swiped my card at about the same speed as the speed of my approach...and got "PLEASE SWIPE AGAIN." No big deal: it happens to the best of us. So I swiped again. "PLEASE SWIPE AGAIN." O.K., sometimes third time's the charm. "SWIPE CARD AGAIN AT THIS TURNSTILE." At this point the people getting off the train were off the train, and people were beginning to board. "PLEASE SWIPE AGAIN." I tried another turnstile. "PLEASE SWIPE AGAIN." The subway robot beeped and told everyone to stand clear of the closing doors. "PLEASE SWIPE AGAIN. PLEASE SWIPE AGAIN. TOO FAST. SWIPE CARD AGAIN AT THIS TURNSTILE. PLEASE SWIPE AGAIN."Here's the thing (and if you think this sounds like I'm apologizing to you for a lost erection, then you may be on to something): this never happens to me!
For the rest of the day, I could not get my damned MetroCard to work. The next day (and ever since), it worked fine—just as it had pretty much every day, several times a day, for almost nine years. 
I have never been particularly sympathetic to people who couldn't get their MetroCards to work. I'm particularly infuriated by people who swipe, don't notice the error message, and then spend 5 –10 seconds trying to go through the turnstile while a line of people behind them are thinking (and eventually shouting), "Too fast! Too slow! Insufficient funds! PAY ATTENTION! LEARN TO READ!!!"1 But it goes beyond intolerance of idiocy: I actually get annoyed when people just can't make the thing work, not because they're being dumb, but because I don't have that problem myself. If I can use a MetroCard, why can't you?—is basically the attitude, with a little bit of a defensive–indignant thing, as I'm very aware that "It's impossible to swipe a MetroCard!" has become a kind of non–New Yorker's N.Y. truism (like, "It's impossible to hail a taxicab in New York!"2).
I have never been particularly sympathetic to people who couldn't get their MetroCards to work. I'm particularly infuriated by people who swipe, don't notice the error message, and then spend 5 –10 seconds trying to go through the turnstile while a line of people behind them are thinking (and eventually shouting), "Too fast! Too slow! Insufficient funds! PAY ATTENTION! LEARN TO READ!!!"1 But it goes beyond intolerance of idiocy: I actually get annoyed when people just can't make the thing work, not because they're being dumb, but because I don't have that problem myself. If I can use a MetroCard, why can't you?—is basically the attitude, with a little bit of a defensive–indignant thing, as I'm very aware that "It's impossible to swipe a MetroCard!" has become a kind of non–New Yorker's N.Y. truism (like, "It's impossible to hail a taxicab in New York!"2).But so here's the thing. How do we know the difference between (a) mastering something, being good at it, 
even simply knowing how to do it, and (b) having a string of good luck? Win a coin toss five times in a row, and you can't help it: you're going to start thinking you've somehow gotten the hang of it. You could be in the minority of human beings who understand that it's possible to win a coin toss any number of times in a row, that while the odds are slim, they're still 50–50 each individual time, and still you might start to think you were really good at coin tosses. I'll bet even Dr. Math would fall victim to this sort of illusion.
even simply knowing how to do it, and (b) having a string of good luck? Win a coin toss five times in a row, and you can't help it: you're going to start thinking you've somehow gotten the hang of it. You could be in the minority of human beings who understand that it's possible to win a coin toss any number of times in a row, that while the odds are slim, they're still 50–50 each individual time, and still you might start to think you were really good at coin tosses. I'll bet even Dr. Math would fall victim to this sort of illusion.Now, I'm not saying that I just got lucky with my MetroCard every single day for years and years—but I am saying that I don't have the foggiest idea how to swipe a MetroCard. I mean, obviously I do because I do it, but do I know what I'm doing? I certainly couldn't explain it to anybody. It's all feel. And the thing that freaked me out in a way that is much larger than anything having to do with public transportation is that the difference between swiping it right and swiping it wrong was perceptible to me only in the results. In other words, it's all feel, and yet I couldn't feel the difference!
What I am about to say will probably strike some people as obnoxious, but what can you do.3 I did very well in school. I was good at school. But it occurred to me even way back then that my intelligence was a bizarre and hard-to-pin-down quantity. 
