I think the obvious next step beyond a set of ideas being internally consistent is keeping those ideas consistent with the universe. For better or worse, the universe is our context, and it doesn’t seem to much care for debate on how it works. I may think it would be really great if I could live forever, but reality suggests I can’t, so I shouldn’t grow attached the the idea of immortality.

On the other hand, the universe is full of change, so holding ideas consistent with reality necessitates holding a lot of conditional ideas. It’s good to go outside and get some sun, until the sun becomes a cause of cancer. Being consistent with the universe doesn’t mean siding with the sun and getting cancer; it means recognizing the risk of cancer and not going in the sun so much.

Even a principle as abstract as consistency with the universe already suggests to me some immediate implications for practical decisions. Accepting consistency with the universe as a virtue means avoiding any long-term escapism, e.g. heavy drug use, immersive fiction, or - most extreme - suicide.

Escapism is certainly appealing; the universe can be harsh. For some people, I can imagine it’s so harsh that they just can’t make it work. But because it’s nowhere near that difficult for me, even in my most self-pitying moments, any escape will be temporary. And when it ends, when I go back to facing reality, the escape will prove regrettable, a missed opportunity, a procrastination.

A procrastination from what, I have no idea. I don’t know where the universe is heading, or even if it has a direction. But it’s going to take me along whether I like it or not, so I might as well appreciate the experiences, even the most difficult, as much as I can.

So to review: I’d like my ideas to not contradict each other, nor to contradict reality. I realize I’ve skipped over a big question here: what exactly is reality? I’ll have to come back to that later.

Comment

After seven months (feels longer) of writing nothing on typewriting.org, I should probably preface this by announcing my intention to pick up writing again. Since I last wrote here, I bought a house, got a new job, and a new (to me) car. The car didn’t change much, but the house feels like a very adult responsibility and the job feels like something I’ll do for a while. Life all seems very settled now, no longer the tumult of youth. Suddenly I’m old.

Several of my university friends were philosophy majors. I was not, and know very little about schools of thought on big issues, so I’m sure much of what I have to say has been said more precisely. But I have some ideas on life and whatnot and those that haven't changed much over the past two decades are likely to stick with me through the rest of this, so I thought I should write them down, a sort of ongoing This I Believe.

Trying to begin at what seems relatively like a beginning, my first idea, a principle to guide my other ideas, is that one’s ideas should be internally consistent. We call someone a "hypocrite" if they claim to believe something they really don’t, but I’m not sure we have a word for someone who believes two things that can not possibly both be true.

For example, some people will claim taxes are always bad while secretly valuing government programs paid for by taxes, possibly for political gain. And these people are hypocrites. But other people truly believe taxes are always bad, and truly value government programs paid for by taxes, and just don’t recognize the contradiction.

Some of them just don’t think about it enough to establish the contradiction. We might call them "lazy thinkers" or something to that effect. But what I want to focus on, as the antithesis of where I’m starting, is a whole different class of thinking that believes taxes are always bad, values government programs paid for by taxes, sees the contradiction there, but sees no problem in contradiction.

I don’t know how to engage such thought. I can’t even say inconsistency is "bad," because bad implies some sort of internally-consistent value judgment. "Confounding" is probably the best word I can come up with to describe the antithesis of how I want to approach ideas. Ideas should be consistent, not confounding.

I feel a bit like Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski, when he says Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude; at least it's an ethos. The thing is, I think Nihilism is still better than confounding. Say what you like about the lack of tenets of Nihilism; at least they’re consistent.

So I’m starting with consistency as a base. I don’t really have any justification for that; I just don’t know how to think without it. If anything after seems inconsistent, I hope someone will point it out.

Comment

In Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, Clary Shirky writes:

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times.

On reading this, I started wondering: what might this look like in the advertising industry? And it occurred to me that it might look a lot like some of the largest advertisers in the world trying desperately (and failing) to apply traditional models to a new landscape. At risk of being moved to the Innovation Department (I work at an ad agency), some realism: broadcasting without listening doesn't work in systems designed for conversation. And fake listening doesn't scale. Back to Shirky, with some edits by me:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers advertising demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers advertising to replace the one the internet just broke.

Comment

Many articles about "the internet" are very wrong, and the flaws generally stem from a common source: implying, if not explicitly stating, that the internet does something. It doesn’t. It’s not sentient. It only allows people to do things.

