Once upon a time no-one was f---d-up: not because they weren't, but because there was no concept of being normal. Read any philosopher from Plato to John Stuart Mill – not one of them uses the idea of being a “normal” person. They may refer to “savages” (very un-PC) or to “children” as a contrast to mature adults capable of making reasonably prudent decisions, but never to being “normal” (they did talk about “ordinary people”, but that always meant “people who don't hold the silly views I am now criticising”). You won't find the modern therapeutic idea of “normal people” or “functional people (or families)” and certainly not the idea of “dysfunctional people (or families)”. The psychotherapists gave us the idea.
Psychotherapists are not psychologists, though they may have started their training as one. Psychology has two branches: there is a science that investigates the relationship between emotional states and behaviours and brain-states and hormone levels; then there is a a branch of moral philosophy masquerading as a descriptive science, and that's where the ideas of “normal”, “dysfunctional”, “personality disorder” and other such things come from. (In case you're wondering, psychiatry is a branch of medicine, not psychology. Psychiatrists may use Freudian or other ideas to help them, but then some GP's will give alternative medicines a shot as well.) All those personality typologies – Myers-Briggs, 16PF, the “Big Five” - are just well-researched versions of the Ancient Greek “humours”. Descriptions of the various personality types or traits are riddled with evaluative language and often show rather less subtlety than a sophisticated character reading from a horoscope.
Modern psychotherapy starts with that well-known coke-head Sigmund Freud, who stated that the aim of his therapy was to replace neurotic misery with ordinary unhappiness. In this aim, a lot of people have devised a lot of techniques, theories, schools, cliques and cults. People from L Ron Hubbard to Carl Jung, via Bill Wilson and Dr Bob Smith, have devised therapeutic techniques to cure a wide range of “feeling-bad” and self-destructive behaviour. The idea of a “normal” person arises as a contrast to the parade of human upset, misery, craziness and plain bad behaviour that passes through therapists' consulting rooms every year. A “normal / functioning / healthy person” is someone who doesn't suffer from any of those complaints and also manages to meet a number of basic social norms – for instance, regular washing, holding down a job, paying bills and driving on the proper side of the road.
Now, it is not obvious that a society that only had normal people would make any progress. Normal people are not so ambitious they will sacrifice or set aside much of their lives to achieve a very specific goal – so they aren't excellent at anything (trust me on this, I work in a company full of normal people). Anyone who tells you that an Olympic gold medallist, Oscar-winning writer, or well-known-in-their-profession scientist, engineer, medical consultant or artist is “an ordinary person” is simply not thinking straight. Normal people watch junk TV and spend Saturdays playing amateur sports, recovering from hangovers or taking their children to the zoo – not doing mathematics or practising a Bach cello suite for an upcoming performance on a Sunday.
The therapeutic idea of normality is not the moral idea: a therapeutically healthy person can indulge in hard-core BDSM, extreme sports, make their money from playing online poker and relax by watching endless re-runs of The Simpsons and eating Doritos. As long as they're happy, meeting those basic social norms and not messing up anybody else's life, they count as normal. By contrast, the straightest girl on the block who works diligently for a local accounting firm, plays in an amateur hockey team, works in the soup kitchen Saturday Night and listens to Radios Three and Four, might feel as hollow as an empty oil-drum, as fake as a van Meergeren and as out of place as the proverbial bacon sandwich. Fortunately for the therapy business, almost all criminals and a majority of life's anti-social assholes do suffer from either psychiatric problems or addictions and so couldn't be happy if they tried. It's the jerks who are pleased with themselves who make you wonder if being less of a Good Person might actually have an improving effect on the quality of your life.
A therapeutically-healthy person is not a cohesive character: it's defined by absence, a “healthy person” doesn't do all that stuff. What appears to be positive advice or characteristics - “strong boundaries”, “letting go” - is in fact what you do when you don't do what screwed-up people do. Most ordinary people will have one or two “normality flaws” - things they do that a therapeutically-healthy person should not. This just means they aren't perfect, not that they need to start going to group sessions. Normal / Healthy / Functional is where we start, not where we finish. Though if you've spent twenty years in a cocaine-and-whisky haze, you may be happy just to be at the starting-point, since it's way on from where you were.
Tuesday, 7 July 2009
Sunday, 5 July 2009
Eighties Music
I can't remember how many times I've come close to buying a Level 42 compilation. Back in the day I thought Level 42 – the eponymous album and The Early Tapes – were the business. I had their stuff on a cassette for my Walkman when I took a week's holiday in Paris, met a girl on the train over and spent not many nights at the hotel I'd booked. (And you thought Before Dawn didn't happen in real life?) As for the SOS Band, Jackie Graham, Joe Jackson's Night and Day, The Fatback Band, anything produced by Jam and Lewis, Spandau Ballet, MARRS, The Smiths, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, ABC, pretty much anything else produced by Trevor Horn (even Hand Held In Black and White)... the list goes on and on. All of them strong songs, great production... and I every time I think of putting a CD of it onto the iPod, I stop and put the CD back.
This only happens with Eighties music. I'm fine with all the other stuff. There's too many memories. Too many feelings. Which is odd, because I “grew up” in the Sixties and Seventies. I did my homework by candlelight in the Three-Day Weeks, I can remember double-figure inflation, flared trousers and the Sex Pistols on Top of The Pops. I saw Bob Marley and the Wailers at university and Sam Peckinpah movies as they came out. The strong feelings are all supposed to be around being a teenager, falling in love all the time and discovering the world.
The Eighties was when I screwed up. It's when my future disappeared (at thirty – that's when you've had a great future behind you), when I realised that the party was anywhere I wasn't and on the rare occasions I found it, I didn't really get what was going on. It's when the Girl I Should Have Married told me she was marrying someone else – I hyperventilated for a couple of hours after that phone call. It's when I realised that at the end of the evening, I was the one who dropped everyone else off and then drove the last stretch back “home” on my own. Always. It's when my career crashed and burned, even as my salary went up. It's when I wished I was an accountant – so that I could be as self-satisfied and apparently as securely employed as they were. Did I mention the property company I worked for company whose CEO wound up in jail? Or the way the decade ended with me drinking myself into... well, let's say a state of mind I don't actually want to visit again in case I don't come back from it. Ever. If your character is built on sand, as mine was, then there's a time the lack of foundations is going to show: teens, twenties, thirties... all the way up to your seventies (after that you get to pass it off as “senior moments”). For me it was Eighties. And that music was the soundtrack.
