Metablog

I’ve played chess for a long time. I first learned from a cousin when visiting my grandmother’s house around the age of 8 or so. When I was about 15 I started getting quite interested in the game, and got some books to really start practicing it. This was about the same time that I started playing it daily in class with other bored classmates. (We had several classes that were sufficiently devoid of actual work to make this possible.)

I never could get my mom to learn how to play, or really my brothers either. And even I was reluctant to play in certain circumstances. I purchased Chessmaster 6000 (or some other iteration) and rather than playing the computer, I preferred to watch it play itself. When I started playing chess online, I got tired of the actual playing and started cheating using Chessmaster to make my moves for me.

So why didn’t I actually play? Because I lost. And losing in chess seems to be oddly different than losing in other games. For instance, I’ve recently been playing computer pool, and I don’t have any (psychological) problems losing half my games. Well, not as severe, anyway. For some reason, losing in chess feels a lot more like taking a beating than losing in other games. That’s probably what makes it so compelling for competitive people, and what makes it so repelling, yet no less fascinating, for people who avoid hard competition.

I’ve been trying in the past few days to get back into chess. I think it could do me good to regularly play several games a week. But when I sit down and try to get psyched up for a game, I find myself approaching the moment with trepidation. It’s almost as if I’m putting my intelligence, my ability, my very worth as a person, on the line in the game. Despite (or maybe because of) the fact that chess ratings are an accurate description of your skill at the game, as opposed to a reward for winning, it’s impossible to look at them without a twinge of shame, or pride.

Why must playing a game of chess be such a harrowing experience? Exactly how common is that experience? Continue reading »

I grew up religious. My family went to Mormon churches, Baptist churches, charismatic churches, and fundie churches. I became an atheist at 16. But I miss churches. I miss a big group of people getting together, open to newcomers, organizing to help those who need help, providing facilities for all sorts of other activities. There are all sorts of good functions provided by a church that have nothing to do with religion. Well, except for one thing.

People don’t like doing those things. To get people to provide the money to have buildings like that, and to run the programs like that, and to pay the people in charge of it all, you have to manipulate them, because there are no honest methods that would work. Because people aren’t that charitable. Sure, they’re charitable, they’re just not that charitable. You pretty much have to couch requests for money in moralizing terms. (Any Unitarians out there know if it works the same way for you? I would suspect so.)

Or maybe the problem is that without grandiose visions, there’s not enough motivation for some people to become ministers and church leaders unless they’re religious, or spiritual. Or that the meme is just not viral enough.

But whatever the cause, I do miss churches. I should try out the local Unitarian church, and see how spiritual they are. Maybe they’re relatively secular. God knows most big Baptist churches are.

For a long time, I’ve thought that there’s been a hole in the computer chess world—there are no chess engines that play weak games with human-like mistakes (that I’m aware of). It’s easy to make a chess engine that plays a 2000+ strength game, but weakening these engines by limiting their search depth or time always seems to produce games with many strong moves and a few blunders. I can’t be completely sure—it could just be paranoia—but it seems like real weak players (i.e. most casual players) make mistakes that are quite different, and more fun to compete against. Are there any engines that play good weak chess, that accurately mimic the style of a human weak player? Am I crazy for thinking that existing engines don’t?

I posted a while back (on the first page of google results for “piano wrist tension”!) about learning to get rid of all the harmful wrist tension in my piano technique. Well, I’ve been sort of following my advice there. What I did was I took one single song, and focused on it to the exclusion of all else. It’s a moderately challenging piece, and I’m just now starting to master it to the point where I can play the whole thing with eyes closed* and without really thinking about the notes at all. If I don’t have to give any attention to the notes, I can give all my attention to making sure I stay relaxed throughout the piece, and noticing immediately when I start to get tense. I was able to learn the piece without tension by simply playing it slowly enough, enough times. As it is, I was terribly inefficient at learning it. I should really have halved the time. But I’ve never been that good at practicing.

