Tag Archives: Ideas

A life-changing encounter with a man named Dan

June 29, 2023 By in Culture, ideas, Personal Tags: , , 7 Comments

This essay is by my brother, Sam.

In 2009, I had a life-changing encounter with a man named Dan; he was the top salesman at our company and left an indelible mark on my career. Dan was an impressive figure, standing at six feet four with a heroic build, fierce red hair, and striking green eyes. He possessed an air of confidence, always dressed impeccably, never seen with a loosened tie, even during late nights working on proposals. His crisp, white shirt occasionally had its sleeves rolled up, but he always exuded professionalism and ownership. People naturally gravitated towards him, stepping aside to listen to his words. Dan treated everyone with a warm smile and friendliness, be it the company president or the person serving us lunch at Subway. His positive attitude was unparalleled. Whenever asked how he was doing, his unwavering response was, “I have never been better”—and he genuinely meant it.

Then, one day, Dan received devastating news about one of his children, who passed away. He took some time off from work, but, upon his return, he walked into the building with his laptop in hand, his tie tightly knotted, and a radiant smile on his face. As we were close colleagues, I felt concerned and decided to visit his office that morning, closing the door behind me.

“How are you really doing?” I asked sincerely. “Is there anything I can do for you? I mean it, anything, just ask.”

With a grin, Dan replied, “You know, I’ve never been better,” tossing his empty Starbucks cup into a trash can across the room. I stood there in silence, processing his words.

“How?” I finally managed to ask. “How can you maintain such a positive outlook? How can you genuinely claim that you’ve never been better?”

Dan leaned in and spoke softly, capturing my full attention. “Listen carefully,” he began. “You don’t truly know anything about me or my life. You only think you do. Here’s something you must remember, and I won’t mention it again. Your attitude sucks. Frankly, I’m surprised they tolerate it here. Your attitude defines everything. It shapes your life. You think things are bad? Let me tell you, buddy, they could be a lot worse. A lot worse. You’re standing there, upset because a meeting didn’t go your way, dressed in your shirt and cheap tie. Well, go out and start digging sewers and tell me how much that meeting mattered today. And maybe, after digging sewers, you’ll get laid off and find yourself living in one, eating from a dumpster. You don’t know anything. So, listen up. When someone asks how you’re doing, there’s only one answer: ‘I’ve never been better.’ And you live your life as if it’s true because here’s the stone-cold truth — no matter how bad you think things are right now, they can always be worse. So, wake up and change your attitude. Right fucking now.”

With that, he leaned back in his chair, his smile returning as if nothing had happened. I stood there in stunned silence, my shirt drenched in sweat.

“I need more coffee,” Dan happily announced. “Care to join me? It’s on me. Sales always buys the damn coffee!”

We went to Starbucks in his new Mercedes, and while everything seemed unchanged for him, everything had changed for me. I realized I couldn’t fulfill Dan’s request within that job: so I mustered the courage to quit, eventually finding a position at another company. It was a terrifying move, as I had spent my entire professional career at the previous company.

As I was walking into the new office, the receptionist greeted me with a smile and asked how I was doing.

“I’ve never been better,” I replied, sporting a wide grin.

“Well, that’s a fantastic attitude,” she beamed. “You’ll fit right in here if you can maintain that!”

And so it went. I became the most cheerful and upbeat person in the company. Though I became the subject of jokes, I also became a beacon of hope for those feeling downtrodden. Unbeknownst to me, I’d joined a company on the verge of collapse, but, as things worsened, my attitude gained more attention. I rapidly climbed the ranks, despite lacking expertise in the company’s technology. Layoffs hit, one after another, but I survived each round despite being the most junior member. Perplexed, I asked my boss how this was possible.

“Well,” he explained, “During meetings to discuss layoffs, your name consistently comes up. You’re inexperienced and new to the company, making you the logical choice. However, each time, everyone decides you should stay. Your attitude is so positive that everyone wants you here. The president even said he’d prefer one average employee with a great attitude over five brilliant but gloomy experts. Attitude sells. So, you don’t have to worry. You’ll still be here long after I’m gone, until they turn off the lights, if you want to be.”

And so it unfolded. As things deteriorated, my promotions accelerated. Within 18 months, I became the senior member of the sales team. I became the face of the company’s improbable turnaround. And when things reached their breaking point (the turnaround effort was not enough), a friend offered me a job, and that very day, I walked out.

From my experience with Dan and the job after Dan, I developed a list of three priorities necessary for success in the workplace. Having spent considerable time in the business world, let me share these priorities:

  • Firstly, your boss. Your number one priority is to make your boss look good. This is not a joke.
  • Secondly, your company. Your top priority is to increase revenue. Following closely is improving profitability. These two priorities should guide your thoughts and actions.
  • Finally, yourself. Your primary priority is to maintain an unwaveringly positive attitude, self-confidence, and the appearance of success.