I wasn't screwing up because I wasn't going about getting what I wanted very well: I was screwing up because I had no idea who I was. I thought I wanted the English dream: one wife, two children, three holidays, a four-by-four, five bedrooms and six good friends thing. I didn't. I'm so much more shallow that that. I didn't know that at the time. I didn't really chase after the English dream but I didn't chase after anything else either. Because I didn't know what it was I wanted to chase after. Other than fame, wealth and beautiful lovers – Freud's account of the motivations of artists everywhere – and there was and is no way I had the courage or talent to chase after that. I was too busy doing the damn day job, getting drunk, commuting, keeping up a reasonably respectable front and pretending even to myself to be having a life that was going somewhere.
If it wasn't for the memories, I think I'd be prepared to say that the popular music of the Eighties was about as good as it gets. Technically the writing, recording, arranging and production was way ahead of anything from the previous decades: the lyrics weren't as good, and I keel over now when critics quote the lyrics from Oughties songs because the entire lyrical output of the last ten years isn't worth the lyrics on Like A Rolling Stone. I'm going to assume that if you were nineteen, it had an emotional resonance that would have passed me by as I wasn't nineteen anymore, but was as strong for you as the music that was around when I was nineteen. Don't ask me what those emotions were though, because I can't guess, but your music provided the soundtrack to my lost years. Which is why I always put the CD back into the rack – no matter how much I remember that I liked the songs at the time.
This only happens with Eighties music. I'm fine with all the other stuff. There's too many memories. Too many feelings. Which is odd, because I “grew up” in the Sixties and Seventies. I did my homework by candlelight in the Three-Day Weeks, I can remember double-figure inflation, flared trousers and the Sex Pistols on Top of The Pops. I saw Bob Marley and the Wailers at university and Sam Peckinpah movies as they came out. The strong feelings are all supposed to be around being a teenager, falling in love all the time and discovering the world.
The Eighties was when I screwed up. It's when my future disappeared (at thirty – that's when you've had a great future behind you), when I realised that the party was anywhere I wasn't and on the rare occasions I found it, I didn't really get what was going on. It's when the Girl I Should Have Married told me she was marrying someone else – I hyperventilated for a couple of hours after that phone call. It's when I realised that at the end of the evening, I was the one who dropped everyone else off and then drove the last stretch back “home” on my own. Always. It's when my career crashed and burned, even as my salary went up. It's when I wished I was an accountant – so that I could be as self-satisfied and apparently as securely employed as they were. Did I mention the property company I worked for company whose CEO wound up in jail? Or the way the decade ended with me drinking myself into... well, let's say a state of mind I don't actually want to visit again in case I don't come back from it. Ever. If your character is built on sand, as mine was, then there's a time the lack of foundations is going to show: teens, twenties, thirties... all the way up to your seventies (after that you get to pass it off as “senior moments”). For me it was Eighties. And that music was the soundtrack.
I wasn't screwing up because I wasn't going about getting what I wanted very well: I was screwing up because I had no idea who I was. I thought I wanted the English dream: one wife, two children, three holidays, a four-by-four, five bedrooms and six good friends thing. I didn't. I'm so much more shallow that that. I didn't know that at the time. I didn't really chase after the English dream but I didn't chase after anything else either. Because I didn't know what it was I wanted to chase after. Other than fame, wealth and beautiful lovers – Freud's account of the motivations of artists everywhere – and there was and is no way I had the courage or talent to chase after that. I was too busy doing the damn day job, getting drunk, commuting, keeping up a reasonably respectable front and pretending even to myself to be having a life that was going somewhere.
If it wasn't for the memories, I think I'd be prepared to say that the popular music of the Eighties was about as good as it gets. Technically the writing, recording, arranging and production was way ahead of anything from the previous decades: the lyrics weren't as good, and I keel over now when critics quote the lyrics from Oughties songs because the entire lyrical output of the last ten years isn't worth the lyrics on Like A Rolling Stone. I'm going to assume that if you were nineteen, it had an emotional resonance that would have passed me by as I wasn't nineteen anymore, but was as strong for you as the music that was around when I was nineteen. Don't ask me what those emotions were though, because I can't guess, but your music provided the soundtrack to my lost years. Which is why I always put the CD back into the rack – no matter how much I remember that I liked the songs at the time.
Friday, 3 July 2009
How Not To Do Things With Words
Rae Langton is an America feminist philosopher who wrote a paper, Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts, in which she used some ideas of J L Austin to defend the view that, despite the rulings of the Supreme Court, pornography should be actively banned by the US Federal Government. Unsurprisingly those ideas just won't get us to the required conclusion, and it's half-interesting to see why. Her argument is that exposure to pornography makes it impossible for men to hear a woman refusing their advances. She can say the words, but the meaning just doesn't get across. The same happens when she tries to give testimony during a rape trial: she can use the words, but the jury just don't get it. It's important to understand that Miss Langton is not saying that the female refusal and testimony is ignored. If something is ignored, it's at least heard. She's saying that pornography so alters the meaning of women's speech that they cannot find any words successfully to express sexual refusal. Run over that again and see if it makes sense to you. Let me try to explain why someone once thought it would.
Remember the bit in Blazing Saddles where the sheriff says “You'd do it for Randolph Scott” and the whole town removes its collective hat and says reverently “Randolph Scott!”? Well, quoting J L Austin's name in philosophical circles has the same effect – or is supposed to. Around about the same time as Wittgenstein was developing his ideas of language games, Austin developed his ideas of speech acts in a famous essay called How To Do Things With Words. The idea of both thinkers was that, pace the logical positivists, we use words to do more than describe the real world. We do things like recommending, promising, insulting, praising, instructing, suggesting, inspiring and so on. Austin called these illocutionary acts: what we do in saying something. Uttering the sentence itself is the locutionary act. The consequences of the illocutionary act are the perlocutionary acts. The terminology varies from writer to writer: your Mac dictionary will tell you that perlocutionary acts are those which intend to influence the actions of others, but are not themselves actions: in this sense, recommending, suggesting and persuading are perlocutionary, while promising, warning and prescribing (medicine) are illocutionary.
