I and a politically opposite friend got together today to NOT solve the world's problems, and after a long and charged discussion we came to the conclusion ...
... that the 55+ menu at IHOP is good.
I think we can come together as a nation on this one.
Seriously, just turned 55 recently, and my buddy offered to take me out to breakfast at IHOP and order off the "senior" menu because, well ... sigh. It's time, literally, it's time. And it was pretty good!
So we've got that going for us, which is nice.
"What's that, sonny? First time trying it? I can't hear you over my advancing decrepitude ... "
So! While working on The Neurodiversiverse I've been reading up a lot on neurodiversity. According to Devon Price's Unmasking Autism, autism is massively undiagnosed, and for good---well, understandable---reasons. From parents concerned about their uncommunicative children or fans of cold geniuses on Sherlock and the Big Bang Theory, our culture focuses a lot on certain stereotypes of autism---while ignoring a much larger group of people who suffer from the same underlying conditions in their brains, but who are able to "mask" their behavior to appear much more "high functioning" or even "neurotypical".
As you might imagine, spending your whole day trying to react in ways that are fundamentally unnatural to you---and trying to hide the ways that you react that are natural to you---can stress people the fuck out. But many people never get a diagnosis---either because they're from a disadvantaged group, or because they don't want to risk the stigma and potential negative consequences of a diagnosis, or because they mask too well and no-on notices how they are suffering. But if you don't understand your condition, you may employ coping strategies which may actually do more long-term harm than good.
Well, now there are a lot of online tests and self-help books and even sympathetic therapists who can help people understand themselves better. While I've always known I was a bit strange---mostly solitary, typically withdrawn at family gatherings when I was a child, or explicitly labeled as having a weird brain---I've never pursued a diagnosis of any kind---in the past, because I didn't feel I had any trouble coping to the point that I needed help, and in the present, because having a disability label attached to you can have negative social and legal consequences that I have no interest in dealing with.
BUT! The personal stories of Unmasking Autism resonated a lot with me, and I now have friends who have gone through formal adult diagnoses of autism and ADHD, as well as an undiagnosed autistic friend who clearly is autistic and has to manage her life the way a masking autistic person does, but who did not pursue a diagnosis for precisely the same reasons that many other masking autistics do not pursue it: unless your condition is very severe, it isn't clear that a formal diagnosis can actually get you help, and it can often get you a lot of hurt. But UNDERSTANDING it, that, that we can now do.
So! And I note I again use "So!" at the start of a paragraph. Is that a verbal tic? Who cares? SO ANYWAY ...
Diagnoses of autism, and other neurodivergences! The neurodivergence I identify most with is Social Anxiety Disorder---in fact, this is the neurodivergence I chose for the protagonist of "Shadows of Titanium Rain", my own submission to The Neuroversiverse. But other people have suggested I have characteristics of OCD, or ADHD, or Autism, and I even went into therapy for stress and anxiety during the pandemic. So I decided to take five online tests: Social Anxiety Disorder, Autism, Anxiety, ADHD, and OCD.
The results are at the top of the blog---and I already gave away the game through the order I listed them. Normalizing all the scores from zero to a hundred, most of the tests put the boundary of "you've got the thing" at somewhere around 60-70% of the possible points you could score - let's call it at 2/3, or 66%, shall we? OCD scored the lowest - roughly 53%, which the test judged as "you've got OCD tendencies, but not OCD." ADHD was a little higher, 60%, and general Anxiety still higher, 63%. But none of these were over the "you've got it" thresholds for these tests---they just indicated a general tendency in that direction.
Things start to change with Autism: my test results for "Adult Autism" (*cough* MISNOMER) were 70%, well within the boundary of "you've very probably got it". Some of my friends are quite surprised to hear this, as they didn't see this in me at all; I guess my condition is "mild" and/or I mask very well.
But Social Anxiety Disorder? 86%, off the charts. And this wasn't a surprise: not only do I have a huge raft of coping mechanisms to help me deal with social situations, I also have some of the more subtle symptoms of Social Anxiety Disorder that you might not expect would be symptoms. For example, in certain socially awkward situations, I can partially stumble while walking. Most people, even those close to me, never notice that my foot briefly drags when we're walking and something socially awkward occurs - yet balance and coordination issues are a symptom of social anxiety.
