Month: October 2020

How to be a good writer

PNRJ personal , , , , , ,

Oct 25 JDN 2459148

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
~ Thomas Mann

“You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”

~ Red Smith

Why is it so difficult to write well? Why is it that those of us who write the most often find it the most agonizing?

My guess is that many other art forms are similar, but writing is what I know best.

I have come to realize that there are four major factors which determine the quality of someone’s writing, and the pain and challenge of writing comes from the fact that they are not very compatible with one another.

The first is talent. To a certain degree, one can be born a better or worse writer, or become so through forces not of one’s own making. This one costs nothing to get if you already have it, but if you don’t have it, you can’t really acquire it. If you do lack talent, that doesn’t mean you can’t write; but it does limit how successful you are likely to be at writing. (Then again, some very poorly-written books have made some very large sums of money!) It’s also very difficult to know whether you really have talent; people tell me I do, so I suppose I believe them.

The second is practice. You must write and keep on writing. You must write many things in many contexts, and continue to write despite various pressures and obstacles trying to stop you from writing. Reading is also part of this process, as we learn new ways to use words by seeing how others have used them. In fact, you should read more words than you write.

The third is devotion. If you are to truly write well, you must pour your heart and soul into what you write. I can tell fairly quickly whether someone is serious about writing or not by seeing how they react to the metaphor I like to use: “I carve off shards of my soul and assemble them into robots that I release into the world; and when the robots fail, I wonder whether I have assembled them incorrectly, or if there is something fundamentally wrong with my soul itself.” Most people react with confusion. Serious writers nod along in agreement.

The fourth is criticism. You must seek out criticism from a variety of sources, you must accept that criticism, and you must apply it in improving your work in the future. You must avoid becoming defensive, but you must also recognize that disagreement will always exist. You will never satisfy everyone with what you write. The challenge is to satisfy as much of your target audience as possible.

And therein lies the paradox: For when you have devoted your heart and soul into a work, receiving criticism on it can make you want to shut down, wanting to avoid that pain. And thus, you stop practicing, and you stop improving.

What can be done about this?

I am told that it helps to “get a thick skin”, but seeing as I’ve spent the better part of my life trying to do that and failed completely, this may not be the most useful advice. Indeed, even if it can be done it may not be worth it: The most thick-skinned people I know of are generally quite incompetent at whatever they do, because they ignore criticism. There are two ways to be a narcissist: One is to be so sensitive to criticism that you refuse to hear it; the other is to be so immune to criticism that it has no effect on you. (The former is “covert narcissism”, the latter is “overt narcissism”.)

One thing that does seem to help is learning to develop some measure of detachment frrom your work, so that you can take criticism of your work as applying to that work and not to yourself. Usually the robots really are just misassembled, and there’s nothing wrong with your soul.

But this can be dangerous as well: If you detach yourself too much from your work, you lose your devotion to it, and it becomes mechanically polished but emotionally hollow. If you optimize over and over to what other people want, it eventually stops being the work that had meaning for you.

Perhaps what ultimately separates good writers from everyone else is not what they can do, but what they feel they must do: Serious writers feel a kind of compulsion to write, an addiction to transferring thoughts into words. Often they don’t even particularly enjoy it; they don’t “want” to write in the ordinary sense of the word. They simply must write, feeling as though they die or go mad if they ever were forced to stop. It is this compulsion that gets them to persevere in the face of failure and rejection—and the self-doubt that rejection drives.

And if you don’t feel that compulsion? Honestly, maybe you’re better off than those of us who do.

The straw that broke the camel’s back

PNRJ mathematical models , , , , , , ,

Oct 18 JDN 2459141

You’ve probably heard the saying before: “It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Something has been building up for a long time, with no apparent effect; then suddenly it crosses some kind of threshold and the effect becomes enormous.

Some real-world systems do behave like this: Avalanches, for instance. There is a very sharp critical threshold at which snow suddenly becomes unstable and triggers an avalanche.

This is how weight works in many video games, and it seems ridiculous: In Skyrim, for instance, one 1-pound cheese wheel can mean the difference between being able to function normally and being unable to move. Fear not, however: You can simply eat that cheese wheel and then be on your way.

But most real-world systems aren’t like this. In particular, camels are not. Yes, zero pieces of straw will not break a camel’s back, and some quantity of straw will. No, there is not a well-defined threshold at which adding just one piece of straw will kill the camel. This is one of those times where formal mathematical modeling can help us to see things that we otherwise couldn’t.

