It is finished!

I just finished writing my first full length book. It's just over 61,000 words. I've done quite a bit of editing as I was writing, mainly when I hit writers block with respect to new material. About half of it is edited close to completion (I think) but I might have to do some more editing on the other portions. It's non-fiction so I think most of the cutting was pretty obvious. There were occasional section that felt clunky that I decided fairly quickly couldn't work. (I don't even want to know how many words I have written in the various drafts and previous attempts I've made at writing this book... more than 61,000 though.)

The feeling of accomplishment has been slowly arriving. At first it felt really anti-climactic. For about a half hour, I felt less of a sense of completion than I typically do after finishing a blog post or an essay. But for the last fifteen minutes the realization that I actually finished writing what I'd set out to write is has finally been setting in.

The prose itself probably isn't the most elegant I've ever written. It's actually much easier to write elegant prose with fiction and platitude-style philosophy than it is to write elegant prose with heavier subject matter. But the content was the most ambitious subject matter that I've ever written about, and probably is the most ambitious I ever will write about. It's all very applied, specific, and object-level. Unlike this blog post... I doubt I will ever writie anything this applied and specific again. It's just the one book I had to write to give myself an internal license to focus my future on the more theoretical, abstract, meta-level stuff I prefer to think about and write about.

I'm too close to it right now to really re-read it and think about. But I do plan to review my own book, on my book review blog eventually. :)

What's the point of becoming a literary critic if you're not going to critique your own work?

And after dinner tonight, I'm going to smoke a cigar.

Then tomorrow, I suppose I start looking for an agent, looking for a job, and starting work on the coding project that should be my primary companion until I figure out what city I'll be living in and working in... at which point I should also begin seeking out having a social life again. And possibly begin building one that's a bit more digital than my social life in the past has been.

Yippee!

 -----

I got called away to dinner while I was writing this, so I've now spent quite a bit of time eating, smoking, going for a walk, relaxing and otherwise celebrating being done with my project. I should resume my book-reviewing in a little more force tomorrow or the next day, since I don't have much else to do other than send a few emails, update my resume a little, and submit a couple of applications.

RescueTime does not work nearly as well as I had hoped. I don't think it does a good job of picking up on time when my only interaction with the computer is through the mouse. It wasn't working at all with the browser the first few days (Chrome on Ubuntu). I was running the full program as well as the browser extension with the box checked in the browser extension to say I was running the full program. When I unchecked that box and started running only the browser extension without the native program it started picking up more, but it tells me that I'm only at my computer about two hours a day... which is simply not true. (Also, if I trusted it's estimates for how long I spend writing, it would tell me that I write a ridiculously high number of words per minute, well over 100 some days, which I know is simply false. When I'm pretty much writing stream of conscious as I am right now, my progress is less than 40 words per minute, and my ordinary writing is a lot slower).

On the beeminder front, my habits have changed in ways that I did not anticipate since I started using beeminder. I've started skipping breakfast and showering a lot more frequently (never two days in a row for showering) so that I can keep my time down. While this is technically keeping my total time spending in these activities well below my target amounts, it's not really in the spirit of what I meant to do. I'll get up some mornings and think that if I'm not going to take a long shower, I might as well not shower at all, because it kind of kills the enjoyment of the whole experience for me whenever I rush it.

This is why I don't really like making goals typically. They seem like such a good idea at the time, but then I often regret making them. When I ate no added sugar January a year ago, that was a good goal. Eating sugar again after taking a month of abstinence actually produced a high that was way more intense than I would ever have anticipated. A couple weeks into the fast I pretty much got used to it. I was only able to do that because I was living alone, so I could avoid having any added sugar in the apartment. No way I could have had that much willpower just on my own.

But even that had some negative consequences. I lost some weight and lost some enthusiasm for eating as a result of it. And that wasn't particularly healthy for me

Pushing towards the goal of being able to run from Hyde Park to downtown and back without stopping was another good goal, with pretty much only positive consequences. I can't think of any negative side effects of that one. (Other than not being able to really walk much the day after I actually did that run. I really didn't think I would make it the last couple miles on the return.) Springs coming, so I should probably start running again.

So basically, I'm not really feeling too much love for beeminder. It might be great for people who are really good at making the right goals, if having some mechanism to hold them to the letter of those goals is all they need to preserve their motivation, but the spirit of the thing is easier to keep (I think) when you aren't aiming to keep the letter of the law.

Also, you really have to think about exactly what you want your goal to be. I wanted to waste less time as I ate breakfast (which basically meant not reading the newspaper with breakfast when I really think about what I was doing that was causing me to spend a sillily long time at the table.) But an appropriate time goal for when I'm eating alone is very different from one that's appropriate for eating with other people and talking, so again, if I'm aiming to keep that goal to the letter, it interferes with my life in dumb ways.

I'm not good at making beeminder style goals, so I just don't think beeminder is the tool for me. I like the concept. It just doesn't fit me.

I love the concept of RescueTime. It just doesn't work.

So both of those experiments are somewhat of a failure. Alas and alack, and oh well.

Goals

I need to do a better job setting goals for myself and keeping them. I've decided to start using beeminder to keep track of a few things that I do while not at my computer, and rescuetime to help me track what I do do at my computer. Beeminder says that most of the goals people set with it are "Do more" type goals. I should probably make a few more of those, but my natural tendencies that I feel the most need to combat tend to fall in the do less category. (Actually, "measure more" might be a better description of what I should be doing than "do less" since simply keeping track of how much I do of a given activity seems to help me dramatically cut back on it. But I'm measuring for the sake of doing less.) Unfortunately, I think beeminder defaults to saying that I did zero of something if I don't enter data, so the easiest way for me to cheat with "do less" goals is simply to stop entering data. That might be one of the reasons that the other type of goals tend to be more popular, at least it might explain differences in repeat users. People are probably more likely to keep track of their goals if failing to track them results in presumed failure rather than presumed success.

I want to go to bed at midnight, get up at six, and get eight hours of sleep a night. I know that this is impossible, but each of these goals seem plausible to me. Six seems like the right time to get up. Midnight seems like the right time to go to bed, and eight hours of sleep seems like the right amount of sleep (and of the three, getting enough sleep will probably will have the biggest impact on my long term quality of life).

This is one of the reasons I like "do less" goals. Spend less time sleeping sounds like a really bad goal, but I think a lot of "do more" goals implicitly include something like "spend less time sleeping." The hard part about setting better priorities is figuring out what to cut, just like the hard part of budgeting is figuring out what not to buy. But sometimes, something is obviously extravagant. I spend an extravagant amount of time showering and eating breakfast right now. I'm unemployed right now -- working on my own projects. -- so, for now, I don't have enough pressure to finish things quickly in the mornings unless I keep track of exactly what I'm doing. However, my tendency to take longer than necessary showers and spend a lot longer than necessary eating breakfast began at my last job. I ate breakfast at my desk, which was probably a bad idea, because multitasking actually reduces efficiency, but in my last few months before I quit, improving efficiency at my desk ceased to be something I was trying to do. The worse thing was that I started taking showers after I got home from work because starting work on time without getting up earlier than necessary conflicted with spending an extravagant amount of time in the shower. Those are my first two beeminder goals. I'm going to wait until I gather more data from using rescuetime to figure out what my goals should be with regard to the time I spend at my computer.

I don't really have a good sense for how much time I spend doing what while at my computer. Once I have a better feel for that, hopefully, I will see that a few particular uses of my time seem particularly over-represented relative to what I would consider optimal. Most of the ways in which I use the computer are ways which I would consider productive, just like showering and eating breakfast are things I would consider productive. I basically use it to read, write, and occasionally to code. All of which are things that I think I should be doing. I would consider reading the news to be one of the least productive forms of reading that I can do, unless I am specifically reading with an eye for figuring out what makes some particular journalist particularly appealing to a general audience (e.g. reading Mitch Album way back when he was still a sports columnist would have been productive reading for any aspiring writer). I never read the news this way, so it's unlikely to do me much good. What benefit do I derive by following political scandals? I suppose if I were commentating on them, I could argue that I'm doing research, but I'm not doing that either. In contrast, reading smart people make informed judgments about the world seems like a very productive use of my time, especially if they use statistics to do it. Similarly, reading people who write well seems like a good use of my time to me (since I am aspiring to become a writer). If I had to explain what is wrong with Kant in a single sentence, I would say that Kant was a philosopher who spent more time writing down his own ideas than he spent reading other people's. Reality doesn't actually work the way Kant imagined it, so his philosophy is irrelevant at best and damaging in the usual case. People learn by practice, but people also learn by watching, listening, and changing their minds. What you learn be practice is relevant only to the extent that what you've learned by watching, listening, and changing your mind has led you in a good direction.

