benbald72

Suppose someone put two cards face down in front of you. The person tells you to choose one of the cards to turn over, and if it's higher than an eight, you win.

While picking one of the cards might result in a different outcome from picking the other card, it really doesn't matter which card you pick. From a statistical point of view, both cards are equally good choices because they are equally likely to be higher than eight. Still, if you choose a card and it turns out to be eight or lower, you will feel bad for making the wrong decision, especially if the person then turns over the second card to reveal that it is higher than eight.

This is a lot like the problem I have when I try to decide what to do or who to hang out with, except at least with cards you can know what number you drew. With things like enjoyment, there is no way to measure and be certain. Say, for example, that you are sitting in a room and you feel cold. This does not necessarily mean that the room is cold, there are plenty of other explanations for why you feel cold. It could be that you've been sitting still too long, it could be that you haven't eaten enough, there could be a breeze, maybe you aren't wearing enough layers or the right system of layers. In this situation, you could still determine whether or not the room is cold by asking another person if they feel cold or by taking out a thermometer. Then you run into the problem of defining "cold," since your concept of warmth will shift based on how much clothing you consider to be an acceptable amount of clothing to wear at that time, what time of year it is, what temperature the room has been for the past few days...

Feelings are even more difficult because you cannot use measuring devices or other people to aid your judgement, since you are the only one who will experience your own world.

This is why I hate making decisions.

If the person only gave me one card to turn over, I could at least complain about not having enough choices, shifting my focus from winning the game to fighting the establishment of the game itself, and if I turned over the card and it was an eight or lower then it would be the fault of the dealer and not me. I would not have to feel responsible for the bad outcome, and I could instead rant about how the system itself set me up for failure without giving me any say in the matter.

So I've figured out what I'm going to do. I realized that all of this wanting to go and lead wilderness for the next couple years before I went back to school was really just me procrastinating. I was worried because if I didn't pick a subject that was interesting enough, I would get bored and stop paying attention because it's so boring. I was also anxious because I knew that whatever I picked would be a bunch of work, especially for something technical like physics, computer science, or engineering, which are all really interesting to me. The other problem is that, because so many things are interesting to me, then picking one would mean saying no to the other ones, which also wasn't a decision that I wanted to make.

So I rephrased the problem: how can I procrastinate more effectively?

I'll major in psychology.

There is no field of study that anybody could possibly go into where knowing psychology won't help. I need to know a bunch of psychology just to know how to handle myself, not to mention deal with other people. Imagine being able to come up with a routine and setting that you can stick to and that optimizes your performance, or being able to walk into a job interview and tell what the interviewer wants to hear by looking at what he has on his desk.

I'll also do the a minor in some hard science. I'l probably want to go to engineering school. Psychology will help there too, because the problem will always be limited by how you look at it.

I accidentally gave away my credit card number, so I had to cancel it and order a new one. They were able to cancel the card immediately (after a long and stupid phone menu--I really should be able to do this online), and told me to wait "10 calendar days" for my new card to come in the mail.

Now hang on here. There are three main things that need to happen for me to get a new card. They need to put a new credit card number in the system under my name, they need to make me a new card, and the physical card needs to reach me. The first can be done in seconds (there is no reason why it should take longer to add a card to the system than to remove a card from the system), the second can be done in minutes (they probably already have blank cards that they can just print my name onto), and the third can be done in 3-5 days (USPS is slow, but not "10 calendar days" slow), so the hangup probably comes from people needing to sign forms, send them to senior whatevers to be verified, some other crap needs to be stamped, all kinds of bullshit like that.

This is why I hate humanity, because everything moves so fucking slow. It's like how the US government needs 93 man-hours to process a single form: these are the sorts of things that computers can do in seconds.

So I went to Lovevolution (formerly Lovefest) this year. There was some cool music, and it was fun until it got too crowded, but once that happened the event became way too difficult. When there's a crowd, it takes like twelve years to move five feet, and there's no room to make any worthwhile dance moves. I don't get the appeal of being someplace where there are other people unless there's a way to communicate with them. It was way too loud there to say much of anything to anybody, and nobody's in much of a state to say anything interesting.

