because she’ll grow up and say things like this to you:
man, if there was ever one word in a fantasy book review to make sure i’d never read it that word would be ‘ninjas’
‘Ninja-like Claw assassins’ is just over the line
i mean seriously, wtf
they’re probably all named something like christiano da’gaz’burgh and have swords that are painted black with a ruby in the hilt
So in the end, I caved and sent my coat out to be dry-cleaned. I got it back the next day, not cleaned because the drycleaner claimed it was 1) the zip-in lining was ripped and 2) the zip-in lining zipper was broken and wouldn’t come out. From the position of the rip, it appeared to me that they ripped the lining trying to remove it and then once they had damaged my coat, gave up and sent it back to me. It also reeked of cigarette smoke. This was a lesson to me about trusting strange dry-cleaners. So I went ahead and put the coat out on the balcony of my hotel room overnight, which managed to eliminate most of the smoke smell and the hobo smell. The coat, however, is still not cleaned.
I am, contrary to popular belief, still alive. There has been little progress in actually getting closer to making this blog more than an occasional diversion, but I still have high hopes for the future.
My current concern is that my trenchcoat has somehow acquired the smell of old hobo. I am not sure where or how this happened, though I feel it was some time in the last month. I need to get it cleaned, however my hotel charges 13 dollars to dry clean an overcoat. Is is really worth $13 to not smell like an old hobo?
Shirt woot is a dangerous, dangerous thing. Ten dollars is pretty much the perfect price point for a t-shirt. They offer a new one every day, the number available is limited, forcing you to buy right awaym and shipping is free. Even if over 80% of their designs are crap, they’ll be making a cool $40 off me each month. It is a good thing I continue to find consulting work, because I need it to fund my t-shirt habit.
There is another component, besides informational complexity, that explains why small stories are used: increased informational availability. There is more information available today than there has been in the entire course of human history and we are generating it at an ever increasing rate. There are more scientific studies, books, lectures, papers, experiments, philosophical tracts, esoteric websites in existence now than any one person could ever digest. There are probably more words written in a single week than a person could read in a lifetime. Which means that it becomes increasingly hard for anyone to know something about everything. There was a time when someone could be a ‘Renaissance Man,’ excelling in all the scholarly fields. That is impossible now. It is becoming increasingly hard to even excel in a single field: people are not physicist anymore, but astrophysicists and theoretical physicists.
This has greatly increased the need for “small stories” in every facet of our lives. There is simply not enough time or brain-cycle capacity to absorb everything or even a tiny subset of everything. There is a lot of talk about the decreasing attention span of today’s youth and our need to have constantly changing stimulation Is that a reflection of some sort of deficiency in us as people or just a result of trying to keep up with the massive amounts of information that exist these days. Cable news stations are criticized for reducing everything to sound bites. But, really, what are their options? If you take the time to provide the full context for every story, including all pertinent prior events, you’d never get through the ‘news’ in an entire day. There are more things that happen every day than could possibly be talked about.
That is not saying that cable news is a good thing. It is saying that it is an inevitable thing. As more things happen (and our society is currently increasing the number of things that happen every day) you have less time to talk about each of them. Less time to talk means you have to lose complexity, turn a real story into a ‘simple story.’ It is this process, of condensing information into its most basic component, which is where problems start.
Smart people understand the process. They know that no one has the time to know the real story. So if you craft your press releases and your interviews in ways that are easily compressible, your message will be transmitted better. It is a process that Republicans have come to understand much better than Democrats. The reason that John Kerry was Swift-Boated is that he tried to turn it into a discussion, even though discussions do not get reported on. People do not have the time to know everything. They have to worry about their job, their kids, their sports teams, their investments, their TV shows, their music, their car, their mortgage, their health, their dinner, their marriage, their college education. Where in that is supposed to be the time to study all sides of the issues and reach an informed conclusion?
It is often argued that being informed about
That is reality. This will never change. We will never have more time and less information. The history of human civilization tends towards complexity in all things. It may suck, it may be unfortunate, it may lead people to wring their hands and gripe about the old days. Doesn’t matter. It isn’t going to change. What is now important is learning how to craft small stories that tell the story you want to tell. Small stories that cut to the heart of your issue in the way that you want. Because no one has time to read all the small print all of the time.
Just finished reading “What we believe, but cannot prove” a collection of essays by prominent thinkers about theories or hypothesis that they consider true but have no factual evidence to support. It’s an uneven book. Some of the authors are apparently trying to prove how clever they are by playing word games with the question itself (What is something that you believe but cannot prove?). Others write about things which are so scientifically specific as to be rather meaningless to those of us without advanced astrophysics training. There are some that are quite excellent. And some which are odd.
