Rather than optimization, they emphasize “hemibel thinking,” which says to look for operational performance that is below the theoretically possible by at least a factor of three, because then big improvements can be achieved with or without optimality.
I asked if she thinks Trump even knows how to use 4chan. The message board is notoriously confusing for the uninitiated, nothing like Facebook and other social platforms designed to make it easy to publish quickly and often. “I think he knows way more than what we think,” she said.
I’ve seen signs of your existence, whisperings in the Tumblr, reblogs of @nostalgebraist-autoresponder. Oft I have wondered if there was a @nostalgebraist. Now I know. Apparently the autoresponder was representative enough, because I almost missed that this wasn’t it, attributing the conceptual coherency to luck and shortness.
:)
In seriousness, though, the above post was tagged #quotes, which means it’s not my writing, it’s an out-of-context quote.
Posting quotes in this barely signposted manner, almost as though they’re just bizarre original text posts, is a gimmick I’ve been doing on this blog for … wow, 7 years or so by now? There’s over 3000of them
Finding novel ways to fail the Turing test: a core part of the nostalgebraist brand since the very beginning!
I know tumblr is full of anti-intellectualism but seeing this
in the notes of a post facing the full brunt of tumblr people getting mad
about philosophy jokes not being immediately accessible to people with no interest in philosophy is just hilarious. like yeah ok please explain hawking radiation to me while doing so both in full detail but also while talking to me like i’m somebody with no knowledge of physics whatsoever.
Almost no quantum mechanics concepts make sense unless you phrase them in linear algebra terms, and I don’t think “has taken enough linear algebra to know what tensor products are” makes you a layperson anymore.
Go ahead, explain entanglement *correctly* without putting it in linear algebra terms and without reinventing that language (in some shitty informal incorrect way).
Though I agree with the general principle, I couldn’t resist taking particular case as a challenge.
I thought about it idly, on and off, for the better part of a day, and eventually concluded that entanglement is a tricky example, because even the formal algebraic definition doesn’t “make (enough) sense”!
This is not generic waffle about QM being weird or hard, it’s a gloss on the specific observation that professional physicists do not find the properties of entanglement obvious from its definition:
It’s perfectly evident in the original EPR paper that the states they consider generally cannot be written as product states. That is, EPR and those discussing their paper clearly “understood entanglement” in the sense of being able to formally write down and discuss entangled states.
Yet, for several decades after that, no one “understood entanglement” in the sense of understanding it was a phenomenon irreducible to classical correlation via common cause. Bell’s paper was seen as a startling finding. It’s not simply an explication of what is obvious to anyone who knows the algebra – not unless our bar for “knowing the algebra” is so high that no physicist from 1935 to 1964 managed to cross it.
If one wants to “describe entanglement to laypeople,” one could imagine two very different routes.
In one route, you give some lay explanation of quantum states and, from this, define an entangled state. But this won’t stop your lay listener from proposing impossible hidden variables – not unless your lay definitions are somehow so good they entail Bell’s theorem as an obvious consequence, which isa deeper understanding than professional physicists get from the actual algebraic definition!
In the other route, you start out with Bell, and characterize “entanglement” as a specific phenomenon wherein multiple systems are related in a classically impossible way. This is actually pretty easy to convey in lay terms, as in the sections of Mermin’s moon paper describing the results of the gedanken demonstration.
Neither of these provides a complete understanding, because the two – the definition and its consequences – are linked by a nontrivial proof hard to compress into intuition. (Compare to AC and Banach-Tarski: easy to describe either one, but very difficult to “understand” the two such that they seem obviously connected.)
If “understanding” means finding the proof obvious, as opposed to merely knowing the premise and the conclusion, then it’s debatable whether anyone at all “understands.” Nor is it clear that an understanding of the premise is the more important part; perhaps the concept has a deeper life behind its statement in one formalism, much like the concept of “energy,” which has enough of a conceptual independence that we can recognize things in QM and GR as “energy” without having unified the formalisms.
I asked if she thinks Trump even knows how to use 4chan. The message board is notoriously confusing for the uninitiated, nothing like Facebook and other social platforms designed to make it easy to publish quickly and often. “I think he knows way more than what we think,” she said.
1) It’s true that Ohtori Academy is cult-like, but if it’s a metaphor for anything, it’s a metaphor for the patriarchy. Not just being indoctrinated into a small group, but the indoctrination of society as a whole into unhealthy and abusive gender roles. So it’s not surprising that the show would reveal very little of the outside world. You can leave a cult and join regular society, but leaving society is harder. You’re necessarily going to the fringes (to the End of the World) where there aren’t ready made values to guide you.
