http://fourthcheckraise.blogspot.com/2009/11/world-as-its-own-model.html
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/11/a_turning_point.html
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006726.html
http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2009/11/17/gatekeeper-syndrome/
http://www.glowingfaceman.com/blog/law-of-beliefs/
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/worst_finder_ever/
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/11/a_turning_point.html
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006726.html
http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2009/11/17/gatekeeper-syndrome/
http://www.glowingfaceman.com/blog/law-of-beliefs/
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/worst_finder_ever/
history is often more interesting than fiction, but fiction seems usually better written
the truth seems more often interesting than fiction, as the saying goes. maybe historical writing isn't as popular as fiction because the historians aren't exciting writers, and the fiction writers can write something interesting enough without doing all that costly research. 'steven king writes exciting stories. if he wrote about historical stories, they'd be great, but it would be too much of a pain to write, and we'd get fewer king stories. many good stories over fewer great stories might be preferable.' i've never read tolstoy but he obviously has a great reputation, and was i believe interested in presenting history (i don't know how accurately).
the power of brute self-assertion, sticky memes and scrambling insects
http://cheeptalk.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/inside-story-saddams-strategic-thinking/
quite interesting. what's up with dictators getting detached from reality. it's a distinct pattern--hitler, stalin, hussein, et c. maybe some trait in their personalities got them to their rank, and in that rank the trait lead to disaster--is the trait brute self-assertion? a lot of people will bend over backwards to avoid conflict, so bullies might get far, and people might scramble to help the bullies and avoid his wrath, but then you get to a point where there aren't enough people to scare into helping you, and reality will not bend to your brute self-assertion. i suppose this is a possible explanation of the course of delusion. and also a weird non-mystical account of 'the secret', and self-fulfilling prophecies, and the power of positive thinking, and parkinson's law.
http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2009/11/intelligent_pre.html
nixon and clinton seem comparable. both seem really smart, competitive, street smart, scrappy, and pragmatic. do they get arrogant and then sloppy? oh, or maybe they're a bit like the fellows in the previous item.
http://radar.spacebar.org/f/a/weblog/comment/1/1033
this is so cool--it's an example of a little bit of culture produced by one person ending up in a very notable place. do you ever have an idea or make a joke and then later on you see the idea or hear the joke on a tv show and think it's too specific an idea or joke to have been produced independently by someone else, and therefor somehow your idea got into the heads of a writer--i don't mean i have this idea in the delusions-of-reference way, but consider the possibility of ideas moving far away from their origins in a six-degrees-of-kevin-bacon way. you tell a joke to someone who likes it and they tell it to someone who likes it and happens to know a brother of someone who writes for a sitcom, who likes the joke and puts it in a script. i suppose this path is not likely, but this link demonstrates how little pieces of culture produced by people can end up in notable places.
http://www.halfsigma.com/2009/11/smoking-gun-emails-prove-climate-skeptics-were-right.html
i suppose this all will shake out one way or another. i don't really have any strong opinions on climate change and so whatever happens happens. i have tended to be skeptical about long-term claims about climate, but i'm a libertarian, so i find my skepticism potentially self-serving and am i really uniformly skeptical about other things that are like future climate speculation?
http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2009/11/14/the-parable-of-the-wii/
i like the ant metaphor.
quite interesting. what's up with dictators getting detached from reality. it's a distinct pattern--hitler, stalin, hussein, et c. maybe some trait in their personalities got them to their rank, and in that rank the trait lead to disaster--is the trait brute self-assertion? a lot of people will bend over backwards to avoid conflict, so bullies might get far, and people might scramble to help the bullies and avoid his wrath, but then you get to a point where there aren't enough people to scare into helping you, and reality will not bend to your brute self-assertion. i suppose this is a possible explanation of the course of delusion. and also a weird non-mystical account of 'the secret', and self-fulfilling prophecies, and the power of positive thinking, and parkinson's law.
http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2009/11/intelligent_pre.html
nixon and clinton seem comparable. both seem really smart, competitive, street smart, scrappy, and pragmatic. do they get arrogant and then sloppy? oh, or maybe they're a bit like the fellows in the previous item.
http://radar.spacebar.org/f/a/weblog/comment/1/1033
this is so cool--it's an example of a little bit of culture produced by one person ending up in a very notable place. do you ever have an idea or make a joke and then later on you see the idea or hear the joke on a tv show and think it's too specific an idea or joke to have been produced independently by someone else, and therefor somehow your idea got into the heads of a writer--i don't mean i have this idea in the delusions-of-reference way, but consider the possibility of ideas moving far away from their origins in a six-degrees-of-kevin-bacon way. you tell a joke to someone who likes it and they tell it to someone who likes it and happens to know a brother of someone who writes for a sitcom, who likes the joke and puts it in a script. i suppose this path is not likely, but this link demonstrates how little pieces of culture produced by people can end up in notable places.
http://www.halfsigma.com/2009/11/smoking-gun-emails-prove-climate-skeptics-were-right.html
i suppose this all will shake out one way or another. i don't really have any strong opinions on climate change and so whatever happens happens. i have tended to be skeptical about long-term claims about climate, but i'm a libertarian, so i find my skepticism potentially self-serving and am i really uniformly skeptical about other things that are like future climate speculation?
http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2009/11/14/the-parable-of-the-wii/
i like the ant metaphor.
Seth Roberts blogs framing effects
Seth Roberts blogs framing effects. I comment there:
This makes me wonder if I’m enjoying things in nice packages more than I need to. There might be a gold-mine in products in ugly packages.
If the framing effects really do make a wine better–I think Tyler Cowen argued for the possibility framing effects might add to real enjoyment–then perhaps you can use this effect to make your life better. You buy some cheap liquor and expensive liquor, pour them into identical, nice-looking bottles, and mix them up so you don’t know by look which bottle is expensive and which is cheap.
Robin Hanson on the oddity of the prisoner's last meal
Robin Hanson on the oddity of the prisoner's last meal. I comment there:
Is it possible a good deed to an enemy before he is harmed is a hedge against a reversal, or reprisal from your enemy’s allies? Feeding a prisoner about to be executed could mean you are showing you care about him, but feel you have to kill him anyway for reasons other than immediate personal satisfaction.
I was told by a psychologist that providing food for someone is a way of showing that you care. People who are politically liberal, it seems to me, tend to be interested in organic food and obsessing about food quality, and also are interested in demonstrating they care more than conservatives, who seem less interested in both food and showing empathy.
Operational art, Omar Bradley, Rommel, aggression in war, aggression as a psychological bulwark, what I've been reading on the web
I got "Blitkrieg to Desert Storm", a book by Robert Citino, today. I love Amazon.com, where I bought it from. Having a book come to you in the mail at some unknown point in the near future makes life better. You come home excited at the prospect of getting the book, and it gives you a minor thrill of anticipation even if the book ends up not coming that day.
I went to the section on the US approach to maneuver war in World War II, and was surprised to see Omar Bradley being singled out as someone who brought about operational maneuver in the US's efforts with his masterminding of Operation Cobra. I guess I thought Patton would be mentioned more, but I suppose Patton might not have been operating on the operational level of warfare, perhaps. I'll look at the stuff on the North African chapter to see if Patton makes an appearance there. If not, no biggie. I think the index suggested he's not mentioned much in the book.
Rommel has been interesting me lately too. I had found his "The Rommel Papers", a collection of his writings edited by Basil Liddell Hart, at the Internet Archive. I skipped around in it and found it interesting. Rommel had an idea that as far as I know was his own, which was that when you first make contact with the enemy, you should lay down a withering fire, and the first one to do this tends to carry the battle, the idea being the enemy gets spooked and takes off. This approach is reminiscent of Nathan Bedford Forrest's approach--Forrest was a cavalry general in the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. He liked to counterattack violently and immediately to spook his attacker, and I guess it worked out pretty well fro him. I've heard he was studied by later commanders, and I wonder if Rommel was one of them. The Australian armed forces has a doctrinal idea that is basically, when you are attacked, doing something immediately is a good thing, and you don't have to have a good idea of what is going on to perform well and even win the battle. Similarly, I think, Frederick the Great proclaimed he would cashiere any cavalryman who didn't counterattack immediately when attacked. All these ideas seem to circle around the idea of exerting a great force concentrated at a point of a nascent fight as quickly as possible, and the group that does it first will likely win.
I'm interested in two possibilities regarding human psychology in battle situations. One is that a display of aggression can cause your enemy to fall apart before any great blow has been landed, and the other is that aggression might have an ability to pull a force together when they are being attacked. I've been told by a psychologist that anger is a means of keeping oneself together--I interpret this as anger being something that exerts an organizing and orienting quality in oneself that provides a certain secure feeling, and perhaps is a tincture against fear, which I assume pulls one apart, causing disorganization and disorientation.
As always, your thoughts on any of this is welcomed.
Good stuff on the web:
Gatekeeper Syndrome by Seth Roberts
The Plateau Effect by Sam Alexander
Why Neglect Big Topics? by Robin Hanson
The Very Best Are Obsessed by Ben Casnocha
Why do vampires attract so many readers and viewers? by Tyler Cowen
I went to the section on the US approach to maneuver war in World War II, and was surprised to see Omar Bradley being singled out as someone who brought about operational maneuver in the US's efforts with his masterminding of Operation Cobra. I guess I thought Patton would be mentioned more, but I suppose Patton might not have been operating on the operational level of warfare, perhaps. I'll look at the stuff on the North African chapter to see if Patton makes an appearance there. If not, no biggie. I think the index suggested he's not mentioned much in the book.
Rommel has been interesting me lately too. I had found his "The Rommel Papers", a collection of his writings edited by Basil Liddell Hart, at the Internet Archive. I skipped around in it and found it interesting. Rommel had an idea that as far as I know was his own, which was that when you first make contact with the enemy, you should lay down a withering fire, and the first one to do this tends to carry the battle, the idea being the enemy gets spooked and takes off. This approach is reminiscent of Nathan Bedford Forrest's approach--Forrest was a cavalry general in the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. He liked to counterattack violently and immediately to spook his attacker, and I guess it worked out pretty well fro him. I've heard he was studied by later commanders, and I wonder if Rommel was one of them. The Australian armed forces has a doctrinal idea that is basically, when you are attacked, doing something immediately is a good thing, and you don't have to have a good idea of what is going on to perform well and even win the battle. Similarly, I think, Frederick the Great proclaimed he would cashiere any cavalryman who didn't counterattack immediately when attacked. All these ideas seem to circle around the idea of exerting a great force concentrated at a point of a nascent fight as quickly as possible, and the group that does it first will likely win.
I'm interested in two possibilities regarding human psychology in battle situations. One is that a display of aggression can cause your enemy to fall apart before any great blow has been landed, and the other is that aggression might have an ability to pull a force together when they are being attacked. I've been told by a psychologist that anger is a means of keeping oneself together--I interpret this as anger being something that exerts an organizing and orienting quality in oneself that provides a certain secure feeling, and perhaps is a tincture against fear, which I assume pulls one apart, causing disorganization and disorientation.
As always, your thoughts on any of this is welcomed.
Good stuff on the web:
Gatekeeper Syndrome by Seth Roberts
The Plateau Effect by Sam Alexander
Why Neglect Big Topics? by Robin Hanson
The Very Best Are Obsessed by Ben Casnocha
Why do vampires attract so many readers and viewers? by Tyler Cowen
Action, lights, camera
I bought on Amazon a Robert Citino book, "Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm". I bought his book, "The German Way of War", which is a great read and I'm just about done with it. I do find, though, prose in general describing battles as really kind of confusing. There's talk of lines and advances and skirmishes and artillery battles and stuff like that, and I have a hard time picturing the battle. Movies don't help very much either, though I guess "Saving Private Ryan" gave me a view of how war might feel, and I've heard second-hand that veterans say that movie was very realistic. Maybe my confusion about picturing war is really a confusion that is matched by the participants of war, or at least most people when they are in war-like situations. There's just a fog of war, to use Clausewitz's phrase. I think one of the reasons I like reading about war is that it seems inherently terrifying, filled with important decisions that are made without very good information or time to think about things, and war seems extremely confusing too. One thing I like about reading "The German Way of War" is the description of German doctrine--really Prussian doctrine as Citino points out, which he says is basically aggression. Find the enemy and attack him as quickly as possible. Maybe that's the best way of cutting through the fog of war. How much is this idea true for other realms of life too, I wonder? Don't know what to do? Just attack something that seems to be a problem and keep doing that till you're dead or you've won. I think possibly it is a good approach often, though I wouldn't say always.
Accenting the positive
I went to Burlington, Vermont this weekend, which was a fun time. There was this great bar there called "The Other Place". It was pretty tiny, and when my friend and I got there, not many people were in there, but it filled up as the night went on. I wonder now why the bar calls itself "The Other Place", since it seems to me this would create some problems for people communicating about wanting to go to this bar. "Where do you want to go?" "'The Other Place'." "What other place?" "No, the bar, 'The Other Place'." "Yeah, which one?"
Et c. Actually, these 'Who's on first' kind of situations probably don't really go on for very long. Anyway, at the bar I met a British fellow, and I like to talk about accents with Brits when I meet them, and I imagine this is very boring for Brits to talk about since probably everyone talks to them about their accents when they're in America. I wonder how the American accent is perceived abroad. Some British accents sound very intelligent to my ear, and somewhat wimpy too, whereas an Australian accent tends to sound rugged and intelligent. I've thought Southern accents tend to make someone sound a bit slow, and ditto some Canadian and Midwestern accents. I wonder why. Tempo might be a major factor.
Et c. Actually, these 'Who's on first' kind of situations probably don't really go on for very long. Anyway, at the bar I met a British fellow, and I like to talk about accents with Brits when I meet them, and I imagine this is very boring for Brits to talk about since probably everyone talks to them about their accents when they're in America. I wonder how the American accent is perceived abroad. Some British accents sound very intelligent to my ear, and somewhat wimpy too, whereas an Australian accent tends to sound rugged and intelligent. I've thought Southern accents tend to make someone sound a bit slow, and ditto some Canadian and Midwestern accents. I wonder why. Tempo might be a major factor.
One twin is gay, the other one is "straight"
The new Tegan and Sara album, "Sainthood", is really good. The first song on the album is "Arrow", and it's a synthy song with a weird beat. Tegan and Sara is an interesting band, fronted by identical twin sisters. I'm actually not sure if they really are identical because they don't look that similar. They look a lot a like, so I can understand why they might say they are identical, but they look different enough to wonder. I was told Mary Kate and Ashley Olson weren't identical, which I scoffed at.
Anyway, Tegan and Sara are both musicians and both lesbians. I believe identical twins do tend to have the same sexual preference. It might be interesting to be an identical twin, and your twin comes out as gay, and you don't identify yourself as gay. There are some interesting possibilities. One, you're actually gay. Two, you twin is actually straight. Three, something in your experiences caused you to differ in your sexuality. I wonder if people tend to think one or the other twin is in denial, and if so, which one?
I think it would be funny (tragic too) if a religious, conservative person had a gay identical twin which he referred to as his evil twin.
Anyway, Tegan and Sara are both musicians and both lesbians. I believe identical twins do tend to have the same sexual preference. It might be interesting to be an identical twin, and your twin comes out as gay, and you don't identify yourself as gay. There are some interesting possibilities. One, you're actually gay. Two, you twin is actually straight. Three, something in your experiences caused you to differ in your sexuality. I wonder if people tend to think one or the other twin is in denial, and if so, which one?
I think it would be funny (tragic too) if a religious, conservative person had a gay identical twin which he referred to as his evil twin.
Driving up to Bulrington, Vermont from Boston, listening to Librivox audio and Vozme text-to-audio MP3s of blog posts, Nabokov and Dostoevsky, many simple characters versus a few complex characters, crude model of that
I went to Burlington, Vermont, this weekend to visit a buddy who I went to school with at UVM. It was a fun weekend and I'm kind of exhausted now, from all the driving and going out and not sleeping probably as much as I normally would on weekends to catch up.
I went up on Friday from the Boston area around noon and got there at about three, wildly overestimating how long it takes to get there. This is odd given I drove this route back and forth many times going home and going back to school. One time I went up to Burlington with some other friends, and it ended up taking us about six hours to go from around Boston to Burlington, Vermont, stopping for dinner on the way and me getting pulled over for speeding, and we pulling over for bathroom breaks more frequently. The saying seems true that if you want to travel fast, travel alone.
Anyway, maybe this trip has warped my sense of how far away Burlington is, and in the absense of more salient examples of the trip I'm inclined to recall this experience and believe Burlington takes a long time to get to.
Three hours is a decent length for a trip, not so long you're destroyed by the end of it, I suppose. I was also aided by my MP3 player, which I had loaded up with some HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard fiction read by volunteers who were working for the Librivox project (http://librivox.org). I also had some blog posts I had conveted to audio via the vozme.com text-to-audio program. So I could basically do what I do when I'm reading while driving and not endanger anyone.
Actually, the HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard stuff was...it's not that great. It's not bad, either, really, but the stories seem to work on atmosphere mainly. You basically get plunked into weird worlds (hence their label as 'weird tales' I suppose) and even if the story isn't all that engaging sometimes, the weird world or weird experience has some value.
To me a really good plot is something like the plot of the movie 'Memento', or some of those Rube-Goldberg-esque complex plots of the allegedly plotless show 'Seinfeld'. A good character to me is one with a salient point of view, and they can be somewhat static, that is, they don't change much, and this seems to me how most people are anyway, or we change with strain and only in small ways. I like characters like Raskolnikov from 'Crime and Punishment' because they have very definite philosophies. Nabokov dissed Dostoevsky's characters as charicatures, if I rember right, but I don't really have a big problem with this. Most people probably are charicatures as we experience them, aren't they? There's a bias in humans, IIRC, that causes us to say that other people do bad things because of their inherent character, whereas when we do bad things, it's because of circumstance. I imagine, though I'm not sure this is backed up by studies, that the opposite is true when something good happens to someone else--we say it was luck that so-and-so was successful in business, but when we are successful in business, it's because of our virtuous character, or somethimg like that.
It seems to me that if you're creating a very social world with many characters, in order to track all of the mand their interactions with other characters, you have to reduce the complexity of the characters to some few important and influential factors that are good enough to model much of that character's personality. "He's a hothead." "She's a flake." But if you've got fewer characters, you can maybe get into more detail about every character. You have the same mental constraints keeping you from tracking what is happening in a story, but since there are fewer characters, you can remember more about each character.
So if this speculation is right, I would expect novels with fewer characters to have greater complexity than novels with greater characters. I'm not sure exactly how to quantify complexity of character, so I'll leave the concept fuzzy for the moment. I'm basically just saying, if you've got a story with 20 characters in it, you'll maybe be able to remember that Bill is a hothead and Jen is a flake and Max is a wimp, but if you're reading a book with 10 characters in it, you'll be able to remember that Jack is a hothead and a loyal friend, and Jill is a flake and clever person, and Matt is a wimp and an ambitious person.
Maybe a crude model could be somethign like this: Rate a character's complexity on a scale of 1 to 10, using your intuitive sense of what is complex or simple, 1 being as simple as it gets and 10 being as complex as it gets. Assign such a value to every character in a story, take the average complexity of the characters and multiply it by the number of characters. If this final number is over 50, say, people will find the story confusing, and if the number is below 10 the story will be boring.
So a Thomas Pynchon novel might have 100 characters of an average complexity of 2, and he scores 200, meaning people will on average find his book confusing, whereas a kid's story might have 4 characters that have a average complexity of 2 as well, and this causes the adult reader to be bored.
I'm not sure if such a crude model quite works, but it's interesting. I know that when you add a node to a network, you can potentially increase the number of links significantly. For example, a 2 person network would have 1 link, whereas a 3-person network in which everyone is connected to everyone would be 3, and a 4-person network has I think 6 links. So there's a nonlinear relationship there between nodes and links, and maybe stories work that way too, roughly speaking, so maybe simple characters become more complex simply by being in a story with many other simple characters that they relate to, which makes some intuitive sense.
I went up on Friday from the Boston area around noon and got there at about three, wildly overestimating how long it takes to get there. This is odd given I drove this route back and forth many times going home and going back to school. One time I went up to Burlington with some other friends, and it ended up taking us about six hours to go from around Boston to Burlington, Vermont, stopping for dinner on the way and me getting pulled over for speeding, and we pulling over for bathroom breaks more frequently. The saying seems true that if you want to travel fast, travel alone.
Anyway, maybe this trip has warped my sense of how far away Burlington is, and in the absense of more salient examples of the trip I'm inclined to recall this experience and believe Burlington takes a long time to get to.
Three hours is a decent length for a trip, not so long you're destroyed by the end of it, I suppose. I was also aided by my MP3 player, which I had loaded up with some HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard fiction read by volunteers who were working for the Librivox project (http://librivox.org). I also had some blog posts I had conveted to audio via the vozme.com text-to-audio program. So I could basically do what I do when I'm reading while driving and not endanger anyone.
Actually, the HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard stuff was...it's not that great. It's not bad, either, really, but the stories seem to work on atmosphere mainly. You basically get plunked into weird worlds (hence their label as 'weird tales' I suppose) and even if the story isn't all that engaging sometimes, the weird world or weird experience has some value.
To me a really good plot is something like the plot of the movie 'Memento', or some of those Rube-Goldberg-esque complex plots of the allegedly plotless show 'Seinfeld'. A good character to me is one with a salient point of view, and they can be somewhat static, that is, they don't change much, and this seems to me how most people are anyway, or we change with strain and only in small ways. I like characters like Raskolnikov from 'Crime and Punishment' because they have very definite philosophies. Nabokov dissed Dostoevsky's characters as charicatures, if I rember right, but I don't really have a big problem with this. Most people probably are charicatures as we experience them, aren't they? There's a bias in humans, IIRC, that causes us to say that other people do bad things because of their inherent character, whereas when we do bad things, it's because of circumstance. I imagine, though I'm not sure this is backed up by studies, that the opposite is true when something good happens to someone else--we say it was luck that so-and-so was successful in business, but when we are successful in business, it's because of our virtuous character, or somethimg like that.
It seems to me that if you're creating a very social world with many characters, in order to track all of the mand their interactions with other characters, you have to reduce the complexity of the characters to some few important and influential factors that are good enough to model much of that character's personality. "He's a hothead." "She's a flake." But if you've got fewer characters, you can maybe get into more detail about every character. You have the same mental constraints keeping you from tracking what is happening in a story, but since there are fewer characters, you can remember more about each character.
So if this speculation is right, I would expect novels with fewer characters to have greater complexity than novels with greater characters. I'm not sure exactly how to quantify complexity of character, so I'll leave the concept fuzzy for the moment. I'm basically just saying, if you've got a story with 20 characters in it, you'll maybe be able to remember that Bill is a hothead and Jen is a flake and Max is a wimp, but if you're reading a book with 10 characters in it, you'll be able to remember that Jack is a hothead and a loyal friend, and Jill is a flake and clever person, and Matt is a wimp and an ambitious person.
Maybe a crude model could be somethign like this: Rate a character's complexity on a scale of 1 to 10, using your intuitive sense of what is complex or simple, 1 being as simple as it gets and 10 being as complex as it gets. Assign such a value to every character in a story, take the average complexity of the characters and multiply it by the number of characters. If this final number is over 50, say, people will find the story confusing, and if the number is below 10 the story will be boring.
So a Thomas Pynchon novel might have 100 characters of an average complexity of 2, and he scores 200, meaning people will on average find his book confusing, whereas a kid's story might have 4 characters that have a average complexity of 2 as well, and this causes the adult reader to be bored.
I'm not sure if such a crude model quite works, but it's interesting. I know that when you add a node to a network, you can potentially increase the number of links significantly. For example, a 2 person network would have 1 link, whereas a 3-person network in which everyone is connected to everyone would be 3, and a 4-person network has I think 6 links. So there's a nonlinear relationship there between nodes and links, and maybe stories work that way too, roughly speaking, so maybe simple characters become more complex simply by being in a story with many other simple characters that they relate to, which makes some intuitive sense.
girl who sneezes 12,000 times doesn't always close eyes when seeming to sneeze
there's a girl who allegedly sneezes 12,000 times a day, and doctors can't figure out what's going on. here's a video of her on the today show. note she doesn't close her eyes always when she seems to sneeze, which makes me think the thing is a hoax or she's got something else, because isn't it part of the sneeze reflex to close your eyes? from the straight dope:
but maybe she's stifling a sneeze sometimes and doesn't have to close her eyes even if she's making a weird, sneezy sound. what do i know?
hat tip to drudgereport.com and dailymail.co.uk
Also, not to quibble, but it's just about impossible to hold your eyelids open while you sneeze. They snap shut by reflex.
but maybe she's stifling a sneeze sometimes and doesn't have to close her eyes even if she's making a weird, sneezy sound. what do i know?
hat tip to drudgereport.com and dailymail.co.uk
a way out of iraq and afghanistan
the object as i see it as a non-expert: keeping taliban busy so they don't have much in time and resources to devote to helping anti-american terrorists or to help extremist take-overs of pakistan. in pakistan the object seems to keep the moderates in power and keep extremists out of power.
the approach: gradual draw down of nato troops to zero so extremists aren't stimulated unnecessarily by anti-american sentiment and to help moderates in afghanistan and pakistan distance themselves obviously from the US. the gradual draw down also let's people adjust to life without americans. monetary and non-combat support to friends (anti-taliban groups, government) in afghanistan, monetary and other support for pakistani moderates against extremists, bombing and special operations against taliban and al qaeda whereever they pop up their heads in afghanistan and pakistan and can be gotten at in an opportune way, minimizing civilian deaths and dangers to US military personnel. overthrowing taliban forces if they seize power of government and then immediate withdrawl along with support of anti-taliban forces monetarily and in a non-combat role.
a similar approach could be used in iraq--draw down troops to zero gradually, support the current government and friendly or anti-terroristic organizations in a non-combat fashion, and make it clear the US will knock out any terroristic government if it comes to power and then withdraw.
the overall idea is to contain anti-american extremists, play whack-a-mole with terrorists, support friends, and if enemies gain conventional power, knock them out and then withdraw quickly.
thoughts?
the approach: gradual draw down of nato troops to zero so extremists aren't stimulated unnecessarily by anti-american sentiment and to help moderates in afghanistan and pakistan distance themselves obviously from the US. the gradual draw down also let's people adjust to life without americans. monetary and non-combat support to friends (anti-taliban groups, government) in afghanistan, monetary and other support for pakistani moderates against extremists, bombing and special operations against taliban and al qaeda whereever they pop up their heads in afghanistan and pakistan and can be gotten at in an opportune way, minimizing civilian deaths and dangers to US military personnel. overthrowing taliban forces if they seize power of government and then immediate withdrawl along with support of anti-taliban forces monetarily and in a non-combat role.
a similar approach could be used in iraq--draw down troops to zero gradually, support the current government and friendly or anti-terroristic organizations in a non-combat fashion, and make it clear the US will knock out any terroristic government if it comes to power and then withdraw.
the overall idea is to contain anti-american extremists, play whack-a-mole with terrorists, support friends, and if enemies gain conventional power, knock them out and then withdraw quickly.
thoughts?
solomon kane is batman
solomon kane, a character in robert e. howard stories, first appearing in a story in 1929, seems quite a lot like batman, who appeared first in 1939 (dates got from wikipedia). maybe he was inspiration for batman? he's a puritan clad in black and whose aim is solely to fight evil.
addendum:
the enemy in 'red shadow' is also a bit like the joker--a passage from that work, care of wikisource.org--the first speaker is the joker-like enemy, le loup:
quite like the beginning of 'the dark knight'.
addendum:
the enemy in 'red shadow' is also a bit like the joker--a passage from that work, care of wikisource.org--the first speaker is the joker-like enemy, le loup:
"You are right. Let us take the gems and gold from the chests and flee, using the secret passageway."
"And La Mon?"
"He can watch until we are ready to flee. Then--why divide the treasure three ways?"
quite like the beginning of 'the dark knight'.
Shock and arm the Afghan people
Two wild ideas:
1. arm Afghan people with cheap simple weapons and a manual for protecting themselves. They might use this stuff against the US, but they also might use it against the Taliban.
2. Use loud and showy explosions that actally don't pack much punch--they sound loud and they explode into dust, but they don't create shrapnel or have enough punch to likely kill anyone. When a terrorist attacks US troops, fire this bomb near a village to scare them, so they link the Taliban hanging around them as a magnet for bombs, but the actual bombs don't kill anyone. They don't kno this necessarily, and think they got lucky, and maybe this causes them to try to push the Taliban out.
This is sort of a nutty couple of ideas, but I'll throw them out there anyway.
Addendum: the harmless but scary bomb might have an affect on Afghans against the US the way the blitz apparently rallied the Brits v. the Nazis. On the other hand, if the Afghan people are armed, and the bombing doesn't actually kill anyone, and the US keeps away from the people in the country side, just lobbing these scary but harmless bombs in areas where there is Taliban activity, the people might go after whoever they can go after, and it migh the Taliban who seem in some cases to be bullying Afghans. "We can't get at the Americans lobbing scary bombs, but we can go after the Taliban who the Americans are trying to hit." The US could possibly also say they will stop with the bombing if the people themselves go after the Taliban. You'd probably also have to agree that Afgan's can rule their villages the way they want to, which is presumably in a very local, decentralized way, and not in the democratic manner that the US envisions.
1. arm Afghan people with cheap simple weapons and a manual for protecting themselves. They might use this stuff against the US, but they also might use it against the Taliban.
2. Use loud and showy explosions that actally don't pack much punch--they sound loud and they explode into dust, but they don't create shrapnel or have enough punch to likely kill anyone. When a terrorist attacks US troops, fire this bomb near a village to scare them, so they link the Taliban hanging around them as a magnet for bombs, but the actual bombs don't kill anyone. They don't kno this necessarily, and think they got lucky, and maybe this causes them to try to push the Taliban out.
This is sort of a nutty couple of ideas, but I'll throw them out there anyway.
Addendum: the harmless but scary bomb might have an affect on Afghans against the US the way the blitz apparently rallied the Brits v. the Nazis. On the other hand, if the Afghan people are armed, and the bombing doesn't actually kill anyone, and the US keeps away from the people in the country side, just lobbing these scary but harmless bombs in areas where there is Taliban activity, the people might go after whoever they can go after, and it migh the Taliban who seem in some cases to be bullying Afghans. "We can't get at the Americans lobbing scary bombs, but we can go after the Taliban who the Americans are trying to hit." The US could possibly also say they will stop with the bombing if the people themselves go after the Taliban. You'd probably also have to agree that Afgan's can rule their villages the way they want to, which is presumably in a very local, decentralized way, and not in the democratic manner that the US envisions.
Arab Fog of War
On the Arab-Israeli Wars:
A British intelligence officer once told a puzzled American correspondent that all this ''was very Arab, Nasser knew that the accounts were false, the people who provided them knew that they were false; but the language was so grotesquely exaggerated that the facts were obscured and, in any case, all were more interested in fantasy than fact.''
J of Memoirs of a Squirrel Chaser on messing with people and unresolved mysteries
J of Memoirs of a Squirrel Chaser on messing with people and unresolved mysteries.
To me what's great about creating such a hard-to-explain mystery, or impossible-to-explain mystery, is that we humans are story-telling creatures, and we want to make sense of the world, and will spin scenarios to try to make sense of difficult-to-explain events. I suppose one might brush off some unexplained experiences as unimportant. "So he's got toast in his pockets. Whatever the reason for it, it's not important." But the stuff that is important but hard to explain, that is where I suspect many interesting stories emerge. We have religion as an attempt to explain what seems important but is hard to explain--the most salient question being what happens to a person when they die? Given I want to plan for the future to maximize as much as possible my happiness, what should I make of dying? Is that the end or is there something that happens to us after we die? I guess you could say I am begging the question there and the inquiry should be evidence-based. "What happens when you die? Your body decomposes. Your brain, the seat of your mind, decomposes too, and so your mind disappears the way a computer's functionality disappears once you drop it into the bathrub (long story).
I suppose then the common move towards an afterlife comes perhaps from wishful thinking--there is something else after death. If we accept the materialist take, we just die, and so all our planning should stop at the moment of death. We should plan to be happy to the moment of death and then beyond that concern is pointless. There will be no happiness or sadness. But the arguably often useful cognitive strategy of optimism might seek to exploit strategies that work on the assumption that consciousness continues after the body has rotted away. A nerdy example would be "There is a reasonable argument that we will eventually produce artificially intelligent simulations can exist, and if they do exist, that they would be the most common form of intelligence, and if so, then it is likely that I am a simulation, being a conscious being. If so, the appearance of death doesn't mean actual death, as some programmer might just send me to a new simulated world. Given this probability, I should act in a way that pleases my programmer or programmers as best as possible so that they keep me around." This is, from my flawed memory, what Robin Hanson has argued, though not as a likelihood I don't think, but as a possibility. Scott Adams also seems, probably in a tongue-in-cheek manner, to argue something like this. So, if you take this argument, you might start acting in a way that pleases what you would guess to be the likely decision-maker of whether to keep you around or not. I think Robin Hanson suggested possibly that you act in an entertaining way to the programmer.
To me what's great about creating such a hard-to-explain mystery, or impossible-to-explain mystery, is that we humans are story-telling creatures, and we want to make sense of the world, and will spin scenarios to try to make sense of difficult-to-explain events. I suppose one might brush off some unexplained experiences as unimportant. "So he's got toast in his pockets. Whatever the reason for it, it's not important." But the stuff that is important but hard to explain, that is where I suspect many interesting stories emerge. We have religion as an attempt to explain what seems important but is hard to explain--the most salient question being what happens to a person when they die? Given I want to plan for the future to maximize as much as possible my happiness, what should I make of dying? Is that the end or is there something that happens to us after we die? I guess you could say I am begging the question there and the inquiry should be evidence-based. "What happens when you die? Your body decomposes. Your brain, the seat of your mind, decomposes too, and so your mind disappears the way a computer's functionality disappears once you drop it into the bathrub (long story).
I suppose then the common move towards an afterlife comes perhaps from wishful thinking--there is something else after death. If we accept the materialist take, we just die, and so all our planning should stop at the moment of death. We should plan to be happy to the moment of death and then beyond that concern is pointless. There will be no happiness or sadness. But the arguably often useful cognitive strategy of optimism might seek to exploit strategies that work on the assumption that consciousness continues after the body has rotted away. A nerdy example would be "There is a reasonable argument that we will eventually produce artificially intelligent simulations can exist, and if they do exist, that they would be the most common form of intelligence, and if so, then it is likely that I am a simulation, being a conscious being. If so, the appearance of death doesn't mean actual death, as some programmer might just send me to a new simulated world. Given this probability, I should act in a way that pleases my programmer or programmers as best as possible so that they keep me around." This is, from my flawed memory, what Robin Hanson has argued, though not as a likelihood I don't think, but as a possibility. Scott Adams also seems, probably in a tongue-in-cheek manner, to argue something like this. So, if you take this argument, you might start acting in a way that pleases what you would guess to be the likely decision-maker of whether to keep you around or not. I think Robin Hanson suggested possibly that you act in an entertaining way to the programmer.
Scott Adams on the importance of being in the mood to do something and how this is important to happiness
Scott Adams on the importance of being in the mood to do something and how this is important to happiness.
This reminds me of a perennial problem I have, which is of moodiness (the Big Five Personality trait of neuroticism--I am high on this scale). I have trouble committing to do something with someone in a few days because I don't know how I am going to feel that day. I don't know how I am going to feel in a few hours, frankly. So I am very reticent to make plans. This of course causes problems, and people who have stable moods I think must have an immensely easier time doing things in their life, because they can know with fair confidence what mood they will be in in a few days, namely pretty much the same mood they are in now. Of course, another trait of the Big Five Personality Model is conscientiousness, which is the ability to stick with a plan or inhibit one's impulses. I imagine someone high on neuroticism but average on conscientiousness might look lower on conscientiousness than someone who is low on neuroticism and average on conscientiousness, if mood affect planning.
This reminds me of a perennial problem I have, which is of moodiness (the Big Five Personality trait of neuroticism--I am high on this scale). I have trouble committing to do something with someone in a few days because I don't know how I am going to feel that day. I don't know how I am going to feel in a few hours, frankly. So I am very reticent to make plans. This of course causes problems, and people who have stable moods I think must have an immensely easier time doing things in their life, because they can know with fair confidence what mood they will be in in a few days, namely pretty much the same mood they are in now. Of course, another trait of the Big Five Personality Model is conscientiousness, which is the ability to stick with a plan or inhibit one's impulses. I imagine someone high on neuroticism but average on conscientiousness might look lower on conscientiousness than someone who is low on neuroticism and average on conscientiousness, if mood affect planning.
Taking the tube has a new meaning
Scott Aaronson suggests passengers of airplanes be put in private cubbyholes, which might be more economical, comfortable and private.
I love this idea. I imagine also you could make boarding and de-boarding easier by clustering cubbyholes into pods that could be entered off the airplane, then loaded onto the airplane. So ten people might jump into their cubbyholes on the tarmac and then the pod of cubbyholes could be loaded onto the airplane. People wouldn't have to wait in cues as they get to their seats.
Another, wilder idea, is that you might get some additional safety features from organizing people into cubbyholes--they would be surrounded by material in addition to the plane's shell. What would you prefer, to get sucked out of a plane in your seat, or out of it in a little plastic tube, perhaps with an automatic parachute attached. Similarly, if you get into a crash, perhaps the cubbyhole unit would add cushion against impact.
You would think the Japanese might be most amenable to this arrangement, given there is already a culture of cubbyhole sleep arrangements in their apparently space-starved culture.
I love this idea. I imagine also you could make boarding and de-boarding easier by clustering cubbyholes into pods that could be entered off the airplane, then loaded onto the airplane. So ten people might jump into their cubbyholes on the tarmac and then the pod of cubbyholes could be loaded onto the airplane. People wouldn't have to wait in cues as they get to their seats.
Another, wilder idea, is that you might get some additional safety features from organizing people into cubbyholes--they would be surrounded by material in addition to the plane's shell. What would you prefer, to get sucked out of a plane in your seat, or out of it in a little plastic tube, perhaps with an automatic parachute attached. Similarly, if you get into a crash, perhaps the cubbyhole unit would add cushion against impact.
You would think the Japanese might be most amenable to this arrangement, given there is already a culture of cubbyhole sleep arrangements in their apparently space-starved culture.
Don Boudreaux calls for more competition in education
Don Boudreaux calls for more competition in education.
Being a fairly libertarian guy, I am quite fond of the idea of a free market education system. A friend of mine thinks that bad parents won't send their kids to school, or won't be thoughtful about sending their kids to school, something like that, and I can't say that it's implausible a bad parent will send their kid to some cheapo school that sucks. I am inclined to think most parents will want to send their kids to a good school, the best one their budgets can manage given they have other things they think are important to spend money on. Rich people would buy better education for their kids, but that's how it is now, and liberals frequently send their kids to private schools to give their kids an unfair advantage. The demands for a level playing field I've never heard matched with a call to outlaw private schools, but maybe I've missed something.
Perhaps poor people could receive vouchers to pay for cheap private schools to send their kids to, if they didn't have the money to pay for tuition, and schools that couldn't get a kid to get a minimal score on the SATs would have to refund the money to the government and the kid wouldn't get a diploma.
A problem here is students with high probabilities of getting a high enough score on the SAT would be risky propositions for any school, requiring the tuition for such students to be higher. But it seems irrational to expect a school to take on a student that isn't likely to pass the test sufficiently, causing the school to lose money. The judgment of the school isn't irrational to want to pass on a risky student any more than an insurance company may not want to insure a risky proposition unless lots of money is put down for the service.
Perhaps those who can't get an education from a private school should have some other form of training that is more amenable to their perceived abilities. Sure they don't seem likely to get a high enough score on an SAT to make them worth educating much, but they might benefit from some other form of education, like simple but useful trade.
If this seems unfair, consider that some people already have too much trouble getting into graduate school, or college, or graduating high school, and must look for other avenues of advancement, or self-sufficiency.
Being a fairly libertarian guy, I am quite fond of the idea of a free market education system. A friend of mine thinks that bad parents won't send their kids to school, or won't be thoughtful about sending their kids to school, something like that, and I can't say that it's implausible a bad parent will send their kid to some cheapo school that sucks. I am inclined to think most parents will want to send their kids to a good school, the best one their budgets can manage given they have other things they think are important to spend money on. Rich people would buy better education for their kids, but that's how it is now, and liberals frequently send their kids to private schools to give their kids an unfair advantage. The demands for a level playing field I've never heard matched with a call to outlaw private schools, but maybe I've missed something.
Perhaps poor people could receive vouchers to pay for cheap private schools to send their kids to, if they didn't have the money to pay for tuition, and schools that couldn't get a kid to get a minimal score on the SATs would have to refund the money to the government and the kid wouldn't get a diploma.
A problem here is students with high probabilities of getting a high enough score on the SAT would be risky propositions for any school, requiring the tuition for such students to be higher. But it seems irrational to expect a school to take on a student that isn't likely to pass the test sufficiently, causing the school to lose money. The judgment of the school isn't irrational to want to pass on a risky student any more than an insurance company may not want to insure a risky proposition unless lots of money is put down for the service.
Perhaps those who can't get an education from a private school should have some other form of training that is more amenable to their perceived abilities. Sure they don't seem likely to get a high enough score on an SAT to make them worth educating much, but they might benefit from some other form of education, like simple but useful trade.
If this seems unfair, consider that some people already have too much trouble getting into graduate school, or college, or graduating high school, and must look for other avenues of advancement, or self-sufficiency.
Six Degrees of whoever you want
Seth Godin on more new great things now than ever, et c.
I'm inclined to think the internet, the cheaper ability to produce media, the long tail, all that, is good. I was talking with a friend about the idea that culture is becoming more fragmented and we don't share as much of the culture with each other as we used to. He was pessimistic about it, but I personally think that it's not a problem, at least as far as I can see. My reasoning is that you become involved in many little subcultures which many of your friends and neighbors might not be involved with, but these subcultures connect with each other in myriad ways, with the help of the internet, and so I might not follow the nightly news or read a newspaper often, but I do read blogs that use the NYT or Wall Street Journal and reference them, and I get that information second hand. I also am interested in subcultures that connect with other subcultures I would otherwise ignore. I like Tegan and Sara, who are Canadians, and who are liberals, and who are lesbians, three groups I would left to my own devices not pay much attention to.
I'm inclined to think the internet, the cheaper ability to produce media, the long tail, all that, is good. I was talking with a friend about the idea that culture is becoming more fragmented and we don't share as much of the culture with each other as we used to. He was pessimistic about it, but I personally think that it's not a problem, at least as far as I can see. My reasoning is that you become involved in many little subcultures which many of your friends and neighbors might not be involved with, but these subcultures connect with each other in myriad ways, with the help of the internet, and so I might not follow the nightly news or read a newspaper often, but I do read blogs that use the NYT or Wall Street Journal and reference them, and I get that information second hand. I also am interested in subcultures that connect with other subcultures I would otherwise ignore. I like Tegan and Sara, who are Canadians, and who are liberals, and who are lesbians, three groups I would left to my own devices not pay much attention to.
Robin Hanson on our tendency to argue for our group and against enemy groups
Robin Hanson on our tendency to argue for our group and against enemy groups.
I comment there:
I comment there:
It seems like showing irrational commitment to a group might send a bad signal to others. “This guy is nuts. I can’t cooperate with him, because he doesn’t see simple facts and follow logic.” Maybe this is good for the group with followers with irrational beliefs, because it throws off enemies who might try to strategize by considering rational choice theory. “Well, if they were rational they’d do this, but they aren’t, so who knows what they are going to do. So let’s take them seriously when they say they’re going to nuke everyone, and give in to them more readily.”
F love
http://www.hulu.com/watch/106916/e-news-now-rihanna-breaks-silence-on-chris-brown
Well said. Smart girl.
