Cobb

Conservation of Threat

So profoundly true. H/T Schneier

 

Here's some interesting research about how we perceive threats. Basically, as the environment becomes safer we basically manufacture new threats. From an essay about the research:

To study how concepts change when they become less common, we brought volunteers into our laboratory and gave them a simple task ­-- to look at a series of computer-generated faces and decide which ones seem "threatening." The faces had been carefully designed by researchers to range from very intimidating to very harmless.

As we showed people fewer and fewer threatening faces over time, we found that they expanded their definition of "threatening" to include a wider range of faces. In other words, when they ran out of threatening faces to find, they started calling faces threatening that they used to call harmless. Rather than being a consistent category, what people considered "threats" depended on how many threats they had seen lately.

This has a lot of implications in security systems where humans have to make judgments about threat and risk: TSA agents, police noticing "suspicious" activities, "see something say something" campaigns, and so on.

The academic paper.

Back to Bookage

I don't know much about politics. Don't know parliamentary dirty tricks.
Don't know much about NBC. That's not how I view society.
But I do know that I love books. And if you do to we could exchange looks.
What a wonderful world this could be.

I've been over at Goodreads probably about a decade. I should tell more people about it. When my buddy Richard visited me from out of town last week, we spent a lot of time trying to remember which books we should recommend to each other. Goodreads is the best shortcut. I still belong to The Library Thing, but that's about as moribund as Orcutt. Goodreads is hooked up to Audible and to Amazon, and my short reviews go over to Facebook too.

Here at Cobb, I haven't been maintaining my Bookage column. That's it over to the left. Scroll down. It should be up to date now. These are the latest of the 19 books I've finished this year, a bit ahead of schedule for my modest 30 book pledge. I would like to bring that up the books I read a bit more often, and I should also return to more involved book reviews. There are a couple directions I intend to go in my reading, right now it's all following the little Jordan Peterson in my head, whom I find to be the most exciting dude since Steven Berlin Johnson. So that means psychology, obviously, and I am keeping Steven Pinker on the list of course. And that also means the history of religion. And that therefore means Aldous Huxley, which dovetails nicely with Michael Pollan's latest on psychedelics. So yeah, all that so I can quote the Vedics to suit my purposes.

This follows suit with the prescriptions of Nassim Taleb to understand the wisdom of the ancients, and yeah I'm slogging through The Odessey at long last. Not fun, but more entertaining than I expected. I suppose I'll end up eating some Augustine as well as Neitzsche, God help me.

Naturally, I will keep up my diet of spy novels and space operas with tangents into real history and realistic-er sci-fi.

Stay tuned.

Race and Psychology

This is one of my first public declarations with the implication of my following of Jordan B Peterson. I got a little giddy, but this is sort of the direction in 2018.

Q: Is it possible for society to completely overcome racism and put an end to it for good?

A: Christianity has been working to combat sin for over 2000 years. Guess what?

When you can get tens of millions of people into thousands of buildings around the world to meet on a weekly basis and all repeat the same oaths for hundreds of years, get back to me on that racism eradication.

In the meantime, you can clean up yourself and set a good example. That’s how all goodness starts. It’s really enough. Race is a lie. Don’t internalize it. Don’t eat the poison. Don’t stick your finger in the socket. Simple.

Evil in the world is permanent. It is in your heart. It is in everyone’s heart. It is the nature of mankind. In order for people to work together, they have to WORK TOGETHER. That doesn’t mean walking around in circles shouting slogans with a sign over your head. It means serving and addressing the needs of other human beings. So what have you dedicated your life to doing?

Everybody wants to get rid of evil. It’s not a new idea. You get no credit for wanting things to be better. Everybody wants things to be better.

I tell you what. I’ve been answering race questions online on and off for about… hmm oh. let’s say 20 years. And I’ve probably read 50 books on the subject. And for me, that’s just a part time thing I’ve done in my spare time. I am sure I have answered this particular question 100 times, and maybe 100 different ways. I’m pretty good at it, but there are literally years that go by that I get sick to death of the questions and I don’t answer any. I tell people to piss off and figure it out themselves. And I really don’t care if they do or not. But every once in a while I am inspired to do the work, the best work I’ve ever done, and right now I am because I’ve learned something new that gives me a whole new perspective on the same thing I’ve been working on.

So this year it’s alarmingly simple. Psychology.

Psychology is the science that explains how people’s minds work, how they figure things out, and how to measure this. It depends on theories of mind and consciousness and a whole lot of stuff that’s really vague to me now because I haven’t read any serious books on the subject, yet.

Now since I’m a programmer by trade (in fact, I’m a senior data architect / scientist with 30 odd years in the business, or some fancy crap like that) I have spent many decades learning how to represent knowledge that shapes the way people think when they work with computer systems. That’s the TLDR version of what I do. So I understand from experience how people deal with, let’s call it ‘knowledge formation’, as they interact with computer systems designed to assist in that process.

I understand logic. I know for a fact how racism can be logical and yet untruthful. I understand how people fall for fallacies and fail to see outside of regimes of truth. I understand how it requires energy to sustain beliefs. And of course I understand multidimensional data modeling - so I know what statistical factors make sense and which do not. And why. I’m a really good analyst. I know how to get to the heart of logical principles and make all of the implications clear. That’s my talent. Well, one of them anyway.

All that leads to a sound philosophical logical testing framework for recognizing faulty and deceptive reasoning. And that has been part of my approach to debunking racial theories. But I also understand that (and this is important) Americans don’t often ask about how other countries and other historical periods have dealt with similar problems. Americans know ‘slavery’ as American slavery before our civil war among Africans in the South.. blah blah blah. And people are always trying to make points in a very narrow context of blame and responsibility blah blah blah.

But what if I told you that just like there are a few scientifically provable blood types by which nobody in America is judged, there are scientifically provable psychological features by which nobody in America is judged. Lots of people who know jack about genetics will bloviate on an on about heritable IQ, as if they understood gene expression or even how chromosomes work, or which ones are involved in intelligence. But when is the last time somebody told you. “My blood type is O+, that’s the majority on the planet.” I’m the majority, if you’re not O+ you’re the minority. Well it’s because what, because race is not really defined so well, but that’s not the point of supporting a racial theory, just that you can make ‘reasonable’ judgments about race and culture and ethnicity and point to crime statistics or SAT scores or other trivial nonsense, that might represent 1 or 2 or 3 events in some individual’s entire life, and say that explains society. Yeah right. Race only explains your willingness to think about race. And believe me, people are really colorstruck over some meaningless crap right now, yet they think they know something.

But it is interesting to me to look at human psychology which has evolved over millions of year through natural selection and understand not as a humanist desire or platitude but with scientific accuracy to say that human behavior works a very particular way which is as inevitable and unavoidable as blood type. And it works exactly the same way in all humans. In all countries. In all of history. In all societies. In all cultures. In all economies. In all religions. Because that is biologically what it means to be human and to think. And yes of course across all races, languages, governments too. So at some point in the future, some jackhole will say ‘race explains this’ or ‘racism is the cause of this’, and I’ll immolate their rats nest thinking with psychological precision. Hmm. My typing fingers get tingly just thinking about the troll destruction.

Can you hear the excitement in my writing? I’m about to climb another mountain of learning to add to what I know. I expect it to be useful. Not just so I can answer another question about race online among strangers, but to understand human beings better. But yeah I get to make this old tired hobby have a new twist. Plus it answers questions about religion and philosophy and learning and other things as well. A whole new slew of stories and concepts like the Marshmallow Test. Fun for me, maybe exciting for my readers.

Anyway. Nobody is going to solve world peace, or world sin, or world racism. The Romans tried. The Mongols tried. The Ottomans tried. The British tried. ISIS is still trying. You know how that song goes. Everybody wants to rule the world.

Rule yourself. Find a mate. Rule your children. Be at peace with yourself, your mate, your children. Try not to sin. It’s harder than it sounds. But you can do it with sacrifice and love. That’s enough. If you sacrifice and love right, you’ll be right. Avoiding racism is as easy as avoiding spinach. You don’t have to be paranoid that some evil cabal has Popeye terror cells hidden around the world. You don’t have to have sophisticated strategies for combating spinach on a global scale. That’s for geeks like me. But even I’m not fool enough to think I’m on a moral crusade of epic proportions. I’m a writer, just answering questions the best way I know how. And I’m happy and I’m at peace with myself, and I try not to sin.

And so good night to you, sir. Peace.

 

The Psychology of WEIRDos

This particularly struck me today:

This is one of the most important topics, right?  Well, here is a new and quite thorough paper by Jonathan Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich.  Here is the abstract:

Recent research not only confirms the existence of substantial psychological variation around the globe but also highlights the peculiarity of populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD). We propose that much of this variation arose as people psychologically adapted to differing kin-based institutions—the set of social norms governing descent, marriage, residence and related domains. We further propose that part of the variation in these institutions arose historically from the Catholic Church’s marriage and family policies, which contributed to the dissolution of Europe’s traditional kin-based institutions, leading eventually to the predominance of nuclear families and impersonal institutions. By combining data on 20 psychological outcomes with historical measures of both kinship and Church exposure, we find support for these ideas in a comprehensive array of analyses across countries, among European regions and between individuals with different cultural backgrounds.

