🐯 Year of the Tiger (also, I'm back from hiatus!)

(16 min read)
(content note: mental health, lots of cussing)

Hi cats & kittens!

After 16 months of burnout-hiatus, I'm back and am not a better person! But I burnt through 16 months of savings so I'm taking your cash. (Well, starting next month. I paused the Patreon again on Feb 1st as a "grace period", since I'm introducing a refund/block policy & modifying the reward tiers. See "patreon housekeeping" at the end.)

I typed some bulletpoints to outline a really long Patreon post, then realized the bulletpoints are just as good & more respectful of your time.

Why am I sharing my personal reflections? Well, if you too have struggled with anger at the world, your communities, or yourself these past 2 years...

... well, the following probably won't help, but it's... there.

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What Did Nicky Learn During 16 Months of Burnout-Hiatus?

(Happy Disclaimer: the following will read very angry, but right now, I'm actually in a good mood! I was productive last week, and this week I'm staying with awesome friends. I just need to get my anger-bugs out. I'm telling you upfront you don't send me links to a crisis hotline or something. I'm fine now, really. Thanks for your sincere concern 💖)

• You know how when you hold your breath, eventually your brain stem forces you to breathe, screaming, "YOU NEED OXYGEN DUMMY"? That's my current hypothesis of burnout, and its little cousin, procrastination. Ignore your needs long enough (for stability, love, and creative growth) and the rest of your non-conscious brain will mutiny, screaming, "YOU NEED STABILITY, LOVE & GROWTH DUMBASS"
  
  • 🤬 Stability: [see later section, titled, "I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything".]
    
  • 💖 Love: (or relationships in general) I work alone, and work a lot, so even before 2020 my social well-being sucked, and the pandemic made it worse (as I'm sure it did for everyone). Though, the pandemic did force me to put 2x more effort into my relationships –– so maybe the "every pipe bomb has a silver lining" thing here will be, once things open up again, I can keep my 2x better social-connection habits.
    
  • ⭐️ Growth: Despite "interactive explanations" being novel for most people, it's not novel for me anymore, and I've been growing self-resentful for doing "the same damn thing" over and over. For example, 2 weeks into making my Covid-19 explorable, I deleted everything with no backups in a fit –– and I felt proud of myself for doing so. Yes, it's ironic that the person who makes stuff to help others learn playfully is not learning playfully. (But doctor, I am Pagliacci!) So, I tried to spend my hiatus trying new things. I didn't do as much as I wanted in 16 months, but I tried some stuff! For example:
    
    • Spent 3 months on a computer-science research project that was a dead end & did not work. I will probably [30% chance] post this null result online eventually, to spare future folks the pain.
      
    • Took Andrew Huang's course to learn how to make music with Ableton Live! I've made a few songs, and will [90% chance] release an album with all of them by next week.
      
    • Animated a raunchy musical-comedy starring a trans catgirl. It was released on my lewd patreon last week, and the public safe-for-work version will [90% chance] be launched by next week!
      
    • I went through a used copy of Uri Alon's textbook Introduction to Systems Biology, and did The ODIN's DIY Genetic Engineering kit. Check it out, I put some fluorescent jellyfish protein in E. Coli!

I also had an extra Petri dish, so I made a smiley face with my spit microbes:

And now, the angry part.

“I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything.“

~ Charles Darwin

• People throw around the phrase "faith in humanity", but for me it exactly psychologically functioned as a faith. In two ways:

1. It was the foundation for direction in my life, my hope for wanting to live to see the future, an anchor to hold me when all is Hell. That good ol' secular humanist narrative à la Carl Sagan/Kurzgesagt/CGP Grey: "I am but a neuron in the grand brain of humanity, it is my job to be a good reason-and-feeling-sharing neuron, so that one day humanity's brain will be mature, and we can all flourish & go to the stars & reverse entropy & kill death or whatever."
   
2. It was also like a faith in that challenging it hurt, and I knowingly engaged in confirmation bias to avoid that. Every time my faith in humanity was challenged (and 2020–2021 was full of that), I would "look for the helpers", read anecdotes to "restore faith in humanity", etc. You know, confirmation bias. Even while I knew one of the main reasons the world's so fucked is because of our confirmation bias.

