liskantope

[liskantope]

I'm reblogging this because I am in need of much the same thing right now (even though I have much less excuse for needing it). It's not just about learning a particular programming language. It's about learning how a whole world, with a number of associated platforms and commands, works. Any resource that Tumblr people from some part of that world can provide in response to this post might be quite useful here.

My brain is completely and wholly smashed to bits by an unknown problem. I can't really "think". I am very good semantic recall and I the ability to remember new semantic information but very little ability to like, compute, visualize, do anything like that. I can't work right now but when I get better I need to get a job and on the basis of my background that job will almost certainly involve some amount of coding and unfortunately I am not the world's greatest coder. If my brain was working I could practice and improve but it isn't so that's been a no-go. But I do think I could learn git I think I need to know how to use git and github, I've asked about this on here before but then I bookmarked the answers for later and well now's (a) later and I can't understand them.

So.

Is there a thing online that assume you're a smart guy with a basic knowledge of you know what code is what fucking directories are and shit, doesn't assume you were frozen in ice in 1950 and will have your mind blow at the concept of a file, but also kinda tbh just spoon feeds you the commands you need to do different shit? Uh. I can't THINK. Have I explained that on here? I'm like operating fully on the retrieval part of my brain. I can still make good posts because I thought about a lot of stuff before so there's a massive backlog of thoughts.

[liskantope]

[EDIT: Apparently, after I lift the "no one can reblog" setting to let myself reblog, it let's me return to that setting for the original post but not for this reblogged post! So I just have to ask, please do not reblog.]

@postsforposting replied:

"How does anyone even know I'm straight" they don't. They're being bigoted and using "justice" language to excuse themselves for making assumptions about other people based on their own ugly beliefs that anyone they perceive as "better than them" is at best a moron but in all likelihood worse than Hitler. Their assertions about the dangers of free speech are flat out paranoia. They need to believe they're in danger, more than anyone else, because if they aren't then THEY are "privileged" which is tantamount to being Satan. So long as they can accuse someone of being worse, their worldview that they are justified in being hateful--in the same ways they would decry as heinous bigotry were it used against themselves--towards anyone they want to treat badly. Because, ~~~obviously, the only way for anyone to "be better" in this nasty worldview is to be treated like shit so they'll be forced to change by the threat of being treated even worse if they don't comply Also. They're weaponizing labels by calling you straight. Your choices are to either say nothing, or hand them your personal information they have no right to. Calling you straight and using it as damnation of your character is exactly the bigotry they're claiming to be afraid of. Imagine accusing someone of being cis, when they're really trans. They are admitting that they are judging people by their bodies. That's called bigotry and second class citizenship.

Once again, I appreciate the support, but I think you're ideologically overblowing the ideas/motives behind the people I'm discussing. I have to emphasize that the older colleague who instigated this is my friend (as I remember having to emphasize in a painful Tumblr discussion circa early 2020, regarding a worse confrontation with a professional acquaintance who was a much more distant friend and far less nuanced in her ideology). And I mean friend in a true and non-abusive sense, someone who very demonstratively expresses (including yesterday) that she thinks I'm wonderful, who has been my counselor and advocate in a number of situations, who has explicitly tried to boost my professional confidence, with whom I've had an extensive intellectual relationship that my Tumblr audience has never heard anything about, including a history of discussions about tough racial/oppression-related topics, and who is generally free-thinking and nuanced in her opinions (including holding heretical ones like being against DEI statements in academic job applications). This isn't about her or any of the people present trying to be hateful, damn my character, liken me to Hitler/Satan, or make "straight white males" like me know our place as a sort of rightful underclass. ("Moron" is much closer but an exaggeration.)

What it is, I think, is as follows: (1) Despite her usual proclivity towards nuance, she followed a tendency towards a popular catchphrase combination of "straight" and "white" and "male" probably without thinking about how each one applied (making it kind of ridiculous that I spent a long paragraph of the OP prying that apart), though mind you, she did it repeatedly, and eventually the grad student joined in, and an effort to isolate me from the white male gender-conforming but openly gay student at the table kind of appeared to be a factor. (2) If you replace a lot of the language in your comment regarding bigotry against me and damnation of my character and so on with language pertaining to exposing my ignorance and my needing to be enlightened about something as a straight white guy with several students at our university witnessing the example, then I think you're right on.

Your quoting me rhetorically asking, "How does anyone even know I'm straight?" and subsequent answer conflates some things, understandably, as on rereading my OP I see my writing was a little garbled on this point. Where I was going with "How does anyone even know I'm straight?" was referring to my level of privilege walking around in the world with certain government agents in the vicinity. (Plenty of gay men, including the student at the table, present exactly as I do, and I've spent like 6% of my post-college life openly with a female partner. I guess some ICE agent could start looking through my Facebook pictures, see several that show me with my arm around my Recent-ish Ex, raise an eyebrow at her huge rainbow arm tattoo, scroll only a little more and find me with rainbows painted on both cheeks waving a homemade flag that says "L'AMORE È L'AMORE", and make of all that what they will.)

I was not rhetorically asking "How does my colleague even know I'm straight?" Mind you, she probably didn't until like a year or so into our relationship, because (despite what you might think from my Tumblr behavior) I don't really feel comfortable talking much about my personal life to colleagues and even friends who are older and female and never mention their own sexuality. But she does know I'm straight (or at least not gay!) due to things eventually trickling into our conversations about some story involving my ex where I use female pronouns in referring to her, my mentioning something about women's dating profiles, etc. This is all a long way to say that my colleague definitely brought up my straightness based on knowledge and not an unfounded assumption (beyond perhaps an unfounded assumption that I'm not bi), and the grad student at the table had probably heard similar evidence that I'm into women. But it was brought up in front of undergrad students, which I found unpleasantly jarring as I quite strictly never make references to my dating/love life in front of undergrad students.

I had an interesting (in a mostly unpleasant way) experience at lunch today being dressed down about my privilege as a "straight white male"* by an older (woman of color) friend/colleague in front of a couple of undergraduate students at the institution where we work (who were my students this recently-ended semester) as well as a (straight male half-Asian but white-presenting) grad student in my department, over a decade my junior, who eventually joined in the dressing-down of me. None of this involved actual anger or drama or even what felt like genuine scolding, and I appreciate my friend/colleague's consistent straightforwardness with me about tough issues while also feeling proud of my willingness to listen and engage and think before becoming defensive: we can only fix our culture by having open conversations between people of more and less oppressed categories, and it takes a certain type of effort on the part of each party to make those conversations work, and my friend/colleague and I have managed more than once to do that imperfectly but mostly well.

Still, it was a really uncomfortable experience (which again is something I should be committed not to avoid, but maybe some of the uncomfortable aspects were not entirely fair) and left me with a lot of unpleasant thoughts and ideas to unpack, thus mentally derailing a lot of my afternoon. Since I'm making the rare move of describing something this specific on the day it happened, and I don't know for sure whether any of the people involved might be wandering anywhere near my general part of Tumblr and really don't want to find out, I'm making this unrebloggable.

