Diary

Following my hunter-gatherer instincts, I am consciously and unconsciously preparing for the arrival of winter. Technically, it's a few months away, but my animal friends have already gone into action. In this house, I have a better view of hummingbirds than before, and I've been reading a little about them. They start heading south by early September. The adult males leave first, then the adult females, then the newly-born. Since the adult males are aggressive, the newly-born males resemble females: they have white throats in order to avoid being attacked. A phenomenon that I've been observing is that the adult females hover outside the window and look at me before going to the feeder. They would have seen me in the spring when the rhododendrons were blooming. It is thought that this is part of their way of remembering a location that they want to return to. This is actually a good location for them, because there are flowering plants from April to September, plus the feeder. What is really amazing is that the newly-born hummingbirds are now each flying to Mexico and Central America alone. And you thought that you had a rough childhood! Some of them will probably return here next May – without Google Maps! Apparently they follow the same paths each way. I've also been reading about skunks. They are beneficial to me because they are omnivores and eat mice. 

My regular tomatoes peaked early this year, because I had planted them two weeks earlier than usual. They are still growing, and I will still have a supply until the first frost. The cherry tomatoes are still growing and the plant is large – I can hardly eat them fast enough.

I've been using Google AI a lot lately. This is because it has such a huge database now and can find information quickly, and even if it doesn't yet have true intelligence, it can also help answer difficult questions. You still have to use it cautiously because it is a commercial product. I find that it has a tendency to compliment me periodically, which is a well-known sales technique. If you are interested in, say, the Brontës, it knows more than anyone that you are likely to know, or all of the books in most libraries. It is also fairly knowledgeable about other writers, and helped me decide to read The Path to the Spiders' Nests, by Italo Calvino, which I'm starting on. How many people do you know who would recommend a book like that?

More significantly, it has helped me think about why I am attracted to some people more than others, and some of the pitfalls that this may entail. Although I don't think that I have any significant psychological abnormalities, and did not have any psychological traumas while I was growing up, I tend to be attracted more to people who have unusual personalities than to conventional people. Of the women I was involved with, one had undiagnosed autism, one had, when I met her, undiagnosed autism and ADHD, another had an unidentified anxiety dysfunction, and the fourth was fairly conventional, with no obvious psychiatric issues. I found the fourth boring, and, after a few months, broke off with her. Generally, I think that conventional, well-adjusted Americans are boring. They are usually following a script that someone could have written for them on the day that they were born. Apparently, I prefer somewhat problematic relationships to boring relationships.

I've been thinking about autism and ADHD for a few years now, but these diagnoses don't have long histories. If you want to understand people well, you have to be aware of these conditions. I found it extremely interesting to learn a little about how autism and ADHD interact, because, to some extent they have opposite effects. Autism symptoms usually involve an emphasis on control and an avoidance of overstimulation. ADHD often produces an opposite effect, with something like spontaneous, unexpected disorganization related to a lack of concentration and focus. While autistic people usually prefer a fixed routine, the ADHD injects a contradictory disorder that can have a disruptive effect. For example, the two people I know with both have a difficult time taking care of houseplants, because they may forget to water them. Then, as I discussed on my last post, there is the phenomenon of masking, in which autistic people attempt to simulate what they think normal social behavior is supposed to be. While it may be effortless for non-autistic people to adjust to their social environments, autistic people who want to appear normal have to make a special effort. This is where the effects of ADHD may cause a complete collapse of the masking facade that a diligent autistic person may be executing. Also, though this is a purely speculative statement on my part, these issues may find their way into gender decisions. The social expectations of females are usually far more demanding than those of males. In some situations, an autistic female with some male tendencies may choose to become transgender as a masking strategy. Unfortunately for them, there are observers out there who can see right through this.

