Colin Marshall

The stimulation baseline

Given my long-standing love of film, my new but flaming interest in boredom (stoked by reading David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King and interviewing Lee Rourke about his boredom-centric novel The Canal), and my admiration for Manohla Dargis, I think I have a constitutional mandate to blog about "In Defense of the Slow and Boring”:

“Of course, what I think is boring,” [Warhol wrote in his memoir “Popism,” “must not be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to watch all the most popular action shows on TV, because they’re essentially the same plots and the same shots and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different.”

Warhol’s own films are almost always called boring, usually by people who have never seen or sampled one, including minimalist epics like “Empire,” eight hours of the Empire State Building that subverts the definition of what a film is (entertaining, for one). Long movies — among my favorites is Béla Tarr’s seven-hour “Sátántangó” — take time away even as they restore a sense of duration, of time and life passing, that most movies try to obscure through continuity editing. Faced with duration not distraction, your mind may wander, but there’s no need for panic: it will come back. In wandering there can be revelation as you meditate, trance out, bliss out, luxuriate in your thoughts, think.

Forgive me for invoking the same old quote from favorite director Abbas Kiarostami that I drop every dozen posts or so:

I absolutely don’t like the films in which the filmmakers take their viewers hostage and provoke them. I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. I think those films are kind enough to allow you a nice nap and not leave you disturbed when you leave the theater.

Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake me up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks. Those are the kinds of films I like.

As little as I want to approach an argument about the merits and demerits of “boring” movies — or, worse, “eating your cultural vegetables,” the subject of the opinion piece that originally sparked this dialogue — this talk does illustrate something I’ve observed in myself and maybe you’ve observed in yourself: I live in constant fear of boredom, yet I never actually experience anything that feels like boredom. Half the reason I don’t work as much on what I probably should comes down to a terror that the work won’t provide enough stimulation to keep me going. But everything always does provide enough stimulation to keep me going! But is it ever just a matter of the task, the experience, or the work at hand? Isn’t it more to do with my own mind?

Most of the time, I’ve accidentally upped my “baseline” stimulation level too much by, say, opening twelve browser tabs of terribly compelling audiovisual information and rapidly flipping between them, wallowing in a veritable orgy of meaningless auto-distraction. Get up that high and it seems, if falsely, like the labor of Hercules to quiet down the buzz. Only one way to avoid that hassle: keep the distractions flowing. Some forms of entertainment, such as the movies I don’t really like, do this with particularly freakish effectiveness.

Dargis offers this explanation as to why:

If you’re entertained, or so the logic seems to be, you won’t have the time and head space to think about how crummy, inane and familiar the movie looks, and how badly written, shoddily directed and indifferently acted it is. And so the images keep zipping, the sounds keep clanging and the actors keep shouting as if to reassure you that, yes, the money you spent for your ticket was well worth all this clamor, a din that started months, years, earlier when the entertainment companies first fired up the public-relations machine and the entertainment media chimed in to sell the buzz until it rang in your ears.

This explains a lot, for me, about why people meditate. Meditation — or any kind of voluntary deprivation of sensory input — lowers that stimulation baseline like nothing else. I groan a little whenever I hear a film critic call a picture “meditative,” and I groan louder still when I realize that they apply the word to so many of my personal favorites, but I don’t quite consider it coincidental anymore. These films, call them “slow” or call them “boring” or fall asleep during them if you will, both lower my stimulation baseline and yield their riches to the viewer in direct proportion to the lowness of their stimulation baseline. I find that one of the more rewarding positive feedback loops around.

Your mileage may vary, but the lower my stimulation baseline, the more interesting I find any given thing in the world. And could I go to far in arguing that the more interesting you find any given thing in the world, the richer life you lead? I don’t subscribe to the level of asceticism that dictates total severance from the need for stimulation, but I do expect good things from he who eliminates his dependency on any one particular source of stimulation — any kind of stimulation. The world is his, isn’t it?

Harness your unconscious mind for fun and profit

I’ve always distrusted my unconscious mind, and I only now realize how that’s screwed me. Someone recently mentioned to me that he learned English and Japanese by exposing himself to those languages in their “real and raw” states with media made by and for native speakers. Therein lies the case for immersion: envelop yourself with the language you want to understand, and your brain cranks toward comprehension even when you’re not actively studying it. I guess Bart Simpson learned French that way, though when I first saw that episode I felt terrified by the mere prospect of someone expecting me to learn a foreign language, much less in a country that expects me to speak it. “But how?” my five-year-old self would have pleaded to know. “But how?”

