reacting to posts by various internet nerds

"nerd" being of course entirely unjudgmental; I like some of these nerds and dislike others

seeing like a state

I keep meaning to, but I still haven't read this book. but this SSC review is pretty fun to read. similarly, this about warrens vs plazas. when you start seeing it, you see it everywhere: top down wants plazas, bottom up wants warrens. (when you work with computers, you want plazas: your data, your code, everything. but your data comes in in warrens. this is often what we mean by "data cleaning.")

speaking of states, ok, politics:

podcast with guest david shor

- measurement is really hard

- mostly super-engaged super-lefty people work on campaigns, while more centrist (for the US) people vote

- *sigh* I hear people on twitter gripe that we should go for big important ideas (m4a, defund the police, etc) but the more I hear from people who know politics it sounds like those are less successful because of what Shor talks about, which is a bummer because we really need most of the far left's big ideas. (again, this is "USA far left", which would get us in line with European centrists)

- side side gripe: I agree that ACAB is a terrible slogan if you wanna convert white people - they'll all think about the one cop they know and "that C isn't AB!" and "abolish the police" sounds radical too, sure. but how is "defund the police" so controversial? like, ... that could literally mean shrink the police by 99% or 1%. "centrists", seriously, if that's too radical for you, give me a slogan that means "maybe we should consider thinking about changing something please." or do you really not wanna consider changing anything please?

about meritocracy: obviously it's broken now. is it even worth striving for?

Callard argues that "achievement" (where we judge people) is different from "weight management" or "mental health" (where we don't judge people) because in weight/mental health, you can only screw up. If you're average, you're good; if you're off average in any direction, you're bad. Meanwhile, with achievement, if you're average, you're fine; if you're under average, that's bad; but you can be way over average and that'd be awesome.

 

I disagree with this premise. In mental health, you can also be average, below average, or way above average. Some people have ... just really great mental health. They're not just getting by, they're really flourishing and have extra love left over for everyone around them. And with weight - well, that's one narrow slice of "physical health", and it's not fair to compare a narrow thing like weight with a broad thing like "achievement." And in physical health, you have people who are average, people who are below average, and the LeBrons of the world who are just super fit.

 

Well... regardless, she ends up at a conclusion that I think I agree with: we should reward people for their triumphs and not blame people for their failures. This sounds great. The one question I have is: can we do that? As we celebrate wins, do we not also implicitly anti-celebrate the losses? I think she agrees that this is a big challenge.

techno-optimism

I am unimpressed! covid is like... sorta a techno-optimist success story, because we did a vaccine in a year. but that's because "make a vaccine" fits into a category that we're very good at: executing on a well-defined technological problem (that we've been sort of preparing for). everything else covid-related, we are botching pretty miserably. Most of the rest of the techno-solutions are like... not actually solving our big problems (lab meat, self-driving cars, VR), or not actually working (fusion, "AI" whatever that is). and the necessary ideas that are not "tech lab solving tech problem" (like Yglesias's "government guarantees to buy electric cars" or even just "immigrants are good") are political, and therefore stalled forever by our f'ed-up federal government.

meta-post

I'm not sure if doing this kind of post is serving me. I like collecting links and having a record of things I've thought at various times, but I don't know if it's worth the effort. I spend a couple hours collecting stuff I've read and it's kind of tiring, not a lot of fun, and I don't think I have any deep thoughts that are worth sharing.

best of twitter 2020

how to sum up this year? as usual, I maintain that twitter is good at one thing, and that is dumb jokes, and we have had plenty of time to scroll it this year, so it seems about right. here are some of the bests of 2020ish:

 

toots other people made that I love:

- the circular circular (god I'm still in awe of this one)

- wisemind (memes of the year)

- I sent youse two to whack that guy

- doctor doctor, gimme the news

- ganfield

- king's hand

- AI memes

- tell me why

- trump speech. joke: 5/10, execution 10/10

- "mother!" with david byrne songs

- gpt3 words

- jimi halloween

 

and because I'm vain, my toots that I'm proud of:

