Tag Archives: Culture

Exploring the limits in art, writing, and science

August 4, 2013 By in Critics, Culture, ideas, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

In the poorly-titled but otherwise interesting essay “The Disquiet of Ziggy Zeitgeist: Unsettled by the sense that reality itself is dwindling, fading like sunstruck wallpaper,” Henry Allen says that “For the first time in my 72 years, I have no idea what’s going on,” because a lot of culture has splintered, for lack of a better term, and as a result “I don’t know what’s going on. I doubt that anyone does.”

That sense is a result of reaching boundaries or borders in many if not most artistic fields. In music, for example, John Cage famously “recorded” a track that is entirely silent. Composers have created songs or symphonies or whatever that seem indistinguishable from noise. Popular music’s last major style shift was the early 90s, with rap and grunge; since then, we’ve mostly heard dance-disco-hip-hop variations.

In the fine arts, the avant-garde is probably dead, as Camille Paglia has argued in various places for, what is perhaps not surprisingly, twenty years. What people call concept art or non-art or art from life appears indistinguishable from noise or pranks. Or, as Allen says, “Now I go to New York and look at a work of art in Chelsea and say: ‘Oh, that’s one of those.’ (Dripping, elephant dung, monochrome, squalor, scribbling.)”

Literature in some ways “got there” first, with Joyce (Finnegans Wake) and Beckett (whose novels are the whole of boredom) about which I wrote more in “Martin Amis, the essay, the novel, and how to have fun in fiction.” If you’re trying to write a novel that truly pushes the boundaries of the novel, you’re going to have a very hard time doing so while being comprehensible to readers.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERASex mores have fallen too: this weekend I’ve been reading Katherine Frank’s book Plays Well in Groups: A Journey Through the World of Group Sex, she describes gang bangs involving hundreds of participants, along with BDSM and assorted other sex adventures. Most people in developed countries have nothing between them and that, provided they want it. As a side note, she describes swingers who were featured on a TV show called Swing, and the swingers talked to the show’s crew, who said in this rendition that “We don’t know how you’ve done it but most people would kill to have this life.” But you don’t have to kill for that life: you only have to love for it, and most people probably could have it, or a version of it, if they want it. No murder necessary!

Porn has also reached limits or gotten asymptotically. The market has devolved from the monolithic Playboy to innumerable small, online outlets, some commercial and some not, and porn faces the same availability issues that any information does: perpetual availability. Although I’m not an expert, porn videos or pictures from, say, 2005 are still being passed around and viewed in 2013 and may continue to be in 2023. There is already more out there than a single person can digest and the amount is growing over time. Curating, searching, and sorting become the problem amid what is effectively infinite. If you want it, you can probably already find it, and if you don’t like what you find, you can probably make it for a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars.

Video games are an intriguing exception to the trends described above. They’re a young medium, since they’ve only been popular in the last 30 to 40 years and have consequently seen a tremendous explosion in sophistication: compare Pong to a modern game versus a novel published in 1980 to a novel published in 2012. Video games also piggyback on growing computational capabilities. Video games, like the Internet, are still in relative infancy, and they appear to be very far from technical or comprehensibility limits.

I’m not saying that art or artists or culture is dead, but I am saying that the boundaries of comprehensibility have been reached in many fields. If I were more of a blowhard I would also pontificate about the role of the Internet in this—Allen picks 1993 by coincidence, perhaps, but 1993 was also just before the Internet reached the masses in the developed world. Within the next decade or two more than half of the people on the planet will probably get access, and that may further splinter culture. Already it’s possible for people with weird, niche interests to easily explore those interests, like Borgen, in the absence of social feedback.

Some fields, like math, appear inexhaustible. Others, like delivering things people want (which goes by the otherwise dull name “business”) appear if not inexhaustible then nearly so, since material desires keep expanding with GDP. I also doubt that art per se will ever be exhausted; the limits of comprehensibility don’t mean people will stop making art, only that we have to find ways to make it meaningful without being able to push constantly against a conservative establishment, which has been the animating force since Romanticism and now makes little sense.

