I read Glenn Kurtz’s Practicing: A Musician Returns To Music recently. He started as a hot-shot guitar student, went to college in New York and Vienna, started out as a freelance in Europe, realised it wasn’t going to make him money and let him play how he wanted to, and quit for a post-graduate literature degree, which he now teaches. He stopped playing guitar for many years, and came back to it a few years ago. His excellent and wonderfully-written book describes this story in detail and talks insightfully about guitar-playing, musical interpretation and musical education and careers.
I play guitar, after my fashion. I had a few lessons when I was nine or ten, and then started again when I was sixteen. That’s when I got blisters on my fingers. I learned basic theory from a paperback I bought because it told me right up front that I couldn’t learn to play in a day, because it took a month for the blisters to go away. Also it said that people who didn’t like playing scales were missing the point: when you play scales, you’re playing the guitar, and isn’t that what you want to do?. I was sold right there. Even when I’m half-watching a box set and taking care over my fingering of the scale positions, I’m still playing, never “practicing”. If I ever had to perform, then I would learn a piece, and I would rehearse it, but never “practice”. It’s not a verb I use a lot.
I have no doubt that Glenn Kurtz plays way better than I do. He plays classical guitar, and the problems start there. Classical guitars have a high action - the vertical distance between the strings and the frets is a lot greater than it is on a flamenco or folk guitar. The high action is to prevent the string buzzing against the frets, because the aim is to get a perfectly-sounded note. That can be done, but at a huge cost in technical and musical terms. It takes an age and a fair amount of effort to depress and hold down a classical string above the fifth fret, and one has to be quite precise about placing the finger on the string, or the finger can feel as if it will roll off before making contact with the fretboard. The lower action of the steel-string folk and nylon-string flamenco guitars cuts down the effort needed to bring the string against the fret, and the time it takes and the need for accurate placing. And yet one still gets a note - even if it’s not quite perfect.
As a result the classical guitar itself simply won’t let the player emote all over the place as they can on a trumpet, saxophone, piano, violin or cello. Non-classical guitarists have dealt with this by embracing imperfection and personality. They say “tone is in the fingers”: it belongs to the guitarist, not the guitar. Learning to exploit the imperfections available on the folk, blues and flamenco guitars to gain expressiveness is part of developing your own sound: classical soloists do it on the violin family and keyboards, and to a lesser extent on wind instruments. Tone and manner is the player’s brand. Except for the classical guitar, where Kurtz’s story has convinced me that the aim seems to be to make everyone sound alike.
There’s a section of Kurtz’s story, after he leaves music school in Vienna, where he runs up against the reality of life as a jobbing musician, realises he’s not going to make a career of concert performance, and quits. There’s an even more painful moment when he listens to a recording of what he thought was a marvellous graduating concert, and hears everything that is unfinished about it. Despite this, he takes the guitar up again, and then refers to what he is doing as “practicing”.
At this point I wanted to slap him upside the head.
Practice is what we do when we don’t know how to do what we want to do. Practice is when we still have to look at the book to play a scale or a basic chord shape (though looking at an advanced reference book isn’t a sign we are practicing, it’s a sign that we’re learning something new). Practice is what we do to gain the physical strength and conditioning to do what we want to do (and if you think there isn’t strength and conditioning in a guitarist’s left hand, go try stopping some strings with your pinkie finger and let me know how that goes). Practice is what we do to gain the basics of competence needed to perform. How much there is to learn to get to that stage, in any skill, becomes obvious and daunting to beginners very quickly, and they drop out after a few weeks.
The idea of “practicing” is itself a little suspect: it implies that one is somehow doing something and not doing it at the same time. I can practice my tennis serve if I don’t do any more than serve. Once I serve to someone and we play more strokes, we are playing tennis and my serve was a real serve, not a practice serve. There are many things that one can never “practice” in this sense: there’s no such thing as a "practice deadlift”, just like there’s no such thing as “practicing driving in traffic” since you must drive in traffic to do it, and then, oh, you’re driving in traffic. Just not very well.
It’s tempting to suppose that practice for a sportsman anything that isn’t competing, and for a musician or actor, practice is anything not done in front of an audience. Only when one performs for others is what one does “real”, otherwise it’s “just practicing”. Well, I’d suggest that a sprinter who wants to run faster than 3:43:13 for the mile can’t “practice” by running 5:00:00 miles. They can train in many ways, but if they want to see how effective that training is, leaving until the first heat might be a little late. At some point they will have to get on the track and run a mile in practice for real, even though there are no medals to be won.
Doing something “for real” isn’t about the external circumstances, it’s about the internal attitude. In his seminal essay on skills, Hubert Dreyfus points out that past basic competency, further improvement needs an emotional commitment to what you're doing. Someone who wants to move from advanced beginner to competency and beyond stops “practicing” and starts doing. Playing an instrument, that means wanting to make music rather than just string notes together, and making music means that what you do has an emotional or physical effect on people, even if it’s only you.
Perhaps the isolation of the practice room creates an ontological illusion: it tells the musician they are one their own and “no-one is listening”, and that therefore what they are doing isn’t real because there’s no performance and so no audience. But of course, there is. There is the musician themselves, and they are performing for themselves.
Perhaps it would be better to think of the work one does on one’s way from advanced beginner to competence and beyond, not as “practicing”, but as “performance that you don’t want others to hear because it won’t be as good as it could be”. That would contain the question of how rough and imperfect you are prepared to be and still go on to perform. Answering that question may reveal that your issue isn’t with technique, it’s with performing for others, and for yourself.
