The only meta-resolution I need

I long ago gave up on New Years resolutions that involved improving myself.  Not that I can't stand improvement, but self-improvement is so incremental that it is not amenable to any great statement of intent.  Instead, I picked a grand meta-resolution:  to make only resolutions that involve having more fun.

I'm not alone in directing my attention to work.  That's fine and necessary:  I have a demanding day job, and write my fiction mornings and weekends.  But I sometimes neglect to have the fun that is kind of the point of being alive.  Making resolutions to do so seems a bit absurd, but I find that they pay off.  I resolve to see more movies, see more friends, and do other things I enjoy.

So today, when a friend called to take advantage of a beautiful snowfall we just had to go cross-country skiing, I did it.  I had things I could have done at home, and even had to consider it a bit, but, really, doing anything else would have been dumb.  I'll see if I can keep it up.  I never get out to the movies enough, even though I make the same resolution on that year after year.  But the meta-resolution remains.

Where I'll be at Arisia

I will be at Arisia (Cambridge, MA  Jan 15-18).  Here is my schedule, with comments:

Friday, 8 PM, The Best Science Fiction of 2009
Ian Randall Strock, Gardners Dozois, Candra Gill, James L. Cambias

People try to put me on panels like this all the time, and I always dodge, because I don't read enough SF in any given year to participate adequately.  But Gardner requested my presence, and I have obeyed.

Saturday, 2 PM, The Next -Punk
Mario Di Giacomo (moderator), Sarah Smith, Rachel Silber, Israel Peskowitz

If I can't keep up with the present, how can I discern the path of the genre in the future?  This time it is my old friend and housemate Rachel Silber who is responsible, and again I obey.

Saturday, 4 PM, Whither Hard SF?
Allen Steele, Danielle Ackley-McPhail, Stephen R Wilk, Mark L Van Name

"Whither"? In the future, all hard SF will involve archaic grammatical constructions!

Sunday, 2:30 PM, Reading
Just me.

I'll probably read from the new book, Brain Thief.  What else?

You can get anything you want, as long as it's what everyone else wants

My mother, who grew up in the Soviet Union, always said that about the United States.  So even when she came to this country, in the 50s, she was noticing the lack of a Long Tail.  This wasn't Henry Ford producing Model Ts in only black, this was a general problem of production for small market segments.

We're supposed to be over that, aren't we?  So why am I having so much trouble finding a non-widescreen monitor?  My monitor stopped working yesterday, in the middle of actual dayjob work (I don't usually work from home, but my son broke his leg and needed someone in the house with him).  A quick check with the laptop revealed a huge selection of big widescreen monitors at nice prices--one of which I eventually bought at a Staples around the corner.

I spend most of my time on this screen writing.  A widescreen gives me lines that are too long to read comfortably.  And I have no interest in having multiple windows visible--even single tasking puts a serious strain on my underpowered brain.  Surely I'm not the only one who wants this.  Why, then, is a simple portrait-orientation monitor suddenly so hard to find?

I felt the same way when, back in the days of PDAs, they all went color.  I kept addresses, dates, and other such information on it.  All color meant was that battery life went way down.  Then, with cell phones, the same thing happened.

This isn't some kind of curmudgeonly "I liked it better before" thing--at least I don't think it is.  It's a "why can't I buy it if I want it?" thing.

It's also a "is everyone else crazy?" thing.  I would have guessed the market would be split into the two types, with work-oriented people getting one, and entertainment-oriented people getting the other.  Does this show I would have failed in monitor marketing, or that I would have scored a success in an underserved market segment?

Just mark this market segment underserved.

A rose by any other name

How many articles, books, and blog posts have this as a title?  I'm not even going to google it--go ahead if you want to.

But the question is, would it smell as sweet?  More and more studies show how subject our perceptions are to context, expectation, and the inherent hacked-together nature of our sensory circuits.  We think we perceive things, but that is largely an illusion.  Sometimes this happens even when we are prepared for it:  even if you know the lines in the optical illusion are actually straight, you see them as curved.

