Student of Trinity

Please don't stop thinking about m

It's a happy spider attacking from the air, by clinging to a kite. You'd be happy, too, if you were such a clever spider.

Every time you screw up a Latin ending, a tarantula gets squished. In tabletop games I think Machiavellian characters can be fun, but sadists are just gross, and munchkins who just want to ignore the world aren't worth gamemastering for. I think there's a basic practical problem with evil in games, which isn't quite directly about morality itself, though in the end it maybe is about morality, in a deep way. Evil is a lot about ignoring things. You decide that other people aren't really people; you pay no attention to their point of view. Maybe some forms of evil take active delight in fully appreciating others' suffering, but I'd say that's just a sickness, with no more interesting drama in it than there is in a tumor. The thing that can make evil interesting is the freedom that comes from ignoring things that people normally can't ignore. So to really represent evil in a game, you have to put vivid detail into the victims, but then have a rich story that ignores them. So you sort of have to make two good stories instead of just one, and throw one of them away. You are likely to end up with a story that's poorer than it could have been, because one rich character interacts with other rich characters as if they were mere token ciphers. Evil is expensive.

Your supervisor has a boyfriend who also works with you both, but she flirted with you through a whole shift. You know, that doesn't really sound so great, when you put it that way. Offhand, based on only the few lines of text I know about this situation, I can imagine three scenarios. 1) This 'girl' is actually very responsible and reliable both personally and professionally, but her relationship with her boyfriend is miserable and she's so attracted to you that she can't help letting her workplace ethics slip just this once. Your relationship will perfect as soon as you get over this awkward beginning phase that has made you both behave uncharacteristically. 2) You somehow misinterpreted the flirting. It was really nothing. Imagining that it was more than that would be a huge personal and professional mistake. 3) This woman is insensitive at best, and at worst, unprofessional and unfaithful. If a male supervisor behaved as she has, he'd be scum, no matter how smart, driven, and handsome he was. So ditch the double standard. There's actually a sort of continuum of scenarios between 2) and 3): depending on how firmly established her personal and professional relationships are, and how sensitive she is, she might have said more than she should have, just because it didn't occur to her that her casual banter could be taken seriously. Scenario 1) is conceivable, but even if it is true, it would be smart not to just assume it's true, but to take serious account of the other two possibilities. Which strike me, I'm afraid, as rather more probable, from the little I know. If you continue to see what you think are signs of interest on her part, it might be smart to ask a friendly question about what she and her boyfriend (whom you also know, right?) are doing — summer vacation, weekend plans, whatever. Or ask, in a very general way, about the social implications of her supervisor status — maybe not in the context of dating, but just of friendships or socializing. That may be a bit subtle, but if you're careful you could avoid saying anything offensive or inappropriate, and yet give her a clear opportunity to say something a lot more explicit and definite than casual flirting. If she doesn't take such a clear opportunity, then you pretty much have to rule out scenario 1.

I remember a text adventure called 'Dinkum', that was a bizarre Ozzification of Adventure. It ended up with anti-Iranian spaceship stupidity, but most of it was classic. Its syntax about the rifle and the radioactive bullet that was needed to kill the deadly wombat somehow got fused in my mind with the Yale Shooting Problem.

In a Spiderweb game, you start out as an unbelievable wimp, and within a few weeks, you're a god. Real life doesn't quite work that way, but the idea that you get better with time isn't totally wacky. After ten years, you can look back at some distance covered. Milestones are fun. What if an RPG worked the other way? You start out at very high level, and get slowly worn down. That would be horrible, unless you could somehow reinterpret it so that the loss was also progress. You paid prices to gain things, or just to pass obstacles that needed to be passed. In the end you save the world, by killing one goblin — because you have struggled so far, to reach the goblin at the end. It might not be such a great game. That's probably why games aren't like that. But maybe real life sometimes is.

Not all good coders have yachts, but I doubt that very many go hungry.

