Tonya Harding had a problem, and the problem was named Nancy Kerrigan. Harding probably believed that she was a better skater than Kerrigan, and it's hard to come up with an objective way to judge the matter, except to note that in the sport of figure skating, it's the judges' opinions on the matter that set the standards. And the judges loved Kerrigan.
Well, sure. Kerrigan was tall, pretty, with high cheekbones and a toothy smile. She gave off the aura of aristocracy that the hard-scrabble Harding so obviously lacked. It was the Ice Queen vs Trailer Trash, and, really, who was going to win that deal?
Harding could have concentrated on improving the product. She could, perhaps, have spent even more time practicing (perhaps by inventing the 28 hour day). She'd already increased the difficulty of her routines, by adding the triple axle to her skills, a risky procedure, of course, and a bad enough injury could have ended her career. Or she could have worked on her looks, taken charm lessons, and so forth. But really, nothing short of cosmetic surgery was going to raise her cheekbones, and wouldn't the press have gotten a lot of mileage out of that?
So Harding did what any proper CEO would have done with a difficult competitor. She conspired to have Nancy Kerrigan kneecapped. I mean, after all, when Microsoft was competing with Word Perfect, you don't think they put all their efforts into making Word better, do you? Sometimes corporations buy their competitors instead, but that option is not available to Olympic athletes.
But she got caught, so morality carried the day, right? Harding appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek, but that was because she'd been bad, bad, and the 400 members of the press who were jammed into the practice rink in Lillehammer, Norway were there to insure that everyone got the proper moral lesson. Besides, she placed 8th, while Kerrigan placed second, and it was Kerrigan who later benefited the most from the figure skating boom that the sensationalism kicked off.
Still, once a celebrity, always a celebrity, and Harding had an internet sex tape released (with stills appearing in Penthouse), then later turned to boxing, first on the Fox TV network Celebrity Boxing event against Clinton accuser, Paula Jones, then later professionally in a short career. She should probably have gone for pro wrestling, where the villains make more money.
A cautionary tale? Perhaps. But a lot of people made a lot of money off of Tonya Harding, and she herself had more notoriety and more of a career than 99% of Olympic athletes. That she never managed to rise far enough to transcend her origins is unsurprising. Few do.
Showing posts with label competition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label competition. Show all posts
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Hypermodern
When I was nine I won a friendly chess game at the downtown Nashville YMCA with a guy I was told had once placed second in the city chess tournament. I have no idea if that was true; certainly he shouldn’t have fallen for my strategy, which was a variation of a fool’s mate (and not nearly as quick as one). Assuming that the whole thing was as advertised, I assume that he just wasn’t paying attention to a minor game with a young kid. I will say that afterwards he was surprised and annoyed enough for me to doubt he purposefully threw the game.
Hypermodernism was a chess movement that came to prominence after the end of the first World War. It would probably have been called Modernism (as was so much around that time) except for the fact that its predecessor, a set of rules based on the ideas of the great chess pioneer Wilhelm Steinitz and popularized by the German Siegbert Tarrasch, was called both Classical and Modern chess, thereby really hogging the central real estate in the name department.
That’s what Steinitz’s ideas were all about, as it happens: hogging real estate, most specifically the center of the chess board. Pawns advance down the center, protected by knights and bishops in strong positions. Grind it out, don’t make mistakes, and win by not losing. If Vince Lombardi had played chess, that’s the kind he would have played. Also, if you happened to be stuck with Black, you were pretty much doomed to playing defense.
The Hypermodernists were full of the revolutionary spirit of the times, guys like Richard Réti, Aron Nimzowitsch, Ksawery Tartakower, and Gyula Breyer, all hailing from central Europe (where the aliens landed, to judge by the impact other Hungarians, Austrians, etc. had on the sciences at about the same time). They thought that chess had become boring and they were going to shake it up.
They didn’t dispute that the center of the board was important; they just thought you could control it by some method other than stomping all over it. So they inventing asymmetrical strategies with cool names like the Bogo-Indian defense and the King’s Indian attack, many of which involved deliberate trades of knight/bishop. All the while, the idea was to allow the attacker (generally White) to grab territory, but with a weakness in the attack structure that could be exploited by the more wide ranging pieces.
Part of the reason why it worked was because it was new. When you follow a strategy that is unfamiliar to your opponent, you start with a leg up. In fact, in the 1930s, the Russian chess clique expanded this idea to a more or less deliberate strategy. They played with an eye toward tipping the game into some unusual position that they’d previously studied intensively, but which their opponents almost certainly had not.
