After the Peak

Why is it these times that I always know exactly what I want, exactly how to get it, and exactly how I want to live my life, are always the times I’m too drunk to actually do any of it?

Nothing pisses me off these days like Apple-fan-boyism, so I really want to set the record straight on something.

The iPhone did NOT start the touch-screen revolution.

There are only 5 million or so iPhones that have been sold.

On the other hand, there are over 70 million Nintendo DS’s that have been sold, it’s been around since 2004, and it’s still today selling at a faster rate than the iPhone.

Nintendo is the one who brought touch-screen consumer electronics to the masses, not Apple.

I don’t mind crediting Apple for making a gorgeous device and leading the way to making touch-screen phones, but why is it that even in the world of technology news that people still mostly ignore the pervasiveness and innovation of video games?

Life comes from dirt.

Cleanliness only leads to death and destruction.

A Singles Map of the United States

The commentary about this map on the blogs I’ve seen mention it has of course discussed causation, and I guess one of the leading but questionable theories is that there’s “more growth opportunities” in the West and therefore men are more likely to venture off there.

I think there’s a simpler explanation, which is partially backed up by the polling results that single people actually do rate “number of single people of the opposite gender for me to date” as one of the highest considerations for where to live, higher than job opportunities. The simpler explanation also assumes that people aren’t really smart enough to have seen this data before, but instead are going based on more mainstream perceptions.
The simpler explanation is as follows:

If you’re an average single guy, looking for single girls, then you think of California as being the place with the most desirable girls. Desirable girls being, of course, physically attractive, fit, blonde, plastic surgery-ed, etc. When you think of “girls in California”, your first image is immediately a girl on the beach in a bikini. Your best possible catch is a hot, young actress.

If you’re an average single girl, looking for single guys, then you think of New York as being the place with the most desirable guys. Desirable guys being, of course, successful, rich, powerful. When you think of “guys in New York”, your first image is immediately a guy on Wall Street in a suit. Your best possible catch is an ambitious young exec, a doctor, a politician.

Of course, this is probably a wild generalization, right? But strong correlations usually require a pretty dominant, simple explanation as to their cause.

And also, notice in the map, the only red dot that’s in California. That’s Sacramento. Where there are no beaches and no girls in bikinis. But the highest density in the state of politicians in suits.

If it was good, then the ending isn’t happy. Even if it was bad, the ending is at most relief.

The market is not efficient. Obviously not. And it couldn’t be anyway, because equilibriums never really exist. So obvious in some contexts, yet completely overlooked in ones that count big.

I have the beginnings of a thesis as to why the uber wealth gains of the top percent, the US CEO salaries, the golden parachutes, are actually the exact opposite of incentive to do a better job. Every unit of money becomes less useful the more of them you have. I don’t think any CEO’s make decisions they know are bad. But when the cost of a bad decision is taking $100 million and slinking off to some other project and having missed your chance for the billionaire’s club, that cannot possibly be as big a motivator as when $10 million is the jackpot and $1 million the consolation.

And this needs to be the argument of smart progressive econo-politics. This is a simple question of video game design or motivational psychology or game theory or marginal economics. And we can be confident that the best and brightest are going to scrap harder for the diminishing returns when the differences still mean something than they will when the differences are just paper.

That said, the motivation on the 90th percentile now must be insane. The smart money is that the current situation can’t possibly go on forever (no equilibriums remember). And so all of us at the bottom of the top must strike now, or always remember that those indistinguishingly similar to us, starting in the same place, got the memo, jumped through the door before it closed, and rode the power of exponents farther while they could than might ever be possible for the rest of us to go later, once times change.

I’m having new thoughts about Fight Club’s ending that I haven’t had before.  It’s more tragic now.

