When I look back upon my life I see that almost all of my
decisions have been made in order to avoid or decrease feelings of
pain, particularly emotional pain. The pain of embarrassment, the pain
of shame, the pain of failure, the pain of rejection, the pain of self-doubt, the pain of of anger, and most of all
the pain of sadness. With elegance and style and utilizing every clever
trick in the book, I’ve avoided them all. More or less.  At the very
least I’ve managed to mitigate them again and again. If you know
yourself well enough that you can predict what events and circumstances
are likely to make you suffer, you can always find a way to avoid them
or lessen their impact if they cannot be avoided. It’s surprisingly
easy. Surprisingly easy.

Now in my ripe old age of 27 I start to
look back and wonder, maybe pain wasn’t so bad a thing? Should I have
worked so hard to avoid it? Was it worth it? I wonder if what I have
really been doing is living a life under the tyranny of fear. Fear of
pain. Every time I thought I was being clever enough to avoid something
that might hurt,  and I told myself I was making the best and wisest
decision because I couldn’t be hurt by making that decision, maybe the
truth is I was just acting in accordance with my fear. I was doing
exactly as the fear told me to without really thinking it through
clearly. Stupid fear. It’s had me wrapped around its little finger all
this time!

And when I think back to those times when I did feel
pain and I couldn’t avoid it and I couldn’t weaken it very much and I
try to see the impact on my life. Interestingly I find these memories
are the strongest memories I have. Some of them are the best I have.
Some are powerful experiences all mixed up with so many emotions it is
impossible to sort them all out.  Happiness, sadness, shame,
self-doubt, fear, all rolled into one. And yet I learned from these
experiences. Every one of them. And I carry them with me still and they
are constantly helping me to understand the world a little better, to
see things a little clearer.

Pain sharpens. Fear clouds.

Remembering the painful memories still hurts, but they are clear and
crisp and I think I wouldn’t want to ever lose them. They are too
important to me. They define who I am much more so than the acts of
avoidance that characterize the rest of my life.

And the worst
part is, when I look back in contemplative moments like today and see
all of the pain I’ve avoided because of my subservience to my fears, I
can’t help but feel a deeper pain I never would have predicted back
then when I was making all those decisions that seemed oh so right and
clever all the days gone by. The pain of regret. What might have been
otherwise had I not chosen to run away from the pain. How many deeper
cherished memories might I have forged had I faced my fears instead?
Might I not have chosen instead to let the pain exist, let it be as
strong as it might, provided I take in all the other good things that
could have come with it? Who would I be now if I had done that then? At
the very least I know I’d be a person who feels less the pain that
comes from dwelling upon what-might-have-been’s. Would that not alone have been worth it?

Now’a'days
I feel a little insulated, and with it comes a kind of numbness. It’s
as if I’ve boxed off so much of the pain that I could have experienced,
distanced all the things that might hurt, that I don’t experience much
of anything that invokes in me any kind of emotion whatsoever anymore.
It’s like I’ve built an effective cocoon around me, so I only interact
with the world through selected safe channels that I already know won’t
cause me strife. It makes every day living easy, but also empty,
meaningless. It’s all becomes just an endless nothing.

But I’m
trying to be different. Little by little I teach myself to take risks,
to do things that I know are likely to lead to painful gut wrenching
experiences that I can’t help but fear so much. I do them anyway. And
although I’ve just started, I already see myself changing a lot and I’m
finding myself just a little bit happier with each successful choice.
It’s slow going. It’s hard to beat back decades of habits and patterns
so deeply ingrained in me. It’s harder still to beat the deepest fears
that still haunt me. But I’m trying. And I think it is the best and
most important thing I’ve ever tried to do.

And so I feel as if
that is advice that I should give to others as well. So dear reader
take my word for it. Don’t ever get into a situation where you chose to
make things less painful for you and as a consequence miss out on the
good that could have come from it.  Be certain that the pain you choose
to avoid is pain worth avoiding. And let the rest of the pain become a
part of you, ensconced in the heart of your deepest most cherished
memories, making them sharper, deeper, and more real to you. Most often
I think you will find that the pain is not half so bad as living with
uncertainty and fear and being haunted by regrets.

With only one hour you have to imagine that almost anything you do will
be quickly reverted or altered as soon as you lose power. So my
strategy would be to do as much as possible, implement every possible
crazy idea I’ve ever had without even giving them too much thought in
the hopes that at least a little bit of something will have an impact.

First the quick and easy stuff. Close Guantanamo Bay, repeal the
patriot act, no child left behind, the digital millennium copyright act,
unlawful Internet gambling enforcement act,  and the military
commissions act. Eliminate the Department of Homeland Security.
Eliminate the Director of National Intelligence. Withdraw all troops
from Iraq. Also implement a flexible plan to reduce our military
presence abroad everywhere in stages to minimal levels by the year
2020. This plan could be modified but not repealed by Congress or the
President but would require popular vote to overturn. Also I’d pass a balanced budget for once.

Next why don’t I add some amendments on to the Constitution? I have absolute power so I can do that right?

First a long over do Equal Rights Amendment only sightly modified to
clearly state that it guarantees equal rights regardless of sex or sexual preference. The
goal here is to make it impossible to craft an amendment banning gay
marriage without first repealing this amendment.

Second a Guaranteed Popular Vote Amendment which would make it against
the law for the Supreme Court or any other representative body to
determine the results of a close election. It would require that in the
event of an election that is too close to call, votes must continue to
be counted until all votes are counted and if that results in a
difference withing the realm of the margin of error then a re-election
would be held.

Third a Equal Education Amendment which would guarantee any resident
of the U.S. the right to a high quality education under the law. It
would also include a component that also guarantees our right to any
tools or inventions that are necessary in order to be an educated and
functioning member of the society. That would mean that every citizen
would be guaranteed access to computer technology and High Speed
Internet.

Fourth a Freedom of Choice Amendment. Basically an amendment codifying Roe v. Wade into the constitution.

Fifth a Limited Powers Amendment which would weaken the powers of the Presidency as follows:
- ban signing statements
- require Congressional authorization before moving of troops or non-manned military apparatus.
- make it so that organizations that specialize in covert operations
and  intelligence must answer to and take orders from Congress or
officials directly selected by Congress or popular vote, not
presidential appointees

Sixth an Anti-Torture Amendment which would codify the Geneva Conventions into U.S. law.

