8 ideas — week of Jan 26

Eight ideas (and one favorite line) from my week:

Top 3 💡

1. In writing, use parataxis like Vonnegut & PG

Paul Graham, the Y Combinator founder, has a popular essay called Write Like You Talk. Here’s a quote:

Something comes over most people when they start writing. They write in a different language than they’d use if they were talking to a friend. The sentence structure and even the words are different. No one uses “pen” as a verb in spoken English. You’d feel like an idiot using “pen” instead of “write” in a conversation with a friend.

PG’s essay focuses on word choice. But writing like you talk is more than just the words you use — it’s also your phrasing and how you string together the words you use. It’s writing with parataxis.

Parataxis is a literary technique where statements follow each other without any conjunctions to clarify their relationship to each other. All the clauses and ideas are on an equal playing field, as if the writer is saying, “here’s this and now here’s this other thing.” We tend to talk in parataxis because we speak off the cuff and each sentence has an implicit connection — or isn’t connected at all.

The easiest way to understand parataxis might be through understanding its opposite, hypotaxis. Hypotaxis is when phrases in sentences have a hierarchy — there’s a main clause supported by little subordinate clauses, and the conjunctions between them tell you their relationship. For example, if one follows the other in time, if one causes the other, or some other type of comparison. Hypotaxis says, “if this, then that.”

If you’re a fan of etymology, the root words can help you remember the difference. Parataxis comes from a Greek word that means “to place side by side,” whereas hypotaxis means “to place under.”

Parataxis can be used to give writing a certain feel. It can wrap you up in a character’s stream of consciousness. Or it might make the narrative feel fast-paced, staccato, and scattered, as if thoughts are piling on top of one another. In poetry, parataxis can create a mystery where the reader has to figure out what the relationships are.

Vonnegut is one of my favorite examples of parataxis. I noticed it in his writing before I knew the term for it. Here’s an excerpt from Breakfast of Champions:

Dwayne was a widower. He lived alone at night in a dream house in Fairchild Heights, which was the most desirable residential area in the city. Every house there cost at least one hundred thousand dollars to build. Every house was on at least four acres of land.

Dwayne’s only companion at night was a Labrador retriever named Sparky. Sparky could not wag his tail — because of an automobile accident many years ago, so he had no way of telling other dogs how friendly he was. He had to fight all the time. His ears were in tatters. He was lumpy with scars.

Dwayne had a black servant named Lottie Davis. She cleaned his house every day. Then she cooked his supper for him and served it. Then she went home. She was descended from slaves.

Hypotaxis, on the other hand, makes you work to read (as opposed to think). The difficulty in understanding comes from parsing the writing itself, not trying to undercover the ideas behind it.

Here’s an excerpt from Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, with the subordinating and coordinating conjunctions that tip you off to hypotaxis bolded:

A proper appreciation of Gödel’s Theorem requires a setting of context. Therefore, I will now attempt to summarize in a short space the history of mathematical logic prior to 1931 — an impossible task…It all began with the attempts to mechanize the thought processes of reasoning. Now our ability to reason has often been claimed to be what distinguishes us from other species; so it seems somewhat paradoxical, on first thought, that reasoning is a patterned process, and is at least partially governed by statable laws. Aristotle codified syllogisms, and Euclid codified geometry; but thereafter, many centuries had to pass before progress in the study of axiomatic reasoning would take place again.

As I reread these excerpts, I’m realizing that Vonnegut’s isn’t entirely parataxis and Hofstadter’s isn’t entirely hypotaxis. It’s probably better thought of as a sliding scale or a generalization that gives a piece of work its overall feel.

In summary:

• Parataxis is conversation. Or poetry. It’s Paul Graham, Hemingway, and Vonnegut.
• Hypotaxis is scientific papers. It’s Gödel, Escher, Bach or Infinite Jest.

Discovered via Masterclass

Other thoughts:

• I haven’t found anything that explicitly states this, but I’d bet that hypotaxic writing generally has more words per sentence than parataxic, which would mean a lower readability score.
• There’s an open question of whether or not something written parataxis can always be “converted” to hypotaxis, or vice versa. And if it can, how much of the meaning is lost (or made up) in the translation.
• There are definitely situations where one specific technique should be used over the other. I can’t help but wonder if there’s a better method than using words (or more specifically, words alone) to express something that needs hypotaxis. If it’s very important to make the relationships between two statements clear, why not use a diagram instead?

