What do you want? It seems like a simple question, but it can be deceptively difficult to answer. Even when you do have an answer, “wanting” something doesn’t seem to be any guarantee that it’s possible, or if it is, that you’ll actually do it. How can you reconcile the things you want to do, and the things you are capable of doing, with the things that actually get done? There is no easy answer, but it can help to think of your wants as distinct from your wishes–and to realize that you can wish for making better choices, not just for having better choices available. Continue reading
Category Archives: Essays
Power and Freedom: Individuals and Societies
The other day I saw the following quote on a bumper sticker:
“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.”
–Gerald R. Ford
It got me thinking about the relationship between power and freedom, and how that relationship applies not only to governments but also to businesses, authority figures, laws, programming languages, and even games. Continue reading
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Lisp, Smalltalk, and the Power of Symmetry
Like many hackers, my first real programming language love was Lisp. Paul Graham, who inspired my own explorations of the language, is a particular advocate and has written quite a bit about Lisp and what makes it different from other programming languages. So what does make Lisp different? Why does Lisp continue to be one of the most powerful, flexible, and concise programming languages in existence, despite the fact that it was invented in 1958–making it the second-oldest high-level programming language in the world? Continue reading
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The New Service Economy
As our transition from agriculture to manufacturing shifted the focus from food to material wealth (commodities), we are undergoing a similar shift now where material wealth is becoming as cheap as food became during the industrial revolution (introducing similar problems of overabundance). As material goods were the most valuable things before the industrial revolution, ideas and information are what’s most valuable now–in other words, service industries. This has implications across the economy not just concerning which businesses will make the most money, but how most of that money will be made. Continue reading
Why I’m Frustrated With 2D Boy’s Games
I’ve expressed unpopular opinions about nerd idols before, but this one is a little harder for me to talk about. My dislike of Terry Pratchett’s books is simple: I don’t like the deconstructionist genre. Easy enough; I can just stick my tongue in my cheek and go on a rant. But my reasons for disliking World of Goo and Little Inferno aren’t so straightforward. Continue reading
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“What Am I Getting Out of This?” Is the Wrong Question
As a procrastinator, and in particular a procrastinator who is easily addicted, I frequently find myself in the middle of some activity or experience of questionable value. At that point, my usual response has been to ask myself “what am I getting out of this?” It’s good to ask something: every second I spend doing one thing is an irretrievable second spent not doing something potentially more valuable. However, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that “what am I getting out of this?” is the wrong question to be asking.
The problem with asking what you’re “getting” out of something is that it places the burden of responsibility on you. By suggesting that if you only worked a little harder, you might be able to get more value out of something, it makes you culpable for wasted time. It characterizes your relationship with media and experiences as exploitative, as though every time you read an article or attended a concert you were trudging down into some Experience mine in order to extract the raw Value ore therein and shape it into…something (swords?) If you’re not getting enough out of some experience then you could find another, richer vein, sure–or you could just work harder to get more out of what you’ve already got. This thrifty attitude is great for material possessions, or experiences you’ve already had or cannot avoid, but it’s entirely the wrong way to think about time and art. There is a cost to getting better possessions–there’s no cost to finding something better to do with your time.
The other problem with asking what you’re getting out of a given experience is that it encourages the idea that you might be “missing out” on something if you stop. It reinforces the mine fallacy by implying that there might be some hidden, gleaming gem of precious value buried under all that rock that will languish, forever hidden, if you don’t personally unearth it. This idea is especially problematic for perfectionists like myself–it’s the same impulse that makes me want to 100% every videogame I play, or watch all the bonus content on DVDs, or spend hours on Wikipedia or TV Tropes accumulating mountains of useless trivia. “Sure, the first half of this article was 98% crap, but there was that 2% I really liked! What if there’s another 2% in the second half? If I don’t finish it I’LL NEVER KNOW.”
Time for a reality check: you are always missing out on something. You can only do one thing at a time, and there are an infinite number of things you could be doing at any given moment. That’s just how time works: you are always, constantly, continually not doing something of potential value. So to ask yourself what you’re “getting” out of whatever experience you choose at any given moment is to implicitly task yourself with getting the most possible value out of everything. It can’t be done! There are an infinite number of experiences that might be more valuable, any one of which you could be doing instead. The task of creating value from an experience is not your responsibility–it is the responsibility of the experience.
Don’t ask “what am I getting out of this?” Instead, ask “what is this giving to me?”–and if the answer is “nothing” or “not much,” then move on! True, some experiences require an investment if you want to get their full value–a difficult book may be harder to read than a pulp novel, yet give you more to think about in return. But this is true of all experiences, because if nothing else they at least require the investment of your time. By focusing on the value the experience is giving to you, rather than the work you’re putting in to derive that value, you place the burden of responsibility back where it belongs: on the experience in which you have already invested.
Your job is to decide what art and experiences to spend your time on; once you’ve decided it is not your job to “make” those experiences work. If it bothers you that you have to read through two dozen tweets on your timeline before you see one that’s interesting, unfollow some folks! If you’re halfway through an article and you’re reluctant to read the second half, don’t! And if you keep giving a videogame your time (and/or money) because you want something from it that it seems reluctant to give you (story, content, “fun,” whatever), then get rid of that sucker! There are plenty of other experiences out there that will treat you with more respect–your time is valuable, and you should expect a high return for it.
Filed under Essays
What Is Consciousness?
In one of my previous essays, I described Jeff Hawkins’ theory of intelligence. This essay relies heavily on that theory–if you’re not familiar with it, I recommend you read my other essay first.
The question of consciousness–of what it means to be “self-aware”–is one of the longest-standing unsolved problems in human history. It has showed up in practically every field from philosophy and theology to literature and the arts to multiple scientific disciplines including psychology, biology, programming, and even mathematics. Like the nature of sleep and dreams, it is one of those tantalizing problems that has resisted all solutions for millennia, despite being a fundamental part of our daily lives. Yet intelligence was also considered such a problem, and Hawkins’ theory tied a neat bow on it. Might the problem of consciousness be similarly solved? Continue reading
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My Sordid Confession
It’s probably no secret that I’m a nerd. I like nerdy things, like dragons and comic books and Star Wars and mathematics. I have nerdy friends. I have pretty good nerd “cred” (go on, ask me to sing Still Alive. Or pretty much anything by Freezepop. Or The Protomen.) But as a nerd–and in particular a nerd who likes books–I have a secret, shameful confession to make. Continue reading
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Sexism Is Over
The problem with social justice is that it’s easy to see progress: simply look at where society is now, and compare it to where things were a hundred years ago, or three hundred, or a thousand, and say “Look how far we’ve come! Women are no longer married off like property, they’re not barred from participating in the government or military, and they’re not stoned to death for adultery! Surely sexism is over by now–right?”
Filed under Essays
Mind Both Gaps
I was recently going back over some of Paul Graham’s essays, and I noticed something that bothered me while reading “Mind the Gap.” It’s an essay about how income disparities might actually be a sign of health, rather than a sign that something is wrong. That’s not the part that bothers me–it’s an issue I’ve written about myself and with which I mostly agree. No, what bothers me is this:
“A hundred years ago, the rich led a different kind of life from ordinary people. They lived in houses full of servants, wore elaborately uncomfortable clothes, and travelled about in carriages drawn by teams of horses which themselves required their own houses and servants. Now, thanks to technology, the rich live more like the average person. … Materially and socially, technology seems to be decreasing the gap between the rich and the poor, not increasing it.”
What he’s arguing here is that the gap between rich and poor may be quantitatively the same as in previous centuries (i.e., in terms of raw income), but qualitatively wealth makes less and less difference to the way people live. The rich today may still have much more money than the rest of us, he argues, but they are not leading fundamentally different lives anymore.
The problem with this argument is that it’s only half true. It seems clear that, as Graham argues, the gap between rich people and average people has been decreasing, especially in qualitative measures other than raw income. However, he never actually shows that the gap between rich and poor has substantially decreased. In fact, poverty has changed very little since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and in the most severe cases it has not changed at all in millennia.
In fact, in Graham’s own qualitative terms the gap between the poorest of the population and everyone else has only been increasing since the industrial revolution: the standard of life has been going up for most of us, but a beggar living on the streets today is facing conditions nearly identical in every practical respect to those faced by a beggar living in the streets in the 1800s–or, for that matter, the 800s.
Not only have the conditions of poverty not improved (in some ways, they’ve arguably gotten worse), but the demographics of poverty have not changed much either. Now, as ever, the poorest of the poor are overwhelmingly marginalized minorities: blacks, hispanics, homosexuals, the undereducated, people with mental or physical disabilities, religious and ideological outcasts, etc. Anyone who doesn’t fit the normalized ideal of (in our case) “straight white abled male” pays the price in lower wages, higher interest rates, less access to opportunities, poorer educations, and greater exposure to violence and substance abuse. Unless you’re willing to admit to the abhorrent belief that white males are genetically more competent than everyone else, you can’t argue that all these varied demographics bring poverty on themselves–their poverty has to be caused by something external. The obvious answer is that the cause of their poverty and the cause of their marginalization are one and the same: systemic social discrimination.
This is capitalism’s most glaring flaw. I consider myself an Objectivist in many ways, but the problem with Objectivism as portrayed by Ayn Rand is that it assumes the market is blind: let it do whatever it will, and the most competent people will win out. Unfortunately, the market is not blind. The market is made up of human beings, and human beings are biased. If I may quote PG once more…
“It’s absolute poverty you want to avoid, not relative poverty.”
…and there, as they say, is the rub. Poverty now is as absolutely bad as it has always been, and it is bad for almost exactly the same reasons. Until that stops, we have no hope of living in a true meritocracy.
Filed under Essays
In Search of Secrets 