- the Big Challenges series

- Pagliacci footprints

- facebook core value or bruce willis movie

- I'm sorry Ms. Pac-Man (actually a reddit comment)

- alexander haroldhill

- the Kabpaulah and the mystery of Ron Sean

- up all night to bitbucket

- I am a free

- famous karls

- cartoonist retirement

expertise, football, covid, uh, wisemind

Expertise For Sale

Noe Valley still barely has a video store. Of course Netflix is basically putting them out of business. But that's a shame, because "loaning you the newest Avengers DVD" is only half their business, if that; half of it is recommending movies and having hard-to-find stuff. I want to pay people for the 2nd part, though; I want to give them $5 to just tell me what movie to watch.

This bartender started doing this on https://cocktailsforendtimes.com/. Tell her what you have and the kinds of things you like, and she sends you recipes using them. This requires pretty deep knowledge of drinks! I am happy to pay her for this. This is great.

 

Speaking of expertise, I would still pay for regular, customized, sports run-downs so I can keep up with a couple teams in like 5 min/week. Especially if they had a bit of:

Football for nerds

Scorigami, scoring just one point

y'all nerds: if you wanna Get Into Sports in order to talk with friends, family, SOs, whatever, read everything by Jon Bois. Including 17776 and 20020. (ok those won't help you talk sports. but they're great.) I wish I could talk more about the Browns and the Indians and college football and stuff when I see family, which brings us to:

Covid and travel worries

Actually, side note: I've seen very little actual advice about what to do if you get Covid. Here's a thread; bookmarking this for later, just in case.

 

Covid and travel worries: I feel like despite how much I evangelize Microcovid, I'm the only one I know who actually uses it. A lot of friends have canceled holiday trips. And that's great; collective risk reduction is cool. But I think it's a little out of proportion; your individual trip to see 2 family members at Christmas, say, can be pretty low risk. Ok, ok, I'm not gonna tell anyone I know how to weigh risks for them; I guess I'm just feeling defensive because I feel like I'm the only one still planning on traveling. I feel like I'm doing the equivalent of "still drinking water at restaurants in a drought", because your water glass is not the main thing causing a drought anyway. But I guess I'm still thinking about it because I'm afraid of getting called out! which leads to:

"Calling people in"

this has ... just always been a good idea? problem is, most people who are "against cancel culture" are ass-clowns. (indeed; I fear that y'know Ben Sh*piro is gonna link this article too and then I'm agreeing with ass-clowns!) this is because "cancel culture" means everything from canceling some kid who misspoke once, to canceling bill cosby, and of course some of these are bad and some are good. maybe I'll continue to steer clear of any conversation involving the words "cancel", "woke", "sjw", etc; usually the people on the "woke" side are right; yes there's a crummy edge where people don't realize that they're delighting in yelling at people for not being woke enough and not furthering justice and that's a real thing that should be fixed BUT the bigger problem here is our society is so unjust; this is exhausting, I need a dose of:

Gen-Z absurdity

I think there's something to this tweet. 2020 is messed up enough as a secure-enough 30-something; I can't imagine if I were growing up or trying to make my way in the world right now. This goofy-ass humor would totally resonate.

An example: #wisemind is the best thing on twitter 6 months ago. this is poetry. if there were a pulitzer for tweets it should go to dril; if there were one for memes I'd give it to jay dragon.

It's easy to look at this and see it as Dadaist post-war nihilism, but I don't think this is? Or at least, not in a bad way? It's flowering creativity, world-building using the tools we have available.

Swole, Smash, Dr

I should post more frequently, instead of waiting til I have 3 topics and posting 3 at once.

Getting Swole

I'm lifting weights again. Or rather, doing mostly bodyweight exercises in my apartment every other day. It's good. There seem to be 5 main benefits:

 

1. Number Go Up

I like seeing numbers go up in basically anything I do! When I started, doing like 3 dips was hard. Now I can do 3x15! When I started, doing 10 push-ups was hard, now I can do 3x20! And doing 3 pull ups used to be hard, now I can do more than 3x10.

