Links and Comments: Coronavirus, Climate Change, Risk Assessment

Posted on Wednesday 8 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

(updated 9jul20, 11jul20)

Salon, Amanda Marcotte: Climate-change denial and the coronavirus “hoax” are the same conspiracy theory.

The worldwide conspiracy is vast — so vast that most of the world’s scientists, journalists and political leaders are in on it. Somehow, in all this time, not a single one of the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of conspirators has grown a conscience and decided to blow the whistle on the conspiracy. Their goal? To ruin everything that right-wing America holds dear: the nuclear family, NFL football, needlessly enormous vehicles, the specials menu at Hooters.

To accomplish this dastardly goal, the conspiracy will fabricate a worldwide threat. They will falsify the data and use the power of institutions like governments and universities and scientific journals to perpetuate this hoax, tricking billions of people into believing this threat is real and needs a drastic response. The only people in the world who see through the hoax are right-wing Americans, of course, who know what lengths the “socialist left” will go to in order to destroy Mom and apple pie.

And if you think no one would seriously promote such absurdly vast conspiracy theories for such nefarious ends, or defend such ridiculous values as “enormous vehicles,” the essay goes on with examples from Fox News stalwarts Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson.

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New York Times, Paul Krugman: How America Lost the War on Covid-19, subtitled “It wasn’t because of our culture, it was because of our leadership.”

Well, I’m not sure about his premise. Let’s see what he says.

When did America start losing its war against the coronavirus? How did we find ourselves international pariahs, not even allowed to travel to Europe?
I’d suggest that the turning point was way back on April 17, the day that Donald Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” followed by “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA.” In so doing, he effectively declared White House support for protesters demanding an end to the lockdowns governors had instituted to bring Covid-19 under control.
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There has been a fair bit of commentary to the effect that our failed pandemic response was deeply rooted in American culture. We are, the argument goes, too libertarian, too distrustful of government, too unwilling to accept even slight inconveniences to protect others.

And there’s surely something to this. I don’t think any other advanced country (but are we still an advanced country?) has a comparable number of people who respond with rage when asked to wear a mask in a supermarket. There definitely isn’t any other advanced country where demonstrators against public health measures would wave guns around and invade state capitols. And the Republican Party is more or less unique among major Western political parties in its hostility to science in general.
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The main driving force behind reopening, as far as I can tell, was the administration’s desire to have big job gains leading into November, so that it could do what it knew how to do — boast about economic success. Actually dealing with the pandemic just wasn’t Trump’s kind of thing.

OK.

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And also on Tuesday, a Science section article called, in the print edition, Humans Fails the Math of Risk Assessment (online title “Why You’re Probably Not So Great at Risk Assessment,” posted a week ago.) This covers a range of familiar psychological issues including Optimistic Bias, Confirmation Bias, False Sense of Control, and so on.

That humans are so instinctively bad at risk assessment, especially concerning existential threats outside ordinary experience, is why, for example, the software engineering processes I helped refine when I worked in industry included a rigorous risk assessment process, which included the definition of an initial set of risks, assessed both by likelihood and impact, and a regular review and update of these risks as the project moves onward. For a pandemic and climate change, for example, the likelihood of both can, or has, been assessed at High, and the impact at Very High. Having unsuccessfully avoided the risks, mitigation plans established at the beginning of the project would have kicked in.

But some people, including our president, simply cannot wrap their heads around such concepts — or perhaps, are simply unwilling to make short-term sacrifices to avoid long-term consequences they won’t need to take responsibility for, because they’ll be out of office, or dead — and keep claiming the virus will just “go away” and that climate change is a hoax. Thus, Tr*mp “goes with his gut.” What mitigation plans existed for these risks — Obama’s pandemic response plan; the Paris Climate Agreement — Trump and his administration have trashed. MAGA!

In contrast, to get a taste of how complex and thorough the process of risk assessment can be, in different contexts, as implemented by smart people who actually get things done in the world, just glance at Wikipedia’s Risk assessment page.

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My take on this: the human mind became optimized over millions of years of relatively unchanging existence for lives that were short (compared to those in to recent decades), in an environment that was stable, and during which nothing substantial changed for generation after generation. The past few centuries of growing change has challenged this default stance, and struggles with existential threats that either challenge the unchanging order (like climate change) or are existential threats not normally seen in any one’s lifetime (like a global pandemic), are foreign to default human nature.

Which is why so many people have trouble accepting things that happen outside routine human experience.

And so there are many people who simply deny these things are happening. Some of these people prefer to believe in elaborate conspiracy theories — because they understand human motivations behind those, but not the complex interactions among people that would be required for conspiracy theories to be true.

Posted in Culture, Psychology | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Coronavirus, Climate Change, Risk Assessment

Skiffy Flix: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Posted on Wednesday 8 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

In the Fall of 2019, September and October, I began a systematic review of early science fiction films, and adjacent horror films, going all the way back to the beginning of modern film, so to speak–excepting the many silent-movie era adaptations of 19th century novels like Frankenstein and Dracula. That beginning being a silent film yet a significant early science fiction film (Metropolis), followed by the earliest sound-film versions, and still most famous, of Dracula and Frankenstein. My directory of those films to watch and comment on is here, http://www.markrkelly.com/Blog/bibliographies-and-reviews/skiffy-flix/. In the past month or two I’ve returned to this project, having now watched all the films in the first group up to 1945, watching them on Fridays (or yesterday, on a Monday), days when my partner is away at work.

So I’ll fill in comments about those not yet posted. Perhaps not detailed plot summaries, as in some earlier posts, just some general comments. Detailed plot summaries for all of these are on Wikipedia.

Monday 6 July: the 1945 version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. This was originally a novel by Oscar Wilde, and has apparently no fewer than 8 film adaptations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray_(disambiguation)).

The version I watched is, I think, the most famous; Wikipedia’s take is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray_(1945_film). This page has a detailed plot summary.

So then just a broad outline and my comments.

I’ve never read Oscar Wilde’s book, nor seen any of the film adaptations, but I’ve been aware, as a sort of cultural meme, that it’s the story of a man who avoids growing old by having a painting of himself, hidden in closet, grow old in his place. The man remains eternally young.

