So it's become this daily routine where I have a deadline for writing this blog post, and I procrastinate until about 1 hour before the deadline and then just throw topics on the screen until one that I don't hate sticks and I press "Publish."

It's slightly stressful, but that's okay. I certainly do not buy into the notion that I have to wait for some creative mood to strike me. The way I see it it's more like working out.

In fact, I'd be more worried if I were not feeling strain. Strain is the mark of effort, which is necessary - effortless practice doesn't build muscle.

Am I having fun yet?

Calvinism is a branch of Christian thought which subscribes to the concept of predestination. Predestination is the concept that one's actions do not influence whether one will go to heaven or not - all that has been predetermined. Now, you'd wonder how this could possibly work in a religion, since we normally think of the going to heaven as being determined by one's actions and thus serving as incentive to do good.

The way it works is that you merely reverse the arrow of causality. Instead of doing good leading to salvation, you state that those who are destined for heaven would inevitably behave in a good way. The idea is that a Calvinist would be hoping to discover himself to be one of the heaven-bound, and thus be convincing himself that he was indeed doing good deeds out of his very core. It's definitely plausible that this would be more powerful motivation, as someone would be thinking "I'm doing good because I am good" as opposed to "I'm doing good because I don't like lava". It seems to be a clever way to avoid motivational crowding and maximize intrinsic motivation.

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There is a psychology phenomenon called the hedonic treadmill, which is the observation that people seem to revert to the same level of happiness regardless of what happens to them, be it winning a lottery or becoming paraplegic. Psychologists have observed that people are imbued with levels of happiness that are very difficult to change.

I've always thought that it was amusing how much this resembled predestination. I can imagine trying hard to convince myself that my hedonic set point was higher.

It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong.
- Carveth Read

When I first learned double-entry accounting, I was struck by how elegant some of the constructs were. There is a joy in knowing exactly where each number was supposed to go over the profit cycle of a business, when it bought assets and amortized fixed costs and generated a clear and continuous indication of profitability by using accounting as a type of low-pass filter smoothing out the cash flow.

I later realized accounting in reality doesn't work nearly so neatly. It isn't so much that the accounting constructs themselves are flawed - it's more that when interpretation is needed it's common to find the convention of conservatism being applied, and as such a precise but inaccurate answer being the standard.

This is due to the fact that the numbers that appear in accounting are more used for managerial oversight by owners, and not as quantitative thinking tools in their own right.

The statistics and biology used in clinical trials seem to fall in this category as well. Statistics is scientific accounting, and the audience in that case is the FDA.

The risk control applied in banks is another example. There statistics feed directly into accounting, and again are done in ways that are more precise than accurate.

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Most of the numbers that appear in our daily lives are there for their ability to be objective. As such, the techniques which produce those numbers have been tweaked to be as precise and ungameable as practical. That precision often comes at the cost of accuracy and space for intelligent judgment.