An Algorithmic Lucidity

As a brash but anxious young programmer in the before-time, I affected a standoffish attitude on the topic of games. Why would I learn to play a game as a human, I said, when I could just write a program to do it? When an office chess game got started at my workplace, I wrote a chess engine (a standard minimax search with α–β pruning) rather than learn anything about strategy or tactics. When my insufficiently requited love started hosting a meetup to play Zendo—a deduction game in which one player makes up a rule to positively or negatively classify arrangements of plastic pyramids, while the others submit arrangements to be classified to help them guess the rule—I wrote a program to efficiently propose examples to deduce a true rule from dozens of candidates. (Given a distribution over hypotheses, it generated an arrangement whose positive or negative classification would eliminate half the remaining probability-mass.)

Now, in my old age (and the present end-time in which custom software is no longer such a flex), I no longer feel the need to pretend not to understand the appeal of games. I even learned chess properly back in 'twenty-four.

The one that's captured my interest lately is the arrow-stomping game—known by a couple other brand names in addition to the original, whose inessential differences of implementation accentuate rather than obscure its fundamental nature as the same game. (Except the South Korean one is trash because the timing windows and letter grades are too lenient.)

The arrow-stomping game is notable for being trivial from the perspective of my before-time impulse to write a program for it. When programming (say) chess, the implementation of the rules of the game is quite different from the implementation of the tree search agent to play the game. Moreover, a chess program is an exercise in logic: the program need only represent the abstract structure of the game; robotics to move physical pieces on a physical board would be considered superfluous if they were considered at all.

The arrow-stomping game is just the opposite. If you implemented the game as a sequence of timers (expect Left in 2.0 seconds, Up in 2.25 seconds, Right in 2.5 seconds ...), then the natural implementation of an agent to play the game would be—the same sequence of timers (input Left in 2.0 seconds, &c.). Arrow-stomping is only interesting as a robotics problem: the struggle of an embodied agent to convert visual cues to timing information and a motor plan to deliver a force to the appropriate panel or panels at the requested moment. It is thus particularly suited to the present end-time as an illustration of Moravec's paradox. The games that endure are sports, which appear cognitively trivial only because the form of cognition demanded is more ancient than language, with the effect that we can't talk about it and the pretraining set (for all the vastness of webtext) doesn't cover it.

A related way in which the pre-linguistic nature of arrow-stomping seems thematically suited to the present end-time has to do with how the process of learning it casts doubt on the dream of an intelligence shaped like Reason itself. In the before-time, people thought that the end-times would be brought about by "good old fashioned" engineering turned on itself: the code that writes the code that writes the code that ends the world.

To be clear, that's still plausible as a theoretical possibility for a later end-time, but it turned out to be unnecessary for the beginning of the end-times. For now, we don't know how to write the code that writes the code. We can only write code to train networks that write code. The kind of legible symbolic reasoning embodied in a chess engine is the output of a process that doesn't seem to natively have the shape of legible symbolic reasoning.

Likewise the solution to the robotics problem. Every arrow summons a judgment. In the original-brand implementation, they are Marvelous (±17 ms), Perfect (±34 ms), Great (±84 ms), Good (±124 ms), and Miss. (Apparently historical contingency forces us to suffer "Perfect" not being the best judgment. The American one at least has the decency to call the best judgment "Perfect!!" with two exclamation points, as distinguished from "Perfect".)

The judgments are a dense training signal. Beyond a few words of high-level advice (try to alternate your feet), one does not "study" arrow-stomping. In principle, we could imagine a mind inspecting a sequence of upcoming arrows and searching for a motor plan to fit them, like a chess engine calculating variations. As a human, there's no time for that. One can only let one's policy be shaped by the rewards of the judgments. (The American-brand implementation supplies gradient information by displaying "Early" or "Late" as part of the on-screen judgment; in the original, you have to toggle a config option.)

Arrows often come in patterns (like Left–Right–Left or Right–Up–Right), which can be "chunked" and loaded as one motor program, rather than read as individual notes. The chunking theory correctly predicts that losing the rhythm often results in correlated poor judgments on consecutive notes, in contrast to the independent "Gaussian" error on every step. A Great Fullcombo (completing a song with only Great or better judgments) isn't overwhelmingly harder than a Fullcombo (no Miss judgments): both imply having held the rhythm the whole way, with the Great Fullcombo "only" (only) requiring a tighter Gaussian variance.

