improvement

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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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Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden, that grows to seed; blogs rank and gross in nature possess it merely.

ulysses

Hello, good morning, and welcome to another Thursday edition of my weekly blog post.  I didn’t sleep well last night—even by my standards—so if I say something even more bizarre or incoherent than usual, I can only apologize and beg you to bear with me.

It’s been a moderately interesting week.  I can honestly say I think I’m finally starting to see some effects of my new depression treatment regimen (not “regime”).  This can’t mean as much to all of you as it does to me, but nonetheless it’s probably a welcome thought for those committed to following this blog.  At least it means—if I’m correct in my assessment—that I’ll be less likely to write quite such dreary things as sometimes drip from my computer when I’m wallowing in the dumps.

I posted an audio smidgen—only about seven minutes long, if memory serves—on Iterations of Zero yesterday, though it was recorded a week ago. People don’t seem to be responding much to those, so I may relegate them to history’s anonymous junk heap and go back to trying to find time to write about such topics instead of simply moaning and groaning aloud about them.  That’s fine, though.  Written language is more efficient.  It’s also the lifeblood of civilization, besides being the love of my life.

I did, though, on a whim whose source I can’t really credit, decide yesterday to start doing audio for my second latest short story Penal Colony.  I had no specific plans for how much to do, but before I’d finished for the day, I’d recorded about forty-seven minutes of unedited audio, getting more than thirty percent through the story (based on Kindle’s reckoning).  I’d forgotten how much I enjoy reading my stories aloud.  I may go back to it in something like earnest (but not like Frank, I don’t like that guy), doing audio for Free Range Meat, and then resuming the audio for The Chasm and the Collision, for which I think I stopped after chapter nine.  Then, who knows, maybe my other books and stories will follow.

It’s gonna be some time before I get to doing audio for Unanimity, though.  Just thinking about it is daunting.

As further evidence of my gradual but hopeful improvement of chronic mood disorder, I sent out copies of the latest version of Unanimity and my partially complete novella with the working title Safety Valve to my sister and to a dear friend from my youth (both of whom share my love of reading), just in case, as I think I put it, something happens to me.  This may seem morbid and not at all non-depressed at first glance, but it’s a departure.  When I’m deeply in the throes of depression, I become almost completely nihilistic at numerous levels, such that I think that if I die, I really don’t care what happens to my writing, no matter how much work has gone into it…and there has been a LOT of work.  Needless to say, if I were to die, I would not then care what happened to my writing, but the me now can care—or not—about things that the nonexistent future me will be unable to choose to care about or not…if that makes any sense.

Anyway, the fact that I did it shows at least some improvement.  It’s still possible that I might do something successfully self-destructive*, but at least I’m acting to prophylax against such occurrences.

As for other things…I’m studiously avoiding following the process of the presidential trial in the Senate.  I already feel a thoroughgoing contempt for pretty much everyone involved in the government—and by extension many of the people who keep electing them—and in my currently improving but still-fragile mood, I just don’t need the exposure to all the stupidity, vanity, ignorance with wings, hubris, manipulation (successful and otherwise), and petty monkey-poop throwing by a collection of supposed public servants who actually serve no one but themselves, and don’t even do that very well.  It’s spectacles such as these that lead me to the calm, resigned feeling that, hey, it’s not such a big loss if humanity, and even the whole planet Earth, just withers and dies.  It’s gonna happen someday anyway; it might as well be sooner rather than later.

I can do without reinforcing that feeling.  It’s already hard enough to argue against it logically; I’d like to curb the emotion.  Otherwise, I might start working on a doomsday machine of my own to see if I can hasten the end.

Don’t worry, don’t worry.  At least as of now, I’m not doing any such thing.

Humanity doesn’t really need my help, do they?

TTFN

*Of course, there are always external dangers to life and limb for us all, and sooner or later they do catch up to us, but I tend to be by far the greatest threat to my own continued existence.