February 1. A few months ago I thought Donald Trump was a joke, and now I see him as an unstoppable juggernaut. Read this month old reddit comment about Trump's mastery of the media. I would go farther and say he has an intuitive understanding of mass psychology, and he's been laying the foundation for this run since the the 1990's. Because he has established a persona where people already expect him to say ridiculous things, he's gaffe-proof. Other candidates have to walk a tightrope between boring the voters and alienating them, while Trump is walking a highway where he can be popular and offensive at the same time. Somehow he can play the strong leader and play the clown. You can read more about Trump's powers in several smart posts on Scott Adams' blog.
Assuming it's Trump against Clinton in November, I see this as a repeat of 1996, where Trump is Bill Clinton, polarizing but charismatic, and Hillary is Bob Dole: unlikeable and unlucky. And Trump can easily rebrand himself as a moderate, because he has a long history of being a moderate before he talked like an extremist to win the primaries.
I don't think President Trump would ruin America, or save it. I would expect him to propose a bunch of simple-minded reforms, let congress rework them to fit the system, and where the reforms work he'll take credit, and where they fail he'll blame congress. The big doom scenario is if there's some disaster that shuts down congress, Trump takes temporary unchecked power, it goes to his head, and he doesn't give it up.
February 5. Last month my restless legs syndrome was really acting up. It's like an itch in my leg muscles that I can "scratch" by vigorously moving them. If you have it and you want a cure, try high-CBD marijuana edibles. I don't want a cure, because leg strength is correlated with brain fitness, and I can spend a half hour a night doing one-legged squats and heel lifts, not because of self-discipline, but because I have an overwhelming urge to do so.
If only I had an overwhelming urge to write novels or play music. We imagine that highly successful people have some kind of magical virtue, when really they have various restless syndromes that compel them to do things that other people happen to find valuable.
February 15. I love this short piece about How to Raise a Creative Child. The author starts with the observation that child prodigies tend to fizzle as adults because they were learning success on their parents' terms, instead of learning creativity. Then he drops this bomb:
One study compared the families of children who were rated among the most creative five percent in their school system with those who were not unusually creative. The parents of ordinary children had an average of six rules, like specific schedules for homework and bedtime. Parents of highly creative children had an average of fewer than one rule.
Also on the subject of creativity, Why Quantity Should be Your Priority. I've seen the anecdote about the ceramics class before, where students who were graded on quantity cranked out hundreds of pieces and eventually did much better work than students who were graded on quality and did only a few pieces. I doubt that it actually happened, but it would happen, and I would explain it like this: When you do work in the physical world, you learn things you could never learn by doing the work in your head.February 17-19. From a reddit thread on one of my favorite subjects, game metaphors and the meaning of life, comes this insightful comment:
There is no "main quest" in life. Life is all side quests. Grind is what you do when the side quests you really want to complete are too difficult to pull off, so you resign yourself to doing some mind-numbingly monotonous shit that isn't rewarding in and of itself, but levels/gears you to get where you want to go and do what you want to do. But the gear, the skills and the henchmen are only important if having them on their own satisfies you.
If you treat life like a levelling treadmill, it's going to end up as unrewarding as grinding one in a game. It feels great to accomplish something and gain an extra level, and other players might ooh and ahh at your equipment, but in the end you just might find yourself envying the ones that played the game passing up all the leet gear and instead spent every minute laughing their asses off beating the game with the broom.
Another angle on motivation, structured procrastination: if you have a big job you're putting off, it's psychologically easier to do other things, so a good motivational strategy is to put something at the top of your list that seems more important than it is, and put the stuff you really want to do lower on the list so you feel like you're cheating when you do it. This reminds me of fantasy author Joe Abercrombie saying that when he writes he feels like he's looking at porn.
I think this is related to the fact that creative works that stand the test of time are rarely respectable in their own time, either because they're too commercial or too weird. This makes sense because the more you feel like you're doing something trashy, the less you feel constrained by conventional standards, and the easier it is to unlock creativity.
March 16. Magic Mushrooms May Permanently Alter Personality. Specifically they increase openness, which normally slowly decreases for adults. Here's a reddit comment thread with lots of reports of good changes from psilocybin mushrooms, and a few reports of bad changes. From another thread, this comment speculates that mushrooms can be harmful if they open up repressed anxiety faster than people can integrate it. I would recommend trying cannabis first, which does the same thing but more mildly.
Also, The Trip Treatment is a long Michael Pollan article about the benefits of psilocybin. I'm wondering how this relates to computer-generated artificial worlds: in 50 years if everyone is tripping, will it make us totally uninterested in that kind of thing, or just more discriminating?
My personal experience with mushrooms is unusual. Instead of a fun head trip I get a difficult body trip, like being drunk and having the flu. I feel stupid, dizzy, nauseated, feeble, itchy, and have an overwhelming urge to curl up in silence and darkness. On this long list of cognitive and visual effects, the only thing I get is mindfulness: the inability to focus my attention anywhere but inward. But then, about a day and a half later, I feel energetic and motivated, and my brain feels like it's been rebooted, or taken apart and cleaned. So despite not having any fun, I'll probably continue to use mushrooms a few times a year.
March 18. This comment, from a thread asking people what changed their mind about suicide, is one of the most poetic things I've ever read:
What "changed" me? A sunny spring day, and the rain clouds were moving in. I went past a daycare where a little girl was dancing around, away from all the kids, by herself. "You just never know." I thought to myself. What if I had killed myself, all that long time ago.