malaikhanh

Here is an excerpt from a lecture by Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt:



Broadly speaking, the subject of this excerpt is what psychologists call "implicit bias." (Think of the difference between someone who unabashedly claims that blacks are dangerous, and one who insists that this is untrue but crosses the street whenever a black man approaches.) In Eberhardt's study, subjects who claimed ignorance of stereotypical, racist comparisons of blacks to apes seemed nonetheless to respond to such comparisons, as seen in the degraded objects test. So, the idea is that these individuals have some subconscious appreciation of racist attitudes, even as they explicitly disavow them.

Isn't there an obvious alternative hypothesis here? That is, mightn't the reaction of the study participants be explained by the fact that blacks really do, quite simply, look more like apes than do whites?

I like off-color jokes. I think they're funny, but I also think they're healthy, even important, and I'm impatient with people who insist on constant political correctness. At the same time, I've found that most of the people whom I admire are not at all the sort to enjoy (or to tell) off-color jokes. There are times when I'll crack up at a particularly crude joke and then think, "Geez, would I want to be around someone who thinks this is funny?" It's a strange position to be in. On the one hand, I absolutely do not think that there's anything shameful about an off-color sense of humor, or even that more wholesome sensibilities are somehow preferable; and yet when I consider those who have my fondest affection, or whom I find really charismatic, they always seem to fall on the other side of the spectrum.

This happens to me fairly often. For a more significant example (it seems more significant to me, anyway), I've noticed that the people whose passions and intelligence I most respect are students of poetry and literature. This despite the fact that I'm a philosophy student without a literary bone in my body. I read a student essay this past week which I thought was incredible, and I was a little unsettled by the difficulty I had in imagining a philosophy paper which might have the same effect. This case is analogous to that of humor. That is, I don't think any of this means that I should actually be studying English and not philosophy--and I definitely don't take this as evidence that literature is somehow superior to philosophy. But what I find compelling in other people often seems to be totally different from the things which (1) I rationally think are valuable, and which (2) apply to me personally.

I always thought it was kind of funny that the word "highfalutin" is itself highfalutin, with the result that you can never criticize any speech or writing as such without falling into self-parody.

I thought that the love scenes in Wall-E were really affecting. The green angle--it wasn't entirely too heavy, but it came close, and when the film snuck in a  George Bush reference ("Stay the course"), I had flashbacks of George Lucas' ham-fisted attempt to inject political overtones into Star Wars ("Only a Sith deals in absolutes"). I really like Eve, from the OST.

When I was a sophomore in high school, Ms. Desai had one of her classes create self-identity projects (I don't know what they were actually called). I wasn't in that class, but the projects were exhibited in the library, and the idea seemed to be to create displays or presentations or works of art which symbolized aspects of the creator's personality. (For instance, I remember one project which consisted of a model house in which photographs from throughout the student's life were placed.)

Chi's project was fairly elaborate. From a starting point marked on the floor, you would follow a series of paths marked by yellow arrows. Along the way were various signs which built anticipation of the final destination of whichever path you happened to be on ("Almost there!"). And when you'd reached the end of one path, you'd go back and set out on the next path in the sequence.

Now, Chi was known as a tennis star at Blake, and the first path lead to a pile of tennis paraphenalia (tennis balls, medals won at tennis tournaments, etc.). The second path led to a similar but larger pile of tennis stuff, and the third path led to a pile yet larger. By the time I set out on the fourth and final path, I was pretty curious as to what I would find at the end. It was ... a really huge pile of tennis stuff. Much larger than the other piles, centered around an impressive trophy and arranged in the loose form of a pyramid, but otherwise not unlike the others.

I was really confused by this. What was Chi trying to say? My assumption had been that the final pile would reveal Chi's life outside of tennis. It would show us that our narrow assumptions about his personality and interests did not do him justice. "Look!" he might have said. "To you I'm just a tennis jock, but see I also enjoy crocheting and fanfiction and stand-up comedy! I have a rich inner life!!"

Instead, I found more of the same. What's the explanation? Was Chi's project meant to be tongue-in-cheek? Was it his intention to confound my expectations? Or is it really possible that the culmination of his passions, fears and dreams really is just more tennis stuff?

Diary of a Bad Year J.M. Coetzee
Coetzee has the makings of a fine blogger.
Disgrace J.M. Coetzee
Really, really lovely.
Ball Four Jim Bouton
Take home message: (1) Ball players constantly fear for their livelihood, and (2) nearly everyone in the sport is parochial and/or stupid.
After Dark Haruki Murakami
Kind of underwhelming. There's just not much here--"thin gruel," as one reviewer put it.
American Psycho Bret Easton Ellis
This wasn't as sharp as I had expected. The book reads as though Ellis wrote it in one effusive sitting and never revised. 

