The Elements of Lifestyle is a trusty companion for your next existential crisis.

New rule: Before you write a word of non-fiction, you should be required to read a page of nonfiction about whatever it is you’re writing. Have a thousand words to write? Good for you. Now back up your words with knowledge. At least 1000 pages worth.

Words without evidence or citation are just words. Indeed, they’re eminently Digg-able words (usually in the form of “Top N Ways to Something Your Something”) but they’re words nonetheless.

Colin Meloy Is Dark Matter, At Least for the Time Being

dailymeh:

If we could find a chain of well-understood and trusted causal relationships that together forge a connection between cause and effect, military coup and oranges, we would have to accept the relationship as a truly causal one, and not just accidental correlation.

All this is just what Hume more concisely says in the quote above: we unload our uncertainty about causal relations on simpler, more fundamental causal relationships, but this can only stave off our uncertainty for so long. At some point, we have to ask: but how do we know that this elementary interaction causes that one? How do we know that the fundamental cause-effect relationships that we take for granted aren’t accidental? The answer is: we observe correlations!

In his Daily Meh piece that got a lot of attention the other week, Simen argues, with no shortage inscrutable post-Graduate circular logic, that “all we have to help us establish causal relationships is correlation,” or, in so many words, that orange production on one side of the world necessarily impacts the success of military coups on another.

My knee-jerk reaction to this argument was “What? No.” and I tried to argue as much over e-mail, and was, without much hesitation or explanation, told I was wrong in the roughly same terse manner that so many theoretical Computer Science professors had employed to tell me I was wrong in college.

Listen, Simen is a smart dude—I like him so much I even stole his Tumblr theme!—but I see his argument as one dependent on repeatedly observed coincidences and leaps of faith, and a suggestion that just because we can’t prove that a relationship is not causal yet means that we should accept that it is for the time being. Though he has concocted the necessary verbal discrete math to support his argument—or at least otherwise confuse those who would disagree with him—this approach seems wholly unscientific to me, and it seems downright tired, perhaps because this kind of thinking has been continuously proved wrong since at least the 17th century.

I’ll let astrophysicist and generally awesome human being Niel deGrasse Tyson elaborate to that end. In this talk he gave about the role of Intelligent Design in science, Tyson explains that God has historically been and continues to be credited as the cause of pretty much anything that has ever occurred—even by scientists—at least until science comes up with a better explanation. Before Isaac Newton (co-)invented calculus to show why planets move the way they do, it was widely accepted that the elliptical movement of planets was simply God’s will. People didn’t care to give this problem much thought in part because they didn’t know how to approach it, and so they accepted God’s role (quite literally) on good faith. Years later, around the turn of the 19th century, French mathematician Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace used Newton’s work on planetary mechanics and gravitation to show why the universe is far more stable than previously thought. When asked by then emperor Napoleon Bonaparte why his work made no reference to God, Laplace replied, “I did not require him for this explanation.”

“I like to take things all the way to their logical conclusions,” Simen writes, “and unfortunately, the absence of inferences based on correlation would mean that we could never know that one thing caused another.” Yeah, maybe if you’re really impatient.

This way of thinking reminds me of a tangentially-related argument I had with my father, a philosophy and math professor, a month or two ago. He had called to argue that Colin Meloy, lead singer of The Decemberists, was dark matter.

“But Dad,” I said, “to say that Colin Meloy is dark matter is to imply that he emits no observable radiation whatsoever. He has a pulse, he creates heat, therefore he is not dark matter. You are so wrong.”

“But what if we put him on a planet thousands of light years away? We’d have no possible way to detect him. We can’t even detect radiation emitted by entire planets like that, let alone a single dude on one of them—we have to observe their gravitational effect on nearby stars and infer their existence.”

In some sense, I must begrudgingly agree that my dad is correct: Neither you nor I currently have the scientific tools or cognitive ability to conclusively say that Colin Meloy is not dark matter, to say nothing of the slightly twee girls who name their pets after him and buy his records. And similarly, neither you nor I can prove that the Pope shat in the woods if the only thing we have to observe is a steaming pile of feces that smells vaguely like the lunch menu at the Vatican.

