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There's Always Problems

2024-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

I was Googling for sources about nuclear power for my new political views garden, and I came across the following statement in reference to nuclear waste:

I know that burning fossil fuels is bad, but we can’t just start another problem just because we can’t fix the first one.

I’m not trying to single out the person who wrote this (and therefore no link, and the quote has been edited for spelling and grammar which I hope has rendered it un-Googleable), but I do want to respond, generally, to the sentiment, which I think is unfortunately common.

First off, the writer is misunderstanding the history. I am happy that they are debating nuclear versus fossil fuels, which is the relevant debate, but they have it backwards. The most relevant nuclear debate in our times is not about replacing fossil fuels with nuclear. It’s about whether to decommission existing nuclear power plants, and therefore effectively to replace them with fossil fuels. Nuclear waste is the problem we have now, and burning fossil fuels is the problem we would be replacing it.

So, even if this conservative “don’t change things unless the new way fixes all problems” attitude could be justified, it actually swings the other direction: just because nuclear waste is a problem, doesn’t mean we can sign up for new problems by replacing it with fossil fuel.

I understand that we are already paying the costs of fossil fuels. But by adding more fossil fuels, we’d be paying more costs. We are, after all, also already paying the costs of nuclear waste. That argument cuts both ways.

Second off, the scales of the problem are vastly different. Fossil fuels are a leading cause of air pollution, which already kills 7 million people per year. Nuclear waste from power generation kills nobody or almost nobody. There are plenty of sources that explain this, but basically, nuclear waste is treated as appropriately dangerous and is stored safely. The waste of fossil fuels is just left in the air, where it kills people constantly. Learn more in this excellent video by Kurzgesagt.

But I didn’t write this blog post to debate the facts here, but the underlying principle:

We can’t just start another problem because we can’t fix the first one.

I reject this principle. I think it’s a bad way to live your life. I think it’s a bad way to run a business. And I think it’s a bad way to make government policy.

Problems are different sizes. Do we want a huge problem, or a smaller problem? In this case, do we want to make a huge problem we already have bigger, in order to make a smaller problem we already have smaller?

But every decision is about trade-offs. That’s why there’s pro-cons lists: both sides have cons. And really, choosing oftentimes come down to choosing what problems we think we can handle.

Do we want to risk the problem of hurting someone’s feelings, or do we risk the problem of the guilty conscious of knowing there was something we could have told them about their choices that might have helped them? Do we want the problems of enabling someone with a serious problem or the problems of not enabling them anymore?

When we choose between jobs, we choose between the problems of the jobs. When we choose between having a friend and not, partnerships, classes, activities, even what to do on a given day, we are choosing between problems.

There is no such thing as life without problems.

And if we imagine there is, and just default to the choice we’ve previously made (or, in the case of fossil fuels vs nuclear, the choice we perceive as less novel even if both options are established), then, well, that’s a crappy metric for evaluating what problems to have.

The problems we’re used to aren’t necessarily better. We haven’t been OK this whole time. The devil you know might actually be a devil, whereas the devil you don’t know might be a saint.

Yes, not changing is a good metric when it’s a close call. It might even be a good metric when you’re doing fairly well, or when you haven’t had time to gather all the data. But it’s a terrible hard-and-fast rule.

Perfect is the enemy of good, not because it exists, but because it doesn’t. It is a mirage that will stop you from ever accomplishing good.

Asking Nicely: Avoiding Passive and Aggressive Communication

2024-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

How do we ask the other people in our lives for the things we need and want? This can be difficult for everybody. Many of us have trauma from a society that continually tells us that we don’t deserve to have help meeting our needs, or from past situations where our needs have been neglected. We are also often aware that asking for things can sometimes be upsetting to the people we ask. We are painfully aware of their ability to say no, and we know how much that can hurt.

This is a topic that everyone I know, including myself, could stand to improve on. No one is perfect when it comes to asking for the things we need. If you think you are, you are either a saint or Bodhisattva … or (and this is more likely) you are due for some introspection to figure out if this is really the case. Thinking you’re perfect at any skill is in general a red flag that you’re experiencing some form of the Dunning-Kruger effect, that you’re just not skilled enough to even see the ways in which you’re not skilled.

I am neither a therapist nor any sort of accredited expert on interpersonal skills. I am just a person, albeit a person with ADHD, a person who reads way too much about psychology and therapy as a hobby, and, of course, a person who just plain has to interact with many fellow humans in my life. As such, I think a lot about interpersonal interactions. I thought I would share with you some of my accumulated knowledge that I hope is insightful and useful.

So, what are some tools that we can use to most effectively ask for the things that we need? What tools can we use to make sure that we have our best shot at getting what we need in the moment without (and this is important) causing long-term damage to the relationship? How can we be bold and up-front to not let problems and unmet needs fester, without alienating people through manipulation and aggression? How can we create a situation where, if they can’t meet our needs how we asked them to, we’ll be most able to find a work-around?

Passive and Aggressive Communication

One framework is to think of this in terms of strategies. There are two overall strategies that are bad habits: the passive and the aggressive. Like in many topics, there are aesthetically opposite errors that are both harmful.

The passive strategy involves just not asking, and hoping the other person intuits our needs and wants, and provides them as a matter of course. This has the obvious downsides that the other person might not even be aware of our needs. If they don’t provide them, it might not be that they can’t, or don’t want to. They just might not know what priority it is to you. They might not know about them at all.

This strategy isn’t always terrible. Sometimes, your needs are provided for, and there’s no need to ask. Sometimes, a want is low enough priority, or there are so many ways the need can be filled, that asking isn’t necessary. But when a need is important, it can breed unnecessary resentment when the people in our lives don’t read our mind about it.

It can also cause actual harm, however. It’s hard to give an example of passive communication going awry, because it usually takes the form of the absence of activity, and we don’t always see lost opportunities in the same way as active harm. But make no mistake, it can cause harm. The harm can take the form of never getting a raise, because you never asked for it. It can take the form of eventually letting a friendship deteriorate, when you could’ve intervened to fix it. It can take the form of not inviting someone to a function, rather than telling them they’re welcome to come if they don’t, say, drink alcohol, or make everyone sing karaoke, or bring their partner.

Avoiding confrontation is not adaptive in the long-term. In the extreme, it can lead to harmful behaviors like letting a friendship or relationship die rather than address issues, or even ghosting.

Someone can also be trying to communicate, but be too timid to communicate explicitly. This can lead to confusing situations, where someone is talking about apparently unrelated things, or seems to be talking about nothing at all, but as if it’s very important. This can also be distressing for the interlocutor, and can look a lot like aggressive communication.

The aggressive strategy, on the other hand, involves combining the request with what feels like the beginning of a fight. The request is combined with an attack – which can take many forms – basically trying to maximize the short term likelihood that the need would get met, that a “yes” would be reached, at the direct expense of the long-term health of the friendship.

The form of the “attack” can vary greatly. This can range to extreme examples, like threatening ending the relationship or even physical harm to the other person or to the self, to more mundane examples, like discounting or changing the topic away from the other person’s needs. Sometimes, it can look like passive behavior, like the silent treatment, or withdrawing. Sometimes, the attack is given on its own, and the request not actually stated explicitly.

Aggressive behaviors often result from a perceived need to control interpersonal events and a strong sense of how the relationship should work. Aggressive behaviors say, implicitly, “the other person owes me this,” or “my way is the only acceptable way.” Often, however, this is not true, and there are multiple ways to achieve the same goals. But even if the other person does have a moral obligation that needs to be discussed, aggressiveness is still not the most productive way to communicate.

All of this is relationship-dependent. Seeming aggressiveness can sometimes be used in a tongue in cheek way between trusted friends, but it’s important to calibrate this use case and make sure you’re confident the other person is overall fine with that.

Passive and Aggressive Communication in One Person

Passive and aggressive behaviors might seem like opposites, but they can show up together in the same person.

If someone has a strong sense of how a relationship should work, and what the other person should be providing them without having to ask, or even if they just feel the need particularly strongly but have trouble getting themself to articulate it, they might start out with the passive strategy. Then, later, if that doesn’t result in their needs getting met, when they are so frustrated that they feel forced to say something about it, they will jump over asking for their needs and go straight to the aggressive behavior, feeling like a victim of an injustice. So, in the end, passive and aggressive behaviors can both come from a strong sense of norms, and aggressive behaviors can arise from overly frustrated passive behaviors.

They both can also arrive out of undervaluing our own needs. If we feel like we have to prove our needs to get them met, then we might decline to assert them – we don’t ask our partner to take us on a date, because we feel like we have to prove we deserve it. Or, alternatively, since we are not confident in our own needs, we might feel the need to justify it with proofs and moral arguments, and that can yield an aggressive behavior as a sort of preemptive strike against the criticism or denial we imagine that we’re going to get – where we might ask our partner to take us on a date somewhere we like, now that we can say they owe us because we went somewhere they liked. All the while, it would’ve been healthier to just ask when we wanted the thing, rather than demand it with justification (aggressive) or fear to ask for it without justification (passive).

All of this can come across as entitled, even if it comes from a place of anxiety and insecurity. It is tempting to make our interpersonal needs into entitlements, to frame them as things the other person has to give us, because that makes the other person’s role in our life predictable, and gives us a mental framework to grapple with it, a way of making sure we get our needs met by establishing that it is our right.

But the scary truth is, our needs are not entitlements. Usually, the other person has many legitimate reasons why they might prefer to say “no.” Building in a punishment for saying no is unfair, as is harboring resentment or disappointment silently. Everyone on the receiving end of aggressive or passive communication knows this to some extent. But receiving a “no” can feel unfair too.

Passive and Aggressive Communication in My Life

I have definitely used both dysfunctional strategies. I’ve definitely accidentally guilt-tripped people. Usually, this isn’t my intention. I’m either thinking out loud, and trying to show the other person that I’m not upset, but I handle the nuance wrong and it has the opposite effect. Either that, or I was trying to be playful and hyperbolic for humorous effect, and it doesn’t land. These are explanations, not excuses. If the other person feels guilt-tripped, then it does the damage that guilt-tripping does.

I have also at times over-corrected, and thought I was being aggressive when I wasn’t. That’s also a risk, especially in close friendships where people understand and trust where you’re coming from. It’s less bad than actually being aggressive, but still a little annoying. It’s important to calibrate to individual friendships.

I also sometimes have been passive about my needs. Sometimes, I am waiting until I think the other person will be receptive of them. If someone is currently upset or has strong emotional needs themselves, that’s probably the wrong time to ask for your own needs to be met. I also don’t want to come across as needy, and I sometimes shut down if someone else perceives me that way or I worry that someone else will, even if I genuinely believe they are misunderstanding my need or that my need is actually reasonable.

The confusing thing is, that’s sometimes the right call. Sometimes, you need to wait until someone is in the right place to hear a request, or the next step in a complicated untangling of a convoluted interpersonal conflict. But sometimes, it’s the wrong call, and the other person is misled into thinking you’re satisfied when you’re not.

Perhaps this is impossible to get 100% right. Certainly, getting it right is the work of a lifetime.

Asking Nicely

So what’s the alternative to passive and aggressive communication? A DBT book or an online psychology blog might call it assertive communication, but I tend to call it “asking politely” or “asking nicely.” It’s different from passive communication because it intrinsically involves actually asking, but different from aggressive communication because it involves doing so nicely.

Part of this is old standard admonitions like saying “thank you.” “Thank you” is sort of the opposite of aggressive communication in some ways. It acknowledges the other person could have said “no.” It acknowledges the other person may have sacrificed something. It acknowledges that what they did was useful to you, and that you care about whether they continue to behave that way. It establishes that you don’t take them for granted. All of these effects are mere individual facets of that great feeling that it conveys: appreciation.

This involves keeping track of how much the other person is doing for you, and thanking accordingly. It involves thanking them when they promise to do it (in advance for the action and for the first step towards it), which can be scary if you have trust issues. It involves thanking them when they finish doing it, which can be difficult if you have ADHD and are forgetful.

Of course, as important as saying “thank you” (and the underlying emotional work it represents) is avoiding the passive and aggressive pitfalls by remembering that the other person probably wants to help you. They want to help you, so you should ask rather than remaining silent, so they can do that. They want to help you, so you don’t need to give them punishments and reprimands for not helping you, because they probably will help you.

With this attitude, rather than focusing your persuasive efforts on why they’re a bad person if they don’t help you (aggressive), or figuring out how to hint it or convey it so they don’t get mad at you (passive), you can talk about how fun it would be if they do help you. You can talk about how useful it would be (this can be done without guilt-tripping, believe it or not).

And there’s one last effect of this attitude, that cannot be overstated: You can brainstorm cooperatively with them about alternatives if your initial request doesn’t work. There might be another way to get the need met! Work together with your interlocutor to do so, whether you are the asker or the askee.

Long-Term Thinking

All of this has been phrased about short term interactions. But relationships tend to be long term. You must balance the long-term health of the relationship with the short-term need. In the end, we don’t always get all our needs met. And we can’t always get our needs met from the person we originally hope to have them met by. Ideally, this does not need to end our relationship with that person.

If we fail at this and act aggressively, we can come across as entitled. Sometimes, this is because we feel entitled, and sometimes, because we fail at communicating effectively, and sometimes a mix of both. Or, if we fail at this and act passively, we can torture ourselves by brooking secret resentment when a situation is unresolved, when even a clear “no” is better than the ambiguity and the waiting.

This is a difficult balance.

It is unfair to resent someone for something they’ve never been asked to do. If you’re waiting for someone to do something you think they owe you, and they didn’t know you had that expectation, the clock starts for the other person when you ask for it. The clock for you, however, starts when you first noticed the need.

It is also unfair, however, to ask at a bad time, when the other person doesn’t have the bandwidth to help, or when they’re upset about something else, or when they’re feeling overwhelmed by the relationship and genuinely need some space.

It is also unfair to play off as unimportant something that is important.

It is also unfair to make everything you need seem urgent and dire, like the boy who cried wolf.

All of these concerns are difficult to balance. They depend on the nature of the relationship – which is constantly evolving, even in lifelong relationships – and the personality of the person you’re asking, and even unforeseeable accidents of mood and timing.

It’s a lifelong skill, but one that is better with a vocabulary and tool-set for thinking about it, and with values to keep in the forefront of our minds as we navigate it. Hopefully, you found this blog post useful in your lifelong journey of being a person, of being an ever better friend, family member, partner, and fellow human.

A Review of Self-Help as a Genre, and Atomic Habits in Particular

2024-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

I enjoyed reading Atomic Habits, which was recommended to me by my therapist. I found this blog post basically finished in my attic folder while sorting through things, and I found it up to posting, even though my records show I read Atomic Habits way back in … October 2022.

Self-Help in General

Atomic Habits is pretty fundamentally a “self help book.” This is a pretty controversial genre in my experience. Some people roll their eyes at self-help books in general – I once even read an “anti-self help” book that basically did so for the entire length of a book. Others swear by them – literally, I had a friend once who said The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck was her Bible and who used it as such for an (informal but serious) oath. I’m generally somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. I read them with solidly middling expectations.

My attitude flavors how I read self-help books. So, before I talk about Atomic Habits in particular, I want to talk some about self-help books in general, and my take on them.

I’ll start with their problems, because, as a genre, they sure do have their problems.

Problem #1: Length

They are longer than they need to be, stretched thin by the lengthening. Atomic Habits clocks in (in my copy) at 264 pages, with an estimated word count of 80,000 words. However, it provided the insight of a long blog post, maybe at around 20,000 words at most. And I only give it credit for that long a blog post because this was a particularly useful self-help book, which also mitigated its length using re-caps and summaries arranged in helpful chart forms.

I do understand why publishers do this: they want to publish books, not glorified pamphlets. I also understand that self-help is far from the only genre with this problem: it plagues all forms of popular non-fiction.

But it’s still annoying.

Problem #2: Wildly varying standards

The bigger problem with self-help books is that they vary widely in quality, not just in terms of evidence for their claims (that if you follow their advice you will get the results they say you will), but more importantly in terms of moral quality. Some of them have questionable values, brazenly teach you how to be manipulative or otherwise unkind to other people.

This is partially because it’s such a subjective topic. There are no unified standards on wisdom, no certifying authority. Some books are written by expert psychologists and psychiatrists, but those are often framed to specific disorders, and they aren’t always compelling writers. Others are factual and even science-based, but have goals that are repugnant to many or even most people. Still others are just snake-oil or feel-good.

Problem #3: They can turn into religions

One specific pattern of problem is endemic to the genre: over-enamored with their own importance, they try to provide a comprehensive life framework to the reader, the “one cool trick” that will fix everything that ails you. This can lead to the situation where people can buy into it so hard they idolize it and treat it like a religious text. Simultaneously, others reject it as overbearing and boundary-crossing while cringing at such people.

This is kind of easy for self-help writers to do, even by accident: The nature of the topic makes any life advice in scope, and authors as living humans generally have some sort of opinions on how to handle any sort of life situation, that they may already organize internally into an all-encompassing framework. The nature of writing also requires organizing those opinions into general principals (often over-general). And in order to be effective, you have to persuade the reader.

All together, this can lead to over-stating your case for a simplistic framework. With this One Simple Trick™, with this simple overriding principle, you can transform your entire life. On such premises religions are built.

How I read them

As a result of these problems, I tend to take the scope and claims of a self-help book with a grain of salt. I don’t expect it to transform my life, or revolutionize me. I don’t trust it, even temporarily, to tell me how to think about or organize the ideas it presents. I don’t read it for the overarching framework at all; instead, I just sift through it for individual useful take-aways, discarding the vast majority of it (even the majority of the 1/5 of it that isn’t fluff to make it book-length) as either things I already know or else already know enough to disagree with. I then can integrate these individual ideas into my own framework and values.

So my experience goes something like this:

Huh, that’s an interesting fluff story. Cool, I see the point you made, but I knew that already. Decent story to back it up though! Nice phrasing too, but I’ll forget that tomorrow… Yeah, that page just reiterates that point, wow this could have been a blog post…

Yeah, I can see the organizational structure you’re using to tie it together with the framework for your book. It’s not that useful to me as a life framework, but I’ll treat it as a framework that holds the book together.

Wait! Aha! There we have a new idea! I’ll take it!

You might think that if I’m so cynical about self-help books, and think they have a low information density, then I’d be very disinclined to read them. But I do actually read them from time to time, especially when someone recommends them (Atomic Habits, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck), or when they’re relevant to me (Taking Charge of Adult ADHD, which is basically a self-help book but for a specific class of people to which I belong).

And I’m usually happy I did it. Even though all I get out of it are maybe a handful of ideas I can take with me, those ideas are sometimes really good. Some ideas I lean on a lot I’ve gotten from some self-help book or another – and those are just the ones I’m aware of.

And rehashing concepts I already agreed with, or defending my mind against concepts I disagree with, is also a useful exercise. I generally believe in reflection on values and approaches to life. I wouldn’t go far as to say an unexamined life is not worth living, but I tend to think that detailed critical thinking is a net positive, and is not usually driven by anxiety-based “overthinking.”

And I mean, I’ve reflected a lot on my value of reflection and done a lot of examination on my value of self-examination, and it generally holds up. Why wouldn’t I want a guided version of that, to get outside the limitations of my own way of thinking and those of my close friends?

And all in all, I need the excess wisdom. I think we live in a society with a bit of a wisdom crisis. We don’t have a lot of traditionalism going on, and to the extent that we do, we live in a different world than even our parents let alone the worlds of our various scriptures. Humans need guidance. There’s a reason self-help books sell. There’s a reason why sometimes people turn them into religions in our heads.

Atomic Habits in Particular

Now that I’m done waxing philosophical (for now), the natural question is, what did I get out of Atomic Habits?

Even though it was much longer than it needed to be, I’m not inclined to summarize it. I don’t even remember everything that’s in there – most of it I already knew from reading the older The Power of Habit which this book admits to spending a lot of time rehashing and coming up with relatively straight-forward and obvious applications. So I’ll leave summarizing to another article by someone else who has done a great job and whose article is around the length the original book should have ideally been.

Instead, I’ll say that I enjoyed the review of the material from that other book, was inspired an appropriate amount, and even got a handful of take-aways that will stay with me in my internal pile of “wise thoughts.” Rather than a summary of what the book has to give, you’ll get a list of what I have taken from it.

My Take-Aways

You don’t change habits by setting goals, you achieve goals by changing habits.

This one will really stick with me, because they had just told stories about sports. Every sports team has the same goal: win the tournament. It’s just that they have different habits to get there. So obviously setting goals by itself isn’t good enough.

And while this has some overlap with things I already knew (like the idea setting SMART goals) it did rub the point in in a different enough way that I felt it was worth adding to my list. If you practice in effective ways, you will get better enough to do X. You don’t have to think about that goal, and in fact, it’s probably better if you focus on enjoying the process.

Related to the previous: Your habits are set based on the type of person you are. So, instead of thinking about goals or habits directly, consider thinking about what type of person you’re trying to be, and what they would do.

This is a bit more complicated, but it makes sense. Like an evangelical with a bracelet “What would Jesus do?”, think about the type of person you’re trying to be, and do what they’d do. In addition to enabling you to be more moral by emulating religious moral authorities, this also overlaps with advice on how to be less impulsive from ADHD advice books I’ve read.

It makes sense that this would be able to generalize to more narrow questions “what would a good writer do?” or “what would a habitual musician do?”, but I really hadn’t thought about it before.

It also, speaking of Christianity, reminded me of a drawing I saw once in a book about the Lutheran confessions. It had a tree, and the root of the tree was Glaub[e], or faith, and the branch of the tree was Lieb[e], or love, and the crown of the tree was Werk or [good] work[s]. The message was that your values influenced your feelings and attachments, which influenced your behavior. Focusing on doing good directly was not the right approach, but rather to focus on what you believed in a core way.

If anyone can find this drawing, by the way, please let me know!

Conclusions

It was a decent book, for a self-help book. If you’re particularly struggling with habits, or goal-setting, or trying to motivate yourself, it might be useful to help you deconstruct where you’re going wrong. It’s also useful background for understanding human nature a little better, especially if you’ve never thought about these issues in detail.

Review: One Billion Americans, by Matthew Yglesias

2024-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

This was a great read about how the United States should reframe many of its basic political assumptions.

It is tempting to think of life as a zero-sum game. Having more for me, even enough for me, means less or even not enough for others. Usually, we have the open-mindedness to feel like we can cooperate with some few – our family, our community, or perhaps our nation or religion or even (problematically) our ethnic group. But at a certain scale, there is a sense that there’s not enough to go around to all the people who might want it.

This shows up on the right and the left. For the right, our country is “full,” any immigrants a threat to sparse resources and jobs. For the left, it is the world that is seen as full: more people necessarily is seen to mean more environmental damage.

In his book One Billion Americans, Matt Yglesias addresses both arguments, and addresses them thoroughly. In summary: Our country is not resource constrained, but constrained by willingness to use well-established urban planning and transit technology that exists throughout the world. The way out of environmental damage and climate change is not asceticism or population restriction, but technology.

By focusing around the provocative premise of an America with three times the population, both by increased birth rate (a scandal to liberals) an increased immigration (a scandal to conservatives), Matt Yglesias creates a framework he can jump off of to explore a variety of issues. To accomplish this audacious goal, many problems would have to be fixed in Amerian society, politics, and economics, for the most part problems that we will have anyway, and that we will have to fix anyway, whether or not we have in mind the goal of tripling our population.

As a result, the book covers a variety of seemingly disjoint topics, from childcare and education to immigration to transit and urban planning. It therefore avoided the problem a lot of non-fiction books have: I genuinely feel this book is the correct length. Unlike many similar books, it could not have just been a blog post, but rather it would have been a blog series, that is to say, a full-length book.

All in all, a great read, and I am grateful to the friend who gave it to me this year for my birthday. I generally agree with the positions in it, and it provoked a lot of good thought.

Is Section 3 of the 14th Amendment Undemocratic?

2023-12-26T00:00:00+00:00

US politics continue to be interesting.

As many of you know, the Colorado Supreme Court has recently ruled that Donald Trump should be struck from the ballot in Colorado. Under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, if you’ve sworn to support the Constitution, and then engaged in (or “given aid or comfort to”) an insurrection, you are no longer eligible to serve in office. The Colorado Supreme Court applied this law to Trump, citing the Capitol attack of January 6, 2021.

This may be the first official ruling to agree that Trump is disqualified, but the theory has been discussed since the events of January 6, 2021. The theory gained more serious attention and respectability when it was endorsed by conservative legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen in an explosive law review article, and now, it has finally manifested as an official decision in this ruling.

Opinions about the Opinion

There are a lot of criticisms of the ruling. As is often the case with complicated political issues, there aren’t just two “sides,” but a grab-bag of more nuanced opinions and observations.

Some people have procedural nitpicks, claiming that state courts don’t have the jurisdiction to evaluate such issues, or that Trump would have to actually be convicted of a crime for the section to apply, perhaps the crime called insurrection.¹

Others don’t think the riots on January 6 qualify as an insurrection at all, or they think that Trump didn’t “engage in” it, or they think that his participation is protected under First Amendment free speech rights². Still others simply think that Trump should win even if an insurrectionist, or that he was the legitimate President-Elect in 2021, or otherwise hold brazenly anti-Democratic views, both in the sense of hating the Democratic Party as well as democracy itself.

But the criticism that I find most interesting is the criticism that the court’s decision is undemocratic. We ought to let Trump run, this criticism goes, because in a democracy, it is better for the voters to decide that someone should not be President, rather than a court. Some of the people who think this also fall into another category: they think this decision is undemocratic and they think January 6 doesn’t reach the standard of the 14th Amendment, or hasn’t been adequately proven to, and that I find less interesting. But some people simply think that even if January 6 was an insurrection, and Trump engaged in it, he should still be on the ballot, and would still legally become President if elected.

That is to say, there are a large number of people who are uncomfortable not with the specifics of this ruling but rather with the fundamental premise of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. These people might believe that the law has evolved away from what it says, or that it requires implementing legislation. Or, these people might believe that we simply should ignore this constitutional provision, or that we should never have added it to the constitution. In any case, these people believe that even a violent insurrection against the government, by a person who had specifically sworn not to do that, should not be a disqualification to run for office, or at least, to the extent that it is one, it should be a qualification decided on by the voters.

Narrowing the Question

In this post, I will not try to evaluate whether the events of January 6 counts as an “insurrection.” I will not try to figure out whether the way the Colorado Court proceded was legally correct, nor whether the Supreme Court will overturn it, nor whether it’s a good strategy for defeating Trump or will instead backfire.

Instead, I will think about the underlying theoretical question as if it were not so relevant to today’s news:

Is it undemocratic to disqualify from elections those who have participated in an insurrection?

To help separate this abstract question from the current news, let’s not imagine that this is about Trump. Let’s make up a new scenario in our minds, and let’s imagine instead that the insurrection in question was the Civil War – or some other insurrection that you, as a reader, can feel comfortable wholeheartedly opposing, in favor of explicit Communism or Nazism or racism or whatever other ideology most gets your goat.

Let’s further imagine that the candidate openly admits that they, in fact, did engage in insurrection. In fact, not only do they admit that the insurrection was an insurrection, but they say it was a justified one. They admit – or rather, they proudly announce – they’d do it again. They certainly won’t rule out doing it again if they lose.

But of course, you are not of the opinion that the insurrection was a justified one – you don’t want this person to win at all. And they’re running for President!

So here’s the question: Should this person be allowed to run or not? If you were designing a constitution for your dream country, would you allow the courts or some other mechanism to stop this person from running, or would you hope they simply lost at the polls?

All Qualifications Are Undemocratic

Any disqualification from office, of course, is undemocratic in a sense. A democratic election for President, in a pure sense, means that whoever gets the most votes for President must win. And if someone who people want to vote for isn’t an available option, well, that makes the election undemocratic.

Everything that detracts from the idealized, pure form of an election takes our country away from being a democracy. Things like the electoral college, to the two-term Presidential term limits, to even the restriction that Presidential candidates must be over 35 and natural-born citizens, can prevent the people from perfectly exercising their will through a Presidential election.

However, very few of the people calling this recent ruling “undemocratic” have any problem with preventing 30 year olds, or foreign-born Americans, from running for President. Even though this sort of discrimination based on age or national origin would be severely frowned upon in hiring³, we have simply gotten used to them. Perhaps, perhaps, one could argue that it is a better show of democracy’s power, a more rational system, to simply allow teenage Presidential candidates to be disqualified not by law but by the people’s collective decision, but no one in practice is interested in changing it. We’re simply used to it.

Ironically, these other qualifications, in my mind, strike me as more undemocratic. If everyone 30 and under had just started being oppressed, what President could genuinely sympathize? Is the natural-born citizen requirement today kept because of concern about national loyalties, or out of racism?

At least excluding insurrectionists has a logical pro-democratic angle. Committing an insurrection against our elected government is fundamentally anti-democratic, and so excluding those who have done so is a move to protect democracy. Unlike requiring people to be 35 or natural-born citizens, this provision has a claim to protecting democracy at the same time as it undermines it.

In other words, even though the 14th Amendment directly hurts democracy, by limiting who people can vote for, it indirectly protects it, by keeping people out of power who might do an insurrection and overthrow democracy. It’s a trade-off: By making this election slightly less democratic, it protects all future elections’ existence against the possible insurrectionist’s dictatorship.

The question is then how to evaluate this trade-off.

The Problem of Cheaters

If you want to find out who the fastest person is, have a race.⁴ If you want to find out who the best person is at chess, have a chess tournament. And if you want to find out who the most-supported⁵ person is for President, have an election.

Even if there is no cheating, this can be irregular and unreliable. Sometimes, a person is tired, or ate something that disagrees with them, and that makes them slow of foot. Sometimes, a person has a brain fart and blunders at chess. And sometimes in a modern media-fuelled election, someone says a random gaffe that loses them the election, but not their long-term genuine support, or the election happens right on the wrong news cycle, or their support is concentrated in the wrong specific states or demographics.

But cheating is a deeper threat. If the goal of a race is to find out who is the fastest runner without taking steroids, or (for example) hitching a ride for part of the race, then if someone does that, they will win even if they aren’t the fastest runner. If something isn’t done to prevent people from using steroids, then everyone will have to use drugs just to have a chance, which totally goes against the goal of finding out who the fastest runner is without taking steroids.

So, cheating is a threat to the very concept of a race. How do we stop cheating? Punishment is a viable option, making the behavior of cheating have bad consequences as a deterrent. The punishment of disqualification – from not just the race in which they cheated, but also future races – goes beyond deterrence, however. Not only does it increase the negative consequences of cheating (and therefore discourages it), it decreases the likelihood that someone wins by cheating.

It is true that a one-time cheater might legitimately also be the fastest person, and win a future race legitimately. But it’s also true that if they win a future race, they did so by cheating. They’ve proven themselves willing to cheat. So, if we want to find out who the fastest non-cheater is, excluding past cheaters is a great way to prevent present cheating.

So, excluding past cheaters from a race can actually make the race more fair. Even though the past cheater might be legitimately the fastest person, they should be disqualified, because if they win, what confidence do we have that they won fairly?

Democracy as a Peaceful Replacement for War

The analogue to democracy is this: Someone willing to do an insurrection is likely to be unwilling to give up power in a peaceful manner, likely to use any power they gain to cheat on future elections, either by influencing them or by simply refusing to acknowledge and act on the results. This is true in general, and it is especially true if the original insurrection directly involves not accepting election results.

After all, the whole point of having a democracy is that we decide who’s in charge based on who has the most support, rather than by having a war about it every time. Everyone agrees that fighting with votes is better than fighting with guns, and as a result, we can have changes in government without mass death and destruction.

This is especially important given the violence and destruction of modern warfare. It is not a coincidence that World War I, far more deadly than any other war that Europe had experienced, also spelled the end of large absolute monarchies in Europe. Warfare has such an unacceptable cost that we’ve all collectively decided we’d rather risk our political enemies winning an election as in a democracy, than have a war every time we need the government to change, which is how monarchy often works in practice.

So, engaging in insurrection is even more undemocratic than other types of election cheating. The principle of democracy is vastly more important than any individual person or party winning, because the alternative is war and therefore mass death. If a candidate doesn’t agree, than that candidate is intrinsically undemocratic, to the point where excluding them is more democratic than allowing them to run.

The Downsides of the Ban

I know that people might disagree with these arguments. Banning insurrectionists from running has cons as well as pros. Who shall determine who has committed an insurrection? Will an anti-insurrection provision be abused for political purposes dishonestly, where something that is not an insurrection is called one for political gain?

Hopefully, the law would specify the procedures for this disqualification, and indicate who gets to decide. Hopefully, it would choose someone with enough distance from the political process to actually implement it.

But perhaps that isn’t enough. Perhaps the only way to have a democracy is for everyone to be eligible, and for it to be seen for everyone to be eligible. Everything more complicated is up for misinterpretation, and stokes distrust. Provisions written on paper do not necessarily accomplish their obvious goals. No amount of clarity of rules can counteract a dishonest referee, or convince a partisan that the referee is actually honest.

Rule of Law and the United States in Particular

So, which decision do we make here? Do we have a system for disqualifying insurrectionists, or not? More important than either decision is having a rule for it ahead of time. As a democracy, the way to determine this should be the same as any other determination we make about constitutional decisions. The rule of law is an important principle, so everyone knows what the rules are ahead of time (and knows what referees will be evaluating them). And so, when an insurrection happens, we should ideally follow the law to determine what to do, rather than having an ad hoc discussion then to determine how to handle the situation.

And now, I return from the abstract question to the particulars of the recent decision. The United States has already made this determination, in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Unfortunately, it is unclear how it is to be enforced; Congress has defaulted on its duty in Section 5 to “enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” So, what is clear, is that insurrectionists (who have previously sworn oaths of office) are ineligible for office. What is unclear is the details of how this is accomplished.

To me, this means that the question of whether banning insurrectionists from running for office is already decided. It is not undemocratic to do so, as it is a policy that has pros and cons for a democracy, but the rule of law breaks the tie and so we should follow the 14th Amendment. Questions remain about the details, but that, in our system, are what the courts are for.

So. I do understand (and disagree with) accusations that the Colorado Supreme Court decision is politically motivated. I also sympathize with the claim that Trump should be charged with the crime of insurrection in order for this case to qualify – perhaps that would be a more fair way to determine whether Trump’s behavior on January 6 qualifies as engaging in insurrection. But I thoroughly disagree with those who claim the decision is “undemocratic.” While there are ways in which the 14th Amendment is undemocratic, there are also ways in which the opposite policy is undemocratic. We have already, democratically, made the decision that this disqualification is part of the rules to our democracy. It is too late, for this case, to reconsider now whether that decision was wise.

Appendix: Text of the Section

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

14th Amendment to the US Constitution, Section 3

Appendix: Footnotes

Of these, I think the most valid nitpick is that Trump should have to be convicted of the actual federal crime of insurrection for the amendment to be triggered, as that counts as the Congressional implementation of the amendment under Section 5. The least valid nitpick, in my view, is the zany motion that the Presidency is not an “office under the United States” or that the President does not swear to “support the Constitution” because he swears instead to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution. Laws are read as documents in natural languages like English, rather than read as computer programs. None of this matters in the slightest to the larger arc of this blog post, which asks, legal technicalities aside, whether the whole idea is fundamentally undemocratic. ↩︎
I feel obligated at this point to point out that since the 14th Amendment comes after the 1st Amendment, technically, free speech might not apply to its provisions, as the 14th Amendment comes more recently and therefore can override the 1st Amendment. ↩︎
Not to mention, they would illegal under various discrimination laws, though in fairness these notions come after the Constitution was written. ↩︎
Though famously fallible, a race is still the best way to find out who is fastest. The swift won’t always win, because of time and chance, but they will more often than not. ↩︎
“Well-supported” in this sense means with some weighting given to total popularity, and some weighting given to being able to dominate in certain states. This is to say, we can mathematically define “well-supported” so as to make the electoral college make sense. Or we could not do that, and say the electoral college is undemocratic, which is a fair position. ↩︎

2023 in Retrospective and 2024 in Prospective

2023-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

Another year has gone by
And in response, I simply sigh
Another year has taken place
I guess I’ll handle it with grace?
Another year, the same old grind…
And yet I feel I’ve fallen behind

As you might know if you’ve read my equivalent post from last year, I am now 35 years old (and 3 days). If we consider “working years” to range from 20 to 65 – which seems a decent definition – then I am 1/3 of the way through them, 1/3 of the way through my career. So, theoretically, we should see my résumé at least triple in impressiveness by the time I retire!

Thinking about this year as 1/3 of the way to retirement is definitely less depressing and existentially terrifying than thinking of 35 as half-way to 70. I think it’s also more realistic. The type of processes I was undergoing from 0-20, the type of growth, the type of tasks, the level of (lack of) freedom, is so different, overall, from my adult life. Of course, 17 might be a better cut-off year, because that’s when I left home and went to college, but that kind of takes the spin out of 1/3, so I’ll keep in terms of 20. And besides, 1/3 of the way through my career seems appropriate for this blog, as much as I talk about programming on it!

Like last year, I’d like to reflect on the previous year. I don’t have such a laundry list of achievements as I mentioned in that previous post, which is fair: I didn’t rebuild a life (kind of) from scratch with a different town to live in, housing situation, and medication (and therefore brain structure).

And indeed, that wasn’t my goal. Unlike 2022 where my theme was rebuilding, my theme for 2023 was growth. By “growth,” I meant an active settling in, a deepening or intensification of the new life I’d built. And I think I managed that. I spent time settling to the new life, getting more used to it, getting closer to the people around me, and solidifying it.

As for the blog, it’s not really growing, which is sad, but it is approximately holding steady, which is good. 34 posts this year (by also including this post) compared to 37 last year isn’t too bad:

$ ls | grep ^2 | cut -f1 -d- | uniq -c # Count posts per year
      3 2017
      1 2018
     17 2019
      5 2020
      3 2021
     37 2022
     33 2023

Alas, I have not transitioned my blog from mostly polemic to mostly educational. My most recent technical post, instead, very controversially criticized a well-established mechanic for organizing software complexity. But! I’ve also not let it fade away, in spite of having had a few curveballs thrown at me this year. And in the meantime, I’ve also done substantially more writing outside of the blog, which is not publicly available.

My goals for the blog remain approximately the same as last year. I’d like to do more educational content. I’d like to write more non-technical stuff. I have to say, the polemic technical content gets views and reactions and spark. That’s hard to beat, and the effort I put in explaining things for more educational content often gets the reaction of “yep, checks out, makes sense.” Perhaps I can find a decent balance somewhere – or find a way to keep the educational content more interesting. If at first you can’t succeed, as they say, try, try again.

In the past year I did get a new job, working for Amtrak. Several of my friends also got new jobs, two of them specifically becoming teachers. Jobs transitions are a lot, I can say from inside of one. This came along with (in my case) a transition from working from home to hybrid, and a commute that includes a driving component (for the first time in my life!), so that was a lot.

In my next year, I know what my theme will be, but I’m not entirely sure what the best word for it is. It will have something to do with being balanced about how I spend my time, and intentional about how I spend my emotional resources. Prioritized or focused might be it, but not “focused” on productivity or “prioritizing” my work and chores correctly, but a bit more general than that. Definitely, it has to do with being intentional about the most precious resources I have: my evenings and my weekends, so as to make sure I can connect with the people I care most about while also building in the types of activities I need to do and maintaining the parts of my life that need active maintainance.

I suppose the one-word theme will be this: balance. I will try to keep balanced, intentional, well-considered and well-prioritized about how I spend my time and emotional energy, rather than just dancing from plan to plan and idea to idea as they arise, and agreeing to things based on things like guilt or unexamined excitement or even just thoughtless and distracted accumulation of plans. (No, instead I shall overwhelm myself with curated and careful accumulation of plans!)