What was I specifically angry about? Here's a (slightly edited) copy-paste from a message I sent to a friend:

Suffering a very, very, very long dark night of the soul due to watching almost all publics & policymakers fail spectacularly re: a respiratory-virus pandemic, one of the most predicted-in-advance-for-decades catastrophes.

I have sincerely lost sleep, realizing there's a 1-in-6 "Russian Roulette" chance that, in my lifetime, I will see an SK-Class Mass Suffering Event, such as (not mutually exclusive): a bioweapon pandemic, nuclear war, World War 3, a new age of autocratic empires.

And the worst part? Our problems aren't even due to lack of knowledge –– I know how to help with that! I teach stuff! –– but "merely" due to motivated reasoning (replicated research shows that more science literacy is associated with being more polarized, coz "more rational" usually just means more rationalizing), and our lack of give-a-shit for anything beyond zero-sum status and a one-news-cycle attention span.

And the worst worst part? This mental and moral rot isn't just in "the outgroup", it's already infected the movements & institutions I've put my trust in –– my own fans, my own friends! –– and it's escalated to the point where I can't even give constructive criticism without running a 1-in-20 "Critical Hit" chance of being doxxed, ostracized by people I loved, maybe booted off Patreon, and sent death threats & urges to commit suicide (the latter has already happened to me), all the while these Revolution-cosplayers tell themselves that exiling the merely-99%-believers is "solidarity", that outside ideas are "propaganda", that any inside critiques from the marginalized themselves are "infighting, distraction, tone policing, whatabout the other side", that guilt-by-association is critical thinking, that sadism is a moral compass.

And the worst worst WORST part? I have no idea how to express my anger without feeding the anger-attention-economy, "self-fulfilling cynicism", this Moloch that feeds upon you raging against Moloch, this Medusa-cognitohazard that turns your heart to stone if you know its face, this hydra that wants you to cut its heads off but if you don't do it the heads will keep eating you.

[inhale]

...and then there's the background noise of me being a transgender Asian immigrant in this angry world where I'm a triple political football.

I know that's wordy, so here's an easy-to-remember acronym:

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA".

But after several months of screaming into my pillow, I found a few idea-feelings that seem to sustainably help. Maybe they'll help you too: (20% chance I'll expand these into fuller blog posts later this year)

• Faith in humanity *is not required* to live a meaningful, moral life. Even if humanity ends itself this century –– would that make love, learning, and pleasure less meaningful for me while I'm alive? No. Would I want to start being immoral? No. If anything it'd up my commitment to the Alexander Solzhenitsyn quote, "Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
  
• Choosing to put my mental health + morality on a foundation other than faith-in-humanity means I can finally not engage in confirmation bias, re: future existential threats & human nature.
  
• "Are humans inherently good, bad, or in-between?" used to haunt me so much. But now I think it's as silly as asking, "are carbon atoms inherently sweet, bitter, or in-between?" Carbon atoms do have a specific nature, and so do we, but "good/bad" is not even a useful explanatory model.
  
• My best hypothesis right now for "what humans are like 99% of the time", is "a bunch of habits trained by very very very short-term reinforcement and punishment". (e.g: Idea flatters me? Accept it. Idea critiques me? Reject it.) Note this is even "more cynical" than the classic economist "people just maximize their own utility" model –– I no longer think people, including myself, are even good at that.
  
• And yet... that's fine. Why did I used to eat unhealthily? Because it was short-term easy & reinforcing. How did I learn to eat healthily? Did I find some deep spring of willpower within me? Nah I was just shown how to season & roast pre-chopped veggies in bulk then dip it in hummus. Delicious, takes 5 minutes of prep. I now suspect good living, good reason, and good altruism are all "just" figuring out how to make the good thing easy & fun.
  
  • (Aside: I suspect that even System 2 "rational" thinking may just be a bunch of "When this, Then that" habits! When: I see a problem I don't know how to solve, Then: think of a related simpler problem. When: I come up with a plausible idea, Then: try to falsify my own beliefs by looking for counterexamples. Etc.)
    
