Diary—IID
Diary, 2008 was supposed to be my deschooling year: the pain should have gone away by now. But it hasn’t. Diary, I’m smart; I want to understand; I read a lot—why doesn’t it count? I want to be good! I have learned so many glorious things reading on the internet!—but then so often I feel I have wasted time doing such reading. What marks the difference?—what makes it sometimes glory and sometimes suicide, when from the outside they might both look the same? It is good to read, but far too much of the time I don’t read the right things, and I don’t read fast enough, and of this I am ashamed. This is not an argument for going back to school: what I’m seeking are those moments of purity and grace when you are doing something important. Okay, so you can occasionally get that in school, but it doesn’t come from the school institution itself: it’s an interaction between you and the text, or perhaps between you and other people. Why not seek it out directly?—and I’ve done that, somewhat—far too slowly. If, during the writing of this very entry, I have read on the internet and even sent an email—I think this is okay (although I detest metaDiarism), because what I was doing was important enough—or perhaps it was only not so unimportant as to cause me pain, or the various things varied in their importance to a nontrivial degree.
What I need to learn is to notice when I’m doing something unimportant—I guess Paul Graham hit a similar point in one of his essays. I don’t feel bad when I’m doing a large proportion of my time doing something important; the problem is that when I’m doing something unimportant, I don’t notice, and hours go by, and I have sinned. It hurts to have sinned, but it doesn’t hurt to sin—compare Twain’s definition of a classic.
I have been told—and I can’t or won’t tell you how many times or by whom—that I need to learn to interrupt the pain that I go through. Diary, this could be very bad advice. If I’ve sinned, then I should be in pain. What I need to do (and Diary, you will forgive me for belaboring the point) is notice more consistently whether I’m doing something important; if I notice that I’m doing something unimportant, then I can switch to something important, and if I switch soon enough, then my sin will not be so great as to cause me pain.
Diary, should I be able to give you a definition of important? The predicate is rather context-dependent: it is sinful to masturbate upon waking when I should get up and do something important, but there are other times when masturbation is important. My perversion and personality interact in ways that may be unique: there are certain internal conditions under which masturbation is a sacrament. It’s the rest of the time I should regard it as a waste.
What lets me believe that I can change, after so many failures? Am I merely faithful, and therefore doomed? I think not yet, for I have changed. I have learned some math on my own time, which is not something I have always done. And my unfinished ms. of “Greater Glory” contains more than 22 000 words, and if I have hardly done any appreciable amount of work on it in months or even years, the words came from somewhere. Once, somehow, I did some writing. I could write again.
On Tuesday, I bought my University library card (cf. 291, 292). I burned through Freedom and Beyond that very day. Yesterday I installed someone’s prebuilt binary of Darwine on my laptop, hoping to be able to run the A+ test prep software that was bundled with the Mike Myers book: that didn’t pan out, though. I’ve removed Darwine.
I worked in the booth today and yesterday, as I normally do on Fridays and Saturdays. By now, I think I’ve gotten rather good at my job. At lunch, I pulled out the linear algebra textbook, and if I did not get much done, then I’m still doing better than in all those months in which I did no math at all. And what counts as much? In my book, hours and pages are merely a poor but easy-to-measure proxy for core insights. I noticed that the text’s proof that similar matrices share a characteristic polynomial runs as well in the other direction—this is far from core, but it was relevant. And I fantasized about an essay that I have thought I might write and post online in the relatively near future. Preserved Under Symmetry is a distant dream: I don’t know how to write a novel, in more ways than one. But I’m pretty sure I could write an essay: “Discourse on Gender and Rationality; Or, Prelude to a Great Novel.” Maybe that’s not a good title: it could be easily misinterpreted as referring to sex differences in the trait of rationality. But Diary: I have something important in my life, a few core insights about things that are important to me. Can Nicole say that?—maybe.
After work today, I dropped off the coupons at 936 and bought some food. On my way home, I realized I forgot to buy soap, so I went to Longs. I bought a lot of soap: there was a rebate (in the form of a $10 Longs gift card) when you buy $20 of certain Colgate-Palmolive brands. Diary, I don’t think soap goes bad very easily: in the long run, I win. Plus it is fun to send out for rebates; it makes me feel important. I also bought condoms: Trojan unlubricated. I thought I’d try using the unlubricated condoms in conjunction with lubrication from the tube—I did in fact try that today. Condoms are a luxury; of course it is much cheaper to ejaculate into folded sheets of bathroom tissue. However, it is nice not to have to pay the attention needed to come onto the tissue; I also prefer not to have too much direct contact with the organ—I don’t know the science, but it feels unsanitary. You know, Diary, you could actually argue that condoms are a sound investment—maybe. The less direct contact I have with the organ, the less time I feel obligated to wash afterwards. Time is very important. You wouldn’t care about chips or tokens if you knew you couldn’t cash them out for U.S. dollars. Likewise, you shouldn’t care about U.S. dollars except insofar as you cash them out for valuable experiences. I remain yours. —ZMD
Oh, Diary, I’m so sorry I haven’t written sooner! Would it excuse anything to say that I have been busy?—except I haven’t been busy enough. There are so many things worth doing. I am so terribly inefficient with my waking moments that it’s a wonder I don’t die of frustration at myself. Who cares if I read “a lot” compared to others if the fact of the matter is that I don’t read enough?
It must bore you to hear of it yet again, but Diary, I’m still hurt in the wake of my purity [born] of pain. I know, it’s—inefficient. Mark as irrelevant how I came to this juncture; if I’m paid in purity now, if I think I’m winning this way, then I can just—win.
The most recent Overcoming Bias meetup was on the twelfth. The locale was Stanford, with the occasion being a talk by Daniel Dennett. By the time I finally found the location (after much running around and asking for direction), there was no space even to enter the room; there were others standing or milling about outside. “What did we expect anyway?” I said aloud to no one in particular. “It’s Daniel Dennett.” I think a woman chuckled at that. I walked back to a library and read for a bit before coming back in order to meet up with the gang after the talk. When I returned, the doors were open and you could just hear Dennett finishing up the talk. Eliezer was at the door; I waved, and he nodded at me. As people were leaving the talk, he handed out copies of the “Twelve Virtues.”
I got to meet the Marcello Herreshoff. Something about his voice just screams “Asperger’s,” though I wish I knew the etiology of the stereotype. He asked me how an Overcoming Bias reader comes to be working in a supermarket, and I asked if we were really that much of an elite. Robin Gane-McCalla wants to do a bit of street theater, taking passerby aside and doing doing the 2–4–6 experiment or the Wason selection task on them, as means of public education about bias. In conversation I said that the passerby could look it up, and I think that got a laugh.
Apparently I look a lot like Peter de Blanc.
Some conversation should perhaps leave me wondering if I’m doing everything wrong. I think I can effectively learn lots of things simply by reading about them, whereas with math I think I have to actually work the problems. Why? Is math just different for me, or is so much of my supposed book learning really a superficial farce due to my failure to actually write about it? Anna Salamon said she noted my facility in paraphrasing Eliezer’s ideas; I said that’s because I’ve read practically everything he’s written, and she said it was not just reading, but understanding.
Tracy’s taking vacation this week, which leaves me with the booth, Jennifer taking tomorrow and Wednesday. I was going to meet Ellen yesterday, but she canceled. How can I explain to you about Jessica vis-à-vis Ellen and me? Bayesian Methods came in the post today.
Diary, I shouldn’t be hurt. Aren’t I doing better now, in so many ways? Sure, I’ve wasted my youth, but I can’t do anything about that now. We’ll say that as long as I do a lot of math, writing, and tech study tomorrow, I don’t have to hate myself. That much. —ZMD
There was a Overcoming Bias social event on the twenty-fourth. True, it hadn’t even been two weeks since the last event, but Robin Hanson was in town, as was Michael Vassar. I noticed the day before that on the meetup.com site, a user named “biofreak” had RSVPed “Maybe,” asking if anyone was coming from the East Bay. The user’s profile introduction reads “brown dude. you know me.”—Razib of Gene Expression, of course. So I made contact and we agreed to meet at University and Shattuck at 1745. After work on Saturday, I dropped off the coupons at 936 and got a woefully misnamed espresso beverage from the coffee kiösk there. Then I went downtown and parked near the library construction site. I bought a “FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE” button, a replacement for the one I had bought there in ’aught-six and lost some time ago. I had recently reöutfitted my bag with three pins bought from nancybuttons.com, which site I found out about because the proprietor occasionally comments on Overcoming Bias. My newly-accessorized bag could hardly be complete without a gender pin, and for some sentimental reason I wanted it before taking Razib to the social; maybe I wanted to tell you. We made the rendezvous with nearly perfect timing, and it was really fun talking with Razib. He said he’d send me a preprint of the new Cochran and Harpending book. He said that programming is like bricklaying for not-stupid people, which I find heartening and amusing. He paid me a five for the ride.
The meetup was a wonderful experience, as always. A blonde woman wearing a red dress and black high heels stuck out among the predominantly male throng of geeks, and oh Diary, I wish I had a transcript of my brief interaction with her. (Some would argue that I should be wishing that my deontological bindings were weaker, so that I could just loosely try to recap what happened, rather than omitting relevant but inexactly-remembered experiences for fear of introducing inaccuracies into the record.) She introduced herself as Fortune; her full name is Fortune Elkins—the “frelkins” of the blog, it turns out. (Her mentioning this explicitly made everything that came before make much more sense.) Elkins is a fascinating character, perhaps worse than Vassar in some ways (cf. 272). For all my reading, I guess I’m still nowhere near a firm stance on evolutionary psychology. When someone you’ve just met casually speaks of your desire for social dominance, what can you do but stammer out a shocked and perhaps unconvincing denial? And if they reply by saying that you look male, what could I do but say that it doesn’t mean I’m happy about it?—this to the apparent surprise of Robin Gane-McCalla. Before you know it, I’m sketching a configuration space on the board. Elkins said she was not getting the tranny vibe from me. She referred me to one [redacted], who is trans. Diary, I hope this suffices.
I got to meet Kennita Watson (cf. 216). I stayed past midnight, after most of the crowd had left. When I mentioned to Anna the amount of time I spend working, I think she made a face and said I could be using that time to make myself smarter. Marcello lectured to me a bit about group theory, and gave me a tip about visualizing higher-dimensional spaces by analogy that I didn’t really understand. Razib and I talked more on the drive back, and I told him about the theme. He even suggested I perhaps give him a call some time if I come to Berkeley!
O friends O problems O books! Diary, how can I bear to be so inefficient in this world full of data? Razib said that I’m young; I could say that it’s true, that I’m only now starting to sweep around and align myself with the dominant eigenspace of my soul. But that would just be me showing off how smart I am, and probably has nothing to do with reality. —ZMD
I went through the last bit of The Fatal Conceit today. I took some hours at the library, getting food at Taco Bell first, and I burned through the entirety of Charles D. Hayes’s Proving You’re Qualified: Strategies for Competent People without College Degrees. I read a little from the Beginning Programming book, and a very small amount from the Satisficing and Maximizing anthology. No math, though. Maybe I’m starting to better understand the stuff Eliezer wrote about the astronomically high standards required for success.
Some very dramatic family conversation tonight. I’ve scheduled my A+ Essentials exam for next Wednesday. I guess people say that I’m too hard on myself, but I think that I think too easily of my greatness. O glorious how I read and speculate!—but Adaptive Problem still lies on my floor incomplete. Why should it hurt to be reminded of how I’ve politely refused Father’s standing offer of project management guidance, when I still show signs of maybe needing it?—it’s a true fact. I want to live for the most obvious ideals, but my incompetence is absolutely stunning. —ZMD
Tonight I installed the A+ test prep software from the Myers book on Father’s computer. I took both practice final Essentials exams—and failed them both. I know this should cause me to update, but how specifically? What constitutes education, and what training? You can say it’s impure to cram for an exam, but if you’re being tested on facts rather than deep structure, what are you supposed to do? Am I so arrogant as to think that I can absorb deep structure or a pool of facts just by blazing through a couple of books? Even if I do study very hard in the next two days and pass the exam, I can’t allow myself to feel good about it, because it will have been as a result of studying for the exam, and not as a side effect of actual competence.
Diary, what are we actually trying to do? I don’t take myself nearly seriously enough. It is straightforward enough to pity blundering fools who have no idea what they’re after, but what are you supposed to feel towards a person who has a purpose in life, and who has systematically betrayed it? I continue to be angry and hurt about my schooled past, but I should hope to someday get beyond all this, the better to focus on my own selfish quest for true knowledge. Science and mathematics are not the exclusive property of the schools. The referents of the courses people take in school are things in the real world, no fundamentally different from anything else. If you read a magazine because you think the text might impart unto you things worth knowing, then why shouldn’t you study a mathematical text for the same reason? Diary, don’t you think it would be nice to not care about tests or degrees or curriculum vitae?—I mean really genuinely not care, not even enough to complain about them. Sure, you pass tests to get a job ticket the better to fund your private endeavors, but that’s instrumental, a convenient signaling mechanism and nothing more.
Today I continued what is to be an annual tradition of reading Evelyn Fox Keller during the Super Bowl. You see, I think that on 3 February 2008 I worked a long closing shift, and I seem to remember that during my lunch, the game was on the television in the breakroom, where I sat and read a bit from Reflections on Gender and Science. Today I had the booth (this is unusual; normally I only have Friday and Saturday) and after my shift I went to 936 to trade them dimes and borrow check deposit bags. Then I just hung out and read from Reflections.
Yesterday Mother and I visited our cousins, the Chyettes. Sveta had just graduated from high school; we missed the ceremony.
I’ve recently had two private exchanges of interest on Facebook. One was with Liz Lanfranki, who wants [to] be a schoolteacher. The other was with Ellen, who doesn’t want to be friends with me. I actually proposed the sharing of future lifeworks (cf. 292). She said that it’s “[n]ot that [I’m] not a nice guy,” but that she hasn’t “really noticed us having much in common” (cf. 278). —ZMD
It is useless to ask how you were expected to know something. It was in the book, and if it wasn’t in the book, then it was in another book that you could have located and read. I was unhappy for much of today, and for some moments brought to hysterics over this monstrous practice of schooling. Diary, there is so much that I want to do, and it’s so easy to waste practically your entire life. I want to be good, but I have sinned. If it takes so much just to hold things together, by what miracle can people actually succeed? If it takes talent to sing a song for Lynn Conway for the win from nowhere, then what does it take to be like her? Diary, I want to be smart and I want to be rational and I don’t want to be masculine. What can save me? —ZMD
Yesterday I passed the A+ Essentials examination. Much as with the SATs, we are treated to an opaque scaled score between 100 and 900; the passing threshold is set at 675, and I touched down at a 764—whatever that means. I really ought to have taken BART to the exam site; getting pretty dollar coins as change is small consolation for paying thirteen dollars for parking. I think I felt ignorant on the drive home: what insights have I had in the past year? I felt better later in the day: I did some math! I was not doing so well with the line integrals in Stewart, so I soon gave up on that and started off in my complex analysis text, which came in the post recently. This turned out to be a good idea; before the day was done, the text had furbished me with more than one nontrivial insight. So, a good day, then?—I guess. But I didn’t do nearly as much as I counterfactually could have, and surely this is a mark of sin upon my worldline. I’ll take library day today. —ZMD
ADDENDUM—“Drift More So Than Selection”— I took breakfast at Burger King before heading to library day. How to decision-theoretically weigh the taste on the one hand, versus the money and my future coronaries across the many worlds on the other, is an exercise left to the reader. Today was really not the best library day: you want to read fast, but you don’t want to drift into (as Anna put it) running your eyes over the words, hoping for magic. If your focus does so drift, you should at least notice and slow down or choose a different book or activity. And then what if you spend too much time on the wrong books? I am terrible, terrible, terrible. You can ask hopefully: who can say but that I may yet be saved?—it is at least something, that I have my hair and my new method by age twenty-one, when too many of my contemporaries are mere stoners! Still, you have to figure that I am at least ass-deep in sin, and so I leave you. —ZMD
Diary, I’m still hurt, even while the rightness of my new method has been long since overdetermined. You would think I’d been raped or something. Complex roots are so pretty!—I must not let anyone diminish this beauty for me. It is mine.
People are allowed to change. If I once foolishly pledged myself to University, there’s nothing stopping me now from pledging myself to truth and beauty simpliciter. I must study and work ever so hard, and if I’ve been saying that for as long as I’ve known you with ever so little to show for it, well—people are allowed to change. —ZMD
ADDENDUM— Diary, I am stupid. Every day that I don’t do technical study is Bayesian evidence that my new method is a delusion, but if my new method is a delusion, then surely I must die! Diary, I could try to argue that these painful memories are the only thing holding me back from being truly fearsome, but it’s not true. However horrible school is, it exists for a reason. For every life destroyed by “discipline” imposed externally, there are a nontrivial number of lives destroyed by their own hedonism. People fall into traps; there are many who leave school and don’t even study any math at all! Diary, I am very selfish and would seek true knowledge of many things, and this has to include technology or I will be destroyed. I’m at enough risk as it is: autodidacts and boys with long hair are both discriminated against, and I, at the intersection, want more. How could I possibly step up and become fearsome, when right now I am not?—I must simply not let myself get discouraged. I think it should be possible to maintain motivation without deluding oneself about one’s constitution or chances: you just have to disregard sunk costs. It may help to think of your self as a pure utility function, this brain being only a terribly flawed manifestation, a first or twelfth attempt gone horribly, horribly wrong. I have sinned—but perhaps I shouldn’t emphasize this so much. I’m trying to keep the curiosity up, keep the intrinsic motivation up, and maybe a little bit of (realistic) self-esteem could help with this. On my new method, I should expect to make some continuous adjustments (as opposed to binding myself to some fixed schedule, which doesn’t work). So—I’ll make a few adjustments. For instance, I might be totally missing the point of RSS feeds. If I can get myself to notice this, then I can factor a few corrections into my motives and allocate some more time towards technical study. I am smart, Diary, just not nearly smart enough. Forgive me. —ZMD
I’m tempted to say today was a good day, but apprehending as I do the vastness of the possible, I cannot praise myself too highly, knowing somewhat what it would mean to be fearsome. I took breakfast at Burger King and took library day at my usual branch as well as central in Pleasant Hill. I bought a clipboard and a book of graph paper at an office supply store.
I had gotten stuck in the complex analysis text, so in the past couple of days I’ve just been exploring “cee-two,” the space of all ordered pairs of complex numbers. My calculator’s matrix utility won’t accept complex entries, so I’ve written a few simple programs to facilitate my seeking. Diary, if I am accused of being a math person, I will vigorously deny it, but I will proudly affirm the joy associated with this exploratory behavior. Small consolation for my wasted youth, I know, although really I should be glad to at least have my purity borne of pain now, since I can’t have de novo purity in the spring of ’aught-two.
Diary, you know I’ve checked out of the mainstream; my father seems very partisan in comparison. He is very angry at greedy right-wing ideologues and insists that our new President needs to be given a chance. He is enamored with smart people who care about America (you know, as opposed to the other guys). I tend to be skeptical of anyone who would wield such power, but skeptical also of those who would abolish such power; I tend to listen to the arguments claiming that no one is smart enough to spend $800 billion. I don’t know how to run a country. Really, I don’t. —ZMD
ADDENDUM— Diary, I forgot to tell you about a brief but important exchange I had yesterday with one of our customers, the blonde woman who likes to get the fall foamy nonfat mocha and whose name turns out to be Jennifer. She asked if I was going to school and I got to explain how I don’t believe in school anymore, and I think I said something about my excursion into cee-two after having been stuck in the textbook. She said that I was clearly very intelligent, and I said that it’s all relative. —ZMD
Diary, what madness or sanity have I gotten myself into? The latest Overcoming Bias meetup was Wednesday night, the occasion being an interview with Daphne Koller at Stanford. Discussion followed; I ended up sleeping over at the house of Anna et al. Anna thinks the addition of one skilled person to the cause has the potential to reduce existential risk by something on the order of one tenth of a percent. We both agree that this is a ridiculous number; the question is whether this is in the sense of being unrealistic and false, or in the sense of humans being so ridiculously stupid that this opportunity hasn’t been arbitraged away. Re me contributing, Anna said that I would do better by spending time thinking, rather than donating, at least while I make so little money. I don’t know if I was shocked, exactly, but I think I feel as if I should be. Why do these brilliant people think I’m worth having around? When I said I was stupid while Marcello, Steve, and I were questing for my car, Marcello told me not to label myself.
