The Entertainment
Peering at a cloud
I haven’t run through my Anki cards in a while. I had a daily habit of adding at least one Anki card, then going through all the existing ones that the spaced repetition algorithm said were due. But eventually there were too many for it to be a low-friction activity, and finding a principled way to pare them down was also not a low-friction activity, so I stopped. I’m pretty sure I can recall more facts about transformers architecture than I otherwise would, and I now solidly know the words famulus, sprezzatura, and ablation. On the other hand, if I’d been doing Anki during my study of abstract algebra, I’d probably remember way more details than I do.
But this isn’t an Anki postmortem. In fact, just by writing this down, I’m more likely to find a way to revive the habit (much as writing this post led me to actually read When I Win The World Ends). Rather, it’s me noticing that actually trying hard to learn felt a certain way (difficult, plodding, slow), and that lots of stuff I do that purports to be learning feels different.
For example, last night I was bored and enjoyed these two essays by Benjamin Hoffman. I find his perspective really interesting and fresh - he comes at familiar questions in unusual ways, without feeling like a guy trying to “come at familiar questions in unusual ways”. For example, from those two posts (skim or skip if you get bored):
If only statistics are meaningful, then you do not meaningfully understand the material conditions of your life, your sensorium is not meaningful, you cannot help an individual known to you by using your understanding of your own circumstances, and the only information with meaning is the information endorsed by a mysterious-to-itself process by which a large data collection and interpretation agency such as a modern state socially constructs an opinion using statistical methods. Of course such a position rules out as a meaningful intervention not only feeding a hungry person in front of you, but also long-run AI safety work, since while the former case has too many degrees of freedom and too small a sample size to make statistical inferences, in the latter case the relevant statistics could only possibly be collected after the program decisively succeeded.
and
You walk into a workshop, and see someone holding a hammer. You can infer that this is because there is some hammering to do right now, and the holder is competent to do it. Someone else has a saw, and you make a similar inference. In this context, the unequal distribution of production goods is part of how things get made; wealth inequality is a part of the means of production. If a workshop did not allocate tools in a way that justified those inferences - if perhaps you observed one person with a hoard of wrenches doing nothing while others used their bare hands as best they could - then you might infer the existence of a conflict between the wrenchmaster and the other laborers, and you would expect that workshop to do a worse job if called upon to make something. On the other hand, if someone with a hoard of wrenches were freely lending out the wrenches when appropriate, seemed like an especially good judge of which wrench (if any) is appropriate for which job, and made sure people put the wrenches back instead of putting them down at random in hard-to-find places, then you might not think worse of the workshop for its wrenchmaster.
To me, stuff like this is extremely entertaining. A conceptual maestro is at work, whether or not I turn out to agree, indeed whether or not my opinion on anything changes. It’s telling that I often read this stuff when I’m bored at 2am, and obviously not in a position to do the kind of hard thinking that results in tangible results. I couldn’t pass a quiz on either those two posts or even the basic economic concepts they rely on; I’d have to make a little Anki deck on price signals to really get it, well enough that I could teach someone else.
All this to say, it’s entertainment. Not fundamentally; Ben is a serious intellectual writing (I think) with the hope of changing some people’s minds in decision relevant ways, and I expect that he succeeds. Just also, I get to bust out the popcorn.
Nor am I being specific to Ben. I read lots of blogs. Some of them, like Zvi’s, cover topics of direct relevance to my life; he writes about parenting, and I have a baby, and he writes about AI, which has obvious implications for my field of work. But others are obviously just for fun; Freddie DeBoer posts lots of rants about popular culture that are of no consequence to my life in any way, but he’s a good writer and I often enjoy reading them. Sarah Constantin writes conceptual explorations that are philosophically interesting, but that I mostly enjoy for their piquancy; it’s just fun to inhabit her mindset for a while.
When I play too much video games (notice the value judgment), I feel unvirtuous. Because of its status as mere entertainment, it seems indulgent to spend hours and hours on them. I do totally overindulge, and when a game I’ve been anticipating for years comes out, I feel great about throwing a weekend (okay, a week) at it.1 Should I feel the same about reading essays? What about reading novels? What about coding personal projects like my Monopoly simulator? Or writing this blog?
What is Entertainment?
One wrong definition: stuff that doesn’t make money. I mention this because entertainment is almost-but-not-quite the flipside of “productivity”, which is often reduced to economic productivity. Being remunerative is sufficient for not being entertainment; if I were paid to playtest a video game, it wouldn’t qualify as entertainment anymore. But it isn’t necessary!
A closer brush: stuff done for fun that isn’t creative. Entertainment implies passivity, so writing, embroidery, or even noodling around on the piano doesn’t qualify. The important sleight of hand here is “for fun”; how do you know if something has fun as its purpose, or is only fun incidentally? You mostly don’t!
