Love as a bodily function

I’m getting pressure from people who love me to start dating again. Blind dating, speed dating, and online dating have all been unsubtly suggested. The general sentiment seems to be that romance is not going to find me if I’m sitting on my bum.

My response: Can’t you see I’m blogging here? If I do this for 5-10 more years the ladies are sure to start flocking to me.

My more serious response: You’re assuming that (1) romance is something I want/need, and (2) romance is something that can be intentionally dredged up (by me).

I’ll respond to both assumptions by stating my observation that love (the romantic kind) is a bodily function.

It’s something that happens regardless of whether you want it or expect it.¹ It is a fact of life no more worthy of comment than breathing.²

It’s something that, when it does happen, is pretty messy and some might even say gross.

The Point: Suggesting that I go on dates when I don’t feel romantic interest is like suggesting that I go sit on the toilet when I don’t need to poop.

They mean well. They want me to be happy and what not,^3,4 but I’m not unhappy and it’s unlikely that I would be any happier if I found the mess called love, or, more accurately, the mess called love found my body.

---

¹That’s not the same as saying that it will happen at the same frequency regardless of whether you want it or expect it. The more people of the attractive sex you get to know, the more frequently it will happen. So you can, to an extent, seek love just like you can seek other certain bodily functions by eating more fiber.

²But we comment on it a lot, and that’s because, as bodily functions go, this one tends to get us excited. It gets us excited because we need to get excited for it to happen—this is a bodily function involving two people so we can’t be calm about it if we’re going to take the actions necessary for it to happen.

³(or maybe they just want grandbabies)

⁴NB: Happiness as a goal really scrunches my undies.

Stereotyping to learn

On the post about the point of dating, Bob challenged me (I love it when he does that) asking what’s the point of all this male vs. female stereotyping. (That’s crudely paraphrased. Read the comment string.) I’m responding here because, uh, I feel like it.

It’s not so much the word “stereotype” that bothers me (although it obviously carries a connotation) – it’s calling something a stereotype rather than saying anything about whether or to what extent or in what circumstances a particular stereotype is likely to have truth value.

I think your (Bob’s) point is that any stereotype, any wholesale categorization, is inherently flawed and so no further comment is necessary. I appreciate the sentiment of avoiding general patterns and focusing intellectual efforts on individuals, but let’s think about this.

I understand myself to be in the categories of human, male, 26.5 years old, corduroy-wearing, racquetball-playing, etc. Can I fully and accurately understand myself based on the patterns (stereotypes) that accompany those categories? Of course not. But it’s a starting point. It might even be *the* starting point because I don’t know how else you could logically understand a person or object without first having some pattern-observations about categories. I’d have a pretty serious identity crisis if I succeeded in weaning myself from the mental category of “human,” for example.

Your main beef seems to be that thinking in patterns means treating individuals as fitting inside tidy boxes. I don’t think that’s true. Two reasons: (1) a big part of what makes an individual unique is their combination of categories, and (2) no individual perfectly fits every pattern. There’s nothing about recognizing patterns in women in general that prevents me from recognizing that a woman in particular does not fit every pattern. The patterns are merely hypotheses (almost always unconscious ones) I use when trying to understand an individual.

We’re thinking about this nice and consciously behind our keyboards, but the fact is we’re doing this categorization and pattern-recognition stuff all of the time unconsciously. That’s how we learn. That may even be what learning *is*. Are there faults with it? Of course. But time and energy are scarce so evolution made trade-offs. The default is that we use pattern recognition as a starting point and then adjust to the messy individuals we get to know. If you’re arguing that I’d be small-minded not to change, I’m going to need more evidence for why we should spurn the ancient learning system plus evidence for whether spurning it is even possible.

---

UPDATE: Anna adds in her characteristic saying-so-much-in-so-few-words way (see: I notice patterns in individuals, too) this:

Also, it's fun to shoot the sh*t.

(How To) Create your own education

I’ve run into a few people who are or are thinking about doing a create-your-own-education sort of deal. Someone recently asked for my thoughts and seeing as how I meet the qualifying criteria to offer advice (have a blog), thought I’d respond here.

It seems to me that the process of creating your own education involves (or ought to involve) answering these questions:

1. What’s the point of education?

Reasonable minds disagree on this, and I don’t have a strong opinion myself, but let’s just assume that the goal is to make yourself into a productive and valuable worker-bee.


2. How do I become a productive and valuable worker-bee?

Two and a half hard steps:

(a) Gain the requisite knowledge and/or skills.
(b) Be employable.
(c) BONUS: Be remarkable.


3a. What are the requisite skills and/or knowledge?

(Circles drawn to scale.)

The Point: The safest bet is to find the sweet spot, those skills and/or knowledge-sets that are at the intersection of rare, valuable, and interesting.

All three matter. Valuable because otherwise you won’t get $$. Rare because otherwise you won’t get much $$. And interesting because otherwise you’ll either hate it or (worse) spend half of your waking hours chasing $$.


3b. How do I be employable?

Probably the trait that matters most to employability is conscientiousness. You’ve got to be reliable, meaning showing up to work when you are expected to and finishing your tasks when you are expected to, but also being reliable meaning doing things with the appropriate attention to detail given only the vaguest of directions or guidance.

It also helps to not be a jerk.

3bii. How do I be conscientious (and not a jerk)?

Good genes and/or a significant other who will whoop your ass.

3bii-part II. How do I find a S.O. who will whoop my ass?

Just stop already, will you? I DON'T KNOW.

3c. How do I be remarkable? (Besides reading Seth Godin books.)

Besides reading Seth Godin books? Hmm. I suppose you could try reading Wehr in the World.

Being remarkable typically involves doing things beyond your immediate assigned tasks that add major value to the company. Noticing those things and then pulling them off is what makes remarkable people remarkable.

Being remarkable could mean, for example, being so socially adept that you not only understand and translate the most hard to understand and translate people, but you magically get those people to talk to and understand each other so that, in your absence, the place still operates pretty swimmingly.

3cii. Um, how do I do that?

I have no idea. It probably helps to have a lady brain.

4. What does it all mean?

It means that what you choose to study/get good at matters – it’s got to be rare, interesting, and valuable. It’s a hard decision, but it’s one that you ought to be able to make if you devote a day or weekend to it. (Oh the irony of me writing a How To post suggesting that you can figure this out in a day or weekend when I haven’t figured it out after 26.5 years.)

If I were brainstorming a course of study, I would start by making two lists: One of things that I suspect would keep me lastingly interested, and one of things that I suspect will be lastingly valuable. I would then look for even the vaguest overlap between the two lists. The goal is to narrow it down to a few knowledge-sets or skillsets that are likely to be both lastingly valuable and lastingly interesting. Once I had those few things, I’d see if any could be complementary to each other, because complementary combinations are probably the easiest way to achieve rarity. Then the final and most important step is: Get to work. And in particular, get to work at making yourself rare.

That last sentence is important. When people “get to work” they typically focus on becoming supremely good at what they do/know. It’s the 10,000 hours thing. That’s their way of becoming “rare.” But that’s just one way. There are other ways to make yourself rare that don’t involve 10,000 hours of devotion. You can, for example, look for barriers to entry (like admission to med school or passing The Bar), look for tiny niches, look for “new” areas of value, or, my favorite, combine complementary knowledge or skillsets. For example, knowing how to run a multivariate regression is not terribly rare, but you’ve got something rare-ish if you combine it with knowing how to converse with humans. The important part to remember is that the goal is to be rare, not those other things.

I’ve come this far without even using the word “syllabus.” That’s because I think a syllabus is kind of missing the point. This stuff can only be planned to a small extent because you won’t know whether something will be worthwhile or where it will lead you until you get into it. You can use a semi-syllabus for starting points, if you want, but the important (and exciting) part is where you go from there.

One-sentence summary: Choose one or a few knowledge/skillset(s) in the sweet spot and then focus on making yourself rare, but don’t forget that conscientiousness and social intelligence are things that pretty much every productive and valuable worker-bee must have.

Also don’t forget that you are taking advice from a guy who has no idea what he’s talking about.

###

Postscript

The primary benefit of a create-your-own-education type of deal, I think, is that you’re likely to be much more thickly in the Rare and Interesting zones than someone who does traditional education, and if you do it well, you could end up with something much more Valuable than the certificate a university bestows upon you after X years and X*(a bunch) dollars. In summary: I think there’s a good argument to be made for Self-Ed over Formal-Ed.

On the other hand, probably the biggest weakness of Self-Ed, and the biggest strength of Formal-Ed, is the (lack of) feedback that comes from being surrounded by smart people. Using a word like “feedback” makes it sound trivial, but it’s probably the single most crucial ingredient in learning. If you think you can surround yourself with smart people who will give you an adequate level of feedback on the stuff you’re learning, then in my mind it’s no contest in favor of Self-Ed, but that seems especially hard to get on your own.

But shouldn’t you be self-educating anyway? The only real question is whether you should be formal-educating in addition. And there is of course no universal answer: It depends on many things, including what skills/knowledge you hope to gain, smart people density, $$, your ability/history of self-discipline, and whether becoming a productive and valuable worker-bee is even your goal, just to name a few.

