Ostensibly About Stories And Narratives

My long form blog. I was supposed to talk mainly about how stories and narratives shape our life, but I'm bad at sticking to one topic. Even one that broad. Posts will be on whatever I find interesting at the time, spruced up with occasional stories about the shenanigans I sometimes get up to. Updates whenever Beeminder forces me to, currently on Thursdays before midnight. I make shorter posts and reblog things under the name Nano Is Huge.

[storiesandnarratives]

Coalition Making, Coalition Breaking

We’ve all heard that in the US, Donald Trump is leading in polls among likely Republican voters.

But did you know that in Canada, Kevin O’Leary stands tied with Peter MacKay? Kevin O’Leary is almost a Canadian Donald Trump, a brash, anti-establishment businessman who became a household name by starring in a popular TV show. Peter MacKay led the Progressive Conservative party before its merger with Steven Harper’s Canadian Alliance and has held a variety of cabinet positions over the past decade. From the sidelines, Preston Manning practically begs the party he helped create to pick a leader who does more than communicate and entertain.

Right-wing parties are starting to deal with a problem that’s plague parties on the left for a while: the party intellectuals are out of step with the rank and file.

When I feel like shocking someone, I ask them if they know where the BNP’s support comes from. There’s a common (mis)conception that the support for so called far-right parties like the BNP largely come from Tories who don’t find their party radical enough. And certainly, they draw some support from that quarter. But it’s been known (although largely unacknowledged) for quite some time that the BNP gets its support largely from disaffected labour supporters. Two elections ago, someone decided to check this. They found that 59% of BNP supporters felt like labour used to care about them, but no longer does.

I see some of this tension in my own life. My friends are largely drawn from well-educated leftist circles – as you’d expect from a leftist who just graduated from university. My parents are educated, but they’re also somewhat traditional Catholics who have unionized jobs. They vote similarly to my friends, but their beliefs about what constitutes right behaviour are radically different. My friends are more queer and diverse than Canada as a whole. A few of us are in non-monogamous relationships. My parents didn’t take the whole poly thing well and I still haven’t told them that I make out with men from time to time. As far as I know, they have no friends who are queer and no friends who aren’t white.

If casual racism is avoided in my parents’ house, it’s out a belief that it’s a harmless but impolite thing. It’s seen as less worthy of rebuke than swearing.

I’m fairly certain that my parents have a reactionary streak. They care deeply about income inequality (and feel compelled to by their Catholic faith), but I think they believe that the parties they vote for are pushing the country in the wrong social direction. They see a country becoming more godless, queerer, less accepting of traditional gender roles and ideas of marriage and they really don’t like the changes.

The left has been running this balancing acts for a few decades. We have our big tent coalition: socially conservative unionized workers, socially conservative immigrants, university students and other young people, and socially liberal well-educated urban professionals. This group largely holds together, but you can see how it may lose members to other parties from time to time. Unionized workers go to parties that oppose immigration. Socially conservative immigrants go to parties with social platforms more in line with their values. Well-educated urban professionals go to parties that can promise to reduce their tax burden. Aside from an insignificant number of leftist intellectuals, the core constituency of the big tent left is young people.

The problem that the Conservative party of Canada and the Republican Party are now facing is similar to the one faced by the left, but perhaps direr: a large portion of their base is fed up with responsible conservatism.

As in the case of the ex-labour members in BNP, there is a sense among many members of the conservative grassroots that society is moving in the wrong direction and their party leaders care more about being respectable than standing up for their needs. The left has succeeded in moving the Overton Window such that many of the beliefs of the grassroots are not acceptable in polite society, essentially locking them out of mass media, but not out of informal discussion.

Basically, it’s becoming harder and harder to be openly sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic or transphobic.

The men of the conservative grassroots (and this is a movement largely of men) have seen erosion in their societal power. It used to be the deal that you could work hard and support a family on your salary.  Now this is impossible. These men are lashing out on a society they feel has broken its promise to them, as well as all the symptoms of this change.

Responsible conservatism involves staying within the Overton window. In Canada, it also involves a certain amount of belief that the government can have a place at the table in solving collective action problems because as a whole Canadians are much more willing to trust the government to solve those problems for us.

The important point is the Overton window. You’ll note that several establishment Republican candidates have been clobbered in the polls because they’ve stood up to Trump’s disgusting rhetoric on Islam. Similar rhetoric from Canadian politicians may have cost the Conservatives the election – even as it played very well with their base.

The left went through these convulsions when we listened to our intellectuals and activists and began our project of shifting the Overton Window. This is the same project is what the right derisively refers to as “political correctness”. Insofar as “political correctness” improves outcomes that we care about, it seems mainly to revolve around making people feel more comfortable in society (a worthy goal in itself, but probably not enough by itself to unwind the massive persistent marginalization that many groups face).

But from a cynical perspective, there’s another benefit to pushing the Overton window in this direction, at least at a measured pace: we can splinter conservative coalitions.

There will be a certain population of intellectual conservatives who will willingly follow our lead in projects like this, because they care want to be respectable. If we force respectability to mean certain things, they’ll feel compelled to follow. There were very few mainstream (i.e. non-Tea Party) Republicans willing to back Trump when he called Mexicans rapists. If we can set these respectable conservatives at odds with other members of their coalitions, we weaken the electoral strength of the coalition overall.

These “respectable” conservatives may not represent a large part of the conservative constituency, but they do represent a certain proportion of it. And they’re the proportion peddling the rhetoric that can convince some of the swing voters to join their coalition (for example, the well educated professional and students we talked about earlier). Split them from the rest of their coalition and not only do we reduce the overall right wing vote share, we hurt their ability to woo centrists.

There’s a flip side to this of course. Move too fast and we risk helping parties like the BNP or Christian Heritage.

Coalition making and coalition breaking tend to happen by accident. Perhaps its time that activists began giving some thought to how we can strengthen our own coalition while weakening those of our political opponents.

[storiesandnarratives]

The Fraught Thermodynamics of Grey Goo

In one of my very first university classes, a student asked the professor teaching Introduction to Nanotechnology if grey goo would ever be a serious threat. The professor laughed at him and moved on with the lecture.

That professor was an ass. But I’ve slowly come to understand why he scoffed at the very idea of grey goo. The thermodynamic deck is stacked against it. Let’s see why.

Problem 1: Exothermic Reactions

An exothermic reaction is a reaction that releases energy. Fire is an exothermic reaction. Rust is an exothermic reaction. The breakdown of sugar in ATP in our cells is an exothermic reaction.

If grey goo tended to be at a lower energy state than the materials it normally incorporated into itself, its replication would be an exothermic reaction. This would be good for the grey goo – exothermic reactions don’t need a supply of outside energy to be self-sustaining.

But just because a reaction is exothermic doesn’t mean it’s quick. Rusting is an exothermic reaction, but without water to speed things along it can take quite a long time. Fast reactions present a completely different problem.

Imagine exothermic grey goo is eating your house. The cloud of grey goo converts almost the whole thing to a lower energy state – itself.

This is basically equivalent to your house burning down, as fire is also a self-sustaining reaction that converts the materials of your house to a lower energy state.

