Bad at math/Follow-up: College material

A topic with some overlap with my recent text on “college material” is math ability and its interpretation: The world is apparently filled with people who are (a) highly intelligent, (b) have a weak spot specifically for math, even to the point of struggling with the principles of fractions.

The sad truth is that these people are almost* certainly not intelligent—they merely believe that they are, because the material they encounter in other fields requires too little thinking to learn, or to get a good school grade, for an intelligence deficit to become obvious. If someone is taxed by understanding** something as basic as fractions, elementary trigonometry, or high-school algebra, this points to serious limitations—even in the face of e.g. a later bachelor*** in a soft field.

*Exceptions might exists, possibly relating to some neurological condition; however, if they do, they are likely rare and I am not aware of any example in my personal experiences. There have been some cases of someone using the “I am intelligent, just weak at math” claim—all of which have been fairly stupid.

**As opposed to memorizing some rules about how to use fractions—those with an understanding can derive the rules when they need to. Further, as opposed to just finding math boring and not bothering to put in the effort. (Here a part of the problem with other fields might be found: Understanding can be quite important in these fields too, but is often entirely unnecessary to pass the grade or to create the self-impression of having mastered the topic, implying that a lack of understanding is not punished and that the student might not be aware of his lack of understanding.)

***Indeed, a disturbingly large proportion of the population seems to jump to the conclusion that anyone with a bachelor is intelligent—irrespective of field, grades, effort needed, and how much was actually understood (cf. the previous footnote).

I once heard the claim (and I would tend to agree) that we all have a point where math becomes “too hard”—the difference lying in the when and where. Comparing fractions with some of the math I encountered as a graduate student is like comparing splashing about on a flotation device with elite swimming—to fail at the former is a disaster. (And note that there are further levels yet above what I encountered even at the graduate level—just like not all elite swimmers are Olympians, not all Olympians win a gold, and not all Olympic winners are Michael Phelps.)

Generally, the impression of math created in school does not have much to do with true math: Math is not about knowing or being able to calculate that 13 + 25 = 38. It is about things like being able to reason, spot a flaw in an argument, find an overlooked special case, solve problems, come up with creative solutions, think abstractly, abstract the specific and find the specific in the abstract, see similarities and differences, … While there might be some room for having more or less math-specific talent (and definitely interest) for two people who are equally good at these skills, the skills are quite generic and translate into any number of other areas, including everyday life. Indeed, I would not trust anyone unable to understand fractions with any decision of importance or in an even semi-important role—not because understanding fractions is vital, but because the inability points to more general deficits.

Using math as a proxy for being “college material” is a plausible sounding idea—and it has the advantage over “[be] able to consistently learn through a mixture of reading and own thinking” (my suggestion in the original post) that it is easier to test in advance. However, on an abstract level, it has similar disadvantages to those of an I.Q.* cut-off, while my suggestion automatically takes care of aspects like differing difficulties of various fields. Of course, more practically, the “test in advance” aspect is quite important—which explains why e.g. the vanilla SATs have a math section and not a chemistry, history, or whatnot section.

*Not only are math ability and I.Q. fairly strongly correlated, but they are both arguably proxies for the same thing(s) in the context of being college material.

Excursion on the benefit of being pushed to struggle and revealed to be wrong:
An incidental benefit of studying math is that the student has a greater opportunity to learn both humility and his own limits. Math requires thinking, can push us to the border of what our brains can understand, and the only way to escape being provably wrong, again and again, is to be superhumanly good. In the social sciences, it is possible to go through a college education and an ensuing academic career without the same exposure to “I do not understand” (cf. above) and “I was provably wrong”* (either because the actual tests are missing or because there are loopholes when the tests go the other way).

*Note that I speak of opinions based on faulty thought, not e.g. faulty memory: There are many things (e.g. the year of Napoleon’s death) that are recorded as (more or less) fix truths, which might be misremembered and the memory verified as incompatible with the accepted record. A simple memory error says relatively little about someone, however, and being exposed to a memory error is unlikely to bring humility. In contrast, an elaborate hypothesis involving Napoleon and the Illuminati might be impossible to actually disprove, even when others consider it patently absurd.

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A few thoughts around prose

What makes good or aesthetic prose and good (writing) style has been on my mind lately. A few particular issues:

1. I am not convinced that these matters are that important: Language is mostly a vehicle for something else*. By analogy, whether someone watches the same movie in VGA and mono or Ultra-HD and surround sound can make a difference—but it is far more important what movie is watched. If someone can get the point across with mediocre writing—is that not enough?

   *Exactly what depends on the work. Examples include a set of facts, a line of reasoning, a character portrait, a realistic depiction of life, a series of action scenes, a feeling of horror, …

   Some* authors have such an ability to write beautiful prose that it enhances the enjoyment of the text; however, they are a small minority and most best-selling** authors are fairly weak in this regard.

   *I can e.g. recall being highly impressed by some of Goethe’s and Thomas Mann’s works. Unsurprisingly, such authors often have a background heavy in poetry; surprisingly, they have often been German, possibly because the apparent unwieldiness of the German language has led to a compensating increase in skill. Shakespeare is an obvious English example, to the degree that his plays are considered prose.

   **This could partially be explained by the typically commercial and/or “low brow” character of best-selling material. However, (a) the basic principle of language as a vehicle applies even to “high literature”, (b) there are plenty of examples of high literature in unremarkable or even poor prose. (The German of Kafka, e.g., is in parts horrendous, yet he remains in high esteem.) The success of great literature when translated into other languages is a further argument, seeing that now the skills of the translator and the many obstacles to translation are of similar importance to the (prose) skills of the actual author.

   In terms of style, some limits* must be set, especially regarding clarity and (to some degree) conciseness. However, the limits needed for a reasonable vehicle are not all that high (assuming that grammatical correctness has been reached), and any intelligent college graduate should already have the skills to exceed them.

   *There are many writers, including a disturbing proportion of bloggers, journalists, and Wikipedia editors, who are so awful that they should better not write at all.

2. Verbosity* is a tricky issue. (And, in as far as it is negative, I am unusually poorly suited to throw the first stone.)

   *Here this word should be taken in a very wide sense, covering not just “needless words”, but also e.g. the inclusion of details of little importance, roundabout descriptions, unnecessary dialogue, … (No better generic term occurs to me.) Indeed, my focus below largely leaves the topics of prose and style, to focus on something more general.

   On the negative side, works like Pride and Prejudice show how verbosity can be taken too far, e.g. through turning the joy of reading into boredom or unduly increasing the time needed to read a work. Generally, text that does not serve a clear purpose, e.g. moving the story forward or giving nuance to a character, is often a negative and amounts to unnecessary filler. A good analogy is the low tempo and low content shown in many independent, low-budget, whatnot, movies—including those that begin with someone driving a car in silence for several minutes, then parking in silence, then walking to something in silence, with the first significant words uttered/events happening after five or more minutes. It would be better to condense the little information present* to a fraction of the time and just make the movie a little shorter—boring and artistic are not the same thing. Another analogy and partial example is the use of unnecessary adjectives and blurb in advertising language, as discussed in an older text on idiocies of ad writing (to which I might added the blanket advice to cut out any and all adjectives from an advertising text).

   *E.g. that a strategically placed photograph hints that the driver is married with two children, without the need to explicitly mention the fact—something that takes seconds, not minutes, to bring across. If worst comes to worst, doing a “Star Wars”-style introduction and skipping the car ride entirely would be the lesser evil… (Notably, if these car rides and whatnot are intended to serve another purpose, e.g. building atmosphere or tension, they usually fail equally badly at that. If they could pull it off, by all means—but it appears that they cannot.)

