And then I started reading Hofstadter again. I first fell in love with him when I picked up Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (GEB) in my sophomore year at Michigan, on the implicit recommendation of a friend who had it lying on his dorm room floor. That book rebuilt me: I came out of it with a thousand new interests, a new vocabulary, a massively expanded conceptual toolkit, a more playful attitude, and a remarkable feeling of clarity, like the mental equivalent of a cleansed palette. If you haven’t read it yet, you must.

Just a few weeks ago, I dove into his Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, a tome ostensibly “about” translation which of course turns out to be nothing short of an annotated, illustrated garden path through the totality of Hofstadter’s mind. Taking Clément Marot’s short poem “A une demoiselle malade” as its kernel, it unfolds a story of language, of Hofstadter’s personal life, of puzzles and puns and palindromes, of frames and templates and analogical structures, of “recursion, computation, reduction, holism, meaning, ‘jootsing’ (Jumping Out Of The System), ’strange loops,’ and much, much more”—all presented with the usual “family of elaborate (and lovingly elaborated) analogies”, “structural puns”, and in general a feeling of childish delight that makes reading any of his books an incomparable joy. [1]

Enough gushing. The point is, after just one or two sittings with Le Ton Beau, I’ve been re-invigorated. And I think I know why.

Hofstadter’s writing—all of it—is littered with little anecdotes about sets of afternoons here and there where he dives into some intellectual adventure: translating a Stanislaw Lem story from Polish to English, pointing camcorders at televisions to investigate recursion, training himself to speak backwards (he calls it “Hsilgne”), etc. It’s hard not to be inspired by these informal experiments: what else can you do, after Hofstadter tells you that he wrote the preceding paragraph without using the letter “E”—he was making a point about the way constraints drive creativity—than to try it yourself? [2]

That’s why reading Hofstadter is so much fun, because he challenges you on every page. I said earlier, for example, that Le Ton Beau de Marot had Clément Marot’s short poem “A une demoiselle malade” as its “kernel”; what Hofstadter did was to ask a whole slew of his friends to translate that poem as best they could under certain constraints, mainly the requirement that they respect something of the original’s content, tone, and basic metric structure. When his friends began responding in spades, Hofstadter found the submissions so delightful, and the issues they raised—about languages, analogies, constraints, creativity, translation, and “transculturation”—so rich and interesting, that he decided to build an entire book around them. So Le Ton Beau’s expository chapters are interleaved with small showcases of notable translation efforts, just as GEB’s “regular” chapters were interposed between dialogues. The effect is wonderful and, again, it’s virtually impossible to go through without wanting to take a stab yourself. (Here’s mine.)

And that’s the trick. Hofstadter gradually ropes you in with his games and puzzles; he’s always demonstrating the very concepts he’s describing, always coaxing you to play along. In GEB, for instance, his dialogue, “Crab Canon”, about retrogressive palindromic structures in music, art, and biology, is itself palindromic: each speech is repeated twice, with the two halves of the dialogue mirror images of one another. The effect works because he specifically (and painstakingly) collected phrases with ambiguous meanings, like “Not at all!”—which can mean either “Definitely not!” or “No sweat!”—or “One has no frets”—which could either be about guitar strings or worries, depending on the context.

In Le Ton Beau, to take another example, one of the overriding themes is the relationship between form and content, and in particular on the way in which each influences and constrains the other. But rather than just talk about this problem, Hofstadter lives it, not just in little games like the “E”-less paragraph mentioned earlier—though there are plenty of those throughout—but in the construction of the book itself. From the introduction:

Above, I very casually remarked that I have enjoyed total control over page-breaks and such things; yet the truth of the matter would be far more accurately captured by turning the phrase around and saying that the page-breaks and word spacing and such things have enjoyed total control over me! By this, I mean that I have been forced to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite passages in order to make a page boundary come out exactly where I wanted it. It is not just by some happy accident, for instance, that the poems inside chapters are never, ever broken across page boundaries.

The amount of influence exerted on my text by concerns of purely visual esthetics is incalculable — and by “my text”, I don’t merely mean how I wound up phrasing my ideas, I mean the ideas themselves. Content has been determined by considerations of elegant form so often that I couldn’t begin to imagine it. Every single line of text, for instance, is characterized by its spacing — how wide the blanks between words are. I can clearly see the spacing as I type on my screen, and I rewrite and rewrite in order to make sure that no line is too tightly or too loosely spaced. In the course of such rewritings — here extracting a word, there using a shorter or a longer one, elsewhere inserting a word where none was — words and phrases that I would otherwise not have thought of pop to mind, suggesting ideas I would not have thought of, and those ideas suggest unexpected paragraphs, and those paragraphs are in turn linked to other ones, and so on…

It’s this feature—Hofstadter’s habit of taking fairly abstract concepts like “the battle between form and content” or “level-crossing feedback loops” and engaging them at every turn, in the selfsame sentences he uses to describe them—that most contributes, I think, to his ability to spark the reader’s creativity. Because the effect of his incessant demonstrations and illustrations is to gradually train you to think like him, to transform you into a little fledgling version of himself. Which is great, because as Dan Dennett puts it,

What Douglas Hofstadter is, quite simply, is a phenomenologist, a practicing phenomenologist, and he does it better than anybody else. Ever. For years he has been studying the processes of his own consciousness, relentlessly, unflinchingly, imaginatively, but undeludedly. [1]

That is, he’s a student of his own mind, a mind that is unstoppably inquisitive, and we benefit from his struggle to articulate its intricate workings, first because we’re exposed to his innumerable interests and second, because we too become students of those processes—analogy-making, constraint-satisfaction, conceptual slippage, etc.—that he uncovers as the basis of his creativity.

This first feature, the simple fact that his books cover a lot of ground and therefore activate in the reader all sorts of dormant swaths of brain, is probably best illustrated by a simple tour of GEB’s wonderful annotated bibliography. Picking three starred entries basically at random, we find:

1. Mikhail Bongard’s Pattern Recognition. Hofstadter remarks that “In his book, [Bongard] sets forth a magnificent collection of 100 ‘Bongard problems’ (as I call them)-puzzles for a pattern recognizer (human or machine) to test its wits on. They are invaluably stimulating for anyone who is interested in the nature of intelligence.” His enthusiastic recommendation led me to this webpage, an index of 280 Bongard problems, including 56 from Hofstadter himself. Solving these is not only a fun way to chew on difficult questions regarding cognition and AI, but also an excuse to kill four or five afternoons!

