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on October 15, 2011
Benjamin Chabot-Hanowell
Posted project update #8Last update...for now.
Dear Backers and everybody else I've begged for pledge money,
It's official. The My n of 3 Kickstarter campaign was unable to reach its minimum funding goal.
To Backers, I again thank you for your support. To everyone, I am going to do this project with or without this Kickstarter money. I'll find a way, because I'm passionate about the ideas driving My n of 3.
At this point, I've taken stock of why this campaign "failed". The main reason is that I'm trying to tell a story that hasn't happened yet, because I know already it will be a great story. A story about family, about fieldwork, about fatherhood, and about the intersection between social science theory and lived experience.
But I think failure isn't the right word. Preparing the Kickstarter "pitch", holding a discussion on reddit.com's IAmA boards, filming and editing the Kickstarter promo video all forced me to think long and hard about what it is that I need to pay attention to while I'm on my Fulbright mission, missing my family, sweating bullets, and asking strangers very personal questions.
What I hope is that I haven't jaded anybody against the My n of 3 idea with my seemingly incessant pleas for pledges. If I have, please forgive me. And I guarantee you that, when I have a story to tell, it will be well worth the listening.
See you around.
Benjamin
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on October 14, 2011
Benjamin Chabot-Hanowell
Posted project update #78 hours left (an open letter to my Backers)
Post CommentThere are eight hours left in my Kickstarter campaign and I've gotten up to 61% of my funding goal because of you. Thank you. Whether or not I make it to 100% doesn't matter to me anymore. What matters is that you all thought enough of me to pledge.
Evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar hypothesizes that the average human can track about 150 personal relationships at a time. So it makes sense that 145 people so far have liked my Kickstarter page on Facebook. After all, it is my friends and family who have been on board with me on this. That number, small relative to any popular web page, makes sense, too. There is a lot of risk in backing a stranger who promises to write a book about something that hasn't yet happened (i.e., my field trip to Dominica).
More importantly, Dunbar hypothesizes a much smaller number of people that an individual will feel close to and connect with. I'm glad I'm on the right tail of that distribution, because there are 29 of you, plus my wife, of course, who've got my back.
Thanks also to my wife Malyse, who continues to support me every step of the way. I love you, Honeysuckle.
My n of 3 isn't over if I don't make this Kickstarter campaign. I'll do my best to find a way to document the next year with or without the equipment this Kickstarter money would fund. This wasn't an idea for a charity anyway. It is a guy trying to sell a book before it has been written. When I return, I'll take steps to find the funding to complete My n of 3. With a completed project, I'm sure it will be easier to find a bigger audience. It might not be through Kickstarter, or maybe it will. Either way, I hope you'll still be interested.
Thanks again, no matter what.
Sincerely,
Benjamin
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on October 10, 2011
Benjamin Chabot-Hanowell
commented on a project updateJesse: One of the things I want to do for the book is to interview soldiers who were away form their families to compare and contrast -their- situation with mine. So if you know any soldiers who were also fathers and husbands and wouldn't mind an introspective conversation from an inquiring mind, let me know. The difference I see is that the risks to me are mainly financial, although there is indeed increased risk of my death while I am away. Whereas soldiers take on substantial mortality risk as well as financial and social risk. On the whole, I'd say the soldier's experience is more challenging than mine, especially because the majority of soldiers come from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. Cool stuff. This is why I get a sparkle in my eye about the My n of 3 project.
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on October 10, 2011
Benjamin Chabot-Hanowell
Posted project update #6Burning questions
Last night and into this morning, I've been answering questions about the My n of 3 project and my dissertation research on the IAmA boards of reddit, the social news website and image board. There were a wide range of responses to my project and my decision about leaving my wife and daughter for a year to do research.
There were three major themes:
Theme 1: "You're an a-hole" -- Several people responded very negatively to the fact that I am leaving my family to do research. My favorite of these (possibly in jest) came from someone with the screen name "grampa_smurf": "So you're a META-deadbeat?" with "META" referring to my contention that I am, in a sense, becoming what a I study. Others were more serious. "You should stay behind and study your own family," wrote Escendo. The most damning comment came from johnsmcjohn, who wrote, "Not a question, just an observation. If you ditch your family you're a dick. As someone from a broken home, fuck you. There will still be plenty of people to study when your daughter is an adult." These comments were hurtful to me, but also enlightening. I am indeed putting my family at risk, regardless of whether or not they support me.
