What If You Are Special?

OK, so there's this way of thinking that goes like this: if you don't know whether you're "typical" or special with respect to some unknown thing, then you should assume you're typical.

Since, you know, odds are that you are typical.

So, for instance, when people talk about crazy shit like the end of the world, they use this reasoning to predict "with 95% "confidence", that humanity will disappear within 9120 years." That's from the Wikipedia entry on Doomsday arguments. The idea is that you and I probably aren't among the very first people to live, and we're probably not among the very last people to live. Probably. So, probably, we're somewhere in the middle. Which if you add in a few
assumptions, leads to the 9120 number.

Then also there's that book I wrote about before on C and C, Stumbling on Happiness. There, Dan Gilbert says that since most people are really bad at predicting how happy or unhappy something will make you, you should inform yourself by asking how happy or unhappy that same thing made other people.

So, if you're not sure how upsetting it will be when your team loses, or how happy you'll be when you get a raise, you should just check with someone else whose team lost and who got a raise.

This assumes you're pretty typical, which, probabilistically is probably a pretty safe assumption. But what if you're not? If you're not typical, there's no way to reason yourself out of a clearly false conclusion.

So maybe you know that, statistically, almost everyone is happier being married. It seems to follow that in the absence of knowledge of your own specialness, you too should assume you will be happier married. But if you're in the minority of people who just isn't going to be happier being married, well, there's no way you could factor that in. There's no way not to come to the wrong conclusions.

It almost makes you think there's something fishy about the whole thing. I mean, if I don't know anything about how typical I am, how can I assign a probability to my own typicality? Maybe I'm so underinformed about my own typicality that I should just assume ignorance.

In that case, coming up against questions like whether to get married, you'd have to guess, you know, or punt. Kind of wing it. At least then there would be the off chance that if you're atypical, you'll make an atypical decision. And maybe live happily ever after, who knows?

Unless, of course, the world comes to an end.

Lucky, Good, Etc.

So the Lakers won last night, if you weren't paying attention, by three points, on a non-call on a foul by Derek Fisher on Brent Barry. The only reason I know it's a foul is because the TNT guys told me it was, otherwise I wouldn't have known. Also they told me that Barry didn't deserve to get the call because he didn't dive into Fisher and he didn't sell the foul and he put the ball on the floor.

Anyway, I don't have a particular problem with the non-call because, as Phil Jackson pointed out, the shot clock should have reset for the Lakers on an earlier play and then we wouldn't be having this discussion. Also, the Lakers played a lot better than the Spurs, and if the Spurs had played a little better we wouldn't be having this discussion.

But still I had flashbacks to that one game a while back against Sacramento where the Lakers got bailed out by the refs, and my friends, Lakers haters to a man (or woman), rode me unmercilessly about it.

I think I spent the aftermath in that game pretty much in denial. I wanted to believe that it was completely fair that the Lakers won, that they deserved each and every one of those calls.

It's been a few years, and I demand less of the world around me. I'm prepared to admit my team got a few calls, a few lucky bounces of the ball. I still kind of have an internal issue thought. Would I rather the Lakers win in a non-heroic kind of way, does the win mean that much, or would I rather they not win? How about if they didn't win in a super-heroic way? Would I rather root for a team of martyrs, or a team of plutocrats?

I don't know. It doesn't matter that much. I hate goddamn Tony Parker, though.

A Bar-Raiser From Way Back

Me. I'm a bar-raiser from way back. That is, I raise the bar.

When I first started graduate school, it was basically to get health insurance and reasonable work. When I switched to studying philosophy at age 30, I thought, well, whatever; I'd rather have a loser job and a degree in philosophy than a loser job and no degree in philosophy. At that time, I was about 15 pounds heavier than I am now -- quite plump -- and I never exercised. I smoked.

I remember the first time I went to a professional conference on my department's dime. The conference was in the Hilton, or the Hyatt, or something; I hadn't stayed in a place like that ever in my life. "Oh My God," I thought. This is the life. I might even get to do this again!

Sure, well, now I go to our professional conferences three times a year: we have one in the West, one in the East, and one in the middle. I go to all of them. I have a research fund. And I'm all, "What do you mean I gotta pay extra to work out? What? There's no hot tub?!"

I don't have a loser job; in fact I'm a philosophy professor. I live in a fun big city. I've lost some weight; I exercise; I don't smoke. I never dreamed things could turn out so well.

So. Do I spend my days in goggle-eyed amazement and happiness? No.

What I do is compare myself to people who are way ahead of me -- teach at better places, have written more stuff, have other accomplishments like children or speaking five languages -- and I say to myself, "Why am I so behind?"

Poor me! Waah! Time is running out and I'm so behind, boo-hoo!

It's completely ridiculous. But I can't help it: I'm raising the bar. If I've got a good job, I want a better one. If I look pretty good, I want to look great. If I travel to France every year, I want to go to Italy.

It's moronic. All I can say in my own defense is that almost everyone else is just as bad, as far as I can tell.

So there.

Irrationality: What Is The Deal?

Today I did something that is a paradigm case of irrational behavior. I was in line at Starbucks, and although I wasn't exactly hungry, I wanted something. Along with my coffee I ordered a chocolate doughnut. I know from previous Starbucks adventures that those chocolate doughnuts are mm mm good.

I brought it back to my table, and I did some stuff on my computer, and I drank my coffee. The work I was doing was pretty absorbing, and I found myself sort of forgetting about my doughnut. After a little while had passed, I actually was hungry. I hate eating sugary sweets on an empty stomach; it always makes me feel kind of sick. What I really wanted then was a small, pre-workout, healthy snack. In the mall where my gym is there's a food court, and in the food court there's a sushi place that is super-convenient, and at the sushi place they sell these little snack-sized packs of nigiri. About $3.75 plus tax. They're kind of the perfect little snack.

