success is when people no longer attribute your social inadequacy to your deep-seated personal flaws but rather to “oh she’s a quant”

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if Hermione Granger can be a general in one of Quirrell’s armies I can send a message asking some guys if there’s been any progress on the thing

Anonymous asked:

Oh no does Mom know Miss Manners is pro-air conditioning?

why are you, my sister, choosing to communicate with me through tumblr anon ask

I was browsing a bookstore the other day and came across a Miss Manners book, from the 90s, about the culture wars. So of course I had to get it and mine it for insights to help us during our current time of strife.

There are a some things that were hot-button issues in the 90s that just feel totally resolved today. 

• smoking. this seemed really big, like there was a time when everyone was either upset about people smoking or upset about people not wanting them to smoke. I guess the anti-smoking side just won that one
  
• first names. lots of drama about when it was appropriate to call people by their first names, is it sexist/racist to call a woman/black person by their first name (because would you do that to a white man??) feel like the first names have won this.
• swearing. again, I think this has just been resolved in favor of swearing.

And then there are some issues that are obviously still hot-button issues today:

The way race is talked about is interesting. It was clearly an issue on people’s minds back then too. But the way people were thinking and talking about it was really different: it feels like somehow people were actually talking about it in a way they don’t today? Like today there are two sides that don’t talk to each other, and one of them isn’t even talking about race, it’s talking about how you can’t talk about race. But back then there were people on both sides writing to Miss Manners not about how they were angry or exhausted but just trying to figure stuff out: black people asking how to respond to racist remarks, or white people asking how to respond to the black men who are always catcalling them (Miss Manners gently points out that race is irrelevant to this question before going on to answer it).

Workplace sexual harassment was big too. Miss Manners’ take is roughly

• some guys are just dicks, and that’s bad
• other problems result from misunderstanding and miscommunication around changing workplace norms, and see, this is why we never should have gone down the road of workplace informality and casual Fridays in the first place

And yeah I guess people are finally starting to come around and agree with her on that one huh.

She also takes the opportunity to lay out a clear definition of etiquette and explanation of her role:

• “manners” = the principles underlying systems of etiquette. these are universal (eg “show respect in a house of worship,” “guests should respect a host’s home”)
  
• “etiquette” = culture-specific systems of rules to express these principles (eg “take your hat off in a church”/”put a hat on in a synagogue”, “take your shoes off in a Japanese house”/”leave your shoes on in an American house”)
  
• etiquette does and should change over time to keep up with other technological and social changes, but gradually (due to its culturally foundational nature)
• Miss Manners’ role is to chronicle and explain etiquette, as well as arbitrating when changes are necessary
• etiquette can be divided into three categories: regulative, symbolic, and ritual
• regulative = how to resolve conflicts or adjudicate differing preferences: similar role to the law, but for situations below the level of legal involvement (who pays the check at dinner, what do you do when someone cuts you in the grocery store checkout line)
• symbolic = rules that seem arbitrary: their purpose is to allow signaling respect/conformity or defiance by following or breaking them (what do you wear to a formal dinner or a business meeting; do you greet people with handshakes, cheek kisses, bowing, etc)
• ritual = purpose is to “provide an aesthetically pleasing and emotionally reassuring sense of social belonging” (protocol for weddings, funerals, etc)

Examples of etiquette rules changing:

• non-smoking becoming the default for gatherings unless all guests are comfortable with it
• precedence for eg giving up a seat on the bus going from gender-based to purely based on age and disability

She pushes back against people who criticize her as being anti-freedom by arguing that etiquette is actually conducive to freedom. She thinks the declining respect for etiquette is in part responsible for regulatory creep and the increasing impulse to make everything bad illegal; she instead argues for keeping more minor infractions in the realm of etiquette, and enforcing etiquette by:

• practicing it oneself
• teaching it to one’s children
• making admission to voluntary associations dependent on following a system of etiquette (everything from marriage and friendship to parties one hosts to clubs or professional organizations)
• for the worst infractions, public disapproval and shaming

On political correctness:

• PC = condemning things for being racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted
• this can be done appropriately or inappropriately: Good PC or Bad PC
• her principles of good PC:
• responses must be proportionate and consider intent, so people are not severely condemned for minor mistakes
• a rule must first be argued for and widely accepted before you can start the public condemnation phase
• rudeness does not justify rudeness
• prefacing a statement with “I know this isn’t politically correct, but” does not justify rudeness
• appropriate responses to bigotry can range from “surely I must have misunderstood” to “I beg your pardon!” to “how dare you!” to “you will be hearing from my lawyer,” depending on the severity of the situation.

Ok I also just want to quote Miss Manners in response to someone who criticized her for idealizing the past:

“Have you been paying such close attention to Miss Manners’ hairdo that you missed what she was saying? Wild horses could not drag her back to live in the past. For one thing, she has too clear a memory of what perfectly agreeable tame horses, who kindly provided public transportation in a previous era, left in the streets. There are too many things she could not live without, such as air conditioning and feminism.”

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m not sure how much to trust this book. My evaluation of the actual claims ranged from “state of the art then but science has progressed now” to “totally reasonable (but don’t have independent verification)” to “… come on.”

That said, I thought it was great and would totally recommend it.

For one, I found it very readable with lots of fun anecdotes that are great for cocktail parties.

