I'm reading Dsquared's The Unaccountability Machine, and made it to page 39 before I stalled on a combination of disbelief and wondering what is wrong with the British. The book is relating the early career of cybernetics pioneer and management guru Stafford Beer in the British Army:

After the war, he was given a job as an army psychologist and put in charge of a unit of illiterate soldiers who had been diagnosed as having 'psychopathological personalities'.

A unit of what? This seems radically, but radically, underexplained. I'm not saying there's no possible way for it to make sense, but "let's put all the mentally ill illiterates in the same unit," is really not, to me, an obviously sensible decision to make in the name of military efficiency. Whatever Beer did with them, however, it does seem to have led to people thinking well of him.

Henry Farrell also has a new book, The Underground Empire, on how US physical and organizational control over the global flow of information, particularly financial information, has developed into a tool of US power. This one, I managed to read the whole thing without the same sort of bafflement. While it's the kind of topic that I usually feel like I should be paying attention to but can't quite make myself do it, it was clear and engaging enough that it was genuinely helpful in mentally organizing all sorts of things I'd known about the news of the last couple of decades but hadn't really made sense of.

I remembered this post and long thread recently, but this time, with the wisdom of age, I realized well god damn, she's describing Burning Man. Of course this means I was proved fucking right.

But I looked up the post because of this other, new, horrible thing, where every introduction at work has to include "a fun fact about yourself." As far as I can tell, 95% of people hate this ritual, and somehow we all do it. I'm so over "fun facts" that I've traveled the whole spectrum from playing along, to jokingly undermining, to hostiley ignoring, and now I've just got nuthin'. This isn't just a thing at my SF-based company, right? That would fucking figure.

I don't think this is a Grand Unified Theory for explaining all of human behavior, but it articulates something precisely that I've always suspected.

This link directly opens a PDF of a chapter on TMT:

TMT was originally proffered as a relatively parsimonious explanation for two human tendencies that social psychologists had highlighted for decades: the need for self-esteem and the persistent difficulty that people have dealing with people different from themselves (e.g., out-group members; Tajfel, 1982). Psychologists had found these two tendencies to be related--for example, people derive self-esteem from their group affiliations, so they are motivated to create positive distinctions between the in-group and the outgroup, leading to unfriendly behavior designed to enhance the in-group's (and by extension, one's own) perceived value at the expense of the outgroup (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). However, no contemporary theory adequately addressed the question of why we need self-esteem to begin with.

and

In sum, each person knows that he or she will die one day, which is an emotionally catastrophic realization for an animal because knowledge of inevitable death disrupts and undermines the many motivational processes that support self-preservation. Individuals cope with death awareness-- thereby defusing a potentially debilitating psychological threat--by striving to be valuable members of a meaningful reality. The apotheosis of these dynamics can be seen in the great religions of the modern world, which offer not only symbolic but also literal immortality--an afterlife--to those who live up to the standards prescribed by religious traditions.

It follows that TMT has the ability to explain a great diversity of human behavior and psychology. Practically everything that people strive for can be construed as either directly supporting continued life (e.g., eating, avoiding injury, etc.) or indirectly supporting symbolic immortality: the pursuit of selfesteem and/or meaning. Why do people pursue meaningful work, to excel at what they do relative to others, to drive nice cars, wear attractive clothing or maintain nice homes, read self-help books, go to church, or push their children to be high achievers? Self-esteem and meaning can--in principle-- explain all of this, so to the extent that TMT explains the pursuit of self esteem and meaning, it is a powerful theory, indeed.

Oh god, why do I find this terrifying to even read about?!

Is it simply a 100% good thing that noncompete clauses are being ended? Are there any complications or unintended consequences to iron out?

This whole interview is great and the I might need to have the first paragraph of the first answer framed.

Jean Marc Ah-Sen: What was the central attraction of writing Edisto, a bildungsroman that explored Black and white race relations in the South? Why do you think so many writers feel compelled to start their careers writing about emotional and intellectual maturation, and to which characteristics of the coming-of-age novel do you attribute its pride of place among a broadly defined readership?

Padgett Powell: Let me warn us that these questions are too recherche for me. I now lack the juice to fuel the bluster to conceal that I am a simpleton.

A professor in college was roundly pregnant on a Monday, absent Wednesday, and giving her lecture on "The Miller's Tale" on Friday with the baby on her hip. I thought "What if that little bastard picks this stuff up and knows Chaucer when he's five?" My own brother had a good mouth on him, there was already the mother in front of me--the novel was there for the writing. The cerebral cogitation was done. Just Strunk & White some sentences and connect them head to tail and throw in everything you've ever seen or heard. Done.

You don't write about "emotional and intellectual maturation." The attractive characteristic of a young narrator is the absurdity of it and the license of it. Huck Finn is a 14-year-old uneducated antebellum white boy in Mississippi? Huck Finn is Mark Twain being as smart as Mark Twain was. Huck Finn turns him loose. The absurdity of the proposition is like lightning.

How about a conversation on how to exit conversations gracefully?* A former colleague came to visit campus. He was chatting in my office, and then suddenly he was like, "WELL, BYE!" and out the door, and I was so in awe of how he pulled that off.

The worst is when you can't exit a situation entirely, because you're at some dumb thing with hors d'oeuvres and tiny plastic plates and you're sticking around until the guest of honor gets up and says a few words. "I'd like to stop talking to you now, but I'm only going to go to this other part of the same conference room and gaze out the window. WELL, BYE!"

Originally I called this post Deus Ex Machina, but then I became fond of the idea of just saying WELL BYE more often.

*Idea courtesy of Stormcrow, VTSOOBC.