It occurs to me that failure to properly worldbuild an SFFnal story is - sometimes, though not always - less reflective of a writer’s creative ability than it is a consequence of their real-world privilege. The concept of culture as something with multiple facets, that can be experienced from different perspectives and which - crucially - has consequences beyond the obvious is learned rather than innate, and if, in your own life, you’ve never stopped to consider (for instance) how class differences impact access to basic necessities, or the problem of social mobility, then that’s going to influence how you craft, or fail to craft, those elements in your narratives. Because while, in stories set in the present day, you can either compensate with research or write wholly within familiar contexts, in an invented setting, it’s going to be harder to hide the gaps in your knowledge.

And so we get stories whose cultures are founded on stereotypes: Noble Elves vs the Barbarian Orcs, an endless parade of faux-medieval Europes, and dystopias built around a single, reductive premise with no effort made to explore its wider consequences. This last seems especially troublesome to me, given that dystopias are, generally speaking, meant to be the sort of stories that understand class and subversion - but when written by someone who’s never considered that their own society operates on more than one level, that nuance may well be lost. The point of worldbuilding is to create new worlds, but they’re always going to be influenced by how we view our own.

Iranians confront US negotiators at nuke talks with GOP Senate letter.

Mark Aguhar

Investigative reporter James Gordon Meek broke an important story this week: He revealed that U.S.-backed forces in Iraq are committing the same type of horrific war crimes — wanton killings of prisoners, beheadings, torture — as the Islamic State fighters on the other side of the front line.

Meek’s report, broadcast by ABC News and based on photos and cell phone videos that Iraqi fighters had proudly shared on social media, shows the Humvees and M4A1 assault rifles that the U.S. government has supplied in abundance to Iraq’s armed forces. In its effort to push the Islamic State out of Iraq, the U.S. is providing Baghdad with nearly $1 billion a year in weapons, in addition to training by several thousand American advisers.

U.S. and Iraqi officials professed surprise at what is happening, and told ABC that investigations would be launched to get to the bottom of it. If this sounds familiar in a “Casablanca” way — gambling in the casino, stop the presses — it should. Back in 2005, when Facebook was a curiousity used by just a few thousand students and Instagram was years away from being invented, the sorts of abuses that Meek recently found on social media sites were well underway.

Back then, I visited Samarra, a contested town in the heart of what was known as the Sunni Triangle, and wrote about the abuses I saw while accompanying Iraqi and U.S. forces on joint raids. I saw beatings, witnessed a mock execution, and heard, inside an Iraqi detention center, the terrible screams of a man being tortured. I received the same sorts of reactions that greeted Meek’s story: U.S. and Iraqi officials expressed surprise and promised to punish any wrongdoers.

Nothing changed.

That’s because torture, rather than being an aberration, was embedded in a strategy that was described, at the time, as the Salvadorization of Iraq—the use of dirty-war tactics to defeat an insurgency. It is more than a footnote of history that the origins of this policy appear to date to 2004, when the effort to train and equip Iraqi forces got underway in earnest under the leadership of Gen. David Petraeus, who went on to command all U.S. forces in Iraq, then in Afghanistan, then became director of the CIA, then resigned and pleaded guilty to disclosing a trove of highly-classified information to his lover and biographer, Paula Broadwell, and lying to the FBI about it.

I was hardly the first to witness the abuses and hypocrisy that were the hammer and anvil of the American program to build up Iraqi forces. In 2004, Oregon National Guard troops in Baghdad observed officers inside a Ministry of Interior compound beating and torturing prisoners; they entered the compound and found dozens of abused detainees, including one who had just been shot. The Oregon soldiers reported what they had found and received an incredible order from their commanders — leave the compound now.

In 2010, the deluge of military and diplomatic files that were released by WikiLeaks included a document that explained why the Oregon soldiers had been told to forget about what they had seen — FRAGO 242, as the order was called, required U.S. troops to not investigate any abuses committed by Iraqi forces unless U.S. troops were involved. In other words, so long as Iraqis were doing the torturing rather than Americans, it was none of our business. Move along, nothing to see here.

Then, as now, the reason these abuses were tolerated was a battlefield version of expediency — this is the way insurgencies are confronted, they all tend to be dirty, there’s nothing we can do about it because angels don’t win wars. The problem with this thinking is not just moral — we shouldn’t support forces that we fully know are committing war crimes — it is also practical. What has turning a blind eye gotten us since the effort to equip Iraqi forces got underway in the aftermath of the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in 2003?

Expediency is not our friend. It is our enemy.

Photo: Gilles Peress/Magnum Photos

The post Atrocities Committed by U.S.-Trained Iraqi Forces — Again appeared first on The Intercept.

Friendship is context-sensitive.

I wouldn't describe Terry as a friend, but as someone I'd been on a first-name acquaintanceship with since the mid-1980s. If you go to SF conventions (or partake of any subculture which has regular gatherings) you'll know the way it works: there are these people who don't really see outside of this particular social context, but you're never surprised to see them in it, and you know each other's names, and when you meet you chat about stuff and maybe sink a pint together.

I haven't seen Terry since the Glasgow worldcon in 2005. The diagnosis of his illness came in 2007; I'd been spending a chunk of 05-07 out of the country, and after the bad news hit I didn't feel like being part of the throng pestering him (for reasons I'll get to later on in this piece.)

I first met him, incidentally, back in 1984, at a British eastercon in Leeds. It was, I think, my first SF convention. Or my second. I was a spotty 17- or 18-year-old nerd, wandering around with a manuscript in a carrier bag, looking for an editor—this was before the internet made it easy to discover that this was not the done thing, or indeed before word processors made typewritten manuscripts obsolescent. (Let's just say that if in a fit of enthusiasm you borrowed your future self's time machine and went back to that convention in search of me you'd have been disappointed.)

There were plenty of other embryonic personages floating around there, of course. I remember meeting this tall goth dude with shaggy hair, dressed all in black and wearing mirrorshades at midday, who resembled the bassist from the Sisters of Mercy. He was called Neil, he wrote for a comic called 2000AD, and he had an oddly liminal superstar quality even then: everyone just knew he was going to be famous, or in a band.) And there was this thirty-something guy with glasses and a bushy beard propping up the bar. What set him apart from the other guys with beards and glasses was that he had a hat, and he was trying to cadge pints of beer with an interesting chat-up line: "I'm a fantasy writer, you know. My third book just came out—it's called 'The Colour of Magic'." So you'd buy him a drink because, I swear, he had some kind of bibulous mind-control thing going, and he'd tell you about the book, and then you'd end up buying the book because it sounded funny, and then you were trapped in his snare forever.

Back then, Terry was not some gigantic landmark of comedy literature, with famous critics in serious newspapers bending over to compare his impact on the world of letters to that of P. G. Wodehouse. Terry was earning his living as a press officer and writing on the side and didn't feel embarrassed about letting other people pay for the drinks. And so over the next few years I bought him a pint or two, and began to read the books. Which is why I only got hooked on Terry's shtick after I'd met him as Terry the convention-going SF fan.

Some time between about 1989 and 1992, something strange began to happen. I started seeing his name feature more prominently in bookshops, displays of his books planted face-out. He started turning up as guest of honour at more and more SF conventions. When a convention did a signing with Terry, suddenly there was a long queue. And when he walked into a room, heads turned and people began to close in on him. There's a curious phenomenon that goes with being famous in a particular subculture: if everybody knows you, you become a target for their projected fantasy of meeting their star. And they all want to shake your hand and say something, anything, that connects with what your work means to them in their own head. (If you want to see this at work today, just go to any function he's appearing at—other than the Oscars—and watch what happens when Neil Gaiman walks into the room. He is, I swear, the human Katamari.)

Being on the receiving end of this phenomenon is profoundly isolating, especially if you're one of those introverted author types who can emulate an extrovert for a few days at a time before you have to hide under the bed and gibber for a while: you're surrounded by strangers who desperately want to connect with you and after a time it becomes really hard to tell them apart, to remember that they're individuals with their own lives and stories and not just different faces emerging from the surface of a weird shape-shifting fame-tropic amoeboid alien. It's not just authors who get this: if anything we get off very lightly compared to actors, politicians, or rock stars. (For some insight into it, go listen to the lyrics of Pink Floyd's "The Wall".) I should add, this sort of introversion is really common among writers. It's an occupation that demands a certain degree of introspective self-absorption, alongside a constant distance from the people you're observing, who—they mostly don't know this, of course—may provide the raw fuel for your work. So, if you want to hang on to your sanity, eventually you either go and hide for a bit, or you surround yourself with people who aren't faintly threatening strangers who want a piece of your soul. Which is to say, you selectively hang out with your peers, or folks you met before you caught the fame virus.