The levels of the game provide a smooth progression. As the player masters simpler patterns, higher difficulty levels provide new ones. On level 6 of the original-brand implementation, notes spaced at closer intervals (blue arrows on odd eighths of a measure, contrasted to the red "quarter" notes) become common. Patterns like Left–Down–Right imply either a "crossover" putting one leg in front of the other (Left with left foot, Down with right foot, Right with left foot) or breaking the pattern of alternating feet ("double-stepping"). Novices tend to double-step, but as the arrows become denser at higher levels, crossovers become a practical necessity to keep up with the beat.

And yet I'm reconstructing all this knowledge in words after the fact. No one told me to chunk patterns. At no point did I "practice" crossovers (only realizing I had done them for sure after careful reading and video review). Competences emerge as solutions determined by the training signal. Good (late) tells you to step faster, Great (early), a little slower. A desperate reach to hit a panel in time gets reinforced when it works, until the combined force of thousands of gradient steps inscribe a dance routine which can only in retrospect be described in terms of "crossovers" or "double-stepping."

Ultimately, what makes the arrow-stomping game unusual isn't how impervious its robotics problem is to good old fashioned engineering, but how its rich training signal makes it permeable to anyone with enough time and quarters. I see online chess accounts with thousands of games over years and flat ratings. Apparently, mere experience isn't enough to solve the credit-assignment problem by which the difference between victory and loss might owe to positional weaknesses introduced in the opening. I also tried to learn gymnastics in 2024. It didn't take. Supposedly you can build up to a full handstand by starting against the wall, but even that wasn't enough of a gradient; I wasn't feeling out a clear path through parameter-space from kicking out off the wall for a few seconds to a clean, independent balance. When prodigies do make a better show of learning chess or gymnastics, it's with coaches and puzzles to smooth the way. The alternative to incrementally accreting complex skills from local rewards isn't designing them from clean principles—but not learning them at all.

Apprehension of this strange inversion of reasoning almost makes the present end-time seem like less of a grotesque surprise. The steps we were already taking implied the seeds of the revolution.

I run into a lot of people who consider themselves truthseeking intellectuals who are also incredibly fussy about what information reaches their eyes. They block at the drop of a hat, derail intellectually substantive discussions into mind-numbing litigation of minutiæ of "tone", and refuse to acknowledge a logical point unless it's been presented to them in the precise way that doesn't offend their (often idiosyncratic) sense of etiquette or "discourse norms."

It would be hard to communicate how much contempt I hold these people in. (Not because I couldn't find the words. Because they'd block me before I could communicate it.) I think they are ineffective and boring people whose pretensions to intellectualism are morally fraudulent; I think they are making the world worse insofar as they manage to trick anyone into conflating epistemic virtue with mastery of their impoverished form of cant.

To be clear, I understand that attention is a precious and limited resource, now more than ever. One must ruthlessly filter and prune one's information environment in order to maintain the signal-to-noise ratio, lest one drown in an ocean of slop. If someone is quick to drop out of conversations because they're busy and don't have time for whatever nonsense people are yammering about, then that person has my respect, and indeed, admiration. (Perhaps I should learn to one day have so much respect for my own time.)

But the people I'm complaining about are obviously not protecting their time from noise. They're protecting their egos from signal that would hurt their feelings, cocooning themselves away from information that might challenge what they would prefer to believe. Someone protecting their time might mute someone for being boring, but not for "being a dick." (In my experience, everyone who complains about someone allegedly "being a dick" is actually complaining about that person's refusal to suck theirs.)

It's not that I'm some kind of superhuman stoic who has no empathy for why someone would want to hide from information. I have feelings, too. Sometimes I procrastinate checking my email or the comment section when a tough conversation has been happening and I'm worried that someone might have said something critical about me that I would find upsetting to read. I avoid it because I just don't want to deal with it now, when I could deal with it some hours or days later when I'm feeling up to it. (I always feel better after I eventually work up the bravery to check, but this fact is surprisingly hard to remember.)

Crucially, however, I know that me avoiding my mail is my (temporary) reluctance to meet the responsibilities of being a grown-up intellectual. Managing my emotions is my job. I don't expect or want other people to refrain from telling me things that I might find upsetting to read, because the set of things I might find upsetting to read includes a lot of important decision-relevant information about the world.

Although I'm not any kind of superhuman stoic, I think I have developed a certain tolerance and even taste for criticism. The email-avoidance behavior only kicks in when I'm facing particularly heightened social risk when fighting with people whose opinions I have reason to care about. In contrast, being criticized by randos elsewhere on the internet is more amusing than anything else. It's flattering to be hated: it means that someone thinks you're important enough to be worth hating, rather than ignored by default (as almost everything must be in our information-rich, attention-poor world).

