Liberalism and Evolutionary Psychology

Posted on June 7, 2014 by robertpkruger

Liberalism is not so much a political philosophy; it’s the discipline of the scientific method, of rejecting logical fallacies in argument, admitting the limited reach of your paradigms, and keeping yourself open to new information. Humans are not naturally liberal, and not all who claim to be liberals demonstrate liberal behavior nor those who identify as conservative fail to do so.

I’ve struggled with limited success to champion evolutionary psychology. I think it’s unfairly maligned and believe it will stand the test of time. Every heated argument I’ve gotten into about it has been with people who resort to the Appeal to Authority fallacy and Appeal to Nature (loosely, “Naturalistic”) fallacy. Evolutionary psychology is difficult to defend against cultural-relativist arguments and still do full justice to those arguments, which can be highly academic. I’ve found a guy who does this brilliantly, a New Zealander named Daniel Copeland, who identifies as feminist [correction: feminist-aligned]. His analysis is scholarly, brilliant, even-handed, and, above all, humane. No one I’ve read, not even Pinker or Wright, has launched a more powerful exposition and defense of the discipline.

Please give him a fair, careful reading. It takes time, but it’s worth it.

http://www.veryrarelystable.blogspot.com/2014/03/two-cheers-for-evolutionary-psychology.html

 

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On Bradbury, Minorities, and Diversity

Posted on June 7, 2014 by robertpkruger

My teenage daughter was reading Fahrenheit 451 and came to me to discuss it. She’d been struggling with the idea in the book that the grievances of interest groups led to totalitarianism and book burning. She’d always assumed minorities foster diversity and enrich society. I said that her assumption was correct and explained that Bradbury was creating an absurd distortion to make a point, but we discussed the problem of identifying with the victim status of a group. We each belong to many groups. I’m white but not rich. Sometimes I’m healthy; sometimes I’m sick. I’m prone to depression. Even privilege can be a handicap if it makes you intellectually rigid or lazy, or gets you targeted for assault. We agreed that it’s good to champion diversity but that it can be a losing game to seek advantage by identifying oneself as a victim.

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Too Quiet

Posted on March 21, 2014 by robertpkruger
“Say, can you do me a favor?” His baritone voice strains for a high, wheedling note.
“What?” I say, as usual, knowing how it pisses him off.
He huffs. “Don’t say ‘what’; just say yes.”

A hundred, a thousand, phone conversations, starting all the same.

Also, like this: “Here, I want to read you something.”

Viator, “Abimagique,” “Jailwise,” “Radiant Green Star,” “Aztechs” (“What would be a good Spanish word for a fence made of lasers?” “How about ‘El Rayo,’ the lightning.” “Yeah, that’s good”), Handbook of American Prayer, “Halloween Town,” “The Velt,” “Vacancy,” Softspoken, Floater. Movie reviews, essays. Crap, all of them, everything.

He asks, “What do you think?”
“Very nice.”
“I am like unto a god.”

March 21. Two weeks without a call, a new record. Of course, the first few days are generally a relief. Then you begin to wonder what’s up. Then you start to worry a bit.

Then you start to miss him.

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Writing Advice from Lucius

Posted on March 20, 2014 by robertpkruger

lucius-bob

Lucius, Dave Boone, and I took a road trip from Seattle to the World Fantasy Convention in Monterey  many years ago. I bought a copy of Lucius’ collection The Ends of the Earth while I was down there. On the way back through Grant’s Pass, I pointed out a hill that I’d hiked up when I was a kid, and Lucius remarked that the hiking seemed a pointless thing to do. We argued about it a while, and he picked up my book and wrote me this note inside:

For Bob,
Writing is not about experience; writing is from experience.
Writing is not about hiking up the hill; it’s about not having to hike up the hill, about having foreknowledge of the hike.
An historian can stand on a battlefield and picture what has happened; a good writer should be able to stand there and feel what has happened, even though he has no knowledge of the place.
I think you can succeed at this, but you will have to make sacrifices.
What those sacrifices are, I can’t say.
Whether or not you make them is up to you.
That’s the deal…
Writing is not about the truth; it is a reinvention of the truth.

Lucius Shepard was the most challenging friend I’ve ever had. He was an incredible pain in the ass at times, but he was very generous too. He knew the value of his friendship — he knew he was a genius — and he made you pay, because he didn’t want fans close to him; he wanted friends, without condition, an unrealistic hope from anyone. Was he just selfish and sociopathic, or was he deeply wounded and mistrustful from his father’s abuse? He always let the question hang in the air. Most people did not care to pay the cost of his longterm friendship, and I can’t blame them. Like writing, his friendship entailed sacrifice. He demanded favors and constant attention; he’d arbitrarily test your loyalty. Over time, he would return the favors with spectacular generosity, but only a fool would rely on that. I was not friends with the writer; I was friends with the man: profane, bighearted though often mean in his criticisms, and wittier than anyone I’ve ever met. We almost parted in acrimony several times. I’m glad we didn’t, that we remained close, to the end. He needed someone to love him unconditionally, and I did the best I could. It was draining, but I’m very sad it’s over.

