Counting My Blessings

Yesterday, I was diagnosed with a long-term illness. It's not life-threatening, but it is a chronic condition.

This reminder of my own likely mortality has understandably put me into a rather somber mood. I find myself counting my blessings and reminiscing over the arc of my life.

I earn enough to be comfortable.

It feels a little weird to bring up money first, but income really does determine many secondary blessings—enough so that it is the primary blessing I think of. I haven't always had what I'd consider a good income, but my life has been much richer monetarily than most people in the world. On the global rich list, I've pretty much always been in the top couple percent, though that isn't exactly difficult to do if you're born in an industrialized country. (A salary of $25k is sufficient.) There were times that were hard enough that I dropped to subsistence levels, but I've always had safety nets of various kinds to support me, so I've always bounced back.

Today, I earn more than I ever have, and I have multiple safety nets surrounding me in the form of friends and family. I'm happy to be able to donate around 25% of my gross income to effective altruism causes even while keeping up the relatively expensive hobbies of board gaming and Switch playing, where I buy pretty much whatever I think I might enjoy.

I am loved, and I love in return.

Once food, shelter, and other necessities are stable, the next most important thing I notice is love. Companionship is important to me, although it's something that I've had some trouble with in the past. Two of my siblings live nearby, and another plays with me weekly online, so I'm able to maintain relatively close relationships with them all. I receive much comfort from the best of my friends and family, and am extraordinarily grateful to have them around.

It wasn't always like this. There was a time when friendships were difficult to maintain for me. As strange as it may sound, I learned many lessons about friendship from the My Little Pony series. It's helped me to become a better person and allowed me to maintain friendships that I traditionally would have allowed to fade.

I am relatively healthy.

Despite my diagnosis yesterday, I have no reason to suspect that my chronic condition will cause an undue amount of discomfort in my life. I am luckier in this respect than I have any right to be. I spent thirty-five years without seeing a dentist, and was found to have no cavities. I've never broken a bone, nor had any serious illness in the past, other than a bout of whooping cough when I was a young child that left no lasting damage. Although I am apprehensive about my recently diagnosed condition, I nevertheless feel as though I've had a very long time to live in such good health, and am accepting of the health condition I will have to endure moving forward.

Culture surrounds me.

Although I ultimately realize that I am mostly ignorant of the world and of humanity's culture so far, I nevertheless feel a great debt to those that first introduced me to the field of philosophy. Before then, I was so focused on basic science, games of power and control, and shallow story-telling, that I did not appreciate what the world truly has to offer. But one by one, philosophy has opened my mind to fields I never previously would spare a thought to. Most important is ethics, and how it led me to the effective altruism movement, but also great literature, art, economics, history, and much deeper story-telling mediums, such as hard science fiction and rational fiction. Philosophy also helped me to realize the importance of the less deep, strengthening my appreciation for bad tv shows, infantile humor, and naive artistic creation, just to name a few.

I know I am but only slightly aware of the depth of culture that surrounds us. So many things exist that I know I do not know: the beauty in how to understand a rifle so thoroughly that one can tear it down and build it back up again in one's head; the sublime nature of artistic pieces in famous museums that continue to elude me; the workings of various biological systems; the rites of honoring a family tradition that has gone on for long before I was born; the joy that some claim comes from a belief in a higher power. And I'm certain that there must be unknown unknowns that I can't even imagine at the moment. Yet I still so fully appreciate the awareness that philosophy and a liberal education has given me that I wish desperately that others might receive the same sort of study, even if they plan on going into an unrelated career.

I am able to control and remember many dreams.

Perhaps it is because I gloss over poor details at the time, but in my own mind it feels as though I may construct stories of any type and any depth on a whim. No book nor movie has ever come close to the situations and storylines that I imagine while I sleep. While I enjoy my waking life a great deal, I also am extremely appreciative of my sleeping hours. There is much in my imagination that is seemingly able to reference more exactly and build upon more dramatically than any fiction I've seen from any other author. Of course, I recognize that this is because my judgment while asleep is less discriminating than when I am awake, and that there is a selection bias where the references I insert are always recognized by me, while the references other authors use may sometimes go over my head. Nevertheless, the feeling I have is that my dreams are superior, and that is what matters to me in the end.

I am a super hero.

At least I feel like one. I imagine the pride a fireman feels when they save a life, and I consciously attempt to attach that imagined emotion to the result of whenever I donate an amount equivalent to saving a life. It was hard to do at first, and it feels a little weird to talk about it to other people, but, in my private life, when I'm thinking just to myself, I make a point to truly embrace the idea that I have done an equivalent amount of good whenever I donate effectively. This brings me far more happiness and well-being than if I were to spend that money elsewhere.

Evidence points to an upward trajectory.

Yes, there are existential risks. But whereas very few worked on them in the past, the effective altruism movement is mobilizing better and more able minds than my own to work on these problems. Yes, they have an uphill battle, and, on the whole, my expectation is that there is more human capital working toward xrisks than are working against it. But the derivative is positive: we are doing more and more each day to make the world a better place.

Wild animal suffering is a massive problem. People are dying every day for stupid reasons. And yet I feel a Pinker-esque optimism about the trajectory of some of our finest thinkers.



As you can see, I have many categories of blessings to count. I know that much of this is due to the evolution of my ancestors; that the values I care about mostly come about from the replication of genes and memes that started long ago for morally arbitrary reasons. And yet I feel comforted nevertheless.

Yesterday may have given me bad news, but I am happy today.

Snippets of Birthdays Past

July 1st, 1981. I am delivered slightly after midnight, at nearly the exact middle of the year, 183 days into a year of 365. The doctor delivers me via Caesarean section. Unbeknownst to my mother, the doctor has chosen this date specifically so that my mother and I might share a birthday. She does not realize until days later that I am born on the same day of the year that she was.

1984. I am three. My parents and I visited Miami, Florida, to see family on my father's side. My abuelo spoke no English, but we bonded anyway by watching Looney Tunes together. Later, I will tell my grandmother about the trip, which ends up being my first narrated diary entry.