Langton's thesis is that though women can say No (locutionary act) they cannot express refusal by so doing (illocutionary act) because men who have seen pornography have been deafened to the possibility of female sexual refusal. According to Langton, women can speak, but in a culture with pornography their words carry no meaning. So pornography should be banned.
Refusing is an illocutionary act. When I say “no, thank you” (locutionary act), I am refusing (illocutionary act) with the intention that you cease trying to sell me double-glazing (perlocutionary act). What has gone wrong if you don't stop? Perhaps my locutionary act failed: you didn't hear me. Let me say it again louder. Did my illocutionary act fail? Did I fail to express refusal? I expressed it just fine: “no thank you” expresses refusal in a polite manner. Perhaps you failed to recognise it. Let's try “which part of 'get lost' didn't you understand?” and see if you go on talking. If you do, it's pretty clear that you are rude and persistent and I can close the door in your face with a clear conscience.
However, you explain that you have been trained to regard any remark like “no thank you” not as a refusal, but as an “objection” and your sales trainer has taught you a number of hokey tricks to “overcome” the objection. What left me as a refusal arrived with you as an objection. This might sound convincing, except that the very reason you are taught to regard what I say as an “objection” is exactly because you and your sales manager know very well it's a refusal. If you didn't, you wouldn't need to be trained to “overcome” it.
When might an illocutionary act fail? In other words, given that I have not mis-spoken, but used words that under the circumstances would be deemed by other people to convey my wish, can I still fail to refuse? Well, perhaps if I go to an Arab bazaar things might be a little odd. English is a curt language used by a blunt people: we say things once and expect to be understood halfway through the utterance. Other languages belong to more verbose and courtly cultures, and in those cultures it may be normal to express what in English would be a refusal but is actually a response to see how serious you are about selling to me. If you are, you will ask again, to see how serious I am about refusing. You change your sales pitch slightly and lower the price. I shake my head but do not move away. Last chance. If I refuse this time, we're over. If I don't understand that you come from such a culture, we are going to have a communication problem: what leaves me in English as a refusal, arrives with you in Arabic as a possible opening move of a negotiation. I need to find different words to express my intention: I need the Arabic for “I really, really am not interested, stop trying to sell me your damn carpets”. Or maybe I just have to say it three times.
A poorly-phrased locutionary act can fail to express my intentions, and thus express an illocutionary act I did not mean to express. But that's the point: the rest of the world hears my (ill-chosen) words and deduces my illocutionary intentions from those words. That's why it's my fault if I get the words out wrong. The illocutionary act is tied to my words, not to some mysterious inner state of mine. If I get the words out right, it's your fault (of commission if you ignore me or omission if you haven't bothered to learn the rules) if you don't understand it as a reasonable, educated speaker of the language would understand it. This is why a man who tries to defend himself by saying he didn't think she meant it is onto a loser: it isn't what he thought she meant, or even what she thought she meant, it's what she said that matters.
Now we have an empirical question. Has anyone ever re-wired the language of refusal? As far as I know, while various cultures have made "bad" come out "good", no-one has ever made No mean Yes. “Get away from me”, “get your hands off”, “let me out of the car now”, “it's time you got a cab home”, “what the …. do you think you're doing?” - these words mean only one thing. Anyone who thinks they mean “carry on trying your luck” is just hoping to con the jury. No (locutionary act) means NO (illocutionary act). No-one can change that, let alone a guy with a video camera, Devon Lee's number and a day's rent of a studio in the San Fernando valley.
However, Miss Langton may be thinking of, and at one point her discussion suggests she is, the more appalling excesses of the High School Entitled Jock. It's just possible that Entitled Jocks really do believe that No means Try Harder and a study of the collected works of Annie Cruz have been a part of gaining that belief. We call them Entitled Jerks and send them to jail if they behave like that: because they have such faulty illocutionary hearing and poor judgement they commit crimes as a result. High School is not the Marrakesh bazaar: Entitled Jerks are not culturally different, but culturally ignorant.
Langton conflates understanding what someone says with accepting the wishes it expresses and so makes success part of my illocutionary act. According to that, I haven't refused, or been heard as refusing, if you go on pitching your double-glazing at me. Which is convenient for you, as you are no longer a rude oaf for carrying on, but merely someone who has chosen the meaning of the words they hear to suit their purposes. And that brings us right back to it: if you had to choose the meaning you needed, it was because you knew that the meaning I intended did not suit your purposes. You knew darn well what I meant by “no thank you”. You just chose to ignore it and then hide that rudeness behind a philosophical theory of language. Why a feminist philosopher would devise that theory is beyond me, unless she was trying to argue something that really doesn't want to be a conclusion.
Remember the bit in Blazing Saddles where the sheriff says “You'd do it for Randolph Scott” and the whole town removes its collective hat and says reverently “Randolph Scott!”? Well, quoting J L Austin's name in philosophical circles has the same effect – or is supposed to. Around about the same time as Wittgenstein was developing his ideas of language games, Austin developed his ideas of speech acts in a famous essay called How To Do Things With Words. The idea of both thinkers was that, pace the logical positivists, we use words to do more than describe the real world. We do things like recommending, promising, insulting, praising, instructing, suggesting, inspiring and so on. Austin called these illocutionary acts: what we do in saying something. Uttering the sentence itself is the locutionary act. The consequences of the illocutionary act are the perlocutionary acts. The terminology varies from writer to writer: your Mac dictionary will tell you that perlocutionary acts are those which intend to influence the actions of others, but are not themselves actions: in this sense, recommending, suggesting and persuading are perlocutionary, while promising, warning and prescribing (medicine) are illocutionary.
Langton's thesis is that though women can say No (locutionary act) they cannot express refusal by so doing (illocutionary act) because men who have seen pornography have been deafened to the possibility of female sexual refusal. According to Langton, women can speak, but in a culture with pornography their words carry no meaning. So pornography should be banned.
