Drama and Recognition

When I'm going to see a movie, I enjoy a good drama. They push some satisfying buttons in us. As with anything that has ever been considered artistic for any length of time (dramas go waaaaay back...), there has spawned a legion of cheap renditions that have become uncomfortably popular.

There was a time when one popular breed of these cheap renditions were called "soap operas". Nowadays, the main audience for soap operas are mainly senior citizens, due to habit and [importantly] to relative expectations and values. To many younger people, they appear silly today. Of course, our way of categorizing things is askew because we "chunk" the data that enters our minds (essentially, we find patterns in it that then trigger a grouped/pre-built recognition and response). If our recognition were not askew, we would see that they had become a moving target because our societal values and expectations have changed. Today, any number of evening television "dramas" appeal to the lowest common denominator through the same mechanism that made soap operas popular years ago. The fact that a soap opera viewed today is not identical to one of these "dramas" is not the point - the point is that their respective relationships to us, in each of their heydays, was/is the same.

They exaggerate people's actions and proclivities. They reduce people's thoughts and actions to simple and associative processes. People are "good" or "bad" for no reason than because they are "good" or "bad". Personality aspects that real people have disappear completely (usually if you can't define a necessary "arc" to the aspect, or a purpose to the storyline, a person will not have the aspect).

Sometimes it makes me laugh. People actually act quite peculiarly, if our yardstick is real human behavior. For instance, witness someone who "seeks revenge" (superhero style, of course) in these shows, and when they do, it is noble and powerful and right. They are ethically compelled to set things right. Uh, yeah.

In real life, when people seek revenge, it is unbearably disturbing to watch, as they first squirm and shrink from fear and belittlement, and then slowly (and in private), they twist their sexual drive into feelings of aggression and hunger which they extinguish in acts of violence, sometimes against the target of revenge and sometimes against an inanimate object nearby. Sometimes, too, their target simply becomes themselves. This is known as masochism. Ironically, television mostly gets masochism right, at least in theory, although the TV ratio of masochists to human beings is approximately 1,000,000 times greater than in the real world. However, I suppose this sort of predisposition is necessary. I don't want to watch television shows about people living empty, banal lives any more than anyone else.

On the other hand, I also don't want to watch David Duchovney play a "good guy" who just happens to be addicted to sex and gets into alternately hilarious and adventuresome situations (you know, like having sex with an underage girl) and relies on his wits and heart of gold to escape. Or a woman who decides that selling marijuana is a regrettable but necessary way to pay to raise her kids so that they don't have to move out of their ridiculous yuppie surroundings (heaven forbid; a lower standard of living is like a public execution), and oh my, falls further and further into this unfortunate world. It is telling that these sort of plot outlines could underpin some of the most terrifying and cautionary domestic warning tales in years if the outcomes were traced to their conclusions through processes akin to the real world.

Not that anyone would watch them.

And yes, I am concerned about the answer to one question: how much time do I spend complaining?

The Peak?

Two peaks are on my mind.

Peak oil. It's amazing to me that there was any doubt for anyone who had read Hubbert's basic argument for peak oil. It is just a question of when. It would have already occurred if it weren't for technology. But I think it is a dim hope that technology will delay the peak long enough to effect market changes to make the transition smooth. As Charlie Munger has observed, it is unfortunate that we are eating through our supply of petroleum NOT because we rely on it so prevalently for transportation, but because we rely on it so prevalently - and without practical substitutes - for agriculture. Fertilizer is predominantly petroleum-based, and for these fertilizers, there are no petroleum-free alternatives. Clearly, the worrying risk associated with peak oil is not a collapse in Real GDP, it is a Malthusian catastrophe as agricultural land productivity plummets without recourse. This sets up the (admittedly slim) potential for extreme irony, as the vilified company Monsanto could literally end up responsible for saving millions of lives with the greater land productivity of their genetically-modified seeds.

