To Be Yourself Is All That You Can Do

The New York Times ran an op-ed piece saying that "be yourself" is actually bad advice. The reasoning is that if you are truly being yourself - rather than what others expect you to be - it will cause you to act on all sorts of impulses that will not be considered acceptable to others. Want to eat Cocoa Puffs in the bath right now, even though you’re hosting a dinner party? If you’re being yourself, you’ll do what you want to do.

The problem with this concept is that it considers your urges to be "you" while the judgement that stops you from acting on those urges is not you. To put it in Freudian terms, the id is your actual self, but not your ego or superego. Our to put it in Looney Tunes terms, the devil on your shoulder is you, but the angel on your other shoulder is not.

This seems to be a common way of looking at ourselves. We identify with our desires, while assuming our judgement is foreign. I’m not sure why we do that; after all, our judgement is something we have to work to craft out of our experience and values, while our desires just come from out of nowhere. But now that we can identify that “nowhere” as being genes bred for archaic tasks, you’d think that we’d start to cast a more skeptical eye on base urges, and see them as meaningless.

I guess the reason that we see self-constraint as foreign is that we generally get those principles from our families, teachers or spiritual leaders. So often, that voice at the back of our head sounds like someone else’s voice, rather than our own conscience.

I hope we can change this. I mean, I’m glad that the author of the article is against wildly inappropriate impulsiveness. But I think that we need to start taking ownership of our impulse control, and being proud of it. To put it another way, be yourself, as long as the “yourself” in question is not an unsupervised child.

Weighty Ghost

I'm often seeing memes on Facebook reminising sarcastically about the past, saying something like, "When I was a kid, I rode a bike without a helmet and somehow I survived."

Well of course you did. If you didn't survive, you wouldn't be on Facebook to talk about it, now would you? I'd like to believe that somewhere out there is a Ghostbook, where dead people network, and they have their own memes. "When I was a kid, I rode a bike without a helmet, and I suffered a fatal brain injury."

I've since discovered that this is called Survivorship Bias. And ironically I learned that from a Facebook meme.

Any sort of protecting-our-kids-too-much issue is really frustrating. I mean even more than your average Facebook-based politico-philosophocal discussion. It's bad enough when you have an issue that has an intellectually-justified side and an emotionally-justified side and they just argue past each other. But in this case, both sides have a big emotional component. I didn't need a helmet, so today's kids shouldn't wear them, statistics be damned. My kid was in an accident, so all kids should wear a helmet, balancing of public safety and individual freedom be damned.

So whenever I see someone simplistically make one of these arguments, I wish I could steer them towards one of the people making simplistic arguments the other way. You guys just yell slogans and throw memes at each other.  We'll be over here talking it over like adults.

Weep, The North

Deadspin has an interesting article about the Toronto Raptors that starts off examining the teams options in the offseason and ends up opening up the philosophical nexus at the heart of professional sports. To review, the last two seasons have been the best in the team's admittedly aenemic history. They've gotten to the final four and final eight respectively. But both times they've been eliminated by the Cleveland Cavaliers and their star/unofficial-coach/god-of-basketball Lebron James.

So now the team is stuck in an awkward situation teams sometimes find themselves in: wondering if anything can really be done to help. One might think that if you have a good team, you try to improve it, at least until your main contributors have gotten too old. But the fact is that sometimes a team is still good, still in their prime, but can't be improved. Maybe the budget is maxed-out, maybe the players needed to improve aren't available anywhere at any price. Or maybe the players have an incompatable set of talents and it just can't be balanced without wholesale changes. But you get into the situation where you can't imagine how your team can be any better than "good."

In the case of the Raptors (and probably a few other teams in the NBA) this is complicated by the presence of James and the stacked Golden State Warriors. Teams are realizing that not only is good not "good" enough, but "great" isn't much better. At this point, you need to be a generational superteam just to get into the finals. It's not just a question of improving the Raptors, but vastly improving them. Beyond that, there's the question of what good will it do to start over? If you traded/avoid-resigning players now and sign and draft a new team, and even if you do a better job this time, you'll still run into the immovable Lebron. Or even if he's too old by then, you'll run into the next player that launches tiresome discussions of whether he's better than Michael Jordan.