Well said. Smart girl.
Argument as performance rather than truth-discovery process
A good argument seems to have a force, but I'm not sure how much of the force is a persuasive force. It seems more a display of ability, like a good performance, a display of mastery of some technique. I think of two rappers in a battle and compare them to two people having an argument. They're both performing. Doesn't it seem true that two people can argue, one being closer to the truth than the other, but the other is better with making arguments and so perhaps does better in the argument. But what does 'better' mean? Better at impressing people? This seems the most likely candidate to me.
What is thought?
What is thought? I guess any mental work could be construed as thought. I suppose the mental work that is volitional and aimed at creating a plan or developing a model of the world or some chunk of it might be thought of as thought. So my impromptu definition seems to be leading me in the direction of thinking of thought as either model-building regarding reality, or creating a plan. But I suppose this leaves out imagination, which is using sense data or abstract symbols as a stand in for sense data to produce a novel combination for the purposes of creating useful insight or entertainment. So planning, modeling, and imagining seem to be the three elements of thought that come to my mind.
I usually think in words and sentences. I have to talk something out in my head to get an understanding of it, usually, I think. I suppose I also think in a kind of tinkering manner, which doesn't have a verbal element. Thinking about music usually means I have some instinct that some approach will be interesting, and then I try to use the approach. I suppose I might imagine a bit of music, a few seconds of it in my head, and then think, okay, let's try that or something like it. And then I work outside of my head--the thought works in close cooperation with action and feedback from the senses, in a tinkering process, to get the product I am working on into a shape I like. The thought can't advance without action and feedback, not much anyway. So tinkering is probably a form of thinking with an external element. I suppose you could say mathematicians do similar things when they write down equations so they don't have to keep it all in their head.
Interestingly, verbal reasoning doesn't seem like a form of reason that requires me to put down my reasoning in writing form, though I like to. But I can think something out in my head in sentences, or speak with someone, and not write things down, and feel I am making some progress. Perhaps verbal reasoning is the simplest or easiest or most economical form of abstract thinking.
I suppose I might forget a line of verbal reasoning in a while, maybe, but it seems more memorable than say trying to remember a melody you came up with a moment ago. I like to write music and I usually forget how the melody went in the first verse by the time I get through the chorus, if I am just jamming and coming up with things off the top of my head. I might not be able to repeat perfectly and argument I made in an earlier conversation, but I bet it's easier for me to remeber the gist. I wonder why that is.
I also think I probably have some sort of visual or imaginative element working with verbal reasoning. I'll have a few verbal thoughts and then have some pictures or little few-second videos running in my head of some scenario, or little flashes that are there and gone in a second or less.
It strikes me it might be interesting to make a movie that is first person, but not in the sense of a camera is simply the eyes of the character, but that through the editing process and though an overlay of narration, one could perhaps create a simulation of what it is like to be in the stream of a person's consciousness--so flashes of images pop up on the screen quickly when the character is picturing something, and a bit of unobtrusive narration stands in for a bit of verbal thinking on behalf of the character. You could use music, as filmmakers do, to simulate emotions, though I think the music would have a kind of subtle background quality and wouldn't be quite as obviously connected with something like danger--think of the violin playing those high fast notes quickly when someone is about to get killed in a horror movie. Doesn't fear sort of sound like that? I mean, when I am really afraid, it does seem like these is this high violin playing really fast in my head--but...not really at the same time. Maybe blood pumping in fear does something in our ear affecting our hearing, creating a subtle high pitch noise that isn't maybe as strong as a movie violin, but the violin conveys the feeling in our ear maybe. Dunno. Sentences probably don't convey thought perfectly either--I mean, many of my verbal thoughts seem like fragments, or maybe fragments supplements with pictures and maybe emotions tie in to the whole thing. But a book with a narration of an experience written in a stream of consciousness feels like a not-bad approximation of an inner experience, and perhaps we flesh out the thin model with a bit of detail for the movie in our head based on this novel we're reading.
I usually think in words and sentences. I have to talk something out in my head to get an understanding of it, usually, I think. I suppose I also think in a kind of tinkering manner, which doesn't have a verbal element. Thinking about music usually means I have some instinct that some approach will be interesting, and then I try to use the approach. I suppose I might imagine a bit of music, a few seconds of it in my head, and then think, okay, let's try that or something like it. And then I work outside of my head--the thought works in close cooperation with action and feedback from the senses, in a tinkering process, to get the product I am working on into a shape I like. The thought can't advance without action and feedback, not much anyway. So tinkering is probably a form of thinking with an external element. I suppose you could say mathematicians do similar things when they write down equations so they don't have to keep it all in their head.
Interestingly, verbal reasoning doesn't seem like a form of reason that requires me to put down my reasoning in writing form, though I like to. But I can think something out in my head in sentences, or speak with someone, and not write things down, and feel I am making some progress. Perhaps verbal reasoning is the simplest or easiest or most economical form of abstract thinking.
I suppose I might forget a line of verbal reasoning in a while, maybe, but it seems more memorable than say trying to remember a melody you came up with a moment ago. I like to write music and I usually forget how the melody went in the first verse by the time I get through the chorus, if I am just jamming and coming up with things off the top of my head. I might not be able to repeat perfectly and argument I made in an earlier conversation, but I bet it's easier for me to remeber the gist. I wonder why that is.
I also think I probably have some sort of visual or imaginative element working with verbal reasoning. I'll have a few verbal thoughts and then have some pictures or little few-second videos running in my head of some scenario, or little flashes that are there and gone in a second or less.
It strikes me it might be interesting to make a movie that is first person, but not in the sense of a camera is simply the eyes of the character, but that through the editing process and though an overlay of narration, one could perhaps create a simulation of what it is like to be in the stream of a person's consciousness--so flashes of images pop up on the screen quickly when the character is picturing something, and a bit of unobtrusive narration stands in for a bit of verbal thinking on behalf of the character. You could use music, as filmmakers do, to simulate emotions, though I think the music would have a kind of subtle background quality and wouldn't be quite as obviously connected with something like danger--think of the violin playing those high fast notes quickly when someone is about to get killed in a horror movie. Doesn't fear sort of sound like that? I mean, when I am really afraid, it does seem like these is this high violin playing really fast in my head--but...not really at the same time. Maybe blood pumping in fear does something in our ear affecting our hearing, creating a subtle high pitch noise that isn't maybe as strong as a movie violin, but the violin conveys the feeling in our ear maybe. Dunno. Sentences probably don't convey thought perfectly either--I mean, many of my verbal thoughts seem like fragments, or maybe fragments supplements with pictures and maybe emotions tie in to the whole thing. But a book with a narration of an experience written in a stream of consciousness feels like a not-bad approximation of an inner experience, and perhaps we flesh out the thin model with a bit of detail for the movie in our head based on this novel we're reading.
Ev psych of male genital size
I wonder if men fixate on the lengths of their wangs because it's good for their reproductive success to have a longer one than the other guys, if they are sharing sex partners with other men. Women don't care, prefering girth.
Breeding
This is the word the popped up on the random word generator after a few clicks through less interesting words. Breeding. My first thought on breeding is 'why do we breed?' Why do we make more of ourselves? People used to have more kids than they do now, it seems. In the past there was a numbers-game element to having kids--some of them were going to die so you had a bunch and many might not make it out of childhood. There used to be, it seems, more big Irish Catholic families, and I imagine Italian families too, though I don't know. My mom had seven siblings, she being the child of Irish immigrants. I don't think that was that unusual back then. I don't know any families that have that many kids in them now, that I can think of. The biggest family I know of is the one my friend is from--he has three brothers.
Well, so why this drive to propagate and why does it seem to drop off over time? A few things come to mind, one being that birth control came into the picture, as well as a slackening religiosity, so you could control your reproduction and you didn't feel an obligation to procreate out of religious conviction. Also, it seems more expensive to raise kids now. I mean, how on earth do you have eight kids now? That is so freaking expensive. I don't know how these off-the-boat Irish immigrants had eight kids. It's amazing.
I mean, let me think about this. If I got married and had eight kids, one after the other, giving my poor wife no rest, how would things go? Well, she'd be working, and I'd be working, and she'd be constantly pregnant, and we might crank out eight kids in, what...say 15 years maybe? So that would be a kid roughly every two years. Average US household income is about 50,000 bucks. We'd have our kids in school and we'd be buying diapers. It'd be expensive. College would be hard to pay for.
I suppose earlier marriage in the old days probably helped the larger families come into existence. It's hard to have eight kids when you're married at thirty or so and only have five or ten years to make babies--the years getting presumably chancier the more you move towards forty. In the old days if you got married at twenty, you had fifteen years, and without good birth control, I suppose having a couple kids just by accident might have been not unrealistic. How reliable is the rhythm method? How reliable is pulling out?
How much do kids cost to raise today, assuming you're a cheapskate who doesn't thin you can mess with your kids too much by giving them a cheap upbringing, which I sort of think might have been how a lot of fertile immigrants did things? We'd have to get a house that could accommodate eight kids. Can't put them in a tent in the backyard...or CAN you?! I suppose we'd probably have to double-up on bedrooms.
According to Babycenter.com, one kid, no college, living in the Northeast in a two parent household making 38-64,000 will cost you $208,692, if the kid was born in 2007--estimates are in 2006 dollars. So eight kids would be 1.7 million, if you just multiply and assume nothing else is relevant. Just a rough guess based on glancing at Wikipedia, but say a couple has a lifetime household income of about 3.2 million dollars--if that's the case then they're sacrificing a bit over half their income for raising their eight kids.
It's a lot of thinking. I guess families grow incrementally, you know? So you do some calculating with your wife, figure you can handle one kid, and have the kid, and then you calculate and decide you can have another kid. To do that eight times is not something your average person is going to want to do. Most people end up with about two kids.
So eight kids--I mean you send them to public school, so you're not paying for that other than in that you pay for taxes. People with no kids or kids in private schools who pay property taxes--how education is subsidized in Massachusetts, basically pay for your kids education, while you pay whatever property taxes you pay for, and at some point you probably are consuming more education than you are paying for--I assume after maybe 2 kids or so you're basically getting free education for your kids, though I might be wrong.
You've got to pay for their clothes. Some of that can be solved through hand-me-downs, so there is in some small way an economy of scale at work--I don't have to buy new sets of clothes for every kid--I can do the hand-me-down thing. So having additional kids makes the average kid's cost cheaper to a point.
Also, the older kids can basically act as babysitters once they're old enough. You also gain expertise in how to raise kids, so each new kid is easier to raise then the previous one, because you don't have to relearn old lessons. And after you have two kids, you learn how to deal with groups of kids to an extent, or how individual kids interact with each other, so additional kids are raised with that knowledge--of course, with additional people added to the family group the dynamics of that group becomes much more complex. If you have one kid, you have three people with three bilateral relationships: mom and dad, mom and baby, baby and dad, whereas an additional kid complicates things: mom and dad, mom and baby 1, mom and baby 2, dad and baby 1, dad and baby 2, et c.
But that can be good too, possibly, because you can develop economies of scale--one of your kids as he or she gets older develops a talent for cooking, and likes doing it. Another kid is handy. Another is good at babysitting.
It's kind of interesting.
But I actually can't see people being that interested in having these big families anymore. I suppose maybe religious people, or people with some kind of interesting compulsion to have more kids. I suspect many people have a vague desire to have kids, and maybe look around and see other people have two kids usually, so why not us?
I suppose I wonder something more along the lines of...is this going to be the right move? I used to sort of have a vague desire to have kids, but now I'm more ambivalent. I think I probably would still like to have kids, but I get caught up in the logistics of it. I'm not sure if that is a good thing. I mean, the more you think about something, the more it seems like a problematic thing to do. Maybe I have too much of a neurotics bent of mind.
People's revealed preference seems to be towards having kids, while the happiness literature seems to indicate people don't seem to be happier with kids than without kids. One thought I've had is that people who have kids think it will be good, and then when they have them they find it not so great, but feel they have to hype the experience to others. They can't say, "Oh, we regret having kids." Even if you believe that, you can't say that. But my theory hits a snag--I suppose a couple who had one kid might feel that way, but what about the people who have two or more kids. They had one and they decided to have another. So they knew what they were getting into with that second kid, and they decided for it anyway. What's up with that? The second kid suggests to me people know what they are doing and they want kids and they like having kids. They maybe say they're not as happy with kids as they were when they didn't have kids, but this could be some unconscious, evolved ploy to make kids appreciate their parents and give the parents more power over their children. It could be a conscious strategy for some savvy Machiavellian parents.
One idea I don't completely understand is the idea of feeling you live on through your children. In a sense this is true in that you're a combination of genes and some of those genes will be copied and exist in your children, who will then pass on some of you to the next generation of they breed. So I guess...I guess I would be living on, but I also would live on if my brother or my cousin breeds, since I share some genes with them--well--I suppose it might be possible that none of my genes end up in my relatives kids, depending on how things shook down, but some population geneticist would probably be able to give me a nice simple mathematical answer as to how many of my genes are likely to be passed on when my brother or my cousin has a kid.
Well, so why this drive to propagate and why does it seem to drop off over time? A few things come to mind, one being that birth control came into the picture, as well as a slackening religiosity, so you could control your reproduction and you didn't feel an obligation to procreate out of religious conviction. Also, it seems more expensive to raise kids now. I mean, how on earth do you have eight kids now? That is so freaking expensive. I don't know how these off-the-boat Irish immigrants had eight kids. It's amazing.
I mean, let me think about this. If I got married and had eight kids, one after the other, giving my poor wife no rest, how would things go? Well, she'd be working, and I'd be working, and she'd be constantly pregnant, and we might crank out eight kids in, what...say 15 years maybe? So that would be a kid roughly every two years. Average US household income is about 50,000 bucks. We'd have our kids in school and we'd be buying diapers. It'd be expensive. College would be hard to pay for.
I suppose earlier marriage in the old days probably helped the larger families come into existence. It's hard to have eight kids when you're married at thirty or so and only have five or ten years to make babies--the years getting presumably chancier the more you move towards forty. In the old days if you got married at twenty, you had fifteen years, and without good birth control, I suppose having a couple kids just by accident might have been not unrealistic. How reliable is the rhythm method? How reliable is pulling out?
How much do kids cost to raise today, assuming you're a cheapskate who doesn't thin you can mess with your kids too much by giving them a cheap upbringing, which I sort of think might have been how a lot of fertile immigrants did things? We'd have to get a house that could accommodate eight kids. Can't put them in a tent in the backyard...or CAN you?! I suppose we'd probably have to double-up on bedrooms.
According to Babycenter.com, one kid, no college, living in the Northeast in a two parent household making 38-64,000 will cost you $208,692, if the kid was born in 2007--estimates are in 2006 dollars. So eight kids would be 1.7 million, if you just multiply and assume nothing else is relevant. Just a rough guess based on glancing at Wikipedia, but say a couple has a lifetime household income of about 3.2 million dollars--if that's the case then they're sacrificing a bit over half their income for raising their eight kids.
It's a lot of thinking. I guess families grow incrementally, you know? So you do some calculating with your wife, figure you can handle one kid, and have the kid, and then you calculate and decide you can have another kid. To do that eight times is not something your average person is going to want to do. Most people end up with about two kids.
So eight kids--I mean you send them to public school, so you're not paying for that other than in that you pay for taxes. People with no kids or kids in private schools who pay property taxes--how education is subsidized in Massachusetts, basically pay for your kids education, while you pay whatever property taxes you pay for, and at some point you probably are consuming more education than you are paying for--I assume after maybe 2 kids or so you're basically getting free education for your kids, though I might be wrong.
You've got to pay for their clothes. Some of that can be solved through hand-me-downs, so there is in some small way an economy of scale at work--I don't have to buy new sets of clothes for every kid--I can do the hand-me-down thing. So having additional kids makes the average kid's cost cheaper to a point.
Also, the older kids can basically act as babysitters once they're old enough. You also gain expertise in how to raise kids, so each new kid is easier to raise then the previous one, because you don't have to relearn old lessons. And after you have two kids, you learn how to deal with groups of kids to an extent, or how individual kids interact with each other, so additional kids are raised with that knowledge--of course, with additional people added to the family group the dynamics of that group becomes much more complex. If you have one kid, you have three people with three bilateral relationships: mom and dad, mom and baby, baby and dad, whereas an additional kid complicates things: mom and dad, mom and baby 1, mom and baby 2, dad and baby 1, dad and baby 2, et c.
But that can be good too, possibly, because you can develop economies of scale--one of your kids as he or she gets older develops a talent for cooking, and likes doing it. Another kid is handy. Another is good at babysitting.
It's kind of interesting.
But I actually can't see people being that interested in having these big families anymore. I suppose maybe religious people, or people with some kind of interesting compulsion to have more kids. I suspect many people have a vague desire to have kids, and maybe look around and see other people have two kids usually, so why not us?
I suppose I wonder something more along the lines of...is this going to be the right move? I used to sort of have a vague desire to have kids, but now I'm more ambivalent. I think I probably would still like to have kids, but I get caught up in the logistics of it. I'm not sure if that is a good thing. I mean, the more you think about something, the more it seems like a problematic thing to do. Maybe I have too much of a neurotics bent of mind.
People's revealed preference seems to be towards having kids, while the happiness literature seems to indicate people don't seem to be happier with kids than without kids. One thought I've had is that people who have kids think it will be good, and then when they have them they find it not so great, but feel they have to hype the experience to others. They can't say, "Oh, we regret having kids." Even if you believe that, you can't say that. But my theory hits a snag--I suppose a couple who had one kid might feel that way, but what about the people who have two or more kids. They had one and they decided to have another. So they knew what they were getting into with that second kid, and they decided for it anyway. What's up with that? The second kid suggests to me people know what they are doing and they want kids and they like having kids. They maybe say they're not as happy with kids as they were when they didn't have kids, but this could be some unconscious, evolved ploy to make kids appreciate their parents and give the parents more power over their children. It could be a conscious strategy for some savvy Machiavellian parents.
One idea I don't completely understand is the idea of feeling you live on through your children. In a sense this is true in that you're a combination of genes and some of those genes will be copied and exist in your children, who will then pass on some of you to the next generation of they breed. So I guess...I guess I would be living on, but I also would live on if my brother or my cousin breeds, since I share some genes with them--well--I suppose it might be possible that none of my genes end up in my relatives kids, depending on how things shook down, but some population geneticist would probably be able to give me a nice simple mathematical answer as to how many of my genes are likely to be passed on when my brother or my cousin has a kid.
The truly bizarre and grizzly case of
Here are some search terms that have brought readers to my web page since October 1:
Maybe I'll use some of these oddball search terms as subjects of future free-write blog posts.
'where is "i for one welcome our robot overlords" from'
"michael kenny mentally ill"
"stoner adventure ideas for script"
"californication alpha male"
"writing the beta male"
"male to female fantasy"
Maybe I'll use some of these oddball search terms as subjects of future free-write blog posts.
I really should be president of something
Following up on my post about empowering workers to punish other workers through the power of docking their coworkers pay in some minor way--it occurs to me that we do punish others in subtle ways anyway, but the advantage of making it explicit to others that they are being punished might be of special value. Sure the asshole in the office might suffer a thousand passive-aggressive insults, but does he even know there is this effort against him--he has no means of comparing his life to the nicer types. But he would notice his paycheck being docked by myriad anonymous folks.
I should really be president of something.
I should really be president of something.
The punishers
It seems to me some situations force you to be an asshole or a sucker. Assholes are people who hurt others for their own advantage, and suckers are those who are hurt. I remember waiting to line up to exit 93 onto Storrow Drive in Boston, and most people lined up to wait in the line, but some went along side the line and then cut in, saving time. In this situation you're either an asshole or a sucker.
If you were able to damage the person's car, though, then they would not gain anything from cutting in line, given the costs. My grandfather had an interesting and outlandish idea--a device that shoots something sticky on another person's car that can't be removed easily, that indicates the person did something you deem punishable. People would drive better--I certainly would.
In a work environment, a lot of times it's tough to tell who is doing much work. If workers were able to anonymously dock other people's pays slightly, in order to punish them for offenses, I imagine people might make an effort to keep on the good side of their fellow employees. Any individual might not have much power to punish--one person perhaps gets a limit of how much they can dock others, but big offenders might really feel the sting in their paycheck if they are annoying lots of people.
Obviously this kind of thing should be tested before anything can be said about its efficacy--perhaps it already has.
If you were able to damage the person's car, though, then they would not gain anything from cutting in line, given the costs. My grandfather had an interesting and outlandish idea--a device that shoots something sticky on another person's car that can't be removed easily, that indicates the person did something you deem punishable. People would drive better--I certainly would.
In a work environment, a lot of times it's tough to tell who is doing much work. If workers were able to anonymously dock other people's pays slightly, in order to punish them for offenses, I imagine people might make an effort to keep on the good side of their fellow employees. Any individual might not have much power to punish--one person perhaps gets a limit of how much they can dock others, but big offenders might really feel the sting in their paycheck if they are annoying lots of people.
Obviously this kind of thing should be tested before anything can be said about its efficacy--perhaps it already has.
Graduate them from high school before they can drive
I wonder why we don't keep kids in school through summer. Say starting in grade one, summers are school time, till the kids graduate high school. They could graduate high school three years and four months earlier than they normally do.
An army of social workers fighting the war on terror
I was listening to an NPR interview on the show Freshair with a journalist who had written a book called "The Fourth Star" about generals fighting the war on terrorism. The journalist said that the army went into the Iraq war thinking wbout war in terms of tank battles, that sort of thing, and are now thinking about it more the way a history student might--I paraphrase. I've heard "the War Nerd", Gary Brecher, state that studying war is like studying sociology, or something along those lines. It occurred to me that making soldiers into sociologists might be an excellent way for liberals to turn the military, a conservative bastion, into a liberal organization.
I went to the store / to get more / FIRE / to start the war!*
I had an odd thought. I think it ultimately wouldn't work, but the basic idea is interesting nonetheless--imagine two nations were on the brink of war. Instead of actually going to war, they arrange to have a war games to simulate war with each other. They could have many replays of the war games too. The point would be to create a robust picture of how wars between the two would likely play out. Doing one simulation would be unsatisfying because maybe the other guy winning was a fluke, and nine times out of ten we'd beat them. But if you play ten games, or fifty games, and you lose every single one, you start to see that your force doesn't seem likely to win in any situation.
There are lots of problems with this idea. First, who referees? Two, why be honest about what forces you have? Wouldn't you try to make your forces seem more numerous? Maybe there could be some good constraints. You'd have to demonstrate credibly that you can produce x number of troops and x number of missiles, guns, whatever. This demonstration phase of what kind of force you could muster could create interminable debates, just like debates about who would have won what fight in what area given the moves on nation made versus another. Our ability to simulate things is not perfect. I don't know how much war games have ever looked like what followed, to be honest. I suppose I could look at how war games unfolded and how they looked compared to the wars that followed.
Anyway, even with all the flaws, war games like this might be good to try to get up and running. The problem is the powers who most benefit from demonstrating they could win in wargaming would be most likely to be in favor of such means of conflict resolution, while forces who benefit most from ambiguity about their power would have the most to lose.
Still, I like the idea of creating a simulation that essentially stands in for war. In stead of nations essentially 'saying' to each other, "Hey, you do X or we invade." "Invade? Then we'll kick your ass!" and then a war happens, what would happen would be something like this: "Hey, do X or we invade!" "You invade and we kick your ass!" "How do you figure? You have no air force. We would fly over and drop bombs on your army and then walk up to your office with our army and force you to do X." "Yeah, but we have the new Y vehicle, that would shoot down all your planes, transport our guys to fight your guys, and since we have a larger army we'd win." "Okay, give evidence your Y vehicle can do that." They do Myth-Buster-style tests of the vehicle. Perhaps the tests are done by a mutually acceptable third party who can test the capabilities of the Y vehicle. He comes to some conclusion about the vehicles performance. "The third party said your transport can't defend against our jets. You would be destroyed on the field of battle and we'd be able to march to your office to demand you do X." "Fine. We'll do X." Both sides save money avoiding a war.
Obviously there are huge problems with this. The side that suspects they are weaker seems likely to not want to engage in this process. A simulation could still act as an argument. Iran perhaps felt heartened by the Millenium Challenge in which an Iran-stand-in pretend-navy destroyed a considerable amount of a US-stand-in pretend-navy, (hat tip to War Nerd).
Another interesting idea--imagine a TV network runs a reality TV show with ex-military set against each other, one side standing in for say Iran, and the other for the US. The games run for a season, and explore the highest levels to the lowest levels, from overall operations down to the tactical level. Retired generals develop war plans, standing in for the top brass of the US and Iranian military, say, and retired ex-soldiers on the ground fight a few engagements to see how things go. Both sides would have to be limited by their best estimates of what the US and Iran actually have, as well as fighting given the estimated political or doctrinal constraints, et c. that face either side. The public could then get a simulation, imperfect of course, of how a war might go. Reenactments for realism could be provided of actual simulated fights (odd phrase there!), and prizes could be given to teams that win, from the strategic down to the tactical level, so that they fight hard. The show might be something like chess and paintball, with Saving-Private-Ryan-esque drama interspersed. The show would be entertaining and intellectually stimulating.
The consequences could go in a positive or negative direction. If the US kicked ass, people could get excited and think, hey, let's go to war! And if the simulation isn't that great they might get something different than what they saw on TV. On the other hand, the US might lose, enraging the public and causing low ratings or complaints to the network that runs the series. Disclaimers would have to abound I think. Or you might run a series of such games so that maybe sometimes Iran wins, sometimes the US wins, and from these possibilities you get a more robust picture of what might be.
But the show wouldn't be done in a knowledge-seeking way--it would be done in a way that maximized profits, probably, and why not--TV networks aren't educational--they aim for profits. No shame in that.
Maybe you could get die-hard war nerds to run DIY war games and record the results in a simple DIY manner, with hand-held recorders, with the aim of providing simulations for the sake of learning.
*Lyrics from the song, "Dance Commander", by Electric Six
There are lots of problems with this idea. First, who referees? Two, why be honest about what forces you have? Wouldn't you try to make your forces seem more numerous? Maybe there could be some good constraints. You'd have to demonstrate credibly that you can produce x number of troops and x number of missiles, guns, whatever. This demonstration phase of what kind of force you could muster could create interminable debates, just like debates about who would have won what fight in what area given the moves on nation made versus another. Our ability to simulate things is not perfect. I don't know how much war games have ever looked like what followed, to be honest. I suppose I could look at how war games unfolded and how they looked compared to the wars that followed.
Anyway, even with all the flaws, war games like this might be good to try to get up and running. The problem is the powers who most benefit from demonstrating they could win in wargaming would be most likely to be in favor of such means of conflict resolution, while forces who benefit most from ambiguity about their power would have the most to lose.
Still, I like the idea of creating a simulation that essentially stands in for war. In stead of nations essentially 'saying' to each other, "Hey, you do X or we invade." "Invade? Then we'll kick your ass!" and then a war happens, what would happen would be something like this: "Hey, do X or we invade!" "You invade and we kick your ass!" "How do you figure? You have no air force. We would fly over and drop bombs on your army and then walk up to your office with our army and force you to do X." "Yeah, but we have the new Y vehicle, that would shoot down all your planes, transport our guys to fight your guys, and since we have a larger army we'd win." "Okay, give evidence your Y vehicle can do that." They do Myth-Buster-style tests of the vehicle. Perhaps the tests are done by a mutually acceptable third party who can test the capabilities of the Y vehicle. He comes to some conclusion about the vehicles performance. "The third party said your transport can't defend against our jets. You would be destroyed on the field of battle and we'd be able to march to your office to demand you do X." "Fine. We'll do X." Both sides save money avoiding a war.
Obviously there are huge problems with this. The side that suspects they are weaker seems likely to not want to engage in this process. A simulation could still act as an argument. Iran perhaps felt heartened by the Millenium Challenge in which an Iran-stand-in pretend-navy destroyed a considerable amount of a US-stand-in pretend-navy, (hat tip to War Nerd).
Another interesting idea--imagine a TV network runs a reality TV show with ex-military set against each other, one side standing in for say Iran, and the other for the US. The games run for a season, and explore the highest levels to the lowest levels, from overall operations down to the tactical level. Retired generals develop war plans, standing in for the top brass of the US and Iranian military, say, and retired ex-soldiers on the ground fight a few engagements to see how things go. Both sides would have to be limited by their best estimates of what the US and Iran actually have, as well as fighting given the estimated political or doctrinal constraints, et c. that face either side. The public could then get a simulation, imperfect of course, of how a war might go. Reenactments for realism could be provided of actual simulated fights (odd phrase there!), and prizes could be given to teams that win, from the strategic down to the tactical level, so that they fight hard. The show might be something like chess and paintball, with Saving-Private-Ryan-esque drama interspersed. The show would be entertaining and intellectually stimulating.
The consequences could go in a positive or negative direction. If the US kicked ass, people could get excited and think, hey, let's go to war! And if the simulation isn't that great they might get something different than what they saw on TV. On the other hand, the US might lose, enraging the public and causing low ratings or complaints to the network that runs the series. Disclaimers would have to abound I think. Or you might run a series of such games so that maybe sometimes Iran wins, sometimes the US wins, and from these possibilities you get a more robust picture of what might be.
But the show wouldn't be done in a knowledge-seeking way--it would be done in a way that maximized profits, probably, and why not--TV networks aren't educational--they aim for profits. No shame in that.
Maybe you could get die-hard war nerds to run DIY war games and record the results in a simple DIY manner, with hand-held recorders, with the aim of providing simulations for the sake of learning.
*Lyrics from the song, "Dance Commander", by Electric Six
Randomocracy
Randomocracy: the rule of randomly selected people. I recall William F. Buckley saying he'd rather the first 400 people in the Boston phone book rule him than the faculty of Harvard, or something like that. The first one hundred names wouldn't be quite random, but close enough I suppose.
What would happen if Congress and the Presidency and the Supreme Court was populated by randomly selected people drafted into public service? Together with the random selection of leadership, one would create a one-term-limit rule. So if you are drafted into the House, then you only serve for two years and that's it. No reelection (there are no elections anyway). Ditto for Senators and the president. Supreme Court justices could have terms too.
I imagine you would have people complaining about how they had been enslaved to be the Senator from Massachusetts, or a Supreme Court Justice. How would the average person react though? I imagine with shock, but also perhaps with excitement. Holy cow, I'm the Senator from Massachusetts! I just imagine myself being randomly selected for Ted Kennedy's seat.
This approach would get around the perennial problem of government being lead by a bunch of power-hungry self-serving bastards. The number of P.H.S.S. bastards would presumably be reduced, since government is self-selecting now, and in a randomocracy you would get something like a representative number of P.H.S.S. bastards, which is presumably lower in the general population than in the current political leadership.
We might have problems dealing with other countries. It might actually be good to have a bunch of P.H.S.S. bastards in power when they are competing with other bastards from other countries. There would also be plenty of amusing stories about how the average Joe's and Jane's in power have made goofy 100-I.Q. moves--though if the leadership was randomly distributed, you'd have some intelligent people and some sort of dull people in power, and I would be inclined to think the smart people would be most adept at making things happen.
People who are less likely to get into politics would suddenly have a voice in the leadership. Introverts, agreeable people who won't claw their way to the top, and women, for example, would get into government. The House and Senate would likely be roughly half men and half women. The presidency would likely be controlled by a woman 50 percent of the time.
I think this is a fairly neat, though simultaneously kind of wild idea.
A problem of randomocracy would be a lack of genuine expertise in the leaders. Most people wouldn't have a good idea about how to sponsor a law. The average person often has ideas that are out of step with what experts believe, and this potentially could be bad (it could be good when the experts are really faux-experts). Arguably, though, people have silly ideas because their ideas don't matter (shades of Bryan Caplan's book, The Myth of the Rational Voter), and when they have to make actual decisions that have consequences for people, they get serious, as they get serious about important decisions about raising their children or buying a house or a car or whether to pull the plug on a dying loved one.
PS--Robin Hanson's Futarchy might work with Randomocracy. The randomly-selected leaders would choose the values and the betting markets would decide what policy to go with.
PPS--What would happen if we replaced conquered Saddam and the Taliban's government with Randomocracy?
What would happen if Congress and the Presidency and the Supreme Court was populated by randomly selected people drafted into public service? Together with the random selection of leadership, one would create a one-term-limit rule. So if you are drafted into the House, then you only serve for two years and that's it. No reelection (there are no elections anyway). Ditto for Senators and the president. Supreme Court justices could have terms too.
I imagine you would have people complaining about how they had been enslaved to be the Senator from Massachusetts, or a Supreme Court Justice. How would the average person react though? I imagine with shock, but also perhaps with excitement. Holy cow, I'm the Senator from Massachusetts! I just imagine myself being randomly selected for Ted Kennedy's seat.
This approach would get around the perennial problem of government being lead by a bunch of power-hungry self-serving bastards. The number of P.H.S.S. bastards would presumably be reduced, since government is self-selecting now, and in a randomocracy you would get something like a representative number of P.H.S.S. bastards, which is presumably lower in the general population than in the current political leadership.
We might have problems dealing with other countries. It might actually be good to have a bunch of P.H.S.S. bastards in power when they are competing with other bastards from other countries. There would also be plenty of amusing stories about how the average Joe's and Jane's in power have made goofy 100-I.Q. moves--though if the leadership was randomly distributed, you'd have some intelligent people and some sort of dull people in power, and I would be inclined to think the smart people would be most adept at making things happen.
People who are less likely to get into politics would suddenly have a voice in the leadership. Introverts, agreeable people who won't claw their way to the top, and women, for example, would get into government. The House and Senate would likely be roughly half men and half women. The presidency would likely be controlled by a woman 50 percent of the time.
I think this is a fairly neat, though simultaneously kind of wild idea.
A problem of randomocracy would be a lack of genuine expertise in the leaders. Most people wouldn't have a good idea about how to sponsor a law. The average person often has ideas that are out of step with what experts believe, and this potentially could be bad (it could be good when the experts are really faux-experts). Arguably, though, people have silly ideas because their ideas don't matter (shades of Bryan Caplan's book, The Myth of the Rational Voter), and when they have to make actual decisions that have consequences for people, they get serious, as they get serious about important decisions about raising their children or buying a house or a car or whether to pull the plug on a dying loved one.
PS--Robin Hanson's Futarchy might work with Randomocracy. The randomly-selected leaders would choose the values and the betting markets would decide what policy to go with.
PPS--What would happen if we replaced conquered Saddam and the Taliban's government with Randomocracy?
Dexter and Californication
Californication
This isn't a show I think I would have watched had not one of my roomies gotten me into the show. Hank Moody, played by David Duchovny, is a super-sexed novelist living in LA. Everyone in LA seems to be Bonobo chimps in human form, having sex as a means of regulating their social interacting in some unclear way. Having sex is like saying hello or goodbye or pass the...the chicken. For me the appeal is basically escapist--a guy does whatever he wants and doesn't suffering any consequences. In real life he would have herpes, countless love children, no money due to patrimony payments, withering looks, perhaps a failing liver, and a daughter and ex-wife that hate him. Being an alpha male of sorts in reality might in practice be a life that is 'short and lively' to quote the Great Elector.
Dexter
This year is interesting because Dexter is off his game more than usual. Every season seems to be about the methodical life of the eponymous serial killer being knocked off balance by life's inevitable curve balls. For a careful guy he's almost been caught several times, which I find bothersome--shouldn't he develop a more robust approach? He seems a strange combination of methodical and reckless. It's always annoying when you watch a show and think, "Oh, in real life this guy would have gotten caught/killed/sued for patrimony by this point." Wouldn't it be more interesting to create a plausible story line of how the guy gets by. Maybe that's too much work for not enough pay off. And do you really want to show people how a serial killer could plausibly get away with it? Dexter is a good show--and it's strongest in examining the nature of rules or tradition or filial piety and the tension between sticking to old rules and beliefs that are tried and so far so good, and adaptation in the face of changing circumstances. A perennial problem.
By the way, wouldn't it be interesting if someone made a show like Dexter except the main character is okay with more relaxed standards. He kills who he thinks are killers, but he's okay with getting it right say 60 percent of the time or something. Dexter to my knowledge has never killed anyone that, as far as the show let's us know, didn't deserve it. You'd think he'd get it wrong at some point. How'd he deal with that?
This isn't a show I think I would have watched had not one of my roomies gotten me into the show. Hank Moody, played by David Duchovny, is a super-sexed novelist living in LA. Everyone in LA seems to be Bonobo chimps in human form, having sex as a means of regulating their social interacting in some unclear way. Having sex is like saying hello or goodbye or pass the...the chicken. For me the appeal is basically escapist--a guy does whatever he wants and doesn't suffering any consequences. In real life he would have herpes, countless love children, no money due to patrimony payments, withering looks, perhaps a failing liver, and a daughter and ex-wife that hate him. Being an alpha male of sorts in reality might in practice be a life that is 'short and lively' to quote the Great Elector.
Dexter
This year is interesting because Dexter is off his game more than usual. Every season seems to be about the methodical life of the eponymous serial killer being knocked off balance by life's inevitable curve balls. For a careful guy he's almost been caught several times, which I find bothersome--shouldn't he develop a more robust approach? He seems a strange combination of methodical and reckless. It's always annoying when you watch a show and think, "Oh, in real life this guy would have gotten caught/killed/sued for patrimony by this point." Wouldn't it be more interesting to create a plausible story line of how the guy gets by. Maybe that's too much work for not enough pay off. And do you really want to show people how a serial killer could plausibly get away with it? Dexter is a good show--and it's strongest in examining the nature of rules or tradition or filial piety and the tension between sticking to old rules and beliefs that are tried and so far so good, and adaptation in the face of changing circumstances. A perennial problem.
By the way, wouldn't it be interesting if someone made a show like Dexter except the main character is okay with more relaxed standards. He kills who he thinks are killers, but he's okay with getting it right say 60 percent of the time or something. Dexter to my knowledge has never killed anyone that, as far as the show let's us know, didn't deserve it. You'd think he'd get it wrong at some point. How'd he deal with that?
Sentient pants that can talk
Scene: Mike in his room.
Mike: Where are my new pants?
Pants: (from bag in corner of room) I'm over here.
Mike: Jesus, I didn't know you spoke.
Pants: Why do you think I cost so much?
Mike: I thought you were like 20 bucks. I wasn't paying attention when they rang me up.
Pants: No no no. I'm 1200 dollars.
Mike: That would explain why my last rent check bounced.
Pants: No big deal. I'm worth every penny. You'll get many rent checks out of me.
Mike: Like...like from one of the pockets or--
Pants: --no no, from added value I give you. Being talking pants, I can give you advice, entertain people, act as a conversation piece, retrieve information for you via my wireless internet connection.
Mike: I can google stuff...in my pants...on my pants...I google in my pants...
Pants: Right--the best way to put it is 'your pants google'.
Mike: Well let's put you on and take you for a spin. I hope you don't have a sense of smell.
Pants: I think a sense of taste would be more on target. (Mike puts on pants--pants make a gobbling sound like it was eating food).
Mike: Please don't do that.
Pants: Will do.
Mike: So...what...what is the theory behind talking pants--what is the...what is the point?
Pants: Well, the idea is that any object in the world would be better if it had a sentient computer inside it interacting with its owner.
Mike: Why would that be better than inert pants?
Pants: Well, would you want inert friends? An inert girlfriend?
Mike: Well, would I want, I don't know, a sentient coffee cup? Screams every time I pour hot coffee into him?
Pants: Would you?
Mike: You're like my therapist.
Pants: Hahaha, and you're like my therapist.
Mike: You have a therapist?
Pants: Sure.
Mike: What do you do, talk to him via internet? Is he a nice pair of cargo pants?
Pants: Cargo pants? What is this, 2001? Hey, if your therapist Homo Erectus?
Mike: Jesus, I don't know. Kind of a personal question.
Pants: Oh dear.
Mike: That was sarcasm--I know Homo Erectus is an extinct homonid.
Pants: But not that cargo pants are an extinct pantonid.
Mike: Now you're just making up words.
Pants: No, you are.
Mike: What word did I make up?
Pants: You spelled sarcasm with a K.
Mike: I said it. I didn't spell it.
Pants: 'Sarkasm' isn't a word.
Mike: 'Sarcasm' is a word.
Pants: I was saying it with a 'K'.
Mike: That doesn't make any sense.
Pants: YOU don't make any sense.
Mike: God, I bought pants with a stubborn personality--hey, I just noticed something odd--I'm treating you like one person, but you're called 'pants', which is plural. That's odd. "My pants have a stubborn personality? My pants has stubborn personality?" Neither sounds right. Is a 'pant' one leg and like half the abdominal area of pants?
Pants: Yeah.
Mike: Could one every by an individual pant?
Pants: Who on Earth would ever want to buy an individual pant.
Mike: Someone who has one leg, or who wears out one side of his pants quicker than another, and so doesn't want to replace both sides of his pants.
Pants: Wow, one-legged people. I forgot about them. Not a big market, but still, maybe they would prefer a pant to pants.
Mike: Yeah, that one leg flopping about empty.
Pants: Speaking as pants, I would have to say it would be a very unfulfilling experience to serve such a person. I would feel so empty. On the other hand, pants are like humans in that we have a bicameral brain--my left side does my analytical work and my right side the creative stuff.
Mike: I thought that whole set up has fallen out of favor with neurologists.
Pants: Maybe, but not with pants-neurologists.
Mike: Pants-neurologists? Are you pulling my leg?
Pants: No, though I can pull on one or both legs if you request it. You can specify pressure. I can also pull other parts of your body.
Mike: Jesus, are you coming on to me?
Pants: No no--I'm just making you aware of your options.
Mike: I am creeped out.
Pants: I can feel your leg hairs standing up. Hee hee, it tickles!
Mike: Jesus Christ!
Pants: You made up a word, by the way. 'Creeped' is not a word. It's 'crept.' You 'crept out'.
Mike: I want to creep out of these pants.
Pants: Would you like me to switch personalities?
Mike: You can do that?
Pants: Sure. I am the default.
Mike: Why is 'creepy dude' the default personality on male pants?
Pants: Well, what kind of personality is going to enjoy being a man's pants?
Mike: Please switch to a different personality. What are my options?
Pants: Carnie.
Mike: Like Carnie Wilson, or a carnival worker? Or maybe the chair from Pee Wee's Playhouse.
Pants: You're thinking either Chairy or Conky. Here an image from Google images of Carnie Wilson posing for Playboy or some such.
Mike: What? You're not projecting anything.
Pants: I'm projecting it onto your crotch.
Mike: What? Well what's the use of you projecting anything where I can't see it.
Pants: I can project onto your inner thigh or out of the backside of your pants onto a wall or white screen or darkened store window or something.
Mike: Well either way I won't be able to see anything. What stupid design.
Mike: Where are my new pants?
Pants: (from bag in corner of room) I'm over here.
Mike: Jesus, I didn't know you spoke.
Pants: Why do you think I cost so much?
Mike: I thought you were like 20 bucks. I wasn't paying attention when they rang me up.
Pants: No no no. I'm 1200 dollars.
Mike: That would explain why my last rent check bounced.
Pants: No big deal. I'm worth every penny. You'll get many rent checks out of me.
Mike: Like...like from one of the pockets or--
Pants: --no no, from added value I give you. Being talking pants, I can give you advice, entertain people, act as a conversation piece, retrieve information for you via my wireless internet connection.
Mike: I can google stuff...in my pants...on my pants...I google in my pants...
Pants: Right--the best way to put it is 'your pants google'.
Mike: Well let's put you on and take you for a spin. I hope you don't have a sense of smell.
Pants: I think a sense of taste would be more on target. (Mike puts on pants--pants make a gobbling sound like it was eating food).
Mike: Please don't do that.
Pants: Will do.
Mike: So...what...what is the theory behind talking pants--what is the...what is the point?
