Just caught most of the original Assault on Precinct 13 on Netflix (I say "mostly" because less than 5 minutes from the end Netflix decided to stop working; thanks a lot, lack of net neutrality in America). It's not usually billed as a horror movie, but it's just as claustrophobic and full of creeping dread, and with the scenes of the gang members converging on the precinct or climbing in through the windows, it might as well be a zombie flick.
I guess that's John Carpenter's genius, though - it's present in Halloween, the Thing, Escape from New York... pretty much everything I've seen of his. If his characters aren't skulking around a post-apocalyptic landscape, then they're barricading the windows. And he scored Assault, just as he did with Halloween and the others, so it retains even more of his atmosphere, although the music isn't as distinctive as Halloween.
But the other thing that struck me was how raw it all was. Ignoring for a second that the inciting incident (SPOILERS, I guess) is some guy shooting a little girl in the chest, the acting and cinematography and especially the sound are like nothing you'd see in theaters today.
I say "especially" the sound, because most of the time the actors' voices sound like they're actually in the rooms where the action takes place. They echo a little bit, or are slightly drowned out by engine noise (for instance, when they're on a bus at the start), and there's a constant muted roar from LA's traffic - a sound that I recognize immediately having grown up in the Bay Area.
But let's get back to that shooting - "holy crap" was pretty much the sum of my reaction. I struggle to think of a movie that would show you that - a little girl running up to an ice cream truck, only to be gunned down in cold blood by a gang member, who utters no lines in his short time on screen and is soon dispatched by the girl's father.
Another thing that shows Assault is of its time is the fact that it dares to have a black lead. I haven't seen the remake, but during one of Netflix's numerous buffering breaks, I went on Wikipedia to see who played whom in the version with Ethan Hawke and Lawrence Fishburne. Interestingly, the role of the heroic cop and the criminal are completely reversed, in racial terms - which I find a little weird.
We're pretty self-congratulatory about how much less racist and homophobic and misogynist we are than our forebears were in the 1970s, but we don't have movies about black cops as lead characters anymore? I guess in 1976 it was kind of shocking, just like Charlton Heston's interracial romance in The Omega Man, but looking at it now it doesn't seem like we've progressed that much.
I won't deny it's a flawed movie, of course. The bad guys don't seem to have any motives, and they certainly don't have a lot of lines; the only thing that saves it from being creepily racist (apart from the black lead, of course) is the fact, mentioned in the film, that they're "unusually multiracial". Yep, there are even Asians in the gang! And not a karate kick to be seen from them, which is also pretty far ahead of its time, if you think about it. The acting, in places, is also pretty spotty, and I kept looking up at the top of the screen to see if the boom mike ever entered the shot.
But I soon stopped, because the story rumbled along at a pretty good pace - I was so sucked in, in fact, that I paused at one point to take a break and maybe make myself a drink, but was surprised to see that there were less than 15 minutes left. How's that for engaging the viewer?
I guess it's a cliche to say that they don't make movies like that anymore, but it's true. Assault seemed to break all of the conventions of modern scriptwriting I've read lately, from not putting the inciting incident in the first ten minutes, to not showing what kind of person the hero is by having him save a cat or something in the first scene. You certainly wouldn't see something like that shooting of the little girl, I feel - not unless it was a serious look at violence in our society (read: Oscar bait).
Well, it's late and this seems to be drifting into curmudgeonly territory, so I'll sign off and go back to trying to catch the last two or three minutes. And I suppose I'll have to catch the remake at some point, if for no other reason than to see what they've done to it.
Saturday, 15 March 2014
Sunday, 9 March 2014
In Defense of Swearing
In the list of things that the UK does better than the US, one of my favorites has to be the fact that you can see swearwords in British newspapers, like the Guardian. Even the venerable Economist is willing to use words like "bullshit" when quoting a source, whereas American papers like the New York Times tend to tie themselves up in knots to avoid it. This usually takes the form of verbal acrobatics describing what the person in question said without quoting them, and then ending with a phrase like, "and used an expletive".
I think this is a great shame, not because I particularly want to see the word "fuck" appear every other word in the New York Times, but because it shows how the editorial staff (and the wider culture) in each country regards its respective readership. Whereas the Economist or the Guardian accept that people swear, and to achieve a more powerful effect will reflect that reality when they quote a source, the New York Times seems to operate on two assumptions: that a child reading the paper might see the word and repeat it, leading to lawsuits against the Times; and that readers in general can't handle that type of language.
Both are kind of insulting. It's a cliche, but kids really do hear that kind of language all the time in real life, whether at school, on the street or simply on the internet. And adults, by and large, hear and use that language all the time too - they can choose to be offended by it or not, but realistically, it won't incite them to bad behavior, the way they imagine would happen to children.
It is, however, a tiny bit more insidious than that. By banning swearwords in print, we play into this idea that everything has to be "child-safe", thereby infantilizing adults as well. We're treated like creatures who can't make decisions for ourselves, and so we have to be "protected" - all because there will be someone who takes issue with that kind of language.
