Be Liberal in What You Accept

If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart.  If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.

— Winston Churchill

You may have seen this quote floating around online.  Certainly it’s a darling of modern conservatives.  And if so great a luminary as Churchill said it ... well, then, certainly it must be true.

Except, of course, Churchill never said that. The International Churchill society points out that:

There is no record of anyone hearing Winston Churchill say this. Paul Addison of Edinburgh University made this comment: ‘Surely Churchill can’t have used the words attributed to him. He’d been a Conservative at 15 and a Liberal at 35!  And would he have talked so disrespectfully of Clemmie, who is generally thought to have been a lifelong Liberal?’

By “Clemmie,” Addison is referring here to Clementine, the Baroness Spencer-Churchill, a.k.a. Winston’s wife.  So I think these are pretty compelling points that attributing this quote to Churchill is just wishful thinking.

If you really want to know the convoluted origin of this quote, you can read all about it on the Quote Investigator, but basically it likely started off as this:

A boy of fifteen who is not a democrat is good for nothing, and he is no better who is a democrat at twenty.

— John Adams, 1799

which then evolved to this:

Several of my friends urged me to respond with Burke’s famous line: “Anyone who is not a republican at twenty casts doubt on the generosity of his soul; but he who, after thirty years, perseveres, casts doubt on the soundness of his mind.”

— Jules Claretie (translated from the original French), 1872

Along with many, many variations along the way, and since.  Here’s my favorite of the ones QI cites:

An excited supporter burst into the private chambers of the old tiger Clemenceau one day and cried, “Your son has just joined the Communist Party.” Clemenceau regarded his visitor calmly and remarked, “Monsieur, my son is 22 years old. If he had not become a Communist at 22, I would have disowned him. If he is still a Communist at 30, I will do it then.”

— Bennet Cerf, writing about Georges Clemenceau, 1944

That one at least is clever.  The rest are all at least moderately clumsy in the phrasing, not to mention not uttered by anyone as famous as Churchill.  Although John Adams is close.  But also pay attention to what Adams is really saying here: that, by the time you’re merely twenty years old, you should have learned not to have faith in democracy.  I know we Americans have a great belief that we live in a democracy, and that we do so because of our revered founding fathers, but often we forget that irksome things like the electoral college exist precisely because those founding fathers (or at least a majority of them) felt that the common man couldn’t be expected to be informed enough to vote sensibly, so the best they could be trusted to do was to elect someone smarter than they were.  

Of course, as I wrote in my very first blog post about quotes, “really it doesn’t even matter who said it: the wisdom or truth of the words is contained within them, regardless of any external attribution.” So who cares who said it, if it’s true.

Except ...

Well, except that it’s crap.  Even confining ourselves to the fairly modern definitions of “liberal” and “conservative”—and completely ignoring the far right (MAGA, QAnon, etc)—I can quite trivially provide two counterexamples: my father was the same conversative he is today at 25, and I continue to be just as liberal as I ever was well beyond 35.  Or 45 ... hell, I’ve now moved beyond 55, even, and I continue to be, what I’m sure is to my more conservative friends, annoyingly liberal.

And, yes, I do have conservative friends.  Remember: I said we were not defining “conservative” as meaning the MAGA crowd—I’m definitely not friends with any of them.  But, using the normal definition of “political conservative” to mean small government, taxes bad, trickle-down economics good, capitalism great, unions suck, etc. ... sure, I have friends like that.  People like that can be very reasonable and even fun.  The fact that they’re wrong doesn’t make them bad people.  (I’m kidding.  Mostly.)

No, this lovely idea that liberalism is founded on idealism, which is something you really ought to have when you’re young, but you really ought to grow out of at some point, is just crap.  Doesn’t make any sense, and doesn’t bear out in reality.  The best proof of this concept that I’ve run across is in an article from Scientific American, which posits (with some interesting studies to back it up) that conservative and liberal brains are just different.  Liberals have bigger cingulate cortices, while conservatives have bigger amygdalae.  Which means, broadly speaking, that liberals are better at detecting errors and resolving conflicts, while conservatives are better at regulating emotions and evaluating threats.  Nothing wrong with either of those characteristics, of course: each are good, in different situations.  And there’s still some disagreement over which comes first:

There is also an unresolved chicken-and-egg problem:  Do brains start out processing the world differently or do they become increasingly different as our politics evolve?

But I find this whole area fascinating.  Especially because there isn’t anything black-and-white about it, which as you know appeals to my sense of balance and paradox.  Sure, conservatives are less likely to question the status quo, but that means they’re often happier because they’re more willing to accept and enjoy their circumstances.  Sure, liberals may be better at processsing contradictory information, but we’re also prone to waffling and it can take us forever to make up our minds about an issue (that one hits particularly hard for me).  And, yes, all this is a whole lot of generalization, and individuals will differ in how they approach things regardless of their overall tendencies, and obviously we can rise above our programming ... but, at least to me, it’s actually a bit comforting to think that, when a friend expresses some surprisingly conservative viewpoint, I can say to myself, oh: they’re just wired differently.  And that’s okay.

As I’ve said before, the world would be a pretty boring place if we all agreed on everything.  So, while I continue to believe that my politics are the best politics, I don’t hate the other side ... hell, I don’t even dislike or distrust the other side.  But, I must once again stress: Trump supporters are not the other side.  Those are the folks who’ve gone way beyond the other side and out the door and down the road and across the field.  Even my father, bastion of conservatism that he is, is no longer a Trump supporter.  Trump gives conservatism a bad name, sadly.  And I think that Trump will likely not win in the presidential race this year precisely because more and more conservatives are realizing this.  I could be wrong about that ... but I don’t think I am.  And that’s a good thing.

I think proper conservatism deserves a reboot.  I still think they’re all wrong, of course, but it’s never great to have people in charge who all think the same way.  Diversity is important (again, ignoring those ultra-right-wingers who foam at the mouth when you talk about diversity), and, just as having diversity in the workplace makes your business more profitable (look it up if you don’t believe this; there are multiple studies which support this fact), so too is diversity of opinions in government important.  If the government were entirely run by liberals, we’d probably be in just as much trouble as we would be if it were run entirely by conservatives.  Finding the balance is what’s important ... but of course I would say that (balance and paradox again).

What I really wish is that our two political parties would both split in two.  The Republicans have become sharply divided between the MAGA crowd and the “traditional” conservatives, while the Democrats have become too crowded, and people as different as Biden and Sanders both claiming the same party feels weird.  If we had four parties, they could perhaps be led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris, Liz Cheney, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and I think the vast majority of Americans would know exactly which quadrant of the spectrum they fall into just from that alone.  I’d love it, personally.  I would probably vote for AOC’s party the most often, but I’d vote for the Harris ticket plenty, and probably even the Cheney party every now and again.  (The less said on how I feel about the Greene-led crowd, the better.)  But we’d truly have some meaningful choices again, that’s the important bit.  And I think that would be good for our country, for our government, and for our sanity.

Sadly, I think it’s mostly just wishful thinking.  I think the two-party stranglehold on our political system is not giving up its deathgrip any time soon, and we’ll be the poorer for it.  But, as fraught with emotion as the current times are, I think we should still all remember that conservative, liberal—they’re just a difference in how we’re wired, and that’s fine.  We can still all get along, and we can still see the good in others.  And I think that’s a worthy goal.

[Today’s title is the latter half of the Robustness Principle, a.k.a. Postel’s law: be conservative in what you emit; be liberal in what you accept.  So perhaps it’s just my technogeek nature to recognize that both philosophies have value.]

Do Androids Dream of IQ Tests?

Recently, I was listening to a podcast—it happened to be Election Profit Makers, with the lovely and talented David Rees.¹  In this particular episode,² David offers this “hot take”:

I also think AI is kinda bullshit.  I’ve been thinking about it; I think there’s some stuff that AI can do, but on the other hand it really is not ... we shouldn’t call it AI.  Someone was making this point, that calling it “artificial intelligence” is kind of propaganda.  It’s not really intelligent yet.  It’s just like a word prediction algorithm, you know?  You give it a topic—it doesn’t know what it’s saying.  It’s ... it’s like an algorithm that predicts what the—given any word or paragraph, it predicts what the next most likely word is, I think.  I don’t think it really thinks ... I don’t think it’s artificial intelligence.

Of course, I put “hot take” in quotes because it’s not particularly hot: as David himself notes, other people have been making this observation for a while now, especially in relation to ChatGPT.  I gave my own opinions of ChatGPT several months ago, and it’s only become more pervasive, and more useful, since then.  Now, David’s assessment is not wrong ... but it’s also not complete, either.  David’s not a tech guy.  But I am.  So I want to share my opinion with you on this topic, but, be forewarned: I’m going to ask a lot of questions and not necessarily provide a lot of answers.  This is one of those topics where there aren’t any clear answers, and asking the questions is really the point of the exercise.