That's like complaining that your sparring partner hit you. I'm not wielding any authority on this issue; I'm just a guy on a board. I think it's seriously important to be able to cope with fuzzy terms, and with pejorative ones. Words aren't things, and I don't think there's anything so good that it couldn't fit some unflattering descriptions, at least to a fuzzy degree. You've got to be able to stand up for what you believe in, even in an unflattering light; admit that, yeah, it is kind of like that bad thing, in some ways; and then go on to say, But it redeems itself as follows. In return, I'll be happy to concede that some more flattering descriptions of English studies can also be stretched over reality. The point is to try on both descriptions, and try to judge which fits better. Brushing up, yes. In my previous life I've always been quick to deny that the essential purpose of education is economic, but now I'm trying to say, Hang on — there's a grain of truth in there. I'm happy to let rich people pay for courses in wine appreciation, and I acknowledge that it's a rich subject; but I refuse to respect that kind of training in the same way I respect training in medicine. I don't insist that English finds itself in exactly the same place as wine appreciation, in comparison with medicine; but I do insist that it's a meaningful and important question, just where along the spectrum English falls. Defenses of English that take the form of rejections of the question only serve to sharpen my suspicions that English falls too close to the unworthy end. I single out English for personal reasons: it's the subject I know best, after physics (though it's a big step down in expertise from first place to second for me), and it's the subject of the blog that started this train of thought for me. It seems to serve okay as a test case.

Slarty has made another point that strikes me as solid: whatever it is that I mean by 'production', it might be a bad thing; and that might be worse than even the most uselessly self-indulgent training in consumption. I accept this as a solid argument, without accepting it as decisive. I worked at Los Alamos for four years, though I didn't work on weapons (and would not have been allowed to work on them). I felt okay there, however. If I had been a trained physicist during the Manhattan project, I'm pretty sure I would have been part of it. Temperamentally, when the hard bottom line comes, I believe in action. I'm not sure I'd really act, in a crisis, but that's just it: my fear is that I wouldn't act, not that I'd act wrongly. I'd find it easier to forgive myself for acting wrongly, than for not acting. Abusus non tollit usus: just because there's a bad way of doing something, doesn't mean the thing itself is bad. Maybe the market sometimes demands bad things; okay, it's better to deliver nothing to the market, than to deliver bad things to it. Imagine, however, a better market. It would still want something. It wouldn't want everything. Education should supply training in delivering the things an ideal market would want.

My premise was a distinction between training in consumption or appreciation, and training in production. Analysis of just what might be wrong with my premise does interest me, but I really only saw one substantial point being raised. I recognized it most clearly in Kelandon's first post. Other points seemed to me to be either the same point as Kelandon's, stated differently, or else to be simply saying, "No. But here's a different issue." On those different issues, I haven't thought of anything good to say. Kelandon's comparison of Shakespeare to stars made me see that the distinction I'm trying to draw can't really just be exactly the distinction between production and appreciation, because (depending on how you refine your definitions) either those two things are just overlapping shades of understanding, or else all disciplines are going to come out as having elements of both production and appreciation in them. That was enough to make me drop my hard accusations against English, because the only reason I felt competent to weigh English in the balance, with my limited expertise, was that I thought I was seeing a really basic and simple case. Okay, it's not that simple. The glove doesn't fit. I still think there's probably some important distinction that can be drawn, somehow along lines of production and consumption, between two different senses in which education might be valuable. And although I'm no longer sure that this distinction will end up killing English, I still think it's probably a problem for English academia in its current form. If I was initially accusing English of felony, what I'm worried about now is maybe more like bankruptcy: not that it's all bad, but that it's just not paying its way.

