R(5,5)

I was told today that the number 45 was ruined by Trump. I found this difficult to parse at first — to me, a number is not ruined just because it has an association with something bad. But I think that there is more to it than just that. The weather service predicts rain as she'll come home from work today. As the day started (just after midnight here), Russia began an invasion of Ukraine. It really isn't the greatest start to Katherine's 45th birthday for several reasons. (And she was so looking forward to any day that represented a multiple of 5, her favorite number.)

At first, I pointed out Grover Cleveland. Sure, Trump is widely said to be the "45th" president. But since Cleveland was both the 22nd and 24th president (being elected both just prior to and immediately after the little-talked-about Benjamin Harrison), that means that Trump is only the 44th person to take on the mantle of the presidency overall.

Then, to bolster my claim, I remember the old claim that one person was President temporarily. David Rice Atchison has a plaque affixed to a statue in Plattsburg, Missouri, which states: "President of United States One Day". This refers to March 4, 1849, when he was chosen as president pro tempore in the Senate where he resided. The Senate's own website tells the rest of the story:

> On March 2, 1849, Vice President George M. Dallas took leave of the Senate for the remainder of the session and the Senate elected Atchison as president pro tempore. ... Until the adoption of the Twentieth Amendment in 1933, presidential and congressional terms began and ended at noon on March 4. In 1849 March 4 fell on a Sunday. On the morning of March 4, President James Polk signed the last of the session’s legislation at the White House and at 6:30 a.m. recorded in his diary, “Thus closed my official term as President.” The Senate, having been in session all night, adjourned sine die at 7:00 a.m. President-elect Zachary Taylor, in observance of the Christian Sabbath, preferred not to conduct his inauguration on Sunday, March 4, and the ceremony was delayed until the next day. On Monday, March 5, Taylor took the oath of office on the Capitol’s east front portico and the transition of power was complete.

> But if President Polk’s term ended on March 4 at noon, and Zachary Taylor was not sworn in until noon on March 5, who was president on March 4? Under the Presidential Succession Act of 1792 the Senate president pro tempore immediately followed the vice president in the line of presidential succession. Had Atchison been president from noon on March 4 to noon on March 5?

If the answer is yes, then, I at first thought, that might save the number 45. But then I realized that, if Athison had indeed served as president, then that would again make Trump the 45th person to take the role, since Cleveland served twice!

Thankfully, the answer is no. But I'm starting to suspect that this won't appease someone who feels that 45 is ruined anyway.

What, then, can rehabilitate 45? In the eyes of someone who loves the number 5, a strong contender is the fact that 45 is the conjectured value of the Ramsey number R(5,5). What is the least number number of guests that you must invite in order to ensure that at least five guests will know each other or at least five guests will not? Mathematicians are not sure, but we suspect it is 45.

To be slightly more general, R(m,n) gives an answer to the question of the least number of guests you'd need to invite in order to ensure that at least m guests know each other, or that at least n guests don't know each other. R(5,5) is known to be between 43 and 49 inclusive, and is conjectured to be 45. (See OEIS entry A120414 on Conjectured Ramsey Numbers R(n,n).) (To be even more general, R(m,n) refers to the idea that "complete disorder is impossible"; given a sufficiently large set, order will appear among its proper subsets. This is the first basic finding in Ramsey theory, which focuses on order amid disorder.)

Figuring out these numbers are deceptively difficult. Joel Spencer writes about Paul Erdős quip: if aliens come and demand to know the value of R(5,5) or they will destroy Earth, we should marshal all of our computers and mathematicians in an attempt to find the value. But if they demand to know R(6,6), we're better off attempting to destroy the aliens. In fact, Ramsey numbers appear to be difficult to calculate even with hypothetical quantum computers.

If 5 is a great number, and the most exciting parts of mathematics are the parts that lie just on our horizon, and if finding order within disorder is one of the enjoyable parts of being an artist, then R(5,5) must be a special case of representing something that might make up for Trump's taint. While we can't guarantee that it is 45 (some suspect 43 instead), it stands out as something that should make Katherine's 45th birthday special.

