Today I introduced a friend who makes quantitative trading-teaching games to a friend who owns a chain of toy and game stores.
We played a hidden role social deduction game for 3.5hrs. Then they discussed game theory late into the night.
I pitched this buddy on moving to The City. In 2 days he’s met a handful of driven, interesting, intellectual people. He usually lives in a tiny town. He doesn’t get out much. It’s not healthy.
I wonder if he’ll ever expand his possibilities and his capabilities. Or if he’ll collapse back into the short-term, brief-profit-seeking perspective he always has.
—
The last few months I’ve focused on renovating an apartment. Hearing people discuss their passions and excitement is both energizing and deflating. I wonder where I’ll go after this renovation. A family, perhaps. Or an opening of activity into work… or both.
I enjoy playing games. I enjoy bringing people together. I’ll keep playing games. Keep bringing people together.
Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive, but you’ll never know
—
Games played
Just after midnight, as my buddy and I descended the steps into the subway station, a woman in a purple bathing suit followed. She muttered something about “Which way is this train going?” and “Who are you guys?” that we ignored.
We paid our $3 to pass through the turnstile. She followed.
We boarded the elevator toward the platform. The woman followed us. I tilted my head at my buddy. The woman lowered her top.
Later, on the platform, my buddy commented: “She really must have thought we were good marks. Spent $3 and everything. And in the elevator, you see that?”
A buddy had a Medical Issue. He hadn’t spent a night away from home for the last 6 months. I told him he should visit. I asked what he needs. He described to me a Minor Medical Necessity that he needs every day – something akin to using a needle to draw blood. He’s squeamish around blood, so a family member helps him. We hopped on video while his family member performed the task.
I’m not super squeamish, so I gave the thumbs-up. Less than 24 hours later, he arrived to my guest room.
Today at 1pm, we went to a play. At 4:10pm, we left the play. At 4:30pm, we arrived at a friend’s birthday party. At 8pm, I left the party. My friend stayed behind. The time is now 11pm. I assume he’s still there. He hasn’t socialized outside of his family in a long time. He’s a severe night owl. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s out until 2 or 3am.
His family member texted me, asking how the Minor Medical Necessity went. We haven’t done it yet. I didn’t expect him to stay out so late. Perhaps we’ll perform it when he returns at 3am. Or perhaps this “every day” will be a 36-hour stretch between two performings. It’s an odd situation where I’m responsible for doing it, but I don’t feel responsible for making it happen. (I’ve shared this perspective with him. He must habeas the corpus. If he’s out til 9am, I’m not going to see him til the morning.)
I made for this guy a nice evening. I had a nice time at the birthday party. My friend enjoyed it even more than me.
He just called me. He’s not coming back for a while. He’s befriended a few people. He wants to have them over for board games. I asked about the Minor Medical Necessity. He says it’s fine: we can do it in the morning.
I’m not a doctor, and this wasn’t laughter, but I think ‘tis a helpful dose of medicine.
The next morning I awoke to this message:
Games Played:
After listening to yesterdays npr story, one reader sent in the town of Show Low, AZ.
In freshman year of highschool, my theater teacher told me: “There are no magicians. There are only actors pretending to be magicians.”
Tonight we saw neither.
Suhani Shah bills herself as “the world’s most subscribed mentalist. I have no way of disproving that claim.
What I can disprove:
Around ~30 minutes into the show, she wrote a number on a whiteboard, attempting to match the number that had been written while she was blindfolded. She failed. The audience did not clap. She commented on the audience not clapping. I told her “It’s wrong.” (I was on stage at the time as an audience participant.)
Around 3 minutes later, she told me and the other on-stage participant to select one of us to draw on the board, and tell her who it was. We neglected to tell her. She incorrectly guessed it was me.
There was another part where she had someone say a number that was on their mind. The reveal was to be EITHER that she had written the number both on the white board AND on a piece of paper already on stage, OR that she was wrong on the whiteboard as a dramatic intensity-heightener, and then MAGICALLY CORRECT with the paper on the stage. I can’t tell which, because 1) the numbers didn’t match, and 2) she didn’t play off the note-being-correct in a way that was obvious or compelling.
At ~the 75th minute, she performed an actually-shocking trick that I have no idea how she did. (She received random three-to-five-digit numbers from the audience, which combined with an audience member’s “random” button presses of additional numbers summed to the first 6 numbers on a twenty dollar bill and a pre-written scroll.)
Okay, I actually just figured out one way she could do it: have the “calculator” app not actually be a true calculator, but be a program which only looks like a calculator but actually inputs the desired digits at the audience member’s presses.