I want to pick up on just one phrase, "skills demanded in the workforce right now," because I think this might be an indication that Kelandon doesn't disagree with me as much as it seems, but simply uses different words for what I mean. I'm not sure it makes sense to say that "skills demanded in the workforce" are "external to the discipline", as if every discipline were a sovereign judge of value, and the workforce were merely capricious in its demands. In bestowing great wealth the economy may well be capricious, but in providing subsistence, I think it tends to have a fair point. If your academic discipline has given you tools that let you make something that other people want, then you have to be quite unlucky indeed to suffer much want for long. If your discipline doesn't provide you with that kind of tool, then this is what I've been talking about as training in consumption rather than production. I think "valuable" is an unhelpful concept here because it ignores that distinction. Some things I've learned are valuable to me because they've made me happier, but other things are valuable because they've enabled me to make others happier. The distinction between consumptive and productive value is a refinement that I think this discussion needs. The qualifier that I omitted, the "right now" in Kelandon's "demanded in the workforce right now", can indeed make a difference to all that. You might have a skillset that used to be useful but no longer is, or that will be useful soon but isn't yet. I'd like to see that as a separate issue, though. It's certainly practically important if you're stuck with bad timing, but if your skillset has never been demanded in the workforce and is never going to be, then that's even worse. When I talk about production and consumption, I mean to talk precisely about skills being demanded in the workforce, or not. But I don't only mean that 'production' equals 'in demand', by definition. I have the premise that the economy is at least somewhat rational, and that there is a reason why some skills are demanded while others are not. I assume that what the workforce wants is something real, and I call that something "production".

I may have been led astray by the label 'fiction appreciation', but I invented the label for myself. For most of my life I've been a big fan of English as an academic discipline. I was good at it. I got bizarrely high grades in high school English, and won the freshman English prize in college. I reluctantly abandoned my plan to do a double major in English and physics, but I did poorly in thermodynamics because I skipped half my lectures to go to an English seminar instead. Since my undergraduate days I've had less and less contact with academic English, but I always wanted to believe well of English as an academic subject. Recently, I had a crisis of faith. Crises of faith are often triggered by injustice. English in North American colleges suffers more than many departments from a class struggle. There are a lot of doctoral candidates teaching and grading for years and years, for very low pay, while slowly writing the dissertations that are seldom worth much as a career credential outside of academia. Within academia, a PhD in English might let you join the thin ranks of tenure-track faculty, but it is all too likely instead to leave you teaching and grading, for very modest pay, as an adjunct lecturer who can find yourself out of a job at any moment. Science and engineering departments aren't nearly so harsh. They bring in large research grants, from which universities skim off a substantial cut as 'overhead', on the grounds that all that research is supported in lots of ways by the university's infrastructure. Universities like science departments the way governments like rich corporations: because they pay taxes. Grant money also pays graduate students better, and science PhDs are granted sooner; much of the grunt work that is done by Nth-year doctoral students in English is done in science by substantially better paid post-doctoral fellows. Economically, science departments are normally fairly healthy. English departments, in comparison, are like those poor countries with many poor, few rich, and no middle class. It's an ugly fact of life. Some English departments are among the last bastions of Marxism; this is less mysterious than one might think. I happened to be reminded of all that by reading a blog by a suddenly unemployed English lecturer. My instinct was to see this individual tragedy as an inefficiency in an operation that was basically sound, in that it was aimed at achieving a sensible goal at a sustainable cost. A meaningful response to this guy's misfortune, I figured, would be to identify the inefficiency and see what could be done to fix it. That might even suggest a useful next step for the guy himself. Trying to get a clear bead on the problem by taking a fundamental perspective, I found that perspective much less useful than I had expected. What exactly was the purpose of a university English department, anyway? The arguments that came to hand quickest were boilerplate about writing and critical thinking, but then I read a blog comment that shot those down, by pointing out that those great skills can in principle be learned in subjects other than English. So what was English really trying to teach, as core content? Wasn't it something alarmingly similar to gourmet dining — fiction appreciation? Kelandon's analogy between great works of fiction and stars has helped me shore up my faith in English. Perhaps it's an obvious point that I just missed because I never studied English far enough to be challenged by it; I'd thought well of English all those years, as it were, on principle, without really ever having had the personal experience of English as more than self-indulgence. I've dropped my case against English. This is not because I am now convinced that everything about academic English studies is good and healthy, however. I simply no longer believe there is a big and basic enough problem that even I, as an outsider, can judge the case. The issue now seems to me to be one of finer detail than my expertise can reach. Details can still kill, however. Lots of entities are actually supported by a small subset of their activities. A brain surgeon's existence may be justified by a few cuts each day. As long as the small subset of value is valuable enough, it can support a lot of other activities that aren't so valuable. Let the surgeon enjoy some golf. The golf might not even be as worthless as it seems; maybe it's the hours on the links that keep those hands so steady. In the same way, a physics department may do a lot of things that aren't really so valuable, and justify its existence with a few things that aren't even so obvious. And maybe an English department can say the same. On the other hand, though, a marquis of the ancien régime might have insisted that all his indulgence was justified by the exquisite taste with which he led his society to finer things by way of example. At some point, that kind of argument can be specious. In principle there can be hidden value, or partial but adequate value; but sometimes the value delivered just isn't enough, for the cost that is claimed. À la lanterne. The economic injustice of academic English departments still makes me suspicious that there is something rotten going on.

