Psychology

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A shorter and slightly less negative post

Okay, well, I’m back writing this on the smartphone again today.  I decided not to take the lapcom back to the house with me yesterday, because it was annoying to deal with even the minor extra weight, and also because I fear that writing using the lapcom leads me to get a bit too wordy and carried away.  I’ve mentioned this before more than once, though I cannot immediately give you links to the earliest or the most recent mention of the issue.

Anyway, the point is that I can type on a regular keyboard almost as fast as I can talk*, so I kind of run off at the mouth…so to speak.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing‒though given that we’re discussing me, it probably is‒but I think it can cause a bit of an aversion in some people when they see that a blog post is longer than usual.  I don’t know how many of my readers actually do read to the end of the average post, but surely it’s less likely to happen if the post is 1400 words long than if it is merely 900 words long.

Of course, I set my target nowadays at 700 words, but that just means I am less likely to go over 1000.  I almost never stop at or before 700 words.

I tend not to write as much, as fast, on the smartphone. This is partly because it’s just not a good way to write things; it’s clunky and prone to induce errors, and the lack of real keys makes it so there is less sensory feedback about what one is typing.  Also, my thumbs get sore from writing on the phone.

Now, though, I’ve had a few days off, so my thumbs are less painful.  I’ve also been taking strong doses of NSAIDs over the past few days, and that may be helping them.  It’s not helping my stomach, though.  I already feel nauseated right now, and it’s not even 5 am as I write this.

My life is so glamorous, isn’t it?  And I share most of the best aspects of it here, with you readers.  There are many things about which I feel too dreary even to bring them up.  I don’t want even people who are quite nonjudgmental and positive about me to see the squalor in which I live.  I am not very good at taking care of myself.

Sorry, I’m sure this is all very boring.

Sometimes I must admit that I envy people with unreasonably high self-esteem.  I mean, past a certain point, overinflated self-esteem makes one prone to do harm to other people.  But at least such people spend their time, day in and day out, with someone they love, right?  They tend to disgust me (and many other people too) but the kicker is:  they don’t care!

This is not to confuse such people with the pathologically narcissistic, who seem clearly to be motivated by some deep insecurities that they chase like a heroin addict needing a fix.  They are pathetic and do not seem comfortable with themselves, though they can come across as shameless.  I wish I could think of a good, well-known public example of such a person, but for the life of me, no one comes to mind.

Ha.

Ha.

Anyway, my problems lie in the other direction.  I have a pathological self-hatred.  When I’m calm and objective, I know that there are at least some aspects of myself that are not horrible, and some that are even arguably good.  I’m reasonably smart and rather creative, for instance.  But I just annoy the hell out of myself, and it’s very hard to get a break.

I know it’s possible to love someone without really liking them (in the sense of just enjoying spending time with them), but after a while, if you’re forced to spend every moment, waking or otherwise, with this person you had loved but whose personality you found annoying, you can become prone to hate them, or at least to hate their presence.

I’ve never felt this way about another person, but it’s how I tend to feel about myself.  I’m like a chronic, itchy, burning rash somewhere between the lower edges of my shoulder blades, just where it’s hardest to reach.  And though I can briefly mitigate the problem, it doesn’t go away.  There’s only one cure, and unfortunately it involves killing the patient.

Oh, well, whatever.  I need just to get over myself, so to speak.  I think I take life too seriously.  I would be able to do better if not for my chronic, really annoying pain.  I might even be able to enjoy life with or without loving myself.  But, as I often say, if wishes were horses, we’d all be neck deep in horse shit.

I don’t know if I’m working tomorrow, but if I do, I’ll probably write a blog post, and you’ll see it here.  If not, you won’t.  Either way, I hope you all have a good day and a good weekend.

*And not the sort of hesitant speech that happens when I don’t really know the people with whom I’m conversing, but rather my speech when I’m talking to someone about something in which I’m interested.  That probably only happens regularly with my sister, once every week or two, nowadays.

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Please don’t take this post to heart; it’s not aimed at you.

Hello and good morning.  There’s no Shakespearean quote-based title today.  My apologies for that and for what follows.  I’m just having a rough time right now.

It’s Thursday again, and I’m writing this on the stupid mini lapcom again.  It’s “stupid” because I have to deal with changing the base font and type size every time I create a new post now, because Microsoft Word changed its defaults to the shitty little font Aptos Narrow, which sucks hugely, and they now want to start the font size automatically at 12, when for ages it’s been 11, which works just fine and is a prime number.

I swear, it’s almost enough to make me want to buy an Apple computer.  But I’d really rather not buy any more computers, nor any new smartphone, nor any more clothes or shoes or cups or silverware or shampoo or deodorant or any of it.  I hate having to get new things that have to do with the present bleeding into the future, when I don’t even want to be here in the present.

But, of course, one is not supposed to want not to keep living.  That’s taboo.  One tends to get shamed and cajoled about it if one even mentions it.  One is offered no help, of course.  It’s rather reminiscent of the “pro-life” movement, who want to make sure that babies are born if conceived (and many of them want to eliminate contraception) but have no intention to take responsibility for the lives they are forcing to continue.

Well, fuck them in the neck until they are “aborted” is how I feel about that, and when I’m feeling very uncharitable, I’m inclined that way about the other.  I mean, people don’t want you to die, but they don’t offer any actual help, and they don’t offer any serious reasons to stay alive.  At the very least, they don’t offer any convincing ones.

I’ve been dealing on and off with suicidal thoughts and hatred of myself starting when I was in my teens.  It has waxed and waned over my lifetime, and is resistant to the various and sundry treatments I have tried.  At least, they never have seemed to work for very long.

