December Daily Journal 28

If everything goes according to plan, this time tomorrow I'll be at my girlfriend's apartment in the Twin Cities. I don't know whether I'll be posting tomorrow night or very much through the duration of my stay. We don't get to spend much time together.

December Daily Journal 24

So we finally got the Christmas tree put up today. Also attended two church services. Second one was distastefully political, so I hope my parents don't choose to go there. Hopefully Mom and Dad will lay off a bit tomorrow.

All I want to do right now is play KSP. I had a sudden bout of ideas for building a base last night just before bed.

Three Years and A Hundred Posts

It's been almost three years since I began this blog, and tonight I'm publishing this, my 100th post here. I'd hoped to do something special for this, but alas my life has not changed substantially since yesterday. I'm still at my parents' house, sleeping at strange hours and wishing I knew what the hell they had planned for the day so at least I could plan around it. As it is, I'm spending a lot of day wasting my time with online prolefeed which is meaningless, but which can be interrupted with little or no cost.

Now obviously I should be more appreciative of my loving parents and help them with their endless stream of unsolvable problems. But it doesn't work like that. And after taking Diff EQ, I know that cleaning a house definitely doesn't work like that.

So let's talk about projects. And let's talk about growing up.

Last night, I watched a video by Derek Muller talking about the concept of Self Efficacy. He does a good job explaining it and undoubtedly knows more about it than me, but basically self efficacy has to do with your belief that you can accomplish a thing. This is usually collapsed under self-esteem, but separating the two concepts gives a clearer picture of both of them.

One point that Derek makes in the video is that people frequently pursue the careers their parents or older friends pursue, not necessarily because of connections or inherent ability (though those certainly contribute), but also because they see it being done and realize that it's something which they can do, too. Theoretically physics doesn't seem impossible if your parents are theoretical physicists, genetic engineering doesn't seem impossible if your parents are bioscientists, and becoming a stage actor doesn't seem an impossible dream if your parents are on Broadway. You see people going through the various tasks of that career, doing that various things that need to be done, and earning a living.

My parents were government employees, doing the sort of boring jobs necessary to keep the federal bureaucracy running smoothly. I can only describe abstractly what my Dad does for a living. Even after her retirement, I can only gesture and point at some of the things Mom was doing at work. It's not that they're classified or anything--it's just technical paper-pushing that is meaningless without an enormous amount of background knowledge.

That's what I was raised around. The very definition of bland, stable office jobs. They're both French majors, too.

Now, I have friends who are engineering students and the like, but I have to wonder if this relative distance is a contributing factor to my past academic struggles. (I still haven't checked my grades from this semester; there's a decent chance they're still continuing.) Note that my parents were the closest people to me, intellectually, conversationally, etc until last year, and remain in the top five in most categories through today. I don't have a whole lot of role models for academic and social success in engineering that are in at all the same niche as me. I'm making this up as I go along are honestly amn't confident I can do it.

There's projects I want to pursue. I want to clean my room, permanently. I want to design an interplanetary mission in Kerbal Space Program. I want to learn some programming skills that aren't married to Matlab. I want to get good grades. I want to write quality blog posts. I want to read more books. But I'm not particularly confident in my ability to do any of them, in large part because they depend on lots of things outside my control. Specifically, I need time. And time is the one thing my parents adamantly refuse to give me.

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. We'll be trying to cram our tree into the living room and attending not one but two different church services, and I would honestly be surprised if television isn't watched. There will not be time to do my own projects, which is the actual dream I have for holidays. I spend the whole year with my time use dictated by someone else. I just want a few glorious weeks when I'm left to my own devices.

I haven't had a term off school since summer of 2013, I'll remind you. Winter break is the best thing I get. Why not let me enjoy myself for a few goddamn weeks? Why am I stuck trying and failing to recreate the Christmases of Dad's youth? It's okay to try that, I suppose, but why do I have to work so hard to recreate something I never experienced? I'd like to have Christmases of my own for a change.

There's more going on here, of course. The generational differences are quite significant. For one thing, television was the epitome of recreation when they were growing up. For me, it's not. I enjoy certain shows, but it's not a fundamentally enjoyable activity for me. I'd rather play a board game or just enjoy one another's company while doing our own things, but that's not allowed, apparently. I have to sit and watch whatever goddamn movie or show they want to force upon me, when I would rather do something other than sit uncomfortably on the couch while experiencing no agency.

Agency is the main difference here, I think. As adults with jobs and all that, my parents exercise a certain degree of agency on a daily basis. I don't exercise nearly as much because I'm either a college student, a retail drone, or a 21-year-old living with my parents. Watching television with my parents only enforces that feeling of no control. Getting upset at me when I don't want to watch reruns of a show that aired when one could count your age in a single digit does not help the matter.

Scott Alexander said, in 2008, that he didn't blame his parents for the sensation of being stifled. But I've tried to explain this to them, and they apparently don't understand or don't care, so to some extend I do blame them. I keep trying to help them hack my behavior and they keep doing things the hard way. It's doubly frustrating to know why I'm reacting a certain way, and knowing how we all could mitigate these animosities entirely if you would just fucking cooperate. But I suppose that's what they say about me, too.

This really hasn't been terribly coherent, but that's the story of this blog. As mentioned previously, starting next year I will attempt to do longer, more serious posts at another blog, located here. There's nothing there now, but future readers are welcome to peruse it. I'll keep you updated as we get closer to New Year's Eve.

I don't know if I'll be writing a post tomorrow night, but I will try.

December Daily Journal 22

Got up in the morning, found out Scott Manley added a new Realism Overhaul video without telling anyone, went over to a friend's house to play board games, went grocery shopping with my Mom, came home to overall chaos as Dad embarks on his Sisyphean project of making room for a Christmas Tree (because what are priorities?), went to an uninspired fast food dinner, came back to watch an old episode of Doctor Who and a two-hour documentary on Scientology. Not my ideal day and a lot of different things happened, though I am approaching the level of willpower and patience required to live with my parents.

Solstice and Nihilism

I fell and scraped my back today, so that's probably affecting my mood along with everything else. Additionally, telephones are the least efficient means of communication in mass use and it horrifies me that they're still considered the default.

So immediately after my fall, we piled (painfully) into the family car and drove to a different outlet of the same protestantoid church that my parents belong to for a hilariously small Solstice congregation. The service was predictably uninspired, just your usual trust-in-God stuff which I'd forgotten within five minutes of leaving because SpaceX was literally landing a rocket on its tail at that very moment.

Then we ate dinner and went home to finish watching the Childhood's End miniseries. And without giving anything away, I finished feeling an overwhelming sense of nihilism, that all of man's joy and suffering, all our trial and triumph, are so easily forgotten, so fleeting, so quick to pass into the infinite vacuum. That our existence is entirely temporary and, for centuries to come, we'll continue at the whim of probability.

A few of us are working on it. Tonight's launch and landing was a tremendous feat in our conquest of the solar system. And that accomplishment is entirely our own.

