The Lucifer Effect [52 Books #15]

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo

Zimbardo explores transformations from ordinary, stable, average individuals into tormentors and murderers. His field is social psychology and his theory is that a three parts that define a person's responses to another are the personality, the situational pressures and the system defining the encounter. In theory, he claims, almost anyone can be brought to preform deeds even they reflect later upon as horrid violations of another.

The style is a bit to over the shoulder and preaching, and shows a clear bias against the Iraq war. It is however dense and well explained, step by step documenting experiment, experiment, and analysis of real life situations where people have crossed unthinkable lines and damaged fellow humans, and why the line was stepped over. This is not light bedtime reading: it avoids wallowing in dehumanity, but only just.

First Zimbardo discusses acts of violence and basic principals; the Rwandan genocides, the Holocaust, other such light fare are noted. The basic question is, “What makes a person shift to a new mode that sees their lifelong neighbors as inhuman beings needing to be killed?” His first experiment in this area was the famous Stanford Prison Experiment of 1970.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was supposed to investigate the minds of prisoners during incarceration and in the end got more than anyone bargained for. College students were selected, none found to have any dispositional psychological problems, and then divided by coin flip into two groups: prisoners and guards. 9 were incarcerated in the dressed-up basement of the university's psychology building while 9 guards were put on shifts of 3, with instructions to not physically harm the prisoners, prevent chaos, and preserve order. The experiment was set for a two week duration.

It lasted 6 days before an outside observer slapped sense into the head researcher – conditions had deteriorated so far, just in the first few days, that two prisoners had emotional breakdowns. The 'guards' were tormenting the prisoners because they could, depriving them of beds, sleep, communication, and decency.

There's extensive analysis of the SPE, details of other experiments in the field, like famous shock experiments, derailing conventional wisdom – one experiment had a volunteer shock a small puppy whenever it failed to perform a trick, of increasing intensity the more it misbehaved. Conventional psychologists suspected no woman would take the shocks up to the maximum on a puppy: all women did, for the puppy's own good.

Zimbardo then branches into a real life case. Abu Gharib prison, near Baghdad, was a scene of humiliation and torture, and Zimbardo was called to the defense of the coporal in charge of the wing where these acts occurred. He demonstrated how Corporal Fredricks had a decades experience as a correctional officer without any notable reprimand (he once wore the wrong uniform in his first month, and was noted as slow in counting the prisoners) went to serve in the army reserve without negative review, then was put in charge of a wing of this prison under steady bombardment, with meals only from MREs, no bathrooms, no superiors listening, and having to sleep in prison cells himself. Ocassionally civillian contractors and unidentifyied intelligence agents would drop by to interrogate prisoners – at least once killing a prisoner – and told the guards to soften up the detainees for next time. Still, despite Zimbardo's bleak picture of the stresses all the guards were under, the guards were convicted and judged 'bad apples'.

Corporal Fredricks received 8 years in Fort Leavenworth. By comparison, Second Lieutenant William Calley of the My Lai massacre received 3 and a half years house arrest and was later pardoned.

The analysis points to several factors. Those who are online often may recognize a few:

• Dehumanization – Take away the target's individuality, paint them as something lesser, strip any sense of moral obligation or empathy.

• Anonymity – cloak the attacker's identity, remove the feel that they will be recognized doing these acts

• Authority – lessen the strength of authority or, worse, have authority approve of the actions.

• Pressure – show others doing such acts, and have them presented as positive role models to emulate.

• Step By Step – begin with small steps, a slap on the wrist and escalate the inensity and severity of the actions.

Following these steps, well, I played Ultima Online, when I could point to each of these factors in the early days of the PKs. Solitary characters with silly names roamed the countryside slaying any character they met and robbing their corpses. Origin did little beyond tellign the victims they should band together. The PK problem grew and grew until it threatened to swamp the game and leave nothing but PKs, the victims having fled to Everquest and Asheron's Call. Eventually EA stepped in and made the happy fun land of Trammel where no one could ever hurt another without consent. Then came the great era of scamming....

