I swear, only a little bit of decade-recapping

Happy new decade. I'm on kinda an emo tear right now, and I was going to post something more mopey and grim about how I'm not gonna post a best-of list because the earth is a cold dead place or something, but I tend to regret doing that. It's been a hell of a decade. Here's some highlights in media that are somehow roughly connected to when they came out or when I first experienced them. These are the moments that stick with me.

2010
Life in Cartoon Motion by Mika
For the best parts of Burning man. I tried this! I tried a bunch of things in Seattle. None of them stuck. I always felt like I was intruding on someone else's party. (Especially at Burning man.) But when you're at someone else's party and they're having a great time, sometimes you can get a little infected by their joy. It's not enough to live on, but it's fun in the meantime.

2011
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West
Gosh I mean, this is a masterpiece and can be all things to all people. To me it's originally two memories: "Lost in the World" walking over the bridge on Pine St feeling a sense of well-being, and singing along to "Monster" riding my bike as I "visiting scholar"ed (read: sat in a lab and did my own thing) at UW. Monster in particular is still a favorite.

Eye Contact by Gang Gang Dance
I started my gap-year-travel by flying to Delhi, busing to Manali and then on to Leh, just jumping as far into the deep end as possible, and spending 3 days in bed with altitude sickness. This album is about as out-there as you feel at 15,000 feet, trying to stay warm in a parachute dhaba in the More Plains.

Sir Lucious Left Foot the Son of Chico Dusty by Big Boi
This one, on the other hand, is a welcome taste of home when you're just leaving the dark Nepalese border town of Mahendranagar where you spent a mildly worrying night, strapping into a 12 hour bus ride, and wishing that something could be easier.

2012
Odd Blood by Yeasayer
I'm in Pecs, Hungary, just killing time looking at whatever local medieval castle. It's sunny and pleasant. Somewhere around "ONE" or "Love Me Girl" I wonder about the travelers I've met who are basically wandering indefinitely, and I get a sense that I'm wasting time. I'm glad I'm headed back to the US and getting back to nerdy computery things, and building a life. But dang this is nice in the meantime.

Juicy Lucy by Jupiter
Turn back on the adrenaline; I'm back in Pittsburgh, starting grad school, meeting new friends and an exciting new relationship, and everything's working. Wow. This music is what I would make if life was always working so well. Bouncy, infectious, smooth, perfectly produced. Makes even me want to dance.

2013
Shrines by Purity Ring
6 months later: OH WAIT grad school is awful and I am bad. And we call my house the Pretzel House because it feels like it's made of pretzels. This album, though, opens with a creepy synthy bit about "they'll sew their own hands into their sleeves, to keep the crawlers out" and just gets better from there. I played it in the Pretzel House kitchen in Pittsburgh fall/winter and immediately put it on repeat. In contrast to the previous album, Shrines is dark and weird and beautiful. I don't care if I can only use that word once in this whole post. This is probably my favorite album of the decade.

DUKE 2 by Mrs. Paintbrush
Part of what helped me deal with grad school was the Pittsburgh connection. I have friends, and I know some local culture and stuff, and Mrs. Paintbrush (half of Grand Buffet) is all the things I love about Pittsburgh. A rapper who's funny as hell, but doesn't act like he thinks he's funny as hell.

2014
Inspector Norse by Todd Terje
This summer was electric as it seemed like a way out of the grad school doldrums. Tati interned at Facebook, I interned at HP Labs, I lived in a shared house in San Francisco, I did a lot of Caltrain and burritos, but it was ok because this seemed like an exciting new world that's worth going for more. Inspector Norse is a song that seems right at home exploring this goofy new city, or a song that you can listen to on headphones while you work.

Edit: Space Is Only Noise by Nicolas Jaar
This is the dark shadow side to the excitement. The title track especially, but really the whole album, is the moodiest dark-sidewalk-at-night kind of music that's a great accompaniment to being a bit of a stranger in a bit of a strange land.

2015
Art Angels by Grimes
Man, this year's kind of a blur. I was traveling back and forth between SF and Pittsburgh, trying to finish up grad school, and geez I don't know what was happening but this album is start-to-finish brilliant multifaceted pop. "Over the first 6 tracks you go from epic symphonic overture to top-40 to aggressive Taiwanese hip-hop back to top-40 to... whatever Kill v. Maim is." - me, at the time.

Edit: Strange Desire by Bleachers
If all emo music sounded like this, I'd listen to more of it. Tracks 1-4 remind me of Silent Alarm in that they'd all be great on their own, but make a solid album kickoff all together. I can't really access this year's emotions very much, but neither can I very well tell what this album feels like, but hey that is fine.

2016
Edit: Without My Enemy What Would I Do by MADE IN HEIGHTS
This and Strange Desire make me want to be a producer. (Or a singer, but I don't think I could ever sing as well as Bulkin. Not that I could produce as well as Sabzi, but eh, one can dream.) I don't know what any of these songs mean, but there are really great sounds on it. It's so crisp and polished and just like... a peppermint? It's not just straight sugar; it makes me feel good afterward.

Stop Making Sense by Talking Heads
Ok this isn't new, but: the key event of this year was Tati and me getting married. Our first dance was This Must Be The Place. I still cry when I watch David Byrne sing this song to a lamp. There's something about that: weird smart nerd who sings about buildings and food realizes he can sing love songs too.

2017
Life Will See You Now by Jens Lekman
The lyric "it's been a long, hard year" in "Evening Prayer" is my version of "I'm gonna make it through this year if it kills me": a kernel of real, hard truth wrapped in a juicy pop song. This year was kind of a long, hard year: finish a thesis, graduate, move, find a job, get frightening imposter syndrome. Jens writes the kind of songs that make me feel like someone gets me: "To know your mission" and "Wedding at Finistere" especially. Plus, I challenge you to find a better riff than "How we met, the long version."

Solitary Flight by Theo Parrish
I started spending a lot of time in an open-office workplace. I got into deep house for a while - it's pretty great work music and I wish I knew more of it. This is among the best tracks I can remember. At one point I put this on while at a ski trip with some new friends, one of them made fun of me about it, and still I felt like, nah, it's ok, I still belong.

2018
Over the Garden Wall
This animated series is so perfectly in the Venn diagram overlap between me and Tati. It's charming, cute, weird, spooky, very funny, perfectly acted and brilliantly animated. I know it's not everyone's definition of cozy, but it makes me think of a time in our SF apartment that's more cozy than full of our neuroses.

Dirty Computer by Janelle Monae
Like Art Angels, this is a multifaceted pop masterpiece. It's very California, in the good ways; it's like the kinds of warm weather I like, and the kinds of people who still want, humbly, to change the world. (Unfortunately, these things seem rarer and rarer; California seems to me more NIMBYs, cars, and WeWork startup nonsense.)

2019
Clemency for the Wizard King by Mountain Goats
I finally got into the Mountain Goats. Of course they have a ton of great stuff. This is probably my favorite. I don't know if it's because a recurring D&D campaign has been a really nice thing in my life the past couple years; I don't think it's just that. The tone almost feels religious; they're pleading with the captor of their king, but it feels like pleading with God or the universe or something. Did I mention my recent emo streak? I cry more now than I used to. This song makes me also.

Annihilation
It's a sci-fi thriller about journeying into the unknown. It's a psychological thriller about self-destruction. It's cosmic horror about the universe being weirder than we can even perceive. Obviously I love all these things. (yeah the books are better; they're kind of dense though.) I love art that gives you a sense of the sublime and of life outside our little comfortable cocoon, and this does more than most. The sublime and real happens to be terrifying. This fits with how I see the world now. 2020s, prove me wrong.

Cutting off bad experiences, or somehow integrating them into your life

Sometimes people get in a bad state. They become homeless or go to prison or something. There are two ways that a non-homeless non-incarcerated doing-pretty-ok person can respond to this.

1. The "separation" approach. Just say "well, that's not me", and do all you can to avoid that becoming you. Cut those parts off from your world.
2. The "integration" approach. Try to include those parts in your world. Which means, you try to make those situations not so bad, and you try to behave with as much compassion as possible towards those people.

I think integration is better.

(I'm trying not to make this so obvious, though in 2019 America this is obvious, because an individual has so little control over whether they end up in these situations. Especially if you're black or brown or poor or whatever. But let's imagine a more ideal world, a just world where only people who do a crime get thrown in jail, and you've got some control over whether you become poor, etc. I want to argue that the "integrative" vision is better for everyone in it, even in this more ideal world.)

I've got more feelings than logic about why integration is better, and those feelings are based on comparing the world to your body.

Sometimes your body gets in a bad state: you get sick. There will be times you're in the hospital - or at least, sick in bed. And at some point you'll die! You can take the days that that's happening and cordon them off, and say, "well, I'm healthy, not gonna think about that now." Then when you get there, you grit your teeth and you get through it. (Or you don't, and you die - that'll happen once! Either way, it eventually ends.) This "solution"... feels bad? Sure, being sick always feels bad, but being sick and unprepared, knowing that you're in the place you've tried to pretend doesn't exist, makes the sickness feel worse.