But when Juliet goes into her semiotic discussion of Romeo's name (Romeo and Juliet, Act II Scene II) she's misleading us--part of the excitement of Romeo is that he is forbidden, a bad boy Montague.  If he changed his name, he'd be less interesting.

A company name is that way too.  It seems like no big deal--let's call ourselves something, people know how good we are at what we do, after all, it won't make much difference.  Only it can, it really can.  People, even in their professional capacities, make capricious and arbitrary decisions all the time.  They don't t hink they do, of course.  If holding something warm makes you think of a new person you meet as having a warmer personality, without your having any idea that you're being influenced, you have to know that a company's name can influence you at an unconscious level.

Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that you need to drop half a million dollars on that plausible branding company's year-long rebranding scheme, but it does mean you shouldn't take it for granted.  And you should give it the time and resources it deserves.

This is occupying a certain amount of my time at work, with a fair amount of stress.

Habit is everything

And the most important conscious decision you can make is what habits to acquire.  Conscious decisions otherwise seem almost epiphenomenal, "say it, brother!" exclamations to validate unconscious decisions already made.

So I biked to work today, though the day never got above 15 F.  I'd never start biking on a day like today, but I have a habit, and so it actually takes a carefully considered decision to keep me from biking in.  Fortunately, the modern world is full of great equipment:  with balaklava, neoprene booties, lobster mitts, and warm jacket, it's really not uncomfortable.  The worst is the tiresome unpeeling when I get to work.

I've been too busy at work to get to the gym at lunch, so this has been my only workout for the past few days.  If you have to exercise in order to get home, you are way more likely to do it.

What caused the financial crisis?

Another of the ways I make my bike ride to work more dangerous is listening to podcasts from Russ Roberts' Econtalk.  Roberts is a great interviewer, and sounds quite boyish.  The best of the recent ones was one with Charles Calomiris, about the banking crisis.  Calomiris manages to talk at great speed with complete clarity on a complex topic, barely letting the usually gabby Roberts get a word in edgewise.  "All I learned about economics I learned from reading blogs" isn't completely true of me, but has a lot of truth in it--and most economics books I've read are by people who blog as well.  Despite these less than impressive credentials, I think I understood Calomiris pretty well.

Moral hazard is behind a lot of what goes wrong, not just in banking, but in healthcare as well.  Build a guardrail, and people not only get closer to the precipice than they would otherwise, they lean on it, then build their houses on it.  Everyone is enraged when it breaks and everyone falls in.  Don't blame Calomiris for this metaphor--it's all my own.

Calomiris is dismissive of securitization and "originate and distribute" as the causes, and is persuasive on that score.

The interview is worth a listen, maybe two--I think it covers a lot of issues very clearly.  The Richard Posner interview on the same topic a few weeks later was quite otherwise.  Though I'm a big fan (I love Sex and Reason), I thought he was dull and a bit of a blowhard--I'm not persuade he's the right person to go to on this topic.  Calomiris clearly is.  I'll tell you what I learned about the FDIC some other time.

Giving voice to silent cars

In its annual Ideas issue, the NYT Magazine notes that hybrid and electric cars are completely silent, which makes them dangerous to pedestrians, who can't hear them coming.

I certainly depend, almost unconsciously, on the sound of approaching cars while I'm bicycling.

In fact, I think people underestimate how noisy cars really are, being so used to them.  I wouldn't mind things getting quieter, without sacrificing those unconscious cues we use to keep ourselves safe.  The article wonders what sound would be best, but doesn't mention one that might be fun:  the clipclop of hooves and the neighing of horses.  With a little effort, we could have the soundscape of a 19th century street, without the smell- and turdscape.

Russian light show

Rockets stopped being entertaining long before we actually managed to land on the Moon, but it seems that the Russians are working on ways of making them fun again.  Just think:  mysterious blue spirals in the sky!  Who needs the things to actually do anything?

I remember reading the people in northern Russia always saw a lot of UFOs, because the secret cosmodrome at Plesetsk fired off all sorts of rockets without ever informing anyone of the base's existence.  NASA has been much less entertaining of late.