The solution? Hedging massive real price inflation with stock holdings that will soar with oil prices. Trickier than it sounds, of course. If oil prices really take off, governments will tax oil producer profits (even though that discourages investment in new production). More practical for long-term safety is Transocean (RIG), who owns the world's largest fleet of oil rigs for underwater drilling (it is important to appreciate that deepwater oil deposits are undergoing the early stages of a large and rapid secular growth phase, as they become economical to develop with higher oil prices). Oil services companies are not as obvious of targets for windfall profit taxation, and better yet, Transocean is not an American company, but a Swiss company.

More exciting is peak #2, and is the absurd terror I feel approaching as so many things recently have gone my way. I have a very short history with determining my own destiny, so the concept of providing myself with significant amounts of satisfaction and joy is fairly foreign. And, I have to admit, I am a little skeptical.

The solution? Relax and take one day at a time, perhaps? But what am I going to spend my summer doing?

Sad Progress in a Bubble

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/science/12psychedelics.html

This is a fascinating field of inquiry that I believe is valid and holds significant promise. My only problem with it is that I believe that the knowledge of what is being taken will affect the success rate. Hopefully, I am incorrect. Regardless, I think there are simply too many societal barriers for this to become accepted any time soon. And, I resent that - I wish it were acceptable - but what can be done? This just goes to show the overreaching arm of the government in controlling what we do to our own bodies. Whose bright idea was it to control substances that are neither dangerous to others, nor physiologically addictive?

Psychedelic drugs (and psilocybin, in particular) have a profound effect that can best be understood by examining their effect in the context of the behavioral model of the human mind. There is a certain statistical situation that sometimes arises where the best predictor of a future value is the previous value; in other words, there is a tendency towards consistency, or mean-reversion. This tendency can be applied to human behavior. In other words, when held up to the wide variety of decisions that myriad humans will make, the best predictor of some individual's future behavior is their own past behavior. While this is commonsensical to us as observers of human nature, what we may not understand is the underlying neurological reason for this. In essence, behaviors, consisting of behavioral firing patterns, are learned in our actions because the firing patterns are learned in our minds. What we may not appreciate is the intricacy of these firing patterns. When we teach ourselves out of a behavior (which we have all experienced as being a difficult process at one time or another - whether it is an addiction such as smoking or something as simple as biting our fingernails), we are not re-writing the firing patterns from the ground up. Rather, we are interceding at one level - among many levels - to divert the learned sequence. Indeed, this level is very "high" on the continuum between deeply-learned, subconscious firings and high-level, conscious decision-making. In essence, there is a very real, "gestalt" behavioral pattern that gets built (at a high level) behind a conscious decision-making sequence when we perform it.

The role of psilocybin and other psychedelic compounds is to change firing patterns at a very low level. This has both immediate and long-term effects. The immediate effects are known as the "psychedelic experience"; a state, notoriously, where the "true nature of the universe is revealed". (Of course, this is not true, except in the perspective of the philosophical assertion that all reality is subjective) Instead, perception is altered because consciousness - as an emanation of the brain's memory mechanism - is altered. The fact that it is altered in such a perceptually unusual way is not an effect of a change in firing patterns per se - after all, a change occurs when we intercede on one of our habits, as well, and that doesn't seem perceptually unusual - it is altered in a perceptually unusual way because our firing patterns are altered at a very low level, and this is one of very few situations that can arise where such a change takes place. (as the above article alludes to, it would seem there is some sort of drug release that precipitates moments of "enlightenment"; would I be the first to speculate that the evolutionary mechanism of predispository selection would encourage this because of the positive effects of divine perception on morality in early cooperative societies? That is not only a mouthful, but it is spectacularly speculative, to the point of uselessness. Perhaps I should read "DMT: The Spirit Molecule" first...)

