The problem with STAR Voting

Posted on 23 May 2024 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

I’ll admit it – when the woman stopped me outside the library a few months ago to get my signature to add “STAR Voting” to our local ballot, I was enthusiastic. STAR Voting is a system where, instead of casting your vote for one candidate, you get to rate them all. Then, for the two highest-rated candidates, a second look at the ballots sees which of those two was favored by each of the voters, and they’re the winner. It’s a system that, according to its promoters, supports “More Voter Choice – Vote Your Conscience! – Never Waste Your Vote!” Mark Frohnmayer has written up a thorough explanation in favor of STAR Voting, here.

On Mother’s Day, though, when we sat down to vote (Oregon is 100% vote-by-mail), my husband was definitely not in favor. He’s a math guy who’s experimented with lots of voting systems, and he immediately saw a problem. The advocates of STAR Voting think that people will vote with their true preferences, but they’re expecting a rather measured voter mentality – and STAR Voting favors a more extremist temperament. So I gave it some more thought.

Let’s imagine an election with three candidates. (In an election with two candidates, STAR Voting is just a more complicated version of what we’ve got right now, so we need at least three to show its flaws.) In our imaginary election, let’s suppose that the Red party has one candidate, and although the majority doesn’t want him, those who do are very enthusiastic and hate the other two.

The Blue party has two candidates, and normally the stronger candidate would get almost all of the Blue votes, but let’s suppose the weaker candidate’s fans are excited about STAR Voting and want to show their support for their candidate, assuming the stronger candidate will win in the second round.

Let’s name the Red candidate Trump, the stronger Blue candidate Biden, and the weaker Blue candidate RFK-Jr. And just to make things simple, let’s pretend we have ten voters, but of course this is all basically the same if we scale it up to an actual voting population.

Of our ten voters, there are three who are enthusiastic for Trump. They rate him as 5, and they rate Biden and RFK-Jr as 0.

We also have three RFK-Jr fans. They rate him as 5, and they rate Biden and Trump as 0. Why do they rate Biden as 0, even though they prefer him to Trump? Because they’ve got caught up in the extremist rhetoric and think a “0” is the right thing to do. (STAR Voting incentivizes trashing the opposition, as we’ll see.)

Now let’s suppose that Biden’s four supporters are taking a more measured approach. Sure, they favor Biden, but they don’t buy into extremism, so they rate him as 3. They rate the other two as 0 because they simply don’t want them.

Normally, we’d have three votes each for Trump and RFK-Jr, and four for Biden, even if the RFK-Jr fans don’t remember that they’re really Blue party members who, under the usual voting system, would typically vote for Biden too. Even without them, Biden has the most supporters, so Biden wins.

With the STAR Voting, though, we now have 15 points each for Trump and RFK-Jr (since they each have three people scoring them as “5”), and 12 points for Biden (four people scoring him as “3”). Only Trump and RFK-Jr go on to the second round, and they’re tied (the downside to having only 10 voters).

But suppose one of those measured-temperament Biden voters thinks, “Ugh, I really don’t want Trump or RFK-Jr, but RFK-Jr isn’t as bad as Trump, so I’ll rate him as “1” on my 0-5 scale and keep Trump as “0”. Guess what? Now RFK-Jr is the winner.

My husband points out that this argument still assumes that all of the voters are being sincere. In this era, though, that’s not something we can take for granted. If the Trump voters really dislike Biden, they could campaign to have their supporters give “5”s to Trump and “4”s to RFK-Jr, such that a majority giving “3”s to Biden end up being outscored anyway, even without a competitive number of RFK-Jr supporters. So the STAR system encourages “strategic” voting too.

I read online today that STAR Voting has failed this time, but of course its creators and backers will keep trying. I hope they’ll take into account, though, that voters do have different temperaments.

STAR Voting measures enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can be manufactured.

And as my son put it when we were casting our ballots on Mother’s Day, people who think in more measured terms are generally more trustworthy. We want our voting system to support that, not to undermine it with incentives for extremism.

Posted in US politics | Tagged , | Leave a comment

To create “small pockets of flourishing”

Posted on 19 May 2024 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

This month, the Oregon Bach Festival book club’s reading project combines two of my special interests: music and nature writing. We’ve been listening to Sarah Kirkland Snider’s “Mass for the Endangered,” which the Oregon Bach Festival is going to perform on June 30, and we’ve been reading a book by Oregon author Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World.