I’ll leave you with these: the first is Tomatito playing por Bulerias
and the second is Bert Jansch playing Blues Run The Game
It’s not about technique. It’s about music, and music is about emotion. And notice that they are both using capos on the third fret. This is frowned upon very deeply in the classical tradition. I'll go with the technical choices of Jansch or Tomatito anytime.
Monday, 13 June 2016
Monday, 6 June 2016
Never Mind the Proof, Why Is The Riemann-Roch Theorem True?
A very long time ago, I began a project to understand the modern theory of algebraic geometry, and specifically the proof of the Riemann-Roch theorem for projective curves. It's finally over. The completed paper, Never Mind the Proof, Why Is The Riemann-Roch Theorem True? is available here.
Why should you read it? Because it will actually explain why the theorem is a) difficult in the first place, and b) true. You won’t drown in endless algebra, rather swim in a sea of geometric intuitions. You will see the Zariski topology being used to provide geometric insight and understand why flatness is at once difficult and yet easy. You will thoroughly understand the difference between a vector, a co-vector and a one-form (a lot of people who write textbooks don’t) and so why a global holomorphic one-form doesn’t give rise to a global holomorphic function. There’s a simple geometric way of thinking about spectrums and sheaves, and an explanation of where twisting sheaves really come from. It’s all about the informal illustrations, arguments and analogies.
It's inspired by Imre Lakatos' championing of informal mathematics, especially in his essay Proofs and Refutations. The aim is to show that informal argument and exposition can lead to greater understanding of abstract ideas and complicated proofs. I used the Riemann-Roch theorem for Riemann surfaces and projective curves because it provides an example of the informal approach in action on a deep but accessible theorem, rather than a toy example.
It has my real name on it and I did think about that. W S Gosset, aka “Student”, was the only serious mathematician to rock a pseudonym (Nicholas Bourbaki might be someone’s real name, oh wait…) and it’s just pretentious for me. If I was someone whose name appears in the Financial Times, maybe a pseudonym might be appropriate, but I’m just another hack in an open-plan office. Nobody I work with or know is ever going to Google “Riemann-Roch” and find this page by chance. Everyone else will be a stranger - but welcome - now and in the future, so my real name is much the same as a pseudonym.
Why should you read it? Because it will actually explain why the theorem is a) difficult in the first place, and b) true. You won’t drown in endless algebra, rather swim in a sea of geometric intuitions. You will see the Zariski topology being used to provide geometric insight and understand why flatness is at once difficult and yet easy. You will thoroughly understand the difference between a vector, a co-vector and a one-form (a lot of people who write textbooks don’t) and so why a global holomorphic one-form doesn’t give rise to a global holomorphic function. There’s a simple geometric way of thinking about spectrums and sheaves, and an explanation of where twisting sheaves really come from. It’s all about the informal illustrations, arguments and analogies.
It's inspired by Imre Lakatos' championing of informal mathematics, especially in his essay Proofs and Refutations. The aim is to show that informal argument and exposition can lead to greater understanding of abstract ideas and complicated proofs. I used the Riemann-Roch theorem for Riemann surfaces and projective curves because it provides an example of the informal approach in action on a deep but accessible theorem, rather than a toy example.
It has my real name on it and I did think about that. W S Gosset, aka “Student”, was the only serious mathematician to rock a pseudonym (Nicholas Bourbaki might be someone’s real name, oh wait…) and it’s just pretentious for me. If I was someone whose name appears in the Financial Times, maybe a pseudonym might be appropriate, but I’m just another hack in an open-plan office. Nobody I work with or know is ever going to Google “Riemann-Roch” and find this page by chance. Everyone else will be a stranger - but welcome - now and in the future, so my real name is much the same as a pseudonym.
Thursday, 2 June 2016
Remain vs Exit: Round 2
The central argument in the Remain camp is the awful economic consequence of the UK leaving the EU. The central flaw in that argument is seen by asking: how do those consequences come about? It won’t be UK companies refusing to do business with EU countries – why would they? It won’t be the UK Government banning all EU imports – why would it? So if there are sudden drops of trade, it must be because the EU is throwing a hissy fit and banning exports to the UK and imports from it. Or imposing ridiculous trade tariffs. And why would it do that? To encourage the others, of course, to demonstrate the wrath of Mama Merkel and Papa Junker. Walk through that door and we will cut off your inheritance.
That’s how this is being told: as a divorce between Daddy UK and Mummy EU. Mummy EU is threatening fifteen sorts of pain in the settlement, which leads one to wonder how she would behave if we stayed, or whether we should have married her in the first place.
Except this isn’t a marriage, it’s business. The day after the UK votes to leave, everything will go on as usual, including the UK’s payments to the EU. It will take a few years to negotiate the new agreement. Only two things will happen immediately: the Strasbourg Court will vanish from British legal consideration (except for trade disputes), and UK borders can and should slam shut to “refugees”. The UK will continue to welcome with open arms all the talented, educated, hard-working young men and women from countries with economies so awful that a job in Pret A Manger looks attractive. Send those people home and London closes down the next day. Retailers and many other companies would go broke before they could find UK citizens to do those jobs.