December Daily Journal 20

The day began about seven a.m., with Dad waking me up to ask if I was going to church. I told him no and was barely waking up by the time they got back.

Today we added more lights to the house, and prepared the Christmas cards. Mom made them, but we had to address the envelops, fold the letter that goes inside, and stuff them. Personally I find it a lot of work so we can tell people I barely know all about our lives. Then again, Dad doesn't use his Facebook so I suppose he has to exercise his vanity somehow.

Then we piled into the car to buy more lights at the hardware store ( w h y ), mail the cards, and use a coupon. Because that's totally how thrift works. And you wonder why our house is packed. On the plus side I got them to buy me books I wanted, which is an independent goal but if I can exploit Christmas to make it happen so be it. Knowledge is a higher value than tradition.

On the subject of values, we spent the evening watching television because of course we did. Watching television seems to be a terminal goal of Mom and Dad's, but it's not one of mine. Sitting in front of the TV is not a fundamentally enjoyable experience for me, so their constant insistence that I devote several solid hours to it every day that I'm at home is less than appreciated.

I suspect the issue here is agency. Watching television is not an agenty experience. You watch characters who aren't terribly likable make bad decisions for an hour. Then you watch the next episode. While I enjoy certain programs, the experience does not generalize for me, not the way that, say, reading does, or YouTube. In both cases, I have greater control over the subject matter (I have little say in what ends up on the perpetually-full TiVo), and at all times I have the option to stop and do something else.

At this point in my life, I have extremely little agency, considerably less than my parents. I can understand why they might enjoy watching someone else do stupid things. I, on the other hand, spend enough time struggling against other people's bad decisions which I can't control in my day to day life, without injecting it into my consciousness. If I were to make a family activity of it, board games would be a much more enjoyable option. (It also allows for conversation, which watching television does not.) But our tables are all to messy for that.

Speaking of which, I wonder if anyone ever picked up the avalanche of papers that happened during our television watching session. I already did it once today; it's someone else's turn.

December Daily Journal 19

Midnight still creeps up on me, especially since my parents would have me monopolized till nearly that hour if they had their way. I think quite a few of the problems in their lives can be attributed to an inability to say "no". "No" to new things, "no" to new obligations, "no" to new television shows. I keep telling them the problem is inputs, not outputs, but they continue to focus on trying to get rid of things while adding to the pile faster and faster.

It's annoying, to say the least. Doesn't make getting around the house any easier, either.

Speaking of the house, we put up some lights today. Fortunately it didn't take very long, but there will be more later. It's all about keeping up appearances, reality be damned. It doesn't matter what labels other people put on their map of you, because that doesn't affect the underlying reality.

I wonder what they'll get up to tomorrow.

December Daily Journal 18

Final presentation for Aerospace went pretty well. Computing final went extremely well, when compared to the midterm and most of the quizzes. I finished with a few minutes to spare, with confident answers for all the questions. We'll see if that confidence was warranted at some point down the road.

Then I came back, ate dinner, packed my things, and drove home. Then I was asked to take my parents' library books to the drop off. Then the interrogation happened, and at last I'm getting some much-needed relaxation and alone time. Tomorrow is an off day, provided parental cooperation.

My right foot hurts and I'm craving chocolate. Hopefully both will go away soon.

December Daily Journal 17

This time tomorrow I'll be home, with some chance of organizing my thoughts decently. Between now and then, I need to sleep (good luck), give my part of a presentation, and take a Computing exam. I just want to be done.

December Daily Journal 16

Did I really used to get up at 6 a.m. seven days a week? My memory says I did but it's hard to believe. When I can back from my exam this morning (which took about 45 minutes), I collapsed and slept off an on again until noon. I wasn't up late last night, either.

I did finish studying for Astronomy in the afternoon, but sorta burnt out by evening. I hope I'm ready. Once that exam is over, it's just Computing and practice for the Aerospace presentation.

Forty-eight hours from now I'll be home and away from this godawful place.

December Daily Journal 15

I actually managed to study a significant portion of the day. Not perfectly and honestly I've got to stop trying to work in my room with the noisy suitemates just across the bathroom, but using the pomodoro technique was an initial success. Now we see if it holds up.

My first final is in the morning. Be there bright and early at 7:30. However, I've done the numbers and so long as I get above 45% my grade will be a B or higher. If only my other professors had their act sufficiently together to post usable grading information. (Well, I know my grade in Computing was crap, but I'm guessing it'll be curved crap regardless.)

After the exam, I'll come back to get lunch, gather up some supplies, and head over to the library to finish prepping for Astronomy. If I have some time left over, I can do practice problems for Computing or (more likely) play a bit of KSP in the evening. Unfortunately I have to come back here for dinner. Unless by some miracle I rise early enough to catch breakfast before the exam, in which case I'll pack a dinner and have some soup when I get back before bedtime.

Winter break cannot come soon enough.

December Daily Journal 14

Nope. Not a damn thing I want to talk about right now.

Catching Up

Maintaining a regular journal during this time of year is more difficult than expected. I am slowly coming to accept that engineering students will always be fighting to balance time between end-of-semester projects and studying for their exams.

So what have I been doing during my unplanned hiatus?

Wednesday, I went to the end-of-semester party for SEDS, getting back only shortly before midnight.
Thursday, we test flew our plane.
Friday was spent writing an astronomy paper due on Thursday.
Saturday morning I finished said paper and spent the rest of the day vegging out.

And today, I attempted to make some progress on my section of the report. Assigning the avionics section to the person who knows Jack Schitt about electronics was probably a mistake, however.

Switching topics, my post-New-Year plan for this blog is slowly emerging. My intention is to resume making Sunday Night posts, for the purpose of conducting a sort of weekly review, and planning for the week to come.

December Daily Journal 8

I guess I'm doing these by date, since I missed yesterday's. That was entirely just me forgetting. I almost forgot again tonight.

Been in a bit of a procrastination rut, but I think I've hacked my way around it. I'll let you know tomorrow if that endures.

December Daily Journal 6

I once joked that the biggest enemies to my success in college are my brain, body, classmates and professors. Three years later this is still pretty much the case. My head hurt most of the day, my brain didn't want to do anything productive, it was noisy all day, and the assignments, well, they're better than what I got at Purdue but not exactly inspired.

I did manage to get some coding in, despite everything. Tomorrow will still be busy but I am making some small progress towards overcoming my learned helplessness.

Complete aside: it's interesting how the lines on my screen affect my perception of space within a webpage. I should do a post on that sometime.

December Daily Journal 5

Not a very productive day. This last week really took it out of me, so I consigned myself pretty early to relaxing. I did laundry, called my grandfather, and performed my first planetary flyby in Kerbal Space Program. That's honestly about it.

Tomorrow's agenda is to get up at a reasonable hour, work on the Computing assignment and do research for astrobiology, hopefully to the point of outlining, and start putting together some things for the aerospace report.

December Daily Journal 4

Why does midnight arrive so early every night? I almost missed it because my brain thinks it's still relatively early.

