Comment when you have something to say

August 4, 2012 By in Culture, ideas Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

By now it’s well-known that most Internet forums devolve over time, even when the people running the forum take concrete steps to avoid devolution. But the main problem is not necessarily the trolls who deliberately attempt to degrade the quality of the conversation. It’s low-quality comments that aren’t necessarily malicious or even mean-spirited but do reflect shallow knowledge. Not only that, but such comments are often designed to appeal to groupish belief or to raise the status of the commenter, rather than sharing information and asking genuine questions.

Kens offered this insightful observation on HN:

My theory (based on many years of Usenet) is that there are three basic types of online participants: “cocktail party”, “scientific conference”, and “debate team”. In “cocktail party”, the participants are having an entertaining conversation and sharing anecdotes. In “scientific conference”, the participants are trying to increase knowledge and solve problems. In “debate team”, the participants are trying to prove their point is right.

Unfortunately, the people in scientific conference mode attract the cocktail people, but the latter don’t tend to attract the former. Debate team-types tend to be attracted to both—they’re the people exhibiting groupish and status-based behavior. In HN land, I’m probably closer to cocktail mode people than the scientific conference mode people, though I want to act more like a conference person.

Still, it’s worth looking more carefully at what the scientific conference-mode means. I don’t think scientific conference means a literal presentation of new results, but I think it does mean that the people commenting are deeply informed, deeply curious, reasonably respectful, and work to speak from a position of knowledge, rather than ignorance, about a subject. In this sense I fit the scientific conference mode when I discuss a small but real number of issues related to teaching, urban planning / development, and grant writing / government practices. The second one relates least to my day-to-day life but is a personal interest about which I’ve read a fair amount. Towards this end, I suspect a lot of people could improve the quality of the conversation simply by not commenting.

I distill this general idea to a simple behavior heuristic that might be valuable to others: don’t comment unless you have a special, unusual, or well-informed viewpoint. Many of my comments link to books and/or articles I’ve read that elaborate on whatever point I’m making or trying to make (here’s one example, linking to Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and here’s another, citing Edward Glaeser’s The Triumph of the City; in response to the second, someone even said, “I got these books simply because of this recommendation,” which makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside). Some of the ideas contained in the books or articles I cite might be wrong or badly argued, but at least I’m basing my comments on something specific rather than some general philosophical point. Too many people argue based on first principles or unsourced speculation. The latter isn’t always bad; for example, someone might work in a field and know something deep and important about it without having a link to a specific discussion of the idea being discussed.

Many of my comments that don’t link to books or articles still deal with specific issues in which I have above average expertise, knowledge, or experience. This comment discusses how I deal with a student who asks a question relating solely to his or her individual issue in a large group without sounding like a jerk (I think, anyway), this comment is about a specific product I’ve used (the Unicomp Customizer), and this comment is about specificity in writing and thinking. Again, I might be wrong, but in each case I’m writing based on experience.

You can find some exceptions to the principles I’ve discussed above. You should ask logical or reasonable follow-up questions, especially if you’d like more information (here’s one sample; here’s another.) Succinct is often beautiful. Focus on genuine questions, rather than challenging people because their beliefs don’t match yours.

You don’t always have to follow these rules—I don’t—but if you’re debating about whether you should post a comment, you should probably err on the side of silence and not intruding on other people’s time. Unfortunately, the kind of people who most need such internal self-restraint are probably also the ones least likely to use it, and I doubt anything can be done to solve this problem, which seems like a variant of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Despite all this, I don’t see a solution to the fundamental problems, at least beyond the person at the margin who might read this and change his or her behavior slightly.

In other words, one can appeal to community rules and norms, or resort to meta-posts (like this one).* Such an appeal shouldn’t be done too often, or a community will spend more time discussing its own rules and norms than it does discussing and reading the material that should be the purpose of its existence (I last wrote a post like this in January; that January post still seems relevant, but I feel like enough time has passed and that I’ve observed enough behavior to make this post relevant too). But perhaps the occasional reminder will, as I said, help at the margins.

Oh, and the other rule for commenting? When you’re done with substantive content, stop.

* Granted, these kinds of posts and comments can make a community deteriorate. For example, there are a set of overly long comments by jsprink_banned and josteink that fail to distinguish between an argument and how the argument is presented: I suspect they’re unhappy with the mod functions mostly because they haven’t focused on how an argument is delivered. Civility counts for a lot, at all levels of debate; see, for example, Tyler Cowen’s comments on civility and Paul Krugman (and his comments on the limits of binary, good versus evil thinking in general).

There are also comments like this, in which the poster argues from nothing, attempts to activate an anti-corporate ideology, and ignores the obvious, abundant evidence of the continued importance of firms. Alex-C, fortunately, did reply: “I almost can’t tell if this comment came from some sort of Markov text generator.” HN used to have many fewer of those kinds of comments, and when it did get those kinds of comments, they were much less likely to rise. It takes more effort than it should for me not to respond to them directly. Incidentally, the comment Alex-C was replying to meant to say something like this.

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

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

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

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

(Hat tip Marginal Revolution.)