1988. I am seven. The front yard of my grandparents' house has a huge pile of dirt (as tall as I am!) from the work done in their back yard. My best friend at the time, Greg Cochran, helps me to dig tunnels and edifices in the dirt pile that we then use to play with figurines from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers. The big gift that year feels like the Nintendo Entertainment System, but in reality it is the new house that my father built just down the street from my grandparents' place. Before finalizing the design of the building, my father asks me: is there anything special you'd like in the house? I tell him I want a secret passage, and the first thing he shows me in my new room is that there is a tunnel from my bedroom closet to the guest bedroom closet.

1990?. I don't know my age. My elementary teacher asks the class what their favorite color is, intending to say that each color means something about each person's personality. I'm not yet familiar with skepticism as a field, but it feels wrong to me. I don't have a favorite color, so I decide to answer flippantly, specifying the glow-in-the-dark halloween orange that you most often see on the uniforms of workmen on the side of a road. I am told that I am being obsequious for my malicious compliance, so I go home that night and resolve that, from then on, orange will be my favorite color. To this day, it continues to be a color in almost every outfit I wear each day.

1993. I am twelve. Summers are a welcome break from school. I use a pair of three-tonged cultivators as my implements of choice as I climb the quarter-mile long cliffside. It is only ten feet tall, but its sheer vertical dirtface continues for well over 1500 feet. There is real danger to falling: it is situated on a roadside, so tumbling down the cliff may result in rolling into the street, which occasionally has traffic. But although I sometimes lose my grip with one hand, the other stands strong, and my feet find purchase on roots and other minor outcroppings that keep me from falling.

1994. I am thirteen. I am in love with Final Fantasy VI. Over the next decade, I will play this game so many times that I am able to memorize the script. I challenged myself to win with only three characters; to win with as low levels as possible; to collect every item and level up every party member. I would later name my daughter after a character in this game. The main reason I consider myself a gamer today is because the epic that is FFVI affected me so deeply.

1996. I am fifteen. I am sulking. Earlier this year, I was expelled from the Alabama School of Math and Science for repeatedly being with a girl, Laura. It was a boarding school I'd been attending since July 1993 that had fairly explicit rules that were supposed to discourage sexual activity. We broke them, became suspended, and then ignored suspension to break them again. Later, I will invite Robin to the high school prom, only to ignore her calls the day of. I am extremely not proud of the person I was back then.

1997. I am sixteen. I've been with Amber for over six months. I couldn't get enough of her. She is an explorer, and I follow her everywhere. The city of Mobile, which once was just the big town I lived closest to, became a labyrinth we would move through each week, seeing this and that, walking through any doors that were left open, so that we could see what was inside and do what teenagers do. Those first eighteen months are ones I'm proud of. I am a good boyfriend; I am a good friend. But I make poor choices, and by my next birthday, things will turn sour.

1998. I am seventeen. Amber is pregnant. My mind was very confused at the time. I think I thought that actions never really had consequences, so the world must somehow work itself out so as to not too terribly effect me. I guess I assumed that the pregnancy would end without a child, or that Amber would move away to give birth and give away the child, or some other such nonsense. Instead, I will end up marrying her out of misguided obligation and becoming a father to an infant that I will never really end up knowing. Starting in June 1998, I become less and less of a good boyfriend. Less and less of a friend at all.

1999. I am eighteen. I live alone in a two-bedroom house. Amber is gone, along with Adrianah, the five-month old child that I will never see again. She has done a great favor to the child, to herself, and even to me. I was not ready to be a father. In fact, even now, twenty-two years later, I am still not father material. I know that I would be a terrible father, and so I am glad to have ensured that I'd never make that same mistake again. (Today, I am happy, at least, to know that Adrianah Celes has been able to grow up in a good, stable family these past 22 years, though I've never spoken to nor seen her since.) By this point, I had dropped out after less than a semester of college. Every day is spent sulking in my home. My friend Greg brings me groceries, because I am too depressed to leave the house. For some reason, I think that if I leave, I might miss Amber coming back, which I don't really want, but which keeps me from leaving the house anyway. It will be another couple of months before I get the strength to leave the house. When I do, I go to Barbara's house and watch Star Trek: Voyager on VHS lying on her couch for hours on end while she's at work.

2000. I am nineteen. I live alone in a McMansion. My parents are separated. My father has left the area. My mother would have stayed in the house they used to inhabit, but she is afraid of my father breaking into the home while she is sleeping, so she instead stays with her mother. This leaves the house empty, so I live there on my own. You might think this would mean I would throw huge parties, but instead it just means that I watch endless episodes of Saturday Night Live on Comedy Central while I eat doritos on the couch.

2001. I am twenty. I live with Allison in Colorado. She is submissive, which is apparently what I wanted in a partner back then. I spend my birthday playing Chrono Cross while receiving fellatio. Later, I will spend a week eating nothing but Hot Pockets for the duration while she is gone. I have still not yet learned to cook my own food, and it will be years yet before I'm forced to start. However, she has instilled within me a love for journaling, which I've kept to this day.

2002. I am twenty-one. I live briefly with my grandmother for a few months. During the period surrounding my birthday, I am fired (then rehired) nearly a dozen times in a span of three months. I work at a call center cold-calling people to get them to sign up for a credit card. Most of my colleagues only manage a sale each day; I'm able to get four each day reliably. My strategy involves ending calls as quickly as possible if I can tell they won't switch, and focusing only on calls where I have a chance of making a sale. In practice, this means that I sit reading my book while call after call comes in, with my voice automatically droning as boringly as possible the opening lines of my pitch. Only when they show interest do I set the book down, and this only happens once per hour so. The rest of the time I read, ignoring my job for the most part. The manager hates me. But I make way more sales than anyone else, so the manager loves me, too. By Wednesday of each week, I tire of working, so I tell the manager that I won't be coming in on Thursday or Friday. He tells me that this is against company policy, and he has to fire me -- but that I'm welcome to reapply on Monday and he'll rehire me. We do this for three months straight. And then, on one particular Monday, I don't feel like going to work. So I instead stop by Spring Hill College and ask to join the classes that just started that same day. They say yes, and my first day of classes occurs on the same day I applied. Soon after, I decide to make my journal entries public online.

2003. I am twenty-two. I was supposed to spend my birthday in South Dakota, digging dinosaur bones. Instead, I ended my trip early and came home after digging up only a scapula of a triceratops. My sister, Anh, greets me in the car with several balloons. I feel loved.

