Puppy, meet basket

Google Images failed to deliver a 4th of July puppy in basket photo, so I had to create my own using sophisticated graphic technology.

Click through for joyful bliss.

Economists endorse quitting

And we do it using terms like “sunk cost” and “opportunity cost.”

Side note: Is there anything more amusing-in-a-painful-way than news anchors or radio hosts attempting to be funny? If someone made a DVD of news anchors' awkward attempts at humor, I'd totally buy it.

Slapstick

A blog called "Too Hard to Keep" does exactly what the title implies: It archives photos deemed too hard to keep.

I find the photos strangely poignant. I often speed click through them in Google Reader not wanting to endure a sinking stomach. But why would they make my stomach drop? Given so little to go on, it seems bizarre that the photos could carry any poignancy-potential.

We don't know the story behind a photo’s hardness-to-keep — no clues are given except possibly the scant evidence in the image. We don’t even have a demographic sketch of the person who sent in the image, nor do we know their relationship to the subject(s) in the photo. And we don’t know what happened or didn’t happen.

If this is a story, then it is almost completely fabricated in my mind. And that’s exactly what happens. Well, sort of. I wouldn’t say that my mind makes up a story as much as it does a list of assumed possibilities.



Nostalgia about youth? An estranged friendship? A good kid ruined by drugs? A suicide? The assumed possibilities race through my mind. The only thing I know with a high degree of confidence is that some kind of loss occurred, and someone is struggling with it.

Is this a sign of my supreme empathy and my emotional sensitivity? I’d like to think so. More likely this says something about what things – or more accurately, the absence of what things – invoke an emotional response.

I imagine that if instead of a photo, someone’s struggles were expressed in the form of an essay, it’d be a snoozefest, and maybe even a little obnoxious. Only the best of writers are able to express their struggles in a way that doesn't sound trite or whiny. That is, only the best of writers are able to avoid the things that block empathy.

But with a photo and no words, those empathy-blockers are easily avoided. And all that's needed to give the photo bite is the knowledge that this photo is oppressive to someone for some reason. That's amazing.

As a general rule of aesthetics, the important part is knowing what to leave out. Art operates on hints. I don’t mean symbolism. Symbolism is for intellectuals and goofballs. I mean hints: Just enough information for your brain to automatically start making assumptions.

A good joke is ruined by over-explaining the punch line. A good smoothie is ruined by adding too much sugar. An attractive woman is ruined by coming on too strongly. A good song thrives on barely audible bass and brush-like percussion. There is no such thing as a good movie where the action never stops.

As a general rule of thumb, anyone trying to be aesthetically effective should probably continually ask themselves, “how can I make this more subtle?”

There are, of course, exceptions. Although even in her case I'd argue that she is subtle in ways you probably don’t realize.

Worried Sick

Last month I posted this quote:

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."

That is quite the claim, so I started reading the book this weekend. It’s called Worried Sick and it’s by Nortin Hadler, a medical doctor and professor at UNC-CH.

I’ll give a crude summary of [my interpretation of] his thesis:


Although life expectancy has been rising as “premature” causes of death have been falling, life span seems to hit a wall at the magic number of around 85 years of age. It’s at this age that people, no matter how well they’ve lived, tend to drop dead. Of course it’s possible to live longer than that, and we all know examples of people who have lived well past 85, but those people, we must bear in mind, are exceptions.

The implication is that medical treatment, no matter how effective it is against the particular fire it is fighting, is highly unlikely to significantly extend a person’s life, because all the fires tend to start burning at once.

Cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, as horrible as they are, are merely labels that we give to the proximate cause of our demise. Although these are the primary checkmarks that go on death certificates, these and all other diseases account for only 25% of our life-expectancy.

What’s far more likely to kill us before the age of 85 is a dissatisfaction with our position in life. This gives rise to “artificial epidemics” that “play out well beyond the walls of the clinic” and that “will not respond to pharmaceuticals and that cannot be surgically excised.” This, says Hadler, accounts for 75% of our mortal hazard.

What we have, then, is contemporary medicine that “nibbles at the frays of the other 25 percent of mortal hazard” — the proximate causes of death, rather than the giant underlying gorilla of “life satisfaction.” Health care, in comparison to this vague thing we are calling “satisfaction with life,” is fairly small potatoes, accounting for, optimistically, 10 percent of mortal hazard.

How can the $2.2 trillion health care industry defend itself against the claim of “small potatoes”? Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery, of course! For an immodest fee, we’ll unclog your arteries and extend your life!

But wait.

Trials comparing CABG surgery with medical treatment found that, with the exception of a small group, the patients who had CABG did not live any longer than those treated medically. A significant percentage of CABG patients died before they could leave the hospital, about half had a stormy recovery, nearly that many had memory loss at a year, and half suffered cognitive decline at five years that was beyond that observed in their birth cohort.

The story is similar, or worse, for angioplasty and stents, neither of which can be shown to offer any important advantages.

And that small group that's the exception? That's 3 percent small. Three percent of all patients happen to have a type of blockage that is treatable, and for this group CABT can increase their probability of five-year-survival from 65% to 85%.

The bottom line, he says, is that no one should be as concerned about the proximate cause of their demise as they are about the likelihood that their course in life will be satisfying.

***

I’ll share my reactions in the next couple of days.

Commencements!

Gotta love commencement season. The NYT put together a handy graphic showing word use by this year’s speakers:



I’ve barely begun working my way through them. So far I’ve read/watched Amy Poehler, Jonathan Franzen, and Conan O’Brien. I liked all three, but I thought Conan's was especially good, particularly the last 5ish minutes.

Our strange bodies

Two reminders of how little we know:

(1) Rob Dunn concludes an article about the “obesity virus” this way:

The first lesson is that the wild workings of our bodies influence who we are. They influence our behavior, our weight, our metabolism and nearly everything else. We are what we eat, but we are also, it appears, what eats us.

The second lesson, though, is the broader one: that we are still so ignorant about our own bodies that a man at a dinner party in Bombay can have an insight during a conversation about chickens that fundamentally changes how we view who we are. We are so ignorant to the fact that the wildest ideas about what might be can sometimes really be.

(2) You’d think, given the male fascination with the female body, someone would have figured this out by now:

It wasn’t until 1982, in fact, that female ejaculate was first chemically analyzed. If it’s not urine, and it’s not semen, then what, exactly, is it? After all, most female ejaculators report "copious" amounts of fluid being released around the time of orgasm, enough to "soak the bed" or "spray the wall" or have their partner scream in terror and misunderstanding. So it’s rather odd that we still don’t have a name for this substance that 40 percent of women report having produced liberally at least once in their lives.

