shameless self-promotion: if you’re interested in dating me, or know anyone who might be a good fit, I am currently looking for people to date!

Open to: irl dates in Hong Kong for the next month, irl dates in the Western Hemisphere starting in a month or so, zoom dates, email conversations, google docs, and probably other stuff.

I think people’s impressions of whether they’d be into me based on my tumblr are quite predictive. Maybe relevant info:

• 26-year-old woman, straight
• ultimately looking for a long-term monogamous relationship, but kinda open to whatever right now given that my location/life are somewhat in flux

concept: a primary-style political debate among everyone you’ve ever gone on a date with

if Hermione Granger can be a general in one of Quirrell’s armies I can send a message asking some guys if there’s been any progress on the thing

I made a twitter! See below the cut if you want to read future content from me in tweet form.

https://twitter.com/carolinecapital

when I first heard about NVC the idea that no one is responsible for anyone else’s feelings seemed unfair to me–letting off the aggriever at the expense of the aggrieved.

but something I’m realizing now is how it helps the aggrieved too: if someone feels responsible for your feelings then you can’t share your feelings without burdening them. but if you can get to the point where they really don’t feel responsible, then regardless of what the feelings are, sharing them can be a light, joyful experience, both of you simply deriving value from the connection it brings.

small brain: prioritizing personal relationships over work because they’re more fun

big brain: prioritizing work over personal relationships because it’s more important

galaxy brain: having personal relationships that are as ambitious and world-changing as your work

A shitty thing about being human and trying to form relationships with other humans is that you have to try to read from their signals how excited they are about interacting with you. And you really can err in both directions, and they’re both bad.

One thing that at least helps is having somewhat well-defined relationships and levels of commitment. If I ignore my sister’s text, well long-term it might add a tiny amount to the erosion or our relationship, but short term her assumption will never be “oh, she doesn’t like me” but “oh, she is busy and flaky and sucks at texting people back, but I’ll try again tomorrow.” Because she’s my sister, it’s not true that I can’t end our relationship, but the threshold is a lot higher; there’s a strong prior that we’re good, so I’d have to be very proactive and explicit if I wanted to cut her off.

Most people are probably biased in one direction or another. I think for most of my life I’ve been too insecure; because I had a negative self-image I was biased toward assuming that people didn’t want to interact with me.

And I think I’ve been getting better at that, which is cool. But disappointingly, getting better at that doesn’t really make the original problem go away.

There is a real problem there, that isn’t just 100% cognitive biases; sometimes people just don’t really like you that much, and you do need to be aware enough to notice that.

But the main problem isn’t of prediction, it’s of coordination. If you’re unsure of how much someone likes you, it makes perfect sense to be more reserved in your interactions, to hold yourself back. And it’s so easy to get into that feedback loop, and so hard to get out

I wonder when I’ll get over the instinctive reaction whenever I finish a call with a CEO of another company or something of “oh thank god, I think I fooled them into thinking I’m a real adult”

my contribution to Supreme Court discourse will be to share my most interesting celebrity encounter story, which is that I used to live in a house Antonin Scalia used to live in

we found this out when someone rang our doorbell one day and my mom opened the door to a guy who announced, “hi, I’m Antonin Scalia! I used to live here!”

and then he proceeded to invite us to visit him at the Supreme Court and reserve seats for us to watch a session if we were ever in DC, which we actually took him up on

a maybe interesting question to ask is, “what’s your biggest constraint?”

three common ones I know of are time, energy, and money. idk what the other big ones are

I think people often have a hard time understanding each other when they’re constrained on different things

also moving from one to another is weird. I switched from “energy” to “time” a couple years ago and it took a long time to actually internalize that time was expensive

I tend to be intuitively skeptical of people saying negative things about “workaholism,” “perfectionism,” etc. To first order it seems like the best way to accomplish your goals is to work really hard, and you’d expect people to come up with a lot of self-serving reasons that isn’t true.

I do think there’s an adjacent concept that I undervalued for a while which is like, tying too much of your self-worth to your work productivity can make you end up doing kind of bad things, like:

• cab driver’s fallacy
• overweighting visible and measurable output
• fear of branching out and doing things outside your normal scope

just sitting down and thinking for a while doesn’t “feel like work” but often it is Actually Good and you come up with new ideas that make the rest of your time much more effectively spent

fact about me: I once broke up with someone after

• he said that he didn’t love me
• I was visibly upset and started crying
• he said “see? this is why I don’t think any amount of chicken suffering is commensurable with human suffering”

it’s actually sort of convenient how triggered I am by men demanding that I be more assertive, disagree with them more, and other things along those lines

“No, I absolutely will not. Also go fuck yourself”

I was having fun today with the insight that relationships can be momentumy or mean-reverty (or both, on different timescales), and classifying my relationships as such

mean-reverty:

• they say something I find hurtful. I act hurt until they notice and start being extra nice to make up for it, at which point I go back to normal
• they’re uncomfortable with intimacy so whenever we start to get too close they pull away. if I give them space they come back

momentumy:

• they do something considerate for me. I’m touched and do something considerate back. the virtuous cycle continues
• they do something I think is bad, ignoring my protests. I’m pissed so I do something I know they think is bad, etc. the vicious cycle continues

I haven’t decided which … is better … idk, mean reversion seems like it will always be a bit disappointing. Otoh, even if you’re in the good phase of a momentumy relationship it’s kinda terrifying because stuff can spiral into a shitshow real quick.

I wrote a LARP!

I successfully ran it a couple days ago; it definitely still has some flaws but I nonetheless feel pleased enough to want to share it with the world.

Here is a spoiler-free intro (feel free to DM for the rest of the materials)

when I first started my foray into poly, I thought of it as a radical break from my trad past, but tbh I’ve come to decide the only acceptable style of poly is best characterized as something like “imperial Chinese harem”

none of this non-hierarchical bullshit; everyone should have a ranking of their partners, people should know where they fall on the ranking, and there should be vicious power struggles for the higher ranks

I think an important fact, that I get wrong way too often, is that other people are never thinking about you nearly as much as you think they are.

other person: I wish someone had done X

me: what does that mean? Well, the only people who could have done it are me and A, and A definitely couldn’t have done it because of B, so they must mean me. But they know I didn’t do X because of Y, so that must mean they think I shouldn’t do Y … so they must think I should do Z instead of Y? But that implies such a low value on my time compared to C’s … oh god, am I really miscalibrated on that?

what they were actually thinking: it sucked for me personally that no one did X, and I’m sad about that

I’ve been hiring and managing people for a year or so now, and it’s been pretty interesting to see what things turn out to be important in employees.

(obviously this is only from my experience; I wouldn’t be sharing it if I didn’t think it had some broader applicability but also my job is pretty weird)

Working more hours is really valuable. I think a reasonable prior is that a person’s output is linear in their number of hours worked. (This sounds like sort of an obvious point, but I think people can miss it because of the strong expectation of a job being something you do 9-5 or whatever; I definitely missed it for a while.) There’s a point at which it gets sublinear, but that’s often pretty far out. (I feel like there can be regions where it’s superlinear as well; if I’m working few enough hours I can get to a point where I have to spend all my time catching up on what happened when I wasn’t working.)

You can pay people more for working more, but the costs of hiring and training are really high, and scale with the number of people. It’s also just sort of better to have one person doing a job rather than two; it allows knowledge to be more concentrated and cuts down on communication and coordination costs.

Another thing that’s valuable: just being in the office. I used to think of “just showing up” as a bad thing and that companies should just care about how much work you get done, not how many hours you’re in the office. But actually, it’s really nice to have people in the office even if they’re not being productive; they can deal with things that come up, answer questions whenever you have them, join in conversations, etc. Being available 24/7 by phone/online is also great.

Willingness to just do whatever needs to be done is another good one. It turns out that a lot of things are annoying, and boring, and someone still has to do them. The difference between “ugh do I have to” and eagerly volunteering for the shittiest jobs is really big.

Being proactive is huge. I think this is the biggest thing I fucked up when I first started working. I was operating under some assumptions like:

• my manager’s time and the time of the more senior people around me are really valuable
• I should try not to waste it
• therefore I:
• shouldn’t talk unless I have something really worthwhile to say
• shouldn’t ask questions unless I’ve exhausted all possibilities for answering them on my own
• shouldn’t ask for more things to do unless I’ve done everything I’ve been given so far
  
• etc.

Now I realize that this is the exact opposite of helpful, and actually makes management way more work. A lot of management comes down to stuff like  having accurate models of what people do and don’t know, and what they’re good and bad at, and what they spend their time on. The less active effort I have to expend to build these models, the better. I love it when people:

• ask lots of questions and talk a lot, especially when they’re saying something dumb. if they say lots of wrong things, it lets me know what they don’t understand, so I can help fill in the gaps. 
• give lots of updates on what they’re doing without being asked
• ask for more stuff to work on
• like my ideal interaction is something like “hey, here are the top 3 things on my stack. here are the stages they’re all at. if there’s something else you think I should do let me know, otherwise I’ll default to working on these”
• suggest things and take initiative. I used to think stuff like “well, no one’s asked me to help with this project, even though it seems like a good fit for me, so they probably think I would be bad at it.” actually, it’s way more likely that it just didn’t occur to them, because constantly assessing and reassessing every combination of (person, project) is really hard, and they’ll be happy at you pointing things out and making their job easier.

I used to be the sort of person who never fought with people. I knew that getting into heated arguments with people, that might escalate to fights with yelling, was a thing that people did in movies and stuff, but I couldn’t imagine doing it myself. If I was annoyed at someone I might engage in passive aggression, but if it seemed like it might escalate to a fight I would always choose the side of backing down and being conciliatory. It just felt like getting into an openly acknowledged, common-knowledge fight with someone was devastating and to be avoided at all costs.

Lately I’ve gotten more into fighting and it seems … fine? I mean, I don’t strongly endorse it; it definitely seems better to resolve disagreements with honest but thoughtful communication. But if in the moment I’m too upset to do that, getting into a fight seems like a pretty good alternative to what I was doing before. It makes me feel better, it releases some tension, and it turns out it’s not devastating and you can generally make up and get along fine afterwards.

When I was younger, I used to say things like “I only want to date guys who are smarter than me,” and people would grimace a bit and murmur something about my self-esteem.

Now that I’m older and have higher self-esteem, I still want to date really smart guys; that part hasn’t gone away. But I do think about it kinda differently; the idea of being an overqualified housewife to a genius mathematician no longer holds much appeal.

Instead, being in a relationship where I’m intellectually respected feels important. But so does dating the smartest guy I possibly can; it’s not the relative values that matter, it’s just the absolute.

Unfortunately, I guess having both of those things requires that I be really smart and impressive. Which already sounds good on its own merits, but it would be nice if all my eggs weren’t quite so in one basket.

gender update: apparently these days, when I’m at a gathering of mixed genders and generations, the group I invariably have the most in common with is middle-aged men

a weird thing about adulthood is going from “I want to hang out with my friends, but I have to work” to “I want to work, but I have all these social obligations to fulfill”

I used to think that there was a thing called “being a good partner” that was mostly like, doing things to make your partner better off.

Now I think something more like–there’s some amount of surplus created by a relationship, and creating surplus is good, but the allocation of that surplus is also important. And finding ways to capture more of the surplus, if you are getting relatively little of it, is an important relationship skill.

Since reading Worth the Candle I’ve started thinking about my interactions with people in terms of loyalty points on occasion, which … I don’t think is endorsed by the text per se but is kind of cool.

My normal model of social interaction is something like: sometimes I have a spontaneous, genuine desire to be nice to people. I invite them to hang out because I enjoy spending time with them, or I ask them something because I’m really interested to hear what they have to say.

Sometimes I don’t feel this spontaneous desire: maybe someone said something that bothered me and now I’m feeling annoyed at them, or maybe I’m just tired or busy and don’t want to devote a bunch of time and energy to social interaction right now. In these cases, I feel like I should be nice anyway, because if I don’t I’ll be a bad person and feel guilty, and then I feel resentful toward them for forcing this obligation on me.

But if I instead think about this as an opportunity to score some loyalty points, it’s no longer an obligation; it’s more like a fun video game that will pay out in actually valuable real life rewards. I don’t have to be nice to anyone; it’s my choice. But if I am nice, then they’ll probably like me more, and say good things about me to other people, and be there for me when I need help in the future, and if we get to level 20 we can use 50% of each other’s skill levels which is pretty useful.

I think I experience less romantic jealousy these days than I used to, and I was thinking about why that is.

I remember when I was younger, I would get really upset if, say, the person I was dating liked a selfie posted by some other girl. I would spiral into despair thinking about how he probably thought that other girl was more attractive than me and he’d rather be dating her. And … I don’t think I was being totally irrational? I was recalling one specific instance of this and, you know, I bet he would rather have been dating that girl. I think that she was more his type and they had more in common.

And I think what’s changed is that over time I’ve just gotten better at dating people for whom I’m–if not the optimal person, at least close to some kind of Pareto frontier. And then when this happens I can think, “actually, no, here are the reasons why he’d be better off dating me than her.”

Lately I’ve been noticing myself getting more extreme along some dimension, in a way that makes it harder to communicate with a lot of people. I would describe it as something like “wanting to see people as they are, and being comfortable with that including irrationality, contradictions, and other bad things.”

Some examples:

I noticed a way in which my thinking was biased against members of an oppressed group, and mentioned it to someone. She got upset, because she saw me as endorsing this by dispassionately mentioning it without disavowing it in some way. I was confused, because I was just reporting some things I noticed about my brain, not trying to endorse or disavow anything, and isn’t social justice supposed to be all about unpacking your biases anyway?

I’ll talk to someone about a book or TV show and they won’t like it because a character does stupid things, or has unhealthy relationships, or acts in self-destructive ways. I am confused that that’s a thing and think the more fucked up the better.

I was shopping with a friend on a warm day and commented that it felt like the weather was too nice to try on sweaters. She replied, “well, I don’t want to try on sweaters … but now is the best time of year to buy them since they’re on sale.” I felt like my joyfully authentic expression of feeling was dismissed. She thought I was saying something dumb and impractical.

I watched the first couple episodes of the Bachelor with a friend who was really confused about my enthusiasm for Hannah B. (I know everyone likes her now after they gave her a good edit later in the season. I liked her from the very beginning.) For the uninformed, in the first few episodes she comes off as neurotic, awkward, petty, jealous, super insecure, and the only actual person on the show.

I was talking to a friend about a story I thought it would be fun to write. I started describing the relationship between two of the characters and she asked “well, do they end up together?” I felt like she was implicitly asking me whether I thought their relationship was good or bad, which seemed like missing the point.

A was mad because B wasn’t doing a thing they were supposed to do. I gave my guesses as to why; they replied “but that’s not okay! B needs to just do the thing!” A was upset that I wasn’t mad at B, suggesting that I didn’t think the thing was serious or important. I was sort of upset that A was mad at B when it just seemed like a fact about the situation and who B is as a person that of course they weren’t going to do it.

Someone I’m dating will tell me something–say, “if you slept with [redacted] I’d like you less.” My instinctive response is probably something like “oh interesting, why do you think that’s the case?” Later I’m telling someone about our relationship and I realize that if I accurately report stuff like this they will just think the person is a dick.

I’ll tell someone about a bad interaction I had with someone. They’ll either: 

• blame the other person
• blame me, but not explicitly say it, and it’s kind of awkward
• try to justify it and come up with reasons it was actually fine

and I get frustrated with all these and find them counterproductive.

I’ve thought about talking to one of my friends about this, but fittingly, I don’t know how to express it in a way that she won’t interpret as me claiming that my way of thinking is better than her way of thinking.