  • The film is set in 1886 London. The settings of the main protagonists are enormous mansions like those in other 1930s and ‘40s Hollywood movies—fantasies, I think, even for wealthy districts like London’s Mayfair (which we visited in our April 2019 London trip, so I know where that is!), because these fantasies appealed to move-goers at that time.
  • The story breaks fairly cleanly into five or six sections, or acts.
  • The opening scene, or first act, is in the home of a painter, Basil Hallward, where he’s visited by bon vivant Lord Henry Wotton. (Who’s played by George Sanders, in a haughty and cynical characterization reminiscent of his theater critic in All About Eve, five years later.) Lord Henry goes on about how life should be devoted to pleasure, with many cynical characterizations of common social customs, like marriage. Meanwhile, Hallward’s subject for a painting is one Dorian Gray, a lovely young handsome young man….
  • Dorian Gray in this film is played by Hurd Hatfield, who did much further film work, but who in this one gives the most blank, expressionless performance I’ve ever seen. Why? I can think, given the story’s premise, only that he’s playing the aspect of his character that was captured in the portrait, somewhat serene, but rather blank.
  • (So, what is the fantasy premise?) While in Hallward house, having his portrait done, Dorian Gray notices a small statue of an Egyptian cat. It’s one of the 73 great gods of Egypt, Hallward claims. Inspired by Lord Henry, Dorian Gray wishes he could be young forever. And apparently his wish to the Egyptian cat god comes true.
  • The second act, so to speak. Inspired by Lord Henry, Dorian Gray seeks out worldly experience. He travels to a tavern in Bluegate Fields (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluegate_Fields), a famous slum in northeast London, and is smitten by a tavern girl singer (played by Angela Lansbury, in her first Oscar nominated role, as supporting actress), named Sibyl Vance. She sings a pretty little song about a yellow bird. He calls himself Sir Tristan. Later, when he tells Lord Henry about her, Henry in turn gives Gray cynical advice about dealing with women, which Gray follows: he invites her to his home, asks her not to leave (for the night), and when she hesitates but accepts, he condemns her as a harlot, and dismisses her.
  • (Now why, pursuing a life of pleasure, should Dorian Gray immediately head for the lowest class slum in all of London, as apparently Bluegate Fields was? It’s not as if he’s…. picking up whores. Or perhaps he was, in the book, and for movie sensibilities in 1945, that was glossed over. Another possibility: Oscar Wilde was a famous, relatively open homosexual, and perhaps the places in his era where he would meet compatriots was in that area. Was there any hint of this in the book, perhaps? Well, apparently not; a quick skim of the book’s plot shows that this film version was remarkably faithful to the book.)
  • Third act: Dorian Gray decides his real life will begin. He recants to Sibyl Vance, asks her to marry him; but learns she’s committed suicide instead of accepting his proposal. Then he sees the painting has changed: there’s a cruel look in his face. Fearing what this means, he hides the painting in his top floor school room, and blocks access to the room so no one will ever see it.
  • Fourth act. Years pass. He looks the same, others have aged; he’s developed a reputation for ruining people’s lives, with even a couple allusions about ruining boys’ lives. Gladys, a girl in the first act when his portrait was painted, is now all grown up (she’s played by a young Donna Reed), and is intent on marrying him, despite her engagement to another man, David (played by a young Peter Lawford). At a party (featuring Balinese dancers, very exotic I suppose for 1945), Gray rebuffs her.
  • One late foggy night Dorian passes Basil, the painter, in the street (near Grosvenor Square, at the center of Mayfair), and is obliged to invite him to his house, where he tells him the truth, showing him how the painting has changed – and now we see the painting in its final form, a grotesque monster, as shown on the Wikipedia page. Basil appeals to God and tries to pray; Dorian, fearing Basil now knows the truth, and could betray him, kills him with a knife. And then blackmails an old acquaintance to dispose of the body.
  • At a dinner, he asks Gladys to marry him, and she agrees.
  • Fifth act. He visits Bluegate Fields again, where Sibyl’s brother recognizes his name—but sees Gray as too young to be the man who caused his sister’s death 18 years before. Gray withdraws to his country estate in Selby, where a group of men hunt rabbits. The brother, having followed, is accidentally shot lurking in the bushes. This is a convenient bit of plotting, perhaps installed to push Gray over the edge with guilt at having caused the deaths of both Sibyl and her brother. So he abandons Gladys and returns to London, intent on withdrawing himself to live anonymously on the continent. But first he’ll slash the horrible portrait, stabbing it in the heart. He collapses in sympathetic magic. Gladys and the others arrive moments later, and see the painting in its original form, and a grotesque man dead on the floor.
  • Narration. Much of the back-story and character motivation is described in a calm, soothing narration by Cedric Hardwicke, whose long career included appearances in various TV shows in the early 1960s. That’s how we know, for example, Dorian Gray’s final intentions as he returns to London at the end.

Points:

  • We don’t see more than three versions of the painting; presumably production costs didn’t allow a broad range. The second version, with the cruel look, is only subtly different from the original. Remarkably, though the film is in black and white, two or three times we see full screen shots of the portrait in full color, including the grotesque version at the end.
  • Already mentioned: a scan of the novel’s plot shows the film is remarkably faithful to it.
  • So bottom line, this is a story that equates pleasure, or hedonism, with corruption, and death. That Dorian Gray dies reflects Victorian morality, I suppose, that traditional conventions are best, and self-indulgence must be restricted. On the other hand, Lord Henry (the George Sanders character) dominates the first part of the film with many witty and subversive opinions, and apparently has been living the life he’s recommended to Dorian Gray (or perhaps not; perhaps he says things merely to provoke?). And though he shocks his friends on occasion, his position in society seems secure. I suspect his character is a reflection of Wilde’s. Wikipedia notes on the novel reveal more.
Posted in Movies, Skiffy Flix | Comments Off on Skiffy Flix: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Notes for the Book: Timelines

Posted on Sunday 5 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

I love timelines, especially those scaled depictions of the progress of time from left (the past) to right (the present and the future). Back in the 8th grade, I think it was, I constructed such a timeline on a scroll of paper, on what particular subject I don’t remember, except that it was inspired by articles in National Geographic and included my tracing of an illustration of Quetzalcoatl, something like the one shown at Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatl).

In my imaginary book timelines will be a counterpart to the hierarchies of concepts. I started thinking about that yesterday and, this morning, realized that the most prominent timelines that I know of are out there on the web; I don’t need to copy them out of the relevant books.

The big timelines are those that cover all of history, since the beginning of the universe – “big history,” in the current parlance, with human history set in proportional context.

  • One is the Timeline of History presented by Yuval Noah Harari, is his brilliant pop-history book SAPIENS: it begins 13.5 billion years ago and covers, in some two dozen steps, the significant developments of the universe and of humankind. It’s here: https://erenow.net/common/sapiensbriefhistory/1.php
  • Another is the set of thresholds of “big history,” as conceived of by David Christian, in his courses and in his book ORIGIN STORY: A BIG HISTORY OF EVERYTHING (and more loosely in the DK coffee table book BIG HISTORY.) This site, https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/eight-thresholds-of-big-history/, describes the “Eight Fundamental Thresholds of Big History”; Christian’s book includes a ninth, with a question mark, “a sustainable world order,” that might be achieved in 100 years.
  • And then there’s the classic “Cosmic Calendar” of Carl Sagan, who introduced it in his 1977 book THE DRAGONS OF EDEN and popularized the concept in his 1980 TV series Cosmos; his book of the same name used literal measures of years rather than the relative calendar, presumably because he’d already introduced that in his previous book. The Cosmic Calendar has its own Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Calendar.
  • And then, of course, there are any number of traditional timelines covering the geological epochs, or life on Earth, etc., many of them gathered at Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline.

