Politics and personality

Personality Traits and the Dimensions of Political Ideology is a paper from a few years ago, where the authors analyze political tendencies in relation to the Five Factors Model of personality. It's nice to think that we take our political positions based on reason, or something, but we are reliant on our core personality traits to relate to the world, and our political traits are strongly affected by those.

I like the Five Factors Model better than other personality typing methodologies, such as MBTI, which I find mostly a way for businesses to have some consultants come in and waste staff time for a week.

If you're not familiar, the Big Five are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (this last makes some people nervous, so they flip the numbers and call it Emotional Stability...only a neurotic would worry about that).

I'll go over their findings, then reveal just a bit about how much my own Five Factor results agree with their theory.

The authors say:

The strength of the association between ideology and the personality traits Openness and Conscientiousness suggests that personality is a powerful factor shaping political attitudes. In fact, these traits can affect outcomes such as political ideology as much or more than canonical predictors such as education and religiosity....Openness is negatively related to political conservatism, while Conscientiousness is positively related to political conservatism...

This has been known for some time.  But the authors found it odd that the other three traits seemed to have nothing to do with political attitudes. Then they decomposed issues into two domains: social and economic. They say:

...we focus on how personality traits affect attitudes in two important issue domains: (1) attitudes about economic policies such as health care and taxes and (2) attitudes about social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. Although the issues in these two domains may be constrained by an overarching ideological disposition, we see little reason to expect the traits that affect attitudes about tax policy will necessarily also affect attitudes about gay marriage. Indeed it is curious that we expect people who support less government involvement in the economic system to support more government involvement in other areas.

That, in fact, has always been my issue with putting myself on a political spectrum: I favor both personal freedom and economic freedom. Which means that disagreement with others is almost inevitable at some point. "Gay marriage and free markets? What kind of a jerk are you?" I also like nuclear power! But I'm aready giving away too much.

They found that in social attitudes, the general relationship held, with Openness being associated with liberalism and Conscientiousness with conservatism.

As for economics:

However, when we examined the relationships between personality traits and economic attitudes we found evidence of other important relationships. Specifically, we found substantial evidence that Emotional Stability is associated with conservative economic attitudes and Agreeableness is associated with liberal economic attitudes.

Or that Neuroticism is associated with liberal (ie., given our weird political lingo, anti-free-market) atttitudes, since the authors use the friendlier, more recent term.

Extraversion had a much smaller correlation to either stance.

Now, the natural thing to do is to use these findings to explain why "those other people" believe what they do, so Arnold Kling, whom I got the pointer from, says:

People who dislike markets tend to score higher on agreeableness, meaning that they like to be seen as pleasing to others. They tend to score low on emotional stability, meaning that they are prone to worry and fear.

I'm a big fan of Kling's. He does tends to dislike liberals, though he does his best to deal with it (his theories are interesting and enlightening, and I would like to get to those at some point). According to a source I will get to below

Agreeable individuals value getting along with others...Agreeable people also have an optimistic view of human nature...agreeableness is not useful in situations that require tough or absolute objective decisions.

I've left a lot of that definition out. Still, you can see that it much more complicated than Kling seems willing to admit. Although that attitude seems like it would be tied to a willingness to make mutually beneficial financial agreements. Why is it tied to trying to intervene to suppress markets instead?

As for Neuroticism, neurotics

...respond emotionally to events that would not affect most people, and their reactions tend to be more intense than normal. They are more likely to interpret ordinary situations as threatening, and minor frustrations as hopelessly difficult.

That is pretty much as Kling observes.

Maybe you need both Agreeableness and Neuroticism to make a liberal suspicious of free markets, Agreeableness to trust other people, Neuroticism to worry that others don't trust people as much as you do.

So how about me?  I took a test here, and this is where those definitions above come from as well. You can take the full 300 question inventory here, and I highly recommmend it.

Why? Because that many questions let the test break down each of the traits into subtraits.  And those subtraits are where the action is.

For example, for Extraversion, I come out as average, a not very helpful result. But broken down, a couple of things pop out.  I rate high on Friendliness, which means I have lots of friends and like hanging around with them, but low on Gregariousness and Excitement-Seeking, which means I dislike crowds and loud parties.  All of these things are true, but somewhat cancel themselves out in the overall measure.

