Too specific

One of the toughest things about being introverted, in my experience, is that you develop relatively uncommon passions. By spending a lot of time alone, you can discover the most intriguing things in the world, to you. The trouble is, you've spent a lot of time alone (not meeting people), and you've discovered something rarely appreciated. Now you realize that no one you know gives a shit, at all, about this thing.

For example, I absolutely love microtuning. And saying that, I realize that probably most people don't even know what that is. And I'm not trying to be weird. Remember? I discovered my fascination with microtuning by spending a lot of time alone, specifically not interested in what anyone else found interesting, really, but in what I found interesting. I feel that many people have this sort of assumption that your interests are pitched to impress them. And if they aren't impressed, they resent that, or you. So I don't really talk about microtuning, even though it's one of the greatest things ever. And just now, the prompt for this screed, I was looking regretfully at a Wendy Carlos video on YouTube whose tab was still open, because I loved the video. What could I do with it? Who could I send it to? Who would like it? Sadly, I don't know anyone who would like it, probably. If I do, I can't think who it would be. Oh, I can drag up a few people who would semi care. But it would be a case of them trying to humor me; I thought they'd like it, and they kind of find something to say, or they try but don't. (Here's the video. It isn't actually about microtuning, it's about synthesizers, but Wendy Carlos is a big pioneer of microtuning. Here's a great article she wrote on one small aspect of microtuning, one of her own discoveries, actually three of them.)

The television series Atypical shows this pretty well, in a way I find extremely relatable as an introvert. The main character is absolutely obsessed with penguins. He loves all the details. He's an encyclopedia on penguins. He wants to share his love for penguins. No one gives a shit at all. They look at him like he's an idiotic nuisance. He has autism. But I feel like he's me, just with a layer of social anxiety removed. If I were on the screen as him, I'd talk about penguins 1/5 as much and feel really anxious about how everyone thought I was boring and annoying and oafish and interested in penguins for some sort of dark reason. Either way, the fact no one seems to share our interest is this big social/emotional problem, in the end.

I guess maybe part of the difference is I try to get people interested? When tutoring, a lot of what I'm doing is trying to make my enthusiasm for a topic infectious. In my eyes, it isn't just "I like imaginary numbers." It's "imaginary numbers are just objectively incredibly awesome." And sometimes I do succeed. Students are often happily telling me, "Wow, I never thought of it that way before." Friends tell me that I have all this energy and enthusiasm for neat stuff, stuff no one else talks about, and they're always learning stuff from me, and they love it. At least, they say that when they're being nice to me ;)

Start

During a transcontinental video chat with my brother, we talked about The Oregon Trail for a few minutes. We are technically Millennials—after all, the word describes children set to graduate from high school in and around 2000, that is, youths expected to leave home for college at the turn of the millennium. The word was coined for, or first spotted in, a newspaper article in the mid-80s. A class of 2000 kid, I'm as originally Millennial as you can get. And I like that. Some people ask me why I like that.

We first-issue, Ice Age Millennials, we're a little different from the canonical Millennial born near 2000, and we're sometimes not included in the category. Historians seem to consider us distinct, or distinct enough: a "micro-generation." And my favorite name for this micro-generation, bar zero, is "The Oregon Trail Generation." We did. We did, in fact, as far as I've ever witnessed, all play The Oregon Trail in school. We have that in common. We also saw the internet appear under our noses and bike helmets. Most of us remember when no one had a computer in their home, and remember the transition to a few, and then a few more, and then many more, and then everyone having computers, and then computers on the internet and the same adjustment with phones. We grew up right when that change was happening. We saw the tsunami hit. We remember hearing about the tsunami on its way. We remember never having heard of the tsunami.

Computers, of course, had existed for a long time, and even existed in homes when we were born, just not in most homes. Computing was a fringe hobby or a thing to do at work for a small part of the population. You could comfortably go through your first several years of life and have no idea. Even though both of my parents worked in telecommunications, teaching IT and the fundamentals of the internet to professionals around the country (we often stayed with the neighbors upstairs when both parents were off in other states giving seminars), I never saw a computer until I was in Kindergarten. Even though they had met each other at work when they both coded in assembly language (my mom was this amazing engineer called in to fix a router no one else had been able to fix, and she did fix it, which apparently took electrical meters and solder), I never saw a computer until I was in Kindergarten. Alphabet soup about "o-s-i" and "t-c-p-i-p" and "packetswitching" and "networkprotocols" and "itsoverethernet" at the dinner table aside, I didn't even know these gadgets existed.

The Oregon Trail is a surprisingly old game. We think of it as a cutesy educational sim about dysentery and fording rivers, as edutainment dull enough to be vetted by our teachers, ratified as a classroom pacifier. But actually it's one of the earliest of all computer games. It was drafted from paper prototypes in 1971 by a college student teaching his first class, 8th grade history. To help his students understand Westward Expansion (for foreigners, that mid-1800s swarm of pioneers setting out across North America in wagons), he came up with a game idea, a game that could be played with cards. History might easily have swerved down the normal road, but the school had access to a time-share teletype computer, the HP 2100. Wait a second. Most younger people don't know what teletype is, so I'll give you the rundown: you sit at a typewriter, and you type on paper, directly onto paper, as you normally do on a typewriter. But magically, in the background, somewhere, somewhere way out of sight, perhaps in the basement, perhaps not in the same building even, a computer catches drift of your typing, and it grabs control of the typewriter and types responses back to you. It's like using a command line, only you type on paper with a typewriter, and sometimes it springs to life and types back to you. This leaves a paper record of your entire "conversation" with the machine. Get it? (I've never used teletype. I hope this is accurate.)

