Psychology

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“We would zig-zag our way through the boredom and pain”

It’s Monday again; indeed, it is the last Monday in March in 2026 (AD/CE), for whatever that’s worth.  This Monday shall never come again.

Then again, of course, no Monday shall ever come again.  Such is the nature of time.  This is one of the facts that makes senseless the expression “That’s a [measure of time] I’m not gonna get back”.  Well, duh!  You never get any of your experienced amounts of time back.  That’s the nature of time, and the nature of its directionality, dependent upon the second law of thermodynamics.

Even if one could rewind time, one would not “get a moment back” the way people talk about it.  If, like the events of a movie or other video story, one could rewind life, it would not be you (the self who spoke of getting the moment back) who would experience the events anew.  It would just be a return to an earlier state, in which you would again be experiencing all the same events, not merely as if for the first time, but actually for the first time.  The posterior events would be erased for you as you traveled back.

It’s not like playing a video game where you can “regenerate” at your most recent save point, but you can remember what happened to your character before it “died” so that you can learn from your mistakes.  There is no one playing your character (i.e., you) and able to learn from a repeated past.  You are not the player of the game, you are the character.  You are part of the game.  You are part of the movie, not watching it from outside.  If it resets, you reset; if it rewinds, you rewind, and all memory of any events that happened disappear along with the future.

Whether or not you will repeat the same events, like the characters of a movie/show, or if you may do something different, like a video game character, is less clear, but it doesn’t much matter.  You are still going through each moment once, effectively, and you can only learn from mistakes to affect your behavior in the future.  If your mistake kills you, you’re just dead.

Even if time were a closed loop‒if the future of the universe wraps around and becomes “the past” again, forming a closed and fixed structure, as appears to be possible in principle according to General Relativity‒you won’t get to experience it as happening again.  Each time, you will experience reality for the first time.

Just as there is no fixed self looking out from behind your mind, there is no external rememberer hovering over your reality, able to experience your experiences for the first time but as if not for the first time.  You are a phenomenon within reality, not a sojourner through reality that accumulates knowledge that could be used in reliving the past, but better.

If you could rewind yourself except for your mind, somehow retaining your memory of “the future”, that would not be truly returning to the past.  Rather, it becomes the next set of events in your future.  This demands an answer to the question of how it could be possible for you to become your earlier self and yet remember your later self, since your memories are functions of your brain.

This is what makes things like Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia or brain damage so tragic‒they literally are injuries to what makes us ourselves.  If you lose all memories of your past, then in a very real sense, the person you were is already dead.

Of course, even in healthy states, without brain damage, your past self is still “dead” with every new moment that arrives.  Every time you sleep and then wake up, it may as well be that you have died and then been recreated in the morning, just with implanted memories from the previous person, the one who died.  There would be no way for you to know if there is no difference in your brain and the rest of your body.  Indeed, it’s in principle possible that this actually happens with each passing moment, or even each passing Planck time.

Only the past can be remembered.  Only the future, even in principle, can be planned and affected.  And only the ever-moving present can be experienced.  There is, of course, a continuity that is required for us to have any sense of a unified personhood at all, but as Sam Harris has pointed out (more than once) your memories of your past are merely thoughts in your mind in the present moment, as are your plans for the future.

So it really can make sense to “get over yourself”, in more than one way.  It’s worth recognizing that you’re mortal and‒whatever you may believe‒as far as we know, death is the end, and all that you were will be gone after that.  But it’s also worth recognizing that, in a nontrivial sense, each day all that you were the day before is already gone.

Still, though you are only existing for any given present moment, memory at least allows for us to learn and hopefully do better in the future than we would have if we didn’t have memory.  That’s why memory is a trait that gets selected for and is evolutionarily stable:  because its presence makes creatures with that trait or attribute more likely to survive and reproduce than those that do not have it, ceteris paribus.

As with most such subject-specific blog posts, I could go on and on about this.  A thousand (or, well, a lot of) other thoughts arise that could be expressed as I write what I do write.  But I have finite space and finite time (even if spacetime is infinite) in which to write this post, so I’ll stop here for the moment.

Welcome to the new week.  I hope it’s a good one for you.  Heck, I hope it’s a good one for everyone, even “bad” people (with the caveat that, “a good one” entails such people becoming better than they presently are).

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Sometimes drunkards walk to interesting places

Well, well, as the oil tycoon said*.  It’s Saturday now and I am actually writing a blog post, as I expected I would.  It’s been three weeks since the most recent prior Saturday morning post (not counting my “non-post” from last week).  But today, this weekend, I am going to work, and so I am writing a post.

I hope you’re proud of yourself.

Okay, well, that last sentence doesn’t really make sense in this context, but I felt the curious and rather inscrutable urge to write it, and there was no real downside to doing so, so I did.  These are the sorts of things that happen in biological, nonlinear, largely subconscious brains that are communicating using language (especially written language, in my case).

A truly efficient, direct, deliberately programmed AI (not a neural net style, LLM type of AI, but one whose algorithm is precise and understood) might not produce such erratic and seemingly peculiar thoughts.  But maybe it would.  Maybe one cannot have actual intelligence, with creativity and the like, without having a system that meanders a bit into the highly tangential.

I suspect this may be so, because in order to grow and gain new knowledge, to be creative, there has to be a capacity to embrace the unknown‒not in an H. P. Lovecraft sense, but more in a sense reminiscent of Michael Moorcock’s** character that strode into chaos and by interacting with it caused it to become a locally specific order***.

The potential paths into the future which one might, in principle, explore are functionally limitless, and may actually be infinite.  It’s not possible to evaluate them comprehensively through any kind of linear logic‒not in the time span available to the universe, anyway.  So, to work things better, there must be a bit of potential for “randomness”, for moving forward into a future that is one’s best guess, or into which one has narrowed down at least some of one’s choices.  Then one can find a “good enough” path or course of action, one which may produce insights and outcomes that were not, in practice, predictable by any finite mind.  (In a way this follows from the fact that, if you can precisely and specifically predict what insight you are going to have, then you have already had it.)