There were a bunch of moving parts to the conversation and all the topics covered, but the main focus was on the risks of getting one's phone searched by agents at airports when trying to get back into the US, and how what one has posted on social media is (at least according to them, and I didn't openly question what they were claiming) a real risk factor even if it's your run-of-the-mill anti-Trump memes that I see on my newsfeed several dozen times a day. Which to me is a completely surreal departure from the core basic-free-speech non-dictatorship value of allowing ordinary citizens to make ordinary comments critical of their government. And my expressing feelings of genuine outrage with a little too much shock in my emotions is what got me the "straight white privilege" lecturing. Which, well, guess I walked into that one, as one of the most classic ways of betraying privilege (as I've long been aware) is acting too surprised in the midst of being upset about some injustice, and while I feel a little stupid I guess I don't regret it, because I need to open myself to these conversations, as I said.

And I suspect a fair amount of my Tumblr audience would happily join in the lecturing me a bit more along these lines, since I've been hearing a lot here about all-out pure dictator scenarios that sound an awful lot like arresting people just for sharing an anti-Trump meme or something (some versions of this here are more extreme than what my lunch mates were talking about, like that anyone who made/posted an anti-Trump meme is probably soon going to wind up shot in a mass execution and thrown into a mass grave); I also have a (straight white male) mutual with a history of posting scathing stuff about Trump here and who has seemed really concerned for his own safety via such a dystopian scenario. I've been repeatedly accused of underestimating just how far the Trump administration would go this time around (yes, I keep having to postpone it, but this time I'm really determined to get to that sequence of asks next week), and I've been ready for quite a while actually to concede that, broadly speaking, I did underestimate just how much more authoritarian he would be this time around.

And, I don't know, maybe there is some danger now in being found by a certain type of government official with a typical "Trump's policies are gross" political meme on one's phone; things have gone far enough in terms of bad things that have actually happened that worrying about this doesn't seem insane. It just seems like it would be a fundamentally more complete break from basic democratic (and American in particular, outside of the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Civil War and maybe possibly some policies in the early Cold War) norms than this country has seen in a long, long time. And expressing that last bit gets me "You would only be shocked because you're a straight white male" along with a helping of "You would only be shocked because you have no exposure to dictatorships in other parts of the world; this isn't about America, it's just about the world and the way the world is." (As if I'm not, in other conversations with other SJ-ish people who want to talk about the US like it's so uniquely evil, the one bringing up the horrible dictatorships elsewhere in the world, and more to the point, as if I might not be well aware of horrible governments of other countries partly due to fifteen years of having close Chinese and Russian colleagues, while believing that the US has a very different history and is far more defined by a democratic self-concept than almost all other countries. Do I have a troubling case of American exceptionalism? Quite possibly, as I offered to my lunch mates.)

One of the main points I was driving at but probably failing to state clearly (out of fear of coming across as too skeptical of their claims of the danger of having anti-Trump stuff in my Facebook history), and which the others didn't properly engage with, is the following. Part of why it seems so surreal that a history of saying generic anti-Trump things on social media would pose real danger to anyone is precisely that dozens of my anti-Trump Facebook friends are filling my newsfeed with constant anti-Trump posts all day long with seeming no worry about it whatsoever! And they are exactly the people who one would expect to be most hyper-vigilant about how scary the administration is! Whenever I tried to bring this up, I got "straight white male" again and had to point out that I wasn't talking about my own nasty posts about Trump (of which I've made quite a few over the years) and that I don't exactly live in some "straight white male" Facebook bubble. After thinking it over later, I do have to admit that my loudly anti-Trump Facebook friends are by some metric disproportionately (though not all!) white, and maybe there is some significance behind this. They're certainly far from all male, or straight, or even cis -- two recently-transitioned trans women friends, one of whom hasn't fled to Canada, seem fine with ranting about the Trump administration in their Facebook status. I additionally have a trans woman colleague who talks about frequently getting into heated debates with randos on Facebook over trans rights stuff!

So, I really am trying to grapple with what's going on here. Is it that being as openly anti-Trump as a large portion of the country really makes someone a potential target -- maybe even a "straight white male" like myself should watch my back -- and yet a large number of those who are most anti-Trump and therefore should be more aware of this danger than the rest of us continue passing around popular anti-Trump memes on a daily basis out of, I don't know, not caring if it might possibly destroy their life as long as more people see this or that simple meme?

Anyway, not sure how helpful it will be to post this; I feel more like we're drifting into a dystopic reality (for this and reasons not related to this); I don't what to believe or not to believe; there are lot of facts I could probably benefit from learning; and more directly I'm just trying to process the conversation today (which covered a lot more ground even than what I've described here). I'm sorry about being so lengthy and making this sound like more of a personal diatribe than I'd intended.

*This repeated casual impulse to clump "straight", "white", and "male" together and literally point at me, having created a category narrow enough to include only me at the table and separate my category from everyone else's as The Most Privileged, is the aspect of the whole exchange that felt the closest to being genuinely obnoxious. Among the afore-alluded-to axes of privilege that matter with regard to the issues being discussed (detainment, deportation, or imprisonment when entering the country), pretty much the only relevant one is my being white, with it being only a proxy for my being an American citizen (but I don't deny that when officials are eyeballing who to examine, being white definitely can't hurt!). As far as I can tell, maleness has approximately zero to do with it (in terms of "viewed as potential threat", it seem obvious across the board that maleness might even hurt if anything?), and straightness maybe kinda helps someone not make an enemy out of the Trump administration in an entering-the-country context (even though being visibly queer is probably anti-correlated with coming illegally from one of those "dangerous" "brown" countries)? But a much stronger argument could be made for cisness or being gender-conforming rather than straightness, and I find "straight" just a weird thing to bring up. How does anyone even know I'm straight? Most single people's orientations aren't visible or even that widely known among their circles! This friend and colleague had no evidence of my orientation in the first year or year and a half of knowing each other; in fact, I still have no idea of her orientation! The openly gay (but typically gender-presenting) student at the table was wearing a plastic rainbow bracelet which kept being referred to in the conversation as if it were a dangerous visible symbol of his gayness. I was thinking afterwards of how there are pictures of me on Facebook, not with a rainbow bracelet, but with rainbows painted on both of my cheeks, holding a sign up written in a foreign language at an overseas Pride event. Would I be in some amount of danger if an official at an airport started looking through my Facebook pictures and saw it? Should I delete photos like that before traveling abroad? Or would my couple of more recent pictures showing me in affectionate poses with my girlfriend-of-less-than-a-year (my only visible public sign of straightness of the past fifteen years) save me?

(And as a perpetually single person who doesn't talk about my sexuality to many people, this was surely the first time those former students of mine heard about it, which contributes I think to how unsettled I feel about that having been repeatedly added to the epithet today. I'm pretty clearly straight "to a first approximation" but for some reason have long felt the impulse to avoid declaring myself in that category more than I have to.)

