How 2020 feels

Basically the only way I can engage with the horribleness of modernity, politics, society, economics, and human-built institutions which degrade everything about the human condition, is through other people's senses of humor.

For example, Tycho of Penny Arcade on the Google monopoly lawsuit:

There's a lot of odd dialogue that surrounds this stuff, like if you hate the naked exertion of monopoly power you're just hating the player or some shit. That you have a problem with people winning or something, issues with the concept of profit fundamentally. What an incredible rhetorical dodge! We're not talking about profit, and even if we were, it matters how the profit was generated. What we're talking about is a Draconic hoarding of wealth, collected in a vessel made from illegal mergers and filled by illegal acts.

... You can't really make the case to younger people that "capitalism," broadly writ, is gonna do shit for them. ... if money is allowed to pool like this, devils grow in it. If you don't fucking govern, if you don't moat these things in a circle of salt, they will invariably become something uncontainable - something too big to fail, part of the walls.  

Or Alice Fraser on reasons that the money-vampires who rule us hate the idea of minimum wage:

In the news today, debates about minimum wage rage on in America despite the entire economy collapsing in all directions. Because if you can't argue about how much money you shouldn't be paying the employees you're itching to replace with robots, how can you even call yourself a bloated blutocrat? 

Isn't it actually more insulting to pay someone a minimum wage that they can afford to feed their children with, than have them work for free while sucking at the milky teat of a rhetorical belief in forward momentum to a Trumpian future? Do you even want a job if you don't want to work for free? Have you ever thought that working for tips is just charity by c**ts who can refuse to give it to you if they don't like your smile, and let's be honest, you've got a shitty smile 'cause you can't afford teeth in your goddamn mess of a country. 

European countries have suggested that if you can't afford to pay your employees then you shouldn't have employees, if you can't run an economy on businesses that can afford to pay their employees, your economy is a lie, and if you're paying your employees in hopes for some sort of amorphous future advancement, you're not a business, you're a religion. (The Last Post 248: Arts in Crisis, 1m59s -- 2m51s, bleeping in original)

... or basically any episode of TRASHFUTURE, although I warn you that listening to educated people describe the state of the world has flung me into intense despair several times. (The hosts do lighten it with comedy but it's very much a sarcastic look at how horrible everything is.)

If you want something hopeful instead, I suggest following Cory Doctorow's excellent advocacy work, for example  the several articles, books, and links offered here.

This post's theme word is scamander (v. intr.), "to take a winding course." Most dystopias do not reasonably portray the slow scamander preface.

Reality dissonance in POV

One of the continually fascinating and renewed interesting things about being... alive? Just about being a person, just about being, is of course that my first-person experience is incredibly different from everyone else's impression of me.

Obviously yes: how could it be anything else? I have access to lots of extra internal state information, plus the impression of free will to affect my actions. And on the other hand, everyone else can see information hidden from me, for example bugs crawling on the back of my head, or involuntary nervous tics.

Obviously no: whoever I am, that's who I am. Who I feel I am is who I appear to be, it's just that there's a change of perspective. How could they be different? There's only one objective reality, and we're in it. I'm myself and you see me; when I take an action, you see it. This is consensus reality, and no one has yet been able to escape it (as far as we know).

Every once in awhile the contrast of perspectives is thrown into sharp relief, and I just had one of these moments of reality-dissonance.

Here I am, innocently tootling along and doing a language-learning exercise which is trying to teach me new Japanese vocabulary. It brought up a word I definitely think I do not know --- "stylish" (adj), "oshare(na)" --- and I look it up. As soon as I pronounce it aloud, I start to rap in Japanese in my head. Why? Well, it turns out that 15 years ago I memorized some Japanese pop-rap entirely phonetically, with no regard for word breaks, grammar, or in fact content, and not only does my brain still have that stored somewhere (team: Never Garbage Collect), but it is still indexed by phonetic lookup and also immediately available. And also, now that I am hearing the sounds I memorized in my head, my brain is cross-referencing with a lot of new vocabulary I've learned in the past year and translating the rap.

