Do You Remember This?

The reason I have such a good memory for names is because I took that Sam Carnegie
course.  –Anthony  Quinn

 If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.  –Giuseppe Di Lampedusa

I have a memory like an elephant.  In fact, elephants often consult me.   –Noël Coward

 I sometimes worry about my short attention span, but not for very long.   –Herb Caen

I was recently told I should work on improving my memory.  And of course I always do what I’m told.  A new and better calendar was a good start.  Now, this week, I have been checking out some books on the topic.  The goofy wisdom above is from one of those books.  Some of this advice appears to be stuff I've heard before.  I do think I shall make improvements.  But friends, don’t expect miracles.

Dear President Obama (a fantasy)

Please read Nate Silver’s new book.  Invite him to the white House.  So much of this budget business involves making predictions.  Silver knows predictions.  I’m sure you enjoyed his predictions last October and November (I sure did).  However he does more than predict election results.  His new book (as you probably already know) is called The Signal and the Noise: Why so Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don’t.  We often mistake the noise for the signal he says—that is we confuse the information that can help us make predictions—the signal—with the irrelevant information that surrounds it—the noise that is often mistaken for the signal. 

Much of his book is about distinguishing signal from noise.  It reminded me that many of our legislators know little about economics and, it seems to me, often mistake noise for meaningful signals.  Before they plan a budget, they need information about how to think about the results of their actions—predicting.

On page 22 Silver gives a short list of economists who predicted the end of the housing bubble:  Robert Shiller, Dean Baker, and Paul Krugman.  I think a seminar for legislatures would be good start to the coming budget talks, a seminar given by people who have a record for making good economic predictions.  Let Nate Silver help.

Silver can also help policy makers identify the phenomena that can be predicted.

Creating Another Self

My favorite blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates is learning French and, from time to time, he writes about it.  This morning he writes about how some things cannot be translated, that to speak French, he needs to ask, '"How would a French person express this?" or better still, "How would my particular French self express this?"'  At the end of the article, he concludes, “We are not so much learning a second language, as we are creating another self.  And that is incredibly exciting.”  My first response to that sentence was envy.  I’ll never create that other self.  Then I decided I was wrong.  I have created that other self; it just isn’t very fluent.  I've spent of lot of time in Spain with just a little Spanish.  I've bought food, found places to sleep, taken public transportation, and hiked hundreds of miles without getting permanently lost.  Even that is incredibly exciting.

Being Peace

Below are some thoughts on peace from Pema Chödrön:

• War and peace start in the hearts of individuals.
• We seek peace and happiness by going to war.
• War begins when we harden our hearts, and we harden them easily…whenever we feel uncomfortable.
• ...a good definition of peace:  Softening what is rigid in our hearts.
• First the heart closes, then the mind becomes hardened into a view, then you can justify your hatred of another human being…
• …the degree that each of us is dedicated to wanting there to be peace in the world, then we have to take responsibility when our own hears and minds harden and close.  We  have to be brave enough to soften what is rigid, to find the soft spot and stay with it.  We have to have that kind of courage and take that kind of responsibility.  That’s true spiritual warriorship.  That’s the true practice of peace.


(From Practicing Peace in Times of War)

Changing Minds, continued

In his blog today, Ta-Nehisi Coates says, the purpose of his blog "is not the display of knowledge, it's about the acquisition of knowledge." 

Changing Minds??

I've seen this quotation (without a source) in a number of places:  "I don't share my thoughts because I think it will change the minds of people who think differently; I share my thought to show the people who already think like me that they're not alone."  A few days ago, I posted a little piece call "Got Hope?" addressing this issue of why we write and who we write for.  Maybe it's all of these reasons: to change minds, to share with those who agree, to figure out complicated issues, and to manifest hope.  Does writing for more than one reason improve our writing?  I think so.

Stupid Games!!

I have, at times in my life, been addicted to computer solitaire games.  Spider was the worst.  Presently, I'm in recovery, but I have to be careful.  Because of this, I was intrigued by the article "Just One More Game...Angry Birds, Farmville, and Other Hyperadictive 'Stupid Games'" by Same Anderson.  Anderson  tries to figure out why these games are so addictive; I'm not sure he succeeds, but I love this description of these damn stupid games.

Stupid games, on the other hand, are rarely occasions in themselves. They are designed to push their way through the cracks of other occasions. We play them incidentally, ambivalently, compulsively, almost accidentally. They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits. You glance down to check your calendar and suddenly it’s 40 minutes later and there’s only one level left before you jump to the next stage, so you might as well just launch another bird.

Got Hope?

I’ve been cleaning out drawers and files this year.  A few days ago I came across a small piece of paper which said, “Writing is a sign of hope.”  I don’t remember writing it, I don’t remember the quotation, but it’s obvious I wrote it, probably years ago.  And it still strikes me as true, and one of the reasons I write.  I write in my journal for myself.  I rarely come back and read it, so it’s just the process of putting my thoughts on paper.  Yesterday, I spend a good chunk of the morning writing an op-ed piece for the local newspaper.  This piece is more outrageous than pieces I’ve written before, so I haven’t decided yet whether or not to send it.  And then there’s this blog.

That started me thinking about blogs, letters, and opinion pieces I read online and in the newspaper.  The writers often seem so sure.  Does anybody care unless they already agree?  Ta-Nehisi Coates is my favorite blogger.  I imagine he attracts those who lean towards his views, mainly liberal I’d say.  But the reason he’s my favorite is his openness to new ideas.  He writes interesting articles while still seeming unsure and reaching for a better answer.  Over and over, I’m moved by this in his writing.

