What young women believe about their own sexuality

This is a companion piece to my rant of a few months ago against purity culture.

Only this time you don't have to listen to me. This time it's a TED talk by somebody who's done interviews and listened to the answers -- so maybe she knows what she's talking about? Just a thought.

Listen and weep ... or, better, listen and then try to make it better.

Dream this morning

I dreamt I was showering somewhere ... it wasn't a gym, but it was somewhere with several showers in the same place, like a gym or a barracks or so ... and I noticed that a couple of the people walking in to shower (naked, of course) were women. And what was interesting about the dream was how unremarkable it was. Nobody especially commented — I think in the dream I knew one of them and said "Hi" — and there was no sense either of embarrassment or of sexualization. That is, it did not signal to me inside the dream as particularly arousing, nor did anyone (men or women) make a point of turning away or hiding. It was just an unremarkable part of a larger story, and I was thinking about whatever it was in the story I was going to do next after washing ... only it so happened that that was when I woke up, so that's the bit I remembered. (And of course when I woke up I realized how unlikely an event it was and therefore remembered it longer.) But it was nice in a way not having the scene freighted with all the weight it would have in real life. Interesting.


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What's an IYI?

I've talked before about how I am ill-at-ease with academic life, even though historically I was very, very good at it. (See here, for example.) There are multiple reasons, of course. One of them I wrote to Marie some time ago, but I seem never to have published here so I should go find it. (It compares academicism with monasticism as ways of life.)

But another part of it is that it always seems there's a risk of academics talking on and on about things they don't know. It's such an easy mode to slip into, it's not always clear that ignorance can stop you. And in my experience, it doesn't always.

This point has been made in multiple ways, over the years, by a wide range of people. Owen Ulph was always very good on the topic. (See my profile, or this obituary.)

But I recently ran across the writings of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and it is a running theme of his as well. So when I found the following passage available online -- with a statement giving blanket permission to reprint it under certain circumstances [scroll all the way to the bottom for a complete list] -- I could hardly resist.

This is an excerpt from Taleb's book, Skin in the Game.  

The Intellectual Yet Idiot

(Chapter in Skin in the game )

 

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

 

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

 

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They can’t tell science from scientism — in fact in their image-oriented minds scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types — those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior — much of what they would classify as “rational” or “irrational” (or some such categories indicating deviation from a desired or prescribed protocol) comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are also prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter extending the minority rule.

 

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The Intellectual Yet Idiot is a production of modernity hence has been accelerating since the mid twentieth century, to reach its local supremum today, along with the broad category of people without skin-in-the-game who have been invading many walks of life. Why? Simply, in most countries, the government’s role is between five and ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of GDP). The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and is rarely seen outside specialized outlets, think tanks, the media, and universities — most people have proper jobs and there are not many openings for the IYI.

 

Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry.

 

The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “red necks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When plebeians do something that makes sense to them, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated”. What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when the plebeians dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences. While rich people believe in one tax dollar one vote, more humanistic ones in one man one vote, Monsanto in one lobbyist one vote, the IYI believes in one Ivy League degree one-vote, with some equivalence for foreign elite schools and PhDs as these are needed in the club.

 

More socially, the IYI subscribes to The New Yorker. He never curses on twitter. He speaks of “equality of races” and “economic equality” but never went out drinking with a minority cab driver (again, no real skin in the game as the concept is foreign to the IYI). Those in the U.K. have been taken for a ride by Tony Blair. The modern IYI has attended more than one TEDx talks in person or watched more than two TED talks on Youtube. Not only did he vote for Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison because she seems electable and some such circular reasoning, but holds that anyone who doesn’t do so is mentally ill.

 

The IYI has a copy of the first hardback edition of The Black Swan on his shelves, but mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence. He believes that GMOs are “science”, that the “technology” is not different from conventional breeding as a result of his readiness to confuse science with scientism.

 

Typically, the IYI get the first order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects making him totally incompetent in complex domains. In the comfort of his suburban home with 2-car garage, he advocated the “removal” of Gadhafi because he was “a dictator”, not realizing that removals have consequences (recall that he has no skin in the game and doesn’t pay for results).

 

The IYI has been wrong, historically, on Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, transfats, freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, selfish gene, election forecasting models, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup) and p-values. But he is convinced that his current position is right.

