I imply that you imply that I imply that you suck

I made a note on a Facebook event to warn people who have issues with pets and small children that this event is likely to include pets and small children. I tried to word it in a way that would get people to contact me to deal with their concern instead of just not going, or suffering in silence. I got a pretty strong backlash, paraphrased:

"It's worded like an offer to sequester babies away from the party. I feel uncomfortable with phrasings that diminish their personhood, or imply their existence in their own home is a burden on others."

Well, I'm uncomfortable with the implications of this objection!

Don't get me wrong, I understand problems with people considering me a burden to interact with. It's awful. I have a hard time believing in my own worth. I'm continually finding old scars in places I didn't know existed. I don't want to cause that for someone else.

I did reword the note. I wanted to make sure potential issues were resolved ahead of time instead of by last-minute ultimatum, and it wouldn't accomplish my purpose if it pissed off the housemates.

I still resent the implications of this objection.

It tries to provide a protection for personhood by outlining the zone where they cannot be a burden, because, by definition, it is neutral ground to meet all their needs in that zone instead of someone else's. In the process, it runs roughshod over all my attempts to protect my own personhood and respect others'.

When I hear others talk about burdens they seem to treat it as an absolute scale instead of a relative scale. Someone is or isn't thought of as a burden, with some gradation for "how" burdensome. The label clearly matters to people. Being a burden is supposed to be terrible. For the longest time, I thought had to do everything in my power to not be one.

It makes me want to laugh and cry and scream all in one moment when people try to tug on my heartstrings by pointing out how awful it would be if there was no safe, neutral ground to interact with people from. Regardless of whether an interaction is "worth it", regardless of whether I want the interaction or actively try to disengage, it almost always costs me something to interact with people. The most obvious cost is sanity: too much stimulation with no recovery time leads to mental overload and shut down, and this cost is very much additive. The idea of a person who does not come with a cost to burden is *ludicrous* in my experience, but everyone I knew told me it was an achievable standard and failing to meet it was monstrous.

Life started going much better when I decided to to minimize the costs on me and let other people negotiate the costs to them. My neutral ground is the ground I'm standing on. I cannot interact with people as people if they're going to insist that the costs they impose don't count and can't be negotiated. Those aren't agents, those are natural disasters.

With your eyes closed, tell me how to snark

I randomly picked an interview question to answer badly. The permission to give awful answers allays the terror of not finding the perfect and true answer, which can paralyze me to the point I never answer at all. The question I got was a lot more random than I anticipated... I answered it anyways.

With your eyes closed, tell me step-by-step how to tie my shoes.

1. first reach down to your feet.
2. check if you have shoes
3. check if your shoelaces are untied
4. if they are, tie your freaking shoelaces you're an adult gosh

Note, that's pretty uncharitable. What if it's a job interacting with disability or children? However trivial the example, plenty of jobs need you to demonstrate a strong ability to break down tasks into concrete parts and deliver them as clear instructions. Not to mention, some people just don't appreciate a good snark and/or will count my unwillingness to jump through dumb hoops on command like a purebred show-monkey against me.

In any case, showing the concrete steps and practicing each part with on-the-spot corrections would get the point across much more clearly. I have to know my audience to tailor my instructions. I won't pretend that I'm amazing at this task in the best of circumstances, it's worse when you deliberately deprive me of the tools I'd usually use to do it.

And I still like the snark answers better.

Comparative thoughts on the Bay Area

"If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy." - Eliezer Yudkowsky

So I recently visited the Bay Area, again, and I despaired leaving, again. I love it there. While I stay there, I feel like any problem is solvable. It seems like I could achieve my potential in actuality, instead of just in theory. What about that place affects me so deeply? Do I feel freer for the mere fact that I'm on vacation? Does the culture encourage or enable problem-solving more readily? Do I feel more secure and comfortable because I feel accepted in a community of people 'like me'?

The difference in my thinking could have nothing to do with the area or community itself. I've noticed before that I think more clearly after a quick change in context. You can solve a lot of seemingly insurmountable problems by taking a break and coming at them with fresh eyes, hence the common advice to "sleep on" an issue before taking drastic action. I can easily spend all day at home trying to figure out what to do and get nowhere, but if I'm made to go run errands I can organize my priorities and lay out a whole schedule of next-actions in the length of the drive. Taking a trip to a different state shifts the context a lot more than just going for a walk or sleeping on problem does.

I could interpret my sudden competence spike in a darker light too: I can't actually try most of the solutions I think up in California. It's possible that Utah lacks the je ne sais quoi to help me succeed, but it's also possible that there's no reality-checking in California to make me lose. I can have as many ideas as I want, and make them as impressive-sounding as I like. I never have to test their viability until I'm home and the high is gone.

To find that the differences between the cultures here and in the Bay have no meaningful effect on my cognition would surprise me. In Utah's almost-theocracy, appearances matter a great deal. With the surrounding monoculture, I feel a particular pressure to act 'normal' or at the very least with consistency.* I implicitly taboo the thought that I could break character for anything except to adopt normal mode, because it's just not done.
* I suspect this could be a neurotypical thing, not a Utah thing.

However, I can't do Utah normal for any meaningful length of time. I can be consistent, but my most consistent patterns of behavior walk right into downward spirals and depression. I need to break those patterns, and I can't do so by replacing them in whole cloth with normal mode.