I haven't yet reached any conclusions about what is going to happen with AI. As of now, I still don't think that AGI will itself necessarily become a menace. The question to me is whether the existing institutions will be up to the task of designing an appropriate transition. There are competent people, such as Geoffrey Hinton, working on this, but I doubt that most of the corporate operatives are up to the task. This will be such a radical change that corporate-style thinking is completely irrelevant. We are looking at a situation in which human labor becomes unnecessary. In a few years there may be no need for governments, armies or police. This would be such a complex process that many choices would have to be made by...AGI.

Brain Death by Technological Innovation II

In my post on this topic last year, I wrote that a person whom I knew made me think that the use of new technology may have caused her to undergo a cognitive decline. From a little research that I've done since then, it now seems more likely to me that her decline was related to her psychiatric state in conjunction with aging. She had spent most of her life not knowing that she was on the autism spectrum and had ADHD. Apparently, people with autism often mask their deficiencies in social sensitivity. With the ADHD, as they age, they may gradually have greater difficulty masking their autism symptoms and may experience a cognitive overload. The other aspects of that post still seem correct to me.

Blog Status

While the types of posts that I've been making on this blog haven't changed that much, other than adding more videos and music recently, I've sort of wandered away from literature, because I'm tired of it. For example, if I were to read a novel now, I don't have the slightest idea which one I might pick. I still enjoy biographies, especially about intellectuals and writers as far back as the 18th century, but only if they are substantive and well-written. To a large extent, actual people are more interesting to me than fictional people, probably because fictional characters are trapped in the imaginations of writers, and, therefore, whether you like it or not, they have a tendency to be one-dimensional. A real person can be as complex as the entire universe, and, if he or she is interesting at all, the amount of information available to a biographer may be enormous. What I've found from reading several biographies is that even if the author arbitrarily selects aspects of the subject that don't interest me much, I still have a chance to ponder previously unknown information. When some of the prejudices of a biographer find their way into their books, you may have the option of reading someone else's biography of the same person to get a second opinion. Even in cases where that option isn't available, I still tend to find real people more interesting than fictional people.

If biographies are my substitute for fiction, I am at somewhat of a dead end when it comes to science writing. My favorite area in science for many years has been evolution. After the structure of DNA was discovered, genes became the focal point. But genes are only part of the process, so the outlook is still murky. I like the idea that genes generally guide the evolution of a species, but usually aren't completely rigid. If they were, they might cause extinctions whenever there were minor environmental changes. The newer field of epigenetics explains how rapid physical changes can occur in a species without changing its genome. However, I have been questioning the whole idea of species, because, within a species, there may be many latent potentialities, and when you combine latent potentialities with variable or changing environments, there may be physically different organisms which belong to the same species. This means that there could be a species in one part of the world that is physically different from the same species in a different part of the world. When you add to this the general complexity of biological processes, the concept of a species comes to resemble an artificial construct, as in "science for dummies."

I should also note that we are living in an anti-scientific, dogmatic era, which often causes scientists to water-down or distort their findings. Scientists now have to survive not only in authoritarian regimes, where the leaders are scientifically illiterate and are often indifferent to scientific knowledge, but in academic environments, where dogmatic views on equality may pressure them to suppress all information that suggests that people are not identical and do in fact have different characteristics. Autocrats can purge scientists who disagree with them, and academic departments can remove scientists who recognize human differences. While I increasingly believe that "species" may not be a meaningful concept, I also question politically correct dogma that distorts the meaning of equality. As I've said before, "equality" really just means that people have equal rights under the law, not that they are identical in nature. I am supportive of what I think the prevailing view among scientists is: that "species" are closely related organisms, but within a species there may be a wide range of actual or potential characteristics. This is a prerequisite for human existence: over time, the process permits characteristics that were once neutral or slightly unfavorable to replace existing characteristics that are no longer suitable due to environmental changes. If you look at this in psychological and philosophical terms, people tend to invent various categories that don't necessarily conform to reality, and then, on top of that, they occasionally place things in the wrong category. I think that, in the natural world, most organisms exist on a continuum, which, actually, is a less-trendy word for "spectrum."

