Have you ever tuned a musical instrument? Take a guitar, for example. You play two adjacent strings. If you fret the lower, bassier string in the right place (generally the 5th fret, with a single exception - don't worry if this makes no sense - on the B string, which is usually fretted in the 4th position to tune the next string to E rather than F), the two strings should play the same note. Now, they will not actually sound the same. The strings are different thicknesses and they're positioned differently on the fretboard, all of which will lead to different overtones. Though the resulting sounds *will* be different, almost everyone will be able to tell that the notes are the same, and typically they won't be aware of those little sonic (overtone) differences in a performance.

Until they have to do the tuning themselves. Then it can be difficult - much like hearing that a sung note was hit (or not) versus singing it oneself (which takes practice).

What usually happens is that you play the two strings together (appropriately fretting the lower one for the same note) to compare the sounds, then you adjust the higher string until both strings sound the same - which you can feel as a sort of relaxation, as the two sounds stop clashing and merge. But you won't be sure. So then, guess what? You intentionally mess up your work: you retune that same string a little higher or lower, until it definitely sounds out of whack. And you do the same in the opposite direction, going out of tune on the other end.

Basically, you figure out what position to turn the tuning nut to so that the string is definitely too high, and then on the other side, what position is definitely too low. Now you have a tolerance range. In between those two out-of-tune angles of the nut (amounts of rotation, similar to clock hand positions), you have some wiggle room. Some of that wiggle room, if you pay close attention, will also sound a bit out of tune. But just hearing the two ways your tuning can be wrong (too high, too low) brings immediate clarity to the process. And in a pinch, you can simply turn the nut to about the middle of that range, a trick that's unlikely to fail. It will sound surprisingly good and solid and tuned, simply because you picked the spot halfway between "definitely too high now" and "definitely too low now."

This sounds very specific, doesn't it?

What if I told you that much or most of life is something like this tuning process?

The universe is made of signals - waves - cycles - circles - orbits - vibrations.

Almost everything is tuning.

When you learn something, your neurons are tuning.

Does it look like the two strings of a guitar, and the too-high, too-low, find-the-middle-of-those process? Not outwardly. But inwardly? Maybe.

Hierarchy is useful for getting stuff done. But - and this is the part some cads forget - it is a game. There is virtuality to it. You're at the top of one hierarchy and at the bottom of another. And it's by agreement, not by default or by divine decree. Some people think they're at the top of every hierarchy. That's called being stuck up, but it's even worse than what it's called. In some ways it's good that #45 has demonstrated so painfully to most people alive how hideous it is to believe you are at the top of every hierarchy. No one is. No one's even close. That makes thinking you are all the more ridiculous.

Finding Are Us

Different people bring out different sides of you. That isn't artificial at all. It's discovery. And you can think about the two "new" people who appear when two characters talk, and how it's a discovery for each and each other, so actually four discoveries. 1 -> 2 -> 4.

1 person -> 2 people relating -> 4 discoveries

Mind the Q / Mind Trait Q

A common way people lack empathy is failing to understand that a difference between two people can last a lifetime. Imagine you have a friend with trait Q. You may think you know what that is, but they have always had it, and you never had. For you Q goes away when you forget.

For them it never does. And because it is always there, it affects them in all kinds of ways. Imagine Q combined with every other thing that appears in life. Prima facie, any of those could interact. You forget Q exists; they get surprised by interactions between Q and life.

Now you tell them they don't make sense because you fail to remember Q, or when you remember Q, you fail to appreciate that even they are constantly surprised by interactions between Q and other things. You know enough to know you don't know, but then you say "You make no sense."

Or, worse, you distort what you hear and observe, and you leap to inferring all negative motives (prejudice in one of its many guises), giving a convincing appearance of intentional deafness. Rather than learn something or simply understand where another person is coming from, you decide that it's your job to judge what's relevant and important and understandable.

If this is your approach, don't be surprised if that person concludes that you're being stupid and insensitive.

Hurls (from Inside)

The world is a giant multi-dimensional ball hurling through possibility space.

We forget that it's got momentum, that the whole thing's a vector pointed somewhere, moving through the jungle of whatever else is out there. Maybe other worlds.

Say the universe is made of bubbles. It takes a while to see it, then you get knocked back and can't unsee it.

Bubbles that orbit bubbles that orbit bubbles. From there, you get all sorts of hairier superstructures involving filaments, linkages, walls, grates, zig-zag backgrounds, super-polymerizations into tissues and organisms.

Meetings/Brushes with the Beast

Writing is not just capturing a thought. It's also capturing the thought well—what I call "capturing the beast." A writer may develop the habit of writing certain thoughts over and over: searching for a good, true expression.

I'm not convinced it's possible to be a decent writer without this habit. While admittedly I have little in the way of scientific proof, from what I've heard and read, creative types often produce tremendous amounts more than they share as final. The repetition is preparation.

It's frustrating for a creative person to get stuck in the same loop. You want to move on to something new, better. But you know you haven't captured the beast yet.

Fair Is a Form of Smart/Sentient

Fairness is something that takes intelligence to recognize, understand, and arrange. One reason the world isn't fairer is simply stupidity.

"Might makes right" is an easy rule for animals to understand. If a lifeform is simple enough, it'll never appreciate the difference between fairness and unfairness anyway—or may experience nothing at all.

It's because we have conscious experience, and because we can become aware of fairness, that it can matter to us so much.

I say this because while I believe fairness is very important, I think if you are getting depressed about the incredible unfairness of the animal kingdom, you can at least consider that many of the animals do not process as deeply as we do and may not be keenly aware, much if any of the time, of what they are missing.

No one is totally free. Totally free means random, and we aren't. Even when you are ostensibly free—free from an outside perspective—you'll need to find your own restrictions so that you can make decisions. Whether this seems intuitive or not, we have to accept that if no possibility is ever cut off or modulated down until the moment of choosing, the choice is random. And even in perfectly unconstrained randomness, that moment of choosing itself does become a constraint. It cuts off every possibility except one. Randomness, paradoxically, though as free as possible, brings with it the restriction that the choice cannot really make sense, cannot be strategic... or at least not in the thoughtful way we understand the word "strategy."

There are scenarios in which the most rational choice would be to become as random as possible to avoid predictability. For example, when you play rock, paper, scissors, in the first approximation at least, the best you can do is to become completely random selecting among three options. This offers the opponent no chance to predict. Game theory tells us that total randomness here gives the opponent no chance to find an advantage except by luck. Yet if there is a chance to predict the opponent in turn, then pure randomness is no longer the best option. The best option is to constrain that randomness—that so-called total freedom—to complement what can be predicted about the opponent's choice.

I think we have a sort of freedom of will because first our minds are highly complex and their activity bubbles up from chaotic factors, but also second because it behooves us to be unpredictable to any opponents. That is, we do not just choose chaotically, and we are not just inherently unpredictable as weather, we choose chaotically-randomly among sensible options. The seemingly infinite spectrum of possible thought and action is whittled down by sensation and emotion - by feeling. To say we can choose without feeling (if this picture I'm painting is true enough) would be absurd, as it is by feeling - by consciousness, by the reflective innerly sculpting of informing ourselves - that we make any decision at all.

We have trouble choosing "randomly" unless there is a criterion. At simplest, that criterion would be "choose randomly!" and we would not know what to do, we would have to depend on our current feeling to constrain and suggest. So "choose randomly!" for us can only mean "do what you feel!"

If we can only, at our freest, do what we feel, we are not entirely free and never will be while we feel. By this way of seeing, death may be the ultimate freedom. What happens to our window at that moment we do not know for certain. It is relatively unconstrained by known fact. It may well be that we blink out forever, but it may also be that something even more mysterious happens. In a real "forever," patterns are likely to recur. Even a pattern as complicated as a life might recur. So we cannot be entirely certain that a sufficiently close pattern will never recur and we will never take consciousness again. Can we? 

Death is a big rolling of hidden dice. We do not understand the factors, yet, that make us conscious, so we cannot say for certain whether they might ever recur. We can say essentially for certain - to everyone's satisfaction - that consciousness itself will recur. We see it everywhere, even in animals. But we do not know whether our own window, which we find so special and meaningful, will ever have another chance - whether with similar biological details or any other set of circumstances. Most of us would like to continue feeling something after death - would like another life - provided it is not too bad a life - even if nearly everything about us were to change other than the living and the tolerability. 

Feeling is evolved strategy. (Evolved and finite, it is likely flawed.) Choosing is, perhaps, evolved randomness within that strategy. (This may begin to compensate for the flawing.)

It may still be that we tap into quantum randomness for a source of pure unpredictability and universe-branching potential. (Shouldn't that be a term? Branching potential? It's a hypothesis, at least. We have to give it that much.) Relativistic effects - unbeknownst to the developers - are necessary for the operation of car batteries. Quantum effects - unbeknownst to the developers - are necessary for the operation of fireworks. Biologists have already demonstrated that birds' sense of direction by magnetic detection depends on quantum effects. This is a proof of concept that evolution has been able, like the developers of fireworks and car batteries, to drill down and harness "rare" physics for specific uses. Evolution can channel quantum effects and no doubt relativistic effects - that is its genius, that it can use anything that can be found, and without intention.

