On the Good of Young Men Having Their Asses Kicked

I recently visited a martial arts school for kids, and was immediately impressed by - something. It took me a minute to put my finger on what I liked about the place. It was that they were serious, and firm. The instructors wanted these kids to get better, and they didn't need to crack a joke every minute to diffuse tension, or even be especially kind about criticizing someone's technique. And the kids responded well to it, and were focused, and improving. I found myself wishing to see more of this approach, and then wondering why.

Young men having their asses kicked by superiors genuinely interested in the improvement of those young men, is an individual and social good. I express my concern and record my defense herein because I think many young men today should have their asses kicked more. If you're a young man reading this, know that I was once a young man; also, that I should definitely have had my ass kicked more. Below I define ass-kicking, and explain why I believe this.

By "ass kicking" I don't mean physically, and I also don't mean pointless abuse. What I do mean is this - in second person to help you imagine and identify with it:

1. there is a person with higher status than you
   
   
2. they are training you and/or managing you, and they provide intense, frequent negative verbal feedback and potential consequences for underperformance...
   
   
3. for reasons in your best interest (this is critical)
   
   
4. who you won't avoid - because you recognize that tolerating their very negative feedback will help you improve as a person, at specific skills, and achieve your goals.

Expanding on each item above:

1. "Higher status" means the person has objective, measurable achievements that place them unambiguously above you - money, artistic production, athletics, climbing some ladder - that you are also in. If you're trying to be a better electrician, you don't care if an investment banker or mountain climber gives you critical feedback.
   
   
2. This intense, frequent, negative feedback is unpleasant for many reasons, among them that it concerns something you care very much about - some ability or position that you have chosen as part of your identity. The unfortunate paradox is that meaningful negative feedback hurts, and it has to hurt at least a little, if you actually care about the thing you're getting feedback about.
   
   
3. The person is actually trying to help you improve, often to very high standards - this is why it's not abuse - but their concern in helping you improve takes precedence over hurt feelings. Hurt feelings take time and attention to avoid, so by virtue of your superior not having to consider them, you improve faster. What's more, during ass-kicking, the atmosphere is serious. There is no tension release mechanism other than improving your performance. (As an aside, the ass-kickee often attempts humor is in these situations, to his detriment.)
   
   
4. You choose not to avoid the unpleasantness because you know this experience is in your own best interest, and therefore despite its unpleasantness, you choose to carry on; or you're in a setting you can't leave (e.g. the military) but fortunately your superior is trying to improve you rather than just abuse you.
   
   

Some examples of institutionalized ass-kicking are sports coaching, medical school, the apprenticeship process in certain high-performing high-status industries (e.g. high finance), and military training. (For a first-person account of a military boot camp, and interestingly, a distinction between cult abuse and military indoctrination, go here.) Near-universally, people who've been through an ass-kicking program express gratitude for the experience (after it's over) and recognize both the skills and personal transformation it imparted, but are quick to say they wouldn't want to do it again, possibly along with humorous stories of the most difficult superiors who kicked their ass particularly thoroughly.


Why is ass-kicking a good thing? And why am I focusing on young men?

Why am I specifiying young men? Let's broadly define "young" as 13-30. After this developmental window, it is very difficult to change identity and personality in the way that ass-kicking does, and in particular to obtain the benefits such experiences can produce. And I find that it's usually men who have a personality structure and defenses that most benefit from such experiences. A young man's psychological defenses involve a good deal of narcissism about how tough, strong, and awesome he is. When encountering situations suggesting otherwise, he rationalizes, avoids, or attacks. If anyone tells him he's not the greatest thing since sliced bread, he denigrates and/or retaliates and/or disengages. But when it's his superior (his supervisor in a job he wants to advance in) or drill sergeant doing it and he can't rationalize avoid or attack, he has three choices: a) fail b) be miserable because he can never understand that they're not just abusing him personally or c) he "gets it" and grows up and improves, not just in specific skills but in overall character.

It is my suspicion that, not only is ass-kicking happening less often, but also that option c) is being delayed in men's lives and more often happening during romantic relationships; and romantic partners are not enjoying the expansion of their near-parentified duties. Of course it's not only men who can ever benefit from ass-kicking, and certainly not all men will benefit from ass-kicking based on their constitution, but in my empirical observation, in general young men benefit most from ass-kicking.

Why is ass-kicking good? Beyond (obviously) the specific skills and professional identities that are being quickly learned and grown, the general benefits come down to three factors.

• A. We learn to control our negative emotional reactions and decouple them from the person providing the feedback. This is necessary unless you plan to go through life always killing the messenger (which some men certainly try to do.)
  
  
• B. We learn to recognize our flaws and shortcomings and tolerate the distress arising from them, and to turn that energy into something positive by working on them instead of being angry about them, denying them, or avoiding them. We also learn that our position in a hierarchy is not the entirety of our worth and identity. (Note, both B and A are really both forms of "tolerating the distress of being at the wrong end of a hierachical disparity." This both makes young men better able to work in groups, and produces empathy which they might otherwise lack, when they are later at the top of such an imbalance, not to mention improving reality-based confidence.)
  
