Interesting Things I've Read (or Watched) /
Some Interesting Things I’ve Read Lately, Episode 2
Here’s another roundup of some interesting things I’ve come across lately and would like to talk about! As always, I’m sure there’s some great stuff I read but cannot for the life of me remember.
This one is extremely late, since I’ve been incredibly busy and finding time to write has been hard. I think I looked at some of this stuff back in… November? October? Oops. I’ve decided I want to keep these to only 4–5 items per post, so more posts should be coming shortly! There are definitely other things I’ve looked at that I want to talk about.
Nicky Case, The Evolution of Trust
This is an educational game that was recommended to me by a colleague. After playing it, I immediately recommended it to a bunch of friends and classmates, but I’m pretty sure none of them actually played it, so hopefully you will.
The game is an introduction to game theory, and how the right conditions can either incentivize or de-incentivize trusting behaviours. It looks at different personalities and strategies, and what the outcomes of a generalized long-term “prisoner’s dilemma”-type game might end up looking like. I really like the opening questions posed in the game’s opening screen:
Why, even in peacetime, do friends become enemies?
And why, even in wartime, do enemies become friends?
I absolutely loved this game and thought it was a very visceral and effective introduction to game theory. It has you play games against a bunch of characters who may or may not be trying to game the system, and you get to decide what your own strategy is going to be – are you going to game the system too, or not? Each screen also has very clear explanations of what the strategies are, why different characters are making them, and what it all means in the end.
Also, I love the art style and aesthetic and music choices! The whole experience is beautiful and amazing.
Anyway, I don’t want to spoil the game too much, but go play it, it’s great.
Lauren Rivera, Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs
Pedigree is the latest in a series of books I’ve read that examine the relationship between socioeconomic class, university choice, and educational outcomes. This book, specifically, examines how social class influences your chances of being hired in a high paying entry level role in consulting, law, or banking, and similarities and differences between the three industries in terms of hiring practices.
This is a monograph written by an academic sociologist, which means it pretty much just reads like an extended academic paper. While it can make it a dense and at times dry read (and it did take me quite a while to get through the book), the stories in the book are shocking at times. (Depressingly, they’re shocking in terms of severity, mostly; they are not particularly surprising.) Sociology is a discipline that tends to involve a lot of field work, so along with descriptions of the findings, the author includes many scenes and anecdotes from her field research, which helps illustrate the points she makes. It’s just not as fun to read as, say, a work of journalism.
The book examines the recruitment and hiring practices of elite firms, starting from the initial marketing process all the way into the interviewing and selection process. It answers questions like whether encouraging firms to hire employees from more diverse backgrounds is effective (tl;dr, it isn’t; some firms will even retroactively change the scores of non-chosen diverse candidates to make them appear less competent, so they can avoid discrimination allegations) and how much the school you went to matters when applying for roles at elite firms (tl;dr: the name value of your school is everything, or close, anyway). It also shows how non-academic factors, such as leisure and extracurricular activities, which are disproportionately associated with wealthier students, have an outsized impact on who gets hired.
Some other books I’ve read recently that touch on related topics include Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, by Alfred Lubrano; Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, by Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton; Inside the College Gates: How Class and Culture Matter in Higher Education, by Jenny M. Stuber; and Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy, by Tressie McMillan Cottom.
Meritocracy is a lie! I hope you knew that already.
Wikipedia, “Lie-to-children”
I can’t even remember how I stumbled upon this article, but the idea of a “lie-to-children” in education is when a technically incorrect model is used to explain concepts to an audience, because it captures the relevant ideas well enough. It’s this idea of meeting the person where they are, or if you’ve ever heard someone complain that a concept was oversimplified to the point of being wrong, that’s a lie-to-children.
I had no idea that there was actually a name for this educational tactic. We see this all the time in science education; it’s like every year in high school I was taught some model of how the world works, and then suddenly told the following year that the previous model was wrong and shown some updated model. I especially remember this being done in chemistry. I can’t remember how many models of the atom I learned about, but there were at least four.
What’s fascinating is that a lot of the technically wrong explanations are prior models that were accepted as being true. So while one way to look at the later models is as corrections of earlier models, we can also look at earlier models as abstractions of later ones, and that is how we use them in education. The discovery process mirrors our own growing ability to understand; it’s like we view the world through abstractions that we’ve spent years peeling away through science.
The collective scientific discourse started as a child, and is slowly maturing into an adult, and we use the early discourse to teach children and young people. I think it’s just the poet in me trying to find meaning in everything, but I think this is beautiful.
Rachel Lachmansingh, “It’s literally your hand!”
This is a really interesting mini-essay on writing style, and I like it because it doesn’t come at it from a perspective of giving people steps to find their writing style (I find that sort of thing incredibly annoying). Lachmansingh makes a comparison between writing style and handwriting, noting that yes, you can practice, and yes, you can influence it, but there’s always going to be a part of it that’s more or less innate – your hand just moves in a certain way, and sometimes trying to work against that is counterproductive.
I also really like the mention of how in poetry, it’s common to closely engage with the work of other poets by borrowing from them – she calls it “honouring”. There is, for example, a long tradition of writing “after poems”: poems that are in conversation with, and borrow stylistic elements from, other famous poems. (By the way, Canadian Immigration Services Citizenship Exam is one of my favourite after poems!!) In prose, there isn’t such a tradition, but in personal exercises and unpublished work, deeply engaging with and emulating the work of writers you admire can be a fun way of playing with style.
She also talks about the idea of honouring your own work and emulating yourself – studying your favourite works closely to see what you like about them, and dissecting them to find which parts you want to replicate and make a hallmark of your work.
The reason why I want to highlight this mini essay is because I’ve personally found a lot of value in doing some of the things Lachmansingh describes, and I think it’s a very healthy way to engage with the pursuit of “writing style”, or even artistic style in general. So many artists look at artistic style as some sort of holy grail they need to strive to achieve someday, but I don’t think that’s how it works. I think style is achieved through being playful and experimentative, but also through self-reflection and awareness of one’s own strengths. I think style is an expression of what you like to see and do in art, and also of you doing what you do best. Spending too much time worrying about “constructing a style” is pointless.
It’s been interesting to watch my own voice shift over the years. In some ways it’s tighter and cleaner than it used to be. I’m better at conveying my ideas, which on one hand, is unsurprising, given the passage of time, but on the other hand is shocking, given that I’m must less of a “serious writer” than I used to be. I think my word choice has gotten better, again, shockingly; I think my metaphors and analogies have gotten better, which is good, since I primarily write to explain; and I think overall I ramble less than I used to, which isn’t a massive improvement, but it is something.
But there have been some other shifts, some of which I’m not so sure about. I’ve been seeing academic language seep into my non-academic writing, which I’m not sure is a good thing. The time I’ve spent studying math has started to make itself known in my vocabulary, and I find myself consciously scrubbing out math-isms. I think my grasp on form and structure is atrophying, because I don’t do as much experimental writing as I used to. I don’t try as hard to be artsy as I used to, which might be a good thing? I’m not sure, but I think my voice is less overtly lyrical than it used to be.
Like Lachmansingh, I like to spend time looking at work I’ve written over the past year, and trying to find the best in it. I try not to agonize over style too much – I think it usually works itself out. I wish more people had this sort of approach. I think young artists are wayyyyy too anxious about developing a unique style.