God’s blessings to you on this the twenty first day of February in the year of our Lord’s incarnation 2017.

I missed something like four days in a row now. Argh.

I released a video at lunchtime today about a debate challenge I received. It was ridiculous and I think the British expression is that I took the piss out of it:

I laughed at it, in any event. I’ve got a video about prayer which is coming out soon so I’m looking forward to that.

And I’m going to try to get back to daily posts here.

Glory to God in the highest.

God’s blessings to you on this the twelfth day of February in the year of our Lord’s incarnation 2017.

I’m traveling right now and in the hotel I was staying in the bed was too soft and the pillow was too hard. I suppose that means that on average I was quite comfortable.

It’s an old joke, but for a reason. Not everything which can be measured tells you anything when you do. That, of  course,  is the role of wisdom. To (among other things) distinguish between the things one should apply statistics to and the things one shouldn’t. Not too long ago I saw a fun rant / tweet storm from Nicholas Nassim Taleb about how Nate Silver’s predictions in the presidential race were junk. He couched it in terms of any model with such a high variance approaches a coin flip, but I prefer to look at it as Mr. Silver modeling an alternate reality. I’m not sure which, but it’s one of:

• Outcome if nothing changes between now and the election
• Outcome if the election were held today. 

 They’re related, of course, but the first is obviously not our world, because things change constantly in our world, especially when two large groups are vying for a prize. The second is obviously not our world because our election has a different date.

And as we’ve seen, these things will have a similar outcome to our world only when they do, and not for any fixed, causal reason. 

In fact, the only real purpose to such public polls and public models is entertainment. A 24 hour news cycle needs far more interesting events to happen than typically do in the real world, so news organizations are forced to do much if not most of their reporting about hypothetical worlds. The big difference is how discreetly they do it.

Glory to God in the highest. 

I’m sorry I didn’t get to it today or yesterday. Things have been extra crazy. One interesting thing, though, is that my wife sprouted an avocado seed (pit) and put the root in a wine bottle filled with water. Curiously, it put the root out for several weeks before it started growing anything in the top. Seemed odd to me with all of the energy in the pit until I realized that no matter how much energy the plant has available, the leaves will need a lot of water or they will dessicate and die because leaves can’t help using water in sunlight. Hence the relatively large root system first. 

Glory to God in the highest. 

God’s Blessings to you on this the fifth day of February in the year of our Lord’s incarnation 2017.

I recorded a video today which I hope to get up about the asymmetry between good and evil. It’s a curious thing which occurred to me recently because some people mistakenly say that we need evil in order to appreciate good. That’s not true, since evil is the privation of good (privation comes from the same root as deprivation; it means that evil is the absence of good where there should be good; evil is like a shadow—it looks like something, but that’s an illusion caused by the things that do exist around it). But there is, therefore, this asymmetry: you can consider good without thinking of evil, because good has a positive existence, but you can’t consider evil without thinking of good, because evil is defined only by where good should be, but isn’t.

Glory to God in the highest.

God’s Blessings to you on this the fourth day of February in the year of our Lord’s incarnation 2017. When I was young, there was a TV show I sometimes watched called Movie Magic. It was about special effects in particular, but it could have been a much more general title, because everything about movies has a certain magic to it.

As I write this, I’m watching the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode for the movie The Dead Talk Back. According to Wikipedia, it was filmed in 1957 but never screened. It eventually was found in a warehouse and went direct-to-video in 1993, and appeared on MST3K a year later. I wouldn’t call it a good movie, but I sometimes put it on in the background while I’m programming because I find it works well for that. (I can only watch movies I’ve seen more than once before while programming or I find them distracting. I never do this with really good movies because I don’t want to ruin my appreciation of them.) It’s a murder mystery, which I love dearly, and all of the production elements were decent but not good. The acting was OK, the cameraman filmed it so the people were reasonably large in the shots, it was lit so that you could see what was being filmed, etc. The story itself is, while not great, at least coherent and the pacing isn’t bad. And I’ve found that this is what really makes for the best MST3K episodes; the underlying episode needs to be relatively watchable. (I say this as someone who owns more than 20 boxed DVD sets of MST3K.) I very rarely re-watch episodes where the underlying movie was unwatchable.

