Stereotypes in Narrative Art

Recently watched one of those shows in which four critics - it's always four - debate the quality of new books. Critic A said that a character in the novel in question was clichéd. No, said critic B, such women really exist!

Sigh. First, it would be a strange complaint about a fiction book to say something's not realistic. Second, a cliché is but a stereotype, and the existence of a stereotype does not mean it's not true. If anything, the opposite is the case.

Stereotypes in literature and other forms of narrative art can be a problem for a different reason: they're not cognitively challenging, allowing the mind to quickly call up information about the character, because it has this information stored and connected to the characteristics you're given. If your mind's in the mood for a bit of a challenge, it's likely to be bored by cut-out characters. But the unchallenging nature of clichéd characters can also be a virtue: It allows the storyteller to quickly dispense information.

Hence, a rule of thumb for telling stories: If the character's only there for performing a function, you might want to reach for the cliché. Minimum fuss for the reader, info received, move on to the important stuff. On the other hand, if the character's a main attraction of the story, you want to make the character somewhat interesting, hence somewhat challenging, hence somewhat non-clichéd. Of course, another aspect is your intended audience. It's no coincidence that children's TV shows feature very bland characters, and that the villains are particularly bland. Often, the villains are not themselves meant to be interesting, their only function is to act as adversaries and allow the heroes to defeat them.

It seems all of this is but a special case of a more general rule. After all, the same argument has been made with respect to clichéd metaphors.

So That's the Way Scholars of Literature Write These Days

I went over to Google Scholar to test my hypothesis that there must be some scholarship on Dan Brown by now. And indeed there is. Among the first hits is an article by Victoria Nelson entitled "Faux Catholic: A Gothic Subgenre from Monk Lewis to Dan Brown", published in a cultural studies journal called boundary 2 (No, I don't know what boundary 1 is). It begins thus:

We’ve seen it on the big screen any number of times: the possessed woman writhing, screaming, face morphing (courtesy of computer-generated imagery) into a hideous leer as despairing relatives edge prudently away from the imminent prospect of projectile vomiting.

Demon possession, open-and-shut case. Who you gonna call?

Not your rabbi, imam, or Methodist minister. No, you want that Roman Catholic priest with his collar, cross, holy water, and Vulgate Bible—all the papist trappings that Protestant Americans shun in real life but absolutely demand for a convincing on-screen exorcism. A mild-mannered Episcopal reverend, a Southern Baptist preacher in a Men’s Wearhouse suit reciting the Lord’s Prayer in English over that tormented soul? I don’t think so.

If you think the writing style is an ironic take on pop culture, you're mistaken. The topic of Dan Brown is introduced with the phrase, "Looming over it all like the proverbial nine-hundred-pound gorilla is the Dan Brown phenomenon." And if you think that's a parody as well, this time of Brown's writing style in particular, I disagree. Brown would have written something like, "Nine-hundred-pound gorilla Dan Brown phenomenon was looming over it all, his eyes glowing like icicles in the mist."

It's been a while since I've read CultStud, but I don't remember authors aiming to write like sixteen-year-olds. But this just seems to be Mrs. Nelson's style. And, guess what? She teaches creative writing of all disciplines. Here's the somewhat unsettling opening bit from her teaching philosophy: "Teaching writing at the MFA level for me is an empathic act that amounts to entering my students’ imaginations".

Um, thanks, I'd rather not.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 102

1. The experiment Milgram chose not to publish (Tom Bartlett/Gina Perry) (via)

2. Disagreement on the bellicosity of stateless societies (Larry Arnhart)

3. Velvet glove, iron fist, or: How government force works. (Bryan Caplan)

4. The "forced rider problem" and disutility from "public goods" (Eric Crampton). Useful concept!

5. The view that TV shapes people's thinking by not mentioning aspects of topics (Steve Sailer/NOTA)

6. Why people dislike photos of themselves: Mirrors meet the mere exposure effect (Robert T. Gonzales). But don't miss the link in the last paragraph.

