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| http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/hail-the-unknown-explorer.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/?p=20631 If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss; …
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!
Kipling, If (or a damn fine woman)
This thanksgiving weekend, I give thanks and my sincerest admiration to the unknown explorer (of whatever space), over the unknown soldier or “successful” trail-follower.
Yesterday jorge commented:
We remember the flashy outliers. But most of those with “interesting” ideas also had fairly standard high-end resumes. For every independent thinker who wins the Nobel or makes a billion, there are hundreds who never got a top job or were denied tenure or had their projects rejected.
He’s right, I’m lucky. For every luck-out like me who took an independent thinking strategy and achieved a bit of success, many others equally able have failed. A hearty hail to them!!
Sure most unknown explorers weren’t focused on being altruists, any more than most unknown soldiers. Many just couldn’t help themselves. Nevertheless, we owe them gratitude, more than to unknown soldiers or grade-grubbing by-the-book intellectuals. Soldiers, after all, help one side in a war at the expense of another side.
And when grade-grubbers compete to gain prestigious positions and then play it safe following current fashions, it is not clear what difference they make. They waste vast resources in a grueling competition, but how different would things be had another grade-grubber beat them out to follow fashion in their stead?
In contrast, successful explorers of new intellectual ideas, business prospects, etc. displace few competitors and gain to themselves only a bit of the benefits we all get. Let us be grateful to all explorers, both successful and not; even failures deserve honor for valiant attempts. | |
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| The December 2009 Scientific American describes a new way of dealing with garbage: zap it with bazillions of volts of electricity (actually, zap the gas in the container holding the garbage), creating a superheated plasma, hotter than the surface of the sun.
This causes the organic compounds in the garbage to turn into something called syngas, which can be used as fuel to produce electricity, while the remains becomes slag, which can be processed into building materials.
The cost of doing this has now come down enough so that "it's becoming cheaper to take trash to the plasma plant that it is to dump it in a landfill." Major pilot plants are under development. | |
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| A woman on OKCupid said that she bet that I was "fun in bed." And I had a weird dissonance upon reading that.
See, to me, "fun" is slip-n-slides, balloon-twisting performers at parties, playing Rock Band, telling stories. Whereas "sex" - although something I enjoy deeply (or at least as deeply as I am physiologically capable) - consists of hot kisses, fevered gasps, driving each other crazy until we rip off our clothes and have to have each other.
Needless to say, combining clowns and that sort of hotness causes me to pause.
That's not to say that I treat sex as though it's some sort of treasured classical painting - I have giggle breakdowns in bed just like everybody, and the crossover between my clown-fun and sex lies is connected by the luscious goodness of The Tickle Fight, that classic mechanism of getting some "innocent" body-touching that can lead to something a lot sexier. (I repeat: There has never been a thing as an innocent tickle fight between consenting adults in the history of mankind.) But to me, part of the fun of sex is that intensity of wanting, that need, and I have trouble parsing that fun in the way that I'd process Cinco de Mayo parties and squirt-gun fights.
Emotionally, I parse it differently as well, because while sex can be no-strings-attached whoopie, in my experience if you're not careful about setting boundaries, that intensity will often lead to one party or the other getting emotionally involved. You're swapping bodily fluids, there's a heightened sense of vulnerability - it can get messy if you don't watch out.
Which is not to say that anyone's wrong about how they feel. I suspect that for many, sex is the sort of walk in the park thing where there's no distinction between "I had a sundae for lunch and then a hot bi male for dinner!" But for me, there's a distinct and clear barrier between "fun" and "sex" - sex contains fun, but it's got something extra that brings it beyond that point for me. There's an intensity to sex, another layer that amplifies it so much that it nearly always catapults the act almost beyond something I take lightly - even my most casual hookups always had an aspect of, "Whoo, that was a unique experience that let me see a totally different side of that person," even if my partners didn't always feel that way in return.
What about you? Is sex fun? Casual? Whoopie? How do you parse it? | |
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| Yesterday, I read the opening chapter of Stephen King's "Under the Dome." Couldn't have been more than 800 words. And yet it had more characterization than any of my stories had put together.