To use another cliche, this really is a free speech issue. When the FCC fined CBS for the infamous "wardrobe malfunction" during the NFL halftime show in 2004, it led to, in effect, a chilling of speech on public airwaves - TV stations were suddenly afraid to air movies like Saving Private Ryan, for fear of being fined again (even though the FCC ruled it wasn't indecent). More generally, it also led to an unfortunate blacklisting of Janet Jackson by CBS and its affiliates, according to former FCC chairman Michael Powell, who also noted that the backlash didn't affect Jackson's co-star, Justin Timberlake.
The real problem with the US's stance on indecency, however, is that it's so inconsistent. As shocking and complaint-inducing as Saving Private Ryan's opening scene is, it's still defended by people across the political spectrum for its artistic merits. Yet it's hard to imagine anyone defending the idea of nudity on TV (outside of premium channels, like HBO, I mean).
To give another example, at the gym the other day, for some reason, someone had put one of the Final Destination movies on one of the TVs by the treadmills. In the half hour that I was running there, I saw two gruesome deaths depicted on screen - the channel was FXX - and nobody seemed to object. It's a legitimate question, though, whether Final Destination 3, which has some pretty extensive nudity, would have been okay to show on TVs in a public place like that. I also question whether FXX would have permitted use of the word "fuck" in the transmission, or if it censored that out (the sound was off, so I couldn't tell).
Realistically, it would be nice if the US could just move on to airing movies uncut after a certain time of day (say 9 or 10pm), the way they do in Britain. It would also be nice if American broadcasters stopped assuming everybody was so squeamish about sex, but so blithe about violence. Frankly, it should be the other way around.
I think this is a great shame, not because I particularly want to see the word "fuck" appear every other word in the New York Times, but because it shows how the editorial staff (and the wider culture) in each country regards its respective readership. Whereas the Economist or the Guardian accept that people swear, and to achieve a more powerful effect will reflect that reality when they quote a source, the New York Times seems to operate on two assumptions: that a child reading the paper might see the word and repeat it, leading to lawsuits against the Times; and that readers in general can't handle that type of language.
Both are kind of insulting. It's a cliche, but kids really do hear that kind of language all the time in real life, whether at school, on the street or simply on the internet. And adults, by and large, hear and use that language all the time too - they can choose to be offended by it or not, but realistically, it won't incite them to bad behavior, the way they imagine would happen to children.
It is, however, a tiny bit more insidious than that. By banning swearwords in print, we play into this idea that everything has to be "child-safe", thereby infantilizing adults as well. We're treated like creatures who can't make decisions for ourselves, and so we have to be "protected" - all because there will be someone who takes issue with that kind of language.
To use another cliche, this really is a free speech issue. When the FCC fined CBS for the infamous "wardrobe malfunction" during the NFL halftime show in 2004, it led to, in effect, a chilling of speech on public airwaves - TV stations were suddenly afraid to air movies like Saving Private Ryan, for fear of being fined again (even though the FCC ruled it wasn't indecent). More generally, it also led to an unfortunate blacklisting of Janet Jackson by CBS and its affiliates, according to former FCC chairman Michael Powell, who also noted that the backlash didn't affect Jackson's co-star, Justin Timberlake.
The real problem with the US's stance on indecency, however, is that it's so inconsistent. As shocking and complaint-inducing as Saving Private Ryan's opening scene is, it's still defended by people across the political spectrum for its artistic merits. Yet it's hard to imagine anyone defending the idea of nudity on TV (outside of premium channels, like HBO, I mean).
To give another example, at the gym the other day, for some reason, someone had put one of the Final Destination movies on one of the TVs by the treadmills. In the half hour that I was running there, I saw two gruesome deaths depicted on screen - the channel was FXX - and nobody seemed to object. It's a legitimate question, though, whether Final Destination 3, which has some pretty extensive nudity, would have been okay to show on TVs in a public place like that. I also question whether FXX would have permitted use of the word "fuck" in the transmission, or if it censored that out (the sound was off, so I couldn't tell).
Realistically, it would be nice if the US could just move on to airing movies uncut after a certain time of day (say 9 or 10pm), the way they do in Britain. It would also be nice if American broadcasters stopped assuming everybody was so squeamish about sex, but so blithe about violence. Frankly, it should be the other way around.
Saturday, 1 March 2014
Another BRIC in the Wall: Enlightenment Ideals Under Threat as Russia Invades Ukraine
So it would appear that Vladimir Putin is celebrating a successful closing of the 2014 Olympics in Sochi by invading its neighbor, Ukraine. As I've been suggesting on various forms of social media today, this looks like it's pulled straight from Adolf Hitler's playbook - lest we forget, Germany hosted the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and two years later annexed the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, ostensibly to protect the German-speakers in the region. Of course, like the current fracas, that was more of an excuse to flex Nazi Germany's power.
