bias for action

This is what I need to work on:

“I want you to have a bias for action,” one of my basic school instructors told
our class of boot lieutenants. “When there’s not enough information to make a
great decision, I want you to make a good one. When there’s not enough for a
good one, I want you to make any decision. Indecision kills.”

Not to equate my fairly dull and priveleged life with combat, but I often get stuck at the information-gathering (or -binging, like I've posted about before) stage, to the detriment of getting anything done.

That is all.

I saw it in books, and read it on TV

In this space, I tend to do something I don’t really like—taking a secondhand look at research. Doing so can lead me to be unclear about whether I’m criticizing the research or the actual piece I’m reading. Toward this, I think when writing about mass media representation of research, I’ll focus on issues with the article that obfuscate or misrepresent (from the perspective of a researcher) the issue at hand—or illuminate it, if that ever happens. I don’t want to appear to disregard a research project just because it hasn’t considered every possible factor, when every research program necessarily has conceptual and logistical weaknesses, and useful data can often be gleaned with a less-than-ideal instrument.

With that in mind, I had to mention this essay by a Ryan Blitstein about research on speed dating out of Northwestern, which I read in the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine. The research, using a mix of lab methods, real-world-type observation, and self-report, aims to address what is presented as “a gaping hole in relationship research: the period between the initial spark of attraction and couplehood.” According to the article, the researchers, Dr. Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick, set up speed-dating events so that they can find and study emerging couples, to find how initial attraction leads to enduring relationships. I’m going to momentarily put aside my complaints about how this is framed, and say this:

First, it’s exciting that this research exists, and that such a large dataset is being collected around it, despite whatever conceptual problems underlie said dataset. Recording the initial meeting of a pair (just after collecting saliva samples for information about their hormones at the time, no less; though I was unclear if this is supplemented by follow-up or other samples for the purpose of developing some sort of baseline), and following up with them periodically, is inherently interesting to me, and should lead to some good discussion. (It’s also certain to lead to a lot of painful-to-read, for me at least, bad discussion, but that’s not the researchers’ fault.)

Further, I’m happyto read something in the mass media about attraction research that isn’t another evolutionary psychology study. (An aside: I feel like I really pile on that subfield here, and worry that I present it as a monolithic whole. I don’t mean to. I like a lot of it, I really do, and find a lot of it thought-provoking. But when evolutionary explanations bark up the wrong tree, oh man…) Importantly, the article is good enough to make such research sound like it ought to be taken seriously, and has something to offer. As Blitstein points out, the speed-dating data show that, at least in one present-day environment, certain predictions from evolutionary psychology fail: men and women appear to be behaving pretty similarly in this setting, both valuing personal attraction, and both giving equal weight to personality and “earning potential.” I love knowing that a mass media audience is reading this, regardless of whatever problems I have with treating their sample as representative, or in how they operationalize attraction, personality, and perceived earning potential.

The piece itself reads as much more informed about research than most popular writing; it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the author was a social (or other, “real”) scientist. Blitstein provides a little bit of context about research on love and attraction, pointing out how difficult it is for researchers to address this domain, to receive funding and to be taken seriously. S/he gives us this 1975 quote, from a Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin, in condemning (certainly while running for office; for all my excitement about a Black guy running for president, I already really hate this election) the awarding of a National Science Foundation grant to two relationship researchers: “I believe that 200 million Americans want to leave some things in life a mystery, and right of top of the things we don’t want to know is why a man falls in love with a woman.” (This quote nails a stupidity exacta: the casualty-of-his-era kind of ignorance, and a more eternal head-in-the-sand anti-intellectualism. Fantastic.)

Beautifully, Blitstein lets the reader know, through comments from the Northwestern researchers, that laboratory research has some huge drawbacks for looking at human psychology, and that observing what actual people actually do is a good idea.

On the other hand, the author also draws on certain saccharine tropes about love, which unfortunately, as I’ll mention below, appear to inform the research. To be fair, overall this is a good article, and most of the writing is clear and strong, but: “[Research has led to] new truths about the psychology behind what happens when boy meets girl—and how a spark of attraction leads to true romance. Eventually, they may unlock a few of the mysteries of love.” (I promise that these are the worst two sentences in the piece.)

Let me briefly explain why, conceptually, this kind of quote is a problem: it assumes that our prototype love narrative (and really, it touches on the major themes- “boy meets girl,” “spark of attraction,” and “true romance”) is a real-world phenomenon, one that is common to actual human experience. First of all, what is “true romance,” other than a Quentin Tarentino movie with a very memorably offensive monologue? Why assume that most relationships follow this love-at-first-sight quote? Why leave out same-sex couples? (I understand that most research on love will be hugely heterosexist—my nascent research completely is, at least at this stage. But it’s still worth addressing.)

This talking point in the article (and I realize that it might seem unfair to pick on a talking point) nicely represents a concern I have about the research: that the authors are trying to address a really huge question (how does couplehood emerge in human social life) with a really small phenomenon (through speed dating, hoping to catch some “love at first sight” emerge and lead to something; I’m sure this happens sometimes, but…). After reading this article, I felt like they assumed that our paradigmatic narrative for “how love blossoms” is a good representation for what happens in the real world. I just want to add that this romance narrative is a relatively new (albeit very close to an ideal commonly found in literate societies), culturally-specific (albeit recognizable in and imported around the world) trope, that I think runs counter to most peoples’ experience, and often makes people feel unnecessarily bad about their comparatively non-Hollywood lives. This doesn’t make it unworthy of study, but I think that it literally needs to be looked at critically when research is involved.