To be clear, I don’t think it is–I think they’re both helpful and probably there are plenty of people who should move in each direction. I think my way of thinking is useful for forming more accurate beliefs about yourself and others. It might also make me happier, or at least have lower intensity and frequency of negative emotions–I think it promotes a state of lowkey contentment.

But there are also obvious failure modes, e.g. spending the rest of my life doing stupid shit while thinking “hm, I notice that I am doing stupid shit, interesting.” Judging is pretty useful, because sometimes you have to decide what action to take, and it’s good to be able to judge which action is best and do that one. Basically, if I ever become one of those people who does nothing but meditate and drop acid, please slap me and remind me of this post.

As of last week, I’ve lived in the Bay Area for a year. This feels like an intrinsically significant milestone, much more so than recent birthdays or New Years, so I feel motivated to reflect on the past year.

(self-indulgent personal reflections below the cut)

I think I’ve changed a lot this year, more so than in the years before it. That’s not surprising–in part, moving here was a conscious choice, because I felt like I was stagnating as a person and didn’t like who I was crystallizing into. I didn’t quite know how I wanted to change, nor did I feel capable of taking actions to make it happen, but I thought if I threw myself on the mercy of whatever supernatural entities govern San Francisco Bay, that something would come of it, and I was right.

I think I’ve become more agenty in a general way. Describing how I felt about my job a year ago sounds sort of silly to me now; I thought of it as like, part of my role in life or something? It was a thing that I went to for some number of hours a day because that was the normal number of hours a day to work; people gave me tasks; I tried to do the tasks at a pace that seemed reasonable.

The way I think about work now is so different: my “job” is to maximize the expected value of the money that my company makes, and to the extent that I have a defined set of roles I try to do well at it’s purely for instrumental reasons, because companies work best when you give people defined roles. But ultimately, if I waste my time on projects that aren’t valuable I’m not doing a good job. The more productive I am, the better (this seems obvious, but I think before I implicitly thought something like “as long as I’m an average level of productive or something it’s fine.”) If I work more hours, I can do more, and that’s better. If something needs to be done and no one else is doing it, I should just do it, even if it’s not my “job.”

This can definitely be more stressful, and sometimes you need to decide to care less or not take responsibility for something, but I think it’s overall the right way to think about things.

I think I’ve also become more self-aware, partly as a result of trying to be more productive. I started thinking about things like “why am I not doing work right now?” or “why have I made so little progress on this thing?” and realized that most of the time it really seems to come down to “I’m having feelings about something.” I have so many feelings! It’s crazy! They really fuck a lot of shit up.

I’ve become more secure, I think. Partly through becoming aware of and confronting my feelings, partly through failing at things and getting really honest and brutal criticism and realizing that … it’s okay, I can confront the fact that I have flaws and not run away from it because it’s not the worst possible thing and doesn’t mean that I’m fundamentally Bad. I’ve gotten way better at receiving feedback. I think my attachment style has gotten significantly more secure (though still in the anxious bucket), and I’ve gotten more into honesty and openness in romantic relationships.

A lot of things that felt important to my identity a year ago feel less so now. I’m less into femininity, and domesticity, and aesthetics, and being trad. More of my identity is centered around my work. I think I went a little too far with this; I think some recentering of my identity was helpful, but I also think that I genuinely like things to be nice, and beautiful, and I don’t want to destroy my aesthetic sense in the name of utilitarianism. I’ve been working on cultivating that side of myself more again.

I feel more motivated towards EA, but I don’t feel any more altruistic particularly. I think this feeling comes from being more ambitious, and I’ve started to feel like EA is just an inevitable consequence of ambition. If I want to do something with my life, what is there to do? Money is too easy. I could try to become famous or something, but that seems kind of lame. Making the future look the way I want it to really seems like the only worthy goal.

Maybe the most negative change is that I worry I’ve become a worse person to interact with in some ways. I’m more flaky, less likely to respond to messages, and less good at reliably keeping in touch with people. I’m more impatient and easily annoyed by people. I notice others’ flaws more easily. I’m glad about this in some ways–not everyone needs to like me, and I’m glad I went from desperately wanting everyone to want to be friends with me to thinking about who I actually want to be friends with. But I don’t like feeling negatively about others or fixating on their flaws. I think practicing more of an authentic relating-y mindset will be relevant here.

For the past week, I’ve had a strong feeling of things coming full circle. Things are so different from a year ago, and yet the same in some ways. The sun came out, and spring is starting to feel real, and it feels the exact same as last March did, when I moved here from cold and gloomy New York and it felt like anything was possible. I feel different in many ways, but I’ve also had the same job for a year now, lived in the same apartment, hung out with many of the same people. And yet things feel just just as uncertain, and I’m really interested to know what the next year will look like.

the red pill lied to me

I thought that men were only supposed to care about physical attractiveness, having a sweet and submissive personality, and maybe a couple other things like chastity and cooking skill

but it turns out all the men who are interested in dating me only care about “intelligence” and “knowing stuff about trading” and “having good opinions on social justice” and things like that

… I guess there’s probably a selection effect they were missing, isn’t there

Notes on normality and insanity

Before I started dating my first boyfriend, there were lots of outside-view, externally verifiable, socially sanctioned reasons not to date him. When we met, he was 21 and experienced while I was 17 and had never dated anyone; my friends all thought he was bad; he had anger issues; he had a history of stalking and physically abusing exes. I had inside-view reasons why this was okay (it was only once, and he felt reeeeeally bad about it …) and so I dated him anyway.