And so why are we so certain - just because we do not see how it would work - that consciousness has no quantum or relativistic properties? Maybe it has both.

Consciousness is a pure moment. It is the essence of immediacy. If we believe relativity, then separated events in space cannot be exactly immediate - cannot be entirely and definitely simultaneous. Maybe consciousness is a complicated tangle of immediacy, and you and I do not share consciousness because our minds are already too far separated in space - and therefore time.

I think it's true. I may be an ignoramus, may be operating on hunches, but I think it's true.

It's entirely possible - maybe even overwhelmingly likely, for all I know - that consciousness has nothing to do with the special features of relativity or quantum mechanics. But it also seems possible - however minutely - that consciousness has in common with black holes a merging of both kinds of effect.

Physicists may be ashamed to suggest such notions without ways to test them. I am not a physicist and I try not to be ashamed. The child in me wants to know and doesn't see why not.

The Empty Proof—What Next?

In the end, everyone is motivated by self-interest. Even if you're sacrificing yourself, you're identifying with something as an extension of yourself.

The ability to identify with something outside the traditional bounds of self depends partly on empathy, a facility or skill that is not equally distributed in the population.

To see someone's self-interest in their actions, in other words, is not, or should not be, to invalidate that person's actions or words.

In the end, everything we do reduces to some form of self-interest. Proving it is so for someone should not be demeaning. It is always so.

What we should instead critique is how and with what effect.

The idea that rational, well-meaning people never contradict themselves is a misunderstanding of logic, evidence, and honesty.

We are limited and language is limited. It is easy to say two things that seem contradictory yet are nevertheless true for their original speaking purpose.

[EXAMPLE TIME]

An artificial prohibition against that kind of freeform contradiction actually impedes honesty, rationality, and evidence gathering and analysis.

Many things even in science seem contradictory, sometimes even impossible. Yet there they are.

We call these "paradoxes" or in mathematics "pathologies," and creative people know that they are often hugely valuable. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Albert Einstein was referring to the same trouble when he - to many people somewhat enigmatically, and I will get to that in a moment - wrote "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." Zeno's paradox of the arrow is an incredibly good point. Gaslighting about it does nothing useful; the solution is not to dismiss it, but to discover calculus. Fractal math and chaos math and Newtonian physics and Darwinian evolution and so many other branches of knowledge suffered from the disease of social prohibition against apparent contradiction.

It is the groupish, conformist, overly proper mentality that gets in the way of seeing such truths when they appear, or that results in inordinate backlash when trying to get a new thought or observation accepted.

This is one reason that self-testifying in court is so often a bad idea: juries and seemingly the court system and society in general fail to understand that contradiction is often healthy.

With a friend, I was just watching the series The Girl from Plainville and the documentary it was based on, I Love You, Now Die. In it, Michelle Carter does not testify in court because that would probably be a bad idea. But why? Shouldn't an informed, rational court system allow self-testimony in a way that is not biased against natural, healthy kinds of contradiction? Shouldn't it especially remove such biases in disputes where unhealthy kinds of contradiction could be so important to see in sharp relief?

We should know the difference, shouldn't we? But can we figure out the difference by closing our eyes or using a brutally simple filter like "contradicting yourself shows you're stupid or dishonest"?

That criminal case isn't the reason for my post, nor is the article I'm referencing. They are simply two applications of a big idea that's too often overlooked, yet relevant in daily life and many social issues. It can help solve big problems when we see more clearly.

Often that means we feel free to make two observations that seem to be in conflict with each other.

The irony is that this is often more honest, not less, and that's why it's so valuable to take the risk and let people take the risk.

-

Prompted by this article: "The Role of Contradictions in Creativity | Psychology Today"

I think we pathologize mental conditions too much. For many of them, it's less a disease than a natural variant that has clearly conferred advantages to bearers and those around them quite often in the past.

To some extent, then, the disease is often in society for failing or refusing to recognize the variant as natural, valid, and sometimes advantageous - or if not, then as an involuntary illness.

Some conditions like autism, ADHD, and benign narcissism are not really diseases in a person but rather in a society that expects everyone to be the same. If these people are given space to be themselves, are not inordinately punished economically or socially, there is not really a disease, just a difference. With the level of support that neurotypical people get from neurotypical people, I think these other groups would do just fine. Sometimes the real problem even in mental health is that a group is a minority.

I would term these "diseases of psychological minority" - or in other words, "basic neurodiversity."

Being a night owl is not a problem unless society expects everyone to be a morning lark and gives night owls slim pickings and acts as if this is fair.

There are also - sometimes this is the same, sometimes different - diseases of volition. These involve what many simply call "bad behavior."

Diseases of volition are diseases of (inner and outer) context. In other words, actions we disagree with make sense to the person who undertakes them. We want to blame their will, their freedom, and their character - but the trouble is that their analysis of the context - the reality as they see it - is different - different enough that what seems like a good idea to them seems like a bad idea to us.

I find it a bit of a waste of time to blame people's souls. Actually, I'm playing softball: I find it a complete and utter waste of time, and probably societally harmful in the long run.

A certain level of stigma around bad behavior serves as a heads up and a deterrent. That's fine. That's prosocial stigma. We need some of it. But the minute we begin dehumanizing and demonizing people who have behaved badly, we step past prosocial stigma into hate.

I am not a proponent of hate. I'm a proponent of recognizing when you're feeling anger and disgust combined, and dealing with it like an adult capable of compassion and wisdom.

Thinking very much about ways the world is unfair can be depressing, because no single person is ever likely to correct any global unfairness.

For example, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and we know this, it isn't an illusion, and social scientists even have a good handle on how it works. (Hint: greed is a red herring. While greed is undeniably one factor, the vicious circle is mostly a network phenomenon called "the Matthew effect" or "preferential attachment." We've been accusing rich people of greed for millennia, and the reason it hasn't worked is that greed is not the biggest factor in the effect.) Yet despite how much may be known, and the possibility of a solution from accurate and precise understanding, thinking about it is still pretty depressing, isn't it? People are suffering and dying right now.

It's similar with so many kinds of unfairness.

And it's hardly made better by the refrain "Life isn't fair! Didn't you learn that in grade school?" Fairness is not some pie in the sky. It matters. Whatever is unfair should be considered as a topic of interest, not brushed aside as if only fools concern themselves with fairness.

I do happen to think it's possible to fix most unfair conditions - especially when we work together. Whatever really can't be changed can be worked around.

-

Another big hint, which I'll spend the rest of this post on...

Fairness may be related to entropy, which at most scales tends to increase over time. (To recap what we learn in chemistry class too fast, and I'm sorry but hopefully this is enough of a refresher for the purpose: The sun is a huge "organized" not-so-entropic pile of stuff that fell together - in some ways that falling together under gravity is apparently a decrease of entropy, where "entropy" could mean approximately "disorganized" or better yet "freely scattered" or "independent." But because of all that stuff falling inward in a way that looks "organized," the sun will burn and eventually burn out, having shed energy in all directions for billions of years. Throwing light everywhere evenly - and at the highest possible speed, right? lightspeed - is "disorganized" or "freely scattered" or "independent" compared to having everything in a heap or ball. So anyway, with the sun, matter fell together - less spatial entropy, less freedom to be in many places - but in doing so managed to radiate/splatter pure energy in all directions - producing much more entropy, specifically a net increase of entropy, kind of like profits for the work and after the costs of doing business. So entropy is served. And the idea I'm working from here is that light gradually, efficiently flowing all over space is not only more entropic but also "fairer" than fuel stuck in one place.) If that link holds, there may be some reason to believe that the universe - specifically the 2nd law of thermodynamics that says entropy tends to increase - "wants" systems to develop greater fairness wherever possible, and reason to believe that our experiences and activity make up part of that gradual movement. An inner wish for fairness may be part of the universe's tendency toward entropy. But fairness can get complicated, so the kind we're talking about doesn't happen by itself; it takes conscious, intelligent application. We are part of the universe, and some things that happen in the universe happen - or don't - because of us.

Yes matter falling together drives the sun and the entropic scattering of light. But if there isn't enough matter falling together, that doesn't happen.

Yes humans can think about how we interact and create fairer systems, but if we don't put in the effort, that won't happen.

Like the sun, we have an informational-energetic purpose.

Part of our purpose, I would argue, is creating the kind of fairness we sense the absence of - which sensing and fixing takes the kind of mental ability humans have.

A key to fairness is that it's actually a game concept. Something is only fair with reference to certain categories, rules, and expectations. Without those categories, rules, and expectations, "fair" doesn't really compute. (By this way of thinking, law is a game - which may seem objectionable until you realize that every jurisdiction and every state has its own set of rules, and these are - or should be - balanced and adjusted for fairness like the ruleset of a game made for entertainment or art. The level of seriousness and life-and-death is very different, but we're talking about the same larger category of thing: a ruleset for human/sentient interaction.)