What I mean is before now I always thought of it as a love story.  The narrator starts out living an unfulfilled life and then he meets a soulmate.  But sometimes when you resonate so strongly with someone and yet you’re just the slightest bit out of sync the resonance rips you two apart just as strongly as it would otherwise pull you together.  See the narrator meets his soulmate in the moment that he feels at his weakest, when he’s going to groups to seek solace in other people’s greater miseries.  And you don’t feel sexy when you’re at your weakest, so the narrator pushes Marla away.  And re-invents himself as the warrior he thinks he needs to be to win her… or the warrior he thinks she ought to be won by.  So much so that he deludes himself into thinking the loser who trolls the group sessions isn’t even the same person as this warrior he has created.  In the end he pulls himself from the brink, he integrates his split personalities, and he realizes she’s drawn to all of him.  He lets go of his delusions, and as the credit company buildings blow up and reset everyone’s debt record back to zero, he and Marla hold hands and reset their romance back to zero.

Or really, it doesn’t even need to make that much sense.  A good love story just has the energy that lets you know it’s right, no matter what literally happens.

But that’s how I used to think of it.  Tonight, pondering my own split personalities, I was struck by the screaming question I hadn’t yet thought to ask:

Why didn’t Tyler Durden shoot the narrator instead?

The logic was clearly laid out.  Tyler was who the narrator wished he was, but the narrator certainly wasn’t who Tyler wished he was.  And there’s that emotional component…

The elephant in the whole movie is Brad Pitt, who presents the paradox so precisely: “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t.”

In another scene, the narrator sees an advertisement with a Calvin Klein underwear model and asks “Is that what a real man is supposed to look like?” and in response the millionaire movie god with an far more superstar body than the unknown Calvin Klein model smirks knowingly.

The irony of Brad Pitt playing the role of the liberator who realigns our perceptions cannot be reasoned away.  It’s classic joke theory, where our Freudian egos are distracted by the flattery of superficial wit, freeing our ids to fully enjoy the emotional energy of wicked thoughts.  While Palahniuk’s writing is dazzling you with such clever punchlines as Tyler’s:

“Tyler, you are by far the most interesting single-serving friend I’ve ever met… see I have this thing: everything on a plane is single-serving…”

“Oh I get it, it’s very clever. ”

“Thank you.”

“How’s that working out for you? ”

“What?”

“Being clever.”

… your id is feasting on Brad Pitt’s glistening 5% body fat abs, catlike movement, 99th percentile facial symmetry, and total comfort in his own being.   Without the sexiest man alive prancing around and socially proving the narrator, would we really see Everyman Ed Norton or would we see Primal Fear’s psychopath introvert?

I guess these two contrasting views of the movie come down to this:

In a joke, which is more important - the cleverness, or the sex, violence, and farting?

(Answer: The Aristocrats!)

…
I also never noticed before that the narrator shares the same duality condition that I do.  We’re both Ed Norton by ourselves, and Brad Pitt in public.  Except his Brad Pitt is craftier than mine, managing to sneak off into the company of others and spend less and less time as Ed Norton.

Although, I have been going to bed earlier and sleeping in later recently.  I thought it was just depression …but maybe somewhere I’m being Tyler more?

If so, Tyler, please shoot me.  The alternative would be tragic.

1. In the time of Columbus, most people thought the Earth was flat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Navigation_plans

Actually, most educated people, and especially anyone involved with nautical exploration (eg, Kings, scholars, ship captains, sailors) had known the Earth was round since the time of Ancient Greece.  Even more interesting, the story of Christopher Columbus being the kind of genius who thought outside of the conventional wisdom of his time and for that reason made his great discovery is also bogus.

In fact, the people who thought Columbus’ 1492 voyage would be suicidal thought so because they had a pretty accurate understanding of the circumference of the Earth, in particular that the distance traveling West from Europe to Asia was in fact farther than contemporary ships could travel without running out of provisions.  Columbus’ contrary belief was actually quite wrong as he thought that the Earth was much smaller than it actually was, such that the distance between Europe and Asia was much smaller.

Of course, while the contemporary scholars were right and Columbus was wrong, fortune favored Columbus and there happened to be two massive unknown continents in the middle of the vast ocean between Europe and Asia, and they were just close enough to Europe for him to reach before his ships ran out of provisions.