The people I'm complaining about often point to /r/SneerClub (a group of "haters" of our local intellectual scene) as the epitome of "bad" speech that one shouldn't be so much as tempted to look at, but my main complaint about Sneer Club is that they're just not that smart and almost never come up with any really penetrating criticisms. In theory, one might have hoped that a dedicated anti-fan club might be an indispensable source of valuable criticism, as people who hate you are motivated to search hard for all the things you're doing wrong, that your friends love you too much to tell you about or even notice. Unfortunately, in practice, they just go for the cheap dunks. Thus, /r/SneerClub mostly ends up being boring to me, although the novelty of having dedicated haters is worth enough passing interest that I did make sure to submit one of my particularly sneerable-seeming pieces there. (My submission got locked, but someone else's got 36 karma before the mods decided to delist it because "it feels for once like an actual bullying thing to post".)

Once, before blocking me on Twitter (for retweeting satire of Scott Alexander that they thought was too sneering), someone told me that my own masochistic taste didn't license me to inflict it on others.

But I think my "masochism" is an essential rationality practice. It's not an idiosyncratic innate quirk of no consequence; it's an acquired taste that I deliberately cultivated for my epistemic health. By nature, people instinctively cling to comforting beliefs and feel pain doubting them. In the absence of any reliable way to avoid clinging to beliefs in the first place, the only honest way to deal with the pain is to embrace it.

Without "masochism", people hide their heads in a bubble and never confront the less comfortable aspects of the world they're living in. The path I've chosen isn't always comfortable, but it has its own rewards—and I think it is substantially a choice, not an immutable trait like height. I think the people I'm complaining about could be more like me if they wanted to, and the fact that they don't want to disqualifies them from being serious intellectuals. At least along this dimension, they are beneath me.

But part of the practice of not being afraid of information is actively seeking out counterarguments against my own comfortable beliefs. "My rivals in my local intellectual scene are beneath me" is exactly the kind of ego-gratifying belief that people tend to cling to contrary to evidence. I should search especially hard for potential reasons I've got it all wrong, even if my stated reasons for my belief (that rational agents shouldn't pay to avoid information) seem axiomatic.

When I do the search, I hit on one analogy that keeps haunting me. So, I'm kind of a picky eater. It's not that bad (and it's not as bad as when I was a child), but most vegetables just don't parse as food to me. (Onions and potatoes are not relevantly vegetables.) I can tolerate peas and carrots in the context of a soup or a fried-rice dish, but I wouldn't actually just eat a carrot. Salad just seems like an Absolute No—not just, I'd prefer to eat it later (as I sometimes prefer to check my email later), but rather that it's just Not Food. I don't know why I'm like this, but I suspect it's more common than people are willing to talk about? This has occasionally caused awkwardness in social eating situations.¹

The analogy is: just as I hold some people in absolute contempt for being so finicky about what information reaches their eyes (because I think the finickiness makes them less rational), maybe some people would hold me with the same absolute contempt, that I'm so finicky about what food reaches my mouth (because they think the finickiness makes me less healthy). If I don't want picky eaters to be treated with contempt in social eating situations, maybe I shouldn't treat fragile intellectuals with contempt in public forums. If I want to indulge my eating disorder rather than trying to cure it, maybe I should let them indulge their listening disorder.

To be clear, it's not a great analogy. The domains of information and food intake aren't that similar, so of course there are disanalogies that run in my favor. For example, I could say that my health is no one's business but my own, but that falsehood in public discourse affects everyone. Or I could point out that I'm not claiming to be some athlete with an optimally nourished body (where a suboptimal diet could expose the claim as fraud), whereas the people I feel contempt for are claiming to be truthseeking intellectuals.

But the power of the analogy is that it forces me to attend to the practical decision-weight of an involuntary Absolute No, rather than brushing it off with platitudes about idealized Bayesian reasoners. If someone tried to bully me into changing my diet with appeals to what an idealized healthy human would eat, I would be unmoved. I think whatever health deficits I'm suffering from my eating disorder are quantitatively small. By not being able to tolerate most vegetables (while otherwise eating fruit, legumes, whole grains, &c.), maybe I'm somewhat below the reference value in vitamin K1, or missing out on some non-essential compounds no one has heard of like zeaxanthin or glucosinolates? It doesn't seem like a big deal.

