This is a woman who got Wil Wheaton to collate papers for her. Not papers that need collating. She just wanted to see him collate papers.
Most of the This is a woman who got Wil Wheaton to collate papers for her. Not papers that need collating. She just wanted to see him collate papers.
Most of the essays are laugh out loud funny. They are punctuated by bits about just how hard it is go get good mental health care (and sometimes winter heat) in this country.
Would have made a great bus book for the later busses, when people don't mind if you're laughing. ...more
High fantasy where peace and good order are enforced through government assassins armed with a direct route to the collective unconscious. They also eHigh fantasy where peace and good order are enforced through government assassins armed with a direct route to the collective unconscious. They also eat people. Well constructed there-and-back-again. The pages turned. But if there was the little deeper level (other than the actual "deeper level" the assassins took people to kill them) I missed it. ...more
Harley as a passible hero. Great hallucinatory sequences. Don't really get the floating egg guy. Harley as a passible hero. Great hallucinatory sequences. Don't really get the floating egg guy. ...more
This book was strongly recommended by several speakers at Geek Girl Con who were disappointed that Joseph Campbell’s worth on the monomyth excluded thThis book was strongly recommended by several speakers at Geek Girl Con who were disappointed that Joseph Campbell’s worth on the monomyth excluded the female mythic adventure. Campbell’s comment that women don’t need to make the journey pains me deeply.* Like the author, I found it deeply unsatisfying.
I like the idea of expanding on The Hero’s Journey; of moving from a monomyth to a multiplicity of mythic paths. Murdock proposes a different, 10 step mythic adventure for women:
1. Separation from the feminine 2. Identification with the masculine and gathering of allies 3. Road of trials: meeting ogres and dragons 4. Finding the boon of success 5. Awakening to feelings of spiritual aridity: death 6. Initiation and descent to the Goddess 7. Urgent yearning to reconnect with the feminine 8. Healing the mother/daughter split 9. Healing the wounded masculine 10. Integration of masculine and feminine.
. . . and I just don’t buy it. That seems more like a family therapy journey, not a mythic one. The steps that resonate with me are the steps that were in Campbell’s original. Also, it seems even more gender essentialist than Campbell’s original.
Murdock might have been able to persuade me if she tried. But she really didn’t. Instead, she offers variants on myths and a lot of ahistorical woo-woo. Some that really made me cringe: “Finding out about being instead of doing is the sacred task of the feminine.” (128). That’s just what Campbell said that you rejected. “As women have taken more of a role in the outer world, the hearth of the family has been left unattended, and the spirit of nurturing connection has deteriorated.” (140). That’s utter claptrap. “Christ’s message that every human being – woman, man, and child – was made in the image of God was very radical for the culture in which he lived. In the Roman Empire, three-fourths of the people were slaves or descended from slaves, and he preached that these people, not solely the emperor, were one with God. This union of divinity and humanity had far-reaching political ramifications, and that is why Christ was put to death.” (172). Don’t even know where to begin on that.
A valiant experiment but I’d rather watch Buffy again.
*The book reports Campbell telling the author that “‘In the whole mythological tradition the woman is there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to. When a woman realizes what her wonderful character is, she’s not going to get messed up with the notion of being a pseudo-male.’” 2 (quoting a September 15, 1981 New York inteview with the author. Not sure I ever would have read Campbell if I’d known he’d said that.) ...more
Begins and ends with rage. The rage of a man who knows we should better, and knows we aren’t. I read it in two breathless sittings, reading large passBegins and ends with rage. The rage of a man who knows we should better, and knows we aren’t. I read it in two breathless sittings, reading large passages out loud to my husband and my dogs.
He could have structured this book to leave me warm and comfortable, delighted that there is another humanist out there, and one who can speak such poetry. He didn’t.
Angel is on another long hard road for redemption, most immediately for trying to destroy the world to save it as “Twilight.” Shudder. Faith nails my Angel is on another long hard road for redemption, most immediately for trying to destroy the world to save it as “Twilight.” Shudder. Faith nails my feeling about that: "Y'know what? Your whole Twilight phase makes about as much sense as a David Lynch movie." He’s bringing Faith along so she can cut off his head if need be, in this largely magic-less world. Faith’s a hot chick with superpowers and a very nice crash pad thanks to a certain Watcher who got killed by a certain broody vampire, and she’s willing to go along, though she’s grumpy about being the grown up. “I’m not Spider-Man,” she opines testily at some point in the series.
