Psychology

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He reads the post with just his fist and still believes he gets the gist

Well, I said yesterday that there would be roughly a 50/50 chance whether today I would write on the lapcom or on the smartphone, and guess what:  today I am writing this either on the lapcom or on the smartphone!  How’s that for an accurate prediction?

But wait.  Which one am I using?  Can you tell just by reading this post?  Are you sure?

Of course, I know which one I’m using.  It would be most ‘passing strange if I did not know whether I am writing this on my lapcom or on my smartphone.

Is there a way for you, the reader, to tell?  Probably.  Almost certainly.

But do you know what that way is and how to apply it?  I doubt it very much.

That’s not an insult, by the way; I don’t know what it is or how to apply it, either.  I’m just pretty sure there is such a way.

Of course, from my own point of view, the metaphorical wavefunction has already collapsed, and there is only one possible remaining outcome, whereas before there were (at least) two.

I say “metaphorical wavefunction”, invoking the quantum mechanical notion of the collapse of previously superposed quantum states into one final state, but there are good reasons for us to doubt that notion’s accuracy even within quantum mechanics.  After all, it would be the only known physical process in the universe that is not time-reversible and which destroys information about prior states of reality.  That oughtta be a pretty big red flag for scientists.  It’s almost as bad as finding a process that seems to violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics*.

I find the Everettian approach to quantum foundations much more intuitive, personally.  That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s more likely to be correct, but I think, I suspect, that it is.

Anyway, in the macroscopic world, the seemingly superposed possibilities that present themselves as we come to the point of a decision are not actual superpositions.  They are merely models we render in our minds of possible outcomes to try to improve our decisions.  In fact, in almost every case, it’s likely that the choice we make was “determined” ahead of time‒by the laws of physics, not by us.

I would guess that it was that way when Bohr’s and Heisenberg’s “Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum mechanics became so dominant despite its failings.  The problem is, Bohr and/or Heisenberg (I don’t recall which one) was by reputation exceptionally charismatic, and he was well able to ensure that his/their notion(s) became predominant, not because the ideas were more convincing, but because the people were (or the person was).

That’s not a good reason.

This is part of why I dislike the practice of public “debates” about controversial topics at pretty much any level.  When it becomes a contest in and of the moment, the “winner” of the debate is not necessarily the one with the best evidence and the most consistent and clear reasoning.  It is, often, the one more skilled at mere rhetoric, the better sophist, the one with the better ability to manipulate human cognitive biases, the one with the better speaking voice, the better looking one, the one who makes the best jokes (especially at the other’s expense).

This is not a good or reliable or useful way to measure empirical reality‒except that part of reality that tells us who is more superficially persuasive to Naked House Apes.

That’s part of why the court system in general is so bad:  the one who wins in court is not necessarily (or even probably) the one who is right, but rather the one who has the better lawyer with more resources.  This usually translates to “the one who happens to have more money.”  That’s not a good basis for any kind of system that refers to itself with the term “justice”.

Oh, well, what are you gonna do?

Well, it would be nice if you could do your part toward at least improving these things in whatever way you might be able, especially if you are in any kind of influential position.  This here, this writing, is me doing at least some of my part, for whatever it’s worth.

In the meantime, I’d be interested to get your feedback:  do you think this post was written on the lapcom or on the smartphone?  Why do you think that?  Are those your real reasons?  Or are they the reasons you create‒some might say confabulate‒to justify a decision you made for reasons that are not clear to your conscious mind?

Please let me know in the comments.  And talk amongst yourselves there, too, if you like.

Also, please have a good day.

*This is not to say that it is impossible for net entropy to go down in a closed system.  It’s not only possible, but if you wait long enough, it’s going to happen somewhere, for the 2nd Law is statistical in character.  But for anything but the simplest situations, you’re going to have a wait for such an outcome.  Even if you’re just flipping 13 coins until you get all heads or all tails (or any other specific, ordered pattern you might want), then it’ll take a little while.  Getting all heads in a row (say) on 13 coins is a one in 8192 chance, if my mental arithmetic is right.  It would take some time, but you could pretty readily flip those 13 coins more than 8000 times, especially if you flip all 13 at once each time.  But anything much more involved than that (and just 2 more coins would require four times as many flips) becomes rapidly and astonishingly more unlikely.  If you’re waiting for any sensible region of, say, the Earth to experience spontaneously decreasing entropy, you’re going to be waiting such a long time that probably the current time (about 13.7 billion years) since our Big Bang would seem like an unnoticeably tiny fraction of the blink of an eye.  And, of course, the Earth is not going to be around that long‒not more than about another 4 or 5 billion years at most.  If that seems like a long time to you, you need to adjust your perspective.

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I almost forgot to put a title here again

I’m writing this blog post on my smartphone, as I did yesterday’s post, and in contrast to the posts from Monday through Wednesday.  I haven’t yet received any direct feedback on whether there’s a difference for the reader or what it might be, but the numbers seem to indicate that the phone-written posts are more popular than the lapcom-written ones.

This could, however, be mere statistical fluctuation, having no relation to whether readers find one or the other type of post better.  Quite possibly, most readers wouldn’t be able to tell one from the other without being told, even if the lives of their dearest loved ones were on the line.

Such is the difficulty with finding truly dispositive evidence in ordinary life.  But that’s not to say it can’t be done.  One just has to try very hard to be clear-headed and objective.  And I don’t mean “try to try” to be clear-headed, not just to be able to say “I tried to be clear-headed”, but actually to act with the true intent to be clear-headed.

