One of my coworkers was reading about the new McKenzie Phillips autobiography, in which Ms. Phillips says that she first got high, as a young child, when Papa John personally held her down and shot her up. It was incestuous rape, basically, with a needle instead of a cock.

Coworker shared this with me, and we were both appropriately aghast. But then she said, “In his own autobiography, John Phillips wrote about how he was deeply into drugs, so this really isn’t a surprise.”

This time, I was alone in being aghast. It was a (much!) lesser aghastedness, but it was nonetheless there.

Further comments confirmed that coworker assumed that anyone who uses illicit drugs is probably an amoral monster. Le sigh. It gets annoying, dealing with people who are so thoroughly straight.

I suspect this is how those stupid “ACORN expose!” videos have gotten so much traction, even though in the most “damning” one the ACORN workers were clearly fucking back with the Halloween-costumed kids who were trying to fuck with them. Lulzless people can’t even recognize lulz when they see them.

More on the main issue later, but for the moment I’m distracted by a side issue: When a new option is introduced, why do those who prefer the existing option so often react as if the question isn’t ” Is new_option any good? but is instead “Should new_option replace existing_options?”

That’s vague. Here’s the concrete thing that got me wondering: There are people who hate e-book readers. That would be fine, but in any conversation about whether e-book readers might be desirable or advantageous, they come screaming in and frothing about how e-book readers couldn’t possibly ever totally replace pulp-books. Which, y’know, isn’t at all the question on the table.

(The Pulp Brigade are also fun because of their idiotic magical thinking, but more on that later.)

The e-book example is a good one, I think, because the neophobes seem to be especially vocal there. You see it all over the place, though; the neophiles say something is neat, and their opposite number act as if they’re under attack. It doesn’t seem to even occur to them that things can be “both/and” instead of “either/or”. Why, do you think, is that?

Remember Pong? Or, rather, remember what it was like to play Pong back when Pong was state of the art?

Putting things on the home-entertainment timeline, I realize that these must be some of my earliest memories. I know we had an Atari 2600[1] before I started first grade, and that we’d had Pong for some time before that. Hell, my earliest genuine memories may be of playing Pong. Wow.

But the thing about Pong was, it was amazing. It really, truly was a tremendous experience.

I don’t have anything profound to say about any of this, but whenever I think of that, I’m overcome with a sense of weirdness. How could such a primitive game have felt so wondrous? It’s like our appreciation of things has nothing whatsoever to do with the thing itself but rather with the difference between the current thing and the thing that preceded it. And that seems both inarguable and completely at odds with the way we like to think we think about abstracts like “value” and “quality”.

Rambling a bit: It’s too bad there’s no such thing as a Wow-O-Meter. Working from my memories of the way the adults around me reacted, Pong was earth-shattering and the Atari, displacing Pong, was earth-devouring. Zipping forward almost a decade I’m able to include my own reactions, where we found the Nintendo to be cosmos-rending.

And with each system after that, there was excitement and gleeful appreciation of improvement, but never again anything on the scale of Atari-to-NES. I wonder, though, if the younger generations felt a “wow!” on that scale with any of the later upgrades; could it be largely a function of age, or was the level of improvement between each of the first few generations greater than any that have come later?

[1] Actually, it wasn’t an Atari 2600 but a Sears Video Computer System. Sears sold the same hardware, but they rebranded it for distribution through their stores and catalogs. Our unit was VCS, not Atari, branded.

You’ve probably heard about the Marshmallow Test; it seems to be all the rage these days. Upshot: long-ago experimenters gave a kid a marshmallow, told them that they’d get a second marshmallow if they could abstain from eating it, and then left the kid alone with the object of temptation.

Longitudinally, it turned out that little kids who showed self-control grew up to have better lives than those who could not resist the marshmallowy goodness. There’s a New Yorker article you can check out.

But here’s the thing: We have film of a recreation of the experiment. And, dude, it works like the Voight-Kampf test: If you don’t “Awwww!” at least a couple of times, I’m going to suspect you’re a Replicant. Observe:

Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.