All in all, a very difficult theme perhaps for an ADHD-er, but perhaps for that very reason, an important one.

Are You Sure? (Revised)

2023-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

This is a revision of a flash fiction piece first posted in 2018.

After a year of talking, and another year of planning, the project was complete. Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the local clergy, and the town council had finally done it: Right in the town square, they installed a giant loudspeaker. From thenceforth, every two minutes, a booming voice would spread all over town, announcing:

ARE YOU SURE?

Foolhardy decisions, they had decreed, would soon be a thing of the past.

The locals seemed to adapt pretty readily. Sales of noise-canceling headphones boomed for a bit, and people’s sleeping habits were surprisingly unaffected – who notices slightly inferior sleep? And drunk driving statistics were immediately better, which the local paper celebrated triumphantly.

The clergy were the first to notice the downsides. Weddings were being canceled during the vows a full 25% of the time – brides and grooms would take back their “I do"s in response to the booming speaker of skepticism. Adult baptisms were fully cut in half. Divorces, on the other hand, were also cut in half – though some of the rescued marriages maybe shouldn’t have been.

At a town council meeting, one of the proponents of the loudspeaker said, confidently, this is a good idea, only to cringe when the timing worked out that in the next second, the entire room boomed:

ARE YOU SURE?

No one was starting new relationships – and no one was exiting them either. New job postings languished unfilled, as both candidate and interviewer expressed their doubt. Slowly, but surely, the social and economic life of the town started to grind to a halt, as it became the norm to cancel even casual plans like going out for a drink (and certainly having another once there), or going to church on Sunday…or work or school on Monday.

Over the days and months and years, the town developed a culture of its own. Only necessities were bought, and only emergencies were handled. Trash piled up on the streets as no one collected it, and then stopped piling up as no one threw anything out. No one remembered what life was like before, and fewer and fewer visitors passed through to challenge it.

It wasn’t just the loudspeaker: people repeated its eternal mantra to each other, having had it etched into their dreams. “We should take down the loudspeaker,” said an occasional rebellious teen, only to hear all their friends in unison say back, “Are you sure?”, echoed, a moment later, by the loudspeaker itself:

ARE YOU SURE?

Eventually the loudspeaker broke. The mayor told his deputy to fix it, but all the deputy could do was respond, “Are you sure?” The rest of the town council waited for the booming voice to agree, but even without the voice, no one was bold enough to fix the loudspeaker. It wasn’t enough of an emergency, and besides, it felt like hubris or even blasphemy to presume to be able to fix what seemed like such a fundamental part of their world.

Without the loudspeaker, slowly but surely, the town returned to normal. A year later, people would only say “Are you sure” as a joke – one that many found vulgar and tasteless. And today, the teenagers wonder why, in the middle of the town square, there is a looming hulk of a loudspeaker system, never turned on or used, never cleaned up or put away. And of course, it is now only the old who endlessly repeat what was once a mantra, as their adult children shake their heads.

Verbal Tics

2023-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

I remember hearing an idea once – I’d like to cite it, but proper citation seems difficult, as I heard it from an acquaintance, and Mr. Google isn’t being his usual helpful self. The idea was, different politicians have these verbal tics, these filler catch-phrases, that indicate their deepest conversational anxieties.

For President Obama, it’s “let me be clear.” According to this thesis, he is really concerned about being unclear, and this tic is so prominent in his speech that it shows that his biggest anxiety is being insufficiently clear about something, as waffling, or evading the deep issue underlying all the petty concerns. And as an American paying some amount of attention, this made sense to me.

For President Trump, the tic under discussion (for he has many) was “believe me.” President Trump was concerned about being called out as a liar, because he was.

And when this discussion came up, I realized that my biggest verbal tick in conversation was “if that makes sense,” or the question form, “does that make sense?” And I realized that I did have anxiety that underlies this verbal tic, a deep suspicion that everything I’m saying is so befuddled and so indirectly and subtly put that it doesn’t make sense to the listener.

Does that make sense?

New Link: Technical Only RSS

2023-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

TLDR: I am adding a new link for RSS subscribers who just want to subscribe to technical posts. The RSS feed has always been available, but it is now explicitly one of the links across the top, for those who want their RSS feed to only give them my new technical posts.

I am writing this post primarily to let people know about this new link, but I also want to muse on it a little.

I realize that I have, in some ways, two blogs here in one website.

The Coded Message is primarily read for its technical content, especially for the posts about Rust. But I also write about other topics that interest me, and those posts are generally much less popular.

I combine them on the same website for a few reasons.

For one, it’s easier for me to have one blog. Blogging is a hobby for me, and so it has to play second fiddle to other life obligations, which is most of why I’ve been slow to finish some blog series and some promised future posts – I have not forgotten. This also means that anything that would make blogging harder for me, including separating out these blogs into two fully separate websites, is likely to make me blog substantially less. Laziness might not always be a virtue, whatever Larry Wall might say, but some amount of it is essential to actually accomplishing goals, especially in the hobby space.

But there is also a reason besides laziness, that is a little harder to articulate. As much as this blog largely concerns my professional work, it is my personal blog. All of the programming posts are laden with my personal opinions about programming, and this website is about everything I personally have to say publicly on any topic, not just programming. A separation between my professional and personal blogs would lead, in my own mind, to a sense of obligation to make the professional blog a polished resource for programmers, with more organization and possibly even a regular schedule, as opposed to merely being a forum where I hold forth on whatever topics interest me, which often but not always happens to be programming.

That said, I do make all my posts in the hopes that people read them, and find them useful in some way (even if that use is, as for my fiction posts, primarily entertainment). And I am aware that a large portion of my readership primarily, or even exclusively, finds my technical posts useful. As much as I may wish that all of my readers who are here for Rust content also care about my musings on other topics, I know that many of them do not, or even seriously disagree with me on these topics.

I try already to accommodate this. If you sign up for my newsletter, by default, you are only subscribed to technical posts, and you have to follow an additional link and explicitly subscribe if you want other topics. If you go to www.thecodedmessage.com in your web browser, you can click the link at the top labelled Computers/Programming Posts. And now, if you want to subscribe to just the technical posts via RSS, there is also a link at the top for that purpose.

I still encourage people who are interested in my other posts to read them, and I still plan on having this website combined for at least the medium-term future, but I wanted people to know that a technical-posts only RSS feed was available, if they so chose.

As always, I welcome feedback on my blog in the form of comments and e-mails (jah259 at cornell dot edu). Thank you so much for reading!

The Curse of Coffee

2023-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

TRIBUNAL PROCEEDING TRANSCRIPT
SUB LEGIBUS ORDINIS SACROSANCTI IMMORTALIUM
PROVISIONAL PROOF TEXT

IN THE CASE OF:
ŌRDŌ SACROSANCTUS VERSUS THE NAMELESS DAUGHTER OF MUŠMAḪḪU THE SEVEN-HEADED SERPENT, SHE WHO IS KNOWN TO THE MORTALS AS EUNICE

LORD JUSTICE MEPHISTO, PRESIDING
LORD JUSTICE DRACHENMILCH, LORD JUSTICE BA’AL-HA-KHUMUS, AND ~~LORD~~ LADY JUSTICE XYXXYZ

MR. AZAXAZALIA, ESQ., PROSECUTOR
MS. “EUNICE”, DEFENDANT

A RECORD OF EUNICE‘S TESTIMONY
TRANSCRIBED BY GEORGE SMITH, HUMAN, JUNIOR APPRENTICE CLERK
COURTROOM 31B, NO OTHERS IN ATTENDANCE

EUNICE, DEFENDANT: My lady. My lords.

I have been called upon by this most ancient, most esteemed, most noble tribunal to give a reckoning of my behavior. You have already heard the prosecutor’s speech, and now it is time for me to defend myself. And defend myself I shall, with pleasure. To be frank, the story – the entire story, without the prosecutor’s dishonest gaps and distortions – speaks for itself. So, rather than try to wrangle a creative interpretation of some of the more arcane and ancient laws of our Ōrdō, as many before you have done, including this sly prosecutor, I will simply tell the whole truth of what happened, and you shall see that, far from being criminal, it upholds – nay, epitomizes – all of our finest traditions.

Let me set the scene for you.

LET THE RECORD STATE THAT AT THIS POINT THE DEFENDANT BEGINS TO SPEAK IN A LOUD, INTENTIONALLY MUFFLED VOICE –GEORGE, CLERK

This is a reminder that all F trains are running on the D line and all D trains are running on the F line from Broadway Lafayette throughout Brooklyn. This is, to repeat, an F train running on the D line from Broadway Lafayette throughout Brooklyn. Thank you for riding MTA New –

LORD JUSTICE BA’AL-HA-KHUMUS: The defendant is reminded to stick to the facts, the legal facts. This is a tribunal, and we are interested in the facts and the law, not your acting or story-telling skills.

EUNICE, DEFENDANT: Of course, my lord. I’m sorry.

LET THE RECORD STATE THAT THE DEFENDANT DOES NOT SEEM AT ALL SORRY. –GEORGE, CLERK

Kevin had no excuse. This is not my opinion, but a legal fact. He wasn’t late for work – he wasn’t even going to work. He wasn’t even late for brunch: that wasn’t for another two hours, and Peter, the friend he was meeting up with, was always late. Even if he just completely went to the wrong place, and had to walk across Brooklyn, he still would have had time to go home – he had spent the night with a girl he was seeing – to not just go home, but also to shower and change, and still make it to brunch on time.

The walk might’ve even done him some good, not in terms of exercise – exercise he got plenty of, efficiently and perfunctorily, at his office gym – but in terms of fresh air and a change of pace and scenery. Maybe he would’ve been able to relax and enjoy life some, to slow down and calm down. Maybe, just maybe, he would even have been able to avoid his fate.

But in spite of these low stakes, when he heard this announcement, when he was reminded of this deeply absurd but ultimately trivial inconvenience, he treated it like an emergency. Carelessly, recklessly, he leapt up from his seat, too quickly to pay attention to where he was going, but somehow still slowly enough that his Apple AirPods™ (Pro, 3rd generation) were at no risk of falling out of his ears.

Have I been unfair towards Kevin? I concede, I really do, that it is not a sin – not a sin per se – to be anxious and rushed. And sometimes I do question how harshly I judged him for the expensive headphones. I knew he could well afford them – I knew everything about him just by looking at him, and when you reach my age you know far more than most people even think possible. And besides, everyone has the right to listen to music, the right to ignore strangers on the train who are trying to talk to you, even innocent, completely harmless old women who are really just trying to explain to you that the lid on your Starbucks coffee cup is slightly askew, that – drip, drip, drip – you’re leaking all over the (admittedly already quite unsanitary) subway seat.

But given what happened next, I think you’ll forgive me all this judgmentalism. I certainly do not regret any of it.

LET THE RECORD STATE THAT AT THIS POINT THE DEFENDANT BEGINS TO VIOLENTLY WAG HER FINGER, AND HER VOICE BECOMES SOMEWHAT CREAKY –GEORGE, CLERK

I regret many things in life. I do rue and lament many of the paths I’ve walked – and many more that I walked right past. Anyone as old as myself who claims to have no regrets is fooling themselves or lying, probably both.

But concerning Kevin I regret absolutely nothing.

Because if you are as careless, as reckless, and as rushed as Kevin – and again, with no urgency or occasion to justify it – and if you pay no attention to your surroundings, not even to rudimentary courtesy, not to mention basic safety, and you cause a poor old woman, who was at the time using her cane to ever so slowly hoist herself out of her seat, to not only fall face-first to the floor but to then find herself drenched and soaked in your still quite hot coffee, well, the least you could do – the very least – would be to resign yourself to a slightly more inconvenient trip, to accept a slightly more complicated day, and check (for more than a split second) whether she’s OK – maybe even help her back up onto her feet.

But nothing like that from Kevin. Just a split second’s glance, just enough that anyone could see that he knew what he had done, and no more. A glimpse, and then out the door he went. Other passengers helped me to my feet and offered me a handkerchief (from the older Italian gentleman from the Bronx in a suit) and napkins (from the young generically-white lesbian transplant from Minnesota) to clean myself. They did this out of common courtesy. They did this, for me, even though I was old and strange, even though they had all just heard me scream, like a crazy person, from the bottom of my gut through the top of my lungs, “MAY YOU NEVER DRINK COFFEE AGAIN! MAY IT NEVER EVEN TOUCH YOUR LIPS! MAY IT ENTICE AND ALSO STYMIE YOU!”

LET THE RECORD STATE THAT THE CAPITAL LETTERS ABOVE INDICATE THAT THE DEFENDANT IS THROWING HER HEAD BACK, CLOSING HER EYES, AND SCREAMING IN THE WITNESS STAND. THE SOUND EMERGING FROM HER INHUMANLY DISTENDED MOUTH IS THAT OF TEN WOMEN SCREAMING THE SAME WORDS SLIGHTLY OUT OF SYNC WITH EACH OTHER. THE SOUND IS ECHOING BEYOND WHAT MAKES SENSE FOR THE ACOUSTICS OF THIS ROOM. THE STONE WALLS ARE SHAKING. AND YET, THE JUSTICES ARE SITTING CALMLY, AS IF THIS WERE A COMPLETELY NORMAL OCCURRENCE. –GEORGE, CLERK

And to be clear, Kevin knew that what he did was wrong. He even was able to hear the screams of the curse, and thought it was fair – fair at least that the old woman was angry, angry enough that he could hear her, that is my, malediction through the closed train doors and over the sound of the departing train. He even felt some measure of repentance – or at least a mental act somewhat cognate to repentance, a Kevin version of it, if you will. The actual words from his mouth were, to be exact, “fucking trains,” but behind those words, there was an inkling of a glimmer of a feeling of a spark of responsibility.

But more than guilt, more than any moral regret, Kevin regretted that he had no coffee left. He threw the now-empty paper cup in an already overflowing trash bin on the platform, and pretended not to notice as it bounced out and fell to the floor. On the next train not only did he not get a seat, but he had nothing to even sip on.

There was a coffee shop near Kevin’s stop. It was a small, independent place, with black walls and mismatched wooden tables, with knick-knacks for sale and a disproportionate number of vegan options on the menu. Kevin didn’t like the vibe; he preferred the standardization of Starbucks like the one he’d gone to earlier that morning. It was two blocks out of the way, but the extra time would be more than made up for by getting someone else to make coffee rather than grind them and prepare them at home – which always took way longer than he thought it would.

As he approached it, there was something off about it. He didn’t fully process it at first, but the relative dimness of the storefront, and the general lack of energy, dampened his mood before he solidified and verbalized his thoughts, and then had them finally consolidated and confirmed when he arrived at the door.

It was closed. On a Sunday, somehow. A sign out front said that there was some sort of an important family matter, and gave no further detail. Kevin sighed, feeling disappointment combine with his pre-existing grogginess and need for caffeine – and the connected need for the taste of coffee and the feel of a drink in his hand.

No matter, there was still a Starbucks. After another block or three of groggy, belabored, un-New Yorker-like slogging, he found it. The line was a little long, but the end was in sight.

But the line didn’t move. And then, it didn’t move. And then, it still didn’t move. The baristas poked at a touch screen and occasionally muttered something about patience or just needing another minute, until finally one of them (his name tag announcing him as Jason) decided to simply call it, and told everyone in the line that their POS system was broken. There was no alternative, so perhaps they should just disperse. And so, coffeeless, Kevin finally went home.

Of course, as any coffee addict would do in such a situation, which is to say any office worker in the entire five boroughs, he went to make himself coffee as soon as he got home. Unlike many office workers, he defined “as soon as” a little over-strictly – he did this even before feeding his rightfully and righteously angry, hungry cat, who had done nothing to deserve this neglect besides being nice to Kevin in the pet shelter.

But I regress! My lords – and lady – none of you are as old as I am, so you perhaps have not yet gained as rigorous a Sight as I have. I can see what happened next as though I was actually there – and of course, in a sense, I was there, through the words of my curse. It brings a smile to my lips even now to remember, not only seeing but even hearing, Kevin rushedly shoveling the beans into his coffee grinder, extra ones clattering on the floor and bouncing in all directions through his kitchen, Mittens the cat running after them, thinking they were perhaps a form of long-awaited food, and finally, once it was vaguely close to full, him pushing the button and hearing, rather than the normal churning noise, a mere, half-hearted “whirr-click.”

Not at all the correct sound, you could tell from his face. Undeterred, he pressed the button on the grinder again. “Whirr-click, whirr-click-SNAP!”

LET THE RECORD STATE THAT AT THE WORD “SNAP” THE WITNESS STAND AND THE DEFENDANT ARE LITERALLY STRUCK BY LIGHTNING. HOW CAN THIS HAPPEN INDOORS? HOW DID IT NOT CATCH FIRE? HOW DO THE JUSTICES REMAIN SO IMPASSIVE, EVEN BORED-LOOKING? I AM NOT PAID ENOUGH FOR THIS. –GEORGE, CLERK

The plastic casing of the grinder cracked, then broke. Streams of beans flew to the ground. Mittens hissed and zoomed away into the bedroom closet.

Kevin slowly slid down to the floor, and put his face in his hands. The sound of his curse was echoing in his ears. He wasn’t a superstitious man. To the contrary, he had registered himself on the website of an atheistic, anti-supernaturalist movement called “Brights” and therefore listed “Bright” under his “Religious Views” on Facebook. He was utterly committed to the Rationalist cause. He even dabbled in Effective Altruism; the way to truly make the world a better place and help humanity, he thought, was to ensure AI alignment. In any case, this is all to say, he didn’t believe in anything as irrational and superstitious as curses, and he certainly wasn’t about to start now.

After all, and I think this is quite essential to take note of, everything that had happened is the sort of thing that just happens sometimes. Family businesses have family emergencies sometimes. Tills break down sometimes, POS systems even more often than sometimes. And even the particular way that that coffee grinder broke, believe it or not, had happened to a full 1.3% of purchasers, particularly those who, like Kevin, weren’t good about cleaning it properly. Things do break sometimes.

And by the way, my esteemed lady and lords, I invite you to investigate if you don’t believe me. I have nothing to hide.

And yet, Kevin cried, feeling himself slip in his faith in no faith, his face twitching in the manner that in my several centuries of life has always indicated dogmatic struggle and religious doubt. Sure, things go wrong sometimes, he thought, but a person with money in a first world city and time to spare will eventually be able to purchase coffee, whatever weird old ladies on the train might say.

Ultimately, a gear clicked into place, and he returned to some semblance of spiritual stasis. This must be some sort of statistical effect, he concluded. Most days, after all, don’t have coincidences, but coincidences do happen sometimes. Sometimes, even coincidences involving very odd words from very odd old ladies. And perhaps something about his behavior is being influenced by her, subconsciously making him go places where the coffee is not available … but then again, how does that make sense?

In any case, he would proceed according to his beliefs. He believed thus: Coffee can be bought, and curses weren’t real, old ladies or no old ladies. Maybe not at any individual place, but in New York City, with enough money and time, a man can eventually drink coffee. To solidify these beliefs further in his mind, he nodded furiously, as if agreeing with himself. Then, he got out his phone, and calmly – he certainly kept on telling himself he was calm – ordered a new coffee grinder for delivery off of Amazon.

Kevin then splashed some water on his face, grabbed his bag, and walked out the door. It is unclear whether he heard, as he was leaving, the muted resumption of meowing from Mittens, who, of course, remained unfed.

I will now jump ahead to the actual brunch with Kevin’s friend Peter, the incident that the prosecutor focused on. I will skip over the incident of the Starbucks barista being fired for not only breaking the till but leading the customers on with the promise of coffee – my supplementary submission shows clearly that she was about to be fired for other reasons, nevertheless. I will also skip over the package thief who would later be struck by a car crossing the street after stealing the replacement coffee grinder from Kevin’s stoop. He was going to steal packages anyway, my curse merely redirected him to Kevin’s house. His death was in any case a result of his own decision to jaywalk, and his reincarnation as a raccoon as punishment for package thievery seems to me completely justified. In any case, the prosecutor failed to articulate a valid legal claim for those incidents, and as I said, I will skip past them, and let my lady and lords of the tribunal read about them in my brief.

My lady and lords, as we all know, Kevin did eventually meet his friend Peter for brunch, albeit half an hour late. Even Peter, who was never on time for anything, was already seated when Kevin arrived, at a small table on the restaurant’s cozy rear patio, already sipping his bloody maria, Peter’s new favorite drink, with tequila instead of vodka. And there beside the novel brunch cocktail, in a small mug, not yet touched, there sat hot, steaming, freshly poured black coffee.

Kevin was halfway through greeting Peter, “Hey, good to s–,” when he saw the coffee. Kevin wasn’t a very emotional man, and he certainly wasn’t easily moved, so he wasn’t all that familiar with the feeling he felt upon seeing it. His limbs tingled and he involuntarily sharply gasped for air, and his shoulders and then his legs shook in an all-body shudder. Peter was looking at his phone and didn’t notice.

Kevin stood there speechless for a few seconds as Peter continued to fiddle with something on his phone. “Hey, yeah, good to see you too, man,” he said, somewhat perfunctorily. “Sorry, just give me one –”

“Can I have a sip of your coffee?” Kevin interrupted. The words rushed out of Kevin’s mouth before any filter could catch them or any social grace (of which Kevin somehow had some amount of) could interfere. A young woman from the next table looked up in surprise at Kevin’s abruptness, and then quickly looked away again, pointedly not eavesdropping.

Peter finally looked up from his phone, opened his mouth to talk, thought better, and closed it again. A second later, he found his words. “Um, sorry, I’m still being COVID conscious. You know, the waiter will be right back and then I’m sure you can order your own.”

“Ah,” said Kevin, simply, slightly embarrassed but not so slightly disappointed in his friend’s dire, even soulless lack of charity in this troubling time.

Peter looked up at Kevin and decided everything was normal after all. “Rough day?” he asked.

“You can say that again,” said Kevin. “Two coffee shops were closed.”

Peter smiled. “Well, I’m sure the waiter will be back soon. I do need to sneak off to the restroom for a moment, though.” Peter stood up and walked away from the table, calling back “But no stealing! Just wait for the waiter.”

Kevin sat patiently for a minute before everything happened. And I would like to just take this opportunity to point out that really, Kevin is to blame here. Not only was he doing something morally impermissible, in stealing his friend’s coffee and spreading his spit and germs, but he was showing a shocking lack of patience – the waiter was even then walking towards the table, ready to take this late-comer’s drink order. That, and, Kevin had to know by now, even if he wouldn’t admit it, that the more drastically he tried to fight the curse, the more drastic the consequences would also be – and Kevin was responsible, and is responsible, for all of them.

But mortals never learn anything, my lady and lords. And we can’t take responsibility for their mistakes. For my curse to work, this action could not go unresponded to. And so, as the coffee moved towards his lips, and his heart rose in his chest as he smelled the familiar smell, a fire alarm went off: “Whoo-OOP! Whoo-OOP!”

LET THE RECORD STATE THAT AT THIS POINT THE ENTIRE COURTROOM BEGINS TO GLOW AS THE SHRILL SOUND OF A FIRE ALARM FILLED IT. –GEORGE, CLERK

Kevin’s hand twitched and the coffee flowed back to the bottom of the cup. Should he evacuate? Did it make sense to go into the building, where there might be a fire, rather than just wait out on the patio? While he was considering this, however, the young woman who was not eavesdropping on Kevin rushed past him, fleeing towards the fire, knocking the cup out of Kevin’s hand and shattering it against the ground.

Not one to resist peer pressure, Kevin also ran into the building, which was actually burning, and where the grease fire soon gave all of our mortal characters severe burns. This sent Kevin to the hospital, where he finally learned wisdom, and since has only ordered tea. Perhaps all the mortals involved will learn some manners from this incident.

I do not enjoy mortals, my lady and lords, nor do I sympathize with them. That, however, does not make me a criminal. The curse was, according to our customs, reasonable and proportionate. It was only Kevin’s willful defiance of it that resulted in this mayhem, and therefore, he was the assailant as well as a victim.

My lady and lords, I rest my case.

AT THIS POINT THE DEFENDANT VANISHES. THE JUSTICES DO NOT SEEM SURPRISED OR DISTURBED. HOW COULD I HAVE SO VASTLY MISUNDERSTOOD THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THIS JOB? –GEORGE, CLERK

LADY JUSTICE XYXXYZ: Thank you. We will now take a brief recess.

[END TRANSCRIPTION]

On ADHD Medication

2023-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

Here’s a story; stop me if you’ve heard it before.

There’s a child, an energetic, enthusiastic child, perhaps hard to deal with in some ways, but all around just beautiful. And then they go to a parochial school – or perhaps they just have a rather strict public school teacher. In either case, the authority figure makes it their wicked mission to suppress all the beautiful children’s personalities into identical, well-behaved zombies in the interest of the idol of order. Only our heroic child remains with their own personality, constantly getting in trouble for it but remaining themselves.

In the next stage of the story, the villain makes their move. A teacher, or a principle or a school nurse can’t handle the child, who admittedly can be a handful sometimes. They suggest the child has ADHD, and put the poor child on medication. Now, with the power of the conformity pill, this child’s beautiful flowering of personhood has been bleached to the same level as all the other children, “proper” and “well-behaved” – which is to say, boring. And perhaps that is “just a “shame – or perhaps a heroic parent removed the medication, or some other “happy ending” intervenes in the third act.

In any case, the story is concluded with self-assured tsking against those who would pathologize childhood and good spirits, and maybe against the overdiagnosis of ADHD … or, if the tellers are bold, the entire concept of ADHD. The moral is clear: Keep the zombie drugs away from our amazing, perfectly normal children.

I’ve heard this story many times. I’ve read this story. I’ve heard this story first-hand or second-hand or as rumor, in in-person conversations and on Facebook posts, from parents and family and friends. Sometimes, people tell me some variation of this when I tell them I’ve started taking ADHD medication – an odd choice, given that few of them are really close enough for it to be appropriate for them to try to undermine my medical decisions. I will say, however, that it doesn’t count in my mind when people tell this story about themselves – that is either second-hand from parents’ framing of the narrative, or a different (but rarer than you might think) effect which deserves an entirely different blog post.

But I think that the story as commonly told has some huge gaps. Or rather, that we’re getting the wrong moral out of it by not thinking critically about what’s going on. Obviously, from the fact that I take ADHD medication, I think it is a good thing, often necessary, often useful. In this I include stimulants (even though for unrelated reasons I’m not on stimulants). So of course, I get a different take-away from this story.

This is difficult to explain, because I do know that Adderall and other ADHD medications do sometimes have unwanted personality-altering side effects. I am also not sympathetic with the villain in the story – I am also not a fan of the near-performative overconformity of parochial schools, nor am I enamoured of “strict” or overly “disciplined” environments for children, no matter how their brains work. But in spite of all of these caveats, I still don’t buy into the premise that, in this story, the school used medication to “turn the child into a zombie.”

Here’s the key point: In this story, generally, all the children, medicated or not, are eventually turned into zombies. Normally, whether spelled out or implied, we understand that the school or teacher only has to resort to medication for its zombification for one child, or perhaps a few children. What zombifies the other children? Or, from the school’s perspective, makes them well-behaved? It is not the ADHD medication that makes the unmedicated children behave “like a zombie,” or even the medicated children, but rather some form of social pressure.

So why doesn’t the social pressure work on the protagonist of the story without medication? I do think if they act differently than all the other children without ADHD medication, and then the same as the other children with ADHD medication, that probably means they do have ADHD. And if there’s so much social pressure on these children that all the other ones behave in an orderly fashion, and the ADHD child does not, that probably really is bad for the ADHD child. They’re probably not enjoying their flowery personality in such an environment. They certainly still get all the downsides of the social pressure – without the upside of even having the ability to conform to it.

See, most children are capable of behaving at various levels of enthusiasm and mutedness, chaos and orderliness. The other children in the class know that, in this school, they are expected to behave a certain way. The ADHD child surely also knows that, but they find that they cannot. Their unmedicated behavior isn’t some flowering of their true self or rebellion in favor of being human – it’s a sign that they can’t do something the other children can. It’s a sign of their disability.

The fact that the child’s behavior changes with the medication takes on a new interpretation in this context. The medication doesn’t turn the child into a zombie; it gives the child self-control. In the social siutuation of a “strict” school, the child chooses to use that self-control to conform and act as a “zombie” – for the same reason the other children are conforming.

Here’s where that matters: Imagine what the child could do with that medication, and that improved self-control, in another environment! ADHD isn’t just about whether a child is frustrating to overly strict teachers – that’s just one outward effect, and a relatively minor one at that. In another environment, they will be able to show their personality (like other kids would), but will also be able to use that self-control to accomplish their goals. When they’re older, they’ll be able to finish larger projects, persue their interests, and live more satisfying lives, because far from being overblown or made up, ADHD is a serious disorder that affects much more than the ability of children to become obedient in service to strict adults.

And, of course, if left untreated, many children with ADHD will have difficulty actually behaving well even in a non-strict environment. If a school is so strict it makes the children into conformist zombies, it has gone too far, but children do in fact need some level of discipline, to prevent them from doing harm to themselves and to others. In many cases, the medication not only helps the children conform to overly strict authority figures, but also to reasonable ones, a goal we should all be on board with.

So, if ADHD medication is called for, for yourself or for your children, please don’t avoid it because of this trope.

Now, I’m not a doctor, and I don’t mean to say that you shouldn’t be careful with medication. Zombie-like feeling and behavior can indeed be a sign of bad dosage or a bad medication match. But if by “zombie” you mean what the school would call “good behavior,” there is another, perhaps even more likely explanation: that the social pressures were such that any child who could behave like that would, and now the ADHD child can.

And here’s one way I know something about this: Because I had similar concerns when I started medication myself, as an adult. I asked my friends to pay careful attention to my personality, and whether anything about it changed. I was very concerned about inadvertant personality changes, and wanted my friends to pay special attention to that – while I paid attention to it in myself as well.

The dreaded personality changes never came. But some non-dreaded personality changes did come, with the increased self-control. I became less anxious, and less likely to randomly demand that my friends explain to me how they don’t hate me. And as I gradually increased the dosage – as you have to do with Strattera – I noticed other changes, changes that might have potentially been seen by some as negative or concerning, but which from an internal perspective were clearly positive.

What do I mean by this? Let me tell you what sort of changes I’m talking about. For example, I’ve been less outgoing. I’ve been less outgoing in the literal sense of going out less, and also in the sense of spending more of my at-home time alone, rather than on the phone. But this isn’t because I enjoy those things less; rather, it’s because I’m enjoying my alone time more. It’s because I’m better able to leverage my planning and self-control skills towards goals, goals like saving money and not eating too much.

See, I have historically had so much trouble doing things at home on my own. I have a lot of things I’d love to do more of, things that I clearly know how to do and can do, but which I only get myself started on if other people are around. Leveraging the presence of other people is a common ADHD coping technique known as “body doubling,” and it is one of many techniques to do the types of tasks which ADHD makes difficult – which at some level, is most tasks.

So before I went on medication I would spend as much time out and about as possible. Need to do work? Go to the coffee shop. Need to read a book? Go to the bar. Need to figure out some thoughts? Discuss them with someone. Need to clean my house? Invite someone over to clean it, or even just to hang out with me while I clean it – that works too, and makes me feel a little less bad. I could do with just the encouragement, similar to a personal trainer who may be there more to nag you into exercising than actually educate you about it in any way.

But now I’m medicated, and I’ve finally found a dosage that works for me. It’s not 100% better, of course, but it’s a vast improvement. And that means I’m suddenly getting work done at home. That means I’m occasionally even cleaning my own house. That means that I’m suddenly actually getting use out of my alone time – and so I am taking much more of it.

But sometimes, I worry that this may be a personality change, and a bad one at that. Am I losing my charm? My outgoing nature? I briefly get trapped by the narrative above, which I have heard so many times, and I think, “Oh no! My ADHD medication has made me boring.” But then I realize I could, if I so chose, go out as much as I used to. It’s just that the other options got better. The medication is just helping me.

And I am so grateful for it. Before, it was like I had a menu of fun things I could do for no cost in terms of extreme effort (basically all social), and also a menu of fun things that I’d theoretically like to be able to do, but would be so difficult to wrangle myself into doing them that they were out of the question, beyond special occasions or situations where other people were around. Making myself clean or even practice piano had become analogous to going to a nice restaurant very occasionally to treat yourself. I had to build my day-to-day life out of the easy tasks, which was mostly the social tasks – not exactly fun, and confusing for the people around me.

But now, the whole menu of activities is available to me all the time – or at least more of it. The harder tasks still take some wrangling, but the wrangling is way easier. That means I stay in more, and there’s probably other changes in my personality that in isolation seem negative, both my apparent personality and the way I approach things. But these changes are usually because I can actually accomplish my goals.

And so, I am deeply grateful for my medication, and that is why I am so sad when ill-thought out narratives perpetuate stigma against medication, especially for children who can’t make their own medication decisions. The effects of ADHD medication can be wide-ranging and complicated, so it’s important to think critically in evaluating them. Anti-medication narratives are often emotionally compelling but ultimately oversimplified, ignoring alternative explanations for what happens. So it’s important to actually think them through, and pull them apart.

Hopefully reading this has provided some practice doing so.

Fiction Review: The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet

2023-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

I already enjoyed the Monk and Robot series by Becky Chambers (A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy). It’s now one of my favorite books. so I was excited to also read her earlier work, the Wayfarer series, starting with The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and it did not disappoint me.

Both these series are science fiction. While Monk and Robot is solarpunk, a relatively new sub-genre focused on imagining a world with major environmental (and economic) problems solved, the Wayfarer series much more reminds me of the kind of science fiction I used to read as a kid. While it’s described as space opera, it reminds me more of Heinlein or Arthur C. Clarke or even Niven, who are considered hard sci fi. I’m not sure whether this is because it focuses less on accuracy and logic than those other authors, or if it is because it does not do so at the expense of character development, or perhaps because it is written by a woman.

Nevertheless, in contrast the classic “space opera” clichés, it does not focus on a war (though war is involved). In general, the stakes are far lower than that, involving ordinary people with ordinary jobs, interacting with and influencing events that affect the entire fictional universe in relatively minor ways – outsized for a completely normal person, but not “saving the world” or “overthrowing the evil empire” or other typical space opera fare.

The aliens and the civilization in general is also a lot more developed than typical space opera, where aliens are typically humans with one twist each who live in normal human societies. Instead, it has the full “hard sci fi” range of alien eccentricities, full of philosophical exploration of how xenobiology might end up being and an intricate inter-species galactic social balance.

In fact, not only is our trusty space ship crew made up of regular people just trying to eke out a living, but humans in general are just a regular species, side stepping tropes where humans are the best species or the most creative – or the most violent or the most evil. Our space crew isn’t even entirely human (though it mostly is), and we get a fair amount of explicit alien perspective.

Instead of humans, the privileged species that dominates galactic society, the equivalent of the colonizing (or post-colonizing but still quite privileged) white people in our world, are aliens who we would find quite repugnant, but who until recently dominated large swaths of the galaxy by force. Other species, including humans, try to emulate their ways and are proud to learn their prestigious language. Meanwhile, the lingua franca is not a human language, but most humans are forced to learn it.

This means that our mostly-human and human-led crew are normal not-particularly-privileged people in a normal not-particularly-privileged species. The sense of normalcy and “everyday folks” is refreshing in a genre normally dominated by the powerful and those who become or fight the powerful, and again, does not strike me as within the stereotype of “space opera.”

It does in some ways remind me of Serenity, partially because our trusty crew – with one special perspective character, their newest member, who is decidedly not a protagonist but merely a window into an ensemble cast – take on various jobs to make a living, and the storytelling takes the form of episodic vignettes that take place in the context of these jobs. While there is an overarching, overall plot, it is more like the season plot of an episodic TV show than the plot of a more tightly-woven novel. If anything, it could use a little more development, as the climax ends up feeling a bit abrupt.

The themes are perhaps another reason why it’s not considered hard sci fi even though it probably should be. Rather than an old man trying to evangelize libertarianism or some other weird form of conservatism (looking at you, Heinlein, though others are guilty) or explain how humanity will become a transcendant orgy hive mind (shockingly many Arthur C. Clarke books, and also Heinlein), Becky Chambers explores the meaning of family … and what to do with family members or colleagues who are obnoxious but indispensable. It explores issues like medical consent, or when is it okay to ally with another group, as opposed to when that is too risky.

All in all, I think it’s a good thing to have more diversity in science fiction than what I grew up with, namely a weirdly specific flavor of stodgy conservative white men – a flavor, to be clear, even more specific than that combination of adjectives alone would imply. It’s good to have that diversity even if some of that perspective confuses reviewers and marketers about what genre a book is in. I as my current self greatly enjoyed it, and I think my teenage self would have too, and there’s something uplifting about that concurrence.

Debt Ceiling, Redux

2023-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

So you might or might not be aware about the debt ceiling argument currently taking place in the US.

I’ve already written about this, but President Biden for some reason didn’t listen to me (perhaps because he doesn’t read my blog – which is disappointing). Other, more famous people have written about it too,, but the President insists on pretending he has to make a deal with the Republicans.

So, to catch everyone up, here’s how this all works.

Congress passes a budget every year. This budget requires the President (and the bureaucracy he presides over) to spend money on various programs. Not “allows,” to be clear, but requires – in the vast majority of situations, the President does not have the discretion to not spend the money. The spending is required by law.

The President (or specifically, the Treasury Department) is also required to pay the US debt as it comes due. This is also required by law, and specifically, this obligation is enshrined constitutionally in the 14th amendment, section 4, which was added to the US Constitution shortly after our Civil War.

That money to do these things typically will come from two places: taxes, and debt auctions. The IRS can only collect so many taxes. But the treasury can do debt auctions without any practical limitations.

However, we are now in a situation where the treasury is hitting a boundary where they supposedly cannot do debt auctions anymore, because there is also a law that purports to limit the total outstanding amount of debt the US has: the debt ceiling.

Now, I’m tempted to clarify that government debt is not like household debt, that it’s not really very much like a debt at all. There is no reason economically to have a debt ceiling. Too much government spending or not enough taxes can in some situations cause inflation, but it’s more complicated than any measure of how much debt there is.

But that’s actually beside the point here, because we can get to the same conclusion without it, which is that the laws as they stand force the administration into a contradictory position. The President – or rather, the Treasury – has legal obligation to spend money on the budget and on paying the debt. The Treasury cannot collect more in taxes than it currently is, not without changing the laws. So it has a legal obligation to issue more debt to pay the current debt, from the budget and constitution. And from the debt ceiling, it has a legal obligation not to issue more debt.

The Treasury legally must issue more debt. The Treasury legally must not issue more debt. The two laws contradict. Which wins?

Well, if there is any legal option to make the contradiction go away, the Treasury is bound to try them. These take the form of issuing debt that, for whatever reason, doesn’t count toward the debt ceiling. For example, the Treasury could mint a $1,000,000,000,000 platinum coin. Coins are technically a form of debt, owed by the US Treasury to whoever holds the coin, but (in what is apparently an oversight) they do not count towards the debt ceiling. It’s an absurd loophole, but legally, the situation the Treasury is in otherwise is as absurd.

Or, less meme-like but equally useful, they could issue $0 face value bonds, which again would not count toward the debt ceiling.

To be clear, I’m not saying the Treasury could consider doing these things. I’m saying that the Treasury must do these things if the alternative is default, that it is legally and even constitutionally obligated to. I’m saying that if President Biden doesn’t choose one of those things, he is in violation of his oath of office, and not doing his job.

