[Kinda sappy and emotional in parts. Being posted sort of a long time after the event. Not totally happy with the way this post turned out, but, you know, better finished and mediocre than perfect and imaginary, or something. Epistemic state: I deleted a lot of “as far as I can tell”s. Just pretend like every sentence ends with those words, and please do tell me if I’m wrong about anything.]
I attended this year’s European LessWrong Community Weekend. The initial draft of this post began thus:
This is the event report I did not want to write and you do not want to read.
I decided I didn’t like this approach. During the Weekend, people always said, “make it your own.” So let’s do that instead.
This is a collection of things I learned while I was in Berlin.
In the weeks leading up to the Weekend, I was really excited. This was going to be awesome. I would meet new people and have fun talking to them, and maybe even make a few friends. I thought, “I enjoy being in the Study Hall most of the time, how hard could meeting people in the real world possibly be?”
Quite hard, as it turns out. Being around so many people in the real world was completely overwhelming for me and I spent large chunks of the Weekend feeling anxious, depressed, and worthless. I wanted to talk to people, I wanted to socialize, I wanted to have a nice time, but the more I tried, the more I felt like I was failing. I thought I would quite possibly never be able to make any new friends because I was just no good at it.
That was how I felt on the way back from Berlin. But the fact was that everyone at the event had been incredibly friendly and welcoming and the only reason I felt like I hadn’t connected with anyone was because I was being all scared. I decided it would be incredibly unfair to the other participants to let sadness, self-loathing, and resignation be the bottom line I’d draw from this experience.
I needed a mindset-shift. I needed to get into a more positive reference frame. Partly inspired by Robert’s lightning talk on gratitude journaling, I began by making a list of everyone I remembered having a comfortable conversation with. It took me only a few minutes to gather about 20 names, which I thought was pretty good for an event with less than 80 people – especially considering I spent a lot of the time hiding from everyone.
As a result of this exercise, it became much easier to contemplate all the positive aspects of the Weekend and feel a lot better about having attended.
Create opportunities, not conversations
So the plan was to meet new people and form new relationships and socialize and all that business, right? Yeah. But there’s a problem: I don’t actually know how to do that. I know I try, and I know that sometimes I manage to have a good time talking to people. But – and I really should have noticed this earlier – I’m always surprised whenever I have an enjoyable social interaction. So I knew I wasn’t actually incapable of having nice conversations – because they’ve happened before – but I was clearly doing something wrong; somehow, my model of how successful social interactions work must be flawed. Ironically, I could never remember what I’d done when conversations did go well. Whenever I really made an effort and thought about what I was doing, things were awkward and uncomfortable. How would I ever make progress like that?
And it took me this long to notice it. Maybe that is not a coincidence. Maybe trying to socialize just won’t work because socializing is not an action and “trying to socialize” actually does nothing but distract me from doing the actions that lead to everyone having a nice time. Assuming this is true, what are the actions I can perform?
Whenever I find someone interesting, I tend to assume they are somehow “objectively” interesting, so talking to them must be a bad idea because everyone is probably already talking to them all the time and I’ll just be an annoyance. Lesson One: This is not true. In most cases, your interest in someone is primarily a fact about you, and not the interesting person. If you don’t know how to start a conversation, just look for a group of interesting-looking people and stand close to them. What do you do then? You wait. Wait and listen. Don’t think about what to say. Trying to think of something to say is pretty much the last thing you ever want to do when you’re trying to have an interesting conversation (unless you have something specific you want to tell the other person, that is). Thinking about what you might say next will only distract you from listening to what the other person is saying.
So you wait, and you listen, and you try to get a feel for the situation. When you’re not desperately trying to “socialize” or “talk to people”, your brain won’t tell you you’re failing when you don’t say anything for a while. This will give you the time to get comfortable which, in turn, will tell your brain it’s okay to relax. And that is the point where you start talking, because once you feel relaxed and comfortable and you’re listening, you will inevitably find relevant things to say. (If you do find something to say earlier, you don’t need to hold back, of course. This is just supposed to help you think when you can’t.)
When I’m with a group of people I don’t know well, and the group moves from one place to another, I tend to get insecure and not know whether they still want me there, so I often quietly disappear. Lesson Two: The event is called “Community Weekend” for a reason. The others are there to talk to people, too. It will probably be fine to stay with a group and take part in their conversations even when they change locations. If you’re worried about being annoying, keep in mind that it is actually quite difficult to be so annoying that people will want you to go away. And if that doesn’t help, just have some faith that people will tell you to leave if they really don’t like you.