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

* Margaret Atwood answers questions on Reddit.

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

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

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

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

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

* Charter schools raise educational standards for vulnerable children.

Martin Amis, the essay, the novel, and how to have fun in fiction

July 29, 2012 By in Culture, Fiction, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

There’s an unusually interesting interview with Martin Amis in New York Magazine, where he says:

I think what has happened in fiction is that fiction has responded to the fact that the rate of history has accelerated in this last generation, and will continue to accelerate, with more sort of light-speed kind of communications. Those huge, leisurely, digressive, essayistic, meditative novels of the postwar era—some of which were on the best-seller lists for months—don’t have an audience anymore. [. . .]

No one is writing that kind of novel now. Well [. . . ] David Foster Wallace—that posthumous one looks sort of Joycean and huge and very left-field. But most novelists I think are much more aware than they used to be of the need for forward motion, for propulsion in a novel. Novelists are people too, and they’re responding to this just as the reader is.

I think people aren’t reading the “essayistic, meditative novels” because “essayistic, meditative novels” reads like code-words for boring. In addition, we’re living in “The Age of the Essay.” We don’t need novelists to write essays disguised as novels when we can get the real thing in damn near infinite supply.

The discovery mechanisms for essays are getting steadily better. Think of Marginal Revolution, Paul Graham’s essays, Hacker News, The Feature, and others I’m not aware. Every Saturday, Slate releases a link collection of 5 – 10 essays in its Longform series. Recent collections include the Olympics, startups, madness in Mexico, and disease. The pieces selected tend to be deep, simultaneously intro- and extrospective, substantive, and engaging. They also feel like narrative, and nonfiction writers routinely deploy the narrative tricks and voice that fiction pioneered. The best essay writers have the writing skill of all but perhaps the very best novelists.

As a result, both professional (in the sense of getting paid) and non-professional (in the sense of being good but not earning money directly from the job) writers have an easy means of publishing what they produce. Aggregators help disseminate that writing. A lot of academics who are experts in a particular subject have fairly readable blogs (many have no blogs, or unreadable blogs, but we’ll focus on the readable ones), and the academics who once would have been consigned to journals now have an outlet—assuming they can write well (many can’t).

We don’t need to wait two to five years for a novelist to decide to write a Big Novel on a topic. We often have the raw materials at hand, and the raw material is shaped and written by someone with more respect for the reader and the reader’s time than many “essayistic” novelists. I’ve read many of those, chiefly because they’ve been assigned at various levels of my academic career. They’re not incredibly engaging.

This is not a swansong about how the novel is dead; you can find those all over the Internet, and, before the Internet, in innumerable essays and books (an awful lot of novels are read and sold, which at the very least gives the form the appearance of life). But it is a description of how the novel is, or should be, changing. Too many novels are self-involved and boring. Too many pay too little to narrative pacing—in other words, to their readers. Too many novels aren’t about stuff. Too many are obsessed with themselves.

Novels might have gotten away with these problems before the Internet. For the most part, they can’t any more, except perhaps among people who read or pretend to read novels in order to derive status from their status as readers. But being holier-than-thou via literary achievement, if it ever worked all that well, seems pretty silly today. I suppose you could write novels about how hard it is to write novels in this condition—the Zuckerman books have this quality at times, but who is the modern Zuckerman?—but I don’t think anyone beyond other writers will be much interested.

If they’re not going to be essayistic and meditative, what are novels to be? “Fun” is an obvious answer. The “forward motion” and “propulsion” that Amis mentions are good places to start. That’s how novels differ, ideally, from nonfiction.

Novels also used to have a near-monopoly on erotic material and commentary. No more. If you want to read something weird, perverse, and compelling, Reddit does a fine job of providing it (threads like “What’s your secret that could literally ruin your life if it came out?” provides what novels used to).

Stylistically, there’s still the question of how weird and attenuated a writer can make individual sentences before the work as a whole becomes unreadable or boring or both. For at least a century and change, writers could go further and further in breaking grammar, syntax, and point of view rules while still being comprehensible. By the time you get to late Joyce or Samuel Beckett’s novels, however, you start to see the limits of incomprehensibility and rule breaking regarding sentence structure, grammar, or both.

Break enough rules and you have word salad instead of language.

Most of us don’t want to read word salad, though, so Finnegans Wake and Malone Dies remain the province of specialists writing papers to impress other specialists. We want “forward motion” and “propulsion.” A novel must delight in terms of the plot and the language used. Many, many novels don’t. Amis is aware of this—he says, “I’m not interested in making a diagnostic novel. I’m 100 percent committed in fiction to the pleasure principle—that’s what fiction is, and should be.” But I’m not sure his fiction shows this (as House of Meetings and Koba the Dread show). Nonetheless, I’m with him in principle, and, I hope, practice.

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

July 13, 2012 By in Links Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

* The camera you have with you; notice this:

Almost nothing I’ve shot since 2010 is usable.

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

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

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

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

It’s here: Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Prisoner of Heaven

July 10, 2012 By in Books, Fiction Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

This came in the mail yesterday:

(It was actually released today, but books that are pre-ordered through Amazon have a nifty habit of showing up a day early.)