For the politically significant traits, if you must know, I am above average on Openness, and average for the other three. So I guess that explains my political amphibiousness....or namby-pambiness, if you want to see it that way. For me, the key subtrait in Openness is Psychological Liberalism, which means a readiness to challenge authority and tradition. No surprise, mine is high, and I suspect that is a big one for making a political liberal as well.

Except that most liberals nowadays seem no more willing to challenge authority and tradition than conservatives.  They just have different authorities and traditions.

This is all extremely interesting. But anyone dealing with it should resist what I see as a universal tendency in the current political climate:  the urge to weaponize what is meant to be an analytical tool. It's a bit like a fight in a decaying marriage, which uses previous trusted confidences as weapons in the conflict: "You always told me you were worried about your sanity!"

And you snore. I know I always said you didn't. I lied.

Ah, politics.

Have you joined an outrage buyers club?

Sometimes when something is expensive or hard to obtain, purchasers organize themselves into a buyers club. Their combined purchasing power enables them to negotiate a better deal, or even elicit products that might otherwise not be available.

In healthcare, for example, Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs) enable a lot of market leverage from healthcare providers on suppliers of drugs, devices, and supplies. Not high profile, but they are gaining significant influence over the market.

In the modern political order, people who find outrage hard to create on their own, or who, for one reason or another, like their neighbors and find life disconcertingly good, can cheaply and reliably acquire outrage by joining a buyers club. This outrage is generated from a number of sources, packaged, and conveniently conveyed to the consumer.

In fact, this outrage economy is so effective, I can't even figure out how people find the time to consume as much outrage as is being created. I doubt there is any kind of bubble here--outrage is more a service than a product, consumed as it is produced, so there can be no stale inventory of outrage that someone can dump at an opportune moment, causing a crash.

Still, I wonder whether the oversupply is having something of the same effect as the oversupply of sugar and fat. As people are getting obese, they are also wearing out their adrenals by pumping out all that adrenaline and cortisol. In fact, as I write this, I realize that I might have stumbled on yet another possible explanation for the obesity epidemic. Don't blame Big Food. Blame Big Outrage.

So, we've organized ourselves to make outrage cheaper, more effective, and more refined, with less cognitive fiber. Raging more, but enjoying it less? Consider switching back to traditional outrages (neighbors, barking dogs, annoying kids) or perhaps artisanal sources (molybdenum thieves, the threat of anarcho-syndicalism). More time consuming or more expensive, but it might be healthier in the long run.

It's not like you should be worried that we'll run out of it.

I need a "significance meter" on my news feed

Most of the news that I see recently is about "controversies":  Starbucks cups, safe spaces, Syrian refugees, cultural appropriation, Adele...OK, Adele, at least, does not seem to be controversial.

But the number of stories I see about a controversial topic doesn't seem to have much relationship to 1) how important an issue it is, or 2) how many real people actually care about it. As far as I can tell, the Starbucks cup iteration of the "War on Christmas" seems to be pretty much puffed up out of nothing. It's something secular leftists can feel superior to, without having to worry about any ambiguous details.

Most of these stories have that feature. They're just chum for the ideologically committed.

Not that there aren't real issues, real conflicts and real controveries. It's just hard to pick them out of the mass of frantic headlines.

I'd like some simple meter on the story that lets me know, roughly, how many people are involved in the discussion, and how many variations of opinion there are on it. A low number with a low variation implies a media-manufactured controversy. A high number of involved people with low opinion variation implies "important as an ideological litmust test, but probably doesn't have much basis in actual fact". Etc.

Of course, I'm asking the media outlets themselves to give me a sign that I can ignore the stories they are promoting, so they are an unlikely source for this basic "news significance dashboard". But someone who can parse language from comments, tweets, stories, blog posts, etc. and automate the results could do this as a public service, or to promote their own news feed (if their point is that their news is more meaningful, and this proves it). Actually, now that I write this, I see this as great marketing for someone who wants to tout their content, because rolling out these metrics would be...really controversial.

Something like this could similarly be used to tell which stories are so similar to each other that they clearly derive from a single press release, and which seem to be actually reported.

I look forward to a few simple indicators on each news story to tell me whether I should ignore it.

Best sentences I read today, post-mortem edition

From a great article, DeathHacks, in the online magazine Medium:

You should know that for unattended deaths the cops will show up and remove any prescription drugs stronger than Advil and they will not return them. If you are a newly-bereaved family member looking for something in the medicine cabinet to take the edge off, you’ll be out of luck.