Happy birthday, Katherine. <3

I'll close with a poem by Ernest Davis entitled The Ramsey Number R(5,5):

There are fans, among math buffs, of e and of π.
The ratio golden has legions who sigh,
In reverent awe at its beauty ideal.
Euler's γ has got its own quirky appeal.
But what makes me feel tingly, aroused, and alive
Is the mystical integer R(5,5). [Read "R of five five"]

Like Batman and Robin, its everyday face
Is a secret identity quite commonplace.
It's an integer, experts on graph theory state,
At least 43 and at most 48.
And combinatorists laboriously strive
To narrow the bounds known for R(5,5).

It's a quite element'ry idea to define
(Though I don't want to try that in meter and rhyme).
A short, simple program in Python or C
Has no trouble at all finding R(3,3)
But the stars in the sky will no longer survive
Ere it prints out the value of R(5,5).

Said Erdos: "If aliens from far outer space
Want to know, or they'll wipe out the whole human race
If we join all our forces, perhaps we'll contrive
To tell them the value of R(5,5).
But we'll certainly be in a hell of a fix
If they ask for the value of R(6,6)."

A Long History of Gaming

I no longer have any of the video games I grew up with. Some were gifted to others; some were lost as I moved from place to place. Still others may very well be hidden in an obscure box I haven't opened in a decade or so. I played countless games on the NES, Game Boy, SNES, GBA, Playstation, GameCube, PS2, DS, Wii, 3DS, Wii U, and Switch, let alone the hours played on Steam and GOG.

Today, Nintendo released an app that lets you go back to your old 3DS and Wii U gaming memories. It was fun to look back on where I spent most of my time.

My 3DS gaming appears to have been dominated by single player games, with the exception of Tri Force Heroes, which I played through entirely with Katherine Hess and Jon Bockman. I apparently spent 94 hours in Animal Crossing alone, with another 61 hours in Bravely Default.

Not all of my 3DS memories are positive. There was a period of time where my personal life was very, very negative, and I used my 3DS as an escape mechanism — someplace I could go to avoid the harsh reality of life around me. Much of that experience occurred with Ghost Recon, which ended up with 82 hours of emotionless escape gameplay. I'm grateful that later games on the system represented much better times in my life, though apparently I didn't spend as much time with many of those later games as I did with Ghost Recon.

My Wii U gaming experience is a surprise to me: I would have guessed that Splatoon would have topped this list. But instead the top two positions go to Advance Wars: AW2 received 124 hours of my time and AW1 113 hours. These were both nostalgia plays for me — I feel certain that I put even more hours into the original games, and probably an even greater amount into Advance Wars: Days of Ruin on the DS. Meanwhile, poor neglected Splatoon had only 80 hours listed. (If you count Splatoon 2, this number becomes much, much higher, but that's on the Switch.)

The Wii U was a system that I played often with siblings, but I ended up playing mostly on their Wii U system when I visited, rather than on my own. This means the number of hours associated with Smash Bros., Nintendo Land, and several other local multiplayer games are undercounted here. The big surprise for me was that Super Mario 3D World didn't make the top three played games. I feel like I spent entire months of my life working on Champion's Road with Katherine. (Later, on Switch, I replayed 3D World online with three friends and have almost 100% completed it (still missing a Champion's Road finish with Toad).) I also feel like Mario Kart 8 must be missing many of the hours I spent online playing it, but maybe I'm combining in my head the portion of plays I've done on the Switch instead.

When the Switch came out, everything changed for me. Breath of the Wild alone took up entire days of my life when it came out. I can recall playing late into the evening, still playing in the morning when my partner left for work, and not yet finishing my gaming session by the time she returned home. I was obsessed.

In 2019, I logged 706 hours in 62 games on Switch. Considering that I spent a lot of time on StarCraft and a number of Steam games, this is fairly significant. My most-played games were Civilization, Slay the Spire, and WarGroove.

The following year, I became deathly ill, and my game playing reduced commensurately. In 2020, I played 535 hours on Switch in 39 games. My most played titles were Animal Crossing (209 hours by itself in 2020!), Killer Queen Black, and Divinity: Original Sin 2.

