Because I have nothing better to do

“Hey, I’M prettier than HER!”, she says, and that’s…true, although it’s not the same kind of prettiness at all. Or maybe it is, and I’m rationalizing, even though I have no incentive whatsoever to rationalize. I don’t know why that cheered me up, but it did.

Being left alone and not being forced to do anything-even if you have things that need doing, I mean- brings out my tendency to over-analyze things.

The Schlum/Harvard intern- which I have deliberately not mentioned on this blog so far, mostly because I wanted to wait until I finally got to go- might not in fact work out, because even though the university has agreed and everything, they’re sending my visa application for “additional administrative processing”, which means it might be delayed so long that they may as well refuse me. At least according to the time they said they’d take. A friend says I might get it back in a week, however, in which case I would still get to go. Fingers crossed, for the moment.

I’m noticing a lot of latent(?) exhibitionist tendencies. As exemplified by this very post. I want to say “God, I’m so bored and pained and goal-less that I’ve been dancing naked in my room listening to Lady Gaga”, even though I know that that can’t possibly be something I would rationally want to signal. (But I will say that it’s more fun than I thought it would be, at least with some sort of artificial supplements. “I’m your greatest friend I’ll follow you until you love me…”)

So that’s pretty much what I’m up to, at the moment.  I had so many plans for the summer…finally lose that extra 5-10 kilos (well, at least some of that extra 5-10 kilos), practice the violin (almost) every day, streamline my reading habits-cut some of the more arbit feeds from google reader and bundle things better so I can read them the way I want to and rely more on long-form things on things I actually want to learn, anyway, so that I’m not just randomly browsing. Instead, I’ve been eating junk food every day and relying on biscuits and puffs for brunch (there isn’t really much else I can eat unless I pay for a proper meal, which I mostly just don’t feel like doing), not so much as touching the violin (although I plan to try that right after I’m done with this post) and spending hours and hours on tvtropes.org. I AM getting some long-form reading done… in the form of really long Harry Potter fan-fics, mostly ones with very out-of-character Harrys like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and “Oh God, Not Again!, which manages to be fun even without posing any sort of a challenge to Harry at all. I love snarky/cool Harry so much more than nice/tormented Harry.

Although I did read the 6th H2G2 book, “And Another Thing”, which was…good, but not quite up to standards. Even Mostly Harmless was not quite as good as the first 4, but that’s mostly because I didn’t like poor Arthur losing the one bit of happiness in his life so soon after he got it. I also read Ashok Banker’s new book, Gods of War, which is to be the first of a series. I don’t think I’ll be picking the rest up, and I’m left wishing I’d just read this on his website when he put it up for “beta-testing” before publication. I plan to do a post on that sometime, though, so I’ll elaborate then.

We will return to regularly scheduled programming by the end of the week, if not before.

Quote of the Week: Burn Twice as Bright

“I would rather be ashes than dust; I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dryrot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”

–Jack London

Quote of the Week: Don’t put me in a box!

Once you label me you negate me.

—Søren Kierkegaard

Fragments from last night’s dream

“My tongue is GREEN!”
“That’s not the only thing!”
Cue disgusting visions of green froth coming out of my mouth. Actually, not too different from when you brush your teeth, but still disgusting.
“AAARRRGHH!!!”

Sometime later, midway through the ‘quest’:
“But if you remove the dragon ball* from the golden pedestal** china and japan will go to war! China will think they’re taking it to nuke them!”
“We can explain!”
“No, we can’t! They’ll bomb each other before we get to!”
“Well then I don’t care. I’m turning GREEN!!”

This part is supposed to be a flashback, I think. Or equally likely, another dream altogether:
I’m in the restaurant in campus at 1 am or so and I order and I’m waiting for the food when I realize that I’ve ordered far too much. I’m also a little grumpy about the fact that they don’t serve coffee. I stuff myself with the food when it finally comes to the point where it’s painful to eat any more, and then I just collapse right there.

I am apparently very selfish in my dreams. Not that I’m not selfish in real life, but society makes you hide it better. Unless you’re Srivats :).

Also, I know it’s my blog and I’ll rant if I want to, but is this getting painful? Uploading fairly random posts every other day, I mean. Question primarily directed at those who are getting ‘spammed’ on Google Reader/Buzz and Twitter.

It’s raining here and the weather’s really nice but I hve to go back to steamy Chennai in a few days. Which will be worth it if a certain something works out… Will post in two weeks if it does.