Like, I read Three Kingdoms a couple years back. It was a two-volume set, where the second volume was 50% footnotes. Footnotes for both volumes. So the act of reading involved setting both tomes on my bed in front of me, and switching back and forth between them when I came across a footnote. It was a lark and I did it for fun, but it was also hard work, and I chose that particular book in part to get a better appreciation for pre-modern Chinese literature.
I wasn’t creating anything. It was recreational. So, sure, technically entertainment. But I never felt like “shucks, what a waste of time” after a long Three Kingdoms session. Instead, I felt proud.
Lots of my activities are in this gray area, where either they’re recreational but obviously both effortful and enriching, or they’re ostensibly enriching but mostly just serve to pass the time. Nor do I always know in the moment which of the two it is; sometimes I read some essays just for fun, but they have a cumulative effect and actually change my world model, or their exact topic comes up in another context and I find I do remember something valuable. When I went in for my first programming job interview, I saw that they’d whiteboarded out some stuff related to a math problem I mentioned having done, for its own sake, in my cover letter. Was that retroactively productive? Blurry lines abound!
The Point
This post has been swimming around in a miasma of definitions because, well, so have I. If you’re waiting for me to tell you why you should care what qualifies as entertainment, or productive, or whatever, then sorry. Because I don’t know either. This post is secretly in the vein of a case study, in that I’m trying to capture a kind of mental flailing. A flavor of malaise, ennui. The negation of a certain je ne sais quoi, which impedes my joie de vivre.
Basically, there are some terms (productive, entertainment, creative) that function as normative cudgels to encourage virtuous behavior. It’s good to create things, it’s good to spend time producing benefit for one’s self and others, and it’s bad (contra Miriam Schoen) to spend too much time passively consuming stuff. But these are just ideas, orbiting a central feeling. Other things in its orbit: lazy, useless, industrious. The core is something ineffable, but it has to do with attention.
The modern world includes quite a few bids for one’s attention. While writing this post, I heard my baby happily babbling outside, and decided whether I wanted to keep writing or go see her2, my wife started talking to me about the bottle sterilizer (which felt important to pay attention to), and I got a call + voicemail that was either a scam, spam, or some sort of ongoing wrong number situation. And that’s just momentary bids! Explicit entertainment products like TV shows are optimized to keep you perpetually craving more and thus juicing streaming service subscriptions, and the most popular video games are free to play and make money by cultivating, more or less explicitly, addiction. And even bracketing the recent trend towards adversarial super-duper stimulus, the mere existence of TV shows and especially video games is pretty stimulating already! Absent strong efforts otherwise, attention goes to things that reinforce themselves, and oops, it’s all gone. Major life structures like “job”, “childcare” and “marriage” can supersede the attentional pull of vacuous entertainment, but if I want to carve out other practices beyond that, and defend them from tighter feedback loops of gratification, it takes work.
How do I do that work? Mostly with habits. I post to this blog a minimum of once a week. I also have a habit tracker where I account for certain daily tasks - when I get a streak of longer than 10 days or so for some habit, I usually hit escape velocity and keep it up for 100 days or more. Beyond habits, empirically it’s mostly something like hypomania. Not in the psychiatric sense per se, just that I sometimes get a huge surge of creative energy, and can ride the wave. Plus some stuff, like writing novels, is a little of both. The main challenge of this strategy is that it passes the buck to the organizational level of keeping habits straight. Inertia becomes a very powerful force; I can only create new habits when I have extra time and energy, but surplus time and energy beyond what’s needed for habits gets consumed by entertainment.
And complicating all this is that sometimes vacuous entertainment is just extremely pleasurable, or turns out not to have been so vacuous in retrospect, and I suspect that sometimes it’s also load bearing. A life pruned of all self-reinforcing entertainment would be… well, I don’t know what it would be. A very different life than one I live, and in which many of the most fun times in my current life no longer exist. I suppose a heroin addict might use the same logic, but, well, whatever. You can pry my Atelier Shallie: Alchemists of the Dusk Sea from my twitchy, fallible hands.3
Spending several hours trying to figure out how to get into a weird hole I found in Tears of the Kingdom without dying was a highlight of that year; no regrets; also sorry to my wife but the cowards at Nintendo shouldn’t have re-included the paraglider.
I opted to keep writing, in part because it was likely that me showing up would change her mood, and hearing the babbling from here was super cute.
Actually, that game in particular pried itself from my hands last night - when you save after beating the final boss you’re locked into the epilogue, and basically can’t do the postgame anymore. Whoops! On to the next one, I guess.