It’s sometimes said that chess was designed to sharpen the wits for the battlefield, and the analogies are certainly there. Prior to the Classical/Modern style was the Romantic, which I’ve seen referred to as “swashbuckling,” more than a bit like forms of warfare before it got all tech-y. So grind-it-out Classical is like trench warfare, and you can stretch the metaphor to even include Hypermodern, with the power pieces like tanks and air power.
I’m sure it’s a crappy analogy. I haven’t played serious chess in years, and never at anything like an advanced level. But the more general analogy bears some further thought. It’s easy for any “revolutionary” or “radical” in the early stages, where none of his opponents are expecting his strategies. So he rolls right over the opposition, who blink a few times and try to figure out what hit them. Then, as the victories mount, the opposition builds, but more importantly, it adapts, and analyzes, and waits for an opportunity.
Hitler frequently overruled his generals, and at the beginning, it looked like genius, partly because no one was expecting it, and partly because the nature of warfare had changed with the new weaponry. But eventually he got himself locked into a grind-it-out bloodbath with the Russians, and that was the end of him. The new weapons didn’t help much at all when it came down to just swapping men, even at premium exchange rates.
Politics is war carried out by other means and the same rules apply. You can break the rules and win for a while just because you’ve broken them. But eventually, either the reasons for the old rules present themselves, or the new thing becomes the new rules. Either way, you don’t take anyone by surprise any more.
Hypermodernism was a chess movement that came to prominence after the end of the first World War. It would probably have been called Modernism (as was so much around that time) except for the fact that its predecessor, a set of rules based on the ideas of the great chess pioneer Wilhelm Steinitz and popularized by the German Siegbert Tarrasch, was called both Classical and Modern chess, thereby really hogging the central real estate in the name department.
That’s what Steinitz’s ideas were all about, as it happens: hogging real estate, most specifically the center of the chess board. Pawns advance down the center, protected by knights and bishops in strong positions. Grind it out, don’t make mistakes, and win by not losing. If Vince Lombardi had played chess, that’s the kind he would have played. Also, if you happened to be stuck with Black, you were pretty much doomed to playing defense.
The Hypermodernists were full of the revolutionary spirit of the times, guys like Richard Réti, Aron Nimzowitsch, Ksawery Tartakower, and Gyula Breyer, all hailing from central Europe (where the aliens landed, to judge by the impact other Hungarians, Austrians, etc. had on the sciences at about the same time). They thought that chess had become boring and they were going to shake it up.
They didn’t dispute that the center of the board was important; they just thought you could control it by some method other than stomping all over it. So they inventing asymmetrical strategies with cool names like the Bogo-Indian defense and the King’s Indian attack, many of which involved deliberate trades of knight/bishop. All the while, the idea was to allow the attacker (generally White) to grab territory, but with a weakness in the attack structure that could be exploited by the more wide ranging pieces.
Part of the reason why it worked was because it was new. When you follow a strategy that is unfamiliar to your opponent, you start with a leg up. In fact, in the 1930s, the Russian chess clique expanded this idea to a more or less deliberate strategy. They played with an eye toward tipping the game into some unusual position that they’d previously studied intensively, but which their opponents almost certainly had not.
It’s sometimes said that chess was designed to sharpen the wits for the battlefield, and the analogies are certainly there. Prior to the Classical/Modern style was the Romantic, which I’ve seen referred to as “swashbuckling,” more than a bit like forms of warfare before it got all tech-y. So grind-it-out Classical is like trench warfare, and you can stretch the metaphor to even include Hypermodern, with the power pieces like tanks and air power.
I’m sure it’s a crappy analogy. I haven’t played serious chess in years, and never at anything like an advanced level. But the more general analogy bears some further thought. It’s easy for any “revolutionary” or “radical” in the early stages, where none of his opponents are expecting his strategies. So he rolls right over the opposition, who blink a few times and try to figure out what hit them. Then, as the victories mount, the opposition builds, but more importantly, it adapts, and analyzes, and waits for an opportunity.
Hitler frequently overruled his generals, and at the beginning, it looked like genius, partly because no one was expecting it, and partly because the nature of warfare had changed with the new weaponry. But eventually he got himself locked into a grind-it-out bloodbath with the Russians, and that was the end of him. The new weapons didn’t help much at all when it came down to just swapping men, even at premium exchange rates.
Politics is war carried out by other means and the same rules apply. You can break the rules and win for a while just because you’ve broken them. But eventually, either the reasons for the old rules present themselves, or the new thing becomes the new rules. Either way, you don’t take anyone by surprise any more.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Dominance
- In Aikido, one blow can determine life or death. When practicing, obey your instructor, and do not engage in useless contests of strength.