I read it over and over again, just plain amazed by what was there: two characters, and not only did we get the feel and geography of the town they lived in, but we got their dreams, their social status, a good glimpse of their personality, their financial state, and how they interacted with each other. And it was all natural, told with ease, like a beautifully ticking watch where you don't quite realize how much work goes into keeping that ticking plot-hand moving forward until you shuck off that gold casing.
I think I've found my Holy Grail: that beginning section. There's so much in there, so neatly packed into such a small space (and, as you'd know if you read it, in such an easy to read way, that if I ever approach a third of that I'll feel like I've pretty much maxed out my ability.
I have no comment upon the rest of the novel; it's a silly idea stolen straight from the Simpsons, but then again Stephen King specializes in silly ideas made genuinely scary. This one might be a return to form, or might be a lousy crash. But that opener, should you look carefully, is a masterwork of characterization. I'm going to have to take it apart and see if I can find the central motor that drives it. | |
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| One recurring meme that's been popping around over the last couple of days is the idea that climate researchers (and those who trust climate research as a science) are some how in fits of contortions squirming about trying to rationalize this sudden cognitive dissonance. It's a good meme, tells a fun story, and like many memes is generally hogwash. I spent some time today reading a thread of comments at esr's blog: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447There's a lot of discussion there, but for the most part it's a predictable display of global warming skeptics being unskeptical about anything which supports their position, and backers of science asking for more information, more context, and more data. In a poetic turn of events, one line of code has become the anti global warming movement's "hockey stick". The mere existence of commented out code somehow proves once and for all that climatology is just a house of cards, and if they could only pull that bit of code out and show everyone it would topple. It's almost embarrassing to watch. But at the same time, it's sort of hilarious watching the skeptics try over and over again to prove by assertion that this data dump is the end of climate science. In the end, I expect that they whole lot of them will convince themselves that global warming is a fraud (your classic no-op) while generally sane people will continue to monitor scientific publications and/or broad surveys of results (also a no-op). The most disturbing aspects of this whole debate are the parallels with creationism/intelligent design. Both anti-global warming zealots and creationists have done a great deal to dress up their rhetoric in the garb of science, but have had very little success in coming up with scientific models which validate their hypotheses. I wouldn't be surprised if 150 years from now, we still have tons of anti-science crusaders railing against climate science, despite the many probable leaps and bounds the field will make in that time. There's not much that can be done when it comes to certain kinds of irrationality it seems. I understand why some people flock to anti-Darwinism, but for the life of me I have no clue what it is about global warming that gets people's undies in such a bunch. Does anyone have any idea what it is that attracts the wing nuts to anti-global warming? [eta: quote which illustrates esr's own wing nuttery: "Creationism is certainly politicized science..." Yes, that's right. Some software guy railing against global warming thinks creationism is a science.] | |
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| http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/make-more-than-gpa.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/?p=20550 25% Drop in free playtime for 6-to-8-year-olds from 1981 to ‘97, while homework more than doubled. Time 30Nov, p.57.
My youngest son is a junior in high school, but won’t study for the SAT because he is too busy with classes; he won’t believe me that the SAT counts for as much as his GPA. He does his own software projects, which is great, but mainly because he loves them. My older son, newly at UVA, was too busy with classes, basketball and band to do his own projects or study for the SAT.
Most college students ignore my advice to take an independent study and really dive into something. When I suggest that grad school applicants talk about their big projects, they say they were too GPA focused for those. I tell grad students few will care what classes they took or grades they got; it is their degree and major papers that will matter. Yet most still attend too much to in-their-face teachers and their grades.
Students seem overly obsessed with grades and organized activities, both relative to standardized tests and to what I’d most recommend: doing something original. You don’t have to step very far outside scheduled classes and clubs to start to see how very different the world is when you have to organize it yourself.
For example, if you try to study a subject in depth without following a textbook or review, you’ll have to decide for yourself which sources seem how relevant to your topic. If you try to add something to the subject you’ll have to decide what changes are how feasible and interesting. Doing these may feel awkward at first, but they will be very useful skills later in life. Similar skills come from writing your own game or starting your own business or composing your own album.