I decided I'd wait, have a sushi snack, digest a bit, and then go to the gym. Now, the thing is, I don't know what the fuck I was thinking when I ordered the doughnut, because I'm trying to lose weight, and as I said, I wasn't even hungry.

So when I realized it was in my power to forgo the doughnut, the idea of giving it up grabbed me in a big way. So what did I do?

I threw it away. In the garbage.

If you were trying to come up with an example of someone who behaved irrationally, in the sense of being self-undermining, this is a textbook case.

So. What happened? Was it

1) I "changed my mind" twice: once when I went from "I'm watching my weight" to "I'll take that doughut" and once when I threw it away.

2) I suffered from "weakness of will" when I ordered the doughnut, and the will magically reappeared in time for me to throw the doughnut away.

3) I was never sufficiently committed to watching my weight, or to eating the doughnut.

I'm asking seriously. Socrates is famous for having thinking there is no such thing as 2) -- you always do as you just best at the moment, so the problem is with your judging not your asking.

Some other philosophers think 3) is right, but I've always had my doubts. I don't need full commitment to things to carry them out, do I? I mean, it wouldn't be better to be "wholehearted" about doughnut eating, would it?

I'm thinking maybe it's 1). And then, what I don't get is, how are you supposed to know when your changing your mind is going to lead you down the path of utter ridiculousness? Or isn't that something to worry about?

Quitting Quitting: My Diet Coke Habit

I'm quitting quitting Diet Coke.

I love Diet Coke. Actually, I love diet sodas of all kinds. Now that I think of it, I love artificial sweetener in almost anything.

To me, artificial sweeteners are infinitely superior in flavor to sugar and corn syrup - at least in beverages. I don't know how they are in, like, baked goods and candy. Maybe not as good. But in drinks, oh boy, give me Splenda, give me Nutrasweet, hell, give me saccharine for that matter.

Artificial sweeteners are light where sugar is heavy. They're smooth where sugar is sticky. They're the foxy to sugar's lumpen. Diet soda is thirst-quenching and perfect where regular soda is like eating a cough drop.

A couple of months ago I tried to give up diet soda, and artificial sweeteners generally. I had three reasons:

1) Some research shows they're maybe not that good for you, and research definitely shows that all the phosphorous in cola drinks is not good for you in large quantities. Since Diet Coke was my main soda of choice, I was drinking a lot of goddamn phosphorous.

2) Some research shows that the sweet flavor screws up your insulin, and you end up eating more to make up for it. I admit it: I thought, well, maybe I can lose a few pounds this way.

3) For me diet soda goes naturally with all kinds of other junky food, like french fries, and chips, and pizza. If I drank water, I figured, I'd eat a salad.

Well, it doesn't take an expert on human psychology to figure out that 3) was going to be middling at best. Basically I found other junky foods to eat -- sweet ones instead of salty ones.

And perhaps because of this, I didn't "lose a few pounds." If anything, I gained a few. Now, it's possible I gained a few pounds in spite of giving up diet soda, not because of it. We'll never know. But the increase in my jam and cookie consumption suggests otherwise. So 2) was kind of a bust.

That leaves 1). Still a good reason, but not enough to motivate the true lover of diet soda. It's just too abstract.

So I'm giving up giving it up.

Last night I went to see Iron Man, and I was kind of peckish in that late-afternoon-you-don't-really-need-popcorn-but-ooh-you-want-some kind of way. Since I gave up giving it up, I ordered up a nice, small, Diet Coke. (Which came to $3.71 Canadian. I know, I know, but Wow!)

The Diet Coke was delicious and perfect and calorie-free. The movie was awesome. And Robert Downey Jr., well, let's just say it was a perfect trifecta of pleasures.

I'm An Anti-Hoarder

Some people have a psychological problem where they can't throw anything away. They're hoarders.

I have a psychological problem where I can't not throw things away. I'm an anti-hoarder. A thrower-awayer. A de-clutterer. A house purger.

I get a serious kick out of getting rid of stuff, and I get a serious case of the heebie-jeebies when I'm around a lot of cluttery junk. I almost enjoy getting rid of stuff as much as I enjoy buying stuff. Not quite, but almost.

Yesterday I did a major house purge. It was awesome.

I threw away pieces of paper. I threw away old towels that could have been still useful, but were too ratty to donate to the thrift store. I threw away some pajamas tops that I'd bought at a thrift store that couldn't be washed with anything else and thus were driving me crazy.

I made a giant stack of books to take to the used bookstore. I live in a smallish space, and I'm determined not to buy any more bookshelves, so now that I've got some new books I had to get rid of some old ones. Mostly I'm getting rid of novels I started and hated, or novels I sort of enjoyed but were too stupid to want to keep around the house. I say it's a resolution, but the truth is, I was excited and happy to get rid of these books.

I threw away an old wood cutting board that had gotten all moldy-colored on the bottom. I threw away an apple corer that I never use because I prefer knives. I threw away a cookie cutter in the shape of a buffalo. Cute, but when's the last time I made cookies? Never.

Those last two kitchen items were the only thing I felt bad about throwing away. They could have been used; in a perfect world I'd have found a new home for them. But there were only two of them, and they were small, and I was lazy. In the trash they went.

In a kind of fit of craziness, I threw away old mementos and letters. Who needs them? After all, I'm anti-nostalgia. That's when I started to think, "Maybe I am insane?"

Because the truth is I've gotten carried away before. Absurdly, my need to purge extends to my digital life, and I often delete old electronic documents. Once I accidentally deleted all my copies of my CV and I had to remake it from scratch.

Overall, though, I'd say the house purging desire is a healthy one, and only occasionally does it veer into madness. And if I ever get tired of being a professor, I figure I can become a professional. I would love to go throw other people's stuff away.