That's what the original version of The Oregon Trail (called, at the time, just OREGON) was like when it ran in class on December 3, 1971. For a little perspective, many people consider PONG the first video game. PONG came out in 1972.

The truth is, PONG was not the first digital game at all. But for many, many people, it was the first one they ever saw or played. That's because it was the game that made it into arcades and living rooms. It was the first blockbuster. In fact, arcades were practically thrown together from scrap metal around PONG. Well, arcades as you think of them, as places you meander and play video games in cabinets and people scoot in next to you and join in your personal fray with a coin, sometimes asking, sometimes not, just interrupting mischievously. You find yourself two inches away from a stranger—a new friend?—who is there specifically to trounce your best efforts, sometimes giving you a tip or two, a kind word, a boast. Reaching deep into mist: I remember arcades—mostly at the mall, malls would have them. Now they don't. It isn't something I think of often, but I remember asking my parents for change and going off into a bewildering dark room full of strangers and spots of bright light and all kinds of sound and shouting. It was scary and thrilling. It was an arcade. And these dark-lit rooms were everywhere, but I remember when the entire concept and its peculiar outline struck me: that's what this was, I'd seen it around and never fully taken notice, this was an arcade. This was where bigger kids went to play and socialize. How many of them in here knew each other? Who was I and what was I doing? It was a little intimidating.

The Oregon Trail predates that entire culture. Amazing, isn't it?

Mostly, I missed that culture—it was a little before my time, you see—but OREGON threw a curveball around the decade. Its name clung like a burr to a generation. The world changed shape just so, and an idea stuck in all our minds.

Now, here I have to admit that by saying The Oregon Trail predates arcade culture, I can only mean the first version of what would, in wanderings round the sun and release cycles, become The Oregon Trail of 1985, a game with animated graphics and awful music that had gotten all the important parts of its design finally right, and was adopted everywhere and widely copied, both by its publisher MECC (The Amazon Trail, anyone? Africa Trail? The Yukon Trail? me neither, but they exist) and by others scratching their chins thoughtfully. Nevertheless, the session that ran on December 3, 1971 was the same game at heart. Anyone who played the breakthrough version would recognize it.

The version we played was the 1985 "breakthrough" one on Apple ][, or maybe the 1990 on PC, or both. (They seem equally familiar, and they're almost identical.) Funnily enough, I played very, very little of it. But not all experiences must be plural. If you met an astronaut as a child, you wouldn't hedge and say, oh, you only met the astronaut a little bit such a small number of times. YOU MET AN ASTRONAUT. We arrived in Oregon once or twice at least. It worked on me, somehow.

In 2014, TIME gave its game of the year award to 80 Days. At first I didn't make an association with OREGON, but foreshadowing there thickly is. Instead of a rattlesnake-infested continent in 1848, you plot around the globe of an alternate, steampunk 1872, using boats and cabs and zeppelins and other vectors to infect another country with your... wait, wrong game. The tally of all possible itineraries is more than half a million words, written predominantly by British-Indian Meg Jayanth, who works in subtle comments on gender and colonialism. It's the best interactive story-game-travel-thing I've ever played. Interactive travelogue? Travel emulator? Yes, the best of those, and ultra-impressive as an example of interactive storytelling that is also undeniably a game. The blend is unusually natural. A year later TIME named The Oregon Trail the 9th best video game ever. We can, of course, take everything they say with a grain of salt, because they named Tetris the best video game ever.

The mini-lecture I gave my poor brother over Messenger video chat led to his asking what actually was the first digital game. And I didn't know off the top of my head, partly because it really depends how you define "the first digital game." There are a number of answers, depending on the definition you choose. So, climbing a few ladders through my psychic library of images from "History and Future of Immersive and Interactive Media," a class I took a few years ago in graduate school, I drew out Space War! as an example of just about the first, the first true video game, something everyone would agree was exactly that. But I wasn't quite right, and I knew I was dropping my notes off the ladder. If you want live, animated graphics to interact with, the honor goes to a game that was created 3 or 4 years before Space War! (1958 versus 1962). That game is Tennis for Two.

Time for a deep breath. It's nice to pause.

