Juno’s views of Jupiter, Sept 2017**
THE PASTURE
I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan't be gone long. — You come too.
I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan't be gone long. — You come too.
~ Robert Frost
It can be argued that the theme of this poem is “rebirth” (spring both as a season and a source of water), and that the speaker, a farmer, is inviting a friend to come along. In a greater “mortalist” scheme (all poems are in some way about mortality, right?), it can also be saying that life is short and the reader is also ultimately going where the speaker is going. But because of the images of spring and new life, that’s a perverse reading. Springtime is renewal.
But my immediate reaction was that this poem, like all poems, illuminates the nature of poetry. The reader is not just invited to come along. He or she IS coming too, through the act of reading the poem and letting it register on a receptive mind. This happens through the power of images: thanks to the description, we see the spring being cleared of dead leaves and the water beginning to run clear. And we see how the newborn calf totters when licked by the mother’s tongue.
The power of imagery is so suggestive that I didn’t just see the calf tottering; I felt the cow mother’s tongue licking me too. And what a large, strong tongue it is!
Thus, if we read a poem at all, we come along to whatever places the poet takes us to. It won’t take long — but it’s quite satisfying.
THE WIFE: TERRIBLE PLOT, GREAT ACTING (SPOILER WARNING!!)
The plot is so terrible that I’ve decided it doesn’t matter a great deal whether or not you know or guess “the secret” ahead of time. But it’s difficult to discuss the main problem with the movie without discussing the central premise — just skirting it as “implausible.”
I don’t mean to discourage anyone from seeing this movie. The acting works miracles — we are riveted by the painful self-control as revealed by the wife’s facial tension, her every twitch and forced smile. Her husband is at his best in his womanizing scenes, but the acting by Glenn Close may finally win her an Oscar (she has been nominated six times before!). Now if only the plot could be worthy of her.
Close plays Joan Castleman, wife of the famous author Joe Castleman. “Joan” seems too ordinary a name for this extraordinary woman, who immediately comes across as more interesting than her husband. It turns out that Joan (SPOILER ALERT! there is still time to stop reading this if you plan to see the movie and would rather be surprised) is the real writer of the celebrated novels and short stories — she ghost-writes them, while her husband serves mostly as an editor (and not a good one, judging by the one scene of his “editing” that we get to see). He also does — or claims to do — most of the housework. In the past, he acted as the primary parent to the couple’s two children.
Nevertheless, he has also received all the credit and praise, with the wife playing “support” in public, trying to conceal her growing resentment and humiliation (made worse by his non-stop flirtations and affairs — using the same come-ons, including the same famous passage by James Joyce, he used to seduce Joan when she was a student in his creative-writing class). Why the charade? Joan, listening to bad advice, became convinced that as a female author she’d get no attention from publishers (the flashbacks go back to 1958). Why then not adopt a male pen name? That would make too much sense, as the saying goes.
Now, to make things really absurd — though also crazily interesting, I have to admit — the fake author ends up winning the Nobel Prize. The news supposedly bumps Bill Clinton off the Time magazine cover. Some critics took it as a comment on the marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton. True, he womanized while she mostly showed steely self-control — but no one would go so far as to suggest that Hillary was the real president. The movie explicitly wants us to believe that the wife is the real writer. If we don’t accept this premise, the plot crumbles. For me, it does.
And to make things even more implausible, as soon as Joan asserts herself, the fake writer and Nobel-Prize winner has a fatal heart attack. This, in the context of the movie, is a happy ending — even though Joan continues to be willing to keep up the public charade, this time as The Widow who threatens to sue the would-be biographer “if you dare impugn my late husband’s talent.” The final visual and the true happy ending is the triumphant smile that spreads on Joan’s face. For the first time, there is nothing forced about it.
Not that the movie is without interest in spite of the plot. We get to see what goes on in the wings of the Nobel Prize ceremony — more self-effacement for the wives, being offered “shopping trips and beauty treatments” while their husbands rehearse the “three reverences” — the three deep bows they are to render to to the Swedish king, the bust of Alfred Nobel (I loved this best), and, last of all, the audience. And, speaking of the movie’s virtues, the performance of Christian Slater as the sleazy, prying would-be biographer (“I know your secret” — does he really, or is he bluffing?) is also fabulous.
The movie made me think not of Hillary Clinton, but of Vera Nabokov — the archetypal super-devoted, self-effacing wife of Vladimir Nabokov. There is hardly anything that Vera wouldn’t do for the sake of her husband. She was his typist, chauffeur, editor, muse, researcher, teaching assistant, business agent, and more. She did put up with his multiple affairs. She made it possible for Nabokov to become a great writer. When Joan Castleman says about her “occupation,” “I am a king-maker,” I immediately thought of Vera Nabokov. Nevertheless, even if her editing happened to be significant (we don’t really know because she blacked out her comments in the manuscripts), there has never been any doubt as to who did the actual writing.
Now, I read in a New Yorker article that a taxi driver who knew the Nabokovs supposedly said to a journalist, “He’s so lazy — I think she does all the writing.” Who knows, perhaps that was the germ of the idea behind the plot of The Wife. Nevertheless, an idle comment by a taxi driver is only that — the real Vera was much too busy taking care of her genius husband to do the actual writing also. And to my knowledge, no eminent writer — certainly no Nobel Prize winner — has ever been exposed as a fake, with someone else acting as a ghost-writer. That’s pushing the limits of plausibility too far. We know that spouses and other supportive people aren’t given enough credit for the important role they play in the “star’s” achievement, but again, going too far is going too far.
