2084

kw: book reviews, fiction, social experimentation

Suppose, having committed a minor crime, then a few more (not so minor), you are arrested, and you are presented with a choice: either a year or two of jail time, or a social program titled "Transition". You and your spouse (both must participate) will live in the home of a Mentor couple who will retrain your life skills, with full expectation that you and said spouse will emerge as contributing members of society, rather than a drain upon it.

That is the premise of The Transition by Luke Kennard. The protagonist, Karl, has sort of stumbled into a life of credit card fraud to make ends meet. When the personal Ponzi scheme falls apart, he takes the chance to avoid overt jail time by committing himself and his wife Genevieve to The Transition.

I could summarize the plot, but why try? The pendulum-swing of society has produced a generation some call the Millennials. A certain proportion of them are heedless, unambitious, and were "raised" to expect things to work out, even as society has swayed so as to stack the deck against them. Allow me to say that the majority of Millennials are quite a bit more savvy than either Karl or Genevieve (though Genevieve is portrayed as having more street smarts). But I can think of a number of young adults who might actually benefit from The Transition, were it to operate as advertised.

Of course, what is the point of writing a big novel if things work as advertised? There is a subversive element, graduates and non-graduates of Transition, and of course Karl gets involved. It seems he finds a streak of ambition hidden within, and his ambition is to bring the system down. Do you think it can work? Look at the title I chose for this post for your answer!

Lab rats of the world, unite

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, social experimentation, memoirs

George Plimpton may not have created the genre of participatory journalism, but he has certainly inspired a generation of self-experimenters. A. J. Jacobs of Esquire magazine comes close to calling himself "Plimpton Lite" early on in The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Live as an Experiment. He hasn't been clobbered by any heavyweight champions, nor "enjoyed" earning flop sweat at stand-up comedy. But during a recent year or so, he has spent periods from a day to a month

• Impersonating his family's nanny on an online dating site (with her collaboration)
• Outsourcing most of the busy work in his life to two companies in India (one is still on retainer)
• Telling the truth relentlessly, including saying whatever pops into his head (with variable success, and variable amounts of risk)
• For an evening at the Oscars, impersonating a very shy actor whom he resembles (with the actor's grateful consent)
• Attempting to make every decision rationally, such as buying about 40 kinds of tooth paste to test them all (I'd have suggested getting an online subscription to Consumer Reports)
• After arranging a bio article for Esquire that included nude photography, he accepted the woman's suggestion that he also be photographed nude, and his photo published with hers in the article.
• Attempting to conduct himself as George Washington would have. This included bowing rather than shaking hands (he'd have done well to get pointers from Donald Trump)
• Doing only one thing at a time, after learning that "multitasking" is not real; we actually do task switching, and the more frequently we do so, the more time we waste.
• Catering to his wife's every whim (to the extent that this is possible for a guy!) He also offered his wife the chance to write the CODA to this chapter, which she accepted with gleeful alacrity!

Appendix A consists of the 110 rules that  George Washington, in early middle age, wrote out and attempted to follow. Old George had been quite a jerk when younger, cherry tree fables notwithstanding, and crafted himself into an admirable specimen, though not the demigod later writers adulated.

Appendix B defines a few dozen cognitive errors to which we all fall prey, that he compiled as he got into being Vulcanly rational. On this, it occurred to me that the makers of Star Trek were wise to make Spock only half Vulcan. It would have been impossible for any actor to behave in a totally rational Vulcan way.

My favorite cognitive bias, in full as he wrote it:

Bias Blind Spot — We fail to compensate for those biases that we're aware of. (In other words, even behavioral economists fall for biases.)

A slogan my company used for years (not recently, curiously) was "Continuous Improvement". A. J. Jacobs reports that some of these experiments affected his life and improved his marriage. For example, the month of truth-telling opened his eyes to how much he and his wife bicker about trifles. They haven't stopped bickering, but, he writes, it has reduced by about a third. Simply saying what you mean without sniping can gradually engender more trust. But he judges that saying whatever pops into your head is usually destructive. We can filter what we say without lying, and about a dozen of George Washington's rules address the same matter.

Experimentation is a good way of expanding our comfort zone. A certain amount of experiment is needed to continuously improve. The company slogan may have been about business, but we can apply it to our lives. A portion of the chorus of a song I wrote has it

We are dealt the cards, /But our own hand we play.

If this book inspires some of us to try new and better things, it will have done its job.