Metablog

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.

There are a lot of people worrying nowadays about the global energy crisis. Peak oil. The lack of alternative energies. The practicality of solar and hydroelectric and wind and the politics of actually getting it implemented. But why are comparatively few people concerned about the graver dangers facing humanity? Things like genetic engineering, which has the potential to allow a terrorist to create a supervirus, or nanotechnology, which could create something like a supervirus, only that acts much quicker and affects all life instead of just a few species (including humans). You would think people would be worried about this. Well, you would think that if you thought that people were rational. But they’re not, not, not, not. The field of heuristics and biases tells us that humans make scads of different errors, in predictable ways, when we do reasoning. The paper I link, by Eliezer Yudkowsky, gives a great overview, with a specific eye as to how they affect evaluations of global risks.

His next paper (to be published in the same book), deals with another specific threat facing humanity. That is, the creation of a smarter-than-human intelligence. A smarter-than-human intelligence is not simply an intelligence with a very large IQ. You see, IQ (as far is it really does measure general intellectual ability) covers the infinitismal range of intelligence from dumb human to smart human. That complete range, compared to the range from no intelligence to human intelligence, is an extremely tiny dot. And when we sucessfully program an AI, it starts out with no intelligence, and quickly travels along the line until it reaches human intelligence. Is there any reason it should stop there? No, if it gets to human intelligence in the first place, it’s quickly going to go far, far past that. (That’s even besides recursive self-improvement.)

Anyway, that’s just a small taste of the article. He has another great piece of writing here. What is truth?

Theoretically, money is the same thing as “value”. Some generic entity that can be transferred, in continuous quantities, between people. An entity that people are concerned with maintaining a rough balance, or even inflow, of.

In reality, when people do valuable things for each other, the context (whether it’s a business transaction) is very important in determining whether money can be exchanged for it. Non business transactions can be very much transactions, in the full sense that business transactions are. For instance, if you’re dating some guy, starting out expecting to spend some X number of hours a week together (determined implicitly and approximately, of course,) and he starts to blow you off, the reason you’re mad at him is because he violated an implicit contract, which is, in a restricted yet practical sense, the same kind of contract as any business contract. If you marry a guy on the expectation that he’s going to be an active parent, and then he turns out to be more interested in his career or his pub, then you’re going to be mad because he violated a contract.

In fact, these implicit contracts can really pop up all the time. If you bake some sort of dessert for an acquaintance, accepting it is going to indebt them to you, in your and their own minds, to at least maintain a certain level of friendliness and interest in your life until that debt is repaid. Now, people never put it in these terms, and rarely think about it in these terms, but the terms actually describe pretty well what goes on in these situations. People get offended if you don’t reciprocate a certain level of conversational interest in their life.

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I know it’s trite, but it’s about me, so deal. For some people, it’s hard to just hold on, to make ends meet. They have a lot of opportunities to make mistakes and those mistakes can cost them a lot. For more fortunate people, they often make the very same mistakes, but they get bailed out by supporting family, friends, etc. Too much of this is a bad thing, but too little is also a bad thing.

But some people, (perhaps often the more fortunate ones, I’m not sure,) seem to make a different mistake. An error of omission. An overly conservative and fearful approach to life. Not enough risk-taking. And avoiding all those mistakes are nice, but really. It’s too easy for many people, me included, to avoid all the good stuff too. You have top put yourself out there and really live sometimes. People thrive on adversity. Adversity is the only thing that gives meaning to life.

Now, I’m not saying I’m against welfare and safety nets and universal healthcare. The adversity of cancer is something no one needs to deal with. Adversity isn’t something society needs to introduce so that people have something to overcome. It’s something both society and people need to overcome. And when it is overcome, people find new adversity to create for themselves. They seek out challenges, and they go experience more things.

Some people are lucky. Situated comfortably. No real adversity to face. No real challenges. And some of those people are afraid of adversity. They run from it. And that is dull, and boring, and pathetic. Depressing. If you’re situated comfortably, you’re not trying hard enough. You need to aim higher, put more at stake. Because that’s what makes human beings happy. Happiness is about pain. Life is about pain.

