Scott Adams's goal in writing

You might have heard about the shitstorm that resulted when Scott Adams wrote -- and then took down -- a post mocking men's rights. Scott's response to the mess is a must read. It includes a quote that I am absolutely in love with:

Regular readers of my blog know that the goal of my writing is to be interesting and nothing else. I’m not trying to change anyone’s opinion, largely because I don’t believe humans can be influenced by exposure to better arguments, even if I had some. But I do think people benefit by exposure to ideas that are different from whatever they are hearing, even when the ideas are worse. That’s my niche: something different. That approach springs from my observation that brains are like investment portfolios, where diversification is generally a good strategy. I’m not trying to move you to my point of view; I’m trying to add diversity to your portfolio of thoughts. In the short term, I hope it’s stimulating enough to be entertaining. Long term, the best ideas probably come from people who have the broadest exposure to different views.

I am not sure how to describe the feeling that results when a writer crisply combines a few of your unconscious inklings into a coherent conscious whole -- is it joy? relief? excitement? -- but that's the feeling I got from this quote.

Introducing my new book-thingy: 446ish* Ideas** Worth*** Considering

I am excited to announce that my book-thingies are soon to be printed and will be shipped as early as next week. That means I am ready to collect addresses. First, some info so you know what you are ordering.

Here’s the cover, which I hope mostly explains what this is:



You can think of it as a catalogue of the most interesting or insightful ideas I encountered during Winter 2011.

The 446ish ideas constitute a total of 10,948 words (it will probably take you about an hour to read), and they are spread across 32 8.5" x 11" pages and 13 “chapters”:

"Chapter" (# Ideas)
This Queer Universe (17)
Giving and Receiving Information Responsibly (26)
Words are Repositories of Ideas (41)
Human Relations (50)
Moral Animals (26)
The Good (and Bad) Life (35)
Work, Recreation, Indecision, and Idleness (74)
Technofuturism, Market Economies, and "me" (26)
Behaviorism is so 1969 (48)
Getting Emotional (39)
Other Noteworthy Theories, Conceptualizations, and Metaphors (30)
How Trout Fishing is like Life (25)
Choosing Your Words Wisely (8)


I am pleased with the way it turned out, with the one little exception that it probably makes me seem as if pleasure is my enemy. (You’ll see what I mean once you read it.)

I ruminated a lot on how to approach the pricing, and here’s what I decided: It’s totally free¹, including the shipping, because I am not trying to make any money from this. An exception to the free-ness is if you live on some remote island or African savanna. I’ll eat the shipping if it’s under $2.50; otherwise, I’ll probably ask you to paypal me some funds up front.

¹ There is a “but”, and it’s that you might feel a bit guilty if you choose not to send any money my way—not because I'm a kind-hearted person who graciously distributes his lovely gifts to the world (though I am, of course), but because 100% of the proceeds will go to two really great non-profits: TROSA and Love Wins. It's not my intention to make you feel guilty; please only "pay" what you think is fair, and I don’t want you to make that decision until you read it. Payments/donations can be made to paypal account justinwehr@gmail.com.

[Friends, regular commenters: Check your inbox because the deal is a bit different for you.]

You are welcome to share your copy with friends or enemies, or to send them a link to this post, or to input their addresses for them unknowingly.

There’s not really a limit to how many copies I can print, but I absolutely will not print any new copies after June 21, so get your order in before then.

A couple of people have asked whether this will be available for e-readers. The answer is probably not, at least not for awhile. I stubbornly believe this will be best consumed in printed form, but I am open to distributing digital copies once it’s out of print (after June 21).

That’s all I have to say. Now I’m ready to take thine addresses...

You are what you find pleasurable and meaningful, maybe

One of the things I admire most about my friend Bob – and I hate to put it this way because it makes it sound trivial – is his attention to language.

Here is an example:

To me the extent to which our identity is represented by our work is not so much about the work itself but about HOW we do the work. ... Cheri Huber wrote a book called "How you do anything is how you do everything." I think there's a lot of truth in that. We bring our identities to our work and, if we're invested, our work shows it.

Love it. How we do the work seems like a far superior way of constructing one’s identity than what we do. But for the average person, floating through life as we do, identity seems to be stuck on the what.

