Framing Rubiales.

5. The final matter to consider bears upon the segregation issue expressed in "tension" and joking. As will be argued throughout, individuals can rather fully constitute what they see in accordance with the framework that officially applies. But there is a limit to this capacity. Certain effects carry over from one perspective in which events could easily be seen to a radically different one, the latter the one which officially applies. The best documented case, perhaps, is the slow development of the easy right of medical people to approach the human naked body with a natural instead of a social perspective. Thus, it was only at the end of the eighteenth century in Britain that childbirth could benefit from an obstetric examination, an undarkened operating room, and delivery—if a male physician was to do it—unencumbered by its having to be performed under covers.₁₆ The gynecological examination is even today a matter of some concern special effort being taken to infuse the procedure with terms and dottons that keep sexual readings in check.₁₇ Another example is the difficulty faced by those who would promote the practice of rescue breathing: mouth-to-mouth contact apparently cannot easily be dissociated from its ritual implications.₁₈ Similarly, we manage to let orthopedists and shoe salesmen touch our feet, but first we make sure to clean what might ritually contaminate. Or consider the Sensel, the instructor at karate, who, when his students take up a proper position, ordinarily can touch crucial points of their bodies instrumentally, as might a physician, to determine directly whether the appropriate tension is present Consider the question of limits to this sort of physicalistlc framing that is introduced by the admission of female students:

When Sensei makes the rounds to test our "stance," by touching the "butt and thigh muscles, he just doesn't touch ours. After three months he finally did touch the fifteen-year-old's "butt," but he sit avoids us older women like the plague. It seems clear that twenty. five-vear-old Sensei cannot see us as other than females who can be touched for one purpose and one purpose only. ₁₉

It should be obvious that the human body and touchings of it will figure in the issue of frame maintenance, just as the body's various waste products and involuntary movements will figure in tensions regarding boundaries.₂₀ For it seems that the body is too constantly present as a resource to be managed in accordance with only one primary framework. It seems inevitable that our interpretive competency will allow us to come to distinguish, say, between an arm waved to signal a car on and an arm waved to greet a friend, and that both wavings will be distinguished from what we are seen as doing when we dispel flies or increase circu-lation. These discernments in turn seem linked to the fact that each kind of event is but one element in a whole idiom of events, each idiom being part of a distinctive framework. And here what is true of Western society is probably also true of all other societies.₂₁

₁₆ Peter Fryer, Mrs. Grundy: Studies in English Prudery (London: Dennis Dobson, 1963), chap. 17, "The Creeping Obstetrician," pp. 167-170. It should not be assumed that in the West individuals have shown a continuously increasing capacity to suffer examination in a naturalistic perspective and treatment in a purely instrumental, "physicalistic" one. We no longer have slaves, and therefore, presumably, no longer do individuals have to suffer the kind of impersonal testing described by Harold Nicolson in Good Behaviour (London: Constable & Co., 1955) :

The slave dealers, whether those of Delos or the mangones who ran the slave-market by the Temple of Castor in Rome, would display their wares in the manner of horse-copers, allowing prospective purchasers to examine the teeth and muscles of the animals, taking them for little runs on a string to show their paces. Slaves were exhibited for sale in a wooden cage, their feet being smeared with white-wash, and tablets stating price and qualifications hung around their necks. [p. 63]

In any case, one should see that allowing ourselves to be treated as objects is a form of conduct, if only a passive one. Persons being made up by stage cosmeticians, measured by their tailors, and palpated by their physicians conduct themselves in much the same way. They respond to requests to assume various positions, may engage in desultory side talk, but the rest follows a widespread understanding as to how to act when we are supposed to be merely bodies.

₁₇ The staging of the gynecological examination so as to sustain non-sexual interpretations is nicely detailed in James M. Henslin and Mae A. Biggs, "Dramaturgical Desexualization: The Sociology of the Vaginal Examination," in James M. Henslin, ed., Studies in the Sociology of Sex (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971), pp. 243-272. A useful treatment is also available in Joan P. Emerson, "Behavior in Private Places: Sustaining Definitions of Reality in Gynecological Examinations," in Hans Peter Dreitzel, ed., Recent Sociology No. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 1-97. Emerson argues that although joking during a gynecological examination may provide too open a reference to what must be inhibited, other more subtle means will allow (and oblige) participants to give nonmedical matters (such as "feminine" modesty) their due. Here see also "A Simultaneous Multiplicity of Selves," in E., pp. 132-143. Emerson's paper provides a useful reminder that when one schema applies, its tenure may shift from moment to moment and may never totally exclude alien readings—and (it is felt) properly so.

₁₈ See, for example, Maurice E. Linden, "Some Psychological Aspects lescue Breathing," American Journal of Nursing, LX (1960): 971-974.

₁₉ Susan Pascalé et al., "Self-Defense for Women," in Robin Morgan, Sisterhood Is Powerful (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1970), p. 474.

₂₀ Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), provides a text:

But now we are ready to broach the central question. Why should bodily refuse be a symbol of danger and of power? Why should sorcerers be thought to qualify for initiation by shedding blood or committing incest or anthropophagy? Why, when initiated, should their art consist largely of manipulating powers thought to inhere in the margins of the human body? Why should bodily margins be thought to be specially invested with power and danger?