Where is it produced, what is it, and what is its purpose? Why do only some women ejaculate and not others? What, if any, was its role in human evolution? And why—just look at you now—is it is such a giggle-inducing, fetishistic topic? Science has a long, wet, slippery challenge ahead indeed.

Good security means not keeping secrets

Before reading Charles C. Mann's 2002 piece called Homeland Insecurity, if you would have told me that a better form of security than sophisticated technology combined with many layers of secret passwords and privileges is a human sitting with box of donuts watching the premises, I would have looked at you like you were crazy.

But secrecy, it turns out, is counterproductive:

Kerckhoff’s principle of security says that every secret creates a potential failure point. Secrecy, in other words, is a prime cause of brittleness – and therefore something likely to make a system prone to catastrophic collapse. Conversely, openness provides ductility.

From this can be drawn several corollaries. One is that plans to add new layers of secrecy to security systems should automatically be viewed with suspicion. Another is that security systems that utterly depend on keeping secrets tend not to work very well. Alas, airport security is among these. Procedures for screening passengers, for examining luggage, for allowing people on the tarmac, for entering the cockpit, for running the autopilot software – all must be concealed, and all seriously compromise the system if they become known. As a result, Schneier wrote in the May issue of Crypto-Gram, brittleness “is an inherent property of airline security.”

What, then, is good security?

Human judgment is at the heart of most good security. Human beings do make mistakes, of course. But they can recover from failure in ways that machines and software cannot. The well-trained mind is ductile. It can understand surprises and overcome them. It fails well.

Good security is built in overlapping, cross-checking layers, to slow down attacks; it reacts limberly to the unexpected. Its most important components are almost always human. “Governments have been relying on intelligent, trained guards for centuries,” Schneier says. “They spot people doing bad things and then use laws to arrest them. All in all, I have to say, it’s not a bad system.”

When we evaluate a security system, we should keep a couple of questions in mind:

Evaluations of a security proposal’s merits should not be much different from the ordinary cost-benefit calculations we make in daily life. The first question to ask of any new proposal is: What problem does it solve? The second: What problems does it cause, especially when it fails?

Traveling for smarties

Although no one would confuse me for an expert in the art and science of traveling, someone asked for my travel tips, and you know by now that I'm not shy about offering my opinions...

Flights

Hipmunk is awesome for investigating flight options. Only downside is that it doesn't include Southwest.

Best way to get a sweet deal on plane tickets: Date a flight attendant.

Tips on buying plane tickets at the right time:

The lowest price tends to hit between eight and two weeks before departure, but this rule fails during peak demand: Friday departures for spring break, and Sunday returns during the summer, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. For these, now is never too early.

At the end of holidays, there's usually a stampede to the airport. One more day with the in-laws can save you upwards of $100 — if you can stand it.

Flights on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday can easily cost $50 more than those midweek.

Price drops usually come early in the week. So a ticket bought on Saturday might be cheaper the next Tuesday. That's particularly true outside the summer rush, making fall the best time for a last-minute getaway.

If you want a summer vacation, domestic and Caribbean travel is cheaper to begin with and doesn't rise as high.

I don’t understand "aisle people." Gazing out the window is one of my favorite existential pastimes. I try to avoid having a seat directly over the wing by using a seat map finder.

If you’re on a long flight, and you're a professional basketball player with girlishly long legs like me, it’s also not a bad idea to check the seat map to see if you can get a seat with extra leg room.

Rather than trying to avoid layovers at all costs, remember that airports are some of the most interesting places on the planet.


Lodging

I haven’t used it, but if you’re price sensitive and not picky about hotels, Priceline Negotiator seems like a pretty sweet idea.

Hipmunk again for investigating hotel options. Holy crap I love this site. Kayak and TripAdvisor are also good options although with a far less amazing interface. Based on my recent NYC hotel search, Hipmunk was ideal for identifying locations within the city, and Kayak, Priceline, and TripAdvisor were better for finding deals. We ended up going with Priceline because with chopped fees it saved us about 20%.

Yapta is useful for tracking price drops. You can track prices for flights, too.

Before booking from a price comparison site, remember to check the pricing on the hotel/motel’s website.

If you’re adventurous (= non-prissy and non-risk-averse), CouchSurfing is awesome. I had great experiences in Alaska and Seattle.


Packing

If you are nervous about forgetting things, check out one of the many travelers’ checklists. Here’s one.

Bring comfy shoes. (I say that both seriously and ironically.)

Werner Herzog: "Sunglasses. Good boots. Binoculars. And a mosquito net."

I'd hate to travel without my pedometer. I love my fitbit. (Here’s my profile.)

Make sure you have plenty of clean undies and socks. Pack as lightly as possible on everything else.

Space is saved and wrinkles are limited by rolling up your clothes like a fruit roll-up.

Bring an audio recorder. Use it.


Doing

Keep your agenda as small as possible. Traveling done properly is not a checklist.

Wander around. Get lost. Find yourself. Repeat.

To avoid decision paralysis, alternate between who makes the decisions.

Make long stops. A rookie mistake of travelers is trying to actively “find” the city. It will come to you.

If you’ll be in the States, check Roadside America for amusing nearby attractions.

Use Tyler Cowen’s principles for choosing between dining options:

The better ethnic restaurants tend to have many of their kind in a given geographic area. Competition increases quality and lowers prices. The presence of many restaurants of a kind in an area creates a pool of educated consumers, trained workers and chefs, and ingredient supplies - all manifestations of increasing returns to scale.

The best ethnic restaurants are often found in suburban strip malls, where rents are lower and the degree of feasible experimentation is greater. Small and cheap ethnic restaurants are often better than large ones.

...And between menu options:

Ordering is often a more important decision than choosing the restaurant. Some rules of thumb, none of which are absolute:

1. Avoid dishes that are "ingredients-intensive." Raw ingredients in America - vegetables, butter, bread, meats, etc. - are below world standards. Even most underdeveloped countries have better raw ingredients than we do, at least if you have a U.S. income to spend there, and often even if one doesn't. Ordering the plain steak in Latin America may be a great idea, but it is usually a mistake in Northern Virginia. Opt for dishes with sauces and complex mixes of ingredients. Go for dishes that are "composition-intensive."

2. Appetizers often are better than main courses. Meals composed of appetizers and side dishes alone can be very satisfying. Thai and Lebanese restaurants provide the classic examples of this principle.

3. Avoid desserts. Most ethnic restaurants in America, no matter how good, usually fall flat with the desserts. Especially if the restaurant is Asian.

4. Order more than you plan to eat. Keep in mind that you are ordering for variety, not for quantity. You can always take the rest home.

