Constructing an Argument

Glenn Reynolds has a long post and a response from a teacher arguing that high school English should much be more focused on writing persuasive arguments. I can't say I disagree. I'm someone who loves literature and fiction and reads (and writes) a lot of it, but being able to present and defend a position is a much more valuable skill, and so long as we remember that a teacher can't teach everything and teaching priorities need to be made, then we should admit that writing argumentative essays should be a much higher priority. If there's one really important thing that a person can get out of philosophy, it's learning about the history of philosophical arguments for various ideas, more so than the ideas themselves.

Glenn Reynolds has a long post and a response from a teacher arguing that high school English should much be more focused on writing persuasive arguments. I can't say I disagree. I'm someone who loves literature and fiction and reads (and writes) a lot of it, but being able to present and defend a position is a much more valuable skill, and so long as we remember that a teacher can't teach everything and teaching priorities need to be made, then we should admit that writing argumentative essays should be a much higher priority. If there's one really important thing that a person can get out of philosophy, it's learning about the history of philosophical arguments for various ideas, more so than the ideas themselves.

Constructing an Argument

A fragment of a story

I had a dream once that I saw a mystical teacher and his three apprentices, all dressed in spartan, beige-colored habits and bearing closely cropped hair, jogging through a field. It was the half light of dusk and the field was of long brown grass that glowed a golden glow in the light of a sun sinking over the distant mountains. Their goal was a pilgrimage to a far away, high up temple of some vague ominousness, a dark place of uncertain evil. There the youngest of the three apprenctices, the initiate, would be put through a dangerous ritual, a purgation, wherein he'd be cleansed of evil. But along this path the four of them were being stalked, by a small but malicious creature that lurked in the long grass and sought to pick them off one by one.

I woke up at this point, but the question, which perhaps you can answer, is what was going to happen next.

I had a dream once that I saw a mystical teacher and his three apprentices, all dressed in spartan, beige-colored habits and bearing closely cropped hair, jogging through a field. It was the half light of dusk and the field was of long brown grass that glowed a golden glow in the light of a sun sinking over the distant mountains. Their goal was a pilgrimage to a far away, high up temple of some vague ominousness, a dark place of uncertain evil. There the youngest of the three apprenctices, the initiate, would be put through a dangerous ritual, a purgation, wherein he'd be cleansed of evil. But along this path the four of them were being stalked, by a small but malicious creature that lurked in the long grass and sought to pick them off one by one.

I woke up at this point, but the question, which perhaps you can answer, is what was going to happen next.

A fragment of a story

Reasons & Beliefs

Robin Hanson had a post a couple of weeks ago asking people the question of whether they'd support redistributing GPA, in the same way most people support the redistribution of income; namely people in the top 10% or so would give some of their GPA to people in the bottom 10% or so. People were largely against GPA redistribution, though most people think that redistributing income is fine. Hanson's point was that people are naturally hypocritical because, though they support one rather than the other, they couldn't readily give reasons for this belief.

In fact, even if we look at it carefully, the difference is hard to find. People might think it's unfair to take GPA from someone since they earned it, but the same goes with money, since people who are wealthy have earned their wealth as well. One might respond that though many rich people earned their wealth, many of them were born into fortunate circumstances, such as being upper middle class or wealthy from their parents, and thus they didn't earn it. But then one just responds that since GPA is heavily influenced by intelligence, and intelligence is largely determined by innate ability which is unfairly distributed, you don't really earn your GPA either. If one then tried to respond that redistributing GPA would muck up the incentives, making high achieving students work less hard to get high marks (since their GPA will be taken away) and making poor students work less hard to pull themselves out of the bottom 10% (since they'll get free grades anyways). But the same applies to wealth redistribution, which will affect incentives in the same way.

The difference really comes around when we realize the different roles and different importance of the two: grades are primarily informational (they convey information about how much a student learned and how well they performed) and they're not really critical (you won't die without good grades); money on the other hand is a medium of exchange and a store of value and it is really critical in a market economy (without it you can't get food, clothing, shelter and thus potentially face death). These aren't perfect arguments and we could quibble about these differences too, but they're pretty good and get at the key differences: because wealth is essential for functioning in society (because of its role in the economy) then redistributing money is a much bigger help to those in the bottom 10% than redistributing GPA; one might even say redistributing wealth is necessary for people in dire need. The question is whether people who prefer the redistribution of wealth and not GPA are recognizing this difference and just unable to articulate it. Since understanding things you can't articulate is not unheard of, this is plausible.