The characters are believable; the conflict mostly understandable; the stakes appreciable. Also pointy. ...more
Starts out with a bang. Our man wakes up a strange city, with no memory of who he is or why he’s there or why he has a woman’s underwear. After a falsStarts out with a bang. Our man wakes up a strange city, with no memory of who he is or why he’s there or why he has a woman’s underwear. After a false start or two, a compassionate civil society more or less gets him sorted and home, which he does not recognize.
As a stranger in a strange land with known diseases, he was taking a drug called Lariam to avoid malaria. Lariam is a miracle drug. It vastly decreases the chance of getting malaria. According to the book, it was not tested under Nuremberg Accord compliant or scientifically rigorous methods – we needed it too bad. Meaning we missed that it is or at least can become a neurotoxin.
Malaria is also awful.
It starts out with a bang, and there are unsettling implications in the echoes. I tend to think that identity is continuity, but our guy had a radical rupture with his continuity. He feels little connection to the man he was. He doesn’t even recognize his dog. Who nonetheless loves him and takes care of him.
As the bang fades, he’s left miserable and afraid of relapse and the suspicion he was not a very good person. There are many drunken long dark nights of his soul.
My sympathy for him soured a bit as he started talking about Alan Moore’s “For the Man Who Has Everything.” Alan Moore can write Superman. A bad guy figures out how to take him down by taking him home – in a drug induced coma where he believes he’s still Kal-El, part of a loving family, on Krypton, part of a thriving community. It’s a great story and an apt tale for our man trying to sort himself out to explore. I was feeling kinship with this man. And then he disses it with “Even a comic book character has the sense to recognize the validity of the real over the imagined.” (245). (Which, given Moore’s body of works is a terribly fraught statement. Not necessarily wrong. Just fraught. Cf. Glycon).
I’d like to say it ends with a whimper. The feel is right for that – he never really answers the riddle, which might just be one of the main variants on the central existential trauma. He has great misery and much vomiting. But then he finds love and a place to live with a woman who has heroic impulses, so that’s nice.
He says we give massive doses of the drug that made him lose continuity to inmates at Guantanamo Bay, not to prevent malaria, but to soften them up for interrogation. That’s going down on our permanent record.
Good reading group book. I liked the This American Life story better, but it got to edit out the long tail. Many of our lives are more compelling with that that. ...more
Absolutely beautiful, deeply, deeply layered story. Nearly every sentence I paused on unfolded into a rich web of allusions that made it deeper and swAbsolutely beautiful, deeply, deeply layered story. Nearly every sentence I paused on unfolded into a rich web of allusions that made it deeper and sweeter and more fraught. Also with Batman!
I go hot and cold – or at least, hot and mystified – on Grant Morrison. Sometimes, I think he sees all the way through. Sometimes, I think that he’s tI go hot and cold – or at least, hot and mystified – on Grant Morrison. Sometimes, I think he sees all the way through. Sometimes, I think that he’s thought deeply about the same tropes that hold my attention and offer me comfort and meaning in this haunted world. Sometimes, I think he’s just varying the literary tropes of the death-denying baby boomers, which doesn’t speak to my traumas. But I just listened to an EPIC two part “Fat Man on Batman” wherein Kevin Smith interviews the death fearing Scotsman, so I thought I’d stretch a little into his broader catalog, take a little piece of Doom Patrol and see if it grabs me.
And once again, I am mystified. I’ve tried Doom Patrols several times. Steven Shaviro, my critical literary studies prof who blew my mind once upon a time titled one of his books that, and wrote rhapsodically about it. See http://www.dhalgren.com/Doom/ch01.html. And, even with Prof. Shaviro’s gloss, I. Just. Don’t. Get. It.
I think there’s something in here about making stories to keep death at bay; something in here about death breaking through anyway; something in here about vanishing into your own stories; something grandiose about that vanishing being integral to the universe; something about suicide; something about being your own worse enemy; something about the bomb; something about alienation; something about integration of consciousness; something about fracturization of consciousness; something about metatexts; something about the role of art in an age of mechanical reproduction; something about the anxiety of influence . . . but nothing that ever came into focus for me.