Pandagon has a post up about, among other things, the stretched truths and mistruths and outright lies that often show up as multiply-forwarded emails.

Having been a fan of Snopes since before Snopes went online, and having been a huge contemporary-folklore fan even before that, I’ve long been familiar with partisan email forwards and their meatspace precedents. What I’d never thought much about, though, is why they seem to be used much more often as right-wing propaganda than left-wing.

Both sides of the spectrum, after all, have access to the same raw materials, and they both possess significant numbers of people who are willing to bend, stretch, or break the truth in order to get their message across. Both sides, too, are populated by people who will uncritically accept and repeat anything that confirms their worldview.

Why, then, does one side seem so much more likely to use these vehicles than the other? The only major liberal email forward I can remember off the top of my head was the petition to keep PBS funded, one which both overstated its case and metastasized such that it continued circulating long past it was even vaguely relevant. Even then, though, it really didn’t speak to a truly core partisan issue.

The top-of-my-head theory is that cultural conservatives, proceeding from a desire to maintain things as they are (or, in the case of outright reactionaries, to return things to the way they mythically were), are more likely to be the kind of people who use folklore didactically to begin with. Folklore has traditionally been more about conveying mores than information, and it has typically done this through cautionary tales.

This seems a bit weak, though. Any other ideas?

Now here’s a doozy. Reading a thread at Slacktivist, I came across a comment by Kit Whitfield in which she said:

I’m just a bit sceptical at the suggestion that books can corrupt minds…

(Note that “books” in the above and in the following refers to works of fiction and, possibly, popular non-fiction.)

I know this to be a fairly common sentiment, probably the conventional wisdom at this point. But there may be a wee problem.

Also fairly common and conventionally wisdomal is the notion that reading can make you a better person. Usually implied, in my experience, is that “better” here means not more intellectually capable but morally or spiritually improved.

Let’s call these two ideas No-Debuff and Karma-Buff.[1] Of course, I’ve stacked the deck by calling them that, and you can guess where I’m going next.

Karma-Buff holds that literature can be transformative, and they don’t just mean that the simple act of converting alphanumeric characters into mental images can, in itself, be improving. The Karma-Buffer argues that the ideas and messages and lessons and implications encoded in the alphanumeric characters can change a person for the better.

The important thing to realize here is that Karma-Buffers are distinct from (let’s call ‘em) Karma-Modifiers. Both groups will claim that books can be transformative; Karma-Buffers will claim that books can only be positively transformative.

No-Debuff, on the other hand, assumes at least one of two things:

1. Books are incapable of teaching anything outside of displays of overt didacticism; or
2. The reader will judge the correctness of whatever the book is trying to teach and will reject that which is ungood.

I haven’t thought about it too deeply, so I’m willing to grant that either No-Debuff position, held singly, could constitute a coherent philosophy. Unfortunately, I have known many people who claim to hold both positions at the same time.

In my experience, most No-Debuffers are likely to reveal themselves only when arguing against the idea that censorship[2] might at some times be acceptable. Prima will say that certain books are as dangerous as a loaded gun and so should be kept away from children; Secunda will say that, no, books are perfectly neutral and so should be freely available to all.[3]

When not engaged in fights against censorship, though, most of the No-Debuffers I’ve known will gladly proclaim their Karma-Buff beliefs. This is problematic on the face of it, as in one situation our Secunda will argue that books cannot ever be stat modifiers, while later sie will wax rhapsodic over the stat gains one can get from reading.

If we are to assume that our Secunda only makes arguments sie believes to be true, then sie holds two mutually exclusive premises as true. This may not be immediately apparent, as there are two distinct camps of No-Debufers.

The contradiction between the first camp–”books can’t teach anything that’s not an overt lesson”–and Karma-Buffing is obvious; one holding both beliefs maintains both that books can and cannot change us.

