More on Speeding

     A video is making the rounds, supposedly pulling the rug out from under the "Speed Kills" campaigns of the insurance industry, police, and the media. Essentially the argument is that speed limits are too low in many places, and that it's perfectly safe to drive at higher speeds and the only reason police enforce these limits the way they do is to generate revenue, not to promote safety. The insurance companies, it is alleged, are also making money from this because they get to raise premiums when someone gets a speeding ticket, while media is just lazily repeating the "speed kills" rhetoric because it makes a better story.

     Where to begin? Well, let's start with the basic claim, that speed doesn't kill. No, of course it doesn't. It's an abrupt change in speed that kills, such as the sort that arises when two objects of greatly differing vectors collide. And as we know from our basic high school physics, kinetic energy is proportion to the square of the velocity, which means if you double the speed, you quadruple the energy. It takes energy to crumple fenders and bones, so the greater the speed, the greater the capacity to do damage. This much is obvious, but that kinetic energy formula is important in another way, which I'll get to in a moment. The point here is that actually, yeah, higher speeds are more dangerous, and in a non-linear way: going 10% faster is more than 10% more dangerous.
     To be fair, that's not really the point of the video, which argues that higher speeds (on highways or other roads that can handle higher speeds) do not necessarily increase the likelihood of a collision. Well,  maybe not, but even if the chance of a collision remains constant (and it would be bizarre to claim that higher speed limits reduce the chance), the fact remains that higher speeds do more damage.

     This, by the way, answers part of another one of the claims of the video, namely that insurance companies love for people to get speeding tickets because it gives them an excuse to raise premiums. Actually, and actuarially, insurance premiums are supposed to be calculated to reflect the expected cost of insurance. Insurance companies have limited information upon which to make accurate estimates of the likelihood that a given customer will be responsible for a claim, and how much of a claim. Knowing that a driver has earned a speeding ticket reveals a little bit of data about their driving habits which allows for somewhat more precise estimates. Now, I'm the last person to trust in the selfless integrity of the insurance industry, and I haven't actually researched the actuarial data here, but it seems likely to me that at least part of the reason your insurance rates go up when you get a speeding ticket is because statistically speaking, you are a bigger risk.

     The video makes a similar argument about police departments making money from speeding tickets, and while I agree that it's problematic to introduce a profit motive to law enforcement, it's worth noting that the police are still not actually a for-profit organization; the money governments raise from traffic enforcement doesn't exactly go to line the pockets of shareholders.
     And yes, police use stealth traps to catch speeders, when the visibility of a police car is much more effective at getting people not to speed. So what? Is this supposed to show that speed traps are aimed at making money rather than promoting safe driving? Nonsense. It's easy to get people to obey the law when there's a cop around. The point of speed traps is to encourage drivers to obey speed limits when they don't see a cop. Sorry, I shouldn't need to explain that, but apparently I do.

     But my main beef with this video is that it misses the main point of speed limits, which as I've written before, aren't just (or even mostly) about the state deciding how fast you can be trusted to stay in control of your vehicle. Cruising along in your private vehicle, it's easy to feel free and independent and lose sight of the fact that our public roads and highways are part of a complete system of transportation, and that they are a shared public resource. We hire traffic engineers to design and manage this system for us, and we want them to make it serve our needs as efficiently as possible. So they do things like place stop signs and traffic lights and turning lanes and set speed limits and so on with the goal of minimizing the time it takes to make a typical trip. In other words, speed limits are meant to speed up traffic. Let me say that again in a separate line all by itself for emphasis.

     Speed limits are meant to speed up traffic.

     That sounds counterintuitive, I know, but it's true. If you thought the purpose of speed limits was to reduce accidents, well, sure, that's nice, but considering that even very minor accidents create huge delays and reduce average speeds by a ridiculous amount (and accidents where there are injuries or deaths even more so), it's enough to say minimizing accidents is just a good way for system engineers to minimize delay.

     Time for a simple chart.