2. The proceedings of a conference on Communication with Extraterrestial Intelligence. I found this in the New York Public Library and was so blown away by the one chapter I had time to read that I immediately bought it. The conference was broken into distinct sessions organized, roughly, by terms in the Drake equation, which is used to estimate the number of intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy. So each session is this wonderful discussion among top scientists—a few Nobelists, guys like Freeman Dyson, Carl Sagan, Francis Drake, etc.—trying to home in on a reasonable estimate for a given term, say, L, the length of time an average intelligent civilization lasts, sometimes defending their hunches with sophisticated technical arguments and sometimes with nothing more than hand-wavy intuitions. It’s an absolutely fascinating read, not only because the question of extraterrestrial life itself is so fertile, but also because we get to see such talented scientists at work.

3. Howard Bergerson’s Palindromes and Anagrams, a strange little book that boasts perhaps the world’s most complete collection of top-notch palindromes and anagrams (duh), along with several chapters discussing the art of anagrammatical-palindromic thinking, and diversions into other forms of wordplay, like “vocabularyclept poetry”, in which writers are challenged to craft a poem using the complete set of words from another poem that they haven’t seen before (interesting questions there include, How much will this new poem resemble the old one? and Do the two poets connect their (shared) words into phrases in the same way? and How much of a poem’s DNA is contained just in the words it uses, ignoring their placement and order?) Fun, fun, fun.

Three books chosen from more than one hundred, and all of them rich enough to set off about two weeks of intellectual exploration; I could easily write at length about each, with any feeling I used to have of “an empty mind” replaced by a sense of overflowing activity.

I think Hofstadter’s books range so broadly—that is, they touch on so much of the world—because he wants to drive home two points: first, that so much of the world is connected, and second, that analogy-making—the process of seeing an X as a Y—is the crux of thought, and creative thought in particular.

The following is from a section entitled Creativity and Randomness from page 673 of GEB:

Just as science is permeated with “conceptual revolutions” on all levels at all times, so the thinking of individuals is shot through and through with creative acts. They are not just on the highest plane; they are everywhere. Most of them are small and have been made a million times before—but they are close cousins to the most highly creative and new acts. Computer programs today do not yet seem to produce many small creations. Most of what they do is quite “mechanical” still. That just testifies to the fact that they are not close to simulating the way we think—but they are getting closer.

Perhaps what differentiates highly creative ideas from ordinary ones is some combined sense of beauty, simplicity, and harmony. In fact, I have a favorite “meta-analogy”, in which I liken analogies to chords. The idea is simple: superficially similar ideas are often not deeply related; and deeply related ideas are often superficially disparate. The analogy to chords is natural: physically close notes are harmonically distant (e.g., E-F-G); and harmonically close notes are physically distant (e.g., G-E-B). Ideas that share a conceptual skeleton resonate in a sort of conceptual analogue to harmony; these harmonious “idea-chords” are often widely separated, as measured on an imaginary “keyboard of concepts”. Of course, it doesn’t suffice to reach wide and plunk down any old way—you may hit a seventh or a ninth! Perhaps the present analogy is like a ninth-chord-wide but dissonant.

With that in mind, it becomes somewhat natural to think of Hofstadter’s project, or at least the bulk of his popular writing, as a kind of futzing around on this “keyboard of concepts”, looking for harmonies, trying to cull disparate ideas that really are deeply related. Along the way, he has no doubt become an expert in letting concepts “slip”, that is, in perceiving apparently unrelated phenomena as being “fundamentally ‘the same’ at a deeper, more abstract level”. [3] And it’s by watching him do this, by reading and engaging him in the act of analogy-making, that we gradually slip into the same slippable state.

Here’s one of my favorite examples from Le Ton Beau so far, on pages 40-41:

Over the years, I suppose largely because of my fanatical obsession with acquiring native-style accents in various languages, I gradually abstracted and generalized the notion of “foreign accent”. My exploration was rooted in languages and so the first abstractions that I made of it were naturally still language-based, but others soon transcended language.

For example, after I had been studying Chinese for a while, I realized with shame that my clumsily-drawn characters must have a very foreign-looking “visual accent” to them. In the course of trying to get rid of this “accent”, I started to wonder if there was such a thing as a “Japanese accent” in Chinese calligraphy, given that both languages revere the same set of characters and have calligraphic traditions stretching back thousands of years. [. . .]

Moving away from the realm of language, consider baseball, which has spread from America to other parts of the world, where it is played with equal enthusiasm. Do Cubans and Japanese, for instance, have “foreign accents” when they play baseball? Does a lifelong chess player have a “chess accent” in playing Go for the first time? Do I have an “Algol accent” when I write computer programs in Lisp (Algol having been my first computer language)? In the 1950’s and 1960’s, many physicists decided to move over into the exciting new field of molecular biology. Did they all have a recognizable “physics accent” in their various approaches to the problems of this alien discipline? Do Americans have an American accent when they drive in Europe? Do Europeans have European accents when they drive in America? Is it possible to recognize an Italian driver on a German Autobahn, or vice versa (not cheating by using license plates or car makes)?

What is a “French accent” in music? Certainly in the classical genres, Ravel, Debussy, Fauré, Poulenc, and Satie epitomize this notion, but what about someone like Hector Berlioz, who to me sounds more German that French? And what about César Franck, who, although Belgian, can sound just as French as any of them? I even know a piano-trio movement by Russian composer Alexander Scriabin that sound as “French” as anything I can think of. But what is this elusive French musical accent?

The feeling I get after reading stuff like this… that’s the “Hofstadterian mood”. It’s the feeling of having my brain rebooted, or maybe overclocked: I shed my simple-mindedness, I learn how to think analogically again, connectedly, using questions like Hofstadter’s “What is a ‘French accent’ in music?” to slip from one idea into another, stringing concepts together into one of those long-distance harmonic “idea-chords” that blend into the unmistakable euphonious thrum of a fertile mind at work.

Notes

[1] From “Hofstadter’s Quest: A Tale of Cognitive Pursuit“, Ch. 14 of Daniel Dennett’s Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds.

[2] Here’s one attempt—look Ma, no “E”s!—using the preceding paragraph as a model:

His writing—all of it—is swarming with accounts of brainy larks, or whimsical dips into rich tracts of thought: translating a Stanislaw story from Polish to Anglo-Saxon, pointing a photo-gizmo at its own TV output to study spiral loops, training to talk backwards, and so on. It’s hard not to act on such findings: what can you do, upon noticing that his last paragraph is missing our script’s most copious symbol—that paragraph was making a point about constraints—but try it too?