Man oh man, was I ever smart.4 The only way I knew I was smart was that I did well at things that other people didn't do as well at, that things were easy or obvious to me that were difficult or baffling to other people—but I had no sense of why that might be: intelligence was not a power I had, but rather an observation, or more like a description or summary of events over which I had no conscious control. It just happened to be the case that when I took a test or wrote a paper, I got a good grade on it. I am not bragging: in fact, the point I'm trying to make here is that this set up a situation in which it was very easy to imagine one day waking up and not getting good grades anymore, not automatically understanding things my peers couldn't seem to understand, not finding school to be easy.5
Man oh man, was I ever smart.4 The only way I knew I was smart was that I did well at things that other people didn't do as well at, that things were easy or obvious to me that were difficult or baffling to other people—but I had no sense of why that might be: intelligence was not a power I had, but rather an observation, or more like a description or summary of events over which I had no conscious control. It just happened to be the case that when I took a test or wrote a paper, I got a good grade on it. I am not bragging: in fact, the point I'm trying to make here is that this set up a situation in which it was very easy to imagine one day waking up and not getting good grades anymore, not automatically understanding things my peers couldn't seem to understand, not finding school to be easy.5There are plenty of things we know how to do that we really know how to do. These are usually the things we learn or master. But then there are our talents, the things it's just turned out we're good at—like magic! And these are the things that can sometimes feel totally arbitrary. 
Funniness, I suspect, always falls into this category. No matter how great a comedian you might be, sometimes you're going to try to be funny and nobody is going to laugh. That must be a successful stand-up's worst nightmare: one day Chris Rock goes on stage and bombs, and for the rest of his career he's just never able to get more than a few polite chuckles, ever again. Chris Rock knows he's funny because he knows that what he thinks is going to be funny generally ends up striking other people as funny. But if no one ever thought he was funny again, then where did his superpower go?6
Funniness, I suspect, always falls into this category. No matter how great a comedian you might be, sometimes you're going to try to be funny and nobody is going to laugh. That must be a successful stand-up's worst nightmare: one day Chris Rock goes on stage and bombs, and for the rest of his career he's just never able to get more than a few polite chuckles, ever again. Chris Rock knows he's funny because he knows that what he thinks is going to be funny generally ends up striking other people as funny. But if no one ever thought he was funny again, then where did his superpower go?6And frankly nothing we have is immune to this kind of cosmic theft. Hit your head the wrong way or have the wrong thing go down in your brain, and what do you know? You don't know how to talk anymore. Everything you can do, you may one day be incapable of doing. What am I saying? You will one day be incapable of doing. We're all going to die, folks. Everything you have, everyone you know, one day you will lose.7
So, yes, we've gone from MetroCard swiping to the condition of Man, from public transportation to mortality.
Well done, everyone!
1 And by the way: people, you do not need to wait for the person in front of you to board the train before you swipe your MetroCard. In fact, you can swipe your MetroCard immediately upon their swipe's being accepted. It pays to make sure they're actually going through the turnstile (because if some idiot makes the thing go around and doesn't make it through, he could end up going through on your swipe), but once he's on his way through, SWIPE YOUR CARD. People always stand there waiting patiently for the person to be clear of the thing, as if they're afraid they'll electrocute somebody if they swipe too soon. Nobody will be electrocuted. This is a busy city! Swipe, swipe, swipe!!!
2 My theory is that the reason out-of-towners think it's so hard to hail a taxicab (another thing I've always found easy, assuming any cabs are even around) is that they are fucking idiots: almost every day I see some tourist getting angrier and angrier as more and more cabs drive by without picking him up—the funny part being that none of these cabs have their lights on! If you change the statement to, "It's impossible to hail an occupied cab," then sure, I suppose you're right.
3 I'm not even going to give that a question mark.
4 But don't worry: I was bad at sports.
5 That's a plausible scenario. For example, I once felt like a math genius because I was the first person to finish a Geometry final exam and thought it was way easy but then started having serious doubts when it took 45 minutes for the next kid to come out and he and everyone else were like, "Oh, man, that was so hard," so I started to think I must have missed a page of the test or something, but then I got it back and I got something absurd like a 125% with extra credit—and it was clear to me from experience that it's not that I was the best student in that class (I definitely was not) but that I had just happened to immediately see the best way to do this one particular proof. I had gotten lucky. In other words, my performance on that test had no predictive power when it came to my performance on future tests—and I knew it even then.
6 This is a bad example because if Chris Rock stopped being funny, people would still think he was hilariously funny for years and years—because most people's sense of humor is really a sense of the crowd's sense of humor, just another form of conformism, and "Chris Rock is funny" is a fact with power way beyond its actual description of the man's actual funniness. (Or, wait...maybe that makes it a really, really good example.)
7 Hi, I just finished watching all five seasons of Six Feet Under!
2 comments:
This blog has been particularly good lately. Thank you.
To paraphrase Hume (or was it Chris Rock?): The best predictor of the future is the past. How do we know? It's always worked in the past.
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