Leonardo Boiko’s Diary

Tomorrow: classes. Tomorrow: I (re-)start the long road to Monbushō.

In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. The Japanese people are simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.

—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

Still standing for some false, impossible shore.

—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)

If asked
What is the nature of the tea ceremony
Say it’s the sound
Of windblown pines
In a painting.

—Sen Sōtan (1578–1658)

If this is so, it might seem that science can be our only salvation from unreality. This is true up to point. It can indeed save us from what is unreal, but cannot give us more than a mechanically correct universe in place of phantasy. It cannot tell us what life is, nor can it give it to us more abundantly. This is the function of poetry, but as in the passage from the “Inferno” above-quoted, we have to look for poetry, that is, for reality, in the most unlikely places also, in the mere sounds of the lines, in the perverse denial of truth, and in the impossible desires of human beings, in the tremendous castles of intellectual air that they have erected, in the lies and sophistries which are only inverted truths.

—R. H. Blyth (1898–1964)

Delighfully manifestoistic text by Nancy R. Smith:

For every woman who is tired of acting weak when she knows she is strong, there is a man who is tired of appearing strong when he feels vulnerable.

For every woman who is tired of acting dumb, there is a man who is burdened with the constant expectation of “knowing everything.”

For every woman who is tired of being called “an emotional female,” there is a man who is denied the right to weep and to be gentle.

For every woman who is called unfeminine when she competes, there is a man for whom competition is the only way to prove his masculinity.

For every woman who is tired of being a sex object, there is a man who must worry about his potency.

For every woman who feels “tied down” by her children, there is a man who is denied the full pleasures of shared parenthood.

For every woman who is denied meaningful employment or equal pay, there is a man who must bear full financial responsibility for another human being.

For every woman who was not taught the intricacies of an automobile, there is a man who was not taught the satisfactions of cooking.

For every woman who takes a step toward her own liberation, there is a man who finds the way to freedom has been made a little easier.

• People With Mental Illness Enhance Our Lives

• Dementia Ward
• It Could Be You
• Darkness
• Mad or Bad
• Cut & Delusions
• Blood
• Bipolar Disorder
• Schizophrenia
• Suicide
• Last Chapter

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I consider it a mistake to have discussed my clinical depression in this blog. The general public is basically ignorant about mental diseases, and with the safety of distance, people in the Internet have a belligerence they wouldn’t dream of showing in real life (the “Internet Tough Guy” phenomenon). If you have mental problems, that’s  …not good.

Nonetheless it did have a few good effects. After I came out this particular closet, several people have privately contacted me about their own problems, telling me of how much my posts helped them. That alone makes it worth to have endured the trolls. When you’re mentally ill, it’s very important to find out you aren’t the only one.

Darryl Cunningham’s Psychiatric Tales was that important to me, and I always recommend it to my friends who need the same kind of help. However, I can’t seem to find an index, and I always struggle to find all chapters. This time I’m writing it down for later reference. Because it could be useful for someone, I’m posting the list.

I suspect there’s an index somewhere and I’m being a dummy, but who knows—one more cannot hurt.

• Shigesato Itoi… copywriter, essayist.
• Fumito Ueda… classical art.
• Hideo Kojima… illustrator, writer, filmmaker.
• Shigeru Miyamoto… painter, designer.
• Keiji Inafune… illustrator, designer.

Number of game designers I admire with an education in computer science or engineering: 0.

Not many posts since last year’s. Still reeling from the blow from Google. Should I play the disgruntled employee and dig up teh gossip? Or give it the self-help spin and pretend it was all a wonderful tale with a lesson to learn? Won’t do neither. It all feels too much like dragging myself down to a dirty little world I came to despise.

Let’s just say I’m heading back to the Academy.

As I write this I just completed 26, and also just completed the final exam for a position in the São Paulo University staff. I honestly can’t say whether I performed well enough. Should I succeed, I’ll be in an uniquely convenient place to dual-class employee/student. Should I fail… I’ll dual-class anyway.

Society keep saying I can’t/shouldn’t/mustn’t do it. Society doesn’t know shit.