2005. I am twenty-four. My summer is spent reading Aristotle's Ethics with a group of fellow students at the local Barnes & Noble. Each night is spent at my mother's house. It is the last extended length of time I will spend with my mother. In a couple of months, I will move in with Stephanie.

2006. I am twenty-five. I live with Stephanie. I am so very much not a good boyfriend. Shawn Allin, my first college friend and chemistry teacher, committed suicide a month earlier. It is the second suicide I've had happen to someone close to me. The first was only a few years previous, while I was teaching Tae Kwon Do. She was presented with her newly earned belt. She looked proud. But that night she hung herself with the same belt. I'm not a fan of suicide.

2007. I am twenty-six. I live in Maryland for the first time. I'll leave for elsewhere later, but Maryland will eventually end up my permanent home. I finish my first published book. It's on email marketing techniques. I'll later publish other texts on social media, and will go on to speak at conferences on how to properly use social media at food banks. My lifelong career in communications has begun.

2008. I am twenty-seven. I live with Rosemary. It is my first romantic relationship that was net good overall. I am now the webmaster of a national nonprofit with over $150 million in revenue. Life has become routine, but I am happy. I feel successful.

2010. I am twenty-nine. I live with Robin. She helps me to learn how to be a better friend and partner. Much of my growth in terms of what I can offer in a friendship matures during this time, partly due to her influence, and partly due to My Little Pony. Looking back, I certainly was not yet what I'd consider to be a good friend (nor even a good person, really!), but I was definitely changing, and I greatly appreciate this time in my life.

2011. I am thirty. I don't live with Amanda, but we spend enough time together that it may as well be so. I treat her more as an accessory than a friend. I think at the time I just wanted companionship romantically, without any other attachments.

2012. I am thirty-one. Six months earlier, I learned about Effective Altruism, which has since dominated my life choices. I was listening to a podcast with Toby Ord and Luke Muelhauser while trekking through a flat portion of the Appalachian Trail, fascinated by the discussion. That night I slept outside in the rain, sitting in a camping chair that I brought on my back, with a 'tent' draped above me, held aloft only by my head. My iphone was the only light as far as I could see, and I used it to listen to podcasts on all kinds of philosophical positions on charity and what we should be doing with our lives. It has been nearly ten years since that day and I still am fascinated and moved by the tenets of effective altruism.

2013. I am thirty-two. I live with Katherine. Jack has just died. I am sad, but life has become much, much better for me. Katherine is, by far, the best thing to have ever happened to me.

2015. I am thirty-four. I attend my first effective altruism conference and am extraordinarily excited by it. These are my people. Meanwhile, at home I remain happy with Katherine, and at work I greatly enjoy the company of Day.

2018. I am thirty-seven. Check out this awesome puzzle portrait I received as a gift this year.

2019. I am thirty-eight. My grandmother is dead. I haven't seen the maternal side of my family in years. I stop for a moment to wonder if this is a mistake. What is it about me that makes it so that I don't think much of going for long periods of time without talking to people that I used to care deeply about? Is this just another facet of my aphantasia, or is there something deeper going on?

2020. I am thirty-nine. I am weak. I survived sepsis only a few months earlier, followed by several life-saving operations. Although I had gone this far in life without ever taking medication more than a dose of tylenol once or twice a year, from now on I must take pills every single day. For the first time, I start to feel like I am finally older.

2021. I am forty. I feel strong. COVID-19 has dominated my life for the past sixteen months. I haven't seen family, outside of two occasions for my father's side of the family, and two occasions for Katherine's mother, for the past sixteen months. But later today I will go to a physical restaurant for the first time since the end of 2019. I will see my family in person. I will celebrate the dismissal of all that lost time. I will tell my family about the charity that I'm starting. I will give gifts to my siblings and parents for the missed birthdays, the missed Christmas, the missed everything. I am looking forward to being able to give on my birthday, rather than to receive. I am happy.

202X. I will be older. Hopefully wiser. It is my wish that my success continues. That my partner and I continue to support each other in all that we do. That my family is happy and forward-looking. That no more deaths haunt these future years. I wish that our long term future is secured; that the alignment problem is solved or finally looks solvable; that lab-grown meat supplants killed meat as the cheapest meat source; that poverty declines ever further worldwide. And, maybe, if I can get past the akrasia, I'll finally pull the trigger on cryonics.

The Choice to Be Good

[Note: This entry spoils plot points in Cobra Kai, The Sword of Good, and (maybe if you stretch it) My Little Pony. Please only read this entry if you don't mind casual discussion of spoilers or if you've already read the short story The Sword of Good and watched Cobra Kai to at least the first two episodes of the third season.]

John Kreese, Cobra Kai

In the final scene of season 3 episode 2 of Cobra Kai, John Kreese kicks out the weak members of Cobra Kai and gives a speech justifying why he did so.

"Your whole life you've been told to be good. But good is only a matter of perspective. Always remember your enemies think that what they're doing is right. They think they are the hero; you are the villain." —John Kreese, Cobra Kai

Kreese goes on to say that there is no good; there is no bad. Only strength and weakness. We've heard this sort of thing from fictional villains many times before. And while there is a level of truth to this if you buy in to moral antirealism as I do, that same level of skepticism can and probably should be applied to many other things. (For a frank example of this, listen to the final six minutes of Embrace the Void's interview of Jeff Sebo (starting at 1:01:01, though the rest of the interview is also excellent).) Ultimately, speeches like this are reserved for fictional villains. Yet with a small bit of tweaking, rational fanfic style, you can construct from here a position that is not only much more convincing, but which also may very well be true.

I have been told my entire life to be good. To do the right thing, to make the good choice. At first, this was hard for me. I was rather selfish as a child; I cared very little for others, except insofar as it affected me. Even when it did affect me a great deal, I still didn't take care to do well for others, because I incorrectly judged short term personal gains over the problems that I'd create for my then future selves. If I look back to those times, putting myself into the position of that younger me, I believe I would truthfully think: It is hard to make the choice to be good. I know that the choices I am making are bad, but I like what I get when I make those choices. Lying is bad, but lies help me to get sex when I want. Not being there for friends is bad, but I only enjoy these friendships when they make me feel good, and being around when they need me doesn't feel as good, and avoiding them doesn't have negative consequences because they are pushovers.