The third item is crucial for your career and life. No amount of education or expertise surpasses its significance in most circumstances. An employee with average skills and a positive attitude holds greater value than five brilliant but unpleasant individuals. As pilots say, “your attitude determines your altitude.” Maintaining a positive attitude at all costs ensures your success, as surely as day follows night. Failure is not an option.

Since then, I’ve strived to adhere to these priorities. Where I succeeded, they brought me great achievements. Where I faltered, they resulted in failure and misery. Attitude stands as the foremost determinant of success in life. You must consistently exhibit a positive attitude, no matter the circumstances. Because it’s true—no matter how dire things may seem, they can always be worse. Your attitude will dictate how you navigate through it all.

If I could impart one thing to anyone, regardless of their stage in life, it would be to always display a positive attitude. It holds immeasurable power in the universe.

Personal epistemology, free speech, and tech companies

November 10, 2020 By in Culture, ideas Tags: , , , 5 Comments

The NYT describes “The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation, and in response Hacker News commenter throwaway13337 says, in part, “It’s not unchecked free speech. Instead, it’s unchecked curation by media and social media companies with the goal of engagement.” There’s some truth to the idea that social media companies have evolved to seek engagement, rather than truth, but I think the social media companies are reflecting a deeper human tendency. I wrote back to throwaway13337: “Try teaching non-elite undergrads, and particularly assignments that require some sense of epistemology, and you’ll discover that the vast majority of people have pretty poor personal epistemic hygiene—it’s not much required in most people, most of the time, in most jobs.”

From what I can tell, we evolved to form tribes, not to be “right:” Jonathan’s Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion deals with this topic well and at length, and I’ve not seen any substantial rebuttals of it. We don’t naturally take to tracking the question, “How do I know what I know?” Instead, we naturally seem to want to find “facts” or ideas that support our preexisting views. In the HN comment thread, someone asked for specific examples of poor undergrad epistemic hygiene, and while I’d prefer not to get super specific for reasons of privacy, I’ve had many conversations that take the following form: “How do you know article x is accurate?” “Google told me.” “How does Google work?” “I don’t know.” “What does it take to make a claim on the Internet.” “Um. A phone, I guess?” A lot of people—maybe most—will uncritically take as fact whatever happens to be served up by Google (it’s always Google and never Duck Duck Go or Bing), and most undergrads whose work I’ve read will, again uncritically, accept clickbait sites and similar as accurate. Part of the reason for this reasoning is that undergrads’s lives are minimally affected by being wrong or incomplete about some claim done in a short assignment that’s being imposed by some annoying professor toff standing between them and their degree.

The gap between elite information discourse and everyday information discourse, even among college students, who may be more sophisticated than their peer equivalents, is vast—so vast that I don’t think most journalists (who mostly talk to other journalists and to experts) and to other people who work with information, data, and ideas really truly understand it. We’re all living in bubbles. I don’t think I did, either, before I saw the epistemic hygiene most undergrads practice, or don’t practice. This is not a “kids these days” rant, either: many of them have never really been taught to ask themselves, “How do I know what I know?” Many have never really learned anything about the scientific method. It’s not happening much in most non-elite schools, so where are they going to get epistemic hygiene from?

The United States alone has 320 million people in it. Table DP02 in the Census at data.census.gov estimates that 20.3% of the population age 25 and older has a college bachelor’s degree, and 12.8% have a graduate or professional degree. Before someone objects, let me admit that a college degree is far from a perfect proxy for epistemic hygiene or general knowledge, and some high school dropouts perform much better at cognition, meta cognition, statistical reasoning, and so forth, than do some people with graduate degrees. With that said, though, a college degree is probably a decent approximation for baseline abstract reasoning skills and epistemic hygiene. Most people, though, don’t connect with or think in terms of aggregated data or abstract reasoning—one study, for example, finds that “Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts.” We’re tribe builders, not fact finders.

Almost anyone who wants a megaphone in the form of one of the many social media platforms available now has one. The number of people motivated by questions like “What is really true, and how do I discern what is really true? How do I enable myself to get countervailing data and information into my view, or worldview, or worldviews?” is not zero, again obviously, but it’s not a huge part of the population. And many very “smart” people in an IQ sense use their intelligence to build better rationalizations, rather than to seek truth (and I may be among the rationalizers: I’m not trying to exclude myself from that category).

