Metablog

I just bought a MacBook. OS X is a pretty neat operating system, but compared to the hype I’ve been hearing about, I’m underwhelmed. Still, I’m happy with my purchase—I’m dual-booting with windows, and I’m going to use it as a work laptop. (I have to work in Windows, since I develop Windows applications using Windows-specific libraries and development tools.)

But I’ve found myself booting into OS X a lot more than I would have thought, because of one application I found that came with the system: Omni Outliner. Oh, man, I love this thing! For a long time, I’ve tried various ways to use outlines to help me organize my thoughts, using various sorts of outlining tools, including notepad, wordpad, Word, Emacs, and Keynote. All of them sucked. But this, this. This is what I need; it’s what I’ve always wanted! It’s what I would have written for myself at some unspecified point in the future.

I want a windows version. I need a windows version. I might be able to use OS X at home, (it would involve switching a program I’m working on to the other platform, and finding a good development environment for the mac and learning it,) but I simply can’t at work, and I want to use it at work. And, wouldn’t you know, there’s nothing like it for Windows. Well, there’s Keynote, and there’s the defunct, but now freeware, Ecco outliner. It’s too bad I have no idea how to do good text rendering and editing with C#, or I’d totally write my own.

So far I’ve used it to do a todo list, based on the whole 43 Folders, Getting Things Done type system. And so far I’ve had the same problem I’ve had with every other organization system I’ve ever tried—while it helps me get organized, it doesn’t help me fix my actual problem, which is not having the energy and motivation to actually do the things I need to do. I can sit there staring at the list of a fairly complete list all the tasks I think I have on my mind, and look at the next thing that I’d need to do on each, and still not find it in me to work on them. Well, at least having it all organized helps me feel a little less anxious about not doing it.

Online dating has been frustrating for me. I’ve been on OKCupid since last August, ten months ago, and I’ve only gotten two dates out of it. I’ve sent out dozens of messages, and I’ve only gotten responses to maybe 20%. Some of the people with the most promising profiles turned out not to be interested. And I have received only four messages from people I didn’t contact first. So it hasn’t been completely bare, but don’t people typically have more activity than that? Even when I haven’t been doing anything on the site, I regularly log in so that they can see that I’m still active. I have some good, objective reasons to believe that my profile doesn’t have anything seriously wrong with it, though of course there’s always room for improvement.

I wonder if part of my problem is that people just tend to be really picky. I think that the people I’d be interested in would be especially picky. Maybe I’m underestimating how picky most other people are, and so my expectations for success are too high. (Short-term success, for me, would be ongoing conversations with other interesting users leading to around a date per month on average.) Do I need to be less picky to get there? Would I have a much better chance of finding a long-term partner if I were less picky about first dates?

And I’m pretty sure that part of my problem is that I find it hard to get a good idea about someone, to the point where I can actually feel attracted to them, online. On the two dates I’ve actually had, it just ended up feeling weird and flat. I imagine this is unavoidable. You just have to spend time with someone before those feelings can start, and e-mail conversation, especially through a dating site, is a slow, slow process. And then, how long do you need to try to make conversation before you ask someone on a date? Would I have better luck if I sent out first e-mails suggesting a date (along with the usual greeting and conversation starter), instead of e-mails just trying to get a conversation going?

It takes so much energy, and it’s discouraging when you feel like the women don’t have to put as much energy in. I’ve heard a lot of success stories, or at least “success-getting-dates” stories. I’m not one of them.

I am not an introvert. I just reclassified myself today. (Well, back in March when I wrote this, anyway.) I had always thought that being uncomfortable around people, and being socially pretty reclusive, meant that I was introverted. But after reading this WaPo article, (via Overcoming Bias,) I realized that those aren’t really the core traits of introversion as commonly conceived. Introversion, according to Mary Carpenter, means that “[you] don’t reveal [yourself] by working through problems out loud or by talking much about how [you] think or feel.” And that’s pretty much the opposite of me.

In fact, my non-introversion goes farther than that. Why, I’m positively extroverted, considering that I published a diary online for over a year (no longer available), and that I regularly reveal rather intimate things about myself to total strangers in the internet public, or to people IRL that I’m not especially close with.

I could be described as socially isolated or interpersonally hostile, but not introverted, not as a character trait. I do get introverted when I’m around strangers, but that doesn’t mean much. Social anxiety, maybe.

I think blog reading might be a bad thing for an introvert without any real-life friends. (One who’s recently moved, for instance.) Blogs are such a high-quality form of conversation, that most real-life conversations with random people will seem insipid in comparison. (This effect is even greater the smarter the blogs you hang out on are.) So you’re setting yourself up to get a large and essential part of your socialization needs met by a format that can’t really meet the other large part of your socialization needs, and getting yourself used to a level of conversation that you can only find in real-life after years of adjusting your social circle. This decreases your motivation to go out into the world and find things to do where you meet people.

It’s like if all you ate were some really tasty and addictive food that lacked two or three essential nutrients. Enough to keep you alive, but not healthy.

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.