I often do things that anger people.

Yeah, what else is new, right? Everyone does. One of the things that's somewhat different, in my case, is that I often know I'm doing it. I often do it on purpose, knowing that it will anger someone. ( I don't do it with the purpose of angering them... )

Tenuously connected thoughts.

It seems that many people conflate "commitment" with "exclusivity". They're not the same thing, obviously. I was wondering why a lot of people equated them, at least in interpersonal relationships, and then it hit me: If you are exclusive, you are committed. It's like putting all your eggs in one basket, which by default gives you reason to commit to protecting that basket. The reverse statement, if you are not exclusive then you are not committed, is not true. It's the standard bit of bad logic: If P then Q, so if not P then not Q. This is wrong, but a lot of poeple think that way, anyway. In any case, if you're unable to point to commitment, then your only measure of commitment in an interpersonal relationship would be looking to see if it's exclusive or not. If it's exclusivve, there's commitment, and if it's not exclusive, you really don't know. If you want commitment, and you're blind to seeing it directly, then why would you take that chance? Makes sense to me now.

I seem to have a different view of commitment to relationships than most people. I commit to making the relationship as good as it can be. Apparently, most people commit to making the relationship survive. That seems silly to me on many levels. First of all, the relationship always exists, even if it changes to become a bad relationship, or an apathetic one. You can't kill a relationship, you can only change it. Second, if you're committed to making it subsist, you're not focused on making it a good one -- and as it's easier (at first) to maintain a bad relationship than a good one, you're giving yourself motivation to make it a bad one. When you commit to making your relationships as good as they can be, the survival of the relationship kinda works itself out. After all, people like being in good relationships. It feels nice.

People are funny. How can you get so hung up on "this is the way it's supposed to be done" when people had vastly different dating patterns 20 years ago, and vastly different dating patterns 20 years before that, and different yet again 20 years prior to even that? It springs forth an intense sense of righteousness, anyway.

If you think you're worthy of being loved for who you are, do you need the safety blanket of exclusivity? It seems that people who are very insecure will want someone who will validate their insecurity, in the form of not caring for them, giving them evidence that they have no reason to be secure. Hello, abusive relationships and swinging. It seems that people who are a little insecure will want someone who will validate their insecurity, in the form of caring for them only if they have no other options. Hello, stereotypical monogamy. It seems that people who are secure in themselves will want someone to validate their security, in the form of caring for them even in the presence of other easy options. Hello, healthy monogamy and, with even more security, open relationships. Validation of self worth as the common theme.

More thoughts, less time...

I had an IM conversation with ariata today where she asked me to explain ... well, here's the relevant part of that conversation:

( fascinating drivel )

These "definitions" aren't all that nifty, or even overly special. It came up in a discussion of polyamorous relationships. They're not even definitions, really, but names that emphasize some aspect of a relationship. They're certainly not exclusive: think overlapping circles, or Venn Diagrams, or even signal networks, if your'e into that kind of thing. The big R is something you can't really pin down with a single definition.

A relationship, in essence, to me, is a continued interaction between two people. (I understand that, for some people, it's "two or more people". For me, it's "two people". I'll explain that in a bit.) That's the basic framework, and from there it goes in all sorts of directions. The bit about "continued interaction" is generic enough that it's hard to distort much, but "people" can be molded to include pets, computers, cars, whatever -- anything that interacts. So really, I suppose a relationship is a continued interaction between two entities, but that doesn't sound nearly as good, and it doesn't emphasize the people aspect as much as I'd like.

There are so many variations of relationships, on so many axes, that it's really hard even to group them. I mean, society at large has done a pretty good job of coming up with names of the most common varieties such as friends, lovers, and spouses. Thing is, as I wrote to ariata above, these words don't "label" so much as "emphasize" certain aspects of a relationship. It's a difference very similar to the difference between sorting your pictures into various folders versus tagging them with a number of keywords. This journal entry, for instance, doesn't exactly fit into "psychology", "rants", "philosophy", or "introspection", but any of those words would emphasize certain aspects of this entry, so I tag it with all of them -- but not "poetry", or "tech", or "politics" (okay, maybe that one, but I don't want to go there). I would be hard pressed to decide which one tag I wanted to group it by.

To make matters even more difficult, a lot of the words we do have tag things as not there: "fuckbuddy" means there are elements of friendship and lustful activities, but emphasize an exclusion of lifetime partnership; "bedwarmer" and "sex toy" mean there are elements of lustful activities, but emphasize an exclusion of commitment or even friendship. What makes matters extremely difficult is that these terms don't actually, literally mean that those elements aren't present: The negative emphasis comes from the fact that there are other words you would use that do emphasize the commitment, or the friendship, if it were there ... and using the term that doesn't emphasize them gives an implicit emphasis on its opposite. Someone calls their girlfriend (emphasis on the commitment, lustful/romantic acitvities, and friendship) a bedwarmer (emphasis on the lustful activities), the fact that there are words that do emphasize commitment and friendship implicitly gives emphasis to a lack of commitment and friendship -- unless you override it with other terms nearby that do, in fact, emphasize those qualities, in which case the implicit emphasis isn't there anymore. If you say your girlfriend is also an excellent bedwarmer, you're emphasizing everything girlfriend-like with an added, extra emphasis on how she is in bed.

Given all this, it is any wonder that people are eternally confused about what to call their relationships? What do you do when you don't have any convenient words that will emphasize what you'd like to emphasize? Perhaps you have a relationship that's extremely committed, with no lustful activities, but you're sharing your lives with each other economically? What do you call that? You'd have to say something weird like "platonic life mate", because there are no terms I can think of that emphasize shared life with a friend without sex.

The part I don't really understand is the drive to actually categorize relationships, to group them, like putting photos into folders. Is that photo of your beach trip with your ex where you ran into an old friend under "photos of my ex" or under "trips" or under "photos of my old friend"? It seems the same with categorizing relationships. Seems to me it would be simplest to just look at the relationship and emphasize the aspects that are relevent to the conversation at hand, hopefully avoiding any implicit emphases that happen to be false.

This is why, when people ask me what my relationship with someone is, I usually just describe what we do with our time together, instead of trying to find a label. I can use the labels to emphasize certain qualities of a relationship, so if someone asks me "is so-and-so your girlfriend" I can usually answer "yes", "no", or "kind of", depending on if those qualities happen to be present in my relationship with so-and-so, but even then I usually just enumerate which girlfriend-ish things we do and which ones we don't. It's also why I explicitly mention the open nature of my relationships, as there's no common word I know of that means "friends, lovers, partners, and open" (although "primary" comes close, it's not exactly in common usage). Closest I can get, using common words with their common emphases, is phrases like "girlfriend number one". I would often introduce ariata to others as my "partner", because although I have other relationships where I'm friends, lustful, and committed, she was the only one I had partnered with in life (and it was usually immediately apparent that she was also my girlfriend).

So, describing relationships, due to the large number of simple attributes and the much larger number of combinations of those attributes, seems like it often has to be done in a soft, fuzzy fashion. This is all fine and good, because we have ways of doing that, and we even have ways that are easily understood. Still, many people act like they think the label defines what you're supposed to do in the relationship: the label defining the relationship, instead of the relationship specifying the label. What the hell? Someone explain this to me. It's like they took the words -- which were, of course, invented for the purpose of describing actual relationships -- and turned them into cookie-cutters, completely obviating their original purpose. Perhaps the relationships were so standard for so long that people started thinking that the causality went the other way? That the words defined the relationships, instead of describing what the relationships themselves defined? I hear all the time that if someone is your "girlfriend" you should act a certain way toward them. Similar with "friend".

Someone please tell me how this makes sense. Enough people act this way that I'm sure it makes sense somehow; I just don't see it.

Sometimes I feel like a chameleon. Not because I can change who am at will -- oh, how glorious that would be -- but because I soak up my surroundings, and turn into them. Stick me anywhere, and I'll fit in before very much time has passed. My thought patterns themselves shift into something that works with the environment I'm in, copying whoever is around me.

This is somewhat in contrast with my belief about how well I'd fare in the face of extreme, intentional brainwashing. I'm thinking of various bootcamp-type situations, where I'd be subjected to some serious confrontation. I simply can't imagine myself breaking under that. I've been broken before; I know exactly what it takes, and the combination of yelling, menial labor, and getting my ass kicked aren't enough. I'm a chameleon, but I don't lose the ability to wear the color I had before.