Of course, as language-using, socialized beings, any idea we have is embedded in a web of assumptions and associations, but using a fairy-tale notion like “love at first sight” as a starting point for framing a research problem (and please excuse my language here) freaks me the fuck out. Again, I don’t know if this is really what got the researchers started, but the article seems to suggest that this is indeed what they are searching for: how do people move from a love-at-first-sight reaction into “couplehood.” I don’t mean to say that this is an invalid question, but we get no sense of whether this even happens in the real world, and, if it does, to what extent this is applicable to more than a handful of lovestruck, fortunate, probably very annoying couples. Even if that’s the case, I would have no problem with using it as a research topic, but at the end of the article, we are told that Finkel and Eastwick are hoping that this agenda will have the ever-exciting “policy implications” and “profound implications in how we search for love.”

Maybe the author and/or the researchers are concerned about complaints like those of the aforementioned Senator, but I don’t want to read about how this research is going to “make dating less hellish for millions of people, or develop models to predict relationship success based on speed-dating compatibility.” Speed-dating sounds like a great area to problematize certain assumptions about how people make decisions, or communicate in certain novel situations, but research looking for “love at first sight” is not going to help you under stood why your baby done left you, why you feel compelled to date people who make you feel stupid, why you can’t [keep it in your damn pants/keep your damn legs shut], why your partner’s voice is starting to make you want to stick a knife in your ear, or any of the other more common problems in peoples’ relationships. I don’t think it will illuminate much of the realistic happy stuff either, at least not in a very efficient way.

I want to be clear about something: observing speed daters and whatever relationships follow from said speed dating is hugely interesting, fun, thought provoking, etc. But romantic relationships touch on so much more than can be accessed by self-report and a saliva sample, to say nothing of the questions around validity presented by the speed-dating setup. (I know no one who has gone on a follow-up date after speed dating. And I know a lot of people, many of whom share all kinds of potentially embarrassing information on a regular basis.)

Finkel and Eastwick sound like they have some incredibly cool, interesting, and useful research here. I’m just not convinced that they are going to get us closer to understanding how our love relationships emerge and develop, or why they do. I’m not saying that we should only look to the arts or to religion where love is concerned, but I do think we’re best served by considering cultural, material, psychological, and life event factors other than those addressable in a study like this. I know that sounds like a lot of stuff, but hear me out: I’m not saying it all has to be studied in your research, but it should really inform it. These are aspects of emotion that I wish made it into popular discourse more often, especially when potentially exciting research is involved.

A great point was brought up by one of the experts quoted in the article, who says that to do a study like this, one needs to put speed-dating in its larger context: who does it? Why do they do it? What are they trying to do with it? The essay presents Eastwick and Finkel as defending themselves from this by saying that the speed daters filled out a pre-event questionnaire indicating what they wanted out of speed dating, but this would be a very poor way of getting at what speed-dating actually means in participants’ social worlds, how they feel about it, what effect it has on their lives. Finkel notes that people “seem to have no introspective accuracy into what it is that we like,” and I wish more was made of this observation. How well do we know what we want when it comes to love, and how do we go about it? I don’t think we can assume common-sense answers to these questions.

We don’t date or love or whatever as rational and free actors, clear about our intentions, acting on them consistently. We are burdened and moved by social structures, experiences we don’t understand, flimsy ideology and poorly-conceived personal ethics, and our lives are directed by disorienting, nameless, unfathomable responses to intimate others. Pace (Latin for “suck it”) Sen. Proxmire and his pseudopopulist ilk, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t or don’t want to understand further this often-painful, often-joyful mess. I’m hoping for love research that shows how our lives outside our relationships constrict our emotional possibilities, how our stated motivations appear to have nothing to do with our behavior, how we constantly disappoint and surprise ourselves and others. I hope Finkel and Eastwick come up with something more interesting than two doe-eyed Northwestern students developing some dull, self-deluded, Disney narrative for the rest of us to either envy or roll our eyes at.

OK, just two more

Just two more mentions of basketball this month. Well, I'm sure I'll have something to say leading up to or immediately following Thursday's NBA draft, but I wanted to highlight a couple articles that even readers who aren't NBA fans might find interesting:

• An article about Len Bias, the #2 pick in the 1986 draft, and someone whose name comes up a lot at this time of year. For those who don't remember, Bias was the University of Maryland power forward drafted by the Celtics, who was expected to lengthen the Bird/McHale/Parrish dynasty, only to die of a cocaine overdose the day after the draft. I don't really remember this happening; I remember knowing that it was going on, and, although I was only 7, I suppose I might have remembered him from that year's Final Four, which I always watched, even then. I definitely didn't remember that his brother died a few years later, or even really pick up on the other Bias narratives at the time, other than, aside from the obvious tragedy, that this sort of doomed the Celtics for awhile, and that this was the downfall for the idea of college athletics as pure and innocent (despite how often college hoops is lauded over the NBA with a similar valence). The author of the piece, Michael Weinreb, spends time with Bias' mother, as well as a friend of the late Jay Bias, Len's younger brother, who was incarcerated for crack possession (given a sentence that Weinreb points out was three times as long for those of most murderers). As this might suggest, Weinreb ties the Bias story to America's response to crack (Bias OD'ed on powder cocaine, but the death of a young Black man to coca fed legislators' drive to lock up crack users), as well as presenting a fascinating case study of a young athlete caught between life stages and historical eras.