7. 26 great words from the OED (Carolyn Kellogg/Ammon Shea)

8. Differences in preferences for competitiveness as an explanation of the male-female wage gap (John List and Uri Gneezy)

9. "This must be the strangest publicity still ever taken." (Sherbrooke)

10. Three by Tim Harford: Why pro-free-market arguments don't work well for finance; banks are relying less on leverage; how to use e-mail efficiently at work.

11. Paging Quetelet: Why song lenghts are not normally distributed (Gabriel Rossman) (via)

12. People respond to incentives, giving to the poor edition (Eric Crampton/Jillian Keenan)

13. Feelings of extreme bliss produced by targeted brain stimulation (Christian Jarrett/Fabienne Picard, Didier Scavarda, and Fabrice Bartolomei). Gimme, gimme, gimme!

14. Why wages don't fall during recessions (Bryan Caplan/Truman Bewley)

15. How to make voters better informed (Bryan Caplan)

16. Another bonkers graphic presented by Kaiser Fung.

17. The impact on wages of: height; smoking; testosterone (Economic Logician/Petri Böckerman and Jari Vainiomäki/Julie Hotchkiss and Melinda Pitts/Anne Gielen, Jessica Holmes and Caitlin Myers).

Pebbles, Vol. 44

1. When absence of evidence is evidence of absence (xkcd)

2. An attempt to answer the question, "What were Stanley Kubrick's favourite films?" (Nick Wrigley)

3. One more time: Changing football coaches seems to make no sense (on average, within the observed range) (Hannah Barnes)

4. Where does the phrase "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords" come from?

5. Researching the effect of stop-and-frisk is really hard. (Benjamin Wallace-Wells)

6. Andrew Gelman on Axelrod's interpretive overreach concerning trench warfare and the multiple comparisons problem and expressing uncertainty.

7. Who guards the guardians? Cameras could. (Randall Stross)

8. "Slot machine sounds can manipulate players, researchers say" (Meerie Kim)

Around the Blogs, Vol. 92

1. Their behaviour suggests that hardcore libertarians are actually consequentialists. (Eric Crampton)

2. When Will Wilkinson's analytical mind and the topic of writing fiction meet, something interesting is bound to happen. And it does. (via)

3. Using science to beat procrastination. (lukeprog) (via)

4. Jim Manzi explains banking regulation in a way that I can understand.

5. The argument that it's the long-run effects of minimum wage laws that really count (Isaac Sorkin) (via)

6. "Unpaid Internships Have Officially Jumped the Shark" (Paul Gowder)

Differences: Smallness and Closeness

When you look out into the distance, the distances between nearby objects are magnified relative to the distance between objects that are further away. Strangely enough, this is a good model for how the psyche works more generally; people are well aware of differences between "objects" that are "close". This way of dealing with limited cognitive differences is useful. For example, it is more important for you to understand the differences in character between your two brothers than it is for your best friend; it is more important for a New Yorker to know the difference between the North and South Bronx than it is for a Bostoner, and so forth. Also, knowing about the differences between the North and South Bronx is easier when you live in New York. That is, motivation and opportunity, the two horsemen of psychology, are at work again.

Keeping this in mind helps you avoid violations of other people's vanity. Many people have pointed to photos claiming that the person pictured "looks like you"; they were always wrong. Likewise, I once talked to a Frisian who declared that everything south of the river Elbe is Southern Germany, but I can assure you that residents of Cologne don't think they reside in the same corner of the country as Bavarians, and they don't like being told otherwise.

This is sometimes referred to as the vanity, or narcissism, of small differences, but perhaps it is not only the smallness of the differences that counts, but also the fact that differences which are nearby are easier to see. Your typical socialist will see Rothbard and Friedman as more or less interchangeable, but if you've actually read them, it's genuinely easy to point out differences between the two, not least because Rothbard spends a considerable portion of his time pissing in the general direction of Friedman. Which may well be an instance of the narcissism of small differences.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 90

The next few Fridays will bring another playlist, so let's empty out the Around the Blogs folder:

1. Do high wages drive economic growth? (Tim Harford)

2. Attempts to answer the questions, "What is science?" and "What is love?", collected by Maria Popova.

3. How women think about love. (Penelope Trunk)

4. Let's Potato (Andrew Hammel and his brother).

5. "Infographic Names 21 Emotions with No English Word Equivalents" (Erin McCarthy) (via). Large version of graph here. "Saudade" seems especially useful.

