Atomic Nerds

1. Get inquiring comment on earlier post. Make a happy note to yourself that that sounds like a lovely subject for a short, trouble-free little science post as a textbook example of the role of sex in evolution and why, outside of dated/limited Red Queen hypothesis, it is common and asexual reproduction is rare, why the exceptions happen. Cake.

2. Go to look up further detail on the lizard genus in question. Hybridization? Polyploidy? Wait, what does that have to do with it?

3. Look up another relevant lizard. Wait, what, their parthenogenetic offspring are always male? The whiptails are always female. Because the dragons are on a ZW system? Wouldn’t that mean different lizard groups are somehow on a different chromosomal sex-determination system?

4. Wow.

5. Okay, that’s cool, but not really that relevant, so let’s try polyploidy, hybridization, and parthenogenesis.

6. Awesome, exactly what I was after.

7. *note price tag* *frustration*

8. *beg friend with current logins to the Sekrit Science Club* *thank friend profusely*

9. *read* Gosh. *read* Really? *read* How the hell do I interpret that fig- oh. *read*

10. *note time and number of essential things still remaining to do that day* *frustration*

12. *compile process* *post*

One of the more interesting threads of discussion to evolve out of the previous two posts touching on religion is a discussion of faith, specifically the definition in Hebrews 11:

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

This is, I rush to point out, going to be incredibly out of context with the rest of the passage, which has an entirely different intended point than the one I’m about to expound on, but it did lead to a commenter pointing out that everybody operates on implicit assumptions based on things they do not see and cannot be directly experienced. I attempted to use an analogy involving math and, as Roberta pointed out gently, managed to be quite spectacularly wrong in every respect of my example while still managing to come near a reasonable point. (Neat trick that, I’ll have to remember it.) As a caution, I am about to proceed to one of those pieces where I’m not entirely sure I make sense to me, but ultimately I decided trying and confusing a lot of people (again including me) was better than not trying.

I’ve made the point at great length before that what we perceive with our senses isn’t so much a direct reflection of reality as it is a representation of reality tailored by our brains to bring the useful and relevant aspects of reality to our attention. Much of reality-as-we-live in it is experienced by us only through inference; instruments we make built on principles we’ve inferred through careful experiment perceive things like, say, ultraviolet light for us, and the entire process of science- the study of natural law- is a process of seeing “the shape of things unseen”, i.e. the consistent principles of natural law that dictate the shapes that everything takes.

A river flowing down a mountain is, on several levels, a map of things unseen: on one level, it’s a map of the surface of the mountain, whose shape dictates which paths the water flows down. On another level, it’s a force diagram with a little fluid dynamics as well; the shape of the mountain’s surface dictates which paths the water takes, but gravity dictates that the path must always be in a certain direction (towards the lowest surface of Earth it can reach), and the force of the water also over time will dictate the shape of the mountain as it wears its paths deeper. The laws of motion are not seen in that F = m*a is not represented anywhere, but can be inferred from the fact that the flowing water, and everything else with mass, moves in predictable ways. The water will only move through spaces that are not ruled out by natural law; it can move in any direction permitted and will move in many directions down any surface, but will never flow up unless another force is introduced and also will not flow straight outward. There are many paths down, but down is the only option due to gravity. When the landscape limits the space of possible paths for the water by eliminating most of the possible forces on the water, it forms a puddle and stays that way.

Evolution works in much the same way, in that life will diversify but will only do so in ways and shapes dictated by the possibilities available given the constraints of natural law. You will find a very large variety of body shapes in an ocean, but depending on what the ocean animal itself does, they will have certain tendencies to converge- toward, for example, a torpedo-eseque shape with control surfaces for a free-swimming animal. What you will not see despite the range of diversity is any animal shaped like a horse, because that shape is optimized for frequent fast, long motion on a flat surface with no support for its body weight other than its skeleton.

Ocean life may “flow” evolutionarily in any direction, just so long as its path includes an ability to manipulate its position in water, an ability to gain carbon and energy from the resources in water, and an ability to carry out its reproduction in water. Each time in fossil history that a lineage has transitioned from marine life to land life or back again, the shapes the resulting animals take tell us something about the nature of water and land respectively, just as the flowing water tells us something about the nature of the landscape. When conditions sharply narrow the range of possibilities for life, diversity narrows accordingly; rainforests feature libraries of diversity so vast it may never be fully categorized.

The resulting picture in water terms may look something like this:

A deep-sea thermal vent may only feature a few species of archaebacteria that can handle and profit off the heat and extreme chemical conditions. In terms of water flow, more like this:

Likewise, the way that human cultures and societies “flow” across the shape of history also take on shapes that are defined by forces shaping the forms of the possible. Humans adopt profound diversities of music and art, but the shapes that currency takes tend to be highly defined, because it has strict conditions for being able to function in that role. Cultures vary hugely and diversely in their taboos and expressions of “manners”, but they all tend to include a relatively short subset list of items within the “don’ts”- murder, theft, assault. There may be specific social contexts in which killing someone is considered acceptable, but there is no such thing as a society in which casually killing someone because they annoyed you is not forbidden. It is not possible to have a stable society of humans which does not include certain rules, though there may be and likely will be many, many other rules- it’s just that some have much greater ranges of possible variation than others. The nature of the directly acting forces have sources both concrete- the biology of our brains and bodies- and abstract, such as the consequences of abstract intelligence and the forms that it itself creates and manipulates.

Atheists and believers both believe in the substance of things unseen. With respect, I would not define that as “faith”, so much as an acceptance that our knowledge of the nature of our reality is inherently limited. The distinction is that the believers believe that both the forces shaping humanity and its behavior- including morality- and the forces writeable in natural law have a single source and a single, intelligent author and intent. That, and the belief that that force is even partially knowable in the same way natural law is partially knowable, is what I would identify as faith.

Friend Roberta has gotten herself cross-threaded, as we infidel sometimes do, with one of the faithful in some way or another, and what I regard as a thoughtful statement has of course attracted at least one more faithful-and-aggrieved at her disrespect. As you do.

I liked the original post a great deal, as it articulates something I think can be quite difficult to get across to the sincerely religious, which is that it’s not that I have anything whatsoever against religion in general or any religion in specific as I don’t get it. No text nor sermon nor life gracefully lived has quite the same effect on me as it seems to others; I can get quite into analyzing theology and theological concepts, but the spark at the bottom- the faith- is dead for me or in the first place nonexistent. Roberta likens it to being tone-deaf, and I would too. I can tell *that* there are subtle differences in pitch and tone and grasp that’s how music works, but I can’t discern or replicate them in the ways I can, say, color. Faith is much the same in concept to me; I can observe that it exists in others and its effects upon them and upon the way they interact with the world, but it’s not an experience I can in any way duplicate or empathetically relate to. The world is the world, the people in it are people, and on an entirely visceral level I not only cannot connect with a god or gods, I can’t even understand the need or desire theorizing about them rather than going straight on through the tough stuff with just “the world” and “people”.

The reason it’s so monumentally difficult to have a discussion about the entire subject is that there’s something rather insulting in just the premises alone, no matter which direction the subject is going. Saying “I’m not religious, but I wholly respect the religious” sounds nice enough, but there really is no way to explain any further that doesn’t boil down to “I believe the foundation of your worldview and morality to be fictional, but I really like what you’ve done with the story and have no problem if you want to keep telling it to yourself.” Likewise, coming from the other way around it boils down to: “I believe you to be fundamentally rejecting an important cornerstone of reality on which I firmly believe all morality rests, but no pressure. It’s only your immortal soul and, y’know, forever that’s at stake. Good luck with that.”

It is perhaps unsurprising and understandable that the natural human response to either of these is “Fuck you and your asinine claim of respect.”

The other third rail of civil discourse, politics, is similar- in order to come along politely with disagreement between significant ideological rifts, one must pointedly ignore that said ideological distinctions are so fundamental that you believe the other to be basically deluded about the way the world works and the right way to go about ordering society. Much of political rhetoric consists of gleefully pointing out the gap and how profoundly lacking and even malicious one position looks from another, and it is hardly fictional. However, politics is less personal than religion is; it’s a little easier to come to friendly terms with Uncle John the Pinko given enough beer than it is to similarly overcome ideological differences that relate directly to the terms on which you define right and wrong and not just your ideas on the shapes they take. Much of the time it’s accomplished by pointedly looking away from the terms of the disagreement.

Of course, one cannot go through life by consistently pretending that fundamental viewpoints with which you disagree do not exist or only do in some sort of cute social-nicety fashion. When one must have an honest discussion or disagreement, it may impossible to totally avoid insult, but you can at least avoid insult based on complete and utter misconception of the opposing party’s actual views, or based on an extremely poor representation of your own. Thus, here are a few common serious errors made and how they look coming from the other side. I can do a few examples of “how atheists screw up talking to the religious”, but being on the infidel side myself, most of my “facepalm” experiences come from that side of the fence.

If you want the Cliff’s Notes version, they basically all boil down to “Telling someone what their experience is when they, being them, know definitively that it’s not true, is arrogant. Telling someone what their experience is, while being wrong, in a really insulting way will just make them write you off as an irredeemable ass.”

Religion is just a fairy tell people tell to comfort themselves about death.

Have you read any sort of religious text, especially the Bible? I have a lot of words for it but “comforting” isn’t really one of them. God’s not a sugar daddy and often not particularly sympathetic to human failings, and if you decide to embrace every word of it it pretty well sentences you to a life full of moral dilemmas and making hard choices rather than comforting ones. This is only true if the person in question deliberately chooses to ignore all content which is not satisfying, and that’s not exactly the book’s fault. Sure, death is an alarming concept, but just about any religion also includes a lot saying that not only is life pretty fucking alarming too, it also has eternal consequences.

Religion is just a way to simplify the hard questions.

If it’s simple, you’re doing it wrong. There’s a reason they call it Bible (or Torah, or Talmudic, or Koranic) study. Not only are you attempting to divine the attributes, motivations, and preferences of an intelligence far too old and vast to be readily comprehensible by the human mind, you’re trying to do it based on a collection of writings originally set down in a language you do not speak and from a cultural mindset alien to your own. Or else you can hope like hell the person interpreting it all for you is right, seeing as how it’s, again, your soul at stake and God does not accept excuses. Have fun.

