Metablog

All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. If your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won’t get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you’ll have to deal with the consequences.

– Paul Graham

Apathy means that when you sit down and you have this feeling that there’s something that needs to be done, something you want to do, and then you try to start doing it, to figure out what you need to do, that your mind can stare at that problem, and the problem stares right back, and your mind simply whimpers a little bit. Normally, when you look at a problem, you get a sense of its shape and boundries, and a will to take that problem head on, to work through it and find its weaknesses and explode whatever apparent dilemma is facing you, or at least to discover what it is that you don’t know yet.

But when you’re apathetic, that doesn’t happen. It’s not because you’re scared of the problem. It’s not because you’re not interested in the problem. It’s because your mind is too still, just not willing enough, just not able to get started. Sure, there are some issues that will be pressing enough to get your mind going. Mainly when there are things that people want you to do right then. People to give you pressure, and move your mind for you.

And there are a couple other things that can do it. Problems that happen to be especially interesting, for one. Those are fun to solve. Other problems are simply fun to work on, whether or not you actually solve them. (Videogames would be something like that. Who cares if you beat the game? It’s the game itself that makes it fun to play.) Other problems might be those that make you mad, or excited, or sexually aroused.

But when you’re apathetic, there is one thing that absolutely cannot give you an incentive to act: your own mind. You can’t decide that something is interesting enough to grab your attention. It just is or isn’t. If you think you want to do this or that, but it’s not inherently interesting, no amount of will can overcome that disconnect between your higher brain functions and your lower ones. without something external and unconscious and uncontrollable giving your mind an incentive to act, it’ll simply never do anything.

Even this essay I’m writing isn’t a product of my will. It’s a product of my depression of the last two weeks, while this problem has become gradually both more clear and more aggravating. Annoyance at myself, once it becomes strong enough, is enough to motivate me. But there are a dozen other things I’d like to be doing right now (in the abstract) that my mind will simply refuse to wrap itself around. Every day there are two different tasks that I can sit and stare at, and not find the will to actually work on at all.

Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s not that my mind has absolutely no ability at all to direct my attention. It’s more that the ability is so weak that the slightest draw can disturb it and distract me from the other things I’d like to be doing. And this is quite troublesome for me, because it means that there are some days where I can manage to avoid those distractions and be moderately productive (though not as much as I could be otherwise). And so it makes me feel as if my bad days are more my fault—a failure of will. And that is a destructive attitude. Destrutive attitudes suck.

It presents a further problem, too. There are weeks and even months in which I become interested in certain problems, not of my own will, but simple because I happened upon the issue, and I become interested and can give my attention to it. And these are issues I would even direct my own attention to, were I able to. These are times where I feel much better. Healthy, even. So it makes it much harder to understand those times where I don’t feel healthy. But I think I understand now. It’s not my fault when those times end. It’s simply when my interest happens to be distracted once again by some other object, or even when it simply wanes away from all objects.

I think I’ve come to accept my own state over the years. I’ve come to acknowledge that I’m not the kind of person that can complete projects—not the kind of person to make a lasting contribution to any significant field, even if I think my talents and ideas are good enough to qualify me for that sort of accomplishment. So I don’t expect any sort of consistency of attention out of myself anymore, and I’ve become much less depressed as a result. But still not happy. And I still have one major problem.

Fortunately, there have been few times in my life where I didn’t have at least some things that I could give my attention to, even if those things weren’t even close to the ones I would have chosen. Unfortunately, the things that distract me the most nowadays are on the internet. And the internet happens to be a vital part of my job. And so I’m not really getting anything done at my job, which is much more important than other times. It puts my livlihood in jeopardy. Since the net is necessary for my job, it’s not like I can avoid it entirely. Sure, I could install filters on my work computer to whitelist only those sites I need to do my job. But any feasible solution would still require a lot of will on my part to go along with the filtering. I’ve already tried that sort of thing, and it doesn’t make the problem any easier. It’s not the way to solve it.

And even if I were to start being able to be consistently productive, my personal relationships are still suffering. I don’t have the attention necessary to have good, enriching conversations. My conversations end up being very slow-paced, lifeless, scattered, and somewhat inane, even where they can be (and have been) engaging, invigorating, thorough, and inspiring.