Earlier I said that “the world has changed” and for that reason we should stay in the EU and work from within. The world has changed, and the UK will have to negotiate with the EU and if it wants to export to it, make goods and provide services that abide by its rules. Sure. That’s true of any country the UK wants to trade with. The only question is whether it is better placed inside or outside the system. I suspect in the end it will make no difference, and I want the Supreme Court of the UK to be the final court of appeal. I don’t want Strasbourg (except for trade disputes with the EU, that’s a given). I want our management to have the right to refuse entry to anyone for any reason, and to expel anyone who isn’t a UK citizen for any reason. Everything else is business.
There are no consequences of Britain leaving that aren’t actually of the EC’s making. It will be the European Commission that takes it as an affront to its bureaucratic ego and tries to make the UK an object lesson for all the others. It will be the European Parliament who allows the Commission to do so. It won’t be your Leave vote.
Because you never stay with anyone who threatens you if you think about leaving.
That’s how this is being told: as a divorce between Daddy UK and Mummy EU. Mummy EU is threatening fifteen sorts of pain in the settlement, which leads one to wonder how she would behave if we stayed, or whether we should have married her in the first place.
Except this isn’t a marriage, it’s business. The day after the UK votes to leave, everything will go on as usual, including the UK’s payments to the EU. It will take a few years to negotiate the new agreement. Only two things will happen immediately: the Strasbourg Court will vanish from British legal consideration (except for trade disputes), and UK borders can and should slam shut to “refugees”. The UK will continue to welcome with open arms all the talented, educated, hard-working young men and women from countries with economies so awful that a job in Pret A Manger looks attractive. Send those people home and London closes down the next day. Retailers and many other companies would go broke before they could find UK citizens to do those jobs.
Earlier I said that “the world has changed” and for that reason we should stay in the EU and work from within. The world has changed, and the UK will have to negotiate with the EU and if it wants to export to it, make goods and provide services that abide by its rules. Sure. That’s true of any country the UK wants to trade with. The only question is whether it is better placed inside or outside the system. I suspect in the end it will make no difference, and I want the Supreme Court of the UK to be the final court of appeal. I don’t want Strasbourg (except for trade disputes with the EU, that’s a given). I want our management to have the right to refuse entry to anyone for any reason, and to expel anyone who isn’t a UK citizen for any reason. Everything else is business.
There are no consequences of Britain leaving that aren’t actually of the EC’s making. It will be the European Commission that takes it as an affront to its bureaucratic ego and tries to make the UK an object lesson for all the others. It will be the European Parliament who allows the Commission to do so. It won’t be your Leave vote.
Because you never stay with anyone who threatens you if you think about leaving.
Monday, 30 May 2016
Chasing The Scream - The Opposite of Addiction
For a (very) short while way back in the day I dated a girl who did heroin: I’d watched her chopping lines upstairs at a party. A week or so later, we were fooling around (no sex) in my rented flat in Putney, and when we stopped and were lying there kinda peacefully, she said “This is how heroin makes me feel”. She was taking heroin just so she could feel like she’d been fooling around for a while? How freaking bad were the rest of her hours? It turned out, as I slid into alcoholism, that some of my hours may have been as bad as some of hers.
Addicts and drunks are made, partly by genetics and partly by upbringing. Psychologists are learning that harsh emotions are real, chemical storms and floods that destroy one set of synapse links in the brain and make others, and affect the autonomic nervous system as well, so that stress hormones are released at the slightest provocation, because when the addict was small and helpless, the provocations were always serious. I’m sure we will learn that good experiences also create permanent changes in the brain and autonomic nervous system that lead to increased an attraction to, and pleasure from, social events and the company of people. Those without the good experiences or with too many bad ones can learn to behave like an emotionally-balanced person, but they will never feel like one.
In his insightful book about the War on Drugs, Chasing The Scream, Johann Hart suggests that isolation keeps addicts addicted, and connection with people and society helps them get off the drugs. Addicts do improve when they have a job, a medical-grade supply of their drug, someone to listen to their stories, a partner and a place to live. The people who run those programs are decent, caring and practical and the world needs more of those programs and less bullying by politicians. Normal people who find themselves using drugs to cope with extreme situations - the Vets who came back from Vietnam and the patients who come off heavy post-op opiates - don’t live without the drugs because they have “human connections”, they live without the drugs because they are normal people and they don’t need to cope with an extreme envirnoment anymore. The addicts who don’t stop are people whose intolerable environment is internal, not external: that’s why “geographicals” - moving or travelling for months on end to try to make things better - don’t work.
“Connection” is either an euphemism for sex, and that’s just drugs, or it’s about doing stuff together or sitting around talking, and that’s like watching British TV: it seems okay at the time, but when you’re on your own again, you feel cheated. There are a handful of people I can spend time with and feel that time is well-spent, but most hanging-out time is not, minute-for-minute, worth an episode of Elementary or Angel.
There’s a reason people in the 12-Step programs call themselves “recovering alcoholics” or “recovering addicts”. They understand that no-one stops being an addict, and alcoholic or any other kind of dysfunction. What they can stop is acting out on their addiction. The opposite of (acting out on) addiction is living a routine life without excitement or drama, and it’s the vanity and obsession to attend a day job, keep orderly digs, exercise, eat right and read challenging books so that you don’t turn into a tub of lard. It’s getting out of bed and go about your day because you woke up alive again. Most of all, it’s taking chronic low-level emotional un-rest, dis-ease and emptiness, and handling the occasional flare-ups into real emotional pain. It’s those flare-ups that send so many addicts back out again, and what attending 12-Step meetings is can help manage.