I suspect though that this is not the reason that most people feel this way. I think it's rather the case that people feel (accurately or inaccurately) that they've earned their grades and that people who are wealthy haven't really earned their money; or perhaps they think that the unequal distribution of money is uniquely unfair (unlike other unequal distributions like say intelligence, physical attractiveness, athletic ability, height, thinness and so on); or perhaps they just assume that, since wealth redistribution is the norm whereas GPA redistribution isn't, that that's the way is should be (status quo bias). Any attempt to rationalize or explain such assumptions is going to be post hoc.

In short, we can believe that people have pretty good reasons that they can't articulate or believe (as I think more likely) that they simply have unquestioned assumptions they've never thought about (though if they're clever, they'll find good ways to rationalize them). The reason I lean to the latter is because I know that when I was younger I too, like most people supported the redistribution of wealth but wouldn't, if ever asked, have supported redistribution of GPA, and my beliefs have changed (not about redistribution of GPA) precisely because I started to think about these assumptions.

Robin Hanson had a post a couple of weeks ago asking people the question of whether they'd support redistributing GPA, in the same way most people support the redistribution of income; namely people in the top 10% or so would give some of their GPA to people in the bottom 10% or so. People were largely against GPA redistribution, though most people think that redistributing income is fine. Hanson's point was that people are naturally hypocritical because, though they support one rather than the other, they couldn't readily give reasons for this belief.

In fact, even if we look at it carefully, the difference is hard to find. People might think it's unfair to take GPA from someone since they earned it, but the same goes with money, since people who are wealthy have earned their wealth as well. One might respond that though many rich people earned their wealth, many of them were born into fortunate circumstances, such as being upper middle class or wealthy from their parents, and thus they didn't earn it. But then one just responds that since GPA is heavily influenced by intelligence, and intelligence is largely determined by innate ability which is unfairly distributed, you don't really earn your GPA either. If one then tried to respond that redistributing GPA would muck up the incentives, making high achieving students work less hard to get high marks (since their GPA will be taken away) and making poor students work less hard to pull themselves out of the bottom 10% (since they'll get free grades anyways). But the same applies to wealth redistribution, which will affect incentives in the same way.

The difference really comes around when we realize the different roles and different importance of the two: grades are primarily informational (they convey information about how much a student learned and how well they performed) and they're not really critical (you won't die without good grades); money on the other hand is a medium of exchange and a store of value and it is really critical in a market economy (without it you can't get food, clothing, shelter and thus potentially face death). These aren't perfect arguments and we could quibble about these differences too, but they're pretty good and get at the key differences: because wealth is essential for functioning in society (because of its role in the economy) then redistributing money is a much bigger help to those in the bottom 10% than redistributing GPA; one might even say redistributing wealth is necessary for people in dire need. The question is whether people who prefer the redistribution of wealth and not GPA are recognizing this difference and just unable to articulate it. Since understanding things you can't articulate is not unheard of, this is plausible.

I suspect though that this is not the reason that most people feel this way. I think it's rather the case that people feel (accurately or inaccurately) that they've earned their grades and that people who are wealthy haven't really earned their money; or perhaps they think that the unequal distribution of money is uniquely unfair (unlike other unequal distributions like say intelligence, physical attractiveness, athletic ability, height, thinness and so on); or perhaps they just assume that, since wealth redistribution is the norm whereas GPA redistribution isn't, that that's the way is should be (status quo bias). Any attempt to rationalize or explain such assumptions is going to be post hoc.

In short, we can believe that people have pretty good reasons that they can't articulate or believe (as I think more likely) that they simply have unquestioned assumptions they've never thought about (though if they're clever, they'll find good ways to rationalize them). The reason I lean to the latter is because I know that when I was younger I too, like most people supported the redistribution of wealth but wouldn't, if ever asked, have supported redistribution of GPA, and my beliefs have changed (not about redistribution of GPA) precisely because I started to think about these assumptions.

Reasons & Beliefs

What can be taught

There are many that argue that in education we should be focusing more on creativity and independent thinking. The reasoning behind this is basically that these will always be valuable skills and focusing too much on facts and memorization is counter-productive since much of that knowledge may become quickly obsolete. The problem with this line of argument is that it's not entirely clear how or even whether these things can be taught.

