Got back from Berlin late Thursday. Gave me a lot to think about - the two sides (vacation first, then conference) were pretty different, but they had some common themes. With both, the role of other languages was brought into focus - for a very long time I've lived with a number of languages I kinda know as extra parts of my mental world - they didn't play the role that human languages do so much as a private code, part of my personal myths. And my cosmopolitanism was turned at an angle because I've become reclusive; I've hoarded these things for primarily myself, and rarely tested them against other people or reality. In that sense, the trip to Germany dragged a lot that was private for me out into the light, letting me see them from other angles. This is hard to express correctly, but I think the above does at least a reasonable job.
The trip was, the above complexity aside, a good practice of my German language skills, and I learned that apparently my pronunciation is not bad once I'm immersed, and I usually can make myself understood with little effort, although any followup questions easily go outside my vocabulary. I think it wouldn't be a lot of effort to hit fluency if I were to have more frequent exposure. More difficult was navigating a foreign city - not knowing how to navigate the transit system, cultural norms (e.g. not eating pizza with hands, and tap water being largely unavailable), things like that. Broadly, I found it easier to interact with people there in some ways - my concerns and interests are less alien and the cosmopolitanism that I believe in is also fairly common. I was able to get answers to some questions on the meaning of some lyrics in German bands I like, talk about things that felt consequential, and I felt far less lonely than I normally do. There are still some things that I regret, as usual - a need for connection often means I open up more than I wish I had, and when I revisit the conversations in my head I wish I had kept back more.
Things to see:
The day after I got back I went to an IQ2 debate on whether solar engineering to assist in lessening climate change is a crazy idea. I brought a coworker whose company I enjoy and his wife. It was a good, educational, debate, but also strange in that it was won (for the nay side) by a very wide margin based on their successfully framing the debate a certain way - that more research is warranted, and that the proposal of the debate (interpretation of crazy) was that it was so clearly a bad idea that no further research is warranted. Having successfully done that, their victory was sealed. I wasn't caught by that framing, but I think most of the audience was and so they won by one of the biggest swings I've ever seen. A strange win.
It's good to be back home with my cats, in a city which I entirely know how to navigate, and whose norms and how I fit into them I understand fairly well.
Another day's adventures in Berlin. I slept in until noon today, and then set out for the local museum of Technology, stopping at a greek restaurant along the way for something like a large spanikopita (wasn't so much a conscious pick as being hungry and stopping at the first place that looked okay). Leaving there, I passed by Checkpoint Charlie that felt like a tourist trap (it was nice to see some stern words to Russia on a flag outside about their occupation of Crimea). Further on the walk I saw a fascinating building structure - two concentric rings surrounding a park, with one ring being small stores and the other being residential dwellings. The homes were not large, but the design felt very social and I imagine it would be nice to live in a community like that. Wikipedia now tells me it's called Mehringplatz. Walking west on the south side of the river, I ran into two Irish gentlemen and had a very pleasant conversation in English - my first real conversation outside of work for quite some time. I liked them - I think they were hoping to ask me for directions but after it was clear I knew little more than they did but I was from the States, there was some instant camraderie. I have a certain positive prejudice towards people from Ireland that this fed into. We walked the same way for a bit until they reached their hostel, at which point we parted ways and I continued to the MoT. It was pretty great. I stayed for a few hours (was clear this was the kind of museum you can't reasonably get all of in one visit), seeing exhibitions on:
A few more impressions - lots of people ride bikes here and the city is well organised for it. Seems that almost everybody smokes. I wonder if part of it is the cold. It's unsurprising that I only felt I was seeing the real city once I ventured far enough east - comparing the highly-public areas was still interesting but less so than the places people actually live. And I'm also glad I visited during the political campaigning - I can understand most of the campaign posters at least reasonably well. One of them talked about someone having worked a very long career and how that earns respect, another about how Europe was the best idea Europe ever had.
All this walking has given me some pretty bad blisters. Good to have my feet up. Have had plenty of time to think about plenty of things - thoguht a bit about the cslounge events and am still deeply angry and hurt over that. But also about work, and shape-of-life kinds of things. And language - the more I relax the more that German words are coming back to me. I'm using translation apps to make sure they're coming back correctly, but they often are. I'm not sure this is a place I could live long-term, but if for some reason it came up, perhaps it could be. Had some fanciful daydreams of needing to flee the United States for some reason and just endlessly walk around Berlin in exile, somehow given funds for food and nightly shelter and nothing else, as part of a larger community of people doing so, each mostly keeping to themselves. Lots of other daydreams too.
Tomorrow's the last day that I have entirely to myself - on Sunday I check out, travel down to the conference centre, check in, and the conference starts. I haven't yet figured out what's on the agenda for tomorrow - may go to the park or another museum. Will likely rule out the day-trip to the south because I'm not warmly enough dressed and don't want to stray too far from stores. Today was colder than I'd like and that trip sounds like it'd be another cold day.
In Berlin a few days early for a neuroscience conference. This is my first visit to Germany - been enjoying walking around the city and learning its sense of normal. My level of German is turning out to be useful but limited - I can reasonably easily make myself understood, but people often ask me questions involving words I don't know. So for me it's like a write-only language. Kinda. Simple exchanges work well, particularly if I talk first. English is fine as a fallback, and there's a surprising amount of (slightly off) English around. If I lived here I'd be tempted to drop off sheets of corrections to storefronts that have English below their German. Still, I'm trying to speak as much German as possible while here, and I'm getting used to the tonal patterns in nearby conversations I don't quite hear. The city Berlin reminds me the most of so far is Philadelphia, with some street design from San Francisco, and much cleaner than either. One of the things I was curious about was whether the former boundary would mark a dramatic difference in architectural style or general feel, and while I can still trace that boundary by many streets changing their name over certain lines, most of the differences are subtle if still present at all. It's been too long - I regret not getting to visit closer to reunification. Berlin in general seems to take culture pretty seriously - like Boston I see a lot of mention of famous musicians and philosophers of the past, and one nearby store offers a curious service - a personal cello concert (the cellist was playing alone in a storefront as I walked by). I think it's also election season - there are endless adverts for various political parties on the streets, talking about healthcare, attitudes towards the EU, and so on. People? Nobody here would be out of place in New York (even speaking German there). The one surprise that I've seen so far is the canals, which are quite prominent. Foodwise I'm doing okay - not great (travel is always hard on that front, but just like my visits to San Francisco, people here seem to have a different food aesthetic than I'm used to, and the attitudes towards water in restaurants or availability of other drinks are frustrating). I slept poorly on the plane last night so I was tired today, but I expect to have more energy tomorrow to see museums and other things. There's a lot to do.
I'm more lonely than normal - I don't have many people in my life at home either, but the familiar habits help there. As I write this I'm telling myself that I should try harder to build connections because work will only last so long and I don't want that to be all there is for me. But I know promising myself things is cheap and I've done it countless times over the past years. Anything real must come from more than a realisation that things *should* change. On some level I'm impressed that I can function without a social life because at times it really rips at me emotionally, but on another it's deeply miserable and not even something I feel I should do out of some ethics or choice.
About the Never Trumpers - I've followed several on social media as Trump's presidency continues. I don't think they're pulling me towards their view, but it pleases me to see one bright spot in Trump's disasterous presidency - that principled people on the other side stand out. And that in this era they're probably becoming more principled and that helps me see principles I have in common with them. They still occasionally remind me of our political differences - Tom Nichols, for example, recently rattled off a list of major government agencies he'd like to remove, sometimes with very flimsy reasons (e.g. the Ed, with a justification that most people don't understand what it does). Still, a belief in princple and long-term thinking is refreshing. Particularly given that it's about as rare on the left, and presidential hopefuls are eagerly exploring ideas that either strike me as a bad idea (Sanders looking to use precedent-breaking ways of trying to pass a universal Medicare plan, or Warren looking to end the filibuster in the Senate) or as crossing a red line (Cory Booker pushing a reparations commission bill, which is to me an absolute disqualifier for my vote).
On that last point, I feel I should explain - progress in fixing divides in society is primarily about moving people's behaviour to the level where in the important domains of life (employment, finance, daily necessities) they ignore the distinctions at hand, generally treating both genders and all races the same. That's the primary driver of dealing with these issues - there are some rare, time-limited circumstances where we might accept other methods that are in fact incompatible with that primary driver, but they run the risk of damaging it or just not achieving much good. I believe that reparations are a logistical nightmare which are unlikely to accomplish much good and which significantly damage that primary driver (I support affirmative action in education precisely because supporting it for a limited duration limits damage to the primary driver).
Anyhow, I should probably be asleep right now to make sure I'm up at the right time tomorrow - time zones are tricky.