Of course, the human senses and human brains gather a tremendous amount of information every waking moment, checking it against their hitherto-built model of reality, seeing if things meet expectations according to that model, and trying to improve that model, that map, of reality.  Mind you, there’s way more info in most places than anyone can take in.  That’s okay, for the most part.  Most of that detailed information is irrelevant to the life and reproduction of a far-flung African ape*.

Speaking of updating one’s models of reality, I just yesterday came across a video/written course on tensors (for physicists and would-be physicists).  The professor’s approach seems like it’s going to be a good one, so I’m planning on trying to go through the course.

I want to learn well about tensors (about which my understanding is not yet fully clear, though I get the gist of the basics) not just for my own curiosity‒which drives me, in principle, to want to try to understand everything in the universe‒but also because I will need skill in using them and manipulating them if I am to solve my longstanding point of curiosity in Special/General Relativity.

I have a specific question about what the theories predict would happen in specific circumstances, and I have not been able to find anyone who reliably answers it.  Really, no one has answered it at all, which is not too surprising, since it is fairly esoteric.

We’ll see whether I can commit to the bit.  I have a hard time maintaining focus on things for too long at once.  I dearly love to learn about new things and to develop new skills, especially in the sciences‒well, also in the arts‒but it seems that after (far too short) a time I get distracted by another interesting thing.  Either that or I just get mentally fatigued and need to distract myself, usually either with music or something funny.

I suppose that’s not really that unusual.  But lordy, it’s frustrating.  I wish I could actually want to do what I want to want to do.  Maybe I will be able to do so someday.  Maybe I will be able to devise or find more direct control of the regions of my brain which govern attention, focus, and drive.

Of course, we do have some somewhat direct ways to affect those brain regions.  The most widely used of these ways is caffeine.  The majority of people in the world use some form of caffeine on a regular basis.  At least, that was so the last time I looked.

Of course, there are other such tools, some more powerful in some ways than caffeine, but they come with their own sets of difficulties:  these include the amphetamines and related compounds and cocaine.  They can be useful in certain circumstances, but are difficult to use well, without significantly detrimental overall outcomes.

It would be easier if we could directly stimulate (and suppress) specific areas and processes of our brains at will.  Of course, the technology to do such things exists, more or less, in raw form.  One can stimulate the brain with implanted electrodes, or one can manipulate it more indirectly via externally applied electric and magnetic fields.

This has been done, of course, if only fairly crudely.  The technology I describe in Unanimity is (mostly) very real.  Is that what makes it scaaaary?

Probably not.

Okay, that’s enough for today, and for this week as well, since I am not working tomorrow (barring the truly very much unforeseen).  I hope you all have a good day and a good weekend.  Have a good meal or two while you’re at it.  Though, possibly, that’s implicit in most concepts of good days and good weekends, come to think of it.

Oh, well.  Have good ones nevertheless.

*That refers to humans, in case it’s not clear.

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However, but a folly blogged with wit, or else a wit by folly vanquished

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and today I am writing this post on my smartphone.  That’s partly due to the fact that I was feeling very enervated by the end of the day yesterday and didn’t feel like carrying even that little bit of extra weight that is my lapcom.  Also, on the previous three days, during which I wrote the posts on said lapcom, I saw some of the lowest readerships and “likes” that I have had in quite some time.

Now, correlation does not necessarily imply causation (though Judea Pearl has done nice work on how one can more truly discern causality from statistics).  But it really doesn’t much matter if I get that causality exactly right.  Odds are that it was just a statistical fluke or some such thing.  But it sure feels like negative feedback.

Of course, this is all rather pointless no matter what.  Mind you, that’s a fairly useless assessment, since everything is pointless as far as anyone can tell.  I make that statement without real fear of contradiction.  Though, if anyone has any actual argument against it, I’m open to listening.  But bring something original and well thought-out, something that’s been subject to scrutiny and potential disconfirmation, something with arguments strong enough to convince an intelligent but disinterested extraterrestrial*, or don’t expect me to give you much attention.

Anyway, so, yeah, I’m writing this on my smartphone.  If any of you notice any discernible difference in the character and quality of my posts using the two different tools, please let me know.  I recognize, of course, that such an evaluation is highly subjective, but I’m not trying to get rigorous feedback; I’m just trying to get a sense of things, because I really don’t tend to have any idea how I come across to people.  I mean, even if they do tell me, I can’t feel sure that they’re telling the truth, but at least it is some data that I can use to update my priors, however weakly.

And yet, again, none of it really matters, and I have a good chance of screwing everything up even if I get it right at baseline.  I know I shouldn’t feel too bad about that.  There are almost always more ways to get something “wrong” than there are to get it “right”, and it can be difficult to tell them apart ahead of time.  Thus the old saying that the gates of Heaven and the gates of Hell are adjacent, identical, and unmarked**.

I guess you can probably tell that I am particularly directionless in writing this blog post today, even for me.  Unlike earlier this week and some of last week, when I had some thoughts that wanted to get out so much that I made audio recordings***, today I find no burning thoughts to share or even to spray out into the world and see if they land anywhere.  I am simply writing out of habit, and I am not terribly enthusiastic about it‒other than the low-level recognition that this is nearly my only way of connecting daily with anyone in the outer world.

Or, maybe I should say that I am trying to connect with the inner world.  It’s not so much that I am hemmed in someplace.  I am more like a creature caught in the space between universes, like the Other, the Ill Will, in The Chasm and the Collision (though my intentions are much better than its intentions).  I have other antagonists in other currently-in-progress stories that are similar but on a smaller scale, but I won’t get into that too much, because it might accidentally give some spoilers‒just in case I ever finish and publish those stories.

Okay, well, this has been a truly pointless blog post, but I think I’ve written enough for today.  I hope you all are doing well by any reasonable measure of wellness.  I will probably write another post tomorrow.