The rationalist community, on the other hand, prizes changing actions. Actions need to change to align with thoughts, and thoughts need to change to align with reality. If I rationalize or support my opinions with bad epistemology, I expect to get called out on it. Half the time, even before I say a thought out loud, I recognize when a conversation would go down the road "and then they pointed out that I could believe the obvious truth, and take the obvious actions on it". I know I will get confused and disappointed looks if I don't change my thoughts and actions appropriately. It's hard to say how this difference will affect me long-term, but in the short-term it helps break me out of well-worn ruts.

Independent of specific cultural merits, community itself provides value. I share values and a very large frame of reference with Bay Area rationalists, while and I don't have much sense of community in Utah. Indeed, I pounced on the idea of creating this flavor of community in Utah long before I saw the Bay's instance of it. Now that I've seen it, I struggle to maintain even the barest echo of what I know is possible. It seems as though the saner Utahns are too bitter for outreach, too defensive for self-improvement, too skittish for mutual aid, too burnt for cuddle piles.

Mad Hatty Thoughts

(edited freewrite from Dec. 22, 2014)

Today, my thoughts begin with hats. I'm wearing one other than my usual today.

Hats, in fiction and to some degree in real life, externalize your core self. You choose to wear a hat, in a way that you do not choose to need glasses, but also in a distinctly different way from which you choose your wardrobe. Glasses can mean 'cool' or 'nerdy' or 'smart'; they represent constant, immutable traits. Clothes give a shorthand method for determining a person's choices; you can change your choices, if you dislike them. As surely as you must wear clothes, though, you must make choices. On the other hand, few situations truly require a hat; in everyday life you only put on a hat to do hard work or make a statement about yourself. It's the symbolic equivalent of wearing your heart on your sleeve.

An iconic character like Indiana Jones without his hat would be unthinkable; in fact, leaving their hat behind usually signifies that they've given up on their deepest drives. Royalty and clergy alike top themselves with the most extravagant hats as an external symbol of their power and calling. Hacking culture differentiates good and evil hackers as 'white hat' or 'black hat'.

I make it a habit to wear cool hats, as it makes me happy to look as awesome outside as I desperately hope I am inside. At the moment, I'm wearing a straw hat; I worry it signifies silly anime pirate than super-cool rationality master.

Perhaps that describes me better. I enjoyed being a pirate, back when I was pastafarian. Pirate rules pose few restrictions—I just do what I want, since the rules are more like guidelines anyways. A "rationalist" might insist on the doing the sensible thing, for a particularly rigid definition of 'sensible'.

Amidst the rationalist community, it sometimes looks like only certain wants really count. For example, I want a pie. A pirate would just eat the pie, and not share it. The picture of a rationalist in my head decides to eat something else. When I picture my picture rationalist's reasoning, it's because they genuinely want their long-term health more than they want the pie.

However, I have only spotty access to True Rationality(tm). If I decide to not eat the pie, I'm probably just ignoring my desire because Rationality said so. I feel wary of this strategy; ignored desires have a way of coming back at you with a vengeance. I vaguely sense that if my brain could envision quantities well enough to compare desires directly, I would, in fact, want my long-term health more than I want pie. If I try to think about it in terms of health points, I might like eating pies less—but probably just enough to make eating the pie less enjoyable, rather than preventing me from eating the pie.

Does my tendency to reduce rationality itself to a static model make me not a rationalist? These questions haunt me late into the night, and all because I'm wearing a different hat today.

Write What You Know, musings on rationalist buddhism

drafted Sep 23, 2014

“Write what you know,” advises Mark Twain, as does every other person who deigns to advise novice story weavers. I know a rationalist who knows his stoic philosophy, and it shows when he speaks. He likes to expound in detail how rationality and stoic philosophy mesh together; his exuberance in communicating his thoughts inspired me to try it myself. I know too little of stoic philosophy to comment on its merits, but I do know something of buddhism and taoism.

Buddhism builds a narrative around the idea that the reality we think we know is an illusion. It contends one of the more persistent illusions is the existence of the self as a separate and distinct entity from the rest of the world. According to this philosophy, suffering stems from constantly superimposing ideas of what 'should be'—what you want or do not want—onto what is. To live your life to the fullest, you must transcend judging your experiences and learn to simply experience them.

The appeal is clear; you can save a lot of effort by changing what’s in your head rather than the world outside it. The little wants and impulses that drive us often contradict each other. We use our intelligence to try to form coherent goals as best we can; we don't always succeed. When achieving a badly formulated goal leaves you wanting, you can either relinquish the wanting or change what you're doing to satisfy it. Buddhism, as you can imagine, is pretty heavy on the relinquishment.

What you feel or think describes a state of how you are, not of the things you're thinking of or having feelings about; Western (or perhaps, consumer) culture avoids making the distinction. Buddhism, on the other hand, emphasizes it! In a world where people too often confuse the map for the territory, it seems prudent to promote a narrative centered around distinguishing them for balance. The buddhist narrative encourages the useful practice of considering whether you can dissolve a perceived problem as simply as thinking of it in a different light.

Whereas Buddhism might be a useful reaction to our base culture's error modes. A basic technique from CFAR's bag of tricks, goal factoring, feels similar to the buddhist process of relinquishment. They start out identically: first make yourself aware of your own wants, and acknowledge the very human mess of motives lying underneath the surface. Where buddhism moves to relinquish these desires as broken kludges, though, goal factoring aims to bring the larger goal and lower level wants into perfect harmony.