It’s probably brilliant. But it is hella inaccessible. ...more
Smart, fast, and Robert Anton Wilson-esque, if you replaced Wilson’s occult fascinations with paranoid internet tropes and utopian longings. Our POV ESmart, fast, and Robert Anton Wilson-esque, if you replaced Wilson’s occult fascinations with paranoid internet tropes and utopian longings. Our POV EveryWo/Man techno-phobe, Huw, gets dragged along like Rincewind on a mission to Save Humanity – err, whatever that means post-uplift, post-singularity – that s/he profoundly resists being part of.
I’m sure I did not pick up 10% of the genre repurposing. One that particularly delighted me, as Huw is unwillingly descending on what is left of the United States:
“Hasta la vista, sinners,” drawls the missile launch computer in a thick gubernatorial Austro-Californian accent. Two pinpricks of light blossom on the verdant horizon of the gasoline mangroves, then a third that rapidly expands into a fireball as the antique pre-cloud hypersonic missile explodes on launch. The surviving missiles stab toward them and there’s a musical chime from the countermeasures control panel. Huw feels a moment of gut-slackening terror. “You’ve got mail!” the countermeasures system announces in the syrupy tones of a kindergarten teacher. “Facebook-Goldman-AOL welcomes you to the United States of America. You have 14,023 new friend requests, which you will receive after this message from our sponsors. Your hen wants milking, your goat has been turned into a zombie, there are 14,278,123 new status updates, and you have been de-friended 1,974,231 times. There are 5,348,011 updates to the privacy policy for your review.” Bonnie thumps something on the panel, muscles like whipcord standing out on her arm as she glares at the oncoming missiles. Huw backs away. She might actually be a communicant, he realizes in absolute horror. She might actually have a Facebook account! She’s mad enough. ...These days, tales of what Facebook did with its users during the singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales. (102-03)
It’s like Arthur Dent descending on Magrathea. For a new age. And Slartibartfast has been replaced by – oh, that would be telling.
Ayn Rand makes several appearances and is surprisingly effective, even though the authors are careful to let us know that she’s unpleasant, her followers are self-absorbed dingbats, and “if Objectivism were at the center of human philosophical discourse rather than the fringes, we wouldn’t be here—the Big Zap would have arrived decades ago. But I’m going to be generous and let you write down the ghost of Ayn Rand as a brain fart. I won’t bring her up again if you don’t.” (321)
Oh, that was a treat. I've missed that Pratchett prose. Nice work bringing in all these seminal figures in making the world we live in, mythic or otheOh, that was a treat. I've missed that Pratchett prose. Nice work bringing in all these seminal figures in making the world we live in, mythic or otherwise.
Did not seem to go as deep as the best of the Discworld books, but still went down a fair distance.
Beautifully done. Probably very transgressive when Henson and Juhl wrote it. The story was a teeny bit too French Existentialist for my taste, though Beautifully done. Probably very transgressive when Henson and Juhl wrote it. The story was a teeny bit too French Existentialist for my taste, though the Campbellion moment at the end pleased me. ...more
Freeman “Dyson Sphere” Dyson wrote the New York Times review, which has me swooning right there. Dyson was a particularly apt pick because Kahneman heFreeman “Dyson Sphere” Dyson wrote the New York Times review, which has me swooning right there. Dyson was a particularly apt pick because Kahneman helped design the Israeli military screening and training systems back when the country was young, and Dyson at 20 years old cranked statistics for the British Bombing Command in its youth. Dyson was part of a small group that figured out the bombers were wrong about what mattered to surviving night time raids over Germany; a thing only about a quarter of the crews did over a tour. Dyson figured out the Royal Airforce's theories about who lived and died were wrong. But no data driven changes were made because “the illusion of validity does not disappear just because facts prove it to be false. Everyone at Bomber Command, from the commander in chief to the flying crews, continued to believe in the illusion. The crews continued to die, experienced and inexperienced alike, until Germany was overrun and the war finally ended.” http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...
Why did the British military resist the changes? Because it was deeply inconsistent the heroic story of the RAF they believed in. Suppose there are stories I’d die for too. But not the myth that Kahneman dethroned. Kahneman got the Nobel Prize for Economics for showing that the Rational Man of Economics model of human decision making was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human decision making. We are not evolved to be rational wealth maximizers, and we systematically value and fear some things that should not be valued so highly or feared so much if we really were the Homo Economicus the Austrian School seems to think we should be. Which is personally deeply satisfying, because I never bought it and deeply unsettling because of how many decisions are made based on that vision.