My plan is to reduce such calendars, or timelines, into small steps, rather like David Christian’s, in order to use them as a context to discuss the big issues of science fiction.

My thought also is to develop timelines of human understanding. This will require some research. I’d like to be able to document, for instance: In 2000 BC, the average informed citizen knew (this much) about the size and age of the world. This changed by (year) when people knew the world was (this big) and much later when scientists discovered that the world was actually (this old). And so on. In part because even the best informed people today don’t appreciate how extensively this knowledge has changed over the past centuries and decades; many take for granted our understanding of the universe that has not emerged until recent decades.

Related to such timelines: appreciations of scale. The classic example is Powers of Ten, the video and book; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0. And more examples since.

Posted in Cosmology, Culture, The Book | Comments Off on Notes for the Book: Timelines

More About Good People vs. Bad, and (Gottschall) the Ubiquity of Conspiracy Theories

Posted on Saturday 4 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Slate, June 26, Jordan Weissman: The GOP’s One Big Excuse for Cutting Off Unemployment Benefits Isn’t Even True

This topic echoes comments in recent posts about whether people are generally good or generally bad; conservatives presume the former (in particular, that recipients of welfare and unemployment insurance are lazy mooches), and religious conservatives take the matter as an article of faith because it justifies their theology; if people aren’t necessarily bad, and need fixing, the premises of their faiths evaporates.

Republicans in Congress have a simple excuse for why they don’t want to extend the $600-per-week federal unemployment benefits that are scheduled to expire at the end of July: The money, they say, will discourage Americans from going back to work, and slow down the country’s reopening, since businesses won’t be able to rehire staff.

On a moral level, this position is mean-spirited at best, since it implies that we should be forcing low-wage service workers back onto the job and risk lung death in the midst of a pandemic that is presently exploding out of control across the entire Sun Belt just so they can make rent. From a macroeconomic perspective, the argument is dicey as well, since pulling the plug on aid would hurt consumer spending and potentially put millions of jobs at risk. (I mean, if you want people to go out to the Galleria to shop, they need money. That’s science.)

Data and a graph on how unemployment (UI) payments affect the job market. Conclusion:

The most obvious explanation is that, for the moment, labor supply isn’t really a problem for the economy; labor demand is. Businesses are hiring slowly, because the coronavirus is still ripping through the country and they are only able to partially reopen.
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But in the end, there just isn’t good empirical evidence that unemployment benefits are much of a drag on rehiring at the moment, and for every saltwater taffy shop owner who says he can’t find enough staff, there seem to be plenty of everyday examples of employees who’ve gone back to their old jobs even though it meant a pay cut.
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What this means is that the argument against extending the CARES Act’s unemployment benefits is supremely weak.

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After writing up notes on the Gottschall book a couple days ago, I realized that his comments about the ubiquity of conspiracy theories are more significant than I acknowledged. There are the big ones, about JFK, 9/11, and so on, but there are millions more. I’ll quote the book, pages 113-114:

You will find that there is a conspiracy theory for just about everything. There are the big classics, invoking evil cabals of Illuminati, Masons, and Jews. there is a conspiracy theory for any major entertainment or political figure who dies young: Marilyn, Elvis, Biggie, and Tupac; Prince Di (murdered because she had an Arab baby in her womb); RFK, JFK, and MLK (all killed by the same Manchurian candidate). there are conspiracy theories about Hurricane Katrina (government operatives dynamited the levees to drown black neighborhoods), fluoridated drinking water (a means of mind control), aphrodisiac bubble gum (Israelis use it to turn Palestinian girls into tarts), jet plane vapor trails (they spew aggression-enhancing chemicals into minority neighborhoods), Paul McCartney (long dead), John Lennon (gunned down by Stephen King), the Holocaust (didn’t happen), Area 51 cover-ups (happened), moon landings (didn’t), and so on.

And if writing now, he might well have added Flat-Earth conspiracies, which to be true would require the involvement of *millions* of scientists, sailors, astronauts, and jet-airplane pilots, over hundreds of years.

What does this mean? I think, that there is a mindset among many people to see shady forces behind *everything* unusual. That need, again, for everything to “make sense” in an intuitive way. I also think, frankly, that it reveals the divide between the educated classes — those who know something about physics, chemistry, engineering, as well as psychology, even politics — and those who lead lives that don’t involve such knowledge, knowledge that is generally about how the world actually works. I think of the quote from Equus here on my blog in 2018. For most of us there is no need to debate the particulars of any one conspiracy theory; that’s not the point.

I wish I could find the reference, but a key comment about this, that I read several years ago, was about some junior congressman who came to Washington DC: (paraphrasing) “After two weeks of seeing things really work here, how inefficient it is, I’ll never believe any conspiracy theory ever again.”

I had my own encounter with a casual believer a few years ago, after we moved to Oakland. It was the lady gardener next door to us, who (still) comes about once a month, in her big beat-up old pick-up, to spend three or four hours trimming my neighbor’s shrubs and trees. (As an aside, we’ve never met this neighbor; she’s apparently a surgeon at some hospital and works crazy hours, but even on the rare occasions I’m outside and see her getting into or out of her red Mercedes SUV, she doesn’t acknowledge my greeting. We’ve never spoken.) Anyway, the first time I met this lady gardener she ask me if I understood about chemtrails. I think there was a passenger jet flying overhead at the moment, leaving a contrail. I made demurring noises. She explained, and I probably raised my eyebrows but said nothing, and she thanked me for listening. We still say hi once in a while, and that’s all.

Posted in Psychology | Comments Off on More About Good People vs. Bad, and (Gottschall) the Ubiquity of Conspiracy Theories

About Dreams

Posted on Friday 3 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Keying off the previous post, I was fascinated by Gottschall’s comments about dreams, how they often focus on important or threatening things in life. I’ve noticed certain themes in my own dreams, in that they invariably involve some problem, a few kinds of problems repeated in different settings. That they’re hardly life-threatening problems indicates, I suppose, the relative security of modern life, or at least my own life situation. Here are some of my recurring themes:

  • I’ve come out of my office building, or perhaps a shopping mall, and can’t find my car, in the lot or the structure. Has it been stolen? Did I park it in a different lot?
  • I’m in a large office building, or manufacturing plant, and I know I’ve been here before but now I can’t find my way to the exit.
    • Moreover, such searches for the exit usually involve bizarre interior constructions: ramps where steps should be, steps that lead to blank walls, mazes of corridors.
  • I’m in some family setting, in a house with various family members bustling about, myself typically off in a corner doing my own thing, until someone arrives, or needs to leave, or there is some commotion outside that everyone responds to.