Both of those games, both of the two earliest definitely-video games, are actually quite pretty to watch. You may be surprised to hear that Space War! has 1024x1024 graphics, and that doesn't do it justice at all, really. The game ran on an air-traffic control screen, which is why the resolution was so high for 1962 (Jiminy, botswain, even for 1992). The phosphors in the screen produce a dazzling, scintillating, cloudy contrail effect that just firing up the code won't show you. And it ran on the DEC PDP-1, which was the state of the art in computing. Three people created this game at MIT specifically to take the PDP-1 to its absolute limit. It uses every feature and every bit of sail in the new flagship. It was applied not just for fun but also as a "smoke test," a way to make sure the machine was in perfect working order. Space War! is the absolute unblinking state of the art in computing for 1962. And maybe that's why it's still incredible. Here, watch this video if you don't believe me.

Tennis for Two is also entrancing. We didn't have a bad beginning. You can watch it here.

All right, but I was getting at something under the surface. Computer games aren't all graphics, you know? We were just talking about The Oregon Trail, a teletype game from 1971, and we were happy to consider it a game as much as its 1985-and-later descendants, which eventually sported lessons on flora, ancient photographs, recorded voices, and actors in clothes from the era. The Oregon Trail of 1971 could only type on paper. Yet it was clearly a digital game. So what was the first? Where do digital games begin?

Well, this is where I also mentioned the Geniac and Brainiac, two home hobby kits for children who wanted to build computers in the mid & late 1950s (or more like it, for their parents who wanted to give them a head start and take a crack at this themselves). Designed by Edmund Berkeley, who created Simon the first personal computer several years before, these were not "real" computers in the sense that they didn't have a CPU or transistors or even vacuum tubes. They were little more than circular breadboards made of sawdust. Figuring anything out with one of these was like stringing together an electrical abacus from spare Christmas lights. But they could compute, surprisingly, and a book of activities came with them, games for hobbyists to manually "program" into the computer with wires. These lessons were presented as experiments, with names like "EXPERIMENT 38: THE FARNSWORTH CAR POOL" and "EXPERIMENT 11: THE MANGO BLOSSOM SPECIAL." One of the games, "EXPERIMENT 49: THE URANIUM SHIPMENT" (see page 50 here and better yet this video), was recently uncovered as the earliest known digital interactive story. Actually, most people would call it analog, not digital, though it operated on bits, so I'm unclear on whether it should be called both analog and digital, or just one. (Update: technically, it's digital. By its appearance and operation by manual rotation, I think we can be forgiven for thinking it's analog.) Either way, it was the first changing story mediated by a computer. Certainly it didn't have graphics, but also, certainly, we've got to agree it's more primordial than The Oregon Trail.

What is the first code ever written for a game? Now that's a story.

It was the Ur computer opponent. Before anyone knew a computer could play chess, someone was working intensely on making that happen. Doing fundamental research in machine learning about a decade before "AI" was coined for this pursuit, Alan Turing gradually wrote a program called Turochamp with another mathematician, David Champernowne. You may recognize Alan Turing as the protagonist of The Imitation Game.

Turochamp was so experimental it couldn't handle all the rules of chess, just a subset. It could play this watered-down version of chess by looking two moves ahead at all possibilities. But it was so demanding compared to 1948-1952 computers that Turing simply couldn't get it to run. He kept trying but never succeeded.

Not to be defeated, he challenged his friend to a game of chess. And he pulled out some paper. He had brought his code, a stack of pages sitting next to him. They started playing. When it was his turn, he would trace through the code by hand to find what the algorithm said to do. It was a bit like an old mechanical Turk, those contraptions that supposedly could play chess and defeat royalty and statesmen and master players in the 1800s, always turning out to be a hoax with a guy sweating inside the robot (or "automaton," as the word "robot" comes from a 1920 Czech science-fiction play called R.U.R., short for Rossum's Universal Robots, or Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti before translation) pulling cables, only Turing wasn't hiding. He was sitting across the table from his friend, moving the pieces himself once he knew where to move them. That is, once he'd determined what the code said to do.

It would take him half an hour or more to calculate every move, whenever it was his turn.

His friend won in 29 moves.

Tragically, Alan Turing died in 1956, about 4 years later, still never having gotten the code to work on any of the sorcerous machines he had helped invent. The code itself appears to have disappeared, though the basic approach it took is well-known. Not incidental to our larger story, Turing died by suicide, eating an apple laced with cyanide. This could be interpreted as a reference to Snow White or to Adam and Eve and the fruit—that is, perhaps to the religion whose presiding morals led to his mistreatment. Many say, but I cannot confirm, that Turing's apple, bitten and laced with knowledge, is the origin and meaning of the Apple logo. (Hi there, cute little Apple ][ running The Oregon Trail.) In 2013, the Queen of England officially pardoned him for his criminal conviction of homosexuality, which had resulted in his chemical castration and probably also his chemical suicide.

In 2014, The Imitation Game, about Turing's life and what he did for the WWII war effort, saving countless lives by code-breaking Germany's Enigma cipher, won many rounds of acclaim internationally. In terms of his personality, it is not accurate, but it's a great and broadly true story. The title refers to his famous Turing test, a baseline concept for roboticists and lifelike AI developers ever since. The test, in short: What percentage of participants would believe an AI meant to seem human was human? Can we tell the difference? Can we be fooled by an imitator? This idea is made extremely vivid in the movie Ex Machina, which has an ending that can be read as misogynist, but I think that particular interpretation misses the mark, though it's interesting and very much worth discussing (some of why we have fiction). Anyway, the resident math consultant on the crew of The Imitation Game was a well-known game designer who also happens to be a mathematician and cryptographer: Jon Ingold. In fact, the world is an exceedingly small place. Ingold was instrumental in creating 80 Days, specifically as one of the project's two directors and the inventor of the story system it runs on.