I have learned rather recently that this is common in people with ASD, particularly relatively “high functioning” ones, because of the exhaustion and ego-dystonic effects of constant masking, pretending to be human, pretending not to be seriously bothered by the things that bother us, trying to make our quirky habits of thought into jokes so people aren’t bothered too much by them.

It is at least good information to have, that one is autistic, but it points to no solution.  Indeed, data appears to suggest that ordinary treatments for depression that work reasonably well on NTs are often not useful in people with ASD.  But of course, it’s not as though one can cease to have ASD, any more than one can decide to be no longer right handed.

Anyway, the point toward which I was moving is one I’ve mentioned before:  I have been dealing with depression and self-hatred for more than three quarters of my life, and I am a bookish, rather studious sort of person who likes to try to understand things as much as he can.  I am also a trained medical doctor, who obviously has given special attention to such matters when he was/is studying, since it’s of real personal interest.

I’m not saying that no one out there could possibly find some answer or treatment that I haven’t encountered or tried or whatever; that would be astonishing hubris.  But if one is going to go for obvious or stereotypical things (or worse, to try to give religious reasons for one not to take one’s own life) it’s unlikely to be successful.  Indeed, the fact that it just reiterates things that have been tried and have failed already, makes everything all that much more depressing.

Sorry.  I don’t mean to demean or disparage or denigrate or dismiss (or any other d-word) people who want to help those who are in distress.  But it gets frustrating when, for instance, one logs onto Instagram or whatever and a pop-up message says “Someone out there thinks you need help” and it directs you either to—wait for it!—the suicide help line* or to suggestions for seeking therapy or suggestions for how to help oneself that include things like “talking to friends” or such like.

It’s almost as if it were taunting you.  It’s almost as if it were saying, “Aw, are you not doing too well?  Well, here, take a look at these various things that you have tried and found unsuccessful in the past.  Or you can talk to your family or friends, though you live alone and have no local friends**, and your nearest family members are more than a thousand miles away and have their own shit with which to deal.”

Sorry, everyone.  I’m angry and grumpy and gloomy and unpleasant today—more so than usual, I mean.  And yet, other people still come to me with their problems, and I do my best to help when I can, and I even expend my own resources to help.  But no one even asks me if I have any problems, and if I start to mention any, people just get awkward or make some joke or dismissive comment about it all.  If I had a drug problem, there would be available resources, but I don’t have one***, alas.

I get it.  Everyone has their own things happening.  That’s definitely true.  I don’t have any right to impose my troubles on anyone.  But if people aren’t going to do anything, then they should shut the fuck up.

Anyway, again, I’m sorry.  Really.  Forget about that crap from me, please.  I know that none of you out there are doing anything to try to cause me consternation.  I’m the one with the bad hardware and software.  You’re all just curious, literate people reading the blog of someone who occasionally has something mildly interesting to say and being as supportive as its practicable to be, often more so.  It’s my problem or set of problems, and it’s my fault (in the sense that “I am the faulty one” not in the sense of “I have done wrong”).

It doesn’t help that it’s near the solstice, so the daytime is getting shorter and shorter—I tend to be seasonally affected—and also that it’s the holiday time of year, and that the US is in a political state reminiscent of the single available port-o-john after a major rock festival.

I’m overwhelmed and I’m very tired, and I don’t see any reason to expect things to tend to get any better than they are now.  Just as all political and regulatory and economic forces are in place to make the stock market tend to go up in the long run, despite many local ups and downs, my system seems set up to deteriorate over time.  I don’t just mean that in the sense involved in the second law of thermodynamics, though that obviously comes into play.  I mean that so many events of life seem prone to knock me downward, mentally, often in big steps, but my attempts to crawl back upward are plodding and scrabbling, like someone trying to reach the summit of a mountain of loose gravel.

Anyway, geez, sorry again.  I shouldn’t even post this, really, but I don’t have the energy to start over and write a different post, so I’ll stick with this, apologizing yet another time.  If I write a post tomorrow and/or Saturday, it/they will appear here.  If not, it/they won’t.

I hope you all are doing well.

TTFN

*With which I’ve had a particularly bad result in the past, and toward which I am therefore quite wary.

**This is only appropriate or at least predictable.  Believe me, no one wants to be around me much anymore.  I don’t even want to be around myself.

***I know, I know, that’s just what a person with a drug problem might say.  But while that may be true, nevertheless, among the number of people who would say that they don’t have a drug problem when asked, the vast majority really would be people who don’t have a drug problem, because most people don’t have a drug problem.  Bayes saves the day again.

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Here we go again. Heavy sigh.

It’s Tuesday now, in case you didn’t know, though of course you might not be reading this on a Tuesday.  If by some bizarre set of circumstances my writing is still being read in the far future‒or even more improbably that it goes backward in time somehow or tunnels across to some other part of the universe that nevertheless has people who can read English‒there may not even be Tuesdays where and when you exist.

In case that’s the case, I will just say that in the 20th and 21st centuries‒and actually for quite some time before‒we divided the days into groups of 7, which we called weeks*.  There were roughly 52 of these in a year (52 x 7 = 364, one day and some change less than a full year).

In the English-speaking world we called these days Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.  I could go into the etymology of those names, but that’s a bit of a pain.  Anyway, you’re the ones who are in some future, presumably advanced civilization; why can’t you look that stuff up for yourselves?

Anyway, our “official work week” ran from Monday through Friday, with Saturday and Sunday off.  However, that was far from the only schedule people followed, and in a form of evolution due to mutual competition, people vied with each other to work more days and longer hours for less pay, because other people were willing to do it.  Not to participate would lead one to be less likely to get or keep a job, and that could lead to destitution‒at least somewhat more quickly than does steadily working longer and longer for less and less, which is a kind of creeping but pernicious societal malaise.