It's of a techie woman dealing with the elaborately programmed house left behind by her even techier father.

Aside from the advice that all of us should have

a will; durable power of attorney; healthcare proxy; and a way for your loved ones to access (or not) your things, both material and digital

She tells an interesting detective story, of trying to reverse hack her father's oddball programs.

I suspect SF editors will be seeing a bunch of stories based on this article in the next couple of months. It has a lot to offer: mysterious motivations, interesting technology, and the relationship between a daughter and her now-dead father. There are a number of ways to take it, from suspenseful to emotionally revelatory. I may try it myself, but by the time I get to it, editors will be heartily sick of this unasked-for subgenre of competitive hacking between generations and across the abyss of death.

Are there Pantones for teeth?

In the past I have praised dentists for their largely unsung role in making our lives better.

Today I will do it again. A few months ago I lost a chunk of a tooth, and finally went in to get a crown fitted. I learned two interesting things.

One is that many crowns are now made of zirconia, a different form than that used for earrings sold on QVC, but based on the same properties of hardness. In a few weeks I will have zirconia in my mouth. I'll let you know how that works. Every time you go to the dentist, there is some new device, implant, material, or procedure. It never stops. That is the great thing about our civilization. No matter what it is, someone is working constantly to make it better, cheaper, or faster. A time traveler with a tooth problem would startle a dentist from even a decade ago.

The other interesting thing was that the dentist carefully matches tooth color. Everyone's teeth have slightly different shades. My dentist brought out a whole board of tooth color samples and carefully matched them against my teeth, finally picking one color for the bottom (darker) and another for the top (lighter). When I said that when he decided on his career he probably had never expected color matching to have to be part of his skillset, he said seriously that aesthetics is really important, and that a crown or implant that does not match the surrounding teeth is considered a failure. I don't know if the Pantone corporation, which essentially owns all color, also has a stake in tooth colors, but I wouldn't be surprised.

He explained each procedure as he performed it, drilled and excavated away, put on a temporary crown, and sent me on my way.

For much of human history the occasional person who managed to survive to my advanced age had no teeth. I not only have teeth, they are firm in my mouth, and those with problems are replaced with indistinguishable replicas. Give thanks to dentists, and the researchers and device makers who keep our dental technology moving forward. Sexy? No. Wonderful? Yes.

An explanation for opposition to female schooling

One thing we see in religiously fundamentalist cultures is an opposition to female schooling. This comes up in the news most often about Moslem fundamentalists, but is part of other fundamentalist traditions as well. The usual explanation for this is the kind of non-explanation about how these people just want to keep women down, women are threatening to their worldview, something like that. Those things might very well be true, but seem inadequate.

A couple of days ago I was listening to Russ Roberts's indispensable Econtalk podcast. It was an interview with Edward Lazear on the works of the economist Gary Becker, who died recently. One topic caught my ear: Becker's work on the opportunity cost of raising a child, where he, controversially, classified a child as "a consumer durable".

Becker was trying to explain why poorer women in the 19th century had fewer children than wealthy women, while, in the 20th and 21st centuries, it was wealthy women who had fewer children. If having a child is a choice (and to some extent it always has been, even before reliable contraception), the relevant resource is the woman's time, since women, even in our theoretically equalitarian age, do the majority of child-rearing.

So Gary reasoned, well, if it's the mother's time that's involved then you have to ask: What is the cost of using the mother's time? And of course in economics one of the most fundamental concepts is opportunity cost. It's the cost of foregoing the next best alternative. And so Gary then reasoned that the opportunity cost of a child was the price of the mother's time; and the price of the mother's time is what she could be doing elsewhere. And that related to her wage rate. All right, so what does that tell you? Well, in the 20th century, what that says is that when women had the option to work, or when most women were working, as they are now, what you'd expect is that women with high wages have very high values of time, and as a result, it's more costly for them to take time off and to have children, and so they tend to have fewer of them.

In the 19th century, it was poorer women whose time value was higher, given how valuable their labor on the farm or in the household was to the success of the family enterprise, so they tended to have fewer children than wealthy women, who, given the constraints they faced, could contribute little to their own families.

That's an interesting observation and explanation of facts otherwise hard to explain, the kind of thing Becker was known for.

