An Algorithmic Lucidity

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: ???

that spectrum from cis to natal to actual depending on whom they're talking to

went to the genderqueer support/discussion group at the Pacific Center again; showed up early to change into my Pearl dress (it would be a waste to only wear it once) and surreptitiously slip a copy of Anne Lawrence into the library

I think I mostly enjoy being the token conservative/TERF (um, relatively speaking); I say that my pronouns are he/him "because I don't perceive myself as having a choice in the matter" and probably smashed the record for most uses of the phrase biological sex at one of these

"Maybe this is already clear, but I think that you're in something of a negative feedback loop where unmet social needs are affecting your interpersonal behavior in ways that are interfere with social needs being met."

"I still think that's a positive feedback loop, technically."