When I got home, I had an email from Michael Vassar waiting in my inbox. It said:
By the way, what sort of work are you currently doing?
Patri Friedman is considering hiring someone to coordinate H+ youth orgs. Basically an admin job. $40K-$60K/year. Not sure it would fit, but would you be interested in any event?
Diary!—what a world this is! Of course I wrote back today:
Wouldn’t fit; for that, I imagine you’d want someone extroverted who’s been active in such organizations. But thank you for telling me!
Oh, where do I fit in this world?—of course conventional fit is among the lesser of my concerns in the face of my purity borne of pain, or perhaps its dual (I didn’t tell you about this?) my pain borne of purity. Well, I do need a better job. I like playing Tracy, but pretty soon I’m sure it is getting time to move on.
There’s a famous teaser that goes something like this: if you drive at 20 mph one way across ten miles, how fast to you have to go on your return trip in order to achieve an average roundtrip speed of 40mph?—and the answer is that you can’t. Is there any way I can make up for the terrible inefficiency of my youth? Today Jessica said that Ellen lacks common sense in her work. Diary, I should go. —ZMD
ADDENDUM— Diary, I’m horrible. I’m proud of the pretty envelopes I made for the recycling vouchers and authorization slips, but they’re just supererogatory flourishes for my single-figure wage job. It almost seems like I was obsessing about rationality and efficiency all day; how could I let my focus drift that much when I got home?—this is not to suggest I’ve done nothing good today, but I haven’t been nearly good enough; there is so much that I want, and I’ve betrayed it. How dare I, when every mistake that I make can and will be used as evidence for the supremacy of schooling? Even now I would like to masturbate, although I need sleep. It is such a beautiful Diary!—O richness of endeavor! O my glorious notebooks!—and I’m so ignorant. Do I just keep reminding myself that there was a time when I did no math at all?—so change is possible; I just need to make a few corrections, but I’ve told you this. Why should you care? You want to read a glorious novel. Diary, I have sinned, sinned, sinned. —ZMD
Today Dolores asked me if I was going to school before asking a question that amounted to how many milliliters are in a liter. Really, Diary!—what is wrong with people that they associate knowledge of SI prefixes with being enrolled in fucking school? I think I’ve fallen for a romantic vision that makes me want to believe that people study because they desire true knowledge about the world, and people work to make themselves useful unto others and thereby acquire resources for their own endeavors. Whereas in reality, it seems that most people go to school to get job tickets, and have jobs because they have bills to pay. I don’t think I stand to be in danger of being utterly deceived by this romance, because desiring true knowledge about the world entails coming to know about the world as it really in fact is, which is not exactly as it seems, and certainly not as you dream of it. This includes oneself—it feels good to lament the years I wasted in school, and dream of how much better I could have done were I encouraged to seek out knowledge and insight directly—but how well would I really have done? This morning I felt bad about how inefficient I had been with my free time the previous day—although probably whatever I did was more redeeming than the private endeavors of someone who doesn’t know what milli- means. I’m so ignorant. So what if I know lots of things of which Nicole is ignorant? So what if Anna Salamon actually thinks I’m worth having around? I’m shit, Diary. I’m young enough that things are not over yet, but it is saddening to consider what I’ve missed and what I’m missing.
Still I must endeavor forever; hope exists and by some still-unconfirmed reports, nearly abounds. We may only yet be seeing the exact form of my purity [born] of pain. —ZMD
I was relatively good today, but not nearly as good as I must be if there is something I desperately need to understand or do. I did some math. You can only beat your head against a wall in the textbook for so long before you realize you really should go backwards and work problems that you had previously thought you could skip. Later, I ended up doing some more freestyle exploration of the matrix intrigue that apparently hasn’t quite died out yet.
Diary, you probably don’t know this, but once, back when I was a schoolstudent in the days before my purity [born] of pain, I started to write a story set in a future in which artificially conceived sexless humans form a dominant class, and women and men are an oppressed minority (cf. 156, 193, 194, 197, 199, 204). Today I was reading from George Williams’s Sex and Evolution, in part of which Williams argues (if I’m parsing him correctly) that sex is maladaptive in vertebrates and other low-fecundity populations, and that we only have it because we inherited it from our deep ancestors, and evolution can’t make multiple simultaneous design changes. When parthenogenesis is on the table, sex is quickly wiped out! Thus science vindicates my nitwit hack premise!—this when a note at the end of my unfinished digital ms. asserts “that eymen become a majority only shows how powerful the meme is in relation to its base the gene”. Sure, Zack. Whatever. But Diary, you see indications of just how much there is to know and discover!—and I haven’t been good enough. I need to do more technical study. I talked with Josh for about two hours. —ZMD
I was good today, but not nearly as good as—well, you understand. I did a little math in the morning. I took my bicycle to BART and BART to Berkeley in order to fetch a new cache of real books. I read from The Psychology of Computer Programming while on the train. Diary, autodidacts have such a peculiar relationship to academia: much as we might rave against the structure, we are dependent on its output. Someone should write a thesis about alternate structures of knowledge production, and if someone already has, then someone else should write another. I burned through How Children Fail before returning home, I think mostly while loitering around the Walnut Creek station. I also checked out Not in Our Genes, the Oxford evopsych handbook, and an anthology of papers from Robert Trivers. I went through a bit of Genes and Oxford, and the self-deception chapter of the Trivers book. Just tonight I hit the end of A Woman’s Passion (cf. 293). You know how xkcd has the highest overall quality to art quality ratio of any comic in memory? Well, let me just say that Passion has the highest ending quality to overall quality ratio of any novel in memory. (Ender’s Game was good and had a twist, whereas this was just twist.)
Diary, of course I know there is more to life than study—just not necessarily my life. —ZMD
Diary, a funny thing, a really sickening thing: more than once I have been in a library, doing what I like to do, and wondered why I don’t spend more time there. Yet never can I remember thinking that I ought to spend more time browsing the internet at home. So this week, an experiment: every hour that the library is open and I’m not working, I’ll be at the library. Could it really be that simple? Oh, Diary, can you really just notice that you’re doing something stupid and therefore decide to stop doing it? One would imagine that a race of expected utility maximizers would have the same word for I should and I want. Though I speak English even to myself, shouldn’t I want to know something about how that would feel?
The Orinda branch was open today from thirteen to seventeen, so I attended that. Before that, I stopped at work. For one thing, I had forgotten to record my schedule. For another, I think it’s good to check in with Tracy sometimes, although this time was very brief, as I foolishly came at the time of the weekly conference call. For yet another, I wanted to test the barcodes I made.
I’ll explain, Diary. At Safeway, items are input either by keying in a code or by scanning a UPC. Many items, including pastries, fruits, and vegetables, have a short code associated with them, four digits or perhaps sometimes five, that the checker keys in. Other items come with in packages bearing the ubiquitous UPC. However, if the UPC won’t scan for some reason, the checker can key in the numbers (excluding the check digit) manually. Given just these facts, you might very well suppose that “all” the scanning machine is doing is reading the digits from the barcode and accepting these just as if the checker had keyed them. A trivial insight?—maybe, but remember how stupid humans are. Probably there are many facts about the world that we would accept as obvious if only someone were to point them out explicitly, but only very rarely is this actually done. In any case, I don’t think I came to this tiny insight just from the facts I’ve mentioned to you; I used an observation that made it ever more painfully obvious. Occasionally our corporate friends will put together a charity drive, and you can ring up donations either by scanning a paper with a barcode, or by keying in digits. However, when you look at the digits printed with the barcode on the paper, you see that they are just the digits designated for manual entry, but prefaced by a string of zeros long enough to fill up the barcode’s digit width. Likewise with the sandwich coupons.
So I had thought it would be amusing if I were to create barcodes bearing digits that checkers are normally given to keying manually, and it turns out that there’s a GNU Barcode project suited to just this. I didn’t know how to compile or locate a binary from the first download I located, so I downloaded a free software porting application (which said it required that I install Xcode, which I got from my OS X installation DVD) …
Diary, I’m boring you. The upshot, the takeaway is that I bought a bagel and a donut with my tube of oatmeal, only I got Bonnie to scan my barcodes rather than keying the customary digits.
Anna Salamon called me yesterday to consult my knowledge of the Overcoming Bias archives, and we talked.
I did use the internet today—no one said I shouldn’t. I just need to know how much is enough, probably by means of strengthening my gut sense about opportunity costs.
I hate metaDiarism, but I want to mention that OpenOffice.org locked up during the writing of this. I had to force quit the application as well as X11, but luckily most of what I had written was autorecovered. Diary, should I make a backup of important documents tonight? When should I get around to writing a bash script to do backups to flash storage?
Oh, Diary. I may not be a girl yet, but I am beautiful. —ZMD
Today was not a good day. Shades of what I had called my recent madness, if you can believe that. Also, I have not fully achieved my purity [born] of pain; there is still pain. I talked to Josh on the telephone; I am a high-maintenance friend. I’ve wasted so much of my life, Diary; don’t I want to write something more substantive than notebook lines and Diary entries? How does my rationality look now? Caitlin wants me to send her a long email. I take vacation next week. Diary, I am hurt. —ZMD
I performed terribly at work today. I was still hurt and scared, suffering from my recent madness. Diary, I’ve wasted enough time already. This distress has been such that I chose not to take library day either today or yesterday—this is only disgusting, and a breach of experimental protocol (cf. 307). I know that I’m neurotic, that my overcalibrated moral sense drives me to sabotage what by community standards would be decent work. Michael Vassar said I was just being stupid when I felt that I had to explicitly inform the teacher that I didn’t do the reading (cf. 272). But Diary, I suspect the same moral sense that drives me to such madness is just what makes me take the Overcoming Bias project so seriously. It would be too much a violence to blunt my sensitivity, so my sensitivity will just have to cut its own clean path through spacetime. If the thought of being a programmer makes me sick with fear and shame for not-reasons bordering on the absurd, then I can just—not think in terms of being a programmer. Say instead: I have got a matrix intrigue that needs solving, and I am going to solve it by learning about Python and writing an elaborate script. Such are the exact terms of my purity [born] of pain. This is the way it has to be: if I try to compete with my contemporaries or obey the authorities, I’ll tear myself apart, so I’ll just have to pour all my energy into being insanely good. I am not a hotshot of any sort; I’m just curious. I know I’ve been saying things on this theme for a while, but I’m sticking with it until I’ve healed more and have really given it a serious, thorough try. What else is there for me? —ZMD
I got back tonight from visiting Anna et al. in Sunnyvale. It was really fun, and potentially very helpful. I spent a lot of time interacting with Anna. Steve is less articulate, and his sleep patterns were further out of sync with mine. I barely saw Rolf, whom I don’t know very well at all; he works at Google. Robin Gane-McCalla is living there now […]. Vassar (now SIAI president) hired Robin to do outreach work for the Institute […].
We should probably do less navel-gazing next time: my fault. But talking with Anna is fascinating! When Anna said she was surprised by my SAT scores only being ninety-seventh percentile (as I had mentioned on our walk the previous afternoon), I said that I was surprised that she was surprised, and she said that I should expect her to have been surprised, given that I had said earlier that I thought she overestimated my abilities.
Other takeaways and tidbits: I need to take some time to seriously plan for my future. I need to gather more information, and really think about what I actually want to do, and how I might actually do it. Perhaps I’ll even play around with some expected utility calculations. Diary, it is important to realize what g is good for, and what it is not good for. I should consider adopting a no-thoughtcrime principle. Anna says to notice where new theories contradict your old common sense, citing a book titled Made to Stick. Anna says that mere experience isn’t enough to teach you skills—you need to use the experience to try to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Regrettably we don’t know of a study on this. This has not been the best missive; I will keep you posted. —ZMD
I built Memoryless Distribution today (cf. 273 inter alia), but it doesn’t work. I get power, but no BIOS, not even a beep. I’ll take library day tomorrow—I have a book to consult in mind.
Anna seems really serious about collaborating with me. It’s good: I must not let the quotation “my purity [born] of pain” be an excuse for laziness, for then how could I have my purity borne of pain? Diary, I really do want to know things, in whatever sense a human can really be said to have preferences. I haven’t been trying nearly hard enough—I don’t even know what it would mean to try. —ZMD
I exchanged motherboards, but still no beep from Memoryless Distribution; I would seem forced to seek professional help. I took a little bit of library time, during which I burned through the remainder of Bookkeeping for Dummies, although I wasn’t paying full attention and probably didn’t get all that much out of it. I checked out Top 100 Careers Without a Four-Year Degree and David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality.
I’ve started keeping very rough notes of how I spend my time in a blue notebook. Binding yourself to a schedule drawn up in advance doesn’t work, so I’m trying the opposite: doing what I do, but taking notes, not so much in order to keep a record, but so that I’m more likely to notice what it is I’m doing (cf. 294). I also got a whiteboard not too long ago; I don’t think I told you. —ZMD
You deserve an update—but please remember to divide by P(B|A)P(A) + P(B|¬A)P(¬A) this time; you are not good enough of a rationalist to believe the mess I had to put up with after you last tried your hand at Bayescraft.
Thursday the twelfth was a relatively good day. I took Memoryless Distribution to the repair shop on North Main, and within minutes the tech had shown my the true structure of my sinfulness: I had neglected a power connector (also, apparently my RAM was loose). I returned home and installed XP (Home) and Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex, 64-bit edition). Deeply confused as I am about the true structure of human learning, I went to the batting cages to see if I could still hit. I lost some skin on my right hand to the friction. Then I took library day—before it was done, I had successfully completed a beautiful flowchart for a Python script to take the reduced row-echelon form of a two-by-two matrix. The next day, Friday the thirteenth, I completed the script itself. On Saturday, I achieved some small measure of true insight into the Cauchy-Reimann equations. Today I worked the 1130–2030 shift in Starbucks, which tends to be miserable. I was glad to have found some waterproof bandages in the morning, which did a fair job of covering my cut from the batting cages. Baristaïng is such a boring and stupid job that I hardly even try to optimize my performance, shameful as that is to say. In general, I want to do things; laziness is boring; I seek a unity in expected utility maximization. You can see a little of this in my work in the booth, although I still have ever so far to go—with Starbucks I really just don’t care as much. The thing that made today not-terrible was that I attained some nontrivial insight as to how I might render a cleaner, more general rref-taker in Python.
Diary, I should be concerned as to what that store is doing to me. I fear a human can’t avoid being shaped by her environment, whether she likes it or not. My coworkers lack a certain spark that (say) my Overcoming Bias friends have. I don’t want to stagnate; I don’t want to be dragged down. There’s a certain stigma: how can I go on to do great things after having worked so long at Safeway? For myself, I can answer this easily. I seek true [knowledge], not prestige—dwelling on my low social status does nothing to help me do better on an absolute scale, and my only thought should be of doing ever better. But this attitude is really a somewhat serious turning-away from society: we don’t seem to have a place for serious self-directed activity. I think it’s sad. People watch sports on television, but are they really learning from each new game? If you’re not learning, what’s the point? So many people just sit during their lunch, and don’t do any math at all. Why? Why are we all so retarded? Oh, Diary!—why am I? —ZMD
You know, Diary, I probably am doing better than ever before. Take these last two days I’ve had off my job (I should not call it work): I’ve done a nontrivial amount of stuff.
Yesterday: I hit Berkeley on a book run. I downloaded the GParted Live CD, deleted the ridiculously large swap partition on Memoryless Distribution, created a one-gigabyte swap file on the second partition, and edited /etc/fstab accordingly. I burned through a good deal of John Holt’s The Underachieving School (I had previously skimmed early parts of it on Google Books), and a bit of Holt’s Escape from Childhood and Gary Drescher’s Good and Real. I did a little bit of math, and created a flowchart for a more generalized rref-taker.
Today: I started drafting a post for Less Wrong on the sunk cost fallacy. (You don’t say that I didn’t tell you?—the community site Less Wrong is sister-successor to Overcoming Bias.) I gave Memoryless Distribution a video card, activated Windows, and tinkered with my shell environment. I brought my birth certificate to Fidelity to claim the stock Mother had signed over to me. I burned through the remainder of Escape from Childhood (though I likely degenerated into skimming and did not get a lot out of it) and got a bit further in Good and Real. Though my sheet space for today probably contains an higher ratio of English words to mathematical notation than is usual for even me (Diary, you understand that this is saying something), I did make some measure of mathematical progress today. Diary, I wish you knew what there is to say when you come up with a problem that looks like it could spawn interesting results, only you might not be smart enough to solve it, and you might be talking complete nonsense without even realizing it.
One of the books I checked out of the University Library is the infamous Why Men Rule. You can only wonder how I will feel reading this. I should worry that I’m not allocating enough of my force of inquiry along the gender front. Math is beautiful—I only wish I’d realized this earlier—and it is important that I soak up technological knowledge that will help me get a better job. But if I’m not careful, who could say but that I might end up as just another geek, albeit one with beautiful hair? Maybe reading the outrageous Goldberg book will remind me that I’m supposed to have something to protect.
Remind me to give you a discourse on my recent madness sometime fairly soon. —ZMD
Diary, I just wish I knew what the hell it is that I’m trying to do. Today two men from IT came to perform some task: one of them spoke with an accent that sounded Eastern European, and I think the other did not have very much hair on his head, not at all like me. I borrowed James’s keys and let them into the server room. I hung around for a few minutes, watching and talking. The man with the accent suggested I join an open source project; that way, I would have something to put on my resume.
Perhaps more now than ever do I have a sense of the vastness of my ignorance. I have some evidence to the effect that I’m smart enough to do anything I want. On the other hand, there have been many occasions where my work in the booth would have been facilitated if only I were smarter. What does that say about the rest of us poor fools? Did I used to notice the sorts of cognitive deficits I now notice in myself? Even with your help, it’s pin down exactly how I’ve changed. What are other people’s minds like? I remember that at Heald, I collaborated on some worthless presentation with some women who were—ah, not of my class. I remember trying to explain to Lava that you couldn’t just type in material verbatim from the textbook. It could have been just today that I think back and realize that, English being her second language, she probably didn’t know how to rephrase material in her own words. Of course I must have known this at the time: does my recent recollection then represent a new psychological insight, or am I just remembering some random thing?
I’ve long been skeptical of therapy or drugs as a means for easing my frequent mental distress, as if I were insisting that I should reason myself well. (I may have literally insisted as such.) [The] way I am now—I might actually be close to really being able to do that. Thanks to the Overcoming Bias project, I would seem to have a focus that I once lacked, a constant eye towards the sanctity of my map. I’m still doing everything horribly wrong: it is left for you to judge, then, whether I only suffer the delusion of having improved, or whether I would be doing ever so much horribly worse had I never chanced across the words of Eliezer Yudkowsky.
I was not very efficient today. Could a contributing factor be that I’ve lapsed in my time logging?—it’s hard to say. I took some library time after work. I got very little out of Drescher’s gloss of the many worlds (I mean relative states). I did a very small amount of math; I had done a very small amount of math on my lunch. I bought soap and lubricant at Longs using my rebate card (cf. 294). I worked on my generalized rref-taker for a while. —ZMD
Oh, Diary. On more than one occasion, I’ve made reference to what I’ve been calling “my recent madness” (cf., inter alia, 228, 230, 239, 241), but I don’t seem to have any record of explaining to you explicitly what I meant by this: the closest thing to an explanation probably occurs in my 222. I might have written some better explanation during the time lost to your injury (cf. 255), but of this we have no record. Well, I want to explain a little more now. It seems as if I’ve been afraid of accidentally committing plagiarism, or of being falsely accused of committing plagiarism. Perhaps I have also felt the emotions of shame and guilt, in addition to fear. Note that guilt is one of those English words that can be potentially problematic: it is used in referring to both the emotion of feeling guilty and the state of actually being guilty, but a sufficiently neurotic person might feel guilty while in fact being totally innocent.
