Category Archives: 1

Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.

Every way I know to store clothes I hate, to a first approximation.

I hate my current nominal method: keeping them folded on open-front shelves, because they fall out on the floor and I can’t see almost any of them without taking a bunch out. My shelves also happen to be too tall, so I throw my sweaters at the top shelf and they tumble out and impressively twist their arms around and yank down other types of clothing on their way, which on net I hate though I’m glad to have observed it once.

I hate my current actual method: keeping them in a giant mound on the floor in front of a set of open-front shelves. It stops me from being able to reach the shelves, so is self reinforcing. I do enjoy observing feedback loops, so it has that going for it. But in downsides: the only underpants I’ve been able to locate lately are those which I left in my boyfriend’s room and he washed and put in his more functional clothing system.

I hate wardrobes. It’s really annoying to hang things on coat-hangers or to take them off. But honestly I don’t think that’s my true rejection. I may not have tried wardrobes much since childhood, when I used to wait for sleep fearfully in a dark room looking at the big wooden wardrobe with the shape of a fox’s head in the wood, much like the wardrobe in the horror story we read at school in which a wardrobe contained a dead fox which was involved in some then-barely-conceivably fucked up shenanigans, which triggered a years-long departure from acceptable mental health for me. But while that may color my view, the coat-hangers are no good anyway.

I hate chests of drawers, and there my mind doesn’t even raise practical considerations before recollecting chests of drawers of my childhood. Chests of drawers are where you worry about rotting easter eggs that you had hoped to hoard as treasure among your underwear. Chests of drawers are what you stare at while you try to calculate how likely the marks on your leg are to be from a deadly snake, and whether you should be so bold as to tell a parent, and decide to just wait it out and see. And also, you have to pull the drawers out, and they are often sticky, and you can’t see lots of clothes at once, and they are always wanting to be too full to easily open. And they are just unaesthetic somehow. And generally made of fake wood, which I hate.

I hate a chair for keeping not-quite-clean clothes. Chairs are not great for this and are great for sitting on, so what is this nonsense? Most of humans need an object for this purpose, and the best we can come up with is repurposing an object designed for a totally different use that is only serviceable at all because it has two bits that things can hang on and a flattish surface? What if we didn’t have clothes racks and just always used bikes?

I changed my mind, I don’t really hate little bins on shelves, but I don’t love them. You can’t see into them without moving them, and you can’t see very well even if you do move them. So you have to dig around in them but they are too small for that and it’s like trying to mix too much cake mix in a too small bowl. I guess I could have a lot more of them and keep them emptier, but then it’s hard to know which one you should move to a poke-around-able location. Also they tend to be unaesthetic.

There are some more obscure options, which I suppose I merely expect to hate if I tried them. A thing with rotating arms for hanging things, since half the annoyance of hanging clothes is wedging them awkwardly between too-tight other clothes. Just lots and lots of hooks. Several big baskets on the floor. Just don’t wear clothes. Surreptitiously leave all of my clothes in my boyfriend’s room. Nothing good here.

This afternoon I once again set out to find the ideal or at least okay clothes storage system, since I’m moving rooms and changing everything. And I came across the idea of ‘Grab & Go No Fold Clothes Organization’, which is to say storing clothes like potato chips: in boxes with partially-but-not-fully cut out fronts. I wonder if this is the answer: see the clothes, but the clothes don’t fall on the ground. No moving things, no shoving clothes awkwardly between clothes. Underpants on tap. No risk of this reminding me of any part of the past, at least until the future.

Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.

It often happens that I desire kale, but I want it to be clean and cut up, and while shops do sell this product by the bucketload, they are actually only willing to sell it by the bucketload. As a normal-sized person wanting a one-off salad, rather than a family of nine celebrating a kale festival, the market seems very uninterested in my existence.

‘Just put it in the fridge and eat it over the coming week, this isn’t a big deal’ I hear someone say. But I already have several plotlines going on in my life. I don’t want an additional kale arc that I need to track to resolution. I don’t want to commit. I just want a no-strings-attached salad that I can consume and walk away from.

‘Just throw out the rest of the kale’, I hear somebody say. But I don’t like throwing out mounds of delicious food that were elaborately grown and brought to me. This might be a moral failing, but so it is—‘salad + perfectly good kale destruction’ is a much less delicious prospect.

The same situation holds for other greens. I love parsley, but I generally want a fistful, not a promise of parsley for the foreseeable future. Basil becomes black and bad if you don’t eat it for too long, but basically the only way to get some basil is to invest in that outcome.

Why can’t I buy greens in convenient units? I’m not the only person who often eats alone, or doesn’t like throwing out food. My dislike of owning a pile of mildly decaying greens and feeling obliged to eat them is stronger than most, but surely not that rare. Greens don’t last well. I would have thought ‘one meal’s worth’ would be the most likely quantity of greens to want, but instead there is no apparent market for that (at least where I am, in California).

What is going on?

