Wehr in the World

Fascinating things

2012-11-14T00:21:00.000-05:00

Pardon my absence. To play catch up, here are some things that have recently fascinated me:

Searching for Sugar Man is a really good movie that I found kind of awful.

Fifty Shades of Grey is an awful book that I find kind of wonderful.

At the surface, The Battery Park Book Exchange (Asheville, NC) is a used bookstore that also sells wine and coffee. But once you recline in its leather chairs with a dog by your side and a warmly-lit book in your hand, it becomes the type of place that can make you forgive a town for its granola and yoga.

"The visitor to the Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles) continually finds himself shimmering between wondering at (the wonders of nature) and wondering whether (any of this could possibly be true). And it's that very shimmer, the capacity for such delicious confusion, that may constitute the most blessedly wonderful thing about being human."

I have no doubt that Andy Warhol was "the perfect mirror of our time" and "the artist we deserved" but I haven't yet figured out whether that was intentional. Or whether it matters that it was/wasn't intentional. In particular, I'm left chewing on this bit of Warhol philosophy: "I think the less something has to say, the more perfect it is."

This photo. Also the perfect mirror of our time.

Guy Deslisle combines two of the most butchered mediums -- graphic novels and travel writing -- and comes out with something beautiful.

By the time Velvet Underground's "What Goes On" (original version, 9-minute version) was through with me, my eyes were shut, my stomach was up with my lungs, and my tongue was out with my chin. I wiped the drool away and thought, "I didn't know music could do that." The guitar. How is that possible? Well, to get technical, Lou's solo was recorded several times, and it came out slightly differently each time, and then the recordings were placed one on top of the other, much like an Andy Warhol silkscreen painting. But I didn't mean how is that technically possible. I meant how is it possible that such a fantastic, blurred, soul-crushing sound exists in this world?

Criticism is too important to be left to critical thinkers

2012-09-28T03:45:00.000-04:00

Every year our institutes of higher learning push out another batch of world-class critical thinkers. These critical thinkers have been infused with the power to identify, even before a sentence is through, “circular reasoning!” and “straw men!” and “non-sequiturs!” These critical thinkers will smack the misconceptions and presumptions off your goofy argument’s face.

The irony and tragedy is that these critical thinkers haven’t been infused with the power to think critically about their own critical thinking.

Their misconception and presumption: The purpose of thought is to arrive at logically coherent arguments.

Another one: Logical coherence is the only sure way to “truth.”

The saddest one: Language is a vehicle through which to examine the logical coherence of premises and conclusions, rather than to simply listen to what’s going on in a person’s head.

---

Mention the word “poetry” to a critical thinker and they will just about gag, but there is sometimes poetry in natural language, even sometimes in the language of critical thinkers, particularly when they get in a huff and neglect to use their personal censors. Poetry is language in a state of excitement. It makes use of metaphor, alliteration, and regularity of rhythm, and so do we, when moved to speak by anger or frustration or desire. A woman overheard at dinner: “You haven’t kissed me since we were engaged!”

There is something hidden within that statement that is truer and more important than anything that can be revealed by logic or randomized control trials. The mental life of a critical thinker is sorely constrained until he knows this.

---

Here’s Adlai Stevenson from 1956:

I very well know that in many minds “criticism” has today become an ugly word. It conjures up pictures of insidious radicals hacking away at the very foundation of the American way of life. It suggests noncomformity and noncomformity suggests disloyalty and disloyalty suggests treason, and before we know where we are, this process has all but identified the critic with the saboteur and turned criticism into an un-American activity instead of its greatest safeguard.

Our academies are right to stress the importance of critical thinking, they just happen to have stressed the exactly wrong kind. Their version teaches us to search for errors in reasoning, but not errors with the act of reasoning. It teaches us to examine measurements and methodology, but in doing so it limits our search to that tiny subsection of truths accessible via measurements and methodology. It professes to teach “independent thinking” but by teaching all of us to evaluate everything with the same icy logic it does exactly the opposite.

Any really worthwhile criticism will be in part poetic. Its fundamental concern won’t be making sense but rather transforming the reader from a passive observer into an ally. Good critics will be more mindful of the words they don’t write than the ones they do because they know that the only way to transform the reader from a passive observer into an ally is by implying things—by nudging the reader to unravel things for himself.

E.B. White wrote with great poetry about his dog, the critic:

Fred was intensely loyal to himself, as every strong individualist must be. He held unshakable convictions. He was absolutely sure that he was in possession of the truth. Because he was loyal to himself, I found his eccentricities supportable. Actually, he contributed greatly to the general health and security of the household. His views were largely of a dissenting nature. Yet in tearing us apart he somehow held us together. In obstructing, he strengthened us. In criticizing, he informed. In his rich, aromatic heresy, he nourished our faith. He was also a plain damn nuisance, I must not forget that.

Fred devoted his life to deflating me and succeeded admirably. His attachment to our establishment, though untinged with affection, was strong nevertheless, and vibrant. It was simply that he found in our persons, in our activities, the sort of complex, disorderly society that fired his imagination and satisfied his need for tumult and his quest for truth. He never just lay and rested. Within the range of his tether, he continued to explore, dissect, botanize, conduct post-mortems, excavate, experiment, expropriate, savor, masticate, regurgitate. He had no contemplative life, but he held as a steady gleam the belief that under a commonplace stone and behind an unlikely piece of driftwood lay the stuff of high adventure and the opportunity to save the nation.

It’s easier to theorize about human behavior than it is to look at it

2012-09-20T02:26:00.001-04:00

It’s easier to theorize about human behavior than it is to look at it.

It’s easy to look at the photos from Abu Ghraib and construct stories. A social psychologist might say that Abu Ghraib illustrates the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment. An economist might say that “rational” people were responding to grim incentives. An evolutionary biologist might say that Abu Ghraib merely shows apes gone amok amid environmental pressures. A neurochemist might say that the military personnel were experiencing a severe chemical imbalance in the brain.

It’s hard to do what Errol Morris did, which is to examine the events that actually happened and listen to the people involved. The result, Standard Operating Procedure, shows how grossly inadequate simple stories can be.

It’s also easy to theorize about why David Foster Wallace killed himself. Here’s Jonathan Franzen:

One good, simple, modern story would go like this: “A lovely, talented personality fell victim to a severe chemical imbalance in his brain. There was the person of Dave, and then there was the disease, and the disease killed the man as surely as cancer might have.” This story is at once sort of true and totally inadequate. If you’re satisfied with this story, you don’t need the stories that Dave wrote.

The problem with good, simple, modern stories, beyond often being flat wrong, is that they rob us of mysteries – the dark corners of human experience – and replace them with a smug satisfaction of having invented a plausible explanation. Existence is no longer strange and curious—it’s comfortable and scientific. Minds are no longer agitated—we are all now technologists. Then the task becomes to selectively choose evidence that fits your simple story, ignore others, and go on with your comfortable, mundane life.