My issue here is not that, but to note that if you have a cultural value of having lots of children, and see them as an underlying resource in your struggle against the world, and essential to the success of your enterprise, the last thing you want is educated women, no matter how much value you get out of their additional brainpower. The greater the value of that brainpower, in fact, the less likely they will be to want to give birth to and raise a large number of children.

So, if you accept those premises, refusing to let women get educated only makes sense. Of course, I was kind of deprecating "attitudes" as a way of explaining things, but have really just identified a deeper and less structured attitude than just wanting to subordinate women, so clearly the real explanation is even deeper than this.

In fiction, we don't usually dig underneath for the contingent material circumstances that constrain and condition the cultural attititudes that affect the characters and their personalities and opinions. Except in science fiction, of course, where sometimes that is the point of the story, and one reason the genre still has unexplored potentialities.

Do I have a story in mind to deal with that issue? Not yet.

Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy

That's actually a listing of presidents following Nixon in a history lesson in 1975's post-apocalyptic teen sex comedy, A Boy and His Dog, based on the Harlan Ellison story (and featuring a talking telepathic dog that could be the reincarnation of Ellison himself). Probably not worth seeking out, though I enjoyed it at the time.

But it could be an account of the last couple of weeks of news.  My teenage son asked me if some spectacular new piece of information had surfaced about the assassination, thus justifying the enormous amount of coverage. I had to say that no, there hadn't been. It was a generation mourning itself.

I don't mean to be flip. It was, after all, a tragic and significant event. I just found the focus to be a bit relentless.

Still, a couple of interesting things did appear.

One was this recording of Erich Leinsdorf making the announcement of the assassination to a stunned Boston Symphony audience, and then launching into an impromptu performance of the funeral march from Beethoven's Eroica Symphony.

 This is my music. I still remember my parents buying me an LP of a Bernstein/NY Phil recording, with this cover:

Three heavyweights

I've owned a number of recordings since then, but I still remember the pleasure with which I listened to that one. In context, that funeral march is extremely moving, though that may seem odd for someone who grew up outside the context of European concert music. I wonder how many people still remember that particular performance at Symphony Hall?

The second is an eerie HD version of the Zapruder film, which Kottke says was made by someone named Antony Davison, though I see no other references to him online.

A friend who lived in the Soviet Union as a child in the 1960s once told me that there was a TV show there about the United States that played the Zapruder film repeatedly as its opening credits. This is probably the most intensively analyzed 26 seconds of film ever shot, and it still has the power to shock.

City life: what's a "parklet"?

There was a story in the Boston Globe this morning about an experiment with "parkets": parking spots along a street converted into tiny parks.  Surprise news in the story: no one is using this unexpected urban amenity.

Take a look at this picture and see if you might be able to figure out why no one would come and sit down here:

Does my butt look like an arrow to you?Who in the world is supposed to ever sit here? Even assuming the location makes some kind of sense, the space looks completely uninviting, and the seats positively hazardous. Two people can't possibly sit together without rolling off in opposite directions. Designers keep getting too clever with things like this.

Assuming there actually is a demand for a small area along the road to have a sit and meet some neighbors (not necessarily true), I'd say the first change would be to provide comfortable seating that looks inviting. Then make sure a food truck is stationed next to this every day, so it gets a lot of use.

All of us who live in cities want to make them fun and inviting. But cities evolve best by watching what people already do voluntarily, and making it more comfortable to do that. Community meetings aren't as useful as might seem, because people always claim they like to do things they think they would be better people for doing, and then never actually do, no matter what the streetscape. "I want to talk about community affairs with neighbors of ethnic groups different than my own in a convenient location along a major thoroughfare". Well, maybe.

If these areas of town are anything like Cambridge, turning these spots into bike parking lots would have the biggest positive effect. The bike parking situation is murder!

It's good that the Globe covered this not-so-exciting story, though, because it's at this level that life is really lived. The best way to improve is to see what actually works and what doesn't.

Why do people believe crime is getting worse?

For the past 20 years, the rate of both violent and nonviolent crime has been declining incredibly. And the decline has not stopped. As I've mentioned before, the cause of this is obscure--broken windows policing, Roe v. Wade, decreases in childhood lead exposure, increases in obesity...who knows? But the facts are incontrovertible.

So why do so many people think crime has not only not dropped, but has actually risen? According the the Gallup poll at the link

Currently, 68% say there is more crime in the U.S. than there was a year ago, 17% say less, and 8% volunteer that crime is unchanged.