I glossed over "unprepared", because I'm not sure what it means. Obviously taking care of your body helps - if you're usually pretty healthy, your illness might not be as bad. And sure, if you're a meditation master, for example, you'll be able to see each moment coming and going, and knowing the impermanence of it all makes it sting less, and hell maybe you can jhana out sometimes and get some relief. But I'm wondering, positing, guessing that maybe there's an emotional component to this "preparedness" too; that you might be better able to deal with the "sick" parts if you're more emotionally open to them. (I don't know what this means, or how you become emotionally open to them, but it feels true.)

I'm guessing, if you've done this preparation more, then even the times when you're feeling well will be better, because you'll have less fear of the sick states.

So, likewise, imagining "well, I'm never going to be in prison, so who cares" - it's unstable because what if you mess up, but it also just allows your mind to have unspeakable horrors in it, which invariably leads to worries even during the good times. Alternately: it's better, say, to have one yacht but no possibility of going to hell-prison, than 10 yachts *with* that possibility.

(I wonder if this is universally held! I'm sure there are some people who would say "nah, f 'em, I got mine!" I guess I'd just assume that those people are a little bit emotionally underdeveloped, or they've got other issues?)

How do you make spending decisions?

or, "in which I let my privilege hang out" - so, if that kinda thing bugs you, you've been forewarned

How the hell do y'all make money decisions? (Where here "y'all" means "most of my friends and family who do have some disposable income") Like, "friend invited me to dinner at expensive place; should I go?"

Ok, so you make the easy decisions. You switch from AT&T to Fi so your phone bill is $45, not $95. You cancel the gym you never go to, and you share your Netflix account with family or friends. Cool. And then, if you're on a tight budget you might say "my budget for restaurants is $x this month and I literally never go over it." Fine. Or, if you're super rich, you might say "sure, I don't even think about it." What if you're in between? If you've got money to spend, but you're trying to save, and you don't know whether this restaurant is worth it?

In practice, I usually act on the "super rich" side, but that feels unsatisfying. It works - my friends and salary are such that it's never been a problem, and our expenses are below our income - but am I hedonic-treadmilling? How would I know?

I've been trying to do something about this, to at least semi regularly do a little bit of a review, so last year I downloaded all Tati and my transactions from Mint, and tried to categorize them as well as possible, and... well... had no idea what to do. I noticed we spent more than I expected on airfare, but, I mean, what are we going to do there? Not gonna stop flying home for the holidays. We spent more than I expected on uber/lyft, so we both said "huh, I guess let's try to stop taking uber/lyft so much." We spent $x on food, which... I dunno, I guess it's fine? I already cook a decent amount, and certainly I would probably feel like I'm missing out on relationships or experiences or something if I canceled more things because of money (penny-wise, pound-foolish; or scroogey).

But man, we're hedonic treadmilling so hard! My expenses (even just mine, not counting Tati's) are such that if I were an artist or a not-particularly-affluent-nonprofit worker, or something, I don't know how I'd make ends meet! (Yes ok, it's SF, but even our obnoxious rent is still only like 40% of our expenses.)

One thing I've found we can do is to look at particular things, quantify the money spent on those, and think if there's a way to reduce them. But that feels like stabbing fish instead of using a big net - we might make a few targeted changes but it's pretty unsystematic.

So, I don't know, if you have a principled way of thinking about spending, I'm curious to know.

project one-and-a-halfclops

ok, time passes: how's the "shutting off the noise" working?

well, it's pretty ok. it was easier than I expected. I mostly just don't go into a big loop of searching for information to soothe myself now, beyond just my emails and slack. arguably, I'm just satisfying the same urge with slightly different and less satisfying means, but it doesn't last as long though, so that's ok.
some days I don't yell at cars. I do still play video games, because I hadn't beat a20 with Defect yet. (now I have. it's way easier than the Silent, I gotta say. but now I gotta get on the Watcher train!)
I log into twitter maybe once a day, usually when I have something to toot. I like it as a mostly-write-only medium.

I kinda want to know about good jokes from the McElroys, webcomics, and any good memes. (apparently now we've got problems clown? it's pretty good.) But I feel like maybe I'm making a little progress towards something - or rather, I'm taking it on faith that maybe I'm making a little progress towards something. Ideally I'd be more attuned to feelings, and maybe kinder and more patient, because those seem like skills that could make life more pleasant. I realized recently that one of the most important skills in life seems to be the ability to understand and predict your feelings - then you just do the things that will make you feel good! (for some value of "good", of course.)

(anyway, is all this working? who knows? this is frustrating - it's hard for me to take things on faith! but otoh I'm not losing much. reading a bunch of webcomics and listening to a bunch of podcasts: I guess these were not providing as much value to my life as I thought.)

Tasse's Corollary to Pearson's Law

Realize I never set this down in actual written words! So:

Pearson's* Law, paraphrased: when you measure something, you will naturally start to maximize it.

Tasse's corollary: ... even when you're trying to minimize it.

*(or maybe Monson's or Drucker's or Kelvin's or Caulkin's or Ridgeway's or Rheticus's - none of these seem very popular or credible, but I get marginally more hits searching for "Pearson's law")

A friend just pointed out I should have another law: "The broken thing will start working again exactly when you ask someone for help with it."

(Man, am I gonna be a Dignified Olde Gentleman someday publishing a book of sayings? I hope so, 'cause there's no way I'm gonna be a Dignified Olde Gentleman otherwise.)

project cyclops

Someone once told me I sounded like Youtuber CGP Grey, so when I stumbled on the podcast he co-hosts (Hello Internet) I gave it a try, and yep I feel this guy very much.

For a while he was doing this thing he called "Project Cyclops" - turning off a lot of his social media and other internet noise. Obviously, he's not the first to do this, but I like the name, so I'll borrow it.

Why: I don't know specifics, but some combination of calming down, slowing down, getting more out of my head and into my body, just feeling better. Something I'm doing now isn't working; I feel like I'm just zipping from thing to thing the whole time. I also feel stressed a lot, even though my life may be among the less-stressful lives; I feel angry a lot, despite having little to be angry about; and I feel like I'm wasting my life on trivial shiny things instead of focusing on what matters. Turning off your social medias won't solve these, but I hope it helps a little.

Some specifics:

- signing out of Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook, hopefully just not accessing them. Same with Feedly - I feel less sure about that, but I'm gonna try it.

- not listening to podcasts - still doing language tapes, and music if I feel like it, but gonna take a break from podcasts.

- not yelling at cars. To be clear: ban cars, and direct action in the form of yelling at them when their drivers are entitled assholes is probably a small impact in that direction. But for my mental health's sake, I'm gonna give it a rest for a little while.
- probably not videogaming. I like these too, and I think they can be deep and good, but they get me in a tightly wound mind-state, which I wanna practice not being in. (Plus, I just finished all the achievements in Slay the Spire*, so why even bother gaming anymore?)
* yes I am very proud, why do you ask?

I drafted this post on Sunday, and now posting it on Friday, I've done it for about a week. (I'm not totally all talk.)

Too soon to talk about effects, but I have noticed that my checking pattern when I'm bored at work is now email -> other email -> slack -> try to open twitter, realized that I'm signed out, think "hmm maybe there's nothing for me here", stop checking things. So, that's cool.

really bad and really good mental states, I guess?

I don't know how I got linked to this "qualia computing" site but it's occasionally-really-interesting and occasionally-crazy-seeming.

This post on "psychotic depression" just quotes Infinite Jest, and it's a good-though-terrifying read. Similarly, this post on logarithmic scales of pleasure and pain. Gets me thinking a few things:

1. holy god, how do people survive. how is there so much pain in this world. how can we even deal with living in a world where there are people suffering so much. (my answer so far: mostly, ignore the problem and hope it doesn't happen to me. obviously, this is unsatisfying.)
2. I oughta get back to meditating. (if I had a dollar for every time I said this...) I've experienced some pretty-faint jhana-type states, not regularly or dependably or strongly ("0.1th jhana"?), but it'd be really nice if I had a thing I could do to feel good more regularly.
(not that meditation's goal is producing jhana states. as far as I understand it, they're a nice byproduct, and/or a cool thing you can practice for fun.)

50 interviews with people experiencing PNSE (Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience) and a summary. This gets me thinking a few other things:

1. Enlightenment is a lot of things to a lot of people. Maybe a good analogy is, being a good chess player. There are some real discrete steps along the way ("oh, now I really get why you should control the center of the board" or "I finally found a good counter to the Sicilian Defense") but it's not a state you'll get to and be done.
2. It's also not blissful... except, I mean, I think I'd like it. It sounds like it's a quieting of a lot of self-related mental chatter, an expansion of the "self", less common occurrence of negative emotions. I guess that doesn't sound like a general solution to all of life's problems, but it kinda sounds like most of a solution to most of mine.
"When asked, none said they wanted their self-referential thoughts to return to previous levels or
to have the emotional charge returned to them."
3. why the hell does everyone in the enlightenment/etc world write books that look like this

being a body. having a body.

It's been an interesting few days.

For a while I've been trying to "be in touch with my body" more. I'm not sure what that means. I don't know if it's well defined. I think I have for a long time been kinda-in-touch with my body; like, I sometimes know "I feel bad but will feel better when I go outside even if I don't feel like going outside" or "I will not eat that thing because I will feel worse, even though it seems good right now." Also, I can meditate decently enough to where I can feel body sensations at a pretty fine granularity in space and time. (If I try, which I don't very often.)