Many people think fairness doesn't exist, is imaginary, is an ideal. I'd say that actually it is a ludic concept - a concept rooted in games, participants, virtuality, categories, and information itself.

In other words, it's real when you get to information theory and considerations of entropy.

From a game design standpoint, a desirably well-balanced game is fair - or at least fairer - and more fun - and will consequently encourage the most participation. (Nobody except exploiters - and maybe sometimes game designers and playtesters, for the R&D - likes to play an unfair or broken game. Players tend to quit when they realize a game is unfair or broken. Citizens facing an unfair society can behave similarly for similar reasons, as we know.) And curiously enough, a game with full participation from more participants also happens to be more entropic - the players are freer individually to choose their roles and approaches, and also freer to trade places. Those extra degrees of freedom bring measurable entropy. And this is much like how a scuba tank with O2 molecules evenly mixed and distributed throughout via their "exploration" of the space is more entropic (and "fairer") than a scuba tank with O2 molecules clumped up somewhere, barely moving because they're frozen or trapped. Nature "wants" participation. The drive toward entropy is also a drive toward fairness and inclusion.

The desire for freedom itself is, if you ask me, part of nature's drive toward entropy, fairness, and inclusion, and this is the basis for human rights.

Games that are fair and participatory please us. I'd say this is because they help entropy along, and on some level we have evolved to sense this. A fair group is a sustainable group is a group that'll go through energy in the way that produces the most entropy efficiently over the longest time. (Eating enough - but not too much - also helps entropy along. It's the same with other healthy instincts when they're working - in each case, it's easy to see how they help entropy along.)

So. Want to solve big social problems? Get more people to work on that. Want more people working on that? For one thing, get more people voting. Want more people to vote? Make voting and government fairer. It seems to be "what nature wants." But we are part of nature, and sometimes it's on us.

I don't like the word "neurodivergent." There's a need for it I won't dispute. But it's 5 syllables, a mouthful for something ubiquitous (note: even longer than the word "ubiquitous," which is already a puffy way to say "prevalent" or "everywhere" or "widespread" or "common").

Worse than any of that, the opposite of "neurodivergent" is "neurotypical," an even more prevalent condition that's given a supremely dismissive name. Does anyone ever say "neurotypical" without a note of contempt, or at least frustration? I'm not sure I've ever heard it if so.

It makes me uncomfortable. I don't want to be branding normal people with this five-dollar smack talk.

It's fine. I think the words are relatively harmless and sometimes, as I said, necessary.

But how about calling normal people "normal"? And how about calling eccentric people "eccentric"? We don't need to medicalize it, and if we do we don't need to make it sound so weird.

"Neurodivergent" gives an air of authority, like many overlong words.

"Neurotypical" is dismissive not least because a person without ADHD is not "neurotypical" but rather "non-ADHD." We don't know what they might have or be.

If I were writing slang for a sci-fi story, I'd use "reg" for "neurotypical" and "diff" for "neurodivergent."

There's this basic principle I think about a lot, and if it has a name, I don't know what it is. However, others have definitely thought about it. Under various guises, it's known to everyone. But it's actually one underlying principle.

For lack of a better phrase, I'll call it "the category multiplier." (This is in reference to Immanuel Kant's version of it, which he called "the categorical imperative." Maybe my thought is exactly the same, but I think it's more detailed.)

If you act a certain way - driving a car that pollutes more than is necessary - eating meat like most everyone else - treating people who look a certain way with suspicion - expecting everyone who wants a job to manually supply a large quantity of personal information for every single application and go out of their way to get references and transcripts - it may be socially acceptable, understandable, normal, or "not that bad" in each instance. But when you take a step back and look at what happens as a result, take a long, hard, honest look at the result of that policy, you may realize that it's unfair and it's shit and it hurts.

Kant called that the categorical imperative, and he claimed it was the single most important rule for ethics. Since then, that has been much disputed, and it isn't difficult to see why. Under his formulation, which basically says "behave in a way that would be the best way if everyone behaved that way" or "follow the rule that would be the best rule if everyone followed it," you run into (in my limited understanding) two immediate problems. First, you'll never get uniformity, and is that even what we want? I don't think we want everyone acting the same. Variety and diversity are why life continues to prosper, actually. Second, any time you use rules, you categorize people/situations, and any time you categorize, you get a loss of information. That is, no two cases of blindness have ever been the same. No two children are the same. No two roads are the same. When you operate according to categories, you are necessarily losing detail, and sometimes that detail makes all the difference.

All I want to point out here is that there *is* an idea at work. There's how we act. And there's what happens if lots and lots of people act approximately that way and for approximately that reason. I'm calling that the category multiplier. It matters.

The category multiplier is what makes voting meaningful even though your vote typically makes no difference.

The category multiplier is why profiling Muslims and Arabs at the airport is unfair - and would even remain unfair to those individuals if it did manage to statistically save lives (which I'm not saying it would).

The category multiplier is involved in the Tragedy of the Commons (spoiling of public lands and resources) and the Jevons paradox (eg, advances in lightbulb efficiency or gas mileage don't seem to help, because it becomes more economical to be wasteful).

It's how you know that "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" will get overly normative and then exclusionary and toxic.

It highlights that not only can individual efforts add up, multiply, and take on a group life of their own, but so can seemingly normal, convenient, and harmless simplifications and shortcuts and other oversights, which may become monstrous in aggregate.

At the same time, it helps explain how like-enough-minded individuals find each other to collaborate. Concepts have a sort of gravity and people align and gather around them.

It's sadly why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Maybe I'm putting too much under the spell of one phrase, but it seems to me that all of these are nonlinear, macro results from the use of categories by humans (on the micro level of their individual lives and daily decisions).

Benefits and costs scale in weird ways.

It's integral calculus applied to humans, in a sense.

And actually that's what the game that I've been working on for 10 years is about. It's an attempt to teach that idea in a variety of ways players can really feel and intuit.

This is not going to make too much sense to anyone, but one of the defining moments of my life (among many) arrived when playing Fable. I was on a tiny beach with a pier... looking out at the horizon: a pure, Platonic ideal of horizon, a line that transported me because it wasn't just a line. It must have been this serene power of one line and a few splashes of color to become a "real" place; I felt a moment of awe at nature. We can find nature and even Nature in math. I thought, "That means something. I have to remember it."

Why is chess still so much more popular among boys and men? It seems the most common thing girls and women say about chess is that they want to learn the rules, or the rules are complicated, or they think they remember the rules but want to brush up. Most boys and men seem to just know, and I actually can't remember struggling with the rules. That isn't an intelligence difference, but it's some sort of orientation difference. If I had only played 3 games of chess ever, then yes, my comment about the game might include the rules. But after a dozen games, I don't think anyone struggles with the rules at all, or very very little, and only some rare detail like "en passant" that frankly you could spend a lifetime of playing never thinking about and it would be fine (though I'd be extremely surprised if you never bumped into that rule in a lifetime of playing, now, thanks to the internet and so on).

I think most of us understand on an intuitive level that chess is more popular with boys/men because of its heads-up competitive nature. We can sense that it is a little bit like the bucks fighting over a doe. How much of this sense is literary metaphor, how much societal expectation, and how much evolved instinct - I'm not sure anyone can say or quantify precisely.

But here is a clue. Bobby Fischer was without a doubt one of the greatest, most ingenious, most accomplished players in chess history. What motivated him to play? His answer is famous: "I like the moment I crush a man's ego."

That isn't something I like. I've often suspected I'm not very good at chess partly because I'm just not that into beating people. Motivation is missing to get so good that I reliably crush egos. And I've heard many girls and women say similar things. (On psychology tests, I tend tend to come up as rather feminine and also as a bit less sadistic/psychopathic than average. I actually am just "nicer by nature," it seems, at least a little bit.)

Sadism is a normal component of human nature. We might want to deny this and claim we are not ourselves sadistic, not one little bit, but I guarantee you that you are at least one little bit. When people mock others, when they feel good because someone failed, when they tear down the rich and famous, when they feel satisfaction as the bad guy gets it at the end of the movie - these are all instances of normal levels of sadism. You are enjoying someone else's suffering. Maybe you feel that's good and justified or normal and ok - I didn't make a value judgment, but you are enjoying someone's suffering, and that capacity goes by the name of sadism. Even just insulting someone when you're angry with them is evidence of normal levels of sadism.

Men tend to be a little more sadistic on average - most people are willing to recognize that testosterone plays a role in this (as I suspect it does, but I freely admit there are many uncertainties and I defer to current and future science). And when you think about it, competition and sadism must be related. If you felt total empathy for your competitors, it wouldn't seem to matter who won or lost - you'd want them to win. Hell, you might even help them by giving up. If they want it so badly, sure, they can have it. Then you can appreciate that they are happy.

And that's why girls and women are not often as good at chess as boys and men are.

