Well, it isn't so much that computers are bad as computer AIs are bad at games. I have been mixing it up lately, playing some Starcraft 2 against humans and some against computers and I still find it shocking just how terrible the computers can be despite their superhuman ability to control everything at once. As an example, there is an achievement to fight 4 Very Hard computers at once by yourself and win. I normally test random ideas and strategies against 1 Very Hard computer so 4 at the same time would seem to be completely suicidal. The problem is that although I can see a way to turtle up and defend my starting base I can't see how it would be possible to actually push out and capture enough extra bases and territory to defeat the computers. I was considering this problem from the perspective of player vs. player combat though where players would actually look at the screen and draw obvious conclusions instead of just following a simple script.
The trick of course is figuring out where the AI has big holes in its strategies. For example, computers are reasonable at finding and attacking extra bases I make around the map. They see them with a scout and send their big army over to smash them. To counter this I select a map with bases on islands and start new expansions on the islands instead of in normal places. The computers figure out those bases are there but they aren't bright enough to build some flying units and go *smash* me, instead they just build more and more units in their ground army and continue to walk into my impregnable defenses at my main base.
The computers also never learn from past mistakes in a game and just stick to the plan. The first time a person ran an absolutely enormous force into my siege tanks and get ground into hamburger they would decide to try something different next time - maybe use flying units, or maybe just sit outside my base with their completely monstrous army and wait for me to make the first move. The computers can't make those strategy choices though - they get their big army together and their algorithm says attack, so another immense force gets to eat hot tungsten and die. (Starcraft 2 tells me that siege tanks scatter tungsten around when their projectiles explode. Why tungsten, I don't know.)
I figure the most interesting thing is how the strategies and decisions are shifted away from the battle and into the game creation. I can't win against certain challenges on most maps - I spent a while figuring out exactly which map was best to allow me to beat these sorts of achievements. I also had to figure out unit placement, unit mix and costing to sort out exactly how many bases the map would let me safely take so I could be sure to have enough money to actually be able to win at some point and not just survive. Once I figured out the exact strategy I would employ and had a map that was ideal for exploiting the AIs weaknesses the actual play was very easy, which is precisely the opposite of a player vs. player match where the interesting stuff is all in responding to what the player does to respond to you. I guess the real change though is that now that I have beaten 4 Very Hard AIs at once and 2 Insane!!!! AIs at once I can do it again any time I want to, but I know for damn sure just because I beat a player once that I can't do that again with regularity.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Thursday, September 9, 2010
A new beginning
I have been jonesing for some RPG action lately, and not of the WOW kind, I need to roll some dice and use a big ass battle grid with miniatures! I initially started trying to recruit everybody I know who has ever played roleplaying games to play with me but I managed to get one person who can't commit to a schedule and one person who doesn't want to play with random others... this does not make a group. Thanks to the massive and extremely sexy power of the internet I found a group of people right near me who are looking for players and the search only took 15 minutes. Seriously, the internet. Amazing.
Of course there might be some tricky bits involved because the group wants a GM to run the show and I have never GM'd the system we are going to use. They also want to play a specific level range (11) and setting (Forgotten Realms), which is another issue because I have no interest in running a game set in a specific setting that the players are all familiar with but I am not! I can just imagine the players cresting a hill and I say
"As you reach the summit you see a stinking mire filled with decaying trees and still pools. This immense swamp stretches to the horizon with only small, occasional hummocks breaking up the monotony."
And they reply
"Ummm, no, over this hill is a gigantic city sitting in a desert. See, the book says this is the city of Eralune, the domain of the red wizards."
"Well, the damn desert got flooded and turned into a swamp yesterday. The city must have been vaporized by aliens. Shut up!"
This is not the sort of exchange that makes a campaign good. I can see how a campaign could be worked into a preset world but I think it would require a really good knowledge of the world on the part of the GM to make the transition work and my knowledge of the Forgotten Realms is bupkis.
It is funny how the prospective beginning of a campaign energizes my mind with ideas. I am filled with lost civilizations, powerful artifacts and terrifying villains. I have these constant bursts of inspiration that pop in and out of my brain hardly stopping to register. I can have them start in a gigantic jungle. No wait, a immense metropolis. On a pillar that reaches the sky! And the characters have to investigate the lower portions of the metropolis and find a powerful artifact that teleports them to an ancient ruin. No wait, to a cave, which they can follow to the dungeon *below* the ancient ruin. And the artifact is cursed. No, that is too easy. It has lots of other people who want it, yeah, that is better, though perhaps no less overused. Oh, and I can have genies, and a order of paladins!
