Beyond Rivalry

RIP Randy Pausch (1960-2008)

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:06:17 -0400

"Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose 'last lecture' about facing terminal cancer became an Internet sensation and a best-selling book, died Friday. He was 47." He'd been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer almost two years ago. More at NYT and at Carnegie Mellon. This is his update page, which I've been following for about a year (servers at Carnegie Mellon must be overloaded; it's taking many tries to download today).

His Last Lecture is moving and inspiring, imo. Watch it.

Crime Novel Excerpts: In the Woods, by Tana French

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:00:00 -0400

In the Woods (2007) was Tana French's debut novel, winner of the 2007 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. Set near Dublin, Ireland, it's narrated by Murder Squad detective Bob Ryan and moves between two possibly related crimes, both involving children, that take place 20 years apart in the same area. It's marketed as part police procedural and part psychological thriller, but I don't think it lives up to its thriller possibilities. The book was a pleasure to read but I was a bit disappointed with the ending.

What interested me most about it -- besides the well-paced exploration of a few characters and relationships, the intriguing plot, and the good writing (slightly too much 'had she but known" for me, and while in places the writing is beautifully poetic and whimsical, it's also a bit distracting because of that) -- were the Girardian possibilities in the various rivalries and mimetic doubles (two major sets), and the intimations and evidence of psychopathology.

French's second novel, The Likeness, featuring one of the main characters from the first, was published in the U.S. this week. The title plus the synopsis tells me there may be more mimetic doubling going on....

A couple of lines from In the Woods that particularly caught my attention:

"I don't tell people about the Knocknaree thing. I don't see why I should; it would only lead to endless salacious questioning about my nonexistent memories and inaccurate speculation about the state of my psyche, and I have no desire to deal with either." ... Replace "Knocknaree" with a variety of other things and Ryan's reasoning is mine for not talking much with most people about a good deal of my life, experiences, feelings, thoughts, etc.

"I'm not sure what exactly I did for those two years. A lot of the time, I think, nothing. I know this is one of the unthinkable taboos of our society, but I had discovered in myself a talent for a wonderful, unrepentant laziness, the kind most people never know after childhood. I had a prism from an old chandelier hanging in my window, and I could spend entire afternoons lying on my bed and watching it flick tiny chips of rainbow around the room." ... (Similarly -- and that was a fairly industrious day in which Things Got Done.)

Deciding is Exhausting

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 07:55:00 -0400

(Not surprising, really, since "to decide" literally means "to cut off" or "to kill" ... from Latin dēcīdere, to cut off: de- + caedere, to cut, hew, strike, kill. It's hard work.)

"Imagine, for a moment, that you are facing a very difficult decision about which of two job offers to accept. One position offers good pay and job security, but is pretty mundane, whereas the other job is really interesting and offers reasonable pay, but has questionable job security. Clearly you can go about resolving this dilemma in many ways. Few people, however, would say that your decision should be affected or influenced by whether or not you resisted the urge to eat cookies prior to contemplating the job offers. A decade of psychology research suggests otherwise."

Decision-making and prolonged focus both use the brain's "executive function," which "draws upon a single resource of limited capacity in the brain."

What makes choosing so tiring (it's hypothesised) are commitment and tradeoff resolution.

Commitment: "Committing to a given course requires switching from a state of deliberation to one of implementation. In other words, you have to make a transition from thinking about options to actually following through on a decision. This switch ... requires executive resources."

Tradeoff Resolution: "The mere act of resolving tradeoffs may be depleting. For example, in one study, the scientists show that people who had to rate the attractiveness of different options were much less depleted than those who had to actually make choices between the very same options." [This sounds exactly like commitment to me ...]

Implications:

When the brain's executive function is drained, we may make very different choices than when it's not. One study found that the choices made when the brain's executive resources were depleted followed a pattern: the decisions were "reliant on more a more simplistic, and often inferior, thought process." People made worse decisions.

We can "take this knowledge into account when making decisions. If we've just spent lots of time focusing on a particular task, exercising self-control or even if we've just made lots of seemingly minor choices, then we probably shouldn't try to make a major decision."

A number of examples of how decision-making suffers when the executive resource is over-taxed are in the article, "Tough Choices: How Making Decisions Tires Your Brain" by On Amir in Scientific American (22 July 2008).

---

This research reminds me of the recent findings on distraction and impartiality. In that case, remember, when subjects' cognitions were constrained by having to memorize long strings of numbers (prolonged focus, taxing the executive resource ?), the subjects became impartial in their judgments, seemingly unable to construct arguments to justify acting with self-favouritism or partiality.

Perhaps the same mechanism described above is at work there, but with the result that making choices using a tired executive resource may be said to lead to better decisions (if you think impartiality is better) ?

What's Blooming Now

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:35:00 -0400

My garden is foliage-focused -- lots of variegated and neon forms of perennial leaves -- but there are some flowering plants. Right now, here are the perennials that are blooming. Most of the photos of these blooms were taken yesterday; the tradescantia photos are from earlier because their flowers had already closed in the afternoon rain.

The raspberries, as I feared, are molding on the canes. I snipped a bunch of the moldy berries off yesterday to encourage new fruiting.

hosta (white and lavender)

hydrangea (green that turns to white that is turning now to blue)

geranium 'mourning widow' (purple)

tradescantia (blue and magenta)

bee balm (purple on one side of the house, red on the other)

meadow sage (light purple)

daylilies (orange and rich yellow)

black-eyed-Susan (volunteer, maybe left over from a wildflower planting a few years ago)

daisies (no decent shot)

various sedum (pink, white, yellow)

anise hyssop (purple spikes)

the last of the astilbes (faded pink)

the last of the filipendula (also faded pink)

What I'm Reading Lately: Death, Dog Poisoning, Novelty, Flawed Heroes, Psych Experiments, Limiting Generalisations

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:15:00 -0400

A mish-mash of my recent online reading, pondering, etc.

>> Alpine murder mystery: Are sheepdogs being poisoned to save the grey wolf? (Independent, 18 July 2008):

So far this year, 17 sheepdogs (including Great Pyrenees) have been poisoned -- with slug poison placed inside pork meatballs -- in the high Maurienne mountains, just inside the French border with Italy. The killings seem to stem from an ongoing dispute between sheep-lovers (and shepherds) and wolf-lovers. "'The pork meat balls were left, some time during the night, most likely just before dawn, in a place where the dogs would be sure to find them. This is the work of a maniac – a madman. What if the meat had been found by a small child? There are tourists everywhere at this time of year, including many British tourists.'"

"The dogs have often died in great agony.... [The poison] causes instant and catastrophic diarrhoea and lung failure in small mammals like dogs. 'They finish up dying completely dehydrated but, before that, they drown in their own bronchial fluids.'"

There are about 100 wolves in France. There is a sheep-protection plan in place in the area, and there have been no wolf attacks on sheep in the Maurienne area for more than two years.

>> If you haven't read it yet, I recommend "Cancer & Creativity: One Chef’s True Story" (Food & Wine, July 2008):

"While undergoing treatment for tongue cancer, Grant Achatz temporarily lost his ability to taste. Paradoxically, it taught him brilliant new ways to create flavor."

>> Impossible Experiments (Psychology Today, 1 July 2008) is a small collection of research psychologists would like to do "if neither ethics nor practical reality stood in your way." What interests me is that almost all the comments (so far) are about one hypothesis, that how parents raise their kids doesn't influence them significantly. The experiment I would jump on is Tamler Sommers' "Another Man's Shoes." (The YouTube video at the end makes clear that the whole thing is a joke ... or is it?) Other never-done experiments.

>> "Our Infantile Search for Heroic Leaders" by Johann Hari (26 June 2008, Independent). Hari's thesis is two-fold: That there are no perfectly good leaders and that we can't expect leaders to solve our problems because "every civilising advance in history ... was won because ordinary people banded together and agitated for it." Not much new there, but what interested me about this article was Hari's critique of Mandela, Gandhi, and Churchill as flawed leaders. I never knew that Churchill, for instance, was "strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes." His portrayal of Gandhi as a murderer (of his wife) seems overdone, not because I don't believe it's possible but because even as Hari presents it, it sounds more like a matter of adhering to principles in one case (his wife's illness) and not in another (his own illness), a rather ordinary though insidious trait.