Of course, other, parallel forces led to decreasing regulation of companies’ ability to “encourage” their workers to work more for less, and since in the short term** everyone works in response to their local incentives, people tended to allow these things to happen.  And lawmakers and regulators, subject to the inherently woefully dysfunctional political party system, became less and less incentivized to care about the needs and worries of those they nominally represented, and to whom they had sworn their service***.

They were happy to allow the fortunate wealthy and powerful to take advantage of the foolishly earnest and mutually (and self-destructively) competitive citizens, because they were rewarded for allowing it.

Everyone responds to local forces, of course.  Even spacetime itself responds to the spacetime immediately adjacent to it, as the electromagnetic field responds to the state of the field immediately adjacent to it, as demonstrated by the implications of Maxwell’s famous equations, which I’m sure jump right out at you:

Of course, the meaning of “local” is circular here, almost tautological, since the definition of local is merely “something that can affect another thing directly” more or less.

So it’s only too possible for a system to evolve itself into a state that is overall detrimental to those within the system.  Everyone, even the most seemingly successful, can be in a worse situation than they would be in otherwise, but it’s very difficult to see the way out, to get a “bird’s eye view” of the landscape, if you will.

One can therefore get stuck in situations where, despite the overall equilibrium being detrimental to everyone, any one individual taking action to try to move things in a better direction would make their local situation worse for them.

How is one to respond to such a situation?  Well, one can simply go along with it and try to do what’s best for oneself locally, and that is what most people do most of the time‒understandably enough, even though the overall situation may be evolving toward its own miserable destruction.

Or, of course, one could do what family therapists are often said to do:  effectively setting off a bomb***** in the middle of a difficult situation and seeing what happens when the dust settles, figuring that nothing is likely to be much worse than things are at a given present.  At least this allows for a new system to form, like the biosphere after the various mass extinctions.  Maybe it will become better than the previous one.

Maybe they all will always evolve toward catastrophe, to collapse and then be replaced by a new system.

It would be better if people could learn, and could deliberately change local incentives in careful and measured ways, adjusting settings to correct for and steer things away from poorer outcomes and so on, in ways that are not too disruptive at any given place or time.  That’s nominally what many of our systems are meant to be doing, but they don’t do a very good job at it.

Probably it would be better to do a hard reset.  But I’m not sure.  And it’s probably not worth the effort.  The odds of humanity surviving to become cosmically significant seem very low to me, and I’m not sure it would be good for the universe‒whatever that might mean‒if they do.

It’s probably all pointless, and I’m tired of it, anyway.  I don’t want to be part of this equilibrium or lack thereof anymore.  I want to make my own quietus.  Maybe “civilization” should do the same.

*Not to be confused with “weak”, which sounds the same but means more or less “the opposite of strong” and has little or nothing to do with divisions of time.

**And that’s pretty much the only term that comes naturally and easily to humans, for sound biological but horrible psychological and sociological reasons.

***If they were Klingons, they would surely be slain for their dishonor.  I don’t necessarily disagree with such an outcome morally, but practically, it would probably lead to increasing chaos****, so we understandably avoid it most of the time.

****It’s an open question whether such chaos is inherently bad.

*****Metaphorically, of course. At least, it’s usually metaphorical.

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A very low magnitude happiness vector

It’s Friday now, for those of you who have been drinking heavily in the run-up to the big holidays and have lost track of the days.  I’m certainly working today, but I don’t know if the office will be open tomorrow, so I don’t know if I will write a blog post tomorrow.  If you’re interested, feel free to check this site in the morning.  Or, if you like, you can subscribe, and you’ll be sent emails for new posts.  But take that suggestion like a broken barometer:  no pressure.

That’s almost all that I feel I have to say.  Ordinarily, not having anything to say doesn’t mean I won’t write a post.  I’ll just blabber and blather for nearly a thousand words, just to see myself write*.  But there won’t be anything of substance.

Probably a good fraction‒perhaps even a significant majority‒of everything you can find on this blog is pointless nonsense.  Though, of course, I might contend that everything is pointless nonsense.  But here in this blog, you will sometimes find it concentrated, distilled, freeze-dried, and vacuum sealed.

No, I don’t know what some of those things might mean here, metaphorically, any more than you do.  I was just saying words that I thought seemed good.  I have curious tastes, though, so I’ve no idea what others might think of them.

Anyway, that’s me trying to act all silly and funny and whatnot, as if I might be even slightly happy, so that other people don’t have to worry about me.  Well, don’t worry about me.  I’m not happy at all, but it doesn’t matter in the slightest, because neither do I.  Maybe that’s just the way everything is, or maybe it’s just me.  Neither would particularly surprise me.

So, anyway, yeah, I’m not happy, not in any useful sense of the term.  John Galt said that happiness is a state of noncontradictory joy, and that’s always seemed to me like a pretty useful definition of the word, though it’s not the only useful one.  But I like how it separates joy from happiness.  Even people going to the gallows can sometimes joke and laugh, if only as a defense from fear, and in those moments of laughter they may feel joy.  But it is perforce transient, and it’s unlikely that they would be willing to say that they were happy**.

So, in that usage of the word happiness, joy would be necessary but not sufficient for actual happiness.  And both might be relatively orthogonal to a state of wellbeing (which is another word that has more than one interpretation).  Still, though the dot product of happiness and wellbeing may be surprisingly small***, I don’t think it could be zero.

Yes, I use vector multiplication as metaphors for such things, though honestly, it’s not really even so far separated as to be merely a metaphor.  Vectors can be useful for tremendous numbers of things that may seem far afield from each other, from computers and artificial intelligence to physics to biology to economics and ecology.