The question is not whether I have enough ideas, but rather whether I can stop myself imagining long enough to actually build something decent from all of them. Discipline is the trick here, not inspiration.
Of course there might be some tricky bits involved because the group wants a GM to run the show and I have never GM'd the system we are going to use. They also want to play a specific level range (11) and setting (Forgotten Realms), which is another issue because I have no interest in running a game set in a specific setting that the players are all familiar with but I am not! I can just imagine the players cresting a hill and I say
"As you reach the summit you see a stinking mire filled with decaying trees and still pools. This immense swamp stretches to the horizon with only small, occasional hummocks breaking up the monotony."
And they reply
"Ummm, no, over this hill is a gigantic city sitting in a desert. See, the book says this is the city of Eralune, the domain of the red wizards."
"Well, the damn desert got flooded and turned into a swamp yesterday. The city must have been vaporized by aliens. Shut up!"
This is not the sort of exchange that makes a campaign good. I can see how a campaign could be worked into a preset world but I think it would require a really good knowledge of the world on the part of the GM to make the transition work and my knowledge of the Forgotten Realms is bupkis.
It is funny how the prospective beginning of a campaign energizes my mind with ideas. I am filled with lost civilizations, powerful artifacts and terrifying villains. I have these constant bursts of inspiration that pop in and out of my brain hardly stopping to register. I can have them start in a gigantic jungle. No wait, a immense metropolis. On a pillar that reaches the sky! And the characters have to investigate the lower portions of the metropolis and find a powerful artifact that teleports them to an ancient ruin. No wait, to a cave, which they can follow to the dungeon *below* the ancient ruin. And the artifact is cursed. No, that is too easy. It has lots of other people who want it, yeah, that is better, though perhaps no less overused. Oh, and I can have genies, and a order of paladins!
The question is not whether I have enough ideas, but rather whether I can stop myself imagining long enough to actually build something decent from all of them. Discipline is the trick here, not inspiration.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Death Star Contractors
This came up because Full Throttle was talking to me about setting up a business of questionable morality. His business idea is very much like the dollar auctions I talked about a few posts back and has equal merit in that it is simply a way of siphoning money off from suckers. He was wondering if I was interested in working for him part time in an administrative capacity - I wouldn't be doing anything directly to cause anyone harm but I would be supporting a business that is simply a parasite. It is a tricky question. This is an area where legality and morality diverge pretty severely because being a lawyer for a biker gang isn't likely to get you arrested but you are spending your life trying to make sure dangerous criminals evade justice. On the other hand being a secretary for a company that does underhanded things like bribe officials or fix bids doesn't seem particularly evil even if you suspect the wrongdoing taking place.
Strangely I think that the method of payment would make a big impact on my feelings about this proposal. If I was a stockholder working to make the company successful I wouldn't be at all interested in being involved in this sort of proposition. However, if I was just paid hourly and simply doing a job I wouldn't feel nearly so bad about it. How exactly I get my money for doing work perhaps shouldn't influence my moral impression of a job but somewhere in my mind it does; ownership implies greater involvement.
In general I think that anyone that has a really profound effect on an evil organization or who has a ownership stake in it is responsible for the things that organization does. If your job is irreplaceable or you actually get to decide the way things will be you must take ownership of that and recognize that the actions of the organization reflect on you personally. When you are entirely expendable and replaceable I think there is less onus on you to leave a company that does things that are wrong because your leaving will accomplish nothing; you will be replaced and never missed. I don't think that frees you completely from responsibility, mind, but I can accept that disruption of your own life to cause negligible harm to an evil organization may not be warranted. When you are just a cog in the machine you have a responsibility for the function of the machine, but only a small one.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
An Appropriate Discount
Here is the question: How much should we discount future problems to create solutions for today? For example, if we have an economic policy that can make us 10B dollars richer today but we have to pay back 11B dollars in 10 years, is that a good idea? Economists generally assume that there is a discount rate we apply to future wealth and benefits that is multiplicative year after year. For example, if we discount 6% per year then 1 dollar's worth of benefits in 5 years is only worth 73 cents of benefits right now. This is especially critical when evaluating the costs of environmental policy years down the road as in order to talk about the net benefits or penalties of various schemes we need to understand how we weight various outcomes. If we cost ourselves 1 dollar now but our descendants will save 2 dollars by not having to respond to issues later on, is that a good tradeoff?