Mostly met my goals for the day, with an unexpected stint out at the design lab on west campus. Jeremy and I concluded that there's basically nothing we can do about the elevator travel on the plane, at least without risking serious damage. At this late date we're too risk adverse to try any of our ideas. Flight date is next Tuesday.

Not tired (the melatonin is working!), but over my gregarious quota for the day. Spent the better part of an hour talking to a classmate after Russian Movie Night, and I was originally planning to spend my midday break alone. Should be able to retreat to the library tomorrow--there's a lot of writing to do.

Speaking of writing, Scott Alexander is on the shortlist for an award I've never heard of. I've only read one of the other essays on the list, so I can't say for myself he deserve to win, but it's always nice to see people you like getting public recognition.

December Daily Journal 3

I have a lot of thoughts swirling around (as usual), and I'm not going to write about them (as usual). Instead, we're going to talk about what's on my mind right this second (as usual).

It's introspection, though, so that's good.

Lately I've been procrastinating a lot. This isn't all that unusual--I'm not as proactive as I'd like to be. But I've also been procrastinating things I want to do. That category included some things I should do, which only makes the situation more distressing.

I don't know what to do about this, aside from just precommitting to recreation. Which isn't the worst idea. In fact, making basic schedules might be a good plan for myself, so here's one for tomorrow.

Get up

Go to Russian Culture class

Go to Astrobiology

Gotto computing office hours

Have lunch

Screw around on the internet

Go to Computing

Play Kerbal Space Program for an hour or so

Have dinner

Go to Russian Movie Night

Come home, mess around on the Internet

I'd like to fit laundry in there, but I really do need to start going to bed at a reasonable hour, weekend or no. Speaking of which, I should really be heading that way.

December Daily Journal 2

Got more sleep but I still feel like crap. May be getting sick. We'll see.

I feel overstimulated and it's difficult to focus. This happens to be quite a bit, I now realize, usually at least every few weeks. I think cutting down on my internet media consumption would help but that's quite difficult for obvious reasons. Perhaps I should set up an extension that prevents quick page loading a la this. Normally I would suggest that's outside my range of possibilities (at present, it is), but I did finally make it back to Codecademy yesterday, so perhaps not. Wait and see.

Actually, that relates to another issue I've been thinking about. Two conflicting themes I see in the rationalist movement are constraining your anticipation (in particular taming one's optimism) and overcoming learned helplessness. It seems to me that those goals are at odds, at least partially.

Suppose I wish to accomplish a task. It doesn't really matter what, but for purposes of this example imagine one that is relatively difficult but not necessarily impossible. If I believe myself capable of completing it easily, I can become quite bogged down from my optimism. On the other hand, if I believe myself insufficiently capable of completing it--doing so would be too time consuming, painful, or challenging--then my pessimism will prevent me from finishing.

Optimism/pessimism is an oversimplistic way of looking at this situation. First, there's serious psychological phenomena causing each. Second, optimism and pessimism are usually attitudes, while here they stand as a placeholder for beliefs. The difference is significant, though one might expect optimistic attitudes to accompany overconfident beliefs, and the converse. 

I think I'm supposed to say something about calibration here. I have this post bookmarked but haven't done much with it. Maybe I'll try incorporating that into a habit-a-week project for 2016. Something else to do over winter break....--Wrong! Start making a list now, Nathaniel! brb making a google doc.

Okay, that didn't take very long. I'll add to it as ideas come along. If 52 unique ideas is too much...oh well. Something is better than nothing.

Another, related project I'd like to try at some point: quarterly life reviews. CGP Grey had some comments in one of his podcasts (I think it was the first Hello Internet of 2015, though I'll have to go back and check at some point). Perhaps even monthly reviews are in order--but that might be excessive. I'll do some more research (when, Nathaniel?) and develop an introspection routine to start in the new year. Writing in my diary daily is insufficiently rigorous (and frequently gets skipped because I'm lazy). Something done at a set time, regularly but not every day, might solve the problem. Or it might not, in which case I'll drop it.

I'm pretty sure the reason I'm thinking about these is partially because of some things Katja Grace posted the last few days, not because I'm independently self-reflective right now.

December Daily Journal 1

I had some of the worst insomnia of my life last night. Either my sensory issues are getting worse, or my sleeping problems are. Since the latter is easier to treat, I'm starting there. Tonight I'll try taking melatonin in place of my usual Tylenol PM and see how that goes.

Needless to say, it was not a very productive day.

Changes

Tomorrow is December, which means today is the last day of NaNoWriMo. Like the last time I tried this (November of 2013), I failed drastically, though this time I managed to get a few thousand words out before defaulting. Nevertheless, I chalk it up as a partial success. My time spent idly scrolling the Internet is down, though not because I particularly built discipline.

(For the most part. Kerbal Space Program takes willpower after the fifth failed attempt to get a payload into stable orbit.)

However, I can say with high confidence that next semester I will not have the free to to consider such a project. I've taken thermodynamics and statics before, and they are not easy classes. My time must be allocated to assignments, not scrolling social media.

Towards that end, I intend to break the habit over winter break. This should not be terribly difficult. I'll have but a few days before Christmas, then I'll be in Minnesota visiting my girlfriend, after which there's a two weeks before the spring semester starts. My manager has also said they'll let me work while I'm in town. So I will not be overwhelmed with free time.

Concretely, my intention is, before Christmas, to check social media in the morning and evening, but not during the bulk of the day. After that Schelling Point, I'll cut back to only evenings. (New Year would be more natural but ineffective for various reasons, not the least because it will not be a natural boundary in my life.) Once I get back to Kansas City, my focus will be on cleaning out my room and catching up on my reading. (I still haven't finished the list I made for the start of the year.)

Not all changes are deferred until after finals. Starting tomorrow, or effectively today since this is being published well before midnight, I'm going to introduce a daily post rule. This can be of any length, of any quality, on any topic. At a bare minimum, a brief recap of what transpired that day. Such a record might even make me more productive, since I'd have to explain why I got nothing done and instead scrolled Tumblr all day to you, hypothetical reader!

Finally, in 2016 I will be migrating to Wordpress. Blogspot seems to have acquired a slightly negative reputation, and sadly puns are perhaps not the best public face to put forward first. Having a a professional Wordpress is better form, and may just hold me to a higher standard for what writings I publish. This blog won't be going away, however, but I'll be converting it into a more general personal blog while intelligent, well-developed thoughts will go over there. In a way, my December post-a-day project is practice for such a functionality.

This blog will soon be about actual gripes. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

Comment on Hazlitt

I've been working my way through Henry Hazlitt's The Foundations of Morality, and this section caught my eye:

The real distinction we need to make for ethical clarity is not that between the individual and society, or even between "egoism" and "altruism," but between interests in the short run and those in the long run. This distinction is made constantly in modern economics. It is in large part the basis for the condemnation by economists of such policies as tariffs, subsidies, price-fixing, rent control, crop supports, featherbedding, deficit-financing, and inflation. Those who say mockingly that "in the long run we are all dead" are just as irresponsible as the French aristocrats whose reputed motto was Après nous le déluge. 