Atheism is just a way to simplify the hard questions.

Not really. There do indeed exist some people whose philosophical point of view really does seem to boil down to “the universe wasn’t personally gift-wrapped for me and I didn’t get a destiny, so it’s all pointless and I may as well just hang out looking moody”, but they tend to be uncommon and easily disturbed by bumps in reality. The popular view of existentialism as represented by The Stranger is rather skewed by the fact that that particular line of thought was developed by people who could not conceive of any life more meaningful than being a clinically depressed French intellectual.

Life is confusing, difficult, and will frequently force you to make tough choices whether you like it or not. This is inherent to the nature of life. No philosophy or cosmology on earth will get you out of this reality, whether you believe your final fate is “game over, that was your only chance to do it right” or “now everything you did will be judged by someone who cannot be deceived and has standards you cannot possibly have consistently lived up to, but he’s somewhat forgiving”.

There will be a part two, possibly more. I have a lot more I need and want to do today than I have time to do it in, but getting a start on this is better than punting to a link and then trying to see if I can do it all tomorrow.

Holly Pervocracy put up a post recently on the subject of societal beauty standards in general and the concept of certain sub-fetish groups associated with “non-standard” body types that garnered a range of reactions, many of which were pretty far from what she was hoping for, since some took the post for what it was not- a polemic on people needing to get over the beauty standard.

It’s not hard to see why people get defensive about this kind of thing; we tend to get marinated in two conflicting messages: first, that real beauty is all in who you are rather than what you look like and we should really be attracted to people based on how good they are- and second, that good people are beautiful, and making yourself as beautiful as possible by any means necessary is part of being “good”. Mix well with a big healthy dose of sex sells and a media industry driven to not just find the most naturally attractive people to work with, but airbrushing and photoshopping them into something idealized that may not be actually attainable by anybody. As a result, people are surrounded by images of idealized and sexualized people- which they have been trained they should feel bad about being more attracted to than, say, the nice but ugly (either comparatively or really) person at work.

The first refuge of defensive backlash is everyone’s favorite refuge when it comes to desires they’re ashamed of, which is claiming it’s only natural and evolution made them cheat on their spouse/ate six pounds of sugar in a day/be more attracted to Kate Beckinsale than Rosie O’Donnel. It’s natural selection that made us attracted to a certain waist/hip ratio, made us attracted to youth, and that’s why my inner ape wants to fuck Hannah Montana!

The problem with that, as it usually is with just-so rationales, is that the people making these claims usually haven’t bothered to sit down and think through what actually leads to a selective advantage- which, remember folks, is not survival, success, or even how much sex you have, but how many grandchildren you end up with. People who claim that youth is inherently the most attractive have a point up to a point in that menopausal women are unlikely to yield reproductive success, but with any social primate and far moreso for one that undergoes such dangerous and complicated births and lengthy and dangerous child-rearing, the youngest fertile females are nearly as bad a choice from a selection perspective. Primiparous (first-time) young ape and monkey mothers are the most likely to have a pregnancy and delivery that has problems, and the first child she has is by far the most likely of those she will ever have not to survive to the age of fertility itself; the more intelligent and complex the animal gets, the more reproduction becomes a test of skill rather than a test of sheer fertility- and needless to say, humans are right out on the edge of the right tail of the bell curve when it comes to having complicated pregnancies and needing a lot of skill to raise children to be successful enough to reproduce themselves. The youngest women have the least skill, and it takes a few years for their reproductive systems to settle both into regular reliability.

In terms of what kind of female hominid would be the one that actually would have the highest chance of raising a male’s fitness by giving him children likeliest to become reproductively successful themselves, it would be a woman who’d already had at least one child, had lots of high-status female relatives to help her out, and had enough body fat for a comfortable margin before it started to interfere with regular menstrual cycles and overall fertility. And yet, somehow, the height of Angelina Jolie’s status as a sex symbol was when she was pre-pregnancy and had the body fat levels of an underfed whippet- not now.

Likewise, the argument for the weird homogenized “porn-star” or magazine model sexual ideal is that men are wired to be looking for the “best” genes and those are represented by beauty (and women are likewise looking for the “best” and that’s represented by status); this one is a little less easy to blame bad science reporting or education on, because it’s also a weird hangup in sexual selection researcher. The concept of the “best” mate is fundamentally not quite compatible with evolutionary theory, because the entire reason sex exists, so far as can be determined, is that deliberate creation of variation is ultimately more fit than reproducing an ideal. The “best” set of genes for one situation is inherently not the best for another situation; the best body to handle a drought won’t be the best one to handle a blizzard, the best one to hunt with might not be the best one to mate with or the best one to tough out a lack of available prey, and any of those bests might not be the best one to ride out an epidemic. The way to maximize fitness- the amount of your genes that keep on rolling through the epochs- is to hedge your bets against the possibilities by maximizing the combinations your genes wind up in that might turn out to be the best for that generation’s challenges. If attraction were therefore purely a matter of natural selection, no one would have a “type” because their best fitness bet would be to mate with as big a variety of body types and temperaments as possible*.

Americans are obsessed with a strangely homogenized version of youth and beauty not because they evolved to be, but because that’s simply the way our society currently is, and it has a great deal more to do with nurture than nature. I sincerely doubt that we could wish or educate away all conceptions of “beautiful” as a culture or species- there surely do seem to be some basic inborn conceptions of attractiveness that exclude being two hundred pounds overweight and having terrible skin- but the airbrushed teenage minx with six percent body fat is just as surely no monster of our primal id.

The real irony is that I suspect that if this creature did not exist and porn and other sexualized images featuring her were not nearly so common, men in general would be having a lot more sex. Feeling undesirable is a tremendous libido-killer even for men and possibly moreso for women, and women and girls are constantly inundated with idealizations to compare themselves to and helpful articles and products to help them fix their thighs and their boobs and their labia and their eyelashes and whatever else it is about her that deviates from the “standard”. Whether or not any given male is ACTUALLY not attracted or all that less attracted to her doesn’t matter that much when the message is constant enough to internalize, and it takes great self-confidence and self-awareness to shrug it off or purge it entirely.

Men, you know that feeling you had when it seemed like a girl would never be interested in you more than just as a friend, or at all? Or when it seemed or seems like your wife just isn’t interested in touching you except out of a sense of obligation? That’s the way a lot of women feel all the time no matter how many erections actually surround them. (Because, of course, another message we get is that all a man needs is the prospect of a warm hole to be aroused.) Nasty bit of cultural fallout, that, and I wish I knew of a way to fix it outside of fantasyland.

*I realize this statement theoretically conflicts with every argument I’ve ever made about why evolution leaves us wanting to mate with a skillion partners is also flawed thinking about natural selection, but for the moment we’re pretending this variable does not exist.

One thing that I probably don’t need to explain to most of the people who read this, but sometimes find myself floundering to explain to others, is why I enjoy shooting and why I refer to it as a stress reliever. The people who do shoot are already giving the blank look and the “duh”, but it always feels like, when I try to explain “had a terrible week, but now I’m off to burn some brass at the range” to someone to whom guns are something that exists in the news and fiction but not in a way that really relates to them at all, that they’re getting completely the wrong idea even if they know and like me.

I like to think I’m a good person, but I also know I’m not really what you could fairly call a nice person in a lot of ways. I don’t suffer fools gladly, I’m introverted as hell and I find the company of most other people draining rather than refreshing or desirable, and you won’t find being inoffensive anywhere on any of my priority lists. I play Violent Video Games ™ (scare chord). The only sport I enjoy watching (boxing) could fairly be termed a blood sport.

So, to a person to whom guns and violence are a peanut-butter-and-jelly pairing inside their head, and who know I’m no one’s Mother Theresa, I always get the nagging suspicion that they think that, when I head to the range after a frustrating day/week/whatever, I’m acting out some kind of violent fantasy in a safe environment, or purging violent urges. And nothing could be further from the truth.

Oh, I’m not going to sit here and give you doe eyes and claim I’m above that sort of thing or never do it. It’s just that when I do, I jump into a game and tear the elf ears off somebody, or work it out with free weights, or anything else that allows me to do just that- safely and in a socially acceptable fashion act out aggression until I’m too damn tired or mentally fried to have any anymore.

The thing is, even if I wanted to have a fantasy about shooting people that frustrate me (which, for the record, I have never had and don’t expect to have any time soon, if you’re worried about me flipping out spree-killer style- I heavily favor the imagined slap upside the face over BOOM HEADSHOT), actually shooting at the range would make it very difficult to do that. The mindsets are incompatible.

The truth is, if I’m one the firing line with a pistol, a rifle, or a shotgun, I’m too damn mentally busy to fantasize about anything other than putting the shots in the black or knocking down the steel or busting the clay. What needs to be in my head is my sight picture, my stance and what I could theoretically be doing to improve it, not slapping the trigger, not limp-wristing, and all the rest of the things that go into making a projectile go where I want it to, which is a damn sight harder than the movies make it look. Even if I practiced as much as I should/would like to and all of that were long sunk into muscle memory, the mindset is *still* basically incompatible; the combination of focus and ritual is inherently calming, and just doesn’t let you sustain that adrenalined, aggressive jangle that makes catharsis possible and rewarding. From the Four Rules to the set of range commands that allow for safe conditions and a fast-paced, efficient running of a class or training session or sporting event or whatever, everything involved in shooting is highly ritualized.

Shotgun is even more pronounced in this respect- if rifle and pistol force you to focus just on stance and sight picture and all the rest of it, just about any form of shotgun sport will force you to stop thinking altogether, because you only have a few seconds to react in and if you waste that time on conscious activity rather than swinging your gun, acquiring the target, and firing, you are going to miss. You might not even get around to firing at all before the clay lands. And contrary to what sometimes seems to be the popular belief, firing a gun is not an inherently violent or aggressive act- just an inherently loud one.

That’s why I like shooting when I’m stressed; short of tranquilizing drugs I haven’t yet found a more efficient way to force my mind out of an angry or anxious little rut and my body out of that reinforcing set of stress hormones. It’s especially good for an introvert like me that tends to occasionally need rescuing from my own head, especially in a group where I’m often at a little bit of a loss because socializing isn’t always that natural to me- which is why it was a big part of why I was able to easily relax and joke and chat with a bunch of people I’d never met in person before last weekend. At least one person commented that they didn’t expect me to be like that given my prickly persona, and the truth is- in a lot of situations, I’m not. But range time can be a better social lubricant for me than alcohol, minus the hangover. (But just as expensive if not moreso, sadly.)

