About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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I want to spend some time explaining nerds. In particular, nerds of the type that I get along with. I mentioned in my rant about questioning the assumptions that “The difficulty comes in dealing with people who believe that the rules are the rules full stop.” It’s interesting because after reading that in the context of my rant about being an introvert and not getting along with a lot of people, I realized that this understanding of the social construction of rules was one of the defining characteristics of my friends.
I think this quality manifests itself relatively early in life. Let’s look at several of the defining characteristics of the nerd childhood. Reading fantasy or science fiction, for instance. A lot of people think these genres are just stupid because they’re unrealistic. They can’t happen (of course, these same people are fine with spy or romance novels, but that’s another story). But their very unreality is the attraction for nerds. It’s an exploration of the question: what happens if you change the rules? What things can we expect to be the same? What things will change? In some sense, it’s an exploration of what is essential to our humanity. Fantasy and sci-fi novels are often about contrasting humans with aliens, or placing humans in fantastic situations but showing how they still react in a recognizably human fashion.
D&D and other role-playing games are another good example. Again, they let the young nerd explore other worlds, other rulesets, other possibilities, and grow comfortable with those possibilities. By altering the world rules, and by letting the participant construct an alter ego, it permits the telling of a story that would not be possible under the rules of the real world. These stories are often very powerful to the participants, and my current theory is that this is because it lets them assert aspects of themselves that are not available under the real world ruleset. But by playing with the rules in this virtual way, they can discover these aspects that they can then apply in the real world.
A third example is the fascination of nerds with games of all sorts. Computer games, board games, etc. Taking the playing with rules idea to an extreme are games like Nomic, where changing the rules is the whole point of the game, or Mao, where discovering the rules (and later adding to them) is the point. There’s also a fascination with game design; figuring out how to tweak the rules to make them fairer or more interesting. I had one friend in college who spent time trying to design three-player chess. I had another friend who would buy a computer game a week, generally finishing it by the next weekend; when asked what he was doing, he said “Research” - he’s now one of the top computer game designers in the country.
All of these very stereotypical traits of the nerd childhood share a fascination with tweaking the rules. Part of that is due to the outcast nature of the typical nerd; they dream of changing things such that they are part of the in crowd, or are powerful in other ways. But part of it is just the outlook of understanding that everything is a game, that the rules are never set in stone and instead are put in place by somebody for a reason. One reason that I get along with my friends is that there’s an openness to discussing these sorts of topics. They’re willing to take an analytical look at why certain organizations might have the rules that they do. There’s no taboo on the possibilities of conversation; everything is fair game. And this is really hard for most people to understand. To many people, the world is black and white, right and wrong. There are things you think about, and things you don’t. In contrast, my world is all grays. Everything is contextual. I like to sit around with my friends, batting around ideas, exploring them from all sides, and seeing what we get out of the discussion. I can’t do that with most people, because they don’t see other sides; they have the one view they’re comfortable with and refuse to deviate from it. And that’s so limiting to me that I can’t deal with it.
So there’s my theory. Nerds have a certain openness of mind and of considering other possibilities that is either discovered at a young age, or cultivated by the typical activities of a nerd childhood. They develop a certain playfulness with regard to the rules that lets them see how all rulesets in life are socially constructed. And that’s why I get along with them.
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Yes, that’s right. I have no idea if I get anybody actually reading my book review pages, but I figured that if they were, and they wanted to read some of the books I recommended, I might as well link to Amazon and possibly reap the rewards of my recommendation. So you can either click on the logo to the right and go to Amazon to shop, or click on the individual links I’ll start adding. I’m not going to go back and edit all of the individual reviews, partially because it would screw up the weblog software I use to change the modification date (and, yes, it’s lame, and I need to figure out a work-around, which may mean that I’m switching software again soon), and partially because it’s too much work. But I’ll use them from now on. And I’ll include links to my highly recommended books of the last several months here.
So I watch way too much tv. And I was watching Joan of Arcadia last night and realized one of the reasons that I liked the show; there were consequences. Unlike most sitcoms and many dramas, there isn’t a big reset button at the end of each episode where everybody ends up happy. People stay pissed at each other for multiple episodes; when Joan’s friend dissed her(*) in this episode, it was harsh. In fact, the whole show is about consequences; God asks Joan to do things, and never explains why, but the actions tend to have good ripple effects, reminding us that all actions have consequences that we may not even consider. It’s not a show that I really expected to like. I expected it to be something cloying like Touched by an Angel. But it’s turning out to be one of the more enjoyable shows of the season. The dialogue needs work, and I’m not sure how sustainable the whole chaos butterfly effect scenario is, but the acting is excellent (especially Amber Tamblyn as the oh-so-believable disenchanted teenager Joan) and I’m planning to continue watching.