Before I go on to Theme 2, I want to highlight a comment related to Theme 1 from someone on Reddit who preferred to remain yet more anonymous. It is a bit involved, but his person's father drove motor yachts while the poster was a child, so he was away a lot. This time, I had a question to ask: How did it affect his family? The poster (who I think is male, but I don't know) said that he feels he missed out on a lot of memories with his dad, but that it affected his mother the most. But it seems like it was livable. I responded that I may not be leaving as regularly as his father did, but who knows? Will I be able to get a job after I get my PhD that will allow my family to move together? I certainly hope so!
Anyway, on to...
Theme 2: "You're not really a migrant worker" -- A lot of people were skeptical about the comparison the My n of 3 project makes between my experience and the experience of most migrant workers. I agreed with these people that there are huge differences, but reminded them that the My n of 3 project will focus as much on those differences as it does on the similarities. Many also questioned whether the project will indeed put my family at risk comparable to the risk faced by migrant workers' families. I argued that, yes, I will. Though I am relatively very affluent compared to most migrant workers, our situations are somewhat reversed. A migrant worker from a developing region is relatively poor in the destination country but their money goes very far in the origin country. Whereas I will be relative rich in the destination country, but my income will be reduced substantially from the perspective of my origin country (the U.S.). I appreciated these challenging comments, because they drive home a key point I want to make with My n of 3 about the value and difficulty of making comparisons between one's own situation and broad patterns of human behavior.
A comment related to Theme 2 came from Redditor godin_sdxt, who was skeptical about the merits of my dissertation research. In the thread, godin_sdxt argued that my research explores a foregone conclusion and will not have broad impacts on society. I begged to differ. You can read our exchange here.
On to...
Theme 3: "You're so meta" -- Redditors are no dummies. They picked up right away on the self-reflective nature of the My n of 3 project. The word "meta" refers to something that is characteristically self-referential. For example, have you seen the movie Inception? Which brings me to my favorite post on this theme, and possibly over the whole Q&A, from Redditor fechisel:
"This is the most meta scenario I've ever heard of. A N T H R O C E P T I O N"
Another funny remark, punning on my IAmA title, "IAmA Fulbright scholar and anthropologist who will abandon his wife and daughter for a year to find opportunity abroad to study the families left behind by other people who go find opportunity abroad. AMA," came from Redditor arbitraryentry: "That's a lot abroads." A lover of puns, I felt the need to reciprocate.
Anyway, I'm still hoping for some questions about the "unanswerable question" I hope to address with My n of 3: "How far can we interpret our own decisions and their consequences for our loved ones on the basis of scientific theory, that objective amalgam of dry statistical results and cold logic?"
We'll see if I get any. Thanks for reading!
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Jesse Hanowell on October 10, 2011
Ask them how you leaving for a year is any different from a soldier going overseas for 15 months, if they respond that the job is different, then they are not very wise, as a soldier id say that study abroad is more productive for society than war. As for the dolt that said your data would not be significant, he is not very wise either, short sighted at best. Peeps have difficulty understanding Anthropology in general. You are not doing anything a moral by leaving, you are ensuring their future with a small sacrifice now, and greater stability in the time to come after you PHD is on the wall.
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Benjamin Chabot-Hanowell on October 10, 2011
Jesse: One of the things I want to do for the book is to interview soldiers who were away form their families to compare and contrast -their- situation with mine. So if you know any soldiers who were also fathers and husbands and wouldn't mind an introspective conversation from an inquiring mind, let me know. The difference I see is that the risks to me are mainly financial, although there is indeed increased risk of my death while I am away. Whereas soldiers take on substantial mortality risk as well as financial and social risk. On the whole, I'd say the soldier's experience is more challenging than mine, especially because the majority of soldiers come from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. Cool stuff. This is why I get a sparkle in my eye about the My n of 3 project.
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on October 5, 2011
Benjamin Chabot-Hanowell
commented on a project updateHey, Scott. Thanks for spreading the word. Here is a shortened web address where you can acces the pitch: http://kck.st/pThgt8 Thanks again!
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on October 5, 2011
Benjamin Chabot-Hanowell
Posted project update #5One week and some change to go!