[3] From James B. Marshall PhD dissertation, Metacat: A Self-Watching Cognitive Architecture for Analogy-Making and High-Level Perception

Just for fun, I tried comparing that 500+ mile trip to one a fraction of its size, something closer to ten miles. You can see such a route here.

Remarkably, at only 2% of the distance, this short hop from one small town in New Jersey to another requires just fifteen steps, or only two fewer than the hefty road trip to Michigan.

I began to wonder: what’s the relationship between the length of a road trip and the complexity of the route? Do most trips, long or short, require roughly the same number of steps? How many steps are there in the most complex route in the country? What’s the distribution of step counts for every possible route in the contiguous United States?

These questions turn out to be tractable, thanks in large part to Google’s Directions API, which gives lowly developers like me access to their full suite of mapping, geolocation, and pathfinding algorithms, huge stores of data, and fast servers that can deliver tens of thousands of query results to a single client computer in a matter of minutes.

Before we dive into methods and results, though, let’s lay out exactly what we’re looking for:

1. We want a histogram of step counts for some representative sample of routes within the US. This will give us a really good sense of how complex a typical road trip might be.

2. We’d like to find the most complex route in the country, i.e., a pair of points such that the driving directions between them, given by Google, include a larger number of steps than for any other pair in the contiguous US. It’s extremely unlikely that we’ll find the monster route, but at least we’d like a ballpark estimate of its step count — is it 35, 500, 90, 180?

3. We want a plot of route distance against route complexity. What will the plot look like? Is complexity a linear function of distance? Is there a direct or inverse relationship? Will there be any pattern at all?

4. It would be pretty cool to find a “coefficient of friction” for regions in America, that is, a numerical estimate of how hard it is to drive through a particular region based on how many steps there are, on average, in a route passing through it. We could use this information to create a “heat map” of the entire US, with individual counties or zip codes shaded by friction. Such a map would help us figure out which states have the thorniest roads, or where the most straightforward routes are, or which cities are the hardest to get out of.

To get started, then, I went looking for a random sample of points. One way to do that would be to draw a box inscribed within the continental US and simply generate random lat-longs within that box. The trouble with that method, I thought, was that it could easily drop you in barren or ridiculous places like deserts or lakes; I wanted to focus on plausible real-life trips from one population center to another.

So I went looking for a data set, and before long, found one: the “MaxMind World Cities with Population” file, a 33 MB free download with more than enough data to get things rolling: after eliminating non-U.S. cities (a simple grep did the trick, since the text is nicely structured), I was left with 141,989 points covering nearly every corner of the country.

I hacked together a tiny Rails project (RoR being my hammer-that-makes-everything-look-like-a-nail at the moment) to (a) load the cities and lat-longs into some structured form, (b) drop that data into an HTML page hooked up to the JavaScript Google Directions API, and (c) write the results back to a database. All of the relevant code, along with a SQLite3 database with the structured cities data and results, is available at this github project page.

Perhaps the most important snippet, which I’ll excerpt below, is the code that actually samples points and talks to Google:

var map;
var directionDisplay;
var directionsService;
var stepDisplay;
var markerArray = [];
var step_counts = [];
var step_summaries = [];

function initialize() {
  // Instantiate a directions service.
  directionsService = new google.maps.DirectionsService();
}

function calcRoute(start, end) {
  // Retrieve the start and end locations and create
  // a DirectionsRequest using DRIVING directions.
  var city_start = [start[2], start[3]].join(", ");
  var city_end = [end[2], end[3]].join(", ");
  var latlong_start = [start[0], start[1]].join(",");
  var latlong_end = [end[0], end[1]].join(",");
  var request = {
      origin: latlong_start,
      destination: latlong_end,
      travelMode: google.maps.DirectionsTravelMode.DRIVING
  };

  // Route the directions and pass the response to a
  // function to count the number of returned steps.
  directionsService.route(request, function(response, status) {
    if (status == google.maps.DirectionsStatus.OK) {
      var step_ct = countSteps(response);
      step_counts.push(step_ct);
      step_summaries.push([step_ct, city_start, city_end])
    } else {
      console.warn("Couldn't count steps for this route.");
    }
  });
}

function countSteps(directionResult) {
    var myRoute = directionResult.routes[0].legs[0];
    return myRoute.steps.length;
}

function getAndExecutePairs(n) {
    $.get("/directions/get_pairs", {n: n},
        function(ret) {
            pairs = ret;
            console.log(n + " lat/long pairs downloaded successfully.");
            execute(pairs);
        }
    )
}

function execute(pairs) {
    for (i = 0; i < pairs.length; i++) {
        pair = pairs[i];
        start = pair[0];
        end = pair[1];
        calcRoute(start, end);
    }
}

It’s all pretty straightforward. The process is kicked off by the getAndExecutePairs() function, which just hits the Rails server for n pairs of cities. This is the code it calls:

def get_pairs
    n = params[:n].to_i
    cities = City.find(:all, :limit => n * 2, :order => "random()");
    lat_longs = cities.collect {|c| [c.latitude, c.longitude, c.city, c.state]}
    pairs = Hash[*lat_longs].to_a
    render :json => pairs
end

And that’s it. With just ~100 or so lines of code, I was able to get a decent grip on the first three of the four questions posed above. In particular:

1. What’s the distribution of step counts for every possible route in the contiguous United States?

The answer, based on a random sample of some 2,000 points (and confirmed later by 8,000 more trials), is that you have a sort of right-skewed distribution centered at 20-30 steps and tailing out near 60.

2. How many steps are there in the most complex route in the country?

This is a lot less definitive, but the answer I got was 69 steps, in a route from Ponderose Pine, NM to Wildwood, MN. A friend suggested something like the following approach for finding more complicated routes:

Suppose you’re getting “good” (i.e., stepful) routes between points A and B. Draw a box around each of A and B and “wiggle” your start points within that box. If wiggling in one direction removes steps, try wiggling in another direction; or if it’s not direction that matters, but rather something tricky like “being within a development or behind a river,” maybe you could just select points within the box randomly and assign scores to different areas (sort of like a game of Battleship). That way you slowly optimize promising routes until you end up with truly high numbers.