As an example of this, Dan recently bookmarked an article from the Boston Globe subtitled "The turn to online research is narrowing the range of modern scholarship, a new study suggests". There's something interesting going on here, but this article completely misses it. It’s not that the turn to online research is narrowing the range of modern scholarship; it’s that people are narrowing the range of modern scholarship, and the internet is passively letting them do this.

By recognizing the actual actors here, we can ask much more useful questions. Did people always tend toward narrowing research, and only now are able? If so, why do people tend that way? And why weren’t they able before the internet? The answers to these questions might lead to improving the world, whereas assigning responsibility for what happens online to "the internet" is inherently defeatist. We can’t change what the internet does, because it doesn’t actually do anything.

Comment

One of my pet peeves is the phrase “just semantics,” often used to dismiss the importance of something. “Sure it’s more auburn than red,” they’ll say, “but that’s just semantics.” The implication is that it doesn’t matter so much what words mean. But I think it matters a great deal.

We think in words, so if our words are sloppy, that’s a pretty good indication our thoughts themselves are sloppy. And sloppy thinking leads to all manner of big problems. I came across an example of a semantics problem today that prompted me to write this. It’s so astoundingly awful I just can’t believe someone actually wrote it and thought they were saying something intelligent. Here it is, a paragraph from TechCrunch: The other half of Yahoo’s YOS strategy centers on an open strategy, particularly around search - see our update from April where some of those features were discussed and released.

The catastrophe is in the first part: Yahoo’s YOS strategy centers on an open strategy. It’s problematic enough as-is, with the redundant “strategy.” But when you expand the YOS acronym, you get this: Yahoo’s Yahoo Open Strategy strategy centers on an open strategy. Wow. Two words repeated twice and one repeated three times, all in one sentence. That’s “just semantics,” but it’s also just so fundamentally bad that I seriously question the author’s ability to form coherent thoughts.

Don’t let this happen to you, kids. Remember: words mean things.

Comment

People like to debate the phenomenon of global climate change as if it were an academic issue. People who don't live in the path of the huang-sa dust storms that sweep in out of China to blanket Korea every spring, and get worse with each passing year, people who aren't in Central British Columbia watching 85% of the pine trees die off, and with the trees, the futures of their children. People whose health or livelihood isn't directly affected.

— Stavros the Wonder Chicken, My Home Is Dying

Comment

On this 4th of July, I found myself in need of antibiotics. I knew I needed antibiotics because I’d had the exact same symptoms a week prior, and an antibiotic, Cipro, had cured what ailed me. I suppose there’s a chance I could have developed the same symptoms for a completely different ailment within a week, but that seemed unlikely.

The 4th of July being a holiday in America, my doctor was not available to prescribe antibiotics again. And the 4th of July being a Friday this year, my doctor would not be available for 3 days. Faced with a decision between waiting it out or going to an urgent care facility, I sought help from the interwebs. A search for “over the counter antibiotic” soon lead me to an article titled OVER THE GROCERY COUNTER ANTIBIOTIC - WILL ALLICIN REPLACE SOME COMMON ANTIBIOTICS? Allicin is found in garlic, and after reading the article, and determining it to be sufficiently science-y to trust, I decided that yes, it will replace some common antibiotics, for me anyway. So I ate a lot of garlic on the 4th of July.

When I took Cipro, I had a prescription for 3 days, to prevent super bacteria. Apparently whatever doesn’t kill them makes them stronger? But I felt better within a few minutes of taking the first Cipro pill. The first bite of garlic did not offer such immediate relief, but I kept eating.

I ate a large clove of garlic throughout the day, raw because cooked garlic doesn’t contain allicin. Not tasty, but toward the end of the day I was feeling better. Thanks internet! Thanks science!

Most pages discussing the antibiotic effects of garlic make some disclaimer about talking to your doctor first, but as I said, the whole reason I even started looking at garlic is that my doctor wasn’t available. If you find yourself in a similar situation, I recommend just eating some raw garlic. If it doesn’t help, you’ll just get bad breath and then you can do whatever you would have done without the garlic. But when it does help, it’s much simpler than a prescription for Cipro.

2008-07-07T05:57:07-07:00 http://typewriting.org/2008/07/07/4th_of_July_Garlic/

This morning The Consumerist kindly pointed us to a search on Amazon that returns quite a few free MP3s. The Consumerist says No guarantee that they'll be any good, but hey, they're free! I’ll go one further here and reduce the free MP3 list to songs I guarantee are good.

