Category Archives: Random

Your occassional dispatch of quick thoughts, cheap shots, and bon mots.

1. Why do fans yell at players, referees, etc. at sports games, even though they sit far away from the action? A few possibilities. First, yelling and chanting is fun, independent of any actual effect on the game. Same reason people yell at their television sets: let off steam. Second, the fan believes the player or referee will actually hear the encouragement or chide. This is unlikely, as anyone who’s ever played a sport knows, and especially unlikely at the professional level where fans are seated far away from the field of play. Third possibility, the fan believes other fans will be inspired to yell out as well, creating a collective sound that the players and referees will hear. This is a rational strategy and does sometimes happen. Fourth, and most interesting to me, the fan is trying to signal to other fans that he is informed, passionate, and not afraid to be (literally) the lone voice at times. I believe it explains the phenomenon of one fan yelling in an otherwise quiet section that is not ripe for some type of collective cheer. The yeller thinks to himself, “Not only do I care more about the game’s outcome than you, but I am sufficiently self-confident and independent to be the only person yelling.”

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2. Studies show that attractive men and women benefit a great deal from positive discrimination. Here’s Penelope Trunk’s comprehensive run-down about why attractive people win in business. While much of your personal appearance is fixed, to the extent that you can do some things on the margins which increase your attractiveness — hygiene, exercise / lift weights, basic fashion — this may be one of the important yet least talked about ways to invest in your career prospects.

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3. You see more men than women crying at high school and college graduation ceremonies. Why is this? In school it seems men hang out in packs more than women, packs which will unravel as its members move to different cities and pursue different jobs. Women seem to have more one-on-one relationships which do not depend as much on the total group being together. This may be one reason why graduation is emotionally harder for men than women.

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4. “The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.” – Leo Tolstoy, 1897

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5. How will we cite pages from a book if books appear in formats (Kindle, Nook, etc) with different page numbering systems? I know on the Kindle there is no way to see what the corresponding page number is in the printed edition. Dave Jilk tells me: “It turns out that it rarely takes more than three or four sequential words to identify a unique signature for a location in a written work – even a long work. You can try it out by going onto Gutenberg and using your browser search. The advantage of this is that it crosses media and format boundaries.” Perhaps this will be the new citation standard?

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6. Why are some people more enjoyable over email than in-person? The most obvious case is when a person is introverted or unusually intimated or shy in-person. A less obvious case is when a person is an original but slow thinker. Their thoughts can develop and unfold over email at a pace that works for them. Finally, self-absorbed people are better dealt with over email. If a self-absorbed person falls into the habit in an email (harder to do than in-person, but still possible) you can quickly skim and delete!

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7. “Where you allow your attention to go ultimately says more about you as a human being than anything that you put in your mission statement.” – Merlin Mann. Replace mission statement with resume. It reflects poorly on a modern employer when they request a conventional resume as opposed to a record of how you’ve allocated your attention online.

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8. How many Americans understand that Christmas as a snow white holiday — as a time of the year in which chestnuts roast over an open fire in the cozy indoors — is only true in the northern hemisphere? In Chile, Christmas is summer time. For most of the southern hemisphere it’s summertime. In my experience unless you’ve actually been in a warm climate during Christmas you don’t quite realize how local the American conception of the holiday is.

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9. After I expressed detailed disagreement with another person’s ideas, the guy I was talking to said, “Ah, I didn’t know you didn’t respect [Person X.]” In fact, my hierarchy of respect is that if I don’t respect a person I’ll rarely expend the energy to issue detailed disagreement. It’s a sign of respect to engage in thoughtful disagreement. I think about this when I find myself routinely disagreeing with certain bloggers I read. And yet, I’ve been reading them for years, so on some level I respect them more than other folks with whom I may agree but don’t bother to read.

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10. Hypocrisy, according to Samuel Johnson, is not failing to practice what you preach:

Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy (laura hetherington) him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey, without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself

The striking part in an otherwise ho-hum profile of David Brooks in New York magazine:

Whereas Bobos drew accolades, the response to his 2004 follow-up, On Paradise Drive, and the articles that inspired it, was mixed. Negative reviews gave way to critiques of “Brooksianism” itself….

Brooks took the backlash hard. The day Slate ran a takedown, Brooks was on a book tour. “I read it and then went out to perform before 3,000 people and thought, I suck,” Brooks remembers.

I've read similar stories of A-list Hollywood celebrities reading reviews about their movies and taking criticism very hard. I know Truman and Clinton were two presidents consumed by their critics. No matter how successful or famous or self-confident, negative criticism hurts.

It especially hurts when you are an artist producing work individually. If someone criticizes the company you work for, or a project you worked on with others, the impact is diffused. If someone criticizes an essay you wrote, one that has solely your byline at the top in big bold letters — it hurts. Here's one writer's reflection on reading negative reviews. I venture that many wannabe artists never produce because they fear exposing themselves to criticism that will inevitably be felt personally.

Reflecting on the negative feedback that I've received over the years — of the 1.1 million words I've published, there's more than enough crap to arm the haters of the world  — I believe that the process has made me more civil and empathetic when I criticize other people's work. I have some sense of what's going through the other person's head; I feel like I get what Brooks is saying. Despite the stereotype of the blogosphere as a place where civility sits at the lowest order, it's not like this in most corners, and for me anyway, the exercise of writing stuff in public, engaging with critics, etc. has made more thoughtful my argumentative style, online and off, without dulling any of the actual arguments.