   On the positive side, it is often the small additional details that add charm to a work, that prevent it from being just a string of events, that give a marginal character that extra dash of individuality, etc. I have made some minor experiments with cutting out everything (apparently) non-essential from a text, and the result is so sterile and uninteresting that it makes a TV manuscript* a good read in comparison. The lesson is that, while any individual item that appears non-essential might actually be non-essential, removing too much kills the work.** While there is a point of “too much”, most amateurs are likely to fail clearly on the side of too little.*** There are even cases when something with no apparent major bearing on the overall plot/theme/whatnot cannot be cut without damaging the whole—consider e.g. “The Lord of the Rings” and the many detours and side-adventures. (Sometimes the road is more important than the apparent destination.) As a counter-point, I have usually found Stephen King more interesting as a short-story writer than as a novelist: While his ability to paint interesting portraits, give color to situations, find interesting developments, whatnot, might be his greatest strength, he often pushes it too far in his novels—and cutting another**** ten or twenty percent would be beneficial. Quality over quantity.

   *A TV manuscript, like most plays, is not intended to be read for entertainment—it is an instruction on how to create the entertainment. The difference might be less extreme than between a recipe and the finished food, but it goes somewhat in the same direction.

   **Also similar to a recipe: This-or-that ingredient might be foregoable entirely, another might only be needed in half the stated proportion, whatnot—individually. Remove/reduce all of them at once…

   ***My contacts with the works of amateurs have been very limited since I left school, but these contacts, my recollections from my school years, and my own preliminary dabblings with fiction all point in this direction. Indeed, it could be argued that this is the failure of the aforementioned independent movies, e.g. in that the car ride could have remained, had it been sufficiently filled with something interesting (and preferably relevant to plot, characters, whatnot).

   ****According to “On Writing”, he tries to cut ten percent from the first to the second draft.

   From another positive point of view, reality has details, and fiction with too little detail is unlikely to be realistic: Go for a walk in the forest and there will not just be trees around—there might not be a pack of wolves, but a squirrel, a few birds, and any number of insects is par for the course. (And a tree is not just a tall brown thing with small green things on it.) Take a train-ride and there will almost certainly be some unexpected event, even be it something as trivial as being asked for the time or someone falling over. Etc. Sometimes such details do more harm than good; sometimes they are exactly what is needed. (Do not ask me when: I am very far from having developed the detail judgment.)

   The trick is likely a mixture of finding the right middle ground and gaining a feel for which “extras” are merely unnecessary filler and which actually bring value to the text—add color, but do not lose tempo. Chances are that the drives for detail and relevance can be combined, e.g. in that an event written just for color is re-written to actually tell us something about the character(s).

3. The use of various connecting words and “preambles”* is an aspect of my own (non-fiction) writing that has long left me ambivalent: On the one hand, they do serve a deliberate, connecting purpose that enhances the text in some regards; on the other, I am often left with the feeling of a lack of “smoothness” and of too many words that only have an auxiliary character—or even the fear that I would be annoyed when encountering such an amount in texts by others.

   *E.g. “However, […]”, “To boot, […]”, “Notably, […]”, “On the other hand, […]”, etc.

   Looking at almost all texts that I read, including by successful fiction writers, such words are used far less often, and much more of the job of making connections is left to the reader (who, judging by myself, is only very rarely impeded). My background in software development (where the text given to the computer should leave as little room for ambiguity as possible) makes me loath to change my habit, but chances are that I do take it too far even in non-fiction context—and in a fiction context, this habit could be deadly.

4. I am often troubled by (and some of the previous item goes back to) the limited mechanisms for formal clues concerning the syntactic/semantic/whatnot groupings and intentions of a text. A recurring sub-issue is the use of commata, the comma being used in a great number of roles* in writing, which often forces me to deliberately hold back on my use, lest my texts be littered with them.

   *Including e.g. as a list separator, as a separator of main and subordinate clause, as an indicator of parenthesis, … The situation is made worse in my case, because different languages have different rules, and I am underway in three different languages. (For instance, according to English rules, a text might correctly include “the horse that won”. According to German rules, this would be “the horse, that won”. Also note the contrast to the English “the horse, which won”, with a slightly different meaning.)

   For instance, if we consider a sentence like “the brown horse ran fast and won by a large margin” there is a considerable amount of “parsing” left to the reader—and parsing that largely hinges on knowing what various words mean/can mean in context*. Grouping the individual words by structure, we might end up with “(the (brown horse)) ((ran fast) and (won (by (a (large margin))))”—while a sentence like “the horse and the mule […]” would result in the very different “((the horse) and (the mule)) […]”, giving some indication of how tricky the interpretation is.** (And such a mere grouping is far from a complete analysis—in fact, I relied on previous analysis, e.g. the identification of “horse” as a noun and “won” as a verb, when performing it.)

   *Not all words have a unique interpretation. Consider e.g. garden-path sentences or absurdities like “Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.”, which actually is a complete sentence with an intended meaning.

   **Humans rarely notice this, unless they are learning a new language or the sentence is unusually tricky, because these steps take place unconsciously.

   Fields like linguistics and computer science approach such problems through use of very different representations, notably tree structures, that are capable of removing related issues of ambiguity, needing* to know what every word means, etc., and I often wish that everyday language would use some similar type of representation. As is, I stretch the boundaries of what language allows to express my intention—to the point that often I catch myself using “e.g.” and “i.e.” more as interpunctuation (in an extended sense) than as formulation. (Which explains my arguable overuse: In my own mind, they register more like a comma or a semi-colon does, than like “for instance”.)

   *With some reservations for words recognizable in their role through various hints or context. The classic example in English is the “-ly” suffix as a (far from perfect) hint that a word is an adverb.

5. As an interesting special case of the previous item, the use of commata and semi-colons is often contra-intuitive: If we view the comma (“,”), semi-colon (“;”), colon (”:”) and full-stop (“.”) as differently strong “stops”,* which is common and has some historical justification, then a sentence like “I found red, green, and yellow apples” simply does not make sense. We might argue that the separation of “red”, “green”, and “yellow” is warranted; however, at the same time we want them to be (individually or collectively) attached to both “I found” and “apples”—which is simply not the case if the commata are viewed as stops.**

   *Here we see another case of characters doing double duty: Among the multiple roles of quotation marks we have both the signification of a literal string and of something metaphorical or approximate. Different signs for these roles, the role as an actual quote, the “scare quote” role, and whatever else might apply, would be neat. (Then again, most people would likely be over-challenged with such a system, and it would degenerate back into something less differentiated—a problem that might kill quite a few potential improvements.)

   **But note that this problem disappears with appropriate grouping, like “I found (red, green, and yellow) apples.”, which would be one way out. A better way, disconnected from the interpretation as stops, is to see the sentence as an abbreviation of the cumbersome “I found read apples and I found green apples and I found yellow apples”.

   In some cases, the problem could be limited by the prior introduction of a stronger stop*; however, this would often lead to awkward results and/or be incompatible with established use. For instance, “examples of apple colors: red, green, yellow” would be OK (in a context where this is stylistically tolerable), but “examples of apples colors are: red, green, yellow” is extremely odd. This solution is similar awkward for the original example (“I found: red, green, and yellow apples”) and leaves the original problem unsolved—“I found” is now offset, but “apples” is not. We might get by with “I found: red, green, and yellow: apples”, but this would be entirely unprecedented, hard to combine with any current interpretation of “:”, and better solved (assuming that an extension is suggested) by use of one of the bracket types**.

   *Note that the examples provided are somewhat different when “:” is viewed as a stop and when viewed as a “list introductor” or similar.

   **For instance, the scripting language Bash uses “{}” for a similar effect: The command “echo 1{a,b,c}2” results in the output “1a2 1b2 1c2”. (However, “()”, “[]”, and “<>” would be equally conceivable. Other bracket types exist, but would be problematic with current keyboards.)

