Garbage and Gravitas | The Nation

An interesting essay on Ayn Rand that does a really good job of analyzing her work in the context of her own biography. There's also a good take down of her faux-Aristotelian logical system. The arguments weaken when the author tries to draw parallels between Rand and the Nazis, and goes completely off the rails when poor Nietzsche is dragged into the discussion as a proto-fascist straw man.

Conspiratorial Thinking

Interesting thinking about conspiracy theories.

Robert Horning argues that they are a warped form of non-conformity:

It’s a grandiose way of signaling resistance to the normative culture of our time (to borrow a phrase Amitai Etzioni uses in this TNR article). What is at stake for [the conspiracy theorist] in his Holocaust denial is not history at all or even his urge to disseminate anti-Semitic propaganda. Rather, it’s nothing other than his own reputation as a stalwart nonconformist. Holocaust denial ends up seeming like the extreme version of hating Coldplay because they are popular.

Commenter jimstoic adds:

People want the universe to make sense. It feels imbalanced for one person, like Lee Harvey Oswald, to in a single moment have such a dramatic effect on the the world. The perceived magnitude of the evil far outweighs the perceived magnitude of the perpetrator.

Calm acceptance of this imbalance requires either great faith, or an acceptance that the universe has no inherent meaning. The minds of people between these extremes seek explanations for how a meaningful universe could allow such imbalance.

Frank Furedi writes in sp!ked about the problem of causality:

Conspiratorial thinking is encouraged by a powerful cultural narrative that depicts people, not as the authors of their destiny, but as the objects of manipulative secretive forces. Life is interpreted through the prism of a Hollywood blockbuster, where powerful evil and hidden figures pull all the strings. The flourishing of this imagination springs from mainstream society’s own inability to give an authoritative account of contemporary events. Virtually every aspect of public life is contested today, and there is little agreement on what are the causes of our current predicament. This crisis of causality continually calls into question the official version of events. Of course, the official version of events often needs to be questioned, but not through embracing a simplistic conspiratorial worldview that blames small cliques of evil people for what happens in the world.

The jist is that conspiratorial thinking is a form of healthy skepticism, historical reasoning, and the attribution of cause and effect relationships run amok. Ultimately it's a form of intellectual despair in which the drive to create meaning in history and current affairs is caught in a feedback loop of fanciful associations, biases, obsessions, and prejudices: racism, sexism, xenophobia, and religious intolerance. Typically this results in an understanding of events that is private and self-serving. Real history, on the other hand, seeks to understand how social movements, material circumstances, and individual actions drive the historical narrative with the simplest explanation usually being the best one.

Outliers of Success

There seems to be a lot of confusion about Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. I haven't even read the book yet, but I've read enough of the reviews, and enough Gladwell's stuff in the New Yorker to have an idea of where the argument is going.

Here's Kevin Drum responding to a post by Matthew Yglesias:

To a certain extent, I think most people already understand that there's more than a little bit of luck involved in the fact that IBM decided to license Bill Gates's MS-DOS instead of CP/M or that 24 turned out to be a monster hit for Kiefer Sutherland. The genius who got a lucky break early in his career is practically a cliche. What's more, I think most of us don't begrudge the occasional outliers their jackpots all that much. Sure, Gates and Sutherland were both good and lucky, but at least they were good. The bigger problem is with the vast amounts of money earned routinely and consistently by people who aren't even all that good.

So if the book argues that it's better to be lucky than good, then Yglesias thinks this leads to an elite class that mistake their good fortune for talent, and feels entitled to things that they haven't so much earned as just sort of fallen into. Drum pushes back, arguing that the game is rigged, and that luck ends up rewarding the merely mediocre in all sorts of insane ways.

But my understanding is that Gladwell's argument hinges not on blind luck, but on the 10,000 hour rule. In other words: practice, practice, practice. The luck element is not random but circumstantial. You either have to be lucky enough to devote yourself to something for 10,000 hours, or lucky enough to be in demand for your services once you've finished developing your skills. In other words, the argument seems to that you have to be in the right place at the right time with the right skill set to be successful. The reason that Bill Gates or The Beatles are outliers is not that they got lucky, but that the circumstances of time, place, and skill set are not reproducible.

The problem with the biographies of famous people, is that we, the plebs, are meant to draw lessons from them. We are meant to emulate the habits of others so that we too can grow up to be successful individuals. That's the real myth and danger of the so-called meritocracy: the idea that if you do what your told and follow the rules and fight the good fight, then you'll rise up from meager beginnings to be the next "name of famous person" here.

The truth is that there is almost nothing you can learn from the success of others. They already occupy a time and space that doesn't belong to you. You'll never be a Beatle, and you'll never found Microsoft. You'll also never be Emperor of Rome or President during the Civil War. Your opportunities are limited by your circumstances. All of which says a lot, but doesn't really explain anything -- except the temptation in thinking there's a magic secret or some hidden shortcut to untold riches. When really all you can do is live your life, find something you love to do, and hope for the best.

Finders and Seekers

This was in The New Yorker a few weeks ago, and I keep returning to the ideas in it.

The distinction between "Late Bloomers" and "Prodigies," is interesting, but I was more intrigued by the deeper divide between conceptual thinkers and experimental thinkers.

Prodigies like Picasso, Galenson argues, rarely engage in that kind of open-ended exploration. They tend to be “conceptual,” Galenson says, in the sense that they start with a clear idea of where they want to go, and then they execute it. “I can hardly understand the importance given to the word ‘research,’ ” Picasso once said in an interview with the artist Marius de Zayas. “In my opinion, to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing.” He continued, “The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting. . . . I have never made trials or experiments.”

But late bloomers, Galenson says, tend to work the other way around. Their approach is experimental. “Their goals are imprecise, so their procedure is tentative and incremental,”

The idea that we can blossom as we age is a story we tell ourselves so that we won't feel the blunt defeat of growing older. It's a youth culture, and the prodigies always win. But I imagine, that in the distinction between the conceptual and the experimental, one definition will make perfect sense to the reader, and the other will seem sort of blurry, depending on their own style.

For instance, I've discovered that even at work I'm much more experimental than conceptual, while most people in my field seem to be the opposite. In the work world, your goal is to execute plans and find solutions, whereas I'm more interested in rethinking how things are done and reworking projects in an iterative fashion to see what comes of it. Curious.

The Memes are Cascading

This article in the New Republic also says less than it seems to at first blush.

Of course everyone knows about bandwagons. But the recent studies have offered some real surprises. Why does one singer become a superstar, whereas an apparently indistinguishable singer is now waiting tables? Why do some books or movies become blockbusters while equally good ones flop? Observers tend to treat successes and failures as the logical outcomes of well (or poorly) laid plans, or attribute them to large, intrinsic differences among people and products. But cascades, which are unpredictable and not very logical are created by small variations and even coincidences, and these often make all the difference. A few early supporters, or a single favorable review or report, can start a "yes" cascade--just as a few early negatives, or a bad first week, can produce a devastating "no" cascade.

The key point for the author is how rational people make irrational decisions by getting caught up in these waves, but for me the idea of cascades sounds a lot like other similarly weird "the world is not what seems" explanations for how the world really works.

This time instead of memes, we have cascades (perhaps waves are replacing particles in this new Einsteinian universe). But this time it's not the meme that's selfish, it's people who are easily swayed by others and have a tendency for group-think. So the answer really does lie in human nature. We believe what other's believe because the pathways are smoother. It gives us a sense of belonging and social approval. But why? And how is it that so many other people are able to short-circuit or ignore those cascades in favor of ideas that barely make a ripple?