Depression as mental/emotional overwhelm

Here's a hypothesis about a way my brain works sometimes. Epistemic status: talking out of my ass.

You know that feeling where you're overwhelmed with a problem and you just go "this is overwhelming, I can't think about this anymore"?

I'm gonna guess that's what happens with a lot of Trump voters. "The government doesn't work for me anymore. It's so broken, I don't know where to start. Forget it, let's blow it all up and start over. This guy says he's gonna blow it all up and start over, good enough for me."
Person who is not feeling this way: "But... yeah, ok, we need massive overhaul, but in the meantime, shouldn't we do X good thing instead of Y bad thing? Plus, your guy isn't going to actually blow it all up, he's probably going to make things worse."
Person who is feeling this way: "Ehhhhh accepting this train of thought would involve thinking about this space that is too hard to think about. Forget it, blow it all up!"

Similarly with brains: "Life seems really hard and meaningless. I can't really figure out how to fix it. So what do I think about life as a whole? Ehh, forget it, it must just be hopeless anyway."
Person who is not feeling this way: "Yeah, but... isn't it still worthwhile to do thing X instead of Y? Like, don't we prefer some futures over others? And isn't it meaningful to pursue the better ones?"
Person who is feeling this way: "Accepting this train of thought would involve thinking about this space that is too hard to think about. Life is difficult and meaningless, etc. Plus, making a better future means we're going from -100 to -99; yes I think we should do that, but it's hard to get excited about that or find it meaningful."

Just like with Trump voters, I don't think this is a very productive mindset. Luckily, we don't have a Spiritual Fox News, so nobody's trying to convince me to spread the word that life is meaningless. If you don't feel this way, great, keep it up! Similarly, I am continually trying to move this switch for myself. It's probably actually good to try to make a better future, and to feel like it's meaningful to do so.

(Note! Obligatory disclaimer: not crying for help or anything; I have a great support network and am doing fine. The intent of this post is to explain one variety of depressed mind a bit. Also know that I would not cry for help by vagueblogging; if I forget to post a disclaimer like this in on any future post it doesn't mean anything, don't worry.)

on "best"

"I found the best burger place in America. Then I killed it."

Small Brain
Ok. Let's imagine burger places could be reduced to one dimension: Goodness. Local McDonalds: 12/100. Stanich's: 98/100. Then this article would make sense, and the aftermath would be just tragic unintended consequences. Maybe there's a Secret Burger Guide out there that actually knows the next Best place and is hiding it and you can only know it if you're in the Secret Burger Cabal and when you go to this place that is 97/100 you'll say "yes, this is definitely better than the 90/100 place I went to last week."

Medium Brain
Obviously, burger places are not one-dimensional and this is nonsense. Let's imagine burger places are reducible to a small number of dimensions, like 3: taste, atmosphere, and value. Then there is no one "best"; you could average them, but that's not really what people want. You as a reader could then decide "I think atmosphere is the most important" and make your decision based on that. There might still be articles like this: "I found the best tasting burger in America." We'll still have the same problem - it'll just be diluted a bit, as the Best Taste, Best Atmosphere, and Best Value place all get deluged with 1/3 the crowds. Also, each of those people will probably be a little disappointed, as they didn't really want only the taste of the burger.

Large Brain
Obviously, burger places are not 3-dimensional and this is nonsense. Let's imagine burger places have 100 dimensions. Then you could maximize each dimension and spread the crowds out 100 ways - everyone picks their favorite dimension and maximizes that. Burger places start to specialize in only 1 dimension: e.g. Fries Crispiness. Crispy Fries enthusiasts make a pilgrimage to the #1 Fries Crispiness place. The Fries Crispiness place stops making burgers, because everyone's just coming for their fries. Specialization of labor! Everyone's a little disappointed. Also, the fries taste bad because the #1 Fries Crispiness place isn't also the #1 Fries Savoriness place.

Obviously, reducing things to 100 dimensions then maximizing one is dumb and this is nonsense. We can turn every burger place into a 100-dimensional feature vector; your preferences are also a 100-dimensional feature vector; we maximize the dot product of these for you. Now everyone gets super-personalized burger recommendations. Turns out the best one for me is 2000 miles away - eh, still cool, I can make a pilgrimage there someday! There's still some clustering near the top, as those that are pretty good on a lot of dimensions get recommended to more people. But, it's not bad. Still, on Tuesday I might be looking for a quick tasty burger, and on Friday for the best burger in the city. Preferences change over time. Plus, each burger place changes over time: on Friday they're packed, so I'm not gonna go there then.

