Briefly

A thing that is weird: the depth of people's desire to have someone take a picture of them and post it on the internets. I guess I'd sort of confronted this fact several years ago when I became old-person-aware of cobrasnake and misshapes (old-person-awareness is when you are old like me and you become vaguely aware that the kids are doing some new thing, but you do not fully grasp why they would do this thing, and you feel a sinking in the pit of your stomach that this is the future because it seems pretty fucking lame, but then maybe you're no longer able to accurately diagnose lameness because you are so old), but I confronted it up close and personal this weekend. We went to an event at LACMA called LA Flash, which was basically a cool exhibit of photography of street styles in 1973, but they were comparing it to street style today as well, so they were taking photos of the guest's street style. Here's the thing: you had to wait in line to have your photo taken, and people were all waiting in this crazy long line so that someone would take a picture of them and put it on the internet. Is it really that hard to get your picture on the internet? Have you run into so many roadblocks in this quest that you're forced to pay $10 admission and stand in an endless line? Apparently the answer is an enthusiastic yes (n.b. that we did not pay admission because I lied to a dude and said that we were looking for someone that we had lost, which I feel bad about but we got there super late and I did pay $8 for a Heineken). Adrian also blogged about this, so if you're into Rashomon-style dueling blogs, here you go. Adrian would probably also like me to mention that the most likely source of my bad attitude is that my street style is wack, whilst hers is fresh.

An ersatz Disneyland

So I was reading this very real news article from the Sioux-City Journal that has drawn attention for the unintentional Onionesqueness of its prose. For those of you too lazy to click through, it's a slightly breathless article about how the citizens of Sioux City, Iowa, are very excited that they finally (finally!) have an Olive Garden opening up in their fair city. First question: how the hell did it take this long for the Olive Garden to get around to opening a branch in Sioux City? Second question: how dare the commentariat make fun of the residents of Sioux City for being excited about an Olive Garden? Now, admittedly, the Olive Garden is a shitty restaurant with bland-ass food and commercials that make it seem as if non-self-hating-Italian-Americans would actually eat at an Olive Garden. But as someone who loves the equally ersatz but much more delicious Macaroni Grill, I say we have to take a stand. People who are all like "Oooh, I'm all fancy and I demand authenticity from my restaurants and I get all uncomfortable in places that share an enormous parking lot with the Ruby Tuesday and the Outback Steakhouse" are... well, actually, they're my parents, and they're very nice people in a lot of ways. They prefer that their food not be developed by the good folks at the Institute of Food Technologists, which is fine, if a bit quaint.

But, the problem is, if you live in Los Angeles and you're really going to insist on authenticity in all things, you're going to miss out on a lot of awesome stuff. You could still eat at burrito trucks, I guess, and you could drink at Del's (but not on fucking karaoke night! Related post for later: why I hate karaoke so much). But then someone is eventually going to be like "Hey, I need to go buy some mass-market casual clothing that projects a comfortable familiarity with clam bakes, G&T's, and playing with golden retrievers whilst ensconsed in weathered dinghys" and you're like, "That's fine, but for myself I need to ride a make-believe choo-choo train for approximately 50 feet!" and then you both look at each other, smile, and say "Of course, The Grove!". This happens to me and my girlfriend all the time. Actually, mostly it happens to my girlfriend, and then I am a person who hates fun, so I'm all "I haaaaaate The Grove, please don't maaaake me".

For non-Angelenos, The Grove is a "retail and entertainment complex", sort of like a cross between an upscale outdoor mall and a movie set, with false-fronts to each store that collectively are meant to suggest... I don't know, actually. I want to say Venetian villas, but that doesn't seem accurate? Regardless, it's a big fake"experience" that must have suggested "class, but at a discount!" to some focus group; it comes complete with cobble-stone streets and footbridges and fountains and piped-in Sinatra. Also it has a choo-choo train for reasons that escape me. It is the sort of thing that Jean Baudrillard would have had a lot to say about if he hadn't apparently died of typhoid several years ago (btw, typhoid? wtf? That's some Anne of Green Gables shit right there). In short, deep down I am my parent's son, and The Grove is not my favorite place.