I look down. My phone screen has not yet timed out, so this entire revelation - realization - translation phenomenon has taken < 30 seconds. And now I just know a verse, in English, of a series of noises I memorized without linguistic structure 15 years ago.

This just happens, sometimes.

I have been told that I give the impression of being "quick", very clever, very smart, always ready with an answer and a call-back reference. Intelligent. The first-person experience of this is that I am strapped in to an involuntary rollercoaster, my brain whipping me through tangentially-relevant memories in a barely-controllable whirlwind. It's just lucky that I set myself up in situations where "here's a  related memory" so often contains the nugget of truth that I need right now.

Also possibly I am dissociating because it feels very unreal to be still performing my extremely socialization-based job but also to be completely isolated from all other humans.

Hello from my isolation to yours!

This post's theme word is mimsy (adj), "prim, feeble, affected." This blog post gives the impression of a mimsy humblebrag: oops.

Happy birthday, Turing!

Today is the 106th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing. (Of course, at birth he was probably very bad at abstract reasoning and proofs, like most babies, but he overcame these difficulties and grew up to be truly excellent at math.)

Just in case you haven't seen this yet (HT: I saw this on Twitter several times, then on slatestarcodex), it is amusing and recursive and cultural and involves computers:

Humans often post on the website reddit, which hosts many, many different message boards and oodles of subcultures and conversations on specific topics. Each specific message board is called a subreddit and has its own adherents, community standards, topic(s) of conversation, style, level of activity, etc.

There is a subreddit called r/totallynotrobots where the posts claim to be written by humans, but are written in all-caps and a style suggesting that they are actually written by robots. Redditors writing these posts are humans, so these are humans writing as if they are robots who are unconvincingly trying to pass as human.

There is a recent and extremely impressive system called GPT-2 which unsupervised-ly learns English and performs some really impressive computational linguistic feats, including writing mediocre high-school-style essays and writing very interesting and totally feasible poetry.

There is a subreddit called r/SubSimulatorGPT2 which trains GPT-2 on subreddits and automatically writes "coherent and realistic simulated content" for each subreddit. Of course, this subreddit is just going through other subreddits, training GPT-2, and writing new (automated, simulated) posts for that subreddit.

Now the subreddit-simulating robot has trained on r/totallynotrobots, which means that there are posts on the internet which are written by a robot imitating a human writing in a style pretending to be a robot who is unconvincingly trying to pass as a human. (Or, as slatestarcodex put it, "a robot pretending to be a human pretending to be a robot pretending to be a human.") You can see those posts here.

It's turtles all the way down, and every. single. turtle. is a Turing machine!


This post's theme word is anastrophe, "the inversion of the usual order of words or clauses." Silly grammar mistakes and anastrophe are used to denote unfamiliarity with human language.

April Fool's?

These posters mysteriously appeared on April 1 across campus.

They are expressing ... something ... stridently.

It's just not entirely clear what.
And there's no call to action, or url, or reference to a student group... The posters are handwritten in marker, mostly all-caps, on scrap paper. (At least, the pages I read were unrelated middle pages of math or biology articles.)

Is this an April Fool's joke? If so, ... what is the joke?

[Update April 2: posters still up, so reduce the probability estimation of "this is an April fool's joke".]

[Update April 3: found a poster with slightly more context.

Updated my weight for "this is a protest or other political movement" with some connection to climate activism.]


This post's theme word is ekistics (n), "the study of human settlements, drawing on such disciplines as city planning, architecture, sociology, etc." Climate scientists of the future will focus on ekistics as a subdiscipline.