Some addicts reach a moment in their sobriety when they finally accept that nothing and nobody can make them feel better. It can be an awful few weeks while they deal with the idea that they never will know peace and rest and love. They really are on their own, and they learn that the reason for telling the truth is the same as the reason for having a day job is the same as the reason for being honest and thoughtful is the same as the reason for being healthy and organised is the same as the reason for keeping people at a polite distance: it’s less effort, it keeps their lives simple, and you don’t have to remember what lies you told to whom.
But in this realisation lies freedom. The sober addict, in their emotional emptiness, can live for any reason they choose, except the search for an impossible emotional rest and ease. It’s the people who can make “human connection” who wind up as slaves to marriage and fatherhood and all the games that women and children play, and all the threats that wives and employers can make. The sober addict, knowing that “connection” is for them ultimately unsatisfying, can reject the idea that “the real meaning of life is other people” and find a meaning for themselves. Even if that meaning is simply a simple defiance of their condition: showing up and living sober despite. This isn’t easy, but that’s a whole other story.
Addicts and drunks are made, partly by genetics and partly by upbringing. Psychologists are learning that harsh emotions are real, chemical storms and floods that destroy one set of synapse links in the brain and make others, and affect the autonomic nervous system as well, so that stress hormones are released at the slightest provocation, because when the addict was small and helpless, the provocations were always serious. I’m sure we will learn that good experiences also create permanent changes in the brain and autonomic nervous system that lead to increased an attraction to, and pleasure from, social events and the company of people. Those without the good experiences or with too many bad ones can learn to behave like an emotionally-balanced person, but they will never feel like one.
In his insightful book about the War on Drugs, Chasing The Scream, Johann Hart suggests that isolation keeps addicts addicted, and connection with people and society helps them get off the drugs. Addicts do improve when they have a job, a medical-grade supply of their drug, someone to listen to their stories, a partner and a place to live. The people who run those programs are decent, caring and practical and the world needs more of those programs and less bullying by politicians. Normal people who find themselves using drugs to cope with extreme situations - the Vets who came back from Vietnam and the patients who come off heavy post-op opiates - don’t live without the drugs because they have “human connections”, they live without the drugs because they are normal people and they don’t need to cope with an extreme envirnoment anymore. The addicts who don’t stop are people whose intolerable environment is internal, not external: that’s why “geographicals” - moving or travelling for months on end to try to make things better - don’t work.
“Connection” is either an euphemism for sex, and that’s just drugs, or it’s about doing stuff together or sitting around talking, and that’s like watching British TV: it seems okay at the time, but when you’re on your own again, you feel cheated. There are a handful of people I can spend time with and feel that time is well-spent, but most hanging-out time is not, minute-for-minute, worth an episode of Elementary or Angel.
There’s a reason people in the 12-Step programs call themselves “recovering alcoholics” or “recovering addicts”. They understand that no-one stops being an addict, and alcoholic or any other kind of dysfunction. What they can stop is acting out on their addiction. The opposite of (acting out on) addiction is living a routine life without excitement or drama, and it’s the vanity and obsession to attend a day job, keep orderly digs, exercise, eat right and read challenging books so that you don’t turn into a tub of lard. It’s getting out of bed and go about your day because you woke up alive again. Most of all, it’s taking chronic low-level emotional un-rest, dis-ease and emptiness, and handling the occasional flare-ups into real emotional pain. It’s those flare-ups that send so many addicts back out again, and what attending 12-Step meetings is can help manage.
Some addicts reach a moment in their sobriety when they finally accept that nothing and nobody can make them feel better. It can be an awful few weeks while they deal with the idea that they never will know peace and rest and love. They really are on their own, and they learn that the reason for telling the truth is the same as the reason for having a day job is the same as the reason for being honest and thoughtful is the same as the reason for being healthy and organised is the same as the reason for keeping people at a polite distance: it’s less effort, it keeps their lives simple, and you don’t have to remember what lies you told to whom.
But in this realisation lies freedom. The sober addict, in their emotional emptiness, can live for any reason they choose, except the search for an impossible emotional rest and ease. It’s the people who can make “human connection” who wind up as slaves to marriage and fatherhood and all the games that women and children play, and all the threats that wives and employers can make. The sober addict, knowing that “connection” is for them ultimately unsatisfying, can reject the idea that “the real meaning of life is other people” and find a meaning for themselves. Even if that meaning is simply a simple defiance of their condition: showing up and living sober despite. This isn’t easy, but that’s a whole other story.
Monday, 23 May 2016
Polarisation: or When You Get Better, Others Get Worse
For thousands of years, the distribution of just about any human quality, from height to charm through spear-throwing prowess, was distributed on a Bell-curve. Since about the 1970’s, technology and social change has created a phenomenon called “polarisation”.
Whenever a new piece of kit, knowledge, skill or social practice appears, standard consumer behaviour theory says that some people will jump right on it, others will wait a while, others will wait a longer while, and the rest will be hold-outs who don’t adopt or do so with very little engagement. This is the “early adopter / late adopter” model.
Polarisation isn’t anything to do with that, but might be confused with it.
Some bits of kit, knowledge, skill or social practice are only consumer goods and fashions. A few have the capability to change the quality of someone’s performance at a specific activity (think of the Wilson metal-head tennis racquet)
or even the quality of their health and life
Consider the difference in productivity between a programmer using a modern IDE with some hold-out insisting that Notepad and a good memory is all the development environment anyone needs; or consider the difference between you and the people at work who still haven’t go the message about weight-training and eating right.
