Sad as Hell
nplusonemag.com
An intresting book review of 'Super Sad True Love Story'.
nplusonemag.com
This is Gametalk[1], and you are a Loser (a term from [1]: basically one who is not Playing to Win[2] in the game of life.) You are finding no meaning in what you see around you because the things you are likely surrounded with are not real, raw art with messages to communicate, but rather tranquilizers and peptics to calm mutual nerves.
Do not do for what will happen if you do not—acting in fear to return the dial from its painful drift back to the sacred reference point[3]; instead, simply do for what will happen if you do, moving the dial to a new place and observing the change.
[1] http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
[3] http://lesswrong.com/lw/dj/what_is_control_theory_and_why_do...
All of the tools, gadgetry, and connectivity referenced by the author as the harbinger of his decline from individuality (loss of personality) do indeed usher forth his dystopia because he is using them to fill the hole that was created by his leaving the stimulating environment of college. A place where learning is efficient and discovery nil (this is what college is good for, but it isn't the whole equation - I'm obviously leaving research an exception).
College is an intellectually artificial environment whose culture is curated by those who decide what should be taught about what. The ability to cultivate a stimulating life, a life rich in thought and contemplation, rich in actionable accomplishments (finishing that basement, building that open source project, etc...) is not something that can be taught! It is often a quiet and solitary road too - my mind, my books, my notes, and my Self are all I need to have a fulfilling and deep life. Friends make it better. But as the author noted, there are few "self aware" people in the world. That hole is filled by deliberately choosing your thoughts, by being firm with what you choose to believe, by transmuting information (lead) into knowledge (gold).
I hope to see another essay detailing his journey from the state conveyed in this piece to a state chosen of his free will (we all have free will but he's using technology as a scape goat); because, he is an excellent writer.
her
If you can't check your sexist assumptions, then you could check the byline.
Here's an article about the forgotten tradition of they as a singular pronoun: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723184
Also, because of the he, I assumed Ixiaus was referring to Gary Shteyngart, the author being reviewed.
This may be controversial or offensive, but it's the truth so I'll take the heat for saying it:
None of the most successful women I know really care or complain about things like he/she in the English language. For the most successful women I know - I'm thinking of an investment banker, lawyer, and chief editor of a magazine in particular - the idea of causing a fuss over pronouns is so low on their radar that it wouldn't happen.
Again, I'll take heat for this, and so be it - but I think people who complain about that sort of thing need to go do more relevant stuff in the real world. Most people who are actually hard working, enterprising, expansive and successful (professionally or in other worthy endeavors) simply don't have time to be upset and pedantic over this sort of thing.
Anyway, I'll take the heat for this now. It's not 100% the case, but the general pattern certainly holds.
Casual minor acts of racism probably have very little effect on Michael Jordan. That doesn't make them ok.
No, I understood your point. I think you missed mine though - my point is that you have a limited amount of time each day to direct your attention. If you want to be more successful, or want women to be more successful, then focusing on he/she pronouns is a very bad use of your time. Focusing on creating wealth, learning management, networking, investing, saving, become more disciplined, fit, healthy, exercising are all good uses of time.
After the majority of women are well-informed and well-educated on the topics of nutrition/fitness, finance, investing, negotiation, accounting, self-discipline, goal setting, etc, etc, etc. - after all that's done then let's turn our attention to pronouns. In the meantime, it's rather like stepping over dollars to pick up pennies. Learning more personal finance, investing, and negotiation will massively help anyone's career success, including women. Having everyone switch to singular they will not make so big of a difference.
> Casual minor acts of racism probably have very little effect on Michael Jordan.
I'm getting better at predicting what people's responses to my comments will be - I knew someone would play the racism card. Well done. Comparing the historical use of "he" in English for a singular pronoun to racism smacks of really missing the point though - the point is, pronoun usage is going to have a trivial impact, if any, on people's successes. There's much better places to deploy your energy and resources if you want women to be more successful, either individually or as a group.
I respectfully disagree. I think that language matters, and I am concerned about the influence of language on my four daughters (aged 3 to 13). I'm not saying that this is the most important issue, of course-- but I also don't think that sexist language should get a free pass in the name of some higher efficiency.
Learning more personal finance, investing, and negotiation will massively help anyone's career success, including women. Having everyone switch to singular they will not make so big of a difference.
It's not just about career success.
Comparing the historical use of "he" in English for a singular pronoun to racism smacks of really missing the point though - the point is, pronoun usage is going to have a trivial impact, if any, on people's successes.
Again, I beg to differ. Attitudes like racism and sexism are maintained though a variety of means, including casual acts that have largely symbolic value. If you reject the parallel to race, how about we draw an alternative parallel to sexual orientation? I know that in my lifetime, there have been major shifts in both the discourse around homosexuality and the rights gay people have won. I firmly believe the two are related, and that using "gay" as a perjorative has a (subtle, but real) damaging effect on society. Similarly, pretending that "he" is gender neutral supports unconscious assumptions that do women no favors.