It seems like the kind of people that usually go to hostile forums tend to have above average debate skills. Thus, they tend to form a low opinion of the debate skills (and thus general intelligence) of the other people in those forums, since those people will have average skills. Now, people tend to overlook logical fallacies supporting positions they already hold (which they can often justify using better reasoning), so they’ll also tend to overestimate the debate skills of people whose conclusions they share. Now, people who don’t go to hostile forums will tend to pick up a lot of their opinion of “the other side” from the people who do, because they don’t have any direct experience with the other side, but they do have exposure to the contrarians’ opinions of the other side.

Oh, look! Polarization! Insularity! Woah, where did that come from?

A comment about some columnist or another I just read gave me an idea. Any division of labor that divides enough so that a task goes below the minimum threshold for the employee to be fully engaged and challenged by it, creates long-term inefficiences in that machines can always do rote tasks much better than people, and that people who are less than fully engaged by their work will have less opportunity to invent these machines. Far from Adam Smith’s firetruck boy, who replaces his job with some well-placed scrap of metal so that he has more time to play, the vast majority of workers actually have incentive *not* to replace their own jobs with machinery.

Incidentally, while I strongly believe that worker unions are necessary to keep quality of life reasonably high for workers, it seems to me like unions also have the effect of slowing down automation, which is a really good thing in the long term. But unions have a strong incentive to oppose any developments that automate and deprecate jobs.

Apathy means that when you sit down and you have this feeling that there’s something that needs to be done, something you want to do, and then you try to start doing it, to figure out what you need to do, that your mind can stare at that problem, and the problem stares right back, and your mind simply whimpers a little bit. Normally, when you look at a problem, you get a sense of its shape and boundries, and a will to take that problem head on, to work through it and find its weaknesses and explode whatever apparent dilemma is facing you, or at least to discover what it is that you don’t know yet.

But when you’re apathetic, that doesn’t happen. It’s not because you’re scared of the problem. It’s not because you’re not interested in the problem. It’s because your mind is too still, just not willing enough, just not able to get started. Sure, there are some issues that will be pressing enough to get your mind going. Mainly when there are things that people want you to do right then. People to give you pressure, and move your mind for you.

And there are a couple other things that can do it. Problems that happen to be especially interesting, for one. Those are fun to solve. Other problems are simply fun to work on, whether or not you actually solve them. (Videogames would be something like that. Who cares if you beat the game? It’s the game itself that makes it fun to play.) Other problems might be those that make you mad, or excited, or sexually aroused.

But when you’re apathetic, there is one thing that absolutely cannot give you an incentive to act: your own mind. You can’t decide that something is interesting enough to grab your attention. It just is or isn’t. If you think you want to do this or that, but it’s not inherently interesting, no amount of will can overcome that disconnect between your higher brain functions and your lower ones. without something external and unconscious and uncontrollable giving your mind an incentive to act, it’ll simply never do anything.

Even this essay I’m writing isn’t a product of my will. It’s a product of my depression of the last two weeks, while this problem has become gradually both more clear and more aggravating. Annoyance at myself, once it becomes strong enough, is enough to motivate me. But there are a dozen other things I’d like to be doing right now (in the abstract) that my mind will simply refuse to wrap itself around. Every day there are two different tasks that I can sit and stare at, and not find the will to actually work on at all.

Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s not that my mind has absolutely no ability at all to direct my attention. It’s more that the ability is so weak that the slightest draw can disturb it and distract me from the other things I’d like to be doing. And this is quite troublesome for me, because it means that there are some days where I can manage to avoid those distractions and be moderately productive (though not as much as I could be otherwise). And so it makes me feel as if my bad days are more my fault—a failure of will. And that is a destructive attitude. Destrutive attitudes suck.

It presents a further problem, too. There are weeks and even months in which I become interested in certain problems, not of my own will, but simple because I happened upon the issue, and I become interested and can give my attention to it. And these are issues I would even direct my own attention to, were I able to. These are times where I feel much better. Healthy, even. So it makes it much harder to understand those times where I don’t feel healthy. But I think I understand now. It’s not my fault when those times end. It’s simply when my interest happens to be distracted once again by some other object, or even when it simply wanes away from all objects.

I think I’ve come to accept my own state over the years. I’ve come to acknowledge that I’m not the kind of person that can complete projects—not the kind of person to make a lasting contribution to any significant field, even if I think my talents and ideas are good enough to qualify me for that sort of accomplishment. So I don’t expect any sort of consistency of attention out of myself anymore, and I’ve become much less depressed as a result. But still not happy. And I still have one major problem.

