Masochistic weightlifters: You're doing it wrong · 5:33am Feb 23rd, 2016
(I think I posted the first part of this 2 years ago as a quiz, then deleted it and never posted the rest because you guys were too smart to fall for the “P(B|A) ~ P(A|B)” fallacy.)
Half of undergraduates at ivy league schools scored at the 98th percentile or above on their SATs. (This is the true value, accurate to about 2 decimal places. I computed it myself from the 2011 and 2012 data for all 8 ivy league schools.)
If someone in an American undergraduate college scored in the 98th percentile or above on their SATs, what are the chances that they’re in an ivy league college?
A) 10%
B) 50%
C) 90%
The answer, which I also computed myself: 0.0876, which is near 10%. You can't compute it from the information above..
Just because the probability of X given Y is high doesn’t mean the probability of Y given X is high.
I've been reading stories from the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Ploughshares, and the Kenyon Review, trying to figure out what they want. Instead of a wild ecosystem of stories of all kind, they feel to me like most of them were written by the same author. The only ironclad rule literary magazines have, as far as I can tell, is that they will not publish anything that has a beginning, a middle, and an end that work together to tell a story. Anything with a clear interpretation is, presumably, not subtle enough.
I don’t like these kinds of stories. The reader comments on All the Pretty Pony Princesses” (which is a story like that) made me think there can be some merit to an incomplete story like that. The different possible interpretations in the comments showed that the story made people think and let them participate in the story telling. I usually call that explanation “pseudo-intellectual wankery”, but I guess… maybe there’s some use in reading a story like that, every now and then. But I don’t think every last goddamn story in every leading literary magazine in America should have to be like that.
Literature deals with things that can't be reduced to logic and examined in an essay. Instead of clearly defining your terms and delineating your argument, you work with a web of associations and connotations. You grab onto it, pull, and see what comes up. Cleanth Brooks wrote a famous essay about this called “The Heresy of Paraphrase”, which is chapter 11 in his famous 1947 book The Well Wrought Urn describing his theory of poetry. To put it more geekily: You can't summarize a poem, because a poem is its own minimum-length description. A logical summary of the poem's meaning, using well-defined terms, would be much longer than the poem. Poetic language communicates more efficiently, and possibly with less error, because it uses roughly the same fuzzy categories and connotations that our brains do. The "inaccuracy" of language is, I think, a form of data compression.
So great literature is usually subtle, indirect, and ambiguous. It fades when you stare at it directly.
But the probability of Y given X is not the probability of X given Y. Great literature may usually be subtle, indirect, and ambiguous, but that doesn’t mean that subtlety, indirectness, and ambiguity make great literature.
Stories in literary magazines are, I think, deliberately opaque. They take vague themes and approach them obliquely to create something difficult to comprehend. This became fashionable in the 1920s with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Ulysses, which were deliberately crafted to be subtle and ambiguous.
Chapter 1 of Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn says that the basis of poetry is “paradox”: the expression of two apparently contradictory truths. Brooks believes that poetry is artfully-constructed tension between opposing attitudes. I think he's onto something, but the way he says it suggests it's the difficulty itself that we enjoy.
I believe, however, that there are no true paradoxes, so manufacturing them for our titillation hardly seems a worthy goal for art. I prefer to say that good literature confronts apparent paradoxes, not because paradoxes are good, but because resolving them is good. Literature wants to bring us closer to that resolution, or at least make us more aware of its difficulties. A poem that honestly showed the tension between the values of Democrats and Republicans would be good. A poem that successfully resolved them would be even better. But a poem is unlikely to resolve things we’ve argued over for a century. Anything that can be resolved in a poem isn't worth writing a poem about. We've probably already resolved it.
Truly great literature isn’t difficult because difficulty is good. It’s difficult because it’s trying to do something difficult. It’s trying to say things as clearly as it can. There is still some paradox, ambiguity, and confusion unavoidably left after the author has tried to make everything as focused and clear as possible, because literature deals with difficult and ambiguous issues. Lack of clarity is an inevitable side-effect. It is not therapeutic.