However, the most interesting phrase in the story I linked to is "Celebrity astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaar".  This guy could get a reality show just based on that attributed title and his name alone.

The evolution of metaphor

From Peter Frost, of Evo and Proud  something I've read about elsewhere: that we really do tend to think of someone as having a "warmer" personality if we are holding something warm, and that washing really does make us feel less guilty--Pilate was on to something.

This stimulates three thoughts.  One: we always overestimate the influence of our thoughts in our decisions, and underestimate things we don't even perceive.  Two: metaphor is woven into the very way we perceive the universe. It's not just a rhetorical technique.  Three: knowing about this and taking it into account can help you control your environment to allow for more rational decisionmaking (that is, if that is your goal.  It is mine.)

Frost thinks this means we are reusing neural pathways evolved for other purposes, which explains the seeming high heritability of complex and recently evolved behaviors.  I think we've only just started moving toward an understanding of where our sense of the world really comes from.

The romance of employment

While romantic literature is concerned with getting a proposal of marriage, much modern science fiction is concerned with getting a job offer. And while the mate is supposed to be worthy, as well as worth much, the company doing the hiring is supposed to be interesting, important, and innovative. The real difference is that SF deals with exciting jobs, but romantic fiction usually drops the happy couple at the church and goes on its way.

I thought of this recently, after Neil Stephenson's Anathem, where all the characters eventually get recruited into a complex mission, and Bruce Sterling's The Caryatids, where all the various characters (all clones of the same person) get recruited to save the world--retrogressively sleeping with the man hiring them in the bargain (you didn't think we could get rid of that other "romance" in the process, did you? It just has to happen in the workplace.) William Gibson has a lot of hiring and employment in his books, and I'd say it was a fairly common trope.

Most of the writers of these books, on the other hand, are unwilling-to-be-employed freelancers, which allows them to romanticise the workplace without worrying about the realities of quarterly numbers, Yankee swaps at the holiday party, and notices about keeping the microwave clean.

Jane Austen never got married, either.

The social construction of climate change

Us rational nerd-type folks were irritated during the Science Wars (remember them? I suspect we have an armistice, but not a permanent peace) with various postmodern views of the scientific enterprise, including social construction and feminist epistemology, and were delighted by daring forays into the enemy's territory, like Sokal's Hoax. After all, when we write hard SF, we try to base it on reasonable modifications to the current scientific understanding of the universe. We do assume there is such a thing, and that it has something to do with the actual universe.

The recent furor over the stolen emails at the Climate Studies Unit at the University of East Anglia shows that the "current scientific understanding" of anthropogenic global warming is not socially constructed, but may be a bit slipperier than might seem at first.

Modernity's great generators of knowledge and wealth--trade, science, democracy--all involve managing the natural human urges to cooperate with those closest to us (thus building long-lasting personal bonds) in order to allow for large-scale anonymous information-maximizing transactions (thus making us richer and smarter).

Refusing nepotism, cronyism, and groupthink isn't easy. It violates all our natural hunting-band ingroup/outgroup default mental habits. So there is nothing weird or incomprehensible about what happened at the CSU, but there is nothing admirable either. Keeping objectivity is a constant struggle, because we so hate its results. Any coherent mental practice eventually leads to a result you are emotionally uncomfortable with: it's a sign (thought not a guarantee) that you are maintaining consistency. The CSU community seems to have gotten to like each other a bit too much.

For much of the louder part of the world, of course, the truth or falsehood of AGW is not the issue. Coalition is the issue. AGW has no more objective meaning to such people than the presence or absence of Filioque in the Creed, or Socialism in One Country, or wearing white after Labor Day (and, yes, I know people have died, at least for the first two, so I am aware such issues can lead to bloody results).

But we can't worry about the voices of those people when we are seeking some kind of knowlege. Ignoring them can sometimes be the hardest part of true science. What happened at CSU might be "inevitable". But so are plane crashes and house fires. We do our best to make sure they happen as infrequently as possible, with as little loss of life as possible.

