Oxford: starting the day liveblog Oct 19, 2020

A draft post from a year ago that I didn’t put up then, about a problem that I had forgotten about:

I recently woke up, and do not appear to be aggressively pursuing anything worthwhile, for instance understanding the future of artificial intelligence, or trading my precariously slung dressing gown for more versatile writing attire. I did make some coffee, but am falling down on actually drinking it, and it is on the other side of the room, so that might be a thing for later.

My impression has been for a while that I am just a worse human in the morning, and then gradually improve toward the evening. Such that I can spend hours incrementally trying to direct my attention toward some task and carefully reflecting on why it’s not working and how to improve the situation in the afternoon, and then just do it without problems after about 8pm.

Scale of unrest Oct 18, 2020

I live in San Francisco. Some people I know are worried about living in US cities at election time because of the potential for political unrest. This seems surprising to me, since I figure the chance of rioting harming a specific person in a large city is very low, especially if that person takes the precaution of not being intentionally at a riot. If I thought the chance of a riot so incredibly huge and destructive that one in a thousand people in my city is killed is as high as one in a thousand, that is still only giving me around a one in a million chance of death, i.e. similar to the risk from a flight to New York. Possibly I’m not being imaginative enough.

The past: mysterious poem Oct 17, 2020

I found a poem in my Google docs from 2012, seemingly pasted there from an obsolete document system of even earlier. I couldn’t find it anywhere else on the internet, and I seem to have multiple slightly different versions of it in my docs, and also some related notes. Which all suggests that I wrote it.

More seals Oct 16, 2020

In case others also wanted to see more round seals, I present several that I came across in my investigation of illustrations for that last post, and a more extended the seal perusal that followed.

On considering the existence of seals more, I came to wonder how this body design—short plump fur snake with weirdly placed flipper limbs, apparently optimized for being extremely cute while lying in one place—could possibly evolve in a world where animal dexterity can get pretty high (e.g. also leopards exist) and there is just no obvious upside for seals being so cute. After minor YouTube investigation, I think a) seals are not somehow surprisingly agile on land; b) seals live in water, where this seems to be an excellent body design; c) penguins and seals are fairly similarly shaped water creatures, but in their awkward land phase, rest on different edges.

Problems and gratitudes Oct 15, 2020

Being grateful is often suggested as a good and scientific way to raise some kind of wellbeing measure. Probably somehow resulting from that, and from my much greater enjoyment of being grateful than of investigating this claim at all, sometimes I embark on a concerted effort to be grateful for specific things.

However I am sometimes confused about directing gratitude, in a similar way to how I am confused about considering things ‘problems’. Is there a problem—never spoken of but so much bigger than anything that ever is—of everyone not being able to access vast quantities of wisdom and pleasure by pressing their belly buttons?

Maybe I should be grateful that the horsehead nebula isn’t a real horsehead?

The bads of ads Oct 14, 2020

In London at the start of the year, perhaps there was more advertising than there usually is in my life, because I found its presence disgusting and upsetting. Could I not use public transport without having my mind intruded upon continually by trite performative questions?

Sometimes I fantasize about a future where stealing someone’s attention to suggest for the fourteenth time that they watch your awful-looking play is rightly looked upon as akin to picking their pocket.

Stepping back, advertising is widely found to be a distasteful activity. But I think it is helpful to distinguish the different unpleasant flavors potentially involved (and often not involved—there is good advertising):

Todo rocks Oct 13, 2020

Among people, I tend far toward liking to organize things, to make detailed plans, to conceive of my actions as within some sensical framework, etc. I appreciate that all this might be bad, but it is at least very compelling to me.

Among people with these kinds of traits, my guess is that I am unusual in how often when typing something into a todo list or writing it on a whiteboard, I vaguely wish that the task instead involved moving around a bunch of rocks, possibly organized into little heaps.

After having this fantasy a few times, I got some rocks. Here are a few of the more public ones.

200,000 hours Oct 12, 2020

I have never been an enthusiastic bed-goer, because I like life. But a nice thing about going to bed is that you can be confident that you are doing roughly the best thing. At noon, the smallness of the chance that your chosen task is really among the best ways to spend your precious moments in this world might be discouraging or oppressive. Perhaps you would only have to be a tiny bit smarter or think a bit longer to be able to recognize that this is the wrong way and that you could be doing much better. But at 4am, sleeping is probably pretty close to the most valuable thing.

War as a carefully honed coordination failure Oct 11, 2020

Today I watched some YouTube videos about the World Wars, and in particular how the first one came about. It did seem like a sequence of plausible sounding steps that led to a giant war. But there is an abstract level at which I still feel confused. Which is one where initially there are basically a very large number of humans who each very much don’t want to die presumably, most of whom have very little reason to kill almost any of the others. Then somehow this all turns into everyone putting huge amounts of effort in and risking their lives to kill each other. It is as if you told me that you had a barn full of soaking wet hay, and it turned into a big bonfire.

I suppose the natural explanation is that there are rulers, or in more game theoretic terms to match the incentive-level of my confusion:

Heavenly hellfire Oct 10, 2020

Today I read about ancient history instead of doing work. Which got me thinking about Santorini.

If you see blue-domed chapels with whitewashed walls perched idyllically over the Aegean sea, there is a good chance you’ve got yourself (a picture of) Santorini.