In spite of the unbelievable plot, the movie manages to hold the viewer’s interest, and the actors’ performances are worth experiencing. I also liked two memorable statements, both of them made by Joan: “Everyone needs approval” (in defense of her son’s desperately seeking his father’s praise of his writing) and “Don’t present me as a victim. I'm much more interesting than that.” I too think we all need approval, and we all are victims to some extent, but shouldn’t be reduced to just that label; we are, each of us, “much more interesting than that.”
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By the way, the actual winner of the Nobel Prize in 1992 was the poet Derek Walcott (1930-2017). Long before the “Me Too” movement, he’d been accused of sexual harassment; in one case he reached a settlement with his accuser. At no point, however, was there any question about the authorship of his poems. Again, to my knowledge, there has been no real-life precedent for the situation portrayed in the movie.
That said, I agree that spouses and other people who support achievers should get more credit than they typically do. In many cases, the achievement would have been impossible without them.
(Another thought: could Lolita have ever been written by a woman? I don’t think so. The stamp of male sexuality is much too strong here. A woman writer could perhaps write Lolita from Lolita’s point of view.)
(And one more addendum: There are movies where implausible, preposterous plots work fine. Such movies are typically comedies, e.g. The Producers. But a serious drama follows different rules.)
HEALING FROM HATE: CAN WE COUNTERACT WHITE SUPREMACY AND MISOGYNY?
~ “In Healing from Hate, an illuminating book building on over twenty years of thinking and research, Michael Kimmel shows that the boy crisis provides fertile ground for recruiters from white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and other extremist groups. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of hate groups rose from 784 in 2014 to 954 in 2017. The center’s list now includes “male supremacy” hate groups such as Return of Kings and A Voice For Men, which characterize “all women as genetically inferior, manipulative and stupid and reduces them to their reproductive or sexual function.”
Alek Minassian, the man who drove his van into pedestrians on a Toronto street in April, killing ten, declared himself an “incel,” a member of an online community of “involuntarily celibate” men who consider themselves the victims of women who decline to sleep with them. His rampage was pledged to the “Incel Rebellion”—a backlash against feminism, but also against the social hierarchy in which conventionally attractive and successful men, “Chads,” have greater access than other men to sex and the affection of women. The rise of such groups is a threat in itself, but it also reveals a close link between violent extremism and misogyny.
Of those Kimmel profiles—members or ex-members of male hate groups in the US, as well as former members of hate groups in Germany, Sweden, Great Britain, and Canada — virtually all were abandoned by their fathers or “were abused, physically or sexually, by stepfathers or mothers’ boyfriends.” Fathers who were present, he says, were “emotionally shut down, opaque, phantom presences in their own homes.” Many of these sons were bullied or became bullies on the playground. One man told Kimmel he grew up in a “field of violence” that kept him “constantly enraged.” Such a boy then links the harshness and indifference he encountered with his identity asa boy, so that he believes he is being punished for being male. “Whether I was talking with ex–neo-Nazi skinheads in Sweden, ex–white supremacists in the United States, or even ex-jihadists in London,” Kimmel writes, “the issue of masculinity…did not fail to come up.” Failed by men—presumably mothers played some part, though we hear little about it—the men he studied also felt like “failures as men.”
Men don’t need women to recognize their manhood, Kimmel argues; they need other men. “Women would pollute things,” he was told. Generally women are badly treated by white supremacist groups; in the US few accept women as equal members. A number of white supremacists call for “tradwives”—traditional wives—to produce more white children. The men in neo-Nazi groups shave one another’s heads and dress alike in black, tattoo their arms, and wear battle-ready, hard-toed, thirty-two-eyelet boots. Male-to-male initiations into hate groups also called for “minor vandalism” for which they would be “declared heroes,” Kimmel observes wryly, such as painting swastikas on Jewish tombstones. “Men need a glorious war against something,” the historian George Mosse observed of German extremists in the 1930s, so that they can display their masculinity “stripped down to its warlike functions.”
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In his autobiography White American Youth, Christian Picciolini offers a vivid illustration of the path to extremism Kimmel describes. Born in 1973 to blue-collar Italian immigrant parents who worked long hours in Oak Forest, Illinois, Picciolini recalls his father as being quick with undeserved smacks to the head and otherwise as an impassive chauffeur driving him to be placed in “someone else’s care.” A short boy with a funny name, Picciolini became the playground target for bullies, until he developed a vicious punch of his own. He carried guns, drank, and listened to harsh music from bands with names like Skrewdriver, Brutal Attack, Skullhead, and No Remorse.
It was a fatherly gesture from a neo-Nazi that first drew the fourteen-year-old into an extremist worldview. Picciolini was smoking a joint with a friend when he was spotted by a sharp-jawed, bulky man sitting in a car. The friend ran away. Christian stood his ground. The man rose from his car, walked over to Christian, took the joint from his mouth, and told him that he shouldn’t succumb to a Jewish plot to sedate Gentiles.
In his new life of white supremacy, Picciolini began to “succeed.” He wrote and performed songs—one of which Dylann Roof listened to in 2016 a few months before killing nine black churchgoers in Charleston. He started a business selling violent music and launched a band that performed at white power rallies around the world. At sixteen, he led Hammerskin Nation, which the Anti-Defamation League described as the “most violent and best-organized neo-Nazi skinhead group in the U.S.” Picciolini was living out a strange, toxic inversion of the American Dream.
