Tag Archives: Culture

The Dan Savage Interview Problem

December 28, 2014 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Dan Savage’s Playboy interview is interesting for many reasons (among them: Playboy still exists?) and he gets many things right in it and the interview is worth reading. Nonetheless he gets one important thing mostly wrong:

Sex negativity is imposed on us by religion, parents and a culture that can’t deal with sex. [. . .] Judaism, Christianity, Islam and almost every other faith have constantly tried to insert themselves between your genitals and your salvation, because then they can regulate and control you. Then you need them to intercede with God, so they target your junk and stigmatize your sexual desire. If you have somebody by the balls or the ovaries, you’ve got them.

Let me channel Jonathan Haidt and The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Haidt writes that “Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.” Religions serve or served a lot of purposes, and as Savage and Haidt both note regulation was one of them, and sexual regulation exists, as far as I know, in all cultures that have produced writing.

Regulation and control aren’t just about control for their own sake; they’re about solving coordination problems that allow people to act within a system with some expectation of how others will act. Religious regulations weren’t just about stigmatizing desire: they were about trying to create functional societies that minimize jealousy, wasteful resource fights, and so on, while maximizing the chance that the society’s members actually survive and reproduce. Religions act as operating systems for societies (which is a metaphor I’ve stolen from Neal Stephenson). The surviving religions have literally been battled-tested.

Stigmatizing sexual desire happens because desire can be overwhelming and destructive. That was particularly true in an age before birth control, antibiotics, and the many other lovely technologies we take for granted. Even then, a lot of desire found a way towards expression.

It is true that a lot of modern religious figures don’t understand that good guides to life in the year 1000 may not be particularly relevant in post-industrial societies, or that technology may be rapidly reconfiguring what rules make sense and what rules don’t. Robin Hanson has argued in a variety of places (like here and here) that pre-modern foraging societies and farming societies had very different sets of values based on their respective needs. Each group tends to think that its morality is eternal and unchanging, but its morality, rules, and codes may actually arise in response to the conditions of the society. Hanson thinks we may be moving back towards “forager” norms, since we’re now much wealthier and much more able to collectively bear the costs of, say, single motherhood, members of society that don’t produce more than they consume, and so on.

The major Western religions (Christianity and Islam in particular, and Judaism to a large extent) arose or developed in farming societies, and their times have marked them. That sort of idea didn’t of course make it into the religion—one way to enforce religious thinking is to argue that the thinking is eternal and unchanging—and it couldn’t: the Industrial Revolution was impossible to predict before it happened. Values battles of the last 50 (and really more like 100 – 150) years have occurred because social changes lags and sometimes impedes technological change.

We may also see religious systems persist today because followers of religious systems may simply leave many more descendants, who in turn follow the religion, and than those who don’t. I don’t have a citation for this off the top of my head, but it’s fairly well known in social science that religious people have more children, and start having children at younger ages, than secular people. Children tend to act like their parents to a greater extent than is commonly realized.

Given those facts, we may see religions persist because they still enable people to create more people faster than those who don’t participate in such a system. Europe may be a societal-wide example of this phenomenon: it’s probably the least-religious place on earth, and yet the continent is facing serious demographic challenges because of the age distribution of its population and the fact that native-born Europeans are not having enough children. As always there are many other factors at play and I don’t want to isolate religious belief as the sole factor, but there is likely more than correlation going on too.

Note that I’m trying to be relatively value-neutral and descriptive in this post. The amount of value-neutral commentary on these issues is in my view much too low, which may be why we see a lot of ignorance and shouting in public spaces, while people otherwise quietly go about their lives.

I’ll also note that as a religiously indifferent person myself, I find it odd to write this quasi defense of religion. Nonetheless Savage is looking at a small piece of a larger whole and mistakenly thinking that the piece is the whole.

Here is Tyler Cowen on related matters. Here is my earlier post on religion in secular life. The extent to which religious behavior is driven by feeling is underrated. Sex and religion are also fields that some people choose to make their defining characteristic. The religious tendency in this  direction is well-known, but as Katherine Frank writes in Plays Well in Groups: “This is at some level a hobby, sex for fun. As with any hobby, you will make friends, acquaintances and even enemies as you partake. Sex is easy—insert tab A into slot B—but friendship takes time to development” (64). “Hobbies” generally don’t define people, yet how many of the religiously inclined would describe religion as a hobby? Is friendship a hobby?