…

Second, all margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolise its specially vulnerable points. Matters issuing from them is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body. So also have bodily parings, skin, nail, hair clippings and sweat. The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins. There is no reason to assume any primacy for the individual's attitude to his own bodily and emotional experience, any more than for his cultural and social experience. This is the clue which explains the unevenness with which different aspects of the body are treated in the rituals of the world. In some, menstrual pollution is feared as a lethal danger; in others not at all. ... In some, death pollution is a daily preoccupation; in others not at all. In some, excreta is dangerous, in others it is only a joke. In India cooked food and saliva are pollution-prone, but Bushmen collect melon seeds from their mouths for later roasting and eating. [pp. 120-121]

₂₁ A Borneo society might serve to provide an illustration:

The clasping of hands, or throwing an arm about the neck of a friend of the same sex, or a relative beyond the range of defined incestuous relationships, serves to establish boundaries of permitted tactile contacts in social action situations. Lovers regularly denote their status by mutually clasping waists while walking in public. Community members not related, or in the status of special friends, or lovers, are not permitted the familiarity of such forms, since each denotes a meaning of opening another close level of tactile experience. Touching or holding contacts are permitted among non-married adults of opposite sex only during instances of divination and curing relationships between a female ritual specialist and seriously ill persons. In the course of both divination and curing rituals a female specialist in the supernatural seeks out the site of illness through gross palpation of trunk and limb areas. In most in-stances, areas of sexual meaning are avoided. There is no practice of generational transfer of political power through tactile contact, although ritual and magical formula and associated power passage between an aged female ritual specialist and a girl pupil may involve clasping of hands as a symbolic transfer is effected. [Thomas R. Williams, "Cultural Structuring of Tactile Experience in a Borneo Society," American Anthro-pologist, LXVIII (1966): 33-34.]

The Lioness Queen

Since having children of my own, I have become aware of slipping a few places down the hierarchy of people that my own parents want to hang out with. Like a smash hit from a new pop star, the grand. children have entered the charts at number one. But as rewarding as grandparenting may be, their existence is an evolutionary conundrum: why does human female reproduction cease so long before death?

Hardly any other species on Earth has such a prolonged post-reproductive lifespan. In most species - including all of our primate cousins - individuals continue breeding (or try to) until they drop dead. Humans do things differently. Unlike any of the other great. ape species, we have almost no overlap in breeding careers between mothers and daughters. Instead, the period when daughters become reproductively active coincides with the time when their mothers undergo a major physiological transition: menopause. Though we sometimes bemoan this period of life as signifying the start of old age, perhaps feeling as though we are becoming decrepit and defunct, I want to offer an alternative perspective. Menopause is an important switch-point in a woman's life that serves a specific purpose: this is when we change reproductive lanes, going from being breeders to being helpers.

The menopause is not simply an artefact of longer lifespans due to recent improvements in health care and lifestyles. Across most—if not all—societies, menopause occurs at around age fifty and is accompanied by an extended post-reproductive lifespan, even among people who lack access to technology or modern medicine. This includes contemporary hunter-gatherers and even historically high-mortality populations, such as plantation slaves living in Trinidad in the eighteenth century. The age of menopause is also heritable and, as more and more women living in industrialised societies delay having children until later in life, menopause also seems to be getting later.*

* Age at menopause is also influenced by environmental factors, like BMI and smoking. Interestingly, recent evidence finds that frequent sexual activity is associated with a later onset of menopause, suggesting that menopause might come earlier when the body knows' that there is no risk of becoming pregnant.

Taking a closer look at the underlying physiology shows us that menopause is not just part of the normal aging process. Human females are born with around 2 million follicles in situ, each capable of producing an egg. This supply declines steadily throughout life: by the time she is twenty, the average female has around 100,000 follicles remaining, and around 50,000 by the time she is thirty-five. Extrapolating forwards, even with this rate of decline, the average woman should be able to continue reproducing until she is well into her sixties and maybe even seventies. But something strange happens when she is around thirty-eight years old. Now, the number of follicles nose-dives, is going into a much steeper rate of decline. As a consequence, by the time she's fifty or thereabouts, her follicle levels drop below the minimum threshold required for regular menstrual cycles.

This highlights the mechanics of menopause. But it doesn't answer the question of why. Why do women experience this sharp, non-linear decrease in our fertility in our late thirties? And why do we then persist as sterile vessels, when it would seem that we have become reproductive dead ends?

*

To answer these questions, we need to take an evolutionary perspective. Through this lens, we come to realise that menopause is the outcome of an evolutionary battle, played out over millennia, between grandmothers and their daughters-in-law. Poor old mothers-in-law are the butt of a thousand schoolboy jokes but, as the saying goes, a joke is the truth wrapped in a smile.

The science isn't totally resolved on this, but there are good reasons to believe that dispersal in ancestral humans was female-biased. In other words, reproductive-age females tended to move to live with their 'husband' (I use this term loosely, to mean male breeding partner) and his family, rather than the other way around. An important consequence of female-biased dispersal is that the younger females (the wives) are potentially competing with their mothers-in-law over the limited resources needed to successfully raise children. We can make use of historical data sets of pre-industrial humans to get a feel for the effects of this competition. In Finland, the Lutheran church kept meticulous records of marriages, births and deaths from the 1700s until the early 1950s. Originally kept for tax purposes, these records now have a far greater value in helping us understand how selection might have acted upon historical human populations, in a time before inventions like the contraceptive pill and modern medicine could complicate estimates of fitness too much. This data shows that when a grandmother bred alongside her daughter-in-law, all of the children suffered. The costs were heavy: children were less than half as likely to survive to the age of fifteen when there was competition between breeding females. Nevertheless, co-breeding was also exceedingly uncommon, with just thirty or so grandmothers (out of more than 500) being reproductively active at the same time as their daughters-in-law. In most cases, we see a case of what looks like altruism: the older females concede to the younger ones in these reproductive battles. But how might grandmothers possibly benefit from curtailing their own reproduction and allowing younger females to breed unhindered?

This puzzle can be solved by considering the ways in which the younger and older females are related to one another's off. spring. The mother-in-law has a vested genetic interest in any children produced by her son's wife (so long as they are definitely his children*). The wife, on the other hand, has no genetic interest whatsoever in any offspring produced by her mother-in-law.