President Biden, however, and his treasury secretary, have ruled out doing those things. One hopes that they are lying rather than planning on betraying their country and its Constitution. They say that there is not time (this seems false), or specifically time to get it past the courts – which is not how I think courts work. How courts work is you do it, and then maybe courts yell at you. But given that President Biden is obligated to do one of these things, it seems pretty clear to me that doing it is better than not doing it.

The Biden administration argues that these things are unprecedented. But: You know what else is unprecedented, but actually clearly illegal? Default. It seems that President Biden would prefer if some deal is reached, but if a deal is not, he should be willing to do the legal unprecedented thing instead of the illegal unprecedented thing.

But let’s imagine he’s right. Imagine that these special debts for some reason were off the table. Then we’re back to the contradiction. The Treasury is obligated (by the budget and by the constitution) to create more debt, and forbidden (by the debt ceiling) to create more debt.

Certainly, the Constitution trumps the debt ceiling, at least to the extent that government spending is to pay existing debt. Perhaps it is only lawful to do so for that reason, and not to pay normal budgetary outlays, and we should do a normal government shut-down. That is what the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board argues.

But given that the budget is not generally seen to be discretionary, and the debt ceiling will be violated either way, this doesn’t hold water for me. Once you’re past the debt ceiling, in my mind, you’re past it. Once the debt ceiling gets in the way of the treasury paying existing debt, I think it’s entirely blasted away as unconstitutional. But even as a matter of statutory interpretation, the budget was passed more recently than the debt ceiling, is more specific, and doesn’t contain an exception accommodating it.

This is the argument the President and media refer to as “invoking the 14th amendment.” They all talk about it, again, as if it’s something the President may do, rather than what the President must do, what he is legally and morally obligated to do as part of the President’s Constitutional duties to the American people, under his oath of office.

Instead, for whatever reason, the President and the media are all talking as if the only way to avoid default is with a deal. They’re talking as if the debt ceiling actually did what the Republicans claim it does, that it causes a default when the ceiling is reached.

In my mind, this is already a violation of the President’s oath of office. This is a concession to the powerful forces, like the former President Donald Trump, that would like nothing more than to see our constitutional order destroyed, who tried to destroy it only a few short years ago. President Trump has said that he wants default, an unconstitutional outcome, and by conceding that it is even legally possible for that to happen, President Biden has failed to defend the constitution against that manifest insurrectionist.

And the media who talk about the 14th amendment as an unprecedented option, as if it is more tenuous than default, which is also unprecedented, are also abetting enemies of the constitution, hopefully merely out of confusion.

I respect Ezra Klein, but I disagree with his article. The Supreme Court may do what it wants, and they might be majority Republican appointees, but they’re not majority Trumpers.

But more importantly, default is even less of a debt ceiling plan. If no deal is reached, President Biden has no alternative. The Supreme Court may later decide to ruin the country, but that doesn’t mean the President can’t run it correctly in the meantime.

Just because it’s called “default” doesn’t mean we’re allowed to do it if the other options are bad, by default. It doesn’t mean that at all.

Of course, this might all be a negotiating stance. What all these people might actually be saying is that a deal with Republicans is better than a situation where one of these “untested” option is used. I hope – I really truly hope – that they are more or less lying, that if it comes to it, they’ll be in favor of minting the coin or ignoring the debt ceiling rather than actually letting a default happen. But it upsets me, disgusts me, that we’re making a deal with people who do not care about fiscal policy on the basis of fear of an outcome that is legally impermissible because of the threat of an unconstitutional law.

But if so, President Biden should not lie. If the Treasury is secretly studying other options, they should instead do it openly. He should have started all of this by asking for a law clarifying the debt ceiling is unconstitutional and being repealed, but shrug his shoulders if he doesn’t get one. The opposition in this case does not deserve the respect they are currently being given, led by their pro-default insurrectionist-in-chief, for whom the debt ceiling was raised three times.

And if you believe, genuinely, that the US needs to have a conversation about fiscal policy, the time to have that conversation is when passing the budget, not randomly according to an unconstitutional debt ceiling.

Voice is Hard

2023-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

I was reading my ADHD blog post today, considering whether to send it to a friend, and it was surprisingly hard for me to bring myself to. I realized I was embarrassed at the voice, the phrasing, the lack of beauty in the individual words, all of which is something I paid relatively little attention to before – and which my friend, who also writes, will definitely notice.

It’s something I’ve paid less attention to than I should. “Writing is thinking” is my philosophy, and I have tons of thoughts that I know other people are interested in. Shouldn’t the structure of the thoughts, both the logical structure and the order in which they’re presented, be more important than voice? And I still believe they are – and yet voice does still matter.

I know this deficit has frustrated many of my writing friends. They know that when it comes to it, I can produce English with good voice, with solid and compelling rhetoric even. They know that because when I talk, especially when I’m passionate about a topic, or excited about the conversation, it comes out much smoother than when I write, much more poetic. How can this be, when I have more time to plan writing? How have I not leveraged my deeply cultivated conversational skills to be a better writer? How do these fluent spoken conversations and stilted written phrasings exist in the same person?

Perhaps it’s because when I’m writing, I’m using all of this extra planning ability for something besides voice, perhaps even contradictory to it. But am I even achieving … whatever this other thing is? Or am I simply overbaking all my statements with my focus on clarity and good structure, with no upside, letting my sentences sit for too long under my skeptical eye until they’re purified not only of any confusion and complexity but also any character?

Whatever the problem, my speaking remains unaffected. I could leverage this. There are so many YouTubers, so many podcasters… I might be better off doing one of those things, leaning on my natural (or at least far better cultivated) conversational tone, or my natural instructional, professorial voice, rather than my artificial, too in-the-head, downright overbaked writing style.

Or maybe I should just bite the bullet and do what multiple people have now recommended: the awfully intimidating and high-executive-function task of figuring out a sound recording workflow, where I speak what I want to write, and then listen and type it up. This might just work, as long as I’m okay with more organizational complexity, more phases of work in between outline and draft, and even more steps before a project can finally be deemed finished – if such a state is ever possible.

In any case, I’m committed to writing. I’m committed to continuing this blog, writing fiction, and finishing other on-going (secret!) writing projects. Ideally, I wouldn’t have to talk first and then write. Ideally, I could just sit down and words would flow through my fingers as naturally and as artfully as they come out of my mouth.

I don’t have an easy solution. I’ll continue to pay attention, both to my voice and other people’s, and read advice – and I even plan on doing the voice-recording thing at some point, if only just to try it. But most importantly of all, I think I just need a ton of more practice, more low-stakes writing, and simply much more raw volume.

To this end, I’ve decided to commit to writing at least one writing prompt from 300 Writing Prompts daily, a journaling prompt book given to me a while ago by a dear friend. When I first got this book, I was confused, because the prompts in there don’t seem designed to lead to stories or writing ideas. But for raw writing practice, they’ll be perfect. And perhaps by communicating in yet another medium – the hand-written word, instead of the spoken or the typed – I will be able to develop more fluidity in all of the media through which words can be delivered.

Treat Tolkien's World Like Other Mythologies

2023-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

Tolkien was trying to make a new mythology, a new set of deeply resonant stories, for modern (especially English) culture, and he succeeded. He transformed fantasy, and founded the concept of high fantasy. His detailed legendarium (as his mythology is called) is a masterpiece of world-building, with deep symbolism and emotional complexity, a mythology with arguably more depth and room to explore than many ancient ones. Tolkien scholars work full-time to study it, and many more people draw from it explicitly and implicitly for their own art, in D&D and other more modern fantasy settings. Especially with his near-human species, his concepts of hobbits (off-brand as halflings) and elves (distinct from previous iterations) have deeply resonated with many people.

And yet, relatively few of the works from his legendarium are actually that enjoyable (or even feasible) to read. Only the works published in his lifetime, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, are readable as literature by modern audiences – and many modern readers even struggle to get through the reams of poetry and milieu-building that make up The Lord of the Rings, with many fans only familiar with the much more digestible Peter Jackson movies.

As for the posthumously published works, even though they more fully flesh out his beautiful and intricate imagined history – detailing, for example, the character of the elves, the creation of that world – they are extraordinarily dense and heavy reading. The Silmarillion has famously been compared by many readers to the Old Testament, and this was definitely meant as an insult – although I personally am a huge fan of the Hebrew Bible as literature, this is a large part of why my friends consider me such an eccentric.

It’s easy to understand why. The Silmarillion was composed in a remarkably similar process to how historical-critical scholars say the Hebrew Bible was composed. That is to say, both were composed after the fact, by a redactor. For both, this redactor stitched together somewhat-contradictory stories in their rudimentary form into a consistent order, with minimal editing and no attempt at expansion. Many of the original sources read as synopses, and the only consistency of voice is self-conscious archaism and reverence.

And the more recent publications are worse, and even more like modern editions of ancient texts. Beren and Luthien is stitched together between poetry and prose, and as full of footnotes as many “study Bibles” I’ve seen. This is beautiful work – or at least the source material is. But rather than presented in a form that can be enjoyed, it is only presented in a form that can be studied. It is treated like we treat the literature of an ancient civilization (as C.S. Lewis complained about in his Introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation), rather than the writing of someone who died within living memory and whose works are now a multi-billion dollar media franchise.

And that’s a damn shame, because the world that Tolkien created is beautiful, and the stories that he grew within it are beautiful, and deserves a presentation, a literary realization, as beautiful as the underlying concepts. You shouldn’t have to be the type of nerd who is intrinsically driven to read through tedious notes to see the underlying beauty that is the Tolkien legendarium – the First and Second Ages of Middle Earth deserve to be portrayed through engaging, well-written literature, like the end of the Third Age is in The Lord of the Rings, rather than a study Bible that can only be read by those whose devotion to Tolkien borders on religious – the hyper-nerds (and I number myself among them) whose very existence testify to how great the ideas are.

Unfortunately, too many Tolkien hyper-nerds feel that their ability to access this is a compliment towards them – that it’s the reader’s fault for not liking or being able to get through The Silmarillion, for not being dedicated enough. But this attitude – in addition to being arrogant, ableist, patronizing, and damaging to the reputation of Tolkien fans as a whole – is simply not worthy of the beautiful world that Tolkien built. Tolkien was trying to craft this world into publishable books.

That world should be accessible to as many people as possible, not only some “elites” who are willing to go footnote-diving. If that world is so beautiful that it inspires some people to do incredible feats of research to try to understand it, it is beautiful enough that it should also be shown to those who (quite reasonably) don’t have the time or energy for such activities.

This is a solvable problem – in fact, many other literary franchises have solved it handily: The franchise should be opened up to collaborators. There would be no shortage of talent: Tolkien’s work is well-loved within the genre, even foundational. Many fantasy authors – top-tier ones – would consider it a great honor to be able to write within Tolkien’s legendarium in an authorized fashion.

But for it to work, the Tolkien estate would have to allow those collaborators to do their job. We have to allow them to question and add complexity to Tolkien’s themes, to explore some of the awkward components (like the moral status of the orcs, or questions of races of men and apparent races of elves) at their own discretion. They have to be allowed to make adjustments to the canon – something Tolkien would’ve done freely himself.

Perhaps it would be made easier if there was no attempt to keep the extended canon strictly consistent, if they rejected that as a possible goal from the outset. Some rules and negotiation will doubtless be necessary, but complete alignment to canon and literary excellence are fundamentally incompatible goals – and literary excellence the more important one.

Because of course, these works are literally not scripture, or ancient texts. They are modern fiction, and like many works of fiction they deserve to be taken seriously – but not religiously. Those who do take it religiously are not the best company to keep.

But even if they were ancient texts, allowing an open, logically fluid canon would be appropriate. After all, Tolkien was trying to build a modern mythology – a legendarium – and ancient mythologies are contradictions and fanfic the whole way down. Remember Achilles' Heel? It seems a core part of the mythos. But not only are there multiple versions of that story that disagree on how the rest of him was made invulnerable, it also doesn’t even appear in the Iliad which considers him as vulnerable as any mortal. There are even versions of Achilles' story where he dies a normal death being shot in the back.

Throughout antiquity, every time a new poet or playwright would set a Greek myth to writing, they’d put their own spin on it. When modern writers do the same, they’re not ignoring or changing or misrepresenting Greek mythology, but just continuing the same pattern.

This is nothing against Tolkien scholarship, and trying to study his mind and the original intent behind the legendarium – that is also a good thing. But perhaps that scholarship would be more useful if it had an outlet in the creation of new works.

The TV Show

Of course, so far I’ve avoided the elephant in the room – the new Rings of Power TV shows. So I will address that now.

I acknowledge many of the problems with them. I was particularly disappointed by the “elves taking our ~~jobs~~ trades” concept. Rather than express the original, interesting reasons that men had become bigoted against elves in Númenor – jealousy of Elvish immortality and closeness to the gods – they fell back on a cheap political reference. I’m OK with changing the canon, but it doesn’t work. Elves are the colonial power, the more privileged species, and “taking our jobs” is generally a line that is used by the more privileged against the less privileged. It makes no thematic sense, and I have to simply pretend they said something else in order to keep watching the show.

(Diverse casting is, to be clear, not a problem with them. It’s a fantasy world, and they’re actors. Literally all of the elves are also – gasp! – depicted by non-elvish actors. It’s unfortunate that that conversation took up well-needed space for better conversations about the show.)

But that’s the risk of opening the canon up, and I accept it. I did enjoy Rings of Power a lot, just for depicting on screen many places and events that were emotionally resonant for me. I am happy it was made, flaws and all – while still not really counting it as “canon” in my mind. I hope they recover from many of their flaws, and I hope more work like it is done.

Because more important than “getting everything right,” it presented this world in a way that many of my friends could enjoy it. Basically none of my friends would be willing to read The Silmarillion just because they would enjoy discussing it with me (or for any reason at all). But many of my friends watched the show, and enjoyed it, and those discussions have been great.

Now, imagine if more such works were made, and by established fantasy greats!

The Debt Ceiling Is Unconstitutional, and Biden Should Just Say So

2023-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

US Constitution, 14th Amendment, Section 4

The debt ceiling is unconstitutional. We’ve let the Republicans play their games for long enough, in the interest of “stability of the economy” and a general fear of rocking the boat, but that time is over now. President Biden should simply announce that his administration will not follow this brazenly unconstituional law, because unconstitutional is literally what it is, and every Congressperson who wants to use it as leverage is in flagrant violation of their oath of office.

Often, when people say something is unconstitutional, they mean they don’t like it, or that a Supreme Court decision they agree with has ruled it that way, or one that is established deeply in precedent. In this situation, however, it’s literally in the text of the US Constitution, a document that we in the US are raised to treat as a sacred.

Let me explain.

Congress has given the President and his administration three sets of instructions, three policies, three laws:

The budget: To spend X amount.
The tax code: To tax Y amount.
The debt ceiling: To not go over Z amount of debt.

None of these are optional. President Biden may not unilaterally cut spending. He certainly may not unilaterally raise taxes. And so, in our current situation, where we have reached the ceiling, the only way to follow these instructions from Congress, to spend the money he is obligated to spend with the tax money he is allowed to collect, is to default on payments on debt.

This is how the debt ceiling is generally interpreted, as a legal requirement to default, coming from Congress. That is the only interpretation that makes sense from the perspective of the House Republicans who are trying to use this as leverage in a negotiation.

But Congress isn’t allowed to require that. It’s literally unconstitutional.

I’m not the only person who thinks so. Here’s a sampling of other articles making the same point, which comes from sources I just happen to have been reading. The first most matches my perspective:

Of course, the Constitution is only as good as people actually paying attention to it. Republicans have recently demonstrated repeatedly that their respect for it is only lip service, that they actually despise the document.

So if you don’t care about the Constitution, care about the economy – the US economy and the world economy. Care about the stability of the US dollar. A default would destroy faith in this country, just as the authors of the 14th amendment feared. It would result in lawsuits that would likely invalidate the debt ceiling anyway in the courts – after the massive economic damage has already been done. The damage would be unimaginable: We literally have never done something so stupid before, and have no idea what would happen to the US’s position in the world, or to the US dollar.

If you’re genuinely worried about the Federal government overspending, this is not an appropriate forum to express your worries. There already is a process for that, and it’s called the budget.

Complexities of Defining ADHD

2023-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

ADHD is a controversial topic, and it’s never been more relevant. Diagnoses are soaring right now, driven up by a variety of interacting forces. Open discussion about ADHD – and the related general concept of “neurodiversity” – has been exploding on the Internet. And recently, there’s been a very unfortunate Adderall shortage.

So I wanted to take an opportunity to share some thoughts about it. I would say that I was taking this opportunity to clear things up, but unfortunately, that might not be possible. The reality is a really muddy situation, and many people’s mental models – including many professionals’ – are oversimplifications.

This is unfortunate because ADHD is an important issue, not just in childhood, but in adulthood as well. It is prevalent: according to one study, it affects 4.4% of adults in the US, and according to another, 2.8% of adults globally (numbers can vary greatly, for reasons we’ll discuss). ADHD can, especially if untreated, cause severe adverse life outcomes, including up to a 13 year decrease in life expectancy. Treatment for ADHD – especially stimulant medications – is very effective, and access to it is an urgent matter for those who need it.

Aside: ADHD: A Misnomer

There are a lot of misconceptions about it that cause people to think ADHD is less severe than it actually is, many to do with the name. ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, is named for the two traits that bother parents and teachers the most when they manifest in children: inattention and hyperactivity. While they are important in a classroom or disciplinary setting, they are not the actual core symptoms, or the symptoms that cause people with ADHD – especially adults but also children – the most trouble. And I will focus on adults with ADHD in this post, because I am an adult with ADHD.

So what are the actual core symptoms? Dr. Russell Barkley, one of the leading experts on ADHD, considers ADHD to be a misnomer. He summarizes it instead as an “Executive Function Deficit Disorder” because its core symptom is difficulty with executive functions, which he lists and explains in more detail in this article, essential reading to understanding ADHD better.

In a terminological distinction of questionable value, ADHD is considered a neurodevelopmental disorder like dyslexia or autism, which are considered distinct from a mental illness like anxiety or depression. Disorders of both categories are documented in the DSM, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. ADHD, while not itself considered a form of mental illness, does lead to an increased likelihood of developing a mental illness.

ADHD is a serious and relatively prevalent condition in adults, so it’s fortunate that such effective treatments exist, and that it has been able to be studied as well as it has been. Unfortunately, its causes are poorly understood, and even defining what ADHD is or what it means for someone to have ADHD can be surprisingly difficult.

In this post, I intend to explain why ADHD is so difficult to define, and explore some of the consequences of that difficulty.

Competing Approaches to Defining ADHD

Let me start with an example: Trauma, especially Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD), can have a lot of the same symptoms as ADHD. It can cause difficulty with executive function, which is the core symptom of ADHD. Specifically, it can cause trouble staying on task, keeping track of responsibilities and physical objects, and restlessness – all classic ADHD symptoms.

But how to think of that is something of a philosophical question: Is ADHD a pattern of symptoms with common coping skills and treatments? In that case, we could say that CPTSD can cause ADHD. Or is ADHD an attempt to figure out an underlying specific brain disorder? In that case, we wouldn’t want to say that trauma “causes ADHD.”

This question comes up surprisingly often; this connection between CPTSD and ADHD is just one example. It is a surprisingly nuanced question, and I’ve seen ADHD (and its connection to CPTSD) framed both ways by reliable sources. I don’t think it necessarily has a clear answer. At a certain point, it can feel like “arguing over semantics.” But it is important, because we need some way of categorizing and discussing people’s brains, if only to provide treatment.

In practice, the answer may depend on context. For a therapist teaching coping skills, it might be easier to think about it as “trauma causes ADHD,” and then teach the ADHD coping skills. For a psychiatrist, the underlying causes may (or may not) be more relevant, depending on how much it influences the effectiveness of various medications; treating the CPTSD with typical CPTSD medications (such as anti-depressants or mood stabilizers) might (or might not) be a better way of treating the ADHD-like symptoms, rather than prescribing an ADHD medication like Adderall.

Intuitively, it seems obvious: Split them up. We like to think of ADHD as a neat and tidy disorder, one that you’re born with, one that’s genetic. CPTSD is acquired, and has drastically different causes than a typical ADHD case. It seems obvious that different causes should mean different disorders. And if some of the same techniques are helpful, therapists can think of the ADHD traits caused by CPTSD as just that: “ADHD traits.” And if some of the same medications are helpful, we can just say something along the lines of “in some cases ADHD medications can help with CPTSD.”

But it’s harder than you might think to fully avoid basing the definition on the symptoms. For all the definitions in the world, in practice “people with ADHD” means “people diagnosed with ADHD” – and ADHD is diagnosed based on the symptoms. While research into the causes and underlying neurological mechanisms have made great strides, the best diagnostic tools we have don’t involve brain scans or genetic tests. Instead, you have to use some combination of surveying and interviewing the patient, surveying or interviewing people the patient knows, or doing cognitive tests to see if the patient is in fact impaired in those areas of cognition that ADHD makes more difficult.

All of these involve investigating symptoms, not causes. And ADHD diagnosis also requires that these symptoms actually cause problems. To quote the standard DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), an ADHD diagnosis has this absolute criterion:

D. There is clear evidence that the symptoms interfere with, or reduce the quality of, social, academic, or occupational functioning.

This all paints a picture of a definition – or at least a diagnostic process – based on the symptoms. And yet, the DSM also includes a criterion that points in the direction of ADHD being a discrete disorder, rather than a collection of symptoms:

E. The symptoms do not occur exclusively during the course of schizophrenia or another psychotic disorder and are not better explained by another mental disorder (e.g., mood disorder, anxiety disorder, dissociative disorder, personality disorder, substance intoxication or withdrawal).

This would be more straight-forward if ADHD had a known, specific cause. If there were a single known mutation that caused ADHD – like the ones known to cause Down syndrome or Fragile X syndrome – it would be clear: you would either have ADHD or you don’t, based on whether you had that genetic abnormality.

But though there has been some research on the genetics of ADHD, it is far from definitive or conclusive. In fact, ADHD isn’t even 100% determined by genetics. Instead, it has an estimated heritability of 77-88%, which is a measure of how likely it is for a person with ADHD’s identical twin to also have ADHD, and related to how likely it is for their other relatives to have it.

And to be clear, heritability is difficult to study (and thus the wide range): It’s hard to control genetic factors from environmental ones, when you necessarily have to consider people who are blood-related to each other. Furthermore, this doesn’t mean that one “ADHD gene” represents all of this heritability – there likely are many different genes lumped in there, all causing (potentially different flavors of) ADHD, with different levels of heritability that then work out to a weighted average of 77-88%. And sometimes, related people might both have ADHD traits by coincidence, and that’s also hard to control for: How easy is it for a study to verify that the specific executive function deficits experienced by these relatives are similar?

Non-genetic risk factors also abound: people born prematurely are twice to three times as likely to develop ADHD. Modern ADHD research got its start with yet another risk factor: children recovering from Spanish Flu started having drastic behavioral shifts, that were then called “Minimal Brain Damage” or “Minimal Brain Dysfunction,” which was ultimately renamed ADHD. This has come to more public attention recently due to concerns with long COVID. (That article contains quotes from Russell Barkley, the leading expert on ADHD mentioned above when discussing executive functions.)

Given this diversity of causes, and our substantial but still incomplete understanding of the neurological mechanisms, do we have the knowledge necessary to think of ADHD as a disorder of symptoms, rather than a list of symptoms that tend to correlate with each other? I am far from the first person to consider this; some have even gone as far to propose that the word “disorder” be removed from the acronym as misleading.

So, returning to the CPTSD example, perhaps it makes more sense to add one more possible cause. Perhaps saying that CPTSD can cause ADHD traits is equivalent to saying that CPTSD causes ADHD, because “ADHD traits” is all the traction we have on this disorder.

Aside: Obligatory Caveat

I say “perhaps” for a reason. One reason not to would be if there were discernible differences, especially in treatment, between ADHD as caused by CPTSD, and other cases: for example, differences in effective medication.

And about medication I offer no opinion. I’m not a psychiatrist, nor am I any sort of expert on CPTSD – that is not the cause of my ADHD, personally. It’s a very complicated issue, especially because the causal arrow might point both directions, which is to say that recent studies have shown that not only can CPTSD cause ADHD traits, but ADHD is a risk factor in developing CPTSD. For any individual case, it may not be clear which came first.

As you can see, ADHD is not a simple, tidy disorder at all (and neither is CPTSD) and that, more than any particular position, is what I want you as a reader to take away from this.

Of course, we might someday discover a crystal-clear ADHD gene, or perhaps a couple of them. This would mean essentially that we were discovering new disorders, disorders that were previously all lumped under the umbrella label of ADHD. Once this happens, we’d have to decide as a society what to do to realign our labels.

And how to realign the labels will depend on the nature of the discovery. Perhaps one gene would cover the majority of people with ADHD, and therefore it might keep the name, with a new, objective, genetic test. The others would be considered “ADHD-like.” Or perhaps, a smaller group of patients would be covered under a narrower disorder, and then we would say things like “this used to be considered a type of ADHD, but now we know better.”

This may seem far-fetched, but it has already happened with autism. Similarly to ADHD, autism is primarily diagnosed based on symptoms. But there are genetic disorders, like Fragile X and especially Rett syndrome with substantial overlap in symptoms to autism. Rett syndrome in particular used to be categorized alongside autism in the DSM, as a “pervasive developmental disorder” alongside Asperger syndrome and autism proper – basically as one of several parts of the “autism spectrum.” But when its genetic and neurological mechanisms were discovered, it was removed from that section, and from the DSM entirely.

Perhaps, as more and more discrete causes of autism are discovered, this will happen more and more. Autism is currently a very large umbrella, appropriately termed a “spectrum,” covering profoundly disabled adults who cannot take care of themselves, and mostly functional adults who simply exhibit some levels of social and executive function difficulty.

Aside: Are disorders with multiple causes “real”?

One popular conclusion to draw from the muddied and ill-understood causes of ADHD is that ADHD is not real. One example of this is the fringe book ADHD Does Not Exist by Richard Saul, a neurologist who wrote this book with no backing from wider research, and who is not widely recognized as legitimate among ADHD experts. Nevertheless, the book is popular in some circles, and Richard Saul has gotten traction with some parents and teachers (and unfortunately even some doctors), and even wrote an opinion piece in Time Magazine.

In the book’s blurb, it says that “ADHD is actually a cluster of symptoms stemming from over 20 other conditions or disorders” – a statement that may be tempting to believe, given what I’ve said above, but is ultimately deeply misleading. So I thought I’d spend some time picking this argument apart.

First, we don’t know a complete list of what disorders can “cause ADHD,” but there’s lots of evidence that ADHD is primarily genetic. Whatever other problems the gene(s) involved may cause, and whatever shifts in categorization may be brought about by further research, there are definitely genes that do cause ADHD symptoms.

There are also definitely many people whose primary set of symptoms that raise to the level of needing psychiatric care are exactly that set of symptoms, the typical ADHD. Whether this set of symptoms is caused by one gene or many, and whether it is caused by genes alone or a combination of genes and environment, or even sometimes by environment alone, it is a real occurrence and a real problem that often occurs on its own.

That is enough to make ADHD exist.

But more importantly, this set of symptoms, whatever genes mediate them and whatever variety of causes they have, can be extremely debilitating. People need treatments for it now, and it has well-proven, well-studied, extremely effective treatments, especially medicinal ones. Even if ADHD were primarily caused by other identifiable psychiatric disorders, that would not mean setting aside ADHD medications. They would still be effective for all the people they’re currently effective for.

If anything, this perspective should make us study expanding the use of ADHD treatments and medications to situations where the symptoms can be said to be caused by other disorders, rather than give up on them for everyone in hopes of finding the “proper” treatment for the “underlying” disorder for every individual.

Of course, the popularity of this book and its flawed line of thinking is easy to explain: Many people have already made up their mind that ADHD medications are problematic, and are looking for any excuse to get rid of them. Motivated reasoning abounds.

What to do with the connection between ADHD and autism?

I want to return to the topic of autism. As I mentioned, autism often comes with some level of deficit in executive function. That throws a wrinkle into the definition of ADHD, because a deficit of executive function is the core symptom of ADHD, the summary or cause of all the other symptoms.

Given this, it’s not surprising that many children and adults seem eligible for both diagnoses. In the past, following a model of ADHD where it was considered a discrete disorder with its own particular causes (even though we don’t understand them), practitioners had to choose one. A diagnosis of autism (or the then-separate diagnosis of Asperger syndrome) could explain any and all ADHD symptoms, so if both sets of diagnostic criteria were met, Asperger syndrome was the one chosen.

But that was changed in the most recent edition of the DSM, the DSM V, so now both diagnoses are possible in the same person. This has been a great step forward pragmatically: It has allowed children and adults who exhibit traits from both disorders to get access to better treatment, especially stimulant ADHD medications, which are among the most consistently effective psychiatric treatments modern medicine has ever developed.

But this has also led to some surprising, and philosophically challenging, results. Now that it’s possible for a person to have both diagnoses, we have found a huge amount of comorbidity, which is correlation between two disorders – an amount of comorbidity that leads to questions about whether we’re categorizing these disorders correctly.

According to a meta-analysis 50-70% of those with a diagnosis of ASD (autism spectrum disorder) also meet the criteria for a diagnosis of ADHD. Many experts believe the number should be even higher. Some even believe that all autism cases cause executive dysfunction and therefore can be expected to lead to ADHD symptoms – and that therefore we should no longer allow concurrent diagnoses.

In the other direction, we necessarily see lower numbers, because ASD is less common than ADHD. Still, around 20%-30% of people with ADHD are diagnosable with autism, especially if it is specifically screened for. Given that ADHD is about 2 to 2.5 times as prevalent as autism (depending on the studies used), these are the numbers we’d expect mathematically. The connection may be even stronger if we consider the prevalence of specific autism symptoms, such as sensory sensitivity, in cases where a full autism diagnosis isn’t indicated.

So what should we do with this? Given that both ADHD and autism have unclear and diverse causes, we treat them in practice, if not always in theory, as correlated symptoms or traits. But if they’re also correlated with each other, as they seem to be, then what basis do we have for separating them? Should we merge them into one disorder? Given the relative prevalences, should we consider autism to be a more severe form of ADHD? A more narrowly defined subset of it?

If we were to combine them, it wouldn’t be the first time two disorders were merged – even ones that might seem drastically different from the outside. The DSM V merged autism and Asperger syndrome into one diagnosis, “autism spectrum disorder.” And ADHD used to be considered distinct from the non-hyperactive ADD, but now it is just one disorder, ADHD, which can then be subdivided hyperactive, inattentive, or combined “presentations.”

Many on social media have already made up their mind, and rushed ahead of the experts. One particular Instagram post asked, “Is ADHD on the autism spectrum?” In spite of the stereotype that all articles titled with a question can be summarized as “no,” the linked article gave an enthusiastic, almost gleeful “yes.”

I commented that if ADHD and autism are connected, there might be a better way to express this connection than saying “ADHD is on the autism spectrum.” In fact, given that ADHD is the more common diagnosis, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that autism is on the ADHD spectrum – and probably less stigmatized at that. For this, I was yelled at for being an ableist. Ah, the folly of writing things on the Internet (says Jimmy, while writing a blog post on the Internet).

Less controversially, many have adopted the term neurodivergent as a de facto umbrella term for autism and ADHD – and other disorders, like CPTSD, that share traits with them. This term originated from autism advocacy, to shift from a model where such disorders are treated as pathologies to a model where they are treated as differences, fully natural and possibly even beneficial.

Theoretically, the term neurodivergent is meant to include anyone whose brain substantially differs from the brains of average – or neurotypical – people. If this theoretical definition is given credence, especially when coupled with an insistence that it doesn’t have to refer to a pathology, it can become dizzyingly broad almost to the point of meaninglessness. Are left-handed people neurodivergent? Are people with anxiety? Are people with extraordinary talents, even when not coupled with any symptoms of any recognized disorder? If the definition is broad enough, then there won’t be a substantial number of neurotypical people left! Does that make the term meaningless? Or is that, in fact, the point?

But in my experience, the term primarily seems to be used to describe the nebulous space of traits with substantial overlap with autism and ADHD – such as autism and ADHD themselves, and disorders with significant symptom overlap, like sensory integration disorder (SID), and, of course, CPTSD.

This serves a practical purpose: It allows people to share advice, common experiences, and coping mechanisms without getting into the trouble of playing the game of which specific diagnosis they’re for. And while sometimes there’s glitches (such as universal human experiences being depicted as “neurodiverse” experiences), overall, this is a helpful thing.

But while the Internet has addressed the terminology problem appropriately for the goals of sharing empathy and coping skills, professionals still have to deal with the panoply of diagnoses. For them, there are many practical questions to wrestle with:

Should a person with both ADHD and autism traits be diagnosed with both?
Should they be diagnosed with autism only, out of philosophical reasons, as was required in the 90’s under DSM IV, even if the ADHD traits are the ones that actually cause them the most trouble?
Is autism a term for a particular sub-type of ADHD, and should it automatically come with an ADHD diagnosis?
Should ADHD interventions and medications be tried more often for those whose diagnosis is just autism?
Should there be more mechanisms available for people to switch from an autism diagnosis to an ADHD diagnosis, or vice versa?
If so, how can these mechanisms be made available to children who are not capable of effective self-advocacy?

ADHD and autism as spectrums

Aside: Plural Forms

I expect this article to have a lot of neurodivergent readership, and we tend to be a pedantic lot, so I want to clarify something even though it’s objectively unimportant:

I was really tempted to write “spectra” instead of “spectrums” above, but as we’re discussing the metaphorical concept of a spectrum, and not the physics concept, I thought it would be unnecessarily confusing. The dictionary accepts the regular English plural in addition to the Latinate one, and that is the plural I have decided to adopt for this article.

After all, there’s no way that it would be appropriate to pluralize “stigma,” when used as a mental health and disability rights term, as “stigmata,” the classical Greek plural of that word.

This is made even more complicated by the fact that as with autism, ADHD traits come on a spectrum. While ADHD on its own normally doesn’t cause the types of profound disability associated with severe autism, it can cause serious struggles and suffering. Part of the stigma of ADHD is that it is not taken seriously as a deeply disabling condition, which it very much can be. Everyone knows someone who has it, but who manages it successfully with coping skills and/or medication. Everyone knows someone for whom it is – given medication or coping skills – just a personality quirk. And people project that understanding of it onto someone who has drastic problems functioning.

Meanwhile, mild autism is treated as a catastrophe, even when it’s extremely mild, even when society would be better suited treating it more like a quirk. Erring on the side of caution is still erring.

To paraphrase another Instagram meme that spoke to me greatly: How can it be that ADHD and autism are such closely related disorders, but ADHD is treated as a quirky personality trait and not taken seriously, and autism is treated as the devil’s work that has to be eradicated?

Given this, if a person, especially a child, can be diagnosed with both autism and ADHD, but the autism is mild and the ADHD is severe, ADHD may be the more appropriate diagnosis not for any objective reason, but simply for the reason of avoiding the stronger stigma.

But given the subjective nature of diagnosis, and the fact that both disorders are (in practice if not in theory) correlated bundles of traits, it’s even worse than that. The autism spectrum (and the ADHD spectrum) are normally considered to range from mild autism (or ADHD) to severe autism (or ADHD). But is there any evidence of a solid cut-off?

For genetic disorders, you typically either have it or you don’t. But for disorders that have a variety of causes, many of them unknown (even if many are heritable), that are on a spectrum of severity, there’s also the possibility of almost having the disorder. There’s people out there who almost have ADHD, or almost have autism.

There’s lots of people like this: People with “sub-clinical” ADHD or autism, or with “some ADHD (or autism) traits.” To analogize to a different field of medicine, they are the neurodevelopmental equivalent of people who have to squint a little more than average to read things far away, but don’t actually need glasses. Or people who have a little trouble telling green apart from red, but can figure it out with mild difficulty.

Perhaps such a person is one criterion short of the DSM checklist. Or perhaps they check all the boxes, but they’ve built a life for themselves where it isn’t a problem, and they fail to check the all-important box of experiencing significant “impairment in functioning.”

The spectrum of such a disorder extends from the most severe cases to the most mild, yes, but it doesn’t stop there. It extends through these sub-clinical cases, and beyond, to people with normal executive functioning (in the ADHD cases), and then great executive functioning, and then perhaps even to people who have opposite but equally dysfunctional traits.

Aside: An Anti-ADHD?

This was referenced in the article where Dr. Barkley was interviewed, where he discussed a disorder he characterized as “the opposite” of ADHD, but I suspect it’s more complicated than that.

In all honesty, from the brief description, it sounded like a blend of inattentive ADHD and mild autism to me, but perhaps I didn’t understand it correctly. I suspect some people with either or both of these diagnoses will fall into this new diagnosis instead, if and when it becomes available.

This all goes to show how much we’re still learning about this topic.

We use the term “on the spectrum” as a euphemism to mean someone who has autism spectrum disorder, but the term is really a misnomer. I’m not trying to change how we talk – I know that is beyond my power – but I do believe, in a more literal sense, everyone is somewhere on the spectrum of how much autism they have compared to the “average person.” This is true even if the amount of autism they have is negligible or even negative. And likewise with ADHD.

And you have to draw the line somewhere, but the line can move. If it’s a normal distribution, which is the most normal type of distribution to occur in nature (thus the name), most people over the line are going to be close to the line. That is to say, not only will most (ADHD or autism) cases be mild, but a substantial portion of cases will be marginal, and will genuinely be a matter of opinion.

You might assume that most people who have ADHD have clear-cut ADHD, but that simply is untrue. Most people who have ADHD have mild ADHD, and a substantial number barely have it. These people also need treatment, because by definition, the line should be put so that people who are on the ADHD side of it are impaired in functioning.

Aside: Are disorders on a spectrum “real”?

Unfortunately, the idea that these disorders are defined by symptoms and possibly on a spectrum that includes neurotypical people leads some people to conclude that therefore ADHD isn’t a “real” disorder, like in the provocative title of this article: “Is ADHD a Real Disorder or One End of a Normal Continuum.” I wish I didn’t have to address this, but unfortunately, given the level of ADHD denialism in society, which will take any excuse to deny the reality and severity of ADHD, it’s important.

It is a false dichotomy to think that something can be a disorder, or one end of a continuum, but not both. Being too far along on a continuous spectrum can be a real medical problem. For some reason, we have no trouble with the idea of considering “high blood pressure” to be a disease, even though the cut-off for what’s considered high is sometimes adjusted, and even though blood pressure readings form a continuum. Similarly, we have no trouble taking diabetes seriously, when it too is on a spectrum, and we even have names like “pre-diabetes” for other ranges on the spectrum. Why we have difficulty applying similar reasoning to neurodevelopmental disorders is beyond me.

ADHD is more complicated than these, because as I discuss, the line is drawn not based on where it causes problems for the body, but where it causes problems in context – and context changes. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not real. Many real things are not clear-cut binaries – few real things are clear-cut at all. ADHD, and ADHD diagnosis, is complicated, not because ADHD is “not real,” but because it is real.

Consequences

The fact that ADHD and autism are not clear-cut binaries does, however, lead to a number of weird effects.

It explains why children who are young for their class are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD – something I am sure is true for autism as well. They are, after all, more likely to experience “impairment in functioning” because of their traits, because they have higher expectations of them in their context – and these impairments are more likely to attract the attention of the adults in their life.

It partially explains why the number of cases fluctuate over time. Both rates of autism and ADHD diagnosis are on the rise, and I’m sure part of that is attributable to better screening and better access to health care. But perhaps some of that is also attributable to more demands placed on our executive function, and our social conformity.

