Beyond the Pigeon

I bought a small item at the local market the other day. The total with tax was $6.66. “You’d better buy something else, too,” the clerk said. I assumed she was joking. I smiled as I handed her $10. “I’m serious,” she said. “No, that’s OK,” I answered. She sighed as she gave me back change. I could see the exchange really did bother her however.

Numerological hopes and fears are commonplace. Many people play lucky numbers in lotteries and on roulette wheels. (With high frequency those lucky numbers are birthdays.) The number 4 is unlucky in parts of East Asia. Fear of the number 13 is so common in the West that there is a specific word for it (triskaidekaphobia). Many Western buildings lack a 13^th floor – or, more accurately, the 13^th floor is labeled the 14^th. The number is often missing from addresses. As it happens, the street number of my own house is 15. My street is numbered in the usual US fashion with odd numbers on one side and even ones on the opposite side. My adjacent neighbors to left and right are 11 and 17. The assumption, apparently, is that evil gremlins can read “13” on a mail box but that they can’t count.

I don’t normally think about my street number, but it came to mind as I turned into the driveway when returning from the market. It prompted me to pull from my shelf for a reread Superstition by Felix E. Planer. I have the 1988 revised edition. A peek on Amazon reveals that it is out of print; used copies are offered for sale there for $52 and $100. I paid something close to $6.66 back in ’88 or ’89, which is $13.59 in 2019 dollars. It is worth a read: not $52 worth IMHO, but it is worth borrowing from the library anyway. Be aware that some of the terminology in the book, though perfectly correct when written, is regarded as un-PC in some circles today; the reader might find this refreshing.

Planer was born in Berlin in 1914 but moved to London where he earned his doctorate; during the war he conducted scientific and engineering research for the British Admiralty. He was a lifelong skeptic, but was aware he was fighting an uphill battle, not least with himself. People are hardwired to see patterns even where they don’t exist and to worry about them – and not just people. B.F. Skinner’s classic Superstition in the Pigeon demonstrated that pigeons fed on a random schedule develop meaningless rituals; they repeat an action that preceded getting fed the last time, and the more often they repeat it the more likely (just by the odds) they will be fed again soon afterward. So, the ritual behavior is reinforced. This is very similar to a baseball player who eats a Twinkie before a game because he scored a run the last time he did; he might know intellectually that the Twinkie wasn’t the reason, but if he doesn’t eat one he might well be slightly distracted by the thought, which could hurt his batting. That’s how superstition works. It is how obsessive-compulsive disorder works, which is just superstition on overdrive. Fear underlies it, and fear is the problem with it.

Planer’s definition of superstition (in humans: he leaves the pigeons out of it) is therefore two-part: 1) “a belief in influences and events that are incapable of being justified on rational grounds,” and 2) the additional constituent of fear. Planer discusses the global evolution of beliefs in magical objects, rituals, spirits, and the paranormal from Sumerian to modern times. Unlike pigeons, humans are able to think rationally and to overcome superstitions, if not our tendency toward them. Ritual behavior really does temporarily ease superstitious fears, which is why it gets reinforced, but he argues that it is better for longer term happiness and personal freedom to get past them.

I agree for myself, but I’m not sure this is entirely true for everyone. Psychologist Gregg Henriques has written of the three fundamental world views. There is “supernatural dualism, which is the view of most traditional religions.” This posits a spiritual world distinct from the readily tangible material one. Second is “parapsychological mysticism, which refers to a belief about a conscious reality that surpasses conventional scientific understanding.” If this sounds New Age-y, it is. Third is the naturalistic world view, which regards the physical world as all there is. Planer regards the first two as superstition. He may be right (and I think he is) but that doesn’t mean people who belong to the first two categories aren’t happier than naturalistic realists. There is some evidence that a larger percentage of them are: naturally there are depressive and giddy folk in all categories, but the percentages differ. As that may be, each of us believes what he or she must. There are still downsides to many superstitions regardless. Even a mystic might want to give up eating that Twinkie before the big game.

Howlin' Wolf - I Ain't Superstitious

Artificial Intelligence Is Better than None

Humans are having so much fun hating each other these days that other concerns rarely remain in the forefront of public consciousness for long. One such concern that had a flurry of attention in the press in 2018 but then evaporated was the long-term danger posed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics. Perhaps the death of Stephen Hawking, who warned that AI was an existential threat to humanity, had something to do with the passing interest. Other respected figures added their voices including Elon Musk whose robotic cars roam the highways. Musk warned, “The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five-year timeframe.” I’m sure another press flurry will come soon, for robots aren’t going anywhere – or, more accurately, they are going everywhere.