I don't like thinking about the past. Knowing how shifty my own color is, just thinking about a time in the past will change the shade I'm wearing to match, and that usually doesn't work so well. I don't like looking at pictures, even of others, because my mind swirls through so many different people. I've been many of those people, to some degree; I still am those people, to some degree.

I don't forget my past. Or mine. Or mine. Or even mine. Every past of mine is a culmination of each of the pasts that came before, and each time I re-clothe myself in the color of my past, it feels backwards, like relapse, like shucking off all that I've learned since and starting over at that point.

Often, when no one else is around, I go and try on a bunch of my old shades, bringing them into focus for a while and seeing how well they fit with the other shades dancing around in my being. I set the different colors in conflict with one another, just to see where it resolves. This is an emotionally difficult process, to the point of physical pain, but it's the only way I can find to survive, without fracturing into many different shards.

I consider myself marginally insane, or perhaps marginally sane, as I have so many different people inside my head, inside my muscles, inside the core of what I consider "self". Some of me are patient. Some of me are not. Some of me are well defined. Some of me are not. Some of me are trustworthy. Some of me are not. Some of me are machiavellian. Some of me are not.

Which me am I now? All of them. I'm always all of them, even when they don't particularly show their color boldly. What does all this mean? You tell me. I don't know.

I think there's a huge rift between what people think causality is, and what it really is. For instance, we're trained to think that the entire world consists of sequences of "cause and effect"-type scenarios: A causes B which causes C which cases D, etc. But, that's really the exception, and not the norm -- really, it's "everying in the world" causes "everything else in the world". Causality is just a temporal correlation between something that happens before, and something that happens after; and when you start talking about A "causing" B, what you're actually saying is that B always follows A. Or, usually follows A. And that A doesn't happen unless B happens first. Or, usually doesn't happen unless B happens first. But, this is just an approximation, and not actually how the world works.

I'm pretty sure that most physicists will scream when I say there's no such thing as causality. There is such thing as causality, of course, it's just not what people usually mean when they say that something caused something else. What people seem to mean is something more akin to responsibility: If A caused B, then you can blame B on A. The causality that actually exists in the physical world, as far as I can figure out, is the kind where everything about now effects everything about later. Things about now have varying amounts of effect on the things about later, so you can usually safely ignore the things that have very small amounts of effect and just concentrate on the big things, and still get a pretty good picture of what's going on. I think the physicists call that effect "locality", but I'm not a physicist, so you'll have to ask them about that. Still, I'm pretty sure that the way most people think of cause and effect, in little chains of causes and effects, is just so much malarky. The chains just don't happen.

Well, they happen. They're just the exception, and not the rule. When something bad happens, thinking "What caused this?" seems silly to me. There just aren't many scenarios where the cause is clear-cut. What caused your friend to stand you up? What caused your romantic partner leave you? What caused it get so cold last night? What causes us to die at around age 80? What causes us to ask such silly questions?

Science does all of these experiements to figure out what causes what. Except, they don't, really. The really key things about science don't have anything to do with causing things. Take, for example, inertia. What causes things to continue moving if they're moving, or to remain still if they're still? No one knows. We do know, however, that they do -- and this is what we call "inertia". The law of inertia is merely descriptive, and includes no mention of causes. Maxwells equations, used to describe the interactions of electricity and magnetism (and used to calculate the speed of light), are the same way -- there's nothing in them that needs a cause, they just are. Descriptive, even predictive, but not causal.

Then there are all those experiments about what "causes" cancer. Notice how too much of just about anything has been proven to cause cancer in lab animals? What's that mean, to "cause" cancer? It certainly doesn't mean that if you eat too many bananas (or whatever) that you'll get cancer, because chances are you won't. Really, it means that if you eat too many bananas (or whatever) you have a higher chance of developing cancer. Does that suffice for "cause" of cancer? We're talking about slight increases of risk, here, nothing even close to a majority. Like experiments of inertia and Maxwell's equations, the results of the experiments show a correlation between something and the chance of something else happening shortly afterwards ... and that's about it. Once again, all we have is something descriptive, and this time it's not even usefully predictive.

Logically, people tell me, there's a difference between correlation and causality. Science is the art of isolating changes and seeing what happens. When you find a correlation between event A happening and event B happening -- which really means that they happen close together -- it could be one of three things: A caused B, B caused A, or some other "confounding variable" event(s) C caused both A and B. It could also be blind chance, but that's why we only look for what are called "significant" correlations, and we like it if the correlations show up again when we repeat the experiment.

Further, I'm often told that, because of these three (four) options, it's a logical fallacy to deduce causality from correlation. It even has a fancy latin name: "cum hoc ergo propter hoc" (roughly, "with this, therefore because of this"). A common example is the (verified) claim that there is a correlation between ice cream sales and murder rates: when there are more ice cream sales in an area, there's also more murder in the area. It's a little absurd to claim that ice cream sales cause people to murder, or even that acts of murder causes ice cream sales. (There's also a correlation between murder rates and the temperature, and when it's hot people buy more ice cream.)

So, then, when is it warranted to deduce causality?

Taking the same ice cream and murder example, the "answer" to the "puzzle" is that higher temperatures cause both the murders and the ice cream sales. That makes sense, right? Except that heat doesn't cause people to buy more ice cream. It may make it more likely, but it certainly doesn't cause it. Heat doesn't make you more violent or criminal, either. It may make it more likely, due to irritation and what not. So, let's re-word it slightly, to be more accurate: Heat causes an increased likelyhood of homocide, as well as an increased likelihood of buying ice cream. But, it's not a direct cause, is it? The heat really causes perspiration, which causes discomfort, which causes irritation, which causes the increased likelihood of murder. The heat really causes perspiration, which causes discomfort, which causes you to want cold things, which causes the increased likelihood of buying ice cream. Oh, hey, look at that -- the "chain" is similar for the first two items. Perhaps it's the discomfort that causes both? But no, you won't buy ice cream due to being uncomfortably cold. Perhaps the perspiration? This seems to make sense, but you still won't buy ice cream because you're perspiring due to fear. Really, you need the lot of them: You need the heat, you need the perspiration, you need the discomfort, and you need the desire for cold things. Any one of those goes missing (perhaps you're unaware that ice cream will cool you down, for instance, or perhaps you're unaware that heat get more uncomfortable over time), and you don't have any particularly strong urge to buy ice cream. The heat doesn't really cause the perspiration, either -- that's a really complex bodily function that happens when certain parts of your body get warmer.

Factors, factors, factors. Lots of factors. Lots and lots of little things that add up to buying ice cream. Lots and lots of little things that add up to killing someone. Any correlation to the event, large or small.

So, what do we have to work with? Well, we know that there's a correlation between hot days and sweating. We know that there's a correlation between ice cream sales and murder. We know that there's a correlation between hot days and buying ice cream. We know that there's a correlation between sweating and discomfort. We know there's a correlation between discomfort and irritation. We know there's a correlation between irritation and violence. We know there's a correlation between violence and murder. We know there's a correlation between heat+discomfort and wanting to cool down. We know there's a correlation between eating ice cream and cooling down.

All of this is obvious, right? I mean, it really is, if you've ever been angry, ever had ice cream, and ever sweated on a hot day. It's also pretty easy to get all of it from common experience and the statement, "there's a correlation between ice cream sales and murder rates." Here's the million-dollar question: What do we get from the statement, "Heat causes increased murder rates and increased ice cream sales"? It's really just trivia, without much understanding or pattern to it. You certainly can't get hard causality, because there are exceptions to this "rule". You might get that there's a correlation between ice cream sales and murder rates, which would in turn tell you that there are a number of factors in common between buying ice cream and killing someone. Now that's interesting.

Not all factors are equal, of course. Well, perhaps they are, but they have unequal effects on particular things. Sometimes there are "necessary" factors (the event wouldn't happen withat that factor), sometimes there are "sufficient" factors (the event will definitely happen with just this factor), and there's almost always a lot of meta-factors (factors that are combinations of other factors, such as two things happening at once). That's just the way it is. Anything I do, anything I see, is affected by such a large multitude of factors that it just seems silly to try to find "a cause" for it. I could find a cause, but that cause is almost always something like "the factors all added up to make it that way", which doesn't really seem all that helpful.