Today was her first day performing in New York. On ~3 occasions, she found herself a bit bowled over by audience members being very forward. For an audience-participation show, New Yorker culture is, I would suspect, quite specific. We move fast. Give us an inch and we’ll take it immediately. Say to the audience, “We need someone with a handkerchief. Raise your hand if you have one. One of you, join me onstage.” and someone will arrive immediately.
She also mocked the audience participants more than I’m familiar with. This may be a cultural difference, but it rubbed me a bit the wrong way. (Partner didn’t notice or care.)
If you’re a mentalist, your job is to seem like you’re doing magic. Part of that success comes from playing off your mistakes well.
Tonight was opening night. In two weeks, I hope she’s more successful.
After two months of haggling over specific lighting, he has assented that Partner & I are boss. He literally said, “I lose.”
I didn’t want him to lose. I don’t think him feeling like he has lost is helpful for anyone. But I also don’t want to pay an extra $14,000 on lighting. I’d rather have a visible flange. So yes, he loses.
Partner was the key technical driver here. In some areas, I’ve been the pusher (raising the ceilings, which Partner was skeptical about but is now excited for; getting a deep tub; ensuring the island countertop is 34” tall, so it’s ergonomic for Partner’s cooking). In this area, Partner’s prior technical knowledge of lighting (she was a professional theatrical lighting designer in a past life) lends itself to this new domain.
The final straw: learning that the second-tier lighting suggested by the showroom has a beam of ~4 feet in diameter at 6 feet high, while the lighting we found has a beam of ~13 feet in diameter at the same level. The same cost gets us approximately the same lighting specs, but pi*6.5^2 = 133sqft of light vs 12sqft, or 10x the amount of light.
Yes, there’s more to light than the amount of light (or else we’d just light the whole apartment with floodlights), but we’ve already checked those traits! They’re approximately equivalent on every other element, just these have visible flanges!
So today, my designer assented to purchasing the lights we described. He is seeking someone to buy them from. (Why he won’t just buy them from the website I found previously, I don’t know.)
A man with a hand cast approaches Partner in the Houston light rail. He points at her and points at himself as if to say “we’re both injured!”
His opening line: “are you a believer?”
Partner grunts, “Catholic”.
He tells her that Jesus will take care of her. See: he prayed and his hand doesn’t hurt.
—
Houston is a car-based city. The light rail only navigates along a few specific stretches. Therefore the main people who use the light rail are those who don’t have cars. The selection effects mean the light rail users are mainly poor or homeless. It’s the highest proportion of people talking to themselves or yelling arguments at the empty air that I’ve ever seen.
So what?
So it’s a little bit of a spiral to the bottom. The New York City subway definitely has more total homeless or poor or ghost-yellers than the Houston light rail. But the proportion in Houston dwarfs that of New York. And it feels – at least to me – much less safe. I wonder whether that causes it to only attract those without other options. So it attracts fewer riders – and fewer affluent and influential riders. And therefore the service doesn’t expand?
Houston doesn’t necessarily need a better light rail. The buses also work well enough, if you’re okay standing in oppressive heat for fifteen minutes. But it’s a notable trait of infrastructure: if you don’t invest early enough, you’re generally better off waiting for the next paradigm. The US is a car culture. Next up: personal helipads?
—
And a funny quote from Partner:
“You know what’s the funniest part of BTUs? The Brits don’t use air conditioning.”
The best part of Brooklyn? It’s near New York City.
Partner & I trained for 48 minutes each way to an event in Brooklyn.
The event: four fifteen-minute talks plus Q&A, starting at 5pm since we had to vacate the space ahead of a different event starting at 6:30pm.
Partner & I arrived at 4:40. One of the organizers said, “You guys are early. Could you come back in 20 minutes?”[1]
If you’re going to have four fifteen-minute talks, plus Q&A time, you really want to start near 5pm. See, I don’t know what they teach you in Brooklyn. But here in Manhattan, 4 x 15minute = 60 minutes. And 60 minutes = an hour.
Instead, they didn’t start until 5:20pm because, as they said, “Some people are coming from work.”
No duh. It’s Thursday. How did you not consider this?
So the talks got squished to 10mins each. And the Q&A got squished to one chunk of ~8 minutes.
And only two people put their shoes in the little cabinet despite the cabinet being labeled “put your shoes in this cabinet”. And yes, they were Me & Partner.
—
The talks were on living in communal spaces. Partner and I are interested in living with friends. We want to raise a family alongside other families, ideally in the same apartment or neighboring.