(I recently completed a life goal, sort of! When I was ~20 I thought it'd be cool to do my age in pull ups. I never did, but now I can (... in 3 sets). That's cool.)

Numbers Go Up even more if you have barbells or dumbbells; alas, I don't right now.

2. Loss Of Any Kind Of Neuroses Around Food

I never had a ton of neuroses (I'm lucky to be a not-overweight man), but like... as a friend recently said, we live in the Bad Place, you know? So I was always a little bit like "I'd *like* to eat more but I *shouldn't*." Now I eat whatever I want! I sort of have a goal to gain ~5 lbs, I don't really care if it happens, but it means I really don't have to worry about it at all; I eat what I want. To be so self-regulating feels great.

3. General health

Yeah yeah this is probably good for me in the long term whatever

4. Actually You Sometimes Have To Lift Heavy Things

I used to think "why lift weights? I never lift heavy things." But actually I do! Moving furniture, cleaning things, carrying bike, and someday carrying small children. Making all that easier will be nice.

5. Looking A Little Better

One time like 7 years ago I joined a gym because I "should" (see point 3) and bought their intro package of 5 classes + a personal consultation or something. It was not a gym for swole bros, they were all kinds of alternative movement-based exercises and bodyweight exercises and stuff, it was probably pretty cool. But at one point the guy I had my consultation with was like "so... do you want to get big, or do you want to get strong?" and I was like "Strong! pff, who cares about how you look." And he was kinda subtly like "yeah, cool."

What I should have taken from that is, "this gym focuses on getting strong, not big. (not that they're exclusive at all; you'll probably get one as you get the other, to some extent.)"

What I did take from it is "I gave the Right Answer; wanting to look muscley is vain."

But you know what? Looking muscly is a little bit cool! I'm not gonna get all Schwarzenegger here, but I like looking at myself and thinking I have good muscles. It's not the whole picture, but y'know it's one benefit out of 5.

Smash

Super Smash Bros Melee was a game for Gamecube released in 2001. It was great, I played it in high school, it was great. But it's had a behind-the-scenes competitive scene for almost 20 years now, which is pretty incredible. Some documentaries if you find this as fascinating as I do:

The Smash Brothers

"there will never ever be another melee player like Hungrybox"

Metagame (haven't seen yet)

I saw a tournament in 2018 in Oakland. It was wild - there were hundreds of people there. (not knowing anything, I rooted for Hungrybox because I also "main" Jigglypuff ("main" meaning I played Puff in a tournament once, and was proud to only get 2-stocked)). I think that's like rooting for the Yankees. Whatever, he's kind of a heel, that's cool :D

I love this image - I think it's supposed to be Mew2King on the left and Mango on the right? For the record, when I'm playing games, I'm more like the guy on the right.

 

I get something out of watching it, in the way that I imagine a lot of people get about tennis or chess. Different players have different styles, sometimes you can see real particularly good moves that they did, it's real tense, etc.

uh but downside: it's super nerdy in a way that I'm not really happy about; gamers, y'know? It's the only community I've seen that's maybe even more uniformly male than Magic. The documentaries touch on this, but only briefly. to me, seems like the community is not toxic gamer shit, and has built some bridges between people of different races and backgrounds: cool! but, it does seem 95%+ men, and there's a decent amount of casual low-grade sexism and homophobia. That's not real compelling.

Dr

ok obv if anyone wants to use Dr and they've done the Thing We All Agree Lets You Use Dr and you tell them they shouldn't, then go to hell. But side thing I've wondered for years before it became a news item: should I start using Dr. more for myself? Should I list myself in Linkedin/etc as Dr. Dan Tasse? I never did because I thought it was vain and silly, but there's always that nagging doubt: "I should normalize calling myself Dr so that other less-privileged Drs can call themself Dr and thereby level the playing field." I wanna support women and minority Drs, but I think the idea of Dr in general is pretty dumb. How come you get a title for working 6 years in some career paths and not others?