Until relatively recently, almost everyone with a media megaphone had some kind of training or interest in epistemology, even they didn’t call it “epistemology.” Editors would ask, “How do you know that?” or “Who told you that?” or that sort of thing. Professors have systems that are supposed to encourage greater-than-average epistemic hygiene (these systems were not and are not perfect, and nothing I have written so far implies that they were or are).

Most people don’t care about the question, “How do you know what you know?” are fairly surprised if it’s asked, implicitly or explicitly. Some people are intrigued by it but most aren’t, and view questions about sources and knowledge to be a hindrance. This is less likely to be true of people who aspire to be researchers or work in other knowledge-related professions, but that describes only a small percentage of undergraduates, particularly at non-elite schools. And the “elite schools” thing drives a lot of the media discourse around education. One of the things I like about Professor X’s book In the Basement of the Ivory Tower is how it functions as a corrective to that discourse.

For most people, floating a factually incorrect conspiracy theory online isn’t going to negatively affect their lives. If someone is a nurse and gives a patient a wrong medication or incorrect medication, that person is not going to be a nurse for long. If the nurse states or repeats a factually incorrect political or social idea online, particularly but not exclusively under a pseudonym, that nurse’s life likely won’t be affected. There’s no truth feedback loop. The same is true for someone working in, say, construction, or engineering, or many other fields. The person is free to state things that are factually incorrect, or incomplete, or misleading, and doing so isn’t going to have many negative consequences. Maybe it will have some positive consequences: one way to show that you’re really on team x is to state or repeat falsehoods that show you’re on team x, rather than on team “What is really true?”

I don’t want to get into daily political discourse, since that tends to raise defenses and elicit anger, but the last eight months have demonstrated many people’s problems with epistemology, and in a way that can have immediate, negative personal consequences—but not for everyone.

Pew Research data indicate that a quarter of US adults didn’t read a book in 2018; this is consistent with other data indicating that about half of US adults read zero or one books per year. Again, yes, there are surely many individuals who read other materials and have excellent epistemic hygiene, but this is a reasonable mass proxy, given the demands that reading makes on us.

Many people driving the (relatively) elite discourse don’t realize how many people are not only not like them, but wildly not like them, along numerous metrics. It may also be that we don’t know how to deal with gossip at scale. Interpersonal gossip is all about personal stories, while many problems at scale are best understood through data—but the number of people deeply interested in data and data’s veracity is small. And elite discourse has some of its own possible epistemic falsehoods, or at least uncertainties, embedded within it: some of the populist rhetoric against elites is rooted in truth.

A surprisingly large number of freshmen don’t know the difference between fiction and nonfiction, or that novels are fiction. Not a majority, but I was surprised when I first encountered confusion around these points; I’m not any longer. I don’t think the majority of freshmen confuse fiction and nonfiction, or genres of nonfiction, but enough do for the confusion to be a noticeable pattern (modern distinctions between fiction and nonfiction only really arose, I think, during the Enlightenment and the rise of the novel in the 18th Century, although off the top of my head I don’t have a good citation for this historical point, apart perhaps from Ian Watt’s work on the novel). Maybe online systems like Twitter or Facebook allow average users to revert to an earlier mode of discourse in which the border between fiction and nonfiction is more porous, and the online systems have strong fictional components that some users don’t care to segregate.

We are all caught in our bubble, and the universe of people is almost unimaginably larger than the number of people in our bubble. If you got this far, you’re probably in a nerd bubble: usually, anything involving the word “epistemology” sends people to sleep or, alternately, scurrying for something like “You won’t believe what this celebrity wore/said/did” instead. Almost no one wants to consider epistemology; to do so as a hobby is rare. One person’s disinformation is another person’s teambuilding. If you think the preceding sentence is in favor of disinformation, by the way, it’s not.

Maybe cars are just really bad, but they’re normal, so we don’t pay attention to how bad

December 16, 2019 By in Cities Tags: , , 1 Comment

In the United States, 30,000 – 40,000 people are killed by and in cars every year; hundreds of thousands more are maimed. Think of ten to twelve 9/11s, every year—yet death-by-car gets little airplay, despite its importance. No one thinks systematically about how we might do better. Perhaps we ought to be working a lot harder to build a society less dependent on murderous cars. Almost everyone knows someone who’s been killed or maimed in a car crash. But, for whatever reason, most of us don’t think about the sheer amount of death and destruction attached to cars—maybe because the numbers are too vast. So I’m listing some of the car crash victims whose names and/or stories I’ve come across. I’m not looking for them, but I keep noticing how many writers casually mention death in and by cars. Right now, today, it’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed:

John sighed. He asked Margo to look at the caller ID and tell him who had called, but she shook her head and turned away. John reached for the phone with his right hand. Then they collided with a black SUV coming straight at them.