Yes, it’s hard. But I’ll keep trying.

Edit: a winnar is me‼ (just barely though)

Once I was complaining to a co-worker that, because my computer day job was taking up so much time (especially with São Paulo’s slow commuting), it interfered with the Literature studies for my second degree. He said, but I have this friend who’s also studying in your university and, even with all the work here, he’s getting passing grades without any trouble.

I was flabbergasted and didn’t know what to say until I reset my worldview to his. For my co-worker (and for most people in IT) a university is kind of an obstacle course to get tickets to better jobs. Therefore, the only point of studying is to get good grades. I tried to explain, as better as I could, that I don’t join a university to get a title, and absolutely not because I want a job. I start a course because I want to know stuff. Really know stuff. If I don’t have time to read all the bibliography and to comprehend all the topics, I’ll be unsatisfied.

But what does it takes to know stuff?

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No such thing as «learning»

Educator John Holt hates the word «education». As an alternative, he uses «helping people do things better». Another word he hates is «learning». He substitutes «doing». There’s no dividing line between learning flute and playing flute. You don’t say, ok, I’ve learned to play the flute, now I’ll start playing it. From the first time you bring a flute to the lips and try to blow (and fail), you are playing flute. You just do it progressively better.

Holt’s argument is philosophically sound, but unsatisfying. For practical as well as ideological reasons, we want to separate the apprentices from the masters. We want diplomas, black belts, certificates, tea-names, language proficiency tests. For every field there is a fuzzy but established line between learning and doing (and quixotic attempts to unfuzzify it).

One possible criteria for the dividing line is at what point do you perform well enough to get paid. Another is the Boiling Teapot Metaphor. This is a description for the learning process that keeps popping up; I first heard it from my karate teacher. He said, learning karate is like boiling water in a teapot — at first you need a lot of fire to bring the water to 100°C, then you need less fire to keep it at the boiling temperature, but at all times if you stop the fire you’ll have to start again. Most (all?) skills work like this, and then a natural candidate to the dividing line is the boiling point — the point at which you need less practice to avoid cooldown.

Let’s use these ill-defined dividing lines, for the sake of argument if nothing else. I am a flute player if I can read sheets and play mostly anything and perhaps compose my own music. I am a painter if I can represent arbitrary scenes and objects on canvas, and use it to express “art”, whatever my definition of that is. I am a tea-person (chajin) if I can, with some preparation, perform any of the hundred or so formal tea procedures. Far from perfect definitions, but they’ll have to do.

With that in mind, we can ask again: what does it take to know stuff?

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Ten years of solitude

Peter Norvig, famous computer guy, wrote an article about how long it takes to become a skilled programmer; his answer is «about ten years of concentrated effort» (the post you’re reading right now is kind of an inferior version of his article, so by all means go see the source). Norvig’s point is not just some arbitrary guru-talk for computer science undergrads. He cites several cognitive studies on learning, and the same figure of ten years pops again and again, for fields as different as soccer, painting, chess, or topology. As Norvig puts it,

There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967.

Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, looks closely at what the ten years mean, by comparing the top, middle, and bottom groups of a Berlin Academy of Music class:

Everyone, from all three groups, started playing at roughly the same time — around the age of five. In those first few years, everyone practised roughly the same amount – about two or three hours a week. But around the age of eight real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up as the best in their class began to practise more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight by age 12, 16 a week by age 14, and up and up, until by the age of 20 they were practising well over 30 hours a week. By the age of 20, the elite performers had all totalled 10,000 hours of practice over the course of their lives. The merely good students had totalled, by contrast, 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers just over 4,000 hours.

So ten years of concentrated effort means about 10,000 hours of active struggle to improve oneself.

I’ll suggest some exercises to drive this point home. Think of a friend who you believe is a “genius” or “talented” at something — drawing, programming, music, skating, whatever. Go and ask him since when he’s practicing that skill. Then, with his help, try to estimate how many hours he has trained so far. Alternatively, think of a “genius” figure you admire — Da Vinci, Picasso, Michael Jordan, Pelé, Mohammed Ali, anyone — and go research how they lived their pre-fame lives and how much they trained. What UFC champion won the title by training two times a week, two hours per class? What famous physicist read only enough books to get passing grades? If you believe in born geniuses, you’re in for a surprise.

