Alan Jacobs

Perhaps our most dangerous bias is that we naturally assume that everyone else is more susceptible to thinking errors, a tendency known as the “bias blind spot.” This “meta-bias” is rooted in our ability to spot systematic mistakes in the decisions of others—we excel at noticing the flaws of friends—and inability to spot those same mistakes in ourselves. Although the bias blind spot itself isn’t a new concept, West’s latest paper demonstrates that it applies to every single bias under consideration, from anchoring to so-called “framing effects.” In each instance, we readily forgive our own minds but look harshly upon the minds of other people.

And here’s the upsetting punch line: intelligence seems to make things worse. The scientists gave the students four measures of “cognitive sophistication.” As they report in the paper, all four of the measures showed positive correlations, “indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” This trend held for many of the specific biases, indicating that smarter people (at least as measured by S.A.T. scores) and those more likely to engage in deliberation were slightly more vulnerable to common mental mistakes.

I love my flip phone paradoxically because I don’t actually love it. Like many things I don’t love, I don’t look at it often. Sure, I excitedly talk about it when a cute girl at a bar has the same exact relic, but I don’t paw at it endlessly when I’m bored or have a spare minute, and that’s not because I’m a cool, unattached person: It’s simply because there’s nothing to do on a flip phone. My phone has never once obstructed me from noticing my surroundings for more than 15 seconds. I’ve never ”tweeted” on my phone. I don’t have to compulsively check it, because when I get a text or a call, it will vibrate and I will tend to it. It also has this really neat function that displays the time on the front of it, saving me from having to wear a cumbersome watch. I don’t even need a data plan.

Texting is one of the most advanced features the flip phone can handle, and even that gets its own unique little spin you can’t find anywhere else. My mobile can only receive 160 characters per text, so when I receive long messages, they are broken up in chunks, which become like little cliff hangers. Sometimes I have no idea if someone is mad at me or pleased with me based on the first half of their text, and the 20 seconds it takes to get the second half is breathless. I imagine it’s how Alexander Graham Bell felt waiting for the first return phone call. And if you think I’m off by several orders of magnitude, you have obviously never received a lengthy text from a girl whom you just spilled paella all over that the first installment ends in “…just make sure y….” Still gives me chills.

Of a surfing expert with Asperger’s, Lehrer writes, “Clay’s ability to innovate in surfing is rooted in a defining feature of his mental disorder.” Is Lehrer saying that Clay’s surfing expertise is the result of his disease, or merely that certain properties of the disease may lead to success in fields like surfing? Are there an unusually high number of surfers who suffer from Asperger’s? We are not further enlightened.

Lehrer may want us to believe that creativity is essentially abnormal, medically or socially or intellectually; but the history of creativity is riddled with geniuses who worked within the conventions and in the centers. So, perhaps sensing that he has made himself a hostage to fortune, Lehrer also assures us that sometimes rest and relaxation, or outsider status, or a lack of knowledge, is not really the secret to creativity. Sometimes the secret is, in fact, hard thinking. In a brief discussion of Auden, he writes that “September 1, 1939,” feels as if “it were composed on the back of a cocktail napkin,” but assures us that this “ease” is an illusion, and that the poem required a lot of hard work. This is one of the features of Lehrer’s genre: make an absurd claim, and then act as if you alone have the insight to knock it down. It is ridiculous and condescending to conclude from even a perfunctory reading of Auden’s poem that it could have been jotted down on a cocktail napkin. Lehrer goes on to say that sometimes inventions do not come until one can “think no more,” and that an obsessive focus is crucial. Uh-huh. So the lesson of Lehrer’s hot book is this: creativity comes from intense thinking, or it doesn’t.

It’s because we love it. We love grinding.

We cannot get enough of it.

Why? Because there’s something enormously comforting about grinding. It offers a completely straightforward relationship between work and reward. When you log into WoW, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if you just plant your ass in that chair for long enough, you’ll level up. It doesn’t require skill. It just requires putting in the time. Play 10 hours, you’ll do better; play 50, you’ll do better yet; and yet more so with 500 hours.

The thing is, almost no arenas of human endeavor work like this. Many are precisely the opposite, in fact. When you go to your job at the office, there’s little or no linkage between effort and achievement: You slave like a madman all year long, only to watch the glad-handing frat guy hired two months ago get promoted above you. And if you’re a really serious nerd, the logic that governs interpersonal relationships – marriage, kids, your parents – is even more abstruse: Things can actually get worse the more time and effort you put into them.

But grinding? Grinding always works. Always. You get a gold star just for showing up. This is a quietly joyful experience. It feeds our souls, as well as our sense of justice and fair play. We grind because we can’t believe what a totally awesome deal we’re getting handed here, often the first time in our entire suck-ass put-upon lives.

My students, like Allan Bloom’s, live inside music. Their musical lives may well be their spiritual lives. It is hard to say, because they don’t talk about music very eagerly. In class I can get a conversation going about God with no problem. And students love talking about alcohol and its effects on the human mind and spirit, theirs in particular. A conversation about sex is easy to start and quickly goes way further than I’d imagine—and sometimes further than I want. But try asking about music.

Students listen to it for hours a day. They trot around the university grounds with headphones on; they plug into their tunes when they sit at their computers. Music, usually rap, is the iron-hard heart of their parties. There is surely a competition, at least among English-major types, about who listens to the most recondite bands. Sometimes students name them in discussions: the Fruit Bats, the Shins (now no longer obscure), Fatkid Dodgeball, Pimp the Cat, Full Throttle Aristotle, Disgruntled Sherpa Project. I sometimes make up a few myself and throw them into the mix.