So, first let’s get the one minor detail that David is wrong about out of the way.  What David is referring to here are the LLMs, like ChatGPT.  To be pendantic about it, LLMs are just one form of AI: they just happen to be the one that’s hot right now, because it’s the one that’s shown the most promise.  If you’ve had the opportunity to interact with ChatGPT or any of its imitators, you know what I mean.  If not ... well, just take my word for it.  LLMs are extremely useful and extremely promising, and the closest we’ve come so far to being to talk to a machine like a person.³  But they are not the totality of AI, and I’m sure there will be AI in the future that is not based on this technology, just as there was in the past.

But, forgiving that understandable conflation, what about this notion that an LLM is just a “predictive algorithm,” and it doesn’t actually think, and therefore it’s a misnomer to refer to it as “intelligence”?  David goes on to cite (badly) the “Chinese room” thought experiment; if you’re unfamiliar, I encourage you to read the full Wikipedia article (or at least the first two sections), but the synopsis is, if a computer program could take in questions in Chinese and produce answers in Chinese, and do so sufficiently well to fool a native Chinese speaker, then a person who neither speaks, reads, nor understands Chinese could be operating that program, and taking in the questions, and passing back the answers.  Obviously you would not say that the person could speak Chinese, and so therefore you can’t really say that the program speaks Chinese either.  Analogously, a program which simulates intelligent thought isn’t actually intelligent ... right?

This immediately reminds me of another podcast that I listen to, Let’s Learn Everything.  On their episode “Beaver Reintroductions, Solving Mazes, and ASMR,”⁴ Tom Lum asks the question “How does a slime mold solve a maze?” A slime mold is, after all, one of the lowest forms of life.  It doesn’t even have any neurons, much less a brain.  How could it possibly solve a maze?  Well, it does so by extending its body down all possible pathways until it locates the food.  Once it’s done that, it retracts all its psuedopods back into itself, leaving only the shortest path.

Now, the conclusion that Tom (as well as his cohosts Ella and Caroline) arrived at was that this isn’t really “solving” the maze.  Tom also had some great points on whether using maze-solving as a measure of intelligence makes any sense at all (you should really check out the episode), but let’s set that aside for now.  Presuming that being able to solve a maze does indicate something about the level of intelligence of a creature, isn’t it sort of sour grapes to claim that the slime mold did it the “wrong” way?  We used our big brains to figure out the maze, but when a creature who doesn’t have our advantages figures out a way to do complete the task anyway, we suddenly claim it doesn’t count?

Let’s go a step further.  If I give the maze to a person to solve, and they laboriously try every possible pathway until they find the shortest one, then are they really doing anything differently than the slime mold?  And does that mean that the person is not intelligent, because they didn’t solve the maze the way we thought they should?  I mean, just keeping track of all the possible pathways, and what you’ve tried already ... that requires a certain amount of intelligence, no?  Of course we lack the advantages of the slime mold—being able to stretch our bodies in such a way as to try all the pathways at once—but we figured out a way to use our brains to solve the problem anyhow.  I wonder if the slime mold would snort derisively and say “that doesn’t count!”

Now let’s circle back to the LLMs.  It is 100% true that all they’re doing is just predicting what the next word should be, and the next word after that, and so on.  No one is denying that.  But now we’re suddenly faced with deciding whether or not that counts as “intelligence.” Things that we’ve traditionally used to measure a person’s intelligence, such as SAT scores, are no problem for LLMs, which are now passing LSATs and bar exams in the top 10%.  But that doesn’t “count,” right?  Because it’s not really thinking.  I dunno; kinda feels like we’re moving the goalposts a bit here.

Part of the issue, of course, is that we really don’t have the slightest idea how our brains work.  Oh, sure, we can mumble on about electrical impulses and say that this part of the brain is responsible for this aspect of cognition based on what lights up during a brain scan, but, at the end of the day, we can’t really explain what’s going on in there when you can’t remember something today that you had no trouble with yesterday, or when you have a crazy idea out of nowhere, or when you just know that your friend is lying to you even though you can’t explain how you know.  Imagine some day in the far future where scientists discover, finally, that the way most of our thinking works is that words are converted to symbols in our brains, and we primarily talk by deciding what the next logical symbol should be, given the current context of who we’re talking to and what we’re talking about.  If that were to ever happen, seems like we’d owe these LLMs a bit of an apology.  Or would we instead decide that that aspect of how we think isn’t “really” thinking, and that there must be something deeper?

Look, I’m not saying that ChatGPT (for example) actually is intelligent.  I’m just pointing out that we don’t have a very clear idea, ourselves, what “intelligent” actually means.  It’s like the infamous Supreme Court definition of obscenity: we can’t define intelligence, but we know it when we see it, and this ain’t it.  But what I find to be a more interesting question is this: why does it matter?

An LLM like ChatGPT serves a purpose.  Now, overreliance on it can be foolish—just check out the case of the lawyers who tried to use ChatGPT to write their legal briefs for them.  As the Legal Eagle points out in that video, their idiocy was not so much the use of an LLM in the first place, but rather the fact that they never bothered to double check its work.  So you can’t always rely on it 100% ... but isn’t that true of people as well?  Honestly, if you’re a lawyer and you get a person to do your work, you’re still responsible for their mistakes if you sign your name at the bottom and submit it to a judge.  An incisive quote from the video:

... the media has talked about how this is lawyers using ChatGPT and things going awry.  But what it’s really revealing is that these lawyers just did an all around terrible job and it just happened to tangentially involve ChatGPT.

So you can talk to an LLM as if it were a person, it talks back to you as if it were a person, it can give you information like a person, and oftentimes more information that you can get from most of the persons you know, and you can rely it as exactly as much (or, more to the point, exactly as little) as you can rely on another person.  But it’s not a person, and it’s not really “thinking” (whatever that means), so therefore it’s not “intelligent.” Is that all just semantics?  And, even if it is, is this one of those cases where semantics is important?

I’ve got to say, I’m not sure it is.  I think every person reading this has to decide that for themselves—I’m not here to provide pat answers—but I think it’s worth considering why we’re so invested in things like LLMs not being considered intelligent.  Does it threaten our place up here at the top of the food chain?  (Or perhaps that should be “the top of the brain chain” ...)  Should we seriously worry that, if an AI is intelligent, that it poses a threat to the existence of humanity?  Many of the big tech folks seem to think so.  I personally remain unconvinced.  The Internet was proclaimed to be dangerous to humanity, as were videogames, television, rock-and-roll ... hell, even books were once considered to be evil things that tempted our children into avoiding reality and made them soft by preventing them from playing outside.  Yet, thus far, we’ve survived all these existential threats.  Maybe AI is The One which will turn out to be just as serious as people claim.  But probably not.

And, if it is the case that AI won’t take over the world and enslave or destroy us, then what difference does it really make whether or not it’s “technically” intelligent?  If it’s being useful, and if we can learn how to use it effectively without shooting ourselves in the foot, that’s good enough for me.  Perhaps it can be good enough for you as well.

[For complete transparency, I must say that, while ChatGPT did not write any of the words in this post, it did come up with the title.  Took it six tries, but it finally came up with something I felt was at least moderately clever.  So, if you like it, it’s because I’m very good at prompting LLMs, and, if you hate it, it’s because ChatGPT is not very smart.  This is one of the primary advantages of having an LLM as a contributor: I can hog all the credit and it will never be offended.]

__________

1 If you’re not familiar—and can figure out where to stream it—you should check out his Going Deep series.  It’s excellent.

2 Approximately 40 minutes in, if you want to follow along at home.

3 “LLM” stands for “large language model,” by the way, although knowing that is really unnecesssary to follow along on this topic.

4 Again, if you want to follow along at home, jump to about 44:45.

The Sin of Popularity

... and then that’s not even accounting for the people that will be disagreeable simply because it’s popular.  I’ve known people like that, and I’ve never understood that: that it’s like, this is the #1 movie in the world, and that is why I will not watch it.  And I’m like, seems like you just miss out on a lot of dope shit that way, but okay.

Thus sayeth B. Dave Walters, the great sage and teacher.  And, while normally I tend to agree with what B. Dave says (I’ve quoted him several times, in fact), this time I felt a little called out.  After all, I have (very puposefully!) never seen Titanic, nor Forrest Gump, nor Rocky, nor The Godfather, nor The Sound of Music ... in fact, on some random Internet survey of winners of Best Picture Oscars ranked according to how much people actually like them, I’ve only actually seen 7 of their list of 22 (and only 3 of the top 10), and if I consider which movies I’ve just never gotten around to watching, I can only generously come up with a further two.  That means that, on this list of Academy-Award-winning films that people actually enjoy (as opposed to the pretentious twaddle that usually wins), I’ve actively avoided watching 13 of them.  Honestly, to have lived this long managing to avoid seeing Titanic is becoming somewhat of an accomplishment in and of itself these days.