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Of course, people are different and you probably won’t become Mozart by training as much as Mozart. It’s statistically improbable you’ll become an Olympic athlete, even if you train as much as an Olympic athlete. The legends of each area have all kinds of factors other than personal effort helping them, including not only genetics but cultural environment, economics, and plain old luck. There are five points I’m trying to make with all this talk about cognitive research and the value of training—

1. Norvig’s «no shortcuts». To repeat, even friggin Mozart had to work his ass off before composing anything of value. You will have, too.
2. No whining. You might not be an Olympian, but you’re not allowed to use «I don’t have any talent» or «I can’t do this» or «I don’t have slow-twitch muscles» as excuses until you put up 10k hours of deliberative practice.
3. No biologic fatalism. Even if you won’t become a world-famous name, after 10k hours you’ll almost certainly be skilled in that field, enough to satisfy any of those fuzzy definitions of «skilled».
4. Enjoy the ride. It will take a long time to get there. If you’re anxious to be a famous artist or an accomplished teacher, you’ll be impatient for ten years. There’s no choice but to learn to enjoy learning. Don’t expect to be an earth-shattering comic-book author or to come up with wicked guitar solos like your rock heroes after six months of casual dabbling.
5. Jack-of-all-trades is master of none. Do you want to learn music, drawing, writing, languages, physics, woodworking, parkour, typography, cooking? (I do). But how much do you want to learn? For each of these skills, do you want it badly enough to spend 10 years of hard work?

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The Skill Slot Theory

When I had to choose a personal domain, I wanted something long-lasting. I asked myself, what attribute or slogan do I associate with so strongly that, even if my personality and interests change drastically in the coming years, I will still relate to it? I chose «namakajiri» — dilettante — because I don’t think I’ll ever be free from the desire of learning things from widely different areas. But the 10k hours figure, coupled with the span of the human life, put a hard limit on how many skills you can master. Let’s assume you live up to 75 with your mental and physical health intact, and that you have enough knowledge and independence to choose your path at fifteen. That gives us 60 years to learn things. Assuming you apply yourself, hard, during all this time, it means you can learn at most six skills.

Human beings have six skill slots.

Even worse, the value of the slots is not the same. The first skill you learn, you get to use for 50–70 years, most of them with full health. The sixth one, for at best a couple decades as an elder.

This insight highlight what exactly was the tragedy of me choosing programming when I was a teenager. At the time, I believed I could learn anything if I worked hard enough — which is true. Problem is, it takes too long. I wanted to make videogames, but it turns out the things I liked about videogames had nothing to do with programming (and the game creators I liked were not programmers). So I wasted my precious first skill slot with a skill I don’t even care about. It’s nice to have this skill, but it’s not nice to lose a decade on it. If I had considered that at fifteen, I’m sure I’d have spent this time learning something I value more.

The only consolation is that this tragedy is probably the most widespread one, ever. Last week I said to a friend, «I feel like I threw away the last ten years», and he said «welcome to 99% of humankind». It’s always hard to anticipate consequences, and it’s especially hard when adolescent invulnerability feeling blinds you to the limitations of reality (if you want to see this effect for yourself, try asking a sample of last-year students from any course what do they think about their area). I’ll be sure to expose my children to these ideas as early as possible.

This Skill Slot Theory is not a real theory, of course (I feel like I’m stating the obvious, but it’s easy to be misunderstood in the webs). I’m using the word in a cute, tongue-in-cheek Internet sense. There are all kinds of problems with the reasoning, like, to what extent you can try interweave training and exercise more than one skill in ten years (a good idea, according to cognitive science), what skills give experience bonus to others (e.g. programming and math), and where to put those darn certification lines (I might not become a master woodworker by fiddling with wood once a month, but what about being skilled enough for home repair or building a few simple cabinets)? Nonetheless, as a general abstraction of mastering skills I think it’s a good approximation for ambitious people — 10k hours in ten years to become real-good at anything, and a depressingly limit on the number of skills in a life-span. I do think the five stupid self-help slogans coined above are valid. And remember,

The road winds uphill: all law, all nature must be overcome.

