who only by moving can balance

It is commonly asserted, in popular culture (or at least the parts of it that I frequent), that chess grand masters when given a board set up mid-game and asked to list all possible moves... won't. In contrast to amateurs, who'll get a rather more complete set, because -- goes the anecdote -- grand masters just don't see the bad moves.

I have been unable to unearth any actual corroborating evidence for this; I've found a lot on "chunking", on the ability of chess grand masters to recreate mid-game but not random boards they've seen very briefly to a relatively high degree of accuracy -- but that isn't actually what I wanted to set up this post, so instead I'll just present it on the meta level (and gratefully accept any offers of references).

Because the thing I want to talk about is unlearning, well, precisely that.

I've been thinking, recently, about the psychological trick of looking at your catastrophic thoughts, your worst-case scenarios, your Only Possible Explanations, and -- learning how to address them by means of sitting down and just... writing a list (of ten, or five, or three) alternatives that do not have to be realistic or plausible. "She's not replying to my message because she's on a highly classified Mars mission and she's got far enough out that the lightspeed delay is significant." "He's having a tea party with a dinosaur and can't get over the feathers." Anything, anything at all, that gets you out of the space of discarding anything but the Worst Case Scenario as impossible, before you've even really consciously considered it.

You're (re)learning how to see the "bad" moves. You're learning how to see options.

And it's generally much easier to start, to practise those skills, with things you're not even trying to make yourself believe -- where the extent of your emotional engagement is resentment of the exercise -- than with anything that feels threatening because, for example, it involves vulnerability, or uncertainty, or hope. It's got other benefits -- it's distracting; it might even be amusing -- but that's the core of it: you're learning not to dismiss out of hand the options that are obviously impossible.

Like, you know, "maybe they don't actually hate me".

(For the princely sum of £15, no less.)

Boots are polished and out by the window, though, and probably very grateful for it they are too, given how long & how desperately they've needed a clean.

It is an interesting tension, for me, between not-my-religion and definitely-my-cultural-heritage, but observing Heiliger Nikolaus is a link to my grandmother and also an excuse to clean my shoes, so here we are, and in the morning I'll get up early to go to lab & they'll contain treats & I will pocket some of them to take with me.

Do we think that dishwashers fall in the domain of Anoia, goddess of Things That Get Stuck in Drawers?

(I'm pretty sure my dishwasher does, but that doesn't necessarily generalise.)

I have just finished this series, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, and goodness but it does a lot of things with change and motion and theology that speak to me on a very deep level.

I find it very difficult to believe in the writing style -- I... have yet to knowingly meet a teenage girl who writes like that in her diary, okay -- but provided I ignore the conceit of diaries (and my exasperation with implausible world-building -- if food's so hard to come by where in hell are they getting enough cotton to make new jeans from) I am incredibly invested, and I want more, because of course I do, and perhaps I'm going to go and find a bunch of fic (I feel a little ashamed that the fic I want in the first instance is fix-it fic, as though that somehow erodes or elides nuance and complexity; in fact, as we perfectly well know your blue-eyed boys [MCU] is fix-it fic and in no way overlooks struggle and sacrifice and heartbreak).

And it is also sociologically fascinating to have read these books for the first time now, in 2017, when they were written in the 1990s and set in a near-future 2020s-2030s dystopia, in the context of current US politics and racism. ( Mild spoilers? )

Recommended, I think, but with the caveat that it has every single content note, to first approximation. If you'd like more details, please ask.

A brought up originalism this morning (very briefly: it's a legal approach to interpretation of the US constitution that views the Constitution's meaning as fixed as of the time of enactment, rising to prominence in the 1980s) as contrasted with the Living Constitution/constructionism.

It seems obvious to me that this is a theological argument at least as much as it's a secular one, in that originalist interpretations are associated with conservatives (notably Scalia) in a way analogous to Biblical literalism (a school of thought arising, ish, in the 18th century) in contrast with exegesis that treats religious texts as living documents that require reinterpretation in light of their present contexts. (I am contrasting "theological" and "secular" there deliberately, rather than "theological" and "legal": for the purposes of this post I'm taking the perspective that the Bible is a text that sets out a system of laws and precedents.)

I'm neither a theological scholar nor a legal scholar (and nor for that matter am I especially familiar with the US politicolegal system beyond the obvious osmosis) so I'm obviously handwaving quite a lot here, but I would be interested in Your Collective Thoughts on the matter, if you have them and feel like talking!

In that it was the set of readings about how it is easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven, and so there was a lengthy break before the homily in order to pass out and fill in forms to set up standing orders to the parish...

See, right, the thing that annoys me even more than People Criticising Christianity Wrong is lazy, compassionless theology rooted in shame and fear, especially when it's coming from sodding priests.

This is how bad today's sermon was: I walked out after the Peace and my mother joined me after communion, and was genuinely surprised I hadn't walked out while the guy was still talking.

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Content notes: evangelism, mention of non-current suicidality.

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