That’s not to say that the what doesn’t tell you anything interesting. Greg Linster, who writes a nice blog called Coffee Theory, asks this:

Which question reveals more about a person?

1) What do you do?
2) What do you do for fun?

Our behaviors, and especially those things we do in our “free time” (as much as I despise the concept), tell us a lot about ourselves. They probably tell us much more about ourselves than our intentions. Here is a paraphrased idea from Sheena Iyengar that I shared awhile ago:

With deep introspection, you might be able to get a glimpse of your intentions, but who we really are is not our intentions but the choices we've made. The choices we make in the future will be influenced by the choices we’ve made in the past, and who we will be in life is the sum of our choices. So to find out who “you” are, focus not on your intentions but on how to interpret your behaviors.

The question that has been bugging me is, how do people determine the extent to which all the different things they do construct their identity? Or conversely, how does identity affect the extent to which people do all the different things they do? How is it that a person, without consciously considering it, comes to see themselves as mostly an accountant, or as mostly a blogger, or as mostly a Bieber fanboy?

I found an answer that satisfies me, which of course says nothing about its truth value. It is inspired by an innocent-seeming but profound idea from Harvard psychologist Tal Ben-Sahar (which I encountered in this excellent article by Oliver Burkeman). He says that the most dependable sources of happiness are those that lie at the intersection of pleasure and meaning. My speculation is that the same is true for our identity: Those activities that give us the highest pleasure + meaning quotient are also those activities that, by default, constitute the largest part of our identity.

It may be that the causality goes mostly in the other direction – maybe our identity determines which activities we find most pleasurable and meaningful – but I doubt it.

And as a final reminder from Paul Graham, keep your identity small—that is, if the outcome you care about is the accuracy of your beliefs. (And I'm not convinced that's an outcome deserving of high priority.)

An identity tied to what you do

Mark Kingwell in Catch and Release:

Since this is my job, or anyway one key aspect of it, writing isn't just any old thing I might or might not do, like gardening or staying fit. It counts as an important, even essential, task within the highly artificial and contingent universe of meaning out of which I have constructed my identity. I am a writer of books, and therefore must continue to write books in order to maintain the coherence of that identity, vulnerable as it is through the passage of time. At a certain point, hard to define but inevitable, if I have written no further books, I slip, like an unreturned phone call, from the status of deliberate writer into the status of former writer. This shift is distinct from but oddly related to the familiar law, first noticed by Auden, which dictates that all writers under forty are "young" while all writers over forty are "failing to fulfill their promise."

Reminds me of something Anna said:

It occurs to me that, just like you shouldn’t confuse your schooling with your education, you shouldn’t confuse how you make your living with what you do.

Home buying for smarties

I have been pretty lucky with how my house decision turned out, but I realize now that it could have been disastrous. When I signed the mortgage papers I was 22 years old and only a few months removed from college. My lenses were still clouded with visions of beer pong (actually I was too nerdy to play, but sometimes I peered out my window at the games going on with the fraternity gentlemen across the street) and I had no idea how long I would be in my new job or city.

Even before college ended, I felt in a hurry to get started with life, maybe from watching too many frat boys play beer pong. I wanted a job, a dog, a house, and a girlfriend. Amazingly, within a few months after graduation, I had all of those things. Even more amazingly, the decisions didn’t suck.

Why did I want a house? For the classic [and terrible] belief that rent was “throwing away money”. What was I looking for in a house? No idea, but it’d be really cool if one of the rooms was big enough to hold a ping pong table. (Yes, I was really thinking that.)

I remember picking up a vibe of slight discomfort from the realtors and lawyers and sellers, maybe a twinge of concern wondering whether their dealings with this obviously clueless shaggy-haired kid passed the test of ethics. I’m not sure it did. I think the only thing that kept them believing that this wasn’t some big practical joke was the note I had from a banker saying it wasn’t.

I’m not sure how I made it out with any money left, but I suspect it had something to do with my eminent frugality, or more likely the fact that my always-supportive parents were by my side to make sure I didn’t do anything really stupid.

I am now approaching four years in my house. It has its faults like anything else, of course, but on the whole, I am an absurdly lucky guy. Recognizing the potential disaster that it could have been, I felt compelled to share my thoughts -- some philosophical, some practical -- with my sister Meg who is now shopping for houses with her fiancé. She is older and wiser than I was, but I think any first-time home-shopper could benefit from a good, stern talking-to.