One of the odd ones is from Jean Paul Schmetz who believes but cannot prove that most of the things that students are taught in Economics 101 are false. I find this interesting because I pretty much thought that everyone already knew this. The idea that what is taught in Economics 101 has any bearing on how economics really works or that the people teaching it actually believe what they are teaching is one that does not hold a lot of credence. There was an excellent article that I found a while ago (which I think I have currently lost) which talked about just this situation: where students progressing through economics curriculum learn that everything they had initially studied really doesn’t work.
Of course, its not like the professors are maliciously lying to these students. It is more that they are telling them “small stories.” It’s a concept that I ran across in an Elizabeth Bear novel I just finished (Worldwired, great book). Small stories are the stories we tell to children to explain things in simple, often “not-quite-true’ fashion. A small story is telling a child that gravity is the force that keeps us from floating away off the Earth. Which is true in a fashion, but it really does not accurately describe what gravity is. But it does give a child a reference point for understanding and reassures them that they’re not going to float away. Of course, it gets more complicated when you have to explain things like balloons and airplanes, escape velocity, and the concept of gravity wells in the space-time fabric. So small stories never tell the whole story or even the right story, but they allow someone to grasp a concept enough to move forward.
In Worldwired, the concept is expanded from stories for children to the idea of stories that are told between adults who work in highly complicated fields who otherwise couldn’t talk to each other. How does a xenobiologist talk to a space pilot? How does a xenobiologist talk to an astrophysicist? As knowledge becomes more specialized, communication has to become more general. Stories needs to be smaller and smaller in order to be easily accessible. How does a scientist with thirty years of experience in a field, whose entire course of reasoning is based upon a foundation of basic knowledge, explain derived inferences to someone who does not even understand the basic foundation. That’s what small stories are about.
When I started last year, my Amazon wishlist was around 180 books. I read around 75 books last year and I’ve polished off another 20 something this year (I’d have exact numbers if I want ed to go turn on the computer with the list on it, but that’s too much work right now). That’s almost 100 books read in a year and three months. Probably 70 some of them were off the wishlist (the rest were presents, re-reads, books borrowed from my sister or my mom, one book lent by a friend, etc.) Which means all things considered, my wishlist should be around 110 books. It is currently at 240. In the same period of time that I read 70 books off the wishlist, I managed to add 130 books to it! This is clearly going to be a problem.
I have a suggestion: everyone should stop publishing books for the next half year so that I can catch up.
Marriage as an institution has been a hot topic of debate as of late. Most notable has been the increasing struggle over gay marriage, but there has also been the somewhat quieter decline in the number of people getting married. While the divorce rate has stabilized (and actually decreased slightly) lately, part of that may be due to the fact that fewer people are getting married.
The WaPo recently ran an article on the decline of marriage, especially among the lower class. The Post points to statistics showing that increasing it is college graduates with high incomes getting married, while everyone else is resorting to co-habitation.
There are a couple odd statements in the article. One is this:
Married couples living with their own children younger than 18 are also helping to drive a well-documented increase in income inequality. Compared with all households, they are twice as likely to be in the top 20 percent of income. Their income has increased 59 percent in the past three decades, compared with 44 percent for all households, according to the census.
Now, the article has already explained that fewer people are getting married and that only rich people are getting married. If that is the case, then the truth isn’t that married couples are making more money thereby increasing income disparity. It is that poorer people aren’t getting married, which means that the average wage of married couples is going to go up. The Post seems to have put the horse behind the cart here, missing the point of the very demographic information they are quoting. What is true that the increase in income disparity has increased enough (and one real way that it has increased is that earnings among the lower and middle class have been dropping) that only people riding the crest of the wave feel like they are stable enough to risk getting married.
Which I think is probably the largest part of this decline. Stephanie Coontz writes about the changing attitude towards matrimony in her book Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. One things that she highlighted was that the goals behind marriage have substantially changed from being financial partnerships to being love matches. The result is an increasing sense of unhappiness with marriage: if getting together with someone is about true love, rather than ensuring a higher standard of living, then the grounds for complaint are greatly increased. It is easy to measure financial security. But assigning a value to emotional satisfaction is a much harder and more fraught exercise. One that is continually open to ‘the grass is always greener’ syndrome, among other things.
