Today I Learned...

I'm hitting the limits of the English language pretty regularly. Currently I compensate by spending five minutes talking around a concept in the hopes that I can transmit it to the other person's brain, but that's costly, and only works when I have a good idea of the concept already. There are probably millions of times English has limited my thought process that I'm not aware of.

Obvious solution is to learn another language. Difficulty: I'm not naturally good at languages. They were probably my worst subject in school. I don't know how much of this is a self-fulfilling prophecy/a remnant of the fact that I wasn't allowed to be bad in other subjects (I had a terrible relationship with gym in school, and look at me now), and how much of it is genuine difficulty, but I don't think it matters. Doing something that won't pay off until you're good at it is a fool's errand no matter what your talent level. Plus, ease of learning is probably negatively correlated with letting me think things I can't think right now. I have a vague hope that now that I'm going in with the attitude of "show me how you're different" and not "fuck you for not being English", I will get more out of each thing I learn and also learn more things faster, but I really can't count on that.

I'm also very convinced I need to take an actual class, and not just self study. Languages are for communicating with other people and I should learn them in that context. Also, attempts to study German on my own have fallen completely flat, and I went farther in German than I went in anything. German is not on the list for this project because it is pretty much the least useful language for not thinking like English you could ask for.

One intriguing possibility is sign language. The spatial grammar means it will use different paths than English immediately, and I already find Deaf culture fascinating. The lack of writing means I won't be able to game the system the way I usually do, and forces the in-person interaction I think is critical to this.

But before I commit to that, I wanted to open the floor to other suggestions. There's a community college nearby, with classes starting in a month, so most of the standard options should be available to me.

I have something like 6 half-written posts on how awesome Captain Awkward is, but I never finish them because I would rather just read more captain awkward. But! now there is something I absolutely must share (also, I finished the entirety of the archives). It is in fact not something said by captain awkward herself, but by a commenter, because Captain Awkward is so amazing she even has a good comments section.

I have to agree with the Captain. Telling her now about things is a bit of a Schwyzer – i.e. “Look, I used to be awful, but now I’m a much better person. Let me tell you in excruciating and self-absorbed detail just how awful I used to be (and also how much I enjoyed it) so you’ll be able to comprehend just how much great a person I am to have changed so much.”

Yes, that.

Blogging is a weird thing and privacy matters and he does talk about current things some times (mostly relating to parenting), and honestly I've been extremely impressed with his "well, this a bunch of new information that I need to spend a long time thinking about" response to uproar, but... this rings extremely true to me. He doesn't glorify his past, but he does romanticize it to an extreme degree.

It's a fine line to tread. I think it is good and beneficial for everyone- and I mean absolutely everyone- to have a culture in which people can talk openly about mistakes they've made. It reduces the stupid things people do for fear of being found out, it helps people who listen avoid that mistake, it helps people who have been victims of someone else's mistake realize it wasn't them. I guess it's kind of like rape in media- I'm glad it's no longer so taboo we can't even talk about it, but I'm not happy with sexualizing it or using it as punishment, and I'm really unhappy with how Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is used to titillate and moralize that those sluts got what they deserved.*

Schwyzer is sort of like that. He has shaped up an incredible amount, but part of him still revels in the thing he's done and is getting its kicks the only way it can.


*In contrast, see: Bones, where murder victims have sex, even kinky sex, and may even be murdered by their kinky sex partners, and the male lead is portrayed as a prude for looking down on them for this.

So I love The Magicians. And I like, and will possibly come to love The Magician King. But I seriously question The Magician King as a sequel to The Magicians

First, a rant: A workplace blogger I usually like complained about The Magicians being derivative of Harry Potter and Narnia. And just... ugh. There is always room for debate on artistic issues, but that one is provably false. It's not derivative of Narnia because it's a deliberate comment on the fan culture around Narnia. QED. And it's no more derivative of Harry Potter than the thousands of other books about children discovering they have magical powers and going to school for them are. Many of these were written before Harry Potter was even published, and one of them was written by me when I was six, which FYI is before I learned to read.

This is a longstanding pet peeve of mind: Harry Potter is a fine series, and it has done no harm and much good for the world. But it owes more of its success to luck than to quality. There are better books in the world, and better books in the subgenre, and it pisses me off when JK Rowling says the books aren't even fantasy.

Anyways, I feel The Magicians is somewhat maligned, and it makes me very protective of it.

My rule of thumb for series is that they can't be just one story taking up three volumes, that's a waste of our time. I want to see serious growth and change in perspective between books that come together in a harmony. See: Lilith's Brood, whose second and third books follow the descendants of the first protagonist.

TMG is really good evidence for this: it's really has two stories. One follows Quintin, the hero of the last book accompanied a physically preset but emotionally and mentally absent Julia, who had minor appearances in The Magicians. This is the big quest storyline. The other follows Julia in the time period covered by the Magicians. That storyline is pure gold, and it's resolution in the quest storyline is perfect. I don't think you could quite get away with cutting out the entire rest of the quest story, but I haven't given up on it as an idea either. Honestly, the quest would be perfectly tolerable just so you can see how Julia is doing, if it weren't so counter to the messages in the last book.