I like Kevin Kelly’s suggestion about “Laser-Back Travel”:

When you arrive in a new country, immediately proceed to the farthest, most remote, most distant place you intend to reach during the trip. Then once you reach your furthest point, work your way slowly back to the big city (shown in yellow).

This American Life finds story ideas by asking natives, “Who’s the most interesting person in town?” Seems like a good strategy for traveling, too.

Ask a cab driver if you can ride around with him passenger side with no destination to speak of, just to accompany him on his shift.

Try to see the richest area and the poorest area, and the most industrial area and the most “creative” area.

Remember that there is much more to a place than the “sights.” There are also sounds, smells, tastes, and surfaces.

If it’s safe to, try to experience the city in the wee hours of the night/morning. Related: It helps to take mid-afternoon naps.

It gets tiring to be an endless explorer. Your curiosity quotient will inevitably drop. It’s perfectly okay to take breaks from traveling to do “normal” things like check your email.

The best way to finish a day is by writing about it.

You’ve had a complete trip if you’ve seen the inside of a library, a food market, a government office, a church, a convenience store, a sports arena, a bank, a hospital, a bar, a pharmacy, a brothel, and a private home. Four out of twelve ain’t bad either.

***

What else?

"This damn city restores my faith in humanity."

Wryly, but yet, it does—despite everything, including the sentimentality of even thinking so. Because consider how unlikely, how fantastic and multifarious, the lines of cooperation and negotiation that daily make the city possible. New York, like all cities, is a collective experiment in barely averted chaos, a play of vast possibility within the mapped order of the grid. It flows, and that is amazing, because it should not; its congestion, the final gridlock where all the movement suddenly overcomes itself, snapping into the crystalline rigidity forever implied but always avoided, is right there: the culture of congestion, a petri dish of transactions and aspirations and discourses. It allows so much to happen even while not forcing any specific part of itself upon you. It allows you not to attend, and so makes all events optional. Thus does it bestow the “queer prizes” of loneliness and privacy, the great freedom to move or be crushed.

–Mark Kingwell in Concrete Reveries.

This is the third book by Kingwell that I've started, and I think I might end up reading all of his books – all twelve of ‘em – because he writes like angels sing.

I have had a distant love affair with New York City for some time now, inspired mainly by one of my favorite blogs, Pictures From A Taxi. It’s not that I idealize the city – I am just attracted to its seeming liveliness and its immensity and, above all, its metaphor:

New York appears in art and literature as pure metaphor—as the sign or symbol of triumph, of loneliness, of romance. And if one thing is certain, it is that there is no getting to the bottom of New York.

I had semi-serious plans to take up residence there for a month or two this summer. If I am going to experience the city, I’d prefer to do it as a resident and not as a tourist.

There is a space somewhere between tourism and residency when you feel the emotions of a love affair you know must end. This is what the critic Jed Perl has called “the adolescent city,” that shimmering land of half-fantasy, at once true and false—the sense of slightly awed but boldly sanctioned arrival, of Gatsbyesque ambition about to succeed (or not), dreams about to be realized (or dashed). I mean the way we all feel when, well dressed and fresh-faced at least in imagination, we step off the train for the first time at Grand Central or Gare du Nord or King’s Cross.

The plans have since fallen through, but I will be wandering the New York streets for a week next month, when I hope to experience, among other things, the smells of the subway:

The smell of hot air emanating from the entrance, the burp of subterranean gas squeezed out from the innards of the city, the miles of tunnel-intestines and steel-girder bones, is both familiar and comforting. It does not exactly stink, though there are animals and piles of garbage and human effluents down there. It smells homey and warm and alive, like the taste of breath from your lover’s morning kiss, or your mother leaning over you in the evening with Vicks VapoRub ready to apply to your cold-wracked chest. It mingles, the belched-up air, with the other smells of this corner, all corners: the flaming meat and warming rolls of the hot-dog cart; the sickly near-gag rising from sugar-coated pecans; the always-autumn tang, the global odor of cities, from roasting chestnuts.

My favorite New York quote of all comes from Henry Miller. I have read and re-read this many times:

New York is cold, glittering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a test tube. Nobody knows what it’s all about. Nobody directs the energy. Stupendous. Bizarre. Baffling. A tremendous reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated.

When I think of this city where I was born and raised, this Manhattan that Whitman sang of, a blind, white rage licks my guts. New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, like breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of aces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves ... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolutely meaningless.

###

One of the most interesting and well-designed videos I've seen this year is this one showing the interactions between cars, bikes, and pedestrians at a typical NYC street intersection: (hat tip: Kottke)

My new identities

Many of the visitors to this blog arrive via search, and they are greeted with absolutely nothing to tell them about who I am and nothing to tell them what this blog is about. That’s because both I and this blog have a weak identity — we don’t know who we are or what we are about.

Fake it until you make it, right? I can imagine all kinds of identities that would be interesting to have, and one of the great virtues of the Internet is allowing you to freely try them on, switching at will.

And so, in the interests of amusement, I am going to try some on and see what kind of reactions I get.

Here is attempt #1:


Old Identity



<< cricket chirps >>


New Identity



Justin Wehr is a professional basketball player for the Memphis Grizzlies. He combines shot-making ability with wicked good looks. He married Dr. Ruth in 2007.

He blogs about home health, paleo diets, and jump shots.



This information is now on the blog’s sidebar. (Hat tip to Anna for the photo.) Once I get bored with this identity, I’ll try on a new one.

I hope to hear at least a few cries of moral outrage at this cheap gimmickry. Not to preempt it, but who’s to say that I’m lying? You don’t know me. Maybe I’ve been a professional basketball player all along. Moreover, what if lying is part of my identity? I lied prolifically as a kid, so maybe that says something about the Real Me. By criticizing that, maybe you are stunting my voyage of self-discovery. Don't be so judgy.

Comfy Shoes and Rust

I continue to make casual field observations about the differences between men and women, and I am prepared to add two things to the canon of gender differences:

1.

“Comfy shoes”

The word “comfy” is alien and bizarre to me. It’s hard for me to come up with the circumstances in which I would feel compelled to use it, or in which anyone should. It’s obnoxious. It has the annoying high-frequency vibration of a pre-teen sleepover.

Although I see no place for the word in everyday conversation, there is one place where I think it could do some pleasant damage: With a thick dose of irony, in the hands of a good humorist. If we’re keeping a list of words with humor potential, I think this one could be up there with sandwich and pants.

But it’s funny for different reasons. Most words are funny because they sound funny, but I don’t think that’s the case with this one. I checked my mental bank account and I can’t recall ever hearing a dude employ the word. It’s hard for me to even imagine him doing so with a straight face. And in that lies its humor potential: The absurdity of its use by a male.