Why You Shouldn’t Trust Yelp Reviews

June 11, 2013 By in Culture Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

My Dad moved on Saturday, and the experience was horrible: the nominal “company” lied about whether the movers were employees or contractors, the movers themselves were inept and late, and they damaged a piece of furniture.

On Sunday my Dad wrote a nasty e-mail to the owner about the experience. On Monday he hadn’t heard anything, so he posted a scathing Yelp review. This afternoon—Tuesday—someone from the company called and said they’d refund the money if he took down the Yelp review.

My Dad paid $1,400 for the move. I hate to repeat myself, but it’s worth contemplating: The moving company found that a single negative Yelp review could be worth $1,400.

Why? As far as we can tell, the moving company consists of a guy with a telephone and a Yelp rating. He hires crews and rents trucks. If he loses his Internet ratings, he’s cooked.

Nonetheless, the important lesson for people on the Internet is that you shouldn’t trust Yelp and similar reviews.

One could argue that my Dad shouldn’t accept money to take down the review, but, as he observed, he’s not out to save the world from crappy movers.

Thoughts on the movie Spring Breakers

April 1, 2013 By in movies Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

* “Spring break forever” is a refrain in the movie, but spring break forever is actually hell. You need “normal” life to contextualize the party and make it special. Not every day can be a festival if a “festival” is to have any meaning. Tucker Max says in Hilarity Ensures that he “worked in Cancun, Mexico for six full weeks during my second year at Duke Law School” and by the end he says “Cancun beat me, like it eventually beats everyone.”

* A lot of the people in the theater were laughing, and so was I, because the absurdity of the movie. Is this a New York cynicism thing? Would the theater have been laughing in Oklahoma or Kansas? It was hard to tell if most of the movie was supposed to be funny.

* I don’t grok in fullness the spring break ideal, because to the extent I want to drink, take drugs, and hook up with random girls, I can do so at home, and it’s triply easy in college. That being said, I understand intellectually that for many people the distance and otherness of spring break lets them decide that “normal” rules don’t apply. . . but if they don’t apply there, why not just decide they don’t apply at home, either? Is this a lack of imagination?

* Young, attractive women very rarely commit armed robberies, as they do at the beginning of Spring Breakers to fund the trip, because armed robberies are not worth doing: from what I’ve read, the going rate for reasonably young, attractive hookers is about $200 – $250 per hour. The characters could have made more money with way less risk with a couple hours and Craigslist. But the armed robbery functions as a symbolic stepping outside of normal boundaries for them. Still, selling sex makes more sense than robbing banks.

* The movie conveys altered states effectively: the jump cuts, the voiceovers, the visual and audio not matching: for the first 50 or so minutes it’s mesmerizing, like some drugs.

* It’s axiomatic that people who do stupid, dangerous things often die. It’s possible to do things that are stupid but not dangerous, like most reality TV, or things that are dangerous but not stupid, like be an astronaut or test pilot, but the convergence of those two is uniquely irritating.

* Spring Breakers is less fun than Magic Mike but shares many points; both movies are set in Florida, and what does that say about the state?

* Related to point #3, spring break as a concept, like Vegas, fascinates me, especially from a woman’s perspective. If you’re a woman, and especially a reasonably attractive one, it isn’t hard to go out and get laid. So why bother pretending that spring break (or Vegas) is fundamentally different than any other part of your life? Some psychological / anthropological mechanism is at work here.

* The reviews that make it sound interesting are exaggerating the movie’s content; if you want porn, go watch porn, and if you want a story, watch a better movie (it’s not impossible to reconcile nudity and story—HBO does it constantly, and well, but too often movies sunder the two, which is strange given how much our early lives are devoted to stories about nudity or seeking it). Also, Tyler Cowen’s characterization is interesting, and I agree about the vitality, at least in the movie’s first half.

