: Socially acceptable lies
As I wrote before, I am starting a new job, but not for some time, and thus I haven’t told my current colleagues yet. This has made for a lot of meetings where I am engaging as if I will continue to be on the project, knowing inwardly that I will never see through the plans I am laying out, nor are others likely to, because despite my efforts the work has a high bus factor around me.
These kinds of not-fully-transparent interactions are routine in the world of business. I guess the startup that “scammed” me a few weeks back thought they were doing something completely normal in a competitive job market. And similarly, I guess I should feel normal about concealing my plans from current colleagues until they are final final.
But my OCD brain doesn’t let me off the hook so easily. By delaying my notification, I am putting my desires (for security and to avoid awkward protracted goodbyes) against others’ needs (to search for my replacement). That’s just mean, right? Selfish, even?
I was taught from a young age that the essence of being good is to make sacrifices for others and bring my desires under control. This flawed premise was so strongly instilled in me that sometimes I sense virtue in self-sacrifice even when the benefit gained by doing so is unclear. Somehow the suffering itself exonerates one from the scary label of “selfish.”
: LLM doxxing and the end of the anonymous web?
I just read this editorial by Kelsey Piper in which she shares an experiment she’s been doing where she asks an LLM to identify the author of a random snippet of text from her private files. LLMs used to fail this test, but apparently the new version of Claude pretty consistently can pinpoint her, even when logged out (I didn’t realize you could use Claude without logging in?), even when using different styles of text unrelated to her public writing as a journalist.
I always figured this time would come. Even before LLMs, I remember hearing that you can identify people fairly reliably by just counting which words they use most often. And probably a zillion other ways to association pseudonymous internet accounts with yes-onymous ones.
Needless to say, convexer is not my real name and this is meant to be an anonymous blog. I haven’t said anything here I wouldn’t defend in a court of law. But the purpose of the dumpster site is just to be able to speak a bit more freely about political/sensitive topics, and there are personal experiences I have discussed here that I would prefer my employer and mother not know about. I haven’t tried plugging my own blog into Claude and seeing if it can doxx me; perhaps it goes without saying that I would prefer if readers didn’t do so either.
Perhaps there’s a flicker of hope in the fact that a statistical prediction (texts X and Y are likely to have the same author) isn’t the same thing as proof—if someone doxxes you with Claude, you still have the option of denying it or chalking it up to an LLM hallucination. That’s notably not the case with the other kind of doxxing, where people post your address and shit online; you can’t deny that you live in the place you live in.
In the end I feel the same way as Kelsey does about all this:
I don’t think this is a good development. I just think it’s a predictable development.
One day, we will improve our social norms around anonymity and privacy, and collectively embrace the fact that identity is multifaceted and situational. Perhaps we will evolve new rules of etiquette or even laws about trying to unmask people. But I don’t know how you force that to happen: While the anonymous internet has been a helpful place for me (going back to childhood, when it allowed me to get advice from people older and wiser than me), there are obviously people who take advantage of anonymity to engage in bullying and crime.
People (in particular, voters) are motivated more strongly by fear than by high-minded ideals about safe spaces for free conversation; we’ve seen this already with all the age verification laws, like the one in the UK, which I’m told is quite popular despite the objections of techies. The anonymous web will most likely be a casualty of this suspicious and vindictive cultural moment.
: Reading Ursula K Le Guin and getting scammed
Midway through The Dispossessed, it occured to me that the Fortune 500 corporation is a social technology not unlike a utopian cult. A hierarchy of charismatic figureheads demands unconditional obediance from those beneath them, all under the flimsy premises of “growth” and “fairness” and “alignment.” Enforcers up and down the chain punish anyone who dares to point out the hypocrisy or shifts in direction. And yet it is painfully obvious to anyone on the outside that the real purpose of the system is to protect the fragile egos and obscure pet interests of those at the top.
You can choose to buy in, and maybe make some marginal gains, maybe even win … but doing so requires doing terrible indignities to your own mind, becoming a true believer despite your instincts to the contrary.
I uh, got a new job. I also got scammed. the new job comes with a pretty decent pay increase, but nothing compared to the job I almost got, at a very cool startup whose vision, technical approach, and team impressed me greatly. I did four rounds of interviews with them, the last of which felt more like an internal meeting than an interview. We were just talking shop, outlining the next phases of the project, solving a technical problem. The CTO took careful notes, said she would have next steps in my inbox soon.