* Probably quite a safe bet in the Finnish data set, where monogamous marriage was strictly enforced and adultery was severely punished. On average, the median estimate for misattributed paternity worldwide is low, estimated to be about 1-2% - the Finnish data set is likely to be comparable.

This is what's known as a relatedness asymmetry - and it weakens the mother-in-law's hand. A grandmother is disincentivised to breed, if doing so harms her grandchildren. The reverse is not true: the younger female's genes simply don't care about any costs they might impose on those residing in the mother-in-law and her children. As a consequence of this relatedness asymmetry, the grandmother is more likely to concede in any battle over reproduction; her pay-off coming, instead, in the form of grand-children. Once she is committed physiologically to sterility, she can make the best of it by helping to raise her grandchildren. The benefits that grandmothers confer are well documented and can provide the selective impetus needed to favour the increased post-reproductive lifespan. From the ashes of an evolutionary conflict, grandmothers rise up.

When all we have to go on are records of births, deaths and marriages, it is very difficult to infer how, exactly, grandmothers helped their grandchildren to survive. It is likely that these ancient grand. mothers acted as repositories of knowledge, passing vital information on everything from breastfeeding to dealing with infants’ illnesses. In some cultures, grandmothers breastfeed their grandchildren, and are able to produce milk for the child even when their own breeding attempts ended many years earlier. Grandmothers are also an extra pair of hands, someone who is available to help care for any dependent children, which allows mothers to undertake other jobs (foraging and paid labour, for example) that contribute to infant survival.

*

Another broad pattern emerging from these data sets is that not all grandmothers are equal: data from twenty-six historical and contemporary natural fertility populations has shown that maternal, rather than paternal, grandmothers make the most difference to the survival of their grandchildren. This is a bit confusing - we know women tended to have their babies in their husband's household, which might seem to imply that it would be the paternal grandmothers who would be doing the heavy lifting when it came to the childcare. The answer to this evolutionary riddle comes from yet another church database - Canadian this time - documenting the lives of French settlers in and around Quebec in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The data shows that, even when daughters leave home to have their babies, the maternal grandmothers are still able to help out - so long as the daughters don't move too far away. Increased distance between mothers and their daughters corresponded with decreased survivorship of the daughter's off. spring, likely because the maternal grandmother was less able to help out from afar. The general pattern therefore seems to be that conflict among mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law explains the evolution of menopause, but post-reproductive females direct their investments to the grandchildren they are most certain that they are related to: to their daughter's rather than to their son's children.

If women's post-reproductive lifespan has been extended by the benefits they could bestow upon their grandchildren, we might ask why grandmothers don't live for even longer. In fact, why do they have to die at all? Before answering this question, it is important to dispel the seemingly intuitive explanation that people die because they become old and decrepit. Senescence - the process of ageing - is not just a biological inevitability. Instead, it is something that is under the control of natural selection. If there were sufficient fitness advantage to living a bit longer and not being riddled with the ailments of old age, then we probably would have longer healthy lifespan. Ageing is what happens when evolution no longer sees a future for us, and selection becomes less assiduous in maintaining and overseeing basic physiological processes, like cell division. There's no point proofreading a document that no one is going to read.

So why don't grandmothers live forever? A recent analysis of the same Finnish data set indicates that grandmothers are only useful (in an evolutionary sense) for the child's first few years of life. Most of the children a grandmother can expect to help with will have been born by the time she is about seventy-five. Beyond this point, not only are grandmothers unhelpful for child survival, but they actually become a liability: living with one means that any child is less likely to survive into adulthood. This detrimental effect acts as a counterweight to the selective force favouring increased lifespan: in the end, grandmothers are no longer selected to live, but to die.

Victims of their own victimism.

Many are so angry or bewildered that they give up trying to understand what is going on. Many refuse to make a contribution to the emerging universal culture because at some point they decided once and for all that the world around them was incomprehensible, hostile, bloodthirsty, demented or diabolical. Many are tempted to see themselves as mere victims - victims of America, of the West, of capitalism or liberalism, of the new technologies, of the media, of change, and so on. It cannot be denied that such people really do feel wronged and suffer accordingly, but their reaction seems to me inappropriate. To imprison oneself in a victim mentality can do the injured party even more harm than the aggression itself. And this is as true of societies as of individuals. They huddle themselves away, they barricade themselves in, they try to ward off everything, they close their minds, they ruminate, they give up looking for anything new, they don't explore anymore, they don't make any more progress, they are afraid of the future, of the present and of everyone else.

Stockholm Syndrome for The Machine.

Not only do we surrender our work to machines that run almost entirely by themselves, we also sacrifice important parts of our lives to them. Machines tell us what to buy and where, what to eat and drink, whom to date and marry, what to read and what kind of music we should listen to. They give us, unprompted, the latest news and social gossip, and they rush to satisfy what they take to be our intellectual and emotional needs. And, apart from a handful of experts involved in their programming, they don't need us. Machines are a world unto themselves. They feed and maintain themselves- they even teach themselves, learning from their own errors and ours.

Freed from toil and worries, we should be happy at last, hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, cowboys in the evening, as Karl Marx once wanted us to be. But we are far from happy.

We can no longer get away from the machines that make this possible. The machines (from the personal computer and smartphone to the internet itself) have permeated our lives so thoroughly that if, for some reason, we are severed from them, we are no longer ourselves. Our alienation is now complete.

Significantly, we find ourselves in a state more helpless than before we started using the machines. It is not just that, by giving in to them, we have ceased to practice some important skills, lost some of our mental sharpness, or forgotten how to use simpler, yet more demanding tools. It's much worse: we have altered ourselves. Our heavy reliance on automation and artificial intelligence so wot and was and me incroncingly dependent on things over which we have little control—it is making us positively dumber. Surrounded by objects that run by themselves, we encounter little that challenges us to think. Trained and fed and taken care of by algorithms as we increasingly are, our mind is largely jobless. And when thinking is not employed, it atrophies and dies.