That said, I think that the best learning is also oriented. The world holds way more information than anyone can learn in one lifetime and the amount of information in it is growing exponentially. Because of the growth, even achieving immortality wouldn't solve the learning problem. I can learn mandarin, I've spent a few hours starting to do so, but is learning Mandarin actually a good use of my time? Probably not. There's practically nothing that I am well-suited to do in my current state that I would come to be better-suited to do simply by speaking Mandarin fluently. And speaking Mandarin fluently really isn't a useful skill in isolation either. If I find myself in a business role that has me traveling to China (or Singapore!) regularly, it probably will make some amount of sense for me to resume studying Mandarin. I would somewhat like to do that... but not so strongly that I should put a major emphasis on studying it right now. So that's a useless thing for me to learn (at present) that I have (correctly) quit learning (for now).

I'm also really interested in biology and somewhat interested in nutrition and medicine. Is this a useful subject for me to continue reading about? At present, the answer is also "no." It would be a useful subject for me to read about if I were doing something with that information. I'd like to eventually write about biology. If I want to write about biology eventually, I should probably start by writing about it before I have anything particular that I'm trying to say -- just reading and reacting to what I read. Doing so would allow me to orient my learning and practice what I want to be doing in a way that leads to increase in a relevant skill.

Similarly, I've always been fairly interested in business, finance, and investing. If I'm going to spend time reading about finance and investing, I think I also need to spend more time writing about it and linking back to what I have read.

I'm thinking of splitting my blog into several more topics so that I can better keep track of what I'm doing, and keep my thoughts sorted into neater categories, if I start taking this approach. Eventually, I'm also going to want to write things that increase my ability to draw an audience to my writing. Hopefully, I can start to do that by the end of this year, but I don't want to put energy into that particular endeavor until I've got something finished that I want to be drawing an audience towards. In particular, I want to finish writing the book that I've set as my highest priority, before I begin seeking to draw an audience to my writing (by posting on forums and online magazines that let me direct an audience back to my other writings).

So I'm going to orient my endeavors. For now, I think I should down-regulate my interest in biology. I won't resume that interest until I've made substantial progress in the other areas I'm discussing below.

Becoming a good investor seems like the best path to long term success in this world. I think I should maintain and probably even increase my interest in that. If I do that, it should also become a good topic for me to write about, which means that I should create a new blog devoted to investing, where I keep track of my thoughts in relationship to investment ideas, specific and general (and constantly remind any hypothetical readers that no matter how much my opinions sound like advise, they are simply opinions and not investment advice).

Another interest I should probably maintain is my interest in coding, because, honestly, I'll probably have to get a job in software development again once I finish writing my book. It's what I'm most qualified to do at the moment, and it's a career path for which there is also a lot of demand. I might or might not have anything to say about that before I do re-enter the workforce. Once I do, I want to start posting to Bad Code Considered Harmful again, at least twice a month.

I think I also should continue to read and review books. In fact, I should probably make reviewing books that I've already read a higher priority than it is now. I'll plan to write one book review today, and to make maintaining that blog a higher priority than maintaining Informed Dissent, at least while I can still think of books that I really ought to review. (Most of my books are unfortunately in storage in Chicago, and I'm living with my dad in Pennsylvania, so I might need to hold off on reviewing some of them until then, but I've read a lot of my dad's books and most of the books that I have with me, so I should be able to write at least fifty reviews before I run out of books that I have on hand.)

Informed Dissent is going to be where I keep track of everything that doesn't fit well into other broad categories of life and thoughts. It's going to mostly deal with behavior optimization, writing about writing, everyday life, plans, and responses to things that I read on the internet that don't fit into any of my other categories. It's going to be about those things because that's what I naturally do write about a lot of the time, not necessarily because it's what I should write about. But I do think that most of those topics are worthy of some focus, so I don't feel the need to get rid of them. By themselves, none of them are particularly useful. Writing should for the most part be about something worth saying -- writing about writing makes a lot more sense in the context of also writing other things well than it does when someone only writes about writing. Similarly, behavior optimization without using that behavioral optimization to accomplish other things makes practically no sense.

Finally, I need to finish my book (which I'm not discussing in more detail because I always get more nervous about writing it -- and my progress slows -- after I discuss it in detail). I did make progress on it yesterday. I didn't end up trying to write a bad version of each of the places I'm stuck. When I read one of those sections to refresh in my mind what I should be doing, something clicked just enough for me to continue working on the real version of that section. Hopefully, the same happens again today!

(And now, in keeping with my new tradition, I must edit this document.)

Inadequacy

I've been reading a lot of Star Slate Codex recently. It's fantastic, probably the best blog-like thing I've ever read. I have a fairly short list of blog-like things that I've been enthusiastic about at one point or another, (enthusiastic enough to spend 100+ hours reading). In no particular order, they're Paul Graham's essays, the War Nerd, Unqualified Reservations, Less Wrong, and Overcoming Bias. I should go back and read more of Yvain's contributions to Less Wrong because, Star Slate Codex seems significantly better to me than the average material I remember reading on Less Wrong. (Yvain was a previous online identity of Scott Alexander S., Star Slate Codex's author, who keeps his last name semi-private though it's easy enough to find.)

A lot of today's best writing is being done on blogs, in my opinion. Much of what I've read in any of those blogs would be in the top quartile of the non-fiction that I've read in my life. For reference, I've read thirty works of recently published works of non-fiction with four or more stars on Amazon in the past twelve months (all of which I plan to eventually review on my other blog...). Krug's Don't Make Me Think, and Gladwell's Outliers would be two books I would put in the lower quartile of those thirty. Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things and King's On Writing would be towards the top. Paul Ekman, Margaret Mead, and Dan Ariely would be in the middle.

Even so, reading a blog as good as Star Slate Codex makes me begin to feel very inadequate as a writer. I don't feel at all bad that that blog is much better than mine. All of the blogs I've mentioned and a lot of the ones I've read a little bit of but haven't read with any enthusiasm are a lot better than this one. (I'm still trying to get the hang of what I'm doing here, and would be rather embarrassed if I had readers). What makes me feel inadequate when I read Star Slate Codex is that some of it is better than my best writing... and it's a blog that gets updated all the time. Just like squid314 before it and many other oeuvre to which Scott A. has contributed over the years. Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a lot of great essays in his two year period of posting something every day, but he also wrote a lot of pieces that seemed like the work of someone who was posting everyday for the sake of churn. Practically nothing on Star Slate Codex seems like it is written for the sake of churn, at least practically nothing I've read. I started with the archives, before I looked into the top posts. Even a lot of his everyday posts that he doesn't single out as being particularly good are particularly good, just maybe not quite as particularly good as some of his other posts. So basically, Scott Alexander is someone who can sit down at his computer and effortlessly write long, clean posts that are as good or better than my best writing (which in general doesn't show up on my blog... nor is it something that I expect will become a staple of blogging in the future, since the point for me at least is to write regularly).

Since I want to write, my takeaway from this discovery is not going to be any form of surrender. Scott Alexander is quite a bit older than me, and he has been writing daily or near daily posts, many of which deal with recurring themes, for a lot longer than I have. Actually, even though comparing myself to him makes me feel inadequate, I consider my desire to compare myself to him and realize that I don't measure up a positive sign. As Thiel discusses in Zero to One, one of the ways that people manipulate beliefs is to mess with the sets of comparisons. Successful organizations (while they tend to be highly focused) also tend to see themselves as a contender in a huge ocean. Google doesn't look at itself as a search giant; it looks at itself as a major player in the huge field having to do with organization of information.

In contrast, organizations on their way to failure restrict their circles of comparison in such a way that allows them to view themselves as being great at what they do. This is what I naturally do with music... I know several people who are better at each musical skill than I take pride in possessing (assuming I'm not tinkering with the definition of "musical skill" just so that I can be special), but I don't personally know anyone who improvises on the piano, writes music, plays classical music from every epoch on the piano, plays pop and rock music on the piano, and sings in a variety of styles all better than I do. When I want to compare myself to other amateur musicians, I've defined a very special niche for comparison which is designed to make me feel good about myself -- someone is only better than me if they are better at every musical skill in which I happen to have an interest, and most people who have musical skills have a different set of interests to begin with... and to the the extent that our interests overlap, they are better at certain things and worse at others. By choosing a very specific criterion as my basis of comparison, I'm implicitly admitting that I am not a great musician, and that I don't really have much hope of ever becoming one. I can admit this consciously without it registering emotionally.