Shooter ready.

You can’t make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago “Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world’s music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, travelling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don’t have to die of dental abcesses and you don’t have to do what the squire tells you” they’d think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say ‘yes’.

— Terry Pratchett

I don’t really call myself much of anything firm when it comes to politics and ideology, at least not without a lot of hemming and hawing and mealy-mouthed qualifiers. I’m a conservative- but socially liberal in a lot of ways, and there are a lot of other “conservatives” that make my hide want to twitch right off. I’m a libertarian, but I want some controls and limits anyway because I think pure libertarianism contains just as many in the ways of crippling ideological flaws as pure Marxism does. I’m a minarchist, but put me in the same room with an anarchist and we’ll rip each others’ fool heads off*- and when you get right down to it I’m not exactly sure where the lines should be drawn for that -archy. At all.

So, I don’t have an ideology so much as I have a number of guidelines. Here are a few of them.

Any system that depends upon people becoming better people en masse, no matter what motivation is offered- spiritual, material, or political- is doomed to failure. More or less instantly, in fact. If it depends on EVERYBODY being better, no exceptions, then it’s not only going to fail, it’s going to go up in flames overnight.

Even if you do, in fact, know what’s good for someone better than they do, if they’re not your minor child you have no right to enforce this upon them in any way unless their poor conduct is putting you in direct danger.

People do not act altruistically at all times. People do not act rationally at all times. People do not act morally at all times. People do not act independently at all times. If your vision depends on them doing so even most of the time, your idea is in trouble.

There is no such thing as freedom without responsibility, or responsibility without freedom. You must take them both together or not at all, and if you think you can get away with it otherwise, someone has sold you an illusion and the bill will be coming due shortly. There is only one natural right: to do as you will. There is only one natural duty: to accept the consequences. The rest of society is a negotiation from this starting point, from contract law right on up to the death penalty.

People are more than animals, and yet animals still. Any system which ignores this truism is doomed to see people fulfill it to the most blatant and grotesque degree.

Likewise, any system that treats people like animals and nothing more has a very nasty series of surprises coming to it.

No idea, no matter how good, survives contact with reality intact. If one good blow will cause it to shatter, it wasn’t a good idea.

Some people will be philosophical in the face of extremity. There is also a reason why such a minority of people are philsophical to any degree at all. Don’t expect philosophical from people in extremis, be pleasantly surprised by it.

People have a hard ceiling on their ability to understand and manage complexity. No matter how smart and rational the people you put in charge are, and how many of them there are, once the system exceeds a certain size they will be incapable of controlling it, only succumbing to the illusion that being in control of the resultant bureaucracy is the same thing. This applies to traffic, economies, religions, and many other systems.

There is no more tragic misapprehension than “we are wiser now”. Assume at all times we are no wiser than we were in the Pleistocene, even if we are more advanced in knowledge. Knowledge is cumulative, the wisdom that comes from experience is not. This is why historical lessons must be relearned generationally. Never assume that that stops with yours.

You are NOT capable of fully controlling the behavior or reactions of another person. If your plan depends on this and nothing else, your plan is entirely dependent on luck. This also applies to crowds, nations, and any other unit of humanity, up to and including significant others.

Stereotypes and labels and prejudices don’t exist because society is rotten, they exist because it’s part of how we cope cognitively with a complex world that often demands decisions based on little or no information. If you think you can or have rid yourself of them, you have merely rid yourself of self-knowledge.

Children may be innocent, but innocence does not imply harmlessness. Rather the opposite. Remember that innocence is the opposite of knowledge. It is not something to be treasured in and of itself.

Children do not receive a visit from the Judgment Fairy on their eighteenth birthday- they rely on their parents for that, and they had better well have as much of it as they can possibly gather before they become adults. Remember that when contemplating when to broach the subjects of firearms, sex, alcohol, or anything else deemed “adult”. When the law deems them so is too late.

Life is inherently unfair and absolutely jam-packed with disproportionate consequences for minor bad decisions. There are more of these aspects that are immune to engineering than aren’t. Treat any and all proposals to engineer the parities of life with great skepticism.

Lack of education can turn a person with great innate intelligence into an idiot, but extra education cannot make a great mind of a person with little of it, any more than twenty years of music school can make a great musician out of the tone-deaf and arrhythmic.

All people are basically the same under the skin by dint of being humans. This only goes so far- merely because someone else can speak your language does NOT mean they think like you, and it is the height of dangerous arrogance to assume as much. Fish have no word for water, and you are probably unaware of most of your assumptions that stem from your culture rather than your biology or specific rearing. Likewise, any assumption that all members of another cultural context think and behave in the same ways is equally mistaken. If you can’t get six randomly chosen people on your home street to agree on pizza toppings, assume that similar diversity and disagreement exists in other cultures, scaling in degree with the degree of importance of the issue.

Freedom for other people invariably and inevitably means discomfort for you- physical, emotional, and moral.

Your causes and ideals are just that- yours. You do not have the right to force other people to work to achieve them, and you do not have the ability to force them to care.

*Unless it’s civilization’s most civil one, of course. Perhaps strong words over tea, but I doubt it.

ETA: ARRRGH. Well, I don’t seem to have stolen anything else from Marko aside from the title and the format. It was unintentional- apparently when I read it ages ago it lodged a seed of “what a good idea for a post”… Thanks to Blunt Object for catching that for me.

I don’t do the New Year’s resolution thing. I think in essence, it’s a generally good idea; view the new year as a clean slate, view yourself as something that can change for the better, then make changes for the better.

However, I don’t generally view the best time to undertake this process whilst in the middle of a national hungover spasm of guilt with the massive grey wall of the previous night’s debauchery combined with finally facing up to the new year’s load of credit card bills looming over you. There’s just something about that maudlin state of self-loathing as a motivator that doesn’t quite jibe with me as the best motivator for self-improvement. If you have reasonable self-respect, the resolution doesn’t take because most of the time, you don’t hate yourself, and therefore the motivator disappears. If you don’t, then a cheerful little cycle of shame and self-flagellation can arise regardless of whether you succeed (grim perfectionism that can never be satisfied) or fail and retreat into whatever nasty habit gives you comfort.

My blueprint for self-improvement goes roughly as follows: identify the problem. Assess to what degree it is, in fact, a problem. Assess to what lengths you’re willing to go to remedy it, and what would be an acceptable timetable. (For example, if you really don’t want to live on steamed vegetables and prudent portions of fish and chicken whilst working out six days a week indefinitely, “toned beach body by June” is neither a reasonable goal nor a reasonable timetable.) Then, proceed with the plan. If you fail on a small scale, continue to proceed with the plan. (Minor periodic indulgences are not failure. Everyone needs a bit of vice.) If you fail on a large scale, reassess the plan and analyze why it fell apart. Develop a new plan. Continue as needed.

Every day of the year. However, if you enjoy the traditionalism of New Year’s and would like to start tomorrow, it’s as good as any- but I recommend waiting until the hangover wears off first.

A German researcher has managed to prove that magpies at least are capable of recognizing themselves in a mirror.

In case you’re wondering why that’s a big deal, it’s sort of become a standard test in animal behavior circles to see if an animal is bright enough to recognize that an image it sees is actually itself. This first requires the quick leap in reasoning in realizing that an image is a reflection at all, and second implies some limited capacity of the critter to distinguish a “self” in the first place- the most basic level of self-awareness. Until the magpie study, only bottlenose dolphins and great apes had been demonstrated to pass the mirror test.

Outside the realm of pure speculation and philosophical maundering, this proves what we already had hints of- that corvids (the bird family of which magpies are a member- also crows, jays, ravens, rooks, and jackdaws) are among the most intelligent of birds, perhaps as intelligent if not moreso than parrots, the group from which the most advanced research on animal cognition and language use not done on great apes has been done. Crows have been known to ornithologists and people who have to cope with them as pests as uncannily intelligent for a long time now, but more and more research is coming in to show that it’s not just a perception, they really are smart little buggers, more than capable of outwitting humans on a regular basis.

Personally, however, I’ve always had an issue with the test, because it depends rather heavily on something humans take for granted- vision as the dominant source of sensory information. The fact that dogs never pass the mirror test is something that is frequently mentioned in dog behavior literature as proof that dogs have no self-awareness, no conception of “I” and “you”, that they just learn from stimulus and response. It’s extremely important for humans to bear in mind that dogs don’t think or feel or remember the way humans do, but I really wonder first if a total absence of self-awareness is a logical assumption to make of a complex social animal, and second if the test is a fair measurement of an animal like a dog. (Or, for that matter, a horse or any other complex social animal that has failed the test but doesn’t put much reliance on its eyes compared to other senses.)

For a dog, smell is the ruling sense, the chief and most reliable source of information. Not only is the sense of smell of the average dog (let alone a hound) at least a hundred times more powerful than it is for humans, it’s gives them even more information than vision does for us, because scent is the only three-dimensional sense- it doesn’t just tell them what’s going on now, it also tells them what happened then. We can approximate it by taking clues from our vision and reasoning through them, but we can’t tell that someone was standing someplace an intermediate period of time ago (but is gone now) without going through that reasoning process and doing CSI tricks. For a dog, this is standard information, part of the way they hunt naturally.

Likewise, a dog’s hearing is far more sensitive and covers a greater range than ours does. Humans who have disciplined themselves very well can hear well enough to be better hunters, but only a dog can know that his owner is coming home at an unpredicted time because the characteristic sound of their car’s engine has entered their awareness from a mile away. Dog vision, by contrast, is terrible- they have a great eye for motion and are good at identifying individuals by the way they move, but their visual acuity is very poor, about as bad as mine is without my glasses. (Which is atrocious.) In one of the ironies of life, it was discovered that some dogs are nearsighted, and that certain breeds- such as German Shepherds- are particularly afflicted. In a bit of apocrypha I can’t source here but distinctly remembered, it first occurred to anyone to investigate this because a number of GSDs were washing out of certain guide dog tests for no apparent reason, the reason being that the dogs were, functionally speaking, nearly blind themselves.

