My 4th ToastMasters speech
Oct 072014
Oct 032014
When younger I often longed for the ability to use The Force (ala Star Wars). If only I could flick that light-switch from a distance! With time I realized I could, at a distance of ~2.5 feet (the length of my arm). All I had to do was think about it, and expend a tiny bit of energy. From what I saw of Star Wars, it took me far less energy to do it this way than it would have taken by concentrating and using The Force. It didn’t look as cool, since anyone could do it, but it kinda was a form of magic.
This led to my observation that Industry is much like powerful Ritual Magic.
Lately I’ve been renovating an old, trashed house. At times this can get very tedious. But thinking of myself as a wizard really helps the process along. And I don’t mean one of these new-fangled wizards, that just waves a wand around and says a few words and gets exactly what he wants. Kids these days are lazy and spoiled! Back in my day (of AD&D 2nd Ed) you had to do some work to get your magic! You had material components to carry around, which were consumed upon casting, and physical actions that had to be correctly performed, some of which got rather complex. Plus we walked to and from school, through six feet of snow, uphill both ways.
But doing anything that manipulates the physical world isn’t that different. To paint these kitchen cabinets I gathered my material components (gallons of paint of the desired color), my wand-substitutes (paintbrush and roller), and repeated the somatic components (hand moving back and forth inches from the surface to be altered, occasionally returning to the paint container) for a long period of time. This particular spell didn’t have any verbal components. Eventually the Change Color of Surface spell was completed, and now the kitchen looks quite a bit different. I have the power!
The downside of this particular spell is that it’s slow, and can take hours to cast on large areas. On the plus side – it works. It’s hard to overstate how useful that is.
Oct 012014
This post is just me being intensely annoyed with “my tribe.”
For those unfamiliar with the injunction against feigning surprise, the origin (AFAIK) is from Hacker School’s first social rule:
No feigning surprise. The first rule means you shouldn’t act surprised when people say they don’t know something. This applies to both technical things (“What?! I can’t believe you don’t know what the stack is!”) and non-technical things (“You don’t know who RMS is?!”). Feigning surprise has absolutely no social or educational benefit: When people feign surprise, it’s usually to make them feel better about themselves and others feel worse. And even when that’s not the intention, it’s almost always the effect.
And I think we can all agree it is bad form to create a caricature of an opposing position and then try to spread the belief that the caricature is an accurate portrayal of your opponent. I am sorely tempted to call this an Eggers-Man strategy, but that might be construed as Eggers-Manning Dave Eggers.
But what’s really irritating is seeing a satire being shared half a dozen times with OMG! feigned! disbelief! that anyone could do something so ridiculous!
Yeah, I’m talking about the “Fundamentalist Christian Rewrite” of Harry Potter.
Yes, I know about Poe’s Law. And I’ve read plenty of Chick Tracts. But claiming to not know this is a satire (or an extreme outlier) and that you could confuse it for normal christianity is to say you’ve never in your life met a Christian, and you suspect they have horns and can be warded off with garlic. People are simply pretending to not know this is satire so they can publically demonstrate just how stupid they think Christians are. It’s a game of “I think Christians are even stupider than you think they are! I am honestly befuddled by this satire, it is indistinguishable from how stupid all believers must really be!”
Remember how confounded you were when all those Red Tribe people started sharing that Onion article about Planned Parenthood opening an $8B AbortionPlex? And how you thought “There is absolutely no way anyone thought this was real. Anyone who mistook this for real must live in a completely insulated reality where liberals are the Dark Ages equivalent of baby-murdering Jews, and must also be completely and utterly retarded.” If you shared one of the “ZOMG Look At What These Christians Are Doing LOL” articles going around, congratulations. There is no functional difference between you and the AbortionPlex sharer.
The thing is, there’s plenty of real stupidity in christian belief. We don’t need to go making things up. And the complete lack of reading comprehension just makes me want to claw my eyes out. Is our side really that unable to read things? Then how the heck can they claim to be the smarter side? Or are they just that willing to misrepresent and mock the other side? Then how can they claim to be the less evil side? Is this what we want our social discourse to be? People sharing parodies of the other side and pretending they’re real? Do we see this going anyplace good?