The distinctive thing about these dreams, like those about office buildings and parking lots, is that the settings are never exactly places I’ve never been before, but are instead loose replicas of such places, variations on their themes. I can realize as I wake up (when I remember the dream at all, of course), that, oh, that was at a version of the Apple Valley house, albeit surrounded by taller buildings and along a gully; or that shopping mall was vaguely like the one in Illinois we went to often. Yet, paradoxically, sometimes the exact same dream location turns up in a later dream. Inside the dream I even realize, here we are back at that shopping mall again, or it that same used bookshop in the enormous dusty attic. Or is my dream memory fooling itself?

I don’t think I’ve discussed my dreams before and am not inclined to expand on it, except to note that I find Gottschall’s speculations about them plausible. On the other hand, frankly I worry about my house burning down in a huge California fire, not so much because I’d lose my house, but because I’d lose the 10,000 books I’ve gathered and carefully tended over five decades, which would be irreplaceable. But I *never* dream about house fires. (I do dream about bookstores, though, especially large used bookstores full of aisles of dusty books… One in particular, the one in the dusty attic, seems like an extrapolation of the tiny narrow attic in my grandfather’s house in Cambridge, Illinois.)

I confess I find dream scenes in fiction, or by Facebook friends recounting their dreams, boring, and pass over them. Because they seems completely arbitrary. Knowing from my own case that the subject matter of my dreams is tangent at best to my wide-awake values and interests, I can’t work up much interest in other people’s dreams.

In my own dreams I do find two significant these things. First, that I’m highly sensitive to *place*, houses I’ve lived in and large structures (office buildings, malls) I’ve explored; and this is why I yearn for those places, especially the houses where I grew up. And second, that my affinity for family life is mixed: in dreams I imagine myself in a house-full of relatives, perhaps extended family or perhaps cousins (but never, again, never any precisely recognizable individuals) – I want to belong and feel I’m at home with them — while at the same time conscious and concerned about getting my own work done, pursuing the interests none of the rest of them understand, which are just as important.

…Actually, I’ve kept a text file log of especially memorable dreams for the past 5 years, and an older log going back farther, back to 2006, and a quick glance at that first shows another recurrent theme:

  • Being at science fiction conventions. Typically in big hotels; milling in the lobby; trying to find the dealers’ room, looking for the elevator, looking for someone to have dinner with, and so on. Again, in any particular dream, some kind of problem.

So perhaps I will review those logs more closely and see if I can come to any other conclusions about my nocturnal preoccupations, though I doubt they would be of interest to anyone but me. Yet perhaps I could learn from myself.

Posted in Personal history, Psychology | Comments Off on About Dreams

Jonathan Gottschall: THE STORYTELLING ANIMAL: How Stories Make Us Human

Posted on Friday 3 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a nonfiction book from 2012 that I just read this past month. It’s one of three or four books I have (another is called HOUSTON, WE HAVE A NARRATIVE: WHY SCIENCE NEEDS STORY) that are about the idea of *narrative*, how humans think of everything in terms of story, of which the most basic example is cause and effect, and why we do so. Despite the fact that deep scientific theories about space and time reveal a cosmos that does not, in fundamental ways, behave in cause and effect ways. Thus the discomfort and dismissal of many to such theories, however validated they may be.

This is of particular interest to me because I’ve been sketching hierarchies of various themes about the understanding of reality, including one of science fiction, and science fiction is of course a bunch of stories, narratives. If it’s a mistake to simplify everything about reality into narratives, how is science fiction useful for this understanding? Well, that’s a paradox to explore, but one way will be to consider the range of different types of science fiction stories, and why some are so much more popular than others, and why some that challenge that presumption are also popular, or notorious, because of anyone, science fiction readers are alert to challenges to common sense.

Summary with a few comments (with more comments at the end):

Ch1, “The Witchery of Story”. Children are creatures of story; they are always in Neverland. But story pervades adult concerns too, from pop music, dreams, daydreams, pro wrestling, opera, TV commercials. Trials are often matters of which side tells the better story. Gossip. Religious traditions. If there were two tribes, one practical, one story-telling, imagine how they spend their time, and which would win.

Ch2, “The Riddle of Fiction”. How children play pretend until a certain age. What are stories *for*? It’s an evolutionary riddle; like the human hand, it serves many purposes. Children’s play is deadly serious — always about trouble, about problems. The differences between boys’ and girls’ play is constant, despite attempts to disprove it. Among both humans and animals, play helps youngsters rehearse for adult life. That so many “children’s stories” (like those of the Brothers Grimm) focus on violence should ameliorate concerns about the violence in modern video games.

Ch3, “Hell Is Story-Friendly.” Stories about dangerous situations are more compelling than ordinary situations. Aristotle noticed this. Writers who’ve tried hyper-realistic stories in which no problems occur discover few readers are interested. Fiction is about conflict; this limits the skeleton structure of a story. The modernists (Joyce, Proust) tried to transcend the conventional story, but there’s a universal grammar in stories around the world, on a handful of master themes. Mirror neurons, discovered in the 1990s, show mental states are contagious. Pinker has suggested that stories equip us with a mental file of dilemmas we may one day face; or do their merely train an inner problem simulator?

Ch4, “Night Story.” About dreams. Why do we dream? Old ideas: messages from the spirit world; from the id. Do dreams sort memories, keeping some and discarding others? Or perhaps they are brain waste, with no purpose at all. In the 1950s it was discovered that kitties dream too. As in stories there are common themes in dreams; they involve important or threatening things in life. Yet, that we forget most of them suggests they are not worth much; as simulations they are seldom realistic.

Ch5, “The Mind Is a Storyteller.” Anecdote about Bill the King, in 1796, who lived an elaborate fantasy involving everywhere he knew and something called an air loom. He was a patient, a lunatic, and Bedlam. Such cases involve bizarre beliefs, outside forces, conspiracies. There is suggestive evidence of a connection between madness and creativity.

