ProfQuirrell
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User ID: 606
Great post; reported as a quality contribution.
I think this is an intriguing framing and I have some very similar habits. I play Breaking Benjamin at loud volumes while working out, listen to speed metal or rap while grading quickly, and will frequently handle all the childcare / cooking / cleaning in the evening (sending my wife upstairs to play violin, drink wine, and relax) ... but only after cracking open a beer (or pouring a glass of scotch) and playing what my kids call "Dad Music". My wife is often flabbergasted at how much I get done and I always maintain that the music / alcohol are key components of productivity.
Your comparison to the Penfield Mood Cabinet recalls some short stories my brother wrote in college with a very similar theme; in his setting there were various drinks called Brews that contained chemical mixtures you could imbibe that would generate emotions (Bliss / Melancholy / etc.). In fact, one of his stories had two characters notice the exact comparison you drew. One of them, Sebastian, argues that the end goal is exactly the same -- creation of a certain mood or emotional connection with what's around you. He feels that the drinks are faster, more reliable, and skip the tedious part where you try to find the perfect song / book / etc.; you can just buy the emotion from a bottle, easy.
At the risk of doxxing, I'll quote the reply of the second character as he's taken the first out on a hike in the Colorado wilderness for a taste of real life:
I brought the subject up again after we had finished eating. We were enjoying hot chocolate in the cool air. The stream was whispering behind us, and we could see our frosty breath by the light of the moon.
"How was your dinner?" I asked.
"Magnificent," Sebastian said. "Better than I've had in days."
I didn't doubt it. Food always helped with my Brew withdrawal, back what seemed like a lifetime ago. "My grandfather used to say that the point of hiking was to have lunch," I said. "He always found that food tastes immeasurably better out here."
Sebastian looked at me.
"He was being a little facetious."
"Clearly," Sebastian said.
"That's not my reason," I said, "But I think my grandfather grasped something important. He also said that the hiker climbs great lumps of rock over long periods of time, not to get anywhere, but to get back to where he started."
"We're not going anywhere?" Sebastian said.
"Don't be silly," I said. I pointed to Eolus, its dramatic face rising above us in the moonlight. "That's where were going tomorrow. I was just thinking about what you said. About why I don't just drink a Brew and become happy that way. There are a lot of reasons why I don't think that's a good idea. The first is that of value. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. How much does someone who buys those Brews value happiness? At around ten dollars and fifty cents. That's pretty cheap for an hour of Bliss, I suppose. When I become happy thanks to something like this, it's something special. It's something... not rare, but out of the ordinary and memorable. I suspect that people who drink those Brews too often not only stop being able to feel things normally, but the Brews themselves will stop working. They will get bored after the overdose of emotions. They will need more and more chemicals in their brain in order to get the same amount of pleasure, and eventually the brain just won't be able to take it. Eventually, the sheer amount of chemicals it would take to produce this amount of happiness," I raised my arms to encircle the situation, "would kill them."
"I don't think the brain works that way," Sebastian said.
"That's not my only point. My second point, the more important one, goes back to what you said in the car. I don't do this purely for an emotional response. I don't read books and watch movies just to feel a certain thing. I do it to learn something about the world, or in this case, something about myself. That's what my grandfather was trying to say, I think. The hiker, when he gets back to where he started, doesn't just go in a circle. He becomes a different person, somehow, thanks to that hike. It's a spiral. He returns to where he was, but on a higher plane. He's wiser, stronger, and more determined. A good hike can, and should, teach you something. It should change you. And if you feel happy along the way, that's an added bonus. But it's not a necessary condition. And I don't think that those Brews can teach you anything that's not already inside yourself. When you drink one and get your emotional rush, in the end, you're the same person. Those Brews primarily look inward, and are self-centered." I gestured to the mountains above us. "This... this looks outward."
My reply is the same. If you dial up an emotion in a Mood Cabinet or by drinking a Brew, it's self-stimulation of a masturbatory and perverse fashion. It doesn't grow you as a person, you don't learn anything, you remain unchanged. I would put use of drugs and abuse of alcohol in this category as well, although I would greatly struggle to explain why I feel like mild use of alcohol is OK and use of drugs at all is problematic.
If you craft an emotion by listening to music, created by other people and selected and enjoyed by you, or by reading a specific book, or drinking a wine you like ... you're engaging with the world around you in a way that develops your taste and personality.
To answer your last point briefly, I think ideally the methods you use to help step into the role of the moment would help you grow in virtue as well, developing you towards your aspirations and the kind of person you think you ought to become next. I shouldn't medicate or dial in emotions to work me in the direction of a drunkard, but a glass of scotch that helps me step into the role of better husband and father is worth it.
(some edits to add a few points in)
ProfQuirrell
2yr ago
"Part-time work" here means 20 hours per week.
