What we talk about when we talk about business

Every once in a while, my Japanese class delivers an irritating reminder of just how ingrained sexism is in language. Of course, this is at least as true in English as in Japanese -- it's nearly impossible to talk about a person in English without using gendered pronouns like "he" or "she". Japanese, thankfully, generally doesn't have this problem, but it has its own set of issues.

I have the misfortune to be taking "business Japanese" this semester, and today's scenario was a discussion between a V.P. and some subordinates. When men and women are expected to say the lines differently, the teacher writes the changes on the board (usually, though not always, the lines in the textbook are the "male" versions). Usually, these are just small modifications to sentence endings; casual Japanese has distinct "male" and "female" speech styles, though as far as I can tell it's acceptable in modern Japanese for anyone to use the "male" style, or something in between. Today, though, we had a particularly egregious change: in the textbook, the V.P. referred to a subordinate with the familiar suffix -kun, but the teacher asked the female students to use the more respectful -san, and when a student used -kun anyway she was "corrected". Apparently it's disrespectful for a woman to use a familiar term of address to (presumably) a man, even if he's working under her.

Of course, I don't know how representative our teacher's opinions are, or what would be considered acceptable in a real modern Japanese business. I suspect that, just as during my stay in Japan my host family all spoke in the "male" style, there are places where these rules don't apply. But it was an interesting, and to me rather blatant, example of how sexism comes across in language, even when the subject of gender is nominally unrelated. When speaking or writing in our native language, we're often too close to see the assumptions we make, but when we take a step back they come across loud and clear. Maybe next time I'll try reading the "other side's" lines; after all, it would still show that I understood the dialogue. If I do, I'll let you know how it goes.

Psych

I had a very strange experience today. I was reading a book, intently, when I felt slightly nauseous. At first I didn't pay it any attention, and kept reading, but it steadily grew worse. Eventually I realized that it was what I was reading that was making me nauseous. Intellectually, I didn't see anything wrong with it; emotionally, I didn't feel anything unusual; but physically, I felt sick. I finished the section, and sat down for a while, and after a few minutes it passed; I picked up at the next section and felt fine.

Now, let me add a bit of context. I've read plenty of shocking, graphic, and unpleasant material, and I have a fairly vivid imagination. I've read things that have given me nightmares, I've gotten awful mental images stuck in my head. I'm a fan of fantasy horror; I've read Lovecraft before sleeping, and I've read the Sandman graphic novels, in which case I didn't even need to visualize*. The thing I read today wasn't as bad as any of these. It wasn't even particularly objectionable. And yet, as far as I remember, nothing I've read has caused such a dramatic physical response.

A combination of genetics, instincts, and early nurture give us a package of associations that determine how we react to various perceptions. This is, perhaps, what we'd call human nature. Throughout the process of education and socialization, new associations are created, and existing ones are undone or superseded. This is because human nature owes nothing to constructed concepts like right and wrong, safe and risky, kind and cruel. It might, in some general sense, tend to encourage the survival of the human species, as was probably the case in this particular incident. However, it works in a way that often isn't the way we'd like to be, and depressingly often can't be overcome by any incentive. We do our best to reprogram ourselves and others to make us, in some sense, better people, but we're constantly fighting against a tendency that doesn't care whether we're good or not, one that can evoke powerful responses on a level that we can't control.

Of course, I'm being incredibly hypocritical here. I've drawn a huge false dichotomy between the human mind and this animal-level "human nature". Our constructed concepts are built on these instincts, and the associations and reactions they provide are the levers by which we can be taught. We wouldn't be able to have a sense of right and wrong if it didn't grow out of our basic responses to perceptions. If we cut out the animal brain, we wouldn't be super-human and super-moral; we'd just die. A little irrational discomfort, a susceptibility to fear, an inability to care about people we've never met and can't put a face to as much as those we've spent all our lives with; these are part of the price we have to pay to be able to have a mind at all. We can't wipe out the roots of our sentience; rather, by understanding how we work, we can come up with new ways to make ourselves better.

Well, that was a large reaction to a relatively minor event. Maybe it doesn't signify anything so grand; maybe it was coincidence, or suppressed neurosis, or something I ate. Still, though, I think there's an important lesson here. Don't take yourself too much for granted -- take the time to think about why you feel the way you feel. Who knows? You might learn something.