It's really surprising that democracy works as well as it does. The Gallup poll also says that 38% say there is an area within a mile of their home where they feel unsafe walking at night.  I had no idea there were that many people who walk anywhere, much less at night.

Was no one alive in the 70s and 80s? Don't any of them notice the difference, particularly in property crime, like stolen cars and break-ins? I sure do.

So, what about that belief is comforting to people? Do they use it to explain to themselves why they so seldom leave their house except to go to work or the mall? Or is it just bad sampling from watching local news, which fronts every violent or perverse act that took place on the continent that day and makes it seem like they are happening in your own village?

I don't know. But if they're wrong on something that really does enter into their day-to-day lives, they're probably more wrong about everything else.

The graph that shows why healthcare costs aren't coming down

Via Derek Thompson of the Atlantic:

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: unless you understand healthcare provision as a jobs engine, you don't understand what's driving it. Yes, look at ridiculous billing practices, unnecessary procedures, gold-plated equipment purchases, etc. All those are important. But not as important as jobs.

Thompson says non-healthcare job growth over the past 10 years has been....0.2 percent per year.  Yow! Most of my employment over the past decade has been healthcare-related, and now I can see why.

And many of these jobs, whether physician assistant, front-desk staff, coding, home health aide, are a route up for immigrants and the people from non-professional backgrounds. They've replaced manufacturing jobs as the way to make it.

So, when you want to cut healthcare costs, take a look at the interests you'll be challenging, and realize that your job is even harder than you thought.

Of course, healthcare-cost pundit is yet another growth profession in this expanding healthcare economy.

Buzzkill in the NY Times

Today's Science Times had two nannyish articles, in the category of "it's 'science' if it gives you evidence that makes you behave in a more socially useful way".

First was "Designated Drinkers" (I don't see it online). Apparently occasionally the "designated driver" in a group has a drink early in the evening.  A study showed that 65% of those identified as designated drivers had no alcohol in their blood, 17% had .02 to .049%, and 18% had .05 "or higher" (the article coyly refused to say how high, but did not indicate that anyone was actually over the legal limit). Legal limit is .08.  The study's author announced that designated driver campaigns were "ineffective".

There's a lot of impairment out there, from sleepiness to texting to OTC medication. Alcohol in small doses is also an impairment. According to this calculator, I would reach .02 by drinking two beers in a three hour period.  I know that "two beers" is the standard unit of theoretical consumption for anyone, no matter how much they actually drank.  I'm talking about an actual two beers. Three hours.

Second "science" story: "Turn Off or Leave Running?", a horror-filled story about the dangers of running a dishwasher or charging a cell phone overnight. It mentions a dishwasher-related death, presumably this one.

When the rules are so restrictive that you can't follow them, what use are they? If you can't charge your cell phone overnight, when do you do it? How much attention should you pay to your dishwasher?

I always thought my life was pretty mundane, but knowing the risks I run daily, I am feeling like more a thillseeker.

Why do recommendation algorithms suggest other movies with the same actor?

Isn't that like recommending other books printed in the same font?

Today's lockdown: have we given something up by assenting?

This morning, as I was getting ready to get on my bike to go to work, I got a robocall from the City of Cambridge. It told me to stay home today. There had been gunfire, and a suspect from the Boston Marathon bombing was being hunted. I don't remember if the message used the phrase "shelter in place", previously unknown to me but now utterly familiar.

I let my coworkers know that I would be working from home today, and went to check out what was going on.  There were a lot of updates, serious-looking police telling me to stay in my house, and helicopters and Humvees. Later, the governor closed down Boston as well. Pictures of normally busy intersections devoid of people and cars proliferated.

As far as I know, what happened is a couple of guys set off bombs at a popular event, killing three people and injuring a number more. Later, they robbed a convenience store, killed a security guard, and got into a gunfight with some cops. One was killed, the other fled, and may or may not be under siege in Watertown, the next town over from Cambridge.

That's all bad. But is it bad enough to shut down an entire metropolitan area? The immediate area of anything going on, sure. Even a fairly large area.  But all of Boston? Bombings are not unusual in American history, including Haymarket in 1887, Wall Street in 1920, LaGuardia in 1975. Bombs are relatively easy to make and hard to protect against. Ditto guns and other weapons.  What makes this situation different enough to require this level of response?