It seems, then, that it's useful to identify which factors are more important than others, or in other words, which factors contributed the most. Some people consider this type of reasoning to be "cause". For instance, auto insurance companies will often attribute fractions of cause to the different people in an accident, saying things like "the person turning left was 80% at fault, but the person going straight was speeding, making them 20% at fault." That certainly seems useful for things like determining insurance payouts, but the math doesn't work very well for those things that have a long, long list of factors, where all of them contribute just a little. Examples: Breaking up with your lover. Trusting someone (distrust is usually easy to find large factors for, but actually trusting someone is another story). Deciding what to put in a picture you're drawing. There are also things that seem right on the edge of that border, where there's a lot of factors, but you can still enumerate them all -- like deciding which house to buy, for instance.

Before thnking about the long, long lists of small factors, think a bit more about the cases where you can find a cause, or at least a few factors that stand out and can act like a cause. Let's take the "hot days increase both ice cream sales and murder rates" scenario. Let's say you've noticed that there's a correlation between ice cream sales and murder rates (why would you look for something like that, anyway?). This is interesting. This causes you to look for that something else that would explain the correlation. Even if you don't know what that confounding variable is, you can still use the information: If you see long lines at the ice cream stand, you might do well to take brightly lit paths if you're walking home at night. You don't need to know the cause. Now, let's say someone just tells you that hot days increase both ice cream sales and murder rates. That's nifty trivia and all -- and if someone mentions that both ice cream sales and murder rates are way up, you can look smart and say "that's because the weather is hot outside" -- but it's nothing useful. It's kind of like a mental masturbation, knowing the answer to a question you've asked yourself. How are you going to use that information? The usefulness of knowing the cause is the ability to figure out the correlations involved. If you already know the correlations, you've already found the useful information. Just like intertia: You don't need to know the cause of intertia in order to use the correlation between an objects current speed and its speed a moment from now. That's a good thing, too, because no one actually knows the cause of inertia, and the inertia effect is pretty darned useful to know.

Then there are the cases where you just can't find a single cause, or even a small list of them. Why do you trust your best friend? It's not because they've never broken your trust, because strangers haven't either. It's a culmination of lots and lots of small things, things that remind you of other people that haven't broken your trust, things you've trusted them with in the past that remained unbroken, all the ways you know they'd have to deal with you if they broke trust, all the things they've trusted you with, and more. So, what's the cause? Well, it's "they're trustworthy". What does that mean? Well, although you won't find it listed that way in the dictionary, it means "a culmination of lots and lots of small things, things that remind you of other people that haven't broken your trust, things you've trusted them with in the past that remained unbroken, all the ways you know they'd have to deal with you if they broke trust, all the things they've trusted you with, and more." Here's some more: Why are you depressed? Why are you sad? Why are you angry? (Okay, people can usually give an answer to that one -- but they're usually wrong, it seems.) Why are you happy? It's rarely possible to actually come up with discrete causes for these things. You can understand them, though, if you stop bothering to try to find reasons for them.

The most damning thing about looking for causes: You'll find them, and when you find something you consider to be "the cause", you stop looking for causes. Your focus is then on that cause, and not the effect itself. This is especially damning if, like in most circumstances, that "cause" is nowhere near the whole story.

When you let go of cause, and just think in terms of the connections or correlations between things, entire worlds of understanding become available that weren't available before. Instead of looking for a cause for your anger right now (or whenever y ou happen to get angry), look at the things that happen whenever you get angry. Find the correlations between them. Then, even though you may not know why those things are correlated with your anger, you'll know they're correlated, and you can use that information even without knowing the cause. You can do the same with happiness, or any emotion, or any of those things scientists just can't come up with causes for.

To further support the abnegation of causal relationships, consider this: You can consider any "cause" to be a very strong correlation between "event that happens before" and "event that happens after". Really, even for the things where we just know that A caused B, we really have no way of testing that it's not actually some unknown thing causing first A and then B. It's not testable. It's not verifiable. What if you just haven't found an exception yet? "Knowing" the cause of anything is just a matter of deciding you're convinced.

There's really nothing wrong with the idea of cause and effect. Just bear in mind that the "cause" is "everything" and the "effect" is "anything". The particulars are in the correlations themselves.

How To Write Good.

1. Always avoid alliteration.
2. Avoid clichés like the plague--they're old hat.
3. Employ the vernacular.
4. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
5. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
6. Parenthetical words however must be enclosed in commas.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren't necessary.
9. Do not use a foreign word when there is an adequate English quid pro quo.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
12. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
13. Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
14. Profanity sucks.
15. Be more or less specific.
16. Understatement is always best.
17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice should not be used.
21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
22. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors--even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
23. Who needs rhetorical questions?
24. Don't use commas, that, are not necessary.
25. Do not use hyperbole; not one in a million can do it effectively.
26. Never use a big word when a diminutive alternative would suffice.
27. Subject and verb always has to agree.
28. It behooves you to avoid archaic expressions. Avoid archaeic spellings too.
29. Placing a comma between subject and predicate, is not correct.
30. Use your spell checker to avoid mispelling and to catch typograhpical errors.
31. Don't repeat yourself, or say again what you have said before.
32. Don't be redundant.
33. Use the apostrophe in it's proper place and omit it when its not needed.
34. Don't never use no double negatives.
35. Poofread carefully to see if you any words out.
36. Hopefully, you will use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
37. Eschew obfuscation.
38. No sentence fragments.
39. Don't indulge in sesquipedalian lexicological constructions.
40. A writer must not shift your point of view.
41. Don't overuse exclamation marks!!
42. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
43. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
44. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
45. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
46. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
47. Always pick on the correct idiom.
48. The adverb always follows the verb.
49. And always be sure to finish what
50. Summarize - the golden rule: 5 +/- 2 points per topic - i.e. 7 maximum

I found this post of zorbathut's just to hilarious not to repost:

Right now I'm being spectacularly amused by the idea of doing a political webcomic that's consistently absolute gibberish.

Imagine a donkey, flying a plane marked "North Korea", dropping a bomb labeled "Coca-Cola" on an oil barrel.

I could so totally come up with hundreds of these.

Gotta love intelligent humor.

A friend of mine came up with this lovely piece of text that has a flesch reading ease of 0, a flesch-kincaid grade level of 34 and a gunning fog index of roughly 35:

I try to make my documents as obscurely erudite as possible, full of multisyllabic words and long sentences comprised of many phrases, delineated appropriately by a veritable slough of commas, colons and semicolons; this type of writing is generally considered unacceptable in modern correspondence, but I find its inherently pedantic qualities endear it to my fundamentally conceited personality. The style having been introduced to me through the voluminous expression of Herman Melville, it preöccupied my ponderings and encouraged me to adopt a similarly expanded idiom when producing inscribed texts; likewise did it profoundly affect my oratory mannerisms, allowing my pontifications to expand incessantly, leading my listeners to the inevitable conclusion that my eventual quiescence is a virtual impossibility.

Beautiful, man, just beautiful.

Internal representations of the world: We all have them. Really, it's all we have, when it comes to knowing what's going on in the universe, when we can't directly perceive it. It's what we manipulate, when we try to affect the world around us. It's what gives us the ideas of what will happen next, and the ideas of how to alter that course.

So, I have a theory of anger.

Many people have noticed that I don't get angry much. When I get angry, it's not all that extreme. I do get angry, though, and when I do, the same thing usually happens: I spend some time thinking about why I got angry, and I find out that my internal representation of the world didn't match reality, didn't match my continued perceptions. I remain angry until I come to accept that the world is the way it is, and update my internal representations to account for the anomaly. Other people seem to work the same way, though they'll often emphasize the "talk" or the "apology", and not the consistency between their own representations and what they see around them.

I have a theory on thought, as well. Thought organization, is more like it. I think of them as little balls that can light up, arranged in network of wires connecting thoughts to many other thoughts, and each of those wires can light up, and there are wires connecting the wires to each other and to other concepts, and those can light up as well. Each of these thought-wires has a certain volatility, a certain probability that they will light up if a connecting thought has been lit, depending on how brightly that connecting though is triggered. All of these thought-wires slowly lose brightness over time. New wires are placed between balls and wires that light up simultaneously, and old wires that don't ever light up eventually decompose and sigh away. The more often and a wire is lit, the easier it is to light in the future, and the less often a wire is lit, the harder it is to light in the future.