If not, cut that shit out. And maybe comment on your friend’s relink with “Don’t be dumb, it’s a satire. We’re better than this.”
Sep 302014
I read an article on the internet, as I am wont to do. This one was about how modern games are lacking a certain innovation that was around in the classic era of gaming, and speculates it may be that older hardware restricted older games to have to focus tightly just on the really good stuff, whereas modern games can sprawl and waste resources and lose focus. Maybe that’s the case, I dunno. But I suspect something else is at work here.
I lean heavily toward bio-determinism. I suspect that older people are more cautious and younger people are more headstrong and reckless not because of differences in life experience, but overwhelmingly due to hormones and biochemistry. If you were to somehow magically stick a 60-year-old man into the body he had at 18, he’d start acting much more like a reckless teenager rather than a wise patriarch, life experience be damned. Stick a teenager in a 60-year-old body and he’d slow down right quick and see the wisdom of contemplating his actions a bit. (Tangentially, I suspect the trend of the constantly-raising-average-age of the population over the last century is at least partially responsible for the lower rates of open warfare in industrialized countries. Wars are at least partly hormonal. I think one of the reasons we jumped so quickly into Iraq after 9/11/01 was because the Taliban fell too quickly and our society had not yet collectively burned through the desire to hurt Arabs in revenge, so we went looking for another target to vent on. Maybe a good leader could have redirected that energy rather than encouraged it. But I’m getting off track.)
It’s been noted quite a bit in the past decade(s) that play is the natural way humans learn. In many cases, simply encouraging play is about as effective as forcing kids to go to school. Game designers already know this, a large aspect of game design nowadays is how to manage the learning curve – effectively teaching the player a new skill in a way that is challenging them to explore new aspects of this skill at every level, right on the edge of their ability without being past it. Portal is one of the most acclaimed games of this century for this reason – every time the player is reaching mastery of a portal technique a new aspect of portaling is revealed to them, a way to apply what they’ve learned in a novel way that unlocks new avenues to explore and learn. It is a learning super-stimulus. (plus GLaDOS is awesome).
Two things happen as you get older. The first is simple experience – once you’ve gone through your first good FPS, or Tower Defense, or RTS, you’ve exhausted that learning path. Further games in that genre will always be less compelling unless they introduce a new mechanic to learn. But much more salient to my point – the older you get the less biologically driven you are to learn things at all.
While I don’t think learning ever becomes not-fun, it becomes less and less fun compared to other activities as one gets older. And since play is the act of learning, play itself simply becomes less fun due to hormonal reasons. I’ve started to notice this in myself as well – I get less enjoyment out of learning new things than I do out of creating lasting stuff (like a chicken coop, or a YouTube short, or a podcast). Before learning would be an end in itself, and if I never applied any of it I didn’t care. Now it’s often a means to an end, and I get impatient with learning things that I don’t think I’ll have much use to apply in the real world. Video games and boardgames just aren’t that interesting anymore.
I can see how this trend could continue, to where I get annoyed with having to learn new things even if they ARE applicable. Like how to use that new-fangled VCR or SmartPhone. I just want to Do My Thing, why’s everything gotta be so complicated?
I am tempted to throw out evo-psych justifications for this (early life is for learning, mid-life is for doing. What’s the point of just learning if you don’t do stuff with it before you die?) But we’ve all been warned away from falling into the trap of inventing just-so stories for our pet observations, so I’ll leave it as a parenthetical and not expound on the issue.
What I’m driving at is this: it’s not that new games suck, and there was a golden age of gaming. This is just yet another instance of a generation aging and saying “Thing X really reached its peak back when I was in my teens & twenties. That was the golden age, the new stuff just isn’t as good.” And it’s not that the new stuff isn’t as good. I see tons of 20-somethings who love the hell out of the games coming out now, and raise an eyebrow at what we call the Classics. It’s that we’re getting older and our brains are resistant to New Things (including new learning and play). I find this is the case with everything ever labeled as having a “Golden Age.” Sometimes I look at the Golden Age of comics and I think “Wow… I’m glad we live in an awful degenerate age, cuz that Golden stuff is crap.” When we try to play and expect to get the same reaction as we did back when our neurochemistry was primed to most enjoy playing, the fault isn’t with the games nowadays, it’s with your understanding of what is enjoyable to you given the body you are in.