It turns out this issue is really contentious. In both The Rational Optimist and The Skeptical Environmentalist this issue was really brought to the fore because both authors felt that it was critical to assume that our descendants would be much, much richer than we are today. For them paying 2 dollars to prevent a flood due to climate change is much less of a problem than it is for us to pay 1 dollar to use renewable energy sources today, so in that particular case we should just keep burning oil. Obviously everyone agrees that it is sensible to make the easiest cuts first and that some cuts should be made, but people strenuously disagree on exactly how deep to cut into our economy today to benefit those will come later. In the books Eaarth and Earth in the Balance the opposite view was held: Those authors felt that we should weight our descendants' problems very highly and that discounting benefits and penalties in the future was unconscionable. In fact this issue is often framed as a moral one with some people even claiming that a discount of zero is the only moral choice, valuing the lives of those many generations from now as equal to those alive today.
I think the idea of a zero discount is bonkers, in particular because the authors themselves don't live that way. People care about those close to them and care much less about others they do not know; even those who are very generous do not spend the same time and money helping random strangers as they do their family and friends. If people really behaved this way the rich wouldn't buy expensive cars or clothes - they would set up trust funds to distribute their money equally among their 1000 potential descendants 10 generations hence and live a middle class lifestyle. People naturally apply their own future discounts and if that behaviour is immoral then I don't know if there exists a moral person.
The other major issue with zero future discounts is uncertainty. We can be pretty confident that 1 dollar of benefit today is worth about 1 dollar. We have a sketchy idea of how much it will be worth in 25 years and absolutely no clue about its worth in 50 years. Think about someone from 1960 trying to work out the economic value of something in the world of the internet, cell phones, facebook and the collapse of communism. They would have no idea, and using valuations of concepts and even raw goods from that long ago is a joke. Because of this we have to value the future less simply because we don't know whether what we are doing will matter at all. Even barring the seemingly unstoppable increases in economic power that each new generation brings the lack of predictive power means we must strongly weight benefits today over seemingly equal benefits far down the road.
None of this means we should pour arsenic into the water just for fun but it does mean that we need to approach these issues cautiously and not idealistically. Future discounts aren't just an economist's construction - they actually model human behaviour if the number is set correctly. We need to accept that, set reasonable numbers and move on.
It turns out this issue is really contentious. In both The Rational Optimist and The Skeptical Environmentalist this issue was really brought to the fore because both authors felt that it was critical to assume that our descendants would be much, much richer than we are today. For them paying 2 dollars to prevent a flood due to climate change is much less of a problem than it is for us to pay 1 dollar to use renewable energy sources today, so in that particular case we should just keep burning oil. Obviously everyone agrees that it is sensible to make the easiest cuts first and that some cuts should be made, but people strenuously disagree on exactly how deep to cut into our economy today to benefit those will come later. In the books Eaarth and Earth in the Balance the opposite view was held: Those authors felt that we should weight our descendants' problems very highly and that discounting benefits and penalties in the future was unconscionable. In fact this issue is often framed as a moral one with some people even claiming that a discount of zero is the only moral choice, valuing the lives of those many generations from now as equal to those alive today.
I think the idea of a zero discount is bonkers, in particular because the authors themselves don't live that way. People care about those close to them and care much less about others they do not know; even those who are very generous do not spend the same time and money helping random strangers as they do their family and friends. If people really behaved this way the rich wouldn't buy expensive cars or clothes - they would set up trust funds to distribute their money equally among their 1000 potential descendants 10 generations hence and live a middle class lifestyle. People naturally apply their own future discounts and if that behaviour is immoral then I don't know if there exists a moral person.
The other major issue with zero future discounts is uncertainty. We can be pretty confident that 1 dollar of benefit today is worth about 1 dollar. We have a sketchy idea of how much it will be worth in 25 years and absolutely no clue about its worth in 50 years. Think about someone from 1960 trying to work out the economic value of something in the world of the internet, cell phones, facebook and the collapse of communism. They would have no idea, and using valuations of concepts and even raw goods from that long ago is a joke. Because of this we have to value the future less simply because we don't know whether what we are doing will matter at all. Even barring the seemingly unstoppable increases in economic power that each new generation brings the lack of predictive power means we must strongly weight benefits today over seemingly equal benefits far down the road.
None of this means we should pour arsenic into the water just for fun but it does mean that we need to approach these issues cautiously and not idealistically. Future discounts aren't just an economist's construction - they actually model human behaviour if the number is set correctly. We need to accept that, set reasonable numbers and move on.
