Category: books

Where Did Blogs Come From?

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The more I blog, the more I think about blogging. (And the more I enjoy blogs.) In an email to Tyler Cowen I wondered if blogs were a new art form. He replied:

I’ve long been interested in early literary models for bloggers, including Boswell, Pepys, Julio Cortazar, and John Cage (having a co blogger and comments introduces an aleatoric element)…I’m always looking for others…

I replied:

My literary model is Scheherazade. When I think of more standard precursors of blogs, I think of diaries and epistolary novels. Improvisational jazz, too, the way bloggers riff on something they’ve read. Also the Watts Towers — especially for MR.

I think the way bloggers inject emotion into non-fiction is something new in the world of expression. Robert Caro once said that he tried to inject desperation into every page of his bio of Lyndon Johnson. “Is there desperation on the page?” read a note to himself pinned near his typewriter.

Non-fiction with emotion isn’t easy, in other words. Caro’s books are fantastic achievements because he manages to convey emotion page after page for thousands of pages. Not just Johnson’s desperation — as a friend of mine said, Caro seems to “hate” Johnson. He certainly hated the later Robert Moses.

Blogging with emotion, however, is easy. Almost unavoidable. For post after post. Nobody blogs about stuff they don’t care about or feel strongly about. If you want to learn about something, find a blog about it.

Addendum: Speaking of blogs and art, this NY Times Mag article is excellent.

Interview about Self-Experimentation (postscript)

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One of my favorite writers is Vladimir Nabokov. When he was alive, I not only read all his books but tried to read every word he wrote (in English). I have a folder full of photocopied interviews from newspapers and magazines. Late in his career, after my folder had become thick, Nabokov did something surprising: Came out with a book of interviews (Strong Opinions — here and here are excerpts), which put into book form most of what was in my folder. He wrote his answers to interview questions so this made some sense. Yes!, I thought, these interviews are just as interesting as I’ve always thought. I’d already read each of them about five times; I read them a few more times in book form.

I was such a big fan of Nabokov, and I liked his written interviews so much, that posting my answers to interview questions (here and here) was not an emotionally-neutral event. Partly it was a huge thrill — like being on your favorite TV show. Like being Nabokov For a Day. And partly it was humbling: My answers were way way worse than his.

Made to Stick

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I went to a panel discussion last night. A professor — with vast public-speaking experience — gave a long boring introduction. “If only he had read Made to Stick!” I thought. The panelists were better but I wished they too had read Made to Stick.

MTS, by Chip Heath, a Stanford business professor, and Dan Heath, a corporate education consultant, tries to say what makes messages more or less memorable. They boil it down to six qualities. To be remembered, your message should be: 1. Simple. 2. Unexpected. 3. Concrete. 4. Credible. 5. Emotional. 6. Told with stories.

They complain that speakers and writers often “bury the lede” — fail to start with the most important compelling stuff. Well, their best story is buried in the middle of the book. Early in his class, Chip Heath has several students give brief talks. The class grades them. Ten minutes later everyone is asked what they remember from the talks. Hardly anything is remembered. The graded quality of the talk doesn’t matter: The “better” talks are remembered just as poorly as the “worse” talks. What is remembered are stories. But hardly anyone tells a story.

In other words, Stanford business students — and by extension the rest of us — don’t know how to give a good talk and don’t recognize a good talk when we hear one. We don’t know — and don’t know we don’t know. I agree. Our collective ignorance is enshrined in bad advice: Start your talk with a joke, for instance. MTS never says anything like that. It says: Start with a story.

Addendum: Seth Godin demonstrates.

For Whom Do Colleges Exist? (continued)

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Yesterday on BART I saw someone reading The And of Poverty. It was an illegal Chinese edition of The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. I asked the person reading it what she thought of it. “Very ethnocentric,” she said. “Very Jeffrey-Sachs-centric,” I said. (For a good critique, see The White Man’s Burden by William Easterly.) America is not the only ethnocentric country, she said, so are other countries who give foreign aid, such as Japan. “What gives me hope is the growth of micro-finance,” she said. “People have a great capacity for figuring out what they need.” I agreed.

In the comments on my “ For Whom Do Colleges Exist?” post someone asked what I would suggest. In my opinion, almost all attempts to improve colleges have had the same core problem as almost all foreign aid: The helpers think they know better what to do than the people they wish to help.

My prescription for higher education is simple: Give students more control of what they learn. When I did this in spades — more by accident than design — my students blossomed. I had never seen anything like it. It happened again and again. When I helped my students learn what they wanted to learn, as opposed to what I thought they should learn, they learned much more. Funny, huh?

Giving students more control of what they learn can be done in many ways, of course. At UC Berkeley, where I teach, here are two possible baby steps in that direction:

1. There exists a system of student-organized-and-run classes called DeCal. Allow one DeCal class to go toward satisfying the Letters and Science college-wide breadth requirement (seven classes, one from each of several areas). The DeCal class would replace any of the seven classes.

2. Allow — or, even better, encourage — admitted students to take a gap year, as they do in England. A gap year is a year away from school between high school and college. (I proposed such a thing a few years ago to the previous UC Berkeley chancellor. My suggestion was given to an administrator who dismissed it. Too hard to administer, she said.)

Professors should like these suggestions. The DeCal proposal will reduce the number of students who take a class because they are forced to. The gap-year proposal will reduce the immaturity of freshmen. When I gave my students much more power to learn what they wanted to learn, my job got much easier. Funny, huh?

How Bad is The Secret?