I've recently been able to feel my body more than that, which is cool. It feels good, mostly! I feel more energetic and positive; like, a little lighter. But it's also a little incomprehensible; sometimes I don't know what my body feels like, or why. I think I'm starting to become okay with the fact that this is just how the body operates. If I could translate all my feelings directly into words, they wouldn't be feelings. Or like, if I want to "be able to listen to my body more", but I'm only listening to things that are easily translated into words, I'm going to miss most of it.

I think about this three level model sometimes:
top level: thoughts
middle level: emotions
bottom level: body
A shallow experience is just at the level of thoughts. If it gets deeper, it feels emotional. Even deeper, and it's something you just feel. Some things about this model:
- You can maybe translate +/- one level - like you can talk about emotions in the language of thoughts. But you can't really talk about body feelings in the language of thoughts (or at least, I can't).
- Trying to interact with something on the wrong level is just not going to work. Ever been feeling a way, and tried to think it out? Didn't work, right? Sometimes just makes it worse.
- The deeper something is, the harder it is to work itself out. Thoughts can change quickly, emotions maybe after minutes or hours, but something that's settled in your body takes a while to change. (I know, I'm just asserting that "things can be in your body" in a way that is uncomfortably squishy and inexact. I'm going to assume that this is a true thing that happens, at least for now, even though I can't really describe how.)

Some other things that I'm feeling more recently, some of which are just platitudes:
- maybe discomfort is ok
- nothing lasts forever; if you don't like now, just wait a few minutes
- I sometimes have to take up more space in the world than I currently let myself take
- the body doesn't think, it just does. it's almost like "my mind" and "my body" are two separate people both living in this same space, and we've got to learn to live well together.

first, links

I have so many things to say! I'll start with "here are a lot of links" because that's easier.

Trying to at least kinda hold car companies accountable for their totally nonsense predictions about how fast they'd have autonomous cars.

Newsletters are the new thing it seems, maybe because of the dark forest the internet has become, and some of them are really good.
Normcore Tech comes to mind. This post about Reddit is pretty right on - Reddit has become a great place for a lot of weird niche things, but there's no sign it's not gonna go the way of Facebook or Twitter. This post and this post about Facebook.
The Margins seems good too, though I haven't read it as long.

"It's so much more than cooking." Yes! "my husband... had focused on the one thing he'd promised to do: grab a pot and a pan, put something in it, and make edible food. But what I'd wanted him to do was much more complex, so ingrained in my experience of cooking that I didn't even think to articulate it. I wanted him to pick up the baton. To check what ingredients we already had, and what might need using up. To plan out a meal that would meet everyone's dietary needs and preferences (including a balanced amount of protein and starch, and at least one vegetable). I wanted him to look up recipes, and make a grocery list if needed, and stop by the store on the way home."
(I mean, I'm usually pretty good at this kind of logistics stuff - but it is certainly a lot of mental overhead!)
(and, in before your "smart refrigerator" - this is the kind of thing that is too multifaceted and messy to be Solved By Technology for a long time, I think.)

Technological development in every direction is not inevitable. "Evolution is driven by random mutation — mistakes, not plans. ... Evolution doesn’t have meetings about the market, the environment, the customer base. Evolution doesn’t patent things or do focus groups. Evolution doesn’t spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to ensure that its plans go unfettered."

"Venn Diagram Problems"

Imagine two friends A and B.

A: Hey, want to go to this Indian place?

B: Nah, I don't really like Indian, how about this Mexican place?

A: You don't like Indian food? How is that possible?

B: I don't know, I'm just not a big fan. And you always want to go to an Indian place, why do you like it so much?

etc

At about line 3, it changed from a conversation about "where to go for dinner tonight" into one about "whether Indian food is good". That's probably not the one you need to solve.

Put another way, imagine the restaurants A likes as one circle, and the restaurants B likes as another one. A and B are trying to force those circles to overlap completely. But that's not the right question - the question is "can we find one place that's in the Venn diagram overlap between A and B?"

These also come up when you're thinking about the future ("what will we do if ____"). You've both got a decision tree in your mind, and you want those trees to overlap perfectly, but you don't really that at all. You just need them to overlap for the part of the future that ends up coming true. So maybe it's not worth arguing about the low-probability branches of the decision tree, and instead focus on stuff that's either true right now or is more likely to be true in the future.

Anyway, just keep your eye out to notice when you're dealing with a Venn diagram problem.

"Pleasure as an organizing principle"

This post/talk (video if you prefer) is a really good description of where I'm often getting to these days.

(I immediately feel a need to defend and hedge by saying "when I (or Tiago Forte) say pleasure, I'm not talking about stupid-hedonism, like just sex drugs rock and roll"; if we've ever talked about this, I've probably said this exact phrase to you; perhaps a way to put it from adrienne maree brown quoted here: "the idea is not to be in a heady state of ecstasy at all times, but rather to learn how to sense when something is good for you, to be able to feel what enough is.")

I've been wondering about this when traveling recently; traveling was hard, and I wanted more comfort. But when I'm home for too long and have too much comfort, that's not great either. I mean, obviously this is true with food and sex and stuff too. Walking that line of "enough" feels better in the long run.

"If you can never tell what makes you come alive, you can never take responsibility for yourself; you're always at the mercy of what you want to do, what you must do, what you should do - there's always some externally defined obligation."

Some of this feels like just the concept of creativity. Like, it's way harder to draw a dog than it is to just color in the lines of someone else's dog drawing. Or, it's way harder to draw something you like than it is to erase things you don't like, or to look at 10 pictures and throw out the 9 you don't like. But curating all the time is draining; creating often feels better afterward.

"The opposite of pleasure is not pain, it's dissociation. Just unhinging from any kind of sense."

I'm trying to just get to a place that is sustainable, that doesn't hurt. What would that be like? How would I know? I can keep increasing my bank account, but that doesn't even necessarily make me feel any better. I thought for a while I could keep increasing my meditative zen and that would just be Better, but that might not be true either. Living a happy life seems more like gardening than spreadsheeting or optimizing. (If this metaphor makes no sense, I will expand it in a future post.) Maybe the real thing is to keep learning what feels right (both to my body and my mind) and trying to get closer to that.

(On the other hand, this is appealing; not suffering sounds better than gritting your teeth and fighting through it. So maybe this is all confirming-what-I-want-to-be-true; maybe I'll wake up someday and realize I've been ineffective my whole life because I've been chasing this dream. But I think it's worth taking that chance.)


ok, enough pleasure, here's some pain, from around the internet:

A good recap of why Uber/Lyft are Bad. (and this doesn't even get into how crummy they treat their *ahem* employees!)

Scientists have been underestimating the pace of climate change. So like, A of all, Mitch McConnell Roger Ailes and Newt Gingrich have done all they can to destroy our future but will die pleasantly of old age before they have to face the consequences of their actions, yes we know, and sorry to pour more salt on that wound; but B of all, this is an interesting look into science communication. The emphasis on univocality and "conservativeness" is a thing I feel too: I really undersell stuff, because I don't want to be wrong. It's hard to build a career on "knowing stuff and being right all the time."

In that direction, Project Wren: make it easy to buy carbon offsets. I'm going so back and forth on A. whether this is good and/or B. whether I should do it. Speaking of "not being wrong", I am loathe to sign up and Be Wrong again, because:
- they're y combinator, and like, that means they *might* run a successful business, but they *might* just totally hose the whole thing and cause more harm than good, not that that ever happens with white people dumping money into Africa
- carbon offsets has been a scammy market in the past (sometimes maliciously scammy, sometimes ignorantly)
- shouldn't I be donating to bed nets instead?
BUT, all that said, it might be worth it for the purely selfish reason of making myself feel less guilty.
Eh. Anyone got some better climate-guilt-soothing donations?

On being "tough"

I kind of value being "tough", where that means some combination of "physically fit" and "able to tolerate discomfort."

Some people who are insanely "tough" would be, like, Shackleton or the guys in Meru. Some people who are more reasonable but still very "tough": probably Appalachian trail through-hikers, or your average mountaineer. Some people who are less tough than that but still tougher than me: more regular backcountry hikers, many-day cyclists, dirtbag backpackers.

Why do I value being "tough"? I think it is some combination of these:
1. I want to be able to do anything. Like, we just hiked the Inca trail; that was amazing but required a certain amount of "tough"ness. Similarly, I have had camping trips with friends I am now glad to know better; I am glad I didn't have to say "sorry, I'm out because I'm not "tough" enough."
2. I tend to admire people who are "tough"? Maybe this is just coincidence? Like, there are very many people who I like a lot who are not "tough." Besides, it's correlation at best.
3. I'm afraid of the life experience of being very non-"tough", or of being the average American. Like, the average American has diabetes and a job they hate. That doesn't sound fun. Maybe if I'm tough I can avoid that.
4. I'm afraid of being contemptible by being very non-"tough". Something like "you coddled rich American, you can't even do a hard day's work (or hike a thing or whatever) if you had to!"
5. I'm afraid of being "the wrong kind of nerd." Like, socially clueless, unkempt, unhealthy, without good skills, generally pitiable. (Being a math nerd, Magic player, computer gamer, etc, I have met many people like this.) "Tough"ness doesn't exempt you from being this but it does correlate negatively.
6. Maybe "tough" people are on to something! Like, runner's high, or some kind of peaceful sense from being in the woods. Usually when I'm in the woods I feel 10% beautiful-peaceful, 40% bored, and 50% tired/dirty. Maybe I can grow that 10%.

