Month / July 2010

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Dan Ariely

In this 40 minute radio interview, the famed behavioral economist discusses uniqueness in relation to behavioral norms, emotional cascades, and human comprehension of disaster.

Dan Ariely appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #344. Mr. Ariely is most recently the author of The Upside of Irrationality.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Looking about for Dichter’s egg.

Author: Dan Ariely

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: The question is whether or not there is some kind of maximum threshold. An escalation of that one item that makes something unique before we realize that it’s really a ruse.

Ariely: I don’t think so. I think that we’re actually going the other way in terms of society. A long time ago, we had to hunt and spend time finding food and cooking and so on. And right now, you can do it in thirty seconds. So what do you do with the rest of the time? I think we get conceptual conception. I mean, we’re still occupied with consumption. But it becomes much more about the idea behind it right now rather than the thing itself. You know, we can get enough food. That’s no problem. It’s about: what does the food mean and what do the clothes mean and the vacation that we get. And so on. As we strive more for meaning and ideas and stories, I think that actually we get more and more involved in this aspect of loving what we create. By the way, I also think this has a lot to do with how things turn out in the housing recession. As the housing market was going down and down and down, Zillow — the website — they did a survey that asked people, “Have houses in your community lost value?” People said yes. “Has your house fallen in value?” And people said absolutely no. And I think that the reason is that we have our own house and we’ve tailored it just to ourselves. So we put much of ourselves into it. And we expect other people to value it. Maybe not as much as we do, but to a much larger extent. So people become immune from thinking that other people don’t see things in the way that they do.

Correspondent: We’re talking about that interval between social norms and market norms. Obviously, you’re dealing largely with behavioral economics. But in this case — like, say, a home — we almost have a social and a market norm. And so, as a result, it becomes a dicey proposition when we’re trying to analyze why people place this extraordinary value on their own particular possessions. Because it may not necessarily be interpreted — at least from their perception — as a possession.

Ariely: Yeah. So housing is complex. Again, it’s one of those things that, when you try to get people to think about the house from the perspective of the market, they have a hard time. First of all, they are connected to the price they bought the house at. It’s irrelevant, right? It’s irrelevant how much you bought the house versus how much you can sell it for. But people get attached to it. But on top of that, I talked with many real estate agents. And they say that when they get a seller to express a price, if they get an offer that is way too low, they take it as a personal offense.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Ariely: It’s not a personal offense! But, no, people really get upset.

Correspondent: Well, you were upset when they did the same to your house. When you had taken out the walls and they asked you to put them back in so you could sell the home.

Ariely: That’s right. So assuming that I did lots of changes to a house and made it just so — so we loved it — lots of other people loved it as well, but didn’t want to live in it. And eventually what we did was we put some walls back. We changed some of the beautiful things we’ve done for our purposes. And actually so many people wanted to see it afterwards then. All these changes. It was really heartbreaking.

Correspondent: But there’s also an interesting irony there. About something that you’d customized.

Ariely: Yes.

Correspondent: It becomes off market.

Ariely: That’s right.

Correspondent: So I guess we need to start off with a baseline item for market value. And then we get into a tricky situation where our own personal — the unique qualities we place…

Ariely: The unique taste that you have might also make the house less valuable.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Ariely: But it’s very hard to see it. Because if you like blue, it’s very hard for you to understand that people might not like blue windows. Or blue something. Especially if you spend lots of time and energy on it. And you do it just so. It’s really hard to imagine. I mean, I can tell you as somebody — so I wrote a couple of books. It’s the same thing. I invested a tremendous amount of effort and energy into those things. And if somebody doesn’t like them as much as I do, I don’t understand how can that be. Right? I expect everybody to love these books. In fact, in my view, they’re better than any other book in the world almost.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Ariely: But once you invest so much effort, you get blinded to the projection of other people.

Correspondent: But how does humility factor into something like this? Just from a scientific standpoint. I mean, I don’t think you really believe these two books are the best books in the world.

Ariely: No, I don’t. (laughs)

Correspondent: I’m going to have to break it to you. You know, if I had a choice between your book — which is great!

Ariely: (laughs)

Correspondent: I would choose Ulysses over that. No offense.

Ariely: Well, talk to my mother.

Correspondent: (laughs)

The Bat Segundo Show #344: Dan Ariely (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Blank is Dead

Once upon a time, an elephant-sized ego wrote a vapid article about the blank being irrelevant. The article inspired other articles and other blog posts and other comments and other tweets. Never mind that the blank wasn’t dead.