( Vague spoilers for Magician King )

I wish I could describe why the Julia thread is so amazing, but I either think that spoilers would weaken it (not an attitude I generally hold), or that it's so delicate I don't want to sully it with my description. Suffice to say that one thing Lev Grossman does really well is show people grow. Quintin's growth in the last book and Julia's in this one generate exactly the harmony I talked about earlier.

People say placebo effect like they mean "it didn't work" or "they made it up"; It puts me in mind of Bill's comment in True Blood: "No offense Sookie, but humans are shockingly susceptible to just about every form of thought manipulation."

The thing is, the placebo effect isn't in our heads. It's chemically measurable- through an increase in dopamine levels when told you were going to get an an analgesic, through an increase in basophil leves when injected with homeopathic (i.e. nonexistent) levels of histamine*, and through a changes in ghrelin levels when given different expectations about the calorie content of a shake**. The original placebo effect- a decrease in pain when told a sugar pill was a pain medication- doesn't work if you introduce an opiate blocker. My psych 101 professor said women could gain about half a cup size over six months through hypnosis. And there's crazy doctor, who has drastically improved my life with the diagnosis and treatment of adrenal fatigue but recently disappointed me with her belief in homeopathy.

Which leads me to conclude that human brain is just an astonishingly powerful device that hasn't yet figured out how to properly harness itself. Yet.

*Extra interesting because most allergy tests use a saline injection as a negative control. Last time I had it done they told me which one was the control. I wonder what happens if they don't.

**Hat tip: stolen_tea

For the past couple of weeks, there's been a thought bouncing around in my head: There's a remarkable correlation between things I'm bad at as an adult and the things I was allowed to be bad at as a child. But it turns out there's an even better correlation between the things I'm good at as an adult and the things my parents could teach me as a child. My dad even said outright "It would have felt hypocritical to expect you to have good social skills." I'm a pretty big genetic determinist, and there are numerous relevant studies showing that adopted children resemble their birth parents more as they age, but... wait a minute, I just figured something out. But first, the counter-anecdotes.

I have thought of two major talents I had as a child that have gone nowhere in my adulthood: fiction writing, and target shooting. The fiction writing started before I could actually physically write, or read. I dictated stories to my mom. Judging by my teacher's reactions, I was very good at these for my age. I think it was actually a good thing my parents didn't push or formalize my writing, but it meant that it did eventually get more or less dropped in favor of other things. Writing is such a difficult career that I can't say I would have had one, but I definitely would have gone farther with it if I had had someone to teach me writing the way I had my dad to sit over me when I learned algebra. I did eventually reach the point in science where my dad was unable to help me, but that was after years and years of being taught that science was a Thing I Can Do.

I started target shooting was I was 16. Under the theory that it's not bragging because it's relevant to the story but unimportant in real life: I was extremely good at target shooting. I would have had the top honor the junior club gave in a year and a half if mono hadn't eaten up the five months before college (I did get it the next year, but was slowed significantly since I was only shooting when I came home on breaks). Multiple people who had worked with olympic shooters said I had the potential to be one. But the next step would have been attending the empire state games, and the first year the fell on the same day as the SAT IIs, and the next year I had mono and that wasn't happening, and then I was at college. I could take it back up now, but I don't have the time to be as good as I was in high school so what's the point, especially since it's competing for much the same energy as martial arts and I think that's the superior choice. But if I'd been one of those kids whose parents shot, and took them to the range at 6, or even 12, I would have gone pretty far in the sport. I want to give my parents some credit here in that they were incredibly supportive and put a lot of time into taking me to the range so I could practice, but none of us had the time to make up for 8 years of not shooting.

Then we have the one thing I'm good at that my parents never taught me: Computers. Seeing as that's my career, it seems like a pretty big counterargument, but I don't think so. As very young children, computers were my brother's thing. He was a prodigy at manipulating computers' inner workings the same way he was at math. But come 8th grade (homeschooled year) we got a computer, and someone needed to talk to tech support. My dad couldn't do it because he was at work, my mom couldn't do it because she'd get stuck at "go to the start menu", and my brother couldn't do it because it involved talking to people. I wasn't good at it, just the least bad option. But over a few tech support phone calls, computers moved from those things I could play games on if they were working to things that could be learned and controlled. So I'm still left with a pattern of "I'm best at things where someone pushed me over the first hump".

I thought this whole "best at the things I was taught" was going counter to the evidence for genetic determinism, but actually it's not. The specific studies I'm thinking of showed that as adopted children aged, they resembled their adoptive parents less and less and their birth parents more and more- i.e., reflected genetics more than environment. But that's perfectly consistent with what I'm doing- I'm probably getting slightly worse at math ever year, since I never have call to use the last four semesters I took, but I'm consistently getting better at the things my parents couldn't teach me- what we could consider moving towards a truer reflection of my genetic talents.

I'm still working this out, so everyone is encouraged to share their own stories of learning.