Yes, I really did learn friendship lessons from MLP.
Does that make me a brony?
Tyson believes that labelling causes people
to make unflattering untrue assumptions,
so I'll not label myself.

Putting aside the fact that I was a terrible person back then, I'd like to zoom in on the idea that choosing to be good was a hard choice for me to make back then. It took real effort of will to do. But somewhere along the line, that changed. At some point, the knowledge that eating animals was bad became a moral imperative for me to no longer eat animals. The idea that a friend needed me turned into me needing to be there for them. I can remember watching the first season of My Little Pony and learning some lesson about friendship, and then actually putting into practice that lesson by enacting that very lesson with my real life friends. By this point in my life, learning that X is good turned into me deciding that I had to do X. It was no longer difficult at all to make the choice to be good -- knowing that something was good was sufficient for me to actually go through with it.

Of course, I still improved over time, but it was more due to me learning what was good. I found parts of my life that I was morally deficient in and did my best to improve them. I learned from others what they thought about what was good or bad, determined if I agreed, and then changed my life accordingly. To me, the idea that making the choice to be good was a difficult choice to make had become alien and weird. It was hard to identify with my past self who had felt differently.

But I think I may have come full circle on this idea. The me of today, writing this now, once again believes that making the choice to be good is an extremely difficult choice to make. Not because I want to do bad, but because as time passes I become much less certain that I know what good even is. (Or, from the perspective of a moral anti-realist like me, I've become much less certain that I even know what I want good to even be.)

Image from the YouTube version of
Brodski's audiobook version of
Yudkowsky's The Sword of Good.

Our whole lives we've been told to be good. But good seems to be only a matter of perspective. We must always remember that our enemies think that what they're doing is right. They think they are the hero; that we are the villains. Yet if we have proper epistemic utility, we must allow that they may be right! The choice between good and evil is not to say "I choose good"; it is to look at a set of facts and to determine which choice is the good choice.

During Christmas, I skyped with family and we played a discussion game. On each person's turn, we were asked a question that we had to honestly answer, not in a kneejerk way, but to really consider and answer truthfully in front of our family. The card I was dealt asked me about mistakes I had made in 2020. The big one was obvious: I almost died because I had not been properly getting checked up medically. But the other mistake was potentially just as grave: I had not been properly considering the value of actively helping to enact social justice.

Those who know me well will understand that I am still very much thinking through these things. I do not yet know to what extent we should value free open discussion over the comfort of people experiencing social inequity. I know only that either extreme seems wrong to me and that I will likely end up endorsing some middle position between them. But figuring out what actually is the good... That is a question that, once answered, may potentially redirect large amounts of intellectual and financial capital in the EA movement and beyond. As a communicator, I feel that if I am able to find a good middle ground, I may be able to help convince a large proportion of the EA community to take that middle ground seriously. But it is important that I get this right.

I told my family that I was having this problem. That knowing that you want to do the right thing is not enough; the hard part is figuring out what the right thing even is. It's especially difficult when the arguments on one side are well written, competently organized, and internally consistent; while the other side purports to give its best face through a racial equity workshop where the trainer talked about their astrological sign, an insistence that marginalized people feel unsafe even among people who are doing their best to be considerate of racial equity merely because they publicly recognized the achievements of someone else who isn't considerate, and who continually push for the idea that direct impact dominates intent when it comes to support of white supremacist institutional structures, regardless of any other externalities. Quite frankly, it is difficult to take one of these sides seriously given how poor their most-often presented arguments seem to be. Yet (ironically) when I look past the impact of their arguments and instead look to their intent -- when I see their suffering and inability to construct a good argument as to why they are affected so much -- it makes me want to delve deeper, to look further, to seek out what I'm missing. Meanwhile, the other side seems so smug. So uncaring. It's as though on the one hand one side seems to be obviously true, and yet simultaneously the other side seems to also be equally obviously true. The contradiction is striking.

Good seems to only be a matter of perspective. To see clearly, we must disregard status quo bias. Imagine that you're starting from scratch. Look to the consequences. If you must aim solely for greatest utility, then you must properly value fairness to avoid utility monsters. Don't fall for Pascal's mugging. Don't overvalue pithiness. Notice confusion. Do check with someone you trust to see if you've made a mistake in your logic. Set aside how you feel when going through logic, but trust your feelings as an alarm bell if it tells you that something is wrong. Remember, though, that sometimes the error is in the alarm system, not the logic. If your conclusion will seem to harm your public image too greatly, then your temporal discounts are probably too high. Just because one of the sides claims loudly to be the good side does not make it so; but also if they can do so with a straight face then you should value that as evidence that they are in fact doing mostly good things. Overall, we must come to a decision eventually, so don't keep retreading old ground. It is difficult, but we must make the choice to be good. We must.

Review: The Rise and Fall of the Dark Lord Sassaflash

The Rise and Fall of the Dark Lord Sassaflash by Dromicosuchus
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In the world of My Little Pony, the Dark Lord Sassaflash is a necromancer with ambition. But to accomplish her great tasks, she needs not only her apprentice, Sweetie Belle, but also a dedicated (not too intelligent) minion who can do her bidding. But who would be willing to take on such a job?

This fanfiction take on My Little Pony has a Lovecraftian aesthetic, yet it fits in perfectly with the show's canon. The Dark Lord Sassaflash wants to take over the world, but she thinks about doing so in just the way you might expect a denizen of the MLP universe to, and all the characters stay in character throughout the story. These are the kinds of fanfiction that I find most impressive — the author Dromicosuchus has successfully crafted a story that not only uses characters from the universe but has done so without taking you out of that universe, all while adding significant plot-relevant aspects to the larger mythos.

I came in expecting a short rationalist-style fanfic; I left having enjoyed a rare treat. I give it five stars not because it is a grand adventure that everyone must read, but because it sets out to be a rational Lovecraftian-style story set in the MLP universe, and it succeeded perfectly. Maybe I wouldn't recommend this to everyone, but only because you'd need to want to read MLP fanfiction and have interest in the Cthulu mythos to really properly enjoy this. Very well done, Dromicosuchus. I only wish I could see a sequel to this one day.