* Leaping from the last point, movies in general are in an interesting spot: in an age of Internet porn, there’s no particular reason other than history and path dependence for them to avoid explicit sexuality, but, on the other hand, in an age of Internet porn, showing T&A isn’t sufficient to make a movie interesting.

* I was ready to leave with about twenty minutes left, and offered to go, but she said, “Don’t you want to know what happens?” and I said, “No. Some of them are going to die, but who cares?” In the context of the movie, “Who cares?” is an important, unasked question.

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.

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.

If you have a “passion for writing” and never do it, you don’t have a passion for writing

February 9, 2013 By in Culture, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , 8 Comments

I signed up for writing-related Meetup.com notifications, and one said this:

Do you have a passion for writing but find it hard to carve out time to engage in the practice of it? It can be hard to find a local writing group convenient for your schedule. If you love to write and would like to be surrounded by others who motivate you, this is the place for you

If “you have a passion for writing,” you don’t need other people around you, any more than if you have a passion for masturbation you need a group wank. You just do it, and masturbation might arguably be the world’s most common leisure activity (among the young at the very least).

IMG_1269For 99% of people, if you “find it hard to carve out time to engage in the practice of [writing],” the solution is simple: redirect time spent on TV and Facebook to writing. If I recall correctly, William Gibson said that he doesn’t write all the time; he’s merely reallocated the time most people spend watching TV to writing. I’m not arguing that would-be writers should never watch TV, but I am arguing that needing extrinsic motivation is, in most circumstances, inferior to having intrinsic motivation.

People also may underestimate how much can be done in small blocks of time. This post, for example, has only taken me a couple of minutes. I haven’t been posting much because I’ve been self-editing a novel and writing proposals. Blogging gets crowded out by those activities. Yet it’s still possible for me to write a short post that says something substantive in about 15 minutes. Cory Doctorow has said in various places that he writes 250 words of fiction every day. A “typical” novel is about 80,000 – 90,000 words. At 250 words per day, you can write a novel in 320 days.

If you have a “passion” for writing, you can express it every day, just like many of you love yourselves every day. You don’t need a group to do it. The need for a group is identical to the need for excuses.

I’m not opposed to writers’ groups in all shapes and forms, and the right group at the right time could in principle provide valuable feedback for the right person (and the right person could give valuable feedback to others). But the raw work should be done alone, and the door opened to others when that work is done.

Why corporations?

January 16, 2013 By in business, Culture, ideas Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Arnold Kling asks: “Why Large Corporations?” I left a comment citing Peter Thiel’s answer:

Companies exist because they optimally address internal and external coordination costs. In general, as an entity grows, so do its internal coordination costs. But its external coordination costs fall. Totalitarian government is entity writ large; external coordination is easy, since those costs are zero. But internal coordination, as Hayek and the Austrians showed, is hard and costly; central planning doesn’t work.

The flipside is that internal coordination costs for independent contractors are zero, but external coordination costs (uniquely contracting with absolutely everybody one deals with) are very high, possibly paralyzingly so. Optimality—firm size—is a matter of finding the right combination.

This applies to corporations more generally, but large corporations presumably persist because they continue to solve this class of problem. Corporations also solve or ameliorate succession and other problems; one way of re-stating Thiel’s point is that corporations help align the interests of a lot of people in approximately the same direction. This mechanism obviously isn’t perfect, but it’s better than alternatives.

IMG_0298Skepticism of corporations is useful, but only when skeptics understand the problems corporations solve. I took a grad seminar on the Modernism / Postmodernism divide and was assigned the movie The Corporation, which is heavy on innuendo and rhetorical slight-of-hand and light on intellectual acuity. When the seminar discussed the movie, my classmates were happy to assume that corporations are evil—but they couldn’t identify why they exist, let alone offer coherent alternatives that don’t have obvious drawbacks. I’m not in love with the corporate legal form as some kind of ideal, but without a plausible alternative, feeling-based criticism isn’t terribly helpful. It’s like people who criticize coal power plants. . . and nuclear. . . and other viable, large-scale options.

