Wordplay

Freedom

2010-07-02T18:46:00.000-07:00

As long as anything--comfort, money, food, friends, respect, love, life itself--ANYTHING--is more important to you than doing what you think is right, you will never be free.

For what is freedom but the ability to do what you think ought to be done? If you value even your life too highly, then you will be the slave of anyone with a gun or a badge.

Concision: Feeling Good

2010-01-23T09:00:00.001-08:00

Feeling good does not make life worth living, but it does make life much easier to live.

Spirals

2010-01-14T17:10:00.000-08:00

Life is not made of adventures.

It's fine to enjoy travel and excitement and sleep in new places and drink with new people, and all these things are a part of life as they are of stories, but by and large life does not move in straight lines from here to there or back again. It moves in spirals, or even in circles, and tomorrow, by and large, will look like today. Next week will look like this week, though perhaps a little warmer and with the days a little longer, and next winter it will be dark and cold again, and there will probably be about as much skiing.

Change may be drastic and sudden at times, but for the most part it is gradual. You do not become stronger all at once, but by repeated exercise, from day to day, spiraling steadily upwards. You do not become fatter all at once, but from day to day, with tomorrow’s morning pastry as much as today’s. The problem, then, is not to avoid routine: we are creatures of routine and routine will have us whether we will or no. The rut we wear may be lined with crowded parties and expensive alcohol and interesting strangers but it will be a rut nonetheless, and it will go somewhere. No, the trick is not to avoid routine, but to create a routine that will take you in the direction in which you wish to go.

We must travel, for the most part, in spirals: circling from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, returning to almost the same ground. It is up to you whether those spirals go up, or down.

So much for the artistic expression of it. What does this mean, practically?

First, we ought not to be constantly seeking thrills and excitement. Personally I like to think about what sort of life I would live if I were rich. I doubt I’m the only one. Of course, at first I get vague ideas about throwing lots of parties for all my friends and anyone interesting who happens to be around, and all the good food I’ll eat and all the expensive clothes I’ll wear and all of the daily chores I’ll be able to hire other people to do. But I’ve been at college for two and a half years now, without a job to speak of, and I know better than that. If there’s a better approximation of the easy life than a slacker’s semester at UMass I don’t know of it. Food is cooked for you, bills are paid for you (or at least they were for me) and there’s no shortage of parties on the weekends. Maybe having to do your own laundry is not quite so good as having no chores at all; maybe having to do a few hours a week of homework is not quite so good as having to do no work at all; maybe the Hiltons and the Kennedys of the world have softer beds and more comfortable clothes and better tasting booze, but the essence is the same and I do not believe that a party becomes a different sort of a thing by costing more. My point is: I KNOW that the pursuit of excitement turns into a routine. Attend party, nurse hangover, play videogames, attend party. And that routine is CRUSHING. The desire to never, ever be bored or uncomfortable for an instant leads, inevitably, to a life that is both monotonous and miserable. And that, of course, makes us crave excitement even more. But this is the lifestyle that many, many people work mind-numbing jobs to do their best imitation of affording. It is the love of this lifestyle that leads many misguided adults to the belief that college is the best time of your life.

I’m a pretty introverted sort of a person, so maybe these things strike me differently than most people. But from where I’m standing, it seems to me that if THIS is the best life has to offer, then life is not worth living.

This brings us to point two: cultivate habits. Accept that every day is going to look more or less like the day before. Accept that each week will look more or less like the week before. Saturday and Sunday may not look much like Monday, but Thursday and Friday will, and I’m willing to bet each of those days will look an awful lot like the one that came around a week ago. Forewarned and forearmed, decide: what do you want your life to look like?

Maybe my perspective is playing tricks on me. It might be no coincidence that what I think is the most important battle we come up against in life is the battle I’m fighting now, but whatever the reason, it looms large in my mind that our main task here is to make a day that we are willing to live over, and over, and over again, because that is the day that we WILL live over and over and over again. There is noise, there are distortions, there are changes both sudden and gradual, but those are all decisions for the moment: we are formed by our habits, and if they are to take us where we want to go we must point them in the right direction, and above all we must KEEP them there.

Crossfit Life

2009-10-28T18:44:00.000-07:00

For the last year or so I've been in the habit of using Crossfit as an analogy for life. It's worked surprisingly well, but tonight I realized there's one thing about Crossfit I've been overlooking: no matter how good you get, it still kicks your ass.