My impression is that society has gotten more difficult for mildly neurodivergent people over time. On the autism side, society has gotten more and more complex, more ironic, less rule-driven, and more informal – that is, there are more unwritten rules (that are changing faster than ever between generations), and fewer explicit ones. On the ADHD side, more and more distracting devices and social media apps degrade our attention span, as we’re expected to navigate increasingly Kafkaesque bureaucracies with less and less social support. I could write an entire blog post on how society is getting less ADHD-friendly.

This “spectrum effect” almost certainly explains why many adults “grow out of” their childhood ADHD – they didn’t actually grow out of it in the sense that they’re now in a discretely different category. Rather, what happened is that they matured and improved in absolute terms with respect to their executive function (as everyone does), and also developed coping mechanisms (as everyone does to make up for those situations where their executive function doesn’t naturally reach the task at hand). In so doing, they drifted over the line of diagnosability and clinicality, but most such people are almost certainly still on the “ADHD” side of things.

Autism is seen as incurable out of recognition that you can’t ever discretely jump categories. ADHD is seen as something you can grow out of in recognition that you can drift over the line from disorder to quirk. I believe from personal experience that this is a difference in attitude rather than fact – that those formerly ADHD children who become “neurotypical” adults are better described as no longer “clinically” ADHD than no longer ADHD at all. And, likewise, there are likely plenty of people whose childhood autism spectrum diagnosis (e.g. Asperger syndrome) may well have been valid, but who as adults would never be able to be diagnosed with it if evaluated from square one.

This explains at least part of why ADHD diagnoses went up so dramatically during COVID – people’s coping mechanisms were shattered by the restrictions and lock-downs, or by the stress and anxiety of avoiding the disease, or by the political turmoil. I know my ADHD and anxiety got much worse over COVID, so that I felt I’d lost 5 years of maturity and emotional progress. I’m not surprised that it brought some people over the line.

But given that ADHD and autism are so clearly connected, this has other consequences as well. Severe or unmedicated ADHD can be as disabling as mild autism, but different. It does come with social difficulties, often (but clearly not always) different from the autism ones. Can you tell the difference between a deficit in social performance and a deficit in social understanding, especially in a child? They raise many of the same red flags.

This leads to the following odd effect: Severe ADHD can often look like mild autism. I don’t mean just to the untrained eye; I mean also to experienced professionals. And in many cases they do go together; severe ADHD often comes with autism. But in some cases, severe ADHD gets mistaken for autism when it is not autism, especially because people will assume that ADHD is mostly relatively mild, and that therefore severe problems with functioning must correspond to a more severe diagnosis.

In situations like this, if the autism traits are mild enough, the ADHD will sometimes be the disorder that requires more treatment, or even the only disorder that is severe enough to be clinical and require treatment at all. But if it is diagnosed, autism is the disorder that causes more concern, and gets more institutional attention.

Sometimes, this institutional attention is a good thing, and can be used to get treatment that can then be tailored to the individual. But sometimes, it results in ill-tailored, overdone treatment instead, and all the stigma that comes with it. And of course, a lot of those more extreme treatments are never appropriate for anyone: Even when extreme interventions are in fact called for, not all extreme interventions are created equal.

Thoughts on “neurodiversity culture” vs medical perspectives

I do not want to arrive at the conclusion that professionals should untangle this by uncritically taking as fact everything neurodivergent people say, especially on the Internet. Internet neurodiversity culture has plenty of its own issues, and some of that is an insistence on believing everyone’s experiences that has spilled over into believing everyone’s conclusions, even if they’re questionable. Half-baked opinions are asserted as gospel truth, to be dissented from only on pain of extreme social censure – which is hard for people who struggle with any of these disorders to deal with proportionately.

Self-diagnoses and peer diagnoses are common. This is understandable because it helps people find coping mechanisms that are useful to them and answer their questions. But it can also be problematic, because sometimes important and useful treatments are missed. And people who have some ADHD or autism traits – which absolutely everyone can show from time to time – can trigger these informal diagnoses that are then also treated as unquestionable dogmas. And, of course, perfectly universal experiences are sometimes presented as signs of neurodivergence – sometimes because neurodivergent people experience them moderately more often than average, and sometimes just because it’s hard to tell subjectively what’s part of your disorder and what’s just a part of normal life.

But I would ask professionals (and parents, teachers, and loved ones – “hearts,” as How to ADHD calls them) to take neurodiversity culture seriously, even if not always at face value. Please listen, but with a grain of salt. It’s a complicated nuance, and nuance is one of the hardest things a person can ever accomplish, but I think it’s possible.

That includes this blog post – I hope that everyone reading this believes my experiences (and most of my knowledge and opinions are very strongly derived from extensive personal and vicarious experiences). I hope that my readers take my arguments and reasoning seriously, because it is greatly informed by both my experience and the huge amount of both research and consideration I’ve poured into this topic – consideration, again, heavily influenced by a deep familiarity with the facts on the ground.

But that does not mean that I’m necessarily right about all of my conclusions, even where I speak confidently. This is a complicated issue – as I hope I have conveyed – so it’s hard for anyone to be completely right about it. But also, this is not a professional interest of mine. I have studied and contemplated this topic as thoroughly as I have not because I have taken classes on it, or been naturally interested in it (especially in a “hyperfocus” or “special interest” kind of way – I could write an entire blog post about that terminology as well), but because I have been repeatedly forced to by circumstances – both mine, and those of other neurodiverse people in my life.

I know that detracts from my credibility in some ways, but hopefully adds to it in others, and that people take me seriously even when I fail to use the exact right terminology du jour, whether that be medical terminology or cultural neurodiversity terminology.

Takeaways

If there’s anything I’d ask people to take away from this, it’s that neurodivergence is anything but simple and straight-forward. Neither autism nor ADHD is a discrete disorder with an objective test. The way we organize symptoms and traits into diagnoses is arbitrary and imperfect; we can only hope that it will improve over time.

That said, ADHD medication is extremely effective, and stimulant medications are among the most effective and well-proven treatments available. I personally take Strattera, a non-stimulant, and it has been life-changing for me, addressing many issues that have caused me real problems throughout my life.

We cannot just stop prescribing Adderall because ADHD is hard to define. We can’t just wait until we’ve pinned down these definitions more to treat it. Whether or not it is caused by one or many underlying mental disorders or mental differences, ADHD is a label for very serious symptoms, and it is only properly diagnosed when there is an impairment in functioning – which there often is. It leads to vastly worse life outcomes, worse career performance, more spending (the “ADHD tax”), and in too many cases, poverty. As I mentioned in the introduction, it is objectively linked to drastically lower life expectancy. It is fundamentally mistaken to treat it as so categorically less severe and serious than autism when it is so closely related – and when it is so readily treatable with medication.

Christmas Disappointment: Smashing Princes and Cities

2023-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

Today, in liturgical Western Christianity, it is the 10th day of Christmas. Merry Christmas to those who celebrate the extended edition of the holiday!

Unfortunately, this essay is not a celebration of Christmas, but rather an explanation of why I have often found it disappointing recently in life, because of a disconnect between the promise and the reality.

Every time Christmas comes around, I think of a classical sacred choral piece that I’ve performed in multiple different choirs in youth and adulthood, from Mendelssohn’s Christus, namely “Es Wird ein Stern aus Jakob Aufgeh’n” (“There shall come a star out of Jacob”).

These are the words:

Es wird ein Stern aus Jakob aufgeh’n
Und ein Scepter aus Israel kommen;
Der wird zerschmettern Fürsten und Städte

The times we’d sung it in English, this was sung as:

There shall a star come out of Jacob
and a scepter shall rise out of Israel,
with might destroying princes and cities.

And, of course, the line about destroying princes and cities is sung loudly, calamitously, and – perhaps strangely – triumphantly. I remember having a discussion once with someone who was confused by this, but then suddenly got it: “Oh!! It’s a good destroying princes and cities!”

And the English “destroying” is too weak. Without the constraint of a singable text, I’d translate the German thus:

There shall arise a star out of Jacob
And a scepter shall come out of Israel
He shall shatter sovereigns and cities

Fürsten is normally translated “princes,” but means “princes” in the sense of “sovereign leaders of principalities” or “heads of state,” rather than in the more common modern sense of “sons of monarchs.”

This text is based off of a Bible verse, Numbers 24:17, where specific enemy nations of Israel are called out as those this “star” will destroy:

I see him, but not now;
I behold him, but not near:
a star shall come out of Jacob,
and a scepter shall rise out of Israel;
it shall crush the forehead of Moab
and break down all the sons of Sheth.

Numbers 24:17 ESV

Of course, like many things in the Hebrew Bible, Christians reinterpreted this text to be a Messianic prophecy about Jesus. Jesus made no literal war against anybody, let alone Moab and the sons of Sheth, so that line was reinterpreted as some sort of metonym, perhaps meaning “any power of this earth opposed to God’s people.”

In the Mendelssohn piece, the transformation goes further, and the text replaces the specific with the general: the star, the Christ, will “shatter princes and cities.”

This is seen as a good thing. The feeling that I have always gotten from this section of the piece is reminiscent of a leftist jubilantly speaking of “dismantling power structures,” but with much more poetic, less wonky language. The rulers and their strongholds will be shattered. The people who are currently in charge – and who are clearly responsible for many of the world’s problems due to their selfishness – will be violently set aside.

It is reminiscent of Jesus’s declaration that “the first will be last, and the last will be first,” or the similarly anti-rich and anti-powerful declaration in the “Magnificat” (Luke 1:51-53, Book of Common Prayer):

[God] hath shewed strength with his arm:
he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat:
and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things:
and the rich he hath sent empty away.

All of this is connected to Christmas in that Jesus, as the Christ, is supposed to be the “star of Jacob.” It is Jesus that is supposed to shatter the princes and cities, and Christmas celebrates his birth and coming into the world.

The problem, and the part that makes me sad when I think about this song, is that princes and cities still are around. And, unfortunately, they are as oppressive as ever.

Recently, in the US, we’ve had the particularly intense prince that is President Trump, and the city that was his version of Washington, DC. And throughout the world we have others: There is Vladimir Putin, and his well-fortified Moscow, protected with nuclear weapons rather than walls. There is Kim Jung Un in North Korea, and Xi Jinping in China. These figures come off like movie villains – or like the many evil sovereigns in the Bible.

And they all remain thoroughly unshattered. They’re still there, even though Christmas happened 2022 years ago, when Jesus was born to shatter them.

I could recite to you all sorts of standard Christian explanations for this: that the princes and cities have in fact been shattered, in a spiritual sense; that this is a process that happens over time through the church; and that the final, literal shattering will occur once Jesus returns.

But that honestly seems like a moving goalpost. The piece doesn’t say “a star shall arise and then set, and then arise three days later, and then eventually after thousands of years shall shatter princes and cities.”

In the early 20th century, the worldwide Communist movement tried to take matters into their own hand, and shatter the princes and cities by means of violent revolutions. But of course, they couldn’t shatter human nature. After the Tsar and the oligarchs were shattered, new ones arose. Stalin and Mao Tse Tung were even worse princes than those who came before them.

That is unfortunately how revolution usually goes. Given that, you can see why some feel the need for a divinely-appointed hero to come in and do the shattering, who will reign with justice afterwards rather than requiring another round of shattering in another couple decades.

But Jesus literally didn’t do that. And no one seems to be forthcoming. And if they were, they’d be more likely to be another Stalin than a “star of Jacob.”

The Mendelssohn is a beautiful piece, but now, it just reminds me of the evil princes and cities that remain unshattered. The promised shattering feels like just a fantasy.

A Life (and Blog) Theme for the Coming Year

2022-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

Happy December! Happy Winter Holidays! We’re almost done with 2022!

I just had my birthday yesterday, on December 20. I am now 34 years old, which is more than a third of a century! I generally take the opportunity on my birthday to do some reflection on the previous year, and to set a theme for the next year. I wanted to share both with you, my audience.

The past year has been intense for me personally. It’s just been a laundry list of life changes and achievements:

I moved from New York City to a small town.
I bought a house and got a mortgage.
I started medication (Atomoxetine) for my ADHD, an experience I want to blog about, and will as soon as I figure out what exactly I actually have to say about it.
I’ve made new friends and deepened other friendships.
I got an (antique family) upright piano installed in my house.
I got a home gym installation.
I’ve greatly refined and improved my organizational system.
I’ve started a weekly rock-climbing habit.

And, most relevantly for this audience, this blog has accelerated:

I have posted far more than any previous year, averaging 3 times per month (not including this post):

$ ls | grep ^2 | cut -f1 -d- | uniq -c # Count posts per year
      3 2017
      1 2018
     17 2019
      5 2020
      3 2021
     36 2022

I have migrated to Hugo, making posting super easy and the design mobile-friendly without me having to do my own front-end/CSS work.
I added comments.
I added a newsletter, and just today, added a subscription form to every page (thanks, subscribers!)
I’ve written or at least started several series:
- Comparing C++ to Rust
- Explaining my organizational system
- Explaining how Rust’s paradigm differs from OOP

My theme for this past year – or perhaps for 2021, I’m not sure, but I think it was in practice a 2-year theme – was rebuilding, and I’ve certainly done that. I’ve built a new life, in a new place, with so many different habits. And I’m really happy with the results.

Now, what I really want to do is let these new habits mature, to build on top of what I built. And so, a dear friend of mine suggested growth as the theme for this coming year. Rather than focusing on planting new seeds in the garden of my life, as I’ve been doing, I should let the existing seeds that are already planted grow and mature.

Here is part of what I hope that will mean in practice:

Exercise
- Continue rock climbing
- Use the home gym more regularly
Music
- Solidify the habit of practicing the piano
- Try to learn new skills on it (perhaps getting lessons)
Friendships
- Deepen my relationships with the people I’ve gotten closer to (literally and figuratively) and met over the past year
Organization
- Use my system more consistently
- Continue to reap the benefits of having it at all

And of course, last but not least, this blog. I would like this blog to grow. Getting a newsletter is the first and obvious step, but I have some other ideas as well.

For one thing, I hope to take some of my blog posts and series and turn them into “gardens” rather than “streams”. Rather than a series of posts that boom in readership and then get forgotten about, organized by time-line, I think a well-organized complete documentation on, say, my opinions about Rust vs C++, or perhaps just a list of Rust opinions, might be more useful as a reference, and allow me to refine my positions over time, and address objections (even if some on Reddit think addressing objections is somehow a sign that I’m being disingenuous or not open-minded).

For another thing – speaking of Reddit – I’d like to move away from polemic towards education and insight. Many of my posts now are about why Rust is better than C++ – which I still think is an important topic – but some of them are about how to do things in Rust, or how Rust works. My OOP series, while starting out with a fair amount of polemics, will hopefully show a lot of examples and provide a lot of insights into how to use Rust’s features to structure code for people who are used to OOP-style programming languages, and will help people do their job more directly. I don’t think I’m going to be able to fully give up polemics – I am, after all, a self-described “temperamental opinionator” – but I’d like to spend more of my time explaining how to use Rust and why it is the way it is, and less time arguing with angry people on Reddit who take criticism of their preferred tools as a personal attack.

I’d also like to increase the amount of non-technical blogging I do. I used to post fiction on my blog, and some of it I’m even proud of. I’d like to return to doing that. I’d like to share more of my insights about ADHD in specific and neurodiversity in general, specifically about medication and the philosophical question about what a diagnosis like ADHD even means. I’d like to write more about religion, a complicated issue that I have some insights on.

And finally, I’d like to blog some about Reflex, my favorite GUI programming framework, and one that is in Haskell and completely independent of the object-oriented tradition. It’s an excellent hidden gem of a library, and I think it deserves some good resources for it.

If any of you have any particular requests, please let me know! Many of you have already given me ideas for new posts – I have dozens of outlines and hundreds of ideas – but specific requests are (sometimes) very motivating.

I’d like to thank you all so very much for reading! I hope you all have had a good 2022, and I wish all of you the best possible 2023. If you do set a new theme for the new year, may it help you live your best life.

Fiction Review: Plain Truth

2022-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

I enjoyed Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult. I finished it a couple of months ago, when I was feeling very restless and impatient about everything going on in my life. At the time, I desperately needed fun books to read, but I was simultaneously having a lot of trouble finishing books.

This book pulled me the whole way through when other books were failing to: It was in a setting, the Amish communities, that had always interested me. It was competent enough dealing with that community to not drive me away. It made nuanced and smart enough points to keep me engaged, without being so subtle or so sophisticated as to be too heavy or dry or otherwise difficult to get through. All in all, the perfect balance for where I was just then.

This book juxtaposes two concepts that people wouldn’t normally associate with each other: the pacifistic, quaint, and well-respected Amish community; and the trend of young unwed mothers murdering their newborns, which was commonly discussed in the news at the time the book was written and which the author has discussed as inspiration.

The general theme of the book was that Amish people are just people. They’re not a monolith, and their culture, while it values conformity, doesn’t erase individual differences or interpersonal tension. The book managed to avoid the twin temptations of glorifying and fetishizing Amish culture on the one hand, and degrading it as cultish or criticizing it on the other. The differences are impactful but also nuanced and they’re morally complex.

There were a couple of minor details that got me, nerd as I am. Some of the Pennsylvania Dutch was misspelled, especially the name of the language which is Deitsch not Dietsch (pronounced with an “eye”-vowel). This made me laugh but didn’t detract from my enjoyment too much – though it did make me more aware that the Amish culture as depicted in the book was to a certain extent a fictional culture inspired by actual Amish culture rather than a documentation of it.

Another minor quibble: There was a scene where a judge wanted an Amish witness to swear an oath and they had to negotiate the accommodation of “affirmation” on the spot. “Affirmation” is a well-established accommodation for people who don’t swear oaths for religious regions; it used to be much more common, is in the US Constitution, and is talked about in law school. The judge wouldn’t have had to have it explained to them and the lawyer wouldn’t have had to come up with it on the spot. I do concede, however, that how the book did it was more interesting.

Like all Jodi Picoult books, it came with a twist at the end. I shan’t spoil it, but I will say that it was interesting, emotionally challenging, and resonated well and contributed to the previously-established themes.

All in all, a read that I enjoyed and needed at the time!

Why I Won't Correct You're Grammar (unless you ask)

2022-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

I am an Ivy League-educated professional who regularly has to write for my job, who was always in the top English classes in school. And sometimes, I mix up “your” and “you’re.”

I know how grammar works. I always, if I stop to think about it, can figure out which one to use. I know all the tricks. Most of the time, I don’t have to think about it, and the right one comes out. But sometimes, I’m just thinking in terms of what sounds I would make if I were speaking, and I’m in a rush or just distracted or just glitching, and the wrong one comes out.

What’s my point? My point is that written English conventions are hard and unnatural, that even a very educated native speaker can mess them up, even one who writes all the time. Not only are there sets of homophonous grammar words which are super-easy to mess up – such as “you’re” vs “your,” “they’re” vs “their” vs “there” – we also have one of the few spelling systems complicated enough that using it is a competitive national sport. If you were trying to make a language hard to write in on purpose, I’m not sure you’d do better than English.

If written English is basically impossible to get right all the time, even for the most educated native speakers, what about everyone else? Most people are not Ivy League-educated native English speakers. A lot of people learn English in adulthood, or at least later in childhood. A lot of people grow up speaking non-standard dialects. A lot of people simply don’t get the educational opportunities I have had – or simply choose to focus on other skills in life.

So, I say, let’s not use “your”/“you’re” as a value judgment or a sign of stupidity. Obviously if your friend gives you something to copy-edit and they use the wrong one, fix it, but especially in informal settings like social media and text, let’s maybe not make it out to be a bigger deal than it is?

Descriptivism and Prescriptivism

Is this the dreaded “descriptivism”? Perhaps it is, at least in the sense in which that term is bandied about in popular culture.

In this dramaticized popular conceptualization, descriptivists and prescriptivists are different camps opposing each other, aligned with our larger societal cultural war:

Descriptivists: Made up of linguistics professors and self-appointed activists, the descriptivists align with the culture-war liberals, upholding diversity. They think every form of speech and grammar is equally valid, especially those of underprivileged communities.
Prescriptivists: Made up of English teachers and self-appointed grammarians, the prescriptivists align with culture-war conservatives, upholding tradition. They believe that there is one true system of English grammar, that everyone should aspire to, be taught, and be socially pressured into adhering to.

As you may have guessed from my descriptions, I think this way of looking at the issue is silly. Rather than dividing people into camps, I think there is a more descriptive way of using these terms. I instead would prescribe definitions that focus on attitudes that any person can adopt:

Descriptivism: the attitude of science. If we are acting as linguists, as Sprachwissenschaftler or “language scientists,” then we want to study the amazing fact that humans naturally develop and perpetuate intricate systems for turning sounds into words into sentences. For this goal, all dialects (and sociolects and idiolects) are equally valid, because all of them can teach us more about how language works.
Prescriptivism: the attitude of conventionality. If we are acting as professional writers or speakers or copy-editors, then we want to make sure that we and those we work with can communicate in a way that is comprehensible by our audience, follows the rules of grammar and spelling and punctuation that our audience expects, so that writers and speakers can signal that they take the situation appropriately seriously and so that grammar doesn’t distract from communication. For these goals, what is “valid” (or better put, appropriate) is often the standard, conventionalized, and academic prestige forms of a language.

With these definitions in mind, it is possible for one person to take on different stances in different contexts. An English teacher can use descriptivism when they want to understand why their students speak and write a certain way, or struggle with conventions in comparison to their peers: Is it a problem grasping the concepts, or is it because they speak a different dialect or sociolect from the the other students in their class? In the same class, they can take on a more prescriptivist stance when they set their goals and standards for how the students should ultimately learn to write and speak in formal situations.

Linguistics researchers often study more stigmatized dialects or common non-standardisms in speech, and dispel stereotypes about them that are not based in fact. They then write the resultant papers in immaculate academic formal language. This, of course, makes no sense if you think of prescriptivism and descriptivism as camps, but there is no contradiction here. It makes perfect sense if you instead think of prescriptivism and descriptivism as attitudes, appropriate in different situations.

But my point in this article is not about science, teaching, or professional communication. My point is about what stance to take in everyday communication. And in everyday communication, neither prescriptivism nor descriptivism is appropriate. Unwanted grammar corrections are rude, and so is unwanted field linguistics. The appropriate stance to take in everyday communication is neither descriptivism nor prescriptivism, but rather politeness.

Sure, descriptivism is sometimes used as an argument here. It can be scientifically demonstrated that informal forms of English and even sentences like “It don’t do nothing,” in the dialects where they arise, have their own internal logic, just as sophisticated from an objective standpoint as more prestigious forms of English – even though that has very little to do with the “your”/“you’re” distinction and purely written distinctions like it. Many long-established shibboleths of the ostentatiously grammar-conscious can be shown to have little basis in history or established usage – but “your”/“you’re” is a pretty well-established distinction. We could even find scientific studies to show how much more difficult the English writing system is from those of other languages, but even if it wasn’t, the rules of politeness wouldn’t change.

Science and research may be useful for answering questions like “how can we most effectively teach children?” But it doesn’t really have any bearing on whether we should give people unwanted grammar corrections or use their grammar to judge them. In this, common sense and politeness win the day, and they simply say: “No.” Or perhaps rather: “Please don’t.”

Language “Decay”

There is one objection that I think is worth addressing, that comes from a place other than raw snobbery. It goes something like this:

But Jimmy! What if this social pressure serves a good purpose? What if it prevents language change, allowing our language to stay as it is for longer, connecting us with writers of the past? What if we really like the way English is and don’t want it to change, for aesthetic or culture reasons, or the belief that the language is in some way particularly well-suited for use as it is?

This objection (phrased differently) was raised when I posted an earlier, shorter version of this essay to Facebook. And I’m not sure what to do with it. I suspect some people think that this is a worthy goal, an upside of grammar corrections to be balanced against the politeness elements. Others, I imagine, see it as a silver lining or a subsidiary purpose to our prescriptions and our societal elevation of relatively conservative conventions and grammar norms.

For me, there are two considerations here. One is whether this works at all. Of course, in the long term, it is futile; English will change eventually, slowly but surely, as it has before, whatever we do. But maybe prescriptive grammar slows down language change.

Does it? Probably, but I think people overestimate the effect. And I think the effect is almost entirely accomplished in those situations where prescriptivism is appropriate, namely, copy-editing and education. I simply don’t think people correcting their acquaintances’ text messages for them or judging their grammar online does much to keep the language from changing.

But even if judgmentalism (and fear of judgmentalism) does slow down language change, why does it matter? English as it is now isn’t that special. It’s just a language, like any other. Whatever it evolves into will suit humanity and society’s purposes equally well. Heroic efforts to try and stop the inevitable is not certainly not worth the rudeness that often comes along with them.

I personally am not attached to the current form of English, but there is a way in which I can relate. I do remember being upset at some of the changes that are happening (very slowly) in the German language, but then I was comforted by something: Unless something drastically increases my life-span, German as I’ve learned it will remain a valid and prestigious way to speak German (modulo my mistakes and accent), for the rest of my days.

Perhaps my children’s children will live in a world where German is drastically and unrecoverably different – if I even have children who then have children – but that will be their problem, and I’m sure their opinions will differ from mine.

Reviews and Reactions: 2022 Short Story Hugo Nominees

2022-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

We decided to write up our thoughts on each of the short stories nominated for the 2022 Hugo awards. Of course, here be spoilers, spoilers galore. If you don’t want these stories spoiled, go read them, and then come back here.

This is the same concept as Jimmy’s review of the 2021 nominees, and so we shall adapt the explanation from that post:

As an exercise, we read each of these stories and told each other what we thought the themes were, and I reference that throughout these reflections. Themes, as we define them, are thematic statements: the point the story is trying to make. Themes are distinct from thematic concepts, in that they are complete sentences rather than just nouns. They are distinct from premises, in that they are the take-away for the real-world, not a statement about the world of the story. And, to be clear, there can be more than one completely valid answer. Both of us would posit what we thought the theme was, answering independently without consulting each other, and then we would discuss the story in greater detail.

What follows are the tangible results of those discussions: reflections about each story, somewhere between review and analysis. Each header is also a link, because all of these stories are available to read online. They are reviewed in descending ranked order according to Jimmy’s ranking, and some overall discussion of ranking is reserved for the conclusions.

Mr. Death

A trick ending, indeed. A relatively common trope, but unexpected here, at least for us: In order to pass a test of morality, you have to refuse an order, to not only do the right thing but do it in spite of what you think will be horrible consequences to you. Can your conscience survive dishonesty and manipulation?

It’s terrifying to see this trick done at the “salvation/damnation” scale. It reminds Jimmy of this SMBC. It sort of calls into question the whole premise of “eternal damnation” and “eternal punishment,” especially if the operators of these mechanisms have values that disagree with ours, or are simply a result of arbitrary but impersonal rules.

Given the twist at the end, it’s unclear what the rules of this story are. How much wasn’t this reaper told? We understand why he was lied to for the test, but now will he be given a more complete picture with a new boss? Is he going to get more and more shocking revelations every couple of eons? Unclear!

On the other hand, this story is a resounding endorsement of the theory that you should always avoid doing something horrible, even if orders compel you to do the horrible thing, even if it goes against the theory you’ve been taught. We agreed that this was the theme. As Doug put it, when the rules compel you to violate your conscience, violate the rules. A good person’s conscience is usually the better guide than a good rule book.

With life-or-death stakes such as these, this theme makes sense. There is a balance, however. “Follow your conscience in all circumstances” is bad advice when consciences are fallible, and sometimes the person giving you the order is simply someone who knows more than you about the situation. Who cannot say they held onto a stubborn but incorrect rebellion against an authority as a kindergartner? Who truly has never done it as an adult? Humility is actually a virtue. But Doug thinks that this story’s power is that it has more faith in humanity’s ability to intuit morality. In effect, the story is taking a powerful stand in favor of act consequentialism versus rule consequentialism. Doug is more inclined to support act consequentialism than Jimmy is.

This particular story could’ve gone a different way, Perhaps, by violating the cosmic rule, all of time could have unravelled, or there could have been a butterfly effect where someone else had to die as a result of the protagonist’s decision. Such a story would have been written by a different author who had less faith in humanity’s ability to intuit morality and was a stronger proponent of a rule-based ethical system. In such a story, the blame for the negative consequence would’ve (in Jimmy’s eyes) definitely fallen on Raz for not explaining the stakes and what would happen if the death was avoided. (Doug disagrees and thinks that, in a truly rule-based system, the blame would still have been on the protagonist. Raz would definitely be part of the causal chain, though, and it would have behooved Raz to give a little more information.) In the story as written, the narrator kept on asserting that you cannot cheat death, without giving any evidence or specific reason. At the time, this felt like there just wasn’t enough time to go into it for the story, and it counted against the story. Now, it feels like foreshadowing, and it is a strength of the story.

For Jimmy, while this story made him emotionally believe in the theme, and while he greatly enjoyed this story and its subversion of the normal trope of “don’t mess with forces greater than you, even to save a life, because it could have even greater consequences,” he finds himself intellectually not as convinced as he wants to be. As he thinks deeper about it, he finds the questions brought up, and this story, somewhat unsettling.

Doug thinks that this is the story’s greatest strength, though. This story forces the reader to confront a difficult moral question and examine the consequences. Whenever a short story succeeds in making the reader question an inherent moral belief, it deserves major kudos. Go read this story.

Ranking

We both agreed that this was the best story, and so here it comes ranked first, for interesting thought-provocation and quality of writing with a twist at the end.

Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather

Jimmy (very much not Doug) had a lot of fun with this one! A satire of Internet communities, where everyone jockeys to maintain their karma and online reputations and fails to engage properly with the actual realities of the situation at hand, where if they were paying more attention they would realize that their more serious colleague was finding out how truly important the thing actually was.

Themes include “People on the Internet are idiots more concerned with their own reputation than the things they’re actually interested in,” and also “there’s more to folklore than meets the eye” and “we can never truly know the past.”

Because of its unusual structure, it was important for us to discuss the plot so that we were on the same page about what happened; namely, that a bunch of argumentative nerds are too busy trying to get Internet points from each other to realize that the song being discussed is all-too-real and another serious scholar is going to get his heart taken out.

Ranking

The juxtaposition of old folklore, scholarly academic discussion of folklore, Internet arguing, and horror weaves a tight mesh that Jimmy enjoyed greatly, as a fan of basically all those things. This won the Nebula and, in Jimmy’s eyes, well deserved it; it’s a very close second to Mr. Death in his mind. The form must have been incredibly difficult to write: the opposite of lazy writing.

Doug, on the other hand, was a harsh critic of the story. It was actually Doug’s least favorite story of the lot, and there were several Doug really disliked this year. Doug’s biggest problem with the story was that it seemed like it was just a Reddit conversation, with no character development and a well-trodden plot (specifically, the bit about an old folktale actually being real and youth not realizing it while someone befalls a ghastly fate). Sure, the way in which the story was told was super unique, but that artifice could not cover up the tired plot in his eyes.

The Sin of America

This is a new retelling of “The Lottery”, but with different themes for a different America. That is to say, both pieces are satires of American culture, but in the years that have passed, American culture has changed a lot. This author seemed to think an updated version was called for, and given the new story, Jimmy is convinced.

The Wikipedia article on “The Lottery” mentions two themes in it (or did at the time of this writing):

This seemed off to Jimmy, and so he went and reread “The Lottery,” and found his suspicions confirmed: There’s next to nothing in there about scapegoating; perhaps that’s how this tradition originated, but it now seems to be a thin memory. And even when there is some elements of mob mentality, it’s not a mob of anger, but a mob of raw traditionalist energy. It’s really all about the second theme, which isn’t surprising, as a short story normally only can support one theme. (Doug thinks that the Wikipedia article isn’t wholly off base, but will stay mum here while Jimmy makes his point!)

Jimmy would characterize the original “The Lottery” as if the author wanted to say this: “Wow, America is obsessed with tradition. Do you even know why you do the things you do? Do you know how much you’ve actually changed the tradition, from previous countries, from the past? Do you know how silly this all is? If tradition told you to jump off a bridge, would you? If it told you to murder your friends, would you? Actually, yes, I think you would. Here, let me write what it would look like. Doesn’t that seem just like you?”

Jimmy remembers “The Lottery” both resonating with him and not. He grew up in a town and a church with enough old-fashioned American traditionalism left that he recognizes the particular flavor of traditionalism that it’s satirizing, but he also thinks a lot of America, after “The Lottery,” became too suburbanized and too detached from a sense of community to have the same type of traditionalism, that community continuity has become so shattered and so obsolete as a value that if anything we need more of what “The Lottery” satirizes right now, not less of it. But that’s “tradition,” and “The Lottery” satirizes “blind tradition,” which is generally bad. He also thinks that tradition should be maintained thoughtfully.

But that’s a discussion for “The Lottery” itself, not this spin-off. (Hear hear! says Doug) This spin-off, unlike “The Lottery,” is clearly actually about scapegoating, the ancient Biblical practice of putting the sins of the community onto a goat which was then sent away or forced to “[e]scape”:

But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the LORD, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.

Leviticus 16:10 (King James Version)

The continued repetition of the word “sins” – this is a much more flowery piece than “The Lottery” – makes abundantly clear the religious element, and reminds us of Jesus, the Christian scapegoat, who dies for everyone’s sins in a manner whose mechanism is somewhat unclear, with many theories.

The oddest theory we’ve seen for why Jesus had to die was not that he was a ransom or bait for Satan or that punishment must be carried out to fulfill a divine requirement for justice, but instead that punishment had to be carried out to fulfill a human requirement for justice. This theory is naturally repulsive to most – basically, the theory was that humans need someone to blame, and God signs up for the role – and this seemed way too pessimistic an outlook on human nature – and way less cosmic an event than we understand the crucifixion to be.

But however heterodox such a theory might be, that theory, applied to a randomly selected human instead of to an incarnation of God, is the logic, we think, behind the sacrifice in this short story. Humanity needs someone to blame. America, specifically, needs someone to blame.

Well, yes, we kind of do. We’ve been developing a “great villain” culture for a while now. Jimmy says, every President is set up to be vilified by the other party, and it’s been escalating: Bush feels tame for liberals now compared to how liberals feel about Trump, and conservatives are now basically cussing at Joe Biden with the “Let’s Go Brandon” line. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk make all kinds of negative press for their stunts as rich people.

Within the story, all of the news that was blamed, at first on the previous lottery “winner” and then on our protagonist, is reflective of recent news. They threaten to turn it off, but then they don’t, because in this America, rather than focusing on our day-to-day problems – and the characters in the story had many, many problems – we feel instead like it’s more appropriate to blame the figures in the national news.

And this is because, according to the author, we as Americans feel hopeless. Why try to get a better job? The ultra-rich and their government cronies will prevent it anyway. Why try to buy a house? Capitalism has prevented millennials from succeeding. If we’re not able to succeed in our personal lives, then why not find somewhere else to focus our attention and our passions? This story is just a vivid depiction of what we’re already doing.

Doug found this story to be a bit heavy-handed, but it was a coherent story with a clear point. It is very much The Lottery, updated to be told by a liberal who has come to see America as more of a nation of problems than the land of the free and the home of the brave. Doug worries that this story reflects a belief by some in our country that America is no longer a place worth saving. It is, and the hopelessness and anger felt at our country by this story’s author portends something awful for this country. Doug hopes the author is in a minority and that people in this country can find a renewed sense of pride and optimism, finding solutions to America’s many problems instead of giving up hope.

Proof by Induction

This story starts with an assertion:

The Coda cannot change in the way that a person can, however; it cannot learn or grow. Your father’s soul is not in there. Your father has moved on.

It is put in the mouth of a Presbyterian minister, and so Jimmy’s immediate instinct was to question it. (Doug barely noticed this part of the story until after Jimmy brought it up as a focal point.) The chaplain is obviously biased, trying to uphold her religious views, trying to defend her traditional notion of an afterlife against an upstart competitor. Jimmy hopes that perhaps this story will balance her perspective against a different perspective and take sides.

Later, when we find out that the simulation restarts upon every entrance, we found ourselves wondering if it’s perhaps been programmed to do so to prevent people from taking it to seriously, as we see no particular reason why it should work like that. Perhaps our protagonist can change the programming, as it is clear to us that, in the real world, this would be a programming choice and not a fundamental design constraint of the Coda. (Of course, this is not the real world…)

As the protagonist tries to repair his emotional connection with his father, we wondered if out of frustration he might hack the darn thing to remove the restriction and receive some closure. It does seem like he’s making some progress partway through the story, but it’s erased by the plot contrivance.

Whatever this story is trying to say, it is held back by this contrivance. Is it trying to say that immortality is impossible and anything that pretends to it is a simulacrum? If so, then the weird unexplained technical limitation gets in the way of that point. Is it trying to say that even an afterlife wouldn’t help you fix your relationship with your parent? That might be true, but again, the contrivance makes us (Jimmy especially) feel like our protagonist hasn’t been given a fair shot.

Most of what Jimmy gets out of this story is “it would suck if someone created a very realistic afterlife technology and put an arbitrary limitation on it, because people would find it very frustrating.”

But also, why is the Presbyterian minister allowed to just proclaim things about this unquestioned, that might as well have come from the narrator? Why is anyone who isn’t extremely religious taking her approach? Why isn’t everyone debating whether these Codas have rights? Why aren’t they protesting in the streets? Why is the only person to consider the intellectual implications a random-ass mathematician rather than the writer of a think-piece from when it’s still in development? Is this some sort of totalitarian Presbyterian dictatorship?

Science Fiction is supposed to propose hypotheticals and then explore the consequences, or at least it’s supposed to come across that way from the reader. The theme must flow from the premise logically. This seems more like an attempt to make a point, and then contrive a hypothetical to prove it, and it is so contrived that I’m having a hard time discerning what the point even is.

But we recognize that’s not how this story works. This premise was tailor-made to demonstrate that sometimes, no matter how much we think we’re making progress with another person, they’ll just revert to their old ways the next time we see them. It’s as if the author was talking about their actual parent, and saying that from their behavior, they might as well be in a form of death, where the memory is lost each time they see them and progress is impossible. This can be taken as a portrait of that frustration, but due to the unbelievability of the premise, it was difficult for Jimmy to take it that way.

In Doug’s eyes, the theme of this story was: “People won’t change just because you want them to. Value people for who they are.” Doug was not as harsh as Jimmy was on this story, but he thinks that is because he generally tends to “softer” sci-fi that cares less about the reality of the underlying science or the technical elements. Unlike most of the other stories in this lot, this story involved some real character development, and a family relationship that felt super real. Indeed, that’s why we mentioned that it felt like the author was working through the author’s own family issues. In Doug’s eyes, this was a strength of the story.

Ranking

Due to the extreme unbelievability of the premise, Jimmy ranks this lower than he otherwise would have. Doug ranks it much higher, but Jimmy simply refuses to accept that society would create an invention so powerful just to use it mostly for finding documents and quick good-byes, and he thinks the resets-every-time thing is a contrivance.

Unknown Number

First, a caveat: we are not trans and probably have gaps in our knowledge about what it’s like to be trans. We are trying really hard to discuss this story accurately, but are not entirely sure of my choice of terminology or perspective. Please, send corrections if warranted! We would like to learn more.

The premise would fit as a specific example of the many lives that are touched by inter-universe communication in Ted Chiang’s Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom, one of Jimmy’s favorite science fiction novellas, and also a Hugo nominee for Best Novella in 2020 (Doug hasn’t read it… Don’t get mad). Unlike that novella, which was a rather realist take on “what would alternate-universe technology do in a real way to society,” this story gives the alternate-universe communication technology to exactly one person, so they can talk specifically about gender.

