Category Archives: science

Tsukareru and suchlike

Posted on by
Reply

Screenshot Chuunibyou (Oriental magic nap society sign)

Now that I am actually trying to learn a Far Eastern language, I have some newfound respect for the Far Eastern Magic Nap Society. (From anime Chuunibyou.)

The verb “tsukareru” means “to grow tired”. It is one of the few Japanese verbs I learned easily, because the suggested memorization phrase was “If you get tired, Sue will carry you.” While I probably would prefer it the other way around (depending on the Sue), it was still memorable enough to stick with me. Unfortunately, most Japanese words are harder to remember. And as a result, I do in fact grow tired. More exactly, after a bout of memorizing five words, I usually become very sleepy and may even fall asleep in my boss chair at home.

That feels about as ridiculous as it sounds. Five words? Now, the Memrise memorization is a bit more than just reading them. The words appear sometimes in Japanes (in the hiragana script), sometimes in English, and you get to pick the counterpart from a growing list of words (starting at four, ending at eight). The words alternate seemingly at random, and some of the time you must type the Japanese word rather than just picking it from a list. Still, it is just five words at a time. I should not go from reasonably wide awake to wanting to just shut my eyes. But I do, fairly regularly.

Reviewing is much easier, but still, if there are more than 20 (and there usually are 50+ when I come home from work) I may still start blinking heavily if I try to take them all at once.

I wonder if this is becoming a form of conditioned reflex now, from doing so much of my studying in the evening and sometimes early morning just out of bed. Those are the times I am not at work or making dinner or exercising though. I am not a full-time student after all.

***

This is not the only strange bodily sensation I experience these days. Having revisited Skyrim after a lengthy absence, I discovered that protracted fight scenes give me a hoarse throat. I know for certain that I don’t actually shout out loud (unlike some overly excitable gamers, usually much younger than me). Yet the body reacts as if I had been using my voice. Or Voice, in the case of Skyrim? I assume it is the muscles of the throat that involuntarily constrict during the intense stress.  Well, intense for me – I have very little stress in my daily life. I am single after all. ^_^

This may seem strange – it certainly did to me – but it is a known fact that the body reacts to imaginary worlds somewhat like it reacts to the real world. The whole concept of porn is based on this, after all, and it is one of the more successful business concepts of the world. So there is definitely something in it. I don’t need to tell most of my male readers about the ease with which the body reacts to even pure illusion of the mind. And it is not restricted to thoughts of the opposite sex. Angry thoughts cause the muscles to knot and the heart to beat more strongly, and fearful thoughts can cause effects in the body so fearsome that they become a source of fear that feeds on itself, leading to panic attacks. So the body is not a separate thing from the mind.

Perhaps interleaving Skyrim and studies will help take the edge out of either. Certainly many college students already do so, from what I see online…

Or perhaps I could, I don’t know, get enough sleep or something? OK, that’s taking things to extremes. It won’t be tonight, for sure. Because it was tomorrow before I even started writing!

Norway and Sweden

Posted on by
Reply

Norwegian spring - circa 2005

If not for the telltale Norwegian flag, this picture from a half forgotten spring day could just as easily have been from neighboring Sweden.

The “brother kingdoms” of Norway and Sweden should be of interest to all of the world, for the way they illustrate what really matters in a highly developed country.

The two nations share the Scandinavian peninsula, my native Norway to the west and Sweden to the east. Most Norwegians are genetically indistinguishable from Swedes (and Danes), the culture is very similar, and even the languages are mutually comprehensible. Well, older Swedes may have a hard time understanding Norwegian unless they are paid for it, but the reason for this is psychological. For centuries, Sweden was the big brother, not just in population but in prosperity and culture as well. From 1814 to 1905 Norway was basically as Swedish province, but gained independence peacefully after a dramatic cultural revival in the latter half of the 19th century, led by world-famous names such as Ibsen (playwright), Grieg (composer), Munch (painter) and Vigeland (sculptor). This golden age turned out to be temporary, and Sweden remained the leader of the Nordic countries.

Then in the 1960es, Norway won the nature lottery: Under the North Sea lay enormous reserves of oil and gas. Over the next decades, great wealth started flowing into the country: Mostly directly to the state through oil taxes and ownership, but the high-tech oil supply industry also earned large amounts of money. By now, a Norwegian worker is likely to earn substantially more than his or her Swedish counterpart, and pay less tax. For some years now, the UN has declared Norway the world’s best country in which to live. Some envy from the Swedish side cannot be avoided, but there is actually less reason for it than one might think.

