Objectives for Q4

As we head into the last three months of 2018, I want to lay out my broad-strokes goals to concentrate upon for the remainder of the year. These aren't targets to hit, exactly, so much as areas in which to focus my efforts.

This is partially motivated by the fact that my output during the third quarter, despite being better than the first part of the summer, still leaves me feeling unsatisfied. Generally speaking, I've found over the years that living with my parents seriously impedes my productivity. There are a lot of potential explanations for this, which I've explored before at-length. We won't be rehashing those in detail today; suffice to say that certain individuals in my family wouldn't recognize priorities if an ordered list knocked on the front door. It seems that I'm constantly pulled between contradicting goals, with insufficient time to manage any of them adequately.

I suspect, however, that a big part of the problem is switching costs. These are really easy to underestimate if one isn't used to thinking in those terms, but are almost always non-trivial. My new strategy in Q4 is to break down my days of the week by objective, and, hopefully, focus on those objectives each day. This is, to some extent, a self-signalling strategy. By committing a certain amount of time to each major activity area, the emotional parts of my brain will better trust me to work on the various projects that it wants to see completed.

Note, however, that this takes some time to go into effect. I'll probably have to put my foot down on some of these issues, because, again, I'm the only person in this household not completely drowned in planning fallacy.

There are two major objectives for the rest of the year, both of which have some supporting objectives. The first is finding employment (or, alternatively, committing to grad school). The second is finishing the interminable project. Let's look at each of these, and their supporting objectives, in turn.

The single biggest change I'm implementing are Application Mondays. From here on out, the primary goal for every Monday is working on job applications. I don't necessarily have to submit them on Monday, but I would like to make progress. I've held off on a number of openings because I felt the need to really concentrate on them, but no opportunity to do so has ever materialized. Instead of waiting for the improbable, I'm designating an entire weekday to the job search.

There are two weekdays set aside for personal tasks and household chores, during which I may also work on applications. I do not expect to make much progress during the other four days of each week.

Supporting my efforts in that regard, I will be continuing and, hopefully, expanding my program of self-education. I've been reading John Anderson's Introduction to Flight to shore up my foundations in aerospace engineering, and to maintain something of my edge. Unfortunately, this has taken longer than expected. I would like to finish it before the end of the year, and move on to a more interesting book.

Studying engineering materials will remain on the agenda every day of the week, though it will remain a relatively small item (less than an hour each day). This does not mean just reading textbooks, but also working though the maze of technical papers that I've accumulated on my desktop. Several of these are several hundred pages long, so getting them read and filed away before the end of the year may be a real feat.

I would also like to practice my programming skills again, as well as expanding into a few new languages. That is a secondary objective, however.

The other major change which I am instituting is again a matter of compartmentalization. I am reducing the number of days each week which I'm spending on the house. By planning around this fact, however, I hope to dedicate more hours in total to the project. I will be spending two weekdays on whatever tasks I can complete individually. Weekends, if the past several months are any indicator, will be spent on tasks requiring two or more individuals.

This should enable us to finish the project in relatively short order. I'm hoping that the house will be on the market by the end of the month.

Indeed, I would like to have things finished well in advance of November, because I'd really like to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. I have some ideas which would be interesting to attempt, but I need a larger segment of unstructured time than is currently available for that to be practical. I will decide on a particular option closer to November 1 if participation is looking viable.

There are also a number of blog posts I've been meaning to write for some time. My hope is that this new schedule will also better serve my ambitions in that department. I don't think my prediction of two posts per month will end up being accurate, but I can probably manage four or five before the end of the year.

My final motivating for finishing the move in short order is that, should employment not be forthcoming, I need to start the process of applying to graduate school. That will require a good deal more money, which will not be available until the house is sold. I would like to have had that process started by mid-November if nothing turns up in the meantime.

I will attempt to keep the hypothetical reader apprised of my progress along these objectives.

August/September Links

Ocean floor mining may finally happen, though plenty of people are having their usual reaction to any suggestion that technological civilization might need natural resources to continue operation.

Scott Alexander: The Tails Coming Apart As Metaphor For Life. I'm not sure how to describe this, but definitely recommend reading it.

Mental health research: treating the prodrome.

New from LessWrong: Strategies for Personal Growth. Old from LessWrong: Reason as a memetic immune disorder.