- Aikido is an art in which a person learns to deal with not only one but multiple attackers. It therefore requires that you practice at all times with careful awareness not only in front of you but in all directions.
- Practice at all times with the feeling of pleasurable exhilaration.
- The teachings of your instructor constitute only a small fraction of what you will learn. Your mastery of each movement will depend almost entirely on individual, earnest practice.
- Daily practice begins with light movements of the body, gradually increasing in intensity and strength. There must be no excessive strain. That is why even an elderly person can continue to practice pleasurably without bodily harm, and will attain the goal of his or her training.
- The purpose of Aikido is to train both body and mind and to develop a person's sincerity. All Aikido techniques are secret in nature and are not to be idly revealed to others in public, not shown to rowdy or unprincipled people who will misuse them.
--Etiquette for Practicing Aikido (by Morihei Ueshiba O'Sensei)
The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. --Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (1996)
Unarmed fighting techniques can be loosely divided into three categories: strikes, holds, and throws. There is also the wealth of ancillary behavior, which mostly comes down to either countering moves (blocks), or getting into a good position to use the techniques (called “irimi” or “entering” in Aikido).
The folks who are adamant that Aikido is of no use in a “real fight,” are generally hypnotized by the throwing techniques. But Aikido is also holds, and Aikido holds overlap substantially with other martial arts, and also form part of the core of most police and military unarmed combat techniques.
There are a set of Aikido holds that are essentially numbered (in Japanese) techniques: ikkyo, nikyo, sankyo, yonkyo, gokyo, and rokyo, the latter two being generally considered to be knife taking techniques, but they work against an unarmed opponent just as well. Most of these have analogs in other schools; ikkyo is commonly called an “arm bar” in wrestling, as is a related technique, ude gateme, which also looks a bit like a half nelson. I’d also add another couple of techniques, kote gaeshi and shiho nage to the core list of things that makes anyone claiming that they “wouldn’t work in a real fight” either ignorant or a blithering idiot.
Throws are a different matter, and throwing techniques generally depend upon the movement and balance of an attacker, and it’s generally true that opponents who do not “commit,” i.e. who do not throw the weight of their body into whatever they are doing, do not grab, etc. are difficult to throw. It’s also true that if someone isn’t even attacking you, it’s very hard to throw them. I’m all in favor of not using martial techniques of people who aren’t attacking you.
It’s also commonly believed that Aikido does not use strikes, punches, or kicks. This isn’t true, since it’s necessary to defend against such attacks, so the Aikido uke must simulate punches, knife thrusts, etc. with some verisimilitude, and not being “sincere” about the simulation can get you scolded.
There is also a event called “atemi,” which is a strike of some sort. Some practitioners de-emphasize atemi, believing it to violate the “non-violent” aspect of the art. Others emphasize that the Founder taught atemi as central to practice (notice the first sentence in the quote that begins this piece). The difference is most often split as holding atemi to be a feint of a sort; pulling the attention of the attacker in order to do a technique. But I’ve heard instructors who were pretty blunt about the notion that if you’ve used a wrist lock on an attacker to bring him to his knees, kicking him in the face may well be the most reasonable next step.
As I said in my original essay, “But Does it Work?” sometimes those fancy rolls are because the next event in a “real fight” would be a strike to the throat.
In re-reading that essay, I notice that I missed one of the reasons why I think some people have such an investment in arguing that Aikido is “fake,” and “wouldn’t work in a real fight.” I did note that most “real fights” aren’t exactly “real,” at least not in the sense of proceeding until one or the other participants is unable to continue. No, the idea is for the other guy to “cry uncle,” that is, to concede dominance. The practice of Aikido does not lend itself to showing dominance, “winning,” in other words. Practice is supposed to be harmonious. It’s not a sport, or a “contest of strength.”
I’ve been in three, well, let’s call them “physical altercations” in the last 30 years. That’s a pretty low count, I think, and I’m obviously not much of a brawler. I haven’t written about them previously, partly because there were more than two people involved (which is usually the case), even though only two of us were fighting. But mostly I’ve refrained because I’m a little ashamed of one of them and a lot ashamed of another. So please excuse me if I leave out the reasons for the fights and other things that would make them better stories, perhaps, except not so much better for me. This means that I’m leaving out a lot of prologue in each case. Sorry.
We’ll join the first encounter with the guy throwing cold coffee in my face after I’d rolled down the window to demand that he move his truck from blocking my way. We will ignore the question about whether under slightly different circumstances the coffee might have been scalding hot.