But when his wife became pregnant, “I suddenly felt guilty and out of sorts,” he recalled. “I didn’t respect…the Klansmen,…the mother carrying her infant with a tiny Klan hood on.” Becoming a father turned Picciolini’s life around, but he acknowledges that this came at the expense of his teenage wife’s own ambitions: “She sobbed. What about her plans? What about college? What about becoming a teacher?” That trade-off is not incidental. Kimmel found in his research that “for several it was a wife, girlfriend, their mother, or another woman who drew them away from the movement. It’s often through personal relationships with women that the guys get enough strength to tear themselves away. It’s hard. It was the intensity of the male bonds that got them in. That intensity has to be matched—or even exceeded—by the relationships with women.”
Like millions of girlfriends and wives, Picciolini’s wife made enormous hidden sacrifices to rescue the angry lost boy she’d married. She deserves great credit for rehumanizing her husband and so improving the safety of those around them. But it seems like a lot to ask of female partners of violent men to take on, in addition to all else they do, the daunting job of acting as society’s tacit rescue squad. It’s surely better to solve the problem at its many roots—with generous support for troubled families, school outreach programs, drug recovery centers, reduced mass incarceration, help with the skyrocketing costs of higher education, and enhanced understanding of the forces at play —all of which contribute to the male crisis itself.” ~
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/11/male-trouble/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Trump%20boys%20in%20crisis%20Elizabeth%20Bishop&utm_content=NYR%20Trump%20boys%20in%20crisis%20Elizabeth%20Bishop+CID_74808861cc46db0ef7a5e3558e65c7c5&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Male%20Trouble
Oriana:
Alas, not only are hate groups on the rise; teachers report an increase in bullying at school. This is one consequence of rewarding a Big Bully with the highest office in the land. Public displays of insults, misogyny, petty vengenfulness, unwillingness to condemn the Nazis — and more, much more — not surprisingly result in social contagion among those already ripe to adore such a leader as “one of us.”
Can anything be done?
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/13/628547971/christian-picciolini-how-do-you-unlearn-hatred
Picciolini emphasizes the need to address the emotional problems of young men who turn to extremist groups to meet their need to belong and have a purpose. His own underlying problem, he says, was the sense of abandonment. He didn’t get enough parenting from his parents, becoming vulnerable who whoever could serve as a father figure. Millions of underparented youths can be found in low-income neighborhoods — that’s where white-supremacist recruiters concentrate their efforts. Hence the need to invest in youth programs — arts-and-crafts, sports, vocational-skills training — where caring adults can basically serve as substitute parents.
Alexander Calder: The Black Gawker
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THE SUNK COST FALLACY — THROWING GOOD MONEY AFTER BAD; HOW TO CUT YOUR LOSSES
~ “A gambler might call it chasing your losses. The British saying – ‘don’t throw good money after bad’ – captures a similar sentiment. Economists call it the sunk cost fallacy, and it’s ubiquitous.
This is the logic that says “I’ve sunk a lot of money into my old car. I can’t just scrap it now. I really should replace that faulty gearbox”. (See also: those who stay in bad relationships for several additional years because they don’t want their time together to have been ‘all for nothing’).
What links these examples is the phenomenon of continuing to throw good resources (time or money) after bad, hoping for things to improve when there’s no good reason to believe they will.
In other words, people are loath to cut their losses. We are much more likely to continue to senselessly plow time or money into a project that isn’t working out, in the hope that it will get better, than take a hit and walk away. What drives this is optimism (that, against the odds, the situation will improve) and an aversion to failure.
Even animals can show a sunk-cost bias. One recent University of Minnesota study found mice and rats were just as likely as humans to fall foul of lab experiments involving delays and rewards. In each case, the more time invested waiting for their ‘prizes’ (for the rodents, flavored pellets, for the humans, funny videos) the less likely they were to quit the pursuit before the delay ended. According to some researchers, this pattern may suggest some evolutionary reason for this economically irrational flaw.
At work, the consequences of desperately hanging on to irrecoverable costs can be catastrophic. For smaller firms, this could mean, for instance, putting off firing a worker you have spent months training, even though it was clear from the outset they were never going to cut it.
But this same spirit pushes people towards totally illogical huge investments. Thinking only in terms of future possible gains means they fail to factor in unrecoverable funds already spent. It’s easy to see why.
After you’ve invested £10 million ($13m) in a project, which hasn’t delivered, the case for throwing in a further £5 million is far easier to justify if you only consider returns on £5 million – rather than £15 million. But in reality, of course, you also don’t want to look stupid by abandoning it.
In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman hypothesizes that ‘sunk cost’ thinking often explains why firms turn to new management, or hire consultants, at this stage of a project’s decline. Not, he believes, because they are necessarily more competent than the original managers – but because the new arrivals carry none of the political baggage (and the associated reluctance to cut losses and move on).
Like a gambler ‘chasing losses’ at a poker table, people stuck in the sunk cost trap will pretend that they have a winning hand. Nick Leeson, the infamous ‘Rogue Trader’ who caused the collapse of Barings Bank in 1995, followed similar reasoning in trying to recover his position from a series of disastrous early trades.
Political overspend
Making continuous foolish decisions driven by sunk-cost analyses will eventually lead firms to hemorrhage money or market share and consequently grind to a halt.
By contrast, there are fewer checks and balances around political decision-making. It certainly doesn’t help that around the world, political U-turns are viewed as inherently weak – further incentivizing politicians to persist with costly decisions.
Many examples bear out this trend on a global level. Public infrastructure projects are notorious for running over budget – Britain’s proposed ‘High Speed Rail 2’ project – on course to overspend by £50 billion ($65bn) and counting, for instance.