Excursion on “Catch-22”:
A draft extended the mention of Kafka with “Joseph Heller, whose ‘Catch-22’ I am currently reading, appears to be a similar English example”. If this book is considered “high literature”, it is indeed a good example; however, I am highly skeptical to this classification: Apart from a few good laughs and the eponymous “catch”, the first hundred-or-so pages has had very little to offer of anything—and give the impression that the author has just sat down by the keyboard, written down whatever occurred to him in the moment, and then sent the resulting draft to be published. There are, incidentally, some Kafkaesque setups, but I would recommend Kafka, himself, to those looking for the Kafkaesque. It might be that the book makes more sense to someone who has lived in a similar setting or it might be that the remainder is better; however, my current feel is that this is yet another book that has gained its reputation due to popularity—not literary quality.

Of Mice and Computer Users

There are days when I can barely suppress the suspicion that life is a weird cosmic joke, “Truman Show”, or scientific experiment that replaces mice in a labyrinth with humans in a Matrix.

Today is one of those days: I had cleared almost every task of my schedule in order to dedicate myself to the tax declaration for 2017—after having postponed it again and again for the last two weeks and knowing that it would likely leave me in too poor a mood to risk anything else that could aggravate me. (Cf. a number of earlier texts, e.g. [1].)

Then a server crashed, which I had had running for several weeks without problems. I rebooted it, started things up again, and decided to do some minor clean-up while still logged in. (Should have stuck to the plan…) In the process, I (very, very unusually) managed to screw-up a command, leading to all the files in the user account being moved. While I discovered this immediately after submitting the command, I could not interrupt it, because my session froze… After a minute-or-so of waiting, I forced a new reboot.

Less than thrilled, I proceeded to clean up the damage (and fortunately, no irrecoverable damage took place)—only to now have my notebook complain about a CPU being stuck and eventually freezing, forcing a reboot of the notebook… Only yesterday, I had noted an up-time of roughly sixty days—today, right in this already annoying situation, it fails! Worse, after the reboot, after I have got everything* back up again, the notebook just crashes. Roughly sixty days without problems and then two forced reboots in twenty minutes. Worse yet, I next decided to use the latest installed kernel,** seeing that I trailed heavily in version, and that newer kernels are usually better—and found myself needing yet another reboot within five minutes…

*With a number of different user accounts, different encryption passwords, and whatnot, this takes a lot more time for me than for the average user. Normally, this is not a problem, because I only need to reboot every few months. When I have multiple reboots in a single day, the situation is very, very different.

**At some point, the newest release became unstable with my notebook, and I set up my boot-loader to use an older, stable kernel per default. However, that was at least six months ago, running an older kernel is a potential security risk, and I had hoped that the current newest release would have resolved these problems in the interim. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Switching to a newer kernel in the above situation was, admittedly and with hindsight, pushing my luck; however, if I had not tried it today, the next “natural” opportunity might have been another sixty days into the future. (Indeed, going by my existing plan, I should have switched kernels already for the first reboot, but simply did not remember to do so until the third attempt.)

As of now, I have an up-time of a little more than four hours (back with the old kernel), and hope for another sixty-ish days. However: Half the day has been wasted between the extra efforts and the time needed to restore my mode—and I am not taking the risk of attempting the tax declaration today, lest things end with a notebook that crashes in a more literal sense (say, into the nearest wall).

College material

Occasionally, the question of who is and is not college material is relevant to my writings. This is a tricky area, seeing e.g. that different fields differ in how much ability to think and how much ability to memorize is needed—even complications like grade inflation and underwater basket-weaving aside. Approaches like drawing a line at an I.Q. of a given value (e.g. 110 or 115) are too inflexible both in this regard and through neglecting criteria like the willingness to put in the work. (In other words, a certain I.Q. might be a requirement, but is not, alone, sufficient.)

Based on my own observations, I would suggest that a better heuristic is to consider as college material those who are able to consistently learn through a mixture of reading* and own thinking—without needing lectures, detailed** other instruction by professors, TAs, whatnot, or the help of other students. Lectures are there for people who cannot read and/or cannot think for themselves! (See an older text for more information on why lectures are idiotic. Note especially the centuries old Samuel Johnson quote.)

*Typically, appropriate books; however, other types of texts can be relevant, including scientific articles and various ad-hoc texts written for a specific course.

**Needing occasional help, e.g. due to an unclear passage in a book or a rare blind-spot, might be acceptable. Even here, however, the preferred solution should be to spend more time thinking until one “gets it” through own efforts, possibly aided by alternative written sources.

Regrettably, the current trend goes in the other direction, e.g. with Germany increasing the proportion of “mandatory presence” lectures during the Bologna process—college is by now based on the assumption that the average student is not college material, be it by my measure or by an I.Q. measure. Certainly, the school system is neither geared at giving students skills of this type, nor at filtering them by such skills.

In a bigger picture, this measure points to fundamental flaws in the education process, including the wasteful use of professors for holding lectures—contrary to popular opinion, the main tasks of a professor should relate to research and not education. Or consider the point of going to college: For a student with the capability to learn on his own, this point is to get the degree that own studies cannot provide—the other benefits he can gain on his own. Why not reshape colleges to focus on independent learning with opportunities to just have knowledge and understanding tested?*

*Seen as a non-rhetorical question, answers like “Because we would be hard-pressed to charge an arm and a leg per year just for a testing opportunity!” arise.

Thoughts around social class: Addendum Part I

Re-reading Thoughts around social class: Part I, I notice two (or three) points that benefit from expansion:

Firstly, I discussed socio-economic status just in terms of income and education, forgetting that profession/job/whatnot is normally a separate third leg.* I suspect that this third leg is not that important to my discussion, having less practical potential effects and, indeed, being more a matter of status for most people (after adjusting for income and education as separate factors). However, for the sake of completeness, this third leg goes the same way as the other two in my anecdotal examples: Contrasting me and my sister, I worked in various qualified positions in software development, including several variations of developer** (often as “senior”), architect, business analyst, and consultant, while she has spent a significant part of her life unemployed and (if I understood my step-father correctly) has finally found work as a personal-care assistant—with the same parents, we differ considerably on all three legs. My father’s mother was a nurse***, while my mother’s mother was some type of hospital orderly, which puts them in the approximate same area of work, but at different levels of competence, of status, and in the hierarchy; my father’s father was a teacher**** and even substitute principal, while my mother’s father was an ambulance driver*****—with parents differing on all three legs, my parents landed on roughly the same level.

*Which is not to say that these three legs are necessarily a universal definition. The concept is inherently ambiguous.

**There is a lot of title confusion in the world of IT, so take the title with a grain of salt. For instance, I once, switching employers, went from being a “software engineer” to being a “software developer”, with virtually no change in my actual work.

***Due to the difference in country and time, I am uncertain how her role compared in detail to that of a modern nurse with a certain qualification, e.g. a U.S. “registered nurse”. However, she had the title (“sjuksköterska”) and the formal education of the day to go with it. Also: Bear in mind that the career paths available to women of her (born 1914) generation were more restricted than today, implying that being a nurse was close to the ceiling for a woman in medicine. (Whereas a nurse of either sex, today, is implicitly someone short of being a physician.)

****Here too, the profession was more prestigious than today, albeit for other reasons than with women and nursing.

*****Had he been working today, he would probably have been qualified and classified as some type of EMT; however, in my understanding, these roles were not very developed at the time and the actual “loading” of patients and driving of the ambulance were the core tasks. It should be added, however, that he was active both with the Salvation Army and some type of union work (I am unaware of the details), appears to have been highly regarded in both roles, and might have scored well on a “fourth leg”.

Secondly, in my excursion on children, I discuss the degree of assistance that is appropriate. The topic of education is not relevant to that discussion; however, without mentioning education, the text is potentially misleading: An important overall theme is a reasonable degree of equality of opportunity and a high degree of social mobility. A wide availability of reasonably priced and reasonably high-quality education is vital to this—anyone with the right brain* should be able to get whatever level of education he desires. This could require additional measures, e.g. free or cheap state** schools of various kind, subsidized student loans, encouragement of scholarships, and similar.***

*This is an important restriction: Common ideas like that everyone needs more education, that anyone with the right degree can do the job well, that it is college that creates the great mind, whatnot are highly misguided. It would be in the best interest of both society and the individual to reduce the college-going proportion of the population, restore the quality of the education, and make a diploma the type of proof of ability that it should be. Similarly, chances are that e.g. the “no child left behind” attitude has done more harm than good to the overall school system, trying to force an impossible improvement on the untalented and reducing opportunities for the talented in the process.