Seventh a Supreme Court Constitution Amendment which would alter the
composition of the Supreme Court so that 3 justices are selected by a
popular vote amongst all scholars in Academia who specialize in law
and/or politics.  3 of the justices are selected by popular vote of the
people and must not come from an academic  or political background at
all. And lastly the final 3 members would be selected through the usual
Presidential nomination process.  All nine members must still be
confirmed  by Congress.  A supreme court justice now will serve an
eight year term renewable one time rather than serving for life.

Eight a Right To Unionize Amendment which would guarantee the rights to all workers to form unions in any work place. Period.

Ninth a Right to Health Care Amendment which would guarantee the right to all residents to quality health care.

Tenth a Limited Monopoly Amendment which would make it illegal for any
government instituted monopoly power including copyright and say
bandwidth allocation and like things to persist indefinitely. Congress
can set the length but the length would be maxed at the average
lifespan of a human being  or 150 years whichever is smaller and this
includes renewals.

Ten seems like an appropriate number of amendments to implement. It has historical resonance.

OK now for a bunch of new laws and decrees:
- legalize all controlled substances currently banned, instead
institute a series of progressive taxation based on the amount of harm
caused by each substance to society and have the money go to mitigate
that harm.

- a similar law legalizing and taxing prostitution

- similarly a law that taxes all kinds of goods that the production of
which or consumption of which causes environmental or social harm
proportional to the amount of harm it causes. So sugar, alcohol, fatty
foods, gasoline, plastic, non-fuel efficient vehicles, light bulbs, all
are taxed. The money is used to offset the harms and to research new
means to offset the harms.

- rather than have laws that ban smoking in all public places, you
instead ban any activity like smoking that creates secondary harm
through its passive use (IE second hand smoke) in all places that
receive public funding. And on top of that you put a tax on any
institution that chooses to allow such substances to be used the money
from which would go into funding the medical system. So you can still
have bars that allow smoking for example they just gotta weigh the
advantages of having a different kind of patronage versus the added
costs the government will force them to fork out.

- a law making it illegal to ban licensed gun owners allowed to carry
concealed weapons from carrying their firearms in any institution that
receives any public funds.

- however at the same time we implement a law that makes carrying an
illegal firearm punishable by life imprisonment. This will be
implemented a year from this date and until that time anyone can hand
in any illegal guns they happen to own at no penalty and the government
will pay them a hundred dollars for their trouble.

- implement a gun responsibility law that makes the registered owner of
a gun economically responsible for any harm that is caused by that gun
whatever the circumstances.

- change the minimum age for alcohol and tobacco and all other controlled substances to 16.

- a law making any attempt to abridge the meeting or prevent the membership of unions punishable by life imprisonment.

- eliminate the death penalty nation wide.

- a law that implements a series of tax benefits and scaling financial
rewards for citizen voting. The more you vote the more financially
benefited you are for voting.

- implement a yearly citizen referendum whereby citizens will be
presented with each law passed during the past year and have the option
to vote to strike them down or not. Simple majority wins.

- during said same referendum, citizens can also propose new laws, as
many as they like. Any proposal supported by a third or more the
citizens would have to be taken up by Congress during the next session.
Any proposal supported by 2/3 or more the citizens would immediately
become law. No Presidential veto allowed.

- a law that appropriates an appropriate amount of money equivalent to
that which is owed for reparations for slavery and discriminative
practices and distributes it to all surviving members of family members
of citizens who were held in slavery or to institutions that are in
support of them. The law would also contain a formal apology for such
events in history.  The law would also eliminate affirmative action,
but not diversity based selection methods which would still be
perfectly legal.

- a law that implements severe financial fines to any news institution
that publishes information that is not true. The fines are proportional
to the size of the organization publishing the story and the size of
its readership/viewership. The fine would be implemented at the moment
we determine that what was asserted was false and the fine would be
mitigated depending on how much corroborating evidence the institution
can bring forth to show that they had reason to believe the story they
were providing was untrue, but there would always be a fine.

- a law creating a public television station and a public radio station
used solely for political advertisements and campaigning and which
guarantees equal access to all candidates.

- a law making copyright terms last 1 year, renewable one time. the law
would also make it so that nothing is copyrighted ‘automatically’ the
way it is now. Rather a copyright must be filed for, everything else
falls into the public domain.

- eliminate the entire patent system not because I am against it but
because its history is pretty chaotic and I think it’d be a good idea
to just start over from scratch.

- a law that flat out bans all campaign contributions of any kind.
Anyone running for office needs to use public funds for campaigning and
is not allowed to use his or her own money either. Anyone sitting in a
public office or working for a public institution would be banned from
taking any gifts or trips from any lobbyists.

- a law that eliminates national income and blanket sales taxes (we
rely more heavily on taxes on goods based on the harm they cause as
described above). At the same time it increases the inheritance tax to
reasonable levels.

- a law codifying that all entities working for corporations must act
in accordance with ethical principles and the law and the well being of
the populace. These interests must take precedent over shareholder
interests.

- a law that ensures that all residents are provided a Minimal
Comfortable Survivability Distribution every year for the entire of
their natural life. This is an amount of money as determined by a
special commission that meets every year that the average person needs
in order to survive comfortably and remain healthy given the current
economic situation in the country. The money given to children is of
course given to their guardians to use on their behalf. This system
will replace welfare systems and social security (the money distributed
may increase if special needs such as disability need to be met). The
money you are given is not effected by the money you earn on your job
and retirement plans you choose to invest in separately. But if you
blow this money, the government doesn’t help you out at all. You’d have
to rely on the charity of your fellow citizens in that case.

- A freedom of migration act which would make it so that the only
restriction upon your ability to come to the U.S. is whether or not you
can get someone to hire you. No lines. No rules. No walls. No limits.
You can either have a job here or you can prove that you are making
enough money or have enough money saved independently to support
yourself and your family, or you can prove that you are actively
searching for a job, which you’d have to verify every month or two and
if after two years you still haven’t found employment you will need to
leave. In fact the government will pay you to leave and look for
employment elsewhere. Similarly if you are having trouble finding a job
there will be government funded programs that help people migrate from
various parts of the country to others where employment opportunities
are greater whenever the worker supply exceeds the demand in a certain
area. Of course going to school in the U.S. basically would be treated
the same way as having  a job here.  I would leave a letter for my
successor  advocating that he or she also try to pressure other
countries to implement the exact same kind of laws making labor
distribution fair and efficient.

