MidAmeriCon Notes, Day 1

Please understand that my memory is not perfect, and that my summaries may misstate or misconstrue the views of the speakers. These should also not be taken as complete synopses of the talks given. I take notes mainly for my own use, and what is included reflects this fact. You can find a full listing of programming here.

The first panel I attended was on Kansas City's Favorite Son: Robert A. Heinlein, featuring Dr. Bradford Lyau and Jo Walton. As a native of the KC area, Heinlein was a guest of honor at the first MidAmeriCon forty years ago. Midwest upbringing undoubtedly influenced his writing. The other two members of the Big Three were from New York (Asimov) and Europe (Clarke), and each represented a different sort of mindset.

A great deal of Heinlein's work deals with a dynamic between a romanticization of his Midwest upbringing, and his desire to escape the false assumptions that pervaded it.  For example, he claims he lost any lingering religion after reading Charles Darwin (he was raised in the Methodist Episcopal Church, an abolishionist offshoot that split before the Civil War). There was both a desire for sophistication, and a feeling of pride for the place he came from.

One consequence of this upbringing was valuing honor and nobility, in a way that many of us today don't entirely comprehend. Heinlein cared about conduct. Walton argues that part of his rhetorical skill comes from appealing to the reader's desire for self-excellence, to be one of the elite. Much of his contribution to science fiction as a movement comes from trying to make writers and fans see their role in history, and act accordingly.

Two of his lifelong influences were Mark Twain and H.G. Wells, who contrasted country cynicism with a utopian optimism about the future. One peculiar instance of the latter was his belief that he'd outlive communism. He nearly made it--the Berlin Wall fell less than two years after his death in 1988.

After that came Earth, We're Stuck Here! This panel explored the challenges of deep space exploration and trying to live on other planets. There was a lot of tension between panelists on the role the government had to play--some argued that it was nothing but a hindrance, others believed NASA is doing the best they can given the challenges. One of the major issues is radiation dosage. We're safe under Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field, but in interplanetary space astronauts will be exposed to both higher cosmic background and occasional solar flares. It's currently estimated that a year in LEO adds 3% lifetime cancer risk (with a base rate around 15%). A 1000 day mission in deep space is estimated at 1 Sievert radiation dose, compared to 150 milliSeiverts for a year on the ISS. So a standard mission to Mars is approximately twice as much radiation as the equivalent time on the space station.

Reduced launch costs could help, though I think a 100x reduction by 2030 is a bit too optimistic. One aspect is marginal cost--a good chunk of the shuttle's enormous pricetag was overhead. Adding another mission to the schedule didn't cost a full $1.5 billion. This means that a successful strategy for reducing launch costs may be cultivating high-volume markets. Unfortunately, there aren't a whole lot of new missions in the pipeline, in no small part because NASA is always in a precarious funding situation. Solving that would go a long way toward making the Space Launch System a winning proposition.

Moreover, we don't really know how to operate above LEO. Again, making space access cheaper would do a lot of allow for more experimental missions, but that's a long way out. We may want to take a more cautious approach--going back to Luna, establishing a base, and so on. Understanding the role of microgravity is important. How much is enough? It looks like any is better than none, but is 1/3 adequate? 1/4? 1/6?

My next panel was back to the fiction world, where the biggest conflict was whether War and Peace is a good book. It was on writing, specifically, Writing Major Minor Characters. This is the art of getting the most out of small details--getting enough characterization without going through the whole process of "rounding out" a character. One panelist mentioned that giving a single detail not relevant to the plot is all it takes in short stories (more is necessary in novels, if that's what you're trying to accomplish).

It's important to realize that is minor characters don't contribute to the plot, then you should be asking yourself why they're there at all. The amount of attention and space given to a character should be proportional to their contribution. Does a given scene advance the story? Does a particular person need details given? According to the panelists, a significant skill for writers is realizing when you've written unnecessary material that needs to be taken out.

Sometimes that material can be reworked or added into later drafts. One valuable tactic is uniting throwaway characters into a single, significant castmember. Other times you'll end up with a major character in disguise--someone who doesn't seem important for most of the book but ends up mattering at the climax.