A key concept in thermodynamics is path independence. It doesn’t matter how you get from state to state, all that matters is the energy difference between those states. Converting a lot of matter to a lower energy state releases a lot of energy. What this means is that the grey goo is in a bind. It can either convert matter to itself quickly, releasing energy too fast for it to dissipate (like a house fire), or it can convert matter very slowly, leaving it vulnerable to countermeasures.

When you’re dealing with large amounts of biomass, there really isn’t a sweet spot. If you want to move fast enough to be difficult to contain, you’re going to be generating about as much waste heat as a fire, conditions which will a) be very rough on the grey goo and b) probably cause an actual fire, which will compete with the grey goo for resources.

The grey goo could get around these problems by being endothermic, but that opens a host of new problems.

Problem 2: Endothermic Reactions

Endothermic reactions are reactions that require energy from their surroundings to proceed. Photosynthesis is an endothermic reaction, whereby CO2 and H2O are converted into sugars using energy from the sun. Melting is an endothermic reaction, whereby solid water is converted to liquid water, using ambient heat.

It’s very plausible that our grey goo could be endotherms. For this to be true, they’d either have higher energy chemical bonds or be more ordered than their food source. In both cases, they’d need a source of energy in order to reproduce. This is the same boat that all living things are in, so it’s not a real problem.

The problem comes when you realize that we’re not going to just let them do this. If grey goo presents an existential threat, we’d be trying to stop it. If the grey goo was an endotherm, the simplest way to slow its reproduction would be to lower its temperature.

Since we can’t magically lower the temperature of matter, we’d have to hit it with something colder than it. Your first thought might be that this would just be further food for the grey goo, but that brings us to our third and final thermodynamic problem.

Problem 3: Inert Chemicals

There are lots of substances that are essentially inert. Noble Gasses, nitrogen gas, CO2, etc. All of these molecules are in low energy states. You can’t really get them to states that are any lower in energy. If you want to break them apart and use them for something, you’re going to need a massive amount of energy.

This means that any low energy or stable molecule would present an effective barrier to grey goo. Simple metal rust or aluminium oxide would be impenetrable.

The most reliable way to slow down a chemical reaction is to cool it down. The most effective countermeasure against grey goo would probably be liquid nitrogen. Liquid nitrogen could be used to freeze grey goo to a point where its reproduction would take millions of years. Exothermic grey goo can’t extract any energy from liquid nitrogen and the extreme cold would rob endothermic grey goo of the energy it needs to reproduce.

The apocalypse would end before it even really started, as soon as the comically slowly replicating grey goo is doused in liquid nitrogen, flash frozen, then carted off to a lab in platinum containers for further study.

Thermodynamics are merciless. Living beings have figured out how to reproduce about as fast as it will let us.

This goes hand in hand with what I’ve been saying for a while. It’s not the nanotechnology engineers you should fear. It’s the synthetic biologists!

[storiesandnarratives]

The Senate Can’t Stop Trudeau

It seems that the Liberals can’t propose a bill these days without the Conservatives threatening to block it in the Senate. The Conservatives currently have a majority in the “scandal-plagued” upper chamber, although there are enough empty seats that the Liberals could easily create their own majority, if they so desire. Trudeau has promised to be non-partisan in his Senate appointments, seemingly closing off this avenue. So is the Trudeau government powerless against threats to their legislative agenda in the Senate?

Hardly.

If you take a look at the options facing both party leaders, you’ll see that the Trudeau is going to get his legislation passed. To prove it, I’ll turn to the Graph Model of Conflict Resolution.

What do the parties want to do?

Each party has a decision to make. The Liberals can choose to stuff the Senate with their partisans, or either leave it vacant, or fill the vacancies in a non-partisan way (let’s assume these have the same effect). The Conservatives can either obstruct legislation in the Senate, or let it pass. This gives us four scenarios. I’m using binary notation, where a 1 indicates an action is taken and a 0 indicates an action isn’t taken. This has the added advantage of letting us sum these binary digits to get the state numbers.

Now we have to rank these states for each party.

Trudeau is pretty easy. He’d clearly prefer that his legislation pass without him having to stuff the Senate with loyal liberals. But he might not get to live in that world. If there were obstructions, he’d probably prefer to stuff the Senate and get things done. Senate stuffing violates one campaign promise. Failing to get any bills passed will violate a whole lot more. Trudeau’s least preferred state is one where he’s seen as stuffing the Senate for no good reason. Pundits would crow about him breaking his promises; it would not be a good scene.

With this in mind, we rank the states for the Liberals as follows: 0, 3, 1, and 2.

The Conservatives are a bit more challenging. They want to stop Trudeau, sure, but how far are they willing to go? Are they willing to set a precedent of partisan Senate obstructionism right before Trudeau has five whole years to fill Senate vacancies with people that will be hostile to any future Conservative government? All they can accomplish with obstructionism is causing Trudeau to break one election promise. They can’t actually stop his legislative agenda.

I rank the conservatives as most preferring a scenario where the can obstruct Trudeau and he does nothing about it. After this, they prefer any scenario where Trudeau looks like a hypocrite or prone to breaking promises. Failing that, they want to prioritize the long-term agenda of the Conservative party; they want to be able to govern effectively when they next form the government.

I rank the Conservative preferences as: 1, 2, 0, and 3.

What can they do?

Each side has two unilateral actions they can take. Conservatives can move from State 0  State 1, or from State 2  State 3. Liberals can move from State 0  State 2 or from State 1  State 3.

The Liberals action is essentially irreversible; senators serve for life. There’s room for wiggle room when talking about how reversible the Conservatives move is, but I think we can safely call it irreversible. Once you’re branded as obstructionist in the press, you’re branded as obstructionist in the press for years. It’s also worth noting that the Canadian press is so delighted to have a prime minister that actually takes their questions and speaks with them and defends their occupation as vital for a free society that they aren’t exactly willing to be charitable to the Conservatives, who are notable for having done approximately zero of those things over the past nine years.

What will actually happen?

Currently, we’re in State 0. The Conservatives aren’t blocking bills in the Senate and Trudeau has begun making noises about setting up non-partisan Senate appointment procedures.

To figure out what will happen, let’s go back to our model, with the States arranged in order of preference for each player. Beneath the States, we’ll list unilateral improvements – actions each player can take that will improve their position.

The Conservatives have a unilateral improvement from State 0 to State 1. They can start obstructing Liberal legislation in the Senate at any time and they prefer a world in which they are.

The Liberals have a unilateral improvement from State 1 to State 3. If the Conservatives start obstructing their legislation, they can fill the Senate with their partisans and they’d rather do this than let all their legislation be blocked.

So, we’re currently in State 0. The Conservatives have a unilateral improvement to State 1. If they move to State 1, the Liberals can unilaterally move to State 3, the Conservatives’ least preferred state. The Conservatives therefore cannot move to the State 1 without expecting the outcome to be worse than things currently stand. The Liberals are already in their most preferred state, so have no incentive to change anything.

State 0 isn’t the Nash equilibrium (the Nash Equilibria are States 2 and 3), but it is the equilibrium under the more sophisticated General Meta-Rationality models of conflict resolution (this model allows blocking an opponent’s move by threatening to shift the state to one they disprefer more than their starting point; this process is called sanctioning). Because the Liberals prefer State 3 to State 1, this is also the stable solution under the Sequential Stability model, where opponents are assumed to only sanction with moves that improve their position.

The end result is also the beginning result. The Liberals will pass their agenda, and the Conservatives will make empty threats to block it.