—Aleister Crowley, The Book Of Lies

«I left that book on a train a long time ago.» —Agent Graves, 100 Bullets #96

(Warning: These three pages are not really a spoiler, but they’re from the innermost meat of From Hell. If you plan to read it, you might want to start at the beginning for full impact.)

I am re-watching Sailor Moon with my two-years old daughter, an episode per night, before sleeping. Sailor Moon is so good it hurts. I can only imagine what it must have felt like, to be involved in the production of something that’s so awesomely spot-on, so correct (in the sense of Wittgenstein’s æsthetics). There has been nothing like this in anime for a long time; perhaps it cannot ever happen again, because we lost the innocence — we cannot go back to not being ironic about anime; today’s Sailor Moon is, inevitably, Puni Puni Poemi.

One thing Sailor Moon got me thinking about are metanarratives. There is some variation in the metanarratives employed for male education; Jump-style is, of course, “becoming strong”, while Western-style is “being strong” — a subtle but very important distinction; Spider-man and Superman and He-man don’t get their powers through arduous training like Goku or Ryū or Naruto; they’re either born with them, or receive them magically, but in any case it’s a gift. The Western boy-fiction often requires the help of godlike authority figures (Gandalf, the Sorceress, the Dungeon Master), while the Japanese substitute this for the importance of friends or “comrades” (nakama). Social implications of these differences are left as exercise. In any case, both the Japanese and American boy-narratives boil down to fighting; to killing dragons.

The female metanarrative is different, and, in both cultural contexts, reflects an earlier era where women were supposed to make products out of themselves and market the result to the best bidder — to “score a good husband”. So the fiction for young females everywhere is about finding true love. Boy fiction: if you just win the battle, everything will be fine. Girl fiction: if you could just get him to like you, everything will be fine.

It’s interesting that the female metanarrative is carried pretty much intact to adult life, while its male counterparts undergo metamorphosis. The themes of struggle and victory have, necessarily, to be abstracted, because almost no one is actually a warrior or a hunter. (I suspect this metamorphosis doesn’t happen with, say, children of religious guerrillas; they can carry on the wars of childhood heroes verbatim). The literal dragons of boyhood become Chesterton’s dragons (“Fairy tales are true, not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be killed.”) But what are the dragons, exactly? In post-capitalist society, it is marginality. You’re supposed to be mainstream. Being a wino or a bum is obviously a contemporary sin, but so is being a NEET. The mystique of marginality, as celebrated by the beats and the hippies, now falls short; you’re allowed to identify as a “punk” or “artist” just as long as you keep being “mature” and “responsible” and “law-abiding” —.i.e. you’re allowed to deviate just as long as the deviation is fake. As Pink Floyd puts it, the metanarrative of our era is “get a good job with more pay and you’re OK”. People voluntarily strive for “self-improvement” — not to empower themselves in the Stoic sense, but to get a good job. It’s like slaves started to train themselves to better please their masters.

The problem with these narratives is, it’s all lies.

Both the male and female metanarratives are empty promises. Find the perfect Other, get in a prestigious university, buy a big house and life will stop sucking. But if you do it, you’ll find life will keep on sucking, about as much as it does right now. Go on a stroll with your soulmate, and you’ll meet the Buddha’s three men in the park—the sick, the old, the dead, Nature’s way of reminding you of your own death clock. Sleep in your big new house, and Sartre’s nausea will be waiting for you 2AM with a cup of insomnia. What are you supposed to do then? Improve your relationship, buy a larger house. Only the ever-flashier distractions we created for ourselves prevent us of seeing the obvious folly of all this striving-for.

