Book Journal: Sword Art Online

... Because of course watching the anime itself or any of the movies isn't enough.

There's a weird thing that happens whenever I try to read the Japanese light novels that some of my favorite animes are based on: I get to the end of the portions that have been translated, get impatient with waiting for more translated volumes to be released, and decide that I am once again going to try to read these things in Japanese.

It's interesting to try, and it's good practice, and in the three months I had with the Japanese version of one of the light novels before the English translation was released, I made it about halfway through the prologue. My comprehension was good for the parts I did reach, but I do need to work a bit on how long that takes me. (The English version of the novel took me less than three hours, of course. For the whole thing.)

But either way. The light novels are just as good as the anime is (which is both praise and criticism, since there are good and bad things about the anime). I've rarely noticed any problems with material being removed or reorganized, unlike with many books that have been made into movies or TV shows in the US. Pacing tends to be kind of odd with them, though - the number of anime episodes that typically comes out of a light novel doesn't match well with the typical number of episodes in a season, which leads to breaks between seasons in weird places, but I don't usually mind that much.

Selecting Candidates

The various writers and editors at FiveThirtyEight will occasionally post some of the group chats they do on various topics. I don't always pay that much attention, because they can be unfocused and hard to read, but some of them are quite good.

Such as this one about the Democratic Party changing their rules about how superdelegates are involved in nominating presidential candidates. There's a decent breakdown of both sides' position and reasoning in there: the faction in favor of the rule change wants to make sure that the superdelegates can't just override the voters, whereas the faction against it wants to prevent the party elites from losing too much of the power they would need to prevent the Democrats from running off a cliff.

One of the detailed arguments against the rule change that I found particularly convincing was the point that this doesn't actually prevent the superdelegates from overriding the voters' wishes. If anything, by specifically defining situations in which they don't get a say and situations in which they do, it might cause some superdelegates to believe that when they do get to vote that they don't have to pay attention to anything except their own preferences.

On the other hand, the idea that ultimately any choice other than trusting the voters' judgment and relying on them to pick the winner is kind of missing the point is rather convincing as well. And there were a lot of interesting questions about how much the results of past elections would have changed if the new rules had been in place earlier; it doesn't look like they'd have changed much.

In the end, while I share some concerns from the chat about whether this makes the Democrats more likely to do something incredibly weird or stupid with their nomination, I don't think this is going to result in too many disruptions to their ability to nominate good candidates. I suppose we'll have to wait until 2020 to see how that turns out.

Skills and Job Requirements

There was an interesting article in the New York Times a few days ago about how sometimes the people with the most talent for a particular field actually make the worst teachers of that subject. For me, it's an interesting opening into thinking about what skills are actually required for various jobs - a topic I suspect isn't as intuitive as it might seem at first glance.

The example provided of teachers is a good place to start, since while they obviously require knowledge of the field they are teaching, they also require clear communication skills and the ability to understand their students. The fact that not every physicist, computer scientist, or other expert necessarily needs those skills is what creates the problem from the editorial.

Leaders and managers in a wide variety of fields are similar to that example, if not more so: many require more skill with communication, planning, and listening than they do in the actual subject matter that the people they lead use. In practice, of course, knowledge of their field is helpful enough that it's a requirement as well, but many leaders run into trouble when they focus on that skill to the detriment of their ability to communicate and lead.

And just about any job requires the ability to work well with others in a number of different ways. This is why it's possible to get fired for being racist, sexist, or just generally hard to get along with; if your bosses can't have you work together with coworkers without risking work-damaging drama, they may choose to get rid of the person causing the drama.

Remembering John McCain

As most people reading this will probably know by now, Senator John McCain died this past Saturday.

As far as I can tell, just about everyone is finding some things to praise him for and some things to criticize about his legacy. They're not the same things, depending on the ideology of the source in question, but that's hardly unexpected. There is, in fact, quite a lot that can be said about him, both good and bad, and to be honest I have no real desire to rehash all of it here. Both the NYT and the WSJ have a number of interesting pieces about him if anyone reading this is looking for something more detailed. I, personally, will leave it at this:

Even with the flaws he had, I can think of plenty of reasons to respect what he managed to accomplish, and I think the Senate and the US will be worse off now that he's gone.

Fair winds and following seas to him and his family. The rest of us have the watch, and will have to do the best we can.

Depressing Positive Stories

There's a lot of social media stories out there about inspiring ways in which people overcome challenges, whether that's finding new jobs, raising money to deal with critical expenses, or donating various valuable things to coworkers in need. It's an inspiring example of how people can make the world better, right?

Unfortunately, a lot of these stories end up being kind of depressing, because they leave many people asking why that level of effort was necessary in order to solve a problem that could be much more easily fixed a different way. That's the topic of the blog post I found which made me want to write about this.

My focus is on a slightly different detail than trying to establish which problems are the responsibility of society as a whole or government to solve, though. To me, one of the most significant points to come out of these stories is that the solutions which the people in them manage to find and use aren't the sort of things that will work for everyone. 