[liskantope]

I had an interesting (in a mostly unpleasant way) experience at lunch today being dressed down about my privilege as a "straight white male"* by an older (woman of color) friend/colleague in front of a couple of undergraduate students at the institution where we work (who were my students this recently-ended semester) as well as a (straight male half-Asian but white-presenting) grad student in my department, over a decade my junior, who eventually joined in the dressing-down of me. None of this involved actual anger or drama or even what felt like genuine scolding, and I appreciate my friend/colleague's consistent straightforwardness with me about tough issues while also feeling proud of my willingness to listen and engage and think before becoming defensive: we can only fix our culture by having open conversations between people of more and less oppressed categories, and it takes a certain type of effort on the part of each party to make those conversations work, and my friend/colleague and I have managed more than once to do that imperfectly but mostly well.

Still, it was a really uncomfortable experience (which again is something I should be committed not to avoid, but maybe some of the uncomfortable aspects were not entirely fair) and left me with a lot of unpleasant thoughts and ideas to unpack, thus mentally derailing a lot of my afternoon. Since I'm making the rare move of describing something this specific on the day it happened, and I don't know for sure whether any of the people involved might be wandering anywhere near my general part of Tumblr and really don't want to find out, I'm making this unrebloggable.

There were a bunch of moving parts to the conversation and all the topics covered, but the main focus was on the risks of getting one's phone searched by agents at airports when trying to get back into the US, and how what one has posted on social media is (at least according to them, and I didn't openly question what they were claiming) a real risk factor even if it's your run-of-the-mill anti-Trump memes that I see on my newsfeed several dozen times a day. Which to me is a completely surreal departure from the core basic-free-speech non-dictatorship value of allowing ordinary citizens to make ordinary comments critical of their government. And my expressing feelings of genuine outrage with a little too much shock in my emotions is what got me the "straight white privilege" lecturing. Which, well, guess I walked into that one, as one of the most classic ways of betraying privilege (as I've long been aware) is acting too surprised in the midst of being upset about some injustice, and while I feel a little stupid I guess I don't regret it, because I need to open myself to these conversations, as I said.

And I suspect a fair amount of my Tumblr audience would happily join in the lecturing me a bit more along these lines, since I've been hearing a lot here about all-out pure dictator scenarios that sound an awful lot like arresting people just for sharing an anti-Trump meme or something (some versions of this here are more extreme than what my lunch mates were talking about, like that anyone who made/posted an anti-Trump meme is probably soon going to wind up shot in a mass execution and thrown into a mass grave); I also have a (straight white male) mutual with a history of posting scathing stuff about Trump here and who has seemed really concerned for his own safety via such a dystopian scenario. I've been repeatedly accused of underestimating just how far the Trump administration would go this time around (yes, I keep having to postpone it, but this time I'm really determined to get to that sequence of asks next week), and I've been ready for quite a while actually to concede that, broadly speaking, I did underestimate just how much more authoritarian he would be this time around.

And, I don't know, maybe there is some danger now in being found by a certain type of government official with a typical "Trump's policies are gross" political meme on one's phone; things have gone far enough in terms of bad things that have actually happened that worrying about this doesn't seem insane. It just seems like it would be a fundamentally more complete break from basic democratic (and American in particular, outside of the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Civil War and maybe possibly some policies in the early Cold War) norms than this country has seen in a long, long time. And expressing that last bit gets me "You would only be shocked because you're a straight white male" along with a helping of "You would only be shocked because you have no exposure to dictatorships in other parts of the world; this isn't about America, it's just about the world and the way the world is." (As if I'm not, in other conversations with other SJ-ish people who want to talk about the US like it's so uniquely evil, the one bringing up the horrible dictatorships elsewhere in the world, and more to the point, as if I might not be well aware of horrible governments of other countries partly due to fifteen years of having close Chinese and Russian colleagues, while believing that the US has a very different history and is far more defined by a democratic self-concept than almost all other countries. Do I have a troubling case of American exceptionalism? Quite possibly, as I offered to my lunch mates.)

One of the main points I was driving at but probably failing to state clearly (out of fear of coming across as too skeptical of their claims of the danger of having anti-Trump stuff in my Facebook history), and which the others didn't properly engage with, is the following. Part of why it seems so surreal that a history of saying generic anti-Trump things on social media would pose real danger to anyone is precisely that dozens of my anti-Trump Facebook friends are filling my newsfeed with constant anti-Trump posts all day long with seeming no worry about it whatsoever! And they are exactly the people who one would expect to be most hyper-vigilant about how scary the administration is! Whenever I tried to bring this up, I got "straight white male" again and had to point out that I wasn't talking about my own nasty posts about Trump (of which I've made quite a few over the years) and that I don't exactly live in some "straight white male" Facebook bubble. After thinking it over later, I do have to admit that my loudly anti-Trump Facebook friends are by some metric disproportionately (though not all!) white, and maybe there is some significance behind this. They're certainly far from all male, or straight, or even cis -- two recently-transitioned trans women friends, one of whom hasn't fled to Canada, seem fine with ranting about the Trump administration in their Facebook status. I additionally have a trans woman colleague who talks about frequently getting into heated debates with randos on Facebook over trans rights stuff!

So, I really am trying to grapple with what's going on here. Is it that being as openly anti-Trump as a large portion of the country really makes someone a potential target -- maybe even a "straight white male" like myself should watch my back -- and yet a large number of those who are most anti-Trump and therefore should be more aware of this danger than the rest of us continue passing around popular anti-Trump memes on a daily basis out of, I don't know, not caring if it might possibly destroy their life as long as more people see this or that simple meme?

Anyway, not sure how helpful it will be to post this; I feel more like we're drifting into a dystopic reality (for this and reasons not related to this); I don't what to believe or not to believe; there are lot of facts I could probably benefit from learning; and more directly I'm just trying to process the conversation today (which covered a lot more ground even than what I've described here). I'm sorry about being so lengthy and making this sound like more of a personal diatribe than I'd intended.

*This repeated casual impulse to clump "straight", "white", and "male" together and literally point at me, having created a category narrow enough to include only me at the table and separate my category from everyone else's as The Most Privileged, is the aspect of the whole exchange that felt the closest to being genuinely obnoxious. Among the afore-alluded-to axes of privilege that matter with regard to the issues being discussed (detainment, deportation, or imprisonment when entering the country), pretty much the only relevant one is my being white, with it being only a proxy for my being an American citizen (but I don't deny that when officials are eyeballing who to examine, being white definitely can't hurt!). As far as I can tell, maleness has approximately zero to do with it (in terms of "viewed as potential threat", it seem obvious across the board that maleness might even hurt if anything?), and straightness maybe kinda helps someone not make an enemy out of the Trump administration in an entering-the-country context (even though being visibly queer is probably anti-correlated with coming illegally from one of those "dangerous" "brown" countries)? But a much stronger argument could be made for cisness or being gender-conforming rather than straightness, and I find "straight" just a weird thing to bring up. How does anyone even know I'm straight? Most single people's orientations aren't visible or even that widely known among their circles! This friend and colleague had no evidence of my orientation in the first year or year and a half of knowing each other; in fact, I still have no idea of her orientation! The openly gay (but typically gender-presenting) student at the table was wearing a plastic rainbow bracelet which kept being referred to in the conversation as if it were a dangerous visible symbol of his gayness. I was thinking afterwards of how there are pictures of me on Facebook, not with a rainbow bracelet, but with rainbows painted on both of my cheeks, holding a sign up written in a foreign language at an overseas Pride event. Would I be in some amount of danger if an official at an airport started looking through my Facebook pictures and saw it? Should I delete photos like that before traveling abroad? Or would my couple of more recent pictures showing me in affectionate poses with my girlfriend-of-less-than-a-year (my only visible public sign of straightness of the past fifteen years) save me?

