the jsomers.net blog.

Something dangerous seems to happen when a person who likes to watch birds decides that they’re a birdwatcher. It’s the difference between doing something and doing some thing—where the latter has a structure to it, a stuffiness, that the former doesn’t. It’s the embrace of a complex of habits and equipment and dispositions and vocabulary, a kind of cancerous scaffold that threatens to swallow the building.

I worry about this mostly in the context of writing. I worry that someday—someday soon, maybe—I’ll start to think of myself as a writer, I’ll start to call myself a writer, and therefrom will not so much write as “write.” I’ll craft “pieces,” ply units of a branded trade, instead of trying to put thoughts into words.

There are concrete risks here. My style might get too much varnish on it. I might forget to be humble and curious. I might expect too much from an empty page (and start to fear it).

I hope like hell that doesn’t happen. I hope like hell I don’t birdwatch something that I ought to just do and live with, like the wise Paul R. Halmos:

As for writing—I write all the time, and I have done so as far back as I can remember. I write letters, from time to time I have kept diaries, and I write notes to myself, explicit ones with sentences, not just “try power series expansion” or “see Dunford-Schwartz for p > 1″. I think by writing. In college I wrote notes—that is, I transcribed abbreviations scribbled in class to legible and grammatical sentences. Later, when I started trying to prove theorems (the acceptably low-key phrase for the more stuffy-sounding “doing research”), I would keep writing, as if I were conducting a conversation between me and myself. “What happens if I restrict to the ergodic case? Well, let me see. I have already looked at what happens when S is ergodic, but the useful case is when both S and T are…” (page 8, I Want to Be a Mathematician)

Adults seem to have this idea that kids rifle through toys because of some problem that kids have, like short attention spans, when really it’s a problem that toys have. Not that they’re poorly made—some of these things are remarkably durable. It’s that a toy never quite measures up to what it was promised to be. It’s never quite as capable as it was in the commercials, never as sparkling or vibrant as its counterpart in the Original Motion Picture.

You have to keep in mind that kids are raised on cartoons. I certainly was. For several hours each day I did nothing except sit still and focus my full awareness on bright, lively characters, few of them human, as they wandered around imaginationscapes doing things that could never happen in the real world. My favorite was “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” a show about reptiles who stumble into a pool of radioactive ooze in the sewers of New York, develop humanoid bodies and brains, and save the world time and again from a talking brain who lives in the stomach of a stupid robot in a massive metallic weaponized sphere that was built in a place called Dimension X.

I suspended disbelief. In fact I always did—suspending disbelief was what I was best at then. For me, like for most kids, there was no sense in letting truth get in the way of a good time: I just wanted to hear about, or read about, or see or imagine worlds where interesting stuff happened, and whatever rules were conjured up to drive the action I’d happily swallow whole. Wishful thinking was my default mode. The bulk of my mental life was fantasy.

One example actually sticks out kind of vividly. I was six. I was hiding in the bow of a ship made out of tires—it was the centerpiece of our school’s new playground, the first sight of which was quite possibly the most ecstatic moment of my life. Anyway, I was hiding there and I suddenly got the idea, quite out of nowhere, that I was wearing these unusual boots, boots that not only made me faster but somehow more powerful, too. I thought to myself—and I really remember thinking this—that with these boots I would conquer the world. I felt the way Simba must have felt when his father told him that he would someday rule over “everything the light touches.”

When I rounded up my friends to show them the way to glory, naturally they played along. Not for a minute did they question my boots—instead, they riffed on the idea. The narrative snowballed.  Soon enough we had new characters, new equipment and abilities, territories, a rapidly evolving status ladder, and all sorts of layered missions. It was all felt to be of the highest importance—we were playing, maybe, but we were very much in it, we had very much forgotten that we were all tiny and powerless and just starting grade school and that it was recess on a cold day and our fortress was made out of discarded rubber.

That was a constant theme: that underneath the apparatus of everyday life was some secret power; that the schoolyard and our parents and day camps and all the little business of little-kid life was a front to a more magical world, a world on the cusp of destruction or in need of a hero or otherwise burdened with something dramatically important; and that we would be the center of it all.

It’s hard to say where that kind of thinking comes from. Is it natural? Are the authors and screenwriters who produce so many variations on that theme just tapping into inborn archetypes? Or does the causal arrow run the other way: do kids weave these stories because of what’s “in the air”?

