It’s Monday, October 23^rd in the year 2023 (A.D. or C.E., depending on your preferred terminology) and I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer.  I took the computer with me when I left the office on Wednesday, expecting not to bring it back, but here I am.

It’s really quite stupid.  But it is more pleasant to write these posts on the laptop computer—quite a lot more pleasant—than it is to write them on the smartphone.  Though more compact and portable, the latter is just awkward and irritating, and it still causes the bases of my thumbs to get sore sometimes.  Well, really, the soreness is at the carpo-metacarpal joints more than it is at the metacarpophalangeal joint, but basically it just feels like my thumbs are sore, and it becomes more difficult to grip things as it continues.

That’s probably about all the news I have for today.  At least, it’s probably the only news I have that’s even arguably worth sharing on this blog, though the arguability of the shareworthiness of even that news would probably involve a lot of distracting rhetoric and sophistry, neither of which is a form of “argument” for which I have much respect.  They’re about as good as taking the word of someone you’ve just met about some matter involving significant (but not life-changing) amounts of money because they “promise” you can trust them.

“Give me 1% of your trust, and I’ll earn the other 99%” is an expression sometimes used in sales.  I guess it works on some people, but I can’t see it ever working on me.  First of all, it’s not really a sensible way to put something.  What is 1% of someone’s trust?  How does one quantify such a thing as if it were a substance or population?

I could see asking for 1% of someone’s trust fund.  That might be worth a bit, depending (obviously) on the size of the trust fund.  But 1% of my trust, however one might reasonably measure trust, is some number so vanishingly close to zero that it might as well be used to calculate derivatives and integrals.  This is largely because I don’t actually believe in or endorse “trust” as a generally good idea, though that certainly depends on one’s definitions.  I think trust is a mostly vacuous concept.

I used to say that I trusted my mother and my father, and with everyone else I took calculated risks.  But of course, that was really just me trying to be clever.  In reality, it’s all calculated risks*.  It’s just a Bayesian prior estimate of the credence we give that, for instance, this person in question will behave as they say they will behave.  Then we will update our future estimate depending on how things turn out this time, using a sort of loosey-goosey, intuitive version of Bayes’s Theorem.

If we started off without a particular preference for “trust or not trust” for someone, our prior would be something like 50%.  If we thought someone was a metaphorical weasel by nature, it might be much lower, though if we’re being good Bayesians, it can never be truly zero.  I trusted my parents—by the time I was fully an adult, anyway—at a level close enough to 100% that it was rarely worth thinking about much.

I honestly don’t know how I get onto these subjects.  I know it’s probably boring as Hell**.  I’ll just close that topic by noting that my Bayesian prior for trusting myself is way lower than my prior was for my parents.  It’s not that I don’t think I’m reliable or anything; I’m probably reasonably reliable as a general tendency.  I just don’t like myself, and I’m almost always disappointed in myself, so it’s reasonable to predict that I’ll probably let myself down in any given circumstance.

For instance, I’ve let myself down already by even doing this blog post, because I’m on my way to work, because I didn’t use this last weekend as a good starting point for the process of my dreamed-of trial by fire and ice (to be ludicrously melodramatic).  That “trial” is basically a notion of a means by which to put oneself at a not-insignificant risk of death—knowingly—without it being anything that could lead one to be forcibly locked up.  There are things that a person can do that will lead to a significant chance of mortality*** if carried on long enough, but which are otherwise entirely unremarkable.  Even water can kill you if you just keep on drinking and drinking and drinking.  In fact, it takes less water than you might think.

That’s not my specific thought, however.  I wouldn’t want to do that because I think I would spend just too much time in the effing bathroom, and it would be a terribly annoying way to pass**** one’s final hours.  But there are things that I could stand doing that, if things go right or wrong (depending on one’s mood or viewpoint) could kill me.  That’s the general idea.

Anyway, that’s enough blather about nothing (and potential nothingness) for today.  I don’t know what’s going to happen from here, but I’ll try to keep you posted if it’s not too much trouble.

*So to speak.  We rarely actually calculate the risk, but rather do a  quick estimate.

**That’s a weird thing to say, isn’t it?  It’s hard to imagine that Hell, as described in most religions, could be considered boring.  Demons and fire and brimstone and torture are things that at the very least don’t seem dull—though I suppose one might be tortured with a dull knife.  But as anyone who has suffered from depression probably would soon realize, “boredom” of a sort (i.e., anhedonia) is a major form of torture.  That’s one of the reasons I always found the apparently more modern notion (reputedly in Catholicism) of Hell as “being removed from God’s presence” a more interesting and subtle and less cartoonish notion of Hell than one gets in many evangelical forms of Christianity.

***If you were an immortal being, and you liked being immortal, taking any chance of mortality—i.e. of becoming mortal—would be something akin to Pascal’s wager, where the potential loss (of an infinite lifespan) would be so vast as to make the most miniscule possibility thereof essentially an intolerable risk.

****No pun intended, but nevertheless, not edited out.