Depression part 2 (personal)

Disclaimer: This is even more subjective than part 1.

This post is going to be a personal exploration into where my depression comes from. The proximate causes I don’t think are a mystery to anyone, and will be kind of mundane, but I also think that in some ways there are deep-seated reasons why I have these mental illnesses described in part 1: many things that I think are key aspects of my personality, including many positive things, are very connected to depression and seem fundamentally correlated.

Depression part 1 (impersonal)

Disclaimer: This post refers only to my (subjective) experience with depression. I’m not claiming that this is descriptive of anyone else’s situation.

The standard presentation of mental illness goes something like this: that there are these people who are qualitatively different, and that it’s a permanent condition, possibly fixable through therapy and drugs, but basically long-term in nature. Of course, there are highs and lows (in the case of manic depressives, accentuated ones), but fundamentally “a person with depression” is a descriptor of the person, like “a person with Down’s syndrome” or “a bald person”.

This has always struck me as a very poor description of the way I experience things. To me, depression feels like a series of temporary illnesses: like having a cold, or whooping cough, or allergies, or an upset stomach. The illnesses certainly vary in their length; just like in 2011 I had this cough that lasted a few months and I thought I would have it forever, sometimes I have depressive episodes that last for quite some time and seem to be permanent (but haven’t been yet, fortunately). But it feels a lot more like that than it does like something that is always there.

Childhood precursors

For no good reason, I was thinking about my childhood today, and whether or not you could see the person I’ve become then, in terms of personality and lifestyle. I’m a pretty clean test case for this, at least subjectively: I draw a very clear line during the summer after freshman year of high school, when I went to math camp at Hampshire College. To me, it’s very clear that this is when my continuous personality starts; that’s when I became a romantic idealist, that’s when my quant inklings started growing geometrically if not exponentially, that’s when I started making super close friends (although actually none from that summer have survived continuously as such).

Why I like Dominion so much

The games are just so different from each other, it’s amazing. I seem to have (presumably temporarily) ascended to #1 on the isotropic leaderboard, which is pretty fun, so at least I kinda know what I’m doing. Check out my last 10 games of the winning streak that got me there and the diversity of strategies:

Vertical dreams

Every now and then I have something that I’ve decided to call a “vertical dream.” What this is is* a dream where things in one level seem to have implications for things in other levels. Okay, every now and then is too much; I’ve had two of these and the second one was last night. I guess these days they can probably be called Inception-style dreams; I’m sure Inception was inspired by a vertical dream its creator had.

* – This one is for you, LWS

New blog

This thing has been somewhat dormant. I’ve moved my main blog presence on the objective stuff over to http://thequantlife.com/, where I hope to write daily on a variety of general interest topics through an economist’s lens. I’ll probably still funnel more personal stuff here occasionally, but please do check that out!

Help me vote

So for the first time (given my newfound citizenship) I’m going to get to vote in the elections this fall. I’m going to do the personally risky thing of talking about my thought process regarding the ballot — this is very risky because it will alienate anyone who doesn’t agree with me, which is probably everyone. But I’m doing this because I’m curious if anyone can legitimately help. What I’d really love to see is some sort of quantitative analysis of certain things. My dream is an analysis of candidates who come from a business or non-political background* and how their job performance was as governor, specifically with respect to the budget. You would intuitively think that businesspeople would be more likely to balance the budget, but I don’t know that that’s true. I am considering doing a study myself, but it would save me lots of time if it already existed. I’d also love any other quant studies (e.g. Democrat vs Republican performance on the budget, 3rd party performance versus political extremity of future elections (do D/R candidates become more L/C in the future in reaction to extremist 3rd parties doing well)) that can possibly be unearthed. Anyway, let me start by talking about what I believe.

The Second Law Of Large Numbers

The first law of large numbers, as everyone knows, is that as n gets high, the sum of n trials of a random variable (e.g. number of heads in n tosses) will asymptotically approach its expected value (e.g. n/2), with the expected average deviation (e.g. difference from n/2 divided by n) approaching 0. To be precise, the standard deviation is proportional to the square root of n. But there’s another, entirely different, truth which I call the “second law of large numbers,” which goes like this: given a large number of possibilities, a lot of improbable things will happen. In this post, I will talk about this law applied to sports, but it works equally well in real life.

The real genius of foursquare et al.

One feature of Web 2.1 appears to be the proliferation of services like Foursquare (Yelp stole the functionality, as did Facebook), which, as I’m sure you all know by now, is a website where you can check in at your (physical) location. This has two facets: first, you let everyone know where you are, and second, you occasionally get bonuses (either virtual or real) for doing sufficiently cool things or identifying yourself sufficiently closely with an establishment. The funny thing is that the website wouldn’t function at all without both of these things, because the second serves as a smokescreen for the first.

At the boundary

So for a while now I’ve sort of felt like I was cool for a nerd and nerdy for a cool person (well, I would never categorize myself as a cool person, so I guess tie goes to “nerd.”) But something occurred to me today: I bet everyone feels this way.