For background, Peter, now in his mid-30s, is autistic, but formally
diagnosed only a year or so ago. And his spouse Jesse Hajicek has
published (with a print-on-demand house called Lulu) a novel titled The
God Eaters, which has sold passably well on Amazon.

Linda:
So I’m reading an article about Kindle and bookstores, and it occurs to
me to wonder, is God Eaters available on Kindle? Can Jesse organize
that, or does it have to be the publisher?

Peter:
I don’t know.
-s

Linda:
Erm, that was a speech act. It doesn’t mean “Do you know?”; it means
“You ought to check this out.”

Peter:
Oh.

… Yeah, that makes sense.

So, here’s a puzzle:

Why do languages form these patterns?  What’s the *benefit* of having
structures which have meaning other than their face-value meaning?

Linda:
I think the generally accepted answer is that primates (not only us, and
actually not only primates among mammals) are intensely status-conscious for reasons that are clearly connected to reproductive success, and the ability to signal and discern status is valuable. Being able to do both indirectly is an additional asset, because it allows everybody involved to save face, and thus avoid open conflict, which can lead to becoming dead.

Since you have some intuitive limitations in the indirectness dimension, you might find some of the work on speech acts, and on pragmatics more generally, of considerable practical use. For a start,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle

I can’t remember what text we used in Pragmatics, but that’s the general
subject heading under linguistics. I do remember writing my final exam
in the middle of the night from a hotel in New York, though not what I
said.

Peter:
Hmm.

I’m innately disposed to dislike [Searle], because the Chinese Box
is so stupid, but I’m fascinated by the topic anyway.

I don’t see how they save face, though.

Linda:
It’s like a vote of confidence in a parliamentary government. If a
high-status individual gives an explicit order, and it is openly
disobeyed, that precipitates a leadership challenge. But non-explicit
“orders” allow everyone concerned to pretend that there was no
disobedience, of course not, oh, no, just some plausible
misunderstanding, and we don’t need to fight/vote about that right now,
do we?

Peter:
Ohhhhh.
Man, you people are complicated.

Linda:
That was sort of my point.

Peter:
The more I study human communication, the more I conclude that most
people are MUCH more complicated internally than I am.

Linda:
I rather think we’re complicated in different ways. If humans had been
subjected to selection pressure in your ways, for say six million years,
and primates whose internal states resemble those of neurotypicals had
been existing on the fringes for all that time, and suddenly there were
environments where they could flourish differentially, what do you think
a) human society would be like now? and b) where would it be heading?

Peter:
No clue.  I suspect we’d have a lot less art, though.

So much art is rooted in internal conflict, and my internal conflicts are
pretty much consistently trivial.  Similarly, so much of it relies on
people being ashamed of their state, or afraid of it, or something, and…
I just don’t get it.

Linda:
By the way, Jane [Gmur] tells me there is Carnelli
[http://mpedia.dan.info/index.php?title=Carnelli] on the program for the
RG [Minnesota Mensa Regional Gathering in April]. Goody. I love
Carnelli. I beat Jon Evans once. He was usually the Carnelli master, but
for some reason he was playing, we were the last two in the circle and
the timer was down to five seconds. The key title word was “up” as in
“Up the Down Staircase,” or “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me,”
and I said, “Up Yours.”

Which is not, so far as I know, the title of anything, but it was so
unlike me, as Jon knew, that he exploded in guffaws and the
(five-second) clock ran out.

Peter:
Brilliant.

Linda:
Brilliant? Maybe, if I’d had time to think about it, but I didn’t. It
was just the first thing that came into my head.

Peter:
That’s the brilliant part. 

Linda:
Also, I bluff a lot in Carnelli. That is, I lie; I make up stuff. You
have to do it fast, or be prepared to do it as if you were saying
something true spontaneously, because people who challenge you
incorrectly lose their place in the circle. (If challenged, you are not
allowed to lie.) People who’d played with me before knew I might be
bluffing, but they also knew it was risky to challenge, because I will
choose to say something true but improbable whenever I can.  At five
seconds, these things don’t matter, because there isn’t time to think
them through.

Puns are also highly valued. “Guns of Navarone” followed by “Never on
Sunday,” is canonical, and one I had never heard but found on MPedia is
“Tequila Sunrise” followed by “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Or maybe the
other way around.

I was in a game once where the prevailing key word was “thing” and I was
beside myself with anticipation hoping it would still be apposite when
my turn came, and it was, and I got to say, “Of Thee I Thing.” Jon was
the Carnelli Master in that game, I think.

