Uncategorized – Page 16 – Pathetic Fallacy

A penny and a half for your thoughts

So Canada has decided to stop minting pennies. It’s a boldly unilateral move; for a country that complains about being seen as an appendage of the United States, they sure do love copying our coins—not only in denomination but in the same exact size, thus ruining countless laundry days for American apartment dwellers in what can only be seen as a vast passive-agressive conspiracy.

But my point is not numismatic plagiarism; my point is that in explaining why Canada will no longer be striking Elizabeth II’s profile in copper, the Canadian Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, gave the reason “It costs taxpayers a penny-and-a-half every time we make one,” which is a textbook stupid argument that sounds smart. There are many reasons one could give to stop minting pennies—they represent a unit of value that is too small to be useful; they cost too much when compared with their utility; they all end up in a big heap on your dresser and when you try your best to quietly remove them from your pocket at night you end up spilling them everywhere and waking your long-suffering wife—but to complain that the cost of producing a coin is more than its face value is to misunderstand how money works in a spectacular way and makes me wonder if Mr. Flaherty also thinks that banks are huge money bins in which millionaires swim through gold coins.

If you sift through your own personal pile of pennies on your dresser, you are almost certain to find pennies from the 70’s and 80’s. You are not that unlikely to find ones from the 50’s and 60’s, and still-circulating coins from the 40’s and earlier are out there. In a year’s time a penny may be used in dozens of transactions; by the time it rolls behind the couch of history, a coin may well have been used in thousands. This is because money is not used up when it is used.

So I’m belaboring this point, or as my friends to the North would say, “belabouring.” (Did you know those extra U’s cost millions of dollars a year? But they’re Canadian dollars, so it’s not such a big deal.) But the Finance Minister’s glib remark touches a nerve with me. Not for any love of pennies—they should all be melted for circuit boards—but because it perfectly encapsulates how a clever turn of phrase will always beat out a well-reasoned argument, particularly in the face of complexity. “It costs a penny and a half.” “Corporations are people.” “Nine, nine, nine.” Sometimes you have to sweat the details. Otherwise, you’re both penny and pound foolish.

Checkmate, I think

A box office flop in 1982, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner today enjoys a preeminent position in geek culture: the first (and best) movie adaptation of Philip K. Dick, whose dystopian vision set the art direction for hundreds of later films. But the best thing about the movie is the way it perfectly demonstrates two hilarious Hollywood clichés. The first is the “enlarge and enhance” scene, where Harrison Ford’s character reviews a still photo and instructs the computer to not only zoom in on a hopelessly out-of-focus scene and fill in the detail, but also to magically change the angle of view to peek around a doorframe. The second is the “check…checkmate!” scene, where the crafty replicant, Roy Batty, instructs the genetic designer J. F. Sebastian on how to defeat the mastermind Dr. Eldon Tyrell at chess in the following bit of dialog, conducted over the building intercom:

Computer: New entry. A Mr. J. F. Sebastian. 1-6-4-1-7.

Tyrell: At this hour? What can I do for you Sebastian?

Sebastian: Queen to Bishop 6. Check.

Tyrell: Nonsense. Just a moment. Mmm. Queen to Bishop 6. Ridiculous. Queen to Bishop 6. Hmm… Knight takes Queen.—What’s on your mind Sebastian? What are you thinking about?

Roy: (whispered) Bishop to King 7. Checkmate.

Sebastian: Bishop to King 7. Checkmate, I think.

Tyrell: Got a brainstorm, huh, Sebastian? Milk and cookies kept you awake? Let’s discuss this. You better come up, Sebastian.

Anyone who has logged more than a few games knows that that is some wiggy chess right there. Barring obvious blunders, successful play is a matter of gaining slow advantages, developing your position, and calculated sacrifices. Winning is never sudden; instead it’s a slow build towards an increasingly unavoidable conclusion. But in movies it’s always “Wot ho, I do believe you’ll find that is check.” “Is that so, now. In that case…checkmate! Sorry, old bean.”