So I was talking to my daughter about, now that I think about it, the 8th End of My Blackness. In this telling, she was relating, her sense of friction she gets for speaking proper English and a host of other upper-middle-class markers that, to her critics, mark her has 'white'. I repeated my normal 'haters gonna hate', but also added that all she needs to do is actually visit Africa in order to shut most of them up. It's an expensive trip for a stupid reasons, but is one that ultimately such haters must acknowledge. The reason I have observed has primarily to do with what those poor souls lack in cranking up the significance of 'their culture', which is an actually researched family tree. The less coherent family you have the more likely you are to adhere to cultural institutions, ethnic myths and racial unity. That's what I see.

When I was talking to Richard Peete the other night - there's no way we could catch up on 7 years in one evening - we did brush across the same subject. I told him about the time when some Hoteps at City College, back in my school days, reduced some freshman girls to tears. They were some of the first in their families to attend college and were informed in no uncertain terms that they had no idea what their real roots were, and would not be complete or authentic black women unless and until they went back to visit the slave castles and the pyramids. Guess who was organizing such trips, for a not so small fee?

While I am ready to accept the premise of WEIRD psychology, and it certainly makes sense to me, I wonder if the gap between the rule of law and of honor codes, viz Pinker, is so deeply broad. What I mean to ask is how long into a Catholic marriage does it take for kinship circles to fade into obscurity? How many generations out of the 'hood with all your play cousins does it take for one to psychologically adapt to Corporate America's bowling leagues and pizza overtime? I'll be keeping this in mind, as it relates directly to Peasant Theory and the applicability of personality to political narratives.

Oh. Have I not talked about that? Probably not. Here's the gist. If and when America comes apart and delivers government of the quality of Ferguson, MO, then people will abandon democratic institutions and adopt tribal and kinship associations. This is likely in most rank and file cases, to result in honor culture lawlessness and radical autonomy of the sort we love to watch in zombie and other post-apocalyptic dramas. Only in this village scenario with the individual start to matter again, as the individual is being squeezed by a bipolar political conformity that grows more shrill by the year. Hard to say what will correct it. But I am very curious as to how personality works when it comes to the fundamentals of civilized community outside of kinship and tribe.

The thing is, ironically, that most American tribes are voluntary 'civic organizations'. Like the skateboarders, the volunteer firemen, the book of the month club, and the stoners at the liquor store.

The Most Important Inequality

Q: Do you notice the American society changing?

A: Yes. I think it is inevitable that American society changes. What is most important, I think, is what parents expect of their children with regard to the amount of responsibility they take upon themselves. And what I perceive is that this has been minimal. That there has been a smaller than usual group of Americans growing up who feel compelled to take responsibility for themselves and the people around them. Instead, a larger than usual group of Americans feel that people owe them.

And so for those who take responsibility, more will be demanded of them. They may or may not be able to meet that demand. And for those who do not take responsibility, they will be unwilling and likely incompetent to meet that same demand.

This divide, more than any, is the most important inequality in society. To put it bluntly, do you “follow your passion” or do you “make yourself useful”?

 

I Will Not Coerce You

"When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived." -- Robert Heinlein

People guess my politics. I have none. What I have are opinions, thoughts, arguments, and concepts that I share through my writing.  I am not an activist. I do not vote. I don't raise funds for candidates, nor do I endorse any. When it comes to the mechanisms of democracy, I am inert. or at least I try to be. I believe strongly in civil liberty and the appropriate role of citizens and I would not take extra efforts to shirk jury duty. I do believe in law and order and I support police and municipal authority. That's about it. Everything that I do in the realm of 'politics' is more about political thought, not political power.

I believe I exercise influence in society. I suppose that makes me rather like that fool Timothy Leary who never asked anyone to vote for anyone, but to change themselves and thus change society. I certainly don't believe all my talking should not make any difference, but it is a difference of the self and a difference of the mind. What satisfies my desire to communicate and to persuade is that I am understood and that understanding makes for a change of conviction. I am attempting to work in the Platonic realm through Socratic dialog. I want to alter consciousness.

