It is a time of less sleeping and also more alcohol drinking (as a result of apparently increased alcohol tolerance). A time of more arousal (in the general mental sense), I guess? Whatever. Hopefully I’ll get a good night’s sleep sometime soon so I can get something done
Okay I’m going to do the bookmeme because now I can’t stop thinking about what I’d put on it, and I have work to do. I’m not going to tag anyone because I usually don’t in these kinds of things – instead, if you see this and want to do it, consider yourself tagged by me.
This is not especially flattering but you will probably learn some things about me.
The Book Meme: In a text post, list ten books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take but a few minutes, and don’t think too hard — they don’t have to be the “right” or “great” works, just the ones that have touched you. Tag ten friends, including me, so I’ll see your list. Make sure you let your friends know you’ve tagged them:
I’m a lot more skeptical than I let on, and if I were really honest all the time, I’d be constantly doubtful of everything, constantly asking “how do you know that?” and “where’s the evidence?”, always wanting to hear the other side of the story, to reserve judgment until I understand the context, the biases involved, the social roles of the participants …
I’d probably be insufferable.
Instead I pretend to be less skeptical than I am and then end up worrying that the annoying skeptic is my “real personality” and I’m just tricking people into not finding me insufferable.
But in any case the skeptic really is my real personality. I’m perpetually confused about how people get to have so many opinions and to be so confident about them. This is why I always end up being oddly fond of people who claim some special source (divine revelation, “Bayesian rationality”) for their confident opinions – everyone seems wildly overconfident, but at least the prophet types know it’s something that needs to be explained.
I asked my graduate advisor if I could read his dissertation and he said he was embarrassed by it and hopes no one ever finds it.
—
Philosophy of Mind professor (via philosophyprofessorquotes)
Sometimes I feel this way about my undergrad thesis. But I also feel sort of proud of it at the same time?
It’s kind of hard to read now, because it so clearly reflects exactly where my mind was at the time, and over-explains a bunch of things and uses weird notation and so forth because I hadn’t read enough scientific literature at that point to know better. It’s an … uncultured document. And there’s also the fact that it was literally a failure. I didn’t complete the experiment I was trying to do by the end of the school year. The thesis ends with a one-page “conclusion,” written while tipsy, which basically says “uh, I didn’t really do what I set out to do, but hopefully this document has some worth anyway.”
On the other hand, I’m still proud of my review of the relevant theory and literature (which is most of the thesis), and even the uncouth way that I over-explained everything and nitpicked over points most writers would find obvious. I want to own that kind of thing. I like explicitness. I like saying what you mean and spelling out every nitpicky detail rather than being vague, the way so many scientific papers are vague. (If you’re not a scientist, you’d be surprised how vague and hand-wavey a lot of scientific papers are.) I am the guy that wants everything spelled out, dammit, and my undergrad thesis is a particularly crude expression of that tendency, and I’m not ashamed of it.
(My one real regret about it was that it involved something called “Paris’ Law,” and possible attempts to move beyond it, and I made some puns about it. But I didn’t take the opportunity to end the shamefaced conclusion section with “if nothing else, we’ll always have Paris.” I will regret this for the rest of my life)
As my friend S. (who has ADHD) cautioned me when I was having the same inklings a year or so ago: it’s easy to spuriously diagnose yourself with ADHD. Any kind of spectrum disorder lets people do the thing where they say “oh, haha, I’m disorganized, I must be [X]” or whatever. I don’t want to do that thing.
But: besides the “stimulants really help me work, according to objective metrics” thing, there’s also … (cut for mopey probable-hypochondria)
In general the question of what I do and don’t “need” to “function” is kind of complicated because I am the sort of person who will just power through obstructions without having the sense that there are any better options
When I did get medicated for anxiety I was like “wow, I should have done this years ago – this lets me eliminate, on command, that horrible thing that kept preventing me from working half the time.” But before that, what I would do is I would just work around the horrible thing, and that was frustrating, but it was basically good enough. Sometimes things did not get done on time (or at all) but professors were forgiving and I was never kicked out of academia – and I never thought “the fact that this process is like pulling teeth means maybe I shouldn’t be doing it.”
I am used to the idea that generating “productivity” or “functionality” is an ugly, frustrating, stressful process involving all-nighters and excuses and strategically applied bursts of intense effort. For many years my credo has effectively been “simulate functionality at all costs” and the thing is I’ve always been able to do it, even though the process is ugly and convoluted and looks nothing like the workflows most of my colleagues seem to have. That’s not necessarily the same thing as being functional? Though it is definitely something. I can do this stuff, and some people can’t
Hmm, still irritable today
This is actually a pretty rare feeling for me – “everything is annoying and inadequate” as opposed to “everything is grotesque” or “everything is better than me” – so abstractly it’s a nice change of pace, I guess
If you were to ask me about anything right now I would tell you about how and/or why it sucks
Jeez I’m so irritable today for no apparent reason
Plan: 1. eat some food, 2. aerobic exercise, 3. convince myself to go to social event on the grounds that it might make me less irritable and sitting around the house certainly won’t
It would be nice to have some widely accepted social cue for “this behavior irrationally drives me crazy, and makes me want to rant about it, although I admit that the behavior is not as bad as the rant may make it sound and may not even be bad at all”
I recognize that the things that do and don’t make my brain SCREECH is not at all a good guide to being a decent person, but nonetheless I like to have a space to say “I hate this thing so much!!!!!” without that being taken as an actual moral condemnation
This may end up being a transitory thing, but I’m starting to see more and more of human life as being determined by people’s attempts to reconcile broad, universal moral principles with their own personal, inherently unfair and disproportionate distaste for certain specific things
Anxiety brain does not follow ordinary rules of plausibility.
“If all the professors in the grad program thought we were stupid, they could have just failed us in our oral exams. They didn’t do that.”
“But maybe they are keeping us around even though we are stupid for mysterious reasons.”
“Can you think of a plausible example of such a reason?”
“No.”
“Can you even think of any example of such a reason, plausible or not?”
“No. But I don’t have to, because I can control our thoughts in a way that bypasses ordinary common sense.”
“…”