the jsomers.net blog.

I remember our high school English teacher explaining to us that “it isn’t crazy to imagine pushing someone down the stairs or in front of the subway, or to think of how little it would take to steer your car into oncoming traffic. Everybody thinks like that. What’s crazy is actually doing this stuff.”

This coming from a guy, mind you, who avoided the draft by pretending to be insane: during his brief interview with military medical personnel, instead of making eye contact with his interlocutor, what he’d do was look just over their right ear—which when you try it with a friend you’ll find to be incredibly disconcerting—and sort of trail off in the middle of his sentences. A bit subtle, but enough to keep him out of the war.

Anyway, I bring this up only as a sort of disclaimer for what follows, which is itself a trail of fairly morbid thoughts—not about suddenly killing people, but about how close we are, all the time, to chaos.

Example: on public buses I often marvel at the intense respect strangers seem to have for each other’s space, and comfort, and quiet. Same thing when I walk through city streets late at night—with no one else in sight, two incredibly socially self-conscious mammals can walk past one another, practically brushing shoulders, completely undisturbed. This is bizarre.

As is the fact that I can totally reliably trade paper for food, or that I can, without a second thought, pay strangers to shave my neck with a straight razor or fly me from Detroit to Seattle. In fact nearly everything I do these days relies on layers and layers of massively complex machinery—economic, legal, mechanical, social, psychological—that is, apparently, remarkably delicate.

Consider the following from an excellent 1990 book, The Collapse of Complex Societies:

Casson…witnessed the breakdown of order in Istanbul after the disintegration of Turkish authority in 1918:

…the Allied troops…found a city that was dead. The Turkish government had just ceased to function. The electrical supply had failed and was intermittent. Tramways did not work and abandoned trams littered the roads. There was no railway service, no street cleaning and a police force which had largely become bandit, living on blackmail from citizens in lieu of pay. Corpses lay at street corners and in side lanes, dead horses were everywhere, with no organization to remove them. Drains did not work and water was unsafe. All this was the result of only about three weeks’ abandonment by the civil authorities of their duties (1937: 217-18)

Think of what would happen if our garbage men stopped coming, or if our water turned off, or if there came a sudden end to the complex illusion that keeps our law alive. What would life be like if we stopped trusting strangers?

Of course it’s easy to imagine more quotidian examples of the same sort of breakdown. My sink, for example, becomes a smelly disaster after just a few days of neglect—as does my body, now that I think about it. Fridges, beards, beds, even inboxes: without our ceaseless teeming cleaning, and shaving, and making, and reading, they all succumb to some kind of overgrowth, their own special version of a fetid parasitic mold.

Virginia Woolf must have been thinking along these lines when she penned the devastating second chapter, Time Passes, of her wonderful To The Lighthouse:

There it had stood all these years without a soul in it. The books and things were mouldy, for, what with the war and help being hard to get, the house had not been cleaned as she could have wished. It was beyond one person’s strength to get it straight now. She was too old. Her legs pained her. All those books needed to be laid out on the grass in the sun; there was plaster fallen in the hall; the rain-pipe had blocked over the study quite. …For there were clothes in the cupboards; they had left clothes in all the bedrooms. What was she to do with them? They had the moth in them—Mrs Ramsay’s things. Poor lady! She would never want them again. She was dead, they said; years ago, in London. There was the old grey cloak she wore gardening (Mrs McNab fingered it). She could see her, as she came up the drive with the washing, stooping over her flowers (the garden was a pitiful sight now, all run to riot, and rabbits scuttling at you out of the beds)—she could see her with one of the children by her in that grey cloak. There were boots and shoes; and a brush and comb left on the dressing-table, for all the world as if she expected to come back tomorrow. (She had died very sudden at the end, they said.)

…What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of nature? …The place was gone to rack and ruin. Only the lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter, looked with equanimity at the thistle and the swallow, the rat and the straw. Nothing now withstood them; nothing said no to them. Let the wind blow; let the poppy seed itself and the carnation mate with the cabbage. Let the swallow build in the drawing-room, and the thistle thrust aside the tiles, and the butterfly sun itself on the faded chintz of the arm-chairs. Let the broken glass and the china lie out on the lawn and be tangled over with grass and wild berries.

