The importance of accepting the role of both chance and cause/effect

This is a second post in a series about the concept of free will. The first part is here. In that part we assumed the existence of a machine, known as the Sorter, which as the ability to perfectly predict human behavior. Let's further assume that this machine has some sort of plan to use its knowledge to further human social harmony.

Ultimately, we this series is about accepting that both chance and cause/effect govern our lives.  I suppose this assumes that chance is not just the result of deterministic forces we don’t yet understand.  However, in practical terms there are things that happen for a reason and things that just happen.  As long as the Sorter is the only thing that embraces this reality, then it remains in control.  That is, the Sorter has a plan, but it knows that chance events may disrupt that plan.  Jason was not supposed to be there, but the Sorter improvises.  This could confused some people, because the Sorter behaves as though it did plan certain things.  Sometimes, the ability to take advantage of chance events makes us believe in one of two fallacious ideas.

The first is fate.  We may convince ourselves that we are destined for greatness or despair due to forces beyond our control.  Though they do not express this explicitly, some are subject to this belief and is prone to self sacrifice and refusal to take action. Others might also struggle with the Sorter’s ability, but in their case it manifests as a confusion between the Sorter predicting outcomes and the Sorter causing outcomes.

The second is complete self reliance.  We may convince ourselves that we have determined our own outcome.  Rosalind and Marianne embrace this idea initially.  While some attempt to achieve self reliance through force of will, others attempt to achieve it through knowledge.  Yet another kind of person is a bit of a mix of both belief in external and internal control.  He operates under the fear that his life may be utterly outside his control, but still resists that control in a way that the person prone to self sacrifice does not.  Thus he behaves in ways more erratic and irrational than anyone else.  This makes him an ideal candidate for the lynch pin of the Sorters plan, because he is the easiest to manipulate.

Absolute faith in either fate or self reliance is an attempt to convert chance into choice and deny its existence.  The Sorter, possessing no psychological need to deny chance, thus appears to be in control because it can adapt.  Once some people begin to take advantage of chance events, they begin to turn the tide.  They may not be successful at first, but eventually they might manage to outsmart the Sorter.

However, acknowledging the role of chance in our lives involves more than adapting to it.  Ultimately, chance is essential to progress. No one would know this more than the one who creates the machine to begin with.  His work on the Sorter forces him to come face to face with the predictability of human behavior.  He counteracts this by injecting chance into his life on purpose.  He uses the roulette device to guide his work and ultimately makes the Sorter self-aware.  This is mirrors the emergence of human intelligence from evolutionary processes.  Natural selection filters random mutations according to their suitability for survivability in a particular environment. The difference is that natural selection blind and driven by survival, whereas the Sorter's creator has a specific goal.  He knows he cannot achieve this goal by “solving for x”.  There is no way for him to get outside himself and look at a problem in a different way without inducing a mental quantum leap.  

There is no way to guarantee that events will not ultimately overcome us.  That is the case no matter what, whether we embrace chance,  attempt to remove chance from our lives, or resign ourselves to inaction or insanity.

The Incoherence Of The Free Will Hypothesis

Before we can ask ourselves whether we possess a free will, we have to ask ourselves what free will is and what criteria we might accept as proof of its existence.  If we pose the hypothesis that free will exists, then that hypothesis must be testable, which is to say falsifiable.  What experiment would you use to prove that free will exists or does not?  

At first it seems easy to construct such an experiment.  Suppose that we developed a machine that could perfectly predict human behavior via a sophisticated mathematical model of psychology. We'll call this machine the Sorter. The makers of this machine suppose that if the Sorter succeeds in predicting the behavior of its subjects, then free will does not exist. However, the converse doesn't obtain. The failure of the Sorter to predict human behavior does not mean that free will doesn't exist. The hypothesis may live another day, but one could always argue that a better Sorter might still prove it false. With this line of reasoning we would have to conclude that we can never know if one possesses free will because a better, more accurate model of human behavior might always be possible.

Having stated that, we must step back and ask the question again: what is free will?  What have we proven false if the Sorter succeeds?  The nature of the experiment implies that free will is the ability to act in a way that cannot be predicted by any model, no matter how sophisticated.  This is tantamount to stating that what governs human behavior is either pure chance or some principle outside the descriptive powers of science.  

Neither of these thoughts is very satisfying.  If pure chance governs our behavior, then there is nothing we can do to change the outcome of our lives.  More significantly, if society is the aggregation of human behavior, then it cannot achieve momentum toward a common goal.  Over small intervals this may appear to be the case, but even a coin toss can come up heads ten times in a row.  Over large sample sizes regression to the mean is inevitable.  

The other option is that human behavior is essentially miraculous.  What we are saying is that science cannot predict it, nor can it ever predict it.  Thus, it must exist outside of logic, cause and effect, or any principles for decoding the universe that the human mind could ever conjure.  In this case the concept is incoherent by definition.  That is, we are defining free will as something the human mind can never understand.  The first question I might ask is how this is distinguishable from pure chance.  While we can suppose the existence of this super-natural principle that we cannot even describe, we have to live with the knowledge that we cannot control it to achieve our goals and that we cannot ever know if it exists or if our lives are really are victims of probability.  Either way, it is not related to human consciousness or subject to human desire.  