Terry was not only a very funny man; he was an irrascible (and occasionally bad-tempered) guy who did not suffer fools gladly. However, he was also big-hearted enough to forgive the fools around him if they were willing to go halfway to meeting him by ceasing to be foolish at him. He practiced a gracious professionalism in his handling of the general public that spared them the harsh side of his tongue, and he was, above all, humane. As the fame snowballed, he withdrew a bit: appreciating that there was a difference between a sharp retort from your mate Terry at the bar and a put-down from Terry Pratchett, superstar, he stepped lightly and took pains to avoid anything that might cause distress.

Anyway, this isn't a biography, it's just the convoluted lead-in to an anecdote about the last time I saw him (which was a decade ago, so you'd better believe me when I say our relationship was "situational friend" rather than "personal friend").

On the last day of the worldcon in 2005, I was wandering around feeling extremely frazzled and a bit hunted. I'd just won my first Hugo award, and my right hand was sore from people I didn't know grabbing it. Eventually I realized that I just couldn't cope with the regular convention concourse in the conference centre—I was a walking target of opportunity for people who wanted to shake the hand that held the pen that wrote the ... something, I guess.

At a British worldcon, you can count on there being a really excellent real ale bar tucked away in a corner of one of the hotels or fan areas. I headed for the real ale bar and found a degree of comfort and shelter there, because it was mostly full of familiar faces who didn't need to push into my personal space because I was just some guy they'd been bumping into in convention bars for a decade or two. The rate of hand-grabbing dropped to a survivable level: I began to relax, and found a couple of old friends to hang with. And then I noticed Terry.

Terry had not won a Hugo. He didn't need to. (As he said, "I was in the audience at some literary awards ceremony or other with J. K. Rowling one time, and she was lamenting how they'd never give her one, so I turned to her and I said, Jo, me neither: we'll just have to cry ourselves to sleep on top of our mattresses stuffed with £20 notes." Money being, of course, the most honest token of appreciation a commercial author can receive.) Terry didn't need a shiny new Hugo award to find it nearly impossible to walk around a convention and just be a fan: I was getting my first taste of the downside of fame, but Terry had been living with being Terry Pratchett, OBE, Richest Author in all the Land, for more than a decade. He was looking tired, and morose, and a bit down in the dumps. So we went over to say hi.

At this point, he perked up. Omega, who I'd been chatting to, had first met him in the mid-80s, about the same time as me: Feorag got a pass for being married to one of us. He'd been having a hard time being Terry Pratchett in public for five consecutive days. He wasn't quite ready to go and hide out in his hotel room, but he needed some respite care from being a Boss-level target in every starry-eyed fan's first-person autograph shooter; so, as it was coming up on lunchtime, by mutual agreement we dragged him away from the SECC to Pancho Villa's in Glasgow for lunch. Okay, Glaswegian-Mexican food is not what you'd necessarily call good good. But it filled a corner and, more importantly, it got him far enough away from the convention to decompress a little in company that wasn't going to place any demands on him.

Now, Terry (like the late Iain Banks) seemed to feel a bit of noblesse oblige (or maybe just plain survivor's guilt) over the sheer mind-boggling scale of his success. ("I realized I was rich," he recounted, "when I got a call from my agent one Thursday. That cheque I mailed you—did you get it? He asked. And I realized I couldn't find it: lost down the back of the sofa or something. Can you cancel it and mail me a new one? I said. And he said, yes I can do that, but you realize you won't be able to deposit it before next week and you'll lose the interest on it? And I said sure, just go ahead, cancel it, and send me a new one. Then I put the phone down and realized it was for half a million pounds.") Things had obviously changed since the days when he had to cadge drinks off fans in convention bars: and I realised that I hadn't bought him a pint since about 1989, and this rankled a little bit. Nobody likes to think of themselves as a charity case. Also, I'd just won a Hugo and landed a new three book deal and was beginning to feel a bit of that survivor's guilt myself.

So at the end of the meal, while he went to the toilet, I tried to pick up the bill. But the waitress was slow, he got back to the table before she could make off with my credit card, and when he pulled out his gold visa card, snarled "who's the rich bastard here?!?", and chuckled to himself, I knew I was beat. And I never did get to buy him lunch, in the end.

Anyway, those are some of my memories of Terry Pratchett.

He was generous not just with money, but with his soul. He was irrascible, yes, and did not suffer fools gladly: but he was empatic as well, and willing to forgive. Witty. Angry. Eloquent. A little bit burned by his own fame, and secretly guilty over it, but still human. And the world is smaller and darker without him, and I miss him deeply.

Related To: You Might Get What You Pay For, Do Life Hacks Ever Reach Fixation?

Here are three interesting psychological studies:

1. Kirschenbaum, Malett, and Humphrey gave students a three month course in how to make monthly plans, then followed them up a year later to see how well their grades were doing. The students who made the plans got an average GPA of 3.3 compared to the students who didn’t getting 2.5. They concluded that plan-making skills are academically important, and that benefits persist at least one year after completion of the plan-making course.

2. Aronson asked Stanford students to write a letter to a middle school “pen pal” urging them to adopt a “growth mindset”. Since this was a psych study, it was all lies and there was no pen pal; the study examined whether writing a letter urging growth mindset made the students themselves have a growth mindset and whether this improved grades. Three months later, the students who wrote the letter had higher GPAs.

3. Oaten and Chang helped undergraduates set up an 8-week time management program involving schedules and diaries. The students who participated not only had better time-management, they also studied more, smoked less, drank less alcohol, exercised more, ate a better diet, spent less money, rated their emotions as better, missed fewer appointments, and were less likely to leave dishes in the sink (really!).

So, remember a couple of weeks ago when I wrote about some psychiatrists conducting a really big (n =~ 1000) study about an early intervention program for troubled youth? A program that cost $58,000 per person and lasted ten years?

And remember how, although it was deemed a success, it was deemed a success because it had modest effects on a couple of outcomes, without improving the really big ones like school retention, employment, or incarceration?

So on the one hand, having a short discussion about making monthly plans will boost your GPA almost a whole point a year later. On the other hand, ten years of private tutoring and pretty much every social service known to mankind will do next to nothing.

This suggests a dilemma: either psychological research sucks or everything else sucks.

I mean, you tell your social engineer “Here’s ten thousand dollars and a thousand hours of class time per pupil per year, go teach our kids stuff,” and they try their hardest.

And then some researcher comes along, performs a quick experimental manipulation (the pen pal one probably took 30 minutes and 30 cents) and dramatically improves outcomes over what the social engineer was able to do on her own.

Then one gets the impression that the social engineer was not using their $10,000 and 1K hours very wisely.

And if it were just the one example, then we could say Carol Dweck or Roy Baumeister or whoever is a genius, the rest of us couldn’t have been expected to come up with that, now that we know we’ll reform the system. But these results have been coming in several times a year for decades. If we’ve been adopting all of them, why aren’t people much better in every way? If we haven’t been adopting them, why not?

My money is on the other branch of the dilemma. The reason the $58,000 study got so much less impressive results is that it was run by medical professionals to medical standards, meaning it only showed the effects that were really there. The reason psychology gets such impressive results is…

Okay. I have only skimmed these three studies, so I don’t want to make it sound like I’m definitively crushing them. But here are some worrying things I notice.

The first study results are actually limited to a small subgroup with I think a single-digit number of students per cell.

The second study results work only on a complex statistical manipulation and disappear when you do basic correlation; further, although the manipulation is supposed to work by increasing trait growth mindset, the correlation between trait growth mindset and academic achievement when correlated directly is actually negative across all variables and in some cases significantly so (!)

The third study is really about stress-related behaviors during an examination period, meaning that all they showed was that people who as part of their time management course were forced to study in a carefully scheduled way for a term show less stress-related behavior during the term exam period, which makes more sense as they probably studied more earlier, had less studying left to do during the exam period, had more free time, and were less stressed. This context was dropped by the popular science press, turning the study into proof that good time management in general always produced all of these effects.

And although there are several other studies I have not been able to find equally worrying flaws with, if they report massive long-term gains from seemingly minor interventions, I expect they’re there and I just missed them.

Basically, you remember this chart?

Source: xkcd

In “Crazy Phenomenon”, add “any large and persistent effect from social psychology”. In “If it worked…” add “education, rehab, and mental health”. In “Are They?”, add “not nearly as much as I would expect”.

He tried to warn us there was nothing we could do but we didn’t listen!

SteamWorld Dig was a surprise joy in 2013. Released first on the Nintendo 3DS, then latterly to Steam, it was a side-scrolling rogue-lite mining platformer, which turned out to be a superb combination of elements. If you haven’t played it, dear me, you ought. Developers Image & Form more recently announced their follow-up game, set in the same universe of water-seeking robots, SteamWorld Heist [official site]. This time it’s a side-scrolling turn-based space explorer, part XCOM, part Gunpoint. You can’t accuse them of resting on their laurels. I’ve had a play of one of Heist’s levels, and it’s looking like they’ve created a turn-based combat even a great big dolt like me can enjoy.