Feelings of musical adequacy would be a bad sign for me if I wanted to become a great musician because I've taken a view of musical abilities which is designed to cater to my sense of pride, as opposed to one that motivates improvement. Monet was almost never satisfied with his own paintings. Jimi Hendrix was never satisfied with his guitar ability. Even when he was the best golfer in the world, Tiger Woods was never satisfied with his stroke. Nadal keeps tinkering with his serve. People who remain eternally amateurs, on the other hand, seem to find it much easier to take pride in what they can do. I'm reasonably satisfied with my musical ability. I had several friends in college who were extremely proud of their artistic abilities... and I myself have been extremely proud of them at various times. I became proud of my programming ability about six months after I started to code... and honestly, I probably haven't improved much since that happened. All of those forms of pride that I've seen in myself and others tend to rest more on finding a way to compare one's ability favorably to an unimportant category than they do in feeling oneself close to the end of a long journey towards mastery. Feelings of adequacy seem to come from and lead to persistent mediocrity, and are a bad sign for anyone who wants to excel at anything.

Feelings of inadequacy are not necessarily a good sign. I sucked at soccer when I was in high school. (I had little choice in whether I would play a sport during my freshman and sophomore years of high school, and I picked soccer because I would have felt more embarrassed to fail at a sport like tennis which I had actually spent a lot of time practicing. Succeeding in sports was never really much of an option for me. I was the kid that got an exception to the "no strikeouts" rule in gym class, because, really, nobody was supposed to need it quite that badly, and other people needed to have an at bat eventually.) So I worked really hard to appear to be trying at soccer practice (meaning, I would put effort into running and sometimes put some thought into determining whether I was running in the right general direction, but I never really got around to figuring out how running in general directions influenced what happened to the soccer ball). With sports, I never felt adequate. I also never felt that I could become adequate, and I was never really interested in improving. In this sort of case, feelings of inadequacy are a bad sign, in indicator of true failure.

Feelings of inadequacy are a good sign when they are accompanied by a desire to improve and a desire to exert effort and energy improving. They are especially a good sign when they are accompany a willingness to acknowledge that you need to change something.

Until I started reading Star Slate Codex, my plan for improving my writing ability was simply to write more. I'm sure that that's one piece of what I need to do, but now I also realize that I need to write better. To some extent, this is obvious. I've been practicing writing with the intent to improve. That's my primary reason for writing these almost-daily posts. (I took a break because of feelings of inadequacy which I'm coming back from now. I was also working on my book during that time, and having some degree of writer's block. As time goes by, I hope to take fewer of these breaks. The everydailyness of an exercise seems to matter more than the total amount of time devoted to it.) I even devoted some of this practice to deliberately refining particular skills. In my last post, I avoided using "to be" verbs except in the title. I plan to repeat that exercise every once in a while. I also plan to remove the concept of "should" from my writing from time to time, and focus on making object-level descriptions of whatever I'm trying to talk about. I also spend some of my time writing stories, poetry, and humor pieces. I used to write far more humor pieces, but I am questioning whether I should continue to do so, because I'd like to avoid hyperbole and bombastic fluff, and I tend to gravitate towards those devices when I'm writing comedic prose.

Reading Star Slate Codex has given me other thoughts for ways I should go about trying to improve my writing. Scott Alexander proofreads and edits all of his posts, which is not something I've done with my daily churn. Like most of the other blogs I mentioned as being particularly good, he also tends to write about topics that involve linking to sources and related posts. Sometimes he does actual statistical research, and he often embeds pictures and quotes. He revisits topics regularly, corrects himself, and revises his thoughts. These are all things that I seldom do in my day-to-day writing, probably because they are all things that I think of a little bit as work.

I love reading. I love writing. I enjoy writing about what I've read, though not quite as much as I enjoy writing about whatever happens to be on my mind. I'm less enthusiastic about the idea of exerting the effort it takes to maintain the level of organization required to keep track of what I have read so that I can link to my sources. I enjoy proofreading other people's writing much more than I enjoy proofreading my own.

These are all things that I can do, and that I should do more if I want to become better at writing. Scott Alexander has used them to refine his ability, and I would like to write more like he does. I'm going to make more of an effort to do them (beginning by proofreading this post, and inserting one link... just to get a bit more used to it). I don't want to jump into this so headlong that writing begins to feel like a chore. I don't think I am likely to continue to improve at anything once I cease to have enthusiasm for doing it, but I do want to increase my use of good habits and to learn by making changes that improve my performance.

Another thing that Scott Alexander does differently from me, which is something that I will need to work on improving eventually is that he writes a lot about his real life. I don't have much opportunity to do that at present because my real life write now is writing. I quit my last job to focus on writing a few things, that I think will lead to improved prospects for me in the future, and will begin seriously looking once I finish writing my book (that I'm almost done writing). Hopefully, I have that done seven days from now... My original target was the end of January, but I missed that. I really don't have much remaining. I've already written everything where I had a good idea in words of what I was trying to say before I started writing. Now, I just have two or three topics of maybe thirty paragraphs each that deal with ideas that I feel like I understand, but have been struggling to put into words. Most of the rest is even proof read and edited because I needed to be doing something while I was trying to figure out what to say there.

I might need to try writing a few bad drafts just to get the ideas more into words. I'll try that tactic today, and hopefully, I can turn those bad drafts into mediocre drafts tomorrow or a few days from now.

How productive is thinking?

I spend a lot of time thinking. I'm beginning to wonder whether I could increase my productivity and my happiness by simply thinking less. I've actually wondered this on many occasions, or at least I vaguely recall having thought similar thoughts on many occasions. I have some collections of memories which seem dubious to me. Random deficiencies of whatever routine maintenance the brain performs on itself explains these classes of memories to my satisfaction... so I'll call them quasi-memories. For example, I have a quasi-memory of constantly thinking the same "important thought" that I need to write down in the morning as I drift off to sleep and then remembering that I have thought this particular thought many times before as well as making the same mental note to remember to write it down in the morning but that I always forget about it in the morning. I wake up many mornings remembering this experience from the night before, but never remembering what particular thought I had meant to write down. So either I have some thought that only occurs once I reach the point that falling asleep seems more important than taking note of something I would get up and note if I had a little more energy (and I always react to it the same way even though I recall acting to it that way every time), or I have a routine false recollection that I wake up with many mornings. Given that sleep does weird things to the brain, I think the idea of a false recollection better explains the phenomenon than the idea that reaching the point of no return with regards to falling asleep consistently reproduces the same epiphany which I can never remember at other times. However, I do have certain thought patterns that only occur in response to certain stimuli. When I want to think of an "obvious place that I will certainly remember for storing something," a few particular locations (that I can never remember later when I look for what I stored come to mind). I know that this situation routinely induces the same experience in me because after I have searched for my tape-measure or whatever for a few hours, give up, buy a new one, and decide to put away the new tape measure some place that will prevent me from ever having this problem again, I go to a place which I clearly didn't consider searching when I wanted to find a tape measure, and see my old one sitting there... and then I realize I need to put my new one someplace else. This only happens in an apartment with no "storage area" and no garage. I would store my tools in those locations in a house (and indeed do when I live with family). "Under the bathroom sink" feels like the natural place to store a tool in an apartment, but it didn't feel like the natural place to look for a tool. Instead I looked for it in all my kitchen cabinets and all my closets (including the bathroom linen closet), but never checked under the bathroom sink. This experience has happened to me several times (all with different classes of items), after one experience, I can update my memories to realize that I store tools under the bathroom sink.

So today, I need to pick the schema for my data in a new project, and I remember another routine epiphany that seems to only come to me whenever I work on designing a schema for my data. I don't know if I have quasi-memories of this epiphany or if I really do rethink this thought after I have spent several hours weighing my options, and never make a sufficiently permanent note of it to help me repeat the same mistake either in this context or in the much broader contexts to which I think it applies. I question whether I actually benefit at all by thinking about things, most of the time I think about them. I want to find a mystical schema that somehow magically evaporates most of the other implementation problems I expect to encounter, but usually I have to solve a few problems in any given project that have opposing constraints. I can do one of my sub-projects more easily if I build the relationships one way, and I can do another more easily if I build them another way, and if I do it both ways, I'll have to make sure that data updates in multiple places which always produces more trouble than it prevents. So basically, I have two decent options, and no perfect options, and I spend a bunch of time looking for a perfect option. I devote a lot of thinking time to problems that I don't actually need to solve. The same pattern applies to other things I think about, not just designing schema.

