33. Your Heart Will Go On

When I talk about metaphorical hearts - or, if you like, in My Culture's Language and Idiom - what that means is not something necessarily about love, but something about desire or longing. (Love - affection and things akin to romantic love and limerence - lives in the liver, along with care and worry; sometimes also in the lungs, with action and expression and centeredness.) It's about what feels alive to you, what feels innately appealing, what strikes directly at your core, your sense of self, your motivation and drive. Crucially, the broader context of that idiom is visibility; think "wearing your heart on your sleeve", or prying your chest open.

With that in mind, I'll define four attitudes or actions that extend that sense of "heart": showing your heart, hiding your heart, denying your heart, and trampling on your heart.

To "show your heart" means to pursue your desires freely and openly, and to be frank about the things that you want - at least, when that seems prudent. It means asking for things that you want, taking actions and spending resources to get closer to the things you want, and sometimes denying those things to other people in the process. Showing your heart is vulnerable but also very alive; having it be known what you long for means that other people can choose to aid or hinder you to their own ends.

To "hide your heart", by contrast, is the absence of those things, though without specifically negating them. It means being furtive about your desires, dissembling, perhaps for fear of being pulled around by your heartstrings. It means biding your time, stashing resources, and keeping your distance. It means acting second, and maybe that means that someone else is quicker on the draw, come what may. It means steering clear of potential regret in the name of low variance and a kind of safety; it means avoiding sticking your neck out and keeping well back from being any kind of burden. Hiding your heart is safer, but not necessarily more secure; it's having your shields up and keeping quiet about what you want or need.

To "deny your heart" goes further. It means not only hiding your heart, but on top of that, actively trying to throw people off the scent - others and even yourself both. It means misleading or even lying about where your heart is and what lives there. It means trying not to think about your heart at all; hearing and feeling what it is your heart wants, and explicitly setting that aside, ignoring the ache. It means surrendering space and control, passing up pursuing your desires out of things like resource scarcity or a marked lack of safety or security. Denying your heart is something to do with extreme caution, to notice when it's happening and to try to avoid doing too much of. It's also something you might do when badly spiritually malnourished, trying very hard to people-please, or otherwise unwell.

Finally, to "trample on your heart" goes further yet. Not only have you given up concealing your heart, but you've then removed it from yourself to some painful extent and then begun to attack it, to tear it down. You begin to fail with abandon, to shove away those appealing things which are just out of reach. You reject the things that you want that feel impossible, that hurt too much to hold the desire for; you try to stamp out that smoldering stubborn feeling of aliveness that serves you no clear purpose any more; you grind that sharp shining yearning down to smoothed edges and powder. Trampling on your heart is something you do when in a lot of pain, or in the middle of giving up on a dream; when you need to grieve something lost but before you're ready to.

Maybe there's other things to do with a heart more daring than showing it and less foolish than giving it away. I wouldn't know.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

20. A Sketch of Helpfulness Theory With Equivocal Principals

You may rightly wonder what else I’m up to, if it’s not just blogging and the occasional adventure. The short answer is that I spend most of my time and mental energy taking part in a summer research fellowship in AI safety called PIBBSS, where my research direction has to do with questions like “how does an agent help a principal, even if the agent doesn’t know what the principal wants?” and “how much harder is it for the principal to teach the agent what they want, and how much worse are the outcomes, if the principal doesn’t know for sure what they want?”. The long(ish) answer is this post. I’ll avoid jargon, mathematical notation, and recommendations to read other long papers, but some amount of that will be unavoidable. Here’s the basic setup - called a “Markov decision process”, sometimes with adjectives like “decentralized” or “partially observable” - which forms the ground assumption for the entire subfield my research direction lies in, called “inverse reinforcement learning”:...
Read more

4. Seven-ish Words from My Thought-Language

Seven entries from a dictionary that will never exist, even though it should. The words in [brackets] show up with some frequency in my thoughts, and I struggle with English’s semantic poverty. Some of them show up in other languages, like Korean or Lojban. Others among them, people I’ve spoken to share in wishing were wider-used words. [untranslatable 1: word-clogged/interference-silent] (adj): Of a person or their state of mind. Descriptive of the phenomenon where a person has multiple different things to say about a specific topic, or multiple different responses or reactions to a remark an interlocutor has made, only one of which can be taken. To be tongue-tied not out of a lack of things to say, but out of an overabundance of mutually exclusive things to say, all of equal priority, especially when each thing to say would result in following importantly different conversational paths. Often used instead in its natural verb form, which means “to be silent as a result of [word-clog]”...
Read more

11. Why the First “High Dimension” is Six or Maybe Five

Image
(Epistemic status: morally correct, in the mathematician’s sense; here to give flavor and intuition without too much rigor.) People toss around the concept of “high-dimensional space” a lot without having a good idea of where that starts. Interpretability researchers staring at vectors in hundreds of dimensions are clearly contemplating a high-dimensional space - loss landscapes packed full of saddle points and spheres where any given pair of vectors is almost certainly nearly orthogonal - but do they know what it means to be a high-dimensional space? Surely we can do better for ourselves than Justice Stewart’s infamous maxim - “I know it when I see it”! What do we care about, when we want to tell how many orthogonal axes we need in a space to start calling it high-dimensional? I claim that we should care about looking at unit-radius disks - like, literal filled-in two-dimensional circles - and in particular, checking when, whether, and how pairs of those unit-radius disks overlap when...
Read more