… [visit site to read more]

There’s a meme, originating from certain corners of the Functional side of programming, that “patterns are a language smell”. The implication being that “good” languages either already encode the patterns as language features, or they provide the tools to extend the language such that modeling the pattern explicitly isn’t needed.

This misses the point on rather a lot of levels.

First, it usually originates from the widespread identification of “patterns” as a discipline with a single patterns catalog, the “Gang of Four” book. The argument goes like this: “You don’t need the Visitor pattern in a language where you can apply an arbitrary lambda over any collection“.

Personally, I think this misses some important subtleties of the Visitor pattern, but I’ll let that slide for now. The larger point is that many of the patterns in the GoF are intentionally foundational, and some of them do in fact reflect weaknesses in certain formalist OO languages like C++ and Java. This is the seed of truth to the whole argument.

Unfortunately, it’s a case of throwing the baby, the bathtub, and in fact the entire west wing of the house with the bathwater. I have an entire shelf devoted to patterns literature. (This would be a great point to insert a photo, but my books are currently in transit to Tennessee.) Very few of those patterns are foundational or even widely applicable.

Instead, each pattern reflects deep experience with a particular type of problem. Some of them are about financial systems. Some are about signal processing. Some are about games. Some are about enterprise systems.

Patterns are experience reports. They are institutional memory that transcends organizational boundaries. But more than that, patterns reflect how a particular team, or series of teams, managed to come to grips with a particular type of problem.

When I transitioned from writing software for air traffic control systems to writing enterprise software, I came with a set of implicit presuppositions. Assumptions such as: an object can only be constructed in a valid state. Invalid data must be rejected at construction time.

This turns out to work well for systems that consume only feeds from other automated systems. But less well for systems that interact directly with humans. If I had read Ward Cunningham’s CHECKS pattern for interacting with humans, I would have been much better prepared for the new world I was entering. I would have more quickly comprehended the need for ideas like Exceptional Value, a value that is clearly unacceptable but which is still kept around so that it can be presented back to the user for correction.

Much of my research time lately has been devoted to the study of how programmers and teams of programmers erect shared constructions of reality in order to come to grips with a problem. Patterns are a way of capturing these reality constructions for posterity.

In the end it doesn’t even matter that much if you actually create classes in your code named after patterns, or whether you use equivalent language features, or none of the above. A pattern language is a set of complementary thought-forms that helped some people get their minds around a problem. Ultimately they aren’t about the code you write; they are about how you see the problem in your mind’s eye, and the vocabulary you use to talk to your team about it.

Of course, since patterns guide how you conceptualize a problem space, this means they also have a lot of power to lead you down a bad path. You have to remember that in the end, you need to construct a consensus reality that makes sense for your project. The realities of those who have gone before should be instructive, not prescriptive.

Patterns aren’t tools for programming computers; they are tools for programming people. As such, to say that “patterns are a language smell” makes very little sense. Patterns are a tool for augmenting language: our language, the language we use to talk to each other about a problem and its solutions; the language we use to daydream new machines in our minds before committing them to code. Patterns aren’t a language smell; rather, patterns are by definition, [optional] language features.

I haven’t been posting, so I figure I should show my work – that is, establish that I’ve been toiling on some sort of important intellectual project behind the scenes.

So here’s the thing. I always figured Jack Kirby just made up ‘weirdies’ – like he invented most things that matter to us today:

But then I checked the OED and, in fact, it’s been around for a while.

“An odd or unconventional person; one who is considered ‘weird’; spec. applied to any young man with long hair and a beard. Freq. in pl.”

It seems to have been a minor synonym for ‘beatnik-type’ but not for ‘hippy’ because it came and went too soon. The OED has one instance from 1949, from The Asphalt Jungle: “Cobby … thought to himself: ‘He’s a weirdy, all right.’” Then one from each year from ‘59 – ‘62:

1959 Listener 3 Dec. 975/1 The weirdies that Kerouac seems always to meet wandering and muttering in the small hours.

1960 Spectator 22 Apr. 569 There were more than forty thousand of us—weirdies and beardies, colonels and conchies, Communists and Liberals.

1961 Observer 28 May 1/5 The beardy weirdies with their querulous bleatings.

1962 Punch 14 Feb. 268/2 One [bedsitter]..advertiser..added ‘No Weirdies either’.

‘conchies’? (A-ha, I didn’t know that one.)

Then it fades. One entry from 1966, one for 1974, then nothing. Funny that Jack Kirby is using it 1972. Dude was one out-of-step genius.

But I forgot the best part. The first occurrence is in:

Andrew Smith Robertson, The Provost o’ Glendookie (1894): “‘He’s awa without his curran’ loaf.’ ‘He’s a weerdie.’”

Yes, Virginia, there is a Provost o’ Glendookie.

I think that’s the issue of Jimmy Olsen where the Newsboy Legion go to Scotland.

Anyway, Big Words would be proud of me, lookin’ it up in the OED an’ all.

Are you going to spend $10,000 on the new Apple Watch Edition?

No, right? Me either. Maybe you can’t afford it. Maybe you could drop $10k on a device but it seems repugnant or simply ridiculous. Maybe you don’t wear a watch at all; I sure don’t, and at this stage I don’t intend to start.

Maybe everyone you know agrees:

Overpriced. Who the hell would buy that? Nobody. Apple jumped the shark. You can’t upgrade the innards and jesus h, it’s gold, what a frigging waste, it’ll be obsolete in a year. Who the hell would buy a $10k watch with planned obsolence? Nobody. What the hell were they thinking?

Right?

Wrong. None of that makes a lick of difference.

The Apple Watch is going to be huge.

It’s gonna sell like hotcakes. Yes, even the $10k ones.

Maybe especially the $10k ones.

I can tell from here you don’t believe me. That’s fine. You probably didn’t believe anyone would pay $399 for an MP3 player that couldn’t even hold half as much as the Creative Jukebox. You probably knew the iPhone would flop because it didn’t have 3rd party apps, 3G, GPS, multi-tasking or even friggin’ copy & paste.

You probably thought the iPad was ugh, just a big iPhone, who cares.

Sarcasm: Great track record you’ve got there.

Reality: You’ve got a problem.

It looks like…

• you don’t understand yourself
• you don’t understand buyers

I can’t help you with column A right now, but I can tell you that if you think the Apple Watch will fail it’s because you don’t understand buyers.

The obvious question is also the wrong question:

“Who buys a $10,000 watch?”

Lots of people. Luxury watches have been a status symbol for a loooong time.

“But those are real watches. They don’t become unusable in 2-3 years.”

Not true, not always, but anyway, the Apple Watch is as much a watch as the iPhone is a phone.

The Apple Watch is merely watch-adjacent.

It will not seduce buyers who pop a tent for a fine complication. It simply can’t deliver, and it doesn’t have to.

Repeat: the Apple Watch is not actually a watch.

The watch fanatics who complain about the Apple Watch are the same as the tech fanatics who complained when Apple killed SCSI, serial, the floppy, the optical drive. Those things were all necessary and mandatory right up to the point that they weren’t.

But obsolescence. And engraving!? RESALE VALUE!?!

No, no, no. People who buy things like this don’t behave the way you think they do.

No, the Apple Watch Edition’s internals are not swappable. Yes, it will go obsolete, like any piece of tech hardware, only it’ll be wrapped in gold with a sapphire screen. And doubly so if you engrave it to that special someone.

That’ll stop anyone from buying it. Right? Wrong.

Here’s a better question:

How many people drop $10,000 on things that don’t last?

Now we’re talking. Say you’ve got money burning a hole in your pocket.

What does $10k get you that won’t last very long?

Here was my first thought: Two round trip, first class airplane tickets to Europe. How long does that last? 32 man-hours. That’s about $315 per hour.

Do people buy first class tickets to Europe? Yes, yes they do.

What else?

Pour it down the tubes…

From what I’ve read, $10k would cover 1.5 to 2.5 regularly scheduled maintenance visits for a Ferrari or Lamborghini. Hello oil and spark plugs, bye bye money.

Guess poor ol’ Ferrari and Lambo are in dire straits because nobody buys them cuz they cost so much to maintain. What? They’ve been doing business this way for decades? Ferrari appears to have had its best year ever in 2014?

You don’t say.

How about something that literally disappears into thin air?

I have a 1,700 square foot home and our gas/electric costs on average $400-600 a month. That’s $5k to $7k a year. Yes, it hurts, but it hurts less than fucking up the Historically Significant interior for more R-value, and I knew that going in.