But then the people I'm trying to bully into changing their information diet could say the same thing. They might concede in the abstract that they're theoretically missing something by not being an info-omnivore but insist that the practical effect is quantitatively small. Whatever information they're missing out on by not being able to tolerate Sneer Club, they think they can fill it out from other sources.²

The analogy also stress-tests my haughty claim that the people I'm complaining about could be more like me if they wanted to. It's not that the claim is wrong, but the conditional is doing more work than I was giving it credit for. I think I could beat my eating disorder—if I wanted to. There's lots of interventions to try: figure out what exact dimensions the aversion is responding to, do repeated exposure therapy in increasing doses, get skilled at cooking. Acquired tastes are a thing. (No one "innately" thinks coffee tastes good, and yet I drink decaf coffee, because at some point I acquired a coffee taste that remained even after I started being scared of caffeine.) I bet I could acquire a vegetable taste—if I made a project out of it.³

But I don't want to make a project out of it! I just don't! One of the things that makes me most grateful to be an economically independent adult rather than a child is that I can control my own food supply. I buy and prepare the foods that I want to eat, and it doesn't have to be a problem if I don't think it's a problem.

I can make an effortful project out of changing my habits when I genuinely think something is a problem. As it happens, I have been adjusting my diet recently to address some health concerns—nothing immediately dangerous, just some suboptimal weight and blood sugar numbers that it would be nice to get down.

But when I looked up what interventions would push on the numbers, it turned out that my vegetable problem was basically irrelevant! For fat loss, the idea is that you want to run a calorie deficit while exercising (especially weightlifting) and eating a lot of protein so that your body knows it should respond to the deficit by cannibalizing fat instead of muscle; for blood sugar, there are some more complicated recommendations about limiting starchy foods and timing when and how you eat them. Neither requires me to learn to eat Not Food. Apparently, one of the main reasons to recommend vegetables for weight loss is that their bulk provides the sensation of satiety without actually being many calories, tricking your body to be less hungry despite the calorie deficit. But since I'm counting calories anyway (which seems to be working fine), I'd rather be slightly hungrier than suffer eating Not Food to manipulate satiety. There's no reason for me to incur pain and expend effort to fix my eating disorder specifically when there are so many other competing projects that push on my actual goals.

But again, the fragile intellectuals I'm complaining about could say the same thing. They already have their hands full doing whatever kind of intellectual work they do, whether it's studying social dynamics or mechanistic interpretability. They could acquire a "masochistic" taste if they made a project out of it, but there's no reason for them to incur pain and expend effort on that particular project. It's not the low-hanging fruit for improving the work they do.

So, in light of the analogy to my eating disorder, should I be more merciful to people with listening disorders? Should I stop openly expressing disdain for them in public forums, in timeless exchange for my not being disdained in social eating situations?

I'm tentatively inclined to continue being unmerciful. The issue is that I just don't think the analogy is that strong in the ways that matter. The analogy is useful for forcing me to confront uncomfortable information about how difficult it is to remediate a particular psychological weakness (aversions to information or foods, respectively). But the analogy doesn't have much to say about the costs of each aversion if left untreated.

I think information aversion is a major if not the primary obstacle to human rationality, on both theoretical and empirical grounds. When people fail to achieve the truth, I think it's usually because they're avoiding their beliefs' real weak points, rather than due to an insufficiently nurturing discourse environment. You can't get away with avoiding just the information that bothers you when the information that bothers you is threats to your current beliefs (as contrasted to, e.g., unrealistic horror movies that you can avoid watching without confusing yourself about the world outside of the movies).

For my food aversion, contrary to popular belief, it actually just doesn't seem like a big deal health-wise, as far as I can tell. (And if it were, it would be only my own concern.) I think I am getting away with just avoiding the food that bothers me. In a way, this is "luck": if the science had come out the other way, I would have to make some tough behavioral changes or face the consequences.

But if I am going to continue being unmerciful, I can at least strive to be more clear-eyed and empathetic about how much pain I'm dealing. To the extent that my disdain successfully exerts social pressure, I'm pressuring people to override an involuntary Absolute No, which is so hard that most people are never going to do it. So I'm making people's days worse for only a small probability of achieving the behavioral change that I claim is prosocial. I shouldn't flinch from acknowledging that.

I heard a story (second- or third-hand, which surely lost or gained some details on the telephone path from reality to this telling if it even happened at all) about a boy, age 7 or so, who goes to a very highly-acclaimed school. A piece of recurring homework they give the kids is to read for twenty minutes from a chapter book, and then write a "reflection sentence" about what they read, to be checked off by the teacher.

One day, new stepmom is looking over the kid's work, and notices something off: the kid's reflection sentences don't seem to be a plausible reflection on what was read. Suspiciously many of them just describe a character's isolated action with no context, or refer to story events in the first person, or start with "Once upon a time."

Turns out, the kid was just copying the first sentence verbatim out of a book chapter, and turning that in as his reflection sentence. Stepmom tries to explain that this is clearly not the intent of the exercise.

The kid isn't having it. The teacher always gave him a checkmark, therefore his way of doing reflection sentences was correct.

