Sunk Costs Fallacy

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

[Contains spoilers for Anathem, if anyone cares.]

I’m going through two intensely frustrating things at present:

1. The end of my first semester of sound engineering school, and
2. Reading Neal Stephenson’s Anathem

School: it’s TAFE, which means no exams worth mentioning, and they really don’t want to fail anyone if they can help it. That means the assessment tasks aren’t too difficult, and in many cases we finish them long before the end of semester so that there’s time for marking, resubmission, late submission, or whatever. The side-effect of this is that the last weeks of semester seem to be spent mostly sitting around not doing much. Last week I had a couple of days where we essentially did nothing — or nothing that I either hadn’t done before, or which I couldn’t do myself via Google or Wikipedia in a fraction of the time — which as you might imagine I found rather irritating. Wait, that’s perhaps too much understatement. I was literally bored to tears, and yes, I do know the meaning of the word “literally” thank you very much.

By Wednesday afternoon I’d started to think the whole TAFE thing was a waste of time. Perhaps I could do better working (paid or unpaid, or most likely a mix of both) in the industry and learning on the job. I’d almost certainly find it more fulfilling than sitting in class, and over the same time period I’d probably learn more and certainly get more hands-on experience and industry contacts. When I approached one of our teaching staff about this, asking for his opinion, he said that I “might as well finish what I started”. In other words: I’ve done a semester of a course that takes two semesters to receive a piece of paper (and four semesters to receive a more advanced piece of paper, but two semesters is the first relevant exit point). Now that I’ve sunk the costs into the first half-year, I might as well go through to the end of it, even if what we’re doing in class is of only limited use to me, and not all that good for my mental health.

On another note, Anathem: a few weeks ago, probably because I was missing Wiscon, I found myself in an SF-reading mood. I wanted to catch up on a lot of the books my friends had been talking about over the last couple of years, while I’d been reading other things. I ordered an ebook reader, which would take a couple of weeks to arrive from the US, and in the meantime I hit the public library and borrowed a couple of books I’d been meaning to read or re-read, to tide me over. One of them was Anathem.

Before I start panning the book, I should mention that I’m actually a moderate Stephenson fan. This website is named after a term I found in one of his books, after all. I first encountered his work when found Snow Crash on the shelf of a general bookstore in Ballarat, sometime in the early 90s. I picked it up because the cover looked cool and bought it because the first paragraph grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. Cryptonomicon came out the same year the geeky consultancy company I was running was working on a gambling project on an offshore data haven; all our servers were named things like “kinakuta” and “raft”, and my laptop was “yt”. Hell, I even got hold of a copy of The Big U and read it. So, I’m not generally averse to the guy, and I have a fairly high tolerance for his diversions, random infodumps, and half-assed endings.

It was only when I got to the Baroque Cycle that I couldn’t handle it. At the time I was reading a lot of historical fiction and had pretty firm ideas on what constituted good writing in that genre. Quicksilver rubbed the wrong way against those genre conventions once too often, and since Stephenson was a relative newcomer to a period I already knew a bit about, his geeky fascination with things I considered commonplace (muskets and slow-match, for example) started to grate. Quicksilver was the first of his books that I didn’t finish, and I didn’t pick up another one until now.

Anathem is about a monk-like order who have survived thousands of years, who remain cloistered for up to a thousand years at a time, and who have a daily service of winding their giant clock, which has not just minute and hour hands, but year/decade/century/millenium hands too. It came out when I was working at Metaweb, on Freebase. The company had been named after Baroque-cycle-affiliated wiki of all knowledge, “The Metaweb” (now defunct, but you can see it on the Wayback Machine), and was founded by people closely associated with the Long Now Foundation, who are actually building a 10,000 year clock. Long Now talk was common at the office when I worked there, and there was lots of enthusiasm for Anathem when it came out — I remember there being an offer of tickets to a launch event or author talk or something for Metaweb staff — but I wasn’t in an SF-reading phase, so I skipped it. When Metaweb was acquired by Google, one of our founders gave a speech at our acquisition party talking about how Freebase was meant to be a repository of information that would last 10,000 years, and getting it into Google was the best possible way of furthering that goal. (True? Not sure.)