The problem with the second camp–”readers will reject bad lessons”–exposes the problem at the heart of the Karma-Buffer’s position.

Again, I want to make clear that I’m working from the assumption that Karma-Buffers are not claiming that the act of decoding and mentally re-encoding characters is in itself that which provides great benefit. While such a claim can be made–the act of reading in itself builds up certain brain muscles–this is not the claim being made by Karma-Buffers. They aren’t arguing that reading makes us better readers (first of literally textual texts, perhaps, and eventually of non-literally-textual texts) but instead that it makes (or can make) us better people.[4]

I also want to again make clear that Karma-Buffers claim that reading can only have a unidirectional effect, that it can make us better but cannot make us worse. This is important, because that’s where the problem lies.

One cannot argue that only desirable messages are found in books; that would be truly Cloud Cuckooland stuff. Paper does not reject the misanthrope’s pen, keyboards do not burn the fingers of white supremacists, and so on.

There clearly exist books trying to teach undesirable lessons. The Karma-Buffer claims that such messages cannot be learned.

Sigh.

It would be nice to believe that people teaching Bad Things are inherently unpersuasive, ineloquent, or otherwise possessed of a tendency to twirl their mustaches inside their prose. It would be nice, but there is no reason to believe it’s so and plenty of evidence suggesting it ain’t. We all know of charismatic monsters, convincing frauds, and all variety of well-spoken fiends; some of them write books, and they’re damned good at it.

A sinner’s how-to manual is physically and rhetorically identical to a saint’s. But, a-ha! But is it rhetorically identical? There might be some hope for the Karma-Buffer after all.

While the saint can get hir point across with honest arguments built from true premises, the sinner has to fudge somewhere–if the sinner’s trying to convince the reader that Bad is actually Good, then sie can’t present a perfectly sound argument. A savvy reader, then, will recognize the dishonest rhetoric, reject the sinner’s tales, and validate the Karma-Buffer. Yay!

Alas, alas, alas.

Let’s deal with the logical problem first.

Remember, Karma-Buffers are making a claim that applies to all readers. It is plausible to assert that a reader well-versed in rhetoric would recognize and reject poor arguments. It is absurd, though, to suggest that all readers are so well-versed.

That said, there’s a much deeper problem: It is easy-peasy to build an argument that is perfectly valid but unsound:

1. President Obama was born on Mars.
2. All persons born on Mars are 12 feet tall.
QED President Obama is 12 feet tall.

Silly? Yup. But how about this:

1. When I skip lunch, I get a headache in the afternoon.
2. I skipped lunch today.
QED I had a headache this afternoon.

So, dear reader: Did I actually have a headache this afternoon?

You may have known people who got headaches after skipping meals, so the first premise is plausible. Or you may never have known such a person, and you think the premise is a bit iffy. Or you may never have known such a person, but it doesn’t seem unlikely to you that such people could exist.

And there’s the biggest problem: If you are in a position to learn from a book, then by definition you do not already possess complete knowledge of that which is covered in the book. In order to accept or reject the book’s (valid) argument, you have to be able to determine whether or not the premises are true. But since you don’t possess complete knowledge of the subject, there will be premises you are unable to independently evaluate. If the lesson to be learned is non-trivial, those are probably the most important premises.

A devoted scholar will turn to other sources to try to evaluate those particular claims, but experience shows that not all readers are so devoted. Since the Karma-Buffer is making a claim for all readers, we have again crashed on the rocks of Fail.

But the logic problem is actually minor, since most of the books promoted by Karma-Buffers (again, in my experience) are fictional works that do not teach their lessons through structured arguments. Sadly, the same problem applies.

If one is to learn about the world, the human experience, the grand wonder of being from a book, then–again–one is by definition lacking in complete understanding of that thing before reading the book. The book teaches through example, through innuendo, through suggestion, sometimes through info-dump.

You can fill in the blanks. The more learning potential you have when you approach a book, the less able you are to determine whether you’re being sold a bill of goods.