We aren't supposed to say, now, that girls and women "aren't competitive" - and after all, that isn't even true. But testosterone does drive (some of) competition and it does lower empathy and it probably contributes to sadism - to what Bobby Fischer craved as he studied and practiced so hard to beat everyone else at chess.

There's even another related angle, here. Women almost universally talk about how much they like a guy who can make them laugh. And indeed, surveys show most people, regardless of gender, rate humor highly in a romantic partner. But why do women talk about this so much, as if it mattered more than everything else?

Most things that women especially like in men, when you look at them, correlate with testosterone and resource provision.

Think about the funniest comedians. Many of them are men. Not all of them. That would be stereotyping. And saying women can't be great comedians - sexist and untrue. But there's an imbalance.

Think about what comedians say to make people laugh.

There's a correlation between funniness and meanness. And there's a correlation between meanness and testosterone. And there's a correlation between testosterone and gender.

Women seem to like funny guys so much not just because it makes them feel good to laugh (surely that is about equally true of everyone), but because people with more testosterone will be a bit meaner on average, and one fallout of that is that they will be a bit funnier on average. It's much the same with confidence. Higher testosterone tends to boost confidence. Women tend to suffer from lower confidence not just because the deck is stacked against them, which is true, but also because lower testosterone correlates with less confidence.

This is something we instinctively know. Confident people are "winners." They're confident because they can get away with being less careful, more carefree. Why can they get away with it? Because they are valued by others, perhaps even feared. Why valued and feared? Because they have won more battles, they have gained status, they have higher testosterone, which boosts their confidence and lowers their concern about what others think, because they can afford to not worry about it.

I think two reasons we let dark triad types assume leadership roles come down to the stresses of responsibility for others and anxiety about shame. We may see the flaws of a leader, may even think there's something quite wrong with them, but it's easy to let someone else have the responsibility and deal with the shame of mistakes.

Unfortunately, this leads to people who either feel no shame or are good at covering up their missteps - or both - taking on many of the leadership roles. We even have the feeling that they're especially good at leading and are "natural born leaders."

In my opinion, a good first step would be to try to stop identifying people as - stop tying their identity strictly to the categories of - "leaders" and "followers." Barack Obama is clearly a political leader, as a former president of the US. But there are many areas in which he is no leader at all - is he a leader as a surgeon, a submarine captain, an astronaut, a pastry chef? - and even in this preeminent sense he is no longer the leader, either. So is he "a leader" or "a follower"? Even in examples that should be as clear as day - the President of the United States of America (and in my opinion a very good one) - that isn't so cut and dry as we assume or pretend.

If we recognize that everyone encompasses "leader" and "follower," we put responsibility back where it belongs: in the hands of each individual, for themselves and how they affect others.

Maybe no one is listening to you; but if you're ahead of your time and you say it well, you're still a leader. Even if what you say is obvious and ancient, if others are ignoring it - and you know it's important - and you go on saying the truth, then things will come around, and you were in some sense a leader.

This is a way I operate and I see it as "leadership" but do not care about the word.

I do, however, perceive some blind spots and over-categorization going on.

Let's try to dissolve the leader/follower dogma a little.

We live in a democracy - that's what we like to believe, and we should cultivate even more of an advanced democracy emulation than we have by recognizing that everyone's got some leader and follower in them, and this is healthy and good for everyone. What's unhealthy is shoving people into one category or another and trying to keep them there all the time.

No one likes to talk about the fact we might all be predetermined in every single thing we do, or about how the concept of free will doesn't make a lot of sense at all.

It's pretty goddamn consequential, as far as ideas go. (That might be a slight pun. Sorry.)

I believe in free will, but I don't even know what that means!

The way I imagine it, roughly, is like a Choose Your Own Adventure. The universe is largely deterministic, but there are branchings. We don't know how they'll turn out. We have clues, sometimes. There's probably a hell of a lot of branching, once you include all your choices and mine and everyone else's and all the animals and so on.

There's a concept called "info scent." It's the impression you get about where a path will lead before you follow it.

I think that's essentially what consciousness is.

The purpose of consciousness is to supply a will with info scent.

The will is capable of branching the universe. The forks start small as little molecular jitters. A neuron fires or doesn't. A muscle twitches or doesn't. You get the general idea.

If there is a God, I think of God as a game designer. There wouldn't be much in terms of "what God wants" and "what God doesn't want." It's *all* part of the design, even though the design includes many choices for you to customize your path and experience.

This may sound silly or non-scientific, and maybe it's both, but I think it's a legitimate question science could try to answer. If we seriously believe this could all be a simulation, then we can just as seriously ask if a sentience put that simulation together with a design in mind.

I don't have an opinion. I don't know. But if there *is* a God, that's my opinion of what it would be like.

And maybe I do have an opinion. The fact we're already, not many years after the first computers, simulating universes in code strongly suggests to me that this is part of a reproductive capacity in the universe—for universes.

So that's the crazy way I see game design: as the forebear of something that might be greater than our wildest dreams.

It might take millions of years. And it might take traveling, say, to a black hole to seed a new universe with custom rules someone has chosen.

But I can imagine the possibility. Can't you?

When we try to explain the universe and its meaning, we're always talking about what came before. What was the intention. Who put this here. What's outside. Is there anything else.

The fact is we don't know. It's quite rational to be an atheist—to say "these religions with their gods do not add up, so I reject them"—and also an agnostic—to say "really I must admit that there's a lot I don't know, or only suspect or believe from limited experience."

What about what comes after? If we do not know who or what—if anything—prompted this bubble of spacetime with its specific code, we also don't know who or what might emerge from what we're seeing now.

I'm not convinced that this universe was *not* created, because we have empirical evidence of humans creating universe-like structures that could, in theory, run in any universe-stuff anywhere, or, in other words, on any substance with the properties of a Universal Turing Machine.

It's starting to look more believable that the universe was created by a supersentience somewhere, somewhen. If we can write code that blossoms into potential universes, then so can someone else. And if someone else can, then someone might have done so for us already, and put us here—intentionally or not. Most likely they wouldn't know exactly what would happen, but they might've had suspicions.

After all, isn't that one possible meaning of life? A growth toward recreating not just life but the conditions for life? And ultimately not just the conditions for life, but maybe even the parameters for a universe or universes?

It has not been mentioned much, because there's a stigma among science-educated people against intelligent design. But in the same breath that says "We could all be running in a simulation on some machine" we can also understand "These patterns or the conditions giving rise to this broad class of patterns might have been designed—selected from infinite possibility—by an external intelligence."

You can't really have it both ways. You can't say "this might be a simulation, and we wouldn't know the difference" and "intelligent design is a total intellectual abomination in every sense."

No, we don't need to posit a helicopter parent of a creator to explain the incredible diversity of lifeforms on Earth. That seems to come with evolution and time. So from that angle, intelligent design appears to be bunk. At the same time, I recognize I am simply giving an opinion, and largely parroting more expert opinion on biological evolution as is already known to occur.

But this thought was not about intelligent design or evolution, per se, but rather about the possibility that when we look for "meaning" in the universe, we are looking backwards. Teleology is a no-no in many scientific explanations, but if a thing leads to another thing—especially if the reaction could be reversible—then can you really disconnect the two in meaning? That is, if I hit a drum and the drum sounds, can I say the sound of the drum has no bearing on the meaning of hitting the drum? It seems to me that when I hit the drum, I sound out its meaning. What follows—not what precedes—most determines the meaning of the moment.

In the end, everyone is the center of their own universe. We can mince words about it, but it's tough to care when you don't exist, and it's tough to exist when you let everyone and everything else go first.

This doesn't mean we must be egotistical. But we always feel through ourselves first. When we empathize enough, there's a suspension of disbelief, a virtual transmigration to another soul. Yet it's all read in through the screen of ourselves. Even when we forget who we are, and assume another's name and viewpoint, we feel through ourselves, and are ourselves.

The piece that's the same trick exactly

We all possess—or are possessed by—consciousness. There is physical matter—not exactly us, but temporarily in our system, temporarily ours. And (as I said) there is this odd informationally aware component—a component we all have, and I think it's even more the same stuff for all of us than the matter is. That is, we're made of mostly the same materials, but slightly different combinations. There are types of molecule or atom in you, no doubt, that are not in me, and vice versa. You or I might be taking a medication or have been exposed to an industrial pollutant, and so our matter is different enough. But our awareness I think arises from the same process. The contents of our awareness differ. But I think it's exactly the same principle that makes you and me aware. So in a strange way what we consider most different and unique—this feeling stuff—is on another level what's most identical.

Few things frustrate me more than reviews that take the attitude that everyone is stupid, or the person who made this is stupid, or both.

Get over yourself. God.

The smartest reviews almost always show an understanding of the intent, the craft, and the people who see something in it.

If you can't do that, you aren't reviewing, you're venting.

Motivation is psychosociochemical... or even psychosocioelectrochemicoinformatic. Wish we had a better term for this.* Maybe electrochemicoinformatic covers the psychosocial, just in more detail, and losing some perspective.

