Metablog

I know it’s trite, but it’s about me, so deal. For some people, it’s hard to just hold on, to make ends meet. They have a lot of opportunities to make mistakes and those mistakes can cost them a lot. For more fortunate people, they often make the very same mistakes, but they get bailed out by supporting family, friends, etc. Too much of this is a bad thing, but too little is also a bad thing.

But some people, (perhaps often the more fortunate ones, I’m not sure,) seem to make a different mistake. An error of omission. An overly conservative and fearful approach to life. Not enough risk-taking. And avoiding all those mistakes are nice, but really. It’s too easy for many people, me included, to avoid all the good stuff too. You have top put yourself out there and really live sometimes. People thrive on adversity. Adversity is the only thing that gives meaning to life.

Now, I’m not saying I’m against welfare and safety nets and universal healthcare. The adversity of cancer is something no one needs to deal with. Adversity isn’t something society needs to introduce so that people have something to overcome. It’s something both society and people need to overcome. And when it is overcome, people find new adversity to create for themselves. They seek out challenges, and they go experience more things.

Some people are lucky. Situated comfortably. No real adversity to face. No real challenges. And some of those people are afraid of adversity. They run from it. And that is dull, and boring, and pathetic. Depressing. If you’re situated comfortably, you’re not trying hard enough. You need to aim higher, put more at stake. Because that’s what makes human beings happy. Happiness is about pain. Life is about pain.

Isn’t life wonderful?

It seems like the kind of people that usually go to hostile forums tend to have above average debate skills. Thus, they tend to form a low opinion of the debate skills (and thus general intelligence) of the other people in those forums, since those people will have average skills. Now, people tend to overlook logical fallacies supporting positions they already hold (which they can often justify using better reasoning), so they’ll also tend to overestimate the debate skills of people whose conclusions they share. Now, people who don’t go to hostile forums will tend to pick up a lot of their opinion of “the other side” from the people who do, because they don’t have any direct experience with the other side, but they do have exposure to the contrarians’ opinions of the other side.

Oh, look! Polarization! Insularity! Woah, where did that come from?

A lot of the time I feel like I should just reinvent everything, and fix all the problems with online forums at once. But that’s stupid and silly. The social evolutionary process that has led to our current generation of intellectual interaction software is much, much smarter than I am when it comes to figuring out what actually works. Now, I believe that natural selection hasn’t had a chance to operate on some forum features that would really make big improvements to the quality of discourse. And it may be that there really is no social demand for that kind of quality, and that many of my ideas that would otherwise work won’t end up working. But in order to take advantage of the critical mass of commenters necessary to really test out a new feature, I really have to be able to integrate it with accepted forms of content production. Things that actually do draw commenters, and bloggers. Otherwise it’s way too easy to miss the mark.

Another perk of incremental changes is that it becomes plausible to market the features to existing bloggers with existing communities, instead of having to displace all existing forms of blogging software.

And if I do this, feature by feature, eventually it’ll end up being very close to the ideal. That is, unless there are some strange barriers in the fitness landscape (not very likely, IMHO), i.e. some large upfront costs/risks to some features that would otherwise be sure things. Transition costs.

A comment about some columnist or another I just read gave me an idea. Any division of labor that divides enough so that a task goes below the minimum threshold for the employee to be fully engaged and challenged by it, creates long-term inefficiences in that machines can always do rote tasks much better than people, and that people who are less than fully engaged by their work will have less opportunity to invent these machines. Far from Adam Smith’s firetruck boy, who replaces his job with some well-placed scrap of metal so that he has more time to play, the vast majority of workers actually have incentive *not* to replace their own jobs with machinery.

Incidentally, while I strongly believe that worker unions are necessary to keep quality of life reasonably high for workers, it seems to me like unions also have the effect of slowing down automation, which is a really good thing in the long term. But unions have a strong incentive to oppose any developments that automate and deprecate jobs.

Well, I’ve finally made some progress on my algebra editor. (Really, it’s more of an environment for the construction of formal systems at this point, but I plan to make it extremely algebra-friendly, such that using it will be much faster and less error prone than pen and paper for most students.) I did this by giving up the idea of implementing it in Lisp, and instead using a language that I use professionally, C#, to really get something done with it. And it really works. I have it to where you can add, edit, delete, and organize axioms, and create theorems and proofs and apply axioms to parts of them. And it’s all saved to disk, too. For instance, if you have

(+ (+ a b) (+ c d))

and you want to change it to

(+ (+ a c) (+ b d))

you need to use two axioms. The first is additive commutativity. It says that any (+ x y) can be transformed into (+ y x), where x and y match any expression. The second is additive associativity, which says that (+ x (+ y z)) can be transformed into (+ (+ x y) z) (and vice versa). So let’s see how this pans out with our problem, shall we?
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I just went to the doctor yesterday. It’s been a long time since I’ve been. I’m kind of afraid of doctors. Weary. Trepid. It’s all the money, and the perscriptions that might work, but you have to start with low dosages, and it takes a million weeks to start working, and funky side effects (especially with SSRIs and related drugs), etc. etc. I’ve tried three or four different antidepressants over the past couple years. But I finally found it in me to force myself to go. Probably seeing my brother finally find a medication to help him with his problem, which incidentally is the same as mine, was a spur. And I got a perscription for Concerta. And the difference is truly incredible. All of a sudden, my mind is full of ideas again. It’s like anything that, before, had some sort of barrier involved—a particular kind of mental barrier, a familiar feeling—now is accessible to me. It’s as if certain tasks required me to “drive uphill” mentally, and I didn’t have the energy to do that. I could go downhill, and perhaps along straight areas. Now I can go uphill.

I think I might start blogging more often.

Reading this thread on Alas, a Blog, gave me an idea. A comment was left disputing another comment that was tangential to the main topic of the post. This happens all the time, but this particular commenter apologized for the tangent (as doesn’t happen quite as often). And, I thought, this happens all the time. Why should people have to apologize for it? What’s wrong with blogs that the make it so tangential comments aren’t appropriate? That really sucks. But there’s a solution.

Subthreads. Have the topic of the main post be handled normally, with comments following serially afterwards. On the comment submission form have a checkbox that says “make this comment a subthread”, and let the commenter enter a title for the subthread. Also have an admin tool to make a particular comment, and maybe some replies, a subthread. A subthread has its own reply-to link, perhaps its own comment submission form, and is colored differently and indented. Perhaps it’s hidden with javascript by default. It appears in the place where its first post would be in a normal comment thread, and all replies are grouped together, followed by the rest of the normal comments.

This would be halfway between hierarchical threading and serial threading, with room for user and moderator participation. I think it would avoid the worst features of both different threading models for comments. Yay me! Now I just need to implement a wordpress plugin for it.