Metablog

Life is meaningless.

What’s interesting about this sentiment is that it doesn’t explain at all the condition which gives life to it. It’s a fundamental psychological fallacy. A projection of one’s state of mind onto the world. And it’s ironic too—the underlying neurological phenomenon, and thus the sentiment itself, is every bit as meaningless as the antagonistic world, the “life” against which the mind rails ineffectually.

Sadness is coercive lack of meaning, or failure of meaning to explain the world. Take away the coercion, and all you have left is apathy. For some, anthropomorphizing can lead to agents on which to project coercive potency, and thus they can rationalize continued sadness. Others have legitimate grievances against society. (Though their sadness or anger is no less a result of their personality.) I guess it takes a pretty good life to realize that depression isn’t a result of it.

On the other hand, I just need to get laid.

I’ve decided to learn shorthand. I’m going with a modified Gregg, Handywrite, that has more symbols to cover many vowel sounds and a couple consonant sounds missing from Gregg. It’s a phonetic system, not an alphabetic system, which means that there’s roughly one symbol per English phoneme (roughly, “sound”). Handywrite technically isn’t a shorthand, but a full phonemic writing system.

Basically, Handywrite is just a different way of writing normal text. It’s designed with the goal of speed—of having the simplest possible shape for each sound, and picked so that common sounds patterns are easy to write. I can only write about twenty or thirty words per minute with normal cursive writing, but with a shorthand system like Handywrite, I could get 80–100 words per minute, which is about the speed I type. This would make handwriting much more practical for me, making me able to comfortably take notes about things when I’m away from my computer, and much more easily take adequate notes in classes or meetings.

Shorthand systems look pretty wild written down. Here’s a sample, from the Handywrite page:

My handwriting is not that good. You may be surprised that the above images represent 24 words. They’re simpler than you’d expect based on the spelling of the word. I think part of it has to do with the spareness of the lines, and another part with all the extra letters that English uses to spell things that aren’t really needed. (One spelling reform proposal, Cut Spelng, achieves a much simpler spelling system solely by removing specific classes of redundancies and inconsistencies (with all other redundancies and inconsistencies being left in). Cut Spelng appears more spare and streamlined, like Gregg or Handywrite shorthand.

Sara Robinson, at Orcinus, has just posted a list of different frames that people use for evaluating how change happens.

One of the grandest — and most frustrating — things about carrying on the great democratic conversation via blog is finding out how many of your fellow citizens (including many who are nominally on your side) turn out to be looking at the world from a completely different set of assumptions than you are. [...]

You often find these meta-level disconnects at the core of online flame wars. [...]

A goodly number of these online disagreements are based in our fundamental assumptions about how change happens. Believe it or not, different people can look at the same situation, and come to completely different conclusions about what’s likely to happen next. [...]

My professors have, over the years, boiled the basic change drivers down to about nine. (There may be others; I’m open to suggestions.) In brief, here are the main assumptions people use to explain why change happens:

1. Progress. Change happens because humans want to improve their condition, and apply ingenuity and good problem-solving to create progress. The people with the best handle on the future are the optimists, though individuals have a lot of control over what will happen. Over the next 20 years, the social and economic conditions of the world will consistently get better, just as they have improved on a ever-rising linear path throughout history.

Her other entries include Development, Technology, Ideas, Markets, Cycles, Conflict, Power, and Evolution. Most people are partial to a few of these, and repulsed by a few. Some of them may be legitimately invalid. But they’re not mutually exclusive, so when two people argue over whether they should use one or another to evaluate the implications of some policy or moral stance, there’s often a neglect of a need to apply both frames in the analysis.

Sara thinks that these frames are behind most of the deep, hard-to-resolve disagreements between people, but I doubt it. I think that these are probably only a subset of all the different frames with that effect. There might be two or three higher-level categories that each contain a dozen basic frames, and this is only one of them. I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing. Sara is a wonderful writer and an insightful futurist. For more of her writing, see her Cracks in the Wall series, about the psychological roots and sociological roots of authoritarianism (especially religious).

Wow, I’ve been blogging a lot today. It’s the second day since I started my free-ranging sleep schedule, and I feel so much better. It would be amazing if my ADHD was actually just symptoms of sleep deprivation from severe delayed sleep phase syndrome. (And suck that I’ve been wasting time with ADHD meds.)

But being out of synch isn’t going to be easy. First of all, I have to be able to predict my sleep schedule in advance so I can make appointments at times when I won’t be sleeping. Second, I have to deal with the lack of daylight during my productive hours. I think for the latter, a couple things are in order. First, I need a new watch, that I’ll set to 8 AM every time I get out of bed. That way I can see what time it should feel like relative to my sleep schedule, and I can try to modulate my level of activity (and my focus) accordingly. Otherwise, if I wake up at 2 PM, I’d be prone to spend a few hours working and then goof off until 11 PM and then do random stuff until I go to bed at 4 or 5 AM. And that’s not a way to get anything done.

Second, I need to get more organized. I need to have a plan about what I need to get done, and follow the plan. Because if I just did what I felt like doing, I would leave a lot of important things undone, since a lot of the meager productivity I have nowadays is tied to habits that are based on my daily routine, which is going to become much more sporadic. So I got a book today (at 3 PM subjective time, 7 PM real time) called “Getting Things Done”, by David Allen. You might have heard of it. We’ll see if it helps.

When people in a discussion disagree strongly, I see a tendency for them to get especially exasperated when the discussion gets to the point where both of them are reading a small (e.g. 20–50 word) section of text, and disagreeing on what it says, or what the direct implications of it are. But I think this is exactly the opposite of what the right reaction is. When you find that kind of disagreement, it should be very easy to structure the remainder of the discussion around it to figure out exactly what some of your different assumptions and mental models are, which is very likely to lead to a lot more understanding. So you should be glad to find this sort of disagreement, since you’re lucky to have such a clear example of the nature of your underlying differences.