We can appreciate the buddhist principle that people, including oneself, are better understood as another fragment of an interconnected world than as unique beings of spirit and free will. Furthermore, we notice intuition oversimplifies identity. Hyperbolic discounting shows the discrepancy well: if you want one thing now, and one thing at a different time, which is your true desire? Is your self a body, or a first-person story, or a nebulous je ne sais quo? Better philosophers than I have tried to tackle these questions.

Buddhism and rationality could make a potent mixing, but I doubt you can equate rationality, whose state of the art right now amounts to a grab bag of tricks and techniques, with any established worldview. If I had to choose, however, I can think of one narrative which stands a chance of pulling the disparate pieces together into a cohesive whole: Taoism. The Tao Te Ching, a chief spiritual text, stresses that the “master” practictioner wields only as much force as needed to complete his task, and never a moment too soon or too late. It is a simple narrative, with the idea of the least action at its very heart. A more poetic way to describe a rationalist’s dance to maintain pareto efficiency may exist outside of those pages, but I haven’t found it yet.

Feels

A free-write from Dec 14, prettied up to be intelligible and self-relevant

I want my friends to be happy.

Part of this is a simple need for security: I rely on others' goodwill for several necessities right now and dislike the thought of losing access to those necessities.

But I also want my friends’ happiness for its own sake. I want them to know that they are people worth knowing. They fill my life with happiness and excitement. I wouldn’t hang around them if they didn’t, regardless of any networking or support agenda.

Some of my friends are attracted to me.

From a security standpoint, it’s almost comforting. Sexual desire is a very simple and straightforward agenda; I can work with it. Gold digging is not complicated. It almost feels more honest to directly trade sex for security than to rely on a relationship of some uncertain value.

From the perspective of wanting the people I like to be happy, it terrifies the living shit out of me.

I process my own emotions at an excruciatingly slow pace. When my friends ask me how I’m feeling, I must literally pause in order to *figure it out*. At the same time, I must make sure I’m not pissing anyone off by sitting silent and blank-looking for 10 minutes. This reaction frustrates platonic friendships and sends all the wrong signals in sexual situations. “I don’t know" becomes an ‘okay’ to pushy people and a de facto ‘no’ to respectful ones. To those who would use me, I become an interactive plaything; To those who want to know and interact with the real me, I become as frigid and unyielding as stone. The opposite would serve me so much better, if I could manage it.

Alright, so the gist of the thing is that I'm pulling a Gwern.

A while back, I decided I was going to start journaling.

I had a journal to do it in and everything, and carried it around pretty consistently. Eventually I did get into the habit of actually writing in it.

A month or so passes by. I notice, "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if I recorded some specific stuff so I could get a sense of cause and effect in my life?" So I start being a bit more strategic in my writings:

• I get an alarm for my phone that goes off at random intervals. While the majority of the time I don't notice it's going off, it's still nice to have some criteria for when I write in my journal that's slightly biased towards when I happen to feel like writing in it.
• The other thing I did is start getting serious about time-keeping. I created a column in each page specifically for writing the time when I make a note. I created another column for specific observations that I'm trying to track, e.g. what I ate for breakfast, what time I went to bed/woke up, what mood I'm in, what medications I took. It was all so very clever, so at this point I'm as pleased as punch.
• I also start doing weekly reviews. I write one review in my journal, and one on the lesswrong site. They cover slightly different topic areas; My journal review tends to cover personal events I may need to refer to in posterity, while the group diary post concentrates on specific interventions I've been trying. I also have monthly reviews in my journals. Neither of these are particularly good at capturing the patterns I've been attempting to set up with the different columns shenanigans.

Fast forward to last weekend. I am at a reunion for the CFAR workshops I went to two years back, and am suddenly surrounded by people who strive to be competent in intelligent ways. This attitude is very contagious.

I look at my journal and realize that a.) I completely fail to fill it out when I am very depressed or very busy and b.) I am not actually getting what I wanted out of the myriad improvements I'd taken on. When someone asked what I like to do, or what I've done, my mind drew a blank the same as it always has. This is despite the fact that I do weekly reviews like clockwork, where I literally go back and read about the things I've done over the past week to summarize the interesting bits. If you asked me what the effects of diet or melatonin have been on my days, I would wind up giving you a wishy-washy "well, it kinda feels like it's done this......" answer that is only marginally better than what if I'd had a normal person's memory and were making no attempt to objectively examine the problem at all.

Most importantly, I got the feeling that substantially more was possible.

So, I'm doing a trial.  I will take a small dose of melatonin nightly for a week, and take nothing for a week after. I am recording bed time, waking time, how I feel when I wake up, and length of naps. I intend to graph the data a couple of ways to get a better feel for what's going on.

• time slept box plots comparing groups.
• waking up feeling box plots comparing groups.
• Time slept vs. waking up feeling for both groups
• Time slept vs. waking up feeling for both groups including naps
• nap lengths themselves vs. waking up feeling
• nap times vs. time slept.

Depending on how these look, I will put together a linear regression model and see what pops out. I think it will be fairly interesting. I have strong doubts these will come out statistically significant, but I'm curious what will come out. And statistically significant or not, it's not ZERO evidence. I'm pretty confident already that melatonin makes me wake sooner, what I don't know is how it affects my morning mood or subsequent naps.