  • When the corpus callosum is cut, splitting the two halves of the brain, each side perceives different things; and so, experiments show, patients will *invent* explanations when needed. E.g., the right brain sees something the left cannot; the left brain fabricates the gap; the left brain is a classic know-it-all that can’t bear not to have an answer.
  • Sherlock Holmes Syndrome—your storytelling mind is like a homunculus behind your left eye, explaining everything like Sherlock Holmes. His trains of reasoning. Actually his method is ridiculous; examples. He reasons backward from the conclusion he prefers. The storytelling animal is addicted to meaning, allergic to uncertainly, randomness, and coincidence.
  • Geometric Rape—the human mind is tuned to detect patterns, and is biased toward false positive rathr than false negatives. Human faces; animals in clouds, 104t. thus a hunger for stories. It makes up stories to relate unrelated events. Example of an animated film. Another example of adjacent photos, the Kuleshov effect.
  • A Cursed Rage for Order—those examples are tame; worse are conspiracy theories, that connect real data points into coherent, emotionally satisfying versions of reality. Examples of novels, films. Alex Jones. The guy about lizard people, 113m. There are millions of conspiracy theories about every prominent person and event. They’re not strange, but ordinary. They would be funny if they did not have consequences. and many people believe them, p115. And they’re not the product of backwardness or ignorance; many are promoted by the educated class. Everyone is subject to the compulsive need for meaning; why are things so bad in the world? They are consoling in their simplicity. P116.

Ch 6, “The Moral of the Story.” About the Holy Books. Lots of stories. All religions in history rely on stories to convey messages. (Note 118b about how staunch believers would call the narratives of *other* religions are stories, but not their own scriptures.) “Religion is the ultimate expression of story’s dominion over our minds.” 119.3. Religion isn’t going away. The roots of spirituality must lie deep in human nature. How did this evolve? “How did dogmatic faith in imaginary beings not diminish our ability to survive and reproduce?” 120.3 The standard explanation is that we invent gods to give meaning to existence; we abhor explanatory vacuums. Some, like Dawkins and Dennett, consider religion a mental parasite best lived without. Others think religion is not useless or worse. David Sloan Wilson (in Darwin’s Cathedral, 2002) speculates that religion makes societies work better. It defines the group. It binds people together and puts the group’s interests ahead of their own (Nicholas Wade, The Faith Instinct). What seems irrational in religion makes sense given what such beliefs cause people to do. Assert their group’s interest against competitors. [[ basically, group selection ]] Yet—it also drives people apart.

  • Sacred Histories—National myths serve similar functions. E.g. what’s taught about Columbus—is mostly fiction. cf Howard Zinn, airbrushed history. Others [Diamond?] say the difference was technological. Yet most of history is myths in which we’re the good guys.
  • Imagining the Unimaginable—About a romance between a 22yo man and a 45yo woman. People glared, objected, but who were they harming? Think about what happened as you picture the story in your head…right up to the end, when you discover they’re actually son and mother. Haidt’s moral logic. We can imagine virtually anything in a story. Except when we hit moral problems. Stories have to resolve in certain ways, or readers rebel.
  • [[ He might have mentioned Shirley Jackson’s famous story “The Lottery,” which had such a shocking, seeming amoral ending that many readers of The New Yorker, where it first appeared, cancelled their subscriptions. ]]
  • [[ This is a good point and might be one of those subversive things science fiction does to challenge assumptions. ]] Examples 129b: Lolita; Clockwork Orange. But storytellers assure us how wrong these things are.
  • Virtue Rewarded—Plato banished poets and storytellers. But fiction is intensely moralistic. In most stories villains die and heroes are rewarded; violence is acceptable only in clearly define circumstances. Yes, there’s moral ambiguity in sophisticated fiction, 133, but pop story forms are structured on poetic justice, 134. Thus stories reinforce norms and values derived from human nature. Evidence fiction has positive effects on moral development. People need to believe in justice for society to function, even though it’s not true; bad things happen to good people all the time. Fiction reinforces the “just-world” belief [[ or fallacy ]]. For most of human history, story has been communal. Even now stories are shared by many people… Story binds society.

Ch 7, Ink People Change the World

  • About two boys, an opera, Adolfus, who fails in art school and becomes Adolf Hitler. Inspired by the opera Rienzi. Wagner was a German nationalist and anti-Semite.
  • Ink People—characters in fiction are just ink people, yet they pervade into our world and change societies. Rienzi was first a novel. Yet some think story useless; people understand fiction vs reality. Yet—the story that became Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Its influence on the civil war. It kept Britain out of the war. Many other examples, 147-8. But are these just anecdotes? Research has been done: fiction does mold our minds [[ Another point to keep in mind when discussing SF. 148b. ]] Fiction teaches you about the world, e.g. police work in TV shows. People are traumatized by scary fiction, more than by articles or speeches. Fiction seems to change beliefs more than nonfiction, 150m. Seeing violence makes people more aggressive. Also attitudes about different races. Becoming absorbed in a story, we drop are critical guard. ß extrapolate to how SF “opens” the mind…
  • Holocuast, 1933—Hitler, in fact, was motivated by art, even as the Nazis burned books by un-Germans. And he was a consummate actor.

Ch 8, Life Stories

About David and Donald, drunk and on drugs… 20 years later he writes his memoir and the two disagree on a key event. People remember what they can live with. James Frey. Other examples. Most memoirs have clear story grammar, 161t. Problem structure, good/bad guy dynamics. Our own life stories are personal myths about who we are, how we got that way, what it means. A life story is a useful fiction.

  • “Memory, of course, is never true”—Example of girl in 1889 reporting a crime in great detail. Flashbulb memories—we do remember traumatic moments in our lives, but the details can’t be trusted. E.g. Challenger, or 9/11. E.g. Bush thinking he saw the first plane hit. Some of these memories are just made up. The girl is 1889 was subject of a doctor’s attempts to implant false memories. Later, the 1990s, the great sex panic. Repressed memories. Elizabeth Loftus. Memory is much less trustworthy than previously suspected. Planting false memories. So, how can we trust our memories about anything? Memories conflate in our brains. The past is a fantasy created in our mind.
  • Heroes of our own epics—Memory may be faulty by design; perhaps to allow us to live better lives. Ego-enhancing bias. Even awful people don’t think they’re bad guys. Examples. Even John Wayne Gacy. We want to be the heroes of our lives—but most of us aren’t heroic. Photos vs. mirrors. We cite our positive qualities, not our negative. Lake Woebegone effect. The things that are important are the things we’re good at. Depressed people are more accurate about their personal qualities. Positive illusions keep us from recognizing that the truth is depressing, 175t. Psychotherapy helps gives people a story they can live with. Until we die, we live the story of our life. A story more truthy than true.

Ch 9, The Future of Story, p177

Are we leaving Neverland behind? Is fiction losing its central place in our culture? Theatre, poetry? Scripted TV? Is gaming taking over? Some think so. Yet tens of thousands of novels are published every year. JK Rowling. Left Behind. Et al, 179t. Literary novels have always had a harder time of it. Even if novels fade, the story would not end. Poetry has given way to song, rap, hip-hop. Video games are intensely story driven.