Note of course the time-worn irony of life overcoming the dead, of thistle and rats claiming an abandoned house.

It’s the exact obverse of an idea used expertly by David Foster Wallace in his occasionally hilarious but essentially depressing account of a week-long cruise, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again:

I don’t think it’s an accident that 7NC Luxury Cruises appeal mostly to older people. I don’t mean decrepitly old, but like fiftyish people for whom their own mortality is something more than an abstraction. Most of the exposed bodies to be seen all over the daytime Nadir were in various stages of disintegration. And the ocean itself turns out to be one enormous engine of decay. Seawater corrodes vessels with amazing speed—rusts them, exfoliates paint, strips varnish, dulls shine, coats ships’ hulls with barnacles and kelp and a vague and ubiquitous nautical snot that seems like death incarnate. We saw some real horrors in port, local boats that looked as if they had been dipped in a mixture of acid and shit, scabbed with rust and goo, ravaged by what they float in.

Not so the Megalines’ ships. It’s no accident they’re so white and clean, for they’re clearly meant to represent the Calvinist triumph of capital and industry over the primal decay-action of the sea. The Nadir seemed to have a whole battalion of wiry little Third World guys who went around the ship in navy-blue jumpsuits scanning for decay to overcome. Writer Frank Conroy, who has an odd little essaymercial in the front of Celebrity Cruises’ 7NC brochure, talks about how “it became a private challenge for me to try to find a piece of dull bright-work, a chipped rail, a stain in the deck, a slack cable, or anything that wasn’t perfectly shipshape. Eventually, toward the end of the trip, I found a capstan [a type of nautical hoist, like a pulley on steroids] with a half-dollar-sized patch of rust on the side facing the sea. My delight in this tiny flaw was interrupted by the arrival, even as I stood there, of a crewman with a roller and a bucket of white paint. I watched as he gave the entire capstan a fresh coat and walked away with a nod.”

Here’s the thing: A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness, and since consciousness of death and decay are unpleasant, it may seem weird that the ultimate American fantasy vacation involves being plunked down in an enormous primordial stew of death and decay. But on a 7NC Luxury Cruise, we are skillfully enabled in the construction of various fantasies of triumph over just this death and decay. One way to “triumph” is via the rigors of self-improvement (diet, exercise, cosmetic surgery, Franklin Quest time-management seminars), to which the crew’s amphetaminic upkeep of the Nadir is an unsubtle analogue. But there’s another way out, too: not titivation but titillation; not hard work but hard play. See in this regard the 7NC’s constant activities, festivities, gaiety, song; the adrenaline, the stimulation. It makes you feel vibrant, alive. It makes your existence seem non-contingent. The hard-play option promises not a transcendence of death-dread so much as just drowning it out: “Sharing a laugh with your friends” in the lounge after dinner, you glance at your watch and mention that it’s almost showtime …. When the curtain comes down after a standing ovation, the talk among your companions turns to, ‘What next?’ Perhaps a visit to the casino or a little dancing in the disco? Maybe a quiet drink in the piano bar or a starlit stroll around the deck? After discussing all your options, everyone agrees: ‘Let’s do it all!'”

This is where I have to disagree. It’s sad, sure, this fact that our world degrades, be it by microbiotic infestation or simple erosion, that, as Yeats put it, “things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” But DFW writes as though painting and repainting, and partying, and playing—or generally just constructing “fantasies of triumph over just this death and decay”—is also sad, as if to begrudge us for skating on what turns out to be the shockingly thin ice of our society. But what’s wrong with that, if it’s all there is to do before the whole thing cracks?

“It turns out” became a favorite phrase of mine sometime in mid 2006, which, it turns out, was just about the time that I first started tearing through Paul Graham essays. Coincidence?

I think not. It’s not that pg is a particularly heavy user of the phrase—I counted just 46 unique instances in a simple search of his site—but that he knows how to use it. He works it, gets mileage out of it, in a way that other writers don’t.