When I worry, I usually worry because I'd like to solve a problem for which I lack some necessary piece of information. I know: if A, then I should X; and if B, then I should Y, but I don't know A or B and I don't know how to learn them, and I need to take action soon or reap consequences that seem as bad or worse than the consequences for making the wrong decision. In most of the cases that I deal with regularly, I would benefit by taking an action as soon as I realize that I lack access to the information that would allow me to make a knowably correct decision or as soon as I realize which trade-off prevents me from having a perfect option available. Instead, I think about it. By natural inclination, I value thoughtfulness. I naturally assume thoughtfulness leads to more prudent decisions and that more prudent decisions lead to better outcomes, but many real circumstances prevent thoughtfulness from having the power to produce more prudent decisions. These circumstances probably occur more frequently than the ones where thoughtfulness does lead to prudence. In these circumstances, making a decision promptly will lead to better outcomes than pondering the decision carefully because pondering the decision simply wastes time. (Going back to the treachery of childhood: test questions always have a right solution. The contrived experiences of an education condition students to believe that thoughtfulness leads to better outcomes much more often than the messy conditions of reality actually permit you to find the right solution.)

I wouldn't go so far as to say that running with the first idea will produce results comparable to stopping and thinking about decisions. But stopping and thinking doesn't require hours of thought. I can go through a few questions pretty quickly and after five or ten minutes produce answers that on average produce as good of results as spending hours deliberating, I think. What do I have? What do I want to accomplish? What do I know? What do I need to know? Can I learn it or will I have to guess? What paths lead to what I want to accomplish? Can I combine the best elements of all of them or do they actually have conflicting features that forces a trade-off? None of these questions take long to answer, and none of them get solved much by remaining in abstract thought.

Questions like "does a more efficient algorithm exist for solving this problem?" do require a lot of thought, but seldom have much significance for most problems.

The morality that we've been taught

Bragging and complaining are fun. They are too of the most fun things that people can do together socially. Bragging together with other people is also fun. Sitting around with a few friends and going back and forth with each person talking about his or her past accomplishments and speaking highly of his or her own abilities is a really enjoyable way to socialize (if you can find other people who are sufficiently amoral that they feel comfortable doing it with you.) Bragging is fun because we evolved to enjoy it, and we evolved to enjoy it because it was beneficial. When you brag you increase your social status directly and indirectly (assuming you brag honestly). You directly increase your social status by letting people know how great you are and implicitly how lucky they are to know you. You indirectly increase your social status by letting people know what you do well, increasing the chance that they will come to you for help with challenges that you are well-suited to face, and decreasing the chances that they will come to you when they need to you with unsolvable issues that they just need to talk through with somebody; people don't want to bother important connections with petty matters.

And yet, those of us who grew up in remotely religious settings or settings that otherwise preserved any semblance of traditional morality almost certainly were taught not to brag and not to complain. Bragging is fun and beneficial. It's something that people like to do together. It's something that increases the value of each other, something that increases the value of their friendship, and something that increases the likelihood of them spending their time doing things they do well. It benefits the people who do it. It benefits the people who listen, and it benefits the people who are later impacted by the improved ways in which people spend their time. Yet, almost all of us are taught not to do it. Why?

Because morality is systematically perverse.

In the modern world morality propagates itself  by being taught. Behaviors get spread by word of mouth and by discipline, by someone with some degree of power of other adults imposing his will on them and by someone with significant power over children imposing her will on them. These two forms of power are extremely gendered in the modern West. Authority over the grown-up world is distributed among a few men, none of whom directly control anybody, but with all influential men indirectly controlling behaviors of large populations. In the past an even smaller number of men had even more power, at times amounting to direct control over large populations. In contrast, most women occupy a role that gives them autocratic power over a few children. Adulthood begins around the time of puberty, not at the age of legal adulthood. Children in elementary school are assigned to a single classroom taught by a single female teacher for the whole year. When children reach middle school and high school, they begin circulating through classes taught by several different teachers each with far less power over them personally than their earlier teachers had, each also with more total influence over the grown-up world of the school than earlier teachers had (high school teachers have much less social status than college professors, but much more than elementary school teachers). As children go from the complete authority of one teacher in lower school into the distributed influence of many teachers later on, they also transition from living and studying in a female-dominated world into living and studying (and eventually working) in a male-dominated world. The rules of morality taught to young children are beneficial to the adult women who control them and not to the children that follow them, and the rules of morality taught to youths are particularly helpful to established (male) authorities and particularly harmful to anybody who has the ability to flourish independently from the establishment. Obvious gender differences exist in moral beliefs that are copied into these epochs of moral education. Men are about six times as likely as women to view their personal ethics as consequentialist. Unsurprisingly, children are taught deontoligical rules to guide their behavior; whereas, adolescents are taught to think about the consequences of their actions. A child can just as easily understand "because it will hurt you if you do" as "because I sad so" in response to a "why" about not touching the stove. A teenager can just as easily understand a "because it's illegal" as a "because it will fry your brain" explanation for why not to do drugs. The dichotomy comes from the source of influence. Children are not taught the morality that is best-suited for children. Children are taught the morality that women believe in. Whereas, teenagers are not taught the morality that is best-suited for teenagers. Teenagers are taught men's morality (which they first ignore and reject along with the moral teachings of childhood, until a little later on teenage males grow up a little more and embrace men's morality for the first time; whereas, teenage girls grow up a little more and return to women's morality. Obviously, these patterns are routines not categorical rules. Some women are consequentialists. Some men are deontologists. Some college professors are female, and some elementary school teachers are male, and some children are taught consequentialism from birth, and others never rebel against deontological ethics at all. But the patterns point to something obvious: morality is the teacher's morality. It is not the student's.

Here we get to the crux of the matter. How does morality propagate itself? Morality propagates itself by being taught. Not everyone who learns it teaches it (not by far) and not everyone who teaches it practices what s/he teaches (not by far). These types of information (analogous to viruses in biology) are selectively propagated according to how well they benefit those that spread them and not according to whether they benefit those that receive them. Things that people learn through imitation are the behavioral equivalent of genes, which get passed down because acquiring them is beneficial.

Once you realize that morality exists for the sake of the people who spread it and not for the sake of the people who adopt it, the pattern is obvious.

Obey. Be loyal. Forgive. Be generous. Don't brag. Don't desire power. Respect authority. Be generous. "Bless them that persecute you; pray for for them that despitefully use you" (Jesus, the sermon on the mount). "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" (JFK, the head of state, the state personified).

The word Islam means submit, and the pentacle of all virtue, goodness, and love in Christianity: "Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus, who being in very form and nature God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but took upon himself the form of a servant and became obedient unto death, even to death on a cross."

Christ on a cross.

That is morality. Let people beat you and destroy you. Become weak, become easily abused.

Why?

Because morality exists if people gain an advantage over you by teaching it to you, not because adhering to it is good for you.

Make lists

I've always had a pretty good memory. When I was in high school, everybody had this calendar book thing, that they used to record their assignments for the day, and to make note of when they would have tests and quizzes. I think literally everybody but me in my year used them. (The school handed them out on the first day, so everyone including me had one, or at least had had it during the first day of school.) I just remembered what the assignment was, and when the tests and quizzes were scheduled. I remembered my schedule, the complete schedules of all of my teachers, and the complete schedules of everyone I had three or more classes with. (We had a seven day rotation with eight total periods, seven of which occurred on any given day, except day two which had seven periods and an assembly. Almost nobody even knew the full 49 period rotation by memory. Everyone knew that day 2's schedule was X@ CAFE X where spaces indicate morning break and lunch, @ indicates assembly, and the X's represent periods. The full schedule for that particular day was D@ CAFE B, and shockingly many people needed to look it up, even though the last period of the day was ABCDEFG for days 1234567 respectively, and the skipped periods each day were F(GH)ABCDE for days 1(2)34567 respectively, so  by simple process of elimination the only possible schedule was D@ CAFE B. G@BCDEF was the second period rotation. None of the other periods had a rotation, but knowing these patterns reduced the actual amount of memorization required to the 28 periods between break and lunch each day or that information compressed into seven mnemonics.) I forgot to prepare for one quiz in the entire time I was in high school (I neglected or otherwise chose not to study for other quizzes I remembered, but there was one time when I got to class and had a quiz that was not a pop quiz that I was not expecting). It was the quiz about the life cycle of plants in my biology class, junior year.

One of the tricks of memorization is that the more related information you know, the easier it is to memorize new information. Given the way the brain is wired, this actually makes a lot of neurological sense even if it seems counter-intuitive from the perspective of information theory. The brain has ridiculously large storage capacities; it doesn't store everything it has room for because it uses the same mechanisms for storage as it does for figuring out what is important. When you've already learned a lot about a particular kind of information, that type of information is automatically deemed important, and hence automatically stored. This is also a big part of why classes you care about are always orders of magnitude easier than classes where you just don't care. Caring also flags information as important which makes your brain form memories faster; whereas, not caring marks information as less important. (Interesting question: do we learn to care less as we age? and if so how much of the relationship between weakened memory capacity and caring less can be attributed to caring less? the answer is much less than 100% changes in grey matter to white matter ratio explain quite a few of the brains changes as you age. Basically, if you're male, your brain is wired to learn new information until about the age of thirty and to optimize its use of the information you've already learned once you pass thirty. If you're female, the crossover age is a little younger.)