This is a pretty fractal picture of thoughts, because you can consider any collection of connected balls and wires as a single ball, with connections to other balls and wires, giving thoughts a "locality" in the network, and making them somewhat "fuzzy". These larger balls get lit when certain balls and wires inside them get lit, even if not all of them are lit, giving us concepts like "chairs" that can have any number of legs, perhaps a back, usually associated with a table, raised from the ground, with the purpose of being sat upon. A lot of the larger balls actually overlap other large balls, giving us things like "stools" and "booths" and "chairs" all being related, with one concept triggering the other. Similarly, you can see how language itself can create connections, such as the word "

This large set of overlapping, ever-firing signals is what gives rise to learning (making new connections, laying new wires), preoccupations that self-perpetuate (every time you think of X close to thinking about X, Y, or Z you strengthen the linking wire), memory (the existence of a particular set of wires), forgetfulness (never firing those wires lets them decay into nothingness), humor (taking a strange route between two concepts), and internal approximate representations of the world (links between cause and effect).

I have a theory on the general effects of a rate of change as well, although that's not my theory, so much as some simple math you can do for yourself. Google for "bifurcation diagrams", and notice that things get chaotic very quickly as you increase the rate of change of the otherwise simple system.

So, anger. When I'm angry, I think faster. Much faster. My chess game improves dramatically, I'm aware of much more, I reach (sometimes bad) conclusions much more quickly. My anger goes away after I've incorporated the differences between my own predictions and what I see of the world outside. I don't get angry unless I see something that doesn't fit with what I think the world is intended to do (what it "should" do, perhaps?), when the world doesn't match my expectations. All of these things seem to be pretty general. What is anger? Why do we experience it? Why us, the thinking beings, when it doesn't affect the nonthinking beings nearly so much? Why was it selected for? What purpose does it have?

It increases the rate of change of the thought system. The wires light up brighter, they decay faster, they're placed more easily, and they get destroyed more easily. It just takes the system like it's a bunch of ping-pong balls in a box with an uneven bottom, and shakes the bejeezus out of it, letting things fall where they may. The angrier you are, the harder things are shaken.

There's a process called annealing. It's used for making metals crystalize. The way it works is that you heat up the piece of metal, very very hot, making the atoms inside jump around like nothing else. Then, you cool it. SLOWLY. If you cool it too quickly, i doesn't work, and will actually even crack. Temperature, as any physicist knows, is the average of the energy of the kinetic energy (average speed, essentially) of the individual particles. Using the uneven-bottomed box of ping-pong balls as an example, you shake it really hard to get things moving, but that will make balls at the lower elevations jump to higher nooks as well as jostling the balls in the higher nooks out to send them down. But, if you decrease the "temperature" slowly, you'll end up with the vast, vast majority of balls at the lowest elevation possible, because the "temperature" will pass through the point just energetic enough to kick a ball out of a high nook but not high enough to put it back from a lower elevation. Annealing again, slightly less rigorously to start, can make it even better.

So, anger. Ever notice that you do things while angry you'd never consider doing while calm? Then, when you calm down, your thoughts on the world will have changed slightly, but nearly all of the core beliefs and memories remain the same as they were before you became angry? Things you would do if your system of htought balls got jostled heavily, and then settled back down into roughly the same pattern? Why does anger have that effect?

It performs an annealing process on the box of connected thoughts in your brain. The "uneven-bottom" is consistency with your perceptions. It takes the thoughts that are too high, in their own nook and out of sync, separated from the rest by some blocking mental wall, and jostles them out and into the mesh to find a spot where they can be useful, connected to other things.

So, why anger? Because, if we don't have a good internal representation of the world around us, we will die out. Compared to people who have better predictions, we will make stupider choices, leading to more danger and less opportunity. Anger is the way, physiologically, we jostle our own thoughts and let them settle into a more reasonable pattern. The higher the blocking mental walls, the angrier you must become for it to be useful -- and if you have an extraordinarily stong and high mental block, and the balls don't get jostled enough to bounce out into the larger fray, it will merely happen again, but more extreme. Just like we observe all around us.

We all know that denial is the first step, then anger. Without denial, there isn't much anger. Block it out, then shake things up.



Food for thought: groups against anger (such as religions), changes you effect in another's brain simply by triggering concepts in close proximity (by communicating), cynicism and the lack of anger, head-in-the-sands philosphy and lack of anger, idealism and the presence of anger, belief that the world is not as it is intended to be and the presence of anger, strength of denial and strength of anger.

I've been increasingly of the notion that I'm somewhat severely screwed up in the head. It doesn't bother me much. As galith has put it a number of times, my parents did a great job with my self esteem. I can count the number of times I can recall feeling bad about who I was on the fingers of one hand. Interesting stories, if you want to hear them. Long, though, so ask me in person.

So, I think I'm a bit screwy, and it doesn't bother me. Much, that is. It bothers me a little; my emotions aren't completely immune to societal expectations. Funny thing is, I don't really know what "screwed up in the head" means. I just know that a lot of people around me believe it, and that's usually a good reason to ponder. Lots of people can all be wrong, but they can be right, too.

Way I figure it, if I'm screwy in the head, well, that's the way I am. In general, I like my head: the way I think, the patterns I see, the communication styles, and the line of my jaw. Okay, the jaw bit isn't really related to what I'm talking about. But if I'm screwed up in the head, I'm okay with that. It's just another way of saying that I don't do what people expect me to do, and that's never really bothered me. The reactions I get bother me, sometimes, but being unpredictable hasn't ever bothered me. Being predictable doesn't generally bother me, either ... I think that's called "trust", in a nutshell. Huh. I'll have to think on that one.

Oh yeah -- the subject line is a joke.

I was talking about this the other night with a friend of mine -- actually, probably my closest friend outside of ariata, now that galith is so far away. (This statement left intentionally ambiguous. I love the English language.) So I said to him, "I've been thinking, and I think I'm really screwed up." This was one of those four-in-the-morning, I'm-too-tired-to-watch-what-I'm-saying talks. Those are the best. He told me that I wasn't screwed up, although he could see how people would think so. He says I'm not ruled by my emotions, that I'll feel the same thing everyone else feels, and might even be slightly swayed by those emotions, but they don't determine my decisions -- I'll make the same decision I would have made minus the mind-clouding emotions, unless it was borderline to begin with.

I think that's called sociopath. I'm not sure, really -- it might be that a sociopath doesn't feel it at all, as opposed to feeling it and denying it. Whatever "it" happens to be. Even if sociopath isn't the right word, I can certainly see how people would think me a sociopath. (Noone has admitted to me that they think so, but I figure some people do.)

I also have this urge that people realize that I'm smart. I really want people to know what I'm capable of. Why? Screwed in the head. My friend says it's just wanting recognition for what I am, and that I'm doing nothing special to show it, and that the urge to be recognized for your achievements is perfectly natural, and that it just looks weird because not many people are as smart as I am (although I might argue that). I respect this guys take on things, but I think it's a bit more than that. I'm an arrogant bastard. Sometimes, for a laugh, I'll try to be as arrogant as possible. That usually takes me down a notch or two. But usually I'm just your regular-old full-of-himself junkie who wants to be the center of attention.

For the longest time, I figured that my upbringing was devoid of downsides. I still think that I received a lot more good than bad (my parents were awesome), but one thing I did deal with was a very manipulative mother. She still is, she's just either not as good at it anymore, or so good that she's trying to look clumsy at it, or I'm just more sensitive to it. And boy, am I sensitive to it. Borderline violently sensitive. The violence is within, though, in my head -- it feels like I'm ripping a train of its tracks with sheer force of will. Not pleasant, and it makes me sweat.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm actually glad of this. I'm still pretty easy to manipulate (everyone is), but I'm more aware of when it happens than the average Joe. I really think this helps me, in the long run. I'm also less swayed by emotions (see? it's all connected), because I'm so used to thinking about where they came from and then making my decisions based on that, instead of on my emotions. To put it another way, I was so over-manipulated that the only way for me to function was to dullen my responses to my raw emotions -- raw emotions that aren't dampened themselves, unfortunately, or things would be a lot easier. Just my reactions to them. It's HARD. But I do it, I think because I believe it's easier than not doing it, in the long run.