• A NY Times piece about Brandon Jennings, a top high school point guard I'd only recently been hearing about, expected to spend a year playing professionally in Europe. (Here's the King Kaufman column that lead me to it.) This is of course following the, in my opinion, dodgy collusion between the NBA, NCAA, and NBA players' union, to force elite American HS basketball to spend a year working for a college program, where they can risk injury and please boosters under the nurturing, watchful eye of the US sports media. Instead, Jennings will be paid to play, and Jennings and Kaufman assume that his game will develop and he will mature unproblematically, presumably while "dating" supermodels and developing a taste for fine art. I like both these articles and love Jennings' guts and drive here, but I can't help but notice a little idealizing of Ye Olde Worlde in both articles. You think he'll be safe from leeches and hangers on in Europe? He's going to develop financial and social savvy just by walking amongst sophisticated, art-appreciating Europeans? (I don't want to accuse the Times writer, William Rhoden, about whom I know nothing, or Kaufman, who I think is a thoughtful, enjoyable read and probably has a great social conscience, of racism, but I can't help but wonder if many other Americans who think this will be great for the kid think it'll be great for him to not be around so many other Black people.) I'd also like to add, in response to the positive references to the Euro leagues in both of these articles, we're seeing a pretty steady decline since 2001 (I'm referring to the draft that brought in Tony Parker, Pau Gasol [who, at least in this years NBA finals, decided to live up every negative stereotype about European athletes], and Mehmet Okur) in the quality of players who've come from the European leagues, at least in contrast to how highly they've been coveted. European players have been getting drafted way too high ever since the Spurs and the Mavs started making huge leaps with Parker and Dirk Nowitzki, and I have to say I disagree with the notion that Jennings will be playing a higher level of game in Spain than he would at a Big East, ACC, Big Te(leve)n, etc, school. But he won't be contributing to the bogus claim that he'd be there because we all value education. (For the record, I really like college basketball, I just prefer the game itself in the League.)

Anyway, enjoy.

misc

Shaquille O'Neal is the greatest rapper alive, because "great" means "large." Him asking Kobe how it tastes was horrifying enough the first time. Maybe he should stick to policework in the offseason.

It was nice to see George Carlin's "Baseball vs Football" routine again yesterday, and driving home past The Minister's house on my way home last night I remembered his reference to, in a bit about PC language in the 90s, "the openly Black Louis Farrakhan" in one of his bits.

Isn't Team Basketball USA a little... short? And are we supposed to be happy with a coach whose last teams have recently been eliminated from tournaments by the likes of Greece and Virginia Commonwealth? I'm sorry, but when it comes to basketball, I am a freaking nationalist, and I will be very annoyed if we fail to win the gold medal again this year. Why? I have no idea. I don't care about the Olympics; the US's poor showing in international basketball just irks me for reasons I'm not interested in exploring. So there.

Oh yeah, I'm starting to feel self-conscious about how much I use semi-colons:

The semicolon has spent the last century as a fussbudget mark. Somerset Maugham and George Orwell disdained it; Kurt Vonnegut once informed a Tufts University crowd that "All [semicolons] do is show that you've been to college." New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's favorite put-down for egghead bureaucrats who got in his way was "semicolon boy." And though semicolons have occasionally made news—tariff bills have imploded over their misplacement, and a 1927 execution hinged on the interpretation of a
semicolon—the last writers to receive much notice for semicolon use have been a New York City Transit employee and the Son of Sam. In 1977 the NYPD speculated that "the killer could be a freelance journalist" because of his "use of a semicolon" in his taunting letters. (Decades later, columnist Jimmy Breslin still marveled that "Berkowitz is the only murderer I ever heard of who knew how to use a semicolon.")

I've been called worse than a "fussbudget," I guess.

"anything is possible!"

I haven't been writing a damn thing, paperwork excluded, for the last week, so, yeah. Whatever. I don't know why, maybe I'm just cranky, maybe I just have nothing to say. A lot of things in my life seem to be ending right now, and not many things beginning in their place. Times of transition, self-doubt, disappointment and a sense of opportunities lost, blah blah.

So I'm just going to briefly go back to last week's big story in my life, the NBA Finals; specifically, the much-discussed Kevin Garnett interview. Many cynical viewers I've talked to and read felt there was something distastefully performative in KG's display. My take was perhaps more naive; I was genuinely moved (as pointed out to me by a thoughtful observer, Garnett's accomplishment and his place in life are pretty meaningful to me right now, given my sense of transition), and felt like it was one of the more striking emotional displays I'd seen televised before. It felt like he was simultaneously emotionally regressing and growing and being pulled in a million different directions at once.

Whatever was going on with KG at the time, after hearing other peoples' more cynical takes on the interview and his season-long tendency to very publicly, before games and at key moments in front of fans and teammates, acting out exhuberantly, got me thinking the role of emotion in team sports. The friend I referred to parenthetically in the previous paragraph suggested that, from a group dynamics perspective, KG had been "holding" a lot of emotion for his team. Basically, the psychology of groups suggest that, within groups, individuals take on certain roles for the group, be they leader or scapegoat, the soother, the leader, etc. It's easier for us to notice this in other people's families, or for therapists to see it in a group, but I haven't heard it mentioned in professional sports, and I think KG this season has been a great example.