 

Is the idea that Dr-achievements (phd/med/etc school) are harder than the corresponding other kinds of work you could be doing? ... maybe! grad school is tough. but geez, getting to change your name because you've "done a hard thing", we as a society are definitely gonna miscalibrate that one.

 

Is the idea that Dr-achievements are somehow Good for humanity and we should reward them? uh, I should give mine back, mine was "all this data seems cool but is pretty useless, I guess you could use it for this shitty feature if you're airbnb." (I still cringe about parts of that thesis.)

 

Should we all have collectively ignored this froth, because it's a case of Someone Wrote Something Bad Somewhere? yeah probly :shrug:

Trying to think about risks for holiday travel

Like probably many of you, I'm thinking about traveling for the holidays. Really, the number I'd like to know is: if I travel, what's my chance of getting Covid?

Microcovid.org has been helpful in this. 1 microcovid = 1 in a million chance of catching covid. 10k microcovids = 1% chance. They're roughly additive, so doing one thing worth 10k microcovids is the same as doing 50 things worth 200 microcovids*.

Normal life, I try to stick to about 200 microcovids a week. I don't really calculate it, but here are some things I regularly do:

go to the grocery store for 1/2 hour with a cotton mask: 30 microcovids

see a few friends outside for 2-3 hours, with cotton masks, not really worrying about spacing: 50 microcovids

go biking with 2 friends all day: 10 microcovids

and I probably do about 3-4 of these a week; add in a x2 fudge factor because I'm probably forgetting all kinds of stuff and I'm at about 200/week.

Now, what are travel risks like? Before counting, I'm going to say that 0.1% chance would be ok. That's 1000 microcovids**. Let's imagine some scenarios:

- spending 1 week with parents from Cleveland, who have been quarantining long enough that we can model them as "they only grocery shop": 300 microcovids.****

- same but with sister's family in Charlotte exurbs: 100 microcovids.

- 1 hour in SFO before a flight where I'm wearing a well-fitted n95 mask: 100 microcovids***.

- 6 hour flight from San Francisco, n95 : 50 microcovids.

- 1 hour in Charlotte airport before a flight, n95: 300 microcovids.

- 6 hour flight from Charlotte, n95: 100 microcovids.

 

So imagining I do all these things; that's only about 950 microcovids, or a 0.095% chance. Maybe a little less if I spend 2-3 days with them, not a week. I'm really not trying to cook the numbers here, but it looks like I might be just under my risk budget. Some things I learned:

 

- the well-fitted n95 (really, kn95, but same thing AFAICT) is a game changer. Without it all these airport numbers go up by about a factor of 5.

- adding a layover makes this much worse. 1 hour in Denver: 600 microcovids. Chicago: 500. And who knows with layovers; especially in the Christmas season, you might be there much longer!

- but uh when you're in the airport, if you stand 10ft+ apart from people, your risks halve again - so I'll be hiding in a faraway corner as much as possible.

* this breaks down when probabilities get big. Imagine doing something worth 500k microcovids, then doing it again - you'd have a "100% chance of covid", but clearly that's not the case. But for our purposes, when we're in the hundreds or thousands of microcovids, it's pretty close. For example, doing 2 things worth 100 microcovids each should really be counted as 199.99 microcovids, not 200... but this is not going to be the biggest source of error in your calculations!

** is this number reckless? did I just inflate my okayness with risk from 1% to 1.1% over the course of the year? I'll try to compensate by doing less stuff most weeks - like this week I'm under 100 for sure - but I'm open to the possibility that I'm fooling myself. (in the same way, though to a lesser degree, than most people who are fooling themselves.)

*** tracking the risks for the airports/planes is a little weird because who knows where these people come from? but let's just model them as all coming from the city that the airport is based in. that's probably true for half of them at least.

**** upon re-checking this page, these numbers have shifted. that's a good sign: it's being updated! as of Dec 18, we're at even lower than 950 microcovids.