Learning musical instruments presented the same problem. I understood the process as having to do with hours upon hours of physical familiarization with an instrument, of listening hard to other people play that instrument, and, above all, of listening hard to yourself play it, but I couldn’t mentally map that out in a way that convinced me it would work. Hence my early struggles with and avoidance of new means of expression linguistic, musical, or otherwise. I didn’t so much find the tasks themselves difficult as I found breaking my mental block about the idea of the tasks and the precise mechanics of their culmination impossible.

That David Ogilvy observation I quoted a little while ago keeps looping in my head: "Big ideas come from only one place: the unconscious. Nobody's ever had a big idea by a process of rational thought.” He spoke of having to “flog himself” to read through all the technical material on the new Rolls-Royce, but only when he’d ingested it, then ingested a big dinner and settled in with a nice bottle of claret, did his unconscious mind produce a way to advertise it. (“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-
Royce comes from the electric clock.”) That this process works now seems clear to me, or at least as clear as I find anything, but the how of it badly tripped me up for the longest time. I could never summon any faith in anything other than conscious, deliberate reasoning. It still trips me up, but slightly less often now that I have an awareness of it.

Naturally, I now wonder how to harness these automatic processes of my unconscious mind — the cycles of thought always running in the background, if you will — to best stuff-making and/or stuff-doing advantage. My attempt to psychologically “place” myself in Los Angeles before moving there in September involves writing a list of “alternative” L.A.-based novels for The Millions, and thus reading a bundle of them in preparation. A coming trip to Mexico City necessitates similar relevant-cultural-product absorption, including but not limited to Alex Cox’s El Patrullero and books like David Lida’s First Stop in the New World and Daniel Hernandez’s Down and Delirious in Mexico City.

Gearing up to devote a much larger portion of my life to filmmaking, I’ve been cramming my mind full of material on the nineties U.S. indie wave that originally inspired me; material on the working methods of kind of filmmakers who tend to have to fend for themselves, financially, intellectually, and aesthetically (Jarmusch, Greenaway, Godard); and the cheap, freewheeling, convert-every-glitch-into-an-artistic-choice first pictures from these directors. And since I feel compelled to imbue my own next film with the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges, you know I’ve been cramming down some labyrinths.

But the unconscious mind — or at least my unconscious mind — needs a hell of a lot of time to chew on this stuff, and that gives me trouble. In my experience, it does its work so slowly that I never notice the progress in real time, only as sudden epiphanies — but so, it seems, did Ogilvy. It also demands that I break my unwillingness to take in what I don’t understand immediately and completely, like the movies, internet videos, and TV dramas in Japanese, Korean, and Spanish that feed those languages, raw, whichever part of my brain can process them involuntary into something resembling linguistic skill.

Sure, I can’t diagram how all this allegedly happens, but would I want to? As I just heard Adam Carolla say on Fitzdog Radio, if you envision life in its totality and everything it requires of you, you’d never do anything. If you think a second floor would look good on your house, you have to put your head down and just act on the vision. If you ponder about all the hassles with lawyers and architects and contractors and zoning and materials, you’ll go straight to bed instead. But if you stare at your feet and take a step at a time, sure, it’ll take twice as long and cost twice as much as the estimate, but ultimately, that second floor will be there, you’ll have stories to tell — and you’ll have actually lived. So, bonus.

Strangle the mushrooms

It’s no accident Douglas Coupland’s name has come up a lot here lately; I’ve spend the past few weeks reading all his novels, chronologically. I’m up to his ninth, Eleanor Rigby, which I understand is also the name of a Beatles song. (The only Beatles song I know is “Rocky Raccoon”.) So far, it’s about a fat middle-aged spinster, desperately lonely to the point of resignation, who doesn’t even remember the one time she had sex, which resulted in a son with MS she gives up for adoption only to have return twenty years later. This character, Liz Dunn, doesn’t seem like the type from whom I’d stand to learn anything, but near the beginning of the book she says something that refreshed in my mind a notion of near-revelation-grade importance.