We'll see how the variance looks, and I can get a better idea of what N I'll need to do other self-trials. I would like to try this with reading affirmations in the morning. I could do a placebo that's just lorem ipsum text.

June Ramblings

On the wall in my bedroom, I have a grayscale printout of a valkyrie.

I'm not sure why I thought valkyries would be a good symbol for my desire to protect the people I care about, honestly. Valkyries collect the souls of the dead--those who are long beyond help.

Visually, at least, they're like a fiercer kind of guardian angel. Really, the biggest difference between a valkyrie and a guardian angel is that guardian angels are meant to gently guide you away from danger. Valkyries are from a culture which encourages you to get into the thick of it. A guardian angel guards your innocence, while a valkyrie guards your valour.

That's more me, I guess. Maybe I don't want it to be, but my wings are not actually for fiercely guarding people from danger. I am selfish. I want to protect my chosen, to take those who have already proven themselves to a paradise where they can continue to hone their valourous qualities without consequence or end.

That is my dream.
I want to make an intentional community. A community of self-expression, and of happiness. Most importantly, though, it is a place of grokking. Illusions are seen as illusions, and appreciated for their strangeness, but are never mistaken for the truth. It is a truth about our perception, not about the things we perceive.

The people I want to take with me to paradise are the ones who take it for granted that simple truths are simple. Not simple in the way that our brain likes to understand the world, but simple like occam's razor and reductionism and bayes rule are simple.

It would be difficult. Human values and thinking are really, really absurd. This is something that buddhist philosophy does a good job of acknowledging, but there's one thing they got wrong: I think there's a bit of happiness that is better for not having to ignore, downplay, or reframe so aversive things are not aversive. I think it would be better to not have to expend that mental effort. Call it a bent towards 'naturalness'.

If only society operated on bayesian updates.. More important than simply starting out with the best policies is being able to change them as needed. The right priors can still be vastly wrong and it won't matter how well we started because we can't adjust after the fact.

I wish we could all dance to the truth. Quick updating methods, quick propogation of ideas and skills. Forceful, but with grace and meaning. Wanton, but always discrete. Democracy tries to achieve this by voting. It votes. This is a good thing if we are not systematically wrong, but there are a good number of areas where we are *are* systematically wrong. We're a biased species. Not to mention, democracy requires waiting for a consensus. The nice thing about dictatorships is that you can get a lot of changing done at once. The trouble is that your direction of top-speed progress might be straight off the edge of a cliff.

Why else democracy? People will talk about rights as part of why democracy is so awesome, but I am not convinced those are as relevant as people claim they are. We have strong incentive to believe they're important now; they're part of our cheers about why we're so awesome and all our forefathers sucked in comparison.

Older civilizations might have been dismayed that our leaders are illegitimate, in that they have no inborn class or divine right. These young whippersnappers don't even know what's important, dammit!! What matters quite a bit, however, is what *works*. What keeps itself in power, what stays stable, what keeps itself going. Democracy has so far won the test of time, and that is the only requirement: survival.

Mandalas

During my brief stint at art school, I took a college preparedness class. The one useful thing I took from it was the idea of a personal mandala.

Mandalas are big in Eastern/Indian cultures, and similar things pop up in the Americas as well. That's because it's a very simple concept: a circle, the classic symbol of unity, is divided into sections and filled from the inside out with symbolic imagery that makes up a spiritual whole.

The teacher suggested that we draw three concentric circles within a larger circle. The outer ring represents the present. The innermost ring represents the way that we wish things to be. The ring between them represents the path we take to get from the present to our ideals. The center represents our core, the things that guide and rejuvenate and make us ourselves.

The circle is also divided into quarters, representing four areas of well-being: Spiritual, Emotional, Physical, and Mental. The teacher suggested we fill in the mandala from the outside in, which is lovely symbolism of a road to self-discovery and all, but I feel it's a more practical exercise to leave the middle ring for last.

I'm glad I took up the habit of doing these now and again. It's probably more helpful than a journal for cataloging my mental state at various points, as it records my current self-image, adversities, and future outlook all at once. I fill them with words, rather than imagery, as my artistic leaning is unhelpfully abstract.

It's an interesting exercise comparing my previous mandalas to the current one. The comparison revealed some inconsistencies in the way I feel about touch. It's definitely touch I want, the chemical rush that comes from skin-to-skin contact. Holding hands, leaning into another's warmth, but otherwise going about my day as normal. It's one of those things that makes it hard to identify with the clinical descriptions of Asperger's.

I've gotten used to getting more affection than I strictly enjoy. With my ex, snuggling got unwarrantedly upped with sexual teasing. My step-dad is a hugger, and he desensitized me to that. Before, I predominately tackle-hugged people for my own amusement whilst avoiding other people's hugs because they always insisted on lifting me up like a rag doll. I've gotten so used to hugs that I briefly felt jilted when my aspie step-sister refused my offer of a goodbye hug. I'd finally started to grok that initiating goodbye hugs was the best way to make people happy and leave non-awkwardly, then she threw me off my game.

Thanks to my mandala habit, I think I'm starting to understand that coping well with a problem is not the same as not having it.