(And as a perpetually single person who doesn't talk about my sexuality to many people, this was surely the first time those former students of mine heard about it, which contributes I think to how unsettled I feel about that having been repeatedly added to the epithet today. I'm pretty clearly straight "to a first approximation" but for some reason have long felt the impulse to avoid declaring myself in that category more than I have to.)

[liskantope]

Actually, on second reading, it would have been more accurate to quote my thoughts in those moments as being more like "Oh crap, it's that Thing again, these next moments are going to be excruciatingly awkward and I feel like panicking!" than "I can't remember what to say right now". Maybe I should have put this description under a readmore or something; hopefully it's not an infohazard (and hopefully suggesting it being an infohazard is not itself an infohazard!). I will say that mercifully, when this happens to me, I can usually get back on track quite quickly -- I find the trick is to put all efforts into positively thinking of something else rather than into not thinking of the Thing!

Main reason I'm reblogging actually is that I found the related ad that I mentioned remembering before. It says

Social Anxiety Disorder can feel like fear of being judged

Which, yeah, this time for sure they're just naming a fear that basically everyone has on a semi-regular basis, I would think? (I got a heaping dose of it earlier today.) I kind of don't think it needs to be treated as a sinister sign of a Disorder.

I just saw an announcement on my Facebook newsfeed calling for subjects for a clinical research study on Social Anxiety Disorder. It said that it's seeking patients who experience "these" (ambiguous between "any of the following" vs. "all of the following") in social situations, with a list given as below:

feeling sick or nauseous

rapid heartbeat

sweating or trembling

shortness of breath

mind going blank

Feeling sick or nauseous or on the verge of a panic attack simply because of being in a social situation certainly could be a sign of some clinical level of social anxiety. But "mind going blank" -- something that occasionally happens to everyone sometimes in social situations, surely? -- is also thrown in here and will attract potential subjects whose minds went blank when they were kind of tired at a party last week (or not even people who sign up for the study, just people like myself who are reading this on Facebook and decide from that they Have Social Anxiety).

I've written before about how bothered I am by the prevalence and loose meaning of phrases like "I have social anxiety". It's late and maybe I'm being uncharitable (and maybe mind-going-blankness in the middle of a social situation is a sign of some clinical problem and I'm just unaware that "normal" people don't experience it), but it seems to me that descriptions of clinical psychological issues that cover this much ground, without expressing much in terms of degree/severity, may be adding to the problem.

But maybe it's not actually possible to lay out possible signs of a psychiatric disorder to a wide audience (rather than a specific patient) without introducing this kind of vagueness, I don't know.

[liskantope]

This example was weak in the first place, and since then I've looked back at "mind going blank" (I was actually doing a few Google searches just now, trying to figure out where to find the ad again, and some of the results contained explanations of what "mind going blank" means), and I guess it's probably referring to something more than just an awkward moment or two when you can't think of anything to say. It's probably about that thing where the fear of forgetting what to say is intense enough that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and you're standing there for what feels like an interminable number of seconds just trying to have thoughts outside of "I can't remember what to say right now". It happens to me from time to time in public speaking situations (including very occasionally when teaching class on a day when I'm stressed about it), is highly unpleasant, and could well arguably be a symptom of a clinical condition if it happens regularly in everyday social situations just because one is in a social situation.

So there's my more charitable take.

That said, the reason I was trying to Google stuff and find the source of the ad again and so on is that I could swear a couple of days ago I saw another ad pop up on Facebook from the same source, and that it listed just one symptom which I remember made me think, "That is absolutely a universal human experience, and I'll make a mental note of this", and now I can't for the life of me remember what it was and don't know how to find that other ad.

I just saw an announcement on my Facebook newsfeed calling for subjects for a clinical research study on Social Anxiety Disorder. It said that it's seeking patients who experience "these" (ambiguous between "any of the following" vs. "all of the following") in social situations, with a list given as below:

feeling sick or nauseous

rapid heartbeat

sweating or trembling

shortness of breath

mind going blank

Feeling sick or nauseous or on the verge of a panic attack simply because of being in a social situation certainly could be a sign of some clinical level of social anxiety. But "mind going blank" -- something that occasionally happens to everyone sometimes in social situations, surely? -- is also thrown in here and will attract potential subjects whose minds went blank when they were kind of tired at a party last week (or not even people who sign up for the study, just people like myself who are reading this on Facebook and decide from that they Have Social Anxiety).

I've written before about how bothered I am by the prevalence and loose meaning of phrases like "I have social anxiety". It's late and maybe I'm being uncharitable (and maybe mind-going-blankness in the middle of a social situation is a sign of some clinical problem and I'm just unaware that "normal" people don't experience it), but it seems to me that descriptions of clinical psychological issues that cover this much ground, without expressing much in terms of degree/severity, may be adding to the problem.

But maybe it's not actually possible to lay out possible signs of a psychiatric disorder to a wide audience (rather than a specific patient) without introducing this kind of vagueness, I don't know.

[liskantope]

I always feel horrible inside about my lack of background and current knowledge of foreign conflicts whenever yet another thing happens in the Middle East (and other places, but most often lately it's the Middle East): I get the vaguest knowledge of it, often rather late, but with the awareness that this is essentially life and death to a certain subset of my friends and neighbors, who know what it feels like for one's country to face true existential crises on a more intimate level than I can comprehend (even being American in this dark day and age of the US).

[liskantope]

I was going to write a couple of more effortful posts to sum up more of what I got out of last weekend's getaway, but instead I spent my evening time brooding over some of my self-betterment goals for the summer, particularly with regard to fitness (which feels like the most uncertain).

I decided that, although my semester of teaching ended partway through May, the summer starts in earnest tomorrow. I'm calling next week Week 1, and I have up through Week 12 or Week 13 to make what I can of -- then a very stressful fall semester begins.

My strategy this summer, which I haven't tried before, is to set a very strict schedule (at least morning schedule) to follow during weekdays. The big unknown is how I'm going to work out and on which days and how long it will take, but assuming that I can do a half-hour thing at my home, let's say, 4 days a week (I've heard of this being successful!), a plausible schedule looks as follows:

wake up around 8am or just earlier (depending on how quickly I'll actually get out of bed), check quick things online, and eat my usual small breakfast

shower and be done showering by 9am (I think this should be the big non-negotiable!)

work-out routine until 9:30am or so, can listen to whatever podcast I like during

reading for self-betterment 9:30-10:00am or maybe until 10:15am: for now this will usually mean reading out of the textbook on the history of Middle Eastern conflicts that was lent to me like a year ago, but which can also mean reading heavy blog posts that have been hanging around as tabs

do my best to leave home for my office no later than 10:30am

if Adulting Task of the Week needs to be done/arranged, late morning is the time to do/arrange it; I think most of these can be done in my office

can otherwise be slow and unfocused until after lunch; then I really do need to work on Math Stuff and focus on leaving the office at some reasonable hour rather than an obscenely late hour past dinnertime

major bike ride twice during the week, maybe additionally once on some weekend days (this is hard to figure out how to schedule, especially since I still don't know quite how the home work-out thing is going to work -- maybe working out is Tuesday through Friday and the bike ride is Mondays and Thursdays, weather permitting? with Thursday being the only day where both happens and the bike ride is probably in the afternoon? otherwise the bike ride could be a first-thing-in-the-morning thing before the shower)

on weeknights (starting tonight), all productive activity stops at 10:50pm following the advice of someone I talked to at last weekend's event (Tumblr-posting usually counts but I guess I've decided writing this post doesn't!)