Enough background. A couple of weeks ago when I was standing in the Darebin Public Library’s Adult SFF section wondering what to read, I saw Anathem and grabbed it. I figured it would fill the time before my ebook reader arrived, I’d get to see what connections it had to Metaweb-the-company-where-I-worked, and it couldn’t hurt to have some of pop-cultural awareness of what it’s all about, the same as how I went to see Avengers, even though I don’t have much interest in the franchise, just so I’d know what people were talking about. All these were reasons to have a shot at it even though I knew there was a risk that I might find it as tedious and annoying as Quicksilver.

Surprise! It’s tedious and annoying! Stephenson finally found a way to add even more tangential infodumps into the story, by having almost the entire cast of characters be philosophers/theoretical scientists who spend most of their time lecturing or in Socratic-style dialogue about things like geometrical puzzles or the sensory perceptions of worms. Most of it ties in to the overall plot development, which at least is an improvement on some of his previous works.

The other thing that annoyed me was his worldbuilding: it’s set in another world where the people in it have “jeejahs” that are almost identical to our mobile phones and tablet devices; where the plebs wear baggy pants and sports jerseys with numbers on the back; where the dominant religion has a schism directly equivalent to the Reformation; and where details ranging from canvas-covered military transport vehicles to bucket-sized “sugar-water” drinks are all surprisingly familiar. The overall effect was of the kind of lazy worldbuilding where everything gets an “alien” name full of Zs and Qs and apostrophes, but is otherwise exactly the same as our world.

And then, over the course of hundreds and hundreds of pages, you eventually realise — SPOILER — that it’s all because parallel universes blah blah. Wait, you’ve been irritating me with your sloppy worldbuilding and “jeejahs” for all this time just so you could go SURPRISE! ALTERNATE EARTH!? And I’m meant to go “oh, wow, you’re not sloppy, you’re actually BRILLIANT!” Sorry, not feeling it.

So, I’m seven-hundred-something pages in to the book, and about ready to throw it across the room. And yet I find myself thinking, “Well, I’ve come this far, I may as well finish. Maybe it’ll get better.” At the same time, I have books ready and loaded on my ebook reader that I could be reading now, and probably enjoying more.

So the questions I’ve been asking myself, and which I ask you, if you care to take a shot at them: Firstly, with about two hundred pages to go, should I finish Anathem? Secondly, should I stay in school? If your answers differ, then why?

Chili verde

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

Okay, a few people demanded this recipe after I tweeted about the deliciousness of my dinner, so here it is. This is pretty much a mishmash of the top few chili verde links I found on Google, but it’s my mish-mash, and it resulted in what’s the tastiest chili I’ve had since leaving the US, and possibly for a good while before that.

• 2 tblsp cooking oil (whatever kind you like)
• ~600g pork, diced
• 1 onion, diced
• 3+ semi-hot green chilis (jalapenos or similar; I use some longer kind I don’t know the name of), seeded and finely diced
• 8 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
• 2 tsp cumin, ground
• 1 tblsp oregano, dried
• 2 cups (500mL) vegetable or chicken stock, water, or beer
• 1 large can tomatillos, drained and chopped (~800g)
• 1 large green bell pepper (capsicum)
• 1 bunch cilantro/coriander leaves, chopped (put some aside for garnish)
• 2 cans white cannelini beans (or 3-4 cups cooked from dry) drained
• additional chili (flakes, powder, hot sauce, whatever) to taste
• 1/2 tsp salt, or more to taste

Heat some oil in a heavy pot and brown the pork. Do it in two batches so the meat really browns, and doesn’t just stew in its juices. Set aside.

