Enough About Me, What Do You Think of Me?
Okay, so I’m a hurricane. Big deal. We all have our faults.
Meanwhile. I’ve been wanting to mention for days, but other subjects kept intervening – the proofs for Why Truth Matters have arrived. Jeremy got his Tuesday, my set arrived Wednesday – on account of how he’s a few miles from Continuum and I’m six thousand miles farther off.
We had a little discussion about the acknowledgements. Gremlins had replaced that page with the acknowledgements from a previous book of Jeremy’s and Julian’s, one that I had nothing to do with. (It would have been even funnier if it had been replaced with the acknowledgements from a book by someone entirely unknown to any of us, thanking a great crowd of people we’ve never heard of, for doing things neither of us would ever dream of doing in our most inebriated or gangrenously delirious moments, such as being helpful or patient or cheerful or pleasant.) Those acknowledgements thanked me for help with the editing – therefore would have looked rather odd in a book I co-wrote. One doesn’t usually thank oneself in the acknowledgements – although it might not be a bad idea. Who else is going to do such a thorough job of it, after all?
And finally, I would like to thank Myself, for being so unfailingly amusing, so inexhaustibly interesting, for shutting up when I needed quiet, for chattering when I needed distraction, for knowing exactly when to moan and whine and fuss, when to shout and rail and execrate, when to smirk and gloat and prance, when to titter and squeal and dribble; for knowing exactly when I wanted to eat something and when I didn’t, when I needed to go for a long walk and when I needed to lie on the floor and breathe deeply. For always being there, for sympathizing so deeply, for admiring so unreservedly, for knowing so well exactly what was wrong about everyone else and right about me.
But I hadn’t thought of that on Wednesday, so I merely suggested a smaller re-write: ‘Special thanks to Jeremy Stangroom for writing some of it, special thanks to Ophelia Benson for writing some of it.’ Jeremy suggested an alternative: ‘Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom would like to thank Ophelia Benson and
Jeremy Stangroom for making the world a better place.’ I think that’s an excellent sentiment, and that we should add it to the front page of B&W.
Just a small hurricane though. Barely category 1, and on the sattelite pictures at CNN it looks decidedly ragged. Anyway, congratulations with the book!
I think it reads slightly better as
Enough about me.
Let’s talk about you.
What do you think of me?
Thanks, Merlijn!
It reads much better that way, but there’s not room on the line. Architectural limitations…
Poor H.Ophelia just fizzled out into a mere tropical storm, sorry OB!
The book sounds much more promising- congrats!
Sorry! No, major relief! Do I want to be hearing about all the damage Ophelia caused for the next several months? I do not.
Since I see no other place to comment, I will mention it here — since you were so nice to ask my opinion — that I was puzzled by the mention of feng shui in “Nick Cohen on Suckers for Fashionable Nonsense.” I am no expert in it at all, nor partiocular advocate for it, but it is my very strong impression that Feng shui is by no means fashionable nonsense at all but a series of common-sense rubrics about environmental design.
In fact such mention (and the casual, dismissive way it was done) diminishes his whole point and makes him in fact look likethe ignorant one.
David – Feng shui has some sensible elements, but it also has a lot of woo-woo about energy flows and chi and the like.
See the sceptical dictionary
http://skepdic.com/fengshui.html
Alleged masters of feng shui, those who understand the five elements and the two energies such as chi and sha (hard energy, the opposite of chi), are supposed to be able to detect metaphysical energies and give directions for their optimal flow. Feng shui has become a kind of architectural acupuncture: wizards and magi insert themselves into buildings or landscapes and use their metaphysical sensors to detect the flow of good and bad “energy.”
The funny thing about sceptics is that pretty much all have a blind spot. I have rigorously sceptical friends who give a pass to their chiropractor and his subluxations, or who consider homeopathy a reasonable response to minor illness. And as for the old wise woman in the village who told their granny …
I could go on, but I have to go stick a candle in my ear.
I hear you, Don. My own policy is to allow myself one crazy non-sceptical belief at a time. Over the year it’s mainly been cryptozoological beasties like Bigfoot and the Mongolian Death Worm, mind you, but I’m recently considering swapping them for Teilhard de Chardin and Omega Point theology…
Of course, cryptozoological beasties aren’t inherently all that woo-woo, since there can always be unseen corners of the planet. I mean – look at the Ivory Bill, for instance. Not to mention the ever-popular black swan.