Arguably related: Duncan Sabien on the representativeness heuristic and Bryan Caplan discussing understated cultural differences.

Russia plans to stop transporting US astronauts starting early next year. Given the recent Soyuz leak, that might not be the worst thing, but it's unclear whether commercial crew capsules will be flying by that date.

American Enterprise Institute reports that the middle class is shrinking, but because household inflation-adjusted income is rising. Their data suggests that the number of households making less than $35,000 has also been falling over the last fifty years.

On the subject of increasing your income: here's the College Info Geek podcast on how to start investing, even in debt.

Writing: Always Harder Than I Think It Will Be

I'd hoped to write a proper post for my longform blog about Atlas Shrugged day, but it's not really coming together adequately. I'm not ruling out making that post at some point in the future, but it's not going to happen today.

The post I want(ed) to write is an explanation that Atlas Shrugged is not a conservative novel. It's not even really a libertarian novel, either, but that's besides the point. Actually, it's not. Not entirely. The problem I'm running up against is explaining complex philosophical distinctions in language which I can expect my non-philosophical friends and family to understand. I could launch into a rundown of the different epistemological and ethical schools of thought underpinning Objectivism and the various strains of conservatism in post-war America, but that's not really the sort of thing that will fit in a medium-length blog post.

Or at least, not at my current writing level. I need a lot more practice (and more feedback) before I'll feel comfortable making that sort of attempt on such short-order. I would have liked to have written that post over the course of several days, but the circumstances this week did not really permit it.

Complicating the matter for me personally, today marks two years since my parents announced their decision to join America in throwing all caution and sanity to the wind. Because that decision dramatically affected my last two years of schooling, and because the incident which prompted the blog post's original idea also happened at school, it's all quite tied together in my brain. I'm not sure I'll be able to unwrap it all until I'm less tired, and I'm not sure if that will really happen until I get a job or finish that interminable project.

Hence, an underlying theme of my writing attempts over the past eighteen months or so has been trying in vain to communicate the concept of a self-interest beyond immediate vanity and status-seeking. This concept is entirely absent from the conservative (and liberal) vocabulary—Protestant work ethic was born of contradiction—and my efforts to introduce a more consistent alternative have not gone over particularly well.

There's really no reason to expect a blog post explaining that a book where the protagonists have a lot of extra-marital sex and practice extreme civil disobedience maybe isn't the most conservative thing would go over any better.

Questioning Marginal Actions in Context

I've been on Goodreads for nearly three years, and for most of that time I've been very diligent about registering the precise edition of the books I'm reading and closely tracking which page I'm on. This has seemed like that natural way to use the platform—I've found it genuinely strange that some of my friends use the default edition of every book and never update their progress within them.

Recently, however, I decided to stop tracking my internal progress. There were a few reasons for this decision. Partly, my desire for legibility is probably in the 99th percentile of Goodreads users, and so the tools aren't really there for progress tracking at the level of fidelity I prefer. Many books are missing editions, and there's huge inconsistencies between publishers on how to assign and measure page numbers. At a certain point, it's easier to chose the closest available edition and stop worrying about whether I should use the textual or PDF page number.¹

The other reason is inconvenience. Logging my current page after reading is trivially easy in itself, presuming a good network connection. Once I'm done, though, I'm using my phone. I've found that this dramatically increases the likelihood of distracted Internet browsing, especially when I'm reading before bed. In practice, this negates much of the benefit from reading at night, and frequently cuts into my designated sleeping time. This is naturally sub-optimal, and an easily avoidable cost.

For the time being, I'm going to continue tracking my progress in academic books.² Everything else, though, gets simple updates. I'll even wait till the next morning if I finish a book before bed—Goodreads' expectation that I'll want to rate and review the book immediately after shelving it as "Read" is honestly quite annoying and probably reduces my likelihood of reviewing it in a timely fashion (it's now an additional task instead of a single, larger task).

Considered by itself, the cost of logging my reading progress is totally worth the value it provides in satisfying my desire for legibility. When I consider it in the greater context of daily routine, I find that that benefit is not worth the additional costs in the form of sleep-schedule disruption and additional mental load.

