"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful....
....but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were."

This is the first line of "Gone With the Wind." Laura's comments responding to "Do Women Try Harder" reminded me of this line - the essence of the Southern Belle was charm, or (as we would say today) charisma. There are other ways to put it: "je ne sais quoi", "he has a certain something", "what is it about her?"

Men respond to it as well as women do, in my experience (more honestly, I respond to it as well as any women I know do.) Laura labels it a sort of "personal status", and that seems right. Once hooked by charisma, it's easy to wonder things like "how can she not be aware of how cool she is?"

I'm trying to think of a suitable analogy for the interpersonal role of charisma, and I think "savoriness" works - the umami flavor whose taste buds were only discovered a few years ago. Chefs and gourmands were well aware of the savory quality in food before it could be pinned down as a real phenomenon. Perhaps similarly, you can point to beauty, outgoingness, wealth, power, humor, etc., etc. as "attractive", but they don't tell you what "essence of attraction" is. Charisma is "essence of attraction" - it's attractiveness stripped of specific context and added to an otherwise normal appearance and personality.

But there still has to be a certain "something" in the charismatic individual's personality that makes them that way. "Self confidence" or "assurance around others" is how it usually gets described, but it seems to me that this is another way of saying "success breeds success". It also ignores uncharismatic outgoing people. Not every used-car salesman is charismatic.

How about this: the charismatic person gives you the feeling of emotionally connecting with them, without giving you a handle you can use to move them. It's the feeling of being a small planet in orbit around a large one: the laws of physics tell you that both bodies are moved from their path, but the large one deviates imperceptibly. Charismatic people have more social mass than the rest of us.




- posted by Scott @ 6:57 PM (0) comments

 
Do Women Work Harder At Attractiveness?

Eugene Volokh has an interesting note from a female friend. Excerpts:

I think almost any man can be sexy, can become a good flirt, can learn to attract women, if he is truly willing to. Like most social skills, the general principles aren't that mysterious, and are quantifiable if you pay attention.

I agree completely with this. Here's more:

And I know a fair number of (good adjectives) single men, but [it's generally] also clear why they're single. They don't listen, and won't; they won't get a real job; they're boring but don't want to acknowledge it or do anything about it. Hey, if that shirt was "in" when they were in high school, no need to see if any ads/mannequins/humans under 60 wear it today.

Notice what she focuses on as the problems. And more:

I don't have a single female friend who hasn't asked herself, "What am I doing wrong?" and been totally open -- often too open, in a self-blame-y way -- to the answer, and to changing the answer, often with great success. But I almost never find that men ask that question, or are even willing to hear the answer, let alone do anything about it.

This is the Big Question: do men try as hard as women?

I think the question is really should men try as hard as women? Maybe it's rational for men to not try as hard! I'm single, and only moderately successful, so let me take a crack at why I don't try harder. It's like elasticity: If a woman tries 10% harder and a man tries 10% harder, do they both get 10% more success? NO! I believe it's easier for women to derive benefit from extra effort!

Stereotypically speaking, men are powerfully influenced by beauty, while women are powerfully influenced by status. Men will chat up stunning women knowing they have no chance. I would bet that women do the comparable thing with unavailable high-status men. On the other hand, men are not particularly influenced by a woman's social status. Women are generally forgiving of a man's looks. The difference between how status and beauty work explains a lot:

1) Beauty can be partially purchased from the drugstore, the gym, the stylist, or the surgeon. Status cannot. There is no "extreme makeover" available for low-status men (short, shy, poor, etc.) The closest you can come is courage in a bottle, which works best if your love interest is also half-drunk. Improvement is cheaper for women than for men, and has a higher chance of success.

2) In a group encounter, you have to advertise more. Beauty is not zero-sum among women. Women focus more on improving their own appearance than damaging the appearance of others. Status is nearly zero-sum among men, so men often try to lower the status of other men and raise their own. Again, here improvement is cheaper for women than men.

3) Men still make the first overt move in most cases. Having done so, the man has already crossed his first interest threshold, while the woman hasn't. From this point, both sides are evaluating personality, but the woman starts with more "points". Having invested the effort, the man is probably willing to take some time to evaluate her personality, while the woman is still applying her first filter - is he worth talking to? Speaking grimly and with some exaggeration, the average outcome for most men is immediate rejection by an attractive person. This is not true for women.

Summing up: A man advertises in a zero-sum environment, every sales interaction starts with some up-front investment on his part, and upgrading is expensive and uncertain to even work. A woman advertises in a non-zero-sum environment, is solicited rather than solicits (possibly often enough that "unwanted sexual attention" is actually an issue for her - rarely so for men), and upgrading is straightforward.

Under these circumstances, why wouldn't women try harder than men? They get much greater output from extra input! My suggestion to women is, if you want men to try harder, make it clear that a payoff is actually likely.




- posted by Scott @ 11:05 PM (2) comments

 
Say You, Say Me
I'm currently taking a Dialects class, and as I hung around with a linguist back in the 90's, I get to compare what acting teachers say about language-sounds with what I learned from her. The teacher is wonderfully talented (when was the last time you heard somebody jump from Yorkshire to Cockney to Brooklyn to Birmingham, Ala. - in the middle of explaining "Received Pronunciation" (RP)?)

The implicit question in a conversation about accents (not your native language) and dialects (your native language, but the speaker ain't from around here) is "Why do they sound like that?" As in, "Why don't we have that funny throat-clearing ch-sound they have in German?" (Meaning the unvoiced velar fricative [x] - speaking of which, here's an International Phonetic Alphabet-to-Braille translation page...groovy.)