Peter:
… And there’s where I get my mileage back off being so much simpler
than normal humans.  Five seconds is a LONG time to me.  In games timed at a few seconds, I have time to consider game theory.

My models are simplistic, but VERY fast.

[All this happened incidentally to whatever else we were doing, over five hours or so, but at this point, we switched to the telephone. Peter also lives in Northfield, about three miles from me, not that it matters. One more bit, later:]

Peter (after rereading the exchanges above):

This is the part that fascinates me still.  I can’t imagine how people can get anything done, given how long it apparently takes them.  And yet…

I think that’s the other reason ADHD wasn’t easy to spot when I was a kid. You check for it by seeing whether the kid can solve problems that take more than five seconds to solve, right?  If he can, that means he’s paying attention for more than five seconds… Right?

Oops.

Linda:
Oh, I’ve gotta put that bit in too.

D’you suppose that’s like J. P. Morgan’s yacht — if you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it?

Sunday cat blogging

Tyler Cowen

Where do most tigers live?

In the United States it turns out. There are 4,000 tigers residing in captivity in Texas alone, where private ownership of tigers is legal. The number of tigers left in the wild is perhaps no more than 5,100-7,500.

A tiger cub costs about $1,000 while the more exotic blue-eyed white tiger costs $15,000.

Ooh, tigers. Lions, too. Cats, all of them, who are just as fierce but they’re littler so we can risk keeping them.

I went to an antique-car show in Texas years ago, and a PR person showed up with a lion cub on a leash, promoting a local safari park. A friend of mine sidled over, and petted the cub.

It bit him.

Not seriously, and I’m in no doubt that he thinks a loss of blood from a lion bite was a price worth paying for the story value.

So he went into the hotel’s restroom to wash off the blood and the guy at the next sink over asked, “Hey, what happened to you?”

Truthful response: “I was just bitten by a lion.”

Rapid evasive behavior ensued.

I wasn’t sure what fruitcake tin this bunch had emerged from, but in my experience people who go on about spiritual they are flatter themselves, and “progressive” is a political code word they use so they can easily locate others of like mind without taking the slightest risk they’d ever run into anyone with different ideas.

The message continues:

“For that reason, we’ve decided to send you periodic snapshots of the discussions we’re having in our office. These will be drawn from the daily-ish updates that our staff send each other. We understand that many of you will not have time to read these, in which case, please feel free to use that delete key.”

Oh, they’ve decided, have they? By what right? And I’m to feel free to use the delete key, that’s decent of them.

Look, if I wanted to be on their daily mailing list of endless pretentious claptrap, I am quite capable of going to their website and signing up. That’s called “opt-in,” and it is the only polite way to add people to an e-mail list. Since I haven’t done so, this is nothing but spam — unsolicited bulk e-mail. And there is nothing either spiritual or progressive about spam. Tikkun — I bet you guessed — ought to know better.

“Caste.” That’s an odd word in the American context, since it refers to inherited social status, as in India, where it is established, and often brutally enforced, as a matter of fact and sometimes of law. Americans loftily assume we don’t have anything like that here.

Hymowitz makes a persuasive case that America does have a caste system, in fact though not in law, and it centers on education.

Well-educated women, for the most part, follow the traditional life script; they grow up, finish school, get married and have children. In that order. Less educated women are more likely to have children before they marry, if they ever marry, and more likely to be divorced if they do. The result, in both cases, is that their children grow up and do likewise.

This is not biological determinism – people are free to make choices, and some of them are good and some of them are bad, or anyway worse, given that the children of married parents are better off statistically than children raised in just about any other circumstances you can think of. And it is not about race – I know what you’re thinking – although there certainly are some statistical correlations with race, and very troubling they are.

Her point is that people who follow the traditional life script, whatever race they are, can reasonably expect a smoother path through life than those who don’t, and so can their children. Anecdotes to the contrary prove nothing; if you care about your kids, present or future, that’s the way you should place your bets.

In an interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez at nationalreviewonline, Hymowitz wrote, “What ails marriage is not that it don’t get no respect; it’s that Americans no longer understand its meaning. For most people it appears to be a love relationship between two adults having little to do with childbearing or childrearing.” (Links here.)

That would seem to be borne out by a recent survey done by the Pew Research center, in which only 41 percent of respondents said having children was important to a successful marriage. Having children ranked eighth out of nine factors, well below “sharing household chores” and ahead only of “political compatibility.”

Look, when you read obituaries, they are about children and grandchildren, not about how often someone remembered to take out the garbage. When people look back over their lives, they rarely say, “I wish I’d spent more time at the office.”

There are many things about ourselves that we cannot change. But we can choose which life script to follow.