6. "Prosecutors are Demi-Gods in the United States" (Andrew Hammel)

7. I want that drug! (Jon M)

Attention English Speakers! New Auto-antonym Spotted!

If Andrew Perrin's post is anything to go by, criticizing a discipline for its low intellectual standards may now be referred to as a manifestation of "anti-intellectualism". Also, did you know that "fire brigade" once referred to an organization responsible for extinguishing fires?

Clash of the Titans: Bayesian Reasoning vs. the Presumption of Innocence

Here's another one of those exchanges you find over and over again in blog comments threads. Person A states something like, X has been accused of rape. Rapist! Person B says, What about the presumption of innocence? Person A: That's for courts. I'll make up my own mind.


Actually, there's a more sophisticated version of that last argument: Bayesian reasoning. For example, assuming that being accused of rape is actually correlated with being a rapist (which I'm pretty sure is true), a person's being accused of being a rapist should make you adjust your estimate of his being a rapist upwards. It's not clear by how much (because the quality of the available data is too low). It might at least seem defensible to say an accusation is good enough evidence to push you over the threshold beyond which you're comfortable saying that X is a rapist.


Presumption of innocence good. Bayesian reasoning also good. What now?


The paradox (if you forgive my lax use of the term) is resolved once you realize that the presumption of innocence is a prescription regarding the treatment of an accused person. The result of Bayesian reasoning is descriptive; a probability estimate. This took me a surprisingly long time to realize, probably because the terms presumption of innocence and it's German equivalent, the Unschuldsvermutung don't exactly go out of their way to let you know they're prescriptions. In fact, they sound a lot like probability estimates.


Does it follow that the presumption of innocence is for courts only? Not in my book. Before you call someone a rapist in public you should want to be really sure he actually is. In fact, the quality of discourse in blog comments sections and elsewhere would be much improved if people assumed less about what other people think or do and stuck more to what people actually said.

Around the Blogs, Vol. 79: No Bunnies, Eggs, or Jesus

1. Appearing less reasonable than you are (Jeff Ely) (via)

2. Excerpts from Jonathan Haidt's new book, provided by Arnold Kling

3. What makes phrases memorable? (Andy McKenzie/Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al.)

How "Social Distance" Is Misleading

Models are wrong because they abstract away from reality. If they didn't they wouldn't be models, but the actual things. They can be useful because they describe some properties of the real things accurately enough. There are also properties of the real things they don't describe accurately enough. The trick is to notice when you leave the realm in which the correspondence of the model and reality is high. This isn't all that easy because you're thinking not in terms of reality, but in terms of the model.

Case in point: For some reason that's not entirely clear to me, people find it useful to think about social relationships as though they were thinking about geography: "I'm closer to Timmy than I am to Tommy." The distance metaphor breaks down once you enter the realm of social relationships involving more than two persons: The geographical distance from A to C cannot be larger than the sum of the geographical distances from A to B and B to C. This is not true, however, for social "distances". Failure to understand this is the source of much misunderstanding.

Operation Blank Slate, 2011 Edition

As usual around this time of year, a list of links I was going to comment on here but didn't (in the order in which I bookmarked them). Lots of interesting stuff, as well as lots of stuff I hardly remember.