* By the way, please don't be put off by this characterization -- both Lovecraft and the Sandman series are great stuff, and highly recommended reading to anyone who doesn't mind a bit of scariness. They won't really give you bad dreams. Probably.

a tangled issue

The New York Times recently ran a fascinating opinion piece on the legal issues surrounding same-sex marriage and transsexuals:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/opinion/12boylan.html

It's hard to think of a more omnipresent dualism than gender. It's almost impossible for most people (I know it is for me) to interact with other people in any way at all without classifying them as either male or female. In the majority of cases of real-world interaction, the classification can be made fairly easily, though, as the article points out, not always consistently or coherently.

It's equally complicated in the case of online interaction. When the only clues one receives are written text, and possibly an avatar which may be genderless or intentionally different from the person it represents, the decision becomes very arbitrary. I've convinced people that I'm of the opposite gender before on the internet, often without even trying (is that an embarrassing thing to admit? I'm not sure). And people tend to attribute gender even to genderless constructs like AIs, based on clues that in this case are completely spurious.

So, what's my take on all this? I'm really not sure. I'm as deeply tangled in it as anyone. Part of me wants to say that gender is another irrelevant distinction that'll become obsolete with the advance of technology. Another part sees it as an important part of our culture, albeit one that should be under our control rather than used to control us. And of course there's the backwards-looking part that keeps pointing out that this distinction has a biological basis. For now, the most I can say is that it's something that merits further thought. Oh, and if you're interested in this sort of thing, my good friend ekblack often writes about gender issues and other fun stuff. Check it out!

Worlds in my head, take 2

It might be obvious by now, but it often occurs to me that my favorite entertainments, chiefly science fiction and fantasy, derive much of their charm from their depiction of alternate realities. Whether it's through books, games, movies, or webcomics, I enjoy imagining (and, if what I've said so far is true, to some extent living in) other worlds. This could easily be described as escapist, and prompts (but does not beg) the question: what's wrong with this world? My first instinct is to get defensive, but that's never a particularly convincing approach. Actually, thinking about it, a better response would be: what do you mean by "this world"?

One of the great triumphs of human society, perhaps even its fundamental purpose, is to convince us that we all perceive the same basic reality. It's obvious why this is generally desirable: we can't work together or communicate if we don't believe that what we see somehow correlates to what others see. Whether this is true or not, as I've said before, is out of my scope for the moment. What's important here is that reality as it's conventionally thought of is just cyberspace on a larger scale, a consensual hallucination including nearly the entire human species. Each of us has different perceptions, but despite this we nearly all believe that we're perceiving the same things. Then to me, what we call "the real world" is the region in which my mental space overlaps with that of (what I believe) most other people think of as real. That is, rather than thinking of the "virtual worlds" I've talked about as alternatives to reality, it makes more sense to think of reality as just another one of these worlds. We each have our own constructed reality, and insofar as we divide it from fantasy that's a constructed division; if we were taught from birth that everything we imagine is real, there'd be no difference to us between reality and fantasy.

Again, it's obvious why this distinction is desirable; a common perspective seems (from the common perspective) to be useful if not necessary to a productive life. Nonetheless, even from within the bounds of our constructed reality we can feel the desire for other interpretations, and can even see it as useful as well, working the idea, if not the reality, of alternate worlds into our own.

So, why fight the status quo, even though it leaves space for the worlds I so cherish? To a certain extent, it's a game; I enjoy thinking about these things, for many of the same reasons that I enjoy science fiction and fantasy. There is, however, a part of me that believes that some serious reenvisioning of reality is going to be required sooner rather than later. The internet has already brought virtual worlds to the forefront to an unprecedented extent, and if developments in any of various technologies continue, including telepresence, AI, and the awkwardly named VR, we'll soon enough have "real-world" issues that can only be discussed coherently by recognizing the proper place of "unreal" worlds. The current debates over intellectual property might well be one of these problems, and of course speculative fiction began to delve into these issues long ago. At any rate, if the future isn't here now, it may well be soon, and if and when it comes this sort of mental exercise will no longer be purely academic. Or so I believe. You have to take anything I say with a grain of salt; after all, I read a lot of science fiction.

My faces are many, my sides are not few

For whatever reason, the first line of this little rhyme popped into my head this morning. The full rhyme is "my faces are many, my sides are not few; I'm the Dodecahedron, and who are you?", and it's from the truly amazing children's book The Phantom Tollbooth. It's a story about a boy who finds himself transported to a world with no rhyme or reason (literally; Rhyme and Reason are princesses who've vanished from the land), where the king of words and the king of numbers are constantly at war. Eventually the boy reconciles them by proving that there is something they agree on, and brings Rhyme and Reason back to the land. It's safe to say that this book (and the associated movie) was one of the pillars of my childhood. Aside from being full of delightful word games and puzzles and such, it's a perfect allegory for the rational/emotional divide I've been talking about (see, it's not just me). The moral, of course, is that the world makes no sense if we try to separate qualitative and quantitative thought; by thinking of them two aspects of the same mind, rhyme and reason are restored. Anyway, philosophical lessons aside, it's a wonderful book, and I highly recommend it even if you're not a child.