Most of the interesting academics I know spent lots of time when young structuring their own “unstructured” activities; GPA fanatics usually have few interesting thoughts of their own. Alas, today even structured activities reward dandelion over orchid abilities. For example, the SAT math test once had harder problems, letting orchids shine on a hard problem, to compensate for missing easy ones. Today’s SAT only rewards never ever making a mistake on easy problems.
Inspired by a conversation with Nicole Iannacone. | |
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| Flipping through Lamebook, the catalogue of embarrassing Facebook debacles, I find myself envisioning an imaginary history in which Stupid Teenaged Ferrett had access to a larger audience via Facebook, instead of private notes and occasional bitter rants. And I shiver with terror. I mean, crap, this blog's embarrassing and self-revelatory enough as it is these days. I was worse, once upon a time, and certainly more psychodramatic; I merely had no medium in which to spread my bozosity. I'm pretty sure every breakup would have been an anguished scream, followed by a crazy commentfest, followed by me working through my emotions in public. I'm pretty sure Facebook would have destroyed me, back in the day. This may be one of the first times I'm grateful I'm old. | |
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|  GUD: Greatest Uncommon Denominator (Issues #3 and #4) What holds GUD together as a magazine? The space to hold a lot of different kinds of quality fiction. There's a lot of different styles in each issue, a veritable bouillabaisse of various stories - straight fantasy, cyberpunk, experimental poetry, even "straight" fiction with no fantastic elements whatsoever. In a gigantic magazine the size of a small book, you're sure to find something you like in here. It's exactly what it says on the tin: a bunch of very good stories, loosely held together by the fact that they're, well, good. That's not strictly true, though. Scratch the surface, and you'll see that GUD tends towards tales that delve into someone's character; in fact, if you're a writer looking to submit and characterization isn't your strong point, you might wanna pass 'em over. The best of GUD's stories are tales of sharply-drawn, real folks in strange situations - a Mayan astronaut about to be sacrificed, an insecure lover with his girlfriend falling for mysterious aliens, a mailman with a bloodied claw-hammer in the back of his truck looking for rebirth canals. GUD's stories also tend towards the longer end - there's some well-done flash fiction in there (and poetry, to break things up), but most of the tales are long enough to lose yourself in for some time. GUD's stories want you to spend some time with the people inside them, walking along them and losing yourself in their skin. When that works, which it usually does, it's a sensuous journey. On those rare occasions that GUD fails with a story, it's usually because the ending lacks punch - you've followed someone for five thousand words, only to find that really, it isn't much of an ending at all, turning what looked to be an actual story into little more than a rambling tone poem. (Or, as will happen, you just hated the lead character and didn't want to follow them anywhere.) There are few misfires, though. The good news, however, is that GUD is of high quality - I anguished over choosing the "best" stories below, since almost all of them had something to recommend them - and is thick enough to be an exceptional value. For $3.50 a PDF, you get 211 pages - and the stories are wildly varying, from quick pulpy prose to lush, lingering visuals, so you're sure to find at least a few stories to fall in love with. And the art inside is also gorgeous. It's a downright pretty magazine, spiced up with professional artistry. And hell, it's even cheaper: as a part of their Black Friday sale, you can pay whatever you like, making a normally unbeatable value of $3.50 an issue even more beatable. That's a lot of reading, man, and a lot of value in a very pretty magazine. It's definitely worth checking out. The stories that called to me in these issues are, in descending order of love: Daya and Dharma, by ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) shweta_narayan (Issue #4)Daya is a handmaid in the palace of a selfish, beautiful princess - and a beautiful red bird from the court of the Rainbow Prince arrives to find a bride for his master. And what could have turned into a twee gratification story instead lands two steps beyond where you think it will to turn into something dark, beautiful, and majestic. The only problem I have with it is that this story started very slowly, but once it got rolling it was unstoppable. Soon You Will Be Gone And Possibly Eaten, by Nick Antoeca (Issue #3) He loves his girlfriend, Sabile, and yet he never really understands her. Even more so, when the aliens come to Earth and start abducting beautiful people. A tragic