I've been doing Crossfit on and off for almost two years, and seriously for almost two months. When I first started I could do about two pullups and then I'd start doing negatives. I don't think I did a workout as prescribed for the first six months. Earlier this week I did 99 pullups over seven rounds, the first 24 of them without letting go of the bar. I can still only do about one workout in five without substituting something, and my times on almost all of them are pathetic. I'm still failing: but I've improved.

It seems like the better you get at life, the harder life becomes. Today, I can do things easily that I could never have pulled off in high school; I can endure handily what would have broken me two years ago. But of course, I'm not dealing with the old stuff any more: I've moved on to new, and harder, challenges. My grades are still slipping, I'm still behind in my classes, just like I've always been. I'm wasting too much time and not doing work that needs to be done--even down to cooking, and cleaning. But the classes I'm behind in are Ordinary Differential Equations and Thermodynamics, not Precalc and Latin; I'm failing to clean up after a life lived on my own, not one where my every need is provided for; what I'm failing to invest enough time in is a business I'm starting around an algorithm I wrote, not a job at the retirement community. I fail: but already I have done so much more in this semester than in any before.

I think it's the same thing for everyone. C.S. Lewis says that when you've mastered one lesson, the teacher moves you on to the next. When you've learned how to add you don't keep doing addition problems; you learn how to multiply. Or with Crossfit: first you scale the workouts down to your level, and do more and more and more of them until you can do them as prescribed; then you do them faster, and faster, or heavier, and heavier, and then you learn to do back levers or flags; but at every single step of the way, what you need to do next is harder than what you can do already. Because that's how you get stronger.

All of which is great for gaining strength and increasing your skills, but it works out to an awful lot of work, and while we may get better at life in general, we will always have to deal with things that are harder than we can handle.

Liberals and Conservatives

2009-10-19T03:31:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine recently put up a picture of Captain Mal as his profile picture on Facebook. As we've had a few political disagreements in the past, I couldn't resist the urge to point out that Mal is a conservative. My friend disagreed. I had homework to put off doing, so I decided to seize the occasion to correct his use of political terminology; I had more homework to put off doing, so I decided to write him a dissertation. I'm pretty proud of it, so I've decided to re-post it here.

I hope you don't mind, Mike, but I'd like to make a point about politics while I have a chance. I think you still have a tendency to use "liberal" to mean "open-minded and forward thinking," and since people generally agree that conservatism is the opposite of liberalism you assume "conservative" must mean "ignorant and idiotic." I think that's why you told me that *I* am a liberal. But while "open-minded and forward-thinking" might be a dictionary definition of "liberalism," the political parties and movements who have identified themselves as "liberal" and "progressive" basically since monarchy went out of style have all had some fundamental philosophical similarities, and it's the common traits of those parties and movements that people refer to today as political liberalism. Insisting on using "liberal" to mean "open-minded and forward-thinking" is about as anachronistic as insisting on using "gay" to mean "happy," and will lead to about as much misunderstanding.

The whole thing is complicated by the fact that liberals like to think that their political views ARE open minded and forward thinking, and the opposing views ARE ignorant and idiotic. But notice that even conservatives, who tend to consider liberalism narrow-minded and intellectually lazy, generally agree with the liberals on who IS a liberal. They wouldn't do that if they thought the word meant "open-minded and forward-thinking."

I'm going to try to present my understanding of what the two groups believe with as little prejudice and with the benefit of as much doubt as I can. In my experience the people who identify themselves as "liberals" generally believe that in a well-ordered and just society no one will suffer too much more than anyone else. They believe that everyone has an equal right to comfort and happiness, and that whatever form of government ensures as many people as possible are as happy and as comfortable as possible is the right form of government. They tend to believe that the ends justify the means: if it is necessary to interfere in some people's lives to ensure the greatest good for the greatest number, then it is acceptable to do so; it is especially acceptable to interfere with people's lives if those people have "more than they need" while others nearby have much, much less.They consider feasting while your neighbor starves a crime comparable to taking his food yourself, and don't really mind stepping in to fix the situation. On the other hand, they generally believe that if the well-being of a handful of people must be sacrificed in order to secure the well-being of a multitude, then the sacrifice is worth making. They generally value kindness over correctness and mercy over justice. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is a logical extreme of this mindset, but most people who identify with it don't carry it that far. A variety of philosophies can be used to justify this set of preferences, but liberals generally tend to identify the good with the pleasant, and to an even greater degree the bad with the painful. They usually consider suffering and death the things to be most avoided in life, and tend to think that things like property, propriety, and even freedom of choice are unimportant when trying to prevent suffering.