**Private institutions must be allowed to set their own prices and admission criteria. This will cause some remaining inequality of opportunity, e.g. in that the rich can afford to pay for Harvard and the poor cannot. Still, this is far less negative than a situation in which only the rich can afford college at all. (And must be put in relation to the rights of the private colleges and the people behind it.) Further, without the right brain, money is not enough. (Of course, a high-reputation college that admits and graduates students mostly based on money is not inconceivable—but how long would its reputation remain high?)

***Assuming that we work within something resembling the current system. I am very open to changes, and like to note that education already is available at a low cost even in the U.S.—the diploma is the expensive part… Some restriction on type of education might be sensible, e.g. in that studies for professional qualification are subsidized, whereas other studies are not, seeing that the former (a) are more important for equality of opportunity, (b) bring more value to society; while the latter is more of a personal satisfaction/development/whatnot issue. The latter does not require a diploma and can be taken care of outside of college. Indeed, my own “extra-mural” studies would easily cover a (sufficiently tailored) B.A. in “liberal arts”/“general studies”. (However, more detailed thought on the restrictions might be necessary, both with an eye on those who target an academic career and the difficulty of judging what education has what benefit. For instance, I have heard claimed that English is a better major than journalism for those who want to be journalists, despite the difference in professional orientation.)

Thirdly, parenthetically, a more explicit comparison between my parents might be beneficial. However, due to the great differences in choices and developments, going beyond “roughly the same level” is tricky. The one is an orange and the other an apple—but neither one is a grape or a melon.

Excursion on the changing status of professions:
Re-reading the early footnotes, I am struck with the change of status of professions (over-lapping with one sub-topic I intend to include later). My aforementioned move from “software engineer” to “software developer” is coincidental in this regard, but it does illustrate an on-going devaluation of software development: With the great need for developers, too many incompetents have been let in, and the idea of a software engineer seems to have gone down the drain, be it with regard to status, qualifications, or approach. Following current trends, I would not be surprised to see the profession move to a similarly low status position as teaching within one or two decades—this especially as teaching still tends to be a regulated profession, while software development is not. (The other way around would have been better…)

Remark on the rest of this series:
I suspect that there will be some delay with the remaining parts, because I have problems finding a reasonable structure for what I want to say—to the point that I cannot even tell whether there will be two, three, or four parts in all…

Overlooked explorations of the male role, etc.

After my recent review of “Pride and Prejudice”, I have spent some time thinking on actually and apparently simplistic literature vs. something that has long annoyed me immensely: Common claims from (almost invariably female) “gender theorists” and their ilk that men would spend too little time analyzing the “male role”, that questions of “manhood” or “masculinity” would not be sufficiently explored, and similar. (While the same, apparently, does not apply to women—presumably, courtesy of the same “gender theorists”.)

These claims show a gross ignorance of the type of influences those men who are interested in fiction are exposed to since childhood—and the considerable efforts, conscious or not, spent exploring such topics in fiction, since long before “gender studies” arose as a social construct*. To boot, it severely underestimates the amount of time many men spend privately contemplating related issues, let alone the apparently universal** male question of when one ceases to be boy and becomes a man.

*Two can play that game…

**With reservations for societies where some type of initiation ritual is involved, as well as sub-cultures where it is tied to first having sexual intercourse. (Going by my own experiences, I suspect that the question is raised so commonly mostly because the process is gradual, both in one’s own eyes and in the eyes of the surroundings.)

Take “The Lord of the Rings” and consider the wide variety of characters, character developments, and situations: Take as positive examples Frodo and his heroic march; Sam and his undying loyalty; Merry and Pippin, and the sacrifices they make for friendship; and how all four grew to become so much stronger than they originally were (or proved themselves to be vs. thought that they were). Take as negative examples Boromir committing evil* in an effort to do good; Saruman being corrupted by a wish for power; Theoden falling prey to his personal Iago; or even Frodo, unable to give up the Ring during the deciding moment. (With many other examples to be found.) There are (mentally/morally/whatnot) small men and great men, there are small men growing, there are great men shrinking. There are dilemmas and decisions. There is heroism and cowardliness. There are good ends and means; and there are bad ends and means—even intermingled (cf. Boromir). A particular point of note is the epilogue in the Shire—unlike in so many other stories, defeating the main evil does not ensure that the world is safe and sound, and the work still goes on. (Incidentally, while the text is dominated by male characters, the few women that do occur are by no means house-wives focused on child-rearing. Most notably, Galadriel is a ruling queen, is one of the most powerful beings that appear in the story, and appears to wear the pants in her own family; while Eowyn disguises as a man, rides to battle, and slays one of Sauron’s greatest champions—both much worthier examples** than any of the female characters in “Pride and Prejudice”.)

*And from another perspective, we have the ethical dilemma of when what actions are justifiable, and the opportunity to consider ourselves in different situations (also see another recent text.) Unlike many other instances of evil being done in the name of good (or “the greater good”, as case may have it), the attempted evil was, on the surface, small and the situation one involving the fate of the world, making his actions easier to understand. (The more severe flaw was, likely, that he failed to comprehend the nature of the Ring, and that things would have ended much worse, had he been successful, than they actually did. My last reading being too far back, I do not recall the degree to which his actions were caused by an active influence by the Ring. The interpretation of these actions might need some corresponding adjustment.) Similar concerns about motivations and what-would-the-reader-do-in-the-same-situation apply in other cases too.

**I caught myself originally writing “examples for a young woman”. I immediately stopped to change this, although not unreasonable in this specific context: While their might be some areas where the sex of an example or role-model is relevant, it is almost always better to focus on the admirable characteristics. The feminist insistence that young women be given female role-models for this-and-that is highly misguided and contra-productive. If we want a role-model, we should pick someone suitable in a manner that ignores both our own and the role-models sex (and color, religion, nationality, whatnot).

Take “Hamlet”; take the “Iliad”; take “Le Morte D’Arthur”; take any number of other works by a great number of authors, even (particularly?) in the fantasy and sci-fi genres; take, even, the lives and adventures of Spiderman and the Hulk, in those despised super-hero comics, those heights of male “immaturity”. To a thinking mind, the right work can raise more questions around what it is and takes to be a man, how to be good, what dilemmas and problems can arise in life, whatnot, than the field of “gender studies” does (even discounting problems like ideological bias within that field). Moreover, in my impression, they do so to a far higher degree than does, m.m., the corresponding age-group literature for women, as demonstrated by e.g. “Pride and Prejudice”.*

*I must make the great reservation that I am not overly well-read in this area; however, what works I have read/watched with a similarly “for girls/women” image (as e.g. “The Lord of the Rings” has a “for boys/men” image), have usually fallen similarly short as “Pride and Prejudice”—with questions like “Who gets whom?”, “Does he love me?” (or even “Do I love him?”), “Which of my two suitors should I pick?”, “Do I dare to have that chocolate bar?”, “Should I remain friends with that other woman, even though she is a horrible person?”, and similar shallowness. While some of these questions might, on a personal level, be important, they do not contribute much to personal growth, to developing a sense of ethics, to gaining insights, whatnot. (Note the difference between works written for women and works written by women—the latter can be quite insightful.)

These works often (similar to “Pride and Prejudice”) work with shallower and more unnuanced characters, proving that this, in and by it self, need not be a problem. However, where “Pride and Prejudice” gives the impression of either lack of insight or lack of effort (which, I will not presume to judge), they often do so for deliberate reasons, in order to e.g. make a point more obvious or to be allegorical.* (Also note that my complaint against “Pride and Prejudice” was not lack of character depth, per se, but the compounded lack of almost everything, character depth included.) More generally, many works of fiction can be quite thought-worthy despite having a reputation that goes more towards entertainment literature. For instance, many with only a fleeting familiarity see Terry Pratchett as just a humorist (he was much more); for instance, many see the “Narnia” books as just children’s literature (they have insight even for the adult reader and can be read on several levels). Also see an excursion in the aforementioned review.

