Rich waxes lyrical about the dinner party scene. Do men have impaired theory of mind, or are they just assholes? On the invisible mastery of social reality, and capturing subjective experience in literature. It goes well enough that the boys decide to actually read the rest of the book.
pre-roll jibber jabber
Cam: I remember when that shape-rotator meme first started going on. There were a few games, and at work I was just trying to shape-rotate with a few of the analysts — a couple of whiz kids, this Chinese guy. I wasn’t that good. I was alright.
Rich: Yeah, what’s the name for people who are neither?
Cam: Neither wordcel nor shape-rotator, yeah. That’s like Howard Gardner or something — multiple intelligences. Physicality is one, and like high emotional…
Rich: Yeah, what’s the consolation intelligence? Physical, probably. Being good at sports.
Benny: Visual awareness.
Rich: Yeah, can see stuff real good.
Benny: Rich, the name for them is “universal explainers” — so get with the fucking program here.
Rich: What, for people who can do neither?
Cam: Yeah, just cultures in the way, man.
Rich: I see — I’m sorry. These are fake quadrants. Everyone has exactly the same capabilities. That’s something I believe in strongly.
Cam: I told this guy about universal explainers because he’d heard of Deutsch and he was just in disbelief. He’s like, “What? Everyone’s the same?” And I was like, yeah, it’s kind of crazy. There’s a big inferential distance between Deutsch’s stuff and that. We almost didn’t talk about it — it was so insane.
Benny: Well, I think if you’re introducing it to someone new, you have to give all the caveats that Deutsch would probably give. Speed and memory — when you’re talking to someone, those are actually quite apparent. But universal explainers want to get rid of that distinction, and so it’s unclear how much, if you gave someone infinite time and infinite speed to figure stuff out, it starts to be more unclear whether everyone could do everything.
Rich: Do you reckon they’d get my proposed experiment past the IRB, where you give a bunch of uh, intellectually disabled people — like you spend 10 years trying to teach them quantum physics and see what happens?
Cam: That sounds like a skit.
Rich: They can’t be literally — like Deutsch says, you can’t have broken hardware or whatever. That could disqualify. 70 IQ is fine, because that’s within the realm of normal.
Cam: Well, it depends on the reason. If you got brain damage, then you got brought down to that.
Rich: Yeah, that just gets us back to Taleb, doesn’t it? All the left-tail stuff is because of… there are lots of ways to break a system, and there are not that many ways to magically make it better.
Cam: I was thinking — the war seems to have broken Taleb’s and Deutsch’s quiet alliance. Because they’re very opposite, and quite vocal about it.
Rich: What, are they beefing?
Cam: No, they’re not beefing. But they were big fans of each other’s stuff. Taleb was a big fan of Deutsch — and Taleb’s not a big fan of many people. But then Deutsch is pretty vocally pro-Israeli, and Taleb’s pretty vocally anti-Israeli.
Rich: I doubt that would be the end of their…
Cam: Yeah, I think they’d say they’re good on this and bad on that.
Rich: Taleb fucking loves Popper. I didn’t realize that. That’s really where I got my Popperian insights from — it’s been made a lot more explicit through Deutsch. But I always understood naive empiricism and stuff like that.
Cam: Well, this is what Black Swan is named after, right?
Rich: Yeah, exactly. And also the turkey problem, which I think about a lot.
Cam: I think it’s chicken.
Bennt: Turkey because it’s turkey before Thanksgiving.
Cam: Well I call it the chicken one.
Rich: Well you’re a fucking idiot!
Benny: What’s the chicken’s p-value?
Rich: I came up with my own example — it’s called the chicken problem. It’s a chicken before Sunday lunch. It’s totally different.
Cam: My history with Karl Popper is I did some random 101 or 201 philosophy class that went over a bit of Karl Popper at a really high level — or maybe I didn’t even do it and just some philosophy students were telling me about it. Someone, either the lecturer or some student, told me that science can’t be 100% true, and I had an aversion to that, because I was a “fucking love science” guy talking to some humanities person. I had just started reading Dawkins and Pinker and stuff — who, to be clear, aren’t anti-Popper — and so I was like, oh no, that’s bullshit. I was pattern-matching onto the people who say, “Well, it’s called the theory of evolution, not the fact of evolution.”
Cam: Dawkins pushes to say “fact,” but…
Rich: No, they should teach in school that there’s no fucking distinction between laws or theories or anything — it’s all just an arbitrary label.
Cam: The reason Dawkins doesn’t like that is because it gives conspiratorial people standing to say “it’s all a theory,” and creationism is just a strong theory. So you call something a law when it’s the dominant explanation — in Popperian or Deutschian terms you’d say that.
Rich: But it’s tough when within recent history we’ve had “laws” that turned out not to be laws. Was gravity called a law?
Cam: That’s the whole thing when Popper talks about Newtonian gravity — at the time, that was the one thing everyone was sure was 100%. It was so pervasive.
Cam: I think Kant’s whole difficulty was this impossibility of knowledge or truth coming through to us — it just can’t work like that. But Newton’s stuff is 100%, so that’s the paradox. Newton must have gotten truth from somewhere, but it’s impossible to get truth from experience. So is it a priori knowledge? That’s why I sort of didn’t realize Popper kind of emphasized that Kant had a big problem situation, which makes Kant easy, and then Popper seemingly solved it.