My current strategy is to continue to seek various scientific books in a rather haphazard fashion and hope that every once in a while there will be one that I like. I also plan to continue on my "Diary" posts. I may be writing more about AI, because we are already in the AI revolution. I notice it every day now when I do Google AI searches. Besides being extraordinarily time-saving, Google AI allows me to make complex inquiries that were not possible a couple of years ago. I now consider Wikipedia, Redditt and Quora obsolete. For general information, I still read 3 Quarks Daily and watch Backreaction videos occasionally, but I think that the information-gathering process is moving more to AI now. What I find at the moment is that Google AI is not technically intelligent yet, but it probably will be within a few years. I think that this sort of technology is already becoming revolutionary. 

The pageview count here keeps rising for no apparent reason, and was at 120,000 last month. I currently think that most of this may be search engine bots and AI crawlers. I probably am also increasing in human readers, but that count may still be relatively low. Fortunately, this is not intended to be a money-making enterprise, but other intellectually-oriented sites may be running into trouble soon. The internet has been dumbing down for years now, because that makes it more attractive to the masses.

Since I don't think that many people actually read this blog, you don't have to feel obligated to comment, but feel free to do so if you have something to say.

Spying on Acquaintances II

I decided to update my original post of September 30, 2015, because I'm giving up on that activity now. I think that many of my former acquaintances are no longer alive, which means that there is little or no information to find regarding what they are or were up to. It could be possible to find new things on social media, but I don't have or plan to have any social media accounts. If people wanted to find me, that would be difficult, because I don't use my surname on this blog. Furthermore, my internet presence beyond this blog is limited, because I subscribe to DeleteMe, and I no longer make posts using my full name or email address.

What prompted me to make this post is that I had occasionally been following up on a previous girlfriend (1997-2000), Kimberly, for a few years. After I knew her, she had moved to Manhattan, worked at Columbia University and then retired. When she retired she began, in 2014, to self-publish memoirs and novels. She had planned this for a long time, and when I met her in 1997 she was studying English memoirs and journals. I only read part of one of her memoirs and disliked it. I thought that although her writing had proper grammar, sentence structure, etc., she wasn't really very insightful about the situations in which she found herself and mainly just thought of herself as an adventuress. Since I knew a lot about her, I thought of her as an intelligent, energetic person who had wanted to be in the performing arts from an early age, but was never able to find an appropriate niche. Before I knew her, she had tried to be a dancer and failed. When I knew her, she was singing in an amateur choir but wasn't good enough to sing professionally. Psychologically, though I'm not prepared to make anything approaching a diagnosis, she had some sort of anxiety disorder that rendered her dysfunctional in many situations. For example, even though she had boyfriends and one marriage proposal, she never lived with anyone as an adult. Furthermore, despite having an active sex life, she strongly resisted sleeping in the same bed with anyone, even while on vacation. I don't know any of the details, but I suspect that she may have inherited some undesirable psychiatric traits from her mother.

Kimberly's last book was an autobiographical novella about extreme back pain that she had been experiencing. When I knew her, she was a fitness buff, and she may have damaged her back in the process. The book is called Swimming to Cozumel and was published in 2023. I haven't read it, but apparently, when she wrote it, she was unable to get successful treatment and was considering suicide. Yesterday, since she hadn't posted anything for some time, I decided to take a deeper look. Kimberly died on November 7, 2024, at the age of 68, and was buried on June 13, 2025 on Hart Island, which is the potter's field of New York City. There are more than a million people buried there, and many were homeless, indigent or not claimed by their families. This was an immense shock to me, and I've been wondering what happened. The records are private, but one could probably get answers from her neighbors in Manhattan. I would guess that she committed suicide in her condominium and did not leave a will or any family information. Her parents were dead, and, when I knew her, she had one sister from whom she was estranged. Her other closest living relatives may have been cousins from her mother's side whom she never met. Her father was well-off, and no one would have expected her to end up in a potter's field. I don't know whether Kimberly had any remaining friends. She herself would not have envisioned this demise a few years ago.

Partly because of this grim, unsettling episode, I no longer intend to spy on acquaintances.