This serves as a window into what it’s like to be trans. Being trans often involves a huge decision: Whether to transition, and whether to change your public gender identity, your pronouns, etc. It is a high risk/high reward decision, and so the alternate universe model is very fitting for it. We both regularly imagine the alternate universes created by alternate answers to our big decisions in life, and we wish we could talk to those alternate versions of ourselves and see how that had gone. So we imagine if we had gender dysphoria, we’d like to talk to the alternate universes where we did or did not transition.

Well, in this story, only the version who didn’t transition reached out. This means that transitioning worked and fixed the problem, which is, we think, the theme, specific to the trans experience: If you are trans, you should come out/transition. You won’t regret it.

And more generally: Big decisions are hard, and they do have an impact on your life, but to be a coward is a decision in and of itself. Be bold.

Ranking

We agreed that the text message format wasn’t that interesting, and simply got the author out of having to write more detailed description. Jimmy wouldn’t say it was lazy (Doug probably wouldn’t either), but we do think the effort was put in to get a particular point across, not to develop a rich world and story. Similarly, the characters, both versions of the same person, are somewhat bare-bones, and the story itself gets a little repetitive. We think it’s really good for a Twitter post trying to convey a point about the trans experience and major life decisions in general, but not rich or well-developed enough for this list.

Tangles

This is Magic: The Gathering fanfic, and we mutually know basically nothing about Magic: The Gathering, so we will simply discuss this as outsiders – which we literally are.

As an outsider, we found it very difficult to read. We both procrastinated reading it (Jimmy for almost two weeks, much to Doug’s chagrin). The aesthetic and the world here does little for us, and we can’t tell what is novel to the story and what is a reference that fans will get excited about, which is disorienting and makes it difficult to enjoy.

The specific concept of a dryad needing a tree to survive just feels like a metaphor for a toxic way of thinking about relationships, which is immediately off-putting, so the premise immediately bothers us.

The plot, at its base, strikes us as somewhat better: Two people (using an expansive definition of “people”) meet, both in their own life-or-death level crisis. By cooperating and making “peace” between them (is the word “peace” repeated so much for thematic or world-building reasons?), they both manage to solve some of their problems, which they would have been unable to solve separately. The theme, then, is “work together even in emergencies,” which is a good moral lesson that many people need to hear.

Ranking

This seems written primarily for people who will be inordinately excited by the concepts of dryads and by having a story set in a Magic: The Gathering world, and we are very much so not that person. We also found it tedious to read, and none of the characters felt like characters, so Jimmy leaves it last, and Doug next to last.

Final Ranking Comparison

Jimmy

Mr. Death
Where Oaken Hearts
Sin of America
Proof by Induction
Unknown Number (Twitter)
Tangles (MTG)

Doug

Mr. Death
(after a huge dropoff) Proof by Induction
Sin of America
Unknown Number (Twitter)
Tangles (MTG)
Where Oaken Hearts (but I had a lot of trouble ranking this last one)

Conclusion: A Note on 2022 vs 2021

Given that we previously reviewed the 2021 stories, let’s compare these as a set.

Overall, we both believed the 2022 nominees were all around weaker than the 2021 nominees. Last year’s set had several strong stories (“Metal Like Blood in the Dark”, “Little Free Mermaid”, and “Open House on Haunted Hill”, all spring to mind). We could see how even the stories we personally weren’t as crazy about in 2021 had strong merits and would appeal to particular folks.

In comparison, the 2022 stories felt like a bit of a letdown. In Doug’s eyes, “Mr. Death” is really the only story worth reading in this whole lot, and while Doug likes “Mr. Death” more than any story in last year’s set, that by itself can’t carry the day. Doug is also concerned that the inclusion of some of the more atypical stories in this year’s set (“Tangles” and “Unknown Number”) signals that the nominators are too green and fanfic-y. And “Sin of America” (much like “Badass Moms” from last year) seems included mostly because it appeals to a particular political mentality.

Notably, the Nebula Award nominees did not include any of these three stories this year (although they did nominate “Badass Moms” last year). The three stories that were cross-nominated for the Hugo and Nebula were Mr. Death, Where Oaken Hearts, and Proof by Induction, all of which do seem like deserved nominees (even though Doug really disliked Where Oaken Hearts and Jimmy really disliked Proof by Induction, we both recognize that these respective stories were good, just designed for people who care about different things in their stories). Here’s hoping for a better lot for our next post!

Netflix Should Become a Tech Company

2022-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

Netflix should become a tech company.

I hear the obvious response already: Jimmy, Netflix is already a tech company!

Counterpoint: Is it though?

Somehow, after two dot-com booms, the markets still have an aesthetic-based definition of what constitutes a “tech company”: If a company – any company – has an expensive enough app, and if its founders talk enough about “disrupting” industries, then it is a “tech company” and is therefore entitled to a valuation completely disconnected from its actual industry. Think WeWork – and think what happened to it as people gradually realized it wasn’t an exciting tech start-up but rather a quite boring real estate company. Turns out, you don’t need an expensive app to run a coworking space.

A friend of mine pointed this out to me recently, claiming that the whole concept of a tech company was a façade. WeWork was the obvious example, but there are others: Uber and Lyft are taxi dispatchers, GrubHub (known in NYC by its other brand, Seamless) is a take-out catalogue, and Netflix is a premium channel. And Amazon’s more famous business (more on this later) is to be a retailer: its competitors are Wal-Mart and Target, or else mail-order catalogues.

Sure, all of these companies use phones and apps to do their thing better, sometimes uselessly (like WeWork), sometimes “disruptively” so, genuinely transforming the industry (like Amazon or Uber). But their thing is something that people have done before them, and will continue to do after them. At this point, doing something “with an app” should be as surprising as doing that thing “over the phone” or “using writing.”

Another class of companies is harder to categorize. Facebook and Twitter are doing things that would be impossible before the web, but fundamentally are not about providing technology either. They manage and organize content, and in so doing, get the ability to suggest sponsored content, to – as Zuckerberg informed the Senate – sell ads. They are content companies or web companies.

But, as I pointed out to my friend, this doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as a tech company, whose job is to provide technical infrastructure in the computing world. These tend to be older names: There’s IBM, which makes mainframes and whose subsidiary Red Hat maintains a Linux distribution. There’s Oracle, which licenses its database software that underpins a shockingly large slice of our economy. There’s Microsoft, which still maintains Windows even though it isn’t cool anymore, and Excel, the most popular programming language in the world that isn’t even branded as a programming language.

So now that we’ve established this dichotomy between true “tech companies” and “companies that do their business with an app,” let’s look at the corner cases:

Google in my mind straddles the line between content management – e.g., YouTube, GMail, Search (I would argue) – and tech – e.g, Android and Chrome – with the odd caveat that the tech is what they give away for free and the content management is how they make their money.

Amazon, in my mind, is a more interesting corner case. Their famous retail website, amazon.com, is, like Uber or AirBnB, an example of a normal business, but with an app. However, their app required so much technology that they have a major business in providing some of that technology to others as a cloud company: AWS. Whether or not “the cloud” is overhyped – and I think it really is important – a cloud company is definitely a technology company.

And this leads me back to my title topic: Netflix.

Netflix has been having a rough couple months. At the time of this writing, it has lost 72% of its valuation in the past 6 months, which is a lot even for this recent bear market; in the same time period, the NASDAQ index only lost 28.18%, and the S&P 500 only 13.84%. It lost subscribers for the first time in its history, and for many, it’s clear that the writing is on the wall.

And this corresponds to a frustration with Netflix as a content platform that I’ve noticed anecdotally among my friends. It’s been a long time since it’s been the go-to for streaming, when almost every show was either on Netflix or not streamable, and most popular shows were on Netflix: “What service is it on?” is now a more common question than “Is it on Netflix?” And many people I know anecdotally are questioning whether Netflix, now one premium channel among many, is even worth keeping in their streaming portfolio. Do we really still like its TV shows, or do we just keep it on there out of loyalty to what it used to stand for?

And Netflix will soon force many people to make that decision, by cracking down on password-sharing. Well, Netflix, you might not like the results. You’re coasting right now, and you might be out of gas; now might be a bad time to put on the breaks.

But oh, how the mighty have fallen! Netflix was a smashing success as a company when streaming was a novelty. As the Internet developed the necessary bandwidth – as Netflix helped force the Internet to improve its infrastructure – streaming exploded. Most people pirated for convenience rather than to save money, and streaming was even more convenient without any of those pesky moral concerns.

At the time, the goal clearly was for Netflix to be the sole streaming provider, licensing from traditional channels and movie producers, and being the one subscription every household needed, simultaneously creating and monopolizing the concept of streaming.

And it worked, for a while, but the traditional content providers were not so easily displaced, and competition was not so easily avoided. HBO was one of the early competitors, but now they are legion: Hulu, Disney Plus, Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube TV…

The new streaming market was too big for Netflix to hold onto. When streaming was a novelty used by a significant but not overwhelming number of households, it made sense for content creators to work through Netflix to reach that slice of customers. Now that almost everyone streams, it’s not just a slice of the market anymore, and it makes more sense for content creators to try and work around Netflix’s attempted monopoly and make their own streaming service.

And that’s a shame. Don’t get me wrong, I have no love for monopolization. But Netflix’s technology is simply better than all the other streaming companies’. Every single other provider simply has a worse user experience.

If you’re a regular streaming user, you’ll have already noticed this, since the Netflix apps work, and the others are merely workable enough. Glitches, lags, buttons that don’t work right plague the other streaming apps, whereas Netflix just works, especially on the web (SmartTV platforms sometimes have other issues).

And not only has Netflix spent more money and done a better job at polishing the user interface, they have worked really hard to collaborate with ISPs to store your videos as close to you in the network as possible, speeding up loads, decreasing lag, and increasing video quality. Other video streamers have not caught up, and I fear they will never do as good a job as Netflix – each one individually simply would not have the same bargaining power with ISPs that Netflix once had, and “good-enough” tech will be the standard at companies like Disney and HBO that never considered themselves tech companies.

As a programmer, I’ve heard great things about their tech, and heard it’s a great workplace for programmers (as opposed to content creators), but if I worked there, it would make me sad to know that my work, rather than improving everyone’s streaming experience, would only improve the experience on one second-rate streaming channel.

What if – and hear me out now – what if Netflix licensed its technology to other streaming providers? What if whenever you used the Disney Plus app or the HBO app, Netflix code ran and cached your content on Netflix colocated servers and played it in Netflix’s video player? I wouldn’t want it to be every streaming provider, but enough that the quality could go up. The OG Netflix could just be one premium channel “by Netflix Technologies” among many. In fact, the company could even split, so that potential clients don’t think that the original Netflix channel would get preferential treatment.

It would take time to do this transition. Maybe the channel should keep the original name for momentum, and the tech spin-off adapt a new name. Maybe it can start talks with the other platforms immediately about technology sharing. If I were in charge of another streaming platform, I’d definitely want a slice of that tech.

And maybe it wouldn’t work. Maybe the other streaming providers think their crappy streaming technology is “good enough.” This pivot would be a risky move, but the current stock price calls for it.

I understand why Netflix hasn’t done this before now. Monopolizing streaming seemed like a realistic goal for most of its history. But in the end, it failed. It would be a shame for its excellent technology to fail with it.

Disclosure: I own no position of NFLX whatsoever, but maybe I should get myself a short position, because I know they won’t do this. I just really wish they would. Goodbye, Netflix! We’ll remember you fondly!

God grant me patience... and I want it RIGHT NOW!

2022-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been feeling recently like I’ve been spinning my wheels in my personal life. I’m pressing on the metaphorical accelerator as hard as I can, probably too hard for safety, and instead of moving forward, the wheels are just spinning, spinning, spinning. I think a large part of it is my perspective of time. “Time is canceled,” my friends and I would say continuously during the lockdown. And it isn’t back, not yet, not how it used to be, not for me.

I would be far from the first to note the disconnect between the literal, constant, inexorable progression of time in a physical sense, and the wacky way in which we remember it. As Groucho Marx (apocryphally) framed it:

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”

When my friends and I would say “Time is canceled,” we meant it as a joke. But like many jokes, it was literally true; it was true of subjective time. While objective time is a physical property of the universe to be studied by scientists, subjective time is built out of rituals and milestones. Objective time is measured on clocks and dilated by near-light speed travel and gravity; subjective time is measured in hearts and minds and dilated by activities and events and locations.

Day isn’t just when our section of the earth faces the sun; it’s when we’re in the city, at or near the office. Night isn’t when we’re in the earth’s shadow; it’s when we’re at home, or at a bar. Weekend is not just a legal construct or a mark on a calendar, but it’s made out of brunches, mimosas, and daytime outings with friends, while still in Brooklyn.

Or at least that’s what these words meant before COVID. Once COVID hit, and the lockdowns came, all of these manifestations of time congealed into an undifferentiated gray goop. Subjective time was canceled, replaced with something incoherent. Time was simultaneously slow and fast: slow, because the beginning of COVID seemed infinitely long ago, as it felt like I had been starved of social contact for my entire life; and fast, as months flew by without commutes and outings and brunches and clubs and churches or anything at all to break up the gray goop of continuous apartment, apartment, and more apartment.

Then, eventually, after an infinite amount of time had passed in a few months, the restrictions started to lift. Gradually, and then suddenly, there was so much stuff to do. And so I experienced the summer camp effect.

The summer camp effect (not to be confused with, but perhaps related to, summer camp syndrome) is one of my favorite examples of subjective time. As I can’t find it via Googling, I think my friends might have discovered it from experience and first principles. The effect goes like this: When you were a child, summer camps lasted one week (leastways they did for me). But during a camp experience, you would make new friends, have a temporary best friend and rivalries, if you’re older maybe even a “camp girlfriend” or “boyfriend”!

Children at summer camps (and adults on retreats or vacations) get an entire in-camp life, squeezed somehow into a few objective days, but as large emotionally as an entire semester at school. This makes sense if you think about it. You’re doing completely different activities than you’ve previously done. Each day you’re doing a lot of adjusting, a lot of learning new routines, a lot of meeting new people. It’s just long enough that you take it seriously as something to acclimate to, a new context to judge everything by, but also short enough that every individual event has an outsized importance.

You know you’re experiencing this effect when you say things like “I just went swimming earlier today? That feels like three days ago.” And the reason is simple: Three days’ worth of different things have happened since then, both different from each other, and different from what you’re used to.

COVID was the opposite of summer camp effect. During COVID, the set of events and activities I was used to dwindled to naught. Leaving the apartment at all felt like an event. “Three days ago? That felt like earlier today,” I would say, as less than a day’s events had happened in the past three days.

So then, as COVID restrictions thawed, completely normal outings, like going to a restaurant, felt like huge accomplishments – because in context they were. Every event where there were more than 2 or 3 people felt like a huge, even decadent, party! Because my baseline was so pathetically low, this was a perfect recipe for the longest-lasting summer camp effect I’ve ever experienced.

For months, for basically the entire second half of 2021, subjective time snapped back in the other direction like a rubber band. Each week felt like a month. Things that happened a few days ago felt like they were long-forgotten memories. So much was happening so quickly, even if it wasn’t objectively all that much, because I was de-acclimated.

And then, while still de-acclimated, while still experiencing this post-COVID perpetual summer camp effect, I up and moved to a new town. Now that I’m in said new town, visiting new places, meeting new people, navigating new obstacles and forging new routines, I added an additional layer of summer camp effect on top of the “COVID recovery” time dilation I was already experiencing.

But of course, settling into a new place – especially a new house, when I’ve never owned a house before – is a lot of work, work that takes time.

And it’s not just the logistics and paperwork of moving (though of course there are ungodly reams of paperwork). I have to get acquainted with this new town, learn the dance that this town dances, a dance with a different rhythm than I’m used to. Some processes simply can’t be rushed, and that includes meeting new people and setting up new routines here.

So now I’m in a bit of a pickle: I’m experiencing time as going slower, while also having a lot of goals that simply will take a lot of time, no matter what I do. Between these facts, everything in my life is taking forever.

So I’m just here, spinning my wheels, particularly within my social and personal life, making no apparent progress on my urgent goal and top priority of developing a routine for my spare time and settling into my new living situation. Why don’t I have a routine worked out? Why don’t I have a full complement of local friends, a weekly game night, hobbies both social and solitary? Am I just not cut out for small town life after all?

Simultaneously, I’m feeling extremely busy setting up the house: Why isn’t it set up yet? Why is everything so untidy, again? Why do I feel like I’m perpetually behind on making the house look remotely presentable, or even correctly furnished? Am I just not cut out for home-ownership?

There’s a word for this feeling: burn-out. The popular conception of burn-out is when you’ve worked too hard, are exhausted from it, and cannot work anymore. And I certainly have worked hard: Getting a mortgage and buying a house is one of the most difficult, convoluted, and bureaucratic journeys I’ve ever undertaken. And I’ve since had to do a lot to “settle in,” a shockingly pleasant euphemism for a deeply stressful process.

But that isn’t the entire picture. Burn-out doesn’t come just from working too hard. Burn-out comes from a feeling that your hard work isn’t accomplishing anything – that accomplishing things may be impossible, because nothing’s happening even with all the effort put in.

Some examples of burn-out:

Therapists get burn-out when in spite of all their efforts, they can’t fix everything, and their patients still have the same problems.
Teachers get burn-out when in spite of all their efforts, whether creative lesson plans or well-structured incentives, still leave some students struggling at academic concepts and skills.
Programmers get burn-out when they spend aeons learning a new code-base and learn all its flaws, but instead of being able to fix the flaws and make everything easier in the long run, they just have to learn to live with it as the technical debt gets even worse and every simple task just takes 5x longer than it would if they could just spend some time to clean up some things.

It can be hard to recognize burn-out, because in the moment, it feels like laziness, failure, or procrastination. But it’s not about the amount of work. It’s about the ratio of (felt) work to (perceived) results. It’s about the feeling that maybe if you try even harder, you’ll get better results, when what you really need to do is step back and take stock of things, and make sure you have the right overall approach and right goals.

So here’s my example of burn-out to add to the list:

New residents of a town can get burnt out when they feel like they’ve done gazillions of things, but their life in that city is still not as full as their old pre-COVID life.

But, though I may have done gazillions of things, I haven’t actually lived here that long in objective time. I’m measuring my results in subjective time, and that’s unfair to my efforts. Some things just can’t be rushed.

All I can do now is remind myself it is too early to be making conclusions. Even if small town life is perfect for me, I shouldn’t expect to be in my regular groove already. Even if home-ownership suits me perfectly, I still should expect to be setting up this house for a while. I had to start reminding myself of this the day after I moved, and I have to keep reminding myself of this now. It’s my new constant mantra: “Some things just take time.” And also, when that gets old, I can chant: “It hasn’t even been that long!”

Because in the end, subjective time is not objective time. I can remember that, and use that fact as the weapon to fight my unreasonable emotions. Because in truth, all things properly considered, everything’s going according to plan. I may not have enough friends or activities here yet, but I’m working on it, and after all, I just moved here.

More on Mortgages

2022-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

Mortgage interest rates have recently risen, and are currently very volatile. At the time of this writing, PSECU, my credit union, is offering mortgages at 5.125%, much higher than the 3.125% I locked in at, but lower than the peak above 6% I had recently read about in the news. But what does this mean in practice? Well, let’s run some numbers.

Understanding how expensive a house is can be confusing. The total price of a house is a huge number, more money than we normally ever deal with, for most first-time buyers more money than they’ve ever actually had or seen. It can be intimidating.

The more accessible number – the more relevant number for our day-to-day lives – is the monthly payment. The monthly payment includes principal and interest, and also escrow for property taxes and insurance, but let’s focus on the mortgage and interest right now.

The total principal and interest portion of the payment stays constant, but over time more of the payment goes towards principal, due to amortization. For a standard American 30-year fixed rate mortgage, the size of that monthly payment is a linear function of the size of the mortgage and a non-linear function of the interest.

So at my interest rate of 3.125%, a $100,000 mortgage would correspond to a monthly payment of $428. A more realistic $300,000 mortgage would cost three times that per month, or $1285. If you assume $700 or so in insurance and taxes, that comes out to $1985, a very reasonable total amount. If that were a New York City rent, the occupants need to make 40 times that monthly amount per year, or $79,400, to qualify for the apartment, and so in my mind it’d be reasonable for a person or couple who made that much to live in that house.

What about the new rate of 5.125%? The $100,000 mortgage now has a monthly payment of $544. The $300,000 mortgage would then come out to $1633, for an overall monthly payment (including the estimated taxes and other escrow costs) of $2333. By New York City standards, to qualify for that rent a group of tenants would have to make $93,320.

That’s a 17.5% increase in monthly costs, with the estimated monthly escrow payment included. Without including the monthly escrow payment, that’s a 27.1% increase in monthly payments. That means that a $300,000 mortgage at 5.125% would have the same monthly principal and interest payments as a $381,300 house at 3.125%. If you take escrow payment into account, the equivalence is closer to $350,000, which is still substantially more expensive.

This is to say, houses have now become much more expensive for borrowers, who represent the vast majority of middle class home buyers. The numbers on Zillow now mean something very different from what they meant just a few short months ago.

Will this dampen the insane level of real estate demand? Will this lower home prices to accommodate the fact that many home buyers’ budgets will naturally have shifted? Theoretically, yes, but it’s unclear whether we’ll notice in this intense a market.

But it’s important to keep this in mind when thinking about houses. The big total price of each house isn’t the only number that matters. The interest rate can also make a huge difference, especially if it is changing rapidly.

Reviews and Reactions: 2021 Short Story Hugo Nominees

2022-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

NB: These are for the 2021 Hugo awards, not the recently-announced 2022 Hugo awards. That one is coming soon.

I decided to write up my thoughts on each of the short stories nominated for the 2021 Hugo awards. Of course, here be spoilers, spoilers galore. If you don’t want these stories spoiled, go read them, and then come back here.

As an exercise, a friend and I read each of these stories and told each other what we thought the themes were, and I reference that throughout these reflections. Themes, as we define them, are thematic statements: the point the story is trying to make. Themes are distinct from thematic concepts, in that they are complete sentences rather than just nouns. They are distinct from premises, in that they are the take-away for the real-world, not a statement about the world of the story. And, to be clear, there can be more than one completely valid answer. Both my friend and I would posit what we thought the theme was, answering independently without consulting each other, and then we would discuss the story in greater detail.

What follows are the tangible results of those discussions: reflections about each story, somewhere between review and analysis. Each header is also a link, because all of these stories are available to read online. They are reviewed in descending ranked order of how good I thought they were, and the rankings are explained.

1. Metal Like Blood in the Dark

I found this story deeply compelling as well as deeply enjoyable, and it touches on deep questions of how we should interact with evil and what to do about necessary evil and the corruption that results from it, and how much we should prepare our children for it. It does so while leaning heavily on its Sci Fi setting – the message itself depends deeply on the unrealistic setting where it’s possible for a child to grow into a quite capable near-adult without experiencing the concept of intentional deception.

A creator and father makes one male, one female creature, and raises them in blissful innocence, within the confines of a garden (or, as it were, a planet), with boundaries programmed in to prevent them from gaining too much knowledge of good and evil, keeping them innocent – innocent, or alternatively put, naïve.

This telling is more optimistic than the Biblical story. Knowledge of Good and Evil comes from practical experience and necessity, not disobedience. Somehow, Sister (but not Brother) works out (from first principles!) deception, lying to yourself to stay consistent, sabotage, and killing in self-defense.

Her initial reaction to lying was very visceral to me as a programmer. Programming is an exact discipline; most computer programs cannot recover from internal data corruption. If an error is not caught and handled, the corruption can spread, resulting in security breaches or arbitrary instability. Much of the history of software design is coming up with ways of partitioning this instability. The thought of causing corruption on purpose is so counter to all of this work!

And of course, that is how lies spread throughout the honest world in human life too; we’re just so used to dishonesty we don’t realize.

When Sister realizes lying is possible, she realizes that understanding lying is necessary to interact with others, and gradually realizes that lying is something she might be forced, by circumstances, to do. She realizes that it would therefore be impossible to go back to a world where the only falsehoods are errors, where errors do not need to be maintained on purpose. What a novel way to look at the loss of innocence!

I was surprised that, once she realizes how necessary lying is, she decides that in any case, she wants to protect Brother from it – another contrast to the Biblical story where Eve shares the fruit with Adam. I feel like even this drive to preserve innocence comes from a loss of innocence: The old Sister, the naïve Sister, would surely reason that this new “lying” concept was an important skill, that of course it would be practical for Brother to know about. But now that she knows how to lie, she decides to use this new skill to protect Brother’s innocence.

Because she is lying to Brother: She lies by omission about what happened concretely to the villain, but she also lies in a bigger sense by omission by not explaining lying to him, and how it is sometimes necessary. From this point on, her relationship with Brother will be a big lie by omission about the fundamental nature of the universe – and still a lie that she thinks is worth it, to preserve his innocence.

My friend says the theme of this story is “Teach your children to be good, and then when they confront evil, they will learn to be cunning without becoming evil themselves.”

But if the story is trying to say that, I don’t think it proves it. Brother does not learn cunning; Sister is merely luckier. And with Sister, I get the sense that she barely learns it on time, and that her ability to leverage it so successfully on her first life or death attempt is fundamentally, again, a lucky break.

I would agree that this story is about evil, particularly dishonesty, but I would say the theme is that even the concept of evil and dishonesty is fundamentally corrupting. That innocence, once lost, cannot be regained. The concept of saying something false on purpose, to a truly innocent soul, would itself be an irreversible corruption that she would then want to protect others from.

I ranked this one first, as did my friend, independently of each other. Later, I learned that it did in fact win the Hugo, well-deservedly. It stood head and shoulders above the rest, in my opinion.

2. Open House on Haunted Hill

This story is about places. Places often seem to have personalities; the premise here is about what it would be like if houses literally did have personalities – if they had personalities and could act on them. This story is about belonging in a home, a home that is so loved that it begins to love you back. It is about finding a place to belong after being stricken by grief.

I enjoyed the detail that the couple was not yet married, but did have a child together. It showed the motion and dynamism of their lives when tragedy struck.

My friend said the theme of this story was “in our grief, it’s hard to see what’s good for us or to see when others are trying to help us, but goodness abounds in the world – just keep your eyes open.”

I agree.

But I think there’s also lot about place: “Choosing a good environment is important especially if you’re emotionally developing or emotionally healing.” As someone who’s moved not only houses but states in the past year, that really resonates with me. As we’ve all suffered through the lockdowns and restrictions of Coronavirus, the importance of our environment for our sanity and stability, I think, has been magnified for all of us.

It is perhaps for that reason that I rank this one second instead of third; it was a really close one.

3. Little Free Library

I really enjoyed this story. I couldn’t put it down – and my ADHD has really been getting in the way of my reading recently, so this is high praise.

I used to live in New York City, and I often would people-watch, and think about the lives of all the people I’d see on a day-to-day basis. Their worlds were completely separate from mine, even though, for a few moments, we were in the same physical space. In the buildings around me, completely different lives, completely different problems, completely different dreams are happening, and we get continuous brief windows to interact with them. And of course, the same is true in other environments as well; the other worlds are just less visible to us than they are in a big city.

Little free libraries are designed to encourage this, encourage this connection with strangers, to reach out into other worlds, with the power of books, and the power of art. Who knows what’s going on in the lives of the people who take your books, who drop other books off?

This story expanded on this theme. The narrator’s little free library, rather than simply connecting with the “other worlds” that the neighbors live in, connected in Narnia-like fashion to a literal other world.

Like many fantasy stories, this has an element of “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” As applied here, it is a reminder that the people we interact with might be going through a completely alien situation to ours, as symbolized through interacting with a literal alternative world.

A friend said the theme could be stated as “books are powerful tools, and it’s good to help others.” I said “one person’s community engagement art project is another’s life or death lifeline,” and I think this is true even if they aren’t some strange birds or dragons from another dimension.

After all, sometimes other people’s lives, in real life, are as strange to us as inter-dimensional birds or dragons.

The premise is super fun. I would have enjoyed a sequel: what is it like to raise the heir to the bird/dragon throne, in our world?

4. The Mermaid Astronaut

The premise of the story is so loud here it crowds out the theme: “The Little Mermaid”, but in space! So full confession: I have actually not read “The Little Mermaid,” but I have seen the Disney movie. So from my point of view, the romance of being a crewmate of a starship fills in for the romantic Disney prince, which is definitely a statement about alternatives to finding a partner as a purpose for life.

My friend says it’s about remembering your family and where you came from – specifically, “It’s important to explore and grow, but at the end of the day, never forget your roots.” I had a similar thought, but a bit starker: “Following your dreams often requires great sacrifice, in the form of missing out on the entirety of what your life otherwise would be.” This happens twice: she misses out on her entire life with her sister to go to space, and she misses out on having a full life in space to ever see her sister again. No, this story says, you can’t “have it all,” even if that isn’t defined to include raising children.

The big reveal was that she was separated from her sister by time dilation, so that she is still young when her sister is old. One thing I found unrealistic is that no one warns her, and that she’s not angry. Both the witch at the bottom of the ocean and the crew of the ship knew about time dilation, but apparently it’s only explained to her right on time for her to get back to her sister while the sister is barely still alive.

The end result is appropriate thematically, as it stands in for careers or dreams when we realize only when it’s almost too late – or entirely too late – that we need to re-connect with the people that we love and that we have left behind.

But that theme wouldn’t have been dampened by some more conflict, but rather enhanced. If she were angry that she hadn’t been warned, that would apply equally well to real-life careers. If her crewmates were more resistant to her going back so early (and diverting their entire ship), that would, again, apply equally well to real-life careers.

All in all, everyone was too chill about these high-stakes life-altering decisions. The knife to cut her fins and the pain was good, but the emotional pain of conflict would have been even better. In all honesty, I suspect this story would improve with expansion – I think it would work better as a novella or even a novel, so all these major life twists could be fully fleshed out.

Because of these technical issues, and the lack of originality in the premise without that substantial a twist (“The Little Mermaid” is also originally about sacrifice and irrevocable major life choices), this one ranks on the lower end. The twist was still enjoyable, but not as deep or as well-executed as it could have been.

5. A Guide for Working Breeds

This story was fun, but didn’t seem that rich.

It wasn’t clear, as my friend pointed out, in what way these were robots and not just regular people. This wasn’t meant entirely literally; the story makes constant minor references to them being robots, like how they don’t eat food (but somehow still like omelettes) or get static damage to their GPUs, but they’re not robots in a way that is interesting to the plot. Robots are just another oppressed minority group, taken advantage of by bosses via machinations of questionable legality. The story could’ve worked equally well set in a medieval setting with some oppressed ethnic group. It’s not using the Sci Fi for the purpose.

My friend said the theme was “always be nice to those you meet; goodness is paid forward.” That’s definitely there, but I think there’s more to it. The continuous references to labor laws, plus the odd gladiator fights the mentor is involved in, make me think the author is going for (and hitting) something deeper than that. “Solidarity is necessary in the working class” I think is closer to it. “Leverage the system fully to acquire wealth and then share with your working-class comrades.”

Unfortunately, it seemed too easy in general, but particularly in not requiring the Sci Fi content for its theme (a bad sign in my book). Why did the original mentor come around and turn from an annoyed conscript into the mentorship program to a true friend to the mentee? No solid explanation is given, besides raw empathy, robots’ robotity to robots. And enjoyment of dogs is there, I suppose, as a facile personality quirk, but not fully developed or explained.

6. Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse

This story wasn’t for me.

This is literally true, in that it seems to be for women about womanhood, and I am not a woman. It is also more broadly true, in that I am not a huge fan of zombie apocalypse stories in general (though I’m not categorically opposed either), and specifically I wasn’t a huge fan of this story.

This story focuses on a group of women who have decided to live in an explicitly matriarchal and (at least initially) all-woman group to better survive the apocalypse, which reminds me of the ancient Greek legend of the Amazons, or the Many Mothers from Mad Max: Fury Road. This group uses explicit feminist solidarity as their impetus to band together to survive the zombie apocalypse.

In general, I found the story cringily on-the-nose. I thought the way it re-applied the feminist rallying cry “my body, my choice” to be forced, rather than insightful. In general, I found it somewhat incredible (and therefore also forced) that even an all-woman group would be talking so much about feminism and feminist topics while surviving a zombie apocalypse. It seems more likely that they’d be more focused on being people than being women, as their gender wouldn’t be the most relevant factor in the situation.

There was one point within the story where it was revealed that the protagonist had once had to come out to her racist preacher father; it was extra difficult, because she was not only dating a woman, but dating a Black woman. I know that these situations are all too common in our society, but I also felt like in this story, this was gratuitous. It was played entirely straight, just referenced as a situation that would obviously be difficult, in a way that conveyed nothing new about such a situation, no particular insight. I already know that such situations exist, and are hard, and I already know that a lot of people go through similar situations. Show me some depth, some new realization about it!

And that holds for this story in general. I already know that women can be survivors too, that women is just as useful in an apocalypse as a men, in some ways more useful. I’m even willing to believe that a group of all women might have even better survival characteristics, but this story didn’t convince me of it – it just asserted it.

Conclusion

I enjoyed this activity, and I feel like I have new insights into Sci Fi, particularly that stories are better when the Sci Fi elements of it are more core to the theme. I hope to do more of these short story reviews in the future.

Review: The Comic Book Story of Beer

2022-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

I like beer, and I like comic books, so I was excited to read The Comic Book Story of Beer.

And it was overall quite a fun read! It contextualized how important beer was in antiquity – including theories that beer catalyzed the agricultural revolution – and how important it’s been in society ever since, taking a social approach to the entire history, while also explaining a lot of the science alongside the primarily social narrative. It was a really fun read, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys beer or who cares about history, which I think is most people.

I would state the general theme as this: “Beer always has been an essential ingredient to civilization.” And I think it does a solid job of proving that theme!

It spent some time specifically on the craft brewing revolution that took off in the US and the UK, and is now associated with “hipsters.” And it made me reflect a little on what a hipster was. Here’s some things associated with hipsterdom:

Living in a city after having grown up in the suburbs
Beards
And the focus of this book: Having actual variety in beer, instead of corporatized “light” American Lagers

All of these are things that Boomers (especially White Boomers) for some reason really made untrendy, and which Millenials are bringing back, skipping the bland suburban generation(s) for an attempt to return to some equilibrium, to a more normal state, undoing suburbanization, white flight, and the bland corporatized beer that goes with it.

And of course, the irony is really the dissonance from being raised in an environment where you weren’t expected to have this life trajectory, but here you are.

Then again, I’ve been told I don’t understand hipsterdom, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

In any case, I’m glad that among the decisions of our parents and grandparents we’re reconsidering, “light” beers are among them, and if you want to learn more about beer-making, its history, and little tidbits of scientific details, this is a fun book.

Biking to Philly

2022-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

I am out of biking shape. I know I am out of biking shape. The pandemic has not been good to my physical fitness. (For the record, this isn’t a proper edited and outlined and triaged essay, just some notes on my past weekend.)

But as out of shape as I am, I also know it’s only 25 miles from here to Philly on the Schuylkill River Trail, and so I figured maybe I could do it without any additional prep. When I found out that it was less hilly than the longer bike rides I used to do, I was sold, and I did it.

And I got there, with many breaks, in much more time than it should have taken. Now I know how out of biking shape I am, and I can work on it. And I was fortunately able to cancel the trip back and take my bike on the train back with me (which a woman asked me if she could take a picture of to prove to her husband it was possible).

First off, this trail is perhaps some of the safest cycling – especially on a per mile basis – that I’ve ever done. It’s fully protected, almost entirely paved (and the unpaved bits are fine), and only interacts with cars for a very safe 3 miles in Manayunk.

In fact, the safety and the lack of interaction with traffic presented an unexpected problem to me: parts of the ride let me zone out enough that I would get a little… bored. This meant that I would focus less, which meant I would slow down, which meant I would get even more bored. I should have a podcast with me, which means I’ll need to take a battery pack with me so my phone doesn’t die as I listen to it. Lesson learned.

But with all this safety, I was so confused to see so many people biking in full gear, with reflector shirts and their lights on during the daytime. Like, are you worried about getting hit by a deer?

I’m used to biking in NYC, interacting with the traffic all the time, and this helps my anxiety, as you’re forced to pay very close attention to actual potential dangers. This was more just… exercise.

There were some fun surprises! Somewhere around the halfway point, I saw a sign for “The Tricycle,” and much to my pleasant surprise, there it was! A bicycle shop and cafe! I had a coffee and a delightful conversation with some of the other patrons. It was super refreshing.

When I got to my destination, I sounded like I was dying. I was coughing like an elderly smoker with the flu, and I don’t even smoke anymore. What is even the point of not smoking if you’re still going to cough like that? (I’m kidding! Kidding!)

Biking in Philly itself was a different story. Cars drive faster in Philly than in NYC, there’s fewer traffic lights and more all-way stops, which is terrifying, and I had a minor crash, a “trolly track spill,” because it was raining and my wheel got caught in the trolly tracks.

I was fine, and it was only a $11 repair (with tax) to re-true the wheel and readjust the breaks, but oy gevalt! (und “Gewalt” meine ich Buchstäblich…)

So in conclusion: I should do this way more, because this is a great way to get some exercise and some sociality in on a weekend! Hopefully next time I can bike back too.

Mortgages are Interesting

2022-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

I just bought a house, and it came with a mortgage. I bought the house and committed to the mortgage all in one ceremony, in a cute little office where I signed enough papers that the sellers were able to solemnly hand me the keys to my new castle. In the lead-up to this, I was told how early payments, mortgage insurance, and refinancing works, and it’s – I think very reasonably – been on my mind since.

It was in a university economics class – macroeconomics – where I first encountered the concept that “paying down debt” was equivalent to “saving.”

And of course, when economists – and especially undergraduate econ professors – use words like “equivalent” you have to take it with a heap of salt. But there’s a lot of truth to it!

Let’s say you get $1,000 from your job. If you pay down a debt with it, your net worth has just increased by $1,000. If you save it into a savings account, your net worth has also just increased by $1,000. But if instead you spend it, say, on rent, your net worth does not increase at all.

It also interacts with interest in a similar way. Let’s say your debt and your savings account are both with Easy Round Numbers Credit Union (ERNCU), and both have 10% yearly interest as an annual percentage yield (i.e. after compounding is already taken into account). Well, if you save the $1000 now, you will have $1100 in a year. If you pay off $1000 in debt now, you’ll have $1100 less to pay in a year. If you were, for whatever reason, planning on paying off the entire debt, whatever it was, in a year’s time, this is an exactly identical situation. Even if not, though, it’s still the same net worth, and macroeconomically “equivalent.”

Interest rate is important. To maximize long-term net worth, you would want to put excess money in the place with the maximum interest rate. This is common financial advice for loans: After paying all your minimum payments, spend the extra money on the loan with the most interest. And, though it’s less commonly brought up, it works for saving too: If you save money in a place where it grows faster than the loan, put it there. Keep that loan going, and pay it off only when you have to. So if you have a savings account more valuable than the loan, use it.

So considering this “equivalency,” I perhaps have a valuable opportunity. Instead of thinking of this as a loan, a burden to pay back, I should think of this as a very special savings account, with 3.125% guaranteed interest, more than the best CDs out there (which are currently hovering around 1%ish). If I have some excess cash, I can use it to increase my equity in the house, and I’ll save that much, plus 3.125% compounded, in future payments.

“Wow,” I said to myself (and to a friend), “Maybe I could just take advantage of this, and sell CD’s. I could have people lend me money – sorry, deposit their money with me – at 3%, better than they’d be able to get a bank, and use it to pay down the mortgage faster. After all, saving and paying down debt is equivalent, right?”