Speaking of that goal, it seems to me much too simple to have one goal (especially that one) for this mess of a universe. I want to learn things and become better at things for reasons beyond becoming a valuable and productive worker-bee. Other (better) reasons include having relationships that don’t suck, preparing for death, propagating genes (thought I’d throw that here in the middle as if it’s just one goal among many), understand my dust-like status in the universe, appreciate the mess that brought us here, and just because it’s fun to learn (OKAY?!). In other words, don’t think that you need a unified purpose for the things you’re learning. There is no such thing as a unified purpose in this giant mess. (Except propagating genes, but come on.)

The point of dating

Anna said in a recent post that “Dating is the process of discerning whether you like, respect, and can see yourself building a life with someone,” and that got me to thinking.

Saying that the point of dating is marriage-screening seems like saying that the point of sex is reproduction. It may be true from an evolutionary perspective that the point of sex (dating) is reproduction (marriage-screening)¹, but at least from a male POV, we rarely have sex (date) thinking hoo boy I’d really like some offspring (marriage) out of this.

So why do we (males) date? Um, because we feel like it. That’s the answer to why we do everything. And I don’t mean “because we feel like it” in the scoff-y teenage way but rather that we have certain mysterious feelings that guide every decision we make and every action we take. As soon as you take the next step to asking why we feel like it, you get into murky philosophical (horseshit) territory where writers like Alain de Botton do most of their damage:

Solitary though we may have become, we haven’t of course given up all hope of forming relationships. In the lonely canyons of the modern city, there is no more honoured emotion than love. However, this is not the love of which religions speak, not the expansive, universal brotherhood of mankind; it is a more jealous, restricted and ultimately meaner variety. It is a romantic love that sends us on a maniacal quest for a single person with whom we hope to achieve a lifelong and complete communion, one person in particular who will spare us any need for people in general.

So Alain’s answer is that we date to rid ourselves of the need of people in general. Sure, that’s one interesting theory, and it’s good because it feels mildly to moderately true, but I could probably name 18 other much less eloquent but equally as valid theories.

What makes the romantic game so challenging (and interesting) is that men and women generally have different goals or at least priorities. There are good evolutionary reasons for those differences, but it’s pretty unpleasant to deal with them as a man or as a woman.

It occurs to me that the female human is probably the single most romantically cautious animal on the planet.² It is crucially important that she gets this decision right and incredibly scary to think that she might get it wrong. What the average male may consider maniacal stalking is actually a pretty common screening process that she does when evaluating someone who seems to have long-term potential. I don’t think the screening is to estimate compatibility as much as it is to assess whether you are likely to be(come) a creep. In other words, it’s not about finding a good thing as much as it is avoiding bad things. I’m generalizing, and I’m not completely sure about this, but that’s my guess from 26.5 years of limited experience.

And this screening process often takes place before they’ve even started dating. There seems to be a crucial pre-dating stage (or stages) that we don’t have and desperately need a word for. Dating often begins at such an advanced stage that it’s like trial marriage.

Oh yeah, there was a point to this, which is that dating is not (for most guys, most of the time) about screening for marriage. To come back to the dating vs. sex analogy, feeling like I’m interviewing wife candidates would be every bit as buzzkilling as feeling like I’m trying to create small humans inside this here uterus. It turns it into something much more scientific and rational than it needs to be.

---

¹I have serious doubts about that. There are lots of other species, and especially the primate variety, that have sex for reasons other than reproduction. Consider the bonobo. Reproduction is a logical, valid reason for sex just like marriage-screening is a logical, valid reason for dating, but there are plenty of other logical, valid reasons for both.

²A related observation is that women, because it’s typically understood that they are the choosier party, seem to have such confidence that they can get the guy that they sometimes have no concept of leagues.

Three years of book ratings

Chart and data here.

Some notes and observations:

(1) For the most part, if I found (or did not find) a book insightful I also found (or did not find) it enjoyable. That is a good thing. (For nerds, the correlation is 0.56.) There are a couple of exceptions: Nassim Taleb’s books drove me nuts but I still found them insightful. On the other hand, some books I found wildly amusing but uninsightful, including my very favorite, Trout Fishing in America.

(2) I think when I try to name my favorite books (or anything else for that matter), I am primarily considering which books I found most enjoyable plus a much harder to measure thing which is something like how much I perceive it to be unique to me and/or how well I think the book meshes with my desired identity. Basically, I think the simplified version of the favoriteness formula is Enjoyability + Identity Signaling. (And Enjoyability is probably at least partially explained by Identity Signaling.)

(3) I am embarrassed by a lot of the books I have read.

(4) If I retroactively rated these books, I would probably get very different results. It’s strange how my perception of a book can change so dramatically with time. Almost always, my perception goes in the negative direction.

(5) With 93% of books, I can pretty accurately predict how I will end up rating them after the first 10-20 pages. I should probably finish fewer books, but that feeling of completeness is so enticing.

(6) How enjoyable I found a book is very highly correlated with how well I perceived it to be written. (For nerds, 0.70.) I will happily read a book on almost any topic if it is written well. That tells me there’s something wrong with the way we (ahem, *I*) shop for books: Rather than looking for an interesting or informative subject, I should be looking first for good writers.

The Internet’s mysteries, explained

1. Why is this so interesting?

You’re going to make me ruin it by explaining it, aren’t you? Fine. Partially it’s the contrast in expressions. Partially it’s the microcosm of the male vs. female experience. Mostly it’s the smile: Upper lip first, lower lip follows. Very primate.



2. Should I wrap my gifts like a burger? Should my tent look like a sandwich?

Not unless you want disappointed bears in your mug.



3. Was it a bad idea for Coastal Carolina to hire the ex-Ameritrade CEO as their head football coach?

But what he lacks in background, he makes up in backing. When Moglia retired as the CEO of TD Ameritrade in 2008, he was making a salary of $21 million and held $100 million in Ameritrade stock. There are no NCAA regulations limiting how much the nation's wealthiest college coach can spend on the Coastal Carolina program either directly or through donations.

I will answer that question with a question: Are you retarded?



4. Where did all the sex go?

I don’t know, but I want it back.



5. Is it possible to watch this without smiling?

If this doesn’t make you smile, then you are, no offense, probably a humorless sack of shit whose existence is not only meaningless but harmful, and you should probably be excreted from this Earth.

Sorry that I snapped at you.

Specialization in art

Philosophical question: Is a song just as good if 80 specialists created it vs. if 1 generalist created it?

(Warning: This post is not very interesting and even more scattered than usual. Skip it unless the question really interests you.)

Specialists, as a general rule, are better than generalists at their assigned function, so we might at first glance assume that a song created by a group of specialists would be objectively better than one created by a generalist. But that assumption seems to be missing something important.

One possible rebuttal to the assumption would be that specialists are disjointed so the music doesn’t hang together as well as it would if it were created by fewer people, but that’s probably not right because you can have experts who specialize in making everything hang together.

I’m not sure this is it, but here is my guess at the problem: Music, like all art, is just a form of communication, and something feels fishy about a group communicating. Individual members of a group can communicate, but the group as a whole… that seems strange/impossible.

I’m biased. I think a big part of what attracts me to the singer/songwriter types like Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, and Ray LaMontagne is that I believe they are the genius and the emotion behind the music. They act as a solo dude – an image – through whom I can interpret the songs. In other words, I imagine that Van Morrison’s music means a certain thing to Van Morrison, and I interpret the music through that lens. And it’s delightful (to me).

It would be quite a bit different, I think, if somebody else wrote Van’s lyrics and somebody else decided the guitar chords and somebody else decided the vocal inflections and somebody else decided the vocal pitch and somebody else decided how the vocal pitch should mesh with the guitar chords, etc. With enough specialists, Van himself becomes just a specialist, someone who goes out and executes the vocals in a way that a team of experts thought they should be executed. And then it’s no longer communication. It’s just a guy performing a mechanical skill.

Analogy Alert: Imagine you had a team of specialists write your personal emails. Roles could be assigned as follows:

• One person decides the general message to get across
• Another person writes the subject line
• Another person writes the intro and salutation
• Another person writes the body
• Another person does the punctuation
• Another person edits for grammar
• Another person makes the words warm and affectionate and attractive
• Another person makes it all hang together

What would happen? You’d probably end up with a very nice-looking email that to the unsuspecting recipient would come across very well. But you’d also end up with something that I don’t know how to describe other than “empty.” The end product would be the result of multiple individuals with no common agenda or desire except to carry out their worker-bee roles. They don’t really care whether they get a message across, and they don’t even really care what the message is. They just want to satisfy their boss/the recipient. That’s not communication. That’s employment.

But then it kind of bothers me that I am bothered by “group” art because I think the best way to understand a brain is as a conglomeration of competing interests, a parliament, a group. So even if Van is the sole force behind his music, it is still a force that is neither coherent nor singular because his neurons are neither coherent nor singular.

And to be fair, not all music is intended to be or needs to be communication in a personal sense. If you are creating party rock anthems, for example, then it’s less important that you communicate inner experiences or some other highfalutin aim and more important that you produce a combination of notes that will induce the desire to dance, and for that aim a team of specialists, or even a team of robots, probably makes a lot of sense.