It is true that a Norwegian worker (or pensioner) has quite a bit more money left after tax. But it just so happens that most things are more expensive in Norway too. Food is so expensive that Norwegians who live near the border often drive to Sweden to buy their groceries for the week, and even on the south coast people take the ferry to Denmark – a rather long trip for something called a ferry – to buy meat and alcohol. Alcohol is expensive in both Norway and Sweden, but even more extreme in Norway. But it is not just food. Books are substantially more expensive in Norway, cars are a lot more pricey, and housing is disturbingly overpriced. (In Oslo prices are comparable to the world’s largest trade centers such as London, New York and Tokyo, with 10-20 times the population density.)

The surprising result is that the living standard in Norway in Norway is only marginally higher in Norway than in Sweden. Indeed, for a large family the costs of housing and food in Norway may make it harder to make ends meet than in Sweden. (That said, large families are rare in either country these days.)

It seems that while money has poured into the Norwegian economy, there has not been a corresponding increase in the things you can buy for money, and so the prices have risen to meet the newfound willingness to pay.

There are some exceptions to this. One is goods that are anyway directly imported from overseas, such as electronics and everyday clothing. Scandinavians also increasingly import music, video and English-language books from abroad, in which case the nominal wealth of Norwegians translate directly into purchasing power. And with both nations having legally enforced 5 weeks vacation, it is also customary to visit foreign countries each year, where the strong Norwegian currency makes the winter-pale Norwegians into princes and princesses.

But for most of the year, the difference in nominal income makes very little difference to the actual standard of living. There is a lesson to learn from this, I think. It is true that for a developing country, lack of money is a big problem. But for the world’s richest countries, GDP growth is no longer really important. Streamlining public services and reaching compromises on political issues contributes more to the wellbeing of the people. A number of countries should pay heed to this and perhaps take a long good look at Sweden now that their own economies are faltering. Perhaps they can get some hints there.

Habit and understanding

Posted on by
4

Screenshot anime Hikaru no Go - Hikaru

I am not like I was before – is that not the defining element of understanding? It is not something that requires work to maintain, because it changes the very way we look at things.

While I am still trying to learn basic Japanese, I have reflected on the different ways of learning: By association, by repetition and by understanding. These are complementary, that is to say they complete each other, but they are also very different. In particular I would say that understanding is in a class of its own.

Associations fade over time, and habits take time to build. But understanding happens in a moment and lasts for a lifetime. In light of this, we might wish that we could learn by understanding only; but in this world that is not possible. On the contrary, the “inferior” forms of learning seem to be necessary to lay the foundation for the experience of understanding. “Before we can make apple pie, we must grow the apples.”

***

I have reflected a little on how this applies to our spiritual life, if any. I can’t help but notice that the monasteries of the various religions all seem to be focused on habit (pun not originally intended). There are routines to be followed for every hour of the day, and they are followed strictly. It may seem to the casual bystander that people are reshaped into robots, mindless machines of the religion. And certainly that could happen. But I believe that the purpose of all this habituation is to lay the groundwork for understanding. Whether that happens in each individual life or not, is another matter.

The secular reader may discard the possibility that there is a human spirit, but look at it this way: Even if we know today that Earth rotates, rather than the Sun circling around us, the experienced reality of the sunrise and sunset is spot on. In the same way, even if we should be able to find another way of looking at spiritual realities, the experience of them will remain, as it has remained for thousands of years.

And in light of this, I hope we can agree that understanding seem to take place at a deeper level, which may be that of the spirit or at least the soul. These words are not interchangeable, the soul is personal but the spirit not so much. And when you gain and understanding, the flash of profound insight that makes your view of something suddenly tilt and you see it from a whole new perspective, I think that may belong to the deeper part of you that is not entirely personal.

For instance, say you are 12 years old and live in a poor family and one day you realize why Pythagoras had it right about those right-angled triangles. (It really is very obvious once you see it.) Before then, you had just read it in a book and accepted it as a fact. Now that you understand it, it becomes more true than your current personality. Even if you grow up and become affluent, even if you fall in love and marry and have kids, even if you divorce and suffer from depression for over a year, even if you lose your religion and gain another, the understanding you had that day remains unchanged. You are never going to look at those triangles the same way again, even if decades have passed.

The purpose of spiritual practice, I believe, is not to simply accustom you to living outwardly a life that is compatible with your religion. That is certainly not a bad thing, but the idea is that at some point a revelation will strike like lightning in your soul and you will realize The Truth. From then on, even if you make mistakes, even if good people happen to do bad things, even if your outward conditions and even your state of mind may vary over time, you will never look at life the same way again.