Now, I have a poorly insulated but smallish house, by American standards. Especially by the standards of people in my income bracket.

Just imagine what it costs to keep a 5 bed / 4 bath / heated pool / hot tub / 4 car garage lit, warm and cool over a year. Does that swell into Apple Watch Edition territory? Yessirreebob.

And don’t forget just how many people have second homes. It’s more than you think.

What about a durable good that becomes un-en-durable in 18-24 mos?

I know jack about fashion but, obviously, handbags. I read enough to know that many women lust after a Birkin bag. Birkins start at $10,000. Hey, what a coincidence!

Now the $10k Birkin is apparently an entry-level model. I saw it described as “the basic bitch Birkin.” Alliteration aside, imagine spending $10k on a luxury item and knowing that everyone who gets it will know you got the cheapest possible one. Ouch.

And while Birkins, allegedly, are immune to the rapid fashion cycle, other luxury handbags aren’t. Those don’t hold their value and they go out of style — blip! — in a matter of a year or two.

And yet they sell, sell, sell at $2,000 to $5,000 a pop.

We're so US focused we're missing the entire narrative of Apple as a status symbol & luxury brand in emerging markets, especially China.

— Crystal Beasley (@skinny) March 9, 2015

Yes, people blow $10k in a thousand curious ways

People blow lots of money on things you consider ludicrous. Things that fly, burn, convect, wear, or fade away as quickly (if not more so) than a $10k gold digital watch.

Things that, objectively, offer far less utility.

I hope it’s obvious by now that the hyper-concern of “resale value” simply doesn’t apply to this category of buyers.

Conclusion: You are not the Apple Watch Edition customer.

And that’s fine. Unless you’re an investor or a pundit, it doesn’t matter that you got it dead wrong.

But it matters a lot in your business.

Here’s the real reason I’m writing a think piece on a $10,000 gold accessory that I would never buy:

I specialize in helping my students learn to create things that other people will actually buy. And this is the most critical lesson they struggle with.

You are not your customer.

Oh, you get told:

• “Scratch an itch!”
• “Dogfood!”
• “Build something you’d buy!”
• “Find your niche!”

Maybe you walk around thinking things like:

• “Developers don’t buy things.”
• “Email newsletters? People still write those?”
• “Nobody would pay for this.”

Bullshit.

Unless you’ve done research, every opinion you have about what people will or won’t buy comes straight from your butt.

You say you won’t buy an Apple Watch. Fine, I believe you. (Although… perhaps you said the same thing about iPods, iPhones and iPads.)

It doesn’t matter, though, whether you buy or not. Lots and lots of other people will.

Let me repeat: You are not your customer. There’s only one of you. You won’t be paying yourself.

Your buy-in doesn’t determine success.

You are not a litmus test for the universe. You are not an archetype. Most people aren’t like you at all, and you don’t seem to understand that they exist.

You can only know your customers by their actions.

And I can guarantee you that my prediction of their actions is better than yours because:

1. I have been following Apple pundit predictions vs actual sales outcomes for 15 years now
2. I have known many different types of wealthy people over the years, and I’ve watched how they behave
3. I took a few minutes to understand how luxury markets work and, by extension, how luxury audiences behave
4. I even googled “Birkin bag” and read what Birkin buyers have to say, and investigated how much they pay new and even used

That’s how I know about the fanaticism for luxury watches (which I don’t wear), the price of first class tickets (which I don’t buy), and the high-fashion handbag cycle (which I have zero interest in).

That’s how I know that extra complicated complications have their own cachet in the watch world. That Ferrari is doing gangbusters (despite their maintenance cost). And how I know that Christie’s has a history of auctioning off second-hand Birkins (unlike other brands), and that the $10k Birkin is for “basic bitches.”

And, because I know what I’m doing, this took me all of 30 minutes to find this out.

That’s the power of research.

It informs your opinions so you can say things that are true and do things that will work. And quit wasting time.

Anything else is just farting from the mouth.

Want to learn how to do what I do?

This research, real-world, what do people really do and buy shit? It’s all I do all day. I do it for myself, and I teach it to others. Here on my blog, and in our Stacking the Bricks podcast.

If you liked this no-BS essay, you will love my 7-part guide. You’ll see why and how you should eviscerate 99% of business “common sense.”

Drop your name in the box, and get it for free:

I was like, “What are the characters in the newspaper strip B.C. called?” so I Googled it.  I’m not even making this up.

Anyway the strip’s only been running for 57 years, so I’m sure they just haven’t gotten around to giving the women names yet, right??

So I did Taft in a badger suit and then a badger in a William Taft suit. So to follow up on that I did this - William Taft in a William Taft suit wearing a badger mask. And then below, I did the next obvious thing: a badger in a badger suit wearing a Taft mask. What's the next logical step? I'm all ears, guys.

I keep having escape fantasies.

In a lot of ways I’m lucky to have this job—I’m still not over the thrill of “holy shit, I’ve got a middle-class income!”—but it’s also exhausting.  I’ve done three 16.5-hour double shifts in the last week.  And it’s not just the hours (or the fact that I walk several miles a shift), but it’s almost comically stressful work.  There’s far too many crises, constant understaffing, unsupportive management, and documentation tasks that range from “pointless” to “literally impossible.” Most of all, I get a general feeling that the administration’s idea of math is “18 clients divided by 8 hours equals… a nurse who really cared would spend an hour with each client.”

I’ve long since given up on eating lunch or really having any breaks at all.  I get home and there’s just none of me left, not enough to write or exercise or craft or play or anything.  Even on weekends (I get two a month), it’s hard to get much more done than the errands and household chores I neglected all week.

Realistically, I need a new job.  Nursing’s rarely easy but it doesn’t have to be this bad.  Fuck the contract penalty and fuck weird guilt about “but they invested in you,” it’s worth it to get out and get into a job I don’t hate.  I’m going to try to do that.

But more and more I have fantasies where I just run away.  Where I get in my car and go… I don’t know where.  To the desert or the woods or someplace I can disappear into, sleep in a tent, hike or write or draw or just exist in the world all day long.  I think my savings would last a while if I didn’t buy much besides food.

It’s a trite fantasy, I know.  It wouldn’t really be all that blissful.  I like having a soft mattress and Wi-Fi, I hate bug bites and dirty clothes, and my desert hideout better be close to a doctor’s office and a CVS because my rugged survivalist game will fall apart really fast without a regular supply of albuterol.   …Also it’s like zero degrees outside right now.

And it’s a selfish fantasy.  I want to run away and not work, but the people who sew my tents and grow my food, they should keep working.  Plus there’s a lot of spoiled-rich-suburban-kid in being so eager to walk away from a steady and lucrative job.

It’s symbolic, at least.  Maybe I don’t really want to go live under a palm tree, but I do want to… I want to get myself back.  Right now I feel like this job has taken over so much of my body and mind that I hardly get to use myself.  All I do at home is recover enough to go back to work and get drained out again.  I’m fucking terrified I could end up feeling this way for the next forty years.

I won’t.  I’ll get out.  It’s spoiled and selfish and I don’t care.  It’ll cost me money and Valuable Career Advancement and it’s fucking worth it.  I’m getting out.

The police department "routinely" blocks citizens from recording their activities under a bizarre rubric of "officer safety," according to the Justice Department's investigation. Read the rest

We come at last to the end of the beginning: this book is 782 pages long, which means the middle is page 391.  To recap for those who fell asleep sometime in the late 1990s when I'm pretty sure I started these posts: Rand al'Thor is a Simple Farmboy (adopted by a master swordsman) who was born at the right time for a prophecy, so he and his besties and his not-girlfriend Egwene (the real protagonist) and his neighbourhood witch have run away from home, under guidance of a wizard and her bodyguard, to escape the hordes of the devil and take refuge in Wizardopolis.  They are also accompanied by a crotchety old bard who has been helpful but formed no close personal bonds with any of our cast members, so I'm sure he'll live to see the end of the book.  Everyone has magic powers and the devil haunts the three boys' dreams.  Girls are scary but okay as long as they know their place.  Our Heroes got split up but are making their separate ways toward the same city.  Ballads are cool, and so are apostrophes.

Is there anything of real substance in the last 400 pages that I actually missed out on, there?  Things that a reader would be confused not knowing if they jumped in now?  I suppose I could detail more prophecies, or the specifics of their magic, or speculate on exactly what 'the sundering' was, but honestly we've only been told fragments of those things already, and they're mostly easily intuited stuff that would take the average reader about four sentences to pick up on.  'The dark lord was fought once before and sealed away but some of his power leaks through and that's how he's able to have armies of minions'--well, fricking obviously.  In terms of Epic Fantasy, that's like saying 'gold can be exchanged for goods and services' or 'none of the protagonists are black'.  There are certain things a reader learns to take as given.


