Sometimes the stars align such that you have to run back inside to get the camera. From an early morning in February.

Michael Nielsen tweets:

There's a great line in an otherwise forgotten Reese Witherspoon movie: she asks a psychologist if there's any universally useful advice. He replies: "Figure out what you want, & learn how to ask for it." She replies: "Thanks!" Her face falls: "But both of those are really hard!"

This strikes a bit of a nerve with me. The second part, askng for help, I have always been bad at and while I realized it late, at least I think I have understood it by now. Just to give an example, my time as a PhD student would have gone soo much better if I had gotten over my instinct "not to bother" my supervisor and collegues. The whole thing with coming from a non-academic background probably plays into this, but that's a topic for another time.

Knowing what to want is the more interesting question to me. It is easy to get stuck in believing to want something, then this belief makes it true, in a self-fulfilling way. There are many reasons why we want, and most of them we do not understand ourselves, at least not very well, because even if we think we have good reasons, the chance that they are a rationalization after the fact is quite high. (I am currently re-reading The Elephant in the Brain because of just that.)

There was a time when I envied poeple who knew what they wanted. I think I never really did myself. There are pros and cons to this. For example, keeping the feeling of uncertainty alive made me getting used to and accept it. This can contribute to the continued feeling of wonder about the world and becoming more and more sceptical of people who are too certain of things. Overall this fits nicely with the scientific mindset.

In addition, there is the whole idea of "wanting is suffering" in Eastern philosophy. Being able to want less is a kind of superpower that not only let's you get off the hedonic treadmill, but also cultivate a sense of gratitude which is said to be a major factor in overall happiness. The Stoics were right in this regard.

On the negative side, wanting less and not know what to want can turn you into a drifter, not having an own agenda and simply going along with the flow. Are you fine with others ending up making decision for you instead? If you had more drive yourself, you might have a stronger sense of agency which contributes to life satisfaction. But then again, if you know that the direction of your striving is not really your own choice anyway, what's the point?

I think my first outside project for the spring and summer is taking shape in my head: a shed extension to move the home brewery out of the kitchen and wardrobe.

The first step is, as so often, to make thing worse, before they bet better. Yesterday I tore down the the small firewood shed (before-picture) after having emptied it in recently.

The area there measures about 3 by 4 metres which should be plenty for my rather modest brewing equipment, even if I decide to expand it somewhat.

But first I'll have to finish the removal of large rocks that are in the way. I started this more than a year ago, but granite is hard and heavy, slowing down the drilling and driving of wedges. Lifting the remaining pieces out of the way is good deadlift exercise though!

In my fresh attempt to blog daily, today is the first time that I don't know what to write about. I am sure this will happen frequently and getting over it is part of the point. Behaviours only become habits when you follow the rule.

I could tell you about that great podcast I just discovered, or the crappy film I watched last night, or I could show you a picture of where in the forest I put up the slaguggleholk this morning. But I won't do that today. Instead I'll just ramble on for a while. Stream-of-consciousness writing they call it, I think. This term might be something my brain just made up on its own but I won't look it up right now. If it isn't a real thing, it should be. James Joyce's Ulysses comes to mind in this context, but I might be wrong about that; I have never read it.

Damn, now I looked it up anyway: James Joyce's name had slipped my mind and of course Wikipedia tells you immediately that he is famous for stream of consciousness, so there's that.

Talking about consciousness, I used to roll my eyes when someone tried to tell that there is a point to "subjective first-person experience" as compared to the "objective third-person" perspective. I'm not so sure about that anymore, not because I've gotten into new-agey woo-woo kinds of things, but because it makes rational sense to me that there are things to learn about one's own mind by paying closer attention to what it does minute-to-minute.

More about that at a later time. For today this will suffice for me to feel good about having blogged something. Not setting goals too high at the outset of a new adventure is a good thing, they say. Whoever "they" are.

In November a Ural owl visited our garden. This might not be very spectacular, after all they are not that rare in middle and northern Sweden. But I had never seen one before and was glad it stayed long enough for me to go get the camera.