Sep 272014
My first coplay (I’m the far-right Gaston)
A reader of the blog wrote to point out that I’m probably placing way too much emphasis on having lost a bunch of weight and starting to care for my appearance a few years back. In his experience, he actually had poorer social outcomes back when he looked his physical best. His attitude (“hostile and intolerant”) kept people away. He believes that “Going off your blog I am thinking that your ability to socialise, opinion of yourself, and feelings towards the general population all improved. The physical fitness is just one aspect of what you have improved, and by itself, at least in my experience, it will not make you any friends or influence anyone.”
These are interesting points. 3.5ish years ago was a rather major turning point in my life in a lot of ways. Not only did I start working out, but I also had UPPP surgery to treat sleep apnea and consequentially got much better sleep. I reduced the time I spent on video games, greatly reduced my drinking (I’d been at alcoholic levels for a few years), forced myself to begin to socialize and say “yes” to any requests, and began work on the HPMoR Podcast (having a major life-goal to direct oneself to is really handy).
I think I focus on the physical attractiveness because I never expected to be in good physical shape in my life. I’d come to accept my body, and I still sometimes feel weird in this new one. And I had been seeing research all my life about how beautiful people have all sorts of advantages in life. Losing the weight coincided with better treatment from others, and I immediately paired up the two.
But it was just one factor among many, and it’s entirely possible that I’m placing way too much emphasis on that one, and neglecting the rest. Which would be a big relief. It means once I get old and trollish everyone won’t abandon me immediately, if it’s true.
It really does seem to help at least a little though, especially in first impressions.
Sep 262014
Sep 252014
Yesterday I mentioned several of Seth Dickinson’s stories over at the podcast site. Today I want to focus on one in particular – Economies of Force. It is a transhumanist story so I’ll assume readers are already aware of common themes in transhumanist fiction – particularly the proposed ability of humans to edit their own mental make-up. Not just memories, but preferences and personality traits as well.
This has been speculated to allow for some pretty worrisome scenarios under sub-ideal economic circumstance, because (quoting Scott Alexander)
>brutal Malthusian competition combined with ability to self-edit and other-edit minds necessarily results in paring away everything not directly maximally economically productive. And a lot of things we like – love, family, art, hobbies – are not directly maximally economic productive. … [Bostrom worries] that consciousness itself may not be directly maximally economically productive. He writes: “We could thus imagine, as an extreme case, a technologically highly advanced society, containing many complex structures, some of them far more intricate and intelligent than anything that exists on the planet today – a society which nevertheless lacks any type of being that is conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland with no children.”
Yudkowsky introduced a different worry a few years earlier. In Amputation of Destiny he points out that the Culture of Iain M. Banks’s novels is rather bad for the humans, because there is nothing in the galaxy that is worth doing that humans can do. Anything they can do is done better by the Minds, and the humans exist simply because the Minds humor them. The humans are basically kept pets. The Minds are the true main characters of the story of the galaxy now. And while it’s good that there’s still intelligent life in the galaxy, it is sad that humanity has made itself irrelevant.
In Economies of Force, Dickinson has managed to bring these two together in a nicely chilling way. It is conveyed rather quickly that humanity is a kept pet species. No human really knows how the system works anymore, all major decisions are passed on to the machines, because the machines always make the best decisions. It’s beautifully described in a section too long to quote, which makes you feel the disorientation and helplessness in the face of forces human minds cannot comprehend. But everyone’s OK with this because it’s so darned efficient and works so well that humanity is basically living in a utopia. The story draws a picture of an idyllic world where life is easy and everything is nice. It certainly beats the pants off of what most people living today have to go through, even in the nicer parts of the world.
But humanity’s keepers are not like Banks’s Minds, because they have no sentience themselves. Humanity has made itself a pet species and the beings taking our place as the main characters of the universe aren’t even characters. They’re self-replicating animatronic gods.