How do you know when you’re being insensitive? How do you know when you’re funny?

December 22, 2014 By in Culture, Teaching Tags: , , , 3 Comments

“Cultural Sensitivity, Cultural Insensitivity, and the ‘Big Bootie’ Problem in Grant Writing” is the rare Grant Writing Confidential post likely to interest Story’s Story readers too, and it concerns a question allegedly given by a high school biology teacher on a high school test about genetics:

“LaShamanda has a heterozygous big bootie, the dominant trait. Her man Fontavius has a small bootie which is recessive. They get married and have a baby named LaPrincess” the biology assignment prompts students.

The assignment then continues to ask, “What is the probability that LaPrincess will inherit her mama’s big bootie?”

As I go on to say in the post, this question comes from media accounts, and we should be skeptical of what we read in the media. But, with that in mind:

Let’s attempt to imagine what might have been going through the teacher’s mind: first off, the teacher said the worksheet “had been passed down to her by other teachers,” which indicates that she might not have looked closely at it. Since I’ve taught plenty of college classes, I can vouch for an instructor’s desire to use what’s been tested and teach efficiently. Secondly, though, she’s probably been hearing discourse and through mandated professional development about cultural sensitivity and incorporating non-dominant or non-Anglo cultures into her teaching for her entire career.

We’re not trying to defend the teacher, but we are saying that her thinking may be understandable, even if the execution is misplaced. Her conundrum, if it exists, can be stated simply: Where does cultural sensitivity end and cultural appropriation or cultural insensitivity begin?

A friend saw the post and he called the big bootie incident a “reverse Poe’s Law,” and while I’d never heard of Poe’s Law it’s brilliant: “Without a clear indication of the author’s intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism.”

The teacher in question, however, might not have been trying to deliberately parody excessive cultural awareness. Being a teacher has taught me a lot, and one thing it’s taught me is that if people have to make thousands of micro decisions in a given year, as teachers do, some are going to end up being wrong. That’s true of me and it’s like true of you in your own life and occupation.

In class, for example, I usually try to err on the side of being entertaining rather than boring, but that has the side effect of being potentially offensive. I’m sure that if someone had a mic on me every time I teach, that person could take something out of context and throw it in an article and make me look bad. Yet I’ve had to sit through insufferably dull classes, which is totally inexcusable in many literature classes, and I don’t want to inflict insufferable dullness on captive students to the extent I can avoid doing so.

Nonetheless in the current media climate, and in a climate in which it’s impossible to tell in advance what’s going to be acceptable to everyone, the risks of being interesting and real are real. The friend who linked to Poe’s law says that the dangerous class on his campus is “The Biology of Sex.” As he says,

If you teach it straight, you end up giving a plumbing lesson. My favored approach is to treat it more like a stand-up routine, but then you run the risk of offending someone. You can usually get away with a lot if you have built up a rapport with your class.

But, on the other hand, he says that no one knows anything about the subject and that students study hard because no one wants to fail sex (the phrase “study hard” may be an expression of my friend’s sense of humor).

I’m inclined toward the benefit of the doubt where possible because we’re now living in a world where a small number of hypersensitive or humorless activists can cause a disproportionate amount of grief. Academic novels have largely traced this development—Philip Roth’s The Human Stain is one good example; Francine Prose’s Blue Angel is another—but they seem to have had little impact. Too bad. Paglia’s descriptions of shrinking violet students is distressingly apt.

As “being reasonably sensitive” transitions towards “being unable to function in a reasonable way” for a small but noisy number of people, we’re going to see more stories like “The Trouble with Teaching Rape Law:”

Imagine a medical student who is training to be a surgeon but who fears that he’ll become distressed if he sees or handles blood. What should his instructors do? Criminal-law teachers face a similar question with law students who are afraid to study rape law.

Much of this issue is academic, because when people hit the real world they’ll often find that clients and customers are indifferent to their feelings or comfort and want their problems solved, whether that problem is rape prosecution or human sexuality or writing or whatever.* Some big companies are intensely bureaucratized and can still have a large institutional feel, but the majority are small and just trying to make it however they can. In which case an excess of sensitivity can be an excessive liability.

EDIT: See also “The race to the bottom of victimhood and ‘social justice’ culture.”