Refusing is an illocutionary act. When I say “no, thank you” (locutionary act), I am refusing (illocutionary act) with the intention that you cease trying to sell me double-glazing (perlocutionary act). What has gone wrong if you don't stop? Perhaps my locutionary act failed: you didn't hear me. Let me say it again louder. Did my illocutionary act fail? Did I fail to express refusal? I expressed it just fine: “no thank you” expresses refusal in a polite manner. Perhaps you failed to recognise it. Let's try “which part of 'get lost' didn't you understand?” and see if you go on talking. If you do, it's pretty clear that you are rude and persistent and I can close the door in your face with a clear conscience.
However, you explain that you have been trained to regard any remark like “no thank you” not as a refusal, but as an “objection” and your sales trainer has taught you a number of hokey tricks to “overcome” the objection. What left me as a refusal arrived with you as an objection. This might sound convincing, except that the very reason you are taught to regard what I say as an “objection” is exactly because you and your sales manager know very well it's a refusal. If you didn't, you wouldn't need to be trained to “overcome” it.
When might an illocutionary act fail? In other words, given that I have not mis-spoken, but used words that under the circumstances would be deemed by other people to convey my wish, can I still fail to refuse? Well, perhaps if I go to an Arab bazaar things might be a little odd. English is a curt language used by a blunt people: we say things once and expect to be understood halfway through the utterance. Other languages belong to more verbose and courtly cultures, and in those cultures it may be normal to express what in English would be a refusal but is actually a response to see how serious you are about selling to me. If you are, you will ask again, to see how serious I am about refusing. You change your sales pitch slightly and lower the price. I shake my head but do not move away. Last chance. If I refuse this time, we're over. If I don't understand that you come from such a culture, we are going to have a communication problem: what leaves me in English as a refusal, arrives with you in Arabic as a possible opening move of a negotiation. I need to find different words to express my intention: I need the Arabic for “I really, really am not interested, stop trying to sell me your damn carpets”. Or maybe I just have to say it three times.
A poorly-phrased locutionary act can fail to express my intentions, and thus express an illocutionary act I did not mean to express. But that's the point: the rest of the world hears my (ill-chosen) words and deduces my illocutionary intentions from those words. That's why it's my fault if I get the words out wrong. The illocutionary act is tied to my words, not to some mysterious inner state of mine. If I get the words out right, it's your fault (of commission if you ignore me or omission if you haven't bothered to learn the rules) if you don't understand it as a reasonable, educated speaker of the language would understand it. This is why a man who tries to defend himself by saying he didn't think she meant it is onto a loser: it isn't what he thought she meant, or even what she thought she meant, it's what she said that matters.
Now we have an empirical question. Has anyone ever re-wired the language of refusal? As far as I know, while various cultures have made "bad" come out "good", no-one has ever made No mean Yes. “Get away from me”, “get your hands off”, “let me out of the car now”, “it's time you got a cab home”, “what the …. do you think you're doing?” - these words mean only one thing. Anyone who thinks they mean “carry on trying your luck” is just hoping to con the jury. No (locutionary act) means NO (illocutionary act). No-one can change that, let alone a guy with a video camera, Devon Lee's number and a day's rent of a studio in the San Fernando valley.
However, Miss Langton may be thinking of, and at one point her discussion suggests she is, the more appalling excesses of the High School Entitled Jock. It's just possible that Entitled Jocks really do believe that No means Try Harder and a study of the collected works of Annie Cruz have been a part of gaining that belief. We call them Entitled Jerks and send them to jail if they behave like that: because they have such faulty illocutionary hearing and poor judgement they commit crimes as a result. High School is not the Marrakesh bazaar: Entitled Jerks are not culturally different, but culturally ignorant.
Langton conflates understanding what someone says with accepting the wishes it expresses and so makes success part of my illocutionary act. According to that, I haven't refused, or been heard as refusing, if you go on pitching your double-glazing at me. Which is convenient for you, as you are no longer a rude oaf for carrying on, but merely someone who has chosen the meaning of the words they hear to suit their purposes. And that brings us right back to it: if you had to choose the meaning you needed, it was because you knew that the meaning I intended did not suit your purposes. You knew darn well what I meant by “no thank you”. You just chose to ignore it and then hide that rudeness behind a philosophical theory of language. Why a feminist philosopher would devise that theory is beyond me, unless she was trying to argue something that really doesn't want to be a conclusion.
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
Gruesome Doubts and Testing
It's fairly easy to test that something does what it's supposed to do. That's what specifications and user acceptance testing is for. Let's call a requirement locally positive if it states that under conditions X, Y, Z the widget will do W within T seconds (or after N repetitions). Locally positive requirements are obtained by a demonstration: here it is doing it. An indefinite positive requirement, is one that asks that the widget does whatever it is at some unspecified time in the future. Similarly, a requirement is locally negative if it demands the widget doesn't do something within T seconds; it is indefinite negative if it demands the widget never does it. A locally negative requirement can be demonstrated: we set up the conditions, start up the widget and wait T seconds or N repetitions. No puff of smoke and it passes. How do we prove an unrestricted negative or an unrestricted positive? We can't, we don't have enough time. No amount of evidence will prove it, because tomorrow something might go wrong or it might go right. And since tomorrow never comes...
Now let's look at some doubts. A doubt is specific if it is about the widget's ability to fulfil a locally positive or negative requirement. Specific doubts are testable. A doubt is gruesome if it claims that under some as yet unknown set of circumstances, the widget will fail to do what we would want it to do if we knew the circumstances.
Why “gruesome”? The philosopher Nelson Goodman invented a predicate “grue”. An object is grue if it is green up to some date and blue afterwards. An emerald might be grue. His point was that if the date is far enough into the future, any evidence that the object was green and would not turn colour on the given date was also evidence that it was grue and would turn colour on the given date. You object to the idea of “grue” as a colour only if you've forgotten that many leaves are “gred”: green before autumn, and red during autumn. Gruesome doubts amount to the claim that the widget is reliable up to some unspecified time or event in the future and unreliable at or after that point. Or that it is reliable for a wide range of inputs but not for an as yet unspecified but suspected set of inputs. The point is, of course, that any evidence that the widget is reliable is also evidence that it is gruesome-ly unreliable.
