LeBron vs. Jordan, again

If you've followed this blog for long enough, you know that I have a weird fascination with LeBron James, and especially with comparing him to Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan.

The Kobe argument has long been dead. This much I am sure of: Since his second or third season, LeBron has never been on a court with a better basketball player. The only interesting arguments that still remain are how he compares to the all-time greats—your Wilts, your Birds, your Magics, your Abdul-Jabbars, your Jordans.

Scottie Pippen caused a stir recently by suggesting that LeBron could be better than his long-time teammate, Sir Michael Jordan. But he padded it with a bunch of one-day-maybe’s, so I’m not sure what all the fuss is about.

I decided to take this up with Baskeball-Reference.com, which has a user-based ranking of the top players in NBA history. Jordan, unsurprisingly, is #1, and by a pretty significant margin. LeBron is hanging down at #18, only two spots ahead of Kobe Bryant, and three spots behind his rival in the finals, Dirk Nowitzki.

This is quite clearly bullshit. And for “proof,” I point you to numbers:

Win Shares is a fancypants statistic that weighs all of the traditional statistics – points, rebounds, assists, turnovers, etc. – into one measure of the player’s efficiency, and, ultimately, his value to his team.

It’s imperfect for obvious reasons – “steals” and “blocks” are hardly a complete measure of a player’s defensive prowess, for example – but if we want to be objective, it’s the best we’ve got.

Here are how the players at the top of Basketball-Reference’s list compare in Win Shares per 48 minutes by age: (Blue is good, red is bad.)



The players are ordered by their average win shares across their prime (ages 23 to 33), meaning that, based on this statistic, LeBron is the second best (= most efficient) player in NBA history. But he might as well be tied for first because he is even with Jordan to three decimal places.

For more analysis of LeBron vs. Jordan, here are how their numbers compare for both the regular season and playoffs:



Based on these comparisons, LeBron and Jordan are about dead even. LeBron has even been a little better in the playoffs (0.270 vs. 0.246). And given that the competition is now marginally bigger, faster, stronger, and probably smarter than it was in Jordan’s day, and given that the win shares measure probably fails to properly account for LeBron's legendary defensive prowess, which includes the ability to guard both centers and point guards, and to hold League MVP Derrick Rose to 6% shooting in a playoff series, if we’re picking teams and I get to choose between LeBron and Jordan in their primes, I’m picking LeBron. Without hesitation, actually.

I know this blog is pretty light on sports fans, but I hope there are some Jordan purists in the audience, because I’d love to engage in a good ole' fashion pissing match with you.

UPDATE: Bigger, badder charts here.

***

Somewhat relatedly, Ben Morris did a crazy in-depth analysis of Dennis Rodman (hat tip: Mark Larson) and kind of sort of concluded that he was more valuable on a per dollar basis than Jordan:

While I may not be ready to conclude that, yes, in fact, Rodman would actually be a more valuable asset to a potential championship contender than Michael freaking Jordan, I don’t think the opposite view is any stronger: That is, when you call that position crazy, conjectural, speculative, or naïve—as some of you inevitably will—I am fairly confident that, in light of the evidence, the default position is really no less so.

Puppy, meet basket

I was told that this blog needs more of these. I agree.

Click the photo for almost equally as stimulating material.

How philosophy is like humor

The construction and payoff of jokes and the construction and payoff of philosophical concepts are made out of the same stuff. They tease the mind in similar ways. That’s because philosophy and jokes proceed from the same impulse: to confound our sense of the way things are, to flip our worlds upside down, and to ferret out hidden, often uncomfortable, truths about life. What the philosopher calls an insight, the gagster calls a zinger.

From Thomas Cathcart & Daniel Klein's Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar...

Worried Sick

I am not sure how valid this estimate is (as a friendly reminder, don't believe everything you read, especially if it comes from blogs), but it has certainly inspired me to look into the book: (Hat tip: The Door)

Only about 20% of our health and life expectancy is based on risk factors for disease; the other 80% can be boiled down to quality of life, which Hadler sums up with two questions: "Are you happy in your socioeconomic status, and do you like your job? It's very powerful."

This *sort of* fits into my understanding that health is more than the lack of illness. What I find more shocking than the relative unimportance of risk factors for disease is that what matters [apparently] is satisfaction with your socioeconomic status and your job rather than, oh, your relationships.

Requires more investigation...

Happy people scare me

Here are two slightly-modified passages from Mark Kingwell's Better Living. The first is about the trouble we seem to have with understanding happiness:

What is alarming is the way our imaginations can often seem so limited when it comes to thinking about what happiness means to us. A generalized feeling of emotional contentment? An oozy warm sensation? The play of sensual pleasures? Cheap thrills, all of them.

To accept misery as part of the human condition is not to celebrate suffering, or to decline into quiescence. It is, instead, to embrace the range of human feeling and experience as inherently valuable because human. Forget for a moment any lingering technical or specific difficulties in the medical model’s implied project of psychic perfection. Assume that it were possible to achieve, without discernible side effects, the end result of a perfectly, and perpetually, contented population. Would it be defensible?

David Sedaris, describing a strange encounter with a woman who posed the question of what to wish for if having the wish granted left you on all fours, wrote, “Maybe if I were to wish for happiness, I wouldn’t mind crawling. But what kind of person would I be if I were naturally happy? I’ve seen people like that on inspirational television shows, and they scare me.”

The second is an amusing story from his graduate school days:

Pathologizing happiness in response to the tendency of the culture to pathologize unhappiness is a move that appeals on a straightforward level to cynics like me, because we have long suspected that people with that just-down-from-the-mountain look are, in fact, crazy.

