Daniel LaPointe

  • Flow states are good. I’m thinking of that LaTeX practice on Christmas,1 or some of my recent calls at work.2 Friday night’s session on the keyboard3 is also coming to mind. There’s this desire I have to become a well-oiled machine perfectly accomplishing everything it sets out to do.
  • See Ron Chernow’s description of Alexander Hamilton:
    ◦ “He wrote with the speed of a beautifully organized mind that digested ideas thoroughly, slotted them into appropriate pigeonholes, then regurgitated them at will.”4
  • See also HAL-9000’s philosophy from 2001:
    ◦ “I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.”5
  • While the pursuit of flow states has been criticized by James elsewhere on this blog, his criticism takes on a Christian bent. This religion being a recurring theme on Stim, I might as well give some thoughts.
  • Having already argued against the superstitious side of Christianity, I’m now starting to wonder if the Christian philosophy sans superstition is even a good thing. In short, I find the message of radical empathy to be a sloppy “first-degree Taylor approximation” of ethical behavior. That is, some people, whether they recognize it or not, enter into this profoundly unproductive cycle of: toxic behavior, forgiveness for said behavior, toxic behavior, etc. It’s like they can’t distinguish between the emotional rush of promising to change and actually changing.
  • The Brothers Karamazov provides a good example of what I mean. Having recently finished the book, I found the character Dmitri to be woefully unsympathetic and, frankly, deplorable. Throughout the novel, Dmitri makes death threats, commits violent acts, and behaves irresponsibly with money. At the same time, he makes numerous (empty) promises to change his behavior. Plainly, it was the Christian ethic of endless moral bailouts that trained Dmitri to behave in such a way.
  • For a more recent example of “Dmitri-ness,” listen to this grunge classic, and give the lyrics a ponder.
  • Considering that the singer, Chris Cornell, would go on to die from grunge disease,6 how much of this song is just some schtick meant to tug at the listener’s heartstrings? Does Cornell actually intend to wait “like a stone” to enter God’s house? I know he says he wants to, but are the non-verbal, executive parts of his brain drawing up a concrete plan? How about this – suppose a loan would be paid if and only if Cornell waited “like a stone” for the required duration. What sort of an interest rate are we talking about here?
  • Though my quip is somewhat facetious (and admittedly rude), I think there’s a bigger point to be made here about interest payments. Is it a coincidence that Dostoyevsky – a gambler whose philosophy called for infinite patience and infinite social bailouts – was notoriously antisemitic?7 In the cases of Cornell and Dmitri, the present narrative self may be deeply sincere, but this means nothing to someone issuing a loan. All they care about is the average past self and how this can be used to predict future behavior. It is this clashing of definitions of “self,” I reckon, that brings financiers so much hatred. The loan issuer, in ignoring the trusting, sincerely-planning self in front of him in favor of that person’s silent – though ultimately prevailing – average self, denies the humanity of the individual he is speaking with. He reduces that narrative self to a mere erratic state of what is ultimately a predictable hunk of flesh.
  • Now, what do the Behavior Predictors have to say about New Year’s resolutions? Not much good, if I recall correctly.8 The idea here, I suppose, is that anyone requiring the excuse of the calendar turning over to begin going to the gym, eating healthy, etc. can’t be all that motivated to begin with.
  • With that in mind, I won’t promise anything overly ambitious in this post. As a general matter, I would like to more regularly bring about that state of affairs where the mind is being worked to full capacity. There’s something immensely pleasing about looking over a finished document like this, tidying up the footnotes, and shooting it off before the deadline – in this case a deadline self-imposed by the title of the piece.
  • Also, maybe this piece will be the first to trigger some genuine correspondence between the authors. Both Sam and James have had their names called…

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Notes:

1. I’ve recently become interested in facing my fear of this software package. Too many math classes as an undergrad were ruined by not being fluent in what is essentially a coding language.a Anyhow, here’s what I produced on Christmas evening, once the festivities were over: a simple proof of a simple theorem. ↩

a. If I could give one tip to teenagers aspiring to learn mathematics, it would be this: become fluent in LaTeX before the end of high school. ↩

2. I’m currently doing call center work related to government-funded health insurance. In the escalated calls unit, I have to, for every phone call: decide whether the caller can have their dispute settled in their favor, deliver this information in a way that doesn’t cause them to escalate the case further, and justify my decision in a citation-laden report written before the call is over. With all the systems I have to juggle, all the HIPAA technicalities I have to bear in mind, all the customer service protocols I have to adhere to, and all the policy I have to locate in real time, there’s plenty of opportunity for flow. It’s kind of like a video game, to be honest. Very, very much a two-monitor job. ↩

3. Though I don’t have a recording of the session from Friday, this is the sort of stuff I compose/perform. ↩

4. From page 250 of the famous biography. This is when Chernow is discussing Hamilton’s composition of the Federalist Papers. ↩

5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be8Gbqdox68&t=27s ↩

6. Suicide.a ↩

a. As fellow blog contributor Sam once put it, “Nirvana killed rock music.” ↩

7. Maybe I’ll get around to reading The Merchant of Venice someday. ↩

8. As the folk wisdom goes, most resolutions are broken by the second week. ↩