That probably sounds like a compliment. But it turns out that “it turns out” does the sort of work, for a writer, that a writer should be doing himself. So to say that someone uses the phrase particularly well is really just an underhanded way of saying that they’re particularly good at being lazy.

Let me explain what I mean.

Suppose that I walk into a new deli expecting to get a sandwich with roast beef, but that when I place my order, the person working the counter says that they don’t have roast beef. If I were to relay this little disappointment to my friends, I might say, “You know that new deli on Fifth St.? It turns out they don’t even have roast beef!”

Or suppose instead that I’m trying to describe a movie to a friend, and that this particular movie includes a striking plot twist. If I wanted to be dramatic about it, I might say “…and so they let him go, thinking nothing of it. But it turns out that he, this very guy that they just let go, was the killer all along.”

So far so good. Now suppose, finally, that I’m a writer trying to make an argument, and that my argument critically depends on a bit of a tall claim, on the sort of claim that a lot of people might dismiss the first time they heard it. Suppose, for example, that I’m trying to convince my readers that Cambridge, Massachusetts is the intellectual capital of the world. As part of my argument I’d have to rule out every other city, including very plausible contenders like New York. To do so, I might try something like this:

When I moved to New York, I was very excited at first. It’s an exciting place. So it took me quite a while to realize I just wasn’t like the people there. I kept searching for the Cambridge of New York. It turned out it was way, way uptown: an hour uptown by air.

Wait a second: that’s not an argument at all! It’s a blind assertion based only on my own experience. The only reason that it might sort of work is that it’s couched in the same tone of surprised discovery used in those two innocuous examples above—as though after lots of rigorous searching, and trying, and fighting to find in New York the stuff that makes Cambridge the intellectual capital, it simply turned out—in the way that a pie crust might turn out to be too crispy, or a chemical solution might turn out to be acidic—not to be there.

That’s what I mean when I say that pg (who, by the way, actually wrote that passage about Cambridge and New York) “gets mileage” out of the phrase: he takes advantage of the fact that it so often accompanies real, simple, occasionally hard-won neutral observations.

In other words, because “it turns out” is the sort of phrase you would use to convey, for example, something unexpected about a phenomenon you’ve studied extensively—as in the scientist saying “…but the E. coli turned out to be totally resistant”—or some buried fact that you have recently discovered on behalf of your readers—as when the Malcolm Gladwells of the world say “…and it turns out all these experts have something in common: 10,000 hours of deliberate practice”—readers are trained, slowly but surely, to be disarmed by it. They learn to trust the writers who use the phrase, in large part because they come to associate it with that feeling of the author’s own dispassionate surprise: “I, too, once believed X,” the author says, “but whaddya know, X turns out to be false.”

Readers are simply more willing to tolerate a lightspeed jump from belief X to belief Y if the writer himself (a) seems taken aback by it and (b) acts as if they had no say in the matter—as though the situation simply unfolded that way. Which is precisely what the phrase “it turns out” accomplishes, and why it’s so useful in circumstances where you don’t have any substantive path from X to Y. In that sense it’s a kind of handy writerly shortcut or, as pg would probably put it, a hack.

The legal blogger Lawrence Solum suggested, in a “legal lexicon” entry about the counter-majoritarian difficulty, “that any really deep discussion” of this rather specific subject “would lead (sooner or later) to almost every other topic in constitutional theory.”

The remark stuck with me because it sounded exactly like something our professor warned us about in a class on James Joyce’s epic novel, Ulysses, about how we would have to be careful not to let a close reading of any particular portion of the text turn into a treatise on the whole book. He suggested that even the most tightly scoped inquiries would have a way of leading us down the proverbial rabbit hole.

It makes one wonder what constitutional theory and Ulysses might have in common, or what it is about these intellectual objects that tempts us to engage all their parts at once, to swallow them whole.

I can think of other examples. Some parts of Wikipedia, for instance, are pretty difficult to leave once you’ve dipped your toe in the water: the large circle of pages on delusions, for instance, which I came to by way of the excellent Best of Wikipedia blog and a post on the Jerusalem syndrome; or the set of concepts surrounding the ultimate fate of the universe; or the history of modern analytic philosophy, the whole of which you can get to via any number of individual philosphers’ pages.