It’s a bit like evolution through natural selection, where the mutations are effectively random, but the survival of those “mutants” is not at all random, at least in the long run, on a large enough scale.  Still, there’s no pre-thinking involved, no teleology, merely “motion” that is constrained (by differential survival due to the facts of surrounding nature).

Even if one has a fairly specific goal, trying to plot out one’s way through the phase space of one’s potential future paths in a very specific and precise and preplanned course is unlikely to be doable.  It may not be preferable even if it were possible.

It may be analogous to trying to get from one location to another in, say, the same city, by following a direct, straight line from one spot to the other.  One probably won’t be able to make any progress at all for very long; buildings and streets and vehicles and the like are probably going to get in the way.  Heck, the very surface of the Earth could be an impediment to any truly straight path, since it is curved****, but we’ll stipulate that you can follow a geodesic (the shortest distance between points on a curved surface).

Anyway, if one precisely follows only a preset straight path, even if one can more or less achieve it, one misses out on many potentially beneficial but unpredictable paths.  Imagine one is heading to one’s usual, mediocre but tolerable, fast food restaurant for lunch, and one only goes straight there without even looking around.  One might well miss seeing all the many other available restaurants, some of which one may find preferable‒perhaps by a great margin‒to one’s “planned” place.

That’s a slightly tortured metaphor, and I apologize for that fact, but I hope you know what I mean.

It doesn’t do‒usually‒to try to make progress by a true random “drunkard’s” walk.  I don’t recall what particular power law the number of possible outcomes follows, but it grows very rapidly, perhaps exponentially, with each new step.  But if one keeps one’s long term goal generally in sight, and one heads in that general direction, adjusting for buildings and railroads and hills and lakes and so on, constantly assessing and, when necessary, adjusting one’s course, one can usually not only get to one’s destination rather well, but one can encounter new sights and new experiences along the way.

Some of these encounters might even make one decide to change one’s goal of travel, having found a better one (by whatever criteria) as one went along.  That’s not going to happen to someone who is dogmatically focused on only one path and only one goal.

Okay, well, that’s my rather stochastic blog post this Saturday.  I hope you are already having an excellent weekend, and that it continues to be excellent (or if it is not yet excellent, that it becomes so in short order).  Thank you for reading.

*To his son, Derrick.

**I don’t remember which character‒it’s not Elric‒or which story.  My apologies.

***Of course, as I think I’ve said before, order is not the opposite of chaos, but is rather a subset of it.

****It is.  Seriously.  There is no reasonable doubt about that fact, and it has been known to humans for at least 2200 years, since Eratosthenes calculated (correctly) the circumference of the Earth using distance along what was effectively a geodesic and the angles of two simultaneous shadows.

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Man doth not yield himself unto the angles save through the weakness of his feeble vectors

It’s Friday.  It must be, because yesterday was Thursday, and by the conventions of the modern English-speaking world, the day after Thursday is Friday.

We could have named the days differently, and if we had, then different days would follow other different days, but they would still proceed in a consistent order.  A day naming system that changes its order from day to day and week to week would not be useful at all.

Similarly, we could name the numerals and numbers differently‒the names we use are fairly arbitrary‒but that would not change the deep nature of arithmetic.  Whatever the equivalent of 2 + 2 might be, it would still equal the equivalent of 4.

That which we call arroz, by any other name, would still be rice.

I am not using the lapcom today.  I felt a bit lazy yesterday afternoon, so I didn’t bring it with me (there was already cat food in my bag, so it was somewhat heavy).  Also, I am still sick, strictly speaking; in fact, I feel slightly worse this morning than I did yesterday morning.

But I do have some regret over not bringing the computer with me, because my thumbs are rather sore.  You might think that would be enough to motivate me to bring the lapcom with me every evening, but the person I am in the evening does not necessarily appreciate what things will be like for the person I am in the morning.

Intellectually, of course, I can know what the situation will be, and I do know it, at least implicitly.  But I cannot feel it in the moment; all I can feel is the resistance to bringing it at that moment, because the immediate extra weight feels much more salient than the discomfort I might feel the following morning.

This is natural, of course.  I suspect that you experience similar disparate and antithetical drives and resistances at different times, despite what you know in your “higher” brain.

This is one of the annoying things about the fact that there is no single, stable, consistent “self”, with a single terminal goal (to use some AI-related jargon), in the minds of humans and humanoids.  There is, instead, a fluid of vectors adding together in a high-dimensional phase space, with lengths and directions that change from moment to moment* in response to changing external facts and to feedback from its own internal states.

Willpower is a function of the brain.  It varies from person to person and from moment to moment.  It is also subject to fatigue.  This has been studied with a fair degree of rigor.  People who have recently been engaged in taxing mental tasks, like solving relatively challenging math problems or similar, are less able to resist (for instance) eating an offered cookie despite being on a diet or even being diabetic.

This stuff may be fairly obvious, but in any given moment, most of us are not mindful enough of our own internal states even to be aware of what might be our current relatively depleted will.

It’s analogous to a person who does strength training with free weights in a gym.  Imagine this person comes to the gym after a hard day that involved physical labor, perhaps more than they usually do.  Or perhaps the person is ill but feels they can tough things out.  In the worst situation, this can lead to catastrophic accidents with weights that are‒at that moment‒too heavy for the person to lift, even though at other times the person may have lifted them with relative ease.  At the very least, such a person is at risk of strain and injury that could impair their ability to exercise for some time.

The mind works much like this.  The brain is an organ, a physical, biological thing, and it is prone to illness and injury and fatigue, in addition to all the software-related weirdness it can instantiate (like having conflicting and/or illogical points of view about empirical facts, and various other forms of irrationality).

This is one reason it can be useful to engender strong habits, even ones that border on the dogmatic.  Because the brain works on habit‒it being simply unworkable to try to evaluate each and every situation de novo‒if one can set up good habits, they can protect one from some catastrophes.