“Enlightenment is like being hit by lightning” say eastern Buddhists, meaning that you cannot train yourself up to enlightenment by practice; “but meditation is like being outside in a thunderstorm.” In other words, you can reduce your chance of being hit by Enlightenment, or more generally by Understanding, if you don’t stay in the zone where it is likely to happen. Sometimes it happens anyway, to the undeserving and unaware. Often it does not happen even if you seek it for a long time. But you can increase your chances, and it is not like you are doing anything criminal in the meantime. Just don’t mistake the habit for the understanding.

Well, that was a strange revelation from memrising Japanese vocabulary. But then I live a strange life, filled with small things. I guess my life is a bit like a bonsai garden. ^_^

Forgetting

Posted on by
2

Screenshot Hikaru no Go

When I first saw this in the anime “Hikaru no Go”, I thought it was fiction. But masters of Go really can remember hundreds or thousands of games, and can stop in the middle of a game and resume it later in their life. So why can’t I remember a word for five minutes without repeating it?

I am slowly making my way through the JLPT N5 vocabulary on Memrise.　While I am learning faster than I am forgetting – at least for now – the margin seems entirely too narrow. Shouldn’t forgetting be reserved for things we know we are unlikely to meet again, like a phone number called only once?

Scientists assure us that there are more connections in the human brain than there are atoms in the observable universe. Furthermore: Poking around in a patient’s brain with electrodes for some other purpose, the doctors accidentally woke to life memories from the distant past, in lifelike detail. So it seems we wander around with a library of a million books, but only a thousand of them are indexed. Why? Why do we forget? What’s in it for us?

***

Forgetfulness could just be a not-so-intelligent design, of course. My previous main computer had 4 GB of RAM, but 32-bit Windows could only access 3.25 GB. Even if I had doubled the computer’s memory, it would have been useless, because the limitation was elsewhere. So it is thinkable that our brains have enormous vaults of storage but the retrieval system can only handle a small fraction of it. When I refer to this as unintelligent design, it is because brains are expensive. The human brain uses a disproportionate amount of the body’s energy, somewhere in the range of 20-25% despite its limited size. The brain of the Peking Man would be plenty enough to store the memories we can recall after a long and eventful life. Probably an Australopithecus as well.

As if to further confuse us, there are a few scattered individuals who can remember pretty much anything. You can give them a long list of random numbers or syllables, which most of us would not be able to recite even right after hearing it; a year later, they will recall it perfectly with only a slight pause. Occasionally someone seems to be born this way, while others have found some system or practice that lets them remember anything. Several of the latter have written books in which they try to teach how to do it. But despite the widespread sale of such books, humankind has not been transformed into their likeness. I am still not surrounded by mnemonic supermen, to put it mildly.

On further inspection, it turns out that memory masters – at least those not born that way – can remember anything, but not everything. That is to say, memorizing random data requires intense concentration, and also deliberate practice beforehand building up the memorizing skill. So the lunch is not quite free after all. We are simply not made to remember our whole life in full 3D color vision and surround sound. Perhaps just as well: If we remembered everything, nothing would stand out. As one Amazon reviewer put it: If life is defined by the moments that take our breath away, holding your breath is just not the same!

In addition to the general memorizing ability, there are many professions and arts that have impressive but specific memories. I have mentioned high-level Go players, who can remember every game in their career move by move. Considering that there are more possible Go games to play than there are stars in the galaxies, this is quite uncanny. But they still need a list to remember their groceries. The deliberate practice of their craft creates a mental model that interacts directly with long-term memory, without going through the usual channel of recalling item by item into short-term memory. This is perhaps similar to how we learn “wordless” skills such as biking, which involve many muscles and senses. Decades later, we can resume where we left off, without any conscious effort to “recall” how we did it.

Learning to speak in the first instance is also a pretty intense practice, and usually involves not only a steady effort from the toddler but also from the surrounding family, which acts selectively on meaningful words before the child even knows their meaning. I could also learn Japanese if I lived with a Japanese family that thought I was the most interesting thing since the world was made. ^_^ But as adults we just have to provide both sides of the learning enthusiasm ourselves.

Once we have learned to talk, we never forget how to do it. (If anything, we forget to not speak.) When there is a particular word we can’t recall, the reason is not forgetting but a psychological block. (For instance, a struggling alcoholic may have trouble with the word “bottle” because the very thought of a bottle sets off a fierce battle in his subconscious.) Only when Alzheimer’s or some such illness unravels the fabric of the mind do the words eventually fail us.