The change that Coonz highlights here is, I think, reflected in the declining lower class marriage rate. Marriage used to be about financial stability. The new perception of marriage is that it is about love and that love is fleeting. While marriage is not expensive, per se, divorce can certainly be and alimony most definitely is. Since marriage is now considered much more transient it make sense that only people who have the financial stability to survive a divorce are getting married.
I’ve currently in the middle of Anya Kamenetz’s book Generation Debt, and while I’ll get to a larger discussion of what I think of the book and what it says later, there was something in it that caught my eye and tied into my early post on narcissism. On page 93, Anya is waxing on about the motivational troubles that our generation sometimes seems to have.
We were raised to dream big. When we face real challenges, our chronic dissatisfaction can itself be a stumbling block. We spend too much time and borrow too much money shooting for the stars.
It is a different take on the issue than the authors of the study took and it is one that does hold more concern for worry. Our generation is different in a lot of ways. We are the first generation that has been raised with technology. When I was 6 years old, I started using personal computers at home learning on my dad’s IBM XT. The first five years of my life were the only times when I was not fully enmeshed in a technologically connected world.
One of the largest things that this has done is that it has drastically shrunk the difficulty involved in sending work overseas. Everyone has, most likely, had to deal with an Indian technical support call-center at some point in the last few years. That is just one of the most visible facets of out-sourcing. And the truth about out-sourcing is that it is barely working right now. Cultural differences are too great, language barriers are still fairly high, there are significant obstacles. But that is all going to change. The financial implications are just too great for it to not be successful.
What is being seen right now if the just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the global spread of business and jobs. And that brings me back to the part about my generation here in America. There is no precedent for this. Consider that someone graduating from a four-year college in the early 1980’s was most likely going to walk into a job that would pay them reasonable well, probably had health care and some sort of retirement, and which could potentially last them a life time. Consider that those facts gets more and more true as you travel back through the 60’s and 70’s to when our parents were graduating. The future that we were brought up to live in is not the future that we actually live in.
The paradigms have shifted, now, where the important thing is not necessarily the college degree, but the ability that an individual has to hone their skills and then market them in a rapidly changing environment. Interestingly enough, I think that being narcissistic may help here as well. Anya mentions that we’re spending too much time and money creating churn, and that is probably true right now. Any new situation requires some reorientation. Adapting to the new economic climes is going to be rough, but in the end, a strong sense of self and the belief that you have vital skills is going to be key. If you can’t tell yourself that you’re a special person, then no employer is going to take a chance on you either.
The L.A. Times published an article today on a non-peer reviewed study that showed increased levels of narcissistic tendencies amongst current college kids. They made tentative associations with the self-esteem training that kids got in their pre-college education all the way back to nursery school.
Considering that I’m a few years out of college, I am probably right on the borderline of the generation that they’re talking about. I don’t remember ever singing songs about being special in nursery school, but I do recall being repetitively told that we could all be anything we wanted if we tried hard enough.
It was something that I actually took to heart. I grew up with a fairly high degree of confidence that I could do anything if I tried hard enough. It also breed a high level of competitiveness, since someone being better than me was an indication that I wasn’t trying hard enough. I am routinely accused of being cocky or arrogant because I exude confidence about my abilities.
But I think that this is somewhat different from what the authors of this study are discussing. There is a difference between believing one is capable of anything and having expectations of things being delivered to you because of your special nature. The worrisome nature of the second viewpoint is that it doesn’t lead to people succeeding in life. It leads to people making unrealistic decisions about life because they expect certain things to be given to them. In the current job market, a college degree is not the career builder it once was. Even a graduate degree can spell tough going outside of the academic world. (I’ve actually just started reading Generation Debt, which is an anecdotal look at how economic conditions for Americans who are currently coming of age are getting worse.)
With all that said, I don’t know if I have quite the same doom-and-gloom feeling that the organizers of the study have. A lack of self-confidence is often considered a large reason that people cannot get ahead or be successful in life. So now two-thirds of college kids have higher narcissism scores than they did in 1982. Isn’t self-confidence at least partially associated with narcissism? If you’re going to trust in yourself and your abilities, doesn’t that involve a certain amount of self-love?
Look at the three sample questions that they list from the exam.
Now I haven’t seen the entire test. I’d love to see it, but it doesn’t appear that the “Narcissistic Personality Inventory” is available online. I’d love to take it and see where I score on it. I’d bet I would score well above the 1982 average as well. But I wouldn’t take that as a sign that there was something wrong with me. I’d take it as a sign that I know my own worth and I am willing to put value on myself.