On the boat still, Thom the gleeman and Mat have exactly the same conversation they had last chapter, about Thom taking his 'pretend the kids are your apprentices' story too seriously.  Rand is shocked to hear Mat speak matter-of-factly about the possibility the rest of their party is dead, but then a voice pops into his head asking if he thinks this is all a cheerful fireside story:

The heroes find the treasure and defeat the villain and live happily ever after? Some of his stories don'tend that way. Sometimes even heroes die. Are you a hero, Rand al'Thor? Are you a hero, sheepherder?

FORESHADOW FORESHADOW.  They turn a bend in the river and finally see the White Bridge, a huge smooth white-stone bridge with implausibly thin supports and no seams, and one end in the town of Whitebridge.  We're told it looks like glass but it's never slippery, and it's apparently indestructible, a remnant of the Age of Legends,when apparently Aes Sedai just did this kind of thing regularly.

There's a lot of generic ship-crew-work described, the captain fires the token sailor we hate (who kept trying to get rid of Rand and company), and gives them back the money they paid for fares, plus some, because of all the morale-boosting work Thom did.  (Silver coins from Moiraine: recovered.  Oh no, our heroes almost actually lost something.)  The captain wants them to keep sailing with him, down to some bard competition in Illian, but Rand insists they have friends to meet nearby.  Thom warns them all to be stealthy and cautious, and then completely forgets that his patchwork cloak marks him as a gleeman, the most exciting thing to ever happen to any of these peasants in their whole lives.  (I'm not clear on why gleemen are such a big deal.  Storytelling is important stuff, but folks in this book act like Thom is one in a million.  It played much better in Backwoodston back in chapter two than it does here at a major shipping junction.)

Times are hard in fantasyland:

Hawkers [...] tried to interest the passersby in their skimpy trays of fruit or vegetables, but none was getting much interest. Shops selling food had the same pitiful displays of produce Rand remembered from Baerlon. Even the fishmongers displayed only small piles of small fish, for all the boats on the river.

I... no, that's the opposite of how famine works.  If the best anyone can get is 'hardly anything' then even really unimpressive cabbages are going for heaps of cash and no one can keep them in stock.  People are desperate for any fish at all--meat; real meat!  The only reason for people to ignore the food for sale is if they already have enough themselves, which they can't if the grocers can't get any better than this.  What are these people eating?  (Please say it's tourists.  It's time for something proper scary; let's have a town full of desperate folks eating adventurers.)

Thom leads them to an inn where they can decide on a course of action.

Rand wondered idly if all innkeepers were fat and losing their hair.

It take some chutzpah to write interchangeable self-parodying stereotypes and then have your characters comment on how These People Are All The Same.  After some more meandering, Thom shakes news out of the innkeeper that Logain, the guy who said he was the Dragon Reborn, has been captured by Aes Sedai and they're taking him to Tar Valon via Caemlyn, where the Queen lives.  (These people have a queen?  But--wait, is this feudal?  Are they serfs?  Do they pay taxes?  Are they granted military protection?  Who governs the territory around Two Rivers?  I thought every town was an independent body in a semi-anarchic city-state sort of model.  You can't just stick a queen on top of that and just act like it makes sense!  Why was the first concern of Two Rivers not to inform their marquess or baron or something?  HOW DOES THIS WORLD FUNCTION.)

We also hear that a proclamation has gone out asking everyone to sign up for book two--I mean, swear their lives to the Great Hunt for the Horn of Valere,which must be found before the final battle with the devil.  At last, Thom carefully describes the rest of Our Heroes to the innkeeper, asking if anyone has seen them, and the innkeeper does a full about-face and tells him to literally get out of town.  Apparently first a locally-known 'madman' asked about them, and then a Fade started appearing out of nowhere to ask people about the three farmboys, although by cleverly keeping its hood up all the time it prevented anyone from noticing that it was an eyeless hellspawn brimming with evil powers.  Our Heroes disagree further about whether they should go to Caemlyn as planned or continue to Illian, which Thom would have us believe is the Greatest City Ever, and Mat is near to shanking him with his Evil Knife when that one sailor we hate arrives in the inn and they have to book it quickly.

Thom swiftly exposits to the boys that the reason he's trying to keep them away from Tar Valon is because he was too slow (busy with work) to save his nephew Owyn, who "got in trouble" and within a few years "you could say Aes Sedai killed him", which Rand figures means Owyn had Illegal Boy Magic.  Thom, who is no Abed Nadir, doesn't seem to realise that giving us his poignant backstory is like turning both keys simultaneously on his personal doomsday device, but he disappears briefly and returns in a black cloak that freaks Rand and Mat right out.  They make their way out of town, and half a page later the actual Fade shows up in the middle of a marketplace.  Thom rushes it, daggers out, and yells for them to run, then screams a lot in blue light while everyone everywhere runs away.  Outside town, Rand and Mat agree to follow Thom's instructions (go to a Caemlyn inn called the Queen's Blessing), and off they go, harrowed by the series' first Named Character Death.

Today's aesop: If you have to shoehorn in a character's sad backstory in the last two pages before their death in order to give it any kind of emotional impact, you should probably workshop that character a bit more.


Back to Perrin, Egwene, Wolfbrother the Brother of Wolves, and the Irish Rovers Travellers.  Because carelessness and laziness are not in any way problematically coded for Travellers and Romani (I'm not clear if Jordan knew the difference) we are told that they make slow time, never getting moving until mid-morning and sometimes stopping mid-afternoon if they find a nice spot.  Le sigh.

There's actually a huge amount of exoticism going on with the Travellers, who are one and all "joyful on their feet", constantly dancing or singing or otherwise making music.  Sweet Non-Allegorical Lion-Jesus, I just caught sight of a paragraph two pages later where it's still talking about how every last one of them "went about a myriad domestic chores as if they had not a care in the world".  The kindest guess at authorial intent here is that the Travellers are analogous to Tolkien's elves, who were much the same in their song and dance, except that with the elves it was supposed to highlight how otherworldly and implausible they were, so here, applied to a particular human culture, it serves more to Other them as shallow flights of fancy with none of the serious thoughts or concerns that weigh down Our Heroes.  And Aram, with whom Egwene spends much of her time dancing, is thus the most sexualised man we've encountered so far, if only because it's the first time a named girl has been blatantly attracted to anyone.  (Egwene's belligerent sexual tension with Rand does not count, since we've seen exactly zero forms of healthy human affection pass between them.)  Oh, joy, and then on the next page Perrin sees some Traveller women dancing for the first time and he gets the most turgid boner of his entire life.  Othered, exoticised, and sexualised.  I'm like a goddamn prophet.

Perrin tries to talk Egwene out of enjoying herself (and at least nominally Perrin is worried about bringing trollocs down on a pack of pacifists) but she counters that this might be their last chance to do so before Wizardopolis.  There is much distress about pacifism and Perrin insistently carrying his axe, and he's increasingly aware of the thoughts of their wolf entourage as well, et cetera et cetera no plot development.

Perrin hasn't had any devil dreams for some days, but at last he does again, and in it Ba'alzamon incinerates his wolf guardian and throws a raven into his head, declaring "I mark you mine".  He wakes, screaming (as are the wolves), and Elyas finally declares it's time for them to leave.

We're more than halfway through this book and pretty much every plot arc has been 'our heroes arrive somewhere comfy, our heroes try to settle in, the devil Does A Thing, our heroes decide they must run faster'.  Please, for the love of sugar gliders and slow lorises, let them get to Tar Valon soon.

They have a rushed but extended farewell with literally everyone in camp, Perrin gets more boners from hugs from every girl (twice), Egwene refuses to stay with Aram, and when Raen gives them their formal farewell, Elyas replies formally as well, swearing that someone will find the song and it will be sung soon: "As it once was, so shall it be again, world without end."  That... is a really weird choice of moment to toss in a King James Bible reference.  The Travellers echo it back, and off they go, with Elyas gruffly explaining he was just being polite about the ceremony.

The wolves bring Elyas up to speed on Perrin's dream (they call the devil Heartfang, pretty badass) and they try to explain to Perrin that he'll only be safe when he accepts them, but Perrin makes bad decisions and forces the wolves out of his brain fully.  There's a final gender joke, when Perrin asks Egwene what she was always talking to Aram's grandmother about ('advice on how to be a woman', she says, which I assume in context means flirting and maybe some HJ pointers), and he says no one needs advice on how to be a man, which Egwene says is why they're so bad at it.

Ahah.

Instead, I share with you an exchange related to me via ye olde tumblre, between a girl and her mother, bemoaning menstruation.

Mother: You're not really a woman until you've got blood on every pair of pants you own. 

Girl: What about women who don't have periods? 

Mother: I didn't say it had to be your own.