• "Make the world a better place" is the moral code I grew up with, and I have learnt it's horribly unhealthy. In hindsight, it's for all the obvious reasons:

1. It makes your circle of concern way bigger than your circle of influence.
2. It's motivation by external results, not intrinsic motivation.
3. Thinking about "saving the world" is a super-stimulus for morality, like Prince Charming is a super-stimulus for love, or airbrushed faces are a super-stimulus for beauty.
4. It means using yourself (and those in "your movement") as a means to an ends, a dehumanized tool.

• Maybe a healthier moral code is "Just build a flourishing, excellent life for you & your close ones *without hurting others' long-term flourishing* (ideally something win-win, or with positive externalities)". Part of me still flinches at this coz it sounds selfish, but given how most people seem to be destructive to others and themselves, if everyone adopted the code "help yourself & at least don't hurt others", we'd be living in a world that's 10x better off.
  
• Every cause I believe in, no matter how noble, will eventually be hijacked by zero-sum status-seeking narcissists. And it usually goes like this:
  
  • "Ok, they're being a jerk, but it's harmless, they're not getting that much attention."
  • "Ok, now these jerks are getting attention, but they mean well, and besides! No such thing as bad press! At least they're raising awareness about the issue."
  • "Ok, now they're being counterproductive re: this issue and are reveling in retributive sadism, but they're not as bad as the other side. And I don't want to critique them, that's infighting, that'll give ammunition to the other side."
  • They now run this movement. All my marginalized friends & I are now terrified to speak out about it because the sadists have demonstrated they are able and willing to get us doxxed, fired, and/or physically harmed –– "for our sake".
    
• As the old dudebro proverb goes, "If she'll cheat with you, she'll cheat on you." To riff off this: if they'll be a narcissistic asshole for you, they'll be a narcissistic asshole to you.
  
• Just as procrastination may be the little cousin of burnout [aversion due to unmet needs]... maybe motivated reasoning is the little cousin of narcissistic personality disorder? [self-esteem based on being perfect now, not recognizing your own mistakes in order to be better later]
  
• I really, really need to learn how to retaliate in anger. I have no idea how to express anger healthily, so I usually bottle it. This keeps happening to me: get involved with a narcissist, forgive them because that's what "a good person is supposed to do", try my best to "save them", get the life sucked out of me, exit, repeat a year later. One thing I wished I was clearer about in Evolution of Trust is that "always cooperating" is not just a harmful strategy for yourself, it's a harmful strategy for the world around you, because you enable and reward abusers. Retaliation without forgiveness is bad, but so is forgiveness without retaliation. (Is "forgiveness" even meaningful if you're not even able or willing to retaliate?) Maybe "retaliation" is too strong a word, I just mean "clearly enforcing norms, boundaries, a social contract."
  
  • However, then the problem is: how do you retaliate against narcissists in an attention economy? Giving them angry attention in an attention economy is like... fending someone off by throwing crumpled $10 bills at them. And attempts at censorship (morality aside) just lead to a Streisand Effect. Some ideas, not mutually exclusive:
    
    • Starve jerks of any attention. "Don't feed the trolls".
      
    • Make educational material to reduce/prevent narcissism in the first place. (Here's an interesting paper on how to raise kids with high self-esteem but not narcissism!)
      
    • Socially reward & promote role models who are exemplars of compassion & careful critical thought. (e.g. a couple of my current fave examples: Max Roser, recent-years Scott Alexander)
      
    • Create a very short-term, immediate "incentive gradient" to socially reward non-zero-sum actors, and ignore zero-sum narcissists, to shift our culture away from "dunk on, own, obliterate the other side" to "actually finding win-win solutions".
      
    • (Do you have any other ideas?)

IN SUM:

I've been lonely, stagnating, and very angry, but 16 months later I'm sick & tired of being sick & tired, so I gotta pull my shit together and actually work the problem. So, here are my (tentative) plans, and public commitments for how I want to better myself in 2022:

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Tentative Plans for 2022

Again, I am making Lunar New Year my new year because fuuuuuuck I was not in the mood on Jan 1st. Also now I'm a day late for Lunar New Year but whatever.

The plan:

• Overall: switch to smaller (1-or-2 month long?) projects. This way I can spend more time on my relationships (Need for Love/Relationships), and "smaller projects" let me explore more (Need for Creative Growth).
  