I'm toying with another decision in this same vein, which is the actual reason for writing this post. Since an unpleasant exam experience a few years ago, I've been using Khan Academy to review basic math and science material for the purpose of maintaining my scholastic edge. This probably helped me during the last two years of my undergraduate career.

Now that I've graduated it's more of a hindrance than a help. Not because taking a few minutes to review basic material is not worth it, but because it necessitates certain changes to how I go about my day. In particular, one of my favorite features of Khan Academy is the daily streak counter.³ However, logging in every day means booting up my computer every morning, because I'm quite likely to forget if I don't do it in the morning. This isn't a huge burden in itself, but has a history of diverting me from whatever tasks I need to be doing because now I'm on the Internet.

To be clear, listening to Sal explain multivariable calculus or the history of the universe over breakfast is not a bad thing in itself. But that time would be just as educational reading a book, which would probably better serve my long-term goals. For a period shortly after I resumed using Khan Academy, I did read at breakfast most weekend mornings, and did Khan Academy in the afternoon.

For the time being, I plan to continue using Khan Academy, but I'll probably make the shift once I'm living in a space of my own. The current set-up of my parents' household makes it much more valuable to break my fast in isolation than it was in my apartment (cf. shifting registers). I also lost my last streak on graduation day, so maintaining the streak is an easy way to track how long I've been unemployed. Once that's changed, however, such a measure won't really be necessary.

Hopefully these two examples illustrate my broader point about marginal actions—namely, that things which are good in themselves may be outweighed by the costs of integrating them into one's life. I think that many people could be a lot happier if they tried to predict such consequences before agreeing to new hobbies and obligations. With a little practice and self-honestly, it's not that hard to see the downsides in advance.

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¹Physical books are more difficult than PDF ebooks, which are more difficult than Kindle ebooks. (Kindle will give you a percentage estimate, avoiding the page number problem entirely.) With physical books, front matter may also be included in the page count. Given that that's one of the indicators I use to determine which edition I'm reading, it can get quite confusing. (No, I don't go so far as counting the actual pages. I make an educated guess and get on with reading.)

²That said, I make relatively small progress compared to the book length on a typical day, and so it might be awhile before I finish Introduction to Flight. I might decide against tracking whichever book I choose to read next.

³This was also one of the reasons why visiting my parents during school was dangerous—the disruption to my routine made me lose some very long streaks.

July Links

The big news a month ago was Justice Anthony Kennedy stepping down from the Supreme Court, which led to a big discussion of what the Court will look like without its moderate tie-breaker. Reason Magazine countered that Gorsuch was more liberal than Kennedy last year. 538 can't even agree with itself about Kennedy's politics and how the President's nominee would change the Court.

The hunt for Planet Nine turned up results closer to home with the discovery of twelve new Jovian moons. This brings the total count to 79.

India tests a crew capsule abort system. Their human space program is a long way from orbital test flights, but it's reassuring to see another nation taking steps to join that exclusive club. Scott Manley discusses the test and its context.

The UK, meanwhile, is finally planned to resume launching from their own territory with a new spaceport in Scotland. The United States is also inching closer to launching crews from American soil, with the first commercial crew assignments to be announced next week.

Underreported old news: improved planetary science models explain the asymmetrical Martian magnetic field.

Scott Alexander reviews the latest attempt to resolve the Fermi Paradox. This argument is strongly early-Filter, i.e. intelligent life is extremely rare. I don't have the statistical background to comment on their reasoning, but research to pin down the base numbers continues. For instance, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is warming up before it takes over the search from Kepler.

Alyssa Vance discusses the doublethink of "meritocracy". Simply put, institutions like to play favorites while also maintaining that their scions are selected on objective merits. You obviously can't have it both ways, but realizing that this is what most people think constitutes meritocracy explains their previously-unfathomable opposition to it.

For a more extreme example of institutional failure, here's a first-hand account of cult-level abuse arising inside a college department. It's a painful read, but ultimately not very surprising given that the school provided all the risk-factors by conscious decision.

Liberal Currents tackles the claim that racism arose from the Enlightenment.

May/June Links

Recent analysis of Magellan data suggests that Venus may have plate tectonics unlike those observed on Terra and Mars. This intermediate form may be a product of Venus' unusual atmosphere-interior combination, which makes the crust a lot more fluid than on other terrestrial planets.