The Guardian yesterday compiled a number of opinions from various writers who briefly weighed in on the question of whether creative writing can be taught. Their opinions range from "not really" to "somewhat." Unfortunately, they don't go into the question in too much depth and I think that more can be said.

There are a few things that should be noted. First, even if we don't know whether writing skill can be taught or not, we know it can be learned. No one is born a Shakespeare. Access to the childhood writings of great writers consistently shows that they wrote generally as poor as all children wrote. Somehow they learned a few things about writing along the way.

Second, the more knowledge you retain and the better you are able to use that knowledge, the more creative you'll be. Memory, particularly working memory, is a big component of overall intelligence. Many people like to make this diametrical division between rote memorization and creativity, but the reality is that the better a person's memory functions, generally the more creative they are. And the best way to improve memory is to memorize things. That doesn't mean that rote memorization is the best way to improve memory, just that memory skill is important. Also, the larger the storehouse of knowledge you can draw from, the more creative you'll be. That means that learning lots of facts can be very beneficial.

Third, a teacher can only be involved in a percentage of the learning of a student. There are only so many hours of teaching time, and these few hours are certainly only sufficient to impart limited knowledge. Students need to be learning on their own, especially if they ever want to attain something that requires a great many hours of skill, such as sophisticated and well-developed writing ability. K. Anders Ericsson famously estimated, based on considerable research, that it takes on average 10,000 hours or 10 years to master something (if not more, in highly competitive fields). That's a lot more hours than I, or any teacher, probably wants to spend teaching a student.

Fourth, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. In other words, you can't force a student to learn anything they don't want to learn. In fact, a student doesn't even need to stubbornly refuse to learn, just simply not paying attention or not studying is enough. In short, the student needs to be involved in the learning process. A good teacher can motivate students, but the student still needs to meet the teacher half way.

Fifth, writers are not entirely aware or able to explain what they know. There are many skills that we develop and master non-linguistically and non-consciously. For example, the ability to throw a football forty yards with pinpoint accuracy cannot be explained because it's a matter of training your muscles and your nervous system to be able to coordinate themselves in such a way that you can simply think, "Throw this ball to hit that target," and it will happen. Your muscles and nervous system are conditioned in such a way that you generally perform poorer if you think consciously too much about it; decisions need to be streamlined such that they can basically be made below the conscious level, quickly and without deliberation. The way you condition them is with practice, repetition and feedback, and a lot of it. A talented writer's sense about what is appropriate, what fits, what the best way to say such a thing, what should happen in a plot, what a character should do, and so on, is also frequently non-conscious; such decisions have been developed through the experience of lots of reading and writing. This means that writers need only be aware of what they are doing in a limited sense; as such they really only have a partial understanding of what they're doing right, not to mention that they might also fall into bad habits that they mistakenly think are favorable. Thus, their ability to pass on useful information will also be limited.

Sixth, being creative means doing thing differently. In other words, you can teach somehow how other people have done things, but being creative means doing things in a different may. By definition, if you teach someone something and they parrot it, they're not creative.

If we take these points in combination I think we can get a good idea of what it means to teach creative writing. Namely, that at best a teacher can facilitate the self-learning of a student. By definition you can't really teach creativity, but you can help students become more creative. And the best way to teach students would be to teach them more readily teachable knowledge like writing techniques, tropes, conventions and genres through giving examples and reading quality writing; as well as trying to motivate them to broaden their knowledge independently. In short, as to the question of whether creative writing can be taught, the answer is: "sort of, but not really."

There are many that argue that in education we should be focusing more on creativity and independent thinking. The reasoning behind this is basically that these will always be valuable skills and focusing too much on facts and memorization is counter-productive since much of that knowledge may become quickly obsolete. The problem with this line of argument is that it's not entirely clear how or even whether these things can be taught.

The Guardian yesterday compiled a number of opinions from various writers who briefly weighed in on the question of whether creative writing can be taught. Their opinions range from "not really" to "somewhat." Unfortunately, they don't go into the question in too much depth and I think that more can be said.

There are a few things that should be noted. First, even if we don't know whether writing skill can be taught or not, we know it can be learned. No one is born a Shakespeare. Access to the childhood writings of great writers consistently shows that they wrote generally as poor as all children wrote. Somehow they learned a few things about writing along the way.