For instance, one of the “dogmas” of gun safety is that one should treat every firearm as if it is loaded, even if one has literally just removed all of its bullets oneself, and one should therefore never point the gun at anything (or anyone) one is not prepared to shoot.  This can feel unreasonable, and in the short term, thinking only of that instance where one has just thoroughly unloaded and checked the weapon, it may seem strictly unnecessary.

But humans are not perfect reasoners‒I suspect that nothing is, and that perfect reasoning is impossible for any finite mind‒and when fatigued, they fall into more automatic behaviors rather than thinking everything through.  This is why it is good to train such automatic behavior to be what one wants it to be when one is able to think clearly.

So, treat every gun as if it is loaded.  Buckle your seat belt for even very short trips**.  Don’t keep sweets in your house if you’re diabetic.  If you’re trying to quit smoking, don’t hang out with people who are smoking and don’t go places where cigarettes are easy to get.  Ditto for other drugs of abuse.

Speaking of which, alcohol tends to screw all those things up.  One of the key effects of alcohol on human (and other animals’) nervous systems is to decrease or diminish what can reasonably be called willpower.  This is not its only deleterious effect.

Okay, well, my thumbs are a bit sore, so I’m going to bring this to a close for the day.  It probably goes without saying‒somewhat ironically‒that there is much more that I could write on this topic.  Perhaps I’ll return to it, and to other related subject matter, tomorrow.

There really should be a blog post tomorrow, given that the previous two Saturdays were surprisingly non-working days.  But, as with a coin flip (or nearly so), previous results don’t have any impact on where the outcome will land this time.

Either way, please try to have a good weekend.

*Lawfully, but in such a complex fashion that it is effectively almost a chaotic system.

**Unless you literally don’t mind the increased risk of injury or death.  It’s possible to be in such a self-destructive state***, but if you are going to accept that risk, try to make sure you really don’t care.  It’s easy enough to imagine one doesn’t mind getting injured or killed in a traffic accident, but when one is injured‒or killed‒it is too late to change one’s preferences, and the version of you who suffers injury may be quite put out with their previous self.  See above about the lapcom.

***e.g., Florida.

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“Something knocked me out the trees – now I’m on my knees”

Okay.  So.  I don’t know what to write today, even more so than usual.

It’s Tuesday, of course.  Though I guess there’s really no “of course” about it; I mean, it could be any day in principle, but it happens to be Tuesday, and I’m up and about, going through various stages of heading to the office as I write this.

At the end of the work day, I will head back to the house and prepare to do it all over again.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  I won’t say “as needed”, because I think it’s probably rather nebulous just how necessary these daily repetitions really are.  Certainly neither the universe nor civilization depends upon me doing any of the things I do.

I suppose that “work” is weakly dependent upon me, in that if I suddenly just stopped coming, they would have to find someone else to do what I do, or divide things up among those already there or something.  That’s not such a big deal, of course.  It happens all the time.

There may be a few people who look forward to my blog every day, though it would be pretty arrogant to consider them “dependent” upon it.  I would much prefer for people to be “dependent” upon, or at least to look forward to, my fiction.  It would be easier to keep writing it if I thought more than one person would actually read my stories, and that maybe people would even tell me what they thought of them*.

I suppose that sort of thing might seem fairly trivial in the face of various events happening in the nation and the world, but on the other hand, those things are trivial in themselves.  There is certainly no good reason for any of them other than that human nature‒while possessing functionally limitless potential‒is almost always prone to default to the level of screaming monkeys.

Each political moment of the world feels so…well…momentous to the people going through it, but these kinds of things have arisen and passed away over and over throughout history.  Probably most such happenings are even outside of history, parallel to it if you will, because many of them are not even noticed beyond their immediate time and place, even by some of the people who experience them.

They are all rather laughable in their self-important yet ephemeral character.

I don’t know why I even notice, let alone care.  I guess maybe it’s because the human race does have such potential for greatness, for the creation of beauty‒by whatever criteria you might measure beauty‒and for making the world a place that’s better than it is in every reasonable way.  Yet, they do not have the intellectual and moral humility to realize how great they could make things.  Ironically, if people were able to stop thinking of everything as being about them, whoever they are, they could participate in a world that could easily be better not just for everyone else, but for them as well.

Of course, it’s honestly difficult not to knee jerk one’s responses to reality as if it were about oneself.  Meditation can help, if only by dissolving the “ego” and decreasing the tendency toward reflexive belief in the inner homunculus.

It would be nice if Earth had its own Surak who succeeded in convincing humanity that calmness, mindfulness, and rationality are not merely options but probably among the best ways to secure a beneficent future for Earth and life and intelligence.  That’s assuming that this is indeed true, which I strongly suspect it is, but do not know for certain.

Wouldn’t it be remarkable if, instead of training our children to believe in the literal truth of fairy tales that are hundreds to thousands of years old (and benighted even for their times of origin), extorting their behavior and “belief” with threats of Hell (or the equivalent), we encouraged our children to be mindful, to be curious, to be patient, to recognize their fallibility, but at the same time, as part of that, to recognize their potential to do truly remarkable and wonderful things.

But left to their own devices‒as they all always are, since even the Powers That Be are just other naked house apes, not significantly different than themselves‒people tend to choose the monkey way.  Or, rather, they go that way by default, never recognizing that they have a choice.

Only if you recognize that you are a monkey can you really, deliberately choose to become something greater.

Only by recognizing your fallibility can you begin to succeed at deliberately chosen and often amazing things.

Only by recognizing that you are not special can you truly steer yourself toward doing things that are special.

Okay, all those “only” beginnings to the above homilies are presumptuous in the extreme, but they make for better quotables than more restrained language would provide.

I’m not a fan of rhetoric‒if you need clever wordplay to convince others of your points, perhaps your points aren’t all that good‒and one of the reasons I’m not a fan is that it is just so damn tempting.

Oh, well.  This is all stupid anyway.  Sorry.

*No trolling though.  I don’t mind reasonable criticism, especially if I find it convincing, but when people are assholes just for the “fun” of it, I see no problem with them being dealt with as one would a troll in an RPG or a book or a movie.  Imagine how much more pleasant the world would be if all people prone to trollish behavior were turned to stone, or barring that, turned to worm food and ash.