If that was all this book was, it’d just be another in a mass of books that have as their thesis “You’re wrong about that!” Which I appreciate knowing, but there’s a point where it’s a little eye rolling because they don’t offer any helpful suggestions on how not to be wrong, or why these patterns of wrongness exist and endure. But Kahneman has a theory. He theorizes that humans have two largely separate decision-making systems: System One (the fast) and System Two (the slow). System One let us survive monster attacks and have meaningful relationships with each other. System Two got us to the moon.
Both systems have values built into them and any system of decision-making that edits them out is doomed to undercut itself. Some specifics that struck me:
Ideomotor Effect: (53) Concepts live in our heads in associative networks. Once triggered, they cascade concepts. Make someone walk slow, they think about old age. Make someone smile, and they’ll be happier. Seeing a picture of cash makes us more independent, more selfish, and less likely to pick up something someone else has dropped. Seeing a locker makes us more likely to vote for school bonds. Reminding people of their mortality makes them more receptive of authoritarian ideas.” (56) “Studies of priming effects have yielded discoveries that threaten our self-image as conscious and autonomous authors of our judgments and our choices.” (55).
Halo Effect (82) “If you like the president’s politics, you probably like his voice and appearance as well.” We find someone attractive and we conclude they’re competent. We find emotional coherence pleasing and lack of coherence frustrating. However, far fewer things are correlated than we believe.
What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI) (85). Our system one is pattern seeking. Our system 2 is lazy; happy to endorse system 1 beliefs without doing the hard math. “Jumping to conclusions on the basis of limited evidence is so important to an understanding of intuitive thinking, and comes up so often in this book, that I will use a cumbersome abbreviation for it: WYSIATI. . . System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and quantity of information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions.” (86). Absolutely essentially for not getting eaten by lurking monsters, and “explains why we can think fast, and how we are able to make sense of partial information in a complex world. Much of the time, the coherent story we put together is close enough to reality to support reasonable action.” Except when it doesn’t. Like in our comparative risk assessments. We panic about shark attacks and fail to fear riptides; freak out about novel and unusual risks and opportunities and undervalue the pervasive ones.
Answering an Easier Question (97). If one question is hard, we’ll substitute an easier one. It can be a good way to make decisions. Unless the easier question is not a good substitute. I have an uneasy awareness that I do this. Especially since it often REALLY ANNOYS me when people do it to me.
The Law of Small Numbers. (109) The counties with the lowest level of kidney cancer are rural, sparsely populated, and located in traditionally Republican states. Why? Good clean living? The counties with the highest level of kidney cancer are rural, sparsely populated, and located in traditionally Republican states. Why? Lack of access to health care? Wait, what? The System 1 mind immediately comes up with a story to explain the difference. But once the numbers are cranked, apparently, it’s just an artifact of the fact that a few cases in a small county skews the rate. But if you base your decision on either story, the outcomes will be bad.
Anchors (119). We seize on the first value offered, no matter how obviously absurd it is. If you want to push someone in a direction, get them to accept your anchor.
Regression to the Mean. (175) There will be random fluctuations in the quality of performance. A teacher who praises a randomly good performance may shape behavior, but likely will simply be disappointed as statistics asserts itself and a bad performance follows. A teacher who criticizes a bad performance may incentivize, but likely will simply have a false sense of causation when statistics asserts itself and a good performance happens. Kahneman describes it as “a significant fact of the human condition: the feedback to which life exposes us too is perverse. Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.” (176).
The Illusion of Understanding (204) The sense-making machinery of System 1 makes us see the world as more tidy, simple, predictable, and coherent than it really is. The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can control the future. These illusions are comforting. They reduce the anxiety that we would experience if we allowed ourselves to fully acknowledge the uncertainties of existence. We all have a need for the reassuring message that actions have appropriate consequences, and that success will reward wisdom and courage.” But it doesn’t . (212). For example, we’re totally wrong about whether you can beat the stock market. Formulas are often much more predictive than learned intuition. I’m going to have to wrestle with this one, but he alluded to a claim by Robyn Dawes that “marital stability is well predicted by a formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels.” (226) Snicker.