>> Reframing Questions by Dave Pollard at How To Save the World (16 July 2008) seeks to promote critical thinking, to help us think beyond our own "false myths and limiting generalizations." He gives some examples of some limiting myths and generalisations he encounters everyday in business, then reframes the questions, and then asks his readers: "What are the false myths and limiting generalizations that you are struggling with, and how might you use appropriate questions to reframe them, disempower them, put them to rest?" Some day I may give some energy to it and respond to that challenge here.

>> "Why We Like New Stuff" (Mental Floss, 16 July 2008). Basically, "our brains are actually hard-wired to prefer novelty and adventure. ... In fact, research on the ventral striatum (the part of the brain associated with rewarding behavior) seems to indicate that sating our sense of adventure provides us the same sort of satisfaction we get from sex and food." Dopamine figures, too. Full study (7 pages, PDF).

>> "Italian Outrage Over Roma Drowning Photos" (21 July 2008, CNN) is confusing to me. "Italian newspapers, an archbishop and civil liberties campaigners expressed shock and revulsion on Monday after photographs were published of sunbathers apparently enjoying a day at the beach just meters from where the bodies of two drowned Roma girls were laid out on the sand."

I think I might be creeped out if dead people were lying on the beach -- I'm creeped out when a dead seal or horseshoe crab is lying on the beach -- but the sunbathers' critics aren't shocked that they're not repulsed enough, presumably; they're shocked that the sunbathers are indifferent to the bodies. Shocked that they can act as if they aren't there, that they can do what they would ordinarily do without creating a sacred space for the bodies, without making their deaths the focus. That doesn't seem so bad to me. In any important way, the girls are not there, so why regard the dead bodies as something sacred, something whose presence means we should act differently than we do ordinarily? I guess it's because death is seen as such a powerful force.

The Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Crecenzio Seppe, said in his blog that "'To turn the other way or to mind your own business can sometimes be more devastating than the events that occur.'" I'd agree if the girls were injured or needed lifesaving efforts; then it would be cruel to be indifferent. But I don't see how the sunbathers' can really mind the dead girls' business now, or why they should.

I've been in the presence of someone in the moments of her death, and in the presence of her body, as it lay in her house, for a couple of hours after that. The moment of dying, yes, that felt like something happened, something a little unusual and yet not, like breathing in and out. But for the hours afterwards? My experience was that life went on in its ordinary way. If I hadn't felt that all along that morning, I would have when the mortuary folks came with their plastic garbage-like bag and heaved her body into it. It was about as sacred-seeming as bodies under beach towels on a sunny day.

(In a twisted way, it kinda reminds me of this ...)

In the Name of Science

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:55:00 -0400

Chocolate 'cake' in a mug in a microwave. Don't forget to scroll down to see all the ... evidence.

One researcher's results:

"I mixed the ingredients exactly as ordered, and put it in the microwave. Over the course of five minutes the scents that came from my microwave were: Cooking chicken, old motor oil, cocoa, and burned coffee.

"It took me two tries to get a fork into my leaning monstrosity, and when I bit into it, it was crunchy. I threw it at a wall as hard as I could and it didn't break at all."

Another intrepid researcher substituted Nestle's Strawberry Quick for cocoa powder: "It tastes a little like strawberries, and a little like failure."