* This is one reason it’s often not worth arguing with academics.

Owning vs sharing: Don’t get caught in the ugly middle

October 13, 2014 By in Culture Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

In a tweet Paul Graham writes: “As buying and selling become easier, owning approaches sharing.” That describes my behavior regarding many objects, especially electronics: for as long as I’ve been buying Macs and Mac products, I’ve been selling the old versions on Craigslist for a third to half of their initial value. In some sense I’m actually leasing them, but using myself as the leasing agent. Although I’ve owned a car I actually prefer not to and Uber is accelerating the ability to rent cars when needed and avoid the hassles of ownership. Housing has of course long been both rented and owned, and like many economists I find the U.S. obsession with owning housing to be misguided.

But there are other ways too that owning approaches sharing in my life:

  • Old cameras and lenses get sold to fund new ones. Like Macs, they tend to retain a fair amount of value—usually about half for lenses and a third for camera bodies.
  • It’s not uncommon for me to sell books that look promising but don’t live up to expectations, almost always through Amazon (despite Amazon’s encourage for buyers to scam sellers; for objects worth less than $20 I don’t think the issue is overwhelmingly important).
  • Although I haven’t begun doing this yet, I think that selling bikes may be more economical than moving them. The last bike I moved from Tucson to New York was probably a net loss and should’ve been sold instead of shipped.

There are some items that still aren’t easily sold, like beds and furniture, in part because they’re heavy, in part because they can harbor bed bugs, and in part because they just aren’t that valuable. I don’t have the citation handy, but I’ve read that Ikea might be facilitating mobility by making it cheap and easy to setup new apartments: it’s possible to buy a couch, a chair, some dishes, a bed, and some shelves for under $1,000, in the course of an afternoon (although I’d prefer a Tuft & Needle bed, but that’s an aside).

Among my friends, city-to-city moves often entail dumping most of their stuff and buying it again at the destination, since the moving cost is too high to justify the hassle. That’s less true of me because I have a sit-stand desk and some other pretty expensive gear, but in this respect I’m in the minority. Keeping a minority of one’s stuff may also lead to a more satisfying, experience-rich life, at least for some people.

The habit of either having very expensive and durable stuff or throwaway stuff may also be indicative of the polarization of many domains, in which it makes sense to either buy or be the best, or buy throwaway stuff or don’t bother competing. Don’t get caught in the ugly middle. Like “Death before inconvenience,” “Don’t get caught in the ugly middle,” is something companies should contemplate.

Owning cars and houses in particular is just insanely expensive. In “The Cheapest Generation,” Derek Thompson and Jordan Weissmann observe that

Smartphones compete against cars for young people’s big-ticket dollars, since the cost of a good phone and data plan can exceed $1,000 a year.

But cars cost close to $10,000 a year, according to AAA—or at least an order of magnitude more than a phone. Even if other transportation expenses (Uber, bikes, subways (where available)) cost a couple thousand dollars, they’re still significantly cheaper than owning a car. And a phone plus a data plan enables those alternatives. Owning and sharing may be less opposed than they were once believed to be.

The appeal of “pickup” or “game” or “The Redpill” is a failure of education and socialization

June 26, 2014 By in Culture, Essays, ideas, Philosophy, sex Tags: , , , , , 11 Comments

Since posting “The inequality that matters II: Why does dating in Seattle get left out?” and “Men are where women were 30 years ago?” I’ve gotten into a couple discussions about why Neil Strauss’s The Game is popular and why adjacent subjects like “pickup” and the “Redpill” have become more popular too. One friend wrote, “It’s so tedious to see how resentful men get—a subject much in the news lately because of the Santa Barbara shooting…”

That’s somewhat true, but underlying, longer-term trends are still worth examining. The world is more complex than it used to be in many respects, and that includes sex and dating. Until relatively recently—probably the late 60s / early 70s—it was common for most guys to marry a local girl, maybe straight out of high school, and marry a girl whose parents the guy probably knows and her parents probably know the guy’s. Parents, families, and religious authorities probably had a strong effect on what their children did, and a lot of men and women married as virgins. The dating script was relatively easy to follow and relatively many people paired early. In the 60s an explosion of divorces began, and that complicated matters in ways that are still being sorting out.