At least in my mind, I'm not just waving away the general issue of usefulness of education. I'm trying to focus instead on the specific issue of being educated in consumption rather than in production. Even if you're being equipped for some form of production, it's certainly hard and arguable undesirable to train in very specific applications; the goal is cross-application. Fine; humanities departments have defended themselves with cross-application for centuries, and science departments can't really claim much higher ground, either. I don't want to rehash all that. The point that's new to me is a wrinkle I never used to notice. The core content of English studies is training in consumption. Cross-application from consumption skills to production skills is a much bigger stretch, it seems to me. Slarty and Alo and others may have had the same points in mind, but Kelandon seems to me to have hit my narrower target most squarely. One of his points is substantial even though it's beside the mark, strictly; the other is directly on the topic I want. The beside-the-mark point is that English does teach quite a lot more close reading and argumentative writing than most other disciplines. That's true. I say this point is beside the mark, because what it says is that English is a product in excellent packaging. I'm trying to focus on products themselves. Other disciplines could adopt English packaging, or English departments could stuff their containers with other things. What if English studies concentrated mainly on non-fiction — on textbooks, for example — but put students through the same traditional exercises of heavy reading loads and lots of essays? What if biology courses demanded a lot more writing? I'm not questioning close reading and persuasive writing as universal skills that can be wrapped around any content. I'm looking narrow-eyed at fiction appreciation as an academic product. The point that hits home is the comparison of stars and Shakespeare. Touché: what I say next is not rebuttal but concession, restating Kelandon's point in my own terms. Everything may be probably useless but astrophysics is astronomically more useless; there's a slight chance that some undergraduate might possibly change the world with any one bit of knowledge, but no-one is ever going to leave college and build us a star. Stars are very interesting phenomena, however, and they illustrate some basic principles that apply to lots of other things. The same can be said of Shakespeare's corpus. It's a very interesting phenomenon. There isn't much around that's fully like it, but a lot of things use common elements. Someone who really knew how Shakespeare worked might indeed use that knowledge to make something really valuable, even if it wasn't specifically Henry IV Part Four: The Final Reckoning, or Wives of Windsor Gone Wild. In fact such a something might be so valuable, that it might be well worth training millions of people in Shakespeare, just to keep buying a ticket in the lottery. Learning how Shakespeare works counts as understanding of something real and important, just as much as understanding how stars work; if understanding Shakespeare is only training in consumption, then so is understanding stars. I think that might be a leg that English can stand on. Shakespeare's a star. There might be a lot of further argument about whether any given current department of English is really standing firmly on that leg, or even whether English as a discipline currently needs more shaking up than most, to shake off self-indulgent satisfaction with consumption and refocus on products that are really valuable. Maybe non-fiction studies should become a thing, and creative writing get a lot more love. But although I may have suspicions about those things, I don't really have the expertise to discuss them. If English does after all have a leg to stand on, then it's for those firmly standing English faculty, however few or many they may be, to get their house in order if it needs it.