I conclude from all this that the natural “garbage collection” of the brain will take away my Japanese vocabulary unless I manage to grow it to a level where it stops being data points and becomes a skill. My plan is to give some priority to drilling basic vocabulary and reading hiragana until I reach the level where I can actually read Japanese manga (comics) in the native language. Comics tend to have a simpler and more limited vocabulary and grammar compared to articles and books. If I can sustain my deliberate practice until I have the skill of reading manga, I should be able reach a “safe haven” against forgetting. We forget data points, but we don’t easily forget skills. That’s just how our minds work, and it is always easier to ride the horse the way it wants to go anyway.

Overwatering memories

Posted on by
2

I want to praise myself! But that’s not easy when I have forgotten every third word pretty much every time. Time to bring a bucket!

Nearly two weeks ago, I wrote in praise of Memrise, a website that teaches (mostly vocabulary) by a combination of mnemonics and spaced repetition. Since then, I have discovered a problem with it. Not a showstopper, but an irritation. Luckily, there is a built-in solution.

The problem is that the system is way too optimistic about my ability to remember the words. Actually it is pretty good when it comes to very simple pieces of knowledge, such as the katakana (a Japanese syllable script I have not made the effort to try to learn before). But for more complex information such as Japanese words, I have frequently forgotten them by the time the next repetition comes around. This is particularly bad with longer words. The website uses the same interval by default for single syllables and long words, but my fail rate is much higher for the longer words.

The goal is a 90% memory retention, but my average sessions tend to yield 60-70%, depending on the mix of words. That is not optimal – the perfect time to repeat a fact is the moment it is about to be forgotten. You should ideally have to think for a moment before recalling it; having it at the tip of your tongue but not getting at it is also acceptable. Remembering without effort is less effective, and having to re-learn it even less so. The closer you get to just barely remembering, the better.

The second effect of this, apart from less than ideal learning, is that it is a bit demoralizing. Failing a third of the time feels like failing a lot, even though technically I remember most of the phrases. Failure has a stronger emotional impact in the short run, although psychologists say that we remember our successes better in the long run.

Strangely the Memrise website comes with a tool that fixes this, but subtly discourages its use. The tool is called “overwatering”. The very name is a discouragement: If you overwater your plants in real life, they will sicken and wilt eventually, just not as quickly as if you forget to water them in the first place. To further discourage its casual use, the “overwater” button is white, the same color as the background. (The “water” and “harvest” buttons are in bright attractive colors when they appear at all.)

But the interesting part is that when I overwater, I get pretty close to the target rate, and also have a much more positive feeling. Yes, the short words are now too easy, but correspondingly I spend very little time on them, just write them and press enter to get to the next. The easy words don’t get much attention, as well they shouldn’t. According to the site forum, overwatering does not directly affect the timers. So you won’t get a longer pause if you get a word right during overwatering. This fits with my experience – new words to water appear fairly soon after an overwatering session, and may randomly include words from that session. It seems to be a stand-alone feature, more or less.

I am a bit baffled by the choice to deflect attention from the overwater tool, and the lack of explanation of it anywhere on the site. Only in fragments of discussions on the forum do I get some idea as to why it was included (by very vocal demand, it seems) and the almost fanatical disagreement between its supporters and opponents. I am surprised: Everything I have read about long-term learning implies that memory retrieval fades quickly once you pass the threshold where you can no longer recall it at will, even with effort.

***

One possibility is that the average user of Memrise learns much more easily than I do. That is certainly not beyond imagining: I am almost 54 years old at this time, while college students are probably the most likely to use a site like this. The ability to learn random data tends to drop off over time, whereas the ability to learn by association remains high until dementia sets in. Hopefully I am not quite there yet, although I feel painfully incompetent at work as well. (Then again, judging from the speed at which our pool of cases is solved, many of us are probably like that. I have no idea whether the others actually feel it though.)

Anyway, if college students remember 90% of the phrases through the ordinary watering process, they will not feel any need to press the white button. So that is one possibility. But I don’t have that luxury. If I want to actually learn enough Japanese to read Japanese books one day, I have to forge on. Even if it means overwatering, by the standards of other people.

Memrise!

Posted on by
Reply

Tiny angels of curiosity

Are you insatiably curious? Then this website may be for you.