The only real thorn in my side, house-purging-wise, is the environment. When I was a kid my father did a yearly house purge, bringing the same pleasure to the task that I now bring to my own. "If in doubt, throw it out!" he'd chant, while dumping old boxes of crayons, markers, and half-used pads of paper. "We'll get new ones if we want!" he'd say.

I would love, love, love to throw away old pens, half-used boxes of greeting cards, packages of mailing labels, and old pads of paper. But the thought of the land-fill stops me. I'm proud to say I've got a half-used box of greeting cards that I've had for about ten years, sitting in my drawer. Ten years! I use one of them every so often. I've thought of trashing them about seventeen times. How's that for the triumph of rationality over desire, guys?

Impressive!

Happiness and Memory

If you weren't reading the Science Times carefully last week you might have missed the interview with Dan Gilbert. Gilbert wrote that book Stumbling On Happiness. It's a good book, and I wrote before about some of the questions I thought the his arguments raised.

One of the things Gilbert says in the interview is that a hard look at happiness shows that experiences are more likely to make you happy than things. Part of this, he explains, is because experiences tend to be shared with other people. This strikes me as very plausible.

Then he goes on to say that experiences also make us happy because they don't decay:

"People think a car will last and that’s why it will bring you happiness. But it doesn’t. It gets old and decays. But experiences don’t. You’ll “always have Paris” — and that’s exactly what Bogart meant when he said it to Ingrid Bergman. But will you always have a washing machine? No."

Here I get less sure I'm with him. In what sense don't experiences decay? Well, you have the memory of the experience, and even though that may change over time, if the experience was a happy one I'm willing to grant that it will continue to be a happy memory.

I'll grant that it's nice to have happy memories. But would it make you happier? My own sense is that I'm happiest when I'm thinking about the future, not the past. If things are good, and I'm expecting them to get a whole lot better, well, that makes me really happy. If things are good, and I'm expecting them to get a whole lot worse, well, that makes me unhappy.

Perhaps a more complicated thought here is that happy memories aren't just memories of events; they're part of your identity. Gilbert talks about going to visit his small granddaughter, and how happy that will make him. In addition to the obvious things like it's fun, and he loves her, and he'll look back on it fondly, he also gets the feeling of, I'm a doting grandfather.

This, too, though, has a lot to do with the present and future. If you're now estranged from your family, those experiences of the past are likely to present very mixed feelings. It's when they can become a part of your identity and your future that experiences like that matter so much.

Putting these thoughts together, it seems to me Gilbert is slightly overestimating the quality of the experience as a past item, and underemphasizing the importance of experiences as ongoing things. Experiences matter most when they're past, present, and future.

I've written before, here on C and C, about how hard it is to judge "correctly" how much you should care about your future self, as compared to your present self. Often, it seems to me, the present gets shafted: Put that money in savings! Don't have that second glass of wine! Please, think of your future selves!

And yeah, it's true that for experiences to be ongoing you have to have some of that worry. But for experiences to add up in the right sort of way, you can't have too much of it, either.

My Limitations Amaze Me

My alarm went off this morning at 6. That is because I set it to go off at 6, even though it is a Sunday.

I had no actual intention of getting up for good at 6. There are some people that enjoy early rising; I am not one. I will sap every last minute of rolling around in bed until I am forced out by hunger or the demands of having a job. This is one of the reasons I don't have a pet.

But nevertheless, I set my alarm for 6 a.m. Because I had bought plants. I have, in my new apartment, a little semi-enclosed area that has some dirt in it, bordering the normal entrance-way/mini-patio. And for whatever reason, I was kind of semi-obsessed with the idea of planting things in that area.

Everybody reading this knows, or can imagine, that I am not what one would call a skilled gardener. Plants wither and die under my care. Even the hardiest of plants. Even when I take my job as plant owner seriously, which I mostly don't. But it is one of my areas of perennial optimism.

Which, actually, I consider a good thing. It may be a little sad for the plants, which die, and it's probably a waste of money and time, but it would also, I believe, be a little sad were I to abandon the dream of plant cultivation altogether, as fit only for a better, stronger breed of humanity than myself.

Anyway, hope sprang eternal and a week ago I went to the gardening center and bought some plants, and some soil, and a little trowel, and a little plant food. Then I got a visit from a friend who actually can keep plants alive and she suggested that I get, in addition, a pitchfork and some starter food.

So then followed a half-depressing/half-childish pleasure-inducing interval of drying to dig holes in the dry cracked soil around my patio. That moment where you realize the extent to which you don't know what you're doing. A kind of furtive burying of the plants in the ground.

Anyway, so my friend who knows about plants told me that for the first week I should be drenching these plants every morning as early as possible. Yesterday I failed to do so, so today I was going to wake up at 6, stagger out, water, return to bed.

And I didn't, because I just turned the alarm off and went back to sleep. Anyway, it just reminded me how strange it is to be alive, to have these things that you want to do, that aren't, on their face, so difficult to do, and yet be continually not doing them when you wanted to, or not doing them in the way you wanted to. How can that be true -- how can it have been too difficult for me to wake up at 6 a.m. to water my plants?

It was, though, and it's not as though I feel particularly bad about it either. Just surprised, mostly.

Money and Happiness In The News

Last Wednesday in the Business section, the Times ran a story about data challenging the old hypothesis that "relative wealth" was more closely tied to happiness than "absolute wealth." The hypothesis was formed in the 1970's on the basis of research showing that while being wealthy did not make people happy, being wealthier than other people did.

This hypothesis is called the "Easterlin paradox" after its formulator, and says that happiness is tied to how wealthy you are relative to others, rather than in absolute terms. But what's paradoxical about it? It's highly intuitive to me. Feeling like one of the richest, the smartest, the coolest, is way more important to my happiness than being, in an absolute sense, rich smart and cool if everyone else is richer, smarter, cooler.