2. A frog placed in water that is very slowly brought to boil will not attempt to escape

http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp

I suppose this one persists because it is such a useful metaphor for the human trait that sometimes we don’t notice a chance that happens gradually over a long time, when we would be shocked if it happens all at once.  I say “sometimes”, because the weird thing about using this example as a metaphor for human behavior, is that if you infinitesimally raise the temperature of a swimming pool or a hot tub, it is a pretty safe bet that any people in the water will get out long before the water gets to a boil.  And that basic physical survival response is at least as old as our shared ancestor with amphibians.  So if you want to boil a live frog, the best advice is really to start the water boiling first, and hope that the scalding water disables the frog before it can respond.

3. You shouldn’t swallow chewing gum

http://www.snopes.com/oldwives/chewgum.asp

This myth actually has consequences, as used chewing gum is disgustingly littered so frequently that Singapore even banned it altogether.  If everyone swallowed their gum from the time they were kids, then a lot of litterers wouldn’t even think to spit it out.  You don’t see already chewed-up candy gumming up mailboxes and keyholes and the undersides of benches, do you?  I myself didn’t put any thought into this until a couple of years ago when I thought to check on snopes.  It used to be such a pain when flying Southwest when they would give me my bag of peanuts but no napkin and I’d have to wait for them to come back again with napkins before I could spit my gum out and eat the peanuts.  Now I just swallow the gum.  So easy.

Now I just need to find a way to convince girls to swallow their gum as well, so after they leave the next morning I don’t have to discover a nasty chewed-up piece of gum just sitting on my nightstand.

http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/07/strange_doings.php

…we’re going to give Israel $30.4 billion in bribes in order to get them to not object to our decision to sell $20 billion of advanced weaponry to Saudi Arabia, who is arming the people we’re fighting in Iraq.

Today’s weather forecast for Guildford.  No joke.

“Paris Hilton did more time than Scooter Libby.”

Follow-up to the life subplot I wrote about here:

About a month has passed, and so it was time to finally go out and get the proper kind of torchiere bulb.  Just got home with it this afternoon, and plugged it in.

Fucking lamp does not work!

And of course, I already threw out the other one because it’s glass part was busted, even though it still actually functioned electrically…

Fuck light.  I’ll pack in the dark.

I’m moving to London. I have been for a while. Processes are in motion for this really happening in late-June.

For some reason, everyone’s first response on hearing that I’m moving, is asking, “Why?”

Well, I didn’t exactly have a reason. But since “I don’t know” isn’t a very friendly response (see further: Alberto Gonzales), I have came up with 10 excellent reasons for this move and here they are:

10. The weather. Seriously. The problem with living in Southern California, where the weather is nice all the time, is that if you’re depressed, then it’s your own fault.

9. Chicks with British accents.

8. I hear there may be an opening for Prime Minister.

7. I want to get in on some of that soon-to-be-beach-front-property due to Global Warming.

6. Only suckers are sticking around to get paid in US dollars right now.

5. I have over a year more of DUI-related probation during which I cannot legally drive with any measurable amount of alcohol (ie, 0.01% or higher BAC) in my blood. And I live in Los Angeles. See a problem?

4. I always wanted to be knighted.

3. Catching an extra bit of sleep on the way to work far safer in a train than in my car.

2. 1400 km to Ibiza, 300 km to Paris, 400 km to Amsterdam, 1000 km to Milan, 2500 km to Mykonos, and 2300 km from gorgeous Black Sea beaches crawling with untapped beauties of the former Soviet Block. (For comparison, Los Angeles is about 4000 km from New York, Miami, or Hawaii.)

1. I have Attention Deficit Disorder and I’ve lived my whole life in California. A better question is, “Why haven’t I moved already?“

A couple weeks ago the guy on the couch said something that I didn’t like.  So I bunched up a comforter and threw it at him.  I missed high and it sailed past him and knocked over the living room torchiere.  Glass everywhere.  Not only the torchiere glass broken but the bulb too.

So the living room has been very dark these past two weeks.  The guy and I have commented to each other a few times about how we miss being able to see.  But we’re lazy.  And have more important things to do, like defending the Earth.

Tonight, I thought I would do something productive, like cleaning up or going through stuff seeing as how I’m moving to London in about a month.  Most of that stuff is not in the living room — that is the areas the stuff is in actually is still adequately lit — but somehow with the living room being the big dark center of the apartment splitting the other areas into little islands of light, well, it was just too dark for productive activity to happen.

