relationship jujitsu

I highly recommend this great little piece by Laura Munson in the NYT:

Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear

“I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did.”

His words came at me like a speeding fist, like a sucker punch, yet somehow in that moment I was able to duck. And once I recovered and composed myself, I managed to say, “I don’t buy it.” Because I didn’t.

Her story is an excellent reminder of how tempting it is to always see everything as being about us, as our own fault - and how difficult yet powerful it can be to break out of that pattern. This isn't fuzzy self-help stuff; this is solid practical psychology.

the world revolves around you

I've been thinking about geocentric cosmology today.

Nowadays we all know that the Ptolemaic/Aristotelian model of the universe is silly. The earth (and the other planets) go around the sun. Copernicus was so awesome not because he discovered something truly profound, but because he (and Brahe and Galileo) provided the arguments and data that eventually forced a bunch of stupid reactionary authorities to stop setting fire to astronomers and to start acknowledging really obvious facts. What kind of moron would put the dinky little earth at the center of the universe?

But pretend you've never been taught anything about astronomy. Go outside and look at the moon and the sun and the stars for a couple days. Go ahead - I'll wait.

Okay, notice anything? The sun and the moon and the stars move. They move, and the earth doesn't move. You can tell it's not moving, because very rarely you do feel the earth move, especially in southern California. But most of the time you don't feel any earth movement. So all those things up in the sky move, and they somehow disappear over one horizon and then reappear over the other horizon later on.

Now, if you're really gullible and superstitious, you might think that the sun and whatnot do something magical, like teleporting back to where they started, or they die and are reborn every day. Or whatever. But, no, we're being scientific. So here's an experiment: get your friend to run around you in a circle while you keep your head still. Notice that she disappears at one side of your visual field but reappears at the other side... because... she's moving in an orbit while you observe from a stationary position! That's it - the sun and moon and stars go in a circle around the earth! This is scientific progress!

Hang on though, some friendless little nerd has an objection. Try a different experiment, he says: have your friend stay stationary, while you run around her in a circle. And while you are running, spin around, so that your back is sometimes toward your friend and your front is sometimes toward your friend. Notice that your friend disappears on one side of your visual field, and reappears on the other. But you are moving, not your friend. Couldn't the earth's relation to the sun or moon be like that? Couldn't the earth be moving?

What a lame idea! Why would I want to spin while running around my friend? I'd trip and hurt myself! And why would the earth - which certainly doesn't feel like it's spinning to me! - do something so stupid? This is a needlessly complicated theory, when good old common sense tells us that the earth is holding still. This idea is obviously the sort of babble you get from crazy people, or troublemakers.


Galileo before the Holy Office, Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury (via wikicommons)

Here's my point: geocentric cosmology was not an obviously false and stupid dogmatic position. It was, in fact, a scientific improvement upon earlier theories of planetary motion. And it was incredibly satisfying on an intuitive level. Copernicus and his friends were only able to overturn the view by providing a tight explanatory framework, and an increasingly demanding amount of data that finally overwhelmed extant accounts. Geocentric cosmology is the simplest explanatory theory when you're idly watching the stars one night, but it stops being simplest when you look at hundreds of nights' observations of all the celestial bodies. Which is to say - heliocentric theory is the best theory, but not at an intuitive level.

Except it certainly feels intuitive to us now. Of course the earth goes round the sun! But it only feels this way because we were raised on colorful planetarium displays. We were taught a heliocentric cosmology before we were able to develop an independent intuitive sense of the universe. That's why it now seems so obvious that Copernicus was right and the prevailing authorities were idiots. But they did not have the benefit of building a diorama of the solar system in elementary school.

So I wonder, now, which contemporary ridiculous and counter-intuitive views will be utterly obvious in the future. For what lapse of scientific common sense will our distant ancestors mock us? And who among our lunatic fringe will someday be a hero of rational progress? Just how much will we come to resemble the Inquisition berating Galileo? We are, after all, still plenty arrogant, even if we're no longer the center of the universe.

top image: Min Su Yun

nonsense sells?