(On the other hand, that putative photograph of Bigfoot is completely laughable.)
OB, it seems to me that your stance on feng shui eliminates it from serious consideration because some enthusiasts go overboard. From my limited experience it (feng shui) seems fairly straightforward and grounded. Are there kooks who promote it in a woo-woo manner? Probably so. And it’s fair to call bunk on them specifically.
But it makes me nervous about Nick Cohen’s judgment (and your seconding, I am afraid) that he would so dismiss it with a casual toss of the word.
There is a difference between being skeptical on systemic merit versus individual overenthusiasm.
OB – you’re right that Bigfoot isn’t a priori woo-woo, though I’m a bit concerned by what appears to be a total absence of Bigfoot droppings in California/the Pacific Northwest (if you encounter any, let me know). The Mongolian Death Worm, though, sounds to good not to exist, so I’ll keep believing in that. And let’s not forget the Mexican Staring Frog!
Hmmyes but Merlijn maybe the droppings are all in very isolated patches of the mountains where no human has ever been (or where the few people who have been there didn’t notice the droppings which were old and dry and small and etc).
I haven’t heard of Mongolian Death Worm or (be still my heart) Mexican Staring Frog before, but I’m certainly happy that I have now!
David, well, what can I say, my experience has been different. I’ve never heard Feng shui mentioned without any woo-woo – all I’ve heard is stuff about ‘aligning’ doors and windows in the right way for energy flows and the like. If there’s any woo-woo free Feng shui out there, I’ve never seen it.
Well OK, OB, so long as we can agree that it is simply a matter of your limited experience…
Seriously, I can’t stand woo-woo stuff but the difficult thing is that a lot of woo-woo stuff does have a core of validity and your approach seems unable to discriminate.
Yes, feng shui has some woo-woo aspects. Yes democracy is accompanied by inefficiency. But we are able to distinguish, to discriminate…that’s the essence of being human.
Ahem, I live in a mainly Chinese society and can tell you that the woo-woo elements in fengshui comprise about 99% of the entirety. Its core of validity (location of homes away from potential hazards and near to desirable elements like clean water, fresh air, more natural light/warmth)does exist but is so rudimentary and common sense it is really, quite unnecessary to the modern day practitioner who has much more practical knowledge and indeed, much less opportunity to stride off to build his house on pioneer terrain, and who actually is much more keen on intangible nonsense like ‘keeping good luck in and reflecting bad omens out’.
Fengshui has a particular (oriental)aesthetic appeal but that like fashion design, is hardly a science!
Most of it is about smoke(bad spirits, energies),mirrors, lights and the sound of tinkling water or chimes. Sounds like magic, no?
I am fond of some fengshui-correct traditional buildings: the quaintness of strangely angled doors and windows, odd placement of mirrors (lots of them in all sizes), foot-high barriers at doorways (to prevent the entry of ghosts who are deemed unable to hop over such a simple barrier, though child safety considerations may have been the original impulse)all add up to a charm I find irresistible.
‘a lot of woo-woo stuff does have a core of validity’
If it had a core of validity it wouldn’t be ‘woo-woo stuff’ (the last time I’m going to use that expression).
Insofar as fengshui is a form of aesthetics, then fine. As Mira says, it can have pleasing effects. To give it one jot more significance requires that an argument be put for it, and that argument should stand up to the usual tests.
So Nick Cohen was, in my opinion, right to be casual and dismissive. Had he been more circumspect and equivocal he could have been interpreted as ‘Well, science may not understand, but there might be something in it…’
Any belief which doesn’t want to be casually dismissed had better step up and make its case.
“Well OK, OB, so long as we can agree that it is simply a matter of your limited experience…”
Oh, I don’t know, David, how about if we agree instead that it’s a matter of your limited analysis?
Really, what Don said. If it has a core of validity it’s not woo-woo. What is the core of validity to the idea of energy flows?
Aesthetics, of course, as Mira says, are quite another matter – but aesthetics don’t need a pseudo-science to ground them.
I entirely agree about the importance of distinguishing and discriminating, but that’s what I take myself to be doing.