2) We do see an alternate value system in the show, it’s just that the values come from within the cult-world itself, not from outside it. The stated values of the society are used to challenge the hypocrisy of that society. (Kind of like using the stated values in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution to challenge what America actually is.) Utena is the most noble character, but as it turns out she got her idea of nobility from a childhood encounter with someone who she later learns is an abusive monster. What do you do with that information? You could abandon trying to be noble and heroic because those ideals came from a tainted source, or you can continue to embody them and use them against the system, which is sort of what she does. She ultimately fails to overthrow her society and winds up outside it, but presumably she will keep trying to be noble on the outside, even if that desire originally came from within society. And her rebellion does seem to have improved things a bit within the Academy - some of the other characters have matured thanks to her and may escape themselves someday.
3) So since the show is about living in a corrupted world, it’s not surprising that we would see little of what’s outside the world. There’s very little to see there yet. And it’s difficult to imagine building a newer, better world because our worldview necessarily arises out of that which we know. Change doesn’t come out of nowhere. The tools to improve the world necessarily come out of the world’s corruption. You take what’s actually good in society and turn it against the rest.
Although the show is clearly “about gender roles,” I don’t find the details of this very plausible. And in the end I guess this feels like the bad message I was worried about, in my OP.
Seriously, though. Both. The interpretation of a complex work generally yields – complexity. And if you can say one thing about about Utena, that thing would be “it is overstuffed with symbolic metaphor, and many of its elements symbolize more than one thing at once.”
There are definitely things that militate towards your interpretion: Ohtori is a sui generis creation of Akio’s narcissistic madness, it is an abusive little private world unlike the real reality outside, you can [ahem] revolutionize the world just by stepping outside and shrugging and ceasing to care. Like, for example, the ending, and all the stuff leading up to the ending.
There are also things that militate towards @femmenietzsche’s interpretation, wherein the insanity of Ohtori is a symbolic reification – or even just an instantiation – of the general insanity of society. This is probably clearer to a Japanese person, or to someone very familiar with late-twentieth-century Japanese high-school norms, since a lot of the stuff we see in Ohtori is (a caricature of) deep normality rather than an outgrowth of Akio’s lyrical fairy-tale weirdness. Queen bees and wannabes, big men on campus, confused yearning, blah-de-blah. Most famously, so many people have found real-world resonance in the way that the show deals with adolescent sexuality and sexual politics – in the actions and desires of the heroes, and in the cruel crushing response of the setting – that it’s very hard to reduce that down to “it’s just Akio’s toxic cult.” (Although, of course, culture has changed a lot with time, in Japan and elsewhere.)
…and there are also Important Symbolic Elements that are neither of those things. One of the major persistent messages of the show seems to be, uh, “patriarchy is super gay,” which is a thematic strain that you definitely can’t comfortably collapse into either of the concepts above. Etc.
I don’t have a lot to add to Utena discourse (analyzing Utena is like making fun of a clown), but I will say this whole cult allegory sounds overly reductionist. There are many key elements of cult life that one doesn’t see in Utena (recruitment, the tenets, and the fact that the leader is hidden for the whole first season.) There are definitely some parallels, but the most you can say is that Utena is about a hothouse atmosphere, and cults are also that, but so are high school and academia and tight-knit families, which are all about equally as valid a target for Ohtori allegories.
That being said, when people want to analyze epic works, they often put far too much weight on the ending and final reveal (as @nostalgebraist is doing.) That’s not what made the meat of the structure tick (count the mixed metaphors in that sentence on one hand!) Instead, watch a random or popular episode, and tell me what’s going on there. Talk about Nanami and Wakaba and Juri and what’s going on with them to create such compelling stories.
I don’t have much to add other than to say that I don’t think that metaphor in a story requires the rigorous 1:1 mapping that @nostalgebraist does. Even if Utena herself is not concerned with the rest of society (as she mostly isn’t) that doesn’t mean her journey can’t be taken as a stand in for a broader political struggle. Even though there is no Bad Guy of Patriarchy in real life you can defeat, that doesn’t mean it’s not about patriarchy. Taking nebulous social forces and personifying them like that is just normal storytelling. Because a person is different from a society, that means that things don’t always “work” the way they do in the real world. The metaphor might be an imperfect fit when you inspect it closely. But as @balioc says, that’s fine because any good story will be amorphously about several things at once.
All of this is completely fair! I think we can all agree that no scheme of correspondence is going to “solve” the whole thing by 1:1 resolving textual elements to their equivalents.
Although I slipped into this kind of talk for the sake of rhetoric, I’m not really trying to present my own proposal as a strict substitute for all others which “wins the contest” and is left standing alone. I definitely don’t think the whole thing is “about” “a cult” and the rest is window dressing.
I don’t feel like I have anything to say that directly continues the thread’s debate in a productive way, but I do feel an impulse to clarify what is motivating me here. It’s tough to phrase, but I’ll try …
To me, Utena seems as much “a story about metaphors” as “a metaphorical story.” That is, it’s very concerned with the ways specific ideas, ideals, conceptual frames take root in people’s minds, the way people cling to these and project them onto others, and the tension that emerges when a person’s totalizing notion of What It’s All About comes into conflict with another person’s, or with brute reality.