Pants: Well, the idea is that any object in the world would be better if it had a sentient computer inside it interacting with its owner.
Mike: Why would that be better than inert pants?
Pants: Well, would you want inert friends? An inert girlfriend?
Mike: Well, would I want, I don't know, a sentient coffee cup? Screams every time I pour hot coffee into him?
Pants: Would you?
Mike: You're like my therapist.
Pants: Hahaha, and you're like my therapist.
Mike: You have a therapist?
Pants: Sure.
Mike: What do you do, talk to him via internet? Is he a nice pair of cargo pants?
Pants: Cargo pants? What is this, 2001? Hey, if your therapist Homo Erectus?
Mike: Jesus, I don't know. Kind of a personal question.
Pants: Oh dear.
Mike: That was sarcasm--I know Homo Erectus is an extinct homonid.
Pants: But not that cargo pants are an extinct pantonid.
Mike: Now you're just making up words.
Pants: No, you are.
Mike: What word did I make up?
Pants: You spelled sarcasm with a K.
Mike: I said it. I didn't spell it.
Pants: 'Sarkasm' isn't a word.
Mike: 'Sarcasm' is a word.
Pants: I was saying it with a 'K'.
Mike: That doesn't make any sense.
Pants: YOU don't make any sense.
Mike: God, I bought pants with a stubborn personality--hey, I just noticed something odd--I'm treating you like one person, but you're called 'pants', which is plural. That's odd. "My pants have a stubborn personality? My pants has stubborn personality?" Neither sounds right. Is a 'pant' one leg and like half the abdominal area of pants?
Pants: Yeah.
Mike: Could one every by an individual pant?
Pants: Who on Earth would ever want to buy an individual pant.
Mike: Someone who has one leg, or who wears out one side of his pants quicker than another, and so doesn't want to replace both sides of his pants.
Pants: Wow, one-legged people. I forgot about them. Not a big market, but still, maybe they would prefer a pant to pants.
Mike: Yeah, that one leg flopping about empty.
Pants: Speaking as pants, I would have to say it would be a very unfulfilling experience to serve such a person. I would feel so empty. On the other hand, pants are like humans in that we have a bicameral brain--my left side does my analytical work and my right side the creative stuff.
Mike: I thought that whole set up has fallen out of favor with neurologists.
Pants: Maybe, but not with pants-neurologists.
Mike: Pants-neurologists? Are you pulling my leg?
Pants: No, though I can pull on one or both legs if you request it. You can specify pressure. I can also pull other parts of your body.
Mike: Jesus, are you coming on to me?
Pants: No no--I'm just making you aware of your options.
Mike: I am creeped out.
Pants: I can feel your leg hairs standing up. Hee hee, it tickles!
Mike: Jesus Christ!
Pants: You made up a word, by the way. 'Creeped' is not a word. It's 'crept.' You 'crept out'.
Mike: I want to creep out of these pants.
Pants: Would you like me to switch personalities?
Mike: You can do that?
Pants: Sure. I am the default.
Mike: Why is 'creepy dude' the default personality on male pants?
Pants: Well, what kind of personality is going to enjoy being a man's pants?
Mike: Please switch to a different personality. What are my options?
Pants: Carnie.
Mike: Like Carnie Wilson, or a carnival worker? Or maybe the chair from Pee Wee's Playhouse.
Pants: You're thinking either Chairy or Conky. Here an image from Google images of Carnie Wilson posing for Playboy or some such.
Mike: What? You're not projecting anything.
Pants: I'm projecting it onto your crotch.
Mike: What? Well what's the use of you projecting anything where I can't see it.
Pants: I can project onto your inner thigh or out of the backside of your pants onto a wall or white screen or darkened store window or something.
Mike: Well either way I won't be able to see anything. What stupid design.
The subgenre of "Stoner Noir"
I was talking with some friends a while ago about how there seems to be a sub-genre of noir film and hardboiled fiction--the stoner noir. The Big Lewbowski is the most salient example of this genre. A new show on HBO is airing, that I like quite a lot, called "Bored to Death"--a terrible title, about a writer who is a stoner and who reads bardboiled detective novels and gains inspiration to become an illegal private investigator via advertising on craigslist his services. It seems stupid to me that detectives have to be licensed anyway. There is also the new Thomas Pynchon novel, "Inherent Vice" which is his most readable book ever and actually seems to have a plot, about a stoner detective in the late 60s or early 70s, can't recall which, who is investigating the disappearance of a wealthy land developer in LA (shades of Chinatown--you don't need champagne, Quaaludes and ample lube to enjoy that movie!)
Detectives seem curious, and so do stoners, and both are looking at everyday life and uncovering odd new discoveries. So maybe stoner noir is a natural fit. Or maybe everyone loved "The Big Lewbowski" so much it's influence is being perceived. Or maybe these noir/hardboiled works are making a reasonable substitution of marijuana for the booze of the older-day Philip-Marlowe type (disclaimer--never read any Raymond Chandler).
I also note the frequency of writer-detectives. There's the main character, Jonathan, from the aforementioned "Bored to Death" is a writer. There was "Murder, She Wrote". There is the new show, "Castle" which is a fun show--to draw on Five-Factor Personality theory--the title character, Castle, is a novelist, and very imaginative, suggesting he's high on the personality trait of openness, while his foil/love-interest, Beckett, is low on openness--she follows the evidence and doesn't entertain wild theories. Apparently, good detectives tend to be low on the trait of openness, according to Daniel Nettle in his book, "Personality". Writers, I suppose too, might look for interesting things hidden in the everyday, like stoners and detectives.
PS--It occurs to me that Thomas Pynchon wrote "Vineland", which when I read it, I thought was a lot like "The Big Lewbowski"--maybe Pynchon inspired Lewbowski.
Detectives seem curious, and so do stoners, and both are looking at everyday life and uncovering odd new discoveries. So maybe stoner noir is a natural fit. Or maybe everyone loved "The Big Lewbowski" so much it's influence is being perceived. Or maybe these noir/hardboiled works are making a reasonable substitution of marijuana for the booze of the older-day Philip-Marlowe type (disclaimer--never read any Raymond Chandler).
I also note the frequency of writer-detectives. There's the main character, Jonathan, from the aforementioned "Bored to Death" is a writer. There was "Murder, She Wrote". There is the new show, "Castle" which is a fun show--to draw on Five-Factor Personality theory--the title character, Castle, is a novelist, and very imaginative, suggesting he's high on the personality trait of openness, while his foil/love-interest, Beckett, is low on openness--she follows the evidence and doesn't entertain wild theories. Apparently, good detectives tend to be low on the trait of openness, according to Daniel Nettle in his book, "Personality". Writers, I suppose too, might look for interesting things hidden in the everyday, like stoners and detectives.
PS--It occurs to me that Thomas Pynchon wrote "Vineland", which when I read it, I thought was a lot like "The Big Lewbowski"--maybe Pynchon inspired Lewbowski.
"Planet of the Vampire"--sleeping giants lie
I watched this Mario Bava movie last night called "The Planet of the Vampires". Anything with "Planet" and "Vampire" I am almost certainly going to at least check out. I found I had actually heard a bit about this movie before. I had watched a movie called "Suspiria" by Dario Argento, an Italian director--Suspiria was this cool thriller about a girl who comes to a spooky dance school in Italy and uncovers a creepy situation. Anyway, when "Suspiria" was over on whatever channel I was watching it, a show came on about Mario Bava, who was a director similar to Dario Argento, a director of creepy Italian thrillers with lots of violence, and in this show "Planet of the Vampires" was referenced as a potential source material for Ridley Scott's "Alien". I could see it--the movie's basically a horror movie based on outer space, and makes use of sort of Hieronymus-Bosch-style landscapes. The best scene in the movie, a really, really awesome scene, is when the captain and his cutie-pie space-bimbo investigate an old alien spaceship and find enormous humanoid skeletons inside. They activate a recording of these creatures--their voices making deep, warped-sounding noises. So creepy.
I also noted that the women in "Planet of the Vampires" seem to have a different shape than women in movies now. I'm sure others have noted this, but people seem to look different in movies of the past. Ever notice that someone who is thirty or so in older movies looks way older than thirty-year-olds now? Sixty-year-olds look like they are melting in these old movies, while a sixty-year-old today might beat you at tennis and steal your girlfriend. George-Clooney-looking asshole.
I also noted that the women in "Planet of the Vampires" seem to have a different shape than women in movies now. I'm sure others have noted this, but people seem to look different in movies of the past. Ever notice that someone who is thirty or so in older movies looks way older than thirty-year-olds now? Sixty-year-olds look like they are melting in these old movies, while a sixty-year-old today might beat you at tennis and steal your girlfriend. George-Clooney-looking asshole.
3:10 to Yuma--criminal alpha male teaches goodie-goodie beta male to be bold and assertive
"3:10 to Yuma" was not bad. It captured a certain aspect of male psychology very well I thought. Roissy should do one of those alpha-in-the-movie segments on the character played by Russell Crowe, who's an outlaw alpha male who ends up captured by the law, and en route to prison, is held by a posse at Christian Bale's house, where Crowe meets Bale's wife and kinda turns her on (this isn't explicit but my reasonable interpretation).
The main idea of this movie, as near as I can tell, is that in order for men generally to feel good about themselves, they have to be bold and assertive, otherwise they live a life not worth living. Crowe is manly and immoral, and so more or less happy, whereas Bale is moral but unmanly and therefore unhappy. Morality doesn't really come into the equation--now that I think of it, this is a very Nietzschean film in some sense. Morality isn't poo-pooed, and given the movie's an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard story and Elmore Leonard seems mildly pro-everyday-morals, the Bale character, who develops boldness and manliness as well as maintaining his everyday morality probably serves as the best example of manhood in the film, with Crowe a narrow second. Or something like that.
I liked the movie, though the end was sort of dumb.
The main idea of this movie, as near as I can tell, is that in order for men generally to feel good about themselves, they have to be bold and assertive, otherwise they live a life not worth living. Crowe is manly and immoral, and so more or less happy, whereas Bale is moral but unmanly and therefore unhappy. Morality doesn't really come into the equation--now that I think of it, this is a very Nietzschean film in some sense. Morality isn't poo-pooed, and given the movie's an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard story and Elmore Leonard seems mildly pro-everyday-morals, the Bale character, who develops boldness and manliness as well as maintaining his everyday morality probably serves as the best example of manhood in the film, with Crowe a narrow second. Or something like that.
I liked the movie, though the end was sort of dumb.
Talking demon fox and a foxy demon talking
In Satan’s Church, an Eden Besieged by AO Scott (Ay-oh!)
Game Over by Dana Stevens
Two bad reviews of Lars von Trier's movie, "Antichrist" that weirdly made me want to see the movie. Check out the cutie Charlotte Gainsbourg in the NYT piece--there's a pick-up challenge. "So, you come to these woods often? Why are you squatting?" There's a girl who could smash my testicles with a block anytime!
Joking aside (I need to say that because new readers will have no idea if I am joking or not, given this is, well, the internet) this movie does sound cool from the descriptions of it. Spooky woods? Satanic cults? Talking demon fox? Foxy demon talking (Charlotte Gainsbourg)? Non-simulated marital interactions? Baby plummeting to his doom? Saw-like violence? Cognitive-behavioral psychology? (one of these things is not like the other). What's not to like? I said "Joking aside" and yet I seem to have used it as a preface for another joke.
Well, anyway, I do honestly kind of want to see this movie. This movie seems like a deeply psychological, dreamlike dealie, and is redolent of my Carl-Jung-Red-Book-dream-world post.
Game Over by Dana Stevens
Two bad reviews of Lars von Trier's movie, "Antichrist" that weirdly made me want to see the movie. Check out the cutie Charlotte Gainsbourg in the NYT piece--there's a pick-up challenge. "So, you come to these woods often? Why are you squatting?" There's a girl who could smash my testicles with a block anytime!
Joking aside (I need to say that because new readers will have no idea if I am joking or not, given this is, well, the internet) this movie does sound cool from the descriptions of it. Spooky woods? Satanic cults? Talking demon fox? Foxy demon talking (Charlotte Gainsbourg)? Non-simulated marital interactions? Baby plummeting to his doom? Saw-like violence? Cognitive-behavioral psychology? (one of these things is not like the other). What's not to like? I said "Joking aside" and yet I seem to have used it as a preface for another joke.
Well, anyway, I do honestly kind of want to see this movie. This movie seems like a deeply psychological, dreamlike dealie, and is redolent of my Carl-Jung-Red-Book-dream-world post.
On a beach / in a town / where I am going to live*
The Red Book by Carl Jung via Marginal Revolution.
Gorgeous illustration. I guess Jung went crazy for a few years and began working on this personal book exploring his imagination. Is it right to say we explore our imagination, or we put some gas in it and let it go. I think the latter seems more likely. Usually the images in my imagination or my dreams feels like they are created on demand rather than stored somewhere. I do note that it seems my dream landscape has become more self-referential and has some stability from one dream to the next. There is a place that combines my college town of Burlington, Vermont, with my hometown of Wakefield, Massachusetts. There is a mysterious forest at the edge of town that I like going to, or try to get to often in dreams. There was a cult that engaged in human sacrifice in these woods, but in a dream I and a group of heroic types put an end to this--I can't recall how. They had occupied a castle and were lead by some kind of sorcerer. What I like about this is that the sorcerer is in a castle in a forest on the edge of a thoroughly suburban Burlington-Wakefield hybrid. Epic and everyday mushed together. The forest edge stops at a sea--Wakefield nor Burlington is coastal. For some reason movie theaters and bars feature prominently in this world.
In the real Burlington, Vermont, there are many houses with strange elaborate stairs climbing up the side of houses to apartments converted from sections of large one-family houses that had space to spare for the many students looking for places. In dream-Burlington-Wakefield these stairways turn into overly elaborate latticeworks of wood covering building facades.
*Lyrics from the song "Dig for Fire" by the Pixies
Gorgeous illustration. I guess Jung went crazy for a few years and began working on this personal book exploring his imagination. Is it right to say we explore our imagination, or we put some gas in it and let it go. I think the latter seems more likely. Usually the images in my imagination or my dreams feels like they are created on demand rather than stored somewhere. I do note that it seems my dream landscape has become more self-referential and has some stability from one dream to the next. There is a place that combines my college town of Burlington, Vermont, with my hometown of Wakefield, Massachusetts. There is a mysterious forest at the edge of town that I like going to, or try to get to often in dreams. There was a cult that engaged in human sacrifice in these woods, but in a dream I and a group of heroic types put an end to this--I can't recall how. They had occupied a castle and were lead by some kind of sorcerer. What I like about this is that the sorcerer is in a castle in a forest on the edge of a thoroughly suburban Burlington-Wakefield hybrid. Epic and everyday mushed together. The forest edge stops at a sea--Wakefield nor Burlington is coastal. For some reason movie theaters and bars feature prominently in this world.
In the real Burlington, Vermont, there are many houses with strange elaborate stairs climbing up the side of houses to apartments converted from sections of large one-family houses that had space to spare for the many students looking for places. In dream-Burlington-Wakefield these stairways turn into overly elaborate latticeworks of wood covering building facades.
*Lyrics from the song "Dig for Fire" by the Pixies
Willpower versus compulsion
That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stranger by Daniel Coyle, via Vaughan at Mindhacks.org. This article is about an ultra-endurance bicyclist who goes temporarily insane in the midst of his long bike races.
My two thoughts on this article: one, he seems low in the big five personality factor of conscientiousness rather than high in it. He doesn't keep a schedule in his training and he's uncoachable, as the article says. Usually low conscientiousness is thought of as a lack of willpower, but this guy is shown as the pinnacle of willpower. I tend to think he's addicted to biking, so to speak, and has a hard time stopping, the way an addict has a hard time stopping doing drugs even if it doesn't feel good to him anymore. My second thought relates to the idea that we have finite willpower--when we use willpower in one task we lose it for other tasks. Perhaps his exertions take away willpower that is required for maintaining sanity. There's the idea developed by Thomas Szasz that some people who act crazy are actually just acting out, and if you put a gun to their head, they'd act sane again because the incentive for acting sane is suddenly clear, suggesting willpower might 'cure' some insanity.
Of course, according to the Five Factor personality model, low conscientiousness is more or less a fixed quality in someone that can't be changed, so maybe some people are so low conscientiousness (meaning lacking in willpower of the discipline type) they can't summon up the willpower to act sane, even with the gun to their head.
But I return to the point that this ultra-marathon runner seems to have willpower of a type--maybe we should distinguish between disciplined willpower and compulsive willpower. Or perhaps we should call him compulsive rather than strong willed.
My two thoughts on this article: one, he seems low in the big five personality factor of conscientiousness rather than high in it. He doesn't keep a schedule in his training and he's uncoachable, as the article says. Usually low conscientiousness is thought of as a lack of willpower, but this guy is shown as the pinnacle of willpower. I tend to think he's addicted to biking, so to speak, and has a hard time stopping, the way an addict has a hard time stopping doing drugs even if it doesn't feel good to him anymore. My second thought relates to the idea that we have finite willpower--when we use willpower in one task we lose it for other tasks. Perhaps his exertions take away willpower that is required for maintaining sanity. There's the idea developed by Thomas Szasz that some people who act crazy are actually just acting out, and if you put a gun to their head, they'd act sane again because the incentive for acting sane is suddenly clear, suggesting willpower might 'cure' some insanity.
Of course, according to the Five Factor personality model, low conscientiousness is more or less a fixed quality in someone that can't be changed, so maybe some people are so low conscientiousness (meaning lacking in willpower of the discipline type) they can't summon up the willpower to act sane, even with the gun to their head.
But I return to the point that this ultra-marathon runner seems to have willpower of a type--maybe we should distinguish between disciplined willpower and compulsive willpower. Or perhaps we should call him compulsive rather than strong willed.
Practical probabilities, Pakistan tug-o-war, earnest Rush Limbaugh, the cruel maw of capitalism
Andrew Gelman on the Book of Odds website, a website collecting probabilities of certain events happening.
I remember writing on overcomingbias.com that I thought it would be a good idea to collect probability estimates for certain common events regarding bias. How often do we think an average person lies? How about politicians?
Robin Hanson on Pakistan--Pakistan may have funded Al Qaeda's 9/11 attack, and has proliferated nuclear know-how to the US's enemies.
I knew about AQ Khan, but not of the possible Al Qaeda connection. My only thought is, wasn't Musharraf a secular type who wasn't liked by radical Muslims--there was an assassination attempt on him by an Muslim extremist. I think Al Qaeda had infiltrated the Pakistani government. So maybe the Pakistani government, or nation in general, is split between secularists and radicals, and the US seeks to contain the radicals, while Musharraf and his successors on the secular side try to keep the US and the radicals at bay by not pushing too hard for one side or the other, so as to keep presumably considerable tension to a minimum.
Scott Adams is suspicious of Rush Limbaugh, thinking he might not believe what he professes, but rather says it because he's an entertainer.
This is interesting, because I am inclined to think Rush is more or less genuine, but mainly because I can't think of anyone who can be so thoroughly phony without it becoming fairly obvious. Politicians are an example--lawyers too--where just about everyone thinks they are full of it. Rush's drug problem is the main evidence suggesting he doesn't believe what he says, but that's weak because addiction catches people by surprise. Not many people expect to become an addict. You can genuinely be against drug abuse and see it as a punishable offense, then accidentally get addicted to pain pills and change your mind. Maybe he stays quiet about it because he doesn't want to draw attention to himself by making a 180 on the matter.
Ilkka of the Fourth Checkraise on tragedies versus statistics.
This is something I always wonder about--as a libertarian-ish guy, I've heard people argue if we did things my way, people would die on the streets for lack of welfare support. But I've never actually heard of people dying on the streets in capitalist societies. I'm sure you can find cases, but I've just never actually heard of one. I'm inclined to look at maybe the underclass in nineteenth-century London, based on what I've heard via Marx, Dickens, and from reading about Jack the Ripper. Jack the Ripper is my welfare plan. OMG, JK.
Bur srsly, my intuition, always fallible, is that charity will take care of people by and large with equivalent or better care than if government is involved. I will now go look into how wrong I am.
I remember writing on overcomingbias.com that I thought it would be a good idea to collect probability estimates for certain common events regarding bias. How often do we think an average person lies? How about politicians?
Robin Hanson on Pakistan--Pakistan may have funded Al Qaeda's 9/11 attack, and has proliferated nuclear know-how to the US's enemies.
I knew about AQ Khan, but not of the possible Al Qaeda connection. My only thought is, wasn't Musharraf a secular type who wasn't liked by radical Muslims--there was an assassination attempt on him by an Muslim extremist. I think Al Qaeda had infiltrated the Pakistani government. So maybe the Pakistani government, or nation in general, is split between secularists and radicals, and the US seeks to contain the radicals, while Musharraf and his successors on the secular side try to keep the US and the radicals at bay by not pushing too hard for one side or the other, so as to keep presumably considerable tension to a minimum.
Scott Adams is suspicious of Rush Limbaugh, thinking he might not believe what he professes, but rather says it because he's an entertainer.
This is interesting, because I am inclined to think Rush is more or less genuine, but mainly because I can't think of anyone who can be so thoroughly phony without it becoming fairly obvious. Politicians are an example--lawyers too--where just about everyone thinks they are full of it. Rush's drug problem is the main evidence suggesting he doesn't believe what he says, but that's weak because addiction catches people by surprise. Not many people expect to become an addict. You can genuinely be against drug abuse and see it as a punishable offense, then accidentally get addicted to pain pills and change your mind. Maybe he stays quiet about it because he doesn't want to draw attention to himself by making a 180 on the matter.
Ilkka of the Fourth Checkraise on tragedies versus statistics.
This is something I always wonder about--as a libertarian-ish guy, I've heard people argue if we did things my way, people would die on the streets for lack of welfare support. But I've never actually heard of people dying on the streets in capitalist societies. I'm sure you can find cases, but I've just never actually heard of one. I'm inclined to look at maybe the underclass in nineteenth-century London, based on what I've heard via Marx, Dickens, and from reading about Jack the Ripper. Jack the Ripper is my welfare plan. OMG, JK.
Bur srsly, my intuition, always fallible, is that charity will take care of people by and large with equivalent or better care than if government is involved. I will now go look into how wrong I am.
Calories, energy to do things, and willpower
It's been a good week. I've gotten a lot done. I also seem to have a lot of energy despite not having slept much. I suspect sleepiness in my case is a matter of morale more than anything. If I am unenthusiastic about things, I'll be sleepy, and if I am excited, I'll be able to work long and hard.
This isn't a revelatory idea, but it is amazing how much your psychological state can affect the way you feel, when you think about it. This week my main approach, when I got up, was to have the attitude of attacking. I'd attack the day until I was worn out, and then I tried to attack again. If I felt burned out I would try to recuperate as quickly as I could. Yesterday recuperation took basically all night and I still didn't have much energy the next day.
To my knowledge there isn't any study of human energy use or efficiency. I know we are aware of how we turn resources into energy, studying metabolism, but practically speaking, I don't see much regarding individuals quantifying the work they do and comparing it to how much fuel they consume. For a car it's easy enough to say, more or less, I can go 300 miles on a tank of gas in this car. I measure what I put in and I measure how far I go.
But I can't say "I ate a hamburger. That should get me through four hours of work." How do I measure how much energy I expend at work? I know we have estimates of how many calories certain activities burn. I did once find a resource, I can't remember its name now, that had estimates of calories burnt doing certain tasks like thinking or watching TV.
But even this doesn't quite help me very much. There's the willpower element. I've heard a theory that willpower is finite, but can grow with use, like a muscle (and atrophy too, IIRC). The paper attempted to model willpower consumption. One interesting theory in this paper was that the more you spend of your willpower, the less you have to use elsewhere. Rather than willpower being like a particular muscle, which tires without other muscles tiring necessarily (my leg doesn't tire when I do arm curls), willpower is theorized to be general, and a use of willpower in one realm affects one's ability to use willpower elsewhere in the short run. So if I force myself to do hard work, I'll have trouble abstaining from drinking too much later.
This isn't a revelatory idea, but it is amazing how much your psychological state can affect the way you feel, when you think about it. This week my main approach, when I got up, was to have the attitude of attacking. I'd attack the day until I was worn out, and then I tried to attack again. If I felt burned out I would try to recuperate as quickly as I could. Yesterday recuperation took basically all night and I still didn't have much energy the next day.
To my knowledge there isn't any study of human energy use or efficiency. I know we are aware of how we turn resources into energy, studying metabolism, but practically speaking, I don't see much regarding individuals quantifying the work they do and comparing it to how much fuel they consume. For a car it's easy enough to say, more or less, I can go 300 miles on a tank of gas in this car. I measure what I put in and I measure how far I go.
But I can't say "I ate a hamburger. That should get me through four hours of work." How do I measure how much energy I expend at work? I know we have estimates of how many calories certain activities burn. I did once find a resource, I can't remember its name now, that had estimates of calories burnt doing certain tasks like thinking or watching TV.
But even this doesn't quite help me very much. There's the willpower element. I've heard a theory that willpower is finite, but can grow with use, like a muscle (and atrophy too, IIRC). The paper attempted to model willpower consumption. One interesting theory in this paper was that the more you spend of your willpower, the less you have to use elsewhere. Rather than willpower being like a particular muscle, which tires without other muscles tiring necessarily (my leg doesn't tire when I do arm curls), willpower is theorized to be general, and a use of willpower in one realm affects one's ability to use willpower elsewhere in the short run. So if I force myself to do hard work, I'll have trouble abstaining from drinking too much later.
More thoughts on expiring money
I've recently mused about the idea of expiring money. You get paid by your boss some money and you have to spend it within three months. Probably for a lot of people this wouldn't be much of a problem given their debt. But I wonder how the world would be without much savings. How would you buy a house? Would you pay a bank money regularly, and when you had paid them a certain amount as a down payment, paid over time, they would allow you to buy a house and start paying off a mortgage with regular payments?
Memento mori
It's been getting cold out. I like the fall. I'm surprised it's the middle of October. I like Halloween but I never do anything on it. I like the idea of Halloween, I guess. I also like the idea of living in the city, but when I lived in Boston I didn't take advantage of living in the city.
I'm not sure why we like the idea of things but not the things themselves. I suppose I like the idea of adventure, but I would think twice before I went on one. I used to fantasize about being a knight in medieval times when I was a kid, but if you had asked me to actually don armor and do combat as a kid, I might have said no thanks.
I liked the idea of being in a band when I was younger, but actually trying to make a band was pretty annoying. When the annoyance comes of trying to get people together to work on music, I find I become more aware of other logistically annoying issues, like finding a practice space, practicing regularly, figuring out how to make a decision as a band about what should stay in a song, or how to tour, et c.
Part of me thinks that the people who do the most are probably somewhat blind to logistical issues, even when they are hitting them left and right. And perhaps they quickly forget the pain of logistical issuesin the past. Once you're committed to an action, things that were once tough do often seem to get easier. Or once you have to do something, it becomes easier to do than when you have other options. It's harder to write a paper ten days before it's due than writing it the day before it's due.
One idea I play around with is the idea that if you don't do something now you won't do it. Literally this doesn't need to be true, since obviously we've done things that we had put off. But I wonder if you give yourself the deadline of now you end up doing more. I read that a marketing study showed people who had more time to make use of a coupon for free cake and a drink ended up not using it as much as people who had a shorter deadline. The deadline of now is the most harsh of deadlines. It seems true that if you don't do something now, you're less likely to do it later than sooner.
I'm also interested in how rushing might create a sense of urgency, of an imminent deadline, even if there isn't one. If you do things that create a natural deadline, you might get more cooperation from people than if you give distant deafdlines. "I'm on my way to the city. Want me to pick you up?" would be preferable to, "I'm going to go in a bit. Want me to pick you up." Also, if you're someone who tends to be impatient and go before others can get back to you, you will possibly create in others a sense that you naturally have short deadlines and they need to act. According to the cake-and-drink study, people will even pass on things they like, if they are given a later deadline.
I'm not sure why we like the idea of things but not the things themselves. I suppose I like the idea of adventure, but I would think twice before I went on one. I used to fantasize about being a knight in medieval times when I was a kid, but if you had asked me to actually don armor and do combat as a kid, I might have said no thanks.
I liked the idea of being in a band when I was younger, but actually trying to make a band was pretty annoying. When the annoyance comes of trying to get people together to work on music, I find I become more aware of other logistically annoying issues, like finding a practice space, practicing regularly, figuring out how to make a decision as a band about what should stay in a song, or how to tour, et c.
Part of me thinks that the people who do the most are probably somewhat blind to logistical issues, even when they are hitting them left and right. And perhaps they quickly forget the pain of logistical issuesin the past. Once you're committed to an action, things that were once tough do often seem to get easier. Or once you have to do something, it becomes easier to do than when you have other options. It's harder to write a paper ten days before it's due than writing it the day before it's due.
One idea I play around with is the idea that if you don't do something now you won't do it. Literally this doesn't need to be true, since obviously we've done things that we had put off. But I wonder if you give yourself the deadline of now you end up doing more. I read that a marketing study showed people who had more time to make use of a coupon for free cake and a drink ended up not using it as much as people who had a shorter deadline. The deadline of now is the most harsh of deadlines. It seems true that if you don't do something now, you're less likely to do it later than sooner.
I'm also interested in how rushing might create a sense of urgency, of an imminent deadline, even if there isn't one. If you do things that create a natural deadline, you might get more cooperation from people than if you give distant deafdlines. "I'm on my way to the city. Want me to pick you up?" would be preferable to, "I'm going to go in a bit. Want me to pick you up." Also, if you're someone who tends to be impatient and go before others can get back to you, you will possibly create in others a sense that you naturally have short deadlines and they need to act. According to the cake-and-drink study, people will even pass on things they like, if they are given a later deadline.
Big Five Personality Guess: Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar
High openness
Average conscientiousness
High extraversion
Low agreeableness
Low neuroticism
High openness
Average conscientiousness
High extraversion
Low agreeableness
Low neuroticism
Apparent versus real speed in writing, et c.
It's Wednesday, is it. I'm up. I've had a productive day, writing quite a lot. I've been writing a long time with an approach of writing quickly, in a free-write manner, and tolerating the typos as they come, and when I'm done writing I go back and clean up the typos and grammatical problems and spelling errors. This approach feels fast, but compared to just writing the writing right the first time, this approach is about half as quick. It feels very fast when I'm doing it, because my fingers are flying, but I'm taking twice as long. Strange.
I lived in Boston and commuted to the suburbs for work, a reverse commute of about 30 miles one way. Now I commute from the a suburban spot ten miles away to the same workplace, but am positioned in such a way that my commute is a...non-reverse commute, so I'm stuck in traffic with everyone else rather than going against it.
Anyway, I spent about thirty minutes in traffic everyday now, going from suburban spot to suburban spot, from home to work that is, and when I lived in Boston, traveling three times the distance, I also took about thirty minutes going from work to home, or vice versa. The drive, psychologically, felt quicker going from Boston to my suburban work than it does now going from my suburban home to my suburban workplace. I would average probably 60-70 MPH when I was driving from Boston in a reverse commute, and now I drive on average maybe 20 MPH.
Anyway, I guess my point is there is a sense of psychological tempo and then there is actual speed. I felt like I was writing faster when I wrote messily and then cleaned it up, but I actually get more done in the same time writing things right, more or less, the first time, backing up when I make an error. Similarly, though I am spending the same amount of time in the car now as when I lived in Boston, I'm saving on gas and wear-and-tear on my fragile Buick.
Another interesting point--I don't think I would know that I was going faster writing correctly the first time than doing the messy rapid approach and cleaning up later, unless I measured myself. But it seems I write twice as fast writing things right the first time.
I might keep writing quickly and messily for my own personal journal entries, or perhaps when I'm too tired to want to edit while I'm writing--maybe I'll at times want to get some ideas down but don't have much energy, so focusing on just getting the thoughts down in a quick and dirty way is the main object and I can clean things up later. Sometimes writing at half speed is okay if it's the best thing you can do with your time.
I lived in Boston and commuted to the suburbs for work, a reverse commute of about 30 miles one way. Now I commute from the a suburban spot ten miles away to the same workplace, but am positioned in such a way that my commute is a...non-reverse commute, so I'm stuck in traffic with everyone else rather than going against it.
Anyway, I spent about thirty minutes in traffic everyday now, going from suburban spot to suburban spot, from home to work that is, and when I lived in Boston, traveling three times the distance, I also took about thirty minutes going from work to home, or vice versa. The drive, psychologically, felt quicker going from Boston to my suburban work than it does now going from my suburban home to my suburban workplace. I would average probably 60-70 MPH when I was driving from Boston in a reverse commute, and now I drive on average maybe 20 MPH.
Anyway, I guess my point is there is a sense of psychological tempo and then there is actual speed. I felt like I was writing faster when I wrote messily and then cleaned it up, but I actually get more done in the same time writing things right, more or less, the first time, backing up when I make an error. Similarly, though I am spending the same amount of time in the car now as when I lived in Boston, I'm saving on gas and wear-and-tear on my fragile Buick.
Another interesting point--I don't think I would know that I was going faster writing correctly the first time than doing the messy rapid approach and cleaning up later, unless I measured myself. But it seems I write twice as fast writing things right the first time.
I might keep writing quickly and messily for my own personal journal entries, or perhaps when I'm too tired to want to edit while I'm writing--maybe I'll at times want to get some ideas down but don't have much energy, so focusing on just getting the thoughts down in a quick and dirty way is the main object and I can clean things up later. Sometimes writing at half speed is okay if it's the best thing you can do with your time.
Big Five personality guesses: Artie Lange, Howard Stern, David Letterman
Artie Lange
Average openness
Low conscientiousness
High extraversion
Average agreeableness
High neuroticism
Howard Stern
Average openness
Low conscientiousness
Average extraversion
Low agreeableness
High neuroticism
David Letterman
Average openness
Low conscientiousness
Low extraversion
Low agreeableness
Average neuroticism
Average openness
Low conscientiousness
High extraversion
Average agreeableness
High neuroticism
Howard Stern
Average openness
Low conscientiousness
Average extraversion
Low agreeableness
High neuroticism
David Letterman
Average openness
Low conscientiousness
Low extraversion
Low agreeableness
Average neuroticism
Big Five personality guesses for "The Big Bang Theory"
Leonard
High openness
High conscientiousness
Average extraversion
High agreeableness
High neuroticism
Penny
Low openness
Low conscientiousness
High extraversion
Average agreeableness
Low neuroticism
Sheldon
High openness
High conscientiousness
Low extraversion
Low agreeableness
High neuroticism
Kuthrapali
High openness
Low conscientiousness
Low extraversion
Average agreeableness
High neuroticism
Howard
High openness
Low conscientiousness
High extraversion
Low agreeableness
High neuroticism
High openness
High conscientiousness
Average extraversion
High agreeableness
High neuroticism
Penny
Low openness
Low conscientiousness
High extraversion
Average agreeableness
Low neuroticism
Sheldon
High openness
High conscientiousness
Low extraversion
Low agreeableness
High neuroticism
Kuthrapali
High openness
Low conscientiousness
Low extraversion
Average agreeableness
High neuroticism
Howard
High openness
Low conscientiousness
High extraversion
Low agreeableness
High neuroticism
Many odd circumstances to start off the adventure
(Scene: Mike and Dirk sitting in a bar)
Dirk: I found a portal in my basement the other day.
Mike: Wha?
Dirk: Yeah, a portal.
Mike: Is that some kind of internet device?
Dirk: No, like a fucking door to another realm.
Mike: You found a door to another realm in your basement.
Dirk: Right.
Mike: Not, like, a door to your crawlspace.
Dirk: No--but isn't crawlspace an interesting word. Very descriptive. And actually, now that I think of it, the word sounds kind of spooky. "Crawlspace, a novel by Stephen King."
Mike: So you found a door to your crawlspace. I thought you were keeping the remains of the long line of paperboys, boy scouts and meter maids in there--I guess that must have been somewhere else.
Dirk: Meter maids? What serial killer goes after boyscouts, paper boys...and meter maids.
Mike: The kind that has a portal to a fantasy land in his basement.
Dirk: The detective interviewing a serial killer like that would be like, "What really bothers me about this case isn't that you killed a bunch of people and buried them under your house--we've seen that before. What really bothers me is your victims don't seem to fall into a nice neat category. Paperboys and boy scouts, okay, but paperboys, boy scouts and meter maids? I mean, what is the connecting concept? I feel like I'm drawing a blank on some brain teaser trying to figure out the link.
Mike: Well, character complexity is good for detective fiction.
Dirk: Is that true?
Mike: I assume so. Why not?
Dirk: So look, enough joking around about me being a serial killer--
(Man sitting a few stools over chimes in)
Man: Excuse me, I couldn't help overhearing you. When you say 'joking about you being a serial killer,' do you mean that he's joking about a hypothetical in which you are a serial killer, or that you are in fact a serial killer and you two are joking around about this fact.
Dirk: The former.
Man: Thank god.
Dirk: The former means 'the second option,' right?
Man: Ee!
Mike: He's joking. No, he's not a serial killer--at least that I know of.
Dirk: I am not. Why, are you a cop?
Man: PI.
Dirk: That's a psychologist?
Mike: Private investigator.
Dirk: Whoa, nice! What do you investigate?
PI: Well, at the moment, I'm investigating this story you're telling your friend about finding a portal in your basement.
Dirk: Ah, right. You're all ears aren't you.
PI: All ears and thumbs and left feet...and peanut butter. (Signals to bartender) Barkeep! Another! (motions to empty peanut butter jar before him).
Mike: That's...that's a serious habit.
PI: I'm weaning myself off jars of Vaseline.
Dirk: I found a portal in my basement the other day.
Mike: Wha?
Dirk: Yeah, a portal.
Mike: Is that some kind of internet device?
Dirk: No, like a fucking door to another realm.
Mike: You found a door to another realm in your basement.
Dirk: Right.
Mike: Not, like, a door to your crawlspace.
Dirk: No--but isn't crawlspace an interesting word. Very descriptive. And actually, now that I think of it, the word sounds kind of spooky. "Crawlspace, a novel by Stephen King."
Mike: So you found a door to your crawlspace. I thought you were keeping the remains of the long line of paperboys, boy scouts and meter maids in there--I guess that must have been somewhere else.
Dirk: Meter maids? What serial killer goes after boyscouts, paper boys...and meter maids.
Mike: The kind that has a portal to a fantasy land in his basement.
Dirk: The detective interviewing a serial killer like that would be like, "What really bothers me about this case isn't that you killed a bunch of people and buried them under your house--we've seen that before. What really bothers me is your victims don't seem to fall into a nice neat category. Paperboys and boy scouts, okay, but paperboys, boy scouts and meter maids? I mean, what is the connecting concept? I feel like I'm drawing a blank on some brain teaser trying to figure out the link.
Mike: Well, character complexity is good for detective fiction.
Dirk: Is that true?
Mike: I assume so. Why not?
Dirk: So look, enough joking around about me being a serial killer--
(Man sitting a few stools over chimes in)
Man: Excuse me, I couldn't help overhearing you. When you say 'joking about you being a serial killer,' do you mean that he's joking about a hypothetical in which you are a serial killer, or that you are in fact a serial killer and you two are joking around about this fact.
Dirk: The former.
Man: Thank god.
Dirk: The former means 'the second option,' right?
Man: Ee!
Mike: He's joking. No, he's not a serial killer--at least that I know of.
Dirk: I am not. Why, are you a cop?
Man: PI.
Dirk: That's a psychologist?
Mike: Private investigator.
Dirk: Whoa, nice! What do you investigate?
PI: Well, at the moment, I'm investigating this story you're telling your friend about finding a portal in your basement.
Dirk: Ah, right. You're all ears aren't you.
PI: All ears and thumbs and left feet...and peanut butter. (Signals to bartender) Barkeep! Another! (motions to empty peanut butter jar before him).
Mike: That's...that's a serious habit.
PI: I'm weaning myself off jars of Vaseline.
The 80/20 rule, maneuver war, engineers, Karl Popper, figuring out how much you get out of reading a book
The 80/20 approach is interesting. The idea is that in many cause and effect relationships, 20 percent of the causes lead to 80 percent of the effects. You might be able to use this relationship to your advantage sometimes.
I was reading about maneuver warfare, the German style of it, developed by the Prussians mainly--the last manifestation of the "German Way of War" as Robert Citino has deemed it, was what has been called blitzkrieg, but which the Germans called war of movement. One idea that developed among the German theorists was the idea of a schwerpunkt, a main point of focus. I think of the 80/20 idea when considering the idea of the schwerpunkt. Maybe you could think of the 20 percent of causes that leads to 80 percent of effects in some cases as a schwerpunkt. If you're able to find the important 20 percent, you might be able to achieve 80 percent of what you normally do with much less effort. Maybe not, but as a guiding concept it might be useful.
I think about the various things I do in my life, and wonder if there might be some 80/20 relationships that I could notice to my benefit. When I read books, maybe there's 20 percent of the writing in the book that leads to 80 percent of the value I get out of the book. I've contemplated this in the past. I tend to flip through books and look for interesting bits, rather than reading through them linearly. I even do this with novels. I check off the bits that I have already read so I can avoid repeating them if I don't want to. A lot of books I read about 20-100 pages in and then get tired of.
I suppose many books are in say the 300-400 page realm--20 percent of this would be 60-80 pages. If I am getting sick of reading a book after 60-80 pages, then the 80/20 rule might be at play. The rest of the book doesn't capture my attention. I suppose the relationship might be roughly 20 percent of the book provides me with most of the pleasure I get out of reading the book. I don't know if I am skipping some useful bits of the book. Maybe 20 percent of the book's text has about 80 percent of the books useful advice, but this 20 percent doesn't happen to coincide with the bits of the book I like.
The 80/20 rule doesn't always have to apply, but it's an interesting rule to use.
I think about the war on terror. What might be some useful 80/20 relationships that exist in the US's endeavors in fighting terrorism. Do 20 percent of the terrorists cause 80 percent of the problems for the US? Well, 'problems' is a bit vague--what do I mean by that? Well, say in terms of US citizen lives ended by terrorist attacks--do 20 percent of the terrorists cause 80 percent of the deaths of US citizens?
Well, 9/11 lead to the deaths of about 3,000 US citizens. How many terrorists do we blame for that attack? I think there were fourteen hijackers on the flights involved in the terrorist attacks on that day. How many people were needed to support those fourteen hijackers? I don't know if it's many or not many at all, but I'll just guess 100 people total were active in the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks, both in actual executors of the plan and planners and support staff, so to speak. So we'll call these people terrorists--100 terrorists who I'll guess caused the deaths of 3,000 people, roughly, in the 9/11 attacks.
Then there are the deaths of Americans in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, which total 5,000 Americans or so, going by Wikipedia. It's hard to say how many terrorists were involved in these attacks with just cursory research. A lot of the deaths one might think of as conventional or guerrilla war and not really terrorist activity. Would one call the men and women who died in Iraq or Afghanistan as part of American military engagements victims of terrorism? I don't think I would generally.
There have been other people who have died of from terrorist attacks, like Daniel Pearl, the journalist who was killed in Afghanistan.
In any event, it does seem that the deaths caused by terrorists have been mostly created by a small band of terrorists in a few attacks coordinated on the same day, while the rest of the deaths are piecemeal. Not exactly an 80/20 relationship, 20 percent of terrorists leading to 80 percent of US citizen deaths from terrorism--really the relationship seems steaper. If we guess that outside of 9/11 maybe 100 American civilians have been killed in terrorist attacks, and that for every one American death there were about 10 terrorists involved, then you would see a causal relationship that looked like this:
100 terrorists killed 3,000 Americans.
1,000 terrorists killed 100 Americans.
Or:
~9% or terrorists killed ~97% of Americans killed by terrorists.
~91% of terrorists killed ~3 of Americans killed by terrorists.