The new data are supposed to challenge the hypothesis, on grounds that people in richer countries are, well, happier.

OK, so I'm not trying to be a pain in the ass about this, but really, I don't see how this follows. I mean, if you're the one of the richest people in Haiti, you're still way poorer than people in other countries. So even if you're rich relative to Haitians, you're still poor relative to the world.

So your unhappiness is just as well explained by the "relative" wealth hypothesis as it is by the absolute wealth hypothesis.

Some cool looking Haitian money.

At least, it is if you're willing to accept the premise that people in poor countries are comparing themselves not only with their fellow-countrymen but also with people in other countries.

The premise seems reasonable. With globalization and the internet, I'm sure people all over the world are fairly informed about people all over the world, and how well they live. At least roughly speaking.

So, uh, I don't get it. Am I missing something?

To My Future Selves: Get With The Program!

I've been away from my proper home for an extended stay, and when I got back, I got on my scale. Just as I'd expected: I've gained five pounds. It reminded me that I'd been sort of pondering hiring a personal trainer.

I can't decide whether having paying for a personal trainer is a sort of normal, healthy thing for a middle-aged, professional woman to do, or whether it's wasteful, stupid, and narcissistic. Also I can't really afford it. So it's been in the realm of pondering only.

After I got off the scale I was thinking about celebrities who lose lots of weight, like Janet Jackson, and I was thinking about the ways people lose weight, and the training thing, and I got to wondering about the power of systems. You know, why is it so much more appealing to have a salad for dinner if it's part of some giant intense life-changing plan, and so much harder to just have a salad for dinner if, you know, you've gained a bit of weight and want to eat sensibly?

Because it is, right? It's so much easier to make a choice like that as part of a dramatic plan and so hard to make a choice like that out of common sense. Well, it is for me anyway.

I'm sure, psychologically, there are lots of reasons. But the funny answer I came up with is that without the plan, you have no reason to think your future selves aren't going to just undermine your efforts -- gorge themselves on cake, eat a box of girl scout cookies, make you look like an idiot for your meaningless sacrifice.

It's like the same problem you have in collective action -- how do I know everyone will do their bit to achieve our goal? Because if I do my part, and no one else does theirs, the goal isn't acheived and I feel a chump. It's the same for planning, only there the "collective" is you, you-tomorrow, you-the-day-after-tomorrow, etc. If these people screw up and have chocolate cake for breakfast, your having had salad for dinner does nothing. You don't lose five pounds, and your salad-eating self feels like a chump.

I like thinking of my future selves in this weird, only semi-identified way . . . I mean, they're you, but they're not, too, and they could screw you over if you can't find a way to keep them in line. The dramatic life-changing plan at least gives you a feeling that the future selves can be whipped into shape, aren't going to show you up, aren't going to make you wish that you, too, had ordered the creme-brulee.

The big difference, I figure, is the way we feel about "free riders." In collective action, it's really annoying if one person signs on, and does nothing, but shares in the pleasure of the goal achieved. This is even called the "problem" of free riders.

But when it comes to you and your future selves, you're only too thrilled if there are free riders. If the goal gets acheived, and you lose the five pounds, and still a couple of your future selves got to have the creme-brulee, well, good for them! Hooray! Knock yourselves out, gals!

The latest thing new thing in the keep-your-future-selves-in-line business is the commitment device thing. You give some company 500 dollars, or whetever, and promise they can keep it if you don't acheive your goal. Since presumably all your future selves want to get back the 500 dollars, they behave themselves.

I'll probably never do something like this: failing to lose the weight and then losing the 500 dollars would kill me. When I have an extra 500 dollars lying around, I'll use it to hire a trainer. I'd rather pay someone to nag me than risk losing both the money and my self-respect.

What Is Up With Economists?

Like I mentioned before, I sometimes read the Freakonomics blog. As I also mentioned before, sometimes the arguments economists make about things, and the way they approach their theories and their lives, leaves me feeling seriously mystified.

Leading me to wonder, is thinking rationally bad for you?

Over at Freakonomics, Stephen Levitt tells the true story of an unnamed economist with a young daughter. Here's the story.

Father promises to take daughter to Hannah Montana concert. They have no tickets. They go to the venue. Increasing panic and anxiety as father realizes prices for scalped tickets are astronomical and time is running out. At the last minute, father scores cheap second-row seats, hooray!

Then a twist. Father thinks: I could sell these, make a huge profit, buy regular seats, and still see the show! Uh-oh! What will he do?

Thank god someone there was behaving like a normal person. Daughter starts crying. Father shifts course: OK, we'll use the tickets! They do, the show is awesome, daughter totally gets to talk to some back-up singer or something and is thrilled. Happy ending.

I suppose the idea behind selling is that using the tickets is like giving away the 1000 dollars you could get for them; you wouldn't pay 1000 dollars even for second-row tickets to start, so why would you now?

Man, if someone tried to pull that reasoning on me I'd start crying, too. Let's face it: giving up the opportunity to maybe make 1000 dollars when time is short and you might miss the concert is in no way comparable to paying 1000 dollars for tickets. It just isn't.

Then, too, how thrilling and fun to suddenly be in the second row. How awesome! It seems so cold not to treat it that way. Many of life's most excellent experiences are like that; how could a person fail to appreciate that so dramatically?

You could say, in this case it's better to act non-rationally. But you don't have to. As some Freakonomics commenters point out, by factoring in the awesomeness, you can defend the choice to use the tickets on purely rational grounds: it was, in this case, worth the money. Cost-benefit-wise.

On this interpretation, what went wrong with the father's reasoning wasn't that he over applied rational thinking, but rather that he underestimated the disappointment of selling and underestimated the pleasure and fun of being in the second-row.

