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

Cantor, Löwenheim-Skolem

Cantor, Löwenheim-Skolem

I dream of countable infinities, that's why I sleep so rough

"You wouldn't believe how stupid these guys are, that's why they make so much"

They're happy to hold the desert one grain at a time. I don't understand

On the other hand I grasp at the dune. It slips through my fingers

"The dune is uncountable, least of all by you -- stupid"

I dream of paradise, and sleep soundly tonight

7/5/26: Lately I've been getting a lot of advice about the action gap. The happiness of your life is inversely proportional to the distance between thinking and doing, so they say. Experiencing over thinking. 

It's difficult, to have both the crippling fear of messing up and the arrogance to believe that I can can think my way out of everything. This "information age" doesn't help. I envy people who just stumble their way forwards and do incredible things with their lives. BTW, should we really call it the "attention age" now? They say attention is now the most valuable commodity. And "attention" is literally the mechanism that drives LLMs so it seems apt...

 

Wreckless love

Wreckless love

I watched them refurbish the ship of Theseus

All hull, bow, stern and keel. 

So well-worn was her body by the love of the sea

There was no part they could keep. 

In the final moments the sea called to the ship of Theseus,

"I will always love you."

In converse echoed back the ship of Theseus, 

"If I do not love you -- it isn't me."

Note

Does love exist in absolutes? Is there such a thing as an overwhelming, never-ending reckless love, without invoking an absolute figure, one that escapes conditions, such as God?  

I think so. Like the ship of Theseus, we are never the same self across time. Within the infinite present moment, love is absolute. But there is another degree to this: if that love were so engrained into our being, it would be impossible to separate the person from that love. Try to remove it, and you end up replacing their entire personality and person. 

To me, "I will always love you" is clearer in the converse. We don't need to be infinite or absolute to love unconditionally. The following is necessary and sufficient: "If I do not love you, that isn't me." 

2/17/26

When I see a really well-written piece of work, I sometimes get a feeling of envy: "Could I have written that? How...?" Today, I came across a really well-written reply to this video. To summarize, it's about "how to be Zen at work" -- the central premise being that by acknowledging our limitations and letting go of things outside of our control, we would actually find greater success. Here's the full text of the comment (credit: Mark Cheetham) pushing back on this messaging:

It’s compelling but this tendency to develop post hoc ‘crack the code’ discoveries after the power laws, sacrifices and imbalances have paid out ignores so much of that which is inevitable And unavoidable about life and trying to reframe it as potential choice . It maybe nice to hear how a mountaineer reaches a summit of a brutal climb then ascribes it to ‘trusting their journey’ and giving up on fear if failure - but when overlooking the missing toe, the dangerous oxygen debt and hospitalisation after the last climb and the local guide who carried all his stuff it risks becoming disingenuous . This starts to feel very close to something akin to spiritualisation of privilege and it starts to undermine the struggle of people still trying to just get to the point of less struggle. To talk about ‘not worrying about that which you can’t control’ is great advice when someone has security, stability and their safety net is also well established - but overlooks the fact they’re likely doing it because it became a habit when they didn’t or has yet to create security.

Should you not have such scaffolding worrying isn’t neurosis it’s your nervous system doing it’s job…ultimately this all has a tendency to make calmness look and sound like a moral superiority when it’s typically just a material advantage.

What seems incredible to me is that this seems written mostly off-the-cuff -- there are grammatical errors throughout -- but the structure and flow are precise, with one idea transitioning smoothly into the next. In particular I like the usage of "power laws" here -- alluding to both the statistical and sociological effects that work against you when you're on the "long tail". 

Power law - Wikipedia

And the sharp metaphor about climbing the mountain are neither vague nor overexplained. He adds realistic detail as he slips into and out of the metaphor smoothly. And "spiritualization of privilege" sums up so much! As for the opinion itself, it seems well balanced and I agree with it. On one hand he agrees that the Zen advice is well and good for people in any situation: the mountaineer learns to "trust the journey" out of necessity during struggle. On the other hand, it's risky to imply that insecurity and struggle is the result of not being Zen enough -- anxiety is, like he says, "your nervous system doing its job" -- it's a lot easier to be Zen when you're secure. 

