diiq

115.

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:54:44 -0500

At my local hackerspace this week, someone reccomended a book. It was written over a century ago, and is in the public domain.

Four of us googled for it. Three of us immediately found it on Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and Google Books, for free.

The person who actually needed the book — a basic math textbook — had a completely different set of results. Amazon. Half.com. Barnes and Noble. Places you pay.

The three people who found it for free had technical backgrounds.

I assumed we had used different, better search terms; I walked over, put my search terms in their machine… and found Amazon.

At the time I brushed it off, passed them the free links, and moved on.

But it’s been haunting me ever since. I know what the difference was: I have my google search history turned off. Google (in theory) isn’t collecting information about my searches (or at least isn’t using them to refine my search results). I turned search history off very much on purpose. It is on by default.

Someone who doesn’t know to turn that feature off, and who searches like a consumer, will be systemically urged to continue consuming. In this case, it meant that someone who wanted an education and didn’t have one would have had to pay or lose. The hopeful student we helped couldn’t have afforded to pay.

This kind of systemic bias is the most distressing to me because there is no one to blame. No one is at fault. Google tried to provide the results it thought this student wanted; those results reinforced a bias the student already had (“books are expensive”).

We’ve simply built a world where people tend to stay the way they are. If I tend to read militantly liberal news, that’s the news I’ll continue to recieve. If I read angrily conservative blogs, the vast majority of the world will seem to agree with me. Because those things make me comfortable.

This form of bias reinforcement is not a new idea. This particular case was particularly distressing because it came out like this: someone without a math education, who thought of themselves as low on money, would have decided they couldn’t afford to learn math.

Most hackers like to believe that anyone, anyone, can get online and learn to do the kind of work that will get them a job anywhere in the world.

It hurts when I’m forced to see how not-quite-true that is.

114.

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:15:44 -0500

If you ask a question to a big group of people, the people who answer it will be largely those people who think they know the answer.

The people who think that it’s a pretty big, subtle and complicated question, and one that they probably don’t really have enough knowledge and experience to answer — if they speak up, it will be in quiet voices, half to themselves.

This is a side effect of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

How can you ask a question in a way that alleviates this?

113.

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:07:48 -0500

Don’t be afraid of making secret languages.

Coin new words when you need them. Invest old phases with new meanings. If you find a hole in your sentence, whittle a word to fit it.

As much as possible, let context and play define these words; don’t fall prey to pedantry. You don’t need a dictionary. Just use your new words. Let them roll around your in mind and then lob them at a friend. Play catch with them.

Build your language up, higher and higher, until it collapses, then examine the rubble to see what still stands.

Keep those words. Treasure them, and treasure the people who know what they mean.

112.

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 22:48:00 -0500

I spent some time wondering, today, if I am a hypocrite. Doubtless I am (it is difficult to avoid), but I’m interested at the moment in one particular context.

I say what I think, and I work hard to say things of which I am unashamed. While there something very right in pausing before opening my mouth to consider, “do I really believe this, ” and, “what is an appropriate way to say this,” I never want to think “should I say this at all?” It is incredibly difficult to speak up when the group seems to be against you — but time and again I have found myself not the odd one out for holding an opinion, but the odd one out for speaking up about it; and as soon as it’s out in the open, many voices join in.

So I have tried to cultivate a habit of saying things without wondering if I should. Again, I wonder how to say things without being hurtful (not always successful) or parading my priveledge (rarely successful) — but I think that opinions held but left unspoken might be worse than opinions voiced, hurtfully. (I’m not sure about that one — send me an email or an Ask if you have thoughts.)

I also refuse to pretend to opinions I do not hold. (There is of course a difference between pretending an opinion and taking it on experimentally, to test if one might believe it.) I’m totally comfortable hanging out with folks who don’t agree with me — but I won’t disguise my opinion.

So, anyway, I try to speak my mind. This fact will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever spoken with me.

I also don’t attempt to separate my work, personal, and public personas because I want to be one person. A view I hold to be true is one I want to hold wherever I go.

So the hypocrisy comes, here: there are things I think that I will not speak. There are things I have done that I will not declare. There are thoughts and actions of which I am ashamed.

Is it a lack of courage that holds my tongue in these cases? A lack of conviction? A self-serving worry that, having shown you each last one of my demons, every door will be closed to me?

It’s not that I don’t believe in allowing other people privacy; I’m just not sure if I believe in my own. Nor do I suspect you’re really that interested in my pathetic closet-skeletons. I just yearn a little to be a person who fears no truth — someone whose dirt is kept in the front garden, as it were — and used to grow flowers.

111.

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 20:24:00 -0500

I have a romantic image of art forgers. Brilliant, misunderstood, and born in the wrong era. Some poor soul who has given their life to learning the ways the old masters painted — not just the subject matter, but every material, every step of the process. What did they use to gesso? How many coats? Which direction did they lay each coat? How did they smooth the surface? What did they sketch with? How fast did they work? How did they grind pigment? Lapis lazuli or azurite? Lead white? How pure?

My image of a forger is of a careful, secret romantic, with the utmost respect for the artists whose works he forges.

This is a wonderful image to have, and it is not entirely false; Tom Keating, for instance, clearly did have an immense love and respect for those artists he copped; as did Eric Hebborn.