Rich: There’s one domain where we have direct access to the truth — the fact of the matter — and that’s called Phenomenology, baby. And that’s what this book by Virginia Woolf is about. How’s that for a segue?
Cam: Yeah, let’s move out. So, Benny, is this your new favorite book?
Benny: I’m on Team Rich now. No, I’m just kidding. I’m somewhere in the middle.
Cam: You’re trying to get some literary pussy, bro.
Benny: It’s true, dude.
Cam: Did you tell your girl you were reading Virginia?
Benny: She was over. I told her about Stoner. I gave her a little monologue about Stoner.
Rich: Did you do a Cam and hide your copy of Infinite Jest inside the Virginia Woolf book?
Benny: I should have pointed out Infinite Jest on my shelf — then she would have for sure slept with me.
Cam: I remember I told a girl about Good Old Neon being one of my favorite stories by David Foster Wallace, and she read it, and the next day she wasn’t a huge fan. She was smart and shit, but it was a bit of a letdown.
Cam: Have you seen that meme about Joe Rogan where they say he’s the equivalent of an ancient warrior lord, and he’d bring sages to come see him — “you show me knowledge.” It’s like: “Flash of light come down from sky. You explain. Why make fire?”
Benny: Poor Joe, man. Just trying to live his life.
Rich: He’s going to do it until he’s 86 years old because he’s already 60 or something.
Cam: It is interesting how big he got.
Rich: No one retires gracefully from anything — they just hang on with their fucking fingernails embedded until the very end, until it’s embarrassing. No one knows when to quit. And yes, I’m talking about American politics.
Cam: Yeah, I wonder how true that is. People probably overdo it in general. It’s hard to leave when you’re at the top.
Rich: Canadians know what’s up because they just euthanize everyone once they turn 70, so they solve the problem of too many old scientists and old politicians.
Cam: Apparently Popper kept going until his last day and he just loved it. He was never depressed about being old — he was like, “What’s my problem for today?” and just spent all day trying to solve it.
Rich: Not trying not to shit his adult incontinence.
Cam: He must have been top-percentile.
Rich: Some people are totally with it until the very end. But what do you do — what does anyone do when you reach such a high peak and then can’t perform at the same level?
Cam: Like star athletes, man — it must be devastating. It’s happening to Djokovic at the moment. At his interview after the Aussie Open semifinal, I think it was his first time he kind of realized. He was still in shock, but he was just like, “I wasn’t good today at my level.” And someone’s like, “You’re 36?” And he goes, “We’ll see, maybe.” But I reckon it was hitting him. Maybe the decline.
Rich: He’s also declined really late. Let’s say your modal athlete peaks at age 30 — you’ve got like 50 years of being over the hill, and you’ve had maybe 10 years of being at or on your trajectory upwards. Don’t like that ratio. That’s why I never became a professional athlete — there’s no other reason why.
Cam: Mine was not enough intellectualism in their life. You can’t be doing that every week.
Rich: I thought you were saying you were too dumb.
Cam: There’s a Tyler Cowen there.
Rich: Alright, let’s do it. I’m just going to dump a few thoughts and then we can dive into whatever.
a man monologues on the male tendency to monologue
Rich: I think I’ve got a frustrating but exciting relationship with this book, in that there are a lot of passages that I just had to absolutely slog through — and I’m very sympathetic to Cam’s argument that preferences are important and some of the stuff is just not really for me. But then there are other bits that I think are so fucking good that felt like a transcendent experience reading them. That would be typified by the dinner scene in particular, which I think is extremely good. It’s such a good depiction of gender dynamics that it almost strikes too close to home — I see myself depicted in there, and it feels a bit uncomfortable, in that she captures very well the demands that men in particular tend to make upon other people in social situations.
Rich: I also really like how — I hadn’t even really thought about it as a feminist text, but obviously it is — it’s not like some kind of shrill, kill-all-men-type portrayal. It’s not satirical or mean or cruel. It feels like some kind of neutral anthropological observation of the ways in which homo sapiens interact between men and women in group contexts or whatever. And I think it’s so perfect.
Rich: And also really timely for me, because I’ve been having some conversations recently with Phoebe and some other people about this tendency for older men to just become incredibly self-interested — to have those male-coded traits of monologuing, being incapable of taking actual interest in others, having a poor theory of mind. And I see it in myself a bit.
Rich: Yeah, but I think there’s something about getting older. I’m going to read a book about autism by Simon Baron-Cohen’s cousin or whoever, because I think it’s going to be quite interesting for me to think about. My dad — I don’t want to name names but I’m going to throw my dad under the bus — he’s a good example of this.
Benny: Is your dad like the breakdancing dead man? Have you seen that?
Cam: I’m not that online.
Rich: Benny’s not online anymore — that’s true.
Cam: Like, Phoebe’s potentially seen the breakdancing dead man.
Rich: No, she’s so un-online — it’s her greatest trait. She knows nothing about…
Benny: I thought she would have been for her job.
Rich: No, man, she’s too busy doing important, useful stuff — startups, surprisingly. I fill her in on any meme-related discourse or culture wars or whatever.
Rich: Anyway — yeah, it’s this thing where you monologue, you’re getting your emotional needs met from other people, but you don’t even know that you’re doing it. You have no male friends or close friends, and so the people close to you — usually your long-suffering wife or your family members — just end up being used in service of your needs, and you’re totally oblivious to it.