When a change like that comes along, some people jump on it to take advantage of the improved performance or productivity it gives them: they want to do whatever it is better, they are prepared to put in the work to learn the new tech and acquire the habits needed to use it. Most other people look at the cost, either financial or of learning, time and work, and decide that they don’t care about whatever it is enough. So they don’t bother.
It’s what happens next that is the kicker: the people who want to improve, improve a lot, and the people who decide they don’t really care that much actually put less effort in and get worse. If, for the sake of an illustration, everyone starts off distributed along a Bell curve (the blue curve below), they wind up along a very different curve (the red one). Depending on the driving change it can happen in a year (high tech) or a decade (social change requiring new habits).
Polarisation is what happens when some people decide to exploit a technological or social change to improve at doing something, and others decide not to, or actually to ease off on doing whatever it is. If it’s a new bidding convention at Bridge, that’s not a problem: but someone who backs down from what little exercise they are doing because they can’t keep up with me or you, is deciding to give up. Polarisation isn’t about genetic or native advantages. Those follow the Bell Curve. Not only do you have to be born looking like Mica Arganaraz, you have to work at staying like that as well: there are a million ways to ruin that look and only a few to keep it.
It’s not enough to buy the gear (hence “all the gear and no idea”), it’s about acquiring new habits and knowledge. Polarisation is about self-discipline, a desire for improvement and/or excellence, combined of course with vanity and a mild obsessive-complusive thing. That’s what makes polarisation brutal: it’s often about moral character.
Notice that the red curve has a lot more people at the right-hand side of the distribution than the Bell curve does: after polarisation there are actually more smart (hot, fit, healthy, well-travelled, whatever) people than before, but everyone else slips to the left. That’s why companies are staffed mostly by novices and advanced beginners, who know enough to do the business-as-usual parts of their job, but not enough to innovate or troubleshoot. They and the company get bailed out by the people in that bump on the right. And they get dragged down by the people in that bump on the left: because there are also more really dumb (lazy, fat, stupid, whatever) people than there used to be as well.
Under polarisation, the smart get smarter and everyone else gets dumber; the fit get fitter and everyone else winds up on statins; the hot get hotter and everyone else puts on a bitch face and wears vanity sizes ; the cultured watch Eva Yerbabuana and everyone else watches Strictly Come Dancing; the travel bugs go to Malaysia one year and Uruguay the next while the rest barely leave the house except to go to work (that’s me); the healthy eat steak and broccoli while everyone else eats Mac and Cheese. And so it goes on. (This is not the same as “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”. That’s been happening since the start of time and has to do with the fact that wealth is a zero-sum game: for you to get rich, you have to take wealth from me. But I don’t get fit at your expense, since you can use the weights after I do. Those sorts of things aren’t zero-sum games.) The others are not worse off because of some conspiracy by the better-off, but because they have chosen to bother less. Some people are content to accept out loud that they have made this trade-off, but others don’t want to accept responsibility, and invent any number of conspiracy theories ("The Patriarchy”, “Colonial Oppression”) to explain why it is someone else’s fault.
It so happens that in the last few decades we have seen changes in the nature of work, entertainment, learning, food and exercise, that have produced a lot of polarisation. Hot women are hotter than they ever used to be, but the rest are barely even attractive. People who exercise are, by the standards of the 1960’s, absurdly fit and healthy, but the rest are physical basket-cases. The Internet has made it possible to wallow in junk culture, or to read books that even in the 1980’s could not be found outside an academic library or Foyles: but most people watch dumbed-down TV documentaries, if they even do that. Smart people have laptops and software that let them express and expand those smarts way beyond anything they could have done in the 1960’s. People with good taste have an incredibly wide range of culture in which to apply that taste, while people with no taste have endless opportunities to demonstrate their cultural klutz.
Although there are more smart people, they tend to congregate in the industries where their smarts are appreciated and rewarded: so they actively avoid the public sector, whereas in the mid-20th century, public service attracted smart people. There are more hot girls, and the contrast between them and regular women gets harsher, with the obvious effect on men’s enthusiasm for all things provisioning and commitment. There are more men who are in shape, and therefore less willing to settle for regular girls who can’t be bothered even with Pilates. The only people who notice the ill effects of polarisation are the people on the right-hand side of the curve: regular people don’t notice a thing, and the ones on the left-hand bump have a feeling that somehow they are utterly superfluous to the functioning of, well, anything, and that nobody would miss them if they vanished overnight. (That’s where third-wave feminism comes from: it’s a screeching demand that the world change to make them relevant so they don’t have to do any work themselves.)
Regular people will carry on leading mainstream lives: but they will be less healthy, less fit, less smart, less cultured, less everything, than before. They won’t notice that because they have no point of comparison except the unattainable standards of the people who put the work in. (This is one reason why governments publish health and dietary advice that is worthless at best and actually harmful at worst. They are trying to say something that will be useful to people who didn’t put the work in and are not going to start now.)
That has repercussions for the health service, the quality of your local government, the quality of the teaching your children get, the quality of customer service you get, and a ton of other stuff. Supported by good systems, even novices and advanced beginners can deliver a reasonable service. The problems start when the organisations need to change those systems to adapt to changing legislation, customer needs and suppliers. They have no internal problem-solving expertise to draw on, and some organisations don’t even have people good enough to spot bad advice from expensive consultants. Take one look at the NHS to see where that goes.