But what is disappointing is that none of these things doth a successful forger make. In fact, almost none of it is necessary.

Yes, it’s true, that to start you need a fake — but this job was sometimes hired out; sometimes a perfectly nice painting by some other artist from the same period is used; sometimes a pastiche is made (with more or less care) — but always, this is the least important part of the affair. There is no magic in the fake; the magic happens in the hands of the dealer.

The great forgers of the twentieth century were social engineers. They had to contend far more with human challenges than with artistic ones.

And what’s even more disappointing — they didn’t have to be very good at that.

Here is the fundamental turn: the business of dealers, auction houses, and high-stakes collectors is not good art. It is valuable art. They are neither artists nor art critics; nor should they be. I don’t want the appraiser at Christie’s to tell me what I should like, or what I should want to buy, or what I should want to sell. I want them to tell me what I should pay or be paid.

And that has very little to do with quality.

The art world is a brand-driven market. A horrible little Monet, done in a hurry and on an off-day, is worth more than the best of a lesser-known artist — say, Bazille.

So to fake a painting, you must fake provenance. Fake the brand, and to hell with the quality.

This might be done by forging documents — exhibition listings, receipts of sale, dealer’s stickers, collectors stamps. Such was the case for the Myatt/Drewe forgeries.

Mostly, though all it takes is a good story. Every dealer wants to sell a previously unknown Vermeer — they’ll be suspicious, but the outcome they want is an authentication. Every auction house wants to sell the hottest brands. The outcome they want is authentication. Every collector wants to own the hottest brands. They want authentication.

It’s not just about money — can you imagine how good it must feel to know the most important art in the world passes through your hands?

But the monetary reward is in authentication; discovering a fake only loses everyone money.

In fact, the emotional and monetary penalties for discovering fakes are so strong that when known forgers step forwards and say, “I made that,” there is still a great deal of resistance to changing the work’s attribution.

Forging art, if you don’t get caught, is perhaps the most perfectly victimless crime in the world; not only does not one get poorer — everyone gets either richer, happier, or both.

Catching a forger creates a victim.

I can’t say that I am pro-forgery; nor am I against the idea of catching forgers.

The storybook forgers, who aspire to best the masters at their own game — they’re few and far between; and in truth, the story is the same either way. Vast sums of money are exchanged for work that’s valued based on who made it, not any property intrinsic to the object.

But, well, so long as the market isn’t flooded with so many fakes that the brand is devalued, a fake is good for everyone involved.

Except, I guess, those of us who want to look at truly transcendent art. For us, there can be no “fake”; art that moves you is art that moves you. A good story is a good story.

You can find them both speaking on YouTube. Tom Keating’s TV show is particularly charming.

A pastiche is a cobbling-together of elements from other sources. All art is pastiche to some extent; all forgeries, more so. If you’re to obvious about your theft, the art (or the forgery) feels phony.

To use a disgusting euphemism for con man.

That’s Frederic Bazille. I didn’t know him, either. No, he’s nowhere near as good as Monet at his best — not even close. But Bazille at his best might beat — or at least approach — Monet’s worst. In quality, but never in price.

Myatt painted, Drewe planted fake documents — then went crazy, pulled a gun, and pretended to be an intelligence officer in an attempt to avoid prosecution. Myatt painted.

Sorry. Artists.

Sorry again. Artists.

Forging work that is important to historical scholarship is a slightly different tin of freoles.

For the stories of individual forgers from the 20th century look into Eric Hebborn, John Myatt, Han Van Meegren, Elmyr de Hory, Tom Keating, Shaun Greenhalgh, or Mark Landis

110.

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 12:25:00 -0500

It’s linux keyboard happy fun time, everyone!

I just left a job where we developed on macs. In general, I was frustrated with the difficulty of customizing my mac; things like the lack of a real tiling window manager really bothered me.

There was, however, one delight. I stole many wonderful tricks from Steve Losh when I customized my keyboard. If you haven’t read his A Modern Space Cadet, then you don’t know keyboard jealousy yet.

I got rapidly used to two things: having my shift keys also produce parentheses — that is, if I pressed left-shift+b I got a B, but it I just pressed and released my left shift, I got a (. Similarly, right shift gave me a ).

I used the same trick on my capslock; in combination with other keys, it acted like control; alone, it produced an F18 (which I could map to useful stuff, like char-jump in emacs).

On linux, I found this trick very hard to emulate. It’s not something that xmodmap, or setxkbmap, or any of the x keyboard utilities can manage.

Yesterday, though, I found Bastien Dejean’s keydouble — which does just what I was after! It uses xtstlib, a library designed for UI testing X11 apps — it can record, replay, and fake X events — including key presses.

It took some modifying (all changes which Dejean has kindly merged) — but I now have my shift-parens and capslock cleverness. In addition, the code was simple enough that it was the work of a few minutes to turn it into keylock, which also gives me control-lock and alt-lock (I use them for a poor-man’s nav-mode in emacs).

This is all great, but you know what’s silly? Macs have KeyRemap4MacBook; Windows boxes have AutoHotKeys. Why on earth does linux, the customizer’s paradise, have two horribly documented and woefully underpowered keyboard mapping utilities and a C library designed for UI testing?

I mean, keydouble is totally useful, but it’s a hack, and it’s written like a hack.