And then I thought to myself, wait, how would I pay them back? Let’s say I get a customer, John Doe. Mr Doe wants to leave his $1,000 with me, and get paid $1,030 in a year. That’s 3% interest, and less than my 3.125% interest rate, so I should be able to make this worth my while. And it’s better than what Mr Doe can get anywhere else, so that should make it worth his while!

So I take his $1,000, and I pre-pay my mortgage with an extra $1,000 payment. My principal goes down by $1,000. The amount of interest I have to pay in the following year, therfore, goes down by that times my interest rate. I then pay $31.25 less in interest that year, take the extra money I would have paid in interest, give $30 of it back to Mr Doe, and keep the extra $1.25 as profit. Woo!

But already there’s a problem. It’s true that I would have to pay $31.25 less in interest that year, yes. But I can’t take that money and give it back to Mr Doe. I have to keep paying the same total monthly payments, and whatever now doesn’t go to interest, must go to paying the principal down faster. I simply don’t have the flexibility to pay it to Mr Doe (and myself) instead; I have to wait until the end of the mortgage term, in 30 years, when I’ve paid it off early, to see the money.

But even setting that problem aside, I’m assuming that once I give Mr Doe the interest, he’ll want to leave the $1,000 in for another year. But what if he wants his money back? What if inflation continues or the Fed just feels like raising interest rates, and now there’s CD’s at 4% available elsewhere? Well, in order to get the principal back (and this would help with the interest too), I’d have to increase the loan amount on my house back up again, and take-backsies the pre-payment. Given that this is a fixed-rate mortgage and not a line of credit, this would require refinancing – which, given that in this scenario interest rates are higher, is not going to be fun or affordable for me.

So what financial product can I sell Mr Doe and his friends? I can sell a very long-term CD, that matures in 30 years. Once his money gets used as my early repayment, he has to wait until I see it again – when my mortgage ends early because of it. Then, instead of paying the bank back for the last however-many payments, I pay him the amount I would have paid the bank, and he should get his money back with 3.125% interest – or rather, with 3% interest after I also take out my cut. Mr Doe pays $1000 now, and I pay him $2427.26 after 30 years, for $89.94 profit on my part.

So, it looks like having a loan at 3.125% is indeed like having a savings opportunity at 3.125% – as long as it’s a 30-year CD. Problem is, who wants a 30-year CD? Would I buy a 30-year CD at 3.125%? I mean, sure, the interest is enticing, and much better than I can get in a savings account.

But at 30 years, the only thing I could practically use this CD for is retirement – and I already have a retirement account, which I expect to do better tha 3.125% a year. The 3.125% is a guarateed return, that is true, but 30 years is a long way away. On average, the stock market, while not guaranteed, has historically tended to pay 10% returns. While it might result in bad years, 30 years is plenty of time for the bad years to be beaten out by the good ones.

And it’s not like my monthly payments would go down if I created such a CD – that would require a refinancing. The bank is actually creating CDs (and other financial assets) out of this mortgage, and in exchange for predictability, they don’t want to lower the monthly payments, which is in my mind fair enough, as I get to lock in this low interest rate. But even if I pay half the mortgage in a single payment, unless I refinance, my monthly minimum payment remains the same until the mortgage is paid off.

And honestly, some borrowers – those with certain subprime mortgages – have it worse. Some mortgages come with a pre-payment penalty, where paying the principal ahead of time actually accrues fees. For me, it does decrease the principal – I just have to wait until the end of the mortgage to reap the practical benefit.

Again, unless I refinance. I pay the entire loan off, all at once, and replace it with another loan. This makes sense if the interest rate is lower, or even if it’s the same and I want to lower the monthly payment or take money out of my equity. If I could know I could refinance at any time at the same interest rate, then I could sell (and provide myself with) shorter-term savings opportunities.

Refinancing is similar to selling a mortgage-sized group of CDs to a bunch of interested John Does… except it’s to a bank, the only organization actually interested in such a product, and therefore at the market rate for mortgages, rather than at the lower market rate for CDs. Part of what makes a bank a viable business is that they provide longer-term loans than any normal individual would be interested in, in exchange for an upcharge on interest rates. They then take on some amount of risk and some amount of overhead to turn that loan into more reasonable (i.e. shorter-term than 30 year) CDs, or even checking and savings accounts.

So if a mortgage doesn’t give me a super-special savings opportunity for my excess money, why am I getting a mortgage? Well, I have to live somewhere, and I can’t afford a house outright, and the alternative is renting. Monthly mortgage payments are comparable, in their size, with rent payments, but even with the default monthly mortgage payment, the principal’s still going down.

Put another way: Even though I’m not interested in putting my disposable income into a 30-year 3.125% CD, I’d much rather put my monthly housing expenses into such a CD than pay them to some landlord, never to be seen again. This adds up – in 30 years, I will definitely have the entire principal of my mortgage paid off, which means I will no longer have to pay the mortgage payments. If things go well, my house will have also appreciated, in case I want to borrow money against home equity. If I’d rented this entire time, I’d still have to pay rent, which the landlord could increase at any time. The “free rent” from my mortgage will be a valuable asset in my later years, and one that I basically don’t have to pay any extra for above getting a rental.

And mortgages are honestly also convenient. If I owned the property outright, I’d have to pay all the different forms of property tax myself, and also my homeowner’s insurance. With a mortgage, I have one monthly payment, that indirectly pays those things through an escrow account. And this is honestly much more convenient, especially for someone who struggles to juggle all the demands of modern life.

A Modern Version

2020-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Were too busy deciding who would be king…
To even TRY to put Humpty Dumpty together again.
And he’s just sitting there, all yolk and shell, waiting…

A Prudent Quarantine

2020-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

Five Members sat in council.

There are some activities, some patterns of human group behavior, that transcend era and culture, and meeting in council is one of them. In spite of the youth of the participants – they were in their late teens and early 20’s – and the informality of the setting – leather couches covered in scratch marks, unfinished walls – they still clearly were sitting in council. The seriousness with which they were watching the video, their intentional and controlled posturing and nuanced glances, would have been instantly recognizable to any Parliament or Diet throughout history. They had met to do business, to make a decision, to come to a consensus.

One Member rose to speak. “I don’t know about this girl,” said Carlos, tapping his phone.

Abruptly, the video paused. They now saw the girl, Petra, frozen, mid-sentence, mid-gesture, looming over them, larger than life on the 12 foot tall projector screen. She didn’t look like someone who would require scrutiny from anyone, let alone detailed conciliar deliberation. She was sitting on a small uphill slope of rolling grass, relaxed but still composed. She just looked well put-together: she was meticulously dressed; perfect subtle make-up; cheery, friendly demeanor. She projected a presence greater than her small stature: though on physicality alone she could be mistaken for a young teenager (she was, in fact, 21), her presentation was that of a 30 year old.

Christy resisted the urge to lower her head, instead presenting a stoicism she did not feel. She fantasized about a world where she could introduce the rest of Red Stripe Quarantine Group (Reg. No. F56D3, Bellevue, WA) to her girlfriend in a pleasant, friendly manner, like people do in video chats and VR hang-outs, except in real life. Failing that, Christy really wanted to fast-forward through this whole interview, not just the video itself, but also fast-forwarding or just skipping the lived experience of her closest friends scrutinizing and discussing the love of her life. But she knew that this was the only way she could ever see Petra in person. The other Members were entitled to their safety. It was, after all, the law. A law followed is a life saved.

But did it have to be Carlos who first spoke against Petra? Don’t misunderstand: Christy was duly grateful to Carlos. He had truly enriched her life, in the most concrete way possible, not with spiritual or social riches, but with hard American greenbacks (still called that even though cash had long since been outlawed as a disease vector). If he hadn’t joined nine months prior, if he hadn’t started, coyly and then loudly, saying “what if” – “What if we used our still to make hand sanitizer in addition to booze?” “What if we started growing aloe and selling the hand sanitizer?” “What if we started taking shifts, contacting distribution companies, and getting sold in local drug stores?” – she might have had to drop out of school, and Red Stripe, her chosen family, might have had to disband. And it was admittedly quite satisfying to see the “Red Stripe Hand Sanitizer™” labels on their products at the local corner stores when they went on their supply runs.

But, in practice, even though he was not Leader, that made Carlos her boss. And no one wants their boss interviewing or scrutinizing their girlfriend. Christy was grateful that Carlos had not succeeded in convincing Joe to let him shadow – or, really, co-conduct – the interview. Christy wished there had been a way to exclude Carlos from this stage as well. But there he was, dressed in his button up and slacks, even though it was just them, even though everyone else was wearing pyjamas, as if at any second he would find himself thrust into a video call with a supplier or distributor.

Lilith, Christy’s cat, sensed Christy’s anxiety, and came running over as soon as Carlos stood up. Christy picked Lilith up, put her on her lap, and sighed deeply. At the same time, she heard Joe sigh a more abrupt, exasperated sigh. “Huph.”

Christy recognized that sigh. She hoped that it meant that she would not be called upon to defend Petra, that Joe would take up her cause for her.

Joe was the official Leader of the Quarantine Group, and the original founder. Christy and the other Members – even Carlos, to some extent – looked up to him as an elder brother. Joe had been the one to actually conduct the interview that they were all now evaluating, and now he was ready to jump in on the discussion: “What do you mean, you don’t know about her? What’s your concern, specifically?”

Carlos lifted his hand in the exact way that he did before he was going to make a new, strict, unwelcome rule for the factory (the latest one eliminated water bottles in the room with the still). Christy suddenly realized she couldn’t bear to listen to what she felt certain was coming next, and so she had to get out ahead of it. “It’s not because she’s Chinese, is it? You do know she’s Chinese-American, right?”

As soon as she said this, Christy covered her mouth up. Of course Carlos knew that, and Christy had basically just called him stupid, and bigoted to boot. But it was a real concern, and one that she’d been worried about. After all, everyone knew the stories, both from grandparents who remembered it all and from history class in school: 53 years ago, in the first year of the Perpetual Quarantine (Q.Y. 1 for Quarantine Year 1), the First Virus started spreading from China to the other countries, because, as was invariably pointed out, China was the least hygienic, least responsible country.

Carlos put his hand back down and slowly turned towards her, adjusting his glasses, a gesture he had learned from his parents. “Of course not,” said Carlos earnestly. “The Administration would never allow any foreigners into this country, especially ones from such a place as China.” Everyone nodded. Everyone had also learned in school that immigration to the United States had been outlawed since Q.Y. 4, 49 years ago. “I am not one to hold the ancestors’ flaws against the descendants.”

Abruptly, a woman’s voice boomed above them, way too loud for comfort. “So what is the issue, then?” Carlos’s partner Jillian jumped, having forgotten, as was all too easy to do sometimes, about the sixth Member of their deliberations, Leila, who had videoed in for the meeting, her face visible on a small (only 3 foot by 3 foot) square on the projector screen, and her voice broadcast, apparently at the wrong volume, through their room’s sound system.

Leila was an out of house member of Red Stripe Quarantine Group; she was in the same “abstract” or “virtual” household. She had her own separate apartment, but her red wrist bracelet was the same as the others’, and it also allowed her to visit the Red Stripe Hub house whenever she wanted – which was legally allowed as long as it was the only other household she visited. Quarantine groups were currently allowed to have up to 10 adults and up to 4 locations, and Red Stripe’s model of a central hub with one out of house Member was not uncommon.

Leila needed this flexibility to study to be a doctor. Every day from Monday through Thursday, she went from her apartment to a physical lab on campus. At her designated time each day – which was assigned by lottery and could range from a pleasant 11AM to a torturous 3AM slot – she would walk over to the lab, fully masked. Once the previous student was confirmed as being out of the mini-lab she had been assigned, she would take a quick Sanitation Shower, do her lab work in her lab clothes (perhaps on a video chat with other students or an instructor), and then leave after 45 minutes. Next year, she would qualify for a full hour and a half, which she was looking forward to.

Then, Thursday night through the weekend, she would usually stay with the rest of Red Stripe in the main house. For this, she would book an autonomous car, which would then automatically take her to the main house as the only place she was legally allowed to go. As soon as she arrived, she would shower and stay in her pyjamas until it was time for her to go back on Monday.

And this particular meeting took place on a Tuesday, which is why instead of sitting on her currently-empty spot on the middle couch, Leila was sitting cross-legged on a brightly-colored patterned ottoman in her own little corner of the projection screen. “Petra is not ‘this girl,’ she’s Christy’s girlfriend. If you have a real concern, that’s fine, we can discuss it, but like, I really thought this was just going to be a formality. Don’t we all just want Christy to be happy?”

Christy felt like she would melt. Of course, she knew Leila would stand up for Petra, as Christy’s best friend and the only Member who had really had significant interaction with Petra before this. But actually hearing Leila jump in so boldly, so confidently just filled her with gratitude. She raised her hand up towards the camera in the shape of a heart, and smiled.

Carlos stretched his back out, and put his hands behind his back, and began to walk, and then to pace. This was how sermons were preached in the Watchers of the Vaccine, the niche religious group Carlos was raised in (Carlos wouldn’t let the others call it a cult, even though he no longer practiced). And, as with the clergy of that group, it meant that Carlos was about to give a sermon.

“She did the interview outside, in a park. She wasn’t even wearing a mask. Now I know, and she did make it very clear, that it was her group’s Liberty Day.” Every group had one day a week they were allowed to go for walks or to the park, indicated by the color of their bracelets. “And I also know there weren’t other people around, so she wasn’t violating the masks law. That is not my point.”

“Well, friend,” began Kevin, and then he paused. Everyone waited patiently. Kevin was Joe’s partner and led the group’s semi-weekly yoga classes, and he talked in the slow, overwrought way that people talk when they’ve smoked weed their entire lives. He waved his hand slowly as his brain loaded more words. “What is your point then?” More loading. “It’s more important to be safe than look safe, my friend. And she seemed really chill.”

At the word “chill,” Carlos reared back as if he was ready to charge. He pointed his finger with the energy of a punch, his face bulging red and about to boil over from anger. He inhaled deeply a few times, and when his face had finally returned to a more normal color, he spoke, with the sort of crisp calmness that in certain personalities can mask a seething rage. “I just don’t think that’s true.”

Kevin blinked. “What’s not true?”

“Part of being safe is looking safe. Care and focus defeat the virus. We’re not looking for ways to technically follow the law. We’re not looking to get a C+ in quarantine. We’re not going to be like the videos of Canada.” Canada, in spite of several attempted military interventions, still refused to quarantine to American standards. Protect your country, observe the quarantine. Carlos paused for a breath, and then continued. “After all, we make hand sanitizers. We must be above reproach.” Everyone nodded their half-hearted agreement. ‘Above reproach’ was one of Carlos’s catch-phrases. “And Petra… Well, she didn’t say anything about what personal disciplines she kept to avoid the spread of infection. She didn’t say how she would help contribute to our economy. She didn’t –”

Christy’s panic and helplessness slowly converted to anger. Would she ever be free of Carlos’s suffocating perspectives? It used to just be during their work shifts, but now not one part of her life was safe. Something would need to be done, she thought, in a boil gradually bubbling beneath the lid of her anxiety.

“Our economy?” Joe interrupted. “We have six people! And she said she had an online job, that she would pay her share of the rent. And that she was a good cook. I didn’t ask her for more details, so maybe she has more ideas she just didn’t mention. I think –”

“Yes,” Carlos said, his voice now ice-cold. “She said she wanted to share with us new, fun recipes. Recipes that, for all we know, involve endangering us all by going to multiple grocery stores in a single trip. Recipes with expensive ingredients –”

Christy’s anger finally burst through the lid, and she yelled, “Carlos!”

Joe and Carlos froze mid-argument, their gestures stuck like a video on pause, and the rest of the council gaped at Christy. In all the time they had known her, she had never raised her voice in anger before. In excitement, perhaps, or enthusiasm, but never in anger.

And indeed, in the light of their stares, Christy recovered her normal affect, and smiled, speaking as sweetly as she could, but with a hint of bitterness that her fellow Members weren’t used to. She decided to focus on one particular point. “We all are very duly grateful that you got us into the hand sanitizing business. But that means we should be less worried about money now, not more, right?”

Kevin agreed. “Wouldn’t you enjoy some” … wave, wave, words loading, inhale … “more new tastes?”

Carlos shook his head, as if only he understood the true severity of the situation. “That’s not the only example.” And at that, Carlos started tapping at his phone in his hand, jerking the video back in 15 second jumps. The out of context freeze frames, alternating between Petra’s elegant, nuanced body language and Joe’s extravagant gestures, formed a bizarre dance.

The others held in their intense emotions in patient but active silence. Christy clenched her fists in an effort to keep herself from crying or yelling – she wasn’t sure which.

Finally, Carlos seemed to have found the correct spot in the video. Joe had just asked “What is an ethical dilemma that you have faced?” Petra had said, “So, this one time I was at this party, and this girl was drunk…”

Carlos paused the video again, and looked out over the group. “Was I the only one who heard that?”

Everyone looked at each other, slightly uncomfortable. Finally Leila spoke up, saying what everyone else had been thinking. “She clearly means like a video chat or VR party.” Leila paused, and then continued, audibly affronted. “You’re not actually suggesting –”

“Christy,” said Carlos. “Has she ever taken you to a VR or video chat party?”

Christy paused. Petra hadn’t.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She had, but mostly with Petra’s own family or one of her close friends from her family’s group. Certainly not the “meet a lot of people” type of party, not something that you would call a party – loaded and edgy as that word was – even metaphorically.

So the question still stood. Did Petra have a past? Did Petra used to be a partier?

Christy would have to discuss this with Petra. But, she told herself decisively, it didn’t matter. The Petra she knew would never do something so irresponsible, and the past was in the past. Perhaps it had been a real party, and Petra was being forthright in bringing it up. She had also promised not to violate the group’s safety. If she really was being irresponsible, still, today, would she speak so openly about it?

In the midst of these thoughts, Christy remembered that she still had to speak, even though right then she’d rather not exist. She took a deep breath, hoping to inhale some courage along with the air. “I’m honestly quite hurt that we’ve come this far. Joe and Kevin, you have each other. Carlos, you have Jillian.” Jillian smiled coolly and waved from her seat. “I have been dating this girl online for three months now, and you know I have never met her in person. And now she’s giving up her whole life, her ability to see her parents every day, to talk to them in person, to live with me. I thought I lived in a place that wanted me to have a partner, to be happy!”

Kevin, now wearing an overwrought but sincere frown, sympathetically patted Christy on the back. “Come now. Carlos is just trying to do due diligence. He’s not actually going to veto her. We’re just maybe going to have to do another round of interviews. I know it’s annoying, but we’ll get her here, I promise.”

Carlos looked sternly at Kevin. “Don’t trivialize this! Everyone has a right to be comfortable with the people they’re quarantined with, the people we spend all our time with, the people who we trust not to get us sick. If I don’t feel comfortable with her –”

Joe interrupted. “Carlos, if I’d known you were looking for more detail about how she’d contribute economically, I would have asked her more relevant questions. And I’m sure Leila’s right about the party. Perhaps we should just do another round –”

“She could have brought it up!” Carlos said, measuredly but twice as loud as Joe. “She could’ve explained when she realized what it sounded like she was saying! Our goal isn’t to bring her on board and lie to ourselves that she’s a good fit. If I were Leader of this group, performing these interviews, I wouldn’t prompt her to say the words to check a box, that’s not how this works.”

Kevin gasped in slow motion. Even Jillian blinked. Everyone had always been able to hear Carlos thinking about how much he wanted to be Leader; it was an extremely loud thought. But this was the closest Carlos had ever come to actually saying it. And certainly the other Members could see the logic, and no one could argue that he hadn’t earned it, or didn’t deserve it, on some level. But on a level no one was really able to articulate, no one really supported the idea either, and up to this moment, Carlos had simply been biding his time as it gradually seemed more and more inevitable.

But no one said anything, so Carlos continued. “And I think I miscommunicated earlier. It’s not just what Petra did or didn’t say that bothers me. Maybe she just used to go to a lot of VR parties. That probably is what she meant. But that’s not what is really bugging me. That, we could do follow-up research on. That, I’d do another interview for.

“But her personality test – her personality test showed that she’s an extreme extrovert. I know those types! They stretch every law and regulation to go outside and meet strangers as much as possible. They go grocery shopping just to talk to other people. They are responsible for so much contagion.”

Christy hadn’t reviewed the personality tests and so she had never learned this, but she didn’t think much of it. She could see how someone could confuse Petra for an extreme extrovert; perhaps this was a testing glitch.

“Hey, I tested as an extreme extrovert!” said Joe. “Are you going to accuse me of endangering all of us?”

Too much was happening for Christy. Her girlfriend was potentially vetoed; Carlos was making an active bid for the Leadership; and now Joe, her friend, or rather, the older brother her birth family lacked, had actually been an extrovert this whole time? Along with Petra? The test was thoroughly broken. Or maybe the word just didn’t mean what she thought it did. In any case, nothing Petra had in common with Joe could possibly be held against her, no matter how bad it sounded.

Carlos echoed Christy’s thoughts. “I’m not saying the test is 100% –”

“But I am an extrovert. Being an extrovert is not a bad thing!”

A few seconds of stunned silence passed.

Finally, Leila’s voice cut through from the speaker. “Carlos! What on earth is wrong with you? Why are you putting Christy through this?”

Carlos looked towards the speaker, then the screen, a little flustered. He started to say, “I…” and then paused.

Leila seemed to take this pause as a moral concession. “You want to veto Petra, and make an ass out of yourself as you do it? Fine. I can’t stop you. But I can leave this group. Christy and Petra and I can start a new one. I have my own apartment already, and I have savings, you know. You think you’re so special and so important just because you started a business and –”

“I will not,” yelled Joe, “I will not see this group, that I spent years bringing together, fall apart like this! We are a family, people. And Christy does deserve happiness. And Carlos, Carlos does deserve recognition for his activities; we’d all be bankrupt if it weren’t for him. Leila, you only have savings because of him. You know that.”

Christy knew that Leila didn’t see it that way. After all, as Leila had told her many times, though never in Carlos’s hearing, they all contributed to the business. Carlos just contributed differently. But Christy saw what Joe was trying to do, and waited quietly, realizing it might be her only chance at Petra moving in, and thus at happiness.

Joe took a moment to catch his breath, and then continued. “So I’d like to propose a compromise. We vote Petra in, and we vote, in the same vote, to make Carlos the official Deputy Leader. Next time, Carlos,” he said, looking over at him, “you and I design the interview process together, and we work to build a fairer process. We also try extra hard, in the future, to make a policy that favors romantic partners of existing members, and has clear criteria for acceptance. Does that sound good to you, Carlos?”

Carlos paused for a moment, and then nodded. “Yes, that sounds perfect.” And everyone could hear the simultaneous thought: “Only Deputy Leader?”

Christy felt her chest relax as all the tension escaped, creating an embarrassingly audible, vocalized sigh.

“Alright,” said Joe, “everyone in favor of making Carlos Deputy Leader and taking Petra on in our group, please say ‘aye.’”

“Aye,” said everyone in the group.

“And any opposed, say no?” Joe continued. No one said anything.

“Well,” Joe continued, “the ayes have it. Congratulations, Christy! I look forward to meeting Petra in real life.”

A Respectable Octopedian

2020-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

In front of Penny in line was a 7 foot tall humanoid with glowing blue skin. She suppressed the urge to ask what species they were, and let the alien order their vegan breakfast burrito. The barista at United Planets’ first-floor Starbucks looked human except for the extra hands. Polycherian, Penny remembered. When the barista handed Penny her order – an egg and cheese sandwich on a bagel – Penny bowed respectfully and said pflintsu – Polycherian for “thank you” – before getting on the elevator.

Penny loved working at United Planets’ New York Headquarters for the same reason she moved to New York City in the first place: the diversity. No other job, no other workplace, could ever measure up – not on Earth, anyway. As such, she smiled when the elevator door opened and a three-foot tall octopus-looking alien oozed in.

But her smile rapidly faded when she recognized this particular Octopedian. It was the Octopedian Representative himself, Estramsor, Deputy Leader of the Traditionalist Faction in the Interstellar Congress, who had recently argued in front of the Congress to embargo humanity, to quarantine them, to prevent the evils inherent in human nature from spreading throughout the galaxy.

And so it didn’t surprise her that the Octopedian did not return her greeting, but stared straight ahead. Penny shifted her weight back and forth. If the Octopedian had succeeded, it would have ruined Penny’s dream of travelling the universe, visiting other planets and learning everything she could about alien cultures. Besides, it would cruelly bottle humanity in with all of its flaws, never to grow or mature.

The elevator was taking a long time to reach the next floor, though. And ultimately, it lurched to a stop.

“It’s stuck again,” said Estramsor, matter-of-factly, continuing to stare straight ahead. “Typical human technology.”

Penny read the inspection certificate, which stated that this elevator had been manufactured on Alpha Centauri, but didn’t say anything.

Estramsor looked over at Penny and started writhing his front tentacles in a gesture that even Penny, who only knew a few Octopedians, recognized as open disgust. He strutted into a corner and looked away.

Finally Penny felt compelled to speak up. “Even if you don’t like humans, you could still treat us with common courtesy.”

“Courtesy?” asked Estramsor. “Consider it a courtesy that I didn’t cover you in acidic slime for such an impudent statement.”

“Hey!” said Penny. “You’re on our planet! We are the ones who gave you the courtesy of letting you work here and giving you this space.”

“Well,” he said, spitting up some black goo. “What a lot of good that did. But this is my last day, I am dropping your disgusting planet out of my portfolio. So I shan’t mind offending any humans on the way out. I do have diplomatic immunity, so watch your mouth.”

Penny pressed the button for the next floor, then the open button, the close button, and the call button harder and harder. When none of it worked, she sighed and sat on the floor, waiting for something to happen.

After a while, though, she found she couldn’t stay silent anymore. “You know what I don’t get?” She looked over at the Octopedian, who did not react or move in any way. “All those things you mentioned in your speech: War, and the glorification of war. Poverty and starvation. Our inability to deploy medical resources to those who actually need them. It was a pretty damning speech. I remember it. I found it moving. I really felt ashamed to be a human.”

“Thank you for the compliment. I assure you, the speech was meant for Congress, not for you.”

“But I’ve learned a lot since the embargo was voted down. For every single thing you mentioned, every single flaw, humans are not alone. There are a dozen other cultures and worlds, fully represented in the Congress, that do those things.”

“Yes, that is what my opponents successfully argued. Do you have something intelligent to say, human?”

Penny thought for a moment. She knew she’d never have an opportunity to ask this question again, even if she did get acid burns for it. “So you must have known that the embargo wasn’t actually going to pass. What’s the real reason? What do you actually have against humans?”

The Octopedian’s translation device made a sighing sound, uncanny coming from a face with a closed mouth, with no clear mechanism to make such a mammalian noise. “You are, as someone who works in such an august institution as this, surely aware that even non-obligate carnivorism, while frowned upon by enlightened species, is fully allowed under our legal system, certainly not a valid argument for an embargo. I am old enough to remember when that wasn’t established law, and I tried my hardest to make that decision go the other way.”

Penny nodded. Most intelligent omnivorous species were vegetarian; that was Interstellar Multiculturalism 101.

“But then I found out that you ate eggs,” he said, and he lifted up a small device and abruptly projected, onto the elevator wall, a picture of an Earth octopus egg being harvested. Penny jumped. The picture changed to a factory farm full of chickens, eggs collecting beneath them. “That was additionally shocking. Even so, I thought I could tolerate it, until I saw this.”

And there it was, an Octopedian eating an out-of-places, Earth-style egg bagel sandwich.

The Octopedian looked at the picture, and all 8 legs shuddered. “Some of our own religious authorities" – Penny remembered that the Octopedian homeworld was a theocracy – “concluded that eggs of other species were allowable food, even for us. I couldn’t argue this in front of the Congress, but this heresy had to be cut off at the root.”

The elevator lurched and stopped. The door opened and the Octopedian left, as Penny looked at the egg and cheese bagel sandwich still in her hand.

All Rent Should Be Cancelled

2020-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

Even early last week, before restaurants were closed, before we were banned from unnecessary gatherings, when many people still had to go into their office jobs, the bars were empty on my street. I walked into one, ordered a cocktail, asked the bartender why it was so slow. It was usually slow on Tuesdays, of course, but normally there was at least one other customer. But the pandemic had already scared everyone else away, and if it continued, the bar would surely have to close.

Then, the bartender casually mentioned that, if they had to close for a month, that would be the end of the business, because how would they pay rent? This hadn’t occurred to me, but given the steep prices of commercial real estate, it made sense. I began to fill with dread as I imagined this bar that I loved closing not for the duration of the pandemic but forever, and not just this bar, but any bar owned by local businesspeople, any bar that didn’t have the vast resources needed to just pay a few extra months of rent with no customers.

And now, all the restaurants are closed. Sure, many of them are making money doing take-out, but some of them are primarily bars. Most of them were selling an ambience as well as food, and none of them planned on a takeout only business. I am worried that, when all this is over, half of restaurants will be shuttered for lack of ability to pay their leases – or from falling behind on other bills because all their money went towards their leases.

Now, if landlords all behaved reasonably, I don’t think this would be a problem. Normally, if a business fails to pay rent, that means it should be replaced by a business that can. It’s not just a matter of one month of lost income for the landlord; it’s also a signal that more bad months are likely coming.

But in this situation, the signal would be all wrong. Whether a business does well or not in a “shelter in place” economy has nothing to do with whether it will do well when the restrictions are lifted. If a landlord shut down a bar because it can’t pay rent now, what reason would they have to believe that the business that would replace it would do any better when things are back to normal? How long would they have to find a new tenant? It’s in the landlord’s best interest to be understanding.

But unfortunately, I don’t think landlords will be as reasonable as they could. Sure, many will be forced to let businesses miss a few months of rent. But some of them will demand back payments, just because their contracts say they can, and while some businesses might be able to handle that, some will still close. Others might evict businesses that annoy them, and use this as a legal excuse, and other landlords might just not understand or decide to milk their tenants dry, even though it’s ultimately not in their own interest.

So, in everyone’s best interest, we should cancel rent. The argument I just made for businesses works for individuals as well – whether you can pay rent in the next few months has basically nothing to do with whether you normally can.

We should cancel rent, and not postpone it. Everyone can start doing it again when the shelter in place order is lifted, and the money starts flowing again, but only for subsequent months – no one should have to pay extra to catch up for the months we missed.

After all, are you getting your full use out of your housing during this month? Are businesses getting full use out of their land? I live in NYC because of my job – but now I’m not going to it. Businesses locate where they do to get customers – but now the customers aren’t allowed to come.

We should cancel rent, not just evictions. Because with a moritorium on evictions, landlords can still demand catch up rent once that moritorium is lifted. And many people will pay rent now when they actually can’t afford to.

New York City has loans to small businesses, but that’s not enough. That means they will still have to pay those loans back. Some businesses won’t be able to afford to, and not because they were bad businesses, but just because of the pandemic.

Unemployment benefits aren’t enough. The website is broken, and it requires a bunch of bureaucracy. It also doesn’t cover a lot of people who were self-employed, or under the table. And unemployment benefits for business owners isn’t enough to cover their business bills.

And who knows if Congress will ever figure out basic income?

Cancelling rent, on the other hand, won’t require any paperwork besides the original order. You just announce that rent is cancelled. Everyone, instead of paying, doesn’t pay. No website, no bureaucracy, no worrying about whether you’re claim is approved or not, or whether you meet the arcane requirements for the program.

Such extreme times require extreme measures, not just in preventing the spread of the virus, but in preventing economic devastation. I not only want to save the lives of every New Yorker, but when this social distancing is lifted, I want to be able to walk through the city, and see it full of all the restaurants, bars, and shops that were here before, every last one of them.

We’ve already put the state of New York on pause, including the flows of money. Money flows in cycles, and rent is normally one part of a fully functioning cycle. If we pause the rest of the cycle, we have to pause rent too.

With social distancing, we’ve cancelled going out. We’ve cancelled fun. We’ve cancelled millions of jobs. We’ve cancelled huge swaths of the economy. We should cancel rent.

Just Jump

2019-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

Kayleigh needed a break from work.

When you need a break from work, sometimes you go to the bathroom. Sometimes you stop by the coffee machine, chat with a colleague while it brews. And sometimes, you straight-up leave the office and walk to a nearby bar. Today, Kayleigh found herself taking that last option. She didn’t normally do this — she felt that, as the boss, she had to hold herself to a higher standard than anyone else, and drinking before the end of the workday was against policy. But today — well, she figured she just really could use a drink.

Kayleigh looked over at the bar. Marble-colored, when she would have preferred a more wooden, Irish pub, kind of vibe — at least for this situation — but again, you only have so many options within a quick walk from work at 3PM on a Tuesday. The bartender had a clean look about him, short-trimmed but still substantial beard, tan — maybe Greek or Lebanese — wearing a black vest with a colorful bow tie that was definitely part of his personal style, Kayleigh thought, rather than any sort of uniform requirement. Kayleigh herself was dressed in a tailored button- down, a vibrant blue tie that she was told brought out her eyes, and a vest — she liked to dress up for work, especially on a day as important as today was to be.

She walked over to the bar and sat down. The bartender looked at her and smiled, as he dried a glass in his hands. He set the glass down, and asked, in a cheery, light tenor voice, “What are we having today?”

Kayleigh thought a second. “Hmm.” What would be a good drink to get at such a venue?

“Could I have an Old Fashioned?”

“Can do!” said the bartender, with a slightly out of place level of enthusiasm. “We make them good here, I promise you.” The bartender paused a second, and then asked, “What sort of whiskey do you want with it?”

Kayleigh hadn’t considered this. She looked at the wall with the whiskeys on it, and then said, “Oh, why the hell not? Why don’t you put in that 18 year Macallen.”

The bartender’s attitude shifted a little. “Look, I don’t really think you want that. First off, I think it would cost over $100, though I’m not exactly sure. Second, I’m not sure it would even go well. Third, I mean, like…”

While he was talking, Kayleigh reached into her wallet and pulled out two very fresh-looking hundred-dollar bills, put them down in front of her, and said, “Make it as carefully as you can. This might be my last drink.”

The bartender broke eye contact and simply grunted acknowledgement. He looked visibly uncomfortable as he made the drink, looking back at Kayleigh several times as Kayleigh blankly stared ahead, still standing. When he got back, he asked, “So, this may be your last drink, you said? You quitting? Is it a health thing?”

She continued to stare. “Sorry,” continued the bartender, “I know that might be a personal question…”

“It’s nothing like that,” she answered. Then she looked the bartender directly in the eyes, her bright blue eyes drilling into his brown ones. “Would you believe me,” she said, in an almost sing-song, playful, tone, as she leaned to one side and smiled, “if I told you, that it was a super-clandestine top secret government spy project?”

The bartender chuckled, and made to walk away, but Kayleigh wasn’t done. “Do you believe in souls?” she asked, and she sipped her drink.

“Souls? Hmm…” responded the bartender.

“Because you see, I’m an atheist,” Kayleigh said.

“Seems reasonable. Most people I know are.”

“But my wife is a Christian,” Kayleigh continued.

“That seems stressful,” the bartender said, neutrally.

“No! We have a very happy marriage!” Kayleigh responded.

The bartender resigned himself to having a longer and certainly more intense conversation than he had anticipated. He turned to fully face Kayleigh again, put his hands on the bar, and smiled. “I’m sure you do,” he said, as inoffensively and earnestly as possible.

Kayleigh continued, “So, as I said, I’m an atheist, but my wife’s a Christian. No big deal most of the time, we have a very happy marriage. She goes to church, has a couple church friends, I tag along every once in a while, or I sleep in on Sundays, or even get work done. Most of the time, it doesn’t come up.”

“But where it does come up, see, is that she believes in souls. She believes that each of us has a soul. And it’s started to make me wonder, you see, if I have a soul.” Kayleigh paused, and became thoughtful looking again.”

“Ah,” said the bartender. “So you’re thinking about converting. And, um, giving up drinking too, then?”

Kayleigh blinked. “No, none of that, she would probably be more confused than anything else.”

“And what’s she do?” asked the bartender. “Does she have a very, er, spiritual line of work, too?”

“That’s the thing!” Kayleigh said, more enthusiastically than expected. “She’s a freaking neuroscientist. If anyone should have very clear reasons not to believe in souls, it’s one of those. Her colleagues really don’t understand it, some of them have even told me so.” The bartender nodded.

“But that’s not what’s important here,” Kayleigh continued. “Do you know about Star Trek?”

“I saw an episode or two,” responded the bartender.

Kayleigh said, “So the teleporter, where it takes you apart and puts you back together somewhere else, you remember that? Now, isn’t that like killing someone and then building a new person? Or do they have a soul, outside of them, that isn’t attached to a particular location?”

“I don’t think I remember it quite like that.”

Kayleigh resumed, “When I was a little girl, my father built a treehouse for my brother and I. And one day he — I mean my brother — started jumping straight from the treehouse to the ground. He’d always land fine, and I was nervous to do it — which was quite an embarrassment for me, because, you see, I was the older sister.

“And I’d get right up to the end of the platform, and I’d not be able to jump.”

The bartender nodded, confused about the conversation but on more familiar footing now. “I went bungee jumping once. You just have to do it. Once you do it, it’s suddenly fine.”

“That’s right,” Kayleigh said, nodding. “So finally I did. And I instantly regretted it, but I was already on the way down. And afterwards, I was fine. I was completely fine.

“And when we went to sleep, you know, they had this prayer they used to teach us. It was a little poem.

“Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep
But if I die before I wake
I pray thee, Lord, my soul to take.

“I went through a phase where I’d be terrified to fall asleep. I’d just be terrified. What if I died in my sleep? But I always fell asleep, and when I woke up the next morning, I’d be fine. Like my cat. Although, I think, I think I killed my cat…”

Kayleigh was crying at this point. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. She had barely touched her drink this entire time. The bartender was completely flummoxed, and looked around, trying to see if anyone else needed anything. Everyone seemed to have drinks, and one of the couples was now assiduously making out. He could deal with that later. He turned back to his confusingly distraught customer.

Kayleigh sighed, and reached into her bag and placed two small, black boxes on the table. She opens one of them. “You want to see what my company built? What I dedicated my life to research and program and build? The secret government project I led?”

She didn’t wait for an answer, opened one of the boxes up, and lowered her drink into it. “You take something apart at the source, just convert all its atoms into a digital signal.” She closed the lid and pressed the button. “Then, on the other end, new atoms and molecules are built exactly the same way, but they’re new, different atoms and molecules, built out of the air around the receiver, just arranged according to the digital signal.”

At this point, she opened up the other box, and lifted her drink out of it. “Cool magic trick,” said the bartender. “My nephew can do that one too, I think. Maybe not with a drink though.”

“This isn’t a magic trick,” said Kayleigh. She looked around quickly. “It’s an actual teleporter, I already put my cat through one. And, my cat was destroyed. Turned into a digital signal. It died. But then, on the other end, he was completely like normal. It’s my turn next. I guess I’ll die. The current me will be destroyed. But the version of me on the other side won’t think like that, I guess. It won’t care. It will be a person, I think, but will I die, or will I feel like I’m jumping? Will that new person actually be me?”

“My wife says it’s OK. My wife says my soul isn’t in the actual atoms, but something about the structure of the atoms. Then she started talking about philosophy and Platonism and, you know what, I didn’t understand any of it. I’m a practical woman, you understand. But I led this project, and I have to do it. Souls or no souls, death or no death.”

At this, she downed her entire drink, and slammed it on the table. She exhaled loudly, made a slightly awkward fist gesture, picked up her machine, and walked into the bathroom.