So, things like my girlfriend demanding that I shower her with attention. I like my girlfriend (or she wouldn't be my girlfriend, yadda yadda), and I want her to be happy, and giving her the attention would make her happy, and my immediate emotional response urges me to do what she asks. But then, I think, where does this urging come from? Well, two major places: the desire for her to be happy, and the fear of losing her. Once I figure that out, it's not too terribly difficult to realize that showering her with attention, too much, just sets up an expectation that I can't maintain, leading to even more unhappiness in the long run, and that showering her with attention, too much, is almost a sure-fire way of losing her, for a variety of reasons. (Bor-ing!) This just begs the question of how much is "too much", and I really don't have an answer for that except "I know it when I feel it".

This is -- as many people have pointed out -- quite manipulative. I see nothing negative about this, as it leads (I believe) to better things not only for me, but for everyone else involved, as well. I can't really argue that I'm not manipulative. I'll argue deceptive, because I really don't think I am, but if you want to call what I do manipulative, then by george it's manipulative. But whatever you call it, what I actually do is attempt to guide. Kind of like leading in a dance, or steering a friend as you're walking around town, you apply gentle force in the direction you want to go and then release when it becomes apparent they aren't going that way. It's not a shove, and I'm not insisting: it's just a suggestion. It's not like I step up the force when I see resistance. I usually just walk away.

So, I do this a lot, just kinda subconsciously, although I can look back later at how I've behaved and realize what I was doing. Thing is, I often see others doing it. I could name names, but it would be a very long list, which is actually an interesting point in itself. I see the pressure, I feel the pressure, and often, I ignore the pressure. As if it wasn't there. Because I don't want to go where they're pressing, so I don't. Sometimes I point at the pressure and laugh, if it's particularly absurd. Sometimes I push back.

People don't mind when I push back. Well, they mind, because when I actually decide to push things I push them really far, but they're not scared. It's expected. It fits with the norms. This is how arguments are started, how fights are started, and how tension is resolved (eventually). People mind IMMENSELY when I don't even acknowledge that the pressure is there. Why is that? Further, they don't mind when they think I'm oblivious to it (they just make it more obvious, usually), but mind rather terribly when they think I'm ignoring it. I can't get into people's minds, of course, but it seems to soothe people when they find out I was really just oblivious, and not actively ignoring their leads.

Sociopath. To observers, when I realize what's going on, and then don't do what's expected of "someone who knows what's going on", it's like I don't feel it at all. Realize it, sure, but not "feel" the rightness or wrongness of things. A number of words come to mind: Machiavellian, sociopathic, psychopathic, immoral, amoral (is that worse?), the like.

I'm okay with who I am. Whatever you want to call me is fine, because what you call me doesn't really change who I am, and whatever I did you could call me something damaging. Truth comes out over time, so I'm not too worried about transient rumors. By and large, the people that know me well really like me, too. Even when I frustrate the hell out of them, as I do fairly often, or they don't approve of my decisions, which happens a lot. Perhaps "like me" isn't what I meant so much as "trust that my heart is in the right place". I think my heart is in the right place, too, but I'm kinda biased, and I think that (perhaps barring extremely rare exceptions) everyone's heart is in the right place -- just moronically wrong on occasion regarding the effectxs their actions will have on things. I'm moronically wrong like this a lot. Kinda sucks, but each time it happens, I can learn from it.

Ah, see, there's a bit more of why I think I'm screwed in the head. Guilt? I don't feel it.

I. Don't. Feel. Guilt.

What the hell? Why not? I don't know. I know it freaks the shit out of people when they find out, though, which is usually after they try to guilt trip me on something or other and it has no noticeable effect. I know what guilt is; I used to feel it. It's that constricting feeling in your chest, plus a heady feeling, plus remorse over something you believe you're the cause of. This isn't a case of me just calling it by another name; I really don't feel guilty about anything I do. Even the things I regret (and there are plenty of those). I odn't even think it's a case of me suppressing it -- I really just don't even feel twinges of guilt.

Here's what goes on in my head, best I can figure: I do something, thinking it's the best thing (of course I think it's the best thing -- I did it, didn't I?). Stuff happens that I don't like, and I realize (or at least believe) that these things are a result of what I did. I regret the action, and would do it again differently if I could reload a saved game and go through the level again. But no remorse. I did what was the best known option (to me) at the time, and I learned from the results that there were better options. Thinking back, if I had to go though it again, with the same knowledge I had the last time (which means without the new knowledge I gained from going through it the first time), I'd do the same, stupid thing. I didn't make a bad decision, I made the best decision I could at the time, and I can't bring myself to feel bad about that, no matter what the effects were. Perhaps if the effects were drastic enough I'd feel bad, but I can't see myself making a mistake of such epic proportions.

Naturalistic Fallacy. I've been accused of it numerous times. You know, the one where you think things should be the way they are, because that's the way they are? That's not quite what the Naturalistic Fallacy is, although it's very close in wording (and perhaps in concept). I really strongly believe that if things are the way they are, then that's the way they should be, because they are the results of the environment being the way it is, which is the result of the environment being the way it was. It's a shame there's a very similar thought with the word "fallacy" attached to it. In short, the Naturalistic Fallacy is the logical fallacy where you believe that things should continue to be how they are now, because that's the way they are now. That's just silly -- things change all the time, as they should. Of course.

I've been playing with the idea of superrationality. Basically, what that means is that if I reach a conclusion, other people will probably reach the same conclusion, so it makes sense for me to choose the thing that's best if everyone chooses it. It's a pet Hofstadter theory. I think it's bunk, really. But, as I was pondering exactly why it was bunk, it got me to thinking -- people do tend to think similarly, and by "think similarly" I mean make decisions using the same type of mental processes. There are large swaths of people who use religion to decide things, and (smaller) large swaths of people who use ethics, a smaller group who is machiavellian, and not many people who use the method I use. Certain minds are just more suited for ethics calculations ("calculations" being a loose term, here), and other minds are more suited to religious dogma calculations, and certain minds are more suited to machiavellian calculations. I do something different, and actually find those methods pretty hard (not to mention error-prone), so I figure my mind is better suited for the types of calculations I make (which are essentially convergence calculations, if anyone can take a gander at what that means). I'm in a decently high strata in terms of IQ, and I do see correlations between intelligence and which swath you happen to be in, and intelligence does become more rare as you get farther away from the average, but that might just be my intense desire to be smart making me lie to myself. In any case, I don't think my mind is suited for using religion, morals, or ethics as a basis for decisions, and I think most minds are unsuited to do the calculations I do. Why? Hell if I know.

This is, of course, all related. I don't feel guilt, I think the world should be exactly as it is, and I'm unpredictable. Exactly how I should be, of course, although there's still room for improvement. Why would I feel guilt if the world is exactly as it should be? Why would I be predictable, if I didn't feel guilt? Why should the world be other than it is, if things can't be otherwise? (They can't, you know -- things are the way they are and the most you can do is change how they'll be in the future.)

All in all, though, I haven't met very many people with similar mindsets. Perhaps two. I discuss philosphy with a lot of people, too, so I think I would have found more if it was at all a common mindset. I've noticed that whenever I bother thinking about how I was thinking three years ago, I figure I was really screwed up. Three years from now, I figure I'll look back at this and think I was screwed up now. So, I think I'm just screwed in the head. Not that I'm gonna do much about it. It works for me. And for God's sake, keep your damn religion away from me -- I don't want it. (I love the English language.)

You know, we're not taught in school how to reason. We're taught how to read, we're taught how to do various things with numbers. We're even taught grammar and spelling, if we're lucky, and we're taught some ways of writing useful papers. But, we're not taught how to learn. Some of us are taught about logic, if we're lucky, but not about the basic things like "if it happens a lot, it's likely to happen again, and now it's your job to figure out why" or "should is very different than reality, so never assume that a thing is the way people say it should be". Some of the most lucky of us are taught the scientific method, which is essentially a long-winded way of saying "guess-and-check until you find it", which some more specific instructions on the "check", but not really any instruction on how to pick a good "guess".

Troubleshooting. How to isolate a problem, or any other phenomenon. The way of understanding the connecdtions between things, and then tweaking those connections to see what changes in the overall scheme of things. How do you pick a good hypothesis? How do you learn methods of choosing a good hypothesis, that you can apply to any sort of issue, problem, situation, or system? How do you learn how to learn?