But it’s also instructive to look at the films on that list that I have seen: Rain Man, Braveheart, Dances with Wolves, The Silence of the Lambs ... I didn’t go see any of those films because they were popular, or because they had won awards: I saw them because they looked good, and they interested me.  Hell, I rushed to see Silence: it was one of the few films on the list that I was really excited to see.  As was the film that inspired the article: Everything Everywhere All at Once is surely an anomoly—an utterly non-pretentious, nerdy movie inspired by The Matrix, Groundhog Day, and various Japanese anime (and none of those have ever won Best Picture awards), and yet it swept the Oscars.  Of course I’ve watched it.  It’s the most “my kind of movie” in this whole post.  But several of the others make perfect sense for me: “Braveheart” and “Dances with Wolves” are both historical action films with cool sword and/or gun fighting (as is Gladiator).  I’m not sure I can explain Rain Man and Kramer vs Kramer other than to say “Dustin Hoffman,” and I will admit that I’ve only seen Casablanca beause a friend convinced me that I simply couldn’t go through life without having watched it, but, in general, the ones I’ve seen make sense, for me.

And, likewise, the ones that I haven’t seen make sense ... for me.  Let me get this straight: you want to pitch me a love story (not a fan) that’s a period piece (not a fan) in a historical context that involves zero swords or guns (not enticing) about an event that I already know quite a bit about, including how it ends?  Oh, and it’s over three hours long?  No thank you.  Why would I ever watch such a thing?  Well, you reply, because it’s one of the highest-grossing films in the world (and the first ever to reach $1 billion), it won 11 Academy Awards (tied for the record with Ben Hur and Return of the King), it won a bunch of other awards, critics loved it, it’s appeared at the top of many lists of the best movies ever, the music won Grammys, and so on and so on.  But does any of that change what it’s about?  It’s still an overwrought love story with a very predictable shipwreck that goes on for three hours ... right?  Why on earth would I watch something that is so antithetical to everything I know I enjoy in a film?  And did I mention the three-hour time investment?  I mean, for a 20 minute short, I might be willing to give it a chance, but three friggin’ hours ... why would I torture myself in that manner?  Just because it’s popular?

Because here’s the correction to what B. Dave was saying.  Speaking as one of those people who pride myself on not doing many things just because they’re popular, I have to take objection to his characterization.  The poularity is not why I won’t watch the movie (or read the book, or eat the food, or listen to the music, or whatever).  But the popularity sure ain’t gonna change my mind.  Look, I’ve already gone over my stance on Cynical Romanticism, and I covered my experience working at Burger King where I first began to understand that people, collectively, are herd animals.  That doesn’t mean that I don’t respect the opinions of any given individual, of course.  But, as Mark Twain once said, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).” I mean, if you’re watching movies that you don’t think you’re going to like just because a bunch of other people are telling you to ... isn’t that just peer pressure?  Bad for sex and drugs but okay for movies, I guess?  I’m just not seeing it.

Look, I’m not saying I’ve never been wrong about whether I’d like something or not before.  I’ve spoken before about liking John Grisham even though I typically hate lawyer stories.  When Grisham first started getting popular, I assumed I wouldn’t like it, and I was wrong.  But what I am saying is, I’ve never discovered something great by following the crowd.  I didn’t read my first Grisham novel because everyone told me to.  I read it because it was the least bad choice of novel in some beach cabin we’d rented one year, and I was bored stiff.  I may have also mentioned in passing that I dig Tom Clancy too, even though I’m not into spy novels.  So did I pick up The Hunt for Red October because it was a national bestseller, or because it got made into a high-profile film starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin?  Nope.  I got it because a friend—one friend—advised me that they thought I’d like it.  Not that they liked it, mind you (though of course they did), but that they thought I would.  And I respected this person enough to know that, if they thought that, they were probably right, so it was worth giving it a shot.  But, not once that I can recall, throughout my entire life, have I ever thought, “well, that sounds terrible, but the public seems to love it, so I guess I’ll love it too.” Never can I remember trying a very popular thing that I didn’t think I would like and being proven wrong.  It just has never happened.  Maybe it will one day.  Except probably not, because I doubt I’m going to suddenly start jumping on bandwagons at this age.  But I won’t say never, for sure.

What’s really funny to me is that I totally misheard what B. Dave was saying at the beginning of the quote.  When he started talking about “people that will be disagreeable simply because it’s popular,” I assumed he meant people that will be disagreeable because it’s popular to be disagreeable.  In other words, disliking something just because it’s popular to do so.  Like, how everyone knows that Nickelback is the worst band.  Except, you know, they’re not.  I’m not saying they’re amazing or anything, but, c’mon: you can’t tell me you can listen to “How You Remind Me” and not think “damn, that song kicks ass.” Ignore the cheesy video: just listen.  And I find this particular example especially intriguing, because that song was super popular.  In the US, it was #1 on the Hot 100 (which is the “main” US chart), plus #1 on the alternative, rock & metal, and mainstream rock charts (a truly dizzying bevy of contradictory genres).  It was #1 in Austria, Denmark, Ireland, and Turkey, and top five in a dozen other countries.  Wikipedia further tells us that it was “the number-one most played song on US radio of the 2000s decade” according to Nielsen, with 1.2 million spins, and Billboard ranked it #4 of the decade.  On the other hand, hating Nickelback has become an Internet meme, and Wikipedia will also tell you that Rolling Stone readers voted them the second worst band of the 90s (behind Creed), and that some music dating site’s users voted them the number one “musical turnoff.” So, if we think we’re supposed to be going along with popular opinion ... exactly which popular opinion are we supposed to be going along with?  ‘Cause I gotta tell you: if I was ever on a musical dating site, my number one turnoff would be pretentious twats who dump on bands like Nickelback and Smashmouth just because it’s popular, and anyone who puts Nickelback in the same breath as friggin’ Creed is obviously looking around at all their friends and saying “just as bad, am I right? guys? I’m right ... right?” and definitely not listening to “How You Remind Me,” which, you may recall from the beginning of this paragraph, kicks some serious fucking ass.

So I won’t watch Titanic just because everyone else in the world has, and I won’t refuse to watch a Keanu Reeves movie just because the Internet tries to convince me he’s a bad actor.  Because, sure: Parenthood and Point Break didn’t demand much of his talent, and every once in a while you hit a true stinker, like Much Ado about Nothing, but I also know that Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is an amazingly fun watch, and The Matrix is one of the best movies of all time, and, if you really need to prove to yourself that the guy can actually act, you can go watch The Devil’s Advocate or My Own Private Idaho or River’s Edge or A Scanner Darkly.  But some people just wanna diss Keanu and Nickelback because “everyone” knows they suck.  I mean, seems like you just miss out on a lot of dope shit that way, but okay.

To Know Them Is to Distrust Them

Recently I was listening to Mayim Bialiks’ Breakdown and I had a thought.  Now, if you’re not familiar with the podcast (also available in video form on YouTube), it’s generally speaking a mental health podcast, but it ranges around from interviews with celebrities about their mental health struggles, to very hard science guests to talk about it from a neurological or psychological perspective, to talking to people who approach it from a more spiritual or even New Age perspective.  The interesting thing about that is that Mayim, known originally for Blossom and more recently for The Big Bang Theory, is often criticized for “pushing pseudoscience” and for being a “vaccine denier,” and yet, if you actually listen to the podcast, it’s her partner Jonathan Cohen who most embraces the New-Age-y stuff, while Mayim demands more rigorous evidence.  (I actually find it fascinating how Mayim’s statement that she chose not to vaccinate her children as babies gets twisted into her not believing in vaccines—she’s actually gone on record saying that she and her children got vaccinated for COVID as soon as possible, which absolutely makes sense, because they’re not babies any more.  But it just goes to show you that pigeonholing someone’s beliefs is so much easier—and gets more clicks, I suppose—than taking a nuanced view of them.  Or maybe it just goes to do show that people require absolute statements to live by ... I’ve often said that “vaccines are good” is just as idiotic a statement as “drugs are bad,” and for exactly the same reasons.^*)

In any event, that’s a bit of a tangent.  The point that struck me was while listening to Mayim and Jonathan’s interview with Michael Singer.  Now, you may not know who Singer is (I certainly didn’t, before listening to the show), and really you don’t need to for this discussion.  Suffice it to say that he had a spiritual awakening and then wrote a bunch of books about it and many folks consider him to be a sort of guru.  Personally, I felt the same way about his thoughts that I do about nearly all New-Age-y type folks: some of what he had to say was interesting, and actually made sense if you can reframe it from the touchy-feely / airy-fairy language that these types of folks tend to use;^** and a lot of what he had to say was just crap.  I do think it’s important to note that it’s perfectly fine to believe some of the things people have to say, even when other things they say are ridiculous.  But, again, that isn’t the interesting part.

Jonathan, of course, was a big fan of Singer: at several points, he jumped in and said the exact same things that Singer was saying, using slightly different words, and Singer would give him some approval in that “yeah, you get it” sort of way.  It was obvious that Jonathan was a student of Singer’s philosophy and really did get it.  It was even more obvious, from the back-and-forth between Jonathan and Mayim, that he had been trying to convince her of all these things for a while now—maybe even for years.  And she wasn’t having it.  From him.

