I couldn't tell you exactly why I do it, or even what the point of it is. What I can say is that a few years back I started to stop by those boxes, write gibberish on one of the cards, and put it in the box. I do zero thinking about what goes on the cards, I just put pen to paper and scribble words until the card is full.

It didn't occur to me to snap pictures of the gibberish until a few months ago. So here is some of the nonsense I've been adding to transparent boxes at a mall near you.

"Enter For a Chance to Win A $5,000 Mall Shopping Spree"

Once upon a time a wizard banished 500 Lions to (a) mirror universe for the sin of being too greedy. The lions found an old machine capable of shattering the crystaline wall that held them back from the edge of the world. They broke through and robbed a bank.

"Enter For a Chance to Win A $5,000 Mall Shopping Spree"

(This is about a hobo with gills)

I grew up a poor and disadvantaged Fishman. I dug through trash and dumpsters for anything breathable, cold coffee, chicken blood or even rotten milk. That lasted until one day when I found a man selling fake watches. He took pity on me and bought me a Coke. Then it was back to the garbage for me.

"Custom Remodelers, Inc"

Complexion of red hot pokers destroys all it sees. It does not know mercy. It does not like Milk. Don't feed it hay! Do NOT!

"FREE STORM DAMAGE ASSEMENT(sic)"

BALROG the Weather Spirit destroyed my above ground pool! I shall avenge it by using my claw of Earthen RAGE to smite his four mothers back to the vortex that spawned them.

I feel like most people don't need this rule in their lives. Either they mentally stop themselves from eating an unnecessary amount of food, their body gives them subtle clues that they unconsciously obey or maybe they just physically cannot just keep eating well past the point of any nutritional justification.

I, however, am the rare type of champion that can power through all of these obstacles and more! My mindless super consumption cannot be stopped by normal means. A lot of the times I just don't think about it. More than often I have found myself, seemingly a passenger in a body car that is rolling into the kitchen.

"What the hell am I doing in here?" I'll say outloud, hoping to establish out some sort of communication with whoever is actually controlling my actions.

"Why are we opening that cabinet that we logically know hasn't had snacks in it for weeks?"

"Why are we continuing to eat these tasteless, stale crumbs of 6 month old Pita Chips?"

Clearly, no logical barrier or physical one can withstand the Kool-Aid man bursting force of my gluttony. So I am hoping that, as has worked in the past, that the velvet rope of resolution will present a symbolic barrier where all others have failed.

Otherwise, I think I might just have to get accustomed to the fact that I am a gigantic fucking pig. (Don't worry, I don't mean this in a strange body image way, I am honestly horrified by my zombie like food trances.)

In preparation for making a New Years Resolution, I took mental stock of my feelings towards eating animals.

I was somewhat surprised to find that they had shifted, not just in my willing to eat them, but also in my desire to eat them.

In short, I feel better about eating cows, but have almost no longing or desire to do so. Still feel bad about pig unless I know where it came from, which is too bad since I really crave them.

Chicken is grossing me out more than last year as the lingering taint of some of the things I've read haven't fallen off, but this is largely counter-balanced by the fact that I have the habit of eating a lot of chicken. So as long as I don't think about it to much, chicken is just fine...

Which is again, a maddening mishmash of nonsensical rules.

For some reason, the lingering revulsion of chicken processing methods reminded me of this study a few years ago about how conservatives' brains have a higher "disgust sensitivity".

The scientists helpfully point out that maybe this is why conservatives are against gay marriage. Since it is a well-known scientific fact that male gay marriage involves twice the number of male butts than "normal" marriage, or as Rick Santorum recently pointed out, that it was impossible to think about the issue without also considering the hypothetical case of upwards of three or four male butts all rhythmically eroding the ability of those of opposite genders to love.

In the case of the grossed-out conservative, it would seem that the hypothesis is that anything over the disgust threshold simply short-circuits the ability to empathize on the nuances of the issue. You can talk about medical visitation, estate transfer rights, tax benefits all day long, and all they'll presumably hear is expermiental jazz comprised of three notes: "penis", "poop" and "butthole".

I kid them, but I can't help wonder if I am entraped in a similar net of moral short-circuits that make normal meat eaters scoff at me. Is my concern that pigs are too intellectual to be confined and subjected to factory farming conditions sound a bit odd? I mean are the farmers supposed to give them sudoku puzzles or something?

It is clearly an odd objection, but with the similar difficulty that it seems an impassable barrier to me getting past it to the utopia on the otherside where the biggest quandry is to mesquite or not mesquite?