(*) I’d been wondering why they’d had one of Joan’s friends, Adam, call her Jane all season long. It was kind of cute, just a weird idiosyncratic thing he did that kind of set the tone for his dreamy distracted character. And it paid off this week when she’s trying to apologize to him, and he listens and then says “Whatever, Joan” and walks off. Boo-yah. Utter harshness. The first time he uses her real name in the entire series and it’s to diss her. Which sets into relief his use of Jane before as an affectionate nickname. I really liked this detail. Obviously. Since I’m writing about it and all.
Those two of you who actually look at this site may wonder why I haven’t posted any book reviews in over a month. Lots of reasons. Things got busy at work. I got a new car, so I was driving instead of taking public transit to work, which cut into my reading time. I took a five-day weekend to attend a friend’s wedding in Washington D.C., where I almost finished a book (David Brin’s Transparent Society) on the plane ride back, but haven’t gotten around to finishing it since then. I’ve been distracted trying to keep up with my normal Economist and Science News subscriptions. I’ve been trying to write more blog entries. October and November are the start of the new television season, so I was watching a couple new shows and several old favorites. It’s also football season, so Sundays now have a significant time-sink. I’ve started playing ultimate and taking salsa lessons. Lots of excuses. No good answers. And it’s not likely to change until the new year because I’ve got craziness in the chorus coming up, with the christmas concert and the Messiah on consecutive weeks in December. Rest assured I will get back to reading at some point, probably when my monster Amazon order gets in - I currently have something like $100 worth of books sitting in my shopping cart at Amazon, just waiting for me to click “Checkout”.
So, as I mentioned in an earlier post, “I’d love to become instantaneously more sociable and more comfortable around people.” It’s hard to explain to folks who aren’t introverts how difficult being sociable is. My friend pointed me to an article in the Atlantic Monthly on the subject which has a lot of good stuff in it. But most “normal” folks, aka extroverts, who thrive on other people, think that meeting people is just about going up and saying “Hi!”. And, for them, it is.
It’s funny because people that have known me for a while don’t believe that I can possibly be an introvert. In a social setting where I’m comfortable, I’m loud and brash and can take over the conversation. Not at all the stereotypical wallflower. But put me in a bar or club, or at a party, and the wallflower takes over. I sulk in the corner for a while, have a miserable time, and leave. Partially it’s the fear of rejection, of going up to somebody, saying “Hi” and having them be bored and walk away. Mostly, though, it’s just not having anything to say. I’m terrible at small talk. There’s definitely a place for it - as Hayakawa puts it, “The prevention of silence is itself an important function of speech.” But I’m okay with silence. In fact, I crave it a lot of the time. So if I have nothing to say, I don’t say anything. And given that inclination, it’s really hard to strike up conversations with folks you don’t know. With folks you know, it’s easy; you have a shared background to draw upon, you’ve got things you know you have in common, and you don’t feel like you necessarily have to sustain a conversation. With folks you don’t, there’s a lot more pressure.
I also just plain don’t get along with most people. I’m weird. I’ve accepted that. I’ve moved on. When I was growing up, I thought I was this weird solitary freak who was different from everybody else. Turned out it was just that I was different from everybody else in the town where I grew up. I went to college, found a living group with a bunch of other freaks like me, and called it home. So, okay, I’m still this weird solitary freak, but I know I’m not alone. And that makes a huge difference. I don’t feel like I have to settle for blending in, for being one of the crowd, for throttling myself down to deal with the “normals”. I do it at work, and in social settings with polite company. I tried it for three years in grad school. But I know there are people out there with whom I can be all of me, weird and wacky and prone to making wild generalizations and strange references and improbable leaps of conversation - people with whom I can say the crazy things that come into my head without having them wonder if I’m insane(*). And so I seek out those people. And there ain’t many. But they’re there, and I’ve found a few, and I’d love to find more.
