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?