Fortunately, there have been few times in my life where I didn’t have at least some things that I could give my attention to, even if those things weren’t even close to the ones I would have chosen. Unfortunately, the things that distract me the most nowadays are on the internet. And the internet happens to be a vital part of my job. And so I’m not really getting anything done at my job, which is much more important than other times. It puts my livlihood in jeopardy. Since the net is necessary for my job, it’s not like I can avoid it entirely. Sure, I could install filters on my work computer to whitelist only those sites I need to do my job. But any feasible solution would still require a lot of will on my part to go along with the filtering. I’ve already tried that sort of thing, and it doesn’t make the problem any easier. It’s not the way to solve it.

And even if I were to start being able to be consistently productive, my personal relationships are still suffering. I don’t have the attention necessary to have good, enriching conversations. My conversations end up being very slow-paced, lifeless, scattered, and somewhat inane, even where they can be (and have been) engaging, invigorating, thorough, and inspiring.

I’ve thought about calling a psychiatrist. But I can’t find the desire to go through with it.

I think that, clinically, my condition would be classified as ADD. But the apathy is the worst part of it, and I think the word better describes the subjective experience of my condition.

Taking positions that go against the general grain of a certain ideology that you believe in for the most part, and then presenting those positions to those who share most of your views, but without having established yourself as a trustworthy member of that ideological community, is a recipe for being misunderstood.

No big surprise there. But it is frustrating, sometimes. I never feel like reading conservative blogs, or anti-feminist blogs, or anti-singularity blogs, for instance. I only like reading blogs that I agree with 80+% of the time. That way, when I argue over the remaining 20%, it’s engaging and constructive. Incidentally, I think that if one wants to expand the ideological spectrum of one’s blogroll, the thing to do isn’t to change the percentage, but to look for discussion at a higher level. I could talk to a conservative about secular moral philosophy, for instance, even if discussions about abortion would be entirely fruitless. Because at the higher levels, eventually you reach logical principles and/or universally common experiences, which will eventually reach 80% agreement.

The downside of all this is that it’s easy to be perceived as not being as friendly and understanding as you really are to the positions that you’re criticising, because people assume that you’re criticizing more than you actually are. They assume that you’re one of “the other” instead of someone with minor differences in opinion. It’s especially hard to be the kind of person that thinks a lot about meta issues, like me, and therefore doesn’t have much to say on the substance of many articles, even if one enjoys them a lot, but instead prefers to point out logical errors in arguments that can probably stand anyway, or on other legs. Pointing out those errors is seen as a hostile action.

I think it boils down to this. It’s really easy to attribute positions commonly held by group A to an individual commenter who appears to resemble group A, even when the commenter really avoids saying anything that explicitly identifies them as being in group A. Part of this is justified, of course. If one is unaware of how a person could reconcile their A-style belief with their wider ideology of B, how their A-style belief could really be consistent with B, then one is justified in identifying the person as a member of group A. But one shouldn’t put much stock in this identification, and this is where I think many people fall short. They cling to that preliminary identification. If the person tries to identify themselves more with B, others will suspect dishonesty. And it’s possible for a commenter to avoid this, to some degree, with careful phrasing and proper ordering and good framing.

This general tendency to confuse a person with a wider group manifests in other ways, too. I see very often where liberals will denigrate conservatives because of some supposed hypocricy in, e.g. being pro-life yet anti-gun-control. But it’s a mistake to accuse a group of people of hypocricy unless the hypocritical actions have been observed together in enough individual members of the group to know that those members are representative of the group.

In particular, it’s patently unfair to take two separate groups of people (say, moral values conservatives versus big business consevatives) with two different behaviors that, in a single person, would be hypocritical, and combine those two groups (say, conservatives), and call that single group hypocritical. For example, it’s a fallacy to say that anti-feminists are hypocritical in argumentation because they’re either saying you’re too shrill or saying you’re getting too technical. Because it’s likely that the group of people that would say the first has a small overlap with the group of people that would say the second, even if both are contained within the larger group of anti-feminists.

This fallacy happens because of the homogenizing effects of intellectual tribalism on the other side. It becomes easier to merge and conflate separate and disparate instances of an opposing viewpoint, perceiving them as being concomitant in individual representatives of the other viewpoint.

Case in point (although this is one of millions): is this comment.