Basically, I’m confused. You can probably tell that I am struggling to find a point in this. Something bothers me about the idea of music (or writing or film or what-have-you) being the product of many minds instead of one or a few, but I’m not sure what or why.

+++

I have a similarly uneasy feeling regarding editing people’s writing. If the editor has the final say in what words are chosen, then what/who am I reading? I can sometimes ease my mind that the editing is just to look for typos and grammar and nitpicky things like that, but I know that’s not true. Editing involves re-arranging and removing and just generally effing up the content and therefore the overall meaning. It’s terribly discomforting to think that DFW’s words might not have really been his words, or that there were significant chunks that were cut out that I’m not seeing.

I know DFW feuded with his editors a lot, and I’m sure I would too if I had editors to deal with. Most of the time they’re going to change (fuck up) the meaning and it’s going to suck, but even on the occasions when they don’t change the meaning but manage make you sound considerably more intelligent and warm and funny than you really are, it still kind of sucks because it’s false product, gratifying though it may be.

I’m not opposed to all kinds of editing. Editing serves a crucial role if its purpose is understood to be clarification. Even the aim of polishing seems generally okay. Where editing gets really dangerous and seedy, I think, is when the aim is audience-pleasing.

But see, I’m still confused, because I understand even the best of writing to be a very crude form of communication where you are giving off a very smelly representation of what’s going on inside you. And if that’s the case – and I’m pretty sure it is – then what’s the harm in having an expert swoop in and make it a bit more audience-pleasing?

+++

I think film, even the highfalutin kind, manages to avoid the problem of diluted-message-by-committee by having a figurehead – a director – who we imagine to be the artistic dictator whose message we are interpreting, and that his army of specialists is merely making minor tweak-y edits to improve visual appeal and sound quality and whatnot.

Analogy Alert, part II: It’s kind of like falling for a woman. If she has a team of makeup artists and fashion consultants and hair specialists to make her look more appealing, that’s fine, because I’m still falling for the same creature that just happens to look better than she might’ve without the added assistance. But if that woman had her words edited for content or if she had a stand-in for when we play tennis or have sex, then that’s creepy (and kind of kinky).

If I have a conclusion, it’s that specialists are great to help you spruce up the periphery of the message and thereby create an audience-pleasing product, but it gets unsettling and seedy and dangerous if the specialists are allowed reign over the core of the product – the message – because groups can’t communicate. (Unless, that is, you’re creating party rock anthems, because then there isn’t really a message to be communicated.)

Death as a verb

You’ll have to excuse me because this might make zero sense, but when did that ever prevent me from posting something?

***

The baby was born.
The baby died.

That is how we English-speakers typically describe birth and death. We typically use the verb to be with the event of birth, but with death we almost always treat it as a verb.

Imagine if we flipped it:

The baby borned.

That’s just awkward, right? Partially that’s because we don’t have a verb for birth except to describe the action the mother takes (giving birth, or birthed). I don’t think it would make much sense to have a verb to describe the action the baby takes in the birthing process because the baby’s not really helping much—it’s kind of a passive passenger in the process. It is in the state of being born, we could say, which is why the verb to be makes sense.

I’m going to re-write the last two sentences but this time replacing “birth” with “death”:

I don’t think it makes much sense to have a verb to describe the action the baby takes in the death process because the baby’s not really helping much—it’s kind of a passive passenger in the process. It is in the state of dying, we could say, which is why the verb to be makes sense.

The baby was born.
The baby was died.

It’s awkward, but it shouldn’t be. The baby was in the state of the death process, and now it’s not.

The baby was died, and now the baby is dead.

It makes perfect grammatical sense to say “the baby is dead,” but we rarely put it that way because it seems terribly insensitive (or unpleasant?) compared to the verb form of saying “the baby died” or “the baby passed away” as if death is just some action the baby took on the way to other actions. Saying the baby is dead is dangerously and uncomfortably close to saying that the baby is in an end state in perpetuity.

I don’t want this to come off as grammatical nitpickiness. I’m not trying to be the language police here. I’m trying to understand what our language says about our relationship with death and deadness.

I don’t even particularly like the word “dead” because I think it’s misleading. It describes the absence of something as if it is not an absence. You are either alive or you’re not. “Unalive” would be fine, but giving it a whole separate word assigns it this mystery and scariness that it doesn’t deserve.

The baby was alive, and now it’s not.

If I have any neat conclusions from this (I don’t), it’s that, on the one hand, we want to describe death as a verb rather than a state presumably because it makes it seem a little bit more like we have some control over the situation rather than being helplessly plunged into a state of nothingness, and on the other hand we use a word like “dead” presumably because we want to assign deadness this special status apart from being unalive, where possibilities of actions and golden harps and whatnot persist beyond the death state/verb.

Personally, I’m more comfortable viewing it as being died and then being unalive.

Half-year in review

People are starting to do year-end wrap-ups. I wanted to join the party, but a year is too long for me to wrap-up my head around. It’s easier for me to think in seasons, and the best I could do was squeeze out the last two. So here is my half-year wrap-up.

Big or just memorable happenings, roughly chronologically:

• Considered moving to NYC. Settled for a 5-day trip.
• Grandma died. I think about her every day.
• Watched, just barely dry-eyed, my sister get married.
• Came close to dying in a wimpy hurricane. My car came closer.
• Tried online dating. “Tried” is the key word, but not “tried” as in took up an interesting side hobby for a couple of months but “tried” as in devoted a ridiculous amount of mindspace to finding a serviceable ladyfriend before deciding / having it decided for me that this was going nowhere.
• Fell in love. His name is Van. He made albums called Veedon Fleece and Astral Weeks.
• Adopted Bethesda Park as my place-du-recreation. (Durham people: Leave it alone. It’s mine.)
• 10 mile hike to an incestuous abandoned cabin in the mountains, including 37 creek crossings, 36 of which I crossed successfully.
• Moderate to knees-weakeningly large crush on a girl I know almost nothing about. Stupid male.
• Started listening to hit music radio. Am trying to figure out how to stop (1, 2).

Nerdy stuff:

• 178,000 words written, or about 970 words per day, 920 of which sucked.
• Used the word “vagina” on this blog at least 8 times.
• 140 hours of exercise, or about 46 minutes per day.
• Used exercise to justify excessive amount of Bojangles consumption.
• Two huge outliers in the movement department: 25,000 steps one day (10 mile hike), and 38,000 steps another (about 17 miles; NYC).
• 4,600 book pages (≈ 20 books) read over a span of 122 hours, or about 25 pages over 40 minutes per day.
• Three books of particular note: David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself because it is the highest-rated book in my nerdy spreadsheet, Demetri Martin’s This Is A Book because it is the funniest book/thing I’ve ever consumed, and Rob Dunn’s The Wild Life of Our Bodies because you (yes, you) should read it.
• I think I only saw one movie, and by movie I mean documentary. It was Werner Herzog’s The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and it was Amazing (capital A deserved). I still want to see The Tree of Life.
• Napped like a mug: 1.3 hours per day in the Summer and 1.75 hours per day in the Fall. (Total amount of sleep has not changed: 7.35 hours per day.)

Shout outs:

• Best dog in the history of spotted furballs, 4.5 years running.
• A pretty sweet house in a pretty sweet city (4.5 years running) in a pretty sweet state (11.5 years running) in a pretty sweet country in a not-very-sweet Universe (26.5 years running).
• An employer that keeps me satisfactorily employed, 4.5 years running.
• Family, friends, co-workers, and neighbors who would have my back if I should ever stop being satisfactorily employed or satisfactorily sane.
• Family, friends, co-workers, and neighbors who are just generally awesome.

Looking forward to:

• Life.
• etc.

My relationships are so inefficient

Attempt # Dozen

***

Carolyn,

Have you heard about the scientific research saying that you can get fat just by associating with fatties? Holy F, right? But it gets even scarier because not just my fatness but also my intelligence, job prospects, vagina options, and happiness are strongly influenced by the people I associate with. Eesh!

Don’t get me wrong: My friends are good people. They’re pleasant to be around if you like dumb jokes or fattening food or alcoholic beverages. They’re just not good enough. Here’s the logic:

1. The only point in life is to make yourself the best human you can be.
2. If life is meaningless then there is no point in going on.
3. You cannot possibly be the best human you can be if the people around you aren’t helping you to become the best human you can be.
4. Therefore, if you are friends with some dweeb named Ty-Dawg whose idea of the good life is World of Warcraft + a bag of cheetos, you might as well shoot yourself in the jugular right now.

Time is our most precious resource so it seems absurd – an insult to the Universe, almost – that I am spending it on dumb unhappy fatties with no job prospects and bad breath.

The ultimate goal, of course, is to make a lasting and formidable dent in the Universe — one that can be viewed from space, ideally. Steven Jobs did it by inventing important electronic devices, and Benjamin Franklin did it by signing declarations or whatnot. I don’t know what my dent will be but I sure as hell know that it’s not going to be lasting nor formidable unless I improve the quality quotient of the people I associate with.

That’s why I need you to help me find a way out of this mess.