Then the recruiter video called me the next day and said my position wasn’t planned after all. She made that oopsie face, the one that looks like an exaggerated pronunciation of the letter E, that you make when asking your BFF for forgiveness after eating their last piece of chocolate.
My position was never planned for. The company took advantage of me—got about a day’s worth of free consulting and technical answers to unblock them from their problem, then ghosted. A tough lesson learned the hard way.
Anyway, the new job should be a good change, but based on the humiliating experience above and other bullshit happening at my current job, I am going in with tightly limited enthusiasm. I’m not gonna be a true believer this time around or let it consume me. My goal with this job is to get paid, use all my vacation days, and work on every other aspect of my life.
: The elusive “self-love”
Went downtown with some new friends, people I consider more fashionable than me. We stopped by a Carhartt store. They immediately knew how to find the good stuff, layer shit together, idk. Made a bunch of good-natured jokes about how they would “drip me out.”
At some point I walked by a mirror and realized just how abysmal my fashion sense really is. My wardrobe consists of precisely two kinds of clothing: Things I can wear to work, and things I can’t. My getting-ready routine is basically this:
clothes = work_clothes if today() in weekdays else other_clothes
while not fully_dressed():
cloth = clothes.pop_random()
try:
cloth.wear()
except:
pass
On this particular occasion I was wearing a poorly faded aloha shirt and jeans that were about 2 inches too short in the legs. Freshly laundered, poorly coordinated.
There is a part of me that wishes I were better at this. I feel envy when I look at people who put effort into their clothing and use it to their advantage. But every time I try to put in that extra effort, maybe coordinate colors or something, someone comments on it (“you look nice today”), which subjects me to the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Seen.
I have never had a great relationship with my corporeal form. I don’t like it when people notice what I look like, how tall I am, how I am shaped. It’s not that I’m an unattractive person, more that I find the suggestion that I “am” this body (as opposed to the soul inside of it) to be offensive. This is difficult to communicate to people, especially since so many people’s entire identity revolves around perfecting their body, e.g. through fashion and exercise.
But as I walked out of the store, having bought nothing, I tried to think the following thought instead: It’s alright to be me. It’s alright to care about different things than other people. Some folks customize their wardrobe and some folks customize their, uhh, text editor config (messing with Zed at the moment).
Baby steps on the epic journey of self-acceptance…
: Caring too much about the world as an OCD symptom
I heard a podcast a while ago (probably years ago tbh) about a dad who got obsessed with global warming and conscripted his whole family into being climate activists. This meant giving up a bunch of vacations (air travel) and weekends to attend climate rallies and hours-long “coaching” sessions where he helped his daughter perfect her stump speech so she could rouse the crowd.
The podcast framed this as a moral dilemma: On the one hand, if you really believe that climate change poses an existential threat to the future of humanity, then weekends and public-speaking lessons are small sacrificies to make—that’s what the dad argued. On the other, the decision to become a full-time activist for any cause isn’t one you can reasonably make on someone else’s behalf; it’s one thing to convey to your kids your passion for climate activism, and another to force them into joining in.
My impression was that if the father’s actions began with a kernel of good intentions, he spun out of control because he suffers from moral perfectionism, aka “scrupulosity,” a common OCD trait. He fixated on climate change as the nexus of all his problems, and determined that any other difficulty could be justified if it meant progress against that goal. This sounds tyrannical, but if you squint, you can see how it’s a self-soothing behavior: it excuses Dad from having to weight competing objectives; he can just proceed according to a simple algorithm: is it good or bad for the environment? Beyond political hardliners, you also see scrupulosity in highly religious types, as well as a subset of people in highly morally charged careers like medicine and teaching.
One of the core dynamics of OCD, in my experience, is the tension between control and powerlessness: The world is a dangerous place, so I must exert maximal control over the corner I inhabit, or else anything bad that happens to me is somehow my fault. Scrupulosity.
I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately with people who are, in their words, “Actually doing weirdly OK despite the state of the world.” They are still employed, they just got pregnant, they took a well-deserved vacation. And unfortunately, the happiness associated with these facts is eating them alive. They experience massive guilt about the rays of sunshine in their life, when the awful news about war and gas prices is such a short series of taps away.
I say “they,” but I am in this point a little. I found a way to spend some time in Europe, eat a bunch of good food, read books, write my journal. I’m holding steady despite everything. I want to celebrate that, but deep down I feel it’s not the right moment.