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.