The actual relationship worked out much better than you’d expect. We dated for less than two months before he broke up with me, and it was basically just fine. (He said some hurtful things to me on occasion, and cheated on me, but I wouldn’t characterize the relationship as abusive.) 

The bad part wasn’t the relationship. The bad part was, after it was all over, I had no idea why I had done it. March 2014!me couldn’t identify with November 2013!me at all, and I still can’t.

The feeling of meaning in my life comes from caring about my past and future experiences, and continuing to exist, and the shape of my life as a whole. To the extent that I value these things, it’s because I experience some amount of continuity of identity. So the idea of ever having been November 2013!me, or of being her again, is scary! It’s scary in the exact same way as being dead!

So like, I understand that society is wrong about a lot of things. We should be able to improve on it, and we almost have to improve on it if we want to do anything good ever.

What I don’t understand is, without externally verifiable confirmation that the things you’re doing are reasonable, how do you know that you’re not just insane?

I started this post by talking about relationships, but I think this actually applies to pretty much everything in my life. Everything I do, unless it’s something my family and all my friends and a panel of normal people would agree is reasonable, I worry that it’s fundamentally bad in some mind-altering way that makes it impossible for me to see its badness. I do this with guys I like, companies I work at, books I read, charities I donate to, events I attend, ideas I believe–you get it. Which isn’t to say I don’t do weird or socially disapproved-of things–I do, in literally all those categories!–but they are really, deeply, scary.

Having written this, part of me is thinking, “Okay, cool, you’ve identified the problem. Things don’t have some fundamental property of badness–ideas can be wrong, and charities can be ineffective, and relationships can be unhealthy, but that’s okay. Maximizing EV means risking that you’ll make mistakes and those things will happen sometimes. What you need to do is get your current self and November 2013 self in a room to talk. Have them feel their feelings and package them up and send them back and forth. Get them to empathize with each other and truly understand each other, and maybe you can forge an identity that’s strong enough to withstand mistakes and changing your mind about stuff.”

and another part of me is like “… dude that sounds insane”

Because people keep misunderstanding my aesthetics: they’re not equivalent to “everything should be as fancy as possible, all the time.” That is not how you effectively class signal. If you are confused about class signaling, read (the now outdated but still informative) Stuff White People Like and note how many things don’t actually cost a lot of money (or even are cheap compared to similar options, like thrift stores and backpacking through Europe).

I feel like I get a lot of criticism for doing things that aren’t obviously fun/pleasurable but are considered more high-status by mainstream society or something. Maybe the criticism is fair but maybe these people just differ from me on how much utility they derive from the object level of their life, as opposed to various meta levels?

For most experiences I think I get more enjoyment out of anticipating and reflecting upon them, and using them to signal (even if just to myself) than I do out of the actual experience. 

Of course, you could just have different aesthetics/signaling strategies than me, and that’s reasonable. I think a lot of people I know have a sort of contrarian hyper-utilitarian aesthetic. But I feel like there’s legitimately less room for interesting signaling there. If your aesthetic is “drink five bottles of Soylent a day” that’s basically … all you can do? Where do you go from there? Whereas the signaling hierarchies of being “cultured,” “classy,” etc. always have more levels to reach.

There are some friends for whom, when I’m with them, we talk a lot about what a good time we’re having. 

The day before we see each other, we’ll text “can’t wait to see you tomorrow!! :D :D <3″ We greet each other with “omg, it’s so good to see you!” We get somewhere and it’s “wow, this cafe is so charming!” “I can’t believe how beautiful the weather is today!” When there’s a lull in the conversation, one of us will end it with “I’m so happy I have you to talk about things like this with.”

When I think about this too hard, it seems kind of weird and fake. If we’re really having a good time, why do we need to keep reassuring ourselves/each other of that?

But actually, I think I do honestly have more fun with friends when we do this.

Interactions tend to get into positive feedback loops; if the person I’m talking to is having a good time, and expressing that, I will be more engaged in the interaction, and have a better time, and feel inspired to express my enjoyment, and so on. Being somewhat artificially effusive at times can actually just get you into the good equilibrium.

I have other friends whose communication style is much more “so, did you have a good evening?” “well, it wasn’t clearly better than the counterfactual thing I would have been doing.” and I appreciate the commitment to truth-seeking but it really just does not work as well for me

I made a sideblog at @worldoptimization-lifeadvice.

It’s experimental and I may or may not continue to update it, I just thought it might be nice to have somewhere to put more low-effort thoughts about super mundane/non-intellectual topics. It’s framed as life advice to my younger self, sort of (and thus obviously may be counterproductive advice for other people to hear).

When I was younger I used to think that not having enough friends was pretty much the most embarrassing thing in the world and meant that you were an irredeemable loser.

These days I feel like half the time I have a long conversation with someone we end up talking about how we both wish we had more friends. (And I’m not even the one to bring it up most of the time.)

So like

1. feeling like the number and quality of your friendships is in part due to circumstance and luck and is in part due to skills you can improve on, rather than feeling like it’s a measure of your inherent worth as a person, is great
   
2. the fact that so many post-college young adults have few friends seems like … a problem idk

tfw you get locked out of your office and try to nonsuspiciously follow the next guy who walks into the building, only to realize

1. he is Nate Soares and
2. you need your key card to get off on the correct floor

so you awkwardly ride the elevator all the way to his floor while resisting the urge to reassure him that you are not in fact the agent of a UFAI trying very incompetently to break into MIRI

She was finished with the lands of men.

She was going to San Francisco.

I have a Goodreads!

I don’t remember if I’ve posted about this before but in any case, I am now trying to actually put the books I read on it and maybe even review them. Please friend me or whatever!

I don’t know what happiness and life satisfaction are, or if they’re real things, or if they have anything to do with what people answer to survey questions, or which one (if either) actually matters.

I do know when I was dating him I was happy, I think? If you had pinged me at random times and asked how I was feeling, in that moment, I would have usually said “pretty good,” and I have the data to prove it.

I also know that if I started to cross the street without looking and a bus whooshed by me, I felt … nothing.

And last week on a night when I was sobbing so hard I was hyperventilating, I went to take some ibuprofen for my headache and looked at the pills sitting in my hand and felt panic. I had forgotten how scared I used to be of swallowing pills and now all I could think was what if I choke and die right now there’s still so much more I want to do

Maybe when I answer how happy I am, it’s relative to a recent average. Sometimes I wish I could remember better what I normally felt like during some period of my life. It’s a surprisingly hard thing to remember. Maybe I’m answering how happy my model of myself says I should be in that moment, or any one of a million other questions.

Maybe “life satisfaction” is partly a way to get information about my happiness that’s below my conscious awareness. What does happiness mean if it’s not something I’m consciously aware of?

I do know I wouldn’t go back for anything in the world.

I.

In the Dear Future Husband music video, Meghan Trainor says she won’t cook for him or anything, and then she rejects him because he can’t do that strength thing at the fair! Isn’t she basically saying that she won’t conform to female gender expectations, but she expects to get a man who conforms to male gender expectations?

–my then-12-year-old sister

Based on a cursory examination of her song lyrics, I made a list of things Meghan Trainor is offering:

• good at songwriting
  
• sex
• all the right junk in all the right places

things she won’t do:

• bake pies
  
• lose weight
• waste all her time and money trying to look right

things she expects:

• commitment
• monogamy
• dates
  
• flowers every anniversary
• dealing with her craziness
• apologizing even when she was in the wrong
• spending more time with her family than yours
• giving her the left side of the bed
• opening doors
• not having a dirty mind
• buying her a ring
• treating her like a trophy

And yeah, flip the genders and this would all be received differently. But I don’t know, which reception is right?

II.

It’s a funny thing about the modern world. You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, “Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn’t love me. He just couldn’t deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me.” Now, how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? … We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water.

–Zadie Smith, White Teeth

I mean, I’m a consequentialist, I don’t really think desert is real. I guess the criteria for whether everyone “deserves” something, or has a “right” to it, are: is everyone having the thing a good goal? and to what extent is getting the thing under people’s control?

So clean water obviously fulfills these. I mean, I don’t think there are many people who could have access to clean water if they’d just get off the couch and stop being lazy but instead drink parasite-infested water out of a sense of entitlement.

Love, though? I don’t know. “Everyone has a romantic partner they’re happy with” would be a great situation but I don’t think it’s an important goal: there’s not much we as a society can do to make that happen, at least not much that’s unambiguously good. And your romantic success is, yeah, something that’s under your control to a large extent.

III.

I hope you don’t think you’re not worthy of love or anything because you totally are 

–unnamed friend

The more I think about this message the more I don’t understand it.

Is it some sort of empirical claim about my attractiveness? Is it a more moral claim–that I deserve love because of my moral worth? (Who would she say isn’t worthy of love?) Or is it not meant as a claim with a truth value but as a recommendation for what attitude I should take, along the lines of “love yourself?”

It’s not crazy to say “you deserve to make a million dollars a year” to someone even if they are not, in fact, making a million dollars a year. Maybe you think they are currently being underpaid due to their failure to negotiate and their employer would happily pay them more. But it’s also not something you would say to just anyone. If you spend enough time thinking about markets it is hard not to develop the prior that the market price is fair.

IV.

I don’t know if I’m worthy of love, or what the fuck that means. I think I’m worthy of existence. I think I’m worthy of clean water. Love gets more airtime in songs and novels, but have you tried clean water? Clean water’s pretty great.

things I have learned from going through my drafts folder: apparently in 2015 I was really upset about the concepts “rolequeer” and “demisexual”

I hate to wade into this discourse but I feel like lately I’ve seen a lot of conversations along the lines of

man: I’m sorry about what happened to so-and-so, but what I don’t understand is why she didn’t just say no! nonverbal signals are sometimes hard to interpret and just saying no would solve so many problems.

woman (or male ally): it’s because men are usually stronger than women and more likely to lash out in anger, and women live in constant fear of violence from men so saying no is often scary or dangerous.

and like. I don’t doubt that that is an experience many women have had. but I want to state for the record as a woman that out of the times I can recall that I’ve failed to say no to something that I didn’t want or that made me uncomfortable or upset, 0% have been because I was scared of the guy in question reacting with anger or violence and 100% have been due to a thought process like “well it seems really awkward to say no right now … I mean it’s not like a big deal … I don’t want to make things weird …”

which doesn’t mean I’m a bad person or deserve to have bad experiences!! but the remedies it suggests may be somewhat different and I hope we can be realistic about the relative frequencies of these things

I wonder how college!me would react if I told her how much time I spend exercising and reading books and how little time I spend staring aimlessly at a computer screen

There’s this idea I have, I’m not sure where exactly it comes from, about the way relationships work. It says that everyone has different needs and preferences, and so to be in a relationship you have to figure out what your needs are, and express them to your partner; they do the same, and if you’re both willing to accommodate each other’s needs then congratulations.

