Anyway, I had a really good day today

Yesterday I told J bohtie that I usually feel I have to put work before everything else, in principle, all the time, because I am bad at what I do – because I am clearly not the brightest bulb in my grad program, and am very likely the dimmest, and I can’t just rely on a normal regular schedule to produce an acceptable level of output

So then this morning I got my TA evaluations back and they involved me being called “the man” and “the bomb” (by two distinct students)

And then I met with my adviser and his major collaborator, who I had never met before, and had an intense two-hour conversation with them about what I’d been doing for the last few weeks, and although the conversation ended with my adviser finding a simple trick that reduced everything I’d done to triviality, it still felt like I was impressing these guys and saying stuff they found interesting

Advisor’s collaborator suggested I still pursue a certain part of what I was doing – “I wouldn’t just say that to any student, but you seem to be really good at this kind of stuff”

I still feel like I am probably the dimmest bulb but I think things like this are worth noting so I can’t ignore them in the future

I think pretty much any fiction I try to write is going to be in the masturbatory “lots of infodumps about mostly made-up ‘science’ ” territory and I’m OK with that

In fact I’ve gotten to the point where I can re-read my old sci-fi epics from my teenage years and realize a kind of continuity between them and anything I’d consider writing now.  They’re still embarrassingly bad, but in a way I’m kind of numb to now, and it’s interesting to read them as kind of a raw untamed version of the thing I am doomed to do even now.  I.e. they are full of people literally saying stuff like

“The input your consciousness recieves [sic] is of a completely different type from that which enters your senses.  The information you see about the world around you is not the light rays that enter your eyes.  Instead, it takes the form of a compressed three-dimensional model, not unlike those used in computer animation.  Your eyes give your brain vast amounts of data about the light rays that enter them.  Your subconscious determines action based on that kind of direct sensory input.  But it also makes guesses and inferences about what that data is supposed to represent in terms of real-world concepts and ideas, and uses them to generate a ‘simulation’ of the world around you.  The same goes for the rest of your senses.  That is what your consciousness views.  The people in this warehouse are representations of the neuron clusters in your parietal lobe that process sensory data and generate the simulation.”

If you want a picture of teen nostalgebraist, imagine someone who would write a novel where people talk like the above all the time and doesn’t understand why people might find this jarring

One of the things that personally resonated with me about both Neon Genesis Evangelion and Infinite Jest, and caused the two to be strongly associated in my mind, was:

they’re both (in part) about teenagers who discover that not only are their lives unusual and messed-up, but in some sense there lives had to be unusual and messed-up, for reasons that trace back before any conscious choices they made

reasons that had to do with how their fathers were very unusual men, and things their fathers did involving the interface between technology and biology and psychology

When I was 15 I thought that I was supposed to have a normal life and something had just gone wrong somewhere and it was probably my fault, and it wasn’t until later, over the course of years, that I realized just how strange my adolescence had been, how even the medications I took were in many cases not normal medications, how it is not normal for a father to give you hormone tests and then give you hormone pills because one of your hormones is low without ever seeing a doctor, how it is not normal to have a father who does amateur brainwave biofeedback on you – it was also a long time before I realized how messed-up of a person my father had been, how much he’d hidden it

Better living through chemistry?  Worse living through chemistry?  Living through chemistry, anyway; I come from broken mutated stock and I have been subject to attempts to correct for that fact since long before I was capable of making informed decisions about any of this.  My father and I are not normal, functioning, homeostatic biological systems.  Normal life was never a possibility to begin with, and the best I can do is make the most satisfying thing I can out of the mutant system I am

This post is a little more dramatic than I’d like it to be and is kind of misleading in that respect – what I’m trying to convey is how the relationships Shinji Ikari and Hal Incandenza had with their strange, monstrosity-building fathers seemed very directly relevant to me

if you’re curious about the hellish/transcendent experience I described under the cut in the previous post, here’s a unfinished account of it I wrote shortly after it happened (summer 2011):

Keep reading

The types of moral intuitions I have tend to break down into two categories:

1. small-scale, minimalistic, seemingly “obvious” ones – not even as far as “murder is bad,” but say “if one of my friends was murdered, I would be very sad”
2. much larger, more grandiose senses of which very broad classes of behavior are deemed as good or bad, often with grand theories of society attached – in my particular case, these tend to be the result of anxiety and other related thought patterns, and lead almost always to the conclusion that whatever I’m doing is bad

I once trusted type 2 intuitions more than type 1 intuitions because they felt big and dramatic and important, and type 1 intuitions felt trivial and academic.  Over the years I’ve grown to very strongly distrust type 2 intuitions because, in my case, they clearly don’t have any sort of self-consistency from moment to moment, and really just focus around hating myself.

One can’t build a moral system from hating oneself, because one changes; once one decides “this is Good because it is not what a wretch like me would do,” it thus becomes something a wretch like you would do, and thus it flips back to being Bad again.  Trying to be a good person on this basis leads to endless theoretical frustration, lots of focus on one’s own most self-hating thoughts, and, in the end, little or no concerted and sustained moral action.

This is why it raises my hackles when people, say, badmouth Trolley Problems for being “too abstract” or “too academic” or “too simplified.”  Trolley Problems are a natural way to try to build on type 1 intuitions – they start with the most basic ideas like “I would feel sad if my friend was murdered” and show how surprisingly hard it is to derive from them any kind of intuitive set of opinions about murder.

This reflects the fact that building on Type 1 intuitions is hard – you rarely get anywhere interesting, and you have to a whole lot of academic fiddling around in order to get anywhere at all.  It’s easy to ask whether the whole exercise really has any value.  Do all of Derek Parfit’s convolutions, for instance, get us anywhere closer to being good people?