Strapped in their booster seats were five-year-old Gracie and six-year-old Gabe. Irish twins, born just a year apart and inseparable. The loves of John’s life. Gracie survived along with John and Margo. Gabe, seated directly behind John and at exactly the point of impact, died at the scene.

Two paragraphs, one death. We need to do a “five whys” analysis. Inattentiveness due to the phone is the proximate cause, yes. But why is everyone in cars? Why are so many distracted amateurs operating these machines? Why is our society built around them? What would an alternate transit setup look like (one that valued human life)? Cities that could help cut the car-based death rate refuse to do so. We have a bad strategy and our collective decision is to keep pursuing it. Despite the way death appears everywhere, every day:

* “In the summer of 2019, we had been T-boned by a drunk and high driver going 90 miles an hour in a 50-mile-an-hour zone. My wife, Gail, and I had survived the crash, but our two teenage children in the back seat, Ruby and Hart, had not.”

* “Three years earlier, my husband, Eric, and I had lost our 22-month-old son, Seamus, when they were struck in a crosswalk by a careless driver.” From “When Sturdy Love Is What You Need.”

* “A few months later the young woman came to see me. She and her boyfriend had had a terrible car crash. He had died, and his family had turned her out of the house they had lived in together” (137). From The Sexual Life of Catherine M., a memoir by Catherine Millet. Everyone knows someone who has died this way.

* “About a decade ago, Derek Sarno, the elder of the pair at 48, was working as a chef and restaurateur in New Hampshire when his longtime partner was killed in a car accident.” From “The Vegetarians at the Gate.”

* “I was back in my hometown cruising the makeup aisles of a 24-hour drugstore around midnight on the eve of my sister’s funeral. I was 23 and my 22-year-old sister had died in a car accident five days earlier.” From “When Lips Speak for Themselves.”

* Miss France Hopeful Morgane Rolland Dies After Being Struck by a Tractor-Trailer.

* Interview with actress Anjelica Huston: “You were 17 and your brother Tony was 18 when your mother was killed in a car [crash] in France.”

* Kevin Hart reportedly able to walk after serious car crash. This one isn’t a fatality, but wouldn’t he have liked to not have been in a car wreck?

* Mother Dies After Halloween Crash That Killed Husband and Toddler. “Joseph and Raihan Awaida were walking home with their 3-year-old son on Halloween night when the entire family was hit by an SUV.” Maybe we should work harder to segment uses and discourage driving: one SUV kills an entire family.

* “Then, in her thirties, [Joanna Parfit] died in a car crash.”

* “In September 1996, after turning thirty-four years old, Paul [Simons] donned a jersey and shorts, hopped on his… bicycle, and set off on a fast ride through Old Field Road in Setauket, near his boyhood home. Out of nowhere, an elderly woman backed her car out of the driveway, unaware [Paul] was riding past. She hit Paul, crushing and killing him instantly, a random and tragic accident. Several days later, the woman, traumatized by the experience, had a heart attack and died.” (159) That’s from The Man Who Solved the Market, a biography of Jim Simons. The writer, Gregory Zuckerman, is not astute enough to realize and then argue that this was not a totally random event: it’s an event engineered by systematic choices made over the course of decades, if not a century, to prioritize car and car travel over life. The elderly should not be driving, yet we’ve decided to ignore their inabilities because cars are so woven into the urban fabric of life.

* “‘I’ve never felt such heartbreak and anger’: Toronto family mourns 23-year-old cyclist Alex Amaro, killed last week on Dufferin St.” The street is apparently notoriously and horribly dangerous, and yet Toronto has done nothing about it, despite the danger and deaths (plural).

* “Lars Vilks: Muhammad cartoonist killed in traffic collision.” This guy survived 15 years of extremist Muslims threatening to kill him, and then died in what appears to be a generic car crash.

* “On a January evening in 1992, I was sitting in our kitchen, reading a comic book. My older sister Claudia went out to run an errand at a nearby minimart, just before it closed. Her keys jingled as she said goodbye and pulled the door shut. I heard her slam the garage door after she had pulled out her bicycle. Moments later, I heard a loud thud from down the street. I also thought I heard a muffled scream. I was 10. A  speeding car had hit Claudia while she was crossing the street. She didn’t die on the spot.”

* Michael Lewis’s daughter Dixie died in a car crash near Lake Tahoe, California.