Curiously, he had created a little experimental game for that system called The Intercept in 2012, either before or during his collaboration on The Imitation Game. Both are about Alan Turing's work at Bletchley Park. There's so much overlap between The Intercept and The Imitation Game that when I saw the latter, I felt certain that the teacup in the interview scene was a direct reference to the game. It was only when the credits rolled that I saw Jon Ingold's name there and couldn't believe my eyes. But it's true. Same guy. And that was a real reference in The Imitation Game to a tiny, obscure, but rather brilliant bit of interactive storytelling (or vice-versa?). Check it out. You can play it in five minutes, and the meanings of moments along with the paths to them change when you replay and choose differently. It's surprisingly clever.

In 2012, about when The Intercept was spun off and The Imitation Game was in development, a historically reconstructed version of Turochamp (remember Turing's and humanity's first code for an AI opponent and arguably the first computer game?) played Gary Kasparov, this time running correctly on an actual computer. Kasparov won in 16 moves. The win can't have surprised him much! He'd gone from the top of a mountain, his chess matches casually and regularly mentioned on the evening news around the world, to sound defeat in 1996 by one of these highly suspect mechanical Turks. The success for IBM's Deep Blue had taken 48 years of AI development after Turing's and Champernowne's first draft. Presumably, Kasparov had beaten every computer nemesis he'd faced before then. But that day in 1996, the great imitator, the computer, had prevailed. Kasparov, the world champion at the game, once refused to believe it would ever happen, famously. Then he had to believe it when it happened. And there was no going back from that shift—in a symbolic sense losing chess for the entire human team. And so this mirror image of a rematch in 2012, a piece of time travel like a Terminator appearing before it was created, was a unique moment. He gave a speech afterwards, saying, among other things, "I suppose you might call it primitive, but I would compare it to an early car—you might laugh at them but it is still an incredible achievement."

So that's the origin story of the computer game. It finally came out in 2012, and the world's greatest (and also most eternally defeated) chess player beat it, but didn't really. Whether you would call the world's very first example a video game or not (I would say clearly not, as no graphics logic was ever involved), and whether you care that a curious gonkulator preceded it in 1947 as the first "interactive electronic game" (this really was an analog mechanism, not a digital processor, and rather more tinker toy than game) or a custom-built Nim player in 1939 (no code and not a general computer, but electromechanics that could do just one thing, as if "EXPERIMENT 49: THE URANIUM SHIPMENT" were burned into a Brainiac that could never change its tune; still, technically a digital computational game with light bulbs instead of graphics, built from relays mere months before the first real computer), Turochamp is today indisputably the first code of any kind written for a game. Because it was never produced, we could also call it the first example of game vaporware.

Let's take stock of the panorama, then. There were various efforts to run simple board games electronically—nim, tic-tac-toe, checkers—using displays made of bulbs (starting in 1939). Turing and Champernowne wrote the first game code, also for a board game, this time a simplified chess (1948-1952), kicking off a strange and lengthy saga. And Tennis for Two (1958) and Space War! (1961) ushered in what we'd all recognize as video games. In terms of creative expression written for a participative machine that could do other things, the common ancestor of The Oregon Trail, PONG, The Uranium Shipment, SimEarth, Grand Theft Auto V, Braid, Undertale, Soma, Five Nights at Freddy's, 80 Days, Sunless Sea, Divinity 2, Surviving Mars, and Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, to name just a very few examples, sprang from the restless mind widely regarded as having created the computer and the field of AI. Maybe that isn't a coincidence after all.

Myself, I suspect that games began—before any system of writing, as we know from artifacts—like the instinct of play itself, as a way for us to learn about what's outside of us. And I suspect they will end as a way for computers to learn from what's inside of us. Instead of playing just to learn, we eventually play to teach. But that's a story for another day.

Have you gathered up and pieced together, with just a few touches of superglue, why I'm proud to be called one of "The Oregon Trail Generation" and why I prefer to be included as a Millennial?

See, Alan Turing was right about several things. He was right in calculations that broke a secret code and shortened a world war. He was right about AI before there was a name for it. He was right to be gay when it wasn't allowed. He was right about the deeply universal nature of computers before any computer even existed. And he was right about this: games are important. They're more than some fool's stray pomposity, though. "Important" means nothing by itself. The form is endlessly ready to represent ideas and feelings. It gives us voice to simulate and explore and tinker with natural and artificial systems, real and imaginary, past, present, and future. It teaches and re-educates us about working together, about improving patterns that aren't good enough. No high count of skeptical parents, time-sink releases, derogatory references to wasting life playing games, or starched suits to impress will reduce that essence. I'm proud to be in The Oregon Trail Generation because I understood. The more of us who understand, the better, and better loved, our Earth can become.