TTFN

*Or changeling, or Nexus 13, or mutant, or whatever might best describe me metaphorically.

**Though this seems like an assholish kind of way for any supposedly benevolent deity to set things up.

***I am curious about the sound quality between the two recent recordings.  The first was made using a USB condenser mic, and the one I shared yesterday was spoken into the recording function of my smartphone and then sent over via Google Drive, downloaded, edited on Audacity, and then exported as an MP3 file (the latter step was also done to the 1st recording, but I recorded it onto Audacity directly in the first place).  If anyone has listened to both, could you please let me know?

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Drop and give me twenty! (The prime factors of twenty, I mean)

It’s another lapcom blog post today, for the second day in a row.  Huzzah!

That doesn’t really count as any kind of streak—though no doubt WordPress will send me an automatically-generated “You’re on a streak!” message, since that’s apparently something that encourages people to keep using the site regularly.

I guess it would be nice if I were going for some kind of personal record—if I were trying to write as many days in a row as possible, for instance—to be aware of how many I had done without having to keep track of it myself.  And, I guess, if you’re recording streaks, you have to start somewhere, and the smallest possible streak is two.  You don’t really want to count one as a streak, because then everything is a streak and it loses much of its meaning.

This is somewhat analogous to the reason that 1 is not considered a prime number, though you cannot deny (correctly, anyway) that it is divisible without reminder only by one and itself (which is also one).  But for mathematical purposes dealing with primes, this would be a rather useless add-on to the set.

It would also make deciding the number of prime factors of a number pointless, instead of being specific and fixed for each number.  As it is, without one counted as a prime, it is specific and fixed.  For instance, the prime factors of 36 are 2, 2, 3, 3.  But if 1 were considered a prime, you could have 1, 2, 2, 3, 3 or 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, with any arbitrary number of 1s, because every 1 would not change the final product of those primes.  You could have an endless string of ones if you wanted.  And so, the number of prime factors of any given number would be up for grabs, whereas right now it’s fixed.

I know, I know, it’s not terribly important in day to day life for you to think about such things.  Some people are disdainful of even learning about such things unless they have a direct impact on their lives in a clear and obvious and simpleminded way (emphasis on the “simpleminded” there).

There are people who make jokes about the fact that they learned the Pythagorean theorem and don’t use it, or that they know how to do square roots but don’t really need them, or learned the quadratic equation and haven’t used it since that class in high school (or college, maybe).

Such people perhaps think that the point of doing push-ups or bench presses or squats or lat pull-downs is to get really good at doing push-ups or bench presses or squats or lat pull-downs.  They may imagine that the reason to do toe touches is to get really good at touching your toes, and if you’re not going to try to do that, then don’t do toe-touches.  These people probably think that everyone who jogs regularly is doing it so they can get better and better at jogging.

I think you probably see my point, but I’ll make it explicitly.  The purpose for all that physical exercise is not to get good at doing calisthenics (or whatever), not for the vast majority of people.  It’s to be comes stronger, fitter, more flexible, to develop better endurance, so that you will have those capacities to bring to bear on any other task in life.  In many, many matters, being physically fit will make a person more effective.  Sometimes it can even save someone’s life.

Likewise for doing things like math.  Some people will go on to be mathematicians, of course, or to become physicists, who use mathematics regularly in their work.  But everyone can strengthen their brains (far more than they can strengthen their muscles, which have a hard ceiling on improvement).  They can improve their ability to think logically and systematically, to recognize patterns and to be able to manipulate them in their heads, by practicing and understanding mathematics.

Understanding percentages will make it immediately clear, for instance, that something cannot sensibly be reduced in price by 600%.  Understanding probabilities can help one recognize why one should not invest in the lottery (unless you’re the one running it, in which case, by all means—if it doesn’t trouble your conscience).  And one should not blindly trust the representations of, say, managers of mutual funds and the like.  Even though what they happen to tell you may be real data, omission can be just as misleading as straightforward lies.  You also need to know what they have left out.

If they tell you their fund increased in value ten days in a row, implying thereby that you should want to invest in it, you need to think about (for instance) just how many funds they have.  How many funds are they picking from and for how long?  If they have a thousand funds, assuming equal chances of gains or losses, you should expect on average for one of them to go up for ten days in a row in any ten day period.  But the next ten days, it would be a different, random one that goes up*.  Or, if you can pick any ten days out of a given year, you can probably find somewhere where there’s a ten-day streak, or nearly so, even if you only have a few funds.

I have not done the math to figure that last bit out specifically, but it directly relates to the probability that you will have a string of ten heads in a row somewhere if you flip a coin 365 times.  That goes back to basic probability.

It can serve you well to study some micro- and macroeconomics.  It can also do you good to study a bit of basic chemistry and biology; you wouldn’t even have to have any more advanced medical knowledge than high-school level to know that while injecting enough bleach will kill COVID, it will also kill you, and so will not be a much better therapy than setting yourself on fire or detonating yourself with TNT.

I made a meme about a similar idea that I sent to a friend who was all too easily persuaded by conspiracy theories about various “natural” substance being able to kill cancer but that “Big Pharma” didn’t want you to know about them.  Actual knowledge of how cancer works and how lab tests in vitro work would have protected him from such claims, but I took a slight shortcut to hammer the point home.  Here it is:

Anyway, that’s already a lot for today.  I tend to write faster with the lapcom, and so I tend to write more.  I hope it’s not too irritating.

I hope that about myself and the things I do quite often, but I’m afraid I still end up being irritating more often than not.  My apologies.  I also hope you have a good day.

*Again, all this assumes about a 50/50 chance of going up or down.  Considering how many regulatory and other factors are in place to encourage markets to go up, it’s probably skewed slightly toward gains**, and this will increase the chance of ten-day streaks of gains.