In the seminar’s discussion, other students and the professor conflated publicly-traded corporations with privately traded ones and LLCs with C Corps, etc. (Incidentally, if you want to listen to something hilarious yet depressing, get a bunch of English grad students and professors together and tell them to talk about business). They also thought that all corporations exist solely to make money. That’s not true: Corporations do what their shareholders tell them to do. As far as I know, courts have decided that publicly traded companies need to maximize shareholder value, but single-owner corporations can do whatever the single owner or small group of owners wants them to.

Thiel says this about the advantages of starting a new corporation to accomplish some task:

The easiest answer to “why startups?” is negative: because you can’t develop new technology in existing entities. There’s something wrong with big companies, governments, and non-profits. Perhaps they can’t recognize financial needs; the federal government, hamstrung by its own bureaucracy, obviously overcompensates some while grossly undercompensating others in its employ. Or maybe these entities can’t handle personal needs; you can’t always get recognition, respect, or fame from a huge bureaucracy. Anyone on a mission tends to want to go from 0 to 1. You can only do that if you’re surrounded by others to want to go from 0 to 1. That happens in startups, not huge companies or government.

Usually, developing “new technology” dovetails with making money, but it doesn’t necessarily have to: you could in principle start a nonprofit technology company to conduct research or develop a product (in some businesses, competition between for- and non-profits is common: think of healthcare, or gyms). That no one or almost no one goes this route means that it could be an under-explored avenue for creative and technological success. Or it could be a deadend, and no one goes down it because doing so would be stupid.

The beta orbiter problem: Observations from the field

October 8, 2012 By in Culture, sex Tags: , , , , , , , 6 Comments

A newly-graduated friend sent me this, as part of an e-mail about the difficulty of making friends after moving to a big city:

I’m now trying to “friend-date” whenever I meet a female (or male) who seems platonically cool. I have an easier time with males, but I don’t think the single ones ever intend to be friends with me from the beginning… mostly beta orbiters I guess.

Think about it this way, from the guy’s perspective: you’re exceedingly hungry. As hungry as you’ve ever been. And you can smell a delicious curry. You can see it. You’re very hungry. You’d love to eat the curry. But you can’t eat the curry.

The metaphor isn’t perfect—women have agency and curries don’t, among other things*—but it should impart the basic urgency single guys feel and the reason why single men who don’t want to be “just friends” also don’t want to hang out with you as a friend. How badly would you want to go to a restaurant when you’re desperately hungry but can’t eat at the restaurant?

My friend also said:

I found this article recently that was telling guys why they should be friends with the women who reject them for dating, but want to be friends. 1) The guy will become more confident around the type of women he’s interested in. 2) She will introduce him to her hot friends.

While “She will introduce him to her hot friends” is true in theory, it isn’t true, or very often true, in practice (based on my experience, anyway). More often, when a girl I’m interested in declines my affections, at best she sets me up with friends who are substantially less attractive than she is, and frequently says they’re “cute” and promises that I’ll “like them for their personality.” Unfortunate euphemisms lead to hurt feelings all around. Actually, my feelings don’t get hurt, but the feelings of other women sometimes do.

The hot girl’s friends also often know the hot girl turned the guy down, and that sends a powerful negative signal. If the guy isn’t good enough for the hot girl, why should he be good enough for her friends? Again, I won’t say that no straight guy has ever gotten the female-friend hookup, but I suspect that the female-friend hookup is more mythologized than actualized.

I’m familiar with the the beat orbiter mindset because I spent a lot of high school being one—but that’s because I was an idiot who didn’t know any better. I finally stepped back from that behavior, wondered why the hell I was doing it, and stopped. Non-adaptive behaviors should be altered. Most self-respecting guys who are dumb enough to go through a beta orbiter phase leave that phase by the time they graduate from college, if not earlier. Not all do, however, and you’ll occasionally run into 35-year-old men with the emotional temperament of 15-year-old boys in the thrall of their first serious, unrequited infatuation.