When a developer is put on a project without clear requirements, and without someone from whom to gather requirements, they’re being put into a very difficult position. If they just make arbitrary decisions about the design and start implementing, it’s likely there will be a lot of wasted effort, both through extra, unneeded things being implementing, and through the wrong things being implemented that consequently have to be done over. So that they don’t have to do over a bunch of work before the product is ready, they stop before developing and try to plan it out. But they don’t have the information to be able to plan anything, so they try to talk to other people to find it out, and they end up waiting around while the others, who might have a meager idea of the requirements, get back to them. In the meantime, the process is repeated on some other subissue, and because humans can only do so many things at once, the poor project developer ends up forgetting about the first issue.

So what’s the solution? Those who know the requirements should be very available to answer all these questions right when they come up. In the absence of such people, can individual “initiative” make up for this? This “initiative” will lead to a lot more work being done, but a relatively small portion of that work will meet the requirements. So it’s not clear whether the extra work is worthwhile. It would depend on the relative value of the time of the various participants, and of the nature of the decision to be made about requirements. (If it’s a relatively minor point, it’s definitely not worth stopping work over). If the people that know the requirements don’t have time to communicate them thoroughly to the developers when they first start development, that doesn’t change the fact that they’ll have to communicate them eventually. So there’s really no point in it not being done immediately.

So what if it can’t be done anyway? What if the people who know the requirements are simply inaccessible most of the time, for some reason? What should be the top priority for our abandoned developer when he has run out of clear directions? There are a few choices here. He could choose another project or issue within the project whose requirements he has better access to. He could attempt to do some more generic version of code that meets the reqeirement that can be specialized later. (Which is often overwriting the software.) He could simply pick arbitrary directions to go with the code.

Any three of these options could be the correct choice in a given situation. If the project has plenty of room before its deadline, then working on another project of slightly lower priority whose requirements are already known is probably the best choice until the requirements for the first project can be clarified. The developer should be sure to write down all of his current state so that when he comes back to the project, or when someone with requirements knowledge becomes available, work can be resumed without wasted additional effort to recover a working memory of all the issues that were being ruminated upon before.

If the project needs to be done soon, however, and the requirement ambiguity can’t be handled simply by doing generic code or adding configuration options–deferring the decision but not holding up development–then the developer is faced with the harsh reality of having to write code inefficiently, because the most efficient use of his time would still leave the project behind a deadline, even if other projects were able to advance more quickly. (And let’s face it. Those “other projects” are really easter eggs, eh?)

It all really comes down to the exact nature of the ambiguity. If taking the wrong direction would mean a complete waste of time–even considering that writing the code would make it easier to write similar code in the future, even from scratch–then the project has to be more or less stalled. But if the decision is something that might not really matter anyway, or even if it’s something that the customer won’t get to mad about when they discover how wrong it is, then an arbitrary choice might not be so terrible.

But god damn, I hate arbitrary choices. Maybe I just need to get over it.

I should think about how this applies in the case where the project is a hobby and the person who knows the requirements is also the developer, but is unable to find the energy to discover the requirements.

Why do people get mad about spam? It’s kind of funny to watch sometimes. Paroxysms of anger. Holy quests to eliminate it. Rightous screeds proclaiming the utter evil that are spammers. Frankly, it’s not the sort of thing that you would expect from a lot of the intelligent people whence it comes.

So what’s the explanation? I believe it all rests on a simple, but basic, misunderstanding. They fail to view the fact of spammers as an inevitable feature of the e-mail system as it stands. (And it is.) Instead, they treat spammers as a member of a social group (users of e-mail) that have broken the codes of that group. Social ostracism, and all that entails, is the natural and instinctual reaction.

But it’s a bad reaction. It’s not rational. Because of the systemic and inevitable nature of spam, and the hugeness of the system, no social sanctions are going to do any good. Social ostracism is worthless, because spammers don’t heed the codes of e-mail.

Spam is nothing more than a disease of the internet. A parasite. They don’t get mad and indignant at viruses do they?

So where do they get this misunderstanding? It’s an attractive proposition, sure. We’re all one big happy family. And spammers are just some of the less desirable members of that family. They can be reformed, or banished. These are all intuitions that evolved in an environment where pretty much anyone we had contact with was either someone to run from, someone to kill, someone to apply social pressure to, or someone to heed to social pressure from. In the modern world, on the other hand, we have interactions with a lot more people than we are in a position to apply social pressure to. Not everyone has really adapted to this reality yet.

Maybe it’ll come with time.