Afterlife porn

From Cat Valente, a brilliant post on mainstream attempted use of fantasy techniques without really understanding them (via the estimable Theodora Goss), and the creation of a useful term:  afterlife porn.

Because that's it. What passes for fantastic fiction in the mainstream is almost entirely this: "You Will Not Die, And Neither Will Those You Love". There are other elements, certainly, but that is the underlying point of its writing and its reading.

So, of course, there is no underlying logic or structure to it. The more fictional plausibility the author creates, the less spiritual plausibility it has, because it becomes about the writer's creative work, and not the reader's denial of death. Those damn writers and their fictions. Just messes up a good book.

The still-living spirits of the dead are not part of daily life (for most people, anyway), so techniques of fantastic fiction seem a natural tool to use. But in the cases at hand these techniques are the accidents of fantasy, and not their substance (using the terminology of Aristotelian physics for literary criticism is perverse, I'm aware, and I suppose there are better literary terms for what I'm talking about, but I don't know what they are--Dora will know).

In her own post referring to Ms. Valente's rant, Dora (I use her first name because, believe or not, I actually know her.  Not her fault, it just happened) goes off on The Time Traveler's Wife.  Now, I actually liked TTTW better than she did (and felt weird liking it--not my usual thing), but it, again, is about denial of death. Dora sees it as a Scenes From a Marriage kind of thing merely, but I think it too is a kind of afterlife porn, with that being a significant emotional element.

Now Ms. Valente and Dora have me thinking, always a dangerous thing. Fear of death makes you accept all sorts of implausibilities. There are people who believe in ghosts, reincarnation, and the afterlife, all at the same time. I suspect those people are not usually readers of my books, or Ms. Valente's or Dora's either.

"In Our Time"

I ride my bike to work and listen to lectures and podcasts while I do it. Not optimally safe, I suppose, but I can hear traffic, and I've been doing it for years.

Aside from The Teaching Company classes I've mentioned before, I like the various episodes of In Our Time, from BBC4.  Melvyn Bragg interviews three different people a week, usually university professors, on a topic of intellectual interest, whether Boethius, the Ediacaran biota, or Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy. Bragg is pretty good at keeping the various dons on topic.

The most recent episode is available on the site as a podcast, and you can listen to the previous ones. I particularly liked the one on the Baroque, and the aforementioned revenge tragedy one.  Bragg did a four part series on Darwin, in honor of the anniversary, that was fun and comprehensive.

Writers and word counts

Some writers post their daily word count on their blogs. To me that seems both weirdly intimate and completely uninformative, but maybe that's because I do not manage to generate anywhere near as many words as these people tend to. Word counters don't seem to post things like "15", "121", "0", "0", "erased everything I wrote last week and then threw up"--they post robust and intimidating numbers instead.

It's not that I don't track my word production. I do. I even (to be weirdly intimate in my own way) graph moving averages, etc. as a way of making sure I'm keeping my pace up.

But that number, while not completely meaningless, is quite misleading. I generally write a lot, and then spend a lot of time rewriting, cutting, rewriting, cutting. I don't usually throw up, but that would not be out of place. So for me that word production number is more "wheat seed sown" rather than "baked loaves of bread delivered". In the current credit environment, no one is lending me money against that.

Using the Peloponnesian War

It was a nasty little regional war, with combat from Sicily to the Hellespont, lasting (with poorly adhered-to truces) for 27 years, involving all the great Greek states (wealthy farming Thebes and oligarchic commercial Corinth as well as the better-known war-geek Sparta and art-for-our-sake imperial/democratic Athens), and many smaller ones, often involuntarily, with brutal massacres, sieges, ethnic cleansings, dramatic turnarounds, and plagues. Being written about by Thucydides sealed its interest for well over two thousand years.

