SLOW GOING

March 11th, 2022

It’s a respectable lamentation that Hofstadter’s Law appears to be infallibly on point. The law states: Everything takes longer than you think it will, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. It’s cute because it’s recursive, but in a kittenish - feline way, in that it’s cute, but deadly in its accuracy. 

The saddest part about this Law is that it also means you’ll have less time. If things always take more time than you think they will, then that means less time for other things. This is on top of the fact that success is not guaranteed. It’s possible to spend all your time working on something, without it paying off and being left with far less time than originally anticipated. It can seem like a lose-loose.

Perhaps this is a reason for our innate desire for novelty, and our quick-to-trigger boredom. It ensures that we don’t fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy - spending too much time pursuing something that won’t pan out. It means we’re skittish and quick to jump ship. Usually this facet of people is frowned down upon, but framed with Hofstadter’s Law, it seems to make a lot of sense.

Unfortunately there are a host of things that we can’t jump ship on. It’s not practical to simply stop eating, paying rent, and other bills, and because of this, there’s forced sunk-cost and forced consistency. It’s necessary to continuously work to feed these needs. Youth is the time for jumping around and trying different things, and living completely without commitment. The responsibilities of adulthood slowly encircle and strangle this so-called freedom. 

What’s funny is that when the topic of automation pops up, suddenly people wonder what we’ll all do if all the boring menial jobs have been eaten by some robotic or digital form. Strange considering this comes from a species that valorizes youth - and for what reason? Surely the freedom of youth has to be part of it, but when proffered the possibility of that freedom again, somehow it’s perceived as a nervous threat.

It’s a personal suspicion that after a period of adjustment to an automated world, we’d all become stranger far more productive. But of course, such a change won’t happen over night. Some already have called upon the powers of automation to maximize leisure, and it would be worthwhile to see what sort of output such people have if their curiosity remains in tact. 

There are those who “never find their way”, who seem perpetually aimless and never seem to stick with anything and never seem to get any meaningful breaks. It’s a worthy thought experiment to wonder what would happen to these people if they simply had a lot more time. What if instead of living barely a century, we had half a dozen or so centuries. Do you think the people who don’t seem to ever get a break or get their act together would ever find their way?

It’s worth wondering about it, if only to realize that the answer would likely be positive. So much of life is spent doing things we don’t want to do so that we can simply stay plugged into the systems of civilization. So few get to have their cake and eat it too, but it is possible - to have desirable, creative work. It seems it’s relegated only to the lucky, but that’s probably because the going is so slow, and rare lucky breaks simply fast track parts of the process for a hallowed few. 

HOW TO CHALLENGE A BELIEF

March 10th, 2022

This post is dedicated to @xodvnnied

Recently, someone asked how to challenge one’s own beliefs. There’s two wonderful challenges here. First, coming up with a strategy that might challenge belief, and then of course carrying out that strategy on yourself. The medium of strategy seemed obvious. Or at least, one effective medium of strategy: Questions. The right question can cleave a person in half, metaphorically speaking.

Beliefs are quite strange things if you think about them. We generally hold that reality is a big collection of facts which are unalterable and unarguable. But, one, there are simply way too many facts, many of which we don’t even know how to find out, and two, the great number of facts we can uncover are still too numerous and complicated when taken together to make much sense of reality, and three, we also just forget things.  We just can’t entertain much objectivism because of so many limitations, so in spite of these limitations we develop cognitive heuristics, or beliefs that attempt to approximate a lot of the space occupied by unavailable facts.

A funny thing about being a human is that it can be a fact that you feel a certain way about something. The truly insidious part of this feeling business is that it’s very VERY convincing. It’s a rare skill that most people have to learn and practice - to be able to question one’s own feeling, and take it less seriously, and ultimately decide whether the feeling should be convincing or not. A tall order.

Now let’s take a fact like: someone’s feeling about the existence of God. The certain fact that there is a feeling becomes a proxy for facts that say anything about the nature of God. The two things are actually very separate, but often times we can’t see through our feelings on a given subject to see what actual facts may or may not exist about the topic. No, instead the feeling plays the role of the fact. Another way of putting it is: in the absence of facts, we go with feelings.

Trust your gut, right?

Well, unfortunately, pretty much all beliefs have to be somewhat inaccurate (or downright wrong) by default, because if we knew the facts of the situation, there would be no need for a belief. Belief is a heuristic for what to think and how to feel in the absence of some facts. Ideally, our beliefs are founded on the facts we do have, and belief smears over the holes left by unavailable facts. But for some beliefs there’s clearly quite a LOT of smearing. Which means, people are often flying blind in a life that could probably benefit from a collision or two with some hard and useful facts.

A rule of thumb about challenging beliefs: if you experience an emotional reaction, then you’re likely making progress. No one argues about if the sun will rise tomorrow - that’s just a fact, and because it’s such an obvious fact, no one gets emotional about it.

Here are some questions to help challenge beliefs:

Given a particular belief, why do you believe it?

What would your life be like if you didn’t believe it?

Does your sense of identity depend on this belief?

Would your sense of identity crumble or get damaged without this belief?

