waste

The boring and the bored

Millgram's "Practical Reasoning for Serial Hyperspecializers" is an odd little paper—I have taken to thinking about it as a defense of the aesthetic mode of life (though it never identifies itself in such terms) built on top of a quasi-Schopenhauerian view of interest and boredom (the one sketched in "On Being Bored out of Your Mind", itself an interesting paper—which if this post were to be thorough I'd have reread [1]—containing the remarkable claim that there hasn't been much philosophical work on boredom). One of the odd things about it, and I suspect this is just a matter of presentation, is that the "ecological niches" Millgram talks about when the talk turns to agents all seem to come down to occupational niches: so the contrast between the non-serial specializer ("Piltdown Man", an entity which is "imprinted" for a niche once and lives out its life within it) and the serial specializer is that the former will be once and for all a factory worker (and will be screwed if the manufacturing jobs go away), whereas the latter will be a "VLSI engineer, comics inker, Cobra gunner, French professor specializing in eighteenth-century poetry, adventure travel agent", etc. (this particular list is rather too heterogeneous to be credible if one isn't also independently wealthy or a rare genius with an enviable background, but one gets, I suppose, the point) who is, potentially, doing a bunch of other things in parallel with these varied careers. What's odd about this way of putting it is that the disadvantages that accrue to Piltdown Man are largely economic: you might be out of a job. And the advantages that accrue to the hyperspecializer are similar. This makes some of the later argument about hyperspecialization leading to deliberation of ends less compelling, immediately, than it perhaps could be. "Since the niches are paradigmatically novel", says Millgram, "the problem cannot be solved by using prestored guides to behavior … Rather, the behavior-guiding goals have to be computed on the fly." But these are different claims: how here to behave may not be clear because "here" is new, but one's goals could be carried over quite easily: one wishes to live relatively comfortably, say. (Millgram's points about interest and boredom survive this: I wish to live relatively comfortably, and either fishing or criticizing can serve this end (if only!); should I be a fisherman or a critic? It wouldn't hurt to try one and see if I like it.)

(I'm really not sure how far to take the talk of niches, in terms of occupations. It does seem more than merely expository. At one point Millgram writes: "The point of having serial hyperspecializers is that they can exploit narrow niches—niches that don't have room for many occupants. That means that, for serial hyperspecializers, the Kantian question, what would happen if everybody did that … is simply be side the point." I am sure that Kantian moral theorists are already capable of explaining why it isn't immoral to become a dealer in antique typewriters, and my admittedly nonexpert understanding has it that the universalizability test has application to questions beyond that concerning whether to deal in antique typewriters or to be a subsistence farmer.)

The really odd point, to me, comes at the close of the section devoted to the question: "should we be serial hyperspecializers?" The conclusion:

Those caveats notwithstanding, as far as the big picture goes, my guess is that the first-glance practical-inductive take on whether to invest one's resources in serial hyperspecialization, and whether to endorse the canons of practical-inductive reasoning, has it right. Piltdown Man is boring, and serial hyperspecializers are interesting. Social institutions and lives tailored to Piltdown Man are frustrating; creativity, novelty and originality, intellectual and otherwise, feel much better. And to be a Piltdown Man is for changes in one's environment to be nonrecoverable catastrophes. It's a no-brainer.

The last sentence but one again seems a little occupation-centric; one could, it seems to me, be Piltdownish enough without being utterly destroyed when the factory closes. (Surely the important point is about the priority of deliberation of ends over means, and someone could keep pretty much all the higher-level ends constant who, after being laid off from the factory, learned to pull shots at a café. Piltdown Man needn't be specialized in all the ways Millgram presents it.) But look at the contrast between Piltdown Man and serial hyperspecializers again. Based on "On Being Bored out of Your Mind", one would have thought the sentence would read: "Piltdown Man is bored, and serial hyperspecializers are interested." (In many things, in series and in parallel!) But it can't quite say that, because while I've no doubt that Millgram, from the perspective he currently occupies, regards the relatively static life of the average Piltdown Man type as something it would be pretty boring to live, that is no guarantee that Millgram, were he actually to be such a person, would himself be bored. Things could be just fine for him: he's got his little routine, etc. (A machinist by day, a model train enthusiast by night—both things that involve creativity, novelty and originality, for that matter.) In fact, one might even suspect that the serial hyperspecializer is bored and interested in close to equal measure—interested in the early phases, neither very much as mastery has been gained, and bored thereafter, unable to settle into mature enjoyment. (One might have thought that serial hyperspecialization was a good design solution because it would let one find something one enjoyed and then, having found it, stick with it, but this does not seem to be part of Millgram's picture—and one's sticking with it, in any case, would not, it seems, be done qua serial hyperspecializer.)