Rich: So that’s something I’ve been thinking about, and I think this is a crazy good depiction of it. Imagine how true it would have been 100 years ago — if you were a man reading this, you would be unlocking a new understanding of things that had simply never occurred to you. I think unfortunately the readership probably doesn’t include that many of the type of people who ought to read it. Maybe it’s a really good early depiction of the concept of emotional labor, which is now sort of in the common parlance from the female perspective.
Rich: But I’ve got more to say than that — I don’t want to monologue at you guys.
Cam: You can’t get out of it, bro.
Benny: That’s genetic.
Rich: I’m actually neurodiverse. But Benny, what do you want to say?
bogged down by poetic prose
Benny: I think it’s just a less honed version of your reaction, basically. I would say 25% of the passages are interesting and 10% are extremely good, and then the other 75% I’m somewhat lost — and perhaps that’s just me being psychologically unable to pay attention. I find it’s best if I read it chapter by chapter: read one chapter, put it down, and come back to it either the next day or whatever. The chapters aren’t short, so it’s a slow read, but trying to jam through 20 pages at once is extremely hard with this kind of book because it’s dense reading.
Benny: Reading someone’s thoughts is dense reading. And insofar as it actually represents how people think and ruminate and observe, it’s a non-trivial stream of consciousness. The more true it is to the human experience, the harder it is to read. And it does seem quite true — a lot of thinking about other people and status and desires and that sort of stuff. So I am enjoying it. Unfortunately I’m on page 70 or something, so I haven’t reached the dinner scene yet. But there are things I’m really liking about it — I’m starting to pick up on various patterns between the characters and observe the trends with which people interact.
Benny: The feminist thing is definitely there in the background. I also find it interesting that — I remember Cam saying last time there are autobiographical elements, and the Ramseys are her parents essentially. So it’s interesting that while there are certainly feminist undertones, at the end of the day Mrs. Ramsay still adopts a very traditional role in her actions. She continues to be the household mom who looks after things, helps set people up, is thinking about good matches for people’s futures. There are a couple of moments where she seemed keen to do that — like what people might call “internalized” something now. But this is where she gets her power from, right?
Rich: Well, I don’t want to interrupt — you keep going, but I want to talk about that. Cam, do you want to do your first impression?
Cam: My impression hasn’t changed too much. Do you guys reckon anyone actually likes all of it, you know what I mean? I was seeing some Goodreads reviews — which I think usually aren’t that great, but in some of them they just seem like they love the writing on every page. I think the type of person who likes poetry — basically parts of this book are almost straight poetry, with metaphor and allusion, and there’s no reference. That’s why it’s so dense. But I think if I read this again — which I actually think I will — I’m going to spend more time on those bits. Whereas in this first read where I’ve been confused some of the time, I’ve been skimming them pretty much, not trying to tease out the meaning of every sentence.
Cam: But I could believe it. Think about the epic poems — Milton and Virgil. Think about Shakespeare. There are a lot harder texts to read than this that people absolutely love, where the language is even more archaic and the allusions are even vaguer or less within the pool of shared knowledge. So I don’t think they’re lying at all.
Cam: Part of it is that especially with those sorts of texts, the background knowledge and understanding — once you understand a lot of that context, then you can… I’m finding Infinite Jest pretty easy to read the second time. I’ve stopped now because all my energy is going into Woolf, but it’s remarkably easy to read. It’s weird thinking back — why was this ever hard? But it’s obvious, because we have a lot of context now and it was extremely difficult to read the first time.
Rich: So should we go to Mrs. Ramsay? I’m curious about Woolf’s intentions for her, because I think she owns her role and enjoys it. I don’t think she feels resentful of it, except in a few individual moments. Whereas if you contrast her against Lily Briscoe, I think Lily is the Virginia stand-in. She’s the artist, and she bridles against all of this stuff being imposed upon her, and she ultimately rejects it. She doesn’t want to play their games — and it’s not a huge spoiler, she doesn’t get married. She becomes like a spinster, and she tries to centre herself around her own art and her own personhood. She doesn’t want to play this game.
Benny: How far are you, Rich?
Rich: Did Woolf get married?
Cam: Woolf was kind of lesbian-ish. She had a famous relationship with her sister, and then her sister got married and Woolf felt quite alone once her sister got married.
Benny: Does she have a marriage of convenience?
Cam: Well, back then you kind of never know — how much she was bisexual, how much she was lesbian. I think there was a marriage of convenience, though later on she actually got pretty into it.
Rich: That’s interesting, because Lily has some vaguely sapphic undertones, I think — she has this reverence for Mrs. Ramsay, and there’s a scene where she’s curled up against her legs, holding them. So yeah, that kind of makes sense.
Rich: But yeah, I think Mrs. Ramsay owns it. And I don’t know if it’s meant to be a critique. Some of it is, but some of it seems to just be saying the way things are. And you get very good insights from the men’s point of view too, where they’re bored by the women’s chatter and wish they were working. They feel annoyed that they have to make conversation about things like the British mail service — “oh, you hardly know why I bother sending letters” — and they’re thinking about their philosophical problems, not being present in the group environment.
Benny: Do you relate to that at all?