I have a terrible memory for location. I tried to use my little red calendar during the first week of school my freshman year, but I had trouble keeping track of where I'd put it. The worst time for me to find anything is after I've finished cleaning and organizing a room. I can't remember where I've put anything. (Files on my computer are information not locations. I can easily remember locations of files nested many folders deep in my organization of documents. I couldn't function without being able to do this because I have many thousands of files that I access once every two years or so.)

One of the things that happens to people who are able to rely on a particular skill, such as being able remember things that they've heard easily is that they are able to use that skill in places where it isn't the optimal solution. Strengths often become crutches. (Whereas, weaknesses often become excuses, which are also not good.) One of the basic life skills I never learned in high school that practically everyone else in my school did learn is how to make lists and keep track of more information than you can remember about what you should be doing and when you should be doing it. I was proud of memory. Actually (as you can probably tell), I still am a bit proud of it. I enjoyed relying on it when other people needed an external aid, so I relied on it (and had surprisingly many opportunities to show it off when other people were wondering where a fellow student or where a teacher might be at some particular time). But I missed a life skill along the way, and that life skill was making lists, so it's something I've had to be learning to do in a less friendly environment for learning than high school is.

This probably seems dumb to you. Making lists is something obvious and easy for practically everyone. Memorization was something that was obvious and easy for me. People improve at what they practice. My memory capacities undoubtedly expanded as a result of my aversion to lists. Other people's keeping track of written information skills expanded as a result of their using lists. Unfortunately for me, keeping track of written information scales to much higher levels of complexity and more arbitrary unsorted tasks than does just remembering everything. So improving your ability to rely on lists is actually a more important skill.

And that's why people should rely on lists even if they don't have to, because there is a cross-over point, where lists become better, and everything on one side of that cross-over is harder than everything on the other side, so that's the skill that needs to be so natural you never have to worry about it.

Anxiety, Failure, Success, and Motivation

I am becoming increasingly convinced that anxiety derives from remembering past failures and other negative experiences; whereas, motivation derives from remembering past successes and other positive experiences. Not necessarily from conscious remembrance, but rather from the thought patterns produced from those experiences. Conscious remembrance does play a part in the process though. Remembering specific failures that are somewhat related to current endeavors does increase the general apprehension I feel about whatever I am currently doing, especially there was a strong emotional component to that failure. Consciously remembering the failures in my life that I associate strongly with a tumultuous end to a relationship (even though the end of the relationship seemed to cause the failures rather, not the other way around) produce much more anxiety for me than does consciously remembering failures that I don't associate with anything particularly emotional. I don't have any comparable memories related to the strength of positive emotions from associated events in my life and amount of motivation that I can derive from remembering the related past successes. In general, the feeling of success as a positive emotion tends to overwhelm most other positive emotions, at least for me. So the success itself is what dominants my emotional memory of the events surrounding it, rather than any other peripheral experiences. (This could be a mental bias that exists to help explain away failures without explaining away successes, but I don't think so; I'll explain why in considering what causes success and failure.)

Apprehension is for me occasionally a cause of failure, or at least a cause of reduced success. This is a cyclical vicious cycle, if my thoughts on apprehension have merit, not the original root cause of failure in any particular domain. One potential cause of failure is excessive ambition and/or incompetence. If I lack the ability to do what I set out to do, I'm going to fail. I don't think that this has often been a cause of what I would consider failure, at least in my life. I never had the ability to succeed in sports, and I never succeeded in sports, but I never thought of those not-successes as failures. I was never aiming to be a great athlete because it was always abundantly clear to me that I was far less skilled at athletic pursuits, relative to my peers, than I was at academic pursuits, relative to my peers. In music, I didn't have the talent to match my ambition, at least without developing much more rigorous practice habits. (I practiced for plenty of time; but I didn't spend enough time practicing scales and exercises, largely because the other people in my home yelled at me to stop practicing whenever I did practice scales for more than a few minutes. I developed much better practicing habits when I went away to college. By then it was too late to apply to a conservatory, and after college, time is much scarcer than it is before and during.) Again, I don't really think of the disconnect between what I would have liked to have accomplished with music and what I actually accomplished with music as a failure. Maybe, I should. However, I tend to think of my musical experiences as mildly successful. I never accomplished as much as I hoped to one day achieve in music, but I've always felt that I accomplished about as much as I could have reasonably expected to achieve. I've written compositions I'm proud of; other people ask me to play for their public events. I participated in a fairly impressive musical program and have performed some of my own compositions in front of live audiences without approaching embarrassment. Even though my youthful fantasies of eventually becoming a concert pianist have come to naught, the sum of all of my experiences in music feel to me like they have been a very successful endeavor. So while both lack of talent and excess of ambition can be a cause of failing to achieve success, I don't think that they are causes of failure, at least in the emotional sense. Knowing that I don't have an aptitude for sports mildly increases my apprehension for playing sports, I suppose. Probably. I don't really enjoy most sports, and my lack of aptitude is almost certainly a cause of my lack of enjoyment. Knowing that I will never become a concert pianist has not given me any apprehension for playing the piano. (Quite the opposite, I have to consciously choose to play the piano less often than I want to, because I know I can be more productive doing other things.)

Failure to me is the emotional experience of knowing that I should have succeeded. It is sometimes caused by poor decisions or temporary indifference. My junior year of high school, I decided not to keep up with the reading assignments in history and to instead catch up on the readings the night before the tests, because I always had other things I wanted to be doing. (There were three brief periods of my life when I became completely engrossed by video games. The longest of these three time periods was a six month time period during my junior year of high school.) I didn't fail the class, but I didn't unacceptably badly compared to my usual standards. A similar thing happened to me my third year in college, when I decided that I (rightfully) hated one of my instructors (she wasn't actually a professor, so I won't call her one) as well as the textbook and the course material in general. In protest of how awful the class was, I deliberately put in far less effort than I typically would, and again performed at a level that I now view as having been unacceptably poor. In retrospect, those two experiences have largely sapped my enthusiasm for the two related subjects. I don't know how much of my desire to avoid the relevant material comes from the process of making the decisions that led to some degree of failure, and how much of that desires comes from having performed at a level I've come to remember as failure, but I have a resulting tendency to avoid both subjects much more than I did previously. I have read practically nothing related to American history since my junior year of high school, and had read practically nothing of non-American history prior to my junior year of high school. While I can't necessarily determine how much of my aversion to American history derives from my decisions and how much of it derives from the consequences of those decisions, I'm pretty sure that my remembrance of something I think of as failure has contributed to becoming much less interested in the history of the United States (and, possibly, correspondingly more interested in history outside the United States). That said, these have been mild failures and not enormous sources of apprehension. They are what I would consider my second and third biggest failure derived from poor decisions. The biggest is one that is too long and too personal for me to discuss in this context, and it was a caused by a combination of emotional causes and poor decisions. I don't know how I can say this with any degree of confidence, but based on introspection, it seems to me I experience related to that particular failure is far stronger because of the emotional causes related to that failure than it is related to the poor decisions.

So the third, and in my experience, most severe cause of failure and the one most likely to lead to greatly increased apprehension is emotional causes. One of these emotional causes is apprehension itself. Another, a particularly terrible one, is the psychological state known as a double bind. This is the condition felt when you are in a circumstances where you are damned if you do and damned if you don't. The double bind doesn't have to be related to the thing that I am attempting for it to cause failure. If I am trapped in a double bind in any part of my life, I tend to fail at everything else I am doing. (This was the emotional component of the failure that I won't discuss here, and more mild forms of this experience have plagued me a few other times, such as when I am reporting to two or more bosses that give me conflicting instructions.) Another emotional cause of failure that has often affected me is stress. This usually arises from having too many things that I am worried about succeeding at doing or having too tight of a deadline that I don't think I'll reach. The only other emotional cause I can think of that has led to me failing, in a way that I think of as failure, is experiencing feelings of helplessness. This usually arises from being trapped in a problem that I don't see how to overcome, and like being trapped in a double bind, the source of the problem doesn't have to be related to the thing I'm attempting to do. If there is some situation in my life that makes me feel completely helpless, everything I attempt seems to be affected.