Are you magnetized?

I've had so many conversations with friends and family and students and colleagues about political polarization, and I find it a fascinating topic. What's essentially happening, we wind up agreeing, is cognitive dissonance in a roiling stew of all the human biases we all inherit.

Cognitive dissonance falls under an area of psychology called "attribution theory." When Star Wars Episode I came out in 1999, many people saw it and said they loved it. For example, I'm not a huge fan, but I saw it a second time and even a third time in the theater, and that wasn't strange and I didn't have trouble finding people interested in seeing it again. After Episode II (I insist it's by far the worst), a tide had turned and most people said they hated Episode I. Both of these extremes resulted from many people unconsciously adjusting their opinions to track the way people they cared about felt. If attribution theory sounds at all interesting, I highly recommend reading more about it. But in short, it's about how we explain to ourselves how we feel about third parties (neighbors, clothes, theories, cities, countries, sports teams, foods, all the "nouny" stuff), and how we influence each other's evaluations without even realizing this is happening. On that note, attribution theory is even able to predict social polarization and illuminate why it happens using math (look up "Heider balance," well ok here). There's a natural underpinning to how, in countries whose constitutions do not recognize political parties, two big parties will form, rather than, say, three big parties, or four big parties. It's a reliable pattern. Attribution theory and its concepts of cognitive dissonance and Heider balance explain why.

A while ago my dad casually asked what cognitive dissonance really means, anyway. He thought he knew what it meant, but he wanted my psych major take on it. So here you go: cognitive dissonance is the way you reject ideas you disagree with, before even realizing that you're rationalizing instead of processing the facts well. Instead of getting curious, which would be the most appropriate response to someone challenging what you believe, you go into defense mode like a box turtle. This thing you hear clashes with what you believe for sure must be true, and rather than experience this clash inside yourself, rather than feel shaken up, rather than letting that sit and percolate, rather than (with practice you can do this) enjoying the intensity of uncertainty and confusion, rather than exploring with questions or searching for evidence against your own view, you take a potshot at the source of this discomfort. You say something that makes the person look stupid, or like a bad person. You make fun of them, you make fun of the idea, you point out some detail you perceive to be a fatal flaw, and then you go about your day as if you just won. And for cognitive dissonance, you did: you just avoided thinking, and you did it in a way that made you feel clever and right. Voilà, the very real and ubiquitous problem of cognitive dissonance. It's the uneasy feeling that prompts you to shoot the messenger, metaphorically or (God forbid in this day and age, but it's happened countless times in history) actually. I hope you can immediately see how this would lead to political polarization. We go all-or-nothing. It's easier. Still, it's nice to know that science has been examining this for decades. We know things about it. Knotty as it may be, the problem is—I am totally convinced—possible to solve.

I explained to my dad that, in my mind, cognitive dissonance is actually pretty relatable to musical dissonance. He loves music, so I thought it would help to add this. We use "dissonance" as a metaphor outside the world of music. When you're trying to sell someone on the need to upgrade equipment in the lab, you want to avoid "dissonance" in the message you give them. Your let's-upgrade-this pitch should be self-consistent. It should make sense. You don't want to tell them you really need this new microscope, but there's a better microscope coming out in two years, but you need it sooner than that. That's dissonant. In music, we have different preferences about dissonance. Some hate it and want all the notes and chords to be consonant, to be sweet-sounding, to avoid clashes. But without conflict, a story is boring. Songs and symphonies and so on, they use this idea of conflict as well: they will introduce dissonance, in other words conflict, and this will make you feel tense. There will be chords that sound tortured, or there'll be a lot of distortion on the instrument, or the regular beat will break down into chaos. And then the song will resolve the tension. Structure will rebuild itself. It'll be beautiful. Some people get used to a lot of dissonance. Some people wouldn't like music without it. For example, I actually kind of like the sound of a cat on a piano; my ear grabs bits of it that I like. I can hit any two keys on a piano and it sounds good to me, or any three or four, and I can add more random notes than that, and even if I don't think it's great, I can appreciate what I'm hearing, and perhaps tweak it until I really love it. So I have quite a strong taste for dissonance in music. It can be an acquired taste, but maybe for some it's natural. Anyway, to return to the topic at hand, when discussing ideas, it's actually very similar. We have different amounts of taste for, and tolerance of, "dissonance," that is, ideas that clash with each other and with our own beliefs.

But with experience, or maybe also by nature depending on your personality, you can appreciate the adventure of that conflict. You can enjoy it even when it hurts, like very spicy food. When you get to that point in discussing ideas, you're handling cognitive dissonance well. You can hear something you totally disagree with and find totally unacceptable, hear it out, discuss it, ask questions to learn more, etc, and you won't lose your mind or hate the person you're talking to. (Note: this is unrealistic and profoundly unfair to expect of someone who is being abused or oppressed, especially on the topic of their own oppression.) You will discover that this does not make your brain leak out of your ears, nor does it make you morally worse as a person. You can listen to the "Devil," get how the Devil is confused, and walk away not as a bad person, or a person convinced by vile views, but as a person who can understand how a human would think this way. People who are wrong tend to think they're right, just like you do. And by the same token, with such strong practice becoming a routine, you'll also be open to new ideas that seem astoundingly wrong at first yet are actually right, and you'll be able to hear criticism that's overly harsh and still derive usable information from it.