If this seems too frivolous, consider that this model need not be about camels: It could be about the weight a bridge can hold, or the amount of pollution a region can sustain, or the amount of psychological stress a person can bear. I think applying it to psychological stress is particularly appropriate at the moment: COVID-19 has suddenly thrust us all above our usual level of stress, and it’s important to understand where our limits lie.

A really strict formal model useful for engineering purposes would be a stress-strain curve, showing the relationship between stress (the amount of force applied) and strain (the amount of deformation of the object). But for this purpose there are basically two regimes to consider:

Below some weight y (the yield strength)the camel’s back will compress under the weight, but once the weight is removed it will return to normal. A healthy camel can carry up to y in straw essentially indefinitely.

Above that point, additional weight will begin to strain the camel’s back. But this damage will not all occur at once; a larger amount of weight for a shorter time will have the same effect as a smaller amount of weight for a longer time.

The total strain on the camel will thus look something like this, for exposure time t: (w-y)t

There is a total amount of strain that the camel can take without breaking its back. This has units of momentum, so I’m going to use p.

What is the amount of straw that breaks the camel’s back? Well, that depends on how long it is there!

w = p/t + y

This implies that even an arbitrarily large weight is survivable, if experienced for a sufficiently small amount of time. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s actually quite realistic: I’m not aware of any tests on camels, but human beings have been able to survive impacts of 40 g for a few milliseconds.

If you are hoping to carry a certain load of straw by camel over a certain distance, and need to know how many camels to use (or how many trips to take), you would figure out how long it takes to cover that distance, then use that as your time parameter to figure out the maximum weight a camel could carry for that long.

So what would happen if you actually added one piece of straw at a time to a camel’s back? That depends on how fast you add them and how long you leave them there!

What if we cared for everyone equally?

PNRJ core principles, ethics, inequality, tribal paradigm , , , ,

Oct 11 JDN 2459134

Imagine for a moment a hypothetical being who was a perfect utilitarian, who truly felt at the deepest level an equal caring for all human beings—or even all life.

We often imagine that such a being would be perfectly moral, and sometimes chide ourselves for failing so utterly to live up to its ideal. Today I’d like to take a serious look at how such a being would behave, and ask whether it is really such a compelling ideal after all.

I cannot feel sadness at your grandmother’s death, for over 150,000 people die every day. By far the highest QALY lost are the deaths of children in the poorest countries, and I feel sad for them as an aggregate, but couldn’t feel particularly saddened by any individual one.

I cannot feel happiness at your wedding or the birth of your child, for 50,000 couples marry every day, and another 30,000 divorce. 350,000 children are born every day, so why should I care about yours?

My happiness does not change from hour to hour or day to day, except as a slow, steady increase over time that is occasionally interrupted briefly by sudden disasters like hurricanes or tsunamis. 2020 was the saddest year I’ve had in awhile, as for once there was strongly correlated suffering across the globe sufficient to break through the trend of steadily increasing prosperity.

Should we go out with friends for drinks or dinner or games, I’ll be ever-so-slightly happier, some barely perceptible degree, provided that there is no coincidental event which causes more than the baseline rate of global suffering that day. And I’d be just as happy to learn that someone else I’d never met went out to dinner with someone else I’d also never met.

Of course I love you, my dear: Precisely as much as I love the other eight billion people on Earth.

I hope now that you can see how flat, how bleak, how inhuman such a being’s experience would be. We might sometimes wish some respite from the roller coaster ride of our own emotional experiences, but in its place this creature feels almost nothing at all, just a vague sense of gradually increasing contentment which is occasionally interrupted by fleeting deviations from the trend.

Such a being is incapable of feeling love as we would recognize it—for a mind such as ours could not possibly feel so intensely for a billion people at once. To love all the people of the world equally, and still have anything resembling a human mind, is to love no one at all.

Perhaps we should not feel so bad that we are not such creatures, then?

Of course I do not mean to say that we should care nothing for distant strangers in foreign lands, or even that the tiny amount most people seem to care is adequate. We should care—and we should care more, and do more, than most people do.

But I do mean to say that it is possible to care too much about other people far away, an idea that probably seems obvious to some but radical to others. The human capacity for caring is not simply zero-sum—there are those who care more overall and less overall—but I do believe that it is limited: At some point you begin to sacrifice so much for those you have no attachments to that you begin to devalue your own attachments.