The long-term effects of psilocybin are to assist our "un-learning" of behavioral repetition that I mentioned before. In other words, someone who has been depressed for some period of time, and who escapes depression by means of a psychedelic experience does so not because they rationalize a greater mystery to the world, but because to some degree, they unlock the negative behavioral pattern that pushed them into depression in the first place. Having impliedly discounted the direct visceral effects of the experience, it is only fair to admit that the inspiration and excitement produced by a positive psychedelic experience are very capable of predisposing them to a replacement of the negative behavioral cycle with a positive one, capable of putting them in a position to fix their issues rather than let them compound.

Greener Pastures

You could call it a ten-year plan.

The most recent step:

http://www.deltarep.com/alphafund.html

Also, doing some research on Nicholas Financial (NICK) this week. From a rudimentary check, can't see too much downside to that one right now.

A Silver Mt. Zion

Of the bands that I admire, A Silver Mt. Zion is at least as removed from the masses as any. Among their gifts is a propensity for awesome song titles. I often feel that it would be possible to relate entire travails using nothing but one or more song titles. For instance, how was my week? Well, it was this:

This Gentle Heart Like Shot Birds Fallen
Hang On To Each Other
Stumble Then Rise On Some Awkward Morning

Conversely, the year 2000 for me could be described as:

Tho You Are Gone, I Still Often Walk With You
Broken Chord Can Sing A Little
I Fed My Metal Bird The Wings Of Other Metal Birds

I have constant, timeless dreams that my future will be thus:

Sow Some Lonesome Corner So Many Flowers Bloom
C'mon C'mon (Loose An Endless Longing)
Collapse Tradicional (For Darling)
13 Angels Standing Guard 'round The Side Of Your Bed

Did I mention that I recommend them? I am not uniformly in love with their music; actually, I probably like a mere minority of it. But I couldn't live without such songs as "Movie (Never Made)", or "Horses in the Sky".

Help Me Measure My Own Sanity: A Survey

I have had some dreams lately about my friends from Europe, and it makes me wistful.

Wistfulness seems to me to be impervious to happiness; even when content, still, it comes wanting more. My dream was a warning that the factors are shaping up for me not to go to Oktoberfest this year, although my honest desire is to do so. I want to get back to Europe; I want to see my German and French friends, especially. It would also be a good birthday present. My birthday this year is convenient, I suppose: I feel I am in a period of fundamental transition.

I had wondered for years how to invoke a self-actualization that never occurred and that I feared was not merely delayed, but missed. I feel like I am now on this precipice.

And so I ask: How crazy am I to assume such knowledge of the future?

One Hundred Years of Solitude

I got a fit of wickedly recent nostalgia, viewing my blog title image just now; I am getting the ceremonial "haircut before the job search", tomorrow. I like my hair long, and a little out of control. It just about fools myself into thinking I am capable of being more unpredictable than I am. It also reminds me of the "haircut weekends" of two summers ago. (confused? ask me about it sometime)

I didn't pay much attention to my outward appearance for most of my life. I was loved intensely and unconditionally at a young age, without criticism, and so I grew up stubbornly resisting such concessions. In the past few years, I started to make these changes as I saw - and could not ignore - the undeniable proof that they were valuable. Besides, I lost the ego for holding onto such things. (although I cannot say when or how)

I will probably always be drawn inward, left wondering how others are so adept at finding common ground in others. Therein, though, lies the question and the answer. I have spent years thinking in isolation; I can seldom relate to others about the pressing concerns of my days. My friends are for fun and trivialities. Against all my will, I still relate best to that Thoreau quote, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation."

Men, wired to conquer the ambivalence of potential mates, wind up desperate to conquer the ambivalence of the world. The modern world, enormous and eternally cementing into its collective destiny, is so thoroughly confounding to affect in any meaningful way that men are left with a proverbial, "un-scratchable itch". The need to collect joy from outside ourselves - joy brought about from within - is tenuous, suffers, and can die. Indeed, without imagination, without dreams, without art - the agents of mitigating this frustration - this process would be both quick and violent.

Oh, and I am reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is far more impressive than I ever assumed it would be. It has reminded me to live in the driver's seat. And, of the importance of making strong and brave decisions, and to make those decisions now.