I think, of these reasons, I should do the following:
- try to jettison reasons #4 and #5; they are just insecurity and judgment, which are not cool for me or other people.
- worry less about #2. You meet who you meet, and I meet plenty of both "tough" people and "not-super-tough" people.
- worry less about #3; I think I will be fit and healthy enough regardless of whether I go camping often.
- be open to #1 and #6, and continue to do some "tough" things when the opportunity arises, but not go out of my way to prove a point.

I don't know what the sum of these changes looks like, but it's probably some kind of "trying to be kinder to myself for being exactly as "tough" as I am." Well, we are all growing, bit by bit.

Observations about Bolivia mostly

Ok now we have been through:
La Paz
A Salar de Uyuni (and beyond) tour
Copacabana and Isla del Sol and Luna
Puno, Peru

Some things I have noticed:
- a lot of dogs have jackets.
- menus have either two choices (local spots) or 500 (tourist spots). Both can be good or bad.
- ATMs in Bolivia are great; they give you lots of small change. In Peru so far they are terrible because they all seem to charge a 5% fee.
- prices for big things (cars, etc) are listed in USD. This doesn't make sense to me; is it just to avoid the sticker shock of "7000 bolivianos" and "1000 USD" sounds better?
- altitude sickness can happen even after a week or more. It can make migraines even worse! It can also manifest in weird ways, like making small problems seem like big problems.
- Bolivia seems entirely cool and very low tourist hassle. I remember seeing some map saying that Bolivia was one of the most foreigner-unfriendly countries, and in our experience that couldn't be further from the truth. Peru (well, Puno so far at least) seems like there are annoyingly more hawkers and touts.
- I find it hard to enjoy things when there's even a moderate amount of discomfort. Like, kinda-wet socks level of discomfort. I think this is a major weakness in my character.
- bathrooms have been great. They usually cost 1 or 2 (or 5) bolivianos ($1=7 Bs) but they are pretty clean.
- Llamas have long banana-shaped ears. Alpacas have short stubby ears and are softer and really just overall cuter. Vicuñas look like deer.

Altitude and cold are bad, teleféricos and airbnb experiences are great?

We are in La Paz, Bolivia!

1. Altitude and cold are bad.
We're at 10,000 ft, and nights get down to maybe the 30s, and central heating kinda isn't a thing? We've got a space heater. Anyway, I haven't really felt 100% the whole time I've been here, and it's gotta be that, right? Like, my stomach is just kinda not hungry for anything and when I do eat, it feels bad. Luckily, we're otherwise doing well.

When my stomach feels "ehh", it also makes me feel mentally "ehh", and I've had a couple of really sad moments so far. That's weird. Gives more evidence to the "depression is caused by feeling bad" hypothesis (as opposed to the "depression is caused by meaninglessness" hypothesis).

2. I think teleféricos are great?
There's gondolas! That go over the whole city! There are 10 lines and like 30 stops! That's how you can get around! It's so cool. And really genius for a city that's like a bunch of little islands between the mountains. They're pleasantly full but never seem to have lines. They cost Bs.3 = $0.50. Waiting for someone to tell me why "actually, they're bad", because they seem pretty great.

3. I think "Airbnb experiences" are great?
A guy named Javier was offering mountain bike tours, he had 30 references and positive reviews, so I went biking with him. It was also so cool. Like, he's just a guy, with a lot of biking-in-La-Paz experience; I could talk to him as a person, not a tour operator. Waiting for someone to tell me why "actually, this is bad" too; I would be less surprised because I'm sure the San Francisco Venture Capital machine will find a way to suck all the humanity out of it or destroy some other industry or whatever, but in the meantime it seems pretty great.

I'll show you photos later. Blogger's mobile app seems to have been made in 2009 and not updated since then, so I don't even know if I can add photos here. (Of course. The SFVC machine doesn't care about maintenance.)

The Dark Forest of the Internet

I feel this a lot. In short: the author (and many formerly-very-internetty people) are withdrawing from large swaths of the internet because those swaths are like being a gazelle out on the savannah: it's not safe and everyone is gunning for you.

In contrast, "dark forests" are "spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments."

I was going to say more but I realized after walking away from this for a while that all I was going to do is just say what the author was saying, but less polishedly. So, maybe I'll just say read that article instead.

Personally, I'm certainly doing this - much less interested in The Internet At Large, much more interested in small dark forests within the internet.

Continuing the series of "Dan notices more what's going on in his mind"

There's a low level hum in the background, basically always, telling me why I'm a Bad Person. Sometimes it's "remember that time in high school where you said that dumb thing" or "you yelled at a car person unnecessarily yesterday" or "global warming is happening and you're still flying 20,000 miles every year, you selfish ass" or whatever. Sometimes it's just a kinda bad feeling without much content around it.

I always used to think that this was because I was judgmental towards other people. Like, I won't tolerate it if someone parks in the bike lane for 5 seconds; I think their car should be immediately impounded and their license revoked, and when they get to the Pearly Gates, St Peter sends them to Purgatory for an extra 1000 years. Therefore, if I commit a traffic violation that's approximately that bad, that shows that I am an equally awful person, in the grand scheme of things, and a hypocrite to boot. I judge other people, and then because of that I also judge myself.

But I had an interesting conversation today where someone suggested maybe it was the other way around. Like, I judge myself, and then because of that I also judge other people.

This has some interesting implications for how to address it. I kinda always thought "I better be nicer to other people, and eventually if I send enough love out into the universe, it might reach that judgmental voice in myself too." But maybe instead I ought to just start by being nicer to myself.

"Logical Mind"

(Mannn I wish I had a better title for this. The point of it, though, is that I'm trying to define an internal concept, so I guess of course naming is hard.)

There are a lot of voices in anyone's head. (talking non-schizophrenic, not-actual-voices "voices" here.) This is obvious when you do something as simple as decide whether to eat a cake: "I want to eat it, but I also don't want to feel too full later or gain weight." There's a real powerful voice that gets a lot of airtime in my head. Let's call it "logical mind" for now (though I might actually just mean "ego" or Kahneman's "System 2", not sure).

Here are some characteristics of Logical Mind:

- it's always looking for problems to solve, and solving them.

- it loves quick answers; it's not patient. 

- it really dislikes things it can't solve.

- it loves saying no and reducing things to a size it can think about

- it loves not having to think about things.

- it's defensive, and hates possibly being wrong.

- it's judgmental and snobby.

(These might not be totally independent vectors. Probably if you dimensionality-reduced it, you'd end up with 3 main dimensions: 1. knowing what you can do with computers, but 2. not having much RAM or processing power; 3. hating being wrong.)

Logical Mind seems like a fine tool to have, a fine voice. But it's troublesome when it runs the whole show all the time. Here are some times it is troublesome:

1. when I don't have anything to do on a weekend, so I just clean stuff up for a while, and then invent more problems to "solve", and then end up mad that I wasted a whole day doing nothing

2. when I have a big mood, but I can't figure it out, so I just distract myself for a while; meanwhile the emotion sits there unprocessed and still messing with me

3. when I notice someone's (perhaps my own!) complex emotional issue, and decide "I know the answer, it's simple, so I should not bother being compassionate with them."

4. when I don't have a super well-formed opinion on something, so I default to "it's bad" to protect myself from being wrong.

5. when I start trying to learn something, find it difficult, and then quit, because in theory it should be way easier.

6. when I think about doing a potentially-fun thing that requires some work to do, and I decide, well... fun thing requires maybe -10 amount of work, and somewhere between I dunno +0 and +30 amount of fun, that's too hard to evaluate, I will not do it.

7. when I'm on vacation or something and I can't just sit still and stop trying to find or solve problems.

8. when I've got some mild discomfort, but I have to fix it, I can't just let it be.

9. when I am debating something that I've already figured out, and I can't tolerate the complexity of the debate because I am Right, dammit

10. when someone does something wrong, and I think "this absolute horrible human, how could they possibly have gotten it wrong, it is so obvious and unquestionable that I am right here."

It is hard to listen to Logical Mind all the time, mostly because it continually points out what is wrong, and therefore focuses you on it. When Logical Mind is in charge, there isn't even a concept of "enjoyment" or "meaning" or "wonder" or "joy", there's just "things are broken and I feel bad" or "nothing seems to be broken right now so I don't feel so bad." It would be nice, I think, if Logical Mind were a bit player I could pull out when I wanted, instead of the captain who's usually steering the ship. So, that is a thing I'm trying to work on.

edit: this very appropriate comic just happened to come up today

Enjoyment

... is a thing I'm trying to focus on more. Some scattered thoughts about it:

Someone gave me a book on alchemy, and after rolling my eyes, I had a read. It was only like 50 pages. The first few pages are dedicated to explaining how alchemy isn't really about "lead -> gold"; it's about becoming a whole/purified/fulfilled human.