My current best theory: kale is pretty cheap, so a lot of the cost of providing it is in non-kale components, such as packaging and people putting putting it out on shelves. This means if you sold a single serve of kale, it would cost a disproportionate fraction of the price of five serves of kale. And most people, even if they did just want one serving of kale, would feel unjustified paying a much higher per-weight price for that, and so buy the mound of kale anyway and hope to figure out what to do with it. This might be a false economy—if they are like me and enacting that hope takes attention or is improbable—or not.

I love home-made salad, and probably eat much less of it than I would for this kind of reason, so the question of why I can’t buy convenient scale greens often crosses my mind, and I welcome better answers (both to why the market is like this, and the question of how to eat delicious salad now and then anyway).

Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.

It’s early in the morning, and sadly 1:29pm. After spending some time looking at things and picking them up and walking up the stairs and down the stairs and considering questions like “what should I…”, which my brain apparently considered objects of art more than of imperative, I inched into a decision to go out somewhere. Perhaps it would be clearer there.

After a blur of climbing and descending stairs and seeking objects and forgetting what I was doing and appreciating how beautiful my bag is, I set out. After remembering I should take various medications and going back inside to do that, I set out.

Often my favorite cafe seems too far away, at about four blocks, but today I had wandered half way there while I considered my options, so I decided to go. It’s a German place that feels homely and wholesome to me in its unamericanness. I too-carefully contemplated different places to sit, and chose outside: today a sunny explosion of roses and umbrellas with words like ‘Reissdorf kölsch’.

I stared at the menu until the waitress had asked me a couple of different questions she hoped would open a conversation about ordering. I tried to go along, but digressed into the pronunciation of ‘Spätzle’ to give myself longer to think. I nearly forgot to order coffee. I slopped my coffee on floor on the way outside, which the waitress offered to clean up. She brought me my food outside just as I was deciding to move all my objects to a different table, at which moment I slopped much more coffee all over my computer.

My computer was closed, but she seemed concerned by this, and perhaps concerned about me in general. She had already told me where to get silverware and napkins, but she went and got them for me anyway, which was nice because otherwise I was maybe just going to not eat things for fifteen minutes until I became fully conscious that that was why I wasn’t eating.

I’m not usually like this, but sometimes I am, and it’s hard to put a finger on what the difference is, except to point at behaviors such as ‘how long will I inexplicably stare at my arm? If I go to buy a drink, what is the chance I will lose it?’ My understanding is that this kind of thing is called ‘executive function’ and that I don’t have heaps of it at the best of times, but much less at the worst of times.

This restaurant was providing me with a certain amount of executive function alongside afternoon breakfast, just out of kindness and obligation. But what if I could recognize the need, and intentionally buy it? Just go to a place that specialized in that, where they wouldn’t only make sure I order eventually and get my utensils and clean up after me, but actively take charge on causing me to get my shit together and do something in the day?

I was reminded of an idea I had before (from ‘10 things society might try having if it only contained variants of me’):

Shopfronts where you can go and someone else figures out what you want. And you aren’t expected to be friendly or coherent about it. Like, if you are shopping, and yet not having fun, you go there and they figure out that you are the wrong temperature, don’t have enough blood sugar, are taking too serious an attitude to shopping, need ten minutes away from your companions, and should probably buy a pencil skirt. So they get you a smoothie and some comedy and a quiet place to sit down by yourself for a bit, and then send you off to the correct store.

I had thought of the value-add there as ‘figure out what you want’, but I think part of what I was imagining is that they take charge and keep the process happening and ensure that decisions are made and blood sugar is acquired for instance. Instead of the thought of blood sugar leading to staring into space or being reminded of a different idea to do with blood sugar that you want to write down but you can’t figure out where to write because there are too many tabs in your computer and you think you should close them but first you want to record the idea..

You can buy executive function in some formats—for instance, I recently hired a Chief of Staff. But what if for instance you just want to buy a little bit of executive function sometimes, on demand? Like on the occasional morning when you are failing particularly hard at being a coherent agent, or when you are stressed or in pain and failing to figure out what to do about the stress or pain because you are stressed or in pain? Are these things that only happen to me? (Humorous ADHD YouTube suggests no.)

In my vision for this kind of service, it might live in the category of ‘way to treat yourself’, like getting a manicure (which—for those who haven’t done that—often involves more hand massage and offers of champagne than it might if treated as a more pragmatic nail improvement chore). Instead of just sitting in your living room considering stuff you should maybe do, you can sit in a comfy chair in a nice smelling place petting a cute puppy while someone charming and encouraging talks to you, figures out how you should proceed, and prompts you to do it in easy and compelling pieces.

Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.

It’s not always better to be more capable. As I mentioned yesterday, it can (famously) be helpful in negotiations to have your hands tied. That is, to be disempowered from giving up everything the other party wants.

I had previously thought of this as a somewhat rare corner case of human behavior—I for one don’t haggle very often—but I now think negotiations where this is an element are are quite common: yesterday I described it in friendly (and honest) negotiations about how to spend time, for instance. And I also see a related thing in the practice of dietary commitments.

But is being less capable helpful outside of negotiating? And is this going to become AI related?

Yes and yes!

Commitments: more good things come to those who can commit (e.g. rides out of deserts, secrets, trust, love). ‘Committing’ generally involves cutting off certain options to yourself, whether in practical terms or via you being the kind of honorable person who can’t bear to do a thing they promised not to do. These are both kinds of limitations. If you were a more powerful creature, who was fully capable of breaking down any barrier, and fully capable of breaking a promise—a creature to whom all options were always open—then commitments would be less available to you.

Transparency: a big way humans know what is going on inside other humans, well enough to trust them, is that there is a connection between what is happening inside them and what is happening on their faces and in their bodies, and they usually can’t control this very well. People who can break this connection and control their external behavior independently tend to be feared and distrusted. It is valuable to be unable to stop these signals escaping.

Consistency: a big way we predict how a specific human will behave in the future is that each human has specific kinds of behavior that come easily to them, and it is hard for them to behave entirely differently. So if you are friends with someone who you have observed be attentive and kind to other people for five years, it is very likely that they continue behaving in that way going forward. Whereas a creature with more freedom of behavior could wholly inhabit that persona for five years, then change to a different one.

Relatedly, we know a lot about what to expect from a human stranger because of our prior knowledge of humans. If humans had the power to rewrite their internal dynamics and become totally different creatures, then we would much less know what to expect from one.

Scope of risk: people are safer to interact with if you know they are limited in their ability to cause destruction. You might prefer to hire a person who you think would be less able to wrest control of your organization if they wanted to. You might prefer to babysit a child who does not know how to pick locks or set fires. So a person might be more employable, or be taken care of by better babysitters, if they are less capable. Similarly, an extremely capable AI system might be a less desirable accountant than a human, if you can only fully trust the human to not be up to the task of hacking your accounts.

These are all to do with interacting with other creatures. For a creature alone in the universe, I don’t know of any situation where they are better off being less capable. But when you need to trust another creature, it is better to know more about them, and better to know they are cut off from options that might harm you.

In the usual picture of AI progress, AI is worse than humans at various tasks, and we are waiting for it to surpass us everywhere, at which point humans will be obsolete as labor. But in a world where AI needs to interact with other agents (humans or AIs) the aforementioned value of being less capable complicates things: perhaps there are skills where AI is already more capable than humans, but where that capability is a liability. For instance, lying smoothly and otherwise generating outward behavior that isn’t revealing about internal dynamics, switching between entirely different personas, and hacking skills. Given that, what does the trajectory look like?

Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.

People are sending signals all the time, and those signals are to my knowledge usually about themselves: they are smart, or kind, or attractive, or not naive, or have their shit together, or care about Palestine, or care about you, or are friendly, or artsy, or professional, or relatively in the know about the cultural currents of TikTok or DC.

People are also taking in signals all the time, and these signals are often about other people, and often even closely related to the signals being intentionally sent: Alice is trying to seem friendly, and Bob perceives her as friendly. But also a lot of signals people take in are about places. People read places as safe or dangerous, lighthearted or depressing, silly or serious, asking them to know more, or get more power, or do more. Suggesting they laugh drunkenly under the moonlight, or get up at 5 and pray. Encouraging submission or rebellion.

These signals that make the world feel one way or another make a big difference to people. They make one neighborhood nice to live in and another feel off, one workplace energizing and another deflating. But they are—to my knowledge—almost entirely unintentional side effects of the ways people behave for other reasons. People don’t dress nicely to collaborate in making you feel like you are in a thriving part of town. They dress nicely to make someone think something about them. And someone probably does, but then the signal is left there for everyone else to sweep into their average perception of the vibe in this part of town.

A lot of ways people behave that affect the vibe are probably not intended as signaling at all—for instance, perhaps I grow roses in my front garden because I love roses, and it nonetheless affects people’s read of the vibe. Or perhaps I keep piles of scrap metal there because I want them for something, and that has a different effect.

But an interesting dynamic to me is that a lot of efforts are going into sending signals about people, and those signals are being read as messages about places. Because places can’t send their own signals, but vibes are a very big part of how people experience places, and place vibes are heavily influenced by people’s attempts to paint themselves as one thing or another.

People try to look not-to-be-messed-with and strangers read the street as dangerous. People try to look generative and strangers read the neighborhood as wealthy enough to have time for this. People try to look rich and people read the area as safe. People try to look beautiful and people read the scene as shallow. People try to look smart, and people read the office as unwelcoming.

In sum I posit that there are massive externalities in vibes, and especially in the vibes of places, and there is a particular path of causality from signaling about people to unintentional signals about places.

(I’m not very confident about all this—I was just thinking about it this evening, arriving in and mildly exploring New York City. I think there’s a lot to be said about organizations’ roles in this that I haven’t gone into—for instance in a bar or restaurant or stand up comedy club, people are trying directly to make you experience a vibe. These are small places where the vibe of the place has been mostly internalized—someone owns it.)