I’ll tell you what I’m considering. I am considering dumping all my friends and hanging out with no humans except for those who are active members of the Young Professionals Network. But then I am afraid even that may not be enough because if I want to be Great then I need to hang around people who are even Greater than me. That’s why I’m considering trying to get admission to the Chesterfield Pool & Tennis Club (very ritzy clientele, in case you didn’t know) by offering car washes and sexual favors or whatnot.

But I’m open to other ideas.

+++

While we’re on the topic, I’m wondering if you can help me understand something this guy Hugh wrote. He said, and I quote, “All relationships involve deliberate inefficiency.” Say what?

Here’s his “evidence”:

When you meet a friend for lunch, you do not go to the place that promises you the most efficient source of high quality calories – instead you go to the place that makes hanging out with your friend the easiest. Things like quality of food, how fast the kitchen is and even cost take a back seat to things that make it easier to spend time with your friend. You are not working on the project called “Get Maximum Calories at the Best Price”. You are working on a project called “Hang out with Mike over Food”.

I happen to work with a bunch of economists and since this uses the word “efficiency” I thought maybe one of them could help me decipher this. Here’s what one economist said:

Yes, indeed. There can be no way around it: All relationships involve deliberate inefficiency if by “inefficiency” we mean unproductive use of labor or capital, and if by “unproductive” we mean failing to deliver tangible assets.

Translate, please?

Lovingly,
J$

Important update on the greatest music video ever made

It’s been my steadfast belief since 2002ish that Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You” is the single best music video ever made. I believed it to be so far ahead of the field that there was no possible way it would be dethroned in this century.

I’m not saying it’s been dethroned – it’s far too early to tell – but I’m saying there’s finally a contender. Tonight Pavs¹ introduced me to Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend” and it’d be fair to say that I am obsessed with it. As I write this, there have been 3,604,606 views on YouTube and I’m pretty sure 12% of those are mine.

There is so incredibly much to comment on, but you don’t have the patience and I don’t have the inclination. I’ll just say that it reminds me of “Rock With You” in so many ways, and not just because it’s one person eccentrically dancing in a strobe-lighty room. In both cases, there is so much irony – so much wrongness – but when combined with the un-self-consciousness it adds up to this magical effect that I don’t know how else to describe except to say that it just makes sense.

---

¹Pavs must be committing some kind of moral offense by not having a Tumblr (or something) so that he can share with the Internet all the stuff he digs up. Here, for example, is another one he recently found.

Art that makes breakfast

In case you have any last minute holiday shopping to do for the ironist in your life who needs worthless appliances, consider The Jesus Toaster ($31.95). (Unusual Life via Lone Gunman)

While we're on the subject, you should check out this 5:31 video on toaster collectors. Even if you don't have any interest in toaster collectors, you should watch just to be awed by the journalistic personality that is Bill Geist.¹

---

¹I'm pretty sure that Bill Geist is the single most likeable person on the planet. I swear to Jesus Toast that I will weep like a widow if he dies before me because I am that head over heels in love with him.

“What are you thinking about?”

If there were a prize for the person who most looks like he should be asked what he’s thinking about, I think I’d be in the running. I have that demeanor, I guess.

If you leave me alone in a room with someone for 2+ hours, there is a 93% chance that I will be asked the “What are you thinking about” question, even by people who by most social conventions don’t know me well enough to non-awkwardly ask. Sometimes it might just be a polite conversation-starter but most of the time I can tell that it is phrased slightly accusatorily, such that something about my face has indicated to them that there is an electric storm taking place inside my skull—one that, presumably, they should know about. I haven’t had this empirically verified, but if you surveyed the askers I’d bet they’d tell you that I had an expression emblematic of needing to poop. (Which makes sense.)

What am I thinking about? It’s a good question. So good, in fact, that my answer is often terribly disappointing to the asker. So disappointing, in fact, that I’ve considering developing a handy mental list of profound topics so that I can make it seem like I’m not hiding anything or being disingenuous.

“What are you thinking about, Ju$tn?”

Well, person, something you said earlier about how nice the weather has been lately really tipped me off. It reminded me that weather patterns, as reliable and predictable as they may at the surface seem, are really just like everything else in life: messy. If a butterfly flapping its wings in Asia can cause gale force winds in Scranton, then the only reason why weather patterns are “predictable” is because they are so slow-moving that it takes 3 or 4 days for them to play out, which I take to mean that we are stuck in this terrifyingly unpredictable and uncontrollable universe where “predictability” and “control” are comforting illusions that we employ for psychological safety up to the point in time that slow-moving doom shows itself.

Also, I was thinking that I need to poop.

And with that I make my exit, leaving them feeling something like satisfied.

The problem with such a strategy is that it would be personally unsatisfying, because it isn’t exactly factually accurate. Most of the time I am not consciously mingling with my thoughts, at least not in a way that can be translated neatly into words. Just like I do most of my moving on autopilot, so too do I do most of my thinking. Asking what I’m thinking about is often like asking why I’m tapping my foot—I probably didn’t realize I was tapping my foot and even if I did, putting into words why I was tapping my foot would be an exercise in horseshittery.

And then for the small subset of thoughts with which I am consciously mingling and reasonably able to translate them into words, it is often so embarrassingly mundane or weird that I refuse to let it be known that the “electric storm” face was merely because I was wondering whether ranch or blue cheese dressing is going to accompany my lunchtime carrots.

The truth is that it is almost impossible for me to do any kind of profound thinking within the confines of my skull. I can do it just fine in writing, but that almost doesn’t count because I never know what’s going to come out of my writing. Writing is not, as we so often misbelieve, reproducing thoughts on paper. Writing (for me) is starting with a tiny blip of inspiration and then building on it with reactions, and reactions to those reactions, and so forth. And then of course there is the crucial step of polishing, deleting, and re-arranging to get something like coherence. The end result is probably more surprising to me than it is to you.

And I suspect that the surprisingness of my thought-translations (= words) is a big part of the reason why I am so oppressively quiet around some people. I’ve deduced that if I judge you to be intimidatingly smart, judgy, intolerant of incoherence, easily offendable, or nice – or if I don’t have enough information to know whether you are or are not these things – then you’re probably not going to get much more than two to three word responses out of me, and that’s because if I don’t know what words are going to come out of me, then how can I be sure that my words won’t end up sounding dumb or incoherent or boring or mean? With writing I at least have a backspace key. It’s the everpresent ego issue, yes, but there is also the slightly less narcissistic reason of not wanting to hog the conversational ball by holding it until I finally stumble upon a phrasing that suits me.

(As usual, I’m left in the awkward position of the last paragraph being almost completely unrelated to the first, and I’ve got to try to somehow wrap this up into a coherent assembly. This is the biggest creative challenge I face most days. It’s kind of exciting though, isn’t it? Can’t you feel the excitement? I think we need some silverware to go along with this tension. OK, here goes.)

I’ve concluded that if other people operate pretty much like I do then those who are able to effectively answer the “What are you thinking about” question are either incredibly smart or incredibly stupid because to be able to effectively translate thoughts into words requires either (a) enough brilliance to have some kind of omniscience over your mind, or (b) enough stupidity to be completely unaware of how dumb you sound.

Females as prizes to be won

This post is dedicated to all the ladies who get their romantic advice from this blog.¹

One of the awesomest people on the Internet², whom I will refer to cryptically as “Anna from Chicago,” has started a blog about singles, dating, and relationships called Datingwise. Here is a slightly-revised bit from one of her posts:

Men love challenges. Men don’t care for women who make things too easy for them. The girl who hits on a guy, asks him out, sleeps with him too soon? He didn’t have to work to get her, so he doesn’t value her.

I smell a lifehacking principle, ladies(!).

The standard advice that relates to this is “play hard to get.” The problem with “play hard to get” is that it is so standard and so overused that it seems like just another 12-step lifehacking principle such as, you know, #4- wear clothes that fit, rather than a foundational male mechanical postulate.

Let me rephrase Anna from Chicago’s statement above in a way that I think is a bit more semantically correct:

Men will not under pretty much any circumstances swoon over you unless they sense a challenge—unless they feel that they must “earn” you. Men are “prize”-driven creatures and it is almost impossible for them to cherish something unless they can associate it with their ego. In other words, it doesn’t matter how well your clothes fit if the dude doesn’t feel like he had to work to get them off of you.

Men reach their swooning peaks when they feel that you are just barely achievable.

But be warned: Being just barely achievable does not guarantee that he will swoon. We’re talking necessary rather than sufficient conditions here. You’ve also got to have boobs.

This kind of thing seems squarely in the behavioral economist wheelhouse. It suggests (even if you think I’m generalizing and exaggerating, which I am) that dudes aren’t judging women rationally based on a litany of hard-to-define traits and doing some unconscious internal calculus to determine an Overall Quality Quotient, but instead are relying on some stupefyingly simple heuristics to decide (= feel) whether you are worthy of their pursuit.

