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Nonfiction and a couple of links
Good point: If women don’t “do” visual, please to be explaining to me girls who have their bedrooms plastered with posters of Justin Beiber. Because last I checked, pictures are a visual medium.
The Euro bailout explained. Ha ha ha sob.
Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: I am powerfully drawn to Taibbi’s writing, but I can only read so much at a time before his and my rage threaten to overwhelm me. Also, warning: I can’t overemphasize just how often he uses disability-related words to signify stupidity, evil, or general unworthiness as a human being. Nonetheless, I can’t stay away from a guy in the relatively mainstream media who is this angry about our current situation, and willing to call out specific people. He suggests that Tea Partiers have legitimate grievances about overintrusive local government, and have wrongly generalized that (with substantial assistance from powerful people with every incentive to help them do so), assuming that the government is to Wall Street what it is to Main Street rather than being a handmaiden of looting. But what actually happened and is still happening is complicated, and anti-intellectualism is a brilliant strategy because the Tea Party is “arguing against the very idea that it’s even necessary to ask the kinds of questions you need to ask to grasp bubble economics.” He makes a go of it, covering mortgage securitization (and initiation fraud), health care reform sold out to big pharma and insurance companies, and other consequences of corporate gorging on the 99%.
The version I read was updated with a couple more of his Rolling Stone pieces, and I hope this observation was prescient: “The vast majority of Americans are, I think, waiting for Wall Street itself to agree that it deserves to be punished or reformed, before calling for punishment or reform. But it’s never going to happen. I feel strongly that once more people realize this, that they don’t have to ask for Wall Street’s permission to be angry about what happened to their money and their mortgages and their credit ratings in the last ten years, the politics governing our economy will be altered.” He suggests that rhetoric and expensive lawyers have distracted us from what the people at the top are doing: stealing. People ask, he say, what good it would do to punish the people who tanked the economy. “[W]hen was the last time anyone stood up at a car thief’s trial and argued that jail time wasn’t warranted because putting the defendant in jail wouldn’t end car theft? We don’t make that argument because it’s absurd; that’s not how we measure justice…. If we force the people on Wall Street to live under our laws and our criminal justice system, who knows—they may even start to see themselves as citizens of the same country.”
James W. Pennebaker, The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer copy. Basic thesis: knowing how often people use pronouns, articles, helper verbs, and other countable things can predict a lot about them. This is an easy read, and has some surprises: people who use “I” a lot are more likely to be low-status than high, whereas “we”-users are more likely to be high-status. As is usual with pop science, while Pennebaker is open about the fact that his results are bell-curved, there’s pressure to take more away than the science really supports: women talk like this and men like that, which is true only in gross, and “good” predictions of gender from analyzing written text run in the 65%-75% range, where 50% is chance. He’s clearest about this when he’s discussing lie detection: in situations where there is external validation of truth-telling or lying (people convicted of perjury v. people initially convicted whose convictions were overturned based on DNA or other evidence of innocence), analyzing what kinds of words people use and how complex their sentences are again predicts truth about 70% of the time, again better than chance but hardly a magic bullet. His results also show the importance of context: not only do people talk differently in different situations, they routinely mirror each other’s styles (at least when things are going well), and when you assign them a high status they start talking like high-status people (and vice versa). So, he suggests, our ways of talking are more diagnostic than they are anything else; he’s skeptical of deliberate attempts to change ways of talking without more direct intervention into ways of thinking, though that would be an interesting set of experiments and one I’d definitely like to read about.
David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain: Popular neuroscience, arguing that the best way to think about the brain is as a team of rivals, with conscious and unconscious processes striving to solve problems, sometimes in conflicting ways. Despite giving significant space to the general idea of environmental influence as a key determinant of what happens to the brain (what skills are learned and become automatic, whether genetic differences that are correlated with violence manifest themselves in behavior, etc.), his perspective is fundamentally individualist. So, when he talks about criminal responsibility, he argues that rather than blameworthiness—which isn’t a coherent concept given what we’re starting to understand about human brains—we should focus on incapacitation (locking up people who can’t control themselves) and rehabilitation (offering people the tools to train themselves to behave). What this glosses over is various kinds of criminogenic environments, say Wall Street, or circumstances where the problem is not, as Eastman argues, that the criminal can’t restrain his short-term desires in furtherance of long-term goals, but that the long-term rewards of so doing are too implausible. When you analogize slipping self-control to “trying to elect a party of moderates in the middle of war and economic meltdown,” it might be productive to consider that many people are in the middle of war and economic meltdown. As written, it seems like neuroscience has nothing to offer them.
The Euro bailout explained. Ha ha ha sob.
Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: I am powerfully drawn to Taibbi’s writing, but I can only read so much at a time before his and my rage threaten to overwhelm me. Also, warning: I can’t overemphasize just how often he uses disability-related words to signify stupidity, evil, or general unworthiness as a human being. Nonetheless, I can’t stay away from a guy in the relatively mainstream media who is this angry about our current situation, and willing to call out specific people. He suggests that Tea Partiers have legitimate grievances about overintrusive local government, and have wrongly generalized that (with substantial assistance from powerful people with every incentive to help them do so), assuming that the government is to Wall Street what it is to Main Street rather than being a handmaiden of looting. But what actually happened and is still happening is complicated, and anti-intellectualism is a brilliant strategy because the Tea Party is “arguing against the very idea that it’s even necessary to ask the kinds of questions you need to ask to grasp bubble economics.” He makes a go of it, covering mortgage securitization (and initiation fraud), health care reform sold out to big pharma and insurance companies, and other consequences of corporate gorging on the 99%.
The version I read was updated with a couple more of his Rolling Stone pieces, and I hope this observation was prescient: “The vast majority of Americans are, I think, waiting for Wall Street itself to agree that it deserves to be punished or reformed, before calling for punishment or reform. But it’s never going to happen. I feel strongly that once more people realize this, that they don’t have to ask for Wall Street’s permission to be angry about what happened to their money and their mortgages and their credit ratings in the last ten years, the politics governing our economy will be altered.” He suggests that rhetoric and expensive lawyers have distracted us from what the people at the top are doing: stealing. People ask, he say, what good it would do to punish the people who tanked the economy. “[W]hen was the last time anyone stood up at a car thief’s trial and argued that jail time wasn’t warranted because putting the defendant in jail wouldn’t end car theft? We don’t make that argument because it’s absurd; that’s not how we measure justice…. If we force the people on Wall Street to live under our laws and our criminal justice system, who knows—they may even start to see themselves as citizens of the same country.”
James W. Pennebaker, The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer copy. Basic thesis: knowing how often people use pronouns, articles, helper verbs, and other countable things can predict a lot about them. This is an easy read, and has some surprises: people who use “I” a lot are more likely to be low-status than high, whereas “we”-users are more likely to be high-status. As is usual with pop science, while Pennebaker is open about the fact that his results are bell-curved, there’s pressure to take more away than the science really supports: women talk like this and men like that, which is true only in gross, and “good” predictions of gender from analyzing written text run in the 65%-75% range, where 50% is chance. He’s clearest about this when he’s discussing lie detection: in situations where there is external validation of truth-telling or lying (people convicted of perjury v. people initially convicted whose convictions were overturned based on DNA or other evidence of innocence), analyzing what kinds of words people use and how complex their sentences are again predicts truth about 70% of the time, again better than chance but hardly a magic bullet. His results also show the importance of context: not only do people talk differently in different situations, they routinely mirror each other’s styles (at least when things are going well), and when you assign them a high status they start talking like high-status people (and vice versa). So, he suggests, our ways of talking are more diagnostic than they are anything else; he’s skeptical of deliberate attempts to change ways of talking without more direct intervention into ways of thinking, though that would be an interesting set of experiments and one I’d definitely like to read about.
David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain: Popular neuroscience, arguing that the best way to think about the brain is as a team of rivals, with conscious and unconscious processes striving to solve problems, sometimes in conflicting ways. Despite giving significant space to the general idea of environmental influence as a key determinant of what happens to the brain (what skills are learned and become automatic, whether genetic differences that are correlated with violence manifest themselves in behavior, etc.), his perspective is fundamentally individualist. So, when he talks about criminal responsibility, he argues that rather than blameworthiness—which isn’t a coherent concept given what we’re starting to understand about human brains—we should focus on incapacitation (locking up people who can’t control themselves) and rehabilitation (offering people the tools to train themselves to behave). What this glosses over is various kinds of criminogenic environments, say Wall Street, or circumstances where the problem is not, as Eastman argues, that the criminal can’t restrain his short-term desires in furtherance of long-term goals, but that the long-term rewards of so doing are too implausible. When you analogize slipping self-control to “trying to elect a party of moderates in the middle of war and economic meltdown,” it might be productive to consider that many people are in the middle of war and economic meltdown. As written, it seems like neuroscience has nothing to offer them.
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If women don’t “do” visual, please to be explaining to me girls who have their bedrooms plastered with posters of Justin Beiber. Because last I checked, pictures are a visual medium.
I'm not sure that example really works to support her point-- girls don't put up random pictures of hot guys that they've cut out of ads. They focus on specific hot guys, to sort of further the illusion of knowing and being close to that guy, because he's a person they already know and love. Without the narrative and the personal connection there'd be no point in the visual. (Athough the rest of her article does seem to be arguing that the narrative comes first-- when she say "We just need a few producers to see the light and create that porn series which crosses Supernatural or Harlequin with XXX porn" I think it's very notable that she says *series* -- presumably an ongoing narrative with recurring characters, not one-offs.)
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