Letters from the past

The easiest way to express myself is to freewrite about the things that are on my mind. Something about forcing myself into a linear progression of thoughts makes things simpler to process. I sometimes do this very strictly, obliging myself to resist going back to rearrange the order and grammar of my sentences or even using the backspace key, and other times I just take advantage of the fact that retracting statements in a word processor becomes a conscious action rather than a minor shift of wind in my stormy mind.

It has to be typed, not written, or I will obsess over the forms of the letters and/or my thoughts will shift three times for every thought I manage to record. Ironic, isn't it, that the logorrhea I can put into typing winds up being more coherent than the slow, thought-out version? Physical writing is just too low-bandwidth. I can always go back and delete or rearrange sections of a typed freewrite for sense, but on paper I have limited room for editing and have to recreate the parts of my mindstate that never made it to paper in the first place.

I used to post some of these externalized internal monologues to my blog, prettied up a bit for coherency, in some secret hopes that the people who actually needed to hear these things would find them. I dreamed that someone would look through my scattered thoughts, understand me better than I understood myself, explain to me who I was and why. (Getting diagnosed with ADHD non-hyperactivity did that a little bit, but no one would really talk to me about what that meant other than "Take these pills and you'll be less distracted". Now that someone has actually fulfilled my dream and pronounced my identity as rooted in mild Aspergers, I'm more hysterically confused than ever. Go figure.) I used to do the same thing with physical journals, hoping that someone would take the time to decode my silly little ciphers.

Maybe I'm still doing that, just a little bit.

But as far as I know, they never did. Maybe they were respecting my privacy. Maybe they just didn't know about the blogs and forums I belonged to. Maybe the ciphers were a genuinely effective obfuscation measure. Maybe, and this is a new realization for me, they felt like they already knew me. Maybe they simply didn't feel the need to seek out extra information. If the majority of people do have extra mysterious powers in cognitive empathy and theory of mind that I don't, what they detected from it might have been enough, or 'seemed' enough, to form an opinion. I've observed that my parents, for one, do seem to form strong opinions of others much more readily than I do. Maybe it's not actually as aberrant a habit as I believed it to be. I, on the other hand, seek out concrete information. When I first began to really notice people and their effects on my life, I became a detective. I nose through people's files. I peruse their internet presence. I started keeping written profiles of people's interests, likes and dislikes. I spent most of my time with my first boyfriend repetitively asking questions to comprehend his perspective on life and his interest in me.

Anyways, posting things to the public reminds me to be at least a little bit coherent. And explaining things out loud in general helps me explain things to myself. So excuse me if I go on an asperger's track for a while as I'm figuring things out. I'll probably delete most of these posts at the end of my rumination period as I did before.

I'm rereading rather 'feely' freewrite I made at the end of September 2012. I'd tasked myself with writing periodic free-writes so the words would stop exploding in my head and causing... well, causing meltdowns.

The thing about me and my parents

When I am yelled at, I feel unwanted. When confronted with individual infractions like forgetting to take in the trash or empty the dishwasher, I am not always sure how to correct what I'm doing wrong. I perceive a larger pattern in these, rightly or wrongly, where I am not making specific mistakes but being berated for making mistakes at all. And I feel hurt and frustrated, like nothing I do matters because there will always be a fault to find in it.

I feel like there is something vital missing in our family interactions. Some element of warmth, togetherness. When I am teased, I feel as though there is always an adversarial if not outright hostile undercurrent to it. Does not teasing have to have a small seed of truth to be effective? I perceive resentment in offhand remarks about my absentmindedness and naivety, and it hurts.

There have been times when I have honestly not wanted to come home. I have approached the corner before our house and had to fight off an impulse to stop the car and sleep in the backseat or keep driving past to god knows where. I contemplate having to come inside with the turmoil written clearly on my face, mind ripe full of vivid scenarios of being judged for my weakness and belittled for sensitivity, and it only serves to upset me to a full-on-breakdown.

When my fear is realized, my moment of weakness noticed and brought to full scrutiny, I feel resentment. In the forced revelation of my shames, I can't help but feel a sharp and bitter contrast to how my minor troubles and personal triumphs are not so open. I can do whatever and it really makes no difference to anyone. It makes no difference whether I do something chore-like or not, because my parents will find something to berate me about one way or another. I already understand the material from class lectures and reading ahead, but no one really gives a shit about my homework difficulties until I'm failing my courses. They care about being inconvenienced, not about me. When I talk about atheism and lesswrong and crafts, I don't notice anyone sharing or supporting my enthusiasm. I feel as though I am shouting in an echo chamber, and it's unbearably lonely. The asymmetry feels like a monumental injustice, and I get so angry over it. Even admitting that makes me feel pathetic, like a 5-year-old whose whole world is crushed if their parents don't laud their painstakingly drawn scribbles in front of all their friends and coworkers.

Simple Thought

I'd like to start posting more of my thought sketches. Just sketches, not grand thought-out thesis papers. Just enough to record for myself that I'm actually thinking and progressing, and reach out to others who want to think things through alongside me.

It's occurred to me lately that a major reason I no longer feel happy when learning new things is because I've become insanely obsessed with becoming a *perfect* expert on every topic I brush up against. I must focus on the most important and useful subjects, I must use only the most authoritative sources, I must memorize every random factoid, I must internalize and act on all the implications, I must be able to explain it to others in my own words, and I must go further still to synthesize brand new insights. It's exhausting, especially to try to do with 20 mini-interests at one time, so of course I'm not having fun anymore. Focusing solely on Asperger's Syndrome the past week has been emotionally tumultuous, but also an amazing experience! I'd forgotten what it was like to learn because I can and not because I felt it was my duty to do so. I forgot what it was like to be so full to the brim of excitement about a subject that I literally can't put it aside.

The other major reason I wasn't having fun is because of depression, pure and simple. I wonder which came first, the "too depressed to do things for casual fun", or the "depressed because I believe the things I pride myself on doing well are actually shallow/meaningless"?

Asperger's rant, again.

Is this going to become a "Thing"?

I'm not sure what possessed me to post that last post instead of just archiving it somewhere. I may decide to revert it to a draft in any case.

A friend of mine pointed out to me that PDD-NOS/Aspergers/Autism is a spectrum, and that it would be prudent for me to ignore the pressure around me to figure out for once and forever what label applies to me.

I understand that. I really do. And while I won't deny that I am bothered by whether I'm really "aspie" enough to be an aspie, that's not my primary concern. At the end of the day, a label really won't change much. I'll still be me. I'll still do mostly the same things, though perhaps with better reassurance that they'll work out. Whatever my level, it's clear I have at least superficial similarities.  I show too many objective signs to claim I have NOTHING to do with it.

But it's *because* the spectrum is so varied that I have to keep poking and prodding. It's not enough to say, "Oh, I'm somewhere on the autism spectrum". It's too encompassing a term to convey useful information, I have to explain as a separate packet of information which traits of it I have and to what extent. And at this point, I still don't grok what I do and don't have.

There can be a disparity between actual and apparent ability to act "neurotypically" due to learned coping skills, and I've been glued to psych and sociology books for too long to comprehend what socializing would be like without that theoretical knowledge simmering in the back of my head. It's apparent that I don't know how to tell what is and isn't normal, because I'd always assumed *MY* experience was typical excepting a touch of extra smarts and absentmindedness. Being told "Oh yeah, you're totally a mild aspie" by at least three people with significant knowledge in the field calls this assumption into question.

A stupid question that keeps flitting through my head is "Is this an example of lacking empathy and theory of mind, or had I just not learned that rule yet?" Stupid, self-demonstrating question because apparently no one is supposed to have to tell me the rules. That's something that bugged me about my Mom and step-dad's house, that the rules were basically "Don't answer the door and don't burn the house down" and they expected me to fill in the blanks for everything else. There was no positive suggestion about what I should do, except an occasional chore or "homework", no exact curfew or procedure for leaving the house. I never felt like I had the right to touch things in the fridge because the rules were confusing in that area, so I mostly just ate what they gave me or picked up obviously individual kid snacks like pudding and juiceboxes. I was terrified of filling in the blanks wrong, but I think I did okay.

I don't have serious impairments, I think. I'm still not convinced I'm not just a neurotypical nerd. There are at least superficial similarities, though, and I want to determine the dimensions of those individual traits. Not so I can definitively adopt or refute the label, but because I HAVE to know. The very idea of Aspergers suggests I might have deficits I'm barely aware of the extent of simply because so few bother to tell me whether I'm doing it right or wrong. This uncertainty AGGRAVATES me.

Special: To Be or Not to Be

I just want to know who I am, whether I belong to a family or not. Your family.
- Anastasia
This has been one of the most surreal weeks of my life.

My psychiatrist went and diagnosed me with Asperger's. In some ways, it feels like everything has fallen into place. A hundred different discordant notes, odd quirks and phobias and little itches I can't quite scratch, are suddenly composed into a harmonic, beautiful symphony.

In other ways, I keep seeing cracks in the theory. This symphony can't actually be me. I feel like I fail at being neurotypical, but I fail at being autistic as well. I can't do quick calculations or draw masterpieces or conduct orchestras in my head. My long-term memory is shot to hell, my formative years disappeared like they never existed. I don't follow routines, I can't manage to make one that sticks. I can't share explanations I've read verbatim, in fact I really fumble remembering or saying them in any coherent fashion. I follow other people's interactions just fine. I'm often all too aware of the effect the biting comment at the tip of my tongue will have. I don't persevere, I'm lazy. I have absolutely hidden things from parents and friends based on atmosphere and probable reactions. In fact, I often got upset when others didn't seem to be paying attention to social rules, like my little bro pushing my parent's buttons even harder when I felt he should be easing off. I don't have sleep problems. I don't freak out over coarse fabrics or shirt tags*, though I do dislike anything constricting my neck like helmets or turtle necks. I used to do random, unexpected hanging out with my high school friends just fine.

There's just so many things wrong with the idea.

Oh, but how I want to be. I feel like, by some cruel twist of fate, that the person I was meant to be was Aspie. But the real me just falls short. I crave having a single-minded interest or two like my Super!Aspie sister. I've abandoned too many over the years. It feels like a punch to the gut every time I run into someone whose interests intersect with something I am/used to be interested in and realize the memories are foggy and my expertise is actually sickeningly shallow. I don't know why it feels so horribly *wrong* that I don't have a specialty, other than because I don't know how I'll get ahead in life without one. I don't why it's so aggravating that I've failed to compact all the baseline activities I need to do into an iron-clad daily routine. It took me so long to learn to do normal self-maintainence with any regularity, and some small part of me goes berserk every time I deviate from the plan but I can't seem to STOP doing impulsive, schedule-ruining things like reading marathons. It's horribly idiotic and unfair that no one makes detailed relationship agreements like Sheldon Cooper. Wouldn't it be helpful if there were a general friendship agreement that we could conscientiously modify? It would be so nice to have a socially acceptable friendship questionaire, so I don't have to scour every conversation for dropped hints of preferences, addresses, birthdays, or whatnot. I hear of explicitly stated "social scripts" and I feel a rabid and desperate need to FIND and DEVOUR those resources.