Realize that realistic characters don't need to be well-developed. Connie Willis told a story about a stereotypically slow and annoying person in front of her at the pharmacy. We've all encountered such people, and hated in them for that moment, even though they probably have a long story and rich inner life. The same is true for minor characters. We can recognize such characters, and our minds fill in the rest. Writers can easily let their readers fill in the details so long as they've been pointed in the right direction.

The Opening Ceremonies where a bit underwhelming. It felt a bit disorganized to me, and the audio hookup wasn't that great. I probably should have gone to a talk instead.

The final event of my evening was 1950s Science Fiction Movies, discussing the great and terrible films made in that era. I didn't take very many notes because the lights were off most of the time so we could see the host's slideshow, a couple points stood out. First was the different gender dynamics in various movies. Some still look egalitarian today, while others were already starting to look backwards then. Particularly focus on the conduct of scientists in such films, and importance of script/dialog in an era when special effects couldn't carry a film.

Viewing recommendations include Them!, The 27th Day, and the European cut of First Spaceship on Venus.

The past and future of transportation, side by side.

That's it for day one. Check back tomorrow for the next round of updates!

Links for August

UFOlogy gets serious.

Virginia Postrel argues that donating used eyeglasses is extremely ineffective. Nice to see more effective charity discussion among libertarian types. Speaking of, Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson isn't ruling out basic income. Reminder that GiveDirectly is testing guaranteed basic income in Kenya.

Ned Resnikoff argues against sentimental democracy. Also see this article on the failure of redemptive constitutionalism in The Atlantic.

An interesting hypothesis of governance from Peter Thiel.

Marginal Revolution on the rapid loss of ideological diversity among university faculty. Maybe the Koch brothers recent decision to drop national politics for campus/thinktank activism will mitigage this trend.

KIC 8462852  is still doing weird shit.

Finally, I'll be attending the World Science Fiction Convention for the next few days. I'll be posting throughout the day on Twitter and writing up summaries here each night. If I get inspired, maybe I'll resurrect my writing blog in the fall semester.

Willpower Sinks

In May I mentioned "general willpower sinks", which I've been meaning to talk about since I noticed the phenomena this spring. That never materialized, because I'm bad at working on projects that aren't right in front of me. Maybe I should draft my blogposts in txt files on my desktop.

Anyway, the alternative is cleaning my room, so let's talk about them now.

What I mean by this term are things which require significant willpower to accomplish during the course of the day, yet which do not contribute in any way toward my goals. These things need to be done, but only in a jumping-through-hoops sort of way. The most obvious example I can give you is climbing up the hill to go to class, because somebody thought putting a university on top of a small mountain and the housing at the foot was a sensible and intelligent plan.

Getting to class facilitates my success. Climbing up a hill does not. Insofar as I have to put up with it, it's a willpower sink. I dump willpower into it, and don't really get anything back out.

Maybe it's just my perennial cynicism, but adult life looks increasingly like a collection of willpower sinks which could be avoided if people just agreed to do away with them. Climbing the hill seems this way, to an extent. We could level Mount Oread and rebuild KU at a more sensible elevation, but that's unfeasible for multiple reasons. Only a few of them are very good.

Someone (probably my mother) is going to tell me that doing things we don't like is just a part of life. That's my whole point here! We have to do tons of things we don't enjoy to achieve our desires. My response to this reality is to not waste willpower on unnecessary things, because willpower is scarce and human happiness is scarcer.

The best argument I can generate in the defense of willpower sinks is that they help build discipline in the face of adversity. In an idealized case, that would be valid. In the real world, I'm 22 and literally complaining about walking uphill (both ways!) to school. Character-building experiences are not evenly distributed, and I can only see this problem getting worse as the 21st Century continues.

