It’s exhausting when every cultural event has to be interpreted politically.
I was reading this review by Andrew O’Hagan of a recent book by Dolly Parton and James Patterson. I’ve never read anything by Patterson, but he’s supposed to be a really bad writer, so I wasn’t surprised to see that O’Hagan hated the book and used his review to address some larger questions. That’s fine, indeed really what I was hoping to see. O’Hagan is a thoughtful and interesting writer (see for example here) and a ghostwriter himself, so this seems like a perfect assignment for him.
And I was not disappointed—at least at first. I looooved this line:
In works by the world’s bestselling author, the suspense is always exactly where you think it will be, so there’s actually no suspense.
It’s a zinger, but also he has a good point! There really is a paradox of suspense, and it reminded me of the paradox of the unexpected hanging. (By the way, this is off topic, but if you’re interested in the paradox of the unexpected hanging, I strongly recommend Martin Gardner’s article on the topic, which clarified to me that it’s nothing but an elaborate variant of the sentence, “This sentence is a lie.” In this case, the implied statement is, “You will be hanged today and you will not be hanged today.” The recursion of the multiple days makes the problem seem more complicated than it actually is, and once you recognize that it’s a flat-out contradictory statement, you can see that any resolution requires the jailer to be willing to contradict himself.)
Anyway, all good. But then O’Hagan goes on, and he ties himself into a knot. On one hand, he’s decided to take an anti-Patterson position—this was not necessary, as you could imagine a populist, pro-Patterson take, but it’s fine with me; I’m ok thinking that the world’s best-selling author is not such a good writer, as I guess that many readers are not really looking for a good writer—but the difficulty is that Dolly Parton is a cultural icon and O’Hagan doesn’t want to say anything negative about her. It all feels very political.
Here’s O’Hagan:
A well-written song can dramatise a wonderful character or bring back a singular voice, and in these senses, among others, the siren of East Tennessee is better than most poets. There’s a giggle and a teardrop in her voice, an unmistakeable set of attitudes about life, and I was looking forward to her novel the way lovers of chocolate might look forward to Easter. It was going to be Eudora Welty, Tom Wolfe, Reese Witherspoon and Tammy Faye Bakker in a wild Southern barn dance. It was going to be a roof-raising, hello God hoedown, a complete riot of personal faith, the sentences glinting with rhinestones and Southern Gothic, all of it secured by a narrative raised on sweet tea and Moon Pie. On her own, Dolly can do no wrong, but like many country heroines she sometimes gets into bad company. . . .
Even at this early stage in the narrative, you detect the clumsy fingers of a bad male player drubbing up and down the fretboard of Dolly Parton’s own tune . . . as if her talent could only be explained by a welter of clichés about male brutality and its creative effects. Even as a piece of fun, the book has that strange, bleachy smell of foxes new to the yard, pissing out their territory.
He continues:
Dolly should have dismissed her co-author when she saw the first draft of the first chapter, because it reveals a category error on his part, the supposition that violent men have more to do with a female singer’s creative impulses than her own talent does. . . . That might be deeply un-Dolly, but the yee haws keep on coming. . . . She can’t enjoy a chat over a snifter without it curdling into Oprahese . . .
I get it. He was coming into this book anticipating a guilty pleasure, and it disappointed. Kinda like the last time I went to see a James Bond movie. I was looking forward to a couple of relaxing hours of movie magic, and instead it was . . . kinda boring. Formulaic but not in a good way. I’m not quite sure why the Columbo formula entertains me but the Bond doesn’t, but there you have it. I wasn’t coming into the theater planning to be bored, it just happened. Similarly, I accept that O’Hagan didn’t open that book with the intention of panning it; likely his hope was to say how much he liked it despite, presumably, it being written in a bland, lowest-common-denominator style.
But he didn’t like it: as with many such cultural products, when it disappoints, it disappoints a lot. If I eat a plate of broccoli and it’s not delicious, maybe it even tastes flat-out bad, well, no harm no foul, there’s worse things than getting some greens into my body. But if I eat a 2000-calorie sugar/fat bomb of a dessert, expecting a simple pleasure, and it doesn’t even taste good . . . that’s annoying! An unpleasant experience, a waste of time and money, a let-down, and it’s not even good for you. The worst of both worlds.
OK, fine. My problem is that O’Hagan is so careful to let Dolly Parton off the hook here! Sure, Patterson wrote the damn book so he should get most of the blame, but Parton did put her name on it. I feel like this is all kinda political on O’Hagan’s part, that he doesn’t want to criticize Dolly Parton, culture hero. It’s a cleaner story if Parton’s just the victim here—but, paradoxically, this interferes with other aspects of O’Hagan’s message. It’s the unexpected hanging all over again.