* Obviously, I’m substituting. I’m pretty sure I had a cooler name for the macguffin in my dream. Or maybe that’s just because everything seems cooler in dreams.

** Again…this one I just made up, all I remember is that it had some sort of name.

New Theme: Quentin

I like the classical look, but mostly I just wanted a change. Any comments? If I get enough “dislikes” I will change it back, or go for something else entirely. I’d pick one with a custom header, but a) it’s painful to make one and b) it didn’t work for me on the other theme when I did.

Things I find annoying:

Not so annoying that I would break off contact with them or anything, but annoying enough that I feel like screaming, just a little, every now and then. Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list.

Joining “1000000 STRONG AGAINST WORLD HUNGER” type Facebook groups and posting it all over my wall.

Reading a book about the struggles faced by poor people, and telling people how emotional it made you. (Context-dependent annoyance, obviously. This wouldn’t be annoying if you were telling me this to explain why you decided to give up your corporate law/investment banking job to work at a non-profit or even better, a more traditional charity.)

“Raising awareness of problems” without raising awareness of any practical solution. Especially if you can’t even explain the problem properly. (Oh, go ahead and guess what I’m talking about.)

Many types of political, religious, and philosophical arguments (clearly, not all of them). Particularly the ones that don’t even want to make a point. Especially with people who seem to have taken a vow to never, ever give logical reasons for anything they say. The most *headdesk* cases are where they blatantly state that a logical rebuttal is unnecessary, which of course applies mostly to religious arguments.

People who always, always speak in puns. Or cliches. Cliches I can accept if the people are nice enough, but the puns-or PJs, in most cases- can sometimes get a little overwhelming.

This post was drafted ages back, last October apparently, and I no longer recall what it was motivated by. I still agree with most of it, though.

Mike Rowe, Dirty Jobs and Following Your Passion

My friend Varun Torka pointed this out to me after I wrote that other post about “creative professionals”. This is one of the most awesome TED talks I’ve ever seen. You really, really have to watch the video to get a sense of what he’s talking about: this extract, while relevant, doesn’t come close to doing it justice. I would embed it, but WordPress doesn’t let you use Flash or upload videos other than from some sites without a video upgrade.

So I started to wonder what would happen if we challenged some of these sacred cows. Follow your passion — we’ve been talking about it here for the last 36 hours. Follow your passion — what could possibly be wrong with that? Probably the worst advice I ever got. (Laughter) You know, follow your dreams and go broke, right? I mean, that’s all I heard growing up. I didn’t know what to do with my life, but I was told if you follow your passion, it’s going to work out.

I can give you 30 examples, right now — Bob Combs, the pig farmer in Las Vegas who collects the uneaten scraps of food from the casinos and feeds them them to his swine. Why? Because there’s so much protein in the stuff we don’t eat his pigs grow at twice the normal speed, and he is one rich pig farmer, and he is good for the environment, and he spends his days doing this incredible service, and he smells like hell, but God bless him. He’s making a great living. You ask him, “Did you follow your passion here?” and he’d laugh at you. The guy’s worth — he just got offered like 60 million dollars for his farm and turned it down, outside of Vegas. He didn’t follow his passion. He stepped back and he watched where everybody was going and he went the other way. And I hear that story over and over.

Matt Froind, a dairy farmer in New Canaan, Connecticut, who woke up one day and realized the crap from his cows was worth more than their milk, if he could use it to make these biodegradable flower pots. Now, he’s selling them to Walmart. Follow his passion — the guy’s — come on.

…we’ve declared war on work, as a society, all of us. It’s a civil war.  It’s a cold war, really. We didn’t set out to do it  and we didn’t twist our mustache in some Machiavellian way,  but we’ve done it.  And we’ve waged this war on at least four fronts, certainly in Hollywood. The way we portray working people on TV,  it’s laughable. If there’s a plumber, he’s 300 pounds and he’s got a giant buttcrack, admit it.  You see him all the time.  That’s what plumbers look like, right? We turn them into heroes, or we turn them into punchlines.  That’s what TV does…

Really, just watch. There’s a lot in there. I am SO going to start watching his show.

Did Everyone Know This? The “Buy Me a Drink” Problem

Admittedly, this doesn’t really come up that much in my life- and I don’t even think it applies to Indian bars/dating scenes in general, but that’s a blind guess. But the example on this post took me a little by surprise. (The post is essentially on how high functioning people with Asperger’s need to compute social interactions “in software”, i.e. think through them manually and not rely on instinct. )

Cached answers – you can precompute the “right” responses to social situations. Probably the best example of this is the answer to the “buy me a drink” problem: you approach an attractive NT person who you might like as a future partner. After a short time, they ask you to buy them a drink. The logical answer to this question is “what kind of drink would you like?”, because in most social situations where you want to build up a positive relationship with a person, it is best to comply with their requests; not creating explicit conflict is usually a safe heuristic. But this is the wrong answer in this context, and you can store in your cache of counter-intuitive answers.

Scientific theories of social games – including game theory and especially signaling games, information economics and evolutionary psychology. Building on the “buy me a drink” problem, instead of simply storing the answer as an exception, you can use evolutionary psychology and information economics to see the underlying pattern so that you can correctly answer the “drink” problem and many other similar problems. The NT is using the drink request to solve a cheap talk problem – they don’t really want the drink, they want to know if you have higher dating market value than them, for example higher social status, income, success with other partners, etc. This is because evolutionary psychology makes some people want high-status people as partners. If they just asked you directly for these facts about yourself, you would have a strong incentive to lie. So they make a request that is somewhat rude, where only a lower-status suitor who thought they were worth “sucking up to” would comply, and then reject suitors who comply. This is really a kind of screening, where ability to give the “right” answer plays the role of a credential. Neurotypicals play some devious games, and this is actually quite a tame example.

NT, as you can guess from the quote, stands for neurotypical.

Is this such an obvious thing? I get how blatantly asking someone to buy you a drink is rather rude, but I didn’t really know the rest of it. I would have simply assumed that it would either show the relatively poor social skills of the person who’s asking, or alternately simply indicate that his/her society is more to the “Asker” side of the Asker/Guesser spectrum.

UPDATE: Apparently a lot of people at Less Wrong didn’t really get it, either. Although some people did. And from what I can guess, the people who do seem to have more experience in similar social contexts. So I still don’t really know. Anyone?

Quote of the Week: And I thought it was 23, or pi.

Everything in the universe relates to the number 5, one way or another, given enough ingenuity on the part of the interpreter.

— Principia Discordia, “The Law of Fives”

Hollywood and “Creative Professionals”

I want to think aloud for a bit, and maybe by the time I’m done I will have said something coherent and even something illuminating. Blogs are meant for experiments like this, after all.

So. Fact 1: people who make movies are pretty much by definition creative professionals*. This implies but does not necessitate that a good number of characters in movies are the sort of people who wish to pursue some sort of creative career. In any case, their proportion is considerably exaggerated.

Fact 2: one almost universal lesson/moral in many of these movies is that one should always ” follow your dreams”, even if they seem impractical.

Fact 3: most creative professions are, if anything, over-served (I think there’s a more precise term for this). From a basic econ101 point of view, this should depress wages automatically. Adding to this the fact that many of these professions are just intrinsically less valued by society, at least in terms of how much it is willing to support the average professional, leads to people being paid much less than they would get for a similar amount of work in an alternate, more “conventional” profession.

Fact 4: also consider that many of these professions have very unequal payouts. Charlie Stross had a great post where he showed that the median salary of a writer was a ridiculously low figure by western standards, even though the average is a fair bit (still not that much, though) higher, because a very, very small minority of writers make oodles of money. The same applies to actors, artists, etc. Naturally, the media in general tends to greatly play up the successes and play down the vast hordes who never make it- and no, the starving artist trope is hardly proof against this.

Fact 5: while fact 3 should ordinarily deter those without an “unstoppable” drive from making a career out of these fields, facts 1,2 and 4 considerably alter the situation, mostly by distorting reality- 1 by subtly implying that to be a real character in your own life, you must be some sort of creative person, 2 by suggesting that your life is incomplete if you do not go on to “make the most of your talent”, and 3 by strongly misrepresenting your chances of ever being successful in a material sense by making a career out of what should really stay a hobby. This leads to what is basically mis-informed consent and manufactured preferences, and you know how the rest of this goes.

Proffered conclusion: Hollywood may be ruining your emo teenager’s life.

*As you may have noted, I’m using this phrase in a slightly skewed sense here, not just the literal meaning of the two words strung together. It is not an original usage, so I think I’m safe with it. I think programming is a creative profession, for instance, like much of engineering, but this analysis is far more relevant to the miniature furniture builder or paper sculptor who quits his accounting job than to an engineer.