15, 2013 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* “The [Non] Death of Publishing,” which argues that publishers used to the recession to consolidate their positions and make more money; I can’t evaluate most of the claims, but they seem plausible.

* “BDSM in the mainstream.” (Maybe.)

_MG_8952-1* “The No-Limits Job” is dumb, but it’s also in the NYT’s Fashion & Style section, where rigor goes to die. The basic problem is that the industries described glamor industries, which means lots of people want to get in because people think they’re cool. This drives the salaries down (to zero, in the case of internships). You may notice that there are no examples of programmers working 70 hours a week for $22,000 a year, and the words “supply” and “demand” never appear. I’ve seen this basic supply / demand principle in action, since I went to grad school in English Lit, where many, many people want jobs (because they’re fun) and relatively few jobs are available, with the result being that supply and demand meet at a low number. Solution: Don’t go into glamor industries. If you do, don’t complain about the trade-offs you’ve made.

* Chekhov: a lifetime of lovers. Demonstrating that writers can be players too.

* Christopher Lasch: Scourge of the elites.

* Don’t subsidize parking. This should be obvious.

* Has L.A. fallen behind? (Hat tip Marginal Revolution). To me, the car-centric culture and traffic are the worst parts, and I don’t see those improving without some combination of removing or raising urban height limits wherever subways or light rails are built or planned.

* Upgrade or die.

* The ten-year hoodie on Kickstarter; I “backed” the Flint and Tinder underwear project and though the outcome okay but not exceptional.

* The case for a true Mac Pro successor.

* How New York Could [and should] Get More Affordable Housing.

Journalism, physics and other glamor professions as hobbies

March 8, 2013 By in Culture, Essays Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

The short version of this Atlantic post by Alex C. Madrigal is “Don’t be a journalist,” and, by the way, “The Atlantic.com thinks it can get writers to work for free” (I’m not quoting directly because the article isn’t worth quoting). Apparently The Atlantic is getting writers to work for free, because many writers are capable of producing decent-quality work, and the number of paying outlets are shrinking. Anyone reading this and contemplating journalism as a profession should know that they need to seek another way of making money.

The basic problems journalism faces, however, are obvious and have been for a long time. In 2001, I was the co-editor-and-chief of my high school newspaper and thought about going into journalism. But it was clear that the Internet was going to destroy a lot of careers in journalism. It has. The only thing I still find puzzling is that some people want to major in journalism in college, or attempt to be “freelance writers.”

Friends who know about my background ask why I don’t do freelance writing. When I tell them that there’s less money in it than getting a job at Wal-Mart they look at me like I’m a little crazy—they don’t really believe that’s true, even when I ask them how many newspapers they subscribe to (median and mode answer: zero). Many, however, spend hours reading stuff for free online.

In important ways I’m part of the problem, because on this blog I’m doing something that used to be paid most of the time: reviewing books. Granted, I write erratically and idiosyncratically, usually eschewing the standard practices of book reviews (dull, two-paragraph plot summaries are stupid in my view, for instance), but I nonetheless do it and often do it better than actual newspapers or magazines, which I can say with confidence because I’ve read so many dry little book reports in major or once-major newspapers. Not every review I write is a critical gem, but I like doing it and thus do it. Many of my posts also start life as e-mails to friends (as this one did). I also commit far more typos than a decently edited newspaper or magazine. Which I do correct when you point them out.

The trajectory of journalism is indicative of other trends in American society and indeed the industrialized world. For example, a friend debating whether he should consider physics grad school wrote this to me recently: “I think physics is something that is fun to study for fun, but to try to become a professional physicist is almost like too much of a good thing.” He’s right. Doing physics for fun, rather than trying to get a tenure-track job, makes more sense from a lifestyle standpoint.

A growing number of what used to occupations seem to be moving in this direction. Artists got here first, but others are making their way here. I’m actually going to write a post about how journalism increasingly looks like this too. The obvious question is how far this trend will go—what happens when many jobs that used to be paid become un-paid?