tale of love, loss, and the confused bereavement that comes when a lover betrays you for reasons you can't quite understand but can't quite condemn, either. Night Bird Soaring, by T.L. Morganfield (Issue #3) A Mayan man wants to be an astronaut, but that can never be: he was born as the Night Wind, a living God to be sacrificed at age 30. This is an excellent look at other cultures, one where Mayan culture was ascendant, and the only flaw is that the ending isn't particularly personal; it wraps things up, but doesn't necessarily connect. Still, the journey through this strangely mundane alien land is well worth it. Think Fast, by Michael Greenhut (Issue #3) "Pick an alternate timeline and you'll find my corpse." A man can send messages from his past self to his current self - a power granted so that he can help rescue his sister, who died. But the ending's a strange and surprising twist that makes sense, Memento-wise, becoming that rarity of things: a consistent, satisfying time-travel story. The Great Big Nothing, by Frank Haberle (Issue #3) A story with absolutely no speculative elements at all. Yet it made me tear up. Forests of the Night, by Abigail Hilton (Issue #4) A frail woman is dropped off by uncaring relatives at an old-age home. This story is short, almost flash, but that's good; it's a simple idea, and it doesn't overstay its welcome, finishing up exactly when it needs to. A Man Of Kiri Maru, by Laura L. Sullivan (Issue #4) Kiri Maru, a small island out in the Pacific Ocean, has a unique religion, if it can be called that: their God died by accident, and for a dumb reason, and isn't really worshipped. Into this culture steps a traditional scientist, hoping to study the culture and who instead falls in love. This is a wonderful example of a story that shouldn't work - the beginning has almost nothing to do with the ending, the tale wanders, and the ending is, to say the least, a little odd - and yet somehow, thanks to a wry writing style and engaging characters, this one pulls it off with style and grace and squids. Chica, Let Me Tell You A Story, by Alex Dally McFarlane (Issue #3) "I was a door, once." A magical portal tells her tale. The ending is a little flat, but overall this is strong for its concepts and intrigues. Unfinished Stories, by J(ae) D. Brames (Issue #4) A tale done with style and visceral pulp, this one's a simple tale built up with lot of punkish stylistic (and effective!) fillips. Follow Albert, the crazy mailman looking for a suitable body to scrape off the road so he can crack open the rebirth canal, and the narrator, who tags along for reasons that will be made devastatingly clear towards the end. And it has a damn near perfect final line. The Dancing Aliens, by Mithran Somasundrum (Issue #4) The aliens didn't jet down from a great spaceship in the sky; no, they turned up in public squares everywhere, dancing in strange and hypnotic patterns, starving to death because they didn't know how to busk. And the narrator, one of the first to discover the truth about things, witnesses the reason why they dance. The ending's a little anticlimactic, given the awesome buildup, but it's still reasonably creepy and believable. The Dragon's Thorn, Sword of Kings (And Fred), by Idan Cohen (Issue #3) A very funny flash fiction story about a great magic sword that winds up in the hands of, well, Fred. I've seen a lot of stories like this. Most of them don't work. This does. On The Monthly Magazine Review: Every month (hopefully, on the first, though not this time), I'll review a pro to semi-pro 'zine. There are a lot of potential definitions of "a semi-pro zine," ranging from circulations of over a thousand to income levels for the publisher - but for purposes of this, I'll say that a) you have to pay at least a cent a word, on average, and b) not be a Twitter-zine. I'm not opposed to bold experiments like Tweet the Meat, but paying five cents a word for a 140-character story really isn't going to support any starving artists. I'm also not going to review just a single issue. No, I want to read multiple issues, to get (and give) a greater sense of what hits this particular 'zine's kinks. Is it deep mystery? Beautiful prose? Pulpy action? Reworked myths? You can't tell by a single issue, man, you gotta see a few. My goal as a writer is to both educate myself in the market (so I know what markets like what), to help give some attention to markets that are always hungry for new readers, and to read some damned fine stories. If you have a semi-pro zine you'd like to nominate for review, speak up. | |
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| http://store.xkcd.com/ Hey! A note to anyone interested in buying Christmas gifts from the xkcd store: the deadline for Christmas delivery of domestic orders is December 14th. We'll continue to ship after that, but won't guarantee by-Christmas delivery. (If you haven't been to the xkcd store lately, you might want to check it out. I've got some some new stuff there!)