Hopefully this description of cognitive dissonance in action (and the possibility of growing through it) is more helpful than a textbook definition that you'll simply forget after the test, as it were. Specifically, to recap, cognitive dissonance it that natural discomfort that leads to arguments and unwillingness to understand another position. It's the entire reason we have the phrase "don't shoot the messenger." It's why we seemingly miraculously ignore evidence and logic that doesn't support our preexisting notion (when it's important to us). Rather than reevaluate anything or admit to a sliver of ignorance (a good practice in a forward-moving debate), we lob verbal Molotov cocktails, either disguised as rational objections, or as direct "gotchas" about the disagreeable messenger.

So let me talk about how to use this idea constructively.

For example, let's say you're talking to someone who opposes the expansion of rights and protections for a minority group. For fun, let's pick first-generation immigrants. (I am one, though most people don't know that on meeting me. It isn't something I'm sensitive about at all, I'm just vaguely proud of it. But I'm admitting which side I'm on: I'm pretty much anti-borders and pro-kindness.) Rather than getting into a distracting confrontation with your conversation partner about whether a foreign minority is actually a group of real people (word to the wise: the person you're confronting will inevitably deny that this criticism of prejudice applies to them), I've found it's better to focus on less barbed ways of seeing. For example, the way I think about minority struggles myself is in terms of "being welcoming." It isn't just that we don't want to treat someone like they don't exist or aren't human. In the conversation you can start there if you want, at that low bar, but talk about yourself and your experiences and preferences, rather than accusing the person you're addressing. Know that if you accuse a xenophobe/racist of treating people like they aren't human, they'll usually deny it, and some of them will even totally believe what they're saying. Curiously, people have a hard time asking themselves whether they're treating someone as if they're human. Frustrations can lead to resentment, and resentment can lead to disregarding someone's subjectivity to the point of actively hurting that person without really recognizing it or caring. Wherever it was that I first heard the issue of race and other minorities described as "welcoming," I'm grateful for hearing it that way, and I'll try to share that way of seeing. Whether you think someone deserves XYZ or not, the question of whether we are making sure that we are welcoming to people not like us is actually pretty easy for most people to understand. It raises the bar and it's easier to think about at the same time.

By talking about "being welcoming to people who are not in the majority," we avoid harshness that would heighten the cognitive dissonance someone is already feeling and fleeing instinctively. It comes down to seeing the existence and normality of cognitive dissonance, knowing for sure it will arise (with some appreciation of why), and then using that understanding to communicate with someone who likely wouldn't listen to you if you just gave it to them in plain words without any icing. You may not agree here, but I'll make the claim: if you swapped brains with each other, you wouldn't listen either. While directness is great, and I'm a big fan of directness, there are times when directness will totally fail. Usually that's closely related to cognitive dissonance. Don't thank me now. Just use this truth as well as you possibly can.

It'll make a difference. It can change minds in ways yelling never will. People who are experts in getting through to racists and religious extremists know this. Compassion, openly discussing what you otherwise find to be a hateful view and trying not to judge it, may seem totally misplaced, but it works much better than what you want to say. If you want to say something, tell a personal story and admit that it's just your experience. That's how you can share how you feel, and why, without putting someone's defenses up so high that cognitive dissonance closes their ears and eyes. If you disagree with someone intensely, provided of course that you can manage this, what you need is to show that 1) you care about what they think and feel, 2) you want to understand them and their view and why the world seems that way, and 3) you aren't judging them harshly. Ask questions and follow-up questions. Don't expect a sudden change, or even any change at all. Don't crowd potential like that. You may be surprised to find, though you shouldn't expect it, that this person cares about your stories and possibly even your opinions and your reasons for holding those opinions. They may listen without objecting and seem interested. After you care about their views and see them as fully human, see? Not before. And the good thing is, relating to people is much more pleasant for everyone involved than a shouting match followed by two people canceling each other.

This has been called "nudge theory," which is admirably descriptive. But it's really just understanding cognitive dissonance and applying that understanding. Often the people who most need to hear your words will hear them least, unless you take steps.

Everyone's in some kind of majority and some kind of minority. Everyone. We do not have equal experiences of this at all, but we all have some experience. Just about everyone knows what it's like to feel everyone is against them on something. For that matter, the person widely accused of racism or sexism or nationalism or classism or nepotism or despotism or any bad -ism, that person will probably be feeling singled out, will be feeling they're in a position of, well, misunderstood and unappreciated minority. Odd as it is to think of it like this, they may feel like they're standing up valiantly for the truth, even against the whole world. And if they don't feel that way, they can probably remember at least one time in life so far when they did feel embattled like that. If you are ever in the situation of talking to this person, telling them about a moment you have experienced or witnessed could bring them an opportunity to make the connection between the way they feel (misunderstood and judged and treated like they aren't fully human), and the way others feel (misunderstood and judged and treated like they aren't fully human). It's just... there are ways to bring an opportunity that have a good chance of working, and there are ways that have almost no chance whatsoever of working.

