Ryanmce

I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me. (Why Missouri is “Show Me State”)

Emperor’s New Clothes: Two swindlers arrive at the capital city of an emperor who spends lavishly on clothing at the expense of state matters. Posing as weavers, they offer to supply him with magnificent clothes that are invisible to those who are stupid or incompetent. The emperor hires them, and they set up looms and go to work. A succession of officials, and then the emperor himself, visit them to check their progress. Each sees that the looms are empty but pretends otherwise to avoid being thought a fool. Finally, the weavers report that the emperor’s suit is finished. They mime dressing him and he sets off in a procession before the whole city. The townsfolk uncomfortably go along with the pretense, not wanting to appear inept or stupid, until a child blurts out that the emperor is wearing nothing at all. The people then realize that everyone has been fooled. Although startled, the emperor continues the procession, walking more proudly than ever. (More)

My long intellectual career has in part been a search for the most important questions. I study X until I realize “No, Y is really the more fundamental issue behind X.” I have now made another step forward in this journey; I now guess that the biggest obstacle to getting the world to adopt the many institution reform proposals I favor is our status-gossip-trust system. Let me explain.

Status is respect, shared at a distance. And one of our main ways to create shared distant respect estimates is to accept the gossip-shared judgements of high status people, especially on who else to respect. Furthermore, as we all judge those who are most closely connected to high status people as being higher status themselves, we often try to create closer connections to high status people by blindly trusting them.

That is, they tell us that of course they love us, that they are worth $1000/hr as a lawyer, that their expensive new med treatment will cure us, that their management advice will save our firm, that the articles they write or publish are the most reliable and useful guides to their topics, that their advice given to the halls of power will guide the nation well, and that the candidates praised by their letter of recommendation are worth high salaries. And then instead of checking these claims by watching their track records, giving them financial incentives, testing their abilities, or evaluating the details of their arguments, we just believe what they say. Not only believe, but also actively resist checking their claims, for fear of not seeming to trust them.

This helps explain why we make it hard (often illegal) to give strong incentives to or collect track records about prestigious professionals like lawyers and doctors. Why we care more about potential than accomplishment. Why we prefer grants to prizes, and managed funds over index funds. And why elites so rarely give solid arguments to back their claims. Furthermore, our getting more status mad over the last few centuries can help explain the decline in marriage, decline in legal sanctions against lies, and removing test scores from school applications.

I’m still quite uncertain how exactly to resist this status-trust pattern, but I expect it has something to do with raising the status of status skeptics, like the “show me” people of Missouri, or the kid who exposed the emperor.

Whoooooooooo. You looked stressed. I know, right? First, it was a joke. Then it was unimaginable. Then unthinkable. Improbable. Unlikely. Then it happened and now we’re are all wondering, “When will it get worse?”

Still not sleeping well? Me either. Are you reading the news? Me either. I’m 165 pages into the history of the building of the Panama Canal. Developing a credible strategy for dealing with malaria and yellow fever. Boy, those were the days.

The holidays seem tainted, right? Like it’s not ok to let your guard down and relax? Yup. Same. I’m on high mental alert, and we’re not going to get much done in this state.

What we need, however brief, is an escape. I have just the thing.

Here are five of my favorite pages:

I’ve been shilling the Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-men for years, and I will continue to to shill because if you don’t care about comic books or if you’ve never heard of the X-men, you will still love this work. Whedon is the Aaron Sorkin of comic book dialog. Strike that. Whedon is the Joss Whedon of comic book dialog. It’s clever, well-timed, and distinctly human. Characters I’ve been reading for years becoming more developed and more familiar in this book.

My re-entry into comics came roughly three years ago when I dropped in somewhere in the middle of the Secret Invasion plot line. In an exercise which is surprisingly hard, I reverse engineered the genesis of this entire plot line which was Avengers Disassembled. It’s not the best book on this list, but it kicks off a whole series of fascinating plot lines including the New Avengers, Planet Hulk, Civil War, House of M, and a bevy of other plot lines that a worth your time. Read them before they come to big screen.

Leaving the comfort of Marvel, Dark Horse’s Fear Agent is an offbeat delight. Following the adventures of Heath Huston, a Fear Agent who is a member of a task force dedicated to eradicating aliens threats to member planets. It’s kitschy science fiction. It’s those horrible low-budget sci-fi shows I watched as a kid. Huston quotes Mark Twain, drinks incessantly, but somehow saves the universe.

I’m not going to say a lot about Locke & Key other than to remind of that time you picked up a book and it was so good that you forgot to sleep? That. The complete collection is six books, and only one of the middle books is slightly meh, and you’ll forget all about that by the end. When you’re done, read about the author.

Hawkeye deconstructs the superhero. In this book, he’s certainly superheroing, but he rarely wears the gear. The problems he solves are relatively mundane because, as the book states, this is what he does when he’s not being an Avenger. The page above is the chapter told entirely from the perspective of his dog. It works bro.

Five pages, five paragraphs. If you were to purchase and read all five books, I guarantee you a brief respite from the world. The stories are rich; the art is compelling. You’ll discover tales you’ve heard over and over again told in ways you did not expect. You’ll laugh. You’ll be disgusted. Time will pass, and you’ll be mentally refreshed.

Good, now we’ve got work to do.