For this reason, an interpretation which makes the events onscreen into a microcosm of reality or society feels like an instance of the very behavior whose appeal, ubiquity, and perils the show investigates, problematizes and parodies.
“Is this the world, or just a high school? Should I keep pressing on in pursuit of the beautiful story that has shaped my life for years – and if I stop, what even am I then? Am I in conflict with one person and their beliefs, or a whole social order/reality and its nature? When my frame breaks, must I accept yours?”
When I talk about cults, it’s because cult members – and those in similar groups or under similar pressures, I don’t want to be overly specific here – experience these tensions with unusual intensity and personal relevance.
It’s wrong to take one fork of these dilemmas and say “oh, it was all this guy’s frame, and it then breaks,” as I sort of did earlier. But my motivation was to push back, dialectically, against the other fork (common among interpreters of any work that feels metaphorical) that interprets the story’s particulars as representatives of more universal, more eternal types and structures.
“Is this The Way Thing Are, or just the way you/I have chosen to be?” is a question the characters wrestle with and fight over. The answer “it feels so much like the first one, yet sometimes it is shockingly the second” feels at least truer to the spirit than “yeah, it’s the first one.”
1) It’s true that Ohtori Academy is cult-like, but if it’s a metaphor for anything, it’s a metaphor for the patriarchy. Not just being indoctrinated into a small group, but the indoctrination of society as a whole into unhealthy and abusive gender roles. So it’s not surprising that the show would reveal very little of the outside world. You can leave a cult and join regular society, but leaving society is harder. You’re necessarily going to the fringes (to the End of the World) where there aren’t ready made values to guide you.
2) We do see an alternate value system in the show, it’s just that the values come from within the cult-world itself, not from outside it. The stated values of the society are used to challenge the hypocrisy of that society. (Kind of like using the stated values in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution to challenge what America actually is.) Utena is the most noble character, but as it turns out she got her idea of nobility from a childhood encounter with someone who she later learns is an abusive monster. What do you do with that information? You could abandon trying to be noble and heroic because those ideals came from a tainted source, or you can continue to embody them and use them against the system, which is sort of what she does. She ultimately fails to overthrow her society and winds up outside it, but presumably she will keep trying to be noble on the outside, even if that desire originally came from within society. And her rebellion does seem to have improved things a bit within the Academy - some of the other characters have matured thanks to her and may escape themselves someday.
3) So since the show is about living in a corrupted world, it’s not surprising that we would see little of what’s outside the world. There’s very little to see there yet. And it’s difficult to imagine building a newer, better world because our worldview necessarily arises out of that which we know. Change doesn’t come out of nowhere. The tools to improve the world necessarily come out of the world’s corruption. You take what’s actually good in society and turn it against the rest.
Although the show is clearly “about gender roles,” I don’t find the details of this very plausible. And in the end I guess this feels like the bad message I was worried about, in my OP.
The most common metaphorical reading of Utena of which I’m aware is
one of adolescence. Everything matters so much, everything is bound by
rules that just seem like part of the world, rather than choices
individuals make. Part of its tale is one of how it was beautiful, how
nice it was to have meaning we didn’t have to make ourselves, how it’s
something some of us ache and long for, but it’s still something that at
the end, we have to leave.
Yeah, I can definitely believe this is common – I saw someone saying something similar to this last night in another post-stream discussion. But this just … really does not feel compatible with what I just watched?
I mean, yes, the show does capture an adolescent state of mind which you describe very well in this comment. But virtually all of the focus is on the pain this mindset can cause, and the way it exposes you to manipulation by the very worst people.
It’s portrayed as “beautiful” insofar as the mindset involves seeing this stuff as beautiful, internally. It captures that feeling onscreen, even for an adult viewer, through the Romantic architecture and overwrought (“adolescent”) symbolism and all that, and perhaps a viewer whose adolescence was less woeful than the characters’ can experience this with a kind of conflicted nostalgia.
But for the characters themselves, it starts out bad and gets worse. In its earliest and most innocuous stages it’s about a high school clique of mean weirdos with a fight club where they chant ominous nonsense; by its last third it’s simply, unrelentingly, not at all metaphorically about sexual and psychological abuse (often incestuous) of teenagers by adults.
The salient thing here is not that the abuse victims have nonzero flaws, it’s that they’re being abused. (Indeed their “immaturity” is cited by the main abuser in his own defense, and we’re clearly meant to see this as a despicable attempt to transfer blame.)
The character who most dramatically flips over to making-their-own-meaning is depicted before this flip as experiencing apparently endless, Christlike suffering, metaphorically pieced by a million swords. Leaving behind such an experience is not what I would call “a bittersweet decision to put aside childish things.” It’s what I would call “getting the fuck out of there.” Maybe said character is more grown-up after this happens, maybe they aren’t; it doesn’t matter and it shouldn’t matter.