I have found another fun thing to do: Memrise, a website that teaches things, mostly vocabulary of foreign languages. Of course, there are many such websites, but this one uses state of the art psychology which lets you learn better using less time.

By “less time” I mean less time in total, when you sum up the hours of your life you have spent on learning the thing. It does not mean that you can sit down the night before an exam and learn at superspeed. One of the three “legs” on which this method stands is spaced repetition, which I have written about before (SuperMemo and Mnemosyne.) But this time it is combined with two other “legs”:  Mnemonics and motivation.

Mnemonics is the use of images or other associations which we connect to a random piece of information. Except for small children, most people have a hard time remembering something that is unrelated to everything else. The more vivid, amusing or emotional the association, the easier it will be to remember. If it also is associated with something we think about regularly, the energy that flows through the neural pathways will spill over on something associated. The best mnemonics therefore are those which we associate with ourselves, because we tend to think of ourselves a lot. This site cannot really help with that, but every piece of random data comes with a number of “mems”, images or thoughts that can make it easier to remember. Not as good as making your own, but easy and reasonably effective.

Memory refreshment, or spaced repetition, is the art of reviewing something just before you have forgotten it. This is the ideal time. If you review it while you still remember it easily, the effect is less. If you review it after you have forgotten it, you have to put more energy into re-learning it. The website remembers when you learned each word or fact, and even sends you a mail to remind you. At first, you repeat every few seconds or minutes during the main drill, but then it can take half an hour, four hours, 12 hours… it depends on how many times you have already reviewed it and how well you did. If you keep acing your reviews, it could soon be days or weeks. If you fail miserably, you will have to return to it soon.

Unfortunately, the calculation completely ignores work and sleep, so it is unlikely to work too well in the intermediate range, when you are supposed to review in a few hours. By then you are probably asleep or at work, hopefully not both at the same time!

Motivation is the third and often ignored factor. Most electronic teaching systems assume that you are already motivated by an external factor, and that may well be true. But this one has taken a leaf from the popular Facebook games (or “social games” now that we have Google+ and other venues for them). In these social games, people come back every day or even several times a day to water and harvest their plants or do other boring task to get some small imaginary reward, especially when they can share these with their friends. Memrise uses the same model. The initial learning of a word or fact is called planting a seed. Later you return to water it by testing your knowledge of the word after some hours. Finally you can harvest it into your long-term memory. You get points for each successful action, and your “wealth” of points is visible to your Memrise friends. (My name is itlandm4b by the way.)

As already mentioned, the website will mail you when you need to return to water or harvest your memories. You can also see if you go into each course how long it is until your next interaction with each plot of verbal crops. I have a lot that fall due in 12 hours, when I will hopefully be at work. This thing may be better suited for students. But no worries, if I fail miserably, I will simply have to return to them faster than I otherwise would. The game… er, teaching site keeps track of each individual fact, helping us work more on the difficult ones and less on the easy ones … for us personally, not some imaginary average person.

To keep track of everything and mail you when needed, the site needs you to register. You can create a new account or log in with Facebook. Unfortunately it does not take any of the other popular identity managers, like Google or Twitter or OpenID. Then again, it is free. If you don’t like having to create a new account, you don’t need to. But you may lose out on some of the most entertaining learning, or most instructive fun, on the web.

Wait! If it is free, how does it pay its bills? Well, so far it survives on generous investors, it seems. The plan is to take a cut of for-profit courses, but so far these are notable only by their absence. This may not bode well for the future of the website. But on the other hand, expenses are probably moderate as well: The users are making pretty much all the courses. After developing the software, the founders basically just need to run the server, and people contribute everything from single mnemonics to complete courses. So hopefully it will be around for a while. By then I should have learned thousands of new things. Perhaps. Or I might flutter off like a butterfly to the next flower. You know how I am with such things. Time flows differently for me. A month is an ocean of time, at least until it is over…

http://www.memrise.com/

Writing fiction is easy

Posted on by
Reply

It was a dark and not particularly stormy night. Self-Sim was sitting in front of his old computer…

Writing is easy – it is writing well that is hard. But not everyone will agree with this, at least not with the first part. During this year’s National Novel Writing Month (“NaNoWriMo“), I have had a couple interesting discussions about “filler” or “padding”. NaNoWriMo has a quantity goal, not a quality goal, or not much of one. The idea is to write 50 000 words of a new novel during the month of November. Novels are usually longer than that, but 50 000 words in 30 days is already stretching it for a new writer (and some not-so-new writers as well).