Exploding Brain
Ok, so burger places aren't 100 dimensions; they're 1000 dimensions plus 1000 temporal dimensions, and so am I. Now we can no longer get enough data to fill this absurdly high dimensional space. We can do pretty well, and we do. Still, I have to take a long survey every time I want to go out, just to see what my temporal preferences are like now, and that's annoying. Plus, sometimes it's just wrong. To test it out, I spent a month picking burger places by throwing darts at a map, and I did just about as well, and it was a lot easier.

Galaxy Brain
Burger places aren't 2000 dimensions and this is nonsense. Burger places are in roughly 4 categories: bad, bad and I have a story about it, good, good and I have a story about it. Here, "story" can mean:
- this place is better than the average "good" place; I would go out of my way to eat here
- this place is fine in most dimensions and great on one
- this place is not good usually, but if it's 2am and everything's closed and you were out partying it's great late-night food
- it's so bad you never want to go there; I got sick after eating there
- I have fond memories of this place from college
These stories are in too many dimensions to even model. You can never get enough data to accurately predict if someone will have an "interesting story" about a place. And importantly, you should stop trying. Every second you spend on it is spinning your gears; every story about "The Best burger place" might accidentally ruin it.

Conclusions That Are Not As Profound As I Thought When Starting This Post
Burger places have the following properties: temporally varying, high supply, low stakes, result measured in feelings and stories. As a result, if you wanted to pick a place to live and you loved burgers, you should optimize for "the greatest number of diverse burger places" rather than "the best." See also: coffee, wine, music, movies.

Edit: Even Bigger Galaxy Brain
One review doesn't ruin a place - spousal abuse and ignoring court orders do. Welp :P

What makes the Spelunkyverse possible?

Spelunky is a video game. It's pretty fun, and pretty difficult. I played through Spelunky classic and it took hours upon hours to even get through the game. It's also procedurally generated - which means each time you're crawling through a new random dungeon.

Spelunky was released in 2009/2012, and people are still trying to break it. Here is a high score tracker - note it's been updated 9 times in Oct/Nov 2018.

And these high scores are not just "I managed to do things 0.01 seconds faster through quick reflexes" - these are "I discovered that, if I fire the shotgun a bunch, it rearranges what layer gold spawns on in the screen, which means I can use a glitch to collect each gold piece twice." It's like if Usain Bolt spent years practicing weird things on the track, and then discovered if he walked on his hands he could finish the 100m dash in 5 seconds. More details in this fascinating only-semi-dense article.

(For an example of one of the tomes in the Library of Spelunxandria, maybe try The Spelunker's Guide to Render Dupe. More general info in the Wiki.)

Why do people do this? How do people do this so well?

A few reasons seem obvious to me (caveat: all just hand waving here):

Spelunky has intentional depth

Some credit has to go to Derek Yu, maker of the game, who has inserted some really-fiendishly-difficult challenges/easter eggs, like the Eggplant Run. This encourages exploration.

Spelunky has accidental depth

Some of the "glitches" in this game are the result of programming shortcuts. For example, the Ghost is supposed to be unkillable, but in practice it just has 9999 HP. Also, nothing's supposed to hurt the ghost, but maybe accidentally, lava deals it 99 damage. Therefore, you can kill the ghost by making it go through lava 101 times.

Spelunky offers immediate, deterministic, reproducible feedback

If I had to pick one, this is the biggest reason. In a biology experiment, you have to wait a week for your cells to grow - so if there's some complex thing that happens only when 100 variables are all just so, you'll take a million weeks to get there. But on a video game, you can very quickly test your hypotheses.

There are low stakes to experimenting in Spelunky

Worst case, you just wasted some time.

Spelunky can be easily internet-collaborated

Like, if 0.0001% of any population will love Thing X, that's 1 person in a city of a million people. But, it's 7000 people in the world! If they can collaborate, great. It's not easy for them to collaborate on, say, ending homelessness. But it's really easy to collaborate on something that's on computers and offers immediate, deterministic, reproducible feedback.

Most problems are not like this

I guess that's all. My brain keeps going to "... this is amazing! can we build this kind of arcane tower in other domains?" but that way lies Gamification. Basically: hard things are hard.