My recent madness caused me much distress during my time at University, perhaps peaking during Winter Quarter 2007, before gradually fading away. I would seem to have suffered a sort of relapse recently (cf. 308, 309) over the topic of computer programming. There are some problems you can solve by running away from them: for instance, if you don’t like school, you can just quit. However, I think a neurosis of this magnitude is something that needs to be dealt with explicitly. Dropping out of school to seek true knowledge by some other method is an acceptable outcome; shutting up forever for fear that one might say something vaguely similar to something one has previously heard is not an acceptable outcome. If I seek to be a creature of information, then I should put some effort into pinning down my philosophy and ethics of information. I should inquire as to what the actual facts of the matter are, how I feel, why I feel what I feel, and how to renormalize my moral intuitions in a way that actually makes sense. If the mere emotion of feeling guilty is to be interpreted as a verdict of absolute and unredeemable depravity, then you might as well just kill yourself immediately. On the other hand, if you love life, and want to live a good life—if you actually want to implement your morality in the real world—then you’re going to have to actually think about things. Rationality does envelop everything, in some sense, for whatever it is you’re trying to do, it helps to have an accurate model of what’s actually going on.
We can all agree that it is wrong to take someone else’s work and put your own name on it. However, it is also important to understand that all new work draws upon old work. I could use the phrase shoulders of giants and the use or reference would be an instance of what I’m talking about. We might be able to go even further and say that if you’ve internalized the materialist worldview, you can understand this at a deeper level. Your brain does not contain a magical fount of pure originality utterly unrelated to anything previously existing in this universe. You are a lawful physical system: however creativity works, it has to involve something along the lines of the brain taking in information from the world, processing it, and using it to produce new information. The magical fount account is not merely false; it is also physical nonsense. So it would seem to me right now; if it is someday shown to me that I am mistaken on this point, I hope I will not hesitate to amend my views.
Perhaps some would object that no one really believes in a magical fount, that surely I am only constructing a person. I’m not so sure. It’s cached wisdom among my creepy Singularitarian friends that humans are only barely generally intelligent, and my experience would seem to bear this out. People believe all sorts of nonsense, and what we profess to believe doesn’t always match up with our actual anticipations. The things that should be gut-level obvious aren’t necessarily that obvious to humans, and I think it is often profitable to dwell on them.
I do think there are some nontrivial issues to be worked out here. If I felt scared or guilty about accidentally shooting John F. Kennedy, or being falsely accused of shooting John F. Kennedy, and the observation that I didn’t exist at the time of the offense wasn’t enough to soothe me, then it would be pretty clear my that some part of me was seriously out of touch with reality. Regarding my anxieties about the responsible use of information, I do think that some part of me is seriously out of touch with reality, but it’s nothing so obvious. So let me try to explicitly pin down the moral theory, for the part of my brain that doesn’t seem to understand it already. The reason plagiarism is wrong is not because it’s making use of other people’s work—everyone does that; it’s called learning. The reason plagiarism is wrong is because it’s dishonest and lazy. When you copy something without studying it, you’re not learning from it. And if you do study others’ work, and study it well, then you shouldn’t need or want to merely copy: you’ll have the internalized knowledge you need to create good work of you own. And since I’m not scrambling to get good grades, I have no incentive to cheat anyway. This last remark is only an observation; it is not to say that I would cheat if there were was a payoff for doing so. Diary, I am a good person; I would rather fail with honor than “succeed” with lies. However, I still think observations about incentives and such are potentially valuable, given our knowledge about how unreliable humans are. It is written of the eighth virtue that “[t]o be humble is to take specific actions in anticipation of your own errors.” Even if you feel absolutely certain that you would never do such-and-such a horrible thing, it’s still probably a good idea to avoid situations in which people have been known to do horrible things. For just as feeling guilty does not necessarily imply that one is guilty in fact, so feeling absolutely certain does not necessarily imply that one is actually right.
I neither enjoyed nor did very well in my math classes at University. At University, when there was a problem on the homework that you couldn’t solve, the thing to do was to take it to section and seek help from the TA or other students. My model of how other people work is very poor, but I suspect that a lot of students, upon receiving help, just copied down the correct steps, in order to complete their paper. But I remember not wanting to do just this; I want to have some barrier, so I can tell what’s me and what’s not-me. After all, it would be an act of academic dishonesty to simply copy down someone else’s work—isn’t that what we were given to understand? Isn’t it “show your work” rather than “show work”? Sometimes, in my Winter 2007 linear algebra class, I would render corrections made during section or office hours in red pen, with a note indicating this. “NOTE red ink indicates corrections/additions made at section 22 February” it says on one of the papers I retain from that class. (I cannot express the exact formatting of the scrawl in this medium; I trust that you understand.) Or in my Fall 2007 vector calculus class, I had taken to inserting editorial notes. On one paper I retain from that class, I wrote: “I ask Jacqui what happens when [lambda] cannot be isolated, & she asks what happens when the -1/2 is brought to the other side of the equation. I realize that I need to factor the expression.” A little below this: “I couldn’t factor it. Jacqui was able to solve for [lambda] & noted that the quadratic formula could be used as well.”
Math at University was painful; math on my own is pleasant. Since I’m not trying to throw together a homework paper for Thursday, I have the freedom to let the paper reflect my methodology, rather than forcing my methodology to fit the curriculum. On Friday, I was trying to work a problem from the textbook, and I noticed that I didn’t remember the relationship between ln x and 1/x: I knew that one was the derivative of the other, but which was which? I noted my confusion in writing, and then wrote: “Since I understand what the derivative means, & I can visualize the graph of ln x, I can rederive it.” So I drew the sketched the graphs of ln x and 1/x, and figured it out, showing my work. The next day, yesterday, I found myself wondering: ln x is only defined for positive x, but its derivative 1/x is defined for all nonzero reals. What gives? I might have suspected at the time that the derivative was really 1/x restricted to positive x. But I investigated: I played around with the calculator, and noticed that the imaginary part of the natural logarithm of a negative real number is always pi times i. And if you’re familiar with Euler’s formula (one of them, anyway), you can sort of see why this would be, even if you don’t bother to take the time to work it out explicitly. How does this resolve our dilemma? Well, go to our definition of the derivative: the limit as h goes to zero of the difference of f(x+h) and f(x), divided by h. Then notice that f(x+h) and f(x) have the same imaginary part, so when you subtract them, it cancels out. And this is the true secret of why 1/x is the one and only derivative of ln x, strange though this may seem. No one told me; I figured it out myself—using the math that had been told me. My thoughts have been documented: see page 129 of my math pages. When you’re burdened down with school assignments, you don’t have the time or space to go off on these little detours which would seem to actually help.
So I have my new methodology for studying math: it’s slow, but it seems to work, and it is beautiful: I seem to recall that Father recently said that my writing was like a work of art, and I think that I said that that was the idea. How do other people feel about math? What am I actually trying to do? Consider someone who wants to learn the math as efficiently as possible so as that they can go out and design the next widget. I would tentatively imagine that they wouldn’t get so caught up in the artistry and documentation. I think there’s an extent to which I’m trying to create a beautiful record of my thought, rather than just trying to learn the math. There’s nothing wrong with that—many people have done much worse—but I should at least be somewhat clear on what I’m trying to do. This impulse to document is part of what scares me about learning to program. When you try to solve a math problem and fail, you at least have the notes, but half of a computer program is nothing. When I mentioned this to Anna, I think she said something to the effect that half a math problem was just as bad. She apparently was thinking about getting the answer, whereas my attention focuses towards the artistry. I like the continuity of my math pages or my little notebooks. With a discrete programming project, you don’t have that kind of continuous record of your thought—you type something, and if it doesn’t work, you delete it, and type something else, and I suppose that if you really wanted to keep a record, you could just frequently archive unfinished versions of your work—but it’s not the same. Diary, do you suppose this could be the reason that I don’t actually write fiction, despite my professed desire and the manifest beauty of my notebooks? Could it be that I’m so caught up in the beauty of what should be intermediary notes, that I don’t even care that much about the finished work? (As awful as school methodology may be, intrinsic motivation has its own traps.) The hypothesis is compelling in some ways, but it is contradicted in others. My feelings towards writing fiction seem very different in nature from my feelings towards programming. And I am by no means an excessive documenter in full generality: I read a lot, but I don’t even try to keep track of what I read.
Perhaps it would help to mediate on the fact that not everything can be documented—I already readily accept this with respect to my reading—and focus on thinking seriously about things, not only whether or not I’m being graded, but also whether or not I’m even generating any tangible work. My goal is to understand, isn’t it? So I should feel no aversion to doing exercises from the Python book at the interpretive prompt, even if I don’t save any of the (trivial) code.
To be continued. —ZMD
On checking my email this morning, I saw that I had a received a message from a “[redacted]” who identified herself as Sorceress from the sluggy.net boards, which I used to frequent in days long before those of my purity born of pain. Clicking the appropriate button and link to reply in plain text failed to generate the “>>” that are customarily prepended to lines of an email being replied to. I realized that inserting these would be the perfect job for a script. I didn’t know how to write it myself, but googling quickly directed me to a forum where someone had asked how to do something similar to what I wanted to do. I modified script from one of the replies to suit my purposes, and added a comment line to the effect that I had done so:
#!/bin/bash
# modified from tip in Ubuntu forums
IFS=$‘/n’
for line in $(cat sorc); do
echo “>> $line”
done
Diary, is this sort of inquiry not virtuous? We all draw on previous work at multiple levels: the programmer is not to be faulted for using Python rather than machine language, nor for failing to have built her own CPU from silicon dug up at the beach. I was not using this script blindly: though I could not write it myself, I knew enough to read it and modify it for my purposes. Also, I learned something: I know from the poster’s commentary that “IFS” refers to internal field separator: you see, the original poster’s script kept separating at word breaks, when line breaks were what was wanted. So we learn that bash has an internal field separator variable, and that you can change this to the newline character is you want separation to happen at line breaks. Being able to tell you this is some small form of progress, although I should notice how much I don’t understand. I write the above without looking at the forum thread in question; could I be explaining it wrong?—but you understand that I’m trying. Nothing should be withheld from my force of inquiry, of which I must only endeavor to make ever more efficient. If it seems better to solve a problem on my own, I can do so; and if it seems better to consult what others have done, I can do that. The important thing is to be honest about whatever it is that you’ve done. If you don’t remember exactly that it is that you’ve done, then you can honestly report that you don’t remember. And, you know, Diary, it is in this domain of being honest that I may have unusual talents: rarely in the street do you meet an aspiring rationalist so skilled as I. Humans are such muddled creatures that I suspect there is a nontrivial skill component to honesty: I imagine that a lot of people just make shit up, without having the conceptual sophistication to ask explicitly if the words they express correspond to reality. Perhaps dishonest is not the correct word to refer to this making-shit-up, but I trust that you understand in context. I must not think myself immune to this making-shit-up: how many times have I found myself rehearsing the evidence against schooling because it feels good? Beliefs-of-fact shouldn’t be about feeling good; it’s supposed to be about “the map that reflects the territory.”
I had said that I didn’t want to be a programmer because I didn’t want to compete with the guys who’d been doing it since they were twelve. That’s what I said, and it could have been one reason, but my recent madness might very well also have been lurking in the background. I had said I could be a sysadmin instead: they have to know how to script, but they also have to know about hardware and stuff: they’re not writing software. But it’s funny: why did scripting seem safer in relation to my recent madness? Bigger projects have more scope for originality. There exists a continuum: the bash shell can be used for anything from one-line commands (the equivalent of clicking an icon) to creating sophisticated programs. It would be a monstrous absurdity for me to be accused of plagiarism every time I type “ls | grep” something—that’s simply what is done when you want to see if something is in your current working directory. Telling computers to do things is a skill; maybe someone gets off on writing Perl scripts as glorious works of art, but the economy needs people who know how to get things working; I should understand that not everything has to be so personal.
I wish I knew what other people are like on the inside. I’ve been known to worry myself sick about crimes of which I have every reason to believe I am utterly innocent. But what about the people who actually do commit them? What could they possibly be thinking?
Oh, Diary. There are yet more things I could say on the topic of my recent madness, but for now I would seem to tire of writing to you, and I would like to take library day before my closing shift starts. I think it has been helpful to explain all this to you. —ZMD
I remain rather confident that school methodology is horribly, horribly wrong. Many students bullshit their papers, which are read once by a TA and then thrown away. The students get a degree, but what about the opportunity costs? I’ve wasted enough time filling out worksheets and tests in the service of grades, but Diary, it is difficult to have to rediscover as from scratch what’s really worth doing. I keep my math pages in a pink binder. Soon I have to decide: is this binder (and its successors which I hope you don’t doubt will exist) to be reserved strictly for pure math, or is it a broader binder to be used whenever I study technical things? The flowcharts I made in the service of writing a Python script in the service of my matrix intrigue are beautiful: surely they belong in the binder. But we would not, I think, want to clutter up the binder with my queries and ponderings on the minutia of Python syntax. But the source code of the finished script—surely that belongs in the binder. On the other hand, someone who wants to be a real programmer would do well to write real applications: not just toys in the service of abstract mathematical masturbation. What should I think about that? With regards to the matrix intrigue, at least, I think that it’s a good idea to just hack away at the computer, only making notes in the binder when some particularly interesting thing needs to be worked out. Come to think of it, the binder serves at last two purposes, and I would do well to figure out how to trade them against each other. (Figure that if the two purposes never needed to be traded against each other in any possible world, then really they would be the same purpose.) The binder serves as a repository for my notes in the service of achieving a particular result, as well as serving as an archive of my thought processes on the way to the result, such processes being valued for themselves. Even if you only care about getting to the result as quickly as possible, you might do well to generate many notes, the paper serving as a sort of external working memory.
So what am I really trying to do? Diary, I am ever so lost. I’ve worked a little bit on the generalized rref-taker today: programming is hard—and there are ever so many other things I like to do! I do want to at least resolve the matrix intrigue this way. All civilized people ought to know how to program a computer. (I mean civilized in the Yudkowskian sense.) And I’m going to need a better job. What you practice, you get good at—and as it stands, I’m spending some thirty hours a week practicing my customer service skills at Safeway. There is a dignity in such market service, but this dignity must be traded off against everything else I could do with that time. I am not a master hacker; IT is not my natural field. But when there’s no market for your natural field, then you need to pick something.
Maybe I should relinquish my pretensions of being a generalist. There are simply too many things worth knowing. If I decide that what I want is really to thrash around reading random (not really random) books, then that’s fine, but I should at least know that that’s what I’m doing. Except there does seem to be some sort of relatively general knowledge: in the course of figuring out what specific thing it is that you’re trying to do, it is helpful to have explicit knowledge of (say) the fact/value distinction, or the notion of sunk costs.
However, before running out of space or time for new knowledge, I really need to continue improving my efficiency. I don’t know what the limits of what I can know are, so it is useless to worry about running out of space. Just yesterday, while I was poking around the bookshelves in Nicole’s room (she has textbooks!), I idly looked in come of the Foxtrot collections there, and I remembered having read specific strips. Even if I hadn’t thought of a particular strip in years, I knew upon seeing it that I had read it before. Sad, isn’t it?—all those clockcycles I [spent] reading Foxtrot when I could have been studying math or something. And Foxtrot is a good comic strip: it’s just that life is so short. It is sad also to note that there have been times when I’ve lost my place in an academic book and subsequently could not recognize text that I had allegedly just read less than minutes before.
So human memory is a mystery unto me: I don’t know what I know, and I don’t know what I can know. What I do know is that I’m not sufficiently optimizing my time usage, and so focusing on that is where we should expect to see the greatest expected value.
I started reading the outrageous Goldberg book yesterday: I’m actually kind of impressed. Goldberg is very explicit about what he’s saying and what he is not saying, and he makes the fact/value distinction very clear. The introduction ends: “I hope you find this trip illuminating and enjoyable and remember that nothing here commits you to any moral or political view you do not like.” This is the kind of clarity and rigor that I’m just not used to seeing from the likes of Bettina Aptheker. Still, I should worry that my reading has been unbalanced. More worrisome: I say (as Goldberg says) that I take the fact/value distinction very seriously, but I should remember that humans aren’t built to do this consistently. Could I be developing racist or misogynistic attitudes? It’s practically a standard failure mode: science-minded young man holds disdain against women for (he thinks:) not being as smart and science-minded as him. I’m not at all like that, but—well, one of the big themes of my grand dream-of-a-novel is that it’s possible to be mistaken about what you really are. So I think it’s important to have an image of who you want to be, as distinct from how you-the-physical-system actually are. The former can be whatever you want it to be, whereas the latter is a belief-of-fact and must be determined only by the evidence (and your prior—although I fear Bayes is mostly still but a password unto me). So I have to ask the question as if it were any other ordinary question, such as about rocks or something: do I have misogynistic attitudes? If it makes sense to speak of stripping away my autogynephila and my explicitly egalitarian-individualist ideology, would my very soul be revealed as male? And if so, what can I do about it? What violence could I inflict upon me to make me my self?
I don’t think I ever told you: someday it would be nice to experiment with some androgen-blocking drugs—you know, to see what it would feel like to be on them. But if I’m going to do something like that, it would be nice to have a better job and not be living with my parents—oh Diary, how it all hangs together! Oh, Diary, how ridiculously stupid we all are! —ZMD
I talked to Josh yesterday and will probably meet with him tomorrow. I’ve burned through the remainder of that outrageous Goldberg book today. (You might joke that I would have burned it full stop if it weren’t a library book. But that’s not true.) So do I have something to protect (cf. 314)? It’s still so hard to say. It is written that it takes 10 000 hours to get really good at something. That’s two hours, forty-four minutes, and change, every day for ten years. That’s the list price for a great novel. Am I prepared to pay that? What else do I have to do with my life? You might suggest I devote my life to existential-risk reduction, but what do I have to contribute there? Diary, do not talk to me about sacrifice or discipline: this is simply a matter of not-being-stupid, perhaps a tougher test than anything to do with discipline. I’ve wasted so much time in my life: think of all the minutes and dollars lost to pieces of cardboard bearing pictures of men holding sticks. No doubt there are many who regret having spent so much time writing stories about things that didn’t actually happen. There is a difference, I think: the events and people of the story I want to write don’t exist, but I would speak of grander truths and problems that do exist. This is not just a cool story, this is important. And I think I have a unique take that won’t exist unless I bring it into existence. Who really cares?—perhaps no one but me. The world does not particularly need another grand novel. But neither does the world particularly need another actuary, or another network technician. What the world needs in particular is nothing I’m in a position to provide. Even if my creepy Singularitarian friends are right, I’m hardly Friendship programmer material, and surely Anna et al. can find someone else to spread the word or conduct analysis. Paul Rhodes!—he’s the hard-core transhumanist; I’m just along for the ride. (Spot the rationalization in action, Diary, I dare you.)
It is such a beautiful Diary! And I’m so incredibly stupid! What am I actually trying to do? I know I’m boring you, but this is a really important thing to have nailed down. And I don’t know. And another minute goes by. And my probability of actually writing Preserved Under Symmetry goes down by that much.
ADDENDUM— Have my closes been inferior lately?—it’s just such a boring job. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing, if I get some good thinking done during the shift—but I don’t think that happens so much.
I’ve done a tiny amount of transcribing of possibly novel-relevant notions from my old notebook. It feels good. Why haven’t I been doing this with spare moments every day?—it’s just such an obvious thing to do. —ZMD
Oh, Diary, how am I to make sense of it all? On my book run with Josh, I picked up Bobbi Low’s Why Sex Matters, Dierdre McCloskey’s Crossing, a collection of John Holt’s letters, and a book about information science. Holt I’ve already burned though—he goes very fast. But I don’t know how I am going to manage to read all these other books I have lying around! O books O sacredness!