• The Club by Nick Lowe
• Dead Sound by The Raveonettes
• Energy by The Apples In Stereo
• Jenny Place Your Bets by Dolorean
• Led Zeppelin Sings Dr. Seuss by Mike Rayburn
• Two Times by The Blakes
• Who Taught You To Live Like That? by Sloan

If you’re not satisfied by this musical selection, I’ll give you a full refund.

Comment

2008-04-14T18:11:57-07:00 http://typewriting.org/2008/04/14/Good_Free_MP3s_on_Amazon/

Back in university I had a lot of artsy friends. One of these friends, Sabrina Chapadjiev, got a bunch of artsy people together in a group to make some art. I played music and had long hair, but I’ve never really considered myself very artsy. When my theatre friends needed help with a play, I ran the audio equipment. But when Sabrina wrote a play, I somehow ended up in it. It wasn’t a major part, but I was on stage, which was uncomfortable. The play, called Perhaps Merely Quiet, became even more uncomfortable a couple days before it opened, when I discovered that it was largely autobiographical. That probably surprised me more than everyone else, since it was really kind of foolish of me to not have assumed from the beginning it was at least somewhat related to the writer’s life.

I gather from Sabrina’s website that the play has changed a bit since the initial production, but the key theme of madness has remained. So amidst the chaos that always exists around a theatre production, to find out the director is to some extent using the play to recreate her own past madness, well, I found the experience somewhat disturbing. I really didn’t want to be responsible for helping someone self-destruct, and I had no idea if that’s what was happening. So after the play was done, I tried to stay away from that whole scene, which meant mostly staying away from Sabrina.

I still have friends who have maintained contact with Sabrina, though, so I’ve heard a little of what she’s been doing. She seems to have become a somewhat successful artist, notwithstanding my earlier concerns. And now she has a book, called Live Through This, available to pre-order via Amazon. The subtitle of the book is “On Creativity and Self-Destruction,” exactly what I was worried about back then. Somehow binding it up in a book makes it seem less scary and more impressive, though. I don’t have any of the same worries that this book will have some sort of harmful effect on anyone.

It doesn’t hurt that the book includes a list of prestigious contributors. Remember when I wrote about bell hooks? She’s one of the contributors to Sabrina’s book. So in my small world this makes Sabrina successful. Of course she was probably successful long ago, back when I knew her even, but I just realized it. And I guess my point here is just to say that I knew her when, that I was once a friend (albeit fair weather) of that author now on a book tour with somewhat famous people.

Comment

2008-04-12T10:06:42-07:00 http://typewriting.org/2008/04/12/Live_Through_This/

Ezra Kilty wrote a pretty good summary of why I’m vegetarian, which has little to do with the stereotypical “animals are people too” philosophy most people assign to me when they hear I don’t eat meat. I often half-jokingly say that I don’t like animals and I’m vegetarian because I want to eat their food source and starve them to death. This is only half-joking because starvation would be a natural, reasonable way for animals to die. Industrial meat farming, on the other hand, just doesn’t make any sense. There are a lot of things I still eat that also don’t make sense, but industrial meat is an extreme. It’s a clear aberration in the history of food, and I want nothing to do with it.

I part with Ezra here:

… As living things, [animals] deserve not to be managed strictly as food items. They deserve to eat a diet that their digestion is adapted for, rather than one that fattens them up. (If they are meat-eaters, they deserve to eat other living things, rather than the ground bones of other industrially-farmed animals, which is commonly used as feed.) They deserve to roam, to graze—to follow their behaviors. The industrial system puts the animals in an extremely tight cycle of birth, feeding, waste removal, and slaughter, which is not a life.

My own vegetarianism is more selfish. I don’t think animals deserve any of this, but I do think I deserve to live in a world where animals are treated like, well, the animals they are. The industrial meat industry (and the meat-rich diet that sustain it) upsets me in the same way someone claiming that 2 + 2 = 5 upsets me. It obviously doesn’t work, and I want my world to work.

Nature will acquiesce to most of our modern attempts to bypass it. Our highways through mountains, our televised realities, our internets all infringe on the way the world has optimized itself to work. But industrialized meat goes too far, rearranging the way life itself works. This can’t last. Nature will not adapt to this; it will give us mad cow diseases until we adapt. That doesn’t mean everyone has to be vegetarian, but we will have to eat much less meat. My vegetarianism is a proof-of-concept that this is still possible, that we can still back out of the broken food cycle we’ve created.

Comment

2008-04-11T06:55:26-07:00 http://typewriting.org/2008/04/11/My_Vegetarianism/