So then we ask, well, why did he misestimate? Clearly he misestimated because when you start doing cost-benefit analysis, you develop a clear bias toward easily estimated goods. Like money. And the fact that failing to make 1000 dollars should be the same as losing 1000 dollars, because it's clear, looms sort of large.

In this sense, it seems to me that engaging in rational-decision-making can make you less rational. You just start guessing wrong.

I think this might help explain why economists also underestimate the vague goods associated with community and friends and so on and overestimate the good associated with money and material comforts (as I said was going on here). Material goods are just easier to add up.

When I went back to Freakonomics to get the link for this story, I saw a new post in which Levitt also said that he "started" but "didn't manage to finish" three of the five books related to high SAT scores (don't ask): 100 Years of Solitude, Crime and Punishment, and Atlas Shrugged.

I usually poo-poo alarmists about reading, but really? You couldn't finish 100 Years of Solitude? Crime and Punishment? I mean, I can see not liking them. And putting them down. And I can see never having picked them up. But it really sounds like the problem for Levitt was that they were too long. Hm! Surprising!

No Little Girls Allowed!

That's what this sign, at the YMCA, means: No Little Girls Allowed! How often do you see that?

Actually the little girl outline with the circle and bar through it is kind of pasted onto the original sign. It's meant to clarify: this is the Adult Women's Locker Room, not the Girls' and Women's Locker Room, and also not the Family Locker Room.

That's right: at the Ann Arbor Y, there are five locker rooms: One for girls and women, one for women only, one for boys and men, one for men only, and one for mixed families.

Five locker rooms, well, it's an awful lot.

Sometimes I'm really glad it's all separate like this, because I get a little overwhelmed with all the kids and parents and its nice to change and shower in peace.

I go to the Y around around 6 - 7pm or so. It's a huge new Y with two gigantor pools, very nice, and lots of space. In the common areas, there are lots and lots parents, taking their kids to lessons: basketball and swimming, especially.

At that hour, you can tell the kids are a little worn out. And the parents are worn out too. And yet, clothes have to get changed; snacks have to be postponed; since it's Ann Arbor and it's freezing jackets have to get all zipped up before anyone goes back outside. It's just far enough from most people's homes that everyone drives there so the parking lots is crowded and crazy with cars. There's often an actual line up, like 10 people, at the indoor, airport-style parking pre-payment machine.

It's a recipe for crabbiness -- for kids and parents -- that is no one's fault. And man, even though the kids look delighted when they're actually playing games and swimming, there is a lot of general crabbiness otherwise. I can't help it -- I have a low tolerance. Watching the necessary and constant impulse-restriction of the children makes me feel depressed about human life. It makes me feel like "I want a cookie," "No, you can't have a cookie now. Maybe later" kind of sums up the whole human-existence business, pretty much, which is a dark thought.

So often, I'm happy to escape into the quiet of the Adult Women's Locker Room.

But then, you know, the last two days in the Adult Women's Locker Room, what I've overheard is just endless discussions of diet and weight loss. "Did you eat salad yesterday?" "You know, two tablespoons of Ranch dressing has, like, 40 grams of fat?" "How do you deal with McDonald's cravings?" "I lost 1.5 pounds."

Um, so even in the Adult Women's Locker Room, it seems life is basically just "I want a cookie." "No, you can't have a cookie now. Maybe later."

It's a good thing I've got M. I. A.'s new album Kala on my iPod to remind me of why life is worth living.

Rational Teens, Crazy Adults

It's one of those things everybody knows: teenagers engage in risky behaviors because they have a feeling of invulnerability -- an emotive, but incorrect, sense that the odds are in their favor.

On Tuesday, The New York Times ran of those "everybody knows this, but it's false" stories (link here). In fact, the data show that teenagers generally overestimate the risks involved in their activities. Even more than adults, they tend to say that something bad is bound to happen, even more than it actually is.

The reason kids do risky things, it turns out, isn't that they don't know the risks, but rather that to them, the benefits simply outweigh the risks. They quite rationally judge that since the risk of pregnancy with unprotected sex is quite small, even when overestimated, and the thrill associated with the (possibly fleeting) opportunity is high, the rational action is to go ahead, get it on.

Ergo: reminding teens the activities are risky isn't going to work.

OK, fine. But then the story gets weird. The risk-prevention specialist featured in the article explains that where teens are actually going wrong isn't in judging risk, its in understanding "gist."

The “gist" of a situation is an overall sense of what is the best course of action. It's an intuitive judgment about what to do.

The Times quotes the specialist as saying, “Young people don’t get it. They don’t get the gist of a situation. Gist is based on one’s culture, background and experiences, and experience is what teens lack.”

Oh. I see. So if teenagers are making rational risk-assessment choices, and we're making intuitive judgments that reflect cultural expectations, they're the ones who are supposed to change their decision-making?

This strikes me as bullshit. Look, older people don't want teenagers doing risky things. And for good reasons. But that doesn't mean the teenagers themselves aren't thinking clearly.

The most you could say, I think, is that teenagers may be less capable than adults of predicting what things it will make them happy to have done in five years, as opposed to what things are going to make them happy now. But it's dumb to say they aren't accurately judging what they want now. They are. They just want more fun and excitement than adults do. And they want it more.

The "gist" of a situation is just a fancy way of talking about the fact that adults want certain things, and they want their children to want those things too.

My own opinion is that adults should just be honest here. Speaking for myself, I don't want young people to drive drunk, take too many drugs, have sex without condoms, etc. But the reason is just that I care about them, and it makes me feel bad if bad things happen to them. These are selfish motives, but they're the good kind of selfish motives -- the kind that say, "If you suffer I will suffer. So take care of yourself! Please!" Do it for me.

The "gist" specialist says the right approach is rather to train kids in strategies. From The Times: "In helping a teenage girl resist spontaneous, unprotected sex, a gist-based approach has her practicing ways to say “no” and not worry about losing her boyfriend.

