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.