The question of the mirror test and dogs then becomes, secondary to whether or not the dogs could recognize themselves, but that even if they did have some capacity to recognize “self”, why should they particularly notice or care about their mirror image? Anybody who’s raised a puppy knows that often, they’ll bluster or try to play with the strange “other puppy” they see in a mirror, but that they usually quickly realize it’s just a reflection and lose interest completely. Do they recognize themselves and conclude that it’s an irrelevant local phenomenon, do they completely fail to, and would or should they even care about something with no scent that doesn’t make a sound?

If a human were to notice a strange, sourceless smell- not a BAD smell, just a smell, and a subtle one at that- that they can’t attach to a source, would they first recognize the scent as their own if that’s what it was, and how much time, effort, and thought would they spend on it? I know that if I had no reason to suspect something was up otherwise, I’d never think it was my own scent, and I probably wouldn’t care enough to be very persistent about checking it out. As a tertiary sense, things I smell just aren’t very important to me unless I have cause to attach meaning to them- and since it’s one of my poorest senses, I’m aware my nose often plays tricks on me that I should pay no heed. (One of the quirks of my hormonal cycles is that at the right times of the month, I will often smell things that aren’t there, or smell innocuous things as though they stink, or noxious things as though they smelled a bit appetizing.) Dogs frequently see things that are unusual or alarming or just odd- partly because they live in a human world with all sorts of things they have no capacity to understand (like a human with an artificial limb, or a statue), and partly because their visual acuity is so poor compared to ours.

The second aspect of the conclusion “dogs have no self-awareness at all” that bothers me is that it doesn’t make sense to me. Not because I think the Yard Wolves are brilliant and deep souls who could philosophize like Socrates or even a stoned college student if they could but speak, but because there’s a logical breakdown for me. Dogs are transparently capable of recognizing individuals; they have their people, friends, strangers, and they treat individuals differently based on past interactions with them. They fear individuals that cause them pain, form bonds with members of their families, and remember family friends that tend to have biscuits or just plain know how to scratch in that ecstasy-producing way. Likewise, they recognize other dogs the same way- as, indeed, all complex social animals that do complicated things like hunting together or cooperating to raise young do. It’s a necessary feature, in order to keep track of the others’ behavior and shun or cooperate as appropriate; sociobiologists are seeing this cheater/cooperator distinction- the ability to track multiple relationships with multiple individuals- as more and more important to the very essence of BEING a functional social animal with each study.

And that’s my question: how can any creature have a detailed conception of a “you” with strong individual identification, and the ability to also keep track of “him” and “that other guy” and how it’s appropriate to treat them, without an “I”? How would it even be possible to have detailed external referents without the internal referent to relate it all to?

As I said, I’m not suggesting that dogs- or horses, or prairie dogs, or scrub jays- are self-aware in the same way that humans are, in the sense of being able to make detailed self-evaluations and introspections, or to think about either “I” or “you” in so advanced a fashion in order to make a conclusion like “Fucker went on vacation, I’ll piss in his shoe, that’ll teach him.”

However, in evolution, advanced features do not appear without simple predecessors, and things that are useful are often innovated several times independently. Eyes are a good example- they seem to have appeared independently in several different lineages rather than having been derived from a single early possessor of vision, so great are the advantages of advanced visual capabilities. (The independence of innovation of this feature is also why cephalopod eyes are a so much better design than the vertebrate eye.) It’s convergent evolution, and it’s ridiculously common.

Why, then, should we conclude that self-awareness- not the detailed internal world humans are accustomed to, but the basic concept of “I” versus “you” versus “someone else”- is so unique to only the very most intelligent of animals, and leave this as our automatic default assumption until a heavy body of firm proof otherwise? Because we are really so afraid of the potential for anthropomorphism… or because we are still afraid of finding out that we’re not quite as super-special as we have always loved to believe we are?

Probably some of both.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
-George Orwell

One of the ideas that’s been pinging around my skull lately is the suspicion that a substantial portion of modern ills can be boiled down to the assumption that, as Orwell said, happiness is the goal of life. Don’t get me wrong; I certainly hope to spend as much of my life generally happier than not, and being happy with my life is my own end goal. Note, however, the major distinction between these goals and the goal to be as happy as possible all the time.

The idea that a person should be happy, and that one should direct one’s life towards that end, is a fairly new one, mostly because it’s only recently that there are times and places where this is even possible. There are still patches of apparently intractable human misery all over the planet, and modern well-fed Westerners occasionally look in on them and try to wrap their heads around the contrast between their own existence, in which it is possible to do nearly anything you please so long as you make an effort (and the idea that you even SHOULD have to make an effort to achieve this comfortable state is under increasing assault), with those of these others, in which it seems that any life or moment not spent at the whim of indifferent and cruel forces is miraculous. The sheer fortune of circumstance (as well as how far effort and initiative can take you in one of these lucky societies) is even starkly apparent in this contrast of brothers.

It’s no coincidence that this ideal of ultimate happiness is not found within any traditional religion. In the major Western religions, the goal of life is to live according to the will of God. This may lead you to great success, or this may lead you to a Job-like existence of suffering, but that’s the plan, and your goal is to try and comprehend it and find peace within it. Likewise, the goal of the major Eastern religions is harmony with the world around you; whether it’s Buddha’s extinction of desire, Confucious’s harmony of social life, or Hindu’s goal of ultimate understanding, the emphasis is solidly on comfortably inhabiting the world as it is. Whether it’s God’s plan or nature-and-the-world-as-is, all of traditional religion seems to agree- you should better yourself as you can, but your lot in the universe is largely beyond your control, and happiness can be found in acceptance rather than in actively working to make yourself happy. You might see the Western conception of heaven as a reward of ultimate happiness, but when I’ve read the Bible, it sounds a lot more like heaven is eternity spent in the company of God- which one might assume is neverending happiness as a natural consequence, but sounds to me much more like the natural conclusion of the “end goal of life is to live in accordance with God” theme.

As an atheist with a generally friendly view toward religion, my view of them tends to take the slant that the success of particular religions over others- and the evolutionary and social utility of religion- is due to religions being, effectively, guidebooks to human nature and user manuals for living in a way that can reconcile our reason, emotion, and more animalistic tendencies as best as possible. Essentially, an abstract cornerstone of civilization. It’s not strictly necessary that such things be explicitly religions as we understand them- as I’ve observed before, there have been a nontrivial number of civilizations that had their moral codes removed from their belief in gods, which in those cases tended to act much like humans would WITHOUT any restriction of morality- but it seems to be one of the more common versions. If all of them can agree on a point- for an easy example, we can note that all of them take a dim view of wanton theft and murder- then that probably means they’re all describing an immutable aspect of human nature and the truly necessary elements for a functional civilization.

For most of human history, one reason this view of life, without respect to the religion or philosophy it was framed in, persisted easily, because for most of history, life was as it is now in places we think of as epitomes of human misery: mostly arbitrary and often awful. Plagues were a fact of life, as were being killed for arbitrary reasons by enemy soldiers or simply your own society. Famine? It’s one of the Horsemen, and for a long time it was a fully concrete concept for all cultures, not something they had to imagine. It was obvious living as though it was your birthright to be happy all the time was folly because it was essentially impossible, except for the very few members of the ruling class, and even they were brought low often enough to be periodically reminded that they were kings of men, not of the world, and hardly immune to disaster.

Both these religious precepts- accept your fate without struggle, and you will be more at peace- and the unquestioned truth that might pretty much does make right- were used to justify a great deal of non-arbitrary abuses of power. By the eighteenth century, literacy was widespread enough and philosophy, science, and theology thriving enough that it was possible for serious reforms based on this new body of thought and moral reasoning to occur… and, as a side effect of this enlightened period, a new experiment in government to be tried by a group of men that were as well-read as they were hotheaded and revolutionary. When they were deciding what sorts of things this new form of government should be based on, one of the included precepts was the pursuit of happiness- meaning, in that context, that government should not interfere in citizen activities to build their lives as they chose and instead that they should be left to succeed if they could. (In contrast to societies like China, where the government can simply say “you’re a gymnast, this is your life”, and this is viewed as one of its prerogatives rather than massively unjust a theft of a life as it would be here.)

“Happiness” is a slippery word. The euphoric state itself that we are usually referring to when thinking of our happiest moments is fleeting and of simple realistic necessity cannot be experienced indefinitely, or even in greater proportion than other emotional states; happiness is in itself an inherently special reaction, and the same thing that made you smile and laugh last week may be boring this week, having become unexceptional and thus not worth getting excited about. There is contentment, but it says something that mere contentment is usually attacked by those advocating for something in the name of greater happiness for an individual or a group- its having too great a resemblance to the old, complacent religious ideal of satisfaction with the world.

It is therefore not possible to successfully pursue feeling happy if that is your sole goal. It’s as slippery a state as it is an emotion, and what actually makes us happy is so frequently not what we predicted would that there are several fables and morality tales with that specific lesson in cultures all over the world. If you ask yourself each moment, and at each end result of a decision, if you are as happy as you possibly could be right now, the answer will almost certainly be “no”. Our imaginations being what they are, it is always possible to imagine greater happiness given enough time to think, or even perpetual happiness, the euphoria going on and on.

These truths- that the good feelings of happiness are fleeting, that humans are always able to make an unfavorable comparison to what they have when the alternative is something they imagine they might, and that happiness often lies in unexpected places- are part of what can seem like a paradox: happiness is often obtained through pursuits that place us temporarily in a completely different and decidedly non-euphoric emotional state, such as boredom or frustration. You can even see this principle acknowledged in devices and pursuits that are acknowledged as purely diversionary; to win a traditional game, such as bridge or chess or go, you must be playing against another person, which implies an automatic chance of spending your time and mental effort endeavoring to follow a completely abstract system of rules in order to defeat an opponent and win nothing of consequence except satisfaction- and there’s a good chance you’ll lose and fail and therefore have spent all that time and effort on nothing except the disappointment of failure. Even in modern video games, you don’t just push a button and get a you-win screen, when presumably it’s winning that makes you happy- you must pass a series of challenges, and a growing genre of games are open-ended systems of hidden systems (meant for the player to discover) and endless challenges with no way to win at all, all satisfaction coming purely from the effort invested in figuring out the game and seeing what it can do.