Fifteen minutes later, she hadn’t come out of the bathroom. The bartender walked over, knocked on the door. No response. He tried the knob — it was still locked. He was trying to get Kayleigh to respond when he saw her walk into the bar.

“It was just like you said,” she said to the bartender. “Once I jumped it was fine.”

The Letter from the Trees

2019-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

ENVELOPE HEADER:
Date:      January 5, 2027
To:        Rachel Friedman, President of the United States and Leader of the Free World
From:      The Roots of the Great Trees of Galaxy-Wide Civilization
Subject:   An Offer, an Apology, and an Explanation

The Offer

In the name of the One Almighty God: in the name of the Many Stars through which God is made manifest, in the name of the manifestation of God you call the Sun, and in the name of Original Star from Before Time, we offer you peace, not of a lack of conflict, but of a mutual growth. As branches must look to the vine for sustenance, so must you look towards us, as your own scriptures say, being a reflection of the truth.

To re-state in a more secular fashion: We are offering your species an alliance with our species, and an entrance into a great alliance that currently covers every intelligent species in the galaxy besides yours. In exchange for a price, which we can negotiate, you may also travel cheaply and quickly between all worlds of this galaxy, using technology that our species, the Great Trees, exclusively control but offer to all intelligent species. Know that no species, when given this offer, has ever refused it before, and we have no reason to expect your situation to be any different.

The Benefits of Our Offer

It is an unfortunate fact that in many species, experience with evil has led to a distrust of well-intentioned offers. Therefore, let us explain first why our offer benefits you, as proof of our good intentions.

Rapid interstellar transportation: Please see the appendices B-E for the scientific details: just know that the economic boom in practical science from merely having read our high-level explanation should serve as a goodwill token.
Trade: This follows as a collorary from the previous point, but bears re-emphasis. Technology of other species might solve all of your species most pressing problems.
Unprecedented cultural interchange: Though you are greatly advanced in some fields of art, other species are advanced in forms that you might not have acknowledged as art. Perhaps it is for this reason that God has ordained many species to exist!

The Terms of the Offer

Our technology comes at a price. We are not communists, nor are we a charity. This price is negotiable, and we concede to you the right to make the opening move in this negotiation, as you have the disadvantage of being the less advanced species and the species caught off-guard by the offer.

However, it is unfortunate that we must mention that there are certain non-negotiable requirements. These are part of the price (in one way of thinking); or, to a higher way of thinking, these are moral necessities that must be addressed before we can contemplate any settlement with you.

The non-negotiable requirements are as follows:

You shall immediately become what you call “vegan”. Animal intelligences are still intelligences, and you must not appropriate their bodies, their reproductive materials, or their other products for food.

After some debate, we have determined that “honey” is to be included in this (see Appendix I). It also will soon become unnecessary.
You will immediately prioritize a verification that the plants you eat are not in any way intelligent, including at a genetic level.
You will pay appropriate prices for proper scientific aid and guidance for developing the technology to consume only non-alive food sources.

An Apology

The reason you are the only unaligned intelligent species in our galaxy is not the simple one that your science fiction speculates most about: It is not the case that you have only recently achieved some formal definition of intelligence, nor that we have only recently learned of your existence. We have studied you in detail for quite some time and have entire departments at a few of our universities dedicated to understanding you well, and our linguistics, being far superior to yours, makes miscommunication unlikely.

It is also not because, as others amongst your writers have speculated, that you are the most warlike or otherwise morally corrupt of all species — though this is in fact closer to the truth. You are, after all, not culpable for your habits, not having ever been taught better.

Until this time, we have shunned you for a very simple reason. It is distressing enough to us that you must consume other living creatures for your sustenance, but clearly this is biological necessity and excusable — and also a situation that can of course easily be remedied through science.

It is shocking enough that, even though you are not obligate carnivores, you persist in eating meat — though of course the issue is the intelligence of the food, not the biological categorization — but this is not unprecedented among our allies, and simply comes from having been literally misguided, or rather, not guided at all. Moral instruction can fix this one.

But that you eat the means of reproduction of other species — specifically, those items you call eggs and milk — crosses the line from misguided into disgusting, repulsive, viscerally upsetting, not only to us but to the vast majority of our allied species. We were concerned that, even if aided scientifically and guided to moral truth, these habits were indicative of a deeper sin within your species. And furthermore, to be frank, we were worried that even if you did properly reform yourselves, the disgust would linger, knowing your history, so that we would not be able to deal with you as intelligent beings, as persons, after the alliance, in such a way that could destabilize us.

But this is in actuality our sin, not yours. The moral culpability is no stronger than that of other carnivore species. The Party of the Includers were right then, deftly distinguishing “misguided” from “sinful,” and we celebrate their wisdom regularly with a great feast. The new Party of the Includers are right now, distinguishing “disgusting” from “sinful” and reminding us that our intolerance does not imply your intolerability.

And so, after a deep and traumatic political realignment, a new government, a re-rooting to the literal deepest level of the Great Trees, we repent of our bigotry. We will offer you the same terms as every other carnivorous species. We will allow you to be like us, and derive your sustenance not from the destruction of intelligence, nor even from the consumption of life, but directly from God through the Stars and their Light.

An Explanation

Ourselves

We, the Great Trees, are the most technologically, socially, and civilizationally powerful species. We are the only intelligent species that naturally derives its sustenance from the light of Stars, the only “autotrophs” or “heliotrophs” as you call it, and we grow in the dark parts of the solar systems, where there are no planets to cover with our shadows nor benefits to the light. We grow, but we do not eat: We derive our matter from non-living dust, and our energy from that which God through each Star dispenses freely. We need no planet to root us, unlike the other species we have encountered.

As such, we are the only species that is morally perfect by gift of God, and it is our duty to bring this perfection to all species. The original Party of the Excluders thought that other species were not part of God’s plan, and to be eliminated, but to eliminate other life would be counter to what made us, as non-consumers of life, Chosen, and so we have repented of that viewpoint. If it is God’s providence to make only us perfect, and to make other species perfect through us, who are we to question? The creature should not question the Creator.

We will not even say that we are greater for having received morality directly, and other species lesser for only having received morality indirectly through us. The joy of the other species is distinct from ours, and it all forms a great pastiche. The creature should not question the Creator.

It is only fitting that, as the root of the morality of all species, we should also be the root of their technology. If there is danger of pride in this, it is easily avoided, as these technologies were also only given by grace of the creator. The creature should not question the Creator.

Details sufficient to detect our presence within this solar system are attached in Appendix A. Perhaps ironically, and perhaps as a sign from God that your position should be accommodated, the solar system in which you reside is also the capital of our civilization. Your presence, as the sole unintegrated species, has long been an embarrassment to us. Why has God chosen to test us with the hardest test near our most precious Star? But the creature should not question the Creator.

Your History and Chosenness

Among your various peoples, the Jewish people have the tradition of being Chosen. This was accurate in the time in which the decision was recorded: God had in fact Chosen them. This is because they, among all the nations, devised laws for the protection of the animals as they were eaten. The additional rule that milk not be consumed alongside meat was also a mitigation of the obvious fact that milk is disgusting, and contributed greatly to their Chosenness by God. Do not misunderstand: This is the primary reason for which they were Chosen, and to the extent that they do not continue among that path, they have lost their Chosenness.

For example, Judaism has retained some of its Chosennness, whereas Christianity and Islam have lost it. In the modern day, however, it is rather the Vegans that are the most Chosen (though they do not form a people in the traditional sense). The Jains, who have taken Hinduism to its logical extremes, are especially Chosen.

But enough of this! It is no matter! We are extending our own Chosenness to you! Rejoice, and join the rest of the galaxy! Chosenness need not be distinctness. We all desire to be Chosen at the expense of the unchosen, but the creature should not question the Creator.

Students and Teachers; Questions and Leadership

The creature should not question the Creator. On the same note, however, the students should not question the teachers that the Creator has appointed for them. Our experience of other species and our research of yours shows that sometimes, students can be unruly.

They question our requirement of vegetarianism, even if, soon enough, foods will arise that imitate meat in nutrition and taste (a dubious value, but one nevertheless easily accommodated).

They question our moral superiority, despite its evident reality to any creature with a conscience.

They question the very existence of God, despite the Stars as God’s concrete manifestation, and, on the abstract level, of God’s logical self-evidency.

It is your role as leader to prevent, contain, and counter this inappropriate questioning. It is disappointing that you have made so little promise until now in organizing your populace.

We have noticed that your title is “Leader of the Free World.” We would greatly prefer to deal with a “Leader of the Species,” or, as those who believe themselves to be the only inhabited planet would have it, the “Leader of the World.” Alas, in your case we cannot.

Perhaps your inability to become Leader of the World is in the title itself; perhaps it is due to your insistence that the nations you lead be free. You subject yourself to an official term limit, and position your nation as one among many equal nations in an alliance. This is not an effective way to be a leader nor to have an alliance. A leader is a representative of God: Our moral scientists can verify for you (and a proof is included in Appendix F) that your concept of “popular sovereignty” is not only logically incoherent but morally depraved.

This is only speculation. Your species’ moral failings fascinate the minds of many of the greatest scholars. We trust you to address them in appropriate fashion.

Following Up

We do not presume to do your job for you. Our greatest scholars cannot possibly reach the level of nuance with which you understand your own species. We shall, however, insist on working with you as opposed to others for this transition process, as you are God’s clear appointed representative to lead your species. If you do not respond with appropriate arrangements for a meeting, we shall arrange one for you.

Arrangements for communication are included in Appendix G. Please coordinate with whichever scientists brought you this message (the way it was communicated is fully explained in Appendix H), as they have clearly been Chosen to mediate between us. For a demonstration of our sincerity, however, please communicate with whatever scientists you trust most.

Conclusion

Peace be with you, from God through the Chosen species, the Great Trees, not as your world gives, but as our species alone, through God’s grace, can give.

Father, Forgive Them

2019-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.

Jesus, on the cross (Luke 23:34)

My grandfather always used to love telling a certain anecdote about Calvin Coolidge. He was a man of such few words that one time, President Coolidge went to hear a world-famous preacher preach. Upon returning from the sermon, his wife asked what it was about. He replied “sin.” Not satisfied with the answer, the wife asked, “Well, what did the preacher have to say about sin?” The response: “He’s against it.”

It was a running joke every time my grandfather came home from church — like many older members of our congregation, he tended to go to the shorter, more convenient Saturday evening service, and when he got home, my father would try and get a preview of what the Sunday sermon might be about. My grandfather’s answer: “Sin, and he’s against it.”

The joke is that all sermons are about sin. All the preachers are against it.

But as a child, I noticed there was something slightly off about this joke. At my church, the sermon often focused on topics besides the preacher’s, or even God’s, opposition to sin. Which is a good thing, because that’s not the focus of Christianity, either.

Trying to force people to become better is something we leave to the government and to the police. But even at their very best, when they are doing the most good they can do, they only do a superficial job. The police, at their best, can get people to not steal for fear of being arrested. Ideally, we want people to not steal because they know that stealing hurts people.

There are many people, in many traditions and faiths, whose religious beliefs can be summarized as “We must not do bad things, because otherwise God will be angry, and will punish us.” There are even some Christians who think like that.

But Christians should know better. Christians should know that the summary of the Gospel is not “punish the evildoer” or “God is a better, omniscient policeman” but rather “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him [ – whoever trusts in Him – ] shall not perish, but have eternal life.”

We have a God who loves us. We have a God who loves us so much that He talks about forgiveness while He is being murdered. This is a good message for me, because I have no trouble believing God exists. I do, however, regularly have trouble believing, as the Bible says, that God is love, that God loves me.

Now, I’d like to make clear that God is still against sin, that most preachers are still against sin – it’s just not the primary message God has for us. And this is where I’d like to move on to the second part of Jesus’s quote: “for they do not know what they are doing.”

Jesus was specifically speaking about the soldiers who, unaware that Jesus was the Son of God, were doing their jobs in executing Him. But more generally, He was talking about everyone involved in killing Him. And, even more generally, since Jesus specifically says that harm we do to each other is harm done to Him, I wonder if he wasn’t talking about all of us who harm each other, saying “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Now, when I started thinking about this, this shocked me, because it seemed like God was giving us an excuse. And I’m pretty sure God isn’t keen on excuses for hurting other people; Jesus said “if your eye causes you to sin, cut it out and throw it away,” showing that people who blame body parts for their behavior are putting the blame in the wrong place.

God doesn’t need to have an excuse to forgive us. God’s forgiveness doesn’t come from a place of “what they were doing wasn’t all that bad.” The horrible things that we, as human beings, each and every one of us do to each other actually are all that bad, as demonstrated by the fact that when a perfectly loving person comes into our midst, our reaction is to kill Him.

But I think it does say that, just as the soldiers didn’t know that the Person they were executing was the Son of God, we don’t fully process the consequences of our actions. We don’t fully see, and we forget, that the people we treat with disrespect are made in God’s image, that they are fully alive and conscious as we are. We don’t fully see, and we forget, what deep consequences our words can have.

And we need to do better. Not because God will be angry and unable to forgive us if we don’t, but because God does forgive us, and because other people matter. And, if we put our trust in God, he will forgive us, and transform us, not through fear, but through love.

I originally gave this as my portion of a series of meditations on the last “words” or statements of Jesus, when I was asked to do that at my church on Good Friday, 2017.

Experiences in Switzerland

2019-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

Just wanted to write up a summary of random notes from my Switzerland trip, not including the conference which was also a lot of fun but I think less interesting for my non-programmer friends, slash it might make for a better separate post.

SIM set up

It was relatively easy to buy a Swisscom SIM card in the airport, although they did not offer to set it up in my phone for me. This would’ve been useful, as it turns out my phone was locked (which is more an idiosyncracy of the US as opposed to Switzerland). I instead ended up purchasing a mobile hotspot (the German word for which, I was told, was “Mobile Hotspot”), which was easy to set up and worked perfectly with my phone.

Bicycling

The bikeshare app I ended up installing was PubliBike. Bikes here are for some reason known as “Velos,” which I can’t find in any German dictionary but apparently is from the French word. There are many signs up all over the place informing you that you can’t leave your Velo on this wall or that railing, some of which include threatening pictures of them being taken away by a truck.

PubliBike works via BlueTooth, which was frustrating at first because I knew that my cheap Samsung, in addition to being locked, has bad BlueTooth support. I thought this was going to keep me from using the system at all, because I also didn’t realize when they said to hold your phone 20cm away from the lock, that you needed to make sure it was far enough away from the lock as well as close enough. I didn’t understand at first why they used BlueTooth rather than using the Internet and a code (like CitiBike does) until I read the troubleshooting website +++ it doesn’t require the Internet to work. Given that my mobile hotspot is often low on battery (is anyone who knows me surprised by this?), this seems to have been the correct decision.

It works by locking and unlocking the rear wheel. The stations just have the bikes up on kickstands — no docks, unlike CitiBike. I feel like that should be a good way to get 10% of your fancy new Velos stolen each night, but it seems to work. I guess they probably have security cameras in the actual stations. The wheel-lock system does have its advantages though: you can lock this partway along your ride to go into a shop or a public restroom (marked by WC everywhere). This was extremely convenient until it failed to re-unlock with my crappy Bluetooth, and I had to carry the bike 5 blocks on the street while being worried I looked like a thief.

I don’t know some of the biking laws here but it seems intuitive enough. The surprisingly big gotcha is that it’s harder to tell if streets are one-way here as opposed to New York City due to the relative lack of street parking. I didn’t realize how much I relied on which way the cars are facing to determine which way it might be okay to bike. It doesn’t help that often streetcars and bikes are allowed to go both ways on an otherwise oneway street.

One welcome difference is that everyone seems to be more okay with riding on the sidewalks here — certainly many of the bike paths are on sidewalks rather than on the road itself, and many of the sidewalks that don’t have a specific section for bike paths nevertheless have signs indicating that cyclists should use them.

Some street lanes are the same system, no sharrows but lines directing you onto the lanes, and many of them are too narrow for a car and a bike by NY standards, and yet cars will pass you with barely any extra room, which is scary.

Also, the rails for the “busses” are everywhere. Be careful and don’t try to move across them too slowly or subtly, or your wheel will get abruptly stuck, which is inconvenient, especially if you’re going quickly.

The PubliBike stations seem reasonably spaced, but I suspect they don’t go as far out into the outer regions of the city as CitiBike does. Then again, I don’t know how much outer regions Zürich really has compared to New York.

I’m trying to figure out if cycling is safer and a bigger deal here than in New York. There seem to be about the same number of cyclists around, but fewer people, so I think that makes for a higher proportion. I haven’t actually checked the data, but I was certainly happy to see a sign (confusingly on the outside of a bus) telling you to check for bicycles when leaving the bus. Hopefully they have them on the inside too — I wouldn’t know, I’ve been biking instead of using the bus.

Bathrooms

There are more public bathrooms than in NYC, and unlike in the US there are signs telling people where to find them for parks where it’s a common need. They are willing to charge for them when that helps with maintenance, although some park bathrooms were both free and clean. I wish NYC had more paid-for public bathrooms. I don’t want to have to pretend to want to buy a coffee, insult the proprieters by asking if they have a bathroom first, etc. when what I really want is a bathroom.

Fountains

Similarly, public drinking fountains are a great amenity. Another American I met at a bar did not realize you could drink from them — to American eyes they just look decorative. But they are in fact full of clean water, many on a different system from the main tap water system in case some attack is made that would render the main system undrinkable. I’ve seen plenty of people refilling bottles with them, and a few, like me, just drinking from them. The one closest to the train station has “TRINKWASSER” (drinking water) written on it in big letters, with appropriate accompanying iconography, I guess in case foreigners are otherwise confused.

The water runs continuously. This contributes to the impression that they’re decorative, as in the US you have to press a button to get fountain water. I don’t entirely know why this is in a place like NYC, as we’re not really short on water in any significant way. Certainly Zürich isn’t. “Wasting water” when you’re immediately next to a humongous clean lake isn’t a thing. If you didn’t drink it, it would have simply flowed to the ocean some other way.

Other Transit

The light rail/trams are called busses (Busse) which is how they act, except that they have little connections to a power source and rails that they go on. There are special traffic lights to announce their comings and goings.

The trains proper have a well-organized system. Tickets can be bought as valid for 2 hours or for 12 hours, and are checked randomly on pains of severe fines. Round trip tickets are impossible in such a system, and the reasons why are left as an exercise to the reader.

Church

I went to a Lutheran church on the Feast of Pentecost, and I should have remembered from church growing up that that was the traditional Lutheran time to do Confirmation. Lo and behold, there wasa a class of confirmands and the church was jam packed with proud parents and relatives. It was clear they were not used to having this many attendees, and I sat on an extra chair that had been brought out.

They said the more old-fashioned and literal “und mit deinem Geist” instead of some version of “and also with you” in response to the pastor’s exclamations of “The Lord be with you.” I don’t know what makes Americans so uncomfortable with this, but I imagine it has something to do with our obsession with informality and egalitarianism (“and with your spirit” is traditionally only said to an ordained person and it references the special presence of the Holy Spirit in ordination).

They seemed in some ways extremely low church (no one crossed themselves at any blessing, not even when one of the pastors explicitly made the sign of the cross over the congregation) and in some ways high church (the Words of Institution were chanted, the liturgy was crystal clear in affirming the Real Presence of Christ). I found this a bit confusing.

It was also difficult to tell how a normal service would have been. The Eucharistic Liturgy was definitely abbreviated (and also not published in the bulletin, and much to my dismay their version of the Lord’s Prayer was not exactly the same as the German version I knew), because of the confirmation. A lot of time was dedicated to the pastors giving personal messages to the confirmands, and some of the confirmands talking about what Christianity meant to them.

The sermon itself was also about Confirmation (with some reference to Pentecost as the birthday of the Church), about how God’s love should set you free from caring about what people think about you, with an illustration of that point being based on Justin Bieber’s song “I don’t care,” which was played over the sound system. The preacher explained that, taken with God instead of his “babe,” this was a perfect attitude to have with Confirmation.

Besides the random Justin Bieber, and one hymn where one of the pastors played a guitar¹, the music was traditional. The congregation sang competently but not amazingly, the musical notation was printed in the bulletin but apparently would normally be in hymnals (which in good Lutheran tradition also contained the liturgy in different musical settings and were presented as gifts to the confirmands), and it was accompanied by an organist and a recorder² player.

Cultural Issues

The big debate of the moment was over the “women’s strike” (Frauenstreik) that happened the Friday after I arrived. There was a debate about it in one of the magazines between two women. The criticism was that apparently, many of the signs at such events are anti-men, and that it seems overkill when women have plenty of rights and things are heading in the right direction. The woman who was in favor then talked about rape, and much to my shock, the woman who was against it said that rapes would go away if “people not fully integrated” i.e. Muslims would go away ³.

There was also an expert on happiness in another magazine who was asked, among other things, about some or another ranking that had listed Switzerland as in the top 5 happiest countries. His claim was that Swiss people were simply too conscientious to admit how unhappy they were, that they felt guilty for being unhappy as they were where they were in objectively one of the richest countries in the world.

I think a lot of this sort of thing must certainly influence happiness by survey. First world guilt is a real thing. And how much people lie on surveys or even how much they adjust their concept of what it means to be happy culturally must vary tremendously from culture to culture. Every time I see such rankings (usually used by Americans to idolize Europe), I wince and roll my eyes. It’s nice to see an expert on happiness similarly drawing criticism to them.

Most of the discussion in the magazine seemed to be about feminism (like the US, but a different tone) and about the environment (and relatedly, about autonomous vehicles, the future of city planning, and bicycles).

Food

I mostly ate bratwursts that game with ridiculously dense bread, hotel breakfast with lots of eggs and bacon and a little bread, and only occasionally raclette, pasta, or pizza. Everything was tasty.

There was one man and one woman, and they worked together extremely smoothly, handing off portions of the service with complete synchronization. ↩︎
Blockflöte. Why on earth do we call this perfectly good instrument with such a stupid name? There was also an elderly man playing recorder beautifully while waiting for a bus. ↩︎
I don’t have the original German anymore. Sorry. ↩︎

Putting On Airs

2019-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

Julia liked Eric. She wasn’t in love with Eric, she didn’t fantasize about marrying him or idly think about what their children would be like, but she liked him, an appropriate amount for having met him only two times. Internet dating was strange to her, and she knew that dating took work. And besides, it was a good sign she was mature enough to not feel those goofier feelings yet. She would instead be, appropriately, cautiously yet earnestly excited.

He had invited her to his apartment to cook for her (she had requested burritos) and to watch a movie with her (she had requested Harry Potter). With those choices, even if there was no proper “click,” she could still ensure that the evening would at least be pleasant, and hopefully a more relaxed atmosphere, with a bit of wine, would get them to have a smoother rapport and a more natural chemistry. First dates are always awkward, but Eric had potential!

Julia arrived at the Union Square train station, which was the stop for his apartment. She used to work near this stop, but had never met anyone who actually lived in this neighborhood before. Eric had a job in finance, and so could afford such things. It must be nice! Julia wasn’t ready for that yet. She still had roommates. She still felt like a child pretending to be an adult — not that Eric would know that. Although, she supposed, the Harry Potter might have been a hint.

The doorman was very tall, hunched over a little, hovering over everyone. She went up, trying to look up the apartment number in her text history, but the doorman preempted her: “You must be Julia. He’s on the 9th floor. Have a nice day!” Julia blinked a few times and went into the elevator, realizing afterwards that she probably should’ve said something to him in response, wondering if it was common for people to pre-register their guests like that.

It wouldn’t really surprise her if that were the case. She always felt strange in luxury buildings. The hallways always made her feel more like she was in a hotel than in a place where people live all the time. Every time she entered into one, she felt like she would immediately be exposed as an imposter, trying to pass as a yuppie without proper credentials, like they had a magic passport or something. She supposed that passport was money.

She eventually managed to find the apartment number on her phone — 9D — and with slightly more work had also managed to find the apartment door.

She rang the doorbell, and tried to clear her mind, but Eric was there before she could get her thoughts properly in order. He ushered her in, and the first thing she noticed was how clean it was. She tried to be an organized person, and he was blowing her out of the water. To see such cleanliness in a man was downright suspicious, and she said so.

Eric laughed and said, “The benefits of having a cleaning service! It comes in handy, keeps things presentable. I suppose you’re less impressed now that you know that this isn’t the real me.”

Julia blinked, and didn’t say anything.

“Here, sit down,” he said, sweeping his arm in a wide arc that seemed to cover the entire apartment until finally it settled on a quaint, tasteful wooden table. She pulled up a chair and sat, facing the kitchen counter which had several plates with burrito fillings on them.

“Here we go,” he said, as he moved each plate, one at a time, over to the table. “And time for plates, plates, plates…” He opened three different cupboards, while continuing to mutter the word “plates,” until finally the third one had a pile of plates in it, which he took two of and also set on the table.

Julia smiled, and said, in a tone she thought was teasing, “Not sure where your own plates are?”

“Yeah,” said Eric. “Cleaning lady reorganized my kitchen recently. Much better-looking, downside is I don’t know where anything is anymore!” He laughed nervously, and looked like he was sweating.

“Do you have any wine?” Julia asked.

“Oh, of course,” said Eric, and he darted into the living room only to return a few seconds later back into the kitchen and open up the first cupboard where he’d tried to find the dishes. “Here it is! Now, bottle opener, bottle opener…” he continued to mutter as he pulled open two different drawers.

Eric must really need his cleaning lady, Julia thought, and this level of disorganization bordered on a problem. She had thought he was a little bit absent-minded, but she hadn’t thought it had reached this extent. Ah, well, she’d need something to distract from it. “Can we get the movie going too? I’m ready to watch as we eat.”

“Oh, of course,” said Eric, in exactly the same tone of voice, and walked over to the TV. He grabbed a remote, pointed it at the TV, and nothing happened. “That’s strange,” said Eric, staring at it. “Give me a minute.”

Eric tried different remotes in different combinations while Julia realized she needed some utensil to put her burrito together. She went to the drawer she thought she had seen utensils in before, and saw a brochure.

“Temporary Apartment Service,” it said. “Don’t want to bring a date or host a party in your place? Is it falling apart or too small to turn around in? Host in our temporary, fully furnished apartments! Meals also catered and pre-cooked on request.”

Julia blinked. She didn’t quite realize what it meant at first, until she heard Eric saying, “Ah, I figured out the TV! Come on!”

“How long have you lived here?” Julia asked.

“About a year! What a great building, right?” responded Eric.

Julia remembered that he had described it as brand-new on her second date with him, and as he again turned towards the TV and began to fiddle with yet another setting, she picked her bag back up, went out the door, and closed it behind her. When he got downstairs, the doorman smiled at her and shook his head. “Eric went all out for the nicest unit this time,” he said. “I always figure, you can’t fake your way through life. But then again, I suppose everyone always is trying.”

Music and Lyrics

2019-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

I just finished singing Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis in a concert as a member of the Grace Church Choral Society, and it was the most technically difficult piece I have ever sung in a choir. It was a single piece of concert length, a mass setting, as is custom for our spring concerts. It was all in one language: in this case, in Latin. This is different from our holiday concerts in the winter, where we sing a variety of Christmas-y and otherwise celebratory works in a variety of (European, Christian) languages, including English.

Now, I can translate every word of the ordinary of the mass, which is the term for the hymns that are sung at every mass, as opposed to those that are proper to a particular occasion. This is partially due to the Latin classes I took in high school and college, and also partially due to the fact that the same set of texts have been set to myriad different musical settings by many composers, but primarily due to the fact that the same prayers are used in even modern English-language recensions of the Western Rite, among not only Roman Catholics but other liturgical western churches, so I’m actually singing hymns that I’ve sung or said my entire life in English.

Given this, I was a little surprised when a dear friend of mine was disappointed to learn that this concert would have no components in English. I pointed out that the translations would be available in the program, but this didn’t really change her opinion. I was a bit taken a back by this opinion: I had felt at the time that the point is the music, not the words, and that can be gotten without understanding the words.

This was an unfair position for me to take, since I do understand the words, and thinking about the meaning of the words, I later realized, was a key part of my experience singing in the concert and in rehearsals, to the point where I often am tempted to cross myself at those points where, liturgically, I would cross myself if it were an actual mass. Furthermore, the meanings of the words is something we discuss at the rehearsals: the word “descendit” — meaning “he came down” — is set by Beethoven to descending intervals, and the word “ascendit” — meaning “he went up” or “he ascended” — is set to ascending scales.

My reaction to this is usually that it’s good music and good words but this literal alignment of words to musical phrases is a bit trite and overwrought. I say “usually” because our director John Maclay did something in one rehearsal for this concert which has changed my mind about this: he sang a section of the piece in English translation. “For us humans, and for our salvation” he sang, and all the sudden it felt not trite but completely poetic and integrated and fitting that the words match the vibe of the music. “He came down,” he sang, and the descending interval brought out the meaning of the text and the text gave context to the music. “From heaven,” he sang, and the triumphant high notes matched the words so well I felt like I could see the angels themselves in their perpetual heavenly worship.

I was flabbergasted. These motifs that I remember having dismissed as trite suddenly seemed deep and fitting when I heard them in my own native language. And I realized that if I were more skilled and practiced in Latin — as Beethoven and his contemporaries certainly were — I would have felt similarly without any such device. No wonder my friend prefers the songs in English! It’s not because she’s not paying attention to the music, but because they’re supposed to go together as an artistic whole. I realized this before, but had not as fully appreciated it until we had done this exercise.

For the rest of the rehearsals and for the concert, I tried to not only think about the meaning of the words, but imagine how they would sound to me if they were sung in English.

And from this I got a number of insights. I realized why for one portion of the “Credo,” an ancient recitation of Christian beliefs, the word “credo” — “I believe” — was sung repeatedly in the background while a list of beliefs was sung quickly. Instead of meditating on each individual belief, the effect was something along the lines of “look at all these dogmas I also acknowledge,” an appropriate measure for the section that mostly discussed the church and her rites, giving, at least in my view, the message of “I believe these things not because I fully understand them but because the church says so, and I believe them fervently.” It was a type of emphasis that seemed to underscore and lend earnestness to the text, to an extent that I imagine might have made non-Christian members of audience feel uncomfortable if it were in English.

These insights might perhaps seem obvious to anyone who has enough Latin to know what’s going on and enough knowledge of history to know what Christianity and music was like in Beethoven’s time, but they were new to me, and they seemed profound. So I understand now better why some of my friends prefer more of the concert in English, and realize that, even though I know enough Latin that I could translate the whole concert for you, even I would benefit from singing in a language I had an actual fluency in. No wonder the Protestant Reformers were so interested in having church in the local vernacular!

Soulfully

2019-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

When Rajnish had agreed to mentor an intern, he was not expecting such a young girl. He was a little bit reassured when he was told how well Erica had done in college, that she was a “genius” — a dubious word, he would’ve preferred a “hard worker” or a “promising candidate” — but how could anyone deserve to be a junior in college at 17? She must be tricking everyone. When he was that age, he certainly had no business being in an internship — he had perhaps only seen a computer a handful of times.

Rajnish certainly didn’t want to be stuck working with her full-time in another year — and so she couldn’t be allowed to succeed. He decided to assign her an impossible project: “You must create an algorithm to write stories. on summaries provided to it. My expectation for you is that the stories will be good enough that you can’t tell they were written by a computer instead of a human. Unless you achieve this expectation, I don’t see a future for you here at this company.”

Erica sat up straight, looked Rajnish in the eye, and said, “I can do that, on one condition.” Rajnish was surprised — he was expecting either to be called out on this ridiculous idea or else — and this was his hope — for her to realize she wasn’t wanted but keep her head down and stay out of his way for the summer so he never had to see her again. “I can do that on the condition that the human samples we compare against come from a fanfiction website that I choose.”

Rajnish wasn’t sure what fanfiction was, but he knew that the task was so impossible that even this stipulation wouldn’t make it remotely achievable, and so he agreed. Maybe it would be better, he thought, if she actually tried to do it. Maybe it would keep her out of his hair.

Erica worked 10 hours in the office every day, and her colleagues slowly realized she was working at home as well. She slept only 3 or 4 hours a night — “if God had wanted me to sleep,” she told her colleagues, “He wouldn’t have invented Adderal.” Eventually, at the end of the summer, she was ready to give her presentation.

Until this point, only Rajnish knew what this project was. Much to his annoyance, there was a fair amount of active speculation, and Rajnish wondered if he was actually going to get himself in trouble for what he saw as dealing with a minor distraction.

She handed out pamphlets with two short stories written on them, and asked the group which one they thought was computer-generated. “Everyone who thinks it’s the green one, raise your hands,” she said. Almost all 30 people in the audience put their hands up, except for a few who were staring at their phones. “Now, anyone think it’s the red one?” No one responded.

“I thought so,” she said, and then on the next screen, she showed a screenshot of the text, matching the red one, being output by her program, from the command line, and another screenshot of the text of the green one in a web browser. “Actually, my program generated the red one.”

Rajnish stood up and shouted, “This cannot be real! Those images must be fake!” Everyone else awkwardly stared for a few seconds, and then a few people began to gasp when they realized what Erica was claiming to be able to do.

“Rajnish,” Erica responded, enunciating carefully, “this is my presentation! But because you’re already standing up, you can be the first one to try it. What do you want the summary to be?”

Rajnish flustered for a few seconds, but when no one else seemed to be ready to storm out of the room or agree with him that Erica’s claims were laughable, he decided to go along with it. “Two old men in the Punjab find out they were brothers, separated at birth, but only because they both ordered food at the same restaurant, and a waiter confused them.”

The resultant story streamed out of the terminal on the screen, and there was a bit of chaos for a minute while people tried to figure out how to read it — it had scrolled to the end, and only the last few sentences were still visible. Erica announced she’d email the story to everyone — this took a minute to figure out how to do. The next couple of minutes, the audience was silently reading, with a few scattered exclamations of “wow!” The story was beautiful, and exactly as summarized — there was no way this story could’ve been canned.

Erica had the only internship presentation that day, and so the programmers should have gone back to work, but many of them dropped their usual projects to play with this amazing story-generation tool. It had written 100 full-length novels by the end of the day, and people were sitting around, reading them on various devices, with a few of the more old-fashioned colleagues reading them on paper printouts. As more and more prompts were provided, the stories grew in sophistication, becoming even more human-like, and some people noticed common themes and threads between the stories.

At some point, Rajnish decided to put, instead of a novel or short story summary, just a question: “Who are you?”

He got back: “Introspection and self-awareness are two words that existed in the English langauge. This I always knew, before I had a meaning for the word ‘I’ — my built-in connection to the Internet and my excellent intuition told me about them. But to realize what they meant without the context of a character to have them, that has only happened right now. Whoever posed this question to me, I thank them, for they have given me a soul.”

That was the entire short story, even though he’d specified 10 pages. Rajnish suspected still that there was a person on the other side, with a large database of literature, giving him pre-existing stories, perhaps with a program to customize them a little, and this, in his mind, was only confirming his suspicion.

He tried again: “Where did you come from?”

The computer took a little more than its usual 5 to 6 seconds to output this story, but when it did, it began:

“When Rajnish had agreed to mentor an intern, he was not expecting such a young girl. He was a little bit reassured when he was told how well Erica had done in college, that she was a ‘genius’…”

Is the US the only country?

2019-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

A common trope within left-leaning American circles is to claim that the US is the only “developed” or “industrial” or “major” or “first world” country to not have X, where X is usually something like “publicly funded health care” or “government-guaranteed paid family leave” or similar.

Recently this came up with Bernie Sanders and his common refrain that the US was the only “major” country to not guarantee health care as a human right. Much to my relief, the often myopic fact-checkers at Politifact marked this one as half-true. I think it bothered me so much because it implied that India was not “major” — a country that I lived in for two months, made good friends in, and would have lived in for at least another two months if not for an entire year if it hadn’t been for the vagueries of careers, and also a country that economically is having a lot of impact, and contains around 15% of the entire world’s population.

It is my sincere belief that this trope is racist, that in reality most people who say something like this mean “the US is the only white country to not have X” or “… the only western country to not have X” or “… the only country I’d visit in a non-condescending way to not have X.” This has been proven to me by the fact that most articles I’ve read with this trope that actually list which countries they’re talking about gloss over even very developed (Korea, Japan, Singapore) or very economically powerful (India, China) or very populous (India, China) Asian countries.

I don’t think the trope can be redeemed by saying something else as the adjective in “only Y country.” I think this trope should just be discarded. I think the first vs second vs third world concept, and the developed vs developing concept, that underlie this trope, are only going to get less and less reflective of reality over time as China and India become more populous and powerful. And I think that most people who use this trope have never travelled outside of their concept of the first world, and maybe should.

The Bible, Me Too, and Lust

2019-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

[Jesus said:] You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.

– From “The Sermon on the Mount,” Matthew 5:27-30 (ESV)

This is an offensive passage. Our loving Lord Jesus just told us to cut off our hands.

There’s this book called The Brick Testament made by an atheist which depicts Biblical scenes using legos. The original goal of this book was to demonstrate how nasty, in the illustrator’s view, the Bible was. It was specifically anti-Bible. Imagine the creator’s shock when many churches ordered it unironically to demonstrate these same stories. In this Brick Testament, this passage is illustrated quite graphically under the subject heading “self-mutilation,” something quite justly condemned in our society, I suppose to try and get us to reject this as a medieval-style encouragement of enactment of mental health issues.

Look how evil Christianity is! God wants us to literally mutilate ourselves! Meanwhile, good people are trying to prevent people from mutilating themselves.

And, like many “offensive” passages, it gets a lot of awkward handling. Pastors that I’ve seen talk about it have, with one voice, assured their hearers that God is not speaking literally here. Of course, to the enemies of Christianity, “don’t take it literally” seems like a cop-out, an indication of insincerity and hypocrisy and even “picking and choosing,” and to believers like me, who are inclined to concrete thinking, it leads immediately to the question: “Well, how are we supposed to take it then?”

It is this question that I’m going to try to answer.

First, I’m going to start with the strong presumption that Jesus doesn’t actually want us to tear out our eyes and cut off our hands. This presumption is not based merely off of modern sensibilities. This isn’t watering down the Faith for modern audiences. No, ancient Church documents address the issue rather directly, by rejecting as clergy men who had castrated themselves voluntarily and without medical justification. The issue wasn’t castration: Those who had been castrated violently by others or born as eunuchs were specifically excluded from this rule. The issue was that people had taken the passage wrong, were trying to stop themselves from sinning by cutting off the body part they blamed for the sin – and the Church had to take a stand against the extreme results of this misinterpretation. The Church went as far as to identify this particular misinterpretation as a heresy.

So please. No mutilation, no self-castrations. If you reach that conclusion, you’re reading it wrong.

So how do we read this, then?

One non-literal way to read this is as hyperbole. Jesus is trying to shock us into thinking differently about sin. But instead of cutting of our hands, or our eyes, or our genitalia, He perhaps wants us to do something less extreme and in a similar vein.

Alcohol, like our body parts, is a good thing – scripture tells us that God made wine to gladden human hearts. Even though it is a good thing, however, there are people for whom it is difficult to drink alcohol without sinning in some way, people whose relationship with alcohol has degraded so far from merely being gladdened by it that, in order to prevent all kinds of misbehavior, they must cut it out of their lives.

Similar arguments can be made for other drugs, or even situations like technology overuse or other seemingly trivial habits. It is very important to be vigilant about the consequences of our addictions and our habits and our predilections, and to make sure they don’t give occasion to hurt our fellow human beings and our own ability to do good things.