The historical use of "he" to refer to both genders should, in my opinion, be relegated to history.
A Person Paper on Purity in Language by William Satire (alias Douglas R. Hofstadter)
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
Incredibly well crafted satire.
"Most of the clamor,as you certainly know by now, revolves around the age-old usage of the noun "white" and words built from it, such as chairwhite, mailwhite, repairwhite, clergywhite, middlewhite, Frenchwhite, forewhite, whitepower, whiteslaughter, oneupuwhiteship, straw white, whitehandle, and so on. The negrists claim that using the word "white," either on its own or as a component, to talk about all the members of the human species is somehow degrading to blacks and reinforces racism. Therefore the libbers propose that we substitute "person" everywhere where "white" now occurs. Sensitive speakers of our secretary tongue of course find this preposterous. There is great beauty to a phrase such as "All whites are created equal." Our forebosses who framed the Declaration of Independence well understood the poetry of our language. Think how ugly it would be to say "All persons are created equal," or "All whites and blacks are created equal." Besides, as any schoolwhitey can tell you, such phrases are redundant. In most contexts, it is self-evident when "white" is being used in an inclusive sense, in which case it subsumes members of the darker race just as much as fairskins."
Because the people who 'do care' as you put it, try to 'improve' by imposing a cost on others, namely by polluting every discussion to the point where the actual points get snowed under and this he/she non-issue takes over as the main focus (case in point: this discussion).
It's like Jehova's witnesses or other nutcase religious people: 'oh we're not harming anyone!' - not putting a gun to my head, no, but still ringing my door bell, proposing legislation based around your idiotic beliefs, etc. Get lost with your 'trying to save my soul' and if you really can't contain your beliefs and have to somehow involve others, at least pick people who have expressed an interest (i.e., post on alt.philosophy.feminism or whatever) instead of always imposing your 'debate' on everybody.
I note that nothing in this piece discusses Shteyngart leaving college (where the college link was how I resolved the pronoun in your first paragraph), and that surely Shteyngart will not write a follow-up to "this piece", (which is how I resolved the pronoun reference in your last paragraph). I guess I just don't understand how the male pronouns in your comment refer to Shteyngart.
I guess I shouldn't debate... I read the line about "... the hilarious moment 3 seconds into an intimate embrace when I realize that I'm literally rubbing the screen of my iPhone against his spine," and assumed the author was female because in my head, the "default" participants in an intimate embrace are a guy & a girl, since that's the one I'm most familiar with. So, negative points for me on the knee-jerk gender assumption front.
I thought that was a really great line, potential elicited sexism notwithstanding, by the way. I've had those moments myself. It took me a second to realize exactly what she was talking about, but once I did, I couldn't help but chortle at how much I've chided myself for the very same thing.
It may be uncool to admit but I have no trouble at all keeping my inbox to zero unread items. And I do have a social life -- less active than many, but more active than a lot of people. I even read books, actual physical things made of paper, in my spare time.
How do I do this? I think maybe I instinctively understand that my personal information processing abilities are limited. I know I'm not a computer; I don't try to be like one. First of all, I subscribe or commit to relatively little, and of what I do follow, I don't feel any obligation to read everything. Mailing lists are aggressively filtered, even when I read them I'm culling entire threads left and right. Facebook I avoid unless I want to keep up with invitations and so on. Quora was starting to become a bit addicting, so I've curtailed that.
Am I abnormal? Do the rest of you just... let the machine take from you what it will? Why? Is there some ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: I READ THE INTERNET that I'm unaware of?
P.S. I'll admit that I failed rather badly a company where everyone was expected to read hundreds if not thousands of mail items daily. But I still blame that not on the fact that I didn't read EVERYTHING, but that I didn't prioritize effectively.
P.P.S. It even grinds my gears that this person laments random connections with people on the subway have now, in the Facebook era, somehow become an impossibility. It's not! I've done it! It's really not that hard. And yes I live in San Francisco, not Iowa.
Maybe this effect is stronger in those who remember when information was scarce, especially information on subjects that used to be obscure, like, say, programming languages. :) You instinctively try to eat up as much as possible. Except that strategy is actually harmful nowadays, because there simply is too much information on just about anything, for one person to process. That concept is easy to grasp, but it's not so easy to actually change our habits.
It's sentences like this that I would imagine to be under a dictionary definition of "nostalgia." I read this, immediately look off into the distance in an oh-so-subtle way, and then wonder quickly how this type of thing could be changed... and if it would be changed.