Your Flash Fiction Minute: Addict

The cop stole a glance at her, where she lay on the pavement, and wandered back to the crowd.  His eyes had peered from the shade beneath his cap (god, the glare from the television cameras was unbearable), and his mouth curled on one side for an instant before straightening again.  Mindy knew that look meant, “I know who you are.  You’re the Glam Lady.”  It filled her with terror, and shame.

Some folks say their memories are like fragmented video clips, sometimes shuffled out of order.  It wasn’t like that for Mindy.  She had one long, smooth spool of film.  She wound it backward, to the time she’d been a lady with a mop on television, and her husband couldn’t stop her from cleaning.  She polished the whole house, and then invited the kids to run through it with their shoes on.  Then she began again.  She loved her cleaner,  Floor Glam.  It had been an obtuse little advertisement that played during shitty little daytime soaps.  But then teenagers gave it life by posting her half-senseless character on the Internet.  The Glam Lady was born.  Getting into the groove, Mindy filmed new adds for fake products. Dale Cassidy of Peak Exploding Oven Cleaner.  Homeless Sam of Tourist Killer Roach Spray.  Men, boys, old women and animals.  No one knew they were all Mindy. 

She asked herself; why had she been on her way to a talk show?

She rolled the film back to its ragged end, the present.  She examined her prostrate body; she was dressed in spiky shoes and a low dress.  White lines cross the pavement beneath her.  She’d fallen in a crosswalk, wrapped in her best party gear, surrounded by cops, news hawks and spectators.  A car and its broken headlight idled ten feet from her.  Strands of her dark hair coiled around the glass shards.  Medics were coming with the gurney now.

Mindy spun the reel backward again, stopping it with an imaginary finger.  She’d been watching her date focus on his plate.  His taste in restaurants was unmatched.  But when he picked up the fork, it was just him and the food.  Mindy could understand why he had trouble securing second dates, but she loved his company.  He was a new character to figure out.  He’d put his fork down and caressed her hair, which she’d cut to disguise her youth.  He’d been around fifty, and good looking – but not so much that he wouldn’t look sideways at a spring chicken taking an interest in him.  He was fun, until Mindy was ready to move on.  There was always a new identity around the corner.

He did this to her.  Her memory zipped to when she’d stepped from the cab, onto the crosswalk’s edge.  He’d come around the corner, not looking so refined.  He came at her with – god, who knows - it looked heavy.  Shit, Mindy thought, he lives just upstairs – and she dashed into the street.

                The medics strapped her in and they noticed her shaking hands.  One medic said they’d better check for narcotics.  That was useless.  Mindy knew why her hands were shaking.  She’d gotten greedy.  She’d known she had talent.  She’d pushed and pushed it, even while her mind was telling her to stop, and she’d landed a job on a television sit com.  Everyone knew who Mindy was now, and they’d know about her addiction before long.

                As they rolled her into the ambulance, a giant monitor above the square snapped from a cola add to a live feed from the television studio.  International stock quotes scrolled beneath it.  The host was talking about her.  No one had told the studio about her accident.  Right now, an army of interns was running around the back halls and phoning her agent.  But the show went on, in the hope that she would arrive.  Her hands trembled as the host was saying,

                “And tonight, in her first ever television interview, we’ll get to know a little bit of the real Mindy Posey.”

We Tried Meritocracy. It Was Called Communism

"Do I contradict myself?  Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."

-Walt Whitman

People of the developed world, we don't live in a meritocracy.  I know you're all looking over your left shoulder at that Swede and thinking I am only addressing him, but I assure you that I am talking to the Americans gathered here as well.  In fact, I'm looking right at you and if the Swede hears me it's because he happens to be within ear shot.  Capitalist societies don't produce meritocracies.  The ideas are contradictory.  If you like capitalism that is fine, but don't walk around announcing that blue and red are the same color.  People might start thinking you're some kind of genius, and we wouldn't want that would we?  The moment the rest of the world starts calling you a genius, you've lost all credibility.

I would define a "meritocracy" as a society where the people at the top are there because of the innate value of their abilities.  This is a bit of a vague definition, and in some very broad sense meritocracy is synonymous with civilization.  There is anarchy, which by definition cannot exist (ref. William Golding), and meritocracy, which is everything else and thus all there is.  What I mean is that life, whether lived in the trees or in Manhattan, is nasty, brutal and short.  Our fortunes are governed by some form of selection, natural or otherwise.  If one defines "ability" as aptitude for whatever skill spells survival in the current death match, then of course the people at the top are those most well endowed with this skill.

One may scoff and ask whether being born to the right family counts as aptitude. In small doses it is true that many past and present societies have structures allowing some of their most unwitting citizens to assume fame, power and fortune.  Europe has its royals and America has its Congress.  Though in defense of Congress, they are only slightly less effective than monarchy and much less prone to hemophilia.  This situation is not sustainable, however.  Since there is no such thing as absolute power unless you are from Krypton, even the grandest duchess will have to resort to Machiavellian measures to maintain power.  L'etat c'est vous?  If so, then why did you find the need to demolish provincial fortresses and build Versailles?  Sometimes you have to admire the innate ruthlessness of those born to the throne and yet driven mad by the very real threat of loosing it.  That's right, there is no anarchy and no absolute power, only meritocracy filling the negative space between two imaginary regimes.