Appendix: "who are the Pannenkoeks of other video games" - Pannenkoek being a legendary Mario 64 researcher.

"I'll have to eat my way out!"

I can't believe I've never posted this Simpsons clip. (0:00-0:55, minus the Lisa bit.) Bart pumps Groundskeeper Willie's shed full of creamed corn and he decides to just eat it until he can get out. This is such a metaphor to me: usually for a bad situation that, for whatever reason, the only way out is to just eat for a long time. I hate those situations.

(I didn't mean for it to be about garmonbozia, but maybe it is. Welp.)

Thinking and feeling

A friend recently suggested that maybe a useful guide to think about phases of your life could be "what is the big challenge you're dealing with now?" I kinda like that framing. (It's not super clean, as you're usually dealing with many of them at once; I'm gonna ignore that for now.)

One of my challenges for the past ~10 years has been roughly "to understand what it means to feel, to value feeling, and to get good at feeling."

I'm assuming there are two ways our brains and bodies work: thinking and feeling. Maybe call this System 2 and 1, respectively, like Kahneman, but I don't mean to just talk about decision making here. I mean that there are two ways you can experience reality: thinking about it and feeling it. And I'm relatively good at thinking about it and not as good at feeling it.

(in some ways, my meditation teacher and therapist are telling me the same message, just from different perspectives. convergent theories are encouraging.)

Why is this hard?
- every day I go to work and practice thinking. I don't much have to practice feeling.
- I really like thinking. Like, I am currently spending spare time doing puzzles with some work friends, and it is one of the things that I enjoy most right now.
- my standard tactic when something is hard is to break it down into smaller pieces, figure those out, put it back together. This explicitly does not work when your goal is "feel your body."
- I also like things with nice progress markers. Thinking-mode tends to rack these up: points on your video game, dollars in the bank, miles biked, whatever. Feeling-mode doesn't tend to have them.

What gives me hope?
- feeling is usually at least kinda pleasant, when you can get yourself to do it.
- there's occasionally a marker of progress. I can stop for a second, close my eyes, and feel a kind of "body high"; what Goenka might call the "subtle sensations." Note that this pleasant state is not the goal! But it's a nice sign that I have skills that maybe I didn't previously have.
- if I consider myself an HCI person, HCI is the most feeling-oriented of the computer science fields, I think. So there's hope that I'm not doing 100% thinking all day. (however, Data Science is more thinky. so it goes.)
- feeling-tasks tend not to feel like work. It's probably easier to be good at thinking and working on feeling, than vice versa.

Why bother?
I think because mostly, thinking helps you accomplish things, but feeling makes you want to live. And I'm pretty good at the "how" of life but always searching for the "why."

Unrelatedly, some things that I have found interesting recently:

This story, "Sort By Controversial", is so amusing.
It doesn't map onto our current world just right, because the problem is not that we keep getting these perfectly true/false statements; the problem is that there are people spending all their time to make these statements more controversial. (some actively like Fox, some clumsily like Twitter.)

"AI winter is on its way" - are there hype cycles for high level concepts like "AI"? Do I want this to happen or not? Does it matter? I'm always a grump but I think he's right; I think we might hit some limits (like with self driving cars) where it looked like we were going to hit 100% but we actually hit 90% and the last 10% is harder than the first 90%.

Finally watching Season 2 of Master of None, and it's kind of great. There's rocky bits, and I feel uncomfortable sometimes because, basically, I don't really want The Olds to think that We Old Millennials are like that, but it kinda nails it sometimes. In particular, notice how much of their life revolves around eating! It's like, I don't know what else to do, so I might as well eat good things!

I recently bought a dehumidifier for the basement in Pittsburgh. What humidity level should I keep it at? Beats me, but this pdf from North Dakota State University suggests around 60% in summer and 40% in winter. Thanks, Stack Overflow!

Juliana v. US is bonkers, in a great way. I am surprised that "Sue the entire government for f'ing up all the climate forever" is a legit thing to bring to trial, but I guess so! It feels about right, too: like, we need a carbon tax 20 years ago, and I am a little bit personally mad at every damn Boomer in power who keeps twiddling their thumbs (or worse). Yes, it's a collective action thing - what if we tax and China doesn't, etc - but man, who's going to take the lead if we don't? Props to these young folks who figured out one more way to fight the apathy.