Tyler Cowen thinks we might be headed towards a guaranteed annual income, an idea that was last popular in the 60s and 70s. When I asked Cowen his opinions about guaranteed annual incomes, he wrote back to say that he’d address the issue in a forthcoming book. The book hasn’t arrived yet, but I look forward to reading it. As a side not, apparently Britain has, or had, a concept called the “Dole,” which many people went on, especially poor artists. Geoff Dyer wrote about this some in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. The Dole subsidized a lot of people who didn’t do much, but it also subsidized a lot of artists, which is pretty sweet; one can see student loans and grad school serving analogous roles in the U.S. today.

IMG_1469-1Even in programming, which is now the canonical “Thar be jobs!” (pirate voice intentional) profession, some parts of programming—like languages and language development—basically aren’t remunerative. Too many people will do it free because it’s fun, like amateur porn. In the 80s there were many language and library vendors, but nearly all have died, and libraries have become either open source or rolled into a few large companies like Apple and Microsoft. Some aspects of language development are cross-subsidized in various ways, like professors doing research, or companies paying for specific components or maintenance, but it’s one field that has, in some ways, become like photography, or writing, or physics, even though programming jobs as a whole are still pretty good.

I’m not convinced that the artist lifestyle of living cheap and being poor in the pursuit of some larger goal or glamor profession seems is good or bad, but I do think it is (that we have a lot of good cheap stuff out there, and especially cheap stuff in the form of consumer electronics, may help: it’s possible to buy or acquire a nearly free, five-year-old computer that works perfectly well as a writing box).* Of course, many starving artists adopt that as a pose—they think it’s cool to say they’re working on a novel or photography project or “a series of shorts” or whatever, but don’t actually do anything, while many people with jobs put out astonishing work. Or at least work, which is usually a precursor to astonishing work.

For some people, the growing ability of people to disseminate ideas and art forms even without being paid is a real win. In the old days, if you wanted to write something and get it out there, you needed an editor or editors to agree with you. Now we have a direct way of resolving questions about what people actually want to read. Of course, the downside is that whole payment thing, but that’s the general downside of the new world in which we live, and, frankly it’s one that I don’t have a society-wide solution for.

In writing, my best guess is that more people are going to book-ify blogs, and try to sell the book for $1 – $5, under the (probably correct) assumption that very few people want to go back and read a blog’s entire archives, but an ebook could collect and organize the material of those archives. If I read a powerful post by someone who seemed interesting, I’d buy a $4 ebook that covers their greatest hits or introduced me to their broader thinking.

This is tied into other issues around what people spend their time doing. My friend also wrote that he read “a couple of articles on Keynes’ predictions of utopia and declining work hours,” but he noted that work still takes up a huge amount of most people’s lives. He’s right, but most reports show that median hours worked in the U.S. has declined, and male labor force participation has declined precipitously. Labor force participation in general is surprisingly low. Ross Douthat has been discussing this issue in The New York Times (a paid gig I might add), and, like, most reasonable people he has a nuanced take on what’s happening. See also this Wikipedia link on working time for some arguments that working time has declined overall.

Working time, however, probably hasn’t decreased for everyone. My guess is that working time has increased for some smallish number of people at the top of their professors (think lawyers, doctors, programmers, writers, business founders), with people at the bottom often relying more on government or gray market income sources. Douthat starts his essay by saying that we might expect working hours among the rich to decline first, so they can pursue more leisure, but he points out that the rich are working more than ever.

Though I am tempted to put “working” in scare quotes, because it seems like many of the rich are doing things they would enjoy doing on some level anyway; certainly a lot of programmers say they would keep programming even if they were millionaires, and many of them become millionaires and keep programming. The same is true of writers (though fewer become millionaires). Is writing a leisure or work activity for me? Both, depending. If I self-publish Asking Anna tomorrow and make a zillion dollars, the day after I’ll still be writing something. I would like to get paid but some of the work I do for fun isn’t contingent on me getting paid.

Turning blogs into books and self-publishing probably won’t replace the salaries that news organizations used to pay, but it’s one means for writers or would-be writers to get some traction.

Incidentally, the hobby-ification of many professions makes me feel pretty good about working as a grant writing consultant. No one think when they’re 14, “I want to be a grant writer like Isaac and Jake Seliger!”, while lots of people want to be like famous actors, musicians, or journalists. There is no glamor, and grant writing is an example of the classic aphorism, “Where there’s shit, there’s gold” at work.