*However, many, especially for younger readers, can take this to a point that important insights are lost, most notably the realization that the bad guys usually consider themselves to be the good guys.

Interestingly, questions like those discussed above do not necessarily have any stronger connection with being-a-man-as-opposed-to-a-woman*. Instead, they center on being-a-man-as-opposed-to-a-boy, or, more generically, an-adult-as-opposed-to-a-child; or forego such divisions entirely to focus on e.g. what is right, with no restrictions on who is concerned (being-good-as-opposed-to-bad**, to stick to the pattern). If then, a criticism against one of the sexes should be extended, it would be better directed at women*** for not paying enough attention to the child–adult (or good–bad) division and favoring the female–male division. To some degree, a man is a plain vanilla adult, making issues like a (specifically) male role largely uninteresting; while a woman is a strawberry adult with a scope of cream, chocolate flakes, and a cherry on top, making an investigation of a female role more understandable. (And while I have no objection to women being strawberry instead of vanilla, do they really need all those extras?)

*However, some do, at least in public perception, e.g. in that the demands on a man to take responsibility are larger, ditto to be a provider or protector, ditto to, in a life-or-death situation, give his life to protect his wife’s, etc. Apart from these being unlikely to cause dissatisfaction among feminists, they are also usually of a type that does not require an adjustment of the male self-image or whatnot—if anything, they suggest that women should step up more, that society should to put larger demands on women, and/or that women should revise their image of men.

**I use “bad” over “evil” for two reasons: Firstly, it is not necessarily a matter of e.g. ethics or consequences for others, it can also be a matter of e.g. capabilities and consequences for one self. Secondly, even when ethics is concerned, “evil” might push the contrast too far. For instance, in the parable of the good Samaritan, do we really wish to call those just walking by “evil”? Indeed, even “bad” might be too strong a word in at least some contexts.

***Or at least the type of women who tend to be found in areas like “gender studies” and feminism. Still, in my personal impression to date, women often see “being an adult” as the equivalent of “having a family”—while a man might be more focused on “carrying responsibility” or “doing the right thing”.

But here we might have the crux: These efforts deal with topics like right and wrong, good and evil, positive and negative behavior and developments, human strengths and weakness; often contrasting or putting in conflict egoism and altruism, loyalty towards two different things (say, a brother and country), duty and safety/comfortability, whatnot. What they do not do, is ask questions like “Should I wear a skirt to work?”—and why should they? That is a small and mostly irrelevant question, starting with the low probability that a man would want to do so. (The reverse questions around some women can have a greater value, e.g. to move them towards more practical clothing, but are still not truly important.)

True, in the area between these extremes, there are questions that might be worthy of some exploration (and do not obviously fit in the context of an epic fantasy adventure). For instance, we might consider “Is it unmanly to be a stay-at-home dad?”: It could be argued that someone who avoids that role for that reason is lacking in maturity. On the other hand, this constellation is not very common, with more common reasons including a greater drive to accomplish something professionally and a lesser tolerance of children. A typical intelligent and educated man will not fear what his blokes in the pub will say,* but he will have concerns like loosing ground in his career**, earning less, being bored by a less intellectual type of work, being driven up the wall after spending the whole day, week in and week out, with his children,*** etc. In contrast, here duty can come in, and a man who unexpectedly finds himself a single parent, might very well stay at home out of a sense of duty. His friends might give him a minor ribbing, but they would hardly think less of him—they would see a man doing something manly (viz. doing his duty by his children).

*A recurring issue is that “gender theorists” and feminists present a very stereotypical, prejudiced, and often outright incorrect image of men, e.g. through ignoring individual variation and over-focusing on sit-com “proles”—if men are painted as Al Bundy, then we should equally paint women as Peg Bundy. Similarly, if we do not look at the people with some modicum of intelligence, there is no point in discussing the matter: Stupid people will, barring a revolutionary medical break-through, remain stupid, no matter how many treatises are written on their behavior—and if we look at the behavior of stupid women, they are certainly not something for the female sex to be proud of.

**But is not a career drive also something to analyze/problematize/deconstruct/…? That depends on why the drive is there. Believers in the out-dated “tabula rasa” model of the human mind might jump to the conclusion that a career drive is necessarily something artificial, which explains much of their wish for further investigation (but, obviously, only within their own “everything is a construct” frame-work). However, there are strong signs that such differences are largely caused by biology, making a further investigation a low priority—if in doubt, because this drive is mostly beneficial. A major reason behind the continual failure of various modern feminist, PC, Leftist, whatnot attempts to create equality of outcome is simply that they push past the point where inborn characteristics become a deciding factor—they fail to realize that differences in outcome are not ipso-facto proof of differences in opportunity. (Similar arguments apply to other points above.)

***Note that a love of one’s children is not an obstacle to such irritation.

Appointment with Death: Human memory and a major plot-twist

I have just re-read Agatha Christie’s “Appointment with Death”, following a first reading some ten to fifteen years ago.

(spoiler alert)

While the book was as interesting and well-crafted as I remembered, my enjoyment was marred by the knowledge, from my first reading, that there actually had not been a murder—but a malicious suicide.

I read on, probably not paying as much attention to details as I should have, and saw Poirot, in his traditional final summary/round-up/interrogation, eliminate suspect after suspect, often explaining the inconsistencies in witness statements by a deliberate attempt to protect someone else (in turn based on the incorrect belief that this someone else was the murderer), leaving us with … a murder.

This leads me to two sub-topics:

Firstly, memory is a fickle thing. Incidents like these make me question how much of e.g. my own life that I (and others of theirs) might remember in a distorted manner, especially with an eye on the occasional inclusion in my writings. They also raise serious concerns about e.g. the reliability of witnesses*, and strengthen my opinions concerning topics like statutes of limitations.

*Professionals have raised such concerns for a long time. For that matter, Christie has been known to use unreliable witnesses, including an easily manipulated old lady in this book.

My suspicion is that a suicide was my main hypothesis for most of the original reading, and that this hypothesis, through a larger exposure, remained in my memory, while the actual culprit faded away. Indeed, I have repeatedly had similar experiences in the past (although none so harmful to a re-reading), e.g. in that I had a clear childhood recollection of the brave and capable hero of “Leiningen Versus the Ants” ultimately succumbing to a swarm of his enemies; but found that he actually survived and defeated the ants, when I re-read the story as an adult. Indeed, during the re-reading, my faulty recollection had me contemplating an interpretation of the story as symbolic of the futility of human plans and efforts against something too powerful (e.g. nature, God, or a greater mass of people)—an interpretation that did not pan out… That misrecollection was similar in that most of Leiningen’s efforts through-out the story had been futile: He had repeatedly temporarily held off the ants with consecutive lines of defense, but each line was ultimately over-come, and the general tendency of failure dominates the story. To boot, the scene with his last desperate run, and the attacks during it, must have been very strong to a child, leaving a correspondingly strong impression.

Secondly, I am left with the feeling that Christie made an error of judgment in what is otherwise the best of her books that I have read.* Not only was this the perfect opportunity for the twist ending of twist endings,** but it would also have fit with both the character of the victim (Mrs Boynton) and the timing of events: Mrs Boynton was portrayed as an extremely malicious and tyrannical woman, who enjoyed keeping her family down. To boot, she was elderly and sickly, with her death not being truly unexpected. To boot, her grasp over the family was cracking, as she had under her thumb an own daughter, three step-children, and the wife of one of the step-sons—and the latter had declared her intention to leave (even at the cost of losing her husband), the husband was contemplating following her, another step-son was enticed to rebellion by a new romantic interest (Sarah), and he and the step-daughter had contemplated murder to free the family…***

*In a guesstimate about a dozen—which is still only a fraction of her overall works.

