A scholar’s business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can’t have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having.
Amid the tiny din of two-hundred micturating rodents, Ralph X. Bumblefutz goggled in disbelief at a discovery that would forever lay waste to the West’s most cherished ideas about incontinence. It was a clear Autumn morning in 1974, in a cluttered basement laboratory occupying a disused corner of the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, and pants would never be the same. But before we can come to terms with Bumblefutz and his paradigm-exploding diapered hamsters, we must travel in time to 14th-century Tuscany and confront the mystery of a beloved Dominican friar hanged to death for frock-soiling. …O God! What hath Gladwell wrought?! Plenty of “ideas non-fiction” editors think this hype is what readers want. And maybe they do want this. Maybe editors know readers. But not this one. No, not me. I swear to sweet Moses I’m sick unto death of the anecdote-choked, aha!-hunting ,“What the New Science of Blah Tells Us about Blech,” book-length collection of pop-sci features articles.
A well-off, very successful, and very well-known science fiction novelist raising $500,000 to build a video game engine seems very far from the high-flying promises of the crowdfunding world. After all, [Neal] Stephenson could easily pay for this out of pocket or get a bank to loan him the money. He’s the reverse of someone who needs access to the democratic power of social finance. And yet realistically, it’s almost the ideal crowfunding pitch. Who better to raise funds on this basis than someone who’s already famous? It just so happens that “famous” and “already has a lot of money” are often pretty closely correlated.
excellence-proofed
The fact that I didn't think I heard a single interesting bar of music from the forty or so acts I caught or overheard at Creation shouldn't be read as a knock on the acts themselves, much less as contempt for the underlying notion of Christians playing rock. These were not Christian bands, you see; these were Christian rock bands. The key to digging this scene lies in that one syllable distinction. Christian rock is a genre that exists to edify and make money off of evangelical Christians. It's message music for listeners who know the message cold, and, what's more, it operates under a perceived responsibility — one the artists embrace — to "reach people." As such, it rewards both obviousness and maximum palatability (the artists would say clarity), which in turn means parasitism…. Every successful crappy secular group has its Christian offbrand, and that's proper, because culturally speaking, it's supposed to serve as a standin for, not an alternative to or an improvement on, those very groups. In this it succeeds wonderfully. If you think it profoundly sucks, that's because your priorities are not its priorities; you want to hear something cool and new, it needs to play something proven to please … while praising Jesus Christ. That's Christian rock. A Christian band, on the other hand, is just a band that has more than one Christian in it.… And here, if I can drop the openminded pretense real quick, is where the stickier problem of actually being any good comes in, because a question that must be asked is whether a hardcore Christian who turns 19 and finds he or she can write first rate songs (someone like Damien Jurado) would ever have anything whatsoever to do with Christian rock. Talent tends to come hand in hand with a certain base level of subtlety. And believe it or not, the Christian rock establishment sometimes expresses a kind of resigned approval of the way groups like U2 or Switchfoot (who played Creation while I was there and had a monster secular radio hit at the time with “Meant to Live” but whose management wouldn't allow them to be photographed onstage) take quiet pains to distance themselves from any unambiguous Jesus loving, recognizing that this is the surest way to connect with the world (you know that's how they refer to us, right We're “of the world”). So it's possible — and indeed seems likely — that Christian rock is a musical genre, the only one I can think of, that has excellence-proofed itself.
John Jeremiah Sullivan, “Upon This Rock,” GQ 2004. This is a pretty famous essay, and rightly so. A good many Christians know of it, and know what he means in this passage I’ve quoted about excellence-proofing, but I’m just not sure it’s possible for us to meditate too much on what Sullivan says here. In the last few days I’ve found myself in dialogue with some people who are trying to think in serious ways about what it might mean to engage as faithful Jews with a digital world. I wrote about my encounters in two pieces for the Technology channel of The Atlantic, here and here. The approaches are rather different, and while I think that there could be some fruitful collaboration among these people, I don’t know that it’s going to happen; but in any case, what struck me about both approaches is how grounded they are in distinctive practices of the Jewish faith. One might be on the Orthodox end of the spectrum, and the other closer to the Reformed end, but all the people involved seem to be thinking as Jews. This is something that I often find to be missing from the technological practices of my fellow Christians. I’m sure there must be innovative stuff out there, truly and deeply grounded in distinctive Christian practices, but it’s hard for me to find. In many ways no point could be more familiar: Church buildings look just like ordinary civic auditoriums — indeed they are auditoriums; Christian books are designed to look like whatever books happen to be popular at the time, and follow the same titling practices; Christians dress like whomever they want to imitate socially; and so on. Christian colleges, like the one I teach at, have a curricular structure that exactly replicates that of secular institutions, just with slightly varying proportions of requirements. We all know how this works, and we know that there are — or at least can be — good reasons for it. But this way of doing business has become our default, and that’s not healthy. And it’s especially discouraging to me when I see people who know the emerging tech world well, and have good education and some technical skills, and (most important) have the opportunity to innovate, instead choosing the same imitative patterns that lead, inevitably, to excellence-proofing themselves. Take, as just one example, the series of videos produced by the smart and committed people at Q: They’re imitation TED talks. Pure and simple, nothing but. Same staging, same camera angles, same length. They seem to be designed to make stray viewers think that they are watching TED talks.
Can’t we do better than this? Can’t we back up a step or two, and instead of asking “What currently cool technologies can we copy?” ask “What are our core convictions and core practices, and what existing technologies best support them?” And maybe even ask this more challenging question: “What if the existing technologies don’t serve our needs very well? How can we acquire the imagination, the technical chops, and the sheer courage to roll our own instead of choosing from a pre-existing menu of options?” It’s better — far better — to risk abject failure than to choose a safely imitative course that makes excellence impossible by design.
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.