The frightening thing is that our theories define us. They become the dreamscapes we inhabit—personal story worlds about who people are and what they are doing and why they are doing it and what it all means.

The irony is that simple stories do not suffice precisely because we all live in our own unique little dreamscapes. People are very, very different and act with very different motives precisely because they inhabit very different personal story worlds.

---

The movie The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser has one of the best endings I’ve seen. The movie is about a man who spent his entire childhood in the total isolation of a dark cell and is then thrown into the world, where he struggles to understand people and he develops unorthodox approaches to logic and religion and music. The ending is brilliant because it forces you to seriously consider Hauser's ideas and visions and perspective by so perfectly mocking and robbing us of any sort of scientific or material explanation to his "strange condition." I suggest you watch the whole thing, but I suspect you just want to know how it ends. If so, click here.

Sal Khan will educate the pants off of you

2012-09-14T04:18:00.013-04:00

Khan Academy is the perfect model for education, and it is also the perfect example for how our notion of “education” is profoundly flawed.

The Khan Academy model goes something like this: Students sit with their iPads (or whatever), watch a video tutorial, pausing or rewinding if they need to, then do an online problem set module, and a teacher monitors performance via a "dashboard" and comes deliver personalized feedback when she spots a weakness. (60 Minutes segment.)

Holy smokes, just think of it: Self-paced learning! Personalized feedback! Specialization! Measurement! Continual Improvement!

No doubt this model is a major improvement over the antiquated system of dry textbooks and teachers delivering lectures to a broad, bored audience.

The Khan Academy model is exactly what we need to produce the next generation of income-generating and job-producing technologists. It’s no surprise, then, that Google is one of Khan Academy’s biggest supporters.

But there’s a problem. It’s easier to spot when we take the Khan Academy logic to its limit.

The implicit assumption of the Khan Academy model is that the goal of education is to help students learn material as efficiently and effectively as possible. Okay so then let’s do this: Let’s build a massive Education Auditorium, big enough to fit hundreds of thousands of students sitting diligently at their iPads. Let’s give them cubicles to limit distractions. Actually let’s make it curtains since that’s more cost efficient. Then let’s bring in a small army of tutors, each specializing in a specific subset of a specific subject. The tutors will receive an electronic notification whenever a student is having trouble in their specialty. They’ll hightail it over to that student’s curtain-cubicle in their Segway scooter, deliver their personalized feedback, and then move on to the next faceless student.

Meanwhile, back at administrative headquarters, Khan Academy analysts would be collecting hordes of data to examine outcomes – even long-term outcomes like housing and employment – and continuously improve their products in order to not only educate students better, but also discover what kind of education is going to be most valuable for students’ careers and lives.

There’s no doubt that students will learn material better with the Khan Academy model, and there’s no doubt that learning material is important. My kids and grandkids are going to be educated efficiently! Why, then, do I have this vaguely sickly feeling?

Here's DFW:

Probably the most dangerous thing about formal education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what's going on inside me. It is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master." This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bullshit value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

Studying material in a curtain-cubicle isn’t going to help with that, no matter how personalized and evidence-based.

Sal Khan is often asked why he doesn’t show himself in his video tutorials. His answer is simple: Human faces get in the way. They distract. If my goofy grill is in front of you, he says, then it’s harder to focus on the material.

He’s exactly wrong: the material distracts from human faces, not the other way around.

Yet another example of the unreasonableness of our species

2012-09-10T22:36:00.003-04:00

It is likely to be many years before we see another book like A Wilderness of Error. It is not every day, or even every decade, that one of the most perceptive men on the planet selflessly and obsessively devotes much of his adult life pursuing such a non-cozy truth. The result -- this book -- has the potential to give a fair trial to a man who may have been wrongfully sentenced to life in prison, it has the potential to change the way the country thinks about its justice system, and it has the potential to open eyes to our own self-deception, not just in how we prosecute criminals, but in our mundane day-to-day lives.

And what has been the reception of this book, which was released last week? It has largely been not just negative but furious. Some people are so convinced that Jeffrey MacDonald is inhuman and evil that their response to this 500-page book that suggests otherwise is one not of discomfort or confusion but of physical disgust.

On the book’s Amazon page, I wrote a defense of the book with all of the calmness and reasonableness I could muster. It is currently one of the lowest rated reviews. I am starting to feel physical disgust myself.

There may be no hereafter, but at least we have ranch dressing

2012-09-06T03:26:00.007-04:00

I bet I can bring a grimace to your face by invoking a certain harmless idea:

Salad without dressing.

It’s often said that we modern cats have lost the capacity to endure boredom. But that isn’t quite right. It would be more accurate to say that we are so deeply under the spell of loud pleasures that we have lost the capacity to experience quiet pleasures.

This is more serious than you may realize. The statement “lost the capacity to endure boredom” is evidence for how serious the problem is, because it implies that we consider anything that isn’t stimulating “boring.” We cannot fathom that there are pleasures that are not stimulating.

It isn’t that there is anything inherently wrong with the stimulation of “loud pleasures,” things like cake and TV and video games. It’s that these pleasures are so loud that they make it hard to hear quiet pleasures. And that’s a problem because quiet pleasures are the only reliable sign that you’re doing something right. If you can’t hear them, you are without an existential map, hopelessly lost.

Take, for example, the physical consequences. When the subtle flavors of a tomato are put up against pizza sauce, when the quiet crispness of water is put up against Mellow Yellow, we end up with people whose butts are too big for a single plane seat, people who get diabetes before pubic hair, people whose teeth are rotting.

The more serious consequences are non-physical. They affect more of us, they affect us more severely, and they affect us more deeply.

When the deep friendship of intimate conversation is put up against bar hopping with friends, when the quiet buzz in the brain from a challenging book is put up against movies with explosions, when deliberate, concentrated, purposeful work is put up against the passive entertainment of TV talent shows, we end up with people whose idea of friendship is high-fiving while sharing tales of drunken behavior, people who neither think hard nor feel deeply, people whose idea of happiness is letting the world come in and tickle them.

When a bench under a tree is put up against a couch in an air-conditioned room, when the common creatures in your yard are put up against the Planet Earth series, when the sounds of your neighborhood crickets are put up against internet radio, we end up with people who don’t see themselves as part of the world— an incidental bundle of cells inhabiting a space filled with lots of other incidental bundles of cells. We end up instead with people who see themselves as detached, separate from the world, skeptical of it, expecting rewards from it. On the world rather than in the world. Me versus existence. Feed or be food.

You should probably reconsider your reading habits

2012-09-03T23:07:00.006-04:00

As a general if not universal rule, blogs are garbage. That includes this one. I don’t mean that to be humble. I mean that because it’s true. It’s the same for all the blogs on the sidebar—they are garbage. They are better than average, but they are garbage.