The parallels are interesting, but I don't think we should take them too far, either. Even despite the outcry caused by Russia's (rather provocative) stance on gays prior to the Olympics, I doubt that the Russians are about to embark on a vast pogrom against gays or Muslims or ethnic minorities within their borders.
But it's a little disheartening how easily geopolitics falls into the same old patterns. Ever since the end of the Soviet Union, Russia has been seeking to retain its influence over its former satellite states - after all, this isn't the first time Russia's interfered in Ukrainian politics since then. More instructively, this interference appears to follow more or less exactly Russia's intervention into Georgia, another former Soviet republic that had attempted to forge a more westward path.
This should also be a continuing rebuke to American triumphalists who declared the "end of history" when the USSR collapsed. While I'm aware that Francis Fukuyama, the originator of that phrase, has modified his stance somewhat, I don't think anybody in a policymaking position, either in the US or more generally in the West, has really followed him back to a reality-based view of the world.
It may be true that we've seen the end, at least for now, of clashes between political ideologies, but the enemy of liberal democracy seems to be, not totalitarianism, but a deeply cynical political nihilism. You can see it in China as well as Russia, and potentially in places like South Africa, which also sometimes get held up as future model economies.
Note that "economies" is an important word here - the cynical political nihilism I speak of comes from the fact that everybody seems to have decided that the only aspect of a country worth working on is the economy. In his rather magisterial History of the World, Andrew Marr notes that humanity's technological advancement has handily outstripped its political advancement. He's right if you think about it - we may be running around with phones in our pockets that are better than what put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, but when we go to vote we're doing so within a system put together just over 200 years ago and modeled on something invented over 2,000 years ago.
(Incidentally, I'm referring to the republic, as practiced in Rome, rather than democracy as practiced in Athens; but for purposes of time comparison, effectively, same difference.)
But I'd go a step further than Marr, and suggest that our economic development has also outpaced political development, with equally dire effects. In fact, it may be the more pressing problem, in the short term.
In practical terms, countries like China have realized that liberalizing the economy doesn't mean they have to cede any political power to the masses, they just have to ensure that people have access to internet (to play World of Warcraft) and cash (to periodically despoil the shelves of Hong Kong's boutiques). Russia and its satellite countries have discovered that their political elites don't even need to cede economic power to a very wide section of the population - just a couple of oligarchs who can be conveniently thrown in jail whenever the folks in charge like.
It's worked for them, to the extent that in recent years there's been a lot of talk of the BRIC countries running this century. But that's true only if you value nothing but economic growth - and it's worth noting that Brazil and India, the other two BRICs, suffer from some huge wealth gaps and social problems that don't look like they're being alleviated by this notional growth into economic behemoths.
At the same time, the US seems to be turning into a BRIC itself, as it cedes political power to corporations (the modern purveyors of feudalism) and builds up a wealth gap as wide and unpleasant as that in Sierra Leone (at least, if you use New York as a benchmark for the whole country). And bricks, I hardly need remind you, tend to sink.
Sorry for the pun, but in chasing some vision of "perfect" free-market capitalism and treating economic laws as being as immutable as physical ones (I can't remember the source of that quote, but in lieu of it I'll note that economics doesn't even have laws), we're shedding our democratic and, more generally, our Enlightenment principles. You may not agree, but I certainly hold these principles to be a force for good in the world, and applicable worldwide - even if we haven't always lived up to the principles, and even if the US Founding Fathers were a bunch of slave-owning racist oligarchs, the idea of giving everybody a say in their own fate is a principle we should continue to aspire to.
Unfortunately, this principle is continually under threat, and never more than it is now, today, as Russian tanks roll into Ukraine and the US government continues to spy on the entire world's online activity. But let's at least start by recognizing the problem, all of us - and then we can start fixing it.
The parallels are interesting, but I don't think we should take them too far, either. Even despite the outcry caused by Russia's (rather provocative) stance on gays prior to the Olympics, I doubt that the Russians are about to embark on a vast pogrom against gays or Muslims or ethnic minorities within their borders.
But it's a little disheartening how easily geopolitics falls into the same old patterns. Ever since the end of the Soviet Union, Russia has been seeking to retain its influence over its former satellite states - after all, this isn't the first time Russia's interfered in Ukrainian politics since then. More instructively, this interference appears to follow more or less exactly Russia's intervention into Georgia, another former Soviet republic that had attempted to forge a more westward path.
This should also be a continuing rebuke to American triumphalists who declared the "end of history" when the USSR collapsed. While I'm aware that Francis Fukuyama, the originator of that phrase, has modified his stance somewhat, I don't think anybody in a policymaking position, either in the US or more generally in the West, has really followed him back to a reality-based view of the world.
It may be true that we've seen the end, at least for now, of clashes between political ideologies, but the enemy of liberal democracy seems to be, not totalitarianism, but a deeply cynical political nihilism. You can see it in China as well as Russia, and potentially in places like South Africa, which also sometimes get held up as future model economies.