I have some ideas for one-on-one conversations with a specific person, but it’ll take a bit more practice until I can turn them into something useful.
I go into social encounters viewing most people as a combination of scary and boring. I can sometimes overcome that most of the way by spending months getting to know them and appreciate their unique perspective. Or I can cuddle with them for ten minutes. Either one works.
Ever since I read this, it has been part of my identity. Now I’m not so sure. I still think cuddling is awesome and it can calm me when I’m stressed out, but it did not really make me feel more comfortable around people I didn’t know and was scared of. Apparently, for me, to feel good about cuddles, I need some kind of relationship to be already present, or it will feel uncomfortable for me. Fortunately though, depending on the person, it doesn’t take more than a few minutes of contact to get to point where I feel comfortable cuddling someone. (I’m referring here to the stuff that’s been going on in the Blanket Fort. Regular everyday hugs work all the time with everyone, and I got quite a few of those at the Weekend for which I am very grateful.)
Blanket forts are awesome
Seriously, it’s like a blend between engineering and cuddles.
People know I exist
I once had a conversation with a friend from university. She is the person who (I assume) knows the names of (almost) every other physics student two semesters up and down at my university. To me, she said, “until well into the second semester, I didn’t even know you existed.” And the thing is: That did not surprise me. I’m not a very conspicuous person. Being mostly quiet and if not, uncontroversial, it’s understandable if people don’t notice me much.1
In the Study Hall, as far as I could tell, I’ve mostly been quiet, too, so I figured regulars of the Study Hall who were also attendants at the Community Weekend would be vaguely aware of my existence, but nothing more. It surprised me how much I felt like the other people from the Study Hall felt like they knew me. And then later in the Weekend, a few people even told me they liked talking to me and want to do more of that! Whaaat.
After thinking about this for a while, I concluded that this realization can be generalized to “people seem to feel more connected to other people (including me) than I feel to them”. Knowing that my perception of closeness is apparently different from most other people’s is useful, because (a) now I have something more specific to work on (I can probably worry less about making people like me and spend more time building trust that they already do), and (b) I can be slightly more confident in friendly interactions because I can assume that people probably dislike me significantly less than I might intuitively feel they do.
Someone suggested that this asymmetry may be caused by the fact that I tend to be very open and sharing about my feelings and insecurities and vulnerabilities, which makes people feel more connected to me, while I’m not as good at getting people to open up to me, which makes me feel less connected to them. I have observed that I do tend to sacrifice asking people about themselves in favor of oversharing my own experiences, so this is something else I want to work on.
Purpose, authority, and confidence
As I mentioned, one of my goals for the Weekend was meeting new people and, as I mentioned, I was having a lot of difficulty with that. This made me feel out of place and really useless a lot of the time. Then I saw people who were very distinctly not useless: the organizers were running around, doing important organizing. They didn’t need to worry about fuzzily defined personal goals because they had a clear purpose to fulfill. I imagine that having a purpose like that would have made me feel better. Toward the end of the Weekend, for example, I helped a bit with the clean-up, and that was significantly more comfortable (and confident) than sitting around, not knowing what to do. I decided that, if I’m going to attend the next Community Weekend, I would like to help organize the event. (I haven’t talked about this with this year’s organizers yet, and unfortunately I currently don’t actually know whether I can attend next year.)
You can meditate lying down
During the awesome amazing fantastic incredible Games Of Entropy reading, Daniel mentioned he likes to meditate lying down. I’d been struggling with keeping up my (theoretically) daily meditation because often I was tired and just wanted to take a nap instead. If I’m lying down, I realized, it’s like the perfect blend between a nap and meditation. Afterwards I am both physically rested and emotionally more stable, and the odds that I will actually do the meditation on a given day are significantly higher now.
Conclusion
I may be overly optimistic here, but I get the impression that, with the right approach, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit for increasing my comfort levels in social settings, and I even feel motivated to talk to more people to practice. I have already had a few interesting conversations with people I met at the Weekend and it seems likely that there will be more of those in the future. So, while my happiness-value spent a sizeable portion of the event below zero, I don’t regret having attended and I’m extremely grateful to Anne for suggesting it.2
Footnotes
This sounds so much like self-pity, but I don’t mean it that way, I promise! I’m just trying to describe a perfectly factual situation that consists of nothing but true facts. ↩
Before, my plan had been to see how my life develops and then possibly attend the 2016 LWCW. ↩
I have helped typeset three theses and many shorter documents in LaTeX and I realized that I find myself googling the same things over and over again. Therefore I decided to collect all the problems I have solved so far on this page. At the bottom there is a list of unsolved problems. The reader is invited to give me advice in the comments.