The thoughts I shared with her are below the fold. Would like to hear what you think I'm missing or what you think I got wrong.

Continue reading...

Spouses are instruments of fun

That's the message I get from economist Betsy Stevenson who told Spousonomics that the value-added (= purpose) of marriage is "having more fun".

She and her partner Justin Wolfers go on to talk about how they literally ran regressions on happiness data before deciding whether to have a kid. The regressions, sadly, did not support their decision to reproduce, but they are glad they ignored their empirical tendencies because baby Matilda turned out to be a bundle of joy. So it wasn't a bad decision after all. Because she brought them joy. More happiness for me = good decision. That's the reasoning.

But had Matilda instead been a bundle of hell... or if she turns into one during her terrible twos.... well, then what?

Economists like to brag that they are more honest than practitioners of other disciplines because they are more willing to say repugnant things. And I'm fine with that. In fact, that's what drew me to economics.

But honesty is not the same as intelligence. And what has turned me off from economics is the reliance on happiness as an outcome.

We are a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe, to borrow a phrase from Alain de Botton, and it's hard for me to see how anyone who recognizes that fact would base their lives (= their decisions) on optimizing some expected pleasure quotient.

Whenever you bring this up with an economist the standard reaction will be something like "well, but, we're not just talking about happiness. We're talking about utility."

Utility translates to anything you want, rendering the discussion so vague as to be effectively useless. Which is why when it comes to bringing their theories down from the level of the abstract, economists often end up talking about "happiness" and "fun" and "joy" in the way that Justin and Betsy do in the Spousonomics post.

I think the absurdity of seeking happiness can be partially revealed through mockery:

Sorry, Mom, I won't attend your funeral. That wouldn't be maximizing my utility function.

I love you, honey, so long as you are more fun than my next best alternative.


My former girlfriend, maybe because of insecurity, would regularly flat out ask me why I liked her and wanted to be with her. I would usually start my response by fumbling over clichés such as well because you're sweet and smart and funny, &c... Eventually I arrived at an answer that never seemed to satisfy her, but satisfied me, at least. It goes something like this:

A romantic relationship -- maybe any relationship -- starts for any number of cliché reasons such as traits you observe in the person, but any relationship that persists because of those initial reasons is in trouble. A relationship should not be a contract you make to keep someone you [initially] admired around, nor do I think it should be an arrangement to exchange mutual happiness or comfort or whatever. A relationship is probably best thought of as an investment (through exchanged vulnerabilities) you make in a fellow vaporous transient consciousness to go through this incidental universe a little less alone.

The meaning of fishing

If you asked me to name the type of book I would most like to read, high on my list would be one that semi-seriously relates trout fishing to the meaning of life.

Luckily, it's been done.

More importantly, it's been done well. University of Toronto philosophy professor Mark Kingwell wrote an excellent book called Catch and Release: Trout Fishing and the Meaning of Life.

Much of the book is not about the meaning of life, nor even trout fishing, except in a very indirect way. Nevertheless, the book has more passages that literally made my hair stand up than any other book I remember reading, and more passages that I read and re-read and re-read again.

Here he describes the type of thinking that takes place while fishing:

The state of mind peculiar to fishing is neither precisely analytical nor entirely aimless; rather, it's a happy wandering that may outwardly resemble calm yet inwardly accommodates the most felicitous meanders, a quivering suspension in the delights of the moment. You are there but not there, concentrating but immobile, sharp-eyed but relaxed. Fishing is as close to perfect mental equilibrium as a mortal may wish to approach, it seems to me, since the asymptotic end point it sketches is probably indistinguishable from an out-of-body experience, or, indeed, death. It is, says one devotee, a sport "capable of reducing the most inquiring mind to the happy indifference of a turnip." And how determinedly do we seek the vegetative state of contentment, this oddly welcome fever of peace, this therapeutic disease.

And here again:

And now you see the difference between concentrating and thinking. Fishing is reflexive because it empties the mind of the task-oriented cares of everyday life, makes room for thought. But much of that happens, as it were, at the margins. Fishing isn't like strolling in the woods. It requires your close and undivided attention, and so clears a space of almost timeless emptiness. You fall into the moment and hours pass without any awareness beyond the parting clouds, the rising breeze, a loon's call. But you can't fall entirely into reverie or you will fail. You must make your reflection active, your repose eager. Like playing the field in baseball, still more in cricket, angling will not work unless you match leisure with close attention, a readiness to react swiftly and elegantly when the conditions suddenly demand it.