I met up with Chris from Outward Bound there, and he was telling me that you have to communicate using body language at things like that, but this seems pretty pointless. I don't really get what people communicate to each other with body language: it can't be used to say anything informative, useful, thought-provoking, creative, fascinating, or hilarious. There's certainly not enough information to learn useful facts about the person you're trying to communicate with. I know that he knows way more about human interaction than I do, and he acts like it's something I just need to pick up on, but the problem is that he decided at a fairly early point in his life to focus on learning that, while I figured that there wasn't much point in learning all this social stuff, especially nonverbal stuff.

I now realize that it's definitely important to learn how to interact with other people on all levels because other people are the most difficult obstacle I will ever encounter: they're a total roadblock. They slow down all kinds of things, just look at how long it takes congress to ever decide anything. While I've always been interested in making connections in all sorts of ways--everything from putting together Lego constructions to configuring different electronic devices to work with each other--I consider myself to be largely incompatible with the vast majority of humans. I trust myself to interface with electronics, to interface them with each other, and to communicate with a different person through electronic devices that are communicating with each other, but I don't really understand what information I'm supposed to be sharing when I'm interfacing directly with another person.

52% of the country supports building more nuclear power plants. Why is 48% of the country so fucking stupid?

Episode 1148: Nearly Every Contingency

I'm in no state to make a long journal post, but suffice it to say Prague is awesome. Stay tuned for more posts on the subject. I also have tentative plans to twitter like a madman, except not a hardcore madman because it costs 50 cents to send a text message. It's also worth noting that I haven't really had a decent sleep since the night of the 12th, since I couldn't sleep much on the plane and last night...well Prague is a pretty lively place at night, there's too much energy in the air; not to mention noise. Apparently the noisiness was abnormal though, so I should be alright. Hopefully I'll get in a good solid several hours of sleep tonight instead of these bouts of half-wakefullness which, I estimate, added up to 4 hours on the plane and another 4 last night, with plenty of waking up and falling back asleep in both cases.

Stay tuned for more Praguetastic adventures!

Mentally Ill Test:

[x] You have screamed at an inanimate object for 'hurting you.'
[x] You have ran into a glass/screen door.
[x] You have jumped out of a moving vehicle.
[x] You have thought of something funny and laughed, and then people gave you weird looks.
[x] You have run into a tree/bush.
[x] You have been called a blonde.

TOTAL: 6


[ ] You know that it IS possible to lick your elbow.
[ ] You just tried to lick your elbow.
[ ] You never knew that the Alphabet and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star had the same melody.
[ ] You just sang them to make sure.
[x] You have tripped on your own feet and fallen.
[x] You have choked on your own spit.

TOTAL: 8


[ ] You have seen the Matrix and still don't get it.
[ ] You type with three fingers or less.
[x] You have accidentally caught something on fire.
[ ] You tried to drink out of a straw, but it went into your nose.
[x] You have caught yourself drooling. ( when you're asleep )

TOTAL: 10

[ ] You have fallen asleep in class.
[x] Sometimes you just stop thinking.
[x] Sometimes when you are telling a story you forget what you are talking about.
[x] People often shake their heads and walk away from you
[x] You are often told to use your 'inside voice.'

TOTAL: 14


[x] You use your fingers to do simple math.
[x] You have eaten a bug accidentally
[x] You are taking this test when you should be doing something more important.
[x] You have put your clothes on backwards or inside out, and didn't realize it.
[x] You've looked all over for something and realized it was in your hand/pocket the whole time.

TOTAL: 19


[x] You have posted bulletins because you are scared that what they say will happen if you don't.
[x] You break a lot of things.
[ ] You tilt your head when you're confused.
[x] You have fallen out of your chair before.
[ ] When you're lying in bed, you try to find pictures in the texture on the ceiling
[ ] The word "um" is used frequently.
[ ] You don't know what "um" means.
[ ] You say "what" and "huh" a lot.
[ ] You plan to use a calculator to multiply your score for this bulletin.

GRAND TOTAL: 22

NOW, take your total, and multiply it by 4.
and re-post as: I am --% Mentally ill.
Then tag 10 people to take this quiz after you

Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.

-Charles Peirce


I'm definitely a pragmatist.

Lately my life has been pretty empty, I've been managing to accomplish things but I do not feel like I am a participant in the world. Ironically, my inability to receive and perceive the full force of the physical world stems from my emotional disconnect. I observe what happens in the physical world, I even understand the theory behind why it all happens, but the concept of its significance is lost on me more often than I am comfortable with. This is probably also related to the fact that I don't have much appreciation for music, since studies show that music seems to be some sort of tonal representation of our emotions, and I have not been feeling my emotions to the full extent.

So I want to be able to feel emotions fully again--this condition is getting irritating--but there's a very good reason why I decided to start ignoring them. I have absolutely no way to determine whether or not I'm feeling what I think I'm feeling. The whole concept of an emotion being "real" or not makes no sense since emotions do not have physical existence, yet I still run into this problem. I have to ignore any data I receive about my own emotions because I cannot trust them and I cannot prove them. I also cannot check my data against other people's measurements, since I am the only person who can access the environment of my brain in order to measure emotions. It's like trying to tell the temperature of a room when the only measurement tool you have is a thermometer that may or may not be working. At least if I had two possibly broken thermometers, I could determine whether or not at least one of them is broken, but as it is my mind is a room that only I am allowed to enter, and I only have one thermometer.

This problem drove me crazy when I was with Danusia--I could not definitively prove whether or not I actually loved her. I used to think I loved Staci but it turned out that I had just tricked myself into thinking that I did because I did not want to be alone, and because she wanted to be with me. I cannot allow this sort of mistake to happen again, it ruined my friendship with Staci and I do not want to lose valuable friends for stupid reasons. I can also make myself feel happy at any point in time regardless of whether or not I should be happy.

Normally I use the scientific method because it is the best method. In the scientific method I come up with a hypothesis and then develop an experiment to test the hypothesis using a physical system, but I cannot do this with emotions.

Emotions have no physical presence, the closest we can come to a physical representation of an emotion is an fMRI, and those are impractical. Ideally, I could have some sort of constant scan on my brain to determine what emotions I am actually feeling, and I could check on my watch or something to determine what they are. It would be like a mood ring, only better. Since this does not exist, I have to disregard my emotions, but I notice people around me managing to use their emotions despite this problem of not being able to determine whether they're actually feeling something or if they just think they're feeling it.

So, people who are reading this, how do you do it? How do you use emotions despite the fact that, as I have just demonstrated, they are unusable. You know that at any point in time, any one of the emotions that you act on could be complete fabrication or hallucination, yet you use them anyway. You must have some sort of method for determining whether or not an emotion is "real"--and perhaps even some sort of working definition for what it means to say that an emotion is "real"--so I would appreciate if you could share your knowledge, methodology, and theory with me.

One other question:
Are emotions, feelings, and moods the same thing?

I've decided to add the following person to my list of role-models, which doesn't really exist but I might make such a list at some point and if I do, he'll be on it:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA

He takes some good steps towards my goal of having as many prefixes and suffixes as possible. He probably also has a PhD, making him Sir Doctor Tim Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA. He needs to join the military so he can have another prefix.

Anyway, he created the World Wide Web, which is also pretty cool.

The problem with our schools, in my opinion, is that they are not run for the children but rather for the parents and teachers. To teachers, schools are just entities that employ them, and this can be seen by how teachers unions are unwilling to accept curriculum changes and how they fight hard when an inadequate union teacher gets fired. If they cared about children, they would allow the schools to fire these teachers, but their actions shows how they feel that the school system's obligation to employ supersedes its obligation to help children. Basically, teachers are unable to give adequate input to the school system because they have too much personal investment in the wrong goals. Parents, however, are inadequate for a different reason. Parents rarely enter classrooms, so why should they be the right ones to ask when it comes to what changes should be made?

So that brings us to the students. The argument is that children can not be trusted to make decisions because they lack the ability to make good decisions, while adults can be trusted to make decisions because they have the ability to make good decisions. Basically, if children were given the option to vote on whether or not there should be less schoolwork, they would always vote that there should be less homework because they are unable to see the benefit of schoolwork due to their decreased reasoning and higher emotional/moral abilities.

The argument, however, falls apart here. Suppose that we present adults with a similar decision and allow them to vote on it. One parallel situation would be if adults were asked to vote on whether or not there should be lower taxes. Historically, adults vote that taxes should be decreased in the vast majority of cases where they are given the choice. Adults make the same bad decisions that children make, and are therefore demonstrably unreasonable in certain circumstances, just as children are.


So, to Western society, I give two options for avoiding hypocrisy:
EITHER we say that children can vote on some issues
OR we say that adults cannot vote on any issues


I agree that there are demonstrable differences between adult and child mental capacity. I'm just pointing out how stupid it is to say that adults possess absolute reason or that children possess absolutely no reason. Everybody makes dumb decisions, not just children. If you need more examples of adults making dumb decisions, how about the fact that some adults took subprime loans? Or the fact that some adults gave subprime loans?

In the Constitution, they say that a slave counts as 3/5 of a person. We do not have slaves anymore, but children are similar in that others are given almost absolute control over them. Parents and guardians are charged with deciding whether or not the child can leave the property, have the right to make children work without pay, and are even allowed to issue corporal punishment.

In any situation, it's good to maximize how much feedback the controlling party is getting. That way the best decisions can be made because the amount of information used to make the decision is maximized. Children should be allowed to give input on certain issues, but policymakers should adjust for the fact that the input came from children.

Although, eventually, I would like for everybody to be tested at regular intervals to determine their decision making abilities, and have their vote weights adjusted based on their test results.

So I've been trying to figure out the purpose of emotions. It seemed at first that they were primitive: just a way to make decisions based on chemical balances set up by evolutionary pressures. We couldn't use reason to make all decisions because reason only works when we have information to begin with, and up until recently information has been very limiting. Right now, people in the developed world have, at their fingertips, something that's getting increasingly close to the sum total of all human knowledge.

We have plenty of information, so what are emotions for? We don't need to feel our way through things because we know enough to be able to think our way through them, calculate the most optimal outcomes without having to trust our feelings to guide us. Despite this, I ended up concluding that emotions are necessary for the creative process, the ability to create information (such as a song or an idea) from nothing.

( Explanation for, and exploration of, this idea. )
In summary:
1. Reason cannot replace emotion for all purposes.
2. Emotion is part of an engine that gives us the ability to make something (such as an idea or a piece of art) from nothing.
3. Someone should try to build a chemical computer to simulate emotions.
4. I believe in free will despite the fact that it is currently impossible to prove.
5. Encountering self-aware extraterrestrial beings could teach us a lot.
6. I need to go to space!

The last one is a constant for me, but in this case relates to the fact that I might hopefully meet some extraterrestrial beings who have the power of cognisence.

For those of you who are curious, I got an A+ on that psychology paper. 15/15 points.

Almost every species in the universe has an irrational fear of the dark. But they're wrong- cos it's not irrational. It's Vashta Nerada.
-The Doctor (On the subject of microscopic swarming carnivorous creatures that hide in the shadows on almost every inhabited planet in the universe, which are capable of reducing any animal to bones in seconds.)


This quote resonates with us humans because we are familiar with this fear of the dark, and while we cannot determine if it is common with extraterrestrials, we know that it is common within our own species. It is so common, in fact, that we have many different words for it, such as scotophobia (fear of darkness) and lygophobia (fear of twilight), although we most commonly use the word nyctophobia (fear of night). The fact that it is so common suggests that it is something people are born with rather than something that they develop. This would make sense because this fear more commonly affects children than adults—suggesting that it is something that people are born with and then develop against.

One method to determine if this fear is in fact a relic of an ancient evolutionary development would be to see if it is common in other animals that have the same evolutionary origins as humans, namely monkeys and apes. A way to conduct this would be to place a control group, human children, in a light room and measure their stress levels with a polygraph. At some point in time, most of the lights in the room are turned off and the polygraph will measure the resulting change in the child’s stress levels. In order to eliminate variables, it would be necessary to run a few different variations of this test, such as placing a child in a dark room and then turning the lights on, or having the child sit in a light spot of a dark room versus a dark spot in a light room. Identical tests can be run on other species to see if they display the same stress patterns in response to changes in the light.

I would expect that the other animals tested will display the same stress patterns that the human children do: some but not all of the test subjects will respond to darker situations with higher levels of stress. While this does not prove that the fear of the dark is due to man-eating swarms from another planet (although if some of the subjects are mysteriously devoured during the tests, this could be evidence of such a factor), it does show that the fear resonates throughout various species and was therefore probably developed by one of the common ancestors. Testing increasingly different species would help determine how far back that common ancestor might be. Using an MRI in further testing could determine exactly which region of the brain lights up in dark situations, giving a hint as to what part of the brain is responsible for this specific fear. If the same regions are indicated in multiple species, then neurologists could determine at what point in Earth’s history that region might have developed.

One factor that this test might not be able to determine is whether the fear is actually due to the darkness itself, or if it is due to the resulting disorientation. However, if the light-spot-in-a-dark-room tests produce similar results to the completely-dark-room tests, then this factor will be at least partly accounted for, since the subject, being in light, will not be disoriented but will still be exposed to the darkness. Another problem would be that the subjects would have to be alone in the room for the purpose of the experiment, which could cause considerable stress on its own. In addition, these tests would not be able to determine if the fear of the dark is different from any other phobia that humans develop, although it is possible that most or all phobias are the results of evolutionary pressures. Finally, fear of the darkness might not be properly recorded on a polygraph, and the polygraph might not respond to other animals in the same manner that it responds to humans.




The assignment was to pick a psychological perspective, use it to develop a hypothesis, and then come up with a way to test that hypothesis. My relatively recent obsession with this TV show managed to work its way into this by somehow managing to give me inspiration.

I thought I was clever for writing this, and although I have no evidence to suggest that my psychology professor likes Doctor Who, I have a feeling he'll like the randomness of using a random British science fiction show to introduce my evolutionary psychology theory. He's a pretty cool young guy, pretty nice and open, I actually like him a lot. It's interesting how I often respond to younger teachers better--like how I liked that 25 year old physics teacher I had in high school who other people complained about; but I mean, she was a theoretical physics graduate student who knew a lot about and wanted to study the most mysterious properties of the universe, namely dark matter and dark energy. If that's not cool, I don't know what is.

So it's settled, I'm going to Prague from April 13 to April 20.

See? It's like Europe and update, but COMBINED

Not sure it's the best possible way to spell or misspell it though.

THAT BEING SAID

See, this update about Europe because it relates to my international plane ticket, which is from Lufthansa, which is in Europe. I have the ticket because I was going to go on a trip to Poland with Danusia last summer but then, after the ticket had been bought, decided not to. As a result, despite the fact that they cannot "refund" the ticket, I can "change" it to any other flight that costs the same amount as $250 less than the cost of the Poland plane ticket (~$1150) or less. I thought I could use a bunch of other airlines since Lufthansa is a member of the Star Alliance, but the Star Alliance only deals with transferring miles and points. So I can only go on the routes Lufthansa has.

The other difficulty is that, since air fares are so cheap these days, It'll be hard to find a trip that costs $600 each way. England, for example, is only *200. So I'll need to go someplace three times as complicated as England to get my money's worth.

An example of something acceptable is: for $579 each way I could go to Malta, which I only just learned existed as I was doing this research.

Then again, I'll have to factor in additional fees that they always tack on, so Malta actually ends up putting me a couple of extra hundred dollars over budget. It seems that the additional stuff is $400 per trip, so I need to look for stuff that costs $300. That's a lot easier to do.


Possibilities (in no particular order):

• Frankfurt, Germany


• Munich, Germany


• Budapest, Hungary


• Belgrade, Serbia


• London, England


• Milan, Italy


• Prague, Czech Republic


• Paris, France

If I pay a bit extra, I could go to Kiev in the Ukraine, or Athens, or some other places. For whatever reason, going to Zurich in Switzerland costs a good bit more than going to Athens. I don't understand this system!

I have 9 days to plan an international trip. This is from a ticket that I was going to use to go to Poland last summer, but I didn't end up going. I paid $1400 for the ticket, and if I don't book something by January 31 I lose it. I can't transfer this ticket to anyone either.

Help.

I'm thinking maybe I'll try to go somewhere over spring break, which is the week of April 12. I don't know where I want to go or what I want to do once I get there, and I don't really have much money saved up to spend on a trip.

After several years, I finally changed my default user icon!