2021 had another 546 hours played in 35 games. Surprisingly, Animal Crossing continued to top the list, with Monster Sanctuary and Bug Fables not far behind. Killer Queen Black did not make the top three most played on Switch, but this is probably because I bought it on Steam and Stadia, opting to play on those platforms instead.

Unfortunately, these lists don't take into account the time I spent in 2018 nor in 2022 so far on Switch. I don't see a way to look at past play history in the settings, though the most recent 20 games played do get listed under my play activity. A glance there shows Killer Queen Black at 155+ hours, Grandia HD Collection at 70+ hours, Animal Crossing at 285+ hours, Monster Train at 55+ hours, & Loop Hero at 50+ hours. These are just the games with 50+ hours that exist in the last 20 games I've booted up on the system — I won't bother going through the trouble of going the full list of all 246 games I have on Switch, as that would take far too long. I'll instead just wait for whenever Nintendo decides to create an app that will showcase my Switch gaming memories.

A Valentine's Day Card

Giving something meaningful each Valentine's Day has become a sort of tradition between Katherine and myself.

This year, Katherine has truly outdone herself. Her handmade card quotes Carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World, showcasing a principle that has guided my life ever since I first became a skeptic some twenty odd years ago. It's a principle that I've held close to my being and that has been at the heart of many conversations Katherine and I have about so many different things. She writes that the balance between openness to new ideas and ruthless skepticism is a dance where each of us often switch sides in our cooperative search for truth. Alongside the quote, she has made literal pinpricks of light, referencing the lone lights in the darkness that rational thinking helps us to uncover. These represent the deep truths that lie within the deep nonsense — the very same deep truths that we slowly aim to uncover as we dig through the arguments about the problems of our time.

Upon opening the card, we see that there is yet another layer to the quote on the cover. She says that I brighten her life, implying that, at a different level, the darkness of the card itself also represents our lives, separated, and the lights we have managed to uncover are the shining moments we have made in the course of our relationship. All of this is said within the confines of a Sierpinski triangle, a fractal shape of crystalline regularity that reveals yet another layer of meaning: here, the balance is in the construction of the shape, with its open spaces throughout (literally it has an area of 0) and the numerous lights that we nevertheless uncover via the application of strict logical rules within the triangle itself. It is a saga that shows us the things we can count on even within a field where nothing can be counted on. Here, she implies, is where our love resides.

On yet another layer of interpretation, we see that the lights themselves overwhelm the structure of the sierpinski triangle. The triangle itself is drawn in a dark color that is difficult to see on the black background even with the lights turned off — once they are turned on, it becomes impossible to see the logical order belying them. Only the front of the card, written in reflective ink, remains visible to the human eye when the lights wash out the scene on the dark void itself. Yet even then it is a difficult thing to make out: you must struggle to see the path before you. Ironically, it is the brightness of the lights, not the darkness of the background, that makes this so difficult. This, again, is in reference to our relationship: so many of our brightest moments sometimes overshadow our typical moments in life, and make it that much more difficult to see the structure beneath it all when we reside day by day.

I am completely taken aback at the various layers of meaning weaved into a single card. So many of our conversations over the past years point back to many of the points made on the card itself. I am sure that, to any other person, this must look just like a black card with lights embedded within. But, to me, I see the threads of our relationship here: the discussions and presented arguments, the successes within a background of seeming impossibility, and the simple joys that overwhelm even the lowest of lows in a relationship of this magnitude.

I don't know how I can top this, but I will have to up my game next year.

See also the Puzzle Portraiture she made for me, the screen print of The Tuft of Flowers, & her drawing of Jasper and the Amiibo. You can see more of her work at KatherineHess.com.

Review: mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus

mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus by Eliezer Yudkowsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ambivalence gets a bum rap. Who would ever want to read a book that simultaneously delights and frustrates a reader to no end? When the text continually drops the ball on a simple matter and the mistake is repeated over and over again throughout the text, to the extent that this core mistake permeates the text in a way that can never be corrected by an editor, how could it ever be that the other content could delight enough to make up for this seemingly fatal deficiency?