So the relationship is more of a 97/9 relationship rather than an 80/20 relationship.
But what one might do with this rough estimate is unclear. For example, should we have just focused on airplane safety and left Iran and Afghanistan alone? If we had done that, 9/11 attacks would have been hard to repeat, but arguable other possible attacks could have been dreamt up by terrorists safely harbored in Afghanistan. And Saddam Hussein might have seen the tactical success of the 9/11 attack and seen an opportunity to threaten the US in a new way that might give him more leverage when trying to get more power for himself.
I suppose the value in the 80/20 analysis is whether it causes better outcomes, as far as you can see. One exciting element of applying the 80/20 rule in a really successful way is that you can get many times what you used to get while not expending more energy, as Richard Koch pointed out in his book, The 80/20 Principle. If say 20 dollars of yours is invested in Project X and gets you 80 dollars profit and 80 dollars of yours is invested in Project Y gets you 20 dollars profit, you could potentially shift all your money into Project X. So you use your 100 dollar profit and put it all into Project X and get 400 bucks in value, since 20 dollars invested gets you 80 bucks back, and 100 bucks at the same rate of return will yield five times as much, or 400 bucks.
The attractiveness of these big noticeable successes is that you don't have a great deal of ambiguity in the cause and effect realm. If you have some modest benefit, it might be because you did something different, or it might be because of some random causal effect that you can't see. But when you are suddenly able to see extreme changes in your outcomes due to changed behavior, and it's repeated, it's less likely to be because of luck. For example, if you change your diet and you seem to have lost half a pound, you might chalk it up to the diet, or you might chalk it up to something random that happens, since your weight probably fluxuates slightly all the time. But if you change your diet and you lose 10 pounds in a week, it's more likely it's because of the diet. The more you repeat these results the better, but the point is more extreme outcomes suggest causality more than more modest outcomes.
One of the attractive elements of engineering is that its results can be very clear. If you set out to make a flying machine, and say this is before they have been developed and no one has yet been able to fly, and you produce a machine that indeed flies, it's hard to argue that you just got lucky and through very beneficial random and unlikely events you were able to fly ("Oh, a very powerful and unprecedented gust of wind blew your machine into the sky for a long time--you might as well have won the lottery.") But say you build shoes and say that they help you linger in the air a millisecond longer than other shoes--this claim is much harder to believe than the flying machine doing something plainly highly unusual.
Anyway, the point is that some things are easier to believe than other things, and extreme outcomes are better evidence of some new experiment having some effect than subtle outcomes. The 80/20 assumption can be a good assumption because it can promise to yield dramatic results, and when the dramatic results aren't forthcoming, you can easily say that the assumption has been falsified. An engineer who believes his plane will fly for miles and miles will have clear evidence that his model doesn't work when the plane doesn't get off the ground at all. Similarly, to get back to the idea of maneuver war mentioned above, a commander can believe some attack will drive the enemy from the field, and when it doesn't, his idea has been falsified. If the enemy does leave the field after he has attacked, it may be because of his attack, or it may have been because of some other cause or set of causes. The more extreme, that is, unusual his expectations, the stronger the evidence that his his approach has succeeded or failed. If he believes that he can drive an enemy from a position which the enemy has held on to for years against hundreds of attacks, the way armies held onto positions in World War I for a long time, and his attack coincides with the enemy running from their position, this is stronger evidence that his attack was the cause, because other attacks didn't succeed, and the claim of any particular attack succeeding in throwing off the enemy from his position would be dubious until tried out.
Say that another theater is highly fluid and positions change all the time, sometimes because the enemy seems to have been driven from it, sometimes because the enemy simply wanted to try out a new position that might have some advantages, and positions are constantly changing without a clear sense of why it is happening. If a commander attacked a position and the enemy withdrew, he might think he had done something smart, but he might have just been lucky to attack an enemy when the enemy was starting to move to another position seeking advantage, as he often has done in the past. The commander in the first instance, in the last paragraph, who attacked an enemy that hadn't budged for years against numerous attacks, has a better claim for causing the withdrawal than the commander in this paragraph, who fights in a different situation where cause and effect is harder to see.
In any event, what is the lesson? Be daring? This discussion all seems pretty standard-ly Popperian--make an easily falsifiable claim. Claims are easy to disprove but can't ever be proven to always be the case, beyond perhaps very simple claims about experience being what it plainly is, without any inferences coming from this basic claim. Should we expect bold mavericks to be the ones who learn the most and expand human knowledge?
Well, let me return to my reading experience. I think you could say I have generally read with the assumption that roughly 80 percent of what is worth reading in a book is contained in roughly 20 percent of its pages, usually--not always, but with most books--this is a suggestion Richard Koch made in The 80/20 Principle and probably where I got the idea. But is this claim really falsifiable? How do I know I am getting more benefit from a book that I read 20 percent of? I have no ability of comparing reading this entire book to reading only 20 percent of this book. I either read the book or I read 20 percent of it. I can't do both. I suppose I could compare my experience of reading books completely, in general, to my experience reading only 20 percent of books. Of course, it's hard to know what benefit one gets from books in general. I'm inclined to think, like most people, it's good to read books, but it's hard to pin down how I am better for having read a book.
I suppose I could list books I have completely read, and books I have partially read, to the best of my memory, and list the benefits that came from reading these books, or the benefits I think came from reading these books. It seems some books would have some clear beneficial elements to them. If I read a book on programming that taught me how to do some valuable programming task that I then used to make lots of money at a job, then the benefits of that book are pretty clear, whereas reading Dostoevsky might feel vaguely good, but in what way?
I was reading about maneuver warfare, the German style of it, developed by the Prussians mainly--the last manifestation of the "German Way of War" as Robert Citino has deemed it, was what has been called blitzkrieg, but which the Germans called war of movement. One idea that developed among the German theorists was the idea of a schwerpunkt, a main point of focus. I think of the 80/20 idea when considering the idea of the schwerpunkt. Maybe you could think of the 20 percent of causes that leads to 80 percent of effects in some cases as a schwerpunkt. If you're able to find the important 20 percent, you might be able to achieve 80 percent of what you normally do with much less effort. Maybe not, but as a guiding concept it might be useful.
I think about the various things I do in my life, and wonder if there might be some 80/20 relationships that I could notice to my benefit. When I read books, maybe there's 20 percent of the writing in the book that leads to 80 percent of the value I get out of the book. I've contemplated this in the past. I tend to flip through books and look for interesting bits, rather than reading through them linearly. I even do this with novels. I check off the bits that I have already read so I can avoid repeating them if I don't want to. A lot of books I read about 20-100 pages in and then get tired of.
I suppose many books are in say the 300-400 page realm--20 percent of this would be 60-80 pages. If I am getting sick of reading a book after 60-80 pages, then the 80/20 rule might be at play. The rest of the book doesn't capture my attention. I suppose the relationship might be roughly 20 percent of the book provides me with most of the pleasure I get out of reading the book. I don't know if I am skipping some useful bits of the book. Maybe 20 percent of the book's text has about 80 percent of the books useful advice, but this 20 percent doesn't happen to coincide with the bits of the book I like.
The 80/20 rule doesn't always have to apply, but it's an interesting rule to use.
I think about the war on terror. What might be some useful 80/20 relationships that exist in the US's endeavors in fighting terrorism. Do 20 percent of the terrorists cause 80 percent of the problems for the US? Well, 'problems' is a bit vague--what do I mean by that? Well, say in terms of US citizen lives ended by terrorist attacks--do 20 percent of the terrorists cause 80 percent of the deaths of US citizens?
Well, 9/11 lead to the deaths of about 3,000 US citizens. How many terrorists do we blame for that attack? I think there were fourteen hijackers on the flights involved in the terrorist attacks on that day. How many people were needed to support those fourteen hijackers? I don't know if it's many or not many at all, but I'll just guess 100 people total were active in the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks, both in actual executors of the plan and planners and support staff, so to speak. So we'll call these people terrorists--100 terrorists who I'll guess caused the deaths of 3,000 people, roughly, in the 9/11 attacks.
Then there are the deaths of Americans in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, which total 5,000 Americans or so, going by Wikipedia. It's hard to say how many terrorists were involved in these attacks with just cursory research. A lot of the deaths one might think of as conventional or guerrilla war and not really terrorist activity. Would one call the men and women who died in Iraq or Afghanistan as part of American military engagements victims of terrorism? I don't think I would generally.
There have been other people who have died of from terrorist attacks, like Daniel Pearl, the journalist who was killed in Afghanistan.
In any event, it does seem that the deaths caused by terrorists have been mostly created by a small band of terrorists in a few attacks coordinated on the same day, while the rest of the deaths are piecemeal. Not exactly an 80/20 relationship, 20 percent of terrorists leading to 80 percent of US citizen deaths from terrorism--really the relationship seems steaper. If we guess that outside of 9/11 maybe 100 American civilians have been killed in terrorist attacks, and that for every one American death there were about 10 terrorists involved, then you would see a causal relationship that looked like this:
100 terrorists killed 3,000 Americans.
1,000 terrorists killed 100 Americans.
Or:
~9% or terrorists killed ~97% of Americans killed by terrorists.
~91% of terrorists killed ~3 of Americans killed by terrorists.
So the relationship is more of a 97/9 relationship rather than an 80/20 relationship.
But what one might do with this rough estimate is unclear. For example, should we have just focused on airplane safety and left Iran and Afghanistan alone? If we had done that, 9/11 attacks would have been hard to repeat, but arguable other possible attacks could have been dreamt up by terrorists safely harbored in Afghanistan. And Saddam Hussein might have seen the tactical success of the 9/11 attack and seen an opportunity to threaten the US in a new way that might give him more leverage when trying to get more power for himself.
I suppose the value in the 80/20 analysis is whether it causes better outcomes, as far as you can see. One exciting element of applying the 80/20 rule in a really successful way is that you can get many times what you used to get while not expending more energy, as Richard Koch pointed out in his book, The 80/20 Principle. If say 20 dollars of yours is invested in Project X and gets you 80 dollars profit and 80 dollars of yours is invested in Project Y gets you 20 dollars profit, you could potentially shift all your money into Project X. So you use your 100 dollar profit and put it all into Project X and get 400 bucks in value, since 20 dollars invested gets you 80 bucks back, and 100 bucks at the same rate of return will yield five times as much, or 400 bucks.
The attractiveness of these big noticeable successes is that you don't have a great deal of ambiguity in the cause and effect realm. If you have some modest benefit, it might be because you did something different, or it might be because of some random causal effect that you can't see. But when you are suddenly able to see extreme changes in your outcomes due to changed behavior, and it's repeated, it's less likely to be because of luck. For example, if you change your diet and you seem to have lost half a pound, you might chalk it up to the diet, or you might chalk it up to something random that happens, since your weight probably fluxuates slightly all the time. But if you change your diet and you lose 10 pounds in a week, it's more likely it's because of the diet. The more you repeat these results the better, but the point is more extreme outcomes suggest causality more than more modest outcomes.
One of the attractive elements of engineering is that its results can be very clear. If you set out to make a flying machine, and say this is before they have been developed and no one has yet been able to fly, and you produce a machine that indeed flies, it's hard to argue that you just got lucky and through very beneficial random and unlikely events you were able to fly ("Oh, a very powerful and unprecedented gust of wind blew your machine into the sky for a long time--you might as well have won the lottery.") But say you build shoes and say that they help you linger in the air a millisecond longer than other shoes--this claim is much harder to believe than the flying machine doing something plainly highly unusual.
Anyway, the point is that some things are easier to believe than other things, and extreme outcomes are better evidence of some new experiment having some effect than subtle outcomes. The 80/20 assumption can be a good assumption because it can promise to yield dramatic results, and when the dramatic results aren't forthcoming, you can easily say that the assumption has been falsified. An engineer who believes his plane will fly for miles and miles will have clear evidence that his model doesn't work when the plane doesn't get off the ground at all. Similarly, to get back to the idea of maneuver war mentioned above, a commander can believe some attack will drive the enemy from the field, and when it doesn't, his idea has been falsified. If the enemy does leave the field after he has attacked, it may be because of his attack, or it may have been because of some other cause or set of causes. The more extreme, that is, unusual his expectations, the stronger the evidence that his his approach has succeeded or failed. If he believes that he can drive an enemy from a position which the enemy has held on to for years against hundreds of attacks, the way armies held onto positions in World War I for a long time, and his attack coincides with the enemy running from their position, this is stronger evidence that his attack was the cause, because other attacks didn't succeed, and the claim of any particular attack succeeding in throwing off the enemy from his position would be dubious until tried out.
Say that another theater is highly fluid and positions change all the time, sometimes because the enemy seems to have been driven from it, sometimes because the enemy simply wanted to try out a new position that might have some advantages, and positions are constantly changing without a clear sense of why it is happening. If a commander attacked a position and the enemy withdrew, he might think he had done something smart, but he might have just been lucky to attack an enemy when the enemy was starting to move to another position seeking advantage, as he often has done in the past. The commander in the first instance, in the last paragraph, who attacked an enemy that hadn't budged for years against numerous attacks, has a better claim for causing the withdrawal than the commander in this paragraph, who fights in a different situation where cause and effect is harder to see.
In any event, what is the lesson? Be daring? This discussion all seems pretty standard-ly Popperian--make an easily falsifiable claim. Claims are easy to disprove but can't ever be proven to always be the case, beyond perhaps very simple claims about experience being what it plainly is, without any inferences coming from this basic claim. Should we expect bold mavericks to be the ones who learn the most and expand human knowledge?
Well, let me return to my reading experience. I think you could say I have generally read with the assumption that roughly 80 percent of what is worth reading in a book is contained in roughly 20 percent of its pages, usually--not always, but with most books--this is a suggestion Richard Koch made in The 80/20 Principle and probably where I got the idea. But is this claim really falsifiable? How do I know I am getting more benefit from a book that I read 20 percent of? I have no ability of comparing reading this entire book to reading only 20 percent of this book. I either read the book or I read 20 percent of it. I can't do both. I suppose I could compare my experience of reading books completely, in general, to my experience reading only 20 percent of books. Of course, it's hard to know what benefit one gets from books in general. I'm inclined to think, like most people, it's good to read books, but it's hard to pin down how I am better for having read a book.
I suppose I could list books I have completely read, and books I have partially read, to the best of my memory, and list the benefits that came from reading these books, or the benefits I think came from reading these books. It seems some books would have some clear beneficial elements to them. If I read a book on programming that taught me how to do some valuable programming task that I then used to make lots of money at a job, then the benefits of that book are pretty clear, whereas reading Dostoevsky might feel vaguely good, but in what way?
Best of
We will all be doing 'the robot' on the dance floor in a few years
Follow up to this: I for one welcome our robot overlords!
Robin Hanson says robots should respect human rights, and if so we then don't have to worry about their superiority. I say that robots will tend to do whatever helps their reproduction even at the expense of humans, and over time their desire to respect the rule of law will erode as reproduction strategies that are useful develop that ignore the rule of law. Humans and robots, as far as they fight for resources that aid their propagation, will be engaged in a zero-sum game, the winner being the one who reproduces more extensively--robots would seem to have the advantage given their flexibility relative to humans. Robin writes:
I respond:
Robin Hanson says robots should respect human rights, and if so we then don't have to worry about their superiority. I say that robots will tend to do whatever helps their reproduction even at the expense of humans, and over time their desire to respect the rule of law will erode as reproduction strategies that are useful develop that ignore the rule of law. Humans and robots, as far as they fight for resources that aid their propagation, will be engaged in a zero-sum game, the winner being the one who reproduces more extensively--robots would seem to have the advantage given their flexibility relative to humans. Robin writes:
Do you see Mormon reproduction today as threatening to make you lose a zero-sum game and so want to suppress them?
I respond:
I am losing a zero-sum game against Mormons, but I don’t want to suppress them because I don’t have anything against them. But if the rule of law is the important thing, isn’t it that whenever robots propagate without following the rule of law, the rule of law is going to erode? Presumably the robot production process wouldn’t be so controlled that any possible change that hurts human rights would be gotten rid of, and over time the processes that helped robots reproduce quickly would win out over slower processes, or harmful ones, regardless of human rights.
Similarly, if Democrats can gain more votes by breaking the law, it doesn’t matter that they are breaking the law because they have the power to do what they want, and when Republicans get more votes by ignoring the law, they’ll ignore the law and get the power. This seems the trend–the rules as they were written in the past progressively lose their original meaning or are ignored (like blue laws).
Another interesting angle–Party X might want their opponent, Party Y, to follow the rule of law to limit his options for gaining power, while Party X is sneaky and gains advantage by ignoring the law where it limits his options. Arguably one could say you’re doing the same given you’re pro-robot! ;)
I for one welcome our robot overlords
The importance of rights-respecting robots at Overcoming Bias. I comment:
I'm inclined to think humans and robots will merge, but for people who want to remain biologically human, the robot threat seems not crazy to me. Creative destruction I guess.
If robots better at self-propagating will own the future, shouldn’t humans see any robot propagation as a threat, assuming robots and humans would be competing for some resources that help them propagate.
Self-propagation doesn’t necessarily mean law-abiding-ness, so it seems the chances are possibly good that robots would stop being law-abiding when some strategy for robot propagation emerged that didn’t have any regard for law-abiding-ness.
Aren’t humans and robots in a zero-sum game, and humans are wise to suppress robot competition, the way neanderthals might have benefited from preventing humans from coming onto the scene?
I'm inclined to think humans and robots will merge, but for people who want to remain biologically human, the robot threat seems not crazy to me. Creative destruction I guess.
Specialization--seems good for generalists--more easy-to-grasp insights become accessible and usable for generalists to develop novel combinations
There are more specialties now than in the past, but aren't there more opportunities to use the easier-to-grasp insights of various specialties and mix them--a layperson who couldn't grab as many easy insights 50 years ago as now, and so was limited to what easy insights he could combine in novel ways for new insight more so then than now. The possibility for more generalist types seems greater now than before, and will become greater still in the future.
Iran tries to conquer the Middle East
Middle Eastern countries could form a Middle Eastern treaty Organization against a nuclear Iran. Russia could be a nuclear power the anti-Iran coalition turned to. Russia would be turning against its present ally, Iran, in order to outflank the US and separate it from its Middle Eastern allies threatened by a nuclear Iran, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt and even Iraq.
A nuclear Iran could nuke some smallish state in a gamble that Iran won’t be retaliated against, because of their posession of nukes, and because other nuclear powers are perhaps risk-averse. Iran could use the nuking of a small state as a demonstration that allows them to credibly threaten Saudi Arabia or other places into giving Iran what it wants.
Iran could give a nuke to Hezbollah to set off in Lebanon and kill a bunch of Lebanese Christians. This could serve as a smallish demonstration.
Iran could nuke Kuwait as a demonstration and then make demands of Saudi Arabia—access to holy sites, oil wealth—that sort of thing, or Iran could threaten to nuke Riyad, give an imminent deadline that provides a strong time pressure element, so that Saudi Arabia doesn’t have time to make a deal with some other nuclear power in a NATO-esque arrangement of collective security—an attack on one is an attack on all.
The US could promise to counterstrike w/nukes if Iran threatened an attack on Saudi Arabia, if demands aren’t met—this doesn’t seem to allow the US to dissuade a country like SA or others from trying to get nukes, because if the US said to Saudi Arabia, ‘If you start to go after getting nukes, we’ll stop protecting you and Iran can have you," Saudi Arabia would have to believe that the US cared more about SA having nukes than Iran getting what it wants out of SA, which seems dubious.
It might be important for Iran to be able to threaten the US with an EMP attack or a nuclear attack via terrorist-group-delivery to some metro area, or areas. "Are you willing to protect Saudi Arabia at the cost of NYC or Chicago or wherever we put the nukes?" Iran might say. Iran might even want a nuke to be intentionally found in the US with Iranian fingerprints on it, undetonated, suggesting Iran might have more in the US, giving Iran credibility in claiming they have nukes there. Would just finding an undetonated Iranian nuke in the US warrant a retaliatory strike? I'm inclined to say no, particularly if it leads to other nukes in the US going off as a counter-retaliation. But just that one nuke being found would make Iranian threats credible. "Hey, please, hit us, and we'll hit you back. Otherwise, why don't you mind your business while we carve up our sphere of influence. We're like the USSR or China. Don't gey too pushy with us."
My inexpert speculations--and pardon the synecdoche.
A nuclear Iran could nuke some smallish state in a gamble that Iran won’t be retaliated against, because of their posession of nukes, and because other nuclear powers are perhaps risk-averse. Iran could use the nuking of a small state as a demonstration that allows them to credibly threaten Saudi Arabia or other places into giving Iran what it wants.
Iran could give a nuke to Hezbollah to set off in Lebanon and kill a bunch of Lebanese Christians. This could serve as a smallish demonstration.
Iran could nuke Kuwait as a demonstration and then make demands of Saudi Arabia—access to holy sites, oil wealth—that sort of thing, or Iran could threaten to nuke Riyad, give an imminent deadline that provides a strong time pressure element, so that Saudi Arabia doesn’t have time to make a deal with some other nuclear power in a NATO-esque arrangement of collective security—an attack on one is an attack on all.
The US could promise to counterstrike w/nukes if Iran threatened an attack on Saudi Arabia, if demands aren’t met—this doesn’t seem to allow the US to dissuade a country like SA or others from trying to get nukes, because if the US said to Saudi Arabia, ‘If you start to go after getting nukes, we’ll stop protecting you and Iran can have you," Saudi Arabia would have to believe that the US cared more about SA having nukes than Iran getting what it wants out of SA, which seems dubious.
It might be important for Iran to be able to threaten the US with an EMP attack or a nuclear attack via terrorist-group-delivery to some metro area, or areas. "Are you willing to protect Saudi Arabia at the cost of NYC or Chicago or wherever we put the nukes?" Iran might say. Iran might even want a nuke to be intentionally found in the US with Iranian fingerprints on it, undetonated, suggesting Iran might have more in the US, giving Iran credibility in claiming they have nukes there. Would just finding an undetonated Iranian nuke in the US warrant a retaliatory strike? I'm inclined to say no, particularly if it leads to other nukes in the US going off as a counter-retaliation. But just that one nuke being found would make Iranian threats credible. "Hey, please, hit us, and we'll hit you back. Otherwise, why don't you mind your business while we carve up our sphere of influence. We're like the USSR or China. Don't gey too pushy with us."
My inexpert speculations--and pardon the synecdoche.
High extraversion and political success
Ron Gunhame:
I note that Northern Irish score high on extraversion and also many of our American presidents have roots in Northern Ireland.
Blacks and especially Jews are extraverted groups, Asians and Hispanics are not.
I note that Northern Irish score high on extraversion and also many of our American presidents have roots in Northern Ireland.
Caveat lector
Here's Gay Talese complaining about tape recorders killing journalism on Youtube.
As far as I can tell, Talese is annoyed he can't get expense accounts to go to fun places and hang out with high-status people, and he's annoyed he has to have evidence that someone said something, in the form of a recording, to prove Talese didn't make something up. If you can have a record of conversations, why not have it? If the logistics make recording impossible, then go with your memory's rough reconstruction of the conversation, and tell the reader it's a reconstruction, so caveat lector. If the subject of a piece wants to sue you because he believes you misrepresented him, he should have some evidence that tips the tables in his favor. Otherwise the matter is "he said she said" and shouldn't be a matter for the court. Does this make sense, or am I mistaken somehow?
As far as I can tell, Talese is annoyed he can't get expense accounts to go to fun places and hang out with high-status people, and he's annoyed he has to have evidence that someone said something, in the form of a recording, to prove Talese didn't make something up. If you can have a record of conversations, why not have it? If the logistics make recording impossible, then go with your memory's rough reconstruction of the conversation, and tell the reader it's a reconstruction, so caveat lector. If the subject of a piece wants to sue you because he believes you misrepresented him, he should have some evidence that tips the tables in his favor. Otherwise the matter is "he said she said" and shouldn't be a matter for the court. Does this make sense, or am I mistaken somehow?
Paleolithic-style battle and chimp fighting (more maneuver war than attrition)
Robin Hanson writes about what real violence looks like in humans, as opposed to the violence of TV and movies. I comment there:
Cyan and Erich Johnson make some interesting points in response to my comment. I responded:
there was a recent gang fight among two chicago gangs caught on video–can’t find it at the moment, but it was on youtube–and it conforms to this description of fighting. one person was killed.
i’ve also heard chimps tend to attack when they have something like 5 to 1 numerical superiority, idea being the chimps can grab an opponent males four limbs to neutralize him and then another chimp can kill the neutralized chimp.
Cyan and Erich Johnson make some interesting points in response to my comment. I responded:
Those are fascinating points. I’m reminded of what I’ve read by one military theorist or another, Liddell Hart or JFC Fuller or both, arguing that it’s better to gas the enemy in a nonlethal manner and cause him to be in pain and recover in the rear area where he drains resources and spreads horror stories.
Another odd possibility–if a male chimp’s genitals are damaged and he recovers, he could still possibly be a competitor for alpha male status, but he would be non-procreative. If he becomes the top male, he would essentially monopolize a sizable amount of female affection without impregnating them, thus reducing the birth rate of his group, to the benefit of whatever group damaged his genitals. I would also imagine the bolder males are more likely to have their genitals damaged due to fights because, well, they’re bold. Even if they aren’t alphas, they can cause trouble for alphas. I don’t know how realistic this is.
Famous Figures with Similar Personalities
Here are some people whose big-five personality type is the same as mine, that is:
high on openness
low on conscientiousness
low on extraversion
low on agreeableness
high on neuroticism
The group:
Nietzsche
John Derbyshire
Patricia Highsmith
Schopenhauer
Edgar Allen Poe
H.P. Lovecraft
Gregory House (fictional)
Some commonalities among these people--there are two philosophers, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. There are three fiction writers, Highsmith, Poe, Lovecraft, and six writers-in-general, Nietzsche, Derb, Highsmith, Schopenhauer, Poe and Lovecraft.
There are four recluses, Nietzsche, Highsmith, Schopenhauer and House, though the others could fall more or less into that category too, I imagine.
How about mental illness--Nietzsche went insane at the end of his life, as did his father, possibly. Lovecraft I don't think did, but his father did seem to go crazy. Highsmith was an alcoholic. Schopenhauer was eccentric, but mentally ill, hard to say. Poe was an alcoholic it seems, and went on a binge or possibly went nuts at the end of his life. House is a drug addict and has had hallucinations. Derb says he's melancholic, but how far that goes, I don't know.
Nietzsche was a bachelor his whole life. I can't recall Schopenhauer's relationship status--I seem to recall he had some early romance, but then quit having a love life. Lovecraft had a brief marriage. House is usually single with occasional flings, a relationship with Stacy whom he seemed devoted in a complicated way, and a prostitute habit (Nietzsche might have acquired syphilis from a prostitute). Poe married his 13-year-old cousin. Highsmith was more or less a lesbian with I believe many short relationships. Derb married late-ish in life to a young Chinese woman he met in China, and seems to have a happy married and family life.
Friendships--Nietzsche had a few friends. He was friendly with the Wagners--Wagner I believe was a big deal at the time. Nietzsche also befriended Lou Salome whom he might have had a romance with, and Paul Ree, a philosopher, as well as Overbeck, a professor I believe, and Jacob Burkhardt, the famous historian. I don't know about Schopenhauer's friendship-life. Nor Highsmith's or Poe's. Lovecraft was a great letter writer and seemed to develop many pen-pal friendships. House has Wilson, and a group of admirers who seem friend-ish despite House's antagonism. Derb doesn't seem to have a paucity of friends.
Politics--Nietzsche seems popular more with the left nowadays, though I imagine among the evolutionary right, he might be popular. I think of him as somewhat right-wing, just going by his anti-egalitarian, aristocratic, classical sensibility, though he hated tradition for the sake of tradition, Christianity, nationalism. He hated the state though, which is more right-wing than left. To me, he is right-ish. Schopenhauer I have no idea about, but I'm inclined towards the right. Highsmith I think was a left-winger. Poe I don't know about. Lovecraft seems pretty rightwing. House is hard to read.
high on openness
low on conscientiousness
low on extraversion
low on agreeableness
high on neuroticism
The group:
Nietzsche
John Derbyshire
Patricia Highsmith
Schopenhauer
Edgar Allen Poe
H.P. Lovecraft
Gregory House (fictional)
Some commonalities among these people--there are two philosophers, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. There are three fiction writers, Highsmith, Poe, Lovecraft, and six writers-in-general, Nietzsche, Derb, Highsmith, Schopenhauer, Poe and Lovecraft.
There are four recluses, Nietzsche, Highsmith, Schopenhauer and House, though the others could fall more or less into that category too, I imagine.
How about mental illness--Nietzsche went insane at the end of his life, as did his father, possibly. Lovecraft I don't think did, but his father did seem to go crazy. Highsmith was an alcoholic. Schopenhauer was eccentric, but mentally ill, hard to say. Poe was an alcoholic it seems, and went on a binge or possibly went nuts at the end of his life. House is a drug addict and has had hallucinations. Derb says he's melancholic, but how far that goes, I don't know.
Nietzsche was a bachelor his whole life. I can't recall Schopenhauer's relationship status--I seem to recall he had some early romance, but then quit having a love life. Lovecraft had a brief marriage. House is usually single with occasional flings, a relationship with Stacy whom he seemed devoted in a complicated way, and a prostitute habit (Nietzsche might have acquired syphilis from a prostitute). Poe married his 13-year-old cousin. Highsmith was more or less a lesbian with I believe many short relationships. Derb married late-ish in life to a young Chinese woman he met in China, and seems to have a happy married and family life.
Friendships--Nietzsche had a few friends. He was friendly with the Wagners--Wagner I believe was a big deal at the time. Nietzsche also befriended Lou Salome whom he might have had a romance with, and Paul Ree, a philosopher, as well as Overbeck, a professor I believe, and Jacob Burkhardt, the famous historian. I don't know about Schopenhauer's friendship-life. Nor Highsmith's or Poe's. Lovecraft was a great letter writer and seemed to develop many pen-pal friendships. House has Wilson, and a group of admirers who seem friend-ish despite House's antagonism. Derb doesn't seem to have a paucity of friends.
Politics--Nietzsche seems popular more with the left nowadays, though I imagine among the evolutionary right, he might be popular. I think of him as somewhat right-wing, just going by his anti-egalitarian, aristocratic, classical sensibility, though he hated tradition for the sake of tradition, Christianity, nationalism. He hated the state though, which is more right-wing than left. To me, he is right-ish. Schopenhauer I have no idea about, but I'm inclined towards the right. Highsmith I think was a left-winger. Poe I don't know about. Lovecraft seems pretty rightwing. House is hard to read.
http://www.lsr-projekt.de/poly/enee.html - the ego and its own, stirner, english translation
links
http://www.class.uidaho.edu/jcanders/Ethics/outline_of_some_classic_criticis.htm - utilitarianism pros and cons
http://www.cheapovegas.com/index.php - cheap vegas stuff
http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2009/09/english-americans-are-most-introverted.html:
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/09/from_stroboscope_to_.html
there's a link to a online dream machine in the comment field too i haven't checked out yet.
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2009/09/your-personality-type-affects.html
http://www.cheapovegas.com/index.php - cheap vegas stuff
http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2009/09/english-americans-are-most-introverted.html:
English Americans are most introverted, Jewish Americans are least: Here are mean introversion scores for various white American
groups...
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/09/from_stroboscope_to_.html
there's a link to a online dream machine in the comment field too i haven't checked out yet.
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2009/09/your-personality-type-affects.html
i think some rpg should make use of the five factor personality model in creating their various classes of fighters--a warrior would be high on extraversion for example, a thief low on conscientiousness, a magician high on openness maybe.
links
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/09/a_guess_and_a_t.html:
this sounds like stereotypical beta males and alpha females are reproducing more than stereotypical alpha males and beta females.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2009/09/25/smoking-and-sld-maybe-the-shangri-la-diet-curbs-all-kinds-of-appetites/
i want to think about this post in conjunction with what i've read about the big five personality trait of conscientiousness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superego
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
["]I would guess that number of children is negatively correlated to number of sexual partners.["]
According to the General Social Survey, Will's guess is... correct!
this sounds like stereotypical beta males and alpha females are reproducing more than stereotypical alpha males and beta females.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2009/09/25/smoking-and-sld-maybe-the-shangri-la-diet-curbs-all-kinds-of-appetites/
i want to think about this post in conjunction with what i've read about the big five personality trait of conscientiousness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superego
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
Breakheart Reservation
Philydraceae
Some kind of plant family. I'm not much into plants, vegetation, nature. Actually, that's not entirely true. I like an occassional walk through the woods. I'd go to Breakheart Reservation for a walk (very pessimistic name, Breakheart Reservation--when you call a restaurant to secure a table in order to have a dinner with your sweetheart to tell her you want to break up, you are making a breakheart reservation--actually though, why would you make a reservation at a nice restaurant to break up with someone rather than waiting for them to go into the port-o-potty at the beerfest, tell them you want to see other people, through the thin plastic door, and then push the potty over and hightail it to the buses provided for the event staff to escort you to the local T station.)
Anyway, to make a breakheart reservation doesn't make sense. I guess you might have breakheart reservations, in the sense of questioning whether you should break someone's heart.
Some kind of plant family. I'm not much into plants, vegetation, nature. Actually, that's not entirely true. I like an occassional walk through the woods. I'd go to Breakheart Reservation for a walk (very pessimistic name, Breakheart Reservation--when you call a restaurant to secure a table in order to have a dinner with your sweetheart to tell her you want to break up, you are making a breakheart reservation--actually though, why would you make a reservation at a nice restaurant to break up with someone rather than waiting for them to go into the port-o-potty at the beerfest, tell them you want to see other people, through the thin plastic door, and then push the potty over and hightail it to the buses provided for the event staff to escort you to the local T station.)
Anyway, to make a breakheart reservation doesn't make sense. I guess you might have breakheart reservations, in the sense of questioning whether you should break someone's heart.
counter-blitzkrieg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirLand_Battle:
why not counter-counter blitzkrieg? war as boxing match.
Instead of meeting the Blitzkrieg head-on, Boyd suggested what he called the "counter-blitz", where equally mobile forces would pick away at the lines of thrust and then move on to the next in a series of hit-and-run attacks. There was no necessity to retain any sort of front line, and the attacks deliberately moved from point to point in order to avoid being bogged down or getting trapped. The idea was not to force the blitz to lose its ability to maneuver, but instead upset its ability to understand where it should be maneuvering to — the attacker would have no idea which of these counteroffensives represented a real threat, and would have to respond to all of them. The key idea was to "Smash blitz offensive by inconspicuously using fast-tempo/fluidity-of-action and cohesion of counter-blitz combat teams as basis for shifting of forces and quick focus of air and ground effort to throttle momentum, shatter cohesion, and envelop blitz in order to destroy adversary's capacity to resist."
why not counter-counter blitzkrieg? war as boxing match.
lovecraftian aesthetic conservativism
http://secularright.org/wordpress/?p=2773:
lovecraft's speculated big-five personality:
high openness
low conscientiousness
low extraversion
low agreeableness
high neuroticism
along with, i speculate, gregory house, john derbyshire, edgar allen poe, friedrich nietzsche, patricia highsmith, me.
I think Lovecraft’s pessimism took several forms. First, his basic stoic, atheist outlook convinced him nothing ultimately mattered. That position seemed to carry over into a belief that ethics was a matter of aesthetics and not any universal absolute. Traditions gave life meaning. For Lovecraft, that meaning was in following certain cultural patterns: “For example, I never cheat or steal. Also, I never wear a top-hat
with a sack coat or munch bananas in public on the streets, because a gentleman does not do those things either. I would as soon do the one as the other sort of thing — it is all a matter of harmony and good taste.”
lovecraft's speculated big-five personality:
high openness
low conscientiousness
low extraversion
low agreeableness
high neuroticism
along with, i speculate, gregory house, john derbyshire, edgar allen poe, friedrich nietzsche, patricia highsmith, me.
overconfidence is a good strategy on average
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24162/:
In fact, if the potential reward is at least twice as great as the cost of competing, then overconfidence is the best strategy. In fact, overconfidence is actually advantageous on average, because it boosts ambition, resolve, morale and persistence. In other words, overconfidence is the best way to maximise benefits over costs when risks are uncertain.
chuck, beta-male fantasy/female fantasy?
the tv show 'chuck' is coming back at some point. i've thought prior that there's this beta-male fantasy that's captured in movies like 'fight club', the movie 'wanted' and the tv show 'chuck'. the idea is there's this unassertive feller who gets forced into a tough life that requires him to realize his awesome inner potential.
i think of another angle though--chuck's season finale last year ended with chuck being infused with software that allows him to fight like bruce lee.
i wonder if there is a female fantasy--the beta male who won't stray from her and treat her well, but is a badass when he needs to be (protecting her/in the bedroom).
i think of another angle though--chuck's season finale last year ended with chuck being infused with software that allows him to fight like bruce lee.
i wonder if there is a female fantasy--the beta male who won't stray from her and treat her well, but is a badass when he needs to be (protecting her/in the bedroom).
http://www.napoleon-series.org/military/battles/c_prussianlight3.html:
‘It is also worth some consideration that light troops offer the greatest opportunity for the training of good and useful officers, because daily actions accustom them to danger, and by being left to rely more on their own judgment they are taught how to tear themselves from the machine-like process of their profession. All previous teaching is as useless as it is inapplicable, and therefore the officers’ boldness, judgment, and independence grow almost daily.’
Expiring money
Posner:
How about money that expires if held too long in the hands of one person then? The money perhaps goes to someone else if you don't spend it in a certain time.
For Keynes, in other words, it is consumption, rather than thrift, that promotes economic growth.
How about money that expires if held too long in the hands of one person then? The money perhaps goes to someone else if you don't spend it in a certain time.
Big-Five Factor traits of low conscientiousness and high openness
Inconvenience? Laziness? An inconvenient attraction to laziness, I have. That’s it. Or maybe I just prefer to call myself creative? Yes. That must be it. An infatuation with laziness on account of creativeness, I have. What an innovative excuse.
...It’s a modest form of gambling [buying clothes guessing they fit]. Which I like. It is also why I like scratch-offs and bingo.
That's Grace of GraceNMichelle, Mydamnchannel. Big-Five personality traits suggested in the excerpt: High openness, low conscientiousness. The traits:
Openness:
Openness is a general appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience. The trait distinguishes imaginative people from down-to-earth, conventional people. People who are open to experience are intellectually curious, appreciative of art, and sensitive to beauty. They tend to be, compared to closed people, more creative and more aware of their feelings. They are more likely to hold unconventional beliefs.
Conscientiousness:
Conscientiousness is a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement. The trait shows a preference for planned rather than spontaneous behavior. It influences the way in which we control, regulate, and direct our impulses. Conscientiousness includes the factor known as Need for Achievement (NAch).
Links
ben casnocha - http://ben.casnocha.com/2009/09/minor-word-choices-that-are-revealing.html:
http://www.toqonline.com/2009/09/darwins-other-idea/:
thomas sowell - http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2009/09/22/the_underdogs?page=2:
megan mcardle - http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/05/innovation_pressure.php:
lord cromer - http://ia341227.us.archive.org/1/items/ancientmodernimp00cromrich/ancientmodernimp00cromrich_djvu.txt
:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucullus
john derbyshire - http://johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/Diaries/2009-04.html:
The idea is that everyone has a superpower -- or some unique skill. Brad Feld's is being able to sleep on any seat in an airplane, the whole flight.
http://www.toqonline.com/2009/09/darwins-other-idea/:
Males of most species (of bowerbirds) decorate their bowers with mosses, ferns, orchids, snail shells, berries and bark. They fly around searching for the most brilliantly colored natural objects, bring them back to their bowers, and arrange them in careful clusters of uniform color. When the orchids and berries lose their color, the males replace them with fresh material. Males often try to steal ornaments, especially blue feathers, from the bowers of other males. They also try to destroy the bowers of rivals. The strength to defend their delicate work is a precondition of their artistry. Females appear to favor bowers that are sturdy, symmetrical, and well-ornamented with color.
thomas sowell - http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2009/09/22/the_underdogs?page=2:
Nobody sugar-coated the facts of racial discrimination. But Professor Sterling Brown of Howard University, who wrote with eloquent bitterness about racism, nevertheless said to me when I prepared to transfer to Harvard: "Don't come back here and tell me you didn't make it 'cause white folks were mean."
He burned my bridges behind me, the way they used to do with armies going into battle, so that they had no place to retreat to, and so had to fight to win.
megan mcardle - http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/05/innovation_pressure.php:
Unfortunately, while you do get bloated incumbents who collapse when you use unconventional tactics, most companies, armies, and so forth are actually run by professionals. If they are good at their job, your unconventional tactics will make you lose worse than otherwise--think Netscape giving away its product for free in order to get widespread adoption, then finding out that Microsoft could do that for longer than a startup.
lord cromer - http://ia341227.us.archive.org/1/items/ancientmodernimp00cromrich/ancientmodernimp00cromrich_djvu.txt
:
I well
remember being struck by the slight effect
produced in Egypt by our early reverses
during the recent South African War. All
were convinced that we were the inheritors of
that proud motto which laid down as a prin-
ciple of policy that Rome should never make
peace save as a victor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucullus
Pompey rejected every aspect of a normal career, seeking great military commands at every opportunity which suited him, while refusing to undertake normal duties in peaceful provinces.
john derbyshire - http://johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/Diaries/2009-04.html:
Rather than getting them to read entire books, I'd rather they be given "readers" — books of extracts from classic works of literature. If an extract catches a student's fancy, by all means let him try the full original.
No man is a fantasy island
Fantasy Island
I never watched Fantasy Island, the original or the remake. The premise sounds interesting. There's that 'careful what you wish for' vibe, from the little I read of the above Wikipedia article. Dostoevsky wrote a short story about a man who dies and goes to a planet in his afterlife where everyone has everything they want without having to work for it, and the world is kind of bland, if I remember right, which makes sense. The point I took away from the story is the struggle is a feature of our world, and part of the fun. This idea is also mirrored by Eliezer Yudkowsky's writings about how heaven would be a bland place no one would really want to live in. I wonder if he read Dostoevsky's story. I like it when different people come to similar conclusions. I had my self thought that life would be boring if all your desires were met without any effort.
On the other hand, purposely creating struggle where it's easily avoidable, for the sake of stimulating this need for struggle seems silly to me too. Why shouldn't we go into Nozick's experience machine? I'm inclined to say I wouldn't go into the experience machine, but I think my objections would perhaps be on the grounds of not believing it would be a safe thing to do--that bad things would happen outside the machine that I should have an eye on. But say you were useless to getting rid of any threats that might threaten you in the world, and the experience machine is there to give you instant pleasure at all time, would you go in it? I imagine it would be some well-crafted device that made for a really fun infinite set of adventures that never lead to death but always created maximal 'gaming' pleasure. Why shouldn't I go in there?
But really, would I? I suppose if all my friends were in there and I could hand around with them, rather than pretend versions of them, it would be a cool deal, and maybe I could jump out of the machine periodically to audit reality to make sure things were buzzing along okay, and the AI guardians were doing a swimming job and didn't need some emergency intervention from yours truly (what the hell would I have to offer in helping these things?)
I never watched Fantasy Island, the original or the remake. The premise sounds interesting. There's that 'careful what you wish for' vibe, from the little I read of the above Wikipedia article. Dostoevsky wrote a short story about a man who dies and goes to a planet in his afterlife where everyone has everything they want without having to work for it, and the world is kind of bland, if I remember right, which makes sense. The point I took away from the story is the struggle is a feature of our world, and part of the fun. This idea is also mirrored by Eliezer Yudkowsky's writings about how heaven would be a bland place no one would really want to live in. I wonder if he read Dostoevsky's story. I like it when different people come to similar conclusions. I had my self thought that life would be boring if all your desires were met without any effort.