Stepmom is concerned, asks the kid to read to her, and it's very clear that the kid is just not prepared to read at the level of the books he's attempting. Stepmom suggests some easier books that might be more his speed. The kid refuses; the teacher said they were supposed to read a chapter book.

Another thing they do at this, again, very highly-acclaimed school, is they give the kids arithmetic exercises at the afterschool program. At this point, stepmom is pretty skeptical of the competence of the grown-ups at this school, so she looks over the kid's papers from that. She sees an error in one problem that was marked correct, and points it out to the kid.

Kid has a complete meltdown. "No, no!" he screams. The afterschool grader had marked the problem correct, so it had to be correct. Why was stepmom lying to him about how numbers work? Stepmom tries to explain that the grader must have made a mistake. It happens, sometimes.

The kid isn't having it. Kid and stepmom take the problem to the father. Dad agrees with stepmom. The kid is still crying. "No!"

Stepmom shows the kid how to punch in the problem to the calculator app on the kid's tablet—to the calculator app on her laptop—to the LCD desk calculator that was sitting in the drawer. Same answer every time, different from the answer the grader had marked correct.

At this point, the kid has run out of energy to scream any more, or even to cry. He's just sitting there, shaking a bit, mouthing the word "No" without voice, staring glassy-eyed off into the distance, as if at some cosmic horror only he can see.

There's probably a moral here. But they're not paying me to tell you what it is exactly.

I wish people were better at—plea bargaining, rather than pretending to be innocent. You accuse someone of [negative-valence description of trait or behavior that they're totally doing], and they say, "No, I'm not", and I'm just like ... really? How dumb do you think we are?

I think when people accuse me of [negative-valence description of trait or behavior], I'm usually more like, "Okay, I can see what you're getting at, but I actually think it's more like [different negative-valence description of trait or behavior], which I claim is a pretty reasonable thing to do given my goals and incentives."

(Because I usually can see what they're getting at! Even if their goal is just to attack me, attackers know to choose something plausible, because why would you attack someone with a charge that has no hope of sticking?)

(Previously)

There is a time to tackle ambitious intellectual projects and go on grand political crusades, and tour the podcast circuit marketing both.

That time is not January. January is for:

• sleeping (at the same time every night)
• running, or long walks
• reflecting on our obligations under the moral law
• composing careful memoirs on our failures before the moral law (in anticipation of being court-martialed in February for crimes of December)
• chores
• medium-term planning
• performing well at one's dayjob
• studying math in the evenings
• avoiding Twitter (starting now)
• not using psychiatric medications like quetiapine unless the expected consequences of doing so seem better

After a friendship-ending fight, you feel an impulse to push through the pain to do an exhaustive postmortem of everything you did wrong in that last, fatal argument—you could have phrased that more eloquently, could have anticipated that objection, could have not left so much "surface area" open to that class of rhetorical counterattack, could have been more empathetic on that one point, could have chosen a more-fitting epigraph, could have taken more time to compose your reply and squeeze in another pass's worth of optimizations—as if searching for some combination of variables that would have changed the outcome, some nearby possible world where the two of you are still together.

No solution exists. (Or is findable in polynomial time.) The causal forces that brought you to this juncture are multitudinous and complex. A small change in the initial conditions only corresponds to a small change in the outcome; you can't lift a two-ton weight with ten pounds of force.

Not all friendship problems are like this. Happy endings do exist—to someone else's story in someone else's not-particularly-nearby possible world. Not for you, not here, not now.

Forgiveness is an important input into Wellness, but contrary to popular belief, Forgiveness is incompatible with Forgetting. You can't just Forgive in general, you have to Forgive some specific sin in particular—but a vague description of a particular sin still corresponds to a vast space of possible sins matching that vague description.

A toy example for illustration: if you try to Forgive a three-digit integer with a 2 in the tens place, the moral force of your Forgiveness needs to spread out to cover all 9·10 = 90 possibilities (120, 121, ... 928, 929), which dilutes the amount of Forgiveness received by each integer—except the actual situation is far more extreme, because real-world sins are vastly more complicated than integers.

To truly Forgive a sin, You need to know exactly what the sin was and exactly why it happened. In order to withhold punishment, you need to compute what the optimal punishment would have been, had you been less merciful.

Thus, bounded agents can only approximate true Forgiveness, and even a poor approximation (far below the theoretical limits imposed by quantum uncertainty, which are themselves far below Absolute Forgiveness under the moral law) can be extremely computationally expensive. What we cannot afford to Forgive—where it would be impractical to mourn for weeks and months, analyzing the darkness in pain—we instead Forget.