     Obviously, if the enforced speed limit is zero, traffic's not going to be moving very efficiently. As we increase the enforced limit, the effective speed of traffic increases, but only up to a point. At that point, higher speed limits can actually decrease the effective speed of traffic. Why?
     In an ideal world, where everyone is zipping along at a uniform speed, it doesn't really matter what the maximum is so long as everyone is going close to the same speed. Yes, we need to worry about stationary obstacles, but presumably an ideally-built highway will be free of obstacles.
     But this ideal world is sort of like the ideal universe of basic high school physics, where friction and air resistance are ignored. In the real world of driving, cars do not simply travel along at uniform speeds in happy obedience to Newton's First Law; they are generally moving because the people in them are travelling from point A (where they presumably were at rest for a while) to point B (where they presumably intend to stop for a bit). So unavoidably, there's going to be some acceleration involved somewhere along the way. Moreover, since not everyone has the same points A and B, there's going to be some merging of traffic along the way also, which means that not everyone is going to be travelling at the same speed. And sometimes people are going to need to stop in places they didn't intend to stop, such as by the side of the highway.
    So in the real world, there will be a range of different speeds we have to accommodate, and unfortunately one of those speeds will be zero. Now, traffic can cope with a range of speeds, especially if there are multiple lanes. But changing from a slower lane to a faster one involves acceleration, and remember that whole kinetic energy equation? Among other things, it means that accelerating from 90 km/h to 100 km/h takes almost twice as much energy as accelerating from 50 km/h to 60 km/h. So lane changes and passing are going to be more demanding, and you'll need a bigger break in traffic to be able to execute them safely. That means that if you happen to be stuck in the slower lane, you don't actually benefit from the fact that the faster lane is really really really fast.

     To put it another way, road space is a scarce public resource, and you use more of it when you go faster, leaving less available for others to use. Speed limits are an attempt to distribute that resource equitably, so everyone can enjoy the benefits of a public roadway. People who drive faster may not recognize it, because the delays they cause to other people are barely visible in their rear-view mirror, but they are slowing everyone else down, even if they never actually cause an accident. Oddly enough, a lot of the time they complain about being stuck behind some inexplicable delay in traffic, it's actually due to the ripple effects of some other selfishly impatient driver.

     Are some speed limits too low? Possibly. But not for the reasons given in the video. Want to get where you're going faster? Drive at a reasonable speed, leave a reasonable gap ahead of yourself for other vehicles to change into and out of your lane, and be a patient, strategic driver. Let the speed limits do their job.

Bring on the Jurassic Salad!

     I used to talk about how to me, the scariest part of Jurassic Park had nothing to do with the dinosaurs. I mean, let's be honest here: Homo sapiens is the scariest killing machine on the planet. We don't have big teeth or claws, but we are pretty clever with the use of tools and terrain, and we have language and can use it to plan and execute coordinated operations with terrifying effectiveness. This deceptively wimpy bipedal primate hunted mammoths, aurochs and moas to extinction. We went after sperm whales, fercryinoutloud! A tyrannosaur gets loose from a zoo? Bah. It might eat a few people before we can mobilize an attack helicopter to take it out, but we probably wouldn't even need to do that; a resourceful bunch of humans on the ground would probably figure something out by the time the  pilot finished his preflight checks. (Yes, I know the velociraptors were supposed to be the really scary, smart ones, but seriously, they'd be hunted to extinction in a matter of months, and more people would die in car accidents driving to the store to buy anti-velociraptor gadgets than would be eaten by velociraptors.) Sure, scary to the people on the ground actually being chased by dinosaurs, but not especially more so than most of the countless other ways each and every one of us will face death.

     No, to me, the scariest part was the scene just before we actually saw the dinosaurs, when the paleobotanist played by Laura Dern is marvelling over a fern she identifies as having been extinct for millions of years. I thought that fern was the most dangerous thing in the whole movie.
    Why? Because over time, invasive plant species can do way more harm to a lot more people than a couple of hungry carnivores, and while we humans are unchallenged apex predators who excel at killing other predators to the point that we have to rein ourselves in so we can still have things to kill, we totally suck at controlling little things like weeds. The economic damage caused by kudzu, water hyacinth, and "harmless" little critters like zebra mussels and carp and pine beetles adds up year by year by year, and there's very little we seem to be able to do about it.
     So the Jurassic Park geneticists revive a fern that's been extinct for millions of years, and whose natural predators are, presumably, still extinct. Oh crap. What's going to eat it? What's going to keep it from growing everywhere, including places where we're trying to grow corn or rice or potatoes?