I mean, if I write it down in a place where some other people can see it, I'll follow through, right?

[liskantope]

I just saw an announcement on my Facebook newsfeed calling for subjects for a clinical research study on Social Anxiety Disorder. It said that it's seeking patients who experience "these" (ambiguous between "any of the following" vs. "all of the following") in social situations, with a list given as below:

feeling sick or nauseous

rapid heartbeat

sweating or trembling

shortness of breath

mind going blank

Feeling sick or nauseous or on the verge of a panic attack simply because of being in a social situation certainly could be a sign of some clinical level of social anxiety. But "mind going blank" -- something that occasionally happens to everyone sometimes in social situations, surely? -- is also thrown in here and will attract potential subjects whose minds went blank when they were kind of tired at a party last week (or not even people who sign up for the study, just people like myself who are reading this on Facebook and decide from that they Have Social Anxiety).

I've written before about how bothered I am by the prevalence and loose meaning of phrases like "I have social anxiety". It's late and maybe I'm being uncharitable (and maybe mind-going-blankness in the middle of a social situation is a sign of some clinical problem and I'm just unaware that "normal" people don't experience it), but it seems to me that descriptions of clinical psychological issues that cover this much ground, without expressing much in terms of degree/severity, may be adding to the problem.

But maybe it's not actually possible to lay out possible signs of a psychiatric disorder to a wide audience (rather than a specific patient) without introducing this kind of vagueness, I don't know.

[liskantope]

One interesting aspect of Less Online that I hadn't fully anticipated was how celebratory it was of blogging and how there was a sort of tacit assumption that everyone there was to some degree a blogger or at least some kind of writer. (For instance, both the opening session and the closing session were concluded with a choreographed pumping of both fists in the air while shouting, "For the blogosphere!")

As I was saying in posts a week or two ago, I was apprehensive that I'd wind up feeling like an outsider for not being as smart or plugged into AI/programming stuff as other attendees, and while I'd say I probably was less smart and certainly was less plugged into those things as the average attendee, I never felt that this was extreme or put me out of place. The fact that I blog less seriously than many didn't make me feel too out of place either, but it at least came closer to feeling that way; maybe if I didn't write at all, this would have reached the point of discomfort, I don't know.

The most common getting-to-know-you question I was asked was some variant of, "What brings you to a rationalist event like this one?", but perhaps the second most common was, "What kinds of things do you write about?" At least that was asked to me by a couple of people, the first being Ozy (who knew nothing about me beyond having been vaguely aware of my handle appearing in their comments sections), and I didn't know how to give a very coherent and succinct answer for them. I first said something about mathematics being my profession but not the thing I most prefer to write about, then mentioned linguistics as a passion (but in fact I don't do a ton of writing about linguistics), and then I said something about being fascinated by social subcultural beliefs/values and how groups come by them and the associated fallacies in people's thinking, which is probably what really forms the bulk of what interests me to write about. A few minutes later, I was thinking over that brief conversation and considering that my answer had probably been a little weaselly and that maybe a more straightforward and honest answer would have been "culture war stuff". (I mean, also personal stuff, and yes sometimes linguistics and philosophy stuff, but my "subcultural beliefs/values and my issues with him" content is de facto pretty culture wars -ish, at least in the set of topics it treats.)

I guess the thing is, I feel a sort of stigma around culture wars blogging. (I remember remarking this years ago in a post that I wish I had the energy to look up right now and that someone responded by posting a link to Scott's "toxoplasma of rage" post for whatever reason.) And I'm really not sure there should be such a stigma! Culture war issues are culture war issues for a reason, that reason being that they're highly socially relevant at the present time. That seems like an argument in favor of adding to the discussion about them, no? (Especially if one's contribution is carefully thought out and not just a regurgitation of what one political tribe says.) And, some part of me was embarrassed to say that to Ozy, which is funny because that's quite a lot of what Ozy themself blogs about, albeit in a far more scholarly manner than I'm capable of and maybe that's the source of the embarrassment? Anyway, I gave a more direct answer to "What do you write about?" to the next person who asked (the guy I mentioned having lunch with on Day 3).

Anyway, this experience may spur me into attempting to return to slightly more serious and more rationalist-y writing. The mechanism of the spurring is in large part that, first of all, I already really want to go again next year (seriously, part of me is still mourning that last weekend is over), and if I'm planning the whole next year to go again with a much fuller understanding of what it's like, I really aim to maximize the experience next time, and I think the experience would be enhanced if I already knew more people from the community (not just the ones I've known through Tumblr), and one way of doing that is becoming active on Less Wrong. I've had an account there for quite a while (under this handle, Liskantope) but barely ever used it. I'd like to start using it. I'm afraid this would divert me a bit from my Tumblr activity, but I think it's a worthwhile goal.

Then again, actually trying to write in a more rationalist-y way might just lead to a repeat of my experience writing on my Wordpress blog, most of which was worth it but a lot of which was kind of stressful: writing more casually and off-the-cuff and personal-stream-of-consciousness and less rigorously here on Tumblr is a lot more natural to me than concocting serious carefully-argued essays.

[liskantope]

The Facebook page named The Other 98% Percent has shown up on my newsfeed for years and for some reason I never reset it to not show up on my newsfeed despite the fact that only one out of ten of its posts say something worthwhile while the other nine in my opinion tend to be toxic tribalistic garbage. After today's post, quoted below, I think I will finally banish the page from my newsfeed, if for nothing else out of shame that I feel driven to complain about one of them on Tumblr.

The man vs bear argument has been upgraded to man vs lion. In 2005, a 13yr girl in Ethiopia was abducted and abused by a group of men but was rescued by lions when they heard her crying and protected her until the police came.

Yep. Very classy and a such an insightful, waterproof argument for human men being worse than lions.

The comments section is somewhat like a typical YouTube comments section under something culture war -related, where a YouTube comments section will typically be skewed very anti-feminist and anti-anti-racist and even verging more than a little into sexism and racism, except that here the comments under this 98% post are just proudly and viciously man-hating. As a sort of example, someone in one of the few dissenting comments brought up a "woman vs. tree" discourse that was apparently in response to the "man vs. bear" discourse (from context, I guess it goes something like "Is a man better off being emotionally vulnerable to a woman or to a tree? Arguably the tree") and a woman replied underneath saying that women are better off the more men pick trees over women.

Well yeah, this is a page that maybe like a good quarter of my Facebook friends love. I suppose for me it's finally time to kick it out of my field of vision forever.