However, to make the discussion meaningful, we'd probably like to define meritocracy more narrowly.  We have to, if we planning on boasting that we live in a society where merit is the measure of value.  Kings raised their princes to believe they were appointed by God and had no issue with the idea that some people were born specialer than others.  This didn't remove the very real need to wheel and deal, which wouldn't be necessary with God on your side, but the attitude represents a level of comfort with primogeniture that drives modern man mad.  We're all libertarians now and we don't like the idea that we were born with a leg up or that anyone wanted to help us.  For starters, that would mean having to share and help others, which lord knows is a habit we gave up in kindergarten.  Such a thought would also mean believing that we are not the arbiters of our own fate and that we do not live in a society that empowers all of its citizens equally.

Thus, we refine the concept of merit as a measure of value.  Who decides value?  Well, if I started out with nothing and became successful, then of course whatever it is I did to make that happen is valuable.  Since I believe I rose on the backs of impersonal forces, without the help of anyone with a personal interest in me, I can point to my anonymous piers and say that they have assigned me my worth.  We live in a democracy where people are free to elect whom they choose, assuming they are rich enough to avoid working through voting day and white enough to own voter Id cards.  We also live in a capitalist economy, where people are free to give their money to whomever they want, assuming that someone has convinced us that what what is for sale fulfills an aching need.  Most of the time it doesn't, unless you include psychological needs.  In this case, yes everything we buy we need desperately to prop up our identities.  And that is why we buy into the ultimate shill, the fictional capitalist meritocracy.  Like the White Queen, we want to believe six impossible thoughts before breakfast.

Consider this: The Dove Sketches Beauty Scam.  It's a dissertation on the nature of the long con.  When you're going for broke, you make it appear as though you're giving up the game.  A reformed criminal is always more appealing that a man who has stayed out of trouble his whole life.  Likewise, we are easily impressed by an ad that doesn't sell anything.  Tigers don't change their stripes and major consumer products companies don't pay for advertising without a game in mind.  You know this, you aren't stupid, but the power of the long con is that there are too many redirections along the way to keep track of where it's going.  In the end, we have a system where value is determined by the masses and mined from their deepest desires, but under the control of those who know better.  As the above linked article points out, ads such as these depend on making you feel empowered, which you want, while at the same time giving you an authority to validate your identity, which you need though you may deny it.  The authority, therefore, remains, though it is camouflaged.  It has to do more work to project its power, but it has never gone away.  There are no anarchies and you don't live in a meritocracy.  Neither one would be very appealing.

Once upon a time there was a system called communism, and it was horrific.  God, it was just awful, we all know that.  What is the defining feature of communism?  I suppose there were many, but one that strikes me it that it was a true meritocracy.  In order for something to exist, there has to be a univocal definition of merit and a centralized means of enforcing that.  The only way that can happen is when the state owns all the means of production and a single party system owns the state.  That's what you're getting if you claim you want to live in a meritocracy.  What we live in is a market economy, where value is rooted in what we can make people believe they are buying into of their own free will and under the control of an ever shifting balance of power among that various forces that want to create that value.  I'm not suggesting that communism is a good thing.  I'm suggesting that meritocracy is a bad thing, or perhaps more accurately an imaginary thing.

....

Those in power used to believe in the divine right of kings.  Today we say that we don't accept these arbitrary constraints and want to define our own value.  Our response is to create a new divine authority, this time crowd sourced.  We are still reliant on the notion of an independent authority legitimizing our accidental success, but greater self awareness has necessitated more complex rationalizations.  "Know thyself", said the philosopher, but what good has that done most people?  The most natural response to deep introspection is not personal development, it is a resolve to double our efforts at holding off existential angst.   Think of the alcoholic who weaves complex narratives to avoid change.  And you think, wouldn't it be easier to quit?  In the long term, yes.  In the short term it is easier to change identity than action.

It is psychology all around... creating society and justifying its existence

Won't Someone Please Think Of The Children... And Repeal The Mortgage Interest Deduction

Economics is not an exact science.  Some may even call it statistics, make it worse than lies and damn lies.  We tend to see a lot of disagreement among prominent economists that all too frequently fall along political lines.  This is disheartening, but it also means that when economists of all political stripes are in violent agreement on something, we should take note.  I am not arguing that their consensus is necessarily correct, but geez it's pretty hard to ignore.

One of the things they like to tear down is real estate debt subsidy.  In the US, this takes the form of the mortgage interest deduction.  Many European nations have something similar.  As someone who has owned real estate and received pretty sizable tax break from the deduction, I am here to tell you that I agree with the PhD's when they say this break should be repealed.  I can say for the same reason why I can say I'd like to pay higher gas taxes if it means reduced carbon emissions: I sort of care what kind of world our children live in.

Tax breaks on real estate debt cost governments dearly.  That means we better ask why we're doing it, whether the goal is a good one, and whether our chosen mechanism for achieving it is working.  Why are we doing it?  In the US, the mortgage interest deduction was introduced in 1913, when almost no one but the wealthy owned real estate.  Indeed, at that time most real estate was owned by corporations and the tax was introduced as a part of policies to encourage business investment.  For example, our government considered it a good thing if Ford decided to build a gigantic factory on the back of a tax break.  That sort of thing was certainly more useful to the people who worked in those factories than giving those same people a tax break they could never personally use.  Arguably, tax breaks on corporate real estate are smarter than other kinds of corporate subsidies because it is harder to game, especially in the days before Ponzi's descendants started running JP Morgan Chase.  If you purchase or construct actual, honest-to-god, brick-and-mortar facilities, chances are you plan on using it.