But just because we can or cannot currently prove something to be true or false—or causal, or correlated—does not preclude it from being proven otherwise in the future, nor should it require that we take something at face value for the sake of convenience. I will agree with Simen, then, that correlation does indeed imply causation, but only in those instances where there is something else we’d rather be thinking about to distract us.

How Many Social Media Experts Does It Take to Change a Stock Photo of a Light Bulb?

merlin:

Merlin Mann and John Gruber by Dave Gray

This past weekend I stopped by Books & Co. at The Greene, a massive and luxurious outdoor mall that sits on a now leveled expanse that was once a wooded hillside in Beavercreek, Ohio. Apropos of nothing ¹, I had missed seeing John Hodgman speak there by a day or two, though I was delighted to see that he had autographed every single one of the store’s copies of his most recent book, More Information Than You Require. Crossed out was his name, which had been printed in all caps in bold Helvetica, replaced instead by his name, which had been handwritten in all caps with a bold red magic marker.

Adjacent to the bookcases that shelved Hodgman’s volumes of made up facts were volumes of made up facts about business and “marketing 2.0” by wine-baron-turned-social-media-impresario Gary Vaynerchuk.

I’ll talk about why I didn’t buy his book in a bit, but first, some necessary backstory and perhaps a brief digression.

Gary Vaynerchuk was born in Belarus and emigrated with his family to New York when he was three. Not knowing a lick of English, his father began as a stockboy at a local liquor store and worked his way up the ladder, eventually opening his own store, Shopper’s Discount Liquor, across the river in Springfield, New Jersey. Against his wishes—he would later claim that he was making a thousand dollars a weekend selling baseball cards at the mall at the time—an adolescent Vaynerchuk went to work for his father, sobbing as he put in long hours and had only pennies to show for it.

Vaynerchuk’s “A-ha!” moment came when he realized that people collected wines the same way they collected baseball cards. Years later, a 20-something Gary V. would rechristen his father’s business Wine Library and grow the company’s revenues from $4-million to $60-million in a few short years.

In 2007, inspired in part by the uber-successful one year run of Ze Frank’s The Show, Vaynerchuk started Wine Library TV, a daily video wine blog noted for its brutal honesty and its host’s own manic enthusiasm. Thanks in equal part to his expertise, voice, and the fact that he was one of the first social media evangelists, Vaynerchuk’s popularity experienced the same kind of insane, logarithmic growth as his brick and mortar business.

Or so the story goes.

To make a long story short, today he has nearly a million Twitter followers and a seven figure, 10 book deal with Harper Studio.

So why did I reblog a great drawing from a months-old talk that Merlin Mann and John Gruber gave at SXSW?

Well, the obvious fact that I have a huge intellectual boner for the both of them aside, I had a chance to listen to the whole thing again in its entirety during my drive back from Dayton this past weekend, and was downright surprised by the extent to which much of it mirrored many of the same virtues that Vaynerchuk espouses.

(It’s not all the same, mind you, and I’ll get to that, and in fact it’s most likely that very diversion that makes me want to gay-marry Merlin and Gruber but unfollow Gary V. on Twitter.)

Both Merlin/Gruber and Vaynerchuk encourage people to establish credibility by pursuing the thing they’re most passionate about, whether that means writing a blog or doing a video show or building a house, and finding away to do that thing better than 80% of the competition. It’s hard to argue with that. Doing something because it’s an obsession is always more noble (and sustainable) than doing something because you think it’s popular or there’s money to be made.

Similarly, both camps encourage writers, designers, and stuff-makers alike to pursue ancillary revenue streams as a source of income, rather than in-your-face advertising or anything else that might alienate the the very people to which you’re trying to appeal.

Interestingly enough, that last point—that issue of appeal—is where they begin to diverge immediately and entirely; Merlin and Gruber ask the question “Who do I want to delight?” while Vaynerchuk asks the question “How can I delight everybody?” As it turns out, I find the notion of delighting everybody to be perfectly intolerable.