For example, I had a friend in graduate school who was otherwise a great guy but had two annoying traits. One was the fact that he would begin social gatherings by saying things like, “What do you think of the following argument?” and “Refute this if you can,” conversational gambits on the order of “Would you like me now to bore you to death?” The second was that he walked around all day looking as though he had just seen the face of God, smiling away for all he was worth. This was in graduate school, where feeling mildly depressed is almost a code of honour (“Semper sigh”).

My friend wasn’t seeing the world the right way, because, from the cynic’s point of view, the rational response to the world’s trials is not happiness, still less transcendental bliss, but rather some form of wisecracking Weltschmerz. I could only conclude that he was, considering the circumstances, unbalanced—just plain nuts.

The measure of a blog (hint: it isn’t pageviews)

Imagine if we judged women based on metrics like the # of glances she attracts on the sidewalk or the # of requests she receives to divulge her digits. That would hardly tell us who we’d like to shack up with, right? More likely it would reveal to us the type of female who seems to proudly and cheerfully have issues with keeping her boobs in her blouse. Which is fine, I suppose, if what you’re looking for is a thrill on the cheap, but not so much if what you’re looking for is someone you wouldn’t mind chatting with the next morning.

And isn’t that kind of what we do when we judge blogs? Aren’t visits, pageviews, backlinks, subscribers, comments and other such silly metrics just the digital equivalent of cleavage glances?

Such metrics tell you something, sure, but I can hardly believe that they tell us much about the sorts of things we actually care about.

This frustrates me because, as a blogger, I want to know how I’m doing. I’m interested in whether individual posts land with people, and I get some indication of that (albeit it a frustratingly low-signal one) through responses from friends and through blog comments. But what I really want to know and what I have almost no sense of is how I’m doing overall. I want to know how this blog fits into people’s lives. E.g., for those who read it, is this blog a diversion? A mild antidote to boredom? Or is it an important part of their mental life? And if it is, how does it compare to other sources? Is it relatively dispensable or relatively indispensable?

And cleavage glances aren’t going to tell me that.

I have a thought for a better metric-type-thing to get at these questions, but before I divulge I wanted to toss this to the abyss and see if you have any thoughts on better ways to measure a blog.

Fellow bloggers, are you, too, frustrated with the lack of meaningful “feedback”?

What’s the point of pets?

A question from my friend Harrison:

Just read your adorable post on the giggles and I couldn't help but wonder what you get form Khan. Is he a cheap replacement for human contact or does he give you something no human could?

Along with the broader question of “what’s the point?,” I think what he’s asking is whether pets are complements to or substitutes to human relations.

First, let me try to answer this as detached-edly as possible, as if I am coldly observing myself from a distance.

Two squibs from the masculine booklet come to mind. Here’s one:

People induced to feel lonely show greater belief in supernatural agents and show more attachment to their pets, presumably to regain a sense of connection.

This is talking about a study that found that when people are made to feel lonelier, they tended to ease their loneliness with a greater attachment to their pets, implying that pets are at least partially treated as substitutes to human relations.

And here’s the other:

We not only nurture what we love, we love what we nurture.

Whether it be an infant, a dog, an elderly woman, or a potted plant, when we nurture something – especially something that is vulnerable and dependent on us – that flips the switch of love in the brain. It is the reason people goo goo over their own babies more than others’.

So, from a purely rational, detached POV, you could say that I love Khan because (1) I’m lonely, and (2) by nurturing him, he has flipped the love switch in my brain.

(This makes me wonder about why Americans have much higher levels of affection toward dogs than, say, Europeans. I’m guessing it has to do with social norms around pet nurturing, but that’s another topic.)

Now, if I may re-enter my body, here is what I’d say:

If pets are substitutes for human relations, then so is your God. They may both be antidotes to loneliness – after all, the same study that showed that lonely people have greater attachment to pets also showed that they have greater belief in supernatural agents – but so what? Are we doing pets or gods any justice by reducing them to mere devices of comfort?

This reminds me of an opinion I’ve heard Sherry Turkle express a couple of times. She thinks that we should be wary of personal robots because they can easily manipulate us with their big eyes and their need for nurture to make us love them and become attached to them, and this is dangerous, she says, because the robots can never truly feel your existential pain, know what you’re going through, or relate to you in a meaningful way.

At the surface, that’s a fine, intuitive argument, but it breaks down in the eyes of a dog-lover when you realize that the same could be said of dogs. These are creatures that have been custom-bred over the centuries to appeal to our deepest sentimentalities—to manipulate our emotions, you could say. But calling my love for my dog “dangerous” or “misguided” offends me probably about as much as you were when I compared my dog to your God. (Not that you are calling my love for Khan dangerous or misguided, Harrison—just making a broader point.)

The experience of the love is real, and to reduce it to a “cheap substitute” or to “manipulation” seems to be missing the point. I don’t care whether you love a dog, an infant, a robot, a God, an inflatable doll, or a blade of grass, the experience of love has value and integrity in its own right, regardless of whatever theoretical reasons for why the love exists.

Let me pre-empt a likely response: "But Justin, how far can we really take this line of reasoning? Are you really telling me that loving an inflatable doll can have the same level of value and integrity as loving a spouse?" Admittedly, that seems unlikely, but then again, I’ve never loved an inflatable doll.

What I can tell you is that Khan, for reasons you may never understand, has nuzzled, licked, and high-fived his way into the deepest depths of my heart, and if this is “emotional manipulation,” then I want to know where I can get some more of that nasty stuff.

