BE GRATEFUL TO THE TWENTY PERCENT

Blog number fifty-five                                                                      Oct 30 2006

I just finished reading an essay in the New Yorker by Robert Stone under the subsection, "Life During Wartime," entitled, "Antarctica, 1958."

Okay.  What war are we talking about in 1958?  The Korean War is over by five years, The Vietnam War did not officially begun until 1962 - give or take four or five years.  So if this happened during wartime, it happened right after the French left Vietnam.  And the essay takes place in Antarctica.  Seems to me to be a stretch to make this vignette into a wartime story, but let's give them that.  It's not that important.  Poetic license, one might say.  But what IS important, at least to me, is that it is a story about nothing.  They see a flock of penguins off in the distance, think it a ship, realize it isn't, beginning and end of story. 

But the story uses excellent writing skills, you see. 

The only essay I have ever read in the New Yorker that I liked was one by David Sadaris and that was because it was humorous.  It had a theme, you see.  A purpose.  Most stories in the New Yorker do not have the function of purpose outside the words themselves.  These essays are like abstract paintings -- pretty, but meaningless.

The essay started me to pondering the idea that the New Yorker magazine has a reputation with people who are supposedly people of discernment and influence in the world of writing. 

The literati. 

The written word experts. 

The written word authority. 

From pondering this,  I beganpondering the field of experts and authorities in general that I have run across in my life's experiences.

I like to ponder.

Beats working.

I took a fiction writing class once and the Prof - the expert, the authority, used to rave about this one student's writing.  The guy used flowery words in artistic ways, but he never said anything.  Evidently Teach couldn't see that, being mesmerized by the writing --like New Yorker editors seem to be.

Come a time when we were to try our hand at writing a fiction story and this guy came up with an obvious knockoff of The Wizard of Oz.  I mean, obvious.  I KNEW he couldn't write a story, just from listening to him read what he did write.  Teach didn't know he couldn't write.  Teach praised everything the guy wrote.  The student had the explanation that he "just couldn't think of anything."  Well, duh!  Writing a story is more than just alliterations.

I used to listen to two funny radio personalities in Sacramento.  One day they were talking about a list of the hundred funniest movies and in the course of this they both agreed that "Singing In The Rain" was the funniest movie ever. 

I took these two guys to be experts -- to be authorities on humor until I heard them say that.  "Singing In The Rain" was a musical -- not a comedy.  There was a little sophomoric humor in it, but I wouldn't call it a funny movie.  And most certainly not the funniest movie ever.

And the TV series, "Sex In The City."  That series got awards for being the best comedy on television.  I watched that series for a year and not once did I ever even giggle.  The show is nothing more than an exercise to see how many different kinds of sexual activity could be portrayed.  It definitely is not a comedy.  It's simulated soft porn at best.  It's not even as funny as "Singing In The Rain."

One of the best examples of the power of authority I ever heard came from a radio call-in talk show host.  A caller would say, "well, St. Aquinas said..."  And the host would come back with what some other authority had said, and it went on like that for a while until one caller said, "Before there were religions, there was God."

The host immediately wanted to know who said that.

The caller, "uh ah, well... I did."

The host, you could tell was at a loss for a while and then said hesitantly, "well.... I guess you could say that."  Giving him permission.

You see, the host was looking for an authority.  He couldn't see for himself whether the statement was true or not.  He needed an authority to tell him.  Where he thought an authority would find the idea, I don't know.  In some text book I guess.

There is a story about a man in the desert dying of thirst that refuses a cup of water offered him because "the cup is rusty."

The water stands for truth and the rusty cup symbolizes one who is not an accepted authority.

Now this authority-expert thing is not all cut and dried.  There are thousands of people who see Frank Sinatra as one of the world's greatest singers and I think except for one song, he is horrible.  I can't believe that all those thousands could be mistaken.  There must be something in his singing that I miss.

At one time, until I was in my late twenties, I couldn't stand oysters or asparagus or avocado.  Now I love all three and I realize that the very same taste and texture that used to disgust me I now find delicious.  The very same flavor and texture.  So Sinatra has something that tastes good to many but not to me.  Those two radio hosts that thought "Singing In the Rain" to be the funniest ever.  Are they wrong?  Who's to say?

