I dreamed last night musician Eric Clapton, actor Kevin Bacon, sports journalist Ray Ratto, and an unknown young actor in the Star Trek movie franchise visited our house. I had a family. They were playing a concert after dinner.
Clapton's guitar was on a table. I touched his guitar. Clapton was angry because he just cleaned his guitar. Clapton wanted me to confess. I didn't confess. Clapton rubbed a dirty brush on a yellow and white rabbit figurine on the same table. It turned out Ratto touched Clapton's guitar.
The young actor in the Star Trek movie shared a scene from an upcoming Star Trek movie. The scene took place in Oakland, CA. Jumbo jets were taking off from an army base like the GI JOE Sky Stryker jets taking off GI JOE headquarters in the GI JOE cartoon episode The Synthoid Conspiracy Part 2.
What's the point of the blog? Celebrities are humans. They have lives outside their celebrity jobs. They're normal people living a non-normal life. The public treats them special. They want some time for themselves. Blame the media for interfering the celebrities' private lives. Blame the immature people being assholes to celebrities. Celebrities become assholes by habit because of the immature people being assholes.
Do I want to be a celebrity? My short answer is no. My long answer is unlikely.
Update On A Past Blog
I listened to a Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford podcast Cautionary Tales--Fritterin' Away Genius. The podcast talked about Claude Shannon who invented the information age. What if Shannon spent more time on his work instead of goofing off? The podcast answered the question. Here are a few excerpts from Harford:
*Between those two thunderbolts, Shannon didn't just switch fields, he lived a rich and complicated life. He married and then divorced within a year. He moved to Manhattan to spice things up. He played chess in Washington Square Park. He played clarinet. He loved the jazz scene in New York. He swam. He played tennis. He stayed up too late and played his music too loud. All this was happening when Shannon was at the peak of his intellectual powers. Shannon didn't just hit 35 and abandoned serious thinking in favor of playing around. Shannon was playing around all along. Maybe Shannon's love of fritterin'--and I say fritterin' away his time--on juggling, or unicycling, or music, or chess. Maybe that's not the reason he produced only two truly brilliant ideas. Maybe it's the reason he produced two truly brilliant ideas in the first place.
*Claude Shannon didn't feel that same compulsion to clear his inbox. He often left correspondences unanswered. Then eventually cleared the decks through the use of a trash can marked "letters I procrastinated on for too long." That might seem a trivial thing, but I think it points to something deeper.
Psychologists have identified a tendency called completion bias. If you ever assembled a list of things to do and ticked off all the easy ones while ignoring the important stuff, you demonstrated completion bias. That apparently admirable tendency, persistence, the determination to finish what we start, well, it could be twisted and perverted. If we feel compelled to reach the finish line, we also feel tempted to choose a short racetrack. There's more at stake here than making ourselves feel better by cheating with our to-do list.
Psychologists recently studied completion bias in a high-stake setting--a hospital emergency department. They found that the busier the emergency room becomes, the more the doctors look for quick whims, the patients who aren't really very ill, and can therefore be treated swiftly and ticked off the list. And this behavior is counterproductive. The more serious ill patients wait longer, of course. And the doctors start to slow down after working through a lot of fairly trivial cases. I expect we all know the feeling. But in their subconscious desire to see some work through completion, doctors were harming the patients who were in greatest need.
*Claude Shannon's willingness to set aside projects starts to look like a strength rather than a weakness. Shannon certainly could focus with a building information theory from scratch or building a wearable computer to beat roulette. Yet Shannon also seemed to have an inner confidence that allowed him to declare victory at any point that suited him. If a piece of work was not good enough to publish, fine, he was happy to leave it unpublished.
*When I first thought about writing this Cautionary Tale, I thought it would be a warning not to lose focus like Shannon did. I've changed my mind. Now I think Shannon and [Ed] Thorp are inspiration figures. The Cautionary Tale isn't a warning to keep your focus. Instead, it's a warning not to focus too much. Don't commit yourself so totally to a project you lose heart, or lose sight to a creative ideas, or lose your freedom to change course.
The podcast reminded me when I wrote I'm becoming a genius at Today Is A Lucky Day I Count My Blessings on Feb 23, 2020.
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