Liz says that, if she could tell her younger self one thing, it would be to stop worrying so much. Sound like threadbare advice though this may, I only had to ponder it a moment to get all, “Whoa — whoa.” Yes, there is a very real sense in which Bobby McFerrin beat me to this bottomlessly profound message, but it’s the very intersection of repetition and sheer inanity that makes it so ignorable in the first place. Reflect for a moment on how much time you’ve squandered thinking over and re-thinking over dire (and practically always unrealized) outcomes in the past. (“What if I can’t figure out to write the next sentence? What if this blog post doesn’t turn out? What if this idea is too vague to get across?”) How likely is it that you’re doing the very same thing today? Whoa — whoa.

Plunk this one straight into the “Life’s too short” bucket. Given my fixation on my own mortality — and desire to take the future-based view — I’m surprised I hadn’t given serious thought sooner to put worry into the whole threescore-and-ten context. Maybe I just couldn’t bear to calculate just how much of my life I burnt as a squirrely little kid, computing the gory details of every possible embarrassment (and many impossible embarrassments) ahead. But lately I’ve put a more concerted effort toward strangling worry in the crib, as it were. I don’t know if worry-inclined humans — and I’m far from the worst in that department — can prevent worries from sprouting like fields of poison mushrooms, but maybe they can build the habit of refraining from picking and eat them. My point is: strangle the mushrooms.

Again, I rack my brain looking for a way to make this sound non-stupid. What I seem to have realized — and maybe you already knew this — is that behind the platitudes about not worrying is that worrying has no actual value but as a self-distraction, and distraction is a Bad Thing Indeed. It’s an issue of doing versus having done; worrying might feel appropriate in the moment, but it couldn’t be less cool later on. How easy to fall into the trap of telling yourself that, by way of your obsessive worrying, you’re preparing yourself for the future. At least it’s pretty easy for me to fall into that trap, and if I’m honest with myself, I know I’m doing nothing of the kind. To the extent that I let myself worry, I let myself become the male equivalent of Liz Dunn: comfortable, in a sense, but aimless, unaccomplished, detached from society, and haunted by this weird gnawing feeling.

But yes, to answer your question, I am getting “DON’T WORRY, BE HAPPY” tattooed on my chest in Olde English lettering.

Moments of Clarity

Buying a read bean bun at a Japanese market. Watching a steam pipe in an Apichatpong Weerasethakul movie. Glancing at a bunch of Douglas Coupland novels on a shelf. Running. Staring at a city map. Reading Brian Eno’s diary entry for April 17, 1995. Few and far between though they may be, these moments of clarity — nay, these Moments of Clarity — always repay the wait.

Clarity, I’m starting to suspect, is something I need more than money or even time to accomplishing my goals. The problem is that it’s also a hell of a lot more flaky-sounding. I mean, “clarity”? Sheezus. Yet I do find that my worst frustrations come when I’m not thinking clearly enough to act decisively — should I use that em dash or not? Em dash or not? Em dash or not? — and that most of my peak performance happens in a relative void of mental clutter. Sometimes just defining a desired outcome in my imagination is enough to power me forward, though there are days when even that seems like a Herculean task.

In these aforementioned Moments of Clarity, though, it’s like my entire life falls into order, however micro-briefly. In that tiny window, it’s like the compass stops spinning and just points: I know just what I must achieve and just what I must do to achieve it. Still, it’s more of a gestalt; I can’t verbalize it enough to, like, convince anybody, or even to jot it down in a Moleskine for later reference. Hence all the time I shamefully watch myself pouring time straight down the drain, like a bloodshot meth-head pounding desperately on the tin doors of each and every trailer lab, searching for the one that can make it to give me just the right high. I compulsively walk library shelves, scanning for just the right typographical unconventionality; I comb the net for just the right early video art; I flip through magazines from the nineties, looking for just the right union of form and substance. All in the name of inspiration, but all, typically, for naught.

Though it’s tough to trace out the cause and effect precisely, I fear I’ve never successfully induced a Moment of Clarity. They seem to come unpredictably, of their own accord, in a pattern of settings that looks absolutely nonsensical but nevertheless feels exactly right. But that doesn’t stop me from endless application of what I yesterday called “clarifying devices”: Aim for the life well lived. Would I respect me? Do things slower. Do things faster. Do hard things. Do hard things in a way that makes them seem like easy things. Fortune favors the bold. Fortune favors the stealthy. Be less autistic. Focus harder. Is there a possibility of failure? Reward is proportional to risk. Add more personality. Subtract more personality. Only have epic goals. Only have eminently doable goals. Don’t have goals. Are you producing? Aim for the general. Aim for the niche. Only connect. Is this remarkable?