Note that "economies" is an important word here - the cynical political nihilism I speak of comes from the fact that everybody seems to have decided that the only aspect of a country worth working on is the economy. In his rather magisterial History of the World, Andrew Marr notes that humanity's technological advancement has handily outstripped its political advancement. He's right if you think about it - we may be running around with phones in our pockets that are better than what put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, but when we go to vote we're doing so within a system put together just over 200 years ago and modeled on something invented over 2,000 years ago.
(Incidentally, I'm referring to the republic, as practiced in Rome, rather than democracy as practiced in Athens; but for purposes of time comparison, effectively, same difference.)
But I'd go a step further than Marr, and suggest that our economic development has also outpaced political development, with equally dire effects. In fact, it may be the more pressing problem, in the short term.
In practical terms, countries like China have realized that liberalizing the economy doesn't mean they have to cede any political power to the masses, they just have to ensure that people have access to internet (to play World of Warcraft) and cash (to periodically despoil the shelves of Hong Kong's boutiques). Russia and its satellite countries have discovered that their political elites don't even need to cede economic power to a very wide section of the population - just a couple of oligarchs who can be conveniently thrown in jail whenever the folks in charge like.
It's worked for them, to the extent that in recent years there's been a lot of talk of the BRIC countries running this century. But that's true only if you value nothing but economic growth - and it's worth noting that Brazil and India, the other two BRICs, suffer from some huge wealth gaps and social problems that don't look like they're being alleviated by this notional growth into economic behemoths.
At the same time, the US seems to be turning into a BRIC itself, as it cedes political power to corporations (the modern purveyors of feudalism) and builds up a wealth gap as wide and unpleasant as that in Sierra Leone (at least, if you use New York as a benchmark for the whole country). And bricks, I hardly need remind you, tend to sink.
Sorry for the pun, but in chasing some vision of "perfect" free-market capitalism and treating economic laws as being as immutable as physical ones (I can't remember the source of that quote, but in lieu of it I'll note that economics doesn't even have laws), we're shedding our democratic and, more generally, our Enlightenment principles. You may not agree, but I certainly hold these principles to be a force for good in the world, and applicable worldwide - even if we haven't always lived up to the principles, and even if the US Founding Fathers were a bunch of slave-owning racist oligarchs, the idea of giving everybody a say in their own fate is a principle we should continue to aspire to.
Unfortunately, this principle is continually under threat, and never more than it is now, today, as Russian tanks roll into Ukraine and the US government continues to spy on the entire world's online activity. But let's at least start by recognizing the problem, all of us - and then we can start fixing it.
Saturday, 22 February 2014
Reset, Not Recess: Why We Need Our Politicians to be Gamers
With apologies to Evgeny Morozov, my latest intellectual
hero, I believe that technology really can save the world. I don't mean that in
the bull-shitty tech-startup way that entrepreneurs always use; I'm not
referring to Twitter's info-anarchism, or Facebook's nebulous goal of
"making the world a better place" by connecting everybody, or
Google's increasingly meaningless motto of "Don't be evil".
No, I'm referring to a very specific type of technology: our
political class needs to play more videogames.
It might sound like I'm joking or being provocative, but
this is a serious point. And it's not even about "connecting with the kids,
man". It's about a specific way that playing videogames teaches you to
view the world.
I come from one of the earliest generations to play
videogames – my family had each of Nintendo's US-released consoles from the
original NES to the GameCube, and every time I've moved to a new place one of
my first actions has been to buy a new console, for gaming as well as
DVD-viewing.
With nearly thirty years of videogame-playing affecting my
brain, I think it's fair to say that my way of thinking is different from that
of people who don't play at all, for better or for worse. Specifically, being
intensely goal-oriented and knowing when to quit and start something over.
I don't mean that people who don't play videogames can't do
either of those things. Rather, videogames are designed to reward those
behaviors, so they're stronger in gamers, because those particular
"muscles", if you will, get a lot more use.
As far as being goal-oriented, that's pretty
self-explanatory. When you pick up a game, you're presented with a goal: get to
the end of the level, kill the bad guy, save the princess. There are a bunch of
cute things you can do along the way, like collect things or earn a certain
number of points, but if you don't accomplish that main goal, you don't win.
It's easy to see how this applies to politics, especially in
the US and especially now. The game has been subverted – instead of governing,
the system rewards parties and individual politicians who disrupt their rivals'
policies.
If you want to put this in economics terms, it looks like
game theory to me, specifically the prisoner's dilemma – the system works if
everybody works together, but falls apart when someone cheats, ie, performs an
action that advantages them specifically while not necessarily bringing them closer
to the actual conditions for winning. In practical terms, it means that
politicians are rewarded more for jockeying against each other (and
fundraising) than for governing, so they don't govern.
