Friday, March 29, 2024

Storytelling As Seductive Indoctrination: I Am Right In Narrative’s Crosshairs

Recently at the dentist I opted to watch a Netflix show about animal babies in the wild. Usually I avoid TV, as it makes me antsy and unsettled, and that’s the last thing I need when people are putting things in my mouth. But when I saw “Wild Babies” on the menu, I thought it might be cute and disctracting.


I guess I expected the nature show format of my youth but with fewer killing and eating scenes. The format of my youth was hushed, long-ish scenes with nothing much happening punctuated by violent death; the title “Wild Babies” made me think it might be for kids, and therefore on the gentler side.

It was not the nature show format of my youth. While I didn’t see any death, the show was crudely narrativized in the grossest, dumbest way through careful editing and a constant voice-over. We encountered a cautious baby girl lion had to decide whether to follow her daring and rambunctious older brother lions away from the safety of the den while their mom was away. An outcast baby seal had to struggle to integrate into the in-crowd of other baby seals, or risk being someone’s next easy meal. It was like the ridiculous story construction of reality TV but with “wild baby” animals.

You don’t have to take my word for it. The website for the show says “since cliff-hangers are through lines in the series, you’ll be desperate to learn what these adorable creatures get into next.”

I was disturbed and even a bit appalled. The narrative seemed to me not only anthropomorphic and structured to meet our “cliff-hanger” needs, but also culturally forced into a 1950s sit-com version of what a “story” is. I grew up watching The Flintstones and The Jetsons, only vaguely aware these were all re-packaged Honeymooners. I never thought that in 2024 I’d have to watch those same stories imposed on pangolins.

The experience reminded me of this excellent New Yorker article from last year about how everything is now a story and how weird that is. To change hearts and minds, we need stories — not data and logic, but narrative. To be effective in the marketplace, a brand needs a story. To get elected, politicians need a good story. Stories are seductive: you follow effortlessly, and you get swept up. But narrative imposes its own structures. The New Yorker article asks, “What is it that story does not allow us to see”?

The problem of narrative has bothered me for a while. I am a fan of Murakami’s writing, but the lack of a satisfying narrative grates on me. Things just happen and then they stop happening. I feel annoyed, but I feel stupid for feeling annoyed. Life is things happening and then they stop happening. Patricia, why do you need the book to be about something?  

On the flip side, the form requirements of story in contemporary western culture also piss me off. If you take a writing course, you may be taught that there has to be something unresolved, and that it should get resolved, and that a character should grow and change. And so many stories are like that, even though life is almost never like that. It verges on indoctrination. Whose purposes are being served by this relentless hidden messaging about the relationship of meaning to narrative closure?

One of the most striking domains where story now runs rampant is in statistics. In the lockdowns I used some online tools for learning baby data analysis, and right at the start was a lesson about how data is about story telling. First thing to do is figure out what story you want your data to tell. Then you can figure out how to tell it.

I realize I’m being naive, but: really? We’re all just fine with statistics telling the stories that the storyteller wants to tell? I often think about how in the 80s everyone used to talk about how there were “lies,” “damned lies,” and “statistics” — which I took to mean that quantitative information is slippery and can be used in various ways. That used to be cause for skepticism and cynicism, but now it seems treated more like a feature, not a bug.

All this is to say that I feel right in storytelling’s crosshairs. I am seduced by story — I seek out narrative and I sink myself into it like it’s a warm bath. On the other hand, I am suspicious and skeptical about its covert impacts. With those wild animal babies plot lines, I feel inoculated: childhood viewing of sitcom after sitcom rendered me impervious. But what about newer strains? What am I unconsciously absorbing about the nature of triumph, regret, and what it means for things to work out in the end?

Friday, March 22, 2024

The Personal Perspective And The Complex Dysfunctional Global Systems Perspective

For personal decisions engaging complex dysfunctional global systems, I lack a frame of reference. Doing nothing seems wrong. But given how many consumer choices are embedded in violent, murderous, polluting systems, what would disengaging completely even look like? In 2024, it’s not even clear what “off the grid” means, never mind whether it would accomplish anything.


The obvious answer is that it has to be somewhere in the middle. But where? My most recent confrontation with this question occurs in a choice about travel and the problems of flying and climate change. I have family in the Hartford, CT area I want to visit them in April. I won’t be driving -- because I don’t have a car, because I find driving stressful and exhausting, and because I don’t want to.