Thinking dies like an abused dog: famished and mistreated, all skin and bones, yet absurdly loyal to its abuser, till its last breath. As we become increasingly attached to our machines, we unwittingly start aping them. Eventually, not to be outdone, we tend to develop a whole new "machine self," one that ideally should live up to the machines' commandments: don't take lazy detours, as humans used to, go "straight to the point"; don't waste time with useless things (machines don't do anything useless); don't use ambiguous language (machines are always literal); and, above all, rid yourself of humor (machines don't laugh they have no reason to). Eventually, if we spend enough time in their proximity, we will end up as well-oiled, efficient, and dead inside as the machines themselves. Human automata. If the machines weren't the mindless objects that they are, our over-the-top flattery might embarrass them; but being what they are, they don't mind.

The ultimate irony of course is that, when a tool is fully automated, it's a feat of engineering and a demonstration of human intelligence. When a human being is automated, it becomes stupidity embodied. Artificial intelligence begets the ultimate stultification.

Only a god, or the gift of failure, can save us now.

Lifting up the rock.

Kevin Jackson: Do you think that the film caught so many people's imaginations because of its strong sense of pent-up anger?

Paul Schrader: Yes. Godard once said that all great movies are successful for the wrong reasons, and there were a lot of wrong reasons why Taxi Driver was successful. The sheer violence of it really brought out the Times Square crowd.

But I have no real quarrel with that. I think that films can be extremely violent provided they understand the root causes of the violence. I think The Wild Bunch is a great film because it understands how deeply sick it is, and lets you know how sick it is; so it not only exploits your vicarious need for violence, but undermines it at the same time. I think films that analyse violence in that way are entirely justified.

KJ: But the violence in Travis is not held up for analysis in a sociological or psychological way, is it? The film seems to have distinct spiritual ambitions.

PS: Yes. Travis's is not a societally imposed loneliness or rage; it's an existential kind of rage. The book I reread just before sitting down to write the script was Sartre's Nausea, and if anything is the model for Taxi Driver, that would be it.

KJ: And there are references to Bresson as well - the line about thinking he has stomach cancer …

PS: And the scene where he makes the gun slide, which is sort of an allusion to Pickpocket. Originally Marty shot that scene so that it lasted ten minutes or more, dwelling on the sensuous mechanics of the process.

I think that what makes the film so vivid is what has made all my collaborations with Scorsese interesting, which is that we both have essentially the same moral background - a kind of closed-society Christian morality, though mine is rural and Protestant and his is urban and Catholic; mine is North European and his is South European. We can basically agree on everything in life, but we don't express it in the same way. I once described the film as the story of a Protestant kid from the snow country who wandered into a cathedral in the middle of New York City. That conflict of sensibilities is what makes it vibrate.

KJ: Presumably there was something about Travis's character that reflected an aspect of your own - the loneliness, the rage, the wish for a kind of purgation?

PS: At the time I wrote it I was very enamoured of guns, I was very suicidal, I was drinking heavily, I was obsessed with pornography in the way a lonely person is, and all those elements are upfront in the script. Obviously some aspects are heightened – the racism of the character, the sexism. Like every kind of underdog, Travis takes out his anger on the guy below him rather than the guy above. When they edited the film for TV I didn't so much mind having to lose the violence, but they had to remove huge sections of narration because of the virulent anti-black and anti-women characterizations. He appeared a very silly kind of guy because there was no edge to his anger; you just wanted to slap him in the face and say, 'Come on, come on.'

In fact, in the draft of the script that I sold, at the end all the people he kills are black. Marty and the Phillipses and everyone said, no, we just can't do this, it's an incitement to riot; but it was true to the character.

KJ: It's curious that he should be so racist, given that your first impulse towards fiction came about because of witnessing racial bullying.

PS: Well, that's really what art is about, you know. I think one is stung into progressive, positive behaviour by an awareness of the great lure of negative thought; it's the awareness of prejudice inside you that spurs you on to rid yourself and others of it. One of the things you should do in art is lift up the rock and look at those things inside you.

Sense obstacles no hi ha llibertat.

Tan sols la imaginació, que és font d'enganys, ens pot fer creure que l'obstacle ens impedeix ser Iliures. Cadascú de nosaltres, en el seu fur intern, tendeix a considerar-se el centre del món. I quan deixa que la imaginació el domine, el seu jo s'infla de forma desorbitada. Quin límit pot haver en el meu interior per a considerar-me la més llesta, la millor, la més guapa? Què pot impedir que en la meua imaginació anul·le tots els rivals possibles?

Quan se suprimeix realment un obstacle, tot i que s'estiga cometent un crim real, es tracta d'una supressió imaginària, perquè únicament la imaginació pot creure que sense això que anomena "obstacles a la seua Ilibertat" es puga arribar a ser lliure. Com si el vaixell pogués existir sense mar ni sense vent. A Simone Weil li agradava citar en les seues classes de filosofia la frase de Kant: «La coloma lleugera, quan en el seu vol Iliure sent la resistència de l'aire que solca, podria imaginar-se que encara ho faria millor en el buit».

Behind the lines.

“An intention is more than a conscious purpose, it’s the congruence of that purpose. It requires an alignment of all aspects of one’s self. Of conscious thought and unconscious beliefs, of capabilities and commitment, of actions when working and not. It’s a state of living in harmonic agreement with oneself.

Not all projects take time, but they do take a lifetime. In calligraphy, the work is created in one movement of the brush. All the intention is in that single concentrated movement. The line is a reflection of the energy transfer from the artist’s being, including the entire history of their experiences, thoughts, and apprehensions, into the hand. The creative energy exists in the journey to the making, not in the act of constructing.”