Project Euler, an online competition with hundreds of computer problems in elementary (but often tricky!) discrete mathematics, also seems intraconnected in this way, such that you often end up explicitly reusing code or techniques from one problem to the next, even when they seem only vaguely related at the outset. And if nothing else the problems are gateways to other great examples of deeply intrawoven ideaverses: places like Wolfram MathWorld, or the online encyclopedia of integer sequences, or even the Python language reference.

But it’s not clear to me that there’s anything deep going on here. I suspect that it could just be that any intellectual endeavor of sufficient complexity has to be broken into parts, that these parts have to be connected by links or allusions, and that novitiates especially are drawn into the webs that this process creates by a kind of naive curiosity, or the instinct to follow footnotes. [1]

Notes

[1] A case could be made for the alternative—that these few examples I’ve touched on do share some special feature—by pointing to large, complex subjects that don’t feel “intraconnected.” But I’m having trouble thinking of any.

I have recently written a quick little five-page piece of fiction. I encourage you to read it with low expectations. Click here to download the PDF, or just read on:

A-L-D-E-R

A: That’s really all I’m doing with this chair business, and the crossword, and the beer and a half, and all that—all I’m doing with all that is just trying to get you to imagine a very kind of vanilla scene.

B: To get me to see that there’s no respect, really, in which this wasn’t a typical Wednesday night, that what you’re setting up here, in one manner of speaking, is an archetype of a Wednesday night.

A: Exactly.

B: But of course the danger there is that I’m going to think that this Wednesday of yours was somehow unusually normal. And it sounds—correct me if I’m wrong here—but I’m getting the impression that what you’re decidedly not after is the kind of feeling where the very normalcy of the scene is what ends up predominating. I mean you’re not out to spook me or anything.

A: Yes, that’s exactly the sort of thing that I’m decidedly not out to do.

B: So at what point does the ramen get involved?

A: The ramen comes in a bit later. Right now all he’s really doing is banging his head against the wall with this Druids clue. Because he is just sunk without it—there’s simply no other way he can pull the corner together. And you know what that does to him, I mean we’ve talked about this before, you know that he has a very hard time putting these things down with empty swaths of any kind.

B: One or two letters he can tolerate.

A: One or two letters he can tolerate. But a swath of this magnitude—

B: He’s starting to get, if not quote-unquote stressed, then at least the tiniest bit impatient. He’s slipping out of his usual kind of magnificent calm.

A: Part of it is this beer and a half that I told you about. I mean it’s at this point that he’s seriously starting to think that the beer was a mistake. It feels like—and I mean this in a slightly more literal way than it’s usually meant—but it feels like he’s now working with just a fraction of his regular gear, thought-wise.

B: Like whole associative tracts have just… dried up.

A: And this is really why he starts thinking about noodles in the first place.

B: Frankly it doesn’t surprise me. Say what you will about structural complexity, and operational…—To be dead honest here, you of all people should have a fairly mature handle on the kind of complexities I’m talking about—but at least a solid sixty percent of these battles are really just won with sleep and food.

A: That’s really exactly how he’s feeling at this point with the beer and this Druids nonsense. He’s feeling that this impatience that you brought up, which is absolutely the right word for it, by the way—or vexation, maybe—that this vexation is going to be just about wiped out by a plate or two of noodles.

B: And it’s this feeling, then, that drives him to the kitchen.

A: He goes to the bathroom first, as it turns out, but basically, yes, most of the action from here on in is going to happen with him either standing over the stove or sitting, in various configurations, at this horrible little table in there, in the kitchen.

B: I’m actually starting to think that I’d like a clearer picture of this stove. And the table, too, while we’re at it. The table interests me also.

A: There’s really not much to this stove. In a way it’s really closer to a stove template than it is to being an actual stove. By that all I mean is that to get to any other stove, you really have to start with something that looks exactly like this one. That’s how basic this stove is. You need matches to light the burners, for God’s sake. It’s frankly quite dangerous.

B: You mean he could quite easily leave the gas on?