 

The IYI is member of a club to get traveling privileges; if social scientist he uses statistics without knowing how they are derived (like Steven Pinker and psycholophasters in general); when in the UK, he goes to literary festivals; he drinks red wine with steak (never white); he used to believe that fat was harmful and has now completely reversed; he takes statins because his doctor told him to do so; he fails to understand ergodicity and when explained to him, he forgets about it soon later; he doesn’t use Yiddish words even when talking business; he studies grammar before speaking a language; he has a cousin who worked with someone who knows the Queen; he has never read Frederic Dard, Libanius Antiochus, Michael Oakeshot, John Gray, Amianus Marcellinus, Ibn Battuta, Saadiah Gaon, or Joseph De Maistre; he has never gotten drunk with Russians; he never drank to the point when one starts breaking glasses (or, preferably, chairs); he doesn’t even know the difference between Hecate and Hecuba (which in Brooklynese is “can’t tell sh**t from shinola”); he doesn’t know that there is no difference between “pseudointellectual” and “intellectual” in the absence of skin in the game; has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past five years in conversations that had nothing to do with physics.

 

He knows at any point in time what his words or actions are doing to his reputation.

 

But a much easier marker: he doesn’t even deadlift.

 

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The Blind and the Very Blind

Let’s suspend the satirical for a minute.

 

IYIs fail to distinguish between the letter and the spirit of things. They are so blinded by verbalistic notions such as science, education, democracy, racism, equality, evidence, rationality and similar buzzwords that they can be easily taken for a ride. They can thus cause monstrous iatrogenics without even feeling a shade of a guilt, because they are convinced that they mean well and that they can be thus justified to ignore the deep effect on reality. You would laugh at the doctor who nearly kills his patient yet argues about the effectiveness of his efforts because he lowered the latter’s cholesterol, missing that a metric that correlates to health is not quite health –it took a long time for medicine to convince its practitioners that health was what they needed to work on, not the exercise of what they thought was “science”, hence doing nothing was quite often preferable (via negativa). But yet, in a different domain, say foreign policy, a neo-con who doesn’t realize he has this mental defect would never feel any guilt for blowing up a country such as Libya, Iraq, or Syria, for the sake of “democracy”. I’ve tried to explain via negativa to a neocon: it was like trying to describe colors to someone born blind.

 

IYIs can be feel satisfied giving their money to a group aimed at “saving the children” who will spend most of it making powerpoint presentation and organizing conferences on how to save the children and completely miss the inconsistency.

 

Likewise an IYI routinely fails to make a distinction between an institution (say formal university setting and credentialization) and what its true aim is (knowledge, rigor in reasoning) –I’ve even seen a French academic arguing against a mathematician who had great (and useful) contributions because the former “didn’t go to a good school” when he was eighteen or so.

 

The propensity to this mental disability may be shared by all humans, and it has to be an ingrained defect, except that it disappears under skin in the game.

 

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Postscript

From the reactions to this piece, I discovered that the IYI has difficulty, when reading, in differentiating between the satirical and the literal.

PostPostcript

The IYI thinks this criticism of IYIs means “everybody is an idiot”, not realizing that their group represents, as we said, a tiny minority — but they don’t like their sense of entitlement to be challenged and although they treat the rest of humans as inferiors, they don’t like it when the waterhose is turned to the opposite direction (what the French call arroseur arrosé). (For instance, Richard Thaler, partner of the dangerous GMO advocate Übernudger Cass Sunstein, interpreted this piece as saying that “there are not many non-idiots not called Taleb”, not realizing that people like him are < 1% or even .1% of the population.)

Post-Post Postscript

(Written after the surprise election of 2016; the chapter above was written several months prior to the event). The election of Trump was so absurd to them and didn’t fit their worldview by such a large margin that they failed to find instructions in their textbook on how to react. It was exactly as on Candid Camera, imagine the characteristic look on someone’s face after they pull a trick on him, and the person is at a loss about how to react.

 

Or, more interestingly, imagine the looks and reaction of someone who thought he was happily married making an unscheduled return home and hears his wife squealing in bed with a (huge) doorman.

 

Pretty much everything forecasters, subforecasters, superforecasters, political “scientists”, psychologists, intellectuals, campaigners, “consultants”, big data scientists, everything they know was instantly shown to be a hoax. So my mischievous dream of putting a rat inside someone’s shirt (as expressed in The Black Swan) suddenly came true.

 

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Note: this piece can be reproduced, translated, and published by anyone under the condition that it is in its entirety and mentions that it is extracted from Skin in the Game.

Grand opera

Today is May 19, 2019, and I just realized I never posted this here. I'm back-dating it to the date I got a few suggested improvements from Marie, which I have incorporated.