Kathleen Dean Moore is one of my favorite nature writers. She’s an environmental philosopher, and since she lives just 40 miles or so north of me, she’s often writing about my own ecosystem. Her writing is simply beautiful.

I consider Moore’s writings to be classic examples of “earnest” environmental literature. Scott Slovic, a world expert on nature writing (and, disclaimer, now my work colleague), has written about the distinction between “earnest” writing, where the author says what they mean directly, and more “ironic” literature, where the point is often made indirectly, often with humor. And then, within “earnest” writing, he’s described two categories very commonly found in environmental literature, the “rhapsody” and the “jeremiad.” A rhapsody draws us in with awe and wonder, the beautiful and the sublime – and then a jeremiad hits us with a looming or ongoing disaster.

In one of his papers, Slovic explained that, especially in the earlier decades of environmental literature, it was important to authors not to scare away their public. They would have to be very careful about the ratio of beauty and doom. Sometimes writers would have their whole book focus on describing the amazing qualities of their topic, with only a few sentences of concern. At other times, like with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, she had already created a large audience for her work with two books purely on natural wonders, and then she was able to bring that audience with her for her book on the disasters of profligate pesticide use. (I’ll note that Carson did pepper Silent Spring with moments of sarcasm, which made it all the more readable.)

Now, however, as author Nicole Seymour explains in her book Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age, people are reacting to decades of such writing. The earnest style has become alienating for many. It’s as if the rhapsodies and jeremiads have created a group of insiders who appreciate them, but also outsiders who don’t particularly care about nature, and to whom these styles look too much like religion.

I have to say, it can be very jarring to read Kathleen Dean Moore after reading Nicole Seymour.

However, in one of the essays we read in the book club for this past week, Moore addresses the question of, “What are we supposed to do? What is there to hope for at the end of this time? Why bother trying to patch up the world while so many others seem intent on wrecking it?”

Continue reading →

Posted in environmental thought | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Immersed? or transported?

Posted on 14 April 2024 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

My favorite memory from high school chess club was the time I played against a guy I’ll call Fred, the top player at a small-town high school about 20 miles west of us. I was normally our #2 player, but our #1 player wasn’t available that night, so this was my one and only chance to show what I could do against another school’s very best.

“Fred” and I had been in a college math class together the previous summer, although we sat on opposite sides of the room, so I knew who he was, and I was happy to see him again. He had a buddy with him, though, who was watching him play, and they kept making sarcastic comments to each other about how embarrassing it was that he had to play against… a girl.

I realized quickly that Fred was a better player than I was. I was certainly not a great player. I didn’t study the game, I just went on intuition. Fred was probably a lot more methodical. It was obvious to both Fred and his friend that he was going to win.

I decided to try something crazy and desperate. Ha! Fred dismissed it as irrational, I guess, and continued with his plan of attack. Whoops, checkmate – I had won.

I wasn’t the best sport – I remember running gleefully down a hallway to tell our coach, who was just arriving, that I had beaten Fred, and he scolded me for not being very polite about it. After the snide comments about my gender, though, I felt justified.

This incident came to mind today when I was thinking about what goes on in our heads when we’re playing games.

One of my big interests is “narrative transportation,” the way our imaginations create the world of the story we’re reading or watching. When we’re reading an engrossing book, we can lose track of what’s going on around us – our minds have been “transported” away into somewhere else entirely, a “secondary world” in our imagination that might work somewhat differently from our own.

In my book project #3, when I finish my meta-narratives book and find a home for the one about ways we use language to influence how we think about things, I’m looking forward to thinking about narrative transportation at work in the real world, not just with fiction, and not just for recreation.

Meanwhile, I’m writing a paper about games, which has been a great opportunity to get up to speed on the latest research on narrative transportation, and I’ve had some new ideas. Want to hear them?

When we’re talking about what goes on in our minds when we read, we refer to “narrative transportation,” as I’ve mentioned, but when we talk about playing a game, we use the term “immersion.” Immersion in a game can include narrative transportation, too, if it has a good storyline, but it also includes engagement with other aspects of the game – the aesthetics, the physical aspects, the social aspects, and so on.