I’m going to write more about this in depth some day, but I think that the basic underlying reason for it is that MST3K is fundamentally most enjoyable to people who are—fundamentally—laughing at themselves by proxy. It’s great to people who intuitively understand the magic of movies, and would love to be a part of it in making a movie (or TV, etc.; same basic thing for my purpose here). Those of us who do understand just how willing we’d be to take short-cuts if it meant the difference between coming in under-budget with a movie, versus going over-budget and having to shut down production with nothing. Like is Plan 9 From Outer Space, if you have everything set up and need to get the shot now or give up because you don’t have the budget for another day’s shooting, who wouldn’t just shrug their shoulders at the wrinkle in the blue sheet used to represent the sky behind the colonel giving the orders to shoot? The set used to represent an airplane’s cockpit is absurd, but it does at least remind one, if only a little, of the cockpit of an airplane, and that’s a lot better than (1) nothing in the form of sitting at a desk in a cafeteria or (2) nothing in the form of no movie. B movies might have as their theme song repeating the phrase “don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good” repeated like a mantra. But of course these aren’t good movies. And that’s unfortunate, but in a sense OK. And that’s why MST3K is so funny. Because it is pointing out these two truths which are hard to hold simultaneously: these aren’t good movies, and all being, as such, is good. Also, they’re not really bad movies. If you want truly bad movies, watch wretched things like The House on the Edge of the Park or Slave of the Cannibal God. I learned early that when you want to watch bad movies to make fun of them with your friends, you need to be very careful, because there’s another barrel buried deep in the ground underneath the barrel that Plan 9 From Outer Space at the bottom of.

Anyway, that juxtaposition of truths which are hard to hold at the same time is perhaps the easiest to notice in movies which aren’t good, but are close to good, hence movies like The Dead Talk Back. But I’ve noticed this in other contexts, too. If you want to make fun of things for humor, don’t look for the worst things there are, because no one can stand them even to laugh at them. Pick things that are nearly good but not quite.

And there are exceptions to the rule about B movies, by the way. Gunslinger was on an MST3K episode, and it was actually a good movie. Low budget, to be sure, but a plot worthy of a greek tragedy and with decent enough acting to make it believable. One of the later scenes involves a man and a woman who’ve fallen in love but are on opposite sides of the law professing their love for each other as they shoot at each other, and when the woman hits the man, she rushes over to cradle him in her arms as he dies (which he does). That’s the thing about fiction; no matter what signifiers of quality it comes with, you can never quite be sure what you’re going to find.

Glory to God in the highest.

God’s blessings to you on this the third day of February in the year of our Lord’s incarnation 2017.

Like a lot of people, I read about the violence used to shut down a talk by Milo Yiannopoulos. And like a lot of people, I’ve seen more than a few instances of left-wingers on twitter applauding this violence or defending the idea of punching people they designate as Nazis. It is upsetting, but I think it is upsetting in disproportion to how significant it really is. There is a great deal of human evil in the world, and while we should do what we can to prevent and counteract it, what we can actually do about almost all the evil in the world is, basically, nothing. This is just common sense; there is no way I can prevent the murder of people I don’t even know in a country I don’t live in; and so it goes for nearly everything.

Of course, newspapers and later TV news specialized in telling me about things I cannot control as if somehow, by knowing about them, I could in fact control them. This is obvious nonsense. In some vague theoretical sense, knowing about some problem in Australia means that I could give up my life in the United States and travel to Australia to right that wrong, except that (1) I probably can’t and (2) I would be committing a much graver injustice against my family by abandoning them than I have any real chance of doing good in Australia. (And apart from that, one may not do evil that good will result. So abandoning my family is right out.) I think that the usual dodge is that I can call my congressman and senators and tell them how important fixing whatever it is that’s going on in Australia is. Except, let us be honest, American congressmen and senators are not going to actually drop their pressing American concerns to—do what? They could declare war on Australia, I suppose. Establishing burdensome trade restrictions which mostly hurt innocent people would also be doable, I suppose. But even there, it would only work if more than one congressman and two senators were in favor of it, and I have even less influence over congress critters I don’t vote for. And what’s extraordinarily true of events in other countries is only marginally less true of events within my own country. Countries are big places, and the United States is one of the bigger countries.

And, in fact, when looked at realistically, my sphere of influence drops off to almost 100% uninfluential pretty rapidly; most of what’s in it are my family, friends, and co-workers. In fact, a cynical man might conclude that this is why Christ talked so much about neighbors and so little about society.