I think the time may have come for me to try to do something about the whole UI customization thing.

EDIT:

I should add that the shift-paren hack that Steve Losh does is 100 times more effective because it takes into account rolls like (). This is totally doable, with yet another little x utility, xmacros — but I haven’t done it yet, so I cannot speak to it’s effectiveness.

Today I’m thinking about interfaces. Continuing my thought of two days ago, on personal...

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 00:05:06 -0500

Today I’m thinking about interfaces.

Continuing my thought of two days ago, on personal agency and the internet, I’ve been thinking about the way agency is presented to computer users. Computers are nearly-universal in their capabilities, and it presents a big problem to designers of software: how can the whole panoply of possible actions be offered up in a sensible way? For the most part, the problem is solved by reducing the number of prominent actions to a small set. Any other actions might be hidden away in a sub-menu somewhere — or they might be simply eliminated.

Software designers control the affordances my device offers me.

They also control how those affordances are, uh, afforded: buttons, menus, etc.

As a computer-y kind of person, I’ve dramatically customized a lot of things about my computer. I’ve changed which keys do what; I’ve changed how programs are displayed, how they’re managed, and how I navigate among them.

My phone, however, has no buttons. I have no real choices about how things are presented, or how I interact with them.

The slate-style design, a single touchscreen, is a designer’s dream in that it can take on *any* interface; the designer is offered what seems like total control over how the physical layout of the device maps to the affordances the designer has picked out.

It should come as no surprise that, at this point in my thought, I’d like to turn to made-up things.

Fictional computers, and fictional computery people, don’t work like this. Look at Doctor Who, Doc Brown, Eleanor Arroway, Tony Stark, &c, &c. They are surrounded by buttons, levers, switches, little spinny things — they’re in *cockpits*. Fictional designers don’t worry about discoverability, because fictional computer whizzes *know this shit*. Cockpit is a good metaphor: lots of affordances — a dizzying array of them — but the pilot is familiar. They live there, and so they are unphased.

Yes, we are all idiots. Yes, discovering what all the buttons do would be exhausting. But my generation spends essentially 100% of out time, eating, sleeping, or using a computer of one kind or another. We’ll work it out.

And more than just having lots of static affordances, we should be able to *choose* what all these things do. For ourselves.

Things like the DataHand, or the Kinesis keyboard (with foot pedals! a dream!) try and bridge this gap; so do programs like AutoHotKeys (for Windows) and KeyRemap4MacBook (for, uh, macbooks), and a plethora of tools on linux. And vimium, and, and, and.

But I can list on the fingers of one hand programs that *of their own volition* choose to give their users rich control over the interface. If you make software, take a look at Wings3D, sometime. Delicious, incredibly easy to customize — and still nowhere *near* the kind of flexibility I would like.

Tools should feel like extensions of the self.

That happens through practice, familiarity, habit — but *first*, it *must* happen through customization. If the tool is not right for the job, fix it. We adjust our clothes to fit our bodies; our homes to suit our lives; we should have more power over our devices than changing the theme and installing a soothing ringtone.

Handwriting! Today I’m thinking about handwriting. One of the most pleasantly easy...

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 00:17:19 -0500

Handwriting! Today I’m thinking about handwriting.

One of the most pleasantly easy self-improvements I’ve made in the past few years was to fix my handwriting. As a lefty, and a man, of my generation, I was more or less destined to have horrific handwriting.

And I did! As a kid I could barely tell which *way* to write — I wrote in mirror-writing as often as not — and even when I got that sorted out, cursive (and legibility in general) was way outside my ken. After almost two decades of writing stuff, I came out of college with consitently horrible handwriting. I had even invented a writing system for myself, with the hope that, if the letters were of my own design, I might manage to scrawl them properly. (No such luck, though I have been glad to have it now and again.)

So it came as a huge surprise that, in the course of two or thre days, I completely revamped my handwriting. Something I struggled with for most of my life, I fixed in a matter of hours. What the hell?

At the time, I didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, and so I took my vastly improved handwriting and didn’t look back. In the 18 months since then, my style has continued to improve, and today, while writing a long letter, I began to wonder what had happened. What was I missing all through elementary school?

So I’m going to catalogue the things I think made my handwriting sea-change possible; and I’m going to write out exactly what I did — so maybe, if you’re in the same position I was, you can make an equally happy discovery.

I learned to draw. I mean, I always doodled and drew and so on, but I learned to really look at a line, at a form in space, and let my hand trace it on paper as my eye traced it in the air. This is not a hard skill at all to learn, but very, very few people take the time to learn it. It was not taught in the art school I went to, at least not at the time I was there.

I discovered Saul Steinberg’s cartoons for the New Yorker. He made amazingly mysterious and electric lines, and used them to draw people, places, states of mind, sounds — but relevantly, words. He *drew* words.

This, in retrospect, was the important revelation, though I didn’t notice it at the time: writing is drawing. You’re sighing at the screen, right now, because of *course* writing is drawing. It’s habitualized, made into instict — but it’s just making marks on paper with a pen. Duh, diiq, of COURSE writing is drawing.

But had never really sunk in for me. Not when I was tracing dotted-line letters in first grade, and not when I designed my own writing system. It was always this separate and mysterious process, by which thoughts became words became marks on the page. Writing was, if anything, trapped *sounds* made out of ink — not pictures.