Cam: 100%. Just getting annoyed at chitter-chatter — sometimes I feel well-coded chitter-chatter.
Women as facilitators of social interactions
Rich: And so in this book, after the dinner party scene, Mr. Ramsay’s reading and Mrs. Ramsay’s reading, and his prior is that she probably won’t get it, she’s probably not enjoying it. And he’s wrong about it. But what’s interesting around this is you can go too far and assume women won’t understand things or won’t be interested in them. But it’s also true that women seem to be less interested in a lot of the areas we’re interested in — a lot of the spaces we’re in are highly male, and it’s purely preference. We kind of love it when a woman’s there.
Benny: Until it’s time to fuck them with A.L.A.
Cam: It is kind of true. If it was all guys, we’d maybe be talking about some abstract philosophy or something. It’s also true that you can go too far and just think women can’t contribute anything — obviously wrong.
Rich: Yeah, the three of us are pretty good at this, we actually have good social niceties. But I think the failure mode she’s pointing out is what happens when you get a bunch of — it does seem to be an older male trait — a bunch of men in a room together where someone has to shepherd them into making the group into a unified whole, rather than having these atomized, self-obsessed, highly specialized people sitting there, each waiting for their turn to hold forth. And it is the woman’s role in this book to facilitate and bring about those interactions — to shine their light upon each man so he can have his little moment.
Rich: I think that isn’t true of all interactions among men. Obviously we have a good time and don’t need that social facilitator role. But there are definitely cases where this happens. She uses the word “sterile” — the sterility of men — which I think is a great way of putting it.
Benny: And Mrs. Ramsay’s character doesn’t really like Tansley, but she still has a lot of warmth and energy towards him, to facilitate him.
Rich: She says: “the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her again, she felt as a fact without hostility the sterility of men, for if she did not do it nobody would do it.” And I think that really rings true of my observations of gender dynamics.
Cam: I wonder how much has changed. I certainly think of older movies, and it’s like the guy’s talking and then the wife comes in and organizes — “okay we’re going for a cigar now” sort of thing. I definitely see that dynamic. I find it a little bit harder to relate to these days. I find it easy to relate to the idea of everyone being a bit solipsistic, but not so much the female catering to it all.
Cam: I can imagine it — like when you come stay and Ellen caters towards us sometimes. I see that. She’s making sure the dinner gets made and we get out the door at the correct time so we don’t miss a tennis game. We have time to talk about our philosophy et cetera. I definitely see that more. At a big-scale group thing I find it a little bit — sometimes women aren’t even there, you know?
Rich: Yeah, I don’t think this is what happens every time. I think it’s just the potential failure mode. Obviously the usual caveats apply — individual differences vastly outweigh group-level differences, and masculine-coded and feminine-coded traits are definitely not true of any given person. But in fact that’s one of the reasons I like this book — I sort of empathize with both sides, because I feel like I’m sometimes in both positions. I have these older men in my life who I should pay respect to in some sense, and I’m quite a people-pleasing person, and I’ve found myself so many times in the exact Lily Briscoe position — these guys are fucking oblivious. I know that what will make them happy is to keep asking them questions I’m not interested in so they can just hold forth. They’re not ever going to ask anything about me. They’re not interested in my work or my life. And I play the role anyway, usually, and I feel resentful about it and somewhat hostile towards them, but I continue doing it anyway.
Rich: So it’s not an actual male-female thing. I just wish I had the language to talk about this. From Baron-Cohen’s work, I think there’s some spectrum-y type trait here, a masculinity thing.
Cam: I wonder if… Yeah, I think that’s right. But sometimes I’ve read a little bit from autism activists, and one guy — Jim Sinclair, who’s an autist himself — he pushes back a little at the idea that autists don’t put effort in. He had this quote: autists try to put in tremendous effort to understand where the other person is coming from, and they kind of struggle with it, and regular people don’t put much effort into understanding where autists are coming from. He kind of inverts it.
Benny: Yeah. There are times where there’s kind of a female version of — like me kind of listening to the wife complaining, and I don’t necessarily agree with all of these complaints, but you know… maybe that’s an example of the selfish male — it’s the classic thing of they don’t want you to start providing solutions.
Cam: Yeah, that’s an assault sometimes.
Do women have better theory of mind, or are men just assholes?
Rich: One of the ways I was thinking about phrasing it: do you guys think that at the group level women have better theory of mind than men do, or do women and men have the same theory of mind and men simply don’t care about how other people are feeling?
Benny: I think certainly the latter is a thing. I wonder sometimes if I fall victim to it.
Cam: Well, we could get a handle on it by looking at disagreeableness across populations, right — men are more disagreeable than women on average, which I guess is evidence for the second theory. But I don’t know — I’ve been in enough situations where a woman has told a man, after something happens in a group setting, “do you understand how that was interpreted?” and he goes, “oh, I didn’t realize that.”
Benny: But do you relate to that — do you find that happening to you a lot?
Cam: If I’m being honest, more as I get older. I do notice sometimes it’s slightly harder, and some of that might also be a generational thing. You hang out with some younger people sometimes and there are interesting cues you realize their generation — even people five years younger than you — have developed, that you don’t quite understand.