While liberals tend to begin with a picture of what a good society would look like and build downwards towards what rules will produce that society, conservatives tend to begin with what rules they believe life ought to operate on and are generally content to let society look after itself. They believe that everyone has the right to live their own life as they see fit, and they don't recognize anyone's right to interfere with anyone else. Usually, they just want to be left alone to live their lives and don't appreciate being told what to do. They also don't usually care to tell other people what to do. (This is, incidentally, why the conservative public tends to have such a disconnect from Republican politicians: a thirst for power over other people is a very un-conservative sort of trait and politics rarely attracts "real" conservatives.) On the other hand, they often believe in a set of moral laws governing what people are and are not supposed to do. Conservatives generally identify right conduct, or adherence to these laws, with the good, and immoral conduct with the bad, and think that pain, pleasure, life, and death, are all less important than virtue. While a conservative might happily sacrifice himself for the good of someone else, or accept someone else's sacrifice, they won't volunteer anyone else for an extra burden. A conservative believes that the ends never justify the means and would rather be dead than be a bad person. This set of preferences is very difficult to support with an atheistic or existentialist philosophy, but some people manage it.

A conservative moral code usually stresses the importance of honesty, fair play, discipline, and loyalty.Conservatives respect property and propriety. They also tend to respect authority whenever they acknowledge it, and usually hate to make a nuisance of themselves, which is why everyone seems to think they're a minority, and why it took so long for a real resistance to the rising liberalism in this country to form. They are also often reluctant to part with tradition, which can lead to the perpetuation of bad or outdated things, like slavery.

In practice, because liberals believe the ends justify the means and that we have the right to interfere in people's lives for the greater good, liberal philosophy is an excellent vehicle for the power-hungry to come to power. Under a liberal administration the power and size of the government tends to steadily grow: first to combat this societal evil, then to right that systemic wrong, and then to provide that other social service. Every step of the way tends to increase taxes and decrease freedoms.Conservatives see things like the sin tax on cigarettes and the safety net of social security as unwanted and unjustified intrusions on their life and their freedom of choice, and are concerned that those restrictions and intrusions have been becoming more common and more pronounced. They're worried about where this trend is going.

Questionable Resonance

2009-10-12T08:25:00.000-07:00

This might be a bad sign, but I've been reading Paradise Lost and so far the two lines that have resonated most with me have both been Satan's.

"The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."

"Awake, arise, or be forever fallen."

You know it's a problem when even Satan starts telling you to get off your ass and do something.

Meta-meta

2009-10-11T16:31:00.000-07:00

Today I'm going to talk about reality.

It has layers. Each one contains the one below and is contained by the one above. For example, "housebuilding" contains "bricklaying" and "cement mixing," but is contained in "city planning" which is contained in "community organizing."

People seem to operate on a few levels--it's difficult to divide them up exactly and some people are probably on more than others, but more or less everyone is used to dealing with emotions, thoughts, socialization, and personal politics, and used to operating on all the innumerable levels involved with each of those. There are sciences that study levels below us, like biology, chemistry, physics, and the like, and lots more sciences that study the levels we live on: history, literature, politics, economics, and more or less all of the soft sciences.

An interesting thing to notice is that as you move into higher-level understandings of reality, descriptions get vaguer but meanings get clearer. For example, I can say that "this atom is exchanging electrons with that atom at this energy level" and that is very specific, but it doesn't mean very much. If I describe the same process by saying "chemical X is interacting with chemical Y to make chemical Z," that is less precise but it means more to us. If instead I say "this neuron is firing," it contains even less actual description but much more meaning, and when I say "I'm thinking," it bears almost no resemblance to the lower-level descriptions, contains very little detail, and means more to us than all the other descriptions combined. Again, I can say "I'm nailing this two-by-four to that two-by-four," and while it's more specific than "I'm building a house," it doesn't mean as much.

There are two main observations I want to make from this:

1) Anything that happens on any given level only takes on meaning when viewed from the level above it.

We might watch the individual movements of players on the field, but if we want to understand why their movements are interesting, we have to say "the Patriots are winning." The schematic for a machine doesn't mean anything until you realize it's a toaster: once you know that, you can look at how this particular toaster works, but until you realize what it does the network of wires and resistors and springs doesn't mean very much. We can look at the prices of a bunch of individual stocks over time, but we only feel like we've understood it when we can say something about "the market."

