Just Wander Around

I have no big unifying thought for the contents of this post, just an assortment of interesting things I've consumed recently. Tomorrow is the presidential inauguration, taking place with unprecedented security under threat of further domestic terrorist activity. My wife has had her first dose of the Covid vaccine. I'm still working from home. And trying to get through it all with gentle forward progress, not aggressive force.

A passage from Frankly in Love by David Yoon

When we were little, we used to make oobleck.

You know oobleck: one part water, two parts cornstarch, green coloring for flair. This mixture creates a substance known as a non-Newtonian fluid. It's named after a substance in a children's book by Dr. Seuss. The Oobleck is a big ball of ruinous, sticky goo that arrives and almost destroys everything after a king, bored with his too-perfect realm, fervently wishes for something--anything--new.

It's a careful-what-you-wish-for story.

It's also an appreciate-what-you-have-before-it-turns-into-what-you-had story.

Isaac Newton was a groundbreaking scientist from the seventeenth century. But he was also super into the occult, and wrote a lot about creationism and how there must be some way to turn lead into gold.

Dr. Seuss was a groundbreaking children's book author beloved for his antifascist humanism. But in his early career, he drew a lot of racist cartoons depicting black people as savages and mocking Japanes-American internment victims. He was full of remorse for this earlier version of himself for his entire life.

Nothing is just any one single thing. In fact, what starts out as one thing can turn out to be something completely different.

If you press hard on oobleck, it feels like a solid. Same if you strike it. You can even run across a big trough of oobleck, if for some reason you (a) have a big trough lying around and (b) enough oobleck to fill it.

But here's the weird thing about oobleck: if you gently pass your fingertips through it, it yields just like liquid.

SO . . . 

If walls of oobleck block your way,

don't punch and slap and kick all day.

Just hold your breath and close your eyes

and simply ease yourself inside.

Walk slowly through the dark, don't fear

For someday you'll be far from here.

Pass gently.

Reading that, I couldn't help but think about how I described learning to accept the airflow of a CPAP in Metaphorical Coherence:

I recently started using a CPAP machine for my newly diagnosed sleep apnea. I have the most minimal mask, with two little openings that push a steady stream of air into my nostrils. This is good because it keeps my airways open during sleep when they might otherwise close up. It is also a very strange and sometimes difficult sensation for exhalation--I have to push air out while the machine pushes air in.

At first it was almost suffocating. I felt like I couldn't exhale without tremendous strain, which made me feel winded and in need of faster breaths, which were impeded by the machine, which was a spiraling cycle that sometimes found me ripping the mask off and gasping for air. Even when I could withstand that temptation, it still left me feeling like my breathing was labored and I had difficulty falling asleep.

Except, I realized, when I woke from sleep later, I wasn't having any trouble exhaling. I didn't even really feel the air pushing in any more, and there was no resistance to pushing air out. Once I relaxed, the dynamic changed. It took some practice, but I finally figured out how to achieve that state from the start.

It seems counter-intuitive, but the trick is to stop fighting. I have to stop framing the issue as air coming in and air going out in opposition to each other. I have to stop pushing. Because if I can just relax enough, the air finds a way to flow through in both directions simultaneously. But only when I don't try to force it. Only when I stop trying and give in does it work out.

Don't ask me how or why, it just does.

So many things in life seem to work better when you don't try to force them. Relax and push gently.

My review of Frankly in Love:

Frank Li is a smart, witty high-school senior who tells his story with an entertaining and insightful voice, the kind of observant, reflective narrator who makes you laugh or think with half of the things he says. His friends are the same, the nerdy, intelligent ultra-achievers aiming for perfect SAT scores and top colleges in their final year of high school. Frank's academic quest in this story takes a back seat to his encounters with first love and the struggles they prompt about his identity, caught as he is between his immigrant Korean parents and his American life. He takes readers on a deep exploration into issues of race, culture, class, friendship, love, and family that is moving, heartfelt, and authentic (and, don't forget, entertaining and insightful). A top-notch coming-of-age tale. 

A couple of other quotes I like:

He nods with this wistful sort of look that says, I learned something new today.

People who let themselves learn new things are the best kind of people. . . . 

As soon as I say these words, I realize I've discovered the point. The point is not about playing Food Tour Guide. It's not about peppering Paul Olmo with questions. The point is being able to say I have no idea. Without apology. With confidence, even. . . . 

I have no idea, I realize, is a big part of who I am.

-----

Love is a belief mutually held. As soon as that belief fades on either end, then poof, the whole thing falls face-flat like a tug-of-war suddenly gone one-sided.

I want to be one of the best kinds of people. Because I believe I have no idea should always be a big part of who I am.

I assume these are fake questions that Yoon created, though it's hard to know for sure. I'm certain there's not a clear correct answer for either.

Now I want to explore some SAT practice tests to explore creating my own.

I really resonate with this idea of existential sorrow Ross Gay describes in The Book of Delights.

It astonishes me sometimes--no, often--how every person I get to know--everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything--lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated.

I've written before how I've always related to the sad and depressed, even without any great issues myself. I understand their sorrow. Now that I'm getting up in years I've finally collected a few things to be genuinely sad about--two dead parents, a failed first marriage, many lost pets--but I've always felt--humbly and gratefully--my own list to be exceedingly short.

From Thing Seem From Above by Shelley Pearsall:

Although I often imagined how great it would be to move somewhere else and be someone totally different, was that true? . . . 

To be honest, I started running out of sad things to think about in my own life after about five minutes. . . . 

So I started thinking about bigger problems from the outside world, like war, terrorism, violence, school shootings, global warming, animals going extinct, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods--and it became pretty clear that the outside world has a lot more sadness than my own life. Which kind of puts things in perspective, you know?

Nevertheless, I've always felt a great deal of causeless existential sorrow.

This is a lovely thought.

I've experienced so many strange and wonderful things that I thought it might be nice to relax for a little while. To just wander around and make sure that the sun is glittering on the water in the morning, and that the leaves on the trees are turning yellow, and that it rains every now and then.

From Brown by Håkon Øvreås

This makes so much sense.

A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon

When I saw QAnon, I knew exactly what it was and what it was doing. I had seen it before. I had almost built it before. It was gaming’s evil twin. A game that plays people.

QAnon has often been compared to ARGs and LARPs and rightly so. It uses many of the same gaming mechanisms and rewards. It has a game-like feel to it that is evident to anyone who has ever played an ARG, online role-play (RP) or LARP before. The similarities are so striking that it has often been referred to as a LARP or ARG. However this beast is very very different from a game.

It is the differences that shed the light on how QAnon works and many of them are hard to see if you’re not involved in game development. QAnon is like the reflection of a game in a mirror, it looks just like one, but it is inverted. . . . 

QAnon grows on the wild misinterpretation of random data, presented in a suggestive fashion in a milieu designed to help the users come to the intended misunderstanding. Maybe “guided apophenia” is a better phrase. Guided because the puppet masters are directly involved in hinting about the desired conclusions. They have pre-seeded the conclusions. They are constantly getting the player lost by pointing out unrelated random events and creating a meaning for them that fits the propaganda message Q is delivering.

There is no reality here. No actual solution in the real world. Instead, this is a breadcrumb trail AWAY from reality. Away from actual solutions and towards a dangerous psychological rush. It works very well because when you “figure it out yourself” you own it. You experience the thrill of discovery, the excitement of the rabbit hole, the acceptance of a community that loves and respects you. Because you were convinced to “connect the dots yourself” you can see the absolute logic of it. This is the conclusion you arrived at. . . . 

It’s easy for people to forget that they are not discovering the story, but creating it from random data. . . . 

Q is NOT a whistleblower. Q is a “plot device”. Q is fictional and acts exactly like a fictional character acts. This is because the purpose of Q is not to divulge actual information, but to create fiction. . . . 

Q does not want you to come to your own conclusions. Q is feeding you conclusions. This is VERY important and here are several reasons why this is included in the verbiage of almost every fictional conspiracy theory ever. . . . 

Solving puzzles is extremely rewarding from a biochemical standpoint and the thoughts we gain from them are special to us. . . . 

Do your own research means: “Don’t trust other people. Don’t trust institutions. Listen to me.” . . . 

Then initiates are given the tools to arrive at “their own conclusions” which are in every way more compelling, interesting, and solve more problems than traditional conclusions. Because they are wrong and fictional. . . . 

Solving puzzles together is a great way to form community and to join community. . . . 

The participant is having fun looking around and “solving” riddles reinforced by dopamine rushes and the feeling of being involved in something that no one else knows. They are also now part of a growing, active, and friendly community. Everything they see and hear creates further doubt about people and things they already doubt. Every new theory is easy to understand, compelling, and arrived at through their own ability to reason. Now to doubt certain ideas is to doubt themselves, their ability to see the truth, their community, and maybe the world around them. Quickly, the game is creating an alternate POV that is immensely psychologically satisfying and seems to be supported on all sides as the truth. Celebrities, senators, and even the President are all supportive. . . . 