People make fun of me, or at least look down at me, for how I choose to perceive the life around me. Well, those that actually bother to find out, anyway. I don't really have any defense of my arts, such as they are (and they are arts to me, as are most things I do), except that they work better than any other ways I've tried, and I've tried many. There is something elegant and appealing about being able to use similar systems for thinking about just about everything, from math to martial arts to music to computers to dance to puzzles to games to psychology to geology to leading to craftsmanship to finances and to life in general, and have it all work.

I look at the political situation, as much of it as I've seen, and marvel at the things people are convinced of. I'm not too worried about it, because the media is going the way of no longer being controlled by corporations and instead being controlled by large, interested groups of people (yay internet!), but it's amazing to me that so many people don't even know how to tell fact from fiction. No, that's not right: More importantly, they don't know how to tell whether something is actually relevant. There's a very large list of ways you can convince someone of something without actually convincing them of anything except your "right"-ness: misdirection, misrepresentation, outright lies, misleading statistics, appeals to authority or fame, and other orator conjurer's tricks like over- or under-simplifying a situation. Nearly all of these aren't questions of "fact" versus "fiction" so much as "relevant" versus "irrelevant". Have you ever taken a class in not getting duped? Not in the public school system, I'd wager. Why not?

Seems that there is a large, vast, sweeping misconception about things that aren't as people claim they should be. See, people connive and cheat. They take advantage of people that don't know how to discern relevance, how to avoid being controlled like cattle. There's a couple ways of dealing with this, if you think it's something to deal with. One way is to just tell everyone not to connive and cheat, and impose penalties for when you get caught doing it. The other is to educate the sheep about how they're being duped, so it NO LONGER WORKS. Maybe a bit of both. Adding something to the "things you should not do" list won't do much beyond making people doing the duping a little more cautious and smart about what they do. And it takes lots of resources to maintain, and those required resources grow over time. Educating people how to defend their minds simply removes the tool from the hands of the dupers, that they couldn't dupe if they wanted to, making it a much less useful tool. This, too, would require resources, but those resources will decrease over time, rather than increase. Now, both ways do something, sure -- but the only reason I can think of to choose the first option over the second is if you actually thought that people would stop doing things on the "things you should not do" list, because if they did, then all you'd need to do is add it to that list and you're done. Sounds good, right? Look around, people. Does it work that way? No, really. You tell me. All I do is point at it. Does it make sense, under that light?

We're not taught to look at where things are going. We're taught the one-shot solutions. We're not taught to make the system better so you don't need to keep doing the same fix over and over. Nope, we're taught just to do that fix, over and over, and not even think about the system as a whole. You know, maybe if you looked at the system, you'd find that the best thing to do is just to keep on plugging, doing that same thing over and over again. It happens, pretty often. Then again, maybe not. We're not taught to look at changes over time. We certainly know things that have a direct, easy-to-see causal line, like shooting someone of hitting them. We're taught to ignore the nuances of anything we don't completely understand, like body language., for fear of miscontruing someone's intent. This leads to so many communication troubles, it ceases to be entertaining.

Speaking of which, where do we learn to communicate? From mom and dad, of course, or whoever filled that role in your particular upbrining. That's taken care of. WHERE DO YOU LEARN HOW OTHER PEOPLE COMMUNICATE? Not everyone communicates like I do, or like you do, even if you might think otherwise. Where is it taught that people will probably have the same sayings that mean completely different things in their mind? Where are we taught about how to resolve those differences and allow communication to take place?

Where do we learn to learn?

I've been struggling recently to answer the question, "Why do I act the way I act?" Because I think it's the best way to act, obviously (or I wouldn't be doing it), but why do I think it's the best way to act? When people ask me why I did something, I like being able to know the answer.

So, there are a lot of people who harbor a mild dislike for me. There's a smaller number of people who wish I were dead, or at the very least was never born. A close friend of mine thinks (or thought, at least, I'm not sure now) that I'm just unaware of how my actions will affect how people view me. While I'm no oracle, I think I've got a much better grasp on it than he had assumed.

A bit of exploration.

Why did he think I was unaware of it? Well, probably because he figured that if I was aware of how I was peeving people, I wouldn't do it. Whenever I see someone who is damaging their own opportunities, I think the same thing: They must not know the connection between what they're doing and the damage they're causing. People who continually badger a girl who's told them to go away, for example, probably aren't aware that they're just making things worse. I didn't, back when I was doing such things, which wasn't as long ago as I would like. My favorite example of this, however, is deceit. Why do people deceive? If you get caught in a single deception, the trust people have in your word is so incredibly diminished that it drastically affects your life for the worse. I'm convinced that these people aren't aware of the full ramifications of their deceptions.

Why do I think I'm aware of it? Well, because as I'm doing something that peeves people, I'm thinking, "This is probably going to make them uncomfortable," or even, "You know, this is really going to piss them off." I do it consciously, and although pissing them off isn't my motivation, it's a pre-known consequence. I'm sure there are things I do that piss people off without me knowing, but by and large I think it doesn't take me by surprise.

So, if I know it'll happen, why do I do it anyway? The simple but misleading answer is, "I don't care if they get upset." Obviously, there are levels of upset I care about. If someone is going to go kill themselves, or me, or just go spastic and start hurting things, I'm gonna care and I’m gonna care a lot. I'm not inhuman, or anything. But, barring irreparable damage, I'm not fazed much if someone gets upset with me. Irreparable damage is something I strive hard to avoid.

But, as I mentioned, "I don't care if they get upset" is misleading. It's very misleading. It's not even true, because I do care if people get upset ... I just don't care about that as much as I care about some other things. It pains me every time it happens, and I've even had nervous breakdowns over it (last week, even). But, in the end, after looking at everything I wish to achieve, I keep reaching the same conclusion: it's a necessary evil.

What do I wish to achieve? See, the thing that means more to me than your comfort level, or your short-term dislike of me, is how you will perceive me in a year, in five years, in ten years, looking back on those years of interaction. When dealing with people, that's probably the largest conscious motivation for my actions. It's why I avoid deception like the plague, and why I don't hide my mistakes, and why I don't really give a rat's ass about your drama. See, your drama is now, and will pass by next week, next month, or next year. Rumors are inconsequential, both about me and others, because the truth of the matter will become known over time, and I am patient.

This gives a pretty good metric for people to gauge whether they want me in their lives at the moment. Because, see, if it's just drama and you ask for my thoughts on the matter, I'm gonna tell you it's just drama -- even though it will upset you. If I'm not interested in your hobbies, I'll tell you I'm not interested even though you'd like me to be. And, most damaging of all, I will treat the drama like it's just not there, will causes all sorts of little explodey-noises as I pass through a clique. I will not promise silence. I won't stop doing my hobbies, even if you disapprove of them. In general, I don't run from confrontation. I will accept what is, and then treat it like it is what it is. Self-deception is something I do not tolerate in myself.

A (different) close friend put it to me differently: He told me that, one day, after knowing me for about three years, he looked back and realized that I was one of the few people who had always accepted him for who he was, never asking him to change, but never pulling punches or massaging his ego when he asked what I thought of him, either. He is now one of my best friends. When I compliment him, he realizes that it is a true compliment, and not mere flattery, and when I impugn him, he realizes that I am not merely trying to hurt him. This trust, that builds up over years, is both priceless and irreplaceable.

This is what I strive for. If there is a person or social group that has an issue with an aspect of my personality, I might change -- or I might not. If, in my opinion, people will appreciate me more five years from now for keeping my questionable personality trait, I'll stay the way I am. Sure, I'll alter my behavior to fit in, I do it all the time. But, there are limits on how far I'll alter, and those limits are defined by if I think you'll think better or worse of me five years from now.

So, if I see that there is some tension between us, I'll walk up to you and bring it to a confrontation. Why? Because then it can be resolved -- not right then, perhaps, but someday in the next five years. I'll also do it sooner rather than later. Why? Because five years from now, if we're still in touch, you'll think better of me for it ... even though you'll probably hate it right now. If you ask me to lie for you, I won't. Why? Because in five years, you'll know that I'm not lying to you, either. If you're trying to convince me to feel guilty, I'll walk away. Why? Because in five years, you'll know that others can't make me feel guilty about what I do with you, either. If I find out that I was wrong regarding a heated debate that I actually won, I'll seek you out and tell you I found I was wrong. Why? Because in five years, you'll realize that I am more dedicated to finding reality than I am to exerting authority.