I'm often irritated by how sportswriters and fans single out athlete's behavior for analysis- I'm not talking about Kobe in Colorado or other extreme examples, just how athletes are often described as pouty or unpleasant, or "down-to-earth" and a team player. Part of what makes this irritating and stupid is how tied up in race this tends to be, but I'm not going into that here. But if we take Garnett 07-08 as a mini case study, I think we might consider how displays of intense emotion on the part of athletes can sometimes say more about the team and the moment than about the individual. One of the things that was compelling to me about this last year's Celtics team is the flip side of what a lot of people whose opinions I value dislike-- they're a little bit cobbled together and stylistically uneven. Although they played defense with an almost hive-like unity, they're players who for the most part just started playing together in the last season, which has often been reflected in their serviceable if uninspiring offensive play.

What interests me about a team like this is how difficult it must be, in a behind-the-scenes kind of way, to try to get a team like this to unite and win. Star players like Pierce, Garnett, and Allen, united in a common purpose but lacking one singular narrative to unite them. Their most compelling narratives (Pierce's long history in Boston and his 2000 brush with death, Garnett's conflicted and painful departure from Minnesota, Allen's family turmoil and uneven career) were, other than that of PP, intense, but having little or nothing to do with the grand narratives of the franchise and city for whom they played. Garnett's physically, affectively, and verbal veering and swooning in the post-game interview reflected this. I guess it enabled us-- disappointed not-so-young-anymore adults, pained Timberwolves and Lakers fans, vindicated Boston fans-- to fit it with our own narratives of what this season meant. Was it insincere? I don't think that question is useful very often at all, and it isn't for looking at KG's interview. Whether it was a display or an affectation doesn't take away from the meaningfulness of it all. I don't want to say that it had to happen, but it fit.

I used to stay up reading the Book of Revelation

(RIP Wisconsin Dells)

Did anyone read this essay by Iain McEwan, from a couple of weeks ago in the Guardian? I've just skimmed over it, but want to give it a good read sometime He seems to manage to express a very calm, thoughtful understanding of the appeal of apocalyptic thinking, locating it in a seemingly eternal place where the incomprehensibility of mortality, the fear of the unknown, and real danger meet:

In The Sense of an Ending , Frank Kermode proposes that the enduring quality,
the vitality of the Book of Revelation suggests a "consonance with our more
naive requirements of fiction". We are born, as we will die, in the middle of
things, in the "middest". To make sense of our span, we need what he calls
"fictive concords with origins and ends. 'The End', in the grand sense, as we
imagine it, will reflect our irreducibly intermediary expectations." What
could grant us more meaning against the abyss of time than to identify our own
personal demise with the purifying annihilation of all that is. Kermode quotes
with approval from Wallace Stevens - "the imagination is always at the end
of an era".

(McEwan includes a nice little methodological aside, in reference to polls about American religiosity that secular elites such as myself on both sides of the Atlantic titter over, like, as he puts it, "Atheist pornography":

It might be worth retaining a degree of scepticism about these
polling figures. For a start, they vary enormously - one poll's 90 per cent is
another's 53 per cent. From the respondent's point of view, what is to be gained
by categorically denying the existence of God to a complete stranger with a
clipboard? And those who tell pollsters they believe that the Bible is the
literal word of God from which derive all proper moral precepts, are more likely
to be thinking in general terms of love, compassion and forgiveness rather than
of the slave-owning, ethnic cleansing, infanticide, and genocide urged at
various times by the jealous God of the Old Testament.)

and as long as I've mentioned basketball today...

from Free Darko, a link to an interview with, and the blog of, professional basketball legend and cultural icon Spencer Haywood. (Haywood took the NBA to court in order to be able to play pro ball before his college class graduated; in his case, after his sophomore year. Haywood also led the 1968 US Olympic Basketball team to a gold medal.) Haven't read the blog yet, but in the interview, the man suggests that Carmelo needs to get rid of those braids. Oh yeah, and start playing tough in the paint.

For the writers

First of all, since I decided I'm going to get serious about my dissertation proposal, one of the more subtle procrastination tactics my unconscious is employing is geeking out over recording gear. This task took me to the self-described "technical communication blog" http://www.idratherbewriting.com/. Now that I've decided to be less technophobic, I've decided that I need to incorporate some understanding of technology and communication into my worldview. Anyway, this blog led me to this post about essay writing, which got my mind going a little bit. This, combined with a meeting with a professor who offered a few very specific suggestions about exercizes to generate ideas and writing, have me feeling much more mentally equipped than I did this morning.

Unfortunately, game 4 in LA is likely to wipe out any productivity that otherwise may have occurred this evening.

"May your therapist always believe your explanations of why you're unhappy"

I just made up a fake old curse. You can easily turn it into a fake old blessing by inserting "not" before "always," if you're feeling nice.

What do I mean by this curse? I mean that, as a therapist, you might be performing a disservice by accepting your clients' explanations for why they feel the way they do. This seems obvious to anyone thinking in terms of psychological defenses (though I'd suspect that a lot of therapists, myself included, might take it too far, and are more likely to attribute something to defensiveness than to self-insight, but that's another matter), but not to a British pop psychologist.