P.S. See here for more on James Patterson, also here. Apparently he’s not the same person as Richard North Patterson. According to Wikipedia they’re born exactly one month apart.
“It’s exhausting when every cultural event has to be interpreted politically.”
Agreed, though it seems like the solution would be honesty. I’m all in favor of writing for your audience, not pandering to them or preening at them. So it’s also exhausting reading a book review having to adjust for what the review’s author thinks his friends will think of the review.
I tried to read a Patterson book once, but the bookstore I was in did not have any. They had a lot of James Patterson and someone else books including one where Bill Clinton was the other person. I did pick one up, don’t recall the title, and read thirty pages. It has stark and without any exposition. The protagonist walks into a room, and we’re not told anything about the room. He is in Europe, but it does not tell us whether he is fluent in the local lingo or if people just automatically speak English to him. An excellent counter to reading Proust.
James Patterson, before best sellerdom, was an advertising copywriter. That’s craft–and a craft measured by a different set of rules–rather than an art form. It seems almost unfair to treat him like an author.
The Unexpected Hanging is not the same as the Liar Paradox. See https://www.davidmarcus.com/Doc/Paradoxes.htm .
David:
I followed your link and read what you wrote about the unexpected hanging. I agree with what you wrote. I also think what you wrote is consistent with it being the liar paradox. As you say, the key point of the paradox is that the executioner cannot guarantee it will be a surprise. As Gardner says, if you simplify it to a one-day problem (using the recursive logic), then it’s not just that the executioner cannot guarantee a surprise; in that case a surprise is flat-out impossible. To me that’s an example of the liar paradox: the problem looks paradoxical because it requires assuming a statement that contradicts other aspects of the problem statement.
I also took a look at what you say about the paradox of voting: why should someone vote, given that the probability of my vote being decisive is so low? I think there are several good answers here:
1. The standard answer of civic duty: voting is part of what we do as citizens, it’s one of our obligations. We do all sorts of things that take some effort because they’re part of participating in society.
2. The answer in my paper with Kaplan and Edlin: voting can be a rational choice in a reasonably close election: even if my chance of decisive vote is only 1 in 10 million, the stakes (not just to me personally but to the country and the world) in a national election can be worth the small effort it takes to vote.
3. Reasoning based on our similarity to others: I observe that more than half of American adults vote, including a high proportion of wealthy and well-educated people. This leads me to conclude that voting is not such a silly idea! This is similar to reasoning that it could make sense to go to church, even if you don’t believe in God. Millions of Americans go to church each week: there must be some reason for it.
You seem to favor answer #3. Answer #3 is fine, but I don’t think it’s better than answers #1 or #2. They’re all good reasons! Also I don’t see any need to bring in concepts such as “superrationality”; it’s enough to say that there’s a logic to doing what the crowd is doing. Not always, but following the crowd makes sense in much of life; it’s not a terrible heuristic.
Andrew:
The Unexpected Hanging is different because the prisoner actually is surprised. So, that is the part of the paradox that you have to explain.
Regarding voting:
#3 is not a rational reason.
#2 is wrong for several reasons. People don’t really think that way, and elections aren’t usually that close. But, the main problem with #2 is that it applies the cost-benefit analysis to the wrong alternatives. It is the same error that people make when they do a cost-benefit analysis to conclude that the optimal strategy for the prisoners is to choose the Nash equilibrium and betray each other.
#1 doesn’t answer the question of why civic duty requires doing something that appears to be irrational. The answer is that it isn’t really irrational. If you do the cost-benefit analysis correctly, it is rational to vote. Here “correctly” means the same way that you do the cost-benefit analysis correctly for the prisoners to conclude that they should remain silent.
To understand this, try replacing “voting” with “not littering”.
I don’t buy the prisoner’s dilemma logic. The situation is symmetric but that doesn’t imply it is rational to assume the other player will follow the same strategy that you do. Symmetric is not the same thing as rational. The reason the paradoxical conclusion is a Nash equilibrium is that it pays to depart from any strategy that is not the Nash equilibrium strategy. I would note that I don’t view the Nash equilibrium as a prediction, nor does Nash say anything about what strategy to follow if the other player(s) don’t follow the equilibrium strategy.
Put in terms of voting, your resolution would say it may be rational to vote because you think everyone else will vote. But empirical reality suggests that this would be a bad assumption – so how is it rational to follow a bad assumption?