I try to live by this, mostly. There have been many times when a boyfriend said or did something that upset me, I responded with the classic “when you do x I feel y,” and he responded with “oh okay, I won’t do x.” But somehow that exchange always left me feeling a bit unsatisfied.

You know what feels great? Telling one of my friends that ugh, my boyfriend did x, and hearing her respond with “seriously? that’s so fucked up!”

I think there are a couple things going on here.

One is that no matter how relationship anarchist you want to be about things, there will always be some things that fall outside the realm of needs and boundaries and preferences and end up in the category of “normal things people are or aren’t supposed to do.” You’re not supposed to nonconsensually beat up your partner, or express discomfort at them having friends outside the relationship, or tell your partner’s mother to go fuck herself upon first meeting her. (I think “don’t sleep with other people” used to be on this list, but no longer is.) No one thinks these are boundaries that need to be expressed. And if you can get your preferences into this list, that’s a huge win. So it makes sense that, even if in my small ineffectual way, I push for my preferences to be codified into local social norms.

Another thing is–negotiating an entire relationship from first principles is exhausting. If you are a naturally mono-inclined person trying to date someone who’s never heard of the concept of monogamy, you will spend half your time trying to legislate edge cases. It makes sense to look for someone who shares your basic intuitions about interpersonal relationships.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say here–certainly not that modifying traditional relationship structures is impossible or even undesirable. Maybe that I think it’s too easy to see the modifications and miss the social technology underpinning them.

Yesterday I downloaded Track Your Happiness, an app that sends you notifications at random times throughout the day, asking you what you’re doing and how happy you are at that moment. While I’ll be interested to see what the data shows after a while, I’ve already noticed something cool.

I think there’s sort of a positive feedback loop to noticing my happiness level. It goes something like (notice current happiness level) -> (update towards average happiness being closer to that level) -> (life satisfaction updates in the same direction) -> (happiness updates in the same direction because either “wow my life is so great, I’m happy all the time” or “oh god despite all my success and privilege I’m still unhappy what even is the point”).

And since I’m more likely to be unhappy when alone/idle/introspecting about my emotions, and more likely to be happy when in a flow state, I notice my unhappiness more than my happiness. Track Your Happiness corrects for that bias.

So yeah. It’s never occurred to me to wonder whether I’m happy while immersed in a conversation at work, because immersion, and because I don’t actually have a choice about whether or not to have most of these conversations. But today I got a notification and realized that you know, I was really enjoying the experience.

question I was asked yesterday: “it says you’re straight on your tumblr, is that true?”

“are you asking … if I’m lying … about the fact that I’m not straight … on tumblr?”

I don’t really feel like I have an intrinsic “taste in art,” so today while at SFMOMA I tried to pay close attention to the art my system 1 liked.

Things I learned:

• I like things where art is all around you. I saw a Sol LeWitt wall drawing in isolation and was like “eh.” Then I walked into a room where all the walls were Sol LeWitt drawings and I was delighted.
  
• I like things that involve weird visual distortions. There was one thing involving strobe lights that made something look like molten metal. Also a poem written on a canvas with weird lines, which made it it physically hard to read the poem (my eyes started hurting) and made the poem look like it was shimmering before your eyes.
• I like gold leaf. I already knew that I like medieval paintings with gold leaf, and 19th century paintings that have gold leaf because they’re playing off medieval painting styles. Then today
• System 1: “look! I like that painting!”
• System 2: “huh, I wonder why. it seems like typical abstract art, some primary colors, some shapes …”
• “… it’s the gold leaf, isn’t it.”
  
• System 2: “… yeah.”

I realized recently that at some point I associated “reading books” with “work/productive,” to the point where I will now only read books that I feel like I “should” read, either novels that are generally considered to have literary value or nonfiction books that seem like they will have useful/interesting information. The result of this is that I don’t read that many books, like on the order of 20 a year.

My reading habits in childhood were totally different from this. As a kid, I read constantly and paid no attention to the “value” of the books I was reading. I didn’t watch much TV, just because I preferred reading. 

I was thinking about this when I was reading Cursed Child, realizing

1. even though it was pretty bad, I still felt very engaged/in a flow state, much more so than when watching pretty much any TV or reading tumblr/twitter/other internet stuff
   
2. I felt this way all the time when I was a kid
3. I should read bad books more often and make this more of a default leisure activity

My first experiment in this was reading Amy Snow, which I picked up in an airport bookstore because it had a picture of a girl in a Victorian dress on the cover.

