That. I lack it. There’s a part of me that whines that I don’t have any basis for saying this, that I need more data before I start flinging these thoughts and applying them to myself, but I think I’m getting better at seeing myself justify in real-time (who came up with rationalization as a synonym for justification? It bothers me), and I have to write something, so hey-yo!

Call it heroic responsibility, call it getting shit done, call it programming, muthafuckas. Right now I’m not meeting goals set out by my meta-self, and am instead maximizing the hedons I know will be gone in a week. So, in the next few weeks, I’m going to write at least one post about defragmenting myself: how to make sure I’m applying knowledge of my heuristics and biases to all aspects of my life, not just the parts someone pointed out, and a post on how to make sure the world is being optimized around me. And if all goes well, I’m also going to be reading a lot of books.

Yes, I’m punting. Yes, I want to sleep. Yes, Bastion is a good… hey, stop that!

A hammer of sensory overload, sailing through the after Christmas sales in a mall. Excited families, affectionate couples, clusters of children, a sea of humanity. I feel disoriented at times, garish tinsel and a wash of sound threatening to capsize my calm. I consider my options carefully, and we eventually make our way to the exits.

Later at home, I look at Zappos.com (yes, I am buying shoes). No forces try to upset this juggernaut: in fact, here I am in my element, where I don’t have to traverse the length of a mall to compare shoe styles and weigh their relative qualities in a frustratingly unknown utility function. I wonder how much longer the big box retailers will go before being touched by these sites.

An anticipation before unconciousness, abrupt awakening awareness, undignified scampering, tearing of presents, hefty portions of food, and the end of a day well spent with family. Being together in a special time of thanks and wonder; this is the magic of Christmas.

When did we lose that magic?

We’re all grown up, now, adults or nearly so, having long ago shed our hallucinations of a jolly old man that delivered presents to the good and punished the bad (or only some of the hallucinations, but that post is for another day). Now this modern day approximation of a winter solstice celebration is almost just another day, bracketed by shopping sprees and frosted with religious trappings. Cherry picking the worst, outside of my family is worse: people dreading meeting their semi-estranged relatives, or trying to force some good cheer in an empty apartment.

This is is different from what we want: there is a culture-wide agreement that Christmas is best kept magical, that everyone could do with some good cheer once in a while (even if it is derived from a holiday co-opted into a capitalistic enterprise). In the tradition of only penning antagonistic opinions, I agree with the sentiment: Newtonmas should be kept magical. However, the way I propose doing it is by destroying Christmas (and not replacing it with Newtonmas: again, that post is for another day, and really, Newton isn’t that important).

Before I start, what is magic? Is it an alias for utils? An alias for hedons? Maybe: I like to think that this highly subjective and ill-defined term is shorthand for the amount of blowing-someone’s-mind-in-a-positive-way that happens (it seems like this sort of thing might be a discrete measure, but the amount by which you can blow someone’s mind is continuous. Blowing someone’s mind by showing them a youtube video of people base jumping is probably less of an impact of showing them the internet for the first time). Blowing their minds with kindness, blowing their minds with an invisible jolly obese elf that delivers presents to the children of the world, blowing their minds with good food: I know trying to tamp down a general definition on these words is a futile effort, but I think this will do.

So back to destroying Christmas: do I wish to kill the magic of Christmas? Wrong! I want to learn the secrets of infusing Christmas with magic so I can sustain it forever![1]

(That line might show up in future posts too. Sorry)

Another way of putting it: let’s explicitly optimize for magic while it’s Christmas, and then never stop.

Maybe I’m naive, that this can’t happen easily and that it’s in fact hard, but then I look around inside a church and see people passively accepting of the gospel that seems inane to me, and I think that maybe it isn’t so hard. We’re just swept up in the narrative of our lives, too busy to optimize, not knowing how we can optimize, or ignorant of the fact that we can (ignoring Mazlow’s heirarchy for now).