This is hard. My god, this is hard. It's so much easier, right now, just to do what the people around me want me to do, right now. Everyone will be happier, for now, including myself. The problem is, in five years, you won't trust me at all, because I'm obviously swayed by the majority opinion of the group I'm currently close to. It would be so much easier, right now, to hold you and say that you're good and they're bad, or not to seek you out and willfully embarrass myself. It would be so much easier, right now, to let that tension stand -- the tension isn't nearly as bad, right now, as actually addressing the issue. The problem is, that tension will build, and eventually break open so badly that in five years you probably won't think fondly of me.

So, I force myself to take the long view. Sure, it's selfish and self-preserving -- I'm looking out for myself, after all, even if it's the self five years from now -- but it sure seems personally destructive in the short run. As time goes by, however, I find that people dislike me because it's the chic thing to do, and not because there's anything particularly damning about my actions. An ex that hates me, members of cliques, and the like ... but given time, people keep coming back to me and saying, "You know, you're really not that bad, I was just going with the crowd." If I had gone with the crowd, those people would be walking up to someone else saying they’re not so bad, and I’d just be member of that crowd.

It's been striking me recently how quotes are really ambiguous out of context, but serve as an excellent way to remind people (i.e. me) of large, complicated concepts. You just have to know the large concept first, or the quote makes no sense whatsoever. Okay, on with the quotes:

Dex: Do you want to have sex with this woman?
Dave: Definitely.
Dex: Okay, then you're violating the first rule of being Steve.
Dave: Who?
Dex: You must learn to eliminate your desire.
Rick: It's Buddhist.
Dex: I think the Taoists said it first.
Rick: Hey, are we gonna have a seminar or are we gonna play golf?
Dex: Just a short seminar on the elimination of desire, okay? If you're out with this girl and even THINKING about getting laid, you're finished, cuz women can smell an agenda like shit on a shoe.

Maggie: [to Dex] But you've never been happy with any women you've dated.
Dex: Well, that's Male Insanity Syndrome. Ya know, that is just you're with a woman and no matter how cool she is, you're always thinking "Maybe I could do a little better or I could trade up somehow.
Syd: "Trade up?"

Dex: Doing stuff is overrated. Like Hitler. He did a lot. But don't we all wish he woulda just stayed home and gotten stoned?

Syd: Okay, so, if you're falling in love with me, then why are you with all these other women?
Dex: Oh, come on. Am I supposed to remain celibate while I bask in like the warm glow of your annihilating contempt?

Dex: You think all Buddhist monks are like the Dalai Lama? I mean, you don't there are guys in Nepal, right, who are like, "What should I do? Should I carry packs of heavy shit for Westerners up to the top of the base camp on Mt. Everest, or should I stay down here in Katmandu and maybe just chant all day and check out chicks and pretend to be holy?"

Dex: Both men and women want to have sex. It's natural, except we're on different timetables. Women want to have sex, like, y'know, fifteen minutes after us, so alright, if you hold out for twenty she'll be chasing you for five.

Dex: Y'know, no one ever says, "Hey, God, how was your day? What can I do for you, God?" Or, "Hey, God, did you catch Letterman last night?"
Syd: Oh, and I suppose you talk to God like that?
Dex: Always. All the time.
Syd: And what does God say?
Dex: He says, "You know what? I saw Letterman and it sucked."

-All quotes from The Tao of Steve

Ow.  So much pain. It's odd -- first time I took this test, I felt I did really well, and I failed.  Second time I took the test, I felt I did horribly, and I passed.  Both times, I felt a bit down about the result.

( if you can figure out how the first paragraph relates to the rest of this, you're probably someone I'd like to hang out with )

Playing strategy games.  I know a few people who play strategy games.  Okay, I know a lot of people who play strategy games, of all sorts: cards, board games, CCG's, roleplaying, you name it.  Some of those people (ariata comes to mind, but that's because she's next to me) play those games with the purpose of learning, or "expanding their minds", and get frustrated not when they lose but when they stop learning anything from continuing the game.  I also know a few of people (galith and sartertus come to mind, as well as qazwsxmko to a lesser degree) whose style is to play to win.  There's a definite difference in the way these two classes of people approach playing games.  With those whose desire is to win (and honestly, I'm often in that category, caring more about the win than the learning), the game is approached from a "what advantage can I gain over my opponent this game" angle.  When the current game doesn't matter -- for instance, when the outcome of the game is essentially predetermined, one player being that much better than the other, or when they are playing against themselves -- the game is approached from a "what advantage can I gain over my opponent in future games" angle.  I don't know about other people, but I call the first one "competing", the second one "practicing", and neither of them necessarily "playful".  Someone who plays the game to expand their mind is usually playful, caring less about winning than about having a good game.  It's like Shent, the (fictional) elven game from Tad Williams' "Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn" trilogy:  The initial player can win, every single game, in three moves ... yet doesn't, because it would be uninteresting, and they already know how the game will end if they follow that path.  Losing the game is no worse than winning the game, so long as they are learning, and approach each game from a "what can I learn from this game" angle, only considering the opponent as a source of learning, instead of something to conquer.  The ironic part is, the best teachers I've had have told me to the best practice, for the purpose of beating the guy next time, is to be playful -- and from everything I see, they're right.

Sometimes, I'm playful.  Usually, I either just practice or compete, and knowing this makes me sad.

Mediocrity is the meaning of existence.

Here's a game for you, to be played with three people (or any higher odd number), called Mediocrity: Each round, everyone picks a number. Any number, so long as it's an integer. The person who picks the middle number wins.Now, write that result down. Play this game a bunch of times, and see who wins the most, who wins the least, and who is is merely mediocre at the game.

But wait! This game is about mediocrity. So, the person who wins the meta-game, call it Mediocrity⁽¹⁾, is the one who won the single round of Mediocrity the middle number of times. Write this result down. Now, play Mediocrity⁽¹⁾ a bunch of times, and see who wins the most, the least, and the middle.

But wait once more! This game is still about mediocrity. The person who wins this level of Mediocrity, call it Mediocrity⁽²⁾, should be the one who won the middle number of times at Mediocrity⁽¹⁾. Write this result down.

Lather, rinse, repeat to get Mediocrity⁽²⁾, Mediocrity⁽³⁾, and so on.

Interesting, no? Just when you think you're ahead, you realize that being ahead is not winning the larger picture. The trick is to know which scope you wish to win, which scopes you wish to lose, and which scopes really just don't matter. Another interesting thing to think about: What strategies give the best chances of winning Mediocrity⁽⁰⁾, the base level? What strategies give the best chances of winning Mediocrity⁽¹⁾, the first derivative? And Mediocrity⁽²⁾, the second derivative?

(A Note on Syntax: Calculus students will recognize that the x^(y) syntax means "the y^th derivative of x". This means that x⁽⁰⁾ is the same as x itself, and I use that to specify the base level of Mediocrity so as not to confuse it with the overarching theme of Mediocrity^(x).)

Now, think on this: The only real requirement to this game is the ability to compare three things with each other and come up with an order to them. How does the game change when you add all the Real numbers? Restrict it to just the integers from 0 to 10? Add imaginary numbers? Use letters instead of numbers? Use arbitrary vectors? Nothing really changes.

Think further: There are times in your life when you are trusted more than your peers, trusted less than your peers, and trusted somewhat near average. There are times in your life when you're right more often than your peers, less than your peers, and about average. There are times in your life when you win more often than your peers, lose more often than your peers, and come out just about average. I'm not sure what these parallels say about life, but I'm pretty sure they say something meaningful.

---

Credit where credit is due: This game was, to my knowledge, originally proposed by Douglas Hofstadter in his book "Metamagical Themas" (which is an anagram for "Mathematical Games", the Scientific American column where many of the chapters were first published).

Lyrics to "I May", author unfortunately unknown (courtesy of galith):

I may hate gay folks
I may not, it's true
I may be surprised, that you are so surprised
I may like boys too

I may be heartless
I may be a real dick
When I give you a smile, and look into your eyes
It may not be a trick

I may think you're beautiful
I may cherish you and you may never know
I may live and die each time you blink those gorgeous eye
I may think, that you're a hoe

I may think you're ugly
So repulsive it makes me wish that I were dead
I may not, have ever had such thoughts
running through my head

I'm telling you so you'll know.
I'm telling you so you'll know.
I'm telling you so you'll know.
I'm telling you so you'll know.