A non-flying transit trip between Toronto and Hartford is about a 15-hour trip if you wanted to go straight through (about twice as long as by car). I am too old to travel for 15 hours on transit straight through, so I would have to break it up and stay over. For example, to come home, I could take two connecting buses to get from Hartford to Albany one day (via Greyhound and Peter Pan), stay over in Albany, and take a train the next day. I would incur the cost of a hotel, but I’d be saving on airfare, so that part evens out.

Lest you imagine this is totally hypothetical, in 2022 that is exactly what I did. In some ways, it was OK. Yes, I had to walk through an abandoned warehouse area in Albany to get from my hotel to a dinner place, and yes, for some reason the Albany bus station and the Albany train station are a non-trivial taxi ride apart, and yes, for various reasons the trip lacked the surprise and human interest of the much longer 400-mile transit trip I took in 2019. But hey, I got to see Albany, NY.  

In other ways, it was not quite OK. For reasons to do with scheduling and traffic, my bus ride on the way down was about ten hours. It is a long bus ride. I realize people take much longer flights to go to far away places, but I also know I’m not alone in thinking a ten hour bus ride is not easy: on my visit, I met a guy who was vegan for climate change reasons, and even he was like “Whoa! A ten hour bus ride?!”

And of course, since the flight is like one hour, you’re essentially adding at least two travel days into your trip. Instead of a long weekend, it’s almost a week. I am lucky to have the kind of job where my time is often a bit flexible, and I can work on other weekend days to make up for it, but obviously there are things I’d rather be doing with those two days.

All this to say: from a personal perspective, flying would be vastly more convenient and pleasant, and not even really more expensive.

However, from a complex dysfunctional global systems perspective, flying is one of the main activities exacerbating climate change. When climate protesters say “This is an emergency! No business as usual!” I agree with them. While we obviously can’t address climate change on an individual basis, our individual activities will have to change somehow -- especially in the short term while we lack technological fixes.

Also, if governmental regulation, effective leadership, and collective action are lacking, isn’t it more responsible to step up? Even if we’re “doomed,” as some people say, the details matter. If the kids who are five today have slightly less hellish world when they’re fifty than they would otherwise, isn’t that an important goal? If Greta Thunberg’s mother can give up flying thus ending her career as an opera singer, presumably I can put up with a ten hour bus ride or two.

When I try to reason this out, I feel like I have no frame for thinking it through. I expect I am not alone in this. It’s a judgment call, but based on what? If thousands of ghost flights — empty flights airlines use to retain their take-off and landing spots — are taking off all the time, it makes no sense to consider the impact of a specific action and try to calculate consequences. Individualistic rules like “don’t harm others” don’t really help. What does the recommendation to be a virtuous person entail in such circumstances?

It feels like the transit choice is necessary and vital from one point of view, and pointlessly painful from another. Where is my third perspective to figure this out?

Friday, March 15, 2024

The Fragile Connection Between Liking And Wanting Is Crucial To Our Survival

The most interesting thing I learned this week is that animals whose dopamine system has been rendered inactive will fail to seek food, and will starve to death if left to themselves," but will eat and swallow with pleasure if food is placed in their mouths.

I'm not always an animal-lover type person, but I found it a bit crushing to picture an animal whose life force had been so sapped that food was something they just couldn't be bothered with. Something about the poor little critter chomping gratefully if someone took the trouble, but unable to rouse itself for action struck me as the bleakest metaphor for existence ever.

I found that fact on Wikipedia when I went down a looking-up-dopamine rabbit-hole. I looked up dopamine because I was reflecting on how my motivation or mood seems to change in the evenings, even when I'm not feeling especially fatigued. Why would the sunset cause a mood change? Posing that question made me think of "sundowning," where people with dementia become agitated at sunset. Looking up "sundowning," I learned that one hypothesis is about hormone changes, and that hormones standardly change in accordance with circadian rhythms. One of those changes is that dopamine goes down in the evening.

If I understand correctly, the standard dopamine scheme is that pleasure causes a release of dopamine, which then reinforces the motivation to seek the behavior. In the framework, the “wanting” and the "liking" systems are distinct: pleasure is one thing, and motivation is another, and dopamine is the contingently existing link between the two. Pleasure from a reward and the motivation to seek it thus emerge from separate biological pathways.

I don’t know about you, but I feel like this explains a lot. A lot of our cultural "common sense" encodes a set-up in which the reason you seek out a thing is because you anticipate the thing will bring you pleasure. If it’s true about how dopamine works, things aren’t quite so simple. You can anticipate the pleasure and not have the drive, or you can have the drive without anticipating the pleasure. And the concept of a "reason" barely fits in there at all.