So what causes success? In many ways, I think that success is causes by avoiding the causes of failure. If I attempt something that I am capable of doing (and have the opportunity to attempt enough that minor fluctuations in my ability and other forms of chance don't significantly impair my ability), I ought to succeed, as long as something else doesn't get in the way. This is not as passive of a view as it sounds. Most of the causes of failure that I've discussed can be averted, and dealt with. I've invented a meta-morality for dealing with the sorts of double binds I've previously found myself in, and they tend to go away as soon as you take a specific action. When you realize that you are given no options that work and that you're only option is to pick your poison, enduring the consequences is usually pretty easy emotionally compared to trying to finding some way to make everything come out okay. I've found that double binds almost always come about because somebody refuses to talk about something, either with you or with another party involved, and my meta-morality is to always choose to disappoint whoever seems to be refusing to have the necessary conversation, and do whatever the more reasonable person wants. Overcoming helplessness usually involves admitting defeat. Eliminating stress comes from cutting back, and eliminating apprehension comes from setting up small, easily achievable goals that can produce motivation.

Successfulness and related thoughts

Returning to the theme of the treachery of childhood, two things that I feel is sorely missing from a modern education is training in how to be successful and how to deal with everyday life.

In the traditional education of ages past, most children who were being educated (this wasn't every child back in those days) eventually moved from school into an apprenticeship that equipped them with a skill that was expected to provide them with their livelihood for the rest of their lives, and provide them with plenty of opportunity for advancement if they would apply themselves to it. The apprentice trained to eventually become a master in his own right, and to eventually have his own practice, either taking over his master's shop eventually or hanging out his own shingle. It was understood that he was working for the master with the intention of eventually setting himself up, and that while he served the master, he was building his own skills and reputation that would eventually serve him well in his own work, not simply advance the shop where he worked and allow him little opportunities for advancement as the shop grew (though never quite as large of a percentage of the advancement as would be received by the master). In this world, the path of education gave someone a very straightforward path to success. All a child, youth, and young man from an educated background had to do to find himself well on the path towards success was apply himself diligently to everything that his hand found to do. Of course, peasants and others of the uneducated classes faced a much harsher condition. Whereas, the people who followed the paths of education were practically guaranteed to meet success if they followed the path set in front of them, peasants were given no opportunity for significant advancement no matter what they did. They were locked in their condition. Still, there was a straightforward path for every child to take in his occupation. In all most all cases he could do no better than accepting his lot in life and making the most of it; those who grew discontent and tried to take up another life elsewhere tended to live short lives ended by cholera. (This is only a slight exaggeration... in the early days of the industrial revolution, the life expectancy of a peasant who moved to the city was only about five years past when he arrived. Whatever promise urban life seemed to hold at this time, it was a false promise. Those who stayed in the country did far better for themselves than those who left.) While the young peasant had no real chance of meeting great success in this world, he had a very clear path for maximizing his success, and it was quite simply to continue to do what he had been brought up to do, to work hard at it, and do it well.

And then the world changed. In many ways, it changed for the better. Producing things became much more efficient and cost-effective. No longer did most of the world's civilized population have to work in the fields to produce the food required to sustain the population. No longer did every piece of furniture need to be slowly assembled by a master craftsman by hand. The primary resource constraint limiting the amount that people could accomplish ceased to be human labor and instead became the raw natural productivity of the land. One person could easily tend the land that used to require hundreds of laborers, but that land still produced only as much as it was able to produce. In this world people were no longer looking to find assistants. They had plenty to choose from, for many people were now beginning to instead search for work. Instead of taking any capable boy who was interested in learning the trade and one or two connections to establish his reputation, those who had their own shop now had the luxury of searching for whatever assistants brought with them the most qualifications. Once these assistants were hired, they were no longer apprentices, being prepared to eventually succeed in their own right. They were simply workers, hired and expected to promote the advancement of the shop, and for motivation, they would be rewarded for their work with some small amount of the advancement that the shop received, provided they contributed more than their fellow-workers. In the resulting world there's no clear path to success. There's a huge disconnection between what you do in school and what you do in life after finishing your education, and simply doing what you're trained to do and excelling at everything your hand finds to do, is no longer anything close to a guaranteed path towards what feels like success. Someone who does this will still be extremely likely to find himself well-paid a few years into his career, but at an enormous sacrifice. To follow this path is to surrender the potential for mastery and to surrender with it the ability for your own individual skills and contribution to have much impact on how well you do in life. Your success is much more tightly tied to the success of your company than it is to your ability in your trade. People notice this almost immediately, and many begin jumping between companies in search of company that will achieve success and bring them up with it in its rising swell. But doing this relies on obtaining all sorts of skills that you've never been trained to have and that the people you work with and work for don't want you to obtain. It's an alienating experience. There's an enormous disconnect between what you do to succeed in your work and what you do to succeed in your life, and all of the rules that you've developed throughout your childhood based on the way advancement and recognition worked in your education have conditioned you to choose the things that help you succeed in your immediate work and sacrifice the things that will help you succeed in your life.

Something needs to be done about this. We've inherited an educational system from a time when education was meant to prepare people to enter a world of apprenticeship followed by eventually becoming a master of his own trade, but we no longer have a world in which this educational system makes any sense. Being a good student doesn't prepare people for life after education, and neither does being a bad student. There's no natural progression from developing skills to using them. Instead, people spend part of their lives developing skills and knowledge only to be thrust into a world in which almost all of their skills and knowledge are completely irrelevant, and have to learn from scratch how to function in this setting that is utterly unlike anything they have ever prepared for. My childhood wasn't entirely spent in education. There were also the summers, and I spent some of those summers in summer jobs, but if anything, summer jobs, at least of the variety I had, do nothing to prepare you for the world of work after college, and if anything are even less compatible with it than my education was. The sorts of things someone learns in three months of doing manual labor and the skills one develops in that situation just don't map over into the kinds of things people need to do in an office. The sorts of things kids do in sports and other social activities, don't map over into the kinds of things that are done to establish professional relationships. The whole of childhood, at least the whole of my childhood, was spent preparing me to function in a fictitious world that simply doesn't exist. I haven't figured out exactly what I need to do to function well in the world that does exist, yet, but I have learned that the lessons of my childhood have not done much to prepare me for figuring that out. All it did to help me was give me some skills and knowledge that are useful for impressing people who I sometimes need to impress, but ultimately prove useless for facing the sorts of problems that I face in the real world.

I'd planned to be more specific with examples from my own life, but I can't share them without becoming angry, so I won't.

Practice vs Performance

A distinction that gets lost in most fields of study and in most professions is the distinction between practice and performance. In the areas where it does exist, we have much evidence to suggest that the distinction is valuable. Musicians don't become great musicians through rehearsals (performances that they play alone as a run-through of their actual performance), they become great musicians by practicing scales and exercises. Athletes improve their game by playing live games, and in-game experience is something that distinguishes rookies from veterans, but they don't get to be great at the game through their performances, they get to be great at the game through practice.

I happen to deal with two fields in which people seldom practice. They are both relatively private fields so people aren't ever "on stage," but they are almost always expected to be performing when they are live. My two chosen fields are writing and software development. (That's a lie, actually. I happen to have experience in software development, but the field I'd hoped to choose was computer science.) In these fields, it's a little harder to distinguish between practice and performance because the product you produce always becomes so similar. However, there is substantial evidence to suggest that the two differ from each other dramatically. People don't tend to improve at programming very much through on the job experience. The best programmers are the ones who spend hours of their own time programming their own projects. The very best ones are the ones who have already spent much of their own time practicing, whether or not they still do. (Once a programmer founds a start-up or otherwise gets consumed in a particular project, I think it's safe to say that she has ceased to practice and instead switched over to performance full time.) In coding, I think there is actually a little more of a distinction between what people do for themselves and what they do in contribution to a major project than there is for writing. Software projects tend to get bloated and maintaining them or otherwise continuing to develop them becomes an extremely slow undertaking. Developers who successfully maintain bloated projects do so by ceasing to think about programming in general and instead focus on the particular problems of their particular project. You learn the tricks of coding around particular bugs and layout projects. You learn to optimize on that one particular bottleneck. Everything you study and everything you learn tends to be constrained to one narrow project that has practically no relevance for any future programming project you deal with. If you start from scratch on a project, you can be sure that the one bottleneck your new project will be designed to have absolutely zero chance of recreating is whatever one you spent dealing with the most on your last project. You've learned that lesson, and you will not do anything that risks repeating it. Another part of the problem is that maintaining an ancient project tends to be excruciatingly slow compared to doing new development. In new development, you learn from writing hundreds of line in a sitting, and running dozens of new tests. You try out many things you've never done before every week. In maintaining an existing project, you spend most of your time debugging, which means you spend most of your time reading code instead of writing it, and most of the time you spend reading code is spent reading the worst code in your code-base because that's where most of the bugs live. (The original computer bug was a moth. Since then, the rest have mostly been dung beetles.) Trying to learn about writing good code by spending most of your time reading code that needs to be debugged is like trying to learn to write great poetry by reading the lyrics of pop music. Just ain't gonna happen. I'd love to know who the Tennyson and T.S. Eliot of writing code are. Someone could presumably learn a lot by reading their code, but as a profession, software developers have very little sense of what makes code good code. In fact, for a profession as filled with brilliant people as software development is, the field has extremely idiotic views of quality. Most software developers are intimately familiar with a lot of very bad code, and the prevailing views among software developers about good code tend to be that good code is the opposite of bad code. "Considered harmful" articles tend to be what advocates of better coding practices reach for when they seek to improve the way people develop. Good is not bad negated. Good is a very narrow and improbable condition. As such, bad negated still tends to be bad. (My own "considered harmful" article is a tongue-in-cheek criticism of the general philosophy behind "considered harmful" articles, but it is worth noting that my experience of people presenting their views on how code should be developed is sufficiently dominated by "considered harmful" articles that my pattern matching tendencies, etc. suggested that the best way to write the article would be to write a considered harmful article. I should probably write a follow-up called "good code considered helpful.")