I hadn't even reached the latter half of the paragraph before the obvious objection occurred to me. Despite Hazlitt's claim that in the long run our interests align, the fact is that may take longer than our lifetimes to occur.

We don't exist in some sort of spherical cow universe where everyone lives forever. People die. They get old and start to fall apart. Practically speaking, if our interests don't align within the span of a few decades, then acknowledging this doesn't accomplish anything. The allowable period during which our interests must align only shrinks as we get older.

Perhaps this matters less when everyone is having children (assuming the interest of a parent and child align perfectly, which they don't). Long-term problem solving gets a higher priority when you're focused on "leaving a better future for our children" or some such drivel. But we aren't living in such a culture, so that defense is weak at best.

Dismissing those concerned about long-term coordination failures is not a terribly good sign this early in the book. So far it's been thought-provoking, but I'll have to keep reading and see if that persists.

Update 12 Nov 15: Upon finishing the chapter, Hazlitt does briefly address this issue:

In applying the Long-Run Principle, in other words, we must apply it with a certain amount of common sense. We must confine ourselves to consideration of the relevant long run, the finite and reasonably cognizable long run. This is the grain of truth in Keynes's cynical dictum that "In the long run we are all dead." That long run we may no doubt justifiably ignore. We cannot see into eternity.

Such a short paragraph doesn't do the issue justice, but we're not done with the long run:

We shall reserve until later chapters the detailed illustration and application of the Long-Run Principle. Here we are still concerned with the epistemological or theoretical foundations of ethics rather than with casuistry or detailed practical guidance. But it is now possible to take the next step from the theoretical to the practical. It is one of the most important implications of the Long-Run Principle (and one that Bentham, strangely, failed explicitly to recognize) that we must act, not by attempting separately in every case to weigh and compare the probable specific consequences of one moral decision or course of action as against another, but by acting according to some established general rule or set of rules. This is what is meant by acting according to principle. It is not the consequences (which it is impossible to know in advance) of a specific act that we have to consider, but the probable long-run consequences of following a given rule of action.

Stay tuned.

Available in hardcopy or free pdf through the Mises Institute.

The Text Of Posts Half Written

Following up the previous post, here's the contents of some drafts I'm never going to finish.

A Capitalist Considers Climate Change

As I write this, it's a warm afternoon in late October. Leaves are falling outside, and I'm wondering if I should do any homework before dinner. It seems like an idyllic day during Indian Summer--or is it something more? The scientific evidence would seem to suggest so.

The considerable resistance to this notion is, I believe, a product of how the issue is framed. Generally, those on the left will say you have two options. One the one hand you can be conservative Christian who wants to cut down the rainforest and enslave puppies, damn the consequences! On the other, you can be a progressive environmentalist who loves pansies, rainbows, and Mother Earth.

This post is not going to be a discussion of whether climate change is a real thing. No, today we're talking about how to face it.

Polarization of not-inherently-partisan matters is a feature of our political system, and the climate change debate is just another example. Either you deny global warming, or think anthropogenic climate change is the worst thing since unsliced bread. Saying otherwise invites criticism from both left and right. Being a libertarian, I'm already used to that. What's one more issue?

As with so many things, the climate change debate is a false dichotomy. Leftists believe that Gaia must be obeyed, and the right believes Terra is ours to do with as we will.

But nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Rationality and Leaving People Alone

Libertarians, and Objectivists in particular, have this supposition that if everyone behaved rationally (or their perception of "rationally;" I'm realizing more and more that rationality is a very, very complex mode of thinking) no one would violate one another's person or property. I think this is accurate, but it's not really very intuitive. Some very intelligent people, like Jerry Pournelle, are completely confused by it. Discussing his Political Axes:

On the anti-statist end of the scale we can see the same tendency: extreme anti-rationalism ends with the Bakunin type of anarchist, who blows things up and destroys for the sake of destruction; the utterly rationalist anti-statist, on the other hand, persuades himself that somehow there are natural rights which everyone ought to recognize, and if only the state would get out of the way we'd all live in harmony...

The problem, I think, is a misunderstanding about egoism. I've been meaning to rectify this for some time.

Egoism is a recognition of your nature as a self-interested being. In the context of a rationalist philosophy such as Objectivism, it also implies the fact that other individuals are self-interested, too.

Towards Single Transferable Vote

For those who don't know what Single Transferable Vote is, the YouTuber CGP Grey has an excellent series of videos about voting systems called Politics in the Animal Kingdom. I've included the video on STV at the bottom of this post.

Nearly everyone you meet says they think our elections are unfair and would like to see a third party enter the political arena. Nevertheless, Libertarians and Greens remain by the sidelines for a very simple reason: the spoiler effect. Minor parties usually attract more voters from one of the major parties than the other, leading to a win for the major party they least prefer. Consequently, disaffected citizens continue voting for one of the major parties, simply to prevent the other from gaining a majority.

How can we escape this trap? I'm glad you asked. Enter: the Single Transferable Vote.

I won't attempt explaining STV.

[There was originally a video in here]

Be sure to view the footnotes

Notes On Things Not Written

ICYMI, about a week ago I tweeted the titles of various posts that had been languishing in my drafts, with whatever summary could be crammed into the remaining characters. Surprisingly, it wasn't very hard, which suggests a lot of these ideas didn't need a full-fledged post in the first place. (My thought was to start using my public Tumblr for these, but after that last update....)

However, there's a few that had something approaching an outline, and I'd like to archive those before deleting the posts from my drafts.

Daylight Savings Decentralization

One of my last false starts on a political post before I really began doubting the truth of non-aggression libertarianism. Relevant CGP Grey video.

Twice a year, the inhabitants of a certain nations set their clocks forward or backwards an hour, with the nominal intention of extending the minutes of daylight during the summer months. 

Premise: DST not worth it
States control time zones
No state has incentive to switch stronger than incentive to stay
Failure of decentralization

Unbundling Higher Education

This post was heavily influenced by my experience at Purdue University, where "research" and "undergraduate" were rarely heard in the same sentence. Everything in undergrad was geared towards training, not stretching the frontiers of what's possible--and the occasional grad student or post-doc had been there so long that it made me want to cry.

At the same time, I was learning a great deal about entrepreneurship, thanks to my attempt to earn their certificate in that field. In fact, one of our assignments was to devise a business model for the university.

What struck me was how much interest there was in money for research despite the fact I was already paying more than I could afford, and getting nothing out of research dollars. My thought was "how can we focus on making college cheaper," not "how can we milk the government research grant machine for all it's worth."

This gave me the idea to unbundle higher education. If college is about getting a degree, it should be about getting a degree. And if it's about discovering new things, it should be about discovering new things. And since those two field didn't overlap for the student, it made no sense for then to overlap for faculty (especially in the midst of a PhD glut).

Turns out Purdue is just crap--though they might be the first school to adopt equity student finance--and most colleges do mix training with research, which can help undergrads get jobs after leaving. I'd already realized this by the time I write the actually text below, but was still hedging. I'm archiving this, in part as a reminded that colleges don't have their business model figured out at all.