I didn’t have this revelation out loud; I didn’t even know I’d had it. But when I went to try and fix my handwriting (again) *after* having met and emulated Mr Steinberg, I took a subtly different approach.

Here’s what I did:

I looked up old, handsome epistles. Civil war letters, most of them. I just trawled google, looking for yellowed pages with handwriting of the sort I wanted. I *didn’t* want a round hand like my maiden aunts’. I wanted a hand like an elder statesman, or a general, or a philosopher. I dunno — I knew it when I saw it, and I amassed a small collection of long old letters.

That was key number one: I didn’t look for legibility — I looked for *looks*. Just like I can admire an artist’s markmaking without regard to the images the marks make, I was suddenly looking at the character of cursive *disconnected from it’s content.*

And then I drew the letters. I didn’t copy them, or transcribe them — I could have turned them upside down, and, without ever learning to *read* upside-down, I might have learned to write upside-down. I just looked for shapes that I liked — with an accquisitive eye, I looked for shapes I wanted to *own*. And then I drew them until I did.

And, just like learning to draw a human body, I had to learn the circumstances in which each shape was right. This curl looks nice with a gap after it, but not jammed in between two other bits; this one is only for the start of a squiggle, this one for the end.

And I practiced them, just like I might practice drawing feet in a life-drawing session. Whatever words looked cool, I just drew ‘em. Drew ‘em fast, slow, big, small, blind, whatever.

And only then did I start to make my own words — did I start treating the shapes like letters again.

In two days, I had a *completely different handwriting*. And whenever I encountered a place where I wasn’t sure what to do — just like forgetting some bit of musculature on a human frame (how does the deltoid connect in the back? To the scapula?) I’d just skim through my directory of images. What should double s’s look like? Oooh! Like this! Crossing the t’s in “that” when it’s at the beginning of a sentence — it makes an awkward line, how can it be smooth? Look for someone who has already drawn it.

I’m not saying I have the hardwriting of royalty, now — but people *complement* me on my hand. Me! Who couldn’t figure out how to write from left to right!

I think a lot of things that seem unlearnable hinge, like this, on some almost unspeakable change in perspective. Writing is drawing.

Today I’m thinking about cyberpunk. Neuromancer, Snow Crash — those worlds. What is it about them...

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 23:35:28 -0500

Today I’m thinking about cyberpunk. Neuromancer, Snow Crash — those worlds. What is it about them that excites me so? And why does the internet today seem like such a poor mockery — when it is undoubtedly larger and more complex than anything Gibson or Stephenson imagined it might be?

One point that I think of is that in those story-worlds, the more you know, and the more of a whiz you are, the more places you can go. Secret places, like Hiro’s sewers beneath the city, that are useful and interesting but personal.

We tend to think of things on the web that have limited viewers as failures.

Viewers. That’s another thing; fictional cyberspace is participatory in a much richer way than the internet we use today. One cannot be a hero as a viewer, or as a visitor, or as a customer. That exciting, heroic feeling of being the pivot of action requires agency — full and complex agency. I often use twitter, or facebook, or post on this blog, and have the dull gong ringing in the back of my mind: “You’re shouting in the dark. No one is listening.”

Maybe I’m just hanging around the wrong parts of the net. Maybe I should work harder to stray from the vast social venues. But it seems to me that the parts of the net that are participatory are, more often than not, floods of ten million voices.

Agency requires more than just a voice, even if that voice is heard by the ten thousand. A sense of story is strongly tied to a sense of place. Storytellers have it drilled into them: no disembodied voices, floating in unnamed whiteness. People, taking action, in places. The internet has a very low sense of place. It’s hardly noticable. I might “go to” Amazon, or “visit” youtube — but I do not truly feel like I’ve left. Not the way I do when I read a book, or watch a movie, or (I shudder to imagine) when I actually *go* somewhere.

I don’t mean every website should be a 3D space (like Second Life). God forbid; that would be horrific.

In fact, I have no answers at all. I can only say that I get a stronger sense of place-ness from a fictional description of cyberspace than from the real thing. I get a stronger sense of agency from an imaginary digital face-off than from an online action, like ordering something on Amazon, that has physical reprocussions.
I continue to work with computers, to program and think about programming, because from that I get the echo of something I believe must be there; and the strongest indicator I can find, the best map I have, is the feeling I get when I read books about the internet from before the internet.

I can’t shake this feeling, like the whole web is covered with this shiny veneer, like a terrible cross-breed of the Kitchen of the Future with the Mall of America. If I could just peel it away, hiding behind it I would find the vast, beautiful, and terrifying landscapes I’ve read and dreamed about.

“I cannot say what I feel in any human sense, Partner Elijah. I can say, however, that the...

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 22:30:34 -0500

“I cannot say what I feel in any human sense, Partner Elijah. I can say, however, that the sight of you seems to make my thoughts flow more easily, and the gravitational pull on my body seems to assault my senses with lesser insistence, and that there are other changes I can identify. I imagine what I sense corresponds in a rough way to what it is that you may sense when you feel pleasure.”

