Loftwings and Demons

There's something I find very soothing about math, even when it frustrates me. I think it's just that it's a discipline where logic isn't only valued, it's required. It's not like a debate, where people regularly succeed through sophistry and lies. If you speak a mistruth to the universe in its own language, no matter how eloquent or how confident or how much you believe that lie, it will still tell you 'no'. You cannot move it to believe an untruth, no matter how passionately spoken.

I think it's fortunate that I have so many interests, because it's difficult for me to spend any time at all on things I'm not interested in. Though since I can only be interested in one thing at a time, it can still be difficult to focus on something I would otherwise enjoy doing if it's not what I'm interested in at the time.

Like I say I hate writing sometimes but that's clearly not always true. It can be, though, and it can certainly be said that I hate how I can tell when I'm not writing well, but I can't figure out how to produce something good. Even when I do write something well, I don't know how I did it or how to repeat that. I don't mean things like how to do spelling or grammar or paragraphs or such--I can grasp that part fine. It's the content part. It's like there's some part of that process that I'm capable of doing, but I don't know how I do it, so I can't do it on demand.

And yes, there's a creative aspect to that. But there's a creative aspect to other things I can do fine and also understand how I am doing them to a much greater degree than I do with writing. It's why I like math so much, despite my early schooling repeatedly reinforcing that I'm supposedly mediocre at it (I am very much not mediocre at it at all). I *understand* math. I understand the processes that go into it. When I learn a math concept, I can apply it to arbitrary situations. It may take me a while to absorb it, but when I do, I actually understand it (and can explain it).

But when I write, it's like if someone knows how to play a musical instrument by ear. They can't explain how they do it, and they may sometimes not even consciously understand how they know what to do. Still, something in them knows what to do. But to extend the metaphor to my situation, sometimes they randomly become tone deaf for a while and can't play anything well at all. That's what my experience with writing has been.

I hate thinking anything like this is an unsurmountable problem though. Maybe it is, but maybe it's not. Maybe I just haven't fully grasped the higher level concepts yet. Maybe I just need to be patient.

Am doing some math to help reduce anxiety.  I find math problems a lot more straightforward than some of the other problems I'd like to solve.

Was reading this article, which talks about the safety of elevators vs stairs:

https://www.livescience.com/17504-fatal-nyc-accident-elevators-safer-stairs.html

Now, I am personally already convinced of the thesis of this article, and have been for a long time.  Whenever given a choice, I prefer to take the elevator instead of the stairs, and I prefer living in first floor apartments where I don't have to climb stairs.  I think stairs are dangerous (and they are inconvenient for those who require wheelchairs or other mobility aids).

However, I'd like to point out some reasons why this article doesn't effectively argue it's point (a point which I already agree with) to show the difficulty of supplying good evidence for one's beliefs.  One issue with the article is that it doesn't link the location of the source or otherwise make it easy to verify the number of fatalities caused by stairs that it gives.  It only names the organization it obtained the information from.  Another issue is that there is no number given for the estimated total number of stair trips made in the US annually.  This is a major issue as it makes it impossible to compare the percentage of fatalities to stair trips to the percentage of fatalities to elevator trips.  Just because the total number of deaths is larger from stairs than from the elevator doesn't mean the percentage is larger, and that's a very important distinction to make.  For example, if I told you that I had injured myself several times via knives but never by grenades, it might be relevant to know that I have handled knives many times but that I have never handled a grenade when determining what this can tell us about the relative safety of knives vs grenades.  There's also this line: "For comparison, while 27 people die in U.S. elevators annually..." which should most definitely either have an 'about' before the 27 or reference a particular year from which that statistic was obtained.

There are more issues with the article, but I think that's enough to demonstrate the difficulty of presenting good evidence for an argument.  Evidence must be meticulously examined to determine its quality.  We should all learn what questions to ask ourselves to interrogate if we can properly back up our beliefs.  I certainly can't do that at this point for my belief regarding elevators and stairs.