Japan, too, has a costly addiction to infrastructure spending. This is part of the reason the country has been saddled with the highest level of national debt in the world. Many of these projects have offered very little fiscal stimulus, and there are numerous ‘bridges to nowhere’, both literal and metaphorical.
In the US, the “war on drugs” policy increased the number of people behind bars, creating the most extensive prison infrastructure in the world. Yet despite the wealth of evidence that focusing on supply has done little to curtail drug abuse (and caused a host of terrible side effects) lawmakers would now struggle to dismantle this pervasive system.
The sunk cost trap drives bad decisions in the billions and trillions, but it also impacts personal finances – individuals waste money needlessly pouring their savings, for instance, into repairing a property that gains no value.
The sunk cost fallacy, then, has huge significance on a micro and macroeconomic level – for personal and political decision-making around the world.
“We are all susceptible to these biases”, says Dr Jim Everett, a social psychologist and researcher at Leiden University. “But often, we can partially offset them by taking a step back and thinking through the alternatives.”
When weighing up whether to persist with a course of action, he says, always ask yourself: ‘What would I gain or lose if I stuck with this option, and what would I gain or lose if I switched?’
If in doubt, Everett recommends reflecting on the entire chain of decisions that has led to where you are now, and considering the counterfactuals – in other words, what’s true and not true, a reality check.
“If presented with the same choice again, would I make the same decision? If not – why not?”
So, it’s a simple idea, with global ramifications. And ultimately, it all goes back to the first lesson of gambling. Any good poker player knows when to fold.
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180914-the-trick-to-learning-when-to-cut-your-losses
from another source: THE CONCORDE FALLACY
~ “The sunk cost fallacy is sometimes called the Concorde fallacy when describing it as an escalation of commitment. It is a reference to the construction of the first commercial supersonic airliner. The project was predicted to be a failure early on; but everyone involved kept going. Their shared investment built a hefty psychological burden which outweighed their better judgments. After losing an incredible amount of money, effort and time, they didn’t want to just give up.
It is a noble and exclusively human proclivity, the desire to persevere, the will to stay the course – studies show lower animals and small children do not commit this fallacy. Wasps and worms, rats and raccoons, toddlers and tikes, they do not care how much they’ve invested or how much goes to waste. They can only see immediate losses and gains. As an adult human being, you have the gift of reflection and regret. You can predict a future place where you must admit your efforts were in vain, your losses permanent, and when you accept the truth it is going to hurt.” ~
https://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/03/25/the-sunk-cost-fallacy/
And here is it, perhaps the most beautiful aviation failure, explained on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_wuykzfFzE
Oriana:
The French and British government official fully knew that Concorde would be a commercial disaster. The project should have never been started; if started, it should have been canceled as soon as possible. But that would have been rationality and not ego.
The American equivalent of Concorde is the F-35 stealth plane. The consensus is that the cost of building and maintaining a fleet of F-35 is unaffordable. And yet this behemoth of waste continues to be funded. The more money you have already wasted, the harder it is to stop wasting it.
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Almost everywhere you look, the sunk cost fallacy turns up like a drunken uncle at Thanksgiving . . . once you start repairing that old car . . . or an old computer that is bound to crash again within a month or two . . . a “bargain” fixer-upper that turns out to be a super-expensive nightmare to restore and maintain . . . chemotherapy that keeps failing and ruining a patient’s quality of life, but more continues to be given because so much has already been given . . . Or if you yield to pressure (often from adult children) to try to patch up an old marriage that only keeps you miserable and hampers you from meeting potential compatible new partners . . .
THE MAN WHO LOST EVERYTHING
I knew a man who lost all his retirement savings, which it took him decades to accumulate, on one bad investment. When he approached me to borrow money to put into the same losing project (at this point he was living in his van), I said no. He threw a verbal temper tantrum. “I'm not just someone who just keeps throwing money away like a drunken Indian!” he shouted. “The project isn’t dead,” he said, his voice trembling with desperation. “It’s just in intensive care.”
I'm sure he tried that line on practically everyone he knew. But others understood that if they lent him any money to put into the dying investment, they might as well flush it down the toilet. If someone happened to be foolish enough to lend this man money, they would certainly be approached again and again. Only one person here was blind to the tragic truth. And if not completely blind, then close to a mental and physical breakdown. Abandoned by his long-term partner, losing friends, living in squalor, he seems to have fallen for the old scam of “We need only 5K more from you to keep the project alive. Otherwise all is lost.”
This is an odd cognitive glitch: digging yourself deeper into a hole because you've already done so much digging; staying in a bad relationship because you're already “invested” in it so much miserable time together; in science, defending a bad theory because you’ve already spent so much time defending it. It hurts to admit you’ve made a bad mistake, so you keep perpetuating it, using ego-defense justifications, heroically announcing "I'm not a quitter!" We don't want to look foolish, while in fact, the longer we persist, the more foolish we look (and ARE). What a paradox: by trying to avoid looking foolish, we end up looking more and more foolish and absurd.
The secret: our investment isn’t just financial. Nor can it be counted solely in terms of time, energy, and effort. Our investment is emotional. We start behaving like addicts.
To break the addiction, we need to stop and think. Specifically, it helps to think back to the start of the narrative. Would you make the same decision again?
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SOMETIMES IT TAKES AN OUTSIDER TO SEE THE OBVIOUS
Here the Buddhist saying “No self, no problem” seems especially apt. If you don’t try pretending that you never make mistakes, especially foolish and expensive ones, you can just shrug and say, “So I’ve made a mistake. No point throwing good money after bad” — and you move on. Now and then it really takes an outsider to restore sanity — someone who didn’t participate in the beginning of the losses and so hasn’t fallen into the sunk-cost trap.