Today there are more hookups for a longer period of time and fewer universal scripts that everyone follows, or is supposed to be following. Instead, one sees a proliferation of possibilities, from the adventurous player—which is not solely a male role—to early marriage (though those early marriages tend to end in divorce).

Dating “inequality” has probably increased, since the top guys are certainly having a lot more sex than the median or bottom guys. To some extent high-status guys have always had more sex, but now “top” could mean dozens of partners at a relatively early age, and the numerical top is more readily available to guys who want it. In the old regime it was probably possible for almost everyone to find a significant other of some sort (and I think families had more sway and say). Now that may be harder, especially for guys towards the bottom who don’t want to realize that if they’re towards the bottom the women they’re likely to attract are likely to be around the same place. We don’t all get a Hollywood ending, and Hollywood itself is unrealistic.

Guys who notice that movies, TV shows, and some books portray an unlikely or unrealistic set of dating and marriage patterns should start to wonder what the “real thing” looks like. The Game isn’t bad, though it is dated, and I expect Tucker Max and Geoffrey Miller’s book Mate to be popular for reasons similar to the ones that made The Game popular.

I’ve also noticed an elegiac sense that a weirdly large number of the “pickup artists” or “Red Pill” (sometimes it’s used as two words, sometimes as one) or “manosphere” guys have about the past, and how back then it was relatively easy to find, date, and marry a woman. Much of this is probably mythological, and I don’t think most of them would be happy marrying at 20 or 24 and having two or three kids by 28 or 29.

Like all generalizations, the stereotype above are riddled with holes and exceptions—see further the oeuvre of John Updike—but I’m examining broad trends rather than specific details. Today almost no one gets married straight out of high school. Routine moves from city to city are normal, and each move often rips someone from the social networks that provide romantic connections. Families play a smaller and smaller role. Twenty-somethings, and especially women, don’t listen to their parents’s romantic advice.

If you don’t have the infrastructure of school, how do you meet lots of new people? Jobs are one possibility but looking for romantic prospects at work has obvious pitfalls. Online dating is another, but people who can’t effectively date offline often aren’t any better on—and are often worse.

Technology matters too. Technologies take a long time—decades, at least—to really reach fruition and for their ripples to be felt throughout societies and cultures. Virtually all big ideas start small.* That’s an important lesson from Where Good Ideas Come From, The Great Stagnation, The Enlightened Economy, and similar books about technological, economic, and social history.

A suite of interrelated technologies around birth control (like hormonal birth control itself, better forms of it, and easy condom distribution and acquisition) are still playing out. Same with antibiotics and vaccines against STIs. VOX offers one way to think about this in “From shame to game in one hundred years: An economic model of the rise in premarital sex and its de-stigmatisation.” It begins:

The last one hundred years have witnessed a revolution in sexual behaviour. In 1900, only 6% of US women would have engaged in premarital sex by the age of 19, compared to 75% today . . . Public acceptance of premarital sex has reacted with a lag.

Culture is still catching up. Pickup, game, and the Redpill, regardless of what you personally think of them, are part of the the cultural catchup. They’re responses from guys frustrated by the way their own efforts fail while some of their peers’s efforts succeed. A lot of women appear less interested in an okay guy with an okay job and an okay but not that exciting or fun life, relative to guys with a different set of qualities. Men invest in what they think women want and women invest in what they think men want, and relative wants have changed over time.

Almost every guy sees or knows at least one guy and often a couple who do spectacularly well with women. Guys who are frustrated or who can’t achieve the romantic life they want start to ask, “What are the successful guys doing that I’m not?” Pickup or game or the Redpill are different strains of systematic answers. All three may have things wrong with them, but all three are better than nothing. Saying “Women are mysterious” or “No one knows what women want” is bullshit, and guys only have to look around to notice it.

Pickup artists and those who read them are responding to a cultural milieu in which most guys get terrible socialization regarding dating and women. Pickup artists are stepping into that gap. They’re trying to answer questions in a concrete way, which most people, including their detractors, aren’t. In a review of Clarisse Thorn’s Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser I wrote:

feminism does very little to describe, let alone evaluate, how micro, day-to-day interactions are structured. Pickup artists, or whatever one may want to call guys who are consciously building their skills at going out and getting women, are describing the specific comments, conversations, styles, and venues women respond to. The pickup artists are saying, “This is how you approach a woman in a bar, this is how you strike up a conversation at the grocery store, and so forth.” In other words, they’re looking at how people actually go about the business of getting laid. Their work is often very detailed, and the overall thrust is toward the effectiveness of getting laid rather than how male-female interactions work in theory. Feminism, in Thorn’s view, appears to be silent, or mostly silent, on the day-to-day interactions.

