One Reason People Drink Alcohol

She spread herself over and around him, trying to maximize their contact, feeling big enough to cover him entirely, pressing her face into his head.

"Patty."

"Mm."

"If you're sleeping, you need to wake up."

"No, I'm asleep . . . I'm sleeping. Don't wake me up."

His penis was struggling to escape his shorts. She rubbed her belly against it.

"I'm sorry," he said, squirming beneath her. "You have to wake up."

"No, don't wake me up. Just fuck me."

"Oh, Jesus." He tried to get away from her, but she followed him amoebically. He grabbed her wrists to keep her at bay. "People who aren't conscious: believe it or not, I draw the line there."

"Mm," she said, unbuttoning her pajamas. "We're both asleep. We're both having really great dreams."

Jonathan Franzen, Freedom, Chapter "Free Markets Foster Competition"; p. 167

The Human Condition

"You can't change the weather, Tom," June would say, meaning that some things simply were what they were, and we had no choice but to accept them. Tom understood the principle, but that had never stopped him from cursing the snowstorms and cold winds that blew against his small, shivering body.

Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies (p. 24)

Letzteres kann man von dieser Formulierung nicht behaupten

Eisenstein wird später berichten, dass er noch am Tag der Uraufführung vor den Teilnehmern des XIV. Parteikongresses bis zum letzten Moment am Schnitt gearbeitet habe. Der fünfte und letzte Akt sei nur mit Spucke geklebt zur Vorführung gekommen. Der Film reißt nicht, wie beführtet, in der Projektion, wohl aber das Publikum zu Begeisterungsstürmen hin.

Anna Bohn, "Zur Produktions- und Aufführungsgeschichte", in : Panzerkreuzer Potemkin: Das Jahr 1905 [DVD-Booklet]

Where Does the Discrimination Go?

A similar thing, somewhat attenuated, is going on with smokers. If people were allowed to meaningfully discriminate against people that they didn't like (e.g., pot-smoking pig, you need not apply here for work...smoker dogs can't rent here) without facing legal sanctions, they'd be a lot more willing to forgo making things illegal. Since anti-discrimination has taken that club out of the golf bag for most folks, they have to reach for the 'ban it or harrass them with laws' driver to express their animus. And make no mistake, they WILL express their animus, it's part of the human condition.

Jehu, comment on "Mead's Asymmetric Treatment of Illegal Drugs" by David Henderson

Plus ca change

Why do people think it intelligent to say, "I can see no difference!" It is nowadays quite a mark of culture to say that one can see no difference between a man and a woman, or a man and an angel, or a man and an animal. If a man cannot see the difference between a horse and a cow across a large field, we do not call him cultured; we call him short-sighted. Now, there are really interesting differences between angels and women; nay, even between men and beasts, and all such things. They are differences which most people know instinctively, as most people know a cow is not a horse without looking for its mane; or most people know a horse is not a cow without looking for horns. Whether the difference ought to count in this or that important question is a completely different matter, but it ought not really to be so difficult simply to see the difference.

G.K. Chesterton (via)

The Case for Markets

The case for markets never lay in their perfection but rather in the relative imperfection of alternatives. I'm teaching intermediate micro this semester. We go through the welfare theorems, and they're beautiful. We know that they don't apply generally. However, it's really hard to improve on the imperfection of markets. Both markets and policies are imperfect instruments. Markets fail relative to blackboards, but regulatory solutions often fail relative to the real world market alternative.

Eric Crampton, "The Case for Markets"

The Postmodernists' Promise

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963) appeared at a time when people still wandered freely between the literary and genre sectors, sometimes even forgetting where they were; it felt more like occupied Vienna than Cold War Berlin. Both J. B. Priestley and Graham Greene praised the book in the strongest terms, hardly minding that they were agreeing with people who had enjoyed Ian Fleming's The Spy Who Loved Me a year earlier. It wasn't long before the postmodernists arrived on the scene, vowing to obscure the line between elite and popular culture altogether, and in the sense that a towering wall was erected in its place, they certainly kept their word.