But, for us this trait is only one of our interests. For the people at this presentation, co-living is the main part of their identity.
One of the recommended processes for co-living: have a roommate check-in. Include open dialogue so different housemates can share their problems.
My problem: a poorly scheduled, structured, and run event.
[1] Partner says they said, “You guys are incredibly early.” I didn’t hear the incredibly.
Performance-enhancing drugs are great. They enhance performance, and isn’t enhanced performance good?
Look: today I felt grumpy. So Partner grabbed me a pearl tea: sugar, plus a substance the Olympics banned until 2004. Twenty minutes later I was up and rolling, knocking out work I’d been avoiding for three weeks. It got me thinking.
The classifications we give – food vs supplement vs medication vs drug vs illegal drug – are not chemically meaningful. If you eat the vitamin C that’s in an orange, that’s called eating an orange. If you take the same amount of vitamin C in pill form, that’s called taking a supplement. Yet we think about these very differently. The exact same chemical process that ten years ago was called doing drugs is now called “doctor-prescribed medication for sleep” (cannabis).
Why does our society (all societies?) have these classifications? We want to restrict some behaviors: for the safety of others, for the safety of the individual, or for reasons that aren’t about safety at all.
The biggest not-about-safety category is purity: questions of what a human is, and what appropriate human behavior looks like. So what’s with the obsession with purity?
I’m reminded of a lawyer who built a Supreme Court practice by soliciting: He would identify cases the Court might take, contact the potential plaintiffs to inform them of their potential case, and end up arguing before the Justices. Chief Justice John Roberst pooh-poohed this: “If I’m going to have heart-bypass surgery, I wouldn’t go to the surgeon who calls me up.”
But actually, wouldn’t you? Let’s run the thought experiment. A surgeon approaches you out of nowhere: “Based on the shape of your face, I know that you have obstructive sleep apnea. I’m a medical doctor. I studied at this school. I’m not some quack making things up: here are the rigorous scientific tests you can take to verify what I’m telling you. And get a second opinion, if you like.” I would think: that’s excellent.
In fact, this is roughly what happened to me before my jaw surgery. After six doctors’ worth of searching, I found Dr. Christian Guilleminault – one of the founders of the field of obstructive sleep apnea, since passed. While he hadn’t found me on the street, his diagnosis was as unsolicited as they come. He looked at my face and said: “I can tell by the shape of your face that you were a rambunctious child.”
What a funny thing to say!
He followed it up with, “We will send you in for the lab tests, of course, but I already know what they will say.” He then predicted the results, which aligned perfectly when the tests came back a few months later. That’s the doctor I want to hire!
So much of our restriction runs on purity. But purity is not itself good for the individual. Purity puts the individual into a particular game — a game they can win only by behaving in one specific way, and a game they never asked to play.
The purity game is about packaging. Take virginity, the archetype of purity: a woman who is chaste, who follows the virginal pathway, receives adulation for it. There are other pathways to adulation. Purity just happens to be the lowest common denominator (for women in a specific slice of society).
I drastically prefer informed consent. The biggest danger with performance-enhancing drugs — with drugs, period — is the unknown unknowns. You have to know and understand not only the limitations of the drug itself, but the limitations of our knowledge about the drug. We do this poorly as a society, because much of a doctor’s job is to demonstrate confidence and instill calm. They act, one could fairly say, like a con man. The onus is therefore on you the patient to work out the actual epistemology of your circumstance. It is frequently much less certain than any doctor, drug manufacturer, or therapist would have you believe.
External games like purity are other people’s scoreboard. Informed consent is your own: you, the substance, and an honest approximation of uncertainty. To enhance performance, choose the right substances. To choose the substance, know the limits of what’s known.
Today I consented, informed, to one highly-caffeinated pearl tea. Three weeks of avoidance, cleared. Enhanced performance. Fundamentally good.
At the World Cup final watch party at the Harlem Tavern, a woman waits in front of five bathroom doors. I ask: “Did you check them all?”
She says no.
I walk down the line, twisting each knob. At the third door, the knob turns. The door opens. I gesture to her to enter. She does.
What is wrong with people?
Hold that question.
On the screen, Argentina was busy demonstrating the opposite mistake. A ref draws a box, and you fill the box you’re given. Players will play as rough as you let them — and they should; that’s the correct way to play a game. Argentina filled its box and kept pushing at the sides: four yellow cards by my count, one of them on the coach, two of them on Enzo Fernández, who was sent off. They played the end of a World Cup final a man down. They did it to themselves. (For more on refs and the dark arts, see Drawing a Foul vs. Flopping.)
