personal

How could we make job search less of a nightmare?

PNRJ core principles, market failure, personal, public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 1 JDN 2461101

This has been my “career” for the last two years:

I search through thousands of job postings, which, despite various filters and tags on my searches, almost none of which are actually good fits for me—in part because the search engines simply do not contain a great deal of information that would be vital, like “LGBT friendly”, “supportive of neurodivergent employees”, or “good at accommodating disabilities”. Instead it’s all sorted by “job title”, which at this point is clearly an arms race of search-engine optimization, because I keep getting listings called “tutor” which are actually some sort of interactive training of yet another large language model nobody actually needs. (Actual tutoring of actual human students often is a good fit for me—though it pays much better if you’re freelance than if you work for a company, because the companies take a huge cut of what the customers pay.)

But, after an hour or two of searching, I find a few that seem like they might be worth applying to. They’re never a perfect fit, but beggars can’t be choosers, so I decide I’ll go ahead and apply to them.

They ask for a resume. No problem. Perfectly sensible, I have one handy; maybe I’ll tweak it a bit, but if it’s an industry I often apply to, I may already have a tweaked version ready to go.

They ask for a cover letter. Okay, I guess. There usually isn’t much I can really say there that isn’t already in my resume, but occasionally there’s something worth adding, and it’s only maybe half an hour of work to update an existing cover letter for a new application.

Then, they ask me to input my work history in their proprietary format on their website. WHAT!? WHY!? I just gave you a resume! You aren’t even willing to read it? You want to be able to automate the reading of my resume, so I have to enter into your proprietary database? But okay, fine; beggars can’t be choosers, I remind myself. So I enter everything that’s in my resume again.

Then, they ask me what salary I want. I know this game. You’re trying to make me reveal my preference in this bargaining game so you can gain bargaining power. So I look up what kind of salaries companies like them usually offer for jobs like this, and then I hike it up a bit as the opening bid in a negotiation.

Then, they ask me to fill out some questions that are supposed to assess… something. Some kind of personality test, or “culture fit”, or something similarly fuzzy. I try to interpolate my answers between my genuine feelings and the kind of hyper-obedient corporate drone they’re probably looking for, because I’m not an idiot who would answer honestly (I’m not that autistic), butI wouldn’t actually want to work for anyone who required the very topmost corporate-drone answers.

And then, what happens?

Absolutely nothing.

No response. Weeks pass. At some point, I have to assume that they’ve filled the position or closed it, or maybe that the vacancy was never real at all and they posted it for some other reason—likely to give some sense of searching when they in fact already have someone in mind. (Apparently over a third of online job postings are fake.)

I have done this process over two hundred times.

And in doing so, I have chipped off pieces of my soul. I feel like a shell of the person I was. And I have absolutely nothing to show for it all.

I am not even unusual in this regard: Recruiters often complain that they are swamped because they get 200 applicants per posting—but that means, mathematically, that an average job-seeker must apply to 200 postings before they can expect to get hired. (And which is more work, do you think: Writing a cover letter, or reading one?)

How could we make this better?

There are a lot of problems to fix here, but I have one very simple intervention that would only slightly inconvenience recruiters, while making life dramatically better for applicants. Here goes:

Require them to show you the resume of the person they actually hired.

There should be a time window: Maybe 30 days after you applied; or if it’s a position like in academia where they don’t do interviews for a long time after the application deadline, within 7 days of them starting interviews.

Anonymize the resume appropriately, of course; no photos, no names, no contact information. We don’t want the new hire to get harassed by their competitors. (And this takes, what, 5 minutes to do?)

But having to send that resume solves several problems simultaneously:

  1. It means they have to actually respond—they cannot ghost you. It can be a two-line form letter email with a one-page attachment that’s the same for all 200 applicants—but they have to send you something.
  2. It means they have to actually hire someone—the posting cannot be completely fake. If they are for some reason unable to fill the vacancy and have to close it, they should have to tell you that, and give a reason—and that reason should be legally binding such that if you ever find out it’s not true, you can sue them.
  3. It means that person had to actually apply—they couldn’t have been someone’s nephew who was automatically given the job and the posting was only made to make it look like there was a hiring process. At the very least, said nephew had to actually cough up a resume like the rest of us.
  4. It allows you to compare qualifications—you can see how you stack up against the new hire. If they are genuinely far more qualified? Well, fair enough; perhaps this job was a stretch for you, or it’s a very rough market. If they are about as qualified, or better in some ways, worse in others? Well, you surely were to apply, but you can’t win ’em all. But if they are far less qualified? You now have the basis for a lawsuit, because that looks like nepotism at best and discrimination at worst—and they had to give you that evidence, in writing, in a timely fashion.

The penalty for failing to comply with this regulation could be a small fine, perhaps $100—per applicant. The more people you ghost, the more you have to pay up.