Smart, dedicated people can cause a lot of damage if they want to. They can kill people, sometimes a lot of people. But their danger is limited to what they themselves can do. They are not all-powerful. Now, I might not know things. There might be evidence of a much larger conspiracy. We might all actually be in danger.

Or this could be ass-covering security kabuki writ large. If so, I'm going to be irritated. To be clear: I am not minimizing the danger to the police and other forces pursuing a dangerous fugitive. But proportionality is important. Otherwise I should just huddle in my basement and never leave.

Two forces are at play here, I think. One is just the sheer mass of information, useful, useless, and misleading, that pours out of our communication devices. The other is the increasing power of the security state, which accurately represents our own willingness to trade freedom for some perceived safety.  Together, they allow a couple of killers to hold an entire city hostage.

If I had just ignored the shelter order, what would the consequences have been? Could I have been restrained in some way? It is genuinely astonishing that places like Downtown Crossing and Harvard Square were completely empty just because authorities told us we needed to stay home.

Again, as I said, it might have actually been necessary. I would not have wanted to get in the way of some essential operation.  But, as you can tell, I have my doubts. Someone is going to have to explain this to me.

Invisible infrastructure

Yesterday I got a notice from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority about a bunch of work underway in my area: sewer separations, "floatables control" (screening out leaves and other crap that doesn't sink), outfall construction. Despite the fact that it was a legally mandated communication, I read it with some interest.

We live in Northwest Cambridge, a flat area left by sedimentation of a glacial lake: in earlier eras it was known as Great Swamp, though, compared to some "great swamps" in the Midwest, like the Great Black Swamp that once occupied northwest Ohio (1,500 square miles of it), it was pretty small potatoes. Cambridge has always promoted itself with great effectiveness.

Bush-league or not, the area is flat and low, and Alewife Brook, which drains it, only drops 16 feet from Fresh Pond to the Mystic River.  Not only does it flood easily as a result, it has always served as the main drain for all of the industries (slaughter houses, tanneries, brickyards, chemical plants) that occupied the drained swampland.

The industries are so long gone that a local developer considers "Tannery Brook" a classy name for some condos. It is all now residential. Classy development out from Harvard Square stopped when it reached the heights of the Fresh Pond moraine, with nicer developer-type names like Avon Hill and Strawberry Hill. I live where the employees of Avon Hill families lived.

Until recently, our sewers were not separate from our storm sewers, which meant that, when it rained, raw sewage would get dumped into Alewife Brook, and then run to the Mystic, and to Boston Harbor, doing its bit to help Dukakis lose in 1988. Slowly, bit by bit, that situation has been corrected, with slow and steady work to help water quality, prevent backups into basements, and minimize flooding.

Until I get one of these notices, this is all pretty invisible.  Sometimes a street is blocked, and people are digging a big hole. But who knows what's going on down there?

This is a gigantic investment, no question. And it needs constant maintenance, correction, and control. If some societal disruption occurs, there will first be small problems, backups and the like, and then bigger ones, as water quality declines and bacteria fill the streams.

So, while I was reading about "CSO Outfall CAM400" I was reflecting on how little my fiction can capture the unglamorous work that actually keeps civilization running. Not AI bounty hunters or negotiators with mysterious aliens, but hardhats with backhoes and bureaucrats with water-quality metrics.

Enough of unsung heroes, though.  Time to go out for a run.  See you later.

Word for the day (and maybe the month): greeble

A couple of weeks ago, I read an interesting piece on a sexed-up image of a drone that seems to have become the canonical image of that increasingly dominant device.

The Atlantic article extensively quotes the man who figured out that the image wasn't actually of a real, existing drone, James Bridle. In the quote, Bridle lists some of the evidence that the image is bogus:

The level of detail is too low: missing hatches on the cockpit and tail, the shape of the air intake, the greebling on the fins and body.

"Greebling"? Both Bridle and the article use the word as if it is something perfectly normal, not worth mentioning. I looked at those fins and body and saw no gremlin bites taken out of the leading edges, or anything else that might be greebling.

Greebling is all those plastic pieces of old Revell battleships that designers glued to spaceships to make them look more complicated, and thus, in some sense, more "realistic". Or, as Pooh-Bah might have described it, "merely corroborative detail to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative".

It's interesting that, in a world where all of our personal technology is designed to be utterly smooth, and everything from cars to coffee makers are as sleek as seals, that a whole bunch of crap makes something look like it's real.