On the other hand, purposely creating struggle where it's easily avoidable, for the sake of stimulating this need for struggle seems silly to me too. Why shouldn't we go into Nozick's experience machine? I'm inclined to say I wouldn't go into the experience machine, but I think my objections would perhaps be on the grounds of not believing it would be a safe thing to do--that bad things would happen outside the machine that I should have an eye on. But say you were useless to getting rid of any threats that might threaten you in the world, and the experience machine is there to give you instant pleasure at all time, would you go in it? I imagine it would be some well-crafted device that made for a really fun infinite set of adventures that never lead to death but always created maximal 'gaming' pleasure. Why shouldn't I go in there?
But really, would I? I suppose if all my friends were in there and I could hand around with them, rather than pretend versions of them, it would be a cool deal, and maybe I could jump out of the machine periodically to audit reality to make sure things were buzzing along okay, and the AI guardians were doing a swimming job and didn't need some emergency intervention from yours truly (what the hell would I have to offer in helping these things?)
Links
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/09/understanding-business-development.html:
http://cheeptalk.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/sleep-is-a-kludge/
:
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/09/ur-banned-in-san-francisco.html:
http://gracenmichelle.tumblr.com/post/193494043:
Close the open door. I regularly hear from readers who are frustrated because a big company wasn't willing to hear a great idea they mailed in. Here's the thing: there isn't a shortage of ideas. There's a shortage of execution. That means that successful business development teams look for proven partners and organizations with momentum. A key part of that is the decision to say no early and quickly and respectfully to people who don't meet that threshold.
http://cheeptalk.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/sleep-is-a-kludge/
:
Sleep can be seen as an adaptive state that benefits animals by increasing the efficiency of their activity. It does this by suppressing activity at times that have maximal predator risk and minimal opportunity for efficiently meeting vital needs, and by permitting activity at times of maximal food and prey availability and minimal predator risk.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/09/ur-banned-in-san-francisco.html:
If I were running TSI, as of course I am not, I would discard the entire strategy of PR, outreach and legitimacy. What seasteading needs is not a million people who think it's a cool idea, but a thousand fanatics completely dedicated to making it happen. TSI does not need the New York Times to find these people. In fact, outreach makes it harder to identify them, because it makes it hard to separate the fanatical supporters from the casual ones.
...My message to the seasteaders is: get out there. If you want to prove that seasteading isn't a joke, buy a boat and find a bunch of crazy people who are willing to live on it. Stop promoting; put everything into doing. Any number of eloquent essays, rigorous engineering studies, lovely websites, academic endorsements, or glowing writeups in the Times, do not add up to one genuine maritime community. Worse, they subtract energy and focus from the incredibly difficult task of creating one.
http://gracenmichelle.tumblr.com/post/193494043:
Award shows are fun. I like them. I’ll admit it. They’re entertaining and inspiring. They show a lot of really creative/talented people just plain getting. shit. done.
Arcas
Arcas
Arcas was the son of Calysta and Zeus. Zeus in true alpha-style seemed to have to spread his seed far and wide. That's kind of gross.
It really must have been an odd thing to be a Greek with these shitty gods. Not shitty in the sense that they were not interesting or poorly conceived, but rather they were such assholes. They're not nice people by and large, are they? You can think of stories of just about every god, it seems to me, being an asshole to someone. Maybe the model for the gods, to an extent, were rich people, like kings and nobels, who I suspect were a disagreeable sort, like today's politicians and CEOs, whom I suspect tend to be low on the big-five personality trait of agreeableness. Actually, I've read that CEOs do score low on agreeableness, and I just guess politicians are probably that way given the dog-eat-dog environment they live in.
I guess the Christian god, who was a sky god, I believe, and maybe a warrior god, in the Jewish pantheon of many gods (remember Ba'al?). He was like the Jewish Zeus. And people have observed how he seems like a jerk in the old testament, and then...does he get better in the New Testament? Jesus actually doesn't always come off as Mr. Nice in the New Testament.
Arcas was the son of Calysta and Zeus. Zeus in true alpha-style seemed to have to spread his seed far and wide. That's kind of gross.
It really must have been an odd thing to be a Greek with these shitty gods. Not shitty in the sense that they were not interesting or poorly conceived, but rather they were such assholes. They're not nice people by and large, are they? You can think of stories of just about every god, it seems to me, being an asshole to someone. Maybe the model for the gods, to an extent, were rich people, like kings and nobels, who I suspect were a disagreeable sort, like today's politicians and CEOs, whom I suspect tend to be low on the big-five personality trait of agreeableness. Actually, I've read that CEOs do score low on agreeableness, and I just guess politicians are probably that way given the dog-eat-dog environment they live in.
I guess the Christian god, who was a sky god, I believe, and maybe a warrior god, in the Jewish pantheon of many gods (remember Ba'al?). He was like the Jewish Zeus. And people have observed how he seems like a jerk in the old testament, and then...does he get better in the New Testament? Jesus actually doesn't always come off as Mr. Nice in the New Testament.
Cinnamon Toast Records
Cinnamon Toast Records
I like the name of this label. Cinnamon toast is pretty awesome. I'm not sure I personally would name a label Cinnamon toast. A label doesn't seem like something easily named. An essay seems pretty easy to title because it's about something. Some of those old English essays by the likes of David Hume or Adam Smith had some neat long titles. "On the Commencement of Understanding Regarding Multiple Approaches to Discordant Metaphysics in an Abstruse Political Hamster and Heath Newcastle Brown." I sort of lost the sense-making-ness at the end there. Apologies, it's late. But, you know, you can name an essay something like, "Concerning the Senses" because that is what the essay is about, or "On Bullshit," as that philosopher titled a book. A novel seems harder to entitle. I guess some books are about one particular thing, or a few things. I never read "War and Peace" but I bet it's more or less about war and peace. "The Brothers Karamazov" is about the brothers Karamazov, who ran a lovely Russian circus and had a delightful bear.
But a label, a label isn't really about anything, other than putting out records. I guess if you were a heavy metal records label you might call your label "Heavy Metal Records" or something less direct, but related to metal, like "Lead Records" or "Mercury Poisoning Records". Maybe cinnamon toast is related to whatever the eponymous record label is about. They make toasty music that is sweet. Hm. I don't know what that would be. They make music that is good in the morning. They make music diabetics shouldn't consume--in the economicky rather than nutritional sense of the word.
I like the name of this label. Cinnamon toast is pretty awesome. I'm not sure I personally would name a label Cinnamon toast. A label doesn't seem like something easily named. An essay seems pretty easy to title because it's about something. Some of those old English essays by the likes of David Hume or Adam Smith had some neat long titles. "On the Commencement of Understanding Regarding Multiple Approaches to Discordant Metaphysics in an Abstruse Political Hamster and Heath Newcastle Brown." I sort of lost the sense-making-ness at the end there. Apologies, it's late. But, you know, you can name an essay something like, "Concerning the Senses" because that is what the essay is about, or "On Bullshit," as that philosopher titled a book. A novel seems harder to entitle. I guess some books are about one particular thing, or a few things. I never read "War and Peace" but I bet it's more or less about war and peace. "The Brothers Karamazov" is about the brothers Karamazov, who ran a lovely Russian circus and had a delightful bear.
But a label, a label isn't really about anything, other than putting out records. I guess if you were a heavy metal records label you might call your label "Heavy Metal Records" or something less direct, but related to metal, like "Lead Records" or "Mercury Poisoning Records". Maybe cinnamon toast is related to whatever the eponymous record label is about. They make toasty music that is sweet. Hm. I don't know what that would be. They make music that is good in the morning. They make music diabetics shouldn't consume--in the economicky rather than nutritional sense of the word.
DSCH
DSCH
I guess Dmitri Shostakovich denoted a musical motif as DSCH, it says at that Wikipedia article, and this motif represent himself. I'm not entirely sure what that means. I assume he had a set of notes that played that represented him--if he walked into the room, the violinist who followed him would strike up this motif--well, actually, I guess the violinist is following him around, so is basically playing the motif all the time. So Dmitri Shostakovich must have liked the motif, or at least liked people hearing him walk around with this motif playing.
Basically, he had a theme song, right? I don't think I like any song enough to make it my theme song. Something badass would be cool, if not really representative of me. I could choose something that doesn't make much sense, like the Hurdy Gurdy Man. I'm not a hurdy gurdy man, so why is that my theme song--and have I cleared my use of it with Donovan?
I guess Dmitri Shostakovich denoted a musical motif as DSCH, it says at that Wikipedia article, and this motif represent himself. I'm not entirely sure what that means. I assume he had a set of notes that played that represented him--if he walked into the room, the violinist who followed him would strike up this motif--well, actually, I guess the violinist is following him around, so is basically playing the motif all the time. So Dmitri Shostakovich must have liked the motif, or at least liked people hearing him walk around with this motif playing.
Basically, he had a theme song, right? I don't think I like any song enough to make it my theme song. Something badass would be cool, if not really representative of me. I could choose something that doesn't make much sense, like the Hurdy Gurdy Man. I'm not a hurdy gurdy man, so why is that my theme song--and have I cleared my use of it with Donovan?
April Love
April Love (Hughes painting)
This is a pretty nice painting. I like the Preraphaelites from what I've seen of their work, none of which I can think of at the moment. Nice stuff. I like the darkness of the painting. The Wikipedia article says this painting is of lovers in some crisis. That's a shame. I wonder what it was. Paintings only capture a moment really, so it's hard to tell a story about the lovers. Triptychs might do a better job, but can I think of a triptych that seemed to tell a story rather than just showing three paintings of three frozen moments with no obvious connection between the three paintings?
I probably could think of triptychs that told a story if I thought about it. Francis Bacon did some triptychs--I really hate typing that word. One I think was of his lover, who killed himself. I think Francis Bacon may have had another lover who killed himself, or tried, after they had been involved. There are some people who have an odd pattern with their lovers. Hitler had an odd habit of making women who loved him crazy--or loving crazy women--I think two of his girlfriends tried to kill themselves. I think his first fiancee tried to kill herself, and Geli Rabaul who may have been his lover killed herself or was killed by someone, and then of course Eva Braun bit it in the bunker with old Dolf. Oldy Wolfy. Uncle Wolf.
Strange. I don't think I've ever made anyone I've known want to off themselves. I also am pretty good at keeping the crazies away, I think, because I am generally hard to approach, and I suspect the crazies are suckers for people who are gregarious. I've known a couple, maybe a few people with stalkers or quasi-stalkers, and I think gregariousness or a kind of concern if not overt friendliness attracts the crazies, and I'm generally pretty reserved. People are great and all, but I kind of want to be left alone a lot in public.
This is a pretty nice painting. I like the Preraphaelites from what I've seen of their work, none of which I can think of at the moment. Nice stuff. I like the darkness of the painting. The Wikipedia article says this painting is of lovers in some crisis. That's a shame. I wonder what it was. Paintings only capture a moment really, so it's hard to tell a story about the lovers. Triptychs might do a better job, but can I think of a triptych that seemed to tell a story rather than just showing three paintings of three frozen moments with no obvious connection between the three paintings?
I probably could think of triptychs that told a story if I thought about it. Francis Bacon did some triptychs--I really hate typing that word. One I think was of his lover, who killed himself. I think Francis Bacon may have had another lover who killed himself, or tried, after they had been involved. There are some people who have an odd pattern with their lovers. Hitler had an odd habit of making women who loved him crazy--or loving crazy women--I think two of his girlfriends tried to kill themselves. I think his first fiancee tried to kill herself, and Geli Rabaul who may have been his lover killed herself or was killed by someone, and then of course Eva Braun bit it in the bunker with old Dolf. Oldy Wolfy. Uncle Wolf.
Strange. I don't think I've ever made anyone I've known want to off themselves. I also am pretty good at keeping the crazies away, I think, because I am generally hard to approach, and I suspect the crazies are suckers for people who are gregarious. I've known a couple, maybe a few people with stalkers or quasi-stalkers, and I think gregariousness or a kind of concern if not overt friendliness attracts the crazies, and I'm generally pretty reserved. People are great and all, but I kind of want to be left alone a lot in public.
Final Fantasy, anachronistic worlds
I got Final Fantasy IV (II US) and Chronotrigger for Playstation in the mail on Thursday. I thought I was getting Final Fantasy VI (III US), which is probably my favorite video game of all time. But Final Fantasy II is pretty damn good too. I played FFII when I was a kid when I borrowed it for a friend, and played it on my Super Nintendo. I had been into Final Fantasy since probably fifth or sixth grade. I had never been in to RPGs prior to that, like Dragon Warrior.
I love the blend of modern and medieval elements in the Final Fantasy series. Final Fantasy I had a robot and a computerized sky castle created by a civilization that no longer seemed to be so technologically advanced. What world is the world of Final Fantasy like? The sense of decline from a better time seems medieval, since Western civilization became much less wealthy and culturally skillful in the medieval period (look at the medieval attempts to represent humans in sculpture. The Greeks and Romans could do this, and the Renaissance Italian artists could create great fairly realistic sculptures. I’ve never seen a medieval sculpture that looked realistic, though I’m sure there are many that have a weird coolness to them. And what about nowadays—the sculptures I see of people are always stiff and creepy. And why do they always seem to be made of metal? Well, there’s Lincoln-sitting stiffly in his chair at his memorial in DC. No flowing robes and dramatic gestures. How about Lincoln stepping on the throat of a dragon and impaling it with a spear a la the archangel Michael? Come on.)
But then there’s this blend of computer, like, modern 21st century style computer, and robotics beyond our ability, really humanoid AI it seems, with the medieval/renaissance/age of enlightenment elements of Final Fantasy. I guess Final Fantasy is a hodgepodge of cool things. I can’t complain. I once had an idea to write a Fantasy/Alternative History world in which all periods of time existed at the same time. So you’d have the Romans existing with the Carolingians and the British Empire and Spanish Empire and Ottomans, and Genghis Khan, and the Spartans and Athenians and Persians, and Chinese emperors would exist along Mao and Chiang Kai-Shek. Soviet Russia would exist along side Czarist Russia and the previously mentioned Mongols, I suppose of the Golden Horde.
Well, the fun and the trick of it, is how do you get all these various civilizations existing at the same time. I think my general rules would be to say yes to the existence of any empire or nation, if at all possible, and try to make them able to survive in the world that exists that they have been put into—so obviously Genghis Khan, though a thorough bad-ass, would get his ass handed to him by the US, the Soviets, Czarist Russia, and probably so-on. So for him to exist he would have to have enough power to be able to hold his own with the USSR, the Czar, and so on.
I’d want to retain as much of the qualities of these various empires and nations as possible while also making the changes necessary to allow them to survive to deal with the greatest of powers in this world, namely the US (America, F*** Yeah!).
I love the blend of modern and medieval elements in the Final Fantasy series. Final Fantasy I had a robot and a computerized sky castle created by a civilization that no longer seemed to be so technologically advanced. What world is the world of Final Fantasy like? The sense of decline from a better time seems medieval, since Western civilization became much less wealthy and culturally skillful in the medieval period (look at the medieval attempts to represent humans in sculpture. The Greeks and Romans could do this, and the Renaissance Italian artists could create great fairly realistic sculptures. I’ve never seen a medieval sculpture that looked realistic, though I’m sure there are many that have a weird coolness to them. And what about nowadays—the sculptures I see of people are always stiff and creepy. And why do they always seem to be made of metal? Well, there’s Lincoln-sitting stiffly in his chair at his memorial in DC. No flowing robes and dramatic gestures. How about Lincoln stepping on the throat of a dragon and impaling it with a spear a la the archangel Michael? Come on.)
But then there’s this blend of computer, like, modern 21st century style computer, and robotics beyond our ability, really humanoid AI it seems, with the medieval/renaissance/age of enlightenment elements of Final Fantasy. I guess Final Fantasy is a hodgepodge of cool things. I can’t complain. I once had an idea to write a Fantasy/Alternative History world in which all periods of time existed at the same time. So you’d have the Romans existing with the Carolingians and the British Empire and Spanish Empire and Ottomans, and Genghis Khan, and the Spartans and Athenians and Persians, and Chinese emperors would exist along Mao and Chiang Kai-Shek. Soviet Russia would exist along side Czarist Russia and the previously mentioned Mongols, I suppose of the Golden Horde.
Well, the fun and the trick of it, is how do you get all these various civilizations existing at the same time. I think my general rules would be to say yes to the existence of any empire or nation, if at all possible, and try to make them able to survive in the world that exists that they have been put into—so obviously Genghis Khan, though a thorough bad-ass, would get his ass handed to him by the US, the Soviets, Czarist Russia, and probably so-on. So for him to exist he would have to have enough power to be able to hold his own with the USSR, the Czar, and so on.
I’d want to retain as much of the qualities of these various empires and nations as possible while also making the changes necessary to allow them to survive to deal with the greatest of powers in this world, namely the US (America, F*** Yeah!).
Slackers into Badasses
Okay, I’m going to try writing my journal entries correctly the firs time rather than creating a mess and editing them later, if I am in the mood. This is how I started writing journals, if I remember right. I’d just write sentences as they occurred to me, I suppose. I’m sitting in my room. It’s my birthday. I’ve turned thirty. I no longer have my twenties, and I feel a little weird about that. Part of me feels good though. Maybe this a time for me to change. I think of Otto von Bismarck, who was kind of a slacker until he turned 30 or so. Well, I don’t know if he was a slacker. He did manage his family estate after his father died, with his brother, I think. But I don’t think he got into public life until he was in his thirties. He was an extreme right winger in his views. I think he became a member of some kind of parliamentary organization in his thirties and was known for being very blunt in his opinions. He turned from a sort of wild boy carousing to a Pietist Lutheran, and this change seems linked up with his marriage to his wife, who was religious. He was also a monarchist, believing in the divine right of kings. I wonder how much of this was genuine feeling and how much was calculation. He was a practitioner of realpolitik after all, a Macchiavellian approach to politics, and being a Lutheran and a Monarchist seems like a good way of ingratiating yourself with the king of Prussia, I suppose.
There are other guys who started accomplishing things later in life, like Ulysses S Grant. Well, he did have achievements before the Civil War—that’s something that I think tends to be lost in discussions about him. He graduated West Point, which wasn’t easy to do—I think most people dropped out before graduation. He was in the middle of his group of graduates. He also fought with distinction in the Mexican American War when I think he was probably in his twenties. He had trouble after the war getting a business of the ground, but so do a lot of people. Businesses fail all the time. Don’t most businesses fail, or at least end, in five years? He was having trouble making ends meet by the time of the Civil War, but I’m not sure that’s a sign that he was a failure. He seemed a venturesome person, and many ventures fail. He kept trying. If the Civil War hadn’t come around, I imagine he would have probably found other ventures to engage in. Maybe not. It’s hard to say with counterfactual speculations, but he seemed a venturesome person by personality—I think he was high on extraversion, the big-five factor trait, which makes a person risk-taking and a person of action, which Grant was. True, he seemed to be shy and it’s often said he was lazy, though how lazy can you be if you’re continually starting businesses, then proactively waging war against the Confederates, then acting as president of the United States? Can you really be low-energy and do these things? The key to extraversion as I understand it, based on my reading—particularly Daniel Nettle’s book, “Personality”, is that extraversion is primarily directed by the desire to go after positive rewards, and hence you are outwardly an active person, and a striving person, and judging by the fact of Grant’s behaviors in his life, he seemed like an active, energetic person, if superficially laconic and lazy in his actions. Just because he’s not buzzing around frenetically doesn’t mean he’s not energetic. Do most people have the energy or inclination to engage on the actions Grant did in his life? I suspect not.
Anyway, Grant had succeeded in graduating West Point, and had succeeded in fighting with distinction in the Mexican-American War. He had business difficulties, but in the Civil War he was probably the greatest general, or one of them. This great success came when I believe he was in his forties.
There’s George W. Bush, who reputedly wasn’t very successful until his forties. The story I hear is on his fortieth birthday he decided to clean up his act, I think after he got an ultimatum from his wife. But at that point Bush had gotten his MBA from Harvard, had graduated from Yale, which not every rich kid with connections does, and I believe had run an oil company. It’s true on the last count you could be considered ‘running’ an oil company and not do much, and the oil company apparently wasn’t terribly successful, but again, most businesses aren’t successful, or at least end, within five years of their start, so why should a business failure necessarily be seen as a black mark. I suppose you should probably be more concerned with failing in business at a greater rate than the average, and even then, given you’re not engaging in a large number of businesses, your particular average will not necessarily reflect the overall number of failed businesses, given the law of big numbers.
Bush seems like someone who is low on the conscientiousness scale of the Big-Personality scale. Conscientiousness is the scale that reflects how much you can control your impulses and follow rules or plans aimed at accomplishing some object. People low on conscientiousness tend to have trouble inhibiting their impulses, and have a hard time stopping themselves from following their impulses once they’ve indulged them. So they have trouble with addiction, gambling, that sort of thing. People high on conscientiousness are able to regiment themselves. I think Grant, an alcoholic, and Bush, a problem-drinker if not an alcoholic, were low on conscientiousness. Bismarck too, actually, was probably low on conscientiousness—his wild youth suggests this. He said when he worked as a government bureaucrat that he couldn’t stand working for others, because he wanted to be in charge. This attitude seems a sign of low agreeableness as well as low conscientiousness. He doesn’t want to follow the rules, which someone with high conscientiousness will be likely to have an easy time with, and also, regarding the agreeableness dimension, he doesn’t want to work for other people, or with them. Agreeableness is mainly about empathy and sympathy—you can see other people’s perspective, or believe you can, and feel bad when others feel bad, so wish to cooperate. That’s my impression anyway, again from my reading of Nettle’s “Personality”.
I happen to be, on the Big Five Personality scales, high on openness, which as Nettle suggests, seems to be about divergent thinking—thinking in broad categories and in loosely associative ways. The opposite, low openness, is being a more realistic way of thinking—ideas loosely associative seem far-fetched or silly. I’m low on conscientiousness (alas), extraversion, and agreeableness, while being high on neuroticism. If I were low on openness I’d almost feel like I failed my personality test. Neuroticism is the ability to feel negatively. Things bother you, and so you’re risk averse and negatively incentivized, by which I mean you see dangers and they dissuade you from doing things. People low on neuroticism tend not to see danger, and if they do, they don’t sweat it, it seems. Daniel Nettle gives the example of people who climb Mount Everest. Some of them had been tested for their Big-Five traits, and it was found that they were by and large or completely low on neuroticism. Nettle points out that your chances of dying climbing on Everest might be as great as 1 in 10. These people are pretty close to playing Russian Roulette. And yet they go anyway. Stupid, IMO. Well, not stupid, but they have a rough personality trait.
I do too, of course. Low conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness I think all correlate with less success in the work place. Oh well. I am what I am.
Anyway, today I am thirty, as it’s my birthday. I do feel like a threshold has been passed. I thought I would be further along. It was very natural for me to say when I was younger, “We’ll see how I do by thirty,” with the implication I would be far along. And now that I am here, I see I haven’t obviously made a lot of progress. Obviously, but not in unobvious ways. I’ve written drafts of several novels—two full drafts of two novels and one incomplete draft of a third one. All are in need of much editing. One is perhaps 80 percent done. I have learned more about how I like to work and how I don’t, and I have also uncovered new problems I didn’t know of that I can now focus on.
Probably a lot of the value of my twenties was learning what didn’t work of my theories. I learned more about the limits of my energy. I think I used to think I could do anything, and didn’t consider the cost. I think of German style of war, which tends to focus on operational success, as Robert Citini has pointed out in his book, “The German Way of War”, and less on the logistical and grand strategical elements. The idea is that Germany historically has been a poor state—actually it is better to say Prussia—Prussia was a state which didn’t have access to great resources and was positioned among great powers, France to its West and Russia to its East and Austria to its South and Sweden to its North. Because of Prussia’s position, a military doctrine was crafted that seems to have suited it, which was to fight ‘short and lively wars’—a term coined by the Great Elector and followed by Frederick the Great. You can see this style of war, Citino points out, in the so-called blitzkrieg style of maneuver war fought by the Germans in World War II.
Anyway, this German style of war was created with an eye for limited resources, but when the Prussians and later the Nazi Germans fought protracted conflicts, they were sapped to the breaking point and defeated by Americans and Soviets, who were perhaps overall less maneuver-oriented, but had a grand strategy that mobilized the resources at their hands, whereas the Nazis didn’t seem to make use of the resources which they had secured for themselves through conquest. Their focus was operational, and neglected the logistical and the grand strategic.
How I relate this to my twenties is that I seemed to act like I had more energy than I did. On the other hand, sometimes it seems better to be optimistic than not. If you think you can do more than you actually can, and you bite off more than you can chew, then you might not succeed, but the pressure will probably cause you to work harder than you would if you didn’t have the pressure. The prospect of a hanging concentrates the mind, as Samuel Johnson said, and the prospect of failure probably does too. Johnson was a procrastinator, and probably low on the Big-Five trait of conscientiousness, but got a lot done in his life, and the prospect of a deadline I imagine probably helped him accomplish much. I’ve heard Dostoevsky, another low-conscientiousness writer (his gambling problem suggests low conscientiousness) would waste a bunch of money so that he would have to write or starve. Winston Churchill amassed debts and wrote immensely to help pay off his debts incurred to finance his lavish lifestyle.
Also, a lot of times, when people fail, it’s really not a complete failure, it’s more of a 75% failure, or something along those lines. They fail, but they learned something, or they leave some valuable residual sitting about. It was apparently a bad venture to put up so many cables to support broadband internet, but now that they are there we all use them—an example Nassim Taleb pointed to when suggesting bubbles could be good.
So what’s the lesson? Aim high, don’t court failure but don’t be afraid of it either, and take stock of what you accomplished, and perhaps look to see how you can turn your experience to your advantage?
Maybe it’s the neurotic in me, but I think this is a little overly beamish. If you are a neurotic, like me, when you fail, it feels terrible. If you are low on neuroticism and high on extraversion, a failure is no big deal. You don’t feel much pain when you fail, and you are positively motivated to keep going after whatever it is you like in the external world. I’m low on introversion, so I’m inclined, rightly I think, to not get too positively motivated by the rewards of the outside world. Sure I like the glittering prizes that are out there, but they aren’t that great, and compared to the pleasures of my inner world, quiet, easily gained, low risk, they don’t compare that well. They may be more intense pleasures, the ones I get from the outside world, but they are costly to get in terms of personal energy, and when things go wrong, I’m stung pretty hard. Just how I am, if you believe the Big-Five Personality theory—you tend to stay the way you are throughout your life, after a point of being influenced by your environment and genetics roughly equally in your youth.
I do wonder though, if I am perhaps a bit more extraverted than my scores suggest from the various credible tests I’ve taken. As a kid I think I was more extraverted, and progressively became less so. I wonder if my high neuroticism caused me to repeatedly get negative stimuli from the environment, causing me to learn in a Skinner-ian fashion to avoid lots of actions? Could be. I don’t seem completely happy about this (again a function of neuroticism—not being happy with things in general seems this traits province). Perhaps I am incentivized by neuroticism to avoid, but also to strive. I don’t do things because I think they’ll hurt, but I also do things to avoid getting hurt (like paying my taxes, being polite, et c.) Is what will come from a quiet life so off-putting to me that I am willing to be more daring and court more pain from endeavoring to come off as somewhat energetic? In other words, will leading a more active life allow me to avoid more pain by taking on lesser pain, or will less pain come from a less active life and loss of the prizes of a more active one.
Interesting question. At the moment I am inclined to say the former is what I lean towards, though I must say my twenties suggests that I progressively acted on the latter premise..
I think it might be that I’ve tried out the latter premise and tested it out and perhaps I am finding it wanting, and now want to pursue strategies that rely on the former premise, of taking on pain in the present to avoid pain of not achieving certain desired goals. I am also contemplating the possibility I am less introverted than perhaps I’ve come to believe, and my reclusive qualities come more from neuroticism and avoidance of pain than out of a natural dislike of external rewards.
I normally write my journal entries in a very messy fashion and then edit them to see if there is anything in them worth putting on my blog, but usually there isn’t anything good enough to put on the blog. This entry has been good, because I’ve been writing it right the first time, or as rightly as I can when I am writing quickly, and the prose has been coming out pretty well—I’m just writing the way I talk, as I always do, but getting it right the first time rather than ignoring typos so I can get on to the next point, and I’m not writing filler when I am out of ideas—repeating phrases as I would per the instructions of Peter Elbow in his book “Writing with Power” about how to freewrite.
So maybe I’ll try writing my fiction in this way too. I’ll write, trying to get a clean bit of copy, more or less, on the first go, so I don’t get into the long, often boring process of protracted editing. Up to now, I’ve been writing my novels by free-writing in a very messy way, ignoring the heaps of typos and filler phrases, keeping my fingers moving at lightening speed, and then I would go back and edit minimally, getting rid of filler phrases and typos, and then I would go over the text again to add punctuation and make the prose sound a bit more natural, because in the first minimal editing sweep, sentences would often take on an unnatural sound as some typos were changed to something other than what they were, or the sentences would have a strange rushed, crazy-person-talking-rapidly-to-himself sound—arguable I was a crazy person talking to myself. Anyway, the editing for typos, then adding punctuation and turning the prose back into a natural-sounding (the way I talk) bit of work would take a while. So the rush of speed in writing the first draft would then be followed by a boring slog. I think the net effect is probably a lot of writing quickly done, but I think that morale-wise, I might get more out of writing quickly, but in a pretty clean manner, the first time, so I don’t get so bogged down in the later clean-up process. When I type the last pages of a novel I’m writing, there really isn’t that much else to do, is the idea. I think in reality, there probably is a lot to do as editors tell you what to fix before the work gets published, but comparatively, there would be less to do when I’ve typed that last page than if I had been writing it in the messy free-write fashion that up to now has been my main approach.
I’m going out to dinner with my family tonight, and later this week or sometime later, I’ll probably go out with my friends to a bar or a restaurant, get some drinks, hang out. I wasn’t much for doing it before my birthday. I think I was a bit down a bit down about turning thirty, maybe, though in a vague, hard-to-pin-down way. As I said, I think maybe some of my ideas about where I would be, when compared to where I actually was, was bumming me out, stimulating my neurotic side, which I can keep from being irritated often enough, but which was perhaps getting irritated as I grew closer to my birthday.
There are other guys who started accomplishing things later in life, like Ulysses S Grant. Well, he did have achievements before the Civil War—that’s something that I think tends to be lost in discussions about him. He graduated West Point, which wasn’t easy to do—I think most people dropped out before graduation. He was in the middle of his group of graduates. He also fought with distinction in the Mexican American War when I think he was probably in his twenties. He had trouble after the war getting a business of the ground, but so do a lot of people. Businesses fail all the time. Don’t most businesses fail, or at least end, in five years? He was having trouble making ends meet by the time of the Civil War, but I’m not sure that’s a sign that he was a failure. He seemed a venturesome person, and many ventures fail. He kept trying. If the Civil War hadn’t come around, I imagine he would have probably found other ventures to engage in. Maybe not. It’s hard to say with counterfactual speculations, but he seemed a venturesome person by personality—I think he was high on extraversion, the big-five factor trait, which makes a person risk-taking and a person of action, which Grant was. True, he seemed to be shy and it’s often said he was lazy, though how lazy can you be if you’re continually starting businesses, then proactively waging war against the Confederates, then acting as president of the United States? Can you really be low-energy and do these things? The key to extraversion as I understand it, based on my reading—particularly Daniel Nettle’s book, “Personality”, is that extraversion is primarily directed by the desire to go after positive rewards, and hence you are outwardly an active person, and a striving person, and judging by the fact of Grant’s behaviors in his life, he seemed like an active, energetic person, if superficially laconic and lazy in his actions. Just because he’s not buzzing around frenetically doesn’t mean he’s not energetic. Do most people have the energy or inclination to engage on the actions Grant did in his life? I suspect not.
Anyway, Grant had succeeded in graduating West Point, and had succeeded in fighting with distinction in the Mexican-American War. He had business difficulties, but in the Civil War he was probably the greatest general, or one of them. This great success came when I believe he was in his forties.
There’s George W. Bush, who reputedly wasn’t very successful until his forties. The story I hear is on his fortieth birthday he decided to clean up his act, I think after he got an ultimatum from his wife. But at that point Bush had gotten his MBA from Harvard, had graduated from Yale, which not every rich kid with connections does, and I believe had run an oil company. It’s true on the last count you could be considered ‘running’ an oil company and not do much, and the oil company apparently wasn’t terribly successful, but again, most businesses aren’t successful, or at least end, within five years of their start, so why should a business failure necessarily be seen as a black mark. I suppose you should probably be more concerned with failing in business at a greater rate than the average, and even then, given you’re not engaging in a large number of businesses, your particular average will not necessarily reflect the overall number of failed businesses, given the law of big numbers.
Bush seems like someone who is low on the conscientiousness scale of the Big-Personality scale. Conscientiousness is the scale that reflects how much you can control your impulses and follow rules or plans aimed at accomplishing some object. People low on conscientiousness tend to have trouble inhibiting their impulses, and have a hard time stopping themselves from following their impulses once they’ve indulged them. So they have trouble with addiction, gambling, that sort of thing. People high on conscientiousness are able to regiment themselves. I think Grant, an alcoholic, and Bush, a problem-drinker if not an alcoholic, were low on conscientiousness. Bismarck too, actually, was probably low on conscientiousness—his wild youth suggests this. He said when he worked as a government bureaucrat that he couldn’t stand working for others, because he wanted to be in charge. This attitude seems a sign of low agreeableness as well as low conscientiousness. He doesn’t want to follow the rules, which someone with high conscientiousness will be likely to have an easy time with, and also, regarding the agreeableness dimension, he doesn’t want to work for other people, or with them. Agreeableness is mainly about empathy and sympathy—you can see other people’s perspective, or believe you can, and feel bad when others feel bad, so wish to cooperate. That’s my impression anyway, again from my reading of Nettle’s “Personality”.
I happen to be, on the Big Five Personality scales, high on openness, which as Nettle suggests, seems to be about divergent thinking—thinking in broad categories and in loosely associative ways. The opposite, low openness, is being a more realistic way of thinking—ideas loosely associative seem far-fetched or silly. I’m low on conscientiousness (alas), extraversion, and agreeableness, while being high on neuroticism. If I were low on openness I’d almost feel like I failed my personality test. Neuroticism is the ability to feel negatively. Things bother you, and so you’re risk averse and negatively incentivized, by which I mean you see dangers and they dissuade you from doing things. People low on neuroticism tend not to see danger, and if they do, they don’t sweat it, it seems. Daniel Nettle gives the example of people who climb Mount Everest. Some of them had been tested for their Big-Five traits, and it was found that they were by and large or completely low on neuroticism. Nettle points out that your chances of dying climbing on Everest might be as great as 1 in 10. These people are pretty close to playing Russian Roulette. And yet they go anyway. Stupid, IMO. Well, not stupid, but they have a rough personality trait.
I do too, of course. Low conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness I think all correlate with less success in the work place. Oh well. I am what I am.
Anyway, today I am thirty, as it’s my birthday. I do feel like a threshold has been passed. I thought I would be further along. It was very natural for me to say when I was younger, “We’ll see how I do by thirty,” with the implication I would be far along. And now that I am here, I see I haven’t obviously made a lot of progress. Obviously, but not in unobvious ways. I’ve written drafts of several novels—two full drafts of two novels and one incomplete draft of a third one. All are in need of much editing. One is perhaps 80 percent done. I have learned more about how I like to work and how I don’t, and I have also uncovered new problems I didn’t know of that I can now focus on.
Probably a lot of the value of my twenties was learning what didn’t work of my theories. I learned more about the limits of my energy. I think I used to think I could do anything, and didn’t consider the cost. I think of German style of war, which tends to focus on operational success, as Robert Citini has pointed out in his book, “The German Way of War”, and less on the logistical and grand strategical elements. The idea is that Germany historically has been a poor state—actually it is better to say Prussia—Prussia was a state which didn’t have access to great resources and was positioned among great powers, France to its West and Russia to its East and Austria to its South and Sweden to its North. Because of Prussia’s position, a military doctrine was crafted that seems to have suited it, which was to fight ‘short and lively wars’—a term coined by the Great Elector and followed by Frederick the Great. You can see this style of war, Citino points out, in the so-called blitzkrieg style of maneuver war fought by the Germans in World War II.
Anyway, this German style of war was created with an eye for limited resources, but when the Prussians and later the Nazi Germans fought protracted conflicts, they were sapped to the breaking point and defeated by Americans and Soviets, who were perhaps overall less maneuver-oriented, but had a grand strategy that mobilized the resources at their hands, whereas the Nazis didn’t seem to make use of the resources which they had secured for themselves through conquest. Their focus was operational, and neglected the logistical and the grand strategic.
How I relate this to my twenties is that I seemed to act like I had more energy than I did. On the other hand, sometimes it seems better to be optimistic than not. If you think you can do more than you actually can, and you bite off more than you can chew, then you might not succeed, but the pressure will probably cause you to work harder than you would if you didn’t have the pressure. The prospect of a hanging concentrates the mind, as Samuel Johnson said, and the prospect of failure probably does too. Johnson was a procrastinator, and probably low on the Big-Five trait of conscientiousness, but got a lot done in his life, and the prospect of a deadline I imagine probably helped him accomplish much. I’ve heard Dostoevsky, another low-conscientiousness writer (his gambling problem suggests low conscientiousness) would waste a bunch of money so that he would have to write or starve. Winston Churchill amassed debts and wrote immensely to help pay off his debts incurred to finance his lavish lifestyle.
Also, a lot of times, when people fail, it’s really not a complete failure, it’s more of a 75% failure, or something along those lines. They fail, but they learned something, or they leave some valuable residual sitting about. It was apparently a bad venture to put up so many cables to support broadband internet, but now that they are there we all use them—an example Nassim Taleb pointed to when suggesting bubbles could be good.
So what’s the lesson? Aim high, don’t court failure but don’t be afraid of it either, and take stock of what you accomplished, and perhaps look to see how you can turn your experience to your advantage?
Maybe it’s the neurotic in me, but I think this is a little overly beamish. If you are a neurotic, like me, when you fail, it feels terrible. If you are low on neuroticism and high on extraversion, a failure is no big deal. You don’t feel much pain when you fail, and you are positively motivated to keep going after whatever it is you like in the external world. I’m low on introversion, so I’m inclined, rightly I think, to not get too positively motivated by the rewards of the outside world. Sure I like the glittering prizes that are out there, but they aren’t that great, and compared to the pleasures of my inner world, quiet, easily gained, low risk, they don’t compare that well. They may be more intense pleasures, the ones I get from the outside world, but they are costly to get in terms of personal energy, and when things go wrong, I’m stung pretty hard. Just how I am, if you believe the Big-Five Personality theory—you tend to stay the way you are throughout your life, after a point of being influenced by your environment and genetics roughly equally in your youth.
I do wonder though, if I am perhaps a bit more extraverted than my scores suggest from the various credible tests I’ve taken. As a kid I think I was more extraverted, and progressively became less so. I wonder if my high neuroticism caused me to repeatedly get negative stimuli from the environment, causing me to learn in a Skinner-ian fashion to avoid lots of actions? Could be. I don’t seem completely happy about this (again a function of neuroticism—not being happy with things in general seems this traits province). Perhaps I am incentivized by neuroticism to avoid, but also to strive. I don’t do things because I think they’ll hurt, but I also do things to avoid getting hurt (like paying my taxes, being polite, et c.) Is what will come from a quiet life so off-putting to me that I am willing to be more daring and court more pain from endeavoring to come off as somewhat energetic? In other words, will leading a more active life allow me to avoid more pain by taking on lesser pain, or will less pain come from a less active life and loss of the prizes of a more active one.
Interesting question. At the moment I am inclined to say the former is what I lean towards, though I must say my twenties suggests that I progressively acted on the latter premise..
I think it might be that I’ve tried out the latter premise and tested it out and perhaps I am finding it wanting, and now want to pursue strategies that rely on the former premise, of taking on pain in the present to avoid pain of not achieving certain desired goals. I am also contemplating the possibility I am less introverted than perhaps I’ve come to believe, and my reclusive qualities come more from neuroticism and avoidance of pain than out of a natural dislike of external rewards.
I normally write my journal entries in a very messy fashion and then edit them to see if there is anything in them worth putting on my blog, but usually there isn’t anything good enough to put on the blog. This entry has been good, because I’ve been writing it right the first time, or as rightly as I can when I am writing quickly, and the prose has been coming out pretty well—I’m just writing the way I talk, as I always do, but getting it right the first time rather than ignoring typos so I can get on to the next point, and I’m not writing filler when I am out of ideas—repeating phrases as I would per the instructions of Peter Elbow in his book “Writing with Power” about how to freewrite.
So maybe I’ll try writing my fiction in this way too. I’ll write, trying to get a clean bit of copy, more or less, on the first go, so I don’t get into the long, often boring process of protracted editing. Up to now, I’ve been writing my novels by free-writing in a very messy way, ignoring the heaps of typos and filler phrases, keeping my fingers moving at lightening speed, and then I would go back and edit minimally, getting rid of filler phrases and typos, and then I would go over the text again to add punctuation and make the prose sound a bit more natural, because in the first minimal editing sweep, sentences would often take on an unnatural sound as some typos were changed to something other than what they were, or the sentences would have a strange rushed, crazy-person-talking-rapidly-to-himself sound—arguable I was a crazy person talking to myself. Anyway, the editing for typos, then adding punctuation and turning the prose back into a natural-sounding (the way I talk) bit of work would take a while. So the rush of speed in writing the first draft would then be followed by a boring slog. I think the net effect is probably a lot of writing quickly done, but I think that morale-wise, I might get more out of writing quickly, but in a pretty clean manner, the first time, so I don’t get so bogged down in the later clean-up process. When I type the last pages of a novel I’m writing, there really isn’t that much else to do, is the idea. I think in reality, there probably is a lot to do as editors tell you what to fix before the work gets published, but comparatively, there would be less to do when I’ve typed that last page than if I had been writing it in the messy free-write fashion that up to now has been my main approach.
I’m going out to dinner with my family tonight, and later this week or sometime later, I’ll probably go out with my friends to a bar or a restaurant, get some drinks, hang out. I wasn’t much for doing it before my birthday. I think I was a bit down a bit down about turning thirty, maybe, though in a vague, hard-to-pin-down way. As I said, I think maybe some of my ideas about where I would be, when compared to where I actually was, was bumming me out, stimulating my neurotic side, which I can keep from being irritated often enough, but which was perhaps getting irritated as I grew closer to my birthday.
Hellboy II
I saw Hellboy II last night on demand. I think it was a video on demand feature offered through our subscription to HBO. I liked the first Hellboy and I have a thing for Selma Blaire. I used to think I had more of a thing for blonds than brunettes, and now I feel like I have more of a thing for brunettes than blonds. Maybe I don’t have type and just get wrapped up in the last girl I had a thing for.
Anyway, the movie was okay. It had a kind of lumpy plot, progressing in a herky-jerky manner. I don’t think David Hyde-Pierce was doing the voice of Abe, the aquatic fellah (my spellcheck doesn’t check ‘fellah’ but does catch ‘spellcheck.’ I like that Hellboy likes cats and is messy, and has a soft-spot for sweets, because, well, so do I. I kept thinking of the PUA, Roissy-an, nascently HBD-ish concept of alpha and beta males when observing Hellboy’s beta-ish behavior regarding his girlfriend. Actually, Hellboy has some alpha-ish qualities too—alpha-ish here meaning what is thought of as alpha by PUAs, Roissy and HBD-ers—there are different ideas about what this is but there seems to me a lot of rough agreement. Hellboy is alpha in this sense in that he’s stereotypically masculine and does genuinely not really do what his girlfriend wants of him, even when she gets mad. He’s also scarred, a fighter and has a wounded streak. But he does have beta-ish qualities. He has one-itis of literally epic proportions, a belief that there is a ‘the one’—a girl meant for him, the beautiful and talented Selma Blaire.