The kind of dangerous happening Musk had in mind was, in scifi terms, less Skynet, which consciously chose its own objectives, than HAL, which unexpectedly resolved conflicting mission objectives it was given by trying to kill the crew. There is a difference. As we become ever more reliant on AI to route electric power, drive our cars, fly our airplanes, manage our industrial production, and even just control the temperature in different rooms of our homes, the risk to the systems grows. The worry is not so much about narrow AI, such as the algorithms that tell Amazon or Google what products to recommend to you, though even these sometimes behave unpredictably. The concern is about more generalized higher level AIs that reprogram themselves as they learn about the world by interacting with it; they already have done very strange things such as learn (by themselves) to cheat at games by changing the rules. As they get ever more complex and ever better at simulating consciousness they are bound to spring surprises on us – whether or not by “intent.” There are growing numbers of robotic weapons with the capacity to act autonomously, whether or not they are allowed to do so, with some self-evident dangers, but even autonomous machines built for benign purposes can go badly awry. Reliance on AIs also makes us vulnerable to nefarious fellow humans who aim to disable them with EMP or simpler methods.

A particular kind of AI has intrigued us the most, at least since Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) put the word “robot” in the dictionary: androids. Autonomous robots need not be humaniform (android). Scarcely any are at present, and those few are not very high functioning, but they are clearly the end game. We love android robots, sometimes literally. Brothels with robotic love dolls are in business in Toronto and Paris. The appeal is bound to grow as the machines become not only more animate but better conversationalists. They also scare us. Recently the idea that robots might end mankind through love not war has gained some currency: the notion being that we might so prefer machines to actual fellow humans that we don’t bother to reproduce. (See Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross set in an entirely robotic post-human solar system in which the humans weren’t killed but just faded away; I wrote a short story called Circuits Circus set in the waning days of human-to-human sociality.) It is true that many people already have deeper relationships with their smart phones than with their families, and it is also true that online games such as Love Plus that let the player construct a virtual lover (rather than deal with the pesky real thing) are wildly popular. However, the old-fashioned homicidal robot uprising (pioneered in R.U.R.) is still the classic nightmare.

Roboticist Daniel H. Wilson writes science fiction (including the novel Robopocalypse) when he isn’t tinkering together the mechanical successors to humanity. Some years ago, however, he wrote a tongue-in-cheek guide titled How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself against the Coming Rebellion. In it he reveals the various ways your smart house and your car might try to kill you, and he escalates the possibilities up to the full-out terminator-style assault. He discusses the ways to defeat various tracking sensors and recognition technologies. He explains how to exploit the quirks of AI decision-making; they think far faster than you in familiar situations, for instance, but struggle with wholly novel ones. He tells how to recognize a robot if one calls you on the phone by the way it constructs speech. Though he advises running and hiding whenever possible (with tips on how and where), he tells how best to fight back. Blinding cameras by throwing mud on them is a good first step, though it won’t help if the robot can access real-time drone or satellite imagery. All-in-all, it is a fun little field guide, which despite the silliness really does cover many of the peculiar strengths and weaknesses of present and future advanced AIs and robots. He says in the intro, “Behind every bit of advice exists an area of real research with genuine answers that have been culled from extensive interviews with robotics experts…You probably found How to Survive a Robot Uprising in the humor section. Let’s hope that is where it belongs.”

So, when the AI assistant in your smart house tells you to change a light bulb, wear shoes with well insulated rubber soles to guard against a sudden power surge. Further, enjoy your robotic inamorata when Amazon delivers the crate to your door, but after you activate him or her, keep track of the kitchen knives.

Jefferson Airplane - Plastic Fantastic Lover

Midsummer

The summer solstice came and went last week without my usual low-key fanfare. I don’t ever set epic bonfires to mark the day, or fly to the UK to watch the sunrise at Stonehenge, or travel West to the medicine wheel at Bighorn. I’ve never hosted a human sacrifice in a burning wicker man despite a partially Celtic heritage. Julius Caesar gave this account of the practice in his Commentaries: “Alii immani magnitudine simulacra habent quorum contexta viminibus membra vivis hominibus complent quibus succensis circumventi flamma exanimantur homines.” If your Latin is a little rusty (and I’m impressed if it’s not): “Others have figures of great size with limbs of wicker that they fill with live people; when set afire they are killed by being enveloped in flames.” No, none of that. I do often have a cookout with friends in the backyard, but hamburgers on the grill are all that ever get enveloped in flames. Last week the weather was not cooperating (it was cool and rainy mostly) so I let the cookout slide. But while I may not have celebrated the day with friends and a grill, I did notice – and toasted the event in my own private way.