Grant writing is also challenging. Very few people have the weird intersection of skills necessary to be good, and it’s a decade-long process to build those skills—especially for people who aren’t good writers already. The field is perpetually mutating, with new RFPs appearing and old ones disappearing, so that we’re not competing with proposals written two years ago (where many novelists, for example, are in effect still competing with their peers from the 20s or 60s or 90s).

To return to journalism as a specific example, I can think of one situation in which I’d want The Atlantic or another big publisher to publish my work: if I was worried about being sued. Journalism is replete with stories about heroic reporters being threatened by entrenched interests; Watergate and the Pentagon Papers are the best-known examples, but even small-town papers turn up corruption in city hall and so forth. As centralized organizations decline, individuals are to some extent picking up the slack, but individuals are also more susceptible to legal and other threats. If you discovered something nasty about a major corporation and knew they’d tie up your life in legal bullshit for the next ten years, would you publish, or would you listen to your wife telling you to think of the kids, or your parents telling you to think about your career and future? Most of us are not martyrs. But it’s much harder for Mega Corp or Mega Individual to threaten The Atlantic and similar outlets.

The power and wealth of a big media company has its uses.

But such a use is definitely a niche case. I could imagine some of the bigger foundations, like ProPublica, offering a legal umbrella to bloggers and other muckrakers to mitigate such risks.

I have intentionally elided the question of what people are going to do if their industries turn towards hobbies. That’s for a couple reasons: as I said above, I don’t have a good solution. In addition, the parts of the economy I’m discussing here are pretty small, and small problems don’t necessarily need “solutions,” per se. People who want to turn their hours into a lot of income should try to find ways and skills to do that, and people who want to turn their hours into fun products like writing or movies should try to find ways to do that too. Crying over industry loss or change isn’t going to turn back the clock, and just because someone could make a career as a journalist doesn’t mean they can today.

* To some extent I’ve subsidized other people’s computers, because Macs hold their value surprisingly well and can be sold for a quarter to half of their original purchase price three to five years after they’ve been bought. Every computer replaced by my family or our business has been sold on Craigslist. Its also possible, with a little knowledge and some online guides, to add RAM and an SSD to most computers made in the last couple of years, which will make them feel much more responsive.

Summary judgment: Planet of Cities — Shlomo Angel

March 1, 2013 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Planet of Cities is for a specialized audience, but it has one very big point that I didn’t realize:

New empirical evidence on the average population density of cities across space and time confirms that these densities have been in decline almost everywhere for a century or more. The new evidence is counterintuitive, since numerous academic researchers believe that urban densities have been on the increase. Were that true, it would lend encouragement and support to those favoring densification. However, urban density decline has been persistent and global in scope, and it predated the automobile. It is not restricted to the United States or other industrialized countries, but is pervasive in developing countries as well. [. . .]

The forces driving density decline—rising per capita incomes, cheap agricultural lands, efficient transport, and income inequality—are quite formidable. Accordingly, absent a highly effective policy intervention or a steep increase in travel costs in the future, there is little reason for the global decline in densities to slow down anytime soon.

Planet-of-citiesI like living in cities (if New York were less expensive—as it was until the ’90s—I’d happily live here forever) and attack legal rules that prohibit higher buildings. But the research Angel has both conducted and cited indicates that, even in the absence of such rules, cities would still probably be getting less dense, or at most evening out. That is news to me; he also says, “No matter how we choose to act, however, we should remain aware that conscious and conscientious efforts to increase the density of our cities require the reversal of a powerful and sustained global tendency for urban densities to decline.” Newer cities, like Phoenix or Dallas, are even less dense than older cities, which is an innovation problem for the reasons described in Steven Berlin Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From and Edward Glaeser’s The Triumph of the City.

Cities like New York and Boston remain so important because creating dense neighborhoods like those found in both areas is effectively impossible in today’s climate of urban land-use controls. Building such areas doesn’t have to be impossible, but we, collectively, make it so. Take Seattle, a city I’m very familiar with. In downtown Seattle, rents have effectively increased by 40 – 50% from 2002 – 2012, even though some construction has been permitted. Rapid increase indicates that much more could be commercially built, and that many people want to live there and will pay to do so.