A bathroom line has no ref. That’s what makes it the purer game. Field notes:
The early exit. Leave before the hydration break is called, or the instant it’s called. This is playing within the rules. I left immediately and made the front of the line. Plenty of others made the same move; the line stacked up eight deep behind me.
The exit-door gambit. At the halftime of extra time, a man arrived, realized the line was a line, and was very much not into it. I watched him scan for a shortcut. Finding none, he circled around to the bathroom’s exit and went in from there. He checked whether any doors were open. He played off the visit by washing his hands — “I only came here to wash my hands, not to skip the line…” — and then stood inside, watching the doors, waiting for one to open. Cutting the line is breaking the rules, and watching it riled up a rule-enforcing Germanic part of me that wants to destroy him and everything he stands for. The rest of us waited in the line.
The empty stall. The line filed right past the accessible bathroom. On Partner’s previous bathroom visit, a dude next to her tried that door: empty. She immediately stood in front of that door, waiting for him to come out; someone else lined up behind her. Nobody had been using that bathroom, and somebody should be using the bathroom: seems like an efficient use of resources. But the second line forming back there was the wrong shape. It should be one line, feeding every door. (I have preached this queueing theology before, at Trader Joe’s.)
Which returns us to the woman and the five doors. Five doors, five knobs, all that information free for the twisting. She had checked none of them. Behind door number three: an empty room.
To make a game mean something, make it fair. To make it fair, make it sport, not art.
On the 4th of July, this sleepy beach town south of Santa Cruz, triples in size: Children, grandchildren, aunts and uncles all come into town for hot dogs, sack races, and sand castle competitions.
The children compete first, in the classic Americana races: a diaper derby (baby race, stratified by crawling and walking), then a three-legged race, balloon-between-the-knees race, and peanut-on-a-spoon race. Even before I fell during the wheelbarrow race and hurt my knee, I was not having a good time. In the evening, when I mentioned this to Partner, she expressed surprise. She said something like, “I would have thought you enjoyed these silly games”.
I do like silly games. I just don’t like this implementation of silly games. Here’s why:
1. The judges aren’t performing their solemn duty.
a. After the peanut race, Partner commented that one child appeared to have held onto the peanut with their thumb. The stated rule was you could only use one hand on the spoon. The judges are insufficient and the rules aren’t clearly defined.
b. The sandcastle competition was similarly poorly adjudicated: The judge at sign up told us we could only use items we found on the beach. We used seaweed, sand, sand dollars, sticks, and one large log. When the judges swung by later, they told us they could only judge sand. Well, that’s a whole different competition! We would have only used sand!
2. The starting positions aren’t really fair.
a. For the balloon-between-the-knees race, pre-blown balloons are passed out willy-nilly. Some are full enough to pop when dropped; others are nearly empty so they bounce on the grass instead of popping. The size of your balloon determines the angle of your legs. This trait matters.
b. For the three-legged race, some contestants’ legs are tied at the knee, others at the ankle, and in varying stages of looseness. A loose-tie three-legged race? Oof!
c. For the bubble-gum-blowing competition:
i. The gum is not simultaneously distributed. The real work in this competition is to chew the gum for long enough and vigorously enough to make it malleable (and perhaps chewing decreases the sugar content, which impacts the bubbles, etc.). The blowing is much less important than the chewing. Ergo, the competition includes stratified and arbitrary head starts.
ii. The measurements are inconsistent. Obviously, one should measure bubble size through the center of the bubble. But the bubbles are not perfect spheres: do you measure the longest distance through the center, or the shortest distance? The judges seem to have no consistency at all, the worst option!
iii. (A small gripe: they announced the competition was open – not age-capped – and then ultimately did age-cap it to only children 10 – 12 years old. I mention this not because it’s as big of a fairness issue, but because it demonstrates the general lackadaisical relationship that the town of La Selva Beach – home to Partner’s grandmother – has to its games.)
I know these games have a purpose that diverges from my approach to them. I know that the purpose is something like “Tradition”, and “Nostalgia”, and “Town spirit”, and “Afternoon activities for a National Holiday”.
For those purposes, I take no issue. July 4th is a great opportunity to eat hot dogs and jump in bouncy castles and host a parade and enlist local teenagers to paint children’s faces to raise money for some small town charity like the library or the fire department or that weird hippie dance group that for some unknown reason had a larger and more populous section in the parade than even the fire department.