But! On a recent excursion to The Grove with couple friends Tammy and David, we ate at a magical place called Morel's French Steakhouse and Bistro. We actually ate on the first floor, which I guess is the bistro part. Imagine, if you will, that the producers of Saved By The Bell decided to make a special "study abroad" episode in gay Paris, and at the very last minute they informed the set designer that they needed an "authentic Parisian bistro" for an important scene where Kelly Kapowski is seduced by a Frenchman in a beret, and the set-designer (I imagine her as a chain-smoking, mid-fifties, bleach-blond, overtanned badass) managed to knock one out at the last possible minute using only materials that she had on hand. You can almost hear her in the background quietly mumbling "shit ass motherfucker suck dick assholes" etc.

So the decor, not so much. Neither the wait-staff, who are authentically Parisian in that they are not terribly motivated to be good at their job (also they have white smocks on!). So what did I like so much? Well, their croque monsieur was fucking delicious, if not very authentic. It used chicken instead of ham, but apparently croque monsieur is like a classic cocktail: variations on a theme are expected and welcomed. All I know is, things with melted emmental and baked-on Bechamel sauce are fucking delicious.

And if you're still Quixotically looking for authenticity in this place, I can also recommend their selection of fine liqueurs. They have them all! Galliano, Benedictine, Tuaca, Chartreuse, just a whole bunch of liqueurs. If I remember correctly, I thought about getting a glass of Chartreuse but decided against for some reason. For those who've never had it, Chartreuse is delicious and about as authentic as something can get without being like a granite boulder or something. The color is named after it, that's how OG Chartreuse is. The Carthusian monks who make it in have been around for like 900 years. If you saw Into Great Silence, apparently those are the same dudes (I haven't seen it yet, that shit's been number two on my Netflix for like a year because the next disc of the Wire keeps getting bumped up).

My point, then, if I actually have one, is that even in the most false and derivative place in Los Angeles (The Grove beats out Universal CityWalk for this title by a slim margin - Universal CityWalk is the ersatz Disneyland of my title, a place my parents would just refuse to set foot in. My mother would describe it as too loud, both visually and auditorially. They have giant flaming guitars, shitty live bands, and a giant neon-rimmed King-Kong dressed up according to the season - currently I believe he's wearing board shorts and sunglasses. I imagine the message is "Hey, this gorilla likes to have a good time, and so do we! And we're betting you do too! We're not all snooty like that other retail-and-entertainment complex across town!" Actually, in between the cracks that place is pretty fucking real, we saw some straight-up hookers plying their trade by the Hard Rock Cafe last weekend (we were there for the IMAX - see what I mean about the awesomeness you'd miss out on if you insisted on authenticity?) Also the restaurants at CityWalk are pretty downscale - think Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, which, speaking of simulations, is a fucking restaurant named after two characters in a movie from the nineties - am I blowing your mind yet? How about this, then: the only time I have ever been on a real movie set (i.e. a true falsehood), it was a wrap party that they held on the fake New York street on the ABC lot. It was kind of a weird experience, having a block party on a fake block. You're all chilling, having a beer, standing in the middle of the street, thinking "Hey, it's kind of weird how I'm here in the middle of the street and I'm not worried about getting hit by a car!" like you usually do at a block party, but then you're like "Oh, wait a minute. Fake block." - so I was there courtesy of my roommate Amy for a wrap party of her show, but, get ready to have your mind blown, guess what band was playing that wrap party? The Lieutenant Dan Band, a band fronted by Gary Sinise and inexplicably named after the movie character that he played in that self-same 90's movie).

To start again: even in the most false and derivative place it is possible to find things which are not simulations of some other thing, which were not created so as to suggest some aspirational lifestyle to a focus group, but rather exist because some monk hundreds of years ago tried a strange liqueur recipe that had been given to him and found that the unusual mixture of herbs produced something quite wonderful. Sometimes I worry that eventually all of experience will become a simulation of some other, more distant experience, which will in turn eventually be lost. Chartreuse helps to remind me that there are limits.

Don't you fucking look at her!

There was a study a while ago that found that true "swing voters" or "independent independents" are the least likely to have even the most basic knowledge of politics - like they're seriously unclear on whether Al Gore or George Bush is the one who likes the environment. It's a bit weird for those of us who decided a long time ago to watch these conventions and try to put ourselves in the mindset of that smidgen of the electorate who really haven't nailed it down to a particular candidate yet. I believe the author of the study I'm thinking of (I can't seem to find it right now) mentioned that one plausible reason why extreme partisans such as myself tend to have a bit more political knowledge is that we are akin to the sports fanatic who knows the teams in his league inside and out - if you are rooting hard enough for one candidate, suddenly ag policy seems kind of interesting and worth reading about.

