Five Things: Stupidity, VAR, Skill Nostalgia, Calvin & Hobbes, Birds Flying
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
For quite some time I suggested to my family that we should go up to Norway for summer vacation. But they wanted more sun and also prefer reliable weather. Then the June heatwave changed some thinking and so we decided on Norway.
On Friday morning we packed our car and drove North, stopped in a very warm and humid Copenhagen, got a surprise thunderstorm in Gothenburg and are now in a small resort town at the Oslofjord, about an hour south of Oslo. It’s beautiful here. The wind and rain are pounding against our window and it feels like the last days of fall, except for that it is very light outside until late in the evening. It is also freaking cold at around 15 degrees or so, but it feels colder. Good thing I only brought summer clothes and Birkenstocks. Oh well, now I finally have a reason to get one of these awesome Norwegian wool-knit sweaters It doesn’t look as if I have any choice. Really, too bad.
Anyhow, whenever I am in the Nordics I get the sense that they tend to do more things the right way than we do in Germany. I am sure it is a very limited view that I am having, but I nevertheless like it a lot up here. And all the money I save on sun screen!
Grab a coffee and read this now!
What Makes Humans Stupid
Human beings can land autonomous rovers on Mars, sequence a genome in hours, and engineer nanometer circuits. And yet conspiracy theories, anti-scientific political movements, and institutional hatred proliferate on a scale that might embarrass the meager success record of a medieval alchemist.
One might say that stupidity implies a capacity for getting things right before it can get them spectacularly wrong. Stupidity is not the opposite of intelligence but its evil twin, the dissimulating Cain to a cerebral Abel. And perhaps surprisingly, the degree of stupidity available to any system scales directly with the intelligence that system possesses—more intelligence begets greater feats of stupidity. It would be a stretch to call a bacterium stupid, and we know that cats and dogs achieve modest feats of it. But human beings, equipped with language, abstraction, technology, institutions, and ideology, can be stupid on a truly civilizational scale. This is not a joke; it is close to a law of nature. A law that might very well be our undoing.
This trend really is something I didn’t see coming. We have all the means to gather information and facts, yet still people do really stupid things and get people to follow them.
VAR Is My Mortal Enemy and Should Be Yours, Too
In fact, we’ve already seen the results of such exploration in the form of the World Cup’s hydration breaks, where more advertising is being smuggled into some broadcasts under the unimpeachable cover of protecting players’ health. Is it really implausible to think that ads during VAR reviews may not be far away? All those minutes standing around while a guy looks at a monitor—couldn’t they be better spent trying to convince me that David Beckham loves Home Depot? And once we’ve accepted that there are scenarios during which a gamecast will cut to commercials during the half, why not do what other sports do and start baking in regular clock stoppages just for that purpose?
Maybe I’m the paranoid one here, but I value soccer’s outstanding action-to-ad ratio extremely highly, and I don’t trust FIFA to protect it. I mean, think of what you know about the people in charge of global soccer. Are you confident that they won’t test the limits of what their audience will let them get away with? Do you really think they have too much integrity to do that to the game?
I’d like to quote the legendary German soccer coach Sepp Herberger here: “The ball is round and a game lasts 90 minutes.” - this is what it is all about. I want to discuss with people about the game, not about stupid VAR decisions. It’s the magic of the game that the referees are not always right and stopping the game just to get the VAR to interfere really takes the flow out of the game. If I wanted to watch a game with plenty of interruptions, I’d watch something else. I hate it that games now last 100 minutes. Those hydration breaks need to go. And there shouldn’t be more than 2 substitutions. Less is better.
The radical reasons why you dream of making things by hand
What exactly do I mean by skill nostalgia? For me, the termdescribes both the desire for skilled activity that can be fulfilled by acquiring a skill, and more indirect forms of nostalgia for things – objects, practices, fashions – merely associated with skills. The skill-oriented hobbyist and the impractical hipster dressed in workwear are both expressing forms of skill nostalgia. But are they both expressing a Heideggerian desire to return to some imagined golden period? Is the hobbyist a technophobe? Is the hipster guilty of stolen valour?
A more sympathetic view is that skill nostalgia – and nostalgia in general – is often motivated by a sense of pained loss rather than a desire to return to the past. We can find this sense of loss in the very origins of the word. ‘Nostalgia’ was introduced in the late 17th century as a medical diagnosis for the homesickness of Swiss mercenaries, which was so severe that superior officers banned the singing of the Alpine herding song ‘Ranz des Vaches’, supposedly on pain of death. The word has obviously undergone semantic drift since then, but the association between it and loss appears to be important. What kind of loss might give rise to skill nostalgia?
I often think about leaving my job in tech behind and doing something fulfilling with my hands. And then, after about 5 seconds, I do remember that I have more than one left hand and that I really, really hate doing repetitive tasks. Still, entertaining this tought is quite fun and I sure I could be a really awesome landscape architect, even tough I hate gardening, or build furniture or fix motorbikes. It’s the thought that counts, I guess.
Calvin and Hobbes and the Price of Integrity
On one side of the battle: the conglomerated corporate power of the syndicate-as-Goliath, with their money and lawyers and binding legalese, and their teams of people with vested interests working against the simple artist.
On the other side: Bill Watterson, pencil in hand and heart full of uncompromisable values.
In one of Watterson’s strips from that time, Calvin refuses to get in the bath, shouting about how he’ll never compromise his principles; cut to Calvin in the bath, sullen and grumbling, “I don’t need to compromise my principles, because they don’t have the slightest bearing on what happens to me anyway.”
The way Watterson tells it, he was powerless to stop them forcing him to merchandise Calvin and Hobbes, and all he could do about it was quit, in which case the syndicate would just hire a team of anonymous ghost-artists to churn out more stories for Watterson’s duo. He was one small man facing down a global behemoth that had risen from the swamp of modern capitalism. What could he do?
Calvin and Hobbes is by far the best comic strip ever and I was deeply saddened to read the last one ever published, but at the same time I was happy that it always stood close to its core. I do have a t-shirt that shows Calvin studying and looking really annoyed doing so in the colors of my alma mater UC Berkeley. I cannot throw it away.
Do birds enjoy flying?
During the spring, Massen and his colleagues gave 17 galahs at Avifauna several opportunities to voluntarily take part in a flight demonstration. Almost without exception, the birds chose to participate every time.
After the flights, the researchers observed the birds, conducted a test to measure their level of optimism, and collected droppings to analyze a breakdown product of corticosterone, the avian equivalent of the stress hormone cortisol. By combining these three methods, Massen and his colleagues sought to determine whether the birds enjoy flying.
My wife, who hates flying, is really into watching birds and now even has an app that is like shazam for bird sounds. Instead of just sending her this link, I put it here for you to read. I think it is a wonderful research topic.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico