The Science of Soloing
looking back on our 8-part adventure
Gargoyles or Goblins . . . or Gremlins?
Pointlessly continuing the hockey-team naming hype from last week, this.
Given how many aerospace companies are now in Greensboro and NC more generally, gremlins would also be a good choice. Long-time readers might remember I did some work on a grant to develop the nation’s first automated drone network.
A much pointier naming controversy concerns flipping AI for ‘artificial intelligence’ to IA, for ‘intelligence augmentation,’ as suggested by the authors of the free online book Plurality, which I hope to do an extended series on here later this year. The general idea is that our goals of more automation and less employment are nineteenth century industrial robber baron goals. They are not the goals of the vibrant worldwide federation of democratic nations that the twenty-first century needs. People working are a resource, not a cost.
Back in November I did a little chi-square lesson, based on one of the bio labs I teach at UNCG.
A month later, I wrote down most of the percentile dice rolls I made for this adventure. Here I’m specifically analyzing the yes/no Fate questions.
Out of 146 rolls, we would expect a 50/50 ratio, or 73 rolls 0-49 and 73 rolls 50-99.
Doing the math, this does not meet the customary threshold value of 3.84 to say this is anything other than random variation in dice rolls. In other words, the events that I was stringing together into a narrative had no direction whatsoever. The direction and momentum that I felt during the process were illusions of my storytelling1 monkey mind2.
But wait, wasn’t I massaging the results with my expectations? All that Likely / Unlikely stuff? Maybe at the level of individual rolls (that would be a slightly more sophisticated analysis), but at the level of the entire population of dice rolls the biasing effect was surprisingly small, only a couple of additional YES results.
Stories feel inevitable and sensible. But they’re not. We impose our narratives on top of the actual events.
More Seasons of More Stuff
Resident Alien
I haven’t gotten to Season 3 yet, but one of my Alien Ecosystems students was pretty excited about it, so putting a pin in it for later.
The Witcher
I really liked the latest anime. In fact Nightmare of the Wolf and now Sirens of the Deep may be my favorite versions of that world, except possibly for the original short stories. The wu xia Legolas fight scenes were over the top, but that’s basically what anime is for. There was also a soupçon of musically shitting on Disney’s The Little Mermaid, which was in my opinion just enough.
For further nerd-food jokes, see this post from last year.
Wynona Earp
Or you might fairly think, no, thank you, that’s enough jokes. In which case you do not want to engage with Vengeance, which picks up two years after the end of the series in 2021.3
This feels less like a reunion and more like a reboot.
Lord knows I loves me some wordplay, but this show always laid it on thick, and this Tubi original movie ups the ante. Nostalgia is the only thing allowed to shoulder aside the jokes, and even nostalgia gets limited air time.
Enough Hallmark moments. You’re messing with my bloodlust.
My own cheesy riff on Doc Holliday just hit 4th level in Rick Barton’s home campaign, which means he gets to recruit henchmen! Or in Roman’s case (and unintentionally in keeping with this show) hench-women. Followers / hirelings / retainers are an aspect of the old-school world that we’ve never leaned into, as a group, and I think it’s time.
This is the 310th newsletter, according to Substack, and the beginning of our 5th year together. For the next couple of months I expect to be doing some con reports and some interviews, before diving into a summer series on regenerative medicine, based on a fellowship I’m doing at Wake Forest this summer.
https://jackkornfield.com/the-storytelling-mind/
The poet Muriel Ruckheyser writes, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” Buddhist psychology emphasizes that we must understand the power of the stories we tell, and differentiate them from the direct experience of life. In this way we can use thoughts without being trapped by them.
It might seem like I’m using that phrase wrong, since
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_mind
It is a Buddhist concept that describes a state of restlessness, capriciousness, and lack of control in one's thoughts,
but there is also the sense that people have patterns, and their random thoughts run towards specific self-reinforcing narratives like the inner critic.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-empowerment-diary/201709/calming-the-monkey-mind
Personally, I never got past season 3, and even that was a struggle.
"The stories about the past are so good that they create an illusion that life is understandable, and they create an illusion that you can predict the future."
- Daniel Kahneman, quoted in Curable: How an Unlikely Group of Radical Innovators is Trying to Transform our Health Care System
14 hits? Really? This is by far not the worst thing I have ever posted here.
This, for example.
https://randallhayes.substack.com/p/that-bunch-o-flamingos