Chapter 2 is about what we do when we waste time. What we do for its own sake. Some kind of argument about how that is how we become divine. (Catholics, the author gives a shout out to the Mass as performed by monks for themselves. My opposition to the mass was always that there is no point. The monks would agree that there is no point, and yet that would be why they like doing it.)

Ok, well. I've been feeling a bit joyless recently, and so I guess it's a good idea to tune into that part of the brain. Like, if you're trying to learn to play music, or maybe to write music, you try to listen to what sounds right sometimes and amplify that. If you're trying to be a good chef, you have to pay attention to what tastes right. You can't really notice it if you're not even listening or tasting. So I guess if you're trying to exist in our modern world, you try to listen to what feels right.

One useful framing to me is, "would I do that again?" Like just looking out over the last minute or hour or day and say, "if I had a time machine and could go experience that again, would I?" If the answer is yes, then you just enjoyed something! (This sounds like the most basic thing in the world, maybe, but uh... I'm kind of an alien sometimes? This thought experiment helps me untangle things like "well... it's good for me, I guess" or "well, I got paid" - if you'd go back in the time machine, and redo it for no other reason than to experience it again, that's enjoyment! Everything else is a different thing!)

Anyway, it's tough, though! Especially if you keep looking back and going "nope, not that; not that either; hmm, hasn't been anything for the past few days really." It's like writing a bunch of bad music in a row, I guess, or tasting a bunch of bad food. You begin to doubt your ability to write/cook.

Some examples:

Video games, primarily Slay the Spire. I have enjoyed this quite a lot! However, two problems. One is that it gets me in this amped up achieving-things state. Another is that, if I lose, it gets me in this amped-up kinda angry state! The whole thing is usually a net positive, though, so I'd say I enjoy this.

Biking. This is a mixed bag. I enjoy going fast; sometimes it feels really nice. Sometimes I get nice endorphins too. Sometimes I see nice scenery. Sometimes it hurts a lot and I just want to get home. On the whole, I'd usually say I enjoy this.

Flitting through the internet. I ... don't know. Sometimes I love it, usually involving weird humor. Sometimes I'll have wasted some time and feel kind of strung out.

Meditating. I'm starting to, sometimes, occasionally, enjoy this. It's far from a thing I'm looking forward to, but I can see how it could become that.

Note that this is different from the question of "should I do X?" This is a separate question from "did I enjoy X?" Right now I'm just sharpening the enjoyment sense. More like "did that food taste good?" than "should I eat that food?"

Also note that there are a few levels of granularity. It might be worthwhile for me to notice, not just "did I enjoy this whole bike trip", but "did I enjoy the last 5 minutes in the middle of this bike trip."

Tryna slow down a bit, kinda

This blog is real interesting for self reflection. I recently noticed that I started a post in early March that looked like this:

"I've been feeling energized. One thing is, I've recently been traveling; that often tends to energize me. I'm doing a project at work that's more execution and less deep thinking and that's kind of energizing; it's within what I feel like I can do.
I'm feeling more connected to music and stuff than usual. Like, I feel like I want to *make art*, despite the fact that I have zero experience actually making art, and whenever I give myself a large chunk of unstructured time, I can't say that I do amazing things with it."

This is no longer the case, and I forgot that it even happened, and so recently! Though I do now remember it; it was busy and only pleasant in a kinda hyped up way. Plus, said work project became kinda a bummer, but then finished, so I'm feeling some sense of accomplishment and relief, but mostly just glad to be done with it.

These days, well. For the last couple years, I've been working with at least one professional, often two, sometimes even more, that kinda... help me be a person? Currently it's therapist J and meditation teacher K. It changes sometimes, often with moves, but sometimes otherwise too. It's nice to have a couple outside perspectives, and it's extra nice when they converge.

Recent convergence I've been summing up as "think less, feel more." Step 0 of getting good at meditating seems to involve being able to switch between the fast, feeling system and the slow, focused System 2 thinking system. Living in the present, not worrying about the future; applying your awareness like a floodlight, not a laser; being, not accomplishing.

This essay about "bandwidth" feels relevant. Quote:
"Personal "bandwidth" implies that we must move through the world like machines; and that experience is, to use a different metaphor, something that we need to process, and process, and, process, up until we hit some kind of capacity."
And that's what I've been doing: optimizing for processing the most information, basically. Or for churning through the most tasks on a list.

So, I don't know how relevant it is, but I've been trying to stop thinking about myself as an information processor. Some ways:
- sleeping more (because what do I have to do so late, anyway?)
- listening to podcasts almost entirely
- playing Pokemon go, finally. It wasn't even fun anymore! It was just a way to spend every spare 30 seconds accomplishing something!

Some things that have made this hard:
- Slay the Spire is a great new video game that I like a lot, and I kinda want to spend all my time playing it. I can't decide if this is Good (because I'm doing something I like!) or Bad (because I sure do feel like a computer while I'm doing it).
- I mean, work and stuff; there's kind of a lot of things you need to do just to exist. Work, errands, appointments, etc.

It's a thing I'm thinking about now, anyway.

Regularly scheduled roundup of the world being awful, counting-things edition

"Why data science is a profound threat for queer people."

Where "queer" here could also be expanded to include "anything non-standard." And where "data science" is defined as "The quantitative analysis of large amounts of data for the purpose of decision-making", and later as "The inhumane reduction of humanity down to what can be counted."

A couple quotes:

"Data science as currently constituted:

• provides new tools for state and corporate control and surveillance
• discursively (and recursively) demands more participation in those tools when it fails
• communicates through its control universalized views of what humans can be and locks us into those views."

"Let’s look at a common example of what "administrative violence" looks like and what it does. Suppose you want to update the name and gender associated with your mobile phone: You go in, and the company says that you need a legal ID that matches the new name and gender. So you go off to the government and say, Hey, can I have a new ID? And they say, Well, only if you’re officially trans. So you go off to a doctor and say, Hey, can I have a letter confirming I’m trans? And the doctor says, Well, you need symptoms X, Y, and Z. And then when you do this, and jump through all that gatekeeping, everything breaks because suddenly the name your bank account is associated with no longer exists. You attempted to conform, and you still got screwed."

Arguably, borders have always been this way. (a recent guide from British Columbia about what to do if cops want to search your phone/computer; though it's not actually helpful as much as depressing.) Classrooms haven't been. (aughh!) Consumer devices haven't been. From that (and we're taking a turn here away from quantification and into centralization):

"platforms have also been able to expand rentier relations in ways that enclose everyday things. The key technology of enclosure is the software license, which allows the new rentiers to claim ownership over the software embedded in and data emanating from increasingly more physical things that we use in our daily lives."

"By integrating what were once ordinary objects into the internet of things, companies are able to enact a form of micro-enclosure in which they retain ownership over the digital part of a physical thing - and the right to access, control, and shut off the software - even after you purchase it"

"Nobody would look at the dynamic between landlords and tenants and say, "Yep, I’m happy to apply that to my entire life." Yet that is what’s happening when we accept, or don’t resist, the expansion of extraction-as-a-service."

How to cope:

I don't know! I guess it's like with terrorism or malaria or all sorts of other problems: we realize that the rise of Brazil is a problem somewhere in the world, but we can only do what we can do, so we keep trying to do that and etc etc.

The main thing that gives me hope is that this stuff just doesn't work. It's easy to not buy smart toasters. Most schools with "smart devices" soon realize they don't work, or there's a software update that breaks them or something, and they collect dust. (citation needed.)

(But as you can probably tell, this is a delay at best, and indeed I'm not feeling so terribly hopeful overall.)

Related: 

the "coming AI autumn" which, honestly, can't come soon enough.
Somewhat related: how to actually tell if someone online is fake; should be a required test before you're allowed to post or retweet or interact with anything anywhere on the internet; tongue sort of in cheek.

Doing something from strength or weakness

There's this email that some rando sent to a webcomic artist that I like. Here's the tweet. Transcription because the internet doesn't last:

Tweet from @TinySnekComics:

I don't think I ever shared this but I just wanted to grace the world with the greatest/worst unsolicited email I've ever received

Email contents:

Hello,

I don't know you, just stumbled on your comic. I like the artwork itself, it has a style that's enjoyable and cute.

After reading one comic after another, I didn't feel any of them were funny.

DON'T give up, I would like to see you get better.

Consider spending more time on the writing itself or team up with a writer or comedian to make your comic reach its potential.

Sincerely,

someone who wishes you the best.

(end transcription)

I think Someone Who Wishes You The Best (hereafter SWWYTB) really thinks they're doing the right thing. They think that by contorting their words enough, they can make their message "nice." (I base this opinion on years of thinking that myself as a child.)

This has been coming up a lot recently, and I don't know why. So many instances of people feeling X, doing Y negative thing, and trying to justify it as "actually trying to do good." (Hell, I do this too. See: righteous fury in the bike lane.)

It's possible to offer constructive criticism, of course! It just would look different than this. So obviously SWWYTB is giving unwanted criticism (negative thing) and bending themself into knots in order to say "but no, I'm doing an ok thing." I imagine it's redirected from some other part of life that's not feeling good.

