Last night I was going to write a post about how Tim and Eric had effectively broken up as a duo, and how Eric had gone off to a normal acting career (in Master of None) while Tim had continued doing Tim and Eric type stuff with Gregg Turkington – the two collaborating in the same patterns as T&E used to, “Tim and Gregg” in all but name – and how this revealed that Eric was the key driver of their comedy, since all of the “Tim and Gregg” stuff is so much worse, like a bad imitation that doesn’t get why the original worked –

– but then I noticed that a new season of Tim and Eric’s Bedtime Stories started airing in September, so they’ve worked together recently, time to find out whether their time apart has altered the nature of the alchemical Tim/Eric mixture

Last night I had the most horrifying dream I can remember in a long time.  (Won’t recount the content here, since it was very disturbing, and not very interesting apart from that.)

I’ve become more resentful of my dreams lately.  When I was younger, I used to think of the dream world as a space of open possibility, where I could explore ideas and aspects of my psyche too wild or too deeply buried to be available to my waking consciousness.  But the older I get, the less my dreams seem like deep, creative art and the more they seem like tropey, superficial art.

Considered as stories, they’re almost all thrillers, horror stories, or some mixture of the two genres.  They’re plot-driven, almost entirely free of characterization, with no “room to breathe,” no free exploration.  Everything is always focused on some big Problem I am confronting, what a writer would think of as the plot hook.  How can I avert the impending disaster?  How can I complete my task in the face of an implausibly extensive series of obstacles?  What, if anything, should I do in a scary situation I don’t understand?  How can I live with myself, knowing I’ve committed some great sin?

I think my dreams have grown more unpleasant in the last five years or so, and I’ve usually attributed any resentment I feel to this trend.  But I recorded some of my dreams in high school, and looking back at that text file, I notice that although the emotional tone was less aggressively negative back then, the plot devices and structures were the same.  I was trying to do something (often, transport myself to some particular place) and was repeatedly thwarted; I was placed in a baffling situation and mocked for not understanding it; there was always a Problem, and everything else was secondary to it.  Dream logic was an enemy, as it is now, making it impossible to know how to behave appropriately, morally, or effectively.  (In one dream from high school, I was horrified when I accidentally killed a friend’s bird while pet-sitting, then horrified in a different way when, inexplicably, the friend didn’t seem to care.)

I would resent my dreams less if I were more convinced that they were scaring me every night for a good cause.  But from what I have read of the science, dreams seem oddly disposable at best and actively harmful at worst.  Depression is associated with spending more time in REM sleep, and acute sleep deprivation has an antidepressant effect which can be traced specifically to the resulting REM deprivation.  Most antidepressants decrease REM, and MAOIs obliterate it almost completely – which would seem to rule out any theory of REM that makes it vital to human life, since people on MAOIs manage to do just fine (or as fine as they can given that they needed a MAOI to begin with), and never, like, spontaneously combust from a lack of dream-supplied spiritual sustenance or something.

Warning: here is where this post veers off into speculative bullshit, and speculative bullshit that probably over-weights my own dream experiences over others’.

My current pet theory of the function of REM is that it is doing the same thing as experience replay in DeepMind’s reinforcement learning algorithms.  (I make no claim that this is unique to me; I think a lot of people have independently had this idea.)  In experience replay, instead of learning immediately from each experience as it happens, an AI will build up a buffer of past experiences, and at some regular interval will learn from a random selection of those experiences, presented in no particular order.  This is meant to deal with the problem that successive experiences tend to be correlated, which can cause the AI’s parameters to spiral out of control unless the experiences are shuffled (“decorrelated”) first.

“REM sleep is experience replay” fits with a number of notable features of dreaming.  It fits with the way that dreams often use environments and situations from one’s past, but with different time periods jumbled together.  It fits with the tendency toward difficult and confusing situations, particularly those that are frustratingly unpredictable.  (Generally the AIs I’m talking about are either trying to predict what will happen, or just what “reward”/”punishment” value it will have for them, and it is popular to use an “attention” mechanism that preferentially replays frames on which the AI’s predictions were unusually bad.)