     But then I happened to see this video, "Why aren't all plants poisonous?" in which the answer to the question is actually that all plants are poisonous, but we creatures who feed on plants keep evolving counters to the toxins the plants come up with.  I agree with the analysis, subject to some qualifications: some plants benefit from the action of hungry animals, and thus make delicious fruit or nectar to encourage them. Also, some plants, like thistles and cacti, may rely more on physical deterrents against predation than chemical ones.  (I always suspected that thistles must be tasty, or they wouldn't devote so much metabolic effort to growing those prickles. I first checked a couple of books to confirm they weren't toxic, and then picked some thistle from my weedy backyard, and trimmed the prickles from the leaves. Turns out, they're actually quite palatable!)

     Anyway, it got me to thinking: this arms race of plant toxins vs. evolved herbivore resistance to those toxins has kept on going ever since that fictional fern in Jurassic Park went extinct. That fern may have had state-of-the-art chemical defenses against the herbivores large and small of the late Cretaceous, but the art has evolved considerably since then. It may well be that many of the genetic tricks that herbivores developed to feed on the extinct plant have been retained and refined in the genome of modern animals (including us), particularly if that plant's surviving relatives have continued to use and refine those defenses.

     So maybe, I was wrong, and rather than deathweed juggernauts blacking out the sun, the reanimation of extinct plant species would instead lead to delicious and healthy "new" foods for us to eat. Either that, or they'll be completely ungrowable because every agricultural pest and microbe will eagerly devour them before we can.

Consciousness and Free Will

Some time ago, I read a book called My Brain Made Me Do It, in which the author Eliezer Sternberg (at that time an undergraduate in philosophy and pre-med) talked about some implications of neuroscience he found profoundly disturbing. He seemed most upset by the results of some interesting work using functional MRI to track brain activity while test subjects were asked to perform certain tasks.

Subjects were asked to perform a very simple task: press a button when they felt like doing so. The experiment was intended to piece together the sequence in which various mental events take place, and so the subjects were also asked to make a note of exactly when they decided to press the button, by noting the position of a dot moving regularly in a circle on a screen in front of them.

Now, it turns out that the moment the subjects thought they were deciding to press the button was actually quite a few milliseconds later than the fMRI showed activity in the part of the brain where the choice was actually made. In other words, the conscious experience of choosing was considerably later than the choice itself. The author of this book found that very disturbing with respect to free will, because he felt that a choice made some circuit in one’s brain that lies outside of the actual seat of consciousness was not genuinely a free choice. We do not hold people responsible for epileptic fits or other brain phenomena, after all; doesn’t the discovery that none of our choices are conscious completely do away with the notion of personal responsibility?

I wanted to like this book, because it was engagingly written and earnest, but I kept wanting to shout at it because it was based on an unfounded assumption about the role of consciousness, that it’s the seat of autonomy and choice, the place from which the body is controlled, where “we” as individuals ultimately live. That’s not how I understand consciousness at all, based in part upon my reading of books like Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind and Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained.

We know now that the brain is made up of a whole lot of specialized agents, little programs that are good at doing one thing and one thing only. There’s a bit of your brain optimized for recognizing the letter “Q”, and one for using chopsticks, and another for remembering that gasoline is flammable. Most of these little components are wired up to other components that perform related tasks, so they can share information as needed; your “Q”-recognizer talks to your word readers that recognize words with “Q” in them, letting them know if there’s a “Q” in the visual field, and keeping quiet if there isn’t.

Now, these agents don’t usually have direct connections to other agents if there’s no frequent reason for them to talk to each other. The “Q”-recognizer needs to be linked to your visual cortex, but rarely if ever needs to share information with the part of your brain that knows how to sing the tune to “Happy Birthday”. That’s where consciousness comes in.

Consciousness is just another part of the brain, but its specialized job is to serve as a kind of public bulletin board to which all the other parts of the brain have access, allowing them to share information they wouldn’t normally be able to share. You can see how this works by catching yourself when it doesn’t work. Example: I had just got out of the ground-floor shower (I usually use the shower in our basement), and was thinking about something else (that is, the bulletin board of my consciousness was busy sharing some other kind of information) when I suddenly realized I had just kicked my dirty clothes into the closet. A habitual behaviour (kicking the dirty clothes down the laundry chute) that usually operates without the need for conscious oversight had encountered a problem, and posted the error message on my bulletin board: “Something went wrong trying to kick dirty laundry down chute.” The instant this was posted, and thus made available to all parts of my brain, two other brain elements immediately made relevant reports: “The laundry chute is located on the ground floor of your parents’ house”, and “You are currently in your own house”. (Yet another brain element added: “Dumbass!”)