Suppose you want to be a weightlifter. You go to the Olympics and watch the competitors grunt and strain, their faces contorted in pain, as they lift. Some of them strain a muscle or tear a ligament.
You conclude that the secret to being a great weightlifter is to lift the weight in a way that causes you pain. You go home and practice different ways of lifting, and devise these principles of weightlifting:
- Avoid stretching or cooling down.
- Arch your back as much as possible.
- Use machines to isolate weak points such as knees and rotator cuffs.
- Jerk the weights up, and let them fall down using gravity.
- Lift with your back, not with your legs.
- etc.
You're doing it wrong. In order to lift as much as he can, a weightlifter wants to lift with a form that minimizes pain and stress. When you see him lift, he is at the limits of his endurance. That's because every time he learns how to lift a weight with less stress, he adds more weight.
But, Bad Horse, what about "Old Friends"?
Oh. That. Heh.
Well, the story is about a bird who doesn't understand that death works differently for ponies than for phoenixes. I had to write it in first person, because otherwise I couldn't have shown all the resemblances between different ponies that confused Philomena. But if I'd written it in first person, using good grammar and complete sentences, this would have implied that Philomena was a lot smarter--too smart for the story to make sense.
So you didn't have any fun at all writing confusing sentence fragments?
I'm... going to point to Wimsatt & Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy", which is how authors take the Fifth.
Or maybe the dentist in Little Shop of Horrors. Just because he enjoys hurting his patients doesn't mean he does bad work.
Take a great not-really-modernist work like A Passage to India, The Member of the Wedding, Tess, or anything by Dostoyevsky or Turgenev. You can tell exactly what the author is writing about; you can see the different arguments and counterarguments being made. Yet you're left with doubt and debate, not because the author deliberately hid things, but because the subject matter is difficult. There is nothing difficult about Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor except that he is human.
But academics don't like to study literature that's written so well that it's easy to understand what it's about. They want works that require a priesthood to divine their purpose and meaning. Like the philosophers in The Hitchhiker's Guide, they demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty. They want puzzles, not literature. That's why they prefer William Faulkner to Pat Conroy. And that's why so few people want to read what they publish.
I think you're sort of preaching to the choir.
Your thesis is, "Complexity should not be for complexity's sake," and surely no one here would disagree.
It seems more likely that the academics and literature journals guilty of manufacturing complexity are aware that they are being subversive, but they need to convince the world that their job is useful. Hence the literary sleight of hand that takes place.
It has a lot of resemblance to a cult. There are sociopaths who peddle the kool aid and rubes who drink it. The barrier to entry is simply taking on faith that the higher ups have all the answers.
Oh, so you've taken a Crossfit class.
1.bp.blogspot.com/-NEJ9gTx2hhQ/Uygl_kp3x_I/AAAAAAAAF2M/swBq2TLsakI/s1600/tumblr_lsx3dwHscu1qzbl7f.gif
I'm pretty sure it's impossible to calculate with only the information you've given us. The fact that none of your supplied answers match the one you claim to have arrived at reinforces that idea.
But apparently this is an analogy so you can say the equivalent of "all ants are insects but not all insects are ants". Which is a useful truth that sometimes gets overlooked, but can be said lot faster and in ways more easily grasped by the general populace than using statistics, especially when you devolve to actual notation during the middle here:
It seems to run slightly counter to your argument that indirect complexity isn't necessary in literature. Though, I suppose mathematical language does manage to avoid ambiguity to an extent, since it's all rigidly defined.
Nonetheless, you are correct that people often mistake things that accompany quality for quality itself. That's why Watchmen helped create the Dark Age of Comics. Because it was good and it was dark, so many people assumed dark meant good.
3772384
Correct.
... yeah. I mean, math is more clear to me than English is. Possibly I'm in the minority.
(Bookplayer sent me here, because I currently have a story that's been in Tin House's 'in progress' slushpile for 11 months and she said this blog would make me feel self-righteous. She was right.)