Who else is doing that? Almost no one. As with virtually any other topic, one can muddle along through trial and error (and mostly error) or one can try to systematically learn about it and apply that learning to the problem domain, along with the learning others have done.

To be sure, the worst of the group if just trying to sell shit, and sell as much of it as possible to fools. The best of the group is saying things that almost no one else is saying.

Max, Miller, and Nils Parker wrote Mate: The Young Man’s Guide To Sex And Dating, which is, among other things, a description of modern dating and a description of why so many guys do it so badly for so long. Confusion reigns, and the book promises to be the sort of fun-but-comprehensive read that can be given to unhappy, puzzled guys who understand something is wrong but don’t know how to fix it.

One strategy in response to new social circumstances is to figure out what you should do to be reasonably successful and what you can do to make yourself more appealing. This is not a male-only question: virtually every issue of Cosmo is about how to attract men, retain men, and deal with female friends and rivals. Another is to blame women, or withdraw from dating, or kill innocents because of your own frustration.

If you think half the population isn’t into you, the problem is with you, not the population. There’s an important similarity to business here: If you start a business and no one wants to buy your products or services, you can blame the market or you can realize that you’re not doing what people want.

It’s easier to blame women than it is to make real changes, and there is a tendency among some of the self-proclaimed “Redpill”-types to do that. Paul Graham says the real secret to making wealth is to “Make something people want.” In dating the real “secret” (which isn’t a secret) is to be a person people like. How to do that can be a whole book’s worth of material.

Blame is easy and improvement is hard. Short guys do have it harder than tall guys—but so what? Go ask a fat girl, or a flat-chested one, how much fun dating is for her, compared to her slenderer or better-endowed competitors. Honesty in those conversations is probably rare, but it is out there: usually in late-night conversations after a couple drinks.

I don’t hate “pickup artists” as a group, though I dislike the term and wish there was something better. Many of the critics are accurate. But so what? criticizing without recognizing the impetus for the development in the first place is attacking the plant while ignoring the roots. This post, like so many of the posts I write, is looking at or attempting to look at the root.

Feminism didn’t come from nowhere. Neither has pickup.

* Which is not to say that all small ideas will automatically become big. Most don’t. But ideas, technologies, practices, and cultures spread much more slowly than is sometimes assumed, especially among the rah-rah tech press.

Men are where women were 30 years ago?

April 17, 2014 By in Culture, Links, sex Tags: , , , , 3 Comments

In “Studying U.S. Families: ‘Men Are Where Women Were 30 Years Ago’,” Stephanie Coontz makes some interesting points but, it seems to me, is missing some of the important forces acting on men. She says, for example, that

In some senses, men are where women were 30 years ago. Fifty years ago, women were told, this is your place, stay in it. But about 30 years ago, it was, yes, you can do other things [. . .] Men are at the point where they’re beginning to discover that there are things beyond the old notion of masculinity that are rewarding.

I think the basic issues are simpler:

* Most people have no pre-defined roles in gender or work; this is good in some ways but has costs in others and leads to a lot of confusion, especially given the predominant ideology in schools.

* At some point, probably around 1980 or so (1973 could work, though this wasn’t widely recognized at the time) we entered a period of greater societal, technological, and social volatility. It is hard to predict what the future will look like and what skills and roles will be valuable. My only guess about what will be perpetually valuable is read, writing, and math.

In addition, there is a large number of people (certainly a minority but a reasonably substantial minority) brought up in religious environments that they accept uncritically but that don’t map well onto the modern social world and onto modern hypocrisy. Someone like Dalrock is the consequence (not that I don’t endorse everything he writes or even a plurality of what he writes, but he does criticize many of the social-sexual currents in contemporary Christianity).

* All Joy and No Fun is an interesting book for many reasons, but one is its point about raising contemporary children: many if not most of us don’t know what we’re raising them to do, or be. This makes the task inherently difficult.

* When writers say things like:

It’s so hard to continue the revolution in family life in a situation where there’s so little support for family-friendly work policies, where there’s not good child care available, when there isn’t parental leave. Why don’t we have them?