The system which supports and cares for humanity, while making them irrelevant, has an immune system. To keep running it requires a certain mentality of the humans that comprise it. We need all our cells to work together, and if some cells stop working for the whole and start hoarding all the body’s resources to perpetuate only themselves, we start to die. We call them cancer, and excise them. Likewise, the non-thinking god is composed of humans, and the humans must work in concert. So when certain humans stop working to keep the system alive, they are excised. They’re even described in cancer terms:
>How could you be part of something that, on the deepest level, only cared about making more of itself? A network whose only value was more network, with no ambition to ever be anything more?
Who could live that way?
I read an interview where someone thought of the Loom as an alien virus, a scary zombie-like thing. I think that’s the wrong interpretation though. It’s a memetic hazard, and the really great part of the story is that the hazard is things that we the reader think are good. These humans become a cancer on the system when they start valuing the wrong things. Specifically:
>They just care about something different. Reaching other people, instead of reaching that new promotion, that new car. And they’re here, you understand? You’d be one of them right now.”
And that’s the terrible horror of the story. We can identify with the system, a being composed of smaller parts which must cooperate for us to continue living, and the necessity of eliminating those parts which would kill us in their selfishness. But we also identify with the cellular components as they are us, and the cancer that the greater system must eliminate is what we consider the most precious things in life, while the values the system needs are what we would consider banal, meaningless striving. And worst of all is that the system we are part of isn’t even a being with moral worth. It is mindless. We created what, from the outside, looks like a utopia that most people would kill for. But it is hollow. It is an example of one of the many things that could go very wrong if we create an AI that will give us what we think we want, but fails to fully capture all our values. It’s a demonstration of half of Eliezer’s warnings of faux-utopias that hits you on an emotional level.
(It’s not a true horror story though, but I’ve spoiled enough as it is)
The amazing part of all this is that a story that requires such a level of background knowledge got published in a major market. This is a testament to Dickinson’s writing skill – he made a story on these themes so compelling that it pulls in the average reader unacquainted with these esoteric minutia. When I read Dickinson it makes me want to give up writing entirely, because I know I’ll never be able to make anything as beautiful as what he’s put together. I won’t subject you to my continued ravings, but… damn! So good!
Sep 182014
Colleague/Acquaintance (and possibly Friend? I always feel a bit weird using that word if it’s someone I don’t hang out with regularly. We have a great time when we’re together somewhere, but I don’t think I’ve ever been to her house for a party, or vica-versa, and I don’t want to make claims to a friendship that isn’t actually there. Due to a very isolated childhood I consider people either very-close friends or strangers, and I’m not sure what to label the in-between areas. So lets go with Acquaintance) Rachael Acks posted yesterday about the Amazon/Hachette throw-down. I have one point of disagreement in a large (and well-written) post, so as dictated by long internet tradition I will now blog about that disagreement and not comment on anything else. > Companies are not going to value us or our work as long as we treat it as a thing without value. This is our problem to solve, because we let this happen. […] we’re too fucking cowardly and blind as a society to smack [corporations] with a rolled up newspaper and say NO.
That’s all well and good to say, but the problem with us doing anything is that the vast majority of us aren’t controlled by me. While making money off writing is the dream, it is not the reason that anyone I know of writes. People write for the same reason they create music, or act, or make any other piece of art – to be seen by others. That’s putting it crudely, it’d be more charitable to say something like “To touch others, and connect in a more fundamental way through sharing this piece of ourselves.” But you can’t do that without being seen. The real payment is wide-spread publication, the money is just a bonus. Everyone I know who writes would still write for free if getting paid for it wasn’t an option. Heck, Rachael published free fanfic and raved about how good it felt.
So while one can say “We should all stop devaluing our work! No more providing Service X (stories, in this case) without decent compensation!”, how does one actually stop the vast majority of writers who just want to be noticed and appreciated from making their work available, without compensation? Force is out, and social shaming is becoming less and less popular. Even Rachael spoke out against it (see previous link). As long as people love to write and do it for it’s own sake, wages of writing will be depressed. It’s the same reason that it’s nearly impossible to make a living as a straight male porn actor. People would do it for free in their spare time, so why would producers pay extra?