But—and this is the fascinating part—she was convinced by Singer.  At the end of the interview, she said this:

There’s so many things about the way—not just that you think and the things you’ve experienced—but, again, the way that you communicate them, that just really ... it pierced something, it really broke something open for me ...

Now, should she have been so receptive?  I don’t know, maybe not—I did feel that she wasn’t as critical as she often is, and I think that Singer may have used some language that really snuck past her skeptic’s defenses—but that’s not the point.  It wasn’t fascinating at all that Singer convinced her of something ... what was fascinating, truly thought-provoking to me, was that Singer only said the exact same things as Jonathan—who is, remember, not just her podcast hosting partner, but her life partner—things that this man who she loves has been saying to hear for years.  When he said it, nothing.  Some “expert” comes along, and bam! enlightenment.  And, again, I really want to stress that Singer absolutely did not, in my opinion, say it better.  I honestly thought Jonathan stated it more clearly and logically, although I do give Singer the edge in having a lot of real-life stories that illuminated the philosophy.  So this is the part that caught my attention: why do we discount the words of the people we love the most, and then happily accept those same words when they come from strangers?

Now, I am not a psychologist, so I don’t know for sure, but I found it a very interesting thought experiment to ponder, and I eventually came up with a theory.  Bear with me as I follow this thread logically and try to bring you along.

We are all human ... I think we can agree on that.  And no human is perfect: again, hopefully not too controversial.  Sometimes we have moments of brilliance, but we also all have moments of sheer stupidity.  And who is around to see all the dumb things we do?  Well, us, first and foremost, which is why so many of us struggle with self-esteem—it’s a bit hard to think of yourself as smart and good when you know perfectly well how dumb and bad you can be sometimes.  But hopefully we struggle through that.

But you know who else is there to see all our dumbest moments?  Our family.  Our partner.  Our best friends.  And I think they may also have a bit of trouble seeing us for the intelligent, articulate people that we are (or want to be, at any rate), when they know perfectly well that we’re too forgetful to remember where we left our keys, or that we make the worst puns, or that we’ve proven that we can’t understand what’s going on half the times by asking them really moronic questions that demonstrate our complete lack of understanding.  And, sadly, we think the same things about them.  It is perhaps inevitable—some fundamental trait of humanity—but I think we would all benefit from recognizing it, and maybe even working towards overcoming it.

Because, to circle back to something I said earlier, a person can say a dumb thing without being incapable of saying a smart thing.  This Michael Singer fellow said some things that absolutely made me roll my eyes and say to myself, oh, come on.  But that doesn’t mean that everything he says is silly.  It’s possible for him to say some things which are profound and to say some things which are just pretentious twaddle.  Likewise, it’s possible for Jonathan to say some stupid things, and for Mayim to recognize that and know that he’s not as smart as he likes to think he is, and yet still be right sometimes.  And Mayim probably ought to think about that whenever she’s dismissing what he says out of hand.

And your partner, or your parent, or your child, or your BFF, they ought to think about that when they’re dismissing what you have to say out of hand.  But you can’t really control that.  What you can control, though, is that you need to think about it when you’re dismissing what your loved ones are saying.  Sure, your immediate reaction may be to snort and say “dude, you’re not even smart enough to remember to zip up your pants before you leave the house!” But, if you consider it logically, this is a form of ad hominem fallacy: you can’t prove someone’s statement is false by proving that they’re a horrible person, and you can’t prove that someone’s current statement is not smart just because you know they’ve said dumb things in the past.  Statements have to be evaluated on their own merits, and our emotional reaction to the people we love mustn’t lead us to discount what they have to say.

Of course, the opposite is true as well: we can’t let our love for someone blind us to the fact that they might be saying something spectacularly stupid right now.  But I think that becomes less and less likely the more maturity we achieve.  I think we’re more likely to be critical than to blindly trust.  Which is kind of depressing, if you think about it.  Think of how you feel when your partner or friend dismisses what you have to say on the grounds that “that’s just so you!” or “you’re just being you again.” I’m sure you find it frustrating.  Now, if you can manage to remember that when they’re saying something that is just so them ... then maybe we’re making progress.

__________

* This also ties in to my discussion of grammar proscriptions; while the topic is different, the principles are the same.

** And which is the actual cause of many people’s dismissal, I think.  I have a blog post brewing about how often we as humans just reject ideas which actually have a lot of merit strictly based on the words used to present them.  Hopefully I’ll post that soon.

It's Christmas Time ... Again

Well, another holiday season is upon us, which means it’s time once again for me to wish you a merry christmahannukwanzaakah^* and perhaps invite you to revisit my two holiday mixes: Yuletidal Pools I and II.  Now is a time to be with family, and as much as I also love you, Constant Reader, one must always put one’s children first.

Nonetheless, I will take advantage of this time of the year, as I often do, to wish you and your family the brightest of Yuletides, Hannukahs, Christmases, Kwanzaas, Pancha Ganapatis, and even Boxing Days.  As the year winds down and a fresh one looms on the horizon, it’s a good time to reflect on what we had (or didn’t have), and what we hope for.  What I hope for is that all of us will be happier, and healthier, and more hopeful.  Perhaps it’s a bit meta to hope for hope, but I think we could all use a little right now.

Happy holidays.

__________

* As always, ™ Jon Sime.

Fight the Current ... or Ride the Waves (depending)

A charismatic speaker starts espousing a crackpot theory.  The theory is based on an obscure book published by a little-remembered figure with strong ties to the Church and who is generally recognized to have no scientific credentials.  The speaker offers “evidence,” most of which is just drawings he himself made, and mostly just asks open-ended questions, because that way he can’t be held accountable for telling outright lies.  Everyone agrees that the public is likely to be misled by this person’s dangerous ideas, which could cause irreparable harm.

I bet that scenario sounds way too familiar to you in today’s world.  But I’m not talking about an “anti-vaxxer” or a climate-change-denier.  I’m not even talking about Tucker Carlson, surprisingly.  I am, in fact, talking about Galileo: the “little-remembered figure” was Copernicus, and the “crackpot theory” was heliocentrism ... the idea that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around.  You may think I’ve twisted the facts, but it’s absolutely true that most of what Galileo offered as evidence were his own drawings, and it’s also true that (at least for many years), he avoided making statements of fact which might ruffle the feathers of the Catholic Church.  And it was quite a pervasive belief that Galileo’s ideas were putting the very souls of the public in jeopardy, which was considered far more insidious than merely putting lives at risk.

I present this story because we seem to be getting confused these days by what “skepticism” actually means.  And, admittedly, people such as the aforementioned Fox “news” host make it very difficult.  One the one hand, Tucker presents himself as a classic skeptic: hey, he’s just asking questions, right?  And people attack him just as they did to poor Galileo, just because he questions the accepted wisdom (of medical science, of climate change, of systemic racism ... take your pick).  Poor, poor Tucker—you see what happened to Galileo, right?  Convicted, imprisoned, ultimately died there.  That could happen to Tucker!

Obviously I don’t intend to defend Tucker Carlson, and obviously I don’t think he compares very favorably to Galileo.  But I think it’s important that we don’t dismiss Carlson because he asks difficult questions and demands proof: that actually is what a skeptic is supposed to do.  I think it’s important we dismiss Carlson because he doesn’t offer any answers and refuses to accept proof when it’s handed to him on a silver platter.  Sadly, people like Carlson give skeptics a bad name, and make us more prone to dismiss people who might actually have legitimate points.

But I don’t think we can lay the blame for the decline in skepticism squarely at the feet of Tucker Carlson and his ilk.  The sad truth is that skepticism, like almost all tools for good, is used quite selectively by the majority of people.  For a simple example, buried right in the middle of a very long (but interesting) New Yorker article, we find this nugget:

While acupuncture is widely accepted as a medical treatment in various Asian countries, its use is much more contested in the West. These cultural differences have profoundly influenced the results of clinical trials. Between 1966 and 1995, there were forty-seven studies of acupuncture in China, Taiwan, and Japan, and every single trial concluded that acupuncture was an effective treatment. During the same period, there were ninety-four clinical trials of acupuncture in the United States, Sweden, and the U.K., and only fifty-six per cent of these studies found any therapeutic benefits.

Obviously there’s some bias going on.  But I bet your instinctive reaction was to assume that the bias is on the part of the Asian studies: your scientific skepticism of course leads you to question those results.  By why not question the results on the other side?  Is it perhaps possible that the Western studies are biased against finding benefits that they don’t really believe in?

I’m not saying that’s definitely the case, of course—in fact, given my views on balance and paradox, you’ve probably already guessed that I personally think there’s some bias on both sides, and that the truth lies somewhere in the middle.  But I find it interesting that most people that I know would naturally assume that the people who couldn’t find any evidence were more reliable.  On the one hand, you have scientific proof that a thing exists; on the other, you have no proof of anything at all.  And yet most people reading this will believe the side with no proof.  Why is that?