Some cities have attempted to limit horizontal urban sprawl, and presumably increase vertical urban height. Portland is a case in point, because it created an “urban growth boundary” (UGB) and thus has been a test case for some city planning. By density, which is arguably the most important measure of whether an UGB succeeds, the UGB failed:

The chief aim of the UGB was to contain urban sprawl and preserve the natural beauty of the surrounding countryside within reach of city residents. Sprawl was not defined precisely, but presumably it included both low-density development and fragmentation. After examining the change in built-up area density within the UGB between 1973 and 2005, we found that densities decreased rather than increased.

Even cities that have explicitly attempted to contain sprawl by increasing density have not fully succeeded. This points to the obvious need to plan for sprawl, and to plan for less centralization:

The possibility that cities worldwide are now in a process of transformation from a monocentric to a polycentric spatial structure poses an interesting challenge. It suggests that if public transport is to be a viable option in areas of expansion to economize on the energy expended and to limit greenhouse gas emissions, then it cannot be limited to continued reliance on radial routes to the city center. The transport network must be two-dimensional, providing frequent and reliable service among suburban destinations over the entire metropolitan area, rather than a one-dimensional network of radial routes into the city center. Some public transport systems that already provide such service are the bus lines of Edmonton and Toronto in Canada.

To provide reliable point-to-point service throughout metropolitan areas and to function effectively, bus lines or new transportation technologies will need to operate on a grid of arterial roads.

Again, this is certainly true in Seattle: I can’t find a citation, but for a time there was more Class-A office space in downtown Bellevue than downtown Seattle. In the greater Seattle area, there are major population and employment centers in Seattle itself, Bellevue, downtown Kirkland, Redmond (where Microsoft is headquartered) and Renton (where Boeing has or had many facilities). Many people I went to high school with live on the Eastside and seldom cross Lake Washington, and they can live a relatively urban experience in downtown Bellevue or Kirkland. Seattle as a city still imposes severe height limits in areas adjacent to downtown, and, as a result, some of the development and population infill that might otherwise take place, say, east of 12th Avenue or North of Olive / John on Capitol Hill, instead moves to Kirkland and Bellevue.

The style in Planet of Cities is unimpressive, verging on non-existent, as the quotes above demonstrate. But its insights impress, as does its re-evaluation of the conventional wisdom about rising densities in cities. As I wrote in the first paragraph, it’s a specialist book for specialist interests. Still, most people hold naive views on city planning, even if they don’t realize they hold such views. Planet of Cities replaces naiveté with knowledge. It could use panache, but that’s true of almost all textbooks and monographs.

EDIT: Anthony Flint of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy wrote to ask me to note that the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy published this book. I’m not sure why this is important, but here it is.

Links: Building stuff, Michael Jordan, wine and deception, beliefs, tunnels, BDSM, and more

March 1, 2013 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

* “Home craft project: replacing broken laptop screen.”

* Who pays for healthcare also explains why prices are so high. In my view we also spend too much time debating insurance coverage and too little time discussing access to care and how that can be improved.

* Generally I don’t care about sports, but “Michael Jordan Has Not Left the Building” is special.

* People can’t tell good from bad wine, and use context clues to “decide” which wine is best. I see this effect in many other areas too, and am surprised, for example, the more people don’t remove the badges from their cars.

* I can appreciate “Confessions of a stationery addict,” given my musings on little black notebooks.

* “A Dress-Code Enforcer’s Struggle for the Soul of the Middle-School Girl;” I find Amanda Marcotte’s reaction optimal: “If You Don’t Want Girls Judged by Their Hemlines, Stop Judging Them by Their Hemlines.”

* “Our current communication constructs make us intellectually lazy. It’s too easy to blurt out what you’re thinking on Twitter and Facebook and then forget you said anything at all.”

* The Tunnels of NYC’s East Side Access Project.

* “The global war on drugs has cost billions and taken countless lives — but achieved little. The scant results finally have politicians and experts joining calls for legalization.”

* Human extinction could be closer than anticipated.

* BDSM and the mainstream of American life, from the New York Times.

* The wit of Louis CK; I like him better in quoted, out-of-context form than I like his show or whole acts. This is rare for me.