You have probably had similar experiences, where you just did something on autopilot that, if you had stopped to think about it consciously, you would have immediately recognized that you were making a mistake. You probably could have avoided the error if you had been consciously paying attention to what you were doing, but consciousness is a limited resource. If your consciousness is busy sharing information about which house you’re in and what dirty-laundry-protocol to follow, it’s probably not sharing information between the part of  your brain that remembers what’s in the fridge and the part that’s trying to plan what to cook for dinner. But all these parts of your brain are still part of you, even if they aren’t always (or ever, even) starring in the spotlight of consciousness.

Yet there is something to the moral intuition that we don’t hold an epileptic morally accountable for the actions triggered by brain events during a seizure. So how do we draw a meaningful moral distinction between those unconscious brain events and the ones for which we are responsible?

I would suggest that the answer lies not in whether or not the decision is a conscious one (because no decisions are truly conscious in themselves, even if they are immediately reported through consciousness), but whether or not the decision could be influenced by the information content of consciousness. Let me demonstrate with two examples.

First, take a deep breath. Actually, it doesn’t matter if you take a deep breath or not. The decision to do so is yours, and you may decide not to, but at a minimum, the idea of taking a deep breath is now posted in your consciousness bulletin board for all the other bits of your brain to see and work on. There is probably a part resisting: “Wait, why should we take a breath just because someone told us to?” Another part is saying, “Breathing deeply once in a while is good for you anyway! Do it!” Lots of other little bits are piping up with various arguments for or against, while your poor motor control brain segment has been on alert for the decision to proceed or abort with Operation Deep Breath since you first saw the sentence. Whatever your decision element decides, you will become conscious of your decision mere milliseconds later as it is posted to the bulletin board.

Now, you can and do breathe unconsciously, most of the time in fact. The part of your brain that controls breathing usually doesn’t bother consciousness with it, and doesn’t require any special information from consciousness to keep doing its job. But it can modify its behaviour in response to such information, such as “Don’t inhale now! You’re under water!” The fact that it can be affected by conscious information is what qualifies taking a deep breath as our act, even though it may not always (and usually isn’t) done under conscious control.

Second example: Sneeze, right now. Now, again, it doesn’t matter if you did just happen to sneeze as you were reading this, because odds are that if you did it’s because you already needed to sneeze anyway. Sneezing is, for most people at least, a reflex action that is driven entirely by physiological stimuli, over which the contents of your consciousness have almost no direct influence. Yes, you can take deliberate actions that will indirectly lead to your sneezing (such as inhaling ground pepper or snuff), but the act of will there is “inhale pepper”; the sneeze is at best a consequence of your volitional act, rather than your own act. And yet sneezing is certainly something that takes place using muscles and organs you generally control, and even involves brain events in the very brain whose decisions you are said to be responsible. 

It’s possible, of course, that you’ve trained yourself somehow to establish some neural link between your consciousness and the sneeze reflex, and maybe you can sneeze at will, in which case I’ve just chosen a bad example for you. For me, at least, the sneeze reflex pays no attention to the content of consciousness, and so it would be inappropriate to attach moral blame or praise to me for my “decision” to sneeze, while it might be perfectly appropriate to hold be responsible for a decision to take or not to take a deep breath. 

To me, then, the fact that decision-making may take place pre-consciously does not in any way raise problems for practical free will. It is a mistake to identify ourselves too closely with only the conscious part of our brains. Our minds are the emergent phenomena of complex networks of distinct brain subsystems, not merely some tiny bit that lives in one little corner, pulling the strings.