  • True Lies—On TV, even reality shows turn events into classic story lines. Example of The Ultimate Fighter. SuperNanny. Fiction will always be: character + predicament + attempted extrication.
  • Back to Neverland—About kids playing in a state park, in outfits—a LARP called Forest of Doors. Grown-up make-believe. Derived from RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons.
  • Brave New World!—Storytelling will evolve. Recall feelies and the holodeck. Now there are MMORPGs. World of Warcraft.
  • Exodus—We’re migrating to a virtual world, perhaps. Consider people with no sense of community in ‘real’ life. They find it in the mmorpgs, whose world are meaningful. They resurrect myths about gods. …we evolved to crave story, but could they be a weakness, just as craving for food now makes us obese? The real threat is that story will take over completely. [[ Recall Harari’s prediction that the unemployed will occupy themselves with drugs and games. ]]

Or: we can make nutritious choices, p198-9, summarized:

  • Read and watch fiction;
  • Fiction doesn’t degrade society’s moral fabric;
  • We’re suckers for story and so are easily molded and manipulated;
  • Recognize stories can change the world, for the good or the worse;
  • Allow time in your child’s schedule for time in Neverland;
  • Allow yourself to daydream;
  • Beware your inner storyteller locking into the overdrive of conspiracy theories;
  • By tolerant of national and religious myths;
  • Novels are dying;
  • They way we experience stories will change, but they won’t go away;
  • Rejoice in the power of storytelling; get lost in a novel.

//

Again, the most abstract SF (Olaf Stapledon? Some of Egan and Chiang?) is unsatisfying to some because it *doesn’t* provide the emotional payoff of the traditional story… note 199.2: “People don’t go to story land because they want something startlingly new; they go because they want the old comforts of the universal story grammar.” –Well, I’d say, you find the entire range among science fiction readers. There are the conservative ones who want plain stories with beginnings, middle, and ends; and at the other extreme (e.g. in the 1960s “New Wave”) you had writers and readers utterly bored with all that, looking for something new and exciting.

I didn’t anticipate that the narrative drive (sometimes considered a fallacy) would lead to conspiracy theories, but I should have: in this context, conspiracy theories are the tendency to make sense of the world by perceiving cause and effect gone carcinogenic. I hadn’t appreciated how there are conspiracy theories about virtually every well-known person and event, but am not inclined to speculate why. Not worth the trouble.

Posted in Book Notes, Narrative | Comments Off on Jonathan Gottschall: THE STORYTELLING ANIMAL: How Stories Make Us Human

Notes for the Book? Certainly Excerpt from the Memoirs. Hierarchy of Process Management: CMMI

Posted on Wednesday 1 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m frequently fascinated by trying to recreate my train of thought — or perhaps I should say, I occasionally realize how my train of thought came about and am fascinated by the realization. For five or six weeks now I’ve been summarizing various themes that might inform my book about how science fiction relates to human understanding of the cosmos. Now I’ve realized there perhaps three sources that have inspired my idea of building these hierarchies, that run from simple and intuitive, to sophisticated and complex (and generally, the most like reality).

The trigger for the first one, on awareness (22 May) was inspired by a book I read back in February, Scienceblind by Andrew Shtulman. The book came out three years ago, and I finally got around to it earlier this year. Its premise interested me because I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of “intuitive physics,” e.g. why people assume heavy objects fall faster than light ones, why seeing space fighters swoosh through space and bank like in-atmosphere jet fighters doesn’t bother the so many people who watch Star Wars. (Both because they don’t realize ships in space don’t work like that, and also because story is so much more important than correct physical details, I think.) And why most people never get past these intuitive notions, or care.

I’ll post notes on Shtulman eventually, but he expands on my notion of intuitive physics through psychological experiments, and interviews, of infants, children, and adults, to see how naive assumptions about how the universe work initialize (as base human nature), and are modified with age.

That became the first step of that hierarchy. Some people, fewer and fewer at each level of the hierarchy, learn better how the cosmos actually works. Very few reach the higher levels.

And then several later hierarchies.

More recently, in the past week, I’ve recalled that hierarchy of morality, from one Lawrence Kohlberg, as cited in prominent books by E.O. Wilson and Steven Pinker.

And finally, in writing pieces of my memoir — with one long section, not yet posted, about my work at Rocketdyne for 30 years, which I think might be of interest to even people who don’t especially like me as a person — I discussed a process management model that was the focus of most of the last 20 years of my career. And have only just realized — I’m a bit dim at times — that its structure bears remarkable similarity to the ones I’ve been constructing. Shtulman, Kohlberg, CMMI; surely all of these in the back of my mind inspired my recent hierarchical themes.

So, after that lengthy prelude, I will excerpt discussion of CMMI from that as-yet unposted memoir page:

>>

In the early 1990s NASA and the DoD (Department of Defense) adopted a newly developed standard for assessing potential software contractors. This standard was called the Capability Maturity Model, CMM, and it was developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The CMM was an attempt to capture, in abstract terms, the best practices of successful software development organizations in the past.

The context is that software projects had a history of coming in late and over-budget. (Perhaps more so than other kinds of engineering projects, like building bridges.) If there were root causes for that history, they may have in the tendency for the occasional software genius to do everything by himself, or at least take charge and tell everyone else what to do. The problem then would be what the team would do when this “hero” left, or retired. All that expertise existed only in his head, and went with him. Or there was a tendency to apply the methods of the previous project to a new project, no matter how different.

In any case, the CMM established a series of best practices for software development, arranged in five “maturity levels,” to be used both as a guide for companies to manage their projects, and also as a standard whereby external assessors would assess a company for consideration when applying for government contracts.

The five levels, I now realize, are analogous to the various hierarchies I’ve identified as themes for consideration for knowledge and awareness of world, from the simplest and most intuitive, to the more sophisticated and disciplined.

  1. Level 1, Initial, is the default, where projects are managed from experience and by intuition.
  2. Level 2, Managed, requires that each project’s processes be documented and followed.
  3. Level 3, Defined, requires that the organization have a single set of standard processes that are in turn adapted for each project’s use (rather than each project creating new processes from scratch).
  4. Level 4, Quantitatively Managed, requires that each project, and the organization collectively, collect data on process performance and use it to manage the projects. (Trivial example: keep track of how many widgets are finished each month and thereby estimating when they will all be done.)
  5. Level 5, Optimizing, requires that the process performance data be analyzed and used to steadily implement process improvements.

Boiled even further down: processes are documented and reliably followed; data is collected on how the processes are executed, and then used to improve them, steadily, forever.

Examples of “improvements” might be the addition of a checklist for peer reviews, to reduce the number of errors and defects, or the acquisition of a new software tool to automate what had been a manual procedure. They are almost always incremental, not revolutionary.

The directions of those improvements can change, depending on changing business goals. For example, for products like the space shuttle, aerospace companies like Rocketdyne placed the highest premium on quality—there must be no defects that might cause a launch to fail, because astronaut’s lives are at stake. But software for an expendable booster might relax this priority in favor of, say, project completion time.