Isn’t this search for clarity about finding ways to get your brain excited, as much as anything else? I find that the more junk is floating around my mind, the harder it becomes to get excited enough about something to actually work on it, or even to draw inspiration from it. Mental noise feels as if it weakens mental stimulation, whether it’s from the worthy stuff (that article you’ve been writing) or the less so (trending Twitter topics). And what prevents me from dropping myself into meaningful work more powerfully than anything else? Fear of insufficient mental stimulation ahead — fear of boredom.

Even though I rarely experience anything that could be called boredom, some sort of primal terror of it keeps me from spending as much effort on promising pursuits as I could. I think it helps to take some time to crank down my average volume of mental input so as to boost my sensitivity to it when it really matters. I guess I can see why David Lynch meditates so much. I was just this morning listening to Mark Maron talk to Judd Apatow on WTF about how sure they are that a couple fifteen-minute sessions a day could totally transform their lives — if only they could bring themselves do it. I have to believe that, when your level of ambient mental static gets down there toward zero, clarity-hunting isn’t an issue and the world around you becomes a hell of a lot more interesting. It’s the same principle that makes a humble slice of turkey taste like such a flavor explosion after you’ve endured a monthlong beans-and-plain-yogurt diet. Maybe I should invest in one of those sensory deprivation tanks from 1982.

I have met my enemy, and his name is Timmy

Well, not really. It's short for "Timidity". He just finds his given name a bit too fancy to use. He fears embarrassment, or, worse, getting pounded into the wood chips for his lunch money. Timmy fears a wide range of things, real and imagined, and knowing him, he wouldn't put up a fight against any of them. I can say this because, despite his being the greatest living impediment to my progress, I'm actually on fairly intimate terms with him. Timmy, you see, lives inside my brain.

You might assume there's an easy fix: get Timmy to step outside for a moment, say, then lock the door behind him. The problem is that Timmy is a total and utter homebody. He never leaves. He doesn't go outside, he doesn't talk to anyone, he doesn't visit new places, he doesn't do new things. Timmy's ideal evening is to hunker down with a thick-crust Hawaiian pizza, play old video games on emulators and hope his phone doesn't ring.

Oh, Timmy loves him some hunkering down — believe that. It's his response to everything. Wow, look at that turbulent economy. "Perfect time to hunker down!" Hey, going to this party might be interesting. "Wouldn't you rather hunker down?" How about a run? "Oh, let's hunker down instead." There's a lot to do today, so I'd better get out of bed early! "But it's a lot more comfortable hunkering down under these covers!" Timmy doesn't realize that, in the entirety of recorded human history, "hunkering down" has never lead to success, but man, does he lobby for it.

The fact that Timmy hates humanity is part of this. Well, hate probably makes for an overstatement; it's more like he feels infinitely superior to the rest of humanity, yet also deeply fears it. He's absolutely convinced that most other people are primed and ready to laugh at him — he fears embarrassment more than a bullet — and he's pretty sure that the ones who won't are morons, proselytizing cultists or slicksters with something to sell.

Timmy's animus toward humanity is as mine toward him, but unlike his, mine is well-earned. I don't know how or why he moved into my brain in the first place, but he's been there since day one, moping around and blubbering his endless, ever sadder litany of discouragements, excuses and cop-outs. There is one activity — one activity — Timmy is good at, just one area where he exercises any imagination whatsoever: producing nervous cornucopias of reasons why things won't work.

I've come to understand that Timmy can't function without ironclad certainty. He knows it will always "work" to lay in bed, to flip through magazines, to scarf down cereal, to aimlessly wander the internet, so he's always game to do that sort of stuff. Timmy's only happy — as happy as he ever gets, which still seems kind of depressed — when there is no chance of failure, which also means there is no chance of meaningful success. (But he tries not to think about that last part.)

But dare I propose a task that might not go as planned, that loathsome sad-sack voice always chimes right in. "But Colin, if you shoot a movie, you have to find actors! What if you can't find actors?" "But Colin, if you start that writing project, it might take a long time! What if there's a more comfortable use of that time?" "But Colin, if you go to that interesting part of the world, you won't know anyone there! What if you need goods or services?" Solo endeavors Timmy finds dicey enough, but when other people are involved, he simply assigns catastrophic failure a P of 1.