Coates writes about some things I’m not interested in (of course), but over and over, he sends out his signs of hope.  You can find him here. 

I Am the Bird

Pema Chӧdrӧn tells this story of inmate Jarvis Master in her book Practicing Peace in Times of War. 

One day there was a seagull out on the yard in San Quentin.  It had been raining and the seagull was there paddling around in a puddle.  One of the inmates picked up something in the yard and was about to throw it at the bird.  Jarvis didn't even think about it—he automatically put out his hand to stop the man.  Of course this escalated the man’s aggression and he started yelling.  Who the hell did Jarvis think he was?  And why did Jarvis care so much about some blankety-blank bird?

 Everyone started circling around, just waiting for the fight.  The other inmate was screaming at Jarvis, “Why’d you do that?”  And out of Jarvis’s mouth came the words, “I did that because that bird’s got my wings. 

I think it’s a lovely story.  Also, maybe it explains my attraction to my bird feeder.

Managing the Paradox

About guns and the thinking after Sandy Hook, Dr. Ginny Whitelaw writes the comments below on a website I find to jargon-ish to link to.

For we’re dealing with a paradox here, and one that is core to the American psyche: that pits individual freedoms on the one hand and social safety on the other. Both are good and right and valuable things and, as we know from integral theory, both are facets of our humanity: we are both individual agents and social animals. We affect others through our actions AND we are affected by social context. Little wonder that if we ignore one side of our human equation and go to extremes on the other side, we get into trouble….

 Both individual freedom and social safety are valuable and, if we go too far in either direction, problematic. Too much focus on social safety and we get a police state that violates individual rights. We don’t want to go that far. But too much individual freedom, and we get nutcases wiping out swaths of society. And that, I submit, is where we are right now. We are not managing this paradox well.

To manage it better, we have to move beyond one-sided arguments and embrace what’s right and good about BOTH individual freedom and social safety, and use the tension between them to reach a higher level goal: a society in which we are more free because we’re safe, and more safe because we’re free. The process of managing this paradox would have us set some limits – what’s free enough? Or safe enough? And what are some thresholds below which we don’t want to sink? We might be able to largely agree, for example, that police confiscation of ordinary, non-automatic weapons would be going too far on the social safety side. And that two rampages in one year crosses the threshold on the side of overprotecting the individual freedom to bear arms.

What Do You Think?

Yesterday afternoon, (Sunday!!) I saw “Survey Center” on my phone’s caller ID.  I considered not picking up, but then I did, and I agreed to answer the survey questions thinking, my side needs to be heard.

But like many others surveys I’ve taken, it pissed me off.  It seemed designed to elicit certain answers.  How would I rate Congress on a scale of 1-100?  I already knew that we like cockroaches better than Congress; I read it somewhere on line.  However, some members of Congress I like very much; others I like as much as cockroaches.  I answered “50.”

There were a lot of questions about the EPA.  The caller said some people were worried that the new bill the EPA wants to see passed would raise gas prices to $9 a gallon though others felt it would help asthma sufferers.  Since I knew nothing about the bill I told her I wasn’t qualified to have an opinion.  She answered with something like, “Everybody is entitled to an opinion.  Poor woman.  That caused me to get argumentative—I said an uninformed opinion is worthless.  Of course it’s not her job to think about such things.

But these surveys ask questions as if we will (and should) have an opinion whether we’re informed or not.  Be very wary of poll results.

Americans for Responsible Solutions

The title above is the name of a new organization started by Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly.  Two years ago today, Giffords and others were shot at a Tucson parking lot.  Today they started an organization that will " invite people from around the country to join a national conversation about gun violence prevention, will raise the funds necessary to balance the influence of the gun lobby, and will line up squarely behind leaders who will stand up for what's right."

They have introduced their organization with an op-ed in USA Today.  In their article they ask that we reverse the position that " gun owners are less responsible for the misuse of their weapons than they are for their automobiles."

I'm in.

So Close and Yet so Far

Some of us remember the TV show from the 50s, I've Got a Secret.  If you don't remember it, your parents or grandparents do  Here's a clip from a 1956 broadcast. The guest's secret is that he saw Lincoln's assassination.  It helps bring home the fact that we aren't that far removed from the Civil War and slavery.  Maybe it helps explain why we haven't overcome it yet.

Why so Many Predictions Fail--but Some Don't

Nate Silver is the guy who predicted, with startling accuracy, the last two elections.  It has also made his ideas intriguing.  So I picked up his book The Signal and the Noise: Why so Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don’t from the library yesterday.  I thought at the time it would be a book I would skim through reading only the most interesting parts.  However, after reading the introduction, I predict I will read the entire book. 

Silver repeats what we all know—information has drastically proliferated in this computer age (something that started with the printing press), and we don’t know what to do with it all.  He quotes Alvin Toffer on how we often respond:  

…in 1970 [Toffer] predicted some of the consequences of what he call “information overload.”  He thought our defense mechanism would be to simplify the world in ways that confirmed our biases, even as the world itself was growing more diverse and more complex.(12)

He ends his introduction with this:

The world has come a long way since the days of the printing press.  Information is no longer a scarce commodity; we have more of it than we know what to do with.  But relatively little of it is useful.  We perceive it selectively, subjectively, and without much self-regard for the distortions that this causes.  We think we want information when we really want knowledge.

The signal is the truth.  The noise is what distracts us from the truth.  This is a book about the signal and the noise. (17)

In the Game of Life, What Difficulty Setting Are You Given?

John Scalzi lists this most read post of 2012 for his blog "Whatever." The post "Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is" is number one.  It's an interesting reflection, from a straight male, as to why this is an advantage without using the dread word "privilege." 

Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?
Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.