B.R. Myers, "Tradecraft" (via)

Sounds Like Good Advice

[T]he "extreme programming" planning technique: you estimate work by chopping it up into tasks and figuring out how long they would take in "ideal days" (that is if everything goes perfectly) . Then you see how many "ideal days" worth of tasks you managed to deliver last month (for instance) and multiply your estimate by the ratio actual days/ideal days.

chris cottee, comment on "Planning Fallacy" by Elizer Yudkowsky

The Plasticity Tradeoff

[I]f a system has the ability to change easily (i.e. it has high plasticity), then it will tend to expend resources on a wide range of trait values, and will have fewer resources to focus on the most important and relevant traits.

Andy McKenzie: "Trade Off #10: Plasticity vs Specialization"

Marriage Surprises

Take the cliché of the golf-playing husband and the shoe-shopping wife. Not even an evolutionary psychologist would claim to find monkey equivalents to this. Yet the obsession with the trajectory of ballistic objects is as baffling to most women as the obsession with searching and re-searching every store for the perfect shoe bargain is to men. (I know there are exceptions, but admit it: Marriage surprises most people by revealing the truth of such clichés.)

Matt Ridley, "Can Genes Explain the Sex Divide?"

The Egoistic Case against Deep Thinking

Deep thinking is not really in our own interest. Shallow thinking - working out what tactical manoeuvre to try next, who you can trust and who to copy from, and simply impulsively satisfying yourself with whatever nuggets are available - will bring you a much easier and more fun life, and more quickly.

Deep thinking, on the contrary, is hard work, takes ages, might fail, and mainly benefits other people. If I discover the new theory of everything which reveals the purpose of the cosmos, what do I get? Sure, I'll probably make some money - at least Malcolm Gladwell's publishers will offer me a contract - but the rest of the world benefits much more than me.

Leigh Caldwell, "Thinking and Attention"

Searching for the Young Soul Rebels

Instead, human beings generally try to associate themselves with what is being praised by society and disassociate themselves from what is being criticized. Being callow, young people are particularly impressionable. Despite all the romantic piffle about young rebels, the fact is that young people [...] tend to be conformists.

Steve Sailer, "Whatever Happened to the Democrats’ Youth/Minority Voter Juggernaut?"

A Theory of Perfectionism and Procrastination

The link between procrastination and perfectionism has to do with construal level theory. When you picture getting started straight away the close temporal distance puts you in near mode, where you see all the detailed impediments to doing a perfect job. When you think of doing the task in the future some time, trade-offs and barriers vanish and the glorious final goal becomes more vivid. So it always seems like you will do a great job in the future, whereas right now progress is depressingly slow and complicated. This makes doing it in the future seem all the more of a good option if you are obsessed with perfection.

Katja Grace, "Perfect Procrastination"

Leaving the Goalposts Where They Are While Declaring the Aim Is Now to Not Hit the Goal

Somewhere along the way, during the last 50 years, the critique of capitalism changed from condemning its failure to spread the wealth to condemning the very opposite. Suddenly the great sin of capitalism was that it was producing too much, making us all too materialistic, fueling economic growth at the expense of other values, spreading middle-class decadence, and generally causing society to be too caught up in productivity and too focused on the standard of living.

Jeffrey A. Tucker, "The Decivilizing Effects of Government"

Even So

A person I was seeing in psychoanalysis once said to me, "Don't you think Fraud is rather overrated", he had of course meant to say "Freud", and he blushed.

Adam Phillips, On Balance (quoted here)

If All Models Are Wrong. . .

If the goal of a model is to be useful, surely we need to explore [what] "useful" means. At the very least, usefulness will depend on use.

Richard Berk, quoted in: Andrew Gelman, "Useful models, model checking, and external validation: a mini-discussion"