I don't really mean to argue over whether people actually end up using what they specifically learned in school. Very little of what anyone learns in school or college turns out to be directly useful, even in very applied fields. One reason people still value degrees is that sometimes something you learned turns out to be extremely useful, but you can't tell in advance which particular thing that will be, for you. Another is that the implicit knowledge of the field's general background is very valuable, but the only way to acquire that is to spend some years studying details. In Germany, physics is a highly valued degree, for work in all kinds of industries. It seems to open doors here to all kinds of technical careers, the way an engineering degree does in North America. Physics isn't that way in North America, I'll grant that. North American physics departments do most of their teaching to engineers, though. Whatever the Honors Physics graduates end up doing, the departments have a paying trade. At any rate, physics is at least training you about something objectively real. What you learn could in principle enable you to do something useful or valuable for other people. My worry about English is that all it does, directly, is to help me enjoy or appreciate things better, myself. Every discipline has a struggle to demonstrate direct utility, and I think we should be generous. I'm worried that this 'training in gourmet dining' aspect is something qualitatively different about English, however, that renders it ineligible for much benefit of doubt. Some of these concerns likely do apply to other humanities departments than English; but since I'm willing to accept utility-in-principle, even with a fair amount of stretching, I think some other humanities departments might be off the hook. Philosophy, for instance, trains you to analyze arguments, about anything whatever. You could reform philosophy departments into departments of critical thinking, and it wouldn't be that big a shake-up. Or, history: it's no guide to the future, except that it's the best guide we have. So I'd rather represent History or Philosophy in court, than fiction appreciation. I'm playing Devil's Advocate here, in a stricter sense than people usually mean. Like the Curial official charged with digging up dirt on candidates for canonization, I'm a prosecutor whose heart is with the defense. I'd like to see English exonerated. But it looks like a tough case.

Did I already start a thread about this? I can't find it, so I think I didn't, but maybe I did. If so, sorry. I recently started following a blog by this guy D.G. Myers, who's spent over twenty-five years teaching college English without tenure, and is losing his job because extending his contract would give him a claim on tenure. He's a passionate scholar who's also very articulate, so I think he's probably great at what he does; it's a shame he never got tenure. He's made a few posts about the sad state of academic English studies today, and how doomed his field surely is, because it's far too self-indulgent to be economically sustainable. Allowing for understandable bitterness, I think he probably still has a point. I wanted to be sympathetic, to argue that English departments were legitimate pillars of a university, at least in principle, and so some kind of sane reform could surely salvage the discipline. That's what I'd always felt, as someone who fell just short of minoring in English. But thinking more seriously about the academic study of English, with a few more decades of academic experience, I'm not sure I can buy my own argument. I still want to believe the conclusion. But I'm stuck on one point. Why should there be a university degree in fiction appreciation? Isn't that like getting a degree in gourmet dining? I mean, sure there's a lot to learn. I'm sure it takes a highly educated palate to savor all those truffles fully. But it's not a useful trade, to anyone. It's an indulgence. If rich people with time on their hands want to pay an expert instructor, to learn how to get more out of novels and recognize the really good ones, then fine: they can pay for private courses, just as they pay for courses in wine appreciation. But why should fiction appreciation be an academic discipline alongside medicine and engineering and natural science? I don't just mean that students need an education that will get them a paying job. I mean that education, that's worth supporting with public funds and recognizing with credentials, ought to enable people to make some positive contribution to the world, in the course of their lives. I'm not assuming that every student has to be driven by the lust for flat screen TVs and enormous vehicles. I'm talking about the moral obligation to try to do some good in the world, in the time that you have here. How is studying fiction appreciation going to help with that? I'm aware of the standard argument, that studying English trains one in reading comprehension, critical thinking, and articulate writing. Absolutely, it does — and those are awesome tools to train. I learned a lot about those things when I studied English, and I've valued that learning ever since. But here's the thing that someone else posted, on D.G. Myers's blog, and that struck me immediately as a knock-down point. Other disciplines train those same things, too. Comprehension, thinking, and writing are wonderful things, because they're critically useful everywhere. So every discipline has to train those things. And they do train them. They train them the same way studying English trains them: incidentally, in passing, while conveying something else as core content. But where other disciplines have core content that might someday make you useful to other people, the core content of English is fiction appreciation. So you can get more out of novels. What's up with that? What if English departments all switched over to studying non-fiction books and creative writing? Creative writing is a fine subject. As I said, my point here isn't just Philistinism. Fiction is valuable, because people value it. They pay for it. So training in creative writing would absolutely be a worthy peer to training in engineering. And a little bit of literary criticism might be appropriate to teach and research at university — as an adjunct to creative writing. But all this academic study devoted to fiction appreciation. Really. What's up with that?