Not Many Dead - Volume II

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:05:00 -0400

A magazine I read monthly has a reader write-in column titled "Not Many Dead: Important Stories You May Have Missed." The column is made up of headlines or snippets of 'news' stories that are hardly news. As part of an ongoing series (first one here), I offer these recent non-news stories:

"A study by an independent nonprofit research group, The National Sleep Foundation, found that more than 65 percent of moms drink caffeinated beverages to get through their day." [CNN, 24 June 2008]

Headline: "If Gordon is our Heathcliff, who or what is his Cathy?" First paragraph: "[British PM] Gordon Brown apparently thinks voters are right to compare him to Heathcliff, the brooding figure at the centre of Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Political Editor Tomos Livingstone wonders whether this is one question he should have laughed off instead, while, below right, Catherine Jones explores the true nature of the character the Prime Minister is comparing himself to." [11 July, Wales Online]

"Rapper 50 Cent is free to take a vacation with his son after passing a court-ordered drug test." [18 Jul, NYT]

"Plans for a large human trial of a promising government-developed H.I.V. vaccine in the United States were canceled Thursday because a top federal official said scientists realized that they did not know enough about how H.I.V. vaccines and the immune system interact." [18 July, NYT]

Noose Watch

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:55:00 -0400

A surprising number of noose incidents in the southern New England and mid-Atlantic states ...

Click on map to learn details of each of the 78 incidents reported to authorities within the last year in the U.S.)

The Mechanism

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 08:10:00 -0400

"In a nutshell: before the advent of Judaism and Christianity, in one way or the other, the scapegoat mechanism was accepted and justified, on the basis that it remained unknown. It brought peace back to the community at the height of the chaotic mimetic crisis. All archaic religions grounded their rituals precisely around the re-enactment of the founding murder. In other words, they considered the scapegoat to be guilty of the eruption of the mimetic crisis. By contrast, Christianity, in the figure of Jesus, denounced the scapegoat mechanism for what it actually is: the murder of an innocent victim, killed in order to pacify a riotous community. That's the moment in which the mimetic mechanism is fully revealed." -- René Girard, in Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

Quoted by Chronicles of Atlantis, with accompanying photo at that website.

This may not be what was intended, but reading Girard and learning about mimetic theory these last few years has led me to become extremely wary of all sacrifice (making sacred) -- which actually I think is intended -- and also sceptical and even perhaps cynical of self-sacrifice, in myself and others.

Sacrifice seems so often to go hand-in-hand with feelings of righteousness and resentment, and the act of scapegoating, and it offers an enormous payoff both for acknowledging the sacrifice as such and for denying all else. I see self-sacrifice now as mostly an acceptable way to make oneself sacred, a kind of self-divination that can be deeply satisfying and comforting to the sacrificer. (A short time ago I would have agreed that 'we are all sacred,' and yet now I think that such language amounts to a sort of trick, a means of identifying and attacking 'the profane,' that which we think is unworthy.)

I think we are called to compassion -- i.e., suffering with, abiding with, experiencing what the other experiences without clutching onto the experience -- which sometimes entails sacrifice of one's ego, one's desires, and at times one's life; and yet I can't be unaware of the ego-needs and the desires that are met in the act of sacrificing oneself in both mundane and extraordinary ways, in the stories we tell ourselves and others about the sacrifice -- before (if premeditated or foreseen), during and particularly after the fact -- and in the refuge taken in false modesty that seeks to lift up our own altruism and to deny our own selfishness. And contrariwise, even boasting of our selfish motives can itself become a show of ego self-sacrifice, a twisted pretense of appropriate humility that serves only to enhance the perception of oneself as a hero, a god, someone who isn't even aware of the good they've done. We are a tricky, tricky lot, it seems to me, capable often of hiding the complexity of our own motives from our own minds and hearts.

I can imagine self-sacrifice as a consequence of feeling in the flow of all life, as a heartfelt response to feeling loved, as an act intertwined with living an abundant life, though I have a more difficult time imagining that the story about the act could leave it at that without justification, fabrication, meaning-making, and so on.... What I can't imagine is self-sacrifice as a measurement on a moral scale without also thinking about the Pharisees and their sacrifices, abstinences, denials of pleasures, etc., for the sake of God, and how good they felt about their worthiness under God because of those sacrifices.