I finished it between some of the monumentally tedious readings for my PhD exams. Expect more later. The short version: the novel starts slower than The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel’s Game, and, despite the note that

The Prisoner of Heaven is part of a cycle of novels set in the literary universe of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books of which The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel’s Game are the two first instalments. Although each work within the cycle presents an independent, self-contained tale, they are all connected through characters and storylines, creating thematic and narrative links.

the new novel depends substantially on its predecessors, either of which can be read independently much more easily than The Prisoner of Heaven.

The paper quality is also much worse than the previous hardcovers.

Literature and its language:

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

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

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

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

Links: Literature, SF, the Amazon effect, Paul Fussell, cocktails and drinks, bring something to the table

June 13, 2012 By in Books Leave a comment

* Are literary classics obsolete? A new study says today’s writers are influenced by authors of the present, not the past. This basically describes me.

* The Amazon Effect:

We also feared bloated overheads would hold editors hostage to an unsustainable commercial imperative. (We were right.) But little did we imagine that the blunderbuss for change would arrive in the form of an avaricious imperium called Amazon. It is something of a surprise to see so many now defending the practices of corporate publishers who, just yesterday, were excoriated as philistines out to coarsen the general culture.

* Is SF Still The “Big Idea” Genre? Use this for its ideas and for book recommendations.

* Speaking of SF, Economist Paul Krugman Is a Hard-Core Science Fiction Fan: “The science fiction world has a lot of people doing seriously imaginative thinking, and my usual world is one where, you know, I like to hope that my friends and the people whose work I admire are adventurous thinkers, but we do tend to stick pretty close to the ground on a restricted set of issues, and it’s great to get to talk to people. . .”

Paul Fussell, Literary Scholar and Critic, Is Dead at 88; I especially like this: “At Harvard he developed a disdain for academia akin to what he felt for the military” and this: “These were books, he would later recall, that he was ‘supposed to write.’ Then it struck him that he might reach a wider audience by comparing the art and literature created in response to earlier wars with that inspired by World War I.” The books you’re “supposed to write” seldom seem to be the ones people actually read.

* An Economist Gets (a Zero Martini) Lunch, or how to find places with good cocktails and good food.

* The book reviewer vs the autograph-seeker: the secret to consistent success with women.

* The great Verizon FiOS ripoff.

* David Lee Hoffman and the fight against intrusive government; actual NYT title: “In Hippie Holdout, a Fight Over Worms and Moats.”

This is frustrating: A domain name camper took jseliger.wordpress.com, and the dangers of relying on wordpress.com.

June 4, 2012 By in miscellaenous, Personal Tags: , , 3 Comments

I looked at this site’s statistics at wordpress.com a few minutes ago and saw only a handful of hits from today. Apparently the jseliger.wordpress.com domain expired in April, and, although I thought it would automatically renew because of the blogging bundle I’d bought through WordPress, it apparently didn’t.

Instead, a spammy and nasty domain registrar named GoDaddy.com took it. Apparently, however, they’re likely to charge a very large amount of money to get it back—which means it’s probably gone forever, and the innumerable people who linked to jseliger.wordpress.com at various points in the last two years are feeding the GoDaddy beast.

I’d be lying if I said that this didn’t hurt.

This is frustrating: A domain name camper took jseliger.com, and the dangers of relying on wordpress.com.

June 4, 2012 By in miscellaenous, Personal Tags: , , 3 Comments

I looked at this site’s statistics at wordpress.com a few minutes ago and saw only a handful of hits from today. Apparently the jseliger.com domain expired in April, and, although I thought it would automatically renew because of the blogging bundle I’d bought through WordPress, it apparently didn’t.

Instead, a spammy and nasty domain registrar named GoDaddy.com took it. Apparently, however, they’re likely to charge a very large amount of money to get it back—which means it’s probably gone forever, and the innumerable people who linked to jseliger.com at various points in the last two years are feeding the GoDaddy beast.

I’d be lying if I said that this didn’t hurt.

EDIT: GoDaddy also has a fake “domain bid” service for about $75, which they’ll use to “negotiate” with the registrant—which is a subsidiary of their own organization!

Those are European ideas in Anaïs Nin's Little Birds

May 29, 2012 By in Briefly Noted, Fiction Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Anaïs Nin’s story “A Model” begins with this:

My mother had European ideas about young girls. I was sixteen. I had never gone out alone with young men, I had never read anything but literary novels, and by choice I never was like girls of my age. I was what you would call a sheltered woman [. . .]

(I think a character in one of Michel Houellebecq’s novels says something about American movies’ influence on European sexuality and implies Europeans are somehow behind in this regard at some point in the past, though I can’t find the quote.)

Today’s stereotypes depict “European ideas” as being sexually hedonistic, especially regarding teenagers who are supposed to be under their parents’ control. One can such ideas manifested in discussions of, say, the Dutch response to emerging sexuality, or in Amy Schalet’s “Sex, love, and autonomy in the teenage sleepover.” If widespread assumptions about European and American sexual ideologies flipped at some point in the 20th Century, I’d be curious to know why and how.