This is the first truly summery week of weather this year in this locale even though an alternate name for the solstice (uncommon on this continent for some reason) is Midsummer. It is an odd name since one reasonably might think midsummer should fall on or about August 7, but the solstices and equinoxes were once considered to be the middle of their respective seasons. This actually makes astronomical sense, but the lag between changing insolation and seasonal weather makes the modern way of marking seasons feel more correct down here on the ground. I’m happy to regard summer as lasting until the next equinox: September 23 this year.

My habit of preferentially timing my get-togethers to an equinox or solstice rather than some nearby conventional holiday is partly practical and partly wistful. The practical aspect is that I am not competing with parties held by others, including one or more of my usual guests. The wistful part comes from marking the passage of time. The analogy of the progression of the year and the passage of life has weighed on human minds from prehistoric times to the present. Frank Sinatra released the album September of My Years the year he turned 50. I think 50 is more like August, but we know what he meant: he was feeling his mortality as folks in middle-age tend to do to an extent they hadn’t before. Robert Graves, who always preferred to be known more as a poet than a novelist, went so far as to argue that the cycle (or some part of it) of birth, love, aging, and death as represented (implicitly or explicitly) by the metaphor of the seasons was the sole subject of poetry; one can write verse about other stuff, he argued, but it doesn’t rise to poetry. As that may be, on four days of the year I am particularly aware of people and events no longer in my life, of those that are, and of what may come. Too bad I’m a lousy poet.

Nonetheless, our planet’s orbital prompts are not altogether necessary for ruminations of that kind. Nor are they necessary for parties. Perhaps I’ll hold one on midsummer in the modern sense, which is to say in early August sometime. I’m sure I can work up some wistfulness about the passage of time then, too.

Rolling Stones – Time Waits for No One

The Fifth Dimension

There is a famous 80/20 rule for governing one’s expectations. For example, the rule of thumb is that 20% of participants in any enterprise produce 80% of the value. Another 20% cause 80% of the trouble. 80% of movies are disposable. 20% of college men have 80% of the dates. (Studies actually have confirmed that last one.) And so on. It is so much a part of our experience that we don’t usually think much about it. There is one 80/20 split that has been causing some concern lately however: the widening split between the bulk of the nation and the fifth of it comprising the upper middle class.

It’s easy to hate on the 1%, at least for 99% of us. Hence, at the May Day Occupy march back in 2011 more than a third of the marchers had incomes over $100,000, which only 8% of individuals earn. Yet the more important divide is the top 20% of households (not individuals, though some households are individuals) defined as those with over $115,000 in income vs. the 80% that earn less. 50% of the nation’s wealth is owned by the 19% just below the 1% and it is the prime beneficiary of economic growth.  Political scientists across the spectrum including Charles Murray (Harvard, MIT) on the libertarian right (cf. his book Coming Apart), New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo (see America’s Cities Are Unlivable: Blame Wealthy Liberals on the left, and Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution in the center (see Dream Hoarders) have taken note. All three authors are worth a read. One always has to give credit to someone who, like Manjoo, is willing to critique political allies. Murray’s book is extensively documented though by design it concentrates on white America so as not to confound class differences with ethnic and racial differences, which are always hard to tease out from each other in the US; he brings other groups into the graphs in the closing chapters, however, with surprisingly little impact on the statistics. Of the three, Reeves is probably the most broadly readable in our divided world in which too many of us dismiss out of hand the words of those with ideologies that differ too much from our own.