Monday, September 6, 2010
You suck Al Gore
Back in the year 2000 Al Gore was running against George Bush for president of the United States. At the time I was very much for Gore and figured he would be a good president. I wasn't completely informed as to US politics but everything Gore said seemed reasonable and I have always ended up being in favour of Democrats over Republicans. We all know how it turned out of course, and along the way there was much cursing that Al Gore would have been much better. I don't take that stance back now as I still think with Gore in charge there would be much less pollution, at least one less awful war and vastly more trust in the United States worldwide, but oh man has my opinion of the man plummeted. You see, I just finished reading Earth in the Balance, Al Gore's book on environmentalism and climate change and he managed to offend and disappoint on so many levels.
I will lead off with some quotes:
"[The United States] will once again redeem its promise as the last best hope of humankind on earth."
"The American drive to correct injustice - from the abolition of slavery to the granting of women's suffrage - has constantly renewed our moral authority to lead."
"The United States has long been the natural leader of the global community of nations."
There are plenty of others of course, all mirroring the idea that the United States enjoys some kind of undeniable moral high ground and is looked up to by the world as the greatest among us. Not only this, but he insists that the US Constitution is the basis of democracy worldwide; he stops just barely short of suggesting that every country was a depotism prior to US independence.
There is plenty in the book that focuses on climate change instead of grandstanding for his home country of course; unfortunately he provides precious little in the way of numbers and concrete data and plenty of rhetoric and hyperbole. He is right of course that climate change is real and that the consequences are probably going to be very serious but it is hard to take anything he says seriously when it is so peppered with ridiculous statements. In particular when Gore starts to theorize about the root causes of climate change he suggests it is all attributable to Plato and Descartes. You see, their theories about the mind being separate from the world separated religion and science, which of course lead to the current state of environmental degradation. To be sure, I don't see that at all, but apparently Al Gore does. He also has this idea that scientists are coming around on the God issue because obviously something had to exist before the Big Bang, so clearly scientists who believe in the Big Bang are beginning to see how God must exist. Al Gore seems to have forgotten that you don't convince people of scientific fact very well when you spend much of your time shouting about spirituality, mind/body dualism and how science needs to get back to God.
I think the world would have been a much better place if Al Gore had won that election in 2000. I also think that he is quite the lunatic after reading this book and seeing his movie. Al Gore, you are better than George W. Bush for president, but I sure wish we could have had someone else entirely.
"[The United States] will once again redeem its promise as the last best hope of humankind on earth."
"The American drive to correct injustice - from the abolition of slavery to the granting of women's suffrage - has constantly renewed our moral authority to lead."
"The United States has long been the natural leader of the global community of nations."
There are plenty of others of course, all mirroring the idea that the United States enjoys some kind of undeniable moral high ground and is looked up to by the world as the greatest among us. Not only this, but he insists that the US Constitution is the basis of democracy worldwide; he stops just barely short of suggesting that every country was a depotism prior to US independence.
There is plenty in the book that focuses on climate change instead of grandstanding for his home country of course; unfortunately he provides precious little in the way of numbers and concrete data and plenty of rhetoric and hyperbole. He is right of course that climate change is real and that the consequences are probably going to be very serious but it is hard to take anything he says seriously when it is so peppered with ridiculous statements. In particular when Gore starts to theorize about the root causes of climate change he suggests it is all attributable to Plato and Descartes. You see, their theories about the mind being separate from the world separated religion and science, which of course lead to the current state of environmental degradation. To be sure, I don't see that at all, but apparently Al Gore does. He also has this idea that scientists are coming around on the God issue because obviously something had to exist before the Big Bang, so clearly scientists who believe in the Big Bang are beginning to see how God must exist. Al Gore seems to have forgotten that you don't convince people of scientific fact very well when you spend much of your time shouting about spirituality, mind/body dualism and how science needs to get back to God.
I think the world would have been a much better place if Al Gore had won that election in 2000. I also think that he is quite the lunatic after reading this book and seeing his movie. Al Gore, you are better than George W. Bush for president, but I sure wish we could have had someone else entirely.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
What a deal
Some time ago I talked about a ridiculous online scam trying to sell weight loss and muscle building drugs. The basic premise was that you would follow a link from an online ad and see a page with a 'news coverage' type look talking about how great these new supplements were. Just recently Full Throttle told me about a new internet scam that is even more hilarious (awful?) than that one though. It masquerades as a bidding site like Ebay but instead is a lot more like unregulated online slot machines.