Then I had an idea that only took me two weeks to come up with: Even though I didn’t want to get a whole new torchiere right before moving, why not just go get a new bulb so that it will still light the room even if it’s got a broken glass head?  And that let to an even better thought: Didn’t I actually have a spare torchiere bulp sitting around in some random box of junk that I kept “just in case” any of it might be useful someday?

I did!  And I found it.  And plugged it in.  And…

LIGHT!

…

A short while later, I’m on the phone with my mom.  I pace continually while on the phone, and that was especially appropriate in this conversation as I was talking with her about all of my stuff that I don’t want any more and what to do with it, and so while talking I was pacing around surveying it all at the same time.

Eventually my pacing led me to the little nook between the kitchen and the bar that’s pretty much the most remote area of the apartment (ie, as far as pathfinding or line-of-sight goes).  The human brain has a very important visual filtering system that tosses away things that are always there.  Like always in the same place, a place that you see all the time, never altered or moved or changed in any way.  Like all the pictures on the shelf at Grandma’s house.

Or like the extra, not-broken torchiere that you didn’t need any more when you moved in and so stuck back in the corner of the nook behind the kitchen.

I told this story to my mom who got a kick out of it.  An extra torchiere bulp that only took me two weeks to remember that I had, and even better an extra torchiere that I wouldn’t have even remembered at all had I not been pacing around while talking to my mom about all the junk that I don’t want to move that I’ve been accumulating for years, you know, “just in case” any of it might be useful someday.

…

My mom didn’t get to hear the ultimate conclusion to the story, though.  Having a living room well-lit by a torchiere with a broken-up glass head was obviously not as good as I could do.  So I went to take the extra torchiere bulb out of the broken one in order to put it in the not broken one that I had found in the nook.

But even the little plastic bit holding the glass part of the bulb was a little hotter than I expected, and it turns out that a one inch fall onto the base of the torchiere head is enough to break a just-used-hot torchiere bulb.

So the living room is dark again.

And there’s now bits of glass on the linoleum again.

…

I guess I need to put my pants back on and go to the store and get a new bulb, or how am I going to get anything productive done?

As neuroscience every day brings us that much closer to understanding our the human brain in terms of being just a fleshy machine, the most intriguing feature continues to be consciousness.  Descartes’ claim of its essentiality to existence seems far-fetched — why can’t a rock be?  A rock is, is it not?  Yet romanticism with consciousness endures nevertheless.

But is this importance accorded the consciousness overly egotistical, in the worst connotations of that word?

More to the point — do we need consciousness?  Why?

Of course, the importance of consciousness as the only actual reality, recognizing that nothing exists except perception, yadda yadda yadda, will never go away.  That rock isn’t a rock at all but only a rock in my mind, those interstellar nebulae aren’t really out there either, except as bits flashing in a radar array.

But it works both ways.  One could just as easily argue that consciousness does not exist at all.  Nothing exists except what we do or say.  Tell me a thought you think you had yesterday that you didn’t tell anyone until just now.  And then prove to me that just now wasn’t when you actually thought it.  How can you, except by writing it down, or otherwise externalizing it and therefore invalidating the experiment?  The scientific method does not allow for consciousness.  Point that out the next time a well-intentioned atheist is arguing to you about evolution or global warming.  Point out that the underpinning of those systems of understanding are incompatible with Descartes.  Consciousness exists as far as if you raise a child to speak English and understand what the word “consciousness” means, then if polled “are you conscious?” they will most likely say yes.

(And maybe one day it will exist as much as a clump of neurons, a complex interaction of neuro-electric fields, some ingeniously bizarre mechanism to replicate the function of the instruction pointer register inside whichever computer you’re reading this on.)

So never mind Descartes vs Occam for now.  Let me argue instead that consciousness is worse than useless, is some unfortunate evolutionary artifact like the appendix, one that can only impair our natural functioning.