Think of the last time the bus or the subway car stopped more suddenly than anyone expected. Most everyone will look up, look around, and make brief eye contact with another person to make sure that someone else felt it too. There's that initial panic that sets over a number of people, then, seeing how others have this same, shared experience, everyone is immediately partially comforted. Why wouldn't we be? Someone else is here, they know what's going on, we'll get through this together.
The instant connectivity means that this period of worry before we make the most fleeting of eye contact is even shorter - we're getting rid of that terrifying low in order to have a constant sense of stability. When we do this, we don't feel that euphoric positive delta of connection and of community. The internet, the tubes, the twitters, the facebooks, the pictures, everything is just a numbing agent so we don't have to fret for that initial period of time.
We've advanced as a society to avoid the great pains of life as much as possible - fighting to remove hunger, distance ourselves from war, medicine to cure the sick. Why do we think it unreasonable or unexpected for society to also inadvertently make progress towards avoiding the emotional pains of life?
to add, a lot of people used to read books or magazines on the subway, now they can read off a device, plus for a lot of users our physical location no longer dictates who we can make contact with.
It maybe shallow, but at least technology reminds us that there is someone out there when we might not be the type to connect casually with those in front of us.
The "amputation of our limbs" with devices that seem to enhance our senses is quite a striking metaphor from McLuhan's books.
>Same with all-or-nothing friends: they’re only compelling if you talk to them all the time; when the chatty, daily interactions end so does the prospect of an interesting expository conversation. Without consistency, a long phone call seems not only daunting but also profoundly dull.
I have friends I meet with rarely and have great conversations with. We don't talk about each others' lives quite so much though. We talk about stuff :)
Opening Safari is an actively destructive decision. I am asking that consciousness be taken away from me. Like the lost time between leaving a party drunk and materializing somehow at your front door, the internet robs you of a day you can visit recursively or even remember.
I struggle with internet addiction. On my bad days, I feel like a walking corpse. I breathe, I eat, and nothing memorable or valuable happens. I wonder what made me think I could handle a career in technology. I admire engineers and wanted to be one. But I need to flee from technology to take a piece of my life back, to reawaken to autonomy. I envy you who can ignore the internet and manage to be productive.
I've read a few books by Houellebecq; they seem to get more and more depressing.
Personally, yes. I'm aware that this is unusual. Maybe I will settle down one day but the few times I have tried so far I have experienced what I can only describe as cabin fever.
> ... it's also nice to feel home
I suppose that I do have the same instinct to seek out shelter/security/safety, manifested in an irrational fondness for my tent and the few other belongings I carry with me.
(My attitude seems to be evolving into: "Don't friggin' call me and expect me to drop everything to chat with you. Shoot me an email and I will get back to you within a reasonable period of time without dropping everything like it's some crisis." And I'm a former phone-junkie.)
It's not just communication but the ability to easily keep track of where people are in the world and to coordinate meetings and shared holidays. Facebook is particularly good for keeping in touch with old friends and acquaintances because of the contextual information it supplies. I saw recently that a friend I haven't seen in years is spending a month in Thailand and I arranged to change my travel plans so that I would be passing through during the same period. We weren't close enough friends that we would still be in touch if it wasn't for those kinds of coincidental connections.
I also meet a lot of new people through couchsurfing.org and various expat sites. Couchsurfing is particularly interesting because its goal is explicitly to create friendships between people of different cultures. I would probably be much more lonely when traveling without it.
I can't think of a better explanation for the rise and rise of Farmville. The author mentioned Twitter, Tumblr as examples, but I think Farmville is a far better example.
To me, this was the most striking sentence in the article. It seems to be something that has increased from the time pop culture began to the present. Each of us probably hears more about Justin Bieber than we would ever truly care to, for example.
For instance, I know that Bieber exists, and I can probably count on my fingers how many times I've seen pictures of him. I found the one or two songs of his I've heard innocuous and utterly forgettable - I probably couldn't identify him if I heard those very same songs again. I'm not even aware precisely why he's the go-to example of annoying celebrity, lately.
I'm not utterly isolated from the world or media, though. I just actually choose what media I consume.
So yes, entirely voluntary.
Now, if you'd like to argue that I was "forced" to encounter information by talking to someone I know, then you're going beyond even trying to make victimization out of exposure to media and just showing yourself to long for a hermitage. :)
So it seems voluntary enough.
Indeed, and I've pretty much done it. But it takes effort. You need credible replacements for the mindless time, and then you need to actively push yourself towards the new stuff as opposed to the old stuff.
The credible replacements is everything. If you commute by car, you need either:
-Some audiotapes/audiobooks/podcasts
-Someone to carpool with
-Some way of not driving any more (car service if you're wealthy enough, taking the train or bus otherwise)
...otherwise you're going to listen to the radio. What else is there to do while driving?