Money is used as a motivator to get people to do things they don’t want to do. I would not be doing accounting in my spare time if I was independently wealthy. I’d drop that like a chocolate donut I picked up and then realized was actually a round-shaped turd. People generally don’t get paid to do things that people love to do for their own sake (like eating actual chocolate donuts).
Every year a few people win the Writing Lottery for reasons that appear to be entirely random, and they can make a career of it. I admire them, and wish them all the best. I read quite a few of them. If I were to ever win that lottery for doing something I already love to do, I would be crazy happy about it. But I don’t count on it. I expect, like almost everyone, to hold down a job that produces something people need enough that they’re willing to give someone else money to produce it, and also write when I have time simply for the love of writing. If I can make some money on the side, all the better.
Sep 172014
Yes, today there are at least three links that originated from Scott’s blog. I don’t have a problem! I can quit any time I want! But first: This is what I think of your rabbit!
An atheist church is coming to Denver. Interesting… I fear this will be one of those things for “families” and “children,” but willing to give it a shot
Did you know this about Marx? Cuz I didn’t know this about Marx.
“[He’s] basically just telling us to destroy all of the institutions that sustain human civilization and trust that what is baaaasically a giant planet-sized ghost will make sure everything works out”
Damn, mysticism poisons *everything*. :/
The Answer That Destroys All Our Futures. A good point about banks that I never really thought about before. Society would suck quite a bit more without them. Article goes on to draw a parallel to make a social point, which is also good, but I found the up-front bank commentary to be most insightful.
San Diego School District gets a 18-Ton Armored Vehicle. School Librarians to Tamika Flynn: “Your move, bitch”
“Sarwar and Ahmed, both of whom pleaded guilty to terrorism offences last month, purchased Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies
..[They] may try to justify their violence with recourse to religious rhetoric […] but religious fervour isn’t what motivates most of them.
..large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy
Flight makes emergency landing because woman wouldn’t stop singing Whitney Houston song I Will Always Love You. This is exactly how I want to be escorted off a plane some day. (there’s video!)
Drone Discovers Abandoned Renaissance Faire Deep in Virginia Woods. I know what I’m doing if I’m ever in Virginia.
It hurts me a bit every time Scott says he’s against feminism, since he’s such an ideal example of all the best parts of feminism. I can’t stop admiring him. But he does have some good points which need to be made. If we’re losing people like Scott, we won’t win the long fight.
“everyone knows a Henry. Most people know several. Even three years ago, I knew there were Henry-like people – your abusers, your rapists, your bullies – and it wasn’t hard to notice that none of them seemed to be having the crushing loneliness problem I was suffering from.
And, like my patient Dan, I just wanted to know – how is this fair?
And I made the horrible mistake of asking this question out loud”
Jai responds to Scott – “there’s a much more charitable explanation of a world where almost everyone was and is trying to do the right thing.” Further quoting would just be me quoting the entire post, so… there’s the link.
The Denver Police Department has started using body cameras on their officers. Proud to be living in Denver. Over the past few years we’ve become a hell of a state. :)
Oh hell yes!! MTV releases the Liquid Television archives to the masses. Everyone who was a teen in the 90s knows how awesome this shit is. No one else will care. Which is too bad.
Posting in the hopes that this will help normalize the procedure, and more people will sign up for cryo over time. Bitcoin’s Earliest Adopter Is Cryonically Freezing His Body to See the Future. Also, he posted on LW when he was first diagnosed. The first two comments contain updates as he progressed. I can’t believe how fast that went. Get signed up early, most life insurance companies won’t accept you after something like this is diagnosed.
Good news everyone! Starting in October, Alzheimer’s Patients Will Be Injected With the Blood of Young People. If this works out, old people can feel better, and young people will have an easier time getting established and not suffer through as much getting-started poverty! Everyone wins :)
I always found Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun unbearable, because it seemed like a terribly depressing song forced into an upbeat tempo. At last someone has fixed this and made the music match the song. THANK YOU.
The Gingerbread Scientist. A short, sad story in comic form.