Of course, I haven’t figured out how to do that. Unfortunately, because the kind of people I’m looking for are few and far between, it exacerbates the problem of meeting people. Because I have to sift through a lot of people that aren’t right before finding the few that are. At this point, I’ve mostly given up; I just wait for my friends to meet cool people and expand my social circle that way. But it’s not really holding up my end of the deal to do that.
It’s a pain in the butt. If I were willing to judge on surface characteristics, it’d be much easier. Attractiveness is easy to judge; it may be personal, but you can look at somebody and decided if you’re attracted to them. The spark of weirdness I’m looking for is much harder to evaluate. One friend once described it having an appreciation of the absurd in life. It’s partially a sense of humor that matches mine, partially a broad enough and similar enough background to catch the references I like to drop into conversation, partially an attitude of never being intimidated by blatant generalizations or academic gewgaws. I don’t know how to describe it, which makes it hard to look for. It’s funny, though, because when I find somebody who fits the criteria, there’s an almost audible click. When I first walked into TEP at MIT, within five minutes I had the feeling of having come home for the first time. It was spooky.
I’m mostly frustrated because I’m doing all of these activities now, and meeting all these people, and still don’t feel like I can hold a decent conversation with any of them. Which is partially why I’m resorting to writing these rants online. It’s all I’ve got at the moment. Argh. Enough for now.
(*) As an example, I was once at a dinner party with some folks. Somehow the conversation turned to the zoo, and how they fed live animals to the lions. I said something like “Dude! That’s so awesome! I totally have to check that out!” The woman next to me turned and said “What are you, twelve?” I could have tried to explain about the importance of childlike enthusiasm in my world, and how once you lose that, it’s really all about being a corporate drone, but it would have taken too much effort, so I just shut up, stayed nice and quiet and proper the rest of the evening, and never hung out with those people again.
(originally posted 9/4/03, fixed links on 11/17/03) After reading Partners in Necessity, I said I’d go pick up the rest of the series. Which I did. The day after. And then read most of it over a three-day weekend. And I really enjoyed the rest of it. So I recommend the whole set now. In universe chronological order (as opposed to publishing order), they are:
So basically, three prequels, and four arc novels.
I was intrigued by one of the forewords calling these romance novels set in space. I suppose they might be considered such - four of them (the three prequels, and Agent of Change) have as their main plot arc the meeting and “lifemating” of two prominent characters. I didn’t feel that the romance dominated the novels, though, as I expect them to in “romance” novels. I’m not even sure what I mean by that, but I’m sure it’s some sort of rationalization to avoid me having to consider the possibility that I would enjoy romance novels as I enjoyed these.
One of the other things I really liked about this series was the concept of melant’i, describing the confusing mix of roles that characters play in their lives. One of the main characters, Val Con, is a younger cousin, a clan head, a Scout, and a husband. As a younger cousin, he properly shows deference to his elder relatives. However, as clan head, he deserves their deference. Lee and Miller disentangle these roles by postulating the Liaden language to contain different modes that are appropriate for each role. By a combination of non-verbal actions such as bows and hand gestures, and verbal hints (addressing Val Con as Delm indicates he should be in his role as clan head, as opposed to the younger cousin), the different roles that compose each character’s melant’i are kept distinct. This concept is particularly interesting to me since I’ve been reading a lot about semantics recently, and the power of language to shape our thoughts and attitudes. So the idea of a language that differentiates the many roles that we play in our daily lives sounds like a good one to me. It would lead to much less confusion, I suspect.
But anyway. I digress. Great story. Interesting characters. Interesting culture and world. Neat aliens. All good. I highly recommend. Or just borrow them from me sometime.
I saw this book while looking around on Amazon for books related to Korzybski’s Science and Sanity (much like how I found Hayakawa’s book). I picked it up because I’ve read two of Wilson’s sci-fi trilogies, the Illuminatus trilogy and the Schrodinger’s Trilogy. I liked them, but they were very weird, so I was surprised to find out that his works would be referenced next to serious academic works like Hayakawa and Korzybski.
It turns out that Wilson calls himself a Transactional Psychologist, which he says “holds that we do not passively receive data from the universe but actively “create” the form in which we interpret the data as fast as we receive it. In short, we do not re-act to information but experience transactions with information…derived from our gambles as our brain makes models of the ocean of new signals it receives every second.” In this book, he’s basically trying to take a layman’s impression of quantum mechanics and apply it to psychology, with varying degrees of success. The most interesting correlation was the idea of the observer-created universe. In quantum mechanics, when doing an experiment, there is no “result” until the experimenter makes a measurement or an observation. Until that time, the experimental system exists in a state of superposition, and the waveform does not collapse. This sounds spooky and non-intuitive, as has been illustrated by Schrodinger’s thought experiment with his infamous cat.