Academic Integrity

     When I was an undergraduate, I was always a little bit puzzled by the handout I'd receive in every class warning of what a serious academic offence plagiarism was. The same handout was provided verbatim and unattributed in each class, and I used to think myself clever, arching a suspicious eyebrow at the instructor and asking, "Did you write this yourself?" seldom bringing as much laughter as I'd hoped.
     But I never felt the warning about plagiarism was very helpful in making clear just why it was such a serious offense. We were just told, "Don't do it." My naive first reading of it was based on a sort of intellectual property idea, that "stealing" someone else's work and taking credit for it yourself was essentially a violation of someone else's rights, that you were cheating someone else out of they due credit.
     Of course that's one element of what makes plagiarism wrong, but respect for the original author's interests isn't the only value at stake, and actually a very small one in the academic context. How does it harm me as a writer if some kid in a philosophy of religion class in Kentucky passes off my essay on Anselm's Ontological Argument as his own? Maybe if he published it widely and diluted the market for my doing the same, but in a paper that only his professor will see?
     And so if we emphasize this aspect of plagiarism, we make our dire warnings of how very very bad indeed it is to steal someone else's work ring hollow, arbitrary and forced. Seriously, who cares?

     The problem is complicated, because there are actually several very different values at stake, and some of them are at odds with each other. Curiously, though, these sometimes competing values actually lead to the same conclusion, albeit for very different reasons. I'm going to talk here about three: pedagogy, evaluation, and scholarship.

Pedagogy    
     Pedagogy is about teaching; the objective is to impart knowledge and understanding to the student, to help them gain mastery over the subject matter. To that end, it's an extremely useful exercise to have them attempt to explain concepts in their own words. I have been a student, and I have been a teacher, and I have never learned so much about a subject as when I tried to explain it to someone else. This is why the essay is such a common form of assignment; the cognitive effort of formulating a thesis and composing sentences that actually convey understanding of the subject matter is ferociously powerful in developing and reinforcing the student's own understanding.
     Sometimes, students will misinterpret the reason for an assignment, taking the instructor's question at face value as a request for knowledge. If a friend asks you for a justification of abortion that recognizes the personhood of a fetus, it's perfectly reasonable to just hand him a copy of Judith Jarvis Thomson's A Defense of Abortion, but your instructor presumably already is familiar with the subject matter of the assignment; she's not asking you to explain it for her benefit, but for yours. Merely copying out what someone else has written has almost no pedagogic value whatsoever (beyond perhaps honing one's penmanship, typing, or cut-and-paste skills). Now, maybe you do already have a keen understanding, simply from reading the text (in which case, good for you!), but if that's the case, explaining it in your own words should be a breeze. Even if it is, the exercise is still well worth carrying out, because you will improve your understanding by trying to communicate it.
     So, with respect to the value of pedagogy, plagiarism is primarily an offence against the student himself, a squandering of the opportunity to learn. And, to a lesser extent, it's a waste of the time of the instructor who reads the plagiarized assignment and tries to give you thoughtful feedback on what she thinks is your own understanding of the subject matter. Admittedly, the instructor is probably being paid to waste her time this way, but give her some credit -- she's probably not just doing it for the money, and really also wants to help you learn.

Evaluation
     The purpose of evaluation and testing is to grade the student's performance, whether for the beneficial purpose of diagnosing where more pedagogical effort is needed, the benign purpose of certifying that a student has met some requisite standard of expertise, or the downright pernicious purpose of weeding out those deemed unworthy of further learning opportunities. (As a teacher, I absolutely detest grading, though I understand why it needs to be done and so I grit my teeth and do it ruthlessly.) But whatever the ultimate use of the evaluation, the accuracy of the results absolutely depends on not helping the student to answer the questions. The test is meant to measure how well the student understands the subject matter, without help.
     Obviously, then, a student who copies someone else's work on an evaluation undermines the accuracy of the test. (Well, not always. I once had a student cheat on an assignment in a business ethics class I was teaching. Seriously! Business ethics! The result in that case, though, was actually an extremely accurate measure of how well he had absorbed the subject matter...) To the extent that the grading serves a socially useful purpose, this kind of cheating hurts everyone.

     Of course, there is overlap between pedagogy and evaluation for most assignments, since we tend to put grades on everything, including those assignments which serve a primarily pedagogical purpose. We kinda have to, because students tend to skip assignments if they can get away with it without harming their grades. This complicates analysis of individual instances of plagiarism; is someone trying to get a better grade than they deserve, or just being lazy about the exercise?