[liskantope]

The lengthy opening session of the LessOnline event included being given a sequence of prompts to prime each of us for getting what we wanted to out of LessOnline and told to get out our devices (for me, my laptop) and write answers to them on the spot. I may or may not have misunderstood the instructions as that we should try to answer all of them as opposed to just picking one of them to contemplate: not enough time was given to answer each prompt properly, nor even to follow each of the (lengthily articulated) questions, which were not repeated or displayed in writing, so that I was only able to copy down fragments of them seconds after I heard them. Here is a copy-and-paste of my renditions of questions and their answers, absolutely verbatim what I wrote on my (other) laptop's Notepad.

Prompt: …Where do my thoughts actually go of late? Maybe it's just a very recent vibe that will pass, but somehow I find myself feeling both human society as a whole and myself being at a very pivotal moment. Most of the time recently, I think of this on the "myself" level; being here forces me to think of this on the "whole world" level, but maybe this will somehow come to dovetail with my own personal story. Prompt: …What one concept would I want to drop into everyone else's heads? There are many rationalist-y things I like to talk about and pitch and argue for, and that's why I blog. I'm not sure I feel comfortable naming any one of them as suitable and relevant enough to address the whole (very large) group about. Prompt: …What is one other person here who has something in their brain that I would want to … tug on, and what is the first thing I would ask(?) them given the opportunity? This is very vague, and it focuses on the personal and individual, but I'd like to talk to someone more liberated than I am and find the "one weird trick" towards that liberation somehow through the conversation. (This is probably slightly magical thinking.) Prompt: …if I were to find myself with a post with lots of kaarma on LW, how surprised am I, and what is my gut-level intuition of what the post is about…? [very paraphrased] I have to say I have no idea (and almost no time to answer :P). Prompt: …What are things that I may do wrong, mistakes that I tend to make in these large gatherings, ways I might self-sabotage, not have as good a time as I otherwise might? I might get caught up in a relatively few lengthy exchanges and find that they came at the expense of meeting other people and having other conversations.

[liskantope]

Okay, I'm in a post-intense-trip slump and have procrastinated all day on this, but I really should try to post my report of the last day of the convention while everything's still really fresh on my mind. (By the way, I had an interesting conversation with another attendee on Saturday about techniques for consistently getting to sleep before midnight, her key step being to set an alarm for 10:50pm to stop all mentally/physically engaging activity, but I guess I won't be doing that tonight.) Now that I'm back home and typing on a laptop, I can be a bit more eloquent, but I should try not to go too far with that and just again list how my day went.

Altogether, Day 3 wasn't as good for me as Day 2, and I think the overarching reason was just that I'd reached the point where lack of sleep was really going to start catching up to me, making me something like 20-30% slower/worse at social interactions and intellectualizing and just off my game over pretty much the whole day (the possible exception being the last scene of my evening when I felt somewhat of a second wind). I still came out of Sunday very happy, though.

As mentioned in an earlier post, I was substantially held up by a housemate, then narrowly missed a bus and wound up missing almost the first half-hour of the first session I wanted to go to, on "fucking around and finding out" (really largely about asexuality in a world of compulsory sexuality, and one of the speakers was the same attendee who had given me much-needed advice about getting to bed on time). It was a session that I knew had been thrown together the night before but was done really well and gave me powerful things to think about. Perhaps because I was late, or perhaps because this is a sort of inside rationalist/LW thing that I was never in on, I was unfamiliar with the concept of Fucking Around and/vs. Finding Out, which came up later that day as well.

I then went to a session set up to test a playful new way to run debates, where instead of two debaters focusing on gaining status points, there is a high-status person running things called the king/queen, the two debaters are knights, and there is a jester occasionally interjecting with "shitposty"-type questions. I have to admit that I don't entirely understand what serious idea the organizer was trying to test out, even though he tried to explain this to me while we were in a food line together later, but the sequence of several-minute-long debates made for really fun and entertaining improv. I very nearly volunteered to be one of the knights at one point but was just feeling too tired to be quick-witted enough to manage the role. It made me feel sad that I've never had the courage to try out improv as an adult.

Then was the hour-long Quiethaven period, enforced by the main organizer(s) under threat of the power that emanates from being the one with the spray bottles of water, which I described in the Day 2 reporting post which was finished during that period. (For the record, I think it was an excellent idea that I unfortunately didn't make the wisest use of by clumsily/inefficiently writing on Tumblr on my phone.)

Then was lunch, my main memory of which is spending it all in a one-on-one conversation with a guy I hadn't/haven't run into before or since, who was interested in what I do professionally as well as what I write about, and I was able to give him a clearer answer than I'd given Ozy on what I write about. He was interested in discussing some of the culture war aspects, and it was a solid conversation.

I then went to an excellent talk/session on dating for rationalists, which was led by the author of Second Person (a blog I read a couple of posts of after ACX advertised it but which felt too dense to get into as I was busy at the time). In my generally slowed-down state of mind, I quite possibly misunderstood an early invitation to ask questions as an invitation to make comments or give first reactions or something, and I burst out with the realization I'd just had: "I've always treated my identity as an aspiring rationalist as completely separate from my struggles with dating, but the list of traits you just described and wrote down [of rationalist failure modes in approaching dating] fit me to a T so maybe this isn't a coincidence!" (The listed tendencies mainly involved too much focus on Finding Out at the expense of Fucking Around, the second time that dichotomy had come up that day and the first time I began to understood what it meant from context. In other words, apparently many rationalist types, like me, are terrified of actually trying things out and put all their energy instead into figuring out as much info as they can about a potentially-datable person while lying in wait.)

Next I went to a Hotseat event (the game where one person sits in the "hot seat" and gets asked very intrusive questions by everyone else in the room). I'd had some experiences with Hotseat before, as part of some versions of the drinking game Kings -- I'd only ever been in the hot seat once, I think, and only ever had one very serious question ("What's the lowest thing you've ever done?"), to which I didn't have much of an answer. This LessOnline event took things to a fairly intense but very controlled level. I wish I'd found the courage to go into the hot seat myself; again, I was feeling too slow-witted to be reasonably sure I wouldn't get myself into a painful situation or just blank on a question they gave me even if it wasn't a sensitive one, and there are a few particular things I'd have trouble talking about to a group that big (I made the excuse to myself that the size of the group really was a factor), but I did contribute some of the questions to others who were in the hot seat.

The Hotseat event continued more informally outside, but I had other ideas: I went to a session/workshop on editing run by the main editor of the magazine Asterisk. It was interesting and helpful in a general-writing-skills way, but I found myself quickly out of my depths. This was partly due again to fairly severe tiredness, but maybe primarily it was because I came in with fundamentally the wrong idea about what editing mainly is and followed my immediate instinct of reading the sample article draft given to us for grammar and punctuation and sentence structure issues and marking those up with a pen rather than paying much attention to larger-picture issues with the content and how it was organized. This set me behind and off my footing for the rest of the session and the ensuing open discussion.