Can't say I'd recommend the book. It's long, dense, and can ramble for a chapter on its points. There is some psychology here that think people should understand, but perhaps check out the website instead: The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo

The Long Tail [52 Books Quickie]

My next book on the list looks to be long, dense and dry, so I'll through up a review of what s, essentially, an overgrown pamphlet.

The Long Tail is a 30-page presentation available online that discusses the economies of a digital world; no significant limitations from distribution and retail channels. We can see it today with Amazon, eBay and iTunes.

The premise is that with low overhead, niche markets can account for up to half the sales. Walmart can carry about 39,000 top-selling CDs before the low sales on the bottom few make it counterproductive to stock more. Amazon has no retail store rent, so it can stock more. iTunes has no store at all, simply a web page and a server cluster, and can stock, conceivably, every song made and offer all of them to any prospective buyer.

As written in 2005, Amazon makes 22% of it's sales from books that retail stores see no profit on. These books need only sell once or twice a year for Amazon to make their warehouse costs back. For a digital only model (note the push to sell more ebooks with the Amazon Kindle reader) the numbers could approach 50%.

The two things needed to produce a long tail sales market (the name comes from the curve; hits are a giant spike, and obscure books are a long, shallow fallaway on the far end, a long tail to the graph) are the upfront hits - the pop movies, the stars - to get the customers into the store, then the recommendations for the obscurity and niche: "If you like Britany, you may like..." and "Customers who bought this also bought...". With these two factors a business model designed around serving the tiny niche markets - and serving a LOT of them - becomes functional and viable.

Before They Are Hanged [52 Books #14]

Middle book. Sigh. Lots of stuff happens, and I'm still surprised this is Abercrombie's first published work. He's quite good at creating distinct characters and telling an interesting, if a bit standard, fantasy story. The plot is pared down to what he can handle, I believe, and it's a wise choice for a new author. The real love is in the viewpoint characters and the feel of the world he made.

We see his world through the eyes of a northern warrior who's seen more than a decade of constant tribal fighting and has nothing to show for it but scars; the scout from the warriors old band, who believe him dead as they avoid the new chief hunting them down; a woman obsessed vengeance and avoiding any entanglements. Then the last three viewpoints are from three soldiers all on different paths: one traditional soldier, an aide to a marshal leading an army to chase the northern chief out of the kingdom, a former soldier who's hunt for glory a decade ago left him imprisoned, tortured, crippled, and who now serves as a master inquisitor and torturer, and a noble soldier who gets dragged onto the big magic quest and just wants to go home and fight a real war and earn everyone's admiration.

Each view is different, each has a unique voice, and I'm impressed by Abercrombie's debut. The big quest to find the magic widget is more a side show, with the occasional fight, that takes up a third of the book. The other two stories involve a city under siege by the big bad empire and the army – badly needed at the siege – chasing in the north on a punitive expedition against an upstart chief-turned-king raiding villages. There's a deeper plot behind everything, of course, but the true connection among each thread is the violence; Abercrombie keeps the story moving through sheer brutality. No story doesn't have a good fight every few chapters, interspersed with arrivals in new places (and new places to fight) and recovering from the last fight. The fight scenes are good – although all the large scale battles are tossed off-camera – and varied. There's not really and epic magic battles, all are good swords and bows and straight-up fights. There's only four battles with any magic effects, and none come off as flashy or cheap. No false victories are pulled out from nowhere, the characters, as is common in middle books of trilogies, go through some bad times and have no clean victories.

Abercrombie's First Law trilogy holds up with part two. It's a non-gritty realistic style story, much slogging through mud and close combat scenes and there's no problem that can't be solved with a good knife. Or a really big knife. Possible a lot of big axes for tough problems.

“Forgive your enemies, but not before they are hanged.”

Blindsight [52 Books #13]

I really had no idea what I was getting into.

Blindsight looks like a hard science fiction first contact novel; it is a first contact novel. But there's so much musing and ideas on the nature of sentience and so many ideas stuffed into the story it made my head spin. The five characters (and one computer) sent out to meet the stranger at the edge of our solar system are far, far from humans we are used to seeing.

