Metablog

Hmm. I didn’t mean for my three posts a week to all be on weekends.

I found a medication combination that works a little better for me–I had tried Rozerem for my sleep, but it did really weird things to me. But after getting on Wellbutrin, I thought I might be ready to try Rozerem again, and lo and behold, it’s working for me now. One side effect of all these pills is an utter lack of appetite. I went from a BMI of 25.3 to one of 24.0 on the first SSRIs, and I’m probably going to go down even more on the Wellbutrin. And even when I do eat, the food doesn’t taste as good. But I can deal with that.

Some progress on my piano DDR thing. I’m thinking of calling it Play Play. I actually have the recording part and the scoring algorithm done. The holdup now is that I need a piano roll control so I can record and edit songs to play with it, and so I can display the song while you’re playing it. After I get that finished, (or maybe before,) I’ll try to add some stuff to automatically let you practice different sections of a song.

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.

It’s been two months since my last post. The post before that was a few days earlier, and the post before that two months earlier. I kept a diary for maybe three or four years before I switched to this blog, and I noticed that I tended to have four or so months of pretty consistent posting followed by a few months with almost nothing. Cyclical. Well, I guess we’ll see if the cycle has reached its bloggy springtime again, or if I won’t feel up to posting for another long time.

Here’s what I’ve been up to: Continue reading »

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 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.