Intellectually, I know there is no failure except failing yourself. And I believe it. But tell that to Timmy! See, this is precisely why I envy people who don't have to share their brains with any whiny freeloaders, any pathetic intracranial hikikomoris like mine. It goes without saying that he'll never, ever relocate of his own volition, since the kingdom of nature knows no grip as tenacious as Timmy's on the nearest, easiest sources of food, shelter and satisfaction, no matter how meager the streams of all three. I truly believe his highest aspiration is to nothing more than a painless life, prolonged as far as possible, followed by a swift, merciful death. (But then, why delay the death?)

Though Timmy would never actually try to make anything — too much risk — he does seem to enjoy dreaming about making things. He's basically lost in reverie all day; you might say that he exists, biologically speaking, as nothing more than a reverie support system. This is the perfect "experience" for him, since he gets all the imagined glory in scenarios that admit no deviation from his plan. Oh, the great works he's made in these dreams. Oh, the accolades he's received.

The only real thing Timmy has ever built — and it's a hell of a stretch even to call it real — is a protective structure of B.S. around himself. Each block of this B.S. is different, and differently self-aggrandizing: "Timmy is smart." "Timmy is creative." "Timmy is funny." "Timmy is well-liked." But these cannot be put to the test; were any part of this shield to come into contact with reality, the whole thing would shatter like sugar glass. (And what is embarrassment, Timmy's most feared of all conditions, but a blow on one's self-built, self-regarding B.S. wall?) Hence Timmy's avoidance of as much of the world as possible, any element of which could potentially harm the trumped-up personal identity that buoys his fantasies. This enables him to do what is obviously just replicating the condition of the womb, where no action is necessary, no interaction is necessary and no is reaction necessary — a state of pure receptivity — while believing that he isn't.

Timmy and I used to get along a lot better when I was a kid, perhaps because he's so deeply childish himself. Whether it was the sneaky effectiveness of peer pressure or just the pure credulity of youth, I often took his mewling words as gospel. Could it even be possible to tally all he convinced me not to do? "Don't write that, young Colin. It could turn out to be embarrassing. Don't talk to that person. What if it's embarrassing? Don't go there; you could get embarrassed. Ah, jeez, don't even think about attempting to play that instrument or learn than language or associate with those people or do that sport. Consider the potential embarrassment! Just get yourself a cheese dog, play some computer games and try your best to hide."

I know others who have one of Timmy's relatives — and he comes from a teeming brood of them — clinging for dear life to a long-term least on a corner of their minds. To a homunculus, these brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins are just as dour, just as pessimistic, just as frightened, just as mediocre as Timmy. Some of the hosts are just as irritated as I am. Some are right now potting ways to kill their unwanted tenant. (Some seem to have already pulled off the job, though, for obvious reasons, they won't tell me if or exactly how they did it.) But you know what's the saddest part of all this? Some people have made peace with their own Timmy equivalents. You know what they call them? "Sensible." "Practical." "Prudent." "The voice of reason."

Organ markets, correct interestingness and self-delusion: a talk with Meteuphoric's Katja Grace

Katja Grace's Meteuphoric is one of the more consistently interesting blogs to pop up in the past few years, and I find it all the more so because I haven't quite been able to get a handle on its terrain. She uses it to observe and reason aloud about topics that involve philosophy, economics, psychology, rationality, cognitive science and the like, but you wouldn't really say the blog is necessarily about those things. There's a variety — as of this writing, its front page covers an intellectual span from paying drug addicts not to pop out kids, the connection between bad teaching and certification and the social signaling of Mother's Day — but it also feels as if there's a definite focus. Hence my inclination to shoot her an e-mail and have a conversation about what, exactly, Meteuphoric is. Here's the result.

* * *

Colin Marshall: Having come across your blog via a link from Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen, I was delighted to find you'd already written two archives of posts on compelling subjects — compelling to my mind, at least. I'm still wondering how I might characterize the entire project, and rest assured I've plenty of questions to ask about that, but let me start with this: do you really think about the ins-and-outs of organ sales as often as I imagine you do? Having read through all your posts, I can't help but feel it's been something of a leitmotif. Does that subject happen to stand at the overlap of a few of your interests, or am I imagining things?
 

Katja Grace: Yes, organ markets are at the intersection of a few interesting things — psychology, ethics, institution design, arguing into the night. They are also one of the small number of things that make me slightly cross. I'll tell you why they are interesting for psychology and ethics.