• Robin Hanson: Control Variables Avoid Bias
• Tino Sanandaji: The Spirit Level Is Junk Science
• Various: When Science Goes Psychic
• Bryan Caplan: The Overlords of Immigration
• Daniel Read et al.: Mixing Virtue and Vice: Combining the Immediacy Effect and the Diversification Heuristic (pdf)
• Eric Barker/Francesca Gino & Francis J. Flynn: Are the Best Gifts Surprises or Things the Recipient Specifically Asks for?
• Fabio Rojas/Duncan Watts: Duncan Watts in Scientific American
• Angela Lee Duckworth et al.: Role of Test Motivation in Intelligence Testing
• Statsquatch: A bad apple in Duckworth's IQ-Motivation meta-analysis?
• Lovisa Stannow: Rape Factories
• Mark Liberman: Ask Language Log: One = Only One?
• Eric Crampton: Rationality and Economists
• Andrew Potter: Art, Alcoholism, Amy Winehouse
• Steve Hsu: Heritability 2.0
• Will Wilkinson: What's the Big Idea?
• Eduardo Bonilla-Silva: The Linguistics of Color Blind Racism: How to Talk Nasty about Blacks without Sounding “Racist” (pdf)
• Charles Kurzman: Why Is It So Hard to Find a Suicide Bomber These Days?
• Arnold Kling: Act Libertarianism and Rule Libertarianism
• Bits & Pieces: What Is Something You Realized Embarrassingly Late in Your Life?
• Will Wilkinson: Did Steve Jobs Give Good Advice?
• Seth Roberts: Grandmother Knows Best about Crohn's Disease
• Ross Douthat: Democracy's Collateral Damage
• Sven Wilson: Cheap Sex as Collective Action Failure
• Dr. Φ: Corporations Will Do Anything for Profit (as Long as It's Bad)
• Ann Althouse: System One and System Two: The Brain's "Two Independent Systems for Organizing Knowledge"
• Will Wilkinson: Success as Pollution: Layard Meets Coase
• Bryan Caplan: Usually Look on the Bright Side of Life
• Matt: More Linky, Less Thinky: Special Edition on Income Inequality

Can You Vent Your Anger? Why Psychologists and Laypersons Disagree

When you pick up a book on the psychology of aggression - one informed by actual research, not some Freudian claptrap - it is going to tell you that you can't vent your anger. Yet many laypersons are going to tell you that you can. Is it just because laypersons fail to understand counterfactuals or can't randomize? I think not.

I think the disagreement stems simply from semantic confusion. Psychologists have found that people who are made angry and then given an opportunity to vent their anger do not show less aggression than people who are made angry and are then put into some control condition in which they cannot vent their anger. Laypersons who say that they can vent their anger mean that after venting they feel better because the unpleasant feeling that comes with unvented anger is reduced. In other words, psychologists and laypersons are talking about different dependent variables.

Not a John Holmes Biography

I thought that the distinction of The Worst Translation of an English Book Title into German would forever belong to the person that had the splendid idea to translate Sense and Sensibility as Sinn und Sinnlichkeit. The latter's most obvious translation back into English would be Meaning and Sensuality. Other back-translations would also be possible, but an argument about that would presuppose an idea about what the person responsible had in mind when he or she came up with that one. Other than sound, I mean.

But I have now learned that the German publishers of Chris Anderson's The Long Tail had the good sense to keep the original title and add, as a literal German translation, Der lange Schwanz (as well as two additional subtitles). That translation is not, strictly speaking, wrong, but at least in the general readers that the book is aimed at it is bound to conjure up the image of the gentleman I mention in this post's title.

If we broaden the competition to any medium, however, that prize is still held by the German distributors of the film Mo' Money.

Capitalists and Capitalism (from the archives of Language Isn't Logical)

As Bryan Caplan once said, the reason that economists quote Adam Smith on the baker, butcher and brewer over and over again is that people don't get it. This inability to understand the point is not all that surprising: one person's self-interest bringing about another's welfare is counterintuitive, probably because in many situations one person's self-interest brings about another person's misery.

Likewise, people fond of market solutions often complain that others think they (the people fond of market solutions) are big fans of big business, which they're typically not. Also, it is commonly believed that businessmen and -women are huge supporters of the free market; common observation suggests that instead they like lots of protection for themselves (which is just what you would expect if you assumed they act out of rational self-interest). I just developed a very simple hypothesis about why this belief is so common when it is so obviously false. I did so while reading a post by Shamus Khan. I'll get back to the point after a short detour.