Here's the point. No evidence can satisfy anyone with a gruesome doubt – and there is no point in trying. Gruesome doubts can, if expressed in the right way give you a reputation for wise caution: “let's keep an eye on it”, you say, or, “we should monitor it for any anomalies”, or “the tests seem to indicate that it is working, but I'd like to run some more later”. Gruesome doubts can also be used to bully people: “how do I know it will work with any bit of data / tomorrow / next week?” Don't use these arguments because they won't listen. They are out to make everyone involved look as if they haven't done a good job of testing and make them look bad and feel crazy. Why is she asking this when there is no answer? If you're in this position, philosophy is likely to be little consolation.
Now let's look at some doubts. A doubt is specific if it is about the widget's ability to fulfil a locally positive or negative requirement. Specific doubts are testable. A doubt is gruesome if it claims that under some as yet unknown set of circumstances, the widget will fail to do what we would want it to do if we knew the circumstances.
Why “gruesome”? The philosopher Nelson Goodman invented a predicate “grue”. An object is grue if it is green up to some date and blue afterwards. An emerald might be grue. His point was that if the date is far enough into the future, any evidence that the object was green and would not turn colour on the given date was also evidence that it was grue and would turn colour on the given date. You object to the idea of “grue” as a colour only if you've forgotten that many leaves are “gred”: green before autumn, and red during autumn. Gruesome doubts amount to the claim that the widget is reliable up to some unspecified time or event in the future and unreliable at or after that point. Or that it is reliable for a wide range of inputs but not for an as yet unspecified but suspected set of inputs. The point is, of course, that any evidence that the widget is reliable is also evidence that it is gruesome-ly unreliable.
Here's the point. No evidence can satisfy anyone with a gruesome doubt – and there is no point in trying. Gruesome doubts can, if expressed in the right way give you a reputation for wise caution: “let's keep an eye on it”, you say, or, “we should monitor it for any anomalies”, or “the tests seem to indicate that it is working, but I'd like to run some more later”. Gruesome doubts can also be used to bully people: “how do I know it will work with any bit of data / tomorrow / next week?” Don't use these arguments because they won't listen. They are out to make everyone involved look as if they haven't done a good job of testing and make them look bad and feel crazy. Why is she asking this when there is no answer? If you're in this position, philosophy is likely to be little consolation.
Monday, 29 June 2009
Living With Yourself: Part One
You didn't raise yourself. You were not born knowing the differential calculus. You gave up the piano lessons, remember? That would be why you can't play Blue in Green now. Someone taught you to swim, you had trainer wheels on your bicycle, and there were all those driving lessons. You didn't just ace the test first time you stepped into a car. Name anything you can do and you learned it from someone. The way you suck up to the boss with such dignity? You learned that at Oxford – it's what they really teach there. About the only thing a kid can do on their own is screw up: from burning their hands on the cooker to puking up because they drank too much from Daddy's whisky bottle to getting lost when they went for a walk on holiday and getting Mary (age 14) pregnant. You want to get much right in this world and you need guidance.
You may not have been paying attention at the time. You may not have the maths or the double-somersault gene. You may have had lousy teachers and parents, and you may have fallen in with the wrong crowd at school or in the neighbourhood and adopted ideas and attitudes way above or below your station. You may have gone to the wrong school, no-one noticed your reading difficulties or exceptional talent at tennis. They may have, but they didn't give a damn. You may have received the perfect upbringing for a child with well-connected parents, but yours weren't.
There are so many ways everyone involved can screw up raising a child that everyone comes out of their teenage years with some rough patches, confusion, hurts, pain and missing competencies. I hear they can come out with some polish, strength, skills and happiness – but I think that's just hype put out by expensive fee-paying schools. This does not mean that “everyone is messed up” because there's a difference between not being able to draw a recognisable face (not messed up) and not being spaced out on downers at age fifteen (messed up). It means “nobody can do it all”.
There is no one right way to be a person. There are a few really wrong ways (psychopath, serial killer, rapist, degenerate gambler, drug addict, useless drunk, downsizing CEO, corrupt policeman, child abuser, paedophile, human traffiker, pimp, Taliban, slaughtering dictator and their henchmen, actually, quite a few ways of being a Bad Person) but the rest are okay. You may talk on your mobile on the train, install loud alarms in your cars and house that go off for no reason at two in the morning, not pay your due bills and use power tools on a Sunday evening, but that just makes you an anti-social jerk.
What matters is how much pain you are in living the life you lead. Not regret or sorrow, actual pain. One of the little-noticed clauses about the notorious personality disorders in DSM-VI is that to qualify you have to be in pain and not functioning well. That's what anti-social jerks are: people with personality disorders who don't feel any pain and pay their bills. This pain can come from two sources: because you really are missing out on something you would be a lot better off if you had, or because you think there's something wrong with you because you aren't doing whatever it is, and whatever it is happens to be, in the list of things, optional.
I, for instance, don't do fun. I'm fine with this until the company insists I go on some frakking day out where we listen to empty, generic speeches from the high mucka-mucks and spend the afternoon playing a silly game. On that day I am as miserable as Job and for the same reason: I am suffering torments inflicted by Satan. What's worse is I keep thinking it's my fault. It isn't. Those just aren't my strokes, and I am no longer going to pretend that they should be.
And I'm not terribly good at making a social life. I have some friends, but I don't have a social circle and I miss that whenever I see signs that other people do have one. Just as much of my life, at my age, looks like it does so I don't have to be around squalling kids and irritable parents, or loud partying young people, so I avoid anything that reminds me that people have friends and do things like have eight of them rent a villa in Tuscany for a week. I think I'm missing out there. As I say, I have a lot of tricks for not noticing it, but it still hurts when I do.
Now I am prepared to believe the therapists and wise men when they tell me I would be better off with a social life. I am not prepared to believe anybody if they tell me I would be better off being able to tolerate corporate BS days. I think that might involve the loss of faculties I find quite valuable for the rest of the year.
If you are wondering what I meant by “actual pain” back there, congratulations: you either have everything you need to live a productive and successful life, or are happily adjusted to your limitations, or of course, are an anti-social jerk. If you aren't sure, it isn't you.