What if the conservatives underestimate Trudeau?

I can see two ways my analysis could be wrong. One: Trudeau refuses to stuff the Senate. Two: the Conservatives fail to learn any lessons from the past and underestimate Trudeau’s resolve to get his agenda passed.

I think Trudeau’s advisors are smart enough that we don’t have to spend too much time worrying about scenario one.

Here’s what the Conservatives underestimating Trudeau looks like: some Conservative strategist decides that Trudeau is too naïve/weak/indecisive to stuff the Senate. Conservatives obstruct key Liberal legislation. Trudeau tables legislation that is broadly favoured by Canadians and absolutely toxic to the Conservative base. Maybe he decides to end the abortion debate with finality. Maybe he plans to make Marijuana really easy to get. Maybe he decriminalizes more drugs. Maybe he forces Alberta to share more oil revenue. The Conservatives intervene in the Senate. The media (which broadly favour Trudeau) begin running pieces begging him to stuff the Senate. The prime minister nobly and gracefully acquiesces to the will of the 60-75% Canadians who prefer him to the Conservatives and he stuffs the Senate.

Could Trudeau come up with this plan? Probably not, but I’d be willing to bet that Gerald Butts could. And if anyone in Ottawa could pull off the acting and make it look natural, it’s Trudeau. On a normal day he’s trying just a bit too hard to be a dignified leader. Here’s an occasion where he could ham it up even more.

To see what this would look like in our model, we’ll do something called hypergame analysis. In hypergame analysis, we create two separate games: the one the Conservatives think they’re playing, and the one the Liberals are actually playing. If the Liberals also knew that the Conservatives would get things wrong, we’d go up one level higher and have four games. As it is, we’ll ignore that possibility.

In the game they’re playing, the Conservatives see that the Liberals have no unilateral improvements. This leads to the Conservatives seeing States 1, 2, and 3 being Nash Equilibria (no one can leave them for a better position). The risk adverse General Meta-Rationality strategy gives the Conservatives a game in equilibrium at State 0.

The more realistic Sequential Stability model gives the Conservatives a game they like the look of. From their preference vectors, they can see a unilateral improvement from State 0  State 1. Furthermore, the Liberals (as modelled by the Conservatives) prefer State 1 to any game state they can move to, so they’ll be stuck there.

To see what actually happens in the game, we use the Conservative game to plot their move and the Liberal game to plot theirs. Let’s assume Sequential Stability best models how the Conservatives will act: the Conservatives move the game from State 0  State 1, smug in the assumption that they’ve blocked the liberals with no negative consequences. A few weeks later, Gerald Butts has engineered just the right show down and the Liberals stuff the Senate with their partisans (moving from State 1  State 3), to much Conservative wailing and gnashing of teeth. They end up in their least-preferred state and have no clue how they got there.

And maybe they finally learn to stop underestimating Trudeau.

If you’re interested in further applications of the Graph Model of Conflict Resolution to real world problems, I recommend you read my friend Malcolm Ocean’s blog post on Ultimatums in the Territory. If you’re a student at the University of Waterloo, you can also take a whole course on this sort of thing, under the instruction of the excellent Keith Hipel.

[storiesandnarratives]

Modelling Committed Relationships

What does it mean to be in a committed romantic relationship? And what are the bounds on commitment? If you say you’re committed to someone, it leads to the natural question: “how long is this commitment going to last?”

“’Til the end of my days” is a pretty snappy answer, but it isn’t really informative, especially if the end of your days isn’t going to be particularly soon. Yes, the surest way to piss off people who are deeply in love is to remind them that feelings can change. And yet every day feelings do change.

There are many people who understand this and still say they’re committed to someone else (or several someone else’s). By this they mean that they’re going to stick with them, even if there’s something (or someone) they wish they could go off and do. It’s a sort of prioritization of a relationship over external threats.

I think these are the two principle components of commitment. The first component is a commitment to put a relationship above things outside of it, to avoid moving away for a job or ditching your partner for someone interesting and new. The second component is a promise that your feelings will stay the same; that you will always want to be in the relationship because you always love them. And I think when talking about commitment or asking for commitment it’s important to specify which component(s) you’re interested in.

A relationship can become more committed along one axis while not moving at all along the other. It sometimes feels natural for relationships to escalate to more and more commitment (including adding commitment on any axes where it didn’t previously exist), but this is by no means necessary in a successful relationship.

(This post isn’t interested in the tautology that you can tell a relationship is successful because it’s committed and people only commit to successful relationships. You get to set your own goals and those may be a committed relationship. But that’s only part of the solution space.)

I call commitment to prioritize relationships over other events extrinsic commitment. And I call a commitment that your feelings won’t change intrinsic commitment.

Anyway, let’s take a second to acknowledge that commitment is actually fine grained before we model both types of commitment as dichotomous. As the saying goes: “all models are wrong, but dichotomous models are fun!”

Scenario 1 (No Extrinsic or Intrinsic Commitment)

You’re in the wild west of relationships. Just because there’s nothing keeping your relationship from ending at any moment, doesn’t actually mean it’s going to end at any moment. Probably.

I’m sure there are people who like hanging out in this space. It’s not one I’m particularly fond of. If you are fond of it, make sure you explain this to your partner. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to stay in this scenario, as long as your partner isn’t staying in the relationship only out of a hope that you’ll one-day transition to something more commited.

Scenario #2 (Only Extrinsic Commitment)

The default committed relationship of young people and cautious people everywhere. You understand that you can’t really promise to feel a certain way. Your actions, not your emotions are all you can control.

It makes sense to stay in a good relationship. Being single sucks, dating is scary, etc. This kind of commitment is easy (for you). You’re happy where you are. You don’t want to move for work. You don’t have big plans. And if everything goes well, it’s staying with one partner that lets you know them well enough to give intrinsic commitment as well.

You try and phrase all this in a very logical and sensible way so that the partner you’ve been dating for only a few months doesn’t run away in panic when you suggest the relationship be really committed.  

Scenario #3 (Only Intrinsic Commitment)

The default committed relationship of incautious adventurous people. You don’t understand why everyone else can’t be so committed to the idea of being in the best romantic relationship whenever the opportunity arises. Sure, opportunities to date you might be a bit thin on the ground because you’re off travelling the world and doing interesting things, but that doesn’t mean people should settle for relationships that are less fun just because they have some extrinsic commitment in them.

Like in scenario one, you need to be sure that if you aren’t willing to offer extrinsic commitment, your partner isn’t holding out for it. As weird as it seems to you, they are allowed to leave you for someone who will stick around, even if it means they have a bit less fun. I’m not sure if you should seek out someone more like you; you may never actually end up in the same place as them at the same time.

Scenario #4 (All the commitment)

You love your partner and know that you always will. You’d never think of leaving the area they’re in unless there’s a way they can come with you, or it’s for a defined, limited length of time. This is probably a good level of commitment to have (or fake) before having kids.

(Just be sure that everyone knows if you are faking it. Many people look askance at the thought of starting their romantic life over again at fifty.)

Some people can’t give this level of commitment. Some people look snidely at those who do and assume they’re lying. While I currently find it hard to alieve that you can promise to feel a certain way indefinitely, I do think it’s possible to end up loving someone your whole life, even if you don’t manage to promise it at any point.