2. Develop expert intuition with perceptual exposure

There are two pieces to becoming an expert at something: knowing the rules and techniques of whatever that something is, and having intuition and “feel” for it that makes doing it natural.

Some examples of the latter are:

• when a chess player can look at a position and feel that there’s a mate there
• when a firefighter instinctively dives for cover because she knows the house fire is about to explode
• when a photographer automatically adjusts the frame to fit the rule of thirds because the photo didn’t feel right before

In fact, there are some skills, like chick sexing and plane spotting, that historically couldn’t be taught in the normal way, with teachers explaining what to look for — only “instilled” over time with feedback.

Perceptual exposure is a method for learning that builds that intuition quickly. And if you can do that while you’re learning in more traditional ways (reading books, practicing, etc.), you’ll be able to skill up faster than studying alone.

This is what good perceptual exposure training looks like:

• Find a large set of “expert” examples — situations that experts would run into — that have a correct answer (e.g. there’s either checkmate or there isn’t in the snapshot of the chess game)
• Expose yourself to a large amount of these examples in a compressed time frame and make a best guess on the answer
• Give yourself immediate feedback on your guess (research has shown that the feedback doesn’t have to be after each guess, it can be after a batch of examples)

There’s a lot of experimentation in this to figure out what the right number of examples is in what amount of time. Figuring out the right examples for the right skill can also be a challenge. It’s possible that the examples that are the best fit for perceptual exposure are always visual (an image), or maybe auditory.

If the training fails, possible reasons are that there aren’t enough examples, the examples aren’t different enough, too much time elapses between the exposure and feedback, or the attribute/pattern that tips an expert off to the answer is too subtle.

Learned via Badass: Making Users Awesome

3. The concept of criticality: All things are systemic

The point of criticality is when everything changes and a chain reaction is set into motion. It’s the tipping point, the edge of the cliff, the moment before the rocket launches.

Our minds love criticality events because we can latch on to them as the sole reason for all subsequent events, rather than remembering all the factors that contributed. We also love them because we’re obsessed with what I think of as n=1 storytelling, where there’s an individual narrative. The Jenga tower didn’t collapse because every move leading up to yours chipped away at the structural integrity of the tower; it’s because you screwed up.

One example of criticality I’ve used before is with historical figures. For example, when some people are asked what they’d do if they could go back in time, they say, “Kill Hitler” or “Encourage Hitler to study art” or something, the idea being that then WWII would have never happened.

But the fact is that WWII didn’t happen just because of Hitler. It happened because there were a certain set of circumstances in place that allowed him to come to power. Germany was chaotic and resentful after losing WWI, and the public welcomed an opinionated leader who told them that the loss wasn’t their fault and fed them conspiracy theories of whose it was. If not Hitler, it could easily have been someone else. As they say in physics, “nature abhors a vacuum.”

Criticality is related to fundamental attribution error, which is when we believe that people behave consistently due to some inherent and unchanging part of their personality, rather than based on the circumstances they’re in. In other words, we think people are who they are across the board, when in reality our decisions and actions are a product of the situations we’re in.

When you apply fundamental attribution error to history, you get historicism. A historicist’s perspective is that to understand why people are the way they are, you have to examine their surroundings. And to understand a society, you have to understand its history and the forces that shaped it. Historicism is very contextual and relative.

Both the cognitive bias to overlook criticality and fundamental attribution error are a result of our need to oversimplify to heuristics, to find easily digestible patterns in the world.

Discovered via Farnam Street

Honorable mentions

4. Hofstadter’s Law (for estimating time to completion)

Douglas Hofstadter came up with Hofstadter’s law to describe how difficult it is to make time estimates for tasks:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

He includes it in Gödel, Escher, Bach, where one of the overarching themes is the idea of recursion and self-references.