- An analyst conscription act which will allow congress during times of
needs to draft analysts from business and academia to work on the
research and development needed to keep our country and its populace
safe from whatever threat. A drafted citizen is drafted for a maximum
requirement of serving for 3 years but may elect to stay longer if he or
she so chooses. The analyst is paid a normal average competitive
analyst salary and the analyst goes through a normal interview process
(and background check of course) once randomly selected to see if they
will provide skills or intellect that will be beneficial for dealing
with the problem at hand. If not the person will be allowed to go back
to his or her previous life. So in current times we’d have an
anti-terrorism analyst draft in progress.  The group of analyst
commissions through this act would have extraordinary powers to
implement policy without having to wait for the approval of the
President or Congress but which can quickly be overturned by Congress
or the President should the need arise. So for example if the analyst
commission decides that the levy system in New Orleans is unsafe they
can immediately order an evacuation on their own authority. Of course
they would still need to work normally with other institutions such as
the military.

- A multiple parties act which makes it easy for members of independent
parties to get on the ballot in elections all over the country. All you
have to do is request that your name be put on the ballot and get one
person to vouch for you. If the ballots get too cluttered then we hold
preliminary elections to reduce the candidate pool followed by run off
elections.

- A law that requires the U.S. to make all do effort to intervene in
any humanitarian crises or genocide happening anywhere in the world and
to protect and defend all international laws, statutes, and decrees.

- A law that radically increases the nationwide funds for education. The law would require the building of new schools, hiring of many new teachers and radically increase the pay grade of teachers. Teacher salaries would be partially linked to how bad a school they are willing to teach in, in addition to and even more than their student’s performance. So to get the highest salary you would do a good job teaching and helping to reform the lowest quality schools in the country.

-   A law banning the use of nuclear weapons by the military at any time under any circumstances without unanimous approval of the U.S. Congress. The President still has control over the weapons and can use them if he pleases but it will be an illegal act and if humanity survives he will be impeached for it.  Also the law would call for a massive reduction on our nuclear arsenal.

- A law that implements a moratorium on the development of coal based power plants or nuclear power plants until cost effective solutions to the CO2 emissions and nuclear waste problems respectively can be solved. You can build as many wind farms as you want however.

- A law appropriating a very large sum of money to go into the continued research of fusion power. This is over and on top of ongoing clean energy research.

- A law appropriating a very large sum of money to go into the continued research of faster high speed internet systems with the goal of making the U.S. the country with by far the fastest broadband access available to its citizens in the world.

Lastly, how about we implement one last Amendment if I have time before they kick me out the seat of absolute power.

The Internet Independence Amendment which would say something like
“Congress shall pass no law interfering with the progression and
development of the Internet.”

OK so that’s all I can think of off of the top of my head. I’m sure
most of these are a little bit crazy, might have horribly unforeseen
consequences and probably just generally weren’t thought out very well.
But that’s OK since I just pulled most of it out o my arse just now and
I only had an hour anyway. My hope would be that after doing all of
this all at once it would put a jolt into the system of the country and
we’d be more tolerant to trying radically new ideas to see what works
and what doesn’t. Maybe even a few of these ideas might turn out to be
not so crazy ideas after all and might stick in some way shape or form.

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

A few hours ago I had the strangest most disturbing experience.

I was lying in my bed on my back. I had just been napping for an hour or so and then I was trying to wake up and get up and do some stuff.

And I felt as if I was awake. I could feel my eyes being open I could see the light from my lamp, the ceiling everything around me. It all looked so normal. Just like it did when I went to sleep.

And my eyes felt droopy like there was something in them, so I remember moving my left hand up stretching it out above me and I could feel my arm moving, see my hand out in front of me and then I would reach down toward my face to rub my eyes….

Only my hand would never contact my eyes. As soon as my hand got close to my face it would end up at my side again, right where it was when I was sleeping.  I did this again and again and couldn’t ever rub my eyes.

Then I tried to touch other parts of me and even to pinch myself and each time I could feel my arms and hands moving, even see them moving but I can’t come into contact with myself.  Then I tried to shake myself awake to move my head from side to side or to bend my back and sit up. But I can’t! I feel paralyzed like I can’t move at all, like I’m pinned to my bed. I try to talk or cry out but I can’t do that either.

At this point I realize that I must still be sleeping and this feeling that I am awake is some sort of illusion. And then I say to myself ok, so I’m asleep and I want to wake up. Then comes the struggle. I feel myself fighting with myself and it is a painful fight going on right in my brain as I try to force myself from this weird not really awake state into a real awake state.  The struggle seems to go on forever and it *hurt*. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was really really hard and I was getting to be afraid, very afraid, that I just wasn’t going to wake up at all. I was trapped inside my own head! It scared the crap out of me honestly. I don’t think I’ve been that afraid for a very very long time.

Eventually somehow I won myself free. It was weird though in the immediate after math of my having woken up I couldn’t really tell the difference between my being awake and asleep. My mind still felt lethargic my body slow and deliberate. I felt insubstantial, like I wasn’ really there. But then I rubbed my eyes and felt contact and I sat up and stretched and felt pain. I felt absolutely crappy, like every muscle in my body was a little bit stiff and uncomfortable like I had literally just been in a fight for my life. But I felt a sense of relief too for having succeeded in waking myself up. Somehow.

But the fear lingered on well after I woke up.

I’ve experienced things like this before, moments where I was struggling to wake myself up and couldn’t seem to achieve it. It’s never a nightmare or anything, it usually has no images or sensations to it at all except the conscious knowledge that a part of my mind is very much ready for me to be awake whereas the rest of my body just seems to be in rebellion and refuses to wake up.  But this was the worst of all. Usually it only lasts for like a minute, and I almost almost always immediately able to force myself awake after that. It bothers me, but I usually quickly forget about it and I am never left feeling particularly physically bad afterwards. This time it went on and on and I felt horrible after I woke up. But the worst was that feeling of thinking I had succeeded in waking myself up, feeling as if I was awake when I really wasn’t. That seriously freaks me out just thinking about it.

I wonder if there is something wrong with me. Was I having some kind of a mental fit or something or is this an entirely normal feeling? Whatever it was it was so freakishly scary, I start to fear that one day I might enter into that state and just never be able to wake myself up, or maybe the struggle to wake myself causes me some serious mental or physical harm or kills me. Worse, maybe I trick myself into thinking that I am awake all the time when I am really caught in some sort of a fake and tedious dream world. My mind could be caught in a kind of broken record where I just end up repeating that feeling of moving my hand up in front of my face again and again for all eternity.

Fear is a strange motivator. It can make you choose to do things that you would otherwise hesitate to do. I just started to think after I woke up that well if I am destined to one day fall sleep and just never wake up, I guess I’d better make myself do everything I can do right now. No matter what. I just can’t afford to miss a moment.

I will also probably mention this to my doctor next time I see him, just in case.