Combine it with “shoes” and now we have a phrase that is probably at least 99.99% female. It’s probably the most female-skewed phrase I can come up with. When a dude is searching for adjectives to describe his shoes, ones that may come to mind include “brown” or “formal” or maybe even “worn-in,” but comfy? No. Not that. We’d be more likely to describe our shoes as pillowy, I think.

2.

I was in a meeting today with three female colleagues as they were critiquing a PowerPoint presentation I had created. One of the critiques had to do with the font color, and this is when I started to feel very male. “Could we make that more of a rust?,” one of the women asked.

I paused.

Rust. Okay. I am familiar with the stuff that coats a bike left in the rain. But holy shit you expect me to select this as a color from PowerPoint’s menu bar? I have a few ideas in my head of what you could mean by rust, but dammit, have you seen rust? This is a substance that is characterized by its varying colors(!). Wait, are you just playing with my masculine brain? Is this some kind of female inside joke to watch a male squirm when we describe a color as something other than red, blue, or green?

All of these thoughts went through my head as I tried to formulate a response.

“Rust?,” I finally replied.

After some deliberation, we determined that what was meant by “rust” was dark red. Having that out of the way, I felt relieved but still confused. Why couldn’t she have just said “dark red”? A Google Image search for rust turns up colors ranging from dark browns to yellows to bright oranges to blues – practically the whole spectrum from a male POV. How could you expect a dude to know what you are talking about? Most puzzling of all, why weren't the other women baffled like me?

This, to me, is one of the great mysteries of women: Do ya’ll really know what each other are talking about when you describe colors as “rust” or “cantaloupe” or what-have-you? Honestly, you could tell me you do, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to my befuddlement. If I am going to believe this, I am going to need to see a double-blind study. With EEGs.

If there exists some sort of strange covert female understanding of color descriptors, I want to know where they learn them. We covered the color wheel in art class, but I can guarantee you, “honeydew” was not part of the discussion. It doesn’t even seem that the 120-pack of Crayolas covers the wide spectrum of female descriptors. This seems to be a highly creative process for them. It’s like they describe colors based on objects that fit the hue in their mental bank, which is fine, but then to able to translate that to another human being and have them get it — that’s beyond me.

Scarier still, if women can speak in code about colors, who knows what else they might be saying in front of our clueless faces. I just shuddered a little.

(P.S. - It’s clear that a male designed the Microsoft color selector because it only has the basic colors with percentages. Ha. Eat it, women.)

Also, here is a graphical illustration of what I’m talking about. (Hat tip: Anna.) Notice the dude’s befuddlement.

(Somewhat related: In an awesome post, Kerry announces that the color of the hallway in her new home is called, hilariously, "Magnificent Crouton.")

###

Both of today’s observations are things that women tend to do/say that men tend not to. Being male, it’s much easier to make those kinds of observations than vice versa. I’d like to hear from the women in the audience what things men tend to do/say that women tend not to.

Also, I suspect that both of today's observations will be familiar to the dudes in the audience, but I wonder if women are less aware of these things.

LeBron, the NBA, Touchy-feeliness, etc.

As a LeBron fanboy and public declarer of better-than-Jordan-probably, I’m disappointed and embarrassed. But I’m also kind of pleased that the old guys led by the goofy German pulled off the improbable. The Heat will have other chances — namely, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and probably 2017.

Here are some semi-related musings:

1.

I’ve struggled to figure out why the Heat weren’t winning every game by 40 points. It doesn’t make sense.

They did possess the highest scoring margin in the league – the best predictor of winning percentage and postseason success – but at 7.5 points per game, historically, it was unremarkable.

Finally, I think I’ve found the answer. It comes from the Wall Street Journal:

Not enough touching and feeling!

The Mavericks were out- high fiving, hugging, chest bumping, and butt slapping the Heat by a two to one margin(!).

Not to speak for Udonis Haslem, but when you are trying to guard a 7-footer who shoots one-legged fade away jumpers, you need to know that your teammates will be there for a loving grope, should you start to need one.

As this graphic clearly illustrates, Mike Bibby (as usual) is mostly to blame:



Dear Miami Heat management, I’ve got a winner of an idea. It makes so much sense. Hire Me. I’ll play for the league minimum, I’ll occupy space as uselessly as Bibby, and I will more than surpass the team’s need for physical affection. I know when a player needs someone to jump on his back during a timeout, when he needs a suggestive wink, and when he needs a good bicep squeeze. All of these things, I can deliver.

2.

LeBron CHOKED blah blah. He’s not a big game player blah blah.

My friends: Statistics.

Yeah but in the Finals blah blah... or, worse, yeah but statistics blah blah...

3.



(Hat tip: Mark Larson)

4.

The win probability over the series and over the playoffs.

The Heat still had a ~36% chance of winning the series after the Game 5 loss. Vegas favored them by a pretty sizeable 5.5 points tonight. Had they won tonight, they would have been the clear favorites in Game 7. Meaning this series could have easily gone the other way.

(I refer you again to point #3.)

5.

To make myself feel not terribly unproductive while watching the games, I played with a bunch of statistics to put LeBron in historical perspective, as I'm wont to do. I looked at the stats for every season for every hall of famer and every probable hall of famer. Here are a couple of examples:

This first is an expansion on a chart that I shared in an earlier post. It shows Win Shares per 48 minutes by age:



The two biggest surprises to me were that (1) Dirk Nowitzki has had a better career than I expected — #12 overall, ahead of even Sir Charles Barkley, and (2) Whoa, Chris Paul. I knew he was good, but not #6 good. I’m going to have to start watching him more closely.

The next chart shows championships, MVP ranking, and all-star appearances by season for the same group of hall of famers and probable hall of famers:



And here is a fancypants motion chart showing all kinds of stuff. Sorry but I don’t feel compelled to explain it to you — just hit play and you will see the outlier-ness of Wilt, Kareem, Jordan, and LeBron.



Props to Basketball-Reference and Google Spreadsheets for making this possible (and relatively painless).

6.

I love the idea of the touchy-feely index. (See point #1.) The NBA needs to keep that as an official statistic. I think they might be geeky cool enough to do it, because this year they launched the geekiest coolest site in the history of professional sports called Stats Cube. Check it out.

I can think of some other non-traditional statistics that I’d like to see tracked…

— # of words spoken: to teammates vs. opponents vs. fans, “trash” vs. not
— # of glances at the backsides of members of the dance team
— # of times eyebrows raised vs. lowered
— # of “palms up” gestures to referees
— # of times both feet were in the air vs. butt on the floor
Etc. etc. etc.

7.

Hurry up next season. Don’t make me watch baseball.