The issue all three have with the upper 20% is not their high incomes per se but rather the barriers they place in the path of the 80% trying to join them, particularly (but not only) by placing out of reach big ticket items such as housing and education. Let’s take Manjoo’s primary concern, a subject with which I have familiarity. In constant dollars food is about the same price as in the 1950s while televisions are cheaper as well as vastly better, but the cost of housing has soared. Housing was not always the massive expense it is today. In 1940 the average price of a single family home in the US was $3000 which in inflation-adjusted 2019 dollars is a shade under $55,000. In the decade after World War 2 my grandfather and his three sons (including my father) built smallish but completely serviceable ranch houses for nominal prices much lower than even the cheapest of compact cars today. The homes were sold to average working people (usually single income), few of whom had any degree higher than a high school diploma. One of these very same houses in Whippany NJ is on the market right now priced (not unfairly) at $473,000. In my own town my father in the early 1960s (by then no longer with my grandfather) built slightly more upscale houses (just like the one in which I grew up) priced at $30,000; one of those houses is currently listed at $599,000. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the inflation multiplier since 1961 is 8.4, meaning that in real terms the price has more than doubled. Pretty much all of the increase can be attributed to the land rather than the improvements. The reason? Primarily it is restrictive zoning. It is simply impossible under current regulations to duplicate developments aimed at ordinary middle class buyers on the scale they were built in the two decades after WW2, so the price of properties (the land more than the improvements) is driven up. The remaining large tracts of land in my home township recently have been rezoned for 10-acre lots, which means each individual subdivided lot will cost seven figures. The residents of the town have striven to ensure that no one new will move into town unless Upper Middle Class or truly rich. It is no wonder so many adult Millennials are still living at home with mom and dad.

It is important to note that the 80% is not an underclass in the usual sense – a portion of it is, but there has been no growth in actual poverty in recent decades. The large bulk of the 80% is middle class, but it is largely stuck. Much of what ails it cannot be put specifically on the doorstep of the 20%. For example, while children of 20-percenters overwhelmingly are born into and raised by two-parent households, the majority of 80-percenter children are born out of wedlock and spend at least some of their first 18 years in single parent households. This has powerful economic consequences. The cause of other ailments is open to debate. Male wages, for example, for the 80% (not the 20%) in real terms peaked in 1974 and are down 20% since then; only the influx of women into the workforce kept household income from declining. Intermarriage between 20-percenters and 80-percenters (commonplace 50 years ago) has become rare: college educated professionals marry college-educated professionals. While there always have been nice neighborhoods and less nice neighborhoods, there is a segregation of the classes like never before by zip code. The segregation is not by race: though the 20% is whiter than America in general (75% vs. 63%), it is increasingly diverse as the older whiter members of it die off. The segregation is by class. The 20-percenters live next to, go to school with, and marry each other. They live in a self-contained bubble that really is out of touch with the rest of the country. The 20-percenters are the elites (including news and cultural commentators) at whom average folk rail. The rise of populism of both the right and left wing cannot be understood except in this context.

Do you live in a bubble? Murray has a 25 question quiz available here that might answer the question: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/do-you-live-in-a-bubble-a-quiz-2. (Full disclosure: my score was 42, a result which the quiz describes as "A second generation (or more) upper middle class person who has made a point of getting out a lot." That is basically right: neither of my parents attended college and their assets when they got married at age 21 & 19 totaled $700, so there is no “or more” to the “second generation.”)

Though the three authors write about the US, this growing divide is a trend across the West and one that seems immune to the differing tax and social policies of different nations. Nevertheless the authors do have suggestions. Murray, as one might expect, concentrates on removing the legal and institutional barriers to upward mobility including excessive licensing restrictions, overregulation of small enterprises, and, of course, restrictive zoning, which economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti agree by itself has chopped 50% off GDP growth since 1964. Manjoo agrees about the zoning though we also hear more about taxes from the left. Reeves espouses all of that and more.

Whatever response (if any) is appropriate, acknowledging the division is an obvious first step. Reeves, once again, is the author I recommend to most people. Reeves moved to the US from the UK in part, he says, to get away from persistent class snobbery. He was unsettled to find that, though class snobbery remains less overt in the US, class mobility is if anything lower. Hence the book Dream Hoarders. Of course, (one might note at the risk of snobbery), not all class is about money.

Motörhead – No Class

Dirty & Jerzey: 6/15/19 Derby Bout

The Jerzey Derby Brigade (JDB) was back on its home track in Morristown last night for a bout against the Dirty Jersey Roller Derby based in Metuchen, NJ. Dirty Jersey jumped to an early but modest lead as jammers #3 Babe Brutality, #902 Lady Speedstick, and #21 Jacked Up showed skill at evading or penetrating firm defenses. Jams by #138 Incindyous, #3684 Californikate (in her final bout for JDB), and especially a 16 point power jam by #8 Lil Mo Peep kept the JDB competitive. The game was notable for a much used penalty bench, which is a common signifier of hard blocking. Blocking strategies have evolved over the past decade with a 3-wall becoming commonplace; it is hard to break through and encourages the opposing jammer to take a particular path around it where the fourth blocker is waiting. Both teams used the formation a lot, though it can be (and was) defeated by nimble-footed skaters. The first half ended with the score at 50-87 in favor of Dirty Jersey.