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Peculiar signs and pseudo-wonders

Well, as you probably know*, it’s Monday again.  I’m not excited about it either, believe me, but I was given no input into the matter, so don’t blame me.

As you may also know, I did not work this last Saturday, because several unexpected absences concatenated (I’m not sure that’s good usage) to make it pointless for the office to open, so we did not open it.  Instead, I took advantage of the day off and went on a bit of a trek.

I walked to the bank‒a new branch, or at least one I haven’t used in the past‒and then continued on a few more miles to the Yellow Green Farmers Market, which is quite a nice little place that’s only open on the weekends.

Just outside the market, I saw an amusing collection of signs that I suspect one would not ever see at a farmers’ market in the northeast.  I’ll insert a picture here.

Anyway, I was neither openly carrying nor carrying concealed firearms, and I used no bike, scooter, or skateboard, so I was fine.  I walked around a bit, had a lovely apple and ginger tea and three empanadas, then walked back toward the house by a different route.  Finally, I got back to the Hollywood train station, where I decided to get an Uber the remaining distance back.

I had already walked several miles, and I was rather fatigued.  I could also sense that I had gotten a bit sunburned (which I had).  Anyway, in the end, I walked almost exactly ten miles on Saturday.  This is based on agreement between my pedometer and the map estimate, so I think it’s reasonably accurate.

We used to say “close enough for government work” about things like that, back in the day, implying that governments don’t work very hard to get things too right.  However, nowadays, in the US at least, I feel that it would be better to say “too close for government work” because accuracy and precision, let alone duty and beneficence, seem to be anathema to our current administration.  Let us say as little as we may about competence.  That bit is just deeply embarrassing.

Let’s see, is there anything else that’s at all worth discussing?  I don’t know; “worth” is such a subjective concept.  In my subjective assessment, much of what I do on any day, in any week, in any year is of no worth whatsoever.

Not everything falls under that umbrella.  Everything I did that led up to my children being born is absolutely worthwhile to me.  Nor jot nor tittle would I change of it.  After that, though, things degenerated rapidly.  Again, this is from my point of view, but that’s the only one I can actually have.

I can imagine other points of view.  I can try to see things as if from another point of view, simulating other minds within my own.  So can you, probably.  It’s a very useful attribute shared by most naked house apes.  I think my own capacity to do so‒which is not inherently very good, it seems, probably due to my ASD‒was greatly enhanced by reading a lot of fiction starting from when I was quite young.

Reading is very different from watching a movie or a TV show or even a play, because with reading one can more or less literally “hear” the thoughts of the characters‒and I think this is one of the truly great things about written fiction.  I think if more people spent more of their lives, particularly in childhood, reading written fiction, the world would be, in consequence, a better place by most reasonable measures.

Unfortunately, for many people in the world, the only fiction they read is stuff like the Bible and the Koran.  Not that there’s anything wrong with reading them per se‒I’ve read parts of one and all of the other, myself‒but though they are anthropologically interesting, they are not terribly well written, nor are they coherent, nor is there any unity to their styles.

This is a bit puzzling, given some of the things the books claim for themselves.  Then again, politics frequently demonstrates that people don’t seem too worried about coherence and logic and quality, so one can say and claim almost anything one wants, and some people will embrace it.

DMX said, “Talk is cheap, motherfucker!”  Aye, that it is.  And yet, people will pay through the nose for it, and sometimes, the more worthless it is, the more eagerly they pay.

If given a choice between cheap but big and gaudy fake plastic jewelry and some truly valuable, rare gem that is subdued in character, people seem to pick the plastic nearly every time.  They do this even when they know the difference.  They cannot seem to resist the superficial bling.

Mind you, if it’s just for decoration, the superficial bling is okay as far as it goes.  Especially if it’s going to be transient, like holiday decorations, the cheap and gaudy stuff can be ideal, because one doesn’t have to worry about damaging it; it’s all about a look, an impression, anyway.

But when one wants something durable, something useful, something with depth, it’s best to work with things that are not mere surface shimmer.  One does not want to build factories and fire trucks and skyscrapers and farm equipment out of Papier-mâché, Elmer’s® glue, plastic beads, and glitter.

All right, I think that tortured chunk of rhetoric demonstrates that I have nothing further to say today that’s worth sharing.  Probably that’s true every day, from midnight to midnight.  Silence, I suspect, is probably my ideal mode.

*This is presuming** that most, if not all, readers tend to read my posts on the day they are released.

**I know, I know, when I presume I make a pres out of u and me.  And right now, a pres is not a prestigious thing to be, though there was a time in the past when it was.

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Who calls me “villain”? Breaks my pate across? Plucks off my blog and blows it in my face?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again.

I had to check the date on my phone a few times in a row to confirm that, yes, not only is it really Thursday, but it is also the 19th of March (in 2026 AD/CE).

It’s not that I thought I must have gotten the day and date wrong.  I keep track of these things and recheck these things all the time, often coming from different directions; I usually have at least a couple of methods by which I am able to reconstruct what day it currently is.  But I always feel‒a bit more strongly than is warranted‒that not only could I be wrong in principle (as is always the case) but that I am not likely to be right.

A similar thing occurs when I do the mental addition to update the various totals on “the board” when people get deals at work.  Intellectually, I know that I’m good at it, and that I’m rarely incorrect.  But “emotionally”, I don’t feel like I’m right.

Even after I check my numbers 3 different ways using Excel (there are 3 totals that should match, and if they do, it’s much more unlikely that I’m wrong), I don’t feel like I’m sure that it’s right, even though intellectually, it’s all but a certainty.  I mean, this is mathematics here, one of the few areas in which we can obtain answers with logical certainty.  And I’m pretty good at it.