Rich: That’s a bit different, but yeah, I think there’s a feedback mechanism here where perhaps the reason it tends to be older men is that they end up in situations where people are not giving them feedback, and so they don’t get reminders about how to be good conversational partners, how to take an interest in other people. Or they’re usually the most important person in the room and so naturally people are only inquiring about them and their work, and it just calcifies over time.
Rich: That’s not necessarily inevitable, though. I think I have had some of these traits and the rough edges have been buffed off somewhat through good relationships with women over the years — I’ve definitely had moments where I was like, oh, you interpreted this in that way, oh shit, that was not my intention at all. And I keep those examples in the back of my mind for future interactions. I think I’ve developed a better theory of mind and a better ability to model other people’s reactions, and the realization that other minds can be very different from my own. But that didn’t necessarily have to happen — it’s only happened through lots of fruitful relationships, some fruitful and some more volatile. But yeah, it’s a work in progress. And now, of course, I’m a perfect empath.
Cam: So you’re saying this old man thing is something kind of male about it rather than just narcissism?
Rich: Yeah, because narcissism — if it has any meaning at all — has to be some actual psychiatric diagnosis, right? Other than the colloquial version.
Benny: Well, it can be a colloquial version — some people are more narcissistic.
Rich: Yeah, but doesn’t that just boil down to the same thing? Like, okay, it’s just another way of saying why are men more…
Cam: So are you saying there’s a kind of male tinge to this kind of narcissism phenomenon, this type of narcissism at least?
Benny: My guess is that men have a worse theory of mind than women. For example, my mom was saying that whenever my dad upsets people, he’s unaware that he’s doing it. Whenever he’s boring people, he’s unaware. It’s not malicious — he’s just oblivious. So I’m coming around more to the fact that maybe men on average have worse theory of mind. And as you guys point out, men are more likely to be disagreeable, so they don’t see their role as smoothing things over or being careful not to ruffle feathers. They’re just interested in the truth, saying it like it is — facts don’t care about your feelings, that kind of thing.
Rich: And that’s the bit I especially relate to — I’ve often gotten in trouble from being like, “oh, I’m just being honest, I just want to be totally transparent.” And actually I should have shut my fucking mouth.
Cam: Yeah, it’s funny when you see it in someone else at some social gathering — you’re like, can I come across as a jackass? There are instances where they’re probably more of an innocent victim and being held down a bit. And then sometimes you slip into it yourself.
Cam: But me with theory of mind — I feel like I fall victim more to the Fyodor Pavlovich thing. He’s aware he’s been the clown and he’s okay with it.
Cam: I remember my ex — a couple of her friends, it was almost a shit test. She was like, “I think my friends think you’re weird” because I was being stupid, and I was aware I was kind of being stupid. And maybe the joke was on me. I was saying a Norm Macdonald joke or something, one of his long ones that go nowhere. One girl was just like, “what the fuck is this guy doing?” and I was sort of hoping the other girl was in on the joke. And then my partner at the time was just like, “my friends think you’re autistic” — her stepmom thought I was as well.
Rich: You’ve got to stop trying to tell Norm Macdonald bits.
Benny: I’ve been at a party where a guy — I didn’t even know him, and at the time I didn’t know Norm Macdonald — this guy told a Norm Macdonald joke, the spider joke. It’s really long, goes on for like five minutes, kind of got no ending. And everyone’s like, “why is he saying this?” He’s saying it at the party and people honestly thought this guy was the weirdest person there. And I’m there losing my shit — it was like the funniest thing I’d ever seen. I didn’t even know the guy that well. Then I find out it’s a Norm Macdonald joke.
Cam: So I try it sometimes, but he had to take the brunt of being the Pavlovich clown.
Rich: Anyway, just keep trying it — just tell the joke three or four more times among new groups of friends.
Cam: There’s an appeal to that. It’s almost the same crowd and you’re like, tell them another one, you know what I mean? Which is a little bit sadder.
Rich: It’s got this affecting-other-people dimension — you’re demanding five minutes of their time so you can do a meta-joke, not even a funny joke, but a joke that is not funny, which makes it funny privately to you. And the joke’s kind of on them.
Cam: Yeah, it’s like a way to hold yourself above other people.
Rich: It’s something to do with power dynamics or respect dynamics too, right? The older you get, the more you expect people to pay tribute to you in some way, which might just be giving you attention even though what you have to say is not very interesting. And it’s a self-reinforcing cycle, because we have respect for our elders in general — that’s a good thing — and for our parents, teachers, whoever else. It doesn’t have to happen though. So I’m interested in making sure for me personally that it doesn’t happen, or at least not too badly.
Rich: I know a 93-year-old woman who is almost a Mrs. Ramsay — she has an incredible memory of who is who in relation to who else, all the social context, all the intrigues.
Benny: That’s a classic wife trope as well — the husband can’t remember even your kids’ birthdays, but certainly the nephews and nieces. Or like picking out your shirts for you.
Rich: And often I think that role is enjoyed. It’s somewhat reflected in this book exactly.
Mastery over social reality is invisible
Cam: And that’s why it’s so interesting — it’s not a condemnation of “men are selfish boors.” Mrs. Ramsay is this kind of godlike… what would you call it, a chess master? She’s placing her pieces, arranging people at the table, coordinating who should go on a walk with whom. There’s a lot of information being conveyed without words, where she’ll look at her husband in a certain way to transmit some piece of information that she knows will get such-and-such a reaction out of him. And so you’re watching mastery — mastery over social reality, both in terms of being able to observe and predict all the currents and undercurrents, and then also acting with agency to shape them, to bring about a certain type of experience or to manipulate someone’s mood for the better.
Rich: And I suppose the famous angle is that this mastery is lower status than other types of mastery. But when you see it — I actually think I wouldn’t have seen a Mrs. Ramsay type before this.
Cam: I remember a real-life Mrs. Ramsay type, a big family we’d go for dinner with sometimes in the Coromandel, heaps of kids, heaps of cousins. It was like the Hebrides with the Ramseys. She would often be the one cooking, but she’s so warm — Ellen would feel comfortable with her straight away. She just ran the show.
Rich: But it’s also just not thought about explicitly, because if men on average are bad at even noticing this stuff, then it is truly invisible mastery, invisible labor. And that’s what’s interesting about being led into this world — because part of the act, unlike these men who show everything so transparently on their faces (which is kind of a funny inversion of the emotional-woman trope), part of the job of maintaining a smooth social environment is not letting it show when you’re actually having some internal turmoil about what to do, or feeling stressed or grumpy or whatever. You’re concealing the work you’re doing as part of the work itself.
Rich: Doesn’t she sort of lose her shit a little bit at the dinner thing? I’ve read some commentary around it — it seems like she doesn’t hold it together. It seems like there are two events.
Benny: Yeah, Rich is totally on.
Cam: Yeah, Rich, you’re just making shit up, dude.
Rich: All right, I haven’t read the fucking book. I admit it. Because it seems like two things happen: one, she’s trying to bring two people together, trying to set them up — they arrive late or whatever. And then there’s also the second serving of soup incident.
Cam: No, no — Mr. Ramsay is furious about the soup, not Mrs. Ramsay.
Rich: Oh, got you. Do you guys sometimes mix up Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay because they’re so close? Especially when it flips perspectives.
Cam: Reminds me of that Emma Thompson scene in Love Actually, when she finds out Alan Rickman is cheating on her. She just gets it together and gets the kids out the door. Heartbreaking.
Cam: And speaking of invisibility — that real-life Mrs. Ramsay I was telling you about, I remember her comment once: whenever there’s a barbecue and the guys go out and flip a few sausages, invariably afterwards everyone’s like “oh yeah, great cooker” — good job — and she’s like, he just flipped a few fucking sausages. I sort of give him that because it’s the male need to do that. And she’s made this potato salad and got all this shit — way harder — and then the meat’s the star of the dish and everyone’s like “oh yeah, good job.”
Rich: Yeah, it’s totally unfair. There’s a middle-aged couple I know where the wife refuses to let the husband get a barbecue, because she knows it will just be a weird performative thing for him — he thinks he’s cooking, but he’s constantly telling her to bring him the meat and bring him the platter. She’s done all the shopping and prep and sides, and he just wants to tokenly claim the glory at the end. She just refuses to let him have a barbecue at all. Which is also a fucked up dynamic, but it’s kind of funny.
Cam: It is funny how strong the social conditioning is. Like when I’ve had barbecues — it’s the one time I’m pretty willing to flip the meat.
Benny: So I’ve probably got about 10 minutes left, I gotta run after that.
Rich: Alright, so should we talk about the characters?
Cam: I don’t know if we talked about Tansley.
Rich: We kind of have a little bit. But he’s like a mini Mr. Ramsay. He seems to actually represent — insofar as it’s a book on feminism — the most direct critique of patriarchal norms, like telling Lily she’s not good enough to do various things, that she’s trying to enter men’s endeavors. Whereas with Mrs. Ramsay it’s a little more ambiguous. Is Tansley basically just the epitome of an asshole dude?
Cam: Well, that’s a little bit of it, yeah. And he’s atheist as well, right?
Benny: Yeah. He’s an annoying atheist. He’s the pre-neo-atheist. He’s us. He’s our representation.
Rich: I’m a Catholic now.
Cam: We’re the philosophy pronouncers, bro. We’re Mr. Ramsay.
Subject-object distinction
Rich: Oh yeah, we’ve got to talk about the subject-object distinction. That’s what Ramsay’s philosophy was about.
Cam: I sort of glossed over what his philosophy was actually dealing with.
Benny: Is that what he’s more focused on, or is it more that he’s just obsessed with being remembered?
Rich: Yeah, that’s the main thing, but I think there’s something about subject-object distinction in there. There’s this stuff where Andrew his son is explaining his work — “what does a kitchen table look like when you’re not there?” kind of thing. And it’s kind of funny that a philosopher of subject and objects has a bad theory of mind — like maybe that’s a meta-joke, that he doesn’t realize that the things he perceives as objects are themselves subjects. People are objects to a subject, but every person is also a subject.
Cam: I actually didn’t have bold thoughts on what that means.
Benny: I don’t really know if it’s meant to be a little funny thing, but I think more generally it’s just that pretty smart philosophers can kind of miss these social relation truths. Like the ethicists who aren’t more ethical than anyone else.
Rich: Isn’t there research that shows that?
Cam: It’s a little hard to measure — you judge people as being more ethical, that’s the thing. I think there’d be huge class confounders if you’re looking at professors, so I assume you’d test with other professors.
Benny: Exactly. And then economists are more selfish, right — isn’t that a thing? Economists, or economics students? Once you’ve learned about it or something. I mean all this stuff could be fake science now.
Rich: I think Robert Frank has some quip that “you are what you teach.” There is a finding that when you teach kids they don’t have free will — or if you convince them they don’t — within the next half an hour they’re more likely to cheat in some game or something.
Cam: That seems interesting. But then if you actually take people who’ve held that belief for like 10 years, they’re equally moral.
Benny: Well, I think there’s no one who just believes in free will for five months, let alone 10 years. Even you’d argue people slip back into the illusion of free will — psychologically, when you walk around with beliefs, you act like you have free will.
Cam: Yeah. But that’s still an interesting finding, right? Because intellectually, if you ask me “do we have free will?” I’ll give you the same answer every time, which is no.
Rich: I don’t want to derail, but yeah, I’m still not on board with all that. But do you have any other things you wanted to say, Benny — Tansley stuff or anything else?
Where to from here
Benny: No, I don’t have much. Like I said, I’m still early on. We should probably just talk about what we’re going to do now. Rich is almost done?
Rich: I am not almost done. What the fuck.
Cam: No, Rich has just done part one. Is that right?
Rich: Part one’s most of it, man. Part two’s like five pages or something.
Benny: It’s five pages but it feels like eons. It’s called “Time Passes,” motherfucker. It’s subjective passing.
Cam: That’s my joke, bro.
Benny: Oh, sorry. Your joke, but worse.
Rich: I’ve gotten enough out of this that if you guys want to leave it there, I’m happy.
Benny: I’m worried about Gravity’s Rainbow now — I’m worried I’m going to quit reading.
Rich: He reads one book by a woman and quits reading.
Cam: He doesn’t even read it — he reads the Wikipedia pages associated with the book.
Rich: Not even that, just male literary credits.
Rich: Up to you guys. I’ve got a lot out of this, and I don’t know how much more. I think there will be some things in the second half to talk about around death and entropy and maybe more actual plot elements, but whatever.
Cam: Well, the problem is it looks like we’re not reading it that quickly — Benny and I. So we might be in a similar situation next week, around page 100.
Rich: Yeah, I don’t think I’ll read anything. I won’t have anything more to say.
Cam: Benny’s still saying this is his second favourite book.
Rich: Read fucking five pages a day.
Benny: That’s how you know it’s good — you gotta savor it.
Rich: Imagine if we had to read Infinite Jest five pages at a time. I am worried about Gravity’s Rainbow.
Cam: Do you guys know about that Ulysses reading group? I think they’re reading like one page per month or something and it’s going to take them like 37 years.
Benny: No way.
Rich: Yeah. I can’t remember the exact details but it’s like a 30-year reading group.
Rich: I actually think when we next do Infinite Jest we should do it more slowly — but maybe not, because you can talk about one little section, but probably a whole medium sometimes. Should we just change the book club format so that we talk about Infinite Jest until we finish?
Cam: Yeah — that would be a good high-concept podcast. It would have such a niche audience.
Benny: I would listen to that podcast.
Rich: No — I think if we were to redo it, I’d want to spend time getting the audio right as a potential product.
Cam: Yeah, we could sell it. Or just put it out there for the world.
Rich: Because it’s like that thing — Anna Gat says, she’s the Interintellect person — the niche ones do the best. I have been vaguely thinking that if I start blogging again, I might start… we should maybe talk about cleaning up some audio and linking some of the less terrible ones. But we’d want to edit it and clean it up a bit.
Cam: Yeah. I wouldn’t do it without talking to you guys about it. I don’t think anything I’ve said is too bad.
Further thoughts on value of subjective experience in writing
Rich: Can I just say one last thing before Benny has to go? Which is in response to what you were saying about the experience of being inside someone’s mind. I kind of think I was actually wrong about that last week, where I thought the point was to give an accurate, faithful portrayal of someone else’s experience. But when I thought about it more — if you were inside someone’s mind, you wouldn’t have confusion around who such-and-such a character was. You would instantly understand and know all of the context around a randomly name-dropped person. You would shift through time really fluidly without it being like a random non-sequitur or whatever. So I actually think, ironically, it does a worse job of giving a window into someone’s world than a more straightforward, less poetic literary style where you introduce a character by describing them physically and saying a few things that set the context for who they are in relation to other people.
Rich: And I don’t think people’s internal experience looks like highly abstract metaphors either, or at least mine definitely doesn’t. I think that’s just a stylistic device unto itself — meant to convey some of the intangibility rather than being a high-fidelity impression of what someone’s mind is like.
Cam: Yeah, I think that’s right. And that fits into the classic Arnold Bennett, the contemporaneous writer who said all this modernist stuff doesn’t feel real. But maybe the response is that it doesn’t capture a mind exactly — it captures the thoughts going through…
Benny: I’m more like — this ephemeral — that’s my other thing, I can never pronounce that word: ephemeral, ephemeral.
Cam: Yeah. I agree. Like I was doing our Infinite Jest chat — it’s all about chaos and you kind of don’t know what’s what. I’m thinking something else while Richard’s thinking something, and it’s all kind of weird and joined up and abstract. But yeah, I agree — it’s not as if you’re inhabiting someone’s mind, it’s more as if you were able, insofar as it’s possible, to transcribe all their thoughts as they’re thinking them and then read it. So as I listen to this conversation, I’m not continually reminding myself who you guys are, where we are, what precisely we’re talking about, who the author is, what all the characters’ names are, etc. That’s all just background knowledge that’s not being made explicit in my thoughts. And then my thought is this stream of consciousness about all that stuff that makes sense to me because I have the underlying context. But if you were to write it out or record it as a transcript, it would come across as a little bit timeless, a little bit jumpy — less smooth, honestly, than how she’s writing the book.
Benny: I was sort of meaning — not even in just an individual sense — if you’re trying to capture the scene, it might be like: I start and stop listening and start wondering, and it captures that. It captures the reality of the scene, that everyone is a bit disconnected.
Cam: Yeah, kind of like that. If you were an alien with no conception of human psychology reading most other literature, you’d assume maybe that people are almost more linear and involved in the conversation than they are in reality. People are involved in a conversation but they’re also thinking about how to respond, how they’re looking, what the other person might think of them. There’s this personal experience of having a conversation where some percentage of you is paying direct attention to what they’re saying, but a lot of you is dealing with all these other weird emotional and psychological things.
Rich: Have you guys ever tried to do stream of consciousness writing? It’s hard to do.
Cam: Well, you’d think you could just do it.
Benny: Scott Alexander is a stream of consciousness — that’s a perfect paragraph.
Cam: Yeah, it depends how fucked up your consciousness is, how incoherent.
Cam: But some rappers are like a stream of consciousness and it’s really cool. Andre 3000 is the famous one — he sometimes does that. But there’s this guy called Heems, the Andre 3000 of this group Das Racist. He’s written this way, stream of consciousness, and you can just see it — it feels like a direct transcription of his thoughts.
Rich: How do you draw the difference between freestyle and stream of consciousness?
Cam: Well, freestyle would literally be improvisational. It’s a bit confusing with rap because “freestyle” means two things — if you’re freestyling, isn’t it just stuff coming up in your head? Yeah, freestyling is literally stream of consciousness, and literally improvisational. But what I mean is, Heems would be written the same way that To the Lighthouse is written: in a style that seems like improvisational stream of consciousness, but isn’t. And somehow he’s able to fake it essentially.
Benny: We should read that next week to compare and contrast.
Cam: Yeah. He is a bit of a literary guy — he dropped a David Foster Wallace reference once. Anyway, he’s not like a pretentious nerd either. So it definitely hits sometimes, and it hit a couple of times with this book. There was that one where it was like 10 “yets” in a row.
Rich: And the more time you spend in someone’s head, the more it becomes like an actual empathy pump — getting you to experience what they’re experiencing — and the less disorienting it becomes, to the point where if you spent all your time in their head, you would be that person, basically, or close enough. So I think it does work. But yeah, it was just a bit more — not quite what I had thought it was last week.
Are we gonna actually finish the book
Cam: So what are we doing? Yeah, what’s the plan?
Rich: My guess would be we’ve hit a lot of the themes, and if we’re going to have more meetings about it we’d be rehashing a lot of the same stuff, or just talking more about the specifics of the plot.
Cam: To be honest I got a little bit out of Rich’s analysis of it.
Benny: So you can do that next week. It would be alright. But the problem is that’s all I’ve got up until page 140, so I’m not going to be able to…
Rich: I assume there’s a bit more when they finally go to the lighthouse 10 years later.
Cam: Yeah, that’s the last 50 pages. I’d love to talk about that, but you guys need to teleport there basically.
Benny: It’s only — we could do that. We could just do part three. How important is part two?
Rich: It’s like time is subjective and feels long. It’s surreal, it’s so short.
Cam: Should we just say we do another session, get as far as we get? It would be ideal if we could cover that last section, but if not we can always just do a short meeting. It doesn’t have to be 12 hours — we could just spend half an hour if it only deserves that, or 20 minutes.
Rich: When we look back, it’s low stakes. We’ll never be like, “I wish we didn’t do that extra week on Virginia Woolf.”
Cam: The other big question is what are we doing next. Are we Gravity’s Rainbow-ing it?
Benny: I read a couple of pages and I’m already confused.
Rich: Oh, shit. We need an easy palate cleanser.
Cam: Maybe, but I’m not sure. It seems like it could be like Infinite Jest — tough at the start — but it’s fucking outdated and archaic, talking about gravity and shit.
Benny: Curvature of space-time, rainbow.
Rich: We could do a really good palate cleanser, but we don’t all own that now necessarily. Something like Stoner. Just read Stoner again.
Cam: Books like Stoner. Or we could do A Boy’s Own Story. That would be easy, and short. We could do a Ted Chiang story or something.
Rich: I’m kind of keen to do Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.
Cam: Specific interviews or the whole book?
Rich: I think the book. We’ll do the first 100 pages the first segment — I think we’ll just do it like that.
Benny: I got a copy of that recently, so I could do that.
Rich: I’m guessing Cam doesn’t have one.
Cam: No, I do have it.
Benny: Plus, I live in the first world, so I can get books delivered pretty quickly.
Rich: America.
Cam: I’ll do another week of Woolf, mate.
Rich: Alright, one more week of Woolf.
Benny: Yes. Alright, sweet. See you later, fellas.
Cam: See you guys.
Rich: See you at the lighthouse.