Do you fear a world where this belief is actually false?

Does the real world support or detract from the validity of your belief?

Does this belief make your life better or worse?

Does this belief make your personal relationships stronger or does it limit your potential for connecting with others?

Does this belief limit who you can understand and connect with?

If you were to have a conversation with each and every person on the planet, would this belief help or hinder your ability to relate with some portion of people? How big is that portion?

If you could have a conversation with a version of yourself that did not hold this belief, what would they say to you?

ENOUEMENT

March 9th, 2022

If you were to meet the child who you once were, how would you feel? To what degree are we still the children we once were? Surely the difference is so drastic that it should seem a bit weird to equate it all as the same person. But of course, there’s a single uninterrupted link between that kid and the person that kid has become. 

What about a drastic change in outlook, perspective and mentality? These happen for better or worse to many people. Can we say that the person after such a change is still the same person? If they think and act differently, why do we put so much credit in the idea that what is unchanged is their physical look - their body. It easier to do this when it’s other people, but what about yourself? Only the most foolish people look back on their past selves and don’t have a complicated set of emotions ranging from embarrassment to bittersweet compassion. 

What about who you will be tomorrow? Or in three years from now? With these kinds of thought experiments, it’s always tempting to think about sharing secret knowledge. Oh if only I could tell my 18 year old self this or that!

But what about the other way around? If your 18 year old self had a chance to tell you something, what would they say?

What would you want to say to the person you’ll be in 3 years from now?

It seems odd at first. Any current thought automatically get’s communicated to that future self, doesn’t it?

Well, anyone who has kept a journal for any length of time will often have the very bizarre experience of going back sufficiently far and reading words they don’t remember writing, and having different opinions, and it can even be so drastic that it seems like a totally different person wrote it.

Fact is, we probably change a lot more than we realize. It’s a bit like when you physically grow. Looking in the mirror every day makes it seem like nothing is changing because the change is so small. How much of the same is true for the mind? As our thoughts and opinions shift - do we notice?

It’s interesting to wonder: what about who you are now do you hope will persist as you change into the person you’ll become?

MEMORY'S BETRAYAL

March 8th, 2022

Realism, pessimism and everything in between robs a person of quite a lot. Even a philosophical optimist who tries to armor themselves against downside with a cautious entertainment of pessimism is robbed. Perhaps this is speaking too much from experience, or perhaps this phenomenon is pervasive among realistic optimists: but it seems very positive memories are very often shuffled out of sight.

Recently I was talking with someone from my past who described a certain day that I had engineered. It was a spectacular day, and I had completely forgotten almost every single detail, despite the fact that I’d dreamed up the entire program. I only remembered the single dark event that punctured the day unexpectedly. This is despite the fact that I rallied against this dark event for fear that it would detract from the day I’d planned - it didn’t really matter anyhow, so why not enjoy the moment? And yet, my memory doesn’t appear to abide by the same good logic. Despite enjoying that day, and doing everything in my power to make it excellent, my only lasting memory was the one thing that went wrong with it.

The recollection has made me wonder anew: what else in my past has my memory swept aside in order to highlight all the negative that can be learned from?

Frankly, none of us get out of this game alive, so what really is the utility of such a negatively-focused algorithm? Naturally, this could easily be a personal development, but I’m tempted to think it’s a more pervasive issue. Humans are incredibly susceptible to concentrating on the negative at the expense of ignoring the positive. The average person takes a lot longer to pick out the one smilie face in a sea of frown faces than it takes to pick out the one frown face in a sea of smilies. This is exactly the propensity that my mind is playing when it comes to memory selection and importance.

From an evolutionary perspective this makes sense: preparing for the worst is easier if you can remember the worst of what’s happened. Remember the best of yesterday doesn’t do much good for preparing for the worst. And the point of this difference is that the worst to come has a much higher chance of wiping our your genetics when compared to the best of what’s to come - as backwards as that sounds. Backwards because the continuation of our genetics usually entails some great moments -subjectively speaking. In terms of evolutionary biology, the brain has no interest in remembering good times because that has no bearing in surviving bad times in order to have more good times.

This feels like an enormous betrayal of memory. In the modern civilized world, what should memory be like? Some wonderful amalgam of a museum and a music festival comes to mind: Closing my eyes should be a phantasmagoria of the most wonderful moments that stand as touchstones in the arc of a person that I have become. Memory should be the best place to retreat - no matter how bad things get, I should be able to instantly form a chrysalis of the best that is behind me. Why isn’t a selection of the best nights, the best mornings, the best days and afternoons on constant offer when we close our eyes? Such memories represent incredible achievements. No matter how hard or easy life has been, the fact that these experiences could come into existence is itself an achievement worth.. everything. For why are we here if not to gather up some small patch of treasured memory?

No matter how rich someone is, all we crave is more of this treasured memory.. which is so hard to hold on to. When our mind is hardwired to remember the worst, do we remember less and less the better life gets?

