∞
Inferences
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.
—Richard Feynman
Sid Meier, a famous computer game designer,1 once explained that, because of his development experience, when he plays a computer game, he can’t help but see the algorithms—the underlying software processes that create the action. Experts in a domain can envision the below-the-surface complexity of how determinants form the system in action, as when your doctor presses a stethoscope to your chest and translates the heartbeat to the status of your cardiovascular system.
∞
Skinner's Folly
…the physicist himself, who describes all this, is, in his own account, himself constructed of it. He is, in short, made of a conglomeration of the very particulars he describes, no more, no less, bound together by and obeying such general laws as he himself has managed to find and to record.
—G. Spencer-Brown, from the Laws of Form
B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism is now an over-the-hill band playing oldies at state fairs, but in the sixties, his theories climbed to the top of the charts of academic psychology.
∞
Message to gebloom.com readers
I’m going to experiment with far shorter essays. I usually write short pieces and then figure out how to put the pieces together to make a longer, coherent essay. But why should I work to make these ideas fit when I can offload that to readers?
The shorter pieces also will allow me to simultaneously post to an ActvityPub-compatible site, such as Mastodon and Threads. If you don’t know what that means, you needn’t care.
∞
Hard Fun
The phrase “pleasure of writing” makes me pause. At this very moment, writing is not altogether pleasurable. The ticking of the clock telling me that the deadline is coming close frustrates me. I am stinging from the pain of having to throw out a whole paragraph because “it wasn’t going to work” even though it had a phrase with which I had fallen in love. So maybe “pleasure” isn’t quite the right word.
∞
Communication and Its Discontents, Part 1, Coupling
Despite how unappealing it would be to the average person, there’s an advantage to earning your living doing colonoscopies: other than in politics and social media, assholes don’t talk. Another choice for healthcare professionals who wish to avoid conversation is dentistry. It’s hard to talk with instruments camping in your oral opinion factory. But once in a while, bedside manner and all that, your dentist will ask a question, and they’ll pretend to listen for moments before they cram another instrument in your mouth.
∞
Mastery
Can I move? I’m better when I move.
—The Sundance Kid
Last year, my wife and I moved from Edmonds, Washington to Portland, Oregon to help with our newborn grandchild. At least that’s the explanation I put out. The real reason? I was scared to go out at night in Edmonds. I was afraid I’d run into the notorious gangs of dentists, lawyers, accountants, and the most chilling of all, the “lords of Edmonds mean streets,” the financial advisors.
∞
Learning-Introduction
On a flight, seated behind a teenage girl, a novelist was having a get-off-my-lawn moment. With the click sound enabled, the girl tapped away on her iPhone. Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap… The nonstop cadence of the taps meant she could not be texting back and forth with friends. As the girl tapped away the entire flight, the novelist’s irritation dissolved into admiration and, finally, revelation.
∞
The Psychotherapy of Doc Martin, by Dr. Rachel Timoney
(This is a form of fan fiction, intended solely for educational purposes, that combines events from the Doc Martin TV show, Season 7, with stuff I make up.)
Dr. Rachel Timoney was looking forward to her first session with the eminent Dr. Martin Ellingham. She didn’t know much about him, apart from he was rumored to have abruptly resigned his prestigious position as head of vascular medicine at Imperial College, London.
∞
Privacy — an essential habit of democracy
Bria Bloom recently posted an essay of her witnessing an interaction between a mother and the mother’s (about) ten year-old-daughter. The mother is playing with her daughter’s hair, treating it as if it belonged to a doll, while ignoring her daughter’s repeated requests to stop. The daughter and mother both persist, until her mother finally stops and calls her daughter a brat.
If you stop reading Bria’s essay at this point (because Facebook beckons), you’d probably think nothing of the incident — children and parents will be children and parents.