My least favorite Pulitzer pick, and a political lesson

Have you watched the video [1] in the above post yet? FIgured out how many basketballs the folks in the white shirt passed?

Watch it again. Don't count the passes. Wait for the big, fat gorilla to walk by.

This [2] is the article that won the Pulitzer prize for feature writing. It appeared in the Washington Post Magazine. In "Pearls Before Breakfast," Gene Weingarten writes of an experiment he did with Joshua Bell, one of the world's greatest violinists: he set Bell up in front of the escalator at a crowded subway stop, then watched as thousands of busy commuters ignored him.

From the evidence of these "Pearls Before Breakfast," Weingarten cast the rabble of Washington D.C. soulless swine.

That's absurd.

Josh Bell is the gorilla. People not paying attention to him had nothing to do with how harried and soulless modern commuters are. It had only to do with context, and basic social psychology and hard-wired cognition patterns.

Busking is a skill, a craft--one I deeply appreciate. Part of the craft is placing yourself in a context where people do not merely notice you, but notice themselves noticing you, enjoying the serendipity. Placed where rushed people were guaranteed not to notice-- the brain can only concentrate on a limited number of things at once, thus the gorilla video; these folks were concentrating on making their trains--Josh Bell was not a great violist. He was merely an awful busker.

And then the writer used this meaningless foundation to do the thing I most despise in the world: be a snob. It read, though it was not intended to, like a setup to make the writer look good and everyone else in the world look bad.

There's a political lesson there. The are only a limited number of things a human being can pay attention to at a time—a biological fact. So make your political messages count. Grab people by their lapels. Tell a story. Tell it good. And don't count yourself their intellectual superior if people ignore you. Count yourself a failure.