They actually mean that they want stuff other people are going to have to work to pay for. Not surprisingly most of us want something for nothing. We also have a problem in that lots of old people vote, so their interests are well-represented among the allocation of the federal budget, but not a lot of children do. It’s easy to call for handouts and hard to pay for them.

* Feminism has had a marketing and perhaps a content problem for decades. Among my female students at the University of Arizona, virtually none wanted to be identified as feminists. People who do want to be identified should contemplate why. It may be that students get the motte and bailey issues of modern feminism (do read the whole thing).

* Things that are adaptive in short-term relationships may be maladaptive in long-term relationships and vice-versa, yet I too seldom see this point.

* Men notice the kinds of men who women tend to be attracted to, and a lot of the men women are actually attracted to don’t appear to be the kind who Coontz probably thinks they should be attracted to. In addition, a lot of early socialization about sex and dating is so bad that men (and probably women too) need to learn how to overcome it. Books like Mate and Self-Made Man are important in this respect.

* It should be obvious by now that what people say they want and what they actually do are often quite different.

Politics repeats itself while science and art make it new

March 11, 2014 By in Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

In “Coolidge biography shows how little American politics has changed” Philip Greenspun points out that “Coolidge is primarily about events that occurred roughly 100 years ago, but the political debates often seem as though they could be in tomorrow morning’s news.” Greenspun points out a large number of similarities, though I do think there are more notable differences than he lists; one of the more prominent is the calls, whenever something bad happens, for the federal government to Do Something. Many of those calls in Coolidge’s time were directed at the local or at most state level.

Still, most of what he says is correct and to me the many similarities between 1910 – 1930 and the present imply that a lot of political posturing is wasted signaling. Energy towards politics would probably be better directed towards art, science, and technology—the latter fields at least move unambiguously forward, and in my view the first field does too.* A really good book lasts for decades or centuries while political opinions are almost always of the moment The effort expended in fields that make progress move not just the individual but the whole of humanity forward; most energy spent on politics is just a circle and maybe even a circle jerk.

Science and technology in particular increase the size of the pie that politicians (and the voters who elect them) can fight over.

* When I hear people—usually professors or wannabe professors—argue that art doesn’t move forward like technology (sample, from Wendy Lesser’s Why I Read: “There is no progress in the world of letters, as there is, say, in science or manufacturing. As the centuries pass, we do not get better or smarter at reading, and the authors among us do not get better at writing”), I usually ask them why people keep creating so much new art and why so many people want the new stuff, not the old stuff. By now, there are an infinite number of books to read and an infinite number of songs to hear. If art really didn’t move forward and become better over time, at least as defined by popularity, we wouldn’t see people constantly move towards the new. I haven’t heard a really good response to this point.

Looks matter and always will because they convey valuable information, and a note about the media

January 23, 2014 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In “The Revolution Will Not Be Screen-Printed on a Thong” Maureen O’Connor laments that people judge each other based on looks (“Why can’t we just not obsess about bodies?”), and then kind of answers her own question:

I ask that in earnest — it’s possible that we actually can’t stop, that this compulsive corporeal scrutiny is some sort of biological imperative, or species-wide neurosis left over from millennia of treating women as chattel.

We judge each based on looks because, as Geoffrey Miller describes in Spent and others have described elsewhere, looks convey a lot of useful information about age, fertility, and health. Beyond that, women are competitive with each other in this domain because they know (correctly) that men judge them based on looks (among other things).

In addition, as Tim Harford discusses in The Logic of Life, speed dating and other research shows that women reject about 90% of those in any given speed-dating event, and men reject about 80% of women. Both men and women usually report that they want similar things—men want youth and beauty; women want height and humor. But researchers devised clever experiments in which dating pools of either men or women have changed systematically—for example, by having entirely very tall men or very short men. Yet the rate at which men and women accept or decline dates remains the same.

That implies “compulsive corporeal scrutiny” is based partially on the knowledge that any particular person will be judged based on the other people around.

I don’t bring this up merely to correct a point in an article; it’s also to observe that a lot of the stuff one reads online is based on limited knowledge. As I get older I increasingly get the impression that a lot of journalists would be better served, at least intellectually speaking, to spend more time reading books and less time… doing other things?