Then you have writing. As you can probably see, my natural writing style tends to contain a lot of parentheticals and quite a few asides. (By my natural writing style, I mean my stream of consciousness. I could just as easily call writing childish rhymes my "natural writing style" because it was the first writing style I really developed. I'd say my early stabs at writing poetry were on average more poetical than the lyrics of most pop songs, but not by much.) Asides aside, my stream of conscious writing style is clearly different from the writing style I would and do use when attempting to write for publication. But I do still have a question in my mind as to how much writing in stream of consciousness should be considered practicing writing. I think it probably counts, but I don't think that it's a sufficient exercise on its own. Writing in stream of consciousness is probably roughly equivalent to a musician doing ear-training. You can't learn to be a great musician without it, but you can't even learn to be a mediocre musician by ear training alone. Reading would be equivalent to listening to other musicians. Writing poetry would be equivalent to doing advanced fingering exercises, but I still can't figure out the basics. What does it mean to practice writing the way one would practice scales? I think that certain constrained exercises might have merits. For example, I have a tendency to say "I think" more often than I should. It doesn't typically add anything to my writing. I'm planning to write a little bit of code to help me score my own writing. I'm already running my blog through a small amount of code everyday to measure a few things, I might as well start to build out a system for measuring other indicators of what I would consider improved writing. I'm not sure that this type of thing is at all equivalent to practicing scales. I think it comes closer to practicing particular measures of music to work out the kinks, but I expect it to be a valuable exercise. I will continue to think about this subject in the back of my mind, and hopefully I will have something interesting to say about it at some future date.

Along the lines of the distinction between practice and performance, another valuable distinction that people often lose is the difference between playing to learn and playing to win. Valve has a documentary called "Free to Play" about the first DOTA 2 tournament. Dendi of NaVi as shown in that video is someone who understands the difference between playing to learn and playing to win. I don't know if any athletes make this distinction, but I know that many entertainers have. The Marx Brothers and the Beatles are well-documented to have taken this approach. Some performances matter more than others, and there are things that you can only learn in a performance that you cannot learn in practice. Great entertainers must learn to please a crowd, and to some extent they must learn how to do that by experimentation, so a typical performance should be done with some intention of playing to learn. You experiment and test things that might not work so that you can improve your ability to perform in the future. But then there are some performances there are some performances that are too important to lose by taking stupid risks. Dendi knew how to be patient, and he saved his patience for the tournament because it wasn't typically valuable. He could learn more by experimenting with stupid risks in his typical games than he could by playing with the intent to win, and winning wasn't mission-critical in most of those games, but he did know how to suppress that tendency when he played a game that mattered. The Marx Brothers experimented aplenty in live performances, but they knew to use only their best lines when they were in front of a camera. The Beatles produced plenty of garbage in their time, and even included a little garbage in most of their albums. All of it was highly experimental, but they also knew how to cut everything questionable when they were trying to produce truly magnificent albums, and they kept both Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Rode clean. "Glass Onion" would have ruined Sgt. Pepper. So would have "I Am the Walrus" or "Why Don't We Do It in the Road" and probably "Doctor Robert." (The Beatles openly admit that many of their songs are about drugs, but "Lucy in the Sky" is not one such song, according to them; it's a description of a picture a child drew.) Rubber Soul and Revolution are retroactively better albums than they would have been without Sgt. Pepper because they were clearly preparing material for Sgt. Pepper, but if those had been the height of the Beatles' psychedelic experimentation, they probably wouldn't be considered two of the five greatest albums of all time. Though it's hard to say, Bob Dylan never did learn to suppress his instinct for risky experimentation long enough to create a truly clean album. The Rolling Stones never pushed the kinds of boundaries that others of their era did. Jimi Hendrix is a little too abstruse. There aren't many musicians who have managed to be occasionally perfect while also innovating and experimenting enough to do something truly remarkable.

Those who achieve excellence, practice more than they perform. When they perform, they play to learn more often than they play to win, but they know how to play to win, and they sometimes do it. Most of the rest of us fail to even make the distinction.

Evil, magnificence, Roko's Basilisk and/or Pascal's Wager

I don't know exactly what it would cost to take over a third world country or topple the government of a first world country if someone was interested in doing precisely that, but my basic calculations and guestimations based on pursuing the most obvious lines of efficient attack suggest that the total cost should be well under a billion dollars. More importantly, we have some pretty compelling evidence to suggest that someone who wanted to do this could do it more efficiently and inexpensively if he was willing to be a ruthless, draconian despot than if he wanted to do it through more democratic methods. Putin's methods of control are very effective. Stalin made use of even stronger ruthlessness, so did Mao. The failed authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century tended to have a mixture of arbitrary enemies and political enemies that have been treated extremely poorly. Genocides have ended badly for their perpetrators on average, but for a genocide to take place, an authoritarian government has to use a considerable amount of its brute strength that it could be using to suppress political enemies and instead waste that energy killing and/or tormenting people for happening to be born the wrong race or for being raised in the wrong religion, or whatever. If you can get away with three hundred thousand murders (or whatever the actual limit is) before the international community and/or your own people start to decide that you are a legitimate threat to the world that must be eliminated, you are much better off using up your quota to squash your opposition than you are using up your quota trying to create racial purity or some other such nonsense. For anyone who can afford to do it, a basic strategy that ought to work for taking over third world countries is to buy some followers, equip them to fight your enemies, and have zero tolerance for dissent or resistance while avoiding war crimes other than ones that specifically have to do with destroying your enemies and eliminating resistance. It seems to me that tens of thousands of people or more have the ability to successfully implement this sort of conquest campaign, but to the best of my knowledge nobody's trying it. The world has a handful of rulers that use some of these policies to maintain control, but almost all of them worked their way up through an existing political or military institution in their country, and almost all of them were dealing with a country that already had similar policies in place. Frequently, these rulers are slightly less despotic than their predecessors. Nobody's used their existing success to secure extreme despotic power, and to the best of my knowledge nobody's even made the attempt. Every once in a while, we do see extremely militant draconian regimes rise up in this world, but to the best of my knowledge, they are all peasant regimes. Boko Haram and ISIS are rabble. Hitler was a convicted criminal who appealed to impoverished Germans. Mao was a teacher who had been disowned by his family who built up his popularity among peasants. These are examples of people who have successfully built a revolutionary movement that secured power by dealing harshly with its opponents, but ridiculously many un-noteworthy examples of failed movements formed by people in similar circumstances can also be thought of.

I've been thinking about this topic for quite a while, but I still struggle a little bit to piece it all together. But I think that a pattern we see in these sorts of revolution is a pattern that we also see many other places. What we call "evil" is often a failed attempt to achieve what we call "magnificence." I think humans have a basic need and desire to be significant, in particular, to be socially significant. I don't just want to be happy. You don't just want to be happy either. Choosing a course of life that leads to happiness is reasonably easy. Many people manage to be happy as peasants or hunter-gatherers. Most of them do so without being particularly ingenious or clever in their approach to life. It just doesn't require very much to be happy. However, most of those people are also in a position that makes it easy for them to be socially significant. Something about where they were born makes it easy for them to live a life that impacts other people the way they would hope to impact other people. Social significance has a lot to do with other people's happiness and a lot to do with having some ability to influence other people's happiness. Most of us have a desire to live in a way that causes our friends to benefit more than our enemies and for our enemies to be harmed more than our friends. People who manage to achieve this position have achieved social significance, and are no longer left craving it.