This was several years before I began Aikido training. As a consequence of frequent nose bleeds as a child, I never learned boxing, but I did wrestle for a time at the YMCA. I believe that my weight at the time of my “competitive wrestling career” was roughly 85 pounds. But grappling was pretty much all I knew and I did weigh more than 85 at the time of this particular fight.
I don’t think the guy was expecting me to get out of the car to attack him. I’m positive he didn’t expect me to rush at him, coming in low, to grab him between the hips and knees and lift him completely off the ground in a takedown maneuver. Under other circumstances, that would have been very bad for him, because falling onto pavement, on your back, with someone else’s full weight on you can do pretty unpleasant things to you very quickly.
However, he was standing in front of the open door to the cab of his pickup truck, so we instead went back onto the seat. There was a general struggle, which finally ended when he managed to get his hands to my face and threatened to gouge my eyes. I released him and backed away.
He was pretty much still yelling insults at me as I got back into my car and drove off.
Did I “win” that fight? He could have put my eyes out, remember, or at least he could have made a try for it, and it might have worked. Whatever. It didn’t feel like I’d won anything.
The next one is the one that I’m thoroughly ashamed of, because it was at least 80% my fault, in part because I’m the one who made the threat that initiated the fight. The closest thing I have to an excuse is that it was several years into that-which-we-will-not-call-chronic-fatigue-syndrome, and I was susceptible to mood swings and flashes of rage. I was also still weak, often fuzzy-headed and I hadn’t practiced Aikido for several years, so what occurred is no reflection on that art.
The other guy was small and sturdy and built like a wrestler. In any case, he was a natural grappler, and pretty much marched straight through any techniques, Aikido or wrestling, that I could remember or try. I gave ground and tried to get lower; a tall man can be at a considerable disadvantage against a stronger man who is shorter than he is. Eventually, I wound up on my back, though I’d managed to keep my legs between me and him.
We were in an industrial district in Oakland, in one of those buildings that had been converted to (basically illegal) “live/work” spaces, and we were on top of a large wooden platform that formed the roof of some of those spaces. The platform was maybe 15-20 feet high, and our scuffle had put us maybe 5 ft. from the edge of what amounted to a balcony with no guard railing. His back was to the edge, and I had my legs cocked between him and me.
I whispered, “Keep it up and you’re going for a ride.”
His head snapped around and he realized the danger. He pulled off of me and stomped off. I think there were some more insults involved. It looked for a little while like there might be a rematch, but the words finally cooled, and certain explanations were made. There were no apologies, but some things became better understood.
Did I win? Lose? Would I have risked seriously injuring or killing him? When the matter had been mostly my fault? As I say, I’m just thoroughly ashamed of the altercation.
The last incident took place a few years ago, after I’d re-entered Aikido training. I was working for a time in a “rough neighborhood,” running a thrift shop for a non-profit agency during the Dot Com Bust period. I never felt endangered in the area, but I was aware of the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways that some people act to establish a sense of physical domination of the people around them. This is, I think, automatic for them, and doesn’t really reflect so much on them personally as their surroundings. In other times and places, the dominance behavior is more abstract, more socially derived, less physical and personal.
There was one fellow who I actually like quite a bit, but he was in the habit of doing those little physical dominance things. Joking threats and dominance hypotheticals, as it were. I’d gotten a little tired of it.
One day, when I was out on the sidewalk talking to someone, he came up behind me, stuck his finger in my back and pretended it was a stickup, sorta, kinda jokingly, was the idea, I expect.
I probably recognized his voice, but as I say, I was tired of that sort of thing. Also, he’d stuck something in my back; I did not know what it was. What I did next, I did in much less time than it takes to think it over.
The move is called tenchi nage. As I spun around, my left hand caught his right arm between the wrist and elbow, knocking it aside. (If he’d been using the other arm, I’d have used a different technique). My right hand went up, more or less parallel to his body, sliding off the center line just before it reached his head. He reacted pretty well, flexing backwards to avoid the strike to his head, but the fact is that I could have easily hit him in the throat, chin, or face with a fist or the heel of my palm, if I’d wanted to.
Instead, my arm was outstretched across his body, and he was off-balance, bending backward. All I would have had to do was take a step forward and turn my hip and he’d have been out into the middle of oncoming traffic. Instead, I stepped back and smiled at him.
He smiled back. He never tried anything like that on me again.
Aikido gets called “fake” because it is seen as not using punches or strikes, because it is not aggressive. It doesn’t have tournaments; it’s not a sport, so it doesn’t make for a competition where there are winners and losers.