When you have a mental health condition, this stuff suddenly becomes a LOT more relevant to your life.

But it's relevant to everyone.

Your decisions are not just magical instants. Much goes into them behind the scenes of your own awareness.

What you experience is like what the audience sees - or maybe the actors see, when they're on stage. The actual decision process includes the writing, the living behind it, the rehearsing, the costume design, the lighting, the construction of stage and hanging of curtains, the finding and placement and brandishing of props, and so on. All that extra stuff you aren't aware of helps to make - essentially does make - your decisions. You are aware of the surface, the way you are aware of the steering wheel and gas pedal while driving - whereas the engine is drastically more complicated, and most people wouldn't even know where to start when building one like it.

-

* PSECI? Psysoelchemin? Sylchemin? Pselmin? (I don't feel like any of those would catch on... PSECI is clearest so far as an abbreviation. It also has the problem that the hierarchy of scales is obscured... except... psychosocial is high-level, electrochemical is mid-level, and informatic is low-level. But I think if you ignore any of these components, you're missing something critical. Motivation as we experience it crosses scales and media.) I guess PSECI prounced "sekky" would do.

Games do have a lot in common with candy. As kids, we find candy so amazing. As adults, we're honestly better off if we never eat it, but of course we probably do, here and there.

So... games are an artform, but they're different from other artforms in that they tend to ask for a lot of time and energy.

A great novel promises that by the end we will feel... expanded, wiser, more attuned.

A great game can do the same. But games in general ask for a lot up front and don't give that much back.

My perception.

As a person trying to make a game that asks for not much up front, but leaves you with a lot, I feel... insecurity. Can I manage that at all?

Also, I barely ever play games. If I weren't a person trying to make a game, I would have moved on from games long ago and wouldn't have much if any time for them.

I sort of push myself to play things here and there as if to do so were vitamins, which it kind of can be.

I still do believe in the form. But most games, when they load up, overwhelm with buttons and stats and flavor text and splashy, not particularly refined or noteworthy images.

If I had all the time in the world - or were a kid, feeling that way - I'd relax, or excitedly settle in and absorb what I see. I'd let the spices imbue me and time bake the pie of another world.

But I feel restless. Just loaded up this game advertised on Facebook, Hero Wars. Immediately I want nothing more to do with it. No time or energy or enthusiasm for this. Too much stuff, too little reason to care.

Maybe that's enough. Maybe it's enough to see this and say "Ah, I consider this and this and this a mistake. These are things I do not care about. This game is coming on too strong with points and metrics and cheesy, albeit vivid, drawings. It assumes I want to stay 10 hours at least, and I don't even want to give it 10 minutes. That is not necessary. I can do better. A gentler introduction and less presumption can work magic." 

There's something objective about art, as much as subjective. That's what gets me, the tension between opposites.

Some are offended that it's anything but what they make of it. But there is an artifact you experience, and everyone else experiences that artifact, also. The artifact makes the art, not just how we feel from it.

To me that's very satisfying and tangible, the brew of shaping. It's an intoxication to make.

Total fairness implies the existence of a game. You can only be fair with reference to some rule and some measurement. The universe on one level seems absolutely fair: we're all within exactly the same, apparently extremely consistent laws of physics. If we don't like this and find it still unfair (I find it still unfair, like almost everyone), then we create a new game within the game, and do our best to adhere to it. If the new game within the game became perfectly consistent, why, then wouldn't that be another universe in simulation?

Acting isn't always realistic, and actually this is something I like. Obviously it works most readily in comedy, but it can be interesting anywhere.

When actors go through a scene, they aren't just calling its real equivalent to mind - or a believable equivalent. They're also commenting on a moment that people will recognize. One way or another, every single acted moment plays on recognition - of similar moments, whether real, fictional, or thus far purely imagined, or before today never once imagined, and now for the first time in some audience member's mind. I mean, that's what acting and art in general do, right? They don't have to be realistic, just evocative - somehow interesting and engaging and compelling.

Because acting is also commenting, it's quite acceptable for acting to diverge from realism - in some sense, the divergence is the comment.

Sitcoms do this all the time. People say things in an exaggerated tone that gets the context in that character's mind across loud and clear. And often this is important, and works, because of the ironies - the contrasts between the situation as we in the audience see it, and how the character sees it - which is a comment both on that character (whom we may love by now) and on the situations we know and are reminded of ourselves. So divergence from what someone in the audience would intuitively expect can be a comment on the character or on the situation. In both cases, it's a comment on the audience members' own lives.

There's something wrong with my approach to life. I'm not getting traction - I don't know how to self-actualize or whatever, how to get my talents and experiences and plans to coordinate for long enough to get the results I have in mind. And maybe they're not the best results to have in mind. That's also possible for anyone, and it's surely possible for me. There are many reasons to doubt the wisdom of my goals.

Call me naive, but if the economy can't handle people staying at home to avoid a plague (a problem older than history), then there's a bug in the economy. I wouldn't even blame the plague, let alone excessive caution in the public. If the economy can't handle this, it is quite literally a problem with the economic paradigm. The sky doesn't fall in when people don't go to work. Plants don't stop growing. The sun doesn't stop shining. Buildings don't topple. Books don't evaporate. Inventions don't lose their designs or patents. Even most non-essential computer servers will happily keep on running, especially if they're drawing wind or solar or geothermal energy. If the economy caves in now, it's predicated on a lie.

If you have a garden and you leave town for ten years, and it's abandoned, it'll take some work to make it how it was. But that isn't a calamity. It isn't the ruination of anything.

If the economy cannot behave similarly, I say let's fix it.

Maybe the analogy is all wrong. Maybe I'm all wrong. Maybe it can't be done.

But I bet you it can.

(Wrote 2 years ago today.)

When you work on many aspects of a big project over a long time, you almost become a different person depending on which piece you're trying to tackle, assemble, put in place, etc. Am I more like a science professor, a down and out punk or starving artist, a mental patient, an immature, starry-eyed dilettante, or a solitary, fanatical scribbler? That very much depends what I'm working on. I guess I'm quite like all of those.

-

Sometimes I think of it like vitamins. If I don't read enough science, I start to get itchy and listless and feel out of place in the world. If I don't get into enough art and fiction, I begin to feel unimaginative. If I don't make stuff, I feel hopeless. If I don't dive into studying new areas, I feel suffocated and stop figuring out new solutions to old problems. If I don't teach, I lose perspective and clarity, that sharp sense of the future-present. If I don't prioritize my health, everything else disperses like mist.

I need all the vitamins, but I find it just about impossible to do all that stuff at the same time, that is, every day. Things go in phases and cycles.

When you meet me, you don't always meet the same person. But that's normal enough... we all have moods. And you do always meet the same person. Don't worry, I'm being metaphorical.

I learned a lot about computers through setting up and modifying games and operating systems on pcs when I was a kid.

But I also learned that I'd often spend so much energy on the configuration that I'd lose interest or at least enthusiasm for the game itself.

In high school one summer I spent basically the entire summer researching and hunting down and downloading and configuring classic titles almost no one my age had heard of or played. This wasn't a new activity. It's just one summer it was my entire summer.

The point is I actually don't want to spend all my time setting up and not getting to the actual expressive, emotional, experiential stuff. For me the latter was really the point, and I sort of resented how much of the former I was caught up in.

Which no doubt is why much of the world still plays games on consoles - already pretty well pre-configured - and mobile devices - even more so.

The irony is that as a game developer, you spend even more time and energy on the configuration.

But this time you can honestly tell yourself that the expressive, emotional, experiential stuff IS the point. When you're done, if you're ever done, someone else can feel the message with a minimum of headache.

Logic is essentially a way to slow down thinking and check its accuracy and precision.

All people think very intuitively most of the time. We are not flipping logical AND and OR and NOT and XOR operators around in our heads. Well, not consciously. But internally? Yes, actually. We're doing tons and tons of that. And megatons. But our conscious control of the underlying logic is like a steering wheel and a gas pedal and a brake in a car. Open up the hood. Did you really think it was that simple and easy?

Admit it: you kind of did, didn't you?

Anyway, we have to get on the same page, here. Your thinking (which you suppose is so reliable) has only been made to APPEAR straightforward to you by hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

In reality, that undeniably commonsense, straightforward thinking we do all the time is both complicated and fragile.

So be careful whenever you want to say "There's no two ways about it!" Even if your reasoning is correct, evidently the other person is finding it more complicated... which should be interesting, on some level, because, as we've just said, it usually is more complicated. So even if they're quite wrong, they're right about that bit.

When our commonsense or intuitive reasoning *is* reliable in some situation, we should thank our lucky stars. Even though that's common, we should recognize that we're lucky the steering wheel and gas pedal and brakes are working well for us underneath the hood. (The same goes for empathy, by the way, which, though we associate it heavily with emotion, and that makes sense, is also a form of reasoning that can be working well or poorly.)

The complication begins to come to the surface when we get into an argument with someone. We both think we've got it right, needless to say. And if the argument continues, we're probably both somewhat confused about how the other person could be such a dolt.