In the featured article Internet Monkeys the blogger writes about an article he read that basically argues that the internet is full of too much crap.

How deluded can this author be? Is he even using the same internet that I am using? If so he has somehow completely missed the boat on the significance of the proliferation of online content. I can only guess at whether it is a sort of willful ignorance that is driving the author to write such a misleading piece. Or if the author is acting out of an ulterior motive to trying to cast doubt upon the other mediums through which information is transmitted that are not strictly controlled by rigid authorities.

Regardless, the author is clearly making several mistakes in basic reasoning. For one thing the author is looking at the internet in exactly the same way you might evaluate a book or a factual article. Say you are comparing two such books or articles and trying to decide which one is more helpful to the readers. Let’s for the sake of argument say that they are equally clear and easy to understand and circulated to the same audience.  Then, probably the thing that you would be concerned about most when trying to decide which article is strictly superior to the other might well be quality to quantity ratio. That is the article that is more dense with factual information might well be the one that the audience would get more use out of, whereas the article that spends half of its length rambling on about useless anecdotes from the writer’s own life that the reader doesn’t care about is going to be somewhat less effective.

When you look at the internet using this metric of course you find it immensely lacking. It seems like the medium with a infinitesimally small quality to quantity ratio. Everywhere you look you see piles upon piles of stuff written and created that you are unlikely to care about surrounding the few gems that you actually do care about.

The problem is, this analysis is completely flawed when it comes to looking at content on the internet. Why is the anecdote riddled article ‘worse’ than the direct and to the point article? Presumably because it wastes our time. We can get the same information from reading the other article, and we can do it faster and move on to other aspects o our lives.  Here’s the thing though, in the offline world in order to figure out which article is best we have to probably read them both and figure out after the fact that one was a waste of our time and then we rightly get angry at the expenditure of energy.  The online world is very different for one very important reason. Just as the quantity of content is radically increased on the internet so too are our powers to sort, organize, filter, file, and search it.

This is a very very important thing to remember. Just because there is so much “more” junk on the internet does not immediately imply that you the viewer actually experience more that you would consider to be “junk” when perusing the internet. I would argue that quite the opposite happens in fact. The powerful tools made available to you on the online world make it much much easier for you to find content that you care about, ie content that is most definitely not considered “junk” by you.

Take for example, youtube. Yeah, sure, for any given observer, there’s all kinds of videos on youtube that they wouldn’t have the least bit of interest in watching and would find to be a total waste of time. It’s a good thing then that said observer doesn’t just randomly view all youtube videos until he finds one he likes. Rather, how does the youtube viewer select videos to watch?  He has literally a ton of tools to choose from. First of all he likely views videos posted by the people he knows and respects the opinion of on social networking sites and blogs or emailed to him directly by his friends whose opinion he trusts. Secondly, he probably subscribes to certain channels that have only the videos relevant to the subjects he or she cares about. He may also make use  of the ability youtube has to filter videos by most viewed, most discussed, and top favorites to find out which videos are more appreciated by the majority of viewers and thus more likely to be worth his time.  He may also look to other sites that provide reviews and filters selecting the best and most popular videos online. Above all else there is the simple ability of the viewer to search the videos using keywords to find the videos that interest him and search within categories if need be. Once a video is found that the viewer likes, he is also given immediate access to a set of related videos that are similar to the one he likes and the ability to see other videos made by the same writer. In addition to all that, once such a viewer starts watching a video he can quickly skip through it to see if it will interest him and can easily stop watching at any time if he doesn’t like it.  The videos also all have a quick summary, tags associated with them so you know what kind of content they contain, a star rating so you can see how well liked they are, comments so that you can hear what others are saying about them, and a teaser image from the video iself which sometimes might give the viewer an idea of what’s inside. All of this boils down to a gargantuan toolkit for finding exactly which videos the viewer is actually interested in seeing.

Now contrast all that to the rigidity of trying to find valuable content on television.  Let’s say there’s a television show on that you want to know if it is any good. What can you do to find out if it is something you will like? Not much really except watch it and see. The television provides you with very few tools to see if the show you are watching is something you should bother to watch. You basically have to commit a significant amount of time to watching shows to figure out what is worth watching, or you have to look outside of the medium for filters that can point you in the direction of a show you might want to see. Sure there are commercials that might provide some clues, and newer digital systems sometimes show you a brief summary of the show you are watching, and there’s always the tv guide channel. But these are very poor tools compared to the vast array of tools available on sites like youtube. Your best bet is to happen to be subscribed to other media like newspapers and magazines that you like and are likely to recommend to you content that you will also like.  And of course there’s always the water cooler conversation that might indicate to you that this or that particular show is well liked amongst the social group that you happen to hang out with and so is probably more likely to appeal to you.  Surely we can see how all of this is slow and inefectual compared to the tools that youtube and the likes provide.

The author of this article might object to my argument by saying that just because you can quickly and easily find content that you like online, doesn’t mean that it isn’t still the case that most of that content you are experiencing whether you like it or not is still crap. But that line of argument makes me wonder where the author’s concept of quality comes from. The author seems to have some sort of idea that there exists some objective measure of what constitutes ‘quality’ and that it isn’t all just subjective. The author no doubt believes that for example if Shakespeare’s plays were hated by everyone in the world, they’d still be Shakespeare and hence amongst the greatest literary works of all time.

Now we can wax philosophically about whether that’s true or not if we really want to. I’m game. I’ve always loved philosophy. But with respect to the value of the internet, I really don’t think it matters whether it is true or not. So what if there are less Shakespearean quality works on the internet than there are in the print world? That’s a natural consequence of there being a heck of a lot MORE works on the internet than there are in the print world. I don’t know why you would ever expect it to be otherwise. The thing that matters is that your tools to be able to find the Shakespearean quality works on the internet are much enhanced by the same mechanisms I have described above.  A Google search is just far more effective than digging through a card catalog.

The thing that perhaps is really bothering this author is not the proliferation of works that he would deem low-quality on the internet. Rather, I think it is that the author is upset that these low-quality works are getting so much attention by internet dwellers. But the truth is people really really like reading and watching stuff on the internet that doesn’t usually get the level of praise or critical acclaim that things generated in the offline world generally do.

And what’s wrong with that really? Remember that the internet magnifies what is called “The Long Tail” phenomenon. That means that content that would usually be filtered out of the commercial world because it does not have a critical audience sufficient to justify its inclusion, finds a niche audience on the internet that finds the content worthwhile to it. So basically, things that others would consider crap are quite valuable to someone out there and that someone can find it and appreciate it and have their quality of life fundamentally improved by the experience. So just because a random blog entry is crappy and uninteresting to me does not mean that there aren’t a few people for whom that blog entry is the most important thing in the world for them to read. And isn’t that just a good thing all around? People get to share a part of themselves with people who appreciate it.What’s so dangerous about that?