**As evidence, if one had invested in a simple index fund without any significant churning (I think that’s the term) over the last several decades, one would have made around about 10% a year.  That’s roughly twice the rate of inflation, so there is still a real, adjusted net gain.  Given compounding, if you invested $1 in, say, 1990 with that return, you would now have, let’s see…$30.91.  If you invested a million, you’d now have $30.9 million.  Higher rates of return than this will tend to involve higher risk.

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That blog is our last hope!

Told you, I did.  Reckless am I.  Now, matters are worse:  I’m writing a blog post on a Saturday, because I am going to the office to work today.  I didn’t truly promise, but I did say it was likely.

Speaking of speaking like Yoda (see the opening sentence) I did a little, very brief, voice recording yesterday, as a whimsically silly set of questions arose in my head‒there is nowhere else my questions can arise arise, after all‒regarding an aspect of the Star Wars universe, and I decided to record them.

I didn’t really check my mic placement before I started, so after my quick edit in the form of doing “noise reduction” in Audacity and renormalizing the inherent volume, my voice sounds somewhat weird.  It’s a bit tinny or echoey or something along those lines.  Heck, maybe that’s just what my voice sounds like in real life these days.

That’s pretty unlikely, though.  I’ve heard recordings of my voice, often made by me, since I was quite young (remember those personal cassette recorders in the 70s?).  Still, I couldn’t say with 100% certainty that it isn’t the case.  Indeed, one can never say anything empirical with 100% certainty.

There is after all always the possibility (in principle) of something like Descartes’s imagined malevolent demon, tormenting a mind with entirely illusory experiences.  Anyone who thinks they know some aspect of external reality to 100% certainty is poorly calibrated, doesn’t understand probability, or they’re exaggerating and/or not really thinking about what they’re saying.

Of course, there are many things about which we are so close to 100% implicit certainty that we are willing to risk our lives, usually without even considering that we are taking that risk.  We’re pretty sure of gravity in general, but we implicitly trust the floor beneath us, even in very high buildings.  We’re also pretty sure we won’t die in a car accident on our way to…well, wherever we’re going.  And very nearly 100% of the time, we are correct.

But, of course, every now and then, someone does get killed in a car accident, sometimes on a very short trip, perhaps to the corner store to buy a lottery ticket.  It’s more likely than actually winning that lottery.

They used to say that the vast majority of car accidents happen within five miles of the home.  But don’t worry, once I heard that little bit of trivia, I moved the hell away from that place!

Ha ha.  I have to laugh at my own stupid jokes, otherwise, a lot of the time, no one would laugh at them.

Anyway, as you can probably tell, if you think about it‒though you are not required to do so, your thoughts being your own‒I have no real direction when it comes to this post, and no spontaneously forming topic seems to be appearing, unlike a few times earlier this week.  So, I’m just meandering about in blog post phase space.

That’s okay, though.  It’s Saturday, and I’ve been working all week, and this is my 6th blog post of the week.  WordPress will no doubt send me some automated congratulations on this, my latest “streak”.  They keep doing that, and I know it’s intended to make people feel good about their posting, but it’s just obviously automated and so is annoying.

Also, it sometimes even engages some pathological demand avoidance, arousing a twisted sort of “I’m not doing this for you” feeling that makes one‒well, it makes me‒less enthusiastic about blogging.  The programmed feedback subroutine in WordPress is not my target audience, so getting positive feedback from it doesn’t make me feel that I have accomplished something worthwhile.

Don’t mistake me.  I like getting the specific information, or at least having it available, but it doesn’t have to be accompanied by a cartoon party popper and a “Congratulations!”, as if I’d achieved some kind of merit-based award.  Is this part of the lamentable trend of grade inflation and giving everyone trophies just for participating?

I think some of the mindless, automated, misdirected feedback is part of why I don’t use Brilliant dot org more often*.  They have this “experience point award” thing for when you do problems and exercises and finish sub-courses.  That in itself is okay, because it’s not really too intrusive, and maybe it would be good if you could eventually exchange them for…something, I don’t know.

But instead, they put you in these “leagues” and show you how you compare to other people using the app that day.  That can be kind of annoying, because I don’t go to educational sites to be competitive, except with myself.  I don’t even like multiplayer online games.  And, the trouble is, I get briefly caught up in the league score, because I am intellectually competitive, but that in turn gets distracting and negative (not much, but it’s there) and it discourages me.

I don’t know what I would recommend be done instead; I haven’t really thought about it, I was just expressing a feeling I have about such things.  Maybe other people enjoy these sorts of feedback a lot, in which case, hey, keep it up.  The strength of such enjoyment is almost certainly far greater than my own minor annoyance.

Okay, that’s enough for now.  Below, I am embedding my weird little recording.  I hope you have a good day and a good weekend.

Really, I do hope it, for whatever that’s worth.

*It’s not the only reason nor the most powerful one.  Mainly it’s mental inertia of some kind.

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“And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in a word…”

Hello again.  It’s Friday now, as usually happens immediately after Thursday (but also six days before Thursday, though not the same Thursday it follows).  It’s all very reassuring, this regular, cyclical procession of the days of the week…

…isn’t it?

Well, maybe it would be if they weren’t just arbitrary day names following an arbitrary convention of numbers of days in a week, which number was mainly based on the number of “unfixed” astronomical objects visible to the naked eye:  Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon.  Some of our modern English day names still refer to those objects, namely Sunday, Monday, and Saturday.  The other four, somehow, got saddled with references to Norse mythology.

I guess the Vikings really did have a significant impact on the British isles, didn’t they?

