The Last Trumpet Project, Kevin MacArdry

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Kevin MacArdry's The Last Trumpet Project covers the consequences of a slightly future world in which realistic virtual realities and uploading of people's consciousnesses into software are becoming commonplace. The government and organized religion are both violently opposed to these developments (for different reasons) and work together to suppress the technology and the people promoting it. Since the technology is the result of decentralized processes, rather than a single company or organization, the efforts to suppress don't do much more than slow the tide.

The story is generally well-told, with plenty of excitement, intrigue, and reasonable character development. The one place where MacArdry comes up short is in his depictions of the bad guys. They are caricatures of venal politicians and religious leaders, and may turn off (politically) mainstream readers. Their explicit drives and goals are for personal power, and they verbally admit that they don't care who gets hurt as long as they don't have to relinquish control.

MacArdry presents a plausible economic story about the development of the technology (the ability to view past events necessary for uploading dead people notwithstanding). As the fidelity of the VR improves, and there are more things to do and places to go there, more people spend more time there. The eventual consequence is that their real world activities and sources of income become harder to trace, which squeezes the tax authorities. This is the root of much of the governmental opposition. The religious opposition is stirred up based on the project to resurrect the dead into the artificial worlds.

As befits a technology that people rely on so heavily (the resurrected can't exist without it), the software has actual security (not described) that enables owners to prevent bad actors from getting access to sensitive locations. Of course the weak spot is physical access to the servers hosting the system, and the enemy forces eventually figure that out, though they have a hard time connecting particular servers to particular virtual locations.

The Last Trumpet Project is a finalist for the Prometheus Award, and it has a reasonable chance. It may not be the best written candidate of this year's finalists, but it's one of the best at presenting a clear conflict between freedom and government repression.

Simple Explanation of Prices

One of the podcasts I listen to is Russ Roberts' "Econtalk". In a recent podcast on Hayek, he was talking with Bruce Caldwell about the price mechanism and how markets adjust when circumstances change. They referred to Hayek's article "The use of knowledge in Society", a classic article I've heard of many times. This is the place where Hayek conclusively settled the Socialist Calculation Debate, which had raged for a couple of decades to that point. It's remarkably readable.

The podcast also referenced Roberts' own short article "How Markets use Knowledge". This article gives a concrete example of how markets adapt to changing circumstances, using a simple intersection of supply and demand curves. As circumstances change, suppliers and consumers adapt, by changing the amount they produce or consume, and the changing price gives each all the cues they need to choose a new course of action. Roberts shows how their adaptations respond to the context and the information they each have so different economic actors make different choices in differing circumstances. It's simple and elegant.

War and Peace and War, Peter Turchin

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Peter Turchin's War and Peace and War contains some fascinating details about a period in European history that isn't often covered in order to justify a relatively comprehensive theory about what drives the rise and fall of empires. Since I only have Turchin's view of the events, I don't feel confident in judging the theory, but it does hang together fairly well. Turchin's argument is that societies in which diverse cultures mix and which have frequent contact and conflict with very different groups, usually develop strong asabiya (social capital, Fukuyama's Trust), which leads to a strong culture and government, and historically led to empire (which he defines as a large multiethnic territorial state with a complex power structure.) The mixing which he says is crucial happens most often at the boundaries between empires, so as an empire grows the boundaries grow more distant, and the asabiya is undercut, followed by collapse and the rise of a new empire at the edges of the old.

The heart of the book is a presentation on European history before and after the Roman Empire, focusing on the interactions between the central areas and their Germanic, Frankish, Russian, and Arabian neighbors. There is a lot of detail about the various tribes and societies, and how they interacted, fought, and traded superiority over time. This was quite interesting, but since it was mostly new to me, and presented in support of Turchin's thesis, it was hard to tell how much selective bias there might have been. Turchin covers interactions between Russians and both Tatars and Mongols. The Russians apparently don't have any natural barriers to the east or south, allowing invaders to attack repeatedly. According to the thesis, northern Italy, which had more interaction with divergent neighbors than southern Italy, developed stronger social cohesiveness, which is completely consistent with the argument in Trust.