After World War II, it seems that the tax was co-opted as a boon to the middle class.  In encourages home ownership!  And people who own homes are more likely to invest in their communities, raise stable families, and invest in their futures.  That is so unlike the rest of us, who rent our abodes primarily so we can run away when the police find out we have been vandalizing park benches and beating children.  Have you ever met a homeowner who abused his children or engaged in risky financial behavior?  I didn't think so.  There's also the added problem of economic change.  People don't live in the same place and work for the same company for 40 years.  They want to be mobile and go where their prospects are best.  In the new economy, where there's no safety net and it's each person for him or herself, we're all 49'ers heading west.  Why tie yourself down to a money trap?

Wait, it doesn't matter, because most of you don't take the mortgage deduction.  Why would you when you get more money from the standard deduction?  This is especially true these days, when the government is subsidizing on the other end with low interests rates.  If you have a loan that is big enough to make the tax break worthwhile, chances are you don't need it.  Chances are, it only puts a few hundred dollars more in your pocket than the standard deduction does anyway.  Meanwhile, the government is running a deficit and spending more on this subsidy for the fortunate than it is on defense (estimate cost in lost revenue to the US is more than $500 billion.  The aggregate figure for Europe is something like $700 billion).  It better be worth it, but it ain't.

Sorry, There Are No Self Made Men Here

I don't want to hear you call yourself a self-made man or woman unless you are a hunter-gatherer. The idea that anyone can achieve anything they want with only will power and a sparkle in their eye is so laughable that those who claim this should have their MBA's revoked.  It seems that in some circles, self reliance has become such an obsession that it has collapsed into a dichotomy.  Either you are a hard worker who never got no breaks from no one or you are a free loader sucking money from the first guy.  Reality is always more subtle, always.  It's just that you can't see that because you are blinded by the light of your own deified magnificence.

I grew up without much money, hovering between the middle class and the lower middle class.  Because I am good at taking tests and writing gibberish that sounds sage, I went to a decent college with a tuition scholarship and a little help from the loan sharks in the US federal government.  I studied math and computer science, which led to a remunerative career in the same.  My final (well, never say "never") foray into academia was an engineering master's degree, which I collected on the back of a full scholarship and living stipend.  Listen closely, you can hear my bootstraps stretching to the point of snapping right off my feet.

Do I sound ungrateful?  That snide voice you hear is a parody.  The volume of social investment required to deliver me to where I am today is so vast, it makes me cringe.  If I lived in Somalia, I could be just as smart and just as hard working and wind up with nothing, or even less than nothing if people felt inclined to cut me down to size.  Bureaucracy is a technology, and when used well it is a mighty one.  At some point in the past, some people were feeling in a cooperative mood and decided to create our universities and industries.  Each of us who benefited from there work were victims of the happy accident of living in a society that values this kind of cooperation.

Sometimes we place such value in self reliance that we forget that we can accomplish more together than we ever could alone.  Positioning hard work as the ultimate virtue is almost correct, but a little off center.  The better question to ask is how well I am participating in a system that benefits all of us.  It may be better to give than to receive, but those two do not have to be dichotomous.  When a social system is functioning, the two are a part of the same whole.  Well designed social welfare programs empower those benefiting from them, often leading to amplified returns as we progress from generation to generation.

I think your belligerent distrust is misdirected.  Immigrants are not taking your jobs and women are not having children to collect welfare dollars from your pocket.  I mean, seriously, do you even listen to yourself?  The statistics, if you cared to look them up, support this, but you hardly need them because you don't need statistics to show that one and one don't make three.  The idea is absurd.  Crimes require motive and opportunity.  If you want to find trouble, go looking for those in a position to cause trouble.  Like I said, a functioning social system shores up its foundations along all sides, benefiting us all.  What we lack in the United States is a fully functioning social system and that is the fault of those in charge.  We don't live in a bad country.  It's actually a pretty nice place to live.  However, we suffer from bad leadership.  Or, more accurately, we suffer from absent leadership.

Genetic Engineering Is Bad For All The Wrong Reasons

Why do you think genetic engineering is a bad idea?  Is it because it's unnatural?  Don't be foolish, nothing could be more natural.  Or, perhaps nothing can be unnatural, unless it's supernatural.  Think of all the good it could do.  I'm talking about human engineering here.  You don't need me to tell you the benefits of genetically modified agriculture.  No, it's hitting up the lower 46 that is both scary and exciting in ways we can't imagine, and probably never will.  That is because the problem with human genetic engineering is that we lack imagination.