* Something I just started to do with pieces a year ago—before I would stare with ghastly and grotesque facial expressions at the keys. The amount of tension I had was really amazing. But I realized one day that, for all that staring, I didn’t really do much looking at the keys. So I tried not looking, and I found that psychological blocks were the main thing keeping me from being able to do that. But I still have problems with quick back-and-forth jumps of an octave and a half or more.

I chose the name “Metablog” because at the time my main projecty interest was in ways of improving the quality and pleasantness of blogospheric debates, which, of course, is a metablogoshperical-typed task. (ish.) But, as it happened, personal problems and the tides of fate intervened, and my interest and energy waned, and I haven’t made progress on the issue. And this post is not a turning point either. But I do think that, today, I’ve come to understand one thing that was keeping me from working on this more than was necessary.

The project was just too ambitious. I wanted to make it a “Wikipedia of dialectic”, which is to say, something reusable and referencable and incrementally add-to-it-able. But I realize now that it was defining the scope of a very big problem, when there was a much smaller subproblem that was sitting right there with nearly as much urgency and fun to it. I just need to start out with being able to properly model individual debates. I need to dissect them, at microscopic levels. That’s plenty of work, right there, and maybe even something I can accomplish with a little bit of work. Very boring work, perhaps.

Well, maybe even that’s too ambitious. Maybe I should just start with normal, non-contentious discourse. I don’t think I’ll care to analyze humor much, but starting out with things that don’t generate big long flame wars might make the project less overwhelming to begin with. Let me start practicing on the easy things.

If any of you readers have recommendations on books about this, (which I haven’t tried to look for, because I hate looking for this sort of thing, especially when the emphasis and direction I’m giving it has probably never been studied,) please let me know. And please, if you would, provide a synopsis of the author’s approach so I can try to evaluate whether it’s even close to my own, because I’m not willing to try to extract value from it otherwise. My interest in this subject, unlike so many others, isn’t for its own sake. I’m interested in discussion as a performance art, and I only want to model it like a musician would learn anatomy to improve their technique, or a social scientist would use math. (No offense intended to social scientists, honest!)

I don’t think I’ve yet mentioned how cool xkcd is. Well, check this out. If you aren’t reading the comic yet, start.

To answer the question in the comic. If the question of what it all means doesn’t mean anything, why do we keep coming back to it? Simple—depression does that to you. Happy people are people who are able to blithly ignore the question, because people are actually built to ignore the question. It’s only depressed people, broken people (evolutionarily speaking) that ask it. Happiness means not caring. Depression, when it functions normally, is a signal for people to reflect on their life to figure out what’s causing the bad reaction and try to change it. Depression doesn’t actually help them desire the change, only desire to figure out what’s going on. Then once they’ve identified it, the depression lifts and then comes the desire to change. With depressed people, they’re always getting that signal to reflect on things, so the reflections get more and more abstract until they get to the most general of all. For me, they got to that point and turned inside out (like swinging over the top of the swing) and I started focusing on the descriptive, cognitive perspective of the problem.

So what’s the meaning of life? If you want to know, prod me to finish my post on it.

I discuss linguistics in an Unfogged comment thread, where I am graciously tolerated for my foolish, blinkered, and obtuse comments. You, on the other hand, might find them a bit more palatable. I start off trying to establish the inefficiency of linguistic diversity, but then much of the thread is me making the case that the relationship between phonemes and meaning, and phonemes and affect, is arbitrary. Sapir-Whorf is mentioned.

Somnolent depression. Also called “retarded depression”. I’ve never heard of these terms before. I wonder if they’re in clinical use, or if some pop psychology snuck into the article.

Overcoming Bias has an interesting post about inequality.

Consider that “sibling differences [within each family] account for three-quarters of all differences between individuals in explaining American economic inequality” and that “eliminating income inequality within all nations would reduce global income inequality by no more than one-third.” So why do we talk mainly about financial inequality between a nation’s families, when each of these other six inequalities is arguably larger?

Good question.