Continue reading →

Posted in narrative science | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Awe versus Wonder

Posted on 24 March 2024 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

The great fun of reading and watching a wide variety of things is the discovery of unexpected connections. Today we have: Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, the (apparently) final book in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, a widely loved work of science fiction; Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, a prizewinning 2012 novel set in rural Appalachia; and… the life story of Dante Alighieri, the medieval author of The Divine Comedy, a three-part work of which “Inferno” is probably the most famous and familiar. Between them, I realized it’s high time for me to write about something I’ve been thinking about for years: a useful distinction we can make between “awe” and “wonder.”

Let’s start with Oliver Jole. He’s the admiral of the space fleet of the planet Barrayar, stationed above the planet Sergyar, discovered about 40 years previously. The humans colonizing Sergyar have been learning how to co-exist with its rich and fascinating native ecology, but Oliver hasn’t seen much of that. He’s basically a bureaucrat, keeping his crews and ships ready in case of war, although thankfully things have been peaceful. He’s also turning 50 years old, and wondering about the next stages of his life. Oliver’s long-time love interest has recently passed away at age 87, which was still middle-aged because human life expectancy has improved. Now he’s considering whether to start a new relationship. He’s also considering whether to have children, which no longer requires a female partner or surrogate because conception and gestation can be handled in a laboratory. With these topics on his mind, he heads to the countryside for a weekend date with an old friend (and potential new lover), Cordelia Vorkosigan. They go sailing, get drenched in a sudden rainstorm, and spend a romantic night together, and then the next day they go out on the lake again, this time in an unusual, transparent canoe. From page 129:

“Oh, you have to see all this,” said Cordelia, the first words she had spoken for a while. “Turn around and take a look.”

Jole shipped his paddle, grasped the thwarts, and swung around with all the due care of a fully dressed man not wishing to convert his boat ride into a swim. The canoe was broad in the beam, however, and quite stable for its class. He stared down through the hull, and then, after a moment, slid to his knees for a closer view. And then to his hands and knees.

It was like being a bird looking down through an alien forest. He could count three…six, eight different sorts of little creatures moving through the shading stems. Even more shapes than the round and six-limbed models familiar from dry land, and remarkable subtle colors, reds and blues, silvery and orange, in stripes and spots and chevrons. A larger ovoid slid past, then jerked aside; its… meal?… escaped in a gold flash and a cloud of bronze smoke, and Jole laughed half in surprise, half in delight. “What are all those things? What are they called?” And why, for all the times he’d skimmed over this very lake, had he never noticed them before?

Now let’s turn to Flight Behavior, which I just finished reading last night. It starts with our point-of-view character, Dellarobia Turnbow, hiking up the mountain behind the Tennessee property where she lives with her dull-witted but generally kind husband and their two small children, next-door to her rather tiresome parents-in-law. Dellarobia needs something more from life. At this point she’s prepared to throw away everything she has for a tryst with a hot young guy she’s met, and as her thoughts go on and on, we readers hope she’ll rethink that decision, although what she’d be throwing away may not be that great. As she approaches the place they’ve planned to meet, though, Dellarobia comes across something extraordinary. (I’m going to condense the text, as it lasts for several pages, pages 13-16.)

“…here something was wrong. Or just strange. … The view across the valley was puzzling and unreal, like a sci-fi movie. … The branches seemed to writhe. She took a small automatic step backward from the overlook and the worrisome trees, although they stood far away across the thin air of the hollow. She reached into her purse for a cigarette, then stopped.

“A small shift between cloud and sun altered the daylight, and the whole landscape intensified, brightening before her eyes. The forest blazed with its own internal flame. “Jesus,” she said, not calling for help, she and Jesus weren’t that close, but putting her voice in the world because nothing else present made sense. The sun slipped out by another degree, passing its warmth across the land, and the mountain seemed to explode with light. … “Jesus God,” she said again. No words came to her that seemed sane. Trees turned to fire, a burning bush. … A forest fire, if that’s what it was, would roar. This consternation swept the mountain in perfect silence. …

She was on her own here, staring at glowing trees. Fascination curled itself around her fright. This was no forest fire. She was pressed by the quiet elation of escape and knowing better and seeing straight through to the back of herself, in solitude. She couldn’t remember when she’d had such room for being. … Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road. … A valley of lights, an ethereal wind. It had to mean something. … The burning trees were put here to save her. It was the strangest conviction she’d ever known, and still she felt sure of it. … Her eyes still signaled warning to her brain, like a car alarm gone off somewhere in an empty parking lot. She failed to heed it, understanding for the moment some formula for living that transcended fear and safety. She only wondered how long she could watch the spectacle before turning away. It was a lake of fire, something far more fierce and wondrous than either of those elements alone. The impossible.”