The Peloponnesian War was popular during the Cold War, since it asked various questions of interest, like:

• Can a democracy successfully fight a long war that requires a lot of sacrifice from its population? (Answer: yes, extremely well, but you don't want to be a general in its army or navy. If you fail they execute or exile you, and if you succeed they fete you, then become suspicious of you and execute or exile you)
• If the main path to victory is blocked by a determined opponent, should you try striking in an unexpected place? (Answer: often it's unexpected because it's dumb. Try to avoid high-risk enterprises that, even if successful, have minimal payoffs.  We should all fear a Syracusan Expedition, but instead find the concept of a surprise end-run around a stalemate irresistable.)
• Can terrorizing civilian populations and destroying resources win a war without crushing the opponent's main force? (Answer: no, but it has a weird sort of satisfaction that can become dangerously addictive.)
• Who is more effective at war, determined tyrannies or fractious democracies? (Answer: the judgments of battlefields can be fickle, and chance can play a large role. But no matter who wins, democracies have staying power:  Athens lost, and then regained its prosperity and dominance--before losing all to Philip of Macedon and his nasty little boy, Alexander, in the next century.)

Victor Davis Hanson's A War Like No Other taught me a lot about the ground level truth of that war. Highly recommended to anyone trying to depict realistic state-level combat with Classical-era edged weapons. It's a painful, bloody grind. You have to watch your back as well as your front, and you may do everything right and still die of plague.

Five reasons writers don't improve with age

I had dinner with my old friend Bob Klonowski last week, and he asked me an exasperated question:  why do writers seem to get worse as they get older? If writing is a skill (and it certainly is), why shouldn't increased experience with technique, as well as extended encounters with other human beings, cause writers to improve? He had had several bad experiences with writers he had once enjoyed, and was interested in an explanation.

I didn't have an answer, or even any good counterexamples, but in a related article, Terry Teachout, recently wrote about artists who stop producing, indicating that this is often a good thing, because later work, when produced, tends not to match the quality of earlier, thus bolstering Bob's point.

"I'm a big fan of his early work" is a standard joke.  But is it true?  And if it is, why is it true?

I had a couple of explanations for Bob, and a couple I thought of later.

1. Lack of editing.  Many writers are more the creations of their editors than they would like to acknowledge.  Chop the worst-quality 10 percent (or 20 percent, or 30) of any work, and it likely would be improved.  In a writer's early days, the editorial requirements often cause that to happen. When a writer starts selling, and has a reputation, editing falls by the wayside. Even formerly perceptive friends and colleagues are deluded by the simple fact of success into thinking that editing is no longer as important.
2. Related to lack of editing is the simple fact that a writer has to be better to make a reputation than to keep one. Once a reputation is achieved, reviewers look less carefully, and readers who have developed a taste for what the writer has to offer are willing to put up with a diluted or cut product in order to get it. Marketers have an existing hook to sell the books with, which makes sales relatively easier to achieve.  Having market dominance means that quality is less important as part of the total sales package.  And, since quality is painfully hard to achieve, and successful writers have speaking gigs, tours, and other distractions to contend with, they are disinclined to torture themselves.
3. With increasing age, there are basic failures of cognition. Sad, and agist, but unfortunately true. The number of words you can see ahead goes down. The skein of detailed relationships is harder to perceive. The reader of the final book doesn't see it, but the act of writing is as fraught as surfing and as reflexive as Whac-A-Mole. It gets harder to manage, and thus scarier, leading to writer's block. One hopes that increasing experience can compensate, but sometimes it doesn't.
4. Some writers just don't have that much to say. They have a few experiences, some key perceptions, a limited repertory company of characters, and a couple of verbal tricks. Book One is fabulous and original, Book Two revisits the successes of the first, Book Three is a chastening attempt to try something new that doesn't come off, and successive volumes after that are rewrites of Books One and Two.
5. And, finally (related to the above), maybe the original books weren't really that good in the first place. You were the right age and having the right experiences to be charged up when you read them, but if you read them now, you would like them no better than that obese volume squatting loathsomely on your nightstand that some enthusiastic review persuaded you to buy against your better judgment.

Not all these explanations apply to every writer, of course.  Maybe the trick is to start late in life, like Penelope Fitzgerald, after some other career, thus avoiding unfortunate comparisons with youth.

Anyone know a decent writer who became better with age?

Having a day job means seriously setting priorities

One thing a day job does take is time. I mean, they make me be at work all day. And, as if that weren't enough, I have to be working on the stuff they pay me for. My other job is of no interest to them.