Polarisation matters, and as long as you stay on the right side of it, you're okay. You don't have to be good at everything, but you do have to resist the temptation to slide from acceptable, and so be a little better at a lot of things than most. It's not that hard.
You'll just have to stop flicking through Facebook and read a proper book instead.
Whenever a new piece of kit, knowledge, skill or social practice appears, standard consumer behaviour theory says that some people will jump right on it, others will wait a while, others will wait a longer while, and the rest will be hold-outs who don’t adopt or do so with very little engagement. This is the “early adopter / late adopter” model.
Polarisation isn’t anything to do with that, but might be confused with it.
Some bits of kit, knowledge, skill or social practice are only consumer goods and fashions. A few have the capability to change the quality of someone’s performance at a specific activity (think of the Wilson metal-head tennis racquet)
(If you were an okay player, this made you even better)
or even the quality of their health and life
(It is not the only exercise you need to do, but you should be able to do it)
Consider the difference in productivity between a programmer using a modern IDE with some hold-out insisting that Notepad and a good memory is all the development environment anyone needs; or consider the difference between you and the people at work who still haven’t go the message about weight-training and eating right.
When a change like that comes along, some people jump on it to take advantage of the improved performance or productivity it gives them: they want to do whatever it is better, they are prepared to put in the work to learn the new tech and acquire the habits needed to use it. Most other people look at the cost, either financial or of learning, time and work, and decide that they don’t care about whatever it is enough. So they don’t bother.
It’s what happens next that is the kicker: the people who want to improve, improve a lot, and the people who decide they don’t really care that much actually put less effort in and get worse. If, for the sake of an illustration, everyone starts off distributed along a Bell curve (the blue curve below), they wind up along a very different curve (the red one). Depending on the driving change it can happen in a year (high tech) or a decade (social change requiring new habits).
Polarisation is what happens when some people decide to exploit a technological or social change to improve at doing something, and others decide not to, or actually to ease off on doing whatever it is. If it’s a new bidding convention at Bridge, that’s not a problem: but someone who backs down from what little exercise they are doing because they can’t keep up with me or you, is deciding to give up. Polarisation isn’t about genetic or native advantages. Those follow the Bell Curve. Not only do you have to be born looking like Mica Arganaraz, you have to work at staying like that as well: there are a million ways to ruin that look and only a few to keep it.
(Any excuse for a picture of Mica.)
It’s not enough to buy the gear (hence “all the gear and no idea”), it’s about acquiring new habits and knowledge. Polarisation is about self-discipline, a desire for improvement and/or excellence, combined of course with vanity and a mild obsessive-complusive thing. That’s what makes polarisation brutal: it’s often about moral character.
Notice that the red curve has a lot more people at the right-hand side of the distribution than the Bell curve does: after polarisation there are actually more smart (hot, fit, healthy, well-travelled, whatever) people than before, but everyone else slips to the left. That’s why companies are staffed mostly by novices and advanced beginners, who know enough to do the business-as-usual parts of their job, but not enough to innovate or troubleshoot. They and the company get bailed out by the people in that bump on the right. And they get dragged down by the people in that bump on the left: because there are also more really dumb (lazy, fat, stupid, whatever) people than there used to be as well.
Under polarisation, the smart get smarter and everyone else gets dumber; the fit get fitter and everyone else winds up on statins; the hot get hotter and everyone else puts on a bitch face and wears vanity sizes ; the cultured watch Eva Yerbabuana and everyone else watches Strictly Come Dancing; the travel bugs go to Malaysia one year and Uruguay the next while the rest barely leave the house except to go to work (that’s me); the healthy eat steak and broccoli while everyone else eats Mac and Cheese. And so it goes on. (This is not the same as “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”. That’s been happening since the start of time and has to do with the fact that wealth is a zero-sum game: for you to get rich, you have to take wealth from me. But I don’t get fit at your expense, since you can use the weights after I do. Those sorts of things aren’t zero-sum games.) The others are not worse off because of some conspiracy by the better-off, but because they have chosen to bother less. Some people are content to accept out loud that they have made this trade-off, but others don’t want to accept responsibility, and invent any number of conspiracy theories ("The Patriarchy”, “Colonial Oppression”) to explain why it is someone else’s fault.
It so happens that in the last few decades we have seen changes in the nature of work, entertainment, learning, food and exercise, that have produced a lot of polarisation. Hot women are hotter than they ever used to be, but the rest are barely even attractive. People who exercise are, by the standards of the 1960’s, absurdly fit and healthy, but the rest are physical basket-cases. The Internet has made it possible to wallow in junk culture, or to read books that even in the 1980’s could not be found outside an academic library or Foyles: but most people watch dumbed-down TV documentaries, if they even do that. Smart people have laptops and software that let them express and expand those smarts way beyond anything they could have done in the 1960’s. People with good taste have an incredibly wide range of culture in which to apply that taste, while people with no taste have endless opportunities to demonstrate their cultural klutz.