Several days pass before Dellarobia heads up the mountain again, and this time she brings her glasses (which she’d left at home before, wanting to look good for her prospective lover). I don’t want to give a spoiler here, but I can say that what’s actually there is both astonishing and reasonably consistent with real-world biology. Hint: You could see something very much like this if you visited a certain region of Mexico at the right time of year.

The event becomes a turning point in Dellarobia’s life, as scientists, activists, and journalists all come to the mountain. As the reader has long suspected, she’s actually very bright – her problem is that the world of her daily life has been much too small. Pregnant and married at 17, she’s been isolated at home with her two little kids; the world has been passing her by.

These two books obviously have some things in common. They’re written by American women and were published three years apart. They both have a character named Cordelia! And – most relevant for what I’m writing about today – they are each about someone who has an experience of the natural world that leads them to become fascinated with biology as a science. The two experiences, though, are very different in one important way.

For Oliver Jole, seeing the bizarre aquatic creatures in Lake Serena is an experience of wonder – he is drawn in by its beauty and his curiosity, and he immediately starts asking questions that would let him see the creatures as part of a larger system.

For Dellarobia, seeing the strangeness of the forested valley is an experience of awe – it completely pulls her away from what she was already thinking and doing; she isn’t sure whether to be afraid or not. She wants to know how it fits into the big picture of how things work, but her initial impression of “forest fire” is clearly wrong, and she’s too skeptical for a religious explanation. However, even without an explanation she feels the experience has changed her life. It’s only later that she can start to put together an accurate understanding of how the world has changed.

People often lump wonder and awe together (including, apparently, Dacher Keltner, the world’s leading scientist studying awe), but the distinction can be important. Awe pulls you out of your conventional and current mental world to grab your full attention. It’s not necessarily a positive or a negative experience in itself, although it can lead to wonder (if it’s relatively benign and you have the space to think about things) or shock (if it’s disrupting your world in a potentially major way). It says, “Your way of thinking Continue reading →

Posted in narrative science | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Complicating the Story of Humanity

Posted on 1 January 2024 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

How did we get to be “civilized”? Here’s the big-picture story most of us have learned.

For hundreds of thousands of years, humans lived in small bands that wandered the land, hunting for meat and fish, and foraging for nuts, fruits, edible leaves and tubers, fungi, shellfish, and so on. Eventually some folks domesticated the various species of grazing animals, which gave them milk and sometimes meat, ready to hand.

Then, about 10,000 years ago, grain crops were domesticated in a major agricultural revolution, and because grains can be stored, the surplus crops led to the rise of cities, in which hierarchies organized those crop surpluses, with a king at the top and a warrior class to defend the cities against outsiders. Similar stories are told for each of the great centers of early civilization: the Fertile Crescent in Mesopotamia, the Nile valley in Egypt, the Indus people of India, the earliest Chinese, and the great city-builders in Mexico and the Andes.

Eventually, the story goes, the intellectuals of Western Europe took things a step further and created modern democracy, inspired by the ancient Greeks. This step allowed us to transform our social lives into a much more fair system that echoed the egalitarianism of the early foragers.

Obviously, this is a self-congratulatory meta-narrative of Progress, although many have some ambivalence about it. For example, the ecologist Paul Shepard and other environmental writers have recast the story as a tale of loss and estrangement from the natural world.

However… I’ve just finished reading a fascinating book that explains how and why the story we tell about civilization ought to be much more complicated than the one I’ve just summarized. The Dawn of Everything, by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, purports to be, as its subtitle tells us, “A New History of Humanity.” They point out that the standard meta-narrative of civilization is misleadingly oversimplified and downright inaccurate.
Continue reading →

Posted in history, narrative science | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mighty Ducks, Under-Dawgs

Posted on 2 December 2023 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

Yesterday, alas, we may have seen the psychological power of meta-narratives in action, in a different arena than usual – Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, to be more precise.