This is a model. It’s an attempt to give thinking about commitment a framework. It’s supposed to spur you to ask: “what sort of commitment do I want?” and “what sort of commitment do I need?” and “how can I ask my partner for that sort of commitment?” and “is it possible to negotiate for a different sort of commitment and keep the relationship I currently have?”

Remember that the type of commitment you find really easy to give might be hard to give for your partner. Remember that what you think of as natural might be completely different from your partner’s natural inclinations. Remember that if the type of relationship you want deviates from cultural norms, you should tell your partner this up front; they might end up blindly following cultural norms otherwise and it won’t be their fault! Remember that some forms of commitment feel scary to some people! On the other side, remember that people may feel insecure and scared if there isn’t commitment!

I charge ye now to go out and ask your questions and have your discussions. And then tell me how it goes and how I can improve my model. (Special thanks to @epiphi who suggested I do comics for each type of relationship and provided the scripts for those comics)

[storiesandnarratives]

Universal Ethical Principles and ‘Ethical Collaboration’

Or “Boycott only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law”

On Monday, students at my alma matter will be voting on a non-binding resolution to suspend collaborations with certain Israeli universities that they claim are involved in human rights abuses.

Were I still a student and able to vote, I would be voting against ending collaboration with Israeli universities.

The University of Waterloo has a spotty record on human rights. They had a campus in Dubai that only closed due to money problems, not over human rights concerns. They have research relationships with universities with a history of racist admission policies (this one is easy; you can pretty much count on the Ivy Leagues to have previously discriminated against Jewish students and to be presently discriminating against Asian students). The university is also particularly eager to collaborate with Chinese schools.

There is a group of countries illegally occupying captured territory in violation of international law: India, Pakistan, China, Russia, and Israel spring to mind. There are countries where universities are complicit in reinforcing systemic inequality (the United States is the obvious example, but if I really tried I’m sure I could find universities in India that discriminate against Dalits, universities in Pakistan that discriminate against Hindus, universities in China that discriminate against Uighurs and Tibetans, universities in Myanmar that host genocidal Buddhist monks, universities in Canada complicit in covering up residential school abuses and forced sterilizations, etc., etc.)

I don't recall students protesting against the slave labour that no doubt built the Dubai campus. I don't see any consideration given to the possibility that universities in any other country are complicit in human rights abuses.

I feel like this is a case of “it’s only not okay when Israel does it”, a phenomenon I see all too often from the left (and an attitude I’ve been guilty of in the past).

David Schraub has posited that leftists feel comfortable criticizing Israel because it doesn’t feel colonial ("It's all the joy of liberal guilt-induced self-flagellation, except the wounds show up on someone else's body"). Leftists don’t see Israelis as having a separate identity from European whiteness, so criticism of them doesn’t feel like imposing Western values on a foreign country the same way that criticism of Saudi Arabia or China would.

I think this is a charitable (although not an exclusive) explanation for why Israel is the only country being targeted by this resolution. And as long as Israel is the only country that students are targeting, I won’t be supporting the motion. What could be an attempt to stand up for universal ethical principals feels to me like an unprincipled attack on a country that presents a convenient target.

To stand up for universal ethical principles, activists would have to show that they’ve considered the perils of collaborating with other countries and explain why they’ve chosen to ignore abuses by universities in other countries. And they’d have to explain how a divisive resolution that has no chance of actually changing anything (no matter how students vote, the administration isn't going to end collaboration with Israeli universities) is worth the alienation that some students are bound to feel. Alternatively, activists could present a broader resolution that seeks to ban collaboration with certain Chinese, Indian, Pakistani , American and Russian universities at the same time as ending collaboration with Israeli universities. Ethical Collaboration talks about this being a first step, but there's no evidence they've done the research or have any desire to name universities in other countries.

I'm trying to be charitable in my treatment of this debate and I understand that many people have causes that feel personally important to them. But in the absence of a compelling universal ethical principal that separates Israel from other countries with spotty human rights records it's hard that to ignore the potential parsimonious explanation of anti-semitism.

From David Schraub again: 'One of the lodestones of progressive understandings of discrimination and inequality is that marginalized groups are in a privileged position to "name their oppression."' He notes that in a recent survey, 72% of Jews in the EU think that a boycott of Israeli goods or products is anti-Semitic. I think an academic boycott falls under the same umbrella.

I also worry that we are missing an opportunity for engagement with people we disagree with and trading the liberal virtue of free association and free debate into the reactionary vice of stifling voices. I have to believe that the default dialogue must not exclude parties from the beginning. Lacking some infallible outside view on morality, I can’t see any other system that doesn’t present an unacceptable risk to liberal causes.  

I recognize that other people may have other compelling reasons to vote yes or no on this resolution and that I've barely scratched the surface of the issue. I urge every student to vote and vote their conscience today. My conscience would have me vote no. After consideration, what does yours say?

[storiesandnarratives]

Critical Thought in Fantasy

I just finished reading some classic fantasy, the Elenium trilogy by David Edding. I largely enjoyed it (it’s good a fun old fashioned adventure romp) but I was struck by how little critical examination it contained. There were plenty of opportunities to examine themes (or even to elevate some recurring scenarios to the place of themes), but almost all of these were tragically missed. There was no examination of:

Violence, despite a pacifistic character who often disproved of the violent actions of the knights.

Gender roles, despite a queen who didn't seem all that interested in them.

Racism and racial violence, despite frequent pogroms that the main characters disproved of.

The Feudal System, despite the fact that most of the plot is caused by its failures. 

Who gets to use power, despite involved politicking among the church.

Delving a bit deeper into these:

Seraphina's abhorrence of violence is treated as a quaint culture practice, or something that is nice but idealistic and naive. Eddings never delves into deep questions about use of violence, proportionality, or if people can be good if they go around casually butchering anyone who resists them and then joking about it.

I'm currently nauseous, so I'm not going to make it worse by talking about how stereotypical the gender roles were. Did Eddings not care that he was potentially alienating half his potential readership? I wonder at what particular point authors began to wise up to this. I’m not sure I know of a firm demarcating line and it does probably vary a lot by author.

Everyone was quiet happy to call the non-humans stupid and unsophisticated. Even Seraphina shows little loyalty to her people, instead being the one most happy to criticize them.

Look, a system where you need incredibly noble selfless people to be constantly vigilant and willing to defend it with violence is not a good system. Some of the comments about how arming the peasants was a really stupid idea almost approached critical thinking.  

There's no discussion of how we can determine if people are worthy to hold power beyond some sort of "goodness". Again, I'm annoyed by the lack of powerful institutions, but also by the missed opportunity for our heroes to have to deal with a consensus candidate. Having a loyal opposition would have been really interesting!

I do think a lot of modern fantasy is only able to deconstruct tropes because older fantasy used them so uncritically. Or perhaps it all felt fresh and interesting at the time. There definitely has to be a certain skewed perspective to reading new fantasy before older fantasy, like I have. I certainly realized how much modern fantasy borrowed from The Wheel of Time once I started to read it.

I think an interesting project for the next year or two might be two do a read through of the Hugos or the books mentioned in Among Others (or both, culminating in reading Among Others). Is anyone interested in a classic fantasy book club, or know of one I could join.