I then stayed in the room for the first part of the next event, which turned out to be a very nitty-gritty at-the-level-of-politics discussion of how to reassemble the Democratic party. The content was interesting but not something I could contribute to much, and honestly the most exciting feature of it was that one of the panelists was Kelsey Piper (a.k.a. Unit of Caring), who was definitely on the list of Famous People I've Known Of For 11 Years And Was Curious To See In Person. I was feeling tired and physically uncomfortable from too much sitting in sessions by that point and left not too long into the event to take a break from sessions altogether (something we had been explicitly encouraged to do since many sessions, including that one, were too popular to be contained in the small-ish rooms).

Right now I don't remember much about the break, just that I later went to an outdoor session about relationships run by a couples' therapist and former sex therapist. This felt less rationalist-y and engaging than most other things I went to -- still a very high-quality talk, but for me less effective per unit time than most sessions I'd gone to. I did wind up asking a question at the end based on this observation and got a reasonable but uninteresting answer.

I spent most of dinner with @rendakuenthusiast, to whom I mentioned that I had meant to take a look at Berkeley campus and who then offered to give me a quick drive there during the start of the closing announcements. He did, and it was pleasant despite my suffering ill effects of having wolfed down a second helping of dinner stuff too quickly on the way to his car (an anxiety trigger for me) and somewhat struggling to converse normally. Then caught the end of the closing session, and it was time for me to figure out what I'd be doing with my evening, which, like the other two evenings, contained a few scheduled sessions but mostly devolved into a large-scale party. This time a lot of the evening party was a sort of dance party to recordings of albums of an explicitly rationalist band called the Fooming Shoggoths. I couldn't get much into the music: it was pretty variable in my opinion in terms of quality; I found some of the lyrics interesting and charming, but overall musically it didn't move me anything like Secular Solstice songs do; and interestingly, I dance a lot more easily and with less inhibition to songs that I know well than to songs I'm hearing for the first time. The exuberance with which a hundred rationalists were dancing and singing to the songs was very endearing, though. [EDIT: I've found out since originally writing this post that the Fooming Shoggoths are effectively an AI band; every song was written by AI (although my impression would be that the general topic/gist of each was supplied by a human in the rat community), which possibly explains my subtly cold reaction to it.]

There were two events scheduled for the evening that I was very interested in: a speed dating event, and a cuddling event. Both sadly got cancelled (I discovered only today that the cuddling happened anyway and they in-the-moment tried to reinstate the event). I was left a little aimless. I did recognize and approach @etirabys, having already met all the other members of her family at earlier times (including the new baby), and we talked for a little while outside. I mentioned that she "talks just as much like a rationalist as she writes", which was hopefully not taken as anything other than an expression of delight: it's always fun to discover that someone in person sounds the way they write, and if I don't like the way someone writes, I probably don't seek them out in person. I met someone else whose dating doc I had suggested that I was willing to provide feedback on and with whom I discussed the issue of whether rationalists are funny on the fly. It was some time after this that I discovered I didn't remember where I'd left my backpack; after searching in several places, I ran into rendakuenthusiast again, who asked if I might have left it in his car. When I said I supposed I might have, he, being a very nice guy, dashed out for a trip down a street or more to check in his car, only for me to realize a minute or so later that I'd left it right where I was reading that guy's dating doc. I considered for moments finding a way to send a message through Tumblr or the Less Online platform that I'd found the backpack but then got ambushed by running into someone I'd intended to speak to (about career uncertainty, a helpful convo as it turned out) and didn't have the mental bandwidth to set up the steps for sending the message. Let me publicly apologize to rendakuenthusiast here for putting him to the trouble of taking that trip for nothing!

At some point in the evening (just before discovering my backpack missing, as I recall), with the two more appropriate social intimacy / dating / relationship -type events apparently cancelled, I visited a session I didn't feel I much belonged in, run by Aella and the other high-bodycount men and women on the orgy scene and "how to be a slut" and so on. I felt very much like I was trespassing, someone who shouldn't be there as I have no intention of joining such scenes, so I stood among the crowd just outside the door and made myself small and of course never said anything. I drank the whole thing in with a sensation of enjoying an opportunity to hear firsthand about a segment of human activity that most humans around me will never hear directly about -- weirdly, "this kind of thing makes me more worldly in a certain way than my parents could ever imagine being" was a specific thought that ran through my head.

I felt true exhaustion coming on and decided to head out to my lodgings but to take one last look through all my surroundings first. On my way walking through, I found Anna (back in the day, Tumblr user tchtchtchtchtch, whom I'd played music with the day before) with another person or two around one of the fires with her guitar and some cookies and drinks, who beckoned me to join them. I regained some energy, had some delightful conversation(s) which included gushing with Anna over our shared interest in several languages and linguistic ideas. It was eventually followed by her singing and playing me a beautiful translation of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" into Yiddish which had brought me to the cusp of choked up by the end (not necessarily all because of the song itself, but because of the warmth of the entire scene and the recognized conclusion of the emotional experience of the long weekend).

That essentially ended my Less Online experience on a sweet note, although I did then have to spend some time back inside trying to strategize a way of getting back to my lodgings well past midnight. This time someone who I hadn't met at all gave me a ride in his car, thus ending my interactions with Less Online rationalists with a sense of open friendliness and kindness that had characterized the way my interactions with them started.

So yeah, didn't "perform as well" all day but still a very good day.

Back home safe. That was a weekend I won't forget anytime soon. I'll try to report on Day 3 (yesterday, well, in CA time, now that I'm back in East Coast time it's technically the day before yesterday), as well as write some notes on the event as a whole, tomorrow.

[liskantope]

Yeah, this describes an undercurrent of slight dissonance that I felt the whole weekend at LessOnline as well. Although I never chose to confront it head-on by actually engaging in discussion with anyone about their high P(doom) or attend the session about how to live a good life with a high P(doom).

Watching the crowd at the dance party on the final evening looking so joyful intensified the dissonance.

The strangest thing about being at LessOnline is that there are a lot of people here who think that we're only two or so years away from the world ending. As someone who does not believe that, it always remains a bit stunning to be in a conversation with someone about their favorite roguelites and then they're like "yeah, hope we get some good stuff before The End".

And I don't think it's absolutely ridiculous. I've looked at the analyses, I've run the numbers, I think there are things you could believe, which are reasonable to believe, that could lead you down that path. I don't think that LLMs are everything they're promised to be, but we're clearly in a time of change, with an uncertain future. There's still plenty of low-hanging fruit, and some fundamental problems with current approaches that I expect to be solved.

But what I do find puzzling is that they're just at this event with me, living a similar life to the life that I'm living.

[liskantope]

Back home safe. That was a weekend I won't forget anytime soon. I'll try to report on Day 3 (yesterday, well, in CA time, now that I'm back in East Coast time it's technically the day before yesterday), as well as write some notes on the event as a whole, tomorrow.

[liskantope]

Here is the physical result of my Hamming circle workshop participation yesterday. I focused it on the cluster of problems that first came to my mind and are felt the most strongly in my heart, but this cluster of problems is probably much too vague and broad. I also feel that I failed at the later circle diagram part of it enough that I'm almost embarrassed to include it here.