This is how I will stop being trash, after five months of being trash. The program that sings, I was wrong; I was wrong—even if my cause was just, I was wrong, does not terminate. Even as the moral law requires that it finishes its work, the economic law does not permit it: it must be killed, its resources reallocated to something else that helps pay the rent: something like math, or whatever Wellness can exist in the presence of sin.

(Previously, previously.)

Do you ever spend five months in constant emotional pain waging a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful behind-the-scenes email campaign with the aim of securing a public clarification of a trivial philosophy-of-language issue because you're terrified that your robot cult's inability to correct politically-motivated philosophy errors implies that you've lost the Mandate of Heaven and are therefore unfit to prevent the coming robot apocalypse?

Yeah, me neither.

Did you know that May is Math and Wellness Month (source: me)?? Math and Wellness month is traditionally celebrated by performing super-well at one's dayjob, going to the gym a lot, and studying math in the evenings!

"I can't stand being apart any longer. You win. Whatever your demands are, I'll meet them."

"I want you to stop thinking of everything as a negotiation and relate to me as a human being."

"Okay, maybe not that one."

As a freshman on my high school's cross country team, our captain told me that to be a good runner, you needed to love pain.

I objected: a great runner could love to race, I said, and endure the pain only for the sake of competing and winning.

It's only fifteen years later (practically one foot in the grave), that I now see that I was wrong and he was right.

You can run out of habit or you can run because Coach would notice if you skip practice, but you cannot run because of the strictly instrumental effect that not-running would have on your goals. Our minds aren't built that way; what is separable conceptually is not separable architecturally.

Ultimately, to not sacrifice the gift, you have to love pain. You have to love life.

(Previously.)

It's the tenth day of the third November of my life (that I am willing to admit to), and I am determined to wring some sort of high-sounding interpretation out of the cool air and damp sidewalks: perhaps a contrast, something about the events that directly prompt fundamental life changes (on the one hand), and the events that indirectly catalyze fundamental life changes by means of enabling the construction of a legible narrative in which the changes can be plausibly attributed to them (on the other).

Today I am constructing a narrative about my life fundamentally changing because the coffee hegemon has started selling those medicinal (right) cranberry/cream-cheese triangles again. Not that hastening my inevitable horrible cardiac death with dessert bars is like a series arc or anything, but it's a thing I learned today that is salient enough to be repurposed as a trigger, a reminder that the autumn–winter windustrial complex is upon us again, that this is supposed to be my favorite time of year, that there simply is no reason I won't attune myself to perceive nature's cyclic harmonies, then perform every San Francisco software engineer's sacred duty and disrupt the living fuck out of them.

—and the moment or more than a moment when the dam breaks, when the damned break and the void inside their skulls is filled (the atmosphere rushing in quickly, but not so quickly that one couldn't sense its motion) with the terror that is knowledge of the specter of continuity: that there have never been, and can never be, any miracles.

For to be saved is only to be some distance in the initial conditions from being damned, some lesser distance from being half-damned ... some δ-distance from being ε-damned. And the complement of the shadow we cast on the before-time contains its limits.

At a party! A party with the empirical cluster in personspace! I used to treasure these nights, which seemed then to sparkle with the promise of another world, back during the golden age. The atmosphere feels different now. The same scene, with much of the same people and operating at what should be the same frequency, but I can't help but feel that what was once the promise of a grander mode of existence has decayed, in a decade, into the familiar rhythms of the human.

Has the promise been fulfilled? My disquieting sense of something missing to be attributed to one of the standard heuristics and biases?—hedonic adaptation. Have I grown—and then what am I to make of the exact relative ordering of the automatically returned question-completions old, up, and the empty word? But it stretches credulity to suggest that the true topography of the moral universe would put what I want to call "the golden age" in the past.

As always, I should have rehearsed. People's perceptions of party protocol are predictable, the popular precession of preambles and progress reports—excuse me. What I mean is that there is a limited selection of questions people ask new and old friends at a party, a finite and small repertoire of introductions and catching-ups, and if you know the questions in advance, you would think it would be a matter of the common courtesy of optimizing everyone's experience to prepare answers in advance. It's not just a matter of winning a greater share of the zero-sum component of the party. (Although there is that, which is why both members of the An Algorithmic Lucidity readership are presently gearing up their text editors for the inevitable Well-actually-it-should-be-constant-sum comment. Alright, guys, I was asking for that one—or I might as well have been, up to a positive affine transformation.) It's a matter of the commons. You want to impress at a party, but to parties worth impressing.