Of course, a spaceship doesn't have to streamlined, and presumably you could put a lot of support gear on the outside of your living quarters. But that's not really the point. The point is that our mind likes to see several levels of detail. Gives us something to look at.

But I would argue that the word can also be used in analyzing prose fiction. We often add detail to make things seem real. Consider the following sequence of descriptive sentences:

He poured himself a drink.

He poured himself a glass of whiskey.

He poured the last of the Bulleit rye into the glass without washing it first.

That Bulleit rye (now that I wrote that, I am going to pull the bottle out of my desk drawer and, well pour it into a glass...ah, wonderful. Not quite the last of it, but close...has someone been getting at my private stock?) is greebling. Not only greebling, of course. It tells you something about me, my response to marketing, my socioeconomic status, or at least aspirations, and maybe that I have read way too many old detective novels.

But it is greebling, in the sense that most of us like sentences somewhere between Ernest Hemingway and Henry James. I didn't wander into James territory, because I could not imagine a James character taking a drink in less than a page, and we both have things to do, don't we? But some detail gives us enough to incorporate, without slowing us down too much. It's a delicate dance.  And, as anyone familiar with my work can tell you, I can greeble 'till the cows come home.

The term "greebling" needs to enter literary criticism. Consider this a start.

The rising marginal cost of alcoholic originality

I owe the term "rising marginal cost of originality" to the economist and fantasy writer David Friedman, at his Ideas blog.  In the post I've linked to, he explains why, in intensively researched fields "anything new is quite likely to be either uninteresting or wrong". He says he usually cites city planning or architecture as examples.

But it's everywhere. I can't imagine being an academic right now, particularly in the humanities. The only things you can say about Jane Austen, or Saxon rood screens, or a Mozart quartet have either been said before, or shouldn't be said. But you need to research, you need to publish, you need to get tenure. Sometimes, I presume, something actually interesting and fruitful comes to light. But the odds are against it.

You see this a lot in cocktails. Most good cocktails are three ingredients: base liquor, secondary flavor (juice, vermouth, whatever), and something like bitters. But the number of three-element combinations is limited, and most, over the past century or two of sophisticated drink pounding, have either become established, or rejected as unpleasant.

So what is an adventurous bartender to do? Either create or uncover some new flavor (the unfortunate prevalence of drinks made with elderflower is a result of such), or create drinks of flabbergasting complexity, with at least half a dozen ingredients, many of them infusions of yet other flavors.

Sometimes they uncover a new  peak in the fitness landscape of alcoholic flavors. More often, they find themselves in some mediocre area, neither high nor low. A Negroni is a local maximum. Gin, Campari, sweet vermouth. Move too far away from that, and you've reduced the drink's value. Ditto a Manhattan (whiskey (often rye), sweet vermouth, bitters).

OK, so I sometimes like both of these perfect (half and half sweet and dry vermouth--so sue me). But monkeying with them any more benefits no one save the person hired to write the drink description in the menu. What is important for a good drink is clarity and precision, as well a good glassware, fresh peels and house-macerated cherries, and a snappy line of patter. Not more ingredients.

In his post, Friedman suggests exploring extensively--using your skills in some area that people have overlooked. In economics, his subject, it's clearly the coming thing, as the success of Freakonomics shows.

In bartending, I'm not so sure.

If you must know, this post was composed while drinking, not a cocktail, but Hoponius Union, an IPA-hopped lager from Jack's Abby, from nearby Framingham. A great beer, if you haven't tried it. There is still a lot of room of intensive exploration in the art of getting sozzled.

Thank goodness.

My route to inbox zero

Inbox zero, the state of having your email inbox, your paper mail inbox, and your brain inbox ("Oh, I really should remember that I need to....") empty, with everything that's come in decided on or processed, is a goal many of us have, following the Getting Things Done mantra.

I sure do. I usually fail.  But sometimes I succeed. How I fail, and how I succeed, are worth thinking about, because, looking at what goes wrong, I have discovered two basic rules that make success more likely (this applies mostly to the email box, which is the fastest to fill and the hardest to empty):

1. Don't leave your inbox visible. Check it at some wide intervals during the day--every couple of hours is probably a reasonable interval. And don't look at it first thing in the morning. Work steadily for at least a couple of hours at some important project before you open it up.
2. When you finally do open it up, give yourself a decent block of time and process the emails in received order, one at a time, without skipping any.