Dear Kickstarters,
As we roll up to one more week in the Mn3 Kickstarter campaign, I've decided to take to the virtual streets to help get the word out. This Sunday, I will host a Do-It-Yourself Q&A on the IAmA message boards of reddit, the social news website.
IAmA is a place to go to offer people the chance to ask questions about an experience or quality that is central and unique to one's life, as my predicament next year will be. For example, a recent IAmA poster was a robotics researcher working on autonomous robots for the Army, who half-jokingly offered to answer any questions about the coming robot apocalypse.
Another IAmA post title reads, "I've been in a knife fight in Guatemala, ran a bar in Cambodia, taught geography in Vietnam, sold printers in Tokyo, was face to face with an aggressive hammerhead shark in Belize, and was the first foreign english teacher in Ko Chang Thailand. I'm 26 and have never had a lot of money. AMA."
The "AMA" part of the post title always means "Ask Me Anything." So if you know anyone who visits reddit a lot, or are curious about reddit yourself, stop by the IAmA board a while on Sunday evening, about 8:30 PM Pacific, and...AMA.
Or, if you'd prefer, I'll be doing my own Do-It-Yourself AMA on Facebook at the same time for those of you who aren't into reddit. I look forward to whatever challenging or wacky questions you've got, so have it through Facebook Chat, reddit, or whatever, and I'll see you Sunday night!
Also, here is my latest article on This or That, which gives you yet another taste of something kind of like the genre of Mn3. In this post, I use simple rules of probability to try and explain why marriages and other long-term relationships go south even when the couple is still attracted to one another. The article helps you not only understand probability theory, but apply to something very important: your romantic life.
Finally, here is a picture my two year old daughter drew on Sunday of banana. I'm not kidding you. She drew it and then said immediately, "I drew a banana!" She even has the ridge and color down!
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Scott Kirchner on October 5, 2011
Ben, I would like to solicit my cohort members to donate to your cause. We are pursuing doctoral degrees in educational leadership. There is a strong flavor of social justice as central to our program. With your fancy gadgets and magic box stuff, I don't know how to access your "pitch." Will you please send me a synopsis and directions to donate so I may get the message to them?
Scott aka Cap'n Bob
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Benjamin Chabot-Hanowell on October 5, 2011
Hey, Scott. Thanks for spreading the word. Here is a shortened web address where you can acces the pitch: http://kck.st/pThgt8
Thanks again!
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on September 18, 2011
Benjamin Chabot-Hanowell
Posted project update #4Reminder about how Kickstarter works
Post CommentI got a question from one of my backers today about what I will do with the money if I do not meet the funding goal.
This reminded me that I had not made clear in my promo video how Kickstarter works. The way Kickstarter works is that I define a minimum funding goal and a deadline. If the minimum funding goal is not met by the deadline, I receive no funds for the project, and no money comes out of the account you used to make your pledge.
For you backers, this is all the more reason to spread the word about Mn3 far and wide to assure you get the rewards for your pledge!
Thanks again!
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on September 15, 2011
Benjamin Chabot-Hanowell
Posted project update #3More on Mn3's weird questions.
Post CommentLooking back at my promo video, I'm least satisfied with how I conveyed the interesting and weird questions that Mn3 will try to answer. Not bad, but I could do better. That's what these updates are for. In case you're curious, here's a closer look at those weird questions. (In the future, I'll come up with some catchy name for them. Or not.)
Again, there's a scrawled page in my notebook associated with this update. I'll lay that on you first to show you how dirty and convoluted the writing process is. Here's the pic from my notebook.
Note four characteristics of my note-taking style, which will serve as recurrent themes throughout the Mn3 project (though to a lesser extent in my dissertation fieldwork notes):
- I bitch and moan about something. Actually two things. First, I started these notes on a bus that happened to be on the bumpiest road that exists in Sodo, Seattle. Second, I lost my cell phone right after getting off that bus. Hey, no one's perfect!
- I violently scribble out any screw-ups.
- My handwriting is illegible.
- I write about other stuff in the notebook, not just Mn3 (in this case, notes about a project I'm collaborating on about climate change and migration in Northeast Thailand appears at the bottom of the page on the right).
With that messiness out of the way, here's the clean version.