**In light of the good fit, I make a minor reservation that Christie might have deliberately tried to mislead the reader into thinking suicide, and using the reversal as the twist. With my second reading, I am faced with the problem that I might have failed to see such attempts, already being convinced of the suicide; while my first reading is too long gone by. Even should this be the case, however, I consider the suicide version to be better (with corresponding alterations to remove any too open hints at suicide.)

***Here the question of what Mrs Boynton knew is important, with this question partially hinging on when she died. For instance, she was aware of Sarah, but likely never understood how great her effect was: The step-son in question went to take a stand and break free on the very day of her murder, but she is, towards the end, revealed to have already been dead when he reached her. However, since he pretended towards the others that she was still alive, another interpretation is possible for most of the book, that he did tell her off and that she took this as an impulse to act. The situation with the other step-son is quite similar.

Consider now a scenario in which she has the knowledge that her death is not long due, she is faced with this collapse of her petty dominion, and she sees a final way to spite the family—commit suicide and make sure that one or several of the “steps” go down for murder. (This might also, depending on the wills and laws involved, have moved more of her late husbands fortune onto her biological daughter.)

I am uncertain whether this scenario would have fit well enough given the facts presented prior to the summary, but if not, little would have to be changed. The issues around the syringe(s) need not be a problem, assuming e.g. that she had herself stolen one and deliberately left it at the site of the crime (in order to draw attention to the unnatural death); while one of the family members had later removed it, in an attempt to protect another family member (consistent with behavior actually displayed). Contradictory claims of when she was alive and when she must have been dead might be resolvable through an alleged incident with Mrs Boynton’s watch, which had run out and then been rewound and reset by one of the step-sons—possibly, she deliberately let the watch run out in order to somehow trick him into noting the wrong time from some other source.

The actual culprit and the resolution are unsatisfactory, too sudden, and leave the reader in a position where he would be hard-pressed to reach the right conclusion*: Mrs Boynton had once been a wardress in a prison. The murderer, Lady Westholme, had once been an inmate at said prison, Mrs Boynton had recognized her, and was now intending or threatening to use this knowledge to destroy Lady Westholme’s reputation, political career, whatnot.** Poirot’s conclusion of this hinged on statements made by Mrs Boynton directed at Lady Westholme immediately after being given a speech by Sarah, who was not even aware of Lady Westholme’s presence. (Specifically, statements that she never forgot a face and whatnot.) Re-reading the corresponding passages, I can see Poirot’s point (e.g. direction of gaze, surprising formulation); however, resolving the oddity of the statements in context by assuming that they were directed towards a third party forces the introduction of a greater oddity—she must now have left a severe insult to her self-image go entirely unanswered.*** To boot, the formulation was merely surprising, not implausible, with e .g. “I will never forget you or your insults; and one of these days, I am going to get you” being a reasonable interpretation. (Certainly, the effect on Sarah was considerable, pointing to an odd-but-skillful threat.)

*Poirot’s repeated emphasis of the scene might have been clue enough, but (a) I, specifically, was not paying the attention that a Christie story requires, (b) readers, in general, should not have to rely on meta-information, e.g. what the detective’s suspicions are, in order to reach the right conclusion—the point of a good murder mystery is for the reader to try to find the culprit in competition with the detective, not to be led by him. (I have no recollection of whether I managed to get to the right conclusion during my first reading.)

**How seriously such threats were taken by Lady Westholme is further illustrated by there actually being a suicide in the book: Lady Westholme’s, as she realized that the game was up. Notably, Poirot repeatedly emphasizes that he could not necessarily prove anything, and a conviction was likely far from certain, making a “death before dishonor” scenario likelier than despair over a return to prison.

***Unless we assume that she deliberately directed the same set of statements towards two individuals simultaneously, which, while not entirely impossible, is a bit far-fetched. (Or, just possibly, that she deliberately ignored Sarah as a slight in its own right. If so, however, it failed entirely.)

Generally, to my taste, too many of Christie’s work involve various surprise connections from the past, people living under assumed identities, and similar. In one extreme case, I believe “A Murder is Announced”, there are actually two (!) long separated siblings independently using assumed identities. That these surprise connections are not necessarily the culprits, actually makes matters worse: With Lady Westholme, the surprise connection was the reason for the murder—in other cases, we have both a murder and an unrelated surprise connection. (Not to mention the additional coincidence that these murders take place in connection with Poirot or Miss Marple far more often than could be statistically expected. More generally, if a crime-fighter goes on vacation, it appears a fictional necessity that a crime takes place under his nose…)

A related criticism is how often the murderer is someone originally not among the obvious suspects: If the murderer is someone unexpected in a single story, this is not a problem—it might even be good. However, when it happens in story after story, the effect will be ruined by readers who learn to expect the unexpected. Do X, Y, and Z inherit a fortune after the murder? Then X, Y, and Z are likely innocent, so let us focus on A, B, and C instead.

(These criticisms notwithstanding, I consider Christie brilliant.)

Excursion on incongruities:
When looking at fictional detectives, small incongruities are often very important, in that when nine out of ten facts fit a hypothesis, the hypothesis will turn out to be wrong. Sherlock Holmes might have gained less relative the police from his deductive abilities than from his search for small details and insistence that all the details be explained by a single hypothesis. This well matches my experiences from other areas, e.g. in that a minor deviation in a database is often a sign of faulty code—and possibly code that will at some point cause a major deviation. Scientific theories are a great source of examples—if the theory does not explain all that it is supposed to explain, and have all its predictions come true, something needs to be fixed. (My experiences with real-life crime-fighting is extremely limited, but the same almost must hold there, except as far as coincidences need to be taken into account—that cigar ash might have been left by the burglar, but there is also some chance that the butler had taken liberties and failed to clean up the evidence in the excitement after the burglary was discovered.)

Pride and Prejudice

I have just finished reading “Pride and Prejudice”—and find myself both puzzled and disappointed: While I was well aware that Jane Austen was a “chick-lit” writer, I had expected a work of depth and quality commensurate to its and her reputation. Not so.

The book is not only chick-lit and extremely “high concept”*, but is also void of anything that would raise it above mere entertainment literature.** There are minimal or no attempts to explore questions of ethics, philosophy, personal development (except as below), social criticism, …, and no sign of a “higher” purpose. There is some space given to psychology (in a wide sense), but not much and most is trite, not going much beyond the typical in even entertainment literature. Above all, there was nothing that made me stop to think, showed me something important that I did not already understand, left me an even marginally better person after the reading, …*** For intellectual purposes, I might just as well read a Bond novel—and if I did, I would at least be entertained.

*Specifically, focusing on twists and turns during the process of finding a husband in the then upper-class Britain.

**Which is not to say that there is anything wrong with reading (I often do) or writing entertainment literature. The point is the difference between reputation and reality. (Also see an excursion at the end.)

***A potential lesson is that trying to figure people out without communication is extremely error-prone, including the apparent female habit of trying to deduce a man’s feelings and intentions towards her based on small actions and endless speculation. Ditto understanding a situation after hearing only one side. However, I have understood both since I was a teenager.

The characters are without exception one-dimensional, and most are truly silly and/or unsympathetic people, be it out of stupidity, narrow-mindedness, shallowness, immaturity, or, indeed, “Pride and Prejudice”.* Some lee-way might be given to the teenage or border-line teenage characters acting like teenagers; however, the situation is not that much better when we move up in age, as exemplified by e.g. Mrs. Bennet and Lady de Bourgh. Consider the main character, Elizabeth (“Prejudice”), who builds her entire impression of Darcy (“Pride”) based on hearsay, without any attempt to find out his side of the story—how many twists and turns could have been avoided which just a little bit of common sense and fairness. (While it is true that this failing is very common, it also made it very hard for me to sympathize with her—and even harder to understand that Darcy would be interested in the long-term.)