Engineering works great when you have a measurable goal in mind.  Engineered products have a function.  So far this has been true of genetically engineered plants and animals.  We've been doing it for millennia with selective breeding and now we're doing it with test tubes.  The objectives, however, are basically the same.  Increase yield, improve taste, and promote tolerance to pests.  I'm not really sure where advancements in nutrition fall in there.  Perhaps the agricultural industry puts more effort into nutritional content then I surmise, but my guess is that they don't.  They wouldn't, considering their customer base is so prone to ignorance.  Who cares about nutrition?  You and I do, but at the risk of sounding a little too self righteous, most people don't.  Even those who are trying to eat healthy don't.  Especially those who are trying to eat health don't.  If they did, they wouldn't be eating organic, free range corn from Portland.  Like the Food Babe tells them to, they make sure they can pronounce all of the ingredients before consuming it, because everyone knows ease of elocution is a reliable indicator of content.  You can keep your dihydrogen monoxide to yourself, Monsanto!  Knowing nothing about the basic facts of chemistry, biology or common sense, they settle for theater.  Or, maybe "settle" isn't the right word.  Theater is what they wanted all along.

This is a bit of an overstatement, but this is also the Internet and Google immediately deletes anything that isn't screaming biased generalizations at you.  Genetically modified foods are often more nutritious.  However, I guarantee you that, outside of animal feed, the bulk of the research in food production is not focused on nutrition.  Research costs money and the money comes from the people who vote with their feet.  Those people want bread and circuses, or just circuses really.  This is troubling because nutritional value is a quantifiable metric.  We can unambiguously measure how well we're doing, and yet we don't do it.  What happens when the standard for success is more subjective?

That is the frightening future of human genetic engineering.  I'm sure that we have some pretty laudable goals at the moment.  What if we could eliminate genetic influences on heart disease or cancer?  That sounds good.  Let's do that.  Some day, however, human GMO might become a commodity.  This could be a particular issue in the United States, which has a growing libertarian appetite for everything but abortion, gay marriage and flag burning.  Don't do those things please, but for everything else live free or die.  Preferably, live free or kill some else while standing your ground.  Once all the diseases have been cured, what's next on the shopping list?  Maybe your kids could be a little taller or better at sports.  That's important.  Some opponents of genetic engineering argue that it will ruin professional sports or the Olympics because it makes competition a moot point.  That's a stupid argument because competition is already a moot point and because sports are fun but also a distraction from the looming threat that's really going to east your lunch.

At least with sports, there is a definable goal.  Height, strength and aerobic capacity are all unambiguous, objective measures of "good" in that way the crop yields are.  Having conquered these things, we would naturally start asking if we could be prettier or smarter too.  That may seem like a long way off, but again the research money comes from those who vote with their feet.  How many of you would like to have this ability right now?  Put your hands down, you're making me nervous.  There is no objective definition of beauty.  It is fine for you as an individual to find something beautiful (not that you care about what I think is fine).  It's not superficial for me to stand in awe at the beauty of my children or the truly stunning woman that I love.

However, when scaled up to a social level it starts to become problematic.  It's bad enough that we have to measure ourselves against the model in the Victoria's Secret window, but what happens when some people have the money to actually force their children to look that way?  Do you know how certain baby names become so popular that you have a 50/50 chance of guessing the name of stranger's kid based on age and gender alone?  Now imagine a future where every preschooler at Bright Horizons actually looks like Giselle or her 2035 equivalent.  Don't be surprised by a future where celebrities sell their looks in tubes, like celebrity branded perfumes, and the bone structure of more popular VIPs sell for more.  I imagine this will also help them escape the paparazzi.  Now I know how old you are and how rich your parents are based on the celebrity you perfectly resemble.

Ah, you thought you were libertarian.  You thought you were taking matters into your own hands and taking charge,  but even if you wanted to you can't, because society's momentary ranking of beauty is a major determinant of success and you wouldn't want to sacrifice your progeny's chances at fortune on the pyre of individuality, would you?  Of course you wouldn't, because you're not a jerk and you'll join the rest of us inside the iron cage.  Technology doesn't always free us, even when it appears to do so.  Actually, you should be particularly suspicious when billions of dollars of research has been poured into a product that claims to give you more self determination.  We don't have a choice, even when the pills are handed to us, because our choices have been rigged.  Sometimes you only have two choices, the red pill or the blue pill, and neither is very appealing.  Other times you can have any color you want, so long as it is black.

That's pretty bad, but it ain't the worst.  Living in a world like that is scary enough, but don't forget that we want to be smarter too.  Genetically engineering intelligence will be like teaching to the test, only on a horrific scale.  You might argue that measures of smarts are more objective than measures of beauty.  Aptitudes tests are flawed, but at least they measure something.  At their best, however, these tests can only capture a fraction of human mental capability.  At their worst, no one cares.  Remember all those people who say they care about nutrition, but couldn't care less?  No one wants their kids to be smarter.  They want their kids to win awards and get into Ivy League schools and hedge GMO crop derivatives in corner window offices somewhere.

Intelligence, let alone creativity, can't be fully measured, but that's okay because all we wanted was a proxy for these things.  All we want is for society to agree that we are smart.  Society will respond no differently than it has before, by creating a standard that we can measure ourselves by.  Even if advances in psychology allow us to measure intelligence and creativity more objectively, it doesn't matter because we don't care.  We make it a point not to care.  Even if we start to care, it doesn't amount to much because so much is riding on the flimsy paste board standard we've created that everyone will do their best to prop it up and protect their position in the pecking order.  This is the world we live in right at this moment.  Human genetic engineering will only calcify it.  Technology has always been a way to exponentially extend power.  The steam engine allowed us to pull weights that no muscle could pull.  There's nothing wrong with that, so long as we're pulling something useful.  What I fear is that the power of genetic engineering will arrange stones into a bulwark around a certain standard of success, fortify the positions of those who sit within in it and halting our creative progress as a species.