There is an impulse to go in the other direction and trust grandiose type 2 intutions, great surging feelings about what morality really is, sudden snap judgments about complex situations – to start at the top, rather than the bottom.  (To say not “can I build up from simple feelings to big opinions about politics?”, but instead, “can I take my big opinions about politics and break them down to the simple feelings that compose them?”)

But for me, this is not possible.  My type 2 intutions are just too bad, in every sense, for there to be anything salvageable about them.  If you mock me for playing around in my academic sandbox when I could be thinking about bigger grander things, you are saying that I should be thinking about how I am fundamentally disgusting scum and how God hates me (I don’t believe in him, but he hates me anyway).

This is, I think, why Jacobinghazi drove me so crazy: it seemed like a big battle between type 1 and type 2, and there seemed to be many insinuations that trying to work with type 1 is just pointless and we should all think in type 2 terms.  I can’t do that, I shouldn’t do that, it would be terrible, you don't really want me to do that.  If type 1 is useless then either I am not a moral actor at all, or I can be a moral actor only through endless feats of mental masochism.

One of the reasons I love the book The Last Samurai is that it captures the way my mind is pretentious, when it’s pretentious

There’s more than one way to be pretentious.  There’s the “I will associate myself with all these high-status cultural signifiers, and have generally positive opinions about them, though with some negative opinions mixed in so I seem discerning” way.

And then there’s another way that’s almost the opposite, which is “I will have extremely polarized opinions about things that I can’t exactly explain in terms that make sense to other people, but things are either BRILLIANT or they are TERRIBLE, and I’m not going to sit around having nuanced discussions about the TERRIBLE ones, I will be off in my little hole looking for more BRILLIANCE”

The Last Samurai is about a weird reclusive woman and her son, who she lives alone with.  One of the earliest vignettes in the book is about the moment she decided she couldn’t be an academic because she was reading an academic book as a student and the author said something that was just so STUPID in such a specifically frustrating way that she couldn’t stand it anymore.

There is this one popular writer who she hates because his use of language is sloppy and unserious (or something to that effect) and she does this thing where she refuses to have an important personal conversation with her son until he is capable of reading an essay by this writer and then explaining to her, “correctly,” why his writing is fundamentally WRONG.

And I get that, that is the way my “discernment” and “taste” manifests itself, it’s not this an overall embrace of “high culture” in any popularly conceived sense, it’s not a gently graded pattern of dislikes and likes that lends itself to calm conversation within the central stream of culture, it’s this jagged discontinuous sense of things being WRONG or RIGHT (which probably, in the end, has something to do with my Tourette’s)

When I am pretentious I am pretentious not in in the mold of the cocktail party sophisticate, but in the mold of the outsider with insights too “brilliant” for any normal person to handle.  I have to be careful not to let myself see myself this way.  I can be so obnoxious, and I could be so much more obnoxious …

Speaking of dads I don’t think taking that new sketchy dietary supplement my dad sent me on the same day I’m moving up to even more giant Lexapro pills was a good idea after all

I mean after looking this stuff up I don’t think I’m going to get serotonin syndrome or anything but I sure do feel weird

dadpost

I know I talk obliquely and ominously on here sometimes as though I don’t like my dad, or as though I resent him for causing some of my “issues” or something.  And since it’s Father’s Day I might as well clarify that this is largely untrue –

not just because I love my dad, which I do, but because I feel like in some real way I am my dad.  When I say “he caused my issues” it’s easy to point to things he did that had consequences – nurture – but really it’s hard to distinguish all of that from the genes I got from him.  In any case, the combination of the two has made me feel a deep kinship with him, one I honestly don’t feel with my mother, although I love her too.

Talking to my dad is sometimes eerie because there’s a kind of shared, unspoken resonance between us – as though we’re differently aged versions of the same person, or members of the same tiny secret society speaking in code.  We’re the same kind of person, and I see in him both the things I consider flaws in myself and the things I like about myself.  The things I think he did wrong, as a father, are frankly things I could see myself doing wrong if I became a father myself.

I feel like in some deep way we’re on the same team – not because we always agree or feel aligned, since certainly we don’t – but because we’re both the same kind of creatures, making our way in a world that may not have very many of us.  When I hear his voice on the phone, cynical and weary, reclusive, with a dark sense of humor, always on the edge of some sort of abyss, but also irrepressibly searching for everyday joys and delights, I recognize what 60 years of being me might produce.

I’ve said this before and it’ll never stop being any less dorky, but I find the “scratch / guardian-swap” concept in Homestuck very personally resonant.  I feel like my dad realized that his own youth just had not really worked, and pressed the reset button by having a child.  In many ways I feel like I am jumping through the very same gauntlet of experiential hoops he jumped through at my age, and I love the satisfaction I hear in his voice when he mentions – as he does, again and again, year after year – how much better I’m doing than the wreck he was at my age.

This time, we might win the game.  (Whatever that means.)

There is finally a relatively coherent, comprehensible, and accurate summary of that twitter war I was freaking out about earlier, it’s here – be warned that this whole thing is a huge scrupulosity bomb

(A lot of the controversy here roughly goes

A: “you are making obvious and inarguable misreadings / slanderous accusations / etc.”

B: “maybe I am, but that doesn’t matter because there are bigger issues here, and this is not the time for your little technicalities”

and this is something that really sets me off as someone who worries all the time about whether I’m a cold, insensitive pedant with no sense of proportion, and also who has been manipulated into doing/thinking some pretty fucked up things by some very fucked up people who used things very much like B’s argument.  "There are more important things here than your little technical points" can be poison in the hands of people capable of framing any moral objection to their behavior whatsoever as a “little technical point”)