I feel like a burnt-out genius, once prodigally above grade-level reading and whizzing through math and science without breaking a sweat, now cowering at the very thought of school. Once a real person with interesting hobbies like collecting rocks or crafting little jewelry bits, now with so much information forgotten, and doing nothing at all with my life. I'm stuck in paralysis. I can't even zip through a fun non-fiction to absorb information passively anymore. How do I know I won't just lose it again? Where did it all go?

And oh, how poetic that these needs were crystalizing into perfect clarity all at once right before being handed the tentative diagnosis of asperger's. But an intense desire to have the traits doesn't quite seem the same as actually having them. It's bizarre, but I believe I'm actually feeling unworthy of the designation. Unworthy of an Autism Spectrum disorder, can you imagine?! That's something that fails to make sense whether you think it's a horrible aberration or a different cluster of neurodiversity to equally cherished and accepted as the 'normal' strain. You don't wish to have horrible aberrations, nor do you feel unworthy of something that is of equal value to what you currently have.

But I do. I'm definitely jealous. I am in awe of my sister's skill in sewing and drawing, and her extensive knowledge about fantastic animals. She can see how 2D patterns fit together in 3-dimensional space with an ease that baffles me. Her artwork features so much detail and I'm fascinated by the anatomy and symbolism of the creatures she creates. How could I compete with that? I couldn't. I can't. Intellectually, I know that comes with downsides. I know about the anxiety,  the sensational sensitivity, the hard times coping with innocuous changes, the notorious cruelty of teachers and children. But to me, that's always just been... her. And the idea of trading in any of who she is for small talk and instinctual conformity to idiosyncratic social conventions is absurd. Why would anyone *want* that, outside of society at large forcing her to fit that mold? As I quote from To The Moon, "She remained an outcast and refused to learn how to step against it. I don’t know if it was by choice or limit, whether by bravery or cowardice.. I think in the end, I just envy her."

I am so used to strictly enforcing the boundaries between me and my sister. Asperger's was supposed to already be ruled out. I'm not allowed to hypothesize it, I'm certainly not allowed to have it. Later, I would self-diagnose with any mental problem under the sun trying to understand who I was. But Asperger's? I gave it serious thought for about 2 minutes once, then said "No, that can't be me. I'm different, somehow, but I won't escape into fantasies just to feel special or connected anymore."

((Why would I think like that? Why would I resist having something in common with my sister, when I so clearly *wanted* it to be true? Why would I keep reaching into absurdity to find a different explanation, any explanation at all? Maybe I genuinely didn't think it fit at the time. I ran primarily into the male descriptions of it, and into criteria, which would be vague enough that I would default to assuming a high level of impairment in comparison to isolated characteristics. I was also looking at it from the filter of an ADD diagnosis, so I expected overlap anyways. But more sinisterly... The occasional sharp tension between my mom's and step-mom's life/parenting styles polluted the air with judgments, gossip and resentment aimed at the whole family. The idea that I might belong among them, thrive so strongly in their world of differences and acceptance of them... surely that would be a sign that I was bad and broken too....))

I picked up banging (rocking back in forth, in place or against a soft-backed chair) a few years after I learned my sister was disposed to doing it when stressed. I didn't do it often at all, and only very lightly, and I never told anyone or let them see if I could help it. Banging was my sister's thing, and just because I found it somewhat comforting too didn't mean I could pidgeon-hole all her experiences into mine. I staunchly refused to exaggerate my own quirks just to gain sympathy and consideration. And of course, there was ever the voice in the back of my head whispering warnings of stereotypes and bullying and 'she's not right, everyone says so, don't be like her...'

I'm so confused right now, it's not even funny.

*Edit 5/22: To my surprise, Mom confirmed that she used to have to cut the tags off my shirts and dance around fabric sensitivities when I was younger.

Planning Kata (Ham Style)

I think this needs no comment.

Things I Discovered About Myself Today

I've been working on developing a habit. Several habits, in fact, but in this case a habit of recognizing when I am flinching away from a thought and marking it as important to explore later. It just so happened that one of the thoughts I noticed I was flinching away from was... that I was getting further and further away from my initial pre-minicamp goal of leaving home. I thought about it quite a bit while at minicamp too.

Then I managed to bury it. Again. Under fear and excuses and self-loathing. Granted, I thought about quitting that job myself, independently of any outside prompting. But not like this. Not because I'm scared to deviate from the path put in front of me.

The Formalization of Another Goal

The stick figure is s'posed to be me. With earrings. I may be adding to this in future days. Here's to hoping that Blogger lets you expand this picture upon clicking!

EDIT: New Layout, More Compact!

Value of Information Project

Value of Information: The amount of time/money/happiness that one is potentially leaving on the table by not seeking out additional information. For a common-sense example of this idea, you might be leaving quite a bit of money on the table if you don't ever spare a thought to figuring out what's on sale at the grocery store or if the store down the street might be cheaper in general. However, the value of seeking out extra information has a limit--you would spend more in gas money and waste a lot of time driving around town trying to find the DEFINITIVELY BEST deal. The idea of a VOI calculation is to figure out approximately where the line between too much and too little attention to optimization opportunities.