One potential pitfall of this approach is that there could be discontinuities — A to B could take an unremarkable 35 steps, but (A + ε) to B could take 70 steps — in which case you might not choose the right starting points to begin with. But this would probably only happen if there was something like a maze next to a normal neighborhood.

3. What’s the relationship between trip distance and route complexity?

The graph above plots route distance (measured as the surface distance between the two lat-long pairs) against step counts. Aside from a few outliers, you’ll notice that a really wide range of step counts is covered by a relatively narrow range of distances: that is, most of the variation in step counts is accounted for in trips less than a few hundred miles; and at the margin, an extra mile buys you very little in terms of route complexity.

Perhaps the most interesting points are those short routes with a large number of steps. See, for example, the 69-step route called out above (just over 1,000 miles), or the 67-step route from South Lyndeborough, NH to Hartley, GA (875 miles).

(You’ll notice a few routes with more than 70 steps — these can be safely ignored, since they either originate from or end up in Alaska (oops!)).

4. Can you generate a “heat map” that shades regions by their “coefficient of friction,” i.e., a numerical estimate of how hard it is to drive through a particular region based on how many steps there are, on average, in a route passing through it?

This is left as an exercise for the reader, as is the task of finding even longer routes (here’s a 75-stepper) and the more general underlying problem of understanding which features — of cities and roads and geography — are implicated in route complexity.

I have a mug here next to my keyboard that’s full of water. But I’ve been drinking it just like people in those Folgers commercials drink coffee: the way I go to pick it up; the way I hold it, with two hands; the way I hold it up to my nose, and close my eyes, and inhale appreciatively before I take a small sip; etc. If you were watching me from across the room you’d be convinced that I was drinking coffee, not water, just based on the way I’m moving.

Now the remarkable thing is that because of those movements, I get some of the pleasure, drinking water, that I would be getting if it really were coffee. That is, the movements themselves — the rituals — are enough to trick my brain into thinking the water is sort of rich and warm and fulfilling. How strange.

Not bothering about those guys at the bar who are being rude and rambunctious, or those cackling girls on the bus, is not just about dissociating to calm your nerves. It’s not just about ignoring them or putting them out of your mind. It’s about actively trying to appreciate their fun on their terms, and being heartened, or cheered up, or at the very least not repulsed by what you discover in their minds.

But imaginative empathy only goes so far, you say. “What about the vociferous leader of a hate group? I can’t understand how someone could get that way.” Can’t you? Work to imagine it! What did you learn?

We’re supposed to like these guys, not in spite of their (one-dimensional) distinguishing features, but because of them. We’re supposed to applaud the fact that these are not your typical male leads. So Raj’s ineptitude is meant to be cute; we’re meant to see a bit of ourselves in Howard; we’re meant to take Sheldon down a notch, but to still laugh along with his jokey parade of negativity; we’re meant to appreciate Leonard’s emotional openness.

It’s remarkable that these features don’t actually repulse us. We are so accustomed to good-looking high-status self-confident male protagonists with nice smiles, that you’d think we’d reject a group of awkward nitwits with loser attitudes. How do these guys earn our admiration, or even command our attention, if most of what they do is pine and bicker and trade masturbatory nerdy in-jokes?

Answer: they’re really smart. We are constantly reminded that these are four very talented scientists, former prodigies and possibly future Nobelists, PhDs in physics and engineering at CalTech. And with that, the basic premise of the show instantly transmogrifies from “four self-satisfied dopes failing socially and indulging ComiCon culture” into “the lighter side of genius.” All of those quirks and shortcomings are suddenly framed as the amusing side effects of their brilliance; their social gaffes take place against an implied backdrop of impressive academic achievement; their (irritating) overuse of jargon in everyday situations, their (childish) intellectual one-upsmanship, and their (regrettable) inability to connect with regular minds, are all explained away as the native burden of the brainiac.

All of this is achieved, mind you, not by convincing demonstrations of actual problem-solving ability or quick thinking or wisdom (though God knows what that means), but by mouthful after mouthful of highly technical vocabulary, often ripped from context, that has the veneer of intelligence.

For people who understand it, this kind of dialogue is a cheap enjoyable ego-massage—for what better way is there to feel good about yourself than to swallow whole the very same sentences that are causing so much trouble for the show’s “normal” characters, like Penny and her friends? And those viewers who can’t parse the jargon are, by virtue of the aforementioned buffoonery, encouraged to pat themselves on the back for not being too smart, for being “well-adjusted.” Everybody wins.

Penny, incidentally, is almost the show’s saving grace. She’s friendly, neighborly, warm, and refreshingly open-minded. She manages to both hold her own among these bizarre boys and stay unflinchingly positive in the face of their haughty and patronizing swagger. But I say “almost” the saving grace because she is, alas, reduced to being a babe. That is, much of the show’s action and comedy pivots on her attractiveness, in a way that clouds and crowds out her excellent attitude (among other things). So where her role could be to teach these guys about a life outside their geeky cloister—and granted, she does do this to a significant extent—she operates mainly as The Girl, that enduring staple of nerd fantasy.

But in the end what bothers me most about this show is that these idiots are held up as models, sort of, by the nerd community. I can understand their enthusiasm—the demographic has been shortchanged by just about every sitcom that ever was—but I wish they held out for something less cheap.

Listen: I just believe. I have faith. I’m sorry if you can’t understand that—I really am—but faith is not about reason, and God is not the sort of thing that you can explain.

This is the discursive equivalent of a guy in a duel insisting, after he misses his only shot, that it’s not fair for you to have a gun. It seems like a very low tactic, like a last resort. But it works. And if we’re going to defeat it, we’re going to have to figure out how.

Belief in belief

Dan Dennett, in Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, points out that believing that (a) “democracy is good” is different from believing that (b) “belief in democracy is good.” Someone who held a might write a pamphlet espousing the benefits of a democratic society, whereas someone who held b might see to the distribution of that pamphlet: theirs is a “second-order belief” or, as Dennett puts it, a “belief in belief.”

Historically, religious beliefs tended to be of the first order: “you sacrifice an ox if you want it to rain” because “you really believe that the rain god won’t provide rain unless you sacrifice an ox” (Dennett 227). Belief for its own sake—the kind that drives us to the “faith impasse”—appears to be a relatively recent invention. One explanation is that “the meme for faith exhibits frequency-dependent fitness: it flourishes particularly in the company of rationalistic memes”; since “rationalistic memes” have proliferated in recent centuries, so have calls for “blind faith” and belief in belief (231).