Are those stories in the New Yorker really as I see them or is there something I am missing -- that a story isn't at all necessary when telling a story?  This is true of music.  The story isn't all that necessary in a song, even though it is telling a story.

When I was doing graduate work in Experimental Psychology we were to write up our finished experiments with ten references for each of our papers.  We would get these references from something called the Psych Abstracts - a set of books of all the published work in psychology -- experiments, studies and the like.

If I was trying to find out how chickens picked food from pebbles so quickly, I would just find a mention of a study involving chickens as, "In the 1935 study by Wilkenson and Brady, it was found that chickens favored corn over oat grain."

What that had to do with my study wasn't important evidently.  We were learning to write up experiments.

One study that I found in the Psych Abstracts showed that in over thirty percent of all psychology experiments, the statistics shown were in error by a large degree.  Something like ten percent of them actually showed a result different from the one declared.

I told that to a friend of mine and he said that is probably true in the soft sciences, but not in the hard sciences such as physics and biology. 

I sure hope so.

Our first homework in this experimental psychology class was to go to the zoo, pick out an animal and write down exactly what the animal did, and make sure not to assign any human behavior onto the animal.  Anthropomorphism.  No-no.

So I did that.  "The bear sat down.  The bear looked to the left.  The bear put his right paw on his head" and so forth.  Never anything like, "The bear looked sad."

A day or two after we turned in our papers, I was in the room and the Prof began going over my paper with me and the Teaching Assistant wanted to know how I knew to write like I did. Did I get it out of a book? 

I got the idea that he had to learn not to anthropomorphize.  And found it very difficult.  For a first timer to get it immediately seemed to be beyond his ability to comprehend.  This student, going for his MA in Psychology, would supposedly someday be one of our respected Experimental Psychology authorities.

Behavioral Modification is a psychological method developed by B.F. Skinner that enables a change to take place in a person's behavior by giving negative or positive reinforcement for an action.  Put simply, if a person does an action you want to put a stop to, you punish him in some way every time he does it.  Or, you can reward him every time he does something else instead.

Now, Skinner vehemently declared that negative reinforcement is not permanent.  He gives the example of sheep held in a field by an electric fence.  If the fence ever becomes not electrified, as soon as the sheep find this out, they will escape.

So. Many people have paid big bucks and no doubt are still paying big bucks to quit smoking or drinking by having a small electric shock administered every time they smoke, or every time they take a drink.  Negative reinforcement.  What the creator of the discipline specifically declared to be a temporary fix at best.

The problem is that once the subject leaves the room in where they are being shocked, they can buy a pack of cigs and hit the bars.

And it is the graduates of Behavior Modification schools -- the Phd's and the M.A.s and even the B.A.s that are doing what the guru of Behavior Modification -- B.F. Skinner, explicitly told them wouldn't work.

And as we saw, even a little bit of reasoning will tell the discerning scientist that it won't work.

I was taking a class on dreams in a Clinical Psychology class and one day we got into a discussion about experiments to prove astral projection.  The instructor suggested that one experiment might be to hide something written up in the rafters of a building and if someone could tell what was on the paper without going up there, that would prove that he must have astrally projected. 

Now this guy had a doctorate in clinical psychology -- a scientist, you see.  I pointed out some fallacies with such an idea, but no one else in the class of six psych graduate students along with this Professor with a Ph.D. in Psychology saw anything wrong with a proof like that. 

I didn't push it very much, as I felt very embarrassed for them.  I liked them.  They were kinda like friends and I didn't want them to see that I thought they were kinda naive and dense.  But Damn!  What kind of therapists were they going to be with such sloppy reasoning?

We must never forget, when we have a tendency to believe what an authority in some field tries to tell us some "fact," that eighty percent of the people in any profession are incompetent in that profession.

I finally lost all interest in Experimental Psychology when I ran across a study done on whether first born and only children are more apt to become beauty parlor operators. Sheesh!