I’ve thought about calling a psychiatrist. But I can’t find the desire to go through with it.

I think that, clinically, my condition would be classified as ADD. But the apathy is the worst part of it, and I think the word better describes the subjective experience of my condition.

Oh, wow. Looks like this issue is getting more attention. Amanda Marcotte, Lindsay Beyerstein, and Shakespeare’s Sister have all weighed in, based on a court case actually being argued (I’m supposing) along the lines of my previous post. Now, the former two are writers I read regularly, and who I tend to agree with 90% of the time. So I feel kind of awkward taking a position so very opposed to theirs. But I feel I must.

None really say anything that I feel a need to dissect. They don’t present a strong, well-reasoned case for their side, as I do, and I don’t feel like divining what their exact arguments against my position might be before they state them. But I do want to draw a bit of attention to them for my hypothetical readers, and to make a disclaimer for myself. I don’t necessarily support any of the arguments being made by these MRA laywers or their client, and in fact I probably don’t support many of them. They’re almost certainly not approaching the issue from a feminist viewpoint, and I’d like to think that I am. And while the details of the exact case aren’t clear, this is definitely not the most clear-cut case to support my own view. The existence of a long-term prior relationship (How long term? I’m not sure.) means that the girlfriend could have had reasonable expectations. The boyfriend’s case seems to hinge on the fact that he had made clear, as he said, that he didn’t want any children. Establishing that in court might be hard, and I think it would be a terrible idea for the burden of proof to be on the mother in this situation, as women already have to overcome so much to deal with the courts at all. (See, there? I’m not really an MRA sympathizer.) Is there a precedent for this? Probably not.

But it could turn out that he’s being an asshole about the whole thing.

I’m not sure I can support this case even if it turns out the guy doesn’t really owe her child support by my view. Because this sort of situation is still relatively rare, and in general to have that sort of precedent is going in exactly the wrong direction for women’s rights in this country. I do think it’s unjust for men in that situation, but compared to the injustice that women suffer, it’s really almost excusable. I’m much more afraid that, in the current climate, changing this would be an overcorrection and lead to more injustice to women in child support cases than it prevents against men in these cases.
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Being a meta blog as Metablog is, I want to start getting really meta. I know I was going to review truth mapping, but I feel really conflicted about that, and so I’m going to put it off.

In the meanwhile, I’ll introduce an idea really similar to truth mapping that I think could be a good way to handle the problem of comments threads just getting too damn long to read. The author of the post, as part of their authorly duties, integrates all the substantive comments into the main body of their post, as part of a sort of socratic dialogue. They don’t update the post itself as comments are coming in, but keep a copy in draft. Then, when comments have slowed down, they can post an updated version of the post with integrated comments. This can probably reduce the volume of words by 60% and still keep all the substance. It also has an advantage of making things much more clear to everyone, and of not violating commenters’ expectations enough to really discourage participation.

I imagine the integration would proceed by first directly modifying the post to incorporate criticsms and suggestions that the author agrees with. After that, there come criticisms that the author can empathize with, those being stated in their strongest forms as understood by the author. These might be a bit more distracting, so they could be formatting specially, using a special tag interpreted by the blogging software that would both indent, bullet, and hide the text inside the tag. Then to read it, you’d have to click on it to expand the text. Further, each of these little bullets could, optionally, have some explicit logical relationship to others, making it a “truth mapping” sort of approach.

Finally, this improved concoction could be posted “over” the old one, requiring special support from the blogging package, of course. You wouldn’t see the old one any longer, unless you clicked on a revision history link on the post. Most of the old comments would disappear as well. Finally, when the comments veer off in strange directions, they could be split off into new posts. If the author doesn’t really take an interest to a particular tangent, they can simply not moderate that new thread as much. Another blogger could even “take ownership” of the discussion, and comments could be transferred to the other blog where moderation and integration could proceed in the new venue.

There are some comments, however, that don’t really fit in to be integrated into the post, but the author might feel are worth keeping in the latest revision. So it might be necessary to mark each comment as “keep” or “leave”. Or perhaps it would be easier to simply mark certain comments for deletion when their contents are integrated into the main body of the post, and let other comments be assumed to be worth keeping.