Another fascinating example here is the oppressive churches that require a lot of sacrifices (“investment”) from their members. Paradoxically, these are the churches least likely to lose members. Why? The sunk cost. If you’ve already tithed and spent the time going to church not just on Sunday, but twice a week; if you’ve invested in bible classes, special clothes, stopped drinking alcohol and coffee, going to the movies, and so forth — all these sacrifices add up to a considerable investment. The higher the investment, the less you are willing to simply quit and enjoy what life still remains. No, now you need to stick with it, claiming this is the one true religion, or your investment will look foolish.
The same goes for bad marriages — the more sacrifices, the greater the “investment.” True, it’s painful to realize that if you’d gotten a divorce years ago, back when you were younger and more physically attractive to potential new partners, you’d have been ahead — but no, you go to “couples therapy” and invest thousands of dollars trying to make things work with a spouse you should have never married to start with — or else divorced quickly. But few of us show such wisdom, even if we have the example of the same mistake made by our parents — or maybe particularly when we have this example. The same goes for miserable jobs.
And for unwinnable wars. Seventeen years in Afghanistan, at a horrible cost (not just in money — think of all the mutilated, suicidal veterans), with nothing to show for it. Tough, sometimes you have to say that a war was a catastrophically expensive mistake, and yes, the soldiers died and got mutilated for nothing, and it's a national tragedy — so let's not perpetuate it and get out. But the longer you keep fighting and the more expensive it is, the more flagrantly irrational, the harder it is to let go. The national ego is more monstrous by far than an individual ego.
It's interesting that up to a certain age children are not liable to fall into the trap of sunken cost because they live in the now: they consider only the rewards and/or punishments of the present and the immediate future, not the "investment" they already made (which is irrelevant, being a psychological factor, narcissism — not wanting to look like a fool). What is relevant is the present (not the past) loss of “blood and treasure,” which shouts GET OUT, GET OUT! — and the chance of winning, which is zero, now or ever. The course of action should be obvious. But no administration wants to be the one to “lose” a war.
Even poems aren't exempt from a sunken-cost fallacy. You'd think it would be easy to quit working on a poem that obviously isn't working. If you do it early on, you simply call it a "fragment," stick it into the "fragments" folder, and are free. But if for some reason (maybe a friend criticized it) you keep fiddling with the poem, rewriting it (or a portion of it that should just be tossed), it becomes harder and harder to quit wasting your time.
It helps to have an "absolutism detector." When you hear noble-sounding slogans such as "Never give up," you can be sure that there ARE exceptions, and ignoring those exceptions can prove downright tragic. Persistence is a virtue up to a point -- but only up to a point. When the return isn't in sight, we need to start asking questions: am I persisting only to prove that I'm "not a quitter"? Am I defending a bad investment? Am I trying not to look foolish — not only to others, but first of all to myself? What seemed like the virtue of persistence may just be ego, becoming more and more entrenched.
People losing all their money or wasting their lives being miserable because they don’t know when to quit — let’s not despise them, but be grateful to them. They teach us to recognize the universal bias at work here, and allow us to learn our lessons vicariously rather than the hard way. How easy it is to be an “impartial outsider” versus someone who has made a heavy investment — which is never “only money” — it is ego.
THE WISE MOTHER AND THE FOOLISH VIRGIN DAUGHTER
My mother was a strange mix of the “never give up” heroic ideology and “quit quickly if it doesn’t work” pragmatism — which in her case was a kind of mysticism. She says she learned the latter from her schoolfriend. “Sabina always said, If you don’t get the job right away, that job is not for you,” my mother would say. “If a man shows no interest in you no matter how hard you try, he’s not the right man for you. If the dress doesn’t look right on you the first time you try it, it’s not the right dress for you. If anything starts giving you trouble, if all you experience is difficulties, that thing is not for you. Keep repeating to yourself, THAT’S NOT FOR ME, THAT’S NOT FOR ME.”
Because I’ve inherited her persistence — apparently mostly a genetic trait — my mother often repeated Sabina’s wisdom to me — wisely presenting it as something she learned from a schoolfriend, rather than as having figured it out herself — again avoiding establishing the gulf between herself, the Wise One, and her daughter, a Foolish Virgin. And for all I know, there may have indeed been a real Sabina — just the name sounded wise, sybil-like — who lived by the smart precept of repeating “That’s not for me, that’s not for me,” whenever she encountered difficulties.
This could be understood to imply that certain things (jobs, partners, houses, etc) were somehow meant for us, destined for us — and if they were not destined for us, persistent pursuit would bring only misfortune, and delay our getting the good things that were destined for us. But I’ve discovered that that it’s not necessary to believe the mystical angle. What works is the clarity of seeing that something — or someone — is indeed not working out, and moving on before sinking more resources into it. And yes, it does help to rehearse the sacred chant, “That’s not for me, that’s not for me.”
Hieronymus Francken II (1578-1623): The Parable of Wise and Foolish VirginsBut being a bundle of contradictions as we all tend to be, my mother could also be a fanatic of persistence, with the “Never give up” motto passed on to her by others. But while I remember plenty of times when I heard “Never give up” from her, I think “That’s not for me” pretty much balanced this — and it was different, since it celebrated the freedom to quit and developed the ability to let go. And indeed I never got to see her go ridiculously too far in pursuit of a goal. Thus, I saw that sometimes persistence was appropriate, and sometimes quitting. Deciding which occasion called for which behavior is not always easy. The appearance of difficulty helps, but also it can also goad me into foolish, extreme persistence. This is where Taoism can become an ally: Don’t struggle. Go with what comes easily to you. Cultivate the mind of letting go.