Put a little more oil in the pot and saute the onion and green chilis in it until the onion is translucent. Add the garlic and cumin and continue to saute until fragrant. Add a little stock/water and deglaze the pan if it has brown stuff stuck to it (mine certainly did after browning the pork), then add the rest of the liquid along with the chopped tomatillos. Bring to the boil, then simmer.

If you’re a plan-ahead person, you can do this step well in advance. If you’re a great multi-tasker, then you can do it while the pork browns and the onions saute. If you’re neither, then you can do it now — it’s no big deal, anyway, so now’s as good a time as any to char the skin of the green capsicum/bell pepper. You can do this under the grill/broiler, or over the gas flame of your stove (just drop it right on top of the burner), or using whatever other technique you like. When it’s black all over, or almost, cover it loosely with a cloth or a plastic or paper bag and let it sweat a few minutes as it cools. When cool enough to handle, remove the black, blistered skin then de-seed and chop the rest of the capsicum into short, thin slivers (mine were about 2cm x 0.5cm or, if you don’t like metric, 3/4″ x 1/4″). Toss them into the pot along with the oregano and most of the coriander/cilantro — leave some aside for garnish, though, because you’ll want that later.

And that’s everything for the sauce! Let it simmer for a few minutes. Go wipe down your bench and wash a few dishes or something — it only needs a quick cook. When that’s done, use a blender to blend the sauce til most of the chunks are gone. If you have an immersion blender, then just stick it in and give it a few whizzes. If you have a jug-style blender, like I do, then just ladle out most of the sauce and give it a few pulses, leaving a bit behind, say 1/4 of it, so there’s still a bit of texture. Your overall goal is a mostly-smooth-ish sauce with a few bits of onion and pepper and stuff for texture and colour.

Hurrah, you’ve done pretty much all the work! Now is the time to taste it, and if you think you’ll want it spicier, add some chili in whatever form you like. I’m fond of dried red pepper flakes, so I added a good pinch, probably about a teaspoon full at this point.

Put the browned pork chunks back into the sauce, put the lid on your pot, and put it over the lowest heat you can for at least an hour, or longer if you want — up to three hours would be fine, if it’s a weekend and you are just having one of those lazy cooking afternoons. In any case, by the time that’s done your pork chunks should be tender enough to break apart when you press them against the edge of the pot with the edge of a wooden spoon.

Now you can add the beans. Just dump ‘em in, then bring the chili back to the boil and give it another taste. Adjust your flavours — I added salt and more red pepper flakes at this point. Cook for another 15-30 minutes, or leave it over the lowest heat for, oh, hours really. It’ll only get better. Good for parties!

Serve with rice or tortillas, and have hot sauce, sour cream, and chopped coriander standing by as DIY additions for those who like them.

The quantities I’ve given give a fairly soupy, liquid chili, which is the way I like this dish. If you like it thicker, use less stock/water/beer.

A note on spice: the 3 green chilis I used made the sauce very mild to start with, and I upped the spice twice as it cooked. If you like it spicy and know your chilis well, you could get more enthusiastic earlier on. No harm in waiting, though; a couple of different kinds of chili gives more depth of flavour, in my opinion, and it’s better to under-spice at first than to over-spice, since you can’t easily bring it back.

Chili verde

Okay, a few people demanded this recipe after I tweeted about the deliciousness of my dinner, so here it is. This is pretty much a mishmash of the top few chili verde links I found on Google, but it’s my mish-mash, and it resulted in what’s the tastiest chili I’ve had since leaving the US, and possibly for a good while before that.

