I’ve got a new article at 3 Quarks Daily: Melancholy and Growth: Toward a Mindcraft for an Emerging World.
I’m of two minds about it: On the one hand, I think it’s one of my best non-technical pieces in a decade, maybe more. I enjoyed doing it. I learned a lot. But it was tricky. The ending was not as good as it needs to be.
“Why not?” you may ask. I ran out of time. I had to upload it to meet the deadline. “Why did that happen?” you ask. I didn’t know where I was going. I started out with some great material – the charts of my blog posting frequency, the counts of tag numbers. But as the material developed, it started changing up on me. In a good way, mind you. But it was becoming a new piece, one based on the material I started with, but going in a different direction. I no longer had a sense out where this thing was going. Sure, by the time I had to upload I’d managed to reorient my thinking, but I didn’t have enough to reconfigure the last half of the article.
Still, I like it. It’s some of the best work I’ve done in a few years.
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In the rest of this post: 1) I lay out the core argument in prose, then in 2) I dissect that argument into roughly seven assertions, leading to 3) some final comments based on the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age.
The core argument
My argument starts with the following chart, which depicts my blogging activity since I first established New Savanna in April 2010. The chart is based on the number of posts I make per month.
The dominant feature of the chart is that it is very spiky; there are times when I make many posts per month and other times where I make very few. Furthermore, those ups and downs seem to be fairly regular, with the periods of low positing coming in the winter months. Now, since I lived the experience of producing those posts, and I felt (moderately and more) depressed during the slumps, that suggests that I might be prey to seasonal affective disorder (SAD), which appears to be organic in nature.
That hypothesis, however, is contradicted by my blogging in the last few years. In the article I present a chart that takes a closer look at the period. There we see two stretches where I’m down in the summer and up in the winter. That’s opposite of the pattern typical for SAD.
Something else seems to be going on. What? I argue that it’s creativity. Not only is it creativity during those last few years, but creativity’s been there all along. I further make a (highly speculative) argument that those slumps play a causal role in creativity. They are periods in which I withdraw from active participation in the world (in the form of writing blog posts, and associated activities) so that I can retool my mind/brain.
As empirical evidence for continuous creativity, I present growth in the number of blog tags, which now approaches 750. As I pursue new ideas, new interests, I add new tags to accommodate them. I estimate that my tag reservoir expands at the rate of 7% a year, compounded annually.
Once I’d made that argument I was faced with a problem: However interesting it is to me, why should anyone else care? I needed to generalize from the idiosyncrasies of my particular situation. I knew I’d have to do that when I started writing, but hadn’t thought it through. Faced with the need to actually generalize, I wasn’t sure just how to do it. I did it by way of talking about brain growth and neural development on the one hand, and then looking at changing patterns of education and full-time work, where career have become more fractured and there’s more need for learning and education in adulthood. That pattern will only intensify during the emergence and deployment of A.I.
So that’s the argument I made. But it could have been better if I’d conceived of it from the beginning.
Clarifying the core
The first phase of my overall argument is about depression and creativity in one person, me. The second phase generalizes the argument and draws implications for society.
FIRST PHASE
1. Graph of my posting habits also tracks my mood over the long term. That pattern over the last three years rules out SAD as an account of that pattern.
2. Increase in the number of tags/labels on posts is a crude proxy for mental growth.
3. Tag increase is consistent with the idea that long-term fluctuations in mood reflects long-term creativity. As correlation does not imply causation, that comparison doesn’t clinch the argument. The lack of a correlation, however, would count against the argument.
4. I suggest that my depressive periods are for mental reorganization that in turn enables further creativity.
SECOND PHASE
5. There is no reason to think that I my brain is idiosyncratic. Therefore we can suggest some broad areas for consideration.
6. The disappearance of long-term careers that follow a single path means that people increasingly are forced into mental reorganization so they can pursue a different career. This may lead to a period of depression. This emergence of multi-path careers is likely to be amplified by the adoption of AI into the workplace.
7. I was able to infer patterns of my long-term mental activity by examining my pattern of computer usage as reflected in my blogging activity. Are there other patterns of computer usage that can be used to track mental health? How can they be harnessed to mitigate the troubles caused by multipath careers?
Where I was headed: Young Lady's Primer
The article would have been still better if I’d realized that I was heading toward a somewhat expanded version of Young Lady's Illustrated Primer in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. The Primer is an interactive tutor that four-year-old Nell acquires early in the story and keeps with her through to the end. I’m in effect imagining a similar device that also monitors its owner’s state of mind. In that capacity the device could provide coaching and encouragement when needed, and arrange for virtual or in-person meetings with a human professional where needed. Beyond that ... well, use your imagination.
When will we have such a miracle? I don’t know. The future, that’s all we need to know in order to start working toward it.
I’ll be doing more work on this subject.
Umm, err, and, yes, I know. Stephenson's Primer was in fact surreptitiously run by a woman who was in a position to minister to Nell in a way I'm describing for this new device, which won't be surreptitiously run be a human.
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Note that I’ve done a number of posts here are New Savanna that support the 3 Quarks Daily piece. I’ve tagged them with “melancholy_mind,” a tag I’ll use for further work on this subject. In particular, I want to call your attention to the post, Neural maturation, cerebral plasticity, and the adaptive value of vacations, which I forgot to link in the 3QD piece. I find the discussion of vacations to be quite provocative.
AND, I've written about my daily blogging and sleep during October and November. I was coming out of a down-phase during the second half of November.