But I’m pretty sure I won that last one.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Fighting City Hall III – A Badly Posed Problem
GREEN (VO)
Two Guys in the woods. In a tent. Big bear comes up, he's gonna eat 'em. One guy reaches in his pack, starts putting on his running shoes. The other guy: "you idiot, you can't run faster than a bear..." Guy says 'I don't have to run faster than the bear, I just have to run faster than you..."
EVERYONE LAUGHS
ANGLE: INT. THE PLANE
MORSE
You know why that's particularly funny...? (PAUSE) The man would not be in the woods with his running shoes. (PAUSE) He wouldn't take them in the woods. So the joke indicates hostility on the part of the man who brought the shoes. (PAUSE) It indicates, in effect, that he brought the other man into the woods to kill him.
--David Mamet, The Edge (January, 1996), p. 6
Competition or cooperation, which is it going to be? Like most false dilemma, badly posed problems, the first question is, what the hell does that mean?
A cheetah chasing a gazelle is competition; the two animals are competing for the gazelle’s life. Two men in a post-apocalyptic knife fight for a can of baked bean, that’s also competition.
But two guys on a tennis court are cooperating. One may win the game, but there’s no game at all unless they both agree on it first. Then there’s that thing about there being rules.
Is warfare competition or cooperation? Armies fight, but the individuals in the armies are cooperating with their fellow soldiers, and with the orders they are given. At least they are if they want to have a chance at remaining alive. The choices aren’t quite as stark in the corporate world; corporations aren’t allowed to court martial employees or put them in the stockade or to death (though some would if they could, I’ll bet). Nevertheless, what is meant by “market competition” generally boils down to competition among organizations, and putting up barriers to impeding organizations, interfering with the very act of their organizing (e.g. unions, regulatory bodies, other corporations), is a big part of how the grand game is played.
Tonya Harding was, after all, just being competitive.
Okay then, if I’m so smart, how would I describe the choices that individuals make in dealing with each other and with organizations? Let me suggest another alliterative list: Custom, Command, or Collaboration.
Truth to tell, most of our day-to-day behavior is motivated by Custom, or its baby brother, Habit. It’s midnight, not another car in sight, yet we still stop for the red light. Well, it’s the law, isn’t it? It’s also the law to drive less than 50 on that stretch of Route 4 I drive every morning, the one where everyone drives 70. What’s the difference? Custom, habit, call it what you will. In some places, people don’t lock their doors at night; there’s not enough habitual theft in the area for it to matter, apparently. In some other places, with no greater incidence of crime, the doors get locked. That’s just the way things are done around here. Some other places, you see bars on the windows, and for good reason, because the teenagers in the area have developed the custom of thievery.
In some parts of the world, it’s a full-fledged Tradition, and not one limited to teenagers.
That last neighborhood probably gets more police attention than the other two, incidentally. It’s not a matter of the law itself; it’s whether people are accustomed to obeying it. It’s also a matter of how the police are accustomed to enforcing it.
”If you keep calling them the PO-lice, they ain’t never gonna come!” – from the Flip Wilson Show
Command, in fact, doesn’t work very well without custom, but, truth to tell, pure command doesn’t work very well at all. I once worked briefly with a scientist who tended to treat everyone he worked with as “just another pair of hands,” as one of the programmers put it to me. The scientist in question was undeniably smart, though I personally thought he had some peculiar blind spots; he seemed to have almost no physical intuition, for example, so he had to work through the math to come to even minor, obvious conclusions, or so it seemed to me. Worse, his disregard for those working with him led to some occasionally serious oversights, oversights that could have been caught by subordinates if they’d been given any responsibility or trust.
That’s a minor example, of course. If those under your command really want to bring you down, all they have to do is withhold their own judgment and do exactly what you tell them to do, no more no less. The organization might just as well have fragged the commander. The “tight ship” is more collaboration than command-and-control.
The fact is that collaboration is the also fun part, the activity that truly nourishes. Look at any group of musicians and watch just how much fun they are having, no matter what else they are trying to project. Even the lone performer out on the stage is in collaboration with the audience, and the difference between a good collaboration and a bad one can be pretty obvious. Every writer is a lone performer out on the stage, incidentally, trying hard to collaborate with the audience. When we collaborate with other writers, that just means that part of the audience is a lot closer.
Even mutual hostility is collaboration. The comedian brags about “killing,” and is terrified of “dying.” But it’s really about being in the groove. Any team sport gives that same reward, and it takes two to Tango. Or to Tangle.