I’ve also had girls be the female equivalent of beta orbiters. I say “girls” here because, like men, adult single women usually grow out of this behavior, and if they’re attracted to a guy, they either make their move and see where it goes or they find a guy who is interested in them, instead of pointlessly pining after the unavailable. Straight American women seem to be more susceptible to acquiring beta orbiters than straight American men, while women seem to be, on average, more deluded about their “real” relationships with their supposed male “friends.”

One thought experiment might clarify your “friendships:” imagine that you’re lying in bed, wearing lingerie or nothing, and your male friend comes in. Does he leave or partake? If he leaves, you’re real friends. If he partakes, he’s probably not.

The attention of beta orbiters is kind of flattering to women, but it’s also mostly pointless; if you’re in the game, so to speak, you want to focus on the game, not the crowd. This is true of both sexes, whether gay or straight, but it seems like a lot of people have trouble admitting it.

(As a side note, literature is full of idiots pursuing pointless love for no particular reason: think of Gatsby and Daisy, or Robert Cohn and Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises, or any number of 19th century novels, or The Sorrows of Young Werther, or Romeo and Juliet (which has the advantage of Mercutio, until he dies; it’s his death that’s tragic, because he’s hilarious—”I will bite thee by the ear for that jest” and “for the bawdy hand of the / dial is now upon the prick of noon”). In each case, the obvious thing for the pursuer to do is get over whoever he or she is obsessed with and find someone better / more available, which are much the same thing. That’s a problem with Gatsby and Sun in particular: both novels are constructed around idiotic, self-defeating sexual behavior that contemporary teenagers often see glorified in pop culture and eventually must learn to overcome. The writing and style in both novels are specular, but their plots leave much to be desired, since the obvious thing for Jay Gatsby and Robert Cohn to do is get over Daisy and Brett Ashley. If they do, however, one no longer has a novel. But we shouldn’t admire guys who do things that are clearly dumb and sub-optimal.)

It may also be hard for attractive women to become genuine friends with a guy who already has a girlfriend because most girlfriends won’t want a rival—especially an attractive rival, sniffing around their campfire—so to speak. The reasons should be obvious. The major exception, however, occurs when the girl herself is bi, or at least interested in some girl-on-girl experience(s), but third-wheel situations among relative strangers seldom seem to last long.

This kind of misunderstand seems to be incredibly, stupidly common; I occasionally read the reddit.com/r/relationships section, which is filled with people like “jaqueinabox” who say

I have a friend who I’ve known for about four or five years. A couple years ago, when my boyfriend at the time and I were on a break, I invited him to a social [. . .] I dropped him off at his car, but we ended up making out for a few minutes before I told him I had to stop (I never really do stuff like that and I was incredibly uncomfortable with it.) [. . .] When my boyfriend and I broke up for good, my friend started insisting we hang out more. Go to movies, go out for dinner, go to his place and watch movies, sending me texts with “xoxo” and “;)” in them, and it feels a lot like dating. [. . .] I still see movies and hang out with him because it seems rude to say no.

She’s wrong: it’s actually rude, both to herself and, to a lesser extent, the guy, to keep going out with him. In the thread, I wrote that “Directness is beautiful, both for you and these ‘guy-friends,’ who are not actually friends.” The other day a Reddit commenter wrote, accurately:

Most male friends become friends with attractive women with hopes of getting with them. Usually, when it doesn’t happen or she gets into/is in a relationship, they step back. When she gets out of a relationship, they usually try again.

The best movie scene dealing with this dynamic is the famous bit from When Harry Met Sally:

The contemporary term of art for these guys is, of course, “beta orbiter.”

I do want to clarify one point: It is possible for men and women to be authentic friends (I have a bunch of authentic female friends). It’s just much more unusual than many young straight women want to think it is. Many young straight women want to lie to themselves, or simply like deluding themselves, about male “friends.”