To fix this bug - and it is a sort of bug, a conversational bug - takes slowing down and examining the logic more closely.

Most people are, to be candid, unwilling to do this.

Or at least unwilling when they feel at all upset. And unfortunately that's when it's important. When it isn't important to them right now, they wave it off and think you must have too much time on your hands. Either way, they don't do what it would take to fix the conversational bug.

So they don't get too much practice fixing these.

It can be done. It isn't even very difficult at all. It's often very easy. But both people have to be willing to engage the disagreement on that level, or it won't work.

I think the mythic constructs we especially relate to tell us something about ourselves.

I especially relate to Spock.

On the one side, the Vulcan side, there's this almost autistic/psychopathic reserve and rationality. It's Sherlock Holmes. It's what people find inhuman in mathematics or computers. At the extreme, it's HAL: difficult to see as really evil, because that was never its intent, yet possibly horribly destructive if unchecked. Mostly, though, it's engaged, useful, scientific.

On the other side, Spock's human side, I'm the Phoenix. I'm so overly emotional I burn to the ground and can't move and believe life is over. Or I'm so reflexively a free spirit that even when I'm the one who puts the chains of expectation on me, like Houdini, I slip out. The more chains and ropes and cuffs I apply, the more easily Houdini slips away, unseen.

In the middle, between them, Spock's spectre, is the Nosferatu of F.M. Murnau's 1922 masterpiece. This is animal desire mixed with human affection mixed with the restraints of conscience and fear. This is how I feel when I really like someone new. I'm aware that I could seem creepy. It's the Shadow archetype.

The idea of "number" somehow implies to us that all numbers are created equal, but I don't think they are.

i is interesting because it's clearly a simple numerical concept, but like infinity, it isn't quite like the other numbers.

You could almost say math has a heart.

People who don't understand debate is a game may have a polite conversation, but they probably won't have an excellent debate.

The key to debate is that there IS truth. We don't all get equal wins on participation. Total equality on that front is a fairy tale. Some statements are true. Some are partially true. Some are false. No amount of politeness or feminism will ever reverse that.

You can win or lose in a debate. It isn't all just sharing and respect. That's discussion. Many would call it debate, and that's fine, words are malleable and have multiple definitions anyway, but it is not debate by the definition I'm using here - which equates debate with dialectic.

If you want to dig for the real truth and establish that it's the real truth fair and square, you need dialectic, not just sharing and politeness.

-

(That means that when some people say a thing, it will be a win for them, because it actually is true, and when other people say a different thing, it will be a loss for them, because it actually is not true. We can't have a proper debate - a dialectic - without facing this head on.)

-

The idea that a debate has no winners and no losers is mythology. There is an outside world. Reluctance to accept this is a problem.

I'm very much a feminist, but I'm not a solipsist. "Your truth" is not necessarily an accurate statement. However you feel objectively IS how you feel, but we knew that already - that's a tautology.

However anyone feels IS how that person feels. Big whoop. Not a very interesting observation, really, in my world. (We can say it once and leave it at that. Important, but not necessary to keep reiterating as if it were brand new.)

I want to know what's actually goddamn true, thank you very much.

-

Modern cynicism toward objectivity is frankly backwards.

The moment you decide there is no objectivity anyway, you've fucking given up, and no wonder your views start to disconnect from reality.

Finding and validating the truth can be very, very hard work. People who think there isn't any truth? (Or everyone has their own personal truth, and it's all totally democratically determined like that?) Well why the hell would they bother with all that work?

This is not actually a rhetorical question. It's a gaping hole in public consciousness.

Science draws back the veil, showing us that what we are so sure of is not only more nuanced/complex/uncertain/involved/detailed but also more interesting. Hopefully we feel a bit silly but not too silly.

We love sureness because uncertainty is such a central force in the universe, and it needs a balance. We cannot banish uncertainty. Neither side of this flipping coin is winning any time soon. They are in balance and a kind of highly active harmony.

There are two main types of useful move in debate.

1) Characterizing. This is an attempt to paint a multifaceted, balanced, fair, objective picture all at once in as few words as possible.

2) Responding. This is providing a counter to what has been said and is typically dramatically far from complete. It is (often) intended to be one-sided. It may or may not acknowledge what was said. It replies by extending, adjusting, refuting, or replacing.

1 is very difficult and consequently rare.

2 is often taken for 1, and this leads to endless misunderstandings.

There are moments when everything hinges on a little thing and a principle.

This is why I like interactive fiction so much. To me, that's what it's about.

In many ways it's the idea of IF I like more than most of the available works, though I have a solid sense of fun and adventure and appreciate the efforts that go into all creative work. Adventure games and other games changed my life forever when I was a kid, and in a way I've spent the rest of my life trying to repay and expand on that.

I profoundly dislike those conversations about "are you DEFENDING him/her?????"

If putting in a word toward someone's humanity or subjectivity (because you won't) or possible motives or factors you aren't considering is massively offensive to you - for any person, totalitarian dictators included - then I consider that your problem.

It's a bit of a hard line. I do try not to offend people by "defending" - ie, talking about as if human - people who are being hated on (often with good reason).

But I find this hypersensitivity (or, rather, total numbness accompanied by irritation at the suggestion) toward anything good/smart/decent/acceptable about an objectionable person to be horribly small-minded, and frankly in itself at least as offensive as you think I'm being. Only I'm cooler about finding it offensive. I am one of the most forgiving people - it's something I watch people fail to realize, because it would be dangerous to tell everyone too readily. But I am.

Everyone is human and has some kind of rationale for what they do, and there's always something you don't understand. Socrates knew this 2500 years ago, as have countless wise people since, and probably many before as well. This in no way means all action should be allowed! It means people generally make sense to themselves, and when someone doesn't make sense to you, it's because your brain and their brain are in different states.

If you have trouble with that inevitability, again, that is generally your fault, to my mind, not really mine. I try to be as patient as possible. People do understand eventually.

I'm fundamentally lazy, but then that isn't saying much. Life evolved to conserve energy.

There are plenty of times when I use energy rather than save it. Do you take the elevator? I run up all the flights of stairs. That isn't lazy. But I do it not least because I'm impatient for the elevator and consider running up stairs way more fun, plus beneficial. (Beyond that, I park at the far end of the lot, and prefer to live where I can walk everywhere.)

People have told me that my energy in discussion/debate is more than theirs, and I just seem to keep chugging along. So. My head is often churning with thoughts, and I'm often writing them down, because this is a way most people are lazy compared to me.

Sheer laziness is sometimes delicious. I'd be lying if I said I was only ever totally lazy because I was so miserable I couldn't face activity. No, I sometimes relish being a layabout. There are moments.

Sometimes the world seems so hostile, intolerable really, like so offensively awful that you wouldn't sign up for that or do business with that organization, only the organization is the world and you're stuck in it. Yet at times like this, putting the lie to part of what you've just claimed, it can be so lovely to just lie still under covers with your eyes closed and drift. The contrast between the life you want to veto on principle and how serene you can now feel in a moment of retreat from it...

Most people look at the universe and they posit order.

Look at all these patterns!

Someone must've come up with it all!

There's another tactic:

Posit randomness.

-

How does that work, you ask?

Well, randomness explores. What it can find includes patterns.

The universe is not all causal, but some of it is. Full randomness can be causal or not.

We're in a region of causality. Randomly.

Simple patterns you see a lot? You see them a lot because they're simple, not because someone put them there.

Take spirals. Take parabolas. The math is incredibly simple. A random walk through math space would produce these simplicities often by chance.

The universe is gorgeously patterned because simple, striking patterns are easy to produce computationally, and easy to stumble on randomly.

It is not order that someone created these patterns. They are the encrustations of randomness in mathematics, in causality.

-

This is not an original idea. It's a theory I read about. I've forgotten the name, but I believe the mathematician Kolmogorov either came up with it or was associated with it. And as always/usual, the above is my impression - maybe the flavor of the idea, or a plausible flavor - rather than the technical idea itself in any detail.

I'm a lover, not a fighter.

I have a 2nd degree black belt in TKD - did that for 10 years, 8 to 18...

which helped me know what it means to fight, yet to be a lover, not a fighter.

I've broken someone's bone. I've won full-contact sparring matches at competitions. I've been intimidating, apparently, because people often grumbled about having to fight me, and sometimes I guess they must have been winded or felt pain. I've led classes, grappled without rules (I'm actually very good at this), been hurt in almost every way, flown on kicks, splintered boards, had my fingers jammed and bruised holding boards for others, taken real whacks in the shins and everywhere else, refereed, yelled, been kicked in the teeth so they chipped and cracked, sank to the floor doing the splits on the regular, pushed through so many kinds of pain, etc.

Something I knew basically those entire 10 years is that I'm just not an aggressive or competitive person. What does it matter who wins? It sort of vaguely matters, maybe, and from some points of view does. But me rather than you, you rather than me - so what? Am I going to hurt you for it? Let you hurt me? So I was an excellent fighter, and scary, but ultimately defensive, not offensive. Everyone told me I was defensive, it was my only weakness, I should be more offensive. Should I?