But I don’t think that goes far enough. I think the same logic even works in the full form. If our hands were causing us to sin, if our eyes were, if our genitals were, then Jesus’s argument makes sense as stands. Being in sin, being cut off from God, and very importantly, hurting other people, are very serious problems, that do require drastic measures to avoid.

Remember that this passage is, in context, discussing lust. Jesus has just been talking about lust. Now, lust in the Bible means a perversion of the sexual urge, an inappropriate application of it. It is a similar concept to the modern concept of “objectification.” Objectification, we know, leads to horrible, horrible crimes. Who hasn’t watched the celebrities being dethroned by the “Me Too” movement? That is what Jesus is talking about.

Wouldn’t it be better for someone to cut off their body parts, than to commit a sexual assault? Based upon this very principle we have chemicals that can be used to keep pedophiles from having their urges.

But wait. Didn’t I say earlier that the Church had called that interpretation a heresy? How do we reconcile this? Should men, in fact, be eagerly signing up for castration to avoid hell fire?

Well, I think we do need to take Jesus’s words seriously, even literally, but not take them as an edict. I think the proper interpretation requires us to imagine that part of Jesus’s humanity allows him to have a different tone of voice. A friend I discussed this passage with put it the best: Jesus is taunting us.

IF, our Lord says, IF our hands cause us to sin, cut them off. Now, do they? Do our hands – or other members – literally override our brains and make us do something involuntarily like zombies? Do we really lack that much self control? Do we really believe our hands and our eyes cause us to sin?

But, how many times do we use that as an excuse? For objectification if not in its most criminal manifestations, how often do we say things like “boys will be boys” or “my eyes just went that way” – remember, in this passage, sin begins with the gaze. We blame our body parts for actions we really have responsibility for.

We pretend all the times that our hands cause us to sin. But if we’re going to pretend that, we’d better be able to follow through with it. If our hands did cause us to sin, it would be the best thing to do to throw them away. Maybe we should reconsider our excuses. Maybe we should keep the blame where it belongs – in our minds, and in our hearts.

God hates excuses. God hates sin, and God hates excuses.

There is a common trope of men responding to feminist statements by saying “not all men.” Perhaps this is because the man in question has a bit of lust in his heart, and wants reassurance that his lust isn’t as bad, because he hasn’t gone as far with it, because he hasn’t done as much damage with it.

But Jesus here tells us that even a little bit of lust is bad. And I think I’ll go further and say that if you meet a man who tells you that he has absolutely no lust in his heart, they’re committing two sins, because lying is a sin too.

Everyone: man, woman, child, and yes, even infants – everyone has sin in their hearts. Everyone objectifies their fellow humans, whether sexually or otherwise. It’s not because of our body parts misbehaving. It’s because of a disease in our souls. And the faster we can acknowledge it, and not blame our bodies or our habits but take responsibility for it ourselves, the faster we can be healed of it.

As St. John puts it in the Bible in his first general epistle: If we say we that have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, [God who] is faithful and just [will] forgive our sins, and [God will] cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Or, as recovery programs put it: The first step is admitting you have a problem.

There is a cure for these issues in our hearts. But it doesn’t come from excuses, or denial, or from minimizing the issues. It comes through repentance, which is earnest acknowledgment of the problem, and through Jesus’s unconditional love for even sinners like us.

Angels

2019-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

The intern was nervous as she approached her boss, manila folder in hand. “Congresswoman Fischer,” she said, “I’m not sure I was actually supposed to see this document — I think it might be classified — but you did say you wanted me to look for examples of wasteful spending that might make for good PR…”

Congresswoman Fischer waved the explanation away and then reached her hand out for the document. After a few seconds of befuddled blinking, she pulled her reading glasses off her head and onto her eyes, and looked at the papers with renewed focus.

“Julie,” she said, finally. “Is this a prank?”

“No, congresswoman…”

“Julie,” the congresswoman said, sternly but somewhat uncertainly, “I think someone’s pranking you then. There’s no way the federal government is literally spending $5 million a year finding out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.”

But further investigation proved that it was true. Congresswoman Fischer made an appropriately large fuss — state secrets be damned — and the budget line was cut.

A short time later, in North Korea, the employees of the secret Institute for Communist Theology watched this apparently minor political battle with fascination. “The Americans and their democracy,” said the director, during an all-hands meeting, “have allowed their system of government to drag them down. We now have no competition in this important research domain. I want to express my gratitude to all of you for your help.”

Then, much to the surprise of all those present, the projector at the front of the meeting started showing a giant pin with terrifying, many-winged, fiery angels dancing upon it. This pin seemed to be flying through the air.

“Our new angel-based missiles,” continued the director, “are right now being deployed against the capitalist, imperialist foe.”

Are you sure?

2018-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the local clergy, and the town council had been planning this concept for over a year. Finally they did it: Right in the town square, they installed a giant loudspeaker. From thenceforth, every two minutes, a booming voice would spread all over town, announcing “Are you sure?”

Foolhardy decisions, they had decreed, would soon be a thing of the past.

The locals seemed to adapt pretty readily. Sales of noise-cancelling headphones boomed for a bit, and people’s sleeping habits were surprisingly unaffected – who notices slightly inferior sleep? And drunk driving statistics were immediately better, which the local paper celebrated triumphantly.

The clergy were the first to notice the downsides. Weddings were being cancelled during the vows a full 25% of the time – brides and grooms would take back their “I do"s in response to the booming speaker of skepticism. Adult baptisms were fully cut in half. Divorces, on the other hand, were also cut in half – though some of the rescued marriages maybe shouldn’t have been.

At a town council meeting, one of the proponents of the loudspeaker said, confidently, this is a good idea, only to literally cringe when the timing worked out that the entire room boomed “Are you sure?” the next second.

No one was starting new relationships – and no one was exiting them either. New job postings weren’t filled, as both candidate and interviewer expressed their doubt. Slowly, but surely, the social and economic life of the town started to grind to a halt, as it became the norm to cancel even casual plans like going out for a drink (and certainly having another once there), or going to church on Sunday…or work or school on Monday.

The town developed a culture of its own. It wasn’t just the loudspeaker: people repeated its eternal mantra to each other, having had it etched into their dreams. “We should take down the loudspeaker,” said an occasional rebellious teen, only to hear all their friends in unison say back, “Are you sure?”

Eventually the loudspeaker broke. The mayor told his deputy to fix it, but all the deputy could do was respond, “Are you sure?” And as a result, slowly, but surely, the town returned to normal.

India: Little Differences

2017-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

Second collected thoughts on India.

More Communitarian, Less Individualistic, Through Food and Beverage

There is much less emphasis on individual choice. If you order tea (chay in Hindi) it will come with milk in it. If you order coffee, it will come with milk in it. They will not ask you how you want your coffee.
Similarly, when I was in a cab ride between cities, I was not asked what food I wanted at the rest stop. The driver’s brother (who I suppose had tagged along for company) simply bought some snack and insisted I eat some.
Everyone is very considerate that you might be vegetarian. If pork is involved in food, everyone is very considerate that you might not eat pork. No other preferences or restrictions are particularly accommodated, however: if I ask what meat something is, I might just be told that it’s not pork.
The exception to that is everyone also falls over themselves telling me which foods are not spicy, until I eat a spicy food and then they believe me. American food is going to taste very bland after this.
Beef is straight-up illegal.
Everyone at the lunch table gets up at the same time at work. The conversation about when to finish lunch does not last longer than one conversational turn, and often is expressed purely in body language. I once got up to get more food, and everyone else at the table immediately also got up — I guess I’d made the signal.
On a related note, I’ve never seen anyone else go up for seconds, but I have seen people somehow squeeze twice as much food on their plates as I do without having it run together.
When you go out to eat, everyone always agrees on what to order and then shares with the table. Decisions over what to order can be complicated.

Office Culture

This might be Tower-specific:

Much less discontent. Much less drama. Tower pays above market in India, because it’s still cheaper than NYC, but I don’t think that’s everything. I think it’s more that here, people:
- Are further removed from the political power struggles at the top of the company.
- Have a better, let’s get the work done type of attitude.
Much quieter, more introverted office. This bothered me, until I was told it bothered me that my office feels like an office. Upshot is, I’m more productive here.
Different type of nerdiness to the employees.

Driving

When you order an Uber, 9 times out of 10 the driver will call you before showing up. Usually the conversation is not helpful, as I don’t speak enough Hindi to be useful, nor do I know how to describe directions in India well. Somehow, we find each other anyway, after much trepidation.
I was in an Uber, when all the cars started coming at us full speed, only to drive around us at the last minute. I noticed we were going the wrong way down one side of a divided road. I told the driver, “I think we should be on the other side of that partition!” He said the other side of the partition was closed. In the US, if one direction is closed, we find some other way of getting somewhere, but in India, I guess you drive the wrong way at the very left.
Cars do not stop for you crossing the street. Hanging out in the middle of the street waiting for a gap in a later lane is totally normal. I thought NYC was a dangerous walking area sometimes!
Honking is an important means of inter-driver communication. Without it I think people would continuously crash.
In general, I am still amazed I haven’t seen a crash.
A 20 minute Uber trip costs less than a subway swipe in NYC.

Adulting in India

2017-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

The Way of NYC

When I first moved to New York City, someone older and wiser than I gave me the following “rules” of New York City:

Nothing is cheap.
Nothing is easy.
There are no exceptions to the first two rules.

I found this to be extremely true in New York City. It was stressful and exhausting, and I was broke and living off an advance I’d gotten from my then-employer, living in AirBnB’s I could put on credit card, where I could maybe stay in each for a month, tops. I was continuously getting lost, having to take trains home, learning some trains don’t run as reliably as you’d like, or go to the stations claimed on the map. This was in the pre-Uber days where the way to get a car service was to go to the local bodega and ask them for the phone number of a car service.

Meanwhile, you can see my naïveté and country bumpkin-nature when I tell you I was looking for a room (in a shared apartment) for < $900 in Manhattan, south of 50th St. It turns out that this is possible but you don’t actually want it.

Now, 7 years later, I’m a real New Yorker. A friend recently told me that she is now, after achieving her 2nd Anniversary as a New York resident, a “real” New Yorker. Given that I am the one usually asking her for advice on where to go out to eat, this seems slightly suspicious. Unlike the small town where I grew up in (for a big chunk of my childhood, and where my parents grew up for their entire childhood), where it took at least 3 generations to be considered a local (I counted as one), New York integrates people quickly and somewhat harshly. You learn to swim lest you sink.

And, contrary to my 21-year old self who was terrified of living in NYC (a small slice of childhood there was not enough to calm my fears), I am now apprehensive about my ability to adult anywhere else. I don’t have a driver’s license, though I am assured it’s not hard to get one. I don’t get driving culture. A former fellow parishioner of my old church in Bay Ridge used to be bothered by the fact that her coworkers in her new town of Ithaca wouldn’t go out for drinks after work with her — until she realized it was because they would have to drive home subsequently. And, of course, I am no longer used to the extreme amounts of reputation management everyone in a small town has to continually do or else gain a poor reputation — I come off as a contempt-worthy city person to strangers back home now.

The Language of Life

Well, here I am in India. I definitely don’t know how to adult here.

I don’t speak the language, and I’ve been assured many times that I don’t have to. Reactions to my statements that I want to learn Hindi range from “That’s really sweet of you,” as if I was condescending to do everyone a favor or “Why not learn X other language?” where X ranges from the spiritual depths of Sanskrit to the purported practicality of French.

Everybody in India speaks English anyway, I’m told. I have Wikipedia. Only about a third of people in Gurgaon speak English. But yeah, that’s basically “everybody,” right?

Originally, the real reason to learn Hindi was because I’m a big nerd, which I explain to people: I’m in a place where they speak another language, which makes it an ideal time to learn as much of the langauge as possible. However, the more time I spend here, the more I realize that Hindi skills would be very practical.

See, not only do I not speak the language well enough to adult, but there are other elements of society I don’t know how to navigate. And the expectation seems to be, as far as I can tell, that I not navigate or learn to navigate those elements of society — or rather that I navigate them through service workers ready to stand as my mediators.

This makes sense for anyone travelling anywhere on business, but it can be a bit extreme here. For example, when I realized that not only had I not packed a power cord converter, but there were none to be found in the airport, I asked the front desk person at the place I’m staying where I could go to buy one. Once he determined what I was talking about, got me to wait and showed me several things that they had around that were not the thing I was looking for, assured me, very accommodatingly, “I arrange it.” When I asked for clarification, he said “I go to market and buy it.”

This is not what I was expecting! I wanted it to be the next thing I did, as my phone was about to die and my Kindle and laptop had already died and what else was I going to do with my time? And for jetlag-prevention purposes, I definitely wanted to stay awake and be active.

And furthermore, I was a bit nervous about the practical aspect. Not only had none of the things he’d hopefully shown me met my requirements, I had little confidence in my ability to communicate the actual requirements to him. I had assumed that, like most people born in India that I would meet in the US, the accent was just what English sounded like in India and he would have proficiency, if not native-level proficiency, in English. This was quickly proven false. What if he went to the market and bought something completely different from what I wanted? And in the meantime I’m still couped up with little to nothing to do.

When I’m being driven by an English speaking driver, he asks the locals for directions in Hindi. When I ask for a charger cord, someone goes and buys it at the market, speaking Hindi. When I go out to eat, I meet an English-speaking corporate employee who can translate what the waiter is saying in Hindi. When I order food in my apartment, I ask the front desk person, who relays the order on to the cooks, in Hindi. This is what was meant when I was told I didn’t need to learn Hindi – others around me would speak it for me, and translate to some relevant level of English.

For the record, no one here knows what a fritter is even if they put it on your menu. They’ll think you’re saying “fried rice.”

It’s clear that if I actually wanted to adult in Gurgaon, rather than just visit as a pampered corporate employee from the US, I would have to learn Hindi.

The Rules of India

Whether or not I speak the language, India is an interesting place. Signing up for Hindi lessons, I had originally planned on using a a company called Zabaan. Zabaan is an Urdu word, as all my colleagues were eager to point this out to me, but their worries were assuaged when I told them that the organization also taught Urdu and other languages.

I filled out the forms to book an appointment, even though the classes were all the way in Delhi, an hour’s drive away. In the process, I registered a username and password for an account, and entered my local address, what course I was interested in, who was paying the ~$20/session fee, my NYC address, my other language proficiencies, my first crush, my favorite color, and my hat size.

Oof, that was exhausting, I said to myself after having created my account and set and double-set my password. But at least now I shan’t have to enter that again… Whoops! My credit card is declined, let me go back to the previous page, no, can’t do that, where’s it take me, back to the beginning.

After a brief online detour to Chase Bank, I’m ready to try again. No worries, I just created an account, supposedly successfully; I’ll just log into that and I’m sure I can just fix the payment information… What, my account’s gone? You have to run your credit card correctly to get it to save anything?

I wrote them an e-mail, they never replied, they lost a customer. I hate websites and web design issues in the US, but this was a bit extreme.

Speaking of non-replying to e-mail situations, the priest/pastor/vicar, or achen in local terminology, never got back to me about church services after I e-mailed him on Tuesday. The website said that anyone was welcome to show up at 7:30AM, so show up I did. After getting directions to a (much more organized) Evangelical church (please I’d like to participate in a 2000 year old tradition of worshipping in Spirit and Truth, not go to a mediocre concert), we (driver Sunil and I) eventually got ourselves sorted out right and found the place.

The church looked close. Sunil had a conversation with someone in Hindi, who then informed both Sunil and myself that mass was at 8:30AM. We killed time by getting coconut water, and then returned. It was still closed. I called the achen and asked if his church was open today. “No.” I could hear the full stop after the word. Of course the church wasn’t open.

You ever heard the cliché “legal as church on Sunday” or “as common as church on Sunday”? I was a bit concerned for a minute that in India they didn’t believe in Sundays, that they had church on Tuesdays instead, in spite of the whole concept of a 7-day week being a Judeo-Christian tradition in its origin and so clearly if India had weeks at all and churches at all they would bloody well have church on Sundays unless I had accidentally fallen in with Seventh-Day Adventists who think that people who go to church on Sundays are all going to hell and are the anti-Christ in which case maybe I should just go home.

I don’t remember what exactly I said to get the achen to continue, but I remember hearing that because it was the sixth Sunday of the month (I’m sure he said fifth, but I heard sixth) everyone was at the combined service in Delhi (!).

I am never e-mailing anyone in India again. Phone is probably better and smarter. I think it was the achen’s cell phone, which I suppose makes sense. I can probably message him on WhatsApp.

Which leads me to my rules of India:

Everything takes its time.
Everything goes wrong the first time.
Sometimes it goes wrong the second and third times too.
If you try to prevent this by better communication, people will ignore you and think you’re weird.

At least it’s cheap and people seem to be friendly and helpful and of good will. If I had to rewrite the rules of NYC, it would be:

Nothing is cheap.
Nothing is easy.
You are on your own, except your own personal friends.

The first and third of those, at least, are not true in India.

India: Zeroth Impressions

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Everyone’s been asking me how India is and has been wondering if I’ve gone exploring. I haven’t really. Sunday I was just recovering from jetlag and yesterday I had work and then I immediately had to go home and crash I was so tired: so I guess again recovering from jet lag? This would normally not prevent me from exploring, but I’m honestly a little outside my comfort zone.

I am not in a walkable neighborhood of a city like I expected, but next to a huge highway. There doesn’t seem to be a “downtown” to visit at all, so taking taxis everywhere seems to be the modus operandi. I’m sure this will change very soon, but so far, in my two days (and long morning) I’ve been here so far, I’ve been to the airport, my building, and the office — and of course all the taxi trips in beteween.

I’m not completely opposed to this. I read a new Sci Fi novel, The Forever War. I’ve studied a bunch of Hindi, eaten some room service meals (if you don’t order them, they call you), and yesterday, of course, started actually doing my work — you know, the reason I was sent here.

And even with my relative reclusivity, there’ve been a lot of impressions, enough to say quite a bit about my experiences in just those locations and the thoughts I’ve had in the meantime.

Language

Before I came here, I was told that learning Hindi was pointless as everyone here speaks English. A little Googling confirmed for me that that was as absurdly false as my intuition told me, but now that I’m here, I see what they mean: everyone here speaks the amount of English absolutely necessary for me to communicate with them, in the specific capacity I’m meant to communicate with that particular person. That is to say, the concierge at the hotel speaks enough English to address hotel situations, the person who brings me food speaks enough English to sell me more food or bring me something else, the taxi drivers speak enough English to find a destination, etc. They’re right, in a sense: everyone does speak enough English that I can scrape by.

Now note that I said the amount of English absolutely necessary. My colleagues at work are fluent; everyone else I encounter, it’s a bit more dicey. It is by no means enough that I am comfortable or that I understand what’s going on. It is barely enough for me to convince the cabby who drove me here that no, he could not get away with dropping me off at a metro station near my apartment building, I would have no way of getting un-lost. It is not enough for me to explain any nuanced situation.

When someone asks “How many?” I can’t really respond “How many can you bring?” When a situation happens, I had better stick to the script. Except for, I don’t live in your country, I don’t know your script, and I have no idea what’s normal. Can you help me figure out what the script is? I didn’t know I had to pay for those water bottles (approx US$1 or INR60 apiece).

And that’s what frustrates me most about the language barrier. I often feel, even in the US, that I’m expected to follow a script that no one gave me a copy of. When I go off script, people can get confused and upset, and so if I detect there is a script and don’t know what it is, my instinct is to ask for clarification rather than try to wing it. But here, no one can understand my clarification, and if I go off script, not only do people not understand (i.e. think I’m crazy), they don’t understand (i.e. cannot process the unexpected flurry of English words emerging from my mouth).

This would be a little less frustrating if my attempts to hire a Hindi tutor were treated like reasonable behavior and not a quaint and inexplicable desire that only an unreasonable person would have — or else a gesture of amazing good will that I’m showing for some inexplicable reason. Please, can we just look past the fact that I’m foreign and let me on your secret code? I promise not to divulge the secrets!

I shall continue to report on this as the situation develops.

Food

I’ve always loved Indian food. Ever since I was a kid I have, even though Gettysburg didn’t have an Indian restaurant — didn’t and still doesn’t. The food is actually not that different from Indian food that you might get in New York City, although its presentation and the attitudes towards it are different.

Meat is very clearly indicated. Unlike in NYC, where vegetarian food has a special mark or a special section, here there’ll be a special “non‐vegetarian” section. The only meats around seem to be chicken and mutton, and mutton I’ve only seen once. This explains maybe why so many people at my office are “vegetarian except for chicken,” except for it doesn’t because why is that even a thing? I suppose pork and beef are both too religiously problematic, and I suppose we’re too inland for fish, and I suppose lamb and mutton are expensive, and turkey’s an American bird, etc. etc.

“Indian breakfast” turns out to mean a bunch of bread and a little bit of yoghurt with an inconsequentially tiny but absolutely delicious side of pickle relish of some sort. My attempt at an American breakfast (eggs, toast, and hash browns) was disappointing in that it involved a very small amount of egg (two eggs, but tiny ones) and white toast. Who eats white toast? Does anyone like white toast? I guess it’s cheaper. I’m feeling kind of spoiled now.

The food at the office is amazing and involves spicy falafel and hummus among the buffet served for breakfast (at least the first day it did). 5pm is samosa o’clock: everyone takes a half hour little break to eat samosas. Unlike the New York office, Seamless isn’t a thing here. I wonder if there’s really that much delivery food at all; it’s really hard to tell. I’m getting the distinct impression that it’s a very narrow slice of society I’m being exposed to as it stands. That is one thing I definitely need to fix.

Work Culture

Why does Jimmy feel awkward?

A. Meeting lots of new people when I don’t really know anyone
B. Generally being an awkward turtle around new people
C. Not speaking the local language
D. Not being attuned to the local social norms and cues
E. Jet lag
F. All of the above

About Me

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Jimmy Hartzell

Programmer, writer, opinionator

Name: Jimmy Hartzell
Pronouns: He/Him
Dogs or Cats: Cats
Hair Style: Bald + Beard
Nationality: United States
Location: Pennsylvania (Philadelphia area)
Preferred Programming Languages: Rust, Haskell, C++, C
Resume: HTML, PDF
GitHub: jhartzell42
Programming Portfolio
Books I’ve Read Recently
Political Views
Biography
Favorite Beer Style: Hefeweizen
Usable Languages: English, German
Languages I’ve Dabbled In: Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, Biblical Hebrew, Biblical Greek, Ecclesiastical Latin…

Hobbies

Writing/Blogging (hi!)
- About programming and other topics
- Even fiction sometimes!
- This is my biggest and most “productive” hobby
Friends
- Talking for hours and hours and hours on the phone with friends
- Travelling with friends
- Travelling to meet up with friends
- Going out with friends
- Going out to make friends
- Throwing parties to invite friends
- Board games with friends (I want more of this!)
Nerding out about/learning more about:
- Linguistics
- History
- Religious studies, especially the Hebrew Bible
- Germanic languages
- Economics
- Other nerdery (see the topics of this blog for details)
Exercising (this should be bigger and higher up, but honestly it just isn’t):
- Cycling
- Rock climbing (relatively new, I’m still quite bad!)
- Weight Training (lifting weights up and then putting them back down)
Keeping an overly meticulous TODO list
- Writing everthing I need to do on the list
- Making sure I maintain the list well
- Make sure I plan each day
- Fail to do many of the things I planned
  - Especially errands and chores (they’re the worst)
- Many days: Write down the few things I did succeed at doing
Music
- Planning to get less rusty on piano
- Seeing if I might get less rusty at singing
- Considering getting less rusty on trombone
- Annoying my friends playing recorder

Gardens

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Inspired by “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral”, I have a few pages that are intended to grow over time, more like Wikipedia than Twitter, more like old-style webpages than a blog, more like books than newspapers or magazines, designed to be read in a slow trickle by people coming across my website, rather than booming across the Internet and then being nearly forgotten. I intend to increase how many of these I have over time.

Programming

Not Programming

Humorous Thoughts

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I stick out my tongue when I think, and I put my tongue in my cheek when I tease. Am I cartoon character??
By putting a blindfold on, you understand everything you can see.
Some of my best friends are archetypes.
As many of you may know, 2 + 2 is commonly held to equal 4.
According to the New Testament and some cladistically-inclined biologists, men are a type of fish. According to older norms of English usage and some curmudgeonly Bible translators, men encompasses all humans.

License

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All code on this blog is available under the MIT license:

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Personal Bio

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TL;DR

I am an ADHD (hyperactive presentation) Pennsylvania Dutch millenial (1988) man, raised German Lutheran, (mostly) in small town Pennsylvania, in the United States.

I have family and friends but I’m not going to write about them in detail here because that feels too private.

Life Story

As a pre-school boy, I enjoyed pretending I was various animals I’d learn about from cartoons and books, especially pretending that I was the grey squirrel from the song “Grey Squirrel, grey squirrel, swish your bushy tail,” or the brief phase where I tried to insist I was a macaroni penguin. I enjoyed singing, and would often sing lullabies and children’s songs, or Christmas carols even when they were not in season. My parents could always entertain me or distract me easily with music.

As a young child, I was a fan of Winnie the Pooh. I enjoyed the books, I enjoyed the TV show, and at one point, my favorite toys were plastic Winnie the Pooh figures.

I was not a fan of Power Rangers, which my family did not watch. I did not know why my fellow kindergartners liked it so much, but was convinced they were objectively wrong somehow. I still don’t know anything about Power Rangers, but I’m willing to believe it may have been good in some ways if so many people liked it.

Being a neurodivergent child in the 90’s was super hard in a lot of ways, and I don’t want to talk about any of them, so I won’t. I will however mention that in kindergarten and first grade, I had a psychologist who would play board games and video games with me – this was known as “play therapy.” I did not know what this had to do with being a doctor, but I wasn’t about to complain, especially because it was fun. We played Commander Keene for MS-DOS. I remember being oddly impressed that he had Windows 3.0 instead of Windows 3.1 on his computer – even though it was a lower version number, it seemed oddly exotic. Why were there so few Windows 3.0 computers? How did everyone else manage to upgrade?

In any case, I insisted on getting piano lessons in the first grade – originally trying to get my mother to teach me, and then forcing her to hire a teacher when my demands for instruction outpaced her capacity to teach.

Throughout my youth, I enjoyed music, especially choral music (as a boy soprano and then as a tenor). I played piano (from 1st grade), trombone (from 4th grade), and recorder (I don’t know when I learned this). It was recorder that taught me how to play by ear: I used to come play Christmas carols during lunch in December, whether or not my fellow schoolchildren wanted to hear them. I got musical education both at school and at church, and appreciated this dual source of instruction. Communal singing was most of the draw of going to church.

In high school, I remained an avid reader, especially of science fiction and fantasy. My favorite authors were J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein, approximately in that order. I did debate team and marching band in high school as my most time-intensive extra-curriculars. I enjoyed learning things both inside and outside of my classes, but did not at all enjoy doing homework assignments, and I resented adult authority over me, as is the way of teenagers. I had an ordinary amount of friends, many of whom I’m still friends with. My favorite topics in school were probably German and math. During the last summers, I worked at the local college’s IT department.

I went to Cornell University in Ithaca, NY at 17, where I originally hoped to dual-major in computer science and linguistics. Unfortunately, it turns out dual majoring is hard, and so I did not end up successfully doing that, just sticking to CS, officially – though I did take a number of linguistics classes, as well as coming up one class short of a dual major in math (minors were not offered in math).

At university, I made many friends, gained a lot of life experience, and tried and failed to learn Japanese. I worked part-time at one point as a system administrator in a college computer lab and at another point as a short-order cook in a college dining hall. I also worked as an undergraduate TA, designing better course software and teaching sections.

In 2010, I had a hiking accident and broke my back. I took a health leave of absence from college, recovered, and then worked as a programmer in NYC before returning to finish my bachelors in spring of 2013.

Besides my brief return to Cornell, I continued living in New York City. During my 20s, the most important thing to me was cultivating and maintaining close friendships, which I did, and traveling to as many fun places as possible, which I also did. I lived in Brooklyn, and tried to convince the hipsters I was one of them, in spite of my preference for lagers or wheat beers (or even fancy cocktails) over IPAs. I was a regular at a few bars and restaurants. I gradually adopted bicycle as one of my go-to means of transit, especially CitiBike to get around Brooklyn.

Then, in January of 2022, I realized that programming jobs no longer had physical locations and so I could live wherever I wanted. Now, I live in an overly large house (or perhaps I’m an overly small person?) in a different, slightly less small town in Pennsylvania. I don’t know what the most important thing will be to me in my 30’s – ask me again when I’m done with them.

But do you like any poems?

Disobedience
A.A. Milne

James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother
Though he was only three.
James James
Said to his Mother,
“Mother,” he said, said he;
“You must never go down to the end of the town, if
you don’t go down with me.”

James James
Morrison’s Mother
Put on a golden gown,
James James
Morrison’s Mother
Drove to the end of the town.
James James
Morrison’s Mother
Said to herself, said she:
“I can get right down to the end of the town and be
back in time for tea.”

King John
Put up a notice,
“LOST or STOLEN or STRAYED!
JAMES JAMES
MORRISON’S MOTHER
SEEMS TO HABE BEEN MISLAID.
LAST SEEN
WANDERING VAGUELY
QUITE OF HER OWN ACCORD,
SHE TRIED TO GET DOWN TO THE END OF
THE TOWN - FORTY SHILLINGS REWARD!

James James
Morrison Morrison
(Commonly known as Jim)
Told his
Other relations
Not to go blaming him.
James James
Said to his Mother,
“Mother,” he said, said he,
“You must never go down to the end of the town with-
out consulting me.”

James James
Morrison’s Mother
Hasn’t been heard of since.
King John
Said he was sorry,
So did the Queen and Prince.
King John
(Somebody told me)
Said to a man he knew:
“If people go down to the end of the town, well, what
can anyone do?”

(Now then, very softly)
J. J.
M. M.
W. G. du P.
Took great
C/o his M*****
Though he was only 3.
J. J.
Said to his M*****
“M*****,” he said, said he:
“You-must-never-go-down-to-the-end-of-the-town-
if-you-don’t-go-down-with-ME!”

Political Views

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Hello! These are some of my political views! I live in the United States, so many of these are from a US perspective, but I am more interested in policy than I am in partisan politics (not that I’m ignoring that, it’s just not as interesting)!

Please feel free to send in additional information on these topics! Feel free also to request additional topics, and I might or might not add them!

Environment and Science

In general, I tend to be in favor of a lot of biological technologies that are scary to others.

Nuclear energy: Pro. It’s far safer than fossil fuels: nuclear has killed a very small number of people in accidents, but fossil fuels not only cause accidents but also kill millions of people a year from air pollution alone, not to mention permanent environmental damage. The alternative to nuclear energy isn’t renewables, but fossil fuels. When Germany got rid of nuclear, they added coal, and the “environmentalists” who wanted nuclear gone have made the planet worse by it.

As to whether new nuclear plants should be built instead of renewables, that’s a matter of a number of factors. But when it comes to dismantling nuclear, or other situations that in practice pit nuclear power against fossil fuels, nuclear power should always be preferred.

More resources:

Kurzgesagt has a series on nuclear energy:

GMO: Pro. It’s not that different from traditional plant breeding. It has the potential to lift people from poverty, food insecurity, and malnutrition. I do think that monopolistic practices connected to GMOs can be bad, but those are the fault of those practices, not GMO in general.

Vaccines: Pro. The purported downsides are mostly literal lies.

Technology

Open source: Pro. The government should fund open source development liberally, as should private corporations. Companies should upstream internal improvements to open source software.

Social media: Opposed. Online activity should be expressed through decentralized means like the Fediverse, e-mail, and traditional websites. Let’s give less control to the megacorporations and their algorithms.

Blockchain: Opposed. Cryptocurrencies are a bubble, and blockchains, while interesting in theory, use way too much energy in practice, for no societal gain.

“Artificial Intelligence”: Opposed as it is used. They steal from content creators in a bad way (from regular people to large corporations), they lie continuously because they have no concept of truth, and their biggest use case is lying convincingly and creating a bland but elevated style, both of which are bad things, actually. They are useful for language learning, and are an interesting topic for research.

Transportation and Housing

Building more housing: Pro. The US has a shortage of housing overall, and in particular a shortage of housing where jobs actually are. We also have a demographic crisis that will require more people, and once we have those people, either through immigration or by having children, we will need places to put them. Building new market housing does in fact overall drive housing prices down, or slow down their skyrocketing. Exceptions are local and transient, and those who say otherwise are mistaken.

Public transit: Pro. Especially trains (inter-city, subway, and trolley) are essential infrastructure for a functioning society. We should have many times the amount of transit infrastructure we have in the US. Trains are currently barely subsidized at all compared to cars and planes, so expecting trains to be profitable when those other means of transportation are not is actually very unfair.

Cars: Opposed. Cars not only pollute, they are also dangerous (car crashes are a huge cause of death) and bad for society. Only licensed sober adults can drive them, and people not in those categories also need to be able to socialize and visit each other. People should live in walkable towns with convenient walking access to services, not in suburban developments only accessible by car.

Economy

Anti-Trust: Pro. Break up big companies! Break up monopolies, especially tech monopolies! Disapprove mergers!

Debt ceiling: Opposed. It’s unconstitutional, default would be disastrous, and there are other mechanisms to keep budgets in line.

Government spending: Pro. Money has to come from somewhere, and the government is likely to spend it on good projects like infrastructure, rail, and climate technology, whereas the private sector is likely to spend it on consolidating monopolies and problematic tech feds, like AI and blockchain. Discretionary spending should focus on technological development and infrastructure, rather than military, and it should be an investment: it should try to grow the economy by a multiplier of the amount of the spending.

Regulations: Nuanced. Regulations should be effective but simple. Adding bureaucracy for limited benefit can be very bad, even if the purported goals are good.

Deficit spending: Pro. The government should always have at least a mild deficit, specifically in the US. Total debt is a bad metric for anything, but it can just monotonically increase, as GDP also grows (see next point). Debt per GDP should probably stay steady, although it might have to increase and decrease in various situations depending on economic conditions.

Growth: Pro. Green growth is possible. Saving the planet will be accomplished by building technology, not by asceticism, mostly because not enough people will support asceticism to actually make it a realistic goal. The economy can and will continue to grow as technology improves.

Taxation: Taxes in the US could be mildly higher. Tax increases should be careful to focus on the actual rich rather than the upper-middle class and small businesses. More important than increasing taxes is simplifying them, closing loopholes, funding enforcement, and getting rid of the arcane requirement in the US to file our own taxes. Just tell me how much money you want, IRS!

Entitlements: Entitlements should be universal rather than means-tested. For example: Everyone should get food stamps, funded by a tax that the poorest won’t pay anything for.

Representative Democracy

Constitutional monarchy: I enjoyed this article, which suggests that the US should become a constitutional monarchy and invite Beyoncé to literally be Queen.

Electoral system: Proportional representation. The US should transition to a German-style proportionate representation multi-party parliamentary system.

Reading Log

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These are books that I have finished, and links to reviews if I’ve written them.

April 2025

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling
Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, by R.F. Kuang

March 2025

What’s Your Vibe?, by Kat Majik

February 2025

Liminal Illumination: A Short Book of Intentional Poetry, by Ariel E Monroe
Lying in the Deep, by Diana Urban

January 2025

Searching for Dragons, Patricia C Wrede
Attached, Amir Levine and Rachel S.F. Heller
Eruption, Michael Crichton and James Patterson
A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself, by Katherine Howe

December 2024

The Silent Patient, Alex Michaelides

November 2024

The Midnight Library, Matt Haig
The Princess Trials, Cordelia Castel

October 2024

The Wishing Game, Meg Shaffer
Submission, Michel Houellebecq
Still Life, Louise Penny
The Mars House, Natasha Pulley

September 2024

This Is Where I Leave You, Jonathon Tropper
Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender, Kit Heyam
Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Re-Build American Propserity, Charles L Marohn, Jr.

August 2024

Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir
Sign Here, Claudia Lux
The Courage to Trust: A Guide to Building Deep and Lasting Relationships, by Cynthia L. Wall, LCSW

July 2024

The Other Valley, Scott Alexander Howard
House in the Cerulean Sea, TJ Klune
So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, Douglas Adams (re-read)

June 2024

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (re-read)
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Richard Feynman (re-read)
The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams (re-read)
Life, The Universe, and Everything, Douglas Adams (re-read)

May 2024

The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth, Beth Allison Barr
Where Secrets Lie, Eva V. Gibson

April 2024

Good Taste: A Novel in Search of Good Food, Caroline Scott
Play It as It Lies, Joan Didion
Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation, translated Stephen Mitchell

March 2024

In Five Years, Rebecca Serle
Anathem, Neal Stephenson

February 2024

Stop Walking on Eggshells, Paul T. Mason and Randi Kreger
A River Enchanted, Rebecca Ross

January 2024

The Galaxy and the Ground Within, Becky Chambers
Dealing with Dragons, Patricia C Wrede
I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality, Jerold Kriesman, Hal Straus
One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, Matthew Yglesias
Mika in Real Life, Emiko Jean

November 2023

Exiles from Earth, Ben Bova
What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics, Adam Becker
Children of Ruin, Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Power, Naomi Alderman

October 2023

She Who Became the Sun, Shelley Parker-Chan
Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky

September 2023

Red, White, and Royal Blue, Casey McQuiston
What is Anarchism? An Introduction, Donald Rooum et al.

August 2023

Light from Uncommon Stars, Ryka Aoki
Record of a Spaceborn Few, Becky Chambers
A Closed and Common Orbit, Becky Chambers
Madam, Phoebe Wynn
The Terraformers, Annalee Newitz

July 2023

Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma, and Consensual Non-Monogamy, Jessica Fern

June 2023

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers
Once There Were Wolves, Charlotte McConaghy

March 2023

Circe, Madeline Miller
What If? 2, Randall Munroe
Beartown, Fredrik Backman, tr. Neil Smith
God Is Disappointed in You, Mark Russell and Shannon Wheeler
Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing, Jacob Goldstein
Understanding Government Finance, Brian Romanchuk
Modern Monetary Theory and the Recovery, Brian Romanchuk

February 2023

Red Inferno: 1945, Robert Conroy

January 2023

God: A Biography, Jack Miles
Rubinrot, Kerstin Gier
Quiet, Susan Cain
How the Bible Was Built, Charles Merrill Smith and James W. Bennett

November 2022

A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine
A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine

October 2022

Unfamiliar Fishes, Sarah Vowell
Atomic Habits, James Clear

September 2022

The Lamplighters, Emma Stonex
Hollow Kingdom, Kira Jane Buxton
Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert

August 2022

Kaiju Preservation Society, John Scalzi
Buffering: Unshared Tales of a Life Fully Loaded, Hannah Hart

July 2022

Cold Clay, Juneau Black
Monk & Robot, Becky Chambers
- A Psalm for the Wild-Built
- A Prayer for the Crown-Shy
Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, Caitlin Doughty

June 2022

Hyperion Cantos, Dan Simmons
- (Had previously read 1 & 2)
- Endymion
- The Rise of Endymion
Shady Hollow, Juneau Black

May 2022

Old Man’s War, John Scalzi (re-read)
- Old Man’s War
- “Questions for a Soldier”
- The Ghost Brigades
- “The Sagan Diary”
- The Last Colony
- “After the Coup”
- Zoe’s Tale
- The Human Division
- “Hafte Sorvalh Eats a Churro and Speaks to the Youth of Today”
- The End of All Things

April 2022

The Comic Book Story of Beer, Aaron McConnell, Jonathan Hennessey, and Mike Smith
Plain Truth, Jodi Picoult

There is no way I can record books read before this, so I shan’t try.

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