The other point, about quitting and starting over, is also
valid here. Some games give you a limited amount of attempts to accomplish your
goal – if you run out of attempts, you start from the beginning (or the last
save point). Other games require actions to be taken in a certain sequence, and
if you miss something important, you get to a point where you can't advance
anymore. The thing to do in these cases is to start again and try again,
applying the lessons learned from the first attempt.
There are a lot of areas in real life politics where we
could stand to rip everything up and start again. The tax system in the US is
the main one I'm thinking of here; not just in terms of how much everybody
pays, but the whole system of credits and exemptions, and the way it's become
something that you need to hire a professional to do. Another example of a
system that would be completely different if we designed it from the ground up
today is education, particularly for those in poorer areas. Foreign policy is
another, particularly our presence in places like Afghanistan.
We don't need iterative change in these areas (to borrow
another obnoxious term from the tech world), but a hard reset. There's
something to be said for staying the course, but sometimes that means getting
mired down in unnecessary infighting and holding onto outmoded notions. If our
political leaders had sufficient clarity of vision (see my first point), they'd
be able to see where to cut their losses.
So my solution is this: supply everyone in Congress with an
Xbox (because I would hate to imagine the shitstorm if we gave them a
foreign-made console), and get them to play for an hour a day during their
numerous recesses and breaks. It can be Need for Speed, or the SIMs, or
Assassin's Creed – it doesn't matter, as long as they learn to focus on what's
important again, and to try something new when the same old shit isn't working.
Monday, 17 February 2014
Balancing Conflicting Goals
Like everybody, I've got a bunch of different priorities pulling me in multiple directions - social life, dating, health & fitness, work, and hobbies, to be precise. It's been like this for the past several years, as I've gotten serious about, variously, dating, writing, running and slimming down.
But every once in a while it gets frustrating to try and balance all of these things, because some of them are actually in opposition to one another. For instance, I know that to meet more girls (and, hopefully, down the line, go on dates with them) I need to get out of the house and go where they are. At the same time, if I want to get my stories published, I need to actually block out more time to write them, but that means less time for going out. And so on.
I've heard it said that you can either be successful professionally or personally, but you can't have both areas of your life be perfect. I don't know if that's true or not, because there are plenty of anecdotal examples of both (and it depends on your definition of success, of course), but I try and conduct my life like it isn't. Although given a choice, I think becoming a successful writer just edges out personal satisfaction, if not by much.
One thing that helps is reminding myself that success in one area can actually help in other areas. Getting fitter, for example, would help in becoming a more attractive guy, for instance, while succeeding in getting published is also something that could help attract women (the kind who'd find that attractive, at any rate, but that's who I'm after). I suppose that's all a pretty long-winded way of saying that I've kind of de-emphasized dating, in favor of the other stuff.
One of the self-help books that I go back to from time to time is Goals!, by Brian Tracy, which looks into goal-setting, and how to do it successfully. He advocates regularly writing out a list of your goals in life, but also suggests looking at each and deciding which one, if you accomplished it, would have the greatest positive impact on your life. This is your major definite purpose.
To apply it to my own life, while meeting someone would be great, I don't think it would have as much of an impact on my life as selling a novel or a screenplay. Or to put it another way, publishing a novel would make it easier to meet a like-minded woman, but getting married and having kids would probably make it harder to set aside the time to write the novel or screen play.
(And yes, I'm aware of Elmore Leonard's advice to wake up at 5am and write for two hours at the start of every day. I tried it for a couple of months, and was miserable for every minute of it, not to mention not particularly productive. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman, I want to be a writer so I don't have to get up in the morning.)
That understanding doesn't make my disappointment at continually failing to meet someone less keen, of course. And if I'm honest, sometimes it feels more like a rationalization of why I'm not as proactive as I'd like to be on the dating front. But it helps a little bit.
Although, now that Brian Tracy's gone and written his book about setting goals, I wish he (or somebody else - Tim Ferriss? Chris Hardwick?) would write one about balancing your various goals. That's one I'd devour in one sitting.
But every once in a while it gets frustrating to try and balance all of these things, because some of them are actually in opposition to one another. For instance, I know that to meet more girls (and, hopefully, down the line, go on dates with them) I need to get out of the house and go where they are. At the same time, if I want to get my stories published, I need to actually block out more time to write them, but that means less time for going out. And so on.
I've heard it said that you can either be successful professionally or personally, but you can't have both areas of your life be perfect. I don't know if that's true or not, because there are plenty of anecdotal examples of both (and it depends on your definition of success, of course), but I try and conduct my life like it isn't. Although given a choice, I think becoming a successful writer just edges out personal satisfaction, if not by much.
One thing that helps is reminding myself that success in one area can actually help in other areas. Getting fitter, for example, would help in becoming a more attractive guy, for instance, while succeeding in getting published is also something that could help attract women (the kind who'd find that attractive, at any rate, but that's who I'm after). I suppose that's all a pretty long-winded way of saying that I've kind of de-emphasized dating, in favor of the other stuff.