Later on in his book Crush It!, now a bestseller, Vaynerchuk offers an approach to that end. He suggests that people search Twitter for keywords relating to their niche, and then mingle like they would at a cocktail party to begin building relationships, and thusly, their audience. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

But you have to pause and consider who it is you’re interrupting with that approach. Seth Godin has made a career of talking about the money-making potential of interrupting the right people, but who are the Right People in this instance? I don’t know the answer to that, but it does seem a bit obtuse to believe that someone who shares the same interests you do necessarily wants to talk to strangers about them. If anything, the only people on Twitter or the broader social media landscape who desperately want to be interrupted are the people who use Twitter to talk about social media. (Which admittedly, is still millions of people.) And so what? Maybe it is a cocktail party. But to 90% of everyone else, it’s a cocktail party that you weren’t invited to. One man’s mingling is another man’s pinching a foul loaf in the punchbowl. Or put more simply, it’s Cold Calling 2.0 and you just made the Do Not Call List.

The other fallacy of Vaynerchuk’s approach is the idea that anyone else can duplicate his success. An entire segment of Merlin and Gruber’s presentation is devoted to dispelling that very notion, and is very poorly paraphrased below.

Ted Koppel wasn’t Ted Koppel because he was telegenic and had nice hair; he was Ted Koppel because the Iranians kidnapped a bunch of Americans and, armed only with his aforementioned looks and a passion for the topic at hand, ABC gave him a half hour up against Carson.

Gary Vaynerchuk is Gary Vaynerchuk because his timing was fortuitous and his expertise and enthusiasm were genuine. And contrary to what he says, he did not start from nothing—he started from the $4-million reigns that were handed over by his father.

And that necessarily means the rest of us are already behind the 8-ball.

(Those reasons aside, I didn’t buy Gary Vaynerchuk’s book because he convinced me not to: he’s spent years talking about how he’s not a good writer, and I heard him say in an interview once that he was hoping people would buy his book in a guilt-motivated gesture of thanks for all the free content he’s disseminated over the years. No such guilt here.)

My father is a philosophy professor at a small state school in Dayton, and last year he published a really great book about Stoicism. I want to share with you a passage about success which seems exceedingly apt here.

In order to win the admiration of other people, we will have to adopt their values. More precisely, we will have to live a life that is successful according to their notion of success. … Consequently, before we try to win the admiration of these other people, we should stop to ask whether their notion of success is compatible with ours. More importantly, we should stop to ask whether these people, by pursuing whatever it is they value, are gaining the tranquility we seek. If they aren’t, we should be more than willing to forgo their admiration.

In asking us to consider who we want to delight, Merlin Mann and John Gruber are echoing the same advice that dead guys gave to people two thousand years ago because they thought it could help make them happier. And even now, that advice is hard to disagree with.

Because, let’s face it: even Marcus Aurelius knew that caring what everyone thinks can’t scale.

It's Perfectly Okay

The closest I’ve ever come to watching a man die was on April 1st, 1996, when I watched a man die.

It was a year removed from the labor strike that ruined baseball for me forever—on second thought, maybe baseball ruined baseball for me forever—in the top of the first inning of the Cincinnati Reds’ home opener, when veteran home plate umpire John McSherry stopped play, signaled something to the 2nd base umpire, turned towards the dugout as if to leave, and collapsed, never to get up again, after experiencing what we’d learn later was a massive heart attack. They’d try the game again the next day and we’d happily make the short drive back down from Dayton to see it, this time with plenty to talk about and a couple of lasting memories.

The first was of my friend Zach.

All you really need to know about Zach was that he had a habit of buying the largest pop imaginable whenever we’d go to a movie or sporting event and would invariably end up having to pee during all the good parts. This day was no different. At the time the postponement was announced, Zach was returning to his seat with the largest cup of hot chocolate I’ve ever seen, having done a rather poor job of keeping it from spilling all over his hands and burning him as he maneuvered down the steps and around railings at Riverfront Stadium. This became my lasting impression of him, and though he’d go on to get a masters degree in chemistry from Michigan State, he’d forever remain the kid who always had to pee a gallon of sugar water to me.

And then, obviously, there was the whole “guy dying” thing.