I like things that allow a glimpse at how tenuous the connection is between reality and how we see it, and I think organ markets are one. Many of us feel instantly certain that organ markets should be prevented, and that it's for the sake of potential traders. Yet there seems no easy reason that organ markets should be worse than other exchanges. Some people argue for hours on this one, without any clear argument and a changing collection of unclear ones. Once someone read me a poem to try to get across the incommunicable wrongness I was missing, in vain. It's interesting to ask what about the situation is really so repellent, and why we are so sure our aversion is altruistic.

This leads to the general topic of the difference between being ethical and feeling ethical. Much of what our moral intuitions tell us is in contradiction with what we think are worthy principles. We like to think life is worth a lot for instance, yet in practice life more than a few miles away is worth nothing unless we are personally acquainted with the potentially deceased. Even if we calculate that organ markets would benefit users, many of us feel bad about them. What do you do when feeling virtuous comes into conflict with doing good? Most people go with their feelings.

This is what makes me slightly cross; we have reasons to believe some of our mental faculties should have evolved to be truthful, such as aspects of vision, but there is no reason our moral feelings should have evolved to make us benefit others consistently, so it is dishonest of us to pretend that following them somehow will. That people put their own comfort ahead of others receiving life saving organs while pretending it is for the good of traders irks me. As a friend pointed out, I am hypocritically motivated by disgust at others’ hypocritical motivation by disgust.
 

Colin Marshall: Ah, the old "refutation by poem." I presume that the person who tried that on you didn't know you all that well?

Even beyond the muddy thinking one finds about organ markets, the gap between attitudes as reflected in peoples' speech and attitudes as reflected in their actions seems, in my reading, to have become a larger theme in your writing with time. There's an interest there in your earliest posts, sure, but there's more of one now. How did you come to be intrigued specifically by the points where "feeling" a certain way and "being" a certain way diverge? Do you see this brand of hypocrisy everywhere, or is it confined only to certain sectors of life?

Katja Grace: There's more than one way to know someone well; for instance you can be very familiar with a person's peculiarities without the slightest clue what thoughts could prompt them.

I became interested when I was thirteen and I heard that ABBA — my favorite band at the time — had refused to go on a reunion tour despite a billion dollars' offer. My mother said this was awful of them, as they could fix a small third-world country for a few weeks' singing, saving many lives. This point didn't seem that specific to a billion dollars, though. Any smaller proportion of lives for a smaller proportion of money had to be as good a deal. So, not wanting to murder anyone, I determined not to misuse a cent while such problems lasted and I could help.

It seemed odd that I hadn't thought of this before, but I didn't dwell on it. I figured other people would be interested to hear this great plan, as they valued human life so much. However whenever I explained to anyone they thought of some dubious sounding reason they couldn't be sure they could do anything or that their usual ethics shouldn't apply there. I didn't want to believe that everyone around me was evil, so I cheatingly decided they were probably delusional instead, and took an interest in what was going on.

How broadly does hypocrisy apply? Not sure, but here are some hints. It looks bad to overtly seek things like sex, status, and admiration. Even to admit that such things motivate you to otherwise admirable activities will likely lose you sex, status and admiration. It also appears that we want and benefit evolutionarily from these sorts of things a lot. So if seeking them overtly is condemnable, it would seem strange if we didn't seek them under the guise of other goals if we could. This could be at an evolutionary level or unconsciously, though, rather than through our own minds consciously planning any hypocrisy. We may just find that our genuine desire to help others is somehow sapped when nobody will see.

I suspect most hypocrisy is somewhat like this; we act on what seems right to us and don't notice this is inconsistent and altered by situational factors we wouldn't consciously support. Verifying that your behavior isn't unconsciously bent toward hypocrisy isn't generally considered necessary for answering the question "Am I a hypocrite?", so any related knowledge can happily remain just close enough to consciousness to remind one not to look there.


Colin Marshall: Here we see a bit of overlap with the ground Robin Hanson covers in his rationality-themed blog Overcoming Bias. Reading your posts, it's easy to see that you're a fan of his, and reading the comments below your posts, it's easy to see that he's a fan of yours — his face, at least in icon form, has become a fixture around Meteuphoric.

But he's not the only influence you cite in your writing. Others named in posts include Thomas Schelling, La Rochefoucauld, Paul Gowder and Steven Pinker. Who else's work do you look to as catalysts for your own thought? Who or what, aside from the ABBA-driven curiosity you just described provided the entrée — or "pushed the gateway drug," if you prefer — into reading the sort of thinkers that you do?


