Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

Everyone knows that women's clothing sizes are nebulous and change over time.  But men's pant sizes are also lying to you.

I wonder how this has changed over time.  Would old pants from thrift stores be more honest?

Book Review: The Bonfire of the Vanities

I saw a copy of The Bonfire of the Vanities in the thrift store recently, and since it is a well-known and culturally important book, I decided to grab it and see what it was like.

At first I was impressed. The prose was first-rate, with excellent descriptions and characterizations. I could tell that this was the work of a highly skilled writer. But it got old really fast. Every single character is evil and stupid, except for a few cameo appearances from people who are evil and smart. I had no sympathy for anybody and no curiosity about what would happen next. The plot moved at the pace of molasses, and most of the book ended up being the internal monologues of really despicable people.

I stopped reading The Bonfire of the Vanities about two-fifths of the way through, when it became clear that the book would remain a festering labyrinth of toxic cynicism. I felt like I was reading a bad Seinfeld episode wrapped in thick layers of literary pretension.

I understand the social value of pointing out hypocrisy and bad behavior. This kind of thing can be a good antidote to those who are star-struck or hold unrealistically high opinions of certain groups of people. But The Bonfire of the Vanities, by making rotten attitudes and behavior seem so commonplace, ends up justifying this behavior and making it acceptable. One gets the impression that the entire world is rotten, and that rotten behavior is the norm. Given what we know about human psychology, this will make people who read the book more likely to act rotten.

This effect is magnified by the skill of the writer. Everything is so vivid and memorable that it is bound to stick in one's subconscious. Reading The Bonfire of the Vanities is quite similar to watching Triumph of the Will. I see great artistic skill used in the service of subtle and nasty propaganda, and I get grim and depressed. This book, like Catch-22, is probably responsible spreading a taint of bleak nihilism among the people of our country.

While reading the book, I found myself starting to hate humanity. I had to back up, take a breath, and tell myself that the book is not an accurate representation of society or reality. It is a caricature, one man's distorted look at a small group of people. For example, many of the characters are obsessed with issues relating to Jews. The book is full of descriptions about how people hate Jews and how Jews despise other people, how people's minds and thoughts are always focusing on this, and how the fact that one is a Jew is central to that person's identity.

But 'The Jewish Question' has never been a part of my life. It is not an issue at all. I do not know which names are Jewish, and I cannot identify a person as Jewish unless he is wearing a yarmulke. Nobody I know has ever said anything about Jews or even, to my knowledge, thinks about them as a group. Holding strong opinions about Jews is like holding strong opinions about Vietnamese or Latvians or Algerians. Thinking about them is an alien concept. Antisemitism, like public executions, is a strange, foreign, primitive thing that, in my experience, only exists in history books and news reports from Islamic countries. Maybe it was a feature of New York in the 1980's. But by dragging out this kind of old rubbish, The Bonfire of the Vanities simply serves to keep it alive and in people's minds.

I know that we all have instincts that can cause us to act beastly. When placed in a bad environment, or when given power or secrecy, people will often be corrupt and venal. But we also have instincts to follow the behavior patterns of our peer group, and we have the tools to motivate people to act well. Civilization depends on using socialization and good incentives to create patterns of good behavior. The most charitable thing that can be said about The Bonfire of the Vanities is that it shines a spotlight on a problem that needs to be solved. But the method it uses to do this causes more harm than good, by making rotten behavior seem like a social norm.

Leadership

These studies back up our theory that many leaders owe their position not to calculated, rational decisions on the part of the electorate or interview board, but to their ability to push a "leader button" in the human psyche

From this article

Our decision-making is far more primitive than we usually admit, and these primitive instincts are increasingly unsuited to the modern world.

Economics Parenting Tip

How do you best get your children to sleep in the car?

Language and Thought

Here's a good article about the cognitive effects and benefits of language.

Lupyan found that participants who were given names for the aliens learned to identify the predators far more quickly, reaching 80 per cent accuracy in less than half the time taken by those not told the names. By the end of the test, those told the names could correctly categorise 88 per cent of aliens, compared to just 80 per cent for the rest (Psychological Science, vol 18, p 1077). So naming objects helps us categorise and memorise them, Lupyan concluded.

However language emerged, it seems that our inner voice changes the way we experience the world. "Language is like augmented reality - an overlay that changes how we think, reason and see," says Clark. Boroditsky believes that this is as relevant to us today as it was to early humans. "The sheer amount of information arriving down the optic nerve is far more than the brain can process consciously," she says. Language, she believes, is how the human brain focuses on the essential details. "It's like a guidebook that has been developed by thousands of people before you, who have figured out what is important for us to survive and adapt to our environment." 

This has important and ominous implications that are not discussed in the article.  If language is so important to thought, then people with smaller vocabularies will, ceteris paribus, be worse at thinking, and on a very fundamental level.  They experience the world differently than those with rich vocabularies; their world will be full of confusing, complicated, and unclassifiable objects and concepts.  This is a horrifying handicap to a successful life.

Restaurants

Here's a long but interesting article about the company that owns Olive Garden and Red Lobster:

At the helm of this quiet giant is the 53-year-old son of a janitor from Watts, the Los Angeles neighborhood that made headlines for riots in 1965. "You hear people in the restaurant industry say, 'I have a feel for the business,' " says CEO Clarence Otis. He's not one of those people. "On the continuum of intuitive restaurants versus systematized, analytic restaurants, we're very analytic," he says. "The direction of our business is based on understanding customers."

Darden turned to research. "The key consumer insight was that people missed the emotional comfort and connectivity that comes with family," says chief operating officer Drew Madsen, then the chain's head of marketing. "People come to a restaurant for both physical and emotional nourishment. The physical is the food; and the emotional is how you feel when you leave." 

My family used to like these restaurants, before we became really focused on eating healthy.  But even then, we hardly ever ate out.  I and both of my parents are willing and able to cook good homemade food, so we simply do not need or want restaurants most of the time.

As attitudes changed, the test kitchens took on the preparation challenge; risotto requires 20 minutes to cook, longer than customers are willing to wait.

Restaurant speed has changed a lot in the past couple of decades.  Everything is so much faster.  It makes economic sense, of course.  Not only do people demand it, but the faster you can get people in and out the more people you can serve and the more money you can make.  But something has been lost when people are unwilling to wait 20 minutes in a nice environment.  The 'slow food' people do have a point.

This summer, she's launching another project to share wait times across restaurants so that a hostess can steer customers to nearby Darden establishments that aren't as busy. The next logical step, White says, would be to give customers online access to that information.

I predict that this will boost their restaurant profitability far more then they expect, especially if they provide historical minute-by-minute graphs of wait time.  People will go to their site and find the best time and place to eat,and this will spread out arrival times and make everything run more smoothly.

Paper Fan

I was just copying off the quiz for tomorrow's class when the copier jammed.  I took it apart and found apiece of paper, beautifully folded up like a paper fan.  I kept it, spread out one side, pinched another, and made it an actual fan.

It works amazingly well.