I’m ambivalent about mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus. The characters all just care about sex too much. It's distracting. It's annoying. It makes it very difficult for me to place myself in the story seamlessly. But, unbelievably, the core conceit of a subpar dath ilani being isekaied into the Pathfinder universe where the citizenry literally are lawful evil supporters of hell itself and the dath ilani has yet to realize that evil is evil has got to be the most fascinating and exciting story hook I've come across since I was a teenager and wasn't already jaded to the classical canon.

Let me take a step back to explain, because if you're new to all of this, then the aim of this essay is to get you to read this story. Some very light spoilers follow, but honestly they are so light that I expect no one reading them to be bothered by them (the few who would be bothered by the most minimal of spoilers will stop reading here of their own accord).

First: Pathfinder is a role playing game universe with its own unique set of rules for magic, character alignment, governments, and gods. You usually see people playing an RPG in this setting; it's an alternative to the much better known Dungeons & Dragons universe. You don't need to be familiar with Pathfinder to get into this story, even though it's set in the Pathfinder universe. It's sufficient to be aware of general tropes regarding devils that contract for your soul and to realize that in Pathfinder, some governments are themselves lawful evil and enforce all their citizens to contract with devils for their souls. If you don't know Pathfinder, another basic fact you'll need is that demons are distinct from devils. Demons are chaotic evil fiends from the Abyss that exhibit raw fighting strength, while devils are non-chaotic evil contract-lovers who delight in taking unfair advantage of those who dare to sell their soul.

Second, dath ilan is an invention of Elizer Yudkowsky, one of the authors of mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus. Yudkowsky is significant in the rationality movement and has spent a lot of time writing tracts that help to make people think better about various things. dath ilan started out as an April Fools joke, when Yudkowsky started pretending that he was himself a citizen of dath ilan that was isekaied into our world and has been trying ever since to teach us Earthlings the ways of dath ilan. In dath ilan, the sanity waterline is much higher than on Earth. People cooperate there in ways that people here cannot, merely because everyone is much more rational along the dimensions that Yudkowsky cares about. It's a fascinating world, even if I don't personally agree that such a world would look the way that Yudkowsky portrays it. Their tech level is approximately a little beneath our own, mostly because the responsible adults of dath ilan deliberately slowed down (or stopped?) all technological progress along a dimension that will be obvious if you know any of Yudkowsky's other works, but which I won't name here as I expect it to be a further plot point in the text. If you know nothing of Yudkowsky and are going into this blind, the most important thing to know about dath ilan is that they're supposed to be the best that humans can be. Stuff just works there. Schools teach learning, businesses exist to better organize making goods available, politicians do the right thing, etc. It's not heaven — they're all still baseline humans — but they are much smarter than us and they work together to do society correctly.

Third, isekai is a genre where someone from world A suddenly finds themselves in world B. The genre started as a way to take someone from our world and put them in a fantasy world so that we can identify with the straight man and it is justified in-story why we stop to pay attention to details that people from world B wouldn't find interesting. But in mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus, this is turned on its head because we are unfamiliar with both world A and world B: Keltham (the dath ilani) is transported into the Pathfinder universe, where the lawful evil residents of Cheliax immediately start deceiving Keltham for reasons that I won't spoil here. Keltham is a teenager; he's smart, as all dath ilani are, but he's not the shining standard example you might expect from a place like dath ilan; Keltham is a bit weird by his culture's standards.

The resulting story is amazing. So many stories out there fail in my eyes because they insist on having characters hold the idiot ball, or because the characters make dumb decisions that the audience would never make. (It's the trope of a group in a scary mansion at night deciding to split up, but writ large: charatcers overlook obvious clues or make other choices that they definitely would not take if they were sufficiently rational.) mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus doesn't make this mistake. Keltham acts rationally. The adults of Cheliax act as they should, given their knowledge and desires. The story makes sense, and that's a rare treat among most stories told on Earth. mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus is a prime example of rational fiction, a genre that first started being considered a genre of its own in part due to Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, one of the best fanfictions ever written. If you end up liking mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus, you'll likely enjoy other rational fiction works; alternatively, if you find yourselves liking shorter ratfics, you'll also likely find this text worth the read.