Whatever the case, there can be no doubt that we were absolutely immersed in the stuff. I for one grew up believing deeply in magic; magic was everywhere around me. It showed up in ghost stories and in fairy tales, at church and in the classroom. It showed up every time an adult tried to explain some phenomenon—what makes trees grow? what makes sloths slow?—but ended up explaining it away.

Santa Claus was a big one: I was made to believe, and I enjoyed believing, that my father was good friends with a man who lived at the North Pole and oversaw an impossible factory and knew whether I was swearing too much or “instigating” my brother. Every Christmas morning I marveled that he took a few bites out of the cookies we left the night before.

The list goes on: Dr. Seuss and Disney movies, science fiction, Pixar, Easter, Looney Tunes, Power Rangers, Harry Potter. Just about every piece of myth or media an American child consumes is shot through with magic in one form or another.

The trouble is, a ten-year old doesn’t just get swept away to these imagined worlds and then saunter back into his regular life. He can’t just cleanly bracket the fantasy. A ten year-old who reads about Hogwarts wants to go there, badly, and believes somewhere in the happy shadows of his mind that he one day will. That wonderful prospect might brew in his unconscious for years.

This is where toys come in. Toys promise to reify that fiction. They promise a tangible version of what you saw in your mind’s eye. To touch and even taste the “real” Harry Potter universe, you’re told, all it takes is a trip to Toys ‘R Us or Amazon.com for some officially licensed merchandise.

Imagine what a letdown it is to find that a $15 snitch can’t fly wildly of its own accord, that store-bought “sorting hats” can’t tell you who you truly are, that no combination of light and sound effects can make magic of a plastic wand. It’s like a pinch from a pleasant dream. You’re made to feel the distinctly childish sadness that comes from wishing what isn’t is, and being told it might be, and finding out that it wasn’t, can’t, and won’t.

It’s a disillusionment articulated especially well in Bill Watterson’s beloved comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes. The strip centers on the relationship between Calvin, a six year-old boy, and Hobbes, his supposed pet tiger. The two make a wonderful duo: Calvin is capricious, bold, creative, mischievous; Hobbes is witty, playful, sharp. Together they set out on extravagant adventures. But all of that fades when Calvin’s parents are in the frame. The spell is lifted; Hobbes transforms. He goes from being what Calvin needs him to be—something fantastical, a sassy wise rambunctious friend—into what he must be, what he actually is, which is just a goddamn stuffed animal.

That’s roughly what I have in mind when I say that toys are the emblem, the engine, of a special kind of disappointment, one that operates most keenly in the American childhood but lingers well longer—and manages still to sting.

I’m starting to think that high school was the ideal social environment.

Like most high schoolers I had a social network best described as a series of concentric circles, or maybe fuzzy overlapping halos:

• A group of just enough very close friends to fit around a single table at lunch
• Another handful of chums who I didn’t see as often outside of school
• About a classroom’s worth of happy acquaintances who I talked to on a regular basis
• The rest of my 120-person class
• The rest of my school

The key was that I interacted with these people every day. We were in the same building together for hours. And not through any effort on our part—we were actually forced into the arrangement.

I can’t emphasize how important that is. Socializing in high school was easy and continuous. Whether you were in class, on the bus, playing sports, eating, walking the halls, or lounging, you were engaged with people you had come to know well. In intervals of roughly an hour, the circle of people immediately around you—the classroom, team, whatever—was shuffled, but always chosen from the same distribution. You had a healthy balance of variety and stability.

That mode of interaction turns out to be quite natural. We’re told that 150 is “the estimated size of the typical neolithic farming village,” “the splitting point of Hutterite settlements,” and “the basic unit size of professional armies in Roman antiquity.” This is how people have evolved to operate: in a village. In a stable community of a hundred or so people with multiply intersecting sub-communities.

High school was a village. College wasn’t. Consider what my network looked like at the University of Michigan:

• Miscellaneous

In the Miscellaneous category were all sorts of individuals or small groups I was close with at a particular time or in a particular context. There was the hall from my freshman dorm, the Indians who I drank and sang and smoked with (shisha and cigarettes), the ping pong kids, the kids I stayed up with playing Scrabble, that house I spent too much time at, my Jimbo Jeopardy opponents, the group I studied with junior year, the guy who I helped with game theory problem sets, the kid I played beer pong with over the summer, a former TA and squash partner, the guys I’d meet for beers and complex systems talk, people I saw in more than one class, the kids on my basketball team, etc.