That is, because we have so drastically increased our stock of hard facts over the years—stuff like “rain clouds are formed by colliding air fronts at different temperatures,” or “a baby’s sex doesn’t depend on phases of the moon”—religions that once made all sorts of empirical claims have had to slowly untie themselves from the actual world, in order not to be disproved.

And what happens when a religion no longer has purchase on the real? It retreats into the minds of its believers. All that is solid melts into air: God becomes less a coherent entity than a kind of indescribable omnipresence, an Emersonian oversoul that hears our prayers and “acts in mysterious ways.” He becomes, more and more throughout the years, like a beetle in a box.

Wittgenstein’s beetles

After discussing the Druze—a peculiar religious community based in Beirut where residents insist on lying to outsiders about their beliefs—Dennett goes on, in Breaking the Spell, to quote the following passage at length from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations:

Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle.” No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.—Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. —But suppose the word “beetle” had a use in these people’s language?—If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. —No, one can “divide through” by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. (§293, as quoted on Dennett 235)

Dennett remarks that

much has been written on Wittgenstein’s beetle box, but I don’t know if anybody has ever proposed an application to religious belief. In any case, it seems fantastic at first that the Druze might be an actual example of the phenomenon.

Indeed, the idea of a religion with beliefs that cannot be observed and that (possibly) change constantly sounds a lot like Wittgenstein’s hypothetical box. But the connection seems just as valid for any other religion, or any other belief at all. Every concept, from God to I to chair, is like a beetle in a box: we all use the same word “chair” and say we know what it means based only on our own personal, internal mental contents (the brain state we’re in when we think of chairs), contents which constantly change.

There is a way in which some concepts seem more like beetles in a box than others, though. My concept of two, for instance, is probably very much like everyone else’s; we all have (roughly) the same beetle in our boxes. Thus our word “two” is not pulling any tricks—it is not, as Wittgenstein puts it, that “the thing in the box has no place in the language-game,” for the internal mental contents referred to by “two” are (presumably) not arbitrary. Of all concepts, in fact, two would probably be one of the least like a beetle in a box.

The word “I,” on the other hand, and its corresponding concept of me or my self, is probably much closer to what Wittgenstein had in mind (and to the Druze’s religion). Each person understands “I” based only on his or her own self, obviously, and every self is (just as obviously) different. But still, “I” has a place in the language-game, because everyone who says it is referring to the same type of object, even if the actual constitution of that object is unique. So it goes for any “relative reference”: that chair, the telephone closest to X, etc. Example: “n is the biggest number I can think of” depends on who says it (and is thus just as relative as “I”), but since whoever says it is doing the same sort of thing (mentally) when he “processes” the phrase, it is not useless in the way that Wittgenstein’s “beetle” is useless.

You’ll notice that as we move from one concept to another, we seem to be playing with or turning two critical “knobs,” which together define what I’ll call “the beetle-box metric”: the concept’s articulability, or the degree to which a person can examine and describe his X, and its sharedness, or the degree to which my X is the same as your X.

It should be no surprise that religions—and in particular, their various conceptions of “God”—also admit to degrees of beetle-in-a-box-resemblance. As it happens, these are often distributed across time, with those most like a beetle in a box appearing latest. Dennett gives a run-through, though he doesn’t realize he’s taking steps up the beetle-box ladder: from rain gods and Greek gods to Yahweh of The Old Testament, through to the original New Testament Lord, “that “genderless Person without a body who nevertheless answers prayers in real time (Stark’s conscious supernatural being),” etc., all the way up to “a Higher Power (Stark’s essence).”

What a beetle-box does to your brain

Imagine that in your religion the idea of God is neither shared nor articulable—imagine, in other words, that your most deeply held convictions are about something that’s isomorphic to Wittgenstein’s beetle in a box. What would that mean?

On its own, probably not much. It would probably be harmless. But consider what happens when such a bizarrely vague God-concept is combined with an imperative toward faith, as it is in some forms of Christianity:

I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me. – (John 14: 6)

If your particular brand of Christianity takes this to mean that the only path to eternal bliss is to simply have faith in Christ, then you implicitly have a pretty serious stake in that belief. Dennett warns us what can happen:

Once people start committing themselves (in public, or just in their “hearts”) to particular ideas, a strange dynamic process is brought into being, in which the original commitment gets buried in pearly layers of defensive reaction and meta-reaction.

His point is especially apt when the “particular ideas” to which one is committed are formless and private, like a beetle in a box, because those ideas act like wildcards. That is, ideas that have not been articulated (much) are not yet committed to (m)any facts, and so are compatible with (m)any arbitrary fact(s); moreover, ideas that are private cannot, in principle, undergo the kind of “compatibility checking” with an expert that would elsewise be possible.

The trouble, then, is that it is easy to maintain one’s commitment to these “wildcard” ideas, because there is no inconsistency—logically, cognitively, or publicly—in changing their content if the commitment so demands it. What then happens, as Dennett puts it, is that whatever little actual articulable content comprises the idea gets buried under these changes, or attempts to attack and defend it (his “pearly layers”). This is far less likely when an idea is shared—because an expert’s articulation (the “orthodoxy”) is available—or articulable—because there are more committed-to facts to fix an idea in place.

So someone who claims true belief, but who actually only has a particularly powerful belief in belief, could plausibly not know it, because the truth is buried under all these layers of cognitive infighting.

Through the faith impasse

Where does that leave us?

Well, now we have a (provisional) theory for what leads people to declare their unequivocal faith in a concept they can’t describe. The two critical components are (1) a commitment to belief itself and (2) a sufficiently “slippery” halo of religious concepts to be the object of that belief.

And although it’s a long shot, I’m hoping that we can parlay this theory into a successful attack. The idea is that if we can explicitly articulate the psychological mechanisms at work in a person’s most intimate pernicious religious beliefs, maybe we can help to dismantle them—to at last purge that nasty beetle from its box.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier—even quicker, once you have the habit—to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think.

Maybe Polonius said it best in Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2: “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

The point is well-taken. The best writing feels concentrated, with tight simple language, everything superfluous removed, expressing a great deal. So it goes in every art and science: we are most satisfied by work that is simultaneously deep, important, and simple. That’s the heart of “elegance.”