Maybe this is the ideal manifestation of empathy: invisible yet effectual.

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Here's my more in-depth post on receiving criticism / negative feedback from a year and a half ago. Here's David Brooks' information diet.

Malcolm Gladwell's article this past May examined the "I-know-they-know-I-know-they-know" regress as it relates to spying and national intelligence. If country X knows that country Y is intercepting their communications, isn't country X likely to communicate intentionally wrong information? It's an interesting read.

On a more personal level, social situations where I know the other person knows something about me but they are not aware that I know that they know, or variations thereof, are always intriguing and challenging. Interactions bulging with meta data.

Andre Aciman, in a long, interesting essay in The American Scholar, touches on similar themes when, as an aside, he talks about his favorite French novels which have sentences or paragraphs like:

Her lover knew, by the way she showed every conceivable proof of love for him, that she was determined to say no to him.

Or:

Her future husband could tell, by the way she blushed whenever they were alone together, that she felt neither love, nor passion, nor desire for him; her blushes came from exaggerated modesty, which in her coy, girlish way she was pleased to mistake for love. The very means meant to conceal her blushes is precisely what gave them away. Her husband guessed by how happy his wife was when she heard that their friend was not going to join them on their trip to Spain that he was the one with whom she’d have betrayed him if only she had the courage.

Or:

The frown with which she seemed to dismiss the man she wished she didn’t love told him everything he longed to know. Even the abrupt, rude manner with which she snapped at him as soon as they were alone was a good sign: she was more in love with him than he had ever hoped.

Or:

I thought that if anything could rekindle your feelings for me, it was to let you see that mine too had changed, but to let you see this by feigning to wish to conceal it from you, as if I lacked the courage to acknowledge it to you.

Kaj Sotala, on LessWrong, says that in oral conversation he frequently has trouble formulating sentences and thoughts fast enough to keep up. His solution: cached thoughts.

Both of these problems are solvable by having a sufficiently well built-up storage of cached thoughts that I don’t need to generate everything in real time. On the occasions when a conversations happens to drift into a topic I’m sufficiently familiar with, I’m often able to overcome the limitations and contribute meaningfully to the discussion. This implies two things. First, that I need to generate cached thoughts in more subjects than I currently have. Seconds, that I need an ability to more reliably steer conversation into subjects that I actually do have cached thoughts about.

I agree it’s hard to think new thoughts in real-time. 90% of the things I say in conversation are probably formulations of stuff I’ve already said / written / thought about.

But if the most fluid conversations between two people rely on each person drawing upon the appropriate cached thought to suit the moment, doesn’t this mean that neither party is learning very much or generating new thoughts?

Possibly. However, in oral conversation there is spontaneity and randomness. You can never be certain where a conversation will lead. The joy is in following a conversation’s natural arc.

Real-time interaction with another mind can introduce — in the same frame, in the same moment — two or three of four cached thoughts you have never before thought about at the same time. In this way, conversation can still be a learning device inasmuch as it helps you make connections among your existing ideas and knowledge. Oral conversation may not generate brand new thoughts, but it can enrich and make interconnected your old ones.

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Here’s my popular post on in-person conversation skills. Here are annoying conversation stoppers.

It's too hectic in Chi-Chi-Chi Le-Le-Le to write anything of length myself, so I will instead pass on the following paragraphs which have recently caught my eye.

Ryan Holiday comments on the importance of doing rather than over reflecting and advising:

What caught my attention about your post – and let’s face it, I get hung up on things most people don’t – was you that you were reflecting on a process that you’d only just begun. More honestly, you were giving advice to other people because it’s easier than focusing on yourself. It’s easier than quietly setting out to do your work, creating a position of credibility and then speaking from it.

This is a nasty distraction and habit that the internet completely enables. Think about a comedian in your position 20 years ago – who would he have published those pieces to? He couldn’t have, at least until he was much further down the road. In a way he’d be lucky because he wouldn’t have this gratifying avenue to publicly “reflect” on the process. He’d be more likely to spend that time actually engaging in that process. His sense of self and confidence would be built through the result of that labor, not from the false image he’d crafted in front of a different audience. In some cases, the most honest thing to do is to say nothing at all.

Robin Hanson a few years back on innovations and economic growth:

The truth is that the artistic creations or intellectual insights we most admire for their striking “creativity” matter little for economic growth. Instead, most of the innovations that matter are the tiny changes we constantly make to the millions of procedures and methods we use. And changing these procedures does not require free-spirited self-expression. Instead, it is quite natural for people to constantly think about tiny changes to their procedures as they follow those procedures. In fact, we imagine far more such changes than we can afford to pursue.

Christopher Hitchens being interviewed about his memoir:

There are still people who want to criminalize homosexuality one way or another, and I thought it might be useful if more heterosexual men admitted that they are a little bit gay, as is everyone, and that homosexuality is a form of love and not just sex.

The close of a piece on how the Thailand riots have affected the country's notorious sex trade:

At about midnight, an adorable little girl who looks like she might be about 6 years old comes into the bar selling flowers. "Where else in the world," says Terry, "could I give that girl 1,000 baht, take her outside and do whatever I wanted to her?"

On the authenticity of Ron Artest:

We love Ron Artest because he's real. Not just as a hip-hop cliche—unapologetic, unflinching loyalty to his roots—but as an authentic, honest-to-God example of human complexity. Against a backdrop of cardboard cutouts in jerseys and shorts, Artest gives us three dimensions.