They can even be of use in psychology, though I don’t know how often they are used therein.  I haven’t dived into a lot of more formal psychology recently, though I like the popular works of Daniel Kahneman and of Jonathan Haidt.  And Paul Bloom is great fun.  But popular works of psychology rarely involve measuring aspects of mental functioning as vectors in a phase space.

Though, as you might have picked up if you’ve read a lot of what I’ve written here, I think it’s useful to think of human behavior and actions as the outcome of a vector sum of all the various “pressures” in the brain/mind, which end up with a resultant that determines what one’s actions will be in that moment.

But, of course, the action itself can feed back on the input vectors, altering them in various ways (maybe their angles, maybe their magnitudes, rarely but possibly their actual sign, which admittedly would just be equivalent to an angle change of 180 degrees, or 𝜋 radians).

Likewise, the state of many of those vectors can change with time.  For instance, one could imagine a vector associated with one’s degree of alertness.  Such a vector would tend to have greater magnitude in the daytime than late at night in most humans, so it waxes and wanes inherently (though even this is likely a result of input vectors delivered by various aspects of the sensory systems).

But the actions taken as a product of previous moments’ vector additions can affect this vector, too.  If a previous resultant led to one having a strong cup of coffee, that might increase the magnitude of the alertness vector, though there would be a delay.  Alternatively, if the previous outcome had led to one drinking a significant amount of Wild Turkey 151 on an empty stomach, the alertness vector might soon start decreasing in magnitude.

Okay, I’ve reached the point in the blog post where I’m using vectors to describe the effects of coffee versus whiskey.  I think it’s reasonable to bring things to a close now.  I hope you all have very good days, by any reasonable measure.  If I work tomorrow, I’ll write a post tomorrow.  I’ll leave figuring out what effect that will have on your own wellbeing for your consideration.

*Analogous to speaking to hear oneself talk.

**Though I can imagine possible situations in which one might be literally happy even on the way to the gallows.  It would be a very brief happiness, nonetheless.

***I doubt that it is, but I also doubt that it is the full, direct product of the magnitudes, as it would be if there were no angular difference at all.  Wellbeing, I think, is more complicated than happiness, which is itself by no means simple.

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“Language is the lifeblood of civilization. Courtesy is the lubricant.”

It feels like Tuesday to me today, since I was out sick on Monday, but of course it’s actually Wednesday.  I need to do payroll today at the office, for one thing, and I don’t do that on Tuesdays‒barring some holiday making it necessary‒since before Wednesday we don’t have all of our own reports in.

Don’t worry, by the way, that wasn’t a preposition that I ended that last sentence with*.  In that case “in” acted more as an adjective (I think) than a preposition, a description of where the reports are, not the beginning of a phrase such as “in a world of hurt”, or even “in that case”.

Of course, the specific rules of language are somewhat arbitrary.  They do have to achieve the desired end of coherent communication, and they need to have structure and dynamics that make that end readily achievable.  But there are multiple ways to achieve any given end, usually.  For instance, in Japanese one has postpositions rather than prepositions (if I recall correctly, anyway).  But it is useful to be consistent with grammar, because it tends to make communication more reliable, ceteris paribus.

Oh, and if I come across as pretentious for using expressions like ceteris paribus instead of “all else being equal”, there’s a good reason:  I am pretentious**.  Actually, though, I just really enjoy using interesting language, and learning at least a little bit of other languages.  Learning other languages improves your grasp of your own language and sometimes of your own thoughts.

It’s analogous to Mill’s statement that defending your arguments against those who disagree and hearing their reasons for disagreeing will tend to improve your own understanding of your “side” of the disagreement.  Perhaps more importantly, it might just get you to see some errors in your own position, and even if it does not lead you to change your mind in the moment, it might eventually lead you to improve your thinking.

If this process is to work, it’s essential for one to have honest interlocutors‒at least relatively speaking‒who are not frankly bigoted or otherwise inappropriately prejudiced against their discussion partners.  And I do mean “discussion” not “debate”.  Debates are contests, put on for show, and if you have your mind changed during one and you admit it, you will have “lost”.

That’s perverse and disgusting to me, as well as a real shame.  When you change your mind because you’ve learned new (reliable and convincing) information and/or have heard arguments you hadn’t considered, you have won.  You have grown, you have improved, your map has come to represent the territory at least a little better; your model has become more useful.

But if you’re going to grow in that sense, you cannot be dogmatic.  I’m very much not a fan of dogmas of any kind***.

Social media, unfortunately, does not encourage open and honest discussion and persuasion, but rather enmity and spite and “hooray for our side, the other side sucks” thinking, as well as interactions that barely rise to the maturity level of a kindergarten playground shouting match.  Honestly, “I’m rubber, you’re glue” is a better argument than many of the things one sees online.  And this is not something exclusive to one or another side of any political or social divide.  Almost all forms of social media are often just arenas full of monkeys throwing feces at each other while shrieking monkey noises.

That’s metaphorical, of course.  If there were just lots of videos of actual monkeys doing this, it might at least be funny the first time or two.  Humans, on the other hand, are not really that charming when they’re being nasty to each other.  Maybe it’s the lack of tails that’s the problem.

I do agree that one does not owe reasoned arguments against someone who is openly and actively arrogating their “right” to take that which does not belong to them or to do harm to others in some other, willful way.  However, when one is not openly and actively engaged in literal self-defense, it’s worthwhile to try to be understanding or at least compassionate even for people who have odious ideas.

At the very least, it’s useful to try to understand how such people came to believe what they seem to believe, or otherwise to understand their thought processes and so on as best as possible, because such things do not happen without causes, even if they lack anything that could honestly be called “reasons”.

And if one is going to correct a problem‒or fight a disease, to use a more loaded metaphor‒one will have a better chance the more one understands, with minimal bias, how that disease works.  Understanding such things about others can even‒hard as it may be to believe‒help us see how we are similar, and help us recognize the flaws in our own ideas.