The author makes one other general mistake in that he juxtaposes the question of factual accuracy on the internet with this idea of general “quality”. “Quality” is a very different thing when discussing creative works like Shakespeare than when you are talking about dictionaries and encyclopedias. And so the questions of whether Wikipedia is accurate and how quickly unsubstantiated rumors can spread through the web are very different questions than the question of how worthwhile the random life stories and interesting anecdoes and silly videos people post online are. 

But the author is pretty wrong about Wikipedia too. Sure Wikipedia has inaccuracies but not nearly so much that it is useless or dangerous. Wikipedia has expanded the access to knowledge of a lot of people who just wouldn’t have any way to find out a lot of the stuff they can learn through it, or just couldn’t be bothered to go through the extra trouble to get access to that information. I guarantee you that there are a lot of people learning a great deal on Wikipedia today who never would have, had it not existed, been willing to go to the trouble of traveling to their local library to find out the same. And that doesn’t even take into account the many places in the world where Wikipedia provides an alternative resource to the heavily censored and controlled native press.

Wikipedia is nothing but a subset of the extraordinary amount of knowledge and information available on the web that is not controlled or validated by any of the typical corridors of power that usually serve as gatekeepers on the knowledge viewers can obtain. It’s just one of the best of those resources because of its internal culture that prides itself on a dedication to accuracy and neutrality and the siting of sources. Even if Wikipedia weren’t so very careful about trying to be professional and accurate it wold still be an extraordinary resource just because of the shear quantity of information it is making available all in one place for the regular layman to experience.

But speaking of other fact based resources online, let me offer one personal testimonial of the effectiveness of the internet for providing factual resources. I used to be a programmer and constantly while I was working I would get into situations where there’d be some thing I don’t know how to program or can’t figure out how to do in a particular language I was working with. What I found though was that at least as often as I would find the answer in the documentation, or some professional programming journal or in some book I happen to keep around as a reference, I would find the answer instead on some random person’s website or blog or some random wiki. And the hardest to find answers were almost always ones I found through that way. It was always some user generated content, some individual who figured something out and decided to out of their kindness and devotion to knowledge share it with the world. I was able to achieve a lot more that way then I ever would have been able to achieve had I been bound to having to search through ‘official’ resources. Really I would take the ability to do a web search over a subscription to any and all print programming magazines any day.

The author does mention that he is worried about the quick proliferation of ‘unsubstatiated’ rumors. I have to admit. That is an important concern. The internet can serve as a really big echo chamber where the same idea can quickly float around through the wikis and the blogs and the social networks all before anyone has ever gotten a chance to verify its veracity.  But here’s my question, is this phenomenon really worse online than it is in the offline world? Witness the madness of the prelude to the Iraq war, where you had editorials in virtually every major newspaper in the country basically lying to their audience to their face. And the ‘news’ sections of these papers weren’t much better.  And it isn’t much better right now. How quickly do ideas go straight from the administration’s mouth to our ears without even temporary stop where the truth of the words are checked and confirmed. If you think this is more reliable than the internet, I think you are just delusional. I’ve come to trust Wikipedia about a thousand times more than every major newspaper including the New York Times. A least with Wikipedia I have some insight into the process through which the information is being selected. I can read the discussion and figure out what was taken out and what was added and why. I can also immediately read the sources posted right there on the Wikipedia page to confirm the data posted in the article, and when in doubt it is easy enough to do a google or yahoo or msn search for more information on the subject.  Sure, sometimes I’ll hit an unsubstantiated rumor that I can’t easily refute because all or most online sources are just repeating the same rumor without verification, but like I said it’s just exactly the same as the oligopoly of the news media, only the mistakes made online are made democratically by the community as a whole and are not necessarily the product of the interests of a few agenda setting elites.

I am not saying that there isn’t a place for these big news media companies or that we don’t need reporters who base there career upon the journalistic profession. We do need those people if only because some truths really are easier to expose and verify when you have the money and resources to be able to mount an effective investigation. But not all do. We all know the stories of the random bloggers who expose truths that the major newspapers missed. It happens and it will continue to happen more and more. Our best bet is to have a symbiotic relationship where online and off-line media serve as checks and balances for one another keeping each other honest and resulting in the public being as informed as possible.

But I want to know what the author of this article is trying to advocate instead? Does he want to see us go be in a world where the only movies and videos we see are Hollywood approved, and the only music we listen to is generated by the businesses in the RIAA, and the only creative writing we read is that which the major publishing companies foist upon us, and the only source of factual information we have is that which appears in major newspapers and magazines? Would that be a better world? One in which content does not proliferate rapidly based on the opinions of the populace, but is rather controlled by the few, who tell the many what is high quality enough to be worthy of their consumption?

I have to tell you such a world sounds so sickening to me that I want to throw up just thinking about it. Having experienced the extraordinary freedom that is provided by the internet, I won’t ever voluntarily go back to a world without it. I’d rather die.

I recall reading or hearing not long ago about a concept called “personal identity management” which is sort of a individualized kind of “brand management” particularly relevant today when considering how quickly information about ourselves can propagate through the internet. The basic idea is that you should sort of think of your identity as a kind of precious commodity that you have to protect.

Really, I think this is all really apart of a much larger concept that is nothing new at all. I like to call it perception management. Basically it is the idea that people are concerned a great deal with how people perceive things and there is a great interest people have in ensuring that people perceive things a certain way and more importantly don’t perceive things in a negative light.

So of course in the real world people expend all kinds of effort worrying about how they dress and how they look and how they carry themselves, and what kind of car they drive, what kind of house they live in all in an effort to create a kind of perception of themselves. People also expend enormous amounts of effort watching what they say in order to manage the perceptions of the people they interact with.

Conceptually you would assume that the internet would be no different right? People would watch very carefully what they say online, what details about themselves they share, how they interact with people in the online world, what kinds of site they hang out on etc.   And for the most part, this is exactly what the “personal identity management” idea and all like rants about secrecy and privacy on the internet are about. They are advocating that you should be just as careful with keeping track of how others perceive your online identity as you are with keeping track of how they perceive your real life identity.

Wait a minute. Advocating?  Why should there be a need to advocate this idea? Why does it seem as if some commentators are downright begging their audience to exercise more caution on the internet? It’s entirely normal behavior right? Wouldn’t everyone already be doing it?