I just quit my job. It’s hard sometimes, at moments of high stress, to judge if a choice is right. Right after my resignation, I knew that I was about the face some tricky times; I only have a few months’ rent tucked away, and the job market is a strange place. My mind was filled with ten thousand choices to be made, a million tasks to be completed. It would be easy to be distressed, and to feel like I had done something terribly foolish.

But I didn’t feel that way - I felt grand. I was confident I chose well. I felt grand not because I didn’t think about all those things — but because suddenly thinking was *itself* easier. I think, in trying to judge my own condition, it is more important to judge the *quality* of my thought process than the content.

Good places, good work, good choices and, as Daneel Olivaw notes above, good friends — they make thoughts move silkily, they make bodies seem stronger and more grace-filled. Even when those bodies are under stress, and the thoughts are unpleasant or harried, they are *better*. It is not “happiness” the way anyone I know would define it, nor is it pleasure (as the quote suggests). It is good, though.

I vow to keep a close watch on the quality of my thinking, in addition to the quality of my thoughts. It is this that will be my compass. I can do good anywhere; I can become better only in this peculiar state of ease.

There is a one-way door between reality and fiction. I am allowed to write untrue stories about...

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 21:28:57 -0600

There is a one-way door between reality and fiction.

I am allowed to write untrue stories about real people and places. I can drag real things into the realm of fiction.

But there is a barrier preventing me from pulling fictional things into the real world.

That sounds pretty obvious.

But that barrier isn’t inherent. It’s social.

If I decide I want a light saber, or to follow a fictional religion, or to wear clothes like a character in a movie, I could physically do so. But I would be ridiculed. We are forgiven if we instantiate a fictional thing accidentally - the ipad is acceptable because only after the fact did we say, “aha! I saw that on Star Trek!” but Japanese engineers who build gundams and people who dress like superheros or want to be ninjas - they are pitied and laughed at and, at best, we might help them indulge their hobby. If it is more than a hobby it is an illness.

It is sad that, by writing a story about something lovely, we condemn anyone who hopes to make that loveliness real to the name insane.

Aphorism: you cannot be balanced and run.

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 23:02:49 -0600

Aphorism: you cannot be balanced and run.

Someone told me that Sartre claimed we make our own faces — that the steady wear and tear of...

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 23:07:27 -0600

Someone told me that Sartre claimed we make our own faces — that the steady wear and tear of wearing our habitual attitudes and emotions is what builds the wrinkles, the muscular structure, even influences the growth of bone.

I can find no reference to this quote, so maybe they made it up, or maybe I made them up.

I don’t know for certain that we make our own faces, but I just got a new pair of jeans. It seems strange to me that anyone would buy pre-distressed jeans. Surely we make our own jeans — shouldn’t we wear the badges of our personal distresses with the pride of ownership? Or, no, not ownership, but identity. Our face, our scars, our roughed-up jeans — they’re maps of how we came to become ourselves.

Either a wise man, or else Doctor Who, once said that the only when to know where you’ve come from is to figure out where you’re going, and look backwards. Jeans and faces are like vectors in backstory-space. They tell us our direction, and perhaps our velocity.

I’m thinking about the Copernican principle. They call it the principle of mediocrity, too,...

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 21:27:44 -0600

I’m thinking about the Copernican principle.

They call it the principle of mediocrity, too, but I like calling it the copernican principal. It goes like this: I am not special. Specifically, as an observer, I am probably not in a privileged or unusual position. Copernicus reframed the solar system by stripping earth of its distinctive position at the center; it is just another orbiting body in a huge system of orbiting bodies. This removal of observational privilege simplified the whole problem and made for an elegant description of the situation — it eventually paved the way for a completely universal understanding of the way mass behaves.

There’s a philosophical equivalent that must come into play when investigating human motivations, human behaviors, and the self. I must have every expectation that I am like other people, and that other people are like me. To assume that I am more clever, more capable, more insightful, or more well-grounded in reason or emotional control would be silly. I can observe, really, only the inside of my own head, and so I must predict that other head-insides are similar.

If I am frustrated with someone, the reciprocal frustration probably exists — when I think they are wrong, they think I am wrong. It is inevitable, given human nature that, even understanding that, I *still* think that I am right and they are wrong; but with luck it can color my behavior, and increase my insight into their actions. To see the other as utterly misled, to be waiting for them to admit folly, is probably unwise unless *I* am wondering if *I* am misled — unless I am on the verge of admitting folly. Approaching an other is like approaching a mirror, blindfolded - every step I take, I can imagine them taking. It’s not a perfect model — but an external view of the self is hard to come by.

If there is a problem in the world, it is also in me. If you are wrongheaded, I am likely wrongheaded too. If you are abrasive, so I must imagine am I.

The greatest danger of introspection — and worse, of mysticism — is that I will think of myself as especially wakened, particularly aware, as being somehow “further along”. Wisdom is so small; why should I imagine that only the great-souled will contain it? Rational behavior is never seen - why should I imagine I exhibit it?

OK, that’s enough balderdash for now. G’night!

My phone won’t let me copy/paste your last reply, Jane Henry, so I will summarize here and I hope...

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 00:40:17 -0600

My phone won’t let me copy/paste your last reply, Jane Henry, so I will summarize here and I hope you’ll correct me if I put words in your mouth. I’ll answer them out of order, if that’s alright.