One way to think about this is through random rewards: research indicates that randomly timed rewards are better for reinforcement than regularly timed rewards. Now, our friends aren’t rats under the will of our carrot-stick methodologies, but it seems to indicate that a random gift is more impactful than one agreed upon beforehand, and also removes the awkward gift giving that happens because it has to happen, because, you know, it’s the holidays.

Or something longer term: people might object, claiming that people are built on cyclical natures. Boom and bust, hard work and relaxation, it all follows the deeper rhythms of life. But we’re on the edge of changing ourselves to not be constrained by such things: while people may object about infeasibility or short-term intractability, we can look to where we’re not constrained by crippled wetware, remind ourselves where we could be.

By the way, this is probably a bunch of bullshit. Actually, it is definitely a bunch of bullshit, with a small probability of being right. You will survive.

The first and second days: sacrificed to the gaming gods, they have. It was an easy enough pit to fall into, with what seemed to be a small niggling feeling that I “deserved to have a break”, and that gaming was the perfect way to spend that break. Then, after buying up some games (yes, crazy steam sales got me) and playing for an hour or two, the gaming mechanics hooked into me (have some points! have all the points!), my latent gaming glands kicked into gear, and before I knew it Saturday night had rolled around and I hadn’t written anything yet (hence, this).

If you haven’t already inferred from the tone, I don’t like this turn of affairs. My break from being compelled to do sometimes silly academic things is quite short (maybe I’ll talk about why I’m done with academia another day), and I want to do something useful with it. But looking at what I want to do (cook all the things! write all the things! code all the things!) then it’s less clear that that’s a good thing, since none of my desired activities are purely recreational. The obvious rejoinder “all work and no play makes jack a dull boy” comes to mind, and the objection “fun and useful” comes almost as quickly.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of hedons, perhaps you should go read a bit about them first. tldr; hedon is like a util for feelings. What’s a util? Well, that’s not going to fit in a tldr, so you should just follow the link. I bring up the concept mostly for shorthand, because it fits pretty nicely into an analogy with dieting: gaming offers a burst of cheap short-term hedons, but reading a seminal work of sci-fi offers nearly as many healthy hedons that last much longer: for example, I’m certain no game has not touched me as deeply as Solaris has. And then, when you look past books and look at things like coding, it should share the same deep-seated satisfaction that really good books offer.

Or, maybe I’ll get fewer hedons from coding. Then perhaps I’ll normalize: once I get fewer hedons flowing into my system, then the hedons I do get will satisfy more, analogous to how people that diet on sugar find dark chocolate sweet.

Enough theorizing: how can I change myself to reach my goals? If I could limit myself to playing an hour or so a day, then it might work: I could do other things that day, and not lose momentum on projects. However, I don’t seem to operate well under those conditions (example: reading sprees), so I might have to cut myself off: maybe finish Limbo, crack the mental knuckles, and then start flailing around madly in cyberspace.

Butterflies.

A familiar flutter, deeply set, matching the flutter of probability. I know the numbers, but I can’t quite put my irrationality aside and face up the facts as I fumble for my boarding pass.

So many people have died. Too many to ignore.

Shuffling forward, shoeless, I contemplate. The TSA agents let these people pass, but they will die, like the billions before them. Security? Only for a few hours, and marginal at that.

Now, the two hours I spend waiting for this delayed flight carries about the same risk of death as the two that will follow it: being suspended 10,000 feet in the air is a negligible risk next to the unseen microbes making their way to my gut. It’s unreasonable to focus on flying as a personal existential risk, this I know. This, I also feel. Then from where do the butterflies spring?

A reminder. A reminder that we can do great things, and that one day we can defeat death, when revised culture strides forward hand-in-hand with advancing science. Impossible?

They used to think flying was impossible, too.

And yet here we are, engines thrashing defiantly against gravity with a mighty roar.

Liftoff.

Fuck yeah, Humanity.

Hey! I wrote a tutorial over at HackCU, ADI’s tech blog for non-tech people. It’s about connecting to IRC. No blog post for a while, time to do homework.