Wilson takes this idea and several of Korzybski’s ideas to try to develop the theory that the entire universe is observer-created. And there’s a lot of merit to that idea. Two people observing the same event will often tell two completely different accounts, depending on their backgrounds and their predispositions. This comes up often in our judicial system where eyewitness accounts are incredibly unreliable. Wilson’s example: “A cop clubs a man on the street. Observer A sees Law and Order performing their necessary function of restraining the violent with counter-violence. Observer B sees that the cop has white skin and the man hit has black skin, and draws somewhat different conclusions. Observer C arrived earlier and noted that the man pointed a gun at the cop before being clubbed. Observer D hears the cop saying “Stay away from my wife” and has a fourth view of the “meaning” of the situation. Etc.”
He also delves into several of the same issues as Hayakawa’s book, such as the perils of confusing our mental maps and symbols with reality, and the dangers of saying something “is” something else. In fact, Wilson recommends using a modification of English called E-Prime, where “is” doesn’t exist, instead using “appears” or “is observed as”. For instance, the wave-particle duality issue of physics goes away by using E-Prime - instead of “The photon is a wave” or “The photon is a particle”, we have “The photon behaves as a wave when constrained by certain instruments” and “The photon appears as a particle when constrained by other instruments.” The wave-particle “paradox” is due to our language and preconceptions because we “know” that a photon can’t be two things at the same time. By saying it has to be one or the other, we get confused. But the “paradox” is the result of our trying to impose our Aristotelian classification system onto the world, rather than accepting what the world is telling us. It’s not an either-or world - what we see depends on how we choose to observe the world.
Wilson ridicules the whole idea of “is”-ness. When we say something “is” something, we are contending that the object has some sort of ineffable, eternal quality about it that Wilson calls “spooks” (after Max Stirner) or “semantic noise”. As before, he uses the ideas of quantum mechanics to demonstrate that everything is always changing, and the question of what something “is” at any moment is ultimately undefinable, due to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the distributed nature of probability waveforms.
From there, he departs into some much stranger ideas, including the idea that faith healing may be related to the dispersion of neurotransmitters through the body, and the possibility of non-local phenomena related to the non-local correlations demonstrated by the EPR paradox and the Paris Aspect experiment. He concludes by hoping for “a HEAD Revolution - Hedonic Engineering And Development” where “the neurosomatic healings and neurosomatic “highs” (yogic or chemical ecstasies) found intuitively or accidentlaly in the past will then give way to a precise technology of staying High and living Well.”
All in all, I liked a lot of what Wilson had to say. But I think his application of quantum mechanics to psychology was seriously flawed. He makes the mistake of doing what he criticizes, by taking language and treating it as reality. The language of quantum mechanics is linear algebra. Not English. I took quantum mechanics at three levels on my way through my physics career, and the math is gorgeous. After they introduced the linear algebra notation (instead of the horribly clunky integral notation originally used), the equations just fell out so beautifully. They are wonderfully predictive and useful, as evidenced by the omnipresence of semiconductor technology in the modern world. However, despite having been fairly adept with those equations, I still couldn’t tell you what they “mean” or how to interpret those results in an intuitive sense. The equations are the equations. The math is the math. Trying to apply them to systems other than subatomic particles, even as an aid for intuitive understanding, is using an inappropriate tool, like trying to use a hammer for measuring distances.
By the same token, any description of quantum mechanics that happens in English is automatically imprecise and inaccurate. So to take those descriptions and treat them as reality and draw conclusions from them is a flawed process (Wilson admits that he has never taken a physics course and is going purely on descriptions). I think that many of the conclusions that Wilson draws are interesting and possibly useful, but not because of their derivation from quantum mechanics. They are (or, I should say, they appear as, to properly use E-Prime) interesting and useful in their application to human relation and our daily lives. And, as Wilson says (and I agree), utility should be the judge of ideas and systems, not some ineffable essence.