I subscribed to over 1,000 "idea blogs," and I haven’t yet found one whose ideas weren’t regularly half-formed, poorly considered, poorly crafted, half-assed. On rare occasions, a blog will say something important and true, but most of the time when you read blogs you are marinating yourself in the dross of other people’s opinions.

And blogs aren’t the worst offenders:

When you expose yourself to Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else.

Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? What do the words I live by really mean? Am I happy?

If not Facebook, YouTube, blogs, or newspapers, where, then, should a poor soul get their information? Two places:

1. Great books and great films, because they don’t reflect the conventional wisdom of their day. They say things that have the permanent power to disrupt our habits of thought. They were revolutionary in their own time, and they are still revolutionary today.

2. The deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person. Not Skyping with three people and texting with two others at the same time while you hang out in a friend’s room listening to music and studying.

Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask.

This is what we call thinking out loud, discovering what you believe in the course of articulating it. Our new electronic world has disrupted it violently. Instead of having one or two true friends that we can sit and talk to for three hours at a time, we have 968 “friends” that we never actually talk to; instead we just bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day. This is not friendship, this is distraction.

Online reading is garbage primarily because you, the audience, and your expectations, are garbage.

What the audience can’t be bothered to invest the time to get out of a work, creators aren’t going to take the trouble putting in: subtlety, complexity, detail, depth. Sentences will get shorter. Syntax will get simpler. Ironies will broaden. Vocabularies will contract. Stories and arguments will start dropping parts. Everything will have to squeeze itself into the smallest possible space. If you want an example of the way that writing is shaped by the expectations of its audience, just think of academic prose.

It’s not that a novel is any different on a screen than it is in a book. It’s that we’re different, because the medium tunes our nervous systems to a different pitch. We come to the screen to be entertained: we bring it our impatience. We come to the screen to shop: we bring it the expectation that we’re going to be pandered to.

The generation that waited in line for sweet potato ice cream

2012-09-03T20:24:00.003-04:00

I’m not sure if there’s a statement that I have thought about more or that has hit my gut harder than this one. It encapsulates a generation and an era with cutting precision on almost every level.

It did not yield a great literature, but it made good use of fonts.

---

Take, for example, our drinks:

Every trendy restaurant and bar in town seems to consider it a point of pride to develop its own list of daring new cocktails. The Copper Penny: “Old Overholt rye, Clear Creek pear, Punt e Mes, apricot brandy, Angostura bitters, lemon peel.” The Gin Henson: “gin muddled basil and cucumber, lemon-lime and ginger infused simple syrup, served up with a cucumber garnish.” The Miss You: “Pretty young Lovejoy Hazelnut Vodka makes out with old Laird’s Applejack. Your record collection or mine?” You see the problem. It’s all just way too clever: too self-conscious, too “creative,” and too damn cute. But there are also two more problems with these drinks. They’re too sweet, and they’re too weak. In other words, they suck.

The example could have just as easily been food trucks, those paragons of “creativity” and cuteness. If you were looking for the chief metaphor of our time, you’d be hard pressed to find one more telling than a high-achieving young professional standing in line at a food truck, colorfully dressed, friendly but alone, fiddling with his iPhone, waiting to receive his cup of sweet potato ice cream.

It would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad. If it were just cleverness or self-consciousness or cuteness, we could laugh at those unfortunate side effects of our now-ingrained belief that I am a unique little flower. But cleverness and self-consciousness and cuteness do not define our generation as much as something else. Something that I don’t know how to describe other than a deep and profound emptiness—an unawareness that there is anything worth waiting for other than sweet potato ice cream.

You can sense the emptiness – or rather, you can sense the absence of fullness – in our drinks, our food trucks, our ironic t-shirts, our zombie races, our fashion and food blogs, our Ryan Lochtes and our James Francos. You can hear it – or rather, you can hear its absence – in the dance-pop glitz that infests the radio. You can hear it in our language – amazing, awesome, fabulous, fantastic, great, marvelous, terrific, wonderful – words that represent an implosion of what they once meant.

The word we use most often to describe something or someone we don’t like? “Boring.”

If you pay attention to these things, you can sense a quiet desperation: flailing attempts at achievement, expression, or stimulation, something – anything – we hope – to replace what's missing.

A suggestion? Delete your Facebook account. Invite a friend to lunch. Listen to him.

Researchers Discover That Arts Have Value

2012-08-31T00:27:00.000-04:00

If you are someone who believes (like I did) that music/books/etc. are just trite little things that humans do to stimulate prospective mates or to fend off boredom, or if you are someone who struggles to understand (as I did) how something could be true without being factual, then I politely demand you to put aside an hour this weekend, go find a quiet place, and slowly and attentively read this.

Art that pleases snobs

2012-08-29T04:14:00.002-04:00

Art may be “the most important human activity,” but it is a mystery as to why anyone would bother to make it.

Suppose that we genetically engineered a small army of “artists” by giving them the distressingly rare combination of intelligence, perceptiveness, sensitivity, aesthetic judgment, and selflessness, and suppose that we carefully raised them by exposing them to the masterwork upon masterwork and by subjecting them to intensive trainings in order to develop a mastery of technical skill and by making sure they experienced the appropriate dramatic events to enhance their emotional depth so that, in the end, these mutants would have the mere *ability* to possibly create something on the order of magnitude of Gates of Heaven or Infinite Jest or Astral Weeks.

The pertinent question: Why would they want to?

I must specify that the type of art I am referring to is the type that a snob like me would call “serious.” This immediately disqualifies Maroon 5 and anyone else who exercises creativity in order to make amusing or stimulating things for personal gain. Peacocks raising their tail feathers do not, by this definition, count.

But isn’t that precisely the problem? It’s only snobs like me who recognize a distinction between “serious” and other forms of art, or who even care about “serious” art. Why would our mutants want to please snobs?

Snobs are generally the type of people who wear black turtlenecks and meander in galleries. They are known to stare a little too intently at paintings while strategically pushing on their lower lip with an index finger, presumably as a device to help them reconstruct “discourses of sexuality” or “the circulation of power” or “themes of otherness.” These are the type of people who would like you to believe that they are above pooping.

I ask again, why would our mutants want to please snobs?

---

This is why I adore Community and its creator, Dan Harmon. Community is the only thing I know that delivers the same messages of serious art and with the same effect of serious art but does so in a very un-snob-friendly medium—a network TV sitcom about video games and superheroes and Dungeons & Dragons and Annie’s boobs. It was remarkably ambitious to even attempt this, and Harmon executed it with incredible success. Or I thought he did, until he got fired, and until I read the reviews on Amazon.

The reviews on Amazon are glowing, but they are just exaggerated versions of the reviews of any other sitcom. Most people who adore the show apparently don’t adore it for the same reasons that snobs do. The reviewers almost all say something like “FUNNIEST SHOW ON TV!!,” and will occasionally comment on how relatable or likeable the characters are, implying that the critical rewards Community offers its viewers are the same as any other sitcom: amusement and/or the artificial easing of loneliness.

