"You are mysterious."
"What, really?"
"Well, I can talk with you and guess what you're really like, but that's just me making inferences from your behavior; I could easily be horribly, horribly confused and wrong."
"So I'm not, like, unusually mysterious?"
"No, just ordinarily mysterious. That's still a huge amount of mystery. This is easier to notice when you have first-hand experience of being horribly, horribly confused and wrong about yourself."
They have to. The psychology of what it feels like to learn something from a book is going to be the same whether or not the things the book says are actually true. The psychology of what it feels like to believe the things your teacher tells you and your peers repeat is going to be the same whether or not the things your teacher says are true. You can't just trust the book or the teacher, you have to use whatever other information you have (from observation and experience, from other books, from other teachers) about the reliability of the processes that produced the book, the reliability of your teacher to have done this same kind of thinking.
I've been so confused in so many ways that I had been specifically warned against dozens of times, in writing and in person, and I still didn't get it! Of course, I was warned about this, too: everyone knows that there are things you don't know that you don't know, and that there's a difference between endorsing a proposition, and integrating its implications into your way of thinking. But it's still such a shock to actually see ... to go so suddenly from hating the local Authorities for not telling you all the true and important things that your friends have been telling you, to noticing that the things that your friends have been telling you can actually be applied to stop being so hurt all the time about how the local Authorities had misled you.
"I somehow feel less bitter today."
"Yay!"
"Naturalistic explanations feel better than hatred; I don't feel outraged and betrayed that Safeway is not a Sacred Shining Beacon of Goodness and Food Provision unto the world or that Goldman Sachs is not a Sacred Shining Beacon of Goodness and Efficient Capital Allocation, so I shouldn't feel outraged and betrayed that college isn't a Sacred Shining Beacon of Goodness and True Education."
"Uh-huh."
"Even when Goldman Sachs causes a global financial system meltdown, I don't say, 'And that's why capitalism is Evil forever!'"
"Yes."
"Alternatively and isomorphically, maybe I should start saying—calmly, without malice or outrage, but just as a fact—that capitalism is Evil forever, with the caveat that I don't actually know how to fix anything myself."
"Why would you bother?"
"Because the insight that our current forms of social organization can't be the best possible, that you're actually allowed to think about them, even if innovations that actually work are hard, is really important and worth emphasizing and communicating. Because if you don't know and you don't think, you just get sucked in by whatever memetic attractor happens to be nearby, which is always suboptimal and often quite bad. I mean, you still get sucked in by whatever attractor happens to be nearby, by definition really, but it's nice to have some inkling of what's happening to you."
"I'm entertaining this daydream of standing in a coffeeshop with a sign saying, 'BUSINESSPEOPLE: TELL ME ABOUT YOUR PROBLEMS; I WILL BUY YOU COFFEE' in the hopes that some of their pain points could be easily solved in software for money. I don't know if this would actually work."
"That sounds inexpensive and high-upside. Do it. If it's boring, stop."
"Not right now; I'm still on Father's dole for another year, which is fine. I'm just musing on the principle of Make Something People Want as opposed to 'get a job.'"
"Why not right now? You are allowed to cut yourself off the dole if you find something else."
"I agree that it's important to appreciate that such things are allowed, but note that the amount that I complain about my social position is more reflective of ideologically-induced madness rather than actual preferences; I really do like having time to study. My constant petulance is a distortion, a mistake."
"Ah."
I'm afraid—it seems like (or maybe the weak phrasing seems like is just a form of denial, when the proposition under consideration should actually just be considered obvious) there's this terrible, terrible psychological trade-off, that there are some valuable qualities that you can't have without neglecting other valuable qualities, not just because you don't have enough time to fully develop too many different skills, but because when your brain is specialized in one direction, there are other things you can't learn.
Oftentimes I feel like I don't want or know how to do anything except read and think ... which might be fine if I were independently wealthy and there wasn't any actual work left to do in the world, but in our current situation, it would be nice to make some money and actually accomplish something. There's a Trope for "Shapeshifter Mode Lock" but the cognitive equivalent is arguably more serious as disabilities go.
Short-Term Career Objective: make money and help people by means of using computers to solve problems
Long-Term Career Objective: make lots of money and help people lots by means of wielding godlike mastery over computational existence to solve important problems
In computing, a fork bomb is a program that recursively spawns instances of itself, rapaciously capturing all available system resources. A similar sort of thing can happen, at least metaphorically, within a human mind, when you get so taken with a particular idea (I expect taken is the right word in more ways than one) that it consumes your conscious thoughts, the arguments and counterarguments and countercounterarguments bubbling up and expanding until you can't do or think about anything else. If that one idea is your lifework, then this is probably a good thing. But if not—if there's something more important you want to do with your life rather than obsess about this one idea—then the cacaphony of cognitive noise is a serious vulnerability, as fatal as entering ":(){ :|: & };:" at a Bash prompt.
Dear reader, you occasionally hear people with conservative tendencies complain that the problem with Society today is that people lack personal responsibility: that the young and the poor need to take charge of themselves and stop mooching off their parents or the government: to shut up, do their homework, and get a job. I lack any sort of conservative tendency and would never say that sort of thing, but I would endorse a related-but-quite-distinct concept that I want to refer to using the same phrase personal responsibility, as long as it's clear from context that I don't mean it in the traditional, conservative way.