The part I take issue with is the games. What are we teaching with them? That judging can be arbitrary and capricious? That you can make every move perfectly using the tools you were given and still lose to some corrupt official or other competitor who was given a head start? Yes, those are true. We know, and we experience those all the time. The beauty of games – of children’s games – is that for a moment life can be fair:
“Who can run fastest to that tree?” is at once modified by the child’s genetics, by the shoes their family can afford, by the amount of free time their parents have to let the kid play outside, by the child’s nutrition, and by a host of other unfair discriminations.
But it is also a terrifically fair question: Who can run fastest to that tree?
Obviously, these games are made for children. They’re age-capped and time-bound and some kids receive ribbons on a podium. But they’re also, fundamentally, not made for children. To create something for children means to make something that helps them be better adults. These games do not do that. These games create short-term whimsy with long-term hollowness. And for babies who cannot walk, watching them maybe trudge toward their parents but mainly just sit, confused, while the announcer jokes that “this race is time-capped at 20 minutes”, is funny in the same way that a snail race is funny. It’s joyful because babies are adorable even when they simply sit like an uncooperative blob, and watching them allows us to laugh at the meaninglessness of this endeavor: like herding cats, only cuter.
But the older kids’ games – the ones where the competition is real, where a child might gain pride from their friends and family for decades for winning the bubble blowing competition (as multiple members of Partner’s family informed me that Partner’s sister won ~2 decades ago) – these rules matter.
These games are not made for me. They’re made for children. And they’re not even made for children. That’s sad.
Games are a struggle against entropy. If you haven’t planned for the tide, your sandcastle will wash away to sea. Bet against the fundamental traits of existence at your peril: gravity pulls mass to mass, tides come and go, time ticks on, and wet sand packs better.
When every other activity washes away to a sea of chaos, games build a wall against the ocean, with referees’ fingers blocking leaks.
The traits of the footrace – which tree was chosen, where the starting line for the race begins, when the race starts – these are controllable. In the game, these are sacred. To have an uneven race is to have a meaningless race. It’s to transform games from games into the mere performance of games. I love theater. Keep it separate.
—
My team’s sand sculpture received glowing reviews from passers-by. I enjoyed the process of making it: the conceptualizing, the strategizing, the digging, and the polishing. I enjoyed the creativity when our plans hit reality. I enjoyed the passing-off of tasks from teammate to teammate. I enjoyed the fact that we created art that prompted many people to snap pictures and comment, “Way to go!” and “I’m tired of seeing flags; this one’s great!”
I didn’t join the sandcastle competition to win. I joined it to build a work of art. We did, we succeeded, and I’m overjoyed.
Now the only honest thing to do is to tell all the children in the sack race that they were actually participating in art, not sport.
To win, keep the game going. To keep the game going, drink what you’re given.
At 11:15am this morning, I asked my brother-in-law to set a 30-minute timer. I then sunscreened the tops of my feet and I entered the kiddie pool. My nephew (just shy of 2 years old) was playing squirt with my father. Squirt is played as follows:
One player (the toddler) hangs on the water squirter in the kiddie pool. Sometimes he moves.
That’s it. That’s the game. If you think that’s not a game, you’ve probably never played with a toddler.
Our next game was more active. My nephew rotated the water squirter to hit me. I flapped my arms up in the air and emitted a “wah!” noise reminiscent of Waluigi from the Nintendo games.
After water-squirter-based games, my nephew wrapped his arms around a beach ball, then tried to pelt me with it. He failed. He cackled. He chased it down. He repeated.
It was around this time that my sister (Nephew’s mother) said something to me from outside the pool. I asked her to repeat it. She said, “We’re not watching him”, implying I was in charge of this tiny tot’s life, surrounded by 9 inches of murder-liquid.
Whoa. Big responsibility.
Nephew found a truck. His truck. His dumptruck. He filled it with a green cup. He dumped it out. He repeated the cycle.
Finally, we struck upon the game of the day: Nephew fills the green cup with water, then holds it out for Funcle (me) to drink. Funcle mimes drinking the cup, using only his mouth (no hands!). Nephew cackles. Nephew fills the cup again. This time, Funcle grips the cup using his lips. He drops the cup with a “blah!” sound, imitating the sound of a blub-blub fish.
Repeat this game for 15 minutes.
You might think this game gets boring.
It does not.
At 11:45am, my brother-in-law told me my alarm had gone off, prompting me to check on Partner. I tagged in Oma to ensure the Nephew stayed safe, checked on Partner, and returned to the kiddie pool after learning Partner was on her way down.
The games continued.
Have you ever reminisced about something from a mere 9 hours ago?
Julian Wise 