Problems with self-reference and recursion (Aronson's sequence)

The most delicious, frolicksomely frustrating things to think about are the problems which reference themselves. Recursion is such a twisted mind-trap. Having just exposed my class to the joys of the halting problem (animated video explanation), and using it to show that all sorts of other problems cannot be solved --- one of the duties of professorhood is teaching students how to solve problems, but the peculiarities of my work are that I teach students which problems they can't solve --- I was delighted to read a snippet about Aronson's sequence:

‘T’ is the first, fourth, eleventh, sixteenth, twenty-fourth, twenty-ninth, thirty-third …

Here's the introduction on Futility Closet.

Here is Aronson's sequence on the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (one of my favorite sites!).

I want to know how the sentence ends, but of course the sentence can't end as long as I'm stuck thinking about the way I expect it to end. I'm sure that some sufficiently proficient linguist-mathematician team could come up with a satisfactory, and finite, end to the sentence. I'd buy that book!


This post's theme word is pabulum (noun), "bland intellectual fare: insipid or simplistic ideas, entertainment, writing, etc." Using the word "fare" makes me think of other food analogies. The collection of results stemming from Gödel's (In)Completeness Theorems are savory intellectual nuggets, with not a morsel of pabulum.

On social niceties

During this lull in my professional life while I wait to hear from job applications, I am spending some extra non-research mental cycles going on dates. Other people might just say "I was lonely" but my self-rationalization has long since surpassed such a simply summarized state. Welcome, this is my blog, have we met?

A frequent remark I hear is, "I felt so natural and relaxed around you! Like I could just be myself." This comes, I think, with an subtext (conveyed by delivery, framing, nonverbal cues, etc.) of "this was so special and unusual, we really got along and are a good match!" If this were a movie,it would cue some emotional, peppy music the viewers would be swept into a montage of cutesy date things: riding the merry-go-round, pointing at something together off the Eiffel Tower, sipping drinks at a café while illuminated by the soft glow of sunset. I'm pretty sure it is intended as a compliment to me.

But what I hear is, "You were successful in your cognitive and emotional labor to set me at ease, and I am completely unaware of how much effort goes into social niceties! I think everything just happens."

Because of course we had an easy casual conversation. I worked hard to make it so. Rather than tap my feet, or shift uncomfortably, or fail to make eye contact, I redirected my anxious energies and spinning brain to the Jane Austen circuits: I spoke calmly, I set you at ease, I redirected us from unproductive topics and smoothly suggested interesting topics. I did not comment on your awkwardness, unless I thought it would help. I put a lot of meta-thought into the first date, and I have the conversational skills to show for it: my statements are precise, and clear, and friendly, and pleasant, with a flair for the bizarre, sarcastic, and intellectual to avoid actually appearing anodyne. I'm myself, but the nice version that goes on first dates. If you are fluent in English, you might also appreciate my wordplay and the careful phrasing --- again inspired by Austen --- by which I express both a nice idea and a smirk. If you're not fluent in English, I did all those things anyway; there's no "off" switch.

Then I probably went home and typed up a report and sent it to my Date Review Committee for feedback.

It's interesting to receive so many of nearly-identical compliments. It reinforces that I actually do have some consistent skill, as witnessed by independent observers.

It's also interesting that the meta-level deduction "That date was good because the conversation was so easy and relaxed" doesn't go one level higher. Or, you know, maybe it does, but perhaps my interlocutors' social niceties are preventing them from conveying something more than the simple compliment to me. (That would be neat. If you're one such date, who found this blog and read this far, I'm interested to hear more.)

Lest this post appear to brag, I apparently lack this skill and aura in the workplace. Today I was eating lunch alone at the communal default lunch table, and a colleague came in with his lunch. We know we have two languages in common, as well as a common workplace and intellectual interests. He chose to sit at another table, by himself, rather than joining me. So my appeal as a conversationalist has limited context.


This post's theme word is ugsome, "dreadful, loathsome." The ugsome interlocutor is not to be endured.

