Bricks Without Clay

Read more… or Read more right here… »

It waters down Gore’s message a bit, but if the folks working for universal health-care, election reform and civil liberties (etc.) can take advantage of his traction in the media, maybe they can get some rhetorical unity and finally get taken seriously as reality’s standard-bearers. I mean, when people talk about getting new frames into public debate, this is what they mean: the perfect storm of a compelling idea, a catchy name for it, and famous people to disseminate it.

I wanted to say that it’s a phrase best suited to liberal usage — that we own the phrase. However, googling the phrase “real inconvenient truth” results in 42,000 hits, most of which seem to be right-wing rebuttals along the lines of “You think that’s an inconvenient truth? The real inconvenient truth is X”. Funny thing is, most of the X’s are something like “global warming is a hoax”, which would not be inconvenient at all if it were true. So maybe we do own it after all.

Just thought it was interesting.

« Hide it

Read more… or Read more right here… »

This reminds me of an article in Wired about how some people are using solar panels and batteries to power their homes without relying on the electrical grid:

In the old days, being green meant being hardcore. Earnest enviros plugged their poky electric cars into the wall like four-wheeled toaster ovens. They bought organic food at dusty co-ops staffed by vegan clerks in hemp ponchos. And if they were really serious, they disconnected from planet-ravaging modernity altogether and lived in a creaky cabin off the grid.

Today, hardcore has given way to hybrid. Soccer moms tool around in the Toyota Prius, with its nifty gas-electric engine that saves both fossil fuel and family funds. The suburbs are stuffed with flexitarians - mostly-veggies who pick up their staples from the gleaming organic produce section at the local Whole Foods but also opt for an occasional free-range-chicken breast.

Now come the first stirrings of what may be the most telling sign of this shift from hardcore to hybrid: people who are both middle of the road and off the grid. Across the US some 185,000 households have switched from the local power company to their own homegrown, renewable energy.

In this article, the folks who were living off solar power 30 years ago were clueless hippie wierdos, but the households who are adopting this tactic today are trend-setting role-models. The “hygrid” movement wouldn’t be possible if environmentalists hadn’t been working on the problem for decades. But the first paragraph of this piece describes a stereotype that matches the image most people conjure when they hear the word “environmentalist”, and it’s inconceivable that the lifestyle of the hemp-and-tofu idealists could have any relevance to the salt-of-the-earth types who are (rightly) applauded in the piece. It’s disappointing, because Wired could have framed it like, “these geeks (just like us!) are taking this fringe idea mainstream” instead of “these geeks are revolutionizing the energy industry in a way that’s vaguely reminiscent of what some of those granola-munchers do”.

Another Wired article with the same disconnect is the one that extols the virtue of expensive oil, namely that it makes alternative-energy research financially feasible. That’s a “virtue” in the same way that crime is a boon for society because it allows us to develop some truly awesome tazer technology. There’s a whole sector of people who were trying to solve the oil-dependence problem before it reached crisis proportions, and I wish this wave of business-friendly environmentalism would patch things up with its estranged parent.

« Hide it

Read more… or Read more right here… »

I’ve never heard anyone articulate the exact mechanism by which video games cause violent behavior. That’s why it’s common sense — you don’t have to think about it too much. But the usual word used is “desensitize”. The frame presumes natural empathy on the part of kids — an inclination to see people as living beings with feelings that need to be taken into account as we live our lives. Video games are an indulgence in this frame. They put disposable non-people on the screen — objects that look and act like people but have no feelings and are therefore okay to carjack or whatever. And the theory, as far as I can tell, is that too much of this indulgence makes them less sensitive to the humanity of the real people they interact with.

It gets a little muddled, because objectification and aggression are two different things. Even if video games cause objectification, it doesn’t follow that gamers will be violent to the people they objectify, any more than they’d be violent towards the rest of the objects in their lives. Video games have to simultaneously numb empathy and cultivate aggression in order to be dangerous. If an object pisses you off, you are more inclined to throw it out a window than you’d be if it were a person.

The model of desensitization is legitimate in many respects. It’s certainly neurally plausible. What about the model of aggression? When people talk about violent video games, they talk about aggression like it’s a muscle. The more often you’re aggressive, the easier it is to be aggressive.

But if that’s not the right way to model anger and aggression, what is Jon’s alternative?

And, as it happens, crime rates are down in almost every category. I don’t think they’re down because of violent video games, but simulated mayhem certainly hasn’t created a spike in bad behavior, either. Our culture has always needed a way to express the violent impulses that are part of human nature. Once we had Grimm’s fairy tales, now we have Death Trap 9: Everybody Dies Horribly.