Perish the thought.

*Ha ha!

**Ha ha again!

***And I see no reason to suspect that karma is a real thing, before you go for the “my karma ran over your dogma” joke.

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“Well…I’m back.”

First off, I apologize for not writing a post yesterday.  I did not go to work because I was not feeling at all well.  And, of course, the office was not open on Saturday, so I didn’t do a post then.  I ought to have been well rested, at least, but I wasn’t.  Being alone at the house is not conducive to restfulness and recharging for me, though it’s better than not getting days off.  But I have only my own company, and I hate that guy, so it’s not pleasant.

One of my main weaknesses in the realm of the physical is my GI tract, and that was the main problem over the past few days.  I’ve taken a lot of meds for my chronic pain‒aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, naproxen, all that stuff‒over the last 20+ years (and more, day per day, over the past 10 years or so), so there are no doubt chronic toxic effects on my stomach and even intestines (and possibly liver and kidneys).

Also, I have to take proton pump inhibitors or at least H2 blockers to prevent myself from getting gastritis and ulcers from all the NSAIDs I take.  That’s probably interfering with the absorption of at least some nutrients, such as perhaps calcium and iron, for instance.  I try to counter that with supplements, but it only can go so far.  Also, they tend to cause their own troubles.

Why do I do it?  Well, chronic pain really sucks, I can tell you.  I actually have told you, many a time and oft, probably to the point of making you feel nauseated*.  So I have to make choices about what I value more at any given moment.  And future selves of me don’t always agree with the past selves about these things‒that’s how brains/minds work, I’m afraid.

So, there’s the added frustration of trying to tell myself not to overdo it on aspirin, say, and to cut back on the omeprazole and maybe replace it with famotidine, but failing and becoming physically ill when pain is too much and then stomach upset is too much.  But nothing is ever just right.  And pain is never-ending but not constant, in the sense that it waxes and wanes at least a bit, and some days it is harder to keep to a manageable level than others.

Sometimes it helps if I do things that hurt myself, deliberately, to distract me at least a bit.  That’s difficult to grasp, maybe, for someone who hasn’t experienced such things, but it’s the way it is.  Also, hurting oneself physically can help distract from psychological pain, and give one a sense of at least some control of one’s pain.

Unfortunately, and perhaps strangely, chronic pain does not distract from psychological pain; it makes it worse.  No wonder Darth Vader was always so grumpy‒he was in chronic pain that must have been horrible (which he brought upon himself, of course).  Mind you, the “dark side” of the Force probably didn’t help.

I often think it’s very strange for something like the Force to have a “light side” and a “dark side”.  It feels very much that the sentient beings are projecting their own values onto something that is, finally, a natural phenomenon.  Also, I don’t get why someone would pick a part of the Force to “use” or to follow, but try to avoid the other “side”, if one is truly trying to discern and follow the “will” of the Force.

Oh, well, the metaphysics and metaethics of fictional universes can sometimes be entertaining, I guess, but this is not one such time.

In some ways, it’s just as well that I didn’t write a post yesterday, since it was the 45th “anniversary”** of the murder of John Lennon.  I might have dwelt on that a bit much, since it’s a horrible event that still grinds away at my sense of whether the human race has any net value whatsoever.

John Lennon has now been dead for five years longer than he lived, while his murderer turned 70 this year, alive and at least somewhat healthy.  Well, that little purulent exudate can at least count himself lucky that he has not found himself in my power in the time since 1980.  I would use all my knowledge and all of my quite active and very dark imagination to keep him alive and begging for death as long as I possibly could.  The Spanish Inquisition were pussies.

Anyway, that’s enough of that.

In closing, I just want to share a notion and question that came to me (and has done so on and off):  I wonder if I would get more, or at least second-level, response to my words if I did a sort of vlog in which I read out loud some of my prior posts.  What do my readers think?  Would it be worth it?

Anyway, try to have a good day.  Remember, “do” or “do not” is never fully in your control; there is only “try”.  Or as the Japanese say, you are responsible for the effort, not the outcome.

Yoda’s a moron.

*Ad nauseam, in other words.

**It seems almost disgusting to use that word here, since often anniversaries are celebrated, and this is not something worthy of celebration, but I had a hard time coming up with another word that worked.  And etymologically, the word “anniversary” doesn’t carry value judgments, it just means something that comes every year.

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All ideologies are wrong

I don’t know if what follows will be clear or will convey my thoughts very well, but here goes.

I was in the shower this morning, thinking about nothing specific, and somehow I started feeling irritated, as I often do, at people who are dogmatic about ideologies and try to apply them to every possible situation or state of the world.  Then a connection of ideas clicked into position for me in the phase space of the mind, and I thought about the notion of scientific models.

There’s a famous quote about model-building/using in science that says, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”  (I don’t recall who said it, but I’ll look it up before posting this and I’ll put it in the footnotes*.)  The statement refers to the fact that, to try to understand the world, scientists build models—not usually literal, glue-together type ones, though that occasionally does happen—and see how well those models replicate or elucidate facts of external reality.

They are all simplifications, as they must be, since only the universe itself appears to have enough processing power to simulate the universe fully.  Being simplifications, and reality being complex and prone to chaos (the mathematical form thereof, though the classical kind does occur as well) a simplified model can never be entirely correct.  But some of them are nevertheless quite valuable and useful—take General Relativity and Darwinian natural selection as two good examples—though we know they do not fully encompass every aspect of reality.

Some models are misleading, such as the old notion of the brain as a cooling mechanism for the blood, and some are simply not that useful, such as seeing the brain as a system of hydraulic tubes and valves of some sort.  And when you try to apply a model to a situation in which it doesn’t apply, it will give you wildly wrong (or “not even wrong”**) answers.