The answer, of course, is that it isn’t.  If I show you studies that show that vaccines work, and studies that show that they don’t, you’ll believe the positive ones.  On the other hand, if I show you studies that show that vaccines are linked to autism, and studies that show they aren’t, you’ll believe the negative ones.  The truth of it is, you’re just going to believe whichever studies you were predisposed to believe in the first place.  But, see, that’s not how skepticism is supposed to work.

Paul Kurtz, sometimes called the father of secular humanism and author of The New Skepticism, wrote:

Briefly stated, a skeptic is one who is willing to question any claim to truth, asking for clarity in definition, consistency in logic, and adequacy of evidence.  The use of skepticism is thus an essential part of objective scientific inquiry and the search for reliable knowledge.

Question any claim: even the ones you’re already “sure” are true.  Demand logic and evidence.  These are great criteria.  Surely idiots like Tucker Carlson crumble under such demands.  But other areas are more gray.

The problem, as I see it, is that our Western viewpoints often lead us to the conclusion that, “we can’t prove that it works, therefore it doesn’t work.” Now, if you think about this for a second—and, remember: one of the things skepticism tells you to demand is consistency in logic—you immediately see that this is a ridiculous conclusion.  Try to turn in that deduction in any college class on logic and you’ll get a very disparaging grade: the argument is not sound.  The conclusion does not follow from the premise.  And yet you most likely accept that it’s true, as long as it’s in reference to something you’ve been taught is pseudoscience.

Let’s take one of my favorite examples: chiropractics.  Now, statistically speaking, I’d say there’s a pretty good chance that you believe that chiropractics is complete hogwash.  Why?  Because of the lack of scientific evidence to support it, of course!  We can’t prove that it works, therefore it doesn’t work.  Q.E.D.  Of course, there are studies that show it does work.  But those are flawed studies, obviously.  They’re biased.  They weren’t rigorous.  It’s amazing how much effort we can put into debunking studies we don’t want to believe, and how little effort we put into debunking studies we do want to believe.  Because all those studies that said that chiropractics don’t work?  You didn’t question them at all ... right?

The silliest thing about this debate is that this is one of those areas where “works”/“doesn’t work” isn’t really a valid way to look at the problem.  Chiropractic is a medical treatment, like a drug, or a medical procedure that might be performed in a hospital.  And, I’m pretty sure we all understand that those types of things work for some people, and don’t work for others.  Some of that has to do with the quality of the drug manufacturer, or the expertise of the medical personnel performing the procedure, but most of it is just because we’re all different on the inside.  I mean, we’re all the same, but we’re also all different.  You and I might have the same medical condition, and we might take the same drug, in the same dosage, at the same times of day and in the same relation to when we eat or when we sleep, and it still might be the case that the drug works for you, and not for me.  People’s insides are just funny that way.

So, likewise, it’s silly to try to say that chiropractic works ... you can only say that it works for you, or that it doesn’t work for you.  It happens to work for me, but I have to tell you, I approached it with a very skeptical attitude.  I went to my first chiropractor, assuming it wouldn’t work.  I made the doctor explain exactly why it was going to work, and I didn’t believe a single word of what he said, because he was spouting off bullshit about chakras and energy pathways and shit like that that is very obviously not true.  And yet ... it worked.  It didn’t matter that I didn’t believe in it, and it didn’t matter that the doctor obviously had no idea how it worked.  It worked ... for me.  And I still go to a chiropractor today, several decades later.  I don’t go for every ailment, and I have certainly found complaints where it didn’t work, but, for many things (especially as I get older), it continues to work, despite all “evidence” that it shouldn’t.  Actually, since I want that consistency in logic that Kurtz was talking about, I did eventually find a chiropractor who approached the practice from more of a kinesiology standpoint, and he finally was able to make it make sense (mostly).  But none of that really matters, because, at least for me, it just works.  (I also enjoy it when people, confronted with this simple fact, try to “explain” it by saying that the relief is “all in my head.” “That’s fine,” I typically respond: “that’s where the pain is.”)

So, if you’ve tried chiropratic, and it worked, then you can say it worked for you ... but not that “it works.” Likewise, if you’ve tried it, and it didn’t work, then you can say that it didn’t work for you ... but not that “it doesn’t work.” And, if you haven’t tried it at all, I don’t think you can intelligently say much of anything.  You just don’t know.  And your scientific skepticism ought to demand evidence, which you can really only gather by trying it out.

Of course, when it comes to things like vaccines or climate change, the answer isn’t so easy.  You could just listen to everyone on TV, and most of the government, who are telling you that the COVID vaccine is safe, or you could listen to idiots like Tucker Carlson or the Russian bots posting to your Facebook account, or the rest of the government, who are telling you it’s not.  But, honestly, your scientific skepticism should be telling you not to take anyone’s word for it.  Sadly, unlike chiropractics, this is not something you want to settle via experimentation.  You have to read about it, and you have to read lots of different sources.  You have to listen to what scientists say about the various vaccines, shutting out what the media personalities and the politicians are saying, and try to evaluate which ones make sense.  There will be scientists on both sides, of course.  But, even without any scientific training, it’s amazing how simple it can be to read what a scientist is spouting and either say “yeah, that makes sense” or “what a nutbag!” In my experience, it’s actually quite rare for even a very well-trained scientist who happens to be a nutjob to able to hide this fact from you.  It does happen, mind you, but it’s rare.  And even when it seems like there are sane voices on both sides, usually there are a lot more sane voices on one side or the other.  Now, that still doesn’t always land you on the right side of the debate (see also: Galileo) ... but it’s a pretty good start.

So be skeptical, but be skeptical of both sides.  When you hear someone swimming upstream against the conventional wisdom, hear them out—at least until you can determine if they’re a nutjob (or a Tucker Carlson, who is really more of a douchebag than a nutjob).  Don’t be afraid to come to a conclusion that puts you at odds with what “everyone” else is saying, but also make sure you have facts and evidence and logic to back up that conclusion.  None of this is simple.  But, then again, life rarely is.

Syncretism for the Masses

You know, sometimes you hear or see a discussion, and it makes you think about how you would respond if that topic were to come up in conversation.  Back in the old days, you would probably just wait for someone to bring it up at a party or somesuch.  Nowadays, you can write a blog post about it.

I was listening to Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown recently, and her guest was rabbi Steve Leder, who had some really fascinating things to say.  I particularly liked his point about not blaming all religious people for the actions of the religious extremists, which almost all of us tend to do (well, with all relgions except our own, of course).  I also enjoyed his rejection of biblical literalism and his explanation of the value of many religious practices that otherwise we might think of as frivolous or pointless.  It’s a great show, and you should probably listen to it (or watch it).

But naturally I didn’t agree with everything he had to say.  At one point, he opined:

... and in this business about “I don’t like organized religion,” I ask people: what would you prefer, disorganized religion?  Like, would you like your phone call never to be returned when you call the rabbi for your mother’s funeral?  Would you like your name to be wrong on everything?  ...  Come on, let’s think a little more deeply about these things.  I think that’s just a straw man.

What’s hilarious about this argument, of course, is that his argument is the true straw man.  The opposite of organized religion isn’t disorganized religion.  It’s individual religion, self-directed religion ... in other words, spirituality.  There’s quite a huge gulf between the pomp and cirumstance of the Catholic Church, for instance, and a Buddhist monk meditating alone for years on the nature of the universe.  Some people want to be a part of the large organization, and they’re willing to put up with the downsides—the bureaucracy, the potential for corruption, the chance that your problem might slip through the cracks, the ostracization of those who don’t fit the traditional ideas of how people should behave.  But other people—and I would argue more and more people in modern times—think that they don’t need the big organization to mediate between them and their higher power.

Thank goodness that show has Jonathan Cohen.  Listening to Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown is a bit like listening to Dead Can Dance.  (Yes, this is going to be a tortured metaphor, but bear with me.)  Most likely, you showed up because of Lisa Gerrard’s amazing voice, and sometimes it can be easy to forget about Brendan Perry, just because Gerrard’s vocals are so captivating.  You know he’s there in the background, doing stuff ... you’re just not thinking about it.  And then, all of a sudden, you stumble across “Black Sun” or “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove” and you’re like: whoa ... I’m so glad that guy is there.

So Cohen had my perspective’s back, and he followed up with this:

I think that’s what people mean when they talk about “disorganized religion” or, you know, when they ... not that I think they want disorganized religion, but I think what they’re saying, or what some people say when they’re like, “oh, I’m spiritual not religious” is that they’re looking for the connection points between all these faiths, which are all paths towards the same road, and they’re like, “okay, but, you know, the specifics of any particular path or dogma I can leave, but what I want are those ...”