Self-sacrifice that comes from a sense of duty and a need to 'do the right thing,' and that carries with it a sense of having done right, done well, been worthy and pleasing, feels to me likely to slip unobserved into a self-congratulatory act, and perhaps to leak into resentment, bitterness, anger and eventually accusation when the act is unappreciated, unrecompensed, unacknowledged, unnoticed, and even unaccepted, and/or has an outcome considered bad by the sacrificer. (Or, alternately, the sacrificer may view the lack of appreciation and the bad outcome as yet another burden added to the sacrifice s/he is making, which just enhances the satisfaction s/he feels in making such a sacrifice.)

If such an act derives from wanting to measure up, wanting to do what's right and to be right, then it seems mined with explosive devices that will likely damage the sacrificer, as it did the Pharisees, without their noticing it. If, on the other hand, such a sacrifice derives from a feeling of being loved completely for who one is (and isn't), from a knowledge at the core -- or perhaps simply from a quick glimpse that's never been quite edited out -- that we are the recipients of a gift that our word 'life' doesn't even begin to describe -- Well, that kind of sacrifice could, it seems, be experienced not as giving up anything, not as an unequal exchange, not as suffering at all except in the sense of 'suffer' as 'allow' or 'undergo.' We might then undergo sacrifice as a bit of ash undergoes a lava flow or as a drop of rain undergoes a thunderstorm. What would that be like?

(I ordered Evolution and Conversion yesterday, and a few days ago received a copy of Girard's other book published this year, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005, from which I may occasionally quote as I get into it. I'll probably skip around ... Writers whose works he explores include Stendhal, Voltaire, Valéry, Tocqueville, de Beauvoir, Proust, Racine, Sartre, Hugo, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare ... I haven't read most of the original texts, so it may be hard going. See TOC here.)

Taking A Life

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:36:17 -0400

"When it became clear he wasn't going to move out of the way, I closed my eyes, covered my face and held my breath.

"By the time we were stationary, four of my eight cars were in the platform and I was on autopilot. I told the passengers there would be a delay in opening the doors due to an 'incident', and was calling the line controller for assistance when I heard a tap on my cab door. A smart man inquired, 'Do you know there's a person under your train?' I looked at the blood on the windscreen momentarily before assuring him that, yes, I was aware.

"He paused for a heartbeat, looked at his watch and said, 'So, how long before we get on the move again?'"

(from "Last Year I Killed a Man," by Vaughan Thomas, in the Guardian, 19 July 2008, via Scott)

Martha Blogs Her Visit to the NY DMV

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 06:55:00 -0400

One might ask, Why?, but then one may as well ask, Why not?

As Martha would say, Come see!

(Can you believe they sell pens at the DMV for $.25 so you can fill out their forms!?)

More Funeral Stuff

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:45:00 -0400

A short McSweeney's list: Phrases I'd Rather Not Be Used At My Funeral by Harry Burt, with my anxious additions:

"autoerotic asphyxiation" [likewise: "left 10-inch clawmarks"]

"found by cadaver dogs" ["according to the forensic entomologist"]

"hopped up on goofballs" ["ate her weight in Oreos"]

"minutes from rescue" ["last-second airline flight change"]

"prehensile tail" ["cascading sheets of mucus"]

["salvaged what we could," "leaned over the rim a smidge too far," "must have been in unimaginable pain," "what's that on his forehead? 'syawliarT'?"]

Websites with Narrow Focus, X

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 06:45:00 -0400

In a continuing series ...

I've been saving them up for this post.

It's Lovely! I'll Take It!, "a collection of poorly chosen photos from real estate listings. With love." And comments. Don't miss it.

potentially nervous: "The world's going to hell. Here are some bunny photos."

How I Spent My Stimulus. Tell your story.

Kim's Page o' Chopsticks. Chopstick wrappers, actually. (Thanks, Mike.)

Canadian Feet Update

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:36:57 -0400

The first of the five feet that have washed up so far in British Columbia has been identified as belonging to "a depressed man who went missing a year ago." (Previous stories linked here.)

Reason-Giving: Four Kinds of Reasons

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:10:00 -0400

At the heart of Tilly's book Why? (see previous post) are the four kinds of reasons he posits: conventions, codes, stories and technical accounts.