The viewpoint character, Siri Keaton, is a synthesist on board the spacecraft Theseus. Siri can measure people and things by their exteriors, somewhat similar to Neuro-Linguistic Programming techniques shown on television with Derren Brown. He judges everyone's mood and thoughts by observation to report back to Earth on the state of the mission. He's incredibly detached, unfeeling, and reminds me of Dexter from the series of the same name. The same constant litany of how he doesn't feel, how he learned mechanical routines to convince others he had emotional responses. Oh, and he had half his brain removed as a child.

The team's biologist is a cyborg who's medical gear is tied into his nervous system. Isaac Szpindel tastes blood and feels samples, his cybernetic body splayed across the ship's equipment. Szpindel is the most human of the crew in outlook; obsessed with work, tunnel-visioned, and distant that he is.

Linguist is a gang of four, or more – Susan James is the primary personality of multiple personalities in her body, all multitasking together and each having their own specialties and desires. She had surgery to divide her brain into a set of different cores but believes such fragmentation can be done naturally and at will someday in the future.

Amanda Bates is the military officer on the expedition. She, like Szpindel, is relatively human in outlook, though she can see and feel and command and fight through a distributed network of her 'grunts', robotic soldiers tied to her mind. She's also a pacifist and chafes under the command of the last two crew members.

The Theseus has a quantical computer on board, monitoring and deciding constantly, and could be in command if the powers that launched the mission didn't decide on a somewhat more human leader.

Sarasti is a vampire. Yeah. Vampire.

Watts worked out the biology and history of vampires in great detail, finding a way to make it work in a hard-SF setting. Vampires: a subspecies of humanity that went extinct about ten thousand years ago that was savant-autistic and predated on humanity due to an inability to produce certain neuro-chemicals. Tetra chromatic, dual-retina, resistant to prionic diseases, and capable of hibernation as it's prey replenished numbers over decades. Amazingly, it works as far as I can read the science.

Sarasti is the mission commander, and he doesn't suck blood. He eats brains. He's a predator ordering his food around, using his hunting mind to work the problem of first contact. He usually wears glasses to avoid spooking the crew.

So these are our representatives to the alien. The alien is far stranger than any of them. It chooses the name 'Rorschach' in first communications.

So, first contact is made, and then Peter Watts spins out every damn theory about consciousness he can in a mad rush of speculation, traps, pondering, torture, confrontation, and communication. The effects of EM fields on human minds. The usefulness of DNA. The distinction between empathy and intuition. The need for self-awareness. Viral talk. Dandelions as a model for space exploration. The last sentient being to exist. A strange, shambling host of mental defects throughout history. The blind playing catch. Blindsight.

The ending, as so often happens, is rushed, in a desperate climax once all the pieces are set in place. Really, the great joy is the ideas, the musings, the questions about what we are inside ourselves and just what is the use of ourselves, all brought up in a menagerie of humanity. The appendix alone is a trove of ideas, and reading all the references in the footnotes could keep you reading for a year.

Strangely, the most similar book I've read recently is 'Stumbling Upon Happiness,' also delving into the processes of our memery.

I'd recommend this book to those that like a hard-SF novel and those who love big questions. Blindsight is now available under the creative commons license at http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Creating Unforgettable Characters [52 Books #12}

Seiger goes through the steps of creating a character for movies and television in clear,concise steps. It's a good guide for anyone looking to make better characters for fiction, dramatized non-fiction, role-playing games, or perhaps that other personality for 'that' chat room.

Each character is built through broad strokes then adding details to make them consistent with a real person. The next step is to add contrast to make the characters more interesting, then work on how they all relate to each other; who conflicts with who and how. The chapters are livened by real examples from produced works, such as Rain Man, Ordinary People, Gorillas in the Mist, Fatal Attraction, MacGuyver and Cagney and Lacey.

I liked it. It showed a clear process and gave much good advice for making a character from whole cloth, and showing how we -can't- make a character from whole cloth – we look around us to find ideas and kernels for our fictional parts.