I found a better way to explain some of my thoughts to my workshop partner than the words I wrote down: "I feel that my life has been playing like a sitcom where the main characters never progress nor are expected to progress. At the same time, I go through my life convinced that I'm the main character in a movie where the narrative is naturally about to reach a climax, the kind where the main character breaks down and reaches a forever life-changing epiphany. I'm waiting for that climax, that liberating breakdown, to happen, but that does not amount to being able to make it happen." My partner then made the insightful comment, "In a way, it sounds like part of your problem is that *you're coping too well*."

[liskantope]

For lodgingmate-related reasons was unable to get outside in time, missed a bus, have to wait a while for the next one, and will be 20 min late for the first session. Silver lining is that while waiting I can take a crack at recounting what I got up to yesterday (consulting the posted schedule for help bc I have a hard time keeping track of it all). [Most of this written waiting for it on the bus, but being finished now at a mandatory quiet period of late morning which is for the purpose of giving everyone a chance to blog and decompress. Organizers are prowling around enforcing quiet under threats of being sprayed from a water bottle. I'm lounging in a room full of people typing on laptops, feeling very foolish continuing to write on my phone instead, thanks to my stubbornness about not going on Tumblr on my new/work laptop.]

First did a workshop on Hamming questions. I'll post photos of my quick prompt answers on Tumblr later. Got a nugget or two of insight from talking things over with the guy I was partnered with. Then went to a lecture on causation vs. correlation in which the lecturer presented what he claims to be a novel way to diagram it. I contributed questionable comments about the epistemology of causation and had a brief discussion with the presenter. Then went to a long round of lightning talks, spontaneously decided to sign my name on the list of volunteer speakers, mentally prepared a 200-second talk over the next half hour, gave it to the large group (which included Scott Aaronson), didn't get to my second thesis (story of my life, presenting anything, is I always take too long) but overall came away feeling good about it. Topic was zonal auxiliary conlangs, I've made a WordPress post expanding on these theses circa 2016 and will add link later. Then went to lunch, someone approached me in the lunch line to discuss zonal auxlangs. Overall a small success, even though the topic is prob not interesting to many hard-core rationalists. During lunch found multiple groups of people, one convo was mainly listening to a writer for Asterisk infodump on an interesting topic, in the other I struck up a convo with one of the other lightning talkers about her topic on CharacterAI (the company) and how terrifying I find it. (Her view seemed more nuanced.)

After lunch went to first part of debate between Nate Soares and Scott Aaronson on the AI orthogonality question. Room was overflowing, I found myself crammed in the back practically pressed against the other Scott A. (That Scott muttered something to nobody and turned around and left, prob because of the uncomfortable conditions.) Debate was interesting but hard to follow every point. Then caught a few minutes of a session on religion for rationalists. Then went to a session on how to use the gym. Mostly not for me bc aimed at people who have never set foot in a gym, which is very much not me (although you wouldn't know it from looking). I left within the first half hour, think this was the point where I went on a search for a power cord to revive my dead laptop. Stupid, turned out there were power cords supplied in every nook that I had tuned out bc less noticeable than the phone usbs supplied there. Then went to a talk by Amanda Luce (recent winner of ACX book review) on disability rights discourse, was very very refreshed by its thesis (related to the thesis about autism labels from the day before's session, which Amanda had been unaware of) and it instigated a long convo with Amanda in the evening. Then stuck around for a lavish chocolate-tasting experience. Straight from there introduced myself to Anna (once-Tumblr-user who I knew well here under tchtchtchtchtch) who had wanted to do singing and jamming stuff, retrieved my violin, and spent most of an hour hanging out with Anna and other musicians jamming to songs, many of which were rationalist solstice songs, several of which I didn't remember ever hearing. Then went to dinner, found myself next to Ozy in the dinner line, spent a minute gathering the courage to strike up convo with them which went surprisingly non-awkwardly. Minor convos with others, including I think at this point discussing/debating the potential for super intelligence convincing humanity to make itself extinct.

Then went to an extremely memorable workshop session run by Aella and other very conventionally attractive women coaching men through demos in front of everyone on how to be hotter (in behavior/mannerisms). Possibly deserving of its own post although my perception of the whole event contained a mild layer of confusion that would prob make it harder to write about. Partly bc I was stuck standing in back the first half and there was a speaker malfunction, hard to see and hear.

Discussed Animorphs-related stuff (again planned) over part of dinner. Met @rendakuenthusiast (whom I'd briefly met for the first time right before chocolate-tasting) while talking with Amanda, and he and I wound up hanging out for a substantial portion of the evening. He gave me a slightly closer look at the life of a programmer than I've previously gotten to see. Switched more fully to "party mode". Reunited with two previous conversation partners in a semi-planned way, infodumped on my knowledge of experiments in severe absolute sleep deprivation which one of them was extremely interested to hear while the other confessed complete lack of interest. Engaged the other in a convo about free will, in which I defended my compatibilist views. Then got up and began to fret about how I'd get back to my lodgings as it was past midnight and I was having issues loading more money on my public transportation card. With great thanks to @drethelin, who generously added me to his group Uber ride even though my destination was further out than the others', I got back safely and more quickly than usual.

It really doesn't feel like all that happened in only one day.

Current report: first thing next and final morning. Not much more than five hours of sleep. Maybe 14 or 14.5 hours altogether in the last three nights. Jet lag is helping me wake up in the morning, fun/excited energy is keeping me socializing past midnight each night.

Yesterday I functioned much better than I would have expected. Let's see how I do today.

Yesterday also just went really really well overall. Definitely more satisfying than the day before, which is saying something. Absolutely fantastic actually. I'm already thinking longingly of doing this again next year, but (as usual because of neverending job/career uncertainty!), I can't promise that to myself because I don't know quite how my life will stand a year from now beyond that I do know what my job will be through June 2026 (which is definitely something).

Yesterday was jam-packed, more constant minute-by-minute engagement than at any academic conference I've ever done, which is saying something extreme. (E.g. there wasn't even a moment to do idle things on my phone. I forgot to finish the wordle, which I'm religious about and hadn't forgotten since summer 2022.) I want to jot down a list of everything I did yesterday but don't have time now (need to get ready to try to make first session). Its going be difficult. It felt like longer than a day, and my memories and sense of timing of activities is getting blurred.

[liskantope]

Current report: first thing next and final morning. Not much more than five hours of sleep. Maybe 14 or 14.5 hours altogether in the last three nights. Jet lag is helping me wake up in the morning, fun/excited energy is keeping me socializing past midnight each night.

Yesterday I functioned much better than I would have expected. Let's see how I do today.

Yesterday also just went really really well overall. Definitely more satisfying than the day before, which is saying something. Absolutely fantastic actually. I'm already thinking longingly of doing this again next year, but (as usual because of neverending job/career uncertainty!), I can't promise that to myself because I don't know quite how my life will stand a year from now beyond that I do know what my job will be through June 2026 (which is definitely something).

Yesterday was jam-packed, more constant minute-by-minute engagement than at any academic conference I've ever done, which is saying something extreme. (E.g. there wasn't even a moment to do idle things on my phone. I forgot to finish the wordle, which I'm religious about and hadn't forgotten since summer 2022.) I want to jot down a list of everything I did yesterday but don't have time now (need to get ready to try to make first session). Its going be difficult. It felt like longer than a day, and my memories and sense of timing of activities is getting blurred.