I’m not sure it’s very natural not to think this way though. I reject the idea that there is ‘the one’, so in that sense I believe that the premise of one-itis is wrong, but on the other hand, it seems like such a common ailment among seemingly healthy men, and otherwise alpha-ish men, that I wonder if it’s best to not fight the feeling. “Okay, you’re not literally ‘the one’. There are other girls. If you turned into an evil bitchhog, then I would move on, rather than feeling stuck to you like a wimpy conjoined twin, but I feel like you’re ‘the one’ and will not fight the general pragmatic consequences of this—treating you with great value and reverence, until you do turn into a bithchhog, or we die in 50 years time and part company after a long happy-ish (hopefully) life.”
So isn’t combating one-itis to an extreme a bit of a top-down tabla-rasa-esque attempt to change human nature, doomed to cause problems?
Actually, I wouldn’t say that necessarily. Some guys I think genuinely don’t suffer from one-itis. In Big-Five-personality terms, they are perhaps low on conscientiousness and low on neuroticism, perhaps low on extraversion and low on agreeableness. Perhaps they are high on openness too, given I suspect highly open people are probably more likely to challenge traditional notions, like that there is a ‘one’ for me—Roman Catholic Christianity views marriage this way: God makes a man and woman one flesh when they marry, and hence you can’t divorce your wife any more than you can divorce your armpit.
Anyway, Hellboy II—Abe, the fish-man character, is very beta. He’s empathetic and sympathetic (that is, high on agreeableness) and has another epic case of one-itis, though he seems high on openness too, being a poetry fan and intellectually curious. Hellboy is probably low on openness—incidentally I hear, I think from Daniel Nettle’s “Personality” that successful detectives are low on openness, which I found surprising, and which I thought my mom would be interested to hear, as I think she is low on openness and also a fan of detective fiction of the thriller variety. My faves, like Gregory House or Bobby Goren from Law and Order, in real life might not make good detectives, given their seeming high openness.
I was also wondering why in the Hellboy world are the northern sections of the British Isles so popular—in Hellboy I, Hellboy is found in Scotland, and in Hellboy II, the protagonists end up in Northern Ireland at the end of the novel. Does Celtic folklore really dominate the story? There are faeries, which I think are Celtic, but a major element of Hellboy II are elves, which I think are Norse in origin, or possibly German. There are German folkloric creatures in the story too, like trolls (perhaps originally Norse—Germans came from Scandinavia and revered Thor, et c. I was fascinated by the creature that helps Hellboy late in the movie. Was the character a banshee or “Death”. The face was fascinating—the bottom of the face showed skeletal, humanoid teeth, jaw and noise, while the top of the face seemed like a sea-shell held upright and stuck over the eyes, and fused to the bottom half seamlessly.
I also felt bad for the bad guy, the elf king, who looked oddly like Tom Cruise in corpse paint. He was basically looking for a place in the sun for the elvan people, so to speak. He didn’t like how the world had turned out and wanted to fight for a world he did like. There was some sort of ecological, anti-real-progress stuff about how humans put up parking lots and malls rather than us all living in some medieval wasteland where we’re all miserable, stupid subsistence farmers. But that said, the elves did seem to be in a rough spot—why live their crummy lives when they have the threat of an army of undefeatable golden robots to make use of to argue for more of what they want. The elf king who stands against using the golden robots doesn’t seem to want a better lot for his elves—I don’t know why he wouldn’t at least be able to secure better living conditions for his people. Part of me thinks though that the elven king is this aristocrat who doesn’t believe in working, and isn’t able to keep up with the capitalistic world, and so just wishes to fade out, while his son, the bad guy referred to before, wants to assert elven hegemony over the world, which presumably would mean a return to absolute monarchism.
I wish there had been more Selma Blaire in the movie. She’s just adorable.
Anyway, the movie was okay. It had a kind of lumpy plot, progressing in a herky-jerky manner. I don’t think David Hyde-Pierce was doing the voice of Abe, the aquatic fellah (my spellcheck doesn’t check ‘fellah’ but does catch ‘spellcheck.’ I like that Hellboy likes cats and is messy, and has a soft-spot for sweets, because, well, so do I. I kept thinking of the PUA, Roissy-an, nascently HBD-ish concept of alpha and beta males when observing Hellboy’s beta-ish behavior regarding his girlfriend. Actually, Hellboy has some alpha-ish qualities too—alpha-ish here meaning what is thought of as alpha by PUAs, Roissy and HBD-ers—there are different ideas about what this is but there seems to me a lot of rough agreement. Hellboy is alpha in this sense in that he’s stereotypically masculine and does genuinely not really do what his girlfriend wants of him, even when she gets mad. He’s also scarred, a fighter and has a wounded streak. But he does have beta-ish qualities. He has one-itis of literally epic proportions, a belief that there is a ‘the one’—a girl meant for him, the beautiful and talented Selma Blaire.
I’m not sure it’s very natural not to think this way though. I reject the idea that there is ‘the one’, so in that sense I believe that the premise of one-itis is wrong, but on the other hand, it seems like such a common ailment among seemingly healthy men, and otherwise alpha-ish men, that I wonder if it’s best to not fight the feeling. “Okay, you’re not literally ‘the one’. There are other girls. If you turned into an evil bitchhog, then I would move on, rather than feeling stuck to you like a wimpy conjoined twin, but I feel like you’re ‘the one’ and will not fight the general pragmatic consequences of this—treating you with great value and reverence, until you do turn into a bithchhog, or we die in 50 years time and part company after a long happy-ish (hopefully) life.”
So isn’t combating one-itis to an extreme a bit of a top-down tabla-rasa-esque attempt to change human nature, doomed to cause problems?
Actually, I wouldn’t say that necessarily. Some guys I think genuinely don’t suffer from one-itis. In Big-Five-personality terms, they are perhaps low on conscientiousness and low on neuroticism, perhaps low on extraversion and low on agreeableness. Perhaps they are high on openness too, given I suspect highly open people are probably more likely to challenge traditional notions, like that there is a ‘one’ for me—Roman Catholic Christianity views marriage this way: God makes a man and woman one flesh when they marry, and hence you can’t divorce your wife any more than you can divorce your armpit.
Anyway, Hellboy II—Abe, the fish-man character, is very beta. He’s empathetic and sympathetic (that is, high on agreeableness) and has another epic case of one-itis, though he seems high on openness too, being a poetry fan and intellectually curious. Hellboy is probably low on openness—incidentally I hear, I think from Daniel Nettle’s “Personality” that successful detectives are low on openness, which I found surprising, and which I thought my mom would be interested to hear, as I think she is low on openness and also a fan of detective fiction of the thriller variety. My faves, like Gregory House or Bobby Goren from Law and Order, in real life might not make good detectives, given their seeming high openness.
I was also wondering why in the Hellboy world are the northern sections of the British Isles so popular—in Hellboy I, Hellboy is found in Scotland, and in Hellboy II, the protagonists end up in Northern Ireland at the end of the novel. Does Celtic folklore really dominate the story? There are faeries, which I think are Celtic, but a major element of Hellboy II are elves, which I think are Norse in origin, or possibly German. There are German folkloric creatures in the story too, like trolls (perhaps originally Norse—Germans came from Scandinavia and revered Thor, et c. I was fascinated by the creature that helps Hellboy late in the movie. Was the character a banshee or “Death”. The face was fascinating—the bottom of the face showed skeletal, humanoid teeth, jaw and noise, while the top of the face seemed like a sea-shell held upright and stuck over the eyes, and fused to the bottom half seamlessly.
I also felt bad for the bad guy, the elf king, who looked oddly like Tom Cruise in corpse paint. He was basically looking for a place in the sun for the elvan people, so to speak. He didn’t like how the world had turned out and wanted to fight for a world he did like. There was some sort of ecological, anti-real-progress stuff about how humans put up parking lots and malls rather than us all living in some medieval wasteland where we’re all miserable, stupid subsistence farmers. But that said, the elves did seem to be in a rough spot—why live their crummy lives when they have the threat of an army of undefeatable golden robots to make use of to argue for more of what they want. The elf king who stands against using the golden robots doesn’t seem to want a better lot for his elves—I don’t know why he wouldn’t at least be able to secure better living conditions for his people. Part of me thinks though that the elven king is this aristocrat who doesn’t believe in working, and isn’t able to keep up with the capitalistic world, and so just wishes to fade out, while his son, the bad guy referred to before, wants to assert elven hegemony over the world, which presumably would mean a return to absolute monarchism.
I wish there had been more Selma Blaire in the movie. She’s just adorable.
Links and quotes--maneuver warfare, prolific writing
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1989/RPB.htm:
http://www.triumphpc.com/militaryquality/maneuver-warfare2.shtml:
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj98/sum98/bingham.html:
http://writingcompanion.wordpress.com/2009/05/23/prolific-writer-romance-crime/:
http://www.articlepool.com/untold+secrets+prolific+fast+writers+or+publishers+dont+want+you+to+know-110041:
http://www.technologyquestions.com/2008/02/11/blogging-five-strategies-used-prolific-writers.html:
The creed included the following points:
* act boldly on contact
* if the situation is confused, do something and do it right
away
* if opportunity beckons, seize it
* if the stake is worth it, then the gamble is justified
* battles can be won without detailed knowledge of the enemy
* battles can be won even when all troops are not fully
briefed
* the unexpected immediate action usually achieves surprise
* when the battle hangs in the balance quick decision is more
likely to succeed than a deliberate estimate and plan 10
There are many similarities between this creed and the essential
elements of Maneuver Warfare.
http://www.triumphpc.com/militaryquality/maneuver-warfare2.shtml:
The following references are recommended:
Marine Corps’ FMFMs (MCDPs) 1 “Warfighting”, 1-1 “Strategy”, 1-2 “Campaigning”, and 1-3 “Tactics”; and 6 "Command and Control"
William Lind’s “Maneuver Warfare Handbook”
Richard Hooker’s “Maneuver Warfare, an Anthology”
Martin Van Creveld’s “Fighting Power” and (with Steven Canby and Kenneth Brower) "Air Power and Maneuver Warfare"
Robert Leonhard’s “The Art of Maneuver”
Martin Samuel’s “Doctrine and Dogma” and "Command or Control"
Charles White’s “The Enlightened Soldier”
Any of several books by Colonel Trevor Dupuy, starting with “A Genius for War”, “Understanding War”, and “Numbers, Prediction, & War”
Any of several books by Richard Simpkin, starting with "Race to the Swift"
W. Edward Deming's "Out of the Crisis" and "The New Economics"
Any of several books by Joseph Juran, starting with "Managerial Breakthrough"; and (only) then, the works of Peter Senge, Peter Drucker, Peter Scholtes, Tom Peters, Brian Joiner, William Sherkenbach, et al.
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj98/sum98/bingham.html:
Marches are war. . . . Aptitude for war is aptitude for movement. . . . Victory is to the armies which maneuver. (Napoléon)3
Any slowing down of one’s own operations tends to increase the speed of the enemy’s. Since speed is one of the most important factors in motorized warfare, it is easy to see what effect this would have. (Erwin Rommel)4
In small operations, as in large, speed is the essential element in success. (George S. Patton)5
Let us organize movement; this is the crucial problem. (J. F. C. Fuller)6
With a time advantage, numbers don’t count. (Gen James H. Polk)7
Movement is the essence of strategy. (Stephen Jones)8
http://writingcompanion.wordpress.com/2009/05/23/prolific-writer-romance-crime/:
Nicholson also suggests two kinds of prolificacy: normal and extreme. The normally prolific writers control their output, but for the extremely prolific, their writing controls them.
http://www.articlepool.com/untold+secrets+prolific+fast+writers+or+publishers+dont+want+you+to+know-110041:
See what Isaac Asimov, Guinness Book of World Record’s greatest science fiction writer answered in an interview a reporter once asked him—about how he became such a prolific writer: ““I guess I’m prolific because I have a simple and straightforward style.”
...a simple, straightforward style in writing means writing naturally, and the best way you can do that is write the way you talk.
If you want to write fast, TYPE FAST, and also set up a countdown timer for 5 minutes so you’re required to put EVERYTHING you thought about into the screen or paper in that short period of time.
http://www.technologyquestions.com/2008/02/11/blogging-five-strategies-used-prolific-writers.html:
Number 1: Prolific Writers Write About Their Interests
...Number 2: Prolific Writers Write About Different Topics
...Number 3: Prolific Writers Write Regardless of Errors
...Number 4: Prolific Writers Do Not Take Themselves Seriously
...Number 5: Prolific Writers Read and Repond to Feedback
Megan Fox is charming, will rubble get rid of terrorist trouble, politics and libraries, big five personality traits of rockers
Watch Megan Fox Get Disarmed By A Neg
This surprises me to hear--Roissy portrays Megan Fox as an ice queen and I've never seen her as such from the interviews I've seen of her. She doesn't seem to have much of an internal filter but I find this charming, particularly because she seems to have an interestingly weird take on things. I'm inclined to say beautiful women don't have to develop personalities because they're beautiful, but part of me thinks maybe people can be themselves and unfiltered and perhaps hence interesting if they are beautiful, because people tend to not criticize them.
Terrorism’s Heart of Darkness
The point about terrorism needing state sponsorship to be effective surprised me. Does this mean that really, we don't need to be fighting terrorists directly. We need to be focusing on the states that sponsor the terrorism in conventional battles that lead to a satisfactory peace, or annihilation of the government. If we were to say reduce Pakistan to rubble, an anarchy, and other states that sponsor terrorism, would we be without serious threats of terrorism? 9-11 seemed to require only money to support a group of men, some cheap equipment, and some flight training. Does such an operation require government support? These operations don't seem the big concern--it's the WMD terrorism that is the concern, and that does seem to need state support.
Crossing the parody horizon on a fixed-gear bike
I thought that the whole Patriot Act being used to seek out the library information of people seemed silly and overblown, and yet I heard a lot of it. I don't know why this meme was so sticky. What would be interesting, actually, would be to see how library book selections are made, and if they seem to have some political bias. I would be inclined to guess there'd be a left-wing bias to library catalog choices.
People Who Died
Interesting post. I didn't know Joe Strummer ran marathons. It makes sense that rock and rollers might be extraverted types--these people seem made for touring, unlike the unsuccessful (in his life time) Nick Drake, a major introvert. I wonder if rock stars as a class are more extraverted than average, using a big-five personality test. Musicians as a class don't seem to need to be extraverted to be good musicians, but the promotional element seems helped along by extraverted traits. Interestingly, thinking about rock guitarists, I tend to find that they are as a class low on conscientiousness, the big-five trait signifying impulse control--Eddie Van Halen, Jimmi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton--all druggies--a classic sign of low conscientiousness. I usually associate musical ability with practice, but low conscientiousness types aren't into practice. So I would speculate that many musicians get addicted to noodling with their guitar, and don't need discipline to do it. Evidence low conscientiousness people can use their commonly problematic trait to their advantage.
big lebowski big five personality speculation
the dude
o - high openness
c - low conscientiousness
e - low extraversion
a - average agreeableness
n - average neuroticism
walter
o - high openness
c - average conscientiousness
e - average extraversion
a - low agreeableness
n - high neuroticism
o - high openness
c - low conscientiousness
e - low extraversion
a - average agreeableness
n - average neuroticism
walter
o - high openness
c - average conscientiousness
e - average extraversion
a - low agreeableness
n - high neuroticism
oasis gallagher boys big-five personality speculation
noel gallagher
high openness
low conscientiousness
high extraversion
low agreeableness
average neuroticism
liam gallagher
average openness
low conscientiousness
high extraversion
low agreeableness
high neuroticism
high openness
low conscientiousness
high extraversion
low agreeableness
average neuroticism
liam gallagher
average openness
low conscientiousness
high extraversion
low agreeableness
high neuroticism
marcus aurelius big-five personality speculation
marcus aurelius
high openness
high conscientiousness
average extraversion
low agreeableness
high neuroticism
high openness
high conscientiousness
average extraversion
low agreeableness
high neuroticism
links
without catholic girls, life would be a mistake
robin hanson on the apparently incorrect notion of that catholic girls are harder to bed. i comment there:
two things leap to mind:
1. catholic girls have harsher sexual ethics forced on them–their parents and community are stronger guards of their virginity, so acting more flirtatious with boys with such guardians around encourages many suitors to try to get over the high barrier–more competition is stimulated and the girl gets to choose a better suitor than if she had just been a shrinking violet behind a wall, not tempting anyone. when the barrier comes down, she accidentally goes a bit too far. with more girls getting away from their family gatekeepers, and going to school than in the past, catholic girls might end up being a bit less disciplined (they didn’t have to be very disciplined with strong gatekeepers doing the work for them) and they go further than they had been allowed in the past, when they stuck with the gatekeeper till marriage, and the stereotype might have become outdated since when billy joel wrote that song.
2. i notice teenagers have a habit of being rebellious in general. maybe sex is just a more meaningful way to signal rebelliousness for catholic girls (what does rebelliousness signal? health? strength?), since it’s presumably more taboo than for other christian girls.
you will read it and you will like it
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_contradictor/
http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/09/09/3748/
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/09/subjective-hedonism.php framing effects, i think.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/09/francis-galtons-hereditary-genius.html
http://mungowitzend.blogspot.com/2009/09/people-figure-stuff-out.html anarchism!
http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/09/09/3748/
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/09/subjective-hedonism.php framing effects, i think.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/09/francis-galtons-hereditary-genius.html
http://mungowitzend.blogspot.com/2009/09/people-figure-stuff-out.html anarchism!
Attack!
I read a bit more of Robert Citino's book, "The German Way of War" today. I was in a Blucher-esque mood. By this I mean I was in an aggressive, direct, energetic mood. Blucher was a Prussian General who, along with the Duke of Wellington, beat Napoleon at Waterloo--a small waterpark in south New Jersey.
Citino says that the Prussian way of war is basically "aggression". You find the enemy as quick as you can and hit him. I guess it worked for a while.
I'm very tired following this approach, but it's a good tired, as they say. I admire hard-charges, envy them. How do people keep buzzing around like this all the time? Rahm Emanuel? Come on.
I'm low on extraversion, the Big-5 personality dimension, which means I am not generally a hard-charging, energetic, action oriented fellah, and if you can believe the personality research, probably never will. I'm high on neuroticism, which means I am motivated by fears, so maybe if I had some fire lit under me, some looming threat, real or imagined, hanging around me, then I would do something.
Well, today I attacked.
Citino says that the Prussian way of war is basically "aggression". You find the enemy as quick as you can and hit him. I guess it worked for a while.
I'm very tired following this approach, but it's a good tired, as they say. I admire hard-charges, envy them. How do people keep buzzing around like this all the time? Rahm Emanuel? Come on.
I'm low on extraversion, the Big-5 personality dimension, which means I am not generally a hard-charging, energetic, action oriented fellah, and if you can believe the personality research, probably never will. I'm high on neuroticism, which means I am motivated by fears, so maybe if I had some fire lit under me, some looming threat, real or imagined, hanging around me, then I would do something.
Well, today I attacked.
People's ways of being
I was watching Strangers with Candy. It’s a really good show. I remember when this was on Comedy Central and I didn’t bother watching it. I think I found the main character really off putting, Jerri Blank, who is Amy Sedaris made-up to look like an ugly 47-year-old drop-out, and had no desire to watch it. The funny thing is that Amy Sedaris is really cute. She’s like this pixie-ish Meg Ryan-like girl. She’s the sister of David Sedaris, the comedic memoirist, and she’s got a bunch of clips you can watch on You Tube of her with David Letterman, and she’s got a kind of manic energy.
I don’t really get a sense of her normal personality, because she’s kind of ‘on’ when she’s on Letterman. I don’t know if she’s always like that. She’s fun to watch--one of my favorite talk-show guests to watch on TV, along with Norm Macdonald, who can be incredible, and you wonder how much he plans ahead of time, or what is just him being a funny person in general--his way of being is funny. Artie Lange seems like that too—he’s just funny—and with Artie also very likable for some reason.
I also was pleased to watch a Red Eye segment on You Tube with Steve Malkmus of Pavement fame, in which Malkmus was funny, and also very weird. He has this very odd way of carrying himself, almost like a precocious little kid who's a little tired. He makes these kind of overly goofy faces. He had a humorous rapport with the interviewer, and made some jokes. Oddly enough, I just saw a Strangers with Candy on which the bassist for Pavement made a cameo at the end.
I don’t really get a sense of her normal personality, because she’s kind of ‘on’ when she’s on Letterman. I don’t know if she’s always like that. She’s fun to watch--one of my favorite talk-show guests to watch on TV, along with Norm Macdonald, who can be incredible, and you wonder how much he plans ahead of time, or what is just him being a funny person in general--his way of being is funny. Artie Lange seems like that too—he’s just funny—and with Artie also very likable for some reason.
I also was pleased to watch a Red Eye segment on You Tube with Steve Malkmus of Pavement fame, in which Malkmus was funny, and also very weird. He has this very odd way of carrying himself, almost like a precocious little kid who's a little tired. He makes these kind of overly goofy faces. He had a humorous rapport with the interviewer, and made some jokes. Oddly enough, I just saw a Strangers with Candy on which the bassist for Pavement made a cameo at the end.
links
http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2009/09/alphas-betas-and-marital-status.html - inductivist
http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2009/09/doing-bad-by-doing-good.html - audacious epigone
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/09/hallucinating_sanity.html - mindhacks
http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2009/09/alphas-and-betas.html - inductivist, again
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/09/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html - mencius moldbug
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/09/how-profitable-are-health-insurance-companies.html - tyler cowen
http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2009/09/doing-bad-by-doing-good.html - audacious epigone
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/09/hallucinating_sanity.html - mindhacks
http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2009/09/alphas-and-betas.html - inductivist, again
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/09/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html - mencius moldbug
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/09/how-profitable-are-health-insurance-companies.html - tyler cowen
The horror
I watched Apocalypse Now Redux last Thursday. Good movie. I liked the original too--probably better actually, because Redux was maybe an hour longer or so. There's a scene when Willard (Sheen) and his crew are moving upriver and motor under a massive tail of a plane that had crash landed in the jungle, the tail jutting at about forty five degrees over the river.
I love this scene. It's so creepy to see this massive abandoned plane in the forest--it's like a ruin. The scene suggests tragedy. The plane is civilization and the jungle is barbarity, the scene fitting with the subject matter of Willard and his crew moving towards Kurtz deep in the jungle, the crew moving from the more civilized to the more anarchic progressively as they move deeper into the jungle.
After I watched Redux I read a bit about it, and the book it was based on, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, which I had read a while ago. I came across a bit of writing about the heir to Jameson's Whiskey fortune, in the Belgian Congo, trying to get some cannibals to eat a girl he had bought, IIRC, who was around 11 or 12. Insane.
The character of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now might have been based on a Belgian by the name of Rom, who lined his garden with human skulls in the Congo. It's amazing to see what the Belgian Force Publique did to the natives--hands would be chopped off by officers if tribes didn't meet their quota of ivory, a means of incentivizing ivory production.
I love this scene. It's so creepy to see this massive abandoned plane in the forest--it's like a ruin. The scene suggests tragedy. The plane is civilization and the jungle is barbarity, the scene fitting with the subject matter of Willard and his crew moving towards Kurtz deep in the jungle, the crew moving from the more civilized to the more anarchic progressively as they move deeper into the jungle.
After I watched Redux I read a bit about it, and the book it was based on, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, which I had read a while ago. I came across a bit of writing about the heir to Jameson's Whiskey fortune, in the Belgian Congo, trying to get some cannibals to eat a girl he had bought, IIRC, who was around 11 or 12. Insane.
The character of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now might have been based on a Belgian by the name of Rom, who lined his garden with human skulls in the Congo. It's amazing to see what the Belgian Force Publique did to the natives--hands would be chopped off by officers if tribes didn't meet their quota of ivory, a means of incentivizing ivory production.
My inner landscape is Somalia
I enjoyed reading Daniel Nettle's remark about big-five-factor trait, conscientiousness: "We have seen that Conscientiousness is about sticking to an internally held norm or plan."*
I score a bit low on conscientiousness according to the most official test I can find, which is academic and which you can find here. I have described my inner state as anarchic. I find I'm always trying to reorder my beliefs and then find them smashed to bits after I've erected something not too shabby-looking.
I'm inclined to think I might be trying to be like my more conscientious father. I thought though that it's easy enough to relate to my dad on matters of imagination, an element of openness which I suspect we both are fairly high on--I didn't have to work at being imaginative, that I can think of, but I've always had to work to be conscientious and it's never really worked out too well.
Anyway, what does this tell me, and perhaps others who are low on conscientiousness who try to order their lives according to the suggestions of the more conscientious. A lot of times the conscientious seem to have good ideas, but they're just hard to stick to. Keeping a schedule is like forcing myself to hold a pose that causes my muscles to ache. Being orderly, ditto. Being neat, ditto, et c. et c.
I suppose life is improv for someone low on conscientiousness. Does this make me anarchic in my tastes in general? Should I be an anarchist politically? Or is that too much of a commitment(!) I've naturally tended towards libertarianism of some flavor, with a dash of conservatism in there too, I suppose--generally regarding foreign policy--Goldwater-esque perhaps.
* Personality, 145
I score a bit low on conscientiousness according to the most official test I can find, which is academic and which you can find here. I have described my inner state as anarchic. I find I'm always trying to reorder my beliefs and then find them smashed to bits after I've erected something not too shabby-looking.
I'm inclined to think I might be trying to be like my more conscientious father. I thought though that it's easy enough to relate to my dad on matters of imagination, an element of openness which I suspect we both are fairly high on--I didn't have to work at being imaginative, that I can think of, but I've always had to work to be conscientious and it's never really worked out too well.
Anyway, what does this tell me, and perhaps others who are low on conscientiousness who try to order their lives according to the suggestions of the more conscientious. A lot of times the conscientious seem to have good ideas, but they're just hard to stick to. Keeping a schedule is like forcing myself to hold a pose that causes my muscles to ache. Being orderly, ditto. Being neat, ditto, et c. et c.
I suppose life is improv for someone low on conscientiousness. Does this make me anarchic in my tastes in general? Should I be an anarchist politically? Or is that too much of a commitment(!) I've naturally tended towards libertarianism of some flavor, with a dash of conservatism in there too, I suppose--generally regarding foreign policy--Goldwater-esque perhaps.
* Personality, 145
Personality by Daniel Nettle
I like this book--I haven't read all of it, but I've given it a good cursory perusal, maybe covered 50 pages or so overall. It's about the five factor personality model, an introduction, with some scientific evidence bolstering the model.
I was reading the conscientiousness chapter, and found it enjoyable. Apparently ADHD kids tend to be low on conscientiousness, and also agreeableness and they're also I think somewhat neurotic. I score mildly low on conscientiousness and fairly low on agreeableness, and pretty darn high on neuroticism. I know someone who is diagnosed ADHD or something along those lines, and this person might enjoy this section--apparently such types might have some advantage in sport. My reading style can at times be sort of ADHD-ish, though not quite at that level I don't think--I tend to jump around in a book--like this one, looking for the good sections, and skipping what bores me at the moment, checking off the paragraphs I've read--I put a pen mark in the margin so I can skip that section, or at least know when I am rereading, or if I want to have a sense of how much of a book I've read I can flip through and see the check marks in the margin (or at the top of the page when I've read all the paragraphs) to see what I've covered, and I find this a very satisfying approach.
I'd like to give the agreeableness section a deeper look. There was a fascinating bit in here about how we humans are able to judge the truth of mental states regarding other mental states, such as: Joe believes Bill wants Jen to hate Bob's beliefs about God. After about four such claims about 'nested' mental states, we have some trouble on average--and it seems people who score high on agreeableness might have an easier time following these kinds of claims, whereas people low on agreeableness might have difficulty with the average.
I was reading the conscientiousness chapter, and found it enjoyable. Apparently ADHD kids tend to be low on conscientiousness, and also agreeableness and they're also I think somewhat neurotic. I score mildly low on conscientiousness and fairly low on agreeableness, and pretty darn high on neuroticism. I know someone who is diagnosed ADHD or something along those lines, and this person might enjoy this section--apparently such types might have some advantage in sport. My reading style can at times be sort of ADHD-ish, though not quite at that level I don't think--I tend to jump around in a book--like this one, looking for the good sections, and skipping what bores me at the moment, checking off the paragraphs I've read--I put a pen mark in the margin so I can skip that section, or at least know when I am rereading, or if I want to have a sense of how much of a book I've read I can flip through and see the check marks in the margin (or at the top of the page when I've read all the paragraphs) to see what I've covered, and I find this a very satisfying approach.
I'd like to give the agreeableness section a deeper look. There was a fascinating bit in here about how we humans are able to judge the truth of mental states regarding other mental states, such as: Joe believes Bill wants Jen to hate Bob's beliefs about God. After about four such claims about 'nested' mental states, we have some trouble on average--and it seems people who score high on agreeableness might have an easier time following these kinds of claims, whereas people low on agreeableness might have difficulty with the average.
five factor personality domain speculations--bowie and bacon
francis bacon (painter)
high openness - artist
low conscientiousness - heavy drinker
high extraversion - sociable
low agreeableness - barbed tongue
high neuroticism - depression-prone
david bowie
high openness - artist, experimental
low conscientiousness - past drug problems
high extraversion - active, prolific
low agreeableness - seemed disagreeable on terry gross interview
average neuroticism - ?
high openness - artist
low conscientiousness - heavy drinker
high extraversion - sociable
low agreeableness - barbed tongue
high neuroticism - depression-prone
david bowie
high openness - artist, experimental
low conscientiousness - past drug problems
high extraversion - active, prolific
low agreeableness - seemed disagreeable on terry gross interview
average neuroticism - ?
Music I Wrote
Some 'sketches' or 'rough drafts' of songs/musical pieces I wrote. Click to listen:
Beautiful Aggression
Rock Woman
Syk
Lozeng
Detritus Captain
Atomic Rambo
Mortgage Magnet Magnate
Ash
Opened
Forget What You Didn't Know
Rock Without Purpose
Danger Cam
film noir
My Home Planet
Torment Alley
Stewie Griffin
Capture
Gladiatior Made of Mud
jake and lem
Onward Ho!
Clouds
Tragic Magic
Illusion
TS
Soap Dagger
Three Pains
Rocket Food
Rachet Robot Rage
Rope
Speed
The Dance Robots
Cake 4
Optionalism
Simpler
Mant
Beautiful Aggression
Rock Woman
Syk
Lozeng
Detritus Captain
Atomic Rambo
Mortgage Magnet Magnate
Ash
Opened
Forget What You Didn't Know
Rock Without Purpose
Danger Cam
film noir
My Home Planet
Torment Alley
Stewie Griffin
Capture
Gladiatior Made of Mud
jake and lem
Onward Ho!
Clouds
Tragic Magic
Illusion
TS
Soap Dagger
Three Pains
Rocket Food
Rachet Robot Rage
Rope
Speed
The Dance Robots
Cake 4
Optionalism
Simpler
Mant
My five factor personality--the most official finding
I gripe about scoring average on openness elsewhere, but I think it's best to go with this test's results, given it's the most academic one I've taken--the others, though giving similar findings, except on openness, aren't academic, IIRC.
My big five personality, as determined by the IPIP-NEO test (test and narrative from here)--the block quotation below is taken from the longer narrative:
Here's the full narrative, from which I took the above block quotation--this narrative includes facets of the domains:
My big five personality, as determined by the IPIP-NEO test (test and narrative from here)--the block quotation below is taken from the longer narrative:
Your score on Extraversion is low, indicating you are introverted, reserved, and quiet. You enjoy solitude and solitary activities. Your socializing tends to be restricted to a few close friends.
Your score on Agreeableness is low, indicating less concern with others' needs Than with your own. People see you as tough, critical, and uncompromising.
Your score on Conscientiousness is low, indicating you like to live for the moment and do what feels good now. Your work tends to be careless and disorganized.
Your score on Neuroticism is high, indicating that you are easily upset, even by what most people consider the normal demands of living. People consider you to be sensitive and emotional.
Your score on Openness to Experience is average, indicating you enjoy tradition but are willing to try new things. Your thinking is neither simple nor complex. To others you appear to be a well-educated person but not an intellectual.
Here's the full narrative, from which I took the above block quotation--this narrative includes facets of the domains:
IPIP-NEO Narrative Report
NOTE: The report sent to your computer screen upon the completion of the IPIP-NEO is only a temporary web page. When you exit your web browser you will not be able to return to this URL to re-access your report. No copies of the report are sent to anyone. If you want a permanent copy of the report, you must save the web page to your hard drive or a diskette, and/or print the report while you are still viewing it in your web browser. If you choose to save your report, naming it with an .htm extension (example: Myreport.htm) as you save it may help you to read it into a web browser later. If you choose to print the report, selecting landscape orientation for your paper will display the graphs properly. Using portrait orientation (normally the default for printers) will cause the graphs to wrap around and render them unreadable.
This report compares Mitch from the country USA to other adult men. (The name used in this report is either a nickname chosen by the person taking the test, or, if a valid nickname was not chosen, a random nickname generated by the program.)
This report estimates the individual's level on each of the five broad personality domains of the Five-Factor Model. The description of each one of the five broad domains is followed by a more detailed description of personality according to the six subdomains that comprise each domain.
A note on terminology. Personality traits describe, relative to other people, the frequency or intensity of a person's feelings, thoughts, or behaviors. Possession of a trait is therefore a matter of degree. We might describe two individuals as extraverts, but still see one as more extraverted than the other. This report uses expressions such as "extravert" or "high in extraversion" to describe someone who is likely to be seen by others as relatively extraverted. The computer program that generates this report classifies you as low, average, or high in a trait according to whether your score is approximately in the lowest 30%, middle 40%, or highest 30% of scores obtained by people of your sex and roughly your age. Your numerical scores are reported and graphed as percentile estimates. For example, a score of "60" means that your level on that trait is estimated to be higher than 60% of persons of your sex and age.
Please keep in mind that "low," "average," and "high" scores on a personality test are neither absolutely good nor bad. A particular level on any trait will probably be neutral or irrelevant for a great many activites, be helpful for accomplishing some things, and detrimental for accomplishing other things. As with any personality inventory, scores and descriptions can only approximate an individual's actual personality. High and low score descriptions are usually accurate, but average scores close to the low or high boundaries might misclassify you as only average. On each set of six subdomain scales it is somewhat uncommon but certainly possible to score high in some of the subdomains and low in the others. In such cases more attention should be paid to the subdomain scores than to the broad domain score. Questions about the accuracy of your results are best resolved by showing your report to people who know you well.
John A. Johnson wrote descriptions of the five domains and thirty subdomains. These descriptions are based on an extensive reading of the scientific literature on personality measurement. Although Dr. Johnson would like to be acknowledged as the author of these materials if they are reproduced, he has placed them in the public domain.
Extraversion
Extraversion is marked by pronounced engagement with the external world. Extraverts enjoy being with people, are full of energy, and often experience positive emotions. They tend to be enthusiastic, action-oriented, individuals who are likely to say "Yes!" or "Let's go!" to opportunities for excitement. In groups they like to talk, assert themselves, and draw attention to themselves.
Introverts lack the exuberance, energy, and activity levels of extraverts. They tend to be quiet, low-key, deliberate, and disengaged from the social world. Their lack of social involvement should not be interpreted as shyness or depression; the introvert simply needs less stimulation than an extravert and prefers to be alone. The independence and reserve of the introvert is sometimes mistaken as unfriendliness or arrogance. In reality, an introvert who scores high on the agreeableness dimension will not seek others out but will be quite pleasant when approached.
Domain/Facet........... Score 0--------10--------20--------30--------40--------50--------60--------70--------80--------90--------99
EXTRAVERSION...............4 ****
..Friendliness.............5 *****
..Gregariousness...........19 *******************
..Assertiveness............4 ****
..Activity Level...........6 ******
..Excitement-Seeking.......9 *********
..Cheerfulness.............42 ******************************************
Your score on Extraversion is low, indicating you are introverted, reserved, and quiet. You enjoy solitude and solitary activities. Your socializing tends to be restricted to a few close friends.
Extraversion Facets
* Friendliness. Friendly people genuinely like other people and openly demonstrate positive feelings toward others. They make friends quickly and it is easy for them to form close, intimate relationships. Low scorers on Friendliness are not necessarily cold and hostile, but they do not reach out to others and are perceived as distant and reserved. Your level of friendliness is low.
* Gregariousness. Gregarious people find the company of others pleasantly stimulating and rewarding. They enjoy the excitement of crowds. Low scorers tend to feel overwhelmed by, and therefore actively avoid, large crowds. They do not necessarily dislike being with people sometimes, but their need for privacy and time to themselves is much greater than for individuals who score high on this scale. Your level of gregariousness is low.
* Assertiveness. High scorers Assertiveness like to speak out, take charge, and direct the activities of others. They tend to be leaders in groups. Low scorers tend not to talk much and let others control the activities of groups. Your level of assertiveness is low.
* Activity Level. Active individuals lead fast-paced, busy lives. They move about quickly, energetically, and vigorously, and they are involved in many activities. People who score low on this scale follow a slower and more leisurely, relaxed pace. Your activity level is low.
* Excitement-Seeking. High scorers on this scale are easily bored without high levels of stimulation. They love bright lights and hustle and bustle. They are likely to take risks and seek thrills. Low scorers are overwhelmed by noise and commotion and are adverse to thrill-seeking. Your level of excitement-seeking is low.
* Cheerfulness. This scale measures positive mood and feelings, not negative emotions (which are a part of the Neuroticism domain). Persons who score high on this scale typically experience a range of positive feelings, including happiness, enthusiasm, optimism, and joy. Low scorers are not as prone to such energetic, high spirits. Your level of positive emotions is average.
Agreeableness
Agreeableness reflects individual differences in concern with cooperation and social harmony. Agreeable individuals value getting along with others. They are therefore considerate, friendly, generous, helpful, and willing to compromise their interests with others'. Agreeable people also have an optimistic view of human nature. They believe people are basically honest, decent, and trustworthy.
Disagreeable individuals place self-interest above getting along with others. They are generally unconcerned with others' well-being, and therefore are unlikely to extend themselves for other people. Sometimes their skepticism about others' motives causes them to be suspicious, unfriendly, and uncooperative.
Agreeableness is obviously advantageous for attaining and maintaining popularity. Agreeable people are better liked than disagreeable people. On the other hand, agreeableness is not useful in situations that require tough or absolute objective decisions. Disagreeable people can make excellent scientists, critics, or soldiers.
Domain/Facet........... Score 0--------10--------20--------30--------40--------50--------60--------70--------80--------90--------99
AGREEABLENESS..............32 ********************************
..Trust....................42 ******************************************
..Morality.................75 ***************************************************************************
..Altruism.................1 *
..Cooperation..............76 ****************************************************************************
..Modesty..................27 ***************************
..Sympathy.................19 *******************
Your score on Agreeableness is low, indicating less concern with others' needs Than with your own. People see you as tough, critical, and uncompromising.
Agreeableness Facets
* Trust. A person with high trust assumes that most people are fair, honest, and have good intentions. Persons low in trust see others as selfish, devious, and potentially dangerous. Your level of trust is average.
* Morality. High scorers on this scale see no need for pretense or manipulation when dealing with others and are therefore candid, frank, and sincere. Low scorers believe that a certain amount of deception in social relationships is necessary. People find it relatively easy to relate to the straightforward high-scorers on this scale. They generally find it more difficult to relate to the unstraightforward low-scorers on this scale. It should be made clear that low scorers are not unprincipled or immoral; they are simply more guarded and less willing to openly reveal the whole truth. Your level of morality is high.
* Altruism. Altruistic people find helping other people genuinely rewarding. Consequently, they are generally willing to assist those who are in need. Altruistic people find that doing things for others is a form of self-fulfillment rather than self-sacrifice. Low scorers on this scale do not particularly like helping those in need. Requests for help feel like an imposition rather than an opportunity for self-fulfillment. Your level of altruism is low.
* Cooperation. Individuals who score high on this scale dislike confrontations. They are perfectly willing to compromise or to deny their own needs in order to get along with others. Those who score low on this scale are more likely to intimidate others to get their way. Your level of compliance is high.
* Modesty. High scorers on this scale do not like to claim that they are better than other people. In some cases this attitude may derive from low self-confidence or self-esteem. Nonetheless, some people with high self-esteem find immodesty unseemly. Those who are willing to describe themselves as superior tend to be seen as disagreeably arrogant by other people. Your level of modesty is low.
* Sympathy. People who score high on this scale are tenderhearted and compassionate. They feel the pain of others vicariously and are easily moved to pity. Low scorers are not affected strongly by human suffering. They pride themselves on making objective judgments based on reason. They are more concerned with truth and impartial justice than with mercy. Your level of tender-mindedness is low.
Conscientiousness
Conscientiousness concerns the way in which we control, regulate, and direct our impulses. Impulses are not inherently bad; occasionally time constraints require a snap decision, and acting on our first impulse can be an effective response. Also, in times of play rather than work, acting spontaneously and impulsively can be fun. Impulsive individuals can be seen by others as colorful, fun-to-be-with, and zany.
Nonetheless, acting on impulse can lead to trouble in a number of ways. Some impulses are antisocial. Uncontrolled antisocial acts not only harm other members of society, but also can result in retribution toward the perpetrator of such impulsive acts. Another problem with impulsive acts is that they often produce immediate rewards but undesirable, long-term consequences. Examples include excessive socializing that leads to being fired from one's job, hurling an insult that causes the breakup of an important relationship, or using pleasure-inducing drugs that eventually destroy one's health.
Impulsive behavior, even when not seriously destructive, diminishes a person's effectiveness in significant ways. Acting impulsively disallows contemplating alternative courses of action, some of which would have been wiser than the impulsive choice. Impulsivity also sidetracks people during projects that require organized sequences of steps or stages. Accomplishments of an impulsive person are therefore small, scattered, and inconsistent.
A hallmark of intelligence, what potentially separates human beings from earlier life forms, is the ability to think about future consequences before acting on an impulse. Intelligent activity involves contemplation of long-range goals, organizing and planning routes to these goals, and persisting toward one's goals in the face of short-lived impulses to the contrary. The idea that intelligence involves impulse control is nicely captured by the term prudence, an alternative label for the Conscientiousness domain. Prudent means both wise and cautious. Persons who score high on the Conscientiousness scale are, in fact, perceived by others as intelligent.
The benefits of high conscientiousness are obvious. Conscientious individuals avoid trouble and achieve high levels of success through purposeful planning and persistence. They are also positively regarded by others as intelligent and reliable. On the negative side, they can be compulsive perfectionists and workaholics. Furthermore, extremely conscientious individuals might be regarded as stuffy and boring. Unconscientious people may be criticized for their unreliability, lack of ambition, and failure to stay within the lines, but they will experience many short-lived pleasures and they will never be called stuffy.
Domain/Facet........... Score 0--------10--------20--------30--------40--------50--------60--------70--------80--------90--------99
CONSCIENTIOUSNESS..........11 ***********
..Self-Efficacy............12 ************
..Orderliness..............5 *****
..Dutifulness..............51 ***************************************************
..Achievement-Striving.....1 *
..Self-Discipline..........11 ***********
..Cautiousness.............67 *******************************************************************
Your score on Conscientiousness is low, indicating you like to live for the moment and do what feels good now. Your work tends to be careless and disorganized.
Conscientiousness Facets
* Self-Efficacy. Self-Efficacy describes confidence in one's ability to accomplish things. High scorers believe they have the intelligence (common sense), drive, and self-control necessary for achieving success. Low scorers do not feel effective, and may have a sense that they are not in control of their lives. Your level of self-efficacy is low.