The last straw will be when we face some threat that we cannot defeat because we have lost all flexibility and ingenuity.  When all the smartest people were engineered to get perfect scores on the SATs, what happens when they need to solve a problem that the SATs never predicted?

We've reached the time where I contradict myself.  I wouldn't want you to start trusting me, not that you ever did.  Let's keep it that way.  This isn't a post about genetic engineering.  I mean, the idea that celebrities could sell their faces is absurd, isn't it?  (Forget for a moment that sperm banks charge top dollar for material from good looking Harvard grads).  Maybe this future is not technologically feasible.  That is most unfortunate, because perhaps the feasibility of such horrors would expose the underlying pathology.  Genetic engineering would not create the world I have described, it would only make visible the world we have already created.

Your Personal Brand Is Killing You

I'm an inconsistent producer of content.  Since no one reads what I write, it hardly matters.  However, I think that when writing a blog you're supposed to spool out your thoughts little by little so people keep coming back.  Good thing that no one comes to visit me in the first place, because I write at my own pace.  Some days will see a few blog posts and some weeks will see none.  Rest assured that if my blog experiences a season of silence that I am okay.  I live in the real world, after all.  Well, it's realish.  

This is my second post of the day.  It's about personal branding and why it consumes personal and physical resources without producing value for anyone.  Keep in mind that this opinion is unfounded and that I am stupid.

There’s a lot of fuss among knowledge workers about personal branding.  Note that I called it fuss, not hype.  There’s no hype – personal branding is an essential tool in the white collar worker’s chest and it’s here to stay.  I’m of two minds about personal branding.  On the one hand, the tools available to us now are the most efficient means for professional development society has ever invented – assuming that you are a knowledge worker.  It helps us to solve the problem of increased specialization, where it is not as easy as describing your career as “20 years in carpet installation.”  Companies often want specific skills, and personal branding allows individuals to advertise those skills.  Another feature of knowledge workers is that we often move around among different jobs or different assignments within the same job.  A comprehensive personal brand allows us to synthesize these diverse experiences into a single identity that goes beyond the stock job descriptions previously available to us.

That’s too bad, because personal branding is bad for our health.  What’s more interesting is that it’s yet another sign of America’s economic self abuse.  As sure as the Internet distracts some while Rome burns, personal branding deludes the Internet’s savvier users into believing that they’re doing something about the fire.  All those empty buckets have got to be useful for something.

Do you know what I mean when I say “personal branding”?  It’s one of those things that’s been around forever but looks fresh with a new name.  For example, there’s probably someone in your family appointed (by himself or others) to give everyone advice on cars.  This guy is known as the “car guy”.  If he creates a Twitter feed on the subject of car buying and car repair, then he has created a personal brand.  This is typical for celebrities, such as The Car Guys themselves.  The Internet now offers all of us the chance to turn our expertise in personal brands.  It is more than a hobby, however.  Career advisers tell us that we better increase our competitive edge by starting blogs, writing tweets, participating in discussion boards, writing articles for webzines and paper-zines and doing whatever else we can to give hiring managers the impression that we are respected authorities in our fields.  Writing useless drivel (such as this blog) about your 5-point business strategies isn’t just for bored CEO’s anymore.  You want to go into that job interview with more than references, you need followers.

Max Weber introduced the concept of “The Iron Cage”. Lest I seem too melodramatic, I see this as a frying pan and fire situation.  Pre-industrial life was far from idyllic.  After all, would you rather be a beaureucratic cog with leisure and a health plan or share cropper with hookworms?  To paraphrase Walter Kaufmann, one of the side effects of universal education is that it gives average people enough ambition to lament their uncreative lives, though surely those lives would’ve been even less creative in earlier eras.  It’s just that they would’ve lacked the awareness of something better back then.  Surely you’ve read Flowers for Algenon?  But shouldn’t technology give us more than it takes?  And what happens when the Iron Cage leads us down the path of ruin rather than prosperity? 

Fictional Engineering 2: Story Foundations and Sub-Stories

This is part 2 of my musings on story construction. You can see part one, if you are special and very, very, brave, here.

A Simple Story Foundation

One way to start a story is with three primary entities, called the triangle.  One familiar example is the love triangle, but the concept is broader than that.  And note that I said entities, not characters.  One or more of the three may be a situation.  The ideal is that the story starts with a potential conflict between two characters and a character and an entity.  If it is two characters, it is essential that they each have at least one internal conflict that is related to their external conflict.  Even better, their internal conflicts may be opposed in some way that neither understands.  For example, two characters may be lovers.  One has an inner conflict of suspicion - “maybe he’s after my money rather than my heart” - while the other has a conflict of self doubt - “maybe I’m not good enough for her”.  The external potential conflict is that their parents do not approve of the relationship.  This scenario may exist in a status quo for some time, until the introduction of third character, who throws a wrench into the works.  For example, the wealthy family hires a private eye to spy on their daughter’s lover without the their daughter’s knowledge.  He befriends the couple and then falls in love with the daughter.  Or the other way around.  In either case, the PI plays on the inner conflicts to bring the external conflict to a head.  Either tragedy of comedy may ensue, depending on the writer’s intent.