  
• C. Not only do we decouple our emotional reactions to the person and the message, we learn to respect the person and recognize that they are helping us, even if it wasn't fun at the time.

A, B, and C correspond basically to "I have a long way to go to be a badass, it's okay that I have a long way to go but it's up to me to improve and I can improve, and while it's not fun now, I recognize that my superior did me a favor and that they're in the position where they are for a reason so I will respect and defend them to others." It adds up to the cliche character-building as well as dealing with adversity, being able to function in authority structures and understanding the basis for legitimate authority, i.e. that authority is not synonymous with force. In terms of Kegan and Chapman's hierarchy, ass-kicking is a maturing process that helps young men graduate from level 3 into level 4, and failure to do so has predictable consequences for broader society (see last paragraph.)

To be clear, nothing herein should be taken as justifying abuse. In fact, I think outlining the characteristics of ass-kicking helps us draw a distinction between ass-kicking and mere abuse. And even when an ass-kicking superior intends the ass-kicking constructively to improve the ass-kickee, if the ass-kickee can't tolerate it, they should be able to quit (withdraw consent.) Abuse is non-consensual, and is about pleasing a sadistic abuser, rather than (in the long run) helping the recipient. And even those of us nodding along with this essay and agreeing that ass-kicking is a good thing and was a good thing for us specifically, are usually still able to look back and distinguish between a hardass who you maybe even hated at that time but for whom in retrospect you feel gratitude and respect - versus a bully with an anger problem. (Of course abusers try to trick us sometimes by pretending to be ass-kickers.) Many readers will by this point be thinking of Sergeant Hartmann from Full Metal Jacket (note these links are NSFW and contains slurs) - he is hard but he is fair, directly states you will not like him, but he is trying to help his recruits and he tells them so. He is clearly pleased when they improve. He is an ass-kicker. In contract, Alec Baldwin's character in Glengarry Glen Ross is just an abusive bully, and the ages of some of the men in the meeting suggest they are beyond the useful ass-kicking window anyway. He explicitly tells them he doesn't care about them, and just wants numbers for the company, figure out on your own how to do it or hit the bricks pal. Without Good Result A above, young men are more likely to keep thinking everyone who tells them something they don't want to hear is just another Alec Baldwin humiliating them.


Why did I write this?

It's my impression that opportunities for ass-kicking have decreased over the past half-century or so, at least in my country, the U.S. Why? I suspect it's a combination of our decreasing intolerance of direct-speaking authority figures, and constant consumer messaging: that you are special, you are the best, you should never be uncomfortable, don't listen to people who make you feel that way. Those two reasons may or may not in fact be the same thing. (I intentionally use "impression" and "suspect" not as weasel words but as clear signals of how you might weight these claims.) Therefore, as young men's opportunities for ass-kicking decrease, I predict America will face a worsening epidemic of narcissistic, oversensitive, immature, and adversity-intolerant men, who blame everyone else for e.g. why they couldn't finish college or hold down a job, and who can't tell the difference between bullies and legitimate authority. I leave it to the reader to decide if this trend is already visible.

Why Is Pursuit of Pleasure a "Third Rail" in Central Authoritarian Agricultural Societies?

A friend related the following to me. While she was an undergraduate, her grandparents came to visit and took her out to lunch. At the time she was dating a man of Middle Eastern descent. During the meal it became clear that her grandparents' true mission was not to buy her lunch, but to warn her about Middle Eastern men. They didn’t seem to be disturbed by her being with a non-Christian or ethnically different partner, so much as they were worried about her being in danger of abduction. "You know, when you get married and go back to their countries with them, you have no rights," her grandfather said. "Oh Grandpa," my friend responded somewhat innocently, "I really have no intention of marrying this guy." Her grandparents’ faces drained of color, and the conversation ended, and the rest of the meal was spent in icy silence.

To put it plainly: they were horrified that their granddaughter basically just told them that she was in this relationship for the sex, with no intention of commitment to marriage or reproduction. For them, this was far more serious than the prospect that she would be kidnapped and effectively enslaved! Why? Because she was acknowledging that she was making decisions in the pursuit of sexual pleasure. Of course in American culture and in most places, there is a double standard between men and women, but men are not immune to such attitudes either, though the social consequences are rarely as severe.

This may be part of why homosexual relationships have produced negative reactions across so many cultures - certainly not in all, but in enough for it to be a pattern. At least as often as they are accepted, they are either ignored or reviled. Why? Because gay sex can only result in pleasure. By these standards, an abomination if ever there was one!

But it's not just sex; it's the discussion of pursuit of pleasure in general. In very formal settings, any acknowledgement that you do something just because you like it feels very inappropriate. At a morbidity and mortality conference (where surgical residents stand up and accept blame for bad outcomes of cases - few settings are more formal or tense) I noted with some surprise that a physician even noting that he enjoyed his breakfast was met with uncomfortable laughter, eye-rolling or shifting in seats. The acknowledgement of enjoying any sort of physical pleasure seems to decrease, the more formal the setting, and this was an excellent example.[1] This is so basic to social reality that we don't notice or question it. Why is this?