[storiesandnarratives]

Your Twenties Don’t Have To Be Unsettled

[Epistemic Status: I’m 23 and I endorse this message. This message might not be aimed at you. Remember that this is written specifically as a bravery debate, reversing advice can be a good thing to do, and that I am somewhat deliberately generalizing from one example. @epiphi deserves a lot of credit for helping me clarify these ideas, often by being horrified by them.]

This is a post I was excited to write, because it’s a post I wish I’d read a year ago. With this in mind, I decided that I would break new ground and actually do research for once (most links in previous blogs are me retroactively justifying things, or an aggregation of the antecedents). My ‘research’ (such as it was) involved typing into Google the phrase “how to be 20” and clicking on four likely links.

I pretty much immediately regretted doing things properly. I ended up with a slightly nauseating article from EliteDaily, a Thought Catalogue piece and a Medium piece that tried to convey Really Important Wisdom™, and a condescending article in Forbes.

The thing they all had in common was the typical mind fallacy, which will be important later.

I was looking for one specific piece of advice. So going back to how I usually do it I changed up my search terms and I found a few examples of what I wanted.

Here’s an excerpt from one of the links:

Your 20s are definitely not the time to settle. Keep moving; do not slow down for anyone or anything. When you settle down in a certain relationship or way of living, life becomes stagnant and soon enough, less exciting. Keep moving to keep up with the quality of life that you deserve in your 20s.

And another:

Move to a completely strange city and try and survive alone.

No family, no friends, no safety net. Expose yourself (not literally). Be vulnerable. See how that changes you for the better

Take one more:

Especially if you get a good corporate job early on, it can be tempting to conclude that it’s time to ‘settle down.’ Don’t do it! Instead, try out multiple jobs and industries without worrying about finding the perfect one right away.

This is all valuable and reasonable advice and I fucking hate it. I hate it because it makes feel sick and I hate it because there are a group of people (the lower bound is just me, but I don’t think I’m alone here) for whom this is the absolute worst advice.

People in their twenties are told that we need to move around all the time, that we should search for the perfect career (where did the ridiculous lie that your career defines you get started anyway?), and that stability should only be a secondary concern.

And maybe the people giving this advice are people who are in their thirties and missing the freedom of their twenties. Maybe in 10 years, my dear friend @epiphi will write a companion essay to this one, called “The Pernicious Lie of the Settled 30s” and the universe will be perfect and symmetrical.

I know that the people giving this advice mean well. I know that to them it seems like patently the right advice and they feel like they’re duty bound to give people that little push to do the thing that will obviously make them happy. What they’re forgetting is that not everyone is like them. Not everyone needs this advice. Not everyone will be helped by this advice.

Here’s the thing. There are some people for whom the setting up in a new place feels like work. It isn’t a fun adventure; it’s an aversive slog. Maybe you’re like me and mix extroversion with social anxiety. You want to spend time with people, but the thought of asking someone to hang out sends you into a tailspin of panic. It seems to take me about four years after a change in life circumstances to start to really be happy with my social group.

If I’m going to move every three years in my ‘unsettled twenties’, I will almost never get the kind of interactions I want to have. Instead, I’ll move from half-formed group of friends to half-formed group of friends. I’ll go through all the parts of social interactions that I make me a mess of anxiety and loneliness (messages open in the browser for a half-hour as I vacillate on sending them, crying alone scared to show vulnerability to anyone, etc.) and just as I begin to get to a point where I feel comfortable, I’d be ripping that apart and starting again.

I like getting to know new people. But it isn’t worth it for me to go through all the pain for people where there’s no chance of real close friendship. Sometimes friendships don’t evolve in that direction and that’s fine! But the anxiety isn’t worth it if there isn’t at least a potential there. I can’t go to a new place and meet a bunch of people really quickly to meet my socializing goals. I’m happiest when I can build a solid core group of friends and then expand my network from there.

Maybe you’re different from me. Maybe you have depression and your coping strategy involves having lots of good friends and knowing the town you’re in so well that you can still be kind of functional even if you’re only out of bed for three hours a day.

Maybe you have goals for the future that require you to be settled in one place. Maybe you want to be important in a community; a source of authority, someone who’s looked up to. Maybe you want lots and lots of kids and you realize that this will require lots and lots of money and a committed partner or two.

What I’m getting at is that it’s okay to be 20 or 23 or any age really and see advice that says: “move around lots and try and find yourself and the perfect life!” and panic.

So I want you to know:

That isn’t the only way you can live your life.

You aren’t failing at life if you prioritize improving on what you have over seeking out new experience.

You don’t have to be traveling the world to not be boring. You can live an exciting life without ever really leaving the city you grew up in. Whether or not your life stagnates is fairly orthogonal to where you live.

You might be able to get closer to the perfect career by staying in one place and building up lots of trust. Your best stories could be about wacky antics you got up to in your backyard, with people you’ve known for years and years.

And maybe you could say that these aren’t really reasons to not be unsettled in your twenties. You might be looking at them as obstacles to be overcome. If that’s the case, by all means, go do the unsettled thing. Just understand that there are people for whom the idea of doing a whole bunch of different things in different places feels as viscerally wrong and scary and life-ruining as the thought of staying in one place for the next many years feels to you.

You may feel less free for each thing that is settled in your life. And you may have a friend who feels freer each time they nail something down. You see opportunities shrinking. They see things that they don’t have to worry about anymore.

This is the lifestyle version of my explorer/exploiter dichotomy, and this is the post where I tell you you’re allowed to be an exploiter in all aspects of your life, even in your 20s.

Being settled probably isn’t going to ruin your life. Nor is being unsettled. That isn’t to say either strategy can’t ruin your life; risk free strategies don’t exist. Yes, maybe you’ll miss out on following a dream you had. Or maybe you’ll follow it and become one of the millions of people who are friendless because of moving. Maybe follow a dream across a continent, realize it was the wrong dream, move back to the place you’d been for five years, find a job after 16 days, and see your quality of life drastically improve (not to be specific, or anything).

Maybe you’ll miss out on the best opportunity of your life because you don’t want to go to it. Maybe you’ll miss out on the best opportunity of your life because it came up in the town you were excited to get out of.

There is no risk free way to go through life. There are no guarantees of safety or happiness. It’s up to you to figure out how to best seek out happiness and success. You know what makes you happy better than I ever will. You’re going to have to chart your own path towards your goals. Another thing I didn’t realize for far too long: you’re allowed to!

If I’m quibbling with a large body of advice, I suppose I have to give some specific points of my own. So here:

Some of your friends and lovers are going to want to go do other things in other places. You can’t stop them.

You won’t be the same when they get back. You have no responsibility to be.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you do, the opportunity you want will always be there.

Sometimes you only have one chance at a thing and you can’t go back and change your mind, no matter how badly you want to.

A priori, there’s no real way of knowing which of the two above points applies.

You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. If a partner tells you that you have to settle down with them or you’ll never find love, they’re probably wrong. If a friend tells you you’ll never be happy unless you spend two years travelling the world finding yourself, they’re probably wrong.

You aren’t failing at life if you prioritize your mental health, your support network, your friends, your family, a romantic relationship, several romantic relationships, your community or any other aspect of your current life above opportunities in far-flung places.

You’re allowed to choose to live your life in a way that minimizes your anxiety, helps you deal with your depression, keeps you far from your triggers or otherwise maximizes your mental health. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. You can set your own value function and optimize on it as aggressively as you feel like.