The most recent Overcoming Bias meetup was Sunday. I slept over and hung out the next day, and it was amazing, as usual. I still profess shock that these amazing people think that I’m worth hanging out with.
Some highlights:
Michael Vassar was saying something about how we should cooperate (in the sense of the Prisoner’s Dilemma) with FAI developers across the many worlds of a big universe. I said that I had no idea what that could possibly be like, and I said, So, you’re saying we should cooperate with the Superhappies?—this being a reference to a piece of Eliezer’s fiction recently serialized on Overcoming Bias. I think this ended up sparking a long discussion between Michael and Eliezer about the story and the philosophy. I asked Marcello if I should apologize for having started this; he answered in the negative and rewarded me with a Newton.
At one point, I said, “This is surreal.” Eliezer said, “Welcome to surreality.”
I got to discuss some math I was working on with Marcello. We agreed that it’s important to notice whether you want to solve the problem yourself, or whether you just want the problem solved.
Michael has an informal theory of human moral psychology, phrased metaphorically in terms of robots and monkeys that he was explaining to Marcello, and he used me as an example. He said that I contain some very strong robots that prohibit me from making false statements, or letting other people get away with making false statements about gender issues. I asked him to repeat that; I said that other people could make statements about such issues that I thought were true, but I still—oh, could we talk about something else?
Somehow the concept came up of CEV turning out differently depending on whether Eliezer wrote it with his left or right hand. Eliezer said he wasn’t buying that: his corpus collosum isn’t severed, so he’s got pretty high bandwidth going there. “Not as high as a woman’s,” piped up someone from the kitchen. (Naturally I was familiar with the research being referenced.) Michael said that this was true, and noted that even without a split corpus collosum, experiments have shown differences.
I said that my eudaemonic rate of intelligence increase was probably very slow, as there were so many things I wanted to do. Eliezer asked if this was the “thousand years having sex with catgirls” thing. Michael interjected that of course it wasn’t; this is Z.M. we’re talking about! It’s not surprising that Michael knows me better than Eliezer; but Diary, what makes me worth knowing at all?
The second day, while I was sitting with Robin Gane-McCalla while Anna was off to the restroom, we overheard an interesting exchange. A woman was soliciting passerby to help her organization: You have time to help fight global warming today, right? A passing man said he was on his lunch break. The petitioner said, You can save the world on your lunch break! In light of the crowd I was hanging out with, this was hilarious.
[…]
Anna made an analogy: athletes find their workouts much more fulfilling than people who go to the gym and lift a bunch of weights. In the same way, people who have something to protect might even be happier than those who only thrash about, being merely curious. This is not to say there’s no role for random reading, which Anna affirmed. But I do think it’s important to know what you’re trying to do.
Robin is moving to New York to work with Michael on organizing this year’s Singularity Summit. Accordingly, he’s getting rid of some books! So I got some math and computer science textbooks as well as Hard Heads, Soft Hearts: Tough-Minded Economics for a Just Society. O books!
Tracy’s taking vacation again this week, so Jennifer and I have the booth. I was very inefficient at my job yesterday. It is scary to fundamentally not know where all that time went. Could it have been because I was low on sleep? I took some library time afterwards, and I don’t think I was so efficient with this, either. Checking the internet at home, I saw I had an email from Anna. I think I read part of it, but I think I was afraid of investigating further, so I probably checked blogs and such for some time before actually, you know, following the link in Anna’s message. I think the experience was a reminder of how ridiculously easy it is to get blogsick. Reading the blogs is probably better than what most people end up doing with their time, but I have to do ever so much better if I want not to be destroyed. Actually coming to understand things takes ever so much time. You can see how hard it is just to keep things together. I think everyone is incompetent; I think very few of us have any idea of what it would really mean to do our jobs well. My unusual perspective will cause me difficulties in signaling: I imagine many people who get As in their linear algebra class can credibly go around thinking that they understand linear algebra. I don’t think anyone understands linear algebra: there’s always another theorem you haven’t considered, another perspective you haven’t taken, another notation unnatural unto you. Maybe all this is too obvious to be worth mentioning. Maybe you could invoke the notion itself in attempting to explain why the notion is worth mentioning: there are many levels of understanding; it is one thing to assent to the proposition that humans are not the most intelligent of all possible minds, but it is another thing to be quite consciously aware of all the ways in which you are stupid. Education is not simply the ability to repeat back information when prompted, it’s a matter of what you think when there’s no one around to prompt you.
What are we trying to do, what are we actually trying to do? I’ve been annoying you with this question a lot Diary, but it’s kind of important. Our service scores at the store were not [so] great last quarter, and so management wants everyone to remember what our scores were last quarter, and what our goals are. I’m given to understand that we’re supposed to be able to repeat these upon questioning. I think it’s kind of silly: how does memorizing digits actually help us do our jobs better? Oh, Diary, there’s no one you can trust: everyone thinks they know what society needs, and some of those who admit that they don’t, think that the market knows. I don’t even think the market knows. I think we’re all retarded. But I spend too much time saying this. How do we do better? —ZMD
ADDENDUM— I feel really stupid today. I installed the wireless adapter I bought recently into Memoryless Distribution. It works in XP, but it will take some work to get it to work under Ubuntu. I installed NDISwrapper. which should let me use Windows drivers, but I think I need to find the appropriate *.sys and *.inf files. I looked around in the copy of How to Design Programs that used to belong to Robin Gane-McCalla, and I think it made me sad. Why? Did it seem too easy, or too hard? Was I just annoyed that [it’s] geared toward working with a version of Scheme, when I want to work in Python? I think I’ll work from Introduction to the Design and Analysis of Algorithms instead. Theory is fun. I want general knowledge. You can memorize all the details of some system that will just be obsolete in five years time, or you can strike directly to the true structure of things—the problem is, one is expected to only do the latter at University: there is no support for private inquiry, nor are schools designed to help individuals understand the specific things they want to understand. Of course, I don’t mean to deny or disparage the specific knowledge people need to get things done. And it takes ever so long to learn this, too.
Oh Diary, how could I bear to have masturbated this morning?—I didn’t learn anything from it. Which should remind me that I didn’t tell you: someone left a comment on Less Wrong claiming that reducing his testosterone levels (first through drugs, then castration) has helped him overcome bias, and he invited questions. (I would imagine he’s the same person who I remember once leaving a similar comment on Overcoming Bias.) I left a comment asking if we could chat via email (cf. 318).
I’m going to go take library day. O terrible how I have sinned today! —ZMD
Diary, life is so ridiculously short! How can we bear the way we betray ourselves with every wasted minute? I seek true knowledge of ultimate gender, but math is fun, too—and writing Python scripts to implement the math is fun, too—and writing Python programs that do useful things might be fun, and in any case would probably be more lucrative. And I need to write fiction, and write for Less Wrong, and help my creepy Singularitarian friends save the world! Oh Diary!—how can people bear leaving all this value lying around, as on the floor? They say I’m young—I think I’m not. I read a fair bit of Why Sex Matters during my library time today. My discrete maths textbook arrived in the post! I should be scared—I am so far from decision-theoretic. You could imagine me writing a bunch of really, really good blogposts for Less Wrong and subsequently being hired by Vassar to write up some stuff for SIAI for minimum wage—or this could be a terrible idea, as I suggested. Could I be worthy of such a thing?—but you see, I’m available, I’m familiar with the Singularitarian premise, and I’d work cheap. Oh, Diary—I should be scared—I don’t want to specialize. I want to bask in the fullness of existence! The eunuch from the blog made a comment to the effect that he’ll try to contact me. Could I really end up being a programmer?—but Ben Rayfield is a programmer, and why shouldn’t I be as competent as him? Oh time! —ZMD
Okay, Diary, I just lost some hours to depression. This is terrible—I can’t afford to waste a single minute if I want some fraction of the dreams I would dream, mine eyes shining with greed. Why do my OvercomingBias friends think I’m worth having around?—I’m shit. Nor am I endowed with some sort of mystical free will that let me utterly remake myself some fine spring day. Diary, I am a lawful physical system: if I am going to change, it is going to because of something. If I can’t point to some specific thing that’s going to make me better, then I shouldn’t expect to be better. But Diary!—I can’t simply resign myself to fate, either. I have to strive to do better, even under the burden of history—knowing that all my past striving has gotten [me] exactly here. I need to reason things out, knowing the weakness of my powers of reason. I’ve been told that I’m a good rationalist—but you know better. Is tonight’s madness all just one big mind projection fallacy? Sometimes when I make a judgment, it’s immediately followed by a correction as I do the reduction—it’s hard to describe—but I’ve been doing that tonight, too. I hope I will be forgiven. —ZMD
In the world of Egan’s Diaspora, citizens have the option of running an outlook—a program that emphasizes particular personality features. I’m just a flesher, but it feels as if I’ve run four different outlooks today. In the morning, I was still depressed—I was not very productive at work. My distress was so great that in the afternoon, I even bumped into a display of wine, breaking a bottle. When I went to the back to get a mop and bucket, I ended up spilling that, too. I don’t know if it was the drama of having fouled up so badly, but soon afterwards, my depression broke, and I felt excited. Then, on reading William B Swift’s blog (Swift posts as “billswift” on Overcoming Bias/Less Wrong, I felt humble—I began to see in detail that I’ve been doing autodidacticism all wrong. I do think you learn a lot from passionate reading, and I am not a fan of discipline as traditionally conceived, but I could stand to be much more systematic. For all the reading I’ve allegedly done about evolutionary psychology, how much have I really retained? I think it was early last year—oh Diary, has it really been a year?—I read Anne Campbell’s A Mind of Her Own: the Evolutionary Psychology of Women. I remember there being a part that was rather technical—and I guess I just sort of skimmed over it, without really digging deeper. Somehow I felt like mentioning Campbell, but no doubt I’ve done this to many authors. How many deep insights have I missed my my failure to dig? I could also ask how many broad insights I have missed in my failure to roam, but I think this is somewhat less of a problem. During the forth outlook, I was reading—oh, how can I describe the sequence of links? Diary, the point is that I am not alone in my autodidacticism, and there are people out there who have an entrepreneurial spirit, who don’t just read books, but who actually go out there and make things and do things, and market themselves—where marketing is this thing that my robots (cf. 320) can’t or won’t let me do the way men think it should be done. (We love the robots!) I was very humbled during these third and fourth outlooks—it was as if I could take the outside view of myself. It’s one thing when you’re depressed and think poorly of yourself, but it’s another (and rarer, for me) thing to think poorly of yourself, but in an impersonal way, where it’s not simply a matter of mental illness, but rather the facts. Oh, Diary!—I want to pin down my goal system, but today has been the most dramatic of examples of the mind-boggling extent to which I don’t have a utility function.
Just thinking about the job search stresses me out to no end: the conflict between money, status, and time weighs on my heart. When I look to my core values, it is clear that time is the most important thing: what use do I have for money except to buy time and space?—I’ve got a library card. As for status: I don’t want to care about status; I seek true knowledge for my own purposes, and it is not obvious to me why I should care whether anyone else is doing better or doing worse. Diary, we both know that I’m smart enough and diligent enough such that I’m worth a living wage—I mean, a living wage if I cut a few corners and live on ramen. So why should I be scared? Am I worried about my social status?—that all these other folks are out doing impressive things, whereas I am—not impressive? But I shouldn’t care—I should want other people to be doing impressive things. Human intelligence is a beautiful thing, and the fact that I know a theorem in no way denies or detracts from the fact that you know a theorem. Maybe it would be harder for me to say this if I were not as smart as I am, if I were not as marginal as I am: my madness aside, I shouldn’t seriously worry about my lifework being scooped. There are many people with no lifework at all: maybe it’s more understandable that they should feel jealous. But I want to relinquish jealousy: what good does it do me on my quest for truth and beauty?
I worry that I’m holding myself back. Could I at some level be afraid of learning practical things? I don’t want to be bound up with credentials. If you major in such-and-this at Harvard, then all your life, people will identify you as having gone to Harvard and majored in such-and-this. If you take the A+ exam, then people will identify you as the time of person who takes the A+—and you know they don’t tend to be all that smart. The really smart people go to University and then they get master’s degrees. Diary, I don’t want to be boxed in like that; I want the freedom to study anything I want to. I understand that the wealth of our society rests on professional specialization—so call me a defector, if you must; you can’t take away my library card. I also realize that it’s physical nonsense to not specialize. Also, I really do have a specialty already: through all my outlooks, the core of my gender intrigue remains mostly intact, unlike hardly anything else in my life. I shouldn’t be afraid to study anything. I shouldn’t be afraid of running out of space; I should be afraid of running out of time. Some people have order-of-magnitude wealth advantages over others, but no one has such a time differential: and time is the important thing. Time spent studying is what makes you smarter. Anna had said that I was so caught up in middleclassness: and it’s a good point; I should not worry so much. So I work at Safeway. Who cares? It’s not such a big deal. Sure, I should try to get a better dayjob, but it’s just a dayjob. Nor should I be angry about University: what does the runaround have to do with me, anyway? I’ve just got to be careful; I’ve just got to study.
Why do I get so anxious about status, anyway? Does it have to do with being male?—I don’t know. I really don’t know if Anna or Katie shares this same fear, and so I certainly don’t know the etiology of why they do or don’t.
Diary, what have I just done in the above few paragraphs? This is another outlook, isn’t it?—I’m trying to talk myself into something else. I’m so confused. —ZMD
Today after work I checked Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment out of the library, and it didn’t take but a few pages to charge my ambition. Oh, Diary! How the weight of my wasted youth should burn me! I have “Something to Protect”! Or shouldn’t you believe me?
I bought a second hard drive for Memoryless Distribution; I’ll spare you the details of everything I’ve done to that machine since my last missive. Just don’t ask me why OpenOffice isn’t accepting backspaces.
I have Wednesday and Thursday off work (I mean, my dayjob) next week, and so I’ve made plans to crash in Santa Cruz on the fifteenth. In my flight of ambition, I’ve decided I want to visit the office hours of the Profs. Patrick Tantalo and Bettina Aptheker. Tantalo, I’ve already emailed, Aptheker I haven’t yet. Or haven’t I the nerve? But Diary, this is important: I’ve been underinvesting in reaching out to persons of interest.
I spent a lot of time today futzing with Memoryless Distribution. I should be scared what this is doing to me, both in terms of opportunity costs and the possibility of practicing the wrong thing, but I need a better dayjob, and there is a pleasure in it. The pleasure is what should scare me: we are talking about rather lowly administrative tasks here, and I have a mandate to capitalize on my manifest potential. If I get caught up in a low-status job, who can say but that it will make me stupid? On the other hand, high-status jobs typically require college degrees, and there’s always the distinct possibility of getting your ass handed to you by people who are every bit as smart as you but don’t have such wide-ranging interests. Diary, I read today that you need to use Perl a few hours a week just to retain fluency! I’m not a serious hacker; I’m not elite developer material. I’m just an aspiring rationalist and aspiring novelist who needs a cleaner and richer source of cash. And I work on such incomplete information: does a cognitively intense dayjob drain your finite cache of mental energy, or does the stimulation just leave you stronger to endeavor on your lifework?
Diary, there’s so much! So many books and so much math, so many blogposts I need to write for Less Wrong! What do I have to do tomorrow to make up for the spare moments that I failed to optimize today? —ZMD
Oh, Diary, O thoughts on the passing scene? I should take it seriously when Memoryless Distribution seems to fail the occasional POST. We expect hardware to be more reliable than that; what have I done wrong? I waited too long to email Prof. Aptheker; I was up late last night procrastinating before writing the simplest email—which I got a response to by morning, though I delayed before actually reading it. Yes, she has office hours at fourteen tomorrow, and I can come. Oh, Diary, I am so ignorant of this world; I really don’t know how special I am or am not, or what I should do, but it’s important that I talk to Bettina Aptheker. When I gave Susan a ride home the other night, she said that I was one of the most intelligent people she’s met. (She might have said the most intelligent, full stop.) Today, prompted by the discrete maths book, I drew a series of gates that ought to add two three-digit binary numbers, and I got some software to those ludicrous taxes. My dayjob is boring. I typically wear a low ponytail, but Barry Deutsch was right: a high ponytail looks femme.
I’ll let you know what happens. —ZMD
Diary, I remember why I left the University: it’s a terrible study environment! I would not be altogether surprised if I got more studying done during the time of my visit than Luke and Sean combined. Should I be surprised at the senseless crap my friends spend their time on?—but surely I’m exaggerating the problem. I should remember that this is one of the points where my self-image doesn’t line up with what this poor instantiation actually is—however finely I may sing of science, my sister is the one who spends sixty hours a week in the lab. Still, I seem to have a rare attitude, a sense of sacredness and purpose (however muted, however repeatedly violated) that I’m not used to seeing in the people around me—though this could only be my blindness. Still, you should have seen me before the computer books in the shop we toured in Santa Cruz, mine eyes shining with greed—and I don’t even like computers!
My visit to the Prof. Tantalo went very well. I got to show off my maths, and got some validation for what I’m doing. My visit to the Prof. Aptheker was of little significance, although I’m glad I tried. As I recall, she admitted that hormonal factors could play a role in male aggression, and said that if that were so, then we’d just have to deal with it—she did not seem offended by the possibility at all. Despite this, I think she has no conception of the world I live in. When I tried to explain Lewontin’s fallacy (cf. 281), she said that her training was not in the sciences, and that she was the wrong person to talk to. When I said that there was only one reality, she actually disagreed—and brought up quantum mechanics. She said that if I was really interested in these issues, then I should take classes.
Before returning home from my trip, I hit the University at Berkeley on a book run.
Diary, how can people stand to play games? I suppose some would ask how I can stand to read fiction—but on that note, I don’t read nearly as much fiction as I once did, and I tend to prefer idea-laden fiction that bears on reality, not escapist fluff. Speaking of fiction—before my trip, I checked out The Left Hand of Darkness on tape for the ride. (Historically, I’ve been stupid with respect to long car trips, and was glad to correct the error this time.) In the night after my book run but before finding my way home, I heard the section about Gethenian sexuality—Diary, it was beautiful! Diary, it was right!
The night I crashed in Santa Cruz, the fifteenth, I was allowed to check Less Wrong from Richard’s computer. Yudkowsky had written a post called “Of Gender and Rationality,” discussing the paucity of females among self-identified rationalists. The next day he had a post titled “My Way,” about the styles of individual rationalists, with more discussion of gender. I spent a great deal of my time on the seventeenth preoccupied with this post. In the comments, Yudkowsky wrote that he had never known a male with a true female side, nor a female with a true male side. Restraining myself from inserting a snark about true Scotsmen, I asked him to taboo these, and he posted a reply. Yudkowsky wishes that some women would appreciate the complexities of masculinity. I said(echoing his language to the small extent that I could) that I wished some men would appreciate “that not all men are like them—or at least, that not all men want to be like them—that the fact of masculinity is not necessarily something to integrate.” (These last five words were a link to “Which Parts Are ‘Me’?”) This garnered a “Duly appreciated,” from Yudkowsky, which made me feel better. I had called Josh that day—there is always some measure of distress when your intellectual idol shits all over your something to protect, even if it’s not the first time—but the fitting end to the exchange left me with the strength to carry on.
I had almost left another comment in the thread earlier, but I was foiled by a flagging connection. Unsure of my tack or tact, I count myself happy at this.
Today I visited Sam Goldhaber at his apartment. We talked, and had lunch and coffee. Then I took library day at Orinda, and got some math done.
I’ve burned through The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet. I have so many conflicting priorities—it’s hard to sort things out. I want to reduce my need for status; I want to be motivated nearly entirely by concerns of truth and beauty (with money and such emerging only as conditional subgoals). How will I then avoid collapsing into solipsism?—but I suspect it’s a silly question. There are social phenomena outside of markets and fanclubs. I want intense high-bandwidth relationships with smart people!—you don’t need to be a bigshot to have those. You just have to be interesting. —ZMD
I didn’t tell you—I spend a lot of time lately feeling like Dagny Taggart, cognitively and emotionally disabled, dropped into an alien body in a parallel universe.