One thing I like about journalists or journalist-blogger hybrids like Megan McArdle and Matt Yglesias is their wide, deep reading, and their willingness to connect wide, deep reading with the subjects they write about. One might disagree with them for ideological or other reasons, but they do at least know what they’re talking about and usually try to learn when they don’t. Too much of the media—whether in The Seattle Times or The Wall Street Journal or New York Magazine—is just making noise.*

Given the choice between most media and books, choose books. The challenge, of course, is finding them.

EDIT: Maybe Ezra Klein’s new mystery venture will solve some of the complaints above; he mentions “the deficiencies in how we present information” and promises “context.” I hope so, and certainly I’m not the first person to notice the many problems with the way much of the media works.

* Granted, I may be contributing to this in my own small way by contributing a link and possibly hits to a noise-making article that should be better than it is.

Links: Cars and cities, antibiotics and sex, mattresses, universities, writing advice and more

December 21, 2013 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

* Cars Kill Cities.

* How to design happier cities.

* Computer science professor leaves, explains the problems with his institution, and doesn’t include the standard false-guilt genuflection. Or, as he puts it, he’s “going feral.”

* How Tuft & Needle is disrupting the wildly corrupt mattress industry; I’d buy from them next time I need a mattress.

* The media doesn’t talk about suicide and statistics about suicide with guns are nonexistent or bad.

* “No Antibiotics, No Sexual Revolution,” or, “how the legal system is holding back medical innovation.” See also Alex Tabarrok’s wonderful and short book Launching the Innovation Renaissance.

* “Are Graduate Students At Private Schools ‘Employees’?” Given the amount and kind of work they do, it’s hard to answer “no.” At the University of Arizona, English grad students taught two classes per semester, for pay—the same amount of teaching professors did.

* “Solving the Shortage in Primary Care Doctors;” see also my essay “Why you should become a nurse or physicians assistant instead of a doctor: the underrated perils of medical school.”

* Yet another reason why public schools are as fucked up as they are: Student Gets Suspended, Loses Scholarship After Hugging a Teacher.

* The politics of science fiction.

* “Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots.”

* “How to Write: A Year in Advice from Franzen, King, Hosseini, and More: Highlights from 12 months of interviews with writers about their craft and the authors they love.” Perhaps the most notable part is the number of people who give opposing or at least semi-contradictory advice. From that we might infer a meta rule: what works for other people won’t necessarily work for you (or me), and there isn’t necessarily a perfectly “right” way to do it.

If you don’t have a purpose, pick one for yourself

September 16, 2013 By in Books, Culture, Fiction, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

The New Yorker‘s “Briefly Noted” book review section (behind a paywall, but check here if you’re curious) has a review Very Recent History that displays all the telltale signs of pointlessly plotless modern novels: adrift protagonists; problems with few or no important stakes; expecting the world to be automatically interesting, instead of you being interesting to the world; consumption for its own sake rather than for the sake of pleasure. Even the language of the review is stupid, saying that Very Recent History “serves to underscore the sense of trauma that is daily life in a late-capitalist moment.”

What? How do we know this is “a late capitalist moment?” Assuming capitalism as such dates to the 18th Century and, say, Adam Smith, and is the dominant organization of successful societies in 200 years, this is a “mid capitalist moment.” And there is little or no “sense of trauma” in “daily life” for most urban dwellers: If you want fucking trauma, try getting gassed in Syria, or AIDS in much of Africa, or live as one of hundreds of millions of people without electricity or running water in India. Get some fucking perspective people. Being laid off from a white-collar job is not the same as being shot by the regime’s uniformed thugs.

The other funny thing, as a friend mentioned in an e-mail, is that “no novelist who manages to write an entire book and get it mentioned in the major media is anything like those adrift protagonists; that’s someone with purpose.”

There’s a whole genre of these novels about people who behave stupidly in transparent ways. My favorite example is Adam Wilson’s Flatscreen, because it helped crystallize the problem for me, though there are many others examples. It’s also not a badly written book. These kinds of novels can actually be fabulously well-written, and have all sorts of brilliant micro observations. Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children fits this designation. All those wonderful sentences about a bunch of boring fools leading unimportantly literary lives in New York. I wanted one of them to get a job as a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan instead of debating about whether they should Follow Their Muse or sell out.

The Emperor’s Children is an example of the apparently growing number of people who have no direction or purpose in life and choose not to have one. Call it the Girls problem, which is not having real problems while simultaneously not trying anything and not knowing about anything.