As a parent, what can I do about this sorry, pedestrian state of affairs? Philosophy, for starters. Go to a library and find any “introduction to philosophy” book. Don’t read it; they all suck. But browse the table of contents. Mainstream society is still entangled in the first chapter. The best parts of it stopped at Descartes. We need more Rousseau, more Goethe, more Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucalt, Lacan, Baudrillard, Dogen, Zhuangzi (not trying to be exhaustive or to brag here, just to give a sampler of what’s lacking in the worldview described above). It would be silly to try to preach society about what they’re losing, so the best we can do is to help individual people to find their own calling. The most important thing to teach children is thus how to not bow down to social pressure, and the most important virtue is egoism.

Another important task is to deconstruct the work/husband narratives from early on; say, by exposing data on suicide by the rich and how romantic infatuation burns off quickly.

A comparison of fantasy books:

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• Lord of the Rings (LotR): good story, bad philosophy.
• His Dark Materials (HDM): bad story, good philosophy.
• Harry Potter (HP): good story, good philosophy.
• Narnia (CoN): bad story, bad philosophy.

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• Books of Magic (BoM; the comic book series): better story, and better philosophy (when compared to its successor, HP).

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Coming-of-age stories: HDM, HP, BoM.
Not-coming-of-age stories: LotR, CoN.

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Knows What Storytelling Is: LotR, BoM, HP.
Painfully Proselytizing: CoN, HDM.

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Actually Tries, With Varying Success, to Create an Immersible World:

• LotR.

Do Not Even Try, Only Skimming the Surface of Verisimilitude:

• Everything else.

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Enlightened about Sex: HP, HdM, BoM.
Irritatingly Puritanical (non-)Approach to Sex: LotR, CdN.

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Condescending to Children and Teenagers: LotR, CdN.
Understands Children and Teenagers: HP, HdM, BoM.

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Is Sexist:

• LotR, CdN

Pretends Not To Be Sexist But When You Look Closely Is Actually Quite Sexist:

• HP, HDM

Actually Has Women Outside Male-Supporting Roles:

• BoM

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Racist:

• LotR, CdN.

Enlightened about Race:

• HP, BoM.

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Understand what Magic and Mythology is All About:

• LotR.
• BoM and its predecessor, Hellblazer.
• Tokyo Babylon and XxxHolic.

Pedestrian, Literal, Uninteresting, Unmagic Portrayal of Magic:

• HP.
• CdN.
• Dungeons & Dragons (&, Consequently, Every Videogame Ever, the Most Notable being World of Warcraft, which Fed Back into D&D, thus Creating a Loop of Uncreative Bore).

I decided to do something very stupid. I decided to translate the most famous Japanese poetic diary, Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi.

(This is particularly stupid because I’m still around 3kyū level. I can barely translate a Sakura Card Captors manga with several hours of concentrated effort and hundreds of trips to dictionaries and grammar books. I definitely shouldn’t be messing with bungo and kyūkanazukai at this point. But I’m an idiot, so I’ll try.)

I hate computers, and I especially hate reading on computers, so I typeset a version for print. It is based on the digitalization by the University of Virginia’s Japanese Text Initiative. I do not have permission to reproduce it (no one returned my emails). If someone at UVa thinks this is a problem, please contact me.

I figured perhaps people could use this, so I’m putting it online. I’m not a typesetter, much less a Japanese typesetter, so don’t expect professional-quality work (it’s done on openoffice, of all things; I couldn’t even figure out how to do vertical layout on TeX). Nonetheless, it has a few advantages over simply printing UVa’s website:

• Vertical right-to-left layout.
• Large kanji with plenty of whitespace to write furigana and notes.
• No notes on variations, and no English text (I kept it simple for study).
• Set in Meiji-era Dejima (Tsukiji) type. (Yes, I know that’s an anachronism, but at least it’s less anachronistic than using a modern type. After all, the historically appropriate way would be reading it in handwriting, but that’s, of course, impossible. The truth is, I love the Dejima font and wanted to do something with it.)

Get The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no Hosomichi おくのほそ道), print version (PDF file, A4, 60 pages).