Taking Apprenticeships Seriously: The need for alternate paths

February 19, 2013 By in Academia, Teaching Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments

Timothy Taylor’s “Taking Apprenticeships Seriously” makes an argument for doing something we, collectively, should have started a long time ago. College is not the magic answer to every social and economic problem, as anyone who has taught at a non-elite college should know. Yet this powerful meme holds that college for everybody, everywhere, is a good idea. It isn’t. There should be alternate routes to a reasonable life.

The standard college-for-everyone argument comes from extensive data showing that college graduates earn higher lifetime earnings, which is true, but correlation is not causation: smarter, more conscientious people may attend college, and that is one of Bryan Caplan’s arguments in The Case Against Education. In that line of reasoning, college is mostly about signaling.

It’s hard to tell what’s actually happening in the economic market for college grads, because “college” is a lot of different things, much like it’s hard to evaluate whether, say, “sex” is good or bad: usually it’s good and more is better, but we can all imagine contexts in which it’s not so good. To take one example (about college, not sex), Derek Thompson wrote “The Value of College Is: (a) Growing (b) Flat (c) Falling (d) All of the Above,” which discusses some of these arguments and concludes, naturally, (d), in part because the economic value of college depends a lot on what you do in college. If you do just enough to squeak by and don’t have the skills to make things people want or do things people want to pay for, then have to pay back tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans, college is not so hot and vocational education might have been better.

This issue reminds me of arguments a friend and I have been talking about via e-mail: my friend has heard the endless cry for more Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) graduates. But he’s involved in a business that requires strong communication skills and is disappointed with many of the cover letters and resumes he see; they evince limited knowledge of the very skills he’s hiring for. Can you really take people who lack sufficient knowledge about their native language to write a competent cover letter and make them understand the finer points of the difference between a heap and stack? Or understand differential equations?

My larger point is that everyone needs basic skills but few people have them (English majors could do well with a CS class or two—for the skills imparted and for the appreciation they’ll have of the people designing their iPhones). Taking an average comm or sociology major and sticking them in STEM classes will lead to more dropouts, and, beyond that, most big schools also have STEM weedout courses designed to be punitive rather than to impart knowledge. The world needs more smart, curious people in general, but smart and curious people appear to be in the minority, and probably always have been. One of my favorite moments in Joel Mokyr’s The Enlightened Economy is this:

It is important to stress that the Industrial Revolution was the creation of an elite, a relatively small number of ingenious, ambitious, and diligent persons who could think out of the box, and had the wherewithal to carry out their ideas and to find others who could assist them. This is not to return to the heroic interpretations of the Victorian hagiographers such as Samuel Smiles and credit a few famous individuals with the entire phenomenon […] Even these pivotal people were a minority, perhaps a few tens of thousands of elite workers, well trained through apprenticeships supplemented sometimes by informal studies. (Mokyr 121–2)

(Yes, I do sometimes include page citations in e-mails.)

A relatively small number of people can create, find, or make new ideas that then spread to everyone else. I too would like to increase the number of such people, but I’m not sure that’s really possible, at least at the level of public policy.

We probably could use more people with STEM skills, but we could also use more people with all kinds of skills, and especially people with STEM and humanities interests. The STEM training mantra reminds me of something Gerald Graff wrote in “Narrative and the Unofficial Interpretive Culture:” “As often happens in the history of criticism, an extravagantly stated fallacy proves to be more illuminating than many sober truths, and in appropriate such histories the critical community tends quietly to discount or ignore their exaggerations” (4). The “extravagantly stated fallacy” that many people should major in STEM is wrong; the lesser idea, that perhaps people on the margins should, is probably right.

Still, there’s one other problem with STEM fields: they’re transparently hard; you know if you’re doing it right or not, while other disciplines can more easily be fudged or watered down, as has happened to sociology, comm, and other disciplines.

Links: Critics and novelists, ethernet, dissertations, fashion, writing, porn data, and more

February 16, 2013 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

* “There comes a moment in the life of every literary critic when they need to give up and admit they’re never going to be a novelist. [ . . .] I don’t, in short, have a novelist’s soul.” Though I disagree with this: “Novelists appear to dwell most deeply in their childhoods.”

* “Ethernet at 40: [Bob Metcalfe, Ethernet’s inventor] reveals its turbulent youth.” Ethernet is still, even when wireless is a viable alternative. In some circumstances running a cheap ethernet cable from a router to a desk, couch, or other work station can still be a real win, especially given how even very long ethernet cables from Monoprice.com only cost a couple of dollars. Ethernet cables last forever, aren’t subject to the level of interference wireless is, and, in many conditions, have faster data transfer speeds than wireless.