After all, that's what fishing is about:

Fishing is not really about fish, in the end—or even the beginning. It's about what we allow ourselves to think, what we see reflected back when we look in the mirror of nature.

The modern teenage boy

In his 2001 book Next, Michael Lewis tells the story of a then 15 year old named Jonathan Lebed who managed to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by buying stocks, promoting the stocks on Yahoo! message boards, and then selling them when the price went up. In the process, he attracted the ire of the SEC, who couldn't quite explain how what he was doing was different from any other type of "market manipulation" that CNN analysts or businesses themselves do. (The story was also covered by 60 Minutes back in 2000.)

I found the story interesting, but for me the greatest sources of pleasure from the book were Lewis's characterizations of Lebed, such as this one:

He habitually dramatized or understated his case, and when he did, emitted a strange frequency, like a boy not quite sure how to blow into his new tuba.

I can relate. So, too, can probably many adolescent boys.

Then there's this:

His mind was a peculiar combination of grandiosity and myopia. When he stared into his computer screen he saw the depths of the universe; when he looked up from it he was hardly able to see beyond Cedar Grove. From the moment he became a celebrity in town, he attended meetings of the Town Council, where he’d become a kind of freelance civic activist. He could imagine entering politics but couldn’t imagine much beyond mayor of Cedar Grove, New Jersey. When I asked him where he was thinking about applying to college, he couldn’t think much past Montclair, New Jersey. He had no more ability than I had to link his Internet self with his real-world one. He could imagine himself doing great things, but these great things always took place within a few hundred yards of where he happened to be standing—except when he was on the Internet.

###

I was curious to find out what Leded is up to 10 years later. Interesting to find that he's still promoting stocks -- selling himself as a "stock picking prodigy" -- with a website and video and email newsletter.

I subscribed to his newsletter because I want to see what he's learned about persuasive writing after many years of practice. Discouragingly, he seems to favor the all-caps-plus-exclamation-points method.

Just so that you don't blame me if you make a large bet on RA and lose, I actually will make a target price for RA, my target price is $0! Let me repeat, my target price for RA is ZERO!

You can view writing samples under the "market blog" section of his website. I imagine this is the type of writing we would see from someone who quit their job on the Home Shopping Network and started writing a blog on RARE EARTH METALS -- STOCKS TO WATCH!!!


Somewhat related, Jason Fried writes about how he got good at making money: (hat tip: Kottke)

So here's a great way to practice making money: Buy and sell the same thing over and over on Craigslist or eBay. Seriously.

Go buy something on Craigslist or eBay. Find something that's a bit of a commodity, so you know there's always plenty of supply and demand. An iPod is a good test. Buy it, and then immediately resell it. Then buy it again. Each time, try selling it for more than you paid for it. See how far you can push it. See how much profit you can make off 10 transactions.

Start tweaking the headline. Then start fiddling with the product description. Vary the photographs. Take some pictures of the thing for sale; use other photos with other items, or people, in them. Shoot really high-quality shots, and also post crappy ones from your cell-phone camera. Try every variation you can think of.

To me this quote smacks of the same peculiar combination of grandiosity and myopia that Lewis described, and that combination seems to describe many entrepreneurs. Even so, I like the idea as a way to explore human psychology, albeit a fairly narrow range of it.

Vulnerabilities are the currency of relationships

I'm not sure that's exactly true, but it's more true than I realized last week.

Background: Last week I started a Tumblr where I intended to publish in the public abyss 99 things that I’m embarrassed about in hopes of nudging myself in the direction of openness and comfort-in-skin. I made it up to 19 before quitting. (It's gone, you can't find it anymore, I deleted it.) I didn't quit because I ran out of things to say -- far from it, I barely said anything deserving of an eyebrow raise. I quit because I realized there was something wrong with my premises.

I still believe openness and comfort-in-skin are good things, but only up to a point. Last week I was operating under the unconscious assumption that embarrassing secrets are bad things that we should try to purge from our otherwise pure selves. Now it seems to me that vulnerabilities are better thought of as resources to be spent carefully.