Watch out because this post is about to take a turn from lifehacking advice to existential rant.³

I hate to question the Universe on its design principles – it seems like it did a fine enough job – and maybe the just-barely-achievable heuristic is a reasonably valid and reliable method to judge a mate – but at least at the surface this “principle” just seems terribly twisted and cruel. In a universe where we pair-bond for life (or try to), where the decision of whom to pair-bond with is probably the most important one we face, can’t we dudes get a little more refined and sophisticated ways of judging a woman? You’re going to leave our judgments up to which woman is best at playing games?⁴ I sincerely hope, Universe, that you have given the females some better filtering mechanisms, because from a male POV, this is simply ridiculous.⁵

Your laziness, Universe, is probably the single biggest reason why relationships so often fail. If after a few years the lady no longer seems like an enticing “prize” to the dude, then he starts to lose interest in her and gain interest in other prizes. As the swooning dissipates, so too do his reasons for working to make sure the two of them can inhabit the same living room. If the end result is not a failed relationship, it’s usually a shitty one.

But what you’ve done, Universe, is worse than laziness. You have made relationships essentially profane. You have made relationships arbitrary, game-y, and something that is ultimately more to be fought through than fought for.

Which is why I have decided to lifehackily game the system and have my marriage arranged.^6,7 Arranged marriages reduce the arbitrariness, the gameyness, and switch the pursuit to a more productive prize: Instead of the prize being a woman who will inhabit the same living room (since with an arranged marriage, that’s pretty much guaranteed), the prize is a woman who will grow to like you and respect you and with whom you can be satisfied sharing a living room.

I’m being half-serious, but that half is legitimate.

---

¹Well, err, future ladies?

²(and I am saying that strictly because she pays attention to me)

³(I hate it when that happens.)

⁴(plus the boobies, of course)

⁵Frankly, I’m disappointed and offended. I trusted you to be more conscientious in designing things.

⁶(Also because I’m lazy, which I think I am right in blaming on your influence, Universe.)

⁷Please send inquiries to my mom.

The difference between bad comedy and atrocious comedy

Analogies make me nervous, but when I’m trying to understand – and express – how I feel about abstract things like “comedy” then I’m almost left with no choice.

There is a lot of bad comedy out there. When I say bad comedy you probably think I mean stuff that tries to be funny but isn’t. OK, fine, we can call that bad comedy, but then we need another term for a much worse kind of comedy—the kind that actually is funny but in a terribly unsatisfying way because it only makes you laugh and that’s it. Let’s call it “Damn atrocious very evil – Bad – also really, really yucky Comedy,” or Dave Barry Comedy for short.

I’m going to suggest that the difference between regular, non-terrible comedy and Dave Barry Comedy is rather like the difference between a deep-tissue massage and someone tickling your feet with a feather.

I hope I don’t need to explain that much, but I will a little.

The good (or at least non-terrible) comedians have basically two things to master. First and most difficultly, they’ve got to understand you, your nerve endings, what feels good and what doesn’t, what your body responds to. And then, secondly and much more easily, they’ve got to master the technique of physically working your body to elicit the desired response. The ultimate goal, the contract you implicitly enter into with a comedian, is that you are going to feel a little relief, a little lighter on your feet when you leave the room.

That’s not to say that the goal of comedy is to make you giggly. That’s the mistake that Dave Barry Comedy makes, which I will get to in a second. Sometimes you go to see a comedian just because you are tense and need a professional to mock the world and point out some absurdities so that you feel a little better – but not necessarily giggly – about the situation. A laugh is to a (non-terrible) comedian as a groan is to massage therapist: A mere signal that you are doing something right, that you are working out the incongruities in someone’s muscles—or experiences, as it were.

Dave Barry Comedy thinks that the goal is to stimulate you as much as possible. Dave Barry Comedy thinks that all laughs are created equal. And so the solution, in the mind of Dave Barry Comedy, is to pull out a feather and go to work on your footsies. This would be like a massage therapist using knives because he’s found they elicit more groans. When Dave Barry Comedy is forced upon me, instead of leaving the room feeling lighter, I feel like I want to punch Dave Barry in the nuts.

One place where I think the analogy works well is that it seems that we all have weak or sensitive spots where a skilled comedian can really do some pleasant damage. There are certain things about the world that make us tense and uneasy, and we may or may not even be aware that we are tense and uneasy until a comedian comes and gives us sweet relief.

However, this relates to one area where the analogy makes me uncomfortable.

Comedy, like a deep-tissue massage, doesn’t need to and it won’t succeed in achieving serious relief or poignancy all or even most of the time, but for certain people at certain times in a certain environment, a deep-tissue comedic massage is exactly what they need. And this is not, as the analogy sort of implies, a moment that should be trivialized as a pleasant feeling or a temporary relief. When the stars align, comedy borders on magical. Good comedy, at the right time and place, is as close as it gets to sacred (for me).

There’s at least one other area where the analogy makes me uncomfortable. Everyone’s body has the same network of muscles in pretty much the exact same places, so if a massage therapist learns one body he’s pretty much learned them all. With comedy it seems likely that if bodies are not completely different then there are at least a few basic body types that respond to certain kinds of comedy differently.

On the whole, though, I think the analogy works pretty well. What I’m trying to express (and maybe this is my pretentiousness coming out) is that I feel pretty strongly that comedy should at least be attempting a metaphorical deep-tissue massage.

And I feel even more strongly that comedy should NOT be an attempt to merely stimulate.

***

By the way, reading this post again, there’s not necessarily anything special or unique to comedy here. I think the analogy holds equally as well if you replace “comedy” with “art.” (But I strongly dislike the word “art,” so I refuse to do that.)

Take music, for example: There is “bad” music that tries but falls short of pleasing the brain, and then there is really, really yucky music that has a catchy, brain-pleasing rhythm but delivers no deeper reward.

Actually, I think there is at least one thing that is special or unique to comedy: More than any other type of “art,” it has the potential to change behavior. As Scott Adams has said, people rarely change behavior in response to new information or the power of a better argument, but they regularly change behavior to avoid being mocked.

+++

I think there is a lot more to be said about comedy vs. music.

In one sense, comedy and music relate quite smashingly. Improv comedy I imagine to be a lot like jazz, where your primary task as an improviser or jazz musician is to listen to what the other peeps are doing so that you can add something or else challenge them to do something different. I’d guess that jazz and improv are up there with dance as the most intimate things we can do with our clothes on. It’s probably a magical thing to be a part of… but compared to a stand-up comedian or, say, a Jackson Browne concert, it’s much less magical (for me) to watch.

Stand-up comedy is probably my most cherished form of art. In part, that’s because of the deep-tissue massage-like relief, but it’s also because I have an armchair appreciation of what it takes to be a stand-up comic. To be a stand-up comedian (a good one, at least) must be incredibly hard to do. You’ve first got to be able to observe things about the world that other people aren’t noticing. Then you’ve got to be able to have enough mastery over language to communicate that to people without sounding like a dick. Then you’ve got to understand people well enough to know what they’ll find funny. Then you’ve got to possess enough perfectionism and conscientiousness and neuroticism to spend an absurd amount of time to shape the words and the delivery into a meaningful presentation. And finally you’ve got to go out there and deliver it under the most difficult of circumstances where you, as a human, are pretty much at your most vulnerable, knowing that it may end up falling completely flat, and that you’ve got no place to hide.

I don’t think it’s generally accurate to compare music to comedy. I see comedy as being more akin to writing and music as being more akin to sports. I think musicians, like athletes, generally get into it because they see someone else doing it and think, Woah, that’s cool. Whereas I think comedians, like writers, generally get into it not out of coolness but poignancy, where they felt what it’s like when a comedian pounds some sweet relief into the sensitive areas of their experience.

More evidence: Music is full of clichés. A big part of comedy is mocking clichés.

Females win (again)

The more I learn about sex differences the more I feel that we’re going to need to start offering subsidies or at least pittances to us poor, pitiful dudes.

I say that in half-jest, but these are non-trivial differences, peeps: (From Hannah Holmes’s The Well-Dressed Ape)

One of the clearest studies showed that 90 percent of mature female brains can identify an expression of sadness on an actor’s face, while only 40 percent of males can. Scientists also know that females analyze facial expressions faster than males. And some scientists believe that females alter breathing rate and posture to match the humans they’re communicating with, and that these physical adjustments bring about a matching emotional state called “emotional contagion.” A flock of studies has indeed found that the female cheek muscles do subconsciously crinkle in response to a happy face and produce a microfrown at an angry face—much more strongly than males’.

The gist: Females, on average, are biologically and objectively better social creatures. (Yeah, but can they pee standing up?) I am perfectly sincere when I say that a hiring manager evaluating two otherwise equal candidates would be stupid not to hire a female over a male. Evidence.

There is at least one area where the differences between the sexes have been overblown, and that is in talkativeness:

Investigations based on automated recorders worn on the human body found no statistical difference at all between the word count of males and females. Individual males did, however, claim the word titles of most taciturn (about 500 words per day) and most verbose (47,000). But on average both sexes put forth about 16,000 words a day.

My back of the envelope calculation says that that’s about 1.7 hours of speaking per day (with males ranging from 3 minutes to 5 hours), or about one full-blown novel worth of words every 3 days (with males ranging from 96 days/novel to 1 day/novel).

Although the word count is roughly the same, the average female has a small advantage in the ability to reel up words from memory, and then there is a clear split in what we talk about:

The trend from a few hundred studies is that females broadcast more information about themselves and other humans than males do. Male communication more often concerns objects.