It is commom knowledge here that Ural owls can get pissy during the spring when they have offspring. The Swedish name for them is slaguggla which literally means "the owl that hits you".

Nevertheless I just built a nesting box this morning, from some scrap material:

The cube of 30cm on all sides, plus a half roof, is meant to mimic a dead tree trunk that has rotted away on the inside, leaving a cavity. My little book on animal shelters says this is what Ural owls like to nest in. Now I only have to find a good spot in the forest and a way to put it up; it is quite a bit larger and heavier than it looks in the picture.

Last night I read this piece in one of the Lesswrong books (pictured).

And just now this video flew by on Twitter. It is about meta discussion, the sphinx that both derails and guards conversations, be they with others or yourself.

I don't know about you, but I find this graph (source) extremely frustrating. There is no good reason why we in the EU vaccinate three times slower than the US, UK, or Chile for that matter (who bought the Chinese vaccine).

Yes, paying more per dose and subsidizing production early would probably have been unpopular at the time, but so much cheaper than not nipping the third wave in the bud right now. This is not hindsight talking, knowledgable people knew this all along and were listened to elsewhere. Kudos to the Brits who can rightfully feel smug about Brexit now, even though EU-countries were not prevented from bypassing the EMA in approval and procurement of vaccines - none did that, as far as I know.

More about vaccine manufacturing than you ever wanted to know.

Is it possible to change your mind too much? I am generally trying to be actively aware of confirmation bias, that is fitting every new bit of information into one's existing set of opinions. Plus I like the feeling of novel thoughts and how they tickle your brain.

This sometimes manifests in an instinct to run in the opposite direction when everyone agrees on something. Everyone thinks climate change will be catastrophic soon? Sure, but what about other solutions than admonishing people to behave differently? And aren't some the activists claims exaggerated? (Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger is a book that tries to distinguish the science from the hyperbole; I should finish it some day.)

That same gut reaction seems to be my default in many areas. If I wanted to flatter myself, I would call it a "scientific mindset", to always question common wisdom, but I am not sure it really is that. Also it becomes potentially "dangerous" socially, in the sense that one can easily come across as obnoxious and unnecessarily crontrarian. And in the wrong context it can send the wrong signals as to how one gets sorted into the bins labelled good guy or bad guy.

Thus I am genuinely unsure whether I tend overcompensate when trying to correct my confirmation bias. After all, there often are good reasons that there is a widely accepted view, and quickly throwing out a strong prior is bad Bayesian thinking. In an extreme case, it would make me gullible, accepting new arguments or framings without weighing them properly against what I thought before.

Coincidentally, Scott Alexander wrote about the exact opposite today, trapped priors. Quite likely I have some of these, too, and I see no immediate reason why one cannot have too weak priors concerning one subject matter, and too strong ones in another.

Added 2021-03-12: Also closely related, I just heard Rob Wiblin in his podcst say the following, which gave me a chuckle:

I feel like I can notice a perverse aspect of this in myself when [...] you’ve kind of settled on what is kind of probably the true boring thing, the unexpected boring real conclusion just to some issue that has been controversial to you in the past. Then you’re like, “I’m bored of this. I have to find new takes, something new to say about this issue. [.. ] But what’s left?” What’s left is just bad takes, like dumb, unexpected contrarian takes.

We have had quite the winter here in Uppsala, Sweden. Many days my exercise was replaced by shovelling snow. It never became too much to cause real problems and we made it through the stretch of cold by emptying the firewood sheds.

Now all snow has melted already, but we are in that frustrating period called vårvinter (spring-winter) where everything is gray and ugly, snow and wet take turns, until spring finally comes at the beginning of May.

How difficult it is to consistently post on a blog! One easily gets awe-stricken by people like Tyler or Scott who put out large amounts of interesting material, without having this as their main gig.

I won't pretend I'll be able to get to their level anytime soon, but starting small and from scratch again should make it easier to form new habits. And practice matters in writing, they say.

To put it in different words: I have outsourced my babble to podcasts and books too much, and need to flex my own text generator again. Re-phrasing thoughts fosters their synthesis.