[FRIAM] truth, reality, & narrative

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Ha! Hilarious. I should start doing that at conferences. "I bet you were an only child ...". It's too bad smoking has such a bad rep these days; or I could carry around a pipe and stick it in my mouth after saying that.

Re: my own self-programming -- I finally asserted "I'm an atheist" to someone. I have and do maintain that I'm not an atheist, that agnosticism is fundamentally distinct. But the LDS mormons at the door the other day presented me with a fresh opportunity and I took a different path than I have in the past. I simply didn't want to have the conversation with them, maybe because of the virus and stay-at-home orders. They had masks on. But still. Fvck them for endangering people's lives to spread their idiocy. Even Renee' was surprised I "let them off" so easily [⛧]. I thought about showing them my worn Book of Mormon. But I simply wasn't into it at the time.

For whatever reason, that story seems exemplar for my self-programming ephemeris. I spontaneously generate some tentative arc, just for rhetoric's sake and only later *may* think about what it might mean. Why did I subscribe to the Ethics journal as a freshman EE major in college? I have absolutely no idea. But I read every word of every issue until I could no longer afford the subscription price. Did that self-programming influence my bad grades in digital, good grades in analog, and subsequent switch to math? I have no idea. Now that I've reified my atheism by saying it out loud, albeit to delusional hostiles at my front door, how will that self-programming utterance influence future metaphysical claims I'll be willing to tolerate or mock?


[⛧] The last missionaries to knock on my door sat in our living room with me discussing the deified status of Christ in the form of an old Korean lady and whether or not the New Testament is actually crypto-feminist. Renee' was not pleased and finally told them straight to their faces to get out of our house. >8^D I spent the next few hours flipping through my 3 different versions of the bible. I'm not proud of that.

On 1/5/21 3:03 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> After jumping from project to project for a couple decades, I'd describe my self-programming as the result of something akin to stochastic gradient descent.   The effort to average over longer windows of time seems to gain no extra insight.   On the other hand, I recall being at an offsite SFI meeting once next to a stranger who struck up a conversation after a talk had just completed.   I had reason to think there were topics in the talk where the speaker was not telling the full story, and I said so to this person.   Immediately, he proceeded to make various speculations about my childhood, which struck me as surprising but also kind of amusing.  (As if I could possibly care that I had been judged unfavorably by this random person.)  He wasn't entirely wrong, but his commitment to guessing at my personality development seemed a bit too emphatic.   I guess I had unwittingly offended his sensibilities about his investments and that told him enough (apparently) to infer what my upbringing was like.   I could only speculate that his upbringing involved getting hit with a stick when talking out of turn.   This goes back to the episodic versus diachronic personality hypothesis, perhaps.    A diachronic person might be inclined to have a stronger emotional attachment to their decisions, because they thought they were "going somewhere".  


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