Once upon a time, an elephant-sized ego wrote a vapid article about the blank being irrelevant. The article inspired other articles and other blog posts and other comments and other tweets. Never mind that the blank wasn’t dead. Never mind that you could walk into any blankstore and encounter so many blanks that even the most impotent customer couldn’t ignore them. Never mind that you could look upward at the beautiful cerulean sky and see a bountiful blank filled in by the swirling clouds, annotated at ground level by human interpretation. The blank couldn’t be dead. It was like saying that life was dead. And anyone who believed that all human possibilities had halted overnight probably didn’t have much of an existence in the first place.

But for this unnamed and very sad man, the blank was dead. All forms had been filled out. The government had stopped issuing tax forms. There was no more money to collect and no more cash to spend. All calendars had been confiscated. All paper had been taken and filled up with words and scribbles. All pens were removed from homes and offices to prevent any potential blanks from being filled in.

The blank was dead and there was nowhere more for the human race to go. It had ended on June 22, 2010, at 4:53 PM — the very moment that the article had been published. On June 22nd, there was no further need for the human race to feel or think. The human limit had maxed out. It was time for the blankless world to become the new reality.

Humans could no longer feel giddy when they filled in a conversational caesura with a catty quip. They could no longer fill in a crossword puzzle or jot down a liaison with a scandalous lover into a blank square. But weren’t all those feelings trivial? Wasn’t life more comforting when you knew what was happening every damn minute?

Because the blank was dead, every possibility had been prefigured. Every social occasion had been predetermined, down to the guest list and the specific manner in which you dipped a carrot stick into ranch dressing. Every meal had been prepared. If you wanted to order sushi on a whim, well, then you’d have to consult the fatalist texts to see if the decision had already been made. Because the blank was now dead.

Life went on like this for a while. Until people started to understand that the blank had only disappeared because the man had said so. And those who had easily placed their faith in the foolish pachyderm began to wonder why they couldn’t ignore the wrongheaded article that had caused all the fuss. Somehow, the man had willed the blank into dying. Or perhaps he permitted the unimaginative types who couldn’t believe in the blank to come out of the closet — much in the manner that Proposition 8’s passage had revealed dormant homophobia. Fortunately, there were a few doubting Thomases. When those who believed in the elephant felt ashamed by their unthinking leaps forward, it became necessary for some of the more stubborn acolytes to take cold showers. It became necessary for them to find a blank, any blank, with which to funnel their hopes and galvanize their passions. The truly hopeless committed suicide. If the blank wasn’t dead, these sad sacks could demonstrate their commitment to the end in another form.

Of course, for those of us who never believed in the false prophet, there was no such perceptive problem. We were quite happy living our lives, filling in blanks and finding new ones. And for those writers who insist that the blank is dead, one must naturally ask why you’re talking about blanks in the first place if your mind is so blank and your soul is so dead.

(Image: Jo Naylor)

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Marcy Dermansky

In this 40 minute radio interview, novelist Marcy Dermansky discusses Bad Marie, French geography, potential alliances between authors and copy editors, and people who ask you to sign books for Alexa.

Marcy Dermansky appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #343. Ms. Dermansky is most recently the author of Bad Marie.

Listen: Play in new window | Download

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Misidentifying French landmarks and attempting to make peace with copy editors in sketchy motel rooms.

Author: Marcy Dermansky

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I want to touch upon coincidence. Because it does create possibly a problem for a reader who is looking for a plausible reality.

Dermansky: Yes.

Correspondent: And I’m wondering if you can justify the use of coincidences or convenient run-ins because this is a work of fiction.

Dermansky: Right.

Correspondent: Because anything goes in fiction. Because you should be aware that it’s an artifice. Do you think that verisimilitude was just not required for this particular work?

Dermansky: Well, I think to some extent. There are crazy coincidences in life. And why not? I mean, there goes a motorcycle.

(A motorcycle passes.)

Dermansky: You never know who you’re going to run into or what’s going to happen. When I was signing books at BEA, someone came up to my table and said, “I want you to sign this for Alexa.” And I said, “Okay!”

Correspondent: Who was Alexa?