It's a problem basketball (or more specifically, the NBA) has had for a while now: a superstar is such a huge advantage that it seems like you can't build a contending team without one. Obviously, great players are an advantage in any sport, but in most it is at least possible to build a contending team with a lot of good players, but not one great one. But it's hard to find such teams in the history of NBA champions. People make fun of the Philadelphia 76er's and how they seem to be in eternal rebuild mode, but I totally understand. There's not much point in starting to build until you have someone to build around, so you might as well stay at the bottom until you get lucky with the draft.

The point is that the Raptors are in a weird existential funk in which they have to decide not just what personel moves they are going to make, but what the purpose behind those moves are. Deadspin's Giri Nathan make the somewhat-radical assertion that it's okay for the Raptors to be where they are now: a good-but-not-great team that will never be more than a speed bump on the road from Cleveland to the finals.

On the surface, that looks incredibly defeatist, saying that it's okay not only to not win, but to not even care about not winning. But it also forces us to look at some uncomfortable truths about professional sports: How important is winning championships? After all, each of the "Big Four" pro-sports in the U.S./Canada have at least 30 teams, so on average, your favourite team will win less than once a generation. Even if you have a team in each league, you'll only get a championship about once every 8 years. The very purpose of sports will only be experienced ten times in an average lifetime. And too bad if you happen to be a Cubs/Leafs/Browns fan.

But lots of people get enjoyment out of sports in those years that they don't win. Even those many Cubs fans who lived their entire life during their World Series drought still seemed to enjoy their fandom. So that implies that there is something more to being a fan than actually winning.

And yet, I'd argue that while winning may not be necessary, the possiblility of winning is. It's like that old saying amongst Cubs fans, that our best season is always next season. At least, I think they used to say that - I just Googled that saying, and it just gave me pages of people talking about how their best season was last season. But the point is, I think you have to have the lure of potential. As a personal example, my Toronto Blue Jays have made it to the American League Champtionship series the last two years, without advancing further. This year, the team is off to a bad start, and as much as I try to stay optimistic, I have to admit that this incarnation of the team may be done, without winning a World Series. And I'm okay with that. I won't look back on these two years as wasted, even if no rings came from it. Granted, these years may have felt better because they followed a couple of lean decades, but having the thrill of knowing we might come out on top was enjoyment enough.

But I think that "might" was a necessary ingredient. I can't really imagine caring about going into a playoff run in which I knew all along that we had no chance. You'd have to console yourself with the knowledge that you won lots of games and made it to this level of the playoffs, even if this level is a formality. Similarly, the Maple Leafs are rebuilding, and everyone is excited. No one knows if it will result in finally breaking the team's half-century Cup drought. The team looks good, but it may well run into a dynasty developing in Edmonton that will stop it from winning it all. But the point is, we don't really know. They're going into it with what I, and most fans, believe is a reasonable shot at winning.

Of course, there's precedent for cheering for a hopeless team. Most of the soccer teams in Europe will never win anything in their respective countries. I mean, in the lower divisions, they can treat a promotion as their championship, but I don't really understand how fans of Stoke or Udinese spend their lives hoping for a Leicester-like miracle. Okay, there's a soccer example more personal to me: I still cheer for the Canadian men's team despite knowing that it will never win the World Cup without a really lucky plague outbreak. But I still entertain myself with the idea that they might outdo their previous best. Or just get back to where they once were. Or just get to the freaking next round.

But the important difference there is that it is concievable that they might improve. I - along with much of the world's population - know that my country will never win the World Cup, but I do believe that they can reach a new personal best. And that's the Raptors' dilemma. Now that they've got to best-non-superstar-team, it's hard to imaging that fans will be satisfied with never going further.