But when I ask what role music plays in their lives or why they listen to what they do, there is silence. When I tell them what Plato had to say about music and that he’d disapprove of almost everything they listen to for being far too raucous, far too stirring, far too close to anarchy, they bristle and tell me that Plato is wrong. I ask them if listening to hard-core rap might influence their attitudes toward sex and money—major themes in rap, of course. They tell me that I’m being silly—which to me is a little like saying that the food you eat has nothing to do with how your body feels and how it functions.

Probably the best story about what went wrong with Flickr is this one at Gizmodo, but I’m not sure the Yahoo purchase is related to my own situation. I don’t know what Flickr’s customer service was like before Yahoo stepped in.

Here’s what happened to me: about six months ago a rather disturbed – or, to put it more accurately, complete bonkers – Flickr user decided that I was using one of his images without giving him proper credit. As it happened, I had not used any image of his in any way whatsoever, a point he later acknowledged to be true, but in the meantime he bombarded my Flickr mail with accusations and threats, and, in addition, encouraged everyone he knew to do the same. So I got a load of abusive and threatening messages on Flickr mail, at one of my email addresses, and as comments on blogs I write for. Both his accusations and his incitement to others were obvious violations of Flickr’s terms of service, but when I complained to Flickr they didn’t even acknowledge my emails, much less take appropriate action. That would be negligent in any case, but I was a Pro (i.e., paying) user: surely you’d think that they’d want to keep paying users happy, or at least provide some kind of response to them. But no.

So, with renewal of my Pro account coming up, I decided to delete the whole thing. Interestingly, when you decide to delete your account Flickr not only doesn’t ask you to explain your reasons, they don’t even give you a venue for doing so. Apparently they’re quite pleased to lose customers.

P.S. You want to know why I say the guy is bonkers? When he was finally forced to admit that he had accused me falsely, he insisted that I deserved all the abuse from him and his online posse because I had failed to be sufficiently sympathetic to the pain he felt at having one of his images used without his permission.

Chomsky: And here comes Bilbo Baggins. Now, this is, to my mind, where the story begins to reveal its deeper truths. In the books we learn that Saruman was spying on Gandalf for years. And he wondered why Gandalf was traveling so incessantly to the Shire. As Tolkien later establishes, the Shire’s surfeit of pipe-weed is one of the major reasons for Gandalf’s continued visits.

Zinn: You view the conflict as being primarily about pipe-weed, do you not?

Chomsky: Well, what we see here, in Hobbiton, farmers tilling crops. The thing to remember is that the crop they are tilling is, in fact, pipe-weed, an addictive drug transported and sold throughout Middle Earth for great profit.

Zinn: This is absolutely established in the books. Pipe-weed is something all the Hobbits abuse. Gandalf is smoking it constantly. You are correct when you point out that Middle Earth depends on pipe-weed in some crucial sense, but I think you may be overstating its importance. Clearly the war is not based only on the Shire’s pipe-weed. Rohan and Gondor’s unceasing hunger for war is a larger culprit, I would say.

Chomsky: But without the pipe-weed, Middle Earth would fall apart. Saruman is trying to break up Gandalf’s pipe-weed ring. He’s trying to divert it.

Zinn: Well, you know, it would be manifestly difficult to believe in magic rings unless everyone was high on pipe-weed. So it is in Gandalf’s interest to keep Middle Earth hooked.

And so, after exchanging a few emails, I found myself at the home of the man who owns and operates the only functional Monotype caster in the country. After chatting for a while about hyphenation and justification (my knowledge of which was woefully inadequate) Harry showed me around the press itself. His office was an organised chaos of computers and printing paraphernalia of varying vintage, and as we sat down at a modern PC he explained to me how the Chepman & Myllar Press differed from a traditional Monotype shop. The text is set, he said, not by a Monotype keyboard but by computer.[11]

I’m ashamed to say that it took me some time to grasp this. When I finally did so, I was intrigued; when Mr McIntosh demonstrated it to me, I was flabbergasted.

Most of all, [Žižek] can’t stand students. “Absolutely. I was shocked, for example, once, a student approached me in the US, when I was still teaching a class – which I will never do again – and he told me: ‘You know, professor, it interested me what you were saying yesterday, and I thought, I don’t know what my paper should be about. Could you please give me some more thoughts and then maybe some idea will pop up.’ F**k him! Who I am to do that?”

Žižek has had to quit most of his teaching posts in Europe and America, to get away from these intolerable students. “I especially hate when they come to me with personal problems. My standard line is: ‘Look at me, look at my tics, don’t you see that I’m mad? How can you even think about asking a mad man like me to help you in personal problems, no?’” You can see what he means, for Žižek cuts a fairly startling physical figure – like a grizzly bear, pawing wildly at his face, sniffing and snuffling and gesticulating between every syllable. “But it doesn’t work! They still trust me. And I hate this because – this is what I don’t like about American society – I don’t like this openness, like when you meet a guy for the first time, and he’s starting to tell you about his sex life. I hate this, I hate this!”

I have to laugh at this, because Žižek brings up his sex life within moments of our first meeting.

Malcolm turned five years old yesterday. Here he is on the day we brought him home. Seems like about a year ago.