It fits with what I’ve heard about REM and memory.  REM seems to be important for certain kinds of memory, which sound like the kinds of memories tied to performance in difficult situations.  From Wikipedia (my emphasis):

REM sleep may favor the preservation of certain types of memories: specifically, procedural memory, spatial memory, and emotional memory. In rats, REM sleep increases following intensive learning, especially several hours after, and sometimes for multiple nights. Experimental REM sleep deprivation has sometimes inhibited memory consolidation, especially regarding complex processes (e.g., how to escape from an elaborate maze).^[92]In humans, the best evidence for REM’s improvement of memory pertains to learning of procedures—new ways of moving the body (such as trampoline jumping), and new techniques of problem solving. REM deprivation seemed to impair declarative (i.e., factual) memory only in more complex cases, such as memories of longer stories.^[93]

“New ways of moving the body” sounds like a case where being able to do simulated replays of your own failures would help.  Less so with declarative memory, where (outside of certain school tests) there is rarely a specific past experience you can replay for practice.  (If you try to learn to juggle, you will accumulate many memories of failing to execute a particular maneuver, but for most of the facts you know, you do not have any memories of failing to remember that specific fact.)

This interpretation puts my own dream frustrations in a disheartening light.  If I were a more ordinary mammal or bird, I would benefit from simulating past challenges.  In my dreams, I would replay memories of (say) chasing prey or being chased by predators, especially those where I made inaccurate predictions; I would learn to do better at these tasks, to beat my own high score.  But in my life as a modern human, most of the challenging and unpredictable situations I face are caused by complex social systems I cannot control or predict (even in principle), or complex interpersonal dramas where the least harmful course of action may be to do nothing at all.  Yet my brain subjects itself to endless remixes of these situations, in a Sisyphean search for a better high score, for a solution that does not exist.

silver-and-ivory:

> More and more people are dropping the 50%-real-argument veneer and just admitting that stereotypes and ad hominems are the way they want to conduct everything. Do we really need to turn our hopes and dreams about the world to come into yet another domain where white people accuse other white people of whiteness and are accused of whiteness in turn until everyone hates each other and anything good and real gets buried in an endless heap of bullshit and 140-character brutal owns?

>I wish ignoring this kind of thing was an option, but this is how our culture relates to things now. It seems important to mention that, to have it out in the open, so that people who turn out their noses at responding to this kind of thing don’t wake up one morning and find themselves boxed in.

This isn’t, I don’t think, as well supported as it would need to be for this level of upsetness.

As far as I can tell, people have been writing terrible racist thoughtpieces since newspapers have existed. I’m not convinced that the level of racist thoughtpieces/tweets is increasing.

This seems like the kind of fallacy that is self-enforcing. You can’t afford to decide to ignore the bad sj, because it’s so virulent and common. You know it’s virulent and common because you see it all the time. You see it all the time because you can’t afford to ignore it. And you can’t afford to decide to ignore it because-

-anyway. As theunitofcaring was saying recently, bad terribleness is escapable, and it is not everpresent. The claim that it’s ever-expanding isn’t one that’s supported (and it is highly unlikely that it will envelop all the spaces that Scott feels at home in, because he’s mentioned worrying about that kind of thing in the past).

Bad terriblenesses have ascended in the past. They will decline. The Roman Empire declined, the BPP declined; the most recent bad terrible badthing will decline too. Everything declines; everything will fall, given time.

When we ascend to to the stars, or whatever, we will have different bad terriblenesses, hopefully a bit less bad than now. (Or maybe not.)

In any case, I hope that SSC decides to assign less importance to bad sj.

FWIW, over the past ~10 years i’ve seen a drastic rise in articles using the kind of rhetoric decried in that SSC post. This is of course relative to my bubbles, but I think my bubbles are not too restrictive – my sample pool for “articles” here comes from browsing mainstream newspapers and magazines, seeing what my college friends and acquaintances link on Facebook, etc.  I am making no special effort to avoid or to seek out this stuff, and I am looking in pretty normal places (and the same places I was a decade ago, more or less).

I went to college from 2006 to 2010, and I heavily used the internet at the time, and from a 2017 perspective it’s astonishing how insulated I managed to be from ideas that are now commonplace.  For instance, in 2008, I happened upon an exchange between feminists on LJ and was astonished – astonished! – and outraged at the way they were talking about “men” as this generalized evil category without any acknowledgement that there might be exceptions.  I was a sophomore at a very lefty college, I read at least a smattering of long-form journalism/analysis, and I had literally never seen people talk that way.