And software companies with different kinds of products, like Apple and Microsoft, place higher premiums on time-to-market and customer appeal, which is why initial releases of their products are often buggy, and don’t get fixed until a version or three later. But both domains could, in principle, use the same framework for process management and improvement.

Again, projects are run by processes, and in principle all the people executing those processes are interchangeable and replaceable. That’s not to say especially brilliant engineers won’t have a chance to perform, but it has to be done in a context in which their work can be taken over by others if necessary.

… [skipping some of the memoir]

The software CMM was successful from both the government’s and industry’s points of view, in the sense that its basic structure made sense in so many other domains. And so CMMs were written for other contexts: software engineering; acquisitions (about contractors and tool acquisitions), and others. After some years the wise folks at Carnegie Mellon abstracted even further and consolidated all these models into an integrated CMM: CMMI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model_Integration). And so my company’s goals became satisfying this model.

…

Time went on, and the SEI kept refining and improving the CMMI, both the model and the assessment criteria; Rocketdyne’s later CMMI assessments would not get by on the bare bones examples for Level 5 that were used in 2004. I’ve been impressed by the revisions of the CMMI over the years: a version 1.1, then 1.2, then 1.3, each time refining terminology and examples and sometimes revising complete process areas, merging some and eliminating others. They did this, of course, by inviting feedback from the entire affected industry, and holding colloquia to discuss potential changes. The resulting models were written in straightforward language as precise as any legal document but without the obfuscation. This process of steadily refining and revising the model is analogous to science at its best: all conclusions are provisional and subject to refinement based on evidence. (A long-awaited version 2.0 of CMMI has apparently been released in the past year, so I haven’t seen it.)

<<

Here end excerpts from the not-yet posted memoir of my software engineering career. I mean to emphasize the beauty and precision of the CMMI’s language, refined over decades. The memoir has some reflections:

>>

Looking back at these engineering activities, it now occurs to me there’s a strong correlation between them and both science and critical thinking. When beginning a new engineering project, you use the best possible practices available, the result of years of refinement and experience. You don’t rely on the guy who led the last project because you trust him. The processes are independent of the individuals using them; there is no dependence on “heroes” or “authorities.” There is no deference to ancient wisdom, there is no avoiding conclusions because someone’s feelings might be hurt or their vanity offended. Things never go perfectly, but you evaluate your progress and adjust your methods and conclusions as you go. That’s engineering, and that’s also science.

Things never go perfectly… because you can’t predict the future, and because engineers are still human. Even with the best management estimates and tracking of progress, it’s rare for any large project to finish on-time and on-schedule. But you do the best you can, and you try to do it better than your competitors. This is a core reason why virtually all conspiracy theories are bunk: for them to have been executed, everything would have had to have been planned and executed perfectly, and without any of the many people involved leaking the scheme. Such perfection never happens in the real world.

<<

I think this last paragraph is very important.

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About Motivated Reasoning

Posted on Saturday 27 June 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

(rev. 8jul20)

This isn’t so much a Notes for the Book post, as a refinement of a portion of my Principles page, which compiles what I think are crucial guidelines for understanding the world, in particular how to evaluate claims made in politics, by advertising and the news media, and by religion, science, and pseudo-science (as it says there).

A couple of things came to mind recently, one about the distinction between “can I believe” as opposed to “must I believe.” This was highlighted by Jonathan Haidt (here, http://www.markrkelly.com/Blog/2015/12/09/jonathan-haidts-the-righteous-mind-why-good-people-are-divided-by-politics-and-religion-3/) citing earlier work by Thomas Gilovich. I’ll quote a passage from that link, summarizing my take on a portion of his book The Righteous Mind:

When we *want* to believe something, we ask, *Can* I believe it? For this you need only a single piece of pseudo-evidence. Whereas if you’re not inclined to believe something, you ask *Must* I believe it? And then no matter how much supporting evidence you find, if you find a single reason to doubt the claim, you dismiss it. This is the essence of motivated reasoning, and Haidt illustrates it by observing that conspiracy theories operate on the former strategy (*can* I believe it? give me one example) while science operates on the latter (if all the evidence supports an idea, you must believe), and non-scientists are adept at finding some reason to quibble. p85.6:

Whatever you want to believe about the causes of global warming or whether a fetus can feel pain, just Google your belief. You’ll find partisan websites summarizing and sometimes distorting relevant scientific studies. Science is a smorgasbord, and Google will guide you to the study that’s right for you.

(Don’t get your news, or do your research, from social media, or Google!)

This recalls various takes on the idea of “motivated reasoning.” The simplex take is that people pay attention to evidence that supports their per-determined views, and ignore evidence that doesn’t. A complex take is that people rationalize these two positions; they find reasons to dismiss evidence that doesn’t support their position (mostly invalid, e.g. by ad hominem attacks) and reasons to accept reasons that support their position (by ignoring any counter-evidence). The multiplex take is described above; your standards for belief change depending on whether you want to believe, or not.

(I’ll resist describing examples, for now.)

Another thing that came to mind is the idea that a rational person should be able to evaluate their beliefs and be able to, if only in principle, imagine possible evidence that would cause them to change their minds. If there’s *nothing* that could possibly change your mind about some commitment, then you are not being rational and there’s no reason to hold a conversation with you on this subject. (Other subjects sure; humans are masters at compartmentalizing.) Scientific theories, almost by definition, involve statements that are, in principle, subject to disproof. Religious and political positions do not. That’s why these subjects famously cannot be discussed over dinner; people’s opinions on these matters are seldom (politics) or never (religion) based on rational arguments.

And, a famous quote by Christopher Hitchens: “That which can be claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

 

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Frederik Pohl, THE GOLD AT THE STARBOW’S END (1972)

Posted on Saturday 27 June 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

This is a nice companion book to Pohl’s novel GATEWAY, because one of the five stories here is a prelude that novel. That story and three of the others were all published in various magazines in 1972; the fifth was published two years earlier. These were the first signs that Pohl was rebooting himself from steady editor and occasional writer, to major writer.


The title story, “The Gold at the Starbow’s End,” is one of those science fiction stories that speculates what humans might do should they become very smart. There are two alternating narratives, six chapters in each, over the 70-page story. The primary narrative, told in messenges being recorded for back home, describes the 8 astronauts of the starship Constitution, the first starship, on its way to the newly discovered planet of Alpha Centauri. It’s a 10-year trip, and they will be awake the whole time, so they occupy themselves with abstruse mathematical problems…

The second narrative is set in Washington DC, where Dr. Dieter von Knefhausen, the mastermind behind the mission, is summoned to the White House to address Russian claims that the planet around Alpha Centauri cannot exist. Dr vK initially insists the mission is valid, but then — spoiler!– is forced to admit the truth: that he sent 8 hand-picked astronauts on a 10 year trip to a planet that doesn’t exist. Why? It’s not a fraud, exactly, but camouflage. The real reason is the war against ignorance; these 8 brilliant people will have nothing to do for years but work their minds.