Two Guys in the woods. In a tent. Big bear comes up, he's gonna eat 'em. One guy reaches in his pack, starts putting on his running shoes. The other guy: "you idiot, you can't run faster than a bear..." Guy says 'I don't have to run faster than the bear, I just have to run faster than you..."
EVERYONE LAUGHS
ANGLE: INT. THE PLANE
MORSE
You know why that's particularly funny...? (PAUSE) The man would not be in the woods with his running shoes. (PAUSE) He wouldn't take them in the woods. So the joke indicates hostility on the part of the man who brought the shoes. (PAUSE) It indicates, in effect, that he brought the other man into the woods to kill him.
--David Mamet, The Edge (January, 1996), p. 6
Competition or cooperation, which is it going to be? Like most false dilemma, badly posed problems, the first question is, what the hell does that mean?
A cheetah chasing a gazelle is competition; the two animals are competing for the gazelle’s life. Two men in a post-apocalyptic knife fight for a can of baked bean, that’s also competition.
But two guys on a tennis court are cooperating. One may win the game, but there’s no game at all unless they both agree on it first. Then there’s that thing about there being rules.
Is warfare competition or cooperation? Armies fight, but the individuals in the armies are cooperating with their fellow soldiers, and with the orders they are given. At least they are if they want to have a chance at remaining alive. The choices aren’t quite as stark in the corporate world; corporations aren’t allowed to court martial employees or put them in the stockade or to death (though some would if they could, I’ll bet). Nevertheless, what is meant by “market competition” generally boils down to competition among organizations, and putting up barriers to impeding organizations, interfering with the very act of their organizing (e.g. unions, regulatory bodies, other corporations), is a big part of how the grand game is played.
Tonya Harding was, after all, just being competitive.
Okay then, if I’m so smart, how would I describe the choices that individuals make in dealing with each other and with organizations? Let me suggest another alliterative list: Custom, Command, or Collaboration.
Truth to tell, most of our day-to-day behavior is motivated by Custom, or its baby brother, Habit. It’s midnight, not another car in sight, yet we still stop for the red light. Well, it’s the law, isn’t it? It’s also the law to drive less than 50 on that stretch of Route 4 I drive every morning, the one where everyone drives 70. What’s the difference? Custom, habit, call it what you will. In some places, people don’t lock their doors at night; there’s not enough habitual theft in the area for it to matter, apparently. In some other places, with no greater incidence of crime, the doors get locked. That’s just the way things are done around here. Some other places, you see bars on the windows, and for good reason, because the teenagers in the area have developed the custom of thievery.
In some parts of the world, it’s a full-fledged Tradition, and not one limited to teenagers.
That last neighborhood probably gets more police attention than the other two, incidentally. It’s not a matter of the law itself; it’s whether people are accustomed to obeying it. It’s also a matter of how the police are accustomed to enforcing it.
”If you keep calling them the PO-lice, they ain’t never gonna come!” – from the Flip Wilson Show
Command, in fact, doesn’t work very well without custom, but, truth to tell, pure command doesn’t work very well at all. I once worked briefly with a scientist who tended to treat everyone he worked with as “just another pair of hands,” as one of the programmers put it to me. The scientist in question was undeniably smart, though I personally thought he had some peculiar blind spots; he seemed to have almost no physical intuition, for example, so he had to work through the math to come to even minor, obvious conclusions, or so it seemed to me. Worse, his disregard for those working with him led to some occasionally serious oversights, oversights that could have been caught by subordinates if they’d been given any responsibility or trust.
That’s a minor example, of course. If those under your command really want to bring you down, all they have to do is withhold their own judgment and do exactly what you tell them to do, no more no less. The organization might just as well have fragged the commander. The “tight ship” is more collaboration than command-and-control.
The fact is that collaboration is the also fun part, the activity that truly nourishes. Look at any group of musicians and watch just how much fun they are having, no matter what else they are trying to project. Even the lone performer out on the stage is in collaboration with the audience, and the difference between a good collaboration and a bad one can be pretty obvious. Every writer is a lone performer out on the stage, incidentally, trying hard to collaborate with the audience. When we collaborate with other writers, that just means that part of the audience is a lot closer.
Even mutual hostility is collaboration. The comedian brags about “killing,” and is terrified of “dying.” But it’s really about being in the groove. Any team sport gives that same reward, and it takes two to Tango. Or to Tangle.
Friday, January 12, 2007
The Smartest Guy in the Room
If you’re reading this, odds are that you’ve spent at least some time in your life as the Smartest Guy in the Room. I’m going to hope that everyone at least temporarily lets me get away with the sexist aspects of that statement, though I’ll stipulate that there are plenty of times when the smartest guy in the room is a female. For that matter, I’ll state at the outset that the smartest guy in the room needn’t even be the most intelligent. The SGITR syndrome has a more to do with competition and aggression.