I will update this page when I learn new things.
This page is meant mostly as a reference for myself or others, for how to solve certain problems, technically. There won’t be much discussion of why you should do something a particular way. If you want to know more about that, I suggest you start with Practical Typography and if you’re still interested in typography after that, you can move on to The Elements of Typographic Style or something.
You probably know what most of these do. The geometry settings used here work well for symmetrical layouts. For asymmetrical layouts I like to use 2cm/6cm for inner/outer. That way I can put footnotes and pictures in the margins.
Apart from the standard packages above, the microtype package is the single most important package in existence and should be included in every document. It does a number of things:
Glyph reshaping. Characters are stretched or shrunk by up to 3% (adjustable with shrink and stretch) to improve justification. This will save you many overfull hboxes and even get rid of a lot of hyphenation without producing overlarge spaces.
kerning and spacing probably fixes some kerning and spacing issues. tracking adds some letter spacing for small caps.1
nocompatibility means you get the best possible result instead of microtype trying to keep the page breaks and such the same as without the package.
factor controls how much punctuation protrudes past the end of the line. Some people, for example, like having hyphens at the ends of lines sticking out into the margin. Personally, I don’t like that. You get 100% protrusion with factor=1000.
final=true means microtype is activated even when you use the draft option in the documentclass declaration. This doesn’t have any effect on the final document.
spacing=french is the same as calling \frenchspacing in the document body and prevents spaces between sentences from stretching wider than a normal word space. You might like that, but french spacing is the standard for most printed material nowadays.
Fonts
I don’t have a huge problem with Computer Modern, but (1) it is overused, and (2) since it’s the default, most typographic sins are committed with Computer Modern, so I sometimes get a bad feeling about it (like with Times).
These are some acceptable fonts:
Palatino
\usepackage[osf,sc]{mathpazo}
Palatino is like the Times New Roman of pretty fonts. It’s like everyone who’s unsatisfied with Times goes through their system fonts and says, “oh, that looks fancy!” and chooses Palatino. This means it comes close to being overused, but it still looks good enough that you can use it without feeling bad. Also, the mathpazo package offers real small caps (sc), oldstyle numerals (osf), and most of the mathematical symbols you will ever need.
It also works well with Euler math if you’re into that kind of thing.
\usepackage{euler}
The Johannes Kepler Project
\usepackage[oldstylenums]{kpfonts}
I’ve not used this font yet but, apart from the capital T, I like the look of it. Like Palatino, Kepler offers real oldstyle figures, real small caps, and extensive math support. There is also a sans serif version of Kepler that you might want to use in combination with the serif version, but I haven’t looked at that, so it might suck.
If you’re inclined to save ink, Kepler also has a light option.2
A note on numerals
In normal text, you want to use oldstyle figures3 (lowercase numbers). You only want to use lining figures (uppercase numbers) in combination with all caps, in mathematical expressions, or in tables. With the settings I’ve described above, Palatino and Kepler will automatically switch to lining figures in math mode. If you want to set all the numbers in a block as lining figures, you can place
The default line spacing (\setstretch) is usually too narrow. For most texts, a setting of 1.1 looks good, for very math-heavy or German texts I go up to 1.14 to avoid collisions between ascenders, descenders, accented mathematical symbols, etc.
I prefer indented paragraphs to vertically spaced paragraphs. If you like vertical space between your paragraphs, set \parindent to 0; if you like indented paragraphs, set \parskip to 0. Otherwise LaTeX may add spacing between paragraphs, which will look hideous if the paragraphs are indented.
The S alignment option aligns numbers by their decimal point. Because the column title isn’t a number, it needs to be wrapped inside the weird \multicolumn command. The [table-format=x.y] aligns the column in a way that numbers with x digits to the left and y digits to the right of the decimal point are centered. You can omit this option if everything looks fine, but it’s useful as soon as you have different numbers of digits in each row.
If you use S, the numbers will be set in math-mode, so they will automatically be lining figures. If you use l, r, or c, you will have to declare the \fontfamily at the top of the table to get them to look right.
Colored cells
Include the package
\usepackage{colortbl}
and call
\cellcolor{color-name}
inside your table-cell. The cell coloring doesn’t go all the way to horizontal rules, making the coloring discontinuous. That looks weird when you want to have entire columns in one color. I haven’t figured out how to prevent that.