*Writing this, I contemplate whether the intention might have been some type of deliberate satire of or comedy based on human absurdity, stupidity, silliness, or similar—possibly, something along the lines of “The Pickwick Papers” or “Three Men in a Boot”. However, if so, it is not very skillfully done, and Austen leaves the impression of taking these people seriously. (On the character level: That some were deliberately written as stupid is clear.)

Now, based on the juxtaposition of “Pride” and “Prejudice”, and looking at the initial developments, we might expect personal growth to be a theme. However, even that is not truly the case. Elizabeth did not come around through learning to disregard prejudice, get both sides of the story, whatnot—she was forced to re-evaluate specific prejudice in light of ever more evidence that she had been wrong. To boot, she took far longer than reasonable to complete her change of mind. Whether she truly learned her lesson is far from clear. Darcy might, depending on interpretation, have developed farther; however, most of his later behavior, e.g. his explanatory letter or his help to Lydia, could also be seen as rooted in continued pride*.

*At least the latter illustrating the question (posed in the book) of whether pride is necessarily something negative. (An deeper exploration of this topic could have made the book more valuable.)

In terms of plot, events, whatnot, there is not much to be found—for most of the book nothing actually happens. Who gets whom is not enough to fill a book this long… The main intrigues could have been contained in one volume (as opposed to the actual two), with considerable margin to spare, with no loss of value, and a considerable improvement in readability. The only point of the book that brings something resembling excitement, roughly three-quarters through, is when Lydia, one of Elizabeth’s sisters, unexpectedly elopes, throwing the family into panic. This caused a few chapters worth of more dynamic story, but the situation was soon resolved, and things went back to “nothing actually happens”. Indeed, I suspect that even this episode was not added for excitement, but more to give Darcy an opportunity to validate himself. (Else it would likely have taken place much earlier.) Many of the events and developments that did take place are too predictable, even hackneyed*, including the Elizabeth–Darcy situation: That a woman has strong negative feelings for a man at the beginning of a story, is a very strong hint that they will be romantically involved by its end…

*At least from today’s point of view: Some of it, in all fairness, might have been more novel at the time.

The length is not undue merely because nothing happens, however: The long-winded (even to me!) prose also extends the length of the text considerably, without adding anything over a more compact formulation. (Admittedly, this is a fairly common problem with works from that time.) I often even found myself drifting off, unable to concentrate on the text, because the amount of information gained from reading a certain passage was too small to keep my brain alert.

Even the romance parts are, at least by modern standards, not that romantic. There is little difference made between love and infatuation. Much of the marriage seeking is merely convenience; and this (even with marriage as truly life-long commitment at the time), is often reduced to “is he/she socially suitable, attractive, and willing”*, without spending sufficient time on examining actual long-term compatibility**—where someone with sense and sensibility might, today, consider asking for a date, marriage is already on the table. And, no, this is not the take of the parents—it is the take of the presumptive spouses. This is the odder with an eye on the example of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, Elizabeth’s parents, who are stated outright to have married too optimistically and been less than satisfied because of it. I might go as far as comparing parts to pubescent school romance, in terms of both shallowness of criteria and the roundabout approach to determining whether an interest is returned.

*Echoing the famous first line of “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”.

**Two previous texts of mine ([1], [2]) are highly open to marriages based on reason, and would allow a fairly short period of prior acquaintance. However, this went hand-in-hand with an exploratory process and a great focus on ensuring that both parties would know in detail what to expect.

A partial saving grace is humor: I found myself laughing on several occasions, but the overall amount of humor is simply too small to make up for the weaknesses. A dash of humor in an already enjoyable or valuable work can be the icing on the wedding cake—here, we have the icing on a plain layer of sponge.

Excursion on “popular” and “classic”:
I have long suspected that many of the “classic” works have earned their status more through popularity than quality—that the popular of today is the classic of tomorrow. “Pride and Prejudice” is a likely candidate. (At least some of Dickens’ works, while often having considerably more depth, could also be examples. Similarly, would anyone read “Le Morte d’Arthur” today, had it not contained knights, magic, and whatnots?) This is not necessarily a bad thing; however, when being a classic is automatically seen as a sign of quality, instead of enduring popularity, then caution is needed. The popularity issue is worsened by the lower competition in earlier days, with e.g. far more books being published today than in the 19th century or far more TV shows being broadcast than in the 1950s.

As a counter-point, I have repeatedly encountered books and authors with more depth than their reputation/my expectation. For instance, I recently read a few books by H.G. Wells: I had expected something decidedly pulpy, but found them to be surprisingly intelligent and containing more food for thought than “Pride and Prejudice” did. I have earlier written about “Black Beauty” as a very positive surprise.

The 2018 Nobel Prizes: Women and the Nobel Prize

Time for the yearly Nobel-Prize update:

Unlike 2017, women did reasonable well, with participiations in three out of five categories and putting up a total of three laureates out of twelve.* This even included a share in the Physics Prize—for only the third time, after 1903 and 1963.

*Including the Economy Prize. The Literature Prize is moot (cf. below).

The Literature Prize was not awarded (so far?) for 2018, due to an extremely chaotic situation within the awarding “Swedish Academy”. The situation is worthy of a longer text of its own; however, the information that has reached me through the press over months has been confusing, incomplete, and often looked like a game of mutual blame, which makes me unwilling/unable to write said text.

With this chaos on top of my previous criticism of both the Literature and Peace Prizes, and factoring in their very different character, I will probably ignore both of them in any future updates—I can no longer take either seriously. (And to the degree that they can be taken seriously, they are not that relevant to the original context of my interest.)

Thoughts around social class: Part I

Preamble: Recently, I have contemplated differences in outcome and the changes to the lives of different “classes” over time. The below is the first of several texts on related topics.

Once, as a child, I saw a pedagogical demonstration on TV: Of a large group of children, half were put at a table with good food, half on the floor with bread and water. After a few minutes, the second group was also brought to the table and a short speech was given on how this illustrated the need for “social justice” (or something of the kind—this was a long time ago).

The idea is obvious: The children should see that it is unfair that wealth and whatnot is distributed by a one-time random event, and be brought to conclude that wealth should be distributed equally within and between societies.

This repeats a common flaw in Leftist thinking of assuming an either–or situation: Either we have equality of outcome or we have outcomes decided by the circumstances of our birth (e.g. as children of nobility or peasants, Swedes or Ugandans). Indeed, I have since seen similar scenarios posed to adults, with the same flawed either–or: If your own status in life is random, would you rather live in a society where money is unequally divided between the rich and the poor or in one where money is distributed equally?

Even as a child, I was turned off by this demonstration and this either–or thinking: What if someone is simply more successful than someone else? What if someone is smarter, works harder, takes greater risks*, prioritizes material success higher, …?** Differences in outcome do not automatically imply differences in opportunity, that our fate is determined by who our parents were, or other reasons similar to those implied by the random division of the children into a “table group” and a “floor group”. By all means, where inequality of opportunity exists, remedies might be needed—but why throw the baby out with the bath-water? Indeed, even approximate equality of outcome is only possible by grossly violating one or both of equality of opportunity and personal freedom.

*Risk-takers do not necessarily fair better in life on average; however, the chance of finding them among the unusually successful (and the unusually unsuccessful) is increased. Notably, such effects are not limited to e.g. gambling, speculation, or even investments and founding businesses—they also include who asks for a higher salary at the risk of not getting the job, who holds out for a better employment offer, who trades unpaid over-time for a better shot at a promotion, …

**To which might be added some negatives, e.g. a greater willingness to break the law. I have no objections to suppression of such factors and/or the differences in outcome caused by them.

Exactly this type of baby mistreatment is very common in Leftist thinking and some parts of the Western world, however. For instance, if I work an additional hour, the German state earns more additional money than I do, after all direct and indirect taxes are considered. Some of this money is then spent in a sensible manner, some is wasted on government bureaucracy or otherwise abused—and a significant portion is given to other people in the form of direct or indirect transfer payments. And, no, this is not just payments intended to help those in temporary need to get back on their feet*—it also includes massive systematic attempts at redistribution of wealth.

