Category Archives: Psychology

What is it Like to be a Coyote?

One day while hiking I encountered a couple of coyotes along the trail. At first I got frightened, wondering if they were dangerous. But the coyotes just stood still, watching me from a distance and minding their own business. I walked away, continuing along the trail, while googling for information on my phone. With relief, I learned coyotes rarely ever attack adult humans—only small pets and children. (So don’t leave them out alone in coyote-populated areas.)

I then started wondering what it feels like to be a coyote. What was going through that creature’s mind as it watched me hiking by. Is anything going through its mind? What I mean to say is, are coyotes conscious? But not just consciousness as subjective experience, or the classic definition by Thomas Nagel—that there is something that it is like to be that thing. I mean are coyotes—or dogs, cats, and any animals other than humans—conscious in the same way humans are, with self-awareness, an inner monologue, and imagination? Does any species besides Homo Sapiens possess “sapience?”

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Best Nonfiction Books I Read in 2023

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1. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1997) by David Foster Wallace

I have yet to read Infinite Jest (it is on my bucket list), but I enjoyed this collection of DFW’s long nonfiction essays, maybe even more than his short fiction. They are absolutely genius—not just in their content but in the craftsmanship of the prose on a sentence level. I read a couple of these essays several years ago but struggled with Wallace’s complicated syntax. Between the page-long sentences, invented words and acronyms, and multi-paged footnotes, you practically need a map to read a David Foster Wallace book. With my reading comprehension having expanded since then, I can now better understand and appreciate the complexity of his prose. Few writers could string words together better than DFW (RIP). The essays in this collection include:

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Incubate Stories Subconsciously Before Writing

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When I get a new idea for a fiction story I become obsessed. I am flooded with inspiration, developing the story in my mind while researching online, and rapidly taking notes for a potential plot and characters. I can see a flash of the entire story in my mind like a movie, and I feel the urge to follow this burst of obsessive inspiration to write the story ASAP. Sometimes I do write it right away, while other times I set the notes aside to finish whatever else I was working on at the time (because I am always working on something else). I have found the latter to be more productive for my creative process. It is better to wait and incubate the story for some time rather than rush in prematurely.

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Pseudonymity Makes People More Honest

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There is a misconception that anonymity on the internet inevitably leads to toxicity. But pre-Facebook and social media, most people on the internet were anonymous. Or more precisely, they were pseudonymous, meaning they used a continuous username and avatar, but that name/image was not tied to their real-life identity. In the 1990s and early 2000s it seemed absurd to reveal your real name/face online. Yet under that pseudonymous internet, on average, people were more honest and cordial than they are today when everyone posts under their real names. Contrary to intuition, there was less toxicity when more people were anonymous.

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Sunk Cost Writing: Use AI to Kill Your Darlings

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One of the most difficult parts of writing is “killing your darlings.” That might mean cutting out a part you liked to make the story as a whole better. Or, more generally, it can simply mean deleting the boring parts of your story. (As Elmore Leonard said, there should be no boring parts.) Perhaps one of the greatest upsides of writing with AI is that it can help eliminate the “sunk cost fallacy” that authors often face with the words they have already written.

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E Nihilus Infinitum: Social Media and U.S. Fiction

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In “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction,” David Foster Wallace’s brilliant 1990 essay¹, he hypothesized that fiction writers (like himself and myself) are natural oglers or people-watchers. Writers used to have to observe people in the real world, in public, to get the material for their fiction. But fiction writers (like him and me) are often self-conscious types with social anxiety, which was why television was such a godsend for people like him. With TV, self-conscious writers could ogle and people-watch from the comfort of their own homes without the other people seeing them. In this sense, DFW argued, television is a form of voyeurism.

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Dogs Reject the Metaverse

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Dogs have a better sense of reality than humans. Dogs become ecstatic when they see their human owners in person, even if the human was only gone for a couple of hours. The longer the human is gone, the happier the dog will be when they are reunited. If you go on vacation for a week, the dog will become saddened while you are gone, then overjoyed when you return.

But—and this is key—if you call home via telephone and the dog hears your voice, it will get excited for a second until it realizes that was just the phone. When the dog knows you are not actually there in person it won’t care anymore. Dogs have no interest in listening to your disembodied electronic voice or seeing your face on an iPad—because that is not you. Dogs’ primary sense of perception is smell. If they can’t smell you, you’re not real.

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Why the End of a Story Matters Most

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Storytellers often defend their work that is criticized for a poor ending (cough-cough LOST) by claiming that the story or plot didn’t really matter—it was about the characters all along. This is a cop-out. The most important part of any story is the STORY, not the characters, and a story is not a story without “The End.”

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Is the Lone Genius a Myth?

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There is a growing consensus in the scientific community (and society at large) that the idea of a lone genius who makes great discoveries and innovations in isolation is a myth. That may be partially true—the accomplishments of famous individuals in the past were sometimes overstated while diminishing the efforts of others who helped them along the way. However, the pendulum has swung too far in this respect. The truth is that there were lone geniuses (in science and art), without whom certain discoveries and innovations would not have been made.

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True Crime vs. Fictional Crime or Zodiac vs. Se7en

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The genre of “true crime” is growing in popularity in the form of documentaries and podcasts that cover real crimes pulled from news headlines in detail. There are also fictionalized movies and television series about true crimes. I am not especially interested in true crime, but it is the fictionalized narratives about real crimes that interest me least. Fictional crime stories are better—or have the potential to be better—than true crime stories. The difference between them can best be seen in two of director David Fincher’s films about serial killers: Se7en (1995) and Zodiac (2007).

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