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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This post contains speculation that, even by bloggish standards, is unfounded. Get out your salt shaker. Or buy me access to some cogsci journals.

I’m going to publish this post even though it needs another hour or two of editing, and another fifty of researching, because it’s already getting close to the size where I’ll never finish it.

I’ve been working on my procrastination recently, and as a serendipitous side effect of my unusually consistent effort on it for the past couple weeks, I happened to have not spent as much time as usual practicing piano, reading blogs, watching TV, or playing video games or puzzle games (like Tetris or Sudoku). At the end of that time, I had an unusually productive two days at work, until around mid-afternoon of the second day, when I had finished all of my pressing work and decided to spend a few minutes playing Tetris—despite the fact that experience has taught me that the few minutes would turn into much longer.

Now, there was nothing particularly unusual about my deciding to play Tetris; after all, I am working on my procrastination. But I noticed something quite unusual when I started. I felt a head rush, and a strong one. It was like five shots of espresso, all at once. (Minus the jitteriness.) Now, I’ve never taken cocaine, but I imagine it would feel the same way. I take stimulants for my ADHD, and the feeling was the same, but stronger and immediate.

And it hits me—Tetris gives me a dopamine rush. Of course! That’s why it’s addictive! It’s the same mechanism behind food and sex and cocaine and meth and nicotine!

Continue reading »

Also called “dynamic inconsistency” or “time inconsistency”. This is the feature of the human brain that is responsible for impulse purchases, dieters’ ice-cream binges, the difficulty of quitting smoking, and the tendency for people not to save for retirement. The common feature is that people value a little pleasure today more than they do a lot of pleasure in a month. (My experience is that ADHD exacerbates this, but can’t back up the feeling with hard evidence.)

One fascinating thing about this cognitive “feature” is that people usually don’t realize they have it. And even when they do realize it to some extent, they often still fail to plan as if they had it. How often do people take into account that they will almost certainly have moments of weakness when planning exercise routines or diets? (This actually another bias itself: the bias blind spot.) We’re in denial about this basic, important feature of our minds.

(Read on to see how to practically compensate for this.)

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Now, I have dreams like everyone else. And I have shortages of will like everyone else. But I want to make up for them. When I decide that to start sleeping well, I need to exercise every day, I need a figure out a way to make sure that I exercise every day, considering myself in the future as a person with different desires and interests. I need to figure out how to make myself do these things. I need to figure out how to decide, when I know it’s time to exercise but I’m in the middle of responding to this really interesting post or making great progress on this new feature (or, just last night, finishing a book it took me from 7 PM to 1 AM to read), whether the lost momentum of the activity that was being interrupted will be made up for by being better rested tomorrow. How much do I lose by not spending quite as much time learning new random things and forming new mental connections?

The point has been made (I forget where—maybe Paul Graham?) that you shouldn’t let yourself get too caught up by doing errands and chores, because most things really can wait, and you should be lazier with certain things (or more willing to subcontract them) so that you can be busier with the more important things. Act like your time is valuable. But I think I have the opposite problem. I simply don’t know when to make myself take care of myself and my surroundings, let alone make consistent progress toward any genuine accomplishment, without feeling, desperately, like I’m missing out on something important.

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It’s weird how intellectual allegiance works. I had a scary experience yesterday. I was just reading along, forming a rough opinion of how much I agreed with the arguments. In general, I’m fairly favorable to them, but I worry that that’s just because I identify with the anti-IP culture of internet geeks. But then there was this one section I was much more skeptical about, concerning some attitudes toward government in general or something. All of a sudden the authors mention some other thinker who supports that idea, one that I generally respect and agree with, and who knows much more than me about the relevant issues.

At that point, my valuation of the arguments jumped. And if you’re a person who tries to overcome bias, the fact of this jump is pretty disturbing. First, I knew that it had no rational basis at all. (Edit: By my description, this is arguable. But take my word in this case.) But more importantly for me, it just revealed how much I had been evaluating all the other arguments using the same kind of credence. It hit me, pretty hard, the extent to which the subconscious* processes that comprise our judgment take into account tribal allegiance, and how that allegiance doesn’t have any consistent relationship to truth over humanity in general.

* I don’t agree with the expansive view of the subconscious espoused by many, but I don’t think the conscious mind is as powerful as it believes itself to be. Introspection, beyond direct perceptions of feelings and beliefs, is black-box deduction. We form theories of our motivations based on observing our emotions and their temporal relationships with external events and internal beliefs.

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