Authentic cross-gender friendships are great and they are no less worth cultivating than any other friendship. But don’t lie to yourself and don’t go into authentic friendships with the purpose of trying to covertly shoot for more.

* As far as I know.

The stupidity of what I’m doing and the meaning of real work: Reading for PhD comprehensive exams

September 22, 2012 By in Academia, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Last weekend, I wrote a flurry of posts after months of relative silence because I needed to do real work.

This might sound strange: I am doing a lot of things, especially reading, but all of it is make-believe, pretend work. That’s because the primary thing I’m doing is studying for PhD comprehensive exams in English lit. The exam set is structured in four parts: three, four-hour written segments, and a single oral exam, on topics related to stuff that’s not very important to me and probably not very important to most people. The exams also aren’t very relevant to being an English professor, because the key skill that English professors possess and practice is writing long-form essays/articles that are published in peer-reviewed journals. The tests I’m taking don’t, as far as I can tell, map very effectively to that skill.

As a consequence, the tests, although very time consuming, aren’t very good proxies for what the job market actually wants me to do.*

Consequently, PhD exams—at least in English—aren’t real work. They’re pretend work—another hoop to be jumped through on the way to getting a union card. Paul Graham makes a useful distinction in “Good and Bad Procrastination,” when he says that “Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work.” That’s what I’ve done through most of grad school, and that’s part of the reason why I have a fairly large body of work on this blog, which you can obviously read, a fairly large body of fiction, which you can’t (at the moment, but that’s going to change in the coming months). To Graham, the kind of small stuff that represents bad procrastination is “Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary.” Passing exams has zero chance of being mentioned in my obituary. Writing books or articles does.** PhD exams feel like bad procrastination because they’re not really examining anything useful.

They’re also hard, but hard in the wrong way, like picking patterns out of noise. Being hard in the right way means the soreness you get after working out, or when a challenging math problem suddenly clicks. The quasi-work I’m doing is intellectually unsatisfying—the mental equivalent of eating ice cream and candy all day, every day. Sure, they’re technically food, but you’re going to develop some serious problems if you persist in the ice cream and candy diet. The same is true of grad school, which might be why so many people emerge from it with a lugubrious, unpalatable writing style. Grad school doesn’t select or train for style; it selects and trains for a kind of strange anti-style, in which the less you can say in more words is rewarded. It’s the kind of style I’m consciously trying to un-cultivate, however hard the process might be, and this blog is one outlet for keeping the real writer alive in the face of excessive doses from tedious but canonized work and literary theory. Exams, if anything, reinforce this bogus hardness. If I’m ever in a position of power in an English department with a grad program, I’m going to try and offer an alternative to conventional exams, and say that four to six publishable, high-quality papers can or should take their place. That, at least, mirrors the skills valued by the job market.

The bogosity of exams relates to a separate problem in English academia, which I started noticing when I was an undergrad and have really noticed lately: the English curriculum is focused on the wrong thing. The problem can be stated concisely: Should English department teach content (like, say, Medieval poetry, or Modernist writers), or skills (like writing coherently and close reading)? Louis Menand describes the issue in The Marketplace of Ideas:

[C]ompare the English departments at two otherwise quite similar schools, Amherst and Wellesley. English majors at Wellesley are required to take ten English department courses [. . .] All English majors must take a core course called ‘Critical Interpretations’; one course on Shakespeare; and at least two courses on literature written before 1900 [. . .] The course listing reflects attention to every traditional historical period in English and American literature. Down the turnpike at Amherst, on the other hand, majors have only to take ten courses ‘offered or approved by the department’—in other words, apparently, they may be course sin any department. Majors have no core requirement and no period requirements. (Menand 89-90)

Most departments right now appear to answer “content.” Mine does. But I increasingly think that’s the wrong answer. I’m not convinced that it’s insanely important for undergrads to know Chaucer, or to have read Sister Carrie and Maggie: Girl of the Streets, or to have read any particular body of work. I do think it’s insanely important for them to have very strong close reading skills and exceptional writing skills. Unfortunately, I appear to be in the minority of professional Englishers in this respect. And I’m in grad school, where the answer skill mostly appears to be “content,” and relatively few people appear to be focusing on skills; those are mostly left to individuals to develop on their own. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone discuss what makes good writing at conferences, in seminars, or in peer-reviewed papers (MFA programs appear to be very interested in this subject, however, which might explain some of their rise since 1945).