If You Can't Trust Ronald McDonald...

Lately, McDonald's has been heavily advertising their Ronald McDonald House program, which funds housing for families of sick kids who are in hospital. Of course, it's easy to be suspicious of such ads, since it's a corporation spending money to congratulate itself for spending money, and you wonder how much more they could have done with the money they spent telling us about the money they spent. Okay, in this case you can justify it because they're encouraging people to give to the cause themselves, by putting their extra change in the little box by the till.

How many customers do put money in there? I've had a few people warn me quite seriously that all those donations just go straight to McDonald's profits. Personally, I find that hard to believe. I'm no fan of corporate America, but I doubt they'd try something like that. The negative publicity if found out wouldn't be worth it. And it would require the complicity of so many people; I can understand a few sociopathic executives making an amoral decision, But not the number required here.

But what I find interesting is the huge amount of cynicism that goes into the belief that McDonald's is so corrupt. I'm reminded of something I read about philosophy profs once. It was a kind of BS detector for extreme philosophical views: ask how the views affect their actual lives.

Sometimes you'll hear a philosopher suggest something radical: say, all of reality is in our imagination, or language doesn't contain any information. So ask yourself, does the person expressing these views act like a person who actually believes those views? If you truly believe that reality is an illusion, you wouldn't navigate society the way most of us do. You'd probably cower in your bedroom yelling at the delusions to leave you alone. Or at the very least, you wouldn't let it bother you when the fictional grocery store is out of the figment of collective imagination that is cookie dough ice cream. But usually, these radical thinkers go through the same actions in their everyday lives. If their beliefs don't affect the way they see the world, you have to wonder if they really hold those beliefs, or they're just trying to sound smart or maybe shocking.

I'd apply the same technique to cynicism. If you truly believe that the world is so corrupt that McDonald's steals from its own charity, that's going to affect the way you act. After all, there are countries where such corruption is rife, and the people there act accordingly. For one thing, if you believe everyone around you is on the take, you'll want your piece of the action. You'll assume you have to pay to get things done. You won't have trust in others.

And if your faith in humanity doesn't extend to Ronald McDonald House, then there are plenty of other things to mistrust. You don't even have to leave your local McDonald's to see examples. For one thing, how can you even trust the food? Do you let your kids into the Play Place? Do you trust their debit machine? See, it's just not logically consistent to live in our world which is based so much in trust of those around you, then pick out one thing and claim an absolute lack of trust.

Yes, I know the folks bad mouthing the charity box are really just trying to justify their own cheapness. But I think that opening yourself to that kind of extreme cynicism makes you vulnerable to some bad decision making. If you occasionally and arbitrarily ignore or avoid parts of society, you'll miss out on a lot. This same kind of isolated cynicism-when-convenient contributes to the post-fact situation we're experiencing. If you're in the habit of using outlandish excuses to reject entire institutions when it's convenient, then it becomes easier to understand how you break from accepted consensus.

I'm Walkin' Here

I saw this graphic being passed around on Facebook:

I was wondering who actually said this, so I looked it up. Most graphics attribute it to author Albert Camus. Now first of all, I invite you to think over the implication of a Camus quote being associated with Winnie The Pooh. This is a guy whose most famous novel is about an unemotional man being tried for murder. I figured that somehow this graphic was put together by someone who didn't know the origin of the quote. Certainly it was by someone who didn't know the application of modern copyright laws. Winnie The Pooh is a Disney property, and you don't want to tangle with their lawyers.

But after you've come to terms with existentialist Pooh, then you can try to come to terms with this: I found many other graphics on the web that attribute the quote to Camus, but are just as cutesy.

Of course, all these graphics have one thing in common: they are graphics of quotes on the Internet, therefore they are inaccurate. I looked it up, and although it is cannot be proven diffinitively, he probably never said it.

Please people, if you're going to pass around inspirational images of Camus quotes, at least use something he actually said: