we don't solve our problems, we outgrow them

There are a couple of ways to understand a pie. 

Is pie = filling + crust? 

Or is pie = slice 1 + slice 2 + ... + slice 8? 

Say, how do you honestly answer somebody who asks the following:

• "I want to bake a pie, but should I bake slice 1 first or slice 8 first?"
• "Should I eat the filling first or the crust first?" 

Really think about it.

I think the immediate, natural response is not, "Well, technically, you bake all slices at once, you see" or even "You eat the crust and filling together, but I suppose your teeth usually hits the crust first, hmm". It's more like, "That's... not how it works", or "What are you talking about?". 

It's clear they don't really know what a pie really is, much less ever had one. (Unless, of course, you're talking about some weird deconstructed pies à la molecular gastronomy... in which case, what are you talking about?) Don't you just get this real aggravating feeling that you don't even want to grace that question with an answer, because it might confirm their ass-backwards way of thinking? And yeah, they're not technically doing anything wrong, and you can technically answer their questions like I showed. But something's off. Why would you think about baking pies in terms of slices? It's the kind of situation that makes you want to go, "Okay hold up there, what are you exactly imagining that baking is, and what a pie looks like?" I'm talking about those situations where a question just baffles you because it's so... wrong somehow. 

It brings to mind the image of some deeply enlightened Zen teacher frustrating his arrogant young student with his answers (perhaps with a koan?). Why won't you just answer the question, teacher? Tell me... is it, or is it not! Yet the youth isn't necessarily in the wrong here. Technically and literally, things are or things aren't. But perhaps, by giving the student a "straight answer" -- i.e. an answer that fits with the student's understanding -- the Zen teacher would be confirming the student's mindset, terminating potential development there. This would be a disservice to the student, choosing to specify their understanding in favoring of expanding it. 

More and more I notice I'm that youth, but surrounded by Zen teachers everywhere. I'm that strange dude who hasn't had pie before, doesn't know what it is, can't even ask the right questions about it. I've been noticing that fewer of my questions, even smaller ones, can be answered directly but instead require these difficult little enlightenments... the ones that make me go "Oh, I was totally thinking about it the wrong way" afterwards. 

But as they say, questions are more important than answers. A question zooms in, cuts and joins reality into different possibilities, and presents it. An answer simply chooses one out of these. In fact, my philosophy professor once said that philosophy is not really about answering tough questions (along  the lines of "What's the meaning of life? What is love?"), but rather about restructuring your mind... something about replacing and shuffling the "cabinets" of our minds which hold our thoughts, experiences. So, basically questions, and asking the right ones (it's my belief that "what is the meaning  of life" is the wrong question, but that's for another time). 

You know, a real nice side effect to actually changing up your whole brain is that it sort of makes things that were hard before, easier. Sure, I've made do with some more elementary mindsets, but it's always a struggle, building rulesets and attempting to imitate what seems to come so naturally to others. Like the guy that knows the moves of the dance, but something about how he shifts his weight and balance seems... not as natural, flowing. At best, I'm only 80% there. But then when it "clicks", it clicks. 

It makes me think of this quote by Carl Jung:

We don't solve our problems, we outgrow them. 

Lately I've become more and more convinced of its truth. Or am I just more and more understanding it?

It reminds me of those childhood and adolescent problems we outgrew: playground vendettas, puppy love, drama. And more generally: things never tried, curiosities never satisfied, naïve dreams never accomplished... all these "problems" becoming, for lack of better words, irrelevant upon simply growing up.  (I'm thinking of "problem" to include "things we want", not just "things we want to stop happening".) Forgotten, maybe? Discarded, in favor of something better? 

Growing up is a little bit complicated, isn't it? That old cliché "you'll understand when you're older" made it sound real easy, automatic. In reality, the process involves what can only be described as "paradigm shifts". It's less like the stream of incrementally building knowledge I once thought it was, and more like, I don't know, getting hit by a truck? Multiple trucks? But, good trucks, helpful trucks! 

The things we saw and wanted as children are as ripples on the surface, caused by some deeper system of undercurrents below. Once we grow up and see the undercurrents, we laugh at the past. Somehow, that past seems so trivial! We were so dumb, we say. And in our arrogance we are caught off guard when it happens again and again, when we are swept deeper and deeper still. 

It feels so great, doesn't it, expanding your mind, changing out the cabinets. Understand the true nature of pie! Answer that Zen koan! Even Plato was all about it, except he thought there was an end to it. Just look into the Sun, he said. But that's the thing, there doesn't quite seem to be an end, does it? No Sun, no Forms. And plus, isn't it somehow dissatisfying, that so many of those things we've been dying to try, accomplish, get... are only easy, trivial, and gettable when we're past the point of caring about them at all? Isn't it maddening, that most things you really want, you only get when you stop wanting them as much? And even when you do get them, you and that "more mature brain" of yours will just find something else to want! 

So... is ignorance truly bliss? Should we just stay children, so our wants stay simple and attainable? Maybe we are doomed to either never be satisfied, or to never grow at all. Is this some cruel trick of the mind? Of the universe? If so, I need to understand! 

Perhaps that's because of the complexity of the things we want today. The things that seem valuable to us are exactly that -- they seem valuable because they are fragments of things we can't quite understand and attain, and therefore appear valuable. So they are only valuable in our shallower frame of mind. 

It's not that we want only things which are inherently elusive. It's just that once we understand something, we no longer want that thing anymore, because typically once we have reached some higher understanding, the world complexifies, and there are other things that will provide us greater fulfillment. The previous things just appear to be "simple pleasures", literally.

Once we calm down a little, we might get a little meta and understand that we're posing the wrong questions and that we need to deepen our understanding. So the following is a discussion of two parts: decoupling want from knowing, and decoupling want from happiness. 

Wanting is independent of knowing (in some sense). Want, if the neuroscientific framework is to be believed, is driven by dopamine. Hits of dopamine encourage us to eat food, drink water, have sex. But the modern world is complex, and so are our wants. This happens because our immediate, biological needs are mentally tied (rationally or not) to the more abstract needs, like love, approval, wealth. Understanding this, it's easy to see that "want" is highly dependent on the experiences of the individual and not simply a function of how deep their understanding of life is. 

Put another way, "want" is just an "orientation" of sorts on top of one's understanding of the world. Understanding by itself doesn't really cause you to want or not want anything. If the way you understand the world is like some complex map of rooms, your wants are just arrows drawn on top of that map, leading to... "somewhere". However, when our maps complexify to include more pathways and rooms, our brains can re-evaluate, re-draw those arrows to perhaps find better ways to get to this... "somewhere".

For instance, imagine that Bob wants love, and through some life experiences has come to think of approval as the way to get love. Suppose then through some other big life experience, he comes to realize that approval does not imply love, and that there are healthier ways to get love, like, I don't know, loving himself. Without even resorting to neuroscience (though it's been a great help) we can see that it's no longer rational for Bob's brain to keep wanting approval from others, there's really no point anymore. But take Alice, for instance. She comes from a background where acceptance from the tribe meant the difference between life and death. Do her wants change because she realizes that she can just love herself? I doubt it. 

Want-fulfillment is independent of happiness. Well actually it might not be, at least in some neuroscientific sense. Apparently while dopamine encourages you to chase wants, opiates induce that pleasant state of... well, bliss, when you finally attain that want. BUT! The point is, happiness is something deeper than just going around knocking things off your want-list. It's something much more internal, more enduring and long-term. Something something peace, something something mindfulness. I don't think I need to belabor this point, plenty of philosophers and gurus and pretty much everyone beat this topic to death.

So, conclusion. Taking all of the above in total, the quote deconstructs as follows (but not like a weird pie): 

• 1. Solving our problems = actually fulfilling wants
• 2. Outgrowing problems = accruing deeper understanding, which cause us to re-align our wants. no longer wanting the previous stuff 
• Important to note, wanting and knowing are independent, we do not simply chase that which is elusive
• Quote says: we do 2 more than 1. 
• Author understands this, and is concerned: But wait, does that mean happiness eludes us forever? Is this some sick joke? 
• Author is no longer concerned (?): No, the assumption is that happiness comes from getting  what we want. But... happiness is independent of reaching goals, remember? (Or, it should be. It can be? I hope it is.)

Appendix

I failed to mention within the article, but I meant to talk a little about the nature of outgrowing perspectives particularly in mathematics but science in general. The titular quote should apply to not only brains but any theory or corpus of knowledge. Albert Einstein (supposedly) had a similar quote: "We can’t solve our problems from the level of thinking which created them." 
For example, in the behavioral sciences we have models which delineate between visual/auditory/kinesthetic learners, or categorize of mental illness, or even label personalities. I wonder what kind of impact advances in brain sciences will have on such models -- perhaps it will explain away and dissolve the categories as different activation patterns or different functions in the brain. As our understanding grows, perhaps categories will not be as useful. Kind of like how modern chemistry and atom theory makes splitting things up into Aristotelian elements a bit silly. Sure, you could index everything in the world by its makeup of "fire", "earth", "air", and "water", but... why? We already know it's just atoms.  

I honestly had some other stuff but I forgot.

Further examples (will add as they come to mind)

References

The Neuroscience of Wanting and Pleasure | Psychology Today

We Don't Solve Our Problems, We Outgrow Them | HuffPost Life

Notes

Mathematics and projection-- 3d rotating cube casting shadow onto Flatlanders who see some weird shit, but like us 3d-landers know it's just a cube, really

Nobody looked any finer
Or was more of a hit at the Parkway Diner
We never knew we could want more than that out of life

wealth, happiness, and the pursuit of want

Is it surprising that there are so many who are rich yet miserable? Or not so surprising, once you realize why some people are rich and happy? 

For the happy rich, money doesn't seem to be the main goal but a side effect... perhaps of some passion or goal that drives them and creates value. What they aim for is not wealth, but self-actualization -- some deeper "thing" from which wealth comes via the creation of value (of course it is not always true -- there are plenty of starving artists).

The miserable rich, on the other hand, pursue optics, excelling in projects and working long hours to please their C-level executives or the board. They pursue acclaim and admiration to get that next pay raise or promotion. They pursue the immediate and profitable, heading companies that appear to create value, yet in fact exploit people and the environment, destroying value. I wonder: of what value are their "goods", if produced by those who do not understand what good is? 

How generalizable is this conclusion? Is it only sociopaths who can find fulfillment in money not well-earned? How much wealthy misery can we attribute to the latter category? 

The key to understanding the relationships between these variables lies in, I think, understanding where want comes from, and divorcing that idea of want and happiness. Fulfilling a want does not necessarily make you happy! Refer to: "we don't solve our problems, we outgrow them" 

reality = chaos + order, and Plato's allegory of the possibly infinite lightshow

Here I want to record this feeling that I've been having. I guess I've always had it every now and then but I'm noticing it more now. It's the kind of feeling that there's probably some obscure German word for, but for lack of better words and lack of effort in searching for them, I seem to have written now a whole article to describe it.  

A while back, I read about the "weak Pinsker conjecture". I'm no mathematician, but what it seems to  say is that any dynamical system of a certain class can be seen as a product of some chaos and some order. 

My whole life I have believed in the orderliness of life. I was convinced that everything had structure. For instance, as a child I believed that by studying hard, I could get into a good school (for some reason, it had to be Princeton), and by getting into a good school, I could have a good job, a good life, whatever. 

But as I grew, I realized that these rules, these laws, institutions, apparently fundamental, immutable properties of society were not quite what I had imagined. As one grows in mind, they learn through experience that the things they were taught were only projections of deeper structures. Honesty is the best policy... except for when it isn't. As it turns out, honesty is rather an emergent sub-goal of a larger objective -- perhaps harmony? And when we realize this we feel some kind of temporary euphoria: Ah -- it's not about doing X, X is just an element of this deeper Y! And understanding Y empowers us to make better decisions /be better people / perform better at __ / etc. 

But even in the throes of such euphoria we are perhaps living in a delusion. To use Plato's analogy, we are perhaps only seeing the fire inside the cave projecting the shadows on the wall. But we have not seen the sunlight yet.  

Examples

Music is not about music theory, it's about the pitches played in combinatorial sequence. But as it turns out even that's not very general: music is about something deeper. Rhythm, timbre, pitch -- all sort of projections on the wall of what makes music, music. Outside of the Western study of music, music is much more innately connected to dance, perhaps even inseparable. And expanding our minds the tiniest bit, we might be able to grasp how this could be. Music is not about vibrations per se, but it is that vibrations are manifestations of physical movement, which is something innate to the human mind. Perhaps it even begins in the womb, as we listen to our mothers' heartbeats. 

But back to the thing about getting into Princeton. As it turns out, life isn't as simple as I had imagined. But that whole school -> job -> life logic? It's not totally wrong, either. That's because there's this aspect of determinism in the system -- the rule works, kind of -- but with some (a lot?) of added chaos. Which... makes the rule not quite a rule, but a heuristic... if even that. 

So, what is this "added chaos"? Well, it's exactly this "deeper structure" that people tend to discover as they build their set of experiences across time. It's not about getting into school, but maybe more about finding a good job, which typically requires skills, which presumably you can get lots of at a good school (like Princeton). But wait, do you even want to get a good job? Jobs are actually a medium of trade, a way to trade labor, time for other goods and services. So I suppose the goal here is to attain goods and services, at least as much as we need to continue our existence? But then, is that really what it's all about? As it turns out, to many, life is about more than surviving. Surviving happens to be a part of it, ceratinly, but there's something more, some deep, personal goal. Clearly, this topic is deep enough that entire books of philosophy are written about it.  

No proofs, no guarantees

When we run into roadblocks with our current understanding of the world, most of the times we can reach out for external inspiration, perhaps to mentors, teachers, books. There we might pick up on something that expands and deepens our views, eliminates assumptions about reality, increasing complexity but freeing us from the assumptions and constraints which previously bound us. 

And perhaps we can be lulled into a false sense of security that this is always possible. That for any problem, there is some model, just a deeper, better model that we haven't understood yet, available "out there", not too far away. But I think reality is a bit scarier, in the sense that a lot of times, we just don't know. We are never actually guaranteed any deeper structure that will solve anything. We just have no guarantee in general, period. Taking this up a notch, we don't know that our reality will devolve into some kind of incoherent mess that doesn't respond to us the way we expect it to, like something out of an acid-fueled nightmare. We do not know that the ground will not shift under our feet. 

This isn't really just a philosophical ponderance, but something that just happens in reality. I think everyone really has to face it several times in their lives: starting a new business in an industry that doesn't even exist yet, moving to a place where you don't know anyone, having a kid (from what I hear). It's this visceral feeling, that you're treading actually new ground with guarantee of success, and you're sort of making it up as you go along with only your brain to guide you. This feeling that you're outside of the bubble that is the orderly system which society would have you participate in. Most likely, you're actively expanding that bubble for everyone else. Kind of like a frontiersman, treading new ground and building civilization from the ground up. I like to see that as the basic imagery of the central task and obligation of every generation to the generations succeeding it. We are expanding that sphere of orderly influence, bringing order to a chaotic world. And it brings to light the nature of the bubble we live in -- it's extremely difficult to take it for granted knowing that flawed beings just like myself hand-built this system, and it wasn't "God-given" (for lack of better words) and uncertainty and entropy could be lurking everywhere (and not just at the quantum-philosophical-acid-trip level). 

Being trained somewhat in mathematics, I have always seeked guarantees, proofs. I wanted to live in a universe where there was solid footing. But as it turns out, not even mathematics is like this. The first time I had to come to terms with it was when I read about Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. As it turns out, mathematics isn't as systematically complete and safe as I had once thought it was. Even further, the theory behind the Incompleteness Theorems itself -- mathematical logic, formal logic -- turns out to be only just a model of how mathematicians did mathematics. It describes a fragment of what mathematicians really do. And who knows what mathematicians really do, or what mathematics is -- every professional mathematician works at the frontier, constantly defining what mathematics is. It is an innately human endeavor, something we do because we need to, want to. An act of imposing order against the chaos of the universe (at least a good attempt), but distilled purely down to that act, an attempt to capture at describe at least an ever-expanding fragment of the universe in an orderly way. Kind of like mathematical logic does for mathematics itself, I suppose. 

Maybe this visceral feeling of chaos and uncertainty in just casual, everyday reality has always been so much more obvious to everyone else who tend to get out more. But me... I feel absolutely terrified. It's like I'm in Plato's allegory of the cave, but there's no guarantee that there is some final, terminal Sun outside that represents the level of the Forms or anything like that. Instead, having seen that wacky stuff with the fire, I go outside and see a Sun, but I've played this game before. I look around and indeed, the Sun is actually a huge mirror. And in fact behind this mirror there's a whole constellation of mirrors and lenses among what seem to be other Suns, stars. And depending on where you look from it looks entirely different! Moreoever, I see other people coming out of the cave and talking about stuff, but I can't be sure that they're seeing the same thing I'm seeing, although it seems to be similar, up to some sort of geometric transformation I guess. So where's the real Sun? Is there a real Sun? Are there multiple? It's massively chaotic. 

Though chaotic, I suppose it's only distressing for people like me who were taught the "Platonic dogma" so to speak, and expected something like that in reality. Consider a hypothetical individual who never really expected order in the first place. This is someone who truly embraces the state of the world for what it is -- simply perception (because, what else is there?) -- and has no reason to feel distressed, because again, they never expected otherwise. But I think most people aren't like this, and expect the world to obey some sort of order, because that is the what is presented to us as children. So how do we handle it?

Some people might get out of their caves and face this complexity in a special way; they choose a particular interpretation and believe, say, in a single Sun, in a blissful, non-chaotic, orderly world not filled with mirrors and lenses and weird shit. Religion, for instance, is one obvious way this is done. This does sometimes require some curating and filtering of contradicting information, particularly with interpretations that aren't so consistent with the data, but that's neither here nor there. Or others might avoid complexity altogether, choosing to pretend it is not there. Many others handle it step by step, modifying their theories as they are forced to but still believing that they must be at some terminal point every step of the way. 

Another way to put it is this: There is no "canon" in life, reality. There is only a known complex ordered network of fanons, fan theories. Multiple fanons, generalizing other fanons simultaneously, and other fanons that further explain this fanon as inconsequential side stories, or even mere dreams of some character. 

Some very deep and vast fanon might tie in all these other fanons in my mind, and bring me peace temporarily. But that peace will soon be disturbed again when I start asking new questions. What about the backstory of this other character? What about this other event that happened, how does it tie in? And then again I am in uncharted territory, realizing that the fanon that granted me respite was just that; yet another fanon. The attempt to fanonize seems neverending, and one is never sure that their fanon is quite "right", whatever that means. 

Wisdom

As we grow older we do two types of things: 

1. We learn and understand the orderly world built by our predecessors, retracing their footsteps as we understand the deep structure and meaning behind all these rules and stuff they left behind. For example, maybe going from "I need to get a job" to "What do I really want to in life, and what is the optimal way to get there?" to picking up a book on existentialist philosophy and never actually doing anything about it
2. We face "chaotic frontiers" of our own, actually expanding our domain of order. We make efficient, we optimize, we automate. We create rules, laws, systems. We build families, homes, business, empires, governments, or things totally inconceivably new, etc. And in doing so we understand our domains in a deep way that isn't apparent from just looking at the things we have built, just like our forefathers. 

We crystallize this kind of deep intelligence, often called wisdom. We talk about the "wisdom of the ancients", for instance. The funny thing is though, we're not that great at communicating wisdom to our children, even though it just seems extremely necessary: imagine if society was made up of people who lived forever. But then imagine that they forgot 90% of the stuff they learned every few decades. That's basically us.

Maybe it's just not possible, given our resources and the complexity of the ideas. Or perhaps we just don't think it's possible and choose not to. Perhaps our constant failure is that we have always underestimated both our children's capacity for complexity and our capacity to formulate and communicate knowledge. Instead, we have been teaching them those simpler, surface level "heuristics" -- get an education, get a job, get a family -- rather than showing them the deep-level structure of why  and how. Isn't it telling that we are exasperated by our children persistently asking us "Why?" to every subsequent answer? Why do we choose to forget and hide the difficult trail we traveled to get to where we are, when such ready and willing minds exist? Should we not prepare them for the trails ahead, even if those trails may be different?

In that way we are just like those prideful mathematicians, carefully erasing all of the messy tracks and waylays they took to get to a beautiful proof. And the children are like the poor undergraduates just trying to understand what convoluted piece of logical fuckery got the professor from step 3 to step 4. But in real life, our "proofs" are not so beautiful, or even proofs at all. Proofs have to be correct, after all... and I certainly didn't have to graduate from Princeton to be fulfilled with my life. 

Side note: Chaos as randomness

Earlier I brought up the weak Pinsker conjecture. Technically, it's about randomness + order, not chaos + order. But as some may know, chaos can be modeled as randomness. When we're too "lazy" to actually understand those deep-rooted variables that affect significant change, we typically just write down a probability distribution and call it a day. To use a cliche example, a coin flip results is often modelled as a random 50-50 thing, but we know that technically, it's a (mostly) deterministic system, and if we had the time and computing power we could actually predict if it lands heads or tails.

Tangentially related stuff, in spirit and motivation???

https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-time-really-flow-new-clues-come-from-a-century-old-approach-to-math-20200407/

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.1410.pdf

Anti-realism

Point-free approaches to topology, and intuitionistic mathematics

small things

 I don't know why it is, but it's from the small things I seem to learn the big lessons. A lot of the lessons I've learned come from sitting in the car and just thinking about some presumably insignificant event. 

But maybe that's how it is. Lessons don't always come from big life events, they accrue over time and a small push is all it takes to finally re-organize your mindset. Maybe you've just been really fed up with *everything* and something small happens which makes you actually think about what's happening, and you change everything. You're forced out of your local optimum to look for a global one, although it may not be obvious. 

I did read that it gets harder when you're older. The analogy from the book "The Defining Decade" is apt: tiny adjustments will vastly change the course of the ship towards the beginning of the journey, but later on, only big changes, perhaps a storm, will impact where your ship ends up. 

Maybe because I'm younger, the brain is more "malleable". I wonder though, there was this other article I was reading about how it's possible to make your brain younger by changing your thinking habits, particularly by being mindful, reserving judgement and not resorting to old habits, and seeing things as "new". Kind of like a child sees things. 

Speaking of seeing things as "new".... I did learn a lesson about that. One of those big mindset changes happened while I was driving through In-N-Out and feeling not particularly that great after some shitty badminton. Now, my phone had died and I didn't quite know how to get to my girlfriend's place because I was reliant on the GPS. This was not that bad since I am used to this level of idiocy from myself, but I was frustrated about a lot of things: about how work was going, about how I couldn't work up the motivation to get any of it done, about how I never got any good sleep or felt very good physically throughout the day. Particularly frustrating was the fact that somehow I kept never doing anything about any of these things and yet felt increasingly bad about them. So a lot of annoying things were racking up and amplifying in my mind at that moment. Also, what the fuck was taking so long? I thought this was supposed to be an in-and-out kind of thing? 

It was then I read this ad about addiction on the drive-thru window. Their website: slave2nothing.org. Then I remembered: That's how I should be. My situation may bind me, the laws of physics may bind me, but there is no reason I should be slave to my own mind. I should be slave to nothing! In that drive-thru I recited (something like) this: 

"I am slave to nothing.

I am slave to noone. I am slave to no man. I am slave to no woman. I am slave to no self, no concept of self, no perception of self, idea of self. I am slave to no perceived limitations of self. I am slave to no ideas of "who I am" or expectations of "who I should be". 

I am slave to no past. Every moment I am made anew. No, not made anew, since there is no old self to compare to. In every moment I simply am, and again I am no identity in particular. I choose to be who I want to be in every single moment; this is the ultimate tautology. Therefore, I am free to the extent that I choose to remember that I am free. 

I am slave to no opinion. I am slave to no idea. I am slave to no method, no "way". I am slave to no particular approach to any particular problem. I am slave to no model, no theory, no framework.  

I am slave to no emotion. I am slave to no attitude. I am slave to no mindset. I am slave to no fears; particularly the fear that I am small and weak and worthless -- such concepts and thoughts are not meaningful, they do not come from my authentic self but rather a simplistic, toxic view of the world. I am slave to no judgements, particularly of others, since it also comes from the same inauthentic model of the world which had enslaved me. 

I am slave to no habit. I am slave to no society. I am slave to no expectations. I am slave to no calling or work. I am slave to no measures or metrics. I am slave to no goals, objectives. I am slave to no norms, be they delusions or rationalized illusions. I am slave to no perceived reality. 

I am slave to nothing. ..." 

Overfitting a definition of success

It often rubs me the wrong way that "success" seems to be generally defined by what people call "superficial" things, like money, fame, power, impact. 

It clearly rubs a lot of people the wrong way too, since these are in fact seen as "superficial" things by a lot of people. 

But I think it is not right disdain such things... money, fame, power, impact are all great if you're into that sort of thing. You might not be, but that is no reason to shit on other people's hobbies. I often think that there's a psychological component involved: since you can't have those things (well, you can, but you think you can't, or don't want to try) but deep down, kind of want them, you resolve the cognitive dissonance by devaluing those things in your mind. 
I guess more than anything, that comes from personal experience. :) So maybe I should speak for myself.

Anyways, I definitely think there is a much deeper, healthy viewpoint: Success is relative -- it is defined as optimality in pursuit of a goal. And that's the dictionary definition: "the accomplishment of an aim or purpose" per Google. And notice that no particular aim or purpose is specified. The aim, goal, purpose is personal -- it can be anything you want, and you can be successful at it. The goal can even to live in a jar as a way of living out your philosophy (see: Diogenes).

But there are multiple definitions. The next two are:

• the attainment of popularity or profit.
• a person or thing that achieves desired aims or attains prosperity.

Words can mean different things, and that's great, but there's something... wrong about these latter two. We're in fact being tricked into valuing something because of some language shenanigans. Good feelings are associated with general success, as it should be. But then at some point, success became tied to prosperity, and now "good feelings" are tied to prosperity. Then prosperity becomes of the same ranking as success, despite our original definition of success as not being tied to any goal at all! 

In short, the value that we place in prosperity is undeserved, and only derived by proxy from the linguistic connection between "success" and "prosperity". Success is what we really wanted all along, because success is a more general concept. By definition, success is "greater than or equal to" prosperity. 

Not to shit on prosperity... to some extent, I think all humans want prosperity, we have to. And for some, prosperity IS the main or only goal in life, so equating prosperity and success doesn't really change their perspective/theory/philosophy in any way. 

But in general, people's goals are more complicated, and therefore life-success means something different from maximizing prosperity. Perhaps it's having a good relationship with family, friends. Maybe it's not. Perhaps it's knowledge, learning, self-improvement. Maybe it's not. Whatever it is, this dastardly equivalencing of success and prosperity on the linguistic level makes us forget that success is a much more general thing. It changes our goals, making us forget what we actually want, distancing us from our values. No wonder so many people have stupid regrets on their deathbeds like "I really wish I had spent more time with my friends and family".

At some level we all know this stuff. But we clearly don't act that way or really feel it... because we can't help but talk about success in those superficial terms, like "Wow! Look how rich this person is!" or "Wow! Look how beautiful and influential this person is!" and feel a tinge of jealousy or admiration. We always put rich/famous/powerful/influential people on a pedestal and say "Look! A successful person!" 

This is linguistic theft. You're stealing the word "success", robbing us of something to express the achievement of an arbitrary goal to mean the achievement of a very specific goal. If you've ever read the book 1984 or otherwise experienced this yourself (e.g. the cognitive frustration when you can't find that word, or the joy when you learn a cool new word that expresses exactly the subtle feeling you have) you know what happens when you steal words from people. You steal the ideas that the words represented as well, which has other meaningful repercussions. In this case, the idea of succeeding at life goals loses its expressibility (in the form of the word "success"), and so the idea fades, replaced by what success is now defined as -- succeeding at being rich/famous/powerful/influential. But more importantly, you also take the positive vibes associated with general success in life goals (whatever they may be) and assign it to succeeding at being rich, or whatever. For example, imagine how different our perspectives and our worlds would be if we regularly referred to people like Diogenes as "successes". 

Fundamentally, you can model this with some kind of associative information processing thing and explain it with some brain science, but there's no need: if we just paid attention we would notice this kind of abuse and its repercussions happening all the time. 

Remember this: Linguistic theft is idea theft, word murder is thought murder. Ideas orphaned from words die. (Kind of like orphaned memory blocks. Watch your pointers!) 

In the beginning we all wanted success in the general sense. The problem is that by some influence or another, our goals drifted further and further into "prosperity". If all of the goals are just "prosperity", then of course we will begin to identify success with prosperity and forget the deeper, more general notion of success. 

Another way to look at this: it's like overfitting. You know, when you're a kid when you think a word only applies to a really small thing but it's actually a much more general term (I guess this happens to adults too). Or like, giving a foreigner a tour of America but only taking them to places in NYC so now they think America is all Broadway, stocks, rude people, and good food? You can't really blame the kid or the foreigner for what they think! Yes, it is most often the case that truly successful people are rich, famous, powerful, influential. And it is always the case that these sorts of things really stand out to our lizard brains, because our brains are wired to crave such resources. Media and advertising knows this, and feed into it constantly with the messaging that success = prosperity. And that becomes the percieved truth. 

How do we counteract this? One way I've found is to always assume depth and complexity, from which naturally follows the admission of your own ignorance. In particular, whenever you catch yourself thinking a certain way, just go right ahead and rightly assume that what you're seeing is only a tip of the iceberg. You're seeing a manifestation of a much deeper system... so look deeper. If you can't look, just imagine it, or know it's there. You don't always get to see the whole iceberg right away and it's often easier and instinctive to make assumptions. But knowing that there's "something bigger out there" prevents you from thinking that the tip is the whole thing, so that if and when you do discover the other parts of the iceberg you can more readily understand the bigger picture. I think we should all adopt a mathematical mindset, like in that joke about the purported black sheep in Scotland: all you know is that there is a sheep in Scotland, one side of which is black. 

So next time you see "success" associated with "wealth, fame, power, influence" and catch your lizard brain salivating, think and ask yourself what success really means (hint: answer is above). Go beyond the superficial -- saying you want to be rich or famous can't be the whole story, right? There ought to be something much more fundamental. 

And more immediately, let's redefine our notion of success and stop referring to success as shorthand for "success at being rich and famous". Yes, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett are all successes, but not because they're wealthy or famous or powerful or influential, but simply because they literally attained a lot of goals, some of which were arguably quite difficult. Our current usage is an abuse of notation that is actual abuse, and we should stop. 

Language and understanding, syntax and semantics

Programming languages really are just languages, aren't they...?

It seems a little different, though, because there's the linguistic aspect -- i.e. learning the formal grammar of the language -- and understanding the "way to think" -- this computational, algorithmic thinking, algorithmic, "constructivist" thinking. 

But isn't that true for pretty much anything? For example, mathematics definitely has a loosely defined "language" (I mean, there are subsets that are formalized which claim foundational and expressive power over a large part of mathematics, namely mathematical logics with set theory, category theories, type theories... but that's neither here nor there), but it's mostly about a way of thinking that transcends any particular way of writing it. It's an insistence on rigor and certainty, and a reductivist way of thinking that attempts to capture global complexity by working locally and inherently using conscious processing at least on the surface (the unconscious mind has a huge role, but mathematics is filtered and written by the conscious mind) and scaffolding up. 

For another example, anyone who has ever even attempted to learn a different language has faced the fact that there are certain words that simply don't exist in another language. That's because the native speakers of that language literally think differently than them -- i.e. they slice up the cake differently than you do. For instance, in Korean the word for soybean is pretty much the foundational word for all beans, in the sense that black beans are just "black soybeans". Every bean is just a different kind of soybean. 

This is a relatively easy one because the understanding can still be expressed in terms of English language, and therefore the Korean understanding of beans can be understood in terms of the English way to understand things (it sounds complicated, but just know that there are two layers: language and understanding, and we're talking about two versions of these things represented by their language, English and Korean). 

This is all precisely captured in what logicians and philosophers term as the duality of syntax and semantics. Here, syntax refers to literally the language itself: the words, the grammar, the sentences. Semantics would then refer to the understanding beneath which is expressed by those words.

Hypothesis: Perhaps language learning (as in English, Korean, etc) is a little bit different because there seems to typically be good syntactical mappings between two languages. Everyone seems to split the cake basically the same way, so to speak. If there's a slice that's a bit weird, that slice can often be expressed in terms of simple algebraic combinations of other slices... addition? Union? Subtraction? Complements? Linear combinations? Whatever the proper algebraic structure is, whether we end up talking about linear combinations, sigma algebras (actually the category theorists probably have a thing for this already, so we can talk about some really general structure that fits the bill. Maybe consult math3ma), the point is that some language can be understood "in terms of" another language and vice versa. And this "in terms of" is a "simple enough" transformation (linear? continuous?). 

But then again, is it really? 

An emotional algebra? On formalizing/theory-fying "fuzzy stuff"

 If reasoning with so-called "material" information is so extensively formalized by logic and mathematics in general, why do we shirk from doing the same with so-called "emotional" information? 

There are so many things in history which we could not have anticipated a "formal theory" of. Yet we did it anyways. 

First, we understand it intuitively. Often, people who understand it well enough are seen as incredibly wise, smart, "emotionally intelligent". Then, we start naming things, and build a vocabulary for it. Finally, the words themselves paint a picture as the underlying structure projects itself upon these words, and you end up with a grammar, a language. And once you have a language, the theories are just a step away. 

I like to think of it as there being this deep, vast sea with complicated currents moving under the surface. If you were to take a submarine down there, you might get the lay of the land and begin to understand the currents.

But perhaps an easier way to understand them would be to sink some weighted floaty things beneath the surface, and have little colored flags poking out. This is akin to building a vocabulary. And once you've done this, the rest takes care of itself: the currents under the surface move the flags and you can at once see the "structure" of the currents without diving down. The structure builds itself -- it's what you might call a homorphism between the underlying currents beneath the surface to the arrangements of the colored flags above the surface.

-Need to return to this and add examples, can only think of the "idea" of it atm but no concrete examples

Music theorists and food critics

 So apparently music theory is racist because music theory presumes that valid music follows music theoretic paradigms. Here it is... great watch. Let's define: As Westerners, "music" here encompasses things that deal with melody, rhythm, harmony and other things that extend our set of examples, at least to the extent that we're comfortable with still calling them "music". 

Music theory engenders a certain attitude that even when we include certain non-Western sounds under the banner of "music", we only do so to invalidate it under Western music theory, as perhaps incomplete, or just "bad". The simple yet popular example being Ben Shapiro invalidating rap music because it is missing melody, harmony. 

When we reject this standpoint as inherently racist something interesting happens. We are forced to ask: what then is music, and what does "music theory" have to do with anything? 

We expand: what then is food, and what is "good food"? 

Well, now we are thoroughly confused, and perhaps that's a good thing. Confusion arises from trying, as in trying to fit something that just is into some known mental framework when it never asked to be fit... trying to fit an abstract and infinitely detailed jello peg into a two dimensional hole, if you will. 

And perhaps we should stop trying. Just eat the abstract infinitely detailed jello peg already. Take things for what they are: "Food" is definitely a word, "music" is definitely a word, and we try to associate experiences and things to them, for sure. And so these different "foods" and "musics" inspire all sorts of feelings in us, some pleasant, some not so pleasant. We'd like to assign "good" and "bad" to these things, but it's really not just about being pleasant, is it? Somehow there are all these other variables, like how "special" they feel, maybe the "complexity" of feelings they give you, all that. We're not really sure why we're assigning "good" and "bad" to things, but it seems really instinctive and useful, like understanding which mushrooms are tasty and nutritious and which mushrooms will give you diarrhea and a really bad trip when you're a hunter-gatherer in the wild. It's like a tagging system of sorts.

And we seem to take "good" and "bad" as some context-free indicator of general goodness and badness, as in "things to look for" and "things to avoid", as in "things that will generally improve my life experience" and "things that won't". This, in itself, is actually bad. I mean, at some point I'm sure the classification into "good" and "bad" is useful. I'm sure in some contexts it's meaningful and it's actually a good indicator of goodness and badness. But I fear those contexts are actually "Western music" and "French cuisine" respectively. 

How do people decode racism, and how to encode it

In the recent past I thought of racism very logically. Quite literally, I viewed racism as a proposition in classical logic, say R(x), evaluated as either true or false on the set of scenarios, say S. 

And as a result, saying things like "I'm not racist, I have black friends" wasn't anywhere near racist to me and it never made sense when people said that. In truth, I was actually quite frustrated and angry when people took scenarios that didn't seem clearly racist and insisted they were racist. What did it mean for something to be racist anyway? And how do you know what their intentions were? A non-racist could have easily said the same thing, so your accusation is unprovable, and also harmful. 

I refused to acknowledge police brutality on black people using the above logic. Effectively, I put an inordinate and large burden of proof on proving racism.

It turns out I was wrong: they (they being those people who I dismissively regarded as "SJWs") weren't trying to say that something in isolation was definitively racist or not. To them, it's very much a holistic, and sometimes probabilistic (will explain later), thing: you have to look at what has been said in context of who the person is and what they could have meant. When something is said to be racist, it means something more like "this statement provides information that, when taken in context of the situation and the person (such as: is this person white?), would suggest the person held racist views". 

It's actually quite complicated and is akin to a sort of Bayesian statistical inference, where with the new data we have (e.g. the person says "I have black friends") we extrapolate from prior information to deduce the parameters of our model (e.g. a parameter R determining whether the person holds a particular racist view or not). So the "new data" is not by itself determining R (racism), but rather it represents a positive differential flow of information that helps us determine R. However, the way we actually present the result in language is entirely misleading

The thing is, the language we use to call out racism doesn't accurately portray the complexity of the model doesn't help. In fact it further exacerbates a conflict of models: saying that some element (say of a situation, policy, or a statement/action) is racist (e.g. saying "that was racist" in response to someone saying something... well, racist), which is a common turn of phrase nowadays, suggests that said elements has some fixed quantity or quality of racism, as if racism were some kind of fungible property, like money. That is: money can be added to other money in a context free manner... because fungibility is like "a dollar here is a dollar there". It doesn't really matter where you add the dollar, it increases the value of something by $1 no matter what pile of dollars you add it to*. Further, the fungibility property is suggestive of a linear system: an increase dx always results in the same increase dy, no matter which x you're at. And as I mentioned, that's not the framework in which the "woke folks" are operating: saying something (dx) is racist (dy) is not some universal property of that thing (dx), but is rather an abbreviation for a much more complicated scenario that depends on what the situation (x) is. 

So as it turns out we're literally talking about linearity, and also as it happens, the language the woke folks use just reinforces the linear model. It's a communication problem! And the only way to resolve communication is by true understanding. This can only be achieved by proper listening and going beyond the language. The language, as we mentioned, is flawed: it confirms the linear model. 

The problem is, all of this is extremely difficult to understand. At least, it was for me! To someone who is not particularly invested in these issues (see: anyone who is not personally really affected by racism on a day-to-day basis), they have no reason to move from the simple, linear model to this complicated holistic model, especially when the language is not very helpful. It's much easier to stick with our old model, which tells us to disagree and perceive attacks and accordingly take offense when "called out". And we are surprised at this shouting match between two utterly divided sides. 

Indeed, at the core of any communication problem is a listening problem. In the wake of the Floyd shooting, I think many of us have internally recognized the importance of just listening, that it actually works. There's still a whole lot of the same old not listening, shouting, bickering, but things are getting better in the sense that we are collectively building the vocabulary and concepts required to understand the complexities. 

To further complicate matters, the detection of racist elements is entirely statistical, as nothing is certain. For example, Trump saying something kind of suspicious and racist-sounding might get a pass, but done enough times, we're pretty sure the dude is encoding racism. This is problematic because our entire culture, woke folks included, operate based on an assumption of a "linear world" where making local judgements (i.e. evaluating individual statements and taking things out of context) are "good enough" . This is, of course, in contrast to operating on a global/holistic level, taking things with context, and appreciating nonlinearity and embracing full complexity. 

A side note: Linearity seems to be especially an American way of doing things. I wonder how much of it is rooted in the predominant American culture of pragmatism, where the world is simple and straight and things just are, no fuzzy convoluted stuff. It relates to this sort of engineering philosophy of modularity, where components do what components do, anywhere and anywhen. No weird coupling effects, no mess. And perhaps this is also why Americans are less "global-oriented" and sometimes even insist on ignorance to the point of appearing to take pride in it. To continue with the geometric analogy, what might be happening is just an optimization, from an information-processing standpoint: there's no need to explore the whole manifold when you're assuming it's flat (linear), because local information (i.e. gradient) yields everything you need to know about the rest of the manifold. In short, why explore the rest of a flat hill when you know exactly how high you're going to be at every point? Indeed, to Americans, maybe the rest of the world is basically just America (just shittier).  

And furthermore, at the risk of sounding like I'm contradicting myself, it's not like just because it's statistics, there's nothing really concrete that can be said about racist statements. There are still enforceable "taboos", such as certain words and phrases that are said to be inherently racist. 

But given that we just developed this whole idea of Bayesian statistics and context sensitivity, how could we possibly go back on it and justify calling things "racist" in a context-free manner? How can "things" be "racist", regardless of  how or by whom or when it was said? Well, this is again a language problem -- "that's racist" is a pretty overloaded phrase. It's the "proliferation" argument at work: we should not say certain things simply because we don't want them to proliferate. To use a lateral example, using the word "gay" to describe something negatively isn't homophobic in the sense of the "statistical inference" thing, 

Honestly the whole thing is a little bit too complicated to express in the language of common discourse, which is why we struggle as a society today. The ironic thing is that most such things things are simple to explain in the language of mathematics. It's an unfortunate reality, but usually what happens is that over time, the public learns, effectively recreating the equivalent structure in, literally, their own words. Sometimes the resulting new language and theory reflects the obvious mathematical structure, other times it's a quite a bit different. More on these ideas later... maybe. 

*Generally in finance though, if we go beyond dollar-speak, it turns out that financial decisions are not fungible either, even though we would like to think of them as such (it's a lot easier to calculate and optimize decisions when every aspect of a decision has a fixed cost). For example, we would like to think of purchasing a home as having some sort of fixed value, and one can indeed arrive at some kind of opportunity cost number given some fixed time window like 5 years... but add in just a little pinch of reality and you can ask questions like, if you didn't buy that home and invested it, what then is the cost of the home after 5y? What if you didn't invest it? Should we use that number? Or what if you "invested" in a lottery ticket? It becomes a little ridiculous if we go on, but the point is that it's not so simple, so when financial experts talk about "opportunity cost" of a decision or equivocally the "'value' of the object being bought/sold" itself it's actually in a very particular context. It's important not to believe that $ value applies universally to every financial situation and decision context. 

ice cream is really Good with warm la croix

 yes it is

The Process

I read this interesting article the other day, real eye-opener. 

The idea is that if you just start focusing on the process, rather than the outcome, you'll start feeling much more free, much more effective. And this is true on multiple levels and for multiple reasons. 