It occurred to me there in the shower that human ideologies are quite similar.  They are simplifications, models of the world.  Some are useful in some ways and to some degree, and some are about as applicable as the notion of a spherical cow (which, despite being the punchline of a physics joke, could in principle be useful somewhere sometime).  But it is as absurd to measure every event or occurrence or interaction against some finite ideology as it is to try to apply the germ theory of disease to the question of “dark energy”.

It’s absurd—if you’re being rigorous and serious—to think that the ideas of Karl Marx contain all that is needed to produce a good, fair, productive, and stable society.  But it’s just as absurd to think that laissez-faire, free-market capitalism will for its part provide everything that could possibly be needed for a robust and free and beneficent world, or that the ideas of “post-modernism” contain all that need be said about civilization.

The world is complicated, with many forces interacting at many levels, and no single idea, however personally attractive, can encompass all of it in a useful way.  Capitalism can encourage the production of great innovation and abundance, but it has no inherent justice, despite some popular belief and the works of Ayn Rand.  It can leave people utterly bereft and tortured and miserable through no fault of their own but bad luck.  It can also evolve into inadequate equilibrium states in which isolated, hoarded wealth sits still and does no one any real good while the whole of civilization collapses around it, just as biological systems can evolve into self-destructive states, like cancers, when an individual mutated cell becomes so successful at reproducing itself that it kills off the body in which it resides.

But if people are not rewarded for their work or their creativity or their acumen to some degree that is at least on some level commensurate with the value they produce, then people will stop producing.  Nature does not tend to evolve creatures that act purely to their own detriment without any “personal” gain of some kind  It’s not an evolutionarily stable strategy; such creatures are rapidly selected out.  Humans are no exception.

And history (and mathematics) has shown that economies are too complex to be planned by anyone or any group, and probably by any form of individual intelligence, no matter how advanced.  The information and knowledge required is too staggeringly vast.

It’s not merely political or economic ideologies that are limited and imperfect, either.  All religions fall into this same category.  Some have good and useful ideas, but only the indoctrinated could imagine that highly limited ancient collections of stories or poems or proscriptions and prescriptions can provide even vague guidance about all the things in the modern world, let alone the potential future world.  “Eastern” religions do no better than “Western” ones, though again, some are more useful and some are less so.

Of course, any ideology that is dogmatic is much more likely to be useless or detrimental than one to which inheres the potential for updating and improving itself.  It’s more or less mathematically impossible for a finite set of ideas put down on paper (or wherever) to have successfully discerned all that can be known about how to approach reality.

I think it would be much better if we thought of our various ideologies as models, hypotheses—theories*** at best.  Then we could have many options available to measure and address issues as they arise, and we could honestly assess whether the notions of, say, existentialism or deontology or utilitarianism best apply to a given moment or challenge.

Again, I’m not sure how well I’ve expressed my thoughts here, and I’m sure I could go on and on about this, trying to tease through it as well and thoroughly as possible.  I’ll spare you (and me) that for the moment.  But I think it was a useful realization.  Though I doubt even this has universal applicability in all possible worlds.

Have a good day.

*It was George Box, a statistician, who is credited with this particular phrase, but the idea had been expressed in terms of maps and territories in similar overall fashion previously.

**This expression is attributed to Wolfgang Pauli (of the eponymous exclusion principle fame), one of the early giants of quantum mechanics.

***In the scientific, not the colloquial sense.

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Knock there and ask your blog what it doth know

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday.  At least, I think it’s Thursday.  I’m wearing my Thursday trousers and my Thursday boots.  You may think I’m joking, but I’m not; I have a specific pair of each of those things for Thursdays.  The other days of the week are not quite as specific because all my other trousers and shoes are identical one to another, at least in “make and model”, if you will, though some have seen more wear than others.

I don’t like having to choose what to wear anymore, and I don’t want to have to worry about matching colors or styles or anything like that.  So it’s all black, same shirt brand and model, same trousers, underwear, socks, and shoes.

But on Thursdays, I wear a pair of‒get this‒gunmetal gray trousers*.  They are the same brand and “model” as the others, though.  Interestingly, the gray ones don’t hold a crease nearly as well as the black ones do; possibly something about the dyeing process affects the fabric.

Oy, this is boring, huh?  I can’t believe I’ve been writing about my clothes!  The thing I meant to address when starting this post was that I feel mildly unsure about days and dates lately.  I’m not completely lost, of course; I can check my phone and computers and whatnot to confirm the day and the date and the time.  Also, of course, I remember writing in yesterday’s post about how the date numbers were 1-2-3 in order, so it was December 3rd.  And yesterday I did the payroll, which means yesterday was Wednesday**.

There is, however, a circuit or module or subroutine in my brain/mind that seems weaker than it is in many other people:  the feeling of being right (as in “correct factually”, but to a lesser degree, also the feeling of being morally right).  This is not to be confused with the intellectual process of discerning whether something is correct, in either sense.  I’m talking about the feeling, the belief if you will, that one is right, which often has very little to do with actually being right.  One is an intellectual process while the other is an emotion, and emotions are unreliable indicators of truth or guides to action‒but they are powerful***.

This is an important and consequential dichotomy.  It gives rise to the tendency for a particular societal issue, so nicely put by Yeats:  “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.”

I strongly suspect that it’s not being “the worst” that leads to such passionate intensity, but rather passionate intensity‒that feeling that one is right‒that makes one prone to do horrible things.  If you feel that you are right, you’re more inclined to give yourself license to do whatever you think is “for the greater good”.