Not everyone has the time to come up with detailed pictures and write-ups to accompany their GoFundMe campaign, particularly not when they're also battling illness - and even those that do have to rely at least a little bit on luck, since it's not like there's a consistently applied standard for what goes viral. And, indeed, something like 90% of all of those campaigns fail - so do we really want to rely on something with that level of success to ensure everyone can pay for medical care?

There was another story about Domino's paying $5,000 to fix potholes in the city of Milwaukee as part of an advertising campaign. Which is certainly nice, but the city of Milwaukee has a public works budget right around $140 million. I don't think relying on private businesses and organizations to make up all of that money is going to happen anytime soon, assuming we even could find sufficient reasons to persuade them to do so.

Or how about the story of the California man that handed out resumes instead of panhandling and got tons of job offers? Well, what do we think would happen if every panhandler was handing out resumes as well? What used to be an example of ingenuity would become routine, and handing out resumes by the side of the road would almost certainly become no more successful than any other means of job hunting - with the caveat that a level of effort not previously considered necessary would now be required.

Worse yet, these stories contribute to the same attribution errors that routinely interfere with our ability to determine what truly contributes to success and failure and what level of effort is reasonable to expect out of people. The story about the superintendent who painted one of his schools over the summer is a great example, and the blog post I originally saw quite clearly explains that a senior administrator spending his time on that job should not be considered normal or required. A superintendent who chooses to do their actual job instead of something like painting shouldn't feel like they've failed. Neither should someone who has been putting a good level of effort into their job hunt without success feel like they've failed because they didn't try something truly unusual, nor should someone who has no vacation days to give to their pregnant or sick coworkers because they actually wanted to use the benefit that comes with their job feel like they've done something wrong - and yet these stories promote a world in which all of these people have.

We can do a better job - as a country and as a society - of finding ways that will actually work to solve these problems. Making a big deal out of specific individual examples that aren't generally applicable isn't going to help us get there. It'll just give us a reason to believe that we only need to support people if they're putting in a superhuman effort already. I'd much rather have a world in which we don't demand that people meet an unreasonable standard before we help them.

Book Journal: Arpeggio of Blue Steel

This week I'm trying to continue with some graphic novels I was reading a while back. I mostly stopped reading them because it was a lot harder to find the most recent manga in the series once I left Japan, but finally had the chance to pick up some of the once I'd missed when I took a trip over there.

Arpeggio of Blue Steel is a science fiction manga in which humanity finds itself beset by strange enemies, the Fleet of Fog - so named because they basically sailed out of the mist one day with ships outwardly similar to those humanity had lost in previous wars but armed with weapons well beyond anything humans possessed. As far as I know, most of the series is about humans trying to find a way to finally defeat the Fog... well, that's how it starts, but it quickly develops quite a few interesting plot lines about everyone trying to figure out what's going on, since clearly not even the Fog itself and its sentient ships know very much about what's happening.

If nothing else, it does remind me that I should probably be spending more effort practicing my Japanese. I was never as good at reading it as I really wanted to be (the difference between how long it takes me to read English books and Japanese books is rather excessive), but even with that in mind, it felt harder to manage than I remember it being.

A related problem is that I've never been able to tell whether the stories with particularly convoluted plots should be as incomprehensible as they are when I'm also trying to figure out the language. For all I know, there's a detail that slipped past me because I skimmed over the wrong word which would make the whole thing easier to understand. It makes me very cautious about passing judgment on the series, since my lack of understanding could easily be my own fault.

All of that said, I really do enjoy the series. There's a limit to how bad it can be when you have World War II cruisers and battleships blasting away at each other with plasma weapons and gravity weapons, and I don't actually mind seeing the submarines do things that are flatly impossible by any known laws of physics. And when I do feel like digging though the Japanese dialogue in detail, there's a lot of interesting plot points about the mysteries of the Fog's appearance and what even they don't know about themselves.

Hunting for an Explanation

Apparently there's a campaign underway in some of the more prosperous counties in Maryland to stop expanding the light rail system further out from Baltimore - or even to close existing stations and limit where it operates.

Given that I've basically always relied as much as possible on mass transit and as little as possible on car ownership, I can't think of a single reason that's even remotely sensible to do anything like that. I suppose if the system was operating at a total loss and needed to save money, it might make sense, but even then I'd be spending a lot of time asking whether there are improvements that might help it make more money first.

... And as it turns out, the reason these people have decided to oppose the light rail is because they think it increases crime in their area. Never mind that half of the anecdotes they muster don't show that the criminals they're talking about used the light rail to travel in or out of the region, or that the police department's data doesn't agree that the areas around the light rail have the most drug use and crime. They keep taking videos of the criminals they do find, and clearly we can tell from the number of videos they post that the problem is extensive! (Yes, I'm being sarcastic.)

Apparently none of them ever learned what confirmation bias is, given that they are so clearly falling victim to it in such an obvious way. They would do better to find ways to explain the police data that doesn't agree with their point, rather than point at the limited examples they can find as an excuse to ignore that data.