The answer seems easy enough, that in this case, my car is just pointed the wrong way. These matters of disgust all seem like the frosted glass across the doors of our messy primal instincts. You enter the room, you do a thing, and then you leave without over analyzing what just happened. This is the way things were meant to be.

It is like going to a cocktail party to discover the home owner has set up his dog with a tophat and monocle, as if he were the host. The next step at that party is to relax and enjoy it, and not point and wonder at how the dog could have possibly folded thin layers of ham around pickles.

In the end, we're all the dogs in the top hats, and the most polite thing to do is to not point this out to one another, because, for one, we all secretly know it and two we very much want to be invited back to these sorts of parties again.

Among the attendees were school board members past and present, and their stories of how they got "recruited" to run.

Nearly every time it was the exact same story, X slots were open, Y people were running, Z of those people were nutjobs. It was at this point that almost everyone in the room got brought in. Chosen largely for their reasonableness.

Taken one way, it was almost as if it was a cabal of people secretly determining the outcome of each school board election, but after listening to them, and meeting them, it was much clearer that they took it as their social responsibility. Their sacrifice for the community of plugging a warm bodied hole before vermin invade it.

I'm kind of down on representative democracy right now. The definition instilled in my in junior high of it being a mechanism for selecting the greatest among us to inspire us to do more than ourselves is quickly dissolving.

But seeing these people, a vocal mix of Democrats and Republicans come together under the common banner of keeping "the crazies out", I found particularly inspiring.

This, this is one thing that maybe representative democracy as currently structured can be good at.

And by "crazy" let's refine that down to "Idealistic", that is, someone who is more concerned with the purity of their personal view of the world than reality.

You might be asking how, precisely the 2008 election of Obama fits into this mold. He of course ran on a very high minded, idealistic platform.

My response to that is that the other side was offering someone crazier, in the form of Sarah Palin. I believe her simply, folksy fundamentalist view of the world, and her disdain for those that corrected it pushed the independent voting groups to the less "radical" candidate who was running on very generically defined "change".

So often people get discouraged with democracy because they don't see a candidate who perfectly fits their views, or they'll feel cognitive dissonance about "wasting" their vote on a third-party candidate they agree *more* with, but who stands little chance of winning.

I think this view of voting simplifies things. The goal of voting is not to raise up the next Octavian for the masses, it is to keep the Neros out.

While Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog may have tainted the association forever, I often find it useful to think of the logical portion of my brain as a tool. A hammer specifically.

The simile is particularly obvious at night, when it's incessant presence first annoys me and eventually makes me feel like the helpless neighbor of a prolific nocturnal carpenter.

The comparison also helps to separate the "A+B=C" automatic sequencing I perform all day from who I am. It used to be that the mere thought of someone "smarter" than me would drive me to existential crisis. But when you think of reasoning as just another wielded skill that humans makes use of, I find the remainder a much more comfortable living room for a self.

My brief, but frequent dabblings in meditation also helped with this insight. If you totaled how I've spent my life so far, my guess is I've probably spent more time literally vomiting from sickness than spent in a comfortable state of having my calculating mind "off".

I've also gotten interesting mileage out of the "mind as a tool" concept when trying to reconcile my love of science with religion.

If all your life you have only encountered nails, straight-forward problems with linear solutions, you would naturally develop a strong tool preference. You might also have good reason to believe a user of any non-levered tools a complete fool.

That said, I think it is safe to conjecture the existence of some life obstacles where there exists no useful solution. For instance, if a loved one is dying and you very much want to stop that from happening, the answer is simply that you can't. This is the 100% logically correct answer, but is completely unsatisfying to a man of action with a hammer in his hand. In my case, I spent a good deal of time doing the equivalent of hitting a bunch of things with hammers. Striking out at anything on the off chance that it could be budged any metric unit towards my goal. The "Guess and Check" method has no logical terminating condition, only different values of desperation.

To a devout hammer user, a screwdriver must seem a very strange thing. Almost sinister. At first glance it appears to be nothing other than a tool for inflicting swift and gross harm, completely rubbish on nails, and seemingly designed for an imaginary situation. Similarly, to a person who has spent most of their life in situation after situation largely out of their control, the utility of being able to optimally choose your next course of action might seem like a strange thing to be excited about. If life hands you moments of freedom, why not simply relax and enjoy it?

So, as usual, I have leapt through overly complicated wickets to arrive at a point of forced moral relativism, and staked out what these days is considered the largely radical stance amongst most of my peer group that "religion might be good for something".

My son is going to Sunday School. I did this on purpose because I want him to be comfortable turning to religion if he's ever in a hopeless situation, rather than it being the a place he turns when he is in a grief stricken depth-first search.

That said, it scares the crap out of me how thoroughly he takes to it. I think religion is useful, but I also pretty much hate most of its implementations. I hate that my kid is learning Old Testament stories that are just weird. I hate the Noah story, and I hate that it is currently taking up real estate in his precious young mindspace. I hate that my kid will have to essentially apologize to most smart people he meets (or more than likely, disavow it and live in fear of me finding out of his decision), I hate that he will likely be unable to articulate the difference between his liberal Lutheran ELCA church and the crazy, hateful people that are constitute essentially 100% of religion's vocal cheerleaders.

When it comes down to it, if you throw a dart at a random Christian church, I probably disagree with something they do orsay.

So why bother?

I actually like Christian philosophy. Abandoning it just because so many people suck at it would be like abandoning Newton's equations just because 75% of the American public aren't anywhere near understanding them and 40% start using it as reasoning for denying rights to a minority group.

I believe good ideas should be judged on their merits, not by the company that claim to hold them.

Too often, people's interaction with religion goes as follows: Heaven sounds too good to be true, so it probably isn't, therefore religion likely has nothing to offer me.

This is the type of short circuit logic I employed for a long time. When really, using that logic is similar to saying "The natives on this island said their god would strike me down if I eat these berries, their god clearly doesn't exist, therefore it is safe to eat these berries". By definition the reason given for the superstition is a straw man, you learn far more by asking why it successfully propagated...

To scientifically analyze religion, you really should judge it by its component actions:

For me, they were:
• Get up on Sunday morning and hang out for an hour with people who want to be better people
• Brief group meditation where you think of friends and family that might need help
• Sing songs with very talented musician accompaniment
• Donate money earmarked for supporting the largest local food shelf
• Get reminded that it is okay to forgive yourself for all the stupid crap your mind keeps bringing up
• Eat Donuts
• Make small talk with nice old ladies

To me, the only damnable one up there that is "getting up on Sunday morning".

Okay, I actually wrote a ton more here, but I think I've tested your patience long enough. I know that reading about what another person thinks of religion is probably the least enjoyable topic possible. As a reward, I leave you with this.]]> General http://www.mindlessdrivel.com/index.php?itemid=694 Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:26:37 -0600 http://www.mindlessdrivel.com/index.php?itemid=690 An oft hollered question on this blog these last dozen years has been regarding how such a fundamental difference in viewing reality has come about in American politics.

Today My Friend Chuck whose blog is better than mine shared an article by David Frum entitled "When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?"

Frum is a staunch Conservative, and was one of loudest voices for the invasion of Iraq. So rather than tearing down Conservative values he is more providing insight into what has happened to the GOP in the last ten years.

I think his most interesting point is his observation that the Republican Party these past years has transformed into something altogether different from the standard political party of 80's that it used to be.

Having a nation wide network of TV ,radio shows and book authors willing to parrot your talking points is useful. The problem being, that ratings often rewards the exaggerators (see also, Glen Beck), eventually after many years there has been the subtle shift of politics driving news content, to news show antics driving politics.

Republicanism is now no different than a brand, and currently it is the Coke of the market. Both in economic success, and in the fact that it has essentially refined itself over the years tto have the maximal appeal to its target audience, even if that means becoming a sickly sweet secret concoction with questionable value to the well being of its consumers.

If Republicans are Coke, the Democrats appear to be Shasta. In that there are excellent rational reasons for choosing them, but in the end you just feel embarrassed about your choice. Now, I'm not saying that the Democrats are equally as empty as what the GOP media machine has created, just that since most people assume the two are foils, if one has become more about selling commercials and books than most people will just assume the other is comprised of identical garbage. (Garbage which does a far poorer job about making people feel good about choosing it...)

That said, from my vantage point, the Democrats seem largely unchanged these past dozen years. It is still largely comprised of old white dudes who are pretty much okay with the status quo, and lack the creativity or leadership to transform their party into something that could actually combat the Republican media juggernaut.

Frum talks quite frankly about how he was thrown off the GOP gravy train for pointing out that the train was moving in the incorrect direction. You do not discuss the quality of brand names. You don't point out that Pepsi might be more delicious with a burger than Coke, because brands are not something that can be rationally argued about. They are a symbol of trust of an iconic ideal, and the more you choose it, the more you trust it.