Khan isn't happy about the recent reverence extendet to Steve Jobs. When that's the general direction your post is going, I'm almost certain to like it, but of course Khan, a U.S. conservative's caricature of a lefty, manages to blow it. Khan has multifaceted beef with Jobs, but most of it is related to manufacturing:

Manufacturing was exported to China, where minimal worker and environmental regulations meant that production processes could employ techniques that were effectively sweatshop-like and at times deployed child labor — leading to the mass suicides and suicide attempts within workplaces as well as the unnecessary poisoning of countless workers. And Apple has had one of the worst environmental records — both in terms of the production process and their products themselves.

Some of the worker poisonings were the product of a decision to use N-hexane instead of alcohol to clean products in the production process. While alcohol is relatively safe, N-hexane is known to damage the central nervous system. But it’s a faster cleaning process. So Jobs and those at Apple decided to use it. Long before these poisonings were made public, Jobs was made aware of them. And he didn’t really care until it became a PR problem. The same can be said of the environmental problems of the production process and the products themselves.

Does Khan offer good reasons for not buying Apple products? Well, I, for one, don't have to think about this, because I'm not considering buying any. Nor have I ever. You would think the same is true of Khan. Is it?

I presently own three Macs and an iPhone (I’m actually on my 3rd such phone, and have owned other Macs in the past). I bought my mother an iPad2 for her birthday this year.

Which leads me to conclude that maybe Khan doesn't care all that much about the exploited Chinese workers after all. It's called "revealed preferences".

As for the main point, consider this bit:

He [Jobs] was also a capitalist, par excellence.

Marx called the capitalists capitalists (Kapitalisten) as they were the ones who had and used the capital. He called capitalism capitalism (Kapitalismus) because in this mode of organizing the economy, capital is the most important resource (at least that's what Marx thought). That both makes sense. But it can easily lead to misunderstandings. Think about it:

Socialists: those who like socialism
Racists: those who like racism
Segregationists: those who like segregation
Capitalists: HONK!

Contra Marx*, symbols matter. Now, it's not as though I think this is the only reason for the common fallacy of thinking that entrepreneurs like free markets and free marketers like entrepreneurs, but I do submit it makes a nontrivial contribution.

_____
*Or perhaps that's just my simplified understanding of Marx's views? My knowledge of his work is not deep enough to know for sure.

A Cloud on Which You Catch No Cough

Eric Crampton links to an article by David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart on the origins of the phrase "the dismal science" to describe economics. That's a question I had wondered about on and off, but not enough to spend 15 minutes with Google to come up with an answer. Anyway, according to Levy and Peart, the phrase has nothing to do with Thomas Malthus's "gloomy predictions" (as is popularly believed, apparently), but was coined by Thomas Carlyle in reaction to economists' view that Africans were not inferior, a hypothesis contrary to the one held by Carlyle.

Now, if that's right, one might wonder why such a tainted phrase is so immensely popular, especially on the left. But then, many Germans like "quoting" Churchill's ostensible insight "I don't believe any statistic that I have not fabricated myself", despite the phrase probably having been put in Churchill's mouth by the Nazis (link in German). People don't know about these things.

What I find more surprising is the phrase's popularity despite its lack of qualities that one might think make for a popular phrase, such as wit, insight or alliterations. What's more, it often doesn't seem to fit particularly well. While "dismal" is just the word to describe an Introduction to Macroeconomics lecture, the use in other contexts often seems a little laboured. Economists failed to predict the housing bust? Dismal! Lab experiments falsify Savage axioms? Dismal! Econ students can't get laid? Dismal! That poor adjective is allocated more work than it was cut out for.

We clearly need more derogatory terms for economics. I hence propose that economics is Farting by Numbers. While I'm at it, sociology is Compassion with Significance Tests and Ethnology is Tourismplus. Spread the word, oh readers! Or come up with your own. It's not that hard.

Type I and Type II Errors: A Trick to Remember Which Is Which

In statistics, a type I error is when you reject the null hypothesis when you should not; a type II error is when you accept the null hypothesis when you should not**. No owner of a normal brain can remember which is which without problems. Ethan Fosse posts a mnemonic which is supposed to help, but it doesn't work for me. Neither do any of the alternatives suggested in the comments. So I came up with my own. Here it comes.