I even occasionally deliberately say to myself, after confirming in those 3 ways that I got all the mental arithmetic correct, “Yes!  I am the king!”  It’s an attempt to feel good about myself in a slightly silly way, which is the only way I allow myself to feel good about myself.  But it doesn’t work much, if at all.  It feels like what it is:  a scripted, fictional remark.

This may be part of the problem I have long had with self-affirmation, autosuggestion type things.  If I say good things to myself about myself, I don’t believe them.  in fact, I feel very squirmy and uncomfortable inside when I try to say good things about myself, or to tell myself that I like or love myself.  It’s as though I’m committing some grotesque violation of ordinary decency.

I don’t feel as though I’ve done something truly horrible mind you; I don’t feel as though I’ve harmed some helpless person or otherwise victimized the innocent.  It’s more akin to sticking one’s bare hands into a big bowl full of maggots.  I just feel that I’m disgusting and pathetic and that I make myself more so by saying things that sound as though I’m pretending I’m not disgusting and pathetic.

I recognize these as emotions that are not good guides to the empirical world; intellectually, I can handle them, assess them, recognize their irrationality, and call the judgment made.  But I have not yet been able to shake those feelings, and they are not fun.

I cannot convince myself, down to my bones, that 2 plus 2 equals 4…at least not when I’m doing the figuring.  I know I’m right in a logical sense.  I’ve perceived no reason to doubt my answer, other than the stupid fact that I am the one making it.  But I cannot seem to shake‒or I have not yet been able to do so‒the idea that I may very well have the whole thing fundamentally wrong, and that this is not just a remote, theoretical possibility.

It’s quite frustrating.  I might even say that it’s maddening, except that it seems to be the madness, itself.  It doesn’t matter how well I know and understand something intellectually, how much I know, empirically, that I’m right about something.  Somehow, I always just seem to feel that I, in and of myself, am wrong.  And so must be most of the things I do, unless I am ridiculously careful and check and recheck and triple check* everything.  And even then, I just reduce my anxiety about things a bit.

I have real sympathy for Hamlet, who didn’t want to take vengeance upon his uncle for the murder of his father without being able to convince himself beyond all reasonable doubt that he was not being misled by the apparent ghost of his father.  It makes sense to “have grounds more relative than this” when it comes to killing the king of Denmark, even if you’re the prince.  You don’t want to kill someone in the name of justice or revenge unless you’re really darned sure that they deserve it, otherwise you are committing an irrevocable crime.

Doing arithmetic, on the other hand, is rarely so consequential**.  Neither is failing to turn off a bedside lamp before leaving my room in the morning.  Nor is even the possibility of having failed to lock one of my locks when leaving the house.

But these things often lead me to feel that squirmy misgiving, almost a kind of deep formication.  It’s very annoying.

Oh, I’m also never quite sure‒emotionally‒that no one is going to push me off the platform onto the tracks in front of an oncoming train at the station***, so I’m always glancing around to make sure no one’s right behind me or coming too close, and if they are, I pay significant attention to them, preparing to dodge or fight back if attacked.

You’d think, given how often I think about the benefits of being dead, that I would be less worried about being randomly murdered at the train station.  But there’s something infuriating about the prospect that someone else could choose to kill me.  That would really tick me off (so to speak).

Anyway, it’s weird, and it’s quite frustrating.  It’s also exhausting.

They say there shall be no rest for the wicked.  I know that’s just part of a prophecy, and therefore bullshit, but in the real world, there shall often be no rest for those who feel that they are wicked.  The actual wicked, of course, probably often sleep the deep, deep sleep of the innocent (as Radiohead sang), because they do not see themselves as wicked.

They probably see themselves as perfectly fine, even great.  Some of them even seem to imagine that they are the greatest (whatever) of all time, and they often suffer no serious consequences for that intellectual failure.

Justice is not a natural force, unfortunately (despite all the bullshit, misguided, popular talk about “karma”); it’s something that has to be forced, if you will, that has to be constructed.  And the people who are most careful about trying to get things right are generally the sorts of people less likely to want to be “in charge” of things.

“And enterprises of great pitch and moment / With this regard their courses turn awry / And lose the name of Action.”

TTFN

*Not to be confused with Triple Sec or whatever that liqueur is.  I’ve often wondered if there was ever a Double Sec or even a Mono Sec/Uni Sec.  Probably not.  I suspect the true etymology is based on something that does not mean “threefold” in any sense.  But I could be wrong about this.

**Even the failure of that Climate Orbiter that famously broke up in the atmosphere of Mars was due not to an arithmetic error, but an error of units:  One group involved in the project was using metric units, the other was using so-called imperial units, and nobody seems to have checked.  I cannot imagine what I would have felt if I had made that error.  Seppuku would probably feel too generous.

***This occurred to me because, as I was writing, I was on the train platform getting ready to board the oncoming train and I experienced that minor paranoia, as I nearly always do.

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“Silence will fall”

Oh, right, today is Saint Patrick’s Day, a holiday celebrated more intensely (but far less religiously, I suspect) in the US than in Ireland.  It’s a holiday in which everyone here is said to be a little bit Irish.  I am largely Irish, in fact (by ancestry), so I feel no need to put on an act.  I also am not going to wear green today‒it’s been a long time since I’ve worn anything but black‒and I don’t recommend pinching me, or the only green you’ll have to be concerned about will be whether that will be the color of your rotting corpse or just the color of the bile leaking from your perforated gall bladder.

I certainly don’t expect to drink any beer or stout or even Irish whiskey today.  I do like corned beef and cabbage, and there’s a restaurant near work that makes a great meal of that, but they will probably be a bit oversubscribed today, and I really hate having to jockey with other people for such things.  I would rather go without.

I guess I’ll see what happens.  Getting corned beef from the restaurant is the sort of thing that’s enticing from a (temporal) distance, but the closer one gets, the more it loses its charm and feels not at all worth the effort.

There is an astonishing number of such things.  So many things are so much better in the anticipation than in the experience.  Even James Bond, in the Ian Fleming novels, noted that his favorite drink of the day was the one he had in his head before the first actual one*.