Should I really? Maybe I was right.

Or anyway, maybe that's who I've always been and I never intended to change it, and won't.

One of the big tensions of writing is removing unnecessary words vs. leaving them because this is how this would leave your mouth.

Then there's the megaworse problem: words, phrases, sentences, parentheses, paragraphs that you add because you are worried you aren't clear, coherent, etc.

Something I try to teach students - who are always afraid they can't reach word count - is that you can expand any writing as long as you want by just asking the question "Why?" over and over.

You can use other questions for the same kind of effect. "So what?" "What happens next?" "Where are we?" "How would my enemy attack this?" etc.

Still, at some point you need pruning shears and a spare afternoon.

I understand this better as an aging adult than I did as a kid - namely, one of the reasons we might not like to study:

Studying is not doing.

Yes there are so many things I want to learn.

But my clock is ticking. There are only so many moments out there and in here.

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Note: studying *is* doing. It's working through material, rehearsing and absorbing and relating it, and often enough, if we're studying well, sharing it. That is certainly a kind of doing, just as thinking through an issue carefully is a kind of doing, or making a detailed plan is a kind of doing.

But we are also animals. We have large brains, much of which realize they are not being used in anything that looks very active or world-influential right now.

Reading a whole textbook is doing something, for sure. But much of us would feel that playing a basketball game or going on a date or giving a presentation at work is doing a lot more.

-

Ironically, reading a whole textbook might amount to doing more than going and marching in a protest. The one can expand your understanding dramatically, changing the potentials of the rest of your life. The other... might contribute to society reaching a tipping point, but then again might not contribute appreciably.

Either way the action is a megaphone we breathe into with our volition.

I'm not the most imaginative or creative person, but I've learned some things by trying. One is that the beginning of a great home run is the same kind of spark you've experienced many times.

For example, I was on a walk at night, just in the neighborhood, and I went by a driveway up a tiny hill through trees with two garage doors and brass lanterns on them. I can't tell you what it was about them, but I got this intense feeling. It was just... you know, this is a painting, and something's going on in it, and I've never had quite this feeling/image before. It's a unique moment with a unique emotion, unique potentials suggested, somehow. We're always feeling this when we're intrigued by something, whatever it is, however small.

That's the beginning of something. Microsoft. The Space Shuttle. Black Panther. The Star Spangled Banner. Whatever it is.

You might be waiting for a sufficiently great idea, but the thing is, that's all backwards. The little sparks are everywhere. You follow the spark. You pull on the thread. You let the flame travel down the long fuse, watch the fireworks, catch them, rebuild something with their light and heat.

-

(Oh, I mentioned the driveway. I imagined a dad who lived in that house, and I started writing some dialogue. Three hours later, the impulse had become a sketched out story with two pretty well-developed characters and two peripheral ones. If I weren't so... whatever... ADHD... I'd finish that story and share it.

The point is, the quality of the story is extraneous: that initial spark is the same intrigue that creates everything. It doesn't have to be utterly extraordinary. Jesus will not tell you about being God, as it were - if you'll forgive stretching the comparison too far. It's up to you to recognize the humble shepherd's son as more. Then your imagination begins to complete the picture, which is finally slotted into place by the audience, by their own imaginations.

But the next time you or a friend says, "Wouldn't that be a great name for a band?" please realize that you could probably do that. There is nothing exceptional about inspiring moments that become something, except your willingness to listen and then make the efforts.)

It's weird, a lot about a song is how it develops, but when I hear a new song that I'm going to love and hear many times, I often know within a minute. Yes it's how the music develops, but minds generate fractals, and what the music does in a few measures is an indicator of what it'll do in a few verses or movements.

Theory and practice are two different things. From that, many people conclude that theory is bogus and practice is all that matters. This is much like saying daytime is all that matters because day and night are different; the logic is faulty. Try living without sleep! People go crazy where the sun never goes down. Practice without theory is playing the lottery in everything all the time.

Prospectating Far

Humanity lacks goals, in some ways, I think. Wouldn't it be amazing if all the art we enjoy today still existed and was still understandable in, say, a billion years?

That isn't a totally unreasonable goal. No one spends much time thinking about it, but I see no reason to think it definitely couldn't be achieved.

If we don't set our sights long, all we're doing is failing to make it to the end of the century.

Is/Not Perfect

Something I've realized is that there both is and is not perfection. Perfection is mostly a feeling, not a metric. So in that sense it's real. When you see the perfect ending to a great movie and it's just *chef's kiss* that's a moment of perfection. It may not be perfect the next time you see it, but right now it is, and that's a real phenomenon, and very desirable. I've heard this kind of perfection described as "stillness" - it gives you a sense of inspiration and a kind of Zen joy. You have no criticism. Your inner critic's jaw has dropped. That's real. It's a moment.

Similarly if you love someone and you just can't love them any less despite a big flaw you notice - or maybe even love them more because of it - that's perfection. It's a feeling. A moment. And real.

There is no perfectly reliable perfection. By throwing different criteria at anything, you can find ways it falls short of one aspiration or another. That's what we mean by "there is no perfection" and "nothing is perfect."

We're all on Earth only finitely. You will run out of time. Before then, wouldn't you like to do some things? Sometimes the "more perfect" action is like the lover's flaw - it's perfect because it's real and it doesn't get in the way of the intention or the central quality of a thing. A flawed message that expresses a heartfelt thing is far "more perfect" than never expressing that. By allowing perfection to fracture and be a feeling, a moment, an intention, we invite it. In Japan this general idea is called "wabi-sabi." In Italy, "sprezzatura."

Live with more perfection by embracing wabi-sabi and sprezzatura. We have only so many moments. Use them. Well. You will find there is perfection in that.

Losing What I'm Doing

I keep losing myself. A couple days ago a student asked me what I'm doing with my life... because his mother kept asking him. I laughed, because I know what they both mean. And I tried to answer.

But I admitted that I'm kind of lost. There's a lot I'm working on, and I'm trying to get it all to come together. He said something about "a trusting the process thing" and I said "It's very much a trusting the process thing." Except that's a half-truth, because mostly I don't even trust my own process, and that's the biggest problem.

So yeah, I talk about uncertainty being so important and it is, but I recognize that confidence is also important—and even faith. Always have seen that, at least in part! But I don't necessarily talk in such a way that you'd know. And maybe the way we talk changes how we see.

This wasn't exactly the point I started out trying to make here. There's a particular concept, or nucleus/vortex/nexus of concepts, that is so important to me that it's almost who I am - even though it's just ideas, and ideas aren't selves. But when I forget that this nexus is what I'm about, I lose myself somehow.

It's the first thing I studied in graduate school - complex systems, how simple things create amazingly complicated and even living patterns.

That's an art and a science and it's what I'm about. The simple things could be shapes and letters and words and sentences and paragraphs and chapters and life stories. They could be pulses and sounds and textures and music. They could be bits and you know all that IT stuff.

That's what fascinates me. Something from nothing - or almost nothing.

It's why black holes fascinate me. Even the slight chance that they could be universes on the other side - it's the most intriguing thing imaginable. Something from nothing - or everything from one point.

It's why I wonder at games made of plastic tokens or digital bits, movies made of film grain and magnetic crackles, albums made of air made of fingers on instruments.

Does what I'm interested in make sense? It might make sense to no one except me as a single thing, but I see a single thing in that, and that's my life's work. That's what I'm doing with my life, or trying. And what am I going to do but keep trying? Moth to flame. The flame is everything.

Increasingly Inaccurately Numbered List of Coding Tips

There are four ways I know to get into code.

1) Decide what you want to do next and write code for it. (Works great when you're already immersed.)

2) Find comments to add/improve and other ways to tinker and buff up clarity/correctness. (Works to slowly get you immersed because this is much easier than 1 and always possible if the code is yours.)

3) Run the code. Just do it. Play with the running program, look for something you feel excited to alter. Alter it. Any which way. Just do. Find the relevant code and leave it different and run it all again.

4) Sit down (or stand up) with someone who also codes and collaborate.

Despite knowing these things, I go through weeks and even months of being basically unable to do 1), because I can't find my way to the flow state that makes coding easy and fun, or challenging but the best jigsaw puzzle in the world.

5) Music.

Sometimes it really helps, sometimes it sinks the submarine.

6) Set a timer for attempting the above.

7) Keep drinking cups of decaf coffee until zone found.

All right that's all folks. I'm totally out of tips.

I have this saying, "People before principles." What that means is that principles are very important, but in our lives, people are even more important. So if you disagree with a person on some principle and hate that person for it, I see where you're coming from, but I think you're putting principles before people, which to me is wrong.

I teach math and code and other kinds of knowledge and expression. Believe me, I thoroughly enjoy and value principles.

That includes ethical and moral principles.

One of those is "People before principles." I'm not sure where it came from. I think I heard it somewhere.

