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Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.

A common view around me seems to be that journalists are frequently dishonorable and dangerous, and talking to them is a risk to be avoided unless you have a very specific piece of information that you seek to publicize. Then you should carefully ensure that you are as off the record as practical, and prepare to aggressively pivot the topic back to your agenda.

My own attitude is different: journalists are to be talked to as much as possible, and ideally in a relaxed fashion. If a journalist wants to observe you in some unusual circumstance, say yes. Don’t have an agenda much more than in the rest of life; basically listen to their questions and say what you think. (Note: I don’t have strong reason to believe this is safe for others or even for me.)

As evidence of the commitment with which I act in this way, this New Yorker piece describes me as ‘an oversharer’, before detailing some of my incompetent and substance-involving preparations for a dinner party at my house. (To be clear, I consider that accurate and agreeable coverage.)

I’ve talked to a lot of journalists, so how do I survive such recklessness? Well, in my experience, journalists are usually delightful: smart, sincere people trying hard to understand important topics and convey them to the public. And I’m impressed by how well they do. When I meet them, they are usually spending a tiny number of days diving into a complicated and wild situation, and while their summary isn’t perfect, I think it’s pretty good!

And what they write about me rarely feels adversarial. I can think of maybe two cases where it felt unfair or unfriendly, though there might be more I’m forgetting. And meanwhile there’s also the upside chance of them writing whole articles explaining your ideas to a large audience.

How is it that I and other people can have such divergent views here? Policies for interacting with journalists are hardly abstract philosophy—the people with the other views presumably also get to repeatedly experience talking with journalists.

One theory is that we have different expectations. What seems to me like imperfect summarization maybe seems to others like lies. What seems to me like accurate summarization maybe seems to others like ‘making me look weird’. I’ve noticed some weird-to-me expectations about the nature and constraints of journalism—like, thinking it would be better if a New Yorker article was about a technical paper and didn’t contain personal anecdotes. These expectations seems wrong about where the value of such an article comes from.

Another possibility is that we have different risk tolerances. The same low (but real) risk of a journalist writing a hit piece or randomly otherwise misusing their powers might be a deal-breaker for someone else, while I’m not very emotionally troubled by it. (My feelings: “You’re saying they could lie about me? That seems like a them problem? Can’t they lie about me anyway? Is my input that helpful? I’ll just say they lied about me, and we can have a public disagreement about it, and then maybe other journalists will come to talk to me.”) If I had more information I really needed to hide, this might be different.

Another class of theories is that we are different people, and either journalists treat us differently, or we come in contact with different journalists.

For instance, maybe people trying to learn about expert surveys of AI researchers tend to be in a cooperative mindset. But I’ve talked to journalists about my dating life, AI destroying the world, and all manner of other AI-related questions (as well as about accidentally getting into a physical altercation with nationalistically enthusiastic protesters, and probably oleander trees, and I bet some other stuff, but it’s less clear I would remember if I didn’t like the coverage in those cases.)

Someone suggested the other day that maybe I’m just a likable person, or likable to journalists. Similarly, my demeanor might just discourage being an asshole to me somehow—perhaps I seem unusually cooperative or too naive to be taken advantage of without feeling bad.

Perhaps journalists are responding to these different attitudes themselves. Probably journalists are like everyone else: they can somewhat tell if you are on their side or seeing them as an enemy to be thwarted and steered and then escaped from unscathed. And perhaps seeing the latter causes them to suspect you and find it more likely that you are weird and troubling, and shouldn’t have your words quoted without qualification or your behavior described uncritically.

If I recall, I have basically always had the attitude I have here, and it has only been strengthened by my experience talking to maybe hundreds of journalists. I think I’m also attracted to this attitude beyond pragmatism. So if journalists were responding to the attitudes, I would have had a different experience from the start.

I don’t really know what to make of this. I feel reasonably good about my policies for myself, but I don’t know if I can recommend them, because I don’t understand why they go fine for me. I can still record what I’ve experienced here, and send it out for other people to see. Which is maybe what talking to journalists is all about.

Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.

Suppose you and Bobby the car salesman are haggling over the price of a car. You could try saying that you won’t pay more than $3k, but Bobby can equally retort that he won’t sell it for less than $4k. If you guys manage to negotiate a sale, it will probably be at more than $3k (and involve revealing both of you as liars).

Now imagine the same situation, but you only have $3k and Bobby knows it. Now, if $3k is actually ok for him, you win and get your price.

Now imagine you are rich but you have a boyfriend at home who has only agreed to a $3k expenditure on a used car at this time, and thinks any more would be crazy. It’s shared money, so to pay more you would need to go away and get his permission, and it wouldn’t be easy. If Bobby believes you, then your situation is much like being poor again, and you win.

My guess is I read about this in Thomas Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict when I was a teenager. The general observation is that being more constrained can often be helpful in a negotiation. Which is a bit shocking because it undermines the seeming truism that more power—more options, more resources—is always better for getting what you want.

A less general observation that also stuck with me about this is that you can trivially arrange to have such constraints through having an associate, such as a stubborn and spending-conscious boyfriend. (Ok, finding one of those is not trivial, especially if you have other desiderata.)

This is all background. The thing I want to point out is that being part of an organization rather than a free agent means creating and using this effect all over the place.

This is most obvious with timing and deadlines. I am a relatively free agent, and I am quite good at making deadlines for myself and then taking them seriously. But I feel like other people I casually negotiate with about how to spend time, aka my friends, often feel like deadlines I make are not very real, since I could just ignore them. Because it’s just an agreement with myself, it’s up for negotiation with myself. And if I insist on respecting these lines I drew myself that have no legible consequences, then it feels like I’m being weird and stubborn and unfriendly or perhaps charmingly neurodivergent. So I often don’t—once it’s a negotiation, then negotiating hard for my own goals, against my friends, doesn’t feel very friendly to anyone.

Now consider a friend working in an org. They can casually throw out that they have this thing due tomorrow, and everyone will take it as a hard constraint. I will take it as a hard constraint. I might even offer to help get it done, even though I have other things I want to do. Whereas if I had not only insisted on my imaginary deadline but hoped for any help in fulfilling it, I think that would often feel unreasonable of me.

The org believably cuts off the person’s options, like the boyfriend, and so the person implicitly wins many negotiations (or what would have been negotiations), all in the direction of doing more for the org, and without seeming unfriendly to their friends.

My own difficulties with this are partly a me problem—I’m probably not very good at ‘defending boundaries’. But my point is that if you are a solo human then there’s a whole skill-requiring task of ‘defending boundaries’ that just becomes trivially easy if you have an org around you to cut off certain possibilities. And also if your boundaries are ‘I am going to do this project tonight definitely regardless of if you want me to do something else’ then that will land a way with other people that reporting on your org’s boundary policing—‘I have to do this by tomorrow, alas’—will not.

I think this ‘service’ and making use of it is rarely intentional, but I’d guess it’s very effective, and is a dynamic that makes people more likely to join orgs rather than being solo. It just looks like ‘it’s harder to get things done on my own’ and a component of ‘it’s harder to structure my time’ and ‘I find I keep on doing stuff other than my work’.

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.