Allan Tate said that civilization is an agreement to ignore the abyss. This is actually too limited. More to the point, civilization is an agreement to ignore affect - to ignore the primary drives in our basic animal code, and the reactions they cause in us, and the abyss causes anxiety. So it's not just the pursuit of pleasure we avoid, but the recognition of and response to affect in general - because affect can be dangerous. In social animals, affect is contagious, which is very effective for cohesion in hunter-gatherer groups below the Dunbar number (150 people.) But in any large civilization where we're constantly interacting with strangers in (necessarily) formalized settings, paying attention to and reacting to the affect on others' faces would seem to be inherently destabilizing. Try it when you go for a walk in a busy city some time - at best, you'll quickly be exhausted, and at worst you'll get into fights. And constantly talking about your pursuit of pleasure with strangers can make people resent you, or compete with you, or avoid you, and in general is a ticket to negative affect. The higher the stakes, the less we do it. In therapy training, we're "de-programmed" so that we don't just notice, but pursue affect, even when it flashes across faces for only a moment, and this de-programming is very difficult.

If this theory is correct, there should be other trends of affect-generating cultural practices that differ between hunter-gatherer and centralized agricultural societies, and that are at their most intense in the oldest longest-centrally-organized agricultural society (i.e. China and East Asia); and that are at their most intense in formal settings, like religion and many high-prestige professions.[2] To this end:

• I have found qualitative assertions (but not quantitative studies) that homosexuality is more tolerated in more traditional societies, often with specific institutionalized roles.
  
  
• Gender roles in general become more rigid in the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural.
  
  
• There is a trend toward brighter colors in the art and clothing of cultures that more recently converted from hunter-gatherer to agricultural (or "small-village" agricultural to nation-state.) Yes, bright colors are often used in nation-states - in specific settings (religious displays, holidays, weddings.)
  
  
• Drums tend to disappear as a central musical instrument in this transition as well, only to have re-appeared recently in the West in rock and hip-hop - possibly because, ironically, our wealth has allowed us to ignore social restrictions and revert back to our "native state" as hunter-gatherers, as in Hanson's theory of farmers vs foragers.
  
  
• In the hunter-gatherer to centralized agricultural authority transition, hallucinogens become restricted (often to religious ceremonies) or outright banned.
  
  
• There are exceptions to these rules, in the sense that these things which disappear in the transition still do appear under closed settings controlled by and useful to central authority - war chants, group initiations, religious artifacts and ceremonies, and team sports with big audiences.
  
  
• Bright colors, rhythmic music, hallucinogens, the spread of gender equality and tolerance of sexual minorities, and sex-openly-for-pleasure all reappeared in the West as we transitioned from agricultural back to hunter-gatherer values in the late 20th century, as per Hanson's theory.

These affect-restricting cultural practices can be thought of as a Dunbar's number multiplier, by decreasing the frequency of group fission events. Others are exapting family psychology to the state (leader as father figure, fellow soldiers as brothers) and organizing society into stable hierarchies (family, village, ethnic group, state.) If we assume that agricultural states ultimately win out over foragers - which they consistently have since the Great Stand on the Ugra and the fall of the Yuan Dynasty - then there is a form of selection for groups which develop such multipliers.[3]

A major cultural technology and Dunbar's multiplier is controlled tolerance. It is difficult for people with different moral systems to closely co-exist. The Ottomans had the millet system, China and the Mongols had a theocratically laissez faire approach, and in the modern West many countries build freedom of conscience into the law, though avoiding leg-breaking and pocket-picking by neighbors with different convictions was realistically much easier in Jefferson's wide-open agrarian utopia.


FOOTNOTES

[1] Psychiatrists are less formal than surgeons in our meetings and I am pleased to report much more comfortable talking about food.

[2] Americans in particular might object that there are many high-status arenas in the U.S. which are now fairly informal, for instance technology, the entertainment industry, or academia. I would argue that apparently informal, high-prestige professions are actually formal in a more complex way. This is clearest in academia, but true for the others, that this apparent informality is not so much superficial as an another layer of complexity to let the ambitious signal that they can maneuver even under the paradox of forced "relaxed collegiality." Sure someone can wear jeans to work and set their own hours - but come back in 15 years and see who's setting budgets, and it probably won't be them.

[3] The current greatest combination of Dunbar's number multipliers remains China at about 9.2 million.

The Death of Subculture: Gibson's Failure and Chapman's Explanation

If you're a geek of a certain age (i.e., middle) you've read Neuromancer. And lines from this novel may occasionally come back to you, and not just the opening hook about Chiba. For me, one of the repeaters is

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.

This sets the frenetic hyper-competitive pace of the future. In Gibson's future, youth culture followed suit:

Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the speed of light: entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.

And here Gibson did what science fiction does best - straight-line extrapolation, which often fails, as it did here.