And to all you Europeans who think it’s gross to let dogs sleep in bed with you, eat this: Khan is the greatest butt warmer you’ll never have.

An inconvenient case of the giggles

Every once in awhile, on cold, lonely nights, I sit in my living room and my dog and I look at each other with that 1,000 mile stare knowing that there is only one thing in the Universe that can possibly ease this nagging existential pain.

Three things, actually: fries, a cherry coke, and a thickburger.

Being a champion of pro-activity, I suited up and made my way to Hardee’s drive-thru window, with Khan manning (dogging?) the back seat. Once there, I had what would become the most awkward giggling fit in recent memory.

But first, some context. It’s 9:50 PM, 10 minutes before Hardee’s closing time. Other than two employees in the kitchen, there is no one in the restaurant and no one in the parking lot. Even the road in front of Hardee’s has scantly any travelers at this hour. This is all to say that it is quiet enough to allow my mind to mischievously meander.

And needless to say, I’m hungry. It’s possible that the fumes from my empty stomach had somehow worked their way to my brain.

What spurred the giggling fit, as best as I can tell, had to do with the music selection. I shouldn’t say “selection,” because I can say with near-certainty that this was not a tune that was selected by the folks working in the kitchen at that moment.

The song was one that I hadn’t heard for a few years, and before that, not since the 90’s. The song has always been pretty humorous in a laughing-at-you-not-with-you sort of way, but it gained a new level of hilarity in my mind when it was parodied on The Sarah Silverman Show by Brian Posehn, who played (and actually is in real life) a Metal-loving music nerd. In one episode, he was confronted by his boyfriend after his dirty little secret was discovered that the only song on his iPod is Spin Doctors's Two Princes.

The memory of Brian Posehn jamming out to the song led me to imagine the young chap in front of me doing the same thing. The irony was too much to bear. If you think it’s funny to imagine a nerdy white guy jamming out to Spin Doctors, try imagining a cool young black guy doing it, but in the Hardee’s kitchen, when no one is around, with the song playing on repeat.

He opened the window to hand me that stuffed brown paper bag that always makes me salivate like one of Pavlov’s dogs, and as he thanked me and told me to have a nice night, I tried to respond in kind, but my attempt at a serious salutation to this fellow that I had just imagined getting his Spin Doctors on came out more like “Youew thpupuou—”

And at that point the full-on belly-aching hilarity ensued. I tried desperately to work the damn shifter into drive and escape this moment of humiliating awkwardness, but I was overpowered by the heaves of my esophagus – or whatever – just trying to choke down some air. Now Khan’s getting excited, standing up and putting his wet nose in my ear, making my escape even more tenuous.

I can’t be sure, but I think at one point, in a desperate manoeuver, I might have looked up and given the young lad one of those palms-up nervous-smile shoulder-shrug thingies. I was too embarrassed to remember his reaction, but I’m sure it was a good one.

It was at this point that I faced the ultimate dilemma: Do I just drive off into the night letting mysteries be mysteries and hope to God that I never have to face him again, or do I, in the interest of conscience, try to explain to him the reason for my behavior? I considered, briefly, the second option. And then I floored it.

Can’t fault a dude for the giggles, I reasoned.

Identifying liberals and conservatives (without asking directly)

I've long assumed that the liberal vs. conservative divide is arbitrary – that they are two examples of worldviews out of infinitely many – and that there isn’t a ton of predictive power in identifying someone as one or the other.

I’ve since drifted away from that assumption.

I learned from Jon Haidt that people can be pretty cleanly divided into two groups:

1. People who (a) tolerate hierarchies and inequalities, (b) resist change, and (c) care about group loyalty.

2. People who don’t.

Bet you can’t guess which is which.

It seems that the liberal vs. conservative divide is not just about arbitrary political preferences, but is a foundational moral philosophy—one with not insignificant explanatory power.

(There are theories as to why people tend to fall into these two groups, mainly having to do with mountain/rural culture. If I remember correctly, Haidt discussed it in this diavlog.)

There are some serious implications with these differences in views. I’ve written before about the implication for work/careers, but that’s just one example. In summary, if you want to learn about a person – if you want to predict how they will behave – the liberal vs. conservative distinction is likely to serve as as good of a heuristic as any.

But how do you go about identifying someone’s moral/political views without straight up asking them? Turns out it’s pretty easy.

Here’s one question you can ask:

Do you prefer the people in your life to be simple or complex?

Liberals answer "complex" by 2 to 1; conservatives answer "simple" by 2 to 1. (Business Insider; Hat tip: The Door.)

And here is a four-parter I posted about awhile ago:

Which is more important for a child to have...

Independence or respect for elders?
Obedience or self-reliance?
Curiosity or good manners?
Being considerate or being well-behaved?

Again, bet you can’t guess which is which.

***

As a side note, I think the liberal vs. conservative terminology gets muddied in the field of economics. Studying economics tends to make people more “conservative,” meaning that they prefer smaller governments, but when we talk about the economics department at the University of Chicago being primarily conservative, I think we are talking about something very different from preferences about hierarchies, change, and loyalty. Conservative economists tend to side with the republicans on economic issues, but they side with them for very different reasons. On Haidt’s moral foundations test, I’d bet that “conservative” economists would score as liberal at a rate consistent with the rest of academia.

Improving recall ≈ making mind more interesting

It occurs to me that what I wrote yesterday about improving retention is pretty much the same advice I would give if someone asked me how to make your mind more interesting. I suspect the post would have had landed with people with about 10x the effectiveness if I had framed it that way rather than the dryer option of improving recall. Ah well. Lesson learned.