One of the self-help books that I go back to from time to time is Goals!, by Brian Tracy, which looks into goal-setting, and how to do it successfully. He advocates regularly writing out a list of your goals in life, but also suggests looking at each and deciding which one, if you accomplished it, would have the greatest positive impact on your life. This is your major definite purpose.
To apply it to my own life, while meeting someone would be great, I don't think it would have as much of an impact on my life as selling a novel or a screenplay. Or to put it another way, publishing a novel would make it easier to meet a like-minded woman, but getting married and having kids would probably make it harder to set aside the time to write the novel or screen play.
(And yes, I'm aware of Elmore Leonard's advice to wake up at 5am and write for two hours at the start of every day. I tried it for a couple of months, and was miserable for every minute of it, not to mention not particularly productive. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman, I want to be a writer so I don't have to get up in the morning.)
That understanding doesn't make my disappointment at continually failing to meet someone less keen, of course. And if I'm honest, sometimes it feels more like a rationalization of why I'm not as proactive as I'd like to be on the dating front. But it helps a little bit.
Although, now that Brian Tracy's gone and written his book about setting goals, I wish he (or somebody else - Tim Ferriss? Chris Hardwick?) would write one about balancing your various goals. That's one I'd devour in one sitting.
Sunday, 9 February 2014
How To Be a Good Person
So here's something that's been bugging me for a while:
A week or two ago, I found myself reading one of those silly lists of how to be productive, the kind that seems to be floating all over the internet these days. If it's not 5 things to stop doing with your money now, it's somebody's 10 rules of being a writer or something like that.
In this case, it was James Altucher's rules on how to become a Jedi, which are floating around the internet in various forms. A lot of it makes sense, but the thing that stuck with me, and that's forcing itself out of my head on a Sunday night (the other options were: how I feel I was a screwup in my 20s; racism; or the joys of my new Playstation 3), is Altucher's third point, "practice being good".
As he writes,
At any rate, that post got me thinking. Of course everybody thinks they're a decent human being. For some people, it's true; for others, it might not be true, but the people around them think it is.
But how do we know we're good people, if we never do anything good? I don't know if most people spend their time trying to be jerks to others - it's just that in the course of doing our own thing, we can piss other people off (just ask any of the folks driving behind me as I drove into and out of San Francisco yesterday; I'm still figuring out the city's road network).
On the other hand, how much time do people actually spend trying to do good stuff? I don't think many people make time for it, what with their jobs, their families, their significant others and catching up on all the TV that we're supposed to watch to avoid having stuff spoiled for us.
I wouldn't say this is a call to arms for religious folks. On the contrary, what comes to mind as I write this post is Tad Williams's book The Dirty Streets of Heaven, which is all about angels who act as "advocates" for human souls. When a person dies, Williams's protagonist, Bobby Dollar, has to enumerate the good things they did in life, as a balance to the list of bad things drawn up by his counterparts from Hell. About midway through the book, Bobby has to defend a frat boy who, while he was never a braying sociopath as depicted in film or TV, was certainly a shitty person. I don't believe it's a spoiler to say Bobby loses that case and the frat boy goes to Hell.
Tad Williams, as far as I've read, is an atheist (which is one of the things that made that book so fascinating for me). But he presents a reality where the balance of good to shitty things that we do really does matter, harking back to James Altucher's 10,000 hours of being a jerk. While I don't believe my giving some homeless guy a dollar and giving another driver the finger will be tallied against me when (if) I die, I do think both actions have some kind of weight in the here and now. And I think acting like an asshole creates some kind of mental fog that affects people who witness my assholish behavior.
I might be too sensitive. But having witnessed other people's shitty behavior - one or two former flatmates spring to mind - I feel justified in saying that telling yourself you're a good person isn't enough to actually be a good person. James Altucher has it right when he says you should practice it - as well as when he says to do it through 10,000 small kindnesses. It may not be enough to feed or clothe the poor, but if everybody just tried to be a little less shitty to friends, family and strangers, we all would be better off.
A week or two ago, I found myself reading one of those silly lists of how to be productive, the kind that seems to be floating all over the internet these days. If it's not 5 things to stop doing with your money now, it's somebody's 10 rules of being a writer or something like that.
In this case, it was James Altucher's rules on how to become a Jedi, which are floating around the internet in various forms. A lot of it makes sense, but the thing that stuck with me, and that's forcing itself out of my head on a Sunday night (the other options were: how I feel I was a screwup in my 20s; racism; or the joys of my new Playstation 3), is Altucher's third point, "practice being good".