You feel that my wizard trick is narcissistic, and that it mostly reassures me that whatever I’m doing is right. Perhaps I gave a false impression of how the Wizard works. Sometimes, yes, I am reassured, but more frequently I realize that I must change course immediately or that I need to apologize for something I did weeks ago that, without my realizing, led to my current situation. The wizard is not nice. The Wizard is good, and cares, but the Wizard is rarely nice. An exchange with the Wizard leaves me confident only that I finally understand what I need to do — not that I have been doing good all along. In fact, a consultation with the Wizard is the most consistent way I have to change my own mind about a subject.

You wondered what rewards I have found to modify my habits when I talk. If I had found good ones, the problem would be gone. The only way to change a habit are to remove the triggers (stop talking entirely), find a new behavior that can fit the same pattern and yeild the same reward (my hope), or remove the reward (unsure if this is possible in the conversational case). Part of what makes this habit so damn persistent is that the rewards themselves are Not Good: power, the self confidence of a zero-sum sort, and so on. What I am after is a reward that’s as effective at programming my basal ganglia without the evil parts.

Interestingly, I was much better about this while I was in New Zealand; I rarely got in the kinds of conversations that triggered the bad habits. Because the topics, and the vocabularies, and the environments were so different, the bad habits were never triggered, and I thought I had escaped them entirely. Alas, as habit-studying psychologists will tell you, bad habits are there essentially forever. I the can be overpowered by new habits, or they can lie dormant in the absence of the trigger, but they reappear in an instant if the environment allows for it. So, short answer: I don’t know. If I did, the problem would be fixed.

Still, I am hopeful. I have made positive changes; I will continue to improve. I am working my way along to the habits I’ve held for a long time; they’re carved in like footsteps on an ancient stone stair. If it’s a little trickier to eliminate them, why be surprised?

Your final question was about my problems with methodology, re moral codes. I don’t like the idea of a written behavioral code handed down from the past. That leads to not good. Learning to recognize good moment to moment seems more foolproof, even if it is harder to maintain on the scale of entire societies. When I say “I rebel” I mean I don’t believe in quite the same good that my great grandmother did — and I think it would be silly to try.

I think I’m ready to write some other stuff for a while, Jane Henry, only because I feel like I’ve said everything I know enough to say, I land if I said more I’d repeat myself. But if you’d like to continue, you know my email address: s@diiq.org. If you feel I’ve ommited publishing something important of your opinion, lemme know and I’ll rectify it.

The Jane Henry Epistles: Actually, dogs do train themselves. Dogs also train other dogs, and...

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 23:10:57 -0600

The Jane Henry Epistles:

Actually, dogs do train themselves. Dogs also train other dogs, and dogs train their humans as much as their humans train them. Dogs left alone or untrained do not necessarily become vicious or insane. Part of good dog training is knowing when to follow an ordered path and when to do what will work for you and your dog.

Dogs that turn out nice when trained by random circumstance are lucky. Dogs that are trained by random circumstance for centuries are wolves. Worse; wolves do, as you point out, train each other. But I’ll yield the point. Dogs can train themselves, under favorable circumstances.

You are fully capable of training yourself to improve your thoughtfulness when you talk.

I agree. That is what I’m trying to do.

The benefits of improved conversations should be the motivating reward.

“Should”, alas, can only refer to our own, future, chosen action. It is a very limited field of application. The rest is given. Pain cannot act as a reward. Distant joy cannot act as a reward. training simply doesn’t work that way. Our biology is a given. New rewards can be conditioned — by classical conditioning —- but one must begin with the rewards that work. My post on talking too much highlighted the fact that the reward of improved relationships and conversations was not yet stronger than the rewards which are morally negative.

The full Girl Scout Law: I will do my best to be honest, to be fair, to help where I am needed, to be cheerful, to be friendly and considerate, to be a sister to every other girl scout (maybe that can be revised to be a brother to every other fellow citizen in your case), to respect authority, to use resources wisely, to protect and improve the world around me, and to show respect for myself and others through my words and actions.

OK.

External pressure is not the point.

No, you’re right. I did mot mean to say that it was. It is the methodology, however. This is not wrong; but I rebel. It has not yet worked, fully, for me; so I’m investigating other routes.

The point is experience. If you try to do these things, you are more likely to do Good and others are more likely to do Good to you. There’s positive reinforcement.

I repeat: something that feels good later or less strongly or simply more subtly is not automatically better positive reinforcement merely by virtue of being morally superior. If it were, I would have no blog, and the universe would be ten times as awesome as it is (but less pleasantly challenging).

Also: the good I’m talkin’ ‘bout is not “to” anyone. It’s just good, as I perceive it. When I talk about “my” good, I don’t mean to say “stuff that’s good for me” I mean to say, “upon reflection, this is what I believe is good in the universe, generally”

It is not about blindly following an authority figure from childhood.

Again, I don’t mean to say that’s what it’s about. It doesn’t have to be blind — the Wizard is just a way of un-blinding the process. You think things like the BoyY Scout Oath don’t end up as part of the Wizard? Also the Green Lantern’s Oath, the Oath of Diane Duane’s wizards, the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the Beatitudes? I’m open to what works, Jane Henry — I just want to do it by choice, not by default.

It’s about sticking with what works. Your fear of becoming a blind follower is not justification for narcissism. Your satisfaction to your own goodness neglects goodness to others. Wasn’t that the problem with talking too much, interrupting, patronizing, and insulting?