And here Leder cut Cohen off:

But that’s not how it works.  You cannot separate the values from the specific vehicles that transport those values through society.  You can’t do it that way.  You know, you just can’t do it that way.  What you can do is assign equal value to these different paths.  ...  And so to dismiss all religion, and say “I don’t want the particulars, I just want the outcome” ... that is impossible.  It doesn’t work.

Which misses the point yet again, I think.  Luckily, Cohen was still with me, and not willing to let it go just yet:

I don’t think they want the outcome as much as they say “look: Buddhism has a variety of practices that are very positive and very helpful, and Judaism also has that ...  Again, just playing that other role, is that why can’t I have some of the Buddhist, some of the Judaism, some of those aspects, and why can’t I mix them together, and why does [sic] all of these paths have to be separate?

Yeah, Jonathan: you tell him!  Now, this is followed by a bit of a digression from Mayim, which I won’t repeat here because I thought she made some good points, but I didn’t agree with everything she said, but mostly I don’t want to get off on any more tangents than I’m already prone to.  But the main thing is, both Mayim and the rabbi make some (in my opinion unflattering) assumptions about people who say they are spiritual-not-religious, and I think that my perspective (and, I suspect, Cohen’s) is quite different from how they view us.

Certainly, some people are indicating that they are still Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim, or Buddhist, just without the need for the church (or temple, or mosque).  But I think more often people are indicating that they are truly agnostic, which is certainly my perspective.  Way back in my discussion of balance and paradox (which is really the one post on this blog you probably should read), I (half-jokingly) referred to myself as a “Baladocian.” If you’ll allow me the indulgence of self-quotation:

Primarily I do this because it sounds cool and it gives them something to chew on.  The truth is that I believe that all the major religions are right ... and they’re all wrong.  Heck, that probably applies to most of the minor religions too.  When it comes to Truth, you take it where you can find it, be that the Bible, the Tanakh, the Qur’an, the Upanishads, the Analects, the Tao Te Ching, Stranger in a Strange Land, or Cat’s Cradle.

Now, I moved on from that opening to discuss the intricacies of believing that two extremes are simultaneiously neither true and both true, which was the point of that post, after all.  But what I was alluding to in that last sentence is really the main thrust of this post, and it’s an actual concept called religious syncretism.  Now, syncretism itself is neither good nor bad (which should be an entirely unsurprising statement coming from the Baladocian); in fact, it can be quite negative, such as how the Greeks mostly won the mythology war by absorbing the Roman pantheon, even though the Romans were the actual conquerors, or how the Christians absorbed the pagan and druidic celebrations, which is how we ended up with Christmas trees and Easter bunnies.  But, then again, it can also be quite positive, which is what I was getting at when I said you have to take Truth where you can find it.  As someone whose approach to religion is, paradoxically (go figure), very logical, it only makes sense that to say that the concept that ideas from other cultures, other religions, other scriptures, cannot be correct just because we hadn’t heard them yet ... well, that’s just nonsensical.  It’s a bit conceited to imagine that all the people in the world who don’t wholly embrace your faith can’t be right about something.

The fact of the matter is that even spending a very small amount of time reading different religious texts should convince you that there are a lot of good ideas—even a lot of Truths—spread around in quite disparate doctrines.  There are things in the Tao Te Ching which just blew me away, and I know, in my heart, that they are True ... but I would not say that I’m a Taoist.  Likewise, there things that Jesus Christ said which are so profound and meaningful that I cannot ever deny them ... but I do not describe myself as a Christian either.  Of course, I think there are some pretty big Truths in works of fiction too, from Stranger in a Strange Land to Quantum Psychology, but I’m not gonna claim to be a “Heinleinian” or a “Wilsonian” either.  All those texts have problems.  None of them are perfect.  But they all have something important, and it just doesn’t make any sense to me to not try to synthesize them all into a cohesive picture of the universe.

In my opinion, a “proper” agnostic is a person who believes that there is something ordering the universe—that is, someone who rejects the explicit “everything happens due to random chance” attitude of the true atheist—but that we just don’t know exactly what it is.  I’ll go even further: I personally believe that it’s entirely possible—probable, even—that we can’t know exactly what it is, and that it’s silly to imagine we can.  I think that part of what it means to be human is to accept that and learn to be okay with it.  Contrariwise, that doesn’t mean you don’t try.  It’s another paradox, I know, but think of it this way:  You know you can never be perfect, right?  But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t always strive to be better.  No matter how good you are, you could always be better, and you should shoot for that ... even while recognizing that ultimate perfection is out of your reach.  Likewise, I believe that we should continuously strive to understand the universe, even though we must accept that we can never understand it all.  Same principle.

And, so, in our attempts to know the unknowable, why in the world would we handicap ourselves by limiting ourselves to only one religion?  It’s just silliness.  Well, the rabbi Leder has an answer for that as well:

I also think it’s disrespectful to other religions in this sense, okay?  They are not the same.  There are very profound differences between Judaism and Christianity and Buddhism; they are not the same.  They have the same goal, they have their own structures and rules to achieve that goal, but they are not the same, and some of their beliefs—despite how much in America we want to make a big party out of everything—some of their beliefs are antithetical to each other.  Period.  End of story.  And we are being dishonest and disrespectful to those religions when we pretend otherwise.

You know, this reminds me a of a passage from Extreme Programming Explained.  I read this book about midway through my programming career, and it really changed the way I approached my craft.  There were a lot of really radical ideas in there, and it made me rethink concepts I hadn’t even realized were ingrained in me.  But it also contains a bit of dogma here and there.  Starting right in the section entitled “What Is XP?”:

XP is a discipline of software development.  It is a discipline because there are certain things that you have to do to be doing XP.  You don’t get to choose whether or not you will write tests—if you don’t, you aren’t extreme: end of discussion.

I remember reading this and immediately saying “I reject that premise.” Now, possibly a lot of that has to do with my innate repudiation of authority, or indeed absolute statements in general.  I probably have a touch of oppositional disorder in my psyche, if I’m being honest.  But, also, those types of statements just never turn out to be factual.  I’ll avoid the absolute statement by rephrasing it this way: perhaps someday I’ll read about something where you have to do All The Things in order to be getting anything out of it and it’ll turn out to be true, but so far that day hasn’t come.  It wasn’t true for XP, as it turned out, and I just don’t believe it’s true for religion either.  I don’t have to do all the Jewish things to derive some value from Judaism.  And, furthermore, considering that rabbi Leder is a practitioner of Reform Judaism, I think his actions and his words are providing a bit of cognitive dissonance on this particular front.

I think it’s also worth noting that this concept of religious exclusivity—that is, I am a Jew therefore I cannot be a Christian, I am a Christian so therefore I cannot be a Muslim, etc—is distinctly a concept of the Western religions.  Now, obviously I am no expert on theology, but one of my favorite courses in college was taught by Dr. Young-chan Ro, and he is an expert on theology.  And what he taught me (among many other things) was that the Eastern religions, for the most part, have absolutely no problem with you belonging to several of them.  If you want to be a Hindu and a Buddhist and a Taoist, that’s fine.  It’s a peculiarity of those religions which share an Old Testament (probably because of the whole “thou shalt have no other gods before me” thing).  It’s a bit of a bummer, though, because I think it leads to a lot of us-vs-them mentality, which doesn’t help anyone.  It’s also very strange to me that Jews and Christians and Muslims are so canonically disposed to disregard each others’ beliefs even though they’re all worshipping the same god.  Why can’t we all just get along indeed?

So I take from all the religions at the same time I reject all the religions, and I believe in evolution at the same time I find William Peter Blatty’s discussion of the impossibility of it (in Legion) fascinating, and I reject several of rabbi Leder’s premises at the same time I think he makes some excellent points, and seriously made Judaism sound more attractive than any of the other faiths out there (ironic, since Jews famously don’t proselytize).  I say the “profound differences” are just the surface bits: the bits we should be ignoring.  We should be digging past all that, looking for the deeper meaning ... for the deeper Truth.  And we don’t have to adopt all the practices in order to mine that Truth.  I’m not saying the practices are useless—again, I think rabbi Leder was quite eloquent in explaining the value of many of those practices—but I do think they are there as a way to get us to the underlying Truths.  It’s easy to get caught up in the ceremony, but that’s just the floor show.  The real treasure is what lies beneath the glitz and the glitter.  And we should dig for as much of that as we can.

Short-Form ... Long-Form ... I'm the Content with the Shiny Object

Have you ever been listening to an interview with someone, and they are asked a question, and you think: hey! I have an answer for that.  No?  Maybe it’s just me.

In any event, I was watching an interview with some Twitch streamers, and the interviewer asked why they thought long-form content had become so popular lately.  Many Twitch streams last for hours, and have an audience for the whole time.  You can go to Twitch and watch people play videogames, board games, tabletop roleplaying games, and you can watch them do it for a long time.  Even interviews on Twitch are an hour or two long, compared to the 5 – 10 minutes that you might get on a primetime or late night talk show.  And Twitch is not alone: podcasts can focus on one game or interview for hours, or have limited series that go on for dozens of hours of content.  Turning novels into 2 hour movies is passé: nowadays they are turned into multi-season televsion shows.  Of course, movies themselves are getting longer and longer ... an NPR article puts it like so:

Seven of the year-end top grossers released during the 1980s ran under two hours. But from 1991 to 2000, only three of the top earners were that compact.