Above all: no rule is absolute. You need to take it case by case, and use your intelligence.
So far, my accumulated experience has favored Sabina’s wisdom: it’s better to quit early than risk digging yourself into a deeper and deeper hole. Soon enough there’ll be another opportunity, while digging your way all the way to China is simply not going to succeed.
Mary:
The sunk cost fallacy has some fascinating implications. We can all think of many instances we have encountered, among gamblers, speculators, investors, victims of disease or abuse. It seems puzzling to watch people refuse to abandon situations dangerous and damaging, when there is no evidence to indicate these situations will improve. For instance, the wife who has suffered years of physical abuse, yet continues to remain in the relationship, and while she may temporarily move against her abuser, winning a temporary separation, taking out a PFA, still “takes him back” again and again. Why? I don’t think it is all a matter of “ego” — of her own lack of self esteem or desire not to appear as a failure, though those issues are certainly present. I don’t think it is either entirely a matter of refusing to abandon something you have heavily invested in. I think there is a large component here of something usually thought of as positive—hope. But here hope is unsupported by any indications there is a real and possible positive outcome/reward for dogged persistence or continued sacrifice.
The lottery is a good example. People, sometimes, even often, those who can least afford it, buying tickets again and again, and somehow believing they will win against astronomical odds. Even thinking they came “close” when a number they chose is “almost” the winning number, assuming a logic that doesn’t exist in numbers without sequence. Or the battered wife, who clings to her belief in the possibility her abuser will “change” and a beautiful dream of the future will then replace the misery of the past and present. All this despite there being not one shred of evidence that this is even a remote possibility — or even a desirable possibility in the mind of the abuser. Yes, we don’t want to look foolish, and we don’t want to lose all the time and emotional investment we’ve made, but we don’t want to give up the dream either, or even admit it’s an impossible dream.
I think that is part of the sunk cost equation, not so much that people are too stupid or too foolish about their situations, but that they are too stubborn to relinquish their dreams. We are storytellers and dreamers, which is both the best and the worst of us — we can use these skills to explore and discover the truth of things, or to obfuscate and distort them, to win the future, or lose it.
Oriana:
There has been quite a bit of theorizing about the sunk cost fallacy. The cognitive dissonance theory goes a long way: if I put in so much money, time, and effort into X, then X must be of tremendous value. Obviously the person has it backwards: logically speaking, FIRST you’d see that X is wonderful and beneficial, and THEN you go ahead and invest in it.
Benjamin Franklin didn’t have a name for it, but he touched on the phenomenon when he said that you like your your neighbor because you’ve helped him once, rather than help him because you like him. The sunk cost fallacy predicts this: once you’ve “invested” in someone or something, you’ll feel a loyalty to that person or thing. In fact, who hasn’t heard that disastrous phrase — “But I’ve invested so much in that relationship!”
THE JUST UNIVERSE FALLACY AND CONTRACTUAL NATURE OF RELIGIONS
Some people appear to have a contract with god (as an old joke says, it’s not legally binding since it’s unsigned) or the “just universe” — they “invest” in charity and church activities, they refrain from major sins — and yes, they expect a return on their investment!
I’ve learned about a woman who discovered that her husband was a womanizer. She rushed to her rabbi: “How could this happen to me? I donate so much to charity!”
It seems that all religions are to some extent contractual: they may not have a myth about the actual “covenant,” but the contract is implicit: I’ll fast and pray and offer sacrifices, and in exchange here is what I expect. Now, a person might deny such “crass,” downright commercial reasoning. And we may never state this in words: I do X for god, and he’s supposed to provide a “handsome return on my investment.” But that really is the at the heart of all religions, for all the mystical obfuscations: humans wants an INTERVENTIONIST DEITY, one able and willing to violate the laws of nature for the benefit of a particular individual.
But the belief in a just universe is enough. There is a sinister tale about the Black Forest. A man is returning home when dusk falls, and then a moonless night. He says to himself, “I am a good person, so I need fear no evil. I am a good man, so if there is justice, no harm will come to me.” A sinister laughter is heard and an unearthly voice announces, “THERE IS NO JUSTICE.”
*
How come people become irrational once they invest? The answer is probably multifactorial: no single reason, but an interaction of various reasons. I see with special acuteness not wanting to look like a fool — to myself more so than to others — but that’s no doubt no more important to some people and in some cases than in others. I also see the desire for consistency posited by cognitive dissonance theorists. I see wanting to avoid the pain of admitting to having made an expensive mistake. I see the desire to uphold the belief in the just universe: investment and/or effort should not go unrewarded.
But I especially like Mary’s explanation: we are dreamers and story tellers too stubborn to relinquish our dreams. Sometimes this stubbornness leads to a happy ending — that’s when we are more likely to learn about the venture to begin with. At other times it may lead to tragedy, as when the pursuit of wealth leads to financial ruin. And it is very telling that it’s mainly the poor who play the lottery — in saddest cases, putting way too much money into the lottery tickets.
Hannah Arendt might say: it’s the refusal to think. We cling to the bad, to something that leads to continuous losses, rather than stop and think. We become irrational like addicts. That’s why an outside consultant is sometimes the only solution.
river otter; these beautiful animals are not susceptible to sunk-cost fallacyWHY PEOPLE CLING TO FALSE BELIEFS (hint: recent social feedback)
~ “Getting positive or negative reactions to something you do or say is a greater influence on your thinking than logic and reasoning, the new research suggests – so if you're in a group of like-minded people, that's going to reinforce your thinking.