 As is often the case, the second half was more rough-and-tumble than the first as each team struggled to overtake or maintain the lead. Takedowns were frequent with #221 Det. Sure-Block Holmes and #63 Raven Rage getting in their usual solid hits. Despite strong efforts by JDB including a few star passes to #64 Madeleine Alfight, the overall pattern of the first half continued in the second. Strong jams by Lady Speedstick and Babe Brutality were only partly offset by similar jams by Lil Mo Peep and Incindyous. Dirty Jersey expanded its lead with Thiza Glory taking the team over the 100 mark. The lead expanded as the minutes counted down. In the final jam Babe Brutality as lead jammer, pursued by Lil Mo Peep, ran out the clock. Dirty Jersey won the match with a final score of 99-175.

MVPs:

Dirty Jersey

#3 Babe Brutality (jammer)

#306 Pink Medusa (blocker)

JDB:
#3684 Californikate (jammer)

#206 Bow Chicka Pow-Pow

[For regular readers, yes I missed the 5/18 JDB v. Assault City home bout. Sorry about that. The final score for that game was 134-304 for the Assaulters.]

I Want to Believe

We all have had the strange experience of conversing with a seemingly rational and sane person who at some point expresses some belief that to us seems unimaginably weird: that transdimensional reptilian aliens killed JFK or some such thing. Most often the expressed belief isn’t so far outside the mainstream as that, but even mainstream beliefs can seem inexplicable to those of us who don’t share them. We like to believe (there’s a variant of that word again) that we are logical and those other people are not. This is improbable. Even if we happen to be right, or at least less wrong, the odds are we arrived at our beliefs first and found reasons to justify them later. This is just the way the human mind works; those of us with mainstream opinions come by them with few exceptions the same way the reptilian enthusiasts do.

Michael Shermer is a founding publisher of the magazine Skeptic. He also writes a column for Scientific American. I’d read numerous articles by him in the past. Last week I picked up The Believing Brain in which he explains how people are hardwired to see patterns and agency in the world. Shermer writes about the physiology of belief and the effects of priming, anchoring, and pre-existing expectations. There are good evolutionary reasons for people to be good at discerning causes, patterns, meanings, and hidden links where they exist, but also to be just as talented at seeing and believing in them where they don’t. Those of our primate ancestors who concluded a rustle in tall grasses meant that leopards were lurking in there because there was one the last time the grass rustled, for example, most often were wrong; nonetheless, they were more likely to survive than the primates who didn’t believe in the connection. Being credulous is less likely to get you killed and thereby removed from the gene pool. Evolution favors belief based on shoddy evidence over skepticism. Far from being a barrier to holding outlandish beliefs, by the way, intelligence actually helps. Shermer argues that intelligent people can convolute, reinterpret, and interconnect data in creative ways that dimmer bulbs cannot match. It is especially hard to change minds when a sense of self is tied to a system of beliefs such as a religion or political ideology: “our most deeply held beliefs are immune to attack by direct educational tools, especially for those who are not ready to hear contradictory evidence.” The truth, or something approximating it, sometimes can be found, however, and the scientific method is best way of finding it. It behooves us to recall the admonition of physicist Richard Feynman:

“If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

My math teacher back in high school liked to quote Edgar Allan Poe: “Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.” This is hyperbolic (and of course logically self-negating), but there is an underlying value to the advice. “Belief comes quickly and naturally, skepticism is slow and unnatural, and most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity,” says Shermer. Turning skepticism on ourselves is especially hard, but in a world increasingly characterized by true believers (secular and otherwise) and extreme partisanship it is something to be encouraged.

The Believing Brain is worth a read, as prods to question ourselves (not just others) and our own belief systems usually are. Thumbs Up.

Thin Lizzy – Don't Believe a Word

Eyes on You

In general I prefer horror films and fiction to be free of the supernatural. There are exceptions, but they have to be…well…exceptional. I’ve always felt the scariest monsters are all too human and, very likely in their own minds, not monsters. A novel such as Jim Thompson’s The Killer inside Me and a movie such as Kalifornia are frightening precisely because the characters in them are credible. A recurring figure among all too human screen monsters is the stalker, a character sometimes motivated by material gain (Wait until Dark), sometimes by sadistic playfulness (Duel), and sometimes by romantic obsession (Play Misty for Me). For some reason the stalker genre was especially big in the last two decades of the 20^th century, and Greta (2018), available on DVD, is a throwback to the style of that era. That is a compliment.