It even meshes with my own philosophy of education, a belief that students learn best when teachers tap into their natural curiosity and guide them through processes to reach their own conclusions. All the way back in 2006, I wrote:

I guess what it all comes down to is I believe learning is a process. To truly understand something, a person has to experience it, discover it for him or herself, make sense of it in terms of what he or she already knows, and internalize it. He or she has to take ownership of the knowledge and make it his or her own. Someone can describe "hot" to you, but you'll never really know what they mean until you stick your hand on the stovetop burner. Then you "know." We try to understand new things in relation to what we already know, so our context--everything we've already learned--shapes the way we perceive reality; our perception of information and the way we come to understand it "creates" the knowledge that comes out of it. To facilitate learning, then, you have to create an environment that leads to learning experiences, that allows the process of encountering new information and making meaning of it to take place. You can guide that process and have goals in mind, but have to understand that it ultimately depends upon the student.

It's sad seeing that used not to educate but to manipulate.

My wife is a collector of old books, and someone recently gave her a box of some to add to her library. I captured images from a couple of them:

From:

And from this one . . . 

A pre- "under God" Pledge of Allegiance, and . . . 

An interesting introduction (speaking of educational philosophies.)

Our English: Book Three by Joseph Denney, Eleanor Skinner, and Ada Skinner (1928).

A Short Talk to the Boys and Girls of Grade Seven

This is the best year of your entire school life for mastering English. You are just at the age when people feel the need of a more satisfying self-expression. Many new impulses, new interests, new ambitions, crowd in upon you. Some of these you satisfy by physical exertion, in play or work. You satisfy others by music, pictures, nature study, or reading. About all of your interests you talk, and sometimes write, for you cannot obtain full satisfaction of your thoughts and feelings without communicating them to others. Language is social.

English is the one school study that is in constant use outside of school. You employ it in some fashion all of the time. You want to use it in the best fashion, with fullness and freedom and certainty. Blunders are a handicap to success. Good English brings respect and esteem. It is easier to get your wants satisfied in this world if you can speak well and write correctly. People listen with pleasure to one who can express himself clearly. A good talker or writer brings added strength to any good cause in which he enlists. In learning more about your English you are therefore increasing your power as a good citizen. Our chief bond of unity in this great country is our common English speech. It helps to keep us all friendly and tolerant and prevents many misunderstandings. Whoever by his own usage helps to maintain our English at a high level of purity, contributes not only to his own good but also to national welfare.

I can almost get on board with it, but not quite.

I really like this thought:

Life itself has no meaning. Life is an opportunity to create meaning.

From what I can determine, the source of the thought is Osho, also known as Rajneesh, a twentieth-century Indian mystic.

This gives me hope.

Selfishness Is Learned

We tend to be cooperative—unless we think too much. . . . 

Which is our default mode, selfishness or selflessness? Do we all have craven instincts we must restrain by force of will? Or are we basically good, even if we slip up sometimes?

They collected data from 10 experiments . . . Despite the temptation to be selfish, most people showed selflessness. . . . 

and and his colleagues wanted to know how much deliberation went into such acts of generosity. . . . Those who responded quickly gave *more.* Conversely, when people took their time to deliberate or were encouraged to contemplate their choice, they gave less.

The researchers worked under the assumption that snap judgments reveal our intuitive impulses. Our intuition, apparently, is to cooperate with others. Selfish behavior comes from thinking too much, not too little. Rand recently verified this finding in a meta-analysis of 51 similar studies from different research groups. “Most people think we are intuitively selfish,” Rand says—based on a survey he conducted—but “our lab experiments show that making people rely more on intuition increases cooperation.”

The cooperative impulse isn’t confined to an artificial experimental setting. . . . 

So Rand made a strong case that people are intuitive cooperators, but he considered these findings just the start. It’s one thing to put forward an idea and some evidence for it—lots of past researchers have done that. It’s quite another to describe and explain that idea in a rigorous, mathematical fashion. . . . 

So, it seems there is a firm evolutionary logic to the human instinct to cooperate but adjust if necessary—to trust but verify. We ordinarily cooperate with other people, because cooperation brings us benefits, and our rational minds let us decipher when we might occasionally gain by acting selfishly instead. . . . 

Rand’s work offers a correction to those misanthropes who peer into the hearts of men and women and see shadows. Most of us are genuinely good. And if we’re not, we can be encouraged to be. The math is there.

If you think seeing life as a set of economics games and cooperation as self-interest in disguise sounds dismal, it is actually not so distanced from what you might call virtue. “When I’m nice to other people, I’m not doing it because of some kind of calculation. I’m doing it because it feels good,” Rand says. “And the reason it feels good, I argue, is that it is actually payoff maximizing in the long run.”

Cooperation is self-interest.