For another, I really liked his approach and just felt like he was asking the right questions, you know? with each new section and chapter I kept finding myself going “oh yeah, that’s exactly what I was wondering about.” He has maps and tables cataloguing the various independent inventions of agriculture and writing, which I just happened to be curious about and had been trying to haphazardly piece together in a google doc before I picked up this book. And reading his epilogue I felt sort of gleeful imagining how pissed off any historian reading it must be but also just kinda endorsed it.

I used to think of history and anthropology as sort of fundamentally non-scientific fields: just collecting anecdotes trying to tell you what happened, or what something is like. But I’ve gotten way more into them as I’ve realized their potential to actually explain things in a way that allows you to make falsifiable predictions. I don’t think that’s what most of those fields actually do, and it seems really hard compared to doing the same thing in science, but it totally seems like what they should be going for.

(Not that I think Diamond is a perfect practitioner of this or anything. The length at which he managed to discuss the domestication of plants and animals while totally refusing to consider the role that different environments and selective pressures might have played in the evolution of different human groups was honestly impressive.)

View all my reviews

There’s a strain of thinking about jobs that I see in online leftish spaces, etc that’s very adversarial. That’s where it seems strongest but it also pops up in more mainstream boilerplate “negotiate your salary” type stuff.

And like, I’m really not a fan,

(Tbc this is a privileged perspective; all of that stuff might totally apply if you have a low-paid job and aren’t looking for upside from it and just want to put food on the table, etc. But I feel like part of the trend I see is people taking this framing and applying it to higher-status/more aspirational jobs in tech or media or whatever, and that’s more what I’m talking about.)

And like I very much do think that employment should be a mutually beneficial relationship and there should be some fair allocation of the surplus produced. But it’s less like a simple transaction, and more like an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and you only end up in the high upside cases if you’re both cooperating.

So I used to think a bit more that the motivations of employees didn’t matter; there are lots of mutually beneficial transactions we could make with lots of people, let’s try to make them. And now I think something a bit closer to: a lot of the synergies of employment can only be achieved in an environment of high trust and cooperation, and so a lot of the most successful people in an organization will simply be the most loyal ones. 

So yeah my (completely unqualified, fully anecdotal) advice if you are going for high upside in your career: don’t negotiate your salary! Instead of arguing over scraps of the surplus you can make the surplus orders of magnitude bigger by finding or creating the sort of organization that makes you want to be loyal and doing that.

Catherine Morland is autistic tbh

the great thing about tumblr is the contrast between how dead it feels and how ultimately public it is

when you’re posting it really feels like you’re sending your words out into the void, for your five friends who are still on tumblr to perhaps read and comment on if they so choose

and then sometimes you’re getting drinks with a coworker and she casually mentions that “everyone in the company” reads your tumblr

coworkers if you’re reading this: why?? what could you possibly be getting out of this?? get a life!

etirabys:

After a maintenance lull I did whole lot of meditation in the past week – my go-to is Sam Harris’s Waking Up app and the same 3 Tara Brach meditations on Insight Timer that work for me. The former is more cerebral and dissolving-the-illusion-of-the-self-y, the latter is more Mindfulness Classic – pause before you get het up and react to shit, introspect on what you’re trying to get by shooting people with the emotions you’re currently loading into your rifle and figure out if there’s some non-rifle way you can get it. I’ve had a stressful week and ingested a whole lot of the latter.

I read Jessica Fern’s Polysecure last month, which is “attachment theory + polyamory skills”. I commented to some friends that 

this and other books are very macho unfriendly? I think it’s possible to write a book about feelings for people who are allergic to ‘feelings talk’ without dropping a lot of what’s valuable, but this author is not trying.

I have the same feeling about Tara Brach.

This seems like a shame. I would have bounced off hard Tara Brach or Polysecure in my teens when I was more allergic to ‘feelings talk’, but I sure would have benefitted from it! And I think that a lot of what makes ‘feelings talk’ the thing it is isn’t necessary to communicate about feelings – it’s stylistic.

(I really wanted to write this post with examples but am too tired to put myself through Polysecure again to find good ones. I might add on later.)

I’m not saying the stylistic stuff – ‘sacred core of your being’, ‘connecting to your own heart’ – is bad and should be stripped out. I’m saying that currently a lot of emotional regulation wisdom seems to be in a kind of cultural silo that’s hard for many people to get into, because a distaste reaction to the style is common. I hate gendered products but find myself googling ‘yoga for men’ whenever I want to try yoga again because I personally can’t stand the thing instructors do where my stretches are supposed to affirm my existence or spiritually put me in touch with the planet. Again, there is nothing wrong with that style. Rock on, every yoga instructor on youtube. But having to effectively learn to codeswitch if you want to read about how to have better relationships seems suboptimal.

I was totally just thinking about this same thing earlier today. I think I’m by nature kind of macho in this way, and averse to feelings talk (though these have been getting less true over time).

What I am really into is contrarianism and being an edgelord, and what’s been most successful in getting me into feelings talk is framing it through that lens: basically “I’m so cool and edgy, I’m willing to talk about my feelings and be vulnerable even if it’s socially weird or whatever.”

But I don’t know of many resources on this. (I guess Mark Manson is sorta feelings talk but macho?)