On the nature of nature

A lot of my ideas on what I call dualism (it's possible that nobody else calls it that) come out of an ecology class I once took, in which I learned, among other things, that 1) anything and everything can be thought of in terms of ecology, and 2) the word "unecological" can be used as a scathing insult. I didn't buy wholeheartedly into the professor's philosophy, and I still don't now, but one thing I took away from the class was that people tend to understand things by splitting them into two groups, and then taking sides. This is unecological. The distinctions between between Western and Eastern cultures, between animals and machines, between Us and Them are never quite as sharp as we'd like them to be. For some reason, this inspired me. So, I made dualism my enemy (which, now that I think of it, is rather dualistic of me). I decided that it would be fun to promote greater understanding by, whenever I had the chance, demonstrating that two things people tend to think of as separate are actually inseparable from each other - not only can you not have one without the other, but in fact there's no consistent way of drawing a line between them. A great example of this is the idea of nature.

As a technological crusader (in my own mind, at least), one of the things that most bothers me is the view of the world that says that technology and the environment are diametrically opposed. The basis of this attitude is simple enough: technology is by definition used to change our environment to our liking; the environment would rather stay as it is. But what is this "environment" thing, anyway? Most people would agree that plants and animals are part of it. We might also include features of the land (lakes, mountains, and such), and maybe more abstract concepts like habitats or ecosystems. But what about humans? We're animals too, right? Why aren't we part of the environment? And if we are, what about the things we make? If a bird's nest is natural, then why isn't a skyscraper? We can talk about details like materials, but everything we use comes from somewhere, and if we go far back enough we'll find nature. At what point did humans become a class of our own, separate from the world around us?

My answer, of course, is that there is no meaningful difference. A forest, a park, an office building; there's nothing more or less natural about any of these. Our drive to shape our environment isn't artificial, any more than a bird's nesting instinct. The human capacity for thought, reasoning, innovation is a natural occurrence; everything that follows from it is a natural consequence. This doesn't mean that there's nothing worth preserving in the parts of the world we haven't yet changed to suit us; it just means that casting us as the villains and the woodland creatures as the heroes (or the other way around, which is something I've done on occasion) isn't a coherent line of argument. This kind of dualism is very easy to create, and it might help us make sense of the world, but it doesn't make sense in itself.

A plea for clemency: these are very rough ideas. There may be holes, there may be avenues of argument I've missed. Part of my goal in putting these up here is to help turn my vague ideas into a coherent philosophy. Please comment, but please be gentle.

(As a side note, half of the aforementioned class was spent in debates between two students who considered themselves to be on the side of nature and the environment, and myself and one other student who considered ourselves to be on the side of technology, human progress, etc. I thought this was kind of ironic.)

A skirmish with an old enemy

Today, for whatever reason, I've been thinking about the divide between the rational and the emotional. We're raised from birth with this idea of the two halves of our mind, the left brain and the right brain, the analytical and the creative, and so on. This has several implications, the most serious being that the various range of human mental activities can be classified as one or another, or perhaps on a sliding scale between the two. Painting, singing, writing fiction, "self-expression" sit solidly on one side; solving puzzles, conducting experiments, programming, learning facts belong largely to the other. From this it follows that talent in one is linked to lack of talent in the other; overly analytical people can't make or appreciate art, overly creative people can't do math, etc., and if they can, then clearly these are two separate talents, a case of unusual gift in not one but two unrelated areas.

At this point, of course, I point dramatically and shout "objection!" I've done my best not to make a straw man of this argument, but it still looks like it's full of holes to me. In what sense are these two categories different? At the bottom level, thought is just brain chemistry; at the top level, it's impossible to disentangle "rational thought" from "emotion". As a computer scientist, I can assure you that plenty of emotion, and yes, even creativity goes into solving problems classified as technical; as an amateur sociologist, I can purport that the appreciation of arts such as music, literature, and video games is inextricably linked to analyzing the material in terms of one's social context. Fields like music and architecture are sometimes brought up as rare cases where the two tendencies intersect; I think this is the tip of a broader recognition that the two are intermingled in *every* area of thought.

I think I'll leave it at that for now; I have a tendency to rant, especially on this topic. Rest assured, dualism, we *will* meet again!