So "why do the fur'ners talk funny" is always in the back of your head in this class. Unfortunately, it sounded like my teacher shortchanged us on the explanation. If I have my notes right, she suggested at some point that RP lacks a certain sound that Standard American English uses "because it's easier to do without it." Huh? Here's my old friend's (wildly paraphrased - it's been years) explanation why that isn't enough of an explanation, and it's an excellent example of a symmetry argument hiding in plain sight:

If something is easier for one group of people, it's easier for every group of people - all else being equal. So if "easier" were the whole explanation, everybody should sound the same by now.

That's it. Hence, if "easier" has anything to do with why two groups of people differ in their pronunciations, it can only mean "easier in context", rather than absolutely easier. But in that case, you haven't explained anything! You've simply substituted the word "easier" for the word "different", and swept the entire history of sound changes under the rug.

Something related to the sound change must have happened - perhaps in another, adjacent sound - to make it easier. It's not enough to say "Oh, Americans palatalize here and here because it's easier" without explaining why Londoners *don't*. Maybe Londoners hold their jaws more closed so they get brighter front vowels, and that supports harder medial consonants, whatever - but there's always a more elaborate and meaningful explanation than "easier".

- posted by Scott @ 6:50 PM (0) comments

 
Reagan's Funeral

showed another glimpse of something I've always admired in George Bush (the Elder) - his ability to be overwhelmed by emotion. He chokes up in public less readily, but more easily, than any public figure I can think of. Here's a transcript from a Larry King interview, where he talks about his daughter Robin's death at age 3:

GEORGE H.W. BUSH: I don't know if I could read it. We're very emotional in our family, and this was a long time ago. I've gotten over being a sissy about it[emphasis mine], because that is very personal. And we hurt. But now, you know, a lot of families, Larry, when they have...

KING: Loss.

GEORGE H.W. BUSH: Yes, a loss, they go apart. In ours I think it's closer together.

50 years after his baby daughter died, he chokes up on Larry King Live, and calls himself a sissy, and says he's over it - and he knows he's not. And you know that if anyone broke down in that way in front of him, the word "sissy" would never enter his mind.

And he knows he's prone to emotionalism:

"I was in awe," says Bush. "President Reagan went to Normandy and gave those great speeches. When he came back, I asked him, 'How did you ever get through those speeches without breaking up?' He said, 'Here's what you do. You write it out yourself, and then you say it over and over again. And by doing that, it is still personal the way you say it, but you don't feel that you are apt to choke up.'"

That could be any experienced actor talking to any layman - but GHWB's father was a Senator, and Bush himself was a war hero, served in the House, had served as CIA Director and as U.N. Ambassador, and had been Vice President for four years at that point. He was no stranger to public speaking and grave events.

He knows his heart lives permanently on his sleeve, and he can't do anything about it - and at age 80, it still embarasses him just a bit. What a strange, lovely pair of men, Reagan and Bush I, that they both could retain a core innocence even after the hardening experience of the Presidency.
- posted by Scott @ 8:56 PM (0) comments

 
Deep Thought of the Day*

Reading an article by R.R. Reno in the June issue of First Things. The big idea:

If behavior is identity, then redemption requires the death of self. This is why the idea of salvation can be terrifying.

To discard harmful ways of living and reacting - well-worn grooves that you constantly trip over - is incredibly difficult. My first acting teacher suggested this approach

"Don't try to change the bad habit now - but steadily become more aware that you're doing it. When you get sick of knowing it's still there, you'll stop."

*No guarantee of deep thoughts appearing every day.
- posted by Scott @ 6:44 PM (0) comments

 
So What Do People Visit?

A9 tells me that people who visit National Review Online are also likely to visit this site, which has the URL "spintechmag.com", but is apparently a French site about cosmetic surgery. Did Jonah Goldberg link to this in his column? Not that I can find....

Thank you, A9! Vast new worlds open before me....
- posted by Scott @ 6:25 PM (0) comments

 
A9 toolbar

A9 is an Amazon subsidiary that opened about 6 months ago. I'm testing out their toolbar (download here), which looks like a useful blogging tool. The Google toolbar is a favorite of mine, so I can't help but examine A9 under Google's steady beam. It holds up decently, with only a little sweating and throat clearing, entirely because of new features it provides.

Nifty feature 1: the toolbar is integrated with the common-interest features on Amazon (the part that says "People who bought 'Marat-Sade' also bought...."). That means you can see what other sites are popular among A9 users who visited the site you're looking at. You can also see reviews of the site and submit a review, which will be posted on Amazon. Pretty cool.... This is under the "Site Info" menu, which has little overlap with the Google toolbar's "Info" menu.

Nifty feature 2: the "Diary" feature - for a particular website, you can record notes to yourself, which you see again when you revisit that page. This is the relevant idea to me, since it means I can push back the blogging session to the end of the day without worrying that I'll lose track of my thoughts.

The web search seems to be their own - the style is not very attractive (orange on khaki), but the search is functional. DHTML tabs provide search results under Amazon's book list, as well as a recent-search history. This is imperfect: if you search for the same thing with only minor query variations, it's a pain to scroll through fifty similar entries. Interestingly, it looks as though the A9 toolbar reads the Google toolbar's searches and stores them as well!

A9 only really falls down in its popup-blocker: the Google blocker knows that clicking a link could legitimately open a new window, where A9 asks "is this OK?" and defaults to "no" (and to "never ask on this site again"). For this kind of behavior, these defaults are too harsh.

Overall, a good little tool - we'll see if I still want to keep it in a couple of weeks.
- posted by Scott @ 5:56 PM (0) comments

 
Shrek 2

is absolutely hysterical. No deep thoughts were prompted (in my head) by the making of this film. Go see it.
- posted by Scott @ 8:18 PM (0) comments