He says, “Our culture has always needed a way to express the violent impulses that are part of human nature,” but he doesn’t take that claim very seriously in the rest of his argument, which is a good thing. A common word used to express the harmlessness of video games is “release” — people build up aggression and they need to release it in a controlled way every once in awhile so they don’t explode in an uncontrolled way. It’s a totally different dynamic than the idea of aggression as a muscle. It’s more like a balloon.

The lack of physical activity in video games makes them just as ineffective for venting aggression as they are for reinforcing bad motor programs. It’s been a long time since I played video games, and I’m about as aggressive as a stick of butter, but I don’t remember feeling particularly soothed after a Street Fighter II tourney. Even on the rare occasions when I won. Because tapping plastic just isn’t very purgative. That’s why we have sports and moshing.

So at the heart of this issue are two opposite conceptualizations of how aggression works: muscles vs. balloons. For a sciencey version of this, see Zoltan Kovecses’ work on metaphors of anger. You can see the same conceptual divide in debates about sex ‘n drugs: are they healthy releases of natural inclinations, or are they slippery slopes?

I’d be curious to see whether the additional motor reinforcement that comes with playing video games shows up with games that have nothing to do with killing people. I’m thinking Dance Dance Revolution here. Suppose you go dancing with someone and the next day you buy them a copy of DDR. You watch them as they became more proficient, and then, after they out-boogie the final boss and save the princess (or whatever), you take them dancing again. What if they danced like they were still playing the game? Things like that happen — when you perform the same motor actions in one context (the arcade), you might reflexively perform them in other contexts (a nightclub) if they trigger that first context in your head. Now imagine a version of Grand Theft Auto that comes with a plastic gun that you use as a controller. Would the DDR experiment portend bad things for a game where players physically hold a fake gun and pull an actual trigger to shoot pretend cops?

Probably not. But I wouldn’t blame someone for arguing ‘yes’.

« Hide it

Read more… or Read more right here… »

Why does the patent system exist? To correct a deficiency in the free market. It turns out that people need incentives to create ideas and art just like they need incentives to create guns and butter. But once an idea has been thought up, it is not a scarce resource. You can’t control its distribution unless you keep it all to yourself. The free market doesn’t care about your idea–it only cares about how well you can turn it into something scarce (and therefore sellable). Your invention is worth nothing unless you can actually produce it–and produce it faster and cheaper than your competitors, who have free access to your idea because you can’t lock it up.

In this system, would-be inventors throw up their hands. “I’m a smart guy. I came up with a great idea that deserves to make me a lot of money. You’re telling me that’s not enough? You’re saying I need to be an expert businessman in addition to an expert engineer if I’m to profit off my skills? Forget you.” And innovation stagnates.

The patent system is a human construction, run by the government, which corrects this deficiency. Everyone is glad it exists, and even critics of its current structure don’t think it should be abolished. And yet, patents and copyrights constrain the things someone can naturally do with someone else’s ideas. Right now, there’s a market for cartoons. Anyone is free to make a cartoon, because the techniques for making cartoons are in the public domain. However, every cartoon has to be different. Steven Hillenberg owns SpongeBob Squarepants, so I can’t use SpongeBob in my cartoons any more than Steven Hillenberg can use my toaster when I’m not around. If no one owned SpongeBob, there would be a whole other competitive, innovative market of SpongeBob cartoons. Same goes for Beatles remixes, or fan-made Star Wars movies. No one would have incentive to create those new works, but if those works were somehow created, everyone could improve on them . That’s the way things are in a free market.

Thinking about this has led me to make a distinction between free markets and capitalism. The free market is that entropic, Darwinian system in which anything goes. The amoral laws of supply and demand are the only laws in a free market.

Capitalism is another thing altogether: it puts a controlling framework around a free market to guide its energies toward innovation and societal progress. Capitalist markets have to be constructed on top of free markets, but they are constructed. Capitalism could be conceptualized as the art of constructing market and government policies that foster as much innovation as possible, given the laws of the free market. But capitalism is not the same as the free market. Capitalism’s cool, the free market sucks.

It’s the difference between evolution and animal husbandry. Evolution is a natural system that works well for creating a planet teeming with diverse life. It’s not so good at giving those various life forms the traits that are the most useful for people. For instance, sheep are great, but if their wool were fluffier, that would be better for humans. By intentionally mating their fluffiest livestock, farmers harness the forces of evolution and genetics. They put energy into the system and rules onto the chaos to eliminate inconvenient properties of evolution — whereby it takes millions of years, and trial and error on a cosmic scale, and you might end up with sheep that are fluffy but carniverous.