I think that this idea makes sense, this idea of the political junkie as a fanboy (or girl) for whom it is not enough that we should win, we must be entertained by that win. We don't want our team to run up the score against some bullshit expansion team, we want to beat the Yankees. I hope this idea makes sense, because it's the only explanation as to why I'm so happy about Sarah Palin. Of course, I will be deeply terrified if she becomes vice president, and I really hope that doesn't happen. But this bitch is pure gold. She fucking hates polar bears, and also science. Her husband is a goddamn Eskimo (not an Inuit, apparently). Her first major address on the national stage, and she just stepped up and bitch slapped Barack Obama like her babies weren't out there makin' babies. She fucking supports aerial wolf hunting! Anyone who read Julie of the Wolves as a kid knows that you have to be straight up evil to support aerial wolf hunting. She was surrounded by a crowd of Republicans yelling "Drill, baby, drill!!" like they were bad guys from Captain Planet. She is so much more badass than Mittens Romney will ever be. He was just a slimey dude with no principles who thought everyone would be cool with it if he changed his opinion on abortion suddenly in his fifties. Palin is like the bad guy from Blue Velvet. Frank Booth was scary as hell not because he was willing to cut people's ears off, but because he hated Heinekin and he loved PBR and he wanted you to call him Daddy and not fucking look at him. Sarah Palin feels the exact same way, except about library books.

Also see: Sarah Palin videos, I recommend number 1 and number 4.

Base rates

It occurs to me that my explanation of base rates may not have made a huge amount of sense to non-psychology people, and I'm not sure that wikipedia's explanation is that much better. The idea of Bayesian inference is that before you consider the probability of something given some evidence, you need to take into account what the probability would be if you had no evidence at all (i.e. the base rate). If you fail to do this, your intuition of probabilities will be way, way off. Especially when the base rate is very low.
So, as an example, say you are looking for something in the trunk of your boyfriend's car. You find a duffel bag in there that contains plastic sheeting, black kevlar gloves, a face mask, duct tape, rope, a knife and a crowbar. If you're anything like my lovely girlfriend, you will immediately conclude that your boyfriend is a serial killer (my girlfriend is also very alert to developing terrorist threats at IMAX screenings of The Dark Knight). But, before you leap to that conclusion, it's useful to consider what the good Rev. Bayes would say. First, what is the probability that a serial killer would have creepy tools in his trunk? Hard to say, but in the interests of being generous to the serial killer hypothesis let's say that 1/3 of all serial killers have creepy tools in the trunk of their car. This is called the conditional probability. Next we have to consider the probability of non-serial killers having these things in the trunk of their car. It would seem like this probability is pretty low, however all of these items were taken from a list of earthquake preparedness items that I was looking at earlier (I keep meaning to make an earthquake preparedness kit, but I probably won't get around to it until after the big one hits). So, let's say that 1% of Californians have an earthquake kit, and 10% of those Californians unwittingly create a creepy-seeming kit, so that's 1/1000 odds. Pretty low! But then, and this is key to Bayesian inference, we have to consider: what are the odds of any given person being a serial killer in the absence of any evidence? That is, what is the base rate of serial killers in the general population? I don't know if there's a good answer to this, but on Wikipedia it looked like there were about 100 known American serial killers (including terrifying ones like Zodiac whose acts are known but are not themselves identified; for completists this list also includes old-timey serial killers like the Bloody Benders). Again, for the sake of being generous to the serial killer hypothesis, let's say that for every one serial killer who is known to the world there are 9 that go undetected, so there's maybe like 1000 serial killers in the US. If there are 300 million Americans, then the base rate is 1/300000. If we plug these three numberrs into the formula from Bayes' theorem, we find that the chance your boyfriend is a serial killer is 0.00111, or a little more than a tenth of a percent. So pretty damn low.
We can use a totally different example, but with similar numbers, to illustrate what happens when you alter the base rate. Let's say you find a CD copy of "Now That's What I Call Deep House! Volume 10!" in the trunk of your boyfriend's car. What's the probability that your boyfriend is secretly gay? We'll keep the conditional probability (odds that a Gay American would have crappy house music in the trunk of his car) at 1/3 (an insult to the musical taste of the gays, I know, I'm sorry, but it's in service of explaining a complicated point. Also, I think it's fair to say that about 1/3 of the gays have SOME kind of terrible taste in music). We'll also keep the chances of a straight guy having this CD at 1/1000. But now, insteade of a base rate of 1/30000, we'll have a base rate of whatever percentage of American guys are gay - we'll pick 4% for the sake of argument. Now, all of a sudden, the odds that your boyfriend is gay is about 93%. Remember, the only thing that changed in this example was the base rate. Also the Deep House. Base rates are incredibly important, and nobody who is thinking "intuitively" is taking them into account, at all. So we end up with ladies who are terrified of their boyfriends for no reason and ladies who are not aware that their boyfriends are secretly gay. All because of ignorance of statistics!