(…)

“Intention is all there is. The work is just a reminder.”

Capitalism in hyperdrive.

Matthew Crawford, in The World Beyond Your Head, contrasts the world of a "peon" airport lounge—saturated in advertising, filled with mesmerizing screens—with the quiet, ad-free world of a business lounge: "To engage in playful, inventive thinking, and possibly create wealth for oneself during those idle hours spent at an airport, requires silence.

But other people's minds, over in the peon lounge (or at the bus stop), can be treated as a resource—a standing reserve of purchasing power." Our digital technologies aren't politically neutral. The young person who cannot or will not be alone, converse with family, go out with friends, attend a lecture, or perform a job without monitoring her smartphone is an emblem of our political economy's leechlike attachment to our very bodies. Digital technology is capitalism in hyperdrive, injecting its logic of consumption and promotion, of monetization and efficiency, into every waking minute.

Brand Africa.

I think I have the same feeling toward the word “brand” as I do toward the word “Africa.” “Africa” is an incredibly problematic word for me. It’s a word used with great frequency to describe an intricately complex area made up of people, countries, and cultures that have no more in common than we do with Uzbekistan.

But because it’s a convenient word, and a well-known word, and a geographically defined continent, we use that word to sum up and generalize everyone who lives within the continent. In a way, it really is unfair. But we’ve inherited that framework, and I think we’d be better off if we banned the word entirely.

Getting back to “brand,” the word has similar implications. Yes, it’s of much smaller consequence—it’s a trivial example of the same problem, but it is a problem. The word gets thrown around so recklessly that I wonder whether we wouldn’t be better off setting it aside. Instead, if we could use more specific words that zero in on what we’re really interested in discussing, it would help the conversation.

Millman, D. (2013) Brand thinking and other noble pursuits. New York: Allworth Press.

Dr Stranger Love: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Singularity

The true future of humanity lies not just in our species bidding farewell to Earth and expanding outward into space, but also in slipping the bonds of the “real world” and expanding inward into countless strange and strangely rewarding virtual worlds of our own design. If all of reality can plausibly be designed by computers and artificial intelligence, and if a simulated mode of reality can theoretically become more real than natural reality, then we owe it to ourselves and our society to delve as deeply as possible into those digital frontiers.

(…)

Perhaps this scenario reminds you of The Matrix, and those films’ visions of endless fields of humans kept alive in pods, unaware that their brains are connected to a computer simulation. But I would submit that the dystopian thing about this premise isn’t that trillions of humans might live their lives wholly inside cyberspace, but that they were forced there by hostile robots that had designed the simulation as a control mechanism. I believe that, in the future, plenty of people will choose to connect directly to a simulation as a means of pursuing peak fulfillment. Why does that seem like a bad thing?

Narula, H. (2022) Virtual society: The metaverse and the new frontiers of human experience. London, UK: Penguin Business.

The Curse of Knowledge.

“Education is an admirable thing,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

(…)

The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn.

(…)

How can we lift the curse of knowledge? The traditional advice—always remember the reader over your shoulder—is not as effective as you might think. The problem is that just trying harder to put yourself in someone else’s shoes doesn’t make you a whole lot more accurate in figuring out what that person knows. When you’ve learned something so well that you forget that other people may not know it, you also forget to check whether they know it. Several studies have shown that people are not easily disabused of their curse of knowledge, even when they are told to keep the reader in mind, to remember what it was like to learn something, or to ignore what they know.

But imagining the reader over your shoulder is a start. Occasionally people do learn to discount their knowledge when they are shown how it biases their judgments, and if you’ve read to this point, perhaps you will be receptive to the warning. So for what it’s worth: Hey, I’m talking to you. Your readers know a lot less about your subject than you think they do, and unless you keep track of what you know that they don’t, you are guaranteed to confuse them.

A better way to exorcise the curse of knowledge is to be aware of specific pitfalls that it sets in your path. There’s one that everyone is at least vaguely aware of: the use of jargon, abbreviations, and technical vocabulary. Every human pastime—music, cooking, sports, art, theoretical physics—develops an argot to spare its enthusiasts from having to say or type a long-winded description every time they refer to a familiar concept in each other’s company. The problem is that as we become proficient at our job or hobby we come to use these catchwords so often that they flow out of our fingers automatically, and we forget that our readers may not be members of the clubhouse in which we learned them.

Obviously writers cannot avoid abbreviations and technical terms altogether. Shorthand terms are unobjectionable, indeed indispensable, when a term has become entrenched in the community one is writing for. Biologists needn’t define transcription factor or spell out mRNA every time they refer to those things, and many technical terms become so common and are so useful that they eventually cross over into everyday parlance, like cloning, gene, and DNA. But the curse of knowledge ensures that most writers will overestimate how standard a term has become and how wide the community is that has learned it.

A surprising amount of jargon can simply be banished and no one will be the worse for it. A scientist who replaces murine model with rats and mice will use up no more space on the page and be no less scientific. Philosophers are every bit as rigorous when they put away Latin expressions like ceteris paribus, inter alia, and simpliciter and write in English instead: other things being equal, among other things, and in and of itself. And though nonlawyers might assume that the language of contracts, such as the party of the first part, must serve some legal purpose, most of it is superfluous. As Adam Freedman points out in his book on legalese, “What distinguishes legal boilerplate is its combination of archaic terminology and frenzied verbosity, as though it were written by a medieval scribe on crack.