A: Quite easily. It’s gotten to the point where he’s become a sort of paranoiac regarding the pilot lights in this machine. He’s developed little rituals and so forth to make sure he doesn’t asphyxiate in his sleep. What it really comes down to—and he’s taken a sort of hard line on this—is that wherever he goes next he’s just flat-out insisting on electric burners.

B: And the table?

A: It’s a horrible little table. Plain, cold—the thing is always cold—just horrible. To describe it in any kind of vivid visual detail would, paradoxically I think, take away from the impression I’m trying to convey here, which above all is of a kitchen table that you wouldn’t be enthused to sit at.

B: You’re right that it works better that way, without the visual details.

A: In any case, what he’s doing now is he’s got his back to the table there, and he’s sort of standing around, rifling through his cupboard for a snack. In particular he’s got his eye on the ramen.

B: The thinking there being that anything else—bona fide pasta, say, or some kind of pilaf—is at bare minimum a fifteen-minute operation, and it’s not that he’s starving, is it, it’s that this vexation of his is really going to draw out each additional minute. I mean fifteen of the minutes that he’d be slated to have with the pilaf, say, are really a whole different ball game, qualitatively, from fifteen workaday off-the-shelf minutes.

A: Yes, I think you could argue that something of that sort is going on, at least unconsciously, with his choice of snack here.

B: And so with the ramen in hand, what does he do—he just sets up his pot of boiling water? Then what?

A: He sits down at the table—facing the burners, for the safety of just about everyone in the building—and gets to work on that troublesome corner we were discussing before.

B: How does the crossword get into the kitchen?

A: He brings it with him.

B: Into the bathroom as well? I’m not prodding here, you see, I’m just letting you know that I’m keen on the details.

A: Yes, he brings the crossword into the bathroom with him. He brings paper freely into and out of the bathroom.

B: And I imagine that he’s still not making any progress on this slippery little corner, is he. That would be my prediction—that he’s still stymied.

A: He’s at a real impasse, he really is. Whereas typically he spends about twenty to twenty-five minutes on the Wednesday crossword in total, that’s about how long he’s been going on with this single clue. In fact he’s thought about little else for nearly a full half hour.

B: He’s become a bit obsessive, you might say.

A: Locked in. He’s just locked in to this little world of trees and “E”s and five-letter words. “Tree sacred to the Druids.” He can’t think of much else.

B: His mind’s not wandering in its usual way.

A: Yes, that’s good. What he’s got going here, in a way, is the opposite of a daydream. No imagination whatsoever—a very austere sort of thinking.

B: And then the water starts to boil.

A: His pot really crackles when it boils, so there’s absolutely no mistaking it. And what he does is, he gets up—quite happily, I might add, to have some reason to excuse himself from this clue—and unwraps two of these ramen noodle bricks. And he puts them into this crackling pot.

B: And he sits down again?

A: No. Like I said he’s sort of happy to be away from the clue for a minute. I mean he hasn’t completely given up thinking about it—he’s still sort of chasing trees and “E”s around his brain—it’s just quite a bit different when the puzzle’s not in front of him, is all. Quite a bit more relaxed.

B: And on top of that is that he’s always just gotten a kick out of watching these noodle-bricks kind of melt, hasn’t he? Because they really do unfurl in a neat kind of way.

A: He absolutely gets a big kick out of the bricks unfurling. Sometimes what he does is he’ll even take a fork or whatever out of the drawer and sort of jab the bricks, submerge them, to get this melting underway.

B: But in this particular instance?

A: What he’s doing now is he’s just letting them float for a while—he’s letting the melting sort of play out on its own terms.

B: I mean he’s hungry, sure, but now that he’s over this pot, away from this Druids business for just a minute, he’s really just sort of enjoying the noodle bricks break down.

A: Plus there’s some very nice steam coming out of the pot now. And what he ultimately needed, I think—I mean it’s certainly not hurting—was a nice bit of steam on his face.

B: He’s starting to release a bit from the clue, I’d imagine, at this point.

A: He is.