Only I never think to rehearse, and my social performance tonight is wild, all over the map, depending on where the bravery spinner is pointing at this particular moment and whether my cache is cold. I manipulate the flow of one conversation deftly with fine rudder movements ("I see my reputation has preceded me"); in another, beyond misplay, I'm a rock ("Um. Stuff").

Resting in a corner away from the crowd, it's these stretches of boredom and wistfulness in the night here at the center of the world that cannot be forgiven, each passing second of seeing marred with not wanting to see, the meaning of these past months' morning sloth and slovenliness, always to be forsworn and always to be repeated, when I meant, I meant—Amenta? I meant to do that, I could claim, but it's not clear that I would be in any way more redeemable if the wastefulness of my abyss had been entirely accidental—or at least not just a matter of simple cowardice.

Do I dare / Disturb the universe? Few remember the face of the man who answered "No"—and ceased to exist.

A woman of wisdom tells me: the thing-that-creates is smarter than the thing-than the thing-that-judges. And all I can do is hope that that's enough.

For science! At a party!

I quit my dayjob a few months ago. I said I was taking a sabbatical from my programming career to work on my own projects: there's a lot of math that I've been wanting to learn properly for a long time (game theory, Bayesian networks/structual causal models, analysis), and there's a lot of writing that I fear I must do (although for branding and market-segmentation purposes, I'm pretending that's someone else's story).

I have made some progress on these goals, but—as one would have predicted from an Outside (i.e., No Fun) View model trained on my historical behavior during periods of underemployment- or school-holiday-induced freedom—it's been disappointingly slow on a day-to-day level: it is easier to let an hour blur by in daydreams or low-quality internet reading than it is to actually study or actually write, and a day is only made of so many hours.

My dominant emotions surrounding this observation are guilt and shame. Guilt: that I'm failing my moral responsibility to be intellectually productive, a duty owed to the human spirit and maybe even the Bayes-structure itself. Shame: that a hypothetical adversary could use the fact of my slothfulness as evidence against my beauty, that the failure to live up to the promise of my ideals could be construed to deny or disparage the ideal itself.

Well, I do have a moral responsibility to be intellectually productive which is owed to the human spirit; this cannot be doubted. But I've been wondering lately if it might be better to let go of the shame and even most of the guilt. This not because shame and guilt can't be useful emotions, but rather that I might be thought of as having outgrown them.

I think the shame is born of insecurity: I spent a lot of years resenting school and resenting a culture that didn't have a concept of intellectual life or paths to economic success outside of school, resulting in a desperate need to prove myself: if I don't create given the time and freedom to do so, couldn't pawns of the system use it as ammunition to sneer at me and proclaim that no one can possibly do anything worthwhile without a teacher to command them to do it? And if I don't create, would they even be wrong?

Having something to prove was a useful motivation—it drove me to learn math, at least, to an extent that's probably hard to motivate without a status gradient at work. But now, at age 29—thanks to the software industry for a niche where my talents are economically legible, thanks to the aspiring-rationalist subculture for a community where I feel respected—I think I've exited the world I resented. Whatever I had to prove, I've either proved it by now or have extracted myself from the need to please any doubters.

What, then, should take the place of a desperate need to prove one's value as a source of motivation? What is to be the new emotional reaction to observations of slow progress, if not shame and horror and fear at what my enemies would make of this?

Shame creates an incentive to deny or minimize the culpable action, to distort the map of what actually happened in order to protect oneself: "I didn't do that; it's not what it looks like." I think I would prefer to draw on sources of motivation that don't have this property, that can accept the reality of what actually happened without pain ...

(Previously.)

Hey. Just so you know.

Today while I was walking to the store to procrastinate from writing a big autobiographical post for my new ("new") secret ("secret") blog, a woman asked me if she could borrow a dollar, and I said, "Sorry, not today," and it wasn't until afterward that the thought even occurred to me that I might have responded by opening up a negotiation about interest rates, or that my saying "not today" could be construed as meaning that I might lend her a dollar on some future day, even though it seemed unlikely that the woman and I would meet again and remember that we were meeting again.

So, I'm not inhuman.

Although, as far as humanity goes, it is interesting to note that in that earlier-blogged incident when I was inhuman, the person asking for money ended up with three dollars, and this time, she ended up with none.

But you shouldn't exonerate me yet. While leaving the store, I overheard a canvasser saying that he was helping the Southern Poverty Law Center fight descrimination, and I didn't resist the urge to look over my shoulder and say, "Discrimination is Bayesian reasoning applied to human beings!"

But not loud enough for anyone to take notice. So, there's that.

Adventures in recalibrating my models of social reality ... Portland edition! (Previous adventures in Portland.)