It all goes back, probably, to Occam’s razor, which is the idea that we should prefer the simpler of two Xes, as long as the Xes do the same work. In science, that means preferring the simpler of two explanations that fit the same facts; in aesthetics, the more basic of two depictions; in math, the shorter and more elementary of two proofs. The point in each case is to eliminate anything extraneous.

The fact that this kind of distillation is often incredibly difficult—I’m reminded of Mark Twain telling a friend, “Sorry for the long letter – I didn’t have time to write a short one”—probably goes a long way to explaining our admiration for it. It is hard work, this brevity business, and as a culture we are suckers for toil (at least in theory). Maybe that’s why we’re such big fans of diamonds—for what could better symbolize the painstaking work of an artist than the Earth’s mantle giving birth, over the course of a billion years, to a tiny, rare, and beautiful gemstone, crystal-packed with the force of a volcanic eruption?

But let’s not get carried away. Let’s not start to admire brevity for its own sake, or presume that five hundred words are intrinsically better than five thousand. Because most simple things are just simple—a one-line proof, for example, is far more likely to be proving an obvious fact in a straightforward way than it is to be proving something deep and sophisticated in a clever compact way. And (contra Twain) it actually turns out to be incredibly easy to write a short letter: all you have to do is have not that much to say.

This is why I’m wary of short forms like op-eds and blog posts. The tight space functions, paradoxically, as a kind of buffer for the writer, allowing him to keep his distance from the reader: by virtue of a word limit he is saved from having to flesh out his ideas and saved, in the case that he doesn’t have many ideas, from having to expose his ignorance. It’s a win-win situation—a win for the reader because he gets quick pithy tidbits that are easy to digest, and for the writer because it’s like being asked to hit a single note rather than carry a whole tune.

The trick to being successful with short forms, then, is to have lots of little gists of ideas, to clothe them in elegant prose, without obvious mistakes, leaving as much as you can to the reader’s imagination. All the subtle and challenging stuff can be hashed out somewhere where people will never find it, like in the comments section or letters to the editor.

Which is not to say that there aren’t writers who do make diamonds of their column inches, but merely that for most of the rest of us, compactness is a crutch.

Whenever I see them out in public, I wonder if young pretty girls understand just how prized they are. Everyone wants one. They are universally appreciated and almost constantly ogled, even by people who see them all the time—it never gets old.

I also wonder if young pretty girls, and women generally, envy or admire men for being basically the torchbearers of history—the great generals, and kings, and authors and scientists. When they’re attracted to our masculinity, is this at all a part of it? I don’t mean to sweep historical women under the rug, by the way. I’m just wondering if narratives about “men of history” somehow trickle down into everyday life, so that part of what girls like about boys is their potential to command the world.

The “steadily every day, with no exception, with no holiday” part of “a small part of it, steadily every day, with no exception, with no holiday” is a lot more important than the “it” part or the “small” part. It matters less what you’re doing or how much of it than the simple fact that you do it every day without a day off. Being able to stick with the tiniest something in this way does a great deal for your confidence, and it’s a good bet that no matter what that tiniest something is, the product of your daily effort will add up to something wonderful.

I think I’m good at “typing” people, or putting them into one or another personality buckets. But I rarely test myself. For instance I don’t make predictions about these people. This is what I should do: “I think this person is a hipster. What movies do hipsters like? Fight Club? ‘Hey Caroline, how do you feel about “Fight Club”?’”

Facebook makes it easy to get practice typing people. When you meet someone, try to mentally fill out their Facebook profile. What sorts of things will they list as interests? How many photos will they have? It may turn out that you are good at this kind of bucketing, or it may turn out that this kind of bucketing isn’t very hard. But the only way to know is to experiment.

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests. –David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction“

DFW develops, in the essay excerpted above, what ends up being a fairly coherent theory of television: of how and why we watch it, of what makes a particularly effective episode or commercial, of the ways in which the medium spells trouble for the enterprise of contemporary fiction-writing, etc. I recommend it heartily, not least because of its restraint: DFW somehow manages to explain why the average American watches six hours of TV per day without calling us all idiots and, importantly, without declaring an end to our culture or intellectual life.

I bring this up mostly to excuse myself from having to present such a complete self-consistent picture. I figure that if I did, it would only end up being a sham version of what DFW already laid out in that essay.

So instead what I’ll do is simply write up a quick idea or two about a small set of TV series (and films) to which I’ve given some thought. It’ll be a bit scattered, but I hope the following critical tidbits do at least some useful work:

1. People often miss the point about Seinfeld. Some think its chief achievement is the clever dovetailing, at the end of each episode, of a handful of zany interleaving plotlines—like how in “The Marine Biologist” George saves a whale whose blowhole, it turns out, was actually plugged up by Kramer’s golf ball. When It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia called itself “Seinfeld on crack,” this is mostly what they were referring to: the idea of three guys and a girl getting themselves into outrageous situations that somehow “come together” at the end.

Others think Seinfeld mostly works because of its high-pitched playful banter, as demonstrated in Family Guy’s spot-on “tickler stickler” parody, the idea there being that all the show amounts to is week after week of funny (but formulaic) wordplay.

I think the truth is a bit trickier than that. The banter helps, for sure, as do the “aha” endings. And of course we shouldn’t forget about fundamentals like good acting and funny material. But I think the twin keys to Seinfeld’s watchability are (a) that it deals mostly in funny trivialities and (b) that it trivializes just about everything else.

In that sense it’s unlike nearly every other show, which at some point tackles something serious. Even South Park moralizes, and even Family Guy will occasionally get emotional. But Seinfeld never lets its guard down. Everything that could possibly challenge or scare an actual emotional human being is just ignored—even if a situation gets bad, like if someone dies or if a relationship goes south, the characters always engage it and emerge from it with the same Seinfeldian stance, which is, ultimately, about distance: they live their lives at arm’s length, at the level of a joke.

That’s why the show is so much fun to watch (on top of the physical comedy, the stand-up material, etc.). It’s a way to disengage from reality, far more effectively than you might with American Idol or The Office or even (early seasons of) The Simpsons. Because in those shows conflict matters—amid the humor and upbeat escapism there is real tension and real danger. In Seinfeld, though, it’s all milk cartons and bottle deposits and big toes and parking spaces.

2. Friends mostly works because the cast members are all great-looking. Otherwise we’d probably hate these people or find them boring. The men are either effeminate dolts (Joey and Ross) or smarmy dickheads (Chandler and Ross), and the women consist of Phoebe, a barely likable (and only for some) ditz, the mean and demanding Monica, and Rachel, an essentially empty character whose principal role for 60% of the series is to be a romantic option for Ross.