I try to apply interpretive charity to just about everything, but I'm having a hard time with this ad: (hat tip - angry asian man)



Here's what seems to be happening: In each of the mirror panes, there is a different 'version' of the white customer - a black man (on the left), a Latino man (in the center) and an asian - evidently Filipino - man (on the right). Each of the reflections match up with the customer, except the last, who is inexplicably holding a bag of Skittles. This prompts a query from the customer and a shout (in Thai) from the tailor, provoking a bizarre exchange with the Tagalog-speaking reflection. Eventually the Filipino version of the customer kicks the mirror, shattering himself, and the tailor finds this funny.

So far as I can tell, that is what happens. But what on earth is going on? What is the ad's metaphysical conceit? Is the mirror a gateway to a series of alternate universes, each featuring a racial counterpart to the reflected subject? Why is the tailor's race consistent in each universe? (And why is he Thai?) Or is this is a weird sci-fi thing; are the reflections employees of the tailor, mimicking the customer before closed circuit cameras projecting to a series of screens? Does that explain why the tailor appears to be berating the Skittles-eater?

I doubt there is any correct answer to those questions, and I suspect this is part of the ad's strategy. The commercial is so strange that many viewers will attempt to puzzle out what they have just seen - to engage in interpretation - and will probably seize upon the plot-turning Skittles bag. (Notice that the only line of English dialogue explicitly references the product.) Which makes for a very natural question: what does Skittles have to do with what is going on here? The answer - a conceptual connection between the multiracial theme and Skittles' "Taste the Rainbow" tag line - isn't particularly satisfying (it certainly doesn't explain anything about the plot). But it does require the viewer to think about Skittles.

the absurd and the advert

Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily recently discussed a study regarding the relation between humor and memorability in advertisement. Viewers often remember funny ads, but do they remember the products advertised? The study's upshot seems to be that humorous commercials do work best when the product is directly relevant to the joke, but only if the brand is not previously associated with levity, and only if the audience is not high in "need for humor". Munger poses an interesting challenge:

Of course, this opens a paradox for advertisers. Clearly humor works best when it's unexpected and related to the product. But if an brand develops a reputation for producing humorous ads, whether it's Bud Light or Mutual of Omaha, won't viewers eventually begin to expect humor regardless of how serious the company's line of business?

Does the Skittles ad avoid such pitfalls? The commercial is not merely funny; it is bizarre. In order to (probably unsuccessfully) attempt comprehension of the message, a viewer must actively engage with the product. Presumably that hikes memorability, and it might also counteract any prior expectations of humor associated with the brand. Nowadays, it's hard to know what to expect from a Skittles commercial.

The Skittles ads come from TBWA/Chiat/Day, an agency known for its offbeat work (including the famous 1984 Apple ad and the contemporary and increasingly irritating 'Get a Mac' campaign). Seth Stevenson at Slate's Ad Report Card doesn't think highly of the Skittles ads (part of a sometimes creepy series), on the grounds that these days, "freaky-ass ads are a dime a dozen". But maybe that's because this thing works - people remember ads that just don't make sense, and they remember trying to figure out what the product has to do with the insanity.

surprises and expectations

Here, in its entirety, is a story from Reuters:

”What are you doing here?”: man asks wife in brothel

WARSAW (Reuters) - A Polish man got the shock of his life when he visited a brothel and spotted his wife among the establishment's employees.

Polish tabloid Super Express said the woman had been making some extra money on the side while telling her husband she worked at a store in a nearby town.

"I was dumfounded. I thought I was dreaming," the husband told the newspaper on Wednesday.

The couple, married for 14 years, are now divorcing, the newspaper reported.

Here’s what I want to know: was the woman surprised to see her husband in the brothel? And why doesn’t the article address that question?

Advanced primates that we may be, we’re still wired to notice the unusual or unexpected. What seems to be unusual or unexpected here (both to the man and to us) is that someone’s wife happened to be working in a brothel. It is not unusual or unexpected that someone’s husband happened to be frequenting a brothel. The man’s behavior is (relatively) normal; the woman’s is not.

Can you imagine this article having been written from the other perspective: ‘brothel employee surprised to see husband as client’? I don’t think we’ll ever see such an article. It’s too hard for us (and for the reporter, our proxy) to identify with this abnormal creature, the brothel employee who is also a wife. But we recognize familiarity in the brothel customer who is also a husband. It’s not that we’re necessarily any more similar to him. It’s just that we’re used to him. And so the story gets told from his angle.