Infinite Jest

Phew and egads! I finished rereading Infinite Jest. Relief is accompanied by psychic emptiness, a hollow longing to experience the entire thing again.

... the novel is about many things: fathers and sons; mothers and sons; addiction; communication; entertainment; politics; greatness, mediocrity and failure. It’s a coming of age story alongside a recovery story that is also possibly a love story, all wrapped in a cloak-and-dagger-ish mystery about international realignment and terrorism. Choose your favorite combination and go with it. The book is about a lot of things. -- Mike at Fiction Advocate

The hardest part, psychologically, emotionally, was reading the extremely violent scenes. The Antitoi brothers' deaths, Gately's shooting, the Mt. Dilaudid scene: these are described in straightforward words, treated with the same flat descriptive affect as the extended discussions of drug withdrawal, depression, and early-morning tennis practice. And this consistent authorial treatment is painful to read, because it creates the associative comparison that, for example, being depressed is just as psychically painful as suffering bullets, stabbings, blood loss, head trauma, etc. Reading the violence was unpleasant, not because the violence itself was distasteful or grim or extreme (although those things are true), but because it made so many other things, which had seemed vaguely painful at a clinical remove, become retrospectively intensely painful and excruciating.

Ow.

I understand that this was the a purpose of the book. The reading experience now is colored by DFW's suicide; descriptions of suicidal and anxious, trapped-in-your-own-head scenes are particularly pointed and affecting. When I read:

What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. ... everything unendurable was in the head, ... (p. 1055)

or

If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one. (p. 859)

... then my heart aches, and I am sympathetic and sorrowful that such pain can exist, and can have hurt someone who could so beautifully express the isolating pain in a way which is anti-isolating, which is relatable and unifies the human experience. Yet the words themselves, and expressing them by such clear and enlightening means, can worsen the problem:

Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express can really invoke. This can be tricky. (p. 226)

The novel balances on this edge, not by a sustained series of tiny nudges, but by massive swoops to either side: extreme fear, personality-obliterating anxiety, emotions invoked and clinically discussed and manipulated, each in turn. Rote cliches repeated until they gain meaning, lose it, and eventually become both antaclastically significant and a series of meaningless phonemes.

One overarching goal, or conclusion, or hypothesis of the novel has stood out to me in a few places, on different rereads. It is the conclusive-sounding, earnest, non-ironic idea that we need to give ourselves away.

American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret. (p. 74)

This is echoed later, with links that grab many of the other threads of the novel.

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately---the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. (p. 1102)

Certainly the drug-addiction plots, the tennis-academy plots, the terrorist-plotting plots, the militant grammarians, the film studies, the weird undercover assignments, the personal vendettas --- they all fall under this neat summary: the characters care deeply, dedicate their lives to giving their lives away. Although many of them phrase it as an escape rather than a gift; they all seem to be trying to flee some personal fear by this selfless giving-away of themselves.

It seems that Infinite Jest is fractally interesting. Every closer examination reveals another lurking meaning. I have the sense that each individual sentence could be deconstructed in this way, fruitfully although perhaps meaninglessly: the book holds together so well, it seems unlikely that its individually analyzed components would be as effective at achieving its goals. And in any case, I've written a dissertation already, and have no interest in sinking my time into this recondite time-sponge, especially since it will likely reduce my own enjoyment of the novel. In the end, I let the book describe my feelings about it:

This should not be rendered in exposition like this... (p. 113)

... so, what about rendering it in Legos?


This post's theme word is cathexis, "the concentration of mental energy on one particular person, idea, or object (especially to an unhealthy degree)." Infinite Jest uses the word "cathexis" effectively, as well as embodying in several different ways the never-ending loop of self-reflexive cathexis-spurred paralysis.