It leads a snob to wonder whether we have all become unreachable.

---

I finally found a satisfying answer to why mutants would want to make art. From the Wikipedia page of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker:

On being told that it should be faster and more dynamic, Tarkovsky replied, “The film needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.”

A representative then suggested that Tarkovsky was trying to give the point of view of the audience. Tarkovsky retorted, “I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman.”

Tarkovsky’s reason for making Stalker was not because he wanted to please an abstract audience of intelligentsia (which Tarkovsky openly mocked in the film) but because he wanted to please the people who deeply pleased him.

The lovely thing about money

2012-08-28T23:31:00.008-04:00

The lovely thing about money is that it gives you a free pass to exploit people who care about it.

Amazingly, there are people on this planet who will pay you for your money, and pay you more than your money is worth. Some call it “investing.”

Investing is a funny term because it implies that you are sacrificing some money so that you might be rewarded with more money. But then you are a cartoonish example of a person being exploited for caring about money.

A better reason to sacrifice money is so that you might be rewarded with fewer artificial obligations.

The idea of working for a paycheck or working for a weekend – that’s what I mean by artificial obligations – strikes me as a strange and rather passive way to inhabit a universe in which “paychecks” and “weekends” are not meaningful concepts. Working for paychecks or weekends means working for culture’s artificial constructions.

Sacrifice enough money and you’ll have all the paychecks and all the weekends you’ll ever need. It’s magic.

Another good reason to sacrifice money is, somewhat paradoxically, so that you can work more.

“Working,” properly understood, means sacrificing yourself – your time, your efforts, your unique-ish qualities – in order to do something useful. Why would anyone want to do that? What’s the reward? The reward is no expectation of reward.

What we call “working” in Late Capitalism is usually just investing—investing time, efforts, or unique-ish qualities in order to be rewarded with more, I don’t know, paychecks or weekends. There is nothing sacrificial about it. I am giving you my valuable self and I expect in return regular paychecks, regular weekends, and an unlimited supply of recognition.

The lovely thing about money is that investing it frees you to stop investing yourself and start sacrificing yourself.

Valuable ≠ Useful

2012-08-28T15:20:00.002-04:00

“Valuable” and “useful” are often used interchangeably, which strikes me as a mistake on the order of magnitude of using “Paul Simon” to mean “Don Cherry.”

Our entire school career is spent trying to make ourselves valuable. To be valuable means that you can do things that not everyone can do and people are willing to pay for it.

It feels good to be valuable. But it feels good for the wrong reasons. It feels good because you believe that you are deserving of credit or praise or noteworthiness. You have achieved recognition. How lovely. You are talented and distinguished and people need you. You’re needed! You aren’t just an anonymous sack of flesh! You are… wait for it… Important!

You deserve it, kiddo.

But being useful is different. Very different. More antonymous than synonymous.

Being useful often means doing things that other people won’t do because it won’t earn them the recognition and the sense of value and importance.

Being useful often means listening and asking questions that you don’t know the answer to, letting people reach conclusions themselves, which means ceasing to view your opinions and your advice as in some crucial ways unique or valuable or superior.

Being useful often means doing things that are “inefficient” and non-remunerative, which means ceasing to view your hours as billable and your self as “busy.”

This single sentence from Geoff Dyer (here) made me fall for Don Cherry even before he came through my headphones:

Where Paul Simon exploited the energy and diversity of the world‘s musical styles to bolster his own career, Don Cherry absorbed other musics by putting himself at the service of the cultures of which they were part.

"Honesty" and "fact" as our downfall

2012-08-28T01:12:00.016-04:00

The first rule of photography: The world is beautiful; you don’t manipulate it to find beauty.

Walker Evans was the puritan of this idea. He would go into miners’ homes in West Virginia and take photographs leaving the house untouched, unmolested, innocent. He would do this even if the wall had a giant gaudy poster of Santa Clause’s grill.

Said Evans: “I come across something that’s a howling error in composition and I leave it there. I wouldn’t change it. God made that.”

Observe. Don’t tamper. Walk lightly. Be invisible.

But the world can’t really be tampered with, Mr. Evans, because God made you, too.

All photographs lie. Or at least manipulate. The moment you take one picture as opposed to another, or the moment you select one photograph from a group of photographs, you are doing something very, very similar to manipulating reality. You are selecting certain photographs and editing out certain others that don’t support the ideas you want to present. You’d have to do serious mental gymnastics to convince yourself that that’s any different than taking Santa Clause’s gaudy face off the wall, or than taking an object out of your pocket and putting it on the mantel.

Here is Errol Morris in the book Believing is Seeing, strongly recommended if this topic interests you:

Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies. Vision is privileged in our society and our sensorium. We trust it; we place our confidence in it. Photography allows us to uncritically think. We imagine that photographs provide a magic path to the truth.

What’s more, photographs allow us to think we know more than we really do. We can imagine a context that isn’t really there. In the pre-photographic era, images came directly from our eyes to our brains and were part of our experience of reality. With the advent of photography, images were torn free from the world, snatched from the fabric of reality, and enshrined as separate entities. They became more like dreams. It is no wonder that we really don’t know how to deal with them.

This is all very epistemological and abstract, but there’s a deeper and more important point here.

The “accountant’s truth” – facts reported as seen – is just one version of reality, and the most uninteresting one. Maybe even the most “untruthful” one.

Think of all the horrific things you have seen on the local news, and think of how un-horrifically they came across to you. Facts are hard to relate to, which makes the whole experience of local news kind of horrific. The anchors in their primp hair and their colorful blouses look directly into the camera and give us their best Look of Sympathy while reporting the facts of some gruesome atrocity, and then moments later they turn to each other and share a trite joke about the weather. One can be made to feel very, very unclean watching the local news.

Reported facts inure us to a deeper, truer reality. This deeper reality can only be sensed through “art.” And art might as well be defined as manipulation with a purpose.

Manipulate. Tamper. Change quotes. Insert “facts.”

Our generation is one that prizes “authenticity” and “scientific fact,” and perhaps as a consequence we prize irony and irreverence because we are inured to anything deeper or truer. The result is that we are simultaneously “honest” and insincere.

We lack adequate images. We lack adequate attention to adequate images.

You deserve it, kiddo

2012-08-25T17:50:00.012-04:00

You know that lovely feeling you get after working really hard on something, giving it your fullest attention, using your unique-ish qualities and stretching the limits of your competency, and then being rewarded with that arms-folded satisfaction while admiring the surprisingly impressive product of your efforts? I’m sorry to tell you, you don’t deserve it. You weren’t ultimately responsible for it.

It comes down to this: What does it mean to be “ultimately responsible”? Here’s Galen Strawson:

It means that you are free to choose what to do in such a way that you can be truly, genuinely responsible for your actions in the strongest possible sense—responsible period, responsible without any qualification, absolutely, radically, buck-stoppingly responsible.

But there’s a problem. We feel strongly – or at least believe without questioning – that we are ultimately responsible for our actions, but we also know that who we are is a product of our environment and our heredity. We aren’t responsible for our environment, and we aren’t responsible for our heredity. So we aren’t responsible for who we are. How, then, can we be responsible for what we do?

As Schopenhauer put it, “A man can surely do what he wants to do. But he cannot determine what he wants.”

You can’t be the cause of yourself. You can’t be truly or ultimately self-made in any way.

---

The film Gates of Heaven is a work of staggering genius. Roger Ebert has long kept it in his top-10 list, saying…

It is surrounded by layer upon layer of comedy, pathos, irony, and human nature. I have seen this film perhaps 50 times, and I am still not anywhere near the bottom of it. You can't decide, no matter how often you've seen it, if it's a comedy or a tragedy. This eighty-five minute film about pet cemeteries has given me more to think about over the past twenty years than any other film I’ve seen.

But it wouldn’t be right to say that the “genius” is credit to the filmmaker, Errol Morris. The credit goes to a haphazard series of coincidences:

Errol was born to a ridiculously bright and artistic, Juliard-trained mother.
He was brought up in part by a schizophrenic, movie-loving aunt who introduced him to film at an early age.
He was a nerdy, weird kid from a poor family who didn’t fit in at one of the wealthiest public schools in New York, giving him the requisite detachment and alienation to so acutely observe human behavior.
He was born with a condition that causes him to see without depth perception – a condition shared by directors such as Fritz Lang, John Ford, and Raoul Walsh – which, as Errol describes it, “perhaps creates a sense of being apart from the world, and skeptical of it. I imagine depth perception makes you feel like you are one with the world, floating in it. I imagine it’s wonderful.”
In college at Berkley, Errol repeatedly snuck into the film archive without paying—a theater manager wanted him banned but a sympathetic head-of-programming kept letting him in after Errol said simply, “I have to see movies.”
Errol says that Gates of Heaven, his first film, would have never happened without the financial support of an admiring stepfather and without the non-financial support of Werner Herzog, who literally – not figuratively – ate his shoe (video proof) at the film’s premiere because Werner knew that Errol had a history of not following through on things.

I could go on, but hopefully the point is clear: Gates of Heaven is a product of much more than Errol’s hard work and obsession. Even Errol’s hard work and obsession, when seen in the context of his environment and his heredity, are not really his.

---

So far, you are probably politely nodding and agreeing. But I tricked you. I used an uncontroversial example to get your agreement before springing the serious implications on you.

If we don’t deserve credit for anything we do, then we also don’t deserve blame. This is going to make you uncomfortable when I mention a certain Führer und Reichskanzler. If Errol doesn’t deserve credit for Gates of Heaven, then Hitler doesn’t deserve blame for the Holocaust.

---

It took a lot of chewing for me swallow this even theoretically. There were two things that helped me get it into my mental esophagus. The first was the opening paragraph of Tamler Sommer’s book A Very Bad Wizard:

Imagine for a moment that it was not Timothy McVeigh who destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, but a mouse. Suppose this mouse got into the wiring of the electric system, tangled the circuits, and caused a big fire, killing all those inside. Now think of the victims’ families. There would, of course, still be grief and suffering, but there would be one significant difference: there would be no resentment, no consuming anger, no consuming need to see the perpetrator punished in order to experience “closure.”

It takes an extravagant pride that is uniquely human to disentangle ourselves and our actions from the world, ancestors, and chance—to view ourselves and our actions as entirely the responsibility of our selves. As entirely un-mouse-like.

The second and more persuasive “argument” came from Werner Herzog’s documentary about Linda Carty, a woman on death row for murdering a 25-year-old mother and stealing her infant. The “argument” is more persuasive because it isn’t an argument—at least it isn’t one that relies on logic or theory to make its point. Toward the end, there is a long, reasonable-sounding lecture from the prosecutor, warning Werner about the dangers of attempting to “humanize” Linda Carty because sympathies will go to the criminal instead of the victim. Werner’s response still makes my stomach sink:

I do not make an attempt to humanize her. She is simply a human being, period.

---

An important qualifier: This does not mean that Hitler or Linda Carty did not deserve punishment. Punishment is often a perfectly pragmatic and reasonable response, and certainly it was in Hitler’s case, but punishment isn’t the same as blame or resentment or anger.

A more important qualifier: This does not mean that there is no such thing as good and bad or right and wrong. Hitler did things that no adjective is dark enough to describe. Since he did those indescribably dark things, you might be tempted to say that he *is* those indescribably dark things. But in the end it’s superficial: We don’t call natural disasters evil.

---

If this were all just semantics or an abstract theory about existence, I wouldn’t waste your attention or my time. But I suspect that viewing actions in this default, “I’m-ultimately-responsible” way is symptomatic of the severest of afflictions: the sense of here I am, me against the incidental universe, vested with powers that are innately mine, and using them to try to feed rather than be food. God how lonely, do you feel it?

The proper response to violent criminals isn’t scorn or resentment but sadness and sympathy. And the proper response when you look back at the surprisingly impressive product of your efforts isn’t pride or satisfaction but gratitude and humility.

On the weirdness of music

2012-08-24T04:08:00.006-04:00

When I wrote the post from a couple of days ago, it satisfactorily clarified for me what makes art “the most important human activity,” but as I was writing it, one thing kept nagging me: Where/how does music fit in?

Music is weird. There is something primal and instinctive and just plain weird about it that separates it from everything else. No other art form has such a direct channel to our emotions. It’s almost completely independent of intellect. It inflames emotions or it relaxes, but it does not typically make us think. And for that reason, music maybe isn’t included in the category of “the most important human activity” because we don't have to work for its rewards.

But that doesn’t seem right to me. Van Morrison’s album Astral Weeks is the most mesmerizing and immense art that has ever struck my senses—to call it “unimportant” would be grossly wrong. My stomach hurts when I think about how good it is. It has a complexity and depth and soul that can only be described as otherworldly. Or maybe perfectly worldly.

If you asked me what I gain from Astral Weeks, I’d struggle to answer. But I feel pretty sure that I gain something. Something crucial, even. When I compare it to, say, Rihanna, whose music I actually enjoy, it’s immensely different. Rihanna’s music has what I will refer to as a “pleasant thump,” but little more. Astral Weeks, on the other hand, gives me a full-body psychospiritual workout. I don’t know how to describe it any better than that.