I was surprised to learn that drugs like meth and cocaine mainly hit the "wanting" while opiates activate both wanting and liking. Not surprisingly, addiction can mean elevated "wanting" alongside decreased "liking," if you’ve built up a tolerance for the thing you’re addicted to. So they really are distinct systems.

Distinct systems fits my experience better than the common sense/pleasure anticipation theory does. It’s often opaque to me why I have or lack the motivations that I do. I enjoy running outside once I get going, but frequently I have to push and drag myself out there. I’ve always wondered: shouldn’t my mind update via a feedback mechanism, where liking would cause motivation? Why wouldn’t it? Well — I still don’t know, but it’s a bit less mysterious now.

Obviously the next question is how you might improve your dopamine function so you can enjoy the resulting motivation and Life Force. A person doesn’t live by pleasure alone. Obviously, if you want to increase your pleasure/liking, you can do things you enjoy. But if you want to increase your dopamine/wanting you can … ?

Weirdly, official advice on the internet about increasing your dopamine is that if you want to increase your dopamine, you should — do things you enjoy. The thinking seems to be that since pleasure experiences release dopamine, a way to increase your dopamine is to do the things you enjoy. I get it, but like a lot of official advice, it doesn’t quite add up. If your dopamine system isn’t working well, all the pleasure in the world won’t help you, because it won’t create the motivation.

Other things you can do to increase your dopamine include exercising, eating healthy food, and getting enough sleep and sunshine. So I guess where all this ends up is that while you might think the reasons you do things have to do with your thoughts, plans, and intentions, a lot of it also comes down to animal nature. 

We humans and that starving critter are all in the same boat, just praying that our fragile dopamine connection between liking and wanting isn't wantonly destroyed, rudely hijacked, or just left to desiccate and decay.

Friday, March 8, 2024

I Think A Lot About The Marshmallow Test. Why?

A thing about me is that I often think about the marshmallow test. The marshmallow test is a test of delayed gratification abilities in which little kids are given a small treat, like a marshmallow, and told that if they wait a bit, they can have extra. One marshmallow now, or two later.

The test is famous because researchers said there were correlations between choosing “two marshmallows later” and, years after, getting the good things of modern capitalism like career success, academic achievement, and better SAT scores. Endless variations on the main study have been undertaken since the 1930s; the standard conclusion is that having the self-control to delay gratification is a useful and virtuous.

I’ve always been a skeptic about the marshmallow test. I was a shy, somewhat nervous kid, eager to please the adults around me. If I’d been given the test, I expect I would have been more motivated by social pressure than actual marshmallows. As I wrote on this blog in 2009, the original test set up was that kids who wanted the first marshmallow right away would have to ring a bell to summon a researcher. Are you kidding?! There is no way at four years old I would have rung a bell to summon a strange adult, even if 50 marshmallows had been on the line.

Also, is it even obvious that more later is better than less now? The thing about now is that it’s now: if you have your treat immediately, you are virtually guaranteed satisfaction: you’re having it at the moment that it looks delicious, there’s no risk of some diabolical behavior or random obstacles blocking your treat, and you can move on with your life rather than sitting there in the painful condition of "waiting for a treat."

Color me unsurprised, therefore, that as the years went on, studies showed the marshmallow test was more complicated than it may have appeared. As with the young Patricia, researchers found that children engage in “reputation management,” and were more likely to delay if a teacher knew their choices.

Furthermore, kids from wealthier socio-economic backgrounds were found to do better on the test. It was pointed out that one reason for that could be that if you’re from a richer family, the likelihood of “more later” was more likely to actually materialize. If the adults around you have more resources, they are more able to provide in a stable and predictable way, and to prevent unexpected diabolical behavior or random obstacles from interrupting your treat.

The socio-economic explanation obviously leads to a hypothesis almost diametrically opposed to the original one: that it’s not your inner character that matters, it’s your environment. The potential significance is huge. A few years ago the New Yorker had an article about the test, including how whole schools were being designed to promote learning self-control and delaying gratification. If it’s more the external environment than that intervention is a major investment in a completely wrong direction.

Since this is a blog post and not a philosophy article I will leave aside correlation versus causation and how-do-we-really-know-anything, and get straight to the personal: Patricia, why do you think so often about the marshmallow test?

I think one reason is that I am often amazed by the contrast class between things I can do and things I cannot get myself to do, which makes me wonder: if self-control makes me able to do the first things, why can’t I do the second things?