5. Guidelines for king v. king-pawn chess endgames

Quick rules of thumb for whether you’ll be winning or drawing (assuming you don’t screw up):

• Rule of the square: Mentally draw a diagonal from your pawn to the back rank. If the opposing king can’t enter the “square” that outlines that diagonal, your pawn can safely beat him to the back rank with no help from your king.
• Rook pawns: If the opposing king can get in front of your pawn or get to the square diagonally adjacent to the promotion square, he can draw. (There’s one exception to this.)
• b-/g-pawn trap: If the opposing king gets into the corner and the game results in stalemate.
• If your pawn isn’t a rook pawn, you can win if at least two of the following conditions are met: 1) your king is in front of your pawn, 2) you have the opposition*, 3) your king is on the sixth rank.
• If the opposing king can get to the square ahead of the pawn (or the one ahead of that), he draws. (There’s one exception)

*you have the opposition if the two kings are on the same file with one square between them and it’s your opponent’s move

Learned via Wikipedia

6. del Toro’s “eye protein” is beautiful because it’s meaningful

Beauty is empty without substance.

And that’s why Guillermo del Toro (director of Pacific Rim, The Shape of Water, Hellboy, and Pan’s Labyrinth) differentiates between eye candy and “eye protein.”

His distinction is that eye candy starts with the aesthetic — it’s made to look pretty and catch your eye. The driving question is, “What would make this look good?”

Eye protein, on the other hand, starts with a purpose and a message to be conveyed. Design choices like colors and shapes and textures follow from that.

In an interview, del Toro says:

When you are telling the story, it’s eye protein because it’s intrinsic. If you think of somebody as formalistic as Wes Anderson, every shape, wardrobe, color decision is a storytelling decision. The same can be told about Paul Thomas Anderson.

I derive the look of the movie from the storytelling of the movie. I say, I want the movie to look like this because of this. It’s telling me this. It’s telling me that the fascist world of the captain [in Pan’s Labyrinth] is a cool world. And fantasy is sort of this uterine gold and red. It’s life. So then, we should make the rebels in the mountains also be warm, because they are these characters that are maintaining life against the dictator.

This idea of “eye protein” is analogous to:

• The “form follows function” principle in design
• Dieter Ram’s commandments for good design, especially “good design is unobtrusive” and “good design is honest”
• Designing data visualizations with lots of pretty colors and interactions, but on second look are impossible to understand or — worse — useless
• Pepsi beating Coke in blind taste tests based on one sip (because it’s sweeter), but Coke winning because people consume entire cans of soda

Discovered via kaptainkristian

7. Use a “Freudian flip” to help make decisions

If you’re at a crossroads with a decision, you can check how you really feel with a Freudian flip.

List out your options and assign each one to heads or tails on a coin (or a dice, if there are more than two options). Then flip it.

Do you feel relief? That’s the decision you really wanted, you just need the courage to make it.

Regret? Some piece of you wants the other outcome.

Neither? You must not really care.

Discovered via Scott Young

8. Difference between synecdoche & metonymy

Synecdoche and metonymy are both rhetorical devices — tricks used in writing or speaking for some purpose, like being memorable or persuasive.

Synecdoche is when you replace a term with another that technically only represents a part of the original, or vice versa. Some examples:

• “wheels” for a car
• “threads” for clothing
• “hands” for workers

Metonymy is when you replace a term with another that’s related to it. Examples:

• “crown” for king or queen
• “suits” for businesspeople
• “surf and turf” for lobster and steak
• “track” for horse racing
• a city’s name for its sports team (e.g. “Houston was ahead by six”)
• a writer’s name for his or her work (e.g. “I read Hemingway for class”)

So generally, synecdoche is a type of metonymy.

Learned via Merriam Webster

Favorite line of the week

For writers, certainty has a flattening effect. It washes out the details of human experience so that they lose their variety and vitality. Certainty removes the strength of doubt, the struggle to reconcile incompatible ideals, the drama of working out an idea without knowing where it will lead, the pain of changing your mind. Good writing doesn’t deny or flee these things — it explores them down to their depths, confident that the most beautiful and important truths are found where the glare of certainty can’t reach.

— “The Enemies of Writing” by George Packer, published in The Atlantic