This is the Romance of Genius: the mistaken belief that brainstorms are at the heart of problem-solving. It’s the lightbulb-over-the-head concept of invention or the sing-to-me-O-Muse concept of creativity. I’m not saying that Aha! moments don’t happen; it’s just that they’re very rare, and usually come as the result of slow, deliberate, and incremental work. (See Stephen Johnson’s concept of the “slow hunch” in his talk Where do Good Ideas Come From.) The most important ingredient to being creative is to show up. The most productive period of my life for writing was when I was in a creative writing program that required its fellows to write two short stories every week. How did we come up with all the ideas? We didn’t have a choice. Scheherazade probably didn’t know she had all those stories in her before she had a sword at her throat.

One reason I’m obsessed with copyright and patent reform is I’m convinced that our laws are based on this faulty premise of how creativity happens. By fetishizing novelty we devalue work that is derivative, collaborative, or interpretive. But more often than not, innovation is an emergent quality that arises from combining what is already at hand rather than from creating something original. A good example of this is the iPad. When it was introduced, detractors branded it as nothing new—simply a collection of existing technologies. And even as that, it was missing some obvious features. But none of that mattered to the users who sat down with one for the first time and found its particular mixture of form and function at once humanistic and compelling. Similarly, Edison was not the inventor of the incandescent lamp, but it was his laboratory that found the right combination of filament and vacuum that made the lightbulb a practical invention.

I don’t want to discredit the role of intuition, of the flash of insight. But “sudden” inspiration is always the result of hard work, patterns of thought, and cultural context. It might not be as showy as an unexpected checkmate. That’s because real chess is a conversation.

Teachable moment

I attended Eureka High School, Community Unit School District 140, in Eureka, Illinois from 1982 to 1986. My best subjects were math, French, art, history, and music, but there’s one thing I learned while I was there that has stuck with me more than any other piece of knowledge: there was a door on the far left of the front of the building that, if you pulled on the handle firmly and gave the base a swift kick, would pop open every time, allowing you entry after the building was closed at 4:00.

On its own, this piece of information was not that useful—after all, who wanted to be in the school any more than you had to? But with the knowledge of this exploit came a host of implications. The person who showed me this trick was a dedicated student, a good kid. So I learned that good people break rules. If you were going to use this technique you still had to do it in plain sight. So I learned that you can get away with things if you act like you’re supposed to be doing them. As time went on, I slowly came to learn that nearly everyone knew about the door, probably even most of the teachers. So I learned what an open secret was, and how all communities have them.

In academic circles the phrase for this sort of thing is a “teachable moment.” Often the most important educational moments are unplanned. They arise organically from life experience and deal with large issues: How do you deal with failure? With adversity? Where do you draw a moral line? What’s the right thing to do?

I thought about this yesterday when my brother, who also attended Eureka High School and who now writes for the Daily Show, Facebooked a link to a story about a teacher at EHS being suspended for showing segments of Jon Stewart’s show to his government and law class. It’s unclear what specifically happened because the article is so awful, but I suspect that the teacher warned his students against Googling “Santorum” and some of the district’s parents—those lacking a sense of humor—were upset. That piece of information might have been helpful for readers trying to understand the the article, but the Pantagraph reporter did, however, note the teacher’s salary, so we could all be incensed by what a boondoggle public education is.

Amidst the predictable comments on the article pages supporting freedom of expression and deploring the teacher’s alleged bias, this one, from “teach78” stood out:

Spin it anyway you want; there is no educational “value” in the Daily Show.

teach78 is probably right about this, but there is plenty of educational value in how District 140 dealt with the situation. The best way to handle things is not through private negotiations but through public fiat. A parent’s sense of indignation is more important than a man’s occupation. Pick the right side or you will be dealt with. These are the lessons that Eureka students will take from this event, and they might stick with them longer than a faulty door.