There's a lot that could be said about how exactly the graduate school ecosystem works, but I'll quickly note a few things that you may not know if you've never been a STEM graduate student that may change your read on the situation (I don't have time to offer anything more substantial):
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The 20 hour a week contract you sign is a complete fiction and joke. If you are operating as a teaching assistant in grad school, that will take up at least twenty hours a week in-between classtime, grading, office hours, etc. and more realistically closer to thirty hours. This is on top of all of the research you are already doing; my organic lab had a minimum of 55 hours of research a week as the expectation and other synthetic labs I knew were worse. This is on top of any coursework you may also be taking, which will require you to go to classes and read papers and do homework and prepare for cumes and ... I had many, many weeks in graduate school of working 80+ hours where I'd get in close to 7 AM, go home for dinner and to see my kids, and then go back into the lab and work until 11 PM. The 20 hour a week contract is a complete lie. No graduate student I know in STEM worked anywhere near that.
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The tuition waiver seems like a useful benefit to also consider as compensation (a decade or so back I remember congress was contemplating taxing it like other employer benefits), but it's similarly fictitious. It's not at all clear what you would be paying tuition for. After your first year, you aren't taking classes (you might be teaching them). You're doing research. Research space is not paid for by the university, neither is research equipment, neither is chemical inventory ... you pay for all of that using grant money! Graduate students shouldn't be charged tuition at all in my mind; they're operating much more as employees for the university rather than educational charges. Even your stipend, largely, is being paid for with grant money. I haven't the faintest idea what on earth the tuition is for ... except no, wait, I do, it's so the university can pocket a few extra thousand dollars of grant money from each lab every semester.
Graduate students in STEM are hilariously overworked and underpaid. I guess you get an (increasingly worthless) degree at the end and a job market flooded with competitors from all the other idiots who listened to college counsellors?
Don't go to grad school, kids.
ProfQuirrell
2yr ago
Wikipedia and memory tell me that Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky were favored by the rich and by other entertainers. This suggests something more nepotistic than pure meritocracy.
As someone who has lurked and been around since 2011, this is so out of touch as to be hilarious. Scott / Eliezer are reasonably well read and well known now because they have produced a prodigious amount of writing that is both intelligent and enjoyable to read. They have done so consistently for years.
I assure you in the early 2010s they were neither popular nor well-known, they got there because of the quality of their work.
ProfQuirrell
2yr ago
The song is somewhat cliche at this point, but I really like Pinocchio Story from the album 808s and Heartbreak. It's a live recording and Kanye is difficult to hear and understand over the screams of the crowd, but he raps about how he just wants happiness and a normal life, and somehow all the fame and fortune has made everything worse:
Do you think I'd sacrifice real life
For all the fame and flashing lights?
There is no Gucci I can buy
There is no Louis Vuitton to put on
There is no YSL that they could sell
To get my heart out of this hell and my mind out of this jail
There is no clothes that I could buy
That could turn back the time
There is no vacation spot I could fly
That could bring back a piece of real life.
The contrast between Kanye singing about how he wants to experience real life and real love with the screams of the fans proclaiming their love for him is really fascinating and you can hear in the reality of the live performance how all the fans and the fame ... just isn't a substitute for what he's really looking for. It's a wonderful example of how form / function can work together in a piece of music. You don't have to just listen to Kanye explain how the fame isn't getting him happiness -- you can hear the fans screaming "I LOVE YOU KANYE" as he sings about how he can't find real love and how he lost the only real love he'd ever had... I think it's a beautiful song, personally.
ProfQuirrell
2yr ago
And while schools have done their best, it is near impossible to prevent cheating in a take home test. To be honest, I blame professors using old closed-book test methods for classes learned and tested entirely at distance for cheating scandals: you just can't ask people to be closed book in their own homes, it's stupid. Trust, but verify; and if you can't verify, don't trust at all.
Our institution did this -- when everyone closed up shop in March 2020 we flat-out refused to administer any final exams for the spring since we knew we'd be doing them online and we knew we wouldn't be able to trust the data. Granted, I work for a military academy and we have some flexibility there that most institutions probably don't.
I don't think schools did their best, though. My view on the ground with lots of friends across lots of institutions is that teachers / professors were struggling to carry out their class in a difficult environment with little to no support from administration. If you have to pivot online, there are ways to take some advantage of that media, and lots of ways to do it catastrophically poorly. I haven't see any evidence that administration made any effort to help their professors transition smoothly and teach a good class as opposed to just throwing them to the wolves.
What kind of game are you interested in?
I'll plug Spirit Island as far and away the best board game I've played this decade. It's a complex cooperative game where you play as natural spirits of a lush island with the game automating a joint enemy, the Invaders who try to explore the island, build their towns and cities on it, and than ravage it for its natural resources, causing blight and slowly killing the island, the native people, and the spirits. Your goal as a team is to scare them away, or get rid of them, or just flat-out kill them as the case may be.
I will write a multi paragraph review of this game given the slightest provocation, so I will merely say that it is unique among cooperative games by scaling incredibly gracefully with player count (you can play this game solo and it is in fact consistently the #1 solo board game on BGG) and being near immune to quarterbacking (which constantly plagues games like Pandemic). The theme is incredible, the gameplay is incredible, the spirits are fun and evocative ... this game is an 11 / 10 for me. My brothers and I have played literally over a thousand games between the three of us.
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