Turchin is less convincing when he talks about what drives the disintegration of social cohesion. This may be because he relies less on historical evidence and more on colloquial argument. He puts most of the weight of his argument on the "Matthew Principal" ('The Rich get Richer and the Poor get Poorer'.) He argues it's a cyclic process that occurs between and within classes. This sounds like social mobility to me, but he seems to believe that it's more accordian-like, compacting and stretching out the classes, and he argues that social capital eventually dissipates because of the disparities. In his view, the rich have advantages that allow them to amass more and more, so inequality rises, which leads to a decay of asabiya, ending in the fall of another empire. But it's clear from his description that some of the upper classes are rising and others are falling, and the same thing happens to the middle and lower classes at the same time. He even gives examples of some of the wealthy spending their money foolishly and ending up poor, and of the middle and lower classes saving their money and making it into higher strata.

In the final chapter, Turchin acknowledges that the Internet and the spread of the cell phone have changed the dynamics. He suggests a couple of possible directions that things might go, and some ways in which his theory might continue to be useful, but admits that societies don't have much of the stratification or immobiilty that drove the dynamics in prior eras.

Zendegi, Greg Egan

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Greg Egan's Zendegi is another novel nominated for this year's Prometheus Award that features social media being used by an underground movement to topple a government. But this is Greg Egan, so there must be something about silicon consciousness or artificial life involved, right? Well, yes there is, but the political plot works out to be more interesting this time around. Egan's focal characters are Martin Seymour, an ex-pat American journalist living in Iran and Nasim Golestani, an Iranian scientist who worked in the US but has now returned. At the beginning of the story Golestani is working on the Human Connectome project, which gives her a background in mapping the brain to software. Seymour gets involved when cell-phone pictures help topple the Iranian religious dictatorship.

In the second half of the novel, Golestani works on improving the AI for a virtual reality game company that is struggling to keep up with its competition, while Seymour runs a bookstore in Tehran. Golestani starts incorporating data and software from the Connectome project into the NPCs, which raises the ire of fundamentalists. Seymour, meanwhile, has contracted a fatal disease, and wants to find a way to ensure that someone he trusts will continue to provide guidance to his son, and hits on the idea of getting Golestani to build an artificial mind for him.

Egan's depiction in Diaspora of the development of consciousness in artificial minds was ground-breaking, but nothing of similar scope happens here. There are many scenes in virtual reality, but the story-telling emphasis is on Seymour's attention to influencing his son's maturation. The descriptions of the development of the artificial consciousnesses focused on brain mapping rather than awareness. In the end, the characters decide that the simulacrum of Seymour isn't up to the task of mentoring his son, which renders many of the interesting conflicts and questions moot. The protesters against enslaving artificial being can be pacified with a promise to keep them below the level of a simple automaton, and Golestani doesn't have to grapple with her own moral sensibilities about just how conscious they might become. It feels like Egan really side-stepped the issue here. And his solution doesn't do anything to prevent other developers from taking the same step later.

It's especially bad because Egan has previously made it clear that understands these issues. His Diasporah, and Permutation City directly address issues related to artificial consciousness. In the latter work, his characters explore a large variety of different scenarios of partial experience, and directly discuss the issues concerning how real they are as persons, and what rights a partially aware entity should have.

While the story is well-written, topical, and engaging, the liberty-related themes are sparse and limited. The populace revolts against a corrupt dictatorship, but that's more celebration than presentation of issues. Artificial creatures are developed, but never get advanced enough for their rights to be a serious question. It's neither a strong contender for this year's Prometheus, nor as much as I would have expected from Egan.

Directive 51, John Barnes

0.3

Chris Hibbert

John Barnes's Directive 51 is a fast-paced action story that covers a dystopian apocalypse and the struggle over presidential succession in a suddenly low-tech society which suffered huge losses. It's hard to call it libertarian, since the focus is on how the government will help people pull the country together again, but it does realistically show that the struggle for power trumps many other considerations, even when most of the survivors are fighting just to find food and shelter in an emergency.

The situation is that "Daybreak", a leaderless underground movement, has piggybacked on the Internet (there's a lot of that going around in SF this year, isn't there?) to put together a coordinated attack plan to destroy modern civilization. The participants all have different reasons and different objectives, but they agree that "the system" is broken, and we'd all be better off without it. Most of them haven't thought any deeper than that, and don't realize just how much they'd lose. Some of the movement's participants have invented bacteria that eat plastic and "nanoswarm" that gunks up powered machinery. Others have devised plans to ensure that these destructive agents are spread far and wide (worldwide, though the story's focus is on the US) on the appointed day. All this, of course results in the collapse of civilization, 100s of millions of deaths, and nearly everyone else being reduced to fleeing refugees trying to get out of the major metropolitan areas.