View all my reviews

Blind Invidia

Recently, I learned that I have had a lifelong disability that I never previously realized that I had: aphantasia.

Aphantasia (meaning "without imagination") is a condition characterized by being unable to literally see objects when one's eyes are closed. People with aphantasia cannot visualize things.

Image is from Bebeflapula.

This relatively rare condition affects between 1–3% of the population, of which I am one. Yet despite writing a description of the condition in the preceding paragraph, I can't help but to strongly feel like my description is wrong. Of course I can visualize things; I've visualized things my entire life. Of course I can see objects in my mind's eye. How else am I able to enjoy fiction and dream so vividly and mentally rotate objects?

Yet I am definitely aphantasiac. The problem lies in my misunderstanding of how others have used words for my entire life. Every time someone has said "envision yourself relaxing on a beach," I've diligently closed my eyes and "imagined" myself on a beach. Except I put "imagine" in quotes here because I don't actually see anything at all; rather, I have a rough understanding of what it would be like if I really were relaxing on a beach. If you said to me: "are there any umbrellas on the beach?", I would respond with confusion, wondering if I'm being asked to "imagine" umbrellas on the beach or not. To me, I could say there was an umbrella there, or not, depending on what I might want. Either way, it would not be literally visual. Yet most people can apparently inspect the image in their brain to see whether an umbrella is there. If asked: "is there a cloud in the sky?", these people can just look, and then answer whether a cloud is there. But, for me, none of this is actually visible. I see only darkness when I close my eyes. When I perform what I have called "visualization" my entire life, apparently what I have actually been doing is not visualization at all, but just the listing of properties of things in relation to each other.

If you ask me to imagine a rainbow, I will close my eyes and see nothing. But I can tell you the basic shape. I can draw a curve, whether it is with my hand or by "drawing" in my "mind's eye". (But again I must use quotation marks, for what I mean when I say these things is apparently not what most people mean when they say these things.) I can list the colors of each band in order. I can say that it appears in the sky. But none of those features are inspectable. They're just lists of properties. Not written in text that I can see when my eyes are closed, just... knowledge of what a rainbow would look like, if one happened to be in front of me.

To me, this is what the word "imagination" has always meant. I never took seriously the idea that anyone could actually visualize things in their mind's eye. I never thought people were being literal when they said they could imagine a scene in their head. To me, it is just emptiness. I cannot trace the outline of my friend's body because I do not see their body when I "imagine" them. But I can quite easily draw the outline of their body at will. If given a blank sheet of paper, I cannot trace an outline, but I can move my pencil deliberately in a way that will cause an outline to appear. I am creating this outline, not tracing it. And, in the same way, I can draw a limited hazy outline of a picture in my head. When I close my eyes, it starts black and empty; but I can draw a square -- and it is still black and empty, but I nevertheless can know where its side would be if I had been able to make any marks on the blank sheet of my mind. It is like the pencil in my head does not leave marks, and yet I can still know the not-quite-drawn object's properties. I know how many sides it has, not because I can inspect it, not because I can count edges, but because I can trace where each edge would be.

It is fascinating to me that I could live so many years continuously thinking that people were speaking figuratively every time they talked about imagining things. But it is not just fascinating; it also feels...bad. It wouldn't feel this way if this lack weren't something that everyone else seems to have. After all, I don't have "incredibly stereoscopic" vision, like those 9% who absolutely love 3D media do; nor am I a super recognizer, like the 1% who recognize faces way too easily are; but I don't feel a lack with these in the way that I do with aphantasia, when 98% can imagine visually. This seems irrational to me. If I'm to feel bad about not being phantasiac, shouldn't I also feel bad about not having senses that post-singularity humans might one day have?

...Aaand this is where I start to feel really bad: after all, I've come to feel mudita in so many other areas, whether it's the compersion I've learned through being polyamorous, or the caring I've trained through watching My Little Pony, or even the attachment of fuzzies to utilons that I've painstakingly created through association over the course of my experience with effective altruism¹.

My blind mind's eye has become a source of envy. Jealousy washes over me, even when I no longer feel jealousy in other contexts. I feel bad about feeling bad, and then I start to feel bad about feeling bad about feeling bad, at which point I manually stop the cycle and try to figure out how I can come back to feeling mudita here. But it is just not natural for me. There's something about knowing that 98% of people have the good thing that I lack that makes me unable to intrinsically feel good about their having it. I don't have this problem in other contexts because, I think, it is a much smaller percentage of people who are privileged. Which makes me think: would I also feel this way for other disabilities? If I lost the ability to walk, or the capacity to talk, would I also feel these feelings that are verging on bitterness?

I don't like this aspect of myself. I'm not happy about this at all. I want -- no, I need to be a better person. Now I just need to figure out how to fix this new problem of mine.

¹ Fuzzies are separate from utilons. But if you want to pay more attention to utilons in a specific setting, you can train yourself pavlov style to feel the fuzzies when you do the utilon stuff. In my case, I wanted to feel good when I donated to EA charities. So I used the metric of how much it cost to save a life from GiveWell's figures, decided to donate in chunks of that amount to EA charities, and then mentally "imagined" myself saving someone from a burning building each time I donated that amount. I have an uncle who did this once, and I clearly recall the feeling I had when the story was told around the family dinner table decades after the fact. He was walking down the street, saw a burning building, heard someone call out from inside, and instinctively dropped everything to go in and save that person's life. Even though the story was only told to me decades after the event had occurred, I remember the mix of feelings I had: pride, strength, determination. I wanted to be able to be a hero like that. And so each time I donated a chunk of the appropriate size, I would sit and "visualize" just that. Eventually, I came to associate donating in these chunks with those imagined feelings of saving a life, and the fuzzies had become attached to the utilons. ↩

Personal Value Origination

A friend last night told me about a worrying conclusion to which they'd come: as they were watching old television shows from their childhood, they kept seeing the values that they still hold and deeply believe in to this day. And they worried: was this where they originated?

"I was raised by TV. I always knew this, but I didn't realize how pernicious it truly was until I went back to watch these old television shows. I see my values in them. This is who I am. These are the values that most make up who I am as a person. Am I just…the product of '90s sitcoms? What does this mean about me?"