The bullet character (•) is too large. To get better looking bulleted lists, this snipped works wonders. You can manipulate the size of the circle by changing the 2.2 above to something else. If you need more than two levels in your lists, you can duplicate the last line and change \labelitemii to \labelitemiii.
If you’re using the book document class, never ever use the default headers. I don’t know whose idea it was to make the headers ITALIC ALL CAPS, but trust me, it was a terrible idea. This setting was surprisingly difficult to change, too.
Then you can call \fnhere{Footnote content} where you want the note to appear in the margin and \fnref{} where you want the reference to appear in the text. This is only for moving footnotes up. They should move down automatically, if there are other \marginpars in the way.
\raggedright makes the text left-aligned, which looks better because margins are usually too narrow for proper justified text. \RaggedRight requires the ragged2e package and will re-enable hyphenation for the left-aligned text.
Some symbols
Some symbols I sometimes forget.
\textperiodcentered becomes the mid-dot (·). You should use this more.
Kerning
a\kern+1ptb
This adds 1pt of separation between the letters a and b. When I have the time, I use this extensively for adding space to the insides of paretheses since they’re set too tight in most fonts. Also works in math mode.
Colored boxes
I rarely use these because I always run into problems. But it can be kinda pretty and you can probably fix the issues if your document isn’t too complex.
The normal \ldots{} command creates too much space between the dots and, even with french spacing turned on, the amounts of space to the left and right of the ellipsis aren’t the same, so it looks uneven. You may need to adjust the amount of \hspace, depending on the font.
Comparison:
Only numbering certain lines of an align environment
Outdented lists, such that the bullet symbol or number is placed in the margin. Those are pretty.
Global kerning pairs without using LuaLaTeX. Alternatively: Get microtype to run in LuaLaTeX. Kerning parentheses manually takes a lot of time and search-and-replace is messy.
Figures that take up the whole width of the text and have their description as a \marginpar.
Figures that take up a fraction (e.g. half) of the text-width and have the description in the remaining space next to them.
Full width figures that are as wide as the text plus the width of \marginpars and have their description below.
Lowercase letters don’t ordinarily need letterspacing. Nor do capital letters when they appear at the beginning of a word or sentence, because they’re designed to fit correctly next to lowercase letters. But when you use capital letters together, that spacing looks too tight.
That’s why you always add 5–12% extra letterspacing to text in all caps or small caps, particularly at small sizes.
“Opipramol … is an antidepressant and anxiolytic used in Germany and other European countries.”
I’ve been taking 100mg of Opipramol (almost) every day for the last ~2 years.
I’ve been feeling (almost) constantly tired for ~3–4 years.
I have severe concentration issues.
Akrasia is not as big a problem as it once was. I can sit down and decide to work. Being able to think / pay attention for extended periods of time seems to be a big issue.
My psychiatrist told me the Opipramol might be hindering my concentration and decreasing the dose might help me focus.
I forgot to take my Opipramol a few times in the morning (I take 50mg in the morning and 50mg in the evening) and only noticed this when I was feeling anxious during the afternoon / early evening.
I tried reducing the dose by taking only one 50mg pill some time around noon but felt anxious throughout the day, so I went back up to two pills.
About a week ago I started taking splittable 50mg pills, so I received a dose of 25mg in the morning and 25mg in the evening. I didn’t feel more anxious than usual – perhaps even less.
About half a week later I noticed I had forgotten to take the 25mg in the morning but didn’t feel any unusual anxiety. I decided to try sticking to 25mg per day.
My anxiety has not increased.
Yesterday I felt extremely dizzy, like I was about to pass out, in combination with headaches. Headaches are common for me, this kind of dizziness is not.
Yesterday I also felt unusually awake. I normally start feeling very tired around 1100–1200, but yesterday I didn’t. I took a nap anyway. The headache improved, the dizziness didn’t.
I didn’t take Opipramol today.
Today the dizziness and headache are still there, but less so than yesterday.
I am optimistic that I will be able to live without depending on Opipramol.
I am optimistic that I will be more productive without taking Opipramol.
I tend to get super excited about anything that looks like it’s going to improve my situation and thus may have skewed the facts to point to the conclusion that everything is going to be awesome and I will never have any problems anymore, like, by the end of this week, even though I do not find that probable.
[This gets kinda rant-y. Don’t worry though, it’s not about the Watch.]