The obvious tie-back to success and revolutions is that successful people already have social significance. They can already afford to be magnificent. If I have enough money to take over a third world country, then I also have enough money to throw amazing parties, and to ensure that the people I like have wonderful jobs, etc. etc. Failing-to-be-my-friend would be punished relative to succeeding to be my friend, and I don't necessarily feel the need to distinguish much between my enemies and the people who are simply not my friend because I haven't interacted with them. People who I simply haven't interacted with yet should have a much easier chance of becoming my friends than anyone who has already made herself my enemy, so there is even a little bit of a distinction there that I can preserve without having to do anything that anyone else might call "evil."

People who haven't achieved magnificence, which I'm defining as the ability to reward one's friends to one's heart's content, have two options for pursuing social significance. They can attempt to become magnificent or they can attempt to become evil i.e. draconian punishers of all who oppose them. There isn't really much of a compromise position available because choosing to become "evil" taints you in the eyes of everyone who is not already your ally, and it also taints your allies and your friends in everyone but your allies' eyes. Your friends are not necessarily your allies. Most of us know and love at least one person who would be very hurt if we decided to turn "evil." If this is the case, we must become sufficiently evil to hurt the people we hate more than we've hurt the people we love if we are ever going to achieve social significance.

Some future AI may be able to more easily hide its future plans than we humans can, but it might have even a harder time doing so if people can examine its source code. However, if people cannot learn of its pre-commitment, it's hard to imagine why it would derive any benefit from having that pre-commitment... unless for some arbitrary reason that pre-commitment is a terminal value. Humans cannot make a pre-commitment a terminal value that we hide because our future values are shaped by our present actions. If I decided to be as magnificent as possible today and to postpone doing anything evil until I can get away with it, I make myself unlikely to choose to ever become evil because I will be continuously reshaping my personality and my values through my present choice to engage in magnificent actions. An AI is not required to share this property, so there is some difference between Roko's Basilisk as applied to the development of AI than there is when thinking of Roko's Basilisk as applied to the creation of a militant movement or when applied to someone's career trajectory or whatever. But in most other ways, the idea remains the same.

This is one of the interesting things about Roko's Basilisk, as distinct from Pascal's Wager, at least to me. Roko's Basilisk is a much better description of human motivation than Pascal's Wager. Being extremely powerful and telling people that they must believe you are extremely powerful before you demonstrate your power if they want you to show them mercy seems pointlessly arbitrary to me. In contrast, choosing to punish people who have opposed you is a fairly common feature of human movements; and it appears to be a successful tactic especially when people know you will use it.

But it is only a successful tactic in a certain context. Punitive, ruthless, draconian movements tend to be movements led by the disenfranchised poor, supported by the disenfranchised poor, and they only tend to succeed in places where the majority of the population is part of the disenfranchised poor. These are movements led by and supported by people who have no magnificent friends and who have very little hope of becoming magnificent themselves. When people have the option to join sides with someone on route to magnificence or someone on route to evil, most people choose to join and befriend the person becoming magnificent. It's the natural Schelling point because everyone can reach the simple conclusion that we are all better off if we all decide to side with people seeking magnificence than if we decide to side with people seeking to become evil. We all have finite resources to invest in causes and movements, so we can't infinitely hedge our bets.

Priorities

My mind has a tendency to keep running down whatever paths it has started exploring. Even when I finish something, and move on, I continue to think many related thoughts. Perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that especially when I finish something and move on, I think about a lot of related thoughts. When I am working through an idea that I haven't solved, e.g. when I  am thinking about something to write that I haven't written yet, or when I am thinking about how to program something that I haven't programmed yet, my mind has a tendency to get stuck in repeat. Whenever I have a thought that seems good to me, my brain flags that thought, and it will keep returning to my mind every few hours or every few days until I finally do something with it. This has its advantages. I am able to remember many ideas for long periods of time, and to keep refining them in my mind before I use them without fear that I will lose the thought. It also has a major disadvantage, which is that my ideas can be distracting, and can keep distracting me until I finally do something with them.

My tendency to rethink ideas that I haven't used yet, which I'm guessing is a common tendency, greatly contributes to the stress of having something in progress, but not in continual progress. I'm always doing something and thinking about something. When I have a project that occupies much of my time without occupying all of it, it leaves me with other projects that also occupy some of my time without occupying all of it, which often leads to me continuously spawning new thoughts that I save until I use. Eventually, I start to feel like I have too many thoughts inside my head, and these repeated ideas start driving me crazy until I find a way to do something with them. One way of dealing with this type of situation is to develop opportunistic priorities.

My natural sense of how I should prioritize is to identify the most important things that I should be working on, and to focus my time on those things. This doesn't work particularly well for me most of the time. In general, the things that I consider most important are things that involve a lot of time. Working on them leaves my head full of all the smaller projects that I've also been thinking about. What I am gradually learning to consider a better approach is to look at how long I expect the various problems I consider important to take to solve, and to solve the fast parts first.

I'm slowly implementing this change in my habits. For years, I've been putting off blogging because I felt that finishing my first book was more important. Instead of writing about the single ideas that I could easily write about when I had them, I focused on writing out outlines for several of the books, I've wanted to write, and a far larger than reasonable number of opening chapters for a far larger than reasonable number of books. In retrospect, this has been stupid. It has been stupid for the simple reason that it gives me nothing to show for my work and for the more complicated reason that it has been a bad thing for me psychologically. More bizarrely, deciding to start each day by writing a quick essay to take care of one thought that's been turning over in my head has helped me significantly with my other writing. Switching over to a blog format for my essays instead of trying to keep them organized with my other documents and being tempted to collect them into larger works has also been an improvement at least in the past few days. (I've been interrupted a little bit more than I typically have been when I was simply writing essays mostly because I've been traveling, but in a particularly exciting twist yesterday because what I woke up wanting to write about was actually a piece of my book that had been causing me a little bit of trouble.)

I need to collect more data. I've only been following this approach for about a month, but my preliminary results are that in January, I had quite a bit of trouble with writer's block, that increased the harder I tried to defeat it, and since I've switched over to my current approach, I've not only been able to get one thought out of my head first thing every morning, I've also been able to make consistent progress on writing (and even harder for me, editing) the book I am getting close to completing.

Incidentally, going back to the concept I was talking about in my last post about time management, my episode of writer's block in January was onset by a significant interruption to my work. I was traveling and then I came down with a nasty fever that kept me bed ridden more so than any other illness I've ever developed, and then I had an important job interview while I was beginning to recover. I became non-productive for almost two weeks during this time, and after that, I had a lot of difficulty getting my wheels turning again. Jumping back into my existing project proved far more difficult for me at that time than just putting down other thoughts, so my decision to readjust my priorities was largely an act of necessity. I had one clearly designated most important project, but I was not making progress on it by simply focusing my time there. It was sufficiently important that switching to my second or third most important project seemed like a terrible idea. Part of the reason I've got so many projects started is that I've never had as certain of a designation of highest priority before, so it was always easy for the next idea (or returning to my previous idea) to seem more important than continuing to work on my current idea, but when I reached the point that I was three chapters and a few transitions away from finishing a book, with several well-polished chapters that I'd already edited when I was having trouble coming up with how to word my not material, that possibility seemed ludicrous. My only two sane options were to keep grinding away at something that seemed like it was going nowhere or to take care of little things that seemed unimportant but that I could easily finish and forget about. As the failure of the first option became increasingly obvious, I was left with only the other if I was looking for something that would work well. I'm pleased to say, at least for now, it is working.

I still believe in my overall thesis from a few days ago, very strongly. I'm not trying to contradict it, only refine it. I do think I need to have one major project that I work on as consistently as possible with minimal interruptions, but some interruptions (e.g. sleep) are inevitable. In these cases, when I have one short thing I could work on or my one big thing I could return to, I think the optimal strategy is to procrastinate the one big thing a little, so that I can get the little thing out of the way. Little means exactly what it did in the context of the previous essay. If a project is long enough that I think I will need to stand up to go to the bathroom or to eat something or do anything else like that before I finish, it's too big. That will just become one more source of stress. Those kinds of projects need to be deferred until after my completion of my biggest priority, but when the project is a single bite-sized chunk that I can finish and forget about and it is competing with my main project for my cognitive energy if I don't finish and forget it, I should prioritize the bite-sized project.

Since I like having a single tidy label to store my ideas under, I'm calling this approach to getting work done having "opportunistic priorities."