The flitiness of ideas

A question from a reader:

I feel that 99.99% of what I read I forget; that the words flit by and leave me mostly unchanged. I do occasionally see a line that touches me, but rarely.

Are you the same? What do you do to increase the amount you retain and use productively from your reading?

If there is any question that I feel qualified to answer, it is this one, because I have given this an almost ridiculous amount of thought and I have tried a number of relevant experiments.

I wrote this in the intro to my masculine booklet:

Ideas are fun, and can occasionally be life-changing, but who we are and how we perceive and interact with the world is to an uncomfortable degree a product of the unconscious. Which is to say that “ideas,” at least the conscious sort, probably matter less than we think.

I consume ideas at a rate that would suggest that I believe they will take me somewhere. But it’s obvious, judging by personal history, that they rarely do. I think it would be wise to accept that ideas are unlikely to change us, and adjust our consumption accordingly... but then that is itself just another idea, and so is unlikely to change our behavior. Ugh.

Ideas do not seem to have much effect on us [me] in a moment-to-moment sort of way. For instance, I may read something that opens my eyes to the wonder of the Universe, but when I wake up the next morning, rather than thinking about how wondrous the Universe is, I am going to think about, per usual, how badly I need to pee. This is pretty much inevitable.

Ideas don’t so much change my perspective or my behavior, but there are some ways that they have a more lasting influence on me. In particular, I am often serendipitously reminded of ideas in ways that can add some insight to a situation, add some depth to a thought or discussion, or just plain make things a little more interesting. This may not be the best example, but the other day I was out for a walk with my family and I looked up and saw a tiny little turd of a cloud. Which reminded me of something. I had heard a fascinating tidbit from a Robert Krulwich segment awhile ago, and I raised it with my fam: “How much do you think that tiny little cloud up there weighs, in elephants?” Totally random, I know, but my family is used to these types of absurdities by now. They guessed, and they were, as expected, way off (except Mom, who did impressively well, but her guess was still off by a factor of two). The answer is 100 elephants. That’s interesting because it means that even what seem to be the daintiest of clouds still weigh a shit ton. That fact doesn’t do much to change my day-to-day perception of the world – I do not regularly perceive the vast weight hovering above me as a fact of the Universe – but when I am reminded of this fact, it’s interesting, and it made for a fun 30 seconds of conversation.

But really, Justin, what’s the use in holding such silly factoids in your brain? Fair question. A factoid about cloud weight in elephants is unlikely to add much to anyone’s life, but when you add up all the ideas I’ve assembled, it makes for a vast interconnected hodgepodge of stuff that may not so much affect who I am, but certainly affects what I consciously think about and what I talk about. In sum, it makes mental life more interesting. If you expect ideas to make you behave any differently or perceive the world any differently, you are bound to be disappointed, but you can safely expect them to add some richness to your conscious thought and to your conversations. And that’s worth something.

Once we’ve accepted the limits of ideas, there are some things we can do to increase retention and influence (but again, this would require you to change your behavior, and I’m not optimistic about that happening). I squirm at the thought of this becoming a How To post, but what the hell:

First, recognize that context matters. People are more trusting of and more influenced by well-designed things. So, if you want ideas to penetrate your skull more deeply, a good start is to consume them from an aesthetic perfectionist. A TED Talk or a Werner Herzog documentary is going to be more successful in getting a point across in a meaningful way than a blog post or a home video. That should be obvious. (But you're reading this from a blog post, so maybe it's not.)

For more on the stickiness of ideas, I find Dan and Chip Heath’s six principles to be a good start. But I think the important part comes not while consuming the ideas, but after. And for that I can recommend my own six principles (squirm):

#1. Write them down. There is a Big increase in retention from doing this. And handwriting seems to be more effective than typing.

#2. Question them. Or have others question them. I remember ideas much better when I have given them a mental colonoscopy.

#3. Re-visit them. This chart was huge in helping me understand how memory works:

(Accompanying article in WIRED, 4/21/08)

My approach is to type up all the ideas from my notebook, typically about 3 months after they were originally written. I have also experimented with a program called Mnemosyne that is like a flash-card program based on this memory principle. I found that it did increase retention, but not so much that I felt compelled to go out of my way to use the program.

#4. Explicitly connect them to other ideas. Based on my experience, this is significantly more effective than re-visiting. I do both, but I find that the ones that are explicitly connected to other ideas I remember more clearly and for a longer time.

This is a really important point that often goes overlooked: Ideas need other ideas to tell them what they mean.

#5. Give them an intuitive place in your mind. Organize them into “chapters”. Memory champions do things like organize ideas into an imagined hotel or landscape.

#6. Explain it to someone. Bonus points if it’s someone who will scrutinize the idea. Double bonus points if it’s someone you respect.


These are the main factors that I have found to increase the clarity and longevity of my recall. And there are two big activities I have found that potently combine these components into a sort of steroid for memory muscles:

Blogging. I’d bet that anyone who blogs would agree that they remember the ideas they blog about much better than the ones they don’t. And it’s little wonder because blogging involves writing (#1), scrutinizing (#2 & #6), explaining (#6), and often connecting ideas (#4), and organizing them into subject areas (#5).

Idea Booklet-thingy. What I did with the masculine booklet was simple: Take all the ideas that I had written (#1) in my notebook over the past 3 months (#3), filter out the best ones (#2), scrutinize and re-word them to get to the heart of the point (#2 & #1), organize them into chapters (#5), organize them within chapters (#4), and then share them with a bunch of people I respect (#6, with bonus points).