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| Is this a smoking gun for climate fraud, or something that just happens to look like one? From the CRU code file osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro , used to prepare a graph purported to be of Northern Hemisphere temperatures and reconstructions.
;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey) Because it sure looks bad. In other Climategate news, Declan McCullagh covers the controversy, the original FOIA requester says it's about transparency, not infighting, and Eric Crampton gives the economist's view on global warming. | |
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| Is there a better way to set either of the following hands?
5c4c3c2cAc / 5h6d8hTdQs / 4h5d7s8c / JhJdKh
The straight flush seems so appealing, but if there's no royalty for it is it worth trying to improve the Badugi and 2-7 hands? (But then it looks difficult to put JJ in front too.)
8h8s8cJdJh / 9d7d4s3c2s / 9s7c6h2d / AcAhQs
Could play #2 for the 2-7 hand by abandoning the 9-high badugi, which isn't that great anyway.
Rules: 5-card high hand, 5-card 2-7 hand, 4-card Badugi hand, 3-card high hand which must be less strong than the back hand. No royalties or naturals. If score matters, figure 4 points for winning 3 (1 point per hand + 2 points for overall winner) and 6 points for a sweep, with no tiebreaker. (What is the typical scoring? This seems to not reward a sweep enough.) | |
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| http://ken-jennings.com/blog/?p=1453 I had to run out earlier on an emergency pint-of-whipped-cream run. The line of tents was already set up outside Best Buy! Like sixteen hours early!
Every year, like all right-thinking Americans, I am mystified by “Black Friday” and the priests who officiate at its early-morning rites. Dude, that’s great that you’re going to save $85 on that Blu-Ray player, but, uh, you spent sixteen hours of your “holiday” sitting out in the cold to get that deal. What’s your hourly rate for that?
Mindy points out that some of these people enjoy the hassle. I scam the DVD counters at Barnes & Noble; others want to sit outside Best Buy all day on Thanksgiving. So who am I to pooh-pooh their fun? I also suspect that many of them have an elaborate arbitrage system built around reselling their 5 a.m. buys at a hefty holiday profit, though I’ve never actually met anyone who does this.
On the same errand, I passed a gas station/convenience store that was advertising its new breakfast burritos. The sign said “BREAKFAST BURRITOS! Two/$2. Taste it twice!”
I’m sure they meant well, but “Taste it twice!” is not really the slogan you want to use for your microwaved breakfast burritos. I’ve eaten convenience-store food a time or two, and “tasting it twice,” though par for the course, is not really something you ever look forward to. | |
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| http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/bad-emulation-advance.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/?p=20605 You may recall my guess is that within a century or so, human whole brain emulations (ems) will induce a change so huge as to be in the top four changes in the last hundred million years. So major advances toward such ems are big news:
IBM’s Almaden Research Center … announced … they have created the largest brain simulation to date on a supercomputer. The number of neurons and synapses in the simulation exceed those in a cat’s brain; previous simulations have reached only the level of mouse and rat brains. … C2 … re-create[s] 1 billion neurons connected by 10 trillion individual synapses. C2 runs on “Dawn,” a BlueGene/P supercomputer. … DARPA … is spending at least US $40 million to develop an electronic processor that mimics the mammalian brain’s function, size, and power consumption. The DARPA project … was launched late last year and will continue until 2015 with a goal of a prototype chip simulating 10 billion neurons connected via 1 trillion synapses. The device must use 1 kilowatt or less (about what a space heater uses) and take up less than 2 liters in volume. …
“Each neuron in the network is a faithful reproduction of what we now know about neurons,” he says. This in itself is an enormous step forward for neuroscience, .. Dawn … takes 500 seconds for it to simulate 5 seconds of brain activity, and it consumes 1.4 MW.