The satisfactions of a game are fleeting, however, which is why they’re games. Most of life’s big happinesses- a successful relationship, success in career or in some other area of personal achievement, a successful family- are all the end result of long periods of great effort expended and unpleasantness endured in order to reach an end result. Happy marriages and families are hardly one long parade of joy after having found your soulmate and raised your children to be wonderful little people, rather than brats; humans being what they are, there are inevitably periods, even long ones, where you look at your family members and don’t even like them. They will do things to hurt you, sometimes badly, disappoint you, or frustrate you. However, if you conclude during such periods that the marriage/family is not making you happy and therefore abandon it, you miss out on the strengthened relationships and, yes, happiness of having been patient, worked to solve problems, and keeping the relationship- which, if sound, will have wonderful periods to match the awful ones with the same near-inevitability.

Likewise, a true and deep feeling of achievement in any other area can come only after a great deal of effort expended- endurance through the tedium of study, endurance through the tedium of trial and error, endurance through the vagaries of fortune, and a general suffering through a great many unpleasant emotional states to reach ultimate- or even just modest, but real- success. I love to read, but I don’t enjoy every second of my eyeballs crawling over the page, I enjoy the sensation of having learned something new, or thought or imagined something I wouldn’t have before. (This applies equally as much to fiction as nonfiction, since the basic purpose of fiction is examination of human nature from different angles.) While I do sometimes stop reading a book either because the author has used so much obfuscatory language the experience of reading has become excrutiating, because I suspect the story will have no interesting payoff, or because I suspect the author’s point is actually nonsense, this is very different from doing so purely because it’s not making me happy right that second.

The increasing number of people that ARE using that metric on some level becomes increasingly apparent in our culture, and is epitomized in the spread of psychotropic medications that are advertised and sometimes prescribed as though unhappiness itself were a pathological condition, rather than being as normal and necessary a part of the human experience as happiness. We propose to legislate poverty out of existence, or to to provide unlimited medical care for free to all, or to eliminate work as a necessary precondition to achievement- or, worse, we attempt to eliminate all concept of achievement from our schools, increasingly choosing instead to concentrate on telling students they are special and make sure they feel good about themselves.

Insidiously, in this version of pursuit of happiness- total concentration on one’s internal state and current estimation of one’s worth- we completely eliminate almost all possibility of happiness as a condition as it was understood for thousands of years. If everyone is special, no one is. If all that matters is how you feel, there is always a better theoretical emotional state we must mourn, and always a reason to quit an activity, job, relationship, or even existence that is not immediately satisfying. If there’s no such thing as achievement or failure, there’s never any reason to feel good about ourselves outside of fundamentally fleeting affection- and as soon as failure is experienced, because that’s how life still is no matter how much padding we try and put on the sharp corners, it disappears altogether.

This pursuit of happiness is as surefire a guarantor of misery as has ever been invented. And humans are very creative in that respect.

So, today is the first anniversary of our blogging experiment. Rather than put on a party hat and run around the room yelling “WHEE BLOGGED FOR A WHOLE YEAR GO US”, I thought I’d share what I’ve learned so far.

1. I know about as much about my own writing process as I know about the daily chemical reactions of my liver. Before I actually started, I was pretty sure I was mostly going to do politics with some science thrown in. I got THAT backwards. I also thought I’d probably write brief, pithy posts, like the comments I left on other people’s blogs. Turns out I’m only brief when I’m trying to get something up for the sake of having posted. I also thought fisking- going through a bad argument and tearing it apart line by line- would be a mainstay. Also something I only do now when I’m hard up for material. I don’t know WHAT the hell I’d call the long essays I turned out to actually be good at- around the world in ten thousand words, maybe- but it’s not at all what I expected.

2. No wonder writers refer to “muses”. I can’t tell when the hell I’m going to feel like writing, how long or exactly what the thesis and execution will be, when I’ll feel like spewing an ocean of verbiage on something that annoys me and when I can’t think of anything to say other than “bah”, or how long good periods or bad ones will be. Blaming the frustrating black box on a personalized abstraction seems as useful an approach as any other.

3. Promising a post on a specific subject is a bad idea. Sometimes I’ll turn out not to have the argument I thought I had, sometimes it will turn out I actually wanted to write something else, sometimes I’ll realize a fatal flaw and the whole thing will collapse into a heap of smoldering rubble, sometimes I’ll realize someone else has already done it better and I’d feel lame next to them. And, of course, sometimes I’ll burn out on a subject with a flash and a pop that is damn near audible. I hate it when that happens.

4. I’m an atrocious judge of my own writing. Something I felt kind of bad putting up because I thought it sucked will suddenly turn out to be popular and linked around our corner of the blogosphere, something I posted feeling rather clever and full of myself will draw maybe one comment. I think the number of times I’ve accurately judged how popular a given post will be is actually a fair bit worse than sheer chance.

5. This was a really, really good idea. We’ve probably gotten much more back in value from this project than nearly any other we’ve started in the past year. (Save, maybe, for ponying up for central air.) Thank y’all for reading, for linking, and for generally being a highly entertaining and useful audience.

Normally I’m not too prone to anxiety dreams. Most of the time my subconscious is at one of two ends of the spectrum, either tame as a well-fed kitten, or insane as all get-out. When I do have a nice transparent “Shit Is Going Down!” dream, it goes along fairly predictable lines. Giant monster or some such, and whatever weapon I have to hand Doesn’t Work Right. This ranges from the more occasional “hitting them to no effect” dream to the more common variants wherein my sidearm becomes useful only as a paperweight. Turns out you need FMJ rounds to penetrate the giant spider! D’oh! The FMJ is blowing right through the Shambling Menace, you needed hollowpoints to be effective!

The fact that it’s perfectly clear what the problem is at the time in my dream is probably a side effect of spending way too many hours playing video games, where the Doomslayer 12 (+18 Sleaze Damage) does not affect the undead, whereas the Whacky Stick of Menace (+5 Stench Damage) mows through them like a combine through a field of bunnies.

At any rate, the old Stress Express decided to make a stop in my mind this morning, and I have to say, things are looking up. In this morning’s dystopian near-future, involving time traveling trains, Hiro from “Heros,” some sort of religious cult, an homage to Thunderdome (with the twist that “Three will enter, and with any luck that bastard what we hate won’t leave!”) and a tight-knit group of people I’ve come to trust throughout my life, something novel happened. After a hair-raising raid into seized territory to recover the Nerd Ranch arms stash (with a slightly disturbing level of inventory accuracy, for a dream) and being re-equipped with my sidearm of choice, the cockamamie thing actually worked. More or less. On the draw, the trigger wouldn’t pull. This was quickly fixed by realizing I had the safety on (which normally I carry in double-action mode, so that shouldn’t have been so). Then it stovepiped. A quick tap-n-rack (which I admit I practice no where near enough, thanks for the reminder, subconscious!), and I was back on target and putting rounds close enough to do the job.

Apparently overcoming two-to-one odds is a good way to earn cred with bizarre subconscious religious cults. At least until my dead grandmother called and gave me shit for killing them. Oh well, can’t win ‘em all.

Since the last time I saw my brain, it was wandering off muttering something about how our first batch of brew is ready to drink, and I don’t plan to bother mounting a search party until Monday at least, I’m going to take a cue from Breda and rip off her meme.

The ABCs of Me

Accent: Rocky Mountain Generic with a Gulf Coast chaser. I grew up in Phoenix, my father was from Postage Stamp, East Texas, and my mother is from Postage Stamp, central Louisiana. I sound like a very mild and urbane version of the Marlboro Woman.

Breakfast or no breakfast: Depends. It takes my digestive system a minimum of one hour after waking up to be ready for food, if not actually longer. If I have time, then breakfast. If not, oh well. Left to my own natural patterns, I tend to be a lunch-dinner-midnight-snack person anyway. I do love breakfast foods, however; all-day breakfast menus are my friend.

Chore I don’t care for: Dishes. I have no rational reason whatsoever for this; I hate doing dishes more than just about anything, up to and including cleaning the litterbox or getting a dead animal away from Kang. Oh, I hate washing the car, too, but that I have every reason for.

Dog or cat: Both, thank you. If God parted the clouds, leveled the Celestial Pointer Finger at me, and told me I had to choose only one for the rest of my life, I’d probably choose cats. I’ve had at least one Siamese shouting at me and purring in my lap since I was born. I love dogs, but I love cats just that .001% more.

Essential electronics: Around here? All of them. Oh, they’re not really essential, per se; either one of us would probably take all right to a hermitage in a library. But, that’s not on the table, so… all of them. There’s not much to do on this mountain.

Favorite cologne: On the rare occasions I wear any scent other than the smell of soap, I favor products from Demeter Fragrance Library. They have all sorts of scents, but I like the ones that are meant to recreate certain settings, weather, or times of year best; my three favorites are Snow, Humidor, and Thunderstorm. And yes, they DO all smell like their descriptions.

Gold or silver: Stainless steel.

Handbag I carry most often: I don’t. Anything that’s not so essential I would no more go anywhere without it than without my pants, I don’t carry, because I’m really absent-minded. I’m about due for a new wallet, though. New cargo pants, too.

Insomnia: It comes and goes. It’s been staying away for a good long while now, and I’m grateful. When it’s bad there’s no such thing as a pill strong enough to put me to sleep and keep me that way unless it’s officially classified as a large-animal tranquilizer. My system shrugs off sedatives pretty easily. This can get really “entertaining” with minor surgical or major dental procedures if the doctor or nurse doesn’t heed my warning.

Job Title: Peaches, Queen of the Universe. (Anybody who recognizes Peaches gets much love and squealing from me.)

Kids: I can crate the dogs when their behavior is not fit for man nor beast. Call me when you can legally do this to children up to 18 and I’ll reconsider.

Living arrangements: With my husband in a nice house on two acres in the Atomic City. Elk go through our yard and there’s a particle accelerator a few miles from here. All of the living arrangements I can conceive of that would be preferable fall under the “when we’re filthy rich” category.

Naughtiest childhood behavior: Uh. Absent calling my mother and asking her, I’ll go with “willful” for two hundred, Alex. Timeouts did not work on Toddler Rat; it took me half an hour just to stop attacking the door, which still has scars from where I used my junior golf club. I mellowed a lot with age, especially after getting over the early-adolescent hump.

Most admirable trait:: I’m with Breda; by default, I’m not the person to answer this.