Diary, I might have clocked someone today. One of my customers had a strange appearance, and I wondered if she was trans. I addressed her as “ma’am” (which I never do), and shortly thereafter she asked if we had a tip jar—it is tempting to speculate causality, but perhaps I shouldn’t.
Suppose I was right. How could I know? I say her appearance was “strange,” without being able to say exactly in what way. It’s an applied Lewontin’s fallacy: no matter how many little things you explicitly try to correct for, you are betrayed by the long tail of other little things that you couldn’t correct for. You can wiggle around in the configuration space, but actually getting somewhere is difficult in so many dimensions (cf. 281).
I was accosted in the library by that Georgian man, who went on for a while—his English is poor, but perhaps not as poor as my ability to understand nonnative English speakers. He said I was good, that I was a friend. He took my hand multiple times; he bought my hand to his face; he offered me a cigar (which I managed to decline). I was reminded of how hard it is to even begin to understand people. —ZMD
Yesterday I took the checker pretest—apparently Jamy was fired for some malfeasance, and James wants me to check. Alright—though I should worry; I’ve worked in the supermarket too long and I’m getting bored. Even if I don’t care about status or money except insofar as I can buy time with them—I should think about the time I could buy. I burned through the remainder of the book on software testing that I had checked out the previous day. I managed to relinquish some of my confusion about the composition of binary relations, by means of comparison to the composition of linear transformations (which you should know that I know all about) and by temporarily inventing my own notation (which somehow seemed to help). After my dayjob, I was tired (this may have scared me—quite properly so), and the only thing of note I did was listen to some more Le Guin.
I slept too late this morning and masturbated—O shameful! Perhaps frustrated at my continual ineptitude, I banged out a blogpost and posted it on Less Wrong. It might do me good to pick up the skill of packaging words and shoving them out the door: at least that constitutes doing something. I relinquished some more confusion about the composition of relations.
Mother and Father are out of town, and I don’t have to go to my dayjob tomorrow. I plan on taking the opportunity to crossdress. After my dayjob today, I bought underwear, artificial nails, medical tape, and the most beautiful pair of black pantyhose. I don’t even like crossdressing that much, given that I don’t pass—but it is a certain kind of fun, and it is not often that I have the house to myself all day. I seem to remember that once I decided to try to think of myself as female for a booth shift on my dayjob, but I could not remember to do so. After all, it’s not as if I think of myself as male all day: my lack of an explicit gender identity is what started all this glorious trouble. Well, tomorrow I can try it. I’ll make sure to get some studying done en femme (I do not study enough; I can never study enough). I haven’t checked the blog since before I left for my dayjob today; my post was not promoted and only had a few comments. I don’t think I’ll check again until I’ve had at least a few hours en femme; that community has already ruined one too many crossdressing experiences for me (cf. 265). —ZMD
ADDENDUM— You will again recall that it is acceptable to edit without bracketing entry titles, numbers, and dates. —ZMD
I didn’t get a lot of studying done en femme. Bored of my purple dress, I tried on a lot of Nicole’s old clothes, my favorites being a white dress and a lavender sweater with beads and some things that I probably shouldn’t call sequins—costume jewels, then? I loved the false nails. So I played dress-up, and I took some photographs, and I used that online face transformer (cf. 235) and the GIMP on one of the photos. I did some reading; I listened to a tiny bit of Fiona Apple; I sent three messages to Josh. I took a nap: I think I was hoping that my form would come as a glorious surprise when I woke up, but alas, I just woke up as after any nap. My form, after all, was the same as it always is: what is a little scraping and adornment supposed to do? However feeble an illusion it must have been, it was the most comfortable illusion, to be en femme while reading! As I wrote to Josh in my final missive: there is this trope about the transvestite in love with his image in the mirror, but I’m not so sure it’s true. The mirror ruins everything, because you can see your face in the mirror, and my face is wrong. But before my nap—to read—and looking down, see my nails, and my clothes, and my chest, and my necklace, and my hair—it was splendid.
Not long after my nap I succumbed to the temptation to masturbate, and that was that: cleanup time. I lost a nail down the drain, which I am hoping does not come back to haunt me. Although—somehow I don’t think I told you—or I told you during the time of your injury (cf. 255)—I think my parents know about my occasional crossdressing. Mother cleaned my room once, I think while I was in hospital in early 2008—and as I recall, she did the closet as well, which contained my bra inserts in plain sight. Later, Josh reported to me that at a gathering, my Mother had proclaimed that she was pretty sure I wasn’t a “homo.” Yeah. And I recall that Father knows I’ve shaved my legs—but enough, you understand; I shan’t thrash about trying to summon all the evidential memories.
I’ve lazed about enough today. I did some reading en femme, but I want to do more reading, and I want to do math, and I want to catch up with Less Wrong. Diary, how I hunger to take my autodidacticism to the next level!—there is so much of which I am so terribly ignorant, and I know my methodology is sorely lacking, though I’m less sure of exactly how, and how to correct it. Right now, my superiors are at universities, working on technologies that may one day let me have more than such cheap illusions that I indulged in today. As much as I hate school—really, seriously hate it—I need to acknowledge what kind of world I’m in, how small and useless I am. Oh, Diary, I am full of sin, and you with me. Never forget that. —ZMD
ADDENDUM— I don’t think the commenters understood my post, and I don’t think I understand their comments. Why is it so difficult for humans to communicate, or even accomplish anything? And yet somehow we build these machines—it is beyond me—I’m not smart enough. I do not get an aura of formidability off Father, and yet he makes six figures. And myself? —ZMD
More anxieties about school yesterday and today, perhaps prompted by conversation with Seanan. I feel incredibly stupid and ignorant. Okay, so a lot of students at the University just get good at bullshitting, but some of them are really doing important work. What have I done?—I’ve read a lot of books?—but I haven’t read enough books, and I haven’t read all the right books, and I haven’t done enough math, and there is just ever so much of which I am utterly ignorant. I take a certain pride in my burgeoning rationality—at least I know I’m flawed and want to do better, at least I have a concept of meaningful self-directed action, a concept of optimization—whereas I think so many of the others around me aren’t even trying to optimize anything; they just stumble through life doing what they do. Thus arise the insanities of our current world: poverty, drug addiction, bottled water sold by the case in an area with high quality tap, smart people working in supermarkets. I care, I want to do better. If I am surprised by how little this buys me, I should notice this, and figure out what I’m doing wrong. Rationalists should win: basking in my own self-perceived superiority is not an acceptable outcome, for those who are truly superior do not bask.
Although superior is entirely the wrong word: I don’t want to get lost in some sort of signaling game, doing all sorts of worthless crap just to pad my CV. I don’t want to care about being better or worse than others; I just want to be good; I want to understand things. It’s fairly clear that my true goal system must incorporate some strong element of this; I just need to figure out how to do this without collapsing into solipsism. Competitive or extroverted people are inextricably engaged with society in a way that I am not, which leaves me with philosophical problems that would never occur to them. I want to do good work, but I can’t let my sense of good work be predicated on the approval of others: that would mean being selfless in the Randian sense, an absolute abomination. In a world of nearly seven billions, none of us can depend on being cherished for our unique brilliance. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem right to be completely and utterly indifferent to being ignored: to see no relevant difference between singing in the shower and a five city lecture circuit. The problem really isn’t that hard to solve, though, and I shouldn’t waste too much time thinking about it. The solution is to enforce symmetry: we can recognize the skill of professionals without giving them ontologically privileged status. It is a distortion, I think, to reify writing, and to suppose that some people are writers and ordinary people are not-writers. Writing is an act of communication. If you can call up your friend to chat without lusting to be worshiped, then you should be able to write a great novel in a similar spirit. Seriously, Diary! This is how you can shun status-seeking without collapsing into solipsism: replace your need for status with a need for high-bandwidth personal relationships with smart people. The internet is already bringing us closer to this sort of world; I just want to renormalize my intuitions—even though I’ve been saying this sort of thing for years (cf. 1). I think that in a just world, everyone would have the time and power to write at least one great novel. This egalitarianism is near the center of John Holt’s objections to schooling, as well as mine. Art and science and literature and philosophy and math are not the exclusive property of specialists who have the right to tell everybody else what to do. Exploration of these matters should be recognized as your birthright as a general intelligence, not some onerous burden imposed from above.
I feel much better now, Diary, having written this—maybe very recent developments on Less Wrong have helped, too. Somehow things don’t seem scary or difficult anymore—although of course this is only a mood that will pass. Insofar as I am selfish, I can study and write. Insofar as I am altruistic, I can contribute to SIAI. Learning to make money emerges automatically as a subgoal. If I’m a terrible excuse for a human being, I can only try to do better—and when I say this now, I do so calmly and completely—it’s something I really believe, not something I’m trying to convince myself of. I want to be a better writer, and I want to know more math, and I should shut up and learn to code. I can do these things. If I’m confused about my skills or my history, it’s not a special question: I can just try to figure it out like I would any other factual question. If I don’t know how to package my value, how to put together a resume, I can try to figure that out. I don’t have to let it consume me: I can just say that making money is a useful skill, and that packaging would help with this.
Diary, it’s so strange. I was so distraught earlier, and now it seems like getting my shit together won’t be so hard at all. How can I account for these storms? I wish I were smarter, but I should remember what perhaps I should have screamed at Sam: don’t wish! Don’t ever wish! Study! —ZMD
Diary, O tiers upon tiers! Things could get ever so much worse than you would imagine; things could get ever so much better. Right now, things are getting better. I have done quite a lot of mathy stuff today and yesterday: I have worked with relations; I worked out that the probability of a disjunction of n events each with independent probability p is equal to the sum from i=1 to n of (-1)i+1pi times n-choose-i. Today I wrote a Python script to calculate this—I had done the same on my calculator yesterday, but apparently the device is not powerful enough for my purposes, it having suffered an overflow when I called the function with n=400. A graph confirms that the proposed formula has the expected property of starting out with roughly linear growth, but then slowing thereafter, but I could still have easily made a mistake. With no so-called teacher to run me around, how can I know if I did it right? I could write another program implementing this scenario using a standard pseudorandom number generator, and see if it gives similar results. I started on this today: I drew a flowchart, and I tapped out a few lines of code before quickly hitting a dead end: my programming domain knowledge is very weak.
And Diary, I don’t even like math or computers! Really, you must believe me!
Yudkowsky is to turn his attention away from blogging; SIAI has announced a call for summer interns. I should call Anna soon, see what’s going on, talk to her, maybe see where I fit in?—oh, Diary, intellectual endeavor is the the core of my life! Who could say but that I could go back to school, if this healing continues? I don’t think I mean this seriously: I still don’t like school, and for my usual stated reasons, and I don’t want to go back. But—should this healing continue, I might at least relinquish my bitterness.
Apparently I’ve just received an email from Michael Vassar; he wants to know how I’ve been doing. Diary, may I still confess my shock and confusion that these brilliant, important people think I’m worth hanging out with? I have not achieved mastery of any particular technical field; I don’t have a college degree; I’m not willing to pledge my life for the Singularity—I’m just some stupid guy with around ninety-eighth percentile intelligence who happens to have read all the prerequisites. It’s a big country; why waste time with retarded old me?
Do you think I could even write tonight? My word, Diary. My fucking word. —ZMD
ADDENDUM—“Binary Relations”— I should remember that the source of this recent sense of peace (and accompanying productivity, at least on a relative scale) came after I truly accepted in my heart that Kohnian anticompetitive ideal. So while it’s alright to be surprised that these beautiful people think I’m worth having around, it need not effect me emotionally. I can just accept their respect as data, and—fall into place. If, one day, a horde of supergeniuses we don’t know come and beat down the door of 874 San Juan Drive, demanding to participate in the great FAI project—that would be great, and if it meant that I would never see Anna again before the Singularity, then I should cry with happiness at the slightly greater odds that there would be an after-the-Singularity to wake up to. I really want to internalize this worldview, Diary; it makes so much sense, it seems so right. If I could just resolve this psychological runaround about status and credentials, then a great burden would be lifted from me. I could at long last devote myself fully towards learning all sorts of interesting and important things. And if others should also be learning all sorts of interesting and important things, I should be happy for them. Life is not that kind of vicious contest. And if others should be doing better than I am, this should have no bearing on my actions, because I should already be trying to do the best I possibly could.
It’s not as if I will lack of other burdens: how should I spend my time? How will I make money? How can I make sense of my past and bring order to my future? I don’t want to leave scraps of my self lying around willy-nilly. I want to know what I’m doing, to bring order to this tangle of words. It’s better to keep notebooks, to have a system, than to scribble on random scraps of paper. The system of school is unbearable: to be torn apart trying to cope with the demands of a dozen different teachers. But (as I have told you) this doesn’t mean I’m doing things right, and I should fear losing momentum by stalling, wondering what the right thing to do is. I must not allow anything to be withheld from my force of inquiry: I should not be deterred from writing code that I don’t plan to keep. If I have some grand experience that I didn’t document, but that I want to remember—I can tell you. And if that doesn’t fit on a resume—oh, hell, I should just take Razib’s advice and learn to code. It was pleasurable, today. “Bricklaying for not-stupid people.” Employers have no reason to care about your exquisite wide-ranging general education. It’s not clear whether I should be grateful for this or not. My word. —ZMD
SECOND ADDENDUM—“Reflexivity”— I talked with Anna on the telephone. I find it difficult to describe how such conversations sometimes make me feel. Scared? Alive? Brutal honesty is such a rare and valuable thing. Perhaps, somewhere out there, there is someone who sincerely believes that deception gives life flavor—probably there are many. I think that actually communicating is difficult enough even when everyone is trying to be straightforward. While trying to describe the change that came over me that past few days, I mentioned that I felt a pleasure in coding today, and I speculated about me actually learning to make money. Anna said it would be great if I could make a successful startup. I was surprised; I hadn’t even been thinking about a startup. She pointed out that that’s how you increase your mean income, by accepting greater variance. I guess this just isn’t the sort of thing I’m used to hearing. My coworkers at Safeway are motivated to get more hours. What would Stacy think, to find herself friends with someone who oh-so-casually recommends starting your own software company?
Diary, if you’ve ever wondered whether it’s better to be a big fish in a small pond, or a small fish in a big pond, I know now. Unambiguously take the latter. Large people are fun to be around. Even if you’re shit compared to them, just being graced with their presence drags you upward. Not necessarily in competition, either—I’m trying to get away from that—but just grace. Whereas the sort of people who are pleased to get more hours at Safeway—they are not bad people. They are good people, hard-working people: nor should I be permitted to think myself superior. Even after all my experience, I do not emit an aura of bookkeeping awesomeness. Still—I don’t want to be around these people too long. I may be part of the team at Safeway #1701, but I should be wary of letting myself feel like one of the team, because I know there is another world out there. And I should be scared that I’m pissing my life away. If you spend too much time doing a stupid [ ] job, it makes you stupid—so I fear. Even if work is not at the center of my life, and will never be at the center of my life, I might do well to be more ambitious. I don’t seem to typically run into a cognitive energy limit at the end of my days: I run into a time limit. If I’m going to have to work some dayjob anyway, maybe I should want something demanding, to keep me fit, to make me stronger. I should want to exercise my comparative advantage: I’m not any better at baristaing than any random schmuck, and I suspect the booth isn’t very g-loaded, either. Even the tech study I’ve done, is so far below my intellectual endeavors, so far below your level—so I built a PC. What crap is this? I could be underconfident. I should think of ordering, too: isn’t it better to plunge into the deep technical stuff?—if you have to settle for less job-wise, then at least you learned some things. Whereas if you settle immediately (continually muttering to yourself that one of these days you’ll start writing fiction again), you could just get stuck.
Is this a masculine attitude I’m taking?—scorning the easy and safe for the bright, swashbuckling adventure? But I do it in the service of my great beauty; the forces that brought me to this juncture are—can I say Bayesian?—by which I mean inhuman.
I do have a lot of things going for me, Diary. Once again, at least I have this notion of optimization, of seeking the best, if tautologically then also at least with intent. If I face disadvantages in lacking a college degree, there are also advantages: the freedom to study what I want, the greater amount of money that will be passed to me, my not being tied down to a major. While some of my friends spend their time at University playing games, I have my autodidactic fury, which I must nurture.
As long as I’m breaking away: why not try eating more fruit? How much utility do I really get from the crap I stuff myself with? —ZMD
I worked as a checker yesterday. My feelings fluctuated: at times I could not stand this miserable drudgery; other times, I got in the flow of it and it was—not that miserable. I drove to Davis to see Josh and Alyssa. I got lost and ended up smashing my back bumper—that rock was so unfortunately placed!
In conversation I waxed elitist—if that’s the right word. if I’m an elitist, it’s a very egalitarian sort of elitism: I want to use the absolute scale more often; I want to see greatness all around me. I don’t want to optimize the hell out of spare moments in order to triumph over the masses; I want to see the masses optimize their spare moments as well. I said that I was starting to get to the point where all this obsessing about rationality actually begins to yield practical benefits. Could that really be true?—but I have changed. I am more serious than I used to be; this world seems darker, but there are spots of brightness more precious than I knew. Is all this actually helping me win? Is it ironic that I’ve spoken so much about the optimization of spare moments, when even today I’ve spent such-and-such a time on the internet? But consider the guy at the bar last night: the psych major who thinks that psych is bullshit, who said that the market for programming jobs has dried up, and who spoke of something like wasting a year of his life on a bike shop in Europe—Diary, I think he used the word waste. Don’t I have something very precious that the people in that bar don’t? How can people bear it? This is such an ugly world, so full of schools; yet this is a beautiful world, my primary angst being that I am too small to appreciate our depth of riches. Current rate no Singularity, I will never have the chance spend a decade as a black woman in the great McHenry library. Enough. —ZMD
ADDENDUM— It’s so terribly late in the day! All that bluster about my lack of spare moments —mere words, Diary! (Please don’t be offended.) Somehow I don’t think I should be torn apart by guilt right now. I should simply notice that I’m being stupid, and then stop that. This is currently the project of my life: putting it all together, internalizing good practices, so I don’t have to rely on an authority to force me to be good. It’s such a ridiculously difficult project, but it must be accomplished if I want any hope of really doing what I want. I told Alyssa (I think I mentioned it again later when Josh was present) that one of the dilemmas we all face in this hyperspecialized society is to decide what skills to internalize and what skills to offload onto the environment. If you offload your soul onto the environment, you might still achieve wealth, or fame, or true happiness, but I don’t thin k you’ll get true knowledge of ultimate gender.
I should not be pleased with this ape; anyone with a little imagination can think themselves privy to some special truth. Maybe everyone with a little imagination really is. But it’s not enough, nothing natural is ever enough. —ZMD
I feel better today; I’m doing a fairly good job of optimizing, nor is the day yet over. I got “ma’am”ed over the telephone at my dayjob, which pleased me more than I can say. Reading from Programming Python (which arrived in the post recently) makes me feel stupid. O terrible my terrible ignorance! O terrible my wasted youth!—but I exit this time of sinfulness bearing treasures: a superior epistemology, a concept of serious self-directed study. And I exit. Despite my lapse last night, I might really have been right about this rationality obsession paying off: I might be calmer now; I can notice what kinds of problems I have and actively seek out information to help solve these problems. I need to, ah, “get my love together.” I’ve read a lot of books, but how do I explain?—and I have not read enough textbooks, although this second problem is easily enough fixed. I might justifiably disdain the signaling and status games we get ourselves into, but marketing is not entirely without its just purposes. If I have learned all sorts of interesting and important things, then I should be able to explain. William B Swift’s blog reminded me again.