My own youth subculture was metal (which drags on into old age for many of us.) But rather than accelerating in their life cycles, subcultures seemed to disappear as a cultural phenomenon. I realized this when I was passing through a very small remote town in the western U.S. on a vacation in 2008, saw a gaggle of teenagers with metal shirts and trenchcoats by the side of the road, and realized that I hadn't seen such an assemblage for years by that point. I speculated about the mechanism here.

David Chapman at Meaningness has an explanation which, while not necessarily in conflict with this mechanism, is much broader and relates the phenomenon to modes of developing meaning, understanding of morality, and explains why a counterculture appeared, then subcultures (a "native" mode prevalent from 1975-2000 for Gen Xers), then the atomization of youth culture in the aughts. The full chart is here (you REALLY should view and consider it), but the specific discussion of subcultures is here.

Prepare for People Signalling Their Taste by Seeking Out "Artisanal" Non-Machine-Harvested Wine

Early move toward automation in Napa, predictably there due to land and labor costs and the availability of automation experts. Prepare for the usual pearl-clutching that a culturally important (but nonetheless already commodified) object like wine is being increasingly mechanized. At least this will give the opportunity for future hipsters (I predict on the 5-10 year horizon) to signal their values by only buying human-produced wine.

The People Afraid of Their IQs

[Cross-posted to Cognition and Evolution.]

There has been some gnawing of tongues on the topic of IQ. Here I'm not talking about its very existence, which isn't open to debate (it's very real - disagree? Then you, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump are equally smart. I thought so.) It's that some people - young people, mostly - seem to be scared to find out what their IQ is, because it might not be as good as they would like, and then their life would be ruined.

These people are assuming a high degree of determinism. Yes, IQ is important (go to the link above and follow the links.) But at the same time, Warren Buffet has said that if you could trade every IQ point above 120 for money, you should. The greatest chess player in history Magnus Carlsen has said that too-high intelligence has been a handicap to some of his predecessors, who got distracted by other endeavors. Jeff Bezos of Amazon studied undergraduate physics at Princeton, noted how much harder he had to work than some of his peers, and switched out. What are we to make of this?

Let's start off by assuming that IQ is completely determined by factors out of your control, and furthermore completely determines your future. That being the case, learning one's IQ has been likened to being handed an envelope with your date and manner of death inside.[1][2] Anxiety-provoking? Sure, just like getting the result of an important test back - which, by the way, is invariably the direction the discussion goes, and no, no one likes the day the envelope comes, but everyone would be very upset if one year the nice people at ETS decided to rip up all the tests and give everyone an average. And just like the day you get your test results back, the only possible rational answer to whether you would want to know your death date is YES, and when people actually have such a choice in real life, they almost invariably DO want to know it. Cryonics crowd aside, you already KNOW you're going to die. You even have a rough idea of about when it will happen, statistically. You don't know what from, but you can make some guesses. When someone receives a terminal diagnosis, now they DO know what they'll die from, and they have a much narrower statistical window on when. So put yourself in this position: your doctor has just told you that you have pancreatic cancer. What is your VERY NEXT THOUGHT? "How long do I have?" You'd be pretty angry, and justifiably so, if she told you "I typically don't tell people the life expectancy because they might not want to know that."

There are many other mostly genetically predetermined attributes that strongly affect our quality of life, but the difference is that the rest are all obvious and easy to compare, so we can't remain ignorant of them; e.g., height, physical attractiveness, and to some degree wealth. Readjusting expectations and recovering from narcissistic injuries is hard, but for people who don't want to know their IQ, what's causing them to suffer is much more likely to be their anxiety tolerance and ego strength (which you can improve), than it is their intelligence (which you basically can't.)[3] Jordan Peterson has made the interesting comment that people who are more intelligent than the median in their communities unsurprisingly tend to elevate this trait above all others, but (more insightfully) because of the nature of intelligence as something that we use to build a worldview, people become unidimensional about human value and take intelligence as an end in itself rather than one of many traits to be prized, along with, e.g. impulse control or emotional stability, which are certainly not the same thing even if they co-vary. This tendency leads to these people who define themselves as "intelligent" avoiding communities filled with people smarter than themselves, and in so doing, limiting their own progress in life and the amount they can contribute to the world at large. It also leads to the ridiculous convention of clubs for smart people (Mensa.) Is there a club for tall people? No. Well actually yes. But it's not called a club for tall people, it's called the NBA, and they DO something with their tallness. And by golly, come to think of it, there ARE clubs for smart people (physics departments, Google engineering, medical schools, law firms, consulting agencies, etc.)[4]

Two specific reflections on this.