Overnight hospital stays: None that I recall. Other than some stress-induced migraines which I thankfully grew out of, I was a pretty healthy and sturdy kid. I had to get stitches for a badly cut lip when I was four, but all of it is lost in the mists of memory except for the really terrifying clown puppet one of my parents must have thought might make me feel better that I got after the stitches.

Phobias: I used to be petrified of spiders, now I just don’t like them much. I do have a claustrophobic streak, however. I’m fine with elevators and such, but when Stingray tried to teach me how to change my own oil, I found being under a car supported by a few flimsy jacks such a terrifying experience I couldn’t concentrate on anything he said. Jiffylube only costs twenty bucks, kthx. It’s also why, despite the punk and metal music I love, I’ve never been to a concert.

Quote: “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it!) but ‘That’s funny …’” – Isaac Asimov

Reason to smile: The existence of the dumbo octopus. The knowledge that many more things even more interesting than what we have already learned still wait to be discovered.

Siblings: One half-brother. I haven’t talked to him in years, sadly. Until he’s no longer under my wicked stepmother’s thumb, I’m not likely to.

Time I wake up: Variable. If it’s earlier than nine, it was unwilling. I’ve been a night owl since I was a newborn.

Unusual talent or skill: Not only can I roll my tongue, I can fold it completely in half or into a cloverleaf shape. This has absolutely no applications other than startling dentists.

Vegetable I refuse to eat: Bell peppers, any color. I hate them. I hate them so much. It’s the only true food dislike I have; there are other things that I like more or less than others, but nothing that inspires such active revulsion. I’ve considered training myself out of it through relentless exposure, but… I’m not THAT eager to have a truly fair-n-balanced palate, as Stingray isn’t too crazy about them either.

Worst habit: Again in common with Breda, procrastinating. Probably the best effect marriage has had on me is creating some of the external motivation to do things other than read that I otherwise lack. (Unless I had compelling plans, I used to put off eating until I was so hungry I couldn’t concentrate on anything else, it was that bad.)

X-rays: A few. I’ve snapped a lateral ligament in my right ankle twice, and that needed X-raying. There were a bit more for some really torturous growing pains I had around the age of nine or ten.

Yummy stuff: Too long to list, really. Among my very favorites, however, are the perfectly roast duck, the perfectly fried oyster, the perfectly done elk tenderloin, and Really Good Gumbo.

Zoo animal I like the most: Spotted hyenas. The way they move is interesting. Their body language is interesting. Even their skeletons are interesting. However, most zoos don’t have them due to the hyena’s bad PR, so I’ll say fennec foxes as the more-popular runner up.

Just under a year ago we fired this place up, not having much in the way of A Clue other than being acutely aware that some really cool and interesting people were clearly having a good deal of fun doing this sort of thing. LabRat had made noise in the past about wanting to escape Livejournal and set up a proper blog, but life being what it was, we were promptly swamped with Major Life Happenings shortly after I bought the domain and hosting space, so nothing much came of the idea for a year or two. Finally, with a hearty cry of “Aw, what the hell!” we made a push and got this lil’ soap box set up.

Eleven months later, we’ve met some weirdos very interesting people, have somehow convinced many others that they want to meet us (I worry about some of y’all for that, I do), learned a great deal about many things, and both of us certainly feel much more competent as writers, even if one of the most common phrases used around this nerd-ranch is “Will you come proofread and edit this?”

Honestly, I had no idea what was going to happen the first time I reached over and hit “publish.” I figured maybe if we were lucky we could manage 10 or 15k visitors in a year, tops. The fact that fifty thousand of you wonderful folks felt it worthwhile to drop by and see what our brains managed to dribble out into the bitstream is more than a little humbling (even if a good chunk of you were just looking for boobies, at least according to sitemeter).

Thank you all very kindly for reading our scribblings, and here’s shooting for 100k.

We- especially my better half- are not averse to dishing up a heaping helping of pessimism. The tree of liberty is ever thirsty for blood, and often as not it seems giving it a drink leads to withering rather than the bearing of good fruit. All that we value is constantly in peril, as things decay without maintenance even without outside attack or disease from within being necessary.

Still, though, whenever I contemplate living in a different time and in a different place- as heavy consumers of speculative fiction are prone to do- and ask myself whether I’d truly like that, the answer is always an emphatic “Hell, no!”

Here and now, I’m typing this on my lap- couldn’t do this twenty years ago, couldn’t do this with any comfort maybe ten years ago- and listening to my well-padded mp3 player, another thing I couldn’t have done ten years ago. I’m drinking a cold and delightful microbrewed lager, from one of the dozens of imported and domestically produced beers available in the small liquor section of a pokey mountain grocery store. In the refrigerator is very fresh and delicious produce from a Community Supported Agriculture program- five years ago I would have been stuck with the hardy but flavorless produce available from that same grocery store. My internet time, which ten years ago I paid dearly for by the hour and which was so slow and content-free compared to now that I can scarcely believe I valued it so much, comes cheaply and with an amount of content and speed that can only be compared to drinking from a fire hose.

Information of all kinds, in fact, is always right at my finger tips. If I ever have a question, no matter how obscure, the answer is likely to be no further than Google- and if it’s REALLY obscure, I can probably learn where the dusty paper versions I need can be found. Library research as I was painstakingly taught it in school is now only truly relevant to the obscure and those things for which you really need a primary source. (I have to admit to being a little sad about this, as I learned all sorts of things from books I brought home because they were more enticing than whatever it was I’d gone to look up, but the same general result is regularly achieved via Wikipedia.) For a curious personality, my world is the New Jerusalem, where information and knowledge are only limited by my spare time and energy- and the pace of technology has given me far more value for those coins. On my coffee table sit at least a dozen books, all of which I’ve never read before, and all of which I’m intensely interested in reading. If I could possibly want more, all I have to do is type here that I do, and I’ll be flooded with promising leads.

On the other hand, if I decide I’ve had enough of the fire hose and want a little peace and space and quiet- or even if I decide I don’t want there to be another goddamn chattering, pacing monkey around me for at least a hundred miles in any direction- I can do that, and without ever leaving my own country. For that matter, I can probably do that without ever leaving my own state- and when I’ve had enough of it, provided I’ve done nothing foolish, I can get back to my truck, get on the highway, and be back in civilization soon enough to have my pick of ethnic cuisines for dinner. Or, if I never got enough of it, with a bit of searching for land I can just stay there, so long as I can provide enough of my own necessities for life. (And with money and motivation, I can easily do that too.) Compared to how humans have lived historically and in most of the places around the world today, there’s ridiculously little legal or pragmatic check on that money and motivation.

Speaking of most of history and most places, I am an outrageously impertinent woman, a lousy prospect for a spouse- I have no children or plans to have any, and I have the domestic skills of a brain-damaged goat- yet I’m happily married and legally able to speak and act as I see fit, right up to and including shooting a man that might dare to try and exercise his most ancient form of physically-entitled dominance over me. Were I in a state that limited that right, I would have the money and motivation to simply choose another state that did and move there- again without having to leave my own country. It would be difficult and cost me in money and uncertainty, but I could do it, and without asking for permission from any authority. Because of that choice, I’m having my cake and eating it too- living in a center of massive technological advancement among some of the best-educated people in the world, yet surrounded by truly wild land.

Here and now, my glass is more than half-full- and the brew within it is just delicious.

Commenter Skeeler of Industrial-Strength Science has asked what is basically going to be the question du jour throughout the nation in his reply to the Heller post below.

“So, what, if any, restrictions on the purchase of firearms would you endorse? Age limits (16, 18, 21)? Background checks (misdemeanors, felonies, violent felonies)? Weapons-per-day limits (1, 10, 100)?”

Originally I was just going to answer this in the comment section, but after a while the response grew long enough to merit simply moving it up here, especially since this discussion will be echoing around the nation in a great many halls of lawmaking.

In short, I can’t say I’m particularly in favor of any restrictions. The basic tenet of our legal system is “innocent until proven guilty,” and to my mind restrictions on the purchase of mere durable goods on the grounds that one might commit a crime with it is rather contrary to that tenet.

I even support letting felons have guns. Given how ridiculously easy it is to become a felon in this day and age (when something as simple as carrying one carton of cigarettes too many across a state line is a felony as in Tennesee) I have a hard time stripping so many people of so many rights for so little. As far as violent felons, if they’ve completed their sentence there is no evidence to assure us that they will commit further crime. Recidivism is of course a large problem in this society, and there are certainly plenty of indications that they may commit further crimes, but we then encounter two problems. First, we’re again pre-judging them as guilty, and second, we of course have the old saw that criminals tend to ignore laws. I think they just might manage to get a gun anyway. For cases involving domestic violence, I could even get behind having a chunk of my tax money going towards arming the victim and getting him or her proper training in self defense.

I likewise see little if any benefit to age restrictions. I myself have been shooting since I was three years old, and I know of children quite capable of safely handling a firearm, and have met some shooters as young as seven or eight that I would trust with a rifle while I can think of half a dozen people older than I who I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near if they were armed. Attitude and education are the keys here, not chronology. Ultimately, on the age issue I prefer to punt and leave that as an issue for parents to deal with. Before the age of 18, one is a minor and thus (theoretically) still subject to the rules one’s parents have laid down. If mom and dad are ok with Jr. having a pistol, make it a family outing and let mom or dad technically buy it. And again, if it’s little Johnny Crip or Ralphie Blood looking for a gat, an age restriction isn’t going to slow him down. In other words, this has been a long-winded way to say that I can live with restricting the purchase of firearms to those who are legally adults. Sorta. Kinda.

Weapons per day limit? Why? Does buying a couple guns make you more likely to go shoot a place up? Hell, if that’s your plan you’re better off only buying one anyway given how much ammo costs lately. “Well Bob, I like you and all, and I wasn’t planning on taking out the whole office, but I bought one gun, then another, then another, and then they all ganged up on me and made me come do this.” The only weapons per day limit I can support is whatever the buyer’s credit limit is. Run out of money, no more guns.

And just to cover the last of the usually included options, I don’t like waiting periods either. LawDog has offered a brilliant dissertation on the effectiveness of restraining orders and the like. I believe one of the usual rallying cries used in support of firearm restrictions is “If it saves just one life, it’s worth it.” How does the ethical balance work out if it costs lives? Frank J. Critter will unlikely wait patiently for Bonnie Beatenup to complete the ten day cooling off period before going to Show Her Whut’s Whut. Other situations of immediate need are certainly easy to conjure, and are likewise not to the victim’s benefit to wait around for a week or two.