I tire of my crappy dayjob. If it doesn’t pay well, and I’m not learning much, then why do I stay? Well, I’m learning to be a checker—big deal. I’m happy to learn about the ways and doings of the world, but produce PLUs?—are not high on my list. Still, if I’m going to be around for at least a few more months, I should learn them well, and hope the experience doesn’t change me too much. I’m scheduled for thirty-seven hours next week. My word. Do James et al. know about the other kinds of people out there? Of course they know in the abstract (or is even this too much a projection?) but it’s another thing to have seen the details, to know for a fact how broken you are. O beautiful details! Diary, my position is recoverable. And for the recovery I must work. —ZMD
ADDENDUM— Diary, I should be scared. If I let my life be taken over by math and programming, then how am I ever going to discover true knowledge of ultimate gender? I’ve started reading She’s Such a Geek!, an anthology that I’ve wanted to get to for a while. Should you be impressed by how much studying I’ve gotten done on this day during which I’ve worked a full day?—except it is not enough, as you know very well by now. I only accessed the internet today at the library during my lunch. This worked out really well. I should notice. —ZMD
Tiers upon tiers. I’ve been known to sing along to the Safeway audio loop. Daniel said he’d like to see me in a church choir; I said I was an atheist; he didn’t know what the term meant. At lunch, I worked from the discrete maths book. Andy, a fat man who works in the deli, was complaining that he would probably have to work tomorrow, even though he’s supposed to have Sundays off for church. I saw him playing a Scrabble-type game on his cell phone.
It was a busy day, full as usual with obsessions about rationality and optimization. I’ve burned through the remainder of She’s Such a Geek! I think it triggered more status anxiety, contrary to the theme I’ve been pushing lately, which I thought I had come so close to fully integrating. Diary, it really is more fun to hang out with Anna et al. and feel superior, than it is to hang out with my coworkers and feel inferior. After a positive Singularity, you have fun-theoretic reasons for taking it slow, but in this horrible world, I have a mandate to maximize beauty right now. And I will underscore the point several times more (!), in the hopes that consistency pressures will help this ape really believe it deep down. (If the reader should insist that this should make the record rather repetitive, I’m just going to ask where the hell she has been all this time.) I am happy at the achievements of others. Not “happy” out of some half-accepted duty, because I don’t run on duty anymore, else surely I would die. Genuinely happy, because human intelligence is beautiful. To the extent that you want to triumph over others, you want to do good work, and you want other people to do bad work. To the extent that you actually love achievement itself, you want to do good work, and you want other people to do good work too. You’re beautiful, Diary—you are but ever so beautiful. Shouldn’t everyone keep so beautiful a Diary?—it is not as if we should thus fear stepping on each other’s toes. Everyone already has her own unique story; I’m only talking about better documentation. It would be nice to know what other people are like.
(I continue to smother you with the point, for my strength.) Was I happy? Did my masculine ego feel superior to learn that that fat bastard Andy is wasting a seventh of his life, and doesn’t even know? No, it does not make me happy. He at least deserves to know.
So, I’m doing better: my life is better in ways I never would have guessed. I was a terrible, terrible reporter for The Page. If I were to go back, now, and do it over again—I think I could do a better job. I’m less scared now. But I’m still shit; I am still perceptibly so many dozens of levels below where I need to be if I actually want to get things right. I should remember that I’m not special, Diary. There are lots of smart people out there, Diary, all with their own passions and secrets. Dare I place myself above them in any absolute sense?—no; some of them actually write.
This has all been such a great tear down, Eliezer Yudkowsky and my purity born of pain. I am building a new method. I’ve learned a lot about how to think; I’ve learned some math; I’ve learned that I can learn math. Resolving these status issues is another piece of the puzzle. Michael Vassar argues that rationalists should learn to lie, so that what you can’t say doesn’t warp your own thoughts about what is true. I recall that in a comment, Anna extended this argument: it’s not just about lying per se; it’s about all non-truth-tracking pressures on speech. This might be a valuable skill for me to learn. My soul does not fit any perch in this society. I can’t be an academic, because I hate school, but I can’t be anything but an academic, because I love knowledge. There’s a certain extent to which I can be myself at work, but this is fairly limited. People know I’m smart, but they don’t know what smart means. Treating a dollar like a gun here becomes an important survival skill: I don’t want this stupid dayjob to rub off on my personality. No doubt this is true of many creative people, but most creative people are not rationalists, and don’t have this notion of perfectionism that I do. It’s not just that I don’t want this dayjob to rub off on myself; it’s also that I don’t want myself to rub off on my Self. I want to be rational, intelligent, graceful, widely-read, and androgynous—but this ape is none of these things. There are all sorts of social pressures towards mediocrity that you don’t want to let yourself be shaped by.
I’ve looked up to Tracy as a mentor, and a sort of hero. Maybe her domain knowledge at this one job set off a standard halo effect, making her seem to me to be greater than she is. (Short hair also helps.) But while I should strive to do the best job I can, I should not be looking up to Tracy. Tracy is not special. She’s just some woman with a service job. She’s nice, and competent at what she does, and she has short hair. But if I look up to her, then I put myself below her, then I peg my self-identity as below a full Safeway bookkeeper: not an acceptable outcome. Or is that too simplistic? Can’t I look up to her in some respects, but not in others?—except for the halo effect. Better, I think, to keep a good, strong logical positivist ethic: to look directly at the data without obscuring it with meaningless labels like better or worse. On the other hand, I don’t want to go too far down this road, and accidentally define myself out of existence. I want to accept that this world is terrible, and then go act to fix it. I don’t want to accept that it’s terrible only to contend therefore that it doesn’t matter anyway. I do want to look up to Anna.
This problem of dayjob and lifework is simply a problem, like a math problem. I strongly suspect a solution exists. I just have to find it. —ZMD
Waking up this morning after a deep sleep (I had been exhausted), I feel stupid. Yesterday—before the anthology brought me down, I guess—I felt confident. I thought that relatively soon I would get my ears pierced and make my next job move. Now I just feel retarded. Surely my actual abilities and traits haven’t changed that much over less than twenty-four hours. So how do I filter out the feelings, and look directly at the facts? Taboo all the labels, all the awards and poor grades and status games: what do I actually know? What do I not know? What do I want to know? What should I change in order to get more knowledge?
Why doesn’t it count?! What do they want from me?! But there is no answer. The really isn’t any such thing as society. I don’t mean this as libertarian propaganda, they way it is so often said. I mean it as a simple fact. I feel emotions that we might term social pressures, but there’s no unified entity that I can go to to negotiate better terms for myself. Did I get into fits like this over gender, once?—I wish I had a better memory. Now I can read all sorts of generalizations about women and men without being horrified or enraged. It’s as if now I can really accept that they’re not talking about me. So why can’t I do the same thing about school? They’re never talking about me; I’m a four-sigma event. —ZMD
ADDENDUM—“Enforced Symmetry”— I was a complete emotional wreck at my dayjob today; it was terrible. Shortly after coming home, I called Anna. I feel better now, after having talked with her. She invited me to come over again. Is it that it’s nice to be validated? Most of today, I was a confused and terrified ape. Now I can think again; I’m a person again. I still face the problem of what I’m going to do for money, as well as exactly what I’m going to do. But now I feel I can face it as an optimization problem, rather than some blind terror. Oh, Diary, what separate worlds there are! The mainstream would have you believe that people without degrees are utterly doomed; Anna doesn’t think it’s important. What’s the difference between me and your typical dropout? Psychometric g, I’m sure, but something else, too? Even being selfish is ever so difficult. Anna says that Eliezer once had to deal with not being able to deal with high school—that it’s possible to have successes that overshadow past failures.
I can’t expect the world to cater to me just because I’m smart. That’s a school mentality: that intelligence is this thing that gets you points and positions. Our crowd teaches that you use intelligence to do things. If I’m so smart, I’ll figure out what I want, and I’ll figure out how to get it. —ZMD
On the fifth, sometime during my eight hours of service, I realized that I need to quit my current dayjob soon. I’ve grown a lot at the supermarket; it’s definitely been a worthwhile experience. It’s just that with the burgeoning of my newfound rationalist superpowers (my temporary lapse of personhood Sunday being understood as a grotesque anomaly), it just seems like a major timesink. What am I learning? Even if I get another stupid job doing stupid crap, at least it will be different stupid crap. Alternatively, I am sure there is no shortage of open source projects eager for volunteers, however inexperienced (cf. 315). I can see myself arguing the case to Father: there was a time when I ought not have been trusted to stay in the house all day and actually do work—but I’ve changed. Now, mathematics is just more appealing than online clips from last night’s Daily Show. I have a seriousness about me that the boy at University could not have have anticipated or understood, however much he might have aspired to it, in the days before Eliezer Yudkowsky and my purity born of pain[.]
I started listening to Great Expectations on tape on the trip down to visit my creepy Singularitarian friends. It’s so wonderful to be friends with such large people; I will endeavor to tell you tomorrow. —ZMD
It turns out that there’s a much simpler expression for the probability of the disjunction of n independent events each with probability p; Steve pointed me in the right direction. I had brought along a copy of my abandoned ms. of “The Greater Glory of Our Humble Academy.” Anna read it, and was surprised: she said that the quality was uneven (which I knew), but that it held her attention and was better than many published stories. She said that reading it was a probability-distribution-widening event—the distribution being about my abilities. She said she now understands why I might want to write fiction: before she didn’t take me as seriously; she thought this notion of a grand novel (which I still haven’t explained) was just some idea I had gotten stuck on. The expression of her respect just might be the [event] that will have actually gotten me to write again.
Anna met with John Maxwell IV; I helped draft an email inviting Leda Cosmides to speak at this year’s Summit; I did math; I slow-burned through Radical Honesty and read from Darwin’s Dangerous Idea; Anna and I talked and talked and talked, about extrapolated volition, about ourselves, about status, about many ideas.
The Elements of Computing Systems arrived in the post today. I think Father hurt my feelings: not his fault at all; I just have a hair trigger. We’ve since talked. I think I felt the same thing I felt on Sunday: that fear and inadequacy about school. But Anna thinks I’m cool; Anna doesn’t think it’s important—would it be altogether unBayesian if I take this as emotional reassurance, as well as mere evidence about certain relevant properties of this ape? I have such a needle to thread: I don’t want to shy away from doing things because I feel unworthy, but I don’t want to develop a sense of entitlement, either. I don’t want my goal system to be contaminated by what I have to do to get along in the world, but I can’t lie. —ZMD
ADDENDUM—“Race Conditions”— I added a little bit to “Greater Glory.” I am again feeling that visceral sense of the ridiculously high standards needed to accomplish anything. How can I bear the way I squander my time?—except I don’t squander my time, at least not nearly as badly as I used to. I once wrote a blogpost for Less Wrong quoting research about how we pay too much attention to small savings: five dollars off a cheap calculator seems more significant than five dollars off an expensive jacket, even though it’s the same five dollars. I suggested that the problem could be averted by using the heuristic of converting money to time. But suppose we have the same problem with time: we (some of us) obsess about the value of spare moments, while letting some stupid dayjob suck up thirty hours a week. I care so much; aren’t I thus assured to make a living? Father is not obsessive; he does not have this notion of optimization, and yet he makes six figures. I’ve mentioned this before, but I think it bears mentioning. I say that I care, but do I really care, or how much does mere caring get stuff done?—my carry-forward was shamefully late today. It’s so hard to tell what other people are like, what my competition is—much as I disdain competition when the true wealth of knowledge can be multiplied endlessly without exhaustion. Tiers upon tiers upon tiers: my life is so much better than it used to be, and so much worse than it needs to be. But where did my time go after work today?—shouldn’t I know, shouldn’t I be more sure? The time tracking method I tried with that blue notebook didn’t take. I thought of a variant that might; why didn’t I try it out immediately? I mean, try it out immediately as a matter of sheerest selfishness; don’t tell me about discipline. I love to think; I need time to think; I love to read and write and do math. Why didn’t I stay in the library today; why did I check out the Learning Python book (again; even though I own the seems-like-a-sequel Programming Python, I think I need some more of the gentle version) and leave? I nearly always end up enjoying my library time; why can’t I remember this?
But at least I’m noticing this madness. I can experiment with the blue notebook tomorrow, without feeling at all strange about the discontinuity. I am just making a correction to the behavior of this ape, that’s all. —ZMD
Father does not approve of my idea of quitting my dayjob in order to acquire more study time. So: that’s that. I had been dreaming of taking things to the next level: of having the complete experience, full days packed with as much information uptake as I could handle. Maybe that’s fantasy. I’m just going to have to learn to be ridiculously efficient. I’ve failed miserably so far today—although it remains early in the day. On the other hand, this very notion of commenting on how early in the day it is seems like a wrong move. Sunk costs shouldn’t play into your decision theory; you can only do the best thing now.
Last night I sent emails to Nicole and John Maxwell IV. I coded a rather trivial interactive Mother’s Day card in Python.
I should cry over all those summer vacations I wasted. Sure, I read a lot of books, but I didn’t have this notion of important serious intellectual lifework—I remain angry that this notion does not seem to exist in our culture. I should scream grand larceny: that our birthright to explore the universe occurs largely in chains.
Am I a laughable hypocrite? Yes, I know. But this is a problem. I must not surrender my vision: I want to know, don’t I? I’ve done terribly: I am ever so terrible. But I must continue onwards in the service of this ideal, that I should come to possess (insofar as a human can) a map that reflects the territory, and that it should be mine. I am stupid; I am lazy; I must be brought down.
And up, once more, with all my creepy Singularitarian friends. —ZMD
ADDENDUM—“Wind at My Back”— I was actually relatively good today. I’m still far from optimizing the hell out of every spare moment, but I did optimize quite a lot of moments. I made my frequent pilgrimage to the library at Orinda. I did a lot of math. The discrete maths book asks us to prove that the entries on the main diagonal of the square of the adjacency matrix of a graph represent the degrees of the corresponding vertices. At least, that’s what actually seems to be true; I don’t think the book was very clear in its notation. I wondered if this generalized in the obvious way to the square of the obvious analogue of the adjacency matrix for graphs with weighted edges. Well, it generalizes, but not in the obvious way: it turns out that the entries on the main diagonal of that matrix seem to be equal to the sum of the squares of the weights of the edges adjoining the corresponding vertices. I hope I said that right; perhaps I should be afraid of how much I get done by vaguest intuition rather than full apprehension of the deep structure. But O connections! If you ask whether we can recover the original weighted adjacency matrix from its square, you run headfirst into the problem I was puzzling over when I was visiting Josh and Alyssa in Davis, about how and whether the square root generalizes to matrices. I was never able to solve that one: it seemed to involve solving a system of equations that I could not solve, because it was far from literature. And O connections! For this business about the sum of the squares of the edge weights bears a striking resemblance, I thought, to that whole Lewontin’s fallacy intrigue (cf. 281) that I should be afraid was my last major insight into the gender intrigue. For the entry on the main diagonal of the squared weighted adjacency matrix scales as the square root of n, which is the letter I’m using for the number of edges adjoining the vertex in question. This I believe, Diary.
I started to puzzle together an algorithm to find the shortest path between two vertices in a graph—was the problem supposed to be as difficult as it is proving for me?
I ordered a text on evolutionary theory (the mathy version) from Amazon. Arguably this was stupid: it ran me fifty dollars, and the University library has a copy. But O my glory! I should be able to squeeze in some writing (not in my pink notebook, and not in you) tonight before I consign myself to madness and the void. Oh, how surely I can seriously write, now that I know Anna believes in me!—except that a rationalist does not believe in things in that sense. Tiers upon tiers upon tiers, levels stacked on levels. —ZMD
SECOND ADDENDUM—“Wind at My Heels”— Well, obviously I shouldn’t let myself feel that good about myself, if it’s just going to let this ape be so lazy. It seems like ages ago that I would watch clips of those popular humor news shows on my laptop: as a rule I no longer watch television. I’ve just made an exception for a Kristen Schaal clip from March that I had not seen. I do not think I told you that I emailed Caitlin today. If I’m stalling on “Greater Glory,” then obviously I should do scrapbooking for Preserved Under Symmetry—or listen to Dickens or something. Anything but this puttering about feeling smug. Oh, Diary, it’s so difficult to know what attitude to take, poised as I am between worlds: the supermarket on one day, AGI researchers on another. I don’t want to develop a sense of entitlement, nor do I want to develop the sort of improper humility that leads you away from trying your best. I don’t want to get so caught up in the question of where I stand, that refrain from moving. How smart am I?—but this one word, smart, throws away far too much information. Taboo it, and look directly at the data.
When Anna asked if I had any other hidden talents, I said that I didn’t know. If I were smarter, I would have immediately thought to mention my scraps of song. At another time, Anna suggested that those computer science majors that I was intimidated by couldn’t write fiction the way I could. But I don’t write fiction—I seem to only make notes—then how do I write so fluently to you? Levels upon tiers, tiers stacked on levels stacked on tiers. I’m actually going to go to bed anon, for which I trust you will rightly hate me, you will rightly despise this ape. —ZMD
Well, nothing like a crappy dayjob to remind me of the supreme value of time. Do you imagine I’ll be as tempted to masturbate tomorrow morning?
I’ve probably been writing you too often. It is more interesting to cover four special events than four days in temporal spread, and four days in temporal spread than four days in temporal conjunction. But today did have some interesting aspects. While I was studying math this morning, two women came to the door to proselytize for Christianity, and I did my best to educate them. I hope they learned something: I imagine it’s rare that they meet an atheist so intellectually formidable as I.
At my dayjob today I was embarrassed before lunch. I made an arithmetic error: that’s not so shameful. But then I wasn’t able to get an EBT transaction to process. The customer, a black woman, was frustrated. I apologized for my abject incompetence—that’s the phrase I used. I felt bad: I think of myself as intelligent, but then why couldn’t I remember or deduce this simple sequence of keys to get the transaction to go through? I know, that’s ridiculous: there may be such a thing as general intelligence, but it’s not so general that a single mistake throws everything else you’ve done into doubt. Trends are blippy; we do not throw eggs at the IPPC chair every time it snows.
I didn’t get any math done at lunch. Still stricken by my error, I took to musing in my pink Moleskine. Soon, [Andy, the fat man who works in the deli, was] complaining about how Tanya, the deli manager, had left without telling any of her fellow deli workers, leaving him in a stressful situation. Apparently Tanya did tell Jason. Maybe I was impelled to try to figure out how he thinks: I tried to engage him in conversation with some pedantic remark about the cognitive deficits we all have: how even generally competent people who try to do good work end up making egregious errors. Oh, how I wish I had a transcript! Andy said something about how he had called in one day to Steve, but Steve didn’t tell anyone, and I think Andy said that today’s incident with Tanya was because of that. I balked: yes, the incidents were similar, but I didn’t see how there could be any causal connection. I asked if he was suggesting some sort of conscious conspiracy on Jason’s part to keep him in the dark, as opposed to it just being a coincidence. Andy said something about ambiguity (he did not use the word ambiguity) in Jason’s tone, or of tone versus action. You see, Diary, from my poor recounting of this, how useful an transcript would be. I want to know: was Andy really suggesting a causal relation between two clearly unrelated events? What is his notion of causality like, anyway? The Overcoming Bias project has changed me so much (I think?—I hope?) that I hardly remember what I used to be like without it, and you yourself are of surprisingly little help on this front—what hope of I of understanding others, then?
But it’s not a matter of hope, anymore: if the probability be low, then let the utility be high enough to keep the expectation on my radar. I want to know. What are the differences between people, and what are the tiers? It’s one thing to deal with an epistemic peer, who may have alien desires and use a foreign notation, but a fellow mapmaker nonetheless. But I fear that so many of the people I deal with are somehow below this: I really don’t think they ask the type of questions I’m asking. And Anna seems to have an even lower opinion than I about the intellectual capabilities of ordinary people: it seems to be a continuing point of disagreement between us. (But we know that disagreement on factual questions is a problem; we know that the Aumann theorem forces convergence. What’s it like to not know that? Do I remember?) I know: too much navel-gazing on questions of intelligence. But it’s an important question.
Some might complain that it’s arrogant to believe that you understand many deep truths to which the masses about you are utterly blind. (To which one might do well to question what “arrogance” or the lack thereof has to do with the map that reflects the territory.) But I would say that weighty consideration of the hypothesis only strengthens proper humility: if I can see these obvious things that ordinary people are doing horribly-terribly wrong, then what things am I doing horribly-terribly wrong that I can’t see?