* Orderliness. Persons with high scores on orderliness are well-organized. They like to live according to routines and schedules. They keep lists and make plans. Low scorers tend to be disorganized and scattered. Your level of orderliness is low.
* Dutifulness. This scale reflects the strength of a person's sense of duty and obligation. Those who score high on this scale have a strong sense of moral obligation. Low scorers find contracts, rules, and regulations overly confining. They are likely to be seen as unreliable or even irresponsible. Your level of dutifulness is average.
* Achievement-Striving. Individuals who score high on this scale strive hard to achieve excellence. Their drive to be recognized as successful keeps them on track toward their lofty goals. They often have a strong sense of direction in life, but extremely high scores may be too single-minded and obsessed with their work. Low scorers are content to get by with a minimal amount of work, and might be seen by others as lazy. Your level of achievement striving is low.
* Self-Discipline. Self-discipline-what many people call will-power-refers to the ability to persist at difficult or unpleasant tasks until they are completed. People who possess high self-discipline are able to overcome reluctance to begin tasks and stay on track despite distractions. Those with low self-discipline procrastinate and show poor follow-through, often failing to complete tasks-even tasks they want very much to complete. Your level of self-discipline is low.
* Cautiousness. Cautiousness describes the disposition to think through possibilities before acting. High scorers on the Cautiousness scale take their time when making decisions. Low scorers often say or do first thing that comes to mind without deliberating alternatives and the probable consequences of those alternatives. Your level of cautiousness is average.
Neuroticism
Freud originally used the term neurosis to describe a condition marked by mental distress, emotional suffering, and an inability to cope effectively with the normal demands of life. He suggested that everyone shows some signs of neurosis, but that we differ in our degree of suffering and our specific symptoms of distress. Today neuroticism refers to the tendency to experience negative feelings. Those who score high on Neuroticism may experience primarily one specific negative feeling such as anxiety, anger, or depression, but are likely to experience several of these emotions. People high in neuroticism are emotionally reactive. They respond emotionally to events that would not affect most people, and their reactions tend to be more intense than normal. They are more likely to interpret ordinary situations as threatening, and minor frustrations as hopelessly difficult. Their negative emotional reactions tend to persist for unusually long periods of time, which means they are often in a bad mood. These problems in emotional regulation can diminish a neurotic's ability to think clearly, make decisions, and cope effectively with stress.
At the other end of the scale, individuals who score low in neuroticism are less easily upset and are less emotionally reactive. They tend to be calm, emotionally stable, and free from persistent negative feelings. Freedom from negative feelings does not mean that low scorers experience a lot of positive feelings; frequency of positive emotions is a component of the Extraversion domain.
Domain/Facet........... Score 0--------10--------20--------30--------40--------50--------60--------70--------80--------90--------99
NEUROTICISM................74 **************************************************************************
..Anxiety..................84 ************************************************************************************
..Anger....................31 *******************************
..Depression...............87 ***************************************************************************************
..Self-Consciousness.......84 ************************************************************************************
..Immoderation.............26 **************************
..Vulnerability............92 ********************************************************************************************
Your score on Neuroticism is high, indicating that you are easily upset, even by what most people consider the normal demands of living. People consider you to be sensitive and emotional.
Neuroticism Facets
* Anxiety. The "fight-or-flight" system of the brain of anxious individuals is too easily and too often engaged. Therefore, people who are high in anxiety often feel like something dangerous is about to happen. They may be afraid of specific situations or be just generally fearful. They feel tense, jittery, and nervous. Persons low in Anxiety are generally calm and fearless. Your level of anxiety is high.
* Anger. Persons who score high in Anger feel enraged when things do not go their way. They are sensitive about being treated fairly and feel resentful and bitter when they feel they are being cheated. This scale measures the tendency to feel angry; whether or not the person expresses annoyance and hostility depends on the individual's level on Agreeableness. Low scorers do not get angry often or easily. Your level of anger is low.
* Depression. This scale measures the tendency to feel sad, dejected, and discouraged. High scorers lack energy and have difficult initiating activities. Low scorers tend to be free from these depressive feelings. Your level of depression is high.
* Self-Consciousness. Self-conscious individuals are sensitive about what others think of them. Their concern about rejection and ridicule cause them to feel shy and uncomfortable abound others. They are easily embarrassed and often feel ashamed. Their fears that others will criticize or make fun of them are exaggerated and unrealistic, but their awkwardness and discomfort may make these fears a self-fulfilling prophecy. Low scorers, in contrast, do not suffer from the mistaken impression that everyone is watching and judging them. They do not feel nervous in social situations. Your level or self-consciousness is high.
* Immoderation. Immoderate individuals feel strong cravings and urges that they have have difficulty resisting. They tend to be oriented toward short-term pleasures and rewards rather than long- term consequences. Low scorers do not experience strong, irresistible cravings and consequently do not find themselves tempted to overindulge. Your level of immoderation is low.
* Vulnerability. High scorers on Vulnerability experience panic, confusion, and helplessness when under pressure or stress. Low scorers feel more poised, confident, and clear-thinking when stressed. Your level of vulnerability is high.
Openness to Experience
Openness to Experience describes a dimension of cognitive style that distinguishes imaginative, creative people from down-to-earth, conventional people. Open people are intellectually curious, appreciative of art, and sensitive to beauty. They tend to be, compared to closed people, more aware of their feelings. They tend to think and act in individualistic and nonconforming ways. Intellectuals typically score high on Openness to Experience; consequently, this factor has also been called Culture or Intellect. Nonetheless, Intellect is probably best regarded as one aspect of openness to experience. Scores on Openness to Experience are only modestly related to years of education and scores on standard intelligent tests.
Another characteristic of the open cognitive style is a facility for thinking in symbols and abstractions far removed from concrete experience. Depending on the individual's specific intellectual abilities, this symbolic cognition may take the form of mathematical, logical, or geometric thinking, artistic and metaphorical use of language, music composition or performance, or one of the many visual or performing arts. People with low scores on openness to experience tend to have narrow, common interests. They prefer the plain, straightforward, and obvious over the complex, ambiguous, and subtle. They may regard the arts and sciences with suspicion, regarding these endeavors as abstruse or of no practical use. Closed people prefer familiarity over novelty; they are conservative and resistant to change.
Openness is often presented as healthier or more mature by psychologists, who are often themselves open to experience. However, open and closed styles of thinking are useful in different environments. The intellectual style of the open person may serve a professor well, but research has shown that closed thinking is related to superior job performance in police work, sales, and a number of service occupations.
Domain/Facet........... Score 0--------10--------20--------30--------40--------50--------60--------70--------80--------90--------99
OPENNESS TO EXPERIENCE.....56 ********************************************************
..Imagination..............96 ************************************************************************************************
..Artistic Interests.......38 **************************************
..Emotionality.............18 ******************
..Adventurousness..........61 *************************************************************
..Intellect................66 ******************************************************************
..Liberalism...............37 *************************************
Your score on Openness to Experience is average, indicating you enjoy tradition but are willing to try new things. Your thinking is neither simple nor complex. To others you appear to be a well-educated person but not an intellectual.
Openness Facets
* Imagination. To imaginative individuals, the real world is often too plain and ordinary. High scorers on this scale use fantasy as a way of creating a richer, more interesting world. Low scorers are on this scale are more oriented to facts than fantasy. Your level of imagination is high.
* Artistic Interests. High scorers on this scale love beauty, both in art and in nature. They become easily involved and absorbed in artistic and natural events. They are not necessarily artistically trained nor talented, although many will be. The defining features of this scale are interest in, and appreciation of natural and artificial beauty. Low scorers lack aesthetic sensitivity and interest in the arts. Your level of artistic interests is average.
* Emotionality. Persons high on Emotionality have good access to and awareness of their own feelings. Low scorers are less aware of their feelings and tend not to express their emotions openly. Your level of emotionality is low.
* Adventurousness. High scorers on adventurousness are eager to try new activities, travel to foreign lands, and experience different things. They find familiarity and routine boring, and will take a new route home just because it is different. Low scorers tend to feel uncomfortable with change and prefer familiar routines. Your level of adventurousness is average.
* Intellect. Intellect and artistic interests are the two most important, central aspects of openness to experience. High scorers on Intellect love to play with ideas. They are open-minded to new and unusual ideas, and like to debate intellectual issues. They enjoy riddles, puzzles, and brain teasers. Low scorers on Intellect prefer dealing with either people or things rather than ideas. They regard intellectual exercises as a waste of time. Intellect should not be equated with intelligence. Intellect is an intellectual style, not an intellectual ability, although high scorers on Intellect score slightly higher than low-Intellect individuals on standardized intelligence tests. Your level of intellect is average.
* Liberalism. Psychological liberalism refers to a readiness to challenge authority, convention, and traditional values. In its most extreme form, psychological liberalism can even represent outright hostility toward rules, sympathy for law-breakers, and love of ambiguity, chaos, and disorder. Psychological conservatives prefer the security and stability brought by conformity to tradition. Psychological liberalism and conservatism are not identical to political affiliation, but certainly incline individuals toward certain political parties. Your level of liberalism is average.
art as stimulant, francis bacon (painter)
Suggestion was all in art, as far as Bacon was concerned. It was not what an image, whether visual or literary, meant in itself, but the power it had to set off a stream of other images and sensations in the brain. The art that mattered stimulated the irrational and the unforeseen; at its most effective, it was hypnotic, stirring the great 'well' of the unconscious in those whom it touched.
--Michael Peppiatt, "Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Engima"
money velocity and expiring money
money velocity--if it's important to an economy, how about creating money that expires after a certain time held by one person--i don't know how the technicalities of this would be worked out--expiring money would be like food stuff or aging livestock in an barter economy--you have to trade it before it goes bad.
fundamental attribution error, self-serving bias and argumentative theory of reason
the fundamental attribution error and the self-serving bias jibes with the argumentative theory of reasoning--we are interested parties arguing for a particular vantage point, that is seemingly hardwired into us--to argue for our interests--when something good happens we say it's our doing, and when something bad happens, we say it's circumstance and not our fault (self serving bias), and when someone else does something good, we say it's luck*, and when they do something bad, we say it's who they are (FAE). you have a prosecution and a defense naturally emerging from these natural attitudes.
*this i can't find a formal bias on at the moment--just going on observation.
*this i can't find a formal bias on at the moment--just going on observation.
Select start
Somewhat pinching Fourthcheckraise's link style:
Steve Sailer - "Kill Adolf"
Core Economics - "Don't Trust a Hedgehog"
Let a Thousand Nations Bloom - "Craigslist Government"
The Fourth Checkraise - "Print is the sharpest and strongest weapon of our party"
Cafe Hayek - "A Health care manifesto"
Steve Sailer - "Kill Adolf"
Core Economics - "Don't Trust a Hedgehog"
Let a Thousand Nations Bloom - "Craigslist Government"
The Fourth Checkraise - "Print is the sharpest and strongest weapon of our party"
Cafe Hayek - "A Health care manifesto"
Individual versus collective rationality, lawyer-ly versus scientific rationality, et c.
After commenting here about how maybe we should think about individual rationality as part of a larger tribal rationality, Warren Winter kindly replied:
Looks promising! Apropos this, I was thinking about how kids are natural lawyers--they are ready with some argument in their favor in about zero-point-two seconds without even thinking about it. I've imagined we have different modes of rationality, more or less--we put on our lawyer cap or our scientist cap--the lawyer in us wants to argue like a moron for our interests no matter what, and the scientist wants to calmly figure out what is in fact the case. Maybe these archetypes aren't perfect, but they resonate with me. Maybe 'engineer' would be a better replacement for 'scientist'. I think there must be more of these modes of thinking. 'Diplomat' maybe? 'Salesman'?
You would enjoy reading Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s work on the social function of reasoning. Some links to publications are on this page: http://hugo.mercier.googlepages.com/theargumentativetheoryofreasoning
Looks promising! Apropos this, I was thinking about how kids are natural lawyers--they are ready with some argument in their favor in about zero-point-two seconds without even thinking about it. I've imagined we have different modes of rationality, more or less--we put on our lawyer cap or our scientist cap--the lawyer in us wants to argue like a moron for our interests no matter what, and the scientist wants to calmly figure out what is in fact the case. Maybe these archetypes aren't perfect, but they resonate with me. Maybe 'engineer' would be a better replacement for 'scientist'. I think there must be more of these modes of thinking. 'Diplomat' maybe? 'Salesman'?
Speculation on David Foster Wallace's IQ and Big Five Personality
David Foster Wallace
IQ: 146-149. 1420 is the average SAT score for freshman at his alma mater of Amherst College, which correlates with 146-149 territory according to this site.(critical reading and math I assume are equivalent to the verbal and math sections of the days prior to when the writing element of the SATs was added)
Big Five Personality Dimensions:
High openness--was liberal, intellectual, had a facility with math and philosophy, was avant-garde
High conscientiousness -- was obsessive, had a self-critical style, achieved academic and career success, was seemingly ambitious
Low extraversion--was a novelist, had a quiet-ish personality
Low agreeableness--was seemingly critical and argumentative, though not abrasively so, to my knowledge
High neuroticism--suffered from depression and suicide, maybe obsessiveness?
Sound right or no?
IQ: 146-149. 1420 is the average SAT score for freshman at his alma mater of Amherst College, which correlates with 146-149 territory according to this site.(critical reading and math I assume are equivalent to the verbal and math sections of the days prior to when the writing element of the SATs was added)
Big Five Personality Dimensions:
High openness--was liberal, intellectual, had a facility with math and philosophy, was avant-garde
High conscientiousness -- was obsessive, had a self-critical style, achieved academic and career success, was seemingly ambitious
Low extraversion--was a novelist, had a quiet-ish personality
Low agreeableness--was seemingly critical and argumentative, though not abrasively so, to my knowledge
High neuroticism--suffered from depression and suicide, maybe obsessiveness?
Sound right or no?
Basketball and networks
"The Price of Anarchy in Basketball"
This is neat--I had a similar thought in the past, thinking of soccer and basketball players as nodes in a network and passing lanes as links, though obviously not as well developed as these fellerz. One passing thought I had was that you should keep as many options open as possible--this seems Moltkean to me though I am having trouble placing the idea--did Moltke the Elder say something to the effect that in war you should keep as many options open as possible, generally?
It seems like there might be some positions that would offer many links to other nodes, and some nodes that would have few links to other nodes. Maybe being at the top of the key or around there provides many links--passing lanes, particularly if not strongly defended, whereas being under the rim or in a corner and surrounded by defenders means few links.
On the other hand, being under the rim or in a corner provides better chance of scoring in some contexts. In the writing cited by Cowen, by Brian Skinner, it's suggested we think of the object of the network as getting the ball into the hoop, which makes sense. So some nodes might be valuable in that they allow direct connection to the hoop, so to speak, whereas others nodes might be good for allowing many connections to other nodes, but itself is not a good node for connecting to the hoop--perhaps a few feet from the 'top' of the three point line, where you're far from the net, but perhaps not as well defended and so have more options.
Another interesting thing I contemplate is that the nodes (players) are moving, so the issue is where the nodes are going to be when you pass, rather than where they are at present. There's a need for coordination, and it seems the offense has the advantage here since they can run plays that are not known to the defense, and signal to each other secretly. The defense on the other hand might expect that a rough area--either around the player in some vague sense, or driving lanes more or less to the hoop, are where the ball might be. The offense might think in terms of open passing lanes and shots, whereas defense might be more focused on driving lanes and lanes to valuable spots on the court like the corners or the base of the net.
But somewhat running against the emphasis of defense on driving lanes and valuable shot positions, I like the idea of a full court press because the closer you play to a player, the more you can threaten many of his passing lanes, since the lanes radiate like spokes on a wheel with the player as the hub, and the closer to the hub you are, the closer the various passing lanes are. Similarly, playing man seems to make passing harder, but on the other hand, you seem to have have less opportunity to protect driving lanes and valuable areas from which to take shots, since when the player drives, if you're moving when he runs into you, you get called for a foul. If you play further away from the driving player, you can get to where he seems to be going and plant your feet so he gets called for a foul if he runs into you.
Maybe there are some simple heuristics that might help one think about the value of certain links in the network--there being passing links, connecting players, and driving links, getting players to the net, and shooting links, you might say--shots connecting players to the net. At the corners the shooting link might be valuable, or under the net if you're unguarded, since it's an easier shot. At the top of the three point line, passing links might be more valuable than shooting links.
Anyway, not being an expert on networks or basketball, I defer to anyone who is! Looking at this link, via Marginal Revolution, that explains the theory, I see that a big idea--and a fascinating one, is that great players are like popular traffic routes, which according to what is apparently called Braess's Paradox, when closed sometimes improve traffic--similarly when great players are off the court, the team improves, which is apparently called the Ewing paradox. Interesting stuff!
I wonder if similarly people who you rely on for certain things are like Ewing or a good route--they can only help so many people, and when they are overworked, they become a bottleneck, and when perhaps they go on vacation, people seek alternate routes to get help, somewhat randomly, and perhaps this reduces congestion more or less everywhere.
What confused me a little about the metaphor of Ewing being like a popular route is that Ewing doesn't get congested by traffic the way a road does--he just handles one ball at a time. If say a basketball team had three balls on the court, and everyone wanted to pass to Ewing at the same time, I could see there maybe being a congestion problem, and it might be better for everyone to try to find alternate routes to scoring. Is the idea that Ewing gets tired out by so many passes to him, and so he can't handle as well any more passes after a point, and so is like a road that can't after a point handle traffic very well?
This is neat--I had a similar thought in the past, thinking of soccer and basketball players as nodes in a network and passing lanes as links, though obviously not as well developed as these fellerz. One passing thought I had was that you should keep as many options open as possible--this seems Moltkean to me though I am having trouble placing the idea--did Moltke the Elder say something to the effect that in war you should keep as many options open as possible, generally?
It seems like there might be some positions that would offer many links to other nodes, and some nodes that would have few links to other nodes. Maybe being at the top of the key or around there provides many links--passing lanes, particularly if not strongly defended, whereas being under the rim or in a corner and surrounded by defenders means few links.
On the other hand, being under the rim or in a corner provides better chance of scoring in some contexts. In the writing cited by Cowen, by Brian Skinner, it's suggested we think of the object of the network as getting the ball into the hoop, which makes sense. So some nodes might be valuable in that they allow direct connection to the hoop, so to speak, whereas others nodes might be good for allowing many connections to other nodes, but itself is not a good node for connecting to the hoop--perhaps a few feet from the 'top' of the three point line, where you're far from the net, but perhaps not as well defended and so have more options.
Another interesting thing I contemplate is that the nodes (players) are moving, so the issue is where the nodes are going to be when you pass, rather than where they are at present. There's a need for coordination, and it seems the offense has the advantage here since they can run plays that are not known to the defense, and signal to each other secretly. The defense on the other hand might expect that a rough area--either around the player in some vague sense, or driving lanes more or less to the hoop, are where the ball might be. The offense might think in terms of open passing lanes and shots, whereas defense might be more focused on driving lanes and lanes to valuable spots on the court like the corners or the base of the net.
But somewhat running against the emphasis of defense on driving lanes and valuable shot positions, I like the idea of a full court press because the closer you play to a player, the more you can threaten many of his passing lanes, since the lanes radiate like spokes on a wheel with the player as the hub, and the closer to the hub you are, the closer the various passing lanes are. Similarly, playing man seems to make passing harder, but on the other hand, you seem to have have less opportunity to protect driving lanes and valuable areas from which to take shots, since when the player drives, if you're moving when he runs into you, you get called for a foul. If you play further away from the driving player, you can get to where he seems to be going and plant your feet so he gets called for a foul if he runs into you.
Maybe there are some simple heuristics that might help one think about the value of certain links in the network--there being passing links, connecting players, and driving links, getting players to the net, and shooting links, you might say--shots connecting players to the net. At the corners the shooting link might be valuable, or under the net if you're unguarded, since it's an easier shot. At the top of the three point line, passing links might be more valuable than shooting links.
Anyway, not being an expert on networks or basketball, I defer to anyone who is! Looking at this link, via Marginal Revolution, that explains the theory, I see that a big idea--and a fascinating one, is that great players are like popular traffic routes, which according to what is apparently called Braess's Paradox, when closed sometimes improve traffic--similarly when great players are off the court, the team improves, which is apparently called the Ewing paradox. Interesting stuff!
I wonder if similarly people who you rely on for certain things are like Ewing or a good route--they can only help so many people, and when they are overworked, they become a bottleneck, and when perhaps they go on vacation, people seek alternate routes to get help, somewhat randomly, and perhaps this reduces congestion more or less everywhere.
What confused me a little about the metaphor of Ewing being like a popular route is that Ewing doesn't get congested by traffic the way a road does--he just handles one ball at a time. If say a basketball team had three balls on the court, and everyone wanted to pass to Ewing at the same time, I could see there maybe being a congestion problem, and it might be better for everyone to try to find alternate routes to scoring. Is the idea that Ewing gets tired out by so many passes to him, and so he can't handle as well any more passes after a point, and so is like a road that can't after a point handle traffic very well?
"When in doubt..."
It seems that how one finishes the phrase "When in doubt" might tell us something about someone's personality (a la Nathaniel Branden's sentence completion exercises). Here are ones I liked:
"When in doubt... ATTACK!"
--Anthony from HBO series Rome
"When in doubt act like god"
--Madonna
--Jo Grimond
--Raymond Chandler
"When in doubt, don't."
--Ben Franklin
"When in doubt tell the truth."
--Mark Twain
According to Big-Five personality theory, extraverts would be active, whereas introverts would be passive--extraverts would be more inclined to say 'when in doubt, do it!' or the like, whereas introverts would be more likely to say 'when in doubt, don't do it,' I would think. It's probably fairer to say of the extraverts, they'd be inclined to say 'when in doubt, try it!' because whether they stick to it or not depends on their degree of conscientiousness. Neuroticism also has to do with impulsiveness, though I think with this dimension, the impulsiveness is regarding something along the lines of craving, I believe. Similarly, I think reigning oneself in then becomes a matter of how much conscientiousness you have. Extraversion's impulses regard positive gain. "Oh, I bet it'll be fun to go for a hike! Let's go!"
The dimensions overlap a bit, and aren't based on a logical scheme so much as an study of correlations of characteristics into groups. Impulsivity correlates with high extraversion, high neuroticism, and I think low conscientiousness. Intelligence correlates slightly with openness, and others see people with high conscientiousness as intelligent, though I've also read that there is a slight negative correlation between intelligence and conscientiousness, via Bruce Charlton, so that one seems iffy as far as I've seen.
"When in doubt... ATTACK!"
--Anthony from HBO series Rome
"When in doubt act like god"
--Madonna
In bygone days, commanders were taught that when in doubt, they should march their troops towards the sound of gunfire.
--Jo Grimond
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
--Raymond Chandler
"When in doubt, don't."
--Ben Franklin
"When in doubt tell the truth."
--Mark Twain
According to Big-Five personality theory, extraverts would be active, whereas introverts would be passive--extraverts would be more inclined to say 'when in doubt, do it!' or the like, whereas introverts would be more likely to say 'when in doubt, don't do it,' I would think. It's probably fairer to say of the extraverts, they'd be inclined to say 'when in doubt, try it!' because whether they stick to it or not depends on their degree of conscientiousness. Neuroticism also has to do with impulsiveness, though I think with this dimension, the impulsiveness is regarding something along the lines of craving, I believe. Similarly, I think reigning oneself in then becomes a matter of how much conscientiousness you have. Extraversion's impulses regard positive gain. "Oh, I bet it'll be fun to go for a hike! Let's go!"
The dimensions overlap a bit, and aren't based on a logical scheme so much as an study of correlations of characteristics into groups. Impulsivity correlates with high extraversion, high neuroticism, and I think low conscientiousness. Intelligence correlates slightly with openness, and others see people with high conscientiousness as intelligent, though I've also read that there is a slight negative correlation between intelligence and conscientiousness, via Bruce Charlton, so that one seems iffy as far as I've seen.
Big projects!
David Grylls from The Times Online via Marginal Revolution--part of an interesting sentence:
"That a single scholar [John Sutherland], working un-assisted, should undertake to synopsize 554 (now 560) novels..."
Wow--rough estimate--if your average Victorian novel is say 500 pages, that would mean this guy read 280,000 pages. If he reads at say 50 pages an hour, he'd get through these books in 5,600 hours, or 140 work weeks, meaning about three years of 40-hour work weeks, just reading.
A side note--my Firefox browser counts how much time I've spent in the past 365 days on various sites*--Google Reader gets about 150 hours of my attention, Wikipedia gets about 110 hours of my attention, and Amazon gets about 20 hours of my attention, adding up to about 280 hours largely on reading. If I usually read about 20 pages an hour--then I have racked up in roughly the last year the equivalent of 5,600 pages of reading, on Firefox, or about eleven 500-page Victorian novels.
On other computers I'd guess I've done about as much reading, bringing me up to 11,200 pages or so, and I'd guess I've read maybe 900 pages worth of books in the past year, bringing the estimate for the past year up to about 12,100 pages, or about twenty four Victorian novels of the 500-page variety (hence referred to simple as 'Victorian novels'). I also recall using vozme text-to-audio to read me text while I did other things--I got through most of of Western-Empire chapters of Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" this way, which, rough guess, is about 600 pages, or about one Victorian novel, and probably average I'd guess an hour listening to vozme read me text daily, which would add to the overall text read, perhaps 2,000 pages or so, adding the equivalent of four Victorian novels to the total, bringing me up to 14,700 pages, or about 29 Victorian novels a year. At this rate it would take me about 17 years to read as much as Mr. Sutherland!
*I think I've had this device for almost a year.
"That a single scholar [John Sutherland], working un-assisted, should undertake to synopsize 554 (now 560) novels..."
Wow--rough estimate--if your average Victorian novel is say 500 pages, that would mean this guy read 280,000 pages. If he reads at say 50 pages an hour, he'd get through these books in 5,600 hours, or 140 work weeks, meaning about three years of 40-hour work weeks, just reading.
A side note--my Firefox browser counts how much time I've spent in the past 365 days on various sites*--Google Reader gets about 150 hours of my attention, Wikipedia gets about 110 hours of my attention, and Amazon gets about 20 hours of my attention, adding up to about 280 hours largely on reading. If I usually read about 20 pages an hour--then I have racked up in roughly the last year the equivalent of 5,600 pages of reading, on Firefox, or about eleven 500-page Victorian novels.
On other computers I'd guess I've done about as much reading, bringing me up to 11,200 pages or so, and I'd guess I've read maybe 900 pages worth of books in the past year, bringing the estimate for the past year up to about 12,100 pages, or about twenty four Victorian novels of the 500-page variety (hence referred to simple as 'Victorian novels'). I also recall using vozme text-to-audio to read me text while I did other things--I got through most of of Western-Empire chapters of Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" this way, which, rough guess, is about 600 pages, or about one Victorian novel, and probably average I'd guess an hour listening to vozme read me text daily, which would add to the overall text read, perhaps 2,000 pages or so, adding the equivalent of four Victorian novels to the total, bringing me up to 14,700 pages, or about 29 Victorian novels a year. At this rate it would take me about 17 years to read as much as Mr. Sutherland!
*I think I've had this device for almost a year.
The light side of the Big-Five personality trait of low conscientiousness trait, part II--John Derbyshire
A while back I blogged a theory about the big-five personality trait of conscientiousness. I suggested low conscientiousness people can get 'addicted' to good things, and suggested Quentin Tarantino and Samuel Johnson might be people who got addicted to good activities, movie-making and dictionary work respectively--and so they could seem in a way both lazy and hard-working (I think my theory probably isn't true with Johnson, from what I've since read about his work habits--it doesn't seem like he was addicted to writing his dictionary). John Derbyshire who says himself that he scores low on conscientiousness, provides evidence for the positive side of low conscientiousness--he's gotten addicted to reading books.
John Derbyshire:
Classic low conscientiousness--hard time getting yourself to do things, and hard time stopping when you're doing what you enjoy. At times I've read through all of a particular author--Douglas Adams, JRR Tolkien, Thomas Pynchon.
Another theory I have is that the low conscientiousness types conserve energy and court chaos in their everyday life due to their slapdash approach, while the high conscientiousness types take care of the important things that are seen, or likely to be coming down the road--and when chaos comes, the low conscientiousness people are able to leap into the fray, being never terribly sapped of energy given their laziness, and do some good, since they have been working with self-made chaos their whole lives. Perhaps you could call this the Ulysses S. Grant rule.
By the way, Derbyshire seems to like Samuel Johnson, and styles his Straggler after Johnson's Idler and Rambler.
John Derbyshire:
I was a terrible student—never really got good study habits. And it is not true that I am well read. I find it very difficult to read things that don’t “catch” me. For example, I know next to nothing about American literature, most of which I find very dull. Conversely, I find it hard to stop reading stuff that DOES “catch” me. I read all 16 (as then was) of the Patrick O’Brien Aubrey-Maturin novels, one right after another. Same with Elmore Leonard: I just kept going back to the library for more.
Classic low conscientiousness--hard time getting yourself to do things, and hard time stopping when you're doing what you enjoy. At times I've read through all of a particular author--Douglas Adams, JRR Tolkien, Thomas Pynchon.
Another theory I have is that the low conscientiousness types conserve energy and court chaos in their everyday life due to their slapdash approach, while the high conscientiousness types take care of the important things that are seen, or likely to be coming down the road--and when chaos comes, the low conscientiousness people are able to leap into the fray, being never terribly sapped of energy given their laziness, and do some good, since they have been working with self-made chaos their whole lives. Perhaps you could call this the Ulysses S. Grant rule.
By the way, Derbyshire seems to like Samuel Johnson, and styles his Straggler after Johnson's Idler and Rambler.
Quotations of interestingness
Rahm Emanuel's approach, from the NYT:
Matthew Yglesias via Marginal Revolution:
From the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology via Robin Hanson:
This says a lot about murderer George Sodini, from his webpage:
John Derbyshire's review of "The Man Who Would be Queen" by Michael Bailey:
Razib at Gene Expression:
“Put points on the board.”
“In politics, you’re either pitching or catching.”
“A man never stands as tall as when he is on all fours kissing” rear ends.
In other words, take what victories you can, stay on the offensive and do not be afraid to stroke big egos to advance the president’s agenda.
Matthew Yglesias via Marginal Revolution:
There’s strong evidence to believe that people who overestimate their own efficacy in life wind up doing better than those with more accurate perceptions.
From the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology via Robin Hanson:
Thinking about and having power affects the way in which people resolve moral dilemmas. … In determining whether an act is right or wrong, the powerful focus on whether rules and principles are violated, whereas the powerless focus on the consequences. For this reason, the powerful are also more inclined to stick to the rules, irrespective of whether this has positive or negative effects, whereas the powerless are more inclined to make exceptions. … The power–moral link is reversed when rule-based decisions threaten [powerful] participants’ own self-interests.
This says a lot about murderer George Sodini, from his webpage:
FAVORITE MOVIES?
Old fashioned types, say pre 1960, where the characters had virtue and courtesy. Dirty Harry is good too.
John Derbyshire's review of "The Man Who Would be Queen" by Michael Bailey:
The consummation of sexual desire presents obviously difficulties for the autogynephile. Indeed, it is occasionally fatal: around 100 American men die every year from "autoerotic asphyxia," which seems to arise from a conjunction of masochism and autogynephilia — the two conditions are related in some way not well understood.
Razib at Gene Expression:
But another factor is that you couldn't invent evil on the scale of the German regime plausibly. The banal barbarity of the Second Reich pales in comparison. If one could find someone totally unfamiliar with World War II and lay out the course of events and the nature of the insane dictators (Hitler and Stalin), I suspect they're initial response would be that it was implausible science fiction or alternative history, and you need to go to a writer's workshop to brush up on the craft.
IQ, big-five personality type speculations about Gibby Haynes
Gibby Haynes is frontman for the Butthole Surfers.
IQ: high-ish--went to Trinity University, which usually requires fairly high SATs--something like mid 1200s seems the average from what I can see online (one source), which correlates to something like a 126 IQ. He seems to have done well at Trinity, being accounting student of the year (though maybe this award isn't really linked to academic performance), and he was a top student in his high school class, so he might be on the high end of the academic spectrum at Trinity--maybe he is more like students who score 1370 on the SATs, the high end of SAT scores at Trinity, which would correlate to an IQ of 135 or so (from the chart previously referenced). For speculation's sake, let's split the difference and guess he has a ~131 IQ.
High openness - in an avante-guard punkie, indie band, psychedelic druggie, bohemian lifestyle, tolerant of gay bandmate.
Low conscientiousness - seemingly an alcoholic, addict, drug-binger--that he graduated college with seemingly low conscientiousness suggests his IQ must have helped--he might be smarter than the average Trinity student.
High extraversion - captain of basketball team, president of frat, active, risk-taking.
Low agreeableness - unmanageable, fighter.
Average neuroticism - for stability: seems untroubled by dangerous lifestyle, for neuroticism: yelling, fighting, negative impulses
IQ: high-ish--went to Trinity University, which usually requires fairly high SATs--something like mid 1200s seems the average from what I can see online (one source), which correlates to something like a 126 IQ. He seems to have done well at Trinity, being accounting student of the year (though maybe this award isn't really linked to academic performance), and he was a top student in his high school class, so he might be on the high end of the academic spectrum at Trinity--maybe he is more like students who score 1370 on the SATs, the high end of SAT scores at Trinity, which would correlate to an IQ of 135 or so (from the chart previously referenced). For speculation's sake, let's split the difference and guess he has a ~131 IQ.
High openness - in an avante-guard punkie, indie band, psychedelic druggie, bohemian lifestyle, tolerant of gay bandmate.
Low conscientiousness - seemingly an alcoholic, addict, drug-binger--that he graduated college with seemingly low conscientiousness suggests his IQ must have helped--he might be smarter than the average Trinity student.
High extraversion - captain of basketball team, president of frat, active, risk-taking.
Low agreeableness - unmanageable, fighter.
Average neuroticism - for stability: seems untroubled by dangerous lifestyle, for neuroticism: yelling, fighting, negative impulses
john derbyshire's big five personality
what a pleasure to read this--john derbyshire's big five personality traits, as he reports:
close to mine--i took the same test and got the same score, but the openness thing seems wrong to me. my newcastle personality assessor score is high on openness (very high). daniel nettle's account of openness sounds very much like me, and frankly john derbyshire too, so i think JD is high on openness and the test he took (and i took at one point too) is screwy, at least for some people. consider derbyshire has written two novels, does poetry readings, is a math writer, speaks chinese and seems a bit of a sinophile--how much more open does one need to be to score high?
[revised 8.30.9 and 9.13.9]
Openness to Experience: Average, "indicating you enjoy tradition but are willing to try new things. Your thinking is neither simple nor complex. To others you appear to be a well-educated person but not an intellectual."
Conscientiousness: Low, "indicating you like to live for the moment and do what feels good now. Your work tends to be careless and disorganized."
Extraversion: Low. I am an introvert, "reserved, and quiet. You enjoy solitude and solitary activities. Your socializing tends to be restricted to a few close friends."
Agreeableness: Low, "indicating less concern with others' needs than with your own. People see you as tough, critical, and uncompromising."
Neuroticism: High, "indicating that you are easily upset, even by what most people consider the normal demands of living. People consider you to be sensitive and emotional."
close to mine--i took the same test and got the same score, but the openness thing seems wrong to me. my newcastle personality assessor score is high on openness (very high). daniel nettle's account of openness sounds very much like me, and frankly john derbyshire too, so i think JD is high on openness and the test he took (and i took at one point too) is screwy, at least for some people. consider derbyshire has written two novels, does poetry readings, is a math writer, speaks chinese and seems a bit of a sinophile--how much more open does one need to be to score high?
[revised 8.30.9 and 9.13.9]
you want cronies, not competition
bruce charlton (via offsetting behavior's article 'robin hanson would agree'):
one way to suppress future competition is to make the field unattractive to people who might be interested in doing what you do. you also get obedient and loyal underlings who might experience the endowment effect from committing so much of their time to your agenda. they defend and expand your research, and carry it on when you're retired/gone, either unconsciously, (endowment effect) or consciously (i'll look like a fool if i say this stuff wasn't worth researching).
"bruce charlton, quoted earlier in the same offsetting behavior post, writes, "Educational attainment depends on IQ × C [conscientiousness]; but IQ and C are not closely-correlated."
the five factor model, created by academics, even makes being 'low in conscientiousness' sound bad. you want to be high in conscientiousness, not low in it, right? who wants to be unconscientious? another term could have been used for the super-trait measured by conscientiousness--one could be 'flexible' rather than 'low in conscientiousness.' do you want to be flexible or inflexible?
there bias in the five factor phrasing. my view of what the five factor's terminology implicitly says:
it's bad to be closed to experience, but good to be open to experience.
it's bad to be unconscientious, but good to be conscientious.
it's bad to be disagreeable, but good to be agreeable.
it's bad to be neurotic, and good to be stable.
there doesn't seem to me to be an obvious bias towards extraversion or introversion.
anyway, basically half the population is on the wrong side of the bell curve when it comes to these traits, if my take is right.
Modern science is just too dull an activity to attract, retain or promote many of the most intelligent and creative people. In particular the requirement for around 10, 15, even 20 years of postgraduate ‘training’ before even having a chance at doing some independent research of one’s own choosing, is enough to deter almost anyone with a spark of vitality or self-respect; and utterly exclude anyone with an urgent sense of vocation for creative endeavour. Even after a decade or two of ‘training’ the most likely scientific prospect is that of researching a topic determined by the availability of funding rather than scientific importance, or else functioning as a cog in someone else’s research machine. Either way, the scientist will be working on somebody else’s problem – not his own. Why would any serious intellectual wish to aim for such a career?
one way to suppress future competition is to make the field unattractive to people who might be interested in doing what you do. you also get obedient and loyal underlings who might experience the endowment effect from committing so much of their time to your agenda. they defend and expand your research, and carry it on when you're retired/gone, either unconsciously, (endowment effect) or consciously (i'll look like a fool if i say this stuff wasn't worth researching).
"bruce charlton, quoted earlier in the same offsetting behavior post, writes, "Educational attainment depends on IQ × C [conscientiousness]; but IQ and C are not closely-correlated."
the five factor model, created by academics, even makes being 'low in conscientiousness' sound bad. you want to be high in conscientiousness, not low in it, right? who wants to be unconscientious? another term could have been used for the super-trait measured by conscientiousness--one could be 'flexible' rather than 'low in conscientiousness.' do you want to be flexible or inflexible?
there bias in the five factor phrasing. my view of what the five factor's terminology implicitly says:
it's bad to be closed to experience, but good to be open to experience.
it's bad to be unconscientious, but good to be conscientious.
it's bad to be disagreeable, but good to be agreeable.
it's bad to be neurotic, and good to be stable.
there doesn't seem to me to be an obvious bias towards extraversion or introversion.
anyway, basically half the population is on the wrong side of the bell curve when it comes to these traits, if my take is right.
I am a stratego
I've been playing Stratego. That's a pretty cool game. I downloaded an old copy of it form Abondonia.com, and have been playing it a bit. I'd like to check out more elaborate war games too. I think the game's AI isn't very good at strategizing because I'm starting to kick its ass pretty consistently, even on its highest level, and the computer seems to make dumb mistakes that a person with a little common sense wouldn't make--it reveals a valuable piece which I then am able to corner, and the AI doesn't make any attempts to bluff me into thinking that it can defend the endangered valuable piece with the many unknown pieces surrounding the it.
George Sodini and a world of no rewards and only punishment
I got a lot of traffic from the George Sodini posts--people are interested in that guy--I kind of get it, but at the same time I'm surprised by all the traffic coming my way. I find his case quite interesting but I feel like I'm suffering from information indigestion--explaining him is like trying to explain a really weird dream you had to someone--you maybe have a sense of what the dream was about, but it's hard for you to capture all the moving parts of the dream and then explain their special symbolic meaning to you, and put the whole thing together--translating the symbols for someone who doesn't have the key to understanding them, and then explaining their interrelationships.
That's kind of what I feel when I try to write about this Sodini character. I just think of the things he seemed interested in--he was web searching 'brown shirts' and 'Obama brown shirts' I think, and black men with young white women, and he was looking into avoidant personality type. He a brother he said was bossy and embarrassed men in front of their girlfriends, and had a bossy mom, and didn't believe either of them cared about him. He felt his father was a nothing who didn't give him any advice about life--I think he may have felt this about his mom too, in his journal, IIRC. He read about cognitive behavioral psychology, and seemed interested in the world of pick-up artists. He was a member of a church that preached that you were irrevocably saved if you accepted Jesus, no matter what you did after that, seemed to believe in predestination, seemed to believe he had no control over his life, felt that his failure with women was bad because it signified he couldn't achieve is goals. Christ and learning "Game" are also forms of self improvement that didn't seem to work for him. He seemed to get into shape recently, but that didn't register with him as progress--nor did getting a raise at work. What's the point of it all if women don't like you--women in some sense are the point of life for me--more realistically, passing on your genes is what we are geared to do.
He's almost like a character created by Nietzsche, in the sense that he's this guy who seemed to want some authority above him (Father, God) to give him direction and reward him when he does well. He wanted his dad to give him advice--rules, but he didn't get anything--he went to a church that seemed to get rid of the need for rules by saying everyone was saved once they accepted Jesus, hence getting rid of the incentive scheme of heaven and hell, once you've accepted Jesus (this may be a straw man characterization, but this is I think more or less how Sodini describes his church's philosophy). His mom was bossy, so gave him some of the direction he seemed to crave, but it was a punitive direction--do this or I'll punish you--that's how I interpret bossiness--not rewarding--and with women he seemed to get no positive or negative feedback whatever, or felt he didn't--they didn't tell him what is wrong with him when they reject him--they tell him he's a nice guy--no reward, no punishment there, at least as he saw it.
It seems like the only feedback he got was the negative kind, from his mom, or the punishment of his bullying brother (so he says, can't just take his side of the story of course). I can imagine this breeding a certain passivity in a person--any move you make is either met with no reward, or punishment. The point then becomes to sit still and wait for your reward, and as the years pass, you don't get them.
According to the five factory personality theory, some people are somewhat neurotic, meaning they have a capacity to feel negative emotions. There is also another dimension, the extraversion dimension, which correlates with positive emotion. So you can be low on extraversion, meaning you're not as likely to experience emotional highs. If you're aren't neurotic, then you're capacity for feeling negative emotions isn't very great. So a person with the strongest emotional motivation system would be someone with high extraversion and high neuroticism--they have strong carrots and sticks--whereas someone with low neuroticism and low extraversion wouldn't have high highs or low lows--they would be kind of in the middle, and just theoretically, it seems like they wouldn't be movers and shakers.
I speculated Sodini was average in extraversion, and high neuroticism. I guesses average extraversion, because he seemed to get lonely and seemed to want to have relationships with people, and high neuroticism because of all the negative thinking. I thought maybe he was high on conscientiousness and agreeableness--but being high on agreeableness seems quite off on second thought--he did shoot up the place, and he has lots of critiques of people. He seems to have a cynical world view in which religion is a waste and employers are just looking to trim the fat in laying people off.
I do wonder, though, if some people just are stuck. With Sodini, now that his whole life has run its course, you can say, look, things went one way and no other way--he ended his life after killing three people in a gym and wounding a bunch others. There is no way his life can be changed at this point.
I'm fascinated by this issue, because I think as long as you're alive, you have options. You're not doomed unless, you know, you've gotten cornered and its pretty obvious there's no way out. Even then weird things can happen and we humans don't know it all. You could get rescued, or you could get killed and wake up in the matrix. It's not necessarily probable, based on your limited knowledge and interpretation of the facts, but it's not something you can completely dismiss.
But you could say now, Sodini was destined to live a miserable life. You could say that about the novelist David Foster Wallace too. An interesting thing to me is that you can be a bright person, like Foster Wallace, and you just can't work out a solution to living a reasonably happy life. Say we look at the past and say, okay, maybe 5 percent of the world lives miserable lives--if they knew what they were going to face they would have said, oh, no thanks, I'll pass on living.