I hope that isn't too barbed a way to say it, "almost no chance whatsoever." I hope I haven't given you too much cognitive dissonance—leading to defensiveness—about this ineffective approach we all tend to use before understanding, but I'll leave that concern in as a question for you to consider. Maybe I have stirred up too much dissonance. We need to ask ourselves these questions. And other questions, too. Our best weapon against cognitive dissonance is simply asking questions.

Which way do you choose?

Why?

What is your evidence that it works?

And how are you looking for a better way?

Isn't it so simple

As a teacher, I've come to distrust claims of "It's really simple!" Well yes, that might be true. Many aspects of nature, once you sift through enough experiments and analysis, trial and error, dissent, frustration, and perplexity turn out to be blitzingly more direct than anyone realized. But I think if we were to see these answers naively, like children, we would not at first consider them simple, anyway. We'd need to have the right concepts in place.

There are three major reasons I distrust it's-so-simple-look. First, I see most students struggle with things I find mind-squishingly obvious. At some point I have to put aside whether I think a thing is simple or not. There have been times when I have simplified and simplified and then just told a student the answer, told them exactly which one step to take, a step I know perfectly well they have been able to do easily for years, and they have not been able to do it. It happens more than you think. Once a person feels confused enough, they'll struggle to tell you their own name. You will find that there are times you cannot make anything simple enough, and in those moments you will have to admit that something other than simplicity is critical. Whether it's anxiety about not understanding or a grumbling stomach, it's important.

A decent teacher can reduce problems to individual steps so uncomplicated that anyone can do them. But simplicity isn't enough. I've found myself saying, having lasered in on the next step in a bigger problem, "You add the two numbers. 7 and 3. You add them. What do you get?" And a student no longer in elementary school will not be able to break open this safe, no matter how I phrase it. This deer-in-the-headlights effect is a feature of human psychology. Eventually, I'll have to tell them. "7 plus 3 is 10." Then they'll feel stupid. But I've found it's better to get that over with sooner rather than later. Once a person has reached overwhelming confusion, I'll have to take the wheel for a few seconds. The alternative is sadly a lesson that's so frustrating it's pointless or worse. Before teaching, I had no idea intelligent human minds could be reduced to pebbles so easily by confusion. And I should know, shouldn't I? If you think this is only young students, you are quite mistaken. Whether you remember it or not, you've been there.

Second, when a teacher takes anything as simple, that's often just an assumption too many. The belief can predispose you to demonstrating poorly. You need a hook. You need a good example. You want to tie this to something familiar to your listener; you want to extend their worldview rather than drop in something totally alien. A teacher needs to assume less, rather than more, about what a person knows. As I was just saying, it's much easier to skip ahead when a student gets this area than it is to backpedal into the basics when the student is confused. The best teachers I've watched tend to assume as little as possible about what a person knows. They start with square one and politely ask if the person is familiar with this. If the answer is yes, they test the waters of comprehension with a strategic question or two, then go from there.

How often have you been sitting in a class, or any lecture or presentation, when suddenly it dawned on you that you'd lost the thread? Everyone seems to get what's happening, you even thought you did, but now it hits you that you don't, and you can't even say when that started. It isn't very pleasant, is it? (For me, the answer is "very often." I have ADHD-I.) There's research that says some discomfort from confusion can help learning, but it's also clear that people have different tolerance levels, different points where they'll simply tap out, tune out, fall asleep, or go home.

To make a new idea simple for someone, to see the mist blow away in an instant, it helps to understand what they know and how they think and what kind of stuff they like. "Simple" is mostly relative. (Okay okay okay, we're putting aside the information theoretic way of analyzing this—Kolmogorov complexity—which is not relative. We're talking about practical psychology. And I'm sorry, I'm such a show-off sometimes!) Finding simplicity, even the nexus of an idea you know like a favorite t-shirt, can take a lot of work. But when you find simplicity, it doesn't feel like education. It feels like discovery, because it is.

Third, when I tell someone this thing they are struggling with is simple, they might feel deflated. The best-case scenario is that they immediately see why, actually, this is really easy. They hadn't heard or seen a good explanation; no one had broken it all down for them. But I've seen that fail too many times, whether I was the one teaching or someone else was. I'd rather not promise a student that an idea is simple. It's like telling someone the board game they're about to play is "really fun." Intuitively, you'd think this would encourage them, cheer them up, excite them, etc. Nuh uh. Almost never. They get tense, visibly. "What if I don't find it fun?" they're asking themselves. "What if everyone else gets it and I don't?" And "What if I hate it, how will I make my exit as soon as possible?" I'd rather watch a person discover that they're having a lot of fun with a new game and tell me that. I'd rather watch a student discover that this is actually like making toast or boiling an egg (yet simultaneously amazing) and thank me. There's no need to promise here, in my experience. It just makes people antsy. And it could take away the best part of the surprise.