Second, the more knowledge you retain and the better you are able to use that knowledge, the more creative you'll be. Memory, particularly working memory, is a big component of overall intelligence. Many people like to make this diametrical division between rote memorization and creativity, but the reality is that the better a person's memory functions, generally the more creative they are. And the best way to improve memory is to memorize things. That doesn't mean that rote memorization is the best way to improve memory, just that memory skill is important. Also, the larger the storehouse of knowledge you can draw from, the more creative you'll be. That means that learning lots of facts can be very beneficial.

Third, a teacher can only be involved in a percentage of the learning of a student. There are only so many hours of teaching time, and these few hours are certainly only sufficient to impart limited knowledge. Students need to be learning on their own, especially if they ever want to attain something that requires a great many hours of skill, such as sophisticated and well-developed writing ability. K. Anders Ericsson famously estimated, based on considerable research, that it takes on average 10,000 hours or 10 years to master something (if not more, in highly competitive fields). That's a lot more hours than I, or any teacher, probably wants to spend teaching a student.

Fourth, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. In other words, you can't force a student to learn anything they don't want to learn. In fact, a student doesn't even need to stubbornly refuse to learn, just simply not paying attention or not studying is enough. In short, the student needs to be involved in the learning process. A good teacher can motivate students, but the student still needs to meet the teacher half way.

Fifth, writers are not entirely aware or able to explain what they know. There are many skills that we develop and master non-linguistically and non-consciously. For example, the ability to throw a football forty yards with pinpoint accuracy cannot be explained because it's a matter of training your muscles and your nervous system to be able to coordinate themselves in such a way that you can simply think, "Throw this ball to hit that target," and it will happen. Your muscles and nervous system are conditioned in such a way that you generally perform poorer if you think consciously too much about it; decisions need to be streamlined such that they can basically be made below the conscious level, quickly and without deliberation. The way you condition them is with practice, repetition and feedback, and a lot of it. A talented writer's sense about what is appropriate, what fits, what the best way to say such a thing, what should happen in a plot, what a character should do, and so on, is also frequently non-conscious; such decisions have been developed through the experience of lots of reading and writing. This means that writers need only be aware of what they are doing in a limited sense; as such they really only have a partial understanding of what they're doing right, not to mention that they might also fall into bad habits that they mistakenly think are favorable. Thus, their ability to pass on useful information will also be limited.

Sixth, being creative means doing thing differently. In other words, you can teach somehow how other people have done things, but being creative means doing things in a different may. By definition, if you teach someone something and they parrot it, they're not creative.

If we take these points in combination I think we can get a good idea of what it means to teach creative writing. Namely, that at best a teacher can facilitate the self-learning of a student. By definition you can't really teach creativity, but you can help students become more creative. And the best way to teach students would be to teach them more readily teachable knowledge like writing techniques, tropes, conventions and genres through giving examples and reading quality writing; as well as trying to motivate them to broaden their knowledge independently. In short, as to the question of whether creative writing can be taught, the answer is: "sort of, but not really."

What can be taught

Trial and Error

I'm pretty convinced that trial and error is the most consistently powerful method for attaining knowledge. There's just way to many ways a person to fail and make mistakes in reason. So, it's interesting that Ben Goldacre over at the Guardian should write an article at the Guardian titled "How can you tell if a policy is working? Run a trial." In other words, if you're considering making a law, run a trial to see what the best way to write the law.

A couple of caveats that Goldacre doesn't mention, of course. For one, trials are not always feasible; sometimes they're too expensive or simply unethical. Second of all, trials can only tell you how well a certain policy will achieve a specified goal; it can't tell unconditionally what the best policy is. For example, if you have a policy that increases safety, but compromises privacy, it's an open question whether the increased safety is worth the compromised privacy, and it certainly isn't self-evident that it is lawmakers that should always be making these decisions on behalf of the populace. Third of all, always remember to include a control. In other words, if you're trying to evaluate Law A vs Law B, you want to make sure you include (if possible) a control that evaluates what happens without either Law A or B; sometimes not creating a law to begin with is better. Lastly, it's a bit unrealistic to expect that governments, after a long history of ignoring scientific evidence and expert opinion, to suddenly start building policy on evidence. Alas, there's been too much research in public choice theory to make one think that politicians will consistently enact the laws that best reflect the evidence.

I'm pretty convinced that trial and error is the most consistently powerful method for attaining knowledge. There's just way to many ways a person to fail and make mistakes in reason. So, it's interesting that Ben Goldacre over at the Guardian should write an article at the Guardian titled "How can you tell if a policy is working? Run a trial." In other words, if you're considering making a law, run a trial to see what the best way to write the law.