As he writes,
"Being a good, compassionate person is not something like “having two arms” or “being able to see”. It’s a quality we develop over years and thousands of hours of practice. Most people are not good people. In business, in art, in almost every “world” I’ve been in, most people I meet are pretty gray to black. It takes practice to be the person who is a source of compassion and honesty. Supposedly it takes 10,000 hours to master something. Unfortunately, most people spend 10,000 hours trying to be a jerk to others. If all you do is put in your 10,000 with small kindnesses, then the universe will return that many times over."I admit I got stuck on that point he makes about most people not being good people - calling most people you meet "pretty gray to black" is kinda harsh, to my mind. Maybe I'm naive, but I always figured most people were fundamentally okay - I've encountered a number of shitty people, and even been friends with some for a while, at least until I figured out they were shitty. But I actually think I'm thrust into close proximity with fewer assholes now that I'm grown up than when I was in school.
At any rate, that post got me thinking. Of course everybody thinks they're a decent human being. For some people, it's true; for others, it might not be true, but the people around them think it is.
But how do we know we're good people, if we never do anything good? I don't know if most people spend their time trying to be jerks to others - it's just that in the course of doing our own thing, we can piss other people off (just ask any of the folks driving behind me as I drove into and out of San Francisco yesterday; I'm still figuring out the city's road network).
On the other hand, how much time do people actually spend trying to do good stuff? I don't think many people make time for it, what with their jobs, their families, their significant others and catching up on all the TV that we're supposed to watch to avoid having stuff spoiled for us.
I wouldn't say this is a call to arms for religious folks. On the contrary, what comes to mind as I write this post is Tad Williams's book The Dirty Streets of Heaven, which is all about angels who act as "advocates" for human souls. When a person dies, Williams's protagonist, Bobby Dollar, has to enumerate the good things they did in life, as a balance to the list of bad things drawn up by his counterparts from Hell. About midway through the book, Bobby has to defend a frat boy who, while he was never a braying sociopath as depicted in film or TV, was certainly a shitty person. I don't believe it's a spoiler to say Bobby loses that case and the frat boy goes to Hell.
Tad Williams, as far as I've read, is an atheist (which is one of the things that made that book so fascinating for me). But he presents a reality where the balance of good to shitty things that we do really does matter, harking back to James Altucher's 10,000 hours of being a jerk. While I don't believe my giving some homeless guy a dollar and giving another driver the finger will be tallied against me when (if) I die, I do think both actions have some kind of weight in the here and now. And I think acting like an asshole creates some kind of mental fog that affects people who witness my assholish behavior.
I might be too sensitive. But having witnessed other people's shitty behavior - one or two former flatmates spring to mind - I feel justified in saying that telling yourself you're a good person isn't enough to actually be a good person. James Altucher has it right when he says you should practice it - as well as when he says to do it through 10,000 small kindnesses. It may not be enough to feed or clothe the poor, but if everybody just tried to be a little less shitty to friends, family and strangers, we all would be better off.
Sunday, 2 February 2014
Yes, It Really Is OK to Use Math to Get Dates
I was one of many lovelorn nerds who eagerly read Wired's article the other week about Christopher McKinley, the PhD student who used his math and programming skills to turn OKCupid's algorithms to his advantage. I've been on the site for a while, and I can candidly say it's never been my best source for dates - but figuring out a way to make it work better struck me as worth investigating. So after I read the article, I also picked up McKinley's e-book, Optimizing Cupid, to see what he had to say.
So naturally, I was interested to see dating coach Dr Nerdlove post about the article on his blog, as well as linking to an article on Buzzfeed that attacked the whole concept of what McKinley was doing.
Generally I don't really like Buzzfeed. It feels (is) a lot like a group of 24-year-olds loudly trumpeting their opinions as heaven-sent facts - if you subtracted 5-10 years from their ages they'd probably be Bieber fans, with all the hysteria and self-righteousness that entails. And this article didn't really change my opinion of them, for a number of reasons.
First, the author defaulted to the argument that McKinley was a creepy PUA type for what he did, the implication being that he was misrepresenting himself somehow. Admittedly, the thing about creating a bunch of bots to collect information about all of LA's female OKCupid profiles might give reasonable people pause. But the whole tone of the Buzzfeed article seems to be schoolmarmish horror that someone attempted to improve his odds of meeting someone on the site by means other than browsing at random, firing off a message and waiting in vain for a response.
Frankly, that can be soul-destroying - wading through ten or twenty profiles in one night that all talk about how much they love traveling, red wine and curling up on the sofa to watch a cheesy film (or insert your favorite cliches for male profiles). So figuring out a better way of putting people in front of each other who should click in real life according to OKCupid seems like common sense - why continue playing a game that's rigged against you?
The article also appears to misunderstand the difference between dating and meeting someone from the internet face to face. This is possibly because Wired's coverage ran with the headline that McKinley went on almost 90 "dates" in two months. McKinley himself characterizes those as "meetups" rather than dates, which seems logical to me, especially because very few, if any, of those meetups had a sequel. In the book McKinley is at pains to point out that the real test of whether you click is when you meet face to face - hardly the words of a PUA guru out to, essentially, hypnotize girls into blowing him.