As my readers know by now, meta-narratives are the story-based frameworks we use to make sense of the world from the perspective of the groups we belong to. Familiar examples include believing we need to make our group (a particular country) “great again,” or that we need to save our group (all of humanity, or the biosphere itself) from further climate-based disruptions, or, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., that the long arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. In other words, meta-narratives are beliefs about what’s happening with one’s group over time, the big-picture stories.

Sports teams are also groups, and as any fan of the Chicago Cubs will tell you (although surely they won’t put it that way), sports teams can have meta-narratives too.

ducks_logoSo… speaking of sports teams, I’m a fan of the University of Oregon Ducks. My immediate family (parents, uncle, sister, and sons) and I have all attended the university, which is just a couple miles north of where I live right now. In fact, if I’m correctly remembering when my sister graduated, we’ve had someone at the U of O in each of the past eight decades. I’m the only one in the family who cares about sports, though. Go Ducks!!

Oregon’s official rival is Oregon State, a fine university about 40 miles northwest of us, in Corvallis. It’s a gentle rivalry, for the most part – more a matter of teasing than strong feelings. If Oregon isn’t in the Continue reading →

Posted in narrative science | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Why do we have “human rights”?

Posted on 21 November 2023 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

Where did we get the idea that all people, not just those most like ourselves, should have basic, fundamental, “self-evident” rights? The historian Lynn Hunt has a theory – she credits the novelist Samuel Richardson.

Samuel_Richardson_by_Mason_Chamberlin

In her book, Inventing Human Rights: A History, Hunt describes how Richardson’s first novel, Pamela, published in 1740, became a major cultural event. Women and men alike found themselves totally enthralled by the story – one village even rang its church bells upon hearing a rumor of a happy ending. A few years later, Richardson’s second novel, Clarissa, was published, and the two books inspired a third, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, published in 1761. (Yes, that Rousseau, the one who wrote The Social Contract and became a major political philosopher.)

In each of these books, a young woman is pursued by a man who very much wants to seduce her, with no intention of marriage, and of course, in that era, her life would be ruined thereafter. Pamela is fortunate – although the man pursues her, tricks her, abducts her, and molests her, eventually (after she realizes she’s in love with him, and after he finds and reads her letters) he changes his mind and marries her.

Clarissa’s story, conversely, is tragic. She only wants to be left alone, but the rich and powerful Robert Lovelace insists he wants to marry her and eventually drugs and rapes her. She still resists him (and on, and on – at 1534 pages, it’s one of the longest novels in the English language). Eventually Clarissa starves herself until she falls ill and dies.

Here’s Sean Bean as Lovelace in the BBC dramatization:

sean_bean_clarissa

I watched a bit of it years ago.  He was creepy, and I’d want to avoid him too!

What was special about these books, and what’s the link to human rights?

Continue reading →

Posted in narrative science | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Shocked by Mary Shelley

Posted on 31 October 2023 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

Until this month, I had never read Frankenstein. I always thought that I had, but, nope. Dracula is another matter – I bought my first copy from the Scholastic Book Club in sixth grade, and my life revolved around it for years. Frankenstein, though, surprised me.

Frankenstein is, of course, famous as the first book in a brand-new genre, science fiction, written by a brilliant teenage girl, Mary Godwin Shelley. The story of its origin is famous. One stormy night, at a villa in Switzerland, four friends decided on a competition to see who among them could write the best horror story. The competitors were young Mary Godwin, her lover and future husband the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his notorious friend Lord Byron, and Byron’s personal physician, John Polidori. I don’t know if the other two completed their entries, but Polidori did come up with a story called The Vampyre, based on some notes that Byron had collected on his journeys in the Balkans.

Although The Vampyre went on to inspire Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Frankenstein won the competition, and Shelley published her book in 1818. Then in 1831, she revised it heavily, having been told it was “too radical,” and this later version has been the most widely published since then.

And thanks to the online book club sponsored by retro game streamer Karkalla, whom my partner follows on Twitch TV, it was now my turn to finally read Frankenstein. We’re reading the 1818 edition. It’s considered more true to Shelley’s own beliefs, which were heavily influenced by the writings of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist who had died when her daughter was a baby.