All of that serves as background to the story that Barnes really wants to tell. Directive 51 is (truthfully) the latest in a sequence of Presidential Directives laying out the process for maintaining constitutional government in the aftermath of a calamity that removes the bulk of the leadership of the federal government. In this depiction, the consequences are a deadly struggle for power that seems to supersede the attention that should be paid just to getting people back on their feet.

In order to justify one faction's claims that the nation is still under attack, the book has to enable Daybreak to conduct a continuing series of hydrogen bomb attacks after the devastation has occurred. This is both out-of-character with the rest of Daybreak, and hard to believe technically. Nearly everything else has broken down, but the bombs keep falling.

The book has been nominated for the Prometheus Award, and while it's an exciting story, and well-told, and it shows how power can corrupt even in a paramount emergency, I was disappointed that the focus of discussion of the recovery was largely on the government's efforts. It's clear that behind the scenes, individuals are doing most of the work independent of the government, but we're mostly watching federal efforts to ensure that the government continues to function. You might find that outweighed by the fact that people, acting on their own are the primary source of recovered food, the primary hope for growing more, as well as the drivers of a multitude of new inventions that provide some technologies that can continue to function in the face of the proliferating nanoswarm.

For the Win, Cory Doctorow

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Cory Doctorow's For the Win is very much of the moment, covering an Internet-driven global uprising. In Doctorow's case, though it's a union organizing outbreak among Internet workers (gold farmers, mechanical turks, etc.). Not surprisingly, real-world union busting tactics are used to fight back. Doctorow, as usual, has a firm grasp on the zeitgeist, and has written another story just a few months into his own future. Published last year, it must have been written even earlier. The introduction on his webbed version of the story (linked above) talks up the relevance to the recent financial crisis.

There are a couple of fascinating ideas on display in the book: the parallels to current events in the Middle East of course, the discussions of on-line role-playing games and their various denizens, and the story itself and the characters and events that drive it.

The action centers around the Far East: mostly China and Viet Nam, though Cambodia, Indonesia, and India show up, too. Several groups of gold farmers are the focal characters. They're each controlled and abused by a relatively wealthy investor, who underwrites their access to the net, and resells the gold and treasures they earn on-line. In exchange, they're paid enough to keep them alive, and they get to play games all day. Rather than mindlessly wandering the games or doing the obvious quests, their modus operandi is to play the games and look for exploitable weaknesses—monsters that are easy to kill relative to the treasure they give, places that are unusually likely to spawn a good treasure, or actual bugs in the implementation that let players turn straw into gold with less than the usual effort. Since what they do is fun and exciting, and a lot like playing games, there are always plenty more players available, so individuals don't have a lot of leverage with their employers. In this kind of circumstance, it's not surprising that the situation occasionally turns more explicitly abusive, and that's the context that leads some of the characters to approach union organizers. Once they're gotten in contact, the support goes both ways: the on-line workers provide communication and publicity to traditional union workers, and the organizers provide manpower and experience in dealing with violent tactics.

The book was nominated for the Prometheus Award, but it's hard to identify explicitly libertarian aspects of the story. Most of the conflict is between (abusive) owners and workers, with governments not getting very involved. I found the context intriguing, and Doctorow tells a great story, but the closest I can get to a libertarian angle is to try to describe it as a struggle against authority—but it's only a struggle against power, which isn't quite the same thing.

For the Win is a fun read. Doctorow excels at depicting action crossing back and forth between virtual worlds and the real world, and at giving a feel for a future that's only a little advanced over our own. There's a fair amount of violence in this story, even though Doctorow presents it as a young adult novel. In the anti-union violence there's a fair amount of head-bashing, though eventually it's countered with ghandian non-violence. Definitely worth the read.