B: You could even say—and I’m not trying to put words in your mouth here, so really, stop me anytime—but couldn’t you even say that his thoughts are now unfurling in just about the same way as the noodles? It strikes me as roughly the same kind of unfurling.

A: Well what happens—and I have some theories about why this happens, or how—I mean it almost certainly has something to do with his being just about locked in for a half hour now with this Druids clue, and certainly the steam is involved—but he starts thinking quite wildly about noodles and trees.

B: The noodles are now boiling?

A: That could be the very thing that gets him started. Because he’s looking at this ramen just going wild here—and it’s sort of true about ramen, that when it’s boiling it absolutely teems…

B: Well you have these very long noodles—I mean once you’ve got them unfurled you can really see how long they are—and they’re just squiggling all over the place, knotting and squiggling over and under one another and so forth. I completely understand this impression of teeming that you’re talking about.

A: He’s noticing this teeming—well noticing‘s not the right word, I don’t think, because it’s more that he’s sort of stupefied by it—

B: He’s wrapped up in it, maybe.

A: Yes, he’s wrapped up in the teeming. And on a parallel track—you see now his mind has sufficiently unfurled to be able to entertain at least two tracks simultaneously—he is recalling this very strange idea he once had that trees—and it’s quite clear where this association came from—that trees might think, not thinking the way that we think, you understand, but thinking the way that trees would think, with years and years to form the slow trace of an idea.

B: Which is sort of a wonderful way of looking at trees, really.

A: It is. It’s a wonderful possibility. But don’t forget that this cute little thought of his about trees is happening against a backdrop of all that teeming that we touched on before. It’s important to keep these two tracks in mind.

B: Because these two quite distinct tracks of his, each engaging in its own right, end up sort of coalescing for him.

A: As tracks like these are apt to do.

B: And so he starts to wonder if his noodles are thinking.

A: You have to understand that they really do teem in this very lifelike way, if you boil them just so—and on top of that if you already have this trees idea, I mean it’s really not—

B: This bizarre possibility is not wrought whole cloth here, there are a lot of elements conspiring…

A: You have this locked-in period that we’ve been talking about, which is really just an absolute full half hour of vexatious thinking about trees, and of course the beer and a half—

B: And additionally this pot of lifelike ramen. I mean if he’s under the impression—and it really sounds like he has to be, given this idea of his about trees—if he’s one of these people in the intelligence-qua-pattern camp, for instance—

A: You can sort of imagine how he might find himself in this peculiar spot. I mean it’s not really all that absurd a jump, once you see these various elements conspiring.

B: Conspiring, ultimately, to put him over his plain little stove, enjoying a nice bit of steam on his face, watching these noodles teem, wondering if they cogitate.

A: Thinking about the sorts of things noodles might think about.

B: Sauces, for instance.

A: Or cutlery of various kinds.

B: And whereas trees would presumably think in this very enduring manner, maybe what these noodles care about is by comparison quite ephemeral.

A: Trivial, even.

B: Not to them, of course—but when you stack it up against what the trees…

A: These are just absolutely different planes, I think he’s thinking. I mean he’s interested in the noodles for their own sake, not necessarily with all this tree baggage.

B: Although there is the slightest bit of pity here, isn’t there, with the lamenting of their terribly short lifespans.

A: Where he convinces himself that without the boiling…—that it’s their \’elan vitale.

B: And if someone is… sensitive enough to entertain these possibilities in the first place—

A: Surely they’re sensitive enough to worry about turning the heat off at this point, knowing what they think they know about the lifespans of noodles.