The rest of the show is a series of straightforward gags, mishaps, and trite lessons about relationships. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—the gags are funny, the mishaps create suspense enough, and the lessons about relationships are no triter than any from other great shows like Home Improvement or Family Matters.

But I strongly doubt we’d stick around if it weren’t for the fact that these characters are so pretty. It’s how Joey becomes likable and it’s what keeps Rachel interesting.

Sure, actors everywhere are great-looking (except in the UK, it seems). So it may seem unfair to call out Friends specifically. But the point is that looks here tie the show together, in a way that they wouldn’t elsewhere, because this show doesn’t have much else going for it.

3. Comparing the early to later seasons, it’s clear that The Office has gone downhill—Michael Scott used to be more believable (like Homer, he starts out as a plausible character but degrades into a parody of himself), Jim was more likable (the underdog pining for Pam), and everyone still acted as though this was, in fact, a documentary. If anything has improved over the years it’s probably the use of Dwight and the haircuts of everybody else.

What also becomes clear from watching Seasons 1 and 2 is the extent to which the show was driven by the tension between Jim and Pam. It’s amazing how deflated all those sidelong glances and awkward moments feel when you watch it knowing what eventually happens.

4. The West Wing and Sorkin’s engineering of cheese:

I’ve cut a couple of scenes from A Few Good Men (watch them: they’re awesome) that highlight a peculiar “trick” of Sorkin’s, namely, his ability to command cheesy, tinglish moments—in which the audience feels as though something good and strongly human has happened—practically at will.

My point is that these moments (with the second of the two linked clips being the prototype) have an articulable pattern, and that once you notice it, individual instances (sprinkled all over the early seasons of The West Wing) lose a bit of their magic—because now you know how they work.

5. The West Wing and the late seasons:

I do think the show goes downhill after Sorkin leaves at the end of season 4, and here’s why:

• Even though the later seasons juggle two whole enterprises (the campaigns and the White House), the action in each episode is far simpler. One or two stories dominate, and our pleasure is in the suspense of seeing them unravel; whereas the earlier seasons were about how the characters handle situations, these are about the situations themselves.
• Since the earlier seasons were so much more about characters and their dilemmas, and less about what happens next, there was more time to play. The dialogue was a lot chippier, and the core plotlines were rounded out by episode-long gags and silly moments, the sum of which made the show so much fun to watch. In the same vein, the early episodes had time to show us these people’s personal lives; they did the hard work of making the characters likable. The rest of the show just burns the capital accrued in the first four seasons.
• I know it’s partly excused by his health condition, but the President becomes a shell of his former self as the show goes on. Some of the best scenes in the early TWW are of Bartlet being wonderfully eclectic, esoteric, and right, and inspiring the hell out of an already inspired bunch. There’s almost none of that later on. My pet theory is that only Sorkin could write for Bartlet, and that once he’s gone, the President becomes just another driver of the plot, feeding off his weighty reputation.
• CJ as chief of staff is a lot more serious than CJ as press secretary, and a lot less likable. Leo as VP candidate is a lot weaker than Leo as chief of staff, and a lot less likable. Will as Russell’s man is a lot more hostile than Will as one of the guys, and a lot less likable. Josh as campaign manager is a lot less dynamic, and more tired, than Josh as deputy chief of staff, and a lot less likable. Etc.
• The campaign trail is by its nature leaner than the West Wing, and the cinematography captures this nicely: the cameras shake more, the hues are colder, etc. The only problem is that the show becomes shakier, and colder, as a result.

6. Why, in a word, did The Simpsons used to be so much better than it is today? Because it was warm.

7. Mowgli is a bitch. In case you don’t remember, let me briefly recap The Jungle Book:

1. Bagheera finds Mowgli, and decides, after briefly hesitating, to take care of him (”If I had known how deeply I was to be involved, I would have obeyed my first impulse and walked away”). Puts him under the care of a pack of wolves.
2. Wolves, instead of eating Mowgli, decide against all odds to raise him.
3. Eventually the wolf council decides that, since Shere Khan is on his way back, Mowgli can no longer stay with the pack… and Bagheera offers to take him back to the man-village.
4. But Mowgli doesn’t want to go back to the man-village. In fact he makes a monumental fuss about it. He runs away, eventually happening upon Baloo “dooby-dooby-dooin’” around. What’s the first thing he does (to a bear he’s never met, and who approaches to console him)? That’s right: he slaps him on the face. “Go away,” he says.
5. Baloo takes it all in stride, as Baloo is wont to do. We have a great thrill watching Baloo and Mowgli’s friendship develop—it’s arguably the best part of the movie. “The bear necessities,” etc.
6. Mowgli and Baloo and Bagheera get into all kinds of trouble: elephants, monkeys, snakes, and so forth. It’s a real laugh riot, but these guys put their lives on the line, time after time, for Mowgli and his reckless, selfish desire to stay in the jungle.
7. Bagheera convinces Baloo to take Mowgli to the man-village, because things at this point are just getting too dangerous with Shere Khan around.
8. Mowgli feels betrayed and runs away. Finds himself with a foursome of loser vultures.
9. Shere Khan returns and challenges Mowgli. Mowgli accidentally thwarts him with fire (it literally takes a lightning strike for him to win). But it works: Shere Khan’s done for.

At this point, everyone (including Bagheera) is just having one hell of a time relishing their newfound peace. It looks like Mowgli is going to live in the jungle after all.

But wait! Out of the clear blue sky, a twelve-year-old girl wearing hoop earrings and lipstick gives Mowgli the coyest eye-fuck you’ve ever seen in a Disney movie, and off he goes, leaving Bagheera and Baloo behind.

Is this not completely absurd? Here’s a kid who spends the whole goddamn movie whining about “staying in the jungle,” getting everyone into trouble over it, and who finally gets what he wants thanks to two parts <everyone else’s sacrifice> and one part <luck>—but pulls a 180 because he sees a provisional piece of ass?

He doesn’t even say goodbye.

7. Scrubs is emblematic of a feminine sort of comedy, almost the complete opposite of Seinfeld, in which the regular jokes and gags take place against a backdrop of intense emotional reflection. J.D. is plagued by self-doubt and he talks, with the audience as interlocutor, to work through his “issues.” It is (or was) a good show, but I personally have a hard time watching it, probably because I’m so used to Seinfeld.