The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Atul Gawande has been writing on medical practice, provocatively and informatively, for the New Yorker for several years. His comments on price differences and what drives disparities between different areas garnered a lot of attention, but that area hasn't been his main focus. His recent book, The Checklist Manifesto, is closer to the main line of his writings. In this short book, Gawande presents his argument that medicine as currently practiced is far from a rigorous, science-driven field. He shows how aviation and construction are at least as complex and time-constrained as medicine, and that both have benefited from the use of checklists to help practitioners get the details right when performing complex operations.

Individual errors and mistakes of coordination are far more common in medicine than in other modern highly-technical fields. If medicine followed the standards of professional practice common in other areas, there would be a dramatic improvement in our overall health. Gawande discusses how checklists are constructed and used in aviation, another field where routine work is occasionally suddenly interrupted by situation requiring split second decision making at a rapid pace in a distracting environment with enormous consequences. Safety experts in aviation have learned how to put together checklists that can be found quickly, and that enable professionals to correctly address situations that arise in one flight in a million.

The safety record in aviation world-wide is amazingly good. I've long ascribed that difference between aviation and medicine to the fact that accidents in aviation are scrutinized thoroughly, and every mistake drives new corrective processes that quickly make it less likely that the same thing will happen again anywhere in the world. Every airframe manufacturer ensures that all of its vehicles are quickly updated with the most up-to-date procedures. In medicine, individual hospitals sometimes conduct reviews, but any knowledge gained is used sporadically and locally. There is also no standard for how to conduct these inquiries, so some investigations are derailed by politics, infighting, or a desire to deflect blame (which is exacerbated by medical malpractice risks.) The inquiries conducted in aviation have been designed to find correctable causes, and not to place blame. Focusing on the checklists that result from these inquiries would be a big improvement on what we have in medicine now. It's even plausible that a coordinated process for producing checklists would drive an improvement in the checklists based on measured effectiveness.

The book is very readable. The main story is about how Gawande led a task force for WHO testing out some simple checklists for a few common surgical procedures with high rates of routine errors. The results were spectacular, leading to a 36 percent reduction in complications and 47 percent drop in deaths from a variety of hospitals in rich and poor communities all over the world. Getting doctors and hospitals to actually adopt this simple improvement is a far harder task than getting a pilot program demonstrating its effectiveness. The side trips Gawande makes into aviation and construction to show how checklists work there and how they're constructed are engaging.

Going Inside, John McCrone

0.3

Chris Hibbert

John McCrone's Going Inside provides a lot of insightful observations about how the brain works, but fails to tie them together into a cohesive picture. McCrone focuses on recent findings from new brain scanning technologies, and is particularly fascinated by timing studies that give details on how long it takes us to process incoming information, the specific times at which decisions are made, and how our subjective experience of when choices happen comport with the underlying brain circuitry. In particular, the studies show that it takes a half second to react to new information, even when we're expecting it, but our subjective experience is that the decision is made instantaneously at the end of that period. The experiments that show this are ingenious: by cutting off or distracting the process at various points, we can compare the reported subjective feel about the decision state that was reached with the brain scanner's details of how far into the process the brain actually got. All this works experimentally, because repeated sessions show that there's a lot of consistency in the information processing, so the scientists can pinpoint when the incoming information started being processed, and how long it would have taken to reach a choice.

The problem with the presentation is that McCrone doesn't provide an overview of the whole picture until the closing chapter, so as a reader, I had no framework onto which to attach all the facts as he presented them so as to build up a cohesive picture. I was left with the feeling that he'd presented good evidence that seemed to bear on the issue he was investigating, but I didn't know how it fit as I encountered it, so each tidbit vanished as I encountered the next one. I'm not sure things would be much improved on a re-reading. With a familiarity with the whole story, I could figure out how most of the pieces buttress the argument, but I'd have to make up my own argument structure for why his is the best explanation for the workings of the entire system.

McCrone also flubs up on the evolutionary explanation. At various points, he attempts to show why evolution would have produced just the structures and relationships that he has revealed, but his descriptions are unconvincing--he sometimes speaks as if evolutionary pressures are pushing toward a known result, rather than explaining why some abilities would have been selectively favored and why random mutations could have produced the effects. I think the correctly formed arguments could have been constructed, but McCrone's failed attempts were distracting.