Another eight hours checking tomorrow—this dayjob is such a timesink! O terrible my wasted youth! I can’t let it get to me: I must not think of myself as a Safeway checker. Then what am I? Yours. —ZMD
More status anxiety today. An interminable day of checking. Supper at Burger King. Family drama to top it all off when I got home. Wikipedia was very helpful today. It dispelled my confusion about bipartite graphs. Also: I seem to remember that I once wondered if there was any interesting relationship between a graph and the eigencritters of its adjacency matrix. Today I learn from Wikipedia that this field of inquiry is known as spectral graph theory. At my lunch, I began what may become a great quest to independently discover some deep truths of spectral graph theory. Consider the eight simple graphs on three vertices. It turns out that the characteristic polynomial of the adjacency matrix of any of these graphs depends only on the number of edges. No doubt many fascinating results can be wrung out of this sort of inquiry—given time.
I would like to know if I’ve really been more efficient lately, or if it only seems that way because I’ve been doing more math and less reading, and math leaves a paper trail. I have some books from the University library due on the sixteenth, and I don’t think I’m likely to finish Transvestites and Transsexuals and Demonic Males by then.
I say to myself that I’m going to have to learn to be ridiculously efficient, but no one can be so efficient as to do all the things that I want to do. My entire life should be devoted to the gender intrigue—but I don’t think I could be a specialist if I tried. And my mathematical education is only beginning: math has an inhuman solidity to it. My word, how can people bear to play games when there is so much of which we are ignorant? Games are what’s left long after the Singularity when all the interesting lives have been lived and all the interesting stories have been told. I’m kind of starting to hate people: I mean, how much time we waste. We get caught up in all these sorts of adversarial status games that aren’t actually helping. I want to know everything; why won’t people just get out of my way? But I’ve been too whiny lately. Checking is not beneath me; if it were beneath me, I would be able to do it cheerfully and with a visible aura of formidability. This does not mean that I intend to stay. —ZMD
This has to end. All this doubt and pain about credentials has to stop—it’s too late now. Did I lament my wasted youth? Well, all this time spent in emotional torment is not optimal either. In another world, in which I were not in such pain, I would have already made some progress towards spectral graph theory this morning. But here—I’m still hurt. It’s so senseless. My decision is made; there’s no place for me in the academy. Even if the many-worlds interpretation is false and the stars are but a painted backdrop, we’re already living in a big world relative to Dunbar’s number. This world is full of smart people eager to make their mark on the world; do I expect to be able to successfully fight them for tenure? Can I expect to be worshiped for my unique brilliance?—no. I must only seek what knowledge and relationships I can as an autodidact; the other way is closed.
This is such a terrible world. We are damned to die so terribly ignorant. I don’t want to exactly say I resent having to make choices, but it does seem like a pity that I’ll never get to, in one world, play out all my possibilities: to follow up on every line of inquiry begun in my notebook. What do other people’s trees of inquiry look like? Do they feel the burden of our finitude the way I do?
Paul Graham wrote, “[I]f the worst thing they can hit you with is your own status as an outsider, that implies that in every other aspect you’ve succeeded. Pointing out that someone is unqualified is as desperate as resorting to racial slurs.” I’ve read that essay before; I’ve read it again today in the midst of this moping to you (though I detest metaDiarism). How can I internalize this attitude? My deliberative morality now recognizes a higher standard than obey-the-teacher. How can I force my felt morality to update? My ambitions now recognize a higher standard than fame: would I rather be Kate Bornstein, and have gathered up some measure of notoriety, yet be utterly deluded about what I am? Although as I recall it, Kate Bornstein might not have been doing so well at twenty-one along either measure. How do I get my felt ambitions to actually update?
I seek true knowledge for my own purposes, and it is not obvious to me why I should care whether anyone else is doing better or doing worse. If nothing else will convince you of the seriousness of this entire endeavor, then consider when I stood on the staircase of the University library, pressed the Kurzweil book fast against my chest, and pretended I was Kathy.
I’ve let it get so late today—I really would like to do some math before I have to go to my dayjob again. Should I be working from the cognitive behavioral therapy book?—except how could I possibly make the time? In the midst of this (&c.), Mother announces that she is convinced that I have OCD.
I might have clocked someone again yesterday, but how would I know?
I seek true knowledge for my own purposes, and it is not obvious to me, &c., &c., pretended I was Kathy. —ZMD
Forgive me for writing you again so soon. It’s been a splendid day. Left alone with my books, I quite routinely have splendid days. You might mock me for having spent so long being so angry at school, but maybe it’s a wonder I haven’t been angrier. These serious study days—never have I been so happy. I’m so happy lately when I’m not feeling terrible about my lack of credentials. But I didn’t feel terrible today, nor am I angry.
In the morning I visited the Dr. Leslie Month of Diablo Valley College, who was so kind as to spare me a few minutes of her office hours. She informed me that we possess no general theory for systems of quadratic equations, though she was able to wring a proportion out of my special case relating to my square-root-of-a-matrix intrigue. Later, inspired [by] Wikipedia and something I said in response to something the Dr. Month said, I thought briefly that I might be able to resolve the intrigue by means of quadratic forms, although this did not turn out to be the case.
Great Expectations is hilarious.
If I’m so smart, then why does my code never work? If I could just implement a general truth table in Python, it would be ever so helpful in the quest towards a spectral graph theory, as well as helping with my elegant albeit computationally intensive solution to a problem in the discrete maths book a while back.
Evolutionary Theory: Mathematical and Conceptual Foundations arrived in the post today, and I studied from that. It’s slow going, but O Diary!—how wondrous it will be to be a party to all these true secrets! Father didn’t even know there was a mathematics to evolution. Plus I need to pin down how to study from technical books without problem sets. Also, this math really does bear on the gender intrigue—at least more than graph theory.
It’s horrible to say, but you could argue that I’ve been doing too much mathematics lately. Shouldn’t I work on my writing?
Yesterday, I lent Stewart Calculus and The Teenage Liberation Handbook to Cody Pratt, one of our courtesy clerks. I also wrote him an email yesterday recommending Yudkowsky, and another email today replying to his reply. Maybe I’m on the road to Aumann agreement with Anna on the issue of the intellectual competence of ordinary people. Cody claims to be very good at math—I see no reason to disbelieve him. But his verbal skills, scientific literacy, and rationality are just terrible by my standards. (He doesn’t seem to think verbal skills are important.) But he must be well above average, mustn’t he? He’s actually interested in science; he actually wants to learn.
After my library time today, I bought some frozen yogurt—maybe this was irrational. Daniel asked me questions—he said I’m weird, as he frequently says. Diary, I think it’s nice to have a meaningful conversation across three sigmas. I am beautiful. Only I really must figure out how to make some money. Or what will I manage? Sigmas after sigmas, ladders linking ladders. I remain yours. —ZMD
I was kind of distracted in the morning today at my dayjob. On Thursday, while studying Evolutionary Theory, I had remembered a science fiction story I had once read about an alien biosphere where the organisms had three copies of each gene, and I thought that on that world, such-and-such equation would have a three rather than a two in the denominator. I suppose it was this morning that I realized a few things. For one (trivial) thing, I now remember that the story was actually about aliens with a triple helix in their equivalent of DNA, which is not at all the same thing as having three alleles at one locus. But this was a scarcely relevant passing thought in comparison to my great insight that there ought to be a generalized Hardy–Weinberg law: that the entire model could be generalized to any number of alleles per locus, but that this would take more work than changing a single constant. At the time, I thought this would involve a three-by-three Punnett square, but on working out details during my strange lunch, I discovered to my great shock and pleasure that it has to be a three by three by three Punnett cube. Eager to work out the coefficients on the fitness function, and lacking the combinatoric sophistication to get it analytically, I rushed downstairs to buy a pack of colored pencils to assist me. (Really, Diary—although maybe I was thinking of telling you.) I studied from the Rice text more during library day, reviewed some relevant Wikipedia pages, and drafted a nonstupid version of the algorithm Father and I spent so much time trying to debug last night. I actually coded it at home, and it works. I wanted the algorithm as a building block for using Python to solving some math problems—although I decided that I ought to work on the generalization of one of the problems, which will probably take me a while.
It is such a beautiful power, to be able to think in math! But I don’t want math to take over my life. I’ve been doing so much math lately that I hardly read normal books. O terrible my wasted youth! O terrible timesink of a dayjob that I don’t have the liberty to quit! Still, I had never dreamed that things could be like this.
I’m so ridiculously in my head that I almost forgot to tell you that Nicole has pancreatitis and is in the hospital. She should be okay. —ZMD
My relationship to writing is strange. I love to write, don’t I?—my lifework is supposed to be a great novel. But if I were to apply for (say) a technical writing position, what would I have to show? You are so beautiful, and my notebooks are so beautiful, and yet I have no public triumph to show. I’m proud of some of my better blog comments about gender, but that’s hardly the same thing. Where do I stand? Maybe I should commit to writing a post for Less Wrong once a week: if none of my own ideas flesh out well, I could always resort to blogging Judgment Under Uncertainty. And—oh, my word. I’m so many levels below—there is ever so much that I want to do and know. It is such a matter of threading the needle, to try to figure out what attitude to adopt. My math has really taken off in recent weeks—but I should wonder if my performance at my dayjob has suffered somewhat due to a slight sense of entitlement I’ve developed. That’s bad—but on the other hand, I really don’t want to be dragged down to Safeway’s level, even in the subtlest way. Our friends in Pleasanton might not approve of the desperate signals I send in my checking performance: I’ve been known to frequently cross the line between making a friendly connection and flagrant pedantry. But such is the price I extract: I must preserve my self-identity, which is ravenous and would like to span stars—or at least genders. I’m a transhumanist intellectual; I want to know everything. How do you bridge that gap, associating with people who don’t share this as an obvious ideal, and who don’t think grand abstract thoughts about the gaps between us?
I don’t know what I know; if transcripts are corrupt, then what do I rely on? I told Anna the other night that I wasn’t sure if I was really being more efficient, or if it only seemed like it because I’ve been doing more math and less reading lately, and math leaves a paper trail. Anna suggested that I might start keeping records of what books I read. Yeah—that might be a good idea: I remember having thought of starting one some years back, but it never took. Maybe someday I should try taking a mental inventory, listing out good books I remember having read?—I really don’t know what I know; I really can’t get my love together.
Checking up on Less Wrong tonight, I was intimidated some technical discussion by some of the commenters, casually mentioning issues of which I was ignorant. I don’t know about the security hole inherent in client-side JavaScript—or whatever the issue was. And if neither of the Jennifers at my dayjob know what JavaScript is, this has no bearing on me or my future. I haven’t been taking my technical study seriously lately; I’ve been spending so much time thinking about math. But—oh, Diary how I long to spend yet more time on the academic stuff, what I would give for a thousand years of library time!—but it would probably not be wise to appeal Father’s advice yet again (perhaps this time making an analogy to the Europe trips people take). Oh, but Diary, imagine the evolution simulator I could [make] out of Python if only I had a few months to hack away at it, to learn the math and the code! Would Father buy that? Oh, I must only be ever so much ridiculously more efficient—but so far I’ve mostly just been repeating myself. Boring I know. You will want an update after I get to meet Tom McCabe and Katja Grace—but now? Diary, protect me, Diary, hold me, Diary, Diary, what is wrong with these people who don’t want to know everything, oh, Diary, Diary, what’s wrong with these people who don’t even try? Especially me. Anna said (and surely you can tell by now that Anna Salamon [has] become as a goddess unto me) that even if my actual achievements weren’t good, the derivative of my achievement might be. Let it be so!—and I exit remaining yours. —ZMD
I’ve been very hurt for much of today for what have become the usual reasons. It is in the service of morality that I have to get over this moralism: I just can’t get over the emotional hooks the system has stuck in me. I know I’m boring you: of course you’ve heard it all before. But I’m still hurt. Why doesn’t it count?! What the hell is wrong with us, as a culture?—that you mention something you’re studying, and people ask you where you go to fucking school! It is sick! Today I saw a book in the library about how to raise bookworms, and the back matter referenced how reading was essential to success in school and life. But if you know how to read, what the hell would you go to a fucking school for?! Autodidacticism should be a standard option—everyone should have some topic of desperate curiosity; people should gather around the water cooler sharing tips and hacks towards the achievement of true insight. And instead, you look around, and people waste their time on such trivial crap! How do we bear it? But how can I complain?—I have not been studying nearly hard enough; I have not been writing fiction or blogposts. I’m so hurt—I am so terribly hurt. Why doesn’t it count?!
The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs arrived in the post today; I tried to install Scheme on Memoryless Distribution, but to no avail. I’m so worthless and so hurt—and yet there have moments when I have been so proud and upright. I want to meet Tom and Katja next week with an honest air of dignity and grace: I will have to write; I will have to make the most of every spare moment. Not like today; today was horrible; today I have been so wounded. I’m still so angry. Why don’t they just tell people that insight and productivity are good, and that anything you do in the rational service of these goals is good? I don’t think they tell you: you are raised in a contradictory mess of rules and conventions, and any deeper law you have to generalize for yourself. Was the sense that I have improved only a delusion? It wasn’t; it wasn’t: I do math now. I’m still so horrible; I am still so many levels below—yet it’s a sunk cost. I can only try to be as good as possible tomorrow. —ZMD
Okay, this really has to stop. Soon. Now. Even after getting adequate sleep, I was still emotionally trashed this morning about my lack of a university degree. Rather than clocking in immediately upon arriving at the store, I ended up sitting in the breakroom writing in my notebook for maybe more than thirty minutes. I didn’t perform well today, and the FSM for Friday is fubar, and if I didn’t waste so much time feeling bad, maybe things actually would have gone well. I think my job performance really has declined lately—because I’ve gotten bored?—because I’ve gotten conceited? When I’m not emotionally trashed and actually try to do a good job, I can carry forward well before eight, prepare the Sunday documentation and perhaps even try to sort out some fragment of our gift card atrocity. Today I carried forward closer to ten.
At my lunch, I left the store for health reasons. I bought candy at Walgreens and took library day. I checked my email and the blog, and did some math. The math really made me feel better: I really made some deep conceptual progress. The feeling didn’t last, though, and I didn’t perform well during the second half of my shift, either. I stayed late to try to make up for my backlog, but I didn’t try very hard.
I ended up having a fairly deep conversation with Tammy, which was nice, as I am ever eager to improve my model about how normal people actually think. I expressed to her my anxieties about school. I’ve mentioned some of my mathematical and computer-scientific excursions to her before, and at one point in our conversation today, I think she brought up the possibility of me patenting the stuff I’ve discovered! I said that what I’ve done is trivial undergrad stuff; she said she didn’t know what I meant by that.
Diary, I know how you feel about ad hoc evolutionary psychology—believe me, I know. But listen: I know you’re familiar with Cosmides and Tooby on social exchange. Apparently we’ve evolved adaptations to facilitate social exchange and punish cheaters. Our society has a rule: if you want a well-paying job, you need a college degree; that’s the social reality. And it could be that for those who have not been immersed as I have been in a tradition (!) of extreme rationality, social reality is reality—although I’m sure they don’t think it explicitly in those words. Now, me being a very conscientious person, it could be that the thought of forgoing a bachelor’s degree and yet still expecting a decent job makes me feel like a cheater, and that’s why I feel so terrible. I know this is only a just-so story and is probably wrong—yet maybe it is better to have proposed this hypothesis and to hold it in mind at some level of probability, than to not have thought anything at all. It may be—if you will forgive me—less wrong. Out of those who would scorn me and disparage my beauty because of my lack of a degree, what proportion of them know as much as I do about evolutionary psychology, enough to formulate this hypothesis? What proportion of them could write like this? In an old SL4 post, Yudkowsky wrote: “There is normative reasoning that runs skew to the whole mess of anxieties about how much rank you have or how much rank other people might think you’re claiming.” I have the quote on my Facebook page.
I’ve wasted enough time in school, that I can’t afford to waste any more time worrying about school: how much intellectual progress have I really made in the last two days, the last two months, the last eighteen months? Not enough! Not nearly enough. I’ve wasted too much time! This issue is closed. Would it help if I swore to you that I won’t be bent up about this tomorrow?
I’m so angry: I want to say fuck Caitlin, fuck Ms. Gunnison, fuck all those schooled bastards—but that kind of mindset is all too human. That defiant attitude is about pain and revenge; it has nothing to do with the map that reflects the territory. And that’s what all this is about, isn’t it? They seek friends and happiness. I seek the map—and a book? I’ve got to break away. Even if I did manage to muddle through UCSC, I wouldn’t feel good about it—I might well be ashamed of the readings that I didn’t do, and thereby wrapped up in even more madness than I am in this world. The mainstream does not share my attention to detail.
I’ve been held back too long. It’s only in the last few months, I think, that I’ve really started to learn how to study. I’ve always been a reader, but so rarely have I had the sort of intimate experience I had the other week with Evolutionary Theory.
Can I rise to this test? Starting tomorrow, no more pain and shame and rage?—only my full autodidactic fury. Maybe (following John Maxwell IV in a private comment and my reply) I should say to fuck them all, just to get me in the right mood. I want my beliefs to be as accurate as possible, but I’m hardly in top truthtracking condition when I’m so hurt. I must only strive to do excellent work—and if anyone starts asking questions, I can just show them my notes. Really. I remain yours, and I hope to be able to shut up about this soon. —ZMD
I tell people that I get all my new music from the Safeway audio loop. There’s this one great song by a group called Stretch Princess—
“Oh I am not about to be
Wrecked by the things you did to me
Though it’s not easy to forget”
Of course you can guess that I associate this song with my schooling troubles—about which I suffered more today. Diary, why can’t I just get over it? It would be one thing if the bad feelings actually helped me do stuff—but they really don’t. Doing good intellectual work makes me happy. When I feel bad about my lack of credentials I just end up moping around; I accomplish nothing—or if it’s not about accomplishment, say then that it makes me smaller. It’s scary to think what I would be like if I had dropped out of University but if it hadn’t been for Eliezer Yudkowsky. I know, I’ve told you, but—this network of concepts, this ideal of uncompromising rationality gives me strength. I know that anyone could say the same for their having accepted Jesus Christ into their heart, but mine is a special kind of strength in its exquisite generality. Try to get the best model of what’s actually going on, and use this true knowledge to figure out how to do the best thing. I do seem to have amassed a great general education, and it has proved genuinely useful. It is nice to have some idea of what the fuck is going on. Even in my moments of madness, in my searing pain, I contain a core of relative epistemic rationality.
There’s an Overcoming Bias meetup tomorrow—or maybe I shouldn’t call it that, as Overcoming Bias is now Robin Hanson’s personal blog. I’ve baked cookies to take, and I’m probably going to give Razib or some of his acquaintances a ride.
Yesterday I visited Ms. Gunnison. She agreed to be one of my references for when I start questing for a better dayjob.
I’m such a terrible person; I do not deserve to hang out with such awesome people tomorrow. But I used to be even worse. And consider Jessica, who claims to be too lazy to keep a Diary. What will this terrible world come to? Our books are so beautiful; O beautiful that we create books! But I fear we will tear ourselves apart; we waste so much time. O terrible! —ZMD
Yet more emotional turmoil today. I used to be good at my job in the booth, and I’m not anymore. I ended up crying at lunch before the librarian whom I once half-joked I had a man crush on. (For the record, he has since cut his hair.) It turns out I’ll be driving to the meetup alone. I should be cheered up to meet my creepy Singularitarian friends—and new creepy Singularitarian friends! Only I’m so torn up inside—I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life. You can say I’m doing better than most others, but Diary, that’s such a low bar! I want everything. Today I changed a helium tank for the first time, with no instruction. I have an idea for a piece of shamelessly autobiographical fiction that might be worth writing up and posting to Less Wrong. I remain yours. —ZMD
Mark you that my life is only just beginning, that all this madness was but some terrible prelude, a hoax played by an ape.