But that's one of the other things that bothered me about Buzzfeed's response. It bespeaks some kind of visceral reaction of distaste to that headline (90 dates in two months! Sometimes, "classily", 2 dates per day!), but also no real effort to go beyond the headline and see what the real story is. Given that Buzzfeed appears to have set itself up as some kind of internet gadfly, did they really have to run a story within 48 hours of the Wired article? If you're going to comment on things happening on the internet, rather than just reporting on them, then find out what the real story is.
The other thing that bothered me about this response was how much it reminded me of that Gawker/Gizmodo article from a few years ago where one of the writers went on a date with someone who turned out to be a nerd. Specifically, a hardcore Magic: The Gathering player, which caused her to back away in horror (frankly, she'd have won my sympathy if she'd just talked about the awfulness of being taken to a stage play based on Jeffrey Dahmer's life).
What both articles seem to have in common is this idea that if you aren't "normal", and into "normal" things, like hedge funds and football and whatever else grown-ups are supposed to be into these days, or you try to find dates online in a non-traditional manner, then you're some kind of pariah. I'm not saying the woman from Gizmodo should have let the guy get into her pants - chemistry is chemistry, and if you're not feeling it, that's totally legitimate. And as I said above, the Buzzfeed writer's article read like an ex post facto justification why she felt such distaste for McKinley's story; I can't really argue with her gut reaction.
But, you know, seek first to understand, as Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People recommends. Things that seem odd or distasteful at first glance aren't necessarily so once you've really looked into them. If Buzzfeed can't do that, then they should stick to making stupid lists of things people say on Twitter (and possibly informing the people being quoted).
So naturally, I was interested to see dating coach Dr Nerdlove post about the article on his blog, as well as linking to an article on Buzzfeed that attacked the whole concept of what McKinley was doing.
Generally I don't really like Buzzfeed. It feels (is) a lot like a group of 24-year-olds loudly trumpeting their opinions as heaven-sent facts - if you subtracted 5-10 years from their ages they'd probably be Bieber fans, with all the hysteria and self-righteousness that entails. And this article didn't really change my opinion of them, for a number of reasons.
First, the author defaulted to the argument that McKinley was a creepy PUA type for what he did, the implication being that he was misrepresenting himself somehow. Admittedly, the thing about creating a bunch of bots to collect information about all of LA's female OKCupid profiles might give reasonable people pause. But the whole tone of the Buzzfeed article seems to be schoolmarmish horror that someone attempted to improve his odds of meeting someone on the site by means other than browsing at random, firing off a message and waiting in vain for a response.
Frankly, that can be soul-destroying - wading through ten or twenty profiles in one night that all talk about how much they love traveling, red wine and curling up on the sofa to watch a cheesy film (or insert your favorite cliches for male profiles). So figuring out a better way of putting people in front of each other who should click in real life according to OKCupid seems like common sense - why continue playing a game that's rigged against you?
The article also appears to misunderstand the difference between dating and meeting someone from the internet face to face. This is possibly because Wired's coverage ran with the headline that McKinley went on almost 90 "dates" in two months. McKinley himself characterizes those as "meetups" rather than dates, which seems logical to me, especially because very few, if any, of those meetups had a sequel. In the book McKinley is at pains to point out that the real test of whether you click is when you meet face to face - hardly the words of a PUA guru out to, essentially, hypnotize girls into blowing him.
But that's one of the other things that bothered me about Buzzfeed's response. It bespeaks some kind of visceral reaction of distaste to that headline (90 dates in two months! Sometimes, "classily", 2 dates per day!), but also no real effort to go beyond the headline and see what the real story is. Given that Buzzfeed appears to have set itself up as some kind of internet gadfly, did they really have to run a story within 48 hours of the Wired article? If you're going to comment on things happening on the internet, rather than just reporting on them, then find out what the real story is.
The other thing that bothered me about this response was how much it reminded me of that Gawker/Gizmodo article from a few years ago where one of the writers went on a date with someone who turned out to be a nerd. Specifically, a hardcore Magic: The Gathering player, which caused her to back away in horror (frankly, she'd have won my sympathy if she'd just talked about the awfulness of being taken to a stage play based on Jeffrey Dahmer's life).
What both articles seem to have in common is this idea that if you aren't "normal", and into "normal" things, like hedge funds and football and whatever else grown-ups are supposed to be into these days, or you try to find dates online in a non-traditional manner, then you're some kind of pariah. I'm not saying the woman from Gizmodo should have let the guy get into her pants - chemistry is chemistry, and if you're not feeling it, that's totally legitimate. And as I said above, the Buzzfeed writer's article read like an ex post facto justification why she felt such distaste for McKinley's story; I can't really argue with her gut reaction.
But, you know, seek first to understand, as Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People recommends. Things that seem odd or distasteful at first glance aren't necessarily so once you've really looked into them. If Buzzfeed can't do that, then they should stick to making stupid lists of things people say on Twitter (and possibly informing the people being quoted).
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