I'm just getting started on this.
You may not have been paying attention at the time. You may not have the maths or the double-somersault gene. You may have had lousy teachers and parents, and you may have fallen in with the wrong crowd at school or in the neighbourhood and adopted ideas and attitudes way above or below your station. You may have gone to the wrong school, no-one noticed your reading difficulties or exceptional talent at tennis. They may have, but they didn't give a damn. You may have received the perfect upbringing for a child with well-connected parents, but yours weren't.
There are so many ways everyone involved can screw up raising a child that everyone comes out of their teenage years with some rough patches, confusion, hurts, pain and missing competencies. I hear they can come out with some polish, strength, skills and happiness – but I think that's just hype put out by expensive fee-paying schools. This does not mean that “everyone is messed up” because there's a difference between not being able to draw a recognisable face (not messed up) and not being spaced out on downers at age fifteen (messed up). It means “nobody can do it all”.
There is no one right way to be a person. There are a few really wrong ways (psychopath, serial killer, rapist, degenerate gambler, drug addict, useless drunk, downsizing CEO, corrupt policeman, child abuser, paedophile, human traffiker, pimp, Taliban, slaughtering dictator and their henchmen, actually, quite a few ways of being a Bad Person) but the rest are okay. You may talk on your mobile on the train, install loud alarms in your cars and house that go off for no reason at two in the morning, not pay your due bills and use power tools on a Sunday evening, but that just makes you an anti-social jerk.
What matters is how much pain you are in living the life you lead. Not regret or sorrow, actual pain. One of the little-noticed clauses about the notorious personality disorders in DSM-VI is that to qualify you have to be in pain and not functioning well. That's what anti-social jerks are: people with personality disorders who don't feel any pain and pay their bills. This pain can come from two sources: because you really are missing out on something you would be a lot better off if you had, or because you think there's something wrong with you because you aren't doing whatever it is, and whatever it is happens to be, in the list of things, optional.
I, for instance, don't do fun. I'm fine with this until the company insists I go on some frakking day out where we listen to empty, generic speeches from the high mucka-mucks and spend the afternoon playing a silly game. On that day I am as miserable as Job and for the same reason: I am suffering torments inflicted by Satan. What's worse is I keep thinking it's my fault. It isn't. Those just aren't my strokes, and I am no longer going to pretend that they should be.
And I'm not terribly good at making a social life. I have some friends, but I don't have a social circle and I miss that whenever I see signs that other people do have one. Just as much of my life, at my age, looks like it does so I don't have to be around squalling kids and irritable parents, or loud partying young people, so I avoid anything that reminds me that people have friends and do things like have eight of them rent a villa in Tuscany for a week. I think I'm missing out there. As I say, I have a lot of tricks for not noticing it, but it still hurts when I do.
Now I am prepared to believe the therapists and wise men when they tell me I would be better off with a social life. I am not prepared to believe anybody if they tell me I would be better off being able to tolerate corporate BS days. I think that might involve the loss of faculties I find quite valuable for the rest of the year.
If you are wondering what I meant by “actual pain” back there, congratulations: you either have everything you need to live a productive and successful life, or are happily adjusted to your limitations, or of course, are an anti-social jerk. If you aren't sure, it isn't you.
I'm just getting started on this.
Saturday, 27 June 2009
The Movie List 2 (of Many)
Dinner Rush – Bob Giraldi
“Am I an artist?” Asks Summer Phoenix's waitress of the famous and winging art critic. The established artists with him shake their heads: “The minute you doubt it, it's gone”. “You're an artists if you say you are,” the critic agrees, “you're a successful artist if...” “He says you are,” the established artists joke. You can hear the writers Rick Shaughnessy and Brian Kalata telling each other this as they worked on this perfect script. Every performance is just right and the ending never fails to startle.
Dogtown and Z-Boys – Stacey Peralta / Craig Stecyk
Everything you need to know about life, but will never be able to apply here in England to yours. This was the bunch of middle-school drop-outs who defined modern skateboarding and extreme games. Which is why they practiced all the time, worked hard on their moves, knew that “style is everything”, encouraged each other, could clean out a dirty swimming pool in four hours, dodged the cops, and when the commercial opportunities came along, took them. It helped they had Craig Stecyk to publicise them and document their activities, and it also helped that Jeff Ho and Skip Englbloom were true mentors. Oh, and as a movie, a story, it is as good as any other on the screen.
Unser Taglish Brot – Nicholas Geyrhalter
Bear with me here, this is a documentary about European industrialised farming, and if your jaw doesn't drop on the floor at some of the things you see, you're not paying attention. Who invented the machine for gently sweeping chicks onto a conveyor belt? Or the cow-milking turntable? Did you know what the vaults of a deep salt mine look like? The scene involving a bull, a cow and a man with a test tube is, well, maybe that's too much information already. Watching this movie is part of your education. Don't be a townie who thinks that tomatoes grown in their packing any longer. Oh and the editing, the rhythm, the colour, the warm detachment of it? Flawless.
Basquiat – Julian Schnabel
Films about the art world are few and far between, films about the art world made by an actual artists probably number this one. The first time I saw it, I felt alive for a couple of days. The script is endlessly quotable and it's one of those films you can watch for “bits” - my favourite being the painting-in-the-cellar sequence. The performances are excellent, the ambience feels right, though Basquiat's behaviour and the sheet extent of his drug consumption is only hinted at. Also to judge from the photographs in the various biographies, Courtney Love and Claire Forlani are a lot prettier than the actual women. Apparently Basquiat's estate refused to lend his paintings for the movie, so Schnabel painted the “Basquiats” himself.
Jazz On A Summer's Day – Bert Stern
I saw this at a now-defunct cinema on Baker Street when I was seventeen. It has everything from hard bop to Bach – the cellist with the Chico Hamilton band plays the Prelude from Bach's first Cello Suite. There's a goodly cross-section of the 1958 jazz scene, a truly awful mis-match of sound and vision as Sal Salvador plays guitar, some nice films of yachts and some beautiful photography. It's a look back at a different country – when jazz was at the height of its virtuosity and was the music of the hip of all colours. It isn't now, but it was then.