Of course, capitalism goes awry when it’s structured in a way that commoditizes things too much and stifles innovation. Our current system of de facto indefinite copyrights is such a system, because ideas are treated too much like real objects. My toaster will always be mine unless I say otherwise. Should the plays I write have that property? Disney never has to relinquish the rights to Mickey Mouse, so has no incentive to innovate its Mickey Mouse cartoons or create new cartoon characters.

When we agree that the “benevolent free market” is a distraction, and that any market worth fighting for necessarily structures the range of economic options with some moral end in mind, then we can have productive conversations about those glitchy commodities where the free market laws clash with human endeavors: drugs, algorithms, cartoon characters, etc.

« Hide it

Read more… or Read more right here… »

Consider: “LOL” stands for something, but it’s used so frequently that it no longer needs to be unpacked by readers; I read “LOL” and I no longer think of it as standing for “Laughing Out Loud”. It’s just this word that means laughter, just like the word “laughter” does. It has become a real word in the minds of the digitally literate (much like “ATM” or “VCR”). The story of Pinocchio comes to mind for reasons I can’t quite articulate.

But then what must have happened (I think) is that even though no one ever says “LOL” aloud, they see the similarities in rhythm between the sound “ell-oh-ell” and the more traditional onomatopoeiac “ha-ha-ha”. The term “LOL” is associated not just with the idea of laughter, but with the sound of laughter. So then it follows “logically” that if you want to express more laughter with “LOL”, you add more syllables on just like you would if you were using “ha ha ha”. That’s my first guess, anyway.

My linguist colleagues remind me that the term for this is reduplication — where a syllable is repeated for emphasis or to otherwise change the meaning of the word. Doesn’t happen too much in English as far as I know, but it’d be like if I said, “my computer is the shiznit” and you said, “well my computer is the shiziznit.”

So it seems like “LOL” braves the gauntlet of idiomatization, onomatopoeia and reduplication to become “LOLOLOL”. When it’s not idiomatized — when the original meaning of the acronym remains intact — that’s when we get “ROFLMAO“, which is derived from the unpacked words of “LOL” and not from “LOL” itself. I’m realizing it’s also harder to type and is therefore maybe not long for this world.

« Hide it

Read more… or Read more right here… »

George has always been one for taking initiative, so he goes first: “One dollar for a penny? Sounds like a deal to me. I bid a penny.”

But Donald knows opportunity when he sees it. He bids two cents.

Now George is out a penny, which is not a big deal, but there’s no reason to let Donald win at this point. He goes to three cents.

Donald could give up his two cents which, again, would not be a big deal, but now a little bit of momentum has built up. Pretty soon, bidding is up to fifty cents. The competition is more intense now. The goal of the players is now no longer just to get a dollar for cheap, but to avoid losing money. Psychologically, losses are felt more deeply than gains, so players are focusing on the losses.

Now the bidding is approaching a dollar. George bids 99 cents. When the bid was a penny, all the focus was on winning, because who cares about losing a penny? Now, all the focus is on not losing, because who cares if you get a dollar for 99 cents?

Donald bids a dollar in order not to lose 98 cents. There is no way George can win money now, but it’s better to lose a penny than 99 cents, so he bids $1.01. There’s no rational reason to ever stop, and yet the auction was so innocuous at first! What started out as a sure win is now a contest to see who can cut their losses.

The game theorists who invented this game apparently tried it at parties, with one dollar (back when that was real money). They reported selling the dollar for $3 or even $5, and husbands and wives going home in separate cabs. I believe it, though I’ve never tried it personally.

It’s an elegant model of so many aspects of human interaction: addiction, co-dependance, etc. Anyone who’s been in a situation where they’ve said, “I’ve invested too much to quit now” or “I know it looks bad, but we’ve got them on the run!” has been in a dollar auction.

Now then. This is a frame–a conceptual structure that you can use to interpret things you experience. It’s a model you can use to think about situations, to come to conclusions that may not have been obvious without that model. It differs from most other frames in that you’re very conscious of using it (whereas you may not always be aware of the things you frame as games or forces of nature). The Iraq war sounds pretty damn hopeless when you conceptualize it as a dollar auction:

INSURGENTS: They’re invading our country! If we bomb some of them, they’ll go away.

ARMY: They’re bombing us! Send in more troops!

INSURGENTS: They sent in more troops. That must mean they’re scared! Increase the bombings! We’ve got them on the run!

ARMY: Dammit, they’re bombing us even more now. Well, let’s put some more troops in. We’ve invested too much to quit now.