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Not as bad as you think. The Secret, of course, is the huge best-seller (now #2 on Amazon) that claims you can get what you want by applying “ The Law of Attraction” — namely, that if you think about something it will come to you. According to Wikipedia, “there have been no widely recognized studies demonstrating that the [Law of Attraction] actually works.” The book has been — not to put too fine a point on it — ridiculed, for example by the author Barbara Ehrenreich.

I learned about The Secret last July from my friend Sarah Kapoor, who made a CBC segment about the Shangri-La Diet. She told me about nine YouTube spots (Parts 1-9), each 10 minutes long, that together made a movie. I watched only Part 1 (now unavailable). It wasn’t enjoyable. It seemed like a parody of a film about science, and not a funny one. Sarah said it was growing like wildfire but at the time the segments had received only a few thousand views so I wondered what she was talking about. Time has proven her correct.

Is The Secret complete nonsense? It sounds like complete nonsense, the writers of Wikipedia apparently think it’s complete nonsense (”no widely-recognized studies . . . “), Barbara Ehrenreich thinks it’s complete nonsense (she calls it “mass delusion”), but I don’t think it actually is complete nonsense. Around 1980, Robert Cialdini, a psychology professor at Arizona State, and Kathleen Carpenter, an undergraduate, did a remarkable study. They gave Tempe residents one of two paragraphs to read about the benefits of cable TV (a new thing at the time). One was a dry statement of the benefits; the other asked the reader to imagine partaking of the benefits (”take a moment and think of how . . . you will be able to spend your time at home, with your familly, alone, or with your friends”). A month later, these residents were offered the choice of whether to get cable TV or not. Of those given the dry information, about 20% subscribed; of those given the “take a moment” statement, about 50% subscribed. A huge difference, with nontrivial monetary consequences, from what seems like a tiny treatment. The title of the published article, which appeared in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1982, vol. 43, pp. 89-99) was “Self-relevant scenarios as mediators of likelihood estimates and compliance: Does imagining make it so?” Imagining did make it so, in a surprising way. The effect is much too large to be dismissed. I don’t think it has been repeated, although I’m not sure.

I learned about this study from the excellent new book Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.

Life is Complicated

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Yesterday morning I listened to Ira Glass. Yesterday evening I listened to Bill McKibben. And I reflected:

1. Bill McKibben wrote a whole book, The Age of Missing Information (1992), about the malign influence of TV. He spent a year watching a single day’s output of the 100-odd channels of one cable company. TV makes people self-centered, he decided.

2. Ira Glass said we are living in a Golden Age of Television and listed a handful of current shows — including The Wire, The Daily Show, Colbert, Friday Night Lights, Project Runway, Entourage, House, and “anything with Ricky Gervais” — in support of his claim. He has just spent a year starting a TV version of This American Life.

3. Bill McKibben wrote an article (in The Nation) praising This American Life to the skies.

I think of McKibben and Glass as the two Boy Geniuses of American intellectual life. (Curiously I cannot think of any Girl Geniuses.) Both of them did great work while really young. When McKibben was in his twenties, he wrote a long series of editorials in The New Yorker that were inspiring. (They were unsigned. I found out who wrote them by writing to the magazine.) His first book, The End of Nature (1989), about global warming, was prophetic. I think it was the very first general-audience book on the subject. As for Glass, This American Life was terrific right from the start, twelve years ago. He was 36 when it started.

Charles Murray vs. Charles Murray

Seth Roberts8 Comments

The Bell Curve (1994) by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which argued that IQ is destiny, was the most IQ-glorifying book since . . . well, ever. Now Mr. Murray has taken a big step away from his position in that book, yet he continues to glorify IQ.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Mr. Murray wrote an op-ed piece (“What’s wrong with vocational school?”) with which I mostly agree. His main point is that for most students, college is a waste of time. As a college teacher (at Berkeley), I have seen that all too clearly. Mr. Murray has an unfortunate way of stating his position. “A four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people.” I’d put it differently: A four-year college education teaches analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the interest of most people. I am sure that if my students or anyone’s students were more interested in the material, they would learn it better. That most college students are not interested in the same things as most college professors is a good thing, economically speaking. A healthy economy is a diverse economy; a diverse economy requires a wide range of skills and knowledge, much wider than the narrow skills and knowledge possessed and taught by college teachers. But it is a bad thing for the students and teachers, who are trapped. They have to be there. I feel worse for the students, of course — they are paying to be there.

It isn’t complicated: IQ tests were designed to predict school performance. They do. People with higher IQs do better in school. To believe in the value of IQ is to believe in the school system it reflects. To glorify one is to glorify the other. Now Mr. Murray has taken a step away from one (the school system) but not the other (IQ). Well, nobody’s perfect.

Were I grading The Bell Curve, I would give it a B. The sad truth is that its basic conclusion, that a high IQ is really helpful, is entirely correct. A better book would have replaced the wacky genetic chapter with an attempt to understand why IQ matters so much. In a world where we place less weight on successful completion of college — the world that Murray now advocates — IQ will matter less.

In The Nature of Economies, Jane Jacobs pointed to the stultifying effects of discrimination. “Macho cultures typically have pitiful, weak economies,” she wrote. “Half their population, doing economically important types of work, such as cooking and food processing . . . are excluded from taking initiatives to develop all that work [e.g., open a restaurant] — and nobody else does it, either.” IQ discrimination is also stultifying. If our society did a better job of helping students who are not good at college — helping them find jobs where their abilities shine, instead of wasting four precious years of their lives — the entire economy would benefit.