Good points:

• set in 19th century England
  
• various secrets slowly uncovered throughout the book
• easy to read and kept me turning pages–I definitely got that flow state I was looking for

Bad points:

• bad prose
  
• this distracted me enough that I had trouble enjoying it until I stopped reading every individual word and just tried to get the gist of every sentence
• boring, one-dimensional characters
• annoying projection of 21st century morality onto 19th century setting

I think one problem is that I’ve developed more taste in books since I was young. But it seems like it should be possible to find books that are easy to read and optimized for reading pleasure rather than literary value, but are still good. I feel like a large fraction of the books I read as a kid fell into this category, but I’m not sure what the equivalent books for adults are.

Yesterday I tried to drop a class, and the online course enrollment system gave me an error message.

So I went to the course advisor and explained my situation. “Oh, that’s because if you’re a dual-degree student, the system won’t let you drop down to zero classes for either one of your degrees. I remember so-and-so had the same problem last year.”

“But I thought that was allowed.”

“Oh, it’s totally allowed, no rules against it. It’s just a bug in the system. Go to the Student Services Center, they’ll help you.”

So today I went to the Student Services Center and explained what happened. “Oh yeah, that’s just because you’re a dual-degree student; we see this bug all the time. Fill out this form, give it back to us, and we’ll override the system and drop the course for you within five business days.”

I looked down at the form, titled Petition to Change Course Enrollment. The first section asked you to check off a box to specify the type of request. And the first option was “dual-degree student trying to drop down to zero classes for one degree.”

Like … I feel like if you are at the point of printing forms for students to fill out to request that administrators manually override the system every time they encounter this bug, it might be easier to just fix the bug?

is there an accepted hand gesture or voice equivalent of ~ as punctuation?

because people keep referring to me as ~demisexual~ and I should probably just give in because I don’t think the word is going away and I can’t really do anything about it but the thought of using it without tildes around it is kind of painful

I guess being a senior is making me nostalgic or something but lately I’ve been thinking about communities.

I think when I left high school, I was sad about losing my friends. But I didn’t lose my friends, not really. We still Facebook chat and Skype sometimes and hang out when we’re in the same city. What I did lose was the communities I had in high school.

I had two groups of friends, my main friend group and my math friends. Among my main friends there was this sort of conformity, but in a joyful way. We all liked the same music because the friends with the best taste in music would find bands and tell the rest of us about them. We all dressed the same because we borrowed each other’s clothes and went shopping together. In the same way we mostly liked the same movies and books and TV shows and had years and years built up of complicated inside jokes and memories. And when we went to college we all found new friends who changed us in different ways, and now we’re pretty different. There are friends who network obsessively and ones who respond to “what are your plans after college?” with “uh, travel?” There are friends who go to parties and hook up with guys and ones who’ve never touched a drop of alcohol or kissed anyone. And there’s never more than a few of us together at once, now, and it’s not the same.

With my math friends our community was partly based on the math we did together, and some of us don’t even do math anymore, and none of our lives revolve around it like they did in high school, we’re doing physics or programming or econ or pre-med. And it was partly based on the gossip of our small and incestuous world that doesn’t really exist anymore, and partly based on the inside jokes, so many inside jokes. And so that community is gone forever too, only existing in our memories and gchat logs and Google Docs full of the weird RPF we wrote about about each other.

So I’m not sad about losing my friends when I graduate. I know we’ll still talk. What I am sad about is the idea that a community can exist for only a brief, perfect moment in time and then be gone forever. I’m scared because who I am has been shaped so much by the communities I’ve ended up with through random accident. I’m scared because you can travel through time, but only in one direction.

today I had a break between interviews and was chatting with another guy who was interviewing with the same company 

 him: oh you go to [school]? Do you know this girl … I think her name starts with K … I don’t actually know her, I just read her Tumblr. 

 me: wow theunitofcaring is Internet famous these days ^_^

Tagged by funereal-disease :)

Name: worldoptimization

Nicknames: none really (those who share at least 50% of my genes have been known to call me Car or Scoog)

Birthday: November 1

Age: 20

Gender: woman

Sexual Orientation: straight

Significant Other: none

Work/School: junior studying math and CS

Favorite Color: gray

Time and Date: 10:49 am on January 24

Average Hours of Sleep: 8

Last thing I googled: “offer it up”

(this is what my mom tells me when I complain about something and I was wondering if it’s a common expression among non-Catholics but nope, purely a suggestion to offer up your suffering to the souls in purgatory)

Number of blankets I sleep under: two

Favorite Shows: Game of Thrones, Arrested Development, Silicon Valley, Downton Abbey, The West Wing, 30 Rock, Sherlock, Girls

Favorite Food: according to my roommate, “All you eat is scones and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. And pasta. And chickpeas.”

Favorite Drunk Food: Pirate’s Booty

Favorite Place to Shop for Clothes: H&M

Last Movie I Saw in Theaters: The Imitation Game (with my 11-year-old sister who afterwards commented, “I think the movie would have been a lot better if it had a happy ending”)

Last Book I Read: Permutation City by Greg Egan (really good in case you were wondering)

A Place That Makes Me Happy: my grandparents’ farm, my kitchen at home, upscale malls, the ski trails in Jackson, NH, that fountain outside the Harvard Science Center

What are you doing today? going to see a play in San Francisco, then heading to a charity gala afterwards! my life is so glamorous

tagging nobody (I am less virtuous than theunitofcaring clearly) but consider yourself tagged if you feel like it

best revenge idea: get an account with your enemy’s full name on fanfiction.net

then write super embarrassing fanfic and become popular enough to be the top hit on google