     An example: I once had a student submit an assignment in which he was supposed to choose a scenario and analyze it according to a particular set of legal principles. He picked an actual case, from the published decision of the court, which by itself was not a problem. However, rather than write the entire assignment in his own words, he cut and pasted the relevant portions of the court's own analysis. Now, my first instinct at this point was to nail him to the wall for plagiarism, but then I noticed something: the original case had not addressed every issue (the defense had not contested everything), so my student had taken the trouble to compose his own (quite competent) analysis of these issues. In fact, he'd been very selective in choosing only the best and most relevant sections of the text, and so it was clear to me that he had actually worked on the assignment, reading and thinking hard about it if not actually writing so much. So the pedagogical objective wasn't really being undermined so much. And my purpose in assessing how well he had absorbed the concepts wasn't totally frustrated, though it was made rather more time-consuming as I had to compare, line by line, the original judgment with his submission. If he had just identified the parts he quoted, my task would have been much easier. (As it was, I refused to grade it as written, and gave him a stern warning about the academic integrity policy and just how very dangerous to his academic career such a mistake could be. It was a teachable moment.)

Scholarship
     This brings us to the other reason for academic integrity, which is just a matter of doing good, useful work as a scholar. The whole enterprise of research and writing is to try to make some kind of meaningful contribution to expanding human knowledge. This is inherently a collective effort, involving thousands of human minds over many generations, and this creates some epistemological hurdles. If I publish a paper claiming that the Moon is made styrofoam, it's really not of much use to anyone if it's just my unfounded assertion. I should provide sources and references, cite where and how I got my data and how I reached my conclusions, to facilitate as much as possible the work of other scholars in understanding, evaluating, and ultimately confirming or rejecting my claims. As I've posted before, nobody cares what you think. What people care about is what they ought to think. And so it's important to provide all the information you can to help them make up their mind.
     To that end, we have developed various conventions about how and when to cite authorities, how to identify and attribute a quote, and so on. It's also useful to give credit where it's due for ideas you didn't come up with by yourself, not so much because the original author needs the pat on the back (though that's just courteous) but because it helps your audience to better understand where you're coming from and gives them another avenue to further investigate the ideas you're talking about.
     Failure to properly attribute sources in this sense isn't so much dishonesty as it is just laziness, and the chief effect is that it limits the usefulness of the finished product. Inasmuch as we're trying to teach students the habits of good scholarship, well, of course we're going to want them to include proper citations. But mere failure to do so is really more a matter of doing shoddy work, and shouldn't be confused with the grave offence of academic dishonesty.

Finding Beauty

     From time to time I hear about vicious and cruel tweets or comments thread posts about some woman or other being ugly. Most recently, I recall the winner of some tennis championship being the subject of hateful, nasty comments from people who figured she didn't deserve to win because she wasn't as pretty (in their opinion) as her competitor.
     Quite rightly, plenty of people have condemned this behaviour, and also making the point that there is much more to any individual (female or male) than how physically attractive they are. I have nothing to add to this self-evident observation; instead, I want to suggest another reason why we ought to regard such behaviour with contempt, and that is from the perspective of an unapologetic girl-watcher.

     I make no excuses. I confess that I do appreciate feminine beauty, and spend rather a lot of time in its contemplation. I do love to look at women. Not because I think that's all there is to them, not because I consider it to be any measure of their worth (even a small one), but because I just happen to be wired that way. If you're a woman, and you're talking to me, I am of course interested in what you have to say, because I value humans and their ideas and experiences, and I won't be staring at your breasts because, lovely as they may be, I value your mind much much more. That doesn't mean I'll be completely ignorant of your physical features, but they will just be one of many elements of the environment in which I might take some aesthetic pleasure. That I happen to like the music playing in the background, or the coffee in my cup, doesn't mean I'm not also paying more attention to you, your distinct human mind and your ideas.
     If you happen to just be walking by, or sitting several rows down on the bus from me, or otherwise not interacting with me personally, well, then, while I know there's a unique mind in there, I don't have any access to it; all I have available to notice then is the way your hair complements the shape of your face, or the flattering contours of your jeans. That I might take some pleasure in seeing such things should be no threat to you, nor indeed of any interest to you whatsoever (unless you happen to be interested in me). It happens entirely within the head of this middle-aged married guy that you may or may not notice in a crowd, but with whose mind you are not currently interacting. A guy who happens to derive aesthetic pleasure from many aspects of the world around him, one of which is the appearance of females of his species.