I do a fair number of things that appear to require self-control: I work by myself on large unstructured research projects with no deadlines; I go to the gym even when it’s freezing outside and cozy at home; in the course of my life, I have quit smoking, Diet Coke, and a range of other things we won’t get into here.

On the other hand, the things I cannot get myself to do is mystifying. I have never been able to prepare lunch at home to eat later during the day — now I can afford to buy lunch, but even when I had no money, I would eat like one donut or just skip lunch. I am trying to learn Italian, and I found this great site with Easy Italian News for practice: listening to it is reasonably fun, but am I doing it? No. I’ve been trying to form a new habit of bringing my own silverware from my office to the lunch place on campus, so I can avoid using all that plastic. Easy, but my success rate? Just reaching toward 20 percent.

I’m forced into the conclusion that for me, it's less like there is a self-control part that I direct at one activity or another and more like some habits take and some don't. It’s a confusing mix why. Partly, some things are engaging despite being difficult and some things are just boring and annoying. Partly, a habit is different from self-control. Partly, behavior is social not individual, which is why nagging the people you love is actually an important thing to do.

So I guess that’s why I think about the marshmallow test so often. It seems to test for a quality I feel I don’t really have. I don’t know if y’all have a similar experience, but that’s what’s going on with me.

Friday, March 1, 2024

The Tyranny of the Majority in Advanced Consumer Economies

In 2017 I went down the ethical cell phone rabbit hole. I didn’t do anything like buy a phone — mostly I just reacquainted myself with the ways the elements of a phone are embedded in dysfunctional, oppressive, and murderous global systems.

I learned there is a phone called a Fairphone that considers itself an “ethical cellphone.” I guessed immediately it wouldn’t be available in my area, and I was correct. The main reason is obvious: insufficient local demand.

“Tyranny of the majority” is a phrase in political philosophy usually meant to indicate the possibility that in contexts of majority-rule, minority interests will get steamrolled.

Conceptually, advanced consumer economies should be consumer paradises where it’s the opposite of majority rule. Everything we might need or want would be for sale, because the existence of people wanting and needing is what causes the market to provide.

So I’m always a bit surprised to crash into the obstacles created by the fact that I often want what other people do not want, and do not want what other people want, which tends to lead to my things being simply unavailable.

The fairphone is a sanctimonious example — mostly I’m talking about garden variety things people spend money on. I would like a portable way to listen to high quality terrestrial radio — surprisingly difficult to access beyond the context of a car. I would like to hail a taxi on the street — in my city, this used to work great, and now it doesn’t, because obviously. I would like clothes that have a bit of stretchy fabric for my body shape but aren’t athleisure-wear — not easy to find. I would like to go out dancing at like 6:30pm, not midnight, but that is evidently not something enough other people want to do.

In the 90s, I noticed that there were TVs available for under $100 and I thought OK great, when my mom’s TV gets old that won’t be a problem. But by the time her TV got old, capitalism had moved on: now the only TVs available had some new and better tech than the old “cathode ray” and now they all cost hundreds of dollars.

It’s always striking to me when the law of supply and demand is held up as one of the more fundamental, universal, or well-established laws of economics and human behavior, because we are surrounded by things — especially in technology — that get less expensive the more people want them. If everyone wants a laptop, laptop prices will go down.

Note that I do not mean that examples falsity the law of supply and demand. It’s the presence of what Mill called “disturbing causes”: the more people want a thing, the more money the producers of the thing can invest in new methods and technologies and the more affordable the thing can be. Except - as with the TVs — when “the thing” becomes a different thing altogether, and everyone buys that, so that is what’s available.

Anyway, I’m not saying there is any problem to be fixed, and I’m not complaining. I’m just saying that from an abstract point of view, it’s striking that a system based on the idea that each person should be able to choose what they want for themselves is also a system where “what everyone else is doing” determines a lot of the texture of your experience.

Friday, February 23, 2024

Directing Your Attention Versus Experiencing Whatever Happens to be Happening

 Like a lot of people, I often feel like my mind is running in the wrong gear. There’s too much whirring and burbling in situations where that isn’t needed. I usually self-medicate with exercise, alcohol, novels, and plenty of down time — all of which work great for me, so please, no advice in the comments.

We all know the Psychiatric Help: Five Cents answer to this problem: meditation. In putting it that way, I don’t mean to imply that meditation wouldn’t help me. It probably would. I am, however, implying that where we are in the culture is a rare moment when gurus of science, wellness, therapy and fitness all agree: really, you should meditate.