• 2 tblsp cooking oil (whatever kind you like)
• ~600g pork, diced
• 1 onion, diced
• 3+ semi-hot green chilis (jalapenos or similar; I use some longer kind I don’t know the name of), seeded and finely diced
• 8 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
• 2 tsp cumin, ground
• 1 tblsp oregano, dried
• 2 cups (500mL) vegetable or chicken stock, water, or beer
• 1 large can tomatillos, drained and chopped (~800g)
• 1 large green bell pepper (capsicum)
• 1 bunch cilantro/coriander leaves, chopped (put some aside for garnish)
• 2 cans white cannelini beans (or 3-4 cups cooked from dry) drained
• additional chili (flakes, powder, hot sauce, whatever) to taste
• 1/2 tsp salt, or more to taste

Heat some oil in a heavy pot and brown the pork. Do it in two batches so the meat really browns, and doesn’t just stew in its juices. Set aside.

Put a little more oil in the pot and saute the onion and green chilis in it until the onion is translucent. Add the garlic and cumin and continue to saute until fragrant. Add a little stock/water and deglaze the pan if it has brown stuff stuck to it (mine certainly did after browning the pork), then add the rest of the liquid along with the chopped tomatillos. Bring to the boil, then simmer.

If you’re a plan-ahead person, you can do this step well in advance. If you’re a great multi-tasker, then you can do it while the pork browns and the onions saute. If you’re neither, then you can do it now — it’s no big deal, anyway, so now’s as good a time as any to char the skin of the green capsicum/bell pepper. You can do this under the grill/broiler, or over the gas flame of your stove (just drop it right on top of the burner), or using whatever other technique you like. When it’s black all over, or almost, cover it loosely with a cloth or a plastic or paper bag and let it sweat a few minutes as it cools. When cool enough to handle, remove the black, blistered skin then de-seed and chop the rest of the capsicum into short, thin slivers (mine were about 2cm x 0.5cm or, if you don’t like metric, 3/4″ x 1/4″). Toss them into the pot along with the oregano and most of the coriander/cilantro — leave some aside for garnish, though, because you’ll want that later.

And that’s everything for the sauce! Let it simmer for a few minutes. Go wipe down your bench and wash a few dishes or something — it only needs a quick cook. When that’s done, use a blender to blend the sauce til most of the chunks are gone. If you have an immersion blender, then just stick it in and give it a few whizzes. If you have a jug-style blender, like I do, then just ladle out most of the sauce and give it a few pulses, leaving a bit behind, say 1/4 of it, so there’s still a bit of texture. Your overall goal is a mostly-smooth-ish sauce with a few bits of onion and pepper and stuff for texture and colour.

Hurrah, you’ve done pretty much all the work! Now is the time to taste it, and if you think you’ll want it spicier, add some chili in whatever form you like. I’m fond of dried red pepper flakes, so I added a good pinch, probably about a teaspoon full at this point.

Put the browned pork chunks back into the sauce, put the lid on your pot, and put it over the lowest heat you can for at least an hour, or longer if you want — up to three hours would be fine, if it’s a weekend and you are just having one of those lazy cooking afternoons. In any case, by the time that’s done your pork chunks should be tender enough to break apart when you press them against the edge of the pot with the edge of a wooden spoon.

Now you can add the beans. Just dump ‘em in, then bring the chili back to the boil and give it another taste. Adjust your flavours — I added salt and more red pepper flakes at this point. Cook for another 15-30 minutes, or leave it over the lowest heat for, oh, hours really. It’ll only get better. Good for parties!

Serve with rice or tortillas, and have hot sauce, sour cream, and chopped coriander standing by as DIY additions for those who like them.

The quantities I’ve given give a fairly soupy, liquid chili, which is the way I like this dish. If you like it thicker, use less stock/water/beer.

A note on spice: the 3 green chilis I used made the sauce very mild to start with, and I upped the spice twice as it cooked. If you like it spicy and know your chilis well, you could get more enthusiastic earlier on. No harm in waiting, though; a couple of different kinds of chili gives more depth of flavour, in my opinion, and it’s better to under-spice at first than to over-spice, since you can’t easily bring it back.

Mirrored from Chez Skud. You can comment there or here.