See above re: “my Good”. That’s “The way I define [universal] good” not “Oooh, that’s so good for me.”

To help me better understand your cornerstone vow, could you please describe something that you’ve done differently since writing your vow and its effect on someone else? Out of curiosity, how many people have followed your suggestion and sent a photo of their vow? Jane Henry

Sure. I helped a woman understand her teachers. I take out the recycling at work every night, because it was stressing out our office manager; The oath says: when I choose, I choose good. I think I’ve managed that. The oath is broken — and purposefully broken, in this respect: it doesn’t work when I’m not choosing. Oaths are fantastic, but they don’t automatically alter habit. Part of my goal with asking people to take the oath was to spread some visceral awareness of that gap between choice and habit.

Of course, no one took the oath but me, so that didn’t work so good.

First: Jane Henry, I will continue my replies to your excellent letters tomorrow. Second: I am...

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 22:48:17 -0600

First: Jane Henry, I will continue my replies to your excellent letters tomorrow.

Second: I am tried, and as a birthday gift, I am writing a pataphor and going to bed.

So:

Joining a new community — a new job, a new school, a new social circle — joining a new community is like starting to write a poem.

Starting a poem is like putting on a straightjacket.

I squirm around, and bruise myself, trying to find a way to writhe free of the unfamiliar constraints. But, thought the constrains will soften and bend, it’s mostly me that needs to change shape. The flexibility it takes to twist my still-joined wrists up and over my head is earned, not inherent. Eventually, after the fight has gone, I find there’s much more room than there was when I was first strapped in.

Here continuing my reply to Anonymous, who has chosen the name Jane Henry. Jane Henry has also...

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 22:46:44 -0600

Here continuing my reply to Anonymous, who has chosen the name Jane Henry. Jane Henry has also written a longer response, to which I will get, but I believe I’ll explore things as they come, step by step.

What more than Truth and the time-space of Sam do you want to build Good?

Nothing, of course; there can be nothing else.

I agree with you about the nature of good, and that it can (and must) be achieved with what we are given. My concern is in small degree defining good and, more, how to achieve it consistently.

[I feel like I do nothing but collect digressions — but each one is something I must say before I can say the next. Indulge me, Jane Henry.]

I write in the first person as much as I can, because this is internal stuff, right? I can’t speak to your life, or to what extent your actions meet with your conscience’s approval. I can only examine my conscience and my actions. I try to do so in as brutally honest a manner as I can. In doing so, I suspect I’m gaining some insight into other people — but to write out my thoughts honestly, I must write thing in the first person. About this, about the gap between conscience and action, ones self is the only subject.

And so the picture I paint of myself is a bleak one; my successes are not what I record, here.

I spend most of my time being not-as-good-as-I’d-like.

I feel akin to every New-Year’s resolutioner — to learn French, to write every day, to lose ten pounds and go to the gym everyday. I’m a recidivist.

So.

If I turned to someone who has decided to learn to draw said, “Hey, so just sit down and do it! Draw every day. Practice.”

I would be both correct and also completely unhelpful. And a bit unkind, really; whether or not I find drawing easy, whether or not I find the commitment of a daily practice session easy — these don’t mean anything to anyone else.

I can offer tools — “here’s a book that helped me”, or “Let me cheer you on!” or, “When is your class? I’ll be sure not to invite you out to the bar those nights.” Those are actions that provide aid, give reinforcement, remove distraction.

All it takes, in theory, to learn to draw, is a pen, paper, and time. But a book, a teacher, a grid — these are tools that can help.

Just so, Jane Henry, are space and time all I need. Or maybe like a barrent planet is all I need to build a skyscraper. The raw materials are all there. The wisdoms I’ve inherited — Marcus Aurelius, Buddha, Buddha, and perhaps fiction most of all — those are blueprints and physics lessons. They tell me lots about skyscrapers. I’ve even planted a cornerstone. Now (I hope) I’m building the brick-ovens and the steel-smelters. It may be a little while before I’ve made a ground floor. I’m OK with that. if the tools I build and discover manage to be useful to others, so much the better.

2 . To show respect for yourself and others through your words and actions is part of the Girl...

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 21:59:00 -0600

2 . To show respect for yourself and others through your words and actions is part of the Girl Scout Law, which is a tool for building good.

Codes of Behavior! Yes! These are really interesting. Groups of people have codes of behavior, both written and unwritten; and the pressure to conform with those codes is either social, authoritarian, or physical. The point is, the pressure is external.

Over time, we internalize the moral code of our community; the voice of our leaders becomes a voice inside our head.

By what process does that happen? I think, that in order to communicate effectively with each other — in order to understand and predict each other’s behavior, we must have mental models of each other. This is, again, not a new philosophy — but it’s an important idea for me. In my head, I am building a representation of you, Anonymous; the way you think, the way you write. It’s pretty inaccurate at the moment, because I have all of 150 words to base it on. Still, its there. It’s part of why it is uncomfortable for me that you do not have a name — even a fake name — because I have nothing to connect my model to. No way to refer to it, and through it, to you. Eventually, the name Anonymous might stick to you specifically; but I’d prefer a name that’s not so overloaded.

