I used to have this bad habit of writing out a comment online, deciding it wasn't actually very good, and then just deleting it. Apparently this is a fairly common phenomenon; Facebook calls it self-censorship and found 71% of people sometimes deleted posts before publishing them. Of course, eventually I optimised that whole process away and just didn't bother commenting at all. I doubt even Facebook can capture data on how many people think about writing something and don't.
Lately, though, I've been using an idea I developed earlier, a reverse mantra. A reverse mantra is a question you get in the habit of asking yourself at regular intervals or in specific situations. I wanted one to help me decide what when it's worth saying something and when it's not. I settled on the following: "can I add to this?"
It's too easy to think that what you have to say has to be profoundly important and meaningful to be worth saying. But, really, it can be very small. If you think "oh, I know something about that", "I have a relevant experience", "I can say something that might be helpful or kind", or "I can offer help", that's plenty. Maybe what you say won't add much, but if it adds anything at all it's still a net positive to do it.
I've heard it said that perfect is the enemy of good, and I think that's the intution that should apply here. You don't need to be Rembrandt to paint, and you don't need to be Oscar Wilde to contribute something to a conversation. Your average experience or opinion can still be valuable to someone, can still be adding to the collective information on the internet. And, well, if nobody finds it useful, they can just not read it.
Another failure hot on the heels of my recent one! Not much to say about this except that I got busy and let things slip. I don't think I really got to a place of being comfortably ahead after last time, and then just regular disruptions caught me. I'm also focusing on other areas right now which makes it easy to end up without much energy left over to power through on writing.
I've been thinking lately about the idea of using some of the techniques I've used for catching up when I fall behind to instead get further ahead than normal. A lot of these failures seem to come down to not having much buffer for when things go bad. If I do that it'll probably be in a little while once my future posting plans start coming together.
Last week I did one prototype, but this week was a few more. Mostly, this was bits and pieces for an art project I'm helping out with, but I'd like to get back into some more exploratory prototypes soon.
The project I'm helping out with uses the LightBlue Bean, which is a little Bluetooth Low Energy board. Unfortunately, two of them can't connect to each other directly, so I wrote a little router in Coffeescript to route messages between them. This one just works with two beans.
This is some simple Arduino code to run a servo and a motor based on serial input, vaguely adapted from some example code. It was designed to work with the router and some existing code that sends the state of the digital pins over serial.
This was an adapted version of the sending code that I changed to be more power efficient. It used to read the pins every half-second like the sender, but since it's running off a coin-cell I updated it to use interrupts and sleep the rest of the time.
This was some slight changes to the receiver to make the receiver code work with the servo better.
Finally, since I needed it to handle 8 of the things, I rewrote the router so it had a mapping of which beans connect to which other beans.
I've been thinking about something I observed back in my America post about skylines: self-similarity. You can tell a lot about a city from a few minutes in it because of the way the small-scale patterns reappear at a large scale. While not everything has this self-similar property, a lot of human things seem to, which probably indicates it's something about the way we think. It's much easier to make a system that deals with everything the same way, which seems suggestive in a we're-just-the-first-thing-that-worked sense.
This idea seems particularly relevant when trying to think about large-scale behavioural or emotional goals. Let's say you want to be happier, or calmer, or more creative. Generally the kind of advice you'd get for something like that is to make a plan starting with the goal. So if you want to be happier, just figure out the things that make you happy, figure out how to get them, then go do it. While that works fine for certain kinds of goals, I think that self-similarity makes it difficult to use that process to change yourself.
It's easily possible to be unhappy in the pursuit of happiness, or angry in the pursuit of calmness. If retiring to Barbados is how you're going to be happy, then you've got a fair stretch of non-Barbados unhappiness between here and there. If you need to clear your mind of thoughts to be calm, but you're not good at it yet, then it might just make you more irritated until it works. The point is that the long-term path can take you backwards in the short term. A large-scale change can push you in the wrong direction at a small scale.
But while that works if you're talking about a single achievement, I don't believe it makes sense for changes that are more about your general behaviour or emotions. I don't think if you're unhappy, you can move to Barbados and then become happy. Rather, I think it's the self-similar action of millions of tiny decisions and reactions in the small that cause those emotions to appear in the large. If you're unhappy because lots of little things that you do make you unhappy, then moving to Barbados won't change that; you'll just be unhappy and warm all year round.
That's not to say that long-term goals are unimportant, just that they obey a different set of rules. These external things, facts about the world and your place in it, yield to logic and planning. You want to be an astronaut? There's a finite number of particular steps you can take to achieve that. But internal things, facts about how you feel and what kind of person you want to be, I think they require a more organic approach.
If it's small-scale decisions that lead to large-scale behaviour, then you need an approach that goes bottom-up, not top-down. In other words, use that self-similarity to find goals in the small that represent your goals in the large, and work at them. Rather than a five-year plan for your life and work, think about the five seconds when you notice a particularly nice tree. I think your reaction in that moment will have a lot more impact on your happiness than career achievements or international relocation.
There's been an interesting idea floating around in my head for a while: I think there are two roles for the people in a democracy, and I'm not sure both of them need to be filled in the same way.
Most democracies are bicameral: they have an upper and lower house, or a senate and a house of representatives. At its best, this system separates the legislative branch into two halves: one that proposes laws, and the other that scrutnises them. One body can then be dedicated to oversight and custodianship while the other is dedicated to a more proactive leadership role.
A similar structure appears with the executive and board of a company. The executive is empowered to lead the organisation, but their larger decisions have to go through the board, who ultimately are intended to represent the needs of the shareholders. Another example appears in academic institutions, where you will often have a university executive and separate representative groups of academics and students who have to agree to changes. Finally, unions, ombudsmen, and trade organisations also have a similar representative role, though their power is often less official.
The point is that these oversight groups are not designed to achieve something, but rather to protect something, be it shareholders, students, or union members. Democracy takes both roles. People are given a vote because they want things and those desires should guide the government, but people are also given a vote to protect themselves. After all, if you have the ability to choose who is elected, then they have every reason to avoid passing laws or taking actions that will harm you. Voting is a kind of bad government insurance.
There is a long tradition in democracy of suggesting that voting should be limited to people with certain achievements, income levels, IQ levels, land holdings, democratic knowledge, military service and so on. These ideas, unfortunately, fail the latter category. If dumb people can't vote, what's to stop the government screwing dumb people? After all, it's not like they have any way to fight back. Of course, you could hope that the smart people will stand up for dumb people, but that's a big risk to take.
However, perhaps if we separate these two democratic roles, we could have two kinds of voter. There could be a certain level of qualification required to vote for those who propose changes to society, but not for those who have to be consulted before those changes are made. In other words, the senate would still be elected by the entire population, but the house would be elected by a smaller set of, ideally smarter and more informed, voters. There would also need to be a commensurate adjustment to the power of these branches; the group representing all the people would need to be more powerful.
Interestingly, with these two ideas decoupled, you get a lot more flexibility in both directions. If lower house voters are intended to be the best of the people, there are a lot of dimensions you could use to determine that. More importantly, the upper house voters could perhaps be drawn from an even larger pool than citizens. Is it okay that the government is free to pursue policies that disenfranchise permanent residents? Temporary residents? Visitors and tourists? Refugees? Perhaps they too should get a voice to push back against harmful changes.
Of course, tinkering with democracy is enormously dangerous and I have no idea if any of this would work, but I think it's an idea worth exploring. If only charter cities had taken off so we could have some places to experiment with new forms of government. Still, it seems to me that democracies are doing a relatively good job at protecting their citizens, but a relatively bad job at enacting the changes they want. Perhaps there is a way to get one without giving up the other.