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: A DREAM REFINED

March 6th, 2022

The clacking stopped. Lucilius’ fingers rested easy on the stout keys, the metal crescent of hammers resting easy after their frenzied assault on the white page, now bending in an arc out away from the typewriter. Lucilius pulled the page and reread the last few lines. It was the first decent story Lucilius had written, and he smiled at it, knowing now, for sure, that it was good. After so much rewriting, after so many dozens of stories tossed away, finally, he’d arrived at the place he’d yearned for and dreamt of for so many years. 

It was a starting line, of sorts, he thought. Which lead him to wonder. It would probably take another ten years of consistent, dedicated work to gain the kind of skill he needed to produce the novel he had in mind. A new thought accompanied the dream: what would the world look like in ten years? It didn’t really matter for good fiction. Literature is timeless, and that was his aim, making it irrelevant what the world would look like after another decade of work.

But still, the idea kept at him over the next few days of rewriting and refining. When finally he felt the story was ready to send off, he pushed away his typewriter, and opened his laptop. Obviously, the typewriter was a purposeful anachronism. All of his favorite writers of the past had used typewriters, and the singular purpose of a typewriter helped him focus. A computer has so many uses beyond just a word processor, and they all linger as potential distractions.

So he started to research: did anyone have a good idea about what the world would look like in another ten years? It wasn’t long before Lucilius was in the bowels of a rabbit hole, obsessively reading about the world painted by futurists and technologists.

After several days, Lucilius found himself, thoroughly depressed. The dream he’d spent so much time chasing suddenly felt… quaint. Unnecessary. The aim itself now an anachronism. He suddenly felt like an artisan of spears in the age of gunpowder. So much passion and love now painted in his mind’s eye a vision of himself playing dress-up, like a kid, or an actor for some historical reenactment. He’d always had a notion of what amazing developments there’d be in the future, but what he hadn’t anticipated was that such advancements would get here so soon. In fact it seemed like their progress of arrival was itself speeding up.

For weeks, Lucilius was aimless - paralyzed by a feeling of complete inability. He’d prepared for a different future, for a different life, and now he felt drastically behind everyone else. The technological world he’d been so suspicious of, and had even hated was winning, and it was swarming around Lucilius at a pace he’d never even dreamed possible.

His mind had ruptured. He could do nothing. He could not write, he could not read, he could only obsess over this new and terrible vision of the future, one of accelerating disruption. HIs typewriter began to collect dust while Lucilius spent more and more time on his computer.

After months in this state of horrific limbo, Lucilius finally admitted what he’d known for some many weeks. He sat down at his computer and searched: how to code. If Lucilius was anything, he was a builder, and perhaps - he thought - he could build something else, instead of his stories, and his characters.  

There was a kind of poetry in the act of beginning again. Like starting a new story, and having no idea how it would turn out, what would be required and what his characters would do, it was now him, Lucilius, tasked with learning something new, having no idea how it would go, nor what would come next. And as with anything, the going was slow.

Within a few weeks, he could do the most elemental of tasks with the little code he’d learned. He was spending nearly his whole day trying to learn more, and as much as he tried to ignore it, he really missed writing, like a loved one now gone and mourned. But of course, it was still available, he realized.

One morning, before he set to the grind of learning more, he took his computer with him to the little coffee shop where he spent a bit of his morning everyday, and he opened up the word processor. He wondered what to write about. He didn’t have too much time, he realized, and decided what he could manage in just twenty minutes. Something he could complete then and there. 

Quickly, this became a habit. Before his long days trudging through the task of learning code, he would quickly write a small piece over coffee. What seemed to be materializing were short, whimsical pieces of non-fiction. He seemed to be actively thinking about his own process of thought during these sessions - as if deconstructing how he came about to have the thoughts and beliefs he did. They were satisfying, and quick.

And slowly, he made progress with code. For one of his first projects, as dictated by a program he was following, he built a blog. Lucilius absolutely hated the word, blog, and it was the full reason why he’d never bothered to try and start one himself. But when it came to the step where he had to populate the blog with nonsense Latin, Lucilius realized he had quite a bit of his own writing that would work beautifully as some placeholder text. Lucilius followed through with the project, and got it working online. He was pleased with the look, and the sight of so much of his own writing was nice, especially after such a sad time it had been to ‘give up’ that dream. He’d even mixed in some fictional stories, which he’d dubbed Parables. Stories that were no longer constrained like his serious fiction, but whimsical, like his non-fiction, dipping into all manner of science fiction and thoughtful realism. Writing had become a pure joy, unencumbered by the strict seriousness of his old dream.

Without thinking about it, Lucilius showed the little practice blog to a friend, and then some days later, that friend messaged Lucilius: I keep going back to your blog to read more. When are you going to update it?

Lucilius hadn’t actually considered the project, nor the writing with any kind of seriousness. It was all whimsical - just a selfish excuse to dip into that guilty pleasure of words each morning. But now, perhaps, there was more here than he realized.

Years later, after the blog had grown far beyond anything he expected, he got a package in the mail. He opened it, and smiled, looking down at a book. After years of writing, the number of Parables on the blog had stacked up, and Lucilius realized he might have a book, which he then compiled, and built an online store to sell it with. He now held the forth volume of Parables, and opened it at random. There on the page was a drawing of his old typewriter, and below it, the title of a parable: A Dream Refined.