In the course of my college education, I've often wondered just why people spent so much time talking about research. As far as I could see, it was a distraction from the real purpose: learning a trade. In retrospect, this is a simplistic view, particularly in my chosen field of engineering. Research, design, and development have a mutualistic symbiotic relationship. Nevertheless, I think there is a case to be made for unbundling higher education.
Our institutions of higher learning do not focus on a single core competency. That our colleges support athletic teams and offer academic degrees should be clear evidence of this. Just as no college devotes its entire athletic budget to a single sport, so too does the academic sphere split it's attentions. Though the variations are countless, the general divide (that we will consider, at least) is between research and training.
The "research university" was invented to meet two conflicting needs: to impart existing information, and to obtain new knowledge.
Introduction: where did the research university come from?

• Two conflicting needs: impart and obtain knowledge

• Manpower problem--insufficient number of people trained in technical fields

• "Solution": have researchers teach basic concepts

Why this model failed

• Research has become increasingly divorced from implementation

• Undergrads like me don't benefit from PhDs teaching introductory courses

• Students going into industry aren't properly prepared for company life

21st Century Solution: separate training and research

• Private research firms have existed for a long time: it's time for a renaissance

• Graduate schools + research institutes should be more separated from ugrad education

• We have the manpower, let's focus on core competencies

Conclusion: the future of higher education

• More technical world blurring boundaries between amateurs and professionals

• Training is more important than research for many careers

• Stop depriving both groups of their maximum capacity

Notes

• Pre-research ugrad vs training ugrad

• Professional glut

• Internet education options

• Model allows for specialization

• For-profit institutions (advantageous for researchers, who aren't relying on gov't $$$)

Frontiers and the nature of Morality

Consisted entirely of this quite by Rose Wilder Lane

“Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been to much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god—Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is.”

Typical-Minding and School Reform

[Epistemic Status: Derived from thoughts I had just after waking up. Probably incomplete and definitely lacking rigor.]

In fourth grade, after a considerable struggle, my parents managed to get me admitted to the district's gifted program. This program, like most others of its sort, was a bit of a joke. "Gifted" education consisted of taking us out of class for one day a week (they're smart, surely they can afford to miss a day of class and still do their homework!) to pursue topics of our own interest--not that we got a whole lot of flexibility in the matter. To be fair, most of the ideas I floated were terrible and demonstrated a real lack of grounding in the world, but what do you expect from the son of two Mensans dropped into the slag heap of public education? Anyway, we got most of a day off each week for "gifted" education...then half a day...than an hour each day...then an hour each day if we could find time in our schedule.

I haven't seen what special needs education looks like, but I imagine they have much the same problem. Maybe they get more attention--my impression is that most attention directed at both ends of the bell curve is focused on making sure we look and act normal, and special needs tend to be more visible than gifted. But in either case, the central notion is people should behave like everyone else, you shouldn't be different, egalitarianism.

The school district couldn't afford, politically though possibly financially, to take all the gifted kids and shove them in their own corner. That would imply they're better than everyone else, and deserve more attention. How dare you imply my Johnny isn't as important!

Similarly, there's not many options for dealing with special needs kids. There isn't enough money to give them the attention needed to sort out those with potential from the duds. You've basically got two choices: take all of them and shove them in a corner to be neglected (How dare you imply my Johnny isn't as smart as everyone else!) , or leave them in the general population, slowing everyone down.

It's not popular to say this, but people are different. Some are faster than others. Some learn in one way, some in another. Some top out in third grade and some are graduating from Harvard at the same age.

Most of them are in the middle. Our educational system functions okay for these people. But we should realize that some people are faster than others. I'd argue we should have different school tracts for the various segments of the population--three to five should do. In a sense, we already have this, through Honors/AP classes, "regular", and the more remedial courses.

Why can't we say this publicly? I've been particularly surprised by the resistance I get towards these motions, even among those who would benefit from such an arrangement. I've long wondered why.

Enter typical mind fallacy.

Many smart people naively assume that everyone else is just as smart as they are, provided you can poke and prod them the right way to make their inner intelligence show. There's some validity to this--certain people function terribly in environments that others do fine in--but some are just not as mentally capable.

At the other end of the spectrum, it's common to see assumptions that the gifted students aren't actually that much better, just catered to. I'd be just as good, they say, if only someone gave me a chance.

Typical mind fallacy is at play here. It's uncomfortable to admit that some people are just put together differently than you. It's even more difficult to admit that these people-not-like-you are still people, if history is any guide.

Telling people that they aren't like each other, and that some of them are better than others, is not really viable in a democracy. And thus we get our current school system, where only the very rich have the option of taking their children out of the cesspool of public schools and families are slaving against Moloch to live in better districts.

Maybe we should just admit that people aren't actually equal, and make an effort to live with that uncomfortable reality, instead of fighting it.

Thoughts About Libertarians

Contrary to what some parts of the internet might suggest, libertarians are actually a very diverse bunch. (We're also very good at setting up echo chambers, which is why it can be easy to think your brand of libertarianism is the only one worth mentioning.) Today I'd like to focus on one particular aspect: the epistemic beliefs that lead to their adopting the philosophy.

Before we continue, I would like to be clear that the two belief structures examined below are the not only ways that people become libertarians. I'm not even sure that they're the most common. But they are the most interesting to me right now, so here we are.

First, there are those who become libertarians because they believe it is the right ideology. By right I do not mean morally right, so much as pragmatically best. Morality is often intertwined, though, especially from a rule-utilitarian standpoint. This sort of libertarian believes capitalism is the best economic system, democracy is the best form of government yet devisedimplemented, and the Constitution works pretty well.

Second, there are those who become libertarians because they don't believe they know how to run other people's lives. They see libertarianism as the only option for not forcing a belief system on others. These sorts tend to be divided on capitalism and democracy and definitely biased toward anti-constitution anarchism.

I came to libertarianism from neoconservatism through the first camp. I was very confident in capitalism, but didn't find social conservatism (or religion in general) very appealing. Moral behavior without government enforcement was interesting but didn't seem very viable. It wasn't until discovering Objectivism that the possibility of morality in a godless universe was really presented to me in full, and thus becoming a libertarian became much easier.

Since that time, I've spent some time in that other camp, especially when those ideas are popular (for example, Gary Johnson's campaign in 2012 relied heavily on that rhetoric), though it wasn't a comfortable experience. In part, those arguments lack rigor. It's easy to say "I don't know how to run your life better than you do", but for a significant segment of the population, having someone else take over would be a vast improvement, from reduced responsibility/stress levels if nothing else.

A better argument would be to point out that, in the space of possible policies, most will do more harm than good. However, committing to the position of not-knowing is not a good move in the greater debate. Libertarians have long been able to switch between the two mindsets depending on what the conversation demanded. This is a pretty basic motte-and-bailey strategy, which the more rational subsections of the movement should attempt to avoid.