Anyway, there’s another phenomenon I’ve noticed, which is that if you talk with most liberals—or at least when I do, with the ones in my life—they don’t tend to know a lot about the extreme left wingers that I read about a lot. Now, you can call them useful idiots if you like, and there may even be an element of that going on, but at the same time I’m not very familiar with whoever the extremists on my side are supposed to be, such as David Duke, the Westboro Baptist Church, Sean Spencer, etc. It’s not that I literally have no idea who they are (since liberals bring them up all the time) but that I pay no attention to them because they’re minority idiots. And rightly or wrongly, that’s how the liberals in my life tend to view many of the worst leftists. There is an asymmetry, to be sure, because some awful leftists are quite mainstream to the point where it’s impolite to point out how awful they are, but none the less, when it comes to things like punching Nazis, that doesn’t appear to be a mainstream thing. And to be fair there was a bunch of rather shameful celebrating of the guy who punched Spencer—with ritual incantations of “I don’t condone violence” as if that makes celebrating it harmless.

So, yeah, I don’t know. I was going to say that both sides cherry-pick the worst of the other side, which gives both sides a skewed view of the other side, especially when it comes to the ordinary people who aren’t so involved, but I don’t know any more.

Hopefully I’m just having a bad day, but in any event it’s a damn good thing that God is in charge of the world and not people.

Glory to God in the highest.

In case you’re interested, Russell Newquist and I recently had a long conversation about the state of social media up to the present, and the future of it. Plus other things, because no conversation I’m in is ever free from digressions. But at least they’re all interesting! 🙂

Recently, John C. Wright blogged about the formula used by Lester Dent to write the Doc Savage stories. He began his post with this defense of writing formulas:

There are people who object to formula fiction. Myself, I like formula fiction much better than experimental fiction, because the formula at least means the story will be workmanlike. Some complain formulas make yarns too predictable. But that is like saying the recipe for cheesecake is predictable: depends on well the cook uses the recipe, does it not?

As a small aside, though in the main Mr. Wright’s point about cheesecake is well made, there are—I get the impression—far more people who like to be surprised by fiction than like to be surprised by food. This may be related to the relative difficulty of finding new fiction to finding new foods, but at least I’ve never encountered a restaurant review which gave spoiler warnings so one could avoid hearing about what the food tastes like. Or perhaps a better analogy would be that very few people go to a winery and refuse to avoid the wine tastings because they don’t want to tarnish the experience of drinking the wine they are going to buy with the knowledge of what it tastes like. For people who thus primarily enjoy surprise in fiction, formula fiction is somewhat poorly suited. Being more a re-reader than a reader of new things I’m not very familiar with this, but I’ve heard that there are such people in the world—from their own lips, on some occasions.

Not long after Mr. Wright published his post, Brian Niemeier blogged about writing formulas, linking Mr. Wright’s blog post. Something in it caught my eye, and seemed related to what Mr. Wright said:

A long-running controversy in writing circles rages around the validity of formulas. Keep in mind that I don’t mean formulaic writing, which is just predictable and derivative.

The interplay of the two is this: formulas that work to make enjoyable stories will—with certainty, and possibly of necessity—result in more stories which are predictable and derivative. It will do this because it will result in more stories by fixing other aspects of the stories that otherwise would have died still-born on their author’s fingers or the editor’s in-box. This is in no way a criticism of formulas, but rather an entry-point into considering what it is that formulas actually do.

There are many ways in which a story can be good or bad. One dimension of good stories is characters. Specifically, are they interesting people? Does the story show off their virtues realistically? The wrong character in an interesting situation will be uninteresting because none of their virtues (especially natural virtues) will be relevant and they will remain background non-entities or automatons moved about because the plot requires it and for no other reason. A formula is not likely to help much with this.

Another dimension of good stories is the narration. A good narrator makes observations about human nature that are interesting to read. A formula will not help with this at all, and this is perhaps one of the most neglected aspects of story telling. But consider such amazing narration as you find in Pride & Prejudice:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

Or again:

“[Miss Bingley speaking at length to Mr. Darcy, criticizing every feature of Elizabeth.]”

Persuaded as Miss Bingley was that Darcy admired Elizabeth, this was not the best method of recommending herself; but angry people are not always wise; and in seeing him at last look somewhat nettled, she had all the success she expected.

Or again:

Miss Darcy and her brother appeared, and this formidable introduction took place. With astonishment did Elizabeth see that her new acquaintance was at least as much embarrassed as herself. Since her being at Lambton, she had heard that Miss Darcy was exceedingly proud; but the observation of a very few minutes convinced her that she was only exceedingly shy.

Fresh observations on human nature cannot be taught by formula, but only by extensive education and observation.