Ohhh brother. Don't even get me started.

Sometimes You Can't Decide For Yourself

When I was a kid, my father had a really funny thing he used to do at Christmastime. Starting a few days before the 25th, he would start lobbying to get to open his gifts early. Like real begging and pleading and fussing -- the kind you associate with children.

On certain occasions with certain gifts, he would get his way, and he'd open those presents early. Certainly any gift that came from outside our immediate family -- that is, not from me or my mom -- he considered fair game to open whenever he wanted. So there was a fair amount of opening on Christmas Eve, even though really we were a "Christmas morning orgy of opening" kind of family.

On Christmas morning, my father would complain bitterly, but, you know, jokingly too, about not having any surprises, about not having as many things to open as me and my mom. Poor me! Nothing to open! On Christmas morning!

I remember finding this awesome and hilarious. I thought it was awesome that an adult would care so much about presents that he'd actually be upset about not having enough at the right time. Even if he was sort of hamming it up, I thought was awesome that an adult would carry on like that. About Christmas presents! Most adults I knew were focused on planning family events, buying stuff for kids, cooking, you know.

And I thought it was hilarious that he would fail to learn, or would pretend to fail to learn, year after year, that opening on Christmas Eve meant fewer presents Christmas morning, and that fewer presents Christmas morning was less fun than more presents Christmas morning.

Eventually my mom and I found a way to take this game to the next level: we would hide certain key presents and pretend they didn't exist so that no matter what happened Christmas Eve, my father would always have as much Christmas morning excitement as me and my mom.

This was just one of a range of very funny things my father used to do. Like telling me that airplanes only went up in the air because everyone prayed at the same time (he was an engineering professor), or telling my little friends that if they wanted their parents to get them a pony they should throw a temper tantrum the next time they were in the grocery store.

But I got thinking about the Christmas thing recently because I was reflecting on the ways we do and do not allow people the freedom to choose their own futures.

In a previous post, I mentioned as a kind of off-handed joke the idea that some people felt it was their right not to have health insurance -- that if they wanted to spend the money on other things they should be allowed to.

The prospect of lots of people not having health insurance upsets me a lot. And I can tell you why. Health is one of those things that it's easy to undervalue while you have it. Planning for illness is one of those things no one likes to do. Once you're sick, though, you'd have to be a figure of towering rationality and self-control not to say to those around you, "Help me. I'm sick. I'm dying. There's treatment, and I need it, and I can't pay. Please help me!"

And, you know, if someone says those things to me, I'm going to want to help them. I will find the early deaths of such people incredibly painful.

In that sense, the commitment to shared medical care isn't something you sign on for just because it's in your own self interest, it's something you sign on for because of the people around you, who care about you -- whether they're intimates, friends, or just fellow-citizens.

I consider it my right to infringe your freedoms in this way, at least to some extent. The alternative infringes on my freedom not to be surrounded by sick, dying people who -- oops! -- changed their minds about the whole dying thing once it came into close view.

Sorry, we're going to have to hide your presents sometimes. Hope you don't mind too much. Maybe you'll be happy later.

Real Property

Growing up could be described as the act of trading in one set of illusions for another. But that would be glib, and probably untrue.

The illusion of mine that I miss the most was what I thought it meant to own land. I spent much of the years from 1984 to 1990 daydreaming about owning property. Mostly of an unconventional kind. I blame the Swiss Family Robinson, My Side of The Mountain kinds of books, which encouraged me in the belief that you could make your home in a tree. I daydreamed about that. Also, oddly, about owning a small corner of my school, like a secret room, where I could retreat to during the day. It would just be a single room, but somehow I would have title to it and it would be mine.

I thought ownership of land was absolute, that it was something that you bought that could never be taken away from you, that you could return to no matter what happened. Even at the time, I wasn't sure how the mechanics of buying the land worked, and I had a vague inkling that it could be problematic to talk the state or the school board into selling me that mysterious secret room, not to mention that I had no money. But once I owned it, I thought, it would be mine.

Sadly, I grew up and learned that it doesn't work like that. Land can be taken away from you by eminent domain, by failure to pay property tax, whatever. Also, even if it's not taken away from you, it's not as though you can do what you like with it. There are regulations and requirements and lawsuits waiting to happen.

I'm still startled by my primitive capitalism as a kid, by my desire to carve out a chunk of the world, however small, that nobody else could touch. I'm also startled by its persistence. Sometimes I'm someplace beautiful, and my overriding thought is a desire to own it, to have it be mine. It's a funny deep down possessiveness, not really susceptible to reason; it can be covered up but not erased.

I Am Not The Stuff Of Which Buddhists Are Made

Once, a very long time ago, I lived in a very small town on the border of Colorado and New Mexico and I was the reporter for the finest weekly paper in town.

This was my schedule:

Monday I would wake up at 5 a.m. Sometimes 4. I would drive over the mountain pass into New Mexico. Usually the sun wasn't up yet and I would smoke cigarettes out the window of my car and listen to Roxette or Willie Nelson and worry about the day ahead and whether or not I was going to hit a small animal. Sometimes I would brush the snow off my car first.

Then a period of hubbub and fast and frantic typing and people grouching at each other and the paper would be all ready to go and printed out and I would drive home. Smoking, again, out the window of my car. Usually I would stop at Taco Bell.

When I got home I would sit on the floor and watch old episodes of Northern Exposure which would bleed into Magnum P.I.


Tuesdays I would go to the County Commission meetings in the morning and the City Council meetings in the evening. There would always be a break in the City Council meeting where we would go outside on the balcony and smoke and shoot the shit. In between I would read police reports and talk to people and try to find things to take photographs of.

Wednesday and Thursday were all trying to talk to people, trying to find things to write about, fielding complaints and making sure the obituaries had come in.