Although there are more smart people, they tend to congregate in the industries where their smarts are appreciated and rewarded: so they actively avoid the public sector, whereas in the mid-20th century, public service attracted smart people. There are more hot girls, and the contrast between them and regular women gets harsher, with the obvious effect on men’s enthusiasm for all things provisioning and commitment. There are more men who are in shape, and therefore less willing to settle for regular girls who can’t be bothered even with Pilates. The only people who notice the ill effects of polarisation are the people on the right-hand side of the curve: regular people don’t notice a thing, and the ones on the left-hand bump have a feeling that somehow they are utterly superfluous to the functioning of, well, anything, and that nobody would miss them if they vanished overnight. (That’s where third-wave feminism comes from: it’s a screeching demand that the world change to make them relevant so they don’t have to do any work themselves.)
Regular people will carry on leading mainstream lives: but they will be less healthy, less fit, less smart, less cultured, less everything, than before. They won’t notice that because they have no point of comparison except the unattainable standards of the people who put the work in. (This is one reason why governments publish health and dietary advice that is worthless at best and actually harmful at worst. They are trying to say something that will be useful to people who didn’t put the work in and are not going to start now.)
That has repercussions for the health service, the quality of your local government, the quality of the teaching your children get, the quality of customer service you get, and a ton of other stuff. Supported by good systems, even novices and advanced beginners can deliver a reasonable service. The problems start when the organisations need to change those systems to adapt to changing legislation, customer needs and suppliers. They have no internal problem-solving expertise to draw on, and some organisations don’t even have people good enough to spot bad advice from expensive consultants. Take one look at the NHS to see where that goes.
Polarisation matters, and as long as you stay on the right side of it, you're okay. You don't have to be good at everything, but you do have to resist the temptation to slide from acceptable, and so be a little better at a lot of things than most. It's not that hard.
You'll just have to stop flicking through Facebook and read a proper book instead.
Monday, 16 May 2016
The Routemaster, 1950’s Manliness and Being Out of the EU - You Can’t Go Back to Any of Them
Every decade there’s a year or so when someone decides to revive the styles of a couple of decade earlier. They did it for the Seventies – the decade that style forgot. Nobody actually revives the exact clothes and music: what they do is update some of the iconic styles and designs so that it contrasts with the current-decade stuff but doesn’t look anachronistic. It takes a lot of talent to do it, and nobody got it right for the Seventies revival.
We can’t go back. Not even to the Routemaster bus: why would we give up forty years of improvement in manufacturing and engine technology? The old ones broke down all the time, chucked out diesel fumes and needed big burly men to turn the non-power-assisted steering wheel and stomp on the non-power-assisted brakes. So we get updated Routemasters that are a darn sight more comfortable and can be driven by women (if you care about that sort of thing).
Same with social policy and roles. We can’t go back because the context, the rest of the world, isn’t going to go back with us. Marriage 1.0 was horrible, which is why as soon as they could get out of it (1st January 1971 in the UK when the Divorce Reform Act 1969 came into force), women ran for the legal door and haven’t stopped since. The alternative to easy divorce is not happy “we worked it out” marriages, but a lifetime of indifference, emotional and physical violence, and a long slow death of the soul. Anglosphere institutions support Marriage 2.0 and are not reversible.
Old-fashioned masculinity was not what contemporary writers think it was and whatever conception of being-a-man we make in and for the Anglosphere (as opposed to in and for, say, Nigeria) needs to be made in the context of post-modern Capitalism. Whatever it means in that context (and I’ve said my piece on that), “masculinity” can’t mean that fantasy of post WW2 Golden Age male behaviour promulgated in sites like The Art of Manliness.
It’s the same with the EU. We can’t go back to being Britain-Before-Joining-Europe because the rest of the world has changed and won’t support that anymore. We would be better-off staying in and working to change the EU, especially removing the ability of the Strasbourg Court to over-rule national governments. Europe is never going to be a Federal State, and its bureaucrats have to accept that. Only Britain is big enough to make them see that: the French and Germans still think that Federal Europe will be France (or Germany).
Papa Hegel’s crucial insight was that Nature, mankind and all its works, was a process in development, not a static, unchanging, cyclical bunch of events (though that was a good description of the mediaeval world). Thesis-antithesis-synthesis: Marriage, masculinity and femininity 1.0; Marriage, masculinity and femininity 2.0; Marriage, masculinity and femininity 3.0; and ever onwards. Same with the EU. EU 1.0 was a trade zone; EU 2.0 was an attempt at making a Federal State; EU 3.0 will be an association of co-ordinated national governments; and as the rest of the world changes, we will need EU 4.0.
This line of argument doesn’t apply to everything. Some things are part of the environment and other things just live there. The Internet started as an academic toy and became part of the environment, but Twitter is a loss-making parasite in it. Look carefully at the stuff that seems to survive environmental change and you’ll see that it’s not what exactly what it was, but has been tweaked to fit in with the new world.
We can’t go back. Not even to the Routemaster bus: why would we give up forty years of improvement in manufacturing and engine technology? The old ones broke down all the time, chucked out diesel fumes and needed big burly men to turn the non-power-assisted steering wheel and stomp on the non-power-assisted brakes. So we get updated Routemasters that are a darn sight more comfortable and can be driven by women (if you care about that sort of thing).
Same with social policy and roles. We can’t go back because the context, the rest of the world, isn’t going to go back with us. Marriage 1.0 was horrible, which is why as soon as they could get out of it (1st January 1971 in the UK when the Divorce Reform Act 1969 came into force), women ran for the legal door and haven’t stopped since. The alternative to easy divorce is not happy “we worked it out” marriages, but a lifetime of indifference, emotional and physical violence, and a long slow death of the soul. Anglosphere institutions support Marriage 2.0 and are not reversible.