* Essays in Biography.

* “The Dissertation Can No Longer Be Defended,” which makes points that should be obvious to damn near everybody involved in the humanities section of academia.

* Three views of consumption and the slow economy.

* Riding Around Paris With Olivier Zahm, Fashion’s Most Libidinal Editor.

* “A warning to college profs from a high school teacher,” which is actually about the stakes of student testing.

* New York Times “journalist” John Broder lies in Tesla motors review, gets called out for it.

* “Deep Inside: A Study of 10,000 Porn Stars;” highly data-driven and should be safe for work.

* New York real estate: a study in price escalation.

* Megan McArdle: “How to Make the Most of Your Higher Education.” The bit about not majoring in English, and not getting a PhD in it, resonates, especially as someone who did the one and is doing the other.

A.S. Byatt and Tracy K. Smith speaking in New York

February 16, 2013 By in Books, Fiction Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

A.S. Byatt and poet Tracy K. Smith spoke in New York last night, and my favorite moment may have been Byatt’s comment on influence: she said, “I learn from dead people. I read books.” Which is accurate, simple, and too seldom mentioned. She also said, “If there is one thing I shall never do it is write a memoir.” But Byatt does watch viral YouTube videos, though I won’t offer the context. No word on whether she’s seen “Gangnam Style.” I wanted to listen to her indefinitely; she seemed low bullshit and subtly, Britishly funny in a way not conveyed by these quotes and perhaps not conveyed by any quotes. I would take her seminar despite the danger of being assigned Henry James and Melville.

IMG_2029Byatt also said that at some point “I got sick of realism. . . and I realized realism is only one way of putting prose together.” That remark—”putting prose together” was deliberate. English’s promiscuous borrowing also delights her (as it does pretty much anyone who really writes), and to that I would add that English has a sophisticated technical vocabulary offering a rich lode of metaphors not always available, or easily available, in other languages, unless they’ve borrowed from English (often in turn borrowing from other languages).

One senses that literature for her is urgent, as it is for Roland Mitchell in Possession (in one of my favorite moments in the novel, Roland Mitchell explains that he stole letters from the British Library “Because they were alive. They seemed urgent,” implying that much of what happens in the British Library and academia is so not urgent that one must wonder if and why it should happen at all) and many characters in The Children’s Book. She makes me want to be a better writer.

Smith said, in the context of mentorship, that having someone ask different kinds of questions of your work can be useful. She’s right, though I’d never conceptualized the issue in those terms, and it’s difficult to find people who will ask questions different but still useful than those you ask yourself.

Does she like Billy Collins?

Is Amazon.com’s Marketplace encouraging buyers to scam sellers by filing a refund claim?

February 16, 2013 By in miscellaenous Tags: , , , , , , 38 Comments

I’ve been selling miscellaneous books on Amazon.com for years, and in the last three months three people have filed requests for refunds or sent messages claiming that their items never arrived. That’s a big problem because the cheapest way to ship books and similar items is through the Postal Service’s Media Mail. Big sites, like eBay, solve this problem by letting buyers rate sellers and sellers rate buyers, but Amazon only lets buyers rate sellers—sellers can’t rate buyers. Sellers have to ship the item and hope for the best, which worked fine until recently, or add a confirmation number, which increases costs to the point that selling books isn’t really worth it for me.

Someone claiming one item didn’t show up could be chalked up to USPS, or bad luck, or whatever. Two could be a coincidence. Three makes me think of enemy action: buyers heave learned to game Amazon’s system.* Looking around the Internet makes it apparent that problems like mine aren’t so unusual bad stories are more common than I would have imagined before I had this problem.

Looking back at the problems I’ve had shows that the buyers are systematically weird. In one case, the name of the person contacting me for a refund didn’t match the name of the person to whom the book was shipped (in most cases, Amazon encourages or requires buyers to contact the seller before filing a refund claim). Another message said, “Recipient has not received the item,” which is curious: most people would say, “I haven’t receive the book.” “Recipient has not received the item” is generic enough to be a bot. The third person has a U.S. address but doesn’t actually appear to live in the United States.