Premortems Can Help. (264) before making a decision, assign someone to imagine it’s a year into the future and the plan was a disaster. Have them write a history of the disaster.
We value losses more than gains. (349) Which is fine except when that means we expose others to more risk because we did the math wrong.
The Focusing Illusion (402) “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.” We overvalue what’s in our mind at the moment, which is subject to priming.
He closes by stressing he does not mean to say that people are irrational. But, he says, “rational” in economic terms has a particular meaning that does not describe people. “For economists and decision theorists, [rationality] has an altogether different meaning. The only test of rationality is not whether a person’s beliefs and preferences are reasonable, but whether they are internally consistent. A rational person can believe in ghosts, so long as all her other beliefs are consistent with the existence of ghosts. . . . Rationality is logical coherence – reasonable or not. Econs are rational by this definition, but there is overwhelming evidence that Humans cannot be. . . .
“The definition of rationality as coherence is impossibly restrictive; it demands adherence to rules of logic that a finite mind is not able to implement. Reasonable people cannot be rational by that definition, but they should not be branded as irrational for that reason. Irrational is a strong word, which connotes impulsivity, emotionality, and a stubborn resistance to reasoned argument. I often cringe when my work with Amos [Tversky] is credited with demonstrating that human choices are irrational, when in fact our research only showed that Humans are not well described by the rational-agent model.” (411)
Wow. Also, wow. Tour de force. It's not my Batman. But it is a brilliant Batman. A dark, impotent, infantile Batman who does battle with monsters and Wow. Also, wow. Tour de force. It's not my Batman. But it is a brilliant Batman. A dark, impotent, infantile Batman who does battle with monsters and becomes monstrous. ...more
Seriously insightful, deeply meta-textual, and full of laugh out loud lines. Kevin Smith at his best. A taste, as he’s fighting a deThat was AWESOME.
Seriously insightful, deeply meta-textual, and full of laugh out loud lines. Kevin Smith at his best. A taste, as he’s fighting a demon at Arkham Asylum, he thinks:
“Every evening as I suit up, I remind myself this could be the night I don’t come home because I’ve been crushed beneath the key of a giant prop typewriter. Or the night I die at the business end of an umbrella. Or the night I die at the hands of a caped alien god who’s realized he can just as easily enslave the world as protect it.”
This Dark Night is both Grant Morrison and Adam West. And the Joker is still reading Ayn Rand with a skeptical look. I approve. ...more
Baron-Cohen (cousin of Sasha) is a professor of developmental psychopathology, specializing in autism research. He wrote this book to suggest that theBaron-Cohen (cousin of Sasha) is a professor of developmental psychopathology, specializing in autism research. He wrote this book to suggest that the scientists shouldn’t leave evil to the theologians; that much of it could be researched and quantified. Often using machines that go ping!
I think he’s right about that. People with certain disorders that damage their ability to have empathy for others (psychopathic, narcissistic and borderline personality disorders specifically) are overrepresented in prisons, while those on the autism spectrum aren’t. So it’s not just lack of empathy that drives criminal behavior. Prof. Baron-Cohen suggests that the difference comes from the fact that those on the autism spectrum develop systems to understand the world, which leads to codes of behavior; those in the unholy trinity of P/N/B don’t. My mind goes to Dexter Morgan. And Batman.
But as the book forthrightly acknowledges, it doesn’t deal with evil on a national level; the sort of horrific cruelties an individual can commit as part of communal exercise – like forcing parents to kill their own children, or men in the death camps being forced to put the noose around their friends necks -- then go home and be kind to their own children. There’s no real answer offered to Eichmann in Jerusalem. Or how a doctor in Utah (who he singles out) could put a target on the body of a man tied to a chair for five volunteer members of a firing squad to shoot at.
Having done some death penalty work in my time, I’m struck that juries in my state tend to give mercy when the defendant asks for it, and offers some reasons for it. Maybe that gives the jury, even a death qualified one, the opportunity to develop empathy. Not sure how that works in other states.
He suggests that we could reduce the violence in the world if we were all more empathetic. Well . . . maybe. Individual on individual violence? Sure. But as long as violence is a way systems enforce themselves, it’s gonna be used.
A quick read – I read it in one sitting – with a nice empathy test in the back and some tips for spotting other people’s personality disorders. ...more
Loading...