The problem with the traditional sense of personal responsibility is that it's not personal; it's an attempt to shame people into doing what the extant social order expects of them. I'm aware that that kind of social pressure often does serve useful purposes—but I think it's possible to do better. The local authorities really don't know everything; the moral rules and social norms you were raised with can actually be mistaken in all sorts of disastrous ways that no one warned you about. So I think people should strive to take personal responsibility for their own affairs not as a burdensome duty to Society, but because it will actually result in better outcomes, both for the individual in question, and for Society.
I keep feeling like I need to study Bayes nets in order to clarify my thinking about society. (This is probably not standard advice given to aspiring young sociologists, but I'm trying not to care about that.) Ordinary political speech is full of claims about causality ("Policy X causes Y, which is bad!" "Of course Y is bad, but don't you see?—the real cause of Y is Z, and if you hadn't been brainwashed by the System, you'd see that!"), but human intuitions about causality are probably confused (and would be clarified by Pearl) much like our intuitions about evidence are confused (and are clarified by Bayes).
Almost every policy proposal is, implicitly, a counterfactual conditional. "We need to implement Policy A in order to protect B" means that if Policy A were implemented, then it would have beneficial effects on B. But most people with policy opinions aren't actually in a position to implement the changes they talk about. Insofar as you construe the function of thought as to select actions in order to optimize the world with respect to some preference ordering, having passionate opinions about issues you can't affect is kind of puzzling. In a small group, an individual voice can change the outcome: if I argue that our party of five should dine at this restaurant rather than that one, then my voice may well carry the day. But people often argue about priorities for an entire country of millions of people, vast and diverse beyond any individual's comprehension! What's that about?
Loopy is slang for "crazy", but I think it should be repurposed to refer to the quality of thinking the same sorts of thoughts over and over again, never breaking patterns, being stuck indefinitely at the same stage of intellectual development. You could argue that this is a form of craziness compared how an ideal agent would allocate cognitive resources, but I think it's pretty normal and common in our world, not the kind of craziness generally recognized as crazy.
Of course, the traditional beverage of Newtonmas is bleggnog.
I'm not sure I like how when we want to prove that two statements are equivalent, we typically say "A if and only if B" and we prove it by separately proving "both directions" A ⇒ B and B ⇒ A, but when we want to prove three or more statements are equivalent, we typically say "The following are equivalent" and prove a "circular chain" of conditionals (1) ⇒ (2) ⇒ [...] ⇒ (n) ⇒ (1), as if these were different proof strategies. Because really, the "both directions" business is just a special case of the chain-of-conditionals idea: (1) ⇒ (2) ⇒ (1). At the very least, one of my books ought to have mentioned this.
Maybe self-esteem makes sense for deontologists who think that being a good person is a matter of obeying some knowable set of rules, but I think that the goodness of a person is a real number, probably bounded but with no known upper bound. Saying "I'm a good enough person just the way I am; I deserve self-esteem" isn't bad so much as it is meaningless: once you know what you've done and how close the results were to (your current estimate of) what the results should have been, then there's nothing left to describe, no further question to be answered.
We need a word that means almost the same thing as sellout (in the sense of "a person who compromises their principles for financial gain"), but conveys the idea that the problem is not selling out, but selling out for too low of a price. We all have to make trade-offs; there isn't any one principle that takes lexical priority over every other valuable thing in life: sometimes it makes sense to compromise your ideals in exchange for money or power or fame or fitting in.
But you could at least haggle!
"Some of my Facebook 'friends'—that is, distant acquaintances—are political radicals: here's a picture of the words 'KILL COPS' spraypainted on the ground, with five 'Likes.' It would be psychologically interesting to know what that feels like."
"Huh."
"'Weird' really isn't as useful of a category as I typically think it is. These radicals are outcasts from the society that they want to remake, whereas lots of people in our crowd have mainstream jobs and power. And yet I'm usually inclined to think of us as 'weirder,' because destroying capitalism and the corporate state is comparatively easier to explain."
"Is it more common?"
"That probably depends on exactly where we draw the boundaries around social circles? Our group of core supporters is tiny, but the group of people who've read Ray Kurzweil and approved is pretty big. And no doubt I don't have a good model of what the smartest and most serious radicals believe, just as they have no idea what we believe."
"Yeah."
"Smashing capitalism also looks more straightforward; it's not clear what a transhumanist analogue of the Occupy movement would do exactly. 'Let's all go spend eight years studying bioinformatics! Death to itself!'"
If you shouldn't make lemonade, then life hasn't given you lemons.
Do you ever have trouble reconciling your social role of "ordinary college student at a mediocre state university" with your secret identity as junior member of an elite conspiracy to take over the world?
Yeah, me neither.
"But it's kind of funny how my current idea of morality is so different and so much improved from what I picked up in childhood."
"Is it?"
"Well, funny is the wrong word; maybe it's better to say notable when what I really want is just to note it, just to make it salient, maybe eventually salient enough such that I can actually start to be moral for once, instead of continuing to sit and cry about how I was betrayed."
For five years I've known that at some point I need to stop shouting, "the Authorities lied to me; why why why why did they lie to me?!" and start saying, "Okay, so extant social institutions are flawed in knowable ways, and my parents and teachers didn't tell me. Given my current state of information, this shouldn't actually be surprising, so let's stop crying about it and get on with the whole world optimization thing."
But I don't know how to make the switch; after five years, I still don't know how to break clean. It's so much easier to wallow in the pain. Maybe some amount of wallowing was even justified, this time five years ago. But now, I clearly have much better things to do with my life.