I erupted with invective passionate enough to both earn nasty looks from people at surrounding tables, but also passionate enough to keep them from saying anything, even the smug mom with kids who I always see here and who would not normally hesitate to let me know that I had offended her matronly sensibilities. Then a dude with one withered arm walked in, like if someone had the arms of a tyrannosaurus rex, but only one of them.

I stopped swearing. Now I’m just drinking my tea. It’s too hot, but whatever.

What I mostly notice, though, is how stupid it sounds: they’re separated by distance (presumably one of them is in college) and the dude has taken up with another chick because she’s “fun.” “When I was with fun you were with me,” the chick said. And then some more talk, which I couldn’t make out, but do you really need to make it out? This whole conversation plays out in tone of voice and cliche, and with those two clues, and a select handful of sentences, the human condition gets laid out, of the profoundest importance to these two people, trivial and predictable to anyone else.

Weird how we’re all bundles of the trivial and predictable if you just slide over a couple of seats, especially if you also slide over twenty years. This idea used to bug the hell out of me; now it’s just one of a vast number of things to which I’m dejectedly resigned.

And it suggests an even more pivotal role for any strategies or techniques that aid you in making a beginning: if you can only make a beginning, magic will occur, and you’ll keep rolling. So make the right beginnings, often enough, and life largely solves itself.

Happy thoughts. And science!

I’m not complaining, but I want to know when this happened. When did reasonably-attractive-but-still-generally-normal women reach such a level of comfort with their physical assets that they don’t mind displaying them to the world entire? Or maybe that’s the wrong analysis. Maybe mainstream society is now so hyper-sexualized that what once would have been considered an extreme sexual display is now mundane? And this degree of presentation is to the young modern female what lipstick was to females of my parents’ generation?

This trips people up a lot, the fact that the expectation of reward (not eating a whole pizza right now) might cause you to suffer in the present (eating a salad instead) in order to bring about the big payoff in the future (looking good and feeling healthy.) But that is still well within the bounds of utility theory — we’re just adding a discounting factor to account for the fact that people prefer good things now (pizza now) to good things later (pizza later) all else equal. And in fact, very interesting recent work (of which [1] is a good overview, with wide-ranging implications [2]) grounds this notion of temporal discounting in a person’s estimates of survivability and environmental hazard: if your experience suggests that you might not survive the next five years, it makes no sense to make decisions in service of rewards that operate at that timescale.

Even so, utility theory has nooks and crannies, and the upshot of it all is that re-framing the question “What should I do now?” can produce a different analysis than the one which we customarily indulge by following established behavior patterns or automatically pursuing whatever goals we’re automatically pursuing. Which means that action selection for the explicit purpose of feeling good is likely to to proceed down a different analytical path than the indirect routes that fall out of one’s customary action selection processes.

I started this out with an explicit goal of not getting all cognitive sciency. But subtle ideas want precise language, and here we are, at a place of no interest to anyone who’d ever read this. I’m going to take a break and try again.

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[1] Nettle, D., Coyne, R., & Colléony, A. (2012). No Country for Old Men. Human Nature. doi:10.1007/s12110-012-9153-9

[2] Note the intersection of the idea in the cited article (how sampling your environment affects gene expression governing various behavioral strategies like temporal discounting and risk assessment) and communities of very long-lived people, such as those described in this article. One might conclude from the latter that the ‘signal’ being sent by the environment is that full-spectrum life is a viable option even into very old age, suggesting to the organism [3] that various physiological regulations to support long-life will be worth the trouble.

In other words, the physical and social environment can send a message that a person has some important living still to do, and that his body should be prepared for it. This is in contrast to other environments, some mentioned in the article, some accessible to your imagination, that send the opposite message — that the environment is hazardous and that there’s no point in consuming resources that might be better devoted to one’s genetic relatives.

This last bit of justification dips into group selection theory, which has been out of vogue in recent history, but which seems to be making a revival as a theoretical account of empirical observations. A good popular science summary of some of these issues (with references) can be found here.

[3] Just to be clear, when I say ‘the environment suggests x to the organism, it is shorthand for ‘statistics from the environmental sample allow the organism to rationally infer x under a contextually-appropriate definition of “rational.”‘

I’m so jaded at this point that almost nothing will get my dander up, but this affair did it. Take a gander at this Slate article for some background, which can point you to some other articles on the same topic. The Slate article also features a response from a guy named George Roedler, justifying the State’s position. Mr Roedler’s contact information can be found here. This is a letter I just sent to him:

Hello George -

I’m a lifelong Minnesota resident and current PhD student at the University of MN. Yesterday I was made aware of the ‘illegality’ of Coursera’s offering to Minnesota residents. I will try to be civil here, but after looking into this a little, and reading your comments here:

[ link to Slate article]

… I have to say that I am struck practically speechless at the absolute idiocy of your statement and your position. You don’t know me, and we live in an age of hyperbole and exaggeration, so you won’t really know how to take my comment — as far as you know I could be a raving lunatic — but let me assure you that I’m not generally considered to be a raving lunatic, and I try to be pretty even-keeled in responding to things. Having said that, I literally cannot imagine a stupider, more misguided, and insipid stance than the one that you’re taking.

