Notifications and Being Too-Online

When I switched from Twitter to Bluesky, I attempted to recreate the list of muted words I'd had. The purpose of the list was to filter out a lot of the over-the-top political content, the better to not scroll endlessly a feed of negativity. It worked reasonably well. And as before, I'd add in new names or terms to try and keep things controlled, and avoid whatever the new source of negativity was. Then January 20 rolled around, and it became impossible to keep the negativity out. So now, often as not, Bluesky is a quick scroll to determine whether there is something specifically new and worse or just the general background misery. I spend a lot less time on there (five minutes a day? ten?), and functionally never post.

My break occurred in 2016, but not with the election: it was the Michigan-Iowa football game. Michigan was ahead, but not by enough, and conditioned by years of fandom I knew it was going to end badly. Sure enough, the notifications kept hitting my screen and I laid in bed and watched my hopes collapse for the second time in less than a month.

The next day, I turned off all notifications on my phone, removed news apps and others that would send me updates on the world whether I wanted them or not. I have not added any back since.

Look, on some level my brain is cooked like everyone else's. But I read actively, watch movies as frequently (or more) than tv, which itself is a tiny slice of the day, probably the least I've ever done in my life, walk the dogs, take care of the house and the yard, and try to live a life outside screens. And while life and observation have taught me that in this respect I have more self-control than the average person,* I don't think any of these things are impossible; some of them aren't even difficult. You just have to want to do them.

But I do think there's also a matter of wanting the other things that are available to you. I'll read a book, but not any book and not at any time. Sometimes I want a light movie, sometimes a more substantive one. I ate my vegetables on culture a long time ago so there are a wide variety of things that are pleasurable now, and it's usually just a matter of picking one. And some of that comes down to situations: I know I will have such-and-such time available and I know what occupies my mind in the right way for the right period of time. Your time without screens is a loss if the replacement is nothing, but kids, it's a big, bright world out there, and there are lots of things you could do.

 

(Side note: it's true that I don't devote the time or attention that I did before to pretty much anything. But my day is very different: kids must be woken up and taken to school, meals planned and groceries purchased, dogs walked again, kids picked up, homework done, dinner cooked, bedtimes managed. There are no unbroken 8-hour streaks in my day anymore, so it's not surprising if my brain isn't doing what it did when I had those regularly.)

* I recognize this is a big part of the causal picture, and I don't mean to downplay it. But also: if I want to stop doing something, I stop doing it; if I want to start, I start. There's some window dressing around various situations--I form intentions that take a while to realize themselves, I dislike certain things I do, occasionally there's a second-order intention question about whether I really desire to do x or not-x--but the core of it is never more complicated than that.

Poetry for the Adult Man

Five years ago I made a decision with lasting impact on my life: I started reading poetry again.

In the early days of the pandemic, I needed time by myself. The kids woke up early, and needed attention, and keeping them away from my wife was a constant, only intermittently successful, battle. Being in HR with no departmental leader meant there was a lot of stress as other people were constantly pushed to the breaking point, and I needed something that would keep me going throughout the day. So I'd wake up at 5:30 or so, make a pot of coffee, and read 40 pages of poetry. (Derek Walcott at first)

This was a pivot that had been coming, anyway: I'd been in London the previous fall and done a "bookstore crawl" through independent shops, where poetry was a thing; the London Review Bookshop did one of their celeb parody threads where Pierce Brosnan came in asking about upcoming poetry titles; from that list I'd found Laura Scott's So Many Rooms and the ending piece in Helen Tookey's City of Departures made it clear that the time was right.

For the next two years, poetry was always a part of whatever I was reading: blind spots by major poets, historical poetry, and trying to keep up with the current publishing world. Though as it turns out, poetry is not hierarchically organized, there is no real top of the heap anymore, so you can follow someone influential who has published quite widely and find there's no real consensus about their value or worth because even most poetry readers haven't heard of them.

And we continue on with it because it is old-fashioned, out of step, superfluous, hostile to the idea of efficiency as a written production, hostile to efficiency as a reader (a 70 page collection that really hits three times is a marvel), and something we do simply out of the love for something beautiful and considered.

Nevertheless, a list:

Sujata Bhatt

Mimi Khalvati (Afterwardness especially)

Louise Glück (I cannot even describe what it's like to have read someone's work in whole and then have them win the Nobel, top shelf feeling as a reader; The Wild Iris is indeed her best)

Tomas Tranströmer (there's a line in one of his poems about how the grey winter sky makes all of the other colors seem more vivid which evoked a specific feeling about having grown up in Michigan that I didn't even recognize it as part of my reality until I read him saying it, top tier poetry experience)

Gardening

It's spring in North Carolina--there was snow on the ground three weeks ago, but that's done now.

I am, technically, late on yard improvements--to get the right growing season, everything needed to be in the ground two weeks ago. But life wasn't like that this year. The flipside is that the start of the real heat will likely be a few weeks later, so I have some time--but not much.

When we moved into the house ten years ago, I had some vision of having a lawn like I did when I was a kid. But it turns out that doesn't work in North Carolina, apart from constant monitoring and chemical interventions: you need a lot of fertilizer, weed killer, and a service to keep it looking nice. For once frugality and laziness shook hands with environmental responsibility.

So every year there are projects. First the remedial: rock and fill dirt to level out the backyard. Killing off the invasive species and keeping the ivy in check. Replacing the bluegrass in the yard--doomed anyway, because the previous owner killed the entire yard with weed killer and had to resod the fall before we moved in, using whatever was cheapest--with something more appropriate to the climate. Then we get to the good things: pulling bushes and replacing them with native plants. This year, it's a combo erosion control and bulb-based flower bed in the corner I can see from my office desk. 

A few days ago the older child was asking me what I like about gardening. There are a few obvious answers--it's outside, you can turn your brain off for a bit. And a few less obvious--it's about planning and visualizing in three dimensions across time, it's success over the long term. 

But the truth of the matter, really, is that it's about failure. You will absolutely fail in gardening, sometimes more than you succeed. Sometimes its on you, putting a plant where it shouldn't go or not taking something into account (like the intensity of the summer afternoon sun, something you forget for good reason until you're back in it again). But sometimes you do everything correctly--right soil, right drainage, right light--and it just doesn't work. Seeds don't grow. Plants grow initially and then fail. The plant grows but not to the size it should and throws off the effect of the bed as a whole.

It's nice to have something in life where failure is built in. It's nice to remember that effort counts for a lot, but it's not everything. It's nice to go in with the expectation that it won't all work out in the end. There's too much in life pointing to the idea that everything in life is in your control if only you work better, more consistently, more efficiently, and here goes Mother Earth, rolling along without a problem, failing all over the place.

Lessons from my dissertation: human empathy

It's occurred to me that my dissertation's subject matter is probably more relevant now than it was in the 2010s, when I was still trying to be an academic. In any event, my children's various questions about what's going on in the world around them have answers in the reading I did, which suggests to me I found something of use way back when.

A brief excursus, and then to the point. Hugo Grotius, father of international law, wrote De jure belli ac pacis in 1625 with exactly one aim, which he conveniently explains in his dedication: to convince the French (Catholic) king that it was acceptable, even good, to side with the (Protestant) nations opposed to the Hapsburg (Catholic) empire, since those peoples in small nations would be crushed at best if they lost. To convince a leader to fight against his ostensible co-religionists (they were different flavors of Catholic who also hated each other), Grotius borrowed from neutral, historical sources as well as religious ones, to demonstrate that war could be fought to save others and that engaging in certain prohibited conduct in war would also constitute a reason to get involved.

To do all of this, he draws on the simple point that human beings have responsibilities to one another. Even when there are no other links between people, the mere fact of being another human being places responsibilities, even very serious ones, on each person. If you live in Christianity's moral universe, this is a familiar thought: a person across the world who I will never meet has a moral claim on me and the way I think about my own actions and behavior simply because they are a human being, part of creation, and created in God's image. 

From all of this, it follows that empathy should be the base human response to any person who is in trouble or needs help. If you are a human being and recognize the humanity in others, there's no other possible response.* If you make light of empathy, or pronounce it a vice, then you have simply turned your back on what it means to be a person.** There's nothing left to say to them.

* The ethical and political implications that can be drawn from this vary widely: liberalism of fear, Rawlsian liberalism, social democracy, communism, communitarianism, the kind of conservatism Oakeshott liked but no one practices nowadays, care ethics, etc etc all seem like possible inferences.

** There's a difference between this and a Norm Geras-style Contract of Mutual Indifference. The Contract of Mutual Indifference--I won't help you,  and because I have not helped you I know you won't help me--has a morally tragic dimension because it recognizes that there is an obligation even as it also recognizes that it won't be fulfilled. People who don't care at all about empathy don't consider anything about it tragic.

Mathematics for kids and adults

Dan Davies on math education

Parenthood provides the opportunity to revisit old experiences and skills. While the opportunities are rarely consciously chosen, the results can be a pleasant surprise: years ago now, one of my children requested/demanded that I draw them a cat, which I then did. The fact that I did not believe I could do it and, so far as I can remember, never successfully did it as a kid was not a barrier: my fine motor skills and ability to execute on a conception had improved, and that was enough to draw a cat. (so also guitar, where I can play things I could not when I was a teen, despite playing 8 hours a day back then, having taken a decade or so off from playing at all, and being generally older.)

Math is another one of these. My own math education was typical, long on rote memorization, and using the ability to rotely memorize to quantify being "good" at math. I struggled a bit with advanced algebra and trig, more with calculus, and despite making out pretty well with statistics and game theory, never really got the hang of probability. And now as an adult math and math-thinking is simply everywhere, and it turns out that I'm good at it: the ability to visualize things in my head, honed through grad school, means I often have an intuitive sense of the answer that I can now justify with actual calculations and proofs.

Some of this was the necessity of statistics education in grad school: if you're working on the empirical side of the social sciences at all, you simply need to be able to do it, and so my courses were (from a certain perspective) seminars on examining the decisions someone made in assembling a statistical model, finding problems, and suggesting alternatives, with no real assumption that you had the ability to do any of it apart from the instruction you received in class, and with the assumption that some knowledge of the real world, as reflected in the subject matter of the paper, would aid in your ability to see how the model was constructed and provide critique, no math needed initially. And once you learn to think in this way (subject matter ---> math, not math ---> maybe some real world application one day), it becomes an easy habit to get into.

As a result of all of this, it turns out that I'm a pretty good guide to my children as they work on their math homework. The youngest will learn three or four different ways to solve a problem, and I can pretty well look at a technique I've never seen before and see how it's meant to work and guide them; the oldest is now getting advanced math homework, and it seems pretty clear that all you need to do on those is think clearly about the problem and make a decision about how you're going to find the answer, and the actual math is the least consequential part of it.

* One thing I emphasize to the older child is that math is taught as a closed loop in school, but it's not in the real world: there are a couple of problems they've had where the essential features of the answer are clear but the actual answer is not, and what we do in the real world is just look up the answer rather than guess fruitlessly forever.

War and Peace: Almost Done Edition

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Napoleon is at the gates of Moscow, seems like it'll work out well for him.

Two striking things at this time:

1. War is always in the background of the book, but it spends most of its time as a purely domestic drama with Austerlitz as a kind of setpiece happening far away and of little import to anyone else. And then, gradually, there is nothing but war, even as the characters try to deny it and continue on as normal. 

But of course, war was there throughout the book, impacting people's lives in real ways they just kind of discounted and pretended didn't exist. Napoleon and Alexander don't really change at all. The system of things, as Tolstoy says repeatedly about war, depends on the spur of the moment decisions of regular, ordinary people working in concert (or not). The war machine can't hum without people thinking of military service as noble, the forced raising of troops as a fact of life, and the increased taxation to support those wars as logical. 

And so it seems that if you are ever to find yourself in a world where real life, whatever that is, seems caught up in the machinations of powerful people far away from you, it is almost certainly the case that it has in fact been like that for awhile, and you have chosen not to see it, and by choosing not to see it, brought it on yourself. (A connection, perhaps, with Sartre in Being and Nothingness "if there is a war, it is my war, in my own image, and I am responsible for it")

NB this is not an endorsement of this line of thinking, just a sketch of it. Though I do think people go to great lengths to pretend to not know what they're doing, so they can treat the consequences of their decisions as inevitable.

2. When I read War and Peace in college, I wrote my essay on Pierre, though I now remember nothing at all about it. What strikes me the most about Pierre this time around is not his successive attempts to change, nor the futility of them, but that he remains basically the same person he was at the beginning of the book: a more-or-less good person with some serious flaws but who can rise to the occasion when the occasion presents itself. And as I get older and have observed myself (and other people) for longer, this is pretty much what I see: the external trappings might change, you might graft yourself onto a different plant than the one you started on, but the person doesn't really change that much.

A brief and unfortunate venture back into computer gaming

Via Cookie Clicker. At first it seemed like an ideal type of game: exponential functions, arbitrage, and absolutely no point to any of it. Then I learned there were eventually going to be aliens, gods, monsters, and a revolt by the producers of the cookies. I don't need or want themes, larger points, or involved gameplay.

A reminder, in its way, that Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow worked as well as it did because it merely described the games that were being played; the one chapter in which a game was actually played in the text was not very good.