Each of the three LOTR volumes is divided into two 'Books'. Book 4 is the second half of The Two Towers. I haven't read much of anything in quite a long time. I'm writing my own book, and since I have a real job beside that, my writing has taken over my reading slot. I've been a compulsively voracious reader for most of my life, but I mind not reading much less than I would have expected. I think I may always have been one of those readers for whom reading was in large part about scouting out the space of possible books, to prepare my attack.

D&D games were never intended to be remotely realistic, but just to be playable games that didn't feel too completely unrealistic. I spent a while once trying to re-jigger the D&D system and in the end found only one substantial thing I really wanted to change. The basic feature of this system, I decided, was that combat had two steps: hitting and damaging. I decided that the two-step system was really just there for pacing. The hit point system meant that, except at very low experience levels, damage got doled out in small enough bites that killing something — or being killed — became a story that developed instead of a sudden event. Adding the separate roll to hit, before doing damage, added a new layer of pacing, by potentially making each bit of damage into the satisfying culmination of several rounds of missing. There were some obvious adaptations one could make to that kind of system. Some game systems compressed the two layers into one, with a single roll (possibly of many dice at once) determining how much damage was done each round. Somehow these systems seemed to make combat less exciting. Most rounds were about the same and things were too predictable. Some other game systems added a third layer by incorporating some kind of 'critical hits' that would sometimes do much more damage. Some people really liked that kind of thing, but I always felt it made combat a bit too unpredictable. When too much can happen too fast, there's less opportunity to react to events, and this makes the game less of a story and more of a game of chance. So the two-step system seemed basically good, to me. The two-step system let you distinguish different kinds of opponent; things could be tough by being hard to hit, or by having a lot of hit points, or by doing a lot of damage themselves. You could make agile little critters and big clumsy oafs. For a few kinds of fights you could take the die-rolls seriously as realistic representation of individual swings. D&D combat was pretty darn accurate, for example, at simulating the attempt to swat a fly: give the fly a good armor class, because it's so hard to hit the pesky thing, and just enough hit points that if you were unlucky it might survive a hit. D&D combat would also be pretty direct in representing the chopping down of a tree. Sometimes you might miss your aim with the axe and fail to deepen your main cut, so hitting might not be automatic, but it would be probable and you could expect to slowly wear the tree down. Other than cases like that, though, D&D combat only really made sense as a pretty abstract representation of events. You could interpret it into making sense, but you might have to work at it.

Oh, now I get it. Auto-censor doesn't do Arabic.

I would never stoop to that.

I don't really know how essential the wrapping stuff is for saltimbocca. I think that's just getting fancy, and the important thing is that butter, white wine, and sage have some sort of weird synergy together. The combined flavor is strong and good, and not something I expected from the individual ingredients. Somebody with a super-acute palate might be more articulate about that. YMMV.

Try saltimbocca. It's yummy. I do have a question about salt, though. Did everyone think, when they were little, that salt and pepper were opposites that could cancel each other out? My brothers and I all went through that stage. Discovering that it wasn't so was one of those early increments of understanding how the universe just wasn't as simple as I thought it should be.

What would it take to make a more memorable town?

Mmmm, liquids.

Unfortunately it's bait and switch. After a lengthy interview you'll be told the position is filled, but they were so impressed with you, they'd like to hire you as a goblin.

Or it could start in your breakfast cereal bowl one morning. Careful with that spoon.