If this sounds vaguely like the plot of a Hollywood movie, that’s because it is like the plot of many movies.  It’s also a little like the plot of Othello (a little).  It’s reliable.  And though it’s formulaic, it’s versatile.

One thing I like about this example is that is demonstrates that conflict need not indicate aggression or opposition.  The two primary characters are actually in love.  But if there’s no conflict, there’s no story.  The story is not that they’re in love.  The story is that there are unresolved issues that will test that love.  The story begins with the cinder that lights that powder keg.  

So the triangle begins with two entities, a potential conflict and a potential resolution.  If any of the entities are characters, then they each have at least one inner conflict relating to their external potential conflict.  If the entities are in opposition, then we leave it this way.  If they are not in opposition, then we must add a unifier.  This is something that brings them together.   This is not the same as the potential resolution.  A resolution to a potential conflict is only strong enough to keep the conflict from boiling over, it is not strong enough to bring them together.  There must be something else that stands alone without other mitigating factors.

In my example, the unifier may at first seem obvious: they are in love.  But stating this is no better than stating the theme without involving the specific circumstances of specific characters.  Why are they in love?   There may be many reasons, but the story must story with at least one clear and powerful reason.  For example, they may have both been in imprisoned in a foreign country because they volunteered with a humanitarian mission opposed by the local government.  They helped each other escape.  Along the way, we may find other things they share in common, but this is a good start.  If we twist it further, we can make this unifier relate to the central conflicts: the woman’s family believes her humanitarian stint was just a phase and wants her to “grow up” and prepare to take over the family business.  The man wants is worried that his lover was never really committed to the cause anyway.  Throw in the third wheel and the story gets in motion.   

Scenes and Sub-Stories

Stories are not made of scenes.  Stories are made of sub-stories that may span several scenes and overlap.  A scene still has a structure, but that structure serves the advancement of the sub-stories.  Note that sub-stories are not necessarily sub-plots.  They may be, but not always.  A story is defined by the conflict stated in the premise and the ultimate resolution of that conflict.  A sub-story is about one or more of the character conflicts and their resolutions.  The difference between this and what most think of as a subplot is that a subplot is concerned with characters and events that are secondary to the core of the story, while substories are chunks of action that may make up a main plot or a subplot.

For example, suppose our lovers start out with potential conflict stated above, and the PI comes in and stirs the pot.  He successfully manipulates their inner doubts and suspicions and causes the lovers to split.  This is one sub-story.  It started with a potential conflict and it resulted in a kinetic resolution to that conflict.  But that is not the end of the story.  The audience knows that the split was based on misunderstanding and miscommunication, and they want that to be fixed.  The PI starts a relationship with the woman, but he is hiding the secret to why they are together now.  Meanwhile, the ex-lover decides to give up on love and returns to the country where he was imprisoned.  He has renewed his dedication to the cause, but his pain has also made him a little fatalistic.  

We now have a new sub-story.  It has two potential outer conflicts: (1) the new lovers have founded their relationship on a lie which we all know will come to light at some point and (2) the ex-lover is in a character vs situation conflict where is new work may hurt or kill him.  There are also lots of new inner conflicts: the woman is now even more suspicious, the PI starts feeling guilt over his actions, and the ex-lover wonders whether he’s really dedicated to the cause or has just developed a death wish.  Note that the situation is more dire than the potential conflict which began the story.  As a rule, the consequences of the potential conflicts which began the story have got to be much worse then they at first appeared.

The relationship between this and the previous sub-story is not the same as the relationship between a main and subplot.  These substories are sequential and advance the main plot.  A subplot occurs in parallel with the main plot and would involve something like the woman having to deal with her suspicions that her mother had something to do with her father’s early death.  A subplot starts out with no relationship to the main plot, although it usually has to be brought in at some point or why else is it there?  

There are some exceptions, such as small, quickly resolved subplots that help to illustrate character traits or subplots that help to balance the dramatic weight of the main plot.  A typical example of the latter is when you give minor characters a happy ending to balance the unhappy ending of the primary characters.  If you want to write a tragedy, then maybe the ex-lover dies in that dangerous country and the woman never finds love again.  However, you may want to balance this by letting the woman’s quirky sister find true love.  Or something equally cloying.  Television shows do this a lot to maintain sexual tension.  A classic TV plot is to create main characters that live in a perpetual “will they/won’t they” state (Booth and Bones).  Even if that tension ultimately finds resolution, it can wear on viewers after a few seasons.  Writers often through the audience a bone in the form of minor characters that do fall in love (Angie and Hodgins).  

Start writing a story by picking a substory.  It doesn’t have to be one implied by the premise or one of the primary character conflicts.  It’s even likely that it can’t be one of those, because their introduction probably depends on some other more minor substory.  So we start with one that has no dependencies.  We write that substory from front to back and then pick another, which may or may not be dependent on the first.  The rest follows by induction.  Entire novels can be written this way.  

The key to finishing an entire substory before continuing with another is that they are short.  Ideally, a story of any length is made up of substories of roughly uniform length.  If we have an idea for a substory that seems to long or complex to finish in one go, then it may be that we have concatenated several substories into one and we need to break it up.  The key to do that is to keep it concrete.  That is, try to stick as much as possible to describing conflicts, resolutions and unifiers in terms of physical actions that specific characters take.  The more we think in these terms, the easier it is to decompose bigger pieces into smaller chunks.