To speak sideways to the main conversation (most of which I'm in complete agreement with, especially concerning the state of the 'literature' industry, what they're primarily looking for, and how the majority culture has become a subtlety circlejerk), the thing with lit magazines nowadays is there are thousands of them. They spring up and close shop all the time, and fit into as many niches as they can imagine. The Big List of Super Literature Literati Prestige magazines you mentioned is a specific niche that based on its nature happens to carry a tremendous amount of clout, so a lot of people end up aiming for them first, because, like getting into an Ivy League, there are so many external benefits to having something appear in one of those publications that you always shoot the moon just in case, even if your story might not be a good fit for their publication (or the publication a good fit for your story for that matter). Because despite the pretentious culture, good stories that are satisfying do make their way into those publications from time to time, even if it's rare, and the repercussions of failure is nonexistent. I've lost time to Tin House. Time I've spent writing other things. And when they say no, which I'm expecting them to (any day now), the manuscript will get a quick once-over from me and go onto the next rag. The only requirement is a resilient ego.
But outside of the Prestige rags, you can find any niche under the sun, which isn't interested in running puzzle pieces, they're interested in filling their niche. For most genres, the ideal story isn't a puzzle, it's something that conforms to the genre's standards, which typically have beginnings, middles, and ends. As a writer, I say aim high for the Prestige publications with your works first. As a reader, stick to magazines that cater to genres you like.
Is there a dynamic balance a publication must maintain between "desirable to read" and "tantalizingly difficult" to operate without being decried into unpopularity?
Nice pic Bad Horse, looking good! Talk about a mean split.
I couldn't agree more.
An excellently crafted reminder that no matter how inviting one's navel and anus seem, diving into either isn't going to end well. Thank you for it.
3772387
Math makes sense.
Computers make less sense.
English makes no sense.
Don't even get me started on people.
3772556
The key is to tell the difference between the two. Navel-gazing is fine, having your head stuck up the other place is not.
3772422 By "unpopular" you need to mean something like "not taken as a leader" rather than "not read by a lot of people". A few years ago, a writer took some recent stories from the New Yorker, and submitted them to the other leading literary magazines. All of them rejected the stories; nobody recognized them as stories recently published in the New Yorker. This suggests that even the people editing the literary magazines don't read them.
With that substitution, I still don't know the answer. Are these journals trying to keep up with the literary elite, or are they setting their opinion? You could probably figure it out, but it would take a lot of time. Make a horizontal list of the important magazines, academic journals, anthologies, and university chairs. Then vertically, underneath them, draw lines giving the names of the people holding those positions over time, and the reading interpretations and other positions they advocated over time. Figure out who leads opinion and who trails it.
When I come to power as Planetary Overlord, everyone will be compelled to listen to 30 minutes of Bad Horse a day. As prophylaxis against slackness of thought. I figure we'll have the modern literature department extinct with a week or so.
I do object to the pretentious notion that if it isn't difficult and inaccessible and it's just no fun at all then it isn't art. As an unashamed populist I hate this notion. I think it ghettoizes art; and that ghetto is a miserable place you only explore because someone in authority assigned it to you, or someone managed to convince you that it "would be good for you." There is art in things we actually enjoy.
3772709 Very good plan, if I do say so myself. As a side-effect, the mandatory lecture should also thin out commonucus politicus, the Common Yellow-Striped Politician, as a concentrated dose of logic can cause spontaneous combustion or cranial detonation in the species.
I'll buy a mop. It will be worth it.
Whence stories about scientific matters?
3773373 That is a very good question which I don't have a very good answer to.
Could you give an example of the kind of story you have in mind?
I could say, "That's not Literature with a capital L, because that sort of writing doesn't win Nobel or Pulitzer prizes for fiction." But lots of my favorite kinds of stories never win Nobel or Pulitzer prizes either.