Rationally changing one's own behavior; or, withholding judgment

Context

I have been slowly reading my way through the thoughtful series How To Actually Change Your Mind, which describes itself as "a sequence on the ultra-high-level penultimate technique of rationality". I recommend it as interesting and clearly written (plus in small, digestible chunks which gradually accumulate in the corners of your mind to build a central thesis). I encourage you to sample the text, although I don't necessarily endorse every opinion expounded therein.

Content

This advice on rationality reflects my own behavior.

Since ~12 or so I have observed myself gradually become a quieter person. It's an interesting development to watch in the first person. Yes, I am aware of the weirdness of separating my own behavior from the self which is observing said behavior. And yet. Here I am, typing, and you unseen-yet-anticipated audience are reading. Shall we continue?

Through no conscious campaign of my own, I have been gradually converging on the same approach advocated by the rationalist "How To Actually Change Your Mind" program. Namely, to quietly observe and hold off loudly expressing prefabricated thoughts or proposing solutions.

Historical progression

At first, in middle- and then high-school and college, I thought I was choosing to be quieter in social situations because of a reluctance to be judged until I had observed my observers. I wanted to have the benefit of informational power (imbalance), as it were --- basically everything I do and think eventually works its way around to being expressed as information and privacy, so: I wanted to observe and judge others without actually revealing much about myself. I'm fine with being judged; I just want to get the measure of my judges before I am subjected to their judgment.

Social acceptability

And this makes a certain amount of sense. Plus it is more socially acceptable to be a little quiet, and otherwise pleasant and smiling, than to walk around with a videocamera and a field notebook and obviously take indelible records of transient social interactions for later perusal and processing. So as long as my observation is discreet and entirely in my own mind, it seems socially acceptable. (Now you have an inkling of one of the many sub-processes that is always running in my background; but this is so abstract that I think it unlikely your interactions with me will be affected.)

Crux

But it's not as if I have become a shy or retiring person. I am still able to carry on high-volume conversations and hold my own in, say, a loud bar or a party of Americans. The change is probably most perceptible to me, and as an internal process, and entirely the opposite of the judgment I suggested above.

Here is what it is: I don't judge, I just watch.

I've noticed this tendency more abroad, of course, where I am consciously aware of the possibility of cultural differences leading to weirdly-crossed social expectations. So I probably watch more on this continent than I would on my home continent. But unlike many, many expats' accounts, my ongoing first-person narrative doesn't have much judgment. I see something strange, I try to  figure out why it seems strange and what is happening. Often I learn a new vocabulary word or idiom. And that's it. I move along, things don't bother me or irritate me, I am my own calm little center, I am a zen master. Well, mistress. Rather than accumulating a series of judgments or stereotypes, I am building a library of actual observations; when I am called on for a generalization, I can go right to the observations without the added-rounding error of trying to generalize from judgments with all sorts of extenuating factors hidden.

And I quietly and with a snicker of self-awareness congratulate myself on implementing one step of the carefully-considered rationalist's paradigm without any specific outside guidance. I'm in a fairly content and self-satisfied and cheerful place in life. Whence I blog.

Huzzah!


This post's theme word is a tie between expostulate, "to reason earnestly with someone in order to dissuade" and tergiversate, "to change repeatedly one's attitude; equivocate." I recommend their combined usage in silly poems. I wanted to expostulate, to press you to tergiversate; so long did we prolong debate, that hours have passed and it is late.

Guilt about racism

Racism is bad. We all agree on that. I want to mention two leisure activities --- the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and the movie District 9 --- which made me feel personally guilty about racism.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks describes Rebecca Skloot's journalistic and emotion-heavy research into the immortal cell line derived from Henrietta Lacks' unknowingly-donated-to-science cervical cancer cells. The book has two tones: the first, a factual historical narrative describing scientific research, blends via description of Henrietta Lacks' health and life into the second, a first-person account of Skloot's research efforts over many years, which extended to a very personal relationship with Lacks' descendents.