I found it irritating that I had to adjust the time on my wristwatch twice
every year because of DST, so I bought a radio controlled watch that would do
this automatically, and it’s working fantastically: Now I don’t even notice
when DST starts or ends. Except when I stop and ask myself why I’m feeling so
tired all of a sudden – but that’s beside the point. Here’s the thing:
Every 24 hours, the watch stops for around 20 seconds to look for a signal and
reset itself to the correct time. This is good, of course. Otherwise the watch
wouldn’t know when DST starts or ends, and it would all be for naught. And
besides, you don’t need the second-hand most of the time anyway.
The watch.
Still, it would be good to put the reset time at some point when most people
don’t look at their watches. “How about at night?” one engineer probably said.
“What a fantastic idea!” another exclaimed, “People sleep at night!” And they
went forth and set the reset time to midnight. Of course things aren’t always
accurate, so my watch stops every night at around 2–3 seconds before midnight.
There are not many times at which I need a sort of accurate second-hand, but
the last few seconds before midnight are practically the worst time I can
imagine for an interruption to happen. First of all, I would assume that
a lot more people are asleep at, like, 3 AM than at midnight, and
second of all, midnight is like the number one Schelling Point for things to
count down to. Think birthdays or New Year’s. Nino is like, “You guys, I got
this. I have an accurate watch.” And then everyone is like, “yeah, ok,” and
then they say “10 … 9 … 8 …” and when they’re at “3” the watch stops and Nino
is confused and the others keep counting, and this is not okay.
Why couldn’t they make the watch reset at 10 seconds after midnight?
Or at 2 or 3 AM?
I have a feeling that this wasn’t super well thought through.
[This was difficult to write in a way that makes sense to someone who
doesn’t live inside my brain and I don’t know if I succeeded. I’d be
curious to know if this makes any sense at all to anyone who is not
me.]
When I have a big problem that I want solved, I have found that there is one
simple process which tends to work. It goes like this:
Move towards the goal.
What I’m about to write is kind of part of what his post is about,
but it adds a layer of framing that has allowed me to feel virtually no
anxiety about the future for almost a week now, which is extremely unusual for
me. I wanted to share my thoughts in case anyone finds them useful.
So I know what the goal is and I’ve figured out the next action that will move
me closer to success. At this point everything is fine, but as soon as I look
into the future and try to visualize the transition from the current state to
the state of having reached the goal my mind tells me there’s some mysterious
huge task that still needs to be completed – one that feels unlike any “next
action” I can take along the way. Like all the next actions are just
preparation, and the actual accomplishing of the goal is different –
something I have no idea how to do because I’ve never done anything like it
before.
This probably sounds vague, so here’s an example.
Say I want to make friends. I’ve made friends before, I have some memory of
what I did prior to calling the relationship a friendship – talk to the
person, maybe make a joke or two, don’t be a huge dick, don’t complain about
their improper use of hyphens as dashes, that sort of thing. And then at some
point: bam!, friendship. So I say to my brain, “brain,” I say, “let’s
go talk to people.” And my brain says, “okay, but then what?” – “Then we can
become friends.” – “But how does the actual becoming-friends work? You only
know how to talk to them. You don’t know how to create a friendship. If you
can’t figure that out we might as well not try at all.” And so I stay silent.
There are many other situations where I feel like this. When I’m trying to
study, for example, a good next action might be to do one of the homework
problems. And my brain tells me, “yeah, you can do this now, but have you
looked at what’s still in front of you? You still have to work through this
whole textbook and do all those exercises and pass those two exams and do you
really think you can do all this? Those are really big tasks and
you’re just a small, not particularly impressive person.” So I start worrying,
which makes me unable to focus on the work I have to do now, which
makes me fail later.
But fortunately, for once, the truth is more pleasant than what my intuition
tells me: There are no big mysterious tasks you need to complete in order to
reach your goals. Once you completed all the challenges that stand in the way
of success, you have reached the goal. Everything you will ever need
to do is find the next thing to do and do that in this moment. When you have
done that, reaching the goal is not another task but a consequence that
happens on its own.
And in the meantime, there are never any tasks too big for you to handle. You
won’t need to study for three years, you won’t need to prepare that exam, you
won’t need to write a whole novel, you won’t need to create a friendship out
of thin air. All you need to do is look at one homework problem, read one more
sentence in the textbook, type another key on your keyboard, say another word
to someone you like.
Sure, from your current perspective you can see big tasks ahead, but you won’t
exist anymore by the time those become the next action. Those tasks will be
handled by the millions of consecutive future-you’s, all working on their own
next action for the infinitesimal amount of time they exist and letting the
next one continue.
Thinking about my goals this way helped me worry less about not knowing how to
solve big problems and not being sure whether I will succeed in the end.
Instead I can now focus on right now, and let “someone else” take
care of the rest.
