Metablog

I triggered an interesting thread at Unfogged today, wherein I get the commentariat there (mostly liberals) to give their various opinions on Libertarianism by expressing puzzlement at the animosity between the two groups, since in my limited experience they don’t see to be all that much opposed. I have quite little to say there, except for this:

Private enterprise leads to perverse incentives. So does government. Those incentives affect different kinds of services and products differently, such that for some things government will be largely free of perverse incentives and private enterprise full of them, and for others it’s vice versa. Deciding which incentives apply in which situations, and which are better and worse, is a matter for careful analysis, and it’s terribly unlikely that any blanket statements can be made.

Can’t everyone agree to that?

Words of wisdom.

UPDATE: Here’s another article by Thomas Brown, taking the view that ADD is or is one of a spectrum of executive function impairment disorders. Really good article. I’ll blog it later.

I just read a really interesting article about what Jeffrey Tate, a doctor specializing in ADD, thinks the core symptom of the disorder is. He thinks that it’s about not being able to focus on important tasks, as opposed to interesting tasks. Normally, either importance or interest are enough to allow us to focus on something, but for ADD sufferers, interest is all that suffices.

Now, this seems like it might be a bit off to me. Doesn’t everyone have trouble focusing on boring but important things? Or is that really pretty unusual? So, if you’re reading this, please answer these two questions:

1. Do you find it (a) easier (b) as easy, or (c) harder to focus on important tasks (things that need to be done) versus interesting tasks (that are entertaining, but not necessary)?
2. When there is something quite important but relatively uninteresting to be done, do you find it (a) easy (b) moderately easy (c) moderately hard, or (d) hard to get it done?

If I’m right, most people would answer C on the first question, and C or D on the second. Wouldn’t that make it so most people suffer from ADD? And what is “important”, in this context? Is it our conscious determination of the importance of the task? Unlikely. It’s probably some heuristic based on urgency, using cues from peer pressure (who wants you to do the task?) and the perceived immediate consequences of not doing the task. If someone is breathing down your neck about doing something, it can be a pretty powerful motivator.

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OK, I’ve learned a bit about dopamine and how it relates to various addictions and behavior modification. Dopamine is strongly implicated in addiction to alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, heroin, and morphine. It’s also the chemical release when some task has been sucessfully completed, by a person’s own standards. This positive feedback effect is probably why we become addicted to Sudoku or crossword puzzles. I think it can also explain blog commenting—we get a dopamine rush when we get approval from other commenters, and posting on friendly sites with likeminded commenters is likely to get us approval for many of our comments, and so we end up trying to comment a lot to get and maintain that approval.

Also, there’s probably something satisfying, and dopamine-inducing, about discovering a new and interesting piece of information. Both commenting and reading can lead to this.

It’s possible dopamine plays a central role in all kinds of human motivation and reinforcement learning, though to what extent I couldn’t say (and probably isn’t known yet).

How does interest relate to attention? Can most people choose to pay attention to things that they’re not particularly interested in for long periods of time? I wouldn’t think so. And yet many descriptions of ADD and ADHD (especially, it seems, those geared toward children with the disorder) say that “it much easier … to sustain attention in … work … when tasks are interesting, meaningful, or in some way motivating …”, as if this were something unique to individual afflicted with ADD. But that just sounds like bullshit to me. Even Wikipedia says that “[those affected] face some of their greatest challenges in the areas of self-control, self-motivation, as well as executive functioning”.

On the contrary, it seems more likely to me (and I speak as someone medicated for the disorder) that most people who have these problems have them because they work on very abstract and complicated subject with very little immediate emotional or adrenal influence. And, for humans, that’s a recipe for those problems.

Oooh, shiny. Humans have a “propensity to focus on emergency situations to the exclusion of background phenomena which may be more significant.” They “respond more readily to novel objects and fast changes.” The problem is that our attention allocation system is very poorly calibrated to with the level of complexity that our modern environment has. So many of the stimuli that we have to attend to over the course of the day is so far removed from its eventual impact on our lives, even when that impact is certain and substantial, that we cannot allocate it the amount of attention relevent to its actual importance to us.

But surely “colorful and moving” aren’t the only things that grab our attention. Obviously, people are fascinated by and spend countless time on many things that are quite bland. For instance, crossword puzzles. What draws our attention to crossword puzzles?

I’m going to have to read more about this.

UPDATE: I read a little more about this. (I’m going to the good library tomorrow.) Dopamine reinforcement probably has a lot to do with all this. Which is quite discouraging.