Achievement invading play

The late critic Christopher Lasch, writing in The Culture of Narcissism, noted the American tendency for “the invasion of play by the rhetoric of achievement”—a kind of cultural infection in which the virus of Protestant work ethic steals into the otherwise unself-conscious body of fun. Hence, the aggressive, goal-oriented forms of play so much favoured by weekend warriors of various kinds: mountain climbing, triathlon racing, extreme or high-risk sports, but also the slightly crazed Saturday-afternoon attempts to get through all the enjoyable leisure-time activities of gardening, decorating, cooking, eating and socializing before sundown. Even the standard forms of urban dissolution – drinking and doing drugs, say, or staying up late – are annexed to the peculiar rhetoric of achievement, creating the odd spectacle of apparently non-conformist or anti-establishment hipsters bragging to each other about how drunk, how stoned or how tired they are, just like plaid-sporting businessmen comparing golf handicaps.

— Mark Kingwell in Better Living.

Impressing over the lifespan, and openness vs. courtesy

In the “Who are you trying to impress?” post I argued that nearly everyone cares about impressing people who they don’t know well, and that that’s not such a bad thing. A point that I left out is that people care to varying degrees, and especially varying degrees over the lifespan: the very young and the very old seem to have much less concern about others’ perceptions of them. What can we take from this?

As I said in that post, I have yet to meet a person, no matter how young nor old, that made me think, “wow, that person really doesn’t care.” Even little squirts reliably show signs of embarrassment. But, crucially, they show fewer signs of embarrassment, as in yeah I got brownie all over my face, so what?

To be sure, there are perks to caring less. I was at a restaurant recently when I saw an older guy sitting on his leg so that his foot was jutting out from his butt cheek. This made me jealous because this is a posture I assume at home on the regular. I don’t assume the posture in public because I have an inner masculine critic that says “don’t let them see how dainty you are.” It’d be nice to silence that voice.

But would it be possible to do so? Sure it would, probably. At least at the margin. This is what meditation is designed to do. What I highly doubt is that it would be possible to reduce all voices to nothingness—at best, meditation is a process of picking weeds. (And as I said in the last post, I have doubts about whether these are weeds worth picking because I see value in vulnerabilities.)

I’ll grant this: There are certainly people who have overcome any embarrassment they might have felt with their bodies. If you’ve ever been in a locker room, you know this. Here’s Ross Beeley describing a familiar scene in An Open Letter to the Gentleman Blow-Drying His Balls in the Gym Locker Room: (hat tip: Kottke)

You're actually doing it. I mean, we've all dreamt of blow-drying our balls out in the open, but you're actually doing it in front of me and at least sixteen other people that just finished exercising at this pricey sports club. Some of us will do it in private in our homes, or in a hotel room using a hairdryer a stranger might have just used to style their hair for that big business meeting in Denver. But not you. You are not confined to such social norms, norms that usually keep flapping, flag-like balls out of my eyes.

Does the courage to do this in public come with age? Perhaps it's something a young man like me can't understand. But you, you are on in years; gray and spotted like a ham in a paintball fight. Your scrotum reminds me of boardwalk taffy. Maybe you've been building up to this day your whole life and I'm witnessing the birth of a phoenix. You are no longer a man that blow-dries his balls in secret. You have transcended that station and now fall into an elite group of Spartans that blow-dry their balls wherever they God damn please. If caterpillars emerged from their cocoons as butterflies with heavy, sagging testicles I'd imagine they'd feel the same as you might right now.

He concludes this way:

Your actions disturb and inspire, and I can't look away. I'm either swelling with physical repulsion or the joy a parent feels watching their child take their first steps. Only in this case the child is an 84-year-old man with a hairdryer aimed at his balls. Whatever the case, you're an exemplar of bravery. So, please, shine on you withering diamond.

My feelings exactly.

The reason why this is both disturbing and inspiring is because there is an inherent conflict between openness and courtesy. Our 84-year-old man may blow-dry his balls wherever he God damn pleases, and he may poop in public restrooms with the nerveless ease of a quarterhorse, but he does so at the expense of courtesy.

Bob gives his own, less graphic, example:

Occasionally, I'll actually tell someone, "I know this won't be popular, but I honestly don't care." They're usually shocked, but to me it beats either pretending to care or enduring them going on and on about it. (I rarely care at all about anyone's wedding, let alone their anniversaries.) The people who genuinely love me already know that I don't care, and they love me anyway, probably in some part because of it.

Bob seems to have decided that he prioritizes genuineness, which he equates with loving himself and growing into the person he wants to be, over courtesy. A Dr. Seuss motto that I know he likes comes to mind: “Those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”

Alyssa and Anna, on the other hand, seem to prioritize courtesy over openness. Alyssa is about half a year into what she calls The Year of No Farts in order to be more desirable to her husband. And Anna said this:

One very important thing needs to be mentioned in this discussion: Empathy. Franzen also said: “Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are.”

For example: I have a girlfriend who farts at will. Her husband just laughs and shakes his head. For other couples, this might not be OK (see commentator above). It’s about knowing and respecting and having empathy for your partner’s feelings.

The trade-off between openness and courtesy is a tricky one, and I’m not sure where I fall on the issue. Is it possible to be “genuine” without being “open”? It seems that’d only be possible if you genuinely care about being courteous. Assuming you don’t, then what? Then the more courteous you are, the less “real” you are, right? It becomes a matter of finding a balance, and I’m not sure how you do that.

I think what Anna might be getting at is that if you don’t genuinely care about being courteous, then that might be a sign that you have some work to do, because it might mean that you are lacking empathy or compassion or love.

On the other hand, being empathetic or compassionate or loving does not necessarily mean being polite. Sometimes the loving thing to do is to confront them in a way they probably won’t like.

Then again, a fart is not a loving confrontation, though it would be hilarious if it could somehow be used as one. Choosing not to fart in front of a spouse is simple sacrifice—giving up something you would like to do in order to prevent the other person from having to endure your smell.

Somehow I doubt farts are what Alain de Botton had in mind when he said this, but it seems perfectly fitting anyway:

To show ourselves 'as we truly are' - a terrifying treat we should spare most of humanity, especially anyone we claim to love.

I have no conclusions to leave you with, but this has been interesting to think about.

***

Somewhat relatedly, this discussion reminds me of the differences between individualist and collectivist cultures that I have been reading about in Sheena Iyengar's The Art of Choosing. Here is a somewhat re-worked passage describing how the cultures shape our identities and our values:

People raised in more individualist societies are primarily motivated by their own preferences, needs, rights, and the contracts they have established with others, and give priority to personal goals over the goals of others. Not only do people choose based on their own preferences, they also come to see themselves as defined by their individual interests, personality traits, and actions. (“I am a film buff” or “I am environmentally conscious.”) In this worldview, it’s critical that one be able to determine one’s own path in life in order to be a complete person, and any obstacle to doing so is seen as patently unjust.