As Menand points out, no one is sure what an “‘English’ department or degree is supposed to be.” That’s part of the field’s problem. I think it’s also part of the reason many students are drawn to creative writing classes: in those, at least the better ones, writing gets taught; the reading is more contemporary; and I think many people are doing things that matter. When I read the Romantic Poets, I mostly want to do anything but read the Romantic Poets. Again, I have nothing against the Romantic Poets or against other people reading the Romantic Poets—I just don’t want to do it. Yet English undergrad and grad school forces the reading of them. Maybe it should. But if so, it should temper the reading of them with a stronger focus on writing, and what makes good writing.

Then again, if English departments really wanted to do more to reward the producing of real content, they’d probably structure the publishing of peer-reviewed articles better. Contrary to what some readers have said in e-mails to me, or inferred from what I’ve written, I’m actually not at all opposed to peer review or peer-reviewed publications. But the important thing these days isn’t a medium for publishing—pretty much anyone with an Internet connection can get that for free—but the imprimatur of peer-review, which says, “This guy [or gal] knows what he’s talking about.” A more intellectually honest way to go about peer-review would be to have every academic have a blog / website. When he or she has an article ready to go, he should post it, send a link to an editor, and ask the editor to kick it out to a peer-reviewer. Their comments, whether anonymous or not, should be appended to the article. If it’s accepted, it gets a link and perhaps the full-text copied and put in the “journal’s” main page. If it doesn’t, readers can judge its merits or lack thereof for themselves.

The sciences arguably already have this, because important papers appear on arXiv.org before they’re officially “published.” But papers in the sciences appear to be less status-based and more content-based than papers in the humanities.

I think this change will happen in the humanities, very slowly, over time; it won’t be fast because there’s no reason for it to be fast, and the profession’s gatekeepers are entrenched and have zero incentive to change. If anything, they have a strong incentive to maintain the system, because doing that raises their own status and increases their own power within the profession. So I don’t foresee this happening, even if it would be an important thing. But then again, academics are almost always behind the important thing: the important thing is happening in some marginal, liminal space, and academics inhabit a much more central area, where it’s easy to ignore stuff at the margins. I don’t see that changing either, especially in a world where many people compete for few academic slots. In that world, pointless hoop-jumping is going to remain.

* There’s a vast literature in industrial organization on the subject of hiring practices, and most of that literature finds that the most effective ways to hire workers is to give them an IQ test and a work-skills or work-practice test. The former is effectively illegal in the U.S., so the best bet is to give workers a test of the thing they’ll actually be called on to do.

** I also consciously ask myself this question set:

In his famous essay You and Your Research (which I recommend to anyone ambitious, no matter what they’re working on), Richard Hamming suggests that you ask yourself three questions:

1. What are the most important problems in your field?

2. Are you working on one of them?

3. Why not?

I have an answer to number three, but it doesn’t seem like a very good one.

An economic model of paid sex: Coase’s “The Nature of the Firm,” gains from trade, and the gift economy

August 25, 2012 By in Culture, sex Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

In Roosh’s “Orgasm or Money” story, he describes encountering yet another semi-pro prostitute in Latvia,* and he ends by wondering about sexual cultures around the world:

Then I thought about what she had said, how it was stupid for American girls not to ask for money before sex. Was it possible that the sexual culture in America and other Western countries is fantasy, and that the best move for women was to get as much as she could out of a guy?

It’s possible that getting “as much as she could out of a guy” in terms of money is optimal for an individual woman in some circumstances, but if she plays that game she’s likely to find guys who are unwilling to make long-term investments in her. A guy who pays for sex expects to dump the provider: as the philosopher Charlie Sheen once supposedly said regarding prostitutes, “I don’t pay them for sex. I pay them to leave.”