So, the anticipation is better than the payoff in many cases, which goes right along with my recognition that pleasure and joy cannot ever be durable outcomes, biologically speaking.  It’s not an evolutionarily stable strategy.

One might imagine that one could build up one’s anticipation of a thing, but then trick oneself and not give oneself the reward in the end, but the anticipation modules only really become active if you believe that they will be satisfied.

Failure to get the reward after anticipation can be more unpleasant than never anticipating it, as I think most people would agree.  And then, of course, after repeated disappointments, one stops anticipating, so one loses even that positive aspect of the situation.  “Edging”, as they call it, is only reliably pleasurable because of the knowledge that eventually there will be release.

Okay, that’s enough vaguely risqué crap.  I guess it may be better than dealing with all my dark stuff, which I have been withholding deliberately and consciously of late, since it just seems to make people uncomfortable but doesn’t engender any useful ideas or beneficial interactions or anything remotely resembling help.

So, apart from minor stuff like this, I’m going to just hold the negative thoughts back from sharing, and when I break, that will be it.  Like Keyzer Soze ( “And then, like that [fwoof]…he’s gone!”) you’ll probably never hear from me again. 

That will probably not be today, by the way, just in case you’re worried.  If someone thought some crisis were imminent today they might panic and actually, accidentally do something.  But of course, that’s a horrible way to approach matters, only intervening in a panic when catastrophe is right in front of one, at the very last moment‒when success is least likely‒when intervening earlier might actually have a decent chance of producing a good outcome.

It seems so intuitive.  If you’re trying to go somewhere, the sooner you realize you’re headed in the wrong direction and correct your course, the easier it will be to get where you want to go.  It’s easier to steer the future in the direction you hope to reach if you start the steering early (if you do it intelligently, anyway‒randomly twirling the steering wheel will almost certainly be worse for you the sooner you start doing it).

As Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”  Sometimes the disparity is far more stark even than that.  Sometimes, without prevention, the possibility of a cure is moot, because a lost patient cannot be treated, let alone cured.

Enough.  This, like everything else, is stupid.  Where is Sailor Saturn?  Let there be no alarms and no surprises.  Let there be silence.

*This is second-hand information.  I did not read it myself.  I have tried on more than one occasion to read a James Bond novel, but I could barely last a few pages.  Somehow, I found it utterly non-gripping.  I’m glad other people liked the books enough to make movies, because I really like some of the movies, but man, based on my sample, those books are dry.  Pussy Galore would be ashamed**.

**I know, that’s a rather raunchy and not very good joke.  Sorry.  Let’s pretend I’m already drunk from celebrating the holiday, and that’s why my judgment is impaired.  It’s not true, but the fact that it isn’t true doesn’t stop us from saying it, curiously enough.

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In a better blog than this, I shall desire more love and knowledge of you

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and I’m writing this post on my lapcom.  I feel as though I ought write these posts only on the computer (not that smartphones are not computers, but cut me a little slack on this, please), and I would be more inclined to do so if Microsoft would stop making Aptos the default font!!!!!

If I could go back in time and change something, that’s one of the things I would be inclined to change.  If I found that there was one person mainly responsible for this new font, well…I don’t know if I’d go all Terminator on them and kill that person’s mother before that person was born, or kill the person when that person was a child, but something needs to be done to erase the stain of this horrible font from existence.

Certainly, if I were given* absolute power over the world, from this moment forward, one of the petty things I would do (I would try to keep the petty things to a very bare minimum, trust me**) is to eliminate that font from any and all standard computer systems anywhere.  I would probably allow for individuals to select the font if they really like it, but would not let them use it on anything but internal work between people who also like the font.

Also, I would probably mark people who chose the font freely for a visit from my secret police.

I’m kidding.  I despise the very notion of thought crime, let alone aesthetic policing in private matters.  This is even though some people’s quality of thought sometimes feels like a crime against nature.  But, of course, there cannot actually be crimes against nature.  Nature does not punish one for disobedience to its laws.  It’s simply not possible to do anything but follow them.

That’s one reason why I truly despise headlines like “The new finding by Hubble that breaks physics!” and whatnot.  Not only are they plainly clickbait, they are stupid clickbait.  I don’t know for sure if it’s just the headline writer or the writer of whatever the attached article might be who makes the headline in specific instances, but in either case, when I see headlines like that, I think that whoever wrote it really, clearly doesn’t understand physics very well.  Nor do they the nature of scientific discovery and advancement.  Because of that, I am far less likely to read the attached article (or watch the video) or even click on its link.

Nothing can break physics.  If you find something that seems to violate physics as you understand it, what you have found is not a violation of physics but rather a place where your understanding of physics is clearly incorrect.  This is far from a horrible thing.  This is how progress in physics (and in other sciences) is made:  by finding the places where our “understanding” doesn’t predict or describe what actually appears to be happening.  The world cannot be “wrong”, so our understanding of it must be, and will need to be revised.

That’s progress.

One should be hesitant to give too much “trust” to anyone who refuses to change their mind.  One of the best lines in a Doctor Who episode (not a truly great episode, maybe, but it has a wonderful speech by the Doctor) is after the Doctor has said to the “villain” (who goes by the human name Bonnie, though she is not human) “I just want you to think.  Do you know what thinking is?  It’s just a fancy word for changing your mind.”

Bonnie responds, “I will not change my mind.”

And the Doctor says, “Then you will die stupid.”***

This is simply true.  If you never learn that you were wrong about something, if you never update your credences or think about things in a new way, you will never learn anything new or develop any better understanding of the world than you did when you formed those credences.  Or, to paraphrase Eliezer Yudkowsky, if no state of the world can change the state of your retina and how you perceive that state, that’s called being blind.

I like to refer to Yudkowsky-sensei a lot, but that’s because he has said a lot of bright and interesting things, and he has said them well.  It’s also nice to know that there are some highly intelligent and thoughtful people in the world—clearly there are, or humans would long since has gone the way of the trilobites—because the idiots and the assholes make so much noise.