Members of collectivist societies are taught to privilege the “we” in choosing, and they see themselves primarily in terms of the groups to which they belong, such as family, coworkers, village, or nation. They are primarily motivated by the norms of, and duties imposed by, those collectives and are willing to give priority to the goals of these collectives over their own personal goals, emphasizing above all else their connectedness to members of these collectives. Rather than looking out for number one, it’s believed that individuals can be happy only when the needs of the group as a whole are met.

Sounds awfully similar to the liberal vs. conservative divide. Perhaps we can conclude that conservatives are less likely to blow-dry their balls in public.

Puppy, meet basket

I think I'm going to start doing this more often. Every so often behind a puppy in a basket I will hide some kind of totally unrelated material. It will be either exceptionally dry or pretty amusing — but you won't know which.

“Natural” sleeping routines

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, it occurs to me that an important point I missed in the discussion of “natural” sleeping routines is people who have the most sleeping freedom of all: the young and the old. Both parties are, of course, notorious nappers—perhaps evidence that our bodies are not designed to sleep in a single nightly block.

I did some googling and found a Harvard Medical page called Healthy Sleeping: Changes in Sleep with Age. It includes the usual stuff about how many hours of sleep we need, but also says a little about *when* we sleep:

In the beginning, as all new parents discover, a newborn's sleep is sporadic: the need to sleep and the need to eat cycle across the day and night, with little time for anything else. After three or four months, infants begin to develop a pattern in which sleep becomes consolidated into longer periods. Older infants and young children typically obtain their sleep during a solid nighttime session plus two or more daytime naps. Generally speaking, through the toddler years, naps become fewer in number and shorter in duration, and sleep becomes more consolidated during the night. By the age of six or seven, many children have stopped taking naps entirely. Their sleep is experienced much as it will be through adulthood: in a single consolidated block, most often at night.

So sleeping in a single block may be healthy and normal for adults. Then again – and I didn’t know this – napping practices vary by culture and even by latitude:

In many cultures, napping continues to be a normal part of daily life for both young and old. This practice, which in Spanish-speaking countries is called a siesta, tends to be more common in the tropics than in more temperate latitudes. Naps in these cultures typically take place in mid-afternoon and coincide with the hottest time of day, as well as a lull in the brain's alerting signal that works to counteract the drive to sleep.

As a consequence of these regular daytime naps, nighttime sleep is often shifted to a later hour than it is for societies or individuals that don't nap during the day.

***

I also googled for how our ancient ancestors slept, and here is a bit from an article called Trouble sleeping? The solution could lie in our ancestors' lifestyle and taking rests like a caveman:

Our ancient ancestors were programmed to rest at regular intervals throughout the day rather than sleep for eight hours every night.

'Passing out for hours at a time may not have been conducive to our safety and survival, so throughout the day we rested in short phases, whenever we could, to build our energy for hunting and gathering and to maintain our wellbeing. Rest became a substitute for sleep.'

These days it is widely accepted that human sleep patterns are governed by the 'circadian rhythm' - the 24-hour cycle of being awake and active and then, when it becomes dark, resting and sleepy.

'However, built into this 24-hour pattern is a series of shorter cycles of about 90 minutes - called the "ultradian rhythm". This explains the smaller peaks and troughs of energy at throughout the day.'

Dr Ramlakhan believes this ultradian rhythm is a throwback to our hunter-gatherer years.

And while we tend to pay much more attention to the 24-hour cycle than the 90-minute one, Dr Ramlakhan believes the body works best when we move with these natural ultradian rhythms, building in pauses, stopping and resting, so continually renewing our energy.

So maybe napping is the way to go. I’ll just remind you: Don’t worry about it too much.

***

Gabe also shared two interesting links on polyphasic sleep.

In the first, Dustin Curtis reminds us that sleep is still largely a mystery:

A lot of people believe sleep has been proven to repair or rehabilitate the brain and body, but this is not necessarily true. We don’t really know much about sleep. There’s no clearly defined biological reason for it, and it is intuitively an evolutionary disadvantage.

Given that, he seems a little too sure of himself regarding the benefits of polyphasic sleep, which he says works by "hacking" your brain to get just the good REM stuff and skip the fluff. Yay, productivity hacks! More free time! (In case you can't discern sarcasm, I'm skeptical.)

But I did like the graphic presenting the five types of polyphasic sleep:



The other link was much less annoying, and was Steve Pavlina's account of why he stopped polyphasic sleep and returned to a normal routine. The gist: Because everyone else does it.

The #1 reason I decided to call it quits is simply that the rest of the world is monophasic. If most of the world was polyphasic, I probably would have stuck with it. Obviously when you go polyphasic, you fall out of sync with the way other people live. You’re awake most of the night while everyone is asleep. If you sleep like most people, then the hours you’ll gain from polyphasic sleep will come in the middle of the night. And as I gradually learned, nighttime hours are not the same as daytime hours when you live in a monophasic world.

At first I rather liked the novelty of this new way of living. I enjoyed having all that alone time. It was great for writing, since I’d never be interrupted. But after several months, it began to wear on me. Although I gained those nighttime hours, I also lost about 90 minutes during the daytime because of my naps. So that meant less time to interact with people while they were awake. There were times when that wasn’t such a desirable trade-off.

If I can convince another woman to hang out with me, I'll probably return to a "normal" routine, too. Either that or I'll drag her into The Siesta routine with me.

Sleepy time

I care about sleep. How could I not?

As I see it, sleep is not an optional part of our existence. It is as important to our daily functioning as food. And I don’t just mean the quality of the food we eat – I mean food at all. Not sleeping is comparable to starving. It may be worse. Which is why it’s hard for me to imagine an affliction more miserable than insomnia. Here’s Tony Schwartz:

In the head of the interrogated prisoner a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep ... Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it.

I thank my lucky constellations that, so far, I have been a pretty good sleeper. For the most part, I can sleep almost anywhere, I fall asleep fast, I sleep deeply, and I sleep for a long time. My only weakness, if you can call it that, is that I have trouble waking up.

I worry about not being able to sleep, and I worry about my worrying because I am afraid it might cause the affliction that I fear. But so far, thank Buddha, I’ve been a solid sleeper.

I am only half-joking when I say that one of the things that attracted me to my former girlfriend was her sleeping prowess. Sitting next to her in a statistics class, she would on occasion pull her hood up and just nap, snap-of-the-finger-like, barely even losing her posture except for a conspicuously tilted neck. It wasn’t that she was sleep deprived or even bored. One moment, she could be alertly engaging in a class discussion and laughing heartily at the teacher’s jokes, and the next moment she could decide that it was time for a snooze. In a weird way, this was hot. Maybe in some Darwinian way I wanted to pass good sleeping genes onto my tots. Or maybe I just liked her _fuck it, I’m napping_ attitude.