Thursday night and Friday morning I'd write up my stories. Four or five, usually. Friday afternoon my editor would send me a sketch of how the front page should look and details on the ads for the rest of the paper and Friday night or Saturday morning I'd put the layout together.


Usually I screwed it up, which is why I had to get there so early on Monday morning.

Sunday was my day off. I had developed this fixation on the Sunday New York Times, a hobby that would wax and wane over the years. Unfortunately, the New York Times couldn't be purchased anywhere nearer than an hour and a half away. So my mother bought me a subscription, which still ranks up there with any present I've ever gotten.

But since I was probably the only person in town with such a subscription, delivery was erratic. It would come one week, and you would think that the problem had been solved, and then it wouldn't come for the next two weeks and it would take endless phone calls from both me and my mother to get it to show up on the third week.

On the weeks where the New York Times came, no matter how bad and bleak things were looking, I felt better. The New York Times was something to cling to in a dark and menacing world.

The names change. Sometimes I really want coffee from a particular place, sometimes I want this one kind of potato chip and no other. It makes me feel safe, to be invested in a brand name, a certain product, it makes me feel autonomous and in control, a person of discrimination and taste.

And when that product is not available, there can't be a substitute. If the New York Times is the magical object, what goddamn good is the Denver Post going to be to me? Even if I really like the comics?

Time Off For Good Behavior?

I am, by preference and aesthetic, kind of an unhealthy person. I like junky food, and there's something pleasurable about eating it beyond just the tastiness of all those trans-fats or whatever the hell they're called these days. It's something about swimming against the tide of self-preservation, of sound common sense.

I am thinking about this because I am at a rotten stage of not smoking. I have not had a cigarette in a little over three months. I have developed a fondness for pipe tobacco cigars, which is indisputably unhealthy, but probably less unhealthy than smoking a pack a day. But the stage I am at is the stage where I think, "What the hell's the point of all this?"

I couldn't walk up that one hill that one day. But I was probably sick or something. On another day I could have walked up there just fine. And god knows I could get hit by a car or something tomorrow, and then what would be the good of not having smoked? Here we are, stranded in this incredibly imperfect world; why am I denying myself something I enjoy, when pleasures are so few and far between as is?

This is all so much noise. I do not really want to start smoking again; I don't really want to fall off the wagon. There are nice things about not smoking; there is something nice about not having my body chemistry go haywire every hour if I don't top it off with nicotine.

I just hate that moment when you forget why you're doing something, and the only justification you can offer yourself for why you're doing it is that it is, in some at that moment entirely abstract way, the right thing to do. Not the interesting thing to do, not the amusing thing to do, not the cool or authentic or experimental or tawdry thing to do. No, all you can say to yourself is that it is the way forward, and therefore you are taking it.

Or at least, that's the way it looks right now. Noko Marie compared the inner self to a pet; right now I am the parent screaming at the child in the grocery store "Because I said so," having forgotten, momentarily, why I said so in the first place, anxious for the noise to stop.

Let Me Persuade You To Follow My Example, And Take A Turn About The Room

This blog is no stranger to talk of objectification -- there's this post and this one.

But, despite the sense that I am maybe worrying the issue like a dog with a slightly mangy bone, it's on my mind again due to my reading of the Advice Goddess Blog, to which I am strangely addicted. I say strangely because a) our political views do not coincide and b) I am exactly the sort of weak-kneed liberal she regards with derision/horror. On the other hand, she pretty unflinchingly addresses the issue of women's place in the world and then there's the fascination of knowing what somebody whose views differ almost entirely from yours thinks about things.

And in this post she said that a group of some kind is protesting the fact that the makers of Dove products, who have this whole real women/real beauty public image campaign going, are also the makers of Axe body spray, which has this whole sorority girl/pillow fight/sex in elevators public image campaign going.

The Advice Goddess makes the point that it's stupid in the first place to expect Dove's campaign to mean anything other than an attempt to sell product. Which is probably true, but might still be a point worth making.

This is all so much prelude. This quote is what hooked me:

"Men objectify women and women objectify women -- meaning, they objectify themselves. I think it was my friend, professor Catherine Salmon, who pointed this out in an essay. Male sexuality is visually driven. When men fantasize, they picture the woman (or the gay man) as the object of their desire; women generally picture being the object of desire. (Shouldn't the angry ladies be vilifying women for this, too?)"

This is very clearly put and certainly fits in with my personal experience.

And it does bother me, that self-objectification. In point of fact, it terrifies me, sends me waking up screaming.

While I am not unsympathetic to the difficulties of being the pursuer -- the risks of being shot down, mocked, the difficulties of getting laid -- at least at the end of the day the pursuer wants things, knows he wants things, moves towards them. Whereas, if your chosen role is as an object of desire, you are not supposed to want things. You are supposed to shed your desires, ignore them, go ahead and drift, so that you can eventually be taken by surprise and succumb to the desires of some conscious actor.

Zombie girls from Mars, really.

This mode, blissful non-desire, is often brought back to evolutionary biology. Which is fine; I don't really have any knowledge and/or interest in evolutionary biology. But I refuse to believe, with an almost religious faith, that there is an unalterable biological destiny that forces these roles upon us. And so I am left hoping that, as as Noko Marie suggested, we are somewhere in the middle of the feminist movement, rather than at the end.

Recommended: Botox For The Mind

Sometimes I read the Freakonomics blog. I've never read the Freakonomics book. I'd been sort of waiting for it to come out in paperback.

I just checked Amazon and they offer hardcover and "roughcut." WTF? As far as I can tell it's a hardcover with uneven pages. Why this is interesting or preferable I have no idea. Probably the authors would have something cute and pithy to say about it.

Anyway, over at the blog, Steven Levitt (the economist author) wrote about a study showing increased female unhappiness. He offered some thoughts for its causes, none of which really jumped out at me.

