Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

When life gives you monads, make lemonade.

 

It's interesting how the notion of love being a conscious choice rather than a feeling has so much more traction than compassion. And by interesting I mean that the dependence of most people on affective empathy scares me because they are relying on a feeling rather than a conscious choice, and when you fall out of empathy the consequences seem somewhat worse than falling out of love.
And perhaps that is because the thing called love has so much cultural presence these days that it becomes something so analyzed, so discussed, that there are honest and good-hearted attempts to disambiguate and properly identify what is this thing called love that we are told is so valuable. In the meantime, empathy is silently expected, part of the unspoken background upon which so many moral systems are based, and if you don't speak of it, why should you attempt to rectify anyone's understanding of it, including your own?

Anyway this is probably all just repressed bitterness over how much of modern morality seems to focus on internal state rather than external actions when I'm so bad at processing my own state due to some combination of active denial and unconsidered dissociation.

 

All these cryptocurrencies claiming to be getting away from value by fiat and instead ending up relying on Fiat-Shamir.

 

I've never understood Searle's Chinese Room argument. Of course the human doesn't understand Chinese; the book understands Chinese. The human is a red herring, attracting attention only by virtue of being denoted as human rather than through any behavior or contribution.
I want to ask how this is not obvious but the answer is inevitably that nothing is obvious, even if it's true, or perhaps especially when it's true.

 

Every once in a while I think to myself "I should learn quantum field theory" and then I remember that there's no actual mathematical framework for quantum field theory and I go back to being smugly ignorant instead.
Someday I'll learn topological quantum field theory and algebraic quantum field theory, maybe.

 

I realized recently that I have enough first cousins that, statistically, at least one of us is probably LGBTQ. Unfortunately, I don't know any of them well enough to guess, since it's been years since I've seen any of them, formative years at that.
And then I realized that, as someone who is probably several things that begin with A, I might very well be that cousin.

 

I should tell people that p-hacking is like regular hacking but without any internal qualia.

 

I love that Dynasty Scans has an apparently random "Lizard" tag, and a complementary "Not Lizard" tag.

 

I have now seen two Rian Johnson films that I liked and one Rian Johnson film that I didn't like.

 

I'm actually thinking about maybe getting back into RWBY. Apparently the writing after season 4 is much better, and now there's a canon lesbian couple that probably has plot armor.
But mostly I just want to not feel awkward buying the soundtracks, which from what little I've heard are still one of the highlights of the show.

 

Shout outs are good, call outs are bad.

 

Kind of glad I don't do machine learning stuff anymore, since apparently Google's using the "let's only release alphas without any compatibility in any direction" paradigm of version management.

 

I think if people ask me if I do anything for Christmas I'm going to tell them "No, I'm not all that patriotic".


I'm probably going to have to "explain" that to at least one person, whereby "explain" means spew bullshit.

 

Today was my first encounter with code that assumed particular mathematical properties for some of the parameter values and would cease to function if those properties were missing. In particular, at some point it tries to validate that two functions are inverses of each other, which isn't true unless those parameter values have those properties.

Unfortunately for me, the comments in the code did not indicate this fact, although they did say a lot of other stuff.

 

Update on the breakcore: part of the problem is that the track is in 7/4 time, and while I'm not uncomfortable in 7/4, I think I might have lost my ability to work naturally in it. I have several dnb tracks in 7/4 that I think still hold up rhythmically, but with the breakcore I have to keep making up new rhythm lines and I want them to all like a certain style of darkstep rather than the sort of rolling, lots-of-fills style that a lot of the breakcore that I used to listen to uses.

 

Now taking bets on whether the Gavle Christmas goat makes it to January without getting burned down.

 

My dad keeps asking me "how would one prove X?" for various mathematical statements and I keep having to give up because he keeps refusing to tell me what assumptions I'm allowed to make. This isn't the fucking Declaration of Independence, we don't get "self-evident truths" here.

I know he means well, but unless you're equipped to really get into the gritty nonsense of what numbers actually are, I can't actually prove to you how fractions work without saying "just trust me" a lot.

 

It's probably at least partially based on "things only make the news if they're bad", but I don't trust psychology studies that claim statistical results, mostly because I don't trust their statistics.
A profile of an individual: fine. Not much math you can screw up there, and I can trust that that one person is probably a decent representative of that one person at that given moment, at least as far as things that make it to external behaviors and brainscans go.
But given that population psych studies tend to have only a few dozen participants, I'm not convinced they can make better predictions than "if brain is missing, at least %50 chance not winning a Nobel Prize for future work". This isn't even touching the question of whether the population is representative or not: N of a few dozen is not a large N compared to the effect sizes in play.
I understand that psychologists are trying to answer incredibly hard questions with incredibly limited resources, but that doesn't mean that I should believe them, it means I should rather not believe them, because the idea that they can get answers to these incredibly hard questions using only these incredibly limited resources is, in fact, not credible. The statistics simply doesn't support it.
If it makes anyone feel better, I have similar qualms about sociology.

 

Every once in a while I think about transitioning, until I realize that I don't really have a target, and then I realize that it's not that I want to physically or socially transition to a different gender, I just kind of want to stop being a me. Not stop being me in the sense of being someone else, but rather to transition from being an entity to not being, and maybe even to being not-an-entity. I think I would like to keep all the rest of my properties and attributes, I don't really mind them, but there's a switch somewhere or a boolean variable that tracks "is a thing" and I would like it to be set to false.
I think I would like to transition away from having a self, to better match my internal conceptualization of me. And I suppose that there might be drugs available for that kind of thing, but that sounds expensive and would probably interfere with several of the attributes that I would rather keep. And there are several religions that have recommendations for achieving something similar, but that sounds time-consuming and also attached to cosmological claims that I can't really get behind, even though I know a guy who apparently knows a guy who got his chakras blitzed despite not believing in that kind of thing beforehand so maybe there's something there.

There's an awful "transcender" joke here that I'm going to mention to ensure that people are aware that I am cognizant of it but it's too late at night for me to be eloquent enough to actually put it together properly.

 

I am not a subtle person when it comes to music. I mean, yeah, occasionally I'll listen to trance, the old stuff, where it repeats the same four bars for thirty minutes and the only way to tell where you are in the track is that some of the filter cutoffs have shifted slightly, but mostly I like rather blatant music. Death metal, electronic hardcore, Jtrance, darkstep, loud, complicated music.
So, being a person who likes rhythm, I used to listen to breakcore a lot. It's mostly rhythm, generally. High complexity, high density, high speed, high volume.
But my tastes have shifted, and I'm finding that a lot of the breakcore that I used to listen to is rather bland from most other standpoints. It's all rhythm, no texture, no melody.
I think what I'm looking for is things like Szamar Madar by Venetian Snares, where there is the string sample to tie things together and add a bit of melody, and there's some bass from something or other, and it's not just a lot of drum samples. I mean, there are still a lot of drum samples, but it's not just drum samples and a single noodly synth.