verbal overshadowing

Banausos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plato's Allegory of the Transition Map

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

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

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

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

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

Map and Territory

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

Another few analogies while we're at it: 

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

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

A story

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

What will the world look like in 10 years?

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

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

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

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

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

all models are wrong but some are useful 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

being yourself is the most difficult and valuable thing

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

After years of getting it wrong

But you had it right the whole time

You just had to listen to yourself

But you forgot how

You're just other people now

Playing adult

With other people now

They forgot how

To listen to themselves

They had it right the whole time

After generations of getting it wrong

Are we allowed to weigh in

Cantor, Löwenheim-Skolem

Cantor, Löwenheim-Skolem

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

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

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

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

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

I dream of paradise, and sleep soundly tonight

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

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

 

Wreckless love

Wreckless love

I watched them refurbish the ship of Theseus

All hull, bow, stern and keel. 

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

There was no part they could keep. 

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

"I will always love you."

In converse echoed back the ship of Theseus, 

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

Note

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

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

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

2/17/26

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

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

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

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

Power law - Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heuristic medicine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jan 2026

Somehow I'm always surprised that travel so consistently forces you to re-think and experience in first principles. Being snowed in, having plans and flights cancelled repeatedly, trying to manage classwork and (mostly self-imposed) social expectations with compounding sleep debt... fighting bitterness and depression resurfacing over petty comparisons, past mistakes, lost time... but having the space and time to work through it all and come out happier. It reminds me a lot of the winter youth retreats from years ago: the cold and the discomfort that seemed to contribute to the emotional purge I'd experience at the revival sermons, the afterglow that lasted all of two days when I got back. It turns out those two days were the actual vacation. 

Shoveled friend's driveway for fun. Vacation never feels like vacation unless I do some work... 

There's always this turbulence between a nihilistic "life is meaningless and painful, so why do anything" and existentialist "life is meaningless but joyful, make meaning of it". I think it's that both are valid at different times. You can reframe pain all you want but there is no escaping it in that moment. Avoiding it dulls your capability to live, drags things out. Being stuck in your head prevents you from engaging with, experiencing, remembering the external world, but that struggle is necessary sometimes. You have to fully hold both sides as valid.

I was listening to this podcast today and the author (George Saunders) and Dua Lipa reflected on the absurd nature of death, and how he himself, despite struggling and failing to find peace with death in any consistent way, finds that it lends force to art -- the impermanence of those "sacramental" moments where through art, we become something more than our mundane selves, something more pure. Actually, I'd like to pass this idea to the limit and say that we die every second we are alive, each such "mundane" moment holding the same beauty. It's just that sometimes we are allowed (allow ourselves?) to bask in it when awareness aligns with the moment in a kind of flow state. 

Deleting

I hoard notes. I can't seem to let them go the same way I can't seem to let the past go. I don't want to forget since I don't trust my memory. But it seems the more I try to hold the more things slip through, the more I forget. Sometimes I wonder if my past prevents me from living in the present. 

Many times I've thought that the only reason I didn't end myself is because I'd leave all these notes behind, baring all my embarrassing and personal thoughts. It's a stupid reason, so tonight I decided to eliminate that. I gave a cursory look through some of my notes -- mostly rubbish, but some approached honesty, feeling. There were a couple interesting ideas I thought to save, write-ups I wouldn't be too ashamed of leaving behind. 

So much of my notes were about how to do things better, how to improve, lessons I'd learn, things I had to do and learn. A few reflected pain and anguish. Some were impressive, the way I could contrive thought without knowing a whole lot. It felt pretty human and insignificant, to be honest. If I were capable of regretting right now, I'd say I'd regret not feeling, experiencing, instead of thinking more. I wish I had been at a point I could be more honest with myself. But I guess I've never been a good writer. 

More surprisingly I found that I didn't find a lot of things embarrassing. A few things still were, but I felt more than just cringe. It really felt kind of familiar and distant at the same time. I didn't really care for his past struggles... but I suppose he was not speaking to me. Humans are humans, I feel that now. I can't really judge. Even the most embarrassing parts of myself, stupid things that I wouldn't tell anyone, things that still make me cringe at first glance, I think twice. I now know better than to judge myself, judge others. So maybe it was that, or maybe it was just not caring. 

One particular entry from NYE 2020 was rough. It was titled "I am shit", and it was this text exchange, or more of a tirade on my end, about me realizing how worthless I was. About me having convoluted everything, and it's clear to me now, because I was so incapable of dealing with emotion in myself and others. It's embarrassing but I accept it. I just feel bad that my partner then had to deal with that.

I think the entries that were hardest to delete were my rants on whatever relationship issue I was dealing with at the time. Things with feeling. I don't know if it was the right move... but it feels like a form of death. I remember reading this thing, that even if you remember it's not the real thing, a facsimile, a projection of your current self. But I feel like I remember that past self quite well. It wasn't that long ago.

But it's likely that I won't remember anything now. The idiosyncrasies that stay with me from those times, I won't be able to trace. If I meet them, what reference will I have with them? I'm no longer that person, even moreso now. But maybe that's exactly the thing I have to do. 

Future

It's a well known question: if all we know and are is *now*, what sense is there in preparing for the future?

In the late 1960s, a study was conducted in Stanford where a child was seated at a table with a marshmallow placed in front of them. The child could eat it now or wait until the researcher returned, at which point they would get a second marshmallow. These children were tracked throughout their adult lives, and those who were able to delay gratification tended to have "better" life outcomes -- better paying jobs, better health, etc. 

Some people moralize delay of gratification, talk highly of discipline and grit. Not everyone feels so strongly about it but I'm sure most agree future-thinking is better than living hedonistically or impulsively -- that it's far better to wait for the second marshmallow.

I question that, though. Only the present moment is certain -- and even if we model the future, the further out it gets the more uncertain it is. And a marshmallow in hand is worth two in the bush, no?

There is no real benefit to assigning a hierarchy to different parts of the brain -- the so-called "monkey brain" and the frontal lobe are all part of a singular reinforcement learning agent that seeks reward. For some, two marshmallows doesn't mean double the happiness and they'd rather have a certain marshmallow now. For others, maybe the waiting itself is the reward, as the promise of two is worth it. Or perhaps the reward is the the feeling that you're following the rules, that you're taking the "smarter" path, being a good boy like your parents taught you, or even avoiding punishment by doing the "right" thing. Maybe you even get to feel better than those undisciplined, uneducated folk who just can't wait. 

As it turns out, the latter is closer to the truth. Later replications of the marshmallow study found that family environment and socioeconomic status explained much of the difference in life outcomes. In other words, people who wait for two marshmallows do so mostly because their parents told them to. Then they grow up and tell their kids the same thing, that two is better than one, which conditions their kids to reward themselves while waiting for that marshmallow ("I'm a good kid"/"I'll get hit if I..."/"I'm better than them"), and hence the two-marshmallow faith self-perpetuates. 

Loneliness

There's a kind of loneliness that goes deeper than physical loneliness, emotional loneliness. It's the realization that no matter how close you are with someone, at the end of the day it is only your conscious experience that you have. It is the solipsistic reality that you only presume what others think and feel, *that* others think and feel. It's what I describe as the realization that you are an island in a dense, eternal fog, and there's no real evidence that there are other islands in the sea, only currents to suggest so. 

Even if they do, you communicate through such channels already so narrow and further hampered by societal, cultural, or emotional barriers. 

It's a feeling I want to investigate further. I don't think it's necessarily a bad feeling, this loneliness. I think that maybe it's not necessarily the stripping away of the physical, mental, emotional frameworks of our everyday life that gives it this "lonely" flavor -- in fact I think this ought to be liberating. Maybe it's the holding onto that last frame of "concept of self" -- the ego. If we rid ourselves of this, then what is left but simply a collection of experiences and memories? What is there to *be* lonely?

Moderation

Centenarians often say their secret to longevity is "everything in moderation". But moderation means different things to different people. What is moderation, in a lifestyle where excess is normalized? Too much sugar, meat, caffeine, too much sitting, too much stress, loneliness, and too little sleep... Not to mention our baseline exposure to substances we are slowly learning are poisons: PFAs, xenoestrogens, and more recently microplastics. Our bodies no longer understand "moderation" as it once was known -- it is now considered normal to live out the end of our lives in poor health and isolation.

It is amazing to me that in 16th century Europe, sugar cost more than gold per ounce. It was sold by apothecaries and praised for its medicinal properties: energizing the body, curing melancholy, warding off disease... makes it sound like a drug.

What is the "optimal" use of rote learning in studying (pure) math?

I feel like I wrote a decent answer to the above-titled MSE question so I'm pasting it here. 

How do you solve a jigsaw puzzle? Do you take each piece and try to figure out exactly where it must go first, piece by piece? Or do you start sorting a bunch of pieces by color, texture, until the images start clicking into place? How much of both?

Like puzzle pieces, mathematical concepts gain clarity in context -- e.g. an isolated dark spot on a puzzle piece may be identified as a roof tile only when gathered with other "roof pieces". Or maybe you could have added it with the "skyline pieces" instead. In the same way, there is often more than one way to "understand" a mathematical concept, and each way admits a different set of relations to other concepts. Look up any "intuition" question on MSE and you'll see this at play in the various answers given. It follows that if you are struggling with a particular proof or concept, it's sometimes better to cast your net wide and focus on expanding your context -- that is to say, memorize and move on.

You will find people giving similar advice when reading papers -- skim first, several times if you need to, then drill down as needed. Unfortunately, I don't have anything more specific that can apply to a general case as it even depends on how something is meant to be read, and how well it is written. The best expositors (Halmos comes to mind) mitigate the need for jumping around to some extent and try to keep things linear, but there are still lots of variables like writing style, learning style, and compatibility of background knowledge which make it difficult to give a general solution. The best thing to do, like others have mentioned, is to do the exercises to constantly evaluate your understanding and see where you might need to drill down a bit.

9/19/2025

But all at once I felt like a stone realizing its stone-nature. There is no transcendence to the stone, there is no mind or soul or higher calling. But we humans, unlike stones, possess an incredible ability to acknowledge our own limitations in our own limited minds. A cruel joke, that this doesn't afford us access to any higher plane of experience than a stone's. On the other hand the stone's experience is unadulterated by self-reference, pure and essential. It is better to be the stone. 

There's a sense of disillusionment watching people who are supposedly in love with each other casually hurt each other with their words, and in return, watching those who receive that hurt shrug it off just as casually as if it were nothing. It's the emotional analogue of that sense of disgust and violation you feel watching people do bodily violence to each other callously -- the realization that your body is not sacred or protected, that you're really just flesh. 

It felt like some bubble bursting around me. I, like everyone else, have always felt the need for something sacred in this world. I, like everyone else, possess a void, a void I wanted to fill by striving for something higher, transcendent, without really knowing what that meant. 

It wasn't always Love I sought to fill that void, though. At first it was God. It occurs to me that I have been fundamentally unhappy since I lost my faith in high school. I had felt an acute sense of loss when that happened. I felt aimless... my grades started slipping dramatically and I no longer felt in control of my life. 

Then I found other things, distractions of the mind: I angrily turned on God, arguing with Christians to satisfy my cognitive dissonance. I chased whatever the philosophical curiosity of the week was with my underdeveloped, under-read mind, believing that I was doing something productive with my time. I continued this in college and took on mathematics, that childhood pressure-cooker-turned-refuge when the fruits of my mother's beatings (I was always quite slow at arithmetic) eventually translated into my teacher's praise for being the "smart kid". 

Now I wonder if it's time to outgrow love. Is seeking to fill a void itself a hopeless endeavor? After all, all we have is that irresistible drive to exist and to reproduce, and its countless derivatives that masquerade as "higher purpose" but smell of human and non-generality -- something Mind resists. 

But someone in me protests, says I'm thinking about love wrong. That seeking for others to fill my void is selfish. Like everyone else, I wanted to be understood deeply. But have I really, really tried understanding another soul? To fill their void? I always felt lonely and strived so hard to become more lovable, the most lovable: the most impressive, the most capable and smartest... yet how often do I see others as lovable, without intellectualizing their flaws? They say that love comes when you stop seeking it and start giving it out.

All that to say: I'm not sure it's worth giving up quite yet. Maybe disillusionment is necessary for coming to terms with reality; this reality that is at once so mundane, so cruel, so flesh-bound... If "transcendence" even exists, whatever form it takes, maybe it is within that reality, made of it. 

The metroplex and kinetic theory

Re. the title: I'd like to flesh out a proper model so I can describe more precisely the metric we're looking for, but I don't think I really have the machinery yet. Probably best to revisit this later, but the general idea is that people might modeled as particles. But interactions aren't necessary like collisions, and there's some discretizing, suggesting maybe more of a network/percolation model. Do we go more general, not necessarily choosing collisions over real space nor some graph topology but maintaining a minimal concept of "interaction" to see what general effects arise? Or do we choose, knowing that it's not a perfect analogy but we try to see what happens? Or do we try to model the actual dynamics and more accurately describe? 

There's this weird phenomenon on the Dallas subreddit where some people say the city sucks and it's hard to meet people and equally as many come out of the woodwork and say that it's not the city, it's you, pretty much everywhere is like this, etc. etc... 

Having heard these complaints and counter-complaints over and over the past few years I decided to have a think about it. I'm pretty convinced that the metric we're looking at is "interaction density" -- where an "interaction" is not necessarily you bumping into the love of your life but rather much more mundane things: seeing a flyer for some random event, calling for information and learning about this other group, playing a pickup game of ping-pong with some elderly Chinese man at a public park, etc... 

In short, interaction here seems at least slightly more intentional, more self-sorting with less of locality-based shared experiences here than in other cities in my experience. This is not limited to Dallas, of course, and it's definitely more of a continuum. And yes, I have personally felt there's a bit more difficulty to break in with people here --

For instance you might not have a shared commute with hundreds of other strangers that might have if you took the bus or train, might not see the same bulletins for the same events. In fact these events might not even happen with the same frequency because of that or be distributed moreso across hobby groups rather than proximity. Of course these effects are not necessarily so dramatic but tend to accumulate, so are perceived by some people. 

I think essentially two things mitigate this, as plenty of people have pointed out: having a hobby or the internet. 

The hobby provides an intentionally constructed, virtual network that has higher interaction density as compared to normal since it encourages people to meet in courts, concerts, what have you -- essentially a purposefully constructed substitute for traditional third places. 

An alternative if you don't have a hobby or your hobby sucks for finding people or your hobby is just way too self-sorting, is to use the internet. The internet, like a hobby, is an externally constructed, literally virtual network where interaction density is uncapped, provided people in your locale actually use the internet. 

I think the people with thriving social lives because they already have the right networks and hobbies and methods have to acknowledge the plight of people who don't. 

On the other hand those who don't should accept that yes, it is isolating to have long drives in your metal box to get to stuff and yeah, maybe some people are less social with strangers because of said relative sparsity of interactions/ shared experiences and so on. At the same time -- it's not going to get much better for a while, so you're going to have to expend more energy and look for workarounds. Once you get going and your network grows it's really not so bad.