(Maybe relatedly: procrastination as emotion management.)

Not quite relatedly: a friend recently described Mr. Rogers as being so effective because he was one of the few people to recognize publicly that children have emotions as complex and valid as adults, they just sometimes can't express them quite right, and kids (or anyone!) love being validated like that. I love that characterization. Maybe Mr. Rogers came to mind because he would be the kind of person who could offer constructive criticism, if he knew it was warranted and wanted, and it would be taken well.

So how do we distinguish between SWWYTB and Mr. Rogers? I'm tempted to say Mr. Rogers would be doing the thing (offering feedback or whatever) from a place of strength, while SWWYTB writes this from a place of weakness. Someone else recently described a similar thing as "it's from a place of integrity." Either way it sounds like hippie talk, but I don't know a better way to say it, and it would be a valuable shorthand: "look, he's arguing with you about X, but it's really just place-of-weakness." It would make it easier for the people who are not place-of-weaknessing; it might in rare cases even make it easier for people who are place-of-weaknessing!

"The Jungle" in games

Richard Garfield at one point talked about a part of Magic he loved, and that filtered into why he made Keyforge. It was this sense of being in "the jungle" - that you were all exploring the space in the game together, and you didn't all have it figured out. It keeps coming up for me: this is maybe the thing I love most in games.

Things that are "the jungle":

- printing some plain old busted cards like Black Lotus or Ancestral Recall because, what the heck, nobody will have more than one or two of them anyway.
- a weird mixed lore, like the early cards that had quotes from Coleridge, Shakespeare, and the 1001 Arabian Nights, in addition to Urza and Mishra. (Urza and Mishra were characters created in the Magic universe.)
- diverse art, like a world where Stasis and Chaos Orb existed alongside Shivan Dragon and Serra Angel
- every so often running into cards you've never seen
- every so often running into decks you've never seen. Full English Breakfast was a revelation to me. (non magic player note: this was a wacky deck that incorporated a few cards into a ridiculous combo that could win the game out of nowhere)
- uses for cards you've never seen (see: /r/badmtgcombos)
- chaos drafts. This is where you "draft" (start with a random pool of cards, take turns selecting cards, and build your deck out of those cards) with a bunch of random packs from Magic's past. (usually, when drafting, you all use the same type of pack, which means you can kind of "metagame" because you have a pretty good idea of what cards everyone's going to get.)

Things that are the opposite of "the jungle":

- metagames. Knowing that probably 30% of people are going to be playing Deck A while 20% are playing Deck B, so even if your Deck C is great, you shouldn't play it if it does poorly against Decks A and B.
- honestly, high-level constructed competition. It's going to be really hard to create a competitive scene without metagames. (maybe, "high-level competition" at all.)
- most strategic board games. These games feel "Spikey" - like you all know what are the moves you _can_ make, and you only win if you happen to exactly judge when to make the right moves.
- winning by slivers. Poker is not "the jungle", because you can only win by grinding out a 1% edge over the competition, over and over again. In "jungley" games, you usually win or lose big.

Games that feel jungley to me:

ok yes Keyforge, Spelunkey, "Would You Rather" driven by @wyr_bot, Drawful, Dominion, Ascension, Betrayal at the house on the hill, D&D, Bughouse, most passive games like Antimatter Dimensions, most computer RPGs, Minecraft

Games that do not feel jungley:

Agricola, Settlers, Eclipse, chess, most FPS games like Halo

Games that feel jungley when you're playing at home but not in competitions:

Magic, Smash Bros, RTS games like Starcraft, Dominion

I wonder what Magic player archetype this makes me. I guess Timmy, because I like playing in order to feel the excitement of "what a cool card!" or "what a great play!" With a touch of Vorthos (cool flavor is cool) and Jonny (I like expressing myself through my play)

y'all middle class: many of your favorite things depend on constrained environments, they're gonna get worse, and that's ok

Things are expensive

Skiing is way more expensive than it used to be.
Anecdote: I recently went to Heavenly in Lake Tahoe. The rack rate for a 1-day lift ticket is something like $160. 1-day ski rentals were $59 from the resort. And it was crowded as anything, from the 20-minute lift lines to the 2-hour wait for a shuttle back home.
Mitigating factors and more accurate comparisons: we should compare Heavenly's $160 to the $60-80 in Breckenridge/Keystone/ABasin ~10 years ago; we should compare the old days' $10 rentals to the $30 in-town rentals.

Going to a pro sports game is way more expensive than it used to be.
Anecdote: Friends and I went to a Golden State Warriors game last year. For the uppermost-deck tickets, on a random Wednesday, it was $120.
Mitigating factors and better comparisons: basketball always costs a little more than baseball; the Warriors are better than the Cavs were 8 years ago and even than the Indians 20 years ago; lots of people in SF and the Bay have money.

Traffic is worse than it used to be.
Anecdote: I dunno, it is, right?

Fancy College (defined as "going to a school with a good name") is crazy more expensive than it used to be, and we've even got data for that.

I remember enjoying these things as a child in a comfortable professional family 20 years ago. What's changing? Granted, a ton is changing, but I think one big factor is that the "Middle Class" is growing a lot. (the definition of "middle class" depends on the circumstances.)

The "sports-going middle class" that can afford sports games is growing a lot. The "skiing middle class" is growing a lot. The "driving middle class" is growing a lot, and certainly the "fancy college middle class" is growing like crazy (especially internationally!)

However, the supply of these things isn't growing as much. There have not been many new sports teams or amazing ski areas. You can't build enough roads to adequately compensate for traffic. And you can't "build more fancy colleges" very easily; sure, you could start Angry Dan's Angry University, but until people start recognizing ADAU as a good school, it won't be considered a decent substitute for Harvard/Yale/MIT/Whatever.

This is good!

This probably feels bad if you were used to being in the Sports-Going or Driving or Fancy-College Middle Class. But this reflects the weird fact that we used to have this huge underclass that wasn't able to do these things. Now that underclass is a little smaller and the "Middle Class" is a little bigger. This is good.

What should we do, given this?

- for some things (fancy colleges), we should try whatever we can to increase supply. This probably means starting to accept colleges that aren't Harvard/Yale/MIT as "top tier", and increasing the quality of all of them at every level. I notice this starting to happen. I think if I were a Corporate Executive, I could probably hire a ton of great people by just recruiting heavily at "second tier" universities.
- for some things (cars), we should try to reduce demand. Tax cars until they remain a luxury for the rich, and give the Middle Class some kind of public transit that lets them live an equivalently good life.
- for the other things... I don't know, up to you, but I'm certainly going to look for more and more ways that I can get entertainment that don't depend on a scarce asset like sports or skiing.

Side note

So many luxuries are only luxuries based on other people not having them! This is so f'ed! I write this from an airport lounge, which is literally just this: pay us (or get a certain credit card? which is obv the route I took) and we can get you away from the riffraff. (plus free beer.)

Anyway this particular subset of luxuries is completely destined to fail and/or increase prices spectacularly as more people can afford them, so don't get too comfortable :P

Glassdoor, uMap, morality, privacy, Pandas

Glassdoor ratings widely gamed; another instance of Pearson's Law (or Drucker's or Kelvin's or whatever): "what gets measured, gets managed." I know that Glassdoor got kinda useless for me when picking a job. Oh well. Maybe we should call this "Yelp's Law," after the review site that has similarly become useless.

Anyone used uMap? I so much want a very simple "put a few dots and maybe polygons on a map and share it" tool. I've used Google My Maps before, but: A. it's such a UI mess; is it part of google maps or not? how do I just *get to my map that I made*?, B. it's on google, C. it loads slow.

7 parts of morality from a study by Oliver Scott Curry and Et Al, cross culturally: family values, group loyalty, reciprocity, bravery, respect, fairness, property rights. Compare to Haidt's care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity. I guess we have (Haidt on left, Curry on right):
care (harm reduction) = ?
fairness = fairness + reciprocity + property rights
loyalty = group loyalty + respect
authority = family values + respect + property rights
sanctity = ?
? = bravery
Now, they're probably looking at subtly different things. Also, I'm disinclined to take either of them too seriously.

Privacy is a commons. YES. I do feel worried by ideas like Newsom/Steyer's idea that you should get a cut of the proceeds from Facegoogapplezon - feels like, if that comes to pass, Facebook will pay $7/user (so, $7 or 14B; vs Facebook's $460B market cap, it's a chunk but not a company-killing one) and just keep doing the same ol' nonsense. The analogy to votes is spot on. We don't let you sell your vote, because that corrupts democracy for all of us; we shouldn't let you "sell your data", because that corrupts privacy for all of us. (Also, what the hell does "sell your data" even mean!)

Minimally sufficient Pandas. I feel like especially deduping "pivot", "pivot_table", "crosstab", "melt", "stack", "unpivot", "unstack", "reshape" would be helpful to my state of mind and fluency when dealing with all these things. I often think "I need to make my data look like this: ___" and then google around for a while and settle on one of the above verbs.
I was getting closer to this with dplyr in R! That ecosystem seems like it will get you to think in sane ways. But then I mostly quit using R :-/

Less Wrong and Rationalists and etc; Sabbathing and Act Two of your life

Ok so years ago I first stumbled upon the Less Wrong world and I was very turned off because it all seemed like so much navel gazing. It was also 30 year old nerds, talking about the world as it appears to 30 year old nerds, to other 30 year old nerds. I was afraid to spend all this time hanging out with 30 year old nerds, out of fear that I'd become a basement-dwelling forever-alone m'lady fedora troll.