Yeah, I know. That's a bit like saying that the rules for picking up a gigantic boulder are:

1. Work out and develop gigantic, awesome muscles.
2. Pick that sucker up!

But it's not, really.  Though you could probably stand to do more lifting than you do, right?

I've found that if I watch emails come in, I am driven to respond to them right away. Then I ignore other, more fraught, difficult, or time-consuming emails. They pile up, and then, like abandoned houses, attract a lot of riffraff in various other neglected emails. In a day or so, I have a mess again.

The same is true of my paper inbox.  If I deal with bills and statements every day or so, I have no problem. If the emotional pain of one specific one causes me to delay it, it too serves as a dark area where other stuff accumulates.

Ideas are really the same way.  Sometimes there is not good reason why I'm avoiding some thought, but I can see that I am.  Right now I have to make plane reservations to go to something not particularly onerous, but that somehow has become something I am avoiding.  All sorts of other stuff has gotten backed up because of that, and I risk encountering high ticket prices when I actually go to do it.

So, you see, I haven't solved the problem.  But I do know what practices make the problem worse, and which decrease it. Then it's up to me.

What if Nate Silver had accurately predicted a Romney victory?

Many commentators on the blogs I usually read (centrist, maybe skewing left, self-defining as "smart" rather than overtly "partisan") are immensely pleased with the Nate Silver's accomplishment in calling the election results based on his number-crunching of the polls, rather than the "expert sense" of various right-tending commentators: this Language Log post contains probably the clearest summary of both the history, the pleased feeling, and a cute meme about Silver.

Look, I checked out Five Thirty Eight, Silver's NYT blog pretty much every day in the runup to the election. But that was that I pretty much liked what he was saying. It predicted a result I tended to favor.

Silver clearly has something, and it makes sense that we respect him for analyzing things correctly. It's just that we who liked the prediction he was making shouldn't congratulate ourselves too much for having the sense to see what a great analyst he was. If he'd been accurately predicting the same Romney victory that people like the normally sensible George Will were, how much honor would he have gotten from the left side of the commentariat? Would they have just accepted his results, or would they have devoted a huge amount of effort to poke holes in them?

Right now we'd see him front and center on Drudge, and he'd be getting interview requests from Fox News. The right would be congratulating itself on how devoted to honest statistics they were.

I like to think that the rationality-trending part of the left would still have respected him for his analysis, and that people wouldn't have made delusional predictions of an significant Obama victory in the same way that Barone, Will, Noonan, and others did.

But you don't cheer your team by yelling "The statistics show that our opponents will probably win!"

Some problems with the procrastination literature

Like most people who want to become more effective, I goof off by reading books and blog posts about how to stop wasting so much time.

And you can spend a lot of time doing that, since there are entire blogs devoted to the topic, and a vast library of books.

I am currently in a situation where I have a lot of work in addition to my writing work, and am trying to keep up with all of it, so I'm thinking about how much waste there is in even a productive day. As I've said before, I am not much like the authors of these books ("...and then, as head of Sales, I achieved our first $10 million sales year...." "...and after that, I became the first person to kayak across the Sahara..." etc.) I'm just trying to get a little more writing done, not waste time on irrelevant stuff, and make sure I still have some fun.

One thing these books seem to shy away from is the simple "too boring" problem. What if the task you need to accomplish is really dull? It's necessary, it will take a long time, and it is mind-numbing. OK, maybe you should outsource it to some place in the world with a lower salary rate than yours. This may be a solution for some people, but when the task is, for example, moving handwritten manuscript comments into the electronic version with all the other comments, I'm not sure that's the solution. This is an example of a dull job that requires specific skill and knowledge. There are many such, and most of us have them in our task list.

There are techniques to make it easier, of course--break the task down into small sections, for example. But, ultimately, it is not your self-worth or fear of success that are the stumbling blocks that you need to overcome. It's the task itself.

I guess one meta-solution is to work to make sure your life has a minimum of such tasks. And that's a worthy ambition. I could order commenters to make all their comments in Word. But people work best when they work the way they prefer, and if a commenter likes to sit in an easy chair and make comments with a blue pen on a printed manuscript, that's their call.

Anyway, enough goofing off. I actually do two time-sensitive important tasks today before people come over for dinner, and I suppose I should do them. Neither is boring, but both require some specific performance quality on my part, and a fair amount of time.

Have a good Labor Day weekend.