2023-01-25

• I want to get back into building things with code. I’ve been in such a malaise over the past few weeks. It’s been hard to write posts here because I don’t have confidence that I can do so safely. The things I would want to share are uncomfortable to transmit in this medium. In these cases, I find it can be interesting to go one meta-level up: talk about why it’s difficult to talk about the difficult thing. This is a common/basic mental jiu-jitsu move that I employ regularly in therapy sessions. So, what’s so challenging here? One thing is that writing these things down feels more permanent, like I’m planting a flag on how I feel, and it would be hard to change where that flag is planted or remove it altogether. It feels like I am bound by what I write. The challenge is that it feels like the ground is moving under me here, so planting a flag anywhere feels like a bad idea. Flags do better on stable ground, if we want to keep leaning into the flag metaphor. The other thing is just that the subject feels more private and intimate compared with what I normally share in this medium. Even if I did feel like my thinking was stable here, there are still boundaries around what belongs in this medium that I’d have to find a way to cross when talking about this stuff. And I don’t yet have a way forward there. This is all very metaphorical. In somewhat more concrete terms, the subject is about navigating challenges in intimate relationships. I’m not yet at the point where I can “think out loud” on this topic in this space. So, yeah, it is what it is.
  
• Sitting at a coffee shop rn. It’s raining. Got a nice cappuccino with me while I knock out some flashcards. A card about cognitive biases came up. Specifically, it gave a definition of the availability cascade and asked me to define it. I had forgotten the name, so I marked it as a miss. But the definition stood out to me. It’s an important concept. It’s the idea that beliefs can be self-reinforcing simply by being repeated enough times. Confidence in an idea is correlated with how many times you are exposed to it. Note, it’s not a matter of the belief being actually true or not, though a repeated idea is hopefully correlated with truth (and in a healthy society/information environment that is a generally reasonable expectation). So, repetition alone is enough to make someone believe something more strongly. Lots to digest there. The first thing that comes to mind is the way people talk about the current recession. Now, I want to start by noting that whether this recession is “real” or not is almost not relevant at this point. It’s an idea that has been repeated so many times that it is collectively true, whether or not a perfect view of the economic data would support it. That’s something to pay attention to and it has real world consequences. For example, my brother, based on recent, “recession”-related news about layoffs in the tech industry, asked whether or not tech is still a good career option for him to look at. I can’t help but think that the repetition element is a big one here. The idea of “we are in a recession” has been repeated many more times, and more recently, than other ideas related to his question. Another idea that seems to have a lot of evidential weight but is repeated less often would be “the computer revolution is only beginning, computers will be increasingly important over the next handful of decades.” The fact that this question exists for my brother is, in no small part, attributable to the disparity in repetition of these two ideas in his information environment. And this has real, significant repurcussions. We were talking about a potentially multi-decade decision. Naturally, I stepped in to repeat the bigger/more important truth about computers being a big deal and a bigger deal than the current economic situation. I reassured him that there are still plenty of great career options for him in tech, and that the current recession is not a big deal over the course of a multi-decade career. Unfortunately, I’m just one voice, and my repetition powers are thus limited. Fingers crossed I got through. Ok, changing gears. This bias also made me think about the importance of…flashcards. Anki is, in one framing, an attempt to take advantage of this bias and use it to develop a view of the world that is more highly correlated with reality. Nicely recursive experience there: the system that exploits this idea broadly asks me repeatedly to identify what exactly is going on here. Seeing the recursion at play like this always gives me shivers. Life is crazy. Computers are crazy.

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