The null hypothesis is often represented as H₀.* Although mathematicians may disagree, where I live 0 is an even number, as evidenced by the fact that it is both preceded and followed by an odd number. Even numbers go together well. An even number and an odd number do not go together well. Hence the null hypothesis (even) is rejected by the type I error (odd), but accepted by the type II error (even).**

Yes?
______
*Also, "null" means "zero" in German, but you don't really need that.
**Added: O.k., o.k., you don't actually accept the null, you just fail to reject it.

A Proposal to Make the Internet a Friendlier Place by a Tiny Amount

It might be a strange notion for most readers of this blog, but there are boatloads people in the society you live in that have never read a an academic text. I meet quite a few of these people and can assure you that there are even those who don't have a clear idea of what a footnote is (Michael Jackson, anyone?). A feature of such academic texts that must seem particularly bewildering to people who encounter it for the first time is this:

[sic]

Or even:

[sic]

As you know, "sic" is Latin and means, roughly, "exactly like this"; it is used to indicate that the funny spelling or grammar is the fault of the quoted, not the quoting, author.

For a long time it has also been used in less formal texts as the learned version of the exclamation mark, e.g.:

He claimed to have slept with 10,000 women [sic].

Authors may also use it to signal that their standards are higher than other people's. Here's David Henderson quoting his commenter Pat:

Just because some immigrant wants more freedom than they [sic] have in their awful country doesn't mean they [sic] won't vote to make our system less free.

A variant of this may be observed when Brits use "[sic]" to express their dislike of American English or vice versa, as in

The American stated that "the behavior [sic] of soccer [sic] fans certainly must reduce the market value of the Liverpool FC franchise [sic]."

But even when used in the standard way, the use of "[sic]" when quoting contemporary texts has the side effect of drawing the attention to the fact that the quoted author made a mistake which the quoting author spotted.

I therefore suggest that "[sic]" not be used when it is obvious that the quote was inserted by means of copy & paste rather than typing up, because in this case it's bloody obvious that the mistake was the original author's. New technologies sometimes call for new norms.

(Added before publication: Having finished the text above I read through the comments at Henderson's post linked to above and found that commenter liberty had made pretty much the same point, which Henderson had conceded. Even so, worth making again. Especially since I've already written the post. These things don't write themselves, y'know?)

Lennon Was Wrong

Look:


That's from Ngram, the tool that searches for words in books archived in Google Books. I predict it's going to be a runaway success because it provides a tool of quantitative social research for the very lazy person. Here's a more sociolinguistic example:


(Note, however, that the denominator for the two is different. For "Negro" it is all single words, for "African American" all two-word combinations.)

Here are two from the German corpus, starting with a surprise result (I would have expected more Hitler and less Brandt):




Added: Serious discussion of the program's shortcomings at LanguageLog, including in the comments.

The Argument from Shakespeare

The setting: A pub somewhere in England. Saturday, 3.20 p.m. On the telly: Chelsea v Arsenal.

Bloke 1: Boy, this must be one of the best soccer matches I've seen in years!

Bloke 2: Football! The game is called football!

Bloke 1: Excuse me, Shakespeare used soccer in Troilus and Cressida, act III, scence i.

Bloke 2: Oh . . . Can I buy you a pint?

When the sun set on the time we now call the Middle Ages, scholars started to agree that if you wanted to make an argument, it was not quite good enough to point out that Aristotle said so, too; you had to offer a little more. When it comes to arguments about language, the English still live in the Dark Ages: Just point out that Shakespeare did X and you have proven that X cannot be criticized by any sane person. This is particularly funny because these arguments - although they are too often couched in the language of right and wrong - are usually arguments about different views about aesthetics, which have no correct answer. E.g., this clip, which everybody but me seems to love and which, on top of using the argument from Shakespeare, caters to exactly the feelings of smug superiority it purports to criticize.