“Am I an artist?” Asks Summer Phoenix's waitress of the famous and winging art critic. The established artists with him shake their heads: “The minute you doubt it, it's gone”. “You're an artists if you say you are,” the critic agrees, “you're a successful artist if...” “He says you are,” the established artists joke. You can hear the writers Rick Shaughnessy and Brian Kalata telling each other this as they worked on this perfect script. Every performance is just right and the ending never fails to startle.
Dogtown and Z-Boys – Stacey Peralta / Craig Stecyk
Everything you need to know about life, but will never be able to apply here in England to yours. This was the bunch of middle-school drop-outs who defined modern skateboarding and extreme games. Which is why they practiced all the time, worked hard on their moves, knew that “style is everything”, encouraged each other, could clean out a dirty swimming pool in four hours, dodged the cops, and when the commercial opportunities came along, took them. It helped they had Craig Stecyk to publicise them and document their activities, and it also helped that Jeff Ho and Skip Englbloom were true mentors. Oh, and as a movie, a story, it is as good as any other on the screen.
Unser Taglish Brot – Nicholas Geyrhalter
Bear with me here, this is a documentary about European industrialised farming, and if your jaw doesn't drop on the floor at some of the things you see, you're not paying attention. Who invented the machine for gently sweeping chicks onto a conveyor belt? Or the cow-milking turntable? Did you know what the vaults of a deep salt mine look like? The scene involving a bull, a cow and a man with a test tube is, well, maybe that's too much information already. Watching this movie is part of your education. Don't be a townie who thinks that tomatoes grown in their packing any longer. Oh and the editing, the rhythm, the colour, the warm detachment of it? Flawless.
Basquiat – Julian Schnabel
Films about the art world are few and far between, films about the art world made by an actual artists probably number this one. The first time I saw it, I felt alive for a couple of days. The script is endlessly quotable and it's one of those films you can watch for “bits” - my favourite being the painting-in-the-cellar sequence. The performances are excellent, the ambience feels right, though Basquiat's behaviour and the sheet extent of his drug consumption is only hinted at. Also to judge from the photographs in the various biographies, Courtney Love and Claire Forlani are a lot prettier than the actual women. Apparently Basquiat's estate refused to lend his paintings for the movie, so Schnabel painted the “Basquiats” himself.
Jazz On A Summer's Day – Bert Stern
I saw this at a now-defunct cinema on Baker Street when I was seventeen. It has everything from hard bop to Bach – the cellist with the Chico Hamilton band plays the Prelude from Bach's first Cello Suite. There's a goodly cross-section of the 1958 jazz scene, a truly awful mis-match of sound and vision as Sal Salvador plays guitar, some nice films of yachts and some beautiful photography. It's a look back at a different country – when jazz was at the height of its virtuosity and was the music of the hip of all colours. It isn't now, but it was then.
Thursday, 25 June 2009
Why I'm Quitting Self-Help
Every now and then I weaken and buy a self-help book. I don't mean the really hokey Men Can't Cuddle, Women Won't Fix Light Bulbs nonsense , or the Vegetarian Pie for the Soul twaddle, let alone idiot pamphlets that tell you “Don't sweat the small stuff – and it's all small stuff”. Anyone who says that should find themselves out of work with two weeks' money in a dead job market, and we'll see how small they think buying food for the family is. Most of the stuff under “Mind, Body and Spirit” in even the proper bookshops (Foyles, Waterstones) is shallow, exploitative tosh.
I remember when I read Melody Beattie's Codependent No More . There a large part of me was, right there on those pages. I ticked the fifteen traits of a codependent without the slightest hesitation: I knew exactly what she was talking about. But by heaven she's written some fluff since. So has Julia Cameron (formerly Mrs Martin Scorsese): The Artist's Way is a neat book with a lot of good ideas. I don't do my Morning Pages as much as I used to, but there was a time I needed to and so I did. And that media-free week? Let me tell you, I did that, and I've never been quite the same since. But my god some of the follow-up stuff has been new-age chanting.
Then there are the You-Can-Have-It-All books. The ones that tell you how you can have a successful, meaningful, exciting life in a great job than you wake up and look forward to. Oh, if only. I steer clear of those because I know they're a crock. If there is one group of people I would wish to turn into, oh, say a qaat-chewing Somali and see what they make of themselves then, it's all those professional speakers who tell you the only limit to what you can achieve is your dreams. Absent their ability to raise the sponsorship, these people's dreams are just that. And we can't all live on each other's sponsorship.
Why do we buy self-help books? Because we think the writers know something we don't. But they don't. There's no research on this stuff. Pop economists always quote this or that paper by some behavioural economist or other, but you will never find a self-help guru quoting from research papers about motivation, regaining confidence, keeping unproductive thoughts out of your head, dealing with sudden redundancy (one piece of research found that people who were chucked out with a lot of money were more confident than those who got nothing – having been in both conditions, I will agree). Even if the research was there, I doubt they would quote it, because it would find that the way you felt was pretty much a function of your economic circumstances and the exact degree of insult inflicted on you. There would be a finding that certain people weren't badly affected, but they came from unusual backgrounds and had rare temperaments. Almost invariably the authors are peddling themselves as the success story – and it turns out that they have the temperament to handle being a self-employed author, speaker and trainer. Which makes them just like you and me. You can ignore the examples they quote, those people don't exist.
We buy self-help books because we don't have anyone we can trust to turn to for advice. Think about what that says about your parents, uncles, aunts and friends. That they're as clueless as you about how to handle whatever it is that's happening. If you thought they had some useful advice, you would ask them, not make some publisher's friend (self-help gurus are all friends of one editor or another) a little richer.
We buy self-help books because one of other of the “whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of disprized love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes” eventually knocks us flat, and temporarily takes away our self-confidence, our belief that we can get back up and start all over again and that there is anyone out there who wants to hire us, love us, help us, pick us for their team or generally extend some sign that we're not a total waste of space. From redundancy with beggar-all payoff, through re-organisations, re-locations, separation, divorce, break-ups, not even getting a date, not even getting an acknowledgement to your job application, being rejected for a job after a terrific interview, to being turned away at a nightclub or pub, finding all your alleged mates went off to a party Saturday night and forgot to tell you... the list is endless. The sources of happiness are few, the sources of upset almost infinite: so few Yes's, so many No's.