Many say that Lojban is an unambiguous language. This is true in many respects, and is probably more true for Lojban than for practically any other language. Lojban has an unambiguous phonology (when pronounced clearly and without error) and an unambiguous grammar (again, when used correctly). In its primary word list (both for gismu and cmavo), it avoids polysemy, the assignment of multiple meanings to a word.

Now, this lack of ambiguity, as far as it goes, makes for extremely fascinating discussions about “little words”, like “the” and “so” and “a”, and about the various basic mechanisms of language. But what it does not do is substantially decrease the occurrence of ambiguity in language as it’s actually used.

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Should the manager of an online community be responsible to its commenters, or to its anonymous readers?

Say I put a blog post out, and someone comments (on my blog? hah!) politely and articulately with a question that I think is utterly trivial and silly. (Let’s assume for the sake of this discussion that my judgement accords with that of most readers, which it normally won’t reliably do.) Now, if I want to engage with the commenter, I have to respond to the comment, and enter into a conversation whose starting point is an inane question. This exchange could have value for the commenter, if they’re open-minded. Otherwise, they’re a troll. Let’s assume they’re openminded.

So, a polite, articulate, openminded, and ignorant or slightly stupid person asks a silly and trivial question. I can give that commenter value by answering it. But how much does reading that inane exchange cost my other readers? Is the total cost more than the value I give to that one commenter? Should I delete the comment, and save my other readers the trouble? What if the question is obvious and trivial, but not quite inane or silly?

It’s funny. Most of the time, you can’t really “feel” the primary effects of a brain-targeted medication. The only way you can really tell it’s working is to “notice” its effects. At the end of the day, you notice that you got a lot more done than you have in a long time, but you didn’t notice this before. Or you notice that you just did something really nice, or you just interacted with someone very cheerfully, where you hadn’t done that in a long time. This is really the only way you can tell that medication is working, most of the time.

So, how’s my life? Well, Austin is scary. Traffic, and more traffic. For people that don’t make friends easily, it’s hard. Away from family. Etc. I live way up in the suburbs, where you can’t walk to anything. I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to take pub transit downtown without having to drive my car at all. There’s a park and ride across the freeway. The bus route circles around, but I don’t know if I can stop a bus at a corner or not.

Trying to get more organized, as preceeding post indicates. I need to sit down and plan out some goals of mine. I’d like to finish a few of the 12 unfinished posts I have sitting around. Get some financial business taken care of. Get my stuff all unpacked. (It’s been three weeks and I still have like three full boxes out of the dozen or so I brought.) Buy and arrange furniture. Be more productive at my job, so I can ask for a raise in good conscience. Find a local doctor. Figure out how to allot time spent on blogs (reading, commenting, and writing), debate modeling, the SIAI, and my dynamic compressor plugin. And other hobbies I’m probably forgetting about. Oh, yes. Piano. I definitely have to limit my time practicing to about 30 minutes a day, because of my RSIs. Maybe I can gradually ramp up as my technique and strength improve. I wonder if I should look for a teacher. And I wonder whether I should continue learning classical pieces or start trying to learn how to improvise.

Trying to hit up some people on Match.com. Sent out a few mails, haven’t heard back in two days. I’ll give it another two and then send out another batch of mails. I’ve only seen two people that seem very interesting. Match has 15 million members, and only 250 or so are females between 18 and 26 who live within 20 miles of Austin and don’t definitely wan’t kids. That just doesn’t seem right. I picked about three dozen from those, of which most only have about a 10% chance of being interesting, I’d say. Well, I might find two or three good people out of all those. Match sucks.

A lot of people there are quite religious. Even a couple of the otherwise really interesting ones. That’s kind of disheartening. I can deal with religious, even “spiritual, but not religious”, but not “my faith is very important to me”. No, that would cause problems.

Broadly construed, there are generally only two ways people spend their time*. Either they’re doing something that helps them achieve a certain goal (such as keeping one’s job or not starving or keeping the house clean or getting a degree or finding romance), or they’re doing something that interests them, without having a particular goal in mind. The latter kind of activies are often called “wasting time”.

*More technically, there is a binary, exhaustive, and fuzzy categorization of “ways to spend time” that is the only one relevant to my post.

But is time spent thusly a pure waste? I would say not. Such time is often spent learning new things about the world, or improving one’s skills or social connections. And experiences thus gained can make a person more interesting, and more able to enjoy life, and sometimes can unexpectedly affect the goals a person has and how they achieve them. If I had never spent any time of this quality, I can’t imagine how much poorer my life would be. Additionally, one’s activities in this time are often guided by unconscious goals, which can become more concrete and explicit over time.

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