The best evidence I see for the fact that most people are good or at least benign (overall) is that civilization still exists, and has done so for a long time.  It is far easier to destroy than to create or even to maintain; the second law of thermodynamics tells us that things will fall apart even if we do nothing at all to break them (it says that more or less, anyway—that’s a bit of a bastardization of the proper, mathematical law, but it is related and implicit).

The fact that civilization still exists—so far, at least—seems to indicate that there must be a lot of people working to maintain and sustain and improve it, because we can easily see how much how many people seem to be trying to make it crumble****.

Assholes tend to make a lot of noise in the world, but they’re pretty much all full of shit and “hot air”.  It’s worth it to keep this in mind, because there have always been plenty of such nether orifices out there, spewing their flatus everywhere like perverse crop-dusters.  But the evidence strongly suggests that they are not the norm; they are just the noisiest.

I suppose that’s a good moral of sorts on which to end this post:  Be willing, even eager, to change your mind when warranted, and try not to let the assholes make you think the world is no better than a camp latrine (even if you’re one of the assholes sometimes, which you are, since we all are, sometimes*****).

Though, to be fair, I am hardly the person to be giving that last piece of advice unironically.

TTFN

*If you must be given absolute power, do you actually then have absolute power?  This is similar to the old song that says “Don’t ever take away our freedom.”  If you have to beseech someone not to take away your freedom, you’re not free, and if you have to be given power, your power is clearly not absolute.

**Or don’t, if that’s not in your character.  I’ve often spoken implicitly against the concept of trust, stating that I don’t feel that I can actually, truly trust any living person.  It’s calculated risks all the way down, which is empirically true if nothing else.  So, I can hardly scold someone if they don’t “trust” me.  Go ahead, form your own conclusions.  I do exhort you, though, to be as rational as possible when you form them, with your conclusions drawn as a consequence of the evidence and argument, not with your evidence and argument being curated based on your knee-jerk or at least hasty “conclusion”.

***He then proceeds to lay out the alternatives; he’s not making a threat, he’s making a point.

****When you read that, did you immediately think of your own least favorite political or other public figure, or perhaps of the people you encounter who disagree with your politics or religion or dietary preference or what have you?  Be careful.  Us/them thinking is not usually conducive to formulating true and accurate pictures of reality (though it did inspire at least one beautiful song):

*****We’re also all deuterostomes (I’m assuming only humans are reading this).  Look it up.  It’s kind of funny.

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I had a good headline idea, but it slipped my mind

I was surprised by how much response I’ve received to yesterday’s blog (and that of the day before) as well as the number of comments.  It’s very gratifying, and I appreciate it very much.  Thank you.

As for today, well, I am really not sure what to write, because yesterday’s blog was‒from my viewpoint, anyway‒about as free-form and chaotic and tangential and stochastic (not to say redundant) as anything I’ve written.  But maybe that’s just the experience I had while writing it; maybe it doesn’t actually come across that way to the reader(s).  It’s difficult for me to know, because even more than reading, writing is a solitary thing.

That’s not to say that people can’t write together.  Back when I was a teenager, I co-wrote some partial stories with one of my best friends, and we did it sitting next to each other and talking things through aloud as we typed.  That was a pretty active and interactive collaboration.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we got very far with it.  We made much more progress writing silly computer programs in Basic on the Apple II+ my father had bought.  This was in the days before there were any ISPs as far as I know, though we did dial onto a couple of local “billboard” services from time to time with my dad’s old modem (I think it was 600 baud*, but it may be some even divisor or even a very small multiple of that number).

One time, I even had a conversation with a girl (!) who was helping run one of the billboards.  She was (supposedly) about my age, and obviously she was much more into computers than I was for the time.  There was never (in my regretful mind) any possibility of an ongoing interaction, let alone a physical meetup or anything, however.  Even then, though I was reasonably confident when within my local group of friends and teachers, I was painfully shy and awkward, and could never make conversation other than about specific topics.

Goal-directed interactions are okay, as they tend to flow naturally from the process involved.  This is why I’ve made nearly all my friends at school or at work.  Purely social interactions were never really an option for me, except with people I already knew quite well.  And having a successful romantic relationship was unfortunately not in the cards for me.

It still isn’t, as far as I can tell.  I suspect the problem is that there’s no other member of my true species on this planet.  I did come reasonably close, or so I thought for a long time, but I’ve been divorced now about five years longer than I was married, so I apparently wasn’t all that successful.

Okay, well, sorry about the weird, ancient info-dump.  It’s not nearly as cool as the data that’s coming in from the recently-activated Vera Rubin observatory.  That, at least, is the sort of thing that helps restore my faith in humanity.  Or, well, maybe it would be more accurate to say that it shifts my Bayesian credence slightly away from the “humans are without net redeeming value” end and toward the “humans may not be all that bad in the end” end.

The credence is still quite low, though.  By which I mean I’m closer to the first end than the second most of the time.

Things might be a little bit better if the sort of people who do things like setting up the Vera Rubin telescope, and who set up and launched and now use the James Webb telescope, and the members of the former human genome project, and the people who study cognitive neuroscience, were the sort of people working in government, writing and administering laws.  Generally speaking, though, the first type of people don’t tend to want to do the governing nonsense, probably not least because a lot of that business is not about everyone trying to do the best they can for the people they represent.

The people who want to do astronomy and mathematics and biology and geology and neuroscience and meteorology and so on are probably some of the best people to do those things‒not just from their point of view but also from the viewpoint of civilizational benefit.  Unfortunately, many of the people who want to go into government and politics tend to be some of the worst people for those jobs, from the point of view of civilization.

I can’t say they are the worst possible group for the job.  The truly disaffected and uninterested or the misanthropic and nihilistic might well do a worse job even than the lot who do it now.  This is despite the fact that most of those latter people act on shallow and immediate self-interest.  Self-interest can do the job adequately when the incentives are structured such that one’s self-interest is served by serving the interests of the people of one’s community/city/nation/species.

