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An Update

Hello everyone. I want to apologize for just dropping off of the grid like I did. I was surprised that I had so many people that cared about me and I’m touched by some of the messages you have sent. I am deeply sorry that I caused you all emotional distress. It was rude and selfish of me.

When my life started getting chaotic I stopped going on Tumblr. The last year and a half has been the most turbulent of my life. I am truly blessed to have met such wonderful new friends. At the same time I’ve had some really bad things happen as well.

Thank you all for the wonderful messages. I will likely not be returning to Tumblr anytime soon but if you want to contact me I’ll be sure to log in to check my messages for the next week or two.

I love you all.

- Alex

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Reblog if you actually have made great friendships on tumblr.

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Things I recognize in these two pictures:

- The Office

- My deck of magic cards

- A smoke and CO detector being put to good use

Definitely an authentic Allyson photo

I’ve relocated!

This is the longest I’ve been out of my bed in two fucking days. I’m waiting on my cafe mocha to arrive. It’s nice to have this little change of scenery. And I’d like to thank my crap body for making this possible by lowering my pain levels for a hot second.

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reblog for easter

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Touhou has truly taught me a lot over the years.

It taught me the importance of reading.

It taught me that laughter truly is one of the best medicines.

It taught me to find joy in the things I love.

…it also taught me a whole lot about hats. They help me relax.

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This accurately describes me today. Yay!

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Why I Do Things

I'm starting this off with a disclaimer, no one totally understands why they act the way they do. Therapists help us talk through our reasoning process and cognitive behavioral therapy is based on the idea that examining your own thoughts is both possible and nontrivial. I think people often fail to realize just how wide the gap is between why we think we do things, and why we actually do things. For a great example see this lesswrong post. One of the experiments summarized there was with a split-brain patient. Here's the relevant section:

This divorce between the apologist and the revolutionary might also explain some of the odd behavior of split-brain patients. Consider the following experiment: a split-brain patient was shown two images, one in each visual field. The left hemisphere received the image of a chicken claw, and the right hemisphere received the image of a snowed-in house. The patient was asked verbally to describe what he saw, activating the left (more verbal) hemisphere. The patient said he saw a chicken claw, as expected. Then the patient was asked to point with his left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere) to a picture related to the scene. Among the pictures available were a shovel and a chicken. He pointed to the shovel. So far, no crazier than what we've come to expect from neuroscience.

Now the doctor verbally asked the patient to describe why he just pointed to the shovel. The patient verbally (left hemisphere!) answered that he saw a chicken claw, and of course shovels are necessary to clean out chicken sheds, so he pointed to the shovel to indicate chickens. The apologist in the left-brain is helpless to do anything besides explain why the data fits its own theory, and its own theory is that whatever happened had something to do with chickens, dammit!

I found the book that the author sourced for that experiment and it looks awesome. I'm going to buy it on alibris and I might post about it when I get to read it. The point is, the patient believed that the reason they pointed to the shovel was that it could be used to clean out chicken coops but the actual reason was to shovel snow. This is my best guess for why I do the things I do and I can't guarantee it's correct.

My Brain

I usually think of my brain as being comprised of several, semi-autonomous sub-units. Each has it's own goals, personality and reasoning abilities. There's one special sub-unit which I think is the part that is responsible for abstract reasoning and also, I suspect, language. This is the part that carries out conscious decision making. The other parts are responsible for taking context appropriate actions. These are the parts that sometimes do very annoying things like playing Freecell or browsing Youtube when I'm supposed to be working. Those parts make decisions based primarily on habit. In contrast my conscious brain has a formal process for making decisions.

Conscious Decision Making

I'm a utilitarian. Heuristically, this means that my goal is to take actions that get me as much utility as possible. Utility is a measure of how much I like the state of the world. Equivalently it is how beautiful I find a world to be. To be more precise, it is a function that ascribes to every possible world a number. The higher the number, the more I like that outcome. My goal is to maximize the expected value of this function.

A short aside: I do sometimes keep promises even when I think doing so will result in less utility than breaking them. I only do this in special circumstances where commiting to a promise gives me an advantage in expectation. This is a fairly subtle point and doesn't come up all that often, but it does explain why I'm a bit more honest than you'd expect.

The professor that taught an ethics class I took once thought that utilitarians only care about maximizing total happiness. This is absolutely not the case. A world in which everyone is permanently doped up on soma has very high total happiness, but very low actual utility. The exact definition of utility is whatever my brain says it is, but I've built a approximate version from this which is what I'll discuss here.

All other things being equal, I ascribe higher utility to worlds in which any individual person experiences more happiness and less pain over the course of their life. It similarly increases with the degree to which that person can control their own life. It also increases when I have a better understanding of the world and decreases sharply when I believe things that are false. Some bits of knowledge have more value than others with some facts being worthless and others worth a lot of blood, sweat and tears. It increases when people make things like bridges, spaceships and art. The actual function is a non-linear combination of all these factors.

Focusing just on the component that looks at individual lives, I tend to value the happiness of any two people roughly equally. One exception is that I do tend to value my own happiness somewhat less than that of a stranger's. The total value of a life is approximatly their combined happiness and autonomy integrated over the course of their life. For the purposes of this calculation you can think of pain as negative happiness. For most people alive today I consider their utility at any particular moment to almost always be positive. Thus, all other things being equal, the longer someone lives the better.

