jack

This is something that is likely obvious to other people but appeared in my head and I couldn't easily put into words.

Often, when plot happens in a book, it feels like it kind of comes out of nowhere. It feels like (and maybe was) that the author had written a note that at that point "then the main characters have a big argument" or "then the assassins guild attack them". And then that's what happens. Even if it feels out of character or doesn't make sense with what happened before.

But if instead, I think of it as, "X resents Y for foo but doesn't admit it as long as bar" and "Y thinks X is bad at baz but doesn't want to say so" and "the assassins guild put a bounty on them but have't found them yet", then that typically shows through in previous scenes, naturally creating some amount of factual or thematic foreshadowing.

Like, instead of the current status quo being a natural peaceful state and each plot development being instigated by a new impetus, imagine the status quo is an equilibrium between many opposing forces, both internal to the character (what they want to do, what they're scared of) and external (other factions, things that will likely go wrong, etc). And then every event occurs naturally if you just knock the situation off balance a bit, without needing to contrive new forces of motion.

Also, if the characters have a smaller number of motivations they pursue through many situations, it feels more like a whole plot instead of a series of coincidences.

Roleplaying

If anything, that's probably even more important in roleplaying, and was the way I was thinking of roleplaying scenarios even if I didn't put it in those terms. If you have an overall force pushing the players towards the main antagonist (revenge, macguffin, curiosity, he's hunting them down, whatever), and a force pushing them away (typically, "he's too tough"), then the scenario will likely end up with a big showdown somewhere even if it goes off the rails at every intermediate point. If the momentum is already in that direction, it's easy to improvise some of the details, e.g. they don't know where he is, all you need to do is drop an appropriate clue.

But if you don't have existing motivation shared and understood by the players (often subconsciously), then every event feels tacked on, with the players constantly looking for clues what they're "supposed" to do.

Caveats

Obviously, this is just a way of thinking, it's not actually a solution. And even if you do show problems coming they can feel fake: you repeatedly show a characters' anger, but the reader doesn't accept it and is shocked when it bubbles out of control; or you repeatedly reference the risk of death from something, but without even small consequences, it doesn't feel "real" and when it actually kills someone, it feels "unfair".

When I was talking about prompts I used the word "spirituality", and simont asked what I meant by it, and I realised that what I really wanted was to spill the religion post onto another day.

Last post, I think I described what I didn't believe about religion. Basically, "anything supernatural".

However, I've recently been feeling that there's something I want to explore but I'm not quite sure what. Partly that I know more people who believe in God, but in total have beliefs really similar to mine, and I want to understand that. And partly that I've been thinking in terms of spiritual health, not in terms of a supernatural spirit, but in terms of "being aware of myself" and "giving up being scared of things I'm scared to try" and of "actually doing things I always felt I should do" and generally becoming healthier as a whole mind. And basically everything that is (I think) part of the mind, but in how the mind itself works or doesn't work, not in how it represents facts.

I only slowly realised, I rarely look at people's eyes. I don't do it deliberately, I just subconsciously look away in case it feels awkward. But it means partly, I'm bad at looking friendly.

And partly, I never notice what people's eye colour is, or where people are looking -- both are things that I know, in theory, I ought to know, but I never actually *notice* about people.

A thread on a message board asked, if you went to a university, who was the most famous person who studied there[1]. There were similar questions for "who's the most famous person from the town you were born in"?[2]

I thought "there must be really good answers for Cambridge". And then I hesitated -- who is the most famous? Especially considering that people I consdier famous other people often have never heard of and vice versa.

Hawking? Newton? Darwin? I think Darwin is probably one of the most famous scientists

Cromwell? I'd think so, but I bet he's comparatively unknown outside Britain and Ireland.

Prince Charles? Is he more famous than Charles Darwin? He probably is in Britain, but I don't think he'd win outside if he's not King yet. There must have been other famous monarchs, but which?

Is there an obvious best answer?

What about other famous universities?

Footnotes

[1] I think you can count "taught there". But not "had a college named after them" else Jesus and Wolfson would win every time :)

[2] I think Worcester is most famous for (1) being pronounced differently to how it looks, (2) Worcester sauce and (3) the end of the british monarchy. Except no-one seemed to have heard of #3 :)

I recently read another essay looking for a way of explaining that "Straight white males on average acquire more/better opportunities than non-straight non-white non-males in similar situations" without raising the defensiveness many people experience when talking about privilege.

It used the metaphor of "Some people are playing life on 'hard' difficulty and some on 'easy', but we didn't get the choose the difficulty level". Link:

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/

However, I was reminded of another of Scalzi's essays that I found very moving, on being poor. I found it very effective, and it also seemed to attract much much less defensiveness. It was a list of things that people experience, starting something like:

"Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV"
"Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away"
Etc, etc

But I wondered, would it have been better if it had started by saying:

"Not being poor is not panicing when your kids for ask for all the crap they see on TV"
"Not being poor is being able to go to the dentist when you have toothache"
Etc, etc

I think that would make people MORE defensive.

It seems like most explanations of privilege start out by telling people "you can get on a train without wondering if you'll be groped/harassed by police/unable to get up the steps" and leave it implied that other people can't, but I think it's perhaps the second half that needs to be emphasised. Most men already KNOW they can get on a tube train without worrying about being groped -- the relevant piece of information they're missing is that half of the human population can't. And yes, everyone SHOULD know, so it's fair to vent that some people just don't get it. But if I'm genuinely trying to get someone to "get it", might it be advantageous to put the thing they're missing up front in every paragraph, in big letters, spelled out in words of one syllable?