One of McCrone's goals is to show how quickly brain scanning technologies advanced over the last few decades. The best tools for peering into the deepest details of timing and interaction in the brain have only recently been developed, so the insights that are most crucial to the book's argument aren't presented until a third of the way into the book, when he has set the historical context. Benjamin Libet did a series of experiments on patients (who were getting brain surgery already) that showed that direct electrical stimulation of the brain wasn't noticed unless it continued for a full half-second. If the stimulation was cut off earlier the patient wouldn't notice anything; if it continued for longer, the subject would report that they had been aware of it from the beginning. Later experiments showed that a second stimulus could mask the first one, as much as a third of a second later. This is pretty convincing evidence that processing inputs takes us up to half a second, and our experience of the present is cobbled together after the fact. Explaining "Libet's half-second" and figuring out what it implies about consciousness occupies the bulk of the book.

Libet did other studies later in which subjects were asked to notice the position of a rotating second hand at the moment they made a decision to lift a hand or take a similar action. With these and other similar experiments by other researchers it became clear that there isn't a precise moment at which decisions are made. The state of the brain changes somewhat continuously over a period from a half second to a full second, and subjects report somewhat arbitrary times as "the moment" of decision.

I would have to re-read the whole book (I've re-skimmed about the first half) in order to provide a detailed synopsis of it. I did feel like McCrone brought quite a few fascinating and important insights to light that would clarify an understanding of brain mechanisms, but the organization makes it hard to put them together on first reading. Maybe someone else will (or has) pull the material together in a better order, and that will be a more worthwhile book.

Wired for War, P. W. Singer

0.3

Chris Hibbert

P. W. Singer's Wired for War covers all the ways robots are being prepared for and used in military missions. There's a lot of valuable detail here on what's happening, and what's coming. Singer is a little out of his depth when it comes to the societal implications, though. The robots covered here are used for surveillance, rescue, and actual fighting missions on land, at sea, and in the air. Few of the land-based robots are news, though the pervasiveness and popularity with the troops haven't been widely reported as far as I know. The variety of aerial and marine uses was somewhat of a surprise to me. There has been more progress on small-scale fliers and long-duration flights than I had previously known. The underwater and surface autonomous craft haven't seen as much active use as the others, but rapid development has been happening in these areas in parallel with the better known land and air variety.

The material on consequences for society was much thinner; Singer has thought of several plausible areas where the implications might be interesting, but he was stretching to find things to worry about. The main substantive issue he addressed was whether the operators of remotely-operated robots would be less careful about who they attack because of their distance, and whether autonomous systems are an immoral or inappropriate tool, since there would be no human in the loop. I didn't see any substantive contribution to the issue from Singer: he raised the issue, drew in the outlines of the discussion, and moved on. After that, he talked about issues such as: If the robots are operated by armchair warriors who never approach the theater of operations, how does that affect the military esprit de corps?, should the operators be considered combatants if opposing forces want to target the operators in order to reduce military effectiveness?

Another issue he brought up without any depth is the charge that operators who grew up playing video games are already inured to committing violence on-screen, and so would have a hard time thinking of their targets as actual people. This has been a perennial problem with human soldiers. The military does its best to train soldiers to follow orders and let the officers decide what the strategy and rules of engagement should be. The main limit on the military's tactics is public opinion--the same restraints have to be used with robotic soldiers and their operators. With robots it's likely that we'll have better records of who did what. Additionally, the victims in the modern day will have better tools for recording and publicizing any atrocities that happen, so even if there's a greater ability, and we might expect less hesitation from the soldiers, the same mechanisms are available to restrain their instincts, and better abilities to track and hold them responsible. It only looks like the problem is growing in an unchecked fashion if you don't look at how things used to work holistically. That seems to be common in Wired for War.

I recommend reading the book if you'd like to know more about the impact of robotics on the military, but take what Singer says about the consequences with a grain of salt.

Cambio Bay, Kate Wilhelm

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Kate Wilhelm's Cambio Bay is light fantasy, combining a character study style with an old house that seems to insulate itself and its inhabitants from outside influences and the ravages of time. Cambio Bay is an isolated community on the Santa Barbara coastline of central California, which has somehow escaped the notice of the map makers.