What’s amazing to me is that I have mental models of people who don’t exist. There are fictional people who live in my head; I can build models of characters in books, TV shows, and I can invent them all on my own. I can be the author of internal models for which there is no external referent. How neato is that!?

As a terrible cynical modern man, I find it very hard to listen to the wise voices of the leaders of my youth. They seem very arbitrary; very old-fashioned. The voice of a pastor, a camp-leader, even my parents, whom I love and respect — their voices are weak, perhaps because my models of them are so strong. They’re human. I disagree with them, sometimes. Often, even.

So I’m a little bit in love with the idea of fictional voices taking the role of conscience. It’s so straightforward, to an avid reader like me, to construct a little archetypal wise man; a guru; a Yoda; the sort who asks questions rather than handing down edicts. I call ‘em the Wizard —- and I write little conversations with them.

“O Wizard,” I say, “what’s up with this shit? I’ve been working long hours the past few days, and I’m tired. I’ve done so few of the things I promised myself I would do. Am I on the right path?”

“Kid,” the Wiz replies, “what would make a path a wrong path?”

“I guess it would put me in situations where I did wrong things.”

“Can you still do good, on these long days of yours?”

“… Oh. Thanks, Wiz.”

I walk away from conversations with the wizard feeling reassembled. They ask questions that are hard enough that I sometimes have to take a few days to think of an answer they might accept. But most of all, I can be much more confident that I’m not unthinkingly absorbing the mores of the past simply because they’re there. The wizard is a fluid code of behavior, based on satisfying me as to my own goodness. They are a little bit of me that’s hard to access otherwise, but who is confident about what’s Good.

So yes: a moral code is a tool for building good. It’s a powerful one. I think the Wizard is an even better one, because it is not trapped by a single culture. Anyone, from any background, can imagine their version of a wise-one, and get slapped around by them, in the privacy of their own head.

You are more than your habits. You do choose. Just like training a dog, you will have to learn to...

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 01:18:00 -0600

You are more than your habits. You do choose. Just like training a dog, you will have to learn to recognize your behavior and speech at the moment it occurs and interrupt, correct, praise yourself.

Yes! Yes! I am more than my habits. Identifying a self is a challenging philosophical exercise; we change so much over time. It’s a sophomoric question to ask why I consider me-at-the-age-of-6 to be more me than another white American male technocrat of 24. I’m a sophomoric philosopher, so I’m going to ask it anyway :)

The simplest answer is practical; a moment ago, I was in almost the same spot I am in now; the physical arrangement of the universe is such that the simplest explanation is that me-now is related to me-a-fraction-of-a-second-ago. That chain of connected selves runs all the way back, connecting 24-me with 6-me.

A thought experiment: if I were to suddenly teleport to somewhere I had never been — without causal connection — somewhere outside my light-cone — would that thing that appeared elsewhere still be me?

If I were a pure mind, making each and every choice afresh, truly choosing, I can imagine nothing but circumstance that would tie me to my previous selves.

“M: Every moment is an undeniable call to action. Every moment calls for a choice, and no time is given in which to make it. The choice is offered, considered, and made in an instant. This is impossible; therefore doing it well takes practice.” — Meditations and Vows

I don’t make each choice newly, though. I make mostly do the same things, over and over; taking the same forks at every moment’s di-lemma. These patterns of behavior are what I’m calling habit. I make no claim about whether the existence of habit is good or bad — it is observed. It is given. The same-ness of my choices (even the teeny ones), accounts for the fact that I am recognizable by the way I walk, the way I talk, the way I write and think and the ways I spend my time. They even become encoded in my flesh — my muscle, fat, my skin, my brain. Much of the way I look is due to habit. My habits are the common thread that, above and beyond circumstance, ties me to myself.

By the same token, habits are inertia. Changing, in an instant, the behaviors that have made me me — that seems more of a vanishing act than my imaginary instantaneous journey to the edge of the visible universe. I’m almost equally at a loss as to how either could be accomplished. Sudden transformation is not my goal.

So you’re right. It is like training a dog.

”[…] to recognize your behavior and speech at the moment it occurs” is what I will call mindfulness — if you’ll let me redefine a term. A person with perfect mindfulness needs no training, because they no longer have habit: they have eternal choice. With eternal choice comes the extinction of self (as I’ve defined self) — one could, I suppose, choose to have a self, to exhibit patterns of behavior — but the self would be extrinsic. If I thought I could achieve that state of eternal choice, I’d certainly consider it. But not only do I doubt that I can do it, I believe that it is a route to Good that fails for many people. So we’re left with training.

A dog doesn’t train itself. The random course of events can train a dog; but the results are less than stellar. They are trained into viciousness, into insanity. A happily trained dog as followed a more ordered course of training, designed purposefully.

It is, then, my goal to find methods of self-training that substitute for eternal mindfulness. Because while I’m mostly ruled by habit, I have moments, every day, of clarity. My hope is that I can build the tools, processed that I can set in motion during those moments of clarity that will continue to act on me though the times of habitual action, retraining me even when I do not recognize my behavior and speech at the moment it occurs.

I’m excited to play around with your second and third points — this is interesting and fertile ground, that I’ve spent considerable time working through both philosophically and in practice. However, I’m calling it a night. I’ll unpack your second thought tomorrow.

So g’night, Anonymous.