Next week: More Nynaeve, no Rand.  Still some Perrin, but I'll take what I can get.

There are probably many reasons people hate lawyers, but the best reason was on display today at the Supreme Court during the arguments over King v. Burwell.

When the two bills that make up the Affordable Care Act were written, debated, and voted on, every senator and representative—whether they voted for or against the bills—understood that federal assistance would be given to low-income groups so they could afford to buy insurance on the newly formed exchanges. And they understood that assistance would be given whether the exchange was set up by a state or by the federal government. All of the Congressional staffs understood this, too, as did the lobbyists who worked for and against the bills’ passage. People who thought the bills were a disaster because they’d lead to communism understood the deal, and so did those who thought the bills were a disaster because it was a giveaway to insurance companies.

All told, the two bills comprise more than 900 pages of legislation. Today, lawyers argued before the Supreme Court that a sentence fragment within those 900 pages negates what everyone knew and knows about the purpose of the Act. But they were not laughed out of court, nor were they laughed out of the lower courts that heard this same argument.

This is not the majesty of the law, this is a trick. It’s like we’re in a fairy tale where an evil genie or a monkey’s paw will grant your wishes, but only through deliberate misinterpretation. It’s the kind of thing that makes for a clever twist at the end of a Twilight Zone episode, but it’s no way to run a country.

How can the rest of us be expected to treat the law with respect when lawyers themselves treat it like a con game? And how can we think of lawyers except as Ambrose Bierce did:

Lawyer (n.) One skilled in the circumvention of the law.

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In Hamburg, St. Pauli, it's peeback time. (more…)

Urban planning is a partisan issue. The graph below, produced by the Pew Research Center, shows that the American public are evenly split between small, walkable communities (48%) and sprawling suburbs with McMansions (49%), but that split is strongly partisan.

77% of consistent liberals want to live in neighborhoods where “the houses are smaller and closer to each other, but schools, stores, and restaurants are within walking distance.” In contrast, 75% of consistent conservatives prefer it when “houses are larger and farther apart, but schools, stores, and restaurants are several miles away.”

Relatedly, Americans are about evenly split between those who prefer to live in cities, suburbs, small towns, and rural areas, but there is a clear partisan divide.

And everyone seems to agree that they want to be near family, good schools, and the outdoors, but liberals are significantly more likely to care if they’re near art museums and theaters.

I’m familiar with the idea of the urban liberal and the rural conservative, but I’m still surprised by the strength of these correlations. If the preferences hold true in real life, it means that there is significant partisan residential segregation. That would translate into fewer friendships between people on different sides of the political spectrum, fewer conversations that help them see the others’ point of view, and more cross-group animosity.

In fact, that’s exactly what we see: a strongly partisan population that doesn’t talk to each other very much.

H/t Conrad Hackett. Cross-posted at Pacific Standard.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

70sscifiart:

From my Maddd Fantasy tumblr

Metropolis (1927)

My eternal jam. There is no better film.

Alex Theodoridis of the University of California at Merced asked Republicans, Democrats, and Independents "Which of these do you think most likely describes what Obama believes deep down?" Read the rest

Founding a company is a selfish act. It will consume every waking moment for the next 1-10 years. It’s an act of defiance and irreverence towards competitors and the status quo. That matches well with the life of a 20-something — fueled by the energy of youth, too young to be jaded, with no financial or social dependents. Not all selfish acts are bad ones!

Young founders may fancy themselves wizards of coding, design, and salesmanship, because they’re individually excellent; I did! But it should be obvious that those skills don’t imply they can build a team of 75 engineers that balance quality with speed, or build an international sales team guided by principles other than overwhelming exuberance, or develop a consistent brand with a voice and adherents, or manage cash flows once the P&L becomes abbreviated “in millions.”

Introspective young founders appreciate this, and often the stated solution is “delegation,” as defined by: I’ll do it myself, then I’ll understand it, then if further investment is warranted, I’ll have the experience to hire and instruct a new person.

This is how I did it when I was young and naive, and I see the pattern repeated all the time. And it’s wrong.

The trouble with this form of delegation is it results in a team that is not materially better than the founder, at anything. Which is incredibly limiting for the company, and sadly quite common.

It’s actually a variant of the rule that if you think a certain position at the company isn’t useful, it’s because you’ve never worked with greatness at that position. When you’re looking for someone who knows what you know, you’re not finding greatness, you’re finding a substitute for your already-not-world-class performance, and of course you’ll get exactly that.

Whereas, as the founder, your job is the opposite: To build an organization in which each person is incredible and inspires others to become better. In fact, worse: To hire people who are better than you at every position, because only then is your organization increasing its strength and abilities.

This mistake compounds when you’re building a larger organization, because then the goal is even greater than individual excellence, it’s to built teams which themselves grow and create greatness. This is a meta or recursive problem: Not the founder attracting, identifying, and retaining greatness, but the founder building teams who themselves are doing that. This is the best definition of “team-building.”

Delegation isn’t team-building, and thus it doesn’t lead to scale, nor to greatness.

Scaling your business requires that you convert your initial selfishness into the empowerment of others. “Delegation” means you still own it but someone else does the work. “Team-building” means the team is trusted to own it, has obligations around that, can figure out and execute all the details, and is responsible not just for meeting initial expectations, but increasing their expectations of themselves.

This is where you achieve true scale in a company. Delegation is where you assign away lesser jobs so you can be even more heroic, because it’s still about you. But you’re still the bottleneck even if you’ve made that neck a little wider. Team-building means no bottleneck because the team can be as wide as needed. In fact the best teams measure their own necks and decide how and when to widen further.

This is where you derisk the company by moving from brittle to resilient. Through delegation alone, if one person gets sick, a deadline is missed. Or if someone leaves the company, a strategy isn’t executed. With team-building, you have group knowledge. Someone being sick or leaving the company gets baked into the plan.

The moment where you truly understand and embrace this concept is when you can turn the gun on yourself and realize that no one is exempt from this rule. It’s relatively easy for a technical founder to agree that she isn’t the best person to build a global sales organization, but is she ready to agree that even where she is excellent, it’s still her job to find people who are even more excellent, not just at individual tasks but at building entire teams?

But doesn’t this mean that ultimately leaders are managing a set of people, all of whom are better-qualified than that leader to do those jobs? And isn’t that difficult to manage, after all how do you argue with those people, and how will you earn the respect and confidence of those people? Yes, that is what it means, and yes that is difficult. And it’s your job, because anything less is by definition holding the company back.

So convert the selfishness and egocentrism of starting a company, needed initially to get the engine turning over, into an egoless, outward facing, empowering, team-growing organization, where your goal is for you to never be the most knowledgeable and experienced person in the room, because you’ve surrounded yourself with greatness, who each do the same.

---

The philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers famously declared that there was one aspect of consciousness that was especially difficult to explain. In “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness”, he writes:

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

One of the most famous responses to this is Daniel Dennett’s view that there is no ‘hard problem’, that it is effectively an illusion and will vanish as we understand the ‘easy problems’ of consciousness. I have previously suggested that Dennett’s philosophy of mind was “a bit thin”; I can now revise that position: on Chalmers’ formulation, Dennett’s is as close to a correct answer as is plausible. But both Chalmers and Dennett have gone astray in the same manner.

In a series of lectures in 1925, collected as Science and the Modern World, the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead draws out the history of what he calls – and what is still called – scientific materialism. Whitehead’s view is parallel to my own, and although he uses the phrase ‘cosmology’ where I would use ‘mythology’, we are remarkably aligned in our understanding that the materialist mythos is a remnant of an earlier era of scientific research. When the problems being researched were atoms, electricity, and magnetism, the materialist view helped deliver solutions. But after general relativity and quantum physics (both of which were hot topics while Whitehead was speaking), this imaginative system should have been retired. It was not. It persisted, and became ever-more dogmatic over the following century: Whitehead calls it “the orthodox creed of physical science”, and further suggests it has not helped solve any research problems since Lavoisier in the 18th century.

The ‘hard problem of consciousness’ looks very different if we take Whitehead’s concern’s into account, because materialism presents problems far before we get to anything as complex as human consciousness. He suggests that if we are to accept materialism’s view of isolated material positioned in space “there is no reason in the nature of things why portions of material should have any physical relations to each other.” This is a far greater problem than ‘the hard problem’! To understand it, it is important to appreciate that within the materialist mythos it is matter alone that is the ultimate ground of reality. This makes it seem as if all phenomena above the scale of the atom is explicable in terms of atomic behaviour – a view that should strictly be called reductionism, but which is implicit in materialism in its general form. By fixing our frame of reference on matter as fundamental, materialism creates the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness (and many other problems besides!). If our metaphysics are different, our conclusions will be different.