We should all be striving for life after parking, however utopian that sounds today (getting everyone to quit smoking probably seemed utopian 50 years ago, but here we are). Unfortunately, absurdly expensive infrastructure costs inhibit the development of better transit systems. I’ve changed my view on this issue substantially between when I was younger and today. Housing and transit issues are tremendous determinants of the quality of human life, as well as the quality of our politics, and many of the screeds you read about “income inequality” (a term I dislike because we really want everyone to have a decent baseline quality of life, regardless of whether someone is super rich), education, and health are really about housing and transit—we just don’t, for the most part, think of them this way. Very few reporters or “intellectuals” (a word worthy of scare quotes) connect the dots. So I’m going to connect them here, even though others don’t, and keep adding to this list. Maybe it will personalize the idea that cars are bad in a way that the raw data does not.

We can and should do better: instead of expecting millions of distracted amateurs to correctly pilot fast, multi-ton machines, we should be working towards a world

Linking does not imply endorsement

September 5, 2017 By in Links Tags: , Leave a comment

Linking does not imply endorsement. I link to interesting pieces that seem to be well thought out and that have the possibility of being in part true. I use the word “seem” in the preceding sentence because I don’t always have the capacity or knowledge to evaluate every claim in every article, and for that reason it’s always possible for something to be simply wrong without me knowing it.

It seems to me that today we have an excess of certainty and too little room for wondering things out loud. That’s part of the reason I like posts like “Unpopular ideas about social norms.” Many of us are not doing enough to wonder about things that could be true or could be false, and we’re spending too much time on things we feel must be true or must be false. The (possibly inherent) desire to signal fundamental traits about ourselves, as Haidt describes in The Righteous Mind, may also blind us to possibilities and to thinking better. Granted, the preceding sentence may just be signaling on my part—it’s probably not possible to get entirely outside signaling—but it would at least be good to be aware of one’s own signaling tendencies.

In “Links: How America is going haywire, high-heel heaven, where are the trains?, and more!“, I noted two articles, one on “The Most Common Error in Media Coverage of the Google Memo” and the other on “Men Are Better At Maps Until Women Take This Spatial Visualization Course,” and a friend said they could be read in opposition. To which I say: Great! I don’t think there is a final answer (or if there is it’s not available at this time) to the questions they raise. Moreover, I don’t think it’s a great idea demand total obedience to a particular “side”—even though many people do just that. Let’s try to achieve understanding first and judgment later.

If we go far back enough in time we’d find lots of commonly held opinions that today we find odious or simply wrong. Commonly held opinions today were the minority back then. Which should lead us to ask, “What minority or nonexistent views today could be commonly held or dominant opinions in the future?” It would be very strange if today we’d somehow gotten everything right, for all time! In saying so I’m channeling Paul Graham’s “What You Can’t Say,” which, in the era of glib Twitter and Facebook slagging, seems more relevant and less remembered than ever.

Why read bestsellers

June 23, 2017 By in Books, ideas Tags: , 3 Comments

Someone wrote to ask why I bother writing about John Grisham’s weaknesses as a writer and implied in it is a second question: why read bestsellers at all? The first is a fair question and so is the implication in it: Grisham’s readers don’t read me and don’t care what I think; they don’t care that he’s a bad writer; and people who read me probably aren’t going to read him. Still, I read him because I was curious and I wrote about him to report what I found.

The answer to the second one is easy: Some are great! Not all, probably not even most, but enough to try. Lonesome Dove, the best novel I’ve read recently, was a bestseller. Its sequel, Streets of Laredo, is not quite as good but I’m glad to have read it. Elmore Leonard was often a bestseller and he is excellent. Others seemed like they’d be bad (Gillian Flynn, Tucker Max) but turned into favorites.

One could construct a 2×2 matrix of good famous books; bad famous books; good obscure books; and bad obscure books. That last one is a large group too; credibility amid a handful of literary critics (who may be scratching each other’s backs anyway) does not necessarily equate to quality, and I’ve been fooled by good reviews of mostly unknown books many times. Literary posturing does not equate to actual quality.

Different people also have different views around literary quality, and those views depend in part on experience and reading habits. Someone who reads zero or one books a year is likely to have very different impressions than someone who reads ten or someone who reads fifty or a hundred. Someone who is reading like a writer will probably have a different experience than someone who reads exclusively in a single, particular genre.

And Grisham? That article (which I wish I could find) made him and especially Camino Island sound appealing, and the book does occasionally work. But its addiction to cliché and the sort of overwriting common in student writing makes it unreadable in my view. But someone who reads one or two books a year and for whom Grisham is one of those books will probably like him just fine, because they don’t have the built-up stock of reading that lets them distinguish what’s really good from what isn’t.