2) It is almost impossible to describe the things happening on any given level only in terms of levels below it.

Any physicist could tell you you're wasting your time if you want to describe anything with more than a hundred particles or so atom-by-atom; that's why we invented Statistical Mechanics, which contains popular fields like Thermodynamics and Quantum Mechanics. If a contractor wants to tell you where he's putting the living room, he's not going to do it by describing the placement of boards. You would be hard pressed to explain that the Greeks fought the Trojans for ten years by listing the movements of individual men. And if you wanted to explain that war to someone who didn't have a concept of groups or nations? "It's like these guys were all one person, and these other guys were all one person, and those two people got in a fight." To someone who doesn't think of groups, it would sound like nonsense.

Bearing in mind that we operate on a narrow band of levels ourselves, we can now make a couple of predictions:

1) If there is a meaning to our lives, it will only be apparent on a level higher than the ones on which we exist.

You only know why the muscle is contracting if you know the person it belongs to is running, and you only know why they're running if you know about the soccer game they're playing, and you only know why they're playing soccer if you know about the scholarship they won. If there is a reason why they should become educated and make a living and all that, it is most likely on the next level up--a level we don't think on.

2) Anything that exists on levels above ours will be almost impossible to express in terms we can understand.

Even if you could explain a hockey game by listing the movements of each of the players, it won't mean anything until you understand the teams, the rules, and the score--and if those things are beyond your understanding, how much sense will the game make?

In other words: Don't ask what the meaning of life is and then act surprised when you're answered with a bunch of incomprehensible gibberish. It ought to be incomprehensible: it's bigger than us, and it won't shrink easily.

A few practical rules can be derived from here.

1) Be skeptical of anyone who offers a simple explanation of why we're here and what we're supposed to be doing. It's one thing to boil down complex things into essential rules, but to expect the actual workings of life to be easily comprehensible is nothing but wishful thinking. Simple answers are tempting, and lead most of us to a shallow understanding of our "beliefs;" but when taken as a basis for conversion, they can lead to a Chabad house, or a Richard Dawkins reading, an Objectivist newsletter or a Marxist rally; or sometimes, they can lead to Scientology.

2) Don't write things off because you can't see a reason why they should be true. If you can see a reason why they shouldn't be true, that's different, but don't be too quick to dismiss on a lack of explicit evidence. All of the things that matter should be nigh inexpressible, so it's a pretty good idea to leave lots of time for something to be expressed before deciding it doesn't matter.

3) Don't dwell on it. Assuming we're here for a reason, and that there are things we're supposed to be doing, it's probably impossible to ever really understand that reason or know those things for sure. So don't worry about it. At a certain point, you need to stop thinking and start living.

Diablo III

2009-10-10T15:10:00.000-07:00

I've been spending some time on the Diablo Wiki lately-- I've been bored. It looks like Blizzard has been doing some major retconning since D2, and they've really fleshed out the world of Sanctuary. Apparently, Humans in Sanctuary aren't the ape descendants or the images of God we've come to know and love; they're actually unauthorized half-breeds of angels and demons, "with the power to be greater than both." The Worldstone, it turns out, served two purposes: keeping heaven and hell out of Sanctuary, and keeping humans from growing into their full powers. Remember the Worldstone? Tyrael smashed it.

Hitting a rock with a sword has never looked so cool.

I have no idea what the plot of Diablo III is going to be, but it's set in a world where the borders between heaven, hell, and the mortal world have just been shattered, and the limits keeping humans from becoming the most powerful creatures in the universe have just been removed. Bad. Ass.

I'm never really a fan of Blizzard books, but they do have a knack for badassity in their games. It looks like the plot has been maneuvered around to make room for Diablo III to have the coolest story yet.

Blizzard's New MMO

2009-10-08T20:11:00.000-07:00

So I don't know if you know, but Blizzard is working on a new MMO in a new world. They haven't released any details about it, only said that they're working on it; but this is a quote from a Blizzard higher-up on Wired.com: "Yeah, I can’t comment against the game, the level of detail, the business model or any of that stuff. But what I could tell you is that we’re intending to create a game experience that is unlike anything that has ever been done before. Something that I think takes things far beyond what anyone has imagined and certainly anything anyone has executed."

Blizzard has just announced that they are trying to create a game experience that is unlike anything that has ever been done before.

Tremble, mortals, and despair.