Only two year-end box office champs this century have had sub-two-hour run times, and both were animated: Shrek 2 (2004) and Toy Story 3 (2010).

That article decided that movies are getting longer (at least in part) because they’re competing with long streams and television shows, which seems to be begging the question.  More interesting was the answer of the streamers in the interview that prompted this whole meditation: they decided that, in today’s world of being increasingly disconnected from each other, sometimes you just want to experience personal interaction vicariously.  It’s an interesting theory, and probably not entirely wrong.  But I had a different thought.

I’m just old enough to remember movies with intermissions.  They weren’t common even then; a holdover from the intermissions in plays or operas, which could last for 3 – 4 hours.  (Sure, some were shorter, but then some were even longer.)  Long-form content isn’t new, by any means: it’s old.  Like so many things, it’s destined to come around again.  These types of trends tend to be reactionary, in my opinion.

Becuase I’m also old enough to remember, much more clearly, the advent of MTV in the 80s and the growing popularity of quick cuts.  This even has a formal name, apparently: post-classical editing.  It was a stylistic choice, but somehow it became a mandate.  According to Wikipedia, Lawrence Kasdan said in a documentary “that the generation of people who grew up on MTV and 30 second commercials can process information faster, and therefore demand it.” This assumption that the modern audience can’t handle anything long-form without getting bored was so prevalent by the 90s that the brand new “Comedy Channel” (which would eventually become Comedy Central) even anchored its programming with a “show” named “Short Attention Span Theater,” whose title was, so far as I could tell, completely non-ironic.  What it actually was was small snippets of stand-up routines, because obviously no one had the brainpower to sit through a whole stand-up show, right?

Except that I challenge all this conventional wisdom.  Short-form content wasn’t what the audiences demanded.  It was just a reactionary fad, a way for the modern consumer to differentiate themselves from their parents and grandparents, who had sat through Wagner’s Götterdämmerung and Shakespeare’s Hamlet and even It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and Lawrence of Arabia, both of which were 3½ hours or more long and written as recently as the 60s.  We were young and hip and cool, so we wanted more stuff packed into less time ... or at least that sounded cool, because it was different.  But you know what always happens: it’s only cool while it’s new, and once everyone is doing it, then it’s old hat and we want something different again.  The magic of “Short Attention Span Theater” (which I watched a lot of) was that you could experience a bunch of different comics in a short time.  The sheer quantity of people I was exposed to in that decade is completly unrivaled by any other time of my life.  But, the thing is, once I discovered someone I liked, I wanted to watch a whole show with them.  Five minutes of Bill Hicks is great, but two hours of Bill Hicks is fucking amazing.  So I thank SAST for all its contributions—not the least of which is introducing us to Jon Stewart—but it was never the endgame.  Just a vehicle to get us there.

And now the pendulum has swung back in the other direction.  Now people are just tired of little short snippets, and sound bites, and quick cuts.  We want substance, and nuance, and we’re perfectly willing to devote the time to get it.  So I think that is the truly the reason why long-form content is so popular now ... just as it was back in the “old” days.

Give it another couple of decades and there’ll be a hot new trend for watching everything at 1.5× speed, or watching two things at the same time, or somesuch.  Or maybe it’ll be simpler than that: maybe everything will go to Talk Soup style summary shows of the long-form content that no one wants to invest the time to actually watch themselves any more.  Who knows?  But time is a flat circle—although perhaps we don’t have to interpret that as pessimistically as True Detective’s Rust Cohle meant it—and everything will come ‘round again.  Eventually.

Talking Dreams

“No one wants to listen to your dreams.”

I mean, this is obvious, right?  So glaringly true that it’s practically a cliché.  After all, This American Life put it on a list of “Seven Things You’re Not Supposed to Talk About” in 2013.  In 2015, Amy Schumer worked it into a comedy skit on her show ... and that’s barely scratching the surface of how many comedians have made a joke about this.  Hell, given a Google search for the quote that introduces this blog post, we can find any number of articles expressing this thought, from sources as silly as Cracked to those as prestigious as Scientific American.  So, there’s nothing else to say about it, really.  No one wants to hear about other people’s dreams, it’s undeniably true, end of story.

Except ...

Well, I do.  I enjoy hearing about other people’s dreams just as much as I enjoy talking about mine.  Oh, sure: I don’t talk about my dreams with anyone else outside my family, pretty much in the same way that I don’t try to convince other people that Keanu Reeves can act or that Nickelback is a pretty good band, even though those are both things I believe.  But there are memes and then there are memes, ya know?  And you don’t buck “facts” that are buried in the public consciousness this deep.  Not unless you want to get into physical altercations.  Hey, I’ll bring up politics at work any time—hell, I’ll even bring up religion, if I’m feeling particularly saucy—but I will not try to convince my co-workers that Chuck E. Cheese has pretty decent pizza.  I’m not crazy.

And, honestly, I’m only going to be half-hearted in my attempt to convince you that listening to other people’s dreams isn’t the horrible thing you’ve always been told.  (And, as always, if half-hearted is still half a heart too much, feel free to remind yourself of the name of the blog.)  But it just sort of bugs me how very wrong almost everything about this myth is.  Let’s start with a quick overview of how much wrong there is in the articles from the afore-mentioned Google search.

First off, we can dispsense with the silly ones.  Cracked says:

There is no greater gap than the one between how fascinating dreams are to the dreamer and how fascinating they are to literally anyone else in the world.  Dennis from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia probably put it best: “Listening to people’s dreams ... is like flipping through a stack of photographs; if I’m not in any of them and nobody is having sex, I just don’t care.”

Of course, we must always remember that the entire point of Sunny is that it’s a show about terrible people and how funny it is to watch terrible people do terrible things.¹  Those of us who are not terrible people probably agree to a staggering degree that at least some photographs of other people not having sex are worth looking at.²  Also, the author was kind enough to use the word “literally,” which means his statement is trivially disprovable by providing a single counter-example, of which I am one.

The author of the opinion piece in the UK’s Metro was kind enough to do the same, right in the title: “Literally no-one cares about your dreams.” She continues:

There is no sentence less interesting, less exciting or less compelling than: ‘I had the weirdest dream last night’.

I can (literally, even) think of dozens of sentences less exicting or compelling to me.  In fact, probably the weirdest thing about this article is that the author ends it with:

For those who are still in doubt about whether or not it’s really such a heinous crime to share the story of your dream, ask yourself this: when someone tells you about a dream they’ve had, do you find yourself rapt, begging them to carry on, to make the story longer and to provide more detail?

Well, ummm ... yes, in fact, I do.  In fact, the dream that the author invents to prove how boring dreams are is this:

... they were at the office, but it wasn’t really the office because it was in Yorkshire, and everyone kept talking about sheep.

And, perhaps bizarrely, I really want to hear the rest of that dream.

The article from Vice is a bit of a head-scratcher.  Its title is “Why People Can’t Stop Talking About Their Extremely Boring Dreams,” and it admits:

When it comes to sharing our nightly musings, the overwhelming message seems to be: Just don’t.

But then the author goes to interview Alice Robb, author of a book on dreams, and gives us this:

Robb says it can feel “very intimate” to share a dream with someone, especially depending on your relationship with that person.  But, she adds, “because dreams so often are really cutting to the heart of our emotional lives and emotional concerns, sharing them is one of the best ways to process and understand them.”

I sort of get the feeling that the author of the article is trying to have it both ways.  Or perhaps that she wishes she could advocate sharing her dreams with others but realizes that she’s never going to get anywhere with that message.

The Scientific American article is the most disappointing though.  Titled “Why You Shouldn’t Tell People about Your Dreams” and, just in case you missed the message from getting beaten over the head with it the first time, subtitled “They are really meaningful to you but not to anybody else,” it contains a plethora of “facts” that just don’t ring true:

Because most dreams are negative (support for the threat-simulation theory), our bias in favor of negative information makes them feel important.

I feel really sad that this author’s dreams apparently reinforce this belief for him, because very few of my dreams are negative (at least of those that I remember; common theory is that you forget most of your dreams).  Many of them are utterly bizarre, of course, and sometimes they’re vaguely discomfiting, but that’s very different from “negative.” Of course, this author disagrees with my assessment of “bizarre” too:

We tend to think of dreams as being really weird, but in truth, about 80 percent of dreams depict ordinary situations.