All this sounds really labor intensive, doesn’t it? Well, it really is labor intensive. But I think there would be a lot of benefits. Posts would have a lot of reuse value. Instead of having to argue this or that point ad infinitum in some comment thread, one could instead simply link to the relevant parts of the post, or perhaps copy and paste. The results of that new discussion could contribute back to the old post. Futhermore, the bar to contributing to a really old post with a lot of comments would be a lot lower, because one wouldn’t have to read all the comments from old revisions, and so those old threads would stay alive and healthy longer. Plus, it gives more subtle and/or learned commenters more rewards for their efforts, and thus raises the quality of the blog’s commentariat.

This approach would require quite a bit of programming beyond what I’ve seen available in any system (except maybe Drupal), but I think its potential is large.

More than more explicit and formal approaches to debate modeling, I think this approach has the potential to catch on in the wider blogosphere, at least at the more serious sites. And it will give us the kind of experience and intuition and ideas we need to really know what we would want out of a more explicit system. So it’s a good first step.

Taking positions that go against the general grain of a certain ideology that you believe in for the most part, and then presenting those positions to those who share most of your views, but without having established yourself as a trustworthy member of that ideological community, is a recipe for being misunderstood.

No big surprise there. But it is frustrating, sometimes. I never feel like reading conservative blogs, or anti-feminist blogs, or anti-singularity blogs, for instance. I only like reading blogs that I agree with 80+% of the time. That way, when I argue over the remaining 20%, it’s engaging and constructive. Incidentally, I think that if one wants to expand the ideological spectrum of one’s blogroll, the thing to do isn’t to change the percentage, but to look for discussion at a higher level. I could talk to a conservative about secular moral philosophy, for instance, even if discussions about abortion would be entirely fruitless. Because at the higher levels, eventually you reach logical principles and/or universally common experiences, which will eventually reach 80% agreement.

The downside of all this is that it’s easy to be perceived as not being as friendly and understanding as you really are to the positions that you’re criticising, because people assume that you’re criticizing more than you actually are. They assume that you’re one of “the other” instead of someone with minor differences in opinion. It’s especially hard to be the kind of person that thinks a lot about meta issues, like me, and therefore doesn’t have much to say on the substance of many articles, even if one enjoys them a lot, but instead prefers to point out logical errors in arguments that can probably stand anyway, or on other legs. Pointing out those errors is seen as a hostile action.

I think it boils down to this. It’s really easy to attribute positions commonly held by group A to an individual commenter who appears to resemble group A, even when the commenter really avoids saying anything that explicitly identifies them as being in group A. Part of this is justified, of course. If one is unaware of how a person could reconcile their A-style belief with their wider ideology of B, how their A-style belief could really be consistent with B, then one is justified in identifying the person as a member of group A. But one shouldn’t put much stock in this identification, and this is where I think many people fall short. They cling to that preliminary identification. If the person tries to identify themselves more with B, others will suspect dishonesty. And it’s possible for a commenter to avoid this, to some degree, with careful phrasing and proper ordering and good framing.

This general tendency to confuse a person with a wider group manifests in other ways, too. I see very often where liberals will denigrate conservatives because of some supposed hypocricy in, e.g. being pro-life yet anti-gun-control. But it’s a mistake to accuse a group of people of hypocricy unless the hypocritical actions have been observed together in enough individual members of the group to know that those members are representative of the group.

In particular, it’s patently unfair to take two separate groups of people (say, moral values conservatives versus big business consevatives) with two different behaviors that, in a single person, would be hypocritical, and combine those two groups (say, conservatives), and call that single group hypocritical. For example, it’s a fallacy to say that anti-feminists are hypocritical in argumentation because they’re either saying you’re too shrill or saying you’re getting too technical. Because it’s likely that the group of people that would say the first has a small overlap with the group of people that would say the second, even if both are contained within the larger group of anti-feminists.

This fallacy happens because of the homogenizing effects of intellectual tribalism on the other side. It becomes easier to merge and conflate separate and disparate instances of an opposing viewpoint, perceiving them as being concomitant in individual representatives of the other viewpoint.

Case in point (although this is one of millions): is this comment.