B: And this is where we hit our proverbial flash point. Because he can’t decide what to do about these noodles, these noodles which he now temporarily—but sincerely—takes to be alive—and so, quite naturally in light of what we know he knows (or thinks he knows), he leaves them boiling. And he tends to them for a while. He watches, and he waits, and he tends. When the water runs low—as it invariably does, as it invariably must—he panics. But only for a moment, really, once he realizes that he can just add more, so long as he’s careful not to cool things down too much. He gets into a little routine—a cycle of adding water, little by little, enough to keep a rolling boil. He even cobbles together a sort of system of timers and measurements and what not—he gets the whole thing down quite precisely. And of course through all this there’s some downtime—short breaks which he uses to wrestle with his crossword. But try as he might, that devil of a corner just won’t budge. He gets tired—this tiredness being, in a spiraly sort of way, both a cause and effect of his struggle with this corner—he gets so tired, in fact, that he sort of dozes. He misses an alarm, then two. And with no water to absorb the heat, this ramen and this pot of his can’t help but take every last bit of it, take the full force of this medium flame… You’d think the noodles would burn first, but no, it’s the handle—it’s the plastic handle that catches first. Which is lucky, frankly, because of the terrible chemical smell it puts out—which smell, terrible though it is, is strong enough to wake him up. Startled and confused, and tired, and terrified, he springs up and knocks the pot into the sink, he puts out this smelly little fire, having nearly died because he thought his noodles were alive.

A: You know, I don’t actually think I’m going to use the fire. It’s a bit unbelievable, I think. I mean did what you just say ring true to you? Did it sound like something that could happen, in your mind?

B: Well what’s the alternative?

A: I mean I think he considers your little life-support plan there, but really for no more than about one tenth of a second. At which point I think he gets his head together—he sort of snaps out of it a bit—and he turns the heat down. Remorselessly, I might add. He eats his ramen. He feels better, too—I mean if anything his head is just about absolutely cleared up at this point, with a nice full stomach now. And he solves the puzzle.

B: So this bizarre little episode is just the kick he needed to get him thinking laterally again. Imaginatively.

A: It’s enough of a kick to get him to release a little, yes, to look back for a second at this other clue, this one that crosses the Druids one there. And he sees—this after about forty full minutes of not seeing it—that “cerebral” is spelled with an “A” at the end, not an “E.” Classic irony. So now he’s looking for “A”-trees, not “E”-trees, and of course, being the erudite little fellow that he is, he’s got it in really no more than a minute after that. At which point the rest of the corner basically just undresses for him. It snowballs is what I mean. He finally fills it in. He can put it down. He can put it down and he can go to sleep and he can dream his dreams of wise old thoughtful forests and anxious noodle brains.

On a Hacker News post about the rough-and-tumble of grad school, one commenter tried to explain how he had come to work on seven different projects under seven different advisors, each of which revealed itself after about a year to be a “giant failure”:

That’s how most projects are. I’m not sure why, but I think it has to do with the fact that the projects are “planned research.” The process of getting funding requires planning something that is intrinsically impossible to plan. You write a grant on hope, with the large picture in mind and then you get down to the details and things don’t work out. This is normal.*

This little asterisk of his points to a footnote:

*I know of one exception. He explained his system: he does the research, then he gets grants for his research. This gives him time to do new research and he writes new grants based on that. He delivers because he only proposes to do what he has already more or less done!

To which another commenter added, among other things:

The other thing it reminds me of is Andrew Wiles writing a stack of papers in advance so he would have ten years to work on Fermat’s Last Theorem while still publishing regularly.

I’ve poked around briefly and I’m not sure whether this is actually true. Apparently Wiles only worked on Fermat’s Last Theorem for seven years, not ten, and if gruseom (the commenter) fumbled on that detail, I’m not so sure we can trust the rest of his account. It would be nice to see a reference on this.

That said, it doesn’t really matter. What’s important here are the twin ideas of (a) only promising what you know you can deliver (because you’ve already delivered it) and (b) buying yourself time to work on big projects by finishing and spreading out a whole slew of small ones. It’s this second idea that I’ll call “The Wiles maneuver.”

One question is whether it’s a purely academic move, beneficial only to folks whose lives depend on grant money, or whether it can be applied more broadly.

Answer: I know it can—because I’m using it right now. I wrote this post along with about four others on Sunday, and used WordPress’s scheduling feature to spread them across the week, in order to buy time to work on a more involved piece about the insane human machinery behind Wikipedia (coming soon). I was on the one hand reluctant to leave this blog idle for a week but, on the other hand, didn’t want to restrict myself to short little one-off posts. The Wiles maneuver turns out to be a great way to resolve such a dilemma, and it’s easy to see why: it essentially tricks you into doing twice the work.