Just wrapped up my taxes (selling most of my MongoDB stock meant I paid NYS and the IRS a lot of money this year, ick). Feels good to have it out of the way, and to have made all the transfers needed to pay for it.
Preparing for my trip to Berlin next week. Brought my work laptop home so I can use it for the poster session (if needed), otherwise trying to flesh out a list of things I can do if I feel like it while there. Right now learning about options for fondue. One of the places I'm considering, Schwarze Heidi, weirded me out because, as I read some reviews on Yelp and visited Google Maps to see how close it is to where I'm staying, I mentally transposed it to "Black Heidi" (english translation). I've often had this kind of confusion before - I don't think it's exactly that I translate it to English as I read it so much as my inner representation for the languages is not particularly distinct-for-each. The effect is more pronounced when I have the translation absolutely solid in my head - the subset of German words that I'm almost certain not to forget. Interesting to think about how all this works.
Perhaps there are parallels - the list I'm building is like translating lives - I want to have as many readymade evaluations of places I might go to as if I were to be a resident. I'm not making a plan, I'm simulating a glimse into another life.
Today's been less than smooth; the loss of G+ is annoying, but the loss of Inbox (so far only on my phone) is disabling. I spent a bit of time starting to make sense of the new world, and it still feels like traveling back in time. And ... my vet called to ask about an appointment for Torts and I had to tell them that I wouldn't be coming back because of their offering homeopathic "treatments" (I consider them malpractice). I am not a fan of confrontation, and really only doing it with an activist, or otherwise feeling that it's necessary in some way makes it easier to bear. In cases like this it's just exhausting. And ... my neck is being bad to me again. Realising that it's leading to a lot of tension in my back too.
I have a perspective about a lot of software I use - to me they're often tools I work with to set policy for my data - I don't always care if I'm using them the way the authors meant so long as I can achieve what I want with them. During the year or so that Google Music let me rank songs from 1 to 5, I decided that 1 meant the song was on a list where I'd eventually go through and remove them from my library, 2 meant I would keep it but mostly for either the sake of completeness (album), or for other rare occasions, but I'd prefer it never come up randomly, 3 meant that I had heard it and didn't decide to give it some other ranking, 4 meant that I liked it and wished it would come up more often, and 5 meant that I loved it. Nobody gave me those meanings, but they gave me the means to assign them. And .. then Google took it away and decided that a thumbs up or down was enough for everyone. Sigh. My email box is home to a lot more thought like that, and I used Inbox's tools to build my own habits, and Google's going to take that away too.
Some years back I was in the state where a good subset of the software I used for everyday things was stuff I wrote. I gave that up for two reasons. Firstly, I didn't know how to solve the problem of spam (Google's been pretty great on that front), and secondly I wanted a good mobile client. I got a lot out of that choice, but I lost so much control and Google keeps providing a shitty experience by either taking away things I like (such as Inbox or Reader) or letting their UI people screw them up (such as Google News). It keeps making me wonder how hard it would be to go back.
Anyhow, feeling grumpy and my neck hurts a lot.
Pigged out on a videogame for most of Saturday - a satisfying game of Endless Space 2. Today I'm hoping to be a bit more productive - at Art Lovers Cafe right now, eating a cookie that seems bo somehow be both stale and burned. On the way here, I passed by a large group of women, one of them telling a story to the rest. The only bit I caught (didn't stop) was: "Chaim whispered to me: I'm sleeping in the truck tonight", at which they all laughed. Not sure about the name (not implausible in NYC). I spent part of the rest of the walk wondering what the rest of the story was (may have been a scary or fake-scary story based on her intonation).
Earlier this week I went to an IQ2US debate between 2 never-trumpers (one of them Jeff Flake) and two FoxNewsers on whether Trump should be nominated again for President. It was a surprisingly lively debate (wasn't sure what to expect). Covered:
I've been thinking further about soft and hard power since the meetup; it's obviously a spectrum, the chief differences coming from at one level actual force, another ruinous shifts in economics or other necessities, leaning towards the soft a concrete opportunity, and then at softest promises of consideration, goodwill, and things shaped like that. In an ideal world, hard power would be a rarely used thing, merely understood as an ultimate tool to safeguard the most vital interests of people or as a response to egregious violations of strong in-consensus norms. It's difficult to talk about these nuances in the abstract (at least, comparatively, where someone would criticise someone else with nearby-but-not-identical views on soft-vs-hard power in the abstract; the mapping is difficult. I wonder if it has to be, or if there are frameworks we might find to clarify the grounds.