Caught in the nerd-o-sphere or researcher bubble

January 18, 2017 By in Academia, Culture Tags: , , , Leave a comment

In a Tweet Benedict Evans mentions, “I’m always baffled when people are surprised by charts like this. What do people think the world was like 250 years ago? Isn’t this obvious?”

mortality-chart

I replied, “I teach undergrads; it isn’t obvious to most, and most either don’t think about it or rely on TV-based historical fiction,” but that’s too glib; the chart’s demonstration of growing wealth is obvious to people who’ve read a lot of history and who’re immersed in the nerd-o-sphere or researcher bubble, but that’s a small part of the population. Most people don’t really, really think about or study history, and to the extent they think about it at all they rely on hazy, unsourced stereotypes.

I’ve read lots of student papers (and for that matter Internet comments) saying things like, “In the past, [claim here].” Some will even say, “In the old days…” In the margins I will write in reply, “Which years and geographic areas are you thinking about?” When I ask those kinds of questions in class students look at me strangely, like I’ve suddenly demanded they perform gymnastics.

The past really is a foreign country and unless someone has made the effort to learn about it directly, meta-learn how to learn, and learn how the people in a given time period likely thought, it can look like the present but with different clothes. That’s often how it’s presented in TV, movies, and pop fiction (see e.g. “Rules for Writing Neo-Victorian Novels“). To take one obvious example, characters in such TV shows and movies often have modern sexual and religious mores, ignoring that many of the sexual mores and rules of the last ~500 years of European and American history evolved because a) reliable contraception was unavailable or extremely limited, b) a child born to a single woman could end up killing both child and woman due to lack of money and/or food, and c) many STIs that are now treated with a quick antibiotic were death sentences.

In most countries today, people don’t worry about starving to death, so the kind of absolute poverty that’s stunningly declined in the last couple centuries takes a strong imaginative leap to inhabit. People also seem to experience hedonic adaptation, so the many things that make our lives easy and pleasant become invisible (that’s true of me too).

So the average person probably never thinks about what the world was like 250 years ago, and, if they do, they probably don’t have the baseline knowledge necessary to conceptualize and contextualize it properly. Those of us caught in the nerd-o-sphere and researcher bubble, like myself, do. Our sense of “obvious” shifts with the environment we inhabit and the education we’ve had (or the education we’re continuing all the time).

And about that education system. Years ago I used to read tech sites in which self-taught autodidacts would fulminate about the failures of the conventional school system and prophesize about how the liberation of information will remake the educational sector into a free intellectual utopia in which students would learn much faster and at their own pace, leading to peace, harmony, and knowledge; in this world, rather than being bludgeoned by teachers and professors, students would become self-motivated because they’d be unshackled from conventional curriculums. To some extent I believed those criticisms and prophecies. One day we would set students free and they’d joyously learn for the sake of learning.

Then I started teaching and discovered that the conventional school system exists to work on or with the vast majority of the population, which doesn’t give a fig about the joy of knowledge or intrinsic learning or whatever else Internet nerds and PhDs love. The self-taught autodidacts who wrote on Slashdot (back then) and Hacker News or Reddit or blogs today are a distinct minority and at most a couple percent of the total population. Often they were or are poorly served in some ways by the conventional education system, especially because they often have unusual ways of interacting socially.

Now, today, I’ve both taught regular, non-nerd students and read books like Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology, and I’ve realized why the education system has evolved the way it has. Most people, left to their own devices, don’t study poetry and math and so on. They watch videos on YouTube and TV and play videogames and chat with their friends. Those are all fine activities and I’ve of course done all of them, but the average person doesn’t much engage in systematic skill- and knowledge-building of the sort that dedicated study is (ideally) supposed to do.

In short, the nerds who want to reform the education system are very different than the average student the system is designed to serve, in a way similar to the way the average person in the nerd-o-sphere or researcher bubble is likely very different from the average person, who hardcore nerds may not know or interact with very much.

I’m very much in that nerd-o-sphere and if you’re reading this there’s a high probability you are too. And when I write about undergrads, remember that I’m writing about the top half of the population in terms of motivation, cognition, and tenacity.

“You can teach a lot of skills, but you can’t teach obsession”

November 6, 2016 By in ideas, Links Tags: Leave a comment

There are many interesting moments in Ezra Klein’s conversation with Tyler Cowen but one in particular stands out, when Klein says that “You can teach a lot of skills, but you can’t teach obsession. There’s a real difference between somebody who is obsessed with the work they’re doing and someone who is simply skilled at the work they’re doing.” He’s right. You can’t teach people to be obsessed and over the medium to long term you can’t even pay them to be obsessed. Look for the people who are obsessed, even if it’s hard.

The larger context is:

Look for people who are desperate to be doing the thing they’re doing. I have often found really great people by finding people who either seemed or were literally doing what they need to be doing for free because nobody was yet paying them for it.