Meanwhile, strange and amazing things do seem to be happened aboard the starship. One of them proves [the still unproven] Goldbach’s conjecture. They observe the “starbow” effects of light dilation as they get close to the speed of light. They investigate unlikely subjects like acupuncture and the I Ching (when he hears this, Dr. vK gets livid). They Godelize things; they modify their bodies; their language becomes clipped, more efficient; they modify their drive; they have children.

On Earth things get worse with civil unrest and climate change. The US falls apart, a new president takes over in a besieged White House threatened by flood, and Dr vK is jailed, writing his memories. Then a new message comes in from the astronauts…

(I won’t reveal the finale, except to say the mission succeeds beyond Dr vK’s wildest expectations, and in an unexpected way.)

This is a dazzling story, even if it’s not really plausible. Isolation creates supermen? Then why not just isolate them in Antarctica? But it’s a good illustration of how abstruse topics can be understood by some, and are impenetrable to others. The story reflects the civic turmoil of its time. And it’s a bit cheeky of Pohl to suggest that things like I Ching and hexagrams are valid ideas that lead to great new truths.

Interesting aside: one of the astronauts reports, page 48:

I think it was Stanley Weinbaum that said that from three facts a truly superior mind should be able to deduce the whole universe. … We are so far from being from being truly superior minds by those standards, or even by our own. Yet we have a much larger number of facts to work with than three, or even three thousand, and so we have deduced a good deal.

There are three short stories in the middle of the book. “Sad Solarian Screenwriter Sam” is a mordant look at how the human race, we’re told, has been condemned to extinction by a superior alien race on the basis of close examination of just one man, a slick wheeler-dealer screenwriter whose latest project is to parley the discovery of actual Martians into a rip-off of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom stories. The ironic sting is the aliens report their decision at the speed of light, so the execution action won’t occur until 64,000 AD.

“Call Me Million” is short and powerful, rather like Pohl’s very famous 1966 “Day Million,” though this one isn’t as crisp and is more a horror story than a futuristic satire. Here a man drafted to Vietnam discovers he has the power to “eat” another person’s soul, absorbing it, causing the other person to die. He returns to life and travels the globe, turning people into zombies and living off their spoils, until… he meets another like him.

“Shaffery Among the Immortals” is also mordant, telling of a sad-sack scientist who dreams of making some Einstein-class discovery. Instead he works at a minor observatory in the Lesser Antilles that’s run by a gambling syndicate. He’s pressured to appeal to NASA for a project this observatory can’t handle, and during a board meeting with his Vegas bosses he becomes ill, of a condition that quickly spreads and… his name becomes world-renowned in a way he never intended.

The final story is that prelude (not prequel; it was written first) to GATEWAY, “The Merchants of Venus.” The story is set on Venus, where humans have settled inside a huge cavern left by now-disappeared aliens called Heechee some 250,000 years ago. The narrator, Audee Walthers, is an airbody driver, making money off tourists from Earth. The tourist trade is irregular, and he’s desperate for a client to earn money for new kidney, when he meets wealthy tourist Bruce Cochenour and his girlfriend Dorothea. They set off “prospecting,” Audee leading them to unexplored tunnels in hopes of finding new Heechee artefacts and making fortunes in finder’s fees.

Plot complications ensue. They find an empty Heechee tunnel right away, then nothing for another week of tries. Audee is tipped off that his client is actually broke, playing some long game; their meeting wasn’t chance. They agree to one more dig, coming up against their supply deadline, when client breaks his leg. They persist with Audee depending on client’s timely return in the airbody…until Audee realizes he’s being set up to die. And what he does.

This story is less conceptual than “Starbow” but it’s brilliantly plotting with one surprise or setback after another, story elements that all mesh and explain themselves, and with a satisfyingly just ending. As especially in GATEWAY there are character elements that reflect the progressive era of the 1970s; here, a café owner who, matter-of-factly, is part of an extended family of two men and three wives.

Slight spoiler: ironically, the finale of the story doesn’t reveal what Audee found in that final dig, except that his finder’s fee is enough to provide him with that new liver. In GATEWAY, we learn that the first alien pod, leading the Gateway asteroid in the first place, was found in the Venus caves. So that must be what Audee found.

Posted in Book Notes, science fiction | Comments Off on Frederik Pohl, THE GOLD AT THE STARBOW’S END (1972)

Notes for the Book: Hierarchy of Morality

Posted on Friday 26 June 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

This one isn’t mine; this is Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, which I first became aware of in Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), page 624, and later recalled when I reread E.O. Wilson’s foundational On Human Nature (1980; reread 2019).

These are stages of moral development that exist across cultures. It’s not true that for people to be moral you need to post a list of ancient tribal rules on courthouse walls.

I’ll paraphrase Wilson with comments of my own. Again, this is a hierarchy from the simplest and most simplistic, to the most cosmopolitan and complex.

  1. Simple obedience to rules and authority to avoid punishment. [e.g. Biblical threats of hell for disobedience to The Rules];
  2. Self-interest orientation (what’s in it for me?); conformity to group behavior to obtain rewards and exchange favors;
  3. Interpersonal accord and conformity; social norms; good-boy orientation, conformity to avoid dislike and rejection by others;
  4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation: law and order morality;
  5. Social contract orientation; laws are recognized as social contracts for the common good rather than universal rules;
  6. Universal ethical principles; principled conscience [e.g. Kant’s categorical imperative]; [Wilson:] primary allegiance to principles of choice, which can overrule law in cases the law is judged to do more harm than good. [Thus, protesters, who are not lawbreakers, throughout time.]

Individuals, as Wilson notes, can stop at any rung on the ladder. The Biblical fundamentalists stop at stage 1.

In my hypothetical book I’ll be inclined to appeal to this hierarchy, because in science fiction writers imagine future or alternate societies that span this entire range. The easiest is the first; the default authoritarian society that appeals to a set of rules put down by the ancients, always presumed to be wiser than modern people, that must be followed. (Star Trek TOS did this hilariously, in an episode called “A Piece of the Action,” about a planet visited earlier by an Earth ship that left behind a book about the Chicago gang culture; and so when the Enterprise arrives, they find the entire culture modeled after that Chicago gang culture. The Book! the head boss yells in defense. It must be followed!)

Some recent writers, Michael Shermer, Peter Singer, and Sam Harris among them, have tracked the expansion of humanity’s moral universe, or tried to identify first principles that lead to a morality not derived from ancient superstitions. (Harris’ is basically, policies that lead to the maximum health and happiness of as many people as possible.) But Singer and Harris especially have their critics.

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