There's so many other concepts that link with this one: 

• Focus units -- by removing extraneous considerations, you free up focus units
• These focus units can be used to form a global perspective, for instance. Perhaps "go meta", form a general theory, a model to understand your internal data. A model helps you interpret internal feedback in the model context and gives you hints on which points to test and explore to gain maximal information under the model assumptions. It could even help you build your own learning plan. 
• Control and optimization -- by paying attention to internal factors (factors that are directly under your control) and less so on external factors (factors not under your control), you can run a learning algorithm to find the correct control pattern to get the desired result. The classic example/model is a smooth map between two differentiable manifolds. Outcome-fixation is like trying to control the outcome from the range directly, but it's really the domain that controls the outcome. 
• A cute mathematical application of binary search for optimal control comes in bottle flipping. The mistake people usually make is not paying enough attention to how your kinetic chain feels when flipping the bottle, instead focusing heavily on the way the bottle flips. Once you start feeling, you can start adjusting and remembering and get pretty consistent. In the end, the most complex of movements is controlled by just a series of muscle contractions. It doesn't come from you "imagining the movement really hard in your mind and trying to do it" -- this typically results in your mind resorting to known habits, which is often the opposite of what you're trying to do when you're learning something new
• Mindfulness -- outcome-fixation is often accompanied by looping noise and negative thoughts which ruin focus and consume mental resources. 
• Scarcity mindset -- outcome-fixation is often accompanied by scarcity mindset. This is a well-known cause of tunnel visioning, which is almost always contrary to our complex, modern day goals. 

Global perspectives, and Steve Jobs' definition of "smart"

 Steve Jobs once defined "smart" this way:

A lot of [what it means to be smart] is the ability to zoom out, like you’re in a city and you could look at the whole thing from the 80th floor down at the city. And while other people are trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B reading these stupid little maps, you could just see it in front of you. You can see the whole thing.

Oftentimes you will find that local insights can be put into context if you have knowledge about global trends. It's good to remember that everything you do is part of a larger future, and that you yourself are a cog in the machine. 

Additionally, this perspective also helps you get out of focusing on stupid shit and keeps you reminded of other important lessons. Like:

• Focus on what you CAN do, not the results (Stoicism, Focus, and The Process). Learn to "localize" properly. 
• Understand your local goals in the context of your life, your life goals
• Understand your life goals in context of how you fit into this world
• Understand others, and others' actions and how they appear in context of their own lives, their own feelings as actual human beings (dovetails with emotional intelligence) 
• Understand your life goals, yourself, and others in context of the world
• Understand the world in context of long-term, large-scale, global effects -- e.g. the market, economy, historical patterns leading to rich insights (typically coded in few words but hard to understand unless you know them already) 

Keeping a global perspective prevents you from tunnel visioning, since it's easy to "drill down" into local effects but it's hard to "dig out" to see the big picture. Example: You start having troubles with your old car. You think it's really important that you to purchase a new car soon, but upon taking a global perspective, you start questioning yourself. What do you actually need it for? Frequency of use?  Is it going to increase your life satisfaction? Does it align with your values (e.g. considering environmental impact, economic waste)? 

I think what Steve Jobs defined can also be applied to "wisdom". Wisdom is making sense of everything but in a more elegant mental model. The way society is, all that. In short: Knowledge is local, wisdom is global. 

Related:

"We call the local cue knowledge and its accumulation wisdom, and the canine (and we humans) need both kinds of information to succeed." - L. Mahadevan, https://www.quantamagazine.org/l-mahadevan-finds-math-inspiration-in-the-mundane-20201026/

Learning: Importance of foundations

 I've found that a lot of people "know" things, but one you start questioning them deeply they don't really "understand" things. 

To put things in a formal perspective, you can say there's little "connectivity" and "rich graph structure" beneath that single "node". For instance, you might talk to some pop science enthusiast about the hip new discovery in particle physics. He might know all the names: Higgs-Boson, wave-particle duality, whatever. But you start asking questions and it appears that their mental model is basically the same as yours, except with special names for "very small glowy balls". 

Elon Musk says this is not so helpful. He makes sure to build the trunk first, instead of collecting the leaves. Build a core knowledge base -- what is this field actually about? And then, as you accumulate knowledge start building connections, a rich graph structure, involving the foundations, the new knowledge, to external knowledge, whatever. 

If the previous lesson regarding memory was about having the requisite nodes available, this one is about building connections between the nodes. 

Badminton: The whip action and loosening up to speed up

 So I noticed that especially when I get frustrated in a game, I will tend to try to "push" shots with the more initial, "bigger" parts of my kinetic chain. People call this, "muscling the shot". Meaning, say in a backhand, I will try to push harder with my arm instead of letting go and letting my wrist take care of the rest. It's this insistence on "more muscle = more power" that is absolutely false in badminton. 

As a test, try the backhand lift. How this should feel is that upon the completion of the move, the arm wants to fly up due to the momentum despite the arm being completely relaxed. That's because energy transfer occurred efficiently: nearly all the energy from the arm transferred to the racket, and the racket now wants to pull the arm up. That's how pretty much ALL shots should be. 

Why? Well try muscling a backhand tap drive. You'll notice that the while accelerating, the wrist is not nearly able to generate that speed, effectively springing off of the forearm rotationally and absorbing that energy from the forearm. That's because it requires more force to complete a shot against that acceleration. It's like jumping off of an accelerating platform. 

It's better instead to apply just the right amount of forward force with your arm so that you wrist stays stationary and absorbs the maximal amount of energy while it is uncoiling. Why? I'm not completely sure. 

All I can say is that when it comes to the stretch-shortening cycle, it's better not to fuck with the forces. For example, don't try to force pronation to go faster by either directly attempting to add additional muscle to a pronation or adding forward acceleration to your arm and trying to press the whole thing forward, which would be accompanied by either: 1. attempted additional muscling of the pronation leading to a weaker shot or 2. slowing down of the pronation movement, leading to incomplete and bad shot. 

If you do 1, you're essentially composing motions. This defeats the purpose of the whip action: the cue is to break up your motion into independent segments. Example: When the body is done rotating, it only serves as a foundation for energy transfer into the arm. And when the arm is done accelerating, it too should stop and only hold enough force to pass its energy down to the forearm, then forearm to pronation, etc. This way a slow, large bank of energy gets transferred into a small, fast bank of energy. That's how you generate speed, and that's the idea of badminton shots (and trebuchets). The SSC is the same concept, but with elasticity: it's capable of converting a lot of potential energy into speed, but only under certain conditions. If you mess with it it doesn't work. 

This idea seems to work for basically any shot: the overhead forehand, backhand, drives, lifts. The shot I'm not completely sure about is the forehand drive, the one shot that seems like more muscle rather than the stretch-shortening cycle (SSC). 

Learning: Memory as a component, and prep work in cooking

So I ran across this yesterday.

You know, a math professor I really respect liked to say that "Intelligence is just structured memory". And he's right. Memory is so important, just like prep work is an important part of cooking. 

At some point during high school though I started scoffing at the notion of memorizing things, and the attitude grew with me during college as well. I think it was when I started getting more into philosophy and mathematics that I prioritized the generating of thoughts and ideas, and processing/understanding them as way more important than memory. I rebelled hard against that Asian ideal of rote memorization, and sort of demonized it in my head.

Yes, learning is about understanding and not just about memory. But you need memory, some kind of memory, or else you'll never actually learn anything, you won't change. It's like saying that cooking is not prep work and dicing vegetables and glorifying all the master chef work, recipe research, with absolute disregard for anything that happens before.

But anyone who cooks knows that prep is extremely important, mise en place is extremely important. How you do it is important -- cutting vegetables and meat into even pieces, placing things so as to reduce cognitive load when doing the "cook" part. 

There is a direct relation to learning and thinking as well: you need to have stuff memorized, like really well-memorized, if you want to make sure you don't think in circles, waste time, miss things and misunderstand things and just learn very inefficiently in general. Memorizing provides the foundation for the processing later on, much like the processor works with bits in memory or the cook works with evenly cubed carrots for his curry. 

At some point I forgot this. Or perhaps it's better to say I never actually learned it. Either way, I got into the habit of learning like how I cook now: doing the memory part as an afterthought (most of the time less than an afterthought because I never consciously gave it any thought) only when I absolutely needed it at the time. Although I've gotten better at this, during cooking I often forget to prep and start getting the spices out, looking for stuff, chopping vegetables while something's already in the pan. There's basically no structure to that at all, no thought to optimization. Particularly because I discount the holistic important of memory and focus on the method that I feel is "right" because it appeals to my philosophy and sense of beauty. Prep work is gross, memorizing things is inglorious. Almost a Heidegger-esque revulsion to "manual" labor. 

But when I do have quick-access to things in memory, particularly the very ingrained, muscle-memory type, the processing goes a lot smoother since I don't have to shift my mental resources around trying to remember different things constantly. There's a lot less interrupts and my learning speed increases exponentially. In general, I think that although you shouldn't be stuck in the basics trying to perfect them forever, having a strong (or at least existent) foundation often exponentially increases your learning rate. 