I think this is also part of the explanation for OCD****.  Sufferers have some dysfunction in the parts of their brains that produces the feeling of being right, so they have to keep rechecking and can become more and more unsure of more things, developing “rituals” and repetitive behaviors to try to stave off the anxiety of not being able to feel that one has, for instance, turned off the stove, even when intellectually one knows, or at least has good reason to think, one has done so.

I have at least a little of this problem, perhaps best exemplified in my use of mental arithmetic.  I keep track of ongoing sales at an individual and group level in the office, by dollar amount and by what is sold and so on, and I put it up on “the board” to update it as it happens.  Over time, I’ve gotten pretty good at mental arithmetic‒I never was very bad at it‒and I’ve even gotten to the point where, for fun, I will do some algebra and calculus equations in my head, say if I see one as the thumbnail of a YouTube video.

But even though I’m generally confident of my results intellectually, I never feel okay enough not to check my numbers using the functions of, for instance, Excel.  So, I can run many numbers faster in my head than I could using a calculator, but I cannot trust my answers.

At some level, I think this is better than the alternative.  We can probably all think of people who are quite sure of themselves, quite confident in the results of whatever “thought” processes they have gone through, and yet are woefully off-track or unqualified or just fucking wrong.  And we see what such people do to the world, because they are quite comfortable asserting themselves and seizing power and resources, because they feel that they are in some sense correct.

When you feel that you’re right, you don’t tend to check yourself as often as you would otherwise.  You also are less open to criticism and suggestions, because they fly in the face of your feelings.  This phenomenon is nicely explored in the book On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not by Robert Burton, MD*****.

I could go on and on and on about this, I’m sure.  But it’s time to draw this to a close for the day.  I will finish with one of my favorite quotes from Radiohead:  “Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”

TTFN

*Why do I use the word “trousers” rather than “pants” when I’m an American?  Well, I watch a lot of British comedy panel shows, to the extent that I find if I say “pants” I feel that I’m talking about underwear, since that’s to what the British term “pants” refers.

**Last week, though, due to the holiday, I did the payroll a day early.  And, of course, I didn’t wear my Thursday pants (trousers) at all last week; I wasn’t going to work, so I just rewore the clothes from the day before.  It wasn’t as though I was planning to interact with anyone else, and indeed I did not.  Still, maybe the holiday has thrown me off a bit.

***For good, sound biological reasons as I always say, but such reasons can easily overshoot usefulness and become detrimental.

****It may also contribute to chronic tendencies toward depression, in which one never feels one is “right” either literally or morally or existentially, and also to the tendency for people with depression to be more prone to be accurate in their self-assessment of things such as, for instance, driving ability.

*****I just realized that “On Being Certain, by Robert Burton” rhymes.

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“I am still right here”

Well, it’s Wednesday, and in the American ordering of date numbers, the date is 12-3, (which means “December 3rd”, not “9”).  That’s mildly fun, since it has 1, 2, and 3 in order.  In 20 years, we’ll have 12-3-45, which is also kind of fun.  But we’re ignoring the century number, which ruins everything:  12-3-2045 if you “spell” it out.  See what I mean?  I guess in 2542 years we’ll have 12-3-4567.  That’s much more amusing, but odds are good that by that time, we’ll have different ways of representing the date, so it probably won’t work.

Oh, well.  Life is indeed unsatisfactoriness, or dukkha as you might say.  

I’ve been trying to find something interesting to read, but neither fiction nor nonfiction seems able to grab my attention.  I’ve tried reading books about computer science/machine learning, and about the nature of mathematics in general, and about political philosophy, and about physics, and so on.  I can’t seem to summon the energy to focus or get into any of them.

I did listen to the song Like A Stone by Audioslave* for the first time during the last several days.  I got the chords for it and everything.  I’ve played the video over and over (as I do) and practiced singing it and playing it myself.  It’s got a lot of barre chords, so it’s good exercise for my left hand (which can get very sore) but otherwise it’s fairly simple.

It’s a good song.  Even so, I can only distract myself with that for a short while at a time, and the whole thing is already losing interest for me.  But then again, so is Radiohead, and the Beatles, and Bowie, and Pink Floyd, and all those other people whose songs I play and sing for myself.  It’s all just been done, and it’s just me trying to amuse myself, like when I used to play tabletop RPGs alone as a teenager, rolling random encounters and making stories up based on those as I went along.

I almost wish I still had my old role-playing games, like Gamma World and DragonQuest and Villains and Vigilantes (and even D&D) as well as some dice and hex paper, so I could play again.  But probably, if I had them, I would find them boring, too.

I am not interested in online RPGs, especially not the MMORPG things, especially the ones with graphics.  I have no interest in playing role-playing games with strangers.  That’s an almost horrifying thought.

The problem is clearly with me in all of this.  I got spun off years ago from having any kind of the close and consistent social interaction (outside work and my interlude of prison) which had previously served to keep me more like a human.  Since then I’ve gotten, or felt, more and more…different.  I’ve always known I was weird, really, but in the past I had family and friends around to keep me from going off the rails too much.

It’s a bit like a neutron.  As you probably know, neutrons in a nucleus, where they interact with surrounding nucleons via the strong force, are stable effectively forever.  However, a neutron outside the nucleus decays with a half life of only about ten minutes.  That means that after an hour, only one in 64 such neutrons will not have yet decayed.  After two hours, that would be only one in 4096.  They will all decay eventually.

That’s just an analogy, but it’s apt, I think.  I am a free neutron (and cheap at twice the price!) and must decay before long.

I think I just don’t have any capacity actually to connect to any other beings, anymore.  I don’t feel as though there’s anyone whose interests even complement mine, let alone match up to any reasonable degree.  And when I try to interact with people at a more personal level, it tends before long to be the case that we are both awkward and uncomfortable (but especially me).