If I were to try this myself (rough, not edited): 

You want to swim upstream but you're thrashing against turbulence and struggling to breathe. Yes, you could just learn to swim better, but then not only are you not guaranteed to succeed even if you had the skill and mindset of Michael Phelps, it's actually a lot harder to learn to swim if you're constantly being pulled under. It's normal for your body to panic and thrash. 

It's really wordy and I'm not sure I even have the tools to shorten it, but there it is.  

Some takeaways: If I find myself resorting to vague analogies, question: "Do I really understand this?" If I find myself breaking down the problem using the same neural pathways, challenge myself to consider alternatives. For example, while writing this I was tempted to use the pattern "attributing the cause to X" since it aligns with the way that I normally think about causality, but it was unnecessarily formal. Exploration yields conciseness: by considering a broader scope of alternatives, we allow the idea to breathe and to be expressed in the way it needs to be. Avoid being so afraid to lose detail that you express everything in bit strings -- it's inefficient. 

One further note: If I find myself using the same words over again (like the cliché "good"), ask if I could increase clarity by being more specific, or be more concise by considering alternative ways of thinking. 

https://www.facebook.com/share/14WnxpD5MKM/

We are the same up to diffeomorphism on the shape of life

Do you ever realize something that's so obvious that it doesn't have to be realized, but you realize it anyway? Yesterday I was sitting in traffic getting blinded by the chrome grille of an obscenely large pickup truck. I put on my sunglasses and suddenly I saw: the chrome contained the full reflection of the sun itself! As curved as it is, it's still just a mirror -- you can even see a portion of the sky and clouds around the sun. 

In fact, every glare and glint you see in the daytime off of any continuous surface holds the full image of the sun, however distorted and small. 

I guess I thought there might be some deeper meaning to this. The Platonic Form of the Individual, or something like that...

You often see others in only small portions: you understand abstractly that the glare is "from the sun's light", in the same way that you might empathize with someone because some part of them is like you. But that glare contains the entire form of the sun itself. Every individual is entirely what you are -- all images of the same individual and consciousness -- just warped onto the different circumstances and terroir of life.

Heuristic medicine

I remember a hilarious comment on a TedTalk about breathing saying "I'm even breathing wrong??" I found it to be deep somehow but didn't realize why at the time. 

I was watching this IG reel about reducing the gap between decision and action and immediately felt this instinct to disqualify the advice, thinking about cases where it wouldn't apply. People have any number of reasons they don't act after all... fear, trauma, habits... everyone has their own situation. But was I making excuses? Why?

That's the risk you run consuming this sort of content, I think (particularly as a perfectionist). You miss the whole point: people give you medicine and you refuse because it means admitting that you are sick. But it isn't your fault that you are sick. I don't think the language people use to talk about the "sick" helps either. We blame them for causing their own problems because it helps us believe in a fair world. 

We don't need to self-flagellate. The whole point of self-help isn't to feel anguish for not feeling ready or able to follow this advice nor to feel grief about not having done any of it sooner. 

It's funny because in this case the very sickness often causes us to refuse the medicine. The content could even be about perfectionism and how it has us keeping up illusions and keeps us from living life etc. but this is a painful pill to swallow for a perfectionist given that this is how they might have lived most of their lives.

If I were to suggest anything, content creators should use more compassionate language in serving content. We should think of it in the same way that we think of medicine. Granted it's more holistic (heuristic?) medicine, but we can easily imagine that when the science catches up the whole "doing life" thing won't seem so much like magic and morality and wisdom, but a matter of fact. Morality creeps in when we don't understand something fully. 

This is a lot like the issue of crime. We see criminality as this moral thing and demonize criminals, but as we understand it more scientifically, that it's more like an epidemic, we are somewhat unintentionally realizing that a kind of rational empathy makes far more sense. Even on the individual level we are moved to think of criminals as simply those who are sick and need our care.

I think there will always be that instinct to distance ourselves from the "sick", as we have with lepers and the disabled. Whether it reminds us of our own frailty or it's about guilt, it's uncomfortable. 

But I think as we understand more, we will raise up our level of consciousness. So there is reason to hope. Life, as we know it now, will not seem as complicated. Maybe we will look back on these attempts to explore and share our inner lives the same way we see leeches and acupuncture and herbs -- some things worked, some didn't, but we did our best with what we knew.