Badminton: Learning with constraints and shortening the feedback cycle

I'm going to try constraining myself to "good form" and "solid footwork" first before allowing those "reach" shots. Honestly that's what 

This will serve the purpose of not only habitualizing proper footwork but also learning strategy and shot placement by making the consequences of poor shots more immediate, therefore shortening the feedback cycle. Also I'm pretty sure it also helps with lots of other things like racket position, general positioning, shot quality, etc. 

The idea, of course, applies to everything, not just badminton. Sometimes generalizing and de-constraining helps particularly when there is some elegant expression in the non-constrained space (for example, see "Long-term motor learning: Effects of varied and specific practice" , but oftentimes holding one variable fixed is better for working memory and feedback, and thus better for learning.

Classical music

 There's so much deep theory, so much deep stuff in the study of classical music. And pop music, despite being somewhat inspired by and based on the same theory, seems to just throw all that stuff out the window and start over.

But it actually kind of works, because pop music surprises me sometimes. It does new things all the time, perhaps by virtue of discarding the old entirely. And pop music is kind of fun to listen to.

This pattern happens all the time, though. Movies, shows, video games, what have you. Even food. 

It's this dynamic where a field advances to an extent and develops this massive history, culture, and depth and explores all kinds of things. It gets to a point, I guess, where it just becomes so obtuse and dense that the general populace doesn't care anymore and the popular stuff becomes relatively more "basic". 

The "snobs" look down on these works because they're basically things "they've seen before" -- I mean, not literally, because nobody has lived through thousands of years of music, but things that the "theory" has taught them.

And often it's when the pop stuff encroaches on the domain of the more complex that it often gets really good. This can be explained in terms of the dynamics, too... as the audience starts to re-learn, basically, the theory that already exists classically because they start getting numb to the "quick fix" effects and tire of the same old thing (e.g. people start getting tired of the same old superhero movies and explosions no longer give them the happy feels), they start demanding something with more substance and flavor and complexity (e.g. people actually like the new Joker). And then the classically trained folk look down on this because duh, this has already been done and you're raving about something we've known about and we've gotten over years ago (e.g. critics criticize the Joker for just being a rehash of Taxi Driver). 

And this is not just about music at all, some examples I can list off the top of my head: the rise of foodies, 

I guess this all fits into the theory of expert-layman dynamics, except we're talking about art and entertainment here and in this case the laymen are just as involved (typically in science there's no real "popular culture" around science. I mean there's pop science but that's a little different). 

Contexts and Seas

https://www.quantamagazine.org/emily-riehl-conducts-the-mathematical-orchestra-from-the-middle-20200902/

I wonder if chaos theory, or mathematics in general, had anything to do with how the dinosaurs got out. Did Dr. Malcolm know what he was talking about? Was he showboating? Both?

But then again, when does "mathematics in general" not have anything to do with anything? I wonder if mathematicians who work in dynamical systems sort of see the world differently, and they can just "see" certain things which seem magical to us.

Must be. Sometimes, knowledge global structure and dynamics yields really valuable insight about local patterns. Even things that seem chaotic locally often seem to admit some global pattern, right?  History gives us perspective into law and modern-day politics, evolutionary theory yields insights for psychology, sociology. 

It's sort of a Grothendieck-esque thing, I feel. One of my favorite analogies by Grothendieck is the following: 

"If you think of a theorem to be proved as a nut to be opened, so as to reach “the nourishing flesh protected by the shell”, then the hammer and chisel principle is: “put the cutting edge of the chisel against the shell and strike hard. If needed, begin again at many different points until the shell cracks—and you are satisfied”. He says: I can illustrate the second approach with the same image of a nut to be opened. The first analogy that came to my mind is of immersing the nut in some softening liquid, and why not simply water? From time to time you rub so the liquid penetrates better, and otherwise you let time pass. The shell becomes more flexible through weeks and months—when the time is ripe, hand pressure is enough, the shell opens like a perfectly ripened avocado!"

He imagined that a problem could be "submerged and dissolved by some more or less vast theory, going well beyond the results originally to be established". I think this is particularly striking, because that's how I imagine it -- a structure made of something loose, porous, and then some sea comes along which basically surrounds, marinates, penetrates, and incorporates this structure so that it's not literally the same, but rather the same thing viewed in a lager context. Something that is more "filled in" but at the same time more general, global, reaching beyond your initial world (the porous structure). 

Or maybe it's like never seeing a car before, and looking at a particular portion of it, perhaps the gearbox. You study the thing to death and do some really cool things with it, and then you are shown the whole car, the whole damn thing and you realize why the components are arranged the way they are, and why they HAVE to be like that. But I imagine that cars are not the only thing that use gearboxes, so there are even more ways to expand your concept of gearboxes. 

So I imagine that there are actually multiple "seas" that might encapsulate the same "structure" in different ways. 

Lately I've been wondering exactly how much I know, and judging by my "learning velocity" I know basically nothing. There's so many mind-opening things to be known, so many seas to immerse my models into. 

Badminton post: Good kinetic chain form and the forehand drive

I watched a kid doing training today and observed the way he hit the shuttle when he was doing forehand drives or other non-full-power forehand shots.

Basically, the correct motion is to do a sort of a "push", your arm coming forward and your wrist flying back (relative to the elbow) and then coming forward. It might feel as if you're "slicing" the shuttle from under it, but if you time it right it actually won't slice. Another key point is that a little bit of downward motion with the forearm is OK. The racket still has some upward trajectory because of the wrist, so in combination there is hardly any slicing. That's why it often looks like good players are almost slicing the shuttle. 

Of course if you have less time, you're going to need to tighten up the wrist, and there will be a lot less backstroke, especially at the wrist level. So it won't be this "looser", larger, and more powerful, stroke. That goes with any stroke -- for a properly executed stroke with "good kinetic chain form", a quicker, less powerful stroke corresponds with more tightness along the kinetic chain, but still the same idea holds: propagation of momentum and energy from the base (closed end of the kinetic chain), along the joints (leg drive, hip rotation, torso rotation, shoulder rotation, elbow flexing, wrist flexing or wrist pronation) to the end effector (the racket). 

The following is a page from my OneNote on badminton technique: 

Try not to execute any stroke with an "open kinetic chain". If you have to, at least make sure to generate enough of a "base" so that your shot feels good.

 

You must first prioritize this quality above power. Because this is actually where power comes from. It must come from the base of your kinetic chain and propagate outward (and yes, this means you need to work on proper footing and footwork too). By forcing yourself to do it properly, you will learn to plan your movement to accommodate this.

 

This is one of the biggest differences between trained players vs players with bad habits.

 

 

 

Exercise: Focusing on accuracy

What helped me was just purely focusing my attention on making sure the shot was executed with good kinetic form. Practice forehand drives and forehand lifts without worrying about your power output. Instead, focus on the quality of the shot (i.e. how it bounces off your racket without slicing) and the accuracy of the shot.

 

This is what Ice meant when he said to focus on the accuracy of the shot first. It's not necessarily about where the shot goes, but more that when you focus on accuracy instead of power, you'll think about your body and how it feels in relation to the shuttle and the racket. You'll have to think and prepare for how you want to hit the shot, because accuracy doesn't come without thought. On the other hand, power often comes without thought -- it comes via instinct, strength, muscle, emotion. But… that's only true for very very basic things, not with complex movements like badminton. In badminton, power comes from proper form + time (see below) much like a lot of things. By taking your mind off of power, you forget your instinct and patterns and go into a "learning mode" where you are perceptive about your own sphere of control and the feedback and adjust accordingly.

 

Cue/Check

When you do it right, you'll feel that you're executing the shot with your body, not your wrist or elbow or fingers or wherever. You won't feel unnecessary tension and pain in your joints or muscles because you're trying to force a fast, powerful shot that doesn't exist and reinforcing the lack of kinetic planning and bad habits.

 

Corollary: Power is proportional to time

The interesting corollary to all of this is that if you're holding constant shot quality and accuracy (which is the most important) by executing the same consistent and optimal form, power becomes proportional to time. The only variable you have to play with is how much time you have to execute the shot.

 

And since the amount of time you have from the shot coming off of the opponent's racket and the shot being available to you is bounded by some figure, the only variables you can control are how quickly you're able to mentally process the shot, how prepared you are for the shot, and where you decide to take the shot.

Earning more time: Keeping your racket in position
Let's just discuss the preparation part because that's the easiest to fix. When coaches and others say "keep your racket up", this is what they mean. You will know when you're not doing it right because when you execute the stroke, it will feel as if you're fighting the inertia of the stroke. Remember Stroke: Kinetic Chain? You will feel "rushed" in having to put your racket into position against inertia, fight and cancel out the velocity that was generated while you rushed to raise your racket into position, then perform the stroke. However this requires extra movement because of that extra backwards velocity, so you're going to have to perform a longer stroke (power is proportional to time). That means either you eke out a terrible quality shot that goes outside or just perform a weak shot.