A woman (Iris) and her unspeaking daughter (Bonnie) are on the run because Iris' flaky boyfriend has run afoul of a drug kingpin for whom he did odd jobs. A storm and earthquake shut down the highway and divert Iris and a few other travelers to Cambio Bay and Luisa'a Guest House. Carolyn is a real estate agent with a background in design who quickly realizes that the house's layout doesn't make any sense. She can't be sure that the rooms aren't always in the same places, but she is positive that rooms on opposite sides of the hallway can't both face the beach. She tries several times to sketch out the parts of the floor plan that she has become familiar with (an exercise she commonly performs while touring houses before showing them in her business), and when she can't make consistent picture, she decides the place is too creepy and leaves. Of course the evolving story and the other guests' troubles find ways to lure her back.

In the end, the house turns out to be a force for good, and the good and innocent visitors find ways to outsmart the bad guys. As the story unfolds, we get to know the visitors quite well, and see what drives them. Bonnie's lack of speech is never explained, nor why the drug kingpin is obsessed with capturing her. The house's mystery is traced back to some local Native American legends.

Overall, a pretty fun read, but not very deep. Kate Wilhelm knows how to present interact characters in an interesting story, even when the conflicts remain on a very small scale.

The Price of Everything: Russ Roberts

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Russ Roberts' The Price of Everything is an engaging story written by an economics professor in an attempt to show how prices help us direct our efforts so they will provide the most benefit to others we will never meet. In the story Ruth Lieber, a strikingly insightful Stanford professor leads Ramon Fernandez, a charismatic student athlete, to an appreciation for the unseen consequences of prices after he leads a protest of a local big box store for raising prices after an earthquake.

Ruth sometimes explains, but more often hints so Ramon will investigate for himself, how higher prices or the expectation of a higher return cause suppliers, inventors and others to provide more useful goods and services so they're available when people want them.

The prose is vivid and the characters are interesting. Most of the story is reasonably believable, though there are enough hints at the purpose of the exposition that no one should be surprised at the occasional speech. Roberts does a good job of keeping that to a minimum, but he does have some points to make. Ramon isn't initially interested in economics, but he's smart enough to look into the details when Ruth points out inconsistencies between how he expects people to act and the ways they actually do. Ruth (and Russ) rely on common experiences so Ruth's objections will strike home to readers who are reasonably honest about how events actually turn out, even if their prejudices align more with Ramon's.

I think this would be a reasonable book to give to someone who wants a gentle introduction to the economic way of thinking. It can be read as an interesting story, or for the insights it provides.

That Hideous Strength: C. S. Lewis

0.3

Chris Hibbert

C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength has been a perennial nominee for the Libertarian Futurists Society's Hall of Fame award. Seeking to give it a fair shot, I waited to read it until after reading the first two works in the series: Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandria. Neither of those books impressed me, and this book doesn't significantly rely on the connection to them. Unfortunately, this book didn't impress me either. I think part of it is the style of the writing, which seems vague, foggy, and long-winded to me. I also didn't care much for the characters, didn't find the plot interesting, and had trouble seeing what the conflict was about.

Lewis sets up two clear factions, clearly struggling over something, but we appear to only watching the activities of people who are a few steps removed from those who are aware of the strategy and aims of each side. Instead of watching maneuvering about the great struggle that is going on, we watch the minor characters as they maneuver through office politics, attempting to ensure that they have a seat at the table, while those characters remain ignorant about what the goals of those at the table are whom they wish to join.

Eventually, we see more of the high level action, but the sides are painted so starkly--the bad guys are depraved, manipulating, torturers, while the good guys refrain from acting--that it's hard to imagine how Lewis will turn the struggle into a fair fight. In the end, it was hard to see that it was a fair fight; the bad guys laid waste to the countryside in an attempt to take control over everything, while the good guys recruited a top wizard who eventually makes the bad guys stop.

I couldn't see it as a struggle of ideas, because I couldn't tell what the ideas might have been. One side was full of people who were scrambling for power, and most of their efforts seemed to be the minor squabbles of factional politics. The other side acted in a more genteel fashion, and didn't seem aware that their opponents were preparing a rapacious campaign. In the end, the only part of the struggle that mattered was over who would recruit the master wizard, and this didn't seem to be about who he agreed with as much as who could bridge the language gap with him effectively or who could isolate him better. So the good guys won, but the territory was spoiled in the process, and neither we nor the characters learned much in the process.