2024-08-02 Dopamine Privilege

What I Did

I can finally say I’ve paid off all my technical debt. This may be the largest intermediate-stage project I’ve ever done without it creating any directly observable output.

The consequences of this project have not paid out for me yet. I have had to fight multiple existential battles the past few weeks, and this will only find meaning if I actually get things written.

Words cannot express how mentally exhausted I am, mixed with how relieved I am to have completed this thing. I intend to celebrate. Hard.

What I Learned

Since we’re in an election season, I’ve had politics on the mind. Now that I’ve finally finished my commitment of the past few years, I can uncork a little and start letting the mania of repressed thought express itself again.

I’m severely under-impressed with the scope of my political discussions of the past, most notably my boundaries page. Besides a huge reality regarding social contracts that needs fleshing out, we must consider the concept of “rights” more in-depth.

Essentially, there are rights and privileges, the demarcating principle being that rights are inherent conditions (though they can be forfeited, but more on that later) and privileges are bestowed conditions. Both rights and privileges represent as easily-accessed purposes, and maintain themselves in our imaginations as if they universally exist (even when we never actually use them).

However, another dimension of this mechanism is that there’s an inherent maintenance cost attached to these rights and privileges, and that comes in the form of responsibility.

In effect, all things that can be looked at as a “right” comes with a “responsibility cost”. If you want the privilege of driving wherever you want, you’re responsible to maintain the vehicle or pay someone to regularly take care of it. If you have the right to speak freely, you’re responsible to not make threats or defamatory remarks.

These responsibilities aren’t always clearly demarcated. They may have a prior time requirement (e.g., staying healthy to avoid dying of a fatness-induced disease), a future time requirement (e.g., incurring a debt), or be excessively punitive (e.g., fight for the right to party). Over time, many of these rights and privileges may attenuate as well.

So, to that end, we live well when we only work to maintain the rights and privileges we actually use or plan to use. No reason to work tirelessly without reward, right?

What I’m Doing Now

WHAT I MUST DO:

• Working in an insurance office right now.
• Figuring out life with a beautiful woman at the maximum threshold of the Crazy/Hot Matrix, which currently involves preparing an RV to move into it.
• Slowly succumbing to the standard mental decline caused by maintaining two schoolchildren before they’re old enough to vote.

MY HOBBY:

Marching through my Grandiose Essay-Writing Mission, loosely guided by a Johnny.Decimal-like system:

• It consists of 14,246 files, each one containing between 1 and 10 elements.
• As I go, each condensation or output will make fewer files, but each re-categorization will likely make more files.
• The number is moderately arbitrary relative to results, thereby avoiding the risk of Goodhart’s Law while also implying I’ve made some sort of progress.

The project will eventually send everything to 3 possible places:

1. My essays will be updated, most notably NotaGenius and Trendless Tech.
2. My toolbox, if it’s potentially useful.
3. The primitives and templates for future projects.

Throughout the entire system, I maintain a schema that reflects the content I’m building:

The flow of work represents itself through a unique semi-ordered flow of “phases”:

1. Rebuild my toolbox to conform to all the existing essays.
2. Update the old content I’ve already written (050-700).
3. Finish out a few easy pages (50-400).
4. Add ready-to-go content updates (a).
5. Finish the Entrepreneurship pages (460+610).
6. Finish the Management pages (470+620).
7. Finish the Math pages (430+530).
8. Bounce around Trendless Tech for a while (500-605).