Worst Person used to talk about – as part of her terribly self-conscious and pretentious perception of herself as A Writer – how she wanted to “tell other people how they had better, more beautiful stories than they knew, and tell those stories herself because they can’t”
(I’m paraphrasing but that was the gist)
This is relevant to many things, including “robots”
I can’t sleep tonight and everything seems very relevant to everything
Relatively mild version of very distinctive “horrible feeling of moral revulsion toward all things including myself, based fundamentally on disgust and impossible to describe in terms of e.g. consequentialist principles” began around noon today while I was coming home
I haven’t felt this particular feeling in years (maybe very occasionally within the last year?) and I have no idea why it’s returned. I’ve actually been feeling really good for the past few days though I guess I haven’t been sleeping enough. Mysterious. Anyway it’s nice I have drugs sitting around for the kind of thing
To clarify: I realize the description I gave in the previous post sounds self-deprecating, and I don’t want it to sound like “I think I suck and autistic people also suck so that’s something we have in common.” I am attempting to objectively describe myself
E.g. when I say “re-re-re-read” I’m not making some joke about how weird I am. There are a number of book reviews and things like that that I’ve probably read, I dunno, 20 times, 30 times, more. I will probably re-read one of my standbys tomorrow morning while drinking my morning coffee instead of reading the news or something
The following two things are both facts
at least on a casual reading I seem to fit a lot of the diagnostic criteria for Asperger syndrome (I make stereotyped motions [although this has been diagnosed as Tourette syndrome]; I am very obsessive and would usually rather re-re-re-re-read some article about something I’m interested in than watch a new movie I haven’t seen before; I really like to follow familiar routines for doing things even if obvious “superior” alternatives are available; I have an idiosyncratic, monotone prosody that many people have commented on; I very rarely reach out to people socially though I like it when they reach out to me; I am very talkative, even long-winded and haranguing, when I am talking about an interest of mine but am otherwise very reserved; I am clumsy; etc.)
I don’t want to be that guy from the internet who self-diagnoses autism because he’s a nerd, and – much more importantly – on most days I really do feel that the stuff in point #1 up there just amounts to “being a nerd” and that the mild awkwardness I experience in day-to-day life as a consequence is not really in any way the same as the experience of actual autistic people
but
none of that stops me from wondering
I’m annoyingly skeptical about everything and slow to convince myself of any and every new idea, but it’s not out of any self-righteous desire to “keep an open mind.” My mind is always open but that’s despite my best efforts to get the damn thing to shut.
And while just trying to kick it shut over and over again while yelling at it might be the loudest method, and the most likely to convince other people that I’m “doing something about the problem,” it’s not the most effective method. The most effective method is to stop kicking and actually get in touch with the perverse and subtle logic by which the recalcitrant machine was designed – to figure out the precise chain of motions that will convince it once and for all to relent where coarse shoving couldn’t – maybe even to admit final, shameful defeat and go rummaging around for the manual.
Summer and early fall 2011 were some of the most joyous times in my life, and while I can identify a few obvious contributing factors (summer, pretty house, coming out of a funk, good fiction?), I don’t fully understand why. That presents an obvious obstacle to the task of trying to recapture something like the joy of that period.
“People don’t change their minds in response to good arguments and new evidence as much as they should” doesn’t imply “arguments and evidence don’t change people’s minds ever and caring too much about them is somehow nebulously evil,” and while the former is undeniably true, I really wish I’d never have to hear the latter again
What I’ve personally noticed, in myself, if a bunch of people say something over and over to me but I never hear real arguments/evidence for it, is that some mental Overton Window will shift and I’ll start thinking of the new idea as more “acceptable,” maybe even start believing that I believe it, but as soon as I have to act on it, I realize I don't really believe it. It is possible to believe things like “X is false but ~X is unreasonable,” or “X is false but only dweebs believe ~X,” and confusing these states for actual belief probably causes a lot of people to think they’re more like-minded than they really are. The great thing about actual arguments is that they can sometimes, if you’re really lucky, make people really believe in something rather than just feeling more positively towards it
God everything about that neuropsych battery experience was so odd and creepy. Like even though I wasn’t doing especially well (as I later learned), the examiners kept telling me I was doing ASTONISHINGLY well to the point of stopping their co-workers in the hallway and gushing about me while walking between test rooms. Is this normal? Doesn’t that go against every basic idea about how to do psychology in a scientific way? Even now I don’t know what to make of that, and wonder if I signed some form without reading it that made me consent to an experiment on the effects of praise on performance, or something
Speaking of IQ, I should get another IQ test one of these days to see if my verbal and perfomance scores are still 32 points apart – whether that was the antipsychotic or just me being weird
Instead of saying “you may have a learning disability,” which is I think what they’re supposed to do if the scores are more than 15 points apart, they just interpreted the scores directly and told me my awful performance score meant I would never be competent at math, which, uh
(Strictly speaking the learning disability I probably would have had would have made me bad at math, but I don’t think that was what they said)
Granted my information is limited here because I’ve only ever gotten one glimpse of the report – my parents refused to tell me what it said, and I only learned what my score was months after the fact, when my dad was trying to win an argument with me by proving that he was smarter than me (and thus right by some sort of argument from authority)
It would be nice if I were still as easily fascinated by math and physics as I was when I was 17-20
Back then I got a lot of weird looks for how much I liked these subjects, and now I’m in grad school and I’m casually expected to like them without bound and I don’t anymore
I’m never sure how much of this is me getting older and grumpier, and how much of it is that the subjects are actually just getting harder – interestingness and perceived ease may not always be possible to disentangle from one another