“Enormous step” seems a bit too much, but even so Randal Koene agrees this is big news:
This recent demonstration of computing power in simulations of biologically inspired neuronal networks is a good measure to indicate how far we have come and when it will be possible to emulate the necessary operations of a complete human brain. Given the storage capacity that was used in the simulation, at least some relevant information could be stored for each updatable synapse in the experiment. That makes this markedly different than the storageless simulations carried out by Izhikevich.
Even if big news, this is not good news. You see, ems require three techs, and we have clear preferences over which tech is ready last:
- Computing power – As a steadily and gradually advancing tech, this makes the em transition more gradual and predictable. Here first only expensive ems are available, and then they slowly take over jobs as their costs fall. Since it is a large industry with many competing producers, we need worry less about disruptions from unequal tech access.
- Brain scanning – As this is also a relatively gradually advancing tech, it should also make for a more gradual predictable transition. But since it is now a rather small industry, surprise investments could make for more development surprise. Also, since the use of this tech is very lumpy, we may get billions, even trillions, of copies of the first scanned human. And the first team to make that successful scan might gain much power, if it hasn’t made cooperative deals with other teams. By the time a second, or hundredth, human is scanned most of the economic niches may be filled with copies of the first few ems.
- Cell modeling – This sort of progress may be more random and harder to predict – a sudden burst of insight is more likely to create an unexpected and sudden em transition. This could induce large disruptive inequality in economic and military power, both among teams trying to succeed and among ordinary folks displaced by em labor.
This new DARPA project seems focused more on advancing special computing hardware than cell-modeling. If so, it makes scenario #1 less likely, which is bad. Can someone please tell these DARPA knuckle-heads that they are funding exactly the wrong research? | |
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| A promo for one of MST3K's Turkey Day marathons on Comedy Central: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsWKTcZ6fWAvia boingboing, where the submitter notes "Other people share a fondness for this Comedy Central 'Turkey Day Marathon' commercial and have tried to post it to Youtube, but Viacom seems quite protective of it. So, quick, before it's gone, enjoy this trip down memory lane!" | |
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| Notes re: something going around: postcards and Christmas cards addressed to "any soldier" or "any service member" etc. c/o Walter Reed hospital will NOT be delivered -- the USPS will not deliver any such mail due to security concerns. http://www.snopes.com/politics/christmas/walterreed.aspAs an alternative they mention a "Holiday for Heroes" program: http://www.snopes.com/politics/christmas/soldiercards.aspAlso please note that the "Holiday Mail for Heroes" program is for the delivery of holiday cards only. Those wishing to donate phone cards or gift certificates should go to www.aafes.com, scroll down to "AAFES Community Connection" and click on "Help Our Troops Call Home" or "Gift Cards/Certificates for Our Troops" in order to send such items. The latter Snopes page also has a message from Walter Reed in which they suggest: Instead of sending an "Any Wounded Soldier" letter or package to Walter Reed, please consider making a donation to one of the more than 300 nonprofit organizations dedicated to helping our troops and their families listed on the "America Supports You" website, www.americasupportsyou.mil Also, this came in email from SaveLV.com today, and appears legit as well: http://www.letssaythanks.com/ | |
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| http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/parenting-is-not-about-kids.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/?p=20593 Bryan Caplan wondered why parents forget a kids view:
The mom and dad in these stories … pointlessly alienate their kids by pushing them into activities that aggravate parent and child alike. … [they] largely ignore all sorts of kid-on-kid abuse, leaving their older sons in a brutal Hobbesian jungle. When they do respond, it’s awfully arbitrary. … Many parents really do forget what’s it’s like to be a kid. … I honestly don’t know why. I bet Robin Hanson would have a clever functionalist story.
I commented:
Parents seem so eager to appear adultish that they alienate their kids. How could parents possibly care so much about what other adults think of them than they sacrifice their own kids happiness? It is almost as if parents cared more about being respected than having fun.
Bryan responded:
[This] assumes that other parents care about your parenting far more than they actually do. In reality, most parents are too tired and preoccupied to worry if somebody else’s parents aren’t “adultish” enough.
But Bryan presumes we care less about the judgments others make when they make snappier judgments. Yet we all care about how our surface features appear to others, especially when those others make snap judgments – after all if they judged more carefully, our inner beauty might shine through. And the busier are other parents, the snappier are their judgments.