From salon.com:

An expert has proclaimed that single women, despite their protestations to
the contrary, are completely miserable. According to Pam Spurr, an author and psychologist, single women who assert they are happy with their lives despite "their crushing loneliness and desperation" are not merely deluded, but outright lying. How does she know? Body language.
Upon talking with a woman at a party, who had every semblance of confidence, maturity and fulfillment (every semblance, that is, except for a ring on the all-important finger), the subject of sex and marriage came up. The sex therapist recounts:
"She immediately described herself as happily single. And yet her body language told another story: Chloe crossed her arms defensively over her chest until I just wanted to shout: 'Yes my dear, now try pulling another one.'"
Hmm. You don't suppose her body language seemed defensive because she realized she was talking to a hostile busybody eager to make snap judgments about her life on the spot and write disparagingly about her in an international newspaper, do you?

The Salon poster also makes the excellent point that, in using her patients as her other source of evidence that single women are unhappy, she's using a very skewed sample. (She's also using a skewed sample in that she's only looking at successful professional women in their 20s, 30s and 40s.)
What the poster doesn't point out is that the psychologist in question seems to be taking at face value her patients' assessment of why they are unhappy. This isn't neccessarily a bad thing, but living in a society in which happiness through relationships is such a major talking point, and participating in a sector of the economy (psychotherapy) that produces many ready-made solutions and snap analyses for these problems, patients like those seen by the psychologist in question have a ready-made, easily presented explanation for their malaise. Taking this explanation for granted might be a disservice to her patients, and it's certainly a disservice to anyone listening to your explanation of widespread social phenomena.

(The issue [mostly] overlooked in this very class- and age-specific discussion: are ways of living that are adaptive to upwardly-mobile professionals in their 20s and 30s maladaptive afterward? [The psychologist would be receptive to this argument, and hints at it.] Or are enough people taking on these ways of living that they will develop, as a cohort, adaptive new responses to their situation as they reach their 40s, 50s, and upward [to which I think the salon poster would be receptive], and what are married rich people unhappy about?)

File under "hilarious, not surprising"

From science blog Cognitive Daily:

...David McCabe and Alan Castel have taken this work on the acceptance of
neuroscience to a new level: now they've got pictures! They asked 156 students
at Colorado State University to read three different newspaper articles about
brain imaging studies. The articles were completely fake, and they all discussed
brain imaging, but one of the articles included only text, one included a bar
graph showing brain-scan results, and one showed pictures of brains. The
articles were about three different topics, but an equal number of students saw
each article with text only, the graph, or the brain image...
The articles accompanied by brain images were rated significantly higher than the other articles, despite the fact that the fake claim in each article wasn't actually
supported by the fake evidence, in whatever form it was presented.

OK, I am generally hostile to studies based on how undergrads perform in lab studies, blah blah, etc., but this kind of stuff still cracks me up.

Only writing for one month, and I already have a jinx to call my own.

So far, every time I've posted about something as an inevitability, it hasn't occurred.

I wonder what President McCain, NBA Finals MVP Kobe Bryant, and my ex-wife all think about that.

The Wall Street Journal is doing sports now?

Especially since the years 2000-2003, I have nothing but hateful, bitter scorn to how the major US news outlets handle important news, such as, just off the top of my head, elections, terrorist attacks, and wars. The disgust I feel for how vapid and uncritical most editors and talking heads have been in their handling of the emergence and unfolding of the Bush presidency is probably best articulated here. It makes me want to shudder and puke just thinking about it.

Anywho, for reasons like those, I've always bought into the cliche that the sports page is the only honest part of the newspaper.

Paradoxically, I think a lot of this who feel this way also feel some sort of sadness about the much-trumpeted decline of the newspaper. Despite the, to be honest, partial hatred I feel toward many writers and editors of newspapers who helped drum up support for attacking Iraq (and Iran), I'd still like to see these newspapers become what they were in our great imagined past when journalists were journalists and men were men. And all that. We'd love to see widely-circulated, thoughtful reporting of and commentary on important events.
Where am I going with all this? For starters, much-discussed changes in how people get their news has led to some potentially thoughtful (if sanctimonious) debate about the role of access to high-power sources (like traditional news outlets have); specifically, whether this leads journalists to serve as mouthpieces of these sources, or whether it actually gives journalists access to more important information.
I tend to avoid self-important discussions about journalism, but one domain in which I can stomach this kind of talk is, no surprise here, the world of sports. I think it's great that websites like deadspin and others bring an outsider's perspective to the world of sports; likewise, I like to get the up-close perspective that connected journalists at places like ESPN can provide. Ideally, the outsiders can keep the journalists honest and in check, and the journalists can be informed by the thoughts and concerns articulated by outsiders.

So, despite the nausea I felt (due to the parallels between "sports leagues" and political and corporate administrations) in reading the following quote...,

Q: Are sports leagues too controlling in imposing rules on how they can be covered?
A: From a journalist's perspective, absolutely. As Pat Jordan wrote, the
access gets worse all the time and the fans get less out of the coverage because
it's forced to be more superficial. Interviews are shorter, if they can be
landed at all, and the P.R. folks -- not all, but many -- are exerting way too
much control. I understand why the leagues and teams do it. They're all in the
media business themselves now, and they're just taking money out of their own
pockets if they let someone else air a press conference they're perfectly
equipped to air themselves. This is pure speculation, but I wonder if there
isn't some connection between this increased restriction and the rise of the
kind of sports gossip that is a legitimate violation of athletes' privacy.