Blogging works well as a memory aid, but the masculine booklet worked even surprisingly-er well-er. I just tested myself and I can’t quite recite the 446 ideas from memory – okay, I can’t at all – but if I am prompted by a related idea, I will be able to instantly tell you the idea, probably verbatim, along with at least a few surrounding ideas.

Once again, I think we have to ask why memory matters, because it’s not intuitively obvious. The best place that I’ve heard this discussed is in Russ Robert’s podcast with Daniel Willingham. (The good part starts around 13 minutes.) The gist is that abstract reasoning is not just thinking really hard but synthesizing things that are in memory and applying them from previous examples and looking for parallels and analogies and so on. In other words, reasoning doesn’t work without lots of ideas in memory.

The next question is why abstract reasoning matters, and I’d rather not touch that subject right now. This post is already too long, so I’m ending it here.

Real Self vs. false selves

I’ve found myself in a number of discussions lately about identity, and there is one issue that keeps nagging me: What the heck is a “Real Self”?

There is some level of blueprint-ed-ness with our personalities and values and abilities and behavior and so on, because genes shape a lot of who we are. So in that sense I can kind of see how one could conceive of a Real Self. But genes are not destiny, and genes only work by interacting with the environment. Environmental factors are at least semi-random, and so “I” am at least semi-random.

Some people seem to conceptualize a Real Self as the parts of us that are stable over the lifetime, but that seems strange to me. I am different from when I woke up this morning—not by much, but a little. I am definitely different from 5 – or 20 – years ago. My interests have changed, my behavior has changed, my values have changed, as they have in any healthy person who ages. We can maybe go on a mission to find a few common threads that seem unique to me throughout my lifespan – maybe I’ve always been a little introverted, or maybe I’ve always preferred blue over red – but to construct a Self from those things, I don’t know, just seems bizarre.

And as far as I can tell, the only thing that would distinguish a false self from a Real Self is wanting to impress other people, or something like that. But wanting to impress other people is probably one of those traits that we can say has been a constant thread throughout our lives, so shouldn’t I call that part of “me”?

The one goal that all forms of life have in common is, of course, gene propagation, and so impressing people is a crucial part of who we are because it’s essential in the competition over status, mates, territory, etc. People seem to want to escape to a Zen-like state of not caring what others think, but why? That would make life hideously boring, wouldn't it? Maybe I don’t want to care about impressing you, but I sure as hell want you to care about impressing me (or if not me, then someone, at least). (Related: The Darwinian Theory of Beauty.)

So, I’m puzzled. What does a “Real Self” mean to you? And why should anyone care about finding it? And to what extent is an identity developed vs. found?

Truth and Happiness

This post is an expansion on “I’d rather be happy than right”, and sort of a reply to the comments from Xan, Bob, and Jonathan.

---

I completely agree with Xan that we should be charitable when people say things informally. (Our language hardly allows for pristine logical statements anyhow.) When Bears says that he prefers happiness over truth, let’s not interpret that as “Bears rejects all truth.”

However, coming back to the specific topic at hand, happiness vs. truth, I think the general sentiment from Bears and from his students is that when truth is inconvenient (in this case to happiness), ignore it, and in this matter I think Kingwell’s rebuttal has legs. It is probably not a logically winnable argument as Kingwell seems to be going for, because Bears and others are merely stating a preference for happiness over truth, and all logical firepower seems to collapse under the weight of “preference,” but it does seem an odd preference indeed. Maybe the gravity metaphor isn’t completely fair, but I’ll extend it anyway, just for the sake of controversy: Preferring to ignore truth because you’d rather be happy is like preferring to ignore gravity because you’d rather fly. Ignore it all you want – I can’t argue against the preference – but you are probably going to fall flat on your face.

To be fair, what I hear Bears saying is saying is that his approach, even if it’s not true, allows him and others to metaphorically fly, and the aim is flying, he says, not Truth. Logically, I think that’s perfectly fine, and maybe even wise, but my beef is with his assumption that an untrue theory will work just as well, just as reliably, and for just as long as a true theory. Admittedly, there is no such thing as a “true” theory—all theories are merely approximations of Truth, and, who knows, maybe Bears’s theory is as good an approximation as any, but he seems sufficiently close to the murky philosophical waters of Truth-doesn’t-matter that I am with Kingwell in doubting the practical integrity of his theory to serve whatever interests he claims to have very reliably or for very long.

I think that for a lot of people – and for me – the end goal is not to have accurate beliefs but beliefs that take us somewhere, and on this point (preference) I am with Bears. But because Bears and I care more about other aims than Truth as an end goal does not mean that we can ignore Truth, or worse reject Truth with the cringeworthy ignorance-is-bliss line. Just as you have to learn to work within the constraints of gravity if you want to fly, you have to work within the constraints of Truth if you want happiness or gratitude or comfort or contribution or godliness or meaning or lots of sex or whatever, because some strategies are going to take you somewhere and others aren’t.

We don’t need to expend all our energy trying to make sure all of our information and our interpretations thereof are accurate – that would be entirely impractical – but when it comes to our beliefs regarding the approach that will take us to where we want to go, how could you possibly hope to get anywhere when your theory is suffocating without the fresh air of competing evidence?

What are economies for?

Here’s one possible answer, offered by a character in Jane Jacobs's book The Nature of Economies:

I don’t know what economies are for, ultimately, other than to enable us to partake, in our own fashion, in a great universal flow.

And here’s another:

I have two thoughts on the question. First, beware of drift into ideology. Economic ideologies are a curse. Carts before horses, tails wagging dogs, self-imposed blinders! I prefer the dry proposal to look factually into import-stretching ratios.