But, as the opening of this review points out, I don't have nothing but praise for this book. Several parts make me feel strongly ambivalent.

mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus is a glowfic. It's written by two authors, each of whom writes dialogue and setting for the portion that they're responsible for. The text itself is a series of forum posts, where each post is written by one of the authors. It's not clear if they played it straight, but hypothetically, each other doesn't always know in advance what the other author is necessarily going for. In some glowfics, this means you get to see a succession of "yes and" situations, but in this specific glowfic style, you're more likely to see one author putting forth a general idea and the other one pushing back and finding edge cases that may trip them up. Does this make for good writing? Maybe, but not here. That's why I suspect that these two glowfic writers are more in concert than they may at first appear, since it's resulting in writing that more closely corresponds to what a single author may have written on their own. Parts of this feel stumbly where it needn't if this hadn't been a glowfic. I'm especially unhappy with the forum post format, which artificially creates issues not only with mathematical notation but also doesn't allow for graceful chapter headings or appropriate white space.

The strongest thing that puts me off the story, however, is the continued focus on sex. Yes, I get that Keltham is a teenager, and that a lawful evil society like Cheliax would use sex to nefarious ends. But the BDSM stuff is really pushed as a major part of the storyline in what feels like the cringiest thing I've ever started and then continued to read. The Erogamer, which is famously full of sex and yet nevertheless tells a deep story you won't expect (even having given this disclaimer, it will still be unexpected), does a legit better job of making the sex feel important-to-the-story than mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus does. Despite being asexual myself, I really enjoyed The Erogamer, and, in a similar way, I'm really enjoying mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus. But the former feels like the sex stuff is earned, while the latter feels like the authors just really wanted their rational story about math and rationality to also have a bunch of sex in it. I cannot tell you how much this turns me off. When I say I'm ambivalent about this, I don't mean that the sex part is bad but I recommend the story anyway because of its good qualities. No, what I mean is that the sex thing is so bad that I actively want to warn people away from reading this trash. Yet, at the same time, the rest of it is so good that I need others to experience this treasure. That's what I mean by my being ambivalent.

But, as I mentioned, I am asexual. Maybe other people just won't mind this level of BDSM in their stories. I tend to cringe when I see the two leads in a movie kiss (I keep hoping they're just friends!), and yet movie-makers keep using this trope over and over again, so maybe the rest of society just tolerates this kind of thing without cringing in the way I do. Maybe you'll enjoy it. But I remain ambivalent.

Sex isn't the only issue, however. The math is somewhat jumbled; the reader, if they are math literate, will be able to follow only with difficulty because dath ilan uses a different way of teaching and talking about math; the math illiterate will do no better than to skim over these parts. Worse, the format lends itself poorly to mathematical notation: at some points, the authors literally use a series of dashes to create a vinculum (dividing line in a fraction). The html doesn't wrap correctly in some browsers, so this makes the math appear amateurish. Given that I think at least one author really does intend for readers to learn this stuff, I'm guessing this doesn't have any aspect of authorial intent, and if the authors knew how to allow LaTeX to appear, they might use that instead. (I'm only partially sure because the authors insist upon making dath ilan math use different notation and go about describing mathematical relationships in an entirely different way.)

Worse, the author seems to want to teach the reader, even if the reader just wants to enjoy the story. This creates a tension where the author spends way more time on explaining a concept than any other author realistically would, and it may cause some readers to lose interest for a dozen forum posts at a time. I get that the point of the story is to semi-secretly increase the sanity waterline. But it feels like playing an edutainment game at times. Maybe if the teaching sections were shorter, or less dense, then you could stealthily teach while the reader is focused on enjoying the story. But, as written, it's like a story that occasionally takes breaks in order to go in depth and teach a lesson on rationality. Unfortunately, this isn't fixable by editing out the teaching parts, because the teaching parts are integral to the story itself. Fascinatingly, as you learn each lesson, you are supposed to be able to better understand what Keltham was doing in previous parts of the story. In a way, this is like an M. Night Shyamalan twist where when you see the twist at the end, you look back at the beginning and see it in a new light — except the twist is continuous: as you learn more ratonality, you're better able to appreciate how Keltham has been experiencing the situation the entire time, since he's looking at everything with a rational eye.