I have been told that all of my questions are loaded. That is true. Somehow, I picked up the habit Cornel West calls 'provocation'. It was, after all, the anthology '50 Years of the New Republic' and the rants of Mencken that got me addicted to this style of writing. I cannot imagine myself writing children's books. I think we should always be mentally prepared for the fact of human suffering and conflict and that our minds should be agile and practiced in managing those persistent and horrible truths.

So such an attitude brings me into conflict with other minds. I know that my questions persist long after others are tired of whatever subject I start blathering on about. I try not to appeal to authority. I am unsettled and thus unsettling. I am not comfortable with this despite my stoicism. I wrestle with the question of whether or not I should have anything to say to the world at all. This discomfort compels me, if only for my own peace of mind, to record what becomes clear to me from time to time in writing. I feel generous when I share this writing, and yet I know it provokes. But sometimes it gives comfort to those who struggle as I do to make sense of the world and bring understanding to society. It can bring satisfaction to those looking for an ally in spirit or a foil of note.

But I do not want policy. I do not desire regime change. I am indifferent to whom occupies seats of power, and only am concerned with what occurs. All men are capable of all things when our minds are prepared to understand our human possibilities. My mind's defense is yours, would you only read me.

Reality TV and the Public Interest

This morning I read part of an article in which Jordan Peterson is reported to be caught off-guard in a equivalency test between the principle of selling gays wedding cakes and serving blacks wedding cakes. I cranked through this a bit as I lay in bed and the conversation and logic that I found myself in when a little something like this.

I put myself in Peterson's shoes and estimated why he stumbled and I think it might have been something of an overreach on his part, but also because of the strange ubiquity of the gay cake argument. Firstly I qualified myself as Peterson saying I'm not an oracle and I can only muster my own train of logic in the context that I conclude what I do and from that point I became me, myself.

In the end, I speculated out loud why it is that a comedian, as brilliant as they can be searching for the ironies of human life, can represent the public interest in thumping a public intellectual. This gets to the crux of my problem and the title of this essay. But let us consider the equivalence, if there is any, in the reasons for which someone might choose to discriminate against blacks and/or gays in the first place. Why is this of public interest?

In light of the recent Supreme Court decision to cure the anti-gay baker I note that the substance of the case turned on a technicality that fell afoul of one of the minor cogs of anti-discrimination law - something about the punishment being inappropriately harsh given the balance of harm at principle. I also note that given all of the skin in the game, how have we come to represent the public interest in something as insignificant as a $100 cake? Would we consider wedding cakes a public accommodation? In other words, in the great scheme of things, does this matter? I wondered how in the public mind something like this would even catch our attention in a world absent television. How on earth did homosexuality survive without such panoptic scraping activism? How indeed did black life persist or interracial love exist before the Loving decision? Do we really need this level of attention in order to have justice?

I conclude, for the sake of this argument that there was homosexual love long before Stonewall. But I also just recently watched 'Easy Rider' and I know that the road trip ends in murder and that this murder characterized the threat faced by the counter-culture. Well the counter-culture won, and as far as I know, there were only a few murders they suffered, even at Chicago in 1968. By the Bicentennial, there was only cursing. Long hair was no longer a threat. We have become as permissive a society as anyone might desire while still remaining a civilization, but that's not where are heads are at. Our emotions are animated by the memories of segregated water fountains, and fire hoses, and Michael Brown. Our emotions are animated by Matthew Shepherd and Harvey Milk, and by defiance in the streets. Our emotions are subject to react to the drama that characterizes the stories that persist, but not to the way people survive every day. We look to the moment where all hope was lost and the law and the state could not rescue the innocent victim.

Whenever I make my arguments, I do so in order to reveal the way I think about things with the hope that someone else can replicate my logic and see the sense in it. People have a hard time understanding this. If you're a programmer, you understand that you can represent any logical construction, and if you open source your programs, you are making an argument for the program's approach, not so much the end product of the program. There is beauty and power in the use of language itself. But there is always the limited experience of the programmer to solve problems and keep those solutions running in production. No programmer, no matter how clever, can have all the experience to solve all of the problems programs are capable of solving. No philosopher or shaman or priest solves all human problems. No public intellectual or comedian does either. But we might still use their arguments and algorithms. As I look towards the 95 Billion dead of humanity, I use today's logic languages, with an understanding that life, in a Jurassic Park metaphor, finds a way - even ineffably with proprietary logic and coding way may never know. Homosexuals did find love before Stonewall. Blacks and whites did find accommodation in their lives before 1955. We are not the last programmers, we just have the biggest compute networks ever.