The more widely you distribute it, the less it's worth. The harder it is to say, the more it's worth. The longer you hold it in, the more it's worth. But unless you let it out, it's worthless.

By this theory, there are two types of people who are relationship poor: (1) people without embarrassing secrets, and (2) people who refuse to ever "spend" their secrets.

Vulnerabilities are different from financial resources in at least one important way: Vulnerabilities are not a cha-ching money-in-the-bank kind of resource. You don't invest in them as you would a 401K. The goal is not to accrue as many vulnerabilities as possible.

But like any other resource, it is scarce, and it ought to be spent wisely.

New Year's Rulin's

In 1942, Woody Guthrie penned these dandies. My reactions: (1) He has really nice handwriting, and (2) How Awesome.

1. Work more and better
2. Work by a schedule
3. Wash teeth if any
4. Shave
5. Take bath
6. Eat good - fruit - vegetables - milk
7. Drink very scant if any
8. Write a song a day
9. Wear clean clothes - look good
10. Shine shoes
11. Change socks
12. Change bed clothes often
13. Read lots good books
14. Listen to radio a lot
15. Learn people better
16. Keep rancho clean
17. Don’t get lonesome
18. Stay glad
19. Keep hoping machine running
20. Dream good
21. Bank all extra money
22. Save dough
23. Have company but don’t waste time
24. Send Mary and kids money
25. Play and sing good
26. Dance better
27. Help win war - beat fascism
28. Love Mama
29. Love Papa
30. Love Pete
31. Love everybody
32. Make up your mind
33. Wake up and fight

###

Hat tip: Mark Larson (Whom I award The World's Best Tumblr)

See also:
Johnny Cash's To Do List
David Foster Wallace on country music's weirdly existential quality
Ben Franklin's Do Good Every Day chart
Ben Franklin's 18 13 Virtues (Wiki)

Psychological Differences Between the Sexes: An Historical Perspective

I often hear of various studies about how men and women might differ in certain traits or behaviors, but it has been my default position (because I heard it from a psychologist once -- admittedly not with the careful-est of consideration) that men and women are pretty much psychologically the same in every way except the ability to throw overhand. A number of things have recently challenged that position.

First there was Anna's detailed summary of linguist Deborah Tannen's book You Just Don't Understand which dissects the communication differences between the sexes. Then Rick pointed to a WSJ article from last April called "Friendship for Guys" which includes this gem of a quote. Then Penelope Trunk posted in her characteristically provoking style the suggestion that maybe the workforce should be segregated by gender.

I have tended to tire quickly of gender differences discussions because they are typically filled with speculation and clichés, but these articles along with the statistics presented in this TED Talk are making me want need to reconsider the differences that may exist, and the implications thereof.

I intend to explore some of these topics in future posts, but before we get ahead of ourselves I think an injection of some historical perspective would be healthy. Here is a 13 minute video that was likely played in schools in the 1960's. I am guessing you will either find it hilarious or offensive or probably both.



I share that only to illustrate how perspectives/norms have changed in a relatively short amount of time—not to mute discussion. I fully support Penelope's exploration of "radical" ideas, even if they come at the expense of offending people. If there are significant differences, we ought to know about them and openly discuss them and their implications, not hide behind an egalitarian delusion.

More next week, probably...

Writers on Writing

Did I ever tell you that I love Charlie Rose? I imagine that anyone who has watched him for a significant length of time must feel the same way.

On his website, a 13 minute video was just released called Writers on Writing that features these gems:

Martin Amis on writing being a war against cliché.
Zadie Smith on a book being a person's best self.
Malcolm Gladwell on training yourself to see that everything is interesting.
Joan Didion on the difficulty of writing novels.
Jonathan Franzen on writing in order to cross the great lonely gaps.
Fran Lebowitz on fear of writing stemming from being "reverent about the book".

Trivia Competitions and the Good Life

Last night my friend Pavs (pronounced Pahvz) and I unwittingly got ourselves into a bar trivia competition. The experience reminded me of an important goal I set for myself: Don’t be good at trivia.

I don’t often find myself in trivia competitions, and I am certainly not one to seek them out, but if pride is on the line, and beer is to be had, then dammit I am going to play.

We were competing against a bunch of smarty pants Duke students, and it was only the two of us competing against larger sized groups, but I thought we had a fighting chance because Pavs and I carry a slew of random facts up our sleeves.