And I kind of suck at doing these calculations, especially on the spot.

I'm sure I'm not the only one. So I'm going to practice them. And then I'm going to see if there is any way that I can automate a good chunk of the process. I'd like to make a simple chart on a card that's about business-card size, much like one might make a tip chart to avoid having to do math, that would at least partially simplify the process. If that doesn't work, I'd like to build a mobile app that will let you set a few basic parameters to figure the same thing. Not something I can personally benefit from, as I don't have a smart phone, but it would be cool and useful and great for a starting portfolio.


((Looking at this, I just realized that I skipped the intended option of pawning a VOI assistance app coding project to someone with actual programming experience. I do still want the idea to help someone if it can. And that the 3 hours figure has no basis other than, "I'm guessing if I take any longer than this throwing a prototype together, it's probably going to take 3 whole months for me to muddle my way through." Also, I forgot to add the part where I write down and then deliberately ignore any really cool ideas that come up partway through the process. Mid-operation attempts at optimization tends to derail my entire endeavor. Oh well, it's still a cool chart. Another interesting Alternate project would be the Hope Function.))

Presents

This blog post is going to be very stream-of-consciousness, because I just really need to get a blog post out before I fail at my goal of blog posting semi-regularly.

I signed up to do this goal on beeminder, and it's been a major pain in the behind to keep up on. I just HATE writing. I suck at it so badly that I don't even want to try. Which is why my previous self thought it would be a good idea to FORCE myself to do some writing, so I can overcome my aversion to it.

*scowl* My previous self was too smart for her (my) own good.

I still feel that I should write something positive about my family to make up for all the terrible things I say about them here. I use my blog now like I used to use facebook--For venting my frustrations in a way that I can almost-sort-of convince myself is therapeutic instead of merely a tabulation of my emotional wounds which afterwards continue to fester uninhibited. But then I had to get rational and understand that making passive-aggressive jabs at people in the social circles I am lucky enough to be a part of in ways are specifically visible only to the social circles I am lucky enough to be a part of is not a good way to stay in the social circles I am lucky enough to be a part of.

Blah.

But giving gifts at Christmas is, so I'm working on that.

I bought a bunch of nice glass jars that I plan to decorate and fill with candy. I also want to try making some neat roses out of plastic spoons using this method I saw online that looked uber-cool, and maybe paint some of them with my glow spray. I plan to make some cool glow in the dark rings to stick on fancy ribbon necklaces too, and to get a couple of cheap journals to decorate with glow designs or maybe even just mess around with the covers to make them look more expensive. (It's one of those neat things about human psychology I've learned--people appreciate a high-end cheap item more than a low-end expensive item, even if they have exactly the same monetary value.) I want to get some higher quality chocolate truffles to get for people I really like, but I'm not so sure how much I can afford since my parents recently decided that I'm a cheap miser and insist on making me buy everything for myself. The fact that they only just noticed this NOW, a couple months AFTER I'd finally started making a conscious effort towards being generous and not hoarding things like the world was going to end is just the cruelest sort of irony.

I'm sure I sound like a horrible person for thinking about the psychology of gift-giving and horribly cynical in analyzing the whole process from a cost/benefit viewpoint. But that's how I think of a lot of things, simply because I don't like lying to myself about my own motivations. It happens frequently enough without any conscious effort to it, in spite of conscious effort against it even, so there's no need to make it any easier. Humans are motivated primarily by status, survival, sex, and kids. There are other concerns like empathy, curiosity, desire to make a lasting impact, etc. but people are a lot more wishy-washy about them. I don't have a problem with that. What's true is already so, and people can stand what is true because they are already enduring it (Litany of Gendlin).

I don't quite remember how to look friendship as a generic fuzzy feeling of hanging with someone just because you like them. The dry, sarcastic voice in my head always reminds me that this pleasant company I'm enjoying is a commodity that gets purchased and traded for just like any other, albeit with more subtlety. Who knows, maybe that's why I don't have any friends.

That and because I never really bothered in making any or in investing in the few that I once had.
No, wait--I invested in one. I invested quite a bit in making that friendship work, only to have it come bite me in the ass later. Bad investment, almost negative return on that one. Since then, I've decided to go for breadth before depth. Hence the Christmas presents for everyone.

There I go, sounding cynical again. More so than before. I don't think of my way of thinking as cynical, but that's how it gets categorized. I've noticed that people lump things into two groups like that.. Either someone cynically believes gifts to be bribes or optimistically believes them to be noble expressions of human generosity and compassion. Commercialist hype or Sentimental tradition. Black and white. Right and wrong.

But people are people. They give gifts for people reasons. They give gifts for the same reasons they do everything else. Some of those reasons you can label "good", some "bad", and some are just.. reasons. If your friend's secret motive in giving you a gift is because they want to feel like a kind, generous person who gives people gifts, or to secure your affection and friendship, then so what? Lots of people want to feel like kind and generous people. Lots of people want friends. Doing things that fit with the self-image of who you want to be can go a long way to helping you become that person. And what about a gift isn't a valid way to say that a potential friendship with you is literally worth investing in?

Meh, I've done enough ranting. I'll post this now.