There’s a recent link out there somewhere, in the greatest thinking organism known to man, this Internet, which, btw, functions beautifully without any apparent consciousness.  About a study in which groups were given choices to make.  At first simple, but then complex.  The discovery was: faced with complex choices, people make better decisions, decisions that they are happy with longer, if they are distracted when the choices are presented, such that they cannot bring their full consciousness to bear on the decision.  That is, if they are prevented from fucking up their natural good sense with their woefully underpowered ego.

If we drop the ego’s pretension, we admit, do we not, that this isn’t all that surprising?

What does Kobe Bryant, or any other athlete, say they were thinking during a super-human performance?  “I was playing unconscious.  I really wasn’t thinking at all.”  And what happens to Karl Malone and Jim Kelly and just about any golfer who’s ever taken a one-shot lead over Tiger to the back nine on Sunday, that instant that they start to think “wow I could win this thing”?

Ok so not everyone is a world-class athlete in the most intense moment of competition of our lives, but I say that The Zone is the place we always wish we were in anyway.

Take interpersonal relations.  Giving a presentation to the boss, making that sales pitch, approaching that cute girl at the bar.  Think about every little detail, what you’re saying, what the other person is thinking, how your voice moves up and down.  Think these thoughts mentally out-loud, think about thinking, think about why your voice suddenly went up an octave, you started stammering, and now you don’t remember the next thing you were going to say at all and your audience is starting to look at you funny.

I’ve a debilitating compulsion towards argument.  And a reputation for being somewhat “good” at it.  A feel for rhetoric, the various trips and traps and tacts to take to making my point of view sound the most reasonable.  A record of adversaries surrendering with some comment about me being “so logical”.  It seems to me that people always use “logical” to infer that a conclusion was reached from some methodical process.  Like balancing an algebraic equation.  4x - 7 = 2x + 9.  Move all the x’s to one side.  2x - 7 = 9.  Move the constants to the other.  2x = 16.  Divide out the factor.  x = 8.  The left side of the big brain-polarity myth.

Honest truth though, how I argue is I open my mouth and words just come out on their own.  That they connect into that semantical linguistic symmetry people call “logic” is due to the same mechanism that causes Tetris blocks to fit together just right (hopefully!) even when they’re dropping down the screen at dizzying speeds.  Words said quickly enough to rebut the first half of a sentence before that sentence has even been completed cannot have first wallowed in consciousness any more than can those “reflexes” required to play video games.  It’s all unconscious pattern matching.

And this truth, that our unconscious performs far more of these tricks of intelligence than we give it credit for, is actually kind of logical when you think about it anyway.  That instruction pointer of consciousness holds, what, about 7 things if we’re really pressing things?  But date me for a year and I’ll still have fresh anecdotes I can tell you in vivid detail, pulled out of that vast unconscious beneath.  Consciousness tells as much of the story of our brains as one instance of Firefox can tell you about the Internet.  Or riding in one car can tell you about all the starts and destinations and stories and reasons for travel of all the tens of thousands of people in the traffic jam with you.  That myth that we’re only using a small percentage of our brain holds much truth, at least if we’re only talking about our consciousness.  And don’t wise ones always admonish us to use the bigger of our multiple brains?

And so many problems are caused by that tiny little conscious one.  Like the entire litany of ailments of our modernity: Depression, Anxiety, Politicians, Lawyers, Consultants, Fundamentalism, Deception, Greed, Envy, all the evils of Idleness, New Age anything, Impotence, Narcissism, Pop Culture, the Democratic Leadership Council, Jerry Springer.  Another link that was floating around suggested, in fact, that maybe consciousness doesn’t really predate civilization.  That consciousness was only an attribute humans developed in parallel to modern societies.  Before written history, before mass communications, there was no such thing as consciousness.  People spent all their time toiling to survive, following their instincts to eat and fuck and that’s it.  The oldest stories we know of are always about what people did.  It’s only now we make stories about what people think.  Advancing civilization breeds this neurosis we call “thought”.

So I’m going zen.  Emptying my mind.  All introspection has ever told me is that I can’t think of a damn thing introspection has ever told me.  The conscious chatter are chains holding my super-human self back.  Good-bye Thought, and good riddance.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
- Hamlet