These little unstable clusters would intersect from time to time, or drift, or break apart. There wasn’t much order to it.

We certainly never all came together under one roof. In fact, excepting the handful of people I lived with, spending time with people I knew took work. Not a lot of work, but some: I had to make plans, set up lunches, suggest parties to meet at. For the first time in my life I had to nurse relationships—or watch them fade.

After I graduated my network became even more fractured. My friends moved all around the world, strewn quite unpredictably into new cohorts in New York, Boston, Chicago, Ann Arbor, California, Dubai.

Two years out, I’m sharing a New York apartment with four friends from my high school lunch table. Outside that core my social life is an impoverished mess.

The first problem, of course, is that most of my friends don’t live here. To see them I have to travel. And I would most certainly give up those wonderful weekend trips with free lodging to have more friends within walking distance.

It also doesn’t help that my friendships now are structured just like my friendships in college—that is, without much structure at all—except that now everybody has a lot less free time. My friends are in serious jobs or graduate programs. They have to wake up early. They spend weekends with their families or girlfriends. It’s no longer easy, or wise, to blow six hours playing video games talking about Foucault, or whatever it was we did so much of in college.

Nor is there any longer a central peg, a cafeteria or classroom or dorm or library that we all might share in spite of our multiplex associations.

One rather large caveat is that I haven’t yet worked in a normal big office. I’ve either been at tiny companies, or worked from home, or spent half-days in-house as an independent contractor.

But I doubt I’d find what I’m after in the workplace. My friends with regular day jobs seem to enjoy their coworkers, and socialize with them, but still they spend most of their free time with “real” friends instead of “work people.” Probably this has to do with age differences—the work troupes my friends are in have just a few young people each; youth is spread across the firm.

For all that, though, I do know some people who manage to keep up a very rich social life. They’re gregarious. They put a lot effort into it: they call friends for coffees and drinks and dinners and all those little two-hour blasts of adult conviviality. They flit from group to group, attending to the ones they haven’t seen recently, putting air under the juggling balls that were about to fall.

But even in the best case an especially social young New Yorker might see each of his fifty or so friendly contacts an average of once every three weeks, or something like that, compared to the every day he would have seen them in high school.

You might say: way it goes, bud. We live in cities now, not villages. We run in cliques, not tribes.

Indeed I feel like I’m up against serious structural forces. I feel like it’s normal to split one’s day between intimates and near strangers, or to spend less than a couple hours per day just shooting the bull. I feel like the sort of track my friends and I are on is cutting against the sort of community I want, which is my community, my entire wonderful society of friends, all close and spending time together.

I guess I’ll have to wait for a wedding.

A few months ago, a friend and I were talking about Sporcle, a popular website with moderately educational fill-in-the-blank quizzes. Their most popular page, for example, asks you to name the fifty United States. And here’s one that asks you to name thirty-two characters from The West Wing. There are many thousands more.

My friend thought Sporcle would be much improved if you could compete with other people in real time to fill out the quizzes. That way you’d turn lonely exercises into lively races.

Thinking this “multiplayer Sporcle” was a superb idea, I set out that night to build it. And remarkably I had a version that worked within three or four days, a feat I chalk up almost entirely to the deep brobdinagian complex of other people’s work that supports every modern programmer.

As I’ve steadily hacked away at the project, taking nights and weekends here and there to push out a new feature, preen the code, style some pages, and so on, I’ve been mostly oblivious to the growing complexity of the whole thing—the mess of technologies now implicated in even the simplest user actions. Without paying it any mind, really, I’ve darted fluidly among dozens of languages and dialects and libraries, thinking so little of their differences as to be effectively writing the entire application, top to bottom, in a kind of computational mentalese.

What I mean is that as I tab around in my editor touching some jQuery, then some Ruby code, then HTML, and then tweak some Apache settings, and tune MySQL, and push some new EC2 instances, and rewrite DNS entries, and thin out my Rails controllers, and wrap ActiveRecord around a Redis model, and rejigger some Capistrano recipes, and rethink my Passenger config, and on and on, the whole thing feels rather frictionless—I zip through each modal border-crossing like a well-heeled diplomat. I just slip from one file to the next, thinking mostly about what my application does, assembling the different pieces like so many LEGO bricks.

I hadn’t thought about how extraordinary this was until I took on a small handful of students (thanks, Tutorspree!), some of whom have never programmed before, and tried to look at my code the way they do. It’s been a fascinating exercise.