Though that is an odd thought--I tend to think living, even if it's kind of a crummy life, is better than living no life. But then, if you said, well, look, you can live 1000 years in a virtual reality recreation of Dante's hell, or nonexistence, I might say, oh--I'd prefer oblivion.
Another thing that I think of, with Sodini--why not just buy hookers and go crazy that way, rather than killing people and then shooting yourself? I think of that Nine Inch Nails' lyric, "Nothing can stop me now, 'cause I don't care anymore." It makes some sense. I think of the Joker from Batman. He derives a great deal of power from not caring about outcomes. He can't be cajoled. Terrorists don't care whether they live or die, and derive enormous power from this.
But I think Sodini wanted to like, have a young girlfriend who was head-over-heels for him and they could have this domestic fantasy--the loving man and his beautiful wife, and for some reason he believed that path was completely closed to him. I think this is maybe where the crazy depression kicks in--me trying to think rationally about what he was thinking is the wrong approach--the idea might be to imagine that he didn't even see how crazy his reasoning was--but he did seem to refer to himself as crazy, so that is a curious issue.
I'm reminded of another element of his life--that he might have had a daughter who is maybe 18 or so now--and I kind of wonder what the whole story was there--what was the deal between him and the mother, and why hadn't he kept in touch, and how does this connect to his obsession with young women--he looked up age of consent in Pennsylvania where he lived.
That's kind of what I feel when I try to write about this Sodini character. I just think of the things he seemed interested in--he was web searching 'brown shirts' and 'Obama brown shirts' I think, and black men with young white women, and he was looking into avoidant personality type. He a brother he said was bossy and embarrassed men in front of their girlfriends, and had a bossy mom, and didn't believe either of them cared about him. He felt his father was a nothing who didn't give him any advice about life--I think he may have felt this about his mom too, in his journal, IIRC. He read about cognitive behavioral psychology, and seemed interested in the world of pick-up artists. He was a member of a church that preached that you were irrevocably saved if you accepted Jesus, no matter what you did after that, seemed to believe in predestination, seemed to believe he had no control over his life, felt that his failure with women was bad because it signified he couldn't achieve is goals. Christ and learning "Game" are also forms of self improvement that didn't seem to work for him. He seemed to get into shape recently, but that didn't register with him as progress--nor did getting a raise at work. What's the point of it all if women don't like you--women in some sense are the point of life for me--more realistically, passing on your genes is what we are geared to do.
He's almost like a character created by Nietzsche, in the sense that he's this guy who seemed to want some authority above him (Father, God) to give him direction and reward him when he does well. He wanted his dad to give him advice--rules, but he didn't get anything--he went to a church that seemed to get rid of the need for rules by saying everyone was saved once they accepted Jesus, hence getting rid of the incentive scheme of heaven and hell, once you've accepted Jesus (this may be a straw man characterization, but this is I think more or less how Sodini describes his church's philosophy). His mom was bossy, so gave him some of the direction he seemed to crave, but it was a punitive direction--do this or I'll punish you--that's how I interpret bossiness--not rewarding--and with women he seemed to get no positive or negative feedback whatever, or felt he didn't--they didn't tell him what is wrong with him when they reject him--they tell him he's a nice guy--no reward, no punishment there, at least as he saw it.
It seems like the only feedback he got was the negative kind, from his mom, or the punishment of his bullying brother (so he says, can't just take his side of the story of course). I can imagine this breeding a certain passivity in a person--any move you make is either met with no reward, or punishment. The point then becomes to sit still and wait for your reward, and as the years pass, you don't get them.
According to the five factory personality theory, some people are somewhat neurotic, meaning they have a capacity to feel negative emotions. There is also another dimension, the extraversion dimension, which correlates with positive emotion. So you can be low on extraversion, meaning you're not as likely to experience emotional highs. If you're aren't neurotic, then you're capacity for feeling negative emotions isn't very great. So a person with the strongest emotional motivation system would be someone with high extraversion and high neuroticism--they have strong carrots and sticks--whereas someone with low neuroticism and low extraversion wouldn't have high highs or low lows--they would be kind of in the middle, and just theoretically, it seems like they wouldn't be movers and shakers.
I speculated Sodini was average in extraversion, and high neuroticism. I guesses average extraversion, because he seemed to get lonely and seemed to want to have relationships with people, and high neuroticism because of all the negative thinking. I thought maybe he was high on conscientiousness and agreeableness--but being high on agreeableness seems quite off on second thought--he did shoot up the place, and he has lots of critiques of people. He seems to have a cynical world view in which religion is a waste and employers are just looking to trim the fat in laying people off.
I do wonder, though, if some people just are stuck. With Sodini, now that his whole life has run its course, you can say, look, things went one way and no other way--he ended his life after killing three people in a gym and wounding a bunch others. There is no way his life can be changed at this point.
I'm fascinated by this issue, because I think as long as you're alive, you have options. You're not doomed unless, you know, you've gotten cornered and its pretty obvious there's no way out. Even then weird things can happen and we humans don't know it all. You could get rescued, or you could get killed and wake up in the matrix. It's not necessarily probable, based on your limited knowledge and interpretation of the facts, but it's not something you can completely dismiss.
But you could say now, Sodini was destined to live a miserable life. You could say that about the novelist David Foster Wallace too. An interesting thing to me is that you can be a bright person, like Foster Wallace, and you just can't work out a solution to living a reasonably happy life. Say we look at the past and say, okay, maybe 5 percent of the world lives miserable lives--if they knew what they were going to face they would have said, oh, no thanks, I'll pass on living.
Though that is an odd thought--I tend to think living, even if it's kind of a crummy life, is better than living no life. But then, if you said, well, look, you can live 1000 years in a virtual reality recreation of Dante's hell, or nonexistence, I might say, oh--I'd prefer oblivion.
Another thing that I think of, with Sodini--why not just buy hookers and go crazy that way, rather than killing people and then shooting yourself? I think of that Nine Inch Nails' lyric, "Nothing can stop me now, 'cause I don't care anymore." It makes some sense. I think of the Joker from Batman. He derives a great deal of power from not caring about outcomes. He can't be cajoled. Terrorists don't care whether they live or die, and derive enormous power from this.
But I think Sodini wanted to like, have a young girlfriend who was head-over-heels for him and they could have this domestic fantasy--the loving man and his beautiful wife, and for some reason he believed that path was completely closed to him. I think this is maybe where the crazy depression kicks in--me trying to think rationally about what he was thinking is the wrong approach--the idea might be to imagine that he didn't even see how crazy his reasoning was--but he did seem to refer to himself as crazy, so that is a curious issue.
I'm reminded of another element of his life--that he might have had a daughter who is maybe 18 or so now--and I kind of wonder what the whole story was there--what was the deal between him and the mother, and why hadn't he kept in touch, and how does this connect to his obsession with young women--he looked up age of consent in Pennsylvania where he lived.
George Sodini, socially anxious, dysthymic, cognitive-behavioral methods through the lens of big five personality theory, ev psych musings on suicide
George Sodini was a spree killer who killed 3 women in an LA Fitness in Pittsburgh. He left his journal posted on the web, which I read, via Half Sigma, and found it quite riveting and strange. As far as I can tell, Sodini was socially anxious and depressed, maybe dysthymic, meaning he had a low-grade depression, possibly for a very long time.
I am unclear as to why he shot up an LA Fitness. He seemed to be fixated on women not liking him. I suspect this was mostly a feeling he had in his head rather than a reality--he seems like a decent-looking guy with a not terribly off-putting demeanor, if you look at his youtube videos.
I thought cognitive behavioral psychology might have turned things around for him. Apparently he read about this subject on Wikipedia, according to his Google search log. I'm not sure if he was much of a practitioner of it, or if he were, he fell out of the habit. The idea of cognitive behavioral therapy is that what you say to yourself affects your mood, and you have to change what you say to yourself, on pragmatic or reasoned-out grounds, and you will feel better. Depressives tend to frame things negatively--and you see this in Sodini's journal, in which he mentions he got a promotion despite his company laying off people, and he returns quickly to the point that he hadn't had sex in twenty years. I'm reminded of the idea that we men do everything for women--or maybe we do everything for sex--and so a promotion means nothing if you think you're not going to augment your prospects with women, which is apparently what he thought, though it seems rationally that a raise would get you more money and more status and hence probably would augment your chances with women.
Anyway, cognitive behavioral psychology aims to get people thinking in more realistic terms when their depressive thinking is bad for them, and pragmatically gets people thinking more positively because it seems likely to make your life better to do this. You dispute your negative self talk. Albert Ellis, who invented the ABC method, suggests you notice the "A"--the activating circumstance that leads to the negative feeling, then note the "B", a belief that is associated with the activating circumstance, and then note the "C", the consequence of this belief. So if I feel bummed out, I would look for an activating situation that lead to the bummed-out feeling--I am in a meeting that is going nowhere. I then look for beliefs I probably have about this meeting--something like, "We're never going to get anywhere if we're trying to get things done with these pointless meetings." Then I look at the consequences of this belief--I feel bummed out and lethargic and apathetic.
So, to change the feeling, you would aim to dispute the belief--when the belief falls the feeling will fall with it, and a good belief will make you feel good. So you dispute the belief: "The meetings aren't completely pointless--we have gotten things done in meetings, such as X, Y and Z. Also, I can bring up ideas to change things, and I probably could get permission to skip some of the meetings I'm probably not needed at--and might even be rewarded for my initiative, if my time is otherwise well spent." You then notice how you feel as a consequence, and you might feel better. It's possibly you won't, but I find this approach works pretty good, and if you do it a bunch of times, you start to feel better. The trick is getting up the energy to do it, which is hard if you're bummed out, because by its nature, being bummed out leads to tiredness. Sodini might have been stuck, or not as susceptible to the benefits of the cognitive behavioral approach on this level--it seems plausible it might not work for everyone.
Another element of the cognitive behavioral approach is practicing new behaviors. The method I've heard of is basically exposure to what scares or bothers you, either gradually, which is basically by putting yourself in slightly bothersome or scary conditions, and repeat the experience until the fear goes away, and then move to more intense experiences until they go away, until you've climbed to the top, where your biggest fear lies. The other angle is immediate exposure, which is jumping into the big fear over and over until it doesn't bother you anymore. I think the second approach isn't quite as popular with psychologists, though I suspect it might be because people would get cured quicker and the psychologists would lose out on money. That's probably too cynical an interpretation to be entirely true, though I could see some grain of truth possibly being in it--the other angle is that big shocking exposures might cause patients to freak out and leave therapy, or become further sensitized to the scary situation, making it even more bothersome to them in the future and harder to approach.
I could how people approach these problems being linked to their personality traits of conscientiousness and neuroticism. I would suspect that the more neurotic you are, the harder the immediate exposure is, and this approach might be better for people who are only kind of neurotic or moderately neurotic. Stable people aren't likely to have any problems with fear or depression, so they won't end up in therapy anyway. People with high conscientiousness might do well with cognitive behavioral approaches, either immediate or gradual exposure to fears, because they'll stick to a plan.
The people who might be in rough shape are the highly neurotic who are also low on conscientiousness, because they'd be too freaked out to do the immediate exposure, but too spontaneous to stick to the gradual exposure, or to stick with the ABC approach to dealing with negative self talk.
But this doesn't quite seem right, because Sodini, as far as I can tell, seems to have been high on the neuroticism scale and high on the conscientiousness scale, so my theory doesn't seem to quite be fitting his case and might be in need of some repair.
One thing that leaps to mind is that some people seem to be very orderly on the outside but very chaotic on the inside, and vice versa. I think of myself as extremely chaotic on the outside but very orderly on the inside--I think I get a sense of control from ordering my inner world rather than my external world, whereas some people seem to get the sense of order from the external world, but their way of thinking about the world seems very disordered or ad hoc to me.
Reading Sodini's journals, he seems somewhat disordered in his reasoning. I think it might be unfair to judge him on this, because he was probably upset when writing.
Let me jump back and think about what I would guess are Sodini's Big Five Personality factors--I don't do this with great confidence--this is just a cursory, tentative thing:
O - average openness
C - high conscientiousness
E - average extraversion
A - high agreeableness
N - high neuroticism
With this picture, my speculation is he was someone who felt he did all the right things ostensibly, and was missing some unseen action that people expected of him, his neuroticism seeking some negative thing about himself that lead him to be seen as not good-enough to be rewarded with a woman. He worked hard to try to get one, acting conscientiously and agreeably, and waited, patiently, until it seemed there wasn't going to be a reward, and then felt despondent and self-annihilated after killing some women who were supposed to be his reward for being an agreeable, conscientious person.
From an ev psych perspective, I imagine a dutiful tribe member waiting to be rewarded for his dutifulness, and when no reward comes, he kills some women to punish higher status males for not helping him, and higher status women for not, one of them, settling with him. So he might have had an over-the-top expression of a trait that in smaller doses would have been more valuable, which is the ability to do violence as a tool of getting what you want through threatening and following through on violent acts, or protecting yourself. The self annihilation thing is tricky--it could be that it's an over-the-top expression of a trait of self-harm that induces others to help you, because they would rather you be healthy than hurt, to serve their own interests (imagine a running back who hit his legs--this would induce his friends to pay attention to him, which might be good for him and them, and would be a good tactic in him getting others to give him valuable resources). Another possibility, which I understand less, but imagine some plausibility to, is that a suicide takes out a poorly functioning group of genes--I don't really buy group selection as I understand it, but I think you could maybe argue that selfish genes might have some means of destroying their vessel, the human that will hopefully replicate the genes through reproduction--because the human is hurting the prospects of the selfish gene replicating in other humans near the human. So if John and Bill are brothers, and John is having trouble reproducing, because his behaviors aren't seen as very valuable, it might be good for him to die off, because his brother Bill might try to help his brother, and sink resources into him that he would otherwise sink into himself and his pursuit of reproduction.
I don't know if this really stands up to scrutiny, but if selfish-geners can accept kin selection, I'm not sure why they wouldn't be able to believe a person might kill himself so that his kin would have better reproductive success, passing on some of his genes that way. Someone with expertise could correct me, I'm sure, if I'm wrong and point out the error of my reasoning.
I don't support suicide, of course, generally. It seems to me Sodini could have gotten what he wanted, a woman who loved him. I wonder what a prediction market would have said about the prospects of Sodini getting love prior to his murder spree and suicide.
I am unclear as to why he shot up an LA Fitness. He seemed to be fixated on women not liking him. I suspect this was mostly a feeling he had in his head rather than a reality--he seems like a decent-looking guy with a not terribly off-putting demeanor, if you look at his youtube videos.
I thought cognitive behavioral psychology might have turned things around for him. Apparently he read about this subject on Wikipedia, according to his Google search log. I'm not sure if he was much of a practitioner of it, or if he were, he fell out of the habit. The idea of cognitive behavioral therapy is that what you say to yourself affects your mood, and you have to change what you say to yourself, on pragmatic or reasoned-out grounds, and you will feel better. Depressives tend to frame things negatively--and you see this in Sodini's journal, in which he mentions he got a promotion despite his company laying off people, and he returns quickly to the point that he hadn't had sex in twenty years. I'm reminded of the idea that we men do everything for women--or maybe we do everything for sex--and so a promotion means nothing if you think you're not going to augment your prospects with women, which is apparently what he thought, though it seems rationally that a raise would get you more money and more status and hence probably would augment your chances with women.
Anyway, cognitive behavioral psychology aims to get people thinking in more realistic terms when their depressive thinking is bad for them, and pragmatically gets people thinking more positively because it seems likely to make your life better to do this. You dispute your negative self talk. Albert Ellis, who invented the ABC method, suggests you notice the "A"--the activating circumstance that leads to the negative feeling, then note the "B", a belief that is associated with the activating circumstance, and then note the "C", the consequence of this belief. So if I feel bummed out, I would look for an activating situation that lead to the bummed-out feeling--I am in a meeting that is going nowhere. I then look for beliefs I probably have about this meeting--something like, "We're never going to get anywhere if we're trying to get things done with these pointless meetings." Then I look at the consequences of this belief--I feel bummed out and lethargic and apathetic.
So, to change the feeling, you would aim to dispute the belief--when the belief falls the feeling will fall with it, and a good belief will make you feel good. So you dispute the belief: "The meetings aren't completely pointless--we have gotten things done in meetings, such as X, Y and Z. Also, I can bring up ideas to change things, and I probably could get permission to skip some of the meetings I'm probably not needed at--and might even be rewarded for my initiative, if my time is otherwise well spent." You then notice how you feel as a consequence, and you might feel better. It's possibly you won't, but I find this approach works pretty good, and if you do it a bunch of times, you start to feel better. The trick is getting up the energy to do it, which is hard if you're bummed out, because by its nature, being bummed out leads to tiredness. Sodini might have been stuck, or not as susceptible to the benefits of the cognitive behavioral approach on this level--it seems plausible it might not work for everyone.
Another element of the cognitive behavioral approach is practicing new behaviors. The method I've heard of is basically exposure to what scares or bothers you, either gradually, which is basically by putting yourself in slightly bothersome or scary conditions, and repeat the experience until the fear goes away, and then move to more intense experiences until they go away, until you've climbed to the top, where your biggest fear lies. The other angle is immediate exposure, which is jumping into the big fear over and over until it doesn't bother you anymore. I think the second approach isn't quite as popular with psychologists, though I suspect it might be because people would get cured quicker and the psychologists would lose out on money. That's probably too cynical an interpretation to be entirely true, though I could see some grain of truth possibly being in it--the other angle is that big shocking exposures might cause patients to freak out and leave therapy, or become further sensitized to the scary situation, making it even more bothersome to them in the future and harder to approach.
I could how people approach these problems being linked to their personality traits of conscientiousness and neuroticism. I would suspect that the more neurotic you are, the harder the immediate exposure is, and this approach might be better for people who are only kind of neurotic or moderately neurotic. Stable people aren't likely to have any problems with fear or depression, so they won't end up in therapy anyway. People with high conscientiousness might do well with cognitive behavioral approaches, either immediate or gradual exposure to fears, because they'll stick to a plan.
The people who might be in rough shape are the highly neurotic who are also low on conscientiousness, because they'd be too freaked out to do the immediate exposure, but too spontaneous to stick to the gradual exposure, or to stick with the ABC approach to dealing with negative self talk.
But this doesn't quite seem right, because Sodini, as far as I can tell, seems to have been high on the neuroticism scale and high on the conscientiousness scale, so my theory doesn't seem to quite be fitting his case and might be in need of some repair.
One thing that leaps to mind is that some people seem to be very orderly on the outside but very chaotic on the inside, and vice versa. I think of myself as extremely chaotic on the outside but very orderly on the inside--I think I get a sense of control from ordering my inner world rather than my external world, whereas some people seem to get the sense of order from the external world, but their way of thinking about the world seems very disordered or ad hoc to me.
Reading Sodini's journals, he seems somewhat disordered in his reasoning. I think it might be unfair to judge him on this, because he was probably upset when writing.
Let me jump back and think about what I would guess are Sodini's Big Five Personality factors--I don't do this with great confidence--this is just a cursory, tentative thing:
O - average openness
C - high conscientiousness
E - average extraversion
A - high agreeableness
N - high neuroticism
With this picture, my speculation is he was someone who felt he did all the right things ostensibly, and was missing some unseen action that people expected of him, his neuroticism seeking some negative thing about himself that lead him to be seen as not good-enough to be rewarded with a woman. He worked hard to try to get one, acting conscientiously and agreeably, and waited, patiently, until it seemed there wasn't going to be a reward, and then felt despondent and self-annihilated after killing some women who were supposed to be his reward for being an agreeable, conscientious person.
From an ev psych perspective, I imagine a dutiful tribe member waiting to be rewarded for his dutifulness, and when no reward comes, he kills some women to punish higher status males for not helping him, and higher status women for not, one of them, settling with him. So he might have had an over-the-top expression of a trait that in smaller doses would have been more valuable, which is the ability to do violence as a tool of getting what you want through threatening and following through on violent acts, or protecting yourself. The self annihilation thing is tricky--it could be that it's an over-the-top expression of a trait of self-harm that induces others to help you, because they would rather you be healthy than hurt, to serve their own interests (imagine a running back who hit his legs--this would induce his friends to pay attention to him, which might be good for him and them, and would be a good tactic in him getting others to give him valuable resources). Another possibility, which I understand less, but imagine some plausibility to, is that a suicide takes out a poorly functioning group of genes--I don't really buy group selection as I understand it, but I think you could maybe argue that selfish genes might have some means of destroying their vessel, the human that will hopefully replicate the genes through reproduction--because the human is hurting the prospects of the selfish gene replicating in other humans near the human. So if John and Bill are brothers, and John is having trouble reproducing, because his behaviors aren't seen as very valuable, it might be good for him to die off, because his brother Bill might try to help his brother, and sink resources into him that he would otherwise sink into himself and his pursuit of reproduction.
I don't know if this really stands up to scrutiny, but if selfish-geners can accept kin selection, I'm not sure why they wouldn't be able to believe a person might kill himself so that his kin would have better reproductive success, passing on some of his genes that way. Someone with expertise could correct me, I'm sure, if I'm wrong and point out the error of my reasoning.
I don't support suicide, of course, generally. It seems to me Sodini could have gotten what he wanted, a woman who loved him. I wonder what a prediction market would have said about the prospects of Sodini getting love prior to his murder spree and suicide.
Falling Down--George Sodini--the insight of horribleness
Tyler Cowen on insight through horribleness.
I read later in my google reader this post from Half Sigma--it's a posting of the journal of a man, George Sodini, who ended up going on a shooting spree, I guess. The solipsist in me thinks Cowen read the journal, or parts of it, and then thought to post the Horribleness blog--an apt post. I think of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Poe, Machiavelli, Roissy, Tucker Max, the Marquis de Sade, Eminem, maybe Clive Barker, as writers gaining insight through horribleness. In fiction I think characters who seem to have insight through horribleness--the Dark Knight version of The Joker, and Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness.
Though I may be blurring a vital distinction between being horrible and experiencing horribleness.
A cognitive-behavioral psychologist would have spotted the negative self talk in Sodini's journal in a minute--I bet a ton of what this guy repeated to himself completely blocked him from seeing the positive elements of his life. He talks at one point about how he got a raise at work, and then hastens to remind himself he hasn't had sex in 20 years.
Sodini also notes the value of bullshit confidence in his brother, but doesn't seem to want to fake confidence himself. It's funny that we can see a good approach but find it completely off-putting to use.
If Sodini were still alive and ended up in prison, I bet he would be getting all sorts of love letters from nutty women wanting to marry him, because it takes balls to go on a shoot-out, and morality isn't attractive and self-assertion is. A Roissy-esque point.
My cursory, tentative take away lesson is it's better to assume you have more control than you do, rather than less, and you'd be well off to assume you control as much as a reasonable person could believe. It's probably also good to act as if you have more confidence than you really have, on pragmatic grounds. Avoid negative self talk like the plague and focus on what is genuinely cool about yourself and repeat it as much as possible to yourself--I imagine a defense attorney like Alan Dershowitz arguing how good I am and contesting how bad I am, when I feel bummed out and need a lift--it's amazing the positive buzz you can get from positive self talk--literally, you can get a buzz--Sodini's mantra seemed to have been 'I haven't been with a woman in 20 years' rather than something like 'I just got a promotion when a bunch of other people just got laid off. I'm awesome,' or something like that.
I'm also reminded of how resonant these "Falling Down" type stories seem to be for many men, probably white, middle-class, fairly educated ones whose main frustrations seem to be about women and work.
I read later in my google reader this post from Half Sigma--it's a posting of the journal of a man, George Sodini, who ended up going on a shooting spree, I guess. The solipsist in me thinks Cowen read the journal, or parts of it, and then thought to post the Horribleness blog--an apt post. I think of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Poe, Machiavelli, Roissy, Tucker Max, the Marquis de Sade, Eminem, maybe Clive Barker, as writers gaining insight through horribleness. In fiction I think characters who seem to have insight through horribleness--the Dark Knight version of The Joker, and Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness.
Though I may be blurring a vital distinction between being horrible and experiencing horribleness.
A cognitive-behavioral psychologist would have spotted the negative self talk in Sodini's journal in a minute--I bet a ton of what this guy repeated to himself completely blocked him from seeing the positive elements of his life. He talks at one point about how he got a raise at work, and then hastens to remind himself he hasn't had sex in 20 years.
Sodini also notes the value of bullshit confidence in his brother, but doesn't seem to want to fake confidence himself. It's funny that we can see a good approach but find it completely off-putting to use.
If Sodini were still alive and ended up in prison, I bet he would be getting all sorts of love letters from nutty women wanting to marry him, because it takes balls to go on a shoot-out, and morality isn't attractive and self-assertion is. A Roissy-esque point.
My cursory, tentative take away lesson is it's better to assume you have more control than you do, rather than less, and you'd be well off to assume you control as much as a reasonable person could believe. It's probably also good to act as if you have more confidence than you really have, on pragmatic grounds. Avoid negative self talk like the plague and focus on what is genuinely cool about yourself and repeat it as much as possible to yourself--I imagine a defense attorney like Alan Dershowitz arguing how good I am and contesting how bad I am, when I feel bummed out and need a lift--it's amazing the positive buzz you can get from positive self talk--literally, you can get a buzz--Sodini's mantra seemed to have been 'I haven't been with a woman in 20 years' rather than something like 'I just got a promotion when a bunch of other people just got laid off. I'm awesome,' or something like that.
I'm also reminded of how resonant these "Falling Down" type stories seem to be for many men, probably white, middle-class, fairly educated ones whose main frustrations seem to be about women and work.
Thoughts on possible ways of making socializing easier for more introverted types
Just imagine a fantasy world in which you could pause the outside world and go to your room instantaneously and write or read or do whatever you want, and then you could instantaneously pop back into the social environment frictionlessly. That would be cool. Maybe that would be the way to go—get a lap top and just carry it around everywhere, and when you get bored you can pop onto it, or a blackberry with good internet functionality and some kid of word processor that lets you write a lot when you’re out. I mean, typing with your thumbs probably…it’s probably slower, but it might be something you can do--doesn’t sound that attractive to me actually but I don’t know.
One dictum you might follow is when you’re out and your socializing with people, look for the fun. Don’t be passive about not having fun. Look to get at the fun out there, the good experiences, don’t just sit there tolerating a boring situation or an actively unpleasant situation, have options. You can get out of wherever you are. Try to position yourself so you have options you can easily exercise. Avoid going to desert islands with one person. Having a nice mobile device would give you one robust option—you can get out of where you are and you instantaneously have all the resources of the web at your fingertips. “I’m not feeling this club, or this party. I’m going to head out, go down to a coffee shop, and read something on my iPod or Kindle or lap top—which is usually enjoyable.” Socializing becomes less of a sacrifice if it can be hit or miss, because you at least have the "get out of here and do some reading/writing on my laptop/other device" option. Another way of keeping your options open is bringing your own car, so you’re not tied to a group because you don't have transportation.
I’m fascinated by Tynan’s idea of living out of his RV—one thing he wrote about that appealed to me was that he could park in front of a club, go in there, and then go right out and get into his RV, and he’s home. That’s great. I love that idea.
Having a book with you in your pocket so you can take it out and read when you can—I mean this is not something you would do when socializing with people, whip out the book mid-conversation—though it might be good to have in a pinch when you want to bail on a party and get away and maybe read something. A little pocket notebook might work for something you can write on, if you want to do that when out. In lulls when you’re on a train or your in a cab, something like that, when you’re waiting in line by yourself, waiting for friends, that type of thing, a book in the pocket might be useful—a Kindle would be good because I read like a thousand things at once and jump from one thing to another, but obviously can’t carry a thousand books with me—a problem is the Kindle is pretty big I think. Do they make pocket Kindles? That’d be great. And a laptop/iPod/blackberry offers an opportunity to read that's similar to a Kindle.
One dictum you might follow is when you’re out and your socializing with people, look for the fun. Don’t be passive about not having fun. Look to get at the fun out there, the good experiences, don’t just sit there tolerating a boring situation or an actively unpleasant situation, have options. You can get out of wherever you are. Try to position yourself so you have options you can easily exercise. Avoid going to desert islands with one person. Having a nice mobile device would give you one robust option—you can get out of where you are and you instantaneously have all the resources of the web at your fingertips. “I’m not feeling this club, or this party. I’m going to head out, go down to a coffee shop, and read something on my iPod or Kindle or lap top—which is usually enjoyable.” Socializing becomes less of a sacrifice if it can be hit or miss, because you at least have the "get out of here and do some reading/writing on my laptop/other device" option. Another way of keeping your options open is bringing your own car, so you’re not tied to a group because you don't have transportation.
I’m fascinated by Tynan’s idea of living out of his RV—one thing he wrote about that appealed to me was that he could park in front of a club, go in there, and then go right out and get into his RV, and he’s home. That’s great. I love that idea.
Having a book with you in your pocket so you can take it out and read when you can—I mean this is not something you would do when socializing with people, whip out the book mid-conversation—though it might be good to have in a pinch when you want to bail on a party and get away and maybe read something. A little pocket notebook might work for something you can write on, if you want to do that when out. In lulls when you’re on a train or your in a cab, something like that, when you’re waiting in line by yourself, waiting for friends, that type of thing, a book in the pocket might be useful—a Kindle would be good because I read like a thousand things at once and jump from one thing to another, but obviously can’t carry a thousand books with me—a problem is the Kindle is pretty big I think. Do they make pocket Kindles? That’d be great. And a laptop/iPod/blackberry offers an opportunity to read that's similar to a Kindle.
keep doing the easiest stuff until you're done
patri friedman on difficulty in writing, et c. i comment there:
i find for editing that starting with the easy stuff and marking it off when it's re-written well can be useful, and when i hit a hard spot in the text, i try to skip it till later, and as i mark off more of the easy stuff, i get a better sense of how much of the difficult stuff there is, and usually it's not quite as daunting as it was when i started, because i've maybe got some momentum from doing the easy stuff, and i've also found that the hard stuff is much easier to do when you have a sense of its scale. 'oh, that's all there is?'
also, i think there's a framing effect. what seemed hard earlier might seem easy compared to other hard sections, and i feel better about doing the stuff that seemed hard earlier, because relative to other hard sections its easy.
i think this approach might apply for writing a first draft too, if you maybe note what's tough and move to the stuff that is easy to write about at present, and go back to the hard sections later.
Indirect libertarianism
Something that might help libertarians advance their cause is just doing things that aren’t directly libertarian together. I think of liberals in Hollywood. They aren’t necessarily always like, “Hey, let’s do something liberal together.” They are just a bunch of liberals who make movies together (journalists seem like this too I bet—academics too), and certain liberal ideas are kind of indirectly advanced in their work. I think Hollywood probably helped along the gay rights movement by just having gay people in movies (Halfsigma made a point about gays being portrayed as likable leading to them being accepted, IIRC) and it being no big deal they’re gay—not like “Milk” movies, where gayness is the centerpiece. “This guy is gay, and in the movie, characters like him, and his sexuality isn’t treated like a big deal, and viewers see that and maybe somewhere in their mind think, ‘I want to be like the people in the movie. They are high status, or cool, or heroic. I want to emulate them.’”
So this material doesn’t need to be like Atlas Shrugged. If people feel like you are trying to persuade or propagandize them, then they might instinctively resist-—a well-documented psychological phenomenon.
On the other hand, Atlas Shrugged actually has inspired a lot of people, so I'd have to account for that. I haven't read it but my impression is it preaches to the choir or rallies the troops, or sufficiently avoids the normal political vocabulary such that it flies under the radar of many people who would otherwise resist its message--or did at its inception.
So this material doesn’t need to be like Atlas Shrugged. If people feel like you are trying to persuade or propagandize them, then they might instinctively resist-—a well-documented psychological phenomenon.
On the other hand, Atlas Shrugged actually has inspired a lot of people, so I'd have to account for that. I haven't read it but my impression is it preaches to the choir or rallies the troops, or sufficiently avoids the normal political vocabulary such that it flies under the radar of many people who would otherwise resist its message--or did at its inception.
Terrorism and 'annoy-ism', stink bombs and noisemaking devices dropped on enemy populations to get them to do what you want
It might make sense to look into annoying populations hostile to the US with things like stink bombs—nonlethal but they just make life suck for people living where they got dropped, or noisemakers—drop noisemakers in hard-to-get-to places around a neighborhood that just makes the place noisy and irritating, and keep dropping them, maybe have little drone plans flying around emitting the annoying sound day-in and day-out, hurting the morale of the people in the city, an annoyance siege, if you will, until some demand is met.
You could maybe do that with Iran, drop noise-making things all over Tehran, stink bombs, and say you’ll keep dropping them until you get what you want, makes the people agitate for their leaders to give in to the political demands--communicate to the Iranian people in these areas that what you want and that the noise and stink will stop when you get what you want (does this make sense? Would they agitate for change, or would they fall behind their leaders against those causing the annoyance)—I wonder if they would collectively 'say', ‘We want nukes, but not so much that we have to live in stink and noise day-in and day-out.’
A siege of annoyance—no one or very few get killed (noisemaker beans some poor sap on the head, stink bomb triggers a lethal asthma attack). It makes life an annoying mess for people in the affected area, until they give in—they suffer and we Americans just go on with life, not generally worrying about troops or civilian casualties. And what's the complaint from the international community, or the Iranian government? That you're making things loud and stinky? Not exactly the most terribly situation, subject to getting others to rally behind the Iranian government. It's low-grade terrorism--"annoy-ism"--much more appealing to liberal democracies who don't like terrorism.
I think that is worth thinking about—I wonder if the military establishment has already thought about it—I imagine so—I think the stink bomb thing has been looked into.
You could maybe do that with Iran, drop noise-making things all over Tehran, stink bombs, and say you’ll keep dropping them until you get what you want, makes the people agitate for their leaders to give in to the political demands--communicate to the Iranian people in these areas that what you want and that the noise and stink will stop when you get what you want (does this make sense? Would they agitate for change, or would they fall behind their leaders against those causing the annoyance)—I wonder if they would collectively 'say', ‘We want nukes, but not so much that we have to live in stink and noise day-in and day-out.’
A siege of annoyance—no one or very few get killed (noisemaker beans some poor sap on the head, stink bomb triggers a lethal asthma attack). It makes life an annoying mess for people in the affected area, until they give in—they suffer and we Americans just go on with life, not generally worrying about troops or civilian casualties. And what's the complaint from the international community, or the Iranian government? That you're making things loud and stinky? Not exactly the most terribly situation, subject to getting others to rally behind the Iranian government. It's low-grade terrorism--"annoy-ism"--much more appealing to liberal democracies who don't like terrorism.
I think that is worth thinking about—I wonder if the military establishment has already thought about it—I imagine so—I think the stink bomb thing has been looked into.
Fun and productive novel writing
You write when you’re in the mood about what you want to write about, and look to graft a plot onto it. That’s maybe the most important thing. Start with writing about what you want and look to make it part of a story, and don’t fight where the story seems to be going. Don’t try to force yourself to write stuff that isn’t pleasurable to write. Focus on writing stuff that's enjoyable, and look for ways of making what you've written part of a plot, without making the effort unpleasant. This seems to be more or less what I've heard called 'The Fieldstone Method' of writing, where you write little pieces of writing and then assemble them into something bigger over time.
Fun and productive method, more or less
If something is fun and productive, do it till it’s not fun and productive, and then do something else that is fun and productive. If nothing is fun and productive, then ease your suffering, in an easy way, or the easiest available way that comes to mind for the time being. Use your intuition to figure out when to settle for an easiest available approach, rather than continuing to look for an easy approach. On a hot day like today, what would be an easy way of overcoming suffering? Maybe go to a movie theater or you watch tv downstairs where it’s cooler.
big five personality trait speculation--saddam hussein
saddam hussein
o - average openness
c - average conscientiousness
e - high extraversion
a - low agreeableness
n - low neuroticism
o - average openness
c - average conscientiousness
e - high extraversion
a - low agreeableness
n - low neuroticism
some interesting stuff about succeeding--note the unintended motif of danger and fields
rodney dangerfield develops an image to turn things around for himself:
ulysses s grant from his memoirs:
"At the time I quit, I was the only one who knew I quit!" In the early 1960s he started down what would be a long road toward rehabilitating his career, still working as a salesman by day. He came to realize that what he lacked was an "image" — a well-defined on-stage persona that audiences could relate to and that would distinguish him from similar comics.
ulysses s grant from his memoirs:
He [Stanton] could see our weakness, but he could not see that the enemy was in danger. The enemy would not have been in danger if Mr. Stanton had been in the field.
Samuel Johnson
I haven't read anything by Samuel Johnson, other than maybe a few Rambler or Idler essays. I've read his Wikipedia page, and read many interesting things about him. John Derbyshire seems an admirer of Johnson, and I like reading some of Derbyshire's writing.
I've read that when Johnson was writing his book "Lives of Poets" Boswell offered to get him an interview with someone Johnson was going to be writing about, and Johnson declined, wanting only to work with what was easy to get a hold of.
I was reading in the book, "Samuel Johnson: The Struggle", about Johnson's work habits. Apparently he was lazy, and liked preparing for works, but had a hard time getting started. He would write some work with very little time left to finish, when a deadline was looming, and put the work out. According to this book, Johnson got through some of his big works by breaking them down into smaller works that he could finish quickly.
I've noted that Johnson seemed to possess a trait personality psychologists might call 'low conscientiousness'. Basically, someone with low conscientiousness is prone to addiction, to procrastination, to lack of dutifulness. In Daniel Nettle's book, "Personality", he talks about how someone with low conscientiousness has trouble stopping himself from doing something, and AA strategies might work with this tendency by telling people to completely abstain, since a person with low conscientiousness has trouble stopping. Johnson said something to the effect that it was easier for him to abstain from something than to temper himself in the use of something.
I noted before too that I thought maybe low conscientiousness people might benefit from being able to binge on something. They see some attractive opportunity, take it, and have a hard time stopping. Their production perhaps is lumpier--not working steadily, but creating in bursts in between periods of indolence. Perhaps this was the case with Johnson.
I've also thought perhaps people of low conscientiousness might act as a reserve unit, so to speak. While the people with high conscientiousness have an easy time working steadily and sticking to the task at hand, the low conscientiousness people sit around, preserving their energy, sometimes dealing with minor chaos created by their lack of attentiveness to things like deadlines or duties, and when something unexpected happens, they leap into action, seeing the strong need, having preserved their energy, and having had some practice in dealing with chaos. I think of Ulysses S Grant, another man known for his indolence, who also was able to achieve great things despite it.
I've read that when Johnson was writing his book "Lives of Poets" Boswell offered to get him an interview with someone Johnson was going to be writing about, and Johnson declined, wanting only to work with what was easy to get a hold of.
I was reading in the book, "Samuel Johnson: The Struggle", about Johnson's work habits. Apparently he was lazy, and liked preparing for works, but had a hard time getting started. He would write some work with very little time left to finish, when a deadline was looming, and put the work out. According to this book, Johnson got through some of his big works by breaking them down into smaller works that he could finish quickly.
I've noted that Johnson seemed to possess a trait personality psychologists might call 'low conscientiousness'. Basically, someone with low conscientiousness is prone to addiction, to procrastination, to lack of dutifulness. In Daniel Nettle's book, "Personality", he talks about how someone with low conscientiousness has trouble stopping himself from doing something, and AA strategies might work with this tendency by telling people to completely abstain, since a person with low conscientiousness has trouble stopping. Johnson said something to the effect that it was easier for him to abstain from something than to temper himself in the use of something.
I noted before too that I thought maybe low conscientiousness people might benefit from being able to binge on something. They see some attractive opportunity, take it, and have a hard time stopping. Their production perhaps is lumpier--not working steadily, but creating in bursts in between periods of indolence. Perhaps this was the case with Johnson.
I've also thought perhaps people of low conscientiousness might act as a reserve unit, so to speak. While the people with high conscientiousness have an easy time working steadily and sticking to the task at hand, the low conscientiousness people sit around, preserving their energy, sometimes dealing with minor chaos created by their lack of attentiveness to things like deadlines or duties, and when something unexpected happens, they leap into action, seeing the strong need, having preserved their energy, and having had some practice in dealing with chaos. I think of Ulysses S Grant, another man known for his indolence, who also was able to achieve great things despite it.
some of william t. sherman's insights on war
all quotes from william t. sherman's memoirs. text in bold was emboldened by me
being at the front less anxiety-provoking than being in the rear:
keeping your object in mind, to paraphrase liddell-hart.
command intent and schwerpunkt:
journalists bad for morale:
skirmishing and reserves:
importance of good morale:
being at the front less anxiety-provoking than being in the rear:
I never saw the rear of an army engaged in battle but I feared that some calamity had happened at the front the apparent confusion, broken wagons, crippled horses, men lying about dead and maimed, parties hastening to and fro in seeming disorder, and a general apprehension of something dreadful about to ensue; all these signs, however, lessened as I neared the front, and there the contrast was complete--perfect order, men and horses--full of confidence, and it was not unusual for general hilarity, laughing, and cheering. Although cannon might be firing, the musketry clattering, and the enemy's shot hitting close, there reigned a general feeling of strength and security that bore a marked contrast to the bloody signs that had drifted rapidly to the rear; therefore, for comfort and safety, I surely would rather be at the front than the rear line of battle. So also on the march, the head of a column moves on steadily, while the rear is alternately halting and then rushing forward to close up the gap; and all sorts of rumors, especially the worst, float back to the rear. Old troops invariably deem it a special privilege to be in the front --to be at the "head of column"--because experience has taught them that it is the easiest and most comfortable place, and danger only adds zest and stimulus to this fact.
keeping your object in mind, to paraphrase liddell-hart.
Other great difficulties, experienced by every general, are to measure truly the thousand-and-one reports that come to him in the midst of conflict; to preserve a clear and well-defined purpose at every instant of time, and to cause all efforts to converge to that end.
command intent and schwerpunkt:
No man can properly command an army from the rear, he must be "at its front;" and when a detachment is made, the commander thereof should be informed of the object to be accomplished, and left as free as possible to execute it in his own way; and when an army is divided up into several parts, the superior should always attend that one which he regards as most important.
journalists bad for morale:
Newspaper correspondents with an army, as a rule, are mischievous. They are the world's gossips, pick up and retail the camp scandal, and gradually drift to the headquarters of some general, who finds it easier to make reputation at home than with his own corps or division. They are also tempted to prophesy events and state facts which, to an enemy, reveal a purpose in time to guard against it. Moreover, they are always bound to see facts colored by the partisan or political character of their own patrons, and thus bring army officers into the political controversies of the day, which are always mischievous and wrong. Yet, so greedy are the people at large for war news, that it is doubtful whether any army commander can exclude all reporters, without bringing down on himself a clamor that may imperil his own safety. Time and moderation must bring a just solution to this modern difficulty.
skirmishing and reserves:
When advancing or retreating in line of battle, the usual skirmish-line constitutes the picket-line, and may have "reserves," but usually the main line of battle constitutes the reserve; and in this connection I will state that the recent innovation introduced into the new infantry tactics by General Upton is admirable, for by it each regiment, brigade, and division deployed, sends forward as "skirmishers" the one man of each set of fours, to cover its own front, and these can be recalled or reenforced at pleasure by the bugle-signal.
importance of good morale:
I have many a time crept forward to the skirmish-line to avail myself of the cover of the pickets "little fort," to observe more closely some expected result; and always talked familiarly with the men, and was astonished to see how well they comprehended the general object, and how accurately they were informed of the sate of facts existing miles away from their particular corps. Soldiers are very quick to catch the general drift and purpose of a campaign, and are always sensible when they are well commanded or well cared for. Once impressed with this fact, and that they are making progress, they bear cheerfully any amount of labor and privation.