Katja Grace: I like interesting ideas and don't mind who writes them, so I look for topics more than authors. I often can't even remember who writes things I like — it took a lot of liking Overcoming Bias before I noticed who wrote it at all, and more to realize Robin and Eliezer weren't both women's names.

I like most topics that can be analyzed with neat principles. Vagueness, unorganizable detail and narratives bother me, so I'm yet to find a workable way to know about history. I try to read famous things; I figure they are likely better and others can discuss them readily. I don't read the news much; I find newspapers hard to get through, and if anything happens that I'm in a position to influence, someone will probably tell me.

I like thinking more than reading (a potentially dangerous characteristic) so I try to read things that will be fun or productive to think about, or that I already think something about and want to hear the arguments against. I'm not sure about a particular entree — Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder was influential. It contained an amazing lot of interesting ideas for someone who was used to reading fiction about pre-teen girls.


Colin Marshall: I can't resist probing that bit about the potential dangers of thinking more than you read. What do you think are the problems lurking around corners for those who spend more time internally processing, modifying, testing and reflecting upon ideas than receiving intellectual input? Where do you think you currently fall on the spectrum that runs from those who only read to those who only think? Can you conceive of an ideal place to reside on that spectrum, or is it more of a matter of trial and error?


Katja Grace: The extreme of thinking with no intellectual input gets you as far as a thoughtful caveman. The other extreme is zero improvement on what exists around you. I'm not sure what the optimal compromise is, and it would depend on the topic, but I suspect I am biased in favor of thinking. It's more effort to think correct interesting things than interesting things, and hard for uninvolved listeners to tell the difference, or for that matter for you to. So if you pride yourself at all on having interesting ideas, there's an incentive to think too much.

This probably isn't a major effect in society; more people seem toward the reading end of your spectrum and like a lot of detailed knowledge, keeping up with everything that happens without trying to add much to it. These "biased" positions are not necessarily errors, but merely the results of people's goals not being to produce good insights efficiently. I'm not sure how productive a world with some people focussed on thinking and some on reading is compared to one where most people take the best personal compromise. I mostly feel like I don't read enough personally because reading seems so slow compared to thinking, but I suppose if I really cared I would have learned to speed read by now.


Colin Marshall: Which brings me to the range of topics you discuss on Meteuphoric. You've written an about page which says the blog "is about ideas that apply to lots of things for long enough to be interesting." A wide-open field, as you'd no doubt agree. As a reader, it seems to me that you write about whatever holds enough personal interest for you to compose a post about. This is super-reductive, yes, but is it actually incorrect?

And whether or not that's a perfectly suitable description, yours does strike me as an unusually successful effort — in terms of visible reader engagements, high-profile links to it elsewhere, etc. — given the broadness of its subject matter. It seems to me that 90 percent the blogosphere's population writes about whatever happens to interest them — and their words go unread. What, in your handling of a somewhat similar blogging principle, do you think attracts a readership of your readership's quality? Is it perhaps to do with the aforementioned focus on the ideas that underpin the things on whose surfaces another blogger might linger?


Katja Grace: It's true my claimed theme is a guess at what bounds my interests more than a constraint. There are more criteria though: I try to only post on things where I have a single specific insight that I haven't heard before. That cuts out rants, winding streams of thought and other broad overviews, as well as most reposting of others' ideas. I actually have about three times as many unpublished drafts as posts, mostly because there are issues I've thought a bit about, but don't have a neat single insight I'm confident in to contribute.

I'm not sure why my blog is successful. I don't try to appeal much beyond what personal aesthetics dictates, apart from some extra effort toward clear explanation. A difference from many other blogs is that I try to write dispassionately when talking about people, who are usually generic, and rarely talk about myself or my personal preferences or prejudices. I'm not sure these things help popularity — if the rest of the media is anything to go by, people like emotion, taking sides, and knowing about specific people more than ideas.


Colin Marshall: And finally, I must ask: how does the thinking and writing you do on Meteuphoric reflect back on your everyday life? An unsettling percentage of the people I know who spend sizable chunks of their time pondering and communicating, on the net or otherwise, about issues of rationality, intelligence, human behavior and how things really are versus how they seem don't seem to incorporate their own findings into their operative worldview. How much do you notice that the questions you raise and conclusions at which you arrive on the blog feed back into and shape how you live, and how much is all this stuff compartmentalized off by itself?


Katja Grace: I have to say I'm a hypocrite here to be consistent; either I apply what I write to my life, and thus interpret my behaviour as often hypocritical, or I'm hypocritical for not applying it. It's probably a mix. It's easier to tell yourself that you are delusional about your real motives than it is for that thought to seriously compete with the feeling that you aren't.