My girlfriend's slow descent into 9/11 Truthiness

A thing that is both weird and a little upsetting: for a few days there, I thought my girlfriend was going to become a 9/11 Truther, but for Sarah Palin. When the interblogs started buzzing with rumors that Sarah Palin had never been pregnant and actually little Trig was actually daughter Bristol's baby etc., etc., my girlfriend was right there with them for like half a day. Fortunately for our relationship, she abandoned this line of thinking fairly quickly, and now of course we know that in fact Bristol was pregnant with her own damn baby, thank you very much, and also (and here I'm imagining Bristol's response to the interwebs), frankly, fuck you very much for saying she looked pregnant 8 months ago when she wasn't, that's kind of a fucked up thing to say about a 16 year old girl who just happens to be a little chunky around the midsection. But whatever.

If we could I'd like to take us back to those heady days of earlier this weekend when speculation about the maternity of little Trig was running rampant. My girlfriend was citing all sorts of facts that she learned from Tumblr that JUST DIDN'T ADD UP. Such as: the fact that Sarah didn't look like the Demi Moore Vanity Fair cover when she was 6 months pregnant, or that Bristol was taken out of school with "mono" at some time point that was deemed suspicious, or that baby Trig was not listed in the web-based birth announcements of the hospital where he was ostensibly (OSTENSIBLY!!!) born, or how weird it was for a woman to give a speech after her water broke and then fly for 9 hours to get back to Alaska and not tell the flight crew that she was in labor, etc. All of these unusual facts, or "problems" with the official account of Trig's birth, were cited as leading inexorably to one conclusion: Sarah Palin couldn't deal with the shame of her underage daughter making a baby, but also couldn't deal with the sin of anyone having any abortions, so she faked a pregnancy and then pretended Trig was her son instead of her grandson.

What I noticed when my girlfriend was on board with all of this theorizing was a series of classical cognitive mistakes happening in real-time. The first, and most relevant to actual 9/11 truthiness, was the failure to create a positive account. That is, at some point you have to stop pointing out things in the official account that you find hard to believe, and instead you have to put forward your own account of what happened. Matt Taibbi, in The Great Derangement, has rather brilliantly elaborated on how completely idiotic the 9/11 Truth movement is revealed to be if you simply create a positive account for them based on the ideas that they cling to. Similarly, with BristolGate, we can do something similar:

Bristol Palin: Hey mom, sorry to be calling right before your big speech in Texas, but my water just broke.
Sarah Palin: That's okay honey, in keeping with our vast conspiracy that we have going here, I'll tell everyone that my water broke, but then I'll insist on giving this speech anyways, and then I'll insist on flying 9 hours to get back to where you are.
Bristol Palin: Um, mom, wouldn't it make more sense for you not to tell anyone your water broke until you get back to Alaska? That way, nobody will freak out and it won't look as suspicious later on.
Sarah Palin: No, no, I think it's best that I pretend that my water broke at the exact same time as your water actually broke, just so everything lines up. I don't really know what that accomplishes, but there's a nice symmetry to it.

And so on. The second classic cognitive mistake that I see in BabyMamaGate is a failure to take base rates into account. See Bayesian Inference if you don't know what I'm talkin' bout. Yes, all of these "interesting facts" you are listing would be consistent with someone who is pretending that her grandson is her son. Just as a child in an emergency room who had taken aspirin and was vomiting, lethargic, and mentally confused, would be consistent with Reyes Syndrome. That doesn't change the fact that while all these interesting facts are anomalies, they are nowhere near as rare as the condition your are diagnosing based on them. That is, the base rate of mothers pretending their grandchildren are their children is incredibly low in the US. There is no doubt in my mind that the bloggers who are examining the evidence are failing to take that base rate into account, since doctors, scientists, and economists all have been found to fail to take them fully into account when making decisions (and I don't know if this research has been done, but I'd be willing to bet that psychologists who study base-rate errors also fail to fully take them into account when dealing with real-world problems).