A couple of caveats that Goldacre doesn't mention, of course. For one, trials are not always feasible; sometimes they're too expensive or simply unethical. Second of all, trials can only tell you how well a certain policy will achieve a specified goal; it can't tell unconditionally what the best policy is. For example, if you have a policy that increases safety, but compromises privacy, it's an open question whether the increased safety is worth the compromised privacy, and it certainly isn't self-evident that it is lawmakers that should always be making these decisions on behalf of the populace. Third of all, always remember to include a control. In other words, if you're trying to evaluate Law A vs Law B, you want to make sure you include (if possible) a control that evaluates what happens without either Law A or B; sometimes not creating a law to begin with is better. Lastly, it's a bit unrealistic to expect that governments, after a long history of ignoring scientific evidence and expert opinion, to suddenly start building policy on evidence. Alas, there's been too much research in public choice theory to make one think that politicians will consistently enact the laws that best reflect the evidence.

Trial and Error

Romance Disappointed

When I lived in New York City I had a roommate named Eric that worked in a comedy club. He was tall twenty-something, the child of a white mother and a black father, with a very sarcastic sense of humor and an easy-going personality. He aspired to be a playwright, and had been writing plays and trying to get some productions off the ground for his stuff.

A couple times Eric had been visited by an old friend of his who was studying at Brown in Providence. She was getting her PhD in English and intended to be an English professor. She’s also of mixed parentage half-Filipino, half-Latina, a short woman in her only twenties with a frankly annoyingly squeaky voice, but nonetheless intelligent and funny.

This had been the second or third time she’d come to visit, and she always stayed in Eric’s basement bedroom next to mine, since there was no other room for her in the house that five of us, including Eric and I, shared. This had been a spontaneous, unplanned visit that she’d suddenly decided upon at the last minute, deciding to spend one of her weekends with Eric in New York instead of back in Providence.

What neither I nor Eric realized was that she was romantically interested in Eric. They’d been friends for quite a while, so Eric thought nothing of her visits and they were able to share a bed in his small bedroom without any sex. She, on the other hand, didn’t realize that Eric had just begun dating an older co-worker who waitressed at the comedy club. This older coworker was a woman with considerably more history than Eric, a twice divorced woman who’s most recent divorce occurred after she found her husband in bed with another woman. An impetuous and fiery woman, she’d left her husband right then and there, despite having nowhere to live. She ended up living at a women-only shelter, which was still her home at the time.

That weekend evening, while Eric was working, Eric’s friend and I went to the comedy club to see a show. We talked along the way, traveling from our place in Queens to the comedy club in Midtown Manhattan. We arrived a bit early and walked around. Then we went inside and waited in the downstairs bar for the previous set to finish up before we could take our seats in the main room. This whole time we were talking—about the usual, about literary topics, about what life was like in Brown, about what was going on in Eric’s life. A few minutes before the show was about to start, she’d mentioned the perils of dating co-workers, and I mentioned casually that Eric had just started dating a co-worker of his. Her whole demeanor changed when she heard this and she suddenly became completely silent.

We then immediately went up to hear the show. The show overall was lots of fun and her and I laughed the whole way through, but this was only a reprieve. After the show she was sullen and untalkative. Whereas before, the two of us had had no problem keeping up a conversation, now it was long silences, while I tried to get her talking and she didn’t say anything. We rode back on the subway to Woodside, Queens, and I insisted that she tell me what was wrong. She at first refused, but eventually admitted that she needed to tell someone her secret.

As we walked around the neighborhood, she told me about the process of her growing fondness Eric. They’d gone to school together and become close friends. There’d been some ambiguity about the status of her relationship, and it had seemed at one point, late in their senior year, that Eric was trying to transition from friends to lovers. He’d taken her out on a date, and she balked, wanting to remain only friends. After he’d moved to New York and she’d gone to college in Providence, her affections towards Eric grew and she’d been hoping to come down to New York to try and seduce Eric and make a romantic connection. She told me not to tell Eric about all this, and I promised I wouldn’t

She had to spend the night again, sharing the bed in Eric’s room, but then she promptly left in the morning, telling Eric that something had come up and she needed to get back to Providence. He hadn’t questioned this, and though it was apparent that something was wrong, he attributed it to whatever this thing that had come up was. I kept my silence about her secret, while he told me about how uncomfortable it was to share a rather small bed with someone. You just can’t sleep as well. He said that he’d actually hoped that I would’ve seduced her so that he could have a bed all to himself. I laughed at the joke, but still kept my silence.