I don’t think it’s just music—I think there is something about the experience of sound more generally that operates on a different, weird part of us. You know this if you have ever tried watching a film on mute. Even highly visual films lose almost all of their effect without sound. You also know this if you have ever had the misfortune to live in a noisy area or occupy a noisy office, or even to sit beside a noisy lamp. Noise is one of only a couple of things that the human brain will not and cannot grow tolerant of.

Fittingly, I did most of my thinking about this while sitting in the auditory paradise of my porch at some absurd hour (2:40 AM) as I often do, listening to the vaguely rhythmic choir of cicadas and crickets, the ocean-like sound of faint traffic, and the almost baritone hum of AC units. As much as I adore Astral Weeks, if I had to choose between that or the sounds from my porch, I don’t know which I’d pick.

Career advancement among professional acquaintances

2012-08-24T01:21:00.004-04:00

Most of what I do in my job is unsatisfying. It isn’t necessarily boring or tedious or unchallenging—it just isn’t satisfying.

That may sound absurd when I tell you that my job involves helping people with substance abuse or mental health problems.

But what I do as a junior researcher/evaluator is many levels removed from those people, to the point that I easily forget about their existence. To give you a sense of the levels: I do stuff to help my bosses, who in turn help government agencies by writing reports to evaluate their programs, and the government agencies in turn may help providers by giving them money or by training them on how to do their jobs more effectively, and the providers in turn hire and train social workers who – finally – help people with substance abuse or mental health problems.

In short, the only people I help are my bosses. Everything else is an abstract trickle-down.

But I’m not sure it would be fair to say that I help my bosses. My bosses are the people who sign my performance review and my paycheck, which means that my job can easily devolve into helping myself.

---

Every Saturday morning I meet with my friend Ken to try to help him think through his website. I emphasize “try” because (1) it’s important to me, i.e., is worthy of my effort, and (2) I suck at being helpful.

Re: (2): Too often I behave as if being helpful means offering my opinions or perceptions or advice, when I know that being helpful means almost the exact opposite: it means listening and asking questions that you don’t know the answer to. It means letting him reach conclusions himself and just sort of laying your jacket over mental puddles to help him get there.

Re: (1): I suck at listening/being helpful, but I’m learning, and more importantly, I’m trying, and trying for the right reasons. At first I tried because I thought Ken’s website was interesting. Now I try because of Ken. It doesn’t matter an ounce to me anymore what his website is about—I just want to see Ken do well. I’ve come to understand and deeply appreciate the qualities (flaws included) that make Ken Ken. I’ve come to understand why the website is important to him. I’ve come to understand that he sometimes needs to be kicked in the ass.

And, through all that, I’ve come to understand what it means for work to be “satisfying.” It doesn’t mean doing tasks that you find stimulating or challenging or interesting. It doesn’t mean pleasing your bosses. It doesn’t mean doing things that are grand-scheme important. It doesn’t even mean being useful. It means finding a person whom you deeply respect and admire. And trying.

Having responsibility, being challenged, being useful—these things matter, but they only matter in the right context. And the “right context” means the right people.

---

I suspect the reason so many people are unsatisfied in their jobs is that the default “career path” involves searching for tasks that we find interesting and then searching for impressive ways to do them in order to accord us the esteem necessary for “advancement,” by which we mean more recognition and more money. Skills, knowledge, and experience become the crux—the pawns with which we swarm the “advancement” queen. Almost no consideration is given to whom we work with and whom we work for—people are merely interchangeable spectators in our impersonal chess game.

---

My job became much more satisfying several months ago, and I think I can pin it to a single event: I got a new officemate whom I’ve come to deeply respect and admire. All of the sudden he and a couple of other people I work with provided a context in which I was no longer working among merely “professional acquaintances.”

Being in crush

2012-08-22T01:46:00.005-04:00

She’s cute. There’s no denying it. But there are prettier girls, you keep reminding yourself. There isn’t anything special about her.

But her cuteness is a special cuteness—in particular, it’s a baseless cuteness and an annoying cuteness. You wish that she and her cuteness would go away so that you could put to rest the idle palpitating and return your attention to whatever mundane stimuli you were attending to. But you don’t really wish that at all.

It’s stupid. You don’t even know her. She probably smokes pot. With her boyfriend. And their cat. It’s stupid.

Why her, you wonder. You can think of no distinguishable qualities that separate her from any other primate with a vagina. Is it because you know two interesting facts about her? Is it because she looked at you once? Are you really that pathetic?

In desperation, you start running through a list of her unique-ish qualities in order to possibly identify a logical basis for your attraction. But you backspace over those qualities as soon as you start writing them because you are too embarrassed to put them on your blog. You start to feel pretty sure that yep, you really are that pathetic.

You cling to a dismally faint hope that one day there will be some magical encounter where you will talk to her, or she will talk to you, and she will be everything you imagined her to be, and she will be attracted to you, and she will not have a boyfriend, and she will be at least 93% of the way toward certifiably sane, and then you will keep talking to each other, and it will be great, and then she will come meet your dog, and she will be the first stranger that your dog ever liked, and it will be magical.

It’s stupid. You know that. But it’d be stupid to try to stop your stupidity, because it’s unstoppable. So you stay stupid, and you start to think that maybe that isn’t so bad.

“The most important human activity”

2012-08-21T00:35:00.008-04:00

A line from Wikipedia: “Art is both useless in a functional sense, and also the most important human activity.”

I think I know what they mean, but it’s too vague.

---

Werner Herzog when asked “what is the value of film to society?”:

Who is Society?

(From the 20-minute doc "Werner Herzog Eats His Shoes.")

He went on:

I don’t know. It gives us some insight. It does not change people. Films do not cause revolutions. But films might change our perspective of things and ultimately in the long-term may have some value. But there’s a lot of absurdity involved as well.

Absurdity how?

It makes me into a clown. What we do as filmmakers is immaterial. It’s only a projection of light. And doing that all your life makes you just a clown. It’s illusionists’ work.

Why, then, make films?

We lack adequate images. Our civilization doesn’t have adequate images.

I think I know what he means, but it’s too vague.

---

It is hard to imagine a notion more stunting than the one that says that art is just a matter of “taste.” It reduces art to little more than a weakly-held opinion. We talk about our favorite books no differently than we talk about our favorite color or our favorite model of car.

A deeper problem with the notion is that art is reduced to little more than an emotional massage. All of the sudden great books and great films become indistinguishable from video games or pornography—they are all just things we do for stimulation. All of the sudden the search for art becomes the search for excitement or pleasure or emotional inflammation. All of the sudden stimulation is treated as an end in itself. I’ve been induced to feel. I have confirmed that I am still a sentient creature. Check. All of the sudden there is no need to give your full, active attention—just passively observe and let the stimulation overcome you.

---

Our feelings are what artists work with, the colors on their palette. But the sickening majority of art works with the wrong types of feelings—our lizardly feelings. These are the types of feelings that I can detect by hooking you up to galvanic skin response sensors or by examining the size of your pupils. The problem with art that works with lizardly feelings is that it requires almost nothing from us—no thought, and only the mildest form of attention. And the problem with art that requires almost nothing from us is that nothing can be gained that isn’t worked for.