There’s a scholarly article linked there as well, to “prove” the point, but I can only surmise that there’s a different definition of “ordinary situations” going on here, or that we’re just counting percentages differently.  Perhaps 80% of the dreams I can’t remember were about ordinary situations.  It may even be true that 80% of the dreams that I would never even want to share with anyone else are about ordinary situations.  But, come on: if I want to tell someone about my dream, it’s because it was downright weird.  Why would I want to regale you with a dream about an ordinary situation?  Why the hell would I even want to relive that dream ... because a big part of wanting to share your dreams is wanting to hold on to them.  Telling someone else about your dream manifests it, gives it reality in a way that almost nothing else will—not even writing it down.  Assuming you have a good listener, and the two of you can chuckle over the absurdities and marvel over the oddities, sharing a dream with another living, breathing soul can bring out more details than you initially thought you remembered, plus now someone else will remember your dream too.  And you can trot it out later and chat about how weird that was.

But here’s the most bizarrely incongruous passage.  Admittedly, this is the end of one paragraph and the beginning of another, but the author is the one who butted them up against each other, not me:

Just like someone having a psychotic experience, the emotional pull of dreams makes even the strangest incongruities seem meaningful and worthy of discussion and interpretation.

These reasons are why most of your dreams are going to seem pretty boring to most people.

What the hell?  “Most people” find psychotic experiences with strange incongruities and emotional pull boring?  Really?  Apparently I don’t know “most people,” because very few of the people I know would find that boring, and any I can think of off the top of my head who would aren’t people I wish I knew better, if you catch my drift.  How much imagination do you have to lack if you’re thinking, “you had a psychotic experience? that also carried emotional weight? oh, puhh-leeze—I could care less”???  Well, I’m sorry, but send those people to me.  I am fascinated to learn more.

Nevertheless, it would be foolish to completely ignore such a prevalent opinion, even if I do feel there’s quite a bit of bandwagonry going on here.  So, if you find yourself about to hear about the dream of a friend of yours, and you’re dreading it, here are some tips that maybe will make it a more pleasant experience.

A dream is not a story. It seems ridiculous that I have to point this out, but a lot of the complaints I hear about listening to other people’s dreams revolves around what an incoherent mess it is, and how there’s no proper ending to them.  Well, duh ... they’re dreams.  Dreams don’t follow internal story logic.  Dreams don’t have nice tidy beginnings and middles and ends, rising actions and falling actions and character growths.  They’re just little snippets.  Enjoy them as little snippets: little disconnected slices of unreality that can be appreciated in isolation and examined, not for meaning, but for intrinsic interest.  And, speaking of “not for meaning” ...

Stop trying to interpret the dream. This goes for whether you’re a listener or the dream teller.  Dreams don’t have to mean anything.  Sure, maybe sometimes they do, but there’s no way for you to tell whether this particular dream has a meaning or not, so stop trying to psychoanalyze it and just go with the flow.

Never ask “why?” This is sort of the combination of the above two points.  When someone tells you their dream and you respond with “but why did that part happen?” you’re missing the point.  It isn’t a story, so there is no logical answer, and it probably doesn’t have some deeper meaning, so there’s no deep psychological motivation to be found either.  It’s a question that can only make the teller feel dumb, and, I hate to tell you, but it doesn’t even have the side benefit of making you look smart, because it sounds like you’re trying to make dreams make sense, and smart people don’t do that.

And, finally, one tip for all the folks that, despite their better judgment, have decided to share their dreams anyway:

If your dream isn’t weird or unusual in some way, then don’t bother. Being a dream doesn’t exempt boring conversation from being boring.

I actually debated with myself on whether or not to share a dream of mine with you, dear reader.  On the one hand, it seems practically hypocritical not to support my premise with some actual, personal proof.  On the other, I recognize that I won’t sway everyone (or perhaps even anyone), and there’s also no point gifting people with a juicy dream if they’re not going to appreciate it.  I’ve decided to split the difference and give you just a few snippets from the dreams that I’ve had over the years.  After all, even the entire dream needs to be examined in terms of snippets, as I’ve explained above, so why not cherry pick what I consider to be the most interesting bits and leave them for you here?  Perhaps some of these will intrigue you and make you more interested to hear what other people might want to share.  Just don’t fall into the trap of thinking, “that does sound interesting ... I wonder how it turned out?” Remember: dreams don’t have endings.  It didn’t “turn out” any particular way; it just trailed off, or transmogrified into a totally different dream, or I just woke up.  Still, these are some of my favorite dream moments.

I dreamt that I wasn’t me, but that the actual me was also in the dream, and I ended up killing myself.  I dreamt I was driving a sports car and sometimes it would take off so fast I couldn’t keep up and then I would have to chase it down and get back into it.  I dreamt that I was with an old man and two younger men (his sons? grandsons? nephews?) and the old man told them they were forbidden to be angry until sundown (because of the religious holiday), and so they sat down until dark came and then the old man sprang up and shouted “Now we go get the bastards!” I dreamt I was writing a script that was being produced while I was still trying to finish it, and one of the characters was a disgusting cartoon cat named “Stash.” I dreamt that I dropped a pill in the carpet and, when I went looking for it, I found three completely different pills, one of which was a shiny rose-pink one partially covered with a hard white candy coating designed to resemble foam.  I dreamt my vacation cabin was invaded by badger-like creatures that hunted like the velociraptors from Jurassic Park.  I dreamt that my little sister was upset because she had to do a magic trick in front of her classmates and she was afraid they would find out that she was actually a witch.³ I dreamt that I was in love with the manager of an all-girl band, and at the end of the dream she turned into a ferret in my arms.  I dreamt that a sister and brother swam out to the middle of the ocean to a house that sat up on stilts, too high to reach, and they rang the underwater wind chimes that were the secret way in.  I dreamt about hoods made out of writhing tentacles that were forced onto your head, making you catatonic.  I dreamt that we were attempting to defeat a demonic carpet using holy water and blessed post-it notes on which had been written the address of Hell.

Somtimes I dream about famous people.  I dreamt that I was a noble at the time of the French Resistance, and my friend was played by Ryan Gosling.  I dreamt that Alex Keaton (as portrayed by Michael J. Fox, naturally) grew up to be an alien geneticist and lived in Eureka.  I dreamt that Terry Jones tricked me into giving him the answer he wanted about Parliament.  I dreamt that President Obama helped me investigate a mystery during which we uncovered a body but we couldn’t notify the authorities just yet, because we were too close!  I dreamt that I was telling Liam O’Brien about a dream I had in which I tried to ward off a bullet by holding up my hand and (of course) the bullet went right through it.⁴ I dreamt that I met actor Clifton Gonzalez Gonzalez and was trying to remember what movie I knew him from and he was helpfully recreating some of his past roles to try to jog my memory.

Sometimes all I get out of the dream is litte more than a name.  These are all names from my dreams: Stephen J. Tourettsal, Mark Hanahan, Renwe, Johnny “D-Legs” Crab, Freefall,⁵ A.B.E. (whose name was short for “Android Beyond Expectations”), Dar Beck (a weatherman), Memory (the ex-girlfriend of my eldest child), Merlock and Etheros and Devane (ethnic Riufus⁶ from Latvia and/or Russia), Boxilea Toxicity Brown (“Boxy” for short), Aryn Gill (an anthropomorphic duck wih a human sister named Deborah who had had small role in Pretty in Pink), Mitch (a female aerospace engineer; apparently her real name was Abigail Mitchell, at least according to Samuel L. Jackson, who shouted it out during an emotionally charged scene), the Captain Alexander (a drink, made with Alexander rum, of course⁷), Briscol (a town), Nacho de Vaca (a medieval town in Spain), fontana blue (a color), Pedrolischizenko (a dog whose owner only spoke to him in Hungarian⁸), SQL Snitch (a database of criminal informants), macrocellular degenerative evolution (an alien genetic disease), YaHaNaHael (a monster), Pontebello (a fancy book about cake and Hermetics).

Sometimes I all remember is a quote: “Men and women cannot coexist without blood somewhere.”⁹  “When a statement conveys a Great Truth, it matters not if it is a little lie.”

None of these are sensible, and very few of them have any deeper meaning.  But I think they’re all interesting, at least.  If any of my friends have bits and pieces of vignettes that are as interesting at these, I would love to hear about them ... cultural taboos be damned.  Dreams are insane, and surreal, and wonderful, and perturbing, and occasionally all those things at once.  I’m glad I know as many of them—mine and those of others I’ve been fortunate enough to hear—as I do.  Perhaps you should give it a try some time.  You never know what you’ll hear.

__________

1 Whether you actually find this funny or not probably varies from person to person.

2 If you somehow don’t believe that, just go find any of the number of sites full of staggeringly beautiful nature photos.  Here’s one to get you started.

3 Note: I do not have a sister, little or otherwise.

4 Note: the dream I was explaining was not a previous dream I’d actually had, but rather part of the same dream.

5 A character who I ended up adapting for my ongoing novel; you can see a cameo from him in Chapter 2 concluded.

6 Note: not a real ethnic group.

7 Note: not a real rum.

8 Note: I do not actually speak Hungarian.

9 To be fair, I was much younger when I dreamed this one.