For the solution, I invoke Weird Sun Twitter:

Game theory is asleep, cooperate for no reason

— Deity Of Religion (@DeityOfReligion) October 7, 2015

Picoprocrastination

In my post on hyperbolic discounting in May, I wrote about the akratic habits of university students and the consequences these bring. Specifically:

Compare [the quoted Less Wrong post] to a college student's tendency to procrastinate, rush assignments, not study, and consequently get lower grades than they would otherwise. I'm looking at you, 2013!Nathaniel. 

Actually, I still have this problem (though to a much lesser extent), which is why I'm writing this post when I have two final exams in the next 48 hours. While I dislike the university alarmism, the grades (and more importantly, habits) one obtains during their tertiary education has a tremendous impact on the trajectory of their life. Yet extremely little attention is given to the innate psychology of human beings which makes us act against our own long-term interests.

This doesn't actually do a good job communicating the problem I'm having. Discussing procrastination in terms of the consequences is usually a mistake. Looking at the causes is better. But I want to talk about the methods.

A problem that I've had trouble expressing to family and friends educated before the social media age is the dramatic change in how students my age procrastinate. It's not a conscious decision to not study. It's idly clicking "new tab", typing a few characters, and there you are. It's not putting on your coat and going to the bar, it's not deciding to read a book, it's not even sharpening a pencil and throwing it at the dart board. It's a near-reflexive reaction to the slightest bit of boredom or adversity.

More importantly, it's almost never something which will trigger a serious future-value calculation unless you're so conditioned. Even if it does, there's a lot of ways that can go wrong.

Social media taps right into our dopamine centers, giving us inconstant rewards for checking if there's fresh juicy posts in our newsfeeds. This can be useful, if practiced intelligently. The Pomodoro Technique is one such strategy. It can also be damaging, but that's not really the point of this post.

No, my point is that these things largely are not conscious decision on the part of interested actors, and trying to deal with them as such will be under-effective at best. If you or someone you know is struggling with picoprocrastination, you have to kick yourselves up into far mode and thing about it dispassionately. Be prepared to accept conclusions ranging from delete-twitter-right-this-instant to everything-is-okay-carry-on. This last bit is probably the most difficult, because we've usually made up our minds long before the debate begins.


This post didn't quite go as expected. At least that means more thoughts to get out later.

Pacing

When I'm making plans, it's very easy for me to get overwhelmed by my current mental or physical state. This is especially a problem when I'm deciding how to allocate my time after class, because how I feel right after lecture is very different from how I feel an hour later.

If I'm aware of this, though, it's easier to manage time efficiently, because I can pace my activities based on how I'll feel while doing them, rather than how I feel when I'm making the plan. There's a degree of uncertainty, but trying to predict my mood later is a better heuristic than assuming my current mood is eternal.

Links for July

I'm going to try something new here: monthly link posts to archive things that I don't have anywhere else to post. To be clear, this is far from a comprehensive list, though in the future there will probably be more.

FiveThirtyEight releases their 2016 General Election Forecast.

Scott Alexander and ensuing discussion of poverty.

Washington Post: "Our friends are as similar to us genetically as you’d expect fourth cousins to be."

Libertarianism as Ten Questions Rather Than Ten Answers.

Bryan Caplan on his love for education, which closely mirrors my position on general education requirements.

Brookings Institution: Four questions to ask before breaking up the banks.

Horseshoe Theory in action: very similar articles from Vanity Fair and The Future Primaeval on community and social support networks.

My review of Henry Hazlitt's The Foundations of Morality, and my post on Asteroid Day.

Feeling Good

I would post pictures of the sunset I saw, but I was driving at the time and thus was not recommendable on multiple accounts.

My parents are in San Diego for Mensa's Annual Gathering, which meant I had the house to myself for the weekend. I didn't do a whole lot, beyond homework, messing around on the internet, and reading. I've finishing Part I of my Atlas Shrugged reread and at this point it's given me about 20% of the feels. I'd forgotten how engaging the book is. To be clear, Rand's style isn't for everyone, but it's like catnip for me.

This is the last week of Fluid Mechanics. I can hardly believe the class is nearly over (two exams this week, so we won't be getting the full class time). The next week aerodynamics starts with the same professor in the same room, so it's not like it's over over, but still the summer is flying by.