The meetup was at the house rented for SIAI summer interns. O friends! It is so wonderful to share company with such brilliant people!—and I fit in, too, which I must have previously remarked to you at some point, but it’s the most peculiar thing, to the extent that I figure surely I am justified in remarking on it again! Yesterday I felt like shit; I couldn’t even adequately carry out my duties at Safeway. (I carried them out, but not adequately, not nearly so by my standards.) And then, later this same night, I somehow find myself discussing my alternate evolutionary biology intrigue before Yudkowsky, Peter de Blanc, and a programmer named Jey whom I guess is friends with Razib. I am somehow made legitimate.
Tom McCabe reminds me of Richard.
Liron, who works for a company called Slide, took a quick look at my source for degreeseq.py, taped as it was into my math pages. He said it had no obvious WTFs, and that I had potential. He said I could be good with a few hundred hours practice, that good preparation to be a code monkey would be to learn Python and JavaScript and to write a web application. He implored me to hit him up at Slide—well, Diary! I do want to get out of Safeway soon; it’s just been too long to work in the same store, and it’s really time to move on with my life. I’m not good enough to be a code monkey yet, and it’s probably not wise to propose to Father again the prospect of me taking some months for study. I finally scheduled my second A+ exam for Thursday—I shall have to prepare for that. So I get the A+, apply for a bunch of jobs (making sure to write articulate cover letters addressed to the appropriate person), and hopefully something will happen. I should also consider the possibility (however fancifully the manner in which I do this) of taking a step down: of taking a job, any job that takes fewer hours: in this way I would satisfy the have-a-job desideratum while still procuring more study time for myself.
I has a very engaging conversation with a psychology grad student from Berkeley named Nick Gwynne, who is passionate about his studies.
I slept over, and associated the next day with Carl, Anna, and Peter. We went for a run. I did some math and wrote some code in pencil: there are always yet more problems to solve. O detail! Things just might work out. And if I continue to find it difficult to explain exactly what it is I do—well, but I will work it out. —ZMD
Diary, an interesting couple of data points. I felt so passionate and alive on Saturday night, being with other intellectuals! My every breath was infused with a sense of purpose and meaning. I knew that I had no reason to be afraid: I could work a dayjob, and do anything else that seemed like a good idea (which is really almost the definition of a rationalist), but in the end I was living for insight. All the pain and shame and fear that I felt at reading blogospheric disdain at all the stupid proles simply faded away, and I was happy and unashamed.
And today—the serenity of that night is gone, and I am left with anxiety. What should I do? In this crazy world, what can we do to keep it all from coming down? And from every direction comes conflicting advice—I can’t let the social pressures eat my soul, but I don’t want to be a stupid rebel, and it might be dishonest to believe that I can at least avoid giving advice: we all push on each other, just be being around or saying a single word. Yet I must not surrender my vision.
I’m doing so much better than most—but this is a low bar and means nothing. Rationalists should win full stop and in full generality, not win over others. Why should I care what people think of me? I seek knowledge—I seek the map that reflects the territory, and once I have the map, then I’m in a better position to figure out what to do. But if men holding lesser maps should shout at me, then I can only take this data into my map: it is not some kind of unimpeachable verdict bearing on my soul.
I don’t want to develop a bad attitude; I want to be good. If I am angry that our dominant culture has no place for meaningful independent action, this does not stop me from engaging in independent meaningful action. If I am not honored for my private readings, this is no impediment to reading.
How do I package the magic? How do I hold my own vision, how do I mark my lifeworks as sacred, when those who surround me have no concept of lifework? I can’t go back to University, but I can’t let the rest of this world consume me—but neither do I want to have a sense of entitlement; there is a dignity in jobs. Protect me! —ZMD
ADDENDUM— I talked to Richard on the telephone. At the meetup on Saturday, Eliezer said something about how he wanted to put concepts from his posts on the wiki. The idea was to have posts link to the wiki, and the wiki link to the posts. Later, I said to him personally that his time is valuable, and that I wondered if I should take a shot at this. I think he said that it required a deep understanding of the material, and I said that I’ve read almost everything he’s written, much of it more than once, and thought about it for more than a year. He asked if I had the art of relevance—this was a reference to earlier conversation where he observed that in most discourse, people’s lines just run skew to each other. I said that I didn’t know, and he said that I’ve earned the right to take a shot at it. Oh, but how could I possibly have time? There’s so much that I want to do!
Only I might be engaging in an evasion. I say that I want to know everything—which is fine, as an ideal. But in fact, I am only a human being with limited time (although I could be much more efficient) and a limited brain (although I should think that I’m nowhere near my limits). In fact, I have to study specific things, which means not studying a host of other things. Even if I don’t know how to describe what my background is, I do have a background, and while I don’t want to be pinned down, I should at least be able to say what it is I’ve done, where I’m confused, where I’m not confused, gaps on my map, edges of my map. But I really don’t know, nor do I wish to applaud myself on my mere awareness of my vast ignorance. We want to solve problems, not make ourselves feel superior to stupid proles who don’t even know that they have problems. I guess I should write Swift and Peter Gray. Should—O such an easy word to misuse!
On Sunday, when I said that I need to make up for my wasted youth, Peter almost immediately said, “Sunk cost fallacy.” And of course, he was right. These are the sort of people I want to be around! O Diary O terrible my terrible ignorance! I really think I am unusual, because if more people were like me, you would expect that there would be standard answers to my concerns. The intensely personal art of learning would be an active front of research, and regularly discussed in the media and about water coolers. I’ve said before that it’s more fun to hang out with Anna et al. and feel inferior, than it is to hang out with my coworkers and feel superior. Could it be that for the same reason, it’s more fun to be normal than to be an iconoclast? If you truly love beauty, then why would you want to be an island of beauty? Why not spread beauty all around; should not every person in themselves be a work of art? Why isn’t this view mainstream? Why do people give in to the ugliness and make it part of themselves?—I’m not saying people should be empty-headed idealists; we want to be not-stupid idealists. Riki Wilchins and Leda Cosmides should have a heart-to-heart.
Where do I stand? Worlds beneath worlds, hearts within hearts, where do I stand? I don’t have to go into my dayjob tomorrow, but I have to prepare for my A+ examination, so I can’t spend the entire day studying things altogether closer to my heart. I wish people were smarter; I wish we had some sense of what the fuck we’re doing. And yet I must not wish.
Today a customer remarked to me that wasn’t it funny how sometimes the lines were long, and then there was nobody. I said that there was actually research to the effect that human intuitions about randomness don’t quite match up with how random sequences actually look. She was impressed and asked if I was a (I think she said) sociology major, and I referenced Judgement Under Uncertainty. She said something about how even when it doesn’t seem like it, there’s a plan to everything. Or a Poisson distribution, I said, but I don’t think I said it very loudly, perhaps in part because I probably don’t know how to pronounce Poisson. —ZMD
Diary, I have been careless. I thought I had scheduled the examination for today, and so drove out to Pleasanton, only to find out (after some confusion) that I had actually scheduled the exam for next Thursday, the eleventh.
I put Windows XP back on Memoryless Distribution the other night, in order to run the extra practice tests that I had bought from Total Seminars (the software didn’t work on Father’s machine). I was foolish, and did not take a backup of my important data! Today, after restoring Ubuntu, I find that OpenOffice doesn’t work. Yet I was able to retreive you undamaged, no thanks to my powers of forethought. My word.
My moral deliberations are burdened by such weighty forces. Some sort of Protestant force has some hooks in me. It’s as if something with in me feels that I don’t deserve to do what I want to do, that only painful work is virtuous, that it is somehow shameful to do what you love, that the market is God, that I am shit for not working sixteen hours a day in some high-paying specialty. I could reply: the reason we respect market transactions is because we have theoretical reasons for believing that they contribute to human flourishing; each transaction reputably makes both parties better off, else it would not occur; I thought that was the entire point.
There is no moral duty incumbent on me to become an engineer in order to contribute to society, no duty to destroy my happiness in the service of—what, exactly?—some wayward meme shaped by unintelligent historical, sociological, and biological forces. Epistemic rationality pays dividends once again: if you don’t know about materialism, if you don’t have the knowledge base to think through the true causes of your beliefs, then you’re liable to give your life away to who knows what stupid idea? How many great novels have never been written because some kid thought it was his duty to become an electrical engineer for the greater glory of America against those goddam Chinamen? How many labor-saving devices were never invented because some kid got stuck on the idea of writing a novel, when he could have been a great engineer?
When mean-spirited bloggers with inscrutable handles like “Quarter Lambda” sneer at those they deem “stupid proles” or “welfare queens”—do they know why they so sneer? Is it really because the poor take more in government services than they make in the marketplace?—or is it just ordinary contempt? There’s a certain contempt that I feel for Mother, in recent months—most of the things she says just seem so stupid, now. What’s worse is that she doesn’t seem to know that she’s stupid, in the way that I know that I’m stupid. What do you say about people who aren’t transhumanists? To the extent that I look down on Jessica, it’s not because she’s insufficiently “contributing to society,” but because of what she does with the time reserved unto herself. She’s not an intellectual; she said that she’s “too lazy” to keep a Diary; I think she would rather go to a rave and take ecstasy than study math. I know that there is no objective sense in which her preferences are actually inferior to mine; different people are different, that’s all. And yet—there is a certain sort of asymmetry in that I ask these sorts of questions and try to get answers, whereas these lines of inquiry probably do not occur to her at all—I know the sense in which Jessica and I are on equal footing, whereas I would imagine that she just thinks I’m weird, and lets the inquiry rest there. But I don’t know. What are Jessica’s moral deliberations like? It would be too arrogant, too violent a distortion to suppose that she doesn’t have any.
Richard Hollerith had an interesting Less Wrong post the other day about mate choice for the male rationalist. Diary, even admist these riches, this still seems like such a terrible world to me. How do we bear it? What happens when it all comes down? —ZMD
ADDENDUM—“Wave Equations”— I should worry that I’m becoming a bit of an asshole.
Back up. I read a little from Demonic Males, which put my passions even more in a flutter of activity. But soon my anxiety of the afternoon transitioned into a sort of serenity—I can’t say why. Was is that I saw that IT guy (cf. 315) and told him that I was practicing my Python, and that I started working problems from SICP? For the first part of my shift, struck by my sudden serenity, I actually tried to do my job rather by the book, although with a certain grace and lightness that I should hope was almost feminine. Somehow the feelings passed, however, and I was back again to my usual straddling of the line between making a genuine connection and flagrant pedantry. I far passed that line with one customer. She mentioned a television show that she watches, and I remarked (O so innocently!) that I don’t watch television. Soon, she asked me why I didn’t, and I asked (ever so honestly!) who has time? I said that I had a lot of books to read. And—I cannot say exactly what she said, but I think she asked something to the effect of why or what for—as if, Diary, as if one needed a reason to read books! And I said (O ever so honestly and innocently!), because I don’t want to be ignorant. And of course this was unforgivably rude, because it carries the connotation that people who don’t read books are ignorant. And of course this is perfectly true, but you’re not supposed to say it in such a context, as if every shopper was on Crocker’s rules terms with every checkout clerk. My word, Diary. And then (to make my crime still the worse), when she mentioned something about the school, I said outright that schools are overrated (which is again perfectly true), and babbled something about how cheap my discrete maths textbook was.
I have not been keeping up with that practice of bluebooking my time, by either method. I had thought, once, that binding myself to a schedule doesn’t work. But doesn’t that data come from some time ago, before I possessed my current seriousness? I should try—I will in fact try blocking out my days by the hour—it’s a skill I really, desperately need to have if I want to take things to the next level. And Diary—how could I bear to do otherwise? How could I bear not to be at peak performance in the booth tomorrow? —ZMD
SECOND ADDENDUM— And I don’t think I told you that corrections to quoted lyrics do not require brackets. —ZMD
THIRD ADDENDUM—“Ghosts and Drives”— OpenOffice on Memoryless Distribution is working again. How fortunate yet peculiar! —ZMD
FOURTH ADDENDUM— So, yeah, I feel kind of retarded now, having not done enough academic-type stuff recently. This will be rectified tomorrow. —ZMD
From my notebook:
A couple of things I want to know
—that I want to do. I want to meet a 21-year-
old Megan McArdle, a 21-year-old Eliezer
Yudkowsky, a 21-year-old Robin Hanson. I want
to have an hour-long conversation with each of
them—see how they compare, both to each other,
& to their selves twelve, eight, & twenty-five
years later (respectively). After I’m done with
that—I want to be a 21-year-old Megan
McArdle.
I haven’t kept strictly to schedule, coming to more-or-less ignore it completely this night and the last night. But it does seem to help to have a schedule; I am bound to study in the library rather than going to browse the internet. I hope to improve at the skill of keeping to schedule, and thereby grow yet still stronger, as I must do if I want my soul to not be destroyed. I have wasted a lot of clockcycles tonight, I am sorry to report. And it is clockcycles that are our limiting resource—not teachers. Nor will I try to excuse my sinfulness as being justified by all the good ideas I had this morning, nor the evolutionary math that I studied in the library. One must not try to justify one’s sins on the grounds that one has separately been good, for the same reason that one must not try to justify one’s sins on the grounds that one is better than most others. Restitution can be made for property damage, or judges can be bribed, but this is decision theory.
It’s not over yet. I still have some time to grow, although I will always lament my wasted youth.
My emotions are still so varied. One hour I am distressed at how little I understand the mainstream, how my epistemic greed (“Openness to Experience”?) pervades everything I do, and yet I don’t know what motivates them. Another hour I am anxious again at the thought of being a programmer: not for one old stupid reason (cf. 316, 317), but rather, for another. I don’t want to be lazy and cynical slacker who disdains his dayjob, but neither do I want any job to consume my soul. O tightrope!
The books for Friday are fubar due to repeated crashes of VeriCash. I spent too long tonight composing an email to my superiors explaining the details (in my ridiculously overwrought prose; I blame Dickens), which the Safeway mail robots declined to accept. I will—cope. —ZMD
I hit the University at Berkeley today on my latest book run. I got an anthology from the MIT press titled Sexualized Brains; I got a volume titled How People Learn, I got The Tangled Wing; I got Evolution’s Rainbow; I got The Two Sexes. (Really, Diary, how can I think of myself as a gender scholar without having read Maccoby? My word.) O terrible brevity of human life! If you strictly count only outstanding library books, I now have over 2800 pages of reading. This is not counting textbooks I own like Evolutionary Theory or the Structure and Interpretation; it is not counting the other books I own and have in my stack; it is not counting Great Expectations on that ensemble of cassettes, due back on the sixteenth, with the renewal limit having been exhausted; it is not counting the reading I should do to review for my A+ examination on Thursday. Being a generalist is impossible; the fact that being a specialist is also impossible, and for the same reason, is hardly any consolation.
I’m still sorting out my goal system—no doubt I will always be sorting out my goal system, for the same reason it’s impossible to be a specialist or a generalist. Humans are too small for human ideals. I am an intellectual; I care about truth, and beauty, and high-bandwidth personal relationships with other intellectuals. When I introspect and I look about me, it certainly seems as if there are many things that are now obvious unto me that are not part of the conventional wisdom. I need a decision theory (however informal, however implicit) to tell me what to do, and there’s no one I can trust, because the mainstream does not share my values, and thanks in large part to Eliezer Yudkowsky, I really do seem to know at least a few things that they in large part don’t. Although of course there must be many things that I’m missing, gaps on my map, edges of my map, holes and coffee stains perverting and suffocating the vaunted sanctity of my map, true facts that are obvious to the mainstream but that I don’t know, because no one told me, just like no one told them about materialism—or at least, not in so many words. But at least now I have this notion that I should actively try to fill in the gaps.
I’m getting closer to moving on, but I don’t think I’ve moved on just yet. I am still hobbled, something is still holding back my full autodidactic fury. Why can’t I just cut to the chase? We know where this transformation is leading; we know there is no heading back to school for me. At least—at least not until all these scars have healed and I fully taste the breadth and extent of my full fury as it ought to be, and (I think) could have been much earlier, had things been otherwise. I don’t have my full fury, now, else I would have been furiously tracing my way through Roughgarden’s sophistry, rather than writing yet again to you, rather then letting things get this late with yet hardly any intellectual progress to show to myself for the day.
Why didn’t anyone just tell me that knowledge was good, and that everything I do in the service of the acquisition of knowledge is good? But perhaps I should not ask this, when I know exactly why—in broad outline, if not the details. I don’t think I’m that confused about the sheer facts of the matter; I know that there are reasons why things are the way they are. What is there left for me ask questions about, then? If I want to express my indignation at human nature and the terrible history of this terrible world, then I can do so explicitly, without dressing it up as a rational inquiry. —ZMD
ADDENDUM—“Opportunity Costs”— A precious moment on Less Wrong: Julian Morrison wrote that the unconscious mind is not some little dark corner, but rather that it constitutes the vast majority of our selves. I upvoted him, and a bit later, I commented, “Upvoted because I deliberatively judge that this should scare me, and yet I immediately recognize it as obviously true, and yet it does not really scare me, because nearly all of my emotion, motivation, and so forth are below the level where my deliberative judgement desperately cries that she should be in control.” It very most probably won’t happen, but I hope that someone I’ve met from the meetups writes something like, “I’ve met you, Davis. ‘She’?”
I am thinking that I ought to decrease the frequency at which I write to you, Diary. Writing to you is too easy, and takes up too much time I could be using for other things. Thousands on thousands of words I have written to you, and I may have been eloquent at times, but how much fiction have I written, when supposedly my lifework is a piece of fiction? How many blogposts have I written for Less Wrong, when that would give me practice and a record of public writing? And how I can I bear all the minutes that I’m not doing math or programming?—really, how can I bear it? All the minutes that I rage against the tyranny of schools—and yes, even today I so raged—what good does it do me, now that I do have an alternative, and have every reason to pledge myself fully to it, without worry or care for what other people think I should be doing with my life?
I found myself worrying today about existential risks and the future of this world. On the one hand, maybe I shouldn’t be worrying about this so personally until I have my own shit together. On the other hand, I am proud of my perfectionism—indeed I regard perfectionism as a tautology. So maybe it is good that I should feel a personal guilt that I am not giving everything to help save the world, or a personal guilt that I am insufficiently contributing to the economy—even if I don’t decide to help save the world, or contribute to the economy. Even I do decide to ignore the world, and pledge everything in the service of my great novel, I shouldn’t pretend that there are no opportunity costs involved. There are trade-offs, and part of being an aspiring rationalist is making them explicitly, rather than brushing them under the rug.
So, yes, resolved, I should write to you less frequently, close off this part, and maybe get some printing done. Probably not abandon you entirely for a lengthy period, because it is nice to inform you of goings-on with my creepy Singularitarian friends. But—having spoken of opportunity costs—I have so many other things to do!O Diary! It doesn’t matter how much better I’m doing than others—it really doesn’t matter. Was it ever really about making a contribution to the field? For some people, maybe. For me, it is a desperate and relentless curiosity which will tear apart stars in its quest for true knowledge. And if someone starts asking questions suspicious of my methods or motivations, what can I do but answer them honestly, earnestly expecting to resolve any disagreement, as the Aumann theorem requires? —ZMD
SECOND ADDENDUM— Yes, today is a perfect example of why I need to learn to bind myself to a schedule. If it has never worked before, it might work now that I possess my current level of seriousness. Diary, I don’t know what happened to all my hours today. What’s the use of picking up so many books, if I don’t take desperate measures to maximize the amount of time I spend with books? I didn’t even do any math or programming today—which should scare me. I fear that going too long without doing technical thinking makes you stupid, and I fear furthermore that writing does not meet this threshold. Or is it just the kind of writing I’m doing? Writing to you about my life comes freely and fluently; it is hardly an effort. What would it really mean, to craft a novel? Why shouldn’t it be as intense a technical struggle as any program? There’s so much I want to do—how could I bind myself to a single profession? You end up missing so much that way. No doubt there are people who think that what I’m going to be tested on Thursday is technical material, who have no grasp of the kind of universe we live in, and the kind of power that creates computers in a world which originally had none. I know something of what this type of power is like. So tomorrow I must prepare for this exam filled with passwords, and on my breaks from this, I’ll study actual math. And on days following I will get to those thousands of pages. But I will not give you much report of this, I must be so busy. —ZMD