Second, it seems to me that economies have a lot in common with language—a lot besides unpredictably making themselves up. What is language for? The glib answer is communication, which you could say of the yips of coyotes and pheromones of termites. Not an answer that does justice to the functions of language. Language is also for learning and to pass along learning, in the process permitting us to develop cultures and multitudes of purposes. Just so, economies are to fill material needs, which you could also say of the foraging of deer and the scavenging of buzzards. Not an answer that does justice to the functions of economies. Like language, economic life permits us to develop cultures and multitudes of purposes, and in my opinion, that’s its function which is most meaningful for us.

***

And while we're at it, what is nature for?

You put me in mind of how my grandfather thought about nature. He’d have said, “It’s to supply the needs of mankind.” Being a pious man, he’d have added, “So that mankind may bear witness to the abounding mercy of God.” Being a lawyer and a humanist, he’d have added, “So that people may evince justice and fairness to one another.”

Is that what nature is for? No, of course not. Nature has value and integrity in its own right, regardless of human needs.

I'd rather be right than happy

I have been thinking about the rebuttals to the “I’d rather be happy than right” post, and I intend to respond in the next few days. But for now, here is another related passage from Kingwell:

Countless times over the week I was told that it didn’t matter what was making me unhappy, and also that it didn’t matter what forms of belief or action, however mendacious, selfish or fanciful, I adopted to stop feeling that way. My personal reclamation project took precedence over everything else in life, and anything, but anything, that “worked for me” carried its justification with it. The point, as Kaufman writes in Happiness is a Choice, was to “stretch ourselves continually and passionately to live more fully with a clear and prioritized intention.” Of course.

The same impasse happens now when I object to the idea of “seeing ourselves in God’s eyes” to my dialogue partner. “Whatever you mean by God,” she assures me, beaming away. But I think: Uh-uh, not good enough. Either we’re talking about something in particular, or we’re not even talking—we might as well be rubbing our tummies. Nietzsche’s dismissive phrase for this kind of reassuring nonsense was “metaphysical comfort”; a simpler one is pleasant but dangerous delusion. People say Nietzsche was nihilistic—he said it himself—but there is no nihilism more degenerate than the one in which we make ourselves cheaply happy by refusing to face the challenges of reason, and life. With truth out the window, it’s no wonder that whatever-God-is-to-you, the weak-minded bromide of the moment, has come in through the back door.

And here’s another:

If magic is simply the science of another form of belief—one in which not all connections need be causal, not all links logical—then what we see on offer in the marketplace of psychic technique is a peculiar mixture, sometimes in one and the same method, of pre-scientific and pseudo-scientific trappings decorated in blithe, and necessarily unfalsifiable, claims to generate happiness.

“I’d rather be happy than right.”

In the post on happiness as choice, I posted a video where "Bears" Kaufman says that he would rather be happy than right. Mark Kingwell heard the line, too, and here was his response:

Kaufman is confronted by a married couple who object that he has nothing but banal maxims and anecdotal evidence to support his claim that happiness is a choice. What if it’s just not that simple? What if he’s just plain wrong? Kaufman pauses to consider this, and he “quietly” accepts the possibility. And yet, he knows that teaching what he admits may be an “incorrect belief” has nevertheless “altered lifelong attitudes and behavior patterns in profound and immediate ways.” “Wow!” Kaufman writes in what has obviously become part of the set script. “So what we might have here is you holding the truth and being ‘right’ and us teaching something that’s possibly false, no matter how helpful and healing. Well then, so much for the ‘truth,’ I’d rather be happy!” It was no more convincing in print than when whispered through the cordless mike.

Almost everyone nods at the sentiment, however. Yes, Bears, you’re so right. Screw the truth; ignorance is bliss. I am nearly apoplectic, though fighting gamely not to show it. I want to shout at them: Wait a second, you crazy people. Is what he’s saying right now—that truth doesn’t matter—true? If it is, then truth matters, doesn’t it? You can’t ever say “The truth doesn’t matter” without snaring yourself in a contradiction, because you have just claimed something, and claims are only claims if they are true.

So if what Kaufman is teaching is not true, why should we be listening to it? And if he really doesn’t care one way or the other, why is he charging us all a significant chunk of change to tell us about it? The Socratic doctrina ignorantia—the idea that true wisdom is knowing that you don’t know—is a methodological assumption, not a conclusion. It’s supposed to spur on the search for truth, not lay it to rest.

Kaufman likes to say that the world is all make-believe, a series of constructions that we could as easily shape into happiness as unhappiness. But logic, like gravity, is not just a good idea. It’s the law.

See also Xan's excellent post, where he concludes this way:

If we are in a serious discussion about what is optimal, I will invoke truth and logic and rationalism to find the answer, and in this matter you cannot win by departing from that path. But that is not at all the same thing as saying that truth and logic and rationalism are what is optimal.

The subtle aggression of ideology

In this case, the ideology of happiness-as-choice:

Dying of cancer, Kaufman Senior eventually peeled away his negativity and accepted the gospel according to happiness choice. It is a typical example of the genre, comparable to M. Scott Peck’s endless tales of former hard guys who break down and cry under the influence of unconditional love, but it also exhibits some fine points in the subtle aggression of ideology: the gentle mockery of outsiders who “insist” on being unhappy, the exclusive jargon of “intention” and “being present,” the reliance on anecdote and crude either-or reasoning, and the all-encompassing nature of the belief, which is immune to challenge because it is proudly and cheerfully unfalsifiable.

(From Mark Kingwell's Better Living.)

Happiness as a choice

A couple of months ago, I had not heard of Mark Kingwell. One and a half books later, he is without question one of my favorite writers.