The answer is clearly, remarkably, and I think extraordinarily not. People on the internet are exceedingly less image conscious, less careful and cautious, less deceptive and manipulative, and more honest with respect to their online identity than they are with respect to their real life identity. The real hard core scholars amongst us will ask the question “why should that be?” and they will expend endless hours and mind numbing research to come up with some explanation probably having to do with the illusion of anonymity that the internet provides and basically assuming that people are just dupes too stupid to realize that for the most part their identity is wide open out there for anyone sufficiently determined to see no matter what trivial steps they take to secure it.

I don’t believe that at all. People are well aware that they are not anonymous. In fact they thrive on it. So then is the answer that they are getting ego benefits, notoriety and fame from their exposure? If that were the case, why are we  so less candid in real life. How many people publish their personal diaries to local news papers? How many people post images that they like and images of themselves outside their door and all over their cars and anywhere where strangers can see them? No. People carefully manage the way people perceive them in the real world, sharing the minimum needed to create a perception that they can control, but they don’t or at least don’t yet exercise the same caution online. Why?

Really, truly, I don’t even care what the answer is to that question. I just think it’s awesome. But if I’d hazard a guess I’d say that maybe the issue isn’t that we are unusually forthcoming and un-self conscious in the online world but rather that maybe we are unusually reserved, indirect, and deceptive in the rest of our lives. There are a lot of social causes that may have lead us to be that way, but the argument would go that the internet provides people with an escape from those norms, an opportunity to be more truthful without feeling like an outsider.

My concern though is not with the question of why is it one way here and another way there. That seriously doesn’t matter to me at all. My concern is should it be that way anywhere? Are we justified in putting so much concern and energy in trying to manage how others perceive us? Should we really care? For some reason for me it just always seemed just a little bit too deceptive for my taste. But deception can be moral, immoral, or amoral depending on the circumstances so we still need to ask the questions. Are we justified in managing our perceptions? Is it good for us to manage our perceptions?

I recently saw a few episodes of a television show and it wasn’t particularly interesting to me except for one side plot where basically there was a child who acting in extremely unusual ways. The mother of the child was extremely worried that the child’s actions were so odd that they could be considered “psychopathic” and was basically freaking out. The mother obviously didn’t think her child was a “pyschopath” rather she was concerned about the perception others were having about both her child and herself as a mother. She was trying to solve the problem as a means of a perception management. She was trying to avoid having people think she was a bad mother or that her child was crazy. This is not really selfish or even entirely self-interested thinking on the mother’s part. Rather, the need to manage perceptions is so important in the world we interact in right now that the mother’s desire to avoid unusual perceptions can be said to have been rational interest in the child’s long term welfare. The child could be impacted severely in terms of opportunities for success and welfare and even possibly happiness if she was perceived too be too far on the crazy side by her peers and society.

And yet to me the child was the hero of the story. She did what she wanted and ignored the perceptions of others around her and lived exactly as she wanted. And although the few episodes I saw was insufficient to determine how the child would turn out, since I can’t see as how the child was causing any real long term harm, I could see no wrong in living one’s life that way. So to me then, if society causes some harm to the child who lives in such a manner, all practical considerations aside, should the child really be considered to blame for nonconformity? Or should we judge the society as lacking for not finding a place for her?

Whatever ultimate conclusions we draw about the morality of it, perception management has always seemed to me to have a dark side and as I see it spread and gain traction in the online world I see that dark side rearing its ugly head again and again.  It always seemed to me through observation of myself and of others that the more engrossed we get in the management of how people perceive us, the smaller we seem to grow as people.

What I mean is this, take a simple example where you interact with your parents in a certain way and then you interact with your friends in a different way. You are careful not to share certain aspects of yourself with your friends and you are careful not to share certain other aspects of yourself with your parents. And then you add your coworkers who you want to see a different side of you, or other strangers you interact with to see a different component of your nature as well. And your siblings, potential mates, superiors, clients, constituents,  subordinates, authority figures, etc. etc.

But as always there are collisions, sometimes you are interacting with your parents and your friends at the same time so in such cases there are choices to be made. You can choose to show all aspects of yourself that you show to your friends to your parents and all aspects of yourself that you show to your parents to your friends, or you can choose to show only those aspects of yourself that are consistent to both groups image of you. Most often people seem to choose the later.

What’s more over time it seems that the more you interact with more people the more of yourself you need to suppress in order to remain the common denominator of yourself that can co-exist in all of the various social venues in which you interact. Eventually it becomes habit and soon you don’t even remember that there were was in which you interacted with the world that might not been seen as acceptable to one or more of the people with whom you interact.

I think of this as a kind of process of moving outside of yourself and looking upon yourself as if you were a bush in a great garden of other human beings. And you kind of prune yourself bit by bit, cutting off components of who you are so that you fit in better with the rest of the garden, so that the whole think makes a nicer more pleasant overall image. And everyone else is doing the same so that in the end you have a nice orderly garden of plants all growing cleanly within the confines of their expected places. The only thing is, I can’t help but wonder at all the pieces of self people had to discard in order to get there.

And I see that starting to happen on the internet too. People just keep getting smaller and smaller. Even as technology enhances to allow people to share more and more they are also becoming more and more careful about who sees what and when. People are starting to be greatly concerned about how others are perceiving their online persona. And as a result when in doubt they simply choose to leave data out of the databases that house the online reflection of themselves or even just opt out of the process of posting any information about themselves altogether. And so their online presence grows smaller and smaller, less and less. The internet you becomes less and less you altogether, and more of a shell of the few most pleasant details of yourself that you wouldn’t mind anyone learning.

Whatever the benefits I think this cost is too great. It detracts from the extraordinary capacity of the internet to unify us as a people by exposing how fundamentally similar we all are in the areas that really matter. The internet could turn out to be just a mirror image reflection of the real world where everyone perpetually insulates themselves in order to be able to carefully control how others perceive them, or it could become something more. Something unique. A world in which people just are who they are and don’t give a damn about what anyone who happens by happens to think.

I want the internet to be this way so more and more I try to be less secretive on the internet. More and more I try not to care about who is perceiving what about me and what the might think and why they might think it. In the real world too, I’ve always tried to empty my mind of concerns of conformity and concern about how others think. I fail miserably of course. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of letting yourself shrink to fit in, and so much easier to let yourself be less than deal with the consequences of having everyone else know that you are more. Still, I feel it is worth the effort and I’ll never stop.