This is clearly a very small amount of extra effort for the recruiters. They already have the resume—hopefully—and all they need to do is anonymize it, grab a standard form letter rejection email, BCC all the applicants to this position (which are—again, hopefully—already stored in one place in the company’s database), attach the anonymized resume, and click Send. We’re talking 15 minutes of work here, regardless of the number of applicants. In fact, it could probably be automated so as to require almost zero marginal effort for each new job: Just check the box next to the name of the person who was hired in the applicant tracking system, and it does the rest. (And if the person you hired wasn’t in the applicant tracking system? That sounds like a you problem, because you’re clearly not treating the other applicants fairly.)

Love in a godless universe

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, personal, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 15 JDN 2461087

This post will go live just after Valentine’s Day, so I thought I would write this week about love.

(Of course I’ve written about love before, often around this time of year.)

Many religions teach that love is a gift from God, perhaps the greatest of all such gifts; indeed, some even say “God is love” (though I confess I have never been entirely sure what that sentence is intended to mean). But if there is no God, what is love? Does it still have meaning?

I believe that it does.

Yes, there is a cynical account of love often associated with atheism, which is that it is “just a chemical reaction” or “just an evolved behavior”. (An easy way to look out for this sort of cynical account is to look for the word “just”.)

Well, if love is a chemical reaction, so is consciousness—indeed the two seem very deeply related. I suppose a being can be conscious without being capable of love (do psychopaths qualify?), but I certainly do not think a being can be capable of love without being conscious.

Indeed, I contend that once you really internalize the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science, “just a chemical reaction” strikes you as an utterly trivial claim: What isn’t a chemical reaction? That’s just a funny way of saying something exists.

What about being an evolved behavior? Yes, this is a much more insightful account of what love is, what it means—what it’s for, even. It evolved to make us find mates, protect offspring, and cooperate in groups.

And I can hear the response coming: “Is that all?” “Is it just that?” (There’s that “just” again.)

So let me try phrasing it another way:

Love is what makes us human.

If there is one thing that human beings are better at than anything in the known universe, one thing that most absolutely characterizes who and what we are, it is love.

Intelligence? Rationality? Reasoning? Oh, sure, for the first half-million years of our existence, we were definitely on top; but now, I think computers have got us beat on those. (I guess it’s hard to say for sure if Claude is truly intelligent, but I can tell you this: Wolfram Alpha is a lot better at calculus than I’ll ever be, and I will never win a game of Go against AlphaZero.)

Strength? Ridiculous! By megafauna standards—even ape standards—we’re pathetic. Speed? Not terrible, but of course the cheetahs and peregrine falcons have us beat. Endurance? We’re near the top, but so are several other species—including horses, which we’ve made good use of. Durability? Also surprisingly good—we’re tougher than we look—but we still hold no candles to a pachyderm. (You need special guns to kill an elephant, because most standard bullets barely pierce their skin. And standard bullets were, more or less by construction, designed to kill humans.) We do throw exceptionally well, so if you’d like, you can say that the essence of humanity is javelin-throwing—or perhaps baseball.

But no, I think it is love that sets us apart.

Not that other animals are incapable of love; far from it. Almost all mammals and birds express love to their offspring and often their partners; I would not even be sure that reptiles, fish, or amphibians are incapable of love, though their behavior is less consistently affectionate and I am thus less certain about it. (Especially when fish eat their own offspring!) In fact, I might even be prepared to say that bees feel love for their sisters and their mother (the queen). And if insects can feel it, then our world is absolutely teeming with love.

But what sets humans apart, even from other mammals, is the scale at which we are able to love. We are able to love a city, a nation, a culture. We are even able to love ideas.

I do not think this is just a metaphor: (There’s that “just” again!) I would as surely die for democracy as I would to save the life of my spouse. That love is real. It is meaningful. It is important.

Humans feel love for other humans they have never met who live thousands of miles away from them. They will even willingly accept harm to themselves to benefit those others (e.g. by donating to international charities); one can argue that most people do not do this enough, but people do actually do it, and it is difficult to explain why they would were it not for genuine feelings of caring toward people they have never met and most likely never will.

And without this, all of what we know as “human civilization” quite simply could not exist. Without our love for our countrymen, for our culture, for our shared ethical and political principles, we could not sustain these grand nation-states that span the world.

Yes, even despite our often fierce disagreements, there must be a core of solidarity between at least enough people to sustain a nation. Even authoritarian governments cannot sustain themselves when the entire population stops loving them—in fact, they seem to fail at the hands of a sufficiently well-organized four percent. (Honestly, perhaps the worst part about fascist states is that many of their people do love them, all too deeply!)

More than that, without love, we could never have created institutions like science, art, and journalism that slowly but surely accumulate knowledge that is shared with the whole of humanity. The march of progress has been slower and more fitful than I think anyone would like; but it is real, nonetheless, and in the long run humanity’s trajectory still seems to be toward a brighter future—and it is love that makes it so.

It is sometimes said that you should stop caring what other people think—but caring what other people think is what makes us human. Sure, there are bad forms of social pressure; but a person who literally does not care how their actions make other people think and feel is what we call a psychopath. Part of what it means to love someone is to care a great deal what they think. And part of what makes a good person is to have the capacity to love as much as possible.

Love binds us together not only as families, but as nations, and—hopefully, one day—it could bind humanity or even all sentient life as one united whole. Morality is a deep and complicated subject, but if you must start somewhere very simple in understanding it, you could do much worse than to start with love.

It is often said that God is what binds cultures, nations, and humanity together. With this in mind, perhaps I am prepared to assent to “God is love” after all, but let me clarify what I would mean by it:

Love does for us what people thought they needed God for.

Another year older

PNRJ current events, personal, politics , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 18 JDN 2461059

This post goes live one day before my 38th birthday. I think at this point I have to officially classify myself as middle-aged; I have nearly lived half the life I can expect to live. (Actually if you look at actuarial tables, the point at which, for a male, your expected remaining lifespan is equal to your age is 39 years old, so I’m not quite there yet.)

The odd part is I still don’t really feel like an adult. I don’t own my own home; I’m not making enough money to save; I don’t have any children. I am at least married, and I have a PhD; so I have at least achieved some of the milestones of adulthood—but not nearly as many as I’d expected to have achieved by the age of 38.

Then again, maybe growing older always feels like this. SMBC had a comic about this, where a woman grows older but always feels like she’s a child pretending to be older. But I don’t really feel like a child pretending to be an adult; I feel like a teenager pretending to be an adult. It’s as if my core identity was set at about the age of 16 and ever since then, time passes and my body keeps getting older, but I still feel like I’m that same person pretending to be someone else.

I think I felt more like an adult when I was teaching at Edinburgh; then at least I was working as a professional and paying my own rent. I wish I’d been able to find a way to be happy in academia, because I certainly haven’t found a way to be happy outside of it—and at least on the inside I was making money.

This last year in particular has been one of the worst in my lifetime—not just for me, but for the whole world.

For me personally: I lost one of my greatest mentors, I still remain unemployed, and my mother’s memory problems have not improved (though they also haven’t gotten worse).

For the world at large: Thanks to his enablers in the Republican Party, Donald Trump has been able to do tremendous damage to the United States, the global trade system, NATO, and global poverty relief efforts, with virtually no apparent gain to anyone but himself and perhaps a few of his closest cronies (though even them he would happily throw under the bus for an extra dollar).

I guess it remains to be seen what will happen to Venezuela; while Maduro was terrible, it’s quite clear that Trump does not have the best interests of the Venezuelan people at heart. He seems unwilling to even pretend that this is about anything but oil. (The weirdest part is that even the oil companies don’t actually seem all that interested in the oil!)

We have all watched helplessly as the carnage has ensued, getting news almost every single day about some new horrible thing that he has done. All the institutions that were supposed to stop this kind of madness have utterly failed in their task, most of all the Electoral College, which actually did the exact opposite of its intended purpose by electing him in the first place.

It’s not all Trump’s fault, either: The increase in US carbon emissions had less to do with Trump’s policies than with the war in Ukraine raising natural gas prices and data centers hogging our electricity.

It could be worse, I suppose. We still aren’t in World War 3. Congress is actually doing something to try to stop Trump from—I can’t believe I’m saying this—invading Greenland. And the recent increase in extreme poverty measures was a change in how poverty is measured, not a real reduction in standard of living; global extreme poverty is still decreasing (though also still horrifically high).

I still feel like I’m in survival mode: Just trying to get through each day, hoping that things eventually get better. But at least I get to have some cake with friends.

In memory of Jens Zorn

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Jan 11 JDN 2461052

I received the news when I woke up on January 5 that Jens Zorn had passed away the previous night.

He was born in 1931, so he died at the age of 94; we can all only hope for a run like that. (If I make it as long, I’ll live until 2082. At this point I’m not sure humanity is going to make it that long.) So I can’t exactly be shocked that his life ended, but I still feel like a part of me has been torn away.

Jens was a great mentor to me. I met him through the Saturday Morning Physics program at the University of Michigan, which I attended all through high school. (Oddly enough, my biology teacher in 9th grade gave extra credit for it, but my physics teacher in 10th grade did not.) I then arranged to take his course in intro quantum mechanics as a dual-enrolled high school and college student.

He was of course brilliant—he was a quantum physics professor—but he was also kind, understanding, and down-to-earth in a way that defied the usual stereotypes about physicists. He was also an artist; he created a number of metal sculptures around campus, most of which commemorate major discoveries in physics that were made at Michigan. I think my favorite is the elegant Positronium. As someone who also combines both scientific and artistic interests, I felt like we were (so to speak) on the same wavelength. Maybe that’s why he took me under his wing.

Jens saw tremendous potential in me. He believed I could be a great physicist. He helped arrange numerous opportunities for me to participate in theoretical physics research in high school and college.

Jens also helped my career in other ways. He helped me get summer jobs at the University of Michigan interviewing physicists to compile an oral history for the University’s bicentennial and doing some web development for the physics department. I still look back on those as the best jobs I ever had; they didn’t pay as well as Edinburgh (though by the hour they weren’t actually much worse), but I was actually happy at them in a way I’m not sure I’ve been happy at any job before or since. The work came easily, I got everything done well and ahead of schedule, and I felt like I was making a real contribution.

In some ways, I feel like I let Jens down. For one thing, I didn’t become a physicist at all. I dabbled in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science before finally settling on economics for graduate school. But I think he would still have been happy for me if I had been successful as an economist, or even as a science fiction author. The way I really feel like I let him down was by not being particularly successful at anything at all.

He believed in me when I didn’t; and I think he died still believing in me even though I’m still not sure I do. He saw something in me that I don’t see—and he isn’t the only one who saw it, so I can’t say it was just a mistake. But it also seems like “the world”, or “the market”, or whatever we want to call those inscrutable impersonal forces that actually decide where people end up in life, doesn’t really see it in me either. So I’m left to wonder why so many people have told me they believe I am destined for excellence when actually achieving even mediocrity has been so elusive. Can “the world” be wrong? Could I still have a chance, after all these years of failure?

One thing I know for sure: If I do, Jens Zorn won’t be around to congratulate me—just like my father won’t.

Hope for the new year

PNRJ current events, personal, politics , , , , , ,

Jan 4 JDN 2461045

We have just entered 2026. I remember that around this time last year I felt a deep, visceral despair: Trump had just been elected and was about to be inaugurated, and I could only dread what the next year would bring. For the next several weeks I posted sections of my book The Logic of Kindness (at this point, it is probably never actually going to be published?), partly because I felt—and still feel—that these ideas do deserve to be out in the world, but also partly because I had no creative energy to write anything else.

Well, the first year of Trump’s second term was just about as bad as we thought it would be. He has torn apart global institutions that took decades to forge; he has caused thousands if not millions of unnecessary deaths; he has alienated our closest allies—seriously, CANADA!?—and cozied up to corrupt, authoritarian dictators around the world, because that is exactly what he aspires to be.

It’s true, he hasn’t collapsed the economy (yet). Inflation has been about as bad as it was before, despite the ludicrous tariffs. (He promised to bring prices down, but we all knew he wouldn’t. I honestly expected them to go up more than this.) He also hasn’t started any wars, though he looks damn close to it in Venezuela. And as he continues to make a mockery of our whole government, the checks and balances that are supposed to be reining him have languished unused, because the Republicans control all three branches.

Trump is still in office, and poised to be for three more years.

Yet, at last, there is some glimmer of hope on the horizon.

Other Republicans are starting to turn against him, in part because of his obvious and undeniable connections to Jeffrey Epstein and his ring of serial rapists. (Let’s be clear about that, by the way: They’re not just pedophiles. “Pedophile” merely means you are sexually attracted to children. Some pedophiles seek treatment. These men were rapists who sexually assaulted actual teenagers. And at this point it strains credulity to imagine that Donald Trump himself wasn’t an active participant on multiple occasions—no amount of incompetent redactions will change that.)

Trump’s net approval is now negative on almost every major issue, especially on inflation. It is now a statistical certainty that more Americans disapprove of him than approve of him.

Both of these things should have happened more than a year ago, if not a decade ago; but hey, better late than never.

Democrats—even very left-wing democrats, like Mamdani—have done very well in elections lately, and seem poised to continue doing well in the 2026 midterm election. If we can actually secure a majority in both houses of Congress, we might finally be able to start undoing some of the damage Trump has done—or at least stop him from doing even more.

I’m sure there will be plenty of bad things that continue to happen this year, and that many of them will be Donald Trump’s fault. But I no longer feel the deep despair I felt last year; it seems like things might finally be turning around for America—and thus for the world.

The confidence game

PNRJ core principles, ethics, heuristics and biases, personal, politics , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 14 JDN 2461024

Our society rewards confidence. Indeed, it seems to do so without limit: The more confident you are, the more successful you will be, the more prestige you will gain, the more power you will have, the more money you will make. It doesn’t seem to matter whether your confidence is justified; there is no punishment for overconfidence and no reward for humility.

If you doubt this, I give you Exhibit A: President Donald Trump.

He has nothing else going for him. He manages to epitomize almost every human vice and lack in almost every human virtue. He is ignorant, impulsive, rude, cruel, incurious, bigoted, incompetent, selfish, xenophobic, racist, and misogynist. He has no empathy, no understanding of justice, and little capacity for self-control. He cares nothing for truth and lies constantly, even to the point of pathology. He has been convicted of multiple felonies. His businesses routinely go bankrupt, and he saves his wealth mainly through fraud and lawsuits. He has publicly admitted to sexually assaulting adult women, and there is mounting evidence that he has also sexually assaulted teenage girls. He is, in short, one of the worst human beings in the world. He does not have the integrity or trustworthiness to be an assistant manager at McDonald’s, let alone President of the United States.

But he thinks he’s brilliant and competent and wise and ethical, and constantly tells everyone around him that he is—and millions of people apparently believe him.

To be fair, confidence is not the only trait that our society rewards. Sometimes it does actually reward hard work, competence, or intellect. But in fact it seems to reward these virtues less consistently than it rewards confidence. And quite frankly I’m not convinced our society rewards honesty at all; liars and frauds seem to be disproportionately represented among the successful.

This troubles me most of all because confidence is not a virtue.

There is nothing good about being confident per se. There is virtue in notbeing underconfident, because underconfidence prevents you from taking actions you should take. But there is just as much virtue in not being overconfident, because overconfidence makes you take actions you shouldn’t—and if anything, is the more dangerous of the two. Yet our culture appears utterly incapable of discerning whether confidence is justifiable—even in the most blatantly obvious cases—and instead rewards everyone all the time for being as confident as they can possibly be.

In fact, the most confident people are usually less competent than the most humble people—because when you really understand something, you also understand how much you don’t understand.

We seem totally unable to tell whether someone who thinks they are right is actually right; and so, whoever thinks they are right is assumed to be right, all the time, every time.

Some of this may even be genetic, a heuristic that perhaps made more sense in our ancient environment. Even quite young children already are more willing to trust confident answers than hesitant ones, in multiple experiments.

Studies suggest that experts are just as overconfident as anyone else, but to be frank, I think this is because you don’t get to be called an expert unless you’re overconfident; people with intellectual humility are filtered out by the brutal competition of academia before they can get tenure.

I guess this is also personal for me.

I am not a confident person. Temperamentally, I just feel deeply uncomfortable going out on a limb and asserting things when I’m not entirely certain of them. I also have something of a complex about ever being perceived as arrogant or condescending, maybe because people often seem to perceive me that way even when I am actively trying to do the opposite. A lot of people seem to take you as condescending when you simply acknowledge that you have more expertise on something than they do.

I am also apparently a poster child for Impostor Syndrome. I once went to an Impostor Syndrome with a couple dozen other people where they played a bingo game for Impostor Syndrome traits and behaviors—and won. I once went to a lecture by George Akerlof where he explained that he attributed his Nobel Prize more to luck and circumstances than any particular brilliance on his part—and I guarantee you, in the extremely unlikely event I ever win a prize like that, I’ll say the same.

Compound this with the fact that our society routinely demands confidence in situations where absolutely no one could ever justify being confident.

Consider a job interview, when they ask you: “Why are you the best candidate for this job?” I couldn’t possibly know that. No one in my position could possibly know that. I literally do not know who your other candidates are in order to compare myself to them. I can tell you why I am qualified, but that’s all I can do. I could be the best person for the job, but I have no idea if I am. It’s your job to figure that out, with all the information in front of you—and I happen to know that you’re actually terrible at it, even with all that information I don’t have access to. If I tell you I know I’m the best person for the job, I am, by construction, either wildly overconfident or lying. (And in my case, it would definitely be lying.)

In fact, if I were a hiring manager, I would probably disqualify anyone who told me they were the best person for the job—because the one thing I now know about them is that they are either overconfident or willing to lie. (But I’ll probably never be a hiring manager.)

Likewise, I’ve been often told when pitching creative work to explain why I am the best or only person who could bring this work to life, or to provide accurate forecasts of how much the work would sell if published. I almost certainly am not the best or only person who could do anything—only a handful of people on Earth could realistically say that they are, and they’ve all already won Oscars or Emmys or Nobel Prizes. Accurate sales forecasts for creative works are so difficult that even Disney Corporation, an ever-growing conglomerate media superpower with billions of dollars to throw at the problem and even more billions of dollars at stake in getting it right, still routinely puts out films that are financial failures.


They casually hand you impossible demands and then get mad at you when you say you can’t meet them. And then they go pick someone else who claims to be able to do the impossible.

There is some hope, however.

Some studies suggest that people can sometimes recognize and punish overconfidence—though, again, I don’t see how that can be reconciled with the success of Donald Trump. In this study of evaluating expert witnesses, the most confident witnesses were rated as slightly less reliable than the moderately-confident ones, but both were far above the least-confident ones.

Surprisingly simple interventions can make intellectual humility more salient to people, and make them more willing to trust people who express doubt—who are, almost without exception, the more trustworthy people.

But somehow, I think I have to learn to express confidence I don’t feel, because that’s how you succeed in our society.

Why do we have holidays about death and fear?

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Oct 26 JDN 2460975

I confess, I don’t think I ever really got Halloween. As a kid I enjoyed dressing up in costumes and getting candy, but the part about being scared—or pretending to be scared, or approximating being scared, or decorating with things like bats and spiders that some people find scary but I don’t especially—never really made a whole lot of sense to me. The one Halloween decoration that does genuinely cause me any fear is excessive amounts of blood (I have a mild hematophobia acquired from a childhood injury), and that experience is aversive—I want to avoid it, not experience more of it. (I’ve written about my feelings toward horror as a genre previously.)

Dia de los Muertos makes a bit more sense to me: A time to reflect about our own mortality, a religious festival about communing with the souls of your ancestors. But that doesn’t really fully explain all the decorated skulls. (It’s apparently hotly debated within the historical community whether these are really different holidays: Scholars disagree as to whether Dia de los Muertos has Native roots or is really just a rebranded Allhallowtide.)

It just generally seems weird to me to have a holiday about death and fear. Aren’t those things… bad? But maybe the point of the holiday is actually to dull them a little, to make them less threatening by the act of trying to celebrate them. Skeletons are scary, but plastic skeletons aren’t so bad; skulls are scary, but decorated skulls are less so. Maybe by playing around with it, we can take some of the bite out of the fear and grief.

My general indifference toward Halloween as an adult is apparently pretty unusual among LGBT people, many of whom seem to treat Halloween season as a kind of second Pride Month. I think the main draw is the opportunity to don a costume and thereby adopt a new identity. And that can be fun, sometimes; but somehow each year I find it feels like such a chore to actually go find a Halloween costume I want to wear.

Maybe part of it is that most people aren’t doing that sort of thing all the time, the way I am by playing games (especially role-playing games). Costumes do add to the immersion of the experience, but do they really add enough to justify the cost of buying one and the effort of wearing it? Maybe I’d just rather boot up Skyrim for the 27th playthrough. But I suppose most people don’t play such games, or not nearly as often as I do; so for them, a chance to be someone else once a year is an opportunity they can’t afford to pass up.

For my mother, on her 79th birthday

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Sep 21 JDN 2460940

When this post goes live, it will be mother’s 79th birthday. I think birthdays are not a very happy time for her anymore.

I suppose nobody really likes getting older; children are excited to grow up, but once you hit about 25 or 26 (the age at which you can rent a car at the normal rate and the age at which you have to get your own health insurance, respectively) and it becomes “getting older” instead of “growing up”, the excitement rapidly wears off. Even by 30, I don’t think most people are very enthusiastic about their birthdays. Indeed, for some people, I think it might be downhill past 21—you wanted to become an adult, but you had no interest in aging beyond that point.

But I think it gets worse as you get older. As you get into your seventies and eighties, you begin to wonder which birthday will finally be your last; actually I think my mother has been wondering about this even earlier than that, because her brothers died in their fifties, her sister died in her sixties, and my father died at 63. At this point she has outlived a lot of people she loved. I think there is a survivor’s guilt that sets in: “Why do I get to keep going, when they didn’t?”

These are also very hard times in general; Trump and the people who enable him have done tremendous damage to our government, our society, and the world at large in a shockingly short amount of time. It feels like all the safeguards we were supposed to have suddenly collapsed and we gave free rein to a madman.

But while there are many loved ones we have lost, there are many we still have; and nor need our set of loved ones be fixed, only to dwindle with each new funeral. We can meet new people, and they can become part of our lives. New children can be born into our family, and they can make our family grow. It is my sincere hope that my mother still has grandchildren yet to meet; in my case they would probably need to be adopted, as the usual biological route is pretty much out of the question, and surrogacy seems beyond our budget for the foreseeable future. But we would still love them, and she could still love them, and it is worth sticking around in this world in order to be a part of their lives.

I also believe that this is not the end for American liberal democracy. This is a terrible time, no doubt. Much that we thought would never happen already has, and more still will. It must be so unsettling, so uncanny, for someone who grew up in the triumphant years after America helped defeat fascism in Europe, to grow older and then see homegrown American fascism rise ascendant here. Even those of us who knew history all too well still seem doomed to repeat it.

At this point it is clear that victory over corruption, racism, and authoritarianism will not be easy, will not be swift, may never be permanent—and is not even guaranteed. But it is still possible. There is still enough hope left that we can and must keep fighting for an America worth saving. I do not know when we will win; I do not even know for certain that we will, in fact, win. But I believe we will.

I believe that while it seems powerful—and does everything it can to both promote that image and abuse what power it does have—fascism is a fundamentally weak system, a fundamentally fragile system, which simply cannot sustain itself once a handful of critical leaders are dead, deposed, or discredited. Liberal democracy is kinder, gentler—and also slower, at times even clumsier—than authoritarianism, and so it may seem weak to those whose view of strength is that of the savanna ape or the playground bully; but this is an illusion. Liberal democracy is fundamentally strong, fundamentally resilient. There is power in kindness, inclusion, and cooperation that the greedy and cruel cannot see. Fascism in Germany arrived and disappeared within a generation; democracy in America has stood for nearly 250 years.

We don’t know how much more time we have, Mom; none of us do. I have heard it said that you should live your life as though you will live both a short life and a long one; but honestly, you should probably live your life as though you will live a randomly-decided amount of time that is statistically predicted by actuarial tables—because you will. Yes, the older you get, the less time you have left (almost tautologically); but especially in this age of rapid technological change, none of us really know whether we’ll die tomorrow or live another hundred years.

I think right now, you feel like there isn’t much left to look forward to. But I promise you there is. Maybe it’s hard to see right now; indeed, maybe you—or I, or anyone—won’t even ever get to see it. But a brighter future is possible, and it’s worth it to keep going, especially if there’s any way that we might be able to make that brighter future happen sooner.

Passion projects and burnout

PNRJ cognitive science, personal , , , , , , , ,

Sep 14 JDN 2460933

I have seen a shockingly precipitous decline in my depression and anxiety scores over the last couple of weeks, from average Burns Scores of about 15/29 to about 7/20. This represents a decline from “mild depression” and “moderate anxiety” to “normal but unhappy” and “mild anxiety”; but under the circumstances (Trump is still President, I’m still unemployed), I think it may literally mean a complete loss of pathological symptoms.

I’m not on any new medications. I did recently change therapists, but I don’t think this one is substantially better than the last one. My life situation hasn’t changed. The political situation in the United States is if anything getting worse. So what happened?

I found a passion project.

A month and a half ago, I started XBOX Game Camp, and was assigned to a team of game developers to make a game over the next three months (so we’re about halfway there now). I was anxious at first, because I have limited experience in video game development (a few game jams, some Twine games, and playing around with RenPy and Unity) and absolutely no formal training in it; but once we got organized, I found myself Lead Producer on the project and also the second-best programmer. I also got through a major learning curve barrier in Unreal Engine, which is what the team decided to use.

But that wasn’t my real passion project; instead, it enabled me to create one. With that boost in confidence and also increased comfortability with Unreal, I soon realized that, with the help of some free or cheap 3D assets from Fab and Sketchfab, I now had the tools I needed to make my own 3D video game all by myself—something that I would never have thought possible.

And having this chance to create more or less whatever I want (constrained by availability of assets and my own programming skills—but both of which are far less constraining than I had previously believed) has had an extremely powerful effect on my mood. I not only feel less depression and anxiety, I also feel more excitement, more jeu de vivre. I finally feel like I’m recovering from the years of burnout I got from academia.

That got me wondering: How unusual is this?

The empirical literature on burnout doesn’t generally talk about this; it’s mostly about conventional psychiatric interventions like medication and cognitive behavioral therapy. There are also some studies on mindfulness.

But there are more than a few sources of anecdotal reports and expert advice suggesting that passion projects can make a big difference. A lot of what burnout seems to be is disillusionment from your work, loss of passion for it. Finding other work that you can be passionate about can go a long way at fixing that problem.

Of course, like anything else, I’m sure this is no miracle cure. (Indeed, I’m feeling much worse today in particular, but I think that’s because I went through a grueling six-hour dental surgery yesterday—awake the whole time—and now I’m in pain and it was hard to sleep.) But it has made a big difference for me the last few weeks, so if you are going through anything similar, it might be worth a try to find a passion project of your own.

Grief, a rationalist perspective

PNRJ core principles, ethics, personal , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 31 JDN 2460919

This post goes live on the 8th anniversary of my father’s death. Thus it seems an appropriate time to write about grief—indeed, it’s somewhat difficult for me to think about much else.

Far too often, the only perspectives on grief we hear are religious ones. Often, these take the form of consolation: “He’s in a better place now.” “You’ll see him again someday.”

Rationalism doesn’t offer such consolations. Technically one can be an atheist and still believe in an afterlife; but rationalism is stronger than mere atheism. It requires that we believe in scientific facts, and the permanent end of consciousness at death is a scientific fact. We know from direct experiments and observations in neuroscience that a destroyed brain cannot think, feel, see, hear, or remember—when your brain shuts down, whatever you are now will be gone.

It is the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science: There is no soul but the brain.

Moreover, I think, deep down, we all know that death is the end. Even religious people grieve. Their words may say that their loved one is in a better place, but their tears tell a different story.

Maybe it’s an evolutionary instinct, programmed deep into our minds like an ancestral memory, a voice that screams in our minds, insistent on being heard:

“Death is bad!”

If there is one crucial instinct a lifeform needs in order to survive, surely it is something like that one: The preference for life over death. In order to live in a hostile world, you have to want to live.

There are some people who don’t want to live, people who become suicidal. Sometimes even the person we are grieving was someone who chose to take their own life. Generally this is because they believe that their life from then on would be defined only by suffering. Usually, I would say they are wrong about that; but in some cases, maybe they are right, and choosing death is rational. Most of the time, life is worth living, even when we can’t see that.

But aside from such extreme circumstances, most of us feel most of the time that death is one of the worst things that could happen to us or our loved ones. And it makes sense that we feel that way. It is right to feel that way. It is rational to feel that way.

This is why grief hurts so much.

This is why you are not okay.

If the afterlife were real—or even plausible—then grief would not hurt so much. A loved one dying would be like a loved one traveling away to somewhere nice; bittersweet perhaps, maybe even sad—but not devastating the way that grief is. You don’t hold a funeral for someone who just booked a one-way trip to Hawaii, even if you know they aren’t ever coming back.

Religion tries to be consoling, but it typically fails. Because that voice in our heads is still there, repeating endlessly: “Death is bad!” “Death is bad!” “Death is bad!”

But what if religion does give people some comfort in such a difficult time? What if supposing something as nonsensical as Heaven numbs the pain for a little while?

In my view, you’d be better off using drugs. Drugs have side effects and can be addictive, but at least they don’t require you to fundamentally abandon your ontology. Mainstream religion isn’t simply false; it’s absurd. It’s one of the falsest things anyone has ever believed about anything. It’s obviously false. It’s ridiculous. It has never deserved any of the respect and reverence it so often receives.

And in a great many cases, religion is evil. Religion teaches people to be obedient to authoritarians, and to oppress those who are different. Some of the greatest atrocities in history were committed in the name of religion, and some of the worst oppression going on today is done in the name of religion.

Rationalists should give religion no quarter. It is better for someone to find solace in alcohol or cannabis than for them to find solace in religion.

And maybe, in the end, it’s better if they don’t find solace at all.

Grief is good. Grief is healthy. Grief is what we should feel when something as terrible as death happens. That voice screaming “Death is bad!” is right, and we should listen to it.

No, what we need is to not be paralyzed by grief, destroyed by grief. We need to withstand our grief, get through it. We must learn to be strong enough to bear what seems unbearable, not console ourselves with lies.

If you are a responsible adult, then when something terrible happens to you, you don’t pretend it isn’t real. You don’t conjure up a fantasy world in which everything is fine. You face your terrors. You learn to survive them. You make yourself strong enough to carry on. The death of a loved one is a terrible thing; you shouldn’t pretend otherwise. But it doesn’t have to destroy you. You can grow, and heal, and move on.

Moreover, grief has a noble purpose. From our grief we must find motivation to challenge death, to fight death wherever we find it. Those we have already lost are gone; it’s too late for them. But it’s not too late for the rest of us. We can keep fighting.

And through economic development and medical science, we do keep fighting.

In fact, little by little, we are winning the war on death.

Death has already lost its hold upon our children. For most of human history, nearly a third of children died before the age of 5. Now less than 1% do, in rich countries, and even in the poorest countries, it’s typically under 10%. With a little more development—development that is already happening in many places—we can soon bring everyone in the world to the high standard of the First World. We have basically won the war on infant and child mortality.

And death is losing its hold on the rest of us, too. Life expectancy at adulthood is also increasing, and more and more people are living into their nineties and even their hundreds.

It’s true, there still aren’t many people living to be 120 (and some researchers believe it will be a long time before this changes). But living to be 85 instead of 65 is already an extra 20 years of life—and these can be happy, healthy years too, not years of pain and suffering. They say that 60 is the new 50; physiologically, we are so much healthier than our ancestors that it’s as if we were ten years younger.

My sincere hope is that our grief for those we have lost and fear of losing those we still have will drive us forward to even greater progress in combating death. I believe that one day we will finally be able to slow, halt, perhaps even reverse aging itself, rendering us effectively immortal.

Religion promises us immortality, but it isn’t real.

Science offers us the possibility of immortality that’s real.

It won’t be easy to get there. It won’t happen any time soon. In all likelihood, we won’t live to see it ourselves. But one day, our descendants may achieve the grandest goal of all: Finally conquering death.

And even long before that glorious day, our lives are already being made longer and healthier by science. We are pushing death back, step by step, day by day. We are fighting, and we are winning.

Moreover, we as individuals are not powerless in this fight: you can fight death a little harder yourself, by becoming an organ donor, or by donating to organizations that fight global poverty or advance medical science. Let your grief drive you to help others, so that they don’t have to grieve as you do.

And if you need consolation from your grief, let it come from this truth: Death is rarer now today than it was yesterday, and will be rarer still tomorrow. We can’t bring back who we have lost, but we can keep ourselves from losing more so soon.