My experience with mediation is limited. I go to yoga classes, but they’re usually at the gym, so while we’re “meditating” at the end, there’s often like one person bustling around leaving early, wrecking the vibe, and weirdly sad music on the playlist, making me ponder whether I’m the only one thinking “wait, isn’t music distracting?” and then wondering if I’m missing the point.

To learn more about meditation, I recently downloaded one of the mediation apps and selected a “beginner” series. During the second instalment, I was surprised to hear the narrator make a case for the importance of directing your attention. He said that concentration — being able to direct your attention — is like a muscle, and strengthening that muscle gives you the power to choose what to pay attention to. And nothing is more important than the fundamental ability to pay attention, he said — because what you pay attention to becomes your life.

I realize I’m engaging in the kind of overthinking philosophers are trained and socialized into, but I couldn’t stop myself from being weirded out by the idea that you can always choose what to pay attention to. Because it does seem true, in a way, that what you pay attention to becomes your life. But in that case the idea that you are choosing and directing it seems disturbing. It seems like then you would have to constantly decide what to pay attention to, which is dangerously close to constantly deciding what is worth your attention, which seems overwhelming, overly rationalistic, and in some way just wrong.

I don’t really know anything about eastern philosophy and the general traditions in which meditation is a central activity. So I’m sure there are people who know more than I do about how attention and meditation and focus all fit together and how I may by misinterpreting the fundamentals.

What I want to discuss instead is how the idea of choosing what to pay attention to got me thinking of the cultural expansion of the category “things we control and determine” and the shrivelling of the category “experiencing of whatever happens to be happening.”

I actively enjoy experiencing whatever happens to be happening for its happening part, even when the thing itself is not my fave. For example, I used to love listening to the radio. Part of what I loved about it was listening to “what’s on.” What’s on the radio is on now, and we’re all listening to it. We didn’t choose it, but we’re all out here experiencing it. Because it’s what’s on. I have the same feeling about the NYT crossword. I like to do today’s puzzle. Because it’s today’s puzzle. I don’t want to go into the archive and find a puzzle on a theme I might prefer. I want to do today’s, because today’s puzzle is what’s on now, and we’re all doing it.

Obviously it’s still possible to enjoy experiencing whatever happens to be happening, but I feel like it’s become culturally more challenging — like there’s more friction to it, and it’s harder to opt into, because everyone else is opting out of it — people are crafting their playlists, following their followees, editing their photos, etc. etc. Even friendship has been infiltrated by the power of control: what are you adding to my life, or should I just drop you?

Recently I was in an audio store, and I tried to explain that I wanted a stereo component where I could listen to the radio. No — not through the internet, where I can choose any of a million feeds, just in the regular way of listening to whatever happened to be happening in the area where I can get a radio signal.

I learned this is called “terrestrial radio.” I also learned someone asking for terrestrial radio will be treated as ignorant. The salespeople kept explaining to me again and again that over the internet is better: better sound quality, you can choose any station, it’s the same, only better, was I really so stupid and stubborn as to want the technology of the 1950s?

The good news is I got my terrestrial radio stereo component. The bad news is, my favorite station folded — because no one is listening to terrestrial radio, because don’t you know it’s better over the internet?

Anyway, I’ll have to stick with it meditation-wise, so I can better understand the relationship between directing your attention and still being open to experiencing whatever happens to be happening. Because experiencing whatever happens to be happening is great, and sometimes feels more like relinquishing control than it does like an active choice.

Friday, February 16, 2024

If Human Emotions Are Based On Rationality, I Feel Like An Alien

 Content warning: suicide.

When I was in graduate school, I TAed a course on Contemporary Moral Problems. I can’t remember what the “Problem” was that we were discussing, but at some point our textbook author made the argument that whether or not to kill yourself was a question that could be approached in a rational manner. For example, he said, there are good reasons to kill yourself and bad reasons: a toothache is obviously not a reason to kill yourself.

I remember being taken aback, because in my experience, a toothache is just the kind of thing that makes you want to kill yourself. In saying this, I  do not mean to be treating suicide lightly or simply. I just mean that my own moments of despair most often occur in response to the kind of relentless, slow-burn, non-dramatic things that make life seem grim and pointless. Things like toothaches.

I didn’t study philosophy as an undergrad, so this textbook passage may have been my first time face to face with the philosophical idea that emotions could be objectively appropriate or inappropriate to a situation. It’s an idea that struck me as bizarre, and, to some extent, still strikes me as bizarre. If being a well-functioning person means being sad when bad things happen and happy when good ones do — well, that makes me feel like a bit like an alien.