In all fairness, there's a possible middle ground between these two positions. The argument goes something like this:

The space of possible policies is incredibly huge, and it's very difficult to determine which are superior. This is true whether we're talking about macroeconomics or how to decorate your bedroom. Because this is so, we think people should be left to their own devices so that they can experiment with policies at their own discretion until they feel satisfied. However, I have opinions about what the optimal policies are.

The discerning reader will notice a problem here. Laissez-faire in the realm of personal lives is very different from laissez-faire in the realm of, say, fiscal policy. If you do a terrible job decorating your bedroom, that affects you and maybe your immediate family. If the economy crashes, that affects millions of people, sometimes quite significantly.

Good luck winning debates with that approach. To argue for hands-off economic policies, you should have evidence (or at least theory) that indicates doing so produces better outcomes. That's a bit more difficult and, I believe, the more rational thing to do.

Back to School--ish

It's a new school year! Except, well, I haven't had a term off since 2013. Summer classes have given way to something more closely resembling a proper academic load. Right now I'm signed up for Introduction to Aerospace Engineering, Computing for Engineers, Astrobiology and Russian Culture. Hopefully that'll hold, because I still haven't be formally admitted to the engineering school. I'm not buying textbooks till I find out.

Emotionally, I'm at a dead end. Getting to the fall semester was the extent of my thinking. Get through spring. Get through summer. Visit Mary in Minnesota. Start in the fall.

Now I need "goals" and "plans" again. For the time being, my plan is to go to class and stay on top of my schoolwork. I anticipate success: math and hard science classes were an academic drag, hoovering up far more time than they warranted. Now that I'm done on both counts, we can focus on what matters: spacecraft.

We're not doing that yet, but I've got Kerbal Space Program to sate me during these lower-level classes. We are building a drone this semester, which is more than Purdue can say.

Beyond that...I'm not sure. My professor for Intro to Aerospace was quite clear that he didn't believe engineering students have free time, period. Whether that's accurate is anyone's guess--but it's probably more accurate than not. All too many students come to college expecting it to be all fun and games, when really it's stress and all-nighters.

Was there really a time when I thought getting in would be the most ruthless part?

More Questions Than Answers

"More questions than answers", they say, as if that makes them sound wise. This study, or expedition, or mission raised more questions than it answered. But did it?

Twenty days ago we didn't know what Pluto looked like, let alone anything significant about its atmosphere and surface features. Today we have this:

New Horizons revealed a world we'd never truly seen before—and a world we'll never not know again. Venkatesh Rao has some thoughts on the matter, but I want to address a different problem.

New Horizons did not do a thorough survey. A great deal of Pluto was not imaged in such high resolution, and what was imaged was not truly studied at length. Already we have new questions: why is there haze in the atmosphere? What's causing those ice flows in Sputnik Planum? How about the terrain of Tombaugh Regio?

Some of these will be answered as the rest of New Horizon's flyby data is downlinked over the next several months, but some will persist for decades. It may be that New Horizons raises more questions than answers, but the statement doesn't sit well with me. Information is missing.

When one says "more questions than answers", they don't say anything about the kind of questions. Specifically, the questions that New Horizons raises are questions we never knew to ask before. Our overall picture of the universe has improved, and now we're working on the details.

I'm reminded of Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong, in which he writes:

I RECEIVED a letter the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important. In the first sentence, the writer told me he was majoring in English literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. (I sighed a bit, for I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to teach me science, but I am very aware of the vast state of my ignorance and I am prepared to learn as much as I can from anyone, so I read on.) 

It seemed that in one of my innumerable essays, I had expressed a certain gladness at living in a century in which we finally got the basis of the universe straight. 

I didn't go into detail in the matter, but what I meant was that we now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. We also know the basic rules governing the subatomic particles and their interrelationships, since these are very neatly described by the quantum theory worked out between 1900 and 1930. What's more, we have found that the galaxies and clusters of galaxies are the basic units of the physical universe, as discovered between 1920 and 1930. 

These are all twentieth-century discoveries, you see. 

The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing." the implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal. 

My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." 

The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.

Asimov is right, of course. Some ideas are less wrong than others. Saying the earth is flat is less wrong than saying it is concave, and saying it is spherical is less wrong still. In truth, we live on oblate spheroid which is biased towards the south, with a considerable number of irregularities.

But we expect short inferential differences. We expect to say either the earth is flat or the earth is round. Explaining what's meant by "oblate spheroid" is too much for Greek commoner who has only the loosest grasp on astronomy and geometry. Similarly, the modern public expects scientific questions to have simple, straightforward answers. Most outstanding questions either have not been investigated or have considerable evidence on both sides. That's a level of nuance even those members of the public interested in serious questions has to muster. When you say "more questions than answers", most listeners aren't envisioning an ever expanding and detailed worldview. They see a list of questions getting longer, faster than we cross them off.

It frustrates me when space advocates say things like this. If we want to get a follow up mission to New Horizons (principal investigator Alan Stern has some ideas), it's going to take a better approach to science communication than that. The public is interested, but that interest could easily wane over the many years before another spacecraft can be designed, approved, constructed, and launched.

I love cool toys as much as the next person, and New Horizons is absolutely delightful in that regard—but that isn't why our governments spend billions of dollars every year to fund their space agencies. We're doing it understand our universe, our world, and ourselves. Space exploration is about exploration. We need enthusiasm for learning about the cosmos as we pursue the future of human spaceflight.

Irresponsible Amateur Punditry: GE 2015 Edition

Wikimedia Commons

For those who haven't been paying attention (in other words, most of North America), the UK had their 2015 general election last night.

A quick summary: The Conservatives, formerly in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, won a full majority. Their erstwhile partners were absolutely destroyed, winning a total of just eight seats. SNP won almost every seat in Scotland, making it the third-largest party by number of MPs.

The leaders of the Liberal Democrats, Labour, and UK Independence all resigned after their parties' poor showings. David Cameron remains Prime Minister.

This isn't at all the result the polls predicted. Pollsters had the Conservatives in the lead, but not winning a majority. No one expected the Liberal Democrats to do just as badly as they did. It seemed very plausible that a progressive coalition between Labour, Lib Dems, and the SNP would form the next government.

Nate Silver and the rest will have very interesting things to say about poll bias and herding over the next few days, but I'd like to discuss something else: Duverger's Law.

The UK has long been treated as a counterexample to the rule that first-past-the-post voting tends to produce two party systems. Despite being underrepresented in MPs per votes received, the Liberal Democrats have held their place as the third-largest party, swinging elections and occasionally a coalition government. But after yesterday, they hold less than 2% of the seats in Parliament.

At first glance, it seems that SNP has just replaced the Liberal Democrats as the nation's centrist party. However, the SNP won all of its seats in Scotland--it's a strictly regional party.

In the rest of Britain, the division between Conservatives and Labour is considerably sharper. The UK is suffering from the same polarization that all first-past-the-post electorates suffer from. Votes are cast tactically, to deny the least-favored viable party the win.

To illustrate this for Americans, let's say you have a simplified ballot with the Greens, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Conservatives, and UKIP. If you lean right, you might favor UKIP over the Conservatives, but fear Labour will squeak out a win if you vote for them. You vote Conservative.