The context was ... well it grew out of another one of those long, tangled phone calls with Marie where she was lamenting that in one respect or other we don't have a perfect, fairy-tale romance. And once again I sat with her on the phone and then tried to suggest that no, we don't, and that's a good thing. Later on I worked it into a sonnet as below.

For reference, it's not that she does this a lot. She's not (well ... no longer) as high-strung that way as Wife or D used to be. But it still worries at her from time to time.

Anyway, here's how I tried to express it.






For you and me there’s no grand opera staged,
No fairy tales are told, no epics sung —
Because we’re both securely middle aged,
And songs like that are all about the young.

So I am I, and not a handsome prince;
And you are not a blushing ingenue.
The weakness of those girls, though, makes you wince,
And princes get no scriptless things to do.

So let us write a story on our own:
A tale of second acts, in medias res,
Of tumults weathered, other loves long gone,
Of patient smiles and wrinkles in the face.

Our messy lives don’t shine with fairy dew,
And yet our love is every bit as true.


   

planning

I just now wrote and sent this email to Marie.

My love, my sweet,

This morning when I wrote you about swimming I ended with "More on this theme later." In your most recent reply this evening you talked about me putting structures into my life. (Not nearly enough of them, I add ruefully!) Yes, well I've been thinking.

This week I was supposed to be deciding about [a professional continuing education class]. (At this point I think I'll do it, provided I still can. The deadline is Saturday but there's nowhere to register online, which means filling out a piece of paper, attaching a check, and mailing it. I emailed the coordinator this evening asking if she thinks a letter mailed from here on Friday will get to her there by Saturday. Of course it's only a 15-minute drive....) Anyway, then out of the blue somebody on the NextDoor social media site advertised this furniture. Picking up the sofa sounds like an obvious thing to do, but then I started looking at it more deeply.

The thing is, some time ago (I forget how long -- a year? two years? more?) I started visiting a local furniture store. They work with a company that makes custom furniture, so I got their information on making sleeper sofas. I looked at different styles and sizes, then came home and made a scale model of my living room (the one I texted you) and played with all kinds of variations. And in the end I never got the project finished. I never actually ordered the damned sofa. There were too many decisions and steps along the way, and I ran out of steam. Then this January I thought, "Well I have a good reason not to work on it now because maybe I'm going to move this year." Only that doesn't look very likely either.

Anyway, what this means is that buying a sofa from Donna across town is the same thing as admitting defeat in the larger project. And it's a well-earned defeat, to be sure! If after five years I still don't have a sofa in this place, that approach plainly wasn't working.

What this shows more generally -- one instance isn't enough to prove anything, but it illustrates it beautifully and I already know it's true -- is that I'm very weak at long-term planning and decision-making. I can make impulsive decisions. I can decide to go visit your family for the Fourth of July and book tickets the afternoon you formally invite me. I can make plans to take Son 2 to Peru when my cousin tells me I've got six months before she leaves the country. But something long-term, like researching, planning, and buying a custom sleeper sofa? Not so good.

I am not proud of this, but it's a fact.

Of course, at an intellectual level I know how to solve the problem ... or how I OUGHT to be able to solve the problem. It's the very same thing I was telling you about swimming: start by breaking the problem into the smallest pieces I can possibly imagine, and then just do The Very Next One with no thought to the larger task. If I think about the larger task, I'll quit; but if I just do one tiny piece at a time, then in principle I should make headway against any project which is finite in scope. (Clearly a Cantorian argument will show that I'm not going to make a lot of headway against infinite projects.)

The problem is keeping at it. The problem is accountability. What makes you go swimming when you'd rather sleep in? What makes you order a sofa when you'd rather go to the movies?

Well, I know that too. We all do. Having somebody check up on you, or somebody to answer to. This is why the world needs auditors.

I wish I were better at this kind of long-term task, and I suspect I've known what it takes to address it for a long time. The question is, who do I report to? This isn't the kind of role I want to ask a work colleague to take on for me, because it means exposing an awful lot of my own weaknesses and I'm not sure that's something I want to do to someone I know from work. The obvious answer would be someone close enough that I don't have to worry about maintaining a face in front of them, someone who already knows my weaknesses too well for that, someone more or less like a spouse -- but by the time I started to see and understand this stuff (and I truly don't remember when that was) there was no way I could have trusted Wife far enough. I never got far enough with D or Debbie to try it either. (It might have been possible with Debbie if we hadn't dropped out of touch, because she alluded to having had to do similar things at her end in the past to train herself how to make long-term plans. But in any event it didn't happen.)

You can probably see where this is going.