I mean, of course I want good things and conversely, but for most of everyday life I am much more likely to be influenced by a mood than a thing in the world to which there is an appropriate response. My moods are highly influenced by things like exercise and fresh air and the right mix of people-time and alone-time — things that seem ambient and animalistic and not rationally assessable as causes.  

For some emotions like fear, I suppose I can see it: if you are afraid of a shark attack while walking around downtown, I guess you could say the fear is misplaced and inappropriate to a situation. But I feel like when you try to make a theory out it, things get weird.

For example, speaking of philosophers who believe that emotions are a form of cognitive judgments, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says “On a common interpretation of their view, my anger at someone is the judgment that I have been wronged by that person.” Then you might be correct or not about that.  

Wow, because this seems to say the emotion is a judgment and I would almost say it feels like the opposite: that my feelings of anger and my judgments about whether I have been wronged run on two separate tracks with occasional but obscure points of intersection. Often, I’m not clear whether I feel anger, irritation, hurt feelings or some other negative emotion, and frankly, I often don’t care. In a vast range of cases, there’s no point to doing anything. In those case, I am much more likely to pursue a strategy of emotion-dissipation through distraction. When there is something to be done, the thought process of what that would be barely feels like it engages the original emotion.

I also don’t get how emotions could be “appropriate” in an everyday way to our global situation of climate disaster and injustice on a truly massive scale. I suppose you could say that certain emotions are inappropriate to our situation — people who know what’s up, but just don’t care, aren’t they doing something wrong? Yes — but to me that seems more like a failing than a miscalculation.

Anyway, maybe my textbook author was thinking of a toothache in middle-class US terms — as a temporary problem you can easily address by spending some money and having some short-term pain. Obviously, I also do not want people to kill themselves over temporary, solvable problems.  What a person needs in that situation is partly other people who love them and can say “don’t worry, it won’t last forever!” And even more importantly: good universal health benefits for everyone.

Friday, February 9, 2024

Duelling Metaphors Of Our Time: Optimize and Balance

 It really bothers me that the two fundamental metaphors of how to live life right now are “optimize” and “balance.” How can this be, I ask myself, when optimizing and balancing are like opposite activities?  

“Optimize” is like finding the crucial quantity or aspect or thing and then taking it to its logical extreme. Go as far as you can; get to the max endpoint. “Balance” is anti-extreme. Please avoid the max endpoints; please find an appropriate and moderate middle ground.

If you’re looking for advice on how to live your life and make decisions in the 21st century, you can’t get away from optimize. It’s there under every life hack, every productivity app, morsel of input on improving your health, your wealth, your time, your relationships. It’s there every time we do a cost-benefit analysis or think about the greatest good for the greatest number.

If you’re looking for advice on how to live your life and make decisions in the 21st century, you can’t get away from balance. It crowds in from the ether when you try to think about the relationship between work and family, or how much time you should put into your various projects, or what should be your ratio of cocktails and cake now to trying to avoid cancer later.

From my perspective, the history of philosophy is full of the dead ends of people trying to harmonize optimize and balance. The crucial theoretical move would be to find a quantity X that if you maximize it, would yield the perfect balance for all your various life concerns.

In philosophy, the early utilitarians of the 19th century got themselves tied into knots over whether “pleasure” or “happiness” could be the name for X, the thing that when you maximize it you get the right balance. On the pleasure side, you may know about how Jeremy Bentham said “Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry” — by which he meant that a dumb game like Candy Crush is just as good as any other activity as long as the pleasure you get out of it is the same.

To which Mill pointed out that having been raised on that principle as a child, he then had a nervous breakdown and could only be revived through the arts and sciences of music and poetry, so no. And 21st century optimizers are not using pleasure as their X: a life of just the right amount of Candy Crush  — or opiates, for that matter — is not what the life hack team are preaching.  

Mill then developed his doctrine of “higher pleasures” — you should maximize happiness, but recognize that in happiness some pleasures are better than others. To which people said: that makes no sense, how can there be one metric but it’s made up of lots of little different metrics?

I’m flying irresponsibly over a hundred plus years of debate, but my sense is that the best answer to this question involves working back from the answer: try to figure out what is best overall, then calculate the mix of things that would form X; now maximizing X is the answer to how to live your life. If you’re a utilitarian, you could call X “utility” and just divorce it from any particular sensation like pleasure.

In economics, the typical science-y approach to the puzzle of how to find X is to say that X is satisfaction of your personal preferences, which can be deduced from your behaviour. If you chose the cocktail it must be because you preferred it, because it brought you more utility (whatever that is), so ultimately when you choose it, you’re maximizing your utility so, when you balance well, you are acting optimally.