A classic example is SwipeAuctions.com. What you find when you go there is a fake newscast at the top of the page trying to convince you that this is a legitimate business, tons of pictures of lucky winners paying nearly nothing for products and flashing numbers on the screen telling you that auctions of items going for 5% of retail price are finishing *right now* and you must sign up right away and win them! The site tries to build plausible deniability by claiming that they make their money by buying items from liquidations and warehouse closeouts and it literally is true that they sell all kinds of completely new merchandise for fractions of retail cost. For example, they sold a Honda Civic for $1700 and change, a fact that they tout with tremendous zeal. So if you can log on to this site and buy new stuff for fractions of the retail price, what's the catch?
The catch, it turns out, is that you pay for each bid. The amount you pay varies based on which site you are donating at but 60 cents or a dollar is typical. Also, you cannot choose what amount to bid as the site simply increments the dollar value of the bid by a few cents when you hit the bid button and extends the auction a little bit more. The net result is that even though the site sells a Civic for $1700 they have charged their users over $50,000 for the right to make those bids and they walk away with a quick $36,000 profit on one car sale. They even have extra bids tacked on to items they sell so you might be bidding on a package of 20 bids, which of course gets bids on more than 20 times by various people and nets the company money. It seems like a business model that would be easy to find great testimonials for since regularly your customers hit the jackpot and manage to win an item while paying a tiny fraction of the real cost, but just like slot machines the masses of humanity lose money like crazy chasing a dream they will never realize.
A fun trick these sites try is they may let you spend the value of your bids on an auction towards the regular retail price of goods. For example, you bid 10 times on an Ipod and lose. Now you have a $6 credit towards an Ipod purchase and you can pay the retail price less $6 to buy it. You see how great that is? Last time I checked buying items at full retail price wasn't much of a consolation prize since you can always go to a store and get a big discount any time you like. Another fun page is the one where SwipeAuctions tries to convince you that this isn't like online gambling at all. You see, they get big deals and pass the savings on to you, their customers, no gambling here!
Unfortunately since they probably are on the up and up legally these sites will likely stick around. The rules are all posted, the site is probably following them, and they are reaming foolish people for huge sums. Just like the one armed bandits it is a tax on the foolish and gullible or those who simply crave that sense of danger and excitement and care not for the costs of getting it. After hearing about this business model I just sat there in awe at their moxy, creativity and evil. I suppose you could view it simply as entertainment - customers paying for the thrill - but just like payday loan outfits they end up simply siphoning money from the desperate and depositing it in the bank account of the sharks.
A classic example is SwipeAuctions.com. What you find when you go there is a fake newscast at the top of the page trying to convince you that this is a legitimate business, tons of pictures of lucky winners paying nearly nothing for products and flashing numbers on the screen telling you that auctions of items going for 5% of retail price are finishing *right now* and you must sign up right away and win them! The site tries to build plausible deniability by claiming that they make their money by buying items from liquidations and warehouse closeouts and it literally is true that they sell all kinds of completely new merchandise for fractions of retail cost. For example, they sold a Honda Civic for $1700 and change, a fact that they tout with tremendous zeal. So if you can log on to this site and buy new stuff for fractions of the retail price, what's the catch?
The catch, it turns out, is that you pay for each bid. The amount you pay varies based on which site you are donating at but 60 cents or a dollar is typical. Also, you cannot choose what amount to bid as the site simply increments the dollar value of the bid by a few cents when you hit the bid button and extends the auction a little bit more. The net result is that even though the site sells a Civic for $1700 they have charged their users over $50,000 for the right to make those bids and they walk away with a quick $36,000 profit on one car sale. They even have extra bids tacked on to items they sell so you might be bidding on a package of 20 bids, which of course gets bids on more than 20 times by various people and nets the company money. It seems like a business model that would be easy to find great testimonials for since regularly your customers hit the jackpot and manage to win an item while paying a tiny fraction of the real cost, but just like slot machines the masses of humanity lose money like crazy chasing a dream they will never realize.
A fun trick these sites try is they may let you spend the value of your bids on an auction towards the regular retail price of goods. For example, you bid 10 times on an Ipod and lose. Now you have a $6 credit towards an Ipod purchase and you can pay the retail price less $6 to buy it. You see how great that is? Last time I checked buying items at full retail price wasn't much of a consolation prize since you can always go to a store and get a big discount any time you like. Another fun page is the one where SwipeAuctions tries to convince you that this isn't like online gambling at all. You see, they get big deals and pass the savings on to you, their customers, no gambling here!