I'm not going to ask you to hold my hand while I buy furniture, though, because as noted I have already given up that battle. Time to pick something else that I've let dangle for too long.

One obvious thought would be [a writing project we've talked about recently], which certainly sounds fun and engaging. But I was actually thinking of something that is ... more tangible and in some senses easier, though not easy by a long shot. You remember when we were getting my living room ready to have my new neighbors over for dinner, that there were all these stacks of paper lying around that had to be moved? And if you open my filing cabinet it's almost impossible to squeeze anything else in because there's already too much. And in my storage unit there are boxes of old papers -- God knows what, really -- that I probably don't need, or most of them at any rate. One of the tasks I set myself on moving in was to set up a system for handling all this paper so I don't drown in it, and so I keep only what I want or need.

That was five years ago.

Would you be willing to hold me accountable to this? That doesn't mean putting off [the writing project] till it's over. Once I get my feet under me, maybe I can block out time in my week for writing as well. But what it would mean is this. Step one, due by the end of this weekend, is to write a plan for how to get it done. This means breaking it into tiny steps, absurdly small, the smallest I can imagine. Then it means committing to do at least ONE step every weekend. Remember, these steps are to be really tiny, so there should be no excuse for not getting at least one done each weekend. But if I do two steps one weekend, that does NOT allow me to do zero the next. At least one.

Progress this way will be very slow, of course. But consider: maybe I break the task down into 100 steps. At one step every weekend, that's two years ... but I've already spent five without doing anything. Getting it done in two years would be a huge improvement.

Note also that by planning to act only on the weekends, it means that in principle I can do other things during the week. Go to Sangha. Do my homework for the professional development class. Go to movies. Or maybe, ... you know, ... start writing. At least I don't rule it out. There is room into which it could be structured.

But without structure, it'll be like buying furniture, or any of the other things I want to get to Some Day.

It's a really unflattering picture, but then you already know plenty of my faults. What's a few more, at this point? So maybe the "warts and all" side of it won't exactly be a shock .... (faint smile)

Thoughts?

 

 

Know that I love you ever,
Your dilatory and unstructured (but ever-hopeful!) Hosea

 

 

Reunion

After years of ignoring the mailers, I decided today to go to my 40th high school reunion, at Hogwarts, this October. If nothing else it will also be a chance to see my mom again before Thanksgiving, since she still lives right nearby.

It's interesting that I decided to return the card, and I'm not sure why I did. The last one I went to was my 25th, 15 years ago, when I was still unemployed. It was OK, I guess, but I don't remember it being particularly fun. They had a Dino-Camp for kids (dinosaur themed stuff to do) so I took the boys, who had an absolute blast. Let's see ... back then, Son 1 would have just turned 7 and Son 2 was 5.

The last one I went to before THAT was my 5th.

Of course I've been on campus since then, as a Parent, because Son 1 attended there too. But it's strange. On the one hand I kind of figure it's time to do this again, if only for the sake of building or renewing contacts. On the other hand I'm really not looking forward to it. Why not? Or, if not, why go? I don't have clear answers to either.

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A Doll’s House

Tonight I saw Ibsen's "A Doll's House" for the first time ever. (I know, I know, how is this possible with such a famous play? But there it is.) The production strove for a very modern look. Some of Torvald's speeches sounded a little dated, but Nora's speech as she left could have been written yesterday. (I wonder if they updated any of the lines, but I'm willing to believe not.)

What really struck me though is that if Wife had written a play about our marriage, that could have been it. Obviously that's not my view of the marriage, but you've heard my view. And certainly the details were different. But did she think I micromanaged her spending? She did. Would it have been easy for her to get involved in a shady financial transaction without realizing it was criminal, all from the highest motives? I think so. Did I fly off the handle when I discovered some new crazy or dangerous thing she had done? All too often. Would I have lectured her about the immorality of it? Not for sexual improprieties, but surely for financial ones. Would I have been bereft if she walked out? In the first few years it is likely, and she preserved that belief long after it was no longer true. 

The only one of Torvald's deplorable behaviors that I am reasonably sure I would not have repeated was his hollering, "Don't you realize how your bad behavior is going to damage my reputation?" I'm pretty confident I would have said "our" or "your". Also if I had had time after my tantrum before the reprieve, I would have become more reasonable and started to discuss What are We going to do to move forward? But I would have had the tantrum first; and in the play Torvald has no time to get over his tantrum before the reprieve, so he goes straight to a really condescending forgiveness. Would I have done the same with no intervening time? Maybe. 

It's an unflattering thought. Maybe I should keep thinking it.

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