That's why so many political discussions are short circuited into quips and one-line statements. Since people who prefer Pepsi to Coke don't trust who you trust they aren't to be trusted! Most people chose their choice of detergent with their gut, not their mind.

This also explains the GOP Media's treatment of Ron Paul. He is not part of the brand, does not believe in the brand. In as such, his appearance at the debates is as unwelcome by the GOP as a wedding crasher trying to deliver the best man's speech. It is politely tolerated only due to the fact that the alternative would make too much of a scene.

So where does that leave us?

Well, I'd argue that there is hope. It isn't that there aren't sane Conservatives out there, it is just that they are not given any sane options to vote for.

With Obama content to sit on the sidelines and watch the inevitable belly flop of the GOP's self-made slippery slope, I almost find myself hoping for an Independent spoiler candidate.

I really think Bloomberg, a social liberal, fiscal conservative self financed campaign could bring a lot to the race, if only by making the two sides have a reason to pull themselves into something coherent, rather than relying on the cold zero sum logic of "Vote for me so that the other guy will lose".

I have come to a realization. I don't like Chess.

I was going to right "hate" there, but that would be overstating it.

Chess and I go way back. I remember playing it in third grade with Jason my friend who doesn't have a blog, sometimes we'd stay in from recess to finish a game. We even played it at Festival of Nations where I ended up tying a game to one of those Ukrainian guys who plays like a million games at a time.

At the time I think I played it for the same reason a 5th grader insists on sipping coffee, or a 7th grader tries to smoke, to clumsily show off to everyone how grown up I was.

In 5th grade I carried around a hand held chess set and played it quite a bit. I organized a chess tournament and would play against teachers. In 6th grade I went to chess day camp where I was pretty much humiliated over and over again.

Seriously, I wept openly after one particular game.

Which, to Chess' credit was probably a well needed ego correction at the time.

That said, "get good at chess" was always kind of a life goal of mine, but despite playing over and over, I really feel like I never got any better. Even after reading books on the subject, I just never got to the mystical moment where I could start predicting even a modest number of moves ahead.

So there's that and the fact that Chess seems like the "gotcha journalism" of strategy games, in that you can just be playing along, and if you didn't realize that in three moves their knight was going to be able to move in an L and threaten both your king and your rook at the same time, well fuck you the game is over.

I also almost never have fun playing chess. So many other games I can play and just enjoy the actual game, and lose and still not be grumpy, but Chess is so tied up as an "intellectual" game, that I feel like you can't play someone else without it being, at some level, a "who has got the bigger mind phallus" contest.

That, and I just do not understand the opening game at all, or how it ever transitions to the point where you have any idea what is going to happen next.

I give Chess respect for its long established place in history, but to be honest, in the given game climate, I just think it can no longer be considered a good game. A lot of its game mechanics rely on obfuscation, and fiddly line of sight relationships that are obtuse and unfriendly.

Although, that's clearly not it. That was not the thirty-plus year old me writing sour grapes like "You know, if you think about it, chess it really isn't that great of a game".

Chess is clearly an exceptional game with tight, simplistic rules that explode into effectively infinite variation. It is a classic game which has more than stood up to any and all test of time as well as numerous attempts to profit by changing its core mechanics into something patentable.

Those are clearly the bitter thrashings of the ghost of the elementary school me, who so badly wanted to cling to the idea of himself as a Bobby Fischer style prodigy. Who so often assumed that to be a "smart person" you had to be super good at chess, in the same way that rich people wear suits. It is the prototypical keystone of who I imagined I wanted to be.

Identity is a weird thing, but at some point you have to start examining what you're clinging to.

"Hello everyone, my name is Kyle , and I'm not magically good at chess."

For as long as I've had this blog a common question I often raise seems to be why we live in such a divided world.

It isn't just political lines, I see it developing along essentially every line: religion, child rearing, what game console you prefer, what type of character you prefer to play in a particular game.

As a lad I witnessed honest discussions on many of these topics, which these days would end in shouting or stiff silence.

Last night while reading "Influence: the psychology of persuasion" (Thanks GS!), I think I finally found a hypothesis to explain why.

Our minds value consistency, and in fact often strive to create it. On the surface this sounds like a useful, laudable mental goal.

The problem is, is that this "consistency enforcement", doesn't simply function on the cognitive level, and can influence us in ways we don't expect.

During the Korean Wars, the Chinese had a incredible success rate at breaking captured American POW's who were patriotic and rigorously trained to only provide name, rank and serial number.