Abbreviations are tempting to thoughtless writers because they can save a few keystrokes every time they have to use the term. The writers forget that the few seconds they add to their own lives come at the cost of many minutes stolen from the lives of their readers. I stare at a table of numbers whose columns are labeled DA DN SA SN, and have to flip back and scan for the explanation: Dissimilar Affirmative, Dissimilar Negative, Similar Affirmative, Similar Negative. Each abbreviation is surrounded by many inches of white space. What possible reason could there have been for the author not to spell them out? Abbreviations that are coined for a single piece of writing are best avoided altogether, to spare the reader from having to engage in the famously tedious memory task called paired-associate learning, in which psychologists force their participants to memorize arbitrary pairs of text like DAX-QOV. Even moderately common abbreviations should be spelled out on first use. As Strunk and White point out, “Not everyone knows that SALT means Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and even if everyone did, there are babies being born every minute who will someday encounter the name for the first time. They deserve to see the words, not simply the initials.”20 The hazard is not limited to professional prose. Some of us receive annual Christmas letters in which the household spokesperson cheerily writes, “Irwin and I had a great time at the IHRP after dispatching the children to the UNER, and we all continue work on our ECPs at the SFBS.”

A considerate writer will also cultivate the habit of adding a few words of explanation to common technical terms, as in “Arabidopsis, a flowering mustard plant,” rather than the bare “Arabidopsis” (which I’ve seen in many science articles). It’s not just an act of magnanimity: a writer who explains technical terms can multiply her readership a thousandfold at the cost of a handful of characters, the literary equivalent of picking up hundred-dollar bills on the sidewalk. Readers will also thank a writer for the copious use of for example, as in, and such as, because an explanation without an example is little better than no explanation at all. For example: Here’s an explanation of the rhetorical term syllepsis: “the use of a word that relates to, qualifies, or governs two or more other words but has a different meaning in relation to each.” Got that? Now let’s say I continue with “. . . such as when Benjamin Franklin said, ‘We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.’” Clearer, no? No? Sometimes two examples are better than one, because they allow the reader to triangulate on which aspect of the example is relevant to the definition. What if I add “. . . or when Groucho Marx said, ‘You can leave in a taxi, and if you can’t get a taxi, you can leave in a huff’”?

And when technical terms are unavoidable, why not choose ones that are easy for readers to understand and remember? Ironically, the field of linguistics is among the worst offenders, with dozens of mystifying technical terms: themes that have nothing to do with themes; PRO and pro, which are pronounced the same way but refer to different things; stage-level and individual-level predicates, which are just unintuitive ways of saying “temporary” and “permanent”; and Principles A, B, and C, which could just as easily have been called the Reflexive Principle, the Pronoun Principle, and the Noun Principle. For a long time I got a headache reading papers in semantics that analyzed the two meanings of some. In a loose, conversational sense, some implies “some, but not all”: when I say Some men are chauvinists, it’s natural to interpret me as implying that others are not. But in a strict, logical sense, some means “at least one” and does not rule out “all”; there’s no contradiction in saying Some men are chauvinists; indeed, all of them are. Many linguists refer to the two meanings as the “upper-bounded” and “lower-bounded” senses, labels borrowed from mathematics, and I could never keep them straight. At last I came across a limpid semanticist who referred to them as the “only” and “at-least” senses, labels from everyday English, and I’ve followed the literature ever since.

(…)

Richard Feynman once wrote, “If you ever hear yourself saying, ‘I think I understand this,’ that means you don’t.”

(…)

The amount of abstraction that a writer can get away with depends on the expertise of her readership. But divining the chunks that have been mastered by a typical reader requires a gift of clairvoyance with which few of us are blessed. When we are apprentices in our chosen specialty, we join a clique in which, it seems to us, everyone else seems to know so much! And they talk among themselves as if their knowledge were second nature to every educated person. As we settle in to the clique, it becomes our universe. We fail to appreciate that it is a tiny bubble in a vast multiverse of other cliques. When we make first contact with the aliens in other universes and jabber at them in our local code, they cannot understand us without a sci-fi Universal Translator.

Even when we have an inkling that we are speaking in a specialized lingo, we may be reluctant to slip back into plain speech. It could betray to our peers the awful truth that we are still greenhorns, tenderfoots, newbies. And if our readers do know the lingo, we might be insulting their intelligence by spelling it out. We would rather run the risk of confusing them while at least appearing to be sophisticated than take a chance at belaboring the obvious while striking them as naïve or condescending.

It’s true that every writer must calibrate the degree of specialization in her language against her best guess of the audience’s familiarity with the topic. But in general it’s wiser to assume too little than too much. Every audience is spread out along a bell curve of sophistication, and inevitably we’ll bore a few at the top while baffling a few at the bottom; the only question is how many there will be of each. The curse of knowledge means that we’re more likely to overestimate the average reader’s familiarity with our little world than to underestimate it. And in any case one should not confuse clarity with condescension.

(…)

The key is to assume that your readers are as intelligent and sophisticated as you are, but that they happen not to know something you know.

Perhaps the best way to remember the dangers of private abbreviation is to recall the joke about a man who walks into a Catskills resort for the first time and sees a group of retired borscht-belt comics telling jokes around a table with their pals. One of them calls out, “Forty-seven!” and the others roar with laughter. Another follows with “A hundred and twelve!” and again the others double over. The newcomer can’t figure out what’s going on, so he asks one of the old-timers to explain. The man says, “These guys have been hanging around together so long they know all the same jokes. So to save time they’ve given them numbers, and all they need to do is call out the number.” The new fellow says, “That’s ingenious! Let me try it.” So he stands up and calls out, “Twenty-one!” There is a stony silence. He tries again: “Seventy-two!” Everyone stares at him, and nobody laughs. He sinks back into his seat and whispers to his informant, “What did I do wrong? Why didn’t anyone laugh?” The man says, “It’s all in how you tell it.”