8. Hackers is not one of these movies that’s good because it’s bad or because it’s campy or because its fans are just nostalgic. It’s good because of scenes like this.

Sexual graphs

Maybe this is obvious, but I hadn’t really thought about it until recently: when a group of homosexuals hangs out, each member of the group could potentially hook up with every other member; in terms of sexual opportunities their graph is fully connected. This is decidedly not the case among heterosexuals, who form what’s called a “bipartite” graph.

Imagine how this must change the social dynamics!

Under the sea

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, we are told that humans are actually only the third most intelligent species on Earth, after lab rats (who have really been experimenting on us) and dolphins.

I find this hierarchy oddly plausible, with one exception: there should be a place up there for squid. Not those small idiot squid that live in the shallows, but their cousins, the massive mega-intelligent beasts that live far, far deeper—the giant geniuses who are, presumably, actually doing something useful with all that ink.

Reading pools

The idea here is to combine book clubs and gambling. Everyone who’d like to participate in a regular reading group first buys in for a certain nontrivial amount of money, say, $50. Anyone who quits before the end, or fails to attend enough meetings, or doesn’t read and actively contribute, forfeits their cash. Whatever is left in the pot at the end is divvied up among the remaining readers.

Sheer egoism

George Orwell cited “sheer egoism” as the number one reason he became an author (in “Why I Write”). I’m starting to think that this must be true of every writer. Why else would they bother? Ninety percent of what most writers end up writing has been written before, and written well. What original thoughts you might stumble on are most likely insignificant. And if you ever chance upon an insight that’s both original and important, what are the odds that you’ll express it correctly, that is, in a way that people will want to read? Or that whatever audience you do find will be worth anything in the long run?

I’m convinced, therefore, that the only way to gear yourself up to write with any passion is to be unusually wrapped up in yourself, or at least to have a kind of delusional faith in your own ideas.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

An eccentric billionaire places before you a vial of toxin that, if you drink it, will make you painfully ill for a day, but will not threaten your life or have any lasting effects. The billionaire will pay you one million dollars tomorrow morning if, at midnight tonight, you intend to drink the toxin tomorrow afternoon. He emphasizes that you need not drink the toxin to receive the money; in fact, the money will already be in your bank account hours before the time for drinking it arrives, if you succeed. All you have to do is… intend at midnight tonight to drink the stuff tomorrow afternoon. You are perfectly free to change your mind after receiving the money and not drink the toxin.

It’s probably worth asking why this is considered an interesting problem in the first place, since on face there might not seem to be anything difficult going on.

But Kavka seems to think that it would actually be very hard, if not impossible, for someone to intend at midnight tonight to drink a painful poison tomorrow if they knew that they could eventually back out without losing any money. In asserting this he is really taking two steps: first, to argue that a person would never actually drink the poison, because by the time they reach the moment of truth, the prize will have already been won or lost—and no one would choose pain vs. not-pain if all else is equal; and second, to argue that if you knew that you weren’t going to drink the poison tomorrow, there is no way you could intend to tonight.

The first step is fairly sound, although one can imagine challenging it in the following way: suppose that you had somehow managed, last night, to intend to drink the poison today—isn’t there then a sense in which you’re committed to go through with it (such commitment being what initially enabled your intention)? If so, then it may be that to win the money you do have to drink the poison after all. (This was actually the tack taken by philosopher David Gauthier in a paper published shortly after Kavka’s. See the Wikipedia page for more.)

It’s an interesting possibility that cuts to the core of the problem: can someone intend to drink the poison, and if so, what would such a person look like (epistemologically, psychologically)? Would they be somehow bound, Gauthier-style, to follow through, or is there a way to win the money without having to endure a day of pain?

I certainly don’t think it would be the strangest thing to ever happen, and actually I could imagine a few concrete ways you might pull it off:

1. You could force yourself to literally forget about the option to back out tomorrow. I doubt I could do this, but there must be some people whose minds are sufficiently powerful (or broken) to selectively “delete” memories. (In which case they would in fact follow through and drink the poison, unless the billionaire reminded them that they had the option not to.)
2. More easily, you could construct for yourself a sort of conspiracy theory in which the billionaire is tricking you, and in which you’ll have no choice but to drink the poison tomorrow. You could get yourself all riled up this way, momentarily terrified by the prospect, but gradually talk yourself down to the point of acquiescence—”there are no lasting effects; it’ll only be painful for a day”—mentally preparing yourself so well to drink the poison that you essentially “forget” about backing out, since that option no longer seems real. This train of thought may sound bizarre, but I’d wager that every day all sorts of paranoid people immerse themselves in far more elaborate fantasies. (And the benefit of pulling this one off is that you would wake up the next day a million dollars richer and amazingly relieved the moment the billionaire let you go.)
3. You could be one of those thrill-seekers who thinks it would add to your stock of “life experience” to endure a temporary bout of intense pain. (In this case you probably would end up drinking the poison.)
4. Or you could, quite like a regular person, decide that you really want the million dollars and that you’d be willing to endure a day of pain for it. You might then set out to find some way to intend tonight to drink the poison tomorrow, even though you know in the back of your mind that you are very likely to back out. So for the next several hours you might fight yourself, trying hard as you can to eliminate these nagging thoughts of backing out, flitting back and forth between “totally committed” and “knowing full well I won’t go through with it.” You might even start to consider options like #1-3, but you’d probably dismiss them for being too weird or somehow infeasible. Then finally you’d hit on a brilliant idea: a contract! You have long been telling yourself that “my word is my bond,” that you are trustworthy, that other people might renege or cave but that you always come through. You are certain that if you signed a contract with yourself you couldn’t break it. And so you’d draw one up, sign it, and sleep comfortably, slightly nervous about the day of painful illness ahead, but pleased to know that you’ve got a million dollars in the bag. And it would probably be enough to net you the cash. (Of course odds are that the next day you’d go back on your word, but I imagine we all know a few people who really are so steadfast that they’d actually drink the poison.)

There are no doubt many more methods available. The key point is that human psychology is warpable enough to satisfy the billionaire’s demands—this is, after all, the same psychology that can willingly kamikaze itself in the name of God or country, that is so often ruled by fear and insecurity, that regularly violates expected utility theory, and that acts, for the most part, as though it’s not headed toward an infinite doom.

So the real puzzle here, in my mind, is why Kavka thought this was a “puzzle” at all.