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As an aside it occurs to me that a truly anonymous internet would really create a unique instance where people could for the most part preserve their perception management in the offline world while still being able to be virtually completely revealing in the online world. Just as long as a person doesn’t reveal information that would enable them to be identified there would never be any consequences of what they said on their real life persona. No one could deny you a job for example because of something you wrote on your blog, or if you are a politican you couldn’t get in trouble with your constituents  over something on your myspace.

Indeed in a truly anonymous internet, even breaches of personal security do not necessarily have long term consequences provided you can find out about it. If you accidentally reveal your home address for online identity A, you can simply create an online identity B which no one can ever link to A to figure out that B’s address is also A’s.

Better yet have an anonymous internet with a lousy memory too. So that personal identity A’s revelation of his or her address disappears after a couple of weeks or maybe even days never to be seen again unless the controller of personal identity A and B decides that it is something important worth keeping. And of course said controller can at any time change their mind and *permanently* erase wherever they asserted their address and that change would be propagated throughout the entire network.

But alas all that’s just random wishful thinking. I doubt we will ever be free of the cursed IP addresses that plague our online lives.

Though when we write we write usually as if we are certain about the things we write, I’m pretty sure that those of us who write the most, understand the least about the world. Writing is for us a struggle to try and put into words and create some order for all the many many things that don’t make any sense to us.

Like me. I feel I don’t understand anything. But some days I feel as if it all makes even less sense than others. And sometimes my understanding is so lacking that I’m not even aware of the thing that I’m not understanding for some time until some realization comes to me, and then it all makes even less sense.

So all I do is keep on writing and  hoping some sort of truth can arise from my mind and be committed to text in the fleeting instance before I forget it.

But why did I ever think that stringing together words in arbitrary order would enable understanding?

Individuals making decisions on their own have a pretty rough go of it. You have to weigh the options, deal with gaps in information, uknowns, uncertainties. You have to take the time to research, consider carefully what their own expectations and desires are.  You have to be prepared to accept the consequences of your choices and to
deal with the impact your choice will have on your subsequent choices.  It’s a lot of work. It’s hard. And you only have your own knowledge and abilities to rely upon. If you make the wrong decision it is entirely on you.

To mitigate some of the difficulties of this process, individuals join up with other individuals to make decisions for the group. The logic behind this is that each individual in the group can contribute their own insight and information, can share the burden of applying their mental energy to research and examination, and each can benefit from the consequences of choosing together. Admittedly you have to deal with the difficulties of having two or more sets of desires and expectations to deal with but that it is a small price to pay for the increased labor and knowledge you have available to apply. Each individual deals with the consequences of his or her choices on his or her own even when they are a part of a group, so that aspect of the equation is a wash.

But are there difficulties that arise when decisions are made as a group that do not exist when individuals make decisions on their own?

Absolutely. And they all boil down to one thing. Ego.

When groups interact, most individuals need to feel as if they are a significant part of the decision making process. Individuals within groups don’t generally need to feel as if they are providing a majority of the effort toward making the decision or even an equal proportion to all other members of the group, but they do generally need to feel as if they are relevant, as if they are contributing their fair share.

When decisions are made and individuals don’t feel as if they had any say in the outcome, as if the decisions were simply made for them, it hurts their pride. It lessens them. It makes them feel as if they have less autonomy as if they are less real. They feel, generally, that it is unjust for them to not have a say.  And sometimes they start to feel resentful toward the entities who made the decision and took away their sense of self.

Now the interesting thing is that this is true even when the decision that is being made is in fact trivial, but it impacts the group. Any individual in the group who is rational could make the decision and make the correct choice that benefits the entire group, but if any of the individuals goes ahead and does that it will generally create great strife within the group. Individuals who were left out or not consulted will feel hurt and possibly resentful. Hence many times co-equal members of a group learn to either delegate responsibility in front of the entire group, thus turning group decisions into indivdiual decisions, or to bring up decisions to the entire group even the most mundane. This may well seem like a waste of time, but it is an effective means of keeping the group cohesive and functioning.

I don’t know that there is anyone who doesn’t have a little bit of this tendency to want to make decisions for themselves. Everyone tends to get hurt a little when their agency is taken away by someone else even if that entity is acting in their own best interest.  But the extent to which choices made for someone who is a part of a group, damages their pride depends particularly on the individual, just as the extent to which someone is inclined to make choices for others in a group depends on the individual. In my observation, those who are naturally impatient tend to be more inclined to make decisions for others, especially the decisions they deem trivial or obvious. Those who are more naturally stubborn will tend to object more to not being consulted on decisions regardless of their level of triviality.  It is of course quite possible to be both stubborn and impatient. And I think most people pretty much are a little of both.

For me in particularly, my stubborness far exceeds my impatience. So there is nothing more likely to drive up my ire make me angry or hold a grudge than to have someone else make a decision that effects me without consulting me, or to presume that I wouldn’t want to have a say or wouldn’t care what choices are made provided they are good choices. I want to be consulted even when it is a trivial thing for which the correct answer is apparent. I’d rather be convinced of the correct choice than to have that choice be made for me. And the worst would be if the choice was never even brought to my atention, made for me without me even knowing it was happening or that there was even a choice to be made. That kind of a thing would upset me and I’d find it hard to let it go even if in the end I came to recognize and agree with all of the reasons for which the choice was made.

On the other hand when interacting with others, I don’t tend to rush to decision either. I don’t try to make choices for other people, unless the choice is extremely, extremely trivial. At least I don’t think I do. Generally, it is often in the back of my mind that if I choose this or that and my choice effects others, then those others should get a say in it, or otherwise they will feel exactly as I feel when choice is taken out of my hands: hurt and angry.

Of course some of this hurt and anger, though natural, is quite irrational. We should of course endeavor to be more forgiving of the tendency in others to choose for us at least whenever we know that they are acting out of our shared interests. If of course the decisions are secretly or subconsciously being made for us for selfish reasons that are not in our best interests then that of course is another matter. In those cases the question of whether we forgive or speak up about it and try to expose the less than altruistic motives that lie beneathe is going to be a matter of circumstances and a personal choice that might sometimes be rather difficult to make. In any case for most trivial matters we should try at least to keep an open mind.

On the other hand we should also be cognizant of our responsibility as part of a group to be responsible for putting our faith in the group for decision making. We should be aware of the harm we may well cause when we take decisions into our own hands and the disruption we may cause. We also have to be self-reflective enough to try and understand when it is that we might be subconsciously furthering an ends of our own desire that may or may not truly be in the best interest of the group. It is very very easy to make the mistake of thinking that you reasoned that such and such a choice would yield the best outcome for the group when in fact your reasoning was only sufficient to prove that the decision would yield the best outcome for yourself. Others in the group may well have interests that are counter to your expectations of those interests. So we have to try at least to remember to bring decisions to the group decision making process to the extent that we are able to do so and where it makes sense to do so. Or at least try to understand the expectations and feelings of other members of the group even over matters that don’t seem to matter that much to us.