Unlike elephants (and some primates such as diana monkeys, I later learned), at least we speak the same language, right?

Not all of us(!). A handful of human tribes around the world maintain separate male and female dialects of their language.

The males and females of the Yanyuwa of northern Australia share the roots of their words, but then tack on all manner of prefixes and suffixes particular to each sex. The Yana Indians of California flip around whole chunks of verbiage, depending on their sex: From the mouth of a female, a grizzly bear is a t’et. But a male would call the same animal a t’en’na. The Yana females speak the female dialect to one another and to males; males speak female-ese to females and male-ese to other males.

Hannah Holmes echoes my feelings beautifully:

Given the obstacles already confronting the human pair-bond—the differing brains, the perishable love chemistry, the conflicting reproductive agendas—it seems an unnecessary cruelty to ask the two sexes also to speak different tongues. Really, isn’t it hard enough already?

Yes, Hannah / the Universe, it is.

All communication is a sign of failure

In The Well-Dressed Ape, Hannah Holmes identifies the (unsettling) purpose of communication:

When I was a blob of cells glued to the walls of my mother’s uterus, I undertook a career in communication. I was young and ambitious, eager to get started. Furthermore, I was hungry. The only medium available to me at the time was chemistry. So with an ink of protein, I scrawled missives to my mother: More nourishment, please.

It was a symbolic beginning. Like all animal communication, my signals were bald attempts to bring the world in line with my desires. That theory of communication presents a bleak view of the thousands of words that flow from my face and fingers in a day. But I can’t find a flaw in the argument.

Evidence: The most basic “words” in the animal (or at least mammal) vocabulary are “Ow,” “Look out!,” “Come here,” and “Bug off.”

For humans, it’s not much different. All of our communications are about shortcomings in our environment, just with perhaps more specialized or highfalutin shortcomings. We are a relatively social and relatively attention whore-ish species, so things like bonding and “look at me” are more prevalent purposes of our communication, but they are still just needs/desires.

Our needs, you could say, have just moved higher up the pyramid:

It is a measure of how well we’ve met our needs as a species that we can now turn our attention to something as arcane as prairie-dog talk. But it also illuminates a need that is uniquely human—as far as we can figure: We feel the need to study prairie dog language because it can inform us about our own origins, the social and ecological milieu that drove us first to the pebbles of speech, then on to the masonry and castellations of language. We feel the need to understand ourselves. If we didn’t, we might, at this stage of our career as a species, sit on the porch in a rocking chair. With the status quo satisfactory, we’d have nothing to discuss. Homo sapiens would finally fall silent.

Here is a rather blunt (or “succinct,” if you prefer) way of saying it:

All communication is a sign of failure. If everybody is pleased with the situation, then there is no need for communication.

This idea bothered me for about two and half minutes. Then I discovered the problem. Watch as I make up a couple of theories that are equally as valid (= ridiculous):

All movement is a sign of failure. If I am pleased with the situation, then there is no need for movement.

All breathing is a sign of failure. If I am pleased with the situation, then there is no need for breathing.

In other words, the theory isn’t saying anything, because we are constantly in need, or at least constantly “unpleased” with the situation. That’s probably a good definition for what life is: A perpetual string of things that need doing, of unpleasedness. In a universe of scarcity, it is almost a logical impossibility that it could be any other way.

So the first half of this post was wasted on a useless idea. Sorry.

What’s more interesting about human communication is something that DFW observed in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again when he eavesdropped on people small-talking about why they signed up for a luxury cruise:

It’s the universal subject of discussion in here, like chitchatting in the dayroom of a mental ward: “So, why are you here?” And the striking constant in all the answers is that not once does somebody say they’re going on this 7NC Luxury Cruise just to go on a 7NC Luxury Cruise. Nor does anybody refer to stuff about travel being broadening or a mad desire to parasail. Nobody even mentions being mesmerized by Celebrity’s fantasy-slash-promise of pampering in uterine stasis—in fact, the word “pamper,” so ubiquitous in the Celebrity 7NC brochure, is not once in my hearing uttered. The word that gets used over and over in the explanatory small-talk is: relax. Everybody characterizes the upcoming week as either a long-put-off reward or a last-ditch effort to salvage sanity and self from some inconceivable crock pot of pressure, or both.

What really hit me was the footnote relating to the same paragraph:

I’m pretty sure I know what this syndrome is and how it’s related to the brochure’s seductive promise of total self-indulgence. What’s in play here, I think, is the subtle universal shame that accompanies self-indulgence, the need to explain to just about anybody why the self-indulgence isn’t in fact really self-indulgence. Like: I never go get a message just to get a massage, I go because this old sports-related back injury’s killing me and more or less forcing me to get a massage; or like: I never just “want” a cigarette, I always “need” a cigarette.

To relate this to the first point, maybe we could say that our attempt to conceal or downplay our self-indulgence is a need/desire of status or perception, where we feel under some subtle social obligation to seem like functioning, hard-working members of a sophisticated society instead of hairless apes who would really rather sleep in and be treated to cream puffs and vagina.

I’m not suggesting that this shame/concealment of self-indulgence is necessarily a “bad” thing. Personally, I’m glad to be living in a society with some social norms against open self-indulgence. I imagine that the type of society that was tolerant of open self-indulgence would look a lot like the open-toed shoe wearing and greasy hair sporting kind found in places like Carrboro, NC. (I may be trying to come to terms with humanity, but I’m not close to being ready for Really, Really Free Markets.)

The point: Maybe human communication is a way of preventing society from devolving into Carrboro.

A blogger on his blogging

If you’re like me then you’re curious to hear writers/bloggers comment on their own writing/blogging, and in particular how they perceive their stuff versus how they suspect others perceive their stuff. That’s what I’m going to do today with my most recent posts.

If you’re not like me, then you would find this terribly boring, so you are dismissed from clicking to read the rest of this post. You’re welcome.

Life hacking, economics-style

Erik Torenberg asked for my thoughts on his post about behavioral economics called The Prescriptive Science. I’m posting them here, too.

***

Although I could sit comfortably at the feet of Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely and listen to them rehash the amazing stupidity of humans all day long, I think standard economics has some useful things to say about the useful applicability of behavioral economics to our lives—namely, that there aren’t (m)any free lunches, and that unintended consequences have a nasty way of effing things up.

Boy that sounded like a nice intro sentence, but I’m not actually going to say anything else about free lunches or unintended consequences. Sorry.

One of the many ways in which we are stupid (in a way that behavioral economists and psychologists love to tell us about) is believing that we are conscious actors who are evaluating the information around us, deliberating internally, and then acting according to expected-value optimization (or something). A better description of reality, I submit, is that our bodies are processing a whole bunch of information we didn’t even know it was processing, then a minor electric disturbance takes place in our skulls based on some mysterious but frighteningly simple rules which ultimately cause us to feel a certain way, and then we act, almost always based on the perceived pleasantness of the feeling.

In short: The part of you that you think is doing the driving? That frontal lobe? Yeah, it’s not. The absolute best it can do is holler out some preferences from the back seat.

“Excuse me, body, I’d really like it if we could turn toward 9 o’clock, in the direction of that rather attractive lady, instead of retreating for the comfort of our keyboard for the twelfthtieth time today, as you are doing right n—well, shit.”

The hope of behavioral economics, maybe, is that we can identify some of the frighteningly simple rules that cause us to act (≈ feel) a certain way such that our frontal lobes can take some steps in a moment of emotional coolness to either do some harm-reduction by limiting our exposure to those rules or otherwise use our knowledge of those rules to our (skanky) benefit. (The latter is what marketers and salespeople and politicians do for a living.)

So, yes, although it makes me cringe to say it, there seems to be some merit to the idea that “lives” can be “hacked” using behavioral economic principles.

Your point, I take it, is that the next big intellectual revolution might well come from somebody who figures out how to take the lessons from Kahneman (and other beh econ gurus) and turn them into applicable Lifehacking action steps.

Maybe. But if we are going to speculate about coming revolutions then I think we need to be more science-fiction about it. Behavioral economics-style lifehacking just seems so… analogue. Let’s be more ambitious: Maybe genomic advances will allow us to change the lifechemistry of our offspring such that humans are bigger, faster, stronger, prettier, and less dumb. That’s what I call Progress. Or maybe smartphones will develop new technologies that allow us to plug them into our skulls and let the magnets and silicon do the thinking for us. No more problems approaching hot chicks!

There’s no real use in speculating about whether or not these things would be “good,” because things don’t happen conditional on whether we think they’re “good.” But it’s perhaps useful to ask whether we ought to be taking some behavioral economics steps to hack our lives, today, right now.

The only way I know how to answer that is by asking, again, What Do We Care About? Sorry to be the guy who keeps asking, “What’s the point?,” but, hey, I didn’t make you read this blog.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you might recall that I used to be rather life hacky and personal development-y, and then I kind of stopped. Something changed. I’m not saying the change was “right” or “good” in any way (or even that it’s permanent), I’m merely going to describe what I think that change in perspective was/is: I think I’ve become less interested in achieving or improving and more interested in just experiencing and being present in this giant effing mess.

Primates in an Incidental Universe

Greg Linster asked for my thoughts on his (very compelling) post called Why It’s Morally Wrong to Let a Student Believe in Creationism. I’m posting them here, too.