Even setting aside the ambiguity of “because” (is that a definition of utility or a substantive claim about human psychology?) the success of this formulation as a useful idealization does little to help us figure out what to do next on an individual level. The life pattern in which you work out your utility from your past choices then apply that to the future is the one in which you do the same thing over and over, simply because you’ve done that before. No life hacker or balance influencer is suggesting this, and it would be a dumb way to life your life.

And all of these puzzles arise just for one person’s optimality! We haven’t even talked about the question of how what is best overall for you individually could be best overall from a community-based perspective, which is an even harder problem.

My own take on the situation is that there is no X. There is just a made-up concept corresponding to the thing that if you were to maximize it, you’d get the best thing to do overall, with the proper balance of all your different things.

Made-up concepts are OK in some contexts, but they’re not useful for figuring out life’s practicalities. So I think "optimize" in this sense is a scam. There’s only balance. 

The problem is that the balance metaphor sounds like there is no right answer, which people find destabilizing, but which I also think is true. There’s no algorithm, there are just people muddling through and trying to figure things out.

Friday, February 2, 2024

The Modern Capitalist Categorical Imperative: You Shall Rate, And You Shall Be Rated

The other day I took a taxi ride in which the driver complained about local politics, vented his anger about Uber, and used the phrase “snot-nosed” in a context I won’t explain further. It felt to me like the 1970s. But in kind of a good way.

For a while now, I have been trying to support the taxi industry. I have the same obvious reasons as everyone else: concern about the gig economy, worry that rideshare will drive out competition then monopolistically raise prices, indignation that private companies can just avoid passengers they find inconvenient for some reason. I mix it up, though, for various reasons.

It took me a while to glom onto the fact that so many of the differences in the textural experience could be traced to the ubiquitous rideshare rating system. In modern capitalism, rating is the new categorial imperative: you shall rate, and you shall be rated. And you shall all be judged on your ratings.

The more experience I have with Uber, the more I’ve tuned in to the implications of mutual rating. In my rides, many Uber drivers are quiet and deferential. At first I was really into it. No chit chat. Driver making sure I’m comfortable and not unnecessarily irritated. Clean car. Smells nice. What a great consumer experience!

Over time, though, I started to get weirded out about it. People spend all day working. Constant surveillance at work sucks. It means you have to be not only competent but also constrained: hyper-efficient, or charming, or whatever. Perhaps because I have a bit of social anxiety, sitting in an Uber car, I start to wonder: are they being quiet and deferential to get a good rating? Does that suck for them? To be that way all the time? Does it suck in ways I can’t imagine because I’m not an Uber driver?

Conversely, as time has gone one, I’ve become more and more aware of my own customer rating and how it turns a bit of awkwardness into a federal case. I follow all the usual principles of being a good capitalist citizen, but sometimes things come up. Once, an Uber driver picking me up from my university circled the ring road — all the way around— then was about to circle it again. I found myself unable to say nothing. Dude. You’re going in circles. He insisted he was following his GPS. Awkward. Did it get me down-rated?  

Another time a driver said he couldn’t pick me up on the my side of the road, because the street was a one-way street, so he couldn’t come down the other direction to pull over on the other side. The practicality of that mistake is one thing, but the illogic of it made me CRAZY. It’s a one-way street! You can pull over on either side! Reader, yes, I said something about it, and, yes, the driver thought I was wrong and annoying. I instantly regretted it. Would I get down-rated?

The taxi experience is a surprisingly sharp contrast, because not only is there no rating, there is no boss near by. Drivers vary obviously, but for some it feels like getting paid for a ride is almost secondary to the entertainment value I’m providing. I get rants and complaints, I get unsolicited, sometimes problematic opinions, and I get intrusive questions: “Coming from Toronto, huh? Do you live there?” “Coming from the gym, are you? Do you lift weights?” “Going to BeerTown, eh? Going to get drunk?”

For a long time it got me down. But then the rating system started to seem so much more depressing, it gave me like a gestalt switch. I started to see the unrated interaction as a mini free-range relief-zone. The driver can be a bit strange or annoying. I can be a bit strange or annoying. And as long as I get there and I give them the money, it’s all OK.

I wouldn’t say it’s more pleasant, exactly, but it’s something. 

Anyway, if you want to read about Uber versus taxis from the driver’s point of view, I highly recommend this discussion by an Uber driver who switched for one week to driving a taxi. Relevant part: taxi riding more enjoyable (due partly to camaraderie), but less lucrative (due partly to lower demand). Camaraderie! Not something I had even thought of before reading this piece.