When I lived in New York City I had a roommate named Eric that worked in a comedy club. He was tall twenty-something, the child of a white mother and a black father, with a very sarcastic sense of humor and an easy-going personality. He aspired to be a playwright, and had been writing plays and trying to get some productions off the ground for his stuff.

A couple times Eric had been visited by an old friend of his who was studying at Brown in Providence. She was getting her PhD in English and intended to be an English professor. She’s also of mixed parentage half-Filipino, half-Latina, a short woman in her only twenties with a frankly annoyingly squeaky voice, but nonetheless intelligent and funny.

This had been the second or third time she’d come to visit, and she always stayed in Eric’s basement bedroom next to mine, since there was no other room for her in the house that five of us, including Eric and I, shared. This had been a spontaneous, unplanned visit that she’d suddenly decided upon at the last minute, deciding to spend one of her weekends with Eric in New York instead of back in Providence.

What neither I nor Eric realized was that she was romantically interested in Eric. They’d been friends for quite a while, so Eric thought nothing of her visits and they were able to share a bed in his small bedroom without any sex. She, on the other hand, didn’t realize that Eric had just begun dating an older co-worker who waitressed at the comedy club. This older coworker was a woman with considerably more history than Eric, a twice divorced woman who’s most recent divorce occurred after she found her husband in bed with another woman. An impetuous and fiery woman, she’d left her husband right then and there, despite having nowhere to live. She ended up living at a women-only shelter, which was still her home at the time.

That weekend evening, while Eric was working, Eric’s friend and I went to the comedy club to see a show. We talked along the way, traveling from our place in Queens to the comedy club in Midtown Manhattan. We arrived a bit early and walked around. Then we went inside and waited in the downstairs bar for the previous set to finish up before we could take our seats in the main room. This whole time we were talking—about the usual, about literary topics, about what life was like in Brown, about what was going on in Eric’s life. A few minutes before the show was about to start, she’d mentioned the perils of dating co-workers, and I mentioned casually that Eric had just started dating a co-worker of his. Her whole demeanor changed when she heard this and she suddenly became completely silent.

We then immediately went up to hear the show. The show overall was lots of fun and her and I laughed the whole way through, but this was only a reprieve. After the show she was sullen and untalkative. Whereas before, the two of us had had no problem keeping up a conversation, now it was long silences, while I tried to get her talking and she didn’t say anything. We rode back on the subway to Woodside, Queens, and I insisted that she tell me what was wrong. She at first refused, but eventually admitted that she needed to tell someone her secret.

As we walked around the neighborhood, she told me about the process of her growing fondness Eric. They’d gone to school together and become close friends. There’d been some ambiguity about the status of her relationship, and it had seemed at one point, late in their senior year, that Eric was trying to transition from friends to lovers. He’d taken her out on a date, and she balked, wanting to remain only friends. After he’d moved to New York and she’d gone to college in Providence, her affections towards Eric grew and she’d been hoping to come down to New York to try and seduce Eric and make a romantic connection. She told me not to tell Eric about all this, and I promised I wouldn’t

She had to spend the night again, sharing the bed in Eric’s room, but then she promptly left in the morning, telling Eric that something had come up and she needed to get back to Providence. He hadn’t questioned this, and though it was apparent that something was wrong, he attributed it to whatever this thing that had come up was. I kept my silence about her secret, while he told me about how uncomfortable it was to share a rather small bed with someone. You just can’t sleep as well. He said that he’d actually hoped that I would’ve seduced her so that he could have a bed all to himself. I laughed at the joke, but still kept my silence.

Romance Disappointed

Moving heavy objects

Beginning when we were about six or seven my parents began sending my sister and I out to California to spend several weeks with relatives. Generally it was two weeks with my mother's sister Mary and her family and two weeks with my father's brother Bruce and his family. We always had fun with Bruce and his family, but our experience at Mary and her husband Nick's place was a bit different.