Thus, Dennett deduces that there is no ‘hard problem’ out of faith in the materialistic paradigm to continue solving problems the way it did between the sixteenth and eighteenth century. I will void the ‘hard problem’ in the other obvious manner: by not buying into the materialistic mythos that unites Chalmers and Dennett. Chalmer’s “Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?” is only an inflated form of Whitehead’s objection ‘why do portions of matter have physical relations at all?’, and both spring solely from materialistic metaphysics. Ditch this mythos, and you ditch the hard problem entirely.

Without going too far into Whitehead’s metaphysics, and process philosophy in general, the key to his critique of materialism is the assumption that we have a complete picture of reality when we know what kind of matter is at what location. Whitehead’s counter is that the notion of simple location at the heart of this mythos is misguided (and even more so after general relativity is taken into account). Location alone is not sufficient to describe everything that happens within our universe; we have to take into account the relations between entities – and these relations should be tracked in every context where they (if you’ll excuse the pun) matter. Materialism has had to invent ideas such as ‘emergence’ to deal with this problem – which is actually only a problem within that specific mythos. For Whitehead, relation is what’s important: track the relations, and everything becomes more comfortably explicable.

Whitehead’s process mythos positions events as the constituting elements of reality, rather than stuff, and this leads to a fundamental concept of value (in a wider sense than this term is usually understood) that is at the heart of all events. Coming at the world from this angle, we should expect everything to have its own value experience – it’s own qualia, to use the term philosophers of mind have adopted to describe the quality of experiencing – because every process has it’s own distinctive quality. We don’t even need to constrain this to conscious entities, as long as we don’t mistake the values relevant to non-conscious entities for those of importance to creatures with minds. For instance, an electron is repulsed by another electron because electrical charge is a value relevant to electrons as entities. Notice that in this metaphysics – in stark contrast to the Kantian schism between objective and subjective – value is not some strange foreigner visiting our universe because of bizarrely inexplicable subjectivities – it is the heart of reality.

The ‘hard problem of consciousness’ is thus not a problem that emerges from consciousness at all, it is a problem that depends upon the materialistic mythos that was so successful for the physical sciences in previous centuries. Only if you think the universe is fundamentally made up of bits of inanimate stuff are you surprised that there are clumps of matter that have unique experiences. If you think the universe is fundamentally made up of events, as Whitehead does, the hard problem vanishes as a philosophical artefact – exactly as Dennett suggests, but for precisely opposite reasons.

Chalmers’ problem was never about consciousness, but about the materialist paradigm he (and many other intelligent people) clung to for metaphysical orientation; his intuition that there was a ‘hard problem’ was justified – but it was the hard problem of materialism, the problem of how inanimate matter could possibly be fundamental in a universe so riven through with value. If you must remain within these metaphysics, then your only option is to do as Dennett does, to take it on faith that all mysteries will be solved within that mythos. If you instead defect to another view of reality, both these so-called ‘hard problems’ vanish as artefacts of a peculiar metaphysics that served the ‘men of science’ well in the past, but that will serve the people of the future rather less dutifully.

Research published in the journal Scientific Reports finds that alcohol is the deadliest recreational drug, followed by heroin, cocaine, and tobacco. Cannabis, at the bottom of the list, is 114 times less deadly than alcohol. Read the rest

The thing no one tells you about recovering from depression is that you have to relearn sadness. Recovery doesn’t mean you’ll never be sad again; it just means that getting upset is no longer the emotional equivalent of dumping gasoline on a constantly-burning fire. Sadness becomes, not a baseline, but a discreet event, like an object you can pick up, hold for a while, and then put down again. Even so, the first time it happens, there’s still this moment of panic where you think, shit, what if I’m not actually getting better? What if this is what sets it off again?

Which is totally understandable. Depression tends to condition you, Pavlovian style, to constantly expect the trapdoor of Things Are Unremittingly Awful to open under your feet the second you have a setback or a mildly bad day, and that’s a hard reflex to shake. You flinch like your brain is going to slap you in the face - and then sit there, confused and a little astonished, when it doesn’t. You’re sad, yes, but just about that one thing, or about a manageable cluster of related things, and while you might lie in bed or mope for a bit, the feeling passes, and you can get up again. 

Recovering from depression doesn’t just mean learning how to be happy. It means learning how to be sad in a healthy way.

My long-term path of exploring personal growth has often felt like repeatedly breaking orbit around a familiar star to go explore elsewhere in the galaxy.

Usually this involves three stages:

1. Recognizing that the familiar star is limiting my growth; becoming aware of its constraints
2. Feeling increasingly attracted to new possibilities outside the current star system; itching to go explore
3. Taking action to go explore; breaking orbit; accepting the consequences

One popular star is the star of religion. Many people dwell in its gravity well. It can be a difficult one to leave, especially if you’re threatened for trying like so many are, but breaking orbit opens up a world of new possibilities. There’s an enormous sense of freedom and expansiveness to be found away from this star’s influence.

Another popular star is the star of violence. When you orbit this star, you exist in a world of allies and enemies. Animals are property and product, and the flesh of other beings is a reward that you’re entitled to.

You may also be familiar with the binary star system of jealousy and possessiveness. Those within this complex system frequently lay claim to each other. Clandestinely sneaking off to explore elsewhere is common, but those who get caught are treated harshly upon their return. Even so, within this system appearances are more important than underlying truths.

Searching for Home

On your path of personal growth, you’re likely to break orbit from several different star systems, go explore elsewhere, enter orbit around new stars, and then eventually break orbit from them too.

After some time you may find yourself drifting in the space between stars, looking for a new system that truly feels like home to you.

If such a system already exists, with enough searching you may be able to find it. Then you can settle into orbit and enjoy the wonders of that system for as long as you desire… at least until you get the itch to go and explore some more.

But what if you either can’t find your desired system, or you suspect that it doesn’t exist?

Then you can go find an unoccupied system, plant your flag, and start your own colony. Invite like-minded people from elsewhere in the galaxy to help you colonize it. So if you can’t find a home you like, you’re always free to go build one and invite others to join you.

Creating Your Own Colony

After many years of exploring, I never found a pre-existing, populated star system that felt like home to me. I found some really interesting systems, but the best were usually only a 60-70% match for what I desired… not quite good enough to settle into, although definitely worth visiting for an extended time.

Partly because I didn’t see a better option, I found myself a quiet corner of the galaxy and started my own little colony. It’s not very big, but since I was free to design it as I liked, it has all that I need to be happy.

On this colony we have no established religions. We love philosophy, but have no need for creation myths or gods or anything like that. We love to explore truth, but we have no sacred texts.

Our food is fairly simplistic compared to what’s available elsewhere in the galaxy. We don’t want to overcomplicate or corrupt our sustenance, so we just eat whatever grows fresh on the trees here. Occasionally we’ll get creative with our meals, but for the most part we’d rather put more attention on higher level pursuits.

Our greatest fascination is each other. We love deep conversation. We love co-creation. We’re always working together on some creative project or another. Our colony is a very low-stress place to live, but there’s a constant feeling of positive pressure to tune in and outwardly express the inspired messages that flow through us every day.

We’re optimists at heart and encourage the heck out of each other. Ideas are nice, but we place more value on the expression of ideas. We love to say, “Make it so!”

We’re shamelessly affectionate. Hugging is our standard greeting. We love making each other feel good, both physically and emotionally.

We’re all very curious, so we love to explore. Our colony may be home, but we’re frequently off exploring some other part of the galaxy either together or individually. We gain a lot of creative inspiration from exploration.

We don’t always agree with each other. We actually love disagreement because it’s an opportunity for us to play. Much of our colony has been colorfully stained by some of our previous fruit-hurling battles — a practice we engage in with the utmost vigor and enthusiasm. Whereas other systems treat shame, fear, and guilt as weapons to keep people in line, we regard them as toys for our amusement.

We love hierarchy too — at least as a tool for play. Instead of static titles, we normally refer to each other as Master, Mistress, or slave. These roles can shift multiple times each day depending on our moods, and they allow us to playfully express ourselves while preventing stagnation and boredom. When someone is feeling authoritative, they may start issuing commands, and others will generally play along. When too many people want to be dominant at the same time, some very silly battles can result. And when too many people feel submissive, generally someone will assume command and make everyone do the most ridiculous things until they feel inspired to do something creative. We constantly explore leadership, teamwork, and authority in a most playful manner.

We do have personal possessions, but we’re minimalists in that regard, so our personal territory doesn’t extend far beyond the clothes we wear. We’d rather create, play, experience, and explore than acquire. Possessions are boring to us.

We love to share what we create. We freely gift our creations with the galaxy as a whole, and we encourage others to expand upon our contributions. It’s hard to find a system that hasn’t been influenced by our creative work.