It's true that, in isolation, we would grow up effectively deaf and dumb. With no instruction, we would not be able to take advantage of a shared language, a shared culture, or even shared values. The idea that our values come from our upbringing means that many of the values behind who we are today may indeed come from arbitrary sources like television shows. Should we be concerned about this? If the TV shows behind our actual values today were made without regard to how they might influence various children’s values back then, does that somehow make who we are lesser?

If your conception of a proper human being includes gaining instruction from proper sources, then it makes sense to feel this way. But I don’t think it is appropriate to judge the value of a human being based on the types of instructional learning media they were exposed to as children, even if it means that much of who they are today can be attributed directly to those sources.

I believe in charity. If that belief started because of a tv show I watched when I was young, rather than because my parents taught me, does that warrant scorn? I don’t think that it does. The source does not matter, so long as the content is good. Even if the source is not trying to teach good moral lessons, good fiction writing has to include a satisfying narrative, which almost always includes what most of humanity would consider either a good moral character or an explicitly not good moral character which we are clearly intended to not root for. If something has good writing (and this is worth watching), it almost always has as part of it some level of moral instruction suitable for learning appropriate lessons. (Good stories don’t have to include this, just as art doesn’t have to be beautiful. But it takes an already taught mind to appreciate art or stories that don’t have this common hook.)

If you learned how to be how you are from TV shows way back when, so what? Would it have been better somehow if your parents taught you? Or if you learned from books or tutors instead? I’m not sure it matters that much, in the end. Maybe parents would be better suited at tailoring lessons directly for you, optimizing how quickly you learned the lessons you needed to learn. But I’m not sure that, several years on, it make all that much of a difference in terms of quality.

In my own personal life, there is a stark line between the period where I held several inappropriate values and when I matured to where I am now. Many things helped in this transition — people close to me in my life talked with me about it; self introspection occurred regarding how many long term relationships with various friends were negatively affected by those values — but a huge part of which values I decided to take into myself came directly from episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I owe much of my current self to the lessons that I learned from MLP. To me, this is not something to be ashamed of, but something I feel indebted to. (MLP:FiM came out when I was in my thirties. I never hid being a so-called "brony"; I keep several plush ponies on my desk at work.)

Where we learn how to be who we are does matter. But I don't think that we should be ashamed of these sources when they come in the form of media like television. So long as we can be proud of who we are, we too should be comfortable with where those lessons came from.

A Vacation Review

Following my final day at Animal Charity Evaluators back in August, I enjoyed a much-needed three-week-long vacation. I house-sat with Osi (the family dog) for a week, taking him to a local golf course for fun; we went out to two plays at the Kennedy Center; I got a chance to play way too many board games and video games with people I love and care about; and I even went on a trip to New York City, the highlight of which was the Nintendo New York store. Plus, my sister was with me for part of my vacation, which is a big deal since I only get to see her twice each year.

Admittedly, it was a little strange taking a vacation so soon after having taken another vacation (back in July for three weeks), but it just works out that way sometimes. It's not like I could choose when Dice Tower Con is held, nor could I really choose which date I could see Hamilton, due to the difficulty of obtaining tickets.

Dice Tower Con

Dice Tower Con in Orlando, Florida.

In July, I and several of my friends went to Dice Tower Con in Orlando, Florida. It was, as usual, extremely awesome. Conventions in general are awesome for introverts like me. Sure, each night I always need to go be alone for several hours in order to recharge for the massive influx of interacting with people each day, but other people do something similar, too (when they sleep), so it's not that different from most other peoples' experiences. At Dice Tower Con, the great part is the ease with which you can get games going with strangers. They have signs you can put up at your table to invite others to join, and it tends to work pretty well. The only poor experience I had there was a poorly run "escape room", which was inaccessible to a handicapped person in our party and for which the main devices had been broken by earlier participants. Also, despite being advertised as an escape room, it was more of an escape box, containing electronics that did not work. I especially hate the fact that in a paragraph about an otherwise awesome Dice Tower Con experience, the 'escape room' was so bad that my complaining about it takes up half the paragraph.

The Color Purple

The Color Purple in the Eisenhower Theater on August 21.

The Kennedy Center production of The Color Purple was great. As usual, we sat in what I consider to be the best possible seats (box seats, two to the side from the center, in the very front), and I did my usual (which my partners sometimes chastise me for) of relaxing with shoes off and a drink at my side. I never drink during the play, mind you; but it's nice to have a water bottle at hand during intermission. But I still get quite a bit of flak for walking outside the box seat without shoes. I'm told that it's "inappropriate", but honestly: when you pay extra for nice seats, doesn't that at least warrant an allowance for feet comfort on the carpeted floor?

The Color Purple. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

Beforehand, I had a wonderful salad at the KC Café; it's in all seriousness usually the best place to get salad that I go to all year, despite the fact that it's a café in the Kennedy Center itself. But despite being awesomely good, it's still massively overpriced. And this year it took second place to a salad I had at Sweet Tomatoes in Orlando back in July for something like a third of the price. Nevertheless, one thing I really like about play days is the salad beforehand. (c:

As plays go, I'd seen better. Maybe I'm biased, but it seems like the productions done in the Opera House at the Kennedy Center are almost always more enjoyable than the ones that are shown in the Eisenhower Theater. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed it because I went in blind. Watching the story unfold in person was a great experience, and the actors and musicians both did an excellent job. The production was too sparse for my tastes, though. It was literally a 50 foot backdrop of nothing but a wall from chairs were suspended; the actors then used these chairs as props for every action they took. Time to stand on a hill: stand on a chair. Time to harvest the crops: rotate the chair sideways by 90°. Time to crack a whip? Okay, they used a real whip that time. But still: nothing but chairs and a whip for props.

I was told afterward that John Doyle (the director/designer) deliberately chose to do a minimalist production. While I'm sure that more cultured audience-goers than I fully enjoyed the minimalism, to someone like me who is relatively new to theater productions, I really tend to appreciate the costume changes and set designs much more.

From The Partially Examined Life.