About the TV show Girls: it has probably engendered more essays about it than viewers, but my fiancée and I watched the first couple episodes and the beginnings of a couple episodes after that, but it was too dumb to keep going: the characters were privileged morons. I wanted to climb in the TV and say, “Hey! There are real problems out there! People are starving in various places! Science is finding and doing all kinds of awesome stuff. Programs need to be written. There are sick people in hospitals and children who need education. Why don’t you all get real fucking jobs?”

I would love to see one of the girls on Girls get a job as an ER nurse or doctor. They’d learn a little about what’s fucking important. Or they could be working on democracy in Guinea. None of the characters in Girls appear to be learning how to paint, draw, write education grants, keep tropical fish, hack, solder, cook, sew… the list goes on. None seem to appreciate that SpaceX is sending rockets into space and is probably our best collective shot at visiting Mars in the next 40 years. Wow!

Whole industries are being shaken and rebuilt all around us (publishing, for example, by the colossus in Seattle).

Their collective response to this, however, is to continue to gaze lovingly at the lint gathered in their own navels, and to wonder why people aren’t beating a path to their door to offer them fame and fortune. Hell, they can’t even make the bad sex they’re sometimes having into a politically or intellectually interesting act, as someone like Catherine Millet or Toni Bentley can. They have no sense of the past. They have no sense beyond the most rudimentary knowledge of other cultures. They’re not trying to be an amazing novelist like Anne Patchett.

Why would you want to own a car if you could avoid it?

August 13, 2013 By in Cities, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , 5 Comments

My Dad sent “Who’s Buying ‘Youth’ Cars? Seniors Aging Boomers Are Prime Buyers for Small Vehicles That Auto Makers Target at Hipsters,” because he bought a Mini Cooper a few years ago, which is probably targeted at “young” people. But I replied with a larger point:

Why would you want a car if you could avoid having one?

Young people don’t care about cars. They care about smartphones. See here for more:

Why are younger Americans driving less?

Brad Plumer considers several good hypotheses, including the recession, gas prices, student debt, tougher legal requirements, and a stronger desire to live in places such as Brooklyn. I would add one other factor to his list: because they are working less. A more speculative additional hypothesis would be “because it is easier to have sex without driving to get it.”

Ugh

Ugh

A nice car is still a status symbol but a much less important status symbol than it used to be. Cars are expensive, dirty, and cause a lot of traffic. Old people like you (wrongly) associate cars with freedom and the open road, because when you grew up the roads were relatively empty.

Young people today associate cars with traffic and their parents and death. Cars are like jails. In ye olde days getting laid meant cruising to drive-ins or malls or whatever. Today getting laid means texting, Facebook, and OKCupid. Former students have talked about Tinder (sp?), which is Grindr for straight people. Going back to the status symbol point, is it more useful for a guy looking to get laid to work his ass off for a BMW or to learn guitar and get a YouTube channel? For someone with no financial constraints the obvious answer is “both,” but for someone choosing between them I suspect guitar + YouTube would win.

An iPhone is much cheaper than a car. Even an iPhone, iPad, and laptop together are much cheaper than a car. See also Philip Greenspun on this.

DUI laws are also now heavily enforced and draconian (A BAC of .1 is much more reasonable than .08) and everyone knows someone who’s had ten thousand dollars or more in court costs and hassles related to DUI. Even so, a cop can ruin your night and next day for pretty much any reason if he suspects you’ve had anything to drink. Gas is much more expensive in real terms than it was even in the late 90s / early 2000s.

No one with half a brain would want to drive more than they absolutely must, so I am skeptical that any “youth-oriented pitches” will succeed because really who cares? Driving sucks. Part of selling is having something to sell that people want. And, as you yourself pointed out, you spent much of your working life in high school and college trying to keep a car in working order. AAA estimates that the average car costs $10,000 TCO, or about one quarter of median income. Even knocking $2000 off for a cheaper car, I suspect a lot of people could allocate $2000 to transit / bikes / Zipcar / etc. and come out way ahead.

Almost anyone who can avoid commuting by car is better off ditching their wheels. Even you, Dad, would be much more financially secure by selling your car, renting your parking spaces, and getting a Zipcar subscription.

[Note: My Dad doesn’t have to drive to his office.]