If this all feels obvious, remember that some people have never heard it before. You aren’t the target audience. They are.

If this advice feels malicious and wrong, remember that not all advice is aimed at you. Not all advice will help you.

[storiesandnarratives]

A Brief Essay On My Anxiety

The most interesting part of my anxiety and insecurity is the meta-insecurity: I am insecure about being insecure. This manifests as a belief that I should not talk about it, that I should not follow the excellent advice a friend gave me about seeking accommodations from people if little actions can help make me feel better.

It’s still hard to follow this advice after I made a blog post about it and encouraged everyone I knew to ask for what they need.

Meta-insecurity means that I am scared to be scared. It means that I believe that if I ask for accommodations, I become a burden; the sort of burden that people don’t want around. I worry that I will become unattractive, that any partner or potential partner will be much more interested in someone who doesn’t ask for accommodations, who doesn’t need to be handled with kid gloves sometimes.

Some of the time, most of the time, I’m not sure, I’m able to convince myself that this is false, that my friends love me and want to help me. Other times, I’m convinced that no one actually wants me around, that they are using me for something. This one I learned from experience. In elementary school, the other children were only nice to me if they wanted my help on their homework.

Anxiety can interact oddly with other aspects of my personality. For years I thought I was in introvert. Only recently have I realized that I’m actually extremely extroverted. I need to be around people regularly to be happy. Anxiety keeps me at the edge of groups, afraid to break in, afraid to make my voice heard. I spent eight months in a new city once, making no friends, afraid to take any chance. I didn’t realize I was spiralling into depression until it had blanketed my whole life. I wished myself dead a dozen times a day.

There is a common refrain that social media is harmful. Pundits claim that social media shows us the best parts of everyone else’s lives, while we live through all of our own. How it makes it so that we all believe that everyone has their life figured out, the best job, the perfect partner because that’s the face they choose to show to the world.

We never needed social media to have that belief. It’s far too easy to believe that other people’s lives are uncomplicated and their inner voices friendly. Which, to be fair, is how some people experience life. Maybe. Hopefully. A common refrain I see (online and off) is: “is everyone as messed up as we are?” or the less wry and more confused version of it: “do neurotypicals even exist?”

When I left graduate school because it made me miserable, I made my reasoning public. I wanted to be transparent, to explain my mistakes, and to reach out to others in the same situation. I got several messages from people in the same situation and an incredible outpouring of support.

I want to try doing this again. If social media can make it easier to see only the good in people’s lives, surely we can use it to show more nuanced pictures of ourselves. I don’t want to turn this into a challenge; I don’t want to compel scrupulous people to open up about things they’d rather keep private. I want to become more comfortable talking about my insecurities. This is for me. If you want to try the same, you’re welcome to join in my project.

[storiesandnarratives]

The Reluctant Hero

How to you get your character to answer the call to adventure? I've been thinking about this as I read Player of Games, which features a rather reluctant protagonist.

Not all protagonists are reluctant and require prodding, of course. But there's a certain relatability that can come from a reluctant protagonist. It's easy to understand why someone wouldn't want to leave their comfortable life for one of danger and mayhem.

Here are some of the ways I've thought of to get your reluctant protagonist out the door:

Bribery: this one is a classic. Even the most boring of Hobbits can sometimes be pulled from their holes by the promise of untold riches.

Blackmail: less savoury than bribery is blackmail. If blandishments won't work, try threats. If you can come up with something bad enough, the dangers of adventure can pale beside the dangers of doing nothing.

A curse: the hero or someone they love has been cursed and only a rare or magic item can reverse it. If the consequences of the curse are horrible enough, the hero has no choice but to do everything in their power in the hopes of reversing it.

A cure: similar to a curse, the hero must find or transport a rare cure for a horrible disease. If they don't, people are going to die.

Redemption: the hero has a quiet life in prison or in shame. But if they do this one last job, their record will be wiped clean and they'll be allowed back into society. 

A favour: the hero has owed this favour for a decade. Now its time to repay it. Expect lots of grumbling, but any honourable hero will have no choice but to do what they're asked.

Revenge: my least favourite option. This is a crude and overused way to motivate a hero, but sometimes it's done well. They hero is quite happy with how things are. Someone wrecks them, leaving the hero nothing to live for but the thought of getting back at whoever ruined their life.

Whichever method you use, you have a chance to quickly give the reader a sense of the characters personality. A hero who is willing to come out of retirement to discharge a favour is instantly coded as honourable. A hero who is convinced to tag along with the promise of untold riches is obviously greedy (or needs the money for something). A hero who is out for revenge is probably going to be angry or fatalistic. These opportunities for quick character exposition shouldn't be squandered.

[storiesandnarratives]

Asking for Garlic

When was the last time you asked for something?

I was at a party last night, lying on a couch as my dear friend @epiphi prepared borscht. She hadn’t brought garlic from our house and found herself asking the hosts if she could use some.

“Do you have garlic for my borscht?” she asked.

The hosts didn’t hear her over the sound of boiling pots and kitchen fans.

“Do you have a few cloves of garlic?” she asked.

The hosts still couldn’t hear her, even though she was talking more loudly.

“Do you have a couple cloves of garlic?” she asked.

Still the hosts couldn’t hear her.

“Do you have a clove of garlic?” she asked, practically shouting to be heard over the din.

“Oh, of course,” said the host. “Take as many as you like. Our house is full of garlic.”

When was the last time you asked for something too softly for people to hear?

Epiphi asked for what she actually needed in a relatively quiet voice. It was no surprise that no one heard her over the cacophony of food preparation.

When you aren’t heard, do you keep asking for the same thing? Or do you minimize yourself? Do you seek to be less trouble, less of a burden?

The house had more than enough garlic for everyone to use some in what they were cooking.

This story is true. But I’d also like to use it as a metaphor for a problem that I’ve observed in myself and in several of my friends: we don’t ask for enough _______, where _______ is whatever thing will make us feel happy or comfortable in the place we’re in.

As I heard epiphi ask for the garlic, I had a vision of my friends arriving to the party and filling the room. And I saw each of us curled up upon ourselves, afraid to ask for space from anyone else or just afraid to take up more space than we feel we deserve.

This care has made parties a wonderful space for many people to try unfurling, just a bit. There’s so much space to occupy, and everyone is so kind in letting it be occupied. But I think there’s still plenty of room that is left tragically empty.

I think this curling up is a learned behaviour. We aren’t born asking for too little garlic. Have you ever met a toddler? Asking for what they need is second nature to them. We were slowly taught to ask for less garlic than we need. We were taught to ask for less than we need by the failures of parents, teachers, and authority figures, by the failures of systems that were supposed to protect us.

(I’m cheating a bit here. I’ve heard my friend’s stories and they’ve heard mine. We can trace each other’s scars. We can see the points where we were taught to shrink ourselves.)

We only ask for too little garlic audibly. In our quiet voices, in the ones we’ve been taught to use, we ask for what we need. But it’s hard to hear a quiet voice. By the time we work up the nerve to speak clearly, we’ve already talked ourselves down. Sometimes, we’re lucky and someone hears even our whispers. But this doesn’t happen often enough.

I think this learned response is a fear of burdensomeness and a fear of rejection, a chimera that is difficult to fight. We don’t want to ask for anything because we’re scared that people will say no. And we’re scared that even having to ask will single us out as burdens or freaks, as people unable to do things that everyone else can do.