There’s an interesting reinforcing mechanism at work here. The story treats the wife’s presence at the brothel as the surprising factor, because it is the part of the story that surprises us. And it surprises us because of articles like this.

here kitty kitty

If you've ever been trapped in a car or at a dinner table with cat people for very long, you know that we like to engage in casually speculative feline psychology. "Cats do such weird things!" we observe tirelessly. "Why do they do such weird things?" Then we proceed to document for one another the special weird things that our particular cats do, offering evolutionary or developmental guessplanations for these profoundly enigmatic behaviors. "Princess Fluffy always dips her left paw into the toilet water, never her right paw! She must have fallen into the toilet on her right side when she was a kitten!"

I've come to appreciate the inverse corollary to this practice. I like to think that cats are similarly watching us, acquiring data to support shaky conjectures about causal origins of our own bizarre activities. My roommate's cats watch me constantly. Wendy the cat will sit motionless at the foot of my bed for thirty minutes straight, staring as I read a book. (This can be extraordinarily creepy at night, especially when she maintains exactly that pose after I've turned off the lights.)

Jake, Wendy's brother, loves to watch me get dressed, prepare food, put on makeup, comb my hair, or do any other bit of morning maintenance that has no precise analog in the feline world. (Jake's own morning ritual involves yowling until he's fed and then licking himself.) He is especially obsessed with precise motor behavior involving repetitious employment of a small instrument, such as the brushing of teeth or the application of mascara.

I imagine that when I'm at work Jake and Wendy sit around discussing my behavior, and arguing about its underlying import. "Isn't it weird that she puts on jeans one leg at a time, rather than just jumping into both at once? She must have had an accident as a child." "Why does she always react so readily when that alarm clock makes noise? Humans must have been prey to gigantic buzzing digital displays in their ancestral environment!"

This is perhaps a part of the attraction of cats. Something about them - their panopticon eyes, their ability to purr contentedly in your arms mere seconds before violently and inexplicably perforating several square inches of your epidermis - suggests an intelligence keen enough to engage in something like psychological theorizing and a sentiment alien enough to motivate perplexed curiosity as to the ways of hairless bipedal apes.

A cat's unbroken gaze invites you to see yourself from the outside, to wonder how your own behaviors might appear to someone suitably distanced from your own point of view. Dogs, as wonderful as they are, seem to accept our actions enthusiastically and uncritically. "If Human is doing X, then there must be some darn good reason to do X!" No one takes cats to go hunting in the woods; they wouldn't stand for it.

Cats are living mirrors whose observant presence reminds us that there are other ways of seeing, and other ways of being. Sometimes that is enough to put obstacles in front of a rampant ego. And sometimes it is enough to remind the abstractly rambling subject that it is also a curiously concrete object.

the lecture of my dreams

That was really weird.

I'll be lecturing on personal identity this afternoon. I've taught this material twice before, although it's been about a year since the last time. So the prep consists basically of straining to remember how I presented it before (since most of my lecture notes were lost in the Great Harddrive Failure of 2007). As I fell sleep last night, I had started to think about this...

So in my last dream of the night, I was walking into the lecture hall. This itself is odd, since the class only has 10 students. But in my dream, there were now several hundred people in a two-tiered lecture hall. And apparently I hadn't done any preparation. So I had to give the lecture off the top of my head.

This is where it just gets fascinating. I actually did a half-decent job for awhile. I was genuinely giving this lecture, in my dreams. But all of a sudden I could not remember some technical terms ('numerical identity' was one) and I could actually feel myself mentally straining to recover the words. Even odder, I announced the name of some important Principle, but then couldn't remember what it actually says. (It had something to do with Parfit. But now I can't remember what the name was, and I suspect it doesn't actually exist.) Gradually the focus of the dream narrowed from the giant lecture hall to a sheet of paper on the lectern, where I repeatedly tried and failed to write down the forgotten concepts.

Then the cats woke me up, demanding breakfast. Immediately upon waking, I thought numerical identity! and a few other answers. Very quickly, a rough sketch of the lecture structure popped into my mind.

I find this incredibly interesting. I think I actually got to watch my brain recover explicit memories!