We do have money, but its role is more playful than practical. Anyone is free to create unlimited financial credits out of thin air, and they can gift or spend those credits however they like. People on our colony often use money to buy hugs, massages, and other pleasures. These are freely given anyway, but it’s still fun to occasionally offer someone a thousand credits for a hug. Our colony has a rich variety of silly rituals for expressing appreciation, gratitude, and affection, some of which include gifts of money. We love to ensure that everyone here feels valued.

We generally avoid conflict with other systems, partly by remaining obscure but also by not having anything they’d want to take from us. Our system has few resources they’d care to claim, and anything they might value, such as our creative work, we share freely anyway. We live off the energy from our star, and we inhabit a strategically irrelevant arm of the galaxy. As far as targets go, we remain deliberately unappealing.

The animals of our world are sacred to us. We see them as our brothers and sisters. We do not own them or keep them as pets, but we share our colony with them. When guests visit from other systems, we teach them about the animals of our world and encourage them to treat the animals with respect and love.

Many people are aware that our colony exists, or maybe they’ve heard of it, but few know its exact location or would be able to find it. We’re very cautious about inviting people to visit, and we’re even more cautious about inviting people to join. When we encounter people who express interest in visiting, but it’s clear they’d be a mismatch, we gently refer them to other systems which we feel would be more suitable for them. If it seems necessary, we might even deny the existence of our colony altogether: “Yeah, that place is just a myth. Doesn’t really exist.” We also have some staging areas where we can evaluate people to see if they’d be good matches before we risk exposing ourselves to potential conflict.

Relative to other systems, our colony is delicate and could potentially be knocked off balance if incompatible energies were to infect the place. Security is very important to us, not in terms of protecting our lives or our property but in terms of guarding our peaceful, playful, creative energy and the values we hold sacred. We don’t seek to make our colony popular or even well-regarded. We seek to maintain its purity of essence. It just needs to sustainably exist, and that is enough.

This is my colony. It’s certainly not as grand as some other systems, but it’s my home, and I’m happy here. While I still love to explore and probably always will, my heart keeps drawing me back to this simple colony again and again. It’s the one place in the galaxy where I feel the deepest sense of oneness. And most beautifully, it exists.

It pains me to do this. I mean, I did a privacy rant just a few installments back, and today I wanted to talk about this really cool paper showing that squids are Lamarckian. But the news cycle Waits For No Man, and a couple of recent items have got me re-evaluating my sunny optimism of only a few weeks ago.

Of course, there’s a ton of commentary happening over C-51, the bill currently undergoing (limited) debate in the House. That’s not really news, although its highlights warrant a bit of review in light of recent events. C-51 is the Bill that would, among other things, jail for up to five years anyone who

“by communicating statements, knowingly advocates or promotes the commission of terrorism offences in general”

What exactly is a “terrorist offense”? According to S83.01 of Canada’s Criminal Code, it’s an act committed

“in whole or in part for a political, religious or ideological purpose, objective or cause, with the intention of intimidating the public’s security or compelling a person, government or organization to do or refrain from doing an act.”

Seems a bit broad, no? Lots of people and groups try to compel governments to change their behavior for ideological or political reasons. That’s what advocacy is. I hope that I’m not alone in thinking it something of an overreach to classify acts of civil disobedience— a roadblock, for example, in pursuit of “ideological” ends involving First-Nations or environmental issues— as acts of terrorism.

But C-51 goes one better. I don’t have to be the one planting bombs, hijacking planes, or holding up a protest sign on Exxon’s front lawn; thanks to C-51, I can go jail if I just promote that kind of activity out loud, knowing that someone within earshot “may” be inspired to act on my words.

The bill is almost more remarkable for what it omits than for what it encompasses. There’s no exception for private conversation, for example; I’m just as guilty if I communicate my thoughts in a personal email, or whisper them to my wife at bed-time to get her in the mood. (Yes, they’d have to be monitoring those emails, bugging that bedroom, to catch me at it— but don’t worry, C-51 has that covered too). There’s no exemption for critique or artistic merit, protections which extend even in cases of child pornography. There’s no geographic limitation; I’m just as much a criminal if I speak out on behalf of Hezbollah or Ukrainian rebels as I am if I go Yay Team! To the local chapter of Idle No More. I don’t even need to be guilty of a “terrorist purpose”, whatever that even means these days. If I were to stick my tongue in my cheek and write a blog post in favor of Baby-Eating For Constructive Political Change— knowing, as I do, that my words might be taken seriously by some unhinged and highly motivated reader— well, tough shit. Do not pass Go.

Kent Roach and Craig Forcese have written a number of backgrounders, freely available, about C51 and its implications. They point out that

“A sign or even a gesture could qualify, provided that it promotes or advocates the commission of a terrorism offence. This raises the question of whether a sign that says “I support Hamas” or “Tamil Tigers GO” or “the IRA will strike again” would fall within the ambit of the offence.”

But you know what? Fuck that legalistic ambiguity. If you want to see a terrorist act, right off the presses, here it is:

God, I’d like to see someone take a shot at Stephen Harper.

There’s something ironic about the fact that such statements are going to become indictable at exactly the time when they most need to be said.

Keep in mind, this is only one small part of C-51. The rest of it is wondrously problematic in its own right. Hell, “four prime ministers, five retired Supreme Court judges, three former justice ministers, four past solicitors general, three ex-members of the Security Intelligence Review Committee, two recent privacy commissioners, and a longtime RCMP watchdog” are speaking out with one voice— and, of course, getting the brush-off— on the oversight and accountability issues alone. (You should probably check out Michael Geist’s overview, even if you don’t have time for Roach and Forcese’s more detailed analysis.)

But none of this is news, right? At worst, it merely confirms ancient fears. So why does the same bill that gave me hope back on February 4th shrivel my balls here on the 20th?

Two new revelations, released within hours of each other. The first is a leaked RCMP document (scanned-pdf here) that puts all the ominous hypotheticals about C-51 firmly into the realm of empirical observation. It lumps environmental activists of all stripes together under the label “Anti-Canadian Petroleum Movement” motivated by an “anti-petroleum ideology” (“ideological motive” box, check), while redefining physics as political belief (“…greenhouse gas emissions which, they believe, are directly linked to the continued use of fossil fuels”). It laments the “violent rhetoric” on social media sites (“knowingly advocates or promotes”, check), and it does this all under the rubric of a “Critical Infrastructure Intelligence Assessment”. (Oh, did I forget to mention? Interference with Critical Infrastructure is one of the things that C-51 is crafted to deal with. It’s #6 on the list. “Terrorism”, strangely, is only #4.) The whole document seems pretty explicitly crafted to take advantage of the tools that C-51 would offer.

Again, though, how is this anything beyond another bit of grim told-you-so? For that we go to the second revelation, the only item in this increasingly lengthy post that did come as news to me. It turns out that— even against the backdrop of all these later-than-you-think headlines— Canadians like Bill C-51. It’s overwhelmingly popular across all ages and demographics, with an overall approval rating that weighs in at 82%. Ninety percent of us think it’s okay to criminalize speech that “promotes terrorism”. Over a third of us think the bill doesn’t go far enough, choosing a survey option which contains the line— I shit you not— “if you’re not a terrorist you have nothing to hide”.

This is what has robbed me of hope: the realization that I live in a nation of morons.

My reason to be cheerful, a few weeks past, was that we were fighting back. Sure the pols kept trying to sneak the Snooper’s Charter in through the back door, but they kept getting caught at it. Sure, the US had cops and congressmen who wanted to outlaw encryption; it also had companies who were finally taking encryption seriously enough to piss off those Powers that Be. Even up here in the Great White North, the number of C-bills that kept trying to strip away our privacy— only to get shot down at the last minute— was something of a joke. Our Masters wanted to see our nude selfies and poke at our stools every time we took a dump, but they kept falling short of those ambitions because we said no.

But it kind of takes the wind from your sails when you realize that over three quarters of the people you pass on the street have drunk the Kool Aid and gone back for seconds. We’re not just letting the Panopticon assemble itself around us; we’re actually applauding the engineers who are putting it together.

I know terrorism is a thing. I know measures need to be taken. But up here at least, the ideologically-driven dismantling of scientific institutions is also a thing. The muzzling of scientists and the censorship of research and the denial of fucking reality is a thing. The flooding of aquifers with mine tailings, the strip mining of the oceans, the Anthropocene Extinctions and weather chaotic as a grand mal ECG— things, every last one of them.

ISIS may be a cadre of murdering fundamentalist assholes, but that’s all they are; they don’t even pose an existential threat to Canada, much less an entire biosphere. Now Harper and his cronies shake those psychos in our faces to scare us into emptying our pockets and opening our bedrooms, and I can’t help but see Pol Pot offering us protection against Charlie Manson.

It would actually be kind of comical, if only so many of my fellows weren’t taking him up on it.