What Werner calls “adequate images” is what makes art the most important human activity. Adequate images are those scenes from great films or passages from great books that, when paid careful attention, induce calmer feelings like perplexity, curiosity, a buzz in the brain, a tumult in the soul, a mild exhilaration. These feelings, rather than being an end in themselves, are merely an indication that if you dig here – if you give serious thought to whatever is giving rise to these feelings – you’re apt to gain something.

---

“Neither camera, nor lens, nor film determine the quality of pictures; it is the perception of the man behind the mechanism which brings them to life.” –Helmut Gernsheim, 1942

Adequate images are hard to find. You’ve got to find a ridiculously perceptive person – one who is at least several levels smarter than you – and then you’ve got to pay his art the carefulest of attention.

Possibly the Web's most useful site (for investing)

2012-08-20T02:11:00.006-04:00

We interrupt this existential programming to tell you about what could be the Web’s most useful site (at least for investing): www.futureadvisor.com

You tell them a few simple things (current income, desired retirement age and retirement income, how aggressively you want to invest), give them access to your investment info, and then they run some calculations and tell you…

How much money you’ll need to retire.
How much you should invest per month to get there by your desired age.
How things could vary depending on whether the market performs well, averagely, or poorly.
The extent to which your portfolio is (1) well-diversified, (2) low-fee, and (3) tax efficient.
For each fund you own, they tell you (1) whether or not it is high fee compared to the category average and (2) recommend whether to sell your shares given your personal info/desires.
They recommend which funds to buy and exactly how much money to allocate to each one.

They essentially take all the angst out of investing by telling you exactly where to put your money and in exactly what quantities in order to optimize the diversification, low-fee-ness, and tax-efficiency of your portfolio. It is a rational person’s wet dream. (And probably a financial advisor’s nightmare.)

Future Advisor did not ask me to review their site and I have no stake in their success. I just think it is an enormously useful site and everyone should know about it.

If you know of a more useful site, I politely demand you to tell me what it is.

P.S. – If you don’t already know of Mint.com, you probably need to befriend more geeks.

P.P.S. – Same goes for Hipmunk.com.

P.P.P.S. – I don’t know if I’d call it useful, but WeatherSpark.com is certainly pretty. ForecastAdvisor.com is more useful if you care about accuracy.

“Relationships” and other such silly things

2012-08-14T01:29:00.002-04:00

Any survey since 1970 that has asked some variation on “what’s important in life?” has received the same stupid answer: relationships.

I hate relationships.

Okay, not really. But the word seriously makes me cringe, both because it’s ugly and cheap Latinese and, more than that, because it reminds me of probably the greatest existential error.

Maybe it’s just poor word choice, but there’s an immense difference between saying that your relationships are important to you and saying that the people with whom you have relationships are important to you.

Those who focus on relationships rather than people are likely to be nice and inoffensive and a little overly-complimentary. (I do that. I hate myself for doing that.) Those who focus on relationships are concerned with maintaining a connection, being liked, having the support/comfort/fun of a friend. For them, the “choice” of friends is about who can provide the biggest boost in status/comfort/fun, rather than about who possesses qualities that they admire.

In short, if you are focused on relationships, you are focused on your own bounty (“what’s in it for me?”)—even if it’s only a mild antidote to loneliness.

I suspect that most people who emphasize the importance of their relationships are, paradoxically, less than satisfied with their relationships, precisely because they care about the wrong things.

It’s no different than a musician caring about fame/money/groupies/chart-position rather than the music itself. It makes for music that is empty and soulless and just generally sucky. (Have you turned on the radio lately?)

The greatest existential error is to care about something/someone because of what it can give you, rather than for the sake of its own existence.

Don’t be like Maroon 5.

High-achieving youngsters

2012-08-07T23:04:00.002-04:00

Today my company held an “intern showcase” in which they showcased a few dozen high-achieving youngsters standing awkwardly beside posters.

The high-achieving youngsters pointed to graphics and mumbled. The spectators, detecting nervousness among the high-achieving youngsters, carefully crafted their next question to be as un-intimidating as possible while also inviting a response exceeding 5 words. The high-achieving youngsters, in turn, pointed to graphics and mumbled.

Flipping through the Intern Showcase booklet, you will find profiles and mug shots of each of the high-achieving youngsters. One of them looks like he should be named Kenneth. He wears an expression as tight and uncomfortable-looking as his tie. You can tell that he’s going for the half-serious / half-friendly look. It isn’t working. His six-sentence profile boasts an impressive selection of accomplishments. He is triple-majoring at some distinguished university. He interned for a group that is developing water-treatment solutions in some region of Africa. He is pretty much saving the world. Other accomplishments, however, weren’t so impressive-sounding, particularly the ones involving his responsibilities at my company. “His project demonstrated that web searches can be effective.”

This is awful, especially since I don’t know and have never met the guy, but the thing that struck me most as I looked at Kenneth’s profile and mug shot was my goodness I’m glad I don’t work with that d-bag. Which then reminded me of one of the moments that made me proudest of my little work group: We interviewed someone who looked and sounded very much like he should be named Kenneth, and we rejected his ass. This was a guy with a perfect grade point average at an Ivy League university and a dazzling list of extracurriculars and whatnot. But this was also a guy who, when he talked to you, made you unconsciously clench your fingers a little.

There’s a point to all this: My awesome colleagues have taught me something that it seems high-achieving youngsters desperately need to learn: being an awesome employee is not at all the same as being a high-achieving employee. It isn’t about accruing bullet points for your resume and it isn’t about impressing your boss or your boss’s boss. It’s about being useful, which a lot of the time means it’s about being the exact opposite of high-achieving.

Niceness

2012-08-03T00:55:00.004-04:00

There is a woman at work who, if you send her an email, no matter the content or passive-aggression of the message, will invariably respond by thanking you and telling you how wonderful you are, and CC’ing everyone she knows.

As a Gen Y, of course I like to be praised and acknowledged and told what a special little flower I am. I adore this woman, and I adore the exclamation points in her emails. But there’s something about the predictability or the intensity of the glowingness of her responses that cheapens them, that makes them a little less exclamation point-y.

She reminds me of teachers I had who would encourage classroom participation by exercising infinite niceness.

“Does anyone know the capital of Egypt? Oh, I see the wheels churning in Jimmy. What do you think, Jimmy?”
“Tutankhamun?!?”
“Excellent!! He was an Egyptian pharaoh!! Now can anyone tell me the capital of Egypt?”

Sometimes I wish those teachers would’ve just told Jimmy he was being dumb.