My general explains-most-literature belief is that if you have something analyzable to say, you should write an essay, while if you want to struggle with something from real life that is messy and emotional which you don't understand fully, you should write a story. I say "should" because (A) people who try to write essays about X when they haven't decided yet what X is get into a horrible muddle, (B) "stories about things that are understood clearly" are usually stories with widely-agreed-on moral messages, like "Slavery is bad, m'kay?", and (C) I use a model of story which says that plot and theme are 2 separate things that should connect together at the end, and a theme that you fully understand isn't really a theme, it's just a moral.
If you're writing an educational story, it has a plot and information, and they connect up in a way similar to how a plot and a theme should connect. The information, however, should be completely understood, so the rule about "you should write an essay" doesn't apply.
I guess the educational story is a special case.
Putting on the tinfoil hat, for a certain strength of obfuscation, obfuscated meaning is indistinguishable from noise. To what extent are we certain that the meaning in these alleged stories, in fact, intended? My competing hypothesis is that these stories' intended purpose is to be sufficiently dressed up noise for critics and snobby readers to overfit for prestige.
The question then becomes: how can we tell the difference between obfuscated intention and noise?
3772387
... says the seasoned, celebrated wordsmith without a hint of irony.
I recall reading an interview of Orson Scott Card in regards to Enders Game; he said literary buffs badmouthed the fact that his characters explained their hangups, like he'd given away a big secret and thus spoiled the whole novel.
3773926
Or: Why should we need to try? I consider either a failure.
You see? You were working too hard all along. All that research and analysis and writing to produce the kind of stories magazines like that all publish--completely unnecessary.
All you need have done was get born to rich white people in the northeastern United States who would send you to a rich white people college in the northeastern United States, and then you would have all the social connections necessary to get your manuscript in front of the rich white people who pick the stories published in these magazines (all headquartered in the northeastern United States).
Of course along the way you'd have learned to write exactly the way those magazines want. But you couldn't help it: it's a class marker.
Seriously I wonder sometimes why people as smart as you spend so much time and energy running after a crowd that would never accept you if you weren't born one of them, whose friendship is nowhere near worth the effort and who are pretty rotten people to boot.
Which seems as good an occasion as any to mention the latest installment of Patchwork Poltergeists's Silver Standard saga (and I use the term "saga" advisedly).
Does this mean you're a Sad Puppy now? :^)
Anyway, I thought "paradox" was an epistemological description of a problem, i.e. a paradox is an apparent contradiction. There can be no true contradictions, of course, but paradoxes can exist.
I appreciate the Little Shop of Horrors embed. I grew up watching that movie.
The true is always subjective.
But less about Kierkegaard and more about you and your signifiers. It is only by maintaining paradoxes that people maintain sanity, take away their paradoxes and they become psychotic.
For example, the very obvious paradox which forms the basis of this blog post.
All A are B, yet B does not cause A.
All C are D, yet D does not cause C.
All E are F, because F causes E.
Therefore, <several paragraphs about how there is a conspiracy of dunces to make F cause E>
3776303
My post doesn't say that. The closest it says to that is
"Truth" can be called subjective because, technically, truth isn't observable in a finite universe. Statistical interpretations are objective, and using an epistemology of measurement and statistical observation, rather than of truth and knowledge, allows us to make objective statements which give us everything we wanted from truth except for the transcendent. But that's for a different series of posts.
3775719
I like to interpret it that way, but I don't think that's how most people understand it. For example, college philosophy courses teach Zeno's Paradox, but don't teach the resolution to it, which was realized shortly after it was proposed. Students leave with the impression that it has no resolution.
3776934
>I've been reading stories from the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Ploughshares, and the Kenyon Review, trying to figure out what they want.
I've been looking at Fordham students, trying to figure out what Fordham wants.
>The only ironclad rule literary magazines have, as far as I can tell, is that they will not publish anything that has a beginning, a middle, and an end that work together to tell a story.
They all seem to have high SAT scores.
>Stories in literary magazines are, I think, deliberately opaque.
Therefore, SAT scores are the deciding factor.
To make your argument to your own standards, you would need to see everything that had been submitted, over the course of a year, and then what had cleared which hurdles. Statistical analysis, and so on. The one story published in each issue of the New Yorker is a useless data point.