And you can break that principle, and I will still follow it and put you before the principle. But that doesn't mean abandoning the principle, in this case, because by putting you before a principle, I'm still following the principle. But I'd break a principle if it would save your life, for example.

True objectivity is one of the gentlest of all possible attitudes.

Its hardness comes from background reality, not from a person (yelling, flexing, guilting, etc).

In fact, the energy you pour in may well be the crutch you need because you are mistaken.

Monitor that energy and where it's going and why.

Just a little objectivity tip.

When you have the evidence, winning an argument is almost effortless, and has nothing to do with attitude.

Objectivity wins in the gentlest way because it's there already.

An invading force of 1,000 in a city of 100,000 would need to fight valiantly/brutally, and would need great luck besides.

If the invading force *is* the 100,000 already there, there's no need to fight whatsoever.

That's how objectivity wins: it already has.

And that's how you should argue, as close as you can manage.

I don't know if this is a secret or a trick or just obvious, but every poem is a character. Even if three poems are all perfectly truthful, they paint three different pictures and each has its own character, its own voice. Creative nonfiction is a true story told in an original way, probably with tweaks and embellishments. The same goes even for the truest poem: it has a unique voice, one somehow unlike the voice in every other poem ever written. Each poem is a character.

Photography has a similar quality. A great photo, I often think, is one that allows (or better yet invites) you to imagine a scene and a place other than what was there (around the camera). It's a slice taken from the universe, but because it's removed and held at arm's length, the space outside the frame suggests all these other universes.

Do you see what I mean? Even the truest poem does the same thing. It suggests a character, and people, beings, other than the poet. My heart is attached to me, and I to my heart. But if you remove my heart, it is a heart, and its own thing, and could belong to anyone.

[the image from The Anthologist about fiction/nonfiction poetry not existing as categories]

This is a clipping I posted on my Instagram last year, but it's a thought that chases me around sometimes. Poems often have completely true admissions next to complete fabrications - that holds also for prose or film stories, but they use more space. In a poem, it's all jammed together, like on the DC Metro to the 2017 Women's March. You don't have time, maybe don't even have the leeway to distinguish.

One thing is certain: the poet thought of everything there, and if it's there, almost certainly felt it. In what context? It could have been any context, though. A sad or angry strain need not be the poet's angry or sad strain about that thing in reality. But everyone has felt sad, everyone has felt angry. The poet has put together this arrangement for effect.

Interactive, digital art experiences are a bit like taking a poem, cutting it up, and putting the slices in different gift boxes of different sizes and shapes - or, more boringly, all the same size and shape. It could be wonderful. It could also not. It could feel pointless.

I don't know how else to put it. There's a "boxiness" to interactive art that has nothing to do with pixels. The piece works to the extent that you either love the boxes or you see right through them. If you aren't enthusiastic about the boxes or they're opaque, reading the poem fragments will probably be unsatisfying.

Questionable Speaker: Trans people identifying as women could go into women's bathrooms and rape people.

A: How can you say that?! That's so transphobic! Why do you hate trans people so much? I mean, that's SUCH a misconception. It's a stereotype and you're propagating it, because apparently you're hateful and prejudiced. It's just so wrong and harmful!

OR

B: That's true, it could happen. It has happened and probably will again. What's the probability or frequency? It seems rare, but what can we do about this? And we should be careful not to give the impression that this is normal or usual. All the evidence I've seen points to this being a relatively rare occurrence. And people need to be able to exist. What would you propose?

-

Get my point?

My understanding of human psychology is that B is not only more accurate, it's also more effective.

The original statement may LEAD to misconceptions, but it's a totally true statement. Just like you shouldn't prosecute someone for a crime they haven't committed yet, you shouldn't attack someone for the possibility that their true words could lead to misunderstandings.

If you can't understand why someone disagrees with you, you're at a big disadvantage when it comes to convincing them of anything on the topic.

This goes just as much for misunderstanding or simplifying their position. That does not instill trust.

Now - I should say that it's extremely understandable not to understand why someone disagrees with you. That is probably going to be the default condition. We'd better expect it. But because we'd better expect it, we'd better prepare for it.

There's a way that I think guys are done a disservice. Let me see if I can put it into just a few words.

Remember the classic sex strategies - the female of the species is sparing and choosy, protective of a few eggs and young, while the male of the species is profligate, taking risks and opportunities to basically diversify the portfolio? You know the story. And it's legitimate enough. Much of the animal kingdom is influenced by this pattern, including humans in our history - and today is part of our history. Life is not quite that simple, but it's one of the themes; oversimplified, stylized, but not exactly crazy or wrong. The pattern exists.

Yet promiscuity is seen as negative - not in the same ways for men and women, but generally negative. It's seen as unfaithful or caddish to be sleeping around or interested in many people and playing them off against each other. And that's often at best. It can be seen as objectively hurtful and even, apparently, pure evil. Treatment of cheaters and adulterers has at times been... harsh.

Many guys will understand that it's better, more virtuous, simpler, more honest, etc, to be interested in one person at a time. And to some extent this is maybe because we consider one person enough, and to another extent it is maybe because society has expressed to us that this is a better, more noble way to conduct our lives. So whether it's from some inner compass or reading the room of society, we aren't chasing after multiple women at once. It almost doesn't occur to us. Not usually. We're interested in one person, and we want to know if she's interested back.

The problem is that this is actually - intuitively - read as weak, unmasculine, and possibly desperate by female psychology. That caddish thing that men aren't supposed to be like - you know, cheats, players, etc - is almost the definition of masculinity according to that sex strategies picture, which many have awareness of, including many women, and including some primate instinct around sexuality. So when we ennoble ourselves, we can make ourselves pathetic.

And that's the disservice that's done to men. It's this idea that it's a good thing to be interested in only one woman. And it may be, but we forget that it's also a good thing to be interested in many women. That's perfectly all right, and there are times when that's by far the healthiest - and ironically by far the most attractive - option.

When you flirt with many women, some will flirt back, and some of those will get with you, and all of that will naturally build your confidence and increase the ratio of women who respond. If you don't flirt with anyone, or only one person at a time and it seems like every time you end up rejected - that will naturally harm your confidence, and make the ratio worse in the future. That's a basic equation of human sexuality - again, a bit simplified, but a real pattern.

Yes, it has traditionally been more socially acceptable for men to be promiscuous than women. (This in part derives from matching the sex strategy that goes with the type of sex cell you're carrying, though that concept has been taken to intolerant extremes; strategies of this kind should absolutely not be enforced by others; let people be how they are!) But when men do not want to be promiscuous, or feel that isn't the right way to be in general, they tend to suffer for it, because they seem unmasculine.

And when they like someone? Guess what! That person's opinion matters a lot. In some ways too much. (It isn't supposed to - that's "putting her on a pedestal." And externally this can seem like manipulation. But for the guys I'm talking about - guys like me - it's a purely emotional thing. If someone matters, she matters. If you care what she thinks, you care what she thinks. If you're a little scared of her because you feel intense about her, you're a little scared of her because you feel intense about her. Nothing could be more genuine.) It's easy to get heartbroken and depressed when the one person you really like doesn't even think it's worth responding to a text message, like, ever. It's pretty devastating. Or can be. Then try that on repeat. Because it's what happens on repeat when every person you're interested in thinks you're weak, unmasculine, desperate, creepy, etc... and when she thinks that because she's the only person you're interested in at that time. She'll detect the pressure. Even if you aren't projecting it, she'll sense it. And that will be your undoing.

This has been referred to as "oneitis," and every time I hear it mentioned it's presented as weakness and probably pathetic. Now, if two people are married, then exclusivity is part of the commitment, and it's seen differently. But emotions aren't legal contracts. They happen when they happen. And for men and women the timelines are often a bit out of alignment, probably naturally. (Men seem to fall in love faster, or some do, and women seem to assume it's superficial. Both are probably natural and probably shortsighted in some ways. If a woman can size up a man from his confidence and demeanor and so on, why would we assume men can't do the same? Yet there are some instinctual asymmetries that are not in themselves wrong - just easy to misunderstand.)

This is not adequately explained to men - or women. But I think it's real.

It isn't exactly "nice guys" versus "bad boys." It actually has to do more with flirting, promiscuity, selectivity, and how we process those things - and how those things unconsciously affect our mating instincts.

As a guy, you can be interested in just one person. You can. But you have to let her know you're interested, preferably in a way that's bold but not objectionable or desperate. She needs to know she's special to you and why, yet she needs to not feel pressured by that. And there's kind of a slow reveal; you don't just drop a bomb. Or if you do, it has to be a bomb she likes in that moment - but it can't seem like you're throwing it out there just because she likes it. It's kind of a delicate balance. It's more delicate than the balance of flirting with many women, other women seeing that you like women and are popular with them, and joining in the fun because they expect to have fun.

Basically, the more selective "nicer" strategy is in some ways more difficult to pull off, that is, unless you understand these patterns I've described above.

It's a theory. I don't really know. It's what I think, based on experience, observation, listening, etc.