So even though the teaching parts feel stilted and break up the cadence of the story in unflattering ways, they're nevertheless part of what makes this text great. (Meanwhile, the sex stuff could be removed almost entirely and I suspect the story would be better for it.)

The story itself is ongoing, but I'm a writing a review now anyway because I'm already certain of the five star rating I'm going to give it. You may wonder why a book I'm ambivalent about is getting a perfect rating, but, at the meta level, I think that this is entirely appropriate. I genuinely cringe at sex stuff in this book even when I didn't cringe at more extreme sex stuff in The Erogamer. I actively dislike the sex parts so much that I want to warn people away from reading. I also actively like the other parts so much that I need others to read this. On the meta level I want others to experience this fascinating dissonance, which, when combined with the good object level parts, results in my five star rating.

You can read mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus on glowfic.com. You can learn more about dath ilan on LessWrong, including links to previous stories about dath ilan people isekaied into various locales. If you decide to read this despite never having heard of Yudkowsky or rational fiction before, and you like it, be sure to look up other rational fiction works. Oh, and Eliezer, if you're reading this: good god, man, please stop weaving this much unnecessary sex into your plotlines. It's one thing to write sex into a story about being corrupted by the internet. But when you take what may be the best plot hook of all time (dath ilani isekaied to nation of lawful evil people intent on corrupting them) and then stuff your sex fantasies in there, it ruins what could have been so much better. I'll take it anyway, because it's damn good, and maybe there's no incentive to do otherwise since most of your intended readers won't be asexual like me, but good god that's a lot of sex and masochism for a story supposedly about rationality. Granted, the lawful evil stuff justifies the inclusion of masochism, but not the sex in the first place, no matter how horny a teenage dath ilani might be.

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From Obtuse Mental Health Issues to Acute

It can be difficult to talk openly about mental health. I’ve tried over the years to not shy away from talking about many of the issues in my life, many of which are quite serious. But when it comes to mental health, I tend to stay relatively quiet. I think this may be because I value my mental health more than any physical health or disability that I may encounter in life. It probably explains why I am a teetotaler, and why I take special care to exercise my brain far more often than my body.

Which is all why it still seems so difficult to me now to say the thing that I’ve come here to say. So I’ll just be out with it:

It came on suddenly.

I suffered a mental breakdown a few weeks ago.

If you asked me what caused it, I’m not sure I’d be able to give a good answer. There’s a lot going on in my life that has been causing me extreme stress. There are people who count me as an enemy despite my trying to work with them. There are issues with an employee I hired who is also family, and the relationship has grated as a result. There are undone tasks in my household which have dramatically hurt my ability to live well there. There are people I have let down, and my brain has not been able to make it up to any of them.

The extent of this problem has become severe. Since my ordeal in 2020, I have been instructed by a doctor to take life saving medication every day. Without these medications, I would die. So you would think that, even if other things in my life started falling down, at least when it came to life-saving medication, I would take it every day.

So far, this is true. I do take it each day, with my partner’s help. But my doctor retired last summer. Slowly, one by one, the prescriptions that they ordered for me started to expire. I no longer received the medications that I needed each day to live. Yet I found myself unable to call that doctor’s office. I could not get new prescriptions under another doctor’s name. One day, when my partner found out that I had only a few days left of a certain life-saving medication, she panicked and bought it online instead. The price was ~50 times as expensive as my co-pay would have been. But at least it meant I continued remaining alive.

This is what triggered awareness of just how bad things had become for me. After a few additional events like this, my mental capacities mostly shut down at the beginning of this year. I’ve been slowly picking up the pieces since.