Anyway…

As I said, it’s Friday, and it’s the end of the typical, traditional work week, though I am working tomorrow, so I expect I’ll probably be writing another post.

It is interesting to think of what we mean by “tradition” and “traditional”, because not all traditions are of the same order by any means.  For instance, the “traditional” five-day work week is not really all that old.

Previously, people worked more days and longer hours per week (unless they had no need to work), but various workers’ rights movements over time got various laws passed and then new “traditions” began, and to some degree, people’s quality of life was somewhat protected.  Also, in the US, benefits like health insurance were tied to long-term employment by union contracts and sometimes by legislation.

Then, of course, we rebelled against being told that we could not work longer hours without special, extra compensation.  Why, that made our businesses less able to grind ahead and innovate and compete in global markets of various kinds (or so it was said).  We wouldn’t want that!  So, first salaried people were sort of exempted from the rules, and then that spread in various ways, as businesses and related enterprises tried to compete for more money, more resources, more power*.

Except, of course, plenty of other people and companies and countries were competing as well, so there was never any singular advantage that lasted for long; instead, like trees that evolved to grow taller and taller to compete with other trees for sunlight (while the other trees were subject to the same pressures), they raised the minimum requirement merely to stay alive, to which they were all subject, making life harder for each and every one of them, even the “winners”.

Such are natural equilibria.  Just because they become stable and persistent and “successful” doesn’t mean they are not immiserating for every organism in their structure.  And, of course, it is possible for such equilibria, as for species and for cells, to evolve to extinction.

Evolution by natural selection does not plan ahead, and it is neither benevolent nor malevolent, but it is instead entirely and completely uncaring**.

A somewhat parallel process happens in economies at various scales.  It’s not a perfect analogue, for there exists the capacity to learn from others’ practices without having to reinvent everything oneself, and one doesn’t have to wait for new generations to enact even small adjustments.  But it is still fundamentally a mindless process overall.

And, most pertinently, the mutual competition involved leads to higher and higher minimum requirements for success.  You’ve heard of the glass ceiling, of course, but even more subtly horrifying is the spike-ridden, trap-door-bearing, caustic and red hot floor.

I don’t know, maybe those metaphors don’t quite work.  I’m making these expressions up as I go along, as happens with all my blog posts.

I just wanted to remind everyone that nothing in the way the world is set up‒or, well, at least very few things‒is a necessity in anything but a highly local sense.  “Best practices” are not something inherent in nature; our financial and banking systems are not in any way equivalent to fundamental physics.  It’s all ad hoc, spontaneously self-assembled, no more inherently fundamental or necessary than is any one particular pattern of frost on a window pane.

So, don’t be fooled by the tendency to follow traditions, at least not blindly.  The oldest traditions humans have are only a few thousand years old, which is tiny compared to how long humans have existed.  And most traditions are far more recent.

Maybe your family has or had a tradition of getting together to watch The Ten Commandments every year around Passover/Easter.  But that tradition clearly cannot go back to before the movie was made, nor‒even more restrictive‒before televisions were available to most households.  That’s barely a few generations.

So, traditions are only as important as they are good and useful, though those measures depend very much on who is measuring and what the perceived use and good is from that person’s point of view.  That’s okay.  We don’t have any objective, external measures to use for such things.  They were invented by us, and for the most part, are only pertinent to us.

The universe doesn’t give the slightest f*ck.

Maybe, someday, the distant descendants of humans will gain so much knowledge and power that the universe will “notice” them.  I’m not going to hold my breath.

*The actual events involved in all this were far more involved than may seem implied by my summary, but I’m not trying to capture historical minutiae.  Rather, I’m trying to illustrate, to sketch, the general shape of the things that happened.

**This is not to be confused with saying that successful organisms are uncaring.  Caring, mutual support and protection, cooperation, love, can all be very successful survival attributes.  But that cooperation, that familial support, that maternal caring, that mutual love, as the case may be, does not exist just because it’s nice, or because it’s moral, or because it’s necessary; it exists because, for those organisms in those times and circumstances, it is successful, i.e., it tends to increase the odds of reproduction of the genes that engender that set of attributes.

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Don’t rent a phase space in a detrimental State

First off, just to get it off my chest (and in case “they” are listening) I want to say that I hate Google’s latest iteration of the symbol for Google Drive.  Before, it looked like a 2-D representation of a three way analog of a sort of Mobius strip.  Now it looks like a poor attempt to draw that previous symbol by a somewhat challenged child who doesn’t understand proportions, let alone how to produce a facsimile of a 3-D shape on a 2-D surface.

No shade on such a child for not immediately and intuitively being able to apply techniques that took centuries for adult artists to discover.  But I do willingly throw shade at the adult graphic designers‒professional artists who have the shoulders of all those previous artists on which to stand‒who produced this new version of the symbol.  It certainly doesn’t look professional.

It seems that almost every time Google updates things for apparently aesthetic reasons, it makes them a bit less good than they were before.  This brings me back, as so many things do, to a point I often make, which could really be considered a theorem when you get down to it:  while all improvement is change, most change is not improvement.

Just look at any phase space representing possible states of reality that are good or bad or neutral from your point of view, and put the “origin” at where you are now.  If you pick any random direction to move in this phase space‒perhaps flipping a coin for each axis (or dimension) and either increasing or decreasing your coordinate in that axis by one unit vector based on the outcome of the coin flip‒and do this for all axes, and repeat if necessary, the odds of you getting anywhere you actually want to go are less than 50%*.  At least, this is so by any pre-chosen measure(s) of goodness that does not deliberately and flagrantly include most of the phase space.