I know my friends. We’d all be happy to help each other with what we need. But it’s so hard to ask. It took me forever to realize I could ask for things. I told epiphi once: “I’ve just come to terms with the fact that I’m always going to believe that no one actually likes me.”

And she said to me: “your friends like you; you can ask them for things that will make your life easier and they’ll be happy to help.”

I still barely ask. And when I do, it’s too often inaudible. I don’t know if I can teach the skill of asking for garlic, because I’m still working my hardest learning it.

But I like my friends. I want them to be happy. I want them to feel comfortable at group events or parties and I want them to feel comfortable when they’re just hanging out with me.

So here’s my commitment: I am going to strive to be a safe person to ask for garlic from. You can ask me for as much garlic as you need. I may not have enough to give you, but I may be able to show you to someone who can. What I won’t do is shame you for asking for garlic. I promise that if you ask me for garlic, I won’t see you as a burden or an imposition.

Garlic is fucking delicious.

Lets cook with more of it.

Epiphi have talked a lot about the social norms we want at parties we’re (co-)hosting. I’m going to try and cover all of them in blog posts. This is the first post in the series. At parties that we’re involved in, we want people to know that they can ask for garlic. There will be plenty to go around.

[storiesandnarratives]

Writing Grief

If it is inadequate to say "I am mad", surely it is inadequate to say "I am sad". Even showing your character crying is rarely an adequate expression of grief. At the very least, you have to answer the question: "how do they cry?"

When I truly cry, I keen. It comes right from my diaphragm and is penetratingly noisy. I've pressed my mouth into pillows, into bedding, into the body of a partner and nothing blocks the sound. I can hold it in if I have to, leaving only these horrible, tortured gasps. Snot gets everywhere and my face becomes a mess of red blotches. For me, it's impossible to really cry and not look like shit.

I've seen friends hold themselves rigid and quiet as the tears fall down their face. The only hint of life or animation they give is the occasional sniffle. Their very bearing begs for me to do something to release the tension.

For others, sadness cannot exist without anger. They rage against the heavens, scream, yell throw things, kick things.

Some people don't cry at all. Their grief is a serpent, swallowing everything except itself, a tortured ouroboros.

This ignores all the gradations of grief; all the demarcations on the path between a bad day and a destroyed life. Does your character sob when a friend dies, and stand silent and broken when they lose their child? Or can their grief be measured simply by the volume of Kleenex, a linear relationship between heartbreak and mucus.

If you plan or hurting your character or breaking their heart, you should know beforehand how they'll react, and what that says about them.

[storiesandnarratives]

Inevitable Tragedy

How do you make something interesting when you already know it's going to end poorly?

Everyone knows the Titanic is going to sink, that Hamilton is killed by Burr, that all of Macbeth's dreams turn to ash. And yet people come back to these stories. There's this feeling when you know how it's going to end, where you wish it could end differently. Where you pray that things could take a different course, that people could chose happiness over ambition.

How can there still be tensions when the ending is foretold. You know your prayers are hopeless and the course is set. Why do you do it anyway? Is it the trainwreck principle? Being unable to look away from a disaster you know will happen.

Or does it have to do with loving the characters. Or, if not loving them, rooting for them. Or feeling sorry for them. Wishing that they could have a better ending.

Or is it a desire to know the how or why, to complement the what?

To make a forgone conclusion compelling, I think you need at least one of these. You need a character who can be loved, or pitied, or both. They need to be relatable. They need to have good intentions.

If not this, then you need a fascinating plot. You free the audience to focus and speculate on the why. But if you want to be remembered fondly, you have to blow them away with the why you create. It has to fit better than any they come up with.

[storiesandnarratives]

Normalizing the Abnormal

How do you make something weird normal?

Take the example of Code 61. It was my first introduction to poly in fiction. And amazingly, it wasn't framed as this weird cultish thing. It was introduced as incidental to the murders, not the cause of them. When the controlling influences were removed from the residents lives, they didn't ditch polyamory.

Bujold did the same thing with Gentleman Jole. She makes it pretty clear that these are people who love each other a lot. Their decision was non-standard, but that doesn't denigrate.

Annie on my Mind was written with this explicit purpose, when it was weird to be queer and acceptable to deny queer people benefits, jobs, housing, or just deny that they were capable of love.

In Code 61, the officer is confused by the subculture, but doesn't make a big deal of it. In Gentleman Jole, the people that know about the triad are more concerned about other ramifications than the triad themselves. In Annie on my Mind, most of the (older) people are opposed to the relationship, while the younger ones are generally supportive.

I'm having trouble seeing a common thread. Perhaps the key thing is just to present things as they are, without making authorial value judgements.

An authorial value judgement would be some sort of author filibuster, or perhaps the karma of the story colluding with the author's viewpoint. There has to be everything in the story aligned on the message: these people are not like you and I; they are bad/dangerous/scary.

If you don't have that alignment, will readers be able to figure things out for themselves? Is it skill that makes it come through? Do you have to make the characters compelling enough on their own to overcome their weirdness? That is to say, is it a visibility effect, forcing the reader to choose between a character they like and preconceived notions of what that character's lifestyle/activities/choices mean?

I'm not sure I'm a good enough writer to normalize things I want to normalize. But I will keep trying to write good, compelling characters, regardless of my agenda behind those characters.

[storiesandnarratives]

Well Intentioned Extremist

What makes a good well intentioned extremist? The two fictional characters that pop to my mind when I think of this trope are Dorian from the Night Angel Trilogy and Leto II from Dune.

These are also very relevant to the well intentioned extremist I plan to write this month, because they are also leaders.

Dorian has a simple goal. Reform a country that literally runs on evil. To do this, he needs absolute power in the country. The two feed into each other. He can't reform without absolute power and his reforms make him vulnerable and require him to do more to retain power. But throughout this, he has an absolute belief that he's doing the right thing. That's what allows him to keep holding on to power and doing horrible things to get it. Anything else would be wrong because no one else would use power as well as he does. It require a separate moral system for things that are done to achieve power and things that are done with the power. It collapses the two for others, but treats them as separable and morally subtractive for himself.

That's a good mindset to keep in mind for my NaNoWriMo character. She'll do the same separating process. Everything she does to maintain power is right because her reforms are necessary and she can only stay in power to protect them by doing horrible things. But the long term good of the reforms cancels out the short term evil she has to do, at least in her mind. Because to her, she's the only one noble enough to wield the power for the common good.

Leto wanted to avoid the stagnation and destruction of humanity. His Golden Path accounted even for his own death. His ultimate goal was to ruin prescience and spur human innovation. He destroyed whole worlds. He crushed rebellion more viciously that anyone could imagine. But this was justified for him because he literally knew this was the best possible outcome. He's perhaps not the best model because he wasn't really an extremist. He went as far as his foresight told him was necessary, and no more.

[storiesandnarratives]

Negative Space (And ‘The Traitor Baru Cormorant’)

There a lot of things that go into defining a characters personality. What approach they take, who they talk to first, what they notice. But the subtlest and most important characterization technique (especially for tragic characters) is negative space. More important than what characters notice and say is what they don't notice and don't say.