    Now, I say all this as a way of explaining that I sympathize with guys who pay attention to women's looks. I do too. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that by itself. But let me tell you a little something about how I look for feminine beauty. To me, it is a kind of puzzle, an exercise in perspective, a challenge. I start from the presumption that there is beauty to be seen in just about everything and everyone, if you look in just the right way. It's very much like the famous optical illusion where you can see the image as a young woman or an old lady, just by choosing to identify a feature as either the old lady's nose, or the young woman's chin.
     There is an additional pleasure in trying to solve the puzzle, to find the beauty hidden in plain sight. In many, particularly the women regarded as "conventionally beautiful", it's pretty easy to find. In others, it takes some effort, but it's there, and when I find it it's that much more of a special thrill to see. And if I can't find it (sometimes it's very well-hidden), I realize that the fault is with my imagination, not with her.
      It's one of those little joys of discovery that make my life worthwhile, like solving a crossword puzzle. (And sometimes, I reverse the exercise, trying to find a way to see the ugliness in a supermodel. Not very often, though. I don't much care for ugliness, even if I know it's there. It's just a challenge, to keep my on my toes.)

     And so, whenever I hear some jerk describe a woman as ugly, quite apart from my disdain for his lack of basic human decency (which I feel in my capacity as a human being), I also feel as a connoisseur some scorn for his flagrant and wasteful ignorance of the finer pleasures of girl-watching, pity for his inability to perceive and appreciate what is right in front of him. It is as if he had flung down a crossword puzzle in irritation, saying "Bah! Six letter word for lack of cash, beginning with P and ending in Y? Poverty has SEVEN letters, you stupid crossword!" I mentally pencil in "penury" and get to feel just a little bit superior.

Note: Apologies for the use of "girl-watching" instead of "woman-watching", but that's the commonly accepted phrase for the pastime, and when I started out as a boy, I actually was watching girls rather than women. Also, this piece is written from my subjective position as a heterosexual male who just isn't as interested in exploring the aesthetic beauty of the male form. In principle, my arguments should apply ceteris paribus to the appreciation of masculine beauty. But ceteris non paribus: no one ever seems to say that a man doesn't deserve to win at Wimbledon because he's less attractive than his opponent.

Thoughts on Writers and Editors and the Ego Collisions Thereof

[Note: This was originally a post I made on a writers' forum a couple of years. It's far enough removed in time that I can approach it as an editor instead of as a writer, which is kinda cool, considering the subject matter.]


Q: How many editors does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Only one, but he has to rewire the whole house.

Q: How many writers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: "But why do we have to CHANGE it?"

     I've worked as a writer and an editor at various times, and so both of these jokes ring true for me. The apparent conflict between writers and editors is maybe not inevitable, but it's highly likely considering the nature of the roles, and in particular I think it's often a result of the mindset of the writer. We writers  are in the business of expressing ourselves, of crafting an insightful piece of prose to delight and enlighten our awestruck audience. In the natural order of things, we expect to have people read our stuff and be better for it. However, this also tends to attract personality types to writing who are motivated by this sort of adulation: writers have voracious egos. This makes us naturally resistant and resentful to criticism, even (perhaps especially) when it is well-founded. It also makes us especially sensitive to editorial feedback, and likely to focus on personality issues. "Why can't editors understand what it's like to be a writer?"
     But it's not an editor's job to understand what it's like to be a writer. In fact, it's very much the editor's job not to understand the writer. As a writer, I'm much too close to my own work; I know exactly what I'm trying to say, so I have no trouble reading and understanding it. But I am not my audience, and that's why I absolutely need a set of fresh eyes, the eyes of someone who does not understand me, to read my work and see what understanding comes off the page. Ultimately, as writers, our job is not to be understood and empathized with and admired as human beings, but to be understood through our writing alone. The text is all there is, and complaining that we aren't understood is really just an admission of failure as writers.
     Since editors must also be skilled writers to some extent (i.e. they have a high degree of competence in structuring clearer sentences), they too are subject to the very same sorts of ego issues with respect to text. And all writers have their own approaches to grammatical issues and so on, so there will inevitably be conflicts between writers (including editors) over the best way to express a particular idea. There's just no getting around that; it will always happen. In many professional contexts, it's the editors who have the final say, so they have the power, and naturally we poor writers will lament about how unfair that is.  But in my view, it's a very few people who get into editing because they crave power, or their egos need to be stroked by showing everyone how much better they are at writing than writers are. Yes, it does happen, but for the most part, we writers are already predisposed to see it that way, whether it is so or not.
     And we editors need to take that into account. As editors, our job is to help the writer be as brilliant and articulate as she thinks she already is. The goal is to preserve the author's own voice, not to impose the editor's own. My greatest successes in editing have been those moments when I've been able to take the text, rearrange things a bit to improve clarity and flow and reduce the length by 20%, and have the author look at it in dismay and say, "But you didn't change anything!" Even when I've rewired the whole house.