Conventions and codes don't posit cause-and-effect; they simply appeal to socially appropriate formulas as explanation:

CONVENTIONS -- Conventionally accepted reasons. Examples: My train was late, I wasn't in the mood, she's just lucky, gotta run, I'm so busy,

CODES -- Rules, basically. Particularly relevent in law, medicine, the military, government, religion, diplomacy, sports and so on.

Stories and technical accounts do posit cause-and-effect:

STORIES -- Explanatory narratives, usually used for exceptional, unusual, or unfamiliar events.

TECHNICAL ACCOUNTS -- cause-and-effect explanation used by authorities and specialists in their fields (engineers, physicians, programmers, artists, etc.)

To show the difference among these, Tilly starts the book with a discussion of causes put forth early on, by politicians and survivors, for the 9/11 terrorists attacks:

Story: Terrorists did it, but lax officials let them do it.

Convention: Modern life is dangerous.

Code: Because we have freedom to defend, we must combat terror.

Technical accounts: (Not many given initially. Later, specialists gave accounts of "how airplane crashes brought down supposedly unshakeable buildings, what went wrong with American intelligence," etc.)

He notes that "intermediate forms of reason giving exist. One form sometimes mutates into another as people interact. In religious communities, 'God wills it' stands halfway between a convention and a story, having more or less explanatory power depending on prevailing beliefs about divine intervention in human affairs."

He also makes clear that all of these ways of relating are also used to accomplish things other than give reasons. For example, stories also "amuse, threaten and educate;" technical accounts also "display their providers' expertise and signal where the experts stand on divisive issues;" conventions also "mark boundaries between insiders and outsiders, fill lulls in conversations, and convey accumulated ideas from one generation to the next."

More about each:

CONVENTIONS

Conventions, like etiquette, "mix propriety and self-interest." Etiquette "consists of supplying appropriate, effective reasons why -- for things you do, and for things you won't do. Good etiquette incorporates conventional reasons. The reasons need not be true, but they must fit the circumstances" and, even more, the relationship.

Some conventions consist of 'serviceable excuses' that try to normalise relationships. An example Tilly gives is of someone who's illiterate asking a stranger in a store to read something for them, with the explanation that they forgot their glasses. Other examples of 'serviceable excuses' we give to conceal "our suddenly revealed incompetence" include Sorry - I thought this was someone else's office, These gears always grind, The map was wrong, It's too loud to hear anything, etc. We use these to avoid embarrassment, to "prove that the relation between ourselves and others is not what it might seem." Sometimes, Tilly notes, we give similar explanations not to express our social competence but to "explain a failure as a result of excusable incompetence" (my watch stopped, I'm sick, I'm new in town, I've never done this before, etc.)

Tilly says that justification occurs in all types of reason-giving, but that "justification by means of convention ... has a peculiar property: participants rarely take the reason proposed seriously as a cause-effect account, and more often treat it as a characterization of the relationship, the practices, and the connection between them. A good reason offers an acceptable characterization."

CODES

Using codes as reasons is all about matching the case at hand to the code in the book: "Asked to justify a decision, adjudicate a dispute, or give advice, skillful users of codes find matches between concrete cases and categories, procedures, and rules already built into the codes. Like conventions, reasons based on codes therefore gain credibility from criteria of appropriateness rather than from the cause-effect validity that prevails in stories and technical accounts."

"Sermons, classes, Power-Point presentations, manuals and how-to books often present codes: briefly stated principles followed by practical applications. Their very formats separate them from everyday social interchange. ... Job applications, survey interviews, resumes, obituaries, and citations for honors typically require either their authors or some specialist to convert accounts initially presented in story form into stylized facts to match well-established codes."

Tilly gives lots of legal and medical examples, especially malpractice.

STORIES

Stories "truncate cause-effect connections. They typically call up a limited number of actors whose dispositions and actions cause everything that happens within a delimited time and space. ... Stories inevitably minimize or ignore the causal roles of errors, unanticipated consequences, indirect effects, incremental effects, simulataneous effects, feedback effects, and environmental effects."

(All those errors and effects are what interest me -- as well as what the 'actors' think, feel and do -- and may explain an aversion I have to stories that omit those messy things.)