Since we’re in election season I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time arguing with friends who go on and on about the various evils of “big government” and then you swoop in and make all their tinfoil-hat arguments real with a single wave of your wand. If you wanted to make the clearest, most concise case for the notion that government in general, and MN state government in particular, has its head stuffed firmly up its own ass, good job. If you had any other goal in mind I think you failed as abjectly as a person can fail.

And this is me trying to be civil.

Unless you guys do an about-face forceful enough to cause whiplash, I will do my damndest to figure out just what votes to cast to prevent anything like this from ever happening again. University of Phoenix is selling degrees to imbeciles for $60k+ and you bring out the big guns for a site offering world-class education to everyone, anywhere, for free? Maybe a visit to a neurosurgeon is in order. Run, don’t walk.

Now, practically speaking, there is nothing that can happen — you’ll still be able to get to all the Coursera classes whatever the Minnesota Office of Higher Educations decrees. But just the idea that there is an agency filled with people who are literally paid money to think about this stuff, and this is the result of weeks of somebody’s posits analysis -

hard to figure out why Democrats keep losing elections, isn’t it? Hard to figure out why the Tea Party got so much traction, isn’t it?

Anyway. I will consider it a personal favor if you write or call Mr. Roedler and let him know what you think of his position.

This seems like a dumb question because aren’t we trying to feel good all the time?

Some people might say: “I’m trying to be an ethical person, not feel good.” But really, you’re trying to be an ethical person because being an ethical person feels good. Or volunteering at the shelter, that also feels good. Or taking care of your kids.

Nobody says: “I want to have kids because I hate kids and I will hate raising them.” If you feel that way, you don’t have kids, except by accident. Or else you’re lying. In Augustan Rome you might have said: “I’m having kids because it’s my duty to serve the Empire” but in that case it’s serving the Empire that felt good; or at least, the tax breaks and the governmental approval you received for doing so. Or at least, it felt better than the alternative.

And this maybe is the best way to think about it: your behavior, when it finally emerges from the confines of your brain and is emitted into the world, is the result of a staggering amount of evaluative computation in which the emitted action out-competes all alternatives based on a quantity that economists would call utility but which I am calling ‘feeling good.’

This point is so ridiculously obvious that it has been the source of intense argument. But I’m not here to argue. I’m here to kick ass and chew bubble gum. And I’m out of bubble gum.

Please be careful.

I’m used to this idea from my reading life, although not as used to it as you might think, since until I was 19 the only books I read were fantasy and sci-fi, which might explain some things about me. By a certain point in my adolescence, considering that the set of possible books was whatever was available for sale at B. Dalton’s at Northtown, I had read nearly everything in the reachable universe. As new books would appear in the tiny B. Dalton sci-fi section, I would read them, too.

Anyway, right now the television universe is about the size of the B. Dalton sci-fi section, which sounds like a little but is actually a lot, considering the metrics given above. And it’s speeding up. And what’s most surprising is that the speedup is due not just to idiotic shit like that Honey Boo Boo show — my niece and I watched a few clips from it last night, after which I suffered a tiny stroke — but from stuff that’s really worth watching, the television equivalent of fiction that changes the way you think about stuff.

Which means we’re basically on the cusp of the end of scarcity, measured using the lowest common denominator. Meaning, there’s almost something worth seeing available at all times. In other words, you can become intellectually and emotionally enriched while making no mental effort whatever, while you mash cheetos into your hole. This isn’t like watching linear algebra videos online, is what I’m saying; or learning to speak Mandarin. This is like going to an Adam Sandler movie and coming away with Hamlet.

If anyone actually read this fucking blog they would no doubt take exception to this analogy, and pepper me with outrage; or else not bother being outraged because they’d be convinced I’m talking out my ass again. But believe me when I say that it’s an argument I’m prepared to have.

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[1] I just decided to give this thing a name since I refer to it all the time, and since it seems increasingly clear that I’ll never have anything more important named after me, I chose to bestow my name on this.

It may be worth noting that, though I am christening this after myself, it is actually not my first theoretical contribution to science, since I proposed the Donut Theorem in 1990, and the Donut Corrolary in 1991, and the Tang Hypothesis in 1992. You can probably find the papers on JSTOR.