Friday, January 26, 2024

The “Eerie” Feeling Of Math

I studied math before I studied philosophy and in my youth I was always that person who liked math. I’ve been re-engaging with math after a long hiatus and it has so great — fun, interesting, awe-inspiring. One thing I had forgotten is how math engenders so many different emotions in people: anxiety and fear about not being “good at math,” comfort and calm about being in a place with a “right answer,” curiosity and indignation about whether math is perceived to be discovered or invented.

One of the emotions of math that gets talked about less is what the physicist Eugene Wigner calls an “eerie” feeling. In the 1950s, Wigner gave a lecture on “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in Science.” It’s a miracle, he says, that math works. Math concepts are developed by mathematicians according to aesthetic criteria, including “look at me, I’m so ingenious!”-based considerations. Yet these same concepts are massively useful in physics. It’s strange; it’s surprising; It’s a miracle we neither understand nor deserve.

Wigner’s paper is either famous or infamous, depending on how you feel about his topic. In philosophy, there are whole cottage industries devoted to “is it really surprising, though?” and “maybe you only notice the successful ones?” and “no, it actually is a miracle.”

I don’t want to talk philosophy, though, I want to talk feelings. I love the way Wigner opens his paper with the simple story of a statistician and his old classmate from school days. The statistician shows a paper on population trends to his friend, a paper full of complex and sophisticated mathematics. The friend looks at the complex symbolism and is like “wait, what”? … Then the friend points to Ï€ and says “and what is this symbol here?” “Oh,” says the statistician, “that is Ï€” —“the ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter.” “Now you are pushing your joke too far!” says the classmate, “surely the population has nothing to do with the circumference of the circle.”

Wigner says the story gives him an “eerie” feeling. Surely, the reaction of the classmate betrays “only plain common sense.” Like: yeah, what does the ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter have to do with population statistics?

I have this eerie feeling about math all the time. I get it about the application of math in science, and I also get it about the application of math to other math. You’ll be going along learning some thing, and suddenly a concept from some completely different concept not only pops up, but turns out to be exactly the thing for situation.

Just look at the Wikipedia page for the constant e and the bewildering array of seemingly unrelated applications: compound interest, probability theory, optimization using calculus, number theory, etc. etc.

In connection with the eeriness of math, I only recently learned more about the emergence and significance of the complex numbers — numbers like a+bi where i is the “imaginary” square root of minus one. They appear in Cardano’s work in the sixteenth century in connection with finding the solutions to polynomial equations — equations like x^2+1=0. If you try to find two numbers that add to 10 and multiply to 40 — that is, solutions to x^2-10x+40=0 — you find that there are no such real numbers, but that 5+√–15 and 5-√–15 work just fine.

While the square roots of negative numbers are not ordinary numbers, Cardano wasn’t uncomfortable with them: “√–9,” he wrote, “is neither +3 or –3 but is some recondite third sort of thing.” 

Complex numbers were essentially thought up to solve mathematical problems, not practical or physics problems. And as Wigner himself says, if you ask a mathematician to justify their interest in complex numbers, they will point (“with some indignation”) to their many uses in “beautiful” theorems in the theory of equations and other branches of math. So it is a bit weird when you find out later on that complex analysis is one of the most directly applied parts of math there is and that imaginary numbers are everywhere in physics and other applications.

A thing I wondered about for many years was why complex numbers were ubiquitous and other analogous ways of extending the real number structure less so. If you’re thinking abstractly, the addition of “i” according to certain principles is just an extension of real numbers with a new symbol according to calculation rules regarding how that symbol works with the existing numbers and relations. So — I never understood: why are we always studying that one extension of the real numbers and not some other one? Why not add multiple new symbols instead of just one? 


Then a few months ago I read Numbers: A Very Short Introduction, and I learned that “it is not possible to construct an augmented number system that contains [the complex numbers] and also retains all the normal laws of algebra.” Aha! That is a clear explanation of the specialness of the complex numbers: you can’t go bigger and still keep the rules you want to keep.

Of course, it’s a clear mathematical explanation. It explains how the complex numbers are mathematically special. But then the complex numbers are also special in applications of math — so much so that while you can take a “pure math” course on “Complex Analysis,” there are also courses on “Applied Complex Analysis.” Does the mathematical specialness of the complex numbers somehow carry over to the scientific context?  

It is strange! For me, the deeper I go, the eerier it gets.