I guess I find all the contortions to explain civic behavior as “rational” somewhat tedious. Isn’t it more straightforward to accept that many civic actions are beyond rational? The discrete categories of “rational” and “irrational” may not be adequate to describe the range of behaviors that humans can exhibit. It seems to me that it doesn’t leave room for doing things because you believe they are “right.”
Dale:
I think of a behavior as “rational” if it is justified by good reasons. Voting because voting is good for democracy is rational in the same way that it’s rational not to litter even if nobody is looking: it’s rational to develop habits of social behavior. Also, it’s rational to follow the crowd: if reasonable people are doing something, it’s rational to follow their lead.
Also, remember that “rational” does not need to imply “self-interested.” We have lots of other-directed goals, and we can pursue those goals rationally.
Andrew
Then I think Nash should be interpreted as the equilibrium that arises from self-interested parties in a one-shot non-cooperative game. The word “rational” should not be used in that context. I’d probably extend that logic to voting then – distinguish between self-interested voting and rational voting.
The mistake #2 makes is the same mistake people make when analyzing the Prisoner’s Dilemma: Assuming only one person is rational. After making this mistake, and getting the wrong answer, #2 adjusts the probabilities and benefits to get the right answer in some situations.
For rational prisoners, the Nash Equilibrium is not the optimal strategy. Both defecting is worse than both cooperating. This explains why cooperation is rational, even when no one is looking.
The common appeal to civic duty is in essence just pointing out that there are many rational voters, so we should all vote. (As well as trying to convince the irrational ones who we think will vote the same as us to vote.)
Dale: I am not assuming that everyone will vote. I suggest you read what Hofstadter wrote on the topic of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Tit for Tat. The reference is on my webpage.
I am not claiming there are a lot of rational people in the world. The little game that Hofstadter played with the readers of his column indicates that there are fewer than we would hope.
If there really are very few rational voters, then I agree we need to resort to Andrew’s #2. For example, suppose there are a million voters and 999,999 of them will vote by tossing a coin. I might vote if it was really easy, but probably not if I had to wait in line for an hour.
OK, I read Hofstadter’s piece (as much as I could stand – it has to be one of the wordiest explanations I have ever seen – or perhaps it is just my lack of patience). The first result is simply the repeated game result – it is well known that in a repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma, cooperation is optimal. His second result is that this holds even in the single play game. I am unconvinced. First, to the extent he has provided empirical evidence, it is from a real experiment where the stakes are low compared with the original conception of the problem – so it is easy to imagine people cooperating (even when he went to lengths to tell them to be logical or rational).
More importantly, his argument seems to rest on the idea of symmetry: if I conclude it is better to defect, then everyone else should have reached that conclusion, therefore it is rational for me to not defect since they will all reach the same conclusion – we all end up better off. This seems to rely on some strong assumptions regarding expectations. What is the evidence regarding these expectations?
I think this is an important question since a number of real world issues depend on how people behave under such circumstances (I’m thinking of things like nuclear disarmament, global warming, etc.). First of all, these are really repeated games, not one shot games. Even there, it is not clear to me how robust the cooperative solution is, though I wish it were. It is hard to think of single play situations where the Prisoner’s Dilemma conditions apply. In fact, I can’t think of any. But the same incentives that the Prisoner’s Dilemma entails seems to be clearly at work in these repeated situations. That is, there is a tension between the desire to use the tit for tat strategy and the incentives to cheat. I view the difficulty that we face in achieving the cooperative equilibrium as evidence that the underlying single play incentives are real – fortunately, they don’t dominate (except perhaps in the global warming case – and I’d suggest this raises additional factors regarding uncertainty and costly monitoring), but they are strong enough to make it difficult to achieve cooperative solutions.
I would say that the Prisoner’s Dilemma is a real dilemma. The paradox is not resolved by your analysis, but your reasoning does show it is more complex than the simple payoff matrix makes it seem. In the case of the decision to vote, I don’t see why it is necessary to show that it is rational to vote. In most cases I don’t think it is rational to vote, and I believe most people vote for reasons that go beyond rationality.
I’m not going to repeat what Hofstadter and others have written. If you don’t understand that cooperation is rational, then I’m not going to cooperate with you.
I don’t know why people think the Nash equilibrium is optimal. It obviously isn’t for the Prisoner’s dilemma. It is called an “equilibrium”, not “optimal”.
Evidence of the Prisoner’s Dilemma from a “true” story: each oarsman can either shirk or work hard. Each prefers shirking if everyone else works hard. If all shirk the outcome is better than if all work hard (from the point of view of the oarsmen). That’s why the burly coolie is needed with the whip!
Wins thread.