(Thanks to Rob Wexler for the picture; I don’t know what we were looking at, unfortunately.)

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Damn It, Lucius

Posted on March 20, 2014 by robertpkruger

I got an email that my friend Lucius died last night. I still expect him to call and tell me that the news is bullshit. We talked weekly, often daily, often multiple times a day, for a decade and a half. He read me all his work in progress, and we watched scores of movies together. Incredibly eloquent, vulnerable, conniving, duplicitous, incisive, open-hearted — like his much-lauded, gorgeous fiction he was fantastic, an outsized projection of humanity in every respect. I will miss him very much.

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The 40-Year Quest for a Game that Breaks All the Rules

Posted on February 16, 2014 by robertpkruger

About three weeks ago, I was talking with Baen editor Tony Daniel and told him I was reading about games and he asked if I’d write something for him. Since it was the 40th anniversary of D&D and Jim Lin’s Super Bowl party was only a few days off and many top game designers would be coming, an article about D&D seemed timely.

http://www.baen.com/dungeonsdragons.asp

Tony supplied the title, and I couldn’t be more happy with it.

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“Your” write

Posted on October 18, 2013 by robertpkruger

The professor who taught me Middle English and Old English loved to remind us that grammar and orthography are modern inventions. She’d say this with sympathy and generosity as she handed back our bleeding papers. I loved that teacher. Such a wonderful hypocrite.

The philosopher Jeremy Bentham said, “All teaching is mischief”… wait, no, he said, “All punishment is mischief.” Never mind.

Unless you’ve worked in publishing, you might think that it’s petty to be hung up on grammar and spelling. However, if you have, you know it is.

You can’t just rip a word, phrase, clause, or sentence out of its living context and judge it right or wrong. Sure “Your the best” looks wrong, but is it really? I watched a game show clip recently where husband and wife had their compatibility tested. They’d been asked independently to write down and hide the answer to the question of how old the man’s mother was (or something like that) in decades. The man revealed his answer first: ten decades old. This surprised the host. “Really? That old?” “Wait,” he said, “isn’t a decade four years?” It was then the wife’s turn to answer. “She’s forty,” the wife said, and revealed what she’d written on her own card…

Ten decades old.

Funny, right? But do you know what “decimate” really means, or where it came from? Does your spouse? Will your answer win you that washer and dryer, or will you go home empty-handed? What will being “right” get you?

That said, “you’re” is a contraction of “you are.” “Your” is possessive. “It’s” is a contraction of “it is.” “Its” is possessive. “Man’s” is possessive, a contraction of “mannes,” which we don’t say anymore, and brings me back to my professor of Middle English. (You thought I’d dropped that, didn’t you?)

Actually, an apostrophe pretty much always marks a contraction. Did you see that coming? And if I’m wrong, I still win the washer and dryer.

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Crimes against spelling and grammar

Posted on October 18, 2013 by robertpkruger
I’m pondering a business plan. You want to improve your writing, don’t you? Hire a team of editors to monitor your tweets and  Facebook screeds and point out your spelling and grammatical errors, your unintended alliteration, your confused idioms, your redundancies and tautologies, your dangling participles, your tired syntactical tics. The burned hand teaches best, especially when all your cruel friends point and laugh.

Okay, I’m kidding. I wouldn’t offer the service, and I’m probably alone in wanting to subscribe. But what would it look like in action? I will explore this, starting today. Today, the topic is “lay” vs. “lie.” Unless you are playing cards, you are probably wrong when you say, “I’m going to lay down.” You are going to lie down, that is, you are going to lay your body down. You “lay” something down. “To lay” is transitive; that means it takes an object; that means, like I said, you lay something down. “To lie” is not transitive, not even when it means to tell an untruth. Of course, the tricky part is that “to lie” in the past tense is “lay.”

Now you’re probably wondering why I’m laying out this pedantic nonsense. Am I the kind of pathetic guy who cringes when I see you step on the sidewalk cracks? No, because I can’t bear to look. Tomorrow, I will discuss “your” versus “you’re.” That’s an important one, because if you’re screwing it up, you will be first to be eaten when civilization breaks down. I wouldn’t eat you, but that’s because as morlocks go, I’m a rare moderate. There are more of us than you think.

If I have made you feel bad, cheer up. There are older, fouler, and more capable editors than I in the deep places of the Web. They’ll be coming for me first.

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Life is a game, redux

Posted on September 5, 2013 by robertpkruger

Life is a game. Maybe playing smaller games can help you win. Read this.

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Essential writing tips

Posted on September 4, 2013 by robertpkruger

Huge tracts of the digital landscape are mulched with advice on how to write. Read this anyway.

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