Since then, I've realized a few things:
- ok I am a 30 year old nerd.
- this is not so bad. Being a 30 year old nerd, and indeed hanging out with other 30 year old nerds, doesn't automatically turn you into a troll.
- the downside is not the "nerd" as much as the fact that so many of them are 30, white, American, richish, and male. This can warp your perception of the world a lot. Maybe don't draw so many conclusions about how The World works based on the opinions of 30 year old rich white male nerds.
- however, it can be good to draw conclusions about how your world works for you based on the experiences and thoughts of many people who are like you. As a result, this community is more useful to me than I had first thought.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky is maybe the first name you'll read on Less Wrong stuff, and he is IMO on the dense and navel-gazey end and therefore maybe not a great introduction.
- Scott Alexander is maybe the second name you'll see a lot, and I find his stuff much more approachable. I don't know how dude's so prolific. Not to say he's always right, but he's usually got a lot interesting to say.
- like me, most of the bloggers in this world write 90% chaff, so it takes a little bit of picking through the noise. But unlike me, every so often they write some gems.

Like these two on Slack (concept, not chat app) and Sabbath Harder:
"If something like the Orthodox Sabbath seems impossibly hard, or if you try to keep it but end up breaking it every week - as my Reform Jewish family did - then you should consider that perhaps, despite the propaganda of the palliatives, you are in a permanent state of emergency. This is not okay. You are not doing okay."

Or, is Venkatesh Rao (Immortality Begins at 40 and The Key to Act Two) the blogger that I need to be reading in my 30s, or is he completely insane?
Similarly, and more concretely (thus less woo): on Wordpress and the lack of blogs anymore.

Anyway, I'd love to discuss any of these posts if you read them too.

Househusbands

The title of this article is clickbait but it's a pretty good argument for househusbands.

(note: the article talks about "housewives." I'm instead saying "househusbands" because:

- makes you think for a second, I guess

- makes me sound not totally backwards and reactionary when I talk about this

- also avoids the common-knowledge problem with "housewives": the author knows she's not totally backwards and reactionary. I know the author's not totally backwards and reactionary. The author knows that I know she's not totally backwards and reactionary. I know that the author knows that I know etc etc. But each of these steps we have to make sure we're clear on; if we just avoid the term, we can stop doing all this work.

- uh and maybe if we use the term "housewives" we're more likely to slip back into backwards and reactionary modes of thinking accidentally

- "househusbands" works as well as "housewives"

- but like I'm not gonna fight you if you say "housewives", whatever, gosh; so long as you don't accidentally or purposefully slip into backwards and reactionary modes of thinking)

Premise: Life today is pretty mentally taxing. Maybe if you're a married couple, one of you staying home might help you manage the stupid taxingness of modern life.

Point 1: Life today is very mentally taxing.

There seem to be uncatalogably infinite challenges. Some recent ones include "how do I manage these stock options" (cry me a river, I know, but they can actually create more hardship than they're worth if you're not careful and very unlucky), "I gotta fill out this form for my therapist", "we have to get someone to watch our cat", "I have to pester my landlord to fix our washing machine", "I have to pester my landlord to get someone to check on my old neighbor so he doesn't get bedbugs again", "I have to figure out how to get my bike to a shop so they can fix a flat tire", etc etc.

Meanwhile I would like to do some things like cook food and see my friends sometimes. This might be more practical than it seems; if I don't do those things then I am less able, not more, to manage all the dumb stock options and stuff.

And this is before kids!

Counterpoint: "Dan, just simplify"

Counter-counterpoint: I agree that many of these are brought on by life-as-career-tech-person-in-SF, and that kind of life is not very simple. However, it seems to be the simplest life that at-least-somewhat fulfills me right now. Other options include independent working (oof!), startupping (double oof!) and academicizing (nevermind!). None of these are simpler. My backup coffeeshop plan sounds nice, but I'd actually probably be bad at that, and once I jump off the tech-career track it'd be hard to get back on. (And being poor in the US suuucks, so I am trying to Make That Money now in order to prevent that happening.)

Point 2: you kiiinda might need a full-time (or at least part-time) house manager, or else you'll both be exhausted all the time.

I guess this doesn't need much explanation, but I do find Tati and me both working Monday-Friday, then doing *tasks* all Sunday, leaving much less time to refill and be myself than I'd like.

Where does this leave us? I guess in the future, especially post kids, it'd be really nice to trade off the full time career life. It'd be good to be able to say, I'm gonna work part time for a few years, and also do all the *tasks*, and that will still leave us plenty of time to be humans.

But like I said, that doesn't feel fulfilling now! Argh. Well, hopefully that will change.

Extra rant: If I ask someone to do a thing, why is it still my responsibility to make sure they don't just forget it forever? Argh! I don't expect everyone to do everything that I ask, but even simply responding to my email/text with "no" would be so helpful! Ok, whatever, life is stressful.

Low pass filters

"We've gotta keep this traffic flowing and accept a little sin" - Cake

Nerd Rage: when you get mad at something that is Definitely Wrong, but not at all important. I am inspired/annoyed/awed by a guy I used to vaguely know at Google who would send you whole changelists/pull requests that were just him correcting your whitespace, irrelevant punctuation, 80-char lines, and other code style/lint issues. He was right, but I dunno, pretty annoying about the whole thing. Nerd rage comes up more often, but I don't have as good examples of it.
Etymology of this term: I made it up.

See also related terms: Bikeshedding, Yak shaving. (Did you know that was named after a Ren and Stimpy episode?) Bikeshedding and Yak shaving are mostly the same, minus the rage.

Well-Actually: someone says something that is technically true but irrelevant. The worst case of it is when you just want to sound smart. A more forgivable, but still bad, case is when you don't realize that you're adding more information that isn't helpful here because you're not skillful enough to realize that's what you're doing.

Righteous fury: (this doesn't really need definition but I can't break the format now.)

Low pass filter: a filter that lets low frequencies through but cuts off high frequencies.

Nerd raging usually doesn't feel good when you're doing it. Righteous fury, or righteous-fury-filled nerd rage, feels good when you're doing it, but feels bad as soon as it's over. Bikeshedding and yak shaving don't really feel good when you look back on the time you spent doing it. Well-actuallying doesn't feel good when you've developed enough social awareness to realize that you're well-actuallying. Life's easier with a well-tuned mental/emotional low-pass filter.

(I'm not sure if "high pass filter" would have made this work better. I'm thinking, cut out pops and hisses, right? Hmm, sorry, filter doesn't let me care about this :P

So, there we go! Just stop worrying about small stuff, right? Like cars parking in the bike lane, or whether an online game could be 1% better! Of course, this is easier said than done. But as a general principle, I think: if Calm You thinks something is not a big deal, then anything you can do to make Angry You care less about it is probably in the right direction.

(If you want to be like Herodotus said about the ancient Persians, you could sub in "Sober You" for Calm You and "Drunk You" for Angry You.)

Animal Hot Springs and telling the story

Remember Neko Atsume (Cat Collector)?

That game was great! Put out some treats, have adorable kittens come visit, maybe take pictures of them if you want. And that's about it. I think the cats give you fish, and you can spend that on new cat toys.

I recently was linked to a knockoff called Animal Hot Springs. I started playing it, and thought it was great! Animals come in to a hot springs, they ask for stuff like a drink or a towel, you drag it to them, and they give you acorns. You then spend the acorns on new hot springs gear.

This eventually became less fun. Dragging the stuff to the animals was not so fun. Hoarding acorns was not so fun. Sometimes you had the option to watch ads to speed up your progress. (I think Richard Garfield would be displeased.) Most of the ads were for other crummy games, like match-3 clones and Farmville knockoffs.

Why was it less fun? I don't know, I guess it was just less tuned. I felt like I had to grind for a long time. Plus, the basic loop of "drag food to animal" was less fun than the basic loop of "look at kitties." Oh, and the ads.

Anyway, it seems very psychically helpful to tell stories of things that happen to you. (See also: recent bike guy story.) In this case, it's not just "I'm an idiot who played a junky game", it's an opportunity to wax philosophical about what did and didn't work about that game. (And to marvel at how silly it is that I didn't like that but I'm now playing Antimatter Dimensions, aka the most recent Number-go-up game.)

And this blog is one way I do this. In a space that's mostly psychologically safe (somehow, despite being on the internet); that is, where I know that if anyone's listening, they're probably friendly. Thank you for making it so!

On mystery hunt, and doing things you really quite like

I got a chance to join the MIT Mystery Hunt with a friend's team this past weekend. This is one of the biggest puzzle-hunt events, open to anyone and drawing in a crowd of a couple thousand to Boston every January. I was a little worried that I couldn't hack it; looking at a couple puzzles last year, I solved zero of them. I was also worried about the group coordination - I get kinda nervous when I'm trying to solve a thing with other people all at once. (Pair programming, for example, I find pretty challenging.) I was excited because, well, when puzzling is good, it's great.