As a first step, the POW would be asked to write mildly anti-American statements (e.g. "America is not perfect."). If he refused, he would be asked to simply copy them from a notebook. A seemingly benign concession.

The problem is, is that your subconscious takes note of things you willing write, and it records the fact that a particular opinion was committed to the public record.

Time and time again it is shown in lab experiments that an opinion that is held silently is mutable, whereas one we've committed to the public record is a dropped anchor that is very difficult to move away from, and eventually the silent opinions, no matter how strong, will eventually succumb to those that are written. So unless the GI was secretly also committing his private, unshared patriotic resolve his unthinking love for his country never stood a chance.

This technique was tested by having college test subjects estimate the number of people in a picture. They were then instructed to keep their guess to themselves or to share it. The next day they were given more information about the photograph. The subjects who had disclosed their estimate were by far the most stubborn at clinging to their first estimate, whereas nearly all other subjects integrated the new information and revised their own estimate.

So what does this have to do about our multiply polarized world?

It used to be the only people who committed their opinions on things were people writing letters to the editor, fan letters to celebrities, or asking a manufacturer to please replace their otherwise terrific product that unexpectedly crapped out.

The barrier to permanently submitting an opinion was fairly high, and took a concerted reason and effort to execute.

This is clearly no longer the case in this era of Web 2.0 where it is a trivial matter to comment at length about the efficacy of a towel you purchased from Amazon ("Of great utility, I bring it everywhere I go! A++++")

As an example, scroll down and take a look at at the comments on this news story from yesterday. Armed with this new insight I view a majority of these comments not as an honest attempt to persuade, but rather a gleeful stone of consistency, placed on a wall already several hundred feet high.

I don't mean to pick on "conservatives", and do not mean to imply it is a problem unique to them since essentially everyone from every political spectrum uses the internet to comment on things, even if it is to just reiterate that they don't participate in politics at all. What it does explain is why people seem to flock to sites which share their point of view.

Could these quick quips that we write and forget about on a daily basis calcify our opinions? What if we post under pseudo-anonymously, will our brain recognize that subtlety and excempt it from "consistancy checking"?

I'm not even convinced this is a necessarily bad thing. From an evolutionary standpoint, why spend brain cycles rethinking a stated opinion? Where is the fitness advantage there? I don't see one.

I've often heard that your opinions solidify around the age of 20. Whether this is due to going to college and writing things down or just the accumulation of a body of evidence that your brain finds sufficient, I don't know.

But with there being no age restrictions on commenting in political forums I wonder how this will effect the current generation. If written opinions truly are more firmly placed in your brain, does that mean that ideological petrification might begin at a younger age?

What if your political views didn't change from age 15 to 20, who would you be?

I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that by writing and posting this piece, I will apparently believe it more than I did before I wrote it.

The first thing I was told when I got my first salaried job out of college was that I should sign up for the company's 401k plan, since they did up to a 5% match, that it was essentially like giving yourself a raise.

So I did that, and I pretty much continued doing that for the past 12 years.

Mostly my 401k allocation languished in whatever I stuck it in, like a forgotten gerbil that begins gnawing on its urine soaked wood chips for sustenance, and whose dried up husk is discovered by surprise under a forgotten stack of newspapers.

That is until recently when I took the advice of my in-laws and started using their financial planner.

One thing I dislike about fiddling with investments is that it seems to have no honor to it. Every time I've brought up the idea of investing in sustainable, green or socially responsible things I am met with the same guarded pause that I imagine I would give to someone if they asked me for a "female computer". Apparently such requests are equal parts naive, ridiculous and impossible.

I feel like if UFC used the same social norms as investing it would be a show about guys who deliver suprise kicks to their opponent's heads while they are picking out cereal with their family at the grocery store.

In any case, my money has someone to hang out with now, and it still feels strange, like my 12 years of play money has taken on a life of its own.

I'm the type of person who doesn't shop at Walmart and is quietly smug about this. My investment portfolio on the other hand invests heavily in the real estate trust that rents strip mall space to big box stores such as Walmart.

Why does it do that? Because 7% is better than 5%.

I follow the statements like a parent watches his college freshman's facebook page, with equal parts confusion and dismay.

If I'm reading the statements correctly this month, I believe I am strongly leveraged towards shorting the S&P 500. Which bothers me, since to me it seems a fundamentally dishonest act and also an unfair advantage since it is essentially never an option for the standard retirement investor..