Katja Grace was once similarly puzzled:
A cheap method of disinfecting water … its effects were not significant … [in] rural Bolivia. … [Researchers] suspect a big reason for this is that lining up water bottles on your roof shows your neighbors that you aren’t rich enough to have more expensive methods of disinfecting water. … Fascinating as signaling explanations are, this seems incredible. … Parents are known for obsessive interest in their children’s safety. What’s going on?
I responded:
The bottles … should reduce kids’s death rate by 1.5%. … When are parents ever willing to make themselves appear poor or low status to reduce their kid’s chance of dying by 1.5%?
Now consider other “tired” parents activities:
- Playing music to baby in womb, dragging them to concerts
- Lots more “pushing [kids] into activities that aggravate”
- Work hard for income to pay for track houses on cul de sacs
- Insist anywhere kids visit eliminate all pointy objects
- Carefully monitor men at playgrounds, even men with kids
- Never let go of hand of kid at mall, to prevent kidnapping
- Making kids sit at table until they eat “healthy” food
- Drag kids to doc every time they get a cold
- Making sure kids do all their homework
- Obsessively overly clean kid environments
These are usually justified as helping kids, but most have questionable marginal value. But they are what “good parents” are thought to do. Ask yourself: how big would the marginal benefit to kids of an activity have to be for parents to do it if that activity made them look like a bad parent?
We all have illusions about love and romance, and are reluctant to accept signaling explanations of behavior where we feel so genuine and virtuous. But romantic illusions pale compared to parenting illusions, making it all the harder to call a parenting spade a spade.
Bryan is writing a book trying to convince parents to have more kids, via convincing them to lighten up on parenting effort. This is a noble cause, but I’m afraid it hangs on Bryan getting parents to see parenting-lite as higher status, such as via celebrating rich folks who send their kids off to boarding school, or our great grandparents who had ten kids each.
Added: Bryan responds here.
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| If you'll be around for the holidays, I'm thinking of doing a movie night Friday (tomorrow) at Tortuga around 7pm. If you'd like to come, then please vote. Wait, what voting system ?!??! Let's try range voting. Poll #1490837 Movie to see on Friday
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 3 Man On A Wire 2 Fast 2 Furious Crank Isle of Roses (New country documentary, Italian, w/ subtitles) America: Freedom To Fascism IOUSA Hold Fast (Anarchist Yacht Club doc) Glengarry Glen Ross Or suggest another movie for now or later, in the comments... | |
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| Fascinating article from OKCupid via onesoul analyzing how men & women rate each other as cute, and (most interestingly) how cuteness affects their messaging. One result was that men write more attractive women much more often, while women only write more attractive men slightly more often. So men value looks more than women do. This is evidence for what I've blogged before: women's attraction functions are on average more worthy of respect than men's, as they are much less superficial. (If the judgement in "worthy of respect" bothers you, just think of it as: "When a woman finds a guy hot, that is a better statistical signal that I would find the guy interesting to hang out with, whereas when a guy finds a woman hot, she's more likely to be shapely and young than interesting to hang out with.") It's almost as if the genders have fundamentally and significantly different wiring in their sexual dynamics...that's crazy, though, we all know that male & female identicality is an axiom and therefore culture must be the whole effect...evolution is only real when we're fighting creationists, not when we're talking about what men & women want in relationships! Oops. Slipped into ranting. Going to try to do less of that in 2010, since I don't think it contributes positively towards my life goals. But it's 2009, so I can still be lazy :). - Tags:troll
- Music:Stop! (12") - Erasure
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| http://pua4ltr.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/animal-training-your-spouse-classical-conditioning-in-relationships/ http://pua4ltr.wordpress.com/?p=45  This is going to be the kind of post that offends the offendable, which is excellent, because it will help our audience to self-select. Reader Divia passes along this fabulous NYT article: What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage. It’s about simple classical conditioning, which I’ve seen mentioned in a number of PUA resources. Basically it means rewarding someone when they exhibit behaviors you like, although as the article shows, there is more nuance to the implementation.
The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don’t. After all, you don’t get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.