And this was great! I met a few new friends (the 4 of us who represented the team out here in SF), and mostly sat around in a room puzzling all day. It feels like, I think, if you're a runner and you go for a nice long run, or if you're a real strongman and you go weightlifting. (ok, maybe not quite that good. (audio NSFW.)) Time really melts away, and you're just there trying to think about this weird thing from 12 different angles, until finally you get it, and then you feel like pumping your fist and dancing around like Coach.

I solved, I think, wholly or partially, 6 puzzles. I hesitate to even say this because:
- count of trophies is kinda not the point
- wouldn't really want this to become even a friendly competition
- don't want to dissuade anyone reading this who can't solve even one
But I like to have it out there as a metric to measure myself against, I think. In the same way that runners track their PRs, I can track my progress in terms of Mystery Hunt puzzles solved.

The puzzles, too, were great. Mystery Hunt puzzles seem to be a notch above puzzles in e.g. the Microsoft College Puzzle Challenge. Like, stack 3 MSCPC puzzles together, and you get one Mystery Hunt puzzle. Before I thought I was just too dumb to solve MH puzzles; turns out you just have to stick with them longer.

Coordination turned out to be great. I could mostly grab a puzzle and go into my little world, which I like. Sometimes I'd get stuck on a thing and then I could ask my 3 fellow puzzlers, and we'd brainstorm together for a minute. Sometimes I'd get really stuck and then I'd just abandon the puzzle; with our sweet Google Docs synchronization, someone else could pick it up.

Anyway, I think it's valuable to do things you really like. I'm happy to have found a way to do a new one, and am looking forward to continuing to puzzle more.

In which I meet another David Tennant wannabe, but he's a big jerk.

Previously in the "Dan is mad at bike lane parkers" saga.

I've moved on to Tactic 8: I bought some nametag stickers and wrote on them "I parked in a bike lane", and have stuck them on a couple cars that are in bike lanes. A change to what I proposed before: these stickers are not bumper stickers, they are harmless and easily removed; the goal is to either spark people to think about it (not likely) or to give them 5 seconds of annoyance as a penalty for doing a slightly annoying thing.

On Wednesday, I try Tactic 5a: stopping in front of a parked car, and kind of waving "hey, can you move out of the bike lane?" (this has been somewhat effective, really!) The driver, a ~30 year old white man in an Audi unfortunately with a resemblance to David Tennant more striking than my own, waves "no." I go "come on, please?" He goes "nope!" So I put a sticker on the hood of his car.

Guy gets pissed, jumps out of car, pulls sticker off, and shoves me off my bike onto the ground. (I am unhurt.) We start yelling at each other, crowd gathers, etc. He's maintaining that I put the sticker on his car, he shoved me, so we're even. I think I said "you think so? want to let the cops settle that?" He says sure, call the cops. So I do.

A couple of other cyclists are going "come on, you two, just shake hands and make up, don't waste the cops' time." I coax a gritted-teeth apology out of him: "I'm sorry." "You're sorry for..." "For pushing you." "And for parking in the bike lane." "... uh, for double parking." "No, for parking in the bike lane."
These other bikers are pressuring me to shut up and accept his apology (as well as scolding me for stickering his car in the first place), so I do, and I ask the cops to cancel the call.

Guy and I then talk more, and I think "ah great, we're all calmed down, we might come to some mutual understanding!" Nope. He goes on to explain that it's just traffic, deal with it, dude. I'm saying "yeah, but this makes me swerve around you, which is dangerous, and this is exactly what a bike lane is trying to prevent." He says he doesn't care and is going to keep parking in bike lanes anyway. Eventually he goes "Look, I don't want to be having this conversation anymore. Have a good one." and climbs back in his impervious metal box.

I'm unimpressed with his... basically, his retraction of his apology! When I thought we might be cooling nerves and he might be realizing he's taken it too far... instead, turns out he's just saying what he really thinks now that he knows the cops won't actually show up. I call back the police and ask if there's anything we can do at this point. We did get his license plate, and it's in the incident report, so in fact yes, we can still file charges.

I go into the police office the next day to make a statement. I try to figure out what happens next - turns out it'd probably be that he'd get charged with misdemeanor battery (possible sentence: up to $2k fine and 6 months jail and/or probation), we'd both have to show up in court, and we see what happens. I decide to take the statement home and think about it.

So many thoughts at this point! And this is 3 days later. I think I've let them settle to where I can put them in order. (and post them publicly on the internet? *shrug*)

1. The primary feelings are anger and frustration because I feel somewhat powerless here, and because he "won."
2. What happens if I do file a report?
1. Probably nothing happens - the case gets dismissed somehow.
2. Maybe we both go in front of a judge and the judge says "you two play nice now, ok?" I would feel good that Dude was inconvenienced; I would feel shitty because he "won." He would continue being a terrible person.
3. Maybe the judge would convict him of this, and he would get a fine and/or probation. That'd be great. Maybe it'd be a "oh geez, I'm kind of a jerk" moment, and he'd clean up his act.
4. Maybe the judge convicts him, and he actually goes to jail! Uh, I would feel... kinda bad about this. Like, he's a rich white kid so I think he'd be ok, but... I dunno, this would feel disproportionate. (to be clear, if he was nonwhite, I probably would not have even bothered him in the first place and certainly would not call the cops on him!) However, the chance of this is (I hope!) miniscule.
5. Maaaybe I get hit with some fault of my own for putting a sticker on his car! I mean, who knows. He'd probably try to make a case that I was "menacing" him or something because I made physical contact with his precious Audi.
6. In any of these cases, I have to deal with it longer, and that exacts a logistical and emotional toll on me, which I could very easily not do. I mean, it's not like I have medical bills that he should pay for or something.
3. What happens if I don't file a report? Guy continues to be an ass. This is kind of a problem. I hate to let that guy continue to exist in the world. Probably he is not as much of an ass usually, but I do feel bad letting him be out there in the world and thinking that whatever he does is ok.
4. Hold up - this case is dumb as hell, right?
1. But remember, this is because of the shove, not the bike lane.
1. However! If there were no bike lane, I would shrug it off. Like, I start arguing with some guy at a bar and he shoves me - there's no way I'm filing a police report.
2. If there were no shove, I wouldn't even think about it either! As a result, this makes me think that I'm playing "gotcha" - the result is, "I tweaked you enough that you fought back, and now that I've got a concrete instance of you technically battering me (though I was totally fine) I'm going to take you down."
3. Why am I playing gotcha? Is this maybe a case of misdirected anger at other things in my life, surfacing as righteous fury at bike lane jerks?
5. Ok, but this whole bike lane fixation is dumb as hell and I should get on with my life, right?
1. Well, "grant me the courage to change what I can, the serenity to accept what I can't, and the wisdom to tell the difference, right? (see also: Ram's answer to my last post)
2. Which category does bike-lane-parking fall under? ... probably a "serenity to accept what I can't." Fighting bike lane parkers one by one is Not Very Effective.
3. But overall bike infrastructure is a "courage to change what I can." Organize lobby phonebank vote etc!
1. On the other hand, I hate doing this kind of work.
2. So maybe this is a "serenity to accept what I can't, while doing the normal background amount of courage like voting and donating and stuff."
3. Yeah, ok, I can deal with that. Based on the last point on #4 here, this might be just misdirection of anger from just the general stress of life.
6. Still, f this guy.
1. But: maybe I caught him on the worst day of his life, who knows.
2. If that is wishful thinking and he is always an ass, well... that tends to be its own reward, and it's ok if I don't accelerate it.
3. For my part, usually I've found the best thing to do with Very Unpleasant People is to just stay away from them forever, if possible.
7. F these other bikers too. Seriously: what the hell? Nattering on about "well, you shouldn't be stickering people's cars"... I have little patience for this sentiment of "the status quo is wrong but let's not make anyone upset ever." If someone is standing up for what's right, you take their side 100%.
8. I get why people don't report crimes sometimes. Not at all saying this is anywhere near the same magnitude as sexual assault survivors but I kinda get the feeling of "I think I have a 90%-solid case to hammer this terrible human, but that's not 100%; I might just get laughed out of the room; and this whole thing is embarrassing and it would just feel really bad to open it back up."
9. That said, all the cops I talked to were remarkably cool about this whole thing! I can imagine them rolling their eyes a lot at this case, but nobody did. The lady at the station who was helping me figure out what would happen in this case, particularly, seemed very adept at conflict resolution and interested in helping me sort through what I wanted out of it.
10. Finally, notice for a moment all the weirdness that the metal box of the car adds to this situation. He feels threatened when I touched his metal box. (probably because many metal-box-damages cost hundreds or thousands to fix.) He has the luxury to withdraw from any situation he doesn't like, into his metal box. The size of his metal box is the problem in the first place (a double parked bike/scooter/longboard/etc probably doesn't even impede anyone). So: electric cars, rentable cars, self-driving cars, Uber/Lyft cars, (fill in the blank) cars are no solution. As long as we are addicted to these metal boxes that take you out of your environment, we'll have drivers (or passengers) being obnoxious because of them.