The basic format of My n of 3 is that each chapter asks a weird question, which I then address with a combination of personal anecdotes about being a "migrant worker," more anecdotes about the work I'm doing in Dominica, cutting edge scientific theory, and mathematical models (intuitively conveyed). The weird questions succeed in a logical order, and each touch upon the main theme of Mn3 (what's the difference, if any, between statistical probability and destiny?).
Here are some example questions, which I'll foreshadow in more detail in backers-only updates of the future, and then write at length about in the book.
- How is pursuing an academic career in anthropology like chasing a giraffe through the Kalahari desert? In which I compare my risky attempt to become a moderately famous academician to the risky endeavor of !Kung "bushmen" and other males from small hunter-gatherer societies, who pursue high-risk, high return game like giraffes. Could these guys do better for their families by taking fewer risks? If so, why don't they? It's all about the evolution of something called "costly signaling", and what if anything it has to do with my decision to abandon my family for year in pursuit of intellectual glory.
- What do family pecking orders have in common with the Traveling salesman problem? Imagine a traveling sales guy is trying to figure out how to tour a list of target neighborhoods along the shortest possible route, visiting each city only once. This problem is more difficult than you think, but is solved with a mathematical tool called "graph theory." In this chapter, I will describe how I'll use this mathematical tool to make inferences about the pecking order in rural households of Dominica from innocuous questions in a standardized social survey. Why is this important? Well, how much would you like talking to strangers about the political machinery of your household? I thought so. And that's why my method is neato. Then I'll segue into the next question by telling you how I'll use my inferences about household pecking order to see how they may dramatically influence the money and other goods migrants send to that household from thousands of miles away.
- How do arguments over the phone with my family back home relate to the mathematics underlying the technology that allows us to call each other in the first place? Here, I'll talk about how passive-aggressively text-messaging your girlfriend who goes to college on the other side of the country is a lot like and perhaps mathematically equivalent to the decryption of coded messages during World War II by both Axis and Allies, and the technology that makes telecommunication possible. All of these things relate to something called information theory, arguably one of the most important ideas ever. The basic idea is that where there is more information, there is more uncertainty, and uncertainty in some cases is bad. What price would you be willing to pay to become more certain about what is happening back home? And what price would you pay if it behooved you to increase the uncertainty someone else has about, for example, how you're spending the money a migrant sends your rural household from abroad? And when do both parties benefit from less uncertainty?
- Can you quantify love? If so, what is its partial derivative with respect to distance? Most people believe that you can't quantify love or, if you could, it would somehow cheapen it. Drawing on evolutionary and economic theory, I'll argue that you can indeed quantify love, but this by no means cheapens it. Even better, quantifying love helps us to better understand it. I go on to ask how distance, together with time, might influence love, however it is quantified. Then I'll tread into dangerous territory, asking what this means for me and my family, who will live over 4,000 miles apart for over a year.
More later. But you might not hear about it unless you're a Backer. All the more reason to become a Backer at whatever level. Thanks again.
--Benjamin
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on September 15, 2011
Benjamin Chabot-Hanowell
Posted project update #2How a Kickstarter video (eventually) gets made.
Post CommentI hope you like my video about the project. I want backers to be a part of the whole process, from pre-launch to finishing the book, and beyond. A good way to do that is show you pages directly out of my notebook. So here's a look at what I was thinking before all the video editing, even before any filming. You'll find that I tend think in lists like this. As time goes on and the stuff I tell you about gets more complicated, the lists will get nested. Then I'll start doodling mock-ups of info-graphics and it'll be like a page out of Da Vinci's notebook, only not written backwards, written in English, and not quite as path-breaking.
Note the list item "sweaty man sex bit." It's not what you think, but who cares if it was? I ended up going for a more toned down version of the original bit about Sedaris, Gladwell, Wilson and Shakespeare getting into a room, which was definitely NC-17 before it was PG-13.
Here you go.
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on September 14, 2011
Benjamin Chabot-Hanowell
Posted project update #1Let's do this!
Post CommentI am so excited to finally launch My n of 3!
Benjamin Chabot-Hanowell
Seattle, WA
When he was six, Benjamin told his Aunt Alice he wanted to be the first Egyptologist to win an Academy Award. He spent the next twelve years pursuing that lofty goal. He trained in dramatic arts, creative writing, dance, voice, and martial arts. When he ... view more
Right on!