Also been thinking - if someone had the ability to savescum IRL, is there a way we could detect it? First - savescumming is a term for player behaviour in some kinds of games that allow easy load/save, where they'd save the game, try something, and if it didn't go the way they want, they load and try again (often many times, usually in games where people are expected to start a new game when they lose something, and especially if they're running the game in a weird environment (e.g. an emulator) that lets them save far more freely than they usually would. So, if we imagine either a general trying to win a war, or someone playing chess, or even someone trying to navigate through the significantly-random early bits of a relationship, where at the end of every day they have the ability to rewind and try it again, could we somehow detect that? The challege being, I think, that it's hard to know someone's mental state and analytical abilities and information sources to reliably tell in the general case if they're breaking reality, or just very intuitive, good at parsing information, and lucky. So in the general case I think it'd be hard, but perhaps there are tricks and traps someone could use catch it (countering it may be impossible unless the rewind is limited). Figuring out tricks and traps like that is an interesting intellectual exercise.
Been thinking further about my earlier idea of how IQ2US relates to argument maps or other ways of approaching disputes that are resistant to misrepresentation of facts (primarily hoping to deal with this by stretching the discussion out so people can go back and factcheck, or for independent factcheckers to get involved). Many of these ideas would also allow for a more methodical exploration of possible arguments to make and respond with. I was initially pretty sure this would be better, but I brought a line of thought in on how I think about democracy - one of the ways I reject the "we'd be better off if dumb people do not vote" argument I've heard from some people is that voting makes people vested in the decisions made and partly illegitimises violence against the system - with in this context it taking the form that these debates are important as debates at least partly because they're social events, and so they help reconstruct civic life here.
My weekly todo lists have evolved into a weekly analysis on key metrics of my life - a todo, a review of past events, reflections on health, weather. I like it, and while I'm not amazingly more productive, there is still noticable improvement.
I've had doing my taxes for this year on the todo list for awhile and while I'm cutting it closer this year, today I finally got the most obvious docs together, and likely today I'll scan them and think harder about if I have everything I need. Good progress.
Last night I went to bad movie night - enjoyed myself, left when I wanted, but on the way back I took the same train car for part of the way as fellow attendees. Most of them were clustered around the more popular people there (two women); I didn't actually end up chatting with any of them for the whole trip, and after I sat down everyone was either with their back to me or blocked by others. Wasn't sure how much of it was intentional. Felt very high-school in some ways (although the use of that term strikes me as potentially worth thinking about). One of the people who left the train last nodded at me as she left, but it all still left me with more pain than if I had just gone straight home after work, I think. Three possibilities still floated through my mind - that it was intentional, that it was accidental because I was being quiet, and that perhaps I was somehow acting in a way indicating it was what I desired.
Listening to a great podcast conversation between Arthur Brooks and John Donvan on contempt in politics and social division. This, I think, is probably one of the more important topics in our society right now. Interesting to see the discussion of anonymity, which I also see as a large problem.
Today I:
There are times when I wonder whether the difference between preventing consensus from closing around ideas that I think are harmful is really that large from trolling. I hope I'm doing these things for the right reasons. I believe that I actually am standing up for free speech, and comfortable diversity of views, and that a lot of current activism is harmful. What I'm not always sure about is whether I chase these things for the right reasons, or if I'm chasing them the right distance. And there are some things that I do where I know that at least some of the reasons are veiled - long term strategic thought to aid my values that I still wouldn't want the sun to shine on right now. And that bothers me. I don't think I'd deny these things if someone guessed. Although I think nobody actually cares enough to guess at my motives for anything because I've kept people at such a distance.
Been thinking a bit more about having left SRE. In particular, the feeling that I had learned most of what there is to learn about those practices. I'm coming to feel as well that a lot of the talks I'm seeing about particular practices in SRE are fairly predictable too. I think any sufficiently intelligent person entering the field will eventually come out on the other side, knowing everything important there is to know, having the technical judgement and skills needed to do everything, and capable of presenting on it. I've been to a lot of meetups where I felt that if I had sat down for a day I could reconstruct almost their entire talk (with slightly different specifics and points). And that a lot of the time, many people there gather around and applaud these things without really learning anything new. The young'uns get things out of it, but that's all. When that's done, it's harder to find meaning in work. I'm happy to be in academia again because nature provides endless mysteries. Industry? Not so much.