I posted my own brief reflection about female unhappiness from my own point of view, including this:

"It seems to me that the things that make me most happy are areas where my life overlaps with a kind of “guy’s life” — I have financial autonomy, great satisfaction in work achievements, enough money to go out to eat when I don’t feel like cooking, interesting colleagues to talk to, and total leisure time when I’m not working.

The things that make me most unhappy all have to do with being female. At 40 I already feel like I am “old” with respect to attractiveness. I have to seriously struggle to maintain an attractive weight, while my guy colleagues are snacking on doughnuts and relaxing with beer. For whatever reason, as a woman, I don’t feel at ease in the workplace. Things my guy colleagues take in stride– like interpersonal disagreements — weigh heavily on me. I feel if I am critical or demanding, I’ll be thought less of."

Thinking about it later, I noticed the strange relationship this bears to Levitt's (3), which says: women's lives have become more like men's lives; men have historically been less happy than women; so now women are less happy than they were.

It's not quite a contradiction, but it's some kind of odd fit.

Around the same time Levitt posted, I noted with interest a report on another study, claiming to show that women worry more because they are more likely than men to believe that "past experiences accurately forecast the future." (Actually the details suggest that women were simply more likely to attribute that belief to others, so I don't know what's up with that).

This is kind of funny. It's long been noted in philosophical studies of scientific reasoning that all of it is based on some kind of assumption that the future is going to be like the past. Otherwise you couldn't base any kind of general conclusion on information from a range of particular cases.

If the second study is right, it suggests you might worry less if you stopped assuming this. You might be dumber and less informed about the world -- even less able to draw inferences about what is going to happen. You might sign up for a variable-rate mortgage. You might tumble around, assuming everything will work out for the best. But you might be happier.

It's kind of a Botox for the mind. And just think: if you worried less, you wouldn't frown as often, and you wouldn't need Botox for real. Another problem solved!

In any case, I'm inclined to agree also with Levitt's (4), which says that self-reports of happiness are basically meaningless anyway. If I'm right in this post it doesn't matter, since we want what we want regardless of whether it will make us happy.

I Want You To Want Some Other Things Too

On Wednesday I wrote about "distributive justice," describing my confusion over the fact that when we come to figure out the fair way to satisfy preferences, we have to count only the preferences people have for things and for themselves (personal preferences) not the preferences they have regarding the preferences of other people (external preferences).

When I said I was confused, I meant it seriously, not as, you know, a polite way of saying an indignant WTF?

What puzzled me was the fact that in an unequal society, it seemed my preferences for, say, the very poor, to have their preferences satisfied ought to somehow count for something.

In the comments, Daniel asked me a good two-part question, and I thought it was worth writing a follow-up to try to answer it.

First, Daniel wanted to know, can't I help satisfy the preferences of these people whose preferences I care about myself? I can just give away my own money, stuff, etc. And second, aren't external preferences being taken into account in distributive justice in, e. g. welfare?

With respect to the second, it's true that many forms of distributive justice involve moving goods from one set of people to another. But usually this redistribution is not justified by an appeal to external preferences, raising the question, what does justify it?

This takes me back to the first question. Imagine instead of two cake-loving people, there's three of us, there's some bags of corn, and winter is coming. A perfectly implausible, doomsday-scenario philosophy example, but whatever.

Imagine A has lots of corn. B has just enough. C has almost none. Suppose 10 bags become available.

Imagine B has a lot of external preferences -- B is just a naturally empathetic person. Imagine A is not -- A doesn't care much about others at all.

Sure, we could count only external preferences. Everyone wants as much corn as possible. Suppose (for the moment) that everyone gets some of the new corn, but that it's not really enough for C to live get by comfortably.

Then B could share his share of the corn with C. Or B can suffer watching C struggle to get by. A will be happy. Asking B to share his own, and asking him to suffer, both seem somehow less-than-fully fair. B seems to be made worse off by the fact that he has this external preference at all. Which is funny, 'cause like I said, we tend to think caring about others is admirable, or good, or something.

If you think about a world of highly empathetic people and a world of not-very-empathetic people, it seems that if there's no place for external preferences in preference-satisfaction schemes, the empathetic people will generally be worse off for their external preferences: either they have to share more of their own goods than the non-empathetic people, or they have to suffer from having their external preferences unsatisfied.

If that's right, it seems raising your kids to be non-empathetic would be the thing to do. But that seems crazy.

Maybe we'd want to say that the various redistributing schemes would take care of this problem -- that this is why we have, e. g. welfare. Maybe we'd want to say that in most real-life distribution schemes, A does get less of the 10 new bags; C does get most of them. A is usually even forced to give some corn to C.

Maybe. But given that there is such a wide range of beliefs and attitudes about how much A must be shortcut here, or whether he must give some corn to C and how much, you start to wonder, what justifies distribution schemes involving forced sharing? And how much sharing is required?

I'm not sure. And I'm puzzled by the fact that the external preferences of empathetic people aren't part of this story. Because it seems that under any system except under the most extreme egalitarianism, those with empathetic external preferences will be worse off in the ways I've described. And I'm not an extreme egalitarian. So I'm in a quandary.

For some reason, whenever I think about empathetic people, I am always reminded of the great 18th-century philosopher David Hume. Hume thought people were naturally quite empathetic. In his sunnily optimistic way, Hume just assumed everyone had lots of external preferences for the good of every one else. "Would any man, who is walking along," he asked, "tread as willingly on another's gouty toes, whom he has no quarrel with, as on the hard flint and pavement?" (from his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals). No one, he thought, could be so callous, so self-absorbed, so cruel.

The sunnily optimistic, always delightful, David Hume.

Well. Indeed, if everyone has equal external preferences for the good of others -- if everyone wants the good of everyone else (as Hume suggested) -- then my puzzles go away. I would love for this to be true, but I believe that it is not.