Informally this time with Nick and Mary was known as "Nick's work camp," because there was invariably a significant amount of physical labor involved on this vacation. Nick and Mary lived on a plot of land in the Trinity Alps region of northern California, a sprawling are in the woods with ponds and streams and wild blackberries filled with several homemade buildings and piles of junk. I use the term "junk" very broadly here, since it included everything from non-functioning cars and tractors to drawer-fulls of nuts and bolts. Nick would buy this stuff off of people and then hopefully resell it to others, possibly fixed up or not. There tended to more stuff flowing in than out, so the collection of stuff only grew.

The work that we were put to varied a lot, from one summer helping them build one of their homemade buildings (a simple three wall building used for storing bike parts and fixing up bikes), to helping them dredge for gold at the bottom of a pond. But one of the most memorable jobs we were put to was the moving of a huge pipe. The pipe in question was a section of steel pipe, some 3 foot in circumference and 15 feet long that probably weighed in at a half to three quarters of a ton. The challenge was to move this pipe from the place where it'd been left in the woods somewhere to Nick and Mary's property. Fortunately, Nick had a truck which could carry this amount of weight, a huge flat bed truck. But the process of getting this pipe from the ground to the raised bed of the truck was the really difficult part. We had to first roll the pipe out of the ditch where it'd been dumped, then using a number of ropes, it was pulled up onto the bed with a couple of ratchet hoists. It was a lot of grunt work and struggling that achieved its goal, but left us beat afterwards.

I'm reminded of it as I read about a man, Wally Wallington, almost single-handedly constructing a cement replica of stonehenge. He explains it on his homepage, and you can see how he's able to very efficiently both move and raise up stones vastly heavier than the pipe we were moving. Such techniques can help explain how many ancient structures using massive multi-ton stones could be built, namely through techniques similar to Wally Wallington's. It also helps explain the mysterious construction of Edward Leedskalnin's Coral Castle in Florida. It makes a person tempted to try and build a stonehenge in their own back yard.

I think about how such techniques might have been applied to our relatively simpler problem to make it easier and doable with a smaller crew. But I guess when you got enough people that you can do it with brute force, why bother with more delicate techniques.

Beginning when we were about six or seven my parents began sending my sister and I out to California to spend several weeks with relatives. Generally it was two weeks with my mother's sister Mary and her family and two weeks with my father's brother Bruce and his family. We always had fun with Bruce and his family, but our experience at Mary and her husband Nick's place was a bit different.

Informally this time with Nick and Mary was known as "Nick's work camp," because there was invariably a significant amount of physical labor involved on this vacation. Nick and Mary lived on a plot of land in the Trinity Alps region of northern California, a sprawling are in the woods with ponds and streams and wild blackberries filled with several homemade buildings and piles of junk. I use the term "junk" very broadly here, since it included everything from non-functioning cars and tractors to drawer-fulls of nuts and bolts. Nick would buy this stuff off of people and then hopefully resell it to others, possibly fixed up or not. There tended to more stuff flowing in than out, so the collection of stuff only grew.

The work that we were put to varied a lot, from one summer helping them build one of their homemade buildings (a simple three wall building used for storing bike parts and fixing up bikes), to helping them dredge for gold at the bottom of a pond. But one of the most memorable jobs we were put to was the moving of a huge pipe. The pipe in question was a section of steel pipe, some 3 foot in circumference and 15 feet long that probably weighed in at a half to three quarters of a ton. The challenge was to move this pipe from the place where it'd been left in the woods somewhere to Nick and Mary's property. Fortunately, Nick had a truck which could carry this amount of weight, a huge flat bed truck. But the process of getting this pipe from the ground to the raised bed of the truck was the really difficult part. We had to first roll the pipe out of the ditch where it'd been dumped, then using a number of ropes, it was pulled up onto the bed with a couple of ratchet hoists. It was a lot of grunt work and struggling that achieved its goal, but left us beat afterwards.

I'm reminded of it as I read about a man, Wally Wallington, almost single-handedly constructing a cement replica of stonehenge. He explains it on his homepage, and you can see how he's able to very efficiently both move and raise up stones vastly heavier than the pipe we were moving. Such techniques can help explain how many ancient structures using massive multi-ton stones could be built, namely through techniques similar to Wally Wallington's. It also helps explain the mysterious construction of Edward Leedskalnin's Coral Castle in Florida. It makes a person tempted to try and build a stonehenge in their own back yard.

I think about how such techniques might have been applied to our relatively simpler problem to make it easier and doable with a smaller crew. But I guess when you got enough people that you can do it with brute force, why bother with more delicate techniques.

Moving heavy objects