One of the things I love best about Amherst is the way the birds begin chirping around 3:30 or 4:00 am. They're very regular about this: When you hear them, you can see that the sky has begun to turn from black to deep blue, and you know that the sun is about to come up. If you're like me, and tend to work late, this can be as alarming as it is lovely, because the birds let you know (1) that you don't have much time left to finish your paper (2) that you've been awake for so long that your writing is probably incoherent without your knowing it, anyway. I live in the suburbs, and the birds chirp in the morning here as well, but they are much less numerous (probably because we don't have any thickly wooded areas around here), and the effect is much less impressive.

I really need to learn to pace myself: Running 10mi on a first workout only to be sidelined for the next week is counter-productive. That's my comeuppance. But when you're actually out there, running, it's so easy to say "one more mile, one more bend." I have no idea why it is that running is so bothersome now; if i ever had pains like this running cross country in high school, I don't remember them, and I can't imagine what might've changed since then.

1. I have a vague desire to see "The Strangers." The film has been panned by critics, but I think that horror films--unlike, say, dramas--don't need to be particularly well made in order to be gratifying. It's like pizza and steak: bad steak is bad, but bad pizza is still good. You know?

Movies like "The Strangers" present an interesting question: Why should it be that perhaps the scariest sight of all is a human face? (Deformed, masked, appearing suddenly at a dark window, etc.) It may seem ironic that we can be so deeply frightened by, well, ourselves.

On a basic level, anything which frightens us probably implies some sort of threat. Yet the stimulus needn't represent the threat itself; it may instead point to the threat indirectly. For instance, I think that a blood-curdling scream is scary, not because we are afraid of the person doing the screaming, but because her scream is a signal which says that there is something else to be frightened of. The same is true of, say, a pool of blood: We're not frightened of the blood, obviously, but the fact that there is spilled blood suggests that there's something dangerous about.

The question is: Are human faces scary directly or indirectly? Are we afraid of the person with the deformed expression, or is it that such expressions, like screams, are a signal which humans use to communicate the presence of danger?

You can thank the consideration I have for one Barb Q. Hirsch that I've not affixed a certain shot from "The Ring" to this entry.

2. Sometimes when I've contemplated suicide, the thought has struck me that God might actually exist and that if I killed myself I would by sent to hell--a huge miscalculation on my part. Now, I'm as strong an atheist as I know, and this worry doesn't last long and isn't particularly distressing; but the fact it occurs to me at all is something I wonder about.

What I want to ask is: Does the fact that I have worries like this--however minute they may be--imply that I am actually not completely atheistic?

I think that most people would reply, "no." This ephemeral thought doesn't mean that I am not ultimately a full atheist. Yet I can't help but feel that my passing concern about god marks my (anti-)religious views as less solid than those I have in regard to other irrational fears. Take this example for contrast: I absolutely never worry at all that I will attacked by a tiger while fetching the mail. It never even comes up. And the fact that my paranoia about god's existence--again, however brief or ultimately unimportant--is noticeably more tangible than my paranoia about tigers suggests to me that I actually disbelieve the dangers of tigers in suburban America more fully than I disbelieve the existence of god. But that implies that I am not entirely atheist. Does that make sense?

(this is a redux of a post i made earlier)

i always like borrowing yuan's car, because he has a large assortment of high school-era mix tapes (semisonic, incubus, etc.). all of his music is very nostalgic, very comforting.

the best way i can illustrate my understanding of nostalgia is to say that when we listen to a sad song, we don't actually feel sad. not strictly speaking, anyway. when a person listens to a sad song, she will often experience shades which are similar to those of sadness; but it's not quite the same thing. consider that if the emotional impact of sad songs were just to replicate real sadness, we wouldn't actually enjoy listening to them--no one likes being sad.

similarly, my intuition is that memories--what makes them stirring--are not simply a matter of reliving past experiences. i think it's really uncanny, for instance, how one can feel wistful when remembering times in which one was unhappy. i was pretty miserable last year, and yet to reflect on that period now doesn't make me feel miserable; i actually feel inexplicably sentimental. and in fact, it sometimes seems to me that sad memories can actually be more emotionally gratifying than happy ones.

i think that what makes memories compelling is that we have feelings about the past, rather than just feelings experienced in the past which we later recall. it's a confusion, then, to wish that one could "go back" and be young again. someone who wishes that he could relive his youth has conflated his sentimental feelings about his past experiences with the experiences themselves. to remember youth, but also to be young no longer, is precisely the point.

it's well known that atheists are inviable as politicians. a recent gallup poll found that, whereas 5% and 11% of americans would be unwilling to vote for a black or female presidential candidate, respectively, a whopping 53% would be unwilling to vote for an atheist; this percentage exceeds that corresponding to any other demographic, including gays.