Receiving good feedback also encourages us to think we know more than we actually do.
In other words, the more sure we become that our current position is right, the less likely we are to take into account other opinions or even cold, hard scientific data.
"If you think you know a lot about something, even though you don't, you're less likely to be curious enough to explore the topic further, and will fail to learn how little you know," says one of the team members behind the new study, Louis Marti from the University of California, Berkeley.
For the research, more than 500 participants were recruited and shown a series of colored shapes. As each shape appeared, the participants got asked if it was a "Daxxy" – a word made up for these experiments.
The test takers had no clues as to what a Daxxy was or wasn't, but they did get feedback after guessing one way or the other – the system would tell them if the shape they were looking at qualified as a Daxxy or not. At the same time they were also asked how sure they were about what a Daxxy actually was.
In this way the researchers were able to measure certainty in relation to feedback. Results showed the confidence of the participants was largely based on the results of their last four or five guesses, not their performance overall.
The team behind the tests says this plays into something we already know about learning – that for it to happen, learners need to recognize that there is a gap between what they currently know and what they could know. If they don't think that gap is there, they won't take on board new information.
"What we found interesting is that they could get the first 19 guesses in a row wrong, but if they got the last five right, they felt very confident," says Marti. "It's not that they weren't paying attention, they were learning what a Daxxy was, but they weren't using most of what they learned to inform their certainty.”
The same cognitive processes could be at work when it comes to echo chambers on social media or on news channels – where views are constantly reinforced.
This recent feedback is having more of an effect than hard evidence, the experiments showed, and that might apply in a broader sense too. It could apply to learning something new or trying to differentiate between right and wrong.
"If you use a crazy theory to make a correct prediction a couple of times, you can get stuck in that belief and may not be as interested in gathering more information," says one of the team, psychologist Celeste Kidd from UC Berkeley.
So if you think vaccinations are harmful, for example, the new study suggests you might be basing that on the most recent feedback you've had on your views, rather than the overall evidence one way or the other.” ~
https://www.sciencealert.com/feedback-study-explains-why-false-beliefs-stick
“People who feel marginalized by life have need to feel special. One way to feel special is to have access to privileged information. Becoming committed to "alternative" facts and theories is a way for some people achieve a sense of validation and belonging to a community of fellow believers.” ~ Andrew Edris
~ “We're freaks of nature. We can misinterpret the shit out of experience because we live in two worlds, the real one and our language-driven imaginations. We can close our eyes and be legends in our own mind. We can imagine that we can do no wrong and then do lots of it.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
Oriana:
No, it's not the lack of intelligence — it's a glitch in how the human brain *typically* operates: by the most recent feedback. Sure, a scientist would look over ALL the accumulated data. But the average person considers just the most recent events (there is some confirmation of this from other studies, e.g. a treatment is remembered as painful if the last minutes of it were painful).
In real life, an additional factor is the sense of threat and emotional pain if someone contradicts our existing beliefs — the physiological stress symptoms are the same as if we were physically threatened. So we tend to stick to “our tribe,” likely to confirm what we already believe. And there is “confirmation bias”: we “cherry-pick,” seeking out statements that confirm our beliefs. It’s critical to realize that the average person does not evaluate information like a scientist; in fact I am surprised that humanity ever developed science (much hated in some circles, seen as the “enemy”).
There is, of course, a non-threatening way to present new information, but it’s a difficult art. We could all use some training about the cognitive biases we are wired for, and how to get around them.
It would help if already primary schools taught basic science in some coherent, accessible manner: this is how hurricanes form, this is what causes earthquakes, this is how vaccines work; the age of the earth, the age and size of the universe and how we know it, earth’s rotation and night and day, axial tilt and the seasons — it could go a long way against the crazy talk that hurricanes are caused by gay marriage.
Complicated models of eclipses and intimidating equations aren’t necessary. We need to start with the simplest, most basic science. I worry about those who don’t know that ice and steam are both forms of water (I wouldn’t believe that anyone didn’t know that until, of course, I met someone, a college graduate, by the way).
Ideally, people would see new information as interesting and even exciting rather than as threatening and possibly traumatizing. Again, it would take early exposure to well-presented basic science. I never had trouble with the scientific worldview, but some of my peers (I mean people who read books), lacking such exposure, would rather read tales of the “spirit world.” To them, “facts are not important” — again, an attitude picked up in environments where there is no clear idea of even the most basic and established facts. And these are often the same people who are appalled that to Trump supporters, “facts don’t matter.” That’s why Russian disinformation warfare finds it so easy to spread conspiracy theories — children and young people are simply not provided with enough basic facts to inoculate them against crackpot fantasies.
*
“Freedom consists first of all in not lying. Where lies proliferate, tyranny appears or is perpetuated.” ~ Albert Camus
Oriana:
Alas, once made-up stuff is preserved in “holy scriptures,” it can last for centuries and even millennia. Fortunately, there is now so much diversity of opinion that another “holy” book is highly unlikely. It would be recognized as fiction — and if the stories happened to be good enough, it would be turned into a movie. Here and there a cult might still crop up, e.g. Scientology, whose very name is an attempt to co-opt science.