(…)

Academics, consultants, policy wonks, and other symbolic analysts really do think about “issues” (they can list them on a page), “levels of analysis” (they can argue about which is most appropriate), and “contexts” (they can use them to figure out why something works in one place but not in another). These abstractions become containers in which they store and handle their ideas, and before they know it they can no longer call anything by its name.

(…)

To escape the curse of knowledge, we have to go beyond our own powers of divination. We have to close the loop, as the engineers say, and get a feedback signal from the world of readers—that is, show a draft to some people who are similar to our intended audience and find out whether they can follow it.26 This sounds banal but is in fact profound. Social psychologists have found that we are overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer what other people think, even the people who are closest to us.27 Only when we ask those people do we discover that what’s obvious to us isn’t obvious to them. That’s why professional writers have editors. It’s also why politicians consult polls, why corporations hold focus groups, and why Internet companies use A/B testing, in which they try out two designs on a Web site (versions A and B) and collect data in real time on which gets more clicks.

(…)

Your reviewers needn’t even be a representative sample of your intended audience. Often it’s enough that they are not you.
Good prose is never written by a committee. A writer should revise in response to a comment when it comes from more than one reader or when it makes sense to the writer herself.

(…)

show a draft to yourself, ideally after enough time has passed that the text is no longer familiar. If you are like me you will find yourself thinking, “What did I mean by that?” or “How does this follow?” or, all too often, “Who wrote this crap?”

(…)

always try to lift yourself out of your parochial mindset and find out how other people think and feel. It may not make you a better person in all spheres of life, but it will be a source of continuing kindness to your readers.

Surt i torna a entrar

To establish a fresh start, people used two types of temporal landmarks — social and personal. The social landmarks were those that everyone shared: Mondays, the beginning of a new month, national holidays. The personal ones were unique to the individual: birthdays, anniversaries, job changes. But whether social or personal, these time markers served two purposes.

First, they allowed people to open “new mental accounts” in the same way that a business closes the books at the end of one fiscal year and opens a fresh ledger for the new year. This new period offers a chance to start again by relegating our old selves to the past. It disconnects us from that past self’s mistakes and imperfections, and leaves us confident about our new, superior selves. Fortified by that confidence, we “behave better than we have in the past and strive with enhanced fervour to achieve our aspirations.” In January advertisers often use the phrase “New Year, New You.” When we apply temporal landmarks, that’s what’s going on in our heads. Old Me never flossed. But New Me, reborn on the first day back from summer vacation, will be a fiend about oral hygiene.

The second purpose of these time markers is to shake us out of the tree so we can glimpse the forest. “Temporal landmarks interrupt attention to day-to-day minutiae, causing people to take a big picture view of their lives and thus focus on achieving their goals.” Think about those spatial landmarks again. You might drive for miles and barely notice your surroundings. But that glowing Shell station on the corner makes you pay attention. It’s the same with fresh start dates. Daniel Kahneman draws a distinction between thinking fast (making decisions anchored in instinct and distorted by cognitive biases) and thinking slow (making decisions rooted in reason and guided by careful deliberation). Temporal landmarks slow our thinking, allowing us to deliberate at a higher level and make better decisions.

The implications of the fresh start effect, like the forces that propel it, are also personal and social. Individuals who get off to a stumbling start — at a new job, on an important project, or in trying to improve their health — can alter their course by using a temporal landmark to start again. People can, as the Wharton researchers write, “strategically [create] turning points in their personal histories.”

Take Isabel Allende, the Chilean-American novelist. On Jan. 8, 1981, she wrote a letter to her deathly ill grandfather. That letter formed the foundation of her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Since then, she has started each subsequent novel on that same date, using Jan. 8 as a temporal landmark to make a fresh start on a new project.

In later research, Dai, Milkman and Riis found that imbuing an otherwise ordinary day with personal meaning generates the power to activate new beginnings. For instance, when they framed March 20 as the first day of spring, the date offered a more effective fresh start than simply identifying it as the third Thursday in March. For Jewish participants in their study, reframing Oct. 5 as the first day after Yom Kippur was more motivating than thinking of it as the 278th day of the year. Identifying one’s own personally meaningful days — a child’s birthday or the anniversary of your first date with your partner — can erase a false start and help us begin anew.

Real Free Speech.

Cooperating instead of competing. Telling instead of lecturing. Listening instead of eavesdropping. Compassion not judgment. Acceptance not censorship. Celebrating identities not shaming. Risking exposure, not hiding. Paying attention instead of zoning out.

That is what makes community storytelling unique and transformational. But what makes it radical?

For one thing, the pure democracy of it all. The essential structure provides all storytellers an equal opportunity to take to the stage and tell about real things that happened to them, things they saw and did, things that they want to share with a roomful of strangers. It’s a place where everyday folks, with different life experiences, joys and sorrows, have a voice. Providing a venue and audience for this sort of activity could be seen as downright subversive. Nothing is canned, predictable or especially polite. It can be raw. mean or sugary sweet depending on who is brave enough to commit to a rehearsal, have their name and bio go out over social media, and show up for the event.

The structure inspires honesty and confessional tales. Intimacy emerges from the bare bones of a stage, a mic, a teller and listeners. One night at an Odyssey Storytelling show a woman, whose mother sat in the audience, confessed to sneaking out of her second story bedroom window, undetected, when she was a teenager. Twenty years later, Mom laughed at the story along with everyone else.

Stories about shame, triumph, and prejudice; love, revenge, and greed; all presented on a neutral stage, inviting deep respect and listening. I’ve never seen nor heard anyone being confrontational, although sometimes people are shocked or confused. If you weren’t expecting to hear about the sex life of a transman, it might take a moment or two to adjust your expectations and relax into serious appreciation.

