Love this post Irrational Dedication, via Duncan Davidson:
Every single thing we see, someone had to will it into existence against the entropy of the universe and the indifference of everyone else. That’s what the entire built world is.
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By a convenience of dates, I can today count in exact months how long I’ve spent in each of three phases of my life:
(I drew a pretty pie chart but a crash ate it.)
Or in other numbers: I’ve now spent ~70% of my adult life, or ~41% of my entire life, living by a name I chose for myself.
I used a deed poll to change my name. And nowadays – with several iterations of my personal documentation issued over the 18½ years I’ve been using my name – it doesn’t even come up any more, except when somebody observes “hey, that’s an unusual name you’ve got there!” I haven’t even looked at my deed poll in over a decade, for example. My name today is more well-established as the one I was given at birth was by the time I reached adulthood.
And so it occurred to me this weekend, while I was reimplementing FreeDeedPoll.org.uk: because I was born in Scotland, there’s no reason I can’t also get my name changed on the one remaining bit of documentation that still has my birth name: my birth certificate! Scottish law allows me to have this retroactively changed for a modest fee, which would result in a re-issued birth certificate that showed “Dan Q” (with my birth name included as an “also known as”).
I’m flip-flopping on whether I should. Want to see my pros/cons lists?
Pros:
Cons:
I don’t know which way I’ll eventually fall on this. Considering how… inconsequential it’d be, either way, to my day-to-day life… it’s surprising how much of an itch it is, at the back of my brain!
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The idea was to start offering sound production services again, as a side activity. I didn't think that through. Taking six months for a 6-song album uncovered an obvious problem, especially if compared to how, back in the day, it used to take less than three weeks, including all the back-and-forth with the author, and proper quality testing.
I can go on however I want to find reasons as to why it took me so long, but it boils down to a simple linear truth: I don't want to do it. Having a day job means that I can only use a few hours here and there, or the weekend, or my holidays, to work on music production. Reality showed me that it's my free time, time to do personal stuff, enjoy relationships, go visit places, do house chores, et cetera.
Having said that, I'm proud of the album, no matter how my obsessed mind will always consider my work as sub-par. Obsessed by a past standard that's currently unattainable to me, that I used to achieve because I poured ten hours a day into the craft, every day, for years. Yet, the simple fact of being proud of this new production is a giant step for me. It means starting to accept that perfection is not of this world, and that sometimes good enough is the best for everyone.
A fulfilling explanation of how things are with me and music production came out of a nice discussion with another friend and musician, with whom I've been collaborating for almost ten years. We share the same age and a similar living situation, so we found each other agreeing with wanting to savour our free time in peace, without obsessing over having to perform something else at any cost.
We also shared the logical result of the above: turn our focus on our music instead. Having no deadline, whatever and whenever it comes to us, work on new music to keep the flame going. Do we have something to say, something to play? Let's record that, and produce the outcome at our pace.
Acceptance is sometimes hard, but when it comes it's satisfying.
Happy Eighth of Bleptember.
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There are four cards, a simple rule, and all you’ve got to do is to work out which cards you need to turn over to see if the rule has been broken. That’s got to be easy, right? Well maybe, but the Wason Selection Task, as it is called, is one of the most oft repeated tests of logical reasoning in the world of experimental psychology.
Three questions.
According to Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, the results of the Wason Selection Task demonstrate that the human mind has not evolved reasoning procedures that are specialised for detecting logical violations of conditional rules. Moreover, they claim that this is the case even when these rules deal with familiar content drawn from everyday life.
However, they argue that the human mind has evolved to detect violations of conditional rules, when these violations involve cheating on a social exchange. This is a situation where a person is entitled to some kind of reward only if they have fulfilled a particular requirement (for example, you can enter a particular nightclub only if you’re over the age of 21). Cheating involves taking the benefit, without fulfilling the condition for the benefit. Cosmides and Tooby have found that when the Wason Selection Task is constructed to reflect a cheating scenario, subjects perform considerably better than they do with the standard test.
Okay, so, obviously invoking evolution is a little silly here. Who’s to say this is a matter of hardwiring rather than what people have practiced?
Still, there’s something very interesting.
In biology, anthropomorphism bad.
In science, the use of anthropomorphic language that suggests animals have intentions and emotions has traditionally been deprecated as indicating a lack of objectivity. Biologists have been warned to avoid assumptions that animals share any of the same mental, social, and emotional capacities of humans, and to rely instead on strictly observable evidence.
You might reason about it: we don’t want to project our own social dynamics onto situations where they’re not fundamentally present, because we’ll project too much and miss what’s going on. Seems fair enough.
But in this case, taking the social out of the same reasoning task makes many unable to pick their way through it.
This suggests to me that various anthropomorphized lenses can help us with cold hard logical problems, especially if we can pick them up and put them down.
The version of this that I’ve found people able to use at work is “adversarial” thinking. Every computer science education handwaves a bit that you ought to be able to do this kind of reasoning, sometimes for worst-case analysis or more commonly for security. You can walk people through this a bit and get to interesting insights.
(Fake example that may make this seem slightly more concrete to software engineers if absolute nonsense to everyone else: Yes, I know that this service is only invoked by three trusted internal callers, and yes, they’re all supposed to be reasonable – but think with me. If you wanted to, could you create load with some attributes that would ruin the async workflow distribution’s performance characteristics? (Some method is discussed.) (Ahh – and could we end up with some amount of that by accident if the upstream caller had a failure in such-and-such way and were resubmitting XYZ?))
But: I think adversarial reasoning and thinking about cheating probably isn’t the only way that social reasoning can help when you’re manipulating endless cold logical abstractions.
My senior year in college, a friend and I were thoroughly and delightedly obnoxious about calling components / interfaces / entities “boi”. “The session state boi.” “The parser boi needs it.” “Ahh but this update will need to touch the factory bois as well.” I can’t say that that must have been fun for others, but… Thinking about the different pieces of code like mammoths in a David Macaulay drawing handing off various tasks to each other makes it easier for me to remember what they all do and how they interact.
Is that embarrassing? Is it something to suppress like a field biologist’s anthropomorphization of a troop of meerkats?
I think it shouldn’t be. I’ve no idea today how to leverage it to be more effective, but there’s a powerful amount of brain that you get to work with for social reasoning, and finding ways of getting it to kick on seems valuable.