Another dimension of good stories is expression. This can be word choice, but it also is related to the judgment of what to describe and what not to; using an apt quotation in place of a lengthy explanation. Formulas cannot teach one a wealth of quotations and which are apt, and when a character might use a quotation rather than an explanation.

Another dimension of writing quality is whether the author as written something the reader did not expect. As Chesterton observed (I can’t find the quote with more than a little googling, unfortunately), the only reason to read anything is to read something one did not expect to read. I think in the original context he said that the only reason to listen to a man is because one expects him to say something one did not expect him to say. Otherwise you could leave off listening and still know what he said. This is why I find it so annoying whenever a hero has been all but utterly defeated by insurmountable numbers of enemies and all he has is a baseball bat and his baseball bat just broke. We know that on the next page—since it is not the last page—that either his friends will show up or the magic amulet he’s been wearing will start to glow and imbue him with the power to defeat all his foes, depending on whether he’s been wearing a magic amulet. This is why I think it’s such a mistake to raise the stakes so much that they die of asphyxiation. The corpse of the stakes is very predictable, in the sense that one need not see how the author wrote the story to know how it was written. There was only one way to write it, excepting a deus-ex-machina which is pure cheating and worse than the predictable next scene. Formulas can help with this, in that a well-designed formula can keep a writer from getting into a situation in which there is only one way out, but it needs to be a very well designed formula to do that. And as a practical matter, it should be noted that formulas do seem especially attractive to people who have a hard time thinking of one way out of the situations they’ve gotten their characters into, but that’s just from my personal experience of a not very representative sample of people.

And finally one dimension of good writing is a plot that holds together. A series of events with no rational relationship to each other is not interesting to read, at least for those who are sober. There is nothing in them to engage the rational mind. And this is where a formula can greatly improve writing. Formulas can help a great deal with structure, and keep the author from writing the protagonist into a corner, and thus keep the author from merely teleporting the protagonist to a new location. I mean a good formula, of course. A bad formula will not keep the author from writing the protagonist into a corner, but then a bad crutch will not support a man’s weight. That does not mean that crutches are a bad idea for a man with a broken leg, and equally it doesn’t mean that formulas are a bad idea for a writer. All tools must be judged by good examples of the tool, not the worst versions of them. Judging all formulas by a bad formula is as much a mistake as judging all saws by a dull saw.

But human nature being what it is, the ability to make a story good in several dimensions tends to go together. This is related in part to the many effects of intelligence and education, but in any event it will be rare to find a man who can write excellent characters, can write fascinating insights into human nature, can do all this with language that is well suited to the needs of the moment (tight in action, luxurious in moments of leisure, and so on), and can always foresee the possibilities of his present course to ensure that there are always multiple viable paths ahead, but who can’t for the life of him come up with a way to get his characters to do what they need to do. Such a man is not impossible, but he is uncommon. By contrast, a man who can’t write characters very well, can’t say much about human nature worth reading, can barely put words together grammatically, to say nothing of concisely and clearly, and who can’t foresee the present course enough to stock the future with possibilities, but who can follow a formula in order to come up with a plot that at least has his characters acting like human beings and connecting his scenes in some sort of rational way—such a man is far more common.

The upshot of this is that if good writing formulas are well known and widely used, it will result in writing which is more predictable and derivative, because while it will elevate the occasional good writing into very good writing, and some mediocre writing into good writing, it will elevate far more bad writing into mediocre writing. And the thing is—contrary to what snobs say—mediocre is not the same thing as bad, and mediocre writing is worth reading.

Now, it should be noted that I am not at all saying that formulas will turn good writing into mediocre writing. Such a thing is, I suppose, not entirely outside of the realm of possibility, but I think it very unlikely. My point is that writing formulas, by their very function of improving writing, will—because they improve it unevenly—result in more mediocre writing. But, like the doctrine of purgatory carves a chunk of hell off and results in fewer people being damned—if, in a sense, it does lower the average quality of the blessed—a writing formula which improves writing will carve a chunk out of terrible writing and make it mediocre. This is in no way a criticism of writing formulas, but instead a studious in how counter-intuitive results can be. Perhaps it can be called a study in the law of unintended consequences.

So again, to be crystal clear—since writing formulas come under a lot of probably undeserved criticism—nothing in what I said is an argument against using writing formulas. At most, it is an argument for trying to improve one’s writing in more ways than just using a writing formula. And that, I suspect, no fool ever doubted. And certainly the men whose blog posts I linked above are no fools.

Glory to God in the highest.