* * *

I have long known that teaching exposes what you don’t know. As you hazard an explanation or answer an unanticipated question, the cruft dissolves, leaving only what you understand well enough to describe in crisp, detailed English. Often it’s not much. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve begun to “explain” something only to stumble when my vague gist proves too shallow—too slippery—to render concretely.

What’s new for me, though, with these little compu-tutoring sessions, is seeing how much I do know. It turns out that after five years of programming in stints variously sporadic and immersive my brain has been colonized by fertile strains of cognitive tropes, skills, ideas, incantations, metaphors, and analogies that I never knew were there. Silent invaders.

It’s strange because I spend most of my time at the computer feeling like I’m faking it, pretending I know what the hell I’m doing but looking everything up along the way, frantically assembling the very ladder I’m climbing.

As it happens I’m a lot higher than I thought. It first hit me when I opened an old Rails project, hoping to walk through the high-level basics with a student looking to get into Web programming. Literally every file I fired up and every line I pointed to was for her a wonderful mystery. She didn’t know the difference between HTML, CSS, and Javascript. She wondered what Gmail was made of. She asked me what UTF-8 and the W3 were, and why they showed up at the top of most web pages (I got her in the habit of hitting “view source”), and what a DTD file is and who makes them, and what sorts of tags there were, and where all the names come from.

She wanted to know why the words on this tab had all those curly braces when the words on that tab didn’t. She asked what all the colors meant. She wanted to know why there were so many different languages that seemed to do the same things. She asked what you couldn’t do in a browser. She had heard of “servers” before, but not “clients,” and wanted me to walk her through what happens when you submit a form. She wondered what the Internet actually was.

When we started writing code together, she was deeply impressed by the idea of storing values in variables instead of copying and pasting them. She loved how programmers all use each other’s code, though she worried about running modules and libraries without knowing how they worked. She seemed intuitively drawn to the Unix philosophy.

We found that she could read some of my code right away—stuff like SQL queries and for loops—and some not at all (like functional Javascript, Rails models, and some Project Euler solutions).

She stopped me in the middle of a tangent: do people really write all that “view source” stuff by hand, in colorful notepads like the one you have open? What’s Dreamweaver do? Why do pages look different in different browsers? Where are the actual titles and articles and pictures coming from? Where are they stored? And what is a database, exactly? How is it different from an Excel spreadsheet?

With all these questions I started to get the feeling I sometimes get when I see new skiers bumble down the mountain: thank God I learned this stuff already. It all seems entirely too big. I could scarcely imagine starting from scratch.

But of course it’s not so bad. If my student sticks with it, she’ll learn just the way I did. She’ll dip into something—a fun little project or time-saving utility—and struggle, and struggle, and somehow get it working.

Along the way she’ll pick up accidental bookfuls of hard knowledge: the basics of HTTP and TCP, how servers work, what OOP is for, how to configure Apache and Nginx and Haproxy and Memcache and Mongrels, how caching works, what hashes and lists and integers and floats all do, why some languages type statically and others dynamically, how to use higher-order functions, how to do file I/O, what to do with pipes, the rationale behind MVC, what’s “cascading” about cascading style sheets, the wonder of LISP macros, how to slice images and minify Javascripts, what the DOM is and how jQuery tames it, how to manage code with Git or Subversion, who Knuth is, how to sort integers and find shortest paths…

And her brain will be invaded just like mine with all sorts of “soft” knowledge. She’ll become intimately acquainted with the bedrock principles of the craft. She will learn Not to Repeat Herself and that “clarity is better than cleverness.”

She’ll learn to pack complexity into data, not code. She’ll fuss over the names of things and aim high on readability. She’ll struggle to cut her problems at their natural joints.

She will develop an uncanny ability to scan API documentation for the precise methods she needs now and to skim for others that might come in handy. She’ll start to sense when some part of the problem she’s working on must have been solved by someone else, and she’ll know how to find and incorporate the stranger’s solution. Her eyes will start snapping to just the right line in error traces.

As her toolkit grows, so too will the space of possible programs she can build. She’ll increasingly find herself daydreaming about unborn projects, imagining their concrete mechanics.

She’ll progress from not really perceiving the distinctions among so many technologies and acronyms, to being scared by the plenitudes, to seeing them as so many variations on familiar themes.

All the while she’ll marvel at how little she knows, and not long after, at all she has to teach.