While we're on the topic, I'd like to bring up Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. I've never directly read Bourdieu's work, but I did go moderately deep into his ideas through discussions with friends during a listen of The Partially Examined Life podcast episode on Bourdieu. The idea is that our tastes in art reflects our social position. In other words, my negative personal experience of John Doyle’s minimalist production is reflective of my 'middle-brow' vantage point. Not because my social position fails to allow me to experience the 'true' version of art on display here, but because humans' need for social strata creates an unconscious difference in how we perceive art. I'm not sure I agree with him (I'm generally skeptical of "just so" arguments that attempt to explain already existing data without presenting falsifiable claims), but I do find the ideas fascinating, especially after I found out that others who saw the play with me actually enjoyed the minimalist production unironically. For me, it was clearly the worst part of the show.

Hamilton

The very next day, we saw Hamilton. It was absolutely mind-blowing.

I'm not sure how exactly to put this. Generally when people review a play, they use words that talk about how good that play was in comparison to the usual reference class of other shows that are also called great. So earlier in this blog post, when I wrote that the actors and the musicians in The Color Purple both did an excellent job, what I meant was that, in a field of other high-quality plays, where the usual compliment is that they are excellent, this, too, should be considered excellent. In other words, it was expectedly good. The best expectedly good play I've seen was The Book of Mormon, and it was heads and shoulders above any other that I'd seen before it. It was so good that I actively sought to have others see it, despite its media being an art form that requires consumers to go through several hoops just to see it: you have to spend a relatively expensive amount for tickets, actually drive to a theater in a city big enough to get the play to show, and you have to do this during a time period not necessarily of your choosing; and then to top it off you have to make it a big part of your evening in order to fully appreciate it. That's a lot to ask for when your alternatives are movies that you can just watch at home while eating dinner, or reading a book that you can literally pick up anytime to enjoy, or games which allow you to interact with friends while enjoying the media. A play has to overcome a lot in order to get me to endorse it, like The Book of Mormon did.

But Hamilton was quite different. It wasn't just a head and shoulders above the rest. Rather, tt may very likely have literally ruined all future play performances for me. It was utterly enjoyable on all kinds of levels.

First: the instrumental music. This music is good. Themes are introduced and reinserted at appropriate times, pushing the story forward appropriately. It isn't just a catchy tune that a play was then written to make sense of. It isn't just a well orchestrated song that sits beside the story. Instead, the music pushes the story forward in the same way that good rpg video game music does. In early video games, voice acting wasn't a thing. So the music had to be a prime actor that informed the player of what was going on. In Final Fantasy VI, Nobuo Uematsu's songs had to immediately tell you the prime characters in a scene, firstly by reusing their theme; but then they also had to combine the themes of disparate characters that interact in a single scene to indicate where the story was headed. Doing this kind of work was horribly difficult in those days. Yasunori Mitsuda literally worked himself into the hospital during his composition work for Chrono Trigger. So to hear this style of story-driven instrumental music in a musical for the first time was absolutely amazing to me.

Add to this the lyrics. Lin-Manuel Miranda used various styles of rap for each character to tell their story, and did so in ways that I've never seen in any previous musical. (See the genius lyrics annotations for details.) Phrases came into play early with one meaning, then get re-used later (alongside their musical accompaniment) with a different meaning for the phrase. This then happens several times, which reminds me heavily of reference-laden novels (in the James Joyce style, not the Ernest Cline or Cory Doctorow style of heavy referencing). For example: "not throwing away one's shot" refers not just to social-climbing, but also drinking alcohol in small glasses, telling his soldiers to literally empty their guns so as to be able to walk more quietly through the night, getting the woman he likes to be with him, remaining quiet about revolution (and later, about politics) in public so you can achieve what you want in public, and, most famously, about throwing away one's shot in a duel. This is just one example of wordplay that goes on throughout the musical. There are also themes on (for one example) 'being satisfied' that are woven throughout, like when Laurens' shot satisfies him, where the music interweaves the themes for "throwing away a shot" and "being satisfied" in a jerky 7/8 time signature. The way that this musical is written makes me repeatedly feel as though I need to watch it again and again to catch more, in an Arrested Development sort of way.

The dance is perhaps my least favorite portion, because it sprinkles in references that are impossible to understand without reading background material. For example, "throwing away one's shot" uses a baseball pitching motion immediately before hand, then a gun pointed upward afterward. One of these I could get from watching; the other I can't imagine anyone getting just by watching them dance. This motif is then repeated when combining references, like "being satisfied" with a baseball pitch motion. Keep in mind that the dance moves are too quick to really see them like this, but if you watch supplementary material, they show the moves in slow motion and explicitly call out what each is meant to represent. So although I like the dancing the least, it's because it uses Cline/Doctorow style referencing, which (to be honest) isn't that bad. It's just not as good as the lyrics using Joyce-style referencing.

The production is *amazing*. Sound is recorded in real time during the show and then played back to make an echo effect. Costumes are elaborate when they need to be and sparse when it makes more sense for the story. The set moves and flows with the story; people move into positions that make sense story-wise (not just for dance purposes), and the props are excellent. The floor moves to allow stationary acting to appear dynamic (it is a show about someone famous for being a writer, after all). And the lighting is on point. Seriously, some of the lighting patterns made the floor look as though a carpet had been laid down, and this one scene where the actors freeze time, then rewind it -- that was breathtakingly choreographed between the dancers, the sound designer, and the lighting person in a way that makes it just feel right. While the lyrics were the best part of the show for me, I nevertheless really need to call out the production team for doing a far better job at lighting, sound, set, and costumes than literally any other play or musical I've ever seen. It just worked.

Hamilton was so good that I want to encourage anyone reading this to take the time and expense required to go see it. It's definitely worth it.

New York City

Natalia and Eric at Vegetarian Dim Sum.

Appropriately, not long after seeing Hamilton we went to visit Manhattan. It was my sister's first time, so we did some of the touristy type stuff, including visiting the 9/11 memorial and taking a ferry to see the Statue of Liberty. But in between walking through Times Square and seeing bull statues and too old graveyards, we also got a chance to eat at an all-vegetarian restaurant in Chinatown that Robin recommended to us: Vegetarian Dim Sum. And we were able to go shopping!