Unfortunately since they probably are on the up and up legally these sites will likely stick around. The rules are all posted, the site is probably following them, and they are reaming foolish people for huge sums. Just like the one armed bandits it is a tax on the foolish and gullible or those who simply crave that sense of danger and excitement and care not for the costs of getting it. After hearing about this business model I just sat there in awe at their moxy, creativity and evil. I suppose you could view it simply as entertainment - customers paying for the thrill - but just like payday loan outfits they end up simply siphoning money from the desperate and depositing it in the bank account of the sharks.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Sick
I have known for some time that I have some lung issues. When I get a chest cold it lasts and lasts and my coughs are really harsh compared to average people. It is common that everyone else beats their cold in four days and I get stuck coughing for two weeks and I simply dismissed it as bad lungs since my father had similar issues throughout his life. I considered myself to be in nearly perfect health less the lung issues and low physical fitness due to too much playing and blogging and too little running! This week I went to the doctor as I have had a cough for over two weeks and we were worried it might be strep throat. Instead she diagnosed me with asthma. It is a very strange thing to go from a undiagnosed 'my body just doesn't work' situation to a named, known disease. Somehow I can't consider myself to be in prime health anymore because I have this big disease psychically imprinted on me for now and forever.
Naming something has tremendous power. It used to be that many kids were simply considered bad kids or poor learners but now they are labeled with ADHD or dyslexia and that change of label completely alters their lives and learning. The change in label is so powerful I think because it changes the source of the issues and their potential resolution. A bad kid is one with a moral fault - they could be different but they choose not to. A kid with dyslexia is suffering from a negative influence from outside their sphere of control which can be dealt with and accounted for. My circumstance is obviously somewhat different but it has similarities in that naming the problem changes it. Instead of something inexplicable and unsolvable I suffer from something with defined parameters and known solutions.
Now I can approach the problem from an entirely new perspective. I can get the doctor to prescribe me a puffer to help deal with coughing jags and I can read online to learn about the triggers for problems and other solutions people have come up with. I do have the new situation of describing my condition as asthma and having all the baggage that goes with it though, which is challenging because my version of it is very mild and many people assume the worst when they hear the name of a disease. I suppose I can call it 'mild asthma' generally speaking and people will understand fairly well, but that is one distinct downside to naming things specifically like this; communication is made much faster but unless the batch of things the listener associates with the word happen to match the characteristics the speaker wants to convey things may be simply made muddier instead of clearer.
One wonderful thing is that my doctor told me it was possible to go get tested for asthma but that she recommended against it. Given the mildness of my symptoms she felt that there would be no useful treatment that would require an official test so she recommended not being tested. I am extremely happy that my physician thinks about things that way - if we can't treat it, don't test for it.
I am away at the cottage for four days this weekend so only 4 posts this week. Next post will go up on Sunday night.
Naming something has tremendous power. It used to be that many kids were simply considered bad kids or poor learners but now they are labeled with ADHD or dyslexia and that change of label completely alters their lives and learning. The change in label is so powerful I think because it changes the source of the issues and their potential resolution. A bad kid is one with a moral fault - they could be different but they choose not to. A kid with dyslexia is suffering from a negative influence from outside their sphere of control which can be dealt with and accounted for. My circumstance is obviously somewhat different but it has similarities in that naming the problem changes it. Instead of something inexplicable and unsolvable I suffer from something with defined parameters and known solutions.
Now I can approach the problem from an entirely new perspective. I can get the doctor to prescribe me a puffer to help deal with coughing jags and I can read online to learn about the triggers for problems and other solutions people have come up with. I do have the new situation of describing my condition as asthma and having all the baggage that goes with it though, which is challenging because my version of it is very mild and many people assume the worst when they hear the name of a disease. I suppose I can call it 'mild asthma' generally speaking and people will understand fairly well, but that is one distinct downside to naming things specifically like this; communication is made much faster but unless the batch of things the listener associates with the word happen to match the characteristics the speaker wants to convey things may be simply made muddier instead of clearer.
One wonderful thing is that my doctor told me it was possible to go get tested for asthma but that she recommended against it. Given the mildness of my symptoms she felt that there would be no useful treatment that would require an official test so she recommended not being tested. I am extremely happy that my physician thinks about things that way - if we can't treat it, don't test for it.
I am away at the cottage for four days this weekend so only 4 posts this week. Next post will go up on Sunday night.
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