It seems to me "privilege" can be absolute or relative. You can say "people whose parents are landed gentry are privileged" or "people who live in the UK are privileged compared to many other people". So saying someone is privileged because they're white is implicitly making two assertions:

(a) that they have some opportunities that would be harder or impossible if they weren't
(b) that people who don't have those priveleges are the correct "baseline" to measure privilege against.

Now, people assuming that straight white males are the "baseline" default sort of person and everyone else falls short is indeed a systematic problem in society. But if you're trying to get someone who isn't familiar with the ideas to "get it", it seems like presenting them with the fairly objective facts about (a), as in the "Being Poor" essay, and inviting their humanity to empathise, is likely to be more effective than saying "OK, humans have a natural tendency to think of themselves as 'baseline' but that tendency is WRONG WRONG WRONG and you should think of someone without any 'privileges' as the baseline for comparison", even if that makes sense.

I notice that the same problem can occur even between two people who DO know the terms. If person from non-straight-white-male-group-A is talking to person from non-straight-white-male-group-B and avers to something that B has easier than A, people instinctively take that as saying that B has it easier in general (and get very cross if that's obviously not true). Even thought according to the literal definition of the concept of privilege, it's just as correct to say there is a (quite small) amount of "Black Privilege" of things black people can do that white people find a lot harder, even if "White Privilege" is thousands of times bigger.

Conclusions

My questions are, is the distinction between "you are privileged" making me defensive and "you are privileged compared to most people" making my empathetic one that only applicable to me, or am I right that most people react the same way?

Secondly, do you think it would work if more "what it's like to have white/straight/male privilege" essays instead focused on telling people what it would be like if they didn't? Do you think it's harmful if postponse the question of the baseline and just start by establishing the large relative difference?

I was recently debating in another journal about new suggestions for internet filtering, ostensibly to prevent children seeing child-inappropriate sites. This is normally met with -- imho justified -- cries of doom. However, it does seem likely that there would be ways to approach it which would actually do some good -- if you, as a reasonably technical aware person, were proposing something, what would it be?

Suggestions:

* Not support political censorship
* If it requires a large investment of manpower (eg. great firewall) be upfront about where that comes from
* Should fulfil stated purpose of allowing concerned non-technical parents to protect their children from inappropriate content to at least some extent
* Should not be a massive expensive unworkable pointless joke
* Should be clear if it will work a country at a time (probably not) or be a small but incremental improvement over large classes of website.

Whatever the government is thinking about is almost certainly unworkable. But if there were something NOT ridiculous which could be suggested instead, that would actually be better than just "it doesn't work", or at least make clear to people who DO want a solution that it may be expensive.

It might even have positive side effects if (eg) pure spam domain names were caught in the crossfire.

In Rainbows End Vernor Vinge describes an example of Augmented reality, where everyone wears VR glasses or contact lenses and see the real world overlaid with helpful informational popups, virtual characters, improved architecture, or alternative fantasy landscapes with gryphons wherever a bus is, etc.

Other authors have taken the idea further, and assume people will move permanently in a semi-virtual world overlaid on reality. Others have taken the idea less far and imagined only occasional non-realistic information pop-ups.

When I read this, I imagined it being in a futuristic future 30-100 years ahead. But now I suddenly realise that with google street view we could buid it *right now*. Not with fully-fledged alternate worlds and full-time immersion (which may well be a red herring), but something with the same basis. It seems like there are notable engineering challenges left but not necessarily any _conceptual_ challenges. Imagine needing:

1. A smart-phone with GPS which can find all google streetview images within (?) metres and let the user scroll between them
2. A wiki-like system for creating (one or multiple) overlays of streetview image that can be edited from a computer
3. Lots and lots of bandwidth

3. Image matching to turn an image from the phone's camera into the corresponding overlay
4. Separate overlays for different purposes, eg. one designed for owners of property depicted, one for a community "decorate the world to look like the discworld" project, one for friends-of-friends-of-friends, one for travel guides, one for everyone etc.
5. Automatic alerts for various information.

Imagine being able to just hold your smartphone up to a restaurant and on the screen see the same thing, but with "warning, overpriced" scrawled on it or up to the colleseum and see someone's painting of it as the original, or up to a complicated junction and see a big highlight on the correct path to take!

Obviously that's a lot of work, there's no reason for it to happen like that, but it feels possible, which is scary in itself!

And if it DID work, it would be easy to get people to submit further photos of streets (to cut the dependency on google) and of countryside, interiors, etc.

I now present a step-by-step guide to turning "society isn't static" into a news report.

1. Report that participation in X is declining.
2. Mention that X experienced resurgences in 18XX, 19XX, 19YY, etc.[1] but young people think what old people do is silly.
3. Make tongue-in-cheek generalisations about the character of various nationalities.
4. Say that the name "supposedly" derives from blah blah blah plausible-sounding etymology[2]
5. Have a companion opinion article that wants to say "some change is inevitable" but instead provocatively phrases that as "good riddance".
6. Say X could be dead in [horizon of future] years.

It's not a bad article, it's just the same one that's written whenever any change happens. You can predict it all from the first line.

[1] To be honest I was pleasantly surprised with that level of research :)
[2] I was astounded by that level of disclaimer. Maybe we were too quick to postulate the death of print journalism, or maybe people griping about linguistic reporting had some effect!

[1] Does it bug anyone else that in MS Office, "redo (of an undo)" is also "repeat last action"? It may be just what I'm used to, they don't feel really synonymous to me, though I can see how they could be viewed like that.

I'd prefer it if they were different shortcuts, so I can redo a bunch of actions without overshooting and splatting a whole bunch more stuff by accident. But then if you have difficulty remembering shortcuts, it might be easier to remember/discover the other one if it's linked to the first one you know?