Does God Matter?

     A visitor commented in my last thread, preferring that I talk more about God than ways to reform our child support regime, claiming that at least it matters whether or not God exists. Well, does it matter?
     I would argue that it doesn't, or rather, that it shouldn't matter to us in how we live our lives. That is, we may care very much whether or not God exists, and we may very much want Him to exist (or not to), but our behaviour should not be affected one way or the other. I approach this question from a moral perspective, and then an aesthetic one.

     I have always been deeply troubled by the idea that God or the promise of an afterlife should be a factor in one's moral deliberations at all. Ultimately, it subverts morality in a profoundly diabolical way. I mean that very seriously: the form of "Christianity" (or Islam or any afterlife-oriented consequentialism) that emphasizes eternal reward or punishment as a reason for moral conduct is genuinely satanic.
     Consider: Suppose Satan were to appear and offer you a similar deal. Everlasting pleasure, in exchange for some earthly act. Perhaps some horribly evil genocidal deed, or perhaps some simple, benign consideration. (Wearing a t-shirt praising Satan for an hour? And you could even say you were wearing it ironically. Doesn't matter.)
     Obviously, if you consider yourself a Christian, you'd say no. After all, Satan's supposed to be the Deceiver, the Prince of Lies, the bad guy, so either he'd be tricking you into doing something much worse than you expected, or he'd not deliver on the reward, or both. No way could you trust such an offer.
     But the same problem applies to promises that purport to be from God. Remember, this Satan fellow is not just a trickster, but the trickster; if anyone can fool you about something, he's the one. And his greatest trick, according to Baudelaire (and The Usual Suspects), is convincing you he doesn't exist, or more generally that he's not the one you're making your deal with. Why could he not, for example, dress himself up as a holy man, pretending to preach the Word of God? Lots of mortals, without divine superpowers, have done so and successfully led people astray; why would this be difficult for Satan himself?
     So, disguised as piety, Satan makes an offer: "Buy into this worldview, ignoring its logical inconsistencies and moral perils, and receive everlasting life." And of course, when you buy into a worldview, you take everything that comes with it, such as (for example) the idea that you'll be rewarded in Heaven for carrying out this or that mission in the name of the church/temple/mosque/etc. You will go along willingly, since you have accepted the premises and believe you're doing the right thing because God commands it, and after all, isn't everlasting reward worth it, even if you've got some apprehension about it?
     I've argued this point with truebelievers before, and the usual claim is that Satan is somehow prevented from uttering certain magic words, so he could never pretend to be God or misrepresent God's truth. Really? That sounds to me like the Greatest Trick. The possibility of Satan posing as true religion doesn't exist, so pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
     The problem isn't with the identity of the person making the deal. It's the deal itself. When you base your actions on consideration of reward or punishment, rather than the good or evil nature of the act itself, you're making what is morally equivalent to a deal with the devil, regardless of who you're actually bargaining with, including if you think you're bargaining with God. A promise of eternal life, and all you have to do is believe? No thanks. The only reason you should need to believe something is that it's likely to be true, and no bribe or threat can or should change that.

     The aesthetic argument is inspired by my thinking about fiction and drama. If God exists and is our Creator, it seems reasonable to think of Him as the author of the novel or play in which we are all characters. The setting He's created appears to have been painstakingly crafted to make obvious evidence of His involvement ambiguous at best. As an actor on this stage, I feel obliged to work with the scene I've been given, and it seems to me tremendously tacky for me to break the fourth wall by addressing or even acknowledging the Author while the play is going on. I'm here, I'm in costume, I'm on this magnificently believable set. I'm not going to second-guess the role I've been given; I'm going to play it. I will follow my conscience, I will engage in dialogue (inner and outer), I will strive to be worthy of treading these boards, but for me, even if the Author does exist,  I would not be paying my role authentically if I were to seek a "personal relationship" with Him while the curtain's still up.