The reason I help some people so much is because I think that I can significantly improve the utility contributed by their lives by doing so. Obviously there are many potential strategies for maximizing total utility but I think it is often better to focus on helping a few individuals a lot, than many people a little.

In summary I care about you, the reader, being happy, in control of your own life, and alive very much. Let me know if there's anything I can do to improve those things.

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@bendycripple

I just stumbled across this.

“It’s pretty funny I guess, in a dry awkward humor type of way”

Time for tea!

I’m drinking sweetened hot chamomile while watching The Office for only the second time ever. It’s pretty funny I guess, in a dry awkward humor type of way. I spent the last hour working on finishing a art treaty project from today. A ‘map of my brain’ diagram. I haven’t yet finished, but I’m finished for the night. I’m going to bed in an hour or so, we’ll see. But I’ve already taken my nighttime meds, it’s just a matter of them kicking in.

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Recommended Reading

The posts from lesswrong (I think they're all written by Eliezer Yudkowsky but I'm not positive) that I find most interesting

This is intended mostly for @bendycripple

Fun

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (fanfic)

https://www.lesswrong.com/hpmor

What if Harry Potter's greatest strength was his intelligence, not his bravery.

Serious

A human's guide to words:

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb

Explains why we use the words and concepts we do, and also provides an argument for why some defintions make more sense than others.

Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners:

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SqFbMbtxGybdS2gRs

Introduces and explains the phrase "The map is not the territory"

Overly Convenient Excuses:

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/FrqfoG3LJeCZs96Ym

Common mistakes when thinking about probability. This one specifically addresses why it is reasonable to say things are true when there is a possibility that they might be wrong.

Noticing Confusion:

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/zpCiuR4T343j9WkcK

Abstract ideas about how we can learn things about the world.

Joy in the Merely Real:

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/6BFkmEgre7uwhDxDR

A counter-argument to the idea that analyzing wonderous things will destroy their beauty.

Reductionism 101:

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/p3TndjYbdYaiWwm9x

Describes very basic, conceptual mistakes that come up extremely frequently in philosophy.

Against Rationalization:

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/GSqFqc646rsRd2oyz

Before the applying the material in the above make sure to avoid these mistakes.

Predictably wrong:

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/5g5TkQTe9rmPS5vvM

A description of the most obvious cognitive biases that cause humans to make mistakes.

Yehuda Yudkowski

http://yudkowsky.net/other/yehuda/

A very personal story of the death of the author's brother and his anger at the religious sentiment that followed. Warning: Extremely depressing

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Ok, here's the truth:

@bendycripple is awesome and I'm so, so glad to be their friend.

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@kitties-an-tiddies

By C.CASSANDRA

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Flowers on the Deck

@bendycripple

Also thank you Tumblr app for inexplicably including some photos twice.

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Ceci n’est pas un CAPTCHA

C’est un blog au sujet de un CAPTCHA

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Would you say that all the leaves are brown and the sky is gray?

I need to see some plants. It’s been a long time since I’ve been around a bunch of trees and flowers and stuff. Akron is made of concrete and all the grass is dead. This city is going to kill me.

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What about Become Immense?

I have always been more of a fan of might of oaks versus giant growth. But I think this is mostly because when I formed this opinion I was almost exclusively an EDH player. My bant deck had substantial mana ramp so I could afford to pay five (which is still pretty good for such an instant speed creature boost) but I discussed this with Cindis husband last night, and I might be coming around in terms of giant growth. They both give +2+2 more then they cost, so good, right? Idk. If I build another bant EDH deck I’m gonna have to weigh it out, or run both.

Opinions?

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Trollkyrkja, or how not plan a trip

The highlight of the trip was visiting the Trollkyrkja or Troll Church in Elnesvågen. All we knew going in was the blurb written in the travel guide. It was a limestone cave and there was a “short hike” to get there.

We started off on the wrong side of the mountain and wandered into a mining camp. N.B: If you are planning on visiting you want to go to the parking place off route 64 on the south side of the mountain, and not the one off 664 to the north. We didn’t have any equipment, not even boots, and didn’t bring water. We were expecting a 10-15 minute walk up a mild slope. What we got instead was a hike that by Norwegian standards was easy, but by our standards was absurdly difficult. I did not expect there to be mountaineering ropes involved. Mary Ellen couldn’t make it up and I was really close to turning around myself. Certainly the lack of water was a big part of that. I did make it up and went into the cave.

It was at this point I discovered that I should have brought a flashlight. The cave leads off into pitch blackness and I have precisely 0 experience caving. So I chickened out and didn’t get the see the waterfall :( . But it was still super cool just being in the cave entrance and someday I’ll go back and explore it properly.

Everything was an disorganized, amateurish mess but the view from the mountain is amazing and it was absolutely worth the scrapes, bruises and soggy feet.

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2019 Norway Trip Summary

May 29: Flew from PHL to LHR to OSL, took the train into Oslo and spent the night

May 30: Explored Oslo

May 31: Took the “Norway in a nutshell” tour from Oslo through Flåm to Bergen. Got to see Norway by bus, train and ferry.

June 1: Explored Bergen, visited the national aquarium

June 2: Drove to Førde taking 2 ferries along the way

June 3: Drove to Molde taking 4 ferries along the way!

June 4: Highlight of the trip, hiking up to the Trollkyrkja (Troll church). Drove along the Atlantic ocean road

June 5: Drove to Vigra, ate at the Rykende Fersk Boulangerie, flew back to Oslo

June 6: Flew back to PHL through LHR