I’m in the process of trying to consolidate the two blogs I’ve been vaguely keeping (the reading list one and the journal one) into blosxom, so I just dumped the last few months of posts into blosxom. That’s why it claims I wrote a bunch of posts this afternoon. I put in the actual dates that the posts were written in, which should help clarify things. I think. We’ll see.
(written 11/14/03) So I missed the Brian Eno talk because I was blogging here. D’oh!
Okay, not quite. The talk was at 8pm, and they warned that people should get there early because it was a free talk. But I go to a lot of weird little events where nobody shows up, concerts where there were more people on stage than in the audience, that I took it with a grain of salt. So I decided not to show up at 7pm, because I thought I’d just sit there for an hour and be bored. I compromised and showed up at 7:30.
Oops.
The line was over two blocks long at 7:30, not counting the people they’d already let in. I ended up being several hundred people away from getting into the theater. They let us into the lobby area, and tried to pipe the audio in, but it was so muddy that he sounded like the teacher from Charlie Brown. So I left, to await the video they promised to upload to the Long Now website.
The experience wasn’t a total waste, though. The lobby area was the site of an American Express-sponsored exhibit of portraits by Annie Leibowitz. Wow. I hadn’t seen any of her photography before, and it’s just amazing. I really liked the portraits of Steve Martin (in a white tux daubed with black paint in front of a large abstract black and white painting), Yo-Yo Ma (with his cello in an autumn setting with falling leaves) and Andy Warhol (taking a picture of her, naturally). Very cool stuff. Worth the visit.
(written 11/14/03) A friend of mine offered up this piece of advice about how to deal with children, learned from experience with his own two-year-old: Offer them choices where you’re happy with both outcomes. That way, they get to make a choice and feel in charge of their life, and you’re happy regardless. Choices like “Do you want to wear the red shirt or the green shirt?” or “Do you want to eat your vegetables first or second?” The question is framed to eliminate the assumptions that the child may want to question, like “Why do I have to wear the shirt at all?” or “I don’t want to eat vegetables.”
This may seem like a non sequitur, but it occurred to me recently while considering the survival strategies of organizations, a point I touched upon in the last post. After all, isn’t this the strategy used by the organizations in power to perpetuate themselves? ABC or CBS or NBC is the choice offered, not whether to watch television. Democrat or Republican. Catholic or Protestant. The dangers of the two-valued orientation should be evident (read Hayakawa’s book for more discussion), but is often overlooked in our society. By giving people only two or three choices, it eliminates the possibility of throwing out the question entirely, much like my friend only gives his two-year-old pre-approved options.
It’s interesting because people become so attuned to societal rules that they don’t even consider what assumptions are ingrained in those rules. For some reason, it’s very clear to me that the rules define a game, and define a world-view. So I speculate on the rules of the game, and how they serve to perpetuate power. And I feel free to step outside them when I think it’s necessary. Not that I’m some sort of crazed outlaw or anything, but I know that the rules exist for certain reasons and certain situations. If I don’t believe the rules apply, then why should I observe them? I liked Heinlein’s expression of it in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Professor Bernardo de la Paz describes himself as a rational anarchist, one who understands that rules exist in society, but also understands that those rules apply to him only as long as he lets them. There are consequences to breaking the rules, of course, but that is factored into my decision as to whether to abide by them.
The difficulty comes in dealing with people who believe that the rules are the rules full stop. People who believe in the organization chart in a bureaucracy and are terrified of breaking the chain of command. People who are brought up as Republicans and will never question their allegiance. People who believe that homosexuality is wrong or birth control is wrong, when I think those are mostly rules that the Church put in to ensure that its followers would “be fruitful and multiply”, thus ensuring the numerical and eventual political sovereignty of the Church.
How do you get people to question the rules? How do you get them to understand that the rules were put in place, often by a political aristocracy to preserve their power? How do you explain that they’re just rules, like in a game, not laws of nature? You’d think it would be easy for Americans to understand this; our entire country was based on the idea that our forefathers broke the rules, and rebelled for the sake of universal principles that they believed took precedence. But at this point, many Americans are just happy to treat the new rules as handed down from above, like Moses and the Ten Commandments.
Points I want to pick up in later posts: How and why I think I ended up with a decidedly independent viewpoint? And whether I think everybody should be trusted with the empowerment of deciding whether the rules apply to them. Also, I’ll see if I can come up with some ideas for encouraging the independent viewpoint I crave. But for now, I’m going to run off to a talk by Brian Eno.