We finished 7th. Of 8.

We were pissed. For one, we knew we should have put “female” for January Jones. More to the point, if you’re going to play with my pride, don’t ask me to guess the gender of January Jones.

But then I remembered my goal. I think Don’t be good at trivia is a good mantra to live by because it provides a surprising amount of guidance on what to avoid. If you look at the things you do in an average day and ask which of them are most improving your trivia skills, I’d bet you’d also say those are some of the least valuable uses of your time.

So, as a simple rule of thumb...

Beware of that which improves your trivia skills.

That includes, of course, sitcoms and celebrity gossip but also things like news, sports, and politics.

(There is an obvious problem here that it depends on what kind of trivia competition you’re in. Maybe they are asking trivia questions about how best to deal with death or something, in which case this heuristic would buckle at the knees. Luckily, most trivia competitions ask nothing of the sort.)

I’d suggest that the mantra also applies to conversation. If you want to have meaningful connections with people, sure go ahead and start with a discussion of the Biebster, but unless a conversation advances beyond chit chat, it's hard to imagine that your connection will be any better than tenuous.

You did what‽ That's cool؟

Why oh why with all the many subtleties of human emotion and human expression do we have only three basic punctuation marks with which to end our sentences?

I often feel constrained by the 250,000+ words available in the dictionary, and to have only three basic ways of ending a sentence? Come on now.

In the 1966 book Plumons l’Oiseau, Hervé Bazin proposed several new punctuation marks, including the following:

Indignation point

Acclamation point

Certitude point

Doubt point

Other uncommon punctuation marks include the interrobang and the irony mark (both used in the title of this post).

We can quibble over the merits of these punctuation suggestions, but it'd be hard to deny that our language (= our capacity for expression) could be vastly enriched with new forms of punctuation.

Just think of how our three options already affect the meaning of a sentence:

The doctor says you have days to live.
The doctor says you have days to live?
The doctor says you have days to live!

An interesting question is, why are we stuck with these three? The answer is probably that there is no obvious mechanism for a punctuation mark to gain widespread adoption. Language is a combinatorial system where new words are spawned from old words, but punctuation marks don't have that luxury. I'm curious to know how the punctuation marks came into existence in the first place.

My libertarian-leaning sensibilities frown at this, but I wonder if the government has a useful role to play. I don't see why not. Governments have had success in introducing currencies that everyone agrees upon, so why not new punctuation marks?

I know that I, for one, would love to see our president at a presser introducing the indignation point.

Squib

We are far too concerned with problem solving and not nearly concerned enough with problem creation.

---

That's not a direct quote, but the general sentiment comes from Chuck Close. I can't recall whether it was from his interview with Charlie Rose or To the Best of Our Knowledge or both, but the idea has stuck with me and has influenced me to an extent that it seems deserving of its own post.

Cat vs. Dog media

Colin Marshall -- a personal inspiration and one of my favorite peeps on the Web -- writes about how media can be divided along cat-dog lines:

Either it dashes right up to you, tongue out, pleading for your attention, or it strikes a pose wherever it happens to sit, meeting you halfway if you care to approach — and not particularly minding if you don’t. ... Cat media knows it’s good, and thus doesn’t mind if you don’t seek it out right away. Dog media doesn’t care if it’s good, as long as you’re absorbing it.

Read the post for elaboration and examples.

I think the observation is that media typically are either (1) interesting/beautiful and less concerned with your attention/money, or (2) sloppier and more concerned with your attention/money.

That is probably generally true, but it is not necessarily true, as Colin himself writes in a previous post:

I've recently come to find that making something interesting and popular is the only creative goal worth pursuing. Sure, you can gun for popularity alone, but the easiest way to that is to crank out something bland that zero love but millions find acceptable. On the coin's other side, you can make maximize only interestingness, but then you risk making something obscure that your potential audience, the pool of people with pre-existing proximity to the work — dwindles to zero.

A quote from Anne Sexton comes to mind: "I am in love with money, so don't be mistaken. But first I want to write good poems."

Another dimension of media metaphorical animalness worth considering is mule-ness -- that is, the extent to which it does something for people. In the stuff I consume and in the stuff I create, usefulness is my priority -- or at least I think it ought to be.