It may well be true, on the other hand, that Piltdown Man is unexciting and boring (when Walter Lowrie calls the Judge a "prosy person", that means in part, I take it, that he is a bore), and serial hyperspecializers interesting, especially from the sort of perspective that Millgram apparently occupies, but the latter are not necessarily admirable on that account (when Odysseus "cast aside the heavy bonds / of known, of household things", because "Nostalgia for the voyage hurt him everywhere, and for morning / arrivals in harbors that you enter, / with such joy, for the first time", it's not just that he's bored with Ithaca—he's bored with Penelope), and, in any case, the desire not to be boring but interesting (rather than not to be bored but interested) is one that is neither universally had nor universally to be heeded even where it is had.

(That said, I think a lot of what Millgram says about deliberation of ends is spot on, if a little too confidently and unequivocally put—he just seems to push it into a function argument with odd consequences.)

[1] But then, if this post were thorough, would it thereby be made better, or worse, qua blog post?

Irk

It is irksome when a quotation contains as much text within square brackets as without, especially when the bracketed text serves no easily discernible purpose:

"You will find it difficult to hit upon such a convention; at least any that satisfies you [Aber es wird dir schwer werden, so eine Festsetzung zu treffen; eine, di dich befriedigt—it will be hard for you to run up against such an establishment, an arrangement, a holding fast, an appointment, at least one that satisfies you]"

I would discount the length of the German text and go just to the translation provided except the whole thing is baffling—what problem present in, or confusion apt to be generated by, the canonical translation (that which precedes the brackets) is the profusion of alternate, occasionally simply literal, terms supposed to solve or allay? Yet more irksome is when the bracketed alternate is simply incorrect:

"The problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth [den Charakter der Tiefe—the character of the deep]"

Well, one might say, "the character of the deep" suggests something somewhat, well, profounder than "the character of depth", so, if the same suggestion holds in German as in English, one might be able to see why the alternate is given (not that anything is made of this different connotation in the text that follows). But AFAICT there is no way this translation can be correct; the text would have to read "den Charakter des Tiefen". "Tiefe" here is not a substantivization of "tief", it is to "tief" as "Hitze" is to "heiß".

An allegory

When I was younger, I had a job in the palace of a legendary Eastern prince. The grounds were lush and verdant, with many acres of fruit trees, wooded areas stocked with all kinds of game, and an aviary with exotic birds from the world over. The voluptuous undulations of the hills to the west were nearly as enticing as those of the prince's consorts, and there was a river, as well, whose water was cool and refreshing, and from which fish nearly lept into one's net.

It was in its entirety given over to the pleasures of the flesh—for, that is, the prince and those he favored. The workers, and I was one of them, endured long, backbreaking days, for however much the palace appeared to be a remnant of the Age of Gold, it, like all things, was yet a product of our present Age of Iron, and the maintenance of the appearance of unsought plenty required near-constant labor.

I must have done something to attract the ire of one of the foremen (who were really in no better a position than the rest of us)—perhaps some imagined shirking, or, it wouldn't surprise me to learn, jealousy regarding my abilities—because not long after I arrived I was transferred to the aviary, one of the worst jobs going. I had to muck out the floor while high overhead birds of prey gazed down at me with expressionless eyes, seemingly well aware that one workman more or less would never be missed. Perhaps I owe my life to the nearly nonexistent meals we were given, just enough to keep us able to work another day ("he fed us on carrion and on a dry crust, mouldy bread that his dogs had vomited", as the poet says); if I had presented a plumper image, I don't doubt that little would remain of me now but bird droppings or owl pellets.

I had other duties still less pleasant in the aviary, among which the worst was no doubt the following. Every day, I would have to climb high up a tree around which the aviary had been built in which a roc had built its nests. (Rocs build more than one nest among which eggs are shifted.) The roc itself however had died, but not before laying a single egg. Let me inform you now, in case you were unaware, that the egg of a roc is quite large and quite heavy, and it was my job, because there was no bird to sit on them, to cover the egg with blankets at sundown, remove them and rotate it at sunup, and periodically move them on the tree from one nesting location to another.

Now as my comment about the precedence of the aviary and the tree may have suggested, it was really for the roc's sake that the whole thing existed, and with it gone all the more importance attached to the egg—and all the less to the other birds. The significance of this was not lost on me: I would surely be released from my duties if the egg didn't hatch. The hard part, of course, would be doing so in a way that wouldn't result in my being tortured to death, which would surely happen if it looked anything like my fault and possibly even if it didn't. Eventually I concluded that there was nothing for it; if I could be assured of a swift execution, were I to be caught, it might have been worth the risk—but no such luxury would be available to me, paltry though it would be compared to those enjoyed daily by those for whom I labored. So my work continued.

But not a day went by without my dreaming about throwing down that oppressive yolk.