This was exciting to me because my previous visits to NYC have all been about going to places that you see on tv. In other words: boring. I don't really get much out of being at the top of the Empire State building, other than perhaps it being an opening for me to talk about the concept of Schelling points to my traveling companions. And seeing the Rockefeller Center in person is just utterly wasted on me, despite having moderately enjoyed 30 Rock. Places just don't interest me as much as ideas. Touching a piece of the Berlin wall doesn't make me feel any differently from touching a random piece of rock, if you take away the story aspect of it. So NYC, for me, would be an exceptionally boring place if not for the chance to go to retail stores that have stuff I care about. And so my mini-shopping tour of NYC commenced.

First: the Disney Store. Two floors of Disney paraphilia. It was…interesting, I guess. There were all kinds of shirts, but all of them were kid-sized, and none had anything I might ever want to wear on it. I like The Nightmare Before Christmas, but not enough to buy anything associated with it. Keep in mind that my office is full of plushes from My Little Pony, Kiki's Delivery Service, Final Fantasy, etc., so it's not as though I wouldn't want to buy something if it caught my eye. But all the Disney characters I saw were just too much aimed at children. Upstairs, the Star Wars section sold nothing but toys for kids and clothes for kids. The same was true for Marvel.  I really thought I'd find something, but instead the only thing that held my attention for more than ten seconds in the entire store was a too expensive and too large Star Wars Lego set. I left disappointed.

Nintendo NY. Photo by Gustavo Camargo.

Next was the Nintendo New York store. I'd seen video of it before, so I knew what to expect in advance. With expectations set, it was a great experience. I loved seeing the shirts (though I wasn't as happy with the limited size options), and the museum pieces were pretty cool. I guess it was a little weird, as everything behind the glass was just stuff that I'm already quite familiar with. I played with the Virtual Boy when it came out, I owned all the old systems, my collection of amiibo is just about as comprehensive as theirs -- even the oldest thing on display, hanafuda cards from before Nintendo made video games, wasn't that impressive given that I had literally handled a deck of those cards a month earlier in Orlando, when my friend showed them off after purchasing a deck in Japan. It felt weird to see all this stuff behind glass that just literally sits in boxes in the corner of my house. But I thoroughly enjoyed myself anyway! Lots of great plush characters, nice journals for sale, and great shirts of all types. I came away with only two purchases, but this was after lots of internal debate about getting more. (No jewelry, unfortunately. My gift plans were ruined due to no jewelry.)

Tree of Creativity in Denmark Lego House.

The final store I visited was the Lego Store. I've watched videos of the LEGO House in Billund, Denmark, and have been fascinated by stories from the architect, tours by fans, and the large variety of stuff on display there. So when I saw a two story Lego store in the Rockefeller Center, I anticipated seeing great things. But from the moment I entered, my excitement was tempered way down. Sure, they had a lot of bricks and sets for sale, and there were two or three moderately sized creations on display, using 30,000 or so bricks. They even had a dragon that snaked through the ceiling that used maybe double that number. But my youtube experience of the Billund house had me expecting things like their three Dinosaurs (~253,274 pieces each) or their Tree of Creativity (6+ million bricks), so I came away quite underwhelmed. In retrospect, I should have expected this. I was expecting New York City to be the site of each company's grandest store, where they could really show off all that they have available. Instead, they all had to limit their ability to showcase impressive stuff due to the high cost of space in Manhattan proper. If all I wanted was to just buy something, I could have used Amazon instead. I should have realized: physical stores just aren't my thing.

From left to right: duplo, standard, technic.
They're each roaring because they've stepped on a lego brick.
Both photos are by Lego; I can't find the photographer's name.

In Conclusion

There were several ups and downs during my vacation(s) this year. I didn't even get a chance to talk about playing six player rocket league, nor doing several board game nights (one of which had 8+ hours of straight board games), nor how I was able to dogsit Osi while binge-watching foreigners finally win in StarCraft for the first time, nor even just the pleasant time of being able to hang out with my sister and do nothing much whatsoever. We had friends come in from Malaysia that I hadn't seen for three years. We stayed in an awesome hotel in Savannah. We even went to Myrtle Beach. There were just too many good times to really name during July and August.

But now I'm ready to move on from vacationing and toward the next phase of my career. My time at Animal Charity Evaluators was great, and taking two months to travel around the country and do fun stuff was enjoyable, but I really do look forward to seeing what happens next with my career in effective altruism. (c:

Emotions

I laughed and cried when I was young. I have no reason to think that I had any less emotion than other children at that age. But at some point in my young adult life, I got it into my head that I could suppress the outer trappings of emotion -- the frowns or smiles, the laughs or tears -- and over time that outer suppression affected (or at least seemed to affect) my own inner feelings.

There was a period of about fifteen years or so where I'm not sure that I laughed or cried at all. Not just outwardly, but on the inside, too. Sure, I smiled at times, but only, I think, on purpose, to fit in, to seem like I was a part of the group. Did I do this to myself? Maybe. But I can't help but feel, after listening to others talk about their emotional lives, that there had to be some sort of natural low-emotion state that I was in in the first place, if I were able to so dramatically suppress certain emotions so easily for so long.

One of the reasons that I fell in love with My Little Pony (G4 FiM) was that its episodes taught me to feel again. I remember sitting there, deeply depressed, turning on those first few episodes and learning, perhaps despite myself, about what it really meant to be a good friend.

I was lying on the couch when I first watched Arrested Development. I don't know which joke it was, but at some point halfway through the first episode, I laughed. --and it was.... I think I missed the rest of the episode, not really paying attention to it anymore. Instead, I was in my own head, thinking and wondering if this really was the first time I'd spontaneously laughed in the last decade and a half. By the time I watched Community later that year, I found myself perfectly able to enjoy laughing at what I felt was funny, without needing to go through all that self-reflection.

Fiction has been especially impactful for me recently. I've found myself crying during shows, crying after reading reddit posts, crying at story beats in my video games. I don't know what caused the changes. I don't think I'd been intentionally suppressing emotions all those years; it just became unintentional habit. But now I seem to be making up for lost time? Or maybe they're hormonal changes after my recent medical issues. It's hard to say.

I'm just glad that I'm experiencing these emotions more fully now. Maybe I'm not nearly as far on the sociopathic spectrum as the PCL-R would have me believe.

(Writing this post reminds me of The Drought, except I think I'm being more honest here than I was there. If I had to rewrite that piece, I'm not sure that it would even make sense to publish it after all the corrections.)