... I have some optimism that the WSJ's resources can enlighten and elevate the level of discourse in the world of sports, which will hopefully draw attention to how much better a job places like the Journal and the Times could handle subjects which are, to me, a lot less fun, but a lot more important.

More questionable developmental thinking in sportswriting

In this week's edition of "the deformed lovechild of free darko and fire joe morgan," let's look at one Miami sportswriter's concerns about all-but-certain top-two NBA draft pick Michael Beasley (I put the stuff in bold):

"I'm still a kid," [Beasley] says. "I'm learning day by day."
...From a personal standpoint, that's comforting, considering the pandemonium he has left in his wake.
No, this is not Caron Butler selling drugs and stashing
guns, only to learn ultimate lessons in solitary confinement.
This, instead, is the kid who sees how far he can push,
without ever pushing too far, the kid who places a dead rat in a teacher's
drawer, who signs his name in as many places as possible in prep school, who wore pajamas to his high school cafeteria, who once put glue on his cousin's underwear, who was suspended from kindergarten — yes, kindergarten — for cutting off a girl's pigtail.
The sum total: Banishment from more high schools than there are grades in
high school. In all, he attended seven schools in five states, a journey that
concluded at Notre Dame Prep in Fitchburg, Mass.
Since high school? Nothing more than a speeding violation.
Of course, "since high school" is just one year ago

I'm going to disregard the "banishment from.. high schools" part, after saying: This refers to a Washington Post article from last year that many people who know Beasley, including many quoted and referenced in the article, misrepresents and takes out of context Beasley's short tenure at these schools. (Basically, what all that boiled down to was the Beasley left schools for a variety of somewhat reasonable basketball reasons; "somewhat reasonable" if we consider the common practice of private high schools recruiting 14 year olds, and adults encouraging said kids to transfer schools for the purpose of increasing their exposure to potential endorsers, etc. Ultimately, Beasley left every school with the endorsement and encouragement of supportive adults in his life, who, while certainly having different priorities than I do, sound like they did care about the kid).

Anyway, let me get this straight. You want your reader be concerned that Beasley has certain, shall we say, temperamental or personality traits that will make his legacy more like that of Derrick Coleman or Vin Baker than Malone/Barkley/McHale/whomever. This is a fair concern, I guess, though I think it has more to do with the fact that, in this draft narrative, the other sure-fire top two 19 year old has been fairly arbitrarily granted the status of "mature, wise, non-uppity player," than anything driven by a realistic assessment of these two very young people.

So yeah, assuming this is a fair concern, assuming that Rose's perceived maturity is more a product of his own psychology than that of a tired old sports narrative that gets trotted out whenever we have to compare two hard-to-compare athletes, let's consider the evidence employed here. The writer uses the redemption of Caron Butler, a Racine, Wisconsin native famously "arrested 15 times before he turned 15." (Oooh! Was he the 7th son of a 7th son? Does he like Iron Maiden as much as I do?) Now the writer seems to assume that it was solitary confinement that redeemed Mr. Butler. While I'd really, really doubt that, let's say that something drastic was required to turn Butler away from his life of "selling drugs and stashing guns." The writer also seems to be assuming that Beasley has lacked this character-developing experience to redeem him from his past sins. I don't think that maturity is dependent on trauma, but I'll buy the fact that many times young athletes who've never heard "no" in their life might need a little extra reality check to be the kind of person we might hope.

The premise that I can't buy, not even for a second, is that any of this stuff Beasley did is all that worrisome. Cutting off a girls' pigtail? Cruel if a teenager does it, creepy if an adult does it. If a kindergartner does it? DUDE. THE KID WAS 5. He had NO IDEA what he was doing. (And what is with "-- yes, kindergarten--?" We're not talking about drug dealing or spousal abuse in kindergarten, which would be truly shocking. But anyway.) Playing a scary prank on a teacher? "Graffito tagging," as Marge Simpson worried about? Wearing pajamas in a high school cafeteria? Would this be the high school he attended that consisted of a basketball team and 12 ESL students that exists as an AAU vehicle, or one of his actual high schools? Either way, WHO CARES? Am I so off-base in thinking that this is fairly average behavior for a bored high school boy?

Even if I am off-base, and I'll admit the dead rat is a little creepy, I don't think that anyone sees these as more worrisome than bringing a gun to school, selling crack, and fathering a child at 14. These were things that Caron Butler did as a kid in Racine, and, by all accounts, he's become not only one of the best players in the Eastern Conference, but a really nice guy. Beasley was a kid who never had structure in his high school life, didn't have age-normative social expectations to make use of, and who responded to being treated like a star/investment in a way that many people would-- pushing limits in a relatively nonmalicious way. Ultimately, Beasley's mischevous response to an unstructured, chaotic environment in his teenage years is useless for predicting future behavior.