Unfortunately, people are much too quick to jump to the conclusion, in this situation, that one or the other must be acting in bad faith, even in the uncommon (but commendable) situation where they both remain civil about it. I think this is because people have a very hard time integrating the belief, if they have it at all, that differing assumptions and worldviews can run very deep and influence how we acquire and process information in very substantial and unintuitive ways. And so arguments often end up getting dropped at the very moment where they could begin to be the most fruitful. If people would just understand how deep these differences can run, and that they don’t necessarily make the others’ views illegitimate, then I think they would more easily see these instances in the light I do.

This might be one of the big mechanisms behind the tendency for people to have so much more trouble debating with people the further apart they are ideologically. The likelihood of encountering and disagreeing about a small section of plainly-written text increases proportionally to the magnitude of ideological difference between the participants. If this tendency weren’t there, people would still have a lot of trouble, but at least they wouldn’t end up doubting the other’s sanity.

Unfortunately, I don’t think everyone is capable of working through a disagreement on this level. It takes both an unusual willingness to dig into the argument, and a capacity for detailed philosophical or semantic discussion.

I think I’m going to edit this into my charitability post.

I just went out and bought some +1.00 reading glasses. I’m wearing them on top of my -1.5 or so normal glasses (to correct myopia) and find that I can focus on my computer screen with less effort. I’m wondering if making a habit of this could slow down or reverse my vision deterioration. I do know that pretty much the only inevitable deterioration experienced by everyone is a decrease in range you can focus through, which leads to needing bi- or tri-focals later in life. I remember when I was very young being able to bring things to within a half or even quarter inch of my eye to inspect them closely. I can’t do that anymore—the closest I can focus is about an inch and a half. But that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be able to focus on distant objects without correction.

With both glasses on, I can see clearly up to about two feet, and with neither on, I can see up to about a foot. If I can increase the latter distance to a foot and a half, I could comfortable work at a computer without any correction, which would be ideal. We’ll see how it goes.

People are really bad at subjectively evaluating the effects of medication for psychological problems. Part of the problem is that evaluating whether a given medication is having a certain effect involves accurately remembering what your moods and subjective experiences were in the recent and distant past. Both of those tasks are things humans are very poor at. In particular, recalling moods and attitudes from weeks ago is particularly difficult, unless those moods were exceptional and remarkable, which is only the case, for these medications, when the problem is quite severe and responds well to the treatment. Even then, it’s not always easy to tell. For instance, when I’m on my ADHD medication, I don’t feel more healthy or able to focus. Instead, things just seem more interesting to me. I wonder: “Why is it that I felt less motivated the other day?” So, it’s a bit better once you know what you need to look for.

But you still have the problem of being able to see the improvement. What do you need to do? Measure it objectively. Chart the effects. This is the essence of self-experimentation, and, I think, the only good way to undergo treatment for depression or ADHD (among other things).

I’ve been measuring my performance at work this way, in the hopes of finding out what works and what doesn’t for treating my ADHD. (Thanks to some help from Seth Roberts.) What I do is record every time I start or stop doing some task at work, sorting tasks into “focusing” and “non-focusing” (i.e. goofing off) tasks. This way I can keep track of how much time I actually spend doing tasks that require focus, and this should give me a pretty good indication of how well my treatments are working. I’ll post about my results one way or another.

I think it’s appalling that the standard way of evaluating medications’ effects (clinical trials) don’t include this kind of objective measurement as a much larger part of the study. And I think that if everyone did this sort of thing when they started treatments for problems, they could get a lot more mileage out of their doctor visits.

So, I’ve been thinking lately about apathy. I’ve been thinking that it’s probably not really just ADHD. It’s mainly depression. ADHD just helps reinforce it. ADHD is the short term, “I’m looking at a problem and can’t make myself focus on it” and depression is the longer-term “I’ve failed at making any progress on problems recently and I feel bad about it” that keeps me from trying again or shifting focus to a meta-problem. So I need to find some medication to help me with the larger aspect of it. Maybe Zoloft?

So, I’ve been doing pretty bad with the ADHD recently. I’ve recently started recording how much work I get done, which is a pretty good proxy for how bad my ADHD is acting up, and really easy to measure objectively, to boot. And just yesterday I started on a new sleep schedule. I now go to bed when I feel like it and get up when I feel like it. I have delayed sleep phase syndrome, so my sleep hours will rotate throughout the day over a period of about two weeks, I’m guessing. I don’t actually know exactly how much my circadian rhythm is elongated, but I guess I’m going to find out. I went to bed at 22:30 yesterday, and will probably go to bed at about 0:30 or 1:00 today. But it’ll take a while before I catch up on all my sleep and then before I see what my schedule settles out to being. (It’s great that my employers are OK with this arrangement. I’ll just come into the office during normal hours as much as possible, and work the rest of the time during off-hours.) So I’ll be tracking how much regular sleep helps my symptoms. (And we’ll see if I start blogging more regularly.)

Incidentally, I know that light therapy helps with my symptoms, but I don’t know exactly how much. Now that I’m able to follow my natural sleep phase, I’ll be able to measure it.

Inspired by Simon Funk.

I find it nearly impossible to find people I can be intellectually intimate with. I can be open, sure, but since I’m smarter, it’s more of a teacher/mentor role (at best). As a result, I have even less of an idea about what intellectual intimacy feels like than I do emotional intimacy. And the smarter you are, the harder it becomes to find people you can relate to intellectually even among people as smart as you, since divergent interests and contrary conclusions become even more of an issue than for people that don’t think as much.