 

So what do you do? Just keep that racket "in position"! And by "in positiion", I mean keep it in a position where you'll have to move it very minimally to get it into the right spot. And that means you actually need to pay attention to where you think the shuttle is going to come very fast where you'll have little time to line up a shot. Think about all the shots you may have to perform, and either imagine or actually experiment whether it's possible to do a shot that is:

1. Quick enough
2. Proper form (kinetic chain is properly engaged with maximal energy transfer)

Focus units

 Watched this video the other day. It's all about focus, and how to manage it -- kind of a game changer, even though I had supposedly learned this lesson before. I read Deep Work and all that, so I should know all about treating your mind as a resource, and managing it efficiently, effectively, blah blah.

 But you know... we forget lessons all the time. That's what practice is for, to drill known concepts into "muscle memory", unconscious processing, habit (that's why they're called drills, I guess) (also on another note... practice doesn't always make perfect). The Power of Habit anyone? And that's what churches are for. It's not enough to tell people once, even if they totally agree with your message during a fiery revival and have some sort of awakening/revelation. That shit happens to me all the time* and it lasts two weeks at best. Not religious revelations, although sometimes it feels spiritual.. 

Anyways, back to focus. The main thing I took from this video, aside from remembering how focus works, was why I had trouble actually implementing the lesson. You see, if I know one thing about myself it's my neuroticism and small working memory. That's two things. And that's a terrible combination with my tendency to worry about missing or failing at anything, so I try to take everything on. That's three. Further I attribute every failure to personal weakness, so I either get dejected or reject the feedback and attempt to delude myself or blame the problem, the situation, or others. Okay, four things and a half. On top of that, I refuse to reach out for help or advice because technically that's also personal weakness. Five things and a half. Also, I sometimes like to gimp myself by insisting I do things, but without using X. Just for fun and generality. Six. 

So when you put 2 and 1 and 1.5 and 1 and .5 together, you get a guy trying to juggle 4 balls and a knife and a torch with one arm, terrible form, while constantly worrying and beating himself up with the other arm or just throwing a tantrum when he drops the ball, causing even more balls to drop, yet still insisting that he can juggle them all while taking on even more balls and doing the same thing over and over. Definition of insanity much? 

Watching this video made me realize that I'm allowed to let myself focus on juggling one ball at a time, and in fact that's pretty much the only way I'm going to get things done. It reminded me how much I actually love focusing, if only I would let myself. It did this my making me face the hard truth that actually I'm finite, and suck just like everyone else and I should just allow myself the pleasure of focusing on something rather than somethings and quit setting physically unattainable nth dimensional bars for myself. Yes, we all suck. If some people look like they suck less it's actually because they accepted the suck and figured out how to make the best out of it. Probably. I mean I'd hate to think that it's just me who sucks.

*More like once every few months, but you get my point

Mathematics is just a form of mental gymnastics

Our neural networks often generate these little "concepts". (See motivating example in addenda)

 

The powerful thing here, is that we can write such concepts down, or otherwise name or remember it. And once we've written it or remembered it, we can do things with it that we normally can't do when it is but a fleeting pattern of signals in our neural network.

 

As a still-quite-abstract example, sometimes we retrieve a mathematical idea from a very "fuzzy" intuitive idea, or some "hunch" that we have. We just know that some mathematical description of it ought to exist, and eventually we're able to write it down and "capture it" to some sufficient degree. This is done in the exact same way a painter captures a feeling or concept in a painting.. in the sense that the image of the painting in our minds can be processed in a way that evokes the concept or emotion in our deeper mind. The simplest way to do it is by naming, which is basically the bundling together of several intuitive thoughts, feelings, experiences into one without any additional structure. Of course we usually do something more than naming, using other pre-established names and relations to build something with structure, and in effect "reducing" the thing-in-our-minds into just these other, already labelled, "known" things arranged in some combinatorial way. 

 

Anyways, once we've captured a concept as described, we can apply other little concepts to it, create more structures. In this way we build and build. Essentially we are "hacking" our own minds, conceiving of new ways to think about the same things in different ways, about different things in the same ways. Further, we often "extend" our neural network by using external memory (e.g. paper and pencil) and external processing (e.g. computers, grad students).

 

This idea of forcing our brains to do different things… this "hacking" thing…. Seems profound. It's like us trying to transcend our own minds, become greater than it by telling it how to think. But by definition… we can never transcend our own minds, right? 

 

..Or can we? We might consider that indeed, we're not just using our minds, but other things: paper, pencil, computers, and… time.

 

The summative mathematical results of our mathematical work across all memory, external or otherwise, and time… may indeed surpass anything any mind by itself would have done, ever.

I mean, that's a nice fantasy. But what do you call math that you do entirely in your head, and learn via experience over time? What if, say, a man thinks up of an addition system all on his own, just over time?

 

Well… that man still made an effort to remember stuff in his head, effectively "writing". The point is that he still used your executive function to make sure his brain "burned in" certain things, certain "gymnastics". That's when you're doing math -- you're becoming aware, conscious, and basically manipulating your unconscious mind to make it do what you want. It often involves taking bits and pieces of the thoughts from the unconscious brain, naming them and storing the labels into the conscious brain, then using them to take control of what the unconscious brain computes for you. Usually, the unconscious brain is purely functional -- like an artificial neural network, it arranges itself in the optimal way in response to reinforcing stimuli. But when one does mathematics, one might say it becomes more than just a means to an end, but a means in itself. This idea, in fact, reflects in mathematics itself at several levels: On the actual doing of mathematics level, there's often theory that just is. It doesn't really "operate" on anything, and it's more like am abstract painting than anything else, just sort of describing this object. It's sort of the part of math where you build definitions, write axioms. And then there's mathematics that "says stuff". Theorems, lemmas, applications. And on the outside-of-math level, there's mathematics that's really "pure" and doesn't seem to be inspired by or say much about much of anything. And then there's mathematics that really came to be as an abstraction of real things and experiences.

 

You might say that the conscious brain is not as powerful, but with the help of the unconscious brain and by making it "its bitch", it can do some pretty impressive stuff, something the unconscious brain by itself wouldn't have really bothered to figure out on its own.

Of course, this is sometimes less true than other times. It's like native people who speak a language vs a foreigner who learned it "by the book". As foreigners, the native people, it might appear, "know" the grammar rules! But anyone who is even slightly introspective about how they speak their native tongue knows that that's just not how it works. We will often be surprised that certain rules even exist, despite the fact that we magically seem to always follow them (e.g. order of adjectives in English).

And indeed, there are structures in our deep unconscious minds that make it so (hence why we don't observe the rules consciously), although they may not actually be represented by literal graph-theoretic components strung together in some logical structure that the grammar books seem to imply.

In fact brain research hints at the contrary (brain surgery experiment), which is that logically modular "functions" seem to be more topologically distributed rather than actually topologically compartmentalized in the brain. And indeed, this may just be a better, faster way to do things, and the componentization is just a side effect of the deep structure of how the function really works.

 

So do we say that the native speaks "does grammar"? Not really, not in the same way that the foreigner "does grammar".

 

And it's true, it's quite beautiful in a way how native speakers can speak their language so well and so effortlessly. The foreigners might be slower, limited. But oftentimes we will be surprised at how eloquent the truly well-studied foreigners are. There's a running joke on social media sites about how people who say apologize saying "sorry, English is not my native tongue" often speak English better than half the native English speakers on the site!

 

And there is an advantage to knowing conscious, compartmentalized, formal rules of grammar. And that's provability, communicability, and extensibility. That is, with provability, we can extend, scale. And we can communicate and share proofs with other minds, because the elementary objects of the proofs are, purportedly, basic concepts we can all work with and understand.

 

With only our pure, unconscious neural networks, we can only do so much. It's true that we often overthink, theorize, and generally forget to get out of our heads and just simply do the task, but at the same time we're not going to be launching spaceships based on the advice of some seasoned veteran who "knows his rockets real well". Because first of all, such a veteran isn't going to exist…. I mean, how much "trial and error" are you gonna have when it comes to building rockets (which is what you need for the training phase of the unconscious mind)

 

I mean, raw experience and ingrained skill are great for most human tasks…  maybe even all human endeavors and jobs/skills made up before some time period (hunting, farming, building). But even the slightly more complex stuff require some theory. And of course, once you're talking theory, you're talking about the conscious mind. Executive function. Rules. Logic. Legos.

 

And the two minds used together in this way, in what we call "mathematics", is truly powerful. And that's what mathematics, at its core, is really all about. Using your head real smart.

But I doubt mathematics is the only way to use your head real smart. It sure is an interesting way to do it, and it definitely seems to be the most executive-dominant method of the bunch.