There were various SJ-related kerfuffles at the college while I was there (which led to LJ flamewars – this was before tumblr), and they tended to involve a lot of people like myself as described in the above paragraph, who were offended by the claims of the SJ “side” in a way that suggests they’d never heard anything like them before.  On the SJ side, IIRC there was a fair amount of “I can’t believe I have to educate you on 101 stuff” gripes, and in retrospect I can understand the frustration, because so many of us really hadn’t seen the 101 stuff.  It wasn’t SJ vs. anti-SJ, back then, it was SJ vs. “Huh? What?”  (And a lot of people in the latter category were pretty far left in every other respect.)

I don’t mean to conflate growing awareness of “SJ 101 stuff” with the rise in the bad rhetoric of that Boston Review article.  I’m saying that it used to be much rarer to assume SJ 101 stuff as a base for your analysis, to the point that lots of us could read lots of mainstream analysis without ever running into those assumptions.  We didn’t read bad identitarian analyses like that article, we didn’t read good identitarian analyses – we mostly didn’t read identitarian analyses at all, in a way that would be hard to achieve in 2017 (and impossible to achieve without deliberately trying).

Perhaps the rate of bad articles is constant, and the rise of SJ 101 has simply led to a greater fraction of the bad articles using SJ 101 as a base.  (I suspect this is the case.)  But something has changed, and changed a lot.

Research on the attentional cost of receiving cellphone notifications indicates that awareness of a missed text message or call impairs performance on tasks requiring sustained attention, arguably because unaddressed notifications prompt message-related (and task-unrelated) thoughts (Stothart, Mitchum, and Yehnert 2015). Related research shows that individuals who hear their phones ring while being separated from them report decreased enjoyment of focal tasks as a consequence of increased attention to phone-related thoughts (Isikman et al. 2016). Forced separation from one’s ringing phone can also increase heart rate and anxiety and decrease cognitive performance (Clayton, Leshner, and Almond 2015).

Cutting edge research, putatively about cellphones, reveals that “people find phone calls important and worry about missed calls,” shocking

(From this study, recently touted in a WSJ article by Nicholas Carr.  Supposedly shows that you take hits to working memory and fluid intelligence from just having your smartphone near you, even if its ringer is off.  I was really impressed until I realized the bars in their figures were SEM, not std. dev., and since their sample is huge the std. devs. would be like 13 times bigger [this is consistent with their small eta-squared values].  So the effects are small, but I wondered how small, and then I started wondering about how to interpret their 10-item Raven’s Matrices test in familiar IQ terms, given that it’ll have higher variance than usual because it’s only one test and a short one at that, plus there seem to be edge effects.  I should be doing real work but if anyone wants to get nerd sniped by this, be my guest)

Beginning as the Son of God, he had ended as a fairly able railroad director.

Our man JCW:

Not being a fan of sports, I am in this controversy in the same position as I was during Gamergate. That is, I do not know the names or the specifics, but I know which side Uncle Screwtape is on, and side of division and mutual hate, and so I know which side I am on.

“I know which side [is the] side of division and mutual hate, and so I know which side I am on [i.e. the other one]” is an unusually … transparent formulation of this sort of twisted reasoning

youzicha replied to your post “Just read a pharmacology study (this one – yes, more marijuana…”

My guess is no, because “By designating a single reference listed drug as the standard to which all generic versions must be shown to be bioequivalent, FDA hopes to avoid possible significant variations among generic drugs and their brand name counterpart.” [https://www.fda.gov/drugs/informationondrugs/ucm079436.htm] I.e. equivalence is not transitive: you must be within 90% of the FDA’s reference drug, not of any approved generic version of it.

Oh!  Well that’s good of them.

(I think I was especially incensed about this case because I found the paper via a blogger who said they showed one form was 18% more bioavailable than the other, and unless I missed something, the only possible “support” for that in the paper is that if you assume the new form can get the same oomph with only 85% of the dose, then it’s 1/0.85 = 1.18 times as efficient.  But that’s just some blogger, not a scientific article)