Stories make meaning, make "the world intelligible. ... Stories provide simplified cause-effect accounts of puzzling, unexpected, dramatic, problematic or exemplary events. ... [T]hey often carry an edge of justification or condemnation. ... The story usually gives pride of place to human actors. When the leading characters are not human" ... (animals, God, storms, etc.) "they still behave mostly like humans. The story they enact accordingly often conveys credit or blame. ... Stories exclude ... inconvenient complications [like those errors and effects named above]. ... Even when they convey truths, stories enormously simplify the processes involved."

Elements of stories and when we choose to tell them:

Stories explain events in question, when conventions and general principles won't do
Stories often assign blame to the actors involved, omitting other non-actor causes
There are master stories that recur frequently[ i.e., myths?]: "A let B down and B suffered," "C and D fought to a standstill," etc.
Stories usually have some kind of moral, even if subtle through assigning praise or blame

This paragraph was most enlightening for me, articulating something felt but not always consciously understood:

"As with conventions the choice of stories obviously has consequences for later relations among the parties to the stories, and typically involves justification or condemnation of certain practices. If I tell you that a mutual friend has cheated me, I am simultaneously aligning you with me against the friend and warning you not to trust the friend .... That is why hearing stories often upsets us and sometimes incites us to challenge the teller: if we accept the story, we take on the consequences."

"Superior stories" are those that are simplified to the greatest degree and are also closest to truth; that is, they get their cause and effect right. These stories are widely accessible and persuasive.

TECHNICAL ACCOUNTS

Technical accounts "combine cause-effect explanation (rather than logics of appropriateness) with grounding in some systematic specialized discipline (rather than everyday knowledge). ... They assume shared knowledge of previously accumulated definitions, practices and findings. For that reason, outsiders often consider technical accounts inpenetrable because they are so hermetic or ... filled with jargon."

Their relationship work is that they "signal relationships with possessors of esoteric knowledge, saying you're one of us to other sympathetic specialists, marking differences within the field from others with whom the author disagrees, providing introductions to the field ..., and establishing the author's respectablity vis-a-vis respectful nonspecialists."

Technical accounts use codes to match and measure cases against norms and standards, and they go on to posit cause and effect based on this.

Tilly's examples concerns violence, crime, the National Academy of Sciences, privatizaton of common resources, property rights, Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel, etc.

(I find most of the examples in this book pretty tedious and very skippable.)

My Conclusion

After reading this book, I have the sense that pretty much every reason we give others or ourselves, or hear from same, is either formulaic or a highly simplified mythic account. Is that it?

I've been trying out reasons in my head -- all stories, so far, because that's the only place where it seems that complexity and doubt could enter -- conventions are not complex per se, codes may be complex but are also pro forma to some extent, and technical accounts aren't that useful for discussing ordinary relationships) -- for various actions I've done, and even when they sometimes include mention of coincidence, feedback effects, incremental effects, etc., they still, I can't help but notice, omit a lot of contributing factors, either because I want to minimise those factors when I present the reasons to myself, or the story gets unwieldy with so many offshoots -- perhaps with cause-and-effect accounts, there is a tendency to weight the contributing factors and to present those writ bold because they seem significant and seem to account for most of the outcome. My life experience, though, tells me that my justifications and reasons-giving after the fact are liable to be misinterpretations of reality, the result of my mind imposing actions, feelings and thoughts (and cause and effect hypotheses) into a biased framework.

I understand, reading this book, why I have felt at times so slighted by someone I considered a friend, when he listens to my story (sometimes a reason-giving story, sometimes not) and responds with what feels to me like a pat convention ("You know it's wrong to do that." "Well, these things happen." etc.) I've done the same thing and felt the chilling effect it's had on the reason-receiver, too. Now I wonder if answering a friend's drama with a conventional response always necessarily reveals either (1) an intention to push the other away, to make an intimate relationship more distant, or, likewise, (2) an intention to change the relationship's power balance -- the one offering the convention is in effect saying, "I'm superior," or is at least making a claim to more power than she currently has within the relationship.