The only conclusion I can draw are that medium-priced items (in the $10 – $30 range) probably aren’t worth selling on Amazon: they’re expensive enough that adding a confirmation number makes them uneconomical, but not so expensive that a confirmation number is a necessity and a small percentage of the price.

Amazon could reduce this problem by providing symmetrical buyer / seller feedback. But Amazon presumably doesn’t want sellers to cancel orders to unproven buyers, and it’s still possible to game feedback systems (as eBay users have discovered). Nonetheless, I sent Amazon a couple of e-mails about the issue, and someone at Amazon did reply to eventually say, “I would also like to let you know that we do have a team that checks on the buyer’s account for any fraudulent activity and take the necessary action on them.” Still, buyers could file claims only on the occasional item. I’m happier knowing that someone at Amazon is at least thinking about the problem. Amazon, however, is a notoriously data-driven company, and I can’t see them taking action unless sellers stop selling on Amazon.

I’m tempted, in the name of science, to buy a moderately expensive item and then claim it never showed up, or showed up damaged, to see if Amazon will refund the money, and, if so, how many times I could do this before Amazon boots me. But I won’t for obvious reasons.

* This is of course a reference to Goldfinger’s rules about coincidence. I should also point out that the items shipped all had normal return addresses; none of them came back to me.

Culture really is the water we swim in: America, France, sexism, and sexual politics

February 15, 2013 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Johanna Kollmann’s recent post, “Sexism is not funny, let’s stop laughing argues what its title implies it will argue, and she uses these examples:

A talk at a conference showing girls in bikinis. An API presentation from a sponsor featuring ladies in bras. A demo at a hack day with a slide of women in underwear. A business model canvas workshop using a strip club as an example to illustrate the tool. These are just a few examples of casual sexism I’ve experience at (tech) events.

But where does sexy end and sexism begin? I too am against sexism (who isn’t?), but most Americans appear to find women in limited amounts of clothing sexy; take a look at most women’s magazines in the grocery store next time you’re there (or, better yet, look through a bunch of Cosmos: a woman once suggested I do it, and I found the experience highly educational). Men’s magazines mostly feature sexy women in limited clothing, and women’s magazine’s mostly feature. . . sexy women in limited clothing. Sexism in tech and the workplace are real problems, but I don’t think a slide with a woman in underwear is a good example and arguably detracts from larger problems.

France_1Beyond that comparisons between the U.S. and France are often dubious, but reading Elaine Sciolino’s La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life made me rethink some of the issues Koll describes. Sciolino writes, for example:

The game of the sexes also extends deep into the workplace. In the United States, the mildest playfulness during business hours and in a business setting is forbidden; in France, it is encouraged. In American corporations, men are told routinely that they cross the line when they compliment a female employee on the color of her dress or the style of her hair. In France, flirtation is part of the job.

Sciolino’s experiences in the French workplace appear to be mostly good. It might be that the U.S. and France are too different to compare, but I also don’t think that the asexual approach implicitly endorsed by Kollmann is right or even practical. In addition, much of humor and personality are bound up in sexuality.

There are also a couple of larger notes: one is that, at the time I read La Seduction, I figured it was just a throwaway book, but I find myself referencing it surprisingly often. Even books that seem like throwaways can turn out to be influential, and no one really knows what those books will be in advance. You have to do the reading, or not do the reading.

France_2In addition, sexism is also one of these important topics that brings the worst out of many user-voting sites (like Hacker News, where I found the link), because it’s a) broad, b) important, and yet c) has a large political and social dimension that makes knowing the whole problem space impossible. Sometimes user-voting sites work well (the top HN comment is substantive and links to actual research), but often people talk past each other, or don’t closely read what the other person writes.

In Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Feynman recounts this anecdote: A Princess says to Feynman that “[. . .] nobody knows anything about [physics], so I guess we can’t talk about it.” He replies:

On the contrary [. . .] It’s because somebody knows something about it that we can’t talk about physics. It’s the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance—gold transfers we can’t talk about, because those are understood—so it’s the subjects that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!

One sees this tendency over and over again. Nobody really knows anything about sexual politics in the workplace, or social problems, or macro economics, so we all have opinions that can’t easily be disproven. The problem is frequently worsened by ignorance.