Don't get me wrong, I love jumping to conclusions based upon sparse data, but you are using exactly the wrong fallacy as your jumping off point.
The paradox of the subjective and the true is somewhat relevant in this case. That the subjective is the true is the fundamental basis of Modernism. Naive realism, the decision that my eyes do not arbitrarily lie to me, is the foundation of the Modernist perspective. Reason is only universal, as Marx and other Hegelians/Kantians/andsoonians hold, if subjectivity is truth.
On the other hand, no matter how much the postmodernist might declare otherwise, it is the xir who believes in an objective reality. Baudrillard could not have devoted his life to images, and Foucault could not have imagined episteme, if they did not first adhere to an objective reality independent of perception.
3776951
You mean when Diogenes walked back and forth?
Because he beat up the guy who applauded him for that.
An equal and fair application of principle.
3778182
I didn't do a formal statistical analysis, but what I did was a statistical analysis, just as if someone flipped a coin and got 20 heads in a row and you got suspicious of that coin, you would be doing a statistical analysis.
I don't know what stories were submitted, but the stories published were remarkably homogenous. I've closely studied many different stories for many years, and the different kinds of structures they had, and all of these stories had the same very peculiar structure. I know that all these magazines get submissions from a large, random population of writers. So seeing this output rules out the possibility that the magazines are doing anything other than deliberately picking out stories of that particular type. It is just as if someone had walked down a beach full of pebbles of all colors picking up pebbles, and I looked at the pebbles in his hand, and he had 50 green pebbles. I could fairly conclude that he was looking for green pebbles.
I don't know what a xir is. I'd say that post-modernists want there to be an objective reality independent of perception, not that they believe in it. I think they think there isn't, but that there ought to be. That "ought", though, doesn't make much sense without actually having it. So perhaps I'm saying that their beliefs don't match their feelings.
3778213
The coin flip is street smarts. Vinnie sees it, but Vinnie also sees the SAT scores, the masochistic weight lifters, and all the other ways the game is rigged, because Vinnie lives in the world of rigged games, and Vinnie is the one rigging most of those games.
Vinnie doesn't do statisitical analysis. Statistical analysis says that 20 heads in a row doesn't prove the next result unless you can weigh the coin and show that one side is heavier. In fact, the essence of statistics is that twenty heads in a row says nothing about the next result on a fair coin flip. I'd be amazed if I had to recommend it to you, but The Black Swan by Taleb is exactly what you should read to understand the difference.
This is the same difference that Diogenes understood when he beat up the one who clapped for him.
This is, as I have already said, the exact same fallacy you are accusing others of committing.
Consider yourself a lucky man. No one has ever czcheched ur priveledges.
Xir, xim, tranx, and so on, they are just what happens with postmodernism. It isn't a "want" that makes them malleable, it is a necessity. You don't spend decades meditating on the image because you want there to be something else, the spectacle Requires of its adherents that there is a non-spectacle behind it. An episteme is completely unintelligible unless there is a core of objective reality behind things.
3778226
When you use the word "prove", you're still operating within the old epistemology of proof and truth. I brought up statistics specifically to get away from that bad old epistemology.
When Taleb says something like "20 heads in a row doesn't mean the next result will be a head", he's using the coin flips as a metaphor for the stock market. He's assuming that the coin is a fair coin, and saying that getting 20 heads in a row on a fair coin gives no evidence about what the next result will be. Taleb is arguing against the human tendency to think that you're more likely on a fair coin to get a tails after a heads, which is false. When I talked about seeing a coin come up heads 20 times in a row, I was talking about the question of whether it is a fair coin. So what Taleb says does not apply.
(Taleb isn't interested in asking whether the stock market is fair. It isn't. It goes up more than it goes down.)
If I doubt whether the coin is fair, there are two common choices as to how to do the statistical analysis: the Bayesian approach, or the frequentist appoach.