Thrashed with those whips and scorns, we have two choices. We can lie down and die or get back up and fight the endless fight. The only issue is how long we spend recuperating. Well, there is a third choice – sometimes: we can organise, so that employers can't just sling you out on the street with a couple of month's money or send the jobs over to Chennai. In the literature of self-help, the third choice does not exist. You are an isolated actor with no politics – though the guru may suggest you enlist friends as “coaches” or “cheerleaders” or some other such role.
Most people can take the whips and scorns of time reasonably well, experiencing a short-term loss of faith and general slump, before their natural good spirits plus some luck gets them back in the game. Also, being “most people”, they don't get whipped and scorned too often – one good reason for getting married and working at it. Some people don't have those natural good spirits, they don't believe in good things happening in the future, nor do they believe that anyone will keep their promises. Some people are just in the wrong places at the wrong times too often, others just can't choose decent people to work for, or love or befriend. Some people, in other words, don't do life very well. Self-help books are not for these people. Self-help books are for “most people”.
All these books need you to have an idea of what you want to do with your life. If you want to stop any self-help guru dead in her tracks, simply claim you have no idea what makes you happy or what is your dream job or lifestyle. Watch them ignore you or worse, tell you that “you must have some idea”. Most people can tell you what they want to do with their lives, just like most people can smile for the camera. Some people have no idea what they want to do with their lives, or worse, they do, but they can't make any money doing it or don't have courage to start and the determination to continue and the sheer damn stamina to finish. Self-help books are not for these people. And that would be me those books aren't for.
I remember when I read Melody Beattie's Codependent No More . There a large part of me was, right there on those pages. I ticked the fifteen traits of a codependent without the slightest hesitation: I knew exactly what she was talking about. But by heaven she's written some fluff since. So has Julia Cameron (formerly Mrs Martin Scorsese): The Artist's Way is a neat book with a lot of good ideas. I don't do my Morning Pages as much as I used to, but there was a time I needed to and so I did. And that media-free week? Let me tell you, I did that, and I've never been quite the same since. But my god some of the follow-up stuff has been new-age chanting.
Then there are the You-Can-Have-It-All books. The ones that tell you how you can have a successful, meaningful, exciting life in a great job than you wake up and look forward to. Oh, if only. I steer clear of those because I know they're a crock. If there is one group of people I would wish to turn into, oh, say a qaat-chewing Somali and see what they make of themselves then, it's all those professional speakers who tell you the only limit to what you can achieve is your dreams. Absent their ability to raise the sponsorship, these people's dreams are just that. And we can't all live on each other's sponsorship.
Why do we buy self-help books? Because we think the writers know something we don't. But they don't. There's no research on this stuff. Pop economists always quote this or that paper by some behavioural economist or other, but you will never find a self-help guru quoting from research papers about motivation, regaining confidence, keeping unproductive thoughts out of your head, dealing with sudden redundancy (one piece of research found that people who were chucked out with a lot of money were more confident than those who got nothing – having been in both conditions, I will agree). Even if the research was there, I doubt they would quote it, because it would find that the way you felt was pretty much a function of your economic circumstances and the exact degree of insult inflicted on you. There would be a finding that certain people weren't badly affected, but they came from unusual backgrounds and had rare temperaments. Almost invariably the authors are peddling themselves as the success story – and it turns out that they have the temperament to handle being a self-employed author, speaker and trainer. Which makes them just like you and me. You can ignore the examples they quote, those people don't exist.
We buy self-help books because we don't have anyone we can trust to turn to for advice. Think about what that says about your parents, uncles, aunts and friends. That they're as clueless as you about how to handle whatever it is that's happening. If you thought they had some useful advice, you would ask them, not make some publisher's friend (self-help gurus are all friends of one editor or another) a little richer.
We buy self-help books because one of other of the “whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of disprized love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes” eventually knocks us flat, and temporarily takes away our self-confidence, our belief that we can get back up and start all over again and that there is anyone out there who wants to hire us, love us, help us, pick us for their team or generally extend some sign that we're not a total waste of space. From redundancy with beggar-all payoff, through re-organisations, re-locations, separation, divorce, break-ups, not even getting a date, not even getting an acknowledgement to your job application, being rejected for a job after a terrific interview, to being turned away at a nightclub or pub, finding all your alleged mates went off to a party Saturday night and forgot to tell you... the list is endless. The sources of happiness are few, the sources of upset almost infinite: so few Yes's, so many No's.
Thrashed with those whips and scorns, we have two choices. We can lie down and die or get back up and fight the endless fight. The only issue is how long we spend recuperating. Well, there is a third choice – sometimes: we can organise, so that employers can't just sling you out on the street with a couple of month's money or send the jobs over to Chennai. In the literature of self-help, the third choice does not exist. You are an isolated actor with no politics – though the guru may suggest you enlist friends as “coaches” or “cheerleaders” or some other such role.
Most people can take the whips and scorns of time reasonably well, experiencing a short-term loss of faith and general slump, before their natural good spirits plus some luck gets them back in the game. Also, being “most people”, they don't get whipped and scorned too often – one good reason for getting married and working at it. Some people don't have those natural good spirits, they don't believe in good things happening in the future, nor do they believe that anyone will keep their promises. Some people are just in the wrong places at the wrong times too often, others just can't choose decent people to work for, or love or befriend. Some people, in other words, don't do life very well. Self-help books are not for these people. Self-help books are for “most people”.
All these books need you to have an idea of what you want to do with your life. If you want to stop any self-help guru dead in her tracks, simply claim you have no idea what makes you happy or what is your dream job or lifestyle. Watch them ignore you or worse, tell you that “you must have some idea”. Most people can tell you what they want to do with their lives, just like most people can smile for the camera. Some people have no idea what they want to do with their lives, or worse, they do, but they can't make any money doing it or don't have courage to start and the determination to continue and the sheer damn stamina to finish. Self-help books are not for these people. And that would be me those books aren't for.
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