That means I spend most of my weekends working on my writing career. That's fine, but that career has a lot of other parts to it other than creating prose. For example, my book is coming out in a little over a month, and, aside from trying to entice you with my witty blog postings, I haven't done that much to promote it.

I feel that creating the work comes first. And it's easy to fall completely behind. If story and novel inventories are empty, it takes an incredibly long time to fill them again. Once the pipelines have something in them, keeping them flowing is somewhat less fraught.

So I've decided to focus on more short stories and the next book, rather than publicity for the one coming up. That may prove to be a long-term error--there is no guarantee that the next book will be picked up unless Brain Thief does well.

Watch with me, and see how my decisions pan out.

Heuristic hijacking

Humanoid robots were once universal in science fiction. They looked somewhat like metal people, and had narrow human personalities with programmed obsessive-compulsive disorder that kept them focused on their assigned tasks.

They were also charming. Now, as I've mentioned before, we tend to react emotionally to beings (fictional or real) that have constrained emotional and intellectual toolsets (autistic, mentally handicapped, animal, programmed). Robots certainly meet that requirement, and were usually written with a certain pertness or "speaking truth to power" attitude. The bombastic or prideful would meet their comeuppance from the clarity of a robot. Robots weren't deliberately contrary, had no emotional needs of their own, weren't petulant, snarky, or angst-ridden, and were in general easier to deal with than messy human minds.

In real life, people are still working on that charm.  In his article Robots That Care, New Yorker medical writer Jerome Groopman describes some attempts at therapeutic robots. The article is vague and bland, partially because robots still can't do that much, and using them to interact with people who have had strokes, Alzheimer's patients, and children is mostly unsuccessful.  The article does have some interesting things to say about how a robot can be programmed to interact differently with an extrovert than with an introvert, but has little hard information on it.

Because, of course, the article is about robots who might someday successfully pretend to care, not robots that care. The designers seek to hijack our hacked-up heuristics for interpreting other minds. Since we're capable of attributing personalities to computers, cars, and cats, we clearly are predisposed to see other minds even when they aren't there. Sherry Turkle, at the end of the article, thinks this is a bad idea. She wonders why people are so eager to cut humans out of the therapeutic relationship. The benefits would have to be extraordinary, she says for it to be worthwhile.

So beware heuristic hijacking (a concept that's been around, but Google indicates that I just now thought up the term--remember that you read it here first). Our makeshift analytics will inevitably be trickable by devices with the right programming and enough processing power. It hasn't happened yet, but it will.

Life is good: we have dentists

This morning I went in to my dentist for a routine cleaning.  Every time I go in to have my gums probed and my teeth examined, I reflect on this relatively unsung hero of our happy existence.

Improperly treated, teeth can cause incredible pain, both chronic and acute.  They rot, cause damage to the jaw, and fall out.  The remaining teeth then shift, and get loose in their turn.  Once you have few teeth, food is harder to eat, your diet suffers, and your overall health declines.  Soon, you are old.
Enlightened dental hygiene combined with regular dentist visits prevent this.

This is incredibly boring, isn’t it?  "Enlightened dental hygiene".  Something you would expect from your most blowhard relative over turkey.  How quickly the miraculous becomes mundane.  Good dental care adds healthy and pain-free years to your life.

Interestingly, I can think of no fairy tale where someone wishes for a new set of teeth (I am no folklore scholar:  does anyone know of one?).  Of course, no one asks for lifelong resistance to infectious disease, escape from death in childbirth, or a smokeless chimney either.  Were these things literally unimaginable?  Most likely it’s just that a fairy tale requires some element of believability to be adequately comforting.  One can imagine a bigger house, more food, or a nicer spouse.  Decent teeth were far beyond the realm of possibility.  It wasn't even something that would occur to anyone.

But so far from being unbelievable, these things are now routine.  So, this Thanksgiving, in addition to giving thanks for all you have, give thanks for dentists.  And vaccines, public health, and smokeless domestic heat as well, while you’re at it.