And it is in that power that I propose an abundance of caution, and I do so in a way that should resonate with all those in favor of civil liberty, although having done so sounds awfully conservative to many ears. If we have the power (yes we do) to get the disposition of a water fountain used by Miss Jane Pittman or of the address of the restaurant who denied service to a political partisan, then how do we as citizens moderate that power? This is the power of media, of its overstepping into the bounds of society, replacing our powers of individuation with their editorial stances.

I am often asked very simplistic questions, and today I think I have a very simple answer that gets at the heart of the questions I raise. How can we take the narrative out of combined media and give a more accurate accounting of what justice actually is? How can we put the dramatic story in context? How can we bring forth the details in which the devil hides?

The public and society have conventions that do and should change. We ought to be able to navigate these changes and initiate them appropriately. That requires that we have the give and take which is prerogative of society but is not the ratchet of law. I see that we have politicized the personal and we agitate to enact the political to give it the force of law. We do so like machine gunners popping our heads out of foxholes every four years. Death to the other side. We have clearly destroyed all coherence in the administration and regulation of health care, and I think we are likely to do so in anti-discrimination law on our current frenzied path. That is because we are not engaged socially, but politically and at the mercy of very sophisticated implementations of mass communications. Our minds are being hacked because democracy. It's what we expect - we expect to listen to people who coherently represent the masses and we enable their abstractions. We pull the lever of consent and let loose the political beasts who will do as they please until the next time we vote. Then we go to sleep with the TV on thinking all of it's connected. Yet we know it's a news cycle of outrage. We let this influence who we befriend and defriend. It's sick. Or as Gordon Bennett said, it's counter-human.

If I were the owner of CBS, I would petition Congress to change one rule. That rule would be the presence of video in courtrooms.

If I were the CEO of Amazon, I would petition Congress to have access to all of that video and put machine learning algorithms to it all.

If I were a citizen, I would stop watching reality TV and watch court cases. Not just dramatizations, but actual court cases.

I would hope that this combination of situations would help us all to understand with more examples, the kinds of duties we might have if we spent more time on juries following individual cases resulting in a collaborative decision making process of delivering a verdict and less time in chat rooms following national sensations generated by editorial boards. It's just that simple. If people would avoid social media courts of public opinion the way they avoid jury duty, this might become a more civil society. If they moved toward jury duty, I think we'd get more actual justice. Ask any attorney how jammed up the dockets are and how much citizens give up by not following the courts more closely.

--

In the other minutes of my morning reverie I thought about what it is we signify about ourselves in our permissive society. I would probably like to deal with that more closely in the future. But I am thinking about uniformity and formality with an aim to bust up the 'salad' of multiculturalism and grind out more 'soup' of pluralism. And this is where I may be making the same mistake at Peterson. It is because I think that sexual intimacy is inherently complex, private and important. That means it is much more individuated than racial identity and it is, I think, inevitably more close to the way a person sees themselves. The implication here is that the more you must identify one's sexual nature through the uniform of citizenship, the more you corrupt the democratic process. In other words, by declaring what is most intimate about you as a public marker, you destroy your own privacy by giving license to third parties to characterize you, not by your actual values and principles, but by your personal identity. To sow 'as a black lesbian, I feel..' reaps 'as a black lesbian, you must..'.  It is because of this exchange that I cannot, nor should anyone, offer up equivalences along the 'multicultural' dimensions of human attributes. We only need act as citizens in the public interest, and therefore the public should only require us to follow orders applying to the uniform.

The uniform of citizenship allows us to be called to public duty without prejudice. The uniform of citizenship allows us to remain private individuals beyond public scrutiny.

 

Driving Fast

A couple years ago, I rented a new Corvette and took it up the Angeles Crest. I wanted to find out if I just liked fast cars or rather if I just liked driving fast. It turned out and it remains the case that I like driving fast. But like most other things, I'm a formalist and I do my extremes with a modicum of restraint. I like being competent at extreme things, I am not particularly interested at being extremely competent at anything. There is the shadow of my father's most prescient and wise words that hangs over me. "A little bit of everything adds up to a whole lot of nothing."

That is why, in the end, I am much more likely to spend my hard earned money on a moderate Porsche rather than any other fast car. I am attracted to its formality, its capability of achieving without straining, its ability to draw one out of mediocrity without a sharp learning curve. Yeah. That's me. The moderate Porsche guy.