• 🥜 Feb 2022: Nutshell. Here's my previous post on this, if you forgot! Still in open beta! I'll likely [70% confidence] finish up Version 1.0 of this "expandable explanations" tool this month, February! (I can then use Nutshell for my blog, so that standalone articles can "build up" to something bigger.)
  
• 🕸 March 2022: How To Infer Causation From Correlation. Then, I'll likely [60% confidence] do an indirect collab with Andy Matuschak to use Orbit (embedded spaced repetition prompts) to make an interactive explanation about causal inference. (This project will also use Nutshell)
  
• 🧬 Learning New Skills: [50% confidence] Learn statistics & biology. (maybe some AI/cognitive science too) Not just the theory, but also doing it in practice (maybe even some original research projects?)
  
• 🎳 Migrate my audience/support base to non-zero-sum, kind, open-minded, smart people –– and start actively weeding out zero-sum, motivated-reasoning narcissists who excuse their own abuses because "the other side is worse". This may entail:
  
  • Upping my security to mitigate doxxing
  • A new refund & block policy [see next section]
  • Making explainers on:
    
    • probabilistic thinking/decision-making
      
    • good emotions for good reason (how emotions can help reason is surprisingly under-studied!) e.g. feeling good about "mistakes" coz they're an opportunity to learn, not a threat to your ego (latter strategy leads to motivated reasoning in average case, narcissism in worst case)
      
    • how to reach hearts & minds, and actually persuade people. (Turns out shaming backfires. Who'd've thunk! Also here's a really cool paper on 3 pre-registered RCTs on reducing prejudice against unauthorized immigrants & trans folk for months, with one-time, empathetic 10-minute conversations!)
      
    • intellectual virtues, with an emphasis on SELF-critique. (Most tutorials on critical-thinking/biases/fallacies/etc, unfortunately, seem to just end up giving the reader tools to only critique the outgroup's ideas; one-sided critical thinking. More "rational" → more rationalizing.)
      
  • Investigating ideas that are controversial even within my own ingroups. (but in a good-faith way, not an edgelord way of saying stuff that's only controversial to your outgroup but 100% flatters your ingroup.) Like... I dunno, how do you sick fucks feel about human cloning, or consensual adult non-reproductive incest, or clone incest

And finally, as a result of all the above:

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Patreon Housekeeping Stuff:

• This Patreon will be un-paused & start taking your cash on March 1st! If any of the above is not okay with you, you have until then to use my new refund policy:
  
• 💸 New refund policy: Just Patreon DM me "refund" and I'll send back the last 3 months' worth of pledges (Patreon's maximum), no questions asked. (Give me a week or two to process it; Patreon stopped sending me email notifications for DMs for some reason. -_-) This is to give people an incentive & face-saving way to exit.
  
• 🚯 New block policy: if you're being a dick to other commenters or me, even if –– especially if –– it's for causes I support, you get a private DM warning if it's not too bad, but if it's really bad or a 2nd time, perma-block with 3-month refund. (Private, no public call-outs, I'm not a sociopath.)
  
• 🎁 New reward tiers: I'll probably [50% confidence – depends on your feedback to this decision] change it to just one "real" reward tier that gets you everything –– name credits, early access, exclusive "What's Nicky Learning" posts –– with "extra donation" tiers above. This tier will probably(?) be $3, to account for fees/inflation since I launched this Patreon eight years ago in 2014. But DO NOT WORRY if you're pledging $1 or $2 a month, you'd be grandparented in! 👍

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. . .

Remember, the above was the outline for the Patreon post I wanted to write. If I'd actually expanded it out, that'd be... what, a 2-hour-long read? Count yo' blessings.

In any case I hope that splurge of blagghhhh was... helpful to you? If you were also raging at the world & yourself these past two years? At the least, I hope it puts into context my future plans, so you can –– with informed consent –– decide if you want to stick around. Remember, just DM me "refund" to get the Patreon-maximum refund, no questions asked. You weren't charged Feb 1st, March 1st is when I start charging again.

Also, thank you for all your kind words re: my last crap-mental-health post.

For those of you who are cool, thank you for being cool. 💖

IN SUM, 2:

I've been lonely, stagnating, and angry, but I want to fix that. In 2022, I will use my anger and turn it into a tiger's courage.

(60% probability)

Happy Lunar New Year! 🐯
~ Nicky Case