1) While genetics is the single greatest determinant of IQ, it is not the be-all end-all deterministic measure that many fear it is. In particular, "smart" may correlate with, but does certainly not equal, happy, moral, or successful, and furthermore there is an endless list of capacities, tendencies and talents that may correlate somewhat, but certainly not entirely, that determine the chances of success in various paths in life. I suspect that Peterson's unidimensionals get most upset in the U.S., where we most resent anyone telling us that any characteristic outside of our control has any influence over our future, despite the obvious reality.[5] Think of the trigger points in these discussions: race, socioeconomic class, upbringing, genes, the wiring in your brain - somehow the second we turn 18 we should be able to leave all the behind and emerge as an un-caused cause, right? (I wonder how much of the hostility to the very concept of IQ stems from this kind of thinking.) Below I've reproduced a figure in the Vox article (which in turn is reproduced from elsewhere) but what's interesting is how broad some of the bars are. What a broad bar should tell you is that there are more people in that profession (more outliers in absolute terms), and/or that IQ isn't as important. Case in point, protective service workers - intelligence appears to be less of a determinant there than for some of the others. I would expect ability to remain calm and vigilant and tolerate distress is at least as important.



2) As an aside, what Buffet was really saying is that there's an inflection point for the marginal value of IQ points around 120. We should grant that an additional IQ point in 2017 is more likely to benefit you than it was in 1917 - the world is hopefully a truer meritocracy, and a lot more value created by industries requiring intelligence rather than brawn or bravado. But there is still more likely to be an inflection point for the IQ vs wealth graph (as opposed to IQ vs overall utility - see #1 above.)


To the extent that IQ is a proxy for achievement, happiness, and self-worth, then just go try to do the things you're worried about and you will get rapid feedback - i.e., Scott Aaronson's recommendation that you just go try to do physics. "But what if I fail?" Think about it this way. How many people have actually said, "You know, if only I had an IQ test, I would've known better, and I wouldn't have made this massive career commitment that I now can't retreat from without massive damage to my finances, freedom, etc." But - interestingly - people certainly do say things like "If only I'd known X about myself, I would've chosen a different career," where X is something about your utility function, like the value you place on time vs. money vs. freedom, security vs. opportunity, ability to get along with certain personality types, etc. The key is to learn about your own many dimensions and find your selective advantage. How sad is Jeff Bezos that he couldn't keep up with the physics students at Princeton?



[1]If a genie told me I was going to die on a certain date and time from a certain thing, I would enjoy making life difficult for fate. Shark attack in 2022? I will move to the Mojave desert and not come out. Yes, I know, something will happen with a great white shark being transported by air between aquariums, and the plane will blow up and the shark will fall on me or something, but I'm really really going to make the universe work for it. I would grant my wife exclusive rights to my story in advance.

[2]While knowing your death date would help you plan, it would mess up the possibility of insurance, assuming everyone gets such an envelope and knows that everyone else does.

[3]If you're still not convinced that you shouldn't be crushed by your potentially low IQ, then consider that many people smarter than you and me both believe that by the end of this century, machines of far greater intelligence than any human who ever lived will exist, and none of the at-that-point meaningless differences in processing power between us flatworms will matter anymore.

[4]In a forum discussion I once referred to academia, medical schools, etc. as "clubs for smart people" and was immediately told "NO. Those are clubs for people with IQs 120-130." Yikes! I guess this particular Einstein had just cured cancer AND made a killing in the stock market that morning so they had time to police the forums for claims like this.

[5]Social media is not helping this, and I'm not the first to think there's a connection between prevalence of social media and the rise in social anxiety in Millennials. But I propose a specific mechanism which accounts for it, which is the failure of insulation between status hierarchies, or between layers of the same hierarchy. For example, growing up in an outer suburb of a rural state that doesn't touch saltwater, until the early 2000s it was easy to be blissfully unaware of the pecking order of academic, corporate and governmental hierarchies; you went to State U., got a good education, and worked in a nearby town without any sense that people in the Big City or at Corporate HQ were better or smarter. That's no longer the case, and already by age 15 there's no hiding from this reality. (I believe this is the hardest thing about growing up now as opposed to when I grew up.) I also think this explains part of the virulence of the culture wars, as each group, particularly the social conservative bloc in middle America, is suddenly aware that there are people who despise them, and that they're at the bottom of, and being relentlessly judged by, this status hierarchy they've suddenly noticed and which is ruled by exactly the wrong kind of people. (Contexts with overlapping status hierarchies would therefore be expected to improve happiness at least in the short term, and status hierarchy monoculture to make it worse; e.g. North Korea; also, professional training programs where you're at the bottom of the totem pole, spend all your time with people at the program, and have no social contacts outside the program.)]

Brands Signal Identity: What About Profession?

Robin Hanson posits, based on the peculiar ineffectiveness of advertising, that in fact brands signal identity. It's been observed that we're seeing wealthy countries move from an identity model where identity is determined by what we produce to one where we choose how to signal it based on what we consume. Concretely:  relative to 30 years ago, today you're less likely to hear someone characterize herself as an accountant (or she will do so to less of a degree) than as a wine connoisseuse, Lady Gaga fan, etc.

There is a general argument, most famously made by Tyler Cowen, that economic growth in wealthy countries will remain indefinitely sluggish relative to previous decades because there is a great stagnation, possibly because we're now wealthy enough to turn non-productively inward. A consumption-based identity accords well with that idea.