*To which I have no objection: There is no shame in being temporarily in need of help. (I have been myself, as was my mother as a single, unemployed parent.) Not getting back on one’s feet over time, that is a different matter—as is e.g., without a temporary crisis, (a) living a life permanently based on government help, (b) fattening one’s pockets with unneeded government money, and, at the extreme end, (c) well-fare parasitism. (The (b) case is quite common in Germany, where politicians often try to use money to govern life-choices, e.g. in that married couples are taxed in a more favorable manner than singles—even when the married couples would have lived well without such favoritism.)

**In Sweden’s past this was sometimes extremely blatant. For instance, my first major push towards political interest, likely in the mid or late 1980s, came from a news piece on Swedish taxes: The post-taxes income of a high and a low earner were compared, showing a much smaller difference than before taxes. I was puzzled and dissatisfied by this. An equally dissatisfied reporter then criticized the situation—because the difference were still too large for his taste.

The typical fiction of the Leftist world-view is that these people are in a worse position than others for reasons that they cannot help—they are the victims of circumstance, most notably having had too poor parents, which prevented them from getting the right education and opportunities. Looking at countries like Sweden and Germany, this is only rarely the case.* The main determinants of success (or lack thereof) in life lie with the individual, how intelligent, ambitious, hard-working, …, he is and what decisions he has made in life—and most of these people are where they are because they did not use their opportunities. (As opposed to not having had sufficient opportunities.) Every once in a while, someone has a genuine piece of bad luck,** and these should be given proper concern, but own actions is the much more common explanation.

*The situation in other countries, and in the aforementioned countries in the past, might be different. However, in Western countries, including the much more “economically diverse” U.S., own abilities and efforts are more important than e.g. what socio-economic group the parents belonged to.

**Consider e.g. a recent colleague of mine: Intelligent, educated, hard-working, and presumably earning well (I am not privy to the details). His wife developed severe, unexpected, and long-term health-issues that (a) racked up medical bills beyond insurance coverage, (b) prevented her from working, (c) forced him to take time off to take care of her and the children. This is a type of situation where a government intervention would be easy to justify. (Whether one took place, I do not know.)

Did someone prefer partying to studying? Take every second Monday off to extend the weekend? Have children while unemployed or on minimum wage? If someone makes decisions with no eye on the future, behaves unprofessionally, follows the “pleasure principle”, … it is his business—but he has to live with the consequences.

Did someone study English instead of Medicine? Go into academics instead of the private sector? There is more to life than wealth, and I can greatly sympathize with the choice—but the trade-off, less money, is his responsibility.

Did someone start a business that ultimately failed? Taking risks for a shot at greater success is perfectly legitimate—but if the dice come up the wrong way, the failure is his to bear.

Did someone lack the brains to get through college? The manual skills to learn carpentry? The writing skills to succeed as an author? We are what we are—but we cannot blame others for such problems, nor demand that they pay for an unearned improvement of our standard of living.

My own family provides several interesting illustrations. Consider the socio-economic status of the parents and its purported effect on the children: I and my sister (unsurprisingly) have the same parents,* yet I am extremely well-educated and have supported myself for almost all of my post-college days, while my sister is a high-school drop-out and spent most of her life supported by my mother. My parents ended up at comparable levels of success in life, yet my father had two formally educated and intellectually interested parents with (to the degree that I can judge it) an above-average family income, while my mother’s mother had six years of school and was definitely below average in IQ, my mother’s father lacked higher formal** education, and the family income likely was below average. Of course, I did considerably better than many others with a similar childhood (cf. below)—at least until my early teens, I was one of those that the Swedish Left considers so disadvantaged that a failure in life is society’s fault…

*Looking deeper, she (as the younger) likely had a small net-advantage in socio-economic status, through a higher average income and education level during our respective childhoods, but might have had disadvantages in other areas, e.g. time spent with our father post-divorce.

**From what I have heard and seen after the fact (he died when I was six or seven), I suspect that he was quite intelligent and reasonably well-read outside of formal education—someone who would have done well in college, had he gone. However, typical measures of socio-economic status, especially in the context of the-world-would-be-much-better-if-everyone-went-to-college propaganda, only consider formal education. (How many years of school he had, I do not know.)

Or consider long-term handling of a temporary crisis: Post-divorce, both my parents (my mother with two troublesome children) did their best to find new* jobs, both eventually went to college, and both ultimately built a good life. Especially my mother, had she had less drive and intelligence, could have gone down the path of the perennially unemployed well-fare seekers. She did not. Neither was she satisfied with temping or dead-end/entry-level jobs, like so many others in her situation, but she actually rose to education and a middle-class income.

*They were officers of the Salvation Army prior to the divorce, and staying on was problematic.

Then again, it can be argued that my parents made disputable* choices prior to the divorce, and could have done a lot better* with other choices. As officers in the Salvation Army, they earned very poorly compared to the average, received no education truly useful outside the Salvation Army, and having two children (even absent a divorce) might have been on the optimistic side. If they had skipped the Salvation Army, they could have taken steps in their lives at twenty that they only actually took when around thirty.

*In terms of material and whatnot success: The general career choice was obviously dictated by other reasons, and cannot be compared to someone who has a poor career e.g. through lack of brains or willingness to work hard. Even as things played out, it is conceivable that they considered the time in the Salvation Army a worthwhile investment. (I certainly do—owing my existence to these choices, the Salvation Army included.)

Excursion on the anecdotal:
Much of the above is obviously anecdotal, special cases that could underlie a lot of chance, whatnot. However, (a) it is born out by what I have seen among others, (b) it is similar to findings in e.g. twin studies and psychometrics, and (c) the “evidence” provided by the Left that e.g. socio-economic status of the parents would be all-important is equally consist with my preferred explanation—that children tend to inherit various traits from their parents, and that these traits cause the greater part of the difference in outcome. For instance, if fewer from the lower class do not get a higher education, is this really because they are deprived of the chance by their family environment*—or because their parents were members of the lower class due to lack of intelligence, drive, whatnot, and that the children inherited these characteristics? (Note that back-breaking tuition fees is not an issue in either of Sweden and Germany.)

*Indeed, to the degree that the family environment is important, I suspect that the common anti-education, anti-intellectual attitude of many in the lower class is more important than the actual education levels and amount of money available. This, in turn, is hard to correct through “social justice”, but is something that school would be well placed to improve. (Unfortunately, school is more likely to kill the interest than to grow it…)

Excursion on children:
The question of children is tricky, because they have to live with the consequences of their parents actions. On the one hand, they have to be protected from at least the worst situations. On the other, giving them too much help would end up giving the parents a better life that they have earned. Ensuring a reasonable minimum of living conditions, food* quality/quantity, and clothing is justifiable, but going much beyond this will likely do little good. I took no harm from hand-me-downs when I was a child—nor from the absence of brand products and vacations abroad.** What help is given should preferably be in a more direct form than money, so that it cannot be abused for other purposes.

*Here there can be greater issues involved than affordability, e.g. that the children are given candy and junk-food instead of proper meals.

**And should this be an issue today, which is sometimes claimed by the proponents of the misnomer “relative poverty”, it is the attitudes of society that need to change—not the wealth distribution.

Excursion on forms of help:
Most well-fare and whatnot programs seem to be directed at giving money. This is the easy way out for the government, and likely what brings the politicians the more votes, but I cannot see it as a good way: Apart from giving e.g. food-stamps* the preference over money, the better general approach is to “teach a man to fish”. Give people the means and incentives to earn more. Help them to avoid unnecessary debt and move existing high-interest debt somewhere with lower interest. Help them to make a budget. Help them to avoid unnecessary expenditures. Etc. There are people who already have optimized what they can and still lack money, but most are far from that point.

*But then some on the Left will complain that using food-stamps might be humiliating and, therefore, unacceptable.