**
FREUD’S IDOLS
~ “Anyone who goes to the Freud Museum in North London is immediately struck by Freud’s collection of antiquities, and, especially, by the forest of figurines from various cultures on Freud’s desk. Freud, as the analyst, would sit overseeing them as he listened to the patient from behind the couch; and the patient lying on the couch could see them by turning to the right, but could not, as we all know, see Freud. In the first psychoanalytic setting – the paradigm of every psychoanalytical consulting-room – the patient could not see the analyst but could see his idols.
Clearly, for many reasons, entering Freud’s consulting-room would have been an unusual experience; the Wolf-man was reminded, he wrote, ‘not of a doctor’s office but rather of an archaeological study. Here were all kinds of statuettes and other unusual objects which even the layman recognized as archaeological finds from ancient Egypt.’ Psychoanalysis, of course, always takes place in a museum – and for the more idolatrous, usually in the Freud museum – but the museum, the stored past, comes to life in language.
Hans Sachs, one of the early members of Freud’s Wednesday Psychological Society in Vienna, recalls in his memoir, Freud: Master and Friend, how ‘under the silent stare of idols and animal-shaped gods we listened to some new article by Freud, or read and discussed our own products, or just talked about things that interested us.’ Presumably, the irony of the situation was not lost on them. And since Jewish thought, by definition, sets itself against idolatry, we should take this as one of the important scenes in the history of psychoanalysis: a group of Jewish men, in a room full of idols, having a new kind of conversation about sexuality. Even though they thought of themselves as secular Jews, this was the equivalent of putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa. It was a critique of traditional forms of reverence, because to talk about sexuality, from a psychoanalytic point of view, was to talk about the nature of belief. As the conventions of love poetry have always insisted, it is in our erotic life that we return, so to speak, to idolatry. And our erotic life – as psychoanalysis would reveal – is intimately connected to our acquisitive, materialistic life.
One of Freud's favorites: the bronze statuette of Athena: "except that she has lost her spear."Towards the end of the 19th century, in the major European capitals, it was possible to purchase gods. ‘The ancients gods still exist,’ Freud wrote to his friend Fliess in 1899, ‘for I have bought one or two lately, among them a stone Janus, who looks down on me with his two faces in a very superior fashion.’ You know the gods still exist, Freud jokes, because you can buy them. They had become a new kind of commodity, just as the personal past was becoming something you could buy in the form of psychoanalysis. Recent archaeological discoveries had given vivid form to the idea that the dead do not disappear. And Janus, we may remember, the Roman god of gods, was the opener and closer of all things, who looked inward and outward, before and after, a pertinent god to have acquired, given Freud’s new-found preoccupations at the turn of the century.
It is, of course, tendentious, to refer to what Freud called his ‘grubby old gods’ as idols. In his collection of over two thousand pieces there were many representations of deities, but Freud did not worship them. He simply collected them with some relish and obviously prized them very highly. On the other hand, it would not be wildly speculative from a psychoanalytic point of view to infer that there were powerful unconscious identifications at work with both the people who had worshiped them and the people who had found them.
If, as has been suggested, they also represented his family romance – his wishful allegiance to alternative cultures – then they were also a rather grandiose parody of that idea. It would not be a family romance that could contain Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Near-Eastern and Asian members, so much as a world-historical romance. ‘I have made many sacrifices,’ he wrote to Stefan Zweig, and it is a telling phrase, ‘for my collection of Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities, and actually have read more archaeology than psychology.’ He couldn’t, we know, have had comparable Jewish antiquities because there could be no such thing.
It is an interesting irony that psychoanalysis – in which only words and money are exchanged, in which no graven images are used, and which is carried out in an atmosphere of relative abstinence – had its beginnings in a setting populated by old gods. Freud’s consulting-room, in other words, was a rather vivid representation of an old dilemma: how many gods, if any, and what are they for? None of Freud’s antiquities was kept in his living quarters. So what was Freud telling his patients and himself by displaying his collection in the rooms where he practiced psychoanalysis, a theory and a therapy that was a consistent and impassioned critique of religious belief?
These antiquities in a Jewish doctor’s consulting-room articulated two things about culture, which had interesting implications for the new science of psychoanalysis. First, that culture was history, and that this history, which was of extraordinary duration, could be preserved and thought about. The present could be a cover-story for the past. And secondly – and more threatening to the monotheism of a putatively chosen people – that culture was plural. These figurines from such diverse cultures, representing what Freud called ‘the splendid diversity of human life’, ‘the varied types of perfection’, might suggest that the only viable notion of True Belief was as something local, provisional and various. The figurines underlined the fact that there were all sorts of cultural conventions and worlds elsewhere, as many as could be found.” ~
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v12/n18/adam-phillips/freuds-idols
Oriana:
Some interesting points here, including the irresistible one: that for a group of Jewish men to gather in a room full of "idols" and discuss sexuality was the equivalent of drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa. And that psychoanalysis was a critique of the religious worldview.
**
I always felt it was hate speech. I live in a Navy town, so there are plenty of believers. For decades I've had to follow cars whose bumper sticker said "Accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior or you'll burn in hell forever." Sad that it was the sole reason given. Once I read a discussion on rejecting the idea of hell. One commenter (a Catholic) said, “But then no one would have any reason to follow Jesus.” So much for the alleged power of the teachings!
LUDWIG FEUERBACH: ~ “I would rather be a devil in alliance with truth, than an angel in alliance with falsehood.”
Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God’s help it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and his striving to attain such a life. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason failed to give him what he really and truly desires.
Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity.”~
The Angel of Death is always with me —
the hard wild flowers of his teeth,
his body like cigar smoke
swaying through a small town jail.
~ Morton Marcus
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