After 46 years out-of-print, new copies of John D. Clark's rocketry history Ignition! are finally available. Get your copy from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or directly from Rutgers University Press.

Scott Alexander and his readers discuss basic income versus basic jobs.

Here's an interesting optical illusion: the Troxler effect. Stare at this fuzzy image long enough, and your eyes or brain will edit out the entire thing. Wikipedia says that the cause is still uncertain.

Does studying ethics increase ethical behavior? There's not enough research to tell for sure, but initial results aren't exactly promising. Depending on what future studies find, this may help open up some space in undergraduate curricula.

Speaking of opening up space, Falcon 9 fairing recovery is coming along.

NASA extends the Juno mission to 2021. The spacecraft was supposed to enter the Jovian atmosphere later this year, but that timeline was based on a 14-day orbital period. Propulsion system issues in 2016 precluded this, however, and Juno remains on its initial 53-day orbit. This extension will allow scientists to complete their observational plan.

How to talk like Mr. Rogers.

Charles Stross explains why books are the length they are. Unsurprisingly, the answer has more to do with technology and economics than literary tastes and artistic merits.

Supreme Court rules that cell phone location data requires a warrant under the Fourth Amendment.

Political Endorsements: What Gives?

I understand the overall concept of political endorsements—one states their opinion on who would make the best candidate for a particular office. This makes perfect sense.

During the 2016 Presidential primaries, however, I noticed something odd: all the discussions of the endorsement primary assumed that each endorser would endorse one, and only one, candidate. This seemed a bit weird because there were really three races going on (for the nomination of each major party¹). Once the nominations are in, it makes sense to endorse one of them, but until then it make ssense to endorse a candidate for each nomination.

Look at it this way: I would rather have the best possible candidate from each party in the final race.² Elections would be a lot less stressful if I liked all the candidates, and had to choose the best rather than the least-terrible. Party officials should like this, because tempting swing voters and moderate members of the other Parties would improve their odds of winning.

Endorsing a candidate for each nomination is a potential way of communicating this information. It's gameable, certainly, but also improves the odds of the final office-holder representing the wider values of their constituents. Letting the opposition parties know which of their candidates you prefer seems like a net-beneficial disclosure.

Maybe this is my idiosyncrasy as an independent showing, though. I'm no longer a committed partisan and vote for candidates that can be expected to reliably represent my values in office, regardless of the letters after their names. Party officials aren't generally receptive to their elected members deciding for themselves—they'd rather everyone vote with the Party line than entertain the possibility of internal dissent. This is the biggest issue with the idea, I suspect. No one in the major parties would like to give up a seat to a candidate outside their organization, even a sympathetic one.

Remind me why we tolerate whips, again?

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¹The Green Party's primaries weren't even remotely competitive, in contrast to the other major parties.

²Where "best" indicates alignment with my values, rather than probability of winning.

Some Things I Didn't Learn in Undergrad (And Really Wanted To)

Since graduating earlier this month¹, several people have mentioned to me that you should never stop learning. I don't object to this statement, but I find it somewhat puzzling. I went into aerospace engineering because I enjoy astronautics, and this field moves fast enough that the only alternative to maintaining technical competency is sliding into obsolescence. Naturally, that does not appeal to me.

But this biggest issue is that I don't think I really learned enough in college. I mentioned this in passing to one of my professors, who assured me that most students from our department pursue graduate studies. That helps, but not a lot, because there's more that a few areas that I want to learn more about. To better structure my thoughts on the subject, let's discuss some of the areas which we didn't really cover, but I had really hoped we would.

Nucleonics. Technically, this one is my own fault. I started at a school which offered a nuclear engineering minor, and I had the credit hours (thanks to AP) to pursue it. Unfortunately, I didn't really understand how the college course system worked, and blew those slots on entrepreneurship classes freshman year.² Trying to work ahead in my science coursework would have probably been a better use of my time.

Heat Transfer, on the other hand, strikes me as a widely-applicable subject for aerospace engineers in general. It does not appear to be standard in undergraduate plans of study. You can probably take it as a technical elective, but those slots are limited, and instead you're more likely to push it to graduate school. Letting M.E.'s have all the fun seems a bit strange, but whatever, there's a lot of ground to cover and plenty of heat transfer books out there.