Back in Maine, I began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I’d kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller.
I was using what trainers call “approximations,” rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior.
I find this technique particularly interesting in the context of the unlikely-to-ever-end theme of manipulation. Not only is it a manipulative technique, and if done inappropriately, without a sense of loving kindness for your partner, I would go so far as to say it can be evil. For example, in relationships where one partner is psychologically dominating the other (which can become abusive), conditioning can play a role, with not only appreciation but all love and hate doled out as carrots and sticks to reinforce the dependency.
Fortunately, like most PUA techniques, the mere fact of using it with someone you love in the context of a long-term relationship automatically moves it strongly towards the side of good. (This is one of my central themes about PUA4LTR, BTW, so expect to see it expressed and explored quite a bit in the future). Choosing to express some of your appreciation at times that help your partner grow and develop in positive ways is very different if done with a base of unconditional love.
I’m going to give up on arguing about manipulation soon, because logic is unlikely to convince those who find skillful interaction and personal growth innately distasteful (hmm, think I’m biased much? :) ). But I want to point out that classical conditioning is something that many of us do to ourselves (“if I go to the gym, I can have a candy bar!”), and to our kids (“Thank you so much for cleaning up your mess, I really appreciate it!”).
Kids are a great example, because they illustrate that base of love that I mentioned. Giving your kids positive and negative feedback to help them grow and learn, if done with a base of constant love, is part of effective parenting. Whereas only loving your kids when they get A’s is evil and can lead to lifelong self-esteem issues and approval-seeking.
As with most cases of being a PUA in an LTR, communication with your partner is important. I won’t go quite so far as to say it is absolutely required, but using this technique without discussion is definitely straying into dangerous ground. But with communication, it can become part of the dance of partnership and growing together:
When the training techniques worked so beautifully, I couldn’t resist telling my husband what I was up to. He wasn’t offended, just amused. As I explained the techniques and terminology, he soaked it up. Far more than I realized.
…
One morning, as I launched into yet another tirade about how uncomfortable I was, Scott just looked at me blankly. He didn’t say a word or acknowledge my rant in any way, not even with a nod.
I quickly ran out of steam and started to walk away. Then I realized what was happening, and I turned and asked, “Are you giving me an L. R. S.?” Silence. “You are, aren’t you?”
He finally smiled, but his L. R. S. has already done the trick.
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| - Mood:amused
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| Leicester Square has been turned into a bloody carnival. No, more than usual. Funny thing. As soon as I set foot on the tube today, I felt like I was really on vacation.  | |
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| The Unwritten Rules of Generational Poverty. While you could argue some of the specifics in the article, I think there's a greater truth here in that a significant amount of poverty is cultural. I'm lucky enough to come from a "rich" family, but my rich family is largely rich because of investing decisions thanks to lessons taught to them by their parents - and in turn, my family passes down those lessons on how to use money wisely. My Grampa nagged me into getting an IRA account, my parents yelled at me to get my 401k maxed out at work, my stepfather sat down with me and discussed how to lay out a portfolio. And even now, I'm using my Mom's trick of "If you get a raise and your expenses haven't risen, keep living on what you had and put all the extra money into savings/investments." (That took like fifteen years to get to, but I remembered it.) I'm reasonably sloppy by their standards, but even when I was making $18,000 a year I still tried to put money away and invest whatever meager windfalls I got. And it's helped. Whereas I've seen people who come from poor families, and they do have a different mindset - some of which overlaps with what's described in the article. It's often a "Well, stuff's gonna happen, whatcha gonna do?" It's a mindset which leaves them much more vulnerable to bumps in the road, and we all have bumps. This isn't saying that poor people deserve their poverty, of course, and that rich people are all smart. Rich covers a lot of stupid financial sins, like spackle, and the smartest person can get jostled out of their best savings plan when they're living close to the edge. But I think a lot of people are poorer than they could be, thanks to them lacking a cultural education in how to plan for the future. I wish there was a way to have the quiet lessons I've been taught spread a little further out, is all. And on Thanksgiving, I'm grateful to come from a background where that stuff was just a subtle, continual lesson. | |
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