Self-Perception and Beauty

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I’ve seen this story on my Facebook news feed for the last day or two, but I just watched it. It was fantastic.

I can’t really describe it without spoiling it, so I won’t try. But I like what it says about beauty. I think our conversations on the topic are often pinned between two extremes: either the pursuit of a very particular and artificial kind of beauty or a rebellion against thinking that beauty should even matter at all, especially for women.

One thing I’ve been thinking about recently is voices. No one seems to think that it’s shallow or superficial to recognize beauty in a human voice, and yet it’s just as much a product of random genetics and superficial body structure as visual beauty. Why is that? I think partially it’s because we know that a beautiful voice is a combination of what you’re lucky enough to be born with, but also of training and effort you take to improving it. We also recognize intuitively that there are wide variety of voices that are all beautiful in their own ways.

But there’s something even deeper. When you see a video or a photo of someone and try to assess whether or not they are beautiful, you’re only seeing a tiny fraction of what I think makes up visual beauty. You’re not seeing motion (not in real 3d, with depth and context), and you’re not seeing live interaction. When you hear a song, however, you’re actually getting a lot of the experience of audio beauty. So our concept of audio beauty is actually pretty robust, but our concept of visual beauty is weirdly warped.

The emphasis on photos and videos as the standard of beauty means that we’re asking men and especially women to conform to a standard that absolutely doesn’t exist. I mean, this is before we even get to the topic of weight and body-image: trying to live “up” to the beauty of a photo or video means trying to be a beautiful picture instead of a beautiful person. It’s impossible, wasteful, and tragic.

Rackspace vs. The Patent Troll

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Encouraging news: Rackspace has responded to a 500% increase in their legal bills by deciding to go after one of the most notorious patent trolls around (Parallel Iron). Looks like the villagers have had enough and it’s time for the pitchforks and torches.

2013-04-16 Patent Troll Sign

Alas, it’s not actually that dramatic. These are court cases, after all, but Rackspace won a major victory against another patent troll just last week, so maybe they’re on a roll. Even earlier, Newegg famously lived up to their “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” approach to patent trolls when they crushed patent troll Soverain Software over shopping-cart patents.

(And if you have no idea what a “patent troll” is or why anyone should care, This American Life recently rebroadcast their 2011 story on them called When Patents Attack. Check it out.)

Kings of Summer Trailer

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This trailer looks fun.

Then again, trailers always look fun. It’s part of their insidious nature. And yet, it also has has Hollywood’s cutest couple together again (Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman), going for it…

Stephanie Meyer: Good Stories, Poorly Told

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2013-04-18 Stephanie MeyerSo Vulture has an interview with Stephanie Meyer (author of Twilight and The Host), and she mentions that she’s working on a sequel to The Host. That caught my eye because I just finished reading the book. I had been asked by a freelance writer to answer some questions about Mormons and sci-fi for a piece about the movie adaptation of The Host (article’s not out yet, not sure if/when it will be), and so I decided to check the book out. [Spoilers ahead, if you were thinking about reading it.]

I got the audiobook version (’cause I have no time for reading) and listened to it during my work commutes. I had it sped up (sometimes as high as 3x) to get through the story faster. And the thing is: I actually liked it quite a bit at first. The premise of the story is that Earth has been taken over by body-snatching parasites and only a few humans remain. You’d expect the story to be one of resistance and rebellion (e.g. Independence Day), but it’s not. Instead of action-adventure, the story takes on a much more fatalistic view of the invasion, which is completely accomplished before the story really starts. The result is that it’s a much more interesting take–philosophically and emotionally–on alien invasion. The relationship between the main characters (Wanderer, one of the parasitic aliens, and Melanie, her unwilling and rebellious host) is also a lot more interesting and, dare I say it, believable than I would have guessed. So the first third of the novel, roughly speaking, was really winning me over.

But then Stephanie did what Stephanie does. First of all, she has almost no ability (as far as I can tell) to trim. The worst of this, by far, was Breaking Dawn (yes, I read all the Twilight books) where it was abundantly clear that she had such affection for her own ideas that she was determined to put every last one in the book. Whether it had anything to do with the story or not. Secondly, there’s just a lot of weird gender-issues stuff going on that I don’t feel competent to evaluate fully but which definitely weird me out. The number of times Melanie gets beaten by the love of her life while and then goes off to whimper over her bruises and injuries while thinking about how much she loves the man who did this to her are just… disconcerting. Of course it’s not just your average partner-abuse scenario because Jared hates the parasite precisely because he thinks she has killed Melanie, but that only gets you one beat-down, in my book. After that, things get creepy. And then of course there’s Ian (another human) who does fall in love with Wanderer (the alien parasite), but only after he tries to choke her to death at the first meeting. And yes, Wanderer falls for him too. What’s a little strangulation in the face of love, right?