. . . You can teach a lot of skills, but you can’t teach obsession. There’s a real difference between somebody who is obsessed with the work they’re doing and someone who is simply skilled at the work they’re doing. I will take the obsession and teach the skills over getting the skills and having to teach the obsession.

Thinking about this now, it’s odd to me that more people, especially in hiring positions, don’t select more or better for obsession. That’s especially true in academia but it’s also true elsewhere. Now that I think about it explicitly I also realize that my essay “How to get your Professors’ Attention, Along With Coaching and Mentoring” is in part about how to if not fake obsession then at least demonstrate that the person seeking help or advice rises above indifference.

Thoughts on Tolkien’s Letters and ossification by age

August 29, 2016 By in Books, Briefly Noted, Culture, Nonfiction Tags: , , Leave a comment

I’ve read Tolkien’s letters before, but as with most reading, each reading is different because I know, think, and believe different things. Tolkien’s occasional crankiness stands out in this reading. He doesn’t like cars (or “motor-cars” in his words) or most industrial / mechanical processes. To him the future often seems grimly industrial, and passages like this speak to his view of what would become modern culture:

Music will give place to jiving: which as far as I can make out means holding a ‘jam session’ round a piano (an instrument properly intended to produce the sounds devised by, say, Chopin) and hitting it so hard that it breaks. This delicately cultured amusement is said to be a ‘fever’ in the U.S.A.

letters_tolkienOne wonders what he’d think of computerized music, if such a term has any meaning anymore: Distinction between digital and analogue music is so blurred as to be useless today. And at least the “jam session” Tolkien does not much like demands more skill than a record, CD, or now mp3.

To my mind too a piano is not “properly intended” to do anything: It’s an instrument or tool that people will apply to all sorts of uses, many unforeseen or unintended. Chopin is one but there are many others, not necessarily worse. I imagine Tolkien did not “get” the Beatles.

I wonder if most people are just most comfortable with the technological world that spans from their childhoods to age 30 or 40, and what comes after often seems unnecessary, gratuitous, or even obscene. When I see the apartments many old people live in, I’m often struck by the lack of prominent computers and by the clutter and (to my eyes) ugly bric-a-brac (even T.G.I.F. is shedding clutter in favor of minimalism). What do they do all day? Old people are often in turn surprised by how much I use computers. I, in another turn, find Snapchat to be of little use, although its popularity is undeniable. When students and my cousins have tried to explain it to me the conversation is often comical.

The usual explanation goes something like, Snapchat lets you tell people what you’re doing; for example you might take a video of yourself on the way to the store, or to the beach, or a concert. I usually then ask, “Why would anyone care?” The conversation breaks down towards mutual incomprehension: They cannot explain the role of this very important tool in their lives, anymore than I could explain video games when I played them as a teenager; I’m too old or set in my ways to understand on a sub-verbal level Snapchat’s uses.

There is an interesting parallel between technology ossification and the way many people seem to lose friends and stop making new friends around age 30. Maybe some common root lies at the bottom of both phenomena.

To return to Tolkien and his dislike of motor-cars, though, Tolkien also got to experience the worst of mechanization in WWI, so his dislike has strong roots, given that virtually everyone he knew was killed using mechanized weapons and the generals who fought WWI had no idea how technology had changed warfare. If virtually everyone I know had died in mechanized warfare I might not love mechanization or machines either.

Like all leter collections the best parts of the letters are scattered amid a lot of material that’s unlikely to be of interest to most people. Unlike most letter collections this one is uncommonly deep and contains uncommonly deep analysis of the author’s own works. To most people who are uninterested in The Lord of the Rings or the Edwardian era the letters will be of no interest. To those who find either fascinating the letters may fascinate.

People vote with their feet, and also the U.S. is not Sweden

August 9, 2016 By in Cities, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

Two pieces about Anu Partanen’s book The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life say much about the blindness of some writers: “Stockholm Syndrome: Spotify threatened to abandon Sweden if the government didn’t address over-regulation and sky-high taxes” is poorly titled and more interesting than the title suggests, and so is “What’s So Special About Finland?” Neither says much about the book itself but both together say much about the U.S. media interest in Nordic countries.

Following the Nordic model would make large parts of the U.S. population worse off; that’s why people are moving away from Nordic-model cities and states and towards inexpensive, laissez-fair cities and states.