***

First, the standard clarifications for whenever we talk about Evolution vs. Creationism: Evolution says nothing about the origin of life. And we certainly don’t know enough to call “primordial soup” a fact, but we *do* have enough evidence to say that humans were not put on Earth as is, with only minor changes over time, like skin color, body hair, height, and fatties. It’s quite clear from studying DNA and even just looking at your freaking body that you come from something much more ancient and seemingly weird.

It’s seemingly weird because the default is to exit the womb as a Creationist. That’s a much more intuitive (and comfortable) argument to the human brain than is the one Evolution advances.

Moreover, Evolution is not just a take-it-or-leave-it sort of deal. It’s pretty pivotal if you hope to understand anything about the history of the Earth, and even to be able to explain pretty fundamental behaviors. You might be able to do some abstract math or philosophy without the Theory of Evolution, but for the most part you will be intellectually lame – and I mean that in all sincerity – without it.

So I would be absolutely comfortable saying that failing to teach Evolution is a serious moral failure given the evidence we have. But watch as I sort of change my mind down below.

That’s not your point. Your point is that the moral failure is in allowing erroneous beliefs to go unchallenged.

From a logical POV, I think you make a good (and controversial and compelling) point.

In general I avoid abstract topics about how to “fix” education or anything of the sort because I don’t like spending neurons on stuff I have no control over – and I don’t envision myself modifying any curricula or even teaching any tots in the near future. But the question you raise is one that we are likely going to have to confront as regular, non-professorial humans, because if you have kids, for example, you’re going to have to decide when and to what extent you start challenging the pretty silly self-centric and intention-ful beliefs that they exit the womb with.

It seems pretty common to teach your kids from the start that they are not, as they suspect, at the center of the Universe. Other kids have feelings, too, and are just as important (i.e., small and insignificant) as you are, so share your toys, dickface.

Parents generally seem less comfortable challenging their kids’ beliefs about a friendly God who created a Universe full of intention. Maybe that’s because they want to, or do, believe it themselves.

We never really shake the belief that we’re at the center of the Universe, do we? It’s a constant battle of the frontal lobe to get your ego away from the control panel. I’m still pretty sure, deep down, that I am the protagonist in the world’s story. I suspect that’s kind of how it is for perceiving the world as full of intention. I can intellectually acknowledge that my ancestor is a fish and that I live in an incidental universe – and believe me, I intellectually acknowledge it all the damn time – but it’s a constant battle to try to absorb that as an honest-to-God (pun sort of intended) fact. I’m still pretty sure, deep down, that there is a divine bearded man who wants me to ultimately be warm and safe and happy (after some inconvenient detours in plot, of course).

I guess my challenge to you, Greg, is this: What’s really the value in challenging beliefs that are very probably erroneous? Assuming that, miraculously, your challenge is not met by the resistance of the rather stubborn human brain, which categorically does not like to be told what to believe (and especially what not to believe), then what really have you accomplished? Seeing ourselves as protagonists in a Universe full of intention is an intellectual battle that we all face (or don’t). Point being that this is not the kind of knowledge that we inject into heads by discipline pump: It seems to me a very personal battle and one that doesn’t end.

Maybe more importantly, I think we need to ask why those beliefs are there in the first place. (Evolutionary question, right?) The beliefs seem pretty steadfast, so there probably is (or at very least was) a good reason for them. Maybe the “good” reason is that our nucleic acids have a job to do – namely, survive – and they need their host to be psychologically stable and comfortable enough to get on with life and go find a serviceable vagina.

It comes down, as it usually does, to the question of What Do We Care About? Is it Truth? Is it Progress? Or is it Vagina?

I say that in half-jest, but to be perfectly sincere, I’m not sure that this is an intellectual battle worth fighting, because I’m not sure that Truth or Progress are goals that I care about in anything other than an armchair way.

The “I’m outta here” guy returns, dispassionately

You may recall from a couple of days ago that this blog received its first semi-public comment saying “that’s it, I’m outta here.” The commenter’s name is, awesomely, Arj. I’ve always wanted a hater named Arj.

I posted a follow-up saying, basically, “yay, I finally offended someone!” Then Arj made his return last night to dispassionately ensure that I didn’t squeeze any flattery out of it.

You’re wrong, he says, I wasn’t offended. You just suck. (I’m paraphrasing here.)

Arj, I would like to take this opportunity to personally address you in front of 200-250 other primates:

I think this could be the beginning of a special relationship. You think I suck. I think I’m awesome. You want to dispassionately let me know that I suck. I want to use your comments to passionately remind people that I’m awesome.

So let’s get this started out right.

You are neither clever nor funny, he says. And really you’re not even very smart. Given your attributes, it seems unlikely that any respectable woman is ever going to give you her vagina. (I’m paraphrasing again.)

You’re probably going to die alone, he added.

Arj, buddy, how can you be so sure? Life is long and my will is strong and vaginas are aplenty. Maybe you just haven’t heard enough to know how awesome I really am. For instance, here are some facts I’ve never shared publicly because I’m too humble:

• Writing talents recognized early. In 1st grade I was sent around to various classrooms to read aloud my stories about trolls.
• Dated the most popular girl in school in 4th grade. Made out in a hot tub.
• Class president. 8th grade. Boom.
• National Honors Society. 11th-12th grades. Hoot.
• The top-ranked tennis player (and Captain and MVP) for the high school in the whitest and wealthiest zip code in the state of North Carolina.
• Victorious in every ping pong tournament ever entered (3).
• Feature story about me in the Wakefield High School Gazette that included the words “fuzzy balls.”
• College: Two majors. 160-something credit hours. 3.7 GPA. Considered by many to be a genius. Wore slippers to class.
• Present day: A salary in excess of most minor league baseball players’. A blog in excess of most blogs. A dog in excess of most humans named Arj.

I hope this won’t be enough to convince you of my awesomeness, Arj, because I’ve got more.

Harmless amusement

The person who knows me best kept telling me that I would absolutely *love* The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And by “person” I mean Amazon.com. So I picked up a copy. Any book that talks about the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything that also tops all kinds of ‘funniest book’ lists must be amazing, right?

I was really excited after the first chapter, which was full of subtle sociopolitical satire and lots of well-executed sideboob. The rest of it, though, felt like pretty typical fiction, and coming from a guy who generally prefers staring into space over reading fiction, that isn’t a compliment.

That’s not to say that I want my 5.6 hours back. It was a fine use of 5.6 hours. It reminded me, for one thing, that there are so many things you can do in writing that you can’t do in images (and far fewer things you can do in images that you can’t do in writing). I needed that reminder, because I’ve been really down on words lately.

I didn’t see the movie, but I can’t imagine it’d be any good, because the story isn’t really any good. The best parts about the book are… I don’t want to call them “plays on language” because that makes it sound trivial, but it’s something like that.

The book also reminded me that a single magical sentence or two can forgive an entire book for being harmlessly amusing. For me, these were the two magical sentences, which I have read at least 14 times:

Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it.

“It’s just life,” they say.

The Internet’s mysteries, explained

1. Why is this so magical?

I have no idea. Don’t make me ruin magic by explaining it.

OK, fine. It’s probably because it has the magic formula: Slightly rhythmic nonsense + “Break it down” moment + Extras who are actually kind of flirting with being the main characters.



2. Should I laugh or cry?

Some of both, probably. Any good metaphor will do that to you. The giggles are because you noticed the incongruity, and the crying is because you noticed the incongruity.

Gene disguises himself as a NYC cab driver, but he’s really in the business of observing metaphors, and hot damn is he good at it.



3. Is this creepy or hot?

I’d hit it.

(And I’d probably take a shower immediately afterward.)



4. What does it mean that font names are so hard to tell apart from cheese names?

http://cheeseorfont.com/play

Meaningless. Absolutely meaningless.

On second thought, it could mean that font designers are not people you want to have as your friends.



5. Why is this so interesting?

Is it? Are you sure it isn’t just you? Looks like a normal living room to me.

Bring me your blog posts

I think I’ll make this a monthly or twice-monthly thing if there’s enough fodder:

If you have a blog post (or whatever) you want a couple paragraphs worth of my opinion brilliance on, just toss out a link either under this post or in an email and, if I find it enticing enough, I’ll come tear it apart. The only price is public ridicule and the corresponding humiliation.

(I’d prefer that they be your thoughts, but will accept other people’s thoughts if they are sufficiently ridiculous.)