Surfing as Signalling

Recently I learned to surf. And I'll tell you what, I was pretty pissed at how many kooks there were at my break yesterday. (Just kidding.) But seriously, it was pretty flat, which left me with plenty of time to wonder why people surf. I haven't seen a rigorous quantitative survey, but from my own discussions, it seems to be some combination of it's fun, and the "lifestyle". This raises questions, most of which have obvious answers, but which people in the surf community nonetheless don't usually seem to address directly:


1) If it's really just for fun and lifestyle, then why do such things as surf competitions exist? Why would anyone care to enter them, unless status was involved? (An unrefined reader might also be tempted to ask why someone would blog about the experience. But you're not such a philistine as to ask such an uninteresting question.)

2) Heterosexual women seem often to be attracted to heterosexual males who surf. This would seem to be a benefit of the lifestyle. So why are males who surf so coy about explicitly citing this reason? (Yes, there are female surfers but they're in the minority, although that I'm aware of there's no taboo or pressure against women who would otherwise be interested in surfing. In the lineup I would estimate it was less than 10% and this seems ballpark for what I've noticed before. If males are using surfing to signal fitness to females, then the gender disparity makes more sense.)

3) It seems strange that, for the combined total of less than 1 minute per hour you're likely to be standing on their board, people are willing to take hours out of their day, secure the equipment to the car before and after, clean off the wetsuit, etc. There are other forms of recreation where the activity itself is less than half the time doing it, but even (for example) the most crowded East Coast ski resort features a better activity-to-prep time ratio. It could be that just relaxing on the board in the water is part of the reward, or (referring to #2) being seen going back and forth with the equipment, to signal you surf.


There is certainly an opportunity to do some North San Diego County cultural anthropology here. Every time I'm in Encinitas I can't help but think there must be a PhD thesis waiting.

Film Quality vs. Profit: Is There Any Connection, and Does Talent Matter?

Bottom line: film studios are profit-making entities. Film quality as assessed by critics does not seem to closely correlate with profits. So do studios care about quality, and if so, why? To what extent do directors and actors affect critical evaluation and profit, and how is such an effect mediated? At times the film industry behaves inconsistently and seems to make decisions in terms of things other than profit. There are clear analogies to be made with the sports business, in terms of apparent paradoxes that can be resolved by being reminded that profit and winning games are not the same thing.

An article on Slate contains a Rotten Tomatoes-based gadget that tracks the performance, as measured by critical reception, of directors and actors over the last 25 years. (This choice of metric is important. The first question should be more obvious than it is: why should they use critical reception your yardstick? Would studios rather work with a Michael Bay, a director who reliably produces top-selling shiny shoot-em-ups, or a Terry Gilliam, who makes movies which are a tremendous joy to watch, and well-received critically - and which are tremendously expensive and run over budget and schedule? Now you see what I'm getting at. Most industries don't have the opportunity to lose focus on profit after getting confused by the artistic value of their products.) In the same way, a sports franchise with loyal fans can afford to have losing seasons, at least for a while, as long as the team can keep those fans filling seats, glued to TV sets to see commercials, and buying branded jerseys.

Reading through the Slate article about this new career-tracker gadget, you will note that John Ratzenberger (Cliff from Cheers) is the "winning" American actor. That is to say, he is the American actor who has made 10 or more films since 1986 whose films' average ratings were rated the highest by critics, at 76.1%. Compare to Chuck Norris, the worst actor, for whom the same statistic 18.4%.


"It's over, Mr. Anderson...I mean Prime." You'll get it in a second.

This might seem strange because Chuck Norris would seem to have more name recognition than John Ratzenberger, and (at a guess) I bet commands a higher quote. Also interesting is that in terms of total gross of films-appeared-in, the top actor in the United States is - wait for it - Frank Welker! You know, Frank Welker, the original voice of Megatron? In 2006 he passed Samuel L. Jackson with a career gross of US$4.9 billion. Of course in the U.S. we don't regard seiyuu as a separate career, as they do in Japan.


Why Would Studios, or Directors, or Actors Care About Ratings?

If you assume that critical ratings (i.e. quality) and profits are the same thing, then even the few statistics above present a real puzzle. Of course if commercial culture has taught is anything, it's that the just-stated assumption is a very false one, hence the existence of movies like Star Crash and Transmorphers (see point #3 here), which have little delusion about themselves as art but are safe bets as business propositions. At the very least there is likely to be a diminishing return on profits by improving critical perception of quality; a dollar you spend on a movie budget to raise it from just-okay to not bad might bring back more sales than a dollar that raises it from pretty good to critically stellar. Even if the critics care enough to spend a dollar more, the broader film-consuming public might not. As in sports, the film industry's product has a cultural value separate from its sales value, and because the cultural value is more salient to the public, film consumers confuse the two - just as sports consumers are puzzled about bowls and college ratings. But the film industry usually has its head screwed on straight and is focused on the real prize; they're (presumably) composed of materially self-interested agents and is not confused by this. Right?