In the end, I think that Meyer has basically the same view of plot as she does of romance: some inexorable force that bends people to its will. Her characters are as stupid as they need to be in order to get them where they need to be in order to further the story. And it’s really disappointing to me, because she really has some great ideas, but they tend to get first drowned out in all the not-so-great ideas and then abusively manipulated in the interest of an irresistible happy ending.

Unlike Twilight, The Host had a lot of genuinely compelling ethical questions. In terms of sci-fi, it actually did a pretty good job. There were some really compelling elements, but in the end it was just a good story, told quite poorly. Still, I guess I have hope for Meyer’s future writing, because this seemed so much better than Twilight. I don’t expect much from a sequel, but when she writes another new story (and I have a feeling that she will), I’m probably going to give it a read.

T&S: An Ensign is Not a Roadmap

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Much like my most recent Sunday School lesson, this blog post seemed much more profound in my head then it did when I actually put it out there. It took me hours to write and rewrite, but it’s not even 1,000 words. Probably one of my lowest words-per-minute posts of all time. Still, since the topic of the post is how I’ve failed at virtually every goal I’ve ever set for myself (and what to do about that), that seems fitting.

Here it is.

I think I’ll write more on this topic one day, but this is just one of those instances where the thoughts in my brain are not ready to come out yet.

The Failure of Market Failure

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2013-04-15 Library of Economics and LibertyArt Carden and Steve Horwitz have an absolutely essential article up at the Library of Economics and Liberty about market failure. Why is this article absolutely essential? Because, although market failure is a real thing, it is too often naively assumed that the proper response to any and all market failures is to override the market. It’s not. From the article:

Externalities, public goods, asymmetric information, and market power provide necessary—but insufficient—conditions for intervention to be justified. They certainly are not talismans that provide interventionists with carte blanche to tinker with the members of a society as if they were pieces on a chessboard. Too often, critics of markets think that merely invoking these terms destroys the case for free markets.

So market failure is when, because of externalities, public goods, etc., the market fails to arrive a the best solution. The problem is that imposing some kind of non-market solution raises new risks, for example that the government intervention will fail as or even more spectacularly than the market would.

The article does a great job of going into depth on each of the varieties of market failure, and I’ll just add my $0.02 to their conclusion. There are twin extremes that need to be avoided. The first is the extreme of assuming that the market is always right. The second is the extreme of assuming that, whenever the market fails, government is always right. Unfortunately–while the first is easily recognized as an extreme by most folks–the second frequently goes unchallenged. It ought to be.

There is no perfect ideological answer to real-world problems. Sometimes market failures really do require intervention. Sometimes, however, they don’t. One of the biggest differences between liberals and conservatives, in my experience and according to psychological research, is that conservatives can accept when the optimal solution is just unreachable and a second-best strategy is the only thing we can hope for.

Smartphones, Boredom, and Creativity

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2013-04-15 iPhone Killing Creativity

Brian Hall, writing for ReadWrite, is afraid that his iPhone is killing his creativity. The basic thesis is that boredom lets your mind wander, and a wandering mind is a creative mind. That’s somewhat plausible, but first I want to step back and point out that there’s an entire genre of “technology spells our doom” writing (closely related to the “kids these days” genre), and I’m generally skeptical. Change almost always has positives and negatives. So finding out some negative aspect of a new technology and then writing an article exclusively about that is a way to pay the bills, I guess, but not really interesting in and of itself.

But I like this topic for two reasons.

Read more

The New New Atheists

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Atheist advertising campaign launched

It might be a bit premature to declare victory, but this piece from The Spectator on the New New Athiests (or Newer Atheists) is still exciting. In it, Theo Hobson first provides a succinct and compelling explanation for the rise of the New Atheist after 9/11 and then sketches out their demise. In a nutshell: the New Atheism was a silly attempt to pretend that religions is neither compelling nor complex, and the moment is over because most people now realize that was a bit silly all long.

I expect it will take time (months, years) for this awareness to trickle down to the level of my Facebook experience, but I’m looking forward to not having to deal with immature arguments about how religion is the root of all evil and fundamentally irrational. Some diehards will never give up, of course, but I’ll be quite happy if it becomes not longer a legitimate topic of discussion, as it never should have been.