Old-fashioned masculinity was not what contemporary writers think it was and whatever conception of being-a-man we make in and for the Anglosphere (as opposed to in and for, say, Nigeria) needs to be made in the context of post-modern Capitalism. Whatever it means in that context (and I’ve said my piece on that), “masculinity” can’t mean that fantasy of post WW2 Golden Age male behaviour promulgated in sites like The Art of Manliness.
It’s the same with the EU. We can’t go back to being Britain-Before-Joining-Europe because the rest of the world has changed and won’t support that anymore. We would be better-off staying in and working to change the EU, especially removing the ability of the Strasbourg Court to over-rule national governments. Europe is never going to be a Federal State, and its bureaucrats have to accept that. Only Britain is big enough to make them see that: the French and Germans still think that Federal Europe will be France (or Germany).
Papa Hegel’s crucial insight was that Nature, mankind and all its works, was a process in development, not a static, unchanging, cyclical bunch of events (though that was a good description of the mediaeval world). Thesis-antithesis-synthesis: Marriage, masculinity and femininity 1.0; Marriage, masculinity and femininity 2.0; Marriage, masculinity and femininity 3.0; and ever onwards. Same with the EU. EU 1.0 was a trade zone; EU 2.0 was an attempt at making a Federal State; EU 3.0 will be an association of co-ordinated national governments; and as the rest of the world changes, we will need EU 4.0.
This line of argument doesn’t apply to everything. Some things are part of the environment and other things just live there. The Internet started as an academic toy and became part of the environment, but Twitter is a loss-making parasite in it. Look carefully at the stuff that seems to survive environmental change and you’ll see that it’s not what exactly what it was, but has been tweaked to fit in with the new world.
Monday, 9 May 2016
The Mind-Body Problem: Phenomenology to the Rescue
I ran across this browsing in some odd reddit...
You are your body. Your body includes your brain, and your brain is a self-conscious organ - unlike your spine, where large chunks of autonomic functions happen without anyone being any the wiser. The brain can be self-conscious because it isn’t doing one huge task, but a whole bunch of independent tasks that can inter-communicate. Many of those tasks (facial recognition, throwing balls, recognising bad smells) are built right into the firmware. Some of those tasks involve monitoring and modifying other tasks (hence the phrase “think, you idiot!”) and that’s where the self-cosciouness of the brain arises. What’s that you say? That’s what a multi-tasking operating system does? Am I saying that OS X is self-aware? Well, which do you want? Accepting the idea that a modern computer has formal self-awareness, or more obfuscation and mysticism about souls, spirits and non-material consciousness? (I rate OS X somewhere about the level of a cat.)
The “Me” in “Who is me” is probably the dominant voice that’s chattering in your head at any given time, along with the dominant physical urge you’re experiencing (your head says No No No and your dick says Yes Yes Yes). That’s why we sometimes wonder what the hell’s going on with us: occasionally a brain task that doesn’t usually get much air time, gets on the phone and rants away. Where did that come from? Who am I?
Your body, your self. (I could write a book with that title… oh, wait…).
My body is the container from which I experience my life. We all make these kind of statements in our daily speeches and writings, but I don't think many people really take the time to think about, and try to understand what these statements tell us about the composition of a human being. If you say, ''my x'', or ''I have y'', or ''I possess z'', what you are trying to communicate(whether you realize this or not), is that you are a separate entity from the object you claim to possess. You cannot be a part of an entity you have, or possess. My body... My mind... My emotions... My feelings... My intellect... etc.. Think about this. Who is this man called Me, who has a body, a mind, emotions, feelings, and intellect, and can boldly say MY body, mind, etc. After thinking about these things(and many other theories) for a long time, I have come to the same conclusion that most religions believe in, that: Man is a spirit, who lives in a body. I have a body and I can control it and make decisions for it. But who am I? Or Who is me? Somebody help!Help is at hand. The Mind-Body duality thing has plagued philosophy and psychology since man first thought about it, and still continues to fool brain-studies academics. It wasn’t really until the mid-twentieth century that Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty got their phenomenological groove on and provided the basis of an answer. To save you wading through Being and Time (Heidegger) and The Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty), I’ll summarise.
You are your body. Your body includes your brain, and your brain is a self-conscious organ - unlike your spine, where large chunks of autonomic functions happen without anyone being any the wiser. The brain can be self-conscious because it isn’t doing one huge task, but a whole bunch of independent tasks that can inter-communicate. Many of those tasks (facial recognition, throwing balls, recognising bad smells) are built right into the firmware. Some of those tasks involve monitoring and modifying other tasks (hence the phrase “think, you idiot!”) and that’s where the self-cosciouness of the brain arises. What’s that you say? That’s what a multi-tasking operating system does? Am I saying that OS X is self-aware? Well, which do you want? Accepting the idea that a modern computer has formal self-awareness, or more obfuscation and mysticism about souls, spirits and non-material consciousness? (I rate OS X somewhere about the level of a cat.)
The “Me” in “Who is me” is probably the dominant voice that’s chattering in your head at any given time, along with the dominant physical urge you’re experiencing (your head says No No No and your dick says Yes Yes Yes). That’s why we sometimes wonder what the hell’s going on with us: occasionally a brain task that doesn’t usually get much air time, gets on the phone and rants away. Where did that come from? Who am I?
Your body, your self. (I could write a book with that title… oh, wait…).
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