Again, I've not pursued a formal diagnosis, and I don't plan to. But understanding these things about myself helps me understand why I've built a mass of coping mechanisms and masking strategies in my life---and can help me start to construct a healthier way to cope with the world within which I live.
If you feel alienated by your world, perhaps that's something you could try too.
This is your periodic reminder that we may not be on the moon, but we live in a pretty awesome world, where almost every movie, book or comic book you ever wanted is either available to stream over the air or can be readily shipped to your home, genre toys that once were inaccessible are now readily available, and we can shrink a playable Galaga machine down to the size you can put it on your coffee table.
Mt internet has been flakey, so I chatted with an AT-AT Druid online about it and they unexpectedly had a free repair tech slot the next morning. Send them? Yeah baby yeah!
After some kerfuffle with the confirmation, we got it scheduled and they showed up at 830 this morning only to find ...
The internet box half ripped off the house and the beginnings of what looked like a squirrel's nest in it.
Remember, folks, step one of network debugging is to check layer one of the stack: your physical equipment. "Your wires are loose" is the network equivalent of "Ain't got no gas in it" from Sling Blade.
So, hopefully, regular blogging will resume soon. Till then, enjoy this lovely blog post thumb-crafted on my phone.
Sometimes when I'm behind I shoot for a relatively minimal breakfast: a grapefruit or half pummelo, some toast, maybe some grits or vegan yogurt. I enjoy breakfast, even though I don't generally eat a full three meals a day: for some reason, since I've been out on my own, I've gravitated to two full meals (brunch and dinner) and the occasional midnight snack of milk and pound cake if I'm not too full.
But the "read and eat" ritual remains important, whether I do it two or three times a day. Unless I'm eating with others, or am in the middle of some absolute emergency, I always have a book with me when I eat --- to the point that I have a stand set up to read at the breakfast table. The current top-of-the-stack books are "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning" for the late-night reads and "Unmasking Autism" for the daily reader (along with "GANs in Action" for a project at work, and various books for writing reference).
Even if your meals are quick and minimal, you can read a few paragraphs while you eat, and hopefully enjoy it. And, if you're persistent, you can get through enormous books this way ... like "A New Kind of Science" or "Machine Vision" or "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science", three long books that I ate, one bite at a time, mostly over breakfast and midnight snacks, a page or even a paragraph at a time, until, at long last, one more mountain was climbed.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Half a pummelo, two slices of toast, and "Unmasking Autism".
This time, I'm using one of my own drawings as a reference, the old "Stand Your Ground" t-shirt image, for which I recently found a scan of the original art from WAY back in the day (the scan was a BMP, !):
This is from 1997 (!). In some ways it's cruder; in other ways it benefits from the larger aspect ratio (I suspect this was done on 8.5x11 paper, or even larger). But my little notebook has been helping me draw every day:
When you've got a lot to do, sometimes it's tempting to just "power through it" - for example, by extending a meeting time until all the agenda items are handled. But this is just another instance of what's called "hero programming" in the software world, and while sometimes it's necessary (say, the day of a launch) it isn't a sustainable long-term strategy, and will incur debts that you can't easily repay.
Case in point, for the Neurodiversiverse Anthology, my coeditor and I burned up our normally scheduled meeting discussing, um, scheduling with the broader Thinking Ink team, so we added a spot meeting to catch up. We finalized the author and artist contracts, we developed guidance for the acceptance and rejection letters, and did a whole bunch of other things. It felt very productive.
But, all in all, a one hour meeting became three and a half, and I ended up missing two scheduled meetings because of that. The meetings hadn't yet landed on the calendar - one because we were still discussing it via email, and the other because it was a standing meeting out of my control. But because our three and a half hour meeting extended over the time we were supposed to follow up and set the actual meeting time, we never set that time, and when I was playing catch up later that evening, I literally spaced on what day of the week it was, and didn't notice the other meeting had started until it was over.
All that's on me, of course - it's important to put stuff on the calendar as soon as possible, including standing meetings, even if the invite is only for you, and I have no-one else to blame for that broken link in the chain. And both I and my co-editor agreed to (and wanted to) keep "powering through it" so we didn't have to schedule a Saturday meeting. But, I wonder: did my co-editor also have cascading side effects due to this longer meeting? How was her schedule impacted by this?
Overall, this is an anthology, and book publishing has long and unexpectedly complex and tight schedules: if we don't push to get the editing done ASAP, we'll miss our August publishing window. But it's worth remembering that we need to be kind to ourselves and realistic about our capabilities, or we'll burn out and still miss our window.
That happened to me once in grad school - on what I recall was my first trip to the Bay Area, in fact. I hadn't gotten as much done on my previous internship, and started trying to "power through it" to get a lot done from the very first week, putting in super long hours. I started to burn out the very first weekend - I couldn't keep the pace. Nevertheless, I kept trying to push, and even took on new projects, like the first draft of the proposal for the Personal Pet (PEPE) robotic assistant project.
In one sense, that all worked out: my internship turned into a love of the Bay Area, where I lived for ~16 years of my life; the PEPE project led to another internship in Japan, to co-founding Enkia, to a job at Google, and ultimately to my new career in robotics.
But, in another sense, it didn't: I got RSI from a combination of typing every day for work, typing every night for the proposal, and blowing off steam from playing video games when done. I couldn't type for almost nine months, during the writing of my PhD thesis, which I could not stop at, and had to learn to write with my left hand. I was VERY lucky: I know some other people in grad school with permanent wrist damage.
"Powering through it" isn't sustainable, and while it can lead to short-term gains and open long-term doors, can lead to short-term gaffes and long-term (or even permanent) injuries. That's why it's super important to figure out how to succeed at what you're doing by working at a sustainable pace, so you can conserve your "powering through it" resources for the times when you're really in the clinch.
Because if you don't save your resources for when you need them, you can burn yourself out along the way, and still fail despite your hard work - perhaps walking away with a disability as a consolation prize.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Powering through taking a photograph doesn't work that well, does it?
My rendering of the last pose from the DALL-E character sheet for Porsche:
Not entirely terrible, though I can see my proportions are a bit cartoonish. These systems can't take art direction yet - I had to clean the character sheet up in Photoshop to really make it suitable, and even then the middle pose should have had the legs more spread apart, which it tried to do erroneously on the right-hand pose with a fifth leg - but they sure can render the heck out of an image.
I've learned a lot about neurodiversity in the past months - first, after having the crazy idea of launching yet another anthology, this one about neurodivergent people encountering aliens, and second, after coming to grips with my own neurodivergence (social anxiety disorder with perhaps a touch of undiagnosed autism). We want The Neurodiversiverse Anthology to land well with its intended audience, and need to get it right!
But it struck me that there's a lot of unhelpful cross-stereotyping between autistic folks and nerd and geek culture. Sure, there are autistic people who become intensely interested in "special topics", but sometimes that special topic is a sport or other "socially acceptable" activity, making it easier for autistic people to mask. And as Devon Price points out in her book Unmasking Autism, autistic people have specific bottom-up processing styles which are different from the top-down, "allistic" style of so-called "neurotypical" people. So just being obsessed with a special topic doesn't make you autistic, nor vice versa.
In fact, speaking as a proud member of "nerd" and "geek" culture, my social group had our own definitions of what "nerd" and "geek" meant, which indicated a difference in thinking styles, but didn't necessarily map to an actual neurodivergence. Geekdom in particular meant a certain kind of out-of-the-box thinking that doesn't align with what I read about the processing styles of autistic folks - not to say that these styles couldn't overlap, or even that they might frequently co-occur, but that "geek" had its own meaning.
That made me think back on conversations with a friend who was once called a "geek" by someone who meant it as an insult. HIs response? "Yes, I am - and you're not. Ha, ha, ha!" To him, it was a badge of honor, as it signified a deeper understanding of certain systems of the world and a different way of thinking - not neurodivergent, per se, but just different. We had a long conversation about different words and their nuances, and it led me to think about how these words have lurking meanings in my head.
So here's my attempt to unpack that terminology a little bit:
Nerds: A nerd is someone who has strong interests that someone else finds socially unacceptable. Calling someone a nerd says way, way more about the source than the target: it's a group identification play, designed to ostracize the person who's not into the currently approved interests. Now, to some folks, nerd can mean someone who is "socially awkward" - the stereotype is big glasses, pocket protectors, and high-pitched voices - but, really, that's just stereotyping, as judgmental people can and will ret-con someone into being a "nerd" as soon as they find out they're into something that isn't "cool."
Geeks: A geek is someone who uses out-of-the-box thinking to build up expertise in a given topic. Geeks can geek out about anything from computers to philosophy to football, just like their close cousins, "fans". But unlike "fans", a geek's expertise is weaponized. A great fictionalized example are the protagonists of the movie Moneyball, loosely based on a couple of real-life geeks who used their deep knowledge of baseball and statistics to turn around the Oakland A's. This is what my buddy meant when he said "Yes, I'm a geek, and you're not: ha ha ha!" - geekdom is something to be celebrated.
Wonks: A wonk is a geek about public policy. Al Gore is the quintessential wonk. Wonks tend to be paid lots of money to run very complicated systems in the public policy arena, though they don't tend to do quite as well when running for elections. Perhaps voters mistake them for nerds.
Cranks: A crank is a geek about a nonstandard scientific theory. Typically cranks are smart, well-educated people with a large body of perfectly normal beliefs, who become convinced of some off-the-wall theory that they've encountered in their broad reading or developed through their out-of-the-box thinking. Unfortunately for many scientists, cranks want to geek out with other science geeks about their theories, which can go badly when scientists try to explain all the ways their ideas don't work. I remember one fellow getting angry with me when I was trying to agree with him that his theory was possible - but had to point out that one of his claims was stated more strongly than the evidence supported. I wasn't even saying he was wrong, just that scientists need to be careful about their claims. The conversation did not go well.
Nutter: A nutter is a crank who has warped his view of reality to fit his nonstandard theory. For example, once a fellow attempted to cajole me into coming to work for his "company" where he was working on a "warp drive" (and no, I'm not joking). Now, I know a thing or two about the actual science behind so-called "warp drives", and this guy wasn't talking about his project in any way that convinced me he knew what he was talking about. I politely declined on the grounds that I was a very busy author and roboticist and preferred to spend my time bringing my own projects to fruition, and he proceeded to tell me how if I saw his plans for the flying saucer he was trying to build I'd abandon my own projects in favor of his. I did not.
Genius: A genius is a nutter who warps reality to fit his nonstandard theory. Fun fact: reality was classical before Einstein invented relativity, and light was just an electromagnetic field before Richard Feynman invented path integrals and showed that photons really go everywhere all at once. More seriously, a genius applies his out-of-the-box thinking at a very deep level, geeking out about all of reality. To some people, geniuses look like nutters ... and you never really do know which one you've got when a nervous looking man steps up to your front porch holding only a suitcase and says, "My brain is open." Turn him away, and you get nothing; take him in and help him tackle his questions, and you get an Erdős number.
So one point I'm trying to make here is that nerding out about something can take you places. Sometimes it takes you to a deep understanding of a subject matter, which sometimes makes people uncomfortable; sometimes that turns out to be very lucrative, and sometimes that turns out to be ostracizing. But, even then, sometimes the people we think are the nuttiest turn out to be the most brilliant people.
But another point I'm trying to make is that nothing about geeking out really has anything to do with neurodivergence - it's a pattern of behavior which occurs in neurodivergent and neurotypical people alike. Perhaps an autistic person might geek out about something, or perhaps they might not. Perhaps a geek might have autistic tendencies, or perhaps they might not. Perhaps some of these traits are often found together, or perhaps, even if that co-occurrence is actually real, it can distract us from looking sincerely at the unique and whole human beings we are interacting with, and collapsing these different ways of looking at people into a single all-encompassing category is unnecessary stereotyping.
Or, put another way, if you know one autistic person, you know one autistic person, and if you know one geek, you know one geek, and there's no guarantee that knowing one tells you much about the other.
Editors have superpowers, but you can't save everybody.
One of Ayn Rand's most useful distinctions for writers is between abstractions and the concretes that realize them. She's obviously not the only person to employ such a distinction, but if you think of abstractions as representations of a set of concretes, it helps you realize that you cannot portray pure abstractions like justice or injustice: you need to show the abstraction in concrete actions to communicate it. For example, the theme of your story may be "the mind on strike" but it must be realized using a set of concrete characters and events that (hopefully) illustrate that theme.
Once you've decided on an abstract theme, it can help you ruthlessly cull unnecessary concretes from your story, or to flesh the theme out to fit the concretes that you do have, or both. The same is true for editing anthologies, only with a little less flexibility as we don't completely control the submitted stories. For example, the Neurodiversiverse's theme is "neurodivergent folks encountering aliens", and if we get a story that does not feature neurodivergent folks, aliens, or encounters, we are not in the position of a writer who can tweak the themes or their realization until they both fit: we have to just reject off-topic stories.
But, as my coeditor and I like to say, editors have superpowers. There's more than one story in the anthology where we've been able to suggest edits - based on the theory of conflict, or the major dramatic question ("who wants what, why can't they get it, what do they do about it, and how does it turn out"), or even just line edits - that would resolve the problems in the story to the point that we'd go from a reject to an accept - or would resolve them, if the author goes along with the changes, that is.
But sometimes we can't even do that. There have been several stories where we applied our editing superpowers and drafted a way to fix the story to fit our theme - but where we, reluctantly, declined to pass on the story anyway, because we were no longer convinced that the edited story would be what the author intended. If a story was way off the anthology's theme, but the story's theme was really integral to the story's implementation, then changing the text to fit the anthology may not have suited the story.
In the end, despite our editorial superpowers, we can't "save" all stories, because not all stories NEED saving: some of them may not be right for this particular project ... and that's OK.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A nice heritage indoor mall in Asheville, which is a great writing town.
Another sketch of Porsche, this one based on a "character sheet" I generated with Midjourney based on my own character descriptions. Yes, yes, I understand there are many issues with AI art generators, some of which are real and some of which are not; my own writing has been used to train large language models, I know artists who have been discouraged from art by generative AI, and I expect the use of these systems for final product will be very disruptive. HOWEVER, there are some things which AI generators can do which can't be feasibly done by any other method - such as producing character sheets for your own practice.
As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I managed to convince ChatGPT / DALL-E to cough up the above "centauress in a spacesuit" drawing after many iterations, then got it to transform that image into the following character sheet of Porsche from several different angles:
It ain't perfect - note she has five legs on the right, and the perspective differences aren't really that well done - but it's close enough for me to use these as reference as I do my own drawing practice, shown at the very top. Seeing these "drawings" gives me new perspectives on how to render my own ideas at a higher level than I can currently do, enabling me to bootstrap my artistic skills.
There's a long way to go for AI generated art to be able to respond to art direction - but it is helping me chart a new direction in my own art, which is great, because if I can draw it, I can then art direct myself.
One of the most frustrating things reading the philosophy of Ayn Rand is her constant evasions of reality. Rand's determinedly objective approach is a bracing blast of fresh air in philosophy, but, often, as soon as someone raises potential limits to a rational approach - or, even, in the cases where she imagines some strawman might raise a potential limit - she denies the limit and launches unjustified ad-hominems.
It reminds me a lot of "conservative" opponents to general relativity - which, right there, should tell you something, as an actual political conservative should have no objections to a hundred-and-twenty year old well tested physical theory - who are upset because it introduces "relativism" into philosophy. Well, no, actually, Einstein considered calling relativity "invariant theory" because the deep guts of the theory actually are a quest for formulating theories in terms that are invariant between two observers, like the space-time interval ds^2, which is the same no matter how the relative observers are moving.
In Rand's case, she and Peikoff admit up front in several places that human reason is fallible and prone to error - but as soon as a specific issue is raised, they either deny that failure is possible or claim that critics are trying to destroy rationality. Among things they claim as infallible products of reason are notions such as existence, identity, and consciousness, deterministic causality, the infallibility of sense perception, the formation of concepts, reason (when properly conducted), and even Objectivism itself.
In reality, all of these things are fallible, and that's OK.
Our perception of what exists, what things are, and even aspects of our consciousness can be fooled, and that's OK, because a rational agent can construct scientific procedures and instruments to untangle the difference between our perception of our phenomenal experience and the nature of reality. Deterministic causality breaks down in our stochastic world, but we can build more solid probabilistic and quantum methods that enable us to make highly reliable predictions even in the face of a noisy world. Our senses can fail, but there is a rich library of error correcting methods both in natural systems and in in robotics that help us recover reliable information that is useful enough to act upon with confidence.
As for the Objectivist theory of concepts, it isn't a terrible normative theory of how we might want concepts to work in an ideal world, but it is a terrible theory of how concept formation actually works in the real world, either in the human animal or in how you'd build an engineering system to recognize concepts - Rand's notion of "non-contradictory identification" would in reality fail to give any coherent output in a world of noisy input sensors, and systems like Rand's ideas were supplanted by techniques such as support vector machines long before we got neural networks.
And according to Godel's theorem and related results, reasoning itself must either be incomplete or inconsistent - and evidence of human inconsistency abounds in the cognitive science literature. But errors in reasoning itself can be handled by Pollock's notion of "defeasible" reasoning or Minsky's notion of "commonsense" reasoning, and as for Objectivism itself being something that Rand got infallibly right ... well, we just showed how well that worked out.
Accepting the limits of rationality that we have discovered in reality is not an attack on rationality itself, for we have found ways to work around those limits to produce methods for reaching reliable conclusions. And that's what's so frustrating reading Rand and Peikoff - their attacks on strawmen weaken their arguments, rather than strengthening them, by both denying reality and denying themselves access to the tools we have developed over the centuries to help us cope with reality.
"There's no individualist so rugged they were born being able to change their own diaper." That's a quote from a story in progress that I thought was good enough to hoist up into the blog, just in case it turns into a "darling" and I need to cut it. The point is not to be against individualism - our world is better if most people are capable of pulling their own weight most of the time - but that none of us, literally none of us, are truly autogenic: self-made men who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.
You cannot fake reality in any way whatsoever: No matter how rugged an individualist is, no matter how much a person has made with how little, there was a point in their life where they could not clothe themselves, feed themselves, or change their own diaper. And yet we've cultivated a mythos in this country that deifies the self-made individual to the point where it has become fetishized - and signaled through purchases and action, as in the residential construction worker who purchased that huge truck, parked it on our grass in the rain, and proceeded to rut up our lawn and track our driveway with mud on the way out. Not even the neighbors doing that construction want this to happen - but it keeps happening, as this patch of our driveway is just out of sight from the office where I work, and we don't often catch them.
In contrast, we have no problem working with our neighbors across the street. When a package was mis-delivered due to a missed digit, I could have kept it, or mailed it back (to Ohio!) with the note "No Such Person At This Address". But I took a few minutes to find them by phone printed on the pacakge, and we quickly worked out that they were a short walk away. On the way out the next day, I dropped the package off, hidden slightly behind their porch columns so it wasn't visible from the road. Working together, we made sure they got their package quickly without it having to be shipped halfway across the country.
I'm all in favor of individualism, even the rugged kind. But we shouldn't fetishize it to the point that we run roughshod over each other to the point that we pretend that other people aren't there or don't matter - we should work together to make sure we have the best world possible.
-the Centaur
Pictured: a construction truck, for which our responsible neighbor apologized - yet once every week or two, the construction trucks creep back onto our land when they think I'm not looking, leading to torn up grass as in the second picture; also pictured, the package I left for our neighbor, rather than shipping it back.