The frequentist approach is more frequent. You state your hypothesis: "This coin is biased towards heads." The null hypothesis is that it is a fair coin.
Then you choose a confidence interval (CI). This is arbitrary. People often choose 99%. You're going to choose a threshold value for your measurement, and ask the question, "If the null hypothesis is true, in what fraction of random trials would my observation be under that threshold?" If your CI = 99%, that means that you will choose a number of heads to observe so that, given the null hypothesis (the coin is not biased), 99% of random trials will have that number of heads or less. If the number you observe is more than that, you conclude the coin is biased. If the null hypothesis is true, you'll conclude that it isn't 1% of the time.
I think there aren't many biased coins, so I'll pick a confidence interval of 99.98%, which means I think the odds of a coin being biased are somewhere around 1 in 5000. As you'll see, both the frequentist and Bayesian approach have to make an assumption about what these odds are.
For coin flips, we use the binomial distribution to figure out that, with a confidence interval of 99.98%, we will conclude the coin is biased if there are 18 or more heads in a series of 20. (You probably don't want the details.)
The Bayesian approach may interest you more, because it is a formal analysis of the infinite regress posited by structuralist accounts of meaning and by Derrida's "deferment", only correct, avoiding the stupid results, and done nearly 200 years earlier.
You want to know the probability p(heads) that the coin will come up heads; for a fair coin this will be 0.5.
We can't really ever know p(heads) exactly, for several reasons, but one is the infinite regress of priors.
p(heads) is a prior, the probability you assign to the coin coming up heads prior to your observations. This is important because it is the thing the evidence can't tell us. This is the point of Derrida's "deferment": the value (meaning) implied by your observation requires already having here, in the prior, an output value from some previous observation. But we discover, in practice, that deferment doesn't matter, because in almost all cases you can plug in any value (other than zero or 1) for your priors, and you will eventually converge on the true values with enough observations. Derrida had only a fuzzy and incorrect view of something mathematicians have known for centuries.
(I'm speaking loosely. Derrida was looking at cases where computing a value for one variable required knowing prior values for different variables. He was looking at problems of the type where f(x,y) = g(y, h(z, f(x,y))), while this is a problem of the type f(a, prior) = f(a, f(b, prior)). Mapping one onto the other would take some work, it just wouldn't be very interesting work. Also, I haven't read either the structuralists or Derrida much, so take what I say about them with a grain of salt.)
(The conditions under which iterative operations like this converge is a complicated subject, and is key to the problem of meaning, yet philosophers are not even aware of this part of the problem.)
Instead of trying to compute p(heads), we'll iteratively approximate it with the probability density function (pdf) f(h), which you can think of as giving a kind of probability to each possible probability h = p(heads).
In each iteration, we'll start with a value for f(h), make observations, and compute the posterior probability density function f(h | observation). This is called updating. We update our pdf from our observations.
We'll use Bayes' theorem to compute f(h | saw 20 heads in a row).
f(h | saw 20 heads in a row) = g(h) / integral from p=0 to 1 of g(p) dp
where g(h) = p(saw 20 heads in a row | p(heads) = h) * f(h)
(This is Bayes' theorem, but in an unusual form, because I'm working with a pdf instead of discrete probabilities.)
If your prior is this distribution:
then after seeing 20 heads out of 20, this would give you
f(0) = .0001, f(1) = .0001, f(.5) = .9998
g(0) = p(saw 20 heads in a row | p(heads) = 0) * f(0) = 0 * .0001
g(.5) = p(saw 20 heads in a row | p(heads) = .5) * f(h) = (1/2^19) * .9998 = 0.0000019
g(1) = p(saw 20 heads in a row | p(heads) = 1) * f(1) = 1 * .0001
f(.5 | saw 19 20 heads a row) = 0.0000019 / (.0001 + 0.0000019) = 0.0186
So either analysis would conclude that it's very unlikely the coin is fair.
3781577 You use a lot of words, and a lot of math... I'm imagining you moving around like the Dentist from little shop of horrors while he was singing.
I refuse to believe you do anything else.