Let me elaborate. Partanen and most media people are not normal and have not normal needs, desires, and willingness to pay for big-city amenities. But most people aren’t willing to pay for those things that’s why sprawly cities, especially in Texas, are the ones that’re experiencing the fastest population growth in the U.S. People choose to move to them much more so than New York or L.A. or a handful of other media capitols. Partanen and her husband live in NYC as writers. I get the appeal, but they’re relatively low-earners in the second-most-expensive city in the country, and New York is in many ways least like the rest of the country. Partanen even says:

First of all, the taxes are not necessarily as high as many Americans think. One of the myths I encounter often is that Americans are like, ‘You pay 70 percent of your income in taxes.’ No, we do not. For someone who lives in a city like San Francisco or New York City—where you have federal taxes, state taxes, city taxes, property taxes—the tax burden is not very different [than the tax burden in Finland]. I discuss my own taxes in the book and I discovered this to be true: that I did pay about the same or even more in New York than I would have paid on my income in Finland. I’ve talked to many Nordics in the U.S. who say the same thing.

So SF and NYC are already paying these crazy taxes… and apparently not getting much in return. Why then should the rest of the U.S. seek to emulate them? When I’ve said that I think Seattle is a much better value than NYC, in part because of crazy tax issues, people often respond, “So you don’t like public schools or fire fighters?” But Seattle, Austin, Nashville, and other similar cities seem to have those public services too, without anything like NYC’s cost of living. So the solution to high taxes and not-great services in those cities is to pay even more? If so, I’m not too surprised most of the US does not want to be more like Scandinavia (or SF).

To be fair, it would be interesting to see what happens if SF, NYC, and LA disempowered municipal unions and liberalized their zoning codes, both of which would lower costs substantially. For now, though, we’re seeing all three cities systematically drive people out. They’re choosing places that are not very Scandinavian.

Partanen and her husband are not very representative of the overall American experience. It’d be interesting to read a story about Finnish people who move to relatively inexpensive suburbs, don’t spend an overwhelming amount on housing, and basically like their lives. A European friend of mine, for example, has a sister who was born in a medium-sized European country and is basically doing that in Florida, and she seems to like it.

People who live in NYC are self-selected to be obsessive weirdos (who also often want to write books). Which is fine. I’m one of those people but I’m also aware that I’m atypical.

In short, revealed preferences show that most Americans prefer a non-Nordic model. They also show why state-level taxation is better on average than federal-level taxation, since at least people who don’t like state-level taxation regimes can easily move to another state. Score one for the Exit, Voice, and Loyalty world.

Links: Old people vote, three-party systems, Facebook dangers, academic norms, marijuana, and more!

March 7, 2016 By in Links Tags: , Leave a comment

* “The boomer supremacy: The dominance of baby boomers is becoming total,” although I think “old people vote” matters most here.

* The three party system:

There are three major political forces in contemporary politics in developed countries: tribalism, neoliberalism and leftism (defined in more detail below). Until recently, the party system involved competition between different versions of neoliberalism. Since the Global Financial Crisis, neoliberals have remained in power almost everywhere, but can no longer command the electoral support needed to marginalise both tribalists and leftists at the same time. So, we are seeing the emergence of a three-party system, which is inherently unstable because of the Condorcet problem and for other reasons.

I don’t buy the entire analysis, but the ideas are excellent.

* It’s not smart to post lots of shit to Facebook.

* The Second Avenue Subway is actually happening. Slowly, oh so slowly, but happening.

* Mathematician Timothy Gowers is bent on proving academic journals can and should cost nothing. This ought to be obvious by now.

* “Laura Wasser Is Hollywood’s Complete Divorce Solution,” hilarious (and depressing) throughout, with the real takeaway hidden at the end:

Wasser never remarried. Instead, she prefers long-term, live-in boyfriends. She’s no longer with either of her sons’ fathers, with whom she shares verbal custody agreements that she’s never felt the need to put on paper. “Is it a little bit of the cobbler’s son not wearing shoes? Maybe,” she says. “But I don’t want to get married. I don’t like the idea of entering into that contract.”

This is becoming the new normal, though laws and norms haven’t caught up.

* “Can NATO and the EU survive Donald Trump, French nationalists, and a Brexit?” A much scarier article than I imagined reading. We are our own worst enemies.

* Why public sector unions are poisonous; one can only hope that the Supreme Court limits this kind of folly in the future.

* “It’s time to give up the fight against grade inflation.” See also me, “What incentivizes professors to grade honestly? Nothing.”

* Amazing:

And it’s not just price — Mexican growers are facing pressure on quality, too. “The quality of marijuana produced in Mexico and the Caribbean is thought to be inferior to the marijuana produced domestically in the United States or in Canada,” the DEA wrote last year in its 2015 National Drug Threat Assessment. “Law enforcement reporting indicates that Mexican cartels are attempting to produce higher-quality marijuana to keep up with U.S. demand.”