Days of Summer >> 7/11/16

1. 7/11/16
1. Staggered forth from the void at 9, packed frantically, read HPMOR over breakfast, and headed out to windsurfing with sisters.
2. The lake was just windy enough to sail on and we all remembered what we were doing pretty quickly. Fun feelings of competence :)
3. Afterwards, quickly changed into work attire and went to Alpha. One of the more productive 3 hours I’ve had there--we got a license for a tool we needed, figured out how to do a few things automatedly we were doing by hand, and most importantly, figured out how the system we were using was merging the two firmware images. We did it wrong the first time but cleverly noticed and did it right the next time :D
4. Back from Alpha, thought was going to meet with Dan and Stephanie (visiting uncle/aunt) for dinner. But worked out that we got to go out for dinner to celebrate Mom’s birthday instead, yay!
5. I got to go to Ultimate first, which was a blast. Again somehow managed to relax and stifle feelings of competition and optimization. Two games were running at the same time so I got plenty of play time.
6. Quick shower, and off to D’ Anna’s with Mom, Dad and Izzy. The food was amazing as always (that salad, man… such a blank-slate, simple-delicious kind of food) and we had a lot of good conversation. Course we got sidetracked into the ongoing utilitarianism/millennials/localityVsHuntingLowHangingScalableFruitInTheDarknessOfUnfamiliarity/congruentRetributivityVsTheAbstractArroganceOfCharity
7. Discussion.
8. But I think we made some progress, explored some new angles. Dad made an argument for quasi-utilitarian millennials being too naive (free-riders don’t exist) or shortsighted (free-riders can’t change and others won’t change their positive attitudes toward them, so we have to work around them) to punish and negatively incent free-riders. He argued (my paraphrase) that a) sweeping world-improvement schemes under discussion often ignored free-riders, and that b) the local, self-interested morality of pure capitalism or libertarianism is the best hope of dealing with them. I think that a) is a reasonable statement of near-fact, but I still think there might be more systematic ways of dealing with free-riders than b), which has problems (like the vanishing trick that productive work is playing on the lower part of the bell curve in developed countries).
9. Headed back home, continued the discussion, which turned to the congruence between reason and feeling (particularly “justified” anger) which I often sense is assumed by my dad. I realize I get his perspective much more when I think in terms of my actual experiences at school and the particular problems I’ve grappled with, and I think my rejection of emotion as driver is maybe a bit overblown. I got to a point in math where I told myself to stop arguing endlessly over the precise logical justification of the simple steps, since this often served as excuse to use fuzzier arguments on the more complicated ones. I think that I must reach this enlightenment when it comes to emotion, that I should accept and resonate with the simplest and most natural emotions, which also fall into congruence with my world-models (such as being angry at free-riders), so that I can put my real effort into rejecting and modifying emotion in the more complicated and interesting cases (such as why, in the name of fwqhgads, do I get annoyed at competent fighters at boffing who are just fighting, but seem to my battle-addled mind as radiating a small amount of judgment or hostility when I cheerfully head over to attack them again and try something different.)
10. Ugh, these sentences are worse than Dickens :) Apologies!
11. Finished up and hit the hay :D