The thing that floored me from the very earliest chapters was the realization that Frankenstein is a total take-down of Romanticism, an artistic and cultural movement that was central to the identities of her Continue reading →

Posted in salience markers | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Biden’s age, Trump’s… everything?

Posted on 13 September 2023 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

This week, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni asked a very revealing question: Why is the American public so focused on Joe Biden’s age, when Donald Trump is almost as old and has a far less healthy lifestyle and physique? It’s a good point. For the moment, let’s set aside all of our thoughts about policies and values associated with the two men (to the extent that our imaginations can stretch that far). Which of them is more likely to be physically thriving in 2028, a trim 85-year-old man who eats well and at least up until now has been getting regular daily exercise, or an overweight 82-year-old man who has spent the last few decades sitting around eating junk?

So why do we care about Biden’s age but not Trump’s?

Bruni mentions geriatric specialist Rosanne Leipzig, who suggests that Biden’s language reads as “old.” He uses words and phrases like “malarkey” and “God love ya” and “c’mon man,” which feel dated. And that theory makes sense, for the small fraction of Americans who actually pay attention to Biden’s speech patterns. (I hadn’t realized “c’mon man” was elderly-talk. I must be getting up there too!) Meanwhile, she says that “Trump’s rebel pose reads young.” Maybe so. Also, as Bruni points out, Trump does his best to disguise his age with hair dye and cosmetics, whereas Biden looks his age.

But I think Bruni himself hits on a better theory, and I’m going to back it up with science.

Way back in the 1950s and 1960s, psychologist Daniel Berlyne dedicated his research career to the features of things that draw our attention: sharp contrasts, disorder, novelty, surprisingness, and so on. In art and music – and in things we see and hear more generally – these features can interest and excite us, Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Living in suspense

Posted on 9 May 2023 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

A few weeks ago, I was eagerly awaiting the final episode of Sanditon. It was a Masterpiece Theater series based on Jane Austen’s unfinished novel of the same name – she’d introduced the characters and the setting, but didn’t live long enough to tell the story, so it wasn’t obvious how it would end. Charlotte would surely end up with the man she wanted, but what about Miss Lambe, the young heiress Austen had described as “half mulatto”? Would she marry the duke to get the fortune seekers to leave her alone, or would the duke be free to pursue his intimate friendship with lovely Arthur Parker? And how about our more mature lovers, the rascally lawyer and the king’s ex-mistress? Or the much more mature lovers, Lady Denton and her long-lost, now rich, childhood sweetheart?

(Arthur Parker is the best!)

turlough-convery-sanditon-arthur-6435c427e6eb7That last week, it felt hard to wait for the ending – especially when the cable’s schedule said there would be a “shocking revelation” (and thankfully that was a total misrepresentation – there was nothing shocking nor a revelation, only a reasonable misunderstanding). Then I realized that with PBS Passport I could easily watch the final episode online, immediately.

I declined. I realized I liked having a whole week to wonder how things would be resolved. It’s a normal human thing to take pleasure in suspense, at least where recreation is involved. Otherwise we’d never sit down to watch or read a story at all.

And I’m accustomed to the pace of television that I grew up with, where you waited from week to week to learn what happens next, and sometimes spent the entire summer waiting for a cliffhanger to be resolved. This binging of an entire series over a few days is alien to me.

I’m not a purist – with anime shows I’m fine with watching two or three episodes back-to-back, and a few more the next night, and the next, especially if the entire show is hundreds of episodes long.

In real life, too, there are a great many ways in which it’s wonderful that we don’t have to wait and wait to find out what’s happened. I can’t imagine living in the 19th century, when if someone you loved moved away or went on a long trip or – ack – went off to war, you’d have to wait for them to write and send you a letter so you’d know they were okay. It was much better when I was a kid – if anything important happened, they could probably use the phone. Now it’s trivial to send a message instantly using that handy device we all carry in our pockets.

I wonder, though, whether this all points to a way our speeded up society has changed that we tend to overlook. If we don’t like dramatic tension when it’s only recreational – if we’d rather binge and get it all at once – then how can we bear such suspense when the stakes are much higher?

Continue reading →

Posted in narrative science, US politics | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment