verbal overshadowing

Banausos

There is something about sports, that simple pleasure of mapping intention to physical outcomes. Modern lifestyles teach many of us to think about movement in a very left-brained way. Reductionistic, forced: flexing muscles in the only ways we know how from the brief period of our time where we were free to learn movement -- childhood. Constrained: by trauma, injuries and shame accumulated as like plaque through adulthood. In this way movement is a very emotional kind of thing. It can be exhilarating or painful. A movement as simple as running is so polarizing -- I know friends who love it but equally many who find it excruciating.

There's also something about art, that simple pleasure of mapping feeling to media. I'd always been very tense when I played the guitar -- it was always about technique, getting the notes right, playing cool songs, feeling good about it all. But recently I discovered the pleasure of being awful at it. Truly awful -- even getting one note to sound the way I really want it to. Lately I am trying to play by ear rather than shapes and notes and found it incredibly difficult. I had to take back all the crap I gave artists: the process of creating I realized was beyond nontrivial -- it's a part of my brain I've hardly explored. 

But it's a bastardization, isn't it? Expressing the inside through clumsy hands upon the restrictive frets of the outside world... even those who have spent their lives mastering technique still pay the expressibility tax. This work is banausic, but in a way also beautiful. Left and right brains work in conjunction to bring forth beauty into reality in whatever imperfect, approximate way we can. All the better, if we can preserve some sense of beauty independent of technique throughout this process. 

We're all trying here (a review??)

I think the English translation of this show's title doesn't do it justice. But maybe that's the paradox of it. It's certainly full of that. The two leads could not be any more different... But they're so much alike in contrast to the other characters in the show. Everything in it makes me want to really live, want to shout myself into the world as the protagonist (Hwang Dong-man) does, literally, in several scenes. At the same time it so well characterizes that heretofore unrecognized fear of being heard. Desperately wanting to succeed -- in what? For what purpose? -- ...but what then? What novel flavors of failure and shame await us? 

Every character teaches us something about existence. A character we might have scorned, who in all rights is an antagonist... but here, while we may not necessarily like them, we empathize with and even love them, root for their growth. Dong-man on the other hand is immediately lovable, yet pathetic to the end in the best possible way. It is tempting and would have been forgiveable to indulge him (and the audience) in some easy wins, but he fucks up at every turn. But it is those exact fuckups that draw people to him, inspire genuine-ness in others when he is genuine (often, overly and stupidly so) with them, and hurtle him towards his goals.

Deep inside, we all want to be this person. I don't think that's a strong claim.

One of my favorite figures of speech in Korean is "사람 냄새난다" -- I.e. "it smells human". This show absolutely reeks of it, and it makes you want to commit to the bit, breathe it all in. In short: it has heart, in spades. Despite having 0 screenplay experience, I'd go as far to say I wish I'd written something like this. Or at least.. could I become the kind of person who could?

A nuance I might add here. In a way as much as this show is about emotion, it is also about language, inevitably so, being a self-referential show about writing itself. The characters here are so beautifully articulate, the dialogue so paced and weighty, that I wonder if my difficulty in expression is due to the lack of words, or whether the lack of words is due to my difficulty in expression. It brings to mind an analogy from episode 10: when Dong-man  says that it's only the art which matters, not the brush, Gyeong-se counters: the best artists are actually the pickiest about their equipment. 

The female lead often says she sees us all as "masses of emotion". Maybe there were no paradoxes in the first place. There are only protagonists and antagonists if we decide there are. Otherwise we are more akin to emotional children left to our own devices, crying out into the world to be recognized by our existence. 

So to me the literal translation is more fitting: "Everyone is fighting their own sense of worthlessness". A title that could read cynical but is in fact entirely hopeful. It's not a tragedy but a comedy, and we might aspire to be as happy with that as Dong-man is. We're All Trying Here leaves us with a few such quotable aspirations. My personal favorite: to "open the thousand doors inside", as not many open even one.

Plato's Allegory of the Transition Map

Imagine that we are watching this amazing play. Then you study it too long and you realize that behind the curtains it's all gears and animatronics, which is depressing. It's all contrived and trivial, you say. Engineered, conditional, material. Love is chemicals, you say, it isn't real, it isn't spiritual or fated or anything bigger than ourselves.

But then you see: the gears are a play in and of itself. The beauty! The complexity! Accept yourself small and you see the bigness in all things. 

You take this further. You realize that both these perspectives, the appearances of the play, the appearances of the gears and automata in your mind -- are, well, appearances we constructed in your mind. Love is fate, love is statistical, love is biological and mechanical and spiritual. Love is unconditional and conditional all at the same time. 

What is this "objective" "reality" we construct in our minds? This idea of things existing, of molecules and stuff? It's just another convenient way of seeing things, like gears and automata. If you look at the stage like a play, then the play exists, for you. If you look at the stage like a bunch of gears, then it's a bunch of gears -- but good luck getting anything profound from that interpretation. The beautiful thing is that the world is complex enough that reductionism can never work too well, leaving us room to imagine. The very mathematics we use to compress the universe show us the beautiful conundrum at every turn: inexhaustibility (Godel) in logic, entropy in thermodynamics, chaos in dynamical systems, emergent phenomena in complexity theory. 

I've realized this more and more. Happiness, fulfillment are more about your ruler than it is about how big your slice of pie is. I know it's trite. Not too long ago I would balk and cringe: temper my expectations? -- disgusting! But I find it's less about tempering than it is about the gratitude that comes naturally when you truly, truly come to peace with the circumstances before you. You just have to ask yourself: is it worth being driven to "success" by anxiety and fears? Or would you rather be driven by a genuine will to change things -- curiosity, motivation, future-facing energies which come only when you've accepted the present? We should remember that accepting reality does not preclude you from changing it.

Map and Territory

I revisit this concept of subjectivity over and over again from different lenses and analogies. Here: how do we communicate with someone who speaks an entirely different language than us? How does a person of science speak to a witch doctor who literally "sees" danger in the form of demons -- but it turns out to actually work? Granting that we haven't yet entirely reduced their system into neuroscientific minutiae, how do both realities coexist? But you'd only pose this problem if you're an objectivist. 

Another few analogies while we're at it: 

- There's map and there's territory. But all we have are maps. Is there really a territory, or are we conceptualizing that, creating a map of mapping itself? Does it even matter? Who does it matter to? 

- There's a manifold, and there's a smooth atlas on it. Need the manifold exist, then, if the atlas is smooth and our coordinate charts agree? If the witch doctor and the scientist have a transition map, we're all good!

A story

In the old days our parents spoke many different languages and thought many different things. But in the pursuit of "development" they indexed on a single transition map, a shared bridge between their many different worlds. But this "bridge" crept into their daily lives, expanded its territory. What they once had their own words for, they spoke the new terms. And soon what was once intended to be a protocol for translation became large enough to be its own reality, and our children were born into it -- speaking only of logic and engineering but losing the individual magics carried within their parents' minds. We no longer see fairies, only misfiring neurons. 

What will the world look like in 10 years?

Before Google, it used to be that when you set out to solve a problem, you'd run across several more. To even begin to answer your question you'd have to understand the domain of the problem to some degree. And often, this domain by itself was not sufficient or even relevant, so you needed to cast your net pretty wide. For example, to answer the question "what was the economy of Sierra Leone like in the 1940s", you might have to understand its geography, its culture, and so on to at least some extent, for context and so you'd know what other resources to look into at least. Every question was a puzzle with your unique solution. You might even end up learning quite deeply about something that you didn't set out to. On the other hand, ask your LLM of choice and see how detailed of a writeup you get: and imagine having to piece something like this together with nothing but a librarian at your disposal. So I think people tended to have some broad expertise about this and that. Not to mention the second order effect of people getting to know each other through these queries. 

Physicist Richard Feynman once suggested keeping maybe three or four unsolved problems in your back pocket and revisiting them over your professional career. If you were ever lucky enough to solve them, you'd look like a genius. But it wasn't that you were necessarily a genius: you just waited until you had the necessary ingredients to solve the problem. 