What the Chicago Bulls' new hire means for human development

I'm not trying to be a very poor man's FreeDarko today, but the basketball world's chattering classes are surprisingly a-twitter over rumors coming out of Chicago. (I say it's surprising because we are possibly two games away from one of the greatest NBA Finals' storylines in years, and sports talking heads all over are speculating about a possible head coaching hire by a 33-49 team.) Supposedly, the Bulls are set to re-hire Doug Collins, NBA tv analyst, Illinois State alum and former NBA all-star, Wizards coach, Pistons coach, and, most importantly, Michael Jordan's coach for the Bulls before Phil Jackson took over and drove the Air Jordan car to 6 NBA titles.

Common wisdom in Chicago has had it that Collins is a great expert on the game, but too much of a taskmaster to lead great basketball players in the present NBA. (Disregarding all the questionable implications implicit in this, and the fact that that immediately makes people think of newly deposed Scott Skiles, I can't shake a piece I read a few years ago about Collins unable to coach Jordan's Wizards team under 23's shadow.)

What do I think this has to do with human development? It's bringing to the forefront one of the more poorly understood questions in our lives: how much can adults change? One of the more immediate points being made is the following: Doug Collins is a head coach who couldn't win with Michael Jordan on his team. What can he do with Hinrich, Deng, Noah, etc?

There are a couple of ideas here I'd like to tease out. The most simple point here is that Jordan, greatest of all time or not, still came into the league without the maturity or teammates to win a championship. The Jordan that Doug Collins coached was not the same Jordan coached by Phil Jackson, plain and simple.

There are two other moving targets here: Doug Collins' coaching ability, and the NBA environment. While no immediate NBA examples come to mind, I'd like to point out a couple of examples from baseball of a coach leaving his role to be an analyist: Bob Brenly and Joe Torre were both able to take what they observed as analysts and apply it to their coaching style. (This is assuming you think a baseball manager or NBA coach have all that much to do with their team's success; I think both are pretty open questions, but think that, particularly in baseball, the players and their talent and cohesion matter much more. But I won't go there.)

A phrase I've heard a couple of times today is "a leopard doesn't change its spots." I think as a society we've retired a few cliches about how people can't change themselves and their place in the world: "there are no second acts in American lives" has been killed over and over again, for example. Here's hoping that Doug Collins can popularize a belief that I, and most of my colleagues, hold: that there is plenty of room to change oneself, and one's ability to thrive within their environment, even late into adulthood.

If you've ever wanted to watch a monkey feed itself using a robotic arm..

"Andrew Schwartz and his team at the University of Pittsburgh, which reports on the monkey experiment in the journal Nature Thursday, say the experiments are paving the way toward prosthetic devices that "could ultimately achieve arm and hand function at a near-natural level."
Observers agree the work is promising, but caution it will take years to perfect the technology that uses electrodes implanted in the brain to control robotic devices."

lost the plot

I'm noticing that, after a period of being pretty effective with my time and on top of things, I am really bad with time lately. Not in terms of sleeping in (though I did this morning, and luckily ended up not having time to take the train to work), or missing appointments, or anything like that. I'm talking about a certain kind of unhealthy binging behavior that has, for a long time, been a problem of mine, that I'm only now starting to feel comfortable addressing.

What happened was, I didn't get home until about 10:00, but planned on catching the end of a certain basketball game, a certain baseball game and perhaps a certain hockey game. Since I'd gotten a lot done while at work today, I was going to just check my fantasy baseball rosters, turn off the computer, watch said games, and turn in early. (Aside: I worry that I sound like I'm 80 years old when I use the phrase "the computer." Anyway.)

I ended up wasting several hours of precious, precious time tracking down ultimately useless information. I spent at least 30 mintes reading news reports about the suspension of a 19 year old minor leaguer I'd been thinking of adding to my keeper fantasy baseball team (if you don't know, you really, really, really don't care). I finally realized who Sydney Pollack was and read reviews of about 8 films from the 70s to the 90s that I not only will not see, but will probably never look at again. This led me to read reviews of several of the movies showing at Cannes this year that I will also never even think about again, and... so on. It only gets less interesting, so I'll spare the details, except to say I've noticed the following: This kind of behavior is binging. Like binge drinking or eating, only not quite as big a problem, information binging leads to the joyless, pointless consumption of information. I don't have any need for most of the information I'm chasing (seriously, one of the tabs open in my browser right now is a wikipedia page for some operetta from the mid-90s), I don't enjoy consuming it, but here I am, up too late, consuming it for its own sake. All this crap distracted me from 3 excellent games and a good night's sleep. Argh.

One nice thing result is that it did lead me to the following quote (an actress in one of the useless articles I read attributed this to Flaubert): "Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." That's kind of what I've been working toward in the past few years of my life, and definitely how I plan to approach my dissertation. So there.

133 Parents' Stories Reveal That Parents Don't Matter

Look, I love research that challenges sacred cows. If you designed a good study that showed that watching baseball while eating apple pie baked by one's mother turned people into sociopaths, I'd talk about it to everyone and high-five you into oblivion.

But do we really want to take a verbal response to "several stories" as a reliable stand-in for what parents provide their children, even if it (somewhat) predicts how children will use a particular toy? Seriously? Do we think this correlates with the environment they provide their children? What if how they respond to these stories correlates with how the family's day is going? With any of the dozens of ideas that seem more likely to correlate with responding to a specific story than the entire effect of all their parenting practices do? The ways they respond to their (specific, real) children when they're being really annoying, or particularly cute, or particularly upset? Their ability to repond affectionately but competently across a variety of contexts?