Not necessarily. On its face the film industry would seem to be maximizing something besides profit, at least some of the time. Assuming Frank Welker's career-film-gross indicates a real contribution to films, and because as a voice actor you could probably get him to work for less than a big screen actor, then it would seem to be a no-brainer to keep using Welker in the Transformers franchise - as opposed to, say, Hugo Weaving, who will undoubtedly cost more and cut into the bottom line. But they still went with Weaving. (Now you get the little joke in the caption above.) What's the justification in cases like this? Did Weaving really want the part, and got his agent to call in a big favor to the studio to get him? Is the studio afraid of looking cheap by keeping the old-series voice actor, and signaling financial weakness to the rest of the industry? Did they actually project how many more tickets and rentals they would get from people who liked the Matrix, to prove that he would pay for himself? Or is it even less rational than that, and people at the studio and film crew just insist on having more prestigious people to associate with (like Weaving) and they're effectively willing to trade away profits to bask in his company? I have nothing against Weaving or his performance in Transformers, but decisions like these are curious from a financial standpoint, and they raise question about what's really being maximized.


Smart, i.e. rationally self-interested studios that win best picture would always auction these off, or melt them down for scrap. Imagine the rational, curmudgeonly studio exec. "Who cares if the academy liked it. I just want to make sure winning this thing doesn't hurt sales."

Going further, you wonder why a studio ever bothers at all with trying to get good critical reception. Yes, the Pixar movies that Ratzenberger is in have done well financially and tend to be highly rated by critics, but Chuck Norris's movies have been financially successful - but only financially successful. If you can sell tickets when Roger Ebert is bashing you, who cares? It's reasonable to think there's some negative impact on sales if the media hates you, but it would be interesting to see the actual relationship. How to measure? Movies are made for different amounts and intended to bring in different amounts; so perhaps compare on one hand each film's profits as a percentage of the film's budget, versus its Rotten Tomatoes average on the other. Either there will be some relationship between the two - or there will be none, or it will be too noisy to care about the correlation. If there's not a clear relationship between critical opinion and sales (or there's one that's grossly non-linear) it's worth asking what the value of the critics is, to the industry and to the public. To make sure we know what their film school wants us to like?

Frank Welker's take-earned-by-films-I've-been-in statistic raises another question. What's the average per film, and more crucially, to what degree was that Welker's influence? There's probably an 82 year-old key grip somewhere with a spreadsheet showing how his own takes are higher than Welker's. But even if you're looking at the average takes as opposed to absolute, what do you compare to? We don't know how much the movie would have made had X been in it instead of Y, and doing an average % take relative to budget wouldn't give us a comparison. That is, even if Welker has a good average %, how do we know that's higher than what the movies would have made otherwise? What counterpart would we use? (Even if we solved that, this is only correlation; the actor might just pick good-selling movies, as opposed to making them good-selling.) If there are measurable effects, do actors or directors on average have more impact on quality and/or take? Analogously, analyze NBA teams, and you'll find that on average their records from year to year are more closely related to who's coaching than who's playing; when I did this, I didn't investigate whether this is from recruiting skill or on-the-court coaching.

Finally, and I have no proposal for how to measure this, even if there are measurable effects from a certain actor appearing in the film, what mediates that? Is the public going because they think they'll get a good performance, or do they just like the actor because they're familiar with him or her? The fact that studios are willing to pay a premium for well-known actors instead of just using unknowns that can act just as well as the people who had a break (which comprise a large portion of the LA population) suggests that the studios believe familiarity is at least part of the effect.

Of course we might assume big studios investing tens or hundreds of millions in projects aren't stupid; they're businesses looking for an ROI, and they must already doing something like these analyses. Then again that assumes that their decision-making process is profit-maximizing, when the choice of actors as discussed above strongly suggests otherwise (status signaling? ego-stroking by association with celebrities vs. unknown actors? quality, among LA's artistic idealists?)

Depressed by how all description of how much the creation of art is dictated by eonomic considerations? Then move to a much less capital-intensive endeavor with smaller teams, like writing. One person risking only their solo time at a keyboard can and does usually produce more innovation.

In conclusion: I'm not the curmudgeon about the value of film quality that you might assume from this post. In fact I'm a huge Darren Aronofsky fan and I'm very much looking forward to his next film Human Nature, which will star George Clooney. But with The Fountain (easily my favorite film of the last decade) Aronofsky came perilously close to Gilliam territory in terms of his production stopping and starting again. I'm glad that he's able to keep making high-quality films but I recognize that he's no doubt compromising what would have been an even better film, all the time, for business purposes. But the mystery remains about why studios care to invest in films like his at all. Whatever un-focused fuzzy calculations distract them from profit for long enough to fund projects like this, I'm glad.

Find the Rotten Tomatoes career-tracker here.

The Dialect of the Bad Stripe

The Bad Stripe as I've marked it out before (most recent here) is in many ways a boundary or transition zone between North and South, for example in social networks and religion. It turns out that it's a separate dialect zone too. The map can't be embedded well so click through to this dialect map of North American English, and you'll see that the Bad Stripe largely overlaps with the non-Texas part of the Inland South zone.

In many other systems (ecology and social networks) being at a phase transition is good, i.e. tidepools, savannas near jungles, being the only person who speaks both languages of two adjacent and relatively wealthy populations, etc. If the repeatedly observed "boundariness" of the Bad Stripe is not a coincidence or a historical accident, it could be that either the principle is reverse here, or that some aspects of the Bad Stripe are caused by the other negative conditions that previously obtained.

