Sanskratio

I'm back at it again. Exactly what, I don't know, but some thoughts need to be generated and words arranged. Recently I've done and read things that might make this hobby a bit easier, in a sense, but I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to venture. But that I don't worry about. Right now.

The thing is that one of the worse habits I've had is to worry about things that needn't be worried. Things like having a point in these words or to say such a point in a manner that makes sense to other people. I've written and then deleted stuff that have been fun to write but which I've felt pointless to publish, but the deletion has been for wrong reasons. I've mostly been deleting them for a defense, of the psychological sort.

Such defenses are, at least in this context, utterly useless. It's mistakes that I should be after, not some imaginary perfection that doesn't even exist. I've known all this for a long time, but knowing and doing are of course two different things. And mind is a funny beast in that you can realize this difference and start thinking even more about doing and feeling that you're then a bit closer to the real thing whereas you're probably just farther away.

Right now I'm fascinated about this irrational fear that prevents one from being open and just saying things that come to mind, on platforms like blogging which are practically made for open thinking. I've been reading a lot of Keith Johnstone and his teaching of improvisation most often comes down to removing the fear of opening up your thought-process. Improvisation's greatest hindrance is thinking in advance, trying to think up clever things to say and so on. Whereas a good improviser is open to whatever his or her mind brings and isn't afraid to give that to open.

And a good improviser isn't afraid to make mistakes. Many of us have this funny perception that when we do a mistake, it's somehow a horrible thing, but when we see someone else do a mistake, in a good spirit at least, it never reflects this view. It's not a big deal. Just don't be ashamed of mistakes, there's nothing dramatic about it. Mistakes are good.

The one particular way people try to "soften" the risk of making a mistake in public is to do things like try to lower one's status before the potential mistake, ie. "well, I'm no good at this", or to have a posture and facial expression that we think is going to make others feel sympathetic for us, and so on, neither of which actually works, but what we're conditioned to do before exposing ourselves to potential humiliation. And the most effective safety mechanism is of course not going into situations where you can make mistakes in public.

Well, as for now on, this is something that I will try to work on or to at least be cognizant of. In other words, I'll try to make more mistakes and I'll try not to feel so bad about it.

Keith Johnstone talks a lot about space (between actors and humans in general) in Impro. How it's essential to acting that you maintain the "correct" space as it's essential to normal human interaction.

I was reminded about it in Sandra Blakeslee's interview in which she talked about body maps in our brains and how the body maps extend to the objects we hold and to the space outside of our body that we think we occupy. So we nowadays actually know about the neural mapping to this concept Johnstone was talking about.

(Of course the space we think we occupy is a dynamic concept based on the context. Ie. in a crowded bus we settle for less space than in empty street and so on.)

One blog that I have always been just glancing over was Creating Passionate Users which I've always found really inspiring (and which I didn't know has quit some time ago), but which I've never taken time to read through properly. Now I've taken that time and I'm really enjoying the experience. It covers a lot of topics I've been interested in. Too bad she/they have quit.

I'm slowly recovering from two years of poker addiction. It was mostly controlled and didn't affect my family life, but it did suck out most of my own time. There wasn't anything particularly addictive about the gambling side of poker. The things I were interested in were pretty academic, to be honest. Stuff like game theory or Nash equilibrium and trying to trick one's brain to understand probabilities and statistics. But even if gambling wasn't the thing, the game is still very addictive.

But the funny thing about poker is that it's centered around a huge illusion. The illusion of money. Or the illusion that money makes you happy. In fact, it's a game about this illusion.

And when I say money is illusion, I'm not saying it in a touchy-feely hippie way. It's a known fact about human mind. Daniel Gilbert writes about it in the book Stumbling on Happiness. It boils down to a flaw in our brains. We have this wonderful machinery for simulating future events, which works fine for most of the tasks, but fails completely when it's used for simulating the affective impact; whether future events make us happy or unhappy, that is.

I've known all this for a while, but I still fall for the illusion. The idea of easy and free money playing poker still feels great, even though I know it wouldn't make me any happier. This wouldn't be such a problem if the activity itself, playing poker, were really rewarding. But it isn't. It's actually pretty awful.

You don't get "highs" for winning after a while, because you learn that winning or losing individual pots isn't what wins you money. (To simplify things just a bit.) You win by losing a bit smaller pots than on average and winning slightly larger pots. And not just that: the good feeling of winning eventually wears out, but not the other way around, unfortunately. Losing still feels bad.

So what you get is oodles of mindless grinding (as poker players like to call it) where you get rather few positive feelings and lots of negative feelings, frustration, anger, what-have-you. The feeling carries out from the (online) poker table too. I've mostly played after everyone else has gone to sleep so when I've left the table with frustration, I haven't been pouring that frustration to anyone else, but I've gone through some pretty awful feelings because of poker, I've got to admit.

As if all this wasn't enough, the sad fact is that there isn't much anything else in poker than winning money. I mean, there isn't much else to any competitive hobby, but poker is special in that you aren't exactly finding out who is the best. What the greatest poker player is aiming for is the worst opponents possible. The difference between extremely skilled players is so small that there is basically no point to play against another competent player, except for the fact there aren't enough absolutely bad players to play against. But in principle, you should try to play against the worst possible players.

And the nature of the poker is such that you don't get pleasure from the activity itself, because the thing you're aiming for is kind of abstract and it's hard to find pleasure in such things. Whereas in say physical activities you get pleasure from getting better at the skill and understanding more.

So I was immersed by the game of poker, but it left me kind of cognitively numb. I mean, there are intellectually interesting stuff to learn about poker, but they aren't leading anywhere. There are some connections, but mostly it's just self-contained.

Even worse, poker is a completely zero-sum (or negative sum, in fact) game where nothing is created. Yeah, it can be fun in and of itself, but that's about it. Some poker professionals delude themselves by thinking that they are sort of like in the entertainment business. That the people who lose money to them get a "entertainment service" back, in a sense. But that's just bullshit. Better analogy would be some sort of drug business. The "donators", the losing players, get their high, because of the inherent luck factor in the game, but they are drawn to the game because it's addictive and the winning players get their money because of this addiction.

I'm not saying poker should be banned or anything. And I'm not saying you shouldn't play poker. I am saying that there's nothing more to the game, for me at least, than, well, money. And I find that's not enough.

TODO lists are a way to store tasks for those times that you have the drive and motivation to do the tasks but when you are not sure about what to do exactly. But TODO lists are not a solution to the problem of not having the drive in the first place.

It's a bit contradictory to have people congratulate (as "exceptional accomplishment!" and so on) a guy who has finished SICP, exercises and all, and then wonder why MIT doesn't have it as their introductory course anymore. SICP is a great book and it would be great if everyone could swallow all of it in their introductory programming course, but reality doesn't seem to agree with this idea.

Eli's post makes me want to take on similar project, though.

Firefox Ubiquity is awesome. Extending the browser becomes painless.