A few days after I loaned the excellent The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth to a friend, I received a note highlighting a sentence that he said contained “a preposterous number” of some of his favorite words:

In the ninth century, nomadic Magyar warriors from the steppes of Eastern Europe crossed the Carpathian Mountains and, renouncing their peripatetic way of life, settled in the middle Danube basin at the heart of what is now Hungary.

His comment surprised me, not because I don’t equally enjoy the sounds and flavors of that sentence, but because I almost certainly ignored them all the first time I read it. In fact, for me this was probably one of the least interesting sentences in the book, so uninteresting that my glossing over it was an unconscious non-event. It’s just a part of the way I read.

Here’s another example: if I’m reading a law review article and the name of a case comes up, and the case isn’t something I’ve heard of before like “Brown v. the Board of Education,” I don’t put any effort into mentally assigning the new name X to the content of the paper, claim, context, etc. I treat the name X as a kind of local variable. That is, the only sense in which you could say I’ve cognized it is that if two sentences in different parts of this paper both said something about X, I’d recognize that they shared their referent; but the moment I move on to something else, that nascent <word, object> pair dissolves.

The same thing happens when I read a long technical blog post about, say, tax policy. I pay zero attention to basically anything in capital letters: the names of various plans, their proponents, the states where certain pieces of the plans are in play, etc. I treat these strings as happy little warp-slides I can safely zoom past.

Maybe more alarmingly—and tellingly—the same thing happens with mathematics. Unless I’m specifically reading an article as a way of learning a piece of math, or the math in an article is so simple that it can be parsed at something close to regular speed, I skip it.

So now we have our first obvious explanations: (a) James is lazy, and/or (b) James goes into these articles at a certain level of abstraction, and both the Capitalized Names and mathematics are below that level. So James ignores them.

That probably does most of the explanatory work. But there are other possibilities.

One is that I have pretty bad recall. It probably hurts my recall to think it’s bad (apparently recall performance has been pegged to self-perception of recall performance), but whatever, my memories just don’t seem to be indexed by names or dates the way they are for some people.

So one theory is that because I have such low expectations about remembering things like names and dates, I simply don’t pay attention to them. In other words, because my brain wants to put strings like “Magyar warriors” or “Ashcroft v. Iqbal” into the to-memorize queue—this it does because Capitalized Strings are often just names, vs. concepts or narratives or ideas which can fold their way into the brain in a more natural sort of way just by nestling into the appropriate associative context—and because my to-memorize queue is run by a bunch of idiot half-a-loafs, I discard them as a way of saving energy.

Example: I often ignore lists. When a writer says that some economic theory has been tremendously successful in explaining behavior in Germany, Austria, Japan, and Norway, I think my eyes literally jump over the List, Of, Capitalized, Country, Names much faster than over the stuff explaining the theory, or the stuff explaining what elements of that list have in common.

In the short run that shouldn’t hurt me because with any luck, the more conceptual-narrative-imagistic-flowcharty lowercase kind of knowledge does stick with me and is indexed analogically against other concepts of the same kind, etc. But in the long run, I’ve lost the information that lowercase concepts x and z are tied to Norway and Japan.

Note also that this strategy is path-dependent: if early on you develop the habit of discarding names and dates, you won’t have a lot of them swirling around, which means that when you later run across new instances in new contexts, you won’t have a rich index to cross-reference against, and so you won’t be able to build organized stores of knowledge about particular things. I think that effect could turn out to be pretty important.

The normative upshot is that I could probably do with a ton more history, where this time around I actually pay attention to the dates, because timelines are a tremendously useful organizing concept–knowledge template, and I have this black hole where I should have the context that most of my friends seem to carry around.

It also means that Sporcle and Quiz Bowl and all this nonsense, in which I have essentially zero interest because I’m so terrible at it, could turn out to be cognitively really important just as a way of ordering what would otherwise be loosely overlapping fact miasmas.

To circle back a bit, I want to ask this question about my friend’s Erdős sentence: could it be rewritten such that I, with my current readerly quirks, would want to underline it? Initially I thought it could, maybe by extracting the conceptual/lowercase content into its own sentence and doing a sort of “for example” to introduce all the names and dates. But in this case there’s really nothing to extract. The lowercase content is that “peripatetic warriors crossed mountains to settle near a river.”

Maybe that’s the upside to my handicap: a mind unencumbered by Uppercase Things can focus on meat and mechanisms. But then again, maybe that’s just Wishful Thinking.