And indeed, the way things are going right now, that does seem to be the behavior pattern that is taking place, but it is hard to realize that without the idea of the dollar auction to put the behavior into perspective. There’s no graceful way out of a dollar auction, and it takes a lot of strength to come to grips with the fact that if you keep going, you will keep losing. Players have tons of short-term incentives to ensure their own long-term ruin.

This is not a concept that is totally foreign to public discourse. There are many related ideas, but none of them have the same level of precision as the dollar auction. Some of these ideas are well-known, so you could use them when you go on TV and know that you’re being understood by the living-room denizens of America. Others have found less purchase in public discourse. Here are three related frames that come to mind:

• Vicious Cycles are frequently brought up in public discourse. It’s a vague term for any situation that recursively gets worse over time. It doesn’t necessarily involve people. The dollar auction is more specific about what the cycle is, who’s doing the cycling, and how exactly it’s vicious.

• Races to the Bottom are, as far as I can tell, confined to political discourse: two parties, candidates or factions are involved in some competition whose very goal is ignoble, or the means both sides are using are taking them to an ignoble non-goal destination, even though their intentions are good.

  I like the “race to the bottom” frame because its vivid imagery packs a punch. It conjures up unpleasant splatting sounds. But I’ve got a little quibble with “race to the bottom”. Maybe I’m thinking about it too hard, but the dynamics don’t make sense. In a race, all the action is generated by the players–they’re the agents in the frame. A downward race is dissonant to me because “downward” makes me think of gravity, and if two players are just falling toward the bottom, that’s not a race because the agency has been removed. No one says “fall to the top”. Of course, it must make sense in some way, because people say it.

  On second thought, it could refer to a race down an incline. Gravity still does most of the work, but it’s a legitimate race, and plus it brings in overtones of a related concept: the slippery slope. However, in my head, I still imagine a vertical plummet.

• Boiled Frogs. Apparently if you put a frog in a pot of water and heat the water, the frog won’t notice it’s being boiled until it’s too late. Whether that’s a biological fact or not, it’s a useful analogy for understanding crucial aspects of human perception. We tend not to notice worsening circumstances until we’re done for. I’ve never heard this frame used outside a political context. Maybe because it’s kinda gross.

  The difference between the boiled frog and the dollar auction is that there’s only one agent. They both have an aspect of gradual, subtle tragedy, but the frog is being boiled by its environment (the hot water), not by another frog that is itself being boiled. The dollar auction is more like two snakes who eat eachother’s tails until they’re eating eachother’s heads. It’s the evil twin of Escher’s “Drawing Hands” picture.

Speaking of which, another term I’d like to see get worked into English is something that expresses the opposite of a vicious cycle, as in the “Drawing Hands” picture. Sometimes a situation recursively gets better and better. What’s the word for that? A blissful cycle? A delicious cycle? Mutually-Assured Construction?

« Hide it

Read more… or Read more right here… »

Something fishy: the study he cites isn’t mentioned at all on the National Fatherhood Initiative website, so I’m going to assume they’re not too proud of it. One way to explain these dubious results is through demographic trends:

The most obvious [cause of this trend] is that the television audience has splintered along gender lines, and sitcoms are now a female domain. Four out of five viewers of network sitcoms are women, and they apparently like to see Mom smarter than Dad.

Another explanation is the rising number of mothers with paying jobs. Now that they have their own paychecks, the old bread-earning patriarch is less essential and therefore more mockable. And TV writers no longer have an easy stereotype of Mom to work with. Jokes about daffy middle-class housewives like Lucy Ricardo and Edith Bunker seem dated now that so many women work outside the home.

As I understand it, back in the Cleaver days, the idea of questioning authority was pretty much absent from public culture. The dominant frame was that people in positions of authority made it there through being wise and moral, and were therefore supposed to be respected. Well, that story’s been balanced with a different one. Modern TV-watchers are very conscious of the logic of questioning authority. They know why authority should be questioned, and what is supposed to happen when the questioning takes place. That’s a frame–a structure of ideas that we use to interpret the things we experience.

Both frames for authority are out there. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe the second frame makes for better comedy. Dads whose ethics or intelligence aren’t on par with the authority they’re given are funny dads. Maybe TV writers construct their worlds around doofus dads because flouting their traditional moral authority results in more chuckles than putting a cardigan on Homer Simpson.

But if you zoom out and look at the universe of male figures on TV, you’ve got quite a lot of strong patriarch figures. President Bartlet from The West Wing, the guy on 24, the dad on Six Feet Under, and all sorts of guys who aren’t fathers but are still good role models. But these guys are all in dramas, where there’s no incentive to portray them as bumbling.