But there are deeper problems.

Moving unpaid “labor” into the “paid” labor can have the nasty, unintended effect of monetizing a lot of activity that’s better left outside the conventional economy. Roosh is really describing is the difference between a gift economy and market economy, which Lewis Hyde describes in his eponymous book. Moving all or a great deal of sexual activity to a market economy will result in fewer people forming mutually beneficial relationships in which both reap gains from trade and specialization. Monetizing such relationships increases transaction costs for both buyers (men, usually) and sellers (women, usually), which can leave both sides worse off for transaction costs and other reasons.

Ronald Coase’s famous essay “The Nature of the Firm” (alternately, here’s Wikipedia on it) points out that firms exist to reduce friction / transaction costs that arise from alternate arrangements—like having a large number of consultants work together. When individuals are try to gain every last monetary or other advantage at the margin, they aren’t working towards the good of the whole. It’s cheaper and better for large groups of people to get lump-sum payments and then work together, to the best of their abilities, to further the total enterprise. That’s true of firms and of marriages.

A relationship can be conceptualized as a very small firm, as people continually rediscover—in “Marry Him! The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough,” Lori Gottlieb realizes that often “Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.” She realizes this after having a child on her own, however. Instead of figuring out that she can reap major gains from finding a decent guy and marrying him, she decides to date around and has a child via a sperm seller, only to find what should really be obvious and only isn’t to someone who’s been taught to never “compromise.”

As noted above, both parties reap gains from specialization in a firm or marriage: one person might like to cook, for example, while the other person does dishes, or runs errands, or builds stuff. Granted, this only works if both parties actually have useful skills: one time I was in a bar, listening to a nasty-sounding woman complain to two friends, one male and one female, about the guy she was divorcing, and the woman was going on about how she wouldn’t cook, or run errands, or acquiesce to any number of normal-seeming things. Finally I asked her, “What do you bring to the relationship beyond your vagina?” The guy started laughing, hard, and the other woman began chuckling, and the complaining woman didn’t know what to say, so she told me I was rude (true, although I prefer to call it “honest”) and asked how I dare ask her that sort of thing—I dare many things. But she didn’t and probably couldn’t answer the obvious question, perhaps because she already knew the answer in her heart.

The larger point contained in that anecdote, however, is that both parties gain, or should gain, from not having search for sex partners or pay for sex. In addition, long-term plans, like offspring, are easier to make.

Most of us don’t want to live in a purely market economy with every potential transaction: when our significant others come over, we don’t charge them for dinner, and, if we did, the charge would create very different expectations. Dan Ariely describes the expectation issue in Predictably Irrational and elsewhere. Once market norms, as opposed to gift-based norms, are activated, they’re very hard, and perhaps impossible, to de-activate.

Plus, to return to Coase, it’s very inefficient to price everything, and to continually think of pricing. It’s better for individuals and the economy as a whole if people trust each other and create value for each other without (always) charging for it. Relationships are, in part, a movement from market economies to gift economies, and in the process they create a lot of value, along with love, trust, and assorted other positive feelings. If there’s a large-scale culture shift away from non-paying relationships and towards women trying “to get as much as [they] can” out of guys, as Roosh describes, both sides lose, including the woman trading sex for money.

Granted, if a woman isn’t looking for long-term relationships or real help, it can make sense to move to a mercantile economy: this might be why a fair number of college girls get into stripping or even hooking, only to quit at or near graduation: they’re shifting from short-term expectations to long-term ones, and they know that violating social taboos can have a (major) economic payoff, but it’s easy enough for many of them to shift back into the “normal” relationship economy when their interests shift to long-term relationships.

* “Semi-pro” meaning someone who doesn’t explicitly advertise their wares but does eventually demand money for sex, or simply tries to drain guys through overpriced bar drinks and the like.