Genuinus et sophia populi

America chews through its own feet democratically. We're constantly talking about "optics" as if this were the value of government. In order not to appear biased or partial, commentators on television—and others copy them—talk about how voters will respond to what they're seeing. So what? Let's put aside this preoccupation with pandering. True democracy is not rule by majority, nor is it pandering to optics. True democracy is healthy engagement, mobilization to change the way we live for the better as soon as the need arises. True democracy is government by the people for the people, yet as little as possible by short-sighted trends or closed-minded majorities. True democracy draws on the full intelligence of an entire population to find the best decisions.

It's geometric

Oh wow, a fragment I had lost forever! You know when you hear an entrancing song on another continent or half-asleep, or learn of an astonishing historical incident or use a quotation for a while, or see one-third of a biopic on an airplane, and it was so moving, but you can never remember what the blazing excess of wasabi it was?

I've been trying to figure out what in those tarry nations this science fiction movie I saw was. One thing it was is a fluke: I wouldn't have given it a second thought, but my dad saw the name on the tv guide station while walking by and said, "Oh, [forgotten title]! That's wonderful! Wonderful! I read the story years and years ago. It's horribly sad. You should watch it. Really!"

So I did.

But I didn't get a chance to see most of it. We had to go somewhere—the dentist, can't the dentist wait, is the dentist more important than this—and I remember the tug and indignation of having to amputate the rest of the story he himself had suggested, right when the plot was thickening. "You'll see it later," he said. The same exit sign had landed on "2001: A Space Odyssey" like a flying saucer when I was in Kindergarten, though I think that was a swim instructor rather than a dentist. That time we'd been taping the broadcast on VHS, so I do know everything up to the late stage where HAL is losing his memory in floating banks. My brother and I watched and watched our copy pirated from the airwaves, but I've only seen the ending once—in the Uptown cinema in DC, actual year of 2001. Later, a friend told me this is the same cinema where 2001 premiered on April 2, 1968. After watching it there that day, the director went home and cut 19 minutes to improve the pacing. In 2010, 17 of these minutes were found in perfect condition in a salt-mine in Kansas.

Anyway, it isn't the kind of thing my dad would remember years later. Yes I asked, and he didn't. I searched... and searched... and searched... and never could find hide or tale of this hard sci-fi adapted for tv. What's in a name? A calling card? Nothing I saw rang any bells—cowbells, doorbells, bluebells, jingle bells, nothing. You know when you're sure you'll remember something, and you do for a while, so you assume you always will? Yeah, that.

The only line I remembered was: "It's geometric." An astronaut on a ship in deep space looks at a graph projecting some pattern into the future. Well. That, uh, just ain't sufficient to locate an obscure bit of television. The only reason the line stuck was because I didn't know that "geometric" and "exponential" were synonyms, or it hadn't quite clicked, and the word puzzled me. So I turned it over in my mind. It was one of those moments that show the use of a word to you right where you're climbing, surrounded by ferns, lianas, gibbons, and no-see-ums. You forget most of the intros, but you remember some.

Right near the end of an Aaron Sorkin video, he mentions this short story "The Cold Equation" by an author he can't remember, and it sets something off in my head.

A little searching later, and I've found it... a 1996 made-for-television movie that aired on The Sci-Fi Channel.

It's aliiiiiiiive! (Clears throat.) Um, yes, er, so this happened!

Haha, I'm sorry, the lost fragment bothered me so many times! Every time I tried to think of this name stuck confoundingly on the tip of my tongue, I couldn't stop hearing "Equilibrium" (which I haven't seen, but which definitely wasn't it). Then I'd think of "Event Horizon" (which I did see, and it was terrifying in the theater), and then I'd go blank and have to give up.

Is it ironic that someone's lapse on the author's name sparked my memory, ending my own lapse? He didn't even have to tell the gist of the story (though he does in the video). That instant I heard the name, I knew. It was as if a time capsule had fallen open in my ear.

"The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin, 1954 short story later named one of the best ever written. It's been produced several times, including for "The Twilight Zone." Now I know more—I've got the bookmark back!

A similar experience with the television series "The Velvet Claw" excited me enough that I wrote about it here.

I guess it's time to finish what I started.

Update: I've read the original story which is in the public domain, found out I can stream the Sci-Fi Channel movie with one of my memberships, and am collecting my thoughts...

Second update: I've watched the movie, and it isn't particularly great, but I'm really glad I got back to it. The line was "It's a geometrical equation." Not "It's geometric." And I must have dropped in towards the end and only seen a bit. The short story is truly heartrending. It's like being punched in the solar plexus at a funeral. It filled me with actual grief for about 15 of the 16 pages. The film is more believable in some ways and less believable in others, but I still shed a tear.

b or b

One of the most frustrating things is when, by hard experience, you know yourself—your limits, your frailties, your normalities, your talents—but you have to contend with the status quo inclinations of others who wish to deny the truth of you. I've been told that it's not acceptable to be shy, not acceptable to be a night owl, not acceptable to spontaneously and arduously follow my many interests and tie them together rather than operate on a strict schedule. Yet these are all denials of deep truths about myself, and the deniers are wrong.