I wish it were easier to find meaning in life. My habits and what I need to respect myself are the biggest barriers I face now.
Feeling better enough to listen to science-y things while I do chores. This Sixty Symbols video came up, on whether we should build a larger particle collider, and I think it's a very interesting question to ask. I appreciate how Dr Copeland first offers a good summary of the "no" side, to the point where I was initially pretty convinced to that side. As he went on, he worked me around a bit towards yes, but I remain unsure given the cost and the timing question between theorists and experimentalists. The point on maintaining the construction industry for these colliders is actually pretty subtle - the idea is that if you're continually doing scientific construction, it's much cheaper than having gaps in those construction because the expertise and economies of scale dry up in the gaps. It also makes me wonder what criteria we should use for deciding where to build these devices - in Europe? In relatively barren parts of the planet? Is there a good case to build all the supercolliders in, say, Dakota or western Canada?
I remain unsure. And I appreciate the question and the debate.
Been having a very tough time healthwise recently, to the point where it's hard to figure out what to say with the usual coworkers-asking-each-other-how-their-weekends-are thing. Sometimes people give details, some people mostly say it was good. This weekend has been, from Saturday morning until Sunday evening, a nonstop migraine where I've barely left bed, having made a brief excusion Saturday night when the pain wasn't so bad to drop off laundry, and a brief excursion earlier today (Sunday) to pick up a shower stool so I can sit down while in the shower (helps with migraine, got the idea from my grandparents on my mom's side who probably had them for other reasons) and to get the laundry. Really hoping it disappears tonight in time for me to get some decent sleep, although at least it's not so bad right now. I've been mostly going with my honest default of "not so great, migraines", but I worry that that frequently being my answer is gonna bum people out. Pain is bearable right now so I want to blog a bit and do some chores until it gets bad again.
Over the years I've occasionally thought about the different states of mind I find myself in and their behavioural tendencies. On my old blog I think I noted once that my online self is fairly different than my in-person self; in retrospect I've come to think that's tied to a lot of the social cues and emotions that come from interacting in-person not being there, with that also meaning lower stress. I find it easier to think when nobody's around. And more recently I've noted that when I need to do things in a migraine, what I call a "maintence mode" self is there - it's a lot simpler because usually I don't have the maelstrom of thoughts happening because thinking hurts, it has a short temper, but also is more prone to small acts of kindness (or at least so I've felt when reflecting on memories of those times). The selves we find ourselves in during dreams are probably different yet, although without clear memories of those times we can only have fleeting snippets for analysis.
Been thinking about an MMO I used to play, ages ago, called Dofus. I played it for several years, having first seen people play it on the cluster at CMU (it started as a Flash game), keeping at it, and eventually making social ties I cared about online. It was also a satisfying game for the most part. The issues that led me to stop playing started when they revised the character class I primarily played (eliminating its strong bonus), and worsened as they made a number of successive changes in pursuit of an ideal I didn't see the appeal of - they wanted to get rid of most of the randomness in the game, making it more like a really complicated chess. I wonder now if they were foreseeing e-sports as a phenomenon, where the skill and other reasonably foreseeable features of a match are meant to dominate results. I don't really approve of that for gaming, and think randomness is enjoyable as a major factor (among others, like player skill and planning) rather than a minor one. I can see why they went that way though.
Recently had a bizarre nightmare which I'm calling "65 degrees", where I was at work having a normal day, and then suddenly everyone in the office went silent, stood or sat still, opened their eyes cartoonishly wide, their mouth in an excessive grin, and tilted their head 65 degrees to the side, and stares at me. And that's it. No other motion. I move from room to room on my floor and everyone is like that. I wonder if they will ever move or begin to chase me, or maybe remain still and eventually starve. For now I see nothing in them. I am weirded out at the stillness and the stares. I run panicked from the office and am horrified to see the street is the same. Cars crashed, people standing still on the street, all staring at me as I half-run through the streets. I am terrified. I eventually make it home, afraid in my apartment building that a neighbour in this state will be in the stairs, but thankfully the usual is the case and nobody's out. I make it to my apartment, c an enter, my hands and legs both shaking enough that turning the key is hard, even getting it lined up, but I do. And then I am horrified to see that my cats are the same. Mouth wide, eyes wide, 65 degrees.
Anyhow, the pain is starting to return. I should try to get to other chores while I still have the ability to focus. And maybe get some food, as I have eaten almost nothing this weekend and am getting weak.