At Hickman Elementary and Donelson High School, Mark and I swapped back and forth for the top scores on standardized tests, achievement tests, PSATs, ACTs, and SATs. Mark went to Oberlin for a while, had a bit of a flameout, then attended and graduated from U. of Indiana, Bloomington in mathematics. Mark was shy and not nearly as aggressive as I am, but during his college years at least, he had the math version of SGITR, which shows up in casual statements like, “Oh, I can never remember that equation; if I need it, I’ll just re-derive it.”
In primary and secondary public education, the occasional Bronx High School of Science being the exception, it’s pretty easy to be the SGITR. My high school graduating class had about 200 students, so all Mark and I had to do was be in the top percentile. Larger schools will have a more in the top 1%, but still, everyone will know who’s who pretty quickly, and the pecking order sorts itself out.
If someone is really invested in being the SGITR, though, college can be a shock, especially if the school is science-and-engineering. If someone goes to MIT, RPI, CalTech, Cornell, or any of several dozen other schools, suddenly he’s confronted with an entire school full of 1 percentiles, each and every one of them with his own history of being the smartest guy in the room.
Some guys just go into shock, like the turkeys dropped from a plane; they just fold their wings and drop like stones, to flunk out of school in the first year or two. Others intensify their competition, sometimes sliding into stereotypes like cutting relevant articles out of library journals so their classmates can’t get them, or pestering their professors to squeeze out every last little decimal of their GPA.
I was lucky in a lot of ways. I was already a weird guy from a strange part of the country (there were exactly two of us from Tennessee in my class at RPI). Moreover, my skill set was markedly different from other RPI students. My math skills were about average (for a ‘Tute student), but my verbal skills were way above the norm, and I had some other things going, like my 3-D visualization is off the charts (if you ever need your trunk packed, I’m the guy to ask for help).
So I branched out. There were a ton of guys studying Math Analysis until 2 A.M., I went for operations research and statistics instead. I became a “publications nurd,” and wound up editing three student magazines during my undergraduate years. And so forth.
I also ditched the lingering traces of my southern accent, because people assume that someone who talks like that is stupid. I might have decided that I didn’t want to win the SGITR competition, but I didn’t want to lose it, either.
Still, I thought about what that competition entailed, and indeed, what all social competitions entailed. I mean, if you’ve got a hundred people and only one winner, what does that make the other 99? Losers? Those odds suck, even for the winner.
So the first thing to do was to put the whole thing in perspective. It’s easy to come up with a lot of things that are more important, at least in terms of the social competition, than being smart. Looks for example, or money. Sure, people will try to claim that smart people make money, but all you have to do is to look at the fate of all those mathematicians to see how silly that is.
But I was more interested in my own valuations, so I deliberately made a list of mental attributes that I thought were more important than raw intellect.
Honesty topped the list. Part of the reason for that is the recognition of how hard real honesty is, even to define. It’s not just a lack of dishonesty, or the inability to lie well (which I have pretty well down pat, but so what?). Real honesty takes considerable courage, because it first has to be turned on itself, stripping away rationalizations, lazy assumptions, comforting suppositions, and cherished theories. Cheap candor is easy; honesty is heavy lifting.
There comes empathy and compassion. I’d need an entire essay (probably more) to examine the nature of those currently popular political philosophies that try to rationalize what is basically a fear of compassion. Empathy and compassion, the ability to see and feel things from another’s point of view, are essential for any civilized view of the world, and it’s revealing that so much effort is being expended to avoid what is seen as “weakness” or “relativism.”
Curiosity isn’t the same as being smart, either, but without it, someone only learns if they think there is an advantage to it. That brings up the matter of depth and breadth of knowledge, another factor that isn’t the same as intellect, but is often mistaken for it.
Making my list at least gave me the intellectual reasons for abandoning the smartest guy in the room competition. I can’t say that I don’t still have the reflexes, of course. You don’t easily drop something that played a big part in your formative years. But I do notice when there is a smartest guy competition going on, and I sometimes manage to bow out honorably. It’s most difficult when someone is trying for an argument, of course.
I once spent an extended period of time consciously attempting to avoid arguments. Toward the end of the experiment, I remarked to a friend of mine, “You know, everyone calls me argumentative, but as nearly as I can tell, it’s everyone else who is trying to contradict every thing I say.”
She said, “Hey, I don’t try to contradict with everything you say.”