Oh, well, again.  I have no reason to expect things to be otherwise, nor to expect to find any “kindred spirit(s)” out there.  I’m way past tired of trying to change myself to fit in with other people, to try to make them happy.  I tried to do that in the past, really pretty much all the time; it slowly but surely wore me down and wore me out.  It never ended up working, anyway; at some point or other, everyone I love has, consciously or unconsciously, found me not worth the effort of being around.

And what have I become, my sweetest friend?  I’m a neutron, a sustained interaction between the up quark field, the down quark field, and the gluon field(s), and I will decay into a proton, an electron, and an electron-antineutrino.

Okay, I’m pushing that metaphor way too far, sorry.  Bottom line, I know I’m weird and unpleasant, and I am not worth the trouble even for myself, let alone anyone else.  If someone wanted to help me or save me, I couldn’t encourage them, not if I were being honest and kind, anyway.  I’m not a good pony, and I don’t recommend betting on me.  “I will let you down; I will make you hurt.”

*Quick Chris Cornell-centered “dad joke”:  Where does an Audioslave work?  In the Soundgarden behind the Temple of the Dog.

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Another day, same old stories

Well, it’s Tuesday the 2nd (of December) and that two/Tue coincidence has to be worth something doesn’t it?  I suppose it would be better if this were February (the 2nd month), but perhaps it’s enough to note that the difference between the official number of this month (12) and its nominative number (10) is 2.  Anyway, having two twos might make more “sense” than having three of them.

Is that important?  Almost certainly not.  In 56 years of time and space, I’ve never encountered anything that was truly and objectively “important”.  But it is the sort of thing that engages my (admittedly rather odd) aesthetic sense, and this is my blog*, so I will indulge myself.

Anyway, it’s the second day of the work week, and I’m going to work.  The reason I go to work is, at root, nominally to keep myself alive and “thriving”, so I can…what?  Keep working?  I don’t have any other, deeper or longer-term reasons.  It’s fairly absurd when you think about it.  It’s a self-referential, almost tautological, ouroboros-like situation.

By the way, I don’t see any reason to think that this state of affairs is the product of some conspiracy‒centuries or even millennia long as it would have to be‒by the powerful to keep the masses toiling away for their benefit.  For one thing, as we can all plainly see (I hope) the powerful are at least as idiotic and moronic and clueless as anyone else, and they probably tend to be less self-critical, so they are more prone to do really stupid things without anyone protecting them from their own stupidity.

They no more really, actually control anything‒including themselves‒than a queen bee (or ant or termite) runs its hive/hill/colony.  The queen just happens to be the breeding female.  And even that is not a role based on any merit, other than being capable of developing active ovaries.  The queens are “chosen” randomly, as far as we can tell.

It’s all just shit that happens in a region of spacetime in which entropy is moving from low to high, as it tends to do, but in which there’s enough movement involved in the process to allow for locally highly complex phenomena based on carbon’s extraordinarily fecund chemistry, which occasionally forms self-replicating molecules that undergo natural selection.

But people tell stories about things.  It’s one of our strongest attributes, and it serves in us roughly the same “purpose” as the various pheromone trails and hive dances in the aforementioned ants and bees and termites.  Our stories allow us to act in concert with many other people, on a scale that puts even the social insects to shame.

We often believe that our stories are true, at least to some degree.  And some of them, in a limited sense, really are “true”.  But most of them are just stories, made up “just so” explanations of things we either haven’t figured out or that have a nature too complicated or too daunting for us to want to face them as they are.

As someone who has a penchant for creating stories, I can tell you, it’s quite easy to make up plausible-seeming, internally consistent tales about worlds and characters and events, real or otherwise, that have little to do with reality other than that it is a fact of reality that I made up those stories.

I consider all religions and all their related tales to be part of this phenomenon.  This is not an insult to them per se, and the tendency for people to take it as an insult or an attack belies the faith such people claim to have in their religions.  But people who really think a particular thing is true don’t have to defend it with anger, let alone violence.

Imagine if the classical physics people had crucified Planck for solving the “ultraviolet catastrophe” by positing that only certain chunks (quanta) of energy can be produced, or if they had burned Einstein at the stake for not only showing that light comes in such quanta but that matter is also finely divided***.

Science does also work with stories.  Every hypothesis is a story, and some of them can seem extremely compelling.  Some of them we really want to think are true.  And that’s why, ideally, science takes every such story and pokes the hell out of it, trying to show if and where it’s wrong, where it’s internally inconsistent, where it doesn’t match what actually seems to happen in the world.  It’s not perfect, but it does improve in an incremental, ratchet-like fashion, at least as long as we hold to the rigorous, ruthless, but honest criticism of those stories.

With that, I’ll draw the main body of this post to a close.  I have no idea why I’ve written what I’ve written, or at least I don’t know very well.  I doubt there’s any internal consistency or coherence to it, but I guess that supports my point.

Please try to have a good day.

[Aside: a thought occurred to me yesterday that, as we approach the era of humane, lab-grown meat derived from animal stem cells, what, if any, would be the moral implications of using human stem cells, taken from a volunteer‒I’m willing‒to grow meat in the lab and have people eat it?  There’s no risk of parasites or infections, assuming reasonable genetic screening, such as might explain an evolved revulsion for cannibalism.  There’s no one being harmed.  What do you think?  I’m not concerned with whether you feel it’s somehow “icky”; that’s just misfiring evolution-based taboos.  Do you think there is any moral reason not to grow and eat such meat?  If so, what are they?]

*There are many others like it**, but this one is mine.

**Are they really like it, though?  You tell me.

***These are two of the things Einstein demonstrated during his annus mirabilis (i.e., “miraculous ass”***) in 1905, the same year he published his paper introducing special relativity.

***That’s not really what it means.