In my mind I imagine a big circle where sometimes it rains money, and everyone clambers into the circle for the free money, but then big alarm bells go off that only some people can hear, and all the people who are in the know can leave the circle and start taking side bets on how many people are going to be knifed to death. Even worse, it is essentially impossible for the people with standard 401ks to ever truly leave the circle. The best they can do for themselves is find the least "knifey" spot.

In the end, I think the least appealing thing about investment planning for me are that it seems laughable to attempt to predict what is going to be useful when I am 60. What will the world be like? How much will cybernetic fingers cost? Will the underwater dome city I live in have an ATM that deposits nanocrystals in USD?

But it is good someone else is doing it. The calculus of my mind so often equates planning for the future with post-apocolyptic hellscapes, that were I still the steward of that money I probably would have squandered it on a rental space full of 10 yr old MRE rations, water jugs and AK-47s.

Although it seems very depressing to me that the most optimistic expression of my hope for the future still resides on betting on the reliable permanence of large corporations.

I have been hard on corporations through out the years, so let me officially take the time to state that they are definitely a preferable and more likely distopian future than a nuclear scarred zombie infested hell-scape.

With the exception that Christmas shopping is a far simpler affair in the latter scenario: "Water purification tablets! I love them! Thank you so much! I will totally use these."]]> General http://www.mindlessdrivel.com/index.php?itemid=679 Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:13:19 -0500 http://www.mindlessdrivel.com/index.php?itemid=673

So there are sort of two parts to parenting.

The first is just the day to day tactical stuff of getting through the day without your kid dying and as a secondary goal, containing their bodily fluids from getting everywhere.

With the first kid we spent most of our time running around like Lucy in the chocolate factory just struggling to accomplish those two goals.

With the second kid who seems "easier" either due to our experience or her temperment, I find that I have time to contemplate the higher responsibilities of being a parent.

Whether I like it or not one of my tasks above and beyond keeping a life alive is being an active part of shaping a future person.

As is common I find this day to day thing that most other parents likely never fuss over a paralyzing computational and existential question.

Foremost, the idea of trying to actively steer a sentient being towards a certain outcome seems like the definition of a NP-complete (a.k.a. impossible to solve) complexity problem. Secondarily there seems the fundamental idea of "Do I want to make my kid come out like me?", that requires an uncomfortable amount of self-examination. Even if I had the self-esteem to say "You know I'm pretty OK", from there seems a vast leap from there to crowing "I am awesome enough that there should be another one of me!"

Of course, some might argue that I already made that decision when I made two things comprised of half my DNA, and there seems little point chickening out now.

Still, there is the fundamental question of "Do I steer my child toward what I know, or toward what looked better?" At least with my life I know the basics that I didn't end up curled in an alley with track marks on my eyelids.

To complicate matters, I've been reading suggested passages from the book "Outliers", which presents research that the key to being extraordinary involves putting 10k hours of work into something before the age of 20.

I've often wondered what would happened if I had choosen the path of more resistance, rather than mathematically deriving how much I could slack off and still receive a degree. If I had actually worked to get good grades to get into MIT and study cutting edge technology.

I have expressed strong opinions about parents working out there fantasies through their children. So I feel some pretty strong cognitive dissonance even contemplating it, but once I did I could clearly see the path before me if I wanted to take it.

Kelvin loves robots. It would be a simple matter to take the measure of his interest, start off building some lower level kid's kits. One weekend a month showing him how it works, having him help put it together. If there was any spark of interest it would seem easy enough to build a bed of dry tinder for it to flourish in.

He'd love it (it would likely putter out and fail if he didn't).

But I can't help keeping a worrisome eye on the destination. There is pretty much a 100% liklihood of my son needing strong glasses. Do I also want to make him the kid who programs robots by himself at age 10?

There is little value for such competence at that level. I might as well teach him to pound nails into his soft pallet, in fact in middle school that talent would probably serve him better.

I envision the law of unintended consequences hanging above me like the sword of some dead greek guy. It almost seems easier to just punt, take it day by day and to not have a grand plan. Just avoid trying to "tiger mom" my child into something hyper-competent and consign all predistnation into the line "as long as you're happy".

Especially since once he's a teenage I can virtually guarantee he will begin to actively reject anything and everything. What plans could possibly survive that sort of willful riot?

In the end it is difficult, if not impossible to subjectively sort out my own motivations. How can I tell the difference between an attempt to be a good parent and ego-based self-indulgence? The best I can come up with is that if it my plans ever verge into the creation of a matching mecha suits and the layout of nearby banks that perhaps it might be the latter.