what's odd is that almost no one regards overwhelming bias against atheist politicians as problematic. if i pointed out that blacks have greater difficulty at winning elections than do whites, it would be understood that this is due to widespread and objectionable prejudice--i.e., racism. barack obama's race undoubtedly costs him votes, the fact of which is rightly decried as unjust; and yet, few people see any compelling analogy between this case and that of atheist candidates.

perhaps one reason that people don't worry about discrimination against atheists is that such discrimination rarely has any prominent effect outside the political arena. the thing about the black, female and gay politicians is that their unelectability is just one aspect of a greater culture of bigoted attitudes and practices. obviously, blacks don't run up against racism in just politics; what makes racism insidious is precisely that it is manifest in so many ways, from the achievement gap in public education to police brutality. by contrast, it's hard to think of an arena besides politics in which atheists expect to have a hard time. i'm an atheist myself, and though i'm concerned about the much-diminished prospects of secular candidates, it would be weird for me to say that i am repressed, just because, as regards almost any of my vital interests, i'm not!

so maybe atheists don't have much to whine about. still, i don't think that this phenomenon should be regarded uncritically. at the very least, i think that we should consider whether bias against atheists is analogous to forms of discrimination (racism, sexism, homophobia) which we take as obviously unjust.

it's always strange for me to hear people talk about how awkward or angsty they were in middle school, or even elementary school. i want to say that i didn't have the psychological complexity to experience real angst or frustration at 11; it wasn't a question of my situation, it just wasn't really possible for me to do things like worry about my future or feel lonely at that age.

i'm sure that many people (and girls in particular, i suspect) just had more going upstairs than i did back then. my point is not that these people must be lying when they describe their pre-pubescent anxieties. rather, i want to highlight something peculiar that happens when we talk ascribe things like pain or depression to our younger selves. we have so much more depth of feeling now, i think, it seems almost wrong (a queer disproportion) to use the same words to describe ourselves at age 11 as at 21. sometimes i wonder, for instance, whether to speak of one's first love is just to describe a certain formative experience, rather than anything that we would call love if we had it now.

this is what makes questions of relative happiness so complicated. were we really well adjusted back then, or merely simple minded? did we have more, or desire less? 

odds and ends:

1. i'm probably more prone to envy than anyone i know. it is very, very difficult for me to feel happy for other people; even those i like. i would say that there are only three people whose happiness unconditionally makes me happy: J, K and R. this can make life less pleasant (and not just for myself), but i'm not sure i quite regret it.
2. i'm in this weird funk where i tend to see everything in overly reductive terms. part of this is merely an overextension of my love for lucidity and succinct, decisive language; but also, i fear that i've lost some enthusiasm. i feel blasé when i want to feel engaged. the richness of things isn't always apparent to me, at this point.
3. my porn spam--i can't get rid of it. but sometimes, the subject lines are pleasantly silly: "make your own sex rules with sooper [sic.] viagra!"; "is this a boy or girl? i could not tell. can you?"; "you wouldn't believe some of the things people do with ladies!"; "get your left hand ready."
4. i think that there are four reasons to devote yourself to anything: the practical (our material interests), the aesthetic (the beautiful), the intellectual (puzzles; analysis; curiosity) and the humanistic (what we need to live). i've written several posts exploring this scheme in detail, but i'm never able to quite grasp what i want.
5. when i think about my friends graduating in march, i feel a little sick.

this is from spike lee's "bamboozled." i really love terence blanchard's score here.

I'm returning one week from now to Amherst, after a year away. My first semester at home (taking classes at UMN) was pretty miserable; probably the worst five months of my life, if that says anything. (I even gained quite a bit of weight.) The funny thing is that when I think of it now, and particularly when I revisit music I listened to then, I feel inexplicably sentimental. It's totally queer.

The explanation is definitely not that I was actually having fulfilling experiences and have only now come to realize it. Hence my puzzlement: what accounts for the way I feel now? This is not the first time I've experienced this weird non-conservation (i.e., nostalgia which seemingly has no referent), either. I have some sweet memories of high school, for instance, but I don't think that (1) my 17-year old self would have described the experience as special or that (2) I had some latent happiness.

I guess the answer is that I'm really thinking of something other than the experience itself. Perhaps it's knowing sympathy for a former self. I kind of wish that I'd taken some pictures.

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of course, it could just mean that this blog is just really clear!

*zing!

-- or, "andy's annual vanilla sky tribute."

1. chuck klosterman doesn't get it quite right in sex drugs and cocoa puffs. he argues that tom cruise's decision to live a "real" life is confused; in fact, there is nothing which could be experienced or achieved in the "real" world which could not be had in a virtual one, since the perceptual illusion of the latter is all-encompassing. this is technically right, and a good exercise. yet klosterman seems to miss the point. it is not tom's (or cameron crowe's) contention that what can be had waking cannot be had dreaming. rather, tom's decision to break with his fantasy is a resolution to live authentically. when he says that he wants to live a "real life," he means this in more way than one. his fall from the skyscraper roof it is a symbolic; klosterman goes wrong when he construes this as simply a practical matter. here, philosophical wavering has taken a backseat to sentimentality and affirmation (probably the biggest difference between crowe's remake and the more cerebral, more stark original).
   