« Hide it

Read more… or Read more right here… »

“We can find not only common ground, but common sense in the Prevention First amendment we are offering today” said Reid. “Whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, our amendment advances goals we should all share: reducing the number of unintended pregnancies, reducing the number of abortions and improving access to women’s health care.”

“This amendment takes a common sense step towards strengthening access to contraception for women while also reducing healthcare costs borne by taxpayers and employers,” said Senator Clinton. “We should all be able to agree that reducing the number of unintended pregnancies and improving access to women’s health care should be a priority.”

Every dollar spent on family planning services saves three dollars in pregnancy and birth-related costs for Medicaid alone. And although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention included family planning in its published list of the Ten Great Public Health Achievements in the 20th Century, the U.S. still has one of the highest rates of unintended pregnancies among industrialized nations.

The Reid/Clinton amendment would provide $100 million to: increase Title X, the nation’s only program devoted solely to making family planning services available to all women; reducing teen pregnancy; providing equitable insurance coverage for contraception; and increasing awareness about Emergency Contraception.

And a snippet of Reid’s speech via Kos:

“Forty years ago today, the Supreme Court recognized a constitutional right to privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut that laid the groundwork for widespread access to birth control for all American women.

“Birth control is a basic part of preventive health care for women. Over the past forty years, increased access to birth control has helped to reduce the rate of unintended pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, abortion and infant mortality.

“While we have made significant advances over the last forty years, we still have a long way to go. The United States has among the highest rates of unintended pregnancies of all industrialized nations. Half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, and nearly half of those end in abortion. Making contraception more accessible and affordable is one crucial step toward reducing unintended pregnancies, reducing abortions and improving women’s health.

I have high hopes for this act and will watch its progress closely. Other liberal legislators would do well to follow Reid’s proactive, well-framed example. I note with amusement that the Family Research Council responded to a NARAL ad promoting the legislation with a Robert A. Heinlein quote: “Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil.” If the best rebuttal they can come up with is “altruism is evil”, they’re on shaky ground.

« Hide it

Read more… or Read more right here… »

“Occasionally one comes upon a term whose motivating context is very specific. One such is the compound FLIP STRENGTH, used, I am told, in the pornographic literature business. Some publishers of pornographic novels instruct their authors to include a certain quota of high-interest words on every page, so that a potential customer, in a bookstore, while ‘flipping’ the pages of the book, will, no matter where he opens the book, find evidence that the book is filled with wonderful and exciting goings-on. A book which has a high ratio of nasty words per page has high flip strength; a book which has these words more widely distributed has low flip strength. As I understand the word, an editor of such a publication venture might reject a manuscript, requesting that it be returned only after its flip strength has been raised.

“With this last example, it is extremely clear that the background text is absolutely essential to understanding the [term]. It is not that that the conditions for using this word cannot be stated without this background understanding…but that word’s meaning cannot be truly understood by someone who is unaware of those human concerns and problems which provide the reason for that [term's] existence.

Now you have an idea to go with the words, whether you like it or not. You have a frame for “flip strength”, so you can understand the word and manipulate the idea behind it. Technically, “flip strength” is the per-page frequency of naughty words in a pornographic novel, but the lovely thing about human ideas is how flexible they are. You can imagine the producer of a TV show asking the writers to up the flip strength of an episode. They can use the term even though they’re not talking about novels. You can imagine reading a boring linguistics paper and wishing the author would up the flip strength–not by splicing pornography in with the bibliography, but by spicing it up somehow. Like turning paper into origami, you have enough working knowledge of the central idea of flip strength (keeping viewers’ attention by making media more interesting) that you can shape it in ways never imagined by the original coiners of the term, even though you just encountered it for the first time a minute ago.

Unfortunately, you can’t present your novel use of “flip strength” to the public, because the term “flip strength” isn’t in public discourse. If you write an op-ed about the flip strength of the Kenneth Starr report, no one will understand it unless you take the time to explain what flip strength is. You don’t have to do that when you write an op-ed about kittens or iPods. Everyone knows what those are, so you can write about them without any expository overhead.

Similarly, reframing political discourse is not as simple as referring to all Republicans as, oh I don’t know, “RepubliCan’ts”^1^. There needs to be a corresponding idea to go with the word, and that idea has to be in the public mind. What is it that RepubliCant’s can’t do? Gotta answer that question before you put a name on it. Framing liberal policy is even harder, because many of the foundational ideas just aren’t out there in public discourse. Everyone knows what the free market is, how it works and why it’s good. No one knows what the commons is, how it works or why it’s good. It’s like trying to understand what “flip strength” means without knowing what pages are.

^1^ I made this up off the top of my head. Please don’t use it, as it is awful.

« Hide it