Dermansky: I have no idea. It was like her cousin or her niece. But at the table next to me, somebody walked up and said — and I just overheard; we were right next to each other — she said, “Could you sign this book to Alexa?” And it was just a different person next to me. And I just thought, “How many Alexas are there in the world that other people want?” And so that happened. And that’s not as dramatic as reading a book in prison and then coming out and finding out that your best friend is married to that author. But there are coincidences.

Correspondent: Did you make any efforts to track a third Alexa?

Dermansky: No. (laughs) I should have done that.

Correspondent: I mean, maybe there was a run-in of Alexas. Maybe there are a lot of Alexas in the publishing industry!

Dermansky: I stopped signing the book and said, “Isn’t it strange that there’s another Alexa?” And the woman whose book I was signing thought I was odd. And she’s just like, “Sign my book.” And I kept going on about how I thought that was interesting.

Correspondent: Did you find out what her name was?

Dermansky: No. I didn’t find out her name.

Correspondent: Oh.

Dermansky: Yeah.

Correspondent: Maybe she was Alexa. Maybe she liked to refer to herself in the third person. We don’t know.

Dermansky: Possible. Yeah, you don’t know. The normal people are often that. That’s what I was saying.

Correspondent: But on the other hand, we are dealing with narrative vs. reality.

Dermansky: I know. It’s true.

Correspondent: And while we can accept numerous coincidences, numerous associations, numerous situations, numerous parallels — that’s not necessarily going to line up neatly in a book. And in this, it seems to me, reading it, that you just didn’t care.

Dermansky: I think I didn’t care. I mean, I could put it back on you and I could ask you that. And you could be truthful. If that bothered you as a reader. Did you say, “Oh my god! She’s gone too far!”?

Correspondent: Well…

Dermansky: (laughs)

Correspondent: It did and it didn’t.

Dermansky: Okay.

Correspondent: I mean, I would say that it is rather curious that your book has a lot of outsider characters who are observing the situation. And then they mostly get involved with the narrative. And I wanted to actually ask you about that. There isn’t a single real stranger who’s looking upon all these weird characters — or unusual characters — or characters who came from a normal author.

Dermansky: Okay. (laughs)

Correspondent: They don’t just sit back and express disgust, save for that waiter. And I’m curious why you felt the need to pull in all these side characters into the narrative like this. As opposed to just letting them look at the situation and offer some expression of disgust, some expression of dismay, or what not.

Dermansky: Right. I was trying to remember who’s the waiter. He’s the waiter at the French restaurant.

Correspondent: Yes.

Dermansky: And he’s very disgusted because they put all the food on the table. And the cat on the table.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Dermansky: Well, I mean, don’t you, when you introduce a character to the story, they have to become part of the story?

Correspondent: Not necessarily. I mean, if you’re in a crowd, and these characters are often running into crowded situations when they’re not in rooms, you’re going to have people give them glances or expressions and the like.

Dermansky: Yeah, that’s true.

Correspondent: So to me, it was interesting that you decided any remote run-in with someone, I mean, immediately they become a supporting character or even a minor walk-on character.

Dermansky: Yeah. I guess that’s true. Like there’s that scene in the bathroom in Paris.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Dermansky: Where the woman walks into the bathroom. And she doesn’t just walk in and out. Well, they’re two teenage girls. They walk in and out. And they give Marie a dirty look. But then a woman in a hijab comes in. And she actually helps Marie change Caitlin’s diaper. So she becomes a character just for that scene. I don’t know. I think, if you put somebody into a room, you want to use them. Or why do that? You can’t just have a book with four characters either. It gets very claustrophobic. And so I do that a lot. I feel that as a writer — I’ve taught writing. So I’ve told students that you don’t introduce a major character in the third act of your book. You don’t. You have to have all of the players in there. But at the same point, it gets so flat and stale. Like new people come in. It’s a little bit like life. So a movie star walks in at the very end of the book.

Correspondent: That’s right.

Dermansky: And that seemed okay to me.

Correspondent: Is this, I suppose, the mark of a very socially inclusive personality?

Dermansky: I don’t think of myself as a very socially inclusive person.

Correspondent: (laughs) Just like you like to introduce people at parties, you like to introduce characters in novels? In your writing?

Dermansky: (laughs) No, I’m the person at the party who stands back and just gets introduced to other people.

Correspondent: You’re just defying all the expectations here. This is great.

Dermansky: I think I defy the expectations without thinking! (laughs)

(Image: Rachel Kramer Bussel)

The Bat Segundo Show #343: Marcy Dermansky (Download MP3)

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