Launch Vehicle Dynamics is a little more specialized but still something would would expect to discuss. Aside from a few problems with extremely unrealistic assumptions, we didn't cover this in any real detail, not even in astronautics classes. This is probably an artifact of KU's program being particularly airplane-focused, and other schools may handle it differently.

Manned Spaceflight. Pretty much everything we covered was unmanned, though "everything" at my school consists of two (2) space systems classes. Manned spaceflight builds on unmanned spaceflight, but there's a lot of material there which we simply did not discuss. Last year's class got some of it because their AIAA design competition involved a crewed mission, but mine didn't. I'm hoping to get my hands on a relevant textbook in the near future.

Advanced Propulsion—specifically, nuclear-thermal propulsion, which motivated my desire to study nucleonics. In retrospect, this was probably a touch optimistic and is a much more common subject to find graduate students learning, but a more flexible plan-of-study might have made undergraduates taking additional rocket classes plausible.³

Computational fluid dynamics and compressible aerodynamics represent the latest additions to this list, and were ultimately my own decision. Both are offered in most curricula, but undergraduates usually don't have room in their schedules unless that is the particular area they intend to specialize in. Taking these classes would have necessarily entailed giving up other electives. I cannot help but wonder, though, whether their stripped-down components could have been included in a more versatile plan-of-study.

If I were to offer any overall theme to this post, it would probably be that underclassmen generally have insufficient information to make intelligent decisions about their education. All too many students end up in the wrong major for their interests, or in the right major at the wrong school, or even at the right school yet mess up their plans-of-study in the first few semesters.

I don't see any easy solution to this problem beyond better advising to underclassmen and prospective students. Perhaps the best we can do is better explain the challenges and minutiae of engineering education, and hope for the very best.

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¹That's three of my 2018 predictions satisfied, incidentally.

²To be clear, entrepreneurship was interesting and will probably still prove valuable, but nuclear engineering strikes me as a much better subject to study in a formal context.

³Note that whether additional classes are available depends on the school. It's worth looking into course listings and developing a preliminary plan of study before Decision Day.

April Links

Bryan Caplan on the monkey trap. Based on alleged behavior of monkeys (I've heard the same said about raccoons), it describes organizations' willingness to accept horrible results, rather than give up a much lesser positive value.

Related: David Chapman on navigating the medical system, which seems to be in the process of regressing to a pre-modern state.

Speaking of pre-modern states: are the Amish unhappy, super-happy, or just meh?

News I missed last fall: NASA is restarting research on nuclear thermal propulsion. This is really good news for the future of manned spaceflight, because sending astronauts to Mars and beyond with chemical propulsion alone really pushes the limits of technological viability.

Maine is voting again in June on ranked-choice voting. Citizens of the Pine Tree State approved ranked-choice voting in the 2016 election, but the legislature fought hard against the measure.  In a rare "people's veto", the issue is going back to the ballot box. Hopefully it wins again.

Reviewing Caplan's new book, The Case Against Education.

An interesting physicist startup tries to help autodidact scientists get a better understanding of the fields they're trying to work in. Good insight into the failings of science communication to the non-technical public.

A Mars sample return mission inches towards reality.

March Links

MIT is taking some actions to deal with credentialism in higher education, though we'll have to wait and see how it plays out.

Megan McArdle discusses the ways that adults exploit youth activism to support favored causes while ignoring kids' needs when it's no longer convenient.

An old article from PEW Journalism on how the media covers topics disproportionately to their real-life implications and importance. Related: who fact checks the fact checkers?

Rationalist bloggers review Twelve Rules for Life.

The European Space Agency is testing an air-breathing electric engine. It's not quite a jet engine that works in space, but it's surprisingly close. NASA, meanwhile, is working on 3D-printed rocket nozzles.

Planetary Resources is struggling after funding setbacks. It's unclear what their new strategy will be but the soundbytes don't inspire optimism.

People had some weird ideas about averages in the first half of the 20th century, with implications ranging from airplane design to fashion. Unsurprisingly, the fields where mistakes had measurable consequences learned the lesson faster. We're still beholded to those lessons today, with most aircraft dimensions sized to accommodate 95th percentile males and 5th percentile females.

Ethereal art, made with drones.