For a chapter in his book Better Living (a title used with a measure of irony), Kingwell makes a week-long visit to The Option Institute and Fellowship, a personal-development institution in Sheffield, MA unique among its peers in its explicit focus on the elusive condition of happiness. The whole chapter, all 54 pages of it, is delightfully snarky, more than a little hilarious, and characteristically insightful.

You will have to read the book if you want the snarky and hilarious parts, but I will share a portion of his conclusion from the week:

About the only wisdom I gleaned from the week’s exercises, and this happened outside of class, was a valuable reminder that happiness is not, as we tend to think, a prize to capture: not a condition to reach, a peak to scale. The attainment rhetoric that leads people back to the shopping mall every weekend, or into desperate flights about jobs, money, peak experiences and multiple sexual partners, just pathologizes happiness.

Happiness does come from within, but that doesn’t mean it’s a choice. Happiness comes from within in the sense that it is a matter of rational satisfaction with your character and actions, a mental and moral condition—hard-edged, lucky, demanding and fragile. And there are no shortcuts—no twelve-step programs, no courses of therapy or drugs, no purchasing plans or career strategies—to that. It is not a place to get to, it is a state of mind and character to cultivate.

***

I was curious to find out more about the characters in the chapter, so I visited the Option Institute website, where I was greeted by this amazing banner:



And here is the founder, “Bears,” talking about happiness being a choice:



I love how he ends it (another idea that Kingwell dismantles in the book): “I’d rather be happy than right.”

(And if you enjoyed that video, here is another one you might like. The first 20 seconds are great.)

When we do and do not know ourselves best

I am always fascinated by the topic of how accurately we perceive ourselves vs. how accurately we are perceived by others. Some important answers come from a provocatively-titled article "Who knows you best? Not you, say psychologists":

It’s not that we know nothing about ourselves. But our understanding is obstructed by blind spots, created by our wishes, fears, and unconscious motives — the greatest of which is the need to maintain a high (or if we’re neurotic, low) self-image.

But it's not that we should rely purely on others' judgments to correct our own:

There are aspects of personality that others know about us that we don’t know ourselves, and vice-versa. To get a complete picture of a personality, you need both perspectives.

What I've long wanted to know is for what things, exactly, it's best to rely on others' judgments vs. relying on self-judgments. Here are some tentative answers:

Anxiety-related traits, such as stage fright, are obvious to us, but not always to others. On the other hand, creativity, intelligence, or rudeness is often best perceived by others. That’s not just because they manifest themselves publicly, but also because they carry a value judgment — something that tends to affect self-judgment.

But improving self-knowledge is not as easy as just asking others' for their perceptions:

People are complex, social cues are many, perceptions of others are clouded by our own needs and biases. Plus, the information isn’t easy to access.

“It’s amazing how hard it is to get direct feedback.”

It's tempting to conclude that self-judgments are systematically inflated, but that may not be the case:

The world is not always the harsher critic. Others tend to give us higher marks for our strengths than we credit ourselves with.

I'm not sure how to reconcile this with the earlier points. If self-judgment is skewed because of our need to maintain a high self-imagine, then why would others tend to give us systematically higher marks than we give ourselves? Maybe it's just for our strengths? Maybe others also tend to give us lower marks for our weaknesses than we credit ourselves with?

Marriage Material [survey results]

Thanks to those who responded to the marriage material survey. Raw data here, summary and reactions below.







Some reactions and surprises:

-- Overall, the responses look surprisingly consistent across groups, especially given the small sample.

-- Respondents were consistent in estimating that more people could be happy with them than vice versa, and that more people would consider them “marriage material” than vice versa. This could be seen as overconfidence, and undoubtedly there is some of that, but I also suspect that the type of people who read blogs like this one would have higher-than-average status in the marriage market, not just because this blog is frickin’ awesome, but because if you are the type of person who goes out of your way to think about the type of questions that are asked on blogs like this one, then you are probably doing alright in life.

-- All but two people estimated that less than a quarter of the population would consider them marriage material. And all but two said that they would consider less than 10% of the population marriage material.

-- Check out the raw data for some interesting responses to these questions: (1) your reasoning for choosing the percentages you did, (2) what you think makes for a "happy" marriage, and (3) what you think makes someone "marriage material."

-- The most interesting response came from a 28 year old single male. He estimates that 90% of the female population could have a happy marriage with him, but only 1% would consider him marriage material. His explanation made me want to give him a hug:

I chose the percentages I did because I don't think there are that many people out there who would marry me. I know, sad. But I wouldn't marry a lot of them either. So maybe I'm just supposed to be alone.

***

My responses were pretty well in line with others’, although, surprisingly, I was the pickiest of the bunch when it came to the percentage I would consider marriage material (0.5%). This is probably my fault for not paying close enough attention or probing deeply enough, but there just seems to be a disturbing dearth of people that I find interesting, and I wouldn’t want to marry someone that I didn’t feel I could at least have interesting conversations with.

I was also one of only a couple of people who said that the percentage that could be happy with me is less than the percentage that I could be happy with (2% vs. 5%). I think it would take a rare bird to be happy with me because I am pretty self-absorbed, moderately reclusive, overly philosophical/logical, and more than a little eccentric. (Now that I think about it, the percentage should probably be considerably less than 2%. Sigh.) That said, I estimate that a reasonably high percentage of women would consider me marriage material (20%) because ladies seem to dig a tall guy with a stable job, a cute dog, and a willingness to laugh at himself. (But they so don’t know what they’d be getting into...)