On the other side, you might favor the Greens over Labour, but fear a Conservative win if you do. You vote Labour. Moderates face a similar choice--which of the two major parties seems like the worse choice?

(It's important to remember that in many constituencies, there's really only two serious contenders. The UK is often less a three party systems and more a patchwork of interlocking two-party systems. However, the same principle applies when voters start thinking on the national scale.)

The fate of the smaller parties isn't really clear at this time. Maybe they'll rebound in time for the next general election, and we'll see another coalition government in the 2020s. Maybe they'll reform into protest vote parties, forcing Conservatives and Labour to alter their platforms or lose seats. Maybe they'll attach themselves to major parties, shifting their center of balance.

The best hope for political diversity, however, is to abolish the first-past-the-post voting system. There's a lot of different ways to go about doing this (personally I favor Singe-Transferrable Vote, but the Alternative Vote would probably be easier to implement). Regardless, I encourage you to watch C.G.P. Grey's series on the subject. I've embedded the first video below.

Disdain for Elections, or Why I'm (probably not actually) Moving to Canada

Recent post to the contrary, this is still a political blog.

We're seven months out, and I'm already getting worried about the 2016 Presidential Primaries. Specifically, the seeming inevitability of both parties nominating a terrible candidate. Right now, it looks like we'll be seeing another Bush or Clinton in office, despite the fact nobody actually wants either of them.

Obviously party nominations are Molochian process riddled by lies, misperceptions, and short-term thinking. But this is a uniquely frustrating problem for me, since I've yet to come up with a solution that's politically viable. Neither party will nominate better candidates, no one will vote for third parties, and no one will support actual voting reform. So what do we do?

I have no idea. Maybe I should just move to Canada. They seem to be stable, above us on both conservative and liberal freedom indices, and a fair bit less partisan. The big problem, of course, is that I hate the cold.

New Zealand is always a substitute.

On a Personal Note

I'm less than six weeks from finishing this semester at community college, and less than two months from returning to a conventional university. Unfortunately, my work and familial obligations are doing their best to keep me from devoting the proper effort to academics. Revealed preferences are fun.

All this has got me thinking  about conscious living, interpersonal relationships, and egoism, but conclusions are a long way off. There's a lot of other things I'd like to write about, but again, there's no time to ruminate on them properly. I'm in the process of setting up a less public blog where I can reflect on various small things without the pressure to state things completely.

For the time being, I'm not going to worry about it. If something comes up that can be written out quickly, it will be; otherwise, this blog will be in effective hiatus until June. Hopefully I can resume regular posting at that time.

Year In Space

This blog is intentionally not focused on current events, but I'm making an exception to remind everyone that the NASA/Roscosmos Year In Space mission launches tomorrow from Baikonur Cosmodrome for the International Space Station.

It's a far cry from the duration called for by most Mars mission architectures, but this is a large step forward. Astronaut Scott Kelly will set a new duration record for American astronauts, while cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko will spend more time in space than any Russian since the deorbiting of Mir. 

The third passenger on their Soyuz flight to the ISS, Gennady Padalka, has been practically forgotten by the media. Padalka will only spent the normal six months on orbit, but upon landing will emerge with the human time-in-space record.

Of course, it's not all butterflies and rainbows. Kelly and Kornienko will occupy slots that could have been assigned to other astronauts and cosmonauts, delaying when they get more flight assignments. Considering how much more science year-long missions will yield, it's entirely possible this is the new normal. However, the astronaut corps has shrunk significantly in the post-shuttle years, so I may be worrying about a non-issue.

Altogether, this is a very exciting time in our push to the planets. Let's hope for a nominal launch.

Smarter Every Day interviews Scott Kelly

Pi versus Tau: a case of nominative determinism?

Tomorrow is Pi Day, which to most people is a day to celebrate mathematics and pretend to like nerds. It seems like good, clean fun, but behind the false front, a battle rages on. Do we keep π, or abandon it in favor of τ?

For those who don't know, τ is a mathematical constant which can be approximated 6.2831853071... or precisely 2π. Many argue that τ is a more elegant and efficient way choice, and a better way to teach mathematics. But that debate is not what this post is about.

No, I want to investigate a different phenomenon: the effect one's name has on their position in the debate.

This first occurred to me when I was watching a Numberphile video on the debate. Brady Haran cleverly replaced letters from the debater's names with their respective constants. It's just two data points, but it got me thinking: do the letters in your name affect how your opinion?

Mere cleverness, or important evidence?

I wondered if this extended beyond Steve and Matt, so I started looking around. My name, in case you forgot, is Nathaniel. It has a T, like Steve, but also has an H right next to it. Where do I stand on the issue? Well, I think τ is more beautiful, but the switching costs are too high to attempt an actual change. I'd rather we just introduce the concept when teaching trigonometry.

My friends are relatively nerdy, but the sample size is too small to drawn any conclusions. I might be seeing a trend, but then again I might be fitting data to the theory. Until I see a rigorous psychology of science study on the subject, I'm putting this one down as "plausible."

No More Politics?

For some time, I've been disinterested in your everyday object-level politics. However, I've taken a sort of hiatus from even metapolitics, and it's quite pleasant. It's quite possible I'm not going to go back.

There's several reasons why this is the case. For one thing, it's draining. You argue and explain and grind away, and it never seems like you're making any progress. In the end, you're faced with a dilemma: explain the 101 material for the umpteenth time, or veer into more advanced territory that's off-putting to newcomers. A Grunted and Hinged post on beginners and burning out described this process in detail. My experiences with libertarianism/Objectivism conform pretty well to the model.

Politics is also mind-killery. I don't think I need to walk anybody through this one. We've all felt it, that frenzy when your beliefs are being attacked. We instantly lose all ability to reason, fixating on discrediting our opponent's position, no matter how eloquently the argue or how much evidence they put forward.

That sensation is a product of our ape brains, still mostly optimized for life on the savanna. To my knowledge, there isn't a direct solution for this, but there are a few hacks to avoid being in that situation to begin with. The most popular tactic is keeping your identity small--or, if you prefer more colloquial terms, "being independent." Of course, Independent and Person-With-A-Small-Identity are still identities, and people will attack you for them.

(If you're thinking "I could be independent without making that part of my identity," I'm afraid it's too late. You also just lost the game.)

Furthermore, there's usually a reason someone starts identifying with a particular ideology or movement. You don't wake up one day saying "I think I'll be a feminist!" Going back to Gruntled and Hinged:

Let’s oversimplify a bit, and presume that the only question that feminism seeks to answer is whether or not women and men are equal.  So you, New Feminist, get involved in feminism (for the purposes of this exercise, and because I’ve already slightly oversimplified, please assume you’re female). You start identifying as a feminist, and as a result start having conversations/arguments/discussions about whether or not men and women are equal.

I emphasize this point, not to comment on feminism, but because your beliefs necessarily contribute to your identity, which then contributes to your behaviors.