After much effort, I eventually won her favor with a combination of eccentricity and Magnum P.I., and we were together for nearly three and a half wonderful, sleepy years. We were a power sleeping couple if there ever was one. Our only weakness, again, was getting our asses out of bed.

Then I got dumped, and things changed. Of course it was a big life adjustment in general, but my sleep, surprisingly, was not affected much. At least not at first.

Here’s my sleeping history for the past yearish. The faint yellow line in the middle is the time of dumpage.



As it currently stands, I am typically heading to el sack between 3am and 4am, and waking up around 8am. I am complementing that with nightly naps from about 6pm to 9pm. I feel a bit more tired during the day than I used to, yawning and stretching more than previously, but I don’t think my colleagues would tell you that I look like I’m sleep-walking. I’m able to hold it together pretty well.

However, when I get home after work, I’m in a bit of a stupor. It’d be amusing to observe myself. What typically happens is that I let Khan out, pace around the backyard zombie-like popping some peanuts and raisins, thinking about nothing in particular, staring into space and perhaps softly chuckling about whatever’s on my mind. I probably bump into things. Eventually I round up the dog, stumble into the bedroom, and proceed to commence monster nappage. We’re talking naps that exceed 3 hours on the regular. And these are the type of naps where I wake up thinking who am I and where am I and what day is it and what am I doing with my life and why doesn’t LeBron James have a championship yet.

I developed this routine by no means intentionally. As you can see from the first chart, it slowly morphed into this, and the trend may not have ended yet. Maybe, before long, I will be taking two 4ish hour naps a day.

I have grown to really like the routine. Although the days are a little sloggier, I feel incredibly full of energy at night. My nights are awesomely productive (unless there’s a Miami Heat game on), and I feel like I’m writing (= thinking) better than I ever have been.

Being single and relatively free of nightly obligations means that I have the luxury to take monster evening naps. There’s not usually anything that I need to be awake for. Maybe my relative freedom means that my body has been allowed to find the sleeping routine it was designed for, but I wouldn’t make any such speculations. I can only say that it seems to be working for me. That’s not a recommendation, just an observation.

I’m curious to know if others who have had long stretches of sleeping freedom have had similar experiences, or if you developed a very different sleeping routine. Only if I hear about others’ experiences would I be prepared to speculate about what sleeping routine is "natural."

Wolves, incentives, and maybe even parenting

Like any good economist, I train my dog using incentives. Lots of incentives. This includes treats, of course, but also belly rubs and a healthy dose of gushing remarks about how adorable he is.

In some sense, the incentives have worked wonders. Homedog can do all kinds of tricks, including but not limited to fetching a can out of the fridge *and* shutting the door behind him. But here’s the thing: In the areas where it matters most, like listening and obeying in dangerous situations, nobody who knows him would call Khan the best-behaved of canines. Strangeness is his vice: He’s not good in strange situations or around strange people. He’s not even that good on a leash.

Naturally, I was humiliated when I read Mark Rowlands’s account of how he trained a wolf. It’s been said that you can’t train a wolf to walk on a leash. Mark Rowlands did. More impressively, he trained the wolf to walk by his side off the leash. More impressively still, he trained the wolf to walk by his side off the leash in a field of sheep(!).

Obviously I’m doing something wrong. I can’t even train Khan to walk on a leash in a field of squirrels.

I think the fact that a wolf can be trained to walk calmly and passively in a field of sheep says that we are missing something important if we are conceptualizing behavior purely in terms of incentives. The wolf has a huge incentive to go and get him some free and easy sheep flesh, so what’s preventing him from doing so? I cannot imagine that it would be treats, no matter how delicious, nor punishments, no matter how cruel. Nor can I imagine that it has anything to do with a desire to please. Something else is going on here.

We economists tend to think along behaviorist lines, believing that if you reward a behavior you get more of it, and if you punish a behavior you get less of it. There is a lot of truth to that, but I’m gradually realizing that it’s far too simple. Dangerously simple. Like holy-shit-I-really-need-to-rethink-things simple.

Here’s Mark Rowlands in The Philosopher and the Wolf:

It is a mistake to think that your dog’s obedience can be obtained by rewards. The rewards can take different forms. Some people obsessively pop treats into the mouths of their dogs for accomplishing even the easiest of tasks. The most obvious result of this is a fat dog that will refuse to obey its owner when it suspects there is no treat around to be offered, or when it is distracted by something – a cat, another dog, a jogger, etc. – that it deems more interesting than a treat.

More often, however, the ‘reward’ takes the form of an inane chatter they insist in carrying on with their dog. ‘Good boy’ … ‘What a clever dog you are’ – and so forth. And they often accompany this chatter with nagging little tugs on the lead to, as they see it, help reinforce their message. This is, in fact, precisely the way not to train a dog – and it hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of working with a wolf. If you’re continually talking to your dog, or half-heartedly tugging on his lead, he has no need to watch you. In fact, he has no reason to give a fig about what you’re doing. He can do what he likes in the sure knowledge that you will let him know what’s happening – and that he can act on or disregard this information as he chooses.

The problem with this approach is that the dog has his own desires:

People who think that their dog’s obedience can be bought are people who think – and how often have I heard this – that their dog basically wants to do as his ‘master’ wants – he always aims to please – and simply needs to have explained to him precisely what this is. And this is, of course, non-sense. Your dog doesn’t want to obey you any more than you want to obey anyone else.

Rowlands doesn’t mention this, but apart from the flawed logic of incentives as teaching devices, psychologists have long known that incentives can be are counterproductive. For example, if you amply reward a kid for reading, the kid will, as expected, read more (at least for a short while). But the perverse part is this: In the absence of the reward, the kid will read even less than they did at baseline.

So what do we do if not layer on the incentives? Rowlands explained that the opposite approach – training through ego, a battle of wills – is equally as flawed because it will result in a dog that will grow up, in all likelihood, to be not very nice at all.

The key to training, he says, is this:

Make him think he has no choice in the matter. This is not because he is made to feel the loser in a battle of wills, but because of an attitude of calm but remorseless inevitability that you must bring to your training. In a battle of wills, what you are saying to the wolf is this: You will do what I say – I am giving you no choice. But the attitude with which to train a wolf is this: You will do what the situation demands – this situation affords no other option. It is not I to whom you are responding; it is the world.