So, this is my exhortation to Google and all other such similar companies, or companies that may face similar perceived pressures:  don’t just change things for the sake of “being a company that doesn’t appear to accept things as being good enough as they are”, especially if your desperate changes are just cosmetic crap.  Focus your energy on things that are “objectively” in need of improvement‒processing speed, ease of use, environmental impacts and other externalities, reliability of backups, security, that kind of hardnosed, practical stuff.

The merely cosmetic crap can be relegated to, I don’t know…the Met Gala or something along those lines, where people make new-looking stuff all over the place for the (apparent) sake of just trying to do something that looks different than anything anyone else is doing.  And, of course, almost everything one sees at such places veers between hilariously awful and just hideously awful.  That’s my judgment, anyway; it’s the only judgment I have available to use.

Okay, so that’s that off my chest.

Except, of course, that it isn’t really “off my chest”.  Unfortunately, human mental states don’t behave like fluids that build up in pressure and volume and then ease when expressed, as if the pressure has been reduced by allowing one to “vent”** it.  It was an old hypothesis (or set of hypotheses) that this was the way mental states work.  It was not a stupid notion at the time, not at all, but it turns out to have been wrong empirically.

Emotions, drives, things like that, are not some kind of metaphorical fluid, but are mental states, somewhat reminiscent of the states of a computer’s RAM (but not exactly like that).  Acting on such states, given the nature of reinforcement that happens in neural pathways, in individual neurons, and in modules of neurons, is if anything likely to reinforce the state on which you are acting.  So, if you feel angry, then venting your anger, acting on it even in a limited way, will not be likely to produce any form of “catharsis”, but will instead make you more likely to get into that state again in the future.

Neural pathways behave somewhat analogously to trails (paths) through a forest or similar place:  the more such paths are used, the clearer, more well-defined, and easier to use they become.

Think about it.  If catharsis were a real thing, a real, causal process, then every time you say or otherwise express the fact that you love someone, you would feel that love less, you would feel it has been released.  But that is not the way things tend to happen (thank goodness).

In fact, expressing emotions you do not feel can make you start to feel them over time.  This is how certain forms of brainwashing and indoctrination work (and it’s probably part of why professional actors so often seem to have such turbulent emotional lives).  Religions have relied upon this fact, sometimes rather openly, for millennia:  say the prayer, enact the ritual, profess the belief, even if you don’t really believe it, and over time, you may actually start to believe.

All right, well, that’s enough from me for today.  I don’t feel very well, either physically or mentally, but I’ll try not to express those facts too much, because I don’t want to reinforce them.  On the other hand, I’m not simply  going to try to change something without having a good reason for the change.  Goodness knows I’ve tried numerous things in many ways, and they have not taken me to regions of my personal phase space that I consider worth inhabiting.

Hopefully you are doing better.

*Unless you do a post-hoc redefining of “good” to include wherever you happen to end up.  But if you do that, then any and every change could be considered good‒even a change that wipes out you and all that for which you care.  Which, honestly, you will kind of deserve, if that word means anything, because you are being willfully irrational and intellectually dishonest.

**Thus the use of that very expression, “to vent”, regarding emotions‒because people wrongly think that things work that way.

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The footnote may make the best point in this post

Well, it’s the start of another work week, and it’s also the start of another month‒June, in case you don’t know.  I wouldn’t say it’s a “work month” since there are no real non-work months.  Though in some cultures, there is (or was) at least a part of this month when people took several days off.  The time around the summer solstice was, in some cultures, a festival time.  They even suspended the counting of the months at that point, to make up for the 5 days (6 on leap years) left after 12 thirty-day months.

Actually, I don’t know for sure if any real cultures did this, but the hobbits of the Shire, in Tolkien’s world, did something like this, and I have long thought that it seemed like a nice way to go.  However, apparently taking 5 days off completely in the middle of the year‒at the beginning of summer, though it’s sometimes called midsummer‒would fall afoul of commercial pressures, much as have most holidays in general in the modern world.

There is too great a perceived disadvantage to taking any time off when one’s competitors are working (and that perception is probably not entirely illusory).  So, one business working on the holidays is liable to spawn others who wish to compete.  Those that don’t may be less likely to survive ceteris paribus.

And the implementation of the decision to work on holidays is made by people in echelons so far removed from the consequences of overwork and the rat-race-ification of daily life that they feel no pressure not to grind their employees into dust; there are (so far) always more potential employees, and the stockholders only pay attention to the last three months if that when deciding how to tell the boards of directors to act.

It’s not so much that (as many young people seem to suspect) capitalism is an inherently evil system‒it is not.  It has indeed contributed greatly to the productivity and prosperity, to the physically good, that exists in the modern world.  But it is not a perfect system.  Or rather, it is a system that is useful for what it does, but it does not encompass or elicit or create all the good things that humans might need to prosper in any thoroughgoing way.  How could one expect it to do so?

Humans are displaced and distributed hunter-gatherers from sub-Saharan Africa; the “modern world” is an epiphenomenon that has developed and grown and is continuing to develop and grow and change, after have been created‒without any prior planning nor understanding of what it is or its implications‒by humans who were, as at all times, working almost entirely under the influence of local incentives and disincentives.

No one designed the world economy, nor any local economy, nor most of the other trappings of civilization.  I almost wanted to add “any more than any ant designs an ant hill”, but the human society/economy is far less a preplanned thing than is even the most haphazard ant hill or termite mound or beehive, for those structures are guided rather specifically by instincts selected and honed over countless generations and eons.

No human society has been in any kind of equilibrium anywhere near long enough for it to have had a very strong evolutionary impact on human attributes.  Some of the pre-civilization eras of humanity endured and were consistent enough to have impacts, certainly, but nothing in culture since the dawn of agriculture has stayed the same long enough for humans to adapt to it biologically in any significant way (though there are probably some effects).