Francis (Chloe Grace Moretz) is an innocent, but not too innocent, young woman who has recently moved to NYC where she works as a waitress and lives with a rich young friend named Erica (Maika Monroe). (Erica’s father gave her a loft as a graduation present.) Francis is still shattered by the death of her mother a year earlier and has an uncomfortable relationship with her father in Boston because, so we learn from their phone conversations, he is moving on. Francis does not approve. One day Francis finds a purse on the subway and returns it in person to the owner who turns out to be an older woman named Greta (Isabelle Huppert). She connects with Greta and they soon develop an ersatz mother-daughter friendship. Something, however, is off, and when Francis finds a cabinet full of purses in Greta’s home, she is shaken. How many other purse-returners have preceded her and what happened to them? Francis tries to break off the relationship but Greta isn’t ready to let go. Greta stalks Francis and steadily ramps up her threats, which at first are implicit and later explicit.

Unlike many modern productions, the pacing of the film isn’t rushed, which works better for building suspense. The movie is entirely female driven with men in minor supporting roles. The director Neil Jordon (Interview with the Vampire) plainly had fun with this film. By all appearances French actress Huppert (Elle) did, too. The final act is a little hard to swallow for reasons I can’t explain without a major spoiler, but more sensible behavior by a character would have undermined the necessary climactic tension, so this is not a fatal flaw. The movie is no modern classic, but does what it does well enough for a Thumbs Up.

How common is stalking actually? That depends on the definition. Internet stalking is so common that it barely counts. Unwanted in-person attention is usually what we mean. This is a disturbing thing to experience despite it having been the theme of a creepy love song by (ironically) the Police. Fortunately (if that adverb can be used at all in this context) for most victims, the activity is far more often annoying than dangerous, but there are enough cases of the latter to be a cause for concern. While there already were laws against many of the common actions of serious stalkers, several high profile crimes – most notably the 1989 murder of actress Rebecca Schaeffer by an obsessed fan – led in the 1990s to specific laws against stalking per se being enacted in all 50 states. The anti-stalking law of California, which is both prototypical and typical, defines a stalker thus: “Any person who willfully, maliciously, and repeatedly follows or harasses another person and who makes a credible threat with the intent to place that person in reasonable fear for his or her safety, or the safety of his or her immediate family.” According to the CDC 15% of women and 6% of men are stalked at some time in their lives. By a looser definition of the activity, the numbers are of course higher. The motivation of the stalker is often a romantic fantasy but there can be other motivations. Some people just want to be associated with someone famous, for example, and pursue a connection relentlessly. Revenge for some real or imagined slight is sometimes a motivation. In any case the goal of the stalker is to elicit fear and/or compliance. The self-styled romantics can be the most dangerous of the bunch. A month prior to the murder of Rebecca Schaeffer, her killer Robert Bardo had written to his sister, “I have an obsession with the unattainable. I have to eliminate [what] I cannot attain.”

The legal definition of a stalker may be relatively recent but the activity isn’t. History is full of examples such as the relentless pursuit in the 19^th century of Lord Byron by Lady Caroline Lamb or of Cecil Rhodes by (of all people) Princess Catherine Radziwiłł. Stalkers often are pretty normal and rational in every way other than their obsession. This is why neighbors and light acquaintances so frequently are genuinely surprised when they learn of an arrest: “What? Him?” There is no one single profile but there are some patterns in the numbers. Unsurprisingly, male stalkers heavily outnumber women but not by so huge a margin as one might guess: 77% to 23%. Most female victims (61%) are stalked by someone with whom they had a previous intimate relationship. A mix of casual acquaintances, coworkers, friends of friends, and complete strangers account for the rest. Men by contrast are more commonly (56%) stalked by casual acquaintances or strangers.

What to do if we experience this? If the activity meets the California definition, definitely tell the authorities. Even if the activity falls far short of that, tell someone. Don’t give the stalkers the attention they desire or they (especially the romantics) will twist your words and actions to give themselves false hope. The “don’t feed the trolls” advice for dealing with harassers online serves in real life, too. The good news is that 52% of stalking cases end in less than a year. The bad news is that the rest don’t. 9% last 5 years or more. The long-lasting ones overwhelmingly involve intimate exes who have trouble letting go. Commitment is not always a virtue.

Trailer: Greta