Facebook using their powers for good! Clearing clickbait from your news feed
We recycle everything we can. But in some cases, recycling is actually worse than throwing something away (most notable example being the dark glass of colored wine bottles)
Memorization of certain copyrighted material is infringement. Notably, many of these are test-practice materials. Even if these claims wouldn’t hold up in court, fucking someone over with thousands in legal fees to defend themselves is nearly as abusive.
The Strange Tale of the North Pond Hermit. This entire story is just FASCINATING. But one of things that most stuck out for me:
Robin Hanson has stated that the conscious self is a social adaptation – Consciousness is the PR-firm of the self, trying to make our actions look good to the other humans around us while still pursuing our own genetic interest. The North Pond Hermit provides support for this view –
“I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn’t even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free.”
Humans Need Not Apply. “Horses today are unemployable. The horse population has plummeted since 1910.”
I expect my job to last 10 years before the computers replace my field entirely. 20 at the very outside. In the USA we *already* condemn a chunk of the population as Too Unproductive To Live, things are gonna get bad as this percentage of the population goes up. Perhaps at some point we will adopt the mentality Scott Alexander recommends and realize that “we were here first and society doesn’t get to make us obsolete without owing us something in return.”
But I’m not holding my breath, and I’m hoping to amass enough capital before that happens to hold me through the upheaval time in between.
The Jon Stewart Show back when he was on MTV. Somethings changed a lot, somethings haven’t changed at all. :)
Ferguson – “How does a stop for jaywalking turn into a homicide and how does that turn into an American town essentially coming under military control with snipers, tear gas, and a no-fly zone? … events like this don’t happen without a deeper context. Part of the context is the return of debtor’s prisons
… fines and court fees comprise the second largest source of revenue for the city
…You don’t get $321 in fines and fees and 3 warrants per household [annually] from an about-average crime rate. You get numbers like this from bullshit arrests for jaywalking and constant “low level harassment involving traffic stops, court appearances, high fines, and the threat of jail for failure to pay.”
(Also, did anyone else not know that we have a fucking NO-FLY ZONE over Ferguson?)
I know this dates me, but this is still my go-to Fuck The System music.
“I look in the mirror and what do I see?
It will all end in anarchy”
Ferguson – “Your right to demonstrate is not being denied” For exactly as long as you can stomach having machine guns trained on you.
The public is the enemy.
Ferguson – If the police shot you, what picture would the media use to represent you?
A news story from 150 years ago: The great balloon riot of 1864
“It is humiliating to think that after all the civilising influences which have been exerted upon them, so much of the savage should still linger in the blood of our working classes.”
Welcome to The Future! (Please enjoy responsibly.) (note: not sarcastic or ironic)
Sep 152014
I mentioned previously some of the effects of going from unattractive to moderately attractive. One that I didn’t mention before, but that I am reminded of all the freaking time…
People touch you. A lot.
I’ve always been really bad with physical touch. I don’t particularly like it, particularly from those I’m not intimately familiar with. So I noticed almost immediately when people started touching me. It didn’t used to be a thing. I mean, handshakes of course, and the glancing brush when maneuvering in tight quarters. But never did anyone intentionally reach out and touch me just in casual conversation. Somewhere between three years ago and now people started touching me. Claps on the shoulder, touches on the upper arm, a pat on the knee. Playful whaps and such. Coworkers, friends-of-friends, people I’ve just met that night. Men and women, and generally without any overt sexual connotation. Except, of course, we’re all primates, so it’s always sexual, even when it isn’t. Right?
I’m getting more used to it. I’ve gone out of my way to start hugging people a lot, especially friends. A sort of aversion therapy. It seems to be working, and I get the feeling people like it. I got so into it that I recently hugged someone out of reflex as she was saying “I have a thing where I don’t like touch,” and felt like a complete jackass for it right after. :(
Every time someone touches me I have a feeling of regret right after. Regret that I’m not in better shape, fear that they touched some soft fatty part. I wish I was iron throughout. It’s a great motivator to keep working out. Yeah, I know it’s not rational, and I know it’s like the least bad problem of all problems to have.
But man, touching. This social-bonding stuff is weird.