I think this might be why I am in love with Bobby Knight. Not because he’s mean. Not even because he’s honest. But because he has an extreme abundance of what Cesar Milan would call “calm-assertive energy” and what I would call the rare ability to be simultaneously tough and loving. I get the impression that B. Knight is tough because he is loving. If only more of us could pull that off.

----

Speaking of Cesar Milan…

The sled dogs I met in Alaska and Werner Herzog’s documentary about hunters living in the Siberian Taiga gave me a new idea of what it means for a dog to be “well-treated.”

It isn’t air conditioning or access to couches or predictable feeding times. It isn’t praise and it isn’t belly rubs. It isn’t even roller-blading with a pack of dogs down a Santa Clara street. It is, as I said a couple of posts ago, giving the dog a chance to be responsible and competent and have the suspicion that he has done something useful.

My dog is not well-treated.

The danger of praise and pampering and niceness is that they are so sweet and delicious and potent that they change the reason why we do things. Dogs start to come when called because they expect (demand?) a sweet reward rather than because they have an internal responsibility to someone they respect. Jimmy starts raising his hand in class because he expects praise from his teacher rather than because he is interested in being competent. And I start emailing Carol because I expect those glorious exclamation points rather than because I have something useful to say.

Ryan Lochte (Hero)

2012-08-02T22:28:00.000-04:00

The thumbs-up of greatness.

He knows what he wants and he goes for it. He is relentless and he is dedicated in the pursuit of what he wants. And what he wants is Greatness.

He is the embodiment of hard work and self-sacrifice in the service of something larger.

He is, in short, a hero.

Could a non-hero put aside the creature comforts of video games and Internet pornography to step into the Florida sun and flip 650-lb tires or drag 580-lb shipyard chains? (See here or here.)

I didn’t think so.

And he’s humble enough to admit that he has made some mistakes—that he’s imperfect. Which kind of makes him perfect. He admits that he has let things distract him from his Pursuit.

"My last Olympics, I had a girlfriend — big mistake," Lochte said before the Games started. "Now I'm single, so London should be really good. I'm excited."

Girls get in the way of greatness. He should have known that. But he has matured since Beijing. He has rededicated himself to what matters. (Hint: It isn’t girls.)

But lest you think that he’s a one-dimensional character who’s only good at and only cares about one thing, Lochte knows how to have a good time. He isn’t a dullard.

He told ESPN the Magazine that 70 to 75% of athletes in Olympic Village will have sex with other athletes during the Games, and that he was looking forward to the partying and hookups.

You’ve got to have some fun or what’s the point, right?

Perhaps what’s most admirable about Lochte is that he isn’t afraid to express his true self. "All the stuff that I do, like, the crazy shoes I wear—like the grills I wear on the podium, the crazy shoes, all that crazy stuff—like, rock star. It's just all my personality."

Lochte giving us his true self, unironically.

His career as a swimmer won’t last forever. He knows that. But don’t worry: He has other plans. His website says he hopes to go on to build a career designing "men's clothing with an edgy flair." The Atlantic described his style as a “mix of jockiness, hip-hop bling, and tropical frat boy.”

His look veers well outside of typical indifferent gymwear, embracing bright tropical colors, metal-studded shorts and belts, and many, many sparkly things—raucous plumage worthy of a macaw. Diamond-studded US flag grills light up his smile. His feet sport kelly-green, glitter-covered sneakers of his own design (with his name on the soles), courtesy of his sponsor Speedo; or red, white, and blue high-top kicks with angel wings at the ankles; or velvet slippers with silver monograms embroidered on the toes.

His non-Olympic swimwear consists of tiny scraps of spandex in bright optical-art florals or in bubblegum pink with stars across the front. Silver bracelets encircle his wrists, and diamond-encrusted skull necklaces hang from his neck when it isn't being used to display Olympic medals. During a videotaped interview with John McEnroe, a trip into Lochte's giant walk-in closet revealed trays of flashy watches next to rows of shirts arranged by color, and neatly stacked fedoras and porkpies and baseball caps. He sometimes carries a bright yellow, studded backpack.

Boy am I glad to see a hero with some color and flair. I’m so sick of boring, poorly-dressed athletes.

The high tops of greatness.

My favorite Ryan Lochte moment came during this 2-minute video (meanly titled, “Ryan Lochte Is Terrible At Interviews”), when he tossed in some existential advice for the kids:

“Whether it’s life or swimming, always, um, do your best.”

---

See also:

A tribute to Ryan Lochte’s seldom-changing face.

Ryan Lochte discussing his shoe collection.

Dissatisfied ≠ not satisfied

2012-08-01T02:08:00.007-04:00

Onion-like subtitle: Management guru heard saying something profound

Alternative Onion-like subtitle: Local man relieved to finally know what satisfies him

---

Work satisfaction and dissatisfaction are not on a continuum with one increasing as the other decreases, but rather are independent phenomena. That’s what Frederick Herzberg suggested in an article published in Harvard Business Review 53 years ago. The idea is that the presence of one set of job characteristics leads to satisfaction, while a completely independent set of job characteristics leads to dissatisfaction.

In particular, dissatisfaction results from external factors – what he called “hygiene factors” – such as shoddy compensation, flimsy job security, grueling commutes, the unpleasantness of your office chair, officemates who hum Maroon 5 songs, bosses who unofficially require attendance at Happy Hour, and excessive use of the meeting. But if these factors suddenly improved, you’re not going to start loving your job—you’ll just be less dissatisfied.

To be satisfied requires a separate set of factors. Internal ones. Things like responsibility or competency or the suspicion that you have done something useful. It helps to work with people and for people whom you admire, trust, respect.

Okay, I made up most of that, mostly because I didn’t like some of the particular “hygiene factors” and “motivator factors” he suggested, but I think I’ve mostly stuck to the spirit of the theory.

Implications:

No matter how much money or status or vacation time you successfully chase down, it won’t satisfy you. The best it can do is make you less dissatisfied.
Your manager/employer can help you be not dissatisfied, but s/he has much less power to make you satisfied.
Work with your manager/employer to get the external things to an acceptable level, and then concentrate on being responsible/competent/useful.

This is more broadly applicable than work, by the way. Try the same thought exercise with marriage.

Synopsis

2012-07-24T01:27:00.001-04:00

There’s an episode of The Sarah Silverman Program with the most fascinating/profound/hilarious one-sentence synopsis I’ve read:

Sarah thinks she’s psychic but quickly discovers her friends are just predictable and boring.

I wonder if it’s possible to say more about our species in as few words.

I’m not sure if we have an inflated self-image because we perceive the world around us as boring or if we perceive the world around us as boring because we have an inflated self-image, but it never occurred to me until now that the two are related.

And, more importantly, it never occurred to me until now that those two things are both what most define us and most afflict us. Most things we do and most "problems" we have can be reasonably explained by our desire to protect our inflated self-image and/or distract us from what-we-perceive-as-tedium.

I'd go into a list of examples, but that would be boring.