The science part was interesting. All the emotional parts --- and this includes parts with scientists being manipulative, deceitful, and exploitative --- made me feel guilty. As a child of privilege, as an educated person, as a scientist, as a human being, the story made me feel guilt. About my own luck, by chance of birth, to have avoided those circumstances. This contrition is reinforced by Skloot's own similar feelings, which she explores at length.

By the end of the book I was having flashbacks of District 9 every paragraph or so. That kernel of an interesting idea, that intriguing nugget of science (or science fiction) was the bait to lure me, yet again, into this abstract feeling of shame and iniquity. Yes, I see that thing you're showing me! It's bad! I want to change it! Yes, 30 seconds later I still feel bad about it!

What purpose does all this remorse-mongering serve? Highlighting awareness? We get it, we're aware of racism. I just wanted to read about cancer research, I just wanted to see alien technology; is there some need to crush me with guilt? Skloot seems to derive some catharsis from writing every twinge of contrition, every individual malfeasance; perhaps bringing unpleasant history to light can shape future history for the better.  District 9 is the bigger culprit here, because I guess the producers weren't sure the audience would pick up on the analogy that confining aliens to a ghetto was like apartheid confining people to a ghetto. So they drew the analogy in every. single. scene. Is this a movie about historical atrocities or about futuristic atrocities? I can only effect one of those. Sure, you're winning the battle for hearts and minds, but there's no opposition and you haven't told us what to do to win the battle for... you know, the actual battle.

In the end I'm forced to blame myself (touché) for enduring. I read the entire book, I sat through the entire movie, I caused myself to have the experience which gave rise to these feelings which I do not enjoy. I'd much rather live the life of the mind, where all recreational (and employment-driven) media consumption is stripped down to its essential ideas, without the dross of attendant emotions.

Of course this "dross" is a main purpose of recreational media. (Thank you, Prof. Lynn M. Festa's "Sex and Sensibility in the Enlightenment", for teaching me all about experiencing emotions as a cultural pastime.)

My recommendations: read some interviews with Skloot, you'll get the main points. And watch District 9 at home, with the fast-forward button handy.


This post's theme word is comminate, "to threaten with divine punishment" or "to curse." Those who have not watched District 9 are roundly comminated.

Set-your-own-price reverse marketplace

Amazon will let vendors -- who own items -- post those items for sale at a fixed price. Ebay lets vendors post items for sale by auction, where buyers have some power over the price they pay. On Kickstarter, speculating vendors attempt to rustle up (financially) committed customers before spending movey on overhead and setup costs. This business model makes some amount of sense, because the market
for your fantastic idea may not exist. It's a way of crowdsourcing market research, pinned to a method of getting startup money from a mob.

I dream of a reverse marketplace, a sort of backwards kickstarter (but not kickstopper, as amusing as that is). It would be a website with a huge inventory (possibly borrowed from Amazon's databanks, like swap.com) where buyers can post offered prices. Then the vendors can browse this collection of data and determine if, e.g., there are millions of dollars to be made if they decrease the price of that CD from $10 to $5. (This still provides more control than the pay-what-you-can and pay-what-you-want models used by JoCo and AFP.)

A secondary benefit of such a site is to reverse-kickstart things. There are books, music, and games that I _would_ buy -- at their present prices-- if they were availabe WITHOUT DRM. So I'd reverse-bid on those. But they're currently only available WITH DRM, which is a no-go and worth $0 to me. This would show vendors, publishers, and creators how many sales they are MISSING because of DRM. It could also show publishers other data about formatting (this movie is in high demand on DVD but not Blu-Ray; this music will sell as vinyl but not CD, etc.).

Think about it as voluntary market research data. I am willing -- WILLING -- to give advertisers, publishers and vendors this data. This VALUABLE DATA ABOUT MY SPENDING PREFERENCES AND HABITS.

Do you hear me, online sellers?


This post's theme word is samizdat, "an underground publishing system used to print and circulate banned literature clandestinely. Also, such literature."