Loneliness (except for a pooch, who doesn't really count)

Attempt #11:

***

Carolyn,

It’s been a while since I last wrote to you and I am wondering if you have started to miss me enough that maybe you might be a doll and go ahead and respond to this email since I am about to pour my SOUL (≈ neurochemical responses to stimuli) into this by telling you that I am starting to ache with the anticipation of having an empty bed on Christmas (except for a dog who doesn’t really count since he’s not the same species and smelly), a bed so empty in a house so alone that if Santa Clause were a real superhuman being who actually did what legends purport him to do instead of some bullshit fairytale used to make small children feel that Life is bigger and more generous and self-centric than it really is, then he would probably pass over my house despite the reasonably-sized chimney just because his radar would sense the hazardous loneliness levels on the interior and he’d say to himself or his reindeer (who magically defy gravity despite having not evolved wings or flying mechanisms of any sort), “I’m not going near that shit,” which really just heightens my angst about the fact that my bed is empty (except for a dog, who smells) and that I have a plate of cookies by the fireplace that are going to go mostly uneaten despite the best of intentions and 2 extra cups of sweetener which, by the way, was purchased from the grocery store back when I had a lady to accompany me and make life marginally more tolerable but now I’m left with half a can of nostalgia and nobody to turn to except for Carolyn Hax who, when you think about it, although she is a professionally-trained or at least professional-seeming giver of advice, isn’t really the most reliable about actually giving that advice, but it’s cool and I understand because you clearly must have many more important things to do like, you know, giving advice – oh wait – I am sure there must be things you do besides giving advice, like sitting comfortably in your child-infested living room, aglow with the satisfaction of having helped people rather like Me to either find love or quit being stupid with respect to the love they already have. Quick break. I’m just saying that maybe if you are feeling in the giving spirit this holiday season then you might either (1) peek back through all those emails from me and decide whether they are deserving of a reply given the not insignificant amount of effort and SOUL that went into formulating those thoughts in such a way that not only would your advice benefit me but would also benefit you by having an amusing (see: revenue generating) piece to share with your money-bags D.C. audience, or (2) marry me, please.

Will ditch the pooch if I have to,
Ju$tn

P.S. – Don’t be fooled by the name. It’s me. I just updated it to be a little more Hollywood.

###

Note to haters: This will probably be the last ridiculously long sentence post I do for a while. I just needed to finish amusing myself, okay? OKAY?? Sheesh.

Note to lovers: Yes, I actually am sending these emails to Carolyn, and no, I actually have not received so much as a restraining order.

“Really got this wrong man.”

It took me 2.9 years and 1,227 posts to get to the point of offending someone so much that they semi-publicly said, “that’s it, I’m outta here.” I actually take the comment to be a sign of (very slow) progress.

I don’t mean to give the impression that I’m cheery about this. My initial reaction, seeing as how it’s the only comment on that post, was that, wow, maybe I really did go way overboard. And then I remembered, yes, of course I went way overboard – that was the whole point of the 701 word sentence, so if it actually caused someone so much angst that they are never going to visit this blog again and they are going to semi-publicly say so (rather than quietly disappearing as is more typical), then, hey, my words might not be completely benign, which in a perverted way is kind of flattering seeing as how I am some random dude writing on blogspot.com.

One of the things that has surprised me the most about this blog and continues to surprise me to this day is the lack of vitriolic feedback. The ratio of positive or neutral comments (or emails or hallway conversations) to negative ones is like 180 to 1. That’s not the same as saying that people typically agree with me; people disagree with me all the time (when they can tell what point I am trying to make) but rarely in a way that they seem offended or upset about it.

I’ve secretly been kind of waiting for a “that’s it, I’m outta here” comment to happen so that I had an occasion to state a theory: It’s my assumption/belief that if you are not offending people then either (1) you are occupying an intellectual territory too safe to be interesting or (2) you haven’t earned enough status points to be taken seriously. I hope I don’t need to explain that; it should explain itself.

While I don’t want to offend people for the sake of offending them (typically), I’d like to be interesting and I’d like to be taken somewhat seriously, so I see offending people as an inevitable consequence of that goal.

Now in this particular case I was not putting forward any controversial ideas so probably didn’t “offend” so much as “bore to death” or just “look really, really lame seemingly trying to write like a good writer,” but, hey, one step at a time, right?

The point: GET MAD AT ME DANG IT, and don’t be bashful about showing it.

The more important point: It’s up to me to make that happen by (1) occupying unsafe (≈ interesting) intellectual territory and (2) presenting the ideas in a way that warrants taking them seriously.

Who I Am

Who am I? That is a simple question, yet it is one without a simple answer. I am many things—and I am one thing. But I am not a thing that is just lying around somewhere, like a marker, or a toaster, or a housewife. That is for sure. I am much more than that. I am a living, breathing thing, a thing that can mark with a marker and toast with a toaster and house with a housewife. And still, I am much more.

I am a man.

I am also a former baby and a future skeleton, and I am a distant-future pile of dust. And I am also a Gemini, who is on the cusp (Taurus cusp).

I am “brother” and I am “son” and I am “father” (but just according to one person, who does not have any proof but still won’t let it go). Either way, I am moving very soon and not letting her know about it. I am asking you to keep that between us.

I am concepts and thoughts and feelings and outfits. And I am each of these all at once, unless I am in the shower. Then I am not outfits, because that would be uncomfortable.

I am what I eat. And I am this especially when I bite my nails.

I am often the one they call “You,” but I am not more “You” than you. I am me. And yet I am more “Me” than you are me or can ever be. I am confused.

I am the Walrus, but not the one you’re probably thinking of. I am the other Walrus, the one who is less the Walrus in the sense of legendary music and more the Walrus in the sense of his tendency to lie around in places for too long.

I am everything and I am nothing. I am just kidding. I am not everything and nothing. That would be ridiculous. I am just everything.

That’s a trimmed and re-ordered passage from Demetri Martin’s This is a Book. I’ll add a little:

I am the descendant of a monkey, a fish, a primordial slime, and a guy from West Virginia named Earl. I am not kidding. (Hi Grandpa.)

I am an economist and, contrary to popular belief, I am no more able to offer investment advice than is a very wise dartboard. But I can differentiate a cost function for you.

I am probably too manly for most girls. That seems to be the most reasonable explanation.

I am listening to Britney Spears as I write this, which makes that last part a little awkward.

I am the proud best friend of a dog, even though he smells. Smells as in jeez dude take a bath and smells as in nose in crotch.

I am legally changing my name to Ju$tn in order to disassociate myself with that goober Justin Timberlake and to associate myself more closely with that leading philosophical mind and all-around good guy, Ke$ha. “Everybody getting crunk crunk / Boys try to touch my junk junk / Gonna smack em if he gettin' too drunk drunk.” Chills, every time. Every damn time.

I am a remarkably complicated and un-intuitive conglomeration of chemicals, electricity, and star bits, and I carry on me and in me a small universe of creatures that spend an entire lifetime on/in Planet Ju$tn, a lifetime of eating, fighting, mating, and arguing about what color to paint the den, which is weird and kind of rude since I didn’t invite anyone to live on/in me, but I am working on being accepting and trying not to be grossed out or offended by the sexual activity taking place on my forehead but am finding it difficult to be accepting when there is more sexual activity taking place on my forehead than there is on my you-know-where, so instead I find that the better approach is to just not spend (m)any neurons on the Small Universe and to instead focus on more practical concerns, like differentiating cost functions and coming up with clever analogies for how I feel about Rihanna, which in a way is a whole separate story maybe deserving of 8 other clauses in this sentence but now I’m just being ridiculous and adding stuff to see if anyone is going to make it to the end of this sentence without throwing a shoe at the monitor or taking some other action in frustration that could either lead to serious regrets or a good story for later, wherein you can tell your friends that you were innocently reading some stupid blog post before the douche decided to absolutely GO OFF and write for more than 250 words without granting you so much as a freaking period when really even a goddamn semi-colon would do but instead he kept extending the shit with “but instead” and various other linguistic shows of disrespect before finally in frustration you decided to end it yourself by grabbing the nearest blunt instrument – in this case, a shoe – which some might argue isn’t the wisest choice of blunt instrument since they are designed to offer padded comfort to your footsies so can’t practically be viewed as intimidating weapons unless maybe they are the steel-toed variety but it seems doubtful that anyone reading this blog would have the need or even the inclination to have a layer of steel protection for their toesies when in all likelihood they are sitting in some climate-controlled environment where the only real dangers to toesies are clumsy people who had a few too many servings of gravy for Thanksgiving and who aren’t terribly self-aware w/r/t the location of their steps, but we have to keep in mind that even the gravy overeater has a Small Universe of his or her own (see how I brought this back around?) whose life-integrity is just as great as our own and probably greater since the gravy adds life-supporting real estate that we don’t have plus probably delicious nourishment to those creatures who inhabit the digestive tract, which is to say as I cross the 500 word mark that (a) maybe we shouldn’t, logically, feel guilty about that gravy we ingested at Thanksgiving, and (b) maybe we should be more respectful and less annoyed by the gravy overeaters and stop using words like “clumsy” and “self-unaware” to describe them since they theoretically have a greater life-integrity than we do, and although that seemed like a reasonable place to end the sentence I am now determined to make it past the 700 word mark not out of any hope of having this sentence mean anything or even of pissing people off to the point of shoe-weaponry – I’m pretty sure anyone who has made it this far is either long past the point of pissyness or else in a weird way amused with this blatant show of disregard turned epic struggle turned trainwreck waiting to happen or in progress of happening – but to see whether I have it in me to wrap this up into a semi-coherent little bundle by saying, for example, that my baseless efforts to cross the 700 word mark are just another representation of the complicated and seemingly illogical behavior that comes about when physical forces alchemize chemicals, electricity, and star bits into this strange thing we call a “human,” Boom: 701 words.