I'm currently reading 'The Traitor Baru Cormorant'. I think there is a masterful display of negative space in this book. There are a lot of things that Baru picks up on very quickly: math, economics, seafaring, science. But she is critically blind to the human element. She holds herself so tightly controlled that she fails to realize that others don't. When people mention human costs or human desires, she brushes them aside in favour of concrete things she can count. If she has a tragic fall, I am willing to bet this will be the cause.

I think there has to be a very deliberate choice to use negative space. When a character is being outlined, I should look for the things that will make them unique. What they will notice, etc. I then need to pay just as much attention to their blind spot. And then to make this work, I have to give them opportunities to confront their blind spot and have them turn away from these.

[storiesandnarratives]

Writing Anger

I’m going to post another series of literary analyses/questions over the next few days, in the hopes that spreading them out makes them easier to share. Here’s the first: It's not enough to just put the words "I am angry" in a character's mouth. How do you show that anger? Does the character freeze? Do they attack someone with no thought to themselves? Do they start shouting? Do they whisper? What other physical signs accompany the anger? Do their hands sweat? Their throat tighten? Do they tremble or shake? Do they get tunnel vision?

How does a character react when they're angry? Do they try and calm down? Do they let it out? Do they refuse to acknowledge that they're even feeling it? Do they try and suppress it but lash out? Do they turn to substances or sex or gambling?

How does anger interact with other parts of their personality? Are they a pacifist at heart (think Marko in Saga) whose anger sometimes gets the better of them? Do they delight in being angry (Caine in Acts of Caine)? Is anger a source of strength for them when all the cards are stacked against them (Malus Darkblade)?

What never fails to make them angry? Is it injustice? Their friends being hurt? Being thwarted? The last one can be combined with a sense of entitlement to create a particularly dangerous and vicious individual. Being threatened? Feeling inadequate or helpless? Being talked to or looked at a certain way?

Is the characters anger often justified, or is it out of proportion?

Some of these will answer themselves. But it may be a good idea to come up with a framework for what makes a character really angry before writing them.

[storiesandnarratives]

Gathering My Scattered Thoughts (My First Experience With LSD)

The day after my first experience with LSD, I spent a while gathering together everything I wrote over the course of the 8-hour trip. This was:

About a thousand words in a text file

Four audio files, totalling about 50 minutes

Three text messages to myself

Four texts to a friend who ended up coming over

Six Facebook messages to another friend

One Tumblr post

Two Beeminder comments

I’m glad for these records, because they’ve helped me reconstruct most of my thoughts over the course of the trip. Some of what I thought and said was pretty banal, standard stoner fare. When I was on acid, I was constantly having revelations. Only a few of them are still interesting now that it’s worn off.

Before I get into what I’ve learned, I have some practical advice for other people considering their first acid trip. I’ve only done it once; so don’t take my word as gospel. But I think the following are good ideas:

Don’t count on the acid taking a full hour to hit. Mine kicked in within half an hour of putting the paper under my tongue. Unfortunately, this happened to be in a pizza parlour. We got home before I was seriously impaired, but that was only possible because it was so close to my house. If we’d counted on a full hour, we’d have been in trouble.

Be around people you trust. You’re going to be suggestible, uninhibited, and overcome with big, powerful, and occasionally scary feelings. You want to be around people who won’t take advantage of you, and people who won’t screw around with your mind for their own amusement.

Having a sober person there to look after you is a good idea. Failing that, someone more experienced with acid and taking a similar amount isn’t a bad substitute.

You probably don’t want to go wandering around outside without sober supervision. You also probably don’t want to be outside during the first part of the trip, when it will be very difficult to pass as sober.

Start small. According to this dose chart, I had about 110µg. That’s plenty for a first time.

Don’t forget to drink water.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the actual trip. Thanks to all my notes, I have a pretty good idea of the chronology.

The first things I felt were giddiness and heaviness in my limbs. This was followed shortly by disorientation, closed eyes hallucinations, mild synaesthesia, suggestibility, and short attention span. I also had some dizziness, and wasn’t the best at walking.

For the first hour, the trip was pretty overwhelming. I wasn’t capable of doing much but lying on the couch, watching my closed eye hallucinations. I was barely coherent when I was talking, and each minute felt like an hour. I couldn’t believe that there was six hours of this in store for me. I could force my mind to focus, but only with great effort, and not for very long at all.

After the first hour, I was able to move around a bit, and hold a conversation, although I was still very disoriented, and my mind was wandering a lot. This is where I took my first set of notes.

They were simplistic, poorly spelled, and they almost entirely lack punctuation. They also aren’t very introspective – they just describe what’s happening and what I’m feeling. Each time I hit a key, it reverberated through my whole body, so I got very into the physical act of typing. I treated my laptop like a typewriter, pounding the return key after each sentence.

Eventually I got a bit more lucid, and began to talk to my friend a bit more, although we were both easily distracted. This is also where the Beemindering, Facebook messages, and Tumblr posts occurred.

What followed was an hour of pretty stoned talking, until we decided to listen to music. I was pretty capable of operating my phone to get the music, and took a few more notes at this point. These notes are more coherent, I was able to focus and exert higher function, I just didn’t enjoy it. I was having stomach cramps, and the more aware I was of my surroundings the more aware I was of the pain. In my notes, I talk about a painful clarity when I tried to be aware. It was much easier to let the trip wash over me and keep me numb.

Between this and the music I had a minor revelation about the substance of the acid trip. In the first two hours, I was learning to understand my brain in its new form. After this, I had some ability to choose how deep I wanted to be. If I concentrated, I could function like I was intoxicated on something more mundane, like pot or alcohol. If I relaxed, I could have closed eye hallucinations and deep revelations.

Listening to the music, I went pretty deep into the trip. I felt the music in every part of my body (despite it coming from tiny speakers), and saw crazy fractal patterns on my closed eyes. I felt all the walls around my personality come down, except for the very last set. I knew that if I let those come down, I’d be one with everything. I either wasn’t relaxed enough or hadn’t taken enough acid for that to happen.

After this, some friends came over, and I talked to them, inhabiting mainly the shallower waters of the trip. There were some fun experiences – a railing became part of my body for a while, and all the stars had halos around them.

I had two revelations that I still think are cool.

My first revelation deals with time. The natural time scale that we should interact on is seconds. This is how we interact when we talk. But technology forces us to think in terms of minutes. All of our texts come with a time stamp in minutes: 20:54, 20:55, etc.

On LSD, each second felt like minutes, and I had trouble disentangling the two time scales. I felt like it was late in the night when it was barely ten because I thought each second was a minute. This led to an odd, and artificial feeling of isolation. We had friends literally down the street, but we both felt a big gulf between us and everyone else in the world. By the times friends actually came over, we’d mostly got over this.

My second revelation dealt with the intimacy of an acid trip. It’s choosing a friend (or friends), and deciding to feel lots of euphoria and vulnerability around them. It’s nice to have a form of intimacy that hasn’t yet been gobbled up by the couple-industrial complex.

If you don’t mind the thought of losing complete control of your mind for an hour or two, and want to experience altered states of consciousness, I recommend trying acid sometime. Even if you have no deep revelations, it’s a pretty fun way to spend eight hours.

[storiesandnarratives]

I had this post hidden while I was living with my parents in case they stumbled across my blog because I was at risk of being kicked out if they saw it. Now I’ve moved out and can have it public again!