Take my own example. I decided I valued natural rights, the Constitution, and limited government, and consequently began thinking of myself as a libertarian. Since I was a libertarian, I began discussing libertarian ideas. Wasted countless hours on the internet arguing about politics, and wasted my vote* on Gary Johnson.

But what did all that accomplish? I stressed over things I couldn't control and didn't shift the political landscape significantly. Meanwhile, my education (both formal and informal) languished. I paid the price for that, too--itself a reason to get out.

So now, I'm realigning my identity away from politics. My beliefs have shifted** and so have my priorities. How I label myself is important, because it's a way of caching the self. What political label you use will impact the direction your beliefs update. As a libertarian, I became more anarchistic and extreme, as a radical centrist the reverse occurred.

You should also try to replace the symbol with the substance. For a long time, I called myself a nerd, because it seemed like an accurate identifier. Even if we ignore the social connotations, though, it wasn't very useful. Nerd implies a lot of things to different people. For me, however, it referred to a relatively succinct set of interests in ideaspace. Now, I'll say "I'm interested in philosophy and spaceflight" instead of introducing myself as nerd. I still am one, but a very particular type of nerd.

The same goes in politics, but that's a lumper's game. Nuance dies upon first contact with the political. If you want to talk about complex ideas intelligently, getting out of politics is the way to go.

*I don't actually consider my vote wasted, since Romney was guaranteed to win Kansas. You could argue that voting at all was a waste of time (especially since I had to do the mail-in forms), but I was 18 and really wanted to.

**More on that later.

Agnostic Lent

“Even now,” declares the Lord,
  “return to me with all your heart,
  with fasting and weeping and mourning.”
Rend your heart
  and not your garments.
--Joel 2:12-13

I am not a very religious person. This probably isn't much of a surprise to those who know me, but in case there was any doubt, there is it. Most of my spiritual life has been spent in the agnostic/deist/rationalist school of thought, thanks in no small part to my secular parents and a wide range of reading materials.

Since my grandmother died, however, Mom and Dad have started attending church again regularly. Naturally I've been towed along to a few services over the months, which for the most part haven't impressed me. Without the promise of eternal life, true altruism breaks down as a moral system.

(I may have to do a post on that sometime.)

So naturally, I wasn't expecting very much when we piled in the car for my first ever Ash Wednesday service. Lent, after all, is traditionally presented as a time of penance and self-denial. We give up something we like to grow closer to God (and each other). Not exactly an egoist nonbeliever's cup of tea.

But that wasn't the path our pastor took. Many people give things up for Lent, she said, things like junk food or alcohol or cigarettes. For the most part, they give up things they should be giving up anyway, because they're self-destroying. She asked us to abstract that into the intellectual sphere. She asked us to try--for 40 days--to give up self-destructive mindsets and behaviors, like blame, procrastination, and greed.

I disagreed on some of her particulars (thought it might've been a case of the definitions), I still think that's a very good message. Lent makes a good Schelling point for changing one's behavior. So does the New Year--yes, making resolutions does have value, if you know what you're doing, and are willing to stick with it.

I'm not giving up anything in particular this Lent, in part because I need to figure out what behaviors to modify. Thanks to our pastor, though, I have a better notion of how to approach this.

Oh, and I got one of those dorky ash crosses:

Updates

I'm way overdue to update this blog but not-finishing-drafts is a bad habit inherited from tumblr. Instead of something meaningful I'm going to do an internal affairs and links post.

Internal affairs first. After many grueling months, I finally finished Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. I didn't find it terribly rewarding, but at least I can move onto other things. I plan to start writing book reviews, but may keep those off this blog. My reading list here on out goes like this:

1. The Martian, Andy Weir
2. An Astronaut's Guide to Life On Earth, Chris Hadfield
3. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
4. The Foundations of Morality, Henry Hazlitt
5. Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking, Merrilee Salmon

That last is an optional textbook for my Logic and Critical Thinking class (the textbook titles in this subject are really uncreative). It's a rental, so that gives me a time limit, but I'm reading a lot faster now that OPAR is over.

What's concerning is how simple and straightforward the class' material is. This should be cultural common knowledge, but it isn't. I may go ahead and do a series of blog posts on basic logic topics.

However, I'm not very good at planning blog posts. Remember last fall when I was all worked up about post-scarcity, and only wrote about it twice? Possible solution: list out the topics in advance, with deadlines. Might be effective, might just clutter up the blog even more.

On the subject of clutter, I've got too many bookmarks, which perhaps I'll start archiving here. Alright, enough whining. Time for the links!

One of my friends made a post on status systems in social justice, which goes a long way toward dissecting the Oppression Olympics. And it reminded me I never update my blog.

I read a kinda old article last week on the topic of left versus right libertarians. Once again, it seems I don't fall into any particular political category comfortably. Maybe "radical libertarian centrist" would do? But I also read Paul Graham's essay Keep Your Identity Small, so slapping labels on everything doesn't seem like a good idea.

(I found that through LessWrong's Rationality Materials page. Lots of interesting stuff, but overwhelming when you get started. Someone should write it up in book form someday.)

The Allusionist Podcast discusses what it means to go viral, why podcasts don't, and confirms my disgust for Buzzfeed. Related: Wired Magazine interview Roman Mars.

On a more technological note, the Lunar Escape System was a contingency vehicle for the proposed long-duration Apollo missions. In the event the Lunar Ascent Stage failed, astronauts could essentially climb into a rocket-propelled chair and rendezvous with the Command Module. Somehow, I'm glad these never flew.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Astronomy Department has a number of online astronomy tools, for those who want a better intuition of star and planet motions.

That about does it for now. I'll plan on making a links post on a monthly basis from here on out.

Failure in the New Year

We're a month into the New Year, and I'm already falling down on my resolutions. Not that I had anything formal, but I was hoping to finally meet my one-post-per-week goal and start flossing regularly. I have been successful at brushing my teeth left-handed.

It's interesting: I had a giant post planned about How to Make 2015 better. It won't be published, though its content will probably slip out elsewhere. I missed a major point, though: conceptualization. I'll be doing a proper post on it soon (maybe), but the problem we have is that we don't adequately conceive, plan, and execute our goals.

Resolutions fail because we use them to wrap up self-improvement in glittering generalities. Success requires concrete percepts and a clear vision forward, covering all the necessary points. That's hard, so most people don't bother. Who cares about making progress when you can feel good?

I do.

Stuff for the Mars Colony

It's not difficult to find conventions and cultural artifacts that really aren't very good. For instance, the customary system of measurements, or telling time on a 24 hour clock. It's relatively easy to develop solutions, but getting them implemented is always a struggle.

The problem gets even worse when you spend time talking about big ideas with smart people. Over the last several months, my friends and I have identified quite a few examples. I've been keeping track of them as "Stuff for the Mars Colony." Here's what we have so far

• Time Scales
• Electrons are positive
• Base-12 system
• Better way to measure acidity/baseness
• Logical engineered languages
• Reasonable sleep schedule
• Standardized education terminology

I'll be doing posts about some of these over the next few weeks. The discerning reader will notice almost all of these are examples of coordination problems--a running theme we'll be exploring.