Most interesting thoughts are wrong, and normal behaviour presumably embodies a lot of previous thought and experimentation, so trying to implement everything you think of in your life can go badly. Which is a good reason to work out why people do or believe things before you write them off. I spent a lot of my childhood rescuing snails from sidewalks because I couldn't think of any good argument for their experience being less vivid than mine, and before that my imaginary friends used to "Pascal's mug" me because I couldn't prove they didn't exist, and they could threaten me with anything, being imaginary. In those cases going with popular opinion might have been better.

These days my most unusual practical application of thinking is to try to save most of my money to give to the most worthy cause I can find. It used to be all of it — my mother thought this so silly she responded by giving me an "entertainment allowance" which I was forbidden to spend on anything "worthwhile."  My honours year project is about anthropic reasoning, which I blog about a bit, and my opinions on political and social things reflect what I write, though those things hardly count as practical applications.

In other ways I think there's a disconnect. It can be hard to apply abstract bits and pieces of understanding to messy reality to find better courses of action than popular opinion could give you. Also thinking about abstract things directly diverts attention from things like remembering to eat breakfast, so reduces practical competence that way. I'm at the end of undergraduate uni, so will soon get to more important decisions that I nervously hope thinking will influence to good effect.

A bold fresh piece of corpse

I've been reading a lot about J.M. Coetzee and his novels lately. One part of it has to do with my interest in borderlands: in the past dozen years, he seems to have bared down hard on the arts of the not-really-an-autobiography-autobiography, the not-really-a-novel-novel and the not-really-a-self-satirizing-formal-experiment-formal-experiment-in-self-satire. The other part is that he seems to have solved the problem of simultaneous interestingness and popularity. He writes what are clearly interesting books, yet they simply can't stop winning prizes, two Bookers and a Nobel included. As (former Marketplace of Ideas guest) James Wood wrote, "Coetzee is undoubtedly one of the best novelists at work in English, yet prize juries are known, more often than not, for their invincible wrong-headedness."

One of Coetzee's interesting and popular "novels" — its essayistic form confuses people — is 2003's Elizabeth Costello. The eponymous protagonist, an aging novelist deep in the opinion-spouting circuit, is given lots of preposterous things to say. Some of her views are poses, some are untestable, and some are only a mere dozen or so revisions away from reasonability. Here is Costello, a vegetarian animal-rights type like Coetzee himself, on the omnivores who surround her:

I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money.

It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, "Yes, it's nice, isn't it? Polish-Jewish skin it's made of, we find that's best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins." And then I go to the bathroom and the soap wrapper says, "Treblinka — 100% human stearate." Am I dreaming, I say to myself? What kind of house is this?

I find myself notice the form of argument implied here more and more often, especially when vegetarians talk about everyone else. "If only they could see it how I see it," the line goes. "If only they could see that it's not beef, it's cow; it's not venison, it's deer; it's not a carcass, it's a corpse. If only they stopped forgetting that the sandwiches they're eating were once living, breathing things, they'd give up meat just like I have!"

Well, no, not really. It's not as if I suspect these claims are made in bad faith; I just doubt they'd ever move anyone not already inclined toward vegetarianism. There are plenty of people who adopt meat-free diets — permanently or, more often, otherwise — on the strength of a behind-the-slaughterhouse scenes PETA video or two. But, speaking as an omnivore who has seen countless many of these grainy, surreptitiously recorded montages of chicken-debeaking and cow-dropping, I guess I just don't care. Not only do they never make me consider giving up meat, I'd bet folding money that I could eat a fresh-grilled piece of corpse while watching them.

(And I'm not even terribly attached to meat. I often think how little I would mind if I woke up one morning to a world that has turned completely vegan. I'm no fan of vegetables, true, but presumably I could avoid my leafy greens almost as easily if all of humanity was producing and consuming an infinite variety of vegan cuisine rather than the unappealing subset now available.)

Abortion, another issue in which I have no real sake, gets tied up in this semantic nonsense as well. The "If only they could see that it's not a fetus, it's a person!" side must see types like me as an irritating obstacle indeed, since I both (a) have no objections whatsoever to abortion and (b) don't see fetuses as "not people." Once again, I arrive at the tentative conclusion that, if you come to declare a belief to the external world, you probably internally "believed" it, in some sense, already.