There is an interior optimum: We should care enough, but not too much. We should sacrifice some things, but not everything. Those closest to us should matter more than those further away—but both should matter. Where exactly to draw that line is a very difficult question, which has stumped far greater philosophers than I; but at least we can narrow the space and exclude the endpoints.

This may even make a certain space for morally justifying selfishness. Surely it does not justify total, utter selfishness with no regard for the suffering of others. But it defends self-care at the very least, and perhaps can sweep away some of the feelings of guilt we may have from being fortunate or prevailing in fair competition. Yes, much of what you have was gained by sheer luck, and even much of what you have earned, you earned by out-competing someone else nearly as deserving. But this is true of everyone, and as long as you played fair, you’ve not done wrong by doing better. There’s even good reason to think that a system which allocates its privileges by fair competition is a particularly efficient one, one which ultimately raises the prosperity of all.

If nothing else, reflecting on this has made me feel better about giving 8% of my gross income to charity instead of 20% or 50% or even 80%. And if even 8% is too much for you, try 2% or even 1%.

How do we fix the Supreme Court?

PNRJ current events, public policy , , , , , , ,

Oct 4 JDN 2459127

By now I’m sure you have already heard the news of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death. My social media feeds have been full of people either lionizing her for her accomplishments on behalf of women’s rights or demonizing her for her record on Indigenous rights.

If you are a woman, a person of color, or LGBT, her death likely struck fear into your heart. If right-wing justices gain a majority, your—our—civil rights are once again up for grabs. Obergefell v. Hodges, Grutter v. Bollinger, even Lawrence v. Texas and Roe v. Wade may not be safe. Even if you’re a straight White male, you should be probably be concerned about the possibility of overturning Massachusetts v. EPA or Riley v. California. And while Trump’s shortlist of potential appointees includes quite a few women, nearly everyone on it is dangerously right-wing.

This is not how the system should work. The death of a single person should not result in the loss of rights for hundreds of millions of other people. Democracy and rule of law are supposed to protect us from this kind of capricious government.

What can we do to fix this system? We obviously do need some kind of judicial branch, but it may not need to be a Supreme Court as we know it.

First, we should fight tooth and nail to block whoever Trump nominates, just as Republicans blocked Merrick Garland. Once again I find myself agreeing with Jacobin.

The next step is clearly to pack the court: Congress can pass a law increasing the number of Supreme Court seats, and then the President can appoint new justices to those seats. Add 8 seats to the existing 9 and you regain a strong liberal majority.

After that, pass a Constitutional amendment to prevent future court-packing. Otherwise we just get a cycle of retaliation in which the Supreme Court doubles in size with every new administration. This amendment should also include term limits for justices, so that new justices are appointed on a regular schedule instead of whenever one happens to retire or die.

Let me emphasize that this plan is 100% legal and Constitutional. It feels unfair and underhanded, and it is certainly playing hardball; but there is nothing illegal about it. This is exactly how we need to respond to fascism: Follow all the rules of democracy to the letter, but otherwise it’s scorched earth. No doubt Republicans would complain that we are violating standards and norms—but they’ve done far worse.

In order to achieve this, we need to win elections across the board. The Presidency is not nearly enough; we need to take control of both houses of Congress (to pack the court) and most of the state legislatures as well (to pass a Constitutional amendment).

But this may not be enough. We should ask whether the Supreme Court as an institution is worth keeping around, or if we could replace it with something better.

We clearly do need some sort of judiciary, and probably some kind of top-level court to act as the court of last resort. In that sense, I guess we need a Supreme Court.

But there’s no particular reason justices need to be appointed by the President. The UK recently established a Supreme Court whose justices are appointed by an independent commission. The Court of Cassation in France is huge, with over 85 trial judges and 40 deputy judges; judges each have a relatively narrowly-defined jurisdiction of the types of cases they handle. The High Court of Australia is modeled on the US Supreme Court and is appointed by the Prime Minister; and yet it has a mandatory retirement age of 70.

I’m not aware of any country that directly elects its supreme court justices, but that would be feasible as well. Whether it would be wise is a different matter: There’s evidence that direct election of judges is a major contributing factor to our mass incarceration, because judges want to look “tough on crime” in their election campaigns. And most people simply aren’t well-informed enough to elect judges. But it’s worth considering whether direct election—requiring re-election every few years—would be better than a system where a single appointment puts someone in power for generations.

In any case, it is clear that the Supreme Court is broken. Our rights should not be this fragile.