At the end of the day, I support punishing people for crimes they actually committed, not with guessing games and crystal ball reading over what may be. If you commit a crime with a firearm, by all means, lump that in and punish the hell out of the criminal. Bad things will happen to good people no matter what laws are in place to prevent it, and to me it is unethical to enact measures which interfere with law-abiding activities of regular citizens, especially measures which so far have not shown the desired result when tested. When these measures go further, and deny a living, breathing, person with goals and plans the tools with which to fight for survival itself in the face of a physically stronger assailant, then they are not merely unethical but have actually aided the predatory criminal scum, and that will never sit well with me.

I’ve always been a cheerful and shameless appreciator of genre fiction. I like mysteries, I LOVE horror, I like fantasy, I like sci-fi; about the only things in this literary dungeon that I don’t like are romances (ew, mushy stuff) and westerns (tend to be like romances with more horses and guns, but I could be convinced by the right stuff). Growing up, I was a horror fan first and foremost, with a secondary preference for fantasy… which, done right, is often horror with more pointy humanoids. I liked sci-fi okay, but I was a real lightweight- Star Trek, but no Heinlein. I’d poked around some of the giants of the genre, like Arthur C. Clarke, but it never really caught fire with me.

Since I’ve started actually socializing with other people and, through a combination of the intertubes and being able to haunt the science and engineering departments of the university I attended, I’ve met a LOT of science fiction fans. One of the bennies of being a profoundly geeky girl with no major physical disfigurements is that you get to meet tons of cute, smart, geeky men that all seem to want to talk to you; one of the drawbacks is that they will also all want to make a “real” science fiction fan out of you. I spent God knows how many hours in college watching the entirety of the local Blockbuster’s science fiction section. Some of it was probably Blockbuster’s fault for having a truly shitty selection (ZARDOZ, anyone?), but I really wasn’t very impressed. Nightfall in particular sticks out in my memory as one of the outstanding worst movie-watching experiences I have ever had. (I had never, and still haven’t, read the short story.) Dune was another; I never even remotely grasped why I was supposed to be interested in the machinations of rubber croissants, bitchy courtesans, and people who couldn’t be bothered to wipe their faces after eating a popsicle. (I had never realized before now that the version I watched was directed by David Lynch. This explains everything.) Predictably, every single one of these miserable experiences was had in the company and at the provocation of either a boyfriend or someone I would have dated if circumstances had been different. Men, you are not the only people whose hormones make them retarded. What I thought of 2001 deserves its own rant, although since Stingray was the boyfriend at the time and had an even more extreme reaction, I may let him do that one.

So, to make a long story not very short at all, I did not have a good impression of the genre in general nor of its diehard fans. Nonetheless, they seemed to be kin to me in other ways, so I have persisted in haphazard fashion in trying to see the appeal. It’s going better this time around, mostly because I now have a much, much improved ability to sort diamonds from muck. Scalzi’s good. Cory Doctorow’s great. Lois McMaster-Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga is a pretty good read. I’ve had less positive results with the movies, but really good science fiction movies are pretty damn thin on the ground… especially if you hated 2001, which everybody and his brother seems to think is the best one ever made. By the time this post has been up for a few days I expect my Amazon list to have undergone another convulsive growth cycle*.

What really interested me though, was that aside from a few gourmand geeks that liked everything, there seemed to be relatively little overlap between the fantasy fans and the science fiction fans, and even a fair amount of active contempt. This confused me; aren’t they basically the same thing? The entire point of either genre is to tell an interesting new story by creating a universe we can recognize, populating it with characters we definitely recognize as humans we can identify with, and then changing a bunch of the rules we have to work with and seeing what happens. Remove faster-than-light travel limitations and propose many sentient species and you get Star Trek. Make the basic human narrative assumptions about destiny an active law of the universe, propose many other sentient races, and toss a MacGuffin in there and you get the Rings trilogy. For something like the Dune universe, the details that make it science fiction and not fantasy aren’t even all that important to the plot; you can rewrite the entire thing to be a fantasy universe and change nothing except some explanations and background information. (Yes, I did go and look up the structure and relevant details of the Dune universe, if only to make a start on figuring out what the hell I had just watched.)

It all started to make a lot more sense when I realized that for each genre, there are two different definitions of what makes something “sci-fi” or “fantasy”, and not only that, its fans often only really wanted one of the two things out of the genre, whether or not they were aware of it. One definition that works for either with a few stipulations about allowed mechanics is the one I just gave: fiction that uses important differences between the way the world of the story works and the way the rules of the universe we live in work to tell a story or even just explore a what-if idea. Science fiction proposes technological solutions to our universe-imposed limitations, or explores things on worlds whose different conditions make for different rules than Earth; fantasy rewrites the mechanics of the universe itself. Since these are fairly piddling distinctions, there’s a lot of stuff in a grey area; Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series is science fiction, but dragons are such a hoary old fantasy cliche that I was shocked to look her up and find that all the awards and societies she’s ever belonged to are for science fiction and not fantasy.

The second definitions are much more genre-specific, because they seem to be an amalgamation of all the hallmarks and tropes that the genre accumulates. Some people are sci-fi fans and not fantasy fans because they really dig spaceships, aliens, and space battles but unicorns, elves, princesses, and pseudo-medieval-Europe battles make them throw up. Some people are fantasy fans and not sci-fi fans because they really dig wizards, dragons, magic swords, and barbarians but cannot stand little grey aliens, ray guns, alien babes that are mysteriously attractive to humans, or gee-whiz technoporn. There’s nothing basically wrong with this; any searching look at my book and DVD collections can only lead a person who can recognize patterns to conclude that I simply like ghost stories, and that’s pretty much true. As with other subgenres I find particularly appealing, I’ll forgive a lot more flaws from a story that’s giving me more of what I already enjoy for its own sake. Not everything has to be To Kill A Mockingbird.

Thus, when fans of one genre or another (or those who hate genre fiction in general) attack the one they don’t like, they tend to go for the big, obvious targets: all the bad habits that writers have developed when they mix up the genre tropes with the reason to write science fiction or fantasy in the first place. If you create a big green landscape and sprinkle it with elves and wizards, the result is NOT automatically good fantasy- it’s just functionally identical to every single other terrible fantasy novel out there generated by someone who read Tolkien and missed what made his stories great. (And I say this as a person who hates Tolkien. I just recognize him as vastly less painful to read than his imitators.) Fantasy fans who just can’t get enough elf will forgive this or automatically sift it out of their continuing search for a good story, but the critics have a very good point. However, all tropes exist because they are tools for the writer, that serve the plot in some way or just create a recognizable shorthand for the reader- they aren’t bad in and of themselves, they’re just frequently misused or used in the same old predictable way too many times. Terry Pratchett started writing Discworld novels purely to poke fun at the glut of terrible Tolkien/Robert E. Howard-inspired fantasy fiction on the market, but it very quickly became more than that when he discovered just how flexible said tropes could be in creative hands. Ironically, much of the definitely-fantasy Discworld series IS a form of science fiction: the author has a habit of grabbing real-world science, turning it inside out, and sticking it in a book. Thus, Hex, the wizards’ cargo-cult computer, which the author openly admits is simply magic that has become indistinguishable from technology.

Critics of fantasy fiction often point out that once you invoke magic, you can use this as a sort of all-purpose Get the Writer Out Of A Corner tool, sort of the narrative equivalent of a Leatherman. In their defense, this is absolutely true in many cases. In fantasy’s defense, the authors recognize this pitfall too, and often go out of their way to make sure first that there ARE rules, and second that those rules are internally consistent within that universe. After all, the audience may be perfectly prepared to accept mangled Latin as the functional mechanic of magic, but if you start having people casting spells without it they get pissed- and rightly so. And, as the fantasy fans point out, Clarke’s Law works both ways: any sufficiently advanced technology can get the writer out of just about any inconvenient plot corner. This is in fact true of all genres; get-the-writer-out-of-the-corner principles can be adapted to nearly anything.

There is a subgroup of science fiction fans who are most enthused about “hard” sci-fi, which distinguishes itself by trying as hard as it can to avoid plot Leathermans by adhering as much as it can to extrapolations of current known science. This is, admittedly, one way to avoid this form of lazy writing, and I’ll admit it can produce some of the best SF simply by being the most tantalizingly plausible. However, I would argue that this only applies to stories that would have been good whether or not they made that extra effort; otherwise, it only falls into another lazy-writer’s pitfall, which is a specialization of the same error of assumption that caused so many well-meaning fantasy authors to scatter elves all over the place. Michael Crichton is perhaps the type example of this: the worst of his novels are just several-hundred-page reviews of current science with a few extrapolations tossed in and some entirely forgettable characters thrown in to move the plot along, which only seems to exist itself in order to move us to the next bit of scientific exposition. This kind of sci-fi only begs the question of why the author did not just sit down and write a popular-science book; I know I always wind up asking myself why I didn’t just go find one of those, when in the clutches of this kind of author.

There is, of course, nothing more wrong with this than there is with really digging ghosts and werewolves… but it’s worth remembering, especially when trying to convert someone dubious about science fiction, that it’s the same principle. Good stories, on the other hand, are good stories no matter what.

*This particular prophecy is already proving self-fulfilling. In the course of searching around for a little inspirational kick, I discovered that David Langford has written a number of books whose existence I had not previously suspected but now cannot live without.

So BobG tagged me, and since I’ve actually never been tagged before, naturally I couldn’t resist. Here are the rules:

1. Write your own six word memoir.
2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you want.
3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to the original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere.
4. Tag at least five more blogs with links.
5. Leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play.

Okay, I can take a crack at this…

Searching for function among the forms.

The critter above is Hallucigenia, one of many very strange fossils found in the Burgess Shale. Paleontologists have been trying to figure out exactly what sort of critter it is, which appendages do what, if the blob they think might be a head actually is one, or even if it’s one whole critter as opposed to a piece of another. The original interpretation was that it walked on the long spines (complete with complex explanation as to HOW), and the shorter blobs on top are feeding tentacles where food would be passed along from one to another. Since then, the accepted explanation has become flipping the entire critter upside down and assuming the smaller blobs are for walking and the long spines are for defense or… something. At least the explanation for how it even walks is a bit easier to swallow now.