Independence Day is next Monday. For the first time since 2012 my parents will be home to celebrate it with me. I'm very happy about this development--usually July 4th is lonely and depressing for me.

Missed my Sunday night post yesterday, on account of spending the weekend at home. My productivity has taken a huge hit, not the mention the easy points lost on the Fluid Mechanics exam today.

I would go into detail about the reasons spending time with my parents is detrimental to my grades, but they don't read this blog, which is actually kinda ironic considering that they're on the pro- side when it comes to parental snooping. Talk about not picking the low-hanging fruit.

Then again, my posting is so inconsistent maybe Mom just forgets about this blog for long periods at a time. Dad doesn't have a whole lot of time to look. It depends on how you choose to structure your free time. We have some substantial differences, but it won't profit me to get into them here.

Suffice to say that I'm not feeling up to the continuous stream of homework, which doesn't take a break just because I made a questionable decision. My plan is to turn in early and hope that when I wake up tomorrow I'm feeling less .... is there a word for this sensation? Probably. It'd be nice to know it right now.

On the bright side, I think I'm going to begin my reread of Atlas Shrugged before turning in. I haven't read a significant portion since high school (if memory serves), so it'll be interesting to see how I react to it after the last few years.

I should start exercising again while I'm at it.

Inconsistency Is Not Conspiracy

A thing I see a lot--from people of all political stripes--is a tendency to frame inconsistencies in the criminal justice system as a conspiracy of some sort. Now sometimes these sorts of criticisms are valid: for example, if two people get radically different sentences for similar crimes, that is indeed a bit questionable. I'd urge you to avoid generalizing from one example and instead look at it statistically*, but that's not categorically wrong.

What does bother me is when people compare the sentences for unrelated crimes and conclude that there's some sort of conspiracy to hurt people or let others off easy. (You see this all the time in the context of social justice issues.) But that makes the very, very foolish assumption that our laws are consistent and well-thought-out. Humans don't think consistently. We're really really bad at coming up with values ex nihilo. If politicians were comparing crimes side by side then we could reasonably expect consistent sentences, but they almost always aren't. Even when a bill considers different crimes, the length may be prohibitive.

This is before we realize that a significant fraction of criminal legislation is symbolic, not designed with the idea that people will be imprisoned or killed for breaking it. Politicians aren't trying to craft an elegant and consistent legal code. They're trying to kiss and cover enough ass to avoid getting primaried and then beat the other guy come November. This is one of the downsides of representative democracy that no one has yet been able to patch. If you have some ideas beyond "term limits", I'm all ears.

Look, politicians are not optimizing for legislative coherency. Ron Paul got painted as a radical in large part for voting consistent. Judges nominally are trying to do that, but they're both handicapped by mandatory minimum sentences and failures of human psychology (see Thinking Fast and Slow for some horrifying research on how lunch breaks affect judges' leniency in granting parole).

I wish I knew what to do about this, but I don't. All I know is that ignoring the real problem isn't going to help the situation.

*Both of those are Scott Alexander articles, so let me just throw a third one at you where he does just that when looking at race and the criminal justice system.

Back at it again

I guess we're gonna try the Sunday Night post thing again.

I've moved into my apartment and summer classes have begun. It doesn't feel like it's only been one week. I've done a pretty decent job studying and paying attention in class, though my feedback via assignments has a pretty low sample size. There's at least another week before any exams, so I'll have a change to adjust upwards if necessary.

Speaking of exams, I did quite well on my spring finals. My GPA technically went down, but I'm happy with a solid slate of B's in engineering classes. Hopefully I'll be able to keep this up through the end of the year.

My concern is avoiding burnout. That sorta happened to me in thermodynamics before spring break, and in regular dynamics in April. I can't say for certain that those spells pulled me down letter grades, but they might have. I'm not entirely sure how to avoid this, beyond building in adequate recreation time and avoiding the aforementioned willpower sinks (I promise I'll get around to writing a post on them eventually).

In the meantime though, I should probably get some sleep.