So it takes some effort. Totally doable though. I just calculated out how much time I spent on pop culture this year - Only one movie (Robin Hood, meh - I would've seen Inception except I was in the back provinces of China when it was released, and then it was gone from theaters when I was back in civilization), less than ten hours of TV (mostly tennis), no pop music except what was on when I was wandering through stores playing music or at a bar, no newspapers, and a few hours of trashy magazines while sitting in an aeronautical engineer friend's bathroom (why he reads them is beyond me, but it wasn't a terrible use of time while in his bathroom).
But this is only possible because I've got a list of stuff to do - a Kindle loaded with good books, an mp3 player loaded with audiobooks/podcasts, Hacker News/LessWrong/Google Reader loaded with good blogs, Lichess.org for when I want to play a game of Chess, and a list of temples/mosques/ruins/parks/beaches to go to.
It's not enough to just "opt out" - you need to "opt in" to some comparable activity to fill your time.
How about just drive? I hardly turn on the radio when I am driving by myself and find it a great time to think about things I am working on.
Justin Bieber, just so you know, is a Canadian teenage singer who has over the last few year build a large mass of rather devoted fans. He makes very 'poppy' music ('mierzoet' as we'd say in Dutch, I'm not aware of an English term capturing the essence of that word) and is therefore widely reviled by those who consider their own musical interests more refined or otherwise better.
It's all described on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Bieber, and no it's not just a US thing (although he has been popular there for longer, but he's also well known here in Europe, including here in the Netherlands; see http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Bieber ).
That said, the tone (as far as there can reasonably be understood a 'tone' from two words) and the upvote the post had when I posted my comment did not, prima facie, lead me to believe that the purpose of the post was to be informed about who actually Justin Bieber is. A 5 second google search would've shown more than enough to be able to understand what the GP (and following posts) are complaining about. So, all these circumstances combined, lead me to believe that there is at least a core of truth to my post, even if it's not as dramatic as spelling it out like I did makes it seem.
Then again, me making these ridiculous multi-paragraph posts on a topic that is wholly devoid of any intellectual value would probably rationally be considered indicative of me taking pride in some sort of meta-pseudo-intellectual snobbery; so am I sticking up for pop culture because for the right reasons or for vain self-gratification? Does it matter? I don't know. And I think it doesn't matter that I don't know, either ;)
More likely he was pointing out to bobf, the user whose post to which he was replying, that participation in pop-culture is entirely voluntary. I think to assume that he was passing judgment on Justin Bieber fans out of some 'pseudo-intellectual snobbery' is just a little bit presumptuous.
Anyway I'm just posting to point out that that last paragraph with the 'pseudo-intellectual snobbery' was a sneer at myself, and not at Jacques; to point out that these things are relative and that I'm not above it. Just sayin' to make it clear - like I said before, I can't presume to be able to pass judgment on Jacques as a person from a few HN posts.
"It used to be you would get on the train with junior-high-school girls and it would be noisy as hell with all their chatting,” Yumiko Sugiura, a journalist who writes about Japanese youth culture, told me. “Now it’s very quiet—just the little tapping of thumbs.”
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/03/realtime_kills.php
When N+1 hosts writers just out of college, this is what we get. It happens.
This is your typical "we're special because of xyz" conceit.
We all know what that is. We've all been there, and fortunately many of of have noticed and the next time is less severe.
The "we're special because humans never before did x" has been around since the beginning of time, and it's always right on some vapid level. The exciting thing is, we all still have blood, and thin skins, and bacteria who want to live in us but also want to eat us, and viruses who just want to subvert us. That doesn't change that much. Sure, lifespan doubles, hurrah.
This conceit is a cousin of ludditism, a 1st cousin that is, just with a different twist.
Enjoy your college writers. They are great entertainment. Nothing more.
Personally I prefer to discuss actual reality as opposed to social reality.
-- everything is new again just like before
-- there is nothing new under the sun ~ all is vanity
-- the only thing we learn from history is that we never learn
for a more culturally correct critique, though less direct, i.e. more metaphorical: this article is a micro-benchmark with a sample size of 1 and not having adequate controls when measuring in a noisy environment.
this is more or less a cousin of what you're saying to me. although it's humorous that you're making it as a critique of me and not of the article when in fact it and i are both painted with that brush.
and while i can just as easily make the same critique, i dispute it as a another conceit: the physical sciences' over-reliance on rationality in a universe that is not fully understood. an old philosophical problem, and one at the core of feynman's overestimated notions of superiority, brilliant as he was, he'll gladly cut down the social sciences and simultaneously provide us with high-quality tools for mass devastation.
ah, the fraternal sciences, one of whom is convinced it is no sibling, but rather the ubermensch already come.
but, yeah, that sort of micro-benchmark metaphor can be popular when misapplied to the humanities. and what do we get out of that?: economics. woohoo! i'm on fire! now, peeps, hurry with the down votes.
so, explain to me reality again, social what? ;)