A Bad Blog

[draconica]

I'm approaching this blog as a Bad Blog — as in "to write one good blog, write 1000 bad ones."  

The number of 1000 is of course a SigmaGrindset-esque exaggeration: truly I tell you, dear reader, that you will see great improvements in a selected creative skill much earlier than only after wading through 1000 attempts. If anything, at 1000 pieces written your skill will plateau so much your recent works will be roughly at the same quality level and you will be yearning for real improvement and have to try radical changes in your strategy which will bring the quality down, because the New is the Unknown, the Fresh is unexperienced: inexperienced. To grow beyond oneself is to become a nobody once again. You will not always write bad blogs, but you will always write a Bad Blog.

"To do the same thing over and over and expect changes" is called madness by the character Vaas from the 2012 video game FarCry 3. Personally I call this training, and everybody calls this training, we kind of expect that by repeating the same motions we get better at them, which is a change. We kind of expect that because it kind of actually happens, see figure 1 for an example from the Academic Literature.

Figure 1. Evolution of reaching trajectories in infants. At 5 months it's wonky and unstable, in adults it's straight and elegant. [Konczak and Dichgans, 1997]
 

This phrase by Vaas about madness has been memed on so hard for many years that I wanted to talk about it. The thing about Vaas is that he's an anti-growth person, he doesn't believe in growth, he believes in a fixed hierarchy where every person belongs somewhere by default and yearning to change things is considered madness in his eyes. It was so easy for him to fall into this trap because he lived in the isolated community where he killed everyone who disagreed with him. So I don't know, maybe Vaas is wrong?

Personally, I'm a pro-growth person. I like writing a Bad Blog again and again, because every once in a while I feel "ooh, this one wasn't that bad actually" and I'm proud of myself and I experience bliss. Not madness. What's the point of being mad at anything? "Aaaah im so mad im not good enough" holy crap, kid, now that's the real road towards insanity.

Also, did you know that properly adding paragraphs in Dreamwidth is done by pressing Shift+Enter? If you just use Enter for this purpose, the rich text editor enters a short-lived psychotic episode each time. But Shift+Enter works like a charm.

References

[Konczak and Dichgans, 1997] Konczak, J. and Dichgans, J. (1997). The development toward stereotypic arm kinematics during reaching in the first 3 years of life. Experimental Brain Research, 117:346–354.