2. tom's fantasy consists in a loving relationship with penelope cruz (who accepts him in spite of his disfigurement). what i think is interesting is the question of whether you could have a really fulfilling relationship with someone you dreamed up. remember: all of this takes place in tom's mind. anything penelope says or does is ultimately something tom himself came up with. she reads his unconscious script. could this actually work? is it possible to conceive your own great love? or is she necessarily someone apart from you; someone whose words and actions you necessarily cannot anticipate? can you derive your complement from yourself? or must this be impossible?

i think about affection all the time; imagine it; wish for it; take it as a baseline for how i interpret my relationships and those of others. apparently i'm not discreet about it either, since barb describes me as clearly "THIRSTY, very thirsty" for affection. her immediate reaction is to wonder whether all this is the result of my parents' having stone-walled me as a child. the thing is, it's not. more than that: i'd be willing to say, not just that my parents were affectionate, but that they were and are and will remain more affectionate and openly loving than those of just about anyone i've ever met. so why the longing? it's a small mystery to me.

there's a part of "xenocide" which comes very near to what i feel. when ender, now old and weary, goes to the "outside" (a kind of spirit realm), he recreates his sister valentine as she was when they were young:

"But Valentine knew.

"'Ender,' she said. 'Dear sweet tormented boy, was this what you create, when you go to a place where you can make anything you want?' She reached out her hand and touched the young copy of herself upon the cheek."

i'm not sure how to convey what this stirs up in me, other than to say that the image of a loved one as a child, how sad and sweet that is, is what i imagine when i think of tenderness or abiding love.

I'm not a football fan, but I love this commercial. It really could not have been made of any other sport. Sports are what we have instead of combat. They fulfill a need, a Dionysian urge. It is standard to think of football players as grunts and of contact sports as suspiciously testeronic. Enlightened liberals are likely to frame athletic competition in terms of triumphing over one's own body, economy of motion, self-affirmation, rather than bludgeoning one's opponent. Yet someone who professes non-appreciation of violence denies what is perhaps most compelling about sports (and he is probably more politically correct than honest, anyway). Certainly, we should be wary of glorifying aggression to too great an extent; but insisting that this instinct is necessarily oppressive seems naive and unnatural.

The commercial features Shawne Merriman of the San Diego Chargers and Steven Jackson of the St. Louis Rams. It is directed by Michael Mann, who also directed "Last of the Mohicans"; the music played in the background is "Promentory," from that film's soundtrack.

i feel a strange swell of pride when i see coverage of the I-35W bridge collapse on CNN. it might seem perverse to take any pleasure from the disaster, but really my feeling here has more to do with the fact that minnesota has come under the national spotlight. (i suppose if you're from new york or l.a. you're used to this sort of thing, but minnesotans certainly aren't.) more broadly, i've found in college that i have a lot more patriotic, school spirit-type sentiment than i once thought i had. when people disparage minnesota or the united states, it gets under my skin in an unexpected way. i find myself reading peanuts and listening to prince because i've an affection for the home grown stuff.

pride in the establishment is very unbecoming for someone my age, of course. we all know sayings which describe how people tend to become increasingly conservative as they age ("if you're young and conservative, you have no heart; if you're old and liberal, you have no brain"), and i guess i see the development of my nationalistic instincts as the result of an increasing sympathy with conservative sensibilities. i see this sort of shift in people all around me, especially in my classmates' blossoming interest in making lots of money.

it's not all bad, of course (there's little reason to suspect that we were any more enlightened as teenagers than we are now). still i'm bothered by the idea that my beliefs and values could shift like this, just as a result of my getting older (and older is not necessarily more mature). in a small way, i worry about the prospect of becoming set in my ways. when i read postmodern philosophy, for instance, i feel this visceral distaste which, i worry, is a sign that i'm growing increasingly parochial. this is not to say that you have to be a pomo in order to claim open-mindedness; rather, what disturbs me is when rejection of radical ideas comes, not from a fair assessment of arguments, but from a defensive, reactionary instinct.

i met a professor this summer who believes that global warming isn't real, that it's just another doomsday hoax. he acted as though he was the only person on earth possessed of common sense, and it seemed strikingly clear to me that his beliefs had grown inflexible as a result of his becoming strongly invested in his way of life. i don't think that he's exceptional in this regard (indeed, my own dad is similarly skeptical of global warming), and for me he provides a vivid picture of how oblivious many people become when their thinking crusts over.