I tend to fixate on problems, and this reflected in a funny way some time ago while playing Minecraft with some friends. For example: I needed more food, so I built a wheat farm. To increase production, I required a ridiculous amount of iron (and doing horrible things to villagers). So I built an iron farm, which itself took a while to get right. There were other problems to solve, and I had to start mapping out dependencies and even doing math. In the midst of all this engineering, I looked over at my friends who actually seemed to be enjoying the game, finding that their chests were filled with incredible amounts of material that I didn't even know were in the game. I thought I'd been playing so efficiently -- at least by the numbers, shouldn't I be ahead?

There's the top-down approach of picking a problem and seeking out resources to solve the problem. But it turns out what my friends were doing, and arguably what we have been relegated to for much of human history, is the bottom-up approach to problem solving. What we effectively do is take inventory of our knowledge, resources, and access available to us locally and solve the problems that are easy and possible to solve within our sphere. Biologist Stuart Kauffman talks about a concept called the adjacent possible: in science, the questions we ask are limited to what we can imagine within our current scientific paradigm. To get to the other doors, we have to go through the doors available to us in this room, first. In the bottom-up approach, we take the easiest door and try to go as far as possible, instead of bashing our heads against the stuck one. Gamers like to call this tunnel vision.

Well anyways I should write a conclusion here but that's about all I've got. 

all models are wrong but some are useful 2

I always thought It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia was a weird show. The acting looked awful, but my friends (die-hard fans) insisted that was the whole point, that if I had started from episode 1 I'd understand. I wondered if that was really true, or that watching the show from the start would simply brainwash me into liking the show.

People say pickleball is actually really difficult. Putting aside the issue of what it means for a sport to be "difficult", I wonder if they say that just because they're the players who are accustomed to playing pickleball and are trained to feel that way. But pickleball is quite accessible and popular right now, so there are players from many other sports who encounter it and give more "objective" feedback. 

On the other hand badminton is a little less accessible and vastly less popular, so there's not much calibration with the outside. I wonder if my sport of choice is actually incredibly easy, not requiring much athleticism, despite having spent 10 years on it and not getting much better. If, hypothetically, the sport had multiple "traps" making you think it was really hard to get better, is it really hard? It's like gatekeeping a restaurant so hard and charging so much that when people finally get in they have no choice but to feel that it's amazing. If it's never realistically possible to test 

When you run a dataset through some model, you often don't care what the truth is. Often, whatever process generated that dataset is stable enough that as long as your predictions come out right, you don't mind that we have no idea about the causal mechanisms behind the data, don't even care that our linear regression coefficients have nothing to do with the reality. Accuracy is accuracy. 

You're not always going to be right, but in the moment you have to believe it, there is no alternative. The mind is only capable of drawing straight lines, as much as we'd like to believe otherwise. But we have to make a decision and tolerate error. In that instance we should have full faith in ourselves. Taking a decision more tentatively in the hopes that somehow you are hedging, does not optimize for result -- it optimizes for the appearance of safety. 

In a way this conviction is truth, your truth, in that instantaneous bubble of the present. Then you take these sequences of linear steps and you find some sort of success on the other side.*

Truth can be local. And in a way -- what else is there? We fawn over objectivity but even if we were to assume an objective universe, only a subset of the paths are well-traveled, statistically. 

A good functional definition of "truth" is then "well-calibration". How we want to define calibration afterwards is up to us. 

(Want to formalize this notion. Logic -- Model theory? Localization of truth, global verification -- application of sheaf theory here?  Tarski did it with the hierarchy -- truth is just an operator, something we model, not interested in philosophy.) 

Paraconsistent logic -- if locally there is no resources, no path, no facts available to disprove a proposition, then it is true, locally. The question is whether this definition of truth, this semantics, admits a Boolean algebra.

* How to deal with this? There's the notion of local truth which indicates a semantics but also a global "goal" here, and also a more global "policy" like "believe in oneself" -- is this a predicate, and the individual beliefs in oneself, are local propositions? 

being yourself is the most difficult and valuable thing

Now that I'm older it's like I'm allowed to weigh in

After years of getting it wrong

But you had it right the whole time

You just had to listen to yourself

But you forgot how

You're just other people now

Playing adult

With other people now

They forgot how

To listen to themselves

They had it right the whole time

After generations of getting it wrong

Are we allowed to weigh in