I’m not sure what point I’m trying to make here, except perhaps to remind people that we should not expect pure capitalism and/or free markets alone to be perfectly conducive to every aspect of human thriving in and of itself.  It is useful and productive, far more so when dealing with primate hunter-gatherers than is any kind of pure socialism or communism, let alone any brand of authoritarianism or totalitarianism.

But there are certainly socialistic things that can be added as tweaks, if you will, to a society that is productive of goods and services thanks to capitalism, to try to counteract the tendencies of unregulated capitalism to produce inadequate and counterproductive* equilibria as well as uncompensated externalities.

We shouldn’t expect society to be simple, nor for any one notion of things to be adequate to ensure or even encourage health and well-being and flourishing in the people in the society.  This all relates to my earlier point about how all ideologies are wrong.  There are unlikely to be any simple answers that describe and ensure beneficent and productive cultures.  Like a building that exists for decades or centuries while still being used, there is going to need to be constant maintenance and updating and sometimes even rebuilding of portions that are crumbling.

It’s that or just knock the whole thing down‒but don’t expect to be able to build anything better from the wreckage.  The same forces and principles will apply to your new edifice as applied to the old one.

*They are counterproductive to the great majority of people in such cultures, at least.  There will often be individuals who do very well even while participating in the stagnation of such detrimental equilibria.  Someone who accumulates great wealth‒and, thanks to that wealth, can gain more, and so on, perhaps creating a monopoly‒might consider the system just peachy, at least for them.   But hoarded wealth does not do anything to contribute to an economy.  It’s like biological energy (calories) stored as nearly-impossible-to-mobilize fat.  Indeed, the stagnation of oligopolistic economies may have many similarities to someone who is obese and in a profound state of insulin resistance but with pathologically high insulin to compensate, so they cannot release their stored energy and feel miserable and constantly fatigued despite having plenty of calories in their bodies.

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“…who could think you under the table.”

Well, I feel a bit better than I did yesterday, at least.  I guess that’s not necessarily all that impressive, when you consider how grumpy and gloomy I was yesterday.  Honestly, I can barely remember what I wrote then or what thought process was going through my mind.

I think maybe some of the difference today (which can’t be due to pain levels, because they are pretty steady) is because I got a few hours’ continuous sleep last night‒maybe 2 or even a little more before any stirring started to happen.  I don’t want to get too excited about this; after all, it’s possible that I’ll never sleep that well again for the rest of my life.  That may not be likely, but it remains possible, at least until I do have a better night’s sleep in the future.

Still, you take what you can get, right?

I find myself quite chagrined‒quite often‒by how grumpy and angry I have become.  This is largely due to my chronic pain, of course.  Even the most loyal and lovable family dog may growl and sometimes snap if it’s hurt and someone seems to mean to touch it.

Not that people seem to mean to touch me.  I’m not drawing that tight an analogy.  Nobody touches me, and for the most part I’m okay with that.  I really dislike it when, for instance, acquaintances want to pat me on the shoulder or what have you.  I can tolerate handshakes, but I like fist bumps better.  They feel almost like something Klingons might do.

Though, more often, I prefer the Vulcan salute, which I use to greet people who know me (and sometimes, without thinking, people who don’t know me).  I even use the emoji for it when texting: 🖖

In addition to the preceding, I created my own Vulcan-salute-based flip-off (there’s no associated emoji), and that is basically to do the Vulcan salute but with the back of my hand outward instead of the palm.  In my mind, the meaning is pretty clear and harsh:  Since the usual Vulcan salute means “Live long and prosper”‒at least, those words accompany the salute*‒then the Vulcan flip-off means roughly “suffer, and die young/soon”.

I know, that’s not a sentiment the Vulcans would be likely to endorse, but in case it wasn’t clear to anyone, I am not a Vulcan.  Quite apart from the obvious physical characteristics, Vulcans are a fictional species, and I am not.  At least, as far as I know, I am not.

I suppose I could be a work of fiction in a sense, as could you:  we could be simulated in some fashion, including being simulated within the mind of some truly vast intelligence, one powerful enough to imagine even all the thoughts of the things they imagine.

But, of course, if you simulate someone right down to their mind, their thoughts, their feelings, then they are not a simulation.  Or, rather, even if they are a simulation, they are nevertheless thinking, feeling, experiencing beings.

It’s possible, of course, to simulate a person without simulating an inner mind.  You could put the whole range of responses you want them to give to most situations in a very large lookup table, and you would have something like the NPCs in computer games (or older-fashioned role-playing games).  Then you are not actually simulating a mind, you are only simulating external behaviors.  It would be something like a very advanced animatronic.

But once you actually simulate a mind, you have created a mind, something with (in principle) moral valence.  Then, even if you are the creator, you still have moral obligations toward your creations, at least if you have them toward anyone.

Maybe this is why God** doesn’t try to anticipate what humans will do, but gives them “free will”, because to know what they will do, God must simulate what they will do, in all detail, in various versions of all possible situations, so God could choose the best outcome.  But to do that would be to create all those versions, including ones that suffer horribly, and God may not be keen to create‒of necessity‒the worst possible versions of these lives and make its creations live them.

So, God leaves them to their devices with the intent to steer events to a very limited degree, and to make things up to them when they die.

It’s an amusing thought, isn’t it?  Maybe not.  If nothing else, this bit of mind play should demonstrate why you shouldn’t really pay too much attention to religious apologetics, especially to theodicy.  Any reasonably good writer of sci-fi and/or fantasy can come up with oodles of scenarios that can explain almost anything; these don’t have any bearing on external reality.