Read the article, and if I'm way off in thinking this study is weak as hell, please, PLEASE, let me know. Look, parenting, making babies, etc, aren't freaking magical. But, to my eyes, these people are massively overstating what their research design is capable of showing.

your first summer jam

to put it mildly, I haven't been blown away by much commercial R&B lately, but this track features:

-what sounds like a Slick Rick sample

-a sweet steppers' groove mid-to-uptempo beat with nice housey synth and electric piano

-male falsetto (is all falsetto male falsetto? is it called something else for women? someone please enlighten me.)

-a Lil' Wayne verse. (This song is way too smooth and "normal" to allow for him to draw from his dank moldy well of psychologically twisted genius, but, whatever. Actually, his verse is, verbally, pretty blah, but I don't care, it fits the track and is catchy, and reminded me to make a copy of one of his 400 mixtapes from 2007 for a friend of mine.)

Nothing special, just some nice Chicago and Bronx via New Orleans ear candy to enjoy for a couple months, throw on a mixtape or two, and feel nostalgic over when you hear it in a couple years, when it takes you back to whatever pleasant silly shit is going on in your life right now.

mission postponed

Not moving to LA just yet after all...

Decided, after consulting with several people whose advice I trust, to postpone my move, at least I finish my dissertation proposal. Which means I'll be in Chicago at least through the winter.

Don't feel like writing much write now, other than to say I'm watching one of my new favorite shows, "Shameless," and it's great. Probably my favorite British TV show ever, other than Father Ted. A few years ago, I planned on doing my research around Britain's hysteria over "anti-social behavior*," which led me to read a lot about the British literary class' disaffection with Britain's white working class. Shameless does a good job of humorously and affectionately, with a minimum of condescension and/or romanticism, portraying what Americans might call "white trash" Britain.

Whether this is a sign I'll soon be back to working on an escape plan to Britain or Ireland, I dunno. My dissertation research will definitely be taking place in the US, so I doubt it.

(*"Anti-social," in this particular discourse [if you're interested, google "ASBO britain" or something], doesn't mean the same thing that, say, American clinicians mean, as in markedly unempathic, sadistic behavior. The British punditry meant it in much the same way Giuiliani and allies might use it in their "Broken Windows" approach approach to crime reduction**.)

(**Don't want to get into this, but NYC's decrease in violent crime during Giuiliani's tenure wasn't much better than those of cities that took on a much less authoritarian approach to social order, and analysts who did think that New York's crime rate went down for any specific reason usually, as far as what I've read, tied it to initiatives associated with previous mayor David Dinkins, or massive gentrification.)

Orgasms and evolution

This article (linked in title) isn't bad, but reinforces for me something that's been on my mind lately. I've even mentioned here that a lot of, and probably most, evolutionary psychology research involves looking for some measurable presumed correlate (i.e. brain scans, hormone levels) of some presumed evolutionary mechanism ("the fight or flight response," sexual jealousy) that we assume was useful in some imagined past (when we were being chased by saber-toothed tigers, or when men were out hunting all the time), that shows us something we "know."

As a way of generating hypotheses or heuristics I don't see anything wrong with it, but when it becomes the only way that a field is represented in any popular way, it leads to a lot of bad thinking. (I don't know enough about evolutionary psychology to say whether this is the main way that things work in this field, but usually when I cross a popular or borderline-popular evolutionary psychology argument, it seems kind of stupid, and often reinforcing of of faulty concepts like biological bases for "race," or just really basic "men are like this, women are like this" standup comedy material.)

So one of the things I like about the research described in this article is that it looks at both "emotion," which sounds like they mean the sentimental attachments held for partners, and more general levels of fear and exitation, and "pleasure," i.e. the orgasm, in both men and women, instead of the common heuristic (men=aggressive/visual/pleasure and power driven; women=sentimental/emotional/relationship driven).

What I don't like is the implicit assumption that sexual reproduction is primarily "pleasure"- and orgasm-driven. Why? First, I don't think pleasure is a very useful construct for an evolutionary argument, being, I believe, too tied to historical and environmental context. The notion that sex is about mutual orgasm for both (in this argument, inevitable male and female) partners might be a very nice idea, but it's likely not one that has driven human behavior for the last few millenia. If it is, it certainly went away until the Kinsey era, at least by my reading. Men and women get all kinds of things out of sex- social relations, chemical effects, economic benefits, etc. Certainly, orgasms are interesting, even from a more evolutionary and less phenomenologically-based perspective, and maybe they really are where the action is for sex research. (I don't know if those were really lame jokes or what.) But by assuming sex="pleasure"=orgasms, we're only going to learn things that we already believe. I think it's likely that other mechanisms, evolutionary and psychological, impact sexual relationships, and we might learn more by thinking more carefully about what sex behavior brings people other than orgasm.

(*of course, the big point I'm not addressing here is that reproduction would not occur without male ejaculation, and that female sexual arousal also greatly facilitates reproduction. all I'm going to say about this for now is that sexual arousal isn't neccessarily, and certainly in the past might not have been, orgasm-directed, and that I wonder if orgasm and ejaculation have always been as directly connected throughout human/hominid history. While simultaneous ejaculation/orgasm is the prototype and ideal in our social world, even within this social world we are aware of premature ejaculation and other non-orgasmic mechanisms for transmitting sperm.)

(** sorry for all the scare quotes.)