The third major cognitive mistake that I see people making in this situation relates to Karl Popper and the falsification model of science. This blog post ended up way longer than I intended, so I'm going to leave this issue for another day, but suffice it to say that the batshit insane bloggers who were propogating these scurrilous rumors spent a lot of time looking for confirmatory evidence and very little time looking for disconfirmatory evidence. As do we all. Of course, that's the opposite of what you want to do if you're interested in finding out the truth about something. A related post for later: how I got to be so fucking discouraged about neuroimaging approaches to neurocognition in psychiatric disorders.

From clinical work to research.

Here is a thing that is not that weird in general, but is proving to be a weird experience for me. So two weeks ago I finished my year-long clinical internship at the VA and went back to UCLA to finish my dissertation. This has been quite a transition, going from full-time, 40 hours a week of doing therapy and assessment to fucking around with Matlab all day. People in the know have been asking me how it's going so far in that sympathetic but slightly amused tone of voice one reserves for gently inquiring after someone's hemorrhoidal issues.
I came into UCLA for the first time in mid-August and I just sat there and tried to figure out what to do. My first thought was that, just one week prior, my day would consist of going in and doing 1 or 2 sessions of group therapy, seeing an individual or two for therapy, writing up some notes, writing an assessment report, and then I would be totally and completely done with all work that I could possible do that day. Not only that, but people would notice that I had done this work and they would appreciate what I had done and I would be considered competent at my job. Now I come in, and I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing. There is no one here who can tell me what I’m supposed to be doing. If I should, against all odds, happen upon something to do, there is not really any one who can judge if I am doing it well or doing it poorly (unless I meet with them for an hour and explain the thinking behind what I have done and what series of problems and stupid Matlab issues led me to this point, and even then it would take great strength of will on their part to give enough of a shit to even offer a vague opinion that what I have done makes sense and is fine. And believe me, nobody wants to have that meeting). But here is the kicker: irrespective of the competence with which I execute whatever thing I should happen to do on any given day, no one will really care if I did it or failed to do it. I will spend the next year of my life working on something that will have no positive or negative impact on anyone, whatsoever. It will be regarded as, at best, an inconvenience by everyone who comes in contact with it. As soon as it is done it will be forgotten about, forever. If you took the average societal impact of performance art pieces carried out by undergraduates in fulfillment of the requirements of their minor in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at third-tier liberal arts colleges, that average societal impact would vastly overshadow whatever impact my dissertation will have on the world.

On the plus side, I can no longer be sued for malpractice if I show up for work drunk.

Here is a thing that is weird.

I can't say that things that are weird are going to be a major component of this blog, but here's one to start us off.

So imagine that you had a really bad case of sinus congestion. You have sinus pressure going on, sinus headaches, etc. You're really miserable. Your friend tells you about this nasal spray that works really well for her. You try it out, and it's like heaven, it feels so good. It totally relieves all the symptoms you are having. But then, you read the warning packet insert, and in the small print it says that using this particular nasal spray may cause a small creature to lodge inside your sinuses. This small creature may actually lodge itself into the mucous membrane lining your sinus and begin to suck nutrients out of your flesh. It will grow larger and stronger with these nutrients, and will eventually grow so large that your face will start to become swollen and disfigured. This creature will continue to grow and suck nutrients and disfigure you for several months before it dislodges itself from your sinuses and attempts to exit your face via one of your nostrils. This will be incredibly painful and will require you to go to the hospital, and most likely your nostril will never be the same.

Okay, now ask yourself: would you EVER use that nasal spray, ever again? No, right? That's the most terrifying nasal spray ever. And yet (and I'm assuming you've figured out this is a metaphor for pregnancy) and yet, chicks are like, "Hey, getting pregnant is not the most terrifying thing I've ever considered. It seems totally normal! Hey, that boy is really cute, I'm not at all petrified of the possible side effects of having sex with him!"

That is a thing that is weird.