Cultures Cannot Suffer

Cultures cannot suffer. Therefore it is senseless and even harmful to talk about actions that result in harm to or destruction of cultures as immoral. This places a higher value on protecting perceived qualities of an inanimate entity than on preventing the suffering of conscious human beings. There is and can be no innate tragedy in the death of a culture or language apart from the suffering it causes to individual human beings.

The suffering caused by a culture's death or change can happen for various reasons. At the most basic level, adult humans don't appreciate the disruption involved with learning new social norms; it's just a pain. But there are additional and unnecessary causes of suffering that are built into the values of some cultures: namely, an explicit and conscious value that preserving the culture is itself innately good; and that if the culture were to change or disappear, it would be a moral disaster.

What prompted this post was Katja Grace's discussion regarding deliberately bringing up children to speak minority languages, thereby limiting their social contact with the rest of the world, "Agreeable Ways to Disable Your Children". (There are links to far more controversial proposals that have actually occurred in the real world.) By teaching children to be monolingual in an obscure language within a broader nation-state, parents are preserving their language, but limiting (disabling?) their children. Humans do indeed sometimes keep their children isolated in ingroups and one of the best insulation methods is by teaching them only the ingroup's language. This is one example where a moral value about preserving culture is inconsistent with preventing individual suffering. The language doesn't care that you preserved it; if you force yourself to perpetuate, you're just making it harder on yourself, and your children.

There is a more general argument to be made here, that more conservative, less open cultures which most strongly harbor an explicit value of preserving themselves for their own sake are doing something similar to their members by limiting them and making them suffer unnecessarily.

To make this slightly more concrete, imagine two cultures which differ in cultural conservatism. Culture A is a mercantile civilization that is frequently changed by its people's contact with foreign lands; they shrug and adopt the food and ideas of the people they meet. Culture B on the other side of the river is more conservative, with an explicit and conscious moral sense that their culture is intrinsically valuable, and that if it were ever lost, it would be the end of the world. Culture B constantly fights the advance of the new and its people wring their hands and gnash their teeth at the strange food and ideas polluting the next generation. In the end the material conditions of both places are the same, but the people in Culture B have suffered more, and unnecessarily. (If nation-states are cultures, then I would put the U.S. in Culture A's category. We've changed far more than we realize due to contact with other cultures, and I expect in 50-100 years we'll be, for example, far more Asian than we are now. And because we're an A-Culture, it fortunately won't bother us that much.)

On the other hand, culture is not just noise; cultural values can be better or worse in their impact on material well-being, so there is potentially still bad news in culture change beyond just the degree to which the culture causes its members to consciously decry change. But again the change or loss of these values must be evaluated only with regard to the effect on individual humans. It's tempting to object that we're still assuming values here in order to evaluate their worth. But there is a baseline that exists independent of acculturation, and it's composed of animal essentials - food, shelter, sex, and status.

[Added later: The Wall Street Journal publishes this article about an Eyak language preservation enthusiast. To put it bluntly: what is the value of this work, to Eyak-descendants or anyone else? Thanks to Thurston for the pointer.]

One Way to Tell Your Workplace Has a Toxic Environment

I consulted at a number of biotech companies in my pre-med-school life and I was fortunate that most of them were great places to work with good people. Two in particular were not. The distasteful reality I noticed at both of them was that it wasn't possible to get anything done without being a member of political alliances. That alone is not uncommon at companies (sadly enough) but the important feature here is that at a truly toxic company, these alliances are based on blood relations or shared ethnic background. Ugly, but unfortunately real - and it unfortunately makes sense. In a company that lacks the corporate equivalent of rule-of-law, life is unpredictable, and the only relationships with any degree of trust are those deeply-imprinted connections of family or culture, because they're not within your power to consciously opt out of.

Needless to say, I didn't spend much time at either company, and neither did very well. One no longer exists, and the other is about to de-list from its exchange.

Economic Impact: If Not Religion, Then Culture?

[Via Organizations and Markets.]

Max Weber famously conjectured that something called the Protestant Work Ethic was responsible for the industrial output of German-speaking workers. For as much as this hypothesis has become a cliche, it's attracted appropriate scrutiny. For example, in the excellent Mystery of Capital, Hernando DeSoto openly scoffed at the idea, turning to Japan as one counterexample. (As an aside: Japan is an excellent counterexample for many, many theories about economics, development, culture and religion, and one which is often inexplicably ignored by Westerners. Fortunately for accurate social science, it's getting much harder to miss the rise of Japan and the rest of East Asia.)

We now have solid quantitative evidence that DeSoto and other doubters were right. Davide Cantoni at Harvard has looked back at historical data from the German-speaking statelets of the Holy Roman Empire and shown no effect of religion on economic growth.

The question remains: what does explain industrial successes of this region, or of one region relative to another? One argument is that other aspects of culture are what matter, since religion and government differed between the German states.