I may want what you want
I may be a lot like you
You may look to me in awe as I say I may know the way to God
My soul may be empty too

I may be the most unassuming kid you've ever met
I may just want to help you how I may
I may be a fiend pulling tricks and spilling schemes
I may you make you feel welcome either way

I may want to puke each time I wake up just to realize that i am still connected to this retched human leg of mine.
And it lies there, and I stare.
And I may want to puke it's true and half the time I do

One thing I can tell you
This may be the more important thing of all
Sometimes I am sure that I would die for you
Just as long as you ______________________.

I'm telling you so you'll know.
I'm telling you so you'll know.
I'm telling you so you'll know.
I'm telling you so you'll know.

---

This song got me thinking this morning, as I was listening to it while driving to work, about what it actually means when a person (A) says something (X) to another person (B). What motivation is there to say it?

The first answer that came to my mind, of course, was "truth". I've been brainwashed by the scientific revolution just as much as the rest of you, so I still have an aesthetic tendency to think of truth as the Great Motivator. But really, let's think about this for a moment: Yeah, okay, so it's truth (hypothetically) -- but why state it? Take a look at this song -- it's all true, but conveys nothing except wonder about why he would say so much of nothingness, and this nothingness in particular. Basically, the fact that there is communication is the communicated fact, along with all the implications. Once I had rejected "truth" as a motive in my mind, things got interesting.

Let's break this down. If A says X to B, then of course, A for some reason wants to state X, and in particular he wants to state it to B. It's not like he's just making gibberishy noises, there's a reason he's chosen this particular arrangement, X, to communicate. What's that reason? Is there a universal reason, or is there no common overlap between all possible reasons?

I would think that one common overlap would be that he thought it was true. But, there are so many things that are true that aren't stated, and things that are false that actually do get stated, that I have a hard time convincing myself that this is the answer I'm looking for. As much as I would like Truth to be the Great Motivator, it just doesn't jive with what I see around me.

Well, what if A wants B to believe X? (I envision X, by the way, is what's actually communicated in context, including all body language and inflections of voice indicating sarcasm, etc -- not just the literal string of words with their literal meanings). This covers lying and other forms of deceit, and seems to be generally true for all communication. But take a look at the song above: all of it is stuff that no one would argue with, because all he's saying is that this or that "may" be true. How can B's belief be a motive, when X is already clearly believed by B? A may want B to believe X in all cases, but suspect this would be an accident of structure rather than a motive. I sense no motive here.

Another thought entered my mind, one step more abstract. Perhaps A wants B to think that A, himself, believes X. This may or may not be true, so it covers lying and deceit, and I can think of a myriad of good reasons A would want such a thing, because B's actions toward A will be different depending upon how B views A and A's beliefs. But then, once again looking at the song, it's quite obvious without being stated that the singer already believes everything he's saying. In other words, B could have told A, "A believes X". So how can this be the motive, if B already thinks that A, himself, believes X?

The idea that finally perchanced upon me, that I can't find a refutation for, is that A merely wishes to illuminate or draw attention to the ideas surrounding X (or away from the ideas surrounding Y). Look at this song; what is it saying to you? To me, it says, "There are lots of possibilities." Further, there's a pattern among those possibilities, and that pattern is that the most likely possibilities are also at odds with each other, along with a feeling of "you'll never know for certain". I can think of no better way of communicating it, either, although the principal communication (or what I principally received as the communication) was never explicitly stated, but rather left for the listener to absorb through context.

So, is this true for all communication? Is it all merely to illuminate or draw attention to (or away from) particular concepts or ideas? I think so. Sarcasm, debate, arguments, lying, misdirection, talking abut the weather (which really just communicates, "Hi! I like talking with you" unless you're a meteorologist), humor, debate: all of these seem just examples of pointing at particular concepts or ideas, in a variety of ways, with a variety of strengths.

Now, the thing that confuses me, and causes me think that maybe I'm wrong, is this: Many people, in particular much of the people I interact with who consider themselves intelligent, consider the communication to be the words themselves, and not the ideas behind them; they worry about the definitions of the words, and not about the ideas they illuminate. Where does sarcasm fit? Where does body language fit? Where does the fuzziness of "literal" translation fit? Where does stating the obvious fit? I don't understand.

When someone, call him A, tells me something, anything -- I'll still call it X -- a number of things run through my mind:

1. A wants to tell me X
   
2. X is likely to be true (in my experience, people say true things more often than not)
   
3. A probably also wants to communicate X', X'', and X''', which follow from context plus X
   
4. A probably wants me to believe X
   
5. A probably wants me to believe that he believes X
   
6. A probably finds X, X', X'', and X''' interesting topics to explore
   
7. A isn't talking about Y
   
8. A probably thinks it's better to talk about X than Y right now, if he's thinking about Y at all
   
9. A chose method M of communicating X (M may be sarcasm, humor, severity, flippancy, body language, written word, whatever)
   
10. A probably attributes importance to X proportional to M
    
11. A probably wants me to attribute the same importance to X that he displayed
    
12. A probably considers this idea, X, as a part of himself
    
13. A will probably consider rejecting X as a partial rejection of himself
    
14. ... and the list goes on, each "probably" being slightly less probable than the ones it depends upon, until it isn't worth considering anymore.

Now, most of this goes on in the back of my brain, unnoticed until I actually have to think about it, but when I want to access it it's there ... already determined, and not deliberated over when I happened to feel like thinking about it. The part I find fascinating is, although all of it has to do with X, only a small portion of it actually is X, and the rest of it stems from the fact that something was communicated. I never specified what X was in that list, so none if it can be from X: all of it stems from the existence of message X, regardless of the contents of the message.

Many of the people I see around me seem to stop at item 2, or perhaps item 3, and then figure it is best to stop there, along the "Mean what you say, and say what you mean" lines of thought. There is so much more information to be had! It's not as if these people don't have the capacity to extrapolate further, it seems they think it is wrong to do so -- I see the brakes lights flash in my face whenever I bring up the idea of looking more into a communication than the words, those sacred words. Why? I don't understand. Sure, it's not a certain thing ... but neither are the words, and the actual communication often isn't in the words at all.

Where do we draw the line of usefulness?

The principle of parsimony states that "One should always choose the simplest explanation of a phenomenon, the one that requires the fewest leaps of logic." From a different source, it's listed as "Given a choice between two explanations, choose the simplest -- the explanation which requires the fewest assumptions." This is more commonly known as the Principle of Simplicity, or Ockham's razor (perhaps "Occam's razor", depending on your source). Put in blander terms, it means that if you have two theories that explain the same thing, the one that's simpler is more likely to be right. Allow me to illuminate a wide, gaping hole in this principle.

I was chatting with mortimerv last night about Life, the Universe, and Everything, and we started talking about our models of the world, and how we chose them. In particular, we were discussing the the different models of human motivation: the necessarily self-centered motivation model versus ... well, I honestly have a hard time thinking of any other model. If you're striving for what's morally right, then it's the same model, just that the person in question values this thing called "being morally right" for some reason. And then we got on to a discussion of why I chose to use the model I did, versus all of the rest I could have used as my explanation of human behavior. It occurred to me that the method I used to choose my model completely ignored Ockham's razor, even though it was a choice between many models that explained the world equally well.

mortimerv brought up the excellent point that, well, assuming all motivations are indeed self-centered in nature (meaning "overall gain for self", which includes happiness/joy/good feelings from being nice to people -- not to be confused with "gain for self with disregard to others"), it's not really useful information to know. It's like saying that all squares have four corners. It might be true, but how do you use that information? It's not a tautology (it's an attribute of squares that they have four corners, and it's hypothetically an attribute of human motivation that it is self-centered in nature), and it actually contains information, but is that information relevant to anything, or merely an irrelevant bit of data floating in the ether of infospace?

I'm not going to it for the "more complex explanations are often more accurate" bit. It might be a compelling argument against Ockham's razor, and it's certainly one I've seen used, but what about when the two theories in question both explain the phenomena equally well and equally consistently? Which one do you choose? In defense of Ockham's razor, applying it to a situation where the two theories in question are not equal in explanative power is a twisted and contorted application of the principle that I don't believe it was ever intended to cover. If one theory explains more than the other, the go with that one. That's the Principle of Completeness, which in my opinion completely trumps the Principle of Parsimony. When you have a larger picture, it's often easier to see what fits in at the smaller levels, because you can see how it would interact with other things in the large picture -- and this is the Principle of Consistency, which a