Yesterday, I spoke with my family for the first time in quite a while. They were concerned because they had not been able to get in touch with me. I’d been avoiding text messages and email entirely since Christmas, with the exception of my EGQ email. I believe that every single other responsibility in my life, whether it’s shoveling snow or dealing with board issues, has fallen by the wayside during these three weeks.

By Katherine Hess.

For those that have never experienced something like this, I will try to explain my inner subjective experience. In a word, it is dread. But the dread is attached to something that should be innocuous. For example, I am owed ~$2700 by someone who wants to pay me. If they were to pay me without me having to do anything, I’d be happy about this. But I have to fill out a form, and that form fills me with dread. Not because it is a difficult form to fill out, nor because there’s some rational reason why I should be wary of it, but merely because my brain has singled this out as something that should fill me with utter dread, and so the filling out of the form becomes such a monumental task that I simply cannot move forward with filling it out.

Not all tasks are so monumental, but each task seems to have an outsized portion of dread attached that takes more effort than it should to complete. Ordinarily, I manage despite this. But in the past three weeks, it has built to a head: there are days where I’ve done little more than sleep. There are days where it takes all the effort in the world to just do the five hours of work I need to do in order to go on. There are weekends where, in order to enjoy the company of a friend for a few hours in the evening, I’ve literally sacrificed my entire day just to ensure that I can have those few moments of joy.

Although I’ve had a predisposition toward these types of things for my entire life, it has never been as bad as it has been these past three weeks. I wish I could point to a singular event that caused this. But even the precipitating event, being unjustly called racist and unwilling to work for a better society for all, was just the thing that pushed me over the edge. Nevertheless, this accusation consumed my thoughts, knocking over the precarious structures I had in place to allow me to function relatively well in society. It made me shut down. That’s when I had my mental breakdown.

Today, I am trying to pick up the pieces. But I will not be able to juggle what I once did, not until I rebuild the structures that allowed me to deal with my mental issues. To aid this, I will be making several changes in my life.

• I’m cutting back on work significantly. Rather than have my fingers in lots of projects, I’m going to focus entirely on just Effective Giving Quest. This means I will be subcontracting out my current contractual obligations and turning down any other offers of work for the immediate future.

• I’m planning on either resigning or cutting back significantly from my board duties. This will be a significant reduction in the number of hours worked for me.

• I will be volunteering far less. This includes the intensive work I’ve put into WikiProject Effective Altruism and the works in progress I’ve had for the Effective Altruism Forum.

• I will be using a therapist from here on out. Depending on what they recommend, I will be open to taking medication to help deal with these issues.

• My days will revolve around three pillars moving forward: EGQ, exercise in and out of the house, and making time/space to spend on fun: with family/friends/books/games.

These are not small changes. While they will take time to implement, I do think that this is the best that I can do moving forward if I want to ensure that a breakdown like this never happens again.

By Katherine Hess.

(For small tasks in the immediate future, I will getting around the outsized feelings of dread not by eliminating the dread, but by putting a sticky note on these immense mental blocks in my mind, reminding me that this portion of my map does not correspond to the territory, and that doing these small tasks will not cause nearly as much discomfort as they appear to in my mind. Specifically, I will be accomplishing this by setting up trigger action plans associated with these small tasks, where the action will be noticing these sticky notes. From there, it will take mere courage to do these small tasks anyway. I'm not sure how effective this will work, but until a therapist recommends something different, this is the method I'll be using to at least reclaim the small things in my life that need to be done.)

To those I’ve let down, I am so very sorry. I will be sending personalized apologies in the coming weeks, alongside my expectations of how I can help mitigate any harms I’ve already caused and how we can set expectations moving forward so that this kind of thing does not recur.

To future me, reading this post in the future: I hope that I’m doing right by you as I make these rather extreme changes. While this will significantly reduce my output, I sincerely hope that by focusing on only a few avenues of change you will nevertheless be more capable of doing good than I am today, in this sad broken state. But even if not, I remain hopeful that these changes will at least make you happier and more capable of enjoying life that I am now. The former is something I am unsure of, but the latter is something that I honestly think these changes will genuinely come to pass. Wish me well, as I wish for you.