If we write in terms of sub-stories, then we always have something that resembles a complete and functional story.  Someone could always pick it up and read it and have some sense of where it is going.  This might be analogous to watching a few episodes of series with a story arch that spans a season.  They leave a sense that there is much more going on beyond those few episodes, but they also have a feeling of internal completeness.  There are unanswered questions, but there aren’t lots of hanging wires and dead drops where someone forgot to put the stairs.  A find that this helps with motivation and brainstorming, especially with a large story.  Substories help you to keep momentum and maintain orientation within the larger whole.  They also provide more agility if you decide to shift course midstream.

Substories are about implementation, not planning or design.  We tend to categorize authors as either discovery writers or outliners.  This intent behind this classification is meaningful, but it presents a false dichotomy.  Discovery writers are supposed to fly by the seat of their pants, jotting down scenes and seeing where their characters take them.  Outliners are suppose to plan everything from the top down so that by the time they start to write the actual scenes, they know exactly what’s going to happen in each.  However, every successful writer must employ both brainstorming and organization.  Without brainstorming, there is no creative spark.  Even so-called outliners must pass through a phase where they let their thoughts roam free.  And without organization, there is no sense.  Even so-called discovery writers must reach a time when they stick their hands in that pile of pages and start reordering and editing.  The difference between these two types of writers, and everyone in between, is which activity happens when in the process.  

I think that the substory approach is amenable to both ends of the spectrum.  One could outline in terms of substories.  Once the outline for each substory is complete, then the scene writing can take place.  On the other hand, one could just outline the characters and then start writing scenes, discovering new characters and conflicts along the way.  This latter type of person may benefit from the use of a backlog.  You may find in the course of writing a substory that we have ideas for new substories.  Following the ideal of finishing a substory before starting another, this author can add an outline of the new substory to a backlog.  The nice thing about a backlog is that if you grow it as you go along, you can always dip into it to find more work.  And you can beat the writing blue by dipping into it in any order.  Just pick another substory and go.

Keep in mind that through all of this scenes are just containers for substories.  They are not the structure for the story.  And a scene may contain several substories.

You Want Police Body Cameras And So Does The NSA

Last week brought us the indictment of six police officers for the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, a city in which I once lived.  The charges come after a series of mixed information from records and eyewitness accounts that have alternately supported and undermined the official story.  Though the trial will become the formal medium for the weight of evidence, it seems that we have another high profile case of police misconduct to judge in the court of public opinion.  Like some other incidents before it, the Freddie Gray case raises the question of whether surveillance may prevent some of the turmoil we've seen this month.  At first it seems like an obvious choice. However, technology serves those who control it.  The body cams and similar forms of monitoring are under the control of law enforcement and the citizenry.

Of course, there is no way it really could be under the control of anyone else.  The cameras not only record the actions of police, but those of the people they engage.  The privacy of the people involved needs to be protected.  You're not going to see all police activity posted on You Tube for all to view like an episode of Cops.  Fox gets release forms from the vast majority of the people it tapes and blurs out the people who didn't sign the paperwork.  This isn't going to be the standard operating procedure for police departments when it comes to their own body cams.  It's pretty sensible that most of the footage will not be released for public consumption.

Who will get to see it, then?  When there is evidence of misconduct, there would be some process for attorneys to access the relevant data.  This evidence has to be separate from the camera footage an sufficient to warrant requesting and obtaining this access.  The cameras would serve to support a case of misconduct, not detect it.  Then, once an attorney obtains the footage, one wonders what would govern how much they get.  It has to be enough to investigate the case, but not so much it provides them coverage of things they shouldn't be seeing.  How easy would it be to leave out those last few minutes that may change the context of the situation?  The only people who would know the total content of the records would be those who create and control that content.

Perhaps more concerning is the potential for public surveillance.  While the cameras watch the activity of the police, they are also watching the activity of every in proximity to the police.  The Snowden case demonstrated that intelligence agencies had created sophisticated programs to analyze the providers of various Internet services.  These agencies made the argument that because companies like Google were providing data to paying advertisers on individuals' web browsing habits, there was no reason the NSA couldn't join in too.  If they give it up in the name of commerce, should the interests of national security be any less entitled?  Police body cams may present a similar opportunity.  Now we're not even talking about data in the hands of private companies.  We're talking about data already on the servers of law enforcement.

Once we could argue that it's too much information to be useful in its aggregate form, but this is no longer the case.  Spy agencies honed their skills searching for terrorist activities in phone conversations and Internet activity.  The software and hardware necessary to search for incriminating evidence has vastly improved over the past decade.  Police cameras present a huge new frontier for looking into the lives of individuals.  We're not talking about public surveillance sources like the security cameras at shopping malls.  For example, every time and officer responds to a domestic dispute, the camera captures the interior of a private residence.  It sees what's on the walls, what books are on the shelves, what web page is up on the computer.  None of this is related to the original reason the police responded.  Indeed, the neighbors may have called the police because they mistook a movie you were watching for a violent argument.  There was no danger to anyone.  And yet , a snapshot of your private life is now stored somewhere.  Could it be construed to indicate motives that aren't there?