One of the weird side-effects of traveling by loop drive is that you can find yourself in the past, and have to relive earlier decisions. Not literally, but vicariously. Really it's just remembering past mistakes and suffering through the lens of hindsight. I have a lot of days like that, and today is one of them. Today I meet Paal de-Shintus.
It's two weeks after the party where I first talked to Pi. I found myself invited to one of her gatherings not as a server but as a guest -- a shockingly potent ref I found out. I dressed well but it was unnecessary, even a bit overkill. Today's Wednesday group was really just a few grad students discussing Crabs, including Sven who I had met, and his roommate Paal, who I had not. My goal had been to listen, to work my way in quietly from the edge of the group. As always, I failed.
Paal was in Pi's own field: political science, that strange voodoo that spans the boundaries between disinterested research and actual power. Subject to peer review and independent verification, political science shouldn't just be a golden ticket to personal success, and yet for the last 50 years there had been a growing chorus of complaints that the field had turned more and more parochial with papers resorting to impenetrable jargon and unverifiable hypotheses. Since I was even more idealistic back then, going in I was -- let's say -- skeptical.
Paal was very softspoken, and worked out his theories carefully and with some humility. His concept was totally valid -- he was analyzing Crab interactions with respect to patronage systems in the middle ages. There were some very interesting similarities that could be fruitful areas to explore, but it became clear partway through the discussion that he held actual biologists in very low regard and thought that all behavior could be explained through rarefied economic models. I started to see red, and even trying to keep a low profile, as soon as he set one foot out of bounds I exploded.
"Have you heard of anthropomorphism?" I asked, glowering. He thought I had said something totally different.
"An-thro-po-mor-phizm," I spelled out. "It's a logical fallacy -- common among non-biologists -- of applying human percepts to the behavior of non-human creatures." Everyone was starting at me. I went on, "Like when you talk about pride as a motivation you have two problems applying it to Crabs. One is 'pride', the other is 'motivation'." I had realized at that point that I was bursting to show him just what could be learned from a study of biology.
Our sessions were long intellectual arguments for the most part. He was cute but shy, so I kissed him first. It took another week for him to make a clumsy, embarrassed pass at me. I don't think Pi's Crab working group was ever happy about our affair, although it might have been what Pi intended.
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