In order to reach the goal of 50 000 words in 30 days, people have taken to various tricks: Not using contractions, always writing a person’s full name (and sometimes those names can get ridiculously long), writing out the lyrics of songs that are playing during a scene, random appearances of ninjas, etc etc.

I have mixed feelings about this. Not so much the contractions, they are overused anyway, and many Americans do not seem able to use them correctly anymore. But quotations, writing without thinking, I am opposed to. Quotations in fiction should only be used when they are important to the story. If you hear a song or a speech that changes your life, quoting the relevant lines is important. If a song is playing in the background while you are doing something else, the lyrics are probably irrelevant.

Still, there is padding and there is padding. Mindless writing is something I cannot really recommend, even if it gets your word count up. There are better ways to do that. A padding that is not just a padding. I think we could call it “reporting from an imaginary world.”

***

When we say to newcomers: “Just write”, we really mean writing their own creation. But it does not need to be good, or even part of the plot. For instance, describe the place where something happens. Is it a room? If so, there are probably windows and doors leading to other places. There is probably furniture, most likely some kind of decorations. Does a teen girl’s room have stuffed animals, or does it have half finished toy planes and a tube of glue? Are there framed pictures, and if so, who or what is depicted? Is the room tidy or messy? If there are objects on the floor, what kind of objects? Blue jeans, black underwear, a dog-eared copy of Scientific American? Putting this down on paper is writing, regardless of whether it makes it into the published novel, yes, regardless of whether that particular novel is ever published. This is the kind of work writers do.

Farmers farm, teachers teach, writers write. Even if you have to scrap most of what you write now, even if you have to scrap all of it, writing is what you do. There is no way around it. (Well, you can use voice recognition software, but that only moves the writing from your fingers to your mouth.) You want to write something that makes you rich and famous, or if you are like me, you want to write something that can lift the spirit of men and women and give them hope and courage in the ages after your passing. But that is like winning a 5 kilometer race in the World Championship. First you have to grasp hold of the dinner table so you can get up and stand on your two feet. That is how you begin becoming a world champion. Writing all those lyrics are like that, it is OK for a week or two or three, but then you must let go and start on the terrible and frightening adventure of walking unaided, of writing what you see in a world no one else can see until you have opened it for them.

Every world has virtually infinite reach in space and time, and infinite depth of detail. In time, you will have to select what to report from that overwhelming flood of information. But at first, when you drill your first holes through the barrier between worlds, there is no torrent. You can barely get anything out with a drinking straw. Keep writing, but keep writing from the other side of that wall. Not this one. Look around. Listen. If worst comes to worst, smell. Watch the way people (or elves) sit, the way their eyes shift, their quirks and tics. It is probably not important, but if nothing important is going on at the moment, this is what you’ve got, and it is your duty to report it. It may never reach the printing press, but that’s the way the world is. Tell it anyway.

You may think that those who write amazing novels, that they happened to see an interior movie that was simply that amazing, and they just wrote it down. Well, I guess that can happen too. But quite likely they choose the best 80 000 words out of perhaps a million or more that reached their paper / computer screen. Or, for the particularly skilled, their brain cortex. But if you are still starting out, you can probably not keep a million words in your brain, so use the computer hard drive instead. Think of it as an extension of your brain. You are a writer. Writing is what you do.

Actually, planning is what you will do, probably before you publish anything longer than a school essay. Planning is underrated, to say the least. But there is nothing wrong with diving in, even while your plan is still sketchy – perhaps even all in your head – and take a look around. Who are these people, how are they living, what are they doing? Make your world come to life. Remember, the possibilities in a human brain exceeds those in the visible universe. You can create worlds without end, or as long as you live and retain your mind. Unlimited space, unlimited time, unlimited detail. The story behind a stuffed toy or a faded photograph may be enough to fill a book all on its own. All there waiting for you to write it down. And write, and write. You are a writer, it is what you do.

Chuunibyou!

Posted on by
3

“It is my fate to bear the burden of endless battle with the harbingers of darkness.” Rikka is a Very Important Person.

Japanese has a new word, since a year or two ago. (OK, perhaps it only reached the world a year or two ago.) “Chuunibyou” – Middle School Second Year Syndrome – is the dreadful condition where someone discovers their individuality and free will before they discover the difference between reality and fantasy. They may dress all in black, including nail polish and lipstick where appropriate (or even if not), and hand in self-written poetry about death instead of their regular English essay. Or they may wear colored contacts and claim to have supernatural powers. They may declare their undying love for an anime character, complete with elaborate plans for the wedding. They may join some unconventional religion and try to convert everyone around them. Usually they get over it, and look back with considerable embarrassment on their actions.

The anime Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai – falling in love despite teenage delusions – is a romantic comedy without excessive display of panties and such. The main character is a high school freshman who is going to a high school a distance from home to avoid being recognized, because he spent his middle school years claiming to be the superhero Dark Flame Master, something that embarrasses him no end. But no sooner has his normal life begun, than he meets a girl in his class who wears an eye patch and a bandage on her arm to seal the supernatural powers inside her. And she knows his secret. Hilarity ensues, but despite all the awkwardness, they eventually become very close.

The anime – loosely based on a light novel with the same name – is warmly recommended for those who want a VERY Japanese love comedy without the usual pantsu glimpsing. There is some drama, but it is nothing that should scare large children. And the crazy antics and imaginary battles are wonderfully animated.

***

Naturally I find it interesting in terms of my own writing as well, since I like to write Young Adult novels, which for some reason is rarely about young adults but about middle and high schoolers. My attempt this year – which still badly needs a rewrite – stars a freshman in high school who takes anime way too seriously, joins a foreign religion, and believes that he is channeling the spirit of a Go player who died over 300 years ago. While I don’t go so far as to say he is deluded, I do have a side character present an alternative and more psychological explanation.

In contrast, my next story features a girl who everyone thinks is delusional or just trying to sound important, but who really spends every night in a magic world. The story is told by her cousin once removed, who comes to live with her and her mother (his real cousin) because there is no high school anywhere near the island where he grew up. The boy thinks the girl is crazy, especially when she starts reading from an invisible book. But then he starts dreaming about the same magic world…

***

One interpretation of the Jewish creation myth in Genesis is that humanity as a whole suffers from a kind of chuunibyou, having woken up to self-awareness at a point where we were still not ready for it. This seems to be the view favored by sci-fi writer and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, in his book about Perelandra (a mythical planet Venus where a new Adam and Eve are created in a tropical paradise.) In that book, the first humans reject the primordial temptation and grow up to their full human potential, which seems to be a kind of demigod. So in this view, the current humanity is in a kind of arrested development, stuck in a youthful delusion that we seem unable to shake off.

But now we’re getting pretty far afield for one entry. More another day. Or perhaps not. Every day is a special day at the Chaos Node.

Jobs are obsolete

Posted on by
2

In the life simulation game The Sims 3, anyone can live off painting, sculpting or writing books, if they have the patience, although the talented will earn more. In real life, few would trust such a hobby to feed them. But what if they already had food and a roof over their head? Might they be tempted to try to add to their income through art then?

The age where paid work is the measure of a man, that age is coming to an end. What will we do to distribute money after jobs?

It has been going on for a while already. In most of the western world, unemployment is high and chronic. Here in Norway, unemployment is low, but disability pension is widespread. This may be a more realistic take on it, for the old jobs will never come back, barring a disaster of horrifying dimensions. I am not sure we would even physically survive such a disaster. So disability it is, in a matter of speaking. But many of these men and women are not in pain or bearing visible scars. In fact, a study a few years ago told us that the disabled rated their health on average as better than those who were still working!

Rather, it is generally assumed that if a person cannot be gainfully employed, they must have some kind of illness that prevents it. As pretty much all of us have some kind of illness or weakness, especially after years of constant stress, there is usually some hook to hang the coat on. But in many cases, people simply don’t have the intelligence and concentration needed to work in the Information Age.

We may need a stupidity pension, and we may need to make it almost universal. For every year and a half, computers double their processing power. Artificially intelligence remains out of reach, it seems, but we are still able to automate more and more tasks. And machines that we don’t think of as robots, still contain more and more computing technology. And don’t be sure you can always get a job as a taxi driver: Self-driving cars are now allowed to drive on roads in Nevada and California.

The office assistants who used to fetch documents in file cabinets and file them away after use are long gone. I started my adult working career as such an assistant (although I got into a different job at the same place a year later). Today, I would probably have needed to stay in school for another three or four year to get into what is the new entry-level job. Some years from now, today’s entry-level jobs will most likely not exist either. People may need to stay in school till they are 30, and only work at highly specialized jobs. On the other hand, the profit from those who work will be very high. We may discuss whether they ought to keep that money or whether the owners of the businesses should keep most of it (in so far as these are still different people). But what about those who are patently unable to study for 25 years? And what about those who educated themselves for jobs that disappear?

An unfair but practical solution is to give a small “living wage” to everyone, whether they work in the traditional sense or not. The idea is that a human life probably has a value even if you are not employed in the traditional sense. You probably have relatives and friends who appreciate your existence, for instance. We might take the conservative approach and tell those relatives and friends to keep you alive if they think you are worth it, but this will likely cause even more resentment than taxation does. Given that those who are employed will earn a lot of money even after tax, it may be easier to give a “living wage” to everyone, and leave it to their own inventiveness if they want to earn more money. Of course, some of that inventiveness may take the form of crime. But not having food and a place to sleep is no less likely to lead to crime. And if we are not going to let people starve on the streets anyway, we may as well give a modest amount to all instead of a larger amount to those who are good at imagining illness. (For instance, whiplash symptoms tend to fade within a few weeks after compensation is paid.)

There is a lot of economic activity already that does not take the form of jobs, exactly. People make various goods and sell them, or perform services against payment without a regular employment. I hope to see much more of this in the future. Many humans are quite creative.

So I expect jobs and freelance supplemental income to coexist for a long time, but the jobs becoming fewer and more specialized, while the informal economic activity grows. But I may be wrong. I may have to confer more with the voices in my head to know for sure. But for now, they are telling me to hang onto my job. ^_^

Thinking is overrated

Posted on by
Reply

Perhaps you can figure it all out on your own, from the basics – if you live for several centuries.

Thinking for yourself is a lot more effective if you first have absorbed the foundation for higher thinking from the great lights of history.

I seem to know an unusually large number of people who say: “Don’t follow traditions, especially not religion. Think for yourself.” I don’t agree with this, even though I have a “gift” to make others think. And I myself have thought a lot too, over the course of the decades. But what I have found is that thinking (much) is not for everyone. Even when it works, it is rarely the best course of action. There are faster, easier and more fruitful ways to accomplish one’s life goals.

Confucius thought that there were three ways to wisdom: Reflection, which was the noblest. Imitation, which was the easiest. And experience, which was the bitterest.

Obviously we would be in a pinch if no one ever took the path of reflection. We would not have all these great quotes, for instance. ^_^ But in this age where we have gathered the wisdom of the ages and of the various civilizations, there is already quite a supply of this. So the path of imitation is wide open. By reading good books, for instance, we can easily receive what others have struggled hard to bring forth. There may not be a lot of wise people around in your family, workplace or neighborhood who you can imitate, although it would be nice if you could find one. But we have the memory of others through the ages, who set a high standard indeed.

If you are single and have more time than you know how to use, and have a brilliant mind, and your passions are limited and known to you, then by all means add to the pool of those who arrive at wisdom by reflection. After all, each perspective is a bit different, and none can see it and tell it just the way you do.

But if you are not such a person, it may be better to learn from others, and think only when necessary, or when you particularly enjoy it.

***

There are of course situations when we need to think for a bit. We may be working in a problem-solving job, for instance. Or we may find ourselves in a new situation with no recourse to handbooks. So it is not a bad thing to be able to think. But it is a waste of our life to invent the wheel over and over again.

If you hire someone, you don’t just take a random person from the street, give them tools, and say: “Think for yourself.”  You hire someone who has studied the experience of others and trained under the supervision of others and can by now do a wide range of tasks without having to think about them.

The game of Go has only 5 simple rules, and you can make your work from there with pure logic. But the great Go players – and there are actually professionals doing this for a living in Asia – they have all studied the games of those who were already masters, and absorbed for themselves what others have found by hard thinking or good luck. It has taken thousands of years from the game was invented till it reached its current level of mastery. Even if you learn it as a child and live for a hundred years, you have little chance to catch up to that with just your own thinking.

Why then do you think that in the matters of your soul, of your lasting happiness and the progress of society, you will succeed by throwing away in your youth the experience of thousands of years, and the wisdom of the greatest lights of human history?

It is true that we see many religious people who are stupid and malicious. But from who have they learned? Have they learned from the wisdom of Solomon or Jesus Christ? No, they have they failed to do so, and simply imitated the equally backwards relatives and neighbors around them. Repeated studies show that benevolent atheists are more familiar with Christian scriptures than the petty-minded religious person. When religion degrades to a form of ethnicity, as it has done in much of the western world, it becomes a label rather than a vehicle for transmitting a higher form of thinking.

By all means, think. But first thing about when it is useful to think, and when it is useful to first gather the necessary basis or foundation for higher thinking. To be born into a civilization is a privilege. Throw it not away lightly, thinking that you are the greatest thinker who has ever lived. Chances are billions to one that you are wrong.