If my life has a defining theme, that’s it: look for similarities, look for differences, ask why it works as well as how it works and importantly, IF it works… and try flipping things upside down and see if they don’t make a lot more sense that way, from time to time.

Tagging… um… MattG, Steve, Kevin, Roberta… and I’m gonna cop out and have the last one be Stingray.

When your standard anxiety dream of beating up on an enemy only to have no visible effect on them changes to beating them so severely that you actually feel bad about it, does that represent an uptick or a downtick in your self-image?

Recently, we upgraded the blogging software to the latest version of WordPress. It contains some improvements, but for some reason we can no longer find incoming links. For that reason, I was entirely unaware that the E3 Gazette (now arriving at a blogroll near you) had linked my post on labeling and expanded upon it. It’s a rather neat encapsulation of how knowing what you don’t know is as important as knowing what you do, and how incompetence, lack of experience, or basic stupidity will rob you of this essential ingredient, but what really interested me was in the comments, when Doug Loss brought up the idea of Unknown Knowns, which he describes as “things you don’t realize you know”, much in the same way that fish have no word for water.

I think this is an important idea for several reasons. The first is that when you live in a culture- or subculture- you’ll absorb all kinds of tidbits and trivia without really realizing it. People who are good at this tend to be excellent at things like Trivial Pursuit, geekery within specific fields- like music or sports- and tend to go through life completely unaware of the degree to which their collection of trivia is not generally shared. I should know, I’m one of them. As with many natural information-packrat geeks, it was a rather crucial social revelation to me to figure out that people would stop wanting to beat me with sticks if I stopped assuming that everyone knew exactly what I meant when I made an offhand reference to Walter Mondale. It’s not consciously researched knowledge, it’s the sorts of odds and ends you pick up when researching something else, or even just small details picked up through a love of fiction- which will, if any good, always contain bits and pieces of it. Terry Pratchett calls is “white knowledge”, and describes it as the process by which people arrive at a general mental picture of elves without ever having picked up Tolkien, much less Celtic or Norse mythology. In this form, it’s mostly harmless- it serves almost as a de facto secret handshake for people in a certain culture, subculture, or hobby.

Another form of unknown knowns involves the sorts of things we accept as basic reality as a member of a particular culture; they are small details of our daily lives, or things we never experience in any other way, or shared cultural agreements that make up the experience of life as a member of that culture. Forget regional music or national costume, these are the sorts of things that really make up the experience, and they are the things most noticed by travelers, because they are completely ordinary to that culture but radical alterations to reality for the traveler. Some years ago I ran across an attempt to document some of these small but important details and assumptions for Americans, in a response to someone’s earnest assertion that America has no culture; it can be found here. It spawned a great many similar lists by residents of other countries or unique regions, and reading through all of them that still lead to a live link was a very eye-opening experience for me. Some of the things I knew because I love to read travel narratives, but most of them were news to me because they simply were outside some bit of cultural certainty I had never questioned or been aware of. People who speak with scorn of the ignorance and lack of world knowledge of Americans are talking about this kind of knowledge, although they usually go on within a sentence or two to reveal that they are similarly afflicted. On an online forum I inhabited long ago, shortly after 9/11 I had an extensive argument with another forum member- a very bright, driven woman, whom prior to 9/11 I had quite admired- who insisted that all the causes of the event were political ones. I pointed out that the architects of 9/11 had made an explicit radical religious case for their actions, which would not be altered an iota if America altered its foreign policy. She insisted this was merely talk to appease the ignorant upon whom they depended. No matter how many quotes, translations, and speeches I gathered, she could not be swayed: the causes were political. She worked with the UN and was not religious herself, and it was simply outside all possible frame of reference for her that someone could put religion above politics to such an extent that it became a greater basis for their attitudes and opinions, let alone that they could put almost all stock in religion and none in politics. (She had a similar complete failure of understanding of deeply religious members of her own culture, whom she regarded as deliberately deceptive about their true political motives.)

The most dangerous form of unknown “known”, is the kind that people think they know but is actually an assumption that has merely always worked so far. Because they do not even know the assumption is there- it’s part of their mental foundation of reality itself- people are therefore unable to question it at all, and these can lead to catastrophic conclusions. At their most harmless, they merely hinder progress; many great scientific advances have been made when this sort of assumption was revealed for what it was, and someone was alert enough to notice it and begin to question. Similarly, many tremendous military victories or defeats occurred because someone either questioned an assumption that was thought to be part of the simple reality of combat, or someone ran into a culture or new tactical reality in which their assumption was totally invalid. These are the kind of unknown knowns that get people or cultures killed.

Widespread- and varied- study is the only thing that can give anybody even a fighting chance at uncovering some of their own unknown knowns. Even then, it’s usually as difficult and painful as trying to kiss your own elbow; how can you recognize a faulty strut in your understanding of reality when you’re currently using it to understand reality?

Over on Teacher’s Pet, Sarah has a recent post up about the hazards of sorting all canine behavior into labeled syndromes, and then acting on the hasty generalization as though reading from some sort of dog DSM-IV. She puts some of the blame on the current rage for pharmaceutical solutions for everything and the labeling of everything as a pathological problem to which there is a pharmacological solution. Up to a point, I agree with her, though I’d go even farther and blame a more general cultural trend of turning everything inconvenient or complicated into either a physiological or psychological syndrome of some kind. (Are you a woman who loves too much with ADHD and restless leg syndrome? Me too!) However, I wouldn’t call that the root of the problem- more of a proximate cause.

In evolution, a proximate cause (or proximate mechanism) is the immediate explanation for a feature or response, and the ultimate cause is the reason the feature came into being in the first place. If you get a fever, the proximate cause is that you have been infected by a hostile organism, but the ultimate cause is that a raise in body temperature of a few degrees will cause more problems for most invading organisms than it will for the host, so having that as a standard response to infection is ultimately favorable even if the fever does sometimes do severe damage to the host. There’s a pretty good explanation of proximate vs. ultimate causes in the context of altruistic behavior here if you’re curious.

Labeling is a sometimes-destructive behavior- a tempting and easily-subverted one by those who seek to manipulate- that arose and persists because it’s more often useful for an individual than not. Normally, when we hear about “labeling” in any context other than conducting store inventory, it’s used to describe the destructive side- substituting a facile series of categorizations and conclusions for any sort of real, useful analysis. It’s a very common flaw of reasoning, one that can very often be found at the root of a lot of bad arguments that may otherwise be beautifully reasoned and supported: a flawed premise that arose and was maintained through a judgment originally arrived at by hasty labeling.

Logic and reason, and especially deductive reasoning, are great. No one is a bigger fan of them than me, and most of the greatest of humanity’s achievements came more or less directly from their use and application. The only problem with them, inasmuch as there are any problems, is that they take tremendous amounts of time, energy, and access to information: you cannot make a sound logical argument or reach a sound conclusion without a great deal of data and a high degree of certainty in your information and its completeness and reliability.

Most of life, indeed the conditions under which the human intellect evolved, is conducted at high speed and with a relative scarcity of reliable information. Whether you’re a hunter-gatherer looking for game while avoiding predators, or a stockbroker trying to survive and thrive at NYSE speeds, you do not have time to base your decisions on carefully analyzed and contemplated reasoning- if you do, you will not survive, because the decision had to be made long before you finished your analysis. You must base your decision on rapid processing of the information you DO have, filtered not through sober reasoning but through a dense series of heuristic filters built from instinct and experience. In effect, the ability to come to a rapid and probably-correct decision is based entirely on the human ability to label and categorize… and to attach instant judgments and recommended courses of action to the label. A really experienced stockbroker can make consistently sound judgments (that appear to an onlooker to be a sort of genius) because he has formed a huge array of heuristics (intuitions) based on those experiences that allow him to rapidly analyze situations based on previous experiences and observations of what is likely to happen under what conditions and how to make decisions in his favor under those conditions. He probably also has the education to apply a healthy dose of theory to those decisions- the sort of abstract knowledge that allows a person to attach a valid meaning to a not-previously-experienced event that would otherwise be meaningless- but most of his skill is based on good heuristics: advanced, applied labeling.

A great deal of the self-help market is essentially run by taking that sort of skill set, whether it’s psychological, nutritional, or financial, and distilling it down into a much cruder and broader set of labels and recommended actions. Much like attempting to distill a broad and complex theory like evolution down to a level comprehendable by a freshman science student entails a lot of necessary “lies-to-children” (which creationists then pounce on as though they were goring the very underbelly of modern biology), the end result is a vast oversimplification which can be very helpful to someone who had very little or none of the relevant heuristics, especially in preventing them from making easily avoidable catastrophic decisions, but also very hazardous to anyone who tries to push them beyond their limits as tools. It leads to exactly the kinds of errors that Sarah was talking about: shoving complex things into narrow categories and proceeding to apply narrow “solutions” to a problem that might not even exist.

This error is alive in the proverb “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

The even bigger problem with the increasing cascade of errors that applying faulty or too-simple heuristics to a complex problem causes is that if you’re inexperienced, incompetent, and uninformed, the more you are, the more likely it is that you will have no idea that’s what your problem is. In order to recognize your own level of skill and experience- and correctly evaluate it in others- you have to have a certain minimum level of competence. Otherwise, you’re missing so many necessary heuristics that you might as well be whacking your problem with a bone and making angry ooking noises. Worse than that, you’re unable to identify who might be able to help you.

Experts from any field, be it medical, financial, legal, or animal behavior, will be quite familiar with these people: they’re the ones that think they know better than the expert to the point where they’ll decide to treat their cancer with coffee and carrot juice, get rich with Amway, represent themselves, or train Fido with a stick and a chain. In one sense, they can’t really help it- they literally wouldn’t know expertise if it came up and smacked them over the head- but on the other, “at some point, you should trust the person with decades of schooling and experience to be much better at making decisions on this subject than you” should really have been a heuristic they absorbed at some point.

Labeling is not bad. It’s the first step to intelligent behavior, the necessary cognitive system for most of life, and with enough experience and incorporation of abstract theory, it’s the foundation of the apparent genius of the true expert practicing his craft. But relying on it completely, never questioning it, and never expanding on it is just… stupid.