Maybe McSherry meant something more to people at the game who were older than 13—after all, he had officiated the World Series game in ‘77 where Reggie Jackson hit three home runs in three swings among countless other classics—but to me, and indeed, to Major League Baseball going forward, he was the 400 pound man who died with a horrified look on his face in front of 40,000 people. After a necessary period of league-wide mourning had subsided, the league put new physical fitness and training guidelines in place to prevent something like this from every happening again.

In the first thing I ever wrote for this site back in June, I said:

Though the benefits may appear self-evident, it’s worth asking anyway: Why would anyone want to be healthy? And just what do I mean when I say, “being healthy is not about you?”

Perhaps it’s best to think of being healthy as a practice that allows us to be dependable, which may just be the ultimate consideration to anyone who has to put up with us on a day-to-day basis. But more than that, being healthy is about being there for your loved ones (even those that don’t yet exist) and being as little a burden as possible to them as you get older.

If the philosophical approach doesn’t do it for you, consider this metaphor. When you buy a new car, you expect it to degrade gracefully over time; You don’t expect the engine to just fall out one day. In essence, this is exactly what the people in your life expect out of you. Don’t be the grandparent that spends the last 10 years of their life in bed hoping for a visit; be the one that does the visiting.

(Notice, for a moment, that I’ve made it this far in our discussion of what it means to be healthy without touching on “looking good” or “feeling good.” That’s because looking and feeling good are the rewards for being healthy, not the reasons. Being healthy because you want to look good is like playing youth soccer because you like eating orange slices.)

I also mentioned the fact that I once lost 45% of my body weight, something I don’t usually talk about unless I think it will help someone better understand my character flaws. Well, full disclosure time: I didn’t lose weight for the Right Reasons. I did it because I didn’t want diabetes, which I have to say is a pretty solid reason to be healthy. I did it because I saw a guy die from standing there once.

I’m pleased to say that I’ve since loosened my guidelines.

It is perfectly okay if the only reason you want to be healthy is to not be the guy grunting and out of breath at the men’s room urinal.

It is perfectly okay if the only reason you want to be healthy is to fit into a $500 pair of skinny jeans.

It is perfectly okay if the only reason you want to be healthy is to avoid being written about by some a-hole on his blog that nobody reads.

Those are all perfectly okay reasons.

Speaking of Rabbit Holes, Planning Your Life around Headlines You Read on Yahoo! News Is Probably Not a Good Idea, Either

If Olympic swimmers, telegenic binge eaters, and trite internet advice are like crack for the mentally idle, then the American news media is a drug dealer in this same extended metaphor, one that always has a way of saying, “Open up, baby bird. Here comes another juicy nugget.”

There was a seemingly innocuous headline on Yahoo! News the other day that read, “Processed food link to depression: research.” It turns out that people who eat a diet rich in whole foods are 26% less likely to suffer from depression than those who don’t, and that’s taking things like smoking and alcoholism into account. Good to know, right? Okay, but what, exactly, are we supposed to do with that information? And how would our visceral reaction to this headline have been any different if it had read, “Two fattest people I ever dated did not own socks: Ryan’s life experience?”

Suppose for a second that you’re the type of person who already eats a diet rich in whole foods or who doesn’t but thinks they probably should. Clearly, this headline’s not for you. You’d give it a passing glance, perhaps feeling a momentary tinge of self-satisfaction for seeing one of your lifestyle choices reinforced by something that comes with a dateline, but at the end of the day you’re still more likely to click on an article about how the H1N1 vaccine wants to kill your family.

Now suppose that’s not you. Suppose that you tend to eat foods that come in sleeves and cylinders when you’re bored, that you’re spending 60 bucks a month on a gym membership you’re not using that’s beginning to feel more like a fat tax, and suppose that you spend more time watching shows about cooking than actually cooking. And suppose for the sake of argument that maybe you’re a little self-aware about all this and that it makes you feel downright bad sometimes. How is a headline like “Processed food link to depression: research” going to help you feel differently? It isn’t, at least anymore than a headline about lung cancer will inspire someone to make this pack of cigarettes their last. Maybe it will make you feel a little worse, or maybe you’ll mistake “whole foods” for Whole Foods and you’ll start to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

The news media is there to inform and entertain you, not give you advice. But in the wrong frame of mind, Lord knows that can be just as distracting. Hell, 26% of all people know that.