People in the writing subreddit often post writing prompts. Problem is, these writing prompts are mostly for the kind of story I have no interest in — things like «write about love at a distance» or «write about how you’d fix a mistake you made in the past». So I thought I’d propose alternative writing prompts, for my own later use if nothing else:

• Write a story involving a lone ninja, an hippopotamus, and Hillary Clinton.
• Write a story involving a fat hairy man with a webcam, Iceland, and an anagram of your middle name.
• Write a story involving talking badgers wearing ties, 70’s rock’n’roll, and the end of the Western civilization.
• Rewrite a fairy tale in hard-boiled noir style.
• Write a fantasy story where every single character turns out to be a villain bent on world domination.
• Write a standard love story, then apply S+7. Try to use the worst dictionary you can find. If the result is still boring, write another story and do it again.
• Write a story in boustrophedon that can be read backwards (line by line). The theme should be the life of Native Americans.
• Write a serious, formal sonnet about a videogame character of your choice. The style should be old-fashioned but not so much as to become caricaturesque.
• Write poetry on how much you love coffee (or tea, or bacon). Make it sound like advertising copy.
• Choose a section of the last contract or bureaucratic document you had to sign and rewrite it as poetry.

Suggested story formats are: short story, fable, drabble (≤1000 words), 100-words story (exactly), dribble (≤50 words), 6-word story, Twitter microfiction (≤140 characters), Oulipian knight’s tour.

Suggested poetry formats are: limerick, double dactyl, sonnet, rhyming couplets, anything in strict iambic pentameter, real haiku (not Internet haiku, those are too easy!), renga (find some friends!), rap.

(This post on reddit)

HERE’S MY ENTIRE EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY SUMMED UP IN A SINGLE SENTENCE:

“Take children seriously“.

NOW HERE’S MY ENTIRE EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY SUMMED UP IN ANOTHER SENTENCE:

“Help people do stuff better“.

BUT THESE ARE PLAGIARIZED SO HERE’S MY ENTIRE EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY SUMMED UP IN A SENTENCE I ACTUALLY MADE UP MYSELF:

I want to help my kids’ life not to suck.

AND HERE’S A LIST OF THINGS I THINK MIGHT HELP LIVES BE LESS SUCKY:

• slow life movement; “ganbaranai” (compare & contrast with simple life)
  • also slow food movement, localvorism
• polyamory
• unschooling
• barefooting (kids are right, shoes suck)
• the ongoing craft renaissance; maker, hacker, diy culture —tear apart your stuff, learn how it works, make things with your hands
• couchsurfing, carpooling, freecycling
• downshifting —”The trouble with the rat race is, even if you win, you are still a rat.”
• altmodernism; the artist as a rootless wanderer; local traditions are great & breaking them is also great
• queer theory; let the kids free from gender chains —boys can sew just fine, girls can fix cars too
• nonexpert age; the cultural acceptance of dilettantism; youtube, deviantart, guitar tabs, guitar hero & rock band, game building tools, flickr, blogs
• creative commons, free software, wikipedia; the sharing of intellectual work seem as positive and pleasurable
• rejecting over-protection; bring back dangerous games, playing with fire, chemistry kits, tree-climbing, violent cartoons; «dangerous» books
• non-competitive physical activities: camping-hiking-backpacking, parkour, (ethnic–) dancing, traditional martial arts, pleasure swimming
• an environmental conscience guided by the scientific method instead of knee-jerk feel-good emotional impressions
• microscopes, telescopes, & amateur astronomy
• good ol’ libraries & public art centers
• early & frequent contact with universities; universities seen as places to learn cool stuff not as gateways to highly-paying jobs
• punching bags
• cooking.

Manga; read right to left. This collage has no big spoilers, but is fairly large below the cut.

(more…)

Then one day you say the wrong thing to the wrong person and bam!, you’re fired
and forgotten,
shaken from Maya without even a goodbye,
blown by the wind in the streets with waves of other discarded bourgeois youth,
we the losers.

The Machine hungers for new blood.

A quarter century, and back to the starting point. Not much to show for all the trouble — a couple babies, a résumé full of job-hopping, a few boxes of the antidepressants I now can’t afford, too many books, too much debt. It doesn’t matter. In the town nothing’s real except the town. It’s morning and grandma is baking me cake.