Maybe it’s scant consolation for the wolf. But it certainly helps put the trainer in his or her proper place – not as a dominant and arbitrary authority whose will is to be obeyed at all costs, but as an educator who allows the wolf to understand what the world requires of it.

This makes so much sense, and I hate that it wasn’t until now that I heard this articulated. Ideas are flitty, of course, but this seems like a rare example of an idea that could, with time and attention, be life-altering, changing not just my conscious thoughts but my behavior and my perceptions.

The way that I understand what Rowlands is saying is that a force that shapes behavior more powerfully than tastes, preferences, incentives, desires, demand functions and other such things economists like to talk about is – not sure how to put this – something like an acceptance of or a submission to constraints. For example, the reason why people remain loyal to spouses, friends, jobs, whatever, is probably often not because they have (unconsciously) concluded that the benefits outweigh the costs, but because they have accepted it as duty. You could say that there is a demand function for duty, but I think you'd be missing the point.

There are important lessons to be learned here. People will probably scoff at my saying this, but it seems that the principles of being an effective dog/wolf trainer also apply to being an effective parent, teacher, manager, whatever. Whenever you are in a position of authority, you'd do better not to act as a reward-giver nor as a dominant and arbitrary authority, but as a calm and remorseless educator, teaching what the world demands of us.

And lest you have questions about the morality of such “training,” Rowlands has a response:

This training was the greatest gift I ever gave Brenin [the wolf] – a shining example of one of the few things in my life I really did right. Some people think that training dogs – and, even more so, wolves – is cruel, as if you are going to break their spirit or make them permanently cowed. But far from breaking his spirit, when a dog or wolf knows exactly what is and is not expected of him his confidence, and as a result his composure, grow immensely.

It is a hard truth that, as Friedrich Nietzsche once put it, those who can’t discipline themselves will quickly find someone else doing it for them. And, for Brenin, it was my responsibility to be that somebody. But the relation between discipline and freedom is a deep and important one: Far from being opposed to freedom, discipline is what makes the most worthwhile forms of freedom possible. Without discipline there is no real freedom; there is only license.

Amen.

"Who are you trying to impress?"

In a previous post I had a throw-away line suggesting that the world would be a dull place if we stopped trying to impress one another. It seems deserving of explanation.

Understandably, a lot of people are uneasy with the idea of striving to impress because it seems fake and insecure and other such adjectives. These people see striving to impress as a fault, and they think the world would be a better place if we all stopped putting on a show and just acted like ourselves so people could know us and love us for who we really are. Or something like that.

A more eloquent articulation of this view came from a recent commencement speech by Jonathan Franzen (hat tip: Anna), who suggested that impressing people (= trying to be liked) is borne out of fear of pain and rejection:

The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.

My first concern with such arguments is that I don’t know what a Real Self means.

My second and bigger concern is that now we’re whining talking about how the world should work, and I can think of nothing more absurd than a bunch of humans sitting behind their keyboards waving their hands about how the world ought to work.

The reality is that we do care about impressing people, or at least not looking stupid in front of them. To care what others think is human. It’s not a decision, it’s a fact of life. Or at least a default setting.

Some people will deny this. My friend Bob already has:

I've never really wanted not to care what someone else thought of me, my choices, my performance, my ideas... I just found over and over again that I didn't. I wrestled with wanting to care. Eventually it became wanting to want to care, and I realized I just didn't, and that was OK (though hard to sell to society - but who cares?).

I wonder whether we are talking about the same thing because I have yet to meet a person that made me think, “wow, that person really doesn’t care.” Even shameless shitters tend not to wear sweatpants out of the house.

Here’s a simple test to find out whether someone cares: Just ask them, “do you ever feel embarrassed?”

This works because feeling embarrassed, by definition, means caring about what others think.

Most people would admit to at least occasionally feeling embarrassed, but some would not. Here’s the thing: To even be able to say that you never feel embarrassed requires that you know how embarrassment feels, and so the statement makes no sense. If a person truly did not care, the only legitimate response to the question would be “I don’t know. What’s embarrassment?” And if they said that, then we’d have to subject them to some serious psychological tests, because that’s just weird.

So, I conclude that caring about how we are perceived is a reality for almost everyone. And even if we could sit behind our keyboards and change this reality, I doubt it’d be wise to. I prefer to view our desire to impress not as a vice but as a great motivator that has inspired many of the greatest creative works throughout human history, from cave paintings to 3D documentaries about cave paintings.

And beyond just the pleasure of aesthetic consumption (like this lovely post you're merrily consuming right now), the desire to impress (= the competition over relative status) is probably what led humans to where we are today. Xan explains in a post called Let them eat status. Here's a piece:

Imagine that at any point in our evolutionary path, we have some store of knowledge, and some baseline of intelligence that is able to put that knowledge to use. If you're smarter, you add a little increment to the pot, which everyone subsequently gets to share. Everyone levels up the same amount relative to the rest of the animals, but you also get additional esteem within human society for being such a smartypants.

(According to this model, if you're a fan of modern society, then competition for relative status is something to be grateful for! Without it, we'd have had considerably less reason to grow to our current state.)

So, don't knock status-seeking.

Now is when I turn the tables a bit: Just as life would be dull if we stopped trying to impress one another, so would it be dull if we never stopped trying to impress one another. Just as there is a natural desire to impress, so I think there is a natural desire to stop impressing once we have been around someone for long enough and feel sufficiently comfortable in their presence. This is the basis of intimacy.

Case and point: There comes a time in every romantic relationship – hopefully well after the first date – when someone has to release the first toot. The transition from a not-farting-relationship to a farting-relationship can be awkward and difficult, but it is an important (and funny) sign of progress. I wouldn’t want to be in a relationship where I felt I always had to be at my best and I had to be careful not to do anything ugly or stinky or human.

What would be even worse is to be in a relationship where the other person never felt comfortable enough to drop their guard. I don’t know if I could trust someone if they were always polite, well-behaved, and intelligent. In a weird way, I want my friends to rip ones in front of me, in part because some toots are impressive, but mostly because toots are human, and my friends’ willingness to release them says that they are comfortable enough with me to have created a refuge from the status-seeking world.

I use flatulence as a salient and amusing example, but this of course applies to many other kinds of behaviors. The important part is having some kind of signal that you are comfortable enough around them that you have stopped trying to impress them. And this matters because it means you can get down to the business of really knowing them and appreciating them, rather than "winning" their favor.

It may be the only kind of relationship worth having.

And having that initial desire to impress is crucial because without it there wouldn’t be a guard to be dropped, meaning there wouldn’t be vulnerabilities, meaning there wouldn’t be intimacy. To put it as simply as I can, the formula for any healthy relationship is this: Impress me at first, then don’t.

Luckily, this seems to be how the Universe actually works, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.