So basically what I am saying is making decisions within a group can be every bit as big a pain in the arse as making decisions as individuals, and sometimes even more so. The complications that arise from being responsible to some extent or another for the reactions and expectations and impacts of decisions upon others can make the meta-interaction surrounding a choice quite a complex scenario that can be a challenge to navigate. It’s worth the challenge and difficulty though for one very simple reason. Paricipant groups that work, overall, tend to make better decisions than individuals.

I would totally trade my laptop for one of these. I don’t know why they think this would only appeal to children:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=rfV7hZGyGlk

“He claimed that there was no greater natural advantage in life than having an enemy overestimate your faults, unless it was to have a friend underestimate your virtues.”

First let me say that in the below I am concerned primarily with “taste” as it refers to opinions about artistic works. I am not talking about “taste” as it refers to actual physical sensations such as the taste of “food” or something which is probably much easier to objectify.

The other day I noted that on this site where one can rate the movies one has seen that I had rated an inordinate number of movies highly. You’d think that you’d end up with some sort of even distribution of ratings, but for me at least I found very few movies that I rated at the 1 or 2 star level whereas there were an enormous number rated at the 4 and 5 star level.  More precisely when I did the count it was:

72 5 stars
81 4 stars
28 3 stars
6 2 stars
5 1 star

The site just pops up random movies to me and I rate the ones I’ve seen so it isn’t like I was looking for my favorite films so I could rate them. The site defines 3 stars as “I liked it” and 2 stars as “I didn’t like it” and so on from there. So basically what this means is that I like pretty much everything. Really. There is virtually no story at all that I don’t like, and most I really like  or even love. Even some of the ones I rated low I don’t think I really disliked but since the site has a recommendation feature I rated some with 2 stars just because I didn’t want the site to recommend anything like that to me in the future. Really looking over the list, only 4 can I honestly say I actively disliked and feel passionately about it.

My experience with similar systems for rating books or anime or video games is pretty much the same. I find myself largely positive about all of the works of art I have experienced from the most minor to the most extreme. Very little that I have seen or experienced really bothers me.

Perhaps this is somewhat predictable since most people I think will tend toward experiencing the things that they know they will enjoy and will stay away from things that they are likely to dislike. But is that really the reason?  Or am I inordinately inclined to like things others would not. Perhaps the truth is that the things I choose to experience or stay away from are arbitrary decisions and that had I experienced the things I thought I would dislike I would find myself liking them after all. And indeed there is evidence for this as virtually every time I go outside of my comfort zone and experience a work of art that is unusual for me that someone recommended I find myself liking it a great deal. Basically I often declare that pretty much anything with a story, I suspect I will like.

So then where does the concept of taste come from? Is it simply that I have been born a person inherently lacking in it?  Or is it rather that the concept of taste is a kind of mass delusion, much like fandom is a mass delusion. There’s no reason for you to root for the Sports teams of the cities near where you live or for any other sports team unless you happen to know someone on the team or directly connected to the team and are acting in support of that person. The rest is just a delusional attitude that people adopt because it passes the time and because it makes social interactions easier and more pleasant. So too with other fandoms and most of the others are even less practical since fandom for a certain movie star or whatever doesn’t really provide any benefit whereas getting a city behind a sports team may provide financial benefits to the city and the region or even foster greater levels of cooperation amongst its citizens. It’s still delusional though.

Taste is likewise I think. By being “discerning” you distinguish yourself from others which creates a point of conversation a thing that can be discussed. You can even make a living out of it, if you con enough people into thinking your taste is somehow more “refined” than others. Hence the critics fill their writings with flower language and pointless references to other works in order to make it seem as if they are smarter and more cultured than the rest of us poor slobs.

More naturally though I think the few real distinctions in taste arise from our life experiences. If you had a negative experience and some movie happens to show the same experience and place the blame entirely upon the character representative of you well then you aren’t likely to like that movie very much are you? Similarly if you are a fan of a comic book series and a movie professes to be a realization of that comic book series but turns out to be radically different, and ruins the characters you like and likewise changes things then you aren’t likely to like that movie either. 

It can go the other way too. Some experience you may have had may well be so perfectly captured by a film that it resonates with you. Some movie might express a message that you need to hear right now and it might change your life. As a result of such an experience you may find yourself loving those movies and thinking they are masterpieces regardless of what other people say.

I think this is a large part of why we even bother to discuss works of art with one another besides just the need to fill the empty silences. We are often looking for clues into each other’s nature. We talk about things just in the hopes of finding out what kinds of experiences we each have had that make us who we are. A movie or a book can be a window into discussing deeper matters that people care about a lot more but don’t know how to bring up.

But for a vast majority of artistic works you experience, you probably won’t have any substantive connections with the work. Mostly they’re just stories and you can choose to hate or love them or not care about them at all on a whim. And I think that under ordinary circumstances most of us will just look for the good in the experience and say that we “liked” it. This is natural since it makes us feel better about having spent the time to experience the thing. If we think about the bad aspects of an experience we’d have to say we “disliked” it and then we’d have to wonder about why we bothered to experience it in the first place.  Then again, you might be a person who naturally just loves the act of criticizing things. In that case then you can dislike anything and everything if you want because you’ll feel the experience is worth while since you get to take pleasure in finding the flaws and weak points. I think that in some ways I have that tendency too. Indeed I think it is an attitude cultivated in academia. There are strong incentives in academia for being a skilled and brutal critic.

Then again, there’s also the social factor.  People tend to like things that the people they interact with like. And they tend to dislike things that the people they interact with dislike. So generally it almost seems like a game of race to an opinion. Whoever comes up with a solid opinion about a work of art first becomes the trend setter and all of the rest in the group follow suit adopting the same opinion. Sometimes you hit an individual dissenting voice but that doesn’t disrupt the interaction because that dissent can be incorporated easily into the overarching narrative. Every group has a crazy person who disagrees with the norm. Making fun of that person’s opinion on this particular work of art or trying to understand it becomes a valuable point of conversation for the group. Still by and large on most works of art the group will agree.

Of course if none of these things were true, and people were simply perfect evaluators and perfectly honest evaluators based on some inexplicable internal capacity called “taste”, I wonder if the end results would look pretty much the same?