Those incentives are very tricky to manage, unfortunately.  It would be much better if we could find people who had real enthusiasm and curiosity and an actually somewhat scientific approach to government.  If only we could find a group as committed to seeing a truly and objectively well-run society‒in which everyone was better off than they would have been in nearly any other‒as the group who set up the Vera Rubin observatory was committed to actually getting the observatory done so they and we could learn ever more about the universe on the largest scales, things might be quite a bit better than they are.  Maybe not, but my credence leans more toward the “maybe so” end.

Alas, politics and government were not born of human curiosity and creativity‒the things almost entirely unique to the species‒but of the old, stupid primate dominance hierarchy/mating drives, which are evolutionarily understandable, but which don’t make for pretty, let alone beneficial, government.  Think about it.  Would you want to put a bunch of self-serving apes doing the jobs of government?

Oh, wait!  That is the group doing the jobs of the government!  Of course, it’s also the group being governed.  Uh-oh.  This could be boding better**.

Not that being recognized as an ape is an insult per se; apes are all that we’ve had available, and they’re the best that’s come along so far.  Some of them are really not so bad.  Some of them figure out ways to launch immense telescopes into space, not so very long after one of them first created the telescope.  Some of them figure out ways to cure and even prevent unnecessary disease.  Some of them figure out ways to turn simple manipulations of base-two arithmetic into information processing that can be scaled up to any kind of logic and information that can be codified.

Some of them just write blogs and sometimes write stories and songs and such***.  But hopefully, that’s not too detrimental an endeavor.

*A baud is a bit per second being sent over the phone lines.  Not a meg, not a K, not even a byte, but rather a bit‒a binary digit, a one versus a zero, on or off.  If you listened to the sound of the modem, you could imagine you could almost hear the individual bits.

**Tip of the hat to Dave Barry’s “Mister Language Person”.

***Though I have done my very small part in advancing human scientific knowledge, in that I am a co-author and co-investigator on an actual published scientific paper.

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Give us this day our daily blog

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m writing this on my mini lapcom.  I don’t know if I wrote any of my posts from last week on the lapcom*, but so far this week, this will represent 50 percent of the week’s posts so far.

Admittedly, that’s not saying much, and one cannot draw many conclusions from a two-item sample in which one is one way and one is another.  To presume that they will continue to occur in a 50/50 ratio would be a major statistical/probabilistic error.  At best, one can say that there are at least two ways in which my blogs can be written, since two have so far been sampled—and that is certainly true.

Anyway, speaking of twos, it’s Tuesday.  It’s the 10th of March, of course, and the second full weekday in Daylight Savings Time, or in non-Daylight Savings Time, whichever one it officially is now.  You can tell that I really don’t see the sense in the whole thing from the fact that I cannot even recall nor logically infer which of the two possibilities is correct.  When I am actually interested in something, I tend to try quickly to dispel any ambiguities in my understanding if I can.  With this, I really don’t care, because it’s all silly.

In fact, it’s so silly that I think that’s all that need be said about it.  On to better things, or at least to other things.  But, of course, the question now is:  What other things should I discuss**?  I don’t know, honestly.

I don’t know dishonestly, either, come to think of it.

Isn’t it weird how much of a habit it is to say things like, “honestly”, or “to tell the truth”, or “I swear”, or other similar words and phrases to try to emphasize the authenticity of our words?  But they don’t do anything at all to confirm our truthfulness; epistemologically, they’re almost without content.  If anything, the fact that we felt unsure enough to have to say we’re being honest might raise a so-called red flag in the mind of a given listener.

Does the fact that a person says “honestly” or “I’m not gonna lie to you” or any similar phrase actually provide any information about truthfulness, except for the fact that this person recognizes that truthfulness is valued, at least by the person to whom they are speaking?  It doesn’t really demonstrate truthfulness, I think that’s clear.

Some might be inclined to think that the words actually indicate falsity, but that’s not true, either (ha ha).  It may be the case, at times, that a person who is trying to deceive another may say “honestly” to reassure their interlocutor that their lies are true and also to relieve some of their own anxiety.  But people who are telling the truth may merely want to recognize and emphasize that fact, and so use the same phrases.  They may, for instance, realize that something true they are saying could seem improbable to some hearers.

If it were always a harbinger of a lie, then such a seeming reassurance would indeed be a reliable signal, but of the opposite state from that described in the message’s content.  People would very quickly stop using it—the honest ones wouldn’t want to use it, since it always implies dishonesty, and the dishonest ones wouldn’t use it because it would be a dead giveaway.

Somehow, seemingly at least partly because it is an ambiguous signal, it stays in our discourse and is used automatically, more for emphasis and for rhetoric than for its prima facie purpose.  I’m sure Steven Pinker could give a good explanation for why this is so, or at least part of an explanation.  I know he’s come out with a recent book about mutual implicit knowledge and its nature (and its implications), but I don’t have it yet, and I haven’t read it.

I’ve read some of his other books and enjoyed them.  I seem to particularly enjoy his work as audiobooks.  I listened to The Better Angels of our Natures in audiobook format during my then-commute, using a Bluetooth enabled motorcycle helmet.  That book is almost 40 hours long on audio, but I was sad when it was over.  There was not one dull moment for me (of course, I was riding a very fast and non-armored conveyance at the time, so even if the book were to have become dull, there would have been other matters to keep me alert).

Okay, well, I’ve managed to meander about lexically—is that the proper term or not?—without any clear destination in mind, other than “at least 700 words”, and have written some vaguely coherent sentences about some distantly interrelated subjects.  I hope I have at least mildly entertained you, the reader.

I know, hopefully there is more than one of you, but only one of you can be reading this at one time in one place.  Now that’s a vaguely interesting thing to recognize:  reading is only ever a solitary process.  One can read alongside others, but one cannot share the process, even if several people are all listening to the same audiobook at once.  Reading does not add in parallel, only in series.

With that little tidbit that some of you will recognize and others will not, I’ll call this blog post to a close.  If there are no objections?  No further business?  Very well.  [Smacks the gavel on the table] This blog post is adjourned.

*I did not.

**Certainly not those round Frisbee® things they throw competitively in the Olympics.