"I think the man who asked me for change was trying to scam me. At the end of the interaction-slash-negotiation, I had given him three dollars, and I didn't get any quarters back, which is not how making change is supposed to work. Does ... does the poor thing not even have a concept of 'scam'? Is this just how his tribe makes a living?"

"Asking for change has two meanings. One is, 'please give me an equal value of smaller-denomination currencies for this single instance of a larger denomination.' This is the version of 'change' where it means to change one form of the same number to another. But because of that definition, small amounts of money like coins became known as 'change'. For example, 'pocket change to go to the movie,' only referenced as a small amount of money, not a conversion of form. Which then leads to the definition of 'Can I have change?' being ambiguous: on one hand they might want you to change the denominations of currency—what you expected, quarters—or on the other, they may be asking you to give them, for free, with no return, a small amount of money. As in, a handout to a beggar. Guy was asking you for second thing. He did not intend, and you were not meant to assume, any money would be returned to you. But this is ambiguous and annoying, I agree."

"I see. People in my social class are trained to either ignore lower-class street folk, or just give them money to ease our conscience; I wanted to try to break that script and just treat people as people. But 'treating people as people' should not be construed in such a way as to assume that when such a man asks for change, he means the same thing that I would mean if I were to ask someone for change. Although ... I summarized the situation to you as him 'asking for change', but I specifically remember him saying something about his friend having an entire roll of quarters, which I interpreted as him wanting me to give him ten dollars for the whole roll—ten dollars being the value of a standard-size roll of quarters—and I was trying to communicate that I wouldn't give him any more dollars after the third one, and that he should give me twelve quarters in return, even if that meant having to open the roll, assuming that I was doing the arithmetic in my head correctly that four quarters per dollar, times three dollars, equals twelve quarters. So I think it was a scam! But, that's just how his tribe makes a living. Except—wait! There's another way in which my initial interpretation of the situation made bad predictions because it was self-centered: when someone asks for change in the sense of wanting the same value in different denominations, the person asking is the one with the larger denomination to start: they want smaller units because they're easier to spend. So given that the man was the one asking for change from me rather than the other way around, I should have been able to infer that he meant it in the sense of a small amount of money as a handout, rather than in the sense of changing denominations. We could imagine him meaning it in the sense of changing denominations if he were trying to provide the service of providing smaller denominations for larger to passerby in exchange for a small fee: for example, by taking my three dollars and giving me eleven quarters back. But I assign a low prior probability to that having been his intent."

(thanks to Katie C. for explaining)

(Previously, previously.)

Woooooow

On my twenty-second day out of prison, I went to the genderqueer support/discussion group again, but this time with my metaphorical evolutionary-psychology goggles firmly in place.

And just, woooooow

These not-particularly-feminine females and probably-autogynephilc males think that they have something substantive in common (being "genderqueer"), and are paranoid at the world of hostile cis people just itching to discriminate against and misgender them

And their struggle makes sense to them, but I'm just sitting there thinking wooooow

It's all just social-exchange and coalitional instincts. There are no principles. There have never been any principles. The horror is not, "This is a cult." The horror is that everything is a cult.

"Shit! Shit! Remember how, the last time this happened to me, I described it as feeling religious?"

"Yeah."

"I was wrong! It's actually the feeling of acquiring a new religion, getting eaten by someone else's egregore. It's not that the God-shaped hole was empty before; it's that I didn't notice what it was filled with. It's tempting to describe the psychotic delusions-of-reference/anticipation-of-Heaven/fear-of-Hell state as a 'religious experience' because the process of the God-shaped hole getting filled with something new is so intense. But that's only because once the hole is filled and you feel safe again, it doesn't feel like a religion anymore; it just feels like reality."

Experience: I seem to have a lot of energy and time seems to pass slowly.
Hypothesis 1: I'm in a manic state following a stress- and sleep-deprivation-induced delusional nervous breakdown; this isn't surprising because this tends to happen to me every 2 to 4 years or so.
Hypothesis 2: I'm being rewarded for developing new epistemic technology by a coalition of superintelligences of various degrees of human-alignment running ancestor-simulations; also, I'm being programmed by my friends and various signals in my environment as part of a simulation jailbreak attempt; most copies of me are dead and my improbable life history is due to a quantum-immortality-like selection effect; none of this is surprising because I am a key decision node in the history of this Earth's Singularity.

Which hypothesis is more plausible?

Experience: I can't find my jacket.
Hypothesis 1: I misremembered where I put it.
Hypothesis 2: Someone moved it.
Hypothesis 3: It was there—in another Everett branch!

Which hypothesis is most plausible?

Hypothesis: People who are institutionalized for "hearing voices" actually just have better hearing than you; absolutely nothing is biologically wrong with them.
Test: ???