The thing about human limitations

Lately I have found myself arguing so much the point that human actions are in some sense constrained by what the actor wants to do (rather than what he consciously reasons he ought to do) that I have started to annoy myself.

I felt like Mark Kingwell was talking directly to me with this bit from his book Better Living:

We may be constrained by our physical, genetic and other natural limits, but we are not altogether defined by them. We therefore cannot accept too easily the notion that whatever is, is right—even if vouchsafed by psychological or physiological theory. Within any natural box of limitations there is much freedom to choose, both individually and socially. That includes, significantly, the idea so important to us, that the most interesting thing about natural limitations is that we can sometimes find the ability to pass beyond them.

It is a profitless reduction of ourselves to crude biological creatures. We are biological, we are animals—but that is not all that we are.

Finding “The One,” and then dealing with all the unsexiness that follows

A couple of questions from Anna (Ah-na [she’s Greek]) in response to the Dating Sites and Determinism post:

Cute post, but I want to know 1. How you figure out that you've met the person the universe has intended for you and 2. What happens after. Because there's a whole life to be lived together and it will involve dirty laundry, differences of opinion, money issues, bad moods, and other not-fun things.

First, cuteness is what I aim for, so thanks. Secondly, I suspect she wasn't actually expecting answers to these monstrous questions, but because I like Anna (and because I owe her for making fun of her music preferences), I’ll bravely take them on one at a time as if I am some sort of authority on these issues, the 26 year old singleton I am.

---

Question 1. How do I know I’ve met The One?

I may be overly romantic, but I am not so overly romantic that I believe the Universe intends one person just for me. Rather, if it does so at all, it does so in moments. Everything is in constant motion. A woman will come into your life that could be totally awesome and rock your world..... for a few months. Sometimes that’s all we get.

But let’s assume that the Universe sends up some kind of invisible flares, even if temporary ones, attempting to inform us that there is a person, at least for right now, that is “The One.” How would we know it?

I think it’s not a terribly absurd notion. When a person is in love – and here I’m talking about that initial period of infatuation – everything else, and everybody else, in the Universe seems like minor, irrelevant details. This is certainly a feeling beyond mere lust.

So, I am almost tempted to go with the Romantic Comedy answer that if you are in its throes, you just know.

“If you have to ask, then...” you know the rest.

But that’s probably bull-honkey. If you don’t feel compelled to question your feelings, then it’s probably just because you are overly confident in your intuition—a personal choice to overlook details, not an objective truth.

So, for those of us who question, what exactly should we ask? Here are some ideas. Mileage will vary.

-- Where does my mind tend to go when I’m not concentrating on anything in particular? The best way I know to understand what the Universe wants from me (or what I want from the Universe) – and this applies to more than just romantic relationships – is to notice trends in my mental driftage.

-- Do I see things in her that other people fail to notice? Like what?

-- What is it that I admire most about her? Is it her boobies? Is it her miraculous intelligence? In either case, I’m probably being deceived—I’m attracted to some show of fertility or competence. If I am, that’s fine – that’s good – but The One probably requires more than that. If this is The One (at the moment), then I will probably find myself swooning over things as mundane and ordinary as her sneeze.

-- How does thinking about her make me feel? Does it bring me a warm glow? Does it bring me a profound sense of longing? A sort of lustful curiosity? If it’s any one particular feeling, then she’s probably not the moment’s One, because love is far more complicated than that. Rather, the feeling of love seems to be a powerful combination of seemingly conflicting emotions.


These are just some silly rules of thumb I pulled out of my buttocks, but maybe there’s some substance hidden in there somewhere.

---

Question 2. What happens after? How do I deal with all the unsexy parts of a long-term relationship?

I’ll let you in on a little secret. This is my motto for life:

Whenever life gets you down, sex it up.

Whenever life throws a myriad of petty little unsexy things at you, just add sex. That’s what I always say. Faced with dirty laundry? No problem! Just add sex.

(I’m kidding, y’all.)

Here, I’ll let DFW say it:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

So, if you buy that (and I do), then I suppose the question is, how do we achieve attention, awareness, discipline, effort, and the ability to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them? And for that I think there can only be one answer: By wanting to.

The alternative is trying to do things because you think you should. I don’t like the idea of doing anything for an extended period of time if I don’t have an internal drive to do it. Psychologists will tell you that the least effective goals are should goals—ones we do not out of desire but out of some warped reasoning that it is something we ought to do.

So, if you are going to get yourself thick into the throes of a “romantic” (quotes for irony) relationship, where dirty laundry and money and diaper-changing will be involved, then you better make sure that you have some pretty serious desire – or that you at least receive some pretty serious warm glows – from doing things for her with no expectation of return.

And now is when I return to my initial point about The One being temporary. What I meant by that is that the initial head-over-heel-ness is frustratingly fleeting. That doesn’t mean that the relationship needs to be. I’ve said before that I think a relationship is best thought of as an investment—not an investment in chores or favors, but an investment in time, in getting to know someone, and hopefully coming to understand them. To share a history together, to have lives intertwined, means that this is not just some detached soul that happens to share the same space and have nice boobies, but that, cliché as it may be, the two of you are in some very real sense progressively becoming part of the same whole.

I don’t mean that in a “you complete me” sense – god no, not that – but rather that you have the literal sense (illusion?) that you are no longer a lonely sailor on life’s lonely waters, because there is a fellow sailor who has agreed to an arrangement of mutual influence where the influence is so intense that the boundaries between “you” and “they” are no longer delineable.

And having that – and, more importantly, recognizing that you have that – makes the myriad petty little unsexy parts well worth it, I'd say.