Then she cracked up, realizing what she had said. “Okay, proposition granted,” she said.
I am pretty lucky to have friends like that.
At Hickman Elementary and Donelson High School, Mark and I swapped back and forth for the top scores on standardized tests, achievement tests, PSATs, ACTs, and SATs. Mark went to Oberlin for a while, had a bit of a flameout, then attended and graduated from U. of Indiana, Bloomington in mathematics. Mark was shy and not nearly as aggressive as I am, but during his college years at least, he had the math version of SGITR, which shows up in casual statements like, “Oh, I can never remember that equation; if I need it, I’ll just re-derive it.”
In primary and secondary public education, the occasional Bronx High School of Science being the exception, it’s pretty easy to be the SGITR. My high school graduating class had about 200 students, so all Mark and I had to do was be in the top percentile. Larger schools will have a more in the top 1%, but still, everyone will know who’s who pretty quickly, and the pecking order sorts itself out.
If someone is really invested in being the SGITR, though, college can be a shock, especially if the school is science-and-engineering. If someone goes to MIT, RPI, CalTech, Cornell, or any of several dozen other schools, suddenly he’s confronted with an entire school full of 1 percentiles, each and every one of them with his own history of being the smartest guy in the room.
Some guys just go into shock, like the turkeys dropped from a plane; they just fold their wings and drop like stones, to flunk out of school in the first year or two. Others intensify their competition, sometimes sliding into stereotypes like cutting relevant articles out of library journals so their classmates can’t get them, or pestering their professors to squeeze out every last little decimal of their GPA.
I was lucky in a lot of ways. I was already a weird guy from a strange part of the country (there were exactly two of us from Tennessee in my class at RPI). Moreover, my skill set was markedly different from other RPI students. My math skills were about average (for a ‘Tute student), but my verbal skills were way above the norm, and I had some other things going, like my 3-D visualization is off the charts (if you ever need your trunk packed, I’m the guy to ask for help).
So I branched out. There were a ton of guys studying Math Analysis until 2 A.M., I went for operations research and statistics instead. I became a “publications nurd,” and wound up editing three student magazines during my undergraduate years. And so forth.
I also ditched the lingering traces of my southern accent, because people assume that someone who talks like that is stupid. I might have decided that I didn’t want to win the SGITR competition, but I didn’t want to lose it, either.
Still, I thought about what that competition entailed, and indeed, what all social competitions entailed. I mean, if you’ve got a hundred people and only one winner, what does that make the other 99? Losers? Those odds suck, even for the winner.
So the first thing to do was to put the whole thing in perspective. It’s easy to come up with a lot of things that are more important, at least in terms of the social competition, than being smart. Looks for example, or money. Sure, people will try to claim that smart people make money, but all you have to do is to look at the fate of all those mathematicians to see how silly that is.
But I was more interested in my own valuations, so I deliberately made a list of mental attributes that I thought were more important than raw intellect.
Honesty topped the list. Part of the reason for that is the recognition of how hard real honesty is, even to define. It’s not just a lack of dishonesty, or the inability to lie well (which I have pretty well down pat, but so what?). Real honesty takes considerable courage, because it first has to be turned on itself, stripping away rationalizations, lazy assumptions, comforting suppositions, and cherished theories. Cheap candor is easy; honesty is heavy lifting.
There comes empathy and compassion. I’d need an entire essay (probably more) to examine the nature of those currently popular political philosophies that try to rationalize what is basically a fear of compassion. Empathy and compassion, the ability to see and feel things from another’s point of view, are essential for any civilized view of the world, and it’s revealing that so much effort is being expended to avoid what is seen as “weakness” or “relativism.”
Curiosity isn’t the same as being smart, either, but without it, someone only learns if they think there is an advantage to it. That brings up the matter of depth and breadth of knowledge, another factor that isn’t the same as intellect, but is often mistaken for it.
Making my list at least gave me the intellectual reasons for abandoning the smartest guy in the room competition. I can’t say that I don’t still have the reflexes, of course. You don’t easily drop something that played a big part in your formative years. But I do notice when there is a smartest guy competition going on, and I sometimes manage to bow out honorably. It’s most difficult when someone is trying for an argument, of course.
I once spent an extended period of time consciously attempting to avoid arguments. Toward the end of the experiment, I remarked to a friend of mine, “You know, everyone calls me argumentative, but as nearly as I can tell, it’s everyone else who is trying to contradict every thing I say.”
She said, “Hey, I don’t try to contradict with everything you say.”
Then she cracked up, realizing what she had said. “Okay, proposition granted,” she said.
I am pretty lucky to have friends like that.
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