Exposure = understanding = acceptance = true connection

Radically changing minds and hearts is just one of many advantages of community storytelling. Shaking people out of their insular lives and dropping them into another reality is radical. Community Storytelling is a place where diversity is celebrated and lessons are learned in the best possible le way—from people who are different from us. By listening fiercely and intensely, we allow ourselves to be amused or scared or made joyful; we open up to new possibilities. As the Tucson Meet Yourself 40th Anniversary Commemorative Magazine so aptly put it, “The messiness of cultures bumping into each other is the messiness of democracy—the elusive aspiration of equality, justice, and respect.”

Infusing storytellers with self-confidence and the knowledge that their stories matter is radical. Exposing tellers to nonjudgmental witnesses who validate their experience by offering kindness in exchange for honesty/trust subverts the paradigm of separateness and competition. For two hours, the length of a show, a community is created. And there is spillover—friendships are forged, connections happen, overlapping social networks will amaze and make us say, “But, of course.”

Edit yourself out.

There is a wonderful book called The Profession of the Stage Director, by Georgi Tovstonogov, who writes that a director may fall into one of the deepest pits by rushing immediately to visual or pictorial solutions.

This statement influenced and aided me greatly in my career as a stage director; and, subsequently, in my work as a screenwriter. If one understands what the scene means, and stages that, Mr. Tovstonogov was saying, one will be doing one’s job for both the author and the viewer. If one rushes, first, into a pretty, or pictorial, or even descriptive staging, one may be hard-pressed to integrate that staging into the logical progression of the play. And, further, while so hard-pressed, one while undoubtedly become wedded to its eventual inclusion, to the detriment of the piece as a whole.

This concept as also stated by Hemingway as, “Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works.”

My experience as a director, and as a dramatist, is this: the piece is moving in proposition to how much the author can leave out.

A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains. What is the story? The story is the essential progression of incidents that occur to the hero in pursuit of his one goal.

The point, as Aristotle told us, is what happens to the hero … not what happens to the writer.

Crime and Entertainment.

HARRIS: (…) Given what we've just said, we know that every person is essentially a force of nature. And in this corner of the universe, the laws of physics are playing out perfectly. Whether the universe is purely deterministic or there's an added factor of randomness doesn't matter; that still gives us no basis to believe in free will. Every person is a puppet who didn't pick his own strings, and the strings reach back to the Big Bang.

But people often do modify their behavior because of what we say or do. That process can be fraught with frustration, of course. But these influences are real. You're doing something I want to discourage, and I know that you, as another primate, are susceptible to being influenced by disincentives—or punishments, in the extreme case. And it becomes totally rational to invoke all the usual means of influencing another person's behavior without attributing free will to whomever you're trying to influence.

SAPOLSKY: I agree. Whether in Eric Kandel's classic work with Aplysia (a sea slug) and all the way up to us, nervous systems can be conditioned by positive and negative reinforcement. We understand that down to the molecular level. Yes, nervous systems can be changed by inputs. They abundantly are, and the inputs sometimes take the form of what we might call punishment, when it may be necessary to change somebody's behavior. If a child gets a "time out" for doing something rotten to another kid, the penalty is going to affect his frontal cortical neurons and strengthen the synapses that tell him not to do that next time. It's a mechanistic thing—and nonetheless it's punitive. What we need to do is use punishment instrumentally, when we know it will accomplish something within a biological framework. But don't stand there and preach while you're doing it, and don't take pleasure from a sense of justice being served.

HARRIS: The wrinkle here is that the pleasure of justice, and even a lust for vengeance, runs so deep in us. The free-will illusion is so compelling that people argue (or at least feel) that the criminal justice system should acknowledge it in some way. Justice isn't satisfying if we medicalize human evil—saying, basically, that every criminal is not guilty by reason of insanity, and we'll either cure them or warehouse those we can't cure, without any moralizing about it. How do you think about the moral improvement of our species in light of the fact that so many people find retribution, and even vengeance, morally compelling, and in some cases psychologically necessary?

SAPOLSKY: This is obviously very powerful, challenging stuff. Neurobiologically, justice is pleasurable. It activates mesolimbic dopamine systems. It feels good. It has an evolutionary logic to it: Third-party punishment (carried out by an objective bystander, rather than by the person who has been wronged) is costly. It costs to have a police department, it costs to have judges, it costs to give dental insurance to prison guards. So there has to have evolved a certain pleasure, a certain reward, in having done the right punitive thing.

But take the historical perspective. There was a time when society's worst people would have been set upon by a mob and beaten to death. And at some point, governmental authorities said, "Yes, yes, we know that's pleasurable, but from now on you have to turn the person oner to us so that we can beat them to death, and tou can watch:" And people had to adjust to that. And then at some lafer point they'd say, "Yes, but now we’re going to do something more humane. We’re going to hang people. You can come and see it and bring your picnic baskets. We’re going to have a public hanging. But you'll have to ger your pleasures in some other way than watching the person being slowly beaten to death." And people adjust to that, and then you don't have crowds at executions anymore. Then we have people designing machines that do lethal injections.

At every step of the way, what essentially has been said is, 'Yes, yes, there's a certain visceral sense of pleasurable vengeance in having it done this way. But we're not doing that anymore, and you're going to have to get used to it." And people have gotten used to it at each one of those steps. People will have to get used to the idea that a damaging act by a human is like a bear attack or a hurricane. We already think that way when it's clear the damaging act was unintentional, purely accidental, and the perpetrator is crippled with remorse. We simply will have to expand that recognition further. At each one of those steps, there's a cultural shift as to what punishments we don't impose anymore, and it's just going to keep happening. Yet at any point where the line is currently drawn, it still seems inconceivable: "My God, if somebody did that to my loved one and they then got to spend the rest of their life enjoying three meals a day, that would just consume me."

Harris, Sam, and Robert Sapolsky. “The Biology of Good and Evil.” Making Sense, Bantam Press, Ealing, UK, 2020, pp. 270–272.