Wrapping up: Without having thought much more deeply than what you see above, it seems to me there are two tenable positions on this subject:

1. Books can have the potential to either enhance or corrupt a reader, depending on what’s in the book and what the reader brings to the table; or
2. Books are at best pleasurable diversions that can’t teach us anything about human nature.

I don’t think I’m excluding anything, but I’d be glad to be set straight.

Now, if you’ve read this far, don’t go getting the wrong idea: Not all people who oppose censorship are No-Debuffers, and not all No-Debuffers will show Karma-Buffer tendencies outside of anti-censorship arguments.[5]

In my experience, though, there does exist a large number of people who will No-Debuff while opposing censorship and Karma-Buff otherwise. This is unfortunate, as it suggests that a significant portion of those who most avidly promote reading-n-stuff actually have an incoherent conception of reading-n-stuff.

[1] Because I’ve been playing Kingdom of Loathing for the last several weeks, that’s why. An adventurer is me.

[2] “Censorship” here meaning whatever the parties involved want it to mean, really. It’s pretty much a lost word at this point.

[3] Perhaps “No-Debuff” should be “Neutral-Neutral”. Hm. I really wish I’d had people to play D&D with as a kid.

[4] You know what? Trying to build honest arguments is fucking exhausting, and I think it may demand turgidity of prose. People often complain about the incomprehensibility of academic prose, but it seems likely to me that, barring the presence of actual literary genius, the demands of being honest forces readabiiity to decrease as the interestingness of the thing under discussion increases. What’s frightening is my suspicion that the curve is not linear but exponential.[4a]

[4a] It occurs to me that the twin demotivators of the necessary effort and the ugliness of the product may conspire to create the situations I’m talking about, in which one can hold two contradictory premises without realizing or caring about it.

[5] There do seem to be very few people, though, who will strongly engage in a “hell yeah it might corrupt ‘em, but they should be able to read it anyway” position. There’s the “…but I’ll defend to the death their right to say it” argument, but it’s long been reduced to a platitude. If somebody object to their kids being required to read a story about girls smoking crack to lose weight before the big dance, you’ll almost never see somebody saying, “You know, it’s possible that some kids will read that and think it’s not such a bad idea. But still, that’s no reason to exclude it.”[5a] You will, though, see lots of No-Debuffing going on.

[5a] The linked discussion hit me pretty hard in a personal place, because it seemed to me that the people involved had never dealt with addiction issues or were (willfully or not) declining to bring those experiences to bear on the discussion. Here’s the thing: I know that when I personally read a story like that, I get a craving to go dig up some crack, and that craving might last weeks. And I’ve never even tried crack. It’s easy to say that your kids wouldn’t be inspired to act badly by a cautionary tale; it’s irresponsible to assume that nobody’s kids will be so inspired.

It’s like the late-80s X-Men, after they all died and were resurrected by the Siege Perilous: hidden from the public eye and invisible to electronics.

When I’m meeting someone in public for the first time, they always ask what I’m driving. I tell them, and they’re every-last-time always “Huh?” Nobody’s heard of it.

And today I went for an oil change. I also needed a transmission fluid change, and some new tires. The oil they could handle, but they had to punch me into their computer for the t. fluid. There was much furrowing of brow and re-typing and re-re-typing until finally dude told me, “Sorry, but your car isn’t in the system.”

And so I went to the dealership. Again with the hunting and searching and pecking away, again with the crumpling of brow and sucking of teeth. Again with the “Huh. There’s nothing in the system, sorry.”

Thinking I could at least price out the tires, I hit the Wal-Mart website. Since it’s dedicated to a single component, there were fewer options and so fewer chances for me to brow-furrow while trying possible variations. Still no joy.

I’m going to spend the rest of the evening digging through the owner’s manual, as I’m now convinced there must be an optic blast or adamantium claw feature I’ve missed. The air conditioning is pretty good, though, so its mutant ability might be climate control.