In this, I make the distinction between moderation and mediocrity. After all, I'm still talking about some appreciable measure of extremity. How's about 120 MPH in a 55 zone? This is actually something I'm fairly comfortable doing, and have done several times. The thrill, after all, comes from leaving the mediocre behind. Half the time I hate being boxed in by laggard traffic, but the other half is from the possession of the power and skill to make things happen as quickly as I can think of them. To see across four lanes of traffic through which you can thread a half mile ahead of your current cruising position is a siren call. On a motorcycle it's almost trivial. In a fast car, there is a different kind of risk. In an expensive Porsche, another dimension of risk is added. All that risk aside it's the thrill of moving from a casual 80 to a manic 135, of making the other traffic stand still, to boldly go. That's a kick in the pants, but it's also barrel fishing.

The real test is to measure oneself against oneself. That requires a track and practice, and that is an expensive proposition for the kind of Porsche owner I'm most likely to become in the next couple of years. That's the sad trombone. That said, there is a strong element of wish fulfillment going on here. I've always wanted to own the Porsche and the Rolex. It's a kind of California thing. It's personal. It's what I would hate not achieving, even though I go back and forth about the Rolex and have for the past 15 years. If I never own my own Porsche, and I never drive fast on that mountain road, it will be an experience I would greatly miss. If I never impress a Maitre D with my Explorer GMT, I can live with that.

Deep in my soul there are a couple interesting characters with whom I'm entirely comfortable. One of them is the guy who drives west on Sunset to the sea, but with that jungle music turned up. I already have composed the tune I want playing when the valet returns my hooptie and I prepare to burnout. So all of my cars had to be cool. The Porsche will be cool.

I think it is true that one cannot enjoy multiple cars. It isn't natural. It is an acquired taste, and one that I'm not sure that I want to acquire. Of course I don't know what it means to be retired with disposable capital. But after all of the car shows and auctions I have witnessed - well they're kind of like strip clubs. You're real happy for the guy who just scored but you're really not all that jealous. I can't tell you how much fun it is for me to sit behind my LG flat screen and enjoy the screeching cars at Goodwood, but do I really want to fly out to England to be a guest of a club they would never let me join?

What I can do is join the club I don't have to join, which is the gang of motorheads native of SoCal car culture, the Cult of Mulholland the Tribe of the Angeles Crest, the Crenshaw Cruisers and the Hoonigan Squids of Griffith Park. I was more than just knee deep, then again, not totally deep, but deep enough to be deep. I wonder if, as I look upon these tepid loves, I have ever wanted anything so much as to break all laws. No. I've only wanted to satisfy my self, and I've never been so greedy as to expect it all at once. I've always wanted to live a long and fruitful life. Perhaps I'll become more reckless once my daughters are married.

This weekend, I took myself through a sheepdip of the Porsche Experience and tested my limits on the little track over in Carson. I can say without qualification that it was a breathless experience, and it was very pleasant to learn that I have a solid grasp of the basics. Unlike when I started shooting several years ago, I was not handicapped too badly by my videogame experience. I could tell what driving on virtual tracks had done to mess me up, but I straightened a lot of that out in a hurry. My motorcycle experience served me well in that. But that was all the first step. Now I'm knocking on new doors.

My strengths are in braking. That's the one thing that I got consistent good marks on. I could take the car reasonably up to 80-90% of its ability with good control. My weakness was a lack of understanding of how hard I could corner, ie how much speed I could take into a corner. I was in too much of a hurry to accelerate hard out of a corner rather than to brake less coming in and ride the speed through then power out later and smoother. That's probably a typical videogame error. At times, I was also not looking far enough down the track because I didn't have a good idea how fast I could actually go given the traffic. My biggest error was slow hand speed on the skid pad. Until I figured I could waggle a lot more on the pedal and steering wheel, I was trying to smooth my way into a perfect drift. So I was trying exactly not to be jerky and I think jerky was called for. All in all, I got a good taste of driving fast. God have mercy on my soul.

The next day I did some American muscle in a Mustang. That was quite the different experience as it was mostly done on the legendary Pasadena Freeway and on the 10 West. It mostly consisted of blowing through traffic as described up in the top paragraphs. Satisfying, but silly. I have to say that kind of driving is much more fun if your car is both loud and obnoxious in sound and color. The yellow vette from two years ago was perfect.  The black Mustang, not so much, but since it was a convertible and we wore Ray Bans, it was doucheriffic. I think the only thing that can outdo that kind of badassery would be doing wheelies on bikes.

So there's that.