Huh.  How the hell did I get to that line of thought?  I guess I’ll see as I edit this.  In any case, I think that’s enough of my weirdness for the moment.  I hope this was better to read than yesterday’s post must have been.  Who knows what state of mind I will be in tomorrow?

Well, probably, it will be the state of Florida.  And as everyone probably knows (unlike the New York state of mind) Florida is a state of mind reminiscent of the “killer on the road” in Riders on the Storm:  it’s a mind that is squirming like a toad.  Or perhaps it squirms like a snake, or an alligator, or‒worse‒like a Florida politician.

Whatever.  I hope you have a good day.

*The usual, formal response is to return the gesture and say “Peace and long life.”  It is not always done with the right hand; I’ve seen responses to a right-hand Vulcan salute given with left-hand Vulcan salutes.  I don’t know if this was deliberate or just an “acting choice”.

**I’m assuming arguendo, and only arguendo, that this God exists.  So, then I am imagining God, including God’s thoughts.  Does that mean, in this sense at least, that God exists, if only in my mind?  I suppose one could say that, but only in a trivial sense.  I don’t have the processing power to simulate God very well.  And any God simulated by my mind would probably welcome its own rapid dissolution.

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“Shell smashed, juices flowing, wings twitch, legs are going…”

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m going to work again, despite‒as the Beatles song puts it‒feeling low down.  My trouble is, I more or less feel low down almost every day.  What am I supposed to do about it by staying at the house?  That’s likely just to make me feel worse, because then I’ll just be alone with one of my least favorite people‒me‒and feeling non-productive and useless.

At least I wouldn’t feel “hysterical and useless”.  I don’t know if I’ve ever been what would be called “hysterical” in my life‒I tend to bottle things up and slash and burn my own figurative innards (and sometimes my literal skin) rather than outwardly flipping out‒but if I have, it’s been quite a long time.

I guess I was probably close to hysterical the time I called the old version of “the hotline” and got picked up by a few undertrained Palm Beach County deputies who did nerve damage to my left wrist with a poorly applied handcuff before dropping me at a clearly underfunded emergency mental health facility.  But I think my hysteria was at least somewhat justified at the time.

That was when I was out on bail, had already lost everything, was effectively homeless, and had very few hopes for much good happening ever again in my life.

I wasn’t wrong, either.  Even the psychiatrist whom I saw for the follow up to that 24-hour hold admitted that he thought there was no way someone wouldn’t be depressed if they were going through what I was experiencing.  He knew I was a doctor, as was he, of course, so he had a certain amount more personal sympathy than he might have had for someone else, but I think it was the shape of the situation, not the specifics, that he thought worthy of despondency if not outright despair.

Anyway, that was a horrible stretch of time, and when I was offered a plea bargain I took it, not because I was actually guilty, but because I saw no way of fighting the whole stupid thing with no money and no real allies in the process.  I hoped at least to have it done in a relatively short amount of time (three years minus gain time) so I would be able to see my kids again before I had missed too much of their lives*.

This highlights how utterly, damnably inadequate our criminal “justice” system is.  The fact that a person who can afford a private attorney can consistently expect fewer convictions, lighter sentences for lesser “crimes”, and even often doesn’t serve time despite having been convicted (see The Donald) than people who don’t have the capacity to hire private lawyers is an absolute and inexcusable travesty.

The word “justice” should not be allowed within a hundred lightyears of that system.  I would say it’s a joke, but jokes are more worthy of respect.  It is, instead, a low-flying, long-term catastrophe, and no one who would like to live in a just society should support it as it is.  No one should be allowed to have private representation in criminal trials unless everyone gets it.  Otherwise those with more money are effectively not subject to the same laws as everyone else, and that includes everything from petty shit up to murder (see OJ), which at the very least in practice violates the Constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law.

Don’t even get started on sex crimes.  I think we all know how rarely and haphazardly they are punished, let alone prevented.

It would be amusing if someone set up a service whereby they would provide assistance to women (and, yes, men) who were the victims of unpunished sexual assault by helping to get rid of the bodies of their assailants (if they killed them themselves) or just helping to delete the perpetrators from start to finish.  Of course, this could easily run afoul of the crucially important notion of due process, without which laws might as well not really exist, but our government(s) are failing miserably in that crucial area anyway.

Enough fantasizing.  I barely have the energy to get up and live my own so-called life, let alone to set up illicit vigilante services.  I am very tired and I am in continuous pain, and I have very little notion of anything good happening in my future.  A few things in my life now are wonderful, of course‒my youngest, my sister, my brother, and yes, my son, since at least I know that he is doing well, and of course, you readers are pretty darn great‒but I know that I am not wonderful.

I am not much more charming or beneficial than a growth of black mold or a teratoma (or even a less benign tumor).  Maybe tumors and mold growths have rights of some sort in an idealized world, if any living thing does.  But they cannot expect to be welcomed or loved or supported.  They are generally only worthy of removal and destruction if anything at all.

I don’t know what the point of this post is, but then again, I don’t know what the point of much of anything is, least of all the point of me.

Whatever.  Never mind.

*That turned out to be a pipe dream.  I also stayed in Florida instead of remaining with my parents up north after getting out of prison for basically the same reason.  I was severely and devastatingly disappointed when my kids themselves asked me not to pursue my legal right to visitation once I was out, because it would be too disruptive of their lives.  I could not in good conscience selfishly